The Joe Rogan Experience - #773 - Dr. Rhonda Patrick

Episode Date: March 10, 2016

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

Look at him. Poor fucker. He's overworked. Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. During my day, Joe Rogan Podcast. My night. All day. By request of Dr. Rhonda Patrick. You wanted to have that music, so there you go. Now, that's how we do it. For you. I appreciate it.

We'll do it from here on out. How about that? Because of you, we'll do it from here on out. Music's kind of like, you know, there's something about it that just makes you feel good. It gets a little dopamine or something. I don't know. A little something. Something. Has there ever been a study on what exactly music does to the mind? Like an inspirational song when you're on a treadmill that makes you keep going? Doesn't it though? Yeah. Oh man, it makes all the difference for me. Yeah. All the difference. I don't know. I don't know if they've done that exact study, but I'm sure there's been studies that have been done looking at how music affects the difference. I don't know. I don't know if they've done that exact study, but I'm sure there's been studies that have been done looking at how music affects the brain.

Yeah. I just don't know. Yeah. There's something going on. It's 100%, right? I mean, when a song, it has to be, it has to work with you. Oh, yeah. You know, but if it's a song, what's your song, like Flashdance? But I feel it. That's good. I really like, really like jamming out to the Stones. I really like the Rolling Stones.

Yeah. And I also like it when it's like, you know, maybe some ACDC. Okay. Like, I need some motivation to push past that. Yeah. That's what I listen to in the cryogenic chamber. I listen to Back in Black. Dude.

Because it just seems like a good song for that. Dude, this morning, after i did a workout i did a cold shower um and i was like singing in the cold shower because it was so cold but it was like me singing and i was like yeah i know we're up and effort and my brain loves it and like dan was like trying to record it for not like video but like audio he was like trying to record it for not like video, but like audio. He was like trying to record it for Snapchat, but he failed miserably. And but I stayed in for five minutes and the singing was like, yeah, it helped me push past that. This is cold as fuck.

So you did it just for the norepinephrine just for the. Did I say that right? Yes, you did. Thank you. I did. I did it. I did that. Plus, I tried doing like high intensity workouts.

I was trying to sprint faster than I usually do. So I like to do a lot of aerobic. I do aerobic and I like to mix it up with some resistance training for different reasons. In the same day? I usually do mix it up, but not always. It depends. It depends. Sometimes I'll start off with a run and I don't do like long, long runs. It depends. It depends. I like to, you know, sometimes I'll start off with a run.

And I don't do, like, long, long runs. It's like two miles, you know. So it's enough to, like, get some brain-derived neurotrophic factor growing, which is a growth factor that helps you grow new neurons. That's been shown to happen with more of aerobic type of exercise. more of aerobic type of exercise. But then the high intensity interval training, like sprinting, or I'll do body weight squats, or I'll do pushups, or, you know, these backward types of pushups, that whatever it's going to like, you know, get me doing that high intensity sort of thing where you're actually producing lactate, because your body is using glucose. Since you can't get oxygen to your muscles quick enough for how quick you're applying force and putting this energetic demand,

you use glucose, and you don't use it inside the mitochondria, meaning you don't need oxygen, so you do it without oxygen, and you make lactate as a byproduct. Well, lactate's been shown to increase dramatically. Lactate uptake into the into the brain increases dramatically upon um that type of exercise and it's lactate that's fueling norepinephrine release so like you're making more lactate to make more norepinephrine in your brain so and norepinephrine is um it has an immediate effect of making the connections

between your neurons stronger so that you remember things better and so that you learn better and you remember better. It's called long-term potentiation. So I was like, I need my brain to work today. I'm going to do that stuff. Yeah. Whereas the aerobic type of exercise has more of a long-term effect because you're making more neurons, but those neurons take two weeks to mature. So like the aerobic training that I did, those effects will come two weeks from now where I have more neurons. But, you know, so the immediate effect of the lactate and making more norepinephrine is happening right now because right now the connections between my neurons are stronger.

