The Joe Rogan Experience - #459 - Dr. Rhonda Patrick

Episode Date: February 20, 2014

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

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. That's a good question, what's in Alphabrain? We could read it all off, but it would sound like another commercial on top of a commercial. It's essentially everything that we could find. You said neurotransmitters, something in serotonin. I'm looking. I should give it to you so you could read it. or something in serotonin. I'm looking. I'm looking. Do, do, do, do, do.

I should give it to you so you could read it. Yeah, because if tryptophan's in there, that's actually a really... Hold on a second. This is just 180. This has alpha-branded too. Oh, cool. Let's see. Let's have a look.

That has a lot of different shit in it. 180 is the stuff that we take. Oh, wow. Yeah, okay. Okay, here's the actual ingredients. You can read that right there. Here's the actual ingredients. Dr. Rhonda Patrick reached out to me

because she had some things to say about some of the things that other podcast guests had said about nutrition, about health, and tell the folks what your credentials are, what you do, who you are, and why you are uniquely qualified to explain nutrition and health to these folks. Absolutely. So my name is Rhonda Patrick.

I have a Ph.D. in biomedical science. I did my undergraduate work in biochemistry chemistry, and now I'm doing a postdoctoral fellowship on nutrition and metabolism. I'm doing a postdoctoral fellowship on nutrition and metabolism. So I started out with synthesizing peptides and doing organic chemistry. And I got really bored with that. And I was a undergraduate sort of student research intern. So then I decided to try biology out. And I went to the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla. And I did some research on aging, using worms as a model because they have a really short lifespan. And so it was really cool to do a lot of genetic manipulation and see how that changed our lifespan.

And from there, I was like, oh, my God, I freaking love this. I want to get my Ph.D. in biology. And I decided to go to Memphis, Tennessee, because I wanted to do research on cancer. And St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, located in Memphis, Tennessee. So I ended up going to University of Tennessee to get my PhD, but I did all my research at St. Jude. Absolutely fantastic place. And then, so I was doing a lot of research using mice and some human cells.

And then I decided I wanted to move on with people. You're just glossing over that. I did research with mice and human cells. Yeah, I did mice and human cells. And I mean, I could go move on with people. You're just glossing over that. I did research with mice and human cells. And I mean, I could go on and on about my actual research. Did you make hybrid mice people? No, no, I didn't make hybrid mice people. But I did a lot of work on mitochondria and mitochondrial metabolism and how that relates to cancer and how cells die and how they don't die and what, you know, what's going wrong with cancer.

And I got a really awesome publication out of it in Nature. And then I decided that I was really wanting to move on to something, you know, during your PhD, you like dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, deep, deep mechanism, you know, and finally you get, you know, you just keep digging deeper. And I felt like I was like lost from like what everything meant and what was the significance of it, you just keep digging deeper. And I felt like I was lost from what everything meant and what was the significance of it. And you kind of have to do that in grad school because you're learning the tools, how to use tools to answer questions, what kind of questions and how you answer them. And so I did really a lot of that. Then I decided I wanted to kind of take a step back and look at the big picture and do some clinical research and apply the tools that I learned in graduate school and try to learn some things using, you know, looking at, you know, people. So now I'm at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. We're working with Bruce Ames, who's pretty famous for his Ames test, carcinogenicity test, where he basically made this test that

could help you figure out whether or not a chemical was a mutagen, meaning if it caused cancer. And so I'm working with him, and I'm actually looking at what causes, you know, I'm not looking at a lot of things, but I'm actually fundamentally looking at people that are obese and how obesity accelerates the aging process. fundamentally looking at people that are obese and how obesity accelerates the aging process. People that are obese die of all sorts of age-related diseases sooner, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer.

By the age of 40, there's a 14-year reduction in their lifespan, which is, I think, even greater than smoking cigarettes. So I'm trying to understand fundamental mechanisms, like why these people are accelerating their aging process. And so I'm actually looking at something specifically. I'm looking at their DNA. So I'm taking blood cells. So we draw blood from people that have a BMI of like 30 or above or 25 and below, which are considered normal or lean. Which is body mass index.

Right. And, you know, it's just problems with like using body mass index as a marker for, you know, obesity. Because, you know, some people are, you know, lean and, you know. Anyways, it's kind of murky, but I'm not going to go into that. So I'm actually looking at, so I take their blood cells and I look at their DNA and how much damage is in their DNA. And I kind of want to get into that a little later, kind of explain what that is. But that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm also doing some research on vitamin D. And I have a paper that's actually coming out in six days.

It's going to hit the press. I found that vitamin D actually regulates serotonin. So it's really cool. Well, that makes sense for people in Seattle. They don't get any vitamin D. They don't get any sun. They're all bummed out. Right. They have that thing every winter. People in northern latitudes, a lot of people have inadequate levels of vitamin D. So it's a really important finding. So that can actually affect your mood, supplementing with vitamin D when you live in a place where it doesn't get sunny? Yeah.

So I'm not going to talk about the details of this paper because there's like an embargo and all that, but I will talk about absolutely serotonin affects mood behavior. So that's why I was asking if tryptophan was in your alpha brain because tryptophan is a rare amino acid that occurs in protein. And most people think that, oh, I eat turkey, I'm getting my tryptophan. But the thing is, is that tryptophan, in order to get converted into serotonin, has to get transported into your brain through this transporter. It converts to 5-HTP, correct? It does convert to that. We have that in New Mood.

5-HTP, and then it converts into serotonin. Yeah, that's one of the principal ingredients in New Mood. New Mood is 5-HTP and L-tryptophan, and the idea being that there's sort of a slow release effect. The L-tryptophan converts to 5-HTP, and then 5-HTP converts to serotonin. Right, so 5-HTP can actually cross the blood-brain barrier. So that can already get converted into serotonin in your brain. And tryptophan, so tryptophan actually competes with other branched-chain amino acids like leucine, isoleucine, to get transported into the brain, and it loses. So leucine, these branched-chain

amino acids, they're abundant in protein. So what ends up happening if you're not taking something like 5-HTP or something else is that most of the time, you're not getting enough tryptophan transported into your brain. Now, certain things can help alleviate that competition, like exercise. So exercise, you take up a bunch of branched-chain amino acids to make muscle. So exercise actually boosts serotonin in your brain by allowing tryptophan to get transported into your brain, alleviating some of that competition from other branched-chain amino acids.

Yeah. And actually, it's really interesting. They've done, you can actually deplete someone's brain tryptophan by giving them a big bolus shake of branched-chain amino acids because then it really out-competes all the, like, tryptophan that you've, from your diet. And within, like, four or five hours, you can deplete, like, 90% of someone's brain serotonin. And then they do all these, like, behavioral tests

to see what, you know the what the results are what how how not having serotonin in your brain impacts behavior and cognitive function and they found that it really there's a lot of things that are you know sort of messed up if you're not making serotonin you become impulsive impulsive behavior your long-term thinking kind of shuts down. Like a meth head? Actually, there's a study. There's a study where they compared methamphetamine users, cocaine users, and then they depleted just normal people.

They depleted their tryptophan by that method I just told you about. And depleting the tryptophan, so basically depleting the serotonin in your brain, you're scoring just as bad as a meth user. And actually methamphetamine does deplete your serotonin. Isn't that frightening? Wow. That's wild. It's wild. The fact that serotonin is affecting our behavior and that it's basically tryptophan and vitamin D are important for that.

People don't realize nutrition affects the way your brain works. It does. And it's so confusing. And when you're a regular person that's trying to go online or read books about health and nutrition and what you need and what you don't need, there's so much contradictory information. There's so many people that tell you you don't need anything, just a balanced diet. Well, what's a balanced diet? Well, then that gets squirrely. You know, the balanced diet includes grains.

Whoa, no, don't eat gluten. Oh, fuck shit. Gluten's bad. You know, stay away from eggs. Eggs contain, you know, it just gets so weird. There's so much information. It's so hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. That's the expression, right?

Wheat from the chaff. Totally agree. So much noise out there, and it's very confusing. You know, and it's, yeah, you get getting your nutrition from your diet. Well, that would be ideal, but the reality is we have, you know, the National Institute of Medicine that are conducting these surveys every five years. They call them the Nutrition and Examination Health Surveys. It's NHANES.

It's very notorious, you know, in the nutrition field. You know, we consider NHANES. It's very notorious in the nutrition field. We consider NHANES surveys to be pretty accurate in determining what people are getting from their diet. And these surveys are telling us, no, people are not getting what they need from their diet. The majority of Americans are not getting what they need in terms of micronutrients. Yeah, it's really hard to do so. And to do so on a daily basis requires you to really eat clean and healthy. I mean, you can get what you need from your diet, but boy, you have to really mind what you're eating. You have to really work at it. And yeah, it's a lot of effort.

And there's also the difference between the idea of you just surviving and not getting a disease and you being at optimal health. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's something that our lab works on. You know, but we're we've got this sort of theory that it's hard to to do aging studies in people and particularly looking at different, you know, vitamins and minerals and what effects they have long term. you know, vitamins and minerals and what effects they have long term. But that's one of the theories in our lab that we've shown some evidence of it, is that, you know, a lot of vitamins and minerals, they're cofactors for many different biochemical pathways in your body. Like, if you would just Google biochemical pathways, you'll see this, like, massive image come up, and it's just like, holy crap. And vitamins and minerals are cofactors for enzymes, meaning they need to be, you know, there for the enzyme to work optimally. And enzymes and proteins in your body are doing everything.

I mean, that's what's doing everything our body's doing. And so if you don't have, you know, there's certain proteins that are important to survive right now, like your sodium, potassium, ATPase, you know, you want to make sure your heart's getting the right signals you want. I mean, if that shuts down, then you're dead, you know? So, I mean, some of these functions are more important. What is that? Yeah. So that's the biochemical pathways I'm talking about. Oh, my God. And that's just a snapshot. That's just a snapshot. So, I mean, all these different pathways, they require vitamins and minerals, essential fatty acids. I mean, these things, it's complicated.

So cheeseburgers don't give that everything it needs? No, they don't. Yeah. No, they don't. They don't. Yeah. No, they don't. They don't. And what is it that someone should absolutely supplement with on a daily basis? You know, I would say definitely most people are not getting enough vitamin D. And that is, it's a steroid hormone. Okay. It's a hormone that controls the expression of over a thousand different genes in our body, which is literally like one 24th of our human genome, many of them in our brain. So what that means is without vitamin D, so vitamin D is so important that we can make it from the sun. Problem is we're not, we're not doing that anymore. Most of us aren't out in the

sun a lot. You know, I know I'm not, I'm always at my computer inside. And when I'm out, we're worried about skin aging if you're a female or skin cancer. And so I'm wearing sunscreen, of course. And as a majority of the people from the surveys, if you look at people that supplement and don't supplement in the United States, about 70% don't get adequate levels of vitamin D. And actually, the way we determine what's adequate is based on vitamin D's classical function of bone homeostasis. So we know vitamin D is important to make sure that our bones don't start breaking down. But in fact, there's a thousand other things it's doing, and we don't know how much vitamin D we need to do those other things. But to at least maintain that, that's considered adequate.

And that's like 30 nanograms per milliliter of the precursor vitamin D called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is what most people, when you get your levels measured, that's what they measure. So what should you take on a daily basis? I would say, you know, definitely you should probably be taking a vitamin D supplement. Like what dose, you should probably be taking a vitamin D supplement. What dose, you think? Yeah, so here's the thing. A lot of different things regulate vitamin D absorption, bioavailability. Body fat, for one, it is a fat-soluble vitamin. So the more body fat you have, the more it's stored in that fat,

and the less of it can be released into the bloodstream to be then circulated and brought to different organs in your body and then get into the cells to do its thing. So people that are obese actually require much higher levels of vitamin D because it's been shown that vitamin D bioavailability is reduced by up to 50% in severely obese people. So that's one thing to consider is how much per body fat. I think generally a good marker is like 1,000 IUs per 25 pounds. But like I said, 25 pounds, you could be 25 pounds of muscle. And so I think the best way to really gauge how much vitamin D you need is to just get a test. If you have health insurance, health insurance pays for it. There's other, you know, places that you can get vitamin D levels tested cheaply, very cheaply.

And it's just so worth it. Like I get mine tested routinely because I just want to make sure that my, you know, dosing is pretty good. Like I personally take 4,000 IUs a day. Is that a lot? I think that's pretty standard for an adult that's normal weight and in pretty good shape. Yeah, I think that's pretty standard. But I can't say that everyone should go out and take 4,000 IUs a day. I can say that you should definitely make sure that you have levels in your blood that's higher than 30 nanograms per milliliter, which is, that's above the adequate status. And actually, if we look at studies where they've looked at, for example, all-cause mortality, lowering all-cause

mortality, they've shown that, you know, huge, like, large cohort studies they've done, they've looked at the levels of vitamin D and then looked at mortality, dying of different, you know, diseases. People with levels of vitamin D between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter in their blood had the least amount of all-cause mortality. So basically, they were living the longest. So maybe you want to have between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter based on that study. It's important to get the levels tested. That's kind of what I like to advocate because it's so cheap and easy. It's so easy. Why not? Very few people ever get their body tested for their vitamin levels. It is kind of unusual that we think about health and nutrition,

but how few people actually get their blood tested. It's the future, really. I mean, we're going to start to do that. Preventative medicine, being able to know if we have adequate amounts of these vitamin minerals, it's going to get easier and easier the next couple of decades, I think. Now, you reached out to me because of people on the podcast saying things that you didn't think were accurate, and you got upset and sent me some videos and some different things that sort of describe what disinformation these people were releasing or erroneous information. Right.

Like, give us some specifics of what thing. Well, let's just talk about what bugged you. One of the erroneous facts were that most people, most Americans get all the micronutrients they need from their diet. That was Brian Dunning. That was Brian Dunning, right? That was Brian Dunning. He's a silly man. And that is not correct. Unfortunately.

Based on, you know, the National Institute of Medicine doing these surveys, we know that's not correct. And in fact, they've even done surveys where they've, you know, looked at people that supplement versus people that don't supplement. And people that supplement have much more adequate levels of these certain vitamins and minerals. So, you know, that's already the first thing that's not true. And, you know, this recent editorial that came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine was really upsetting

because they were basically saying that multivitamins do nothing. And not only do they nothing, do nothing, they're bad for you. And you mentioned, you actually mentioned that on that podcast that you had with Dunning. Yeah, that's that research that they, first of all, I think it's one of the most irresponsible studies or the most irresponsible press releases I've ever read. Because if you actually read what the studies were in comparison to what they're saying, they're saying vitamins don't work, case closed. But the studies that they did were on Alzheimer's patients, not showing any sort of improvement. People over 65 that had heart attacks, not showing any improvement. I mean,

just those two things were two out of the three tests that they did that they're saying that vitamins don't work. When you're talking about a generic multivitamin, too, synthetic multivitamin, like one of those Centrum ones. Centrum silver, right. Those ones that they find in the bottom of porta potties, by the way, when they clean out, they find them. They find those little blue pills still intact.

They pass through people's bowels. Allegedly. That might not be true. I've never looked. What do I know? Have I even looked online to research? No, I'm just parroting it like a little minor bird. But the studies themselves were really shocking.

I'll read you the three things. Male physicians over 65 showed no improvement in cognitive decline using a generic multivitamin supplementation. Like they're dying. Oh God. Can I please just tell you? So that study was so infuriating because they were giving these, these guys six, okay, this was supposed to be a high dose multivitamin and they were giving them six pills a day, six pills a day. Okay. I take a high dose multivitamin. It's one pill a day. Okay. And their total vitamin D levels were like 100 IUs. Like 100 IUs of vitamin D won't do anything. And that was considered a high dose. And their compliance, meaning, okay, you're asking someone to take six pills a day for like 10 years. And then you call them up every three months and did you take your six pills? Well, I took it yesterday. So, you know, yeah, I took it for

the last three months. They didn't measure any, there was no quantitative like biochemical analysis, meaning they didn't measure any vitamins. It's like choose one vitamin that's in that your multivitamin concoction and see if what you're giving them actually raises the level of that, you know, to show that they're A, compliant, B, that you're giving them a dose that's in your multivitamin concoction and see if what you're giving them actually raises the level of that to show that they're A, compliant and B, that you're giving them a dose that's actually doing something. So you're leaving it up to the person to take it as well. In that study, they did. Yeah, that seems pretty faulty. And also you say that you take 4,000 units and they had 100. That's not so good. The other aspect of the study was that high dose multivitamins had no

effect on the progression of heart disease in heart attack survivors. Again, they're dying. Right. These are dying people. I mean, this is not people who... Preventative medicine is one of the things you talked about earlier, about testing blood. And I really think that that is the key. It's not about catching you when you're falling apart. It's about making sure you don't fall apart, giving your body the natural building blocks to repair cells, to keep your body healthy from the jump. And that's what we should be doing. We should be doing intelligently thinking ahead while you're healthy, while you're young.

ahead while you're healthy, while you're young. It's so true. I mean, I'll give you an example. So 45% of the U.S. population doesn't have adequate levels of magnesium. And, you know, I think most people in the fitness community are concerned with magnesium because they're always like, you know, oh my God, I sweated out. I got to replace my magnesium. I think that's their major concern or muscle cramping and things like that. But magnesium is an essential cofactor for DNA repair enzymes. So let me explain what that is because probably what's DNA repair enzymes. So, you know, every day just normal metabolism. So our mitochondria, they're taking food that we eat in, whether it's carbohydrates or protein or fat, and they're generating what's called electron-reducing equivalents through this whole Krebs cycle, if you ever learned in biochemistry.

And those electron-reducing equivalents are really important because they have hydrogen, which has an electron and a proton. And these electrons get passed along inside your mitochondria, these various proteins, and they shoot out protons at the same time. And this is basically the way it generates energy to then take the oxygen you breathe in and reduce it to water and couple that to making ATP. Anyways, so these electrons get passed around. And what happens is they often, because you're taking oxygen you breathe in and making water to generate the energy you need to make ATP, you start making superoxide anion. You start making reactive oxygen species in your mitochondria. Every day we're doing this. We're doing it right now. I mean, that's the major source of, you know, reactive oxygen species. I'm sure you've heard of that in your body. I mean, these reactive oxygen

species, they react. That's what they do. They react with your DNA. They react with lipids, your cell membranes. They react with proteins and they damage them. And what happens when you're doing, it's called DNA damage. When it reacts with your DNA, you know, sometimes you get like an, you know, a bulky adduct that's attached on, or sometimes you get like an oxidative product, which then can cause a break. Your DNA is double-stranded and can cause a break. which then can cause a break. Your DNA is double-stranded and can cause a break. And what happens is, you know, the cells in different organs,

like in your kidneys and your liver, these cells have a limited lifespan, and so they have to replicate. They have to synthesize their DNA, replicate, in order to replace their limited lifespan. So when the cell then tries to replicate its DNA, and there's this, like, funny stuff there, it's like, what is this? And then sometimes it puts another nucleotide, what's not supposed to be there and it causes a mutation. And then you have this mutation. It's like, okay, well you can't go back once you have a mutation, it's there. So, you know, if it's a mutation in a coding region of a gene that does something important, then you could really screw

stuff up. And so, um, in order to prevent that from happening, we have what's called DNA repair enzymes. And they basically take this damage that's there and they repair it. And those DNA repair enzymes require magnesium. Without magnesium, they do not work. They do not work well. They're very inefficient. And so if you're not getting enough magnesium, your DNA repair isn't going well and you're probably getting more damage. But the thing is, this is a decade. It takes decades for this to rear its head. You know, you've got a bunch of – we've got DNA damage.

But you can't look in the mirror and be like, oh, I have DNA damage today. It's like, well, you can look in the mirror and be like, oh, my gums are falling apart. I probably have scurvy. So it's like, you know, this is something you can't see. And what happens is over decades of getting this DNA damage, because it happens at random places in your genes, eventually you get it in a place that you don't want. You get it in a gene that's important for controlling cell cycle or stopping bad cells from, you know, dividing and proliferating. These are called tumor suppressor genes. And when you get in one of those, you're screwed because now you got some funky cell

that doesn't pass those checkpoints that usually our genes and, you know, are making sure they don't pass this checkpoint if they're funny. And then they pass it and they start dividing and proliferating. And now you've got this clonal, you know, population of cancer cells. But, you know, that takes decades to happen. So if you've got this clonal, you know, population of cancer cells. But, you know, that takes decades to happen. So if you're walking around with not, you know, not sub-adequate levels of magnesium, you're not going to know anything until you're in your 50s or 60s and, you know, you come down with cancer. Wow. So.

That's intense. So now when you read something like this, you know, vitamins don't work, case closed, and you find out this is the research that they did and this is the conclusion that they came to from that research, that's so irresponsible and so infuriating. I agree. It's, you know, there's a lot of studies out there that have done meta-analyses and shown just the opposite. You know, it's not like this is the only research that's been done on vitamin and mineral supplementation. The thing that's really infuriating is the big overgeneralizations they did here. You know, for example, there is an important case where taking some vitamins and minerals can be bad, and that is when you have cancer. And, you know, these people had the opportunity to point that out instead of just saying, oh, vitamins are bad, meaning like everyone shouldn't take vitamins. They have, you know, in my opinion, they have, they should, they should be educating people on, okay, well, if you already have cancer, this can happen to you. So, you know,

the perfect example is folate. Okay, folate is an essential B vitamin and it's mostly fortified in a lot of our breads and even junk food like chips. And I've seen it in chips and crackers and stuff. So not that many people in the United States are deficient in it anymore. I think like 14 percent of the population. So it's not a huge, huge problem like it was. However, folate is it's essential to make one of your nucleotides in your DNA, thymine, which means without folate, you're not making thymine. And you have to, you need folate, you know, to basically make new DNA for these new cells that you're making in your body every day. Okay. So when you don't have folate, that can actually cause a single strand

break in your DNA. And it can do the stuff I was telling you about by causing mutations and leading to cancer eventually. However, if you already have cancer, everything that's good for you, cancer, it's like cancer is on crack, man. It's like, oh, it's good for you. Yeah, give me some of that. You know, it's it's like they they just take over everything that's good. And because, well, you know, they want to keep that's that's their goal. Propagate. I want to propagate just take over everything that's good because, well, that's their goal, propagate. I want to propagate and take over. So with folate, because cancer cells, they're dividing. They're trying to replicate themselves.

They love folate. They love it because that's what they need to make more DNA, to make more of their cancer cells. So someone that already has cancer shouldn't be taking high levels of folate. And really, I think these people that wrote this editorial had an obligation to educate them and specifically point this out. There's a mechanism why. Let's talk about it. Instead of making this huge overgeneralization saying multivitamins are bad. What do you think's the motivation behind a study like that, or a conclusion like that? What do you think's the motivation behind a study like that or a conclusion like that? Since it seems kind of unscientific, it's confusing.

I don't understand why they would be motivated to say that based on the findings that they got unless putting out that sort of salacious headline would get people thinking or get people responding and cause attention to their work. Absolutely. It's attention-grabbing. Negative things like that get pressed. They get attention. I don't know what their motive was, honestly. I kind of feel like that's part of it. I think another part of it is that a lot of medical doctors, they aren't trained in nutrition. They aren't trained in preventative medicine. They aren't trained to understand the importance of all these vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids and how

they're cofactors for these proteins and what they're doing long-term versus short-term. They're not, that's, you know, when they're trained, they're actually trained to understand how different pharmacological drugs act on certain receptors, how, you know, it's kind of a different training. So I think in some cases, when you start talking about nutrition and preventative medicine, a lot of people, if you don't know about it, you get kind of threatened and you feel like, oh, it must be wrong. I don't know about this. You know, kind of like one of those responses.

And I think that may also have something to do with a lot of the MD physicians that were involved in this study. There's a lot of people that want to be, there's this need to be like a no-nonsense person. Oh, come on with all that. That's a bunch of hooey. You don't need any of that. It's all complicated. Is that a response to not wanting to delve into the incredibly deep waters of nutrition

and figure out what all these mechanisms are? I mean, is it just sort of a knee-jerk reaction to, oh, it's a bunch of BS? I think there's two reasons. I think one is absolutely it's a visceral response because there is a load of crap out there, and it is hard. It is hard to differentiate between what's the noise and the signal. And so some people are just like, oh, it's all crap, you know. But I think there's also people that just, it's just too much work. Like, you know, I want to keep eating what I'm eating and I want to believe it's fine and that's

what I want to believe and so I'm going to believe it. I think that's another really, you know, mindset that needs to be changed. And I think, you know, personally, I would love to see people eating more greens, you know, more of these dark green leafy vegetables, which are rich in many different micronutrients like vitamin K, folic acid, magnesium. I can talk about that in a minute. But I think, you know, for people that are just that aren't going to do that, you know, at least give them a vitamin that's going to give them some of these trace elements and minerals and vitamin D and some of these important micronutrients that they really do need. Magnesium, you know, so at the very least, it's just it's an easy way to do it. You know, it's an easy way to do it.

Yeah, it seems to me that in order to really get a grasp on what is required, what is necessary for your body, it takes an incredible amount of study. I mean, there's so much information that you have to get, not just as far as dietary information, but supplemental information there's there's just so much it's it's it almost feels you feel a little hopeless like trying to absorb it all and figure out what you actually need and what you don't need and when you read a study like that vitamins don't work case closed good now i cannot think right let me push that aside and just fucking have an apple and feel like i'm doing my job you know one of the reasons why I made a video to this, you know, response to this editorial was because, you know, A, because I could have done some scientific paper and gone through peer review and blah,

but, you know, I want to get it to the people. And it's like, at some level, you know, there's other scientists, they don't really care, you know. I want the people to realize that, you know, because these people like my dad, my dad takes a multivitamin and he listens to the news. He gets his information from the TV like that generation does. And, you know, it's just it's so upsetting that like all of a sudden my dad could stop taking his vitamin.

And I don't want him to stop taking his vitamin because, you know, it's important that he does take his multivitamin. There are certain, you know, components in that multivitamin that I know he's not getting from his diet. So, you know, at least let him get it from his multivitamin. So this study, there was a meta-analysis that included like 30 different studies, and I really read through them all. And there were a lot of methodological errors, and I point them out in the video, where people were just, they weren't measuring levels of any vitamins and minerals and saying they were measuring some outcome like cardiovascular disease or, you know, cognitive function without any biomarkers. Like there was no biomarkers saying, oh, look, we gave them this, this changed. You

know, that's important when you're doing nutrition research. And that's a really important thing. And if you look at some of the studies that did do that, for example, when they were giving them vitamin D, they gave them vitamin D to a severely deficient population, which is like 12 nanograms per mil, where that's severely deficient. We're talking like rickets deficient. And then after their supplementation, they were still deficient. They were still less than 20 nanograms per mil, which is considered deficient. So it's like, okay, well, you're trying to look at this outcome. And yet the vitamin D supplement, you know, the dose that you gave these people was inadequate. They didn't you didn't raise their levels to anything, you know, that was considered adequate by by the National Institute of Medicine.

Now, when when people take vitamin D, what what is the exact vitamin D they're supposed to take? They're supposed to take like D2, D3? Yeah, D3. You can take D2, but it's just less efficient to get converted into the active hormone. So D3 is optimal? D3 is optimal. Yeah, D3 is optimal. And, you know, like I said, I personally can't tell people how much to take.

I can tell them what I take, which is 4,000 IUs a day. And honestly, I can tell them they should have levels of vitamin D in their blood greater than 30 nanograms per mil. And we should also tell them if you're not familiar with taking vitamins that most vitamins need to be taken with food. Yeah. I mean, you can definitely get nauseous if you're, if you're taking your vitamins on an empty stomach, plus some vitamins like vitamin B12, if you're, if you have a, if you don't have an acidic environment in your stomach, you know, you, you basically, I mean, if you have too acidic of an environment, then you can't absorb it. So it's like, there's, there is factors that come into play. I mean, it's complicated. And also your gut bacteria also play a role in what you're absorbing, particularly in minerals.

And when you take vitamins on an empty stomach, if they're not attached to fats and proteins and carbohydrates, do they absorb as easily? I mean, it seems that I think there's been research done that shows that your body doesn't really exactly know what to do with vitamins and vitamin form if you take them on an empty stomach with no food attached to them. I mean, I think it depends on what, if it's a mineral, what vitamin. I mean, I'm not exactly sure. But some things you're supposed to take on an empty stomach, like amino acids, some amino acids you take on an empty stomach. I'm not exactly sure about that. Yeah, sorry. Too complicated even for Rhonda.

See? I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. It's like there's so much to know about what to take. Right. My friend, Dr. Mark Gordon, every time I talk to him, he fills my head up with shit that I'm never going to remember. The newest information, glutathione and this and that. It's hard. It's hard.

It's hard to keep up with it. Yeah, it is hard. Things do get complicated, and I don't have all the answers, but I do dig pretty deep and try to get some information out there to people. Well, that's why these folks who are inclined to be of the no-nonsense group, they find it so easy to dismiss this. I have a friend who's one of those. He and I were talking, and he was like, he had this smug look on his face.

See that thing they said about vitamins? They don't work. And I said, did you read it? And he said, look, I glossed over it. I go, did you fucking read it, man? He goes, well, they say vitamins aren't working. I go, that's not what they say. And then I showed him what they actually said he was like get the fuck out of here that was the test and i go yeah that was the test old people with heart attacks and they gave him a pill oh they didn't fucking die any uh longer and they didn't live any longer crazy yeah and how do you even measure cognitive decline in people over 65 with cognitive decline. By a phone call, by the way. Is it really? It was by a phone call. What?

Yeah. By a phone call. So they called him up. How are you feeling? Like shit. Right. Okay. No improvement.

No improvement. By a phone call. That really got me. Wow. Yeah. The specific, you were reacting to Brian Dunning. What specific things was he saying that you got so fired up about that you had to contact me? Well, one was that everyone gets their, yeah.

And the other thing was he was saying that, what's the vitamin C thing that was getting to me too? He was going on about not needing a thousand milligrams of vitamin C thing that was getting to me too. He was going on about not needing a thousand milligrams of vitamin C. And then I looked up some of his stuff and he was also talking about vitamin C not being important or not doing anything for immune function. And then he started talking about some malignus pollens. I can tell you what's wrong with that guy. And it is a bunch of things. But one of the main reasons he does what he does is that he grew up Mormon, a very strict Mormon background, and then refuted it, and now he's an adult, and he's just not going to take any nonsense. He grew up with all nonsense, and now he's no nonsense.

And I have a unique insight into this because I have some friends that grew up Mormon, and now they abandoned it actually in their 40s. And it's really interesting because they're like children in a lot of ways. They really, they're, they're fundamentalist lifestyle, like growing up in a fundamentalist religion where everything is spelled out for you and everything is preposterous, but you've accepted that your whole life you've accepted and you, you're told not to question and you're told to follow the rules of this ideology. When you get away from that and you try to figure the world out on your own, your thinking developed in this incredibly fucked up way. The way you make your connections to things. Like you have this black and white sort of connection thing going on in

your head and that's his fundamentalism translated to a fundamental skepticism so his skepticism is his fundamentalism now he automatically is skeptical of anything that might require additional thinking or curiosity or something that's going to counter what a lot of people intuitively think to be true. Anything that is bizarre or weird, anything that doesn't seem like you think about someone and then the phone rings and it's them. Nonsense! Nonsense! Immediately try to stop that. He doesn't want like you think about someone, and then the phone rings, and it's them. Nonsense! Nonsense. Immediately try to stop that. You know, he doesn't want anything to be weird. He wants it black and white.

And from a scientific perspective, science is so often, so often gray. So often not black and white. I mean, there are so many gray areas, and there are so many trade-offs. Trade-offs are really another thing, you know, where you're, you're doing something, you're, you have the certain diet and you think it's like going to give me best performance. It's going to give me best cognitive function and make me live longer. And it's like, well, there's some trade-offs here for getting all these things. And I think actually, uh,

that's a really important, it's not black and white. And so people that have that type of thinking that have been trained that way. And just like you were saying, you know, they've, they've built up these connections where, you know, it is, it's black and white. And if it's not black, then it's definitely white. And it's like, that's just not how it works. Well, their religion becomes just the skepticism. And instead of it being an open-minded, objective analysis of what's at hand, and instead they just want to stuff it into this skepticism box you know and immediately debunk things people love to debunk things it becomes like a badge of honor it becomes like they get a check mark on their column yeah they do yeah well

i mean and when you talk about uh science being gray of course oftentimes it's not you know but oftentimes it is but the reality of the science of biology is what's really important to kind of drive home. Human beings vary so much. If you get a phone, like this phone that I have here, I have a good one. It works great. But you could get a same manufacturer, the same Samsung Galaxy Note 3. You can get it from somebody else or from a provider. It's the same components. It's built the same way. It weighs the same thing on a scale. And yours sucks. It fucking breaks. It fails. Absolutely. Let me give you a perfect example. So I was talking about folate, right? Folate's

important to make thiamine, you know, nucleotide. It's also important to, when you eat protein, you know, methionine is an amino acid and protein, it gets converted into homocysteine. And you need folate because it's a methyl donor that then gets methylated and reconverted back in methionine because you don't want too much homocysteine around in your body because it does bad things. You know, basically makes proteins start aggregating and it causes vascular disease and cognitive decline. Anyways, 10%... No, actually, sorry, 10%. 40% of North Americans have a polymorphism in a gene called the methylene tetrahydrate folate reductase, also known as the MTHFR or the motherfucker gene, basically.