So, and plus it also makes you feel good. That's crazy that there's a physical effect. There's a physical effect of your brain actually functioning better. There's a direct mechanism involved in your brain functioning better because of exercise. I have been so obsessed with this lately. I know that we've talked about this before. People probably get sick of me talking about it but this concept of stressing your body stressing exercise most people think exercise is good because the exercise itself is good no the exercise is exercise itself is not

good it's actually very stressful on your body what's good is the stress response. The body, we've got a hardwired genetic program that is conserved in plants, insects, bacteria, primates, humans. We all have this response to stress. And that response is to try to survive. I need to stay alive, pass on my genes. Obviously, the stress response is much stronger when you're younger or the earlier in life, because your body knows you're not old enough, you know, to reproduce for whatever, you know, hormones and things like that that are not being produced. But so the stress response, which is like exercise causes stress, thermal stress, like heat, cold. And then there's all these like compounds and plants that are stressful to us that can induce this.

But it's almost like the brain is preparing for the next time it's going to encounter stress. It's like, OK, this is war. I got to gather up the troops. I got to get this army. We got to assemble this army because that stress is going to happen again. I got to be ready for war. So it kind of makes sense that you're going to have a very profound and positive effect in your brain and also in other parts of the body. I'm, you know, the exercise itself, it's funny because a lot of people do it to lose weight or to mostly to lose weight or, you know, become sexually attractive muscle mass, which has other very important physiological effects, but people do it because they want to look good. Um, and honestly, a lot of, there, there are a lot of people that say, well,

exercise doesn't really play an important role in losing weight. It's nutrition. You know what? They're right. But exercise has a very important role. And that role is to cause your body stress so that you activate all these really good and awesome genes that are helping you deal with stress. And guess what? Stress is happening right now. Every time you breathe in oxygen, you're making stress. You're generating byproducts that are very dangerous. So exercise is good. It's definitely good. I just get freaked out when people that are really smart don't get into exercise. And I just, I always feel like that's just, they have a blind spot. You know, there's a blind spot where they don't want to discipline themselves to actually do the

work. They just find it troublesome. Or maybe they connect it with jocks or people that were assholes when they were in school. You know, sometimes there's that connection. Yeah, they probably don't realize the anti-anxiety effects they have. I mean, it's some of the anti, I really also do it because I've got some kind of like hyperactive stress response, like stress hypothalamus pituitary axis where you know i'm i'm prone to be like what is it there's a tiger there's a lion i'm like you know it's always kind of like i'm ready i'm ready to fight you know something's coming to get me sometimes when i'm really stressed i'll get night terrors so like i'll wake up screaming whoa i scare the crap out of dan jesus really not it used to be a lot like when I was in graduate school and I was really, really stressed, I would wake up and I'd scream.

I thought there was like someone coming to get me. And, you know, there was times where I actually injured myself too. I flew across the room because I thought that there was someone coming to get me. So that... Like more than once? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like hurt my wrist.

I hurt like my like some tendon back here. I broke a mirror. Jesus. Yeah. This is like once a month, once a week. Well, nowadays it's like almost non-existent. I would say it happens once every maybe four months. it happens once every maybe four months but there was a time not too long ago like three years ago where i was doing it at least a couple times a week once once a week for sure that's so weird

i've always associated people that are like really paranoid about fear about danger rather with intelligence because it's like if you actually pay attention to the world around you you realize how vulnerable you are and you how many random things can happen random accidents bizarre occurrences run into the wrong people the wrong place at the wrong time you know and we're so easily damaged i'll take that as a compliment but yeah i actually do uh uh think there, you know, there's definitely something, it's kind of an OCD loop sometimes. And I, and I'll get that where it just,

and it's so bad. Like you just get going. You know, I think I even, even talked about on the podcast before, like there was a time when I was scared to drive. Like, and I,

even now I, I drive, but I feel most comfortable driving in a place that I'm very familiar with. But if I start to let my brain think about it, it's like driving is scary. Yeah, well, it should be. You look around and all these people that are texting too. So few people are giving 100% of their attention to the road these days. There's so much going on.