But 40% of North Americans have this polymorphism in this gene that doesn't make it work correctly. And so what ends up happening is they can't remethylate this homocysteine to convert it back into methionine. So they end up having elevated levels of homocysteine in their blood. And unless they take more folic acid to sort of compensate for that, they're going to have higher levels of homocysteine in their blood. And unless they take more folic acid to sort of compensate from that, they're going to have higher levels of homocysteine in their blood, which will lead to vascular problems and cognitive decline. So yeah, exactly. It's a perfect thing. It's like, how much folate I take versus how much you take, or if I'm from Canada, who knows? I mean, you may have this polymorphism and you have to take, you know, five times more folate than I do.

Well, there's also the variables like how many people grow up and you're in an environment that your biology is not accustomed to. Like people who come from other countries and then they're in a specific country that's unique to their biology. Like if they're like what the Native Americans experienced when they were introduced to alcohol. Like this is not something that their biology was accustomed to and they really didn't have the ability to deal with it. Whereas the Europeans who had been drinking alcohol for untold years, they were so accustomed to it, it was a normal part of their existence that their bodies had adapted to it. whereas the Native Americans just hadn't. Your body adapts to what it needs to adapt to.

Your body adapts to its environment. Your body adapts to its diet. Your body adapts to the genes that have been passed down from your ancestor to ancestor, the epigenetics that are attached to them. It's just so much. So for someone to say, you know, you don't need this and you do, there's so many variables, there's so many components, it's so complicated. Perhaps within 24 hours, if you're eating mostly a protein diet, the different enterotypes that are in your gut, they've shown that people that eat mostly meat and fat, they have bacteria that's geared towards breaking down amino acids, breaking down lipids, metabolizing glutamine because you're given it, a ton of it. But people that eat mostly, you know, vegetable fiber and carbohydrates, they have a lot of bacteria that is involved in amino acid synthesis and synthesizing these things because they're not getting as much. But you can take

that person that's had this long-term diet and give them, you know, meat and within 24 hours, they'll start to get that bacteria that starts to break down the amino acids. So your body is very plastic and it does adapt to, you know, different dietary changes. Do you take probiotics? I do. So, yeah, I do take probiotics. The whole gut is so fascinating. I work with someone that's doing a lot of research on the gut, and so I get to learn just from their research

and reading on my own about the complexities of it. But it's fascinating how important that bacteria is in our gut and how important certain types are and how that affects the way we respond to disease, the way we age. So it's complicated. It's very complicated. It is complicated in the environment that's inside your gut.

It actually can contribute to your mood. It can contribute to depression. It can contribute to all sorts of various aspects of your immune system. Absolutely. Like if you're so, you know, if you're, if your gut is, you know, if you have basically your innate immune systems being active down there because it's unhappy, you know, causing inflammation, things like, you know, having high C-reactive protein has been correlated to depression. Like that's actually a biomarker that, you know, I think could be used with depression is actually C-reactive protein instead of just, you know, this vague kind of, okay,

I feel this, I feel that. Well, let's measure your C-reactive protein levels. Okay. Yeah. Wow. They're really high. They've even done some studies where they've gotten depressed patients, found that they had high C-reactive protein, gave them like two grams of EPA. EPA is the omega-3 fatty acid that's important for, it's like anti-inflammatory as opposed to DHA, which is most of your brain lipids are DHA. But two grams of EPA a day, I forgot for how long,

but it lowered their C-reactive protein and helped with their depression. Um, so that's pretty profound. That is very profound. The connection between the human body and depression is such a weird one because for so many folks, they go to a doctor, they don't feel good. The doctor gives them an antidepressant, they feel better. And then, and then that's it. But there could have been so many other factors that could have been manipulated, either their diet, their exercise routine. Absolutely. Hydrating.

Absolutely. I mean, how many people are fucking just dehydrated and they feel like shit? Right. How many people get out of a bad relationship and they feel like shit? How many people have a bad job i mean consider what people consider to be uh you know depression uh you know you're you're moody you're down the dumps you're not you're not you're not feeling good you have bad thoughts all the time and then consider what's the stimulation that your brain is receiving every day well you're driving in traffic in

fucking pollution to a cubicle where you sit and do shit that you don't want to do all day. You get home, and then you force-feed yourself some terrible foods because you're depressed, and you're just sort of indulging, giving yourself some pleasure

in some fucking shitty macaroni and cheese or whatever you're stuffing down your face, and then you wonder why you're depressed. Right. Absolutely. This reminds me of a study where they're using telomere length. So telomeres are like caps at the end of your chromosomes that prevent your DNA from degrading and from getting damaged. People often refer to like the tips of shoelaces like telomeres because they

prevent your shoelaces from fraying. And these telomere lengths, when you're young, they're long. But each time your cell divides, they get shorter and shorter. Like with each year, they get shorter. I think you lose like 22 nucleotides a year off your telomeres. And it's a biological marker for aging. So the shorter your telomeres are, the shorter your life is, basically. If you look at telomeres from a young person versus an old person, you can see the dramatic differences. And stress, stress has been correlated with taking, like, five years off your telomere length. And the opposite's been true. Meditation, they've shown that meditation,

there's actually an enzyme that can rebuild your telomeres, but we don't express it in high levels. It's called telomerase. But meditation can actually boost the expression of telomerase and cause your telomeres to get longer. So there's really something to that, you know, having a more relaxed, being able to meditate, not having a lot of stress, you know, affecting the way you age. Literally, we have a biological marker for it. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's another thing, vitamin D, I wanted to, vitamin D affects the telomere length also.

If you Google vitamin D receptor mice and pull up this image with the, there's mice, aging mice. So vitamin D actually does affect the way we age. And they did this study on twins where they looked at their vitamin D levels, they measured their vitamin D levels, and they looked at their telomere length. And they found that those twins with the highest levels of vitamin D also had the longest telomeres that corresponded to actually five years, being five years younger, even though they were twins, their same chronological age, their telomeres looked like they were five years younger if they had higher levels of vitamin D. Wow. Yeah. So what, do you know anything about TA-65? This is some sort of

a supplement that's supposed to, uh, enhance your telomere lengths. I haven't heard of it. Um, no. So, but vitamin D exercise is another one that does. They've done studies showing, uh, again in twins, uh, those that exercise the most actually had telomere length that corresponded to being 10 years younger. Um, and those that exercise sort of like average compared to those that didn't have an average of like, I think four years. So, you know, there's, there's, there's things that affect the way you age and we have, you know, there's things that affect the way you age, and we have, you know, markers for that, biological markers like telomere length that proves your lifestyle is indeed, you know, affecting the way you age. Yeah, I'd read this telomere study, and I had seen the ads for this

supplement. Whoa. Okay, so look, check this out. So those two mice, okay, these are the same age mouse. The top panel, these mice are about four and a half months old. And the one on the left is a vitamin D receptor knockout mouse, which means it can't respond to vitamin D. So it's like not having any vitamin D. If you look at the lower panel, those are the same age four months later. Look how rapidly that mouse is aging without having vitamin D. I mean, there's lots of things going wrong. I mean, I told you that vitamin D is regulating over a thousand different genes in your body. So inflammation, I mean, cognitive function,

I mean, there's a lot of things, but look at that. It's pretty striking. Have you ever thought about going into business, like where you provide some sort of a service where people get tested and then they develop specific vitamin protocols for each individual person? Yeah, I know. My boss and I, we talk about that all the time. Why don't you do it? It sounds like a great idea. I've got this assay where I can actually measure DNA damage in your body from your blood. And that's also a marker for age because, you know, the older you are, the more DNA damage you have.

And I can measure that clinically. So what we're thinking is like giving people magnesium and seeing if we can, you know, lessen that damage because there are DNA repairs working better. But that would be really cool. Another thing would be vitamin D, measuring, doing the vitamin D magnesium. Yeah, I think there's a few micronutrients that we know that are really important for long-term effects. Like I was saying, there's often this trade-off where, okay, let's say you're getting some vitamin K, but you don't have enough. In fact, 35% of the U.S. population doesn't get enough vitamin K. Vitamin K is found in plants because they need it for photosynthesis. So if you're not eating a lot of green plants, then you might not

be getting enough vitamin K. But vitamin K is often known for being part of coagulation, being important to make your blood clot right. And that's an essential function. So I'm sure any vitamin K you're getting is going towards that because you want your blood to clot right. You don't want to bleed out and have a hemorrhage, right? But there's other important functions of vitamin K. Vitamin K also prevents the calcification of your arteries. And so if all your vitamin K is going towards the proteins that are important for clotting, then the proteins that are important for not having calcification in your arteries aren't getting any.

And then, you know, two, three decades later, you start to see this calcification in the arteries. And in fact, people that are given warfarin, which is a really common drug for inhibiting vitamin K, they end up having problems with calcification in their arteries and stuff. So, you know, there's, I think there's a lot to understanding how these micronutrients work that we don't know yet. And, you know, we're starting to try to be able to do some experiments to understand them. But the bottom line is that, you know, your body's smart. And if you don't have enough of a certain vitamin or mineral, it's going to shunt it to the one that's going to help you survive now and help you reproduce because that's what it wants to do. And these other things like, you know, DNA, repairing damaged DNA

or, you know, having your brain work optimally, you don't have to be that smart to survive. You know, these things, they probably get the short end, you know? So it's kind of like it's a vitamins in my mind are sort of like a long term thinking. You're thinking long term. It's like, yeah, OK, well, I'm not walking around with any acute deficiencies, which is what most people think when they're thinking, oh, I have enough vitamins and minerals because I don't have beriberi. I don't have, you know, these problems that are severe deficiencies. It's like if you're severely deficient, you're going to have some symptoms that you'll notice. But most of these symptoms you're not going to notice.

And they're insidious damage. It's happening, you know, a little bit at a time over decades. It's amazing to me that there's not a lot of these like a center where you could go and get a full workup done and they provide you with like a recipe for your vitamin supplementation needs. That's the future. That is what we want. Like we want to get it to where we can just get a finger prick of blood and we'll know different proteins we can measure that are we know are involved in long term functions versus the short term functions of these vitamins different proteins we can measure that we know are involved in long-term functions versus the short-term functions of these vitamins.

And we can say, based on looking at these proteins, we can say, okay, you need more of this and this and this vitamin. Like, that's going to be the future. It would seem like, I mean, you go to the dentist. I mean, the dentist is a normal, common thing. They're everywhere to repair your teeth. Right. And that's such a basic thing, you know.

But the idea of going to someone who measures your blood and finds out what you're lacking in your diet, that's not normal. You know, I think instead of going to a doctor to try to find a quick fix to get some, you know, you're depressed, so they give you an SSRI. Well, you know, we don't know what the long-term effects of some of these pharmaceutical drugs are in our brain. Like, they just had this study that came out a couple months ago on antipsychotics, which they give, routinely give people with schizophrenia. And they found that these antipsychotics, in a dose-dependent manner, cause brain atrophy. So, and they followed these people for 15 years. This is the first time, this is the first long-term effect of antipsychotics that came out and that it was a really, you know, big study. And they showed that these schizophrenic patients, like the higher the

dose of antipsychotic they were on, the more brain atrophy. And, you know, it's like, so here you are giving these people antipsychotics and, you know, 15 years from now, their brain is like literally it's atrophying at a rapid rate. So that's just a classic example of us not knowing what some of these long term effects of some of these pharmacological drugs that we're doing, especially when it comes to the brain. There are so many feedback loops. Like if you're if you're inhibiting serotonin from being metabolized or reuptake, I mean, you've got serotonin sitting around, your body starts to downregulate serotonin receptors, which is how your body responds to serotonin. You know, it's like there's feedback things going on that I don't think we even understand. And, you know, one out of 10 Americans is taking an SSRI.

It's so crazy. It's crazy. And I know that they have benefited some people. I know people that they have benefited. Sure, sure. But it's have they exhausted all the other possible options? I have a friend who's on an SSRI, and he recently found out that he had been taking Propecia, and he recently found out that Propecia actually caused depression in some people. It can cause depression in some people. It can cause depression in some

people. And he quit. He quit taking Propecia and he's starting to feel, you know, like maybe that was the cause of his depression in the first place, but he's on an SSRI now. So now he has to figure out what to do. You know, is it, was it the Propecia that caused his depression? Was it, you know, going to happen anyway? Is the ssri that he's but he also eats a lot of candy and doesn't take care of his body and doesn't doesn't really exercise and you know he has a shitty diet all those things can factor into a low production of serotonin in your mind all those things can factor into you know just a a clogging of the pathways of neurotransmitters. Dopamine too. I mean, omega-3 fatty acids, 30% of your brain is made of DHA,

which is an omega-3 fatty acid. And they've shown that actually DHA affects the way dopamine is signaling in your brain. So in terms of like back to the schizophrenia, people with schizophrenia, you make dopamine in this frontal part of your cortex and the dopamine that you make there negatively feeds back on on this dopamine that you make in the back part of your brain and if you don't have that negative feedback what happens is that you start making more dopamine in that back part of your brain you

start to have like negative things like hallucinations and paranoia and things like that yeah and so they've shown that omega-3, they've actually given omega-3 fatty acids, DHA to schizophrenics and shown that it actually elevates the dopamine in the frontal part of the brain and helps regulate some of that negative feedback, you know? And so it's like, how many people are getting there eating fish every single day or getting their omega-3 fatty acids for their brain every single day. I mean, I know I am, but I'm pretty much an exception. You know, a lot of people that are depressed, like I said, the EPA is another big thing because inflammation has been shown to be correlated with depression. I'm a huge fan of omega-3 fatty acids,

especially in fish oil form. They make such a huge difference in how my joints feel. The anti-inflammation qualities of them are really incredible. It's one of the few things that I always recommend to anybody if they tell me they have knee pain or elbow pain. Yeah, I've seen some studies on how EPA, like giving even higher doses of EPA to people with like arthritis, you know, they're inhibiting some of the production of like arachidonic acid and some of these prostaglandins and things that are involved in inflammation, which a lot of people are getting because they're

eating, you know, they're getting a lot of omega-6 fatty acids too. So yeah, I've seen studies where it's been shown to improve it, you know. Now you were looking at this MCT oil over here and you were saying that's lacking something. Oh yeah. So it's interesting because, you know, I actually cook with coconut oil and I, at some periods in my life, I'd put it in my coffee. But coconut oil has lower gas. It's got medium chain triglycerides, which basically is 12 carbons or less. Lipids are just like long chains of carbons that are bound together with hydrogens. So the way your body processes long chain fatty acids is very different from short chain fatty acids. The way it processes long chain fatty acids, for one, I should probably get to that in a minute. Okay, let me start with the medium chain fatty acids. Basically- Get your paper and pen, ladies and gentlemen.

The shit's going to get confusing. It's pretty awesome. The way you digest it's different. It goes straight to your portal vein, and it goes to your liver, and then it goes into the mitochondria without having to go through this transport system, and it sort of slightly uncouples the mitochondria. It's thermogenic you know it has all these great benefits for mitochondria but um an interesting thing with lauric acid is that it's also been shown to be an appetite suppressant um it's you know through a couple of these different appetite suppressing hormones i think cck is one i can't remember what that stands for but stands for. And it's also antimicrobial. So it's been shown to kill off like candida albicans, which is like a yeast.

So lauric acid is 12 carbons. And a lot of MCT oils don't have lauric acid. And I just can't figure out why they wouldn't want lauric acid. Because when I take coconut oil, I'm like, you know, lauric acid's like the thing that I'm really excited about. So it's not naturally in coconut oil? No, it is. It's in coconut oil, but these MCT oils that people put together, a lot of them don't have lauric acid in it because they'll have like less than 12 carbon.

So lauric acid is a 12 carbon medium chain fatty acid. And medium chain triglycerides, how are they exactly extracted from coconut oil? Do you understand the process? I don't know how they do that and I haven't read about it. Yeah. But there is some process that allows it to have this lauric, how do you spell it? L-A-U-R-I-C, lauric acid. I'm going to make sure that-

Dude, lauric acid is awesome. Well, I'm going to make sure that Anit starts making MCT oil with lauric acid. Yeah. Well, I'm going to make sure that Anit starts making MCT oil with lauric acid. Nice, yeah. And what are the benefits of lauric acid, again, specifically for combining it with MCT oil or making sure that it's an MCT oil? Well, it is an MCT, but the benefits is, one, is it appetite-suppressing, and two, it's a very strong antimicrobial. So it's, like, good for your gut. It's killing off, like, yeast. It's been shown to kill off, you know, albicans, candida albicans. It also has the same thermogenic properties, all that

the eight chain fatty acids have. Now, do some MCT oils have it? Have you seen a lot of MCT oils? I haven't, you know, I haven't done a survey. I just look at this one. I see that it says, um, it says eight, eight carbon medium chain triglycerides from coconut and or palm kernel. To me, that says it's not having the 12-carbon, which is lauric acid. But, you know, I don't know. Right. Another thing that someone said to me that they were concerned about was that it's stored in plastic.

Is there an issue with plastic leaching chemicals into things like MCT oil? I mean, they've shown that certain chemicals, you know, especially in the presence of heat, can leach chemicals into whatever is in the plastic container. So if, like, that plastic container sits in the backseat of your car and your windows are rolled down or something along those lines? I always try to keep oils at four degrees in the refrigerator because it slows that, you know, obviously the oxidation process and all those, the heat, you know, slow down. Ideally, though, what should that be stored in? It shouldn't ideally be stored in plastic.

Should it be in a metal? Should it be in a glass? You know, it's not a real big concern of mine, so I haven't really put any thought into it, no. So as long as it's just not allowed to be exposed to heat and long as you're reasonably sure that the process from the storage in the plant, you know, the canning, the bottling, whatever it is,

to storage to store, that you're, you know, you're not, it's not sitting out in the sun. Yeah, I mean. Because that's the thing that people are, you know, you're not, it's not sitting out in the sun. Yeah. I mean. Because that's the thing that people are really concerned with, right? Like plastic bottles. They're concerned with like BPA. A lot of waters.

BPA, which can leach into water and stuff. Yeah. Like I have a friend, his girlfriend went to drink a bottle of water that was in the car that she had sitting in the back seat. He's like, don't drink it. You know, like it's a fucking bomb. My mom did that to me once. Really?

Yeah. For the same reason, right? That the plastic. It's a long time ago but yeah is that something you I mean if you have a bottle of water and sitting in your car and it's a hot day should you not drink that bottle water because it's been sitting in your car it's probably not going to kill you to drink it you know once but you know I wouldn't do it all the time so what happens to the I mean the the bottle like heats up and then the plastics leach out into the water and then it affects hormones in some sort of a way. Yeah. I mean, they've shown that, that, you know, I'm not an expert on, I've done a little bit of reading on

this, so, you know, I'm not going to claim to be any expert here, but yeah, they've shown that, you know, BPA can have some estrogen mimicking effects and, uh, you know, that's particularly, I think a concern, especially in, you know, that's particularly, I think, a concern, especially in developing males. I'm going to email you this TA65 stuff because I want you to check it out. Please check this out. Yeah, no, for sure. But it's about the telomeres. Telomeres.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to email you that cause I, I had a friend who asked me about it and I didn't know and I felt like you were the perfect person to throw this by. And then lauric acid. Lauric acid. Yeah. I'm going to.

Like I said, I, I don't ever buy MCT oil myself. Like I just use coconut oil. So is there a benefit in using coconut oil over MCT oil? Well, only if the lauric, I think lauric acid is a benefit. But if the MCT oil has lauric acid in it. What's the benefit of MCT oil over coconut oil? You know, I think they just – not having the other long-chain fatty acids in there that's also in coconut oil would be a benefit. But are those long-chain fatty acids beneficial?

It's just fat. I mean, saturated fat. So mean, it's saturated fat. So, you know. Bad fat? Good fat? Debatable, right? It's debatable. Yeah, I think.

So when it comes down to, you know, eating a lot of fat, you obviously need fat. I mean, fat's important. You need cholesterol, you know, for your brain. 60% of your brain dry weight is fat. Your cell membranes are fat. You hear that? You freak veg for your brain. 60% of your brain dry weight is fat. Your cell membranes are fat. You hear that? You freak vegans out there. You need cholesterol.

You do need cholesterol. I say that in my act as a joke about vegans, that they say silly things because they don't get cholesterol. There's tradeoffs, dude. This is what I'm talking about. So I've done a little bit of research, and I plan on doing more and actually coming out with a report on this. But I'll just talk about what I've done a little bit of research and I plan on doing more and actually coming out with like a report on this. But I'll just talk about what I've done. So like I plan, I like to dig, really dig and make sure I'm comprehensive. But some of the, when you digest, you know, fats, you have to make bile acids.

And in order to make bile, to basically be able to absorb them. And some of these bile acids that you make when you digest fat are carcinogenic. So deoxycholic acid, DCA, is one that I'm talking about in particular. So that's kind of like every time you're eating fat, your body's making this DCA, which damages DNA, damages DNA in your epithelial cells lining your intestine. So that's sort of a drawback, but it doesn't mean you should stop eating fat. It just means you should be aware if you're eating 60 or 70% fat diet that you might want to consider some of these long-term effects that could, you know, rear their head later in life. Also, eating fat increases IGF-1 because IGF-1 is a growth factor.

And you probably have heard of it because in the fitness community, it's sort of like a downstream media or growth hormone. People are always really excited about having more IGF-1 because it helps you bulk on muscle and things like that. things like that. But also, if you have too much of it that you're making over a lifetime, it's a growth signal that tells cells to overcome the checkpoints I was talking about earlier, where you have these checkpoints where if you have some damaged DNA that has a mutation, then the cell goes, okay, it's time to die. But lots of IGF-1 there says, oh, I don't have to die. I'm going to keep going. So it's highly correlated with cancer, IGF-1. So IGF-1 being in high doses, IGF-1 being like what doses are correlated with cancer? Yeah, that's a great question.

Yeah. So basically people with cancer, they have like it's just out of control. So people have gigantism. They must have an issue with this, right? Like that's people that have like they have tumors in the pituitary gland. We've had a few of those guys in mixed martial arts that had cancer of the pituitary gland and then they had the tumor removed so that they could compete in the United States. They were competing overseas in other organizations like in Pride.

They used to allow these guys to fight and they would be fucking these literally giants we have a guy in the in the ufc right now his name is bigfoot silva antonio bigfoot silva he's he has that disease and he had the tumor removed from his pituitary gland and now he functions on a normal basis but he has to supplement his hormones because of that and is that a similar thing i mean when you're talking about like high igf1 is that a similar thing? I mean, when you're talking about like high IGF-1, is that? Yeah. Well, if you're making a lot of growth hormone from your pituitary, I mean, are these people are making a lot of growth hormone? Yes. I mean, I would assume. I mean, that's why their heads are so big and their bodies are so distorted. That's what he looks like now.

Their bodies are so distorted. That's what he looks like now. That's after the tumor removed. It's a really fascinating situation because you look at the guy and it's quite obvious that his body's gone haywire. I mean his skull's enormous. His hands are enormous. You get to see what he looks like. I mean he has all the classic.

Very good fighter, though. Actually, some people that are making, when your pituitary makes growth hormone and then stimulates the liver to make IGF-1, that IGF-1 negatively feeds back on the pituitary to shut it off. But people that have that sort of problem don't have that negative feedback, and they end up having all sorts of problems. For one, even though IGF-1 can actually make your muscle cells insulin sensitive, which is good, growth hormone can cause insulin insensitivity in like your liver. So they end up getting, you know, having, you know, insulin insensitive liver cells. And that's a major problem with, I know with that. And aren't there certain amino acids that you could take before you go to sleep that will stimulate your body's production of growth hormone?

I don't know. I know that protein and fat stimulate the production of IGF-1. But I don't know about certain amino acids you can take to stimulate growth hormone. I do know growth hormone can be increased from exercise and also from the sauna.

Really? Oh, yeah. The sauna, there's, can increase growth hormone to like massive levels. The sauna can? Yeah, yeah. So like it's a good thing to go into a sauna after you work out? It's a great thing to go into the sauna after you work out. Really?

And it's also a good thing to go in the sauna when you're not working out, if you're injured, because that prevents atrophying of muscles. Yeah, so definitely. That's incredible. I've never heard that before. My husband and I, we did some, I have a report coming out on this probably in a couple of weeks,

so I can't, a friend of yours, I think might publish it on their site. A friend of mine? Yeah. So I'm not going to give too many details. Can you tell me who it is? Tim. Tim Ferriss?

Yeah. Oh, okay, cool. So I'm not, I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but I did, my husband and I did a lot of experimentation with the sauna because we used to live next door to a YMCA, which had a sauna. And so we would just go use the sauna like all the time. And aside from

all the research that I, that I did to write this article, I'll just talk about my experience. And, and like when I was injured, um, I had some injuries and I couldn't work out for like a month and I would do the sauna every day. And I did not, I was not losing my muscle mass like I would have, um, if I wasn't injured. Um, and also it helped me deal with stress and, you know, just dealing with stress and being able to focus. That's incredible. I'm so glad I talked to you today because I thought the sauna was nonsense. No.

I was the other day, I went to a spa and I got a little massage and then they had a jacuzzi and a sauna. I was like, who goes in that stupid fucking sauna? That shit ain't doing nothing. Just getting all hot in there. It's doing so much, dude. Why is it doing something? It was just getting you hot. I don't understand what's happening. Yeah.

There's a lot of things going on, but I'll tweet you the link. Please do. Yeah, because it's like... Well, email it to me and then I'll tweet it. Yeah, I'll email it to you. It could go to the abyss. There's too many people doing it. Sometimes I refresh my feed and I can't find something that somebody sent me

because it's just too much. But the sauna, that's a fascinating thing to me because there's infrared saunas as well. Now, what's the benefit of that? Yeah, so I haven't done a ton of research on the differences between just a normal dry sauna, which most of the studies that I read, they're using normal dry saunas. So a dry sauna is awesome.

Yeah, a dry sauna. I'm just elevating your core body temperature, basically. I think the infrared somehow can heat you up without some of the damaging effects of the heat or something. I'm not exactly sure. I'll just say that I haven't done a lot of research on that. But you can get infrared saunas and just like put them in your garage. My in-laws have one in their garage. Yeah, we have one that my wife loves and she climbs into it. It's like a bag. It's like a

Oh, she's got one of those bags. I've seen those. Is that worthwhile? She looks so stupid. I don't know. She's sitting there with her. She's got her iPad and she's watching Breaking Bad and she's in this fucking sleeping bag. It's so ridiculous. Yeah. I'm not sure if that's, I think to get some of the benefits, you have to kind of push it a little bit. I'm not sure if you're going to.

She's pushing it. Is she? Oh, okay. She gets out of there. It's like she swam in the ocean. She's soaked. Wow. Okay.

I've seen those on Amazon, but I was always curious. Yeah. That's a different one. The image shows a different one. The one that. It's a long one. She has, she actually lies down in it. It's so silly looking.

I thought it was horse shit and voodoo. Yeah, it has benefits on the brain. I mean, it's like... Think about when you exercise. Yeah, it's like you're elevating your core body temperature. That's what she has. That's exactly what she has. She climbs in that goofy fucking thing.

Okay, so her head's not exposed. So her head is out. Yeah, she needs to get her head in there, right? I'm going to tell her. Yeah, I don't know. Put a fucking bag over your head, lady. Yeah, I think put the head. Well, I mean, it sounds like there's a great benefit

to having one of those things in your house if you have room. Yeah, totally. If you've got a garage. I mean, they don't take up a lot of space. I did not know. That's incredible. I'm so glad I talked to you. I mean, I just went take up a lot of space. I did not know. That's incredible. I'm so glad I talked to you.

I mean, I just went last week to get a massage and just looked at that stupid thing. I was like, huh, that hot wood box. I wish my gym had one like my gym now doesn't have one. And I miss it so much. Wow. Yeah. So how does it stimulate human growth hormone? What does it do?

You know, I don't know how it does, but they've measured it. You know, they've measured growth hormone after people have been in the sauna. And is it a temporary benefit of the heat? Yeah, it's a couple of hours after. It's just like if you were to, you know, inject some growth hormone, I don't think it lasts more than a couple of hours either. Wow, that is unbelievably fascinating. It is fascinating.

But there's an interesting, and I did write a post on this, this tradeoff on growth hormone IGF-1 tradeoff. And that is, you know, growth hormone and IGF-1 are, you know, they're considered really good, anabolic. They're, you know, help you bulk on muscle. They're also good. It's good for your brain. You know, it helps with neurogenesis in your brain. But there's a trade-off. They've shown that reducing IGF-1 signaling in lower organisms like worms and flies and also in mice extends their lifespan. So if you take a mouse

and you knock out growth hormone receptor, it can live 50% longer. What? 50% longer, like huge increase in lifespan. That doesn't seem to make any sense because you would think the growth hormone would be repairing the muscle tissue. You would. You would. It's so confusing. And so in people, actually in people, people that have polymorphisms in the IGF-1 receptor, it's associated with like centenarians, like living to be 92 and 100.

And that's mostly mediated through not getting cancer. But there is an interesting trade-off, and I think that in lower organisms, the reason is that having that reduced insulin signaling helps them deal with stress. Like, they have an increase in gene expression for various different genes that are, you know, antioxidant genes, like genes, you know, glutathione reductase and things like that.

And also in genes that help them take care of proteins and increasing neurotrophic factors. I'm not sure if the same benefits are true in humans. In humans, mostly I think it's they're not getting cancer because of having lower IGF-1. Well, here's the answer about amino acids and growth hormone. Apparently, there's a PubMed study on it. And they're saying that specific amino acids such as arginine, lysine, and orathine, can stimulate growth hormone release when infused intravenously or administered orally. Many individuals consume amino acids before strength training workouts, believing that this practice accentuates the exercise-induced growth hormone release,

thereby promoting greater gains in muscle mass and strength. The growth hormone response to amino acid administration has a high degree of inter-individual variability. That's the first time I've ever read that. I'm 46. I've never read that word. Inter-individual. That's a great word though. Inter-individual. Inter-individual variability. And may be altered by training status, age, sex, and diet, although parental administration consistently leads to... No, not parental. Parental. Parental.

Parental. What is that word? P-A-R-E-N-T-E-R-A-L? What is that word? Parental. Hmm. Administration considerably... Oh, peritoneal?A-L? What is that word? Parenteral. Hmm. Administration considerably... Oh, peritoneal?

Peritoneal, is that it? Is it? Is it peritoneal? Okay, anyways. P-A-R-E-N-T-E-R-A-L. Aeneal. No, it's not aeneal. No, okay.

Parenteral. Let's Google that motherfucker. Yeah. This is the golden age of information. Okay, let's see's look up in dictionary. Here we go. It is administered by or occurring elsewhere in the body than the mouth and elementary canal? What's an elementary canal?

God damn it. There goes fucking confusing shit. Okay, anyway. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Leads to increased circulating growth hormone concentration. Oral doses that are great enough to induce significant growth hormone release are likely to cause stomach discomfort and diarrhea. Boom, son! During exercise, intensity is also a major determinant of growth hormone release.

During exercise, intensity is also a major determinant of growth hormone release, although one study showed that arginine infusion can heighten the growth hormone response to exercise. No studies found that pre-exercise oral amino acid supplementation augments growth hormone release. Further, no appropriately conducted scientific studies found that oral supplementation with amino acids, which are capable of inducing growth hormone release before strength training, increases muscle mass and strength to a greater extent than the strength training alone. Hmm. That's interesting. That seems to be contradictory, doesn't it? A little bit? Yeah. I'd have to take a look at the study.

If it says that the administration consistently leads to increasing circulation of growth hormone concentration, oral doses that are great enough to induce significant growth hormone release are likely to cause stomach discomfort and diarrhea. So that means that if you do do that, you will get more growth hormone. You'll also get diarrhea. But doesn't that mean it works? Sounds like it means it works if you're looking at growth hormone, circulating growth hormone as an endpoint. Yeah. So how would they know? That's where it gets confusing, whether they know that it increases

strength or muscle mass to a greater extent than the strength training alone. Because a lot of that is variable individually as well. Yeah. You'd have to do a baseline. You'd have to do the person itself and do their baseline and then what they would do without the amino acid and then do what they do with it. So you'd have to compare each person to their own self. Yeah. That's the only way to do it, right? Yeah. Because I've had friends that can just – I know I have a friend who just can't fucking pack on muscle.