Yeah, self-driving cars. I'm actually looking forward to that. Well, they have them now. Yeah. I mean, well, they're not ubiquitous. They're not, you know, people aren't using them. Well, my friend Matt has one. And no, he have them now. Yeah. I mean, well, they're not ubiquitous. They're not, you know, people aren't using them. Well, my friend Matt has one. And no, he drives with it.

It's the new Tesla. You press two buttons on it and it literally drives on the highway. It turns. On the highway? Yep. Yep. He sits back. He doesn't even put his fucking hands on the wheel.

He's like, it's the craziest shit you've ever seen in your life. Tom Papa. Tom Papa has it too. I thought it was just the new Teslas were only allowing to let you park. I didn't realize you could actually drive on the highway. The newest versions of them drive on the highway. I have two friends that have them. And you press, I guess there's a button, a navigation button.

You punch in the information and then you press it twice. And this sucker will drive you to where you need to go that's pretty cool yeah it doesn't work on shitty old roads though like tom papa was talking about laurel canyon because laurel canyon's got kind of like it goes by computer sensors that are detecting the lines based on the cameras that the car has so the car has these external cameras they they see the lines and then they they adjust. But when the lines are really wonky, like if you've ever gone over Laurel Canyon. I don't think I have. It's really shitty.

The road's kind of bumpy, a lot of potholes and the lines are really blurry. They're worn out. So on that, like a road like that. I've been on roads like that. Yeah, I'm sure you have. But on a really good road, it works great. Like it just drives. Dude, I can't wait.

I'm in. Sign me up. But I want everyone else to be in because I'm actually afraid of everyone else. Even like coming into L.A., like driving to L.A., I don't know. People here are crazy drivers. I saw like people swerving. I mean just constantly swerving. I don't know if people are just really aggressive because there's so many people and you have to. I saw like people swerving. I mean, just constantly swerving.

I don't know if people are just really aggressive because there's so many people and you have to. I don't know. That's exactly what it is. But I've noticed it. Well, there was a study. There's an episode of Radio Lab about this. They did a study on volume of people in cities and what effect the volume of people has on how many syllables per minute they say and how many steps per minute they take. And there's a direct correlation worldwide between higher populations. And you can literally guess, if you set up a camera on a street and you record all the people walking by and you get a good

number of people and you calculate how fast they're walking, and then you record them talking, just from those two pieces of data, you can tell how many people are in the city like so but you know let's see if i can guess so if there's more people in the city do you walk faster and talk less no you walk faster you talk faster oh you talk faster talk faster and you walk faster both of those things but there's a direct correlation so they're talking they're looking at the speed of how you talk not how frequent you talk exactly okay exactly how fast you talk how quickly you walk because i feel like the faster you walk the more you're like i gotta go go go go go the less likely you're gonna stop and talk to someone do you know what i mean so it's kind of

like but it's just like you know hey man i gotta go you know yeah where you going uh dude dude we gotta fucking go downtown there's a lot of shit going on. See you. Bye. Yeah. You know? Whereas if you go to the middle of rural Tennessee, well, hello. What's your name? Dr. Rhonda. Well, very nice to meet you, Dr. Rhonda. What kind of doctor are you? I guess that could be why there's sort of a stereotype that people in the South are a little friendlier. Yes.

Maybe they just, maybe that's why. There's less people. They have more time. Mm- less people, they have more time, you know, more time. I know I get in this loop where it's like, I'm so busy. I know you're super busy

where it's just like, dude, I don't have time, I gotta go. I'm trying to get out of that. Yeah, I think it's a good balance. You need a balance. Yeah. You know, there's,

you need that drive, that motivation. It's good to like, you're obviously doing something productive that's contributing to society. You're fulfilling fulfilling you feel like you're fulfilling something um but also then dude life just goes yeah it goes quick quick it goes quick and you know i'm almost 50 i'm 48 i'll be 49 in august and then like this is like my body works great now, but for how long? You know, nobody's body works great at 70.