The guy will lift weights all the time. He lifts heavy. He tries – he can't gain weight. He gets a little stronger, but he just can't pack on muscle. Then I have other friends that they just look at weights and they just grow. It's crazy. It's like some people, they just have that mesomorphic body structure and they start lifting weights and their muscles just start expanding and growing and they just start getting bigger. And other people, they have that ectomorphic thing going on and they just can't pack it on. So how would you, with those factors i mean

how you'd have to know exactly who you're doing you'd really have to judge it intensely by the individual alone right yeah i think that's the best way to do it is comparing each person to their baseline self uh you know so that's crazy though that growth hormones in mice allow them to live longer. Yeah, and the converse is true also. If you over, if you make a transgenic mouse and overexpress the growth hormone,

like they're expressing lots of it, they live 50% shorter. Wow. So it's, it's an interesting, it's an interesting trade-off, you know, because oftentimes growth hormones,

I mean, associated with what you want more of it because your, you know, growth hormone hormones except i mean uh associated with what you want more of it because your you know growth hormone levels go down as you age and it causes muscle atrophy and you know your brain you know brain atrophy in a sense too so um it's i i think it it has to do with uh more of supra physiological levels growth hormone, like people that are injecting growth hormone. Like people that are bodybuilders that are taking like 10 units a day. That may be a trade off. And they get those big bellies from it.

Yeah. So, you know, like I said, if you're, if you're, when you make growth hormone from your pituitary and then that stimulates IGF-1 to be made in liver, that then inhibits the production of more growth hormone. I mean, that then inhibits the production of more growth hormone. I mean, that feedback's there for a reason. And so if you just keep injecting it, you're sort of overcoming that feedback because, well, your body, you're giving it growth hormone.

It's not making more. Even though there's IGF-1 there saying, shut it off, you're saying, no, I want more. I wonder if there's ever been any studies on people like bodybuilders that are taking massive amounts of growth hormone over long periods of time. Because I read this thing, Dorian, look at that guy oh my god that's a oh my god he's a monster yeah isn't that um what's his name the uh ronnie coleman yeah he's a former mr olympia and i think he probably takes a truckload of pharmaceutical drugs every day in order to achieve that physique.

But his stomach, that's like apparently one of the things that happens when you take massive amounts of growth hormone is they literally bulge out like they're pregnant. Wow. I would love to see someone study that, to see what happens to those guys when they do that over long periods of time. That would be a really interesting study. Well, the bodybuilding industry or the bodybuilding as a sport is so fascinating to me because

essentially you're dealing with these chemical projects because that's what they are. They're chemical projects. They're not humans. I mean, when you look at a guy like Ronnie Coleman, you don't get that big. A normal guy doesn't get that big. I mean,'t get that big i mean you can get big i i i had a friend uh who was a total natural bodybuilder there's photos of him in his gut that's so crazy it's so bizarre and you know i used to think that that was just big stomach muscles i used to think that he did a lot of abs so his stomach muscles were huge until i actually read that their organs grow because of all the hormones that they're on. It's fucking crazy.

He looks pregnant. Look at how pregnant he looks. It's so strange. Yeah, like I said, I know it can cause insulin resistance in the liver. Yeah, well, people get diabetes from it, from overuse of growth hormone. Yeah. Now, the idea that there's a whole sport dedicated to shooting as many chemicals into your body and turn you into some freak of science, that's a strange sport.

It's very strange. But, you know, there's a bit of a tradeoff. These people are bulking up and they're lifting lots of weight and, you know, they're at the expense of, you know, a few years in their life. So I think— They say, fuck it, I'd rather be huge, bro. Yeah, you know. I'd rather be huge.

What do you think about... Whoa, that's not a bodybuilder. What do you think about the studies that have been done on... What is that? The thing that happens to cows. God, I'm trying to remember the exact function. There's something that happens to whippets and it happens to cows. It's an accidental aspect of breeding that causes them to myostatin inhibitors.

Do you know about all that? Oh, great. I'm going to educate you on that. Yeah, please do. Something happens. Pull up myostatin inhibitor dog. It's a whippet. Apparently it occurs like quite frequently amongst these dogs and they don't look real. They look like incredible Hulk dogs. And what it is, is there something... What does myostatin do? I'll tell you right now. Myostatin inhibitor dogs.

Look at that dog. That's real. Holy crap. Holy crap indeed. Yeah. Double-muscled cattle. It happens in cows all the time. Myostatin misfortunes.

It actually occasionally takes place in human beings. There was a boy in Germany that had an issue with myostatin inhibitors. I'll pull that up. A boy in Germany, boy, Germany. And he, that's a cow that has it. And they've done it in mice. And the fascinating thing about them inducing this in mice is that the mice lived longer they didn't just live longer they were fucking huge they were like super mice yeah look at this boy this is a baby look at the fucking muscles on this kid look at his legs wow he looks like an athlete wait you pulled up a mouse study what was that yeah look at the mice look at the mice it's a double muscled

mouse that lives twice as long. That is fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely going to have to look into that, but I still don't know exactly what myostatin does. I'll pull up the thing about the mice. Yeah.

I'm pretty sure they live longer. This is hard to do while you're actually trying to do a podcast at the same time. This is how we rock it here, though. We do it live. Because usually bulking up like that is associated with living a shorter life. Yeah. So that's fascinating. Yeah. Here is myostatin.

Yeah, there's apparently quite a few studies that have been done, not just on the mice but also on dogs and cattle to try to figure this stuff out. This is fascinating. Yeah. If you do a Wikipedia, just like what is the myostatin? Okay, yeah, I'll just do it on Wikipedia here. Okay, abbreviated myostatin, also known as growth differentiation factor 8, abbreviated GDF8, is a protein that in humans is encoded by the MSTN gene. Myostatin is a secreted growth differentiation factor that is a member of the TGF beta protein family that inhibits muscle differentiation and growth in the process known acts on muscle tissue by binding a cell-bound receptor called the actin type 2

receptor. And animals lacking myostatin or animals treated with substances that block the activity of myostatin have significantly larger muscles. And this could be of economic benefit to the livestock industry. However, these animals require special care and feeding which offsets the potential economic advantage. Look at that boy. So it doesn't say anything about their lifespan. Look at that boy's body. What the fuck is going on there? That boy is yoked.

I do not want to go to school with that kid. Can you imagine how bummed out you'd be if you were both 10 and you're like, why does Billy have a fucking 12-pack and I look like a girl It's ridiculous, I mean, what does that kid? I mean, I wonder if they're gonna allow him to like wrestle and do athletics that seems unfair Kids gonna take other kids and just fucking hurl them across the room

He's gonna be the Hulk. A real live Hulk. That is fascinating. I'm going to have to dig into that. It's really interesting. I'd like to understand some of the mechanisms. A gene-encoded myostatin was discovered in 1997 by geneticists Dr. Se Jin Lee and

Alexander McFerron, who also produced a strain of mutant mice that lack the gene. These mice have approximately twice as much muscle as normal mice. Incredible. Yeah. I don't know why it happens all the time in whippets. That dog, that one whippet.

But it does happen in humans. Really, really amazing stuff. Very interesting. Yeah. But these sort of things, it makes you wonder. What is that, the mouse's body? Yeah. What, they killed it?

They killed it just to show us its muscle? They took off the skin, yeah. How rude. Wow. Could have just taken a picture. You don't have to get fucking crazy. Hmm. sure you don't have to get fucking crazy the uh the ones who uh the myostatin uh dogs apparently uh they sucked as runners but their appearance was significantly more muscular yeah they just

the fucking you know that's the thing about muscle and it's an issue that comes up in mixed martial arts all the time um and i i talk about all the time in commentary, is that you can't just pack on all that muscle and not have sort of, there's a point of diminishing returns. It's good to have some muscle, but the more muscle you have, the more you have muscle that's demanding fuel. And you have the same heart and the same lungs that's pumping out to more tissue. And it's just a matter of resources. You have only a finite amount of oxygen that you can take in a single breath and it's distributed through all this tissue all this extra muscle and it really has a significant factor on people's endurance yeah especially in athletics look at guy. Is that a real human? I don't know.

That's not Photoshopped at all? It has to be. I don't know. It might not be, man. It might not be Photoshopped, man. What they can do today is just really, really, really bizarre. I don't think they live longer. They don't live longer.

That's not a myostatin guy. That's just a guy taking drugs. I don't think that's a myostatin guy, right? I don't think there's ever been a human that's lived. I think it's a really recent thing. I don't know. Yeah. I'm just talking shit. It would be interesting to see what their mitochondria are doing.

Your mitochondria, when you're exercising, when you're bulking up muscle, you're inducing mitochondrial biogenesis. That's not real. Yeah, that can't be. That's definitely not real. That's definitely not real. That's definitely not real. There's been a couple cases where they've documented children have it. In 2004, a German boy was diagnosed with a mutation in both copies of the myostatin-producing gene, making him considerably stronger than his peers. His mother has a mutation in one copy of the gene. And then in 2005, an American boy was diagnosed with a clinically similar condition, but with somewhat different cause. His body produces a normal level of

functional myostatin, but because he is stronger and more muscular than most others his age, the doctors believe that a defect in his myostatin receptors prevents his muscle cells from responding normally to myostatin. And that is what I've heard, that they're trying to develop a myostatin inhibitor and that myostatin producing myostatin regulating the size of your muscle tissue, if they could come up with a myostatin inhibitor, it would increase the size of your muscles. I don't know if that's a good thing. It doesn't seem like it is. Yeah.

Well, it seems like it would help some people if they're, you know, if they have, like, wasting disease or something along those lines. Right, right. It's going to be really interesting, though, when they start coming up with, like, gene doping for that and they start giving it to wrestlers or football players or, you know, things along those lines. Because it seems like anything that affects the body so significantly, as you see with

those mice or those dogs, someone's going to take that shit. There's someone lining up. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. There's a guy lining up right now with his wee willy in his pants, and he's ready to just shoot that in there and make up for everything. And there's going to be a trade-off, but, you know, who cares? Well, do you follow genetic manipulation or studies on genetic manipulation

and the potential for what they're figuring out these days? Because it seems incredible, and it seems that the future is going to be so bizarre when you deal with the idea that, you know, the exponential increase in the ability to change things and to alter the human body is just going to continue as long as society allows this research to continue, as long as society allows, you know, as long as we don't blow ourselves up. This work is going to continue to go on. There's going to be more breakthroughs. There's going to be more significant increases in the capacity for change. And I mean, who knows what the fuck is going to

be like just a decade, two decades from now? Yeah, I'd like to see some, we've already made some major advances in the stem cell research, which to me is one of the most important, you know, because if you can, if we can get to the point where we can replace our damaged motor neurons or, you know, make sure we're not getting Parkinson's disease, I think that's a huge thing in helping us extend the quality of our life. Yeah. Because you don't want to nourish our disease. No. That's something you don't – I mean there's certain things you can do in your

lifestyle to try to not get one, but it'd be pretty sweet to have some genetic breakthroughs in these stem cell therapies. And we're making progress. We just, we're not there yet. I would like to see a study on someone who follows the exact protocol that science, that someone like you would prescribe to him or her, and that they do it over a long period of time, and they have a twin that doesn't do it. Right. You know? And they do some of those studies where they're looking at specific things,

like specific vitamins or exercise or things like that, but a long-term study where you're looking at multiple changes, I would love to see that as well. Yeah, one person drinks, one person doesn't, one person smokes. They did this study. They did it in monkeys, and it was like a 27-year experiment, I think, where they – so caloric restriction is known to extend lifespan in lower organisms and also in this monkey, monkeys they did, where if you give a monkey 30% less food than it would normally eat, so you basically let

the monkey decide what it would eat and then you say, okay, I'm going to give them 30% less of that every day. They did this for like 27 years. Can you do a Google search on caloric restriction monkeys and just like pull up the image that compares them? That has a big impact, right? So it has a huge impact on the way they age. These monkeys, they get age-related diseases less, cardiovascular disease less, cancer, brain atrophy, neurodegenerative diseases less. Were they significantly smaller? The monkeys were not significantly smaller,

but they looked significantly better. That's crazy. So they weren't smaller, but they looked better. Yeah. Okay. There's one picture. I think there's one where they have like four panels. Well, it seems like the one on the right is obese though. Okay. Yeah. There, pick that one with the four panels. Yeah, that one. So yeah, these monkeys are actually the same age here. And that monkey on the left, that's monkeys, it's in its old age, 27 and a half years. And it's had a normal diet. Like it's just eaten what it's, you know, normal amount of food. And that monkey on the right has been given 30% less food every day for like it's 27.5 years. That's incredible.

It's incredible. He looks way better. Way better. I mean, you can just tell by the way he looks, he's aging better. But he has the same body. It's incredible. He looks way better. Way better. I mean, you can just tell by the way he looks. He's aging better. But he has the same body. It's actually he looks more muscular. Yeah. So he looks like he's lost less muscle, less muscle atrophy. I mean, so what they found, they've done like these gene profiling expression arrays where they can measure like thousands of different genes at once.

And they've seen that caloric restricting actually changes the expression in like thousands of genes. And so it helps like, you know, genes that are involved in, you know, protein degradation, protein synthesis, like all these things are changed in these caloric restriction monkeys, genes that are involved in like, you know, growth factors in the brain. Those are upregulated. Inflammatory genes are downregulated. So it's like, you know, 27 years less of constant inflammation going on. And so it's very interesting how, and there's a couple of theories as to why these monkeys age better or why caloric restriction, you know, can help the way you age. And one of the big theories out there is that there's sort of like a hormetic response. So hormesis is basically where you have like a low level of stress, like a little bit of stress. And that stress then helps you, changes the expression of genes that are involved in stress. And so you basically can

then deal with stress later. So it's kind of like conditioning your body to deal with stress by giving it a little bit of stress. And this is kind of the same thing with a lot of like xenobiotics, like plant polyphenols, catechins, these sorts of things. That's how they work. They actually, you know, they induce this hormetic response where they increase the expression of stress resistant genes that we have in our body that help us deal with protein stress, with, you know, reactive oxygen species stress, with all these different types of stress. And because we're increasing the expression of those genes, we're dealing with stress better every single day. And that's in that case, you know, for 27 years. And so it's very this whole idea of hormesis is very interesting where you're sort of giving your body a little bit of stress,

like exercise is stress and it's a little bit of stress and it does the same thing. bit of stress. Exercise is stress, and it's a little bit of stress, and it does the same thing. But that whole field of epigenetics is just so fascinating how things that you eat, what you do, can actually change the expression of genes, and this actually affects the way you age. And really, what's interesting, not only does it affect the way you age, it affects the way your children that you haven't had yet age. Are you familiar with what epigenetics is? Yes. Okay, so basically... Please explain it for people who might not be.

So epigenetics is basically causing a change in your gene. They're factors that sit on top of your genes, basically, to give you a very simplistic topical view. They sit on top of your genes, and like methyl groups or acetylation groups, and they turn, they activate your genes. And when they activate your genes, they turn them on. And so the genes become what's called expressed. They're expressing the genes. When they're expressing the genes, they're doing what

they're supposed to do. And other factors can sit on top of them and turn them off. And even though the gene is still there, it's like it's not there because it's not being expressed. But these epigenetic factors don't actually alter the DNA nucleotide sequence like a mutation would. So that's the difference. A mutation changes the DNA nucleotide sequence. Epigenetic factor, this thing can be modulated and it doesn't change the sequence. It just changes how much of that gene is being active or not active. And these epigenetic marks are regulated by what we eat, by stress, by exercise, by all these various factors in our environment.

And so that's one study where they've changed the gene expression from caloric restriction. They've done, and I heard someone on your podcast talk about this study. It's a Swedish study. There's been a few of them that have been done where in Sweden, they keep extensive records of people's, there's records of what they eat, what diseases they've had throughout their life, when they were born, if they were depressed, what they died of. I mean, they're very extensive records on people. And also they have extensive agricultural records. So they can say during this part of the country at this time of the year, country at this time of the year there was a lot of famine or

there was a lot of you know there was a great crop harvest um and so particularly this northern part of sweden called norbutton sweden um back in i think it was like the 1800s they they looked back uh they were during this period of time for whatever reason it was hard to get in and out of there. And so people were really dependent on the crops that were there. So if there was a good, a lot of crops and it was a good harvest, people really gorged themselves. They ate, they overate. And if people, if the harvest was bad, there was a famine and people really, they sort of were calorically restricted. They basically didn't get to eat as much.

didn't get to eat as much. And so a lot of these Swedish scientists decided to look back and see, well, what effects did that have on future generations? So it's kind of like, is there a transgenerational epigenetic effect on longevity? So let's look at these people that grew up during the famine versus feast years, and let's look at their children and their grandchildren and see what diseases they had or how long they lived. And it's not like incredibly, it's not like a controlled study. I mean, it's very correlative and there's a lot of factors missing, but it's still very interesting. What they found is that males that were between the ages of nine and 12, and if they lived during

the, if they were nine and 12 during the famine years, they had children and grandchildren that lived on average about seven years longer than the grandchildren of those that grew up during the abundance years. And when they corrected for socioeconomic status, meaning, okay, rich people kind of ate well no matter what, when you correct for that, when you have people from the same socioeconomic status, those grandchildren of the men that were between the ages of 9 and 12 during famine years lived 32 years longer,

which is like crazy increase in lifespan. And they also, they had more studies coming out where those grandchildren were one-fourth less likely to get type 2 diabetes and also cardiovascular diseases. So it was like, why do you have to be between the age of 9 and 12 and a male? Why growing up during that part of the famine, how does that affect your grandchildren's lifespan?

And we can't really tell you why, but there's some sort of theories as to why. And during that time period, there's something, you know, you're pretty pubescent right before you actually get that growth spurt. And they think there's something to do with the sperm DNA that gets changed. A little bit of stress, a little bit of hormesis possibly, a little bit of stress changes the expression in your sperm genes, and that gets passed on. So, yeah, it's fascinating. So much to learn still about the human body. I feel like we're in a great time in comparison to other civilizations.

When you look back at what they used to do for medicine, what we're aware of now. But I feel like 100 years from now, they're going to be laughing at us. Right. Yeah, no. I think the future is preventative medicine. And there's going to be some breakthroughs eventually in things like stem cell therapy. But I think diet, nutrition, these things are what we can do now. That's what we can do now. We have control over it and it absolutely has been shown to affect the way we age, period.

And so we know this. So let's let's implement it. Let's educate people. this, so let's implement it. Let's educate people. Let's do it. As opposed to waiting around for some scientific breakthrough that may or may not happen during your child's lifetime. So there's just no telling what's going to happen. But we do know right now that we can control certain things and the way we age through our diet and our lifestyle. And that's what we need to start focusing on. I want to mention another really cool thing about this epigenetic thing. If you could turn the microphone a little bit more towards you, it would be a little

Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. All right. So this, back to the epigenetics study, something even as complex as like learning and memory can be modulated by your environment. This was a mouse study where they took mice that were transgenically modulated to get neurodegenerative disease.

And so they put these mice, usually when we work with mice, they're in this cage that has bedding, it has some food and water, and that's about it. There's not a lot of stimulation, not a lot of exercise. It's really kind of sad. But they took these mice and they put them in what we call an enriched environment. So they gave them all these toys that stimulated various regions in their brain, like the cognitive region, motor region, somatosensory regions. And what they found was that these mice scored better on learning and memory tests.

And not only did they score better on learning memory tests, they had increased the expression of a gene that's involved in long-term potentiation. Long-term potentiation is a signal that you're making when you're learning. You need to remember things, you know. But the really interesting thing about this study was that these mice that were genetically engineered to get neurodegenerative disease had offspring mice that were also genetically engineered to get neurodegenerative disease but were not put in an enriched environment. So they were put in that boring cage where they had no stimulation. But they had still increased that long-term potentiation gene, that epigenetic factor was passed on.

In this case, it was through the egg, through the female line, to the offspring mice, which had the same learning and memory benefits, even though they weren't exposed to that environment. which had the same learning and memory benefits, even though they weren't exposed to that environment. So, I mean, just having cognitive stimulation, just using your brain more and exercising more, can affect the expression of your genes, and that can actually get passed on. That's so fascinating. It is so fascinating. So, like, is that one of the reasons why athletes tend to develop athletes for children? Is that one of the reasons why really intelligent people tend to have intelligent children? Like is possibly it not just environmental and educational,

but epigenetics as well? Right. I mean, certainly, you know, the environment plays a component in those things. But, you know, the epigenetics, we're just sort of starting to understand epigenetics and how it works. And it's complicated. It's not easy to study. But, you know, it's, yeah, there's certainly a role for epigenetics in that. So it's complicated. It's not easy to study. But, you know, it's, yeah, there's certainly a role for epigenetics in that. So it's fascinating. It's so fascinating. Yeah, it's very fascinating. It's so fascinating when you stop and think about how much we're going to learn, you know, and what we know now and what we're going to learn.

It's incredible. It's just incredible. You just think of the potential for reengineering the human body. I mean, it seems like we're going to be able to do all these things we're doing to mice, giving them double muscles and making them fucking smarter. We're going to be able to do that to people. We're going to make a Dr. Manhattan, you know? Remember from that movie, The Watchmen?

We're going to make a Dr. Manhattan. It's going to happen. There's going to be a guy one day that's the omnipresent super being that becomes a god. We're going to fuck up and make a god. You know, I try to do what I can to make myself work better and, you know, cognitive wise and, you know, and also try to basically age better. So, you know, it's certainly like we can do things like now, but just, yeah, like you were saying, genetically changing someone's like literally like, you know,

making someone's muscle grow like that by like giving them an inhibitor of a certain myostatin receptor. I mean, that's like hardcore stuff that, you know, we don't really know what the effects are going to be doing things like that long term. An army of super beings. That's what it's going to be. There's Dr. Manhattan.

That's what we're going to have. That guy's going to be running shit in 100 years. That's our new president. You know, as long as he's really intelligent, let's make his brain like super awesome. Well, Dr. Manhattan was really intelligent. Unfortunately, too intelligent. So intelligent that he sort of like factored in a lot of things like, well, you know, people live, people die, you know, remorse and guilt and all these things are really just byproducts of human

culture and our correlation to, you know, cause and effect and our reactions to each other. I mean, it took away all the joy and fun, the zest of life. It got a little bit too intelligent. Right, right. That becomes a problem. Absolutely, absolutely. You got to make people just smart enough, but not too smart, that they realize,

what's the fucking point? You live, you die, you're just a finite organism, and even if you live forever, the planet doesn't live forever. Right. So what are you going to do here? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've had conversations with really intelligent people. They talk about the futility of life. And I'm like, your problem might be you're too fucking smart and you're thinking too much. Or maybe not even too smart, but you're thinking too much about stuff that really you can't control. And maybe you've got to be smart enough to realize that this is all silly. Yeah. Yeah, thinking about the things you can't control. Sometimes that, that over, like, I get these what I call OCD spikes, where if I'm driving on the highway, I start to imagine all the possibilities that can happen, like all the things that can happen with all the cars. And it like, there's moments where it's so overwhelming, where I just can't do I can't drive. Like, it's too much. So and it's like, like, so my husband ends up driving me around a lot on the freeway.

You're too smart to drive. True story. So what I often do is I like to live five minutes from where I work. That way I don't ever have to get on the highway because I don't have to think about all the things that can happen when I'm on the highway. Wow. You're too smart to drive. Well, I don't know if it's that. I sometimes obsess over what I can't control. And the fact that there's like all these people and I'm like, they're doing all these things and all this could happen and all these possibilities.

And, you know, then it's like, okay, it's like overload. I had a moment, um, when, uh, my first daughter was born where, when I was in the hospital in the hospital, in the moment she came out of the box, I was thinking like, how many different people are being born right now simultaneously all around the world? And if you could see that on a giant screen, I mean, it would look like an invasion of babies. If you could see the millions of people, no doubt, being born all over the world at the same moment, just blah, just shooting out of vaginas, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, just, it would be so, and then I got over it.

I'm glad we have that ability to gate out some of that stuff because, yeah, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. It's very overwhelming. Isn't that sort of the issue with one of the main issues with paying attention too much to bad things in the news? And I've talked about this many times. I think we have a real problem with digesting

7 billion people's worth of problems because any time something spectacular or horrific comes up from all over the world, we get it and we absorb it. And it sort of alters our idea of what the world is. Oh, the world is a scary place and it's filled with evil. Really, the numbers are pretty against that. The numbers, like, throughout your day, you experience very little violence. Throughout your day, you experience very little horrific crime. It's

very, very rare in most parts of America, unless you live in a terrible neighborhood, to experience the kind of shit that you see on your news feed or your Twitter feed all day, every day. It's not an accurate expression because it's based on such an insane number that you're not supposed to be correlating. You're not supposed to be looking at a 7 billion people number. You're supposed to be looking at a tribe of 150 people. I mean, that's what our brain, that's what the Dunbar's number is. We don't really know what the fuck to do with 7 billion people's worth of information. So we become these paranoid messes when we start thinking about

all this horrible shit that's happening, but you're talking about a fucking planet worth. Right. I mean, literally a planet worth of information now. And it's like, that's the same sort of thing. Just freaking out, thinking about all the variables that you can't control. We're not designed for that.

Right. Is it possible that we will, that the epigenetics of living in this life will alter our genes and our expression of our genes so that we can accept this kind of information? Is that something we're going to... Like we'll start to adapt? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, they've shown that stress does epigenetically change the expression of our genes. So tabloids are fucking us up. Right. Right? Absolutely. I mean, they've shown that stress does epigenetically change the expression of our genes. So, you know, it's... So tabloids are fucking us up. Right. Right? You know, I don't listen to tabloids, but yeah, I'm sure they are. Or even just fear-mongering, you know, just going on the Alex Jones website, just paying attention to all these people that are doom and gloom, new world order.

They're fucking chemtrails. They're putting caskets out in the FEMA camps and they're getting ready to mass kill people. Yeah, it is. It's definitely changing the expression of your genes. Shit. The stress is doing something bad. Shit.

And it's also shortening your telomeres. Ah, I don't need that. But I got a problem too. I fucking eat like a pig. That's a real problem. I'm going to die young. I eat enough for like two or three people. Like what do you eat?

I eat everything. I eat whatever's in front of me. Whatever you want. I have a problem. I work out a lot. And because of that, I'm always hungry. Yeah. But I eat a lot.

I eat so much sometimes waitresses don't believe me. Like when we go like after shows, like if we'll do like two or three shows at a night, I'll order two like entrees and then a bunch of appetizers and i've had people say that's too much oh that's a waitress will say that's too much like just keep it coming don't worry about it i'm putting it down wow that's a lot of food two entrees yeah i'll regularly eat two entrees and that's after having two other meals usually yeah but it's just if I'm working out. If I'm working out and I work at the same time,

two things happen in a day, my appetite is just insane. It's a pit that just can't be filled. Yeah. Well, I mean, your body needs the amino acids. But I'm going to die younger. I'm not going to be like the cool older mouse or the cool older monkey that's got his shit together.

Right. Fuck. Yeah, you know. Take it down a notch. They're trying to do some of these caloric restrictions the cool older mouse right or a cool older monkey that's got his shit together right fuck yeah you know it's take it down a notch that they're trying to do some of these caloric restriction studies in humans to see you know what if it's the same if it's the same and you know of course doing the longevity study is going to take fucking forever so that's that's hard so they're doing kind of like a year-long study and looking at specific endpoints and they're finding some things are a little different actually from from from the mice and from the monkeys.

Oh, I'm sure. And there's got to be a difference between monkeys and human beings, a pretty profound difference as far as what our needs are nutritionally. And also the idea of stress, because we can sort of conceptualize stress in a way that they can. I mean, they're dealing with immediate threats only. They're not conceptualizing, man, I'm not going to live forever, man. Fucking asteroid hits me, man. That's not there. Right. I don't want to die of cancer. Oh, shit, man. What if my wife's cheating on me? They're not thinking about any of these things. What if I get fired? They're not thinking about any of these things. They don't have anything other than immediate concerns, which is kind of what we're designed for, right? I mean, when you look at the

genes of human beings and the amount of time that we've been in this particular type of a society and the amount of time that we've been essentially hunter-gatherers, I mean, there's no comparison. We have just long stretch of time where we were just living a very specific way. Right. And then over the last couple of hundred years, things radically shift in a very strange and new direction. And then we find ourselves where we are now from the invention of the printing press to the fucking Twitter feeds and internet. Oh, 3D printers freak me out, man. People are just going to start making guns. They're actually, NASA was funding a study. They're trying to 3D print non-living biomolecules like wood chips and like dental enamel.

I know. It's kind of cool. It's very cool. Yeah. So that's kind of, NASA's funding some really cool stuff. Another really cool study I saw recently where they took cancer cells and they cultured them in space because they wanted to see if space could epigenetically change the expression of genes and if this would have any effect. And they found it did,

that gravity did affect actually genes that are involved in metastasis. And when you culture these cells in space, it down-regulates genes involved in metastasis and those cancer cells become less aggressive. So then they took these cells and were like, okay, well, there's a million different things that could be happening in space. Is it the gravity, or is it the cosmo rays or something? And so they, like, culture them, and they centrifuge them, meaning they spin them at a certain rotation per minute to, like, copy or mimic this microgravity, and they found the same effect. So literally, like, the gravity changed the expression of these genes involved in metastasis.

So, yeah. So if you have cancer, maybe, you know, go to space. Wow, or at the very least the top of a mountain. I'm just wondering where they're going to go with that next. I mean, it's like, okay, well, that's an interesting finding, but so what do we do? Are we going to rotate for, you know, if you have cancer? It's just some interesting stuff.

But then there's also the issue where you can't really go to space for very long anyway. Because if you do go to space, your body doesn't really, your body's really not designed to be in a zero-gravity environment. We had Dr. Chris, Commander Chris Hatfield on the podcast. Uh, one of the guys, how long did he go to space for 166 days or something crazy like that. And, uh, he came back and he was describing the, the horrific moments where he first stepped out of the, the, the, the pod or whatever it is that you land in and was walking, uh, on the ground for the first time, getting nauseous and throwing up,

and your body's just so not used to being in gravity and standing on the ground. You've just been floating around for so long that your body's just totally baffled. And he said it was horrific. I thought it would have been a wonderful experience. Like, what is it like when you finally touch down to the ground? You've been up in space for so long. He's like, it is unbelievably awful. Wow.

Yeah. Yes. Your body's just in chaos. It doesn't know what you've been doing this whole time. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. The body's crazy. It is very crazy.

And it does adapt. I mean, there's things that are, you know. It does adapt. It's so endlessly fascinating. It's so endlessly fascinating when you find out what has been learned about the body, how many studies have been done, what information is out there, and then yet how much we need to learn, how much there is to know, how much there is to discover. It's just we're not even close. We're not even close. We're just learning.

Which is, again, why it's so infuriating when you read, you know, vitamins don't work, case closed. Right. Fuck you. Right. No, it's not that simple. A lot of vitamins do work, and there's been a lot of studies showing that they work. Well, it's not an accident that we've isolated vitamin C. It's not an accident that we know that vitamin B12 gives you energy.

I mean, this is science that created all this. So all these no-nonsense people, there is a lot of fuckery when it comes to vitamins. There's a lot of fuckery when it comes to vitamins. There's a lot of fuckery when it comes to nutrition. You're always reading about some false claims that this company has or that company has or these pills have. We hear about things all the time when it comes to nutrition and supplementation, especially when it comes to athletic supplementation, things that are purported to deliver amazing muscle growth. They've found that a lot of those things that are purported to give muscle growth or erection pills. Here's a perfect example.

You know what those things are? There's a Cialis in Viagra. They just sell it. They sell it as some herbal supplement, but they put in pharmaceutical drugs. They buy that shit in bulk, and they sell it, and it actually does, but they put in pharmaceutical drugs. They buy that shit in bulk and they sell it and it actually does work. But they're pharmaceutical drugs. But because of the fact that the restrictions are so small and the ban or the punishment of doing that is so small. We had Aubrey Marcus in from Onnit who was describing the whole process of one of these companies gets caught selling Viagra as

one of these herbal sexual stimulants. They just get like a little fine. So they change the name, they open up another different company and go right back at it. And they just have the, you know, rocket dick or whatever the fuck they call it. I mean, there was a study that came out not long ago. They showed that like 70% of like herbal supplements on the market aren't, aren't actually what you think they are. So in a lot of cases people are just putting some other plant in there and it's like,

you think you're getting, you know, echinacea or, you know, and it's, it's like some other crap. And so that's like, I think there's a whole,

you know, an opening for people to actually do like some DNA barcoding where you can actually test, you know, what's in a supplement and start a company where it's like, I've tested these supplements and they're actually what they're saying they're supposed to be, you know, because it's like you've got a huge problem when people are trying to buy certain supplements and then they're not even getting what they think they're buying, regardless of whether or not there's any science to back up with what they think they're buying. Isn't doing anything. I mean, the point is they should they should be getting what they think they're buying, regardless of whether or not there's any science to back up with what they think they're buying isn't doing anything. I mean, the point is they should be getting what they think they're getting. And then, of course, there's a huge issue of homeopathic

cures, which are mostly nonsense. There's a huge homeopathic industry that's essentially selling you sugar. They're selling you total bullshit. There was a recent study on homeopathic, the actual ingredients in some homeopathic cures, and a lot of it was sugar. It's like they're literally selling sugar pills. Yeah, there's a difference between, you know, not having certain vitamins and minerals and fatty acids in your diet and things that can, you know, it affects your immune system, it affects cognitive function, it affects all these different things. And then taking all this other crap that

I don't know. People like the idea of some exotic thing isolated from somewhere. And it's like, oh, it does this because it's exotic. And the reality is people, they should be focusing on what they're not getting that's essential for things that we know that's essential for the proteins in their body to work. And so a lot of that homeopathic stuff, it gets mixed in with the vitamins and minerals too, and that's really irritating because it's really, they're two different things. Yeah, there's...

Nutrition, yeah, nutrition and like this homeopathic... Yeah, there's a lot of nonsense. If you're interested in that, just Google homeopathic medicine sugar pills, and there's all, there's studies, there's a Google homeopathic medicine sugar pills. And there's studies. There's a lot of different stuff on sugar pills. Well, actually, they've shown. They've done placebo effect studies using sugar pills where they've published.

They've given someone a placebo. I mean, the whole point of the study was not for the person conducting it to not know who had the placebo. It was, okay, let's see if the placebo effect is real. And it absolutely is real. I mean, people, if they think they're getting something, they will experience something, you know, and it's real to them. And actually they don't get sick as much or they feel better. So there's definitely something to be said for a sugar pill,

and maybe that's part of the success of things like homeopathy. Yeah, that's really confusing, isn't it? The placebo effect is absolutely fascinating that you can send the mind a signal or instill it in the mind by taking a pill, and then the mind believes that medicine is there and then conducts business as if this newfound healing property exists. Yeah, I know, and it is real. The placebo effect is real. And we don't know why, right? I mean, I haven't really done a ton of research into understanding why. But yeah, it's interesting how your brain can, you know,

make yourself think that something's working and you actually can force yourself to be healthier. I mean, so it's fascinating. It is very, very, very fascinating. Endlessly, endlessly so. I mean, the human being is like a human body is to me essentially like the most incredibly complex computer ever. And we don't have a guidebook for it. Right. And this we're just talking about the physical aspects of it. Forget about managing your mind, managing your thought process, which also can lead to a lot of ailments and

incorrect thinking and thinking. Oh, absolutely. I mean, when I started getting, when I started researching these studies on the effects of, you know, depleting tryptophan from your brain and how like normal people all of a sudden become like impulsive, impulsive, like, you know, violence and impulsive behaviors and recidivism so they like they'll do these tests where they they're punished for doing something wrong and then they'll keep repeating the same thing i mean i was like i can't believe you can change someone's behavior by depleting tryptophan like that's that was really you know amazing to me and and you know the way that nutrition affects your brain function in general and behavior is really interesting to me because

it suggests that we have to some, some control over our cognitive function and behavior. And I think that we should be optimizing that as much as we can to, you know, perform better, to have better cognitive skills, and to also better society by behaving better, you know. So, you know, they've done studies with, like, school children where they've given them, like, omega-3 fatty acids and multivitamins. And it's absolutely affected their IQ scores, in some cases by dramatic effects. And even affected juvenile delinquency. And juvenile, yeah.

It's affected juvenile delinquency. There's been studies showing that giving these people multivitamin and omega-3 fatty acids. So it's hard to pinpoint what's specifically in it. But I think it's a combination of everything because these pathways are all working together. But what I think is happening is it's also affecting their serotonin. And so they're not as impulsive. It's more like long-term thinking. It's absolutely fascinating that you can actually, through nutrition, affect someone's behavior. There's absolutely fascinating that you can actually, through nutrition, affect someone's behavior. There's another study where they had given prisoners omega-3 fatty acids and it affected their aggressive outbursts, you know, because that's a whole other topic. You know,

you've got a population of people that's incarcerated and God knows what they're getting fed, probably deficient in multiple micronutrients, including omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D. Unquestionably. We had a guy on recently, this kid, War Machine, MMA fighter. John Copenhaver is his real name. War Machine is his fighting name. Pretty cute. And he was talking about a year that he did in prison where they gave him 1,500 calories a day and it was horrible nutrition and just how his body just felt like it was wasting away because of it. Yeah. See, this is, I would like to see, you know, we're spending money to keep people in prison, you know? Absolutely.

Why not give them, give their brain the proper nutrients they need to try to heal itself, to try to make it work better, you know? You're talking silly because you're talking about a person who wants to fix people. They're just trying to make money. I mean, they don't really care. When you're dealing with privatized prisons and you're also dealing with prison guard unions that are trying to keep people in prison so that they have prison guards that have jobs. I mean, you're not dealing with a whole system where the entire system is dedicated to actually rehabilitating people. That's sort of bullshit. They pretend it is. It's just a system. It's a system. And someone can start a company that basically is a charity that we give them to

these... People donate money and we give people these vitamins, these omega-3 and vitamin D and multivitamins in prisons. People are not going to buy it. They're going to say, listen, if you want to give people nutrients and vitamins, give it to poor people. Give it to poor people that haven't committed crimes. Don't give it to prisoners. Don't try to fix prisoners. I see what you're saying. I see your point of view, but I see how people are going to say, if you're going to start somewhere, don't start with people that have already fucked up. Yeah, we should definitely start with, we should definitely give them to poor people also. I mean, you know, we need to

make sure that these people that can't afford to, you know, eat all these greens and fish every day, we can at least give them, you know, a fish oil pill and, you know, a vitamin D pill and multivitamin to help give them some of those micronutrients, particularly the children that are not doing well on their cognitive tests and having behavioral problems. And it's like, people don't want to ever think about the fact that nutrition plays a role in that. It's not just all genetics. It's not all environment. And, you know, in terms of being like abused or, I mean, that definitely plays a role for sure. But there is, there is a component of nutrition that we can, you know, control to some degree. And it's a cheap, it's a cheap solution.

Vitamins aren't that expensive. I mean, relatively speaking, you can, you can get a omega-3 pill, vitamin D pill, multivitamin, and it's not that much money a month. Now, there was something else that you said that you wanted to talk about that Dave Asprey had said that was incorrect. Oh, that was the epigenetic test. The Swedish study. I listened to the podcast that you had some time ago. And, you know, he's got good information. I don't want to, you know, say otherwise. But I wanted to correct that because he had said that the children

from the well-fed, the ones that were grandchildren of the well-fed children, got type 2 diabetes less. And that was completely wrong. It was the opposite. Yeah, he's a collector of interesting ideas. And although I like the guy, he gets shit wrong.

And I don't know if he's always that good about recognizing when he has done that and correcting himself. We've had a real issue with him lately because of mycotoxins. I don't know if you're aware of the whole issue of mycotoxins in coffee. I know a little bit about it. Yeah, I'm not concerned about mycotoxins in coffee. I'm more concerned about not getting my omega-3 and all the other micronutrients involved in... I mean, aflatoxin is certainly something I don't want, but that's, you know, peanuts. Yeah. So mycotoxins in peanuts are a real issue as well. And corn, that's another real issue. Here's the issue. This guy is selling coffee and now we're selling this

coffee through Onnit that was supposed to be the cure to this issue of mycotoxins. No, you're actually drinking Hawaiian Kona coffee that I started drinking. I started drinking right after we got our results back on the mycotoxin tests. Uh-huh. Okay. So his contention was that 70 plus percent, whatever it was, of all coffee is infected with mycotoxins and they make you sick. They make the coffee taste bitter. They make you taste bad. They make you feel bad.

I took too much of this at face value and parroted a lot of the things that he said. And then we decided to start looking into it ourselves. Well, they've known about mycotoxins in coffee for a long time. There's a PubMed study from 1980 about mycotoxins in coffee. It's always been an issue, But they've been able to resolve that issue with wet processing. Wet processing, they know how good coffee providers know how to eliminate this from coffee. We tested four random coffees. Well, two random. One Starbucks, one random bag from Whole Foods, one coffee that we sell, which is the upgraded coffee that Dave produces, which is good coffee, good single-source coffee,

and another one called Caveman Coffee. None of them tested positive for mycotoxins. And so if 70% of all coffee has mycotoxins, and we had three bags other than the upgraded coffee, none of them are taking his upgraded, quote-unquote, bulletproof process, which he won't reveal what this process is publicly. And so I kind of feel like there's some bullshit there for sure. There's no way we're just going to find four bags of coffee and test them.

So our friend Tate, who runs Bulletproof Coffee, he tested two bags and his coffee and this upgraded coffee. And allegedly he found below threshold levels of mycotoxins in Dave's coffee. So I didn't, you know, I didn't conduct that test. I wasn't a part of that test. I don't know if it's right, but what the fuck, you know, i i feel like when you're a guy who's running on and doing these kind of interviews and and spewing out all these facts you have to be really fucking careful you know you have to be really fucking careful that what you're saying is true and if what you're saying turns out to not be accurate and i find out you're profiting from what you're saying, it becomes bad. It becomes a real problem.

And that's where we are with this upgraded coffee thing. We still sell it at Onnit because it is really good coffee, but we've removed all the literature on the mycotoxin issue, all the literature on that. Because when you talk to the people that are in the know in the coffee industry coffee growers People who grade coffee and rate coffee they actually have a rating system That is you know like you get a 94 95 if you have excellent coffee Well your coffee loses points if it tests positive for mycotoxins they test it you know so he's he sort of created this issue and

You know and made this issue out to be like, there's a reason why you have bitter coffee. It's mycotoxins. Well, no, it's not. It's fucking burnt coffee, man. Tannins. Yeah. Tannins are bitter in coffee.

If you leave it on the pot and it stays heated, it gets bitter. I mean, they've known that for years. There's no studies out there that show that coffee with mycotoxins in it tests bitter. And also, this shit of him saying that all these different coffees have tested positive for mycotoxins. There's no tests. He's got no results. You can't just go around saying that without producing the data publicly. You have to.

You have to. Yeah. I mean, like I said, aflatoxin is one thing that certainly can cause cancer. I've never really been that concerned about mycotoxins in my coffee. Being a carcinogen, I'm more concerned about my own metabolism generating reactive oxygen species because that's generating more reactive oxygen species than some mycotoxins in the coffee. Well, mycotoxins most certainly exist. They exist in human breast milk.

How about that? Really? Yes, sure. They exist. I mean, I've gone mycotoxin loopy after all. They're starting to read the different areas where mycotoxins have been found or aspects of mycotoxins that can affect human health.

But the coffee one, they seem to have licked. They know what the fuck it is. They know what causes it. And they know how to deal with it. It's called wet processing. They know how to not store beans where they can get moldy. They know how to prevent these things from happening. So this guy, they have incentive to do that. Exactly. So this guy is sort of, you know, he used my platform in a way that I don't think is totally ethical. Yeah. And, you know, he claims that he's telling the truth and he claims that, you know, if you sign a non-disclosure agreement, he'll show you all his, you know, all his testing methods. Like, but it's, it seems to be bullshit. And I feel bad because I like the guy. And I think that, first of all, he's not, I mean, he's a collector of ideas. He doesn't have

a formal education in education, in nutrition. This is not something that he's, you know, got a PhD in. He's not you, essentially, is what I'm saying. So, you know, when I talk to you about it, I'm getting it from someone who went to really good schools and you do research every day for a fucking living. That's what you do. I do. And like I said, I'm not an expert in mycotoxin, but I've sort of not really been worried about it in coffee, just based on the little bit of reading that I've done.

I haven't... Well, it seems like it can be an issue if you have mycotoxin infected coffee, but if they dictate... If it's really infected, we're talking like, you know, if it's like, if there's a trace amount of it, you know, I don't really think it's. That's the, well, that's what we found. Well, that's not what we found.

What we found is zero. But what Tate, my friend Tate and Caveman Coffee found in his is below threshold levels of two different types of mycotoxins, which is not going to affect you at all. Well, not only that, they say that. If anything, it's going to increase the expression of genes that are involved in stress resistance. It's going to have a little bit of a hormetic effect, possibly. That's interesting. Yeah. Well, the other thing was that the actual process of roasting the beans destroys a huge amount of the mycotoxins.

A huge amount of the mold gets killed. Yeah. Like 70% to 80% in some cases. This reminds me, this whole lectin thing is another thing when you're saying heat, you know, that something destroys the roasting process, destroys the mycotoxin. Well, there's this whole thing with lectins, too. That's a big I don't know who started this lectin thing. I think maybe Mercola, Mark Mercola. But I think he he talks about it also.

And it's like, oh, you can't eat beans because beans have lectins and, and lectins cause an immune response in your gut. And this is going to cause leaky gut. And that's, that's not the whole story. It's, it's a little more complicated. For one, lectins are inactivated by heat. And so unless you're chewing raw kidney beans or raw lentils, you're probably not activating an immune response in your gut.

And actually beans are really high in fiber and fiber gets, you know, broken down into short chain fatty acids, which actually prevents the immune response in your gut. So it's actually doing the opposite. You know, so there's, there's people, some people have good information, but they also have some bad information. And yeah, I agree with you. You got to be careful. I mean, anyone that's offering you like a magic bullet, like this is, this is it, this is the cure. This is, there's, it's complicated and there's trade-offs. And I should be clear when I say that roasting, the roasting process supposedly eliminates mycotoxins.

It just destroys the mold that causes the mycotoxins. Which is the source. Yeah. It's upstream of it. Yeah. Your roasting doesn't actually destroy mycotoxins, but it does destroy the mold to 70 to 80% of it in some cases So it's another one of those cases where there's too much to know There's too much to learn and I have a guy on who says he's an expert and some of the things that he says

Seem to be bullshit and that's the big one that everyone has mold in their coffee except me I know how my super secret way of getting rid of it. But I fucking bought it. So here we have a problem that we've allowed to be created. But I'm not drinking it anymore because of that. Just out of general principle. We'll probably eventually stop selling it. It is good coffee. It's good single source

coffee. There's nothing wrong with the coffee. For me, I prefer the coffee from Hawaii. I love Kona coffee. It has a really great taste to it. So I just started drinking that. Upgraded coffee, yeah. Is that what it's called? Well, not only that, a lot of people buy it based on this premise that has not been proven,

that most coffee has mold in it with no fucking evidence whatsoever to back that up. I haven't seen any evidence that most coffee has mycotoxin, and I haven't seen evidence that it has levels of microtoxins that are harmful. So, you know, I... There was one test that showed that in the bitterness area, there was one test that showed that mice, when they were given saccharin infused with microtoxins, tended to avoid that saccharin with microtoxins. But saccharin is a sweet thing. I mean, it's a sweet product like and who knows why they're avoiding the taste of the mycotoxins who knows if their bodies have

figured out that it's fucking poison i mean i don't know yeah but running around saying that the reason why coffee's bitter is because of mycotoxins just stating it as a fact tannins that's the same thing that's in tea tannins that's what that's that's why that's the bitter part of coffee and but heat causes that uh no they're naturally in in in the those plants but when it gets burnt that burnt taste you know i don't know that burnt taste is i haven't done enough research to know what the heat does to that process it's possible yeah well that's what they say. I mean, the coffee experts say.

I fucking read more about coffee over the last three weeks than I've ever wanted to read or thought I would ever have to. But coffee experts, here's where it gets pretty clear, all call bullshit. All of them call bullshit on what he's saying. They all call bullshit across the board. bullshit. All of them call bullshit in what he's saying. They all call bullshit across the board. Not just coffee providers, not just coffee growers, but coffee tasters, coffee experts

across the board think that what he's saying is horseshit. That's usually a good sign. This one guy who's not even a fucking nutrition expert and he doesn't have a PhD in nutrition, he comes along with these incredible claims and also has this incredible method to alleviate this ailment.

I mean, it's one of those classic examples, you know, create a problem and then offer a solution. Profit. Yeah. You know, and that's that's it seems to be what's been done here, whether or not it's intentional or not. I don't even think it was intentional, but I think that he's one of those guys that once he goes down a path to say he was wrong or to to try to once you have a product on something it's hard to then say you were wrong yeah you're fucking profiting yourself in a situation where it's yeah it's and it's tricky because it's not bad coffee it's good coffee it tastes good it's you know from our testing it's mycotoxin free it's single source single-source coffee. If he just sold it as that, it would be a really good product.

There's nothing wrong with it. The other thing about coffee experts is they want to know when it was roasted. They want to know. They want to know. There's a time between when the coffee's roasted and how long you should keep it while it's still fresh. He doesn't offer that. He doesn't have any of that. So they're calling bullshit on that too. They're like, if you really cared about coffee, you would let us know while it's still fresh. He doesn't offer that. He doesn't have any of that. So they're calling bullshit on that too.

They're like, if you really cared about coffee, you would let us know when it's roasted. It should have a roasted by date, a roasted on date. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds like it's pretty freaking complicated. It's too complicated. I have children and jobs and things to do. I don't have time to deal with this shit. But I'm obligated now

because I got thrust into this situation. It's nice to talk to someone like you to clear up some of the misconceptions of health and nutrition and to find out what's real and what's not and what are issues. When I talk to a guy like Brian Dunning, who's like, you don't need vitamin C.

You don't need this. You don't need that. But look at him. He's fucking totally out of shape. He's fat and just not taking care of his body. He's a no-nonsense guy who got fucked because he was a kid and he was raised a Mormon. And now he's trying to counteract that by being a skeptic. I mean, that's really essentially what's going on.

But that guy can fuck with people's heads because he's not an expert. He's clearly not an expert in a lot of things. So he really shouldn't be reviewing scientific literature, in my opinion. Like, he needs to get some people that, like, really know how to do that if he's going to start trying to critically analyze science. That's my opinion because I've read some of his stuff where he's trying to critically analyze it. That's my opinion because I've read some of his stuff where he's trying to critically analyze it. For example, this Linus Pauling, he's got something on his website talking about how vitamin C has no effect on cancer incidence or can help, if you already have cancer, can help kill the cancer cells. And he puts up these studies by the Mayo Clinic that couldn you know, couldn't repeat these early studies that were done by Linus Pauling and Cameron, I forgot his name, anyways, in the late 70s. But, you know,

anyone that's a scientist will look at that and go, oh, Pauling and Cameron gave their patients, their cancer patients, vitamin C intravenously. And they did that for a reason, because you can only orally absorb so much vitamin C and it'll get into your bloodstream. But intravenously. And they did that for a reason, because you can only orally absorb so much vitamin C and it'll get into your bloodstream. But intravenously, you can like, you know, raise it to like millimolar, you know, concentrations. And so the two myoclinic studies that repeated it, repeated it in quotations, gave them orally. And so, you know, you can't, you can't repeat a study and change the method of administration from oral to intravenous and say, oh, yeah, we repeated the study and it didn't work. So when you're critically analyzing data, you need to focus on those sort of details because they're actually really important.

And a recent study just came out like two weeks ago where they took patients, female patients that had ovarian cancer, and they gave them vitamin C intravenously, and they were doing their standard chemo. It's really hard nowadays to do any sort of unconventional cancer treatment. That's not, you know, because it's like you don't want to just kill someone. I mean, it's hard. So anyways, they did it with the chemotherapy, and it actually killed the cancer cells better, and it also alleviated a lot of the negative symptoms associated with the chemo. And this was published in Science Translational Medicine,

which is a pretty good journal for translational research, in fact. Well, Brian has several problems with some of the things he puts out. He's accused me of being a pseudoscience shill. And even after the podcast, even after the podcast, where he came on and had all these really ridiculous accusations that he threw at me on his website. And we talked about them one by one, what I believed and what I actually didn't believe, what I said and what I didn't say. And even after basically just tapping him out mentally for three hours, just over and over and over again, you're wrong here, you're wrong there, this is silly, this is dumb, this is poor thinking,

he went and wrote this really distorted thing on his website, this really bizarre account. I mean, he was very kind to me. He said I was nice and funny, but here's why he thinks I still promote dangerous pseudoscience. Well, if you look at the videos that that guy puts out himself, he's got this video on fracking and how safe fracking is and how no need to worry about fracking. And he's got this really hilarious smug video on the reality of fracking or hydraulic fracturing. Fracking fucks up environments permanently all throughout the world. There's been over a thousand instances of poisoned wells in this country because of

fracking. Documented, documented instances of poisoned wells. I mean, they've fucked up huge parts of this country pretty much forever because of fracking. So what does fracking do? Like, how do they? Well, it's a very complicated process of getting this stuff out of the ground, getting oil and natural gas out of the ground. Mostly oil, right? And it involves water, hydraulic fracturing.

And they pump water in. And I'm not the guy to be describing. Is this his thing on fracking? Here. Flammable. And Fox blamed the fact that fracking was used in the area. An investigation into this family's well... First of all, your music makes me want to kill babies. ...discovered that their well had been drilled directly into a shallow natural gas deposit. This is common. It's not a problem if the well is properly vented.

Theirs wasn't, so gas got into their water. How do we know it had nothing to do with fracking? Water wells range in depth from a few meters to a few hundred at the very deepest. But fracking takes place kilometers deeper, past numerous layers of bedrock. Years of study have proven what geologists have always known. There's just too much distance of solid rock between the two regions for any seepage to take

place. Stop this guy right here. That's such total horseshit. He's just parroting the words of the people that have been paid by these companies that are making fucking trillions of dollars to say. I mean, that's what he's doing. These piss poor studies,

these people that have been documented on all these various documentaries, like there's the two ones on the Gasland 1 and Gasland 2, but then there's also people that have done interviews and showing how they can light their fucking water on fire now and showing how their wells are poisoned.

People who have been really made deathly ill by drinking what they thought was filtered water, but it's not filtered enough because some of the chemicals from fracking got into the water, proven that those are the specific chemicals that are in their water that got there from fracking. And this is, he's just one of those fucking guys,

those no-nonsense guys. Don't worry. The government says it's okay. It's safe. We're fine. But even his tone, that's such an affected tone. That's like a fake way of talking. He's talking like this, like reassuring you.

That's such nonsense fucking talk. Wow. You know, I don't know much about fracking, but I can tell you just from reading, like, his trying to criticize science. Like, he's got a very topical understanding of it. And when I was reading some of his stuff, I was just like, this guy shouldn't be doing this. It's very, very naive understanding. And so if you're going to try to criticize something and say it's not true,

then you really need to know what you're talking about or get some freaking experts that really do. He's got some real problems with his thinking, and I think he knows it. He sent me an email asking me about psychedelics, asking me about psychedelics and mind expanding. I think he knows he's fucked up. I really do. He's also indicted by, I mean, he's going to jail. He's involved in an eBay scam. He scammed them for millions of dollars. He didn't want to talk about it on the podcast, but after he talked shit about me, he can go fuck himself. Wow.

He was involved in this eBay scam where they were cookie stuffing. They were stuffing cookies. You would go to use an application, and I don't know the full details of it, but he's in real trouble. He pleaded guilty, and he's a felon. So he was asking you about psychedelics? That's very off. Well, I think he wants to try to figure out what the fuck's wrong with his thinking. Maybe.

Well, I really think that it has to do with growing up Mormon. I really think that it's not a small amount that it fucks your head up when you grow up in a fundamentalist mindset. When you are told that there's a man in the sky that Joseph Smith told his disciples about, and that there's golden tablets of the lost work of Jesus, and this guy found him when he was 14. I mean, all the shit that you have to believe to be a Mormon. This guy bought into that hook, line, and sinker,

and that's how he grew up. That's how he grew up as a child. That's how he grew up as a teenager. That's how he grew up as a man until he refuted it. And your thought process is fucked. Now he just doesn't believe anything. I mean, it's like, okay, well, everything that I was told throughout my life is wrong. So then everything else must be wrong.

If you just Google dangers of fracking, there is a tremendous amount of information out there about fracking, about what's bad about fracking, about the dangers. And I had Peter Schiff on the podcast, who's an economic genius, very smart guy, but also owns fracking companies. And he was talking about it. And when I brought it up to him, he didn't deny the dangers of it. What he said was, look, those people got money and they got millions of dollars because of that. Like, that's a great thing for them. Like, in his mind, millions of dollars is OK to poison places forever.

I mean, I'm no fracking expert. I don't claim to be a fracking expert. But if one fraction of what is said about fracking, the negative aspects of fracking, is true, it's a tricky thing. It's a very tricky thing. Yes, we could use the natural resources. Yes, it would be nice to not be dependent on foreign oil. yes, you know, it would be nice to not be dependent on foreign oil. However, if you really are destroying thousands of wells, if that really is documented, if really people are getting sick from drinking water that's contaminated with the very chemicals that they use for fracking,

you know, that doesn't seem like it's good. That seems like that's something that most people are not aware of. And when you find out who are the people that are funding these studies that are saying it's safe and where's the money all coming from, a lot of it's coming from these oil companies. A lot of it is coming from these oil companies. And the reason why these laws are in place in the first place,

a lot of it is because people have been greased. A lot of it is people have been paid off. They understand that there's a lot of money to be made in this and they've allowed the doors to be open for these companies to come in and fuck up giant parts of the country forever. Not according to Brian Dunning.

Don't worry. Hydraulic fracturing takes place kilometers into the earth. It's no concern. Sleep tight. Don't worry about eBay. Poor bastard. Poor bastard.

I liked him. He's not a bad guy too. But, you know, he said after the podcast, he said he would remove me from his list. He said, you've convinced me I'm going to remove you from my list. Then from just getting crushed by people online, the poor guy got destroyed on Twitter. Because people who listened to the podcast were so frustrated by him and the ridiculous way he thinks and the ridiculous things that he was saying. Yeah. It must have been the same one.

Has he only been on once? Yes. Okay. That was so infuriating. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I haven't seen all your podcasts, but I can tell that you don't seem to be a promoter of pseudoscience. You seem to be an inquisitive person that likes to critically

think about things. And you're also very open-minded. So it's like, well, what if this is, you know, let's think about, let's think about how this could be working and what if it is true. It's not, you know, there's a difference between thinking like that and pseudoscience where you're just like, you know, you're just crazy and like you're thinking all the, you know, there's the, I don't think he can see the difference. Differentiate. Yeah, the differentiate between someone that's actually just inquisitive and open-minded and, you know, doesn't see things as, okay, it's either this or that. And maybe there's something that we don't understand. And you know what?

There is a lot that we don't understand. Like, you know, it's even for just back to nutrition, you you know, like taking eating a plate full of green vegetables. We think we're getting vitamin K and folic acid and magnesium, but there's a whole bunch of crap in there. We don't know what it's doing. We don't know what what's in there and what it's doing and how it's affecting, you know, you know, processes in our body. And we do know that there's good stuff going on in there and things that we don't even understand. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that we just can't explain yet. We're trying to. I'm not concerned with looking like a fool.

So if something comes up and I go, well, is that possible? Is that true? Let's think about if that's possible. There's a lot of people that are very concerned about looking like fools that won't go down those roads. They won't say something absolutely ridiculous. You think the CIA really did kill Kennedy? Let's think about it. You think it's possible for them to kill Kennedy? A lot of people that go, oh, come on now. Look, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Case closed. We're done here.

They want to be that no-nonsense guy that doesn't look like a fool. But the problem is, there's a lot of nonsense in the world. And if you really look into things open-minded, you find that there's some gray in everything. In almost every subject, there's some fucking weirdness. I agree 100%. Poor Brian Dunning. Yeah. Poor bastard. All I have to say to him is hire some people that know how know read science and critically analyze it if you're

going to call yourself a science writer for god's sake you know yeah well and the people like that along with people like dave asprey who got the the information on the uh the study the the dietary study incorrect there's a real problem with those guys because they're not a guy like me who's not a fucking expert in anything look if you ask me questions about martial arts, if you ask me questions about stand-up comedy, I can give you the opinion of an expert. I'm a true expert in those very small areas. That's it. You talk to me about anything else, I'll go, well, I fucking read some shit online.

Right. I read a book. I'm not an expert. But when people start spouting shit out as fact, I'm learning on this podcast that there's a big responsibility to that. I'm learning how the pitfalls of having people spouting things as fact that aren't necessarily factual. And you know what?

I know a lot about nutrition and science, and there is a hell of a lot that I do not know. Well, I love that you're honest about it, though. Like when I asked you about amino acids and taking them without water, you're right away. I don't know. I don't. But that's great. That's how the world should be. The guys like Dave Asprey ask him, they come up with a fucking answer because they don't want to look stupid. And that answer might be, why is coffee bitter? Mycotoxins. Are you fucking sure? Where's your test that show mycotoxins make coffee bitter? You don't have anything, man.

You got to stop doing that. You got to stop. You're confusing the fuck out of me. And then I parrot what you're saying. I confuse the fuck out of a bunch of people. And that happens a lot. Like I said, you know, he also talks about the lectins and the beans. And Mercola does the same thing where it's like, you know, they have some good information.

You know, these people have, there are some good things that they say. But there's also some information that's totally wrong. And the problem is people think because they have one good piece of information that everything they say is right and it's not. And that's where you get this parodying where it's like, well, there's a meme now. It's like I don't know who started it, but someone started it and it's not accurate. They didn't dig deep enough. They don't understand enough of the science behind it. And so then you get everyone following this, this big following. And it's like, you know, like, how do you come in and say, okay, look,

this is how it's really happening. And that's kind of what I'm trying to do in some degree. It's not easy. You know, and I'm doing it in my spare time because I'm also still doing research. So I'm like on weekends, I'm like writing articles and making videos instead of going out and enjoying the Bay Area, you know. But I freaking love doing it. Well, listen, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think you've opened up a lot of people's eyes and you've educated a lot of people and provided a lot of information, almost too much information. I'm definitely seeing people writing down all these different things and Googling all these different things that you've said. But I think we could have this conversation a hundred times.

I really do. And if you ever want to come on again, I would love to have you on again. And tell people what, you know, your videos, where can they find them? They're on YouTube. So, yeah, if you go to my page, foundmyfitness.com, and really just kind of ski down the social media slopes, you know, I've got, really there's three ways people can help me. One is by subscribing to my podcast or my iTunes and my YouTube channel to really help me keep going. And is that Found My Fitness?

Found My Fitness. Is that the name of the podcast? That's the name of the podcast. That's the name of my, that's my Twitter name. That's the name of my podcast. I also have a Patreon campaign they could help me with. That's kind of like a Kickstarter, but you can contribute like 25 cents a month, and that's to help me pay for my podcasting,

like to host my podcasting. And it's really just to help me continue doing what I'm doing, like on weekends and in my free time. And lastly is signing up for my newsletter. I know that's not that cool these days, but I actually put a lot of good information in my newsletter. I'm going to put this link to this new study on the sauna that I was talking about that's coming out in a couple of weeks. That's awesome. Yeah. So I would love to come back and talk about everything. Absolutely. Absolutely. This paper on serotonin is coming out in a couple of weeks, actually six days. So look for that. And I'll probably send you a link. I'll email you a link. Send me anything. I would be happy to tweet it. It's so important to me to have

people like yourself that are actual experts with legitimate credentials that can separate and clear the fog on a lot of these issues. I'm fucking not tolerating this anymore. If someone comes in and they have all these claims and they don't have information to back up their claims, I'm just going to

fucking kick them out. Hit me up. Anytime you have a question, I will dig into it. I'm going to look into some of the stuff you talked about today that I didn't know about. Beautiful. Um, so thank you very much. It's really is, it's so important to have someone like yourself, who's an expert that's willing to take the time to come on a podcast and educate us. So I really appreciate it very much. So you can follow Rhonda on Twitter. It is foundmyfitness on Twitter. And that is also the name of the podcast, Found My Fitness.

Anything else you want to say to people? Yeah, just what I said, the three ways they can help me out. That would really be great. Go help her out, folks. Help her out. This is a hugely entertaining and educational podcast. You're really good at this. You should have your own podcast.

Oh, you do. It's Found My Fitness and it's on iTunes. Go get it, folks. Thanks to our sponsor. Thank you to Ting. Go to rogan.ting.com and save $25 off your mobile device

with a lovely network. Ting, rogan.ting.com. Thanks also to Onnit. Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. That's it fornit. Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. That's it for this week. Next week though, lots

of cool people coming in, ladies and gentlemen. We got a lot of shit happening and thank you for all the love. All the love on Twitter, all the love on Facebook, and all the positive responses that we get and all the cool people that I meet that tell me how much this podcast enhances your life. It enhances mine too. And it wouldn't be nothing without you guys. So thank you so much.

Keep it together. We're all in this as one big kiss.