It just doesn't. They're all shitty. They're all, ah, everybody's like holding their back and their fucking knees hurt when you hit 80. Who's an athlete at 80? Who's doing cartwheels at 80 and, you know, and doing 20 chin-ups in a row? It's just not happening, you know? I used to surf with a guy back when I was in college. He was a surgeon.

He was a doctor. We called him Doc. And he was pushing 90. I don't remember like 88, 89. We rounded up and it was like he's 90. But he was out there surfing, catching waves. Now I'm sure he wasn't like competing. Yeah.

But I do think that the more physically fit you are and the more, you know, throughout your life and the better you eat, these things are all going to affect the way you age. They're all going to affect, you know, how much pain you're in, you know, all that stuff. And obviously losing muscle mass is a big thing. You know, starting in mid, middle, starting at 40, humans start to lose like 0.5 to 1% or something like that of muscle mass per year just without without doing anything. That makes sense. Yeah, I think that that's probably one of the more difficult things to gain as you get older. So if you can maintain it, you know, you're way better off because if you just if you're out of shape your whole life and then all of a sudden you're pushing 60 and you're like you know what I need to get to the gym well it's so hard to make gains it's so hard to to do you know any sort of like real resistance training on a regular basis and you're going to be so sore it's going to be so hard to build a base this is going to be a much

more difficult route it's difficult now and you know that resistance training I it's something I don't know a lot about this but it's it's a topic that I'm interested in, you know, because I'm convinced that maintaining muscle mass is very important as you age. And specifically, I think that the type two type of muscle fibers that you do get when you're doing more resistance training, those are the kind of fast twitch. I think those actually play a role in like stability like being able to like quickly you know if you like lose your balance or which is important as you start to get older and you become more frail and falling down and breaking your hip can that can take you out like that's a big problem like that's another thing that bone density gets increased by muscle resistance training, weight training, squats, deadlifts, things along

those lines. That has a pretty profound effect on bone density. There's a hormone that's actually released, I think, from muscle tissue called irisin that is released when you're doing resistance training and possibly also during aerobic. I'm not sure, but it does. It plays a role in helping maintain your bone density as well as osteocalcin. Osteocalcin is released. Osteocalcin then gets into your bloodstream and it pulls calcium out of your bloodstream and brings it back to the bone. So, you know, the thing is, is that most of the calcium that we store in our body is in our bone or, you know, teeth and bones and muscle. But calcium plays a very important role in the bloodstream as well.

So anytime we're not getting enough calcium, and I think something like 38% of the US population doesn't get enough calcium. So there's a huge percentage of the population that doesn't get enough calcium. Whenever you don't get enough, your body actually pulls it out of the bone and brings it to the bloodstream so that it can play an important role in endothelial cells and making sure they don't get too stiff. That's where osteoporosis comes in? Yeah, because as you age, if you imagine a lifetime of chronic calcium, quote unquote, inadequacy, so you're never getting enough of the calcium every day, eventually that's going to start to build up and you're going to keep pulling it out of your bone. You're going to keep pulling it out of bone. You know, there's a couple

of things that regulate that. That's one, just, you know, obviously just not getting enough calcium. So you keep pulling it out of your bone. And the other thing is not getting enough of the, so doing the types of exercises that you need to do to, you know, make sure you're releasing these hormones that are bringing calcium to the bone that that are doing that. And also certain dietary factors can play a role in that. So making sure that you're getting enough vitamin K. So vitamin K1 is found in green plants. It plays a role in blood coagulation. When you have enough of it for that blood coagulation, then some vitamin K stays around the bloodstream and activates osteocalcium and other genes that are able to pull the calcium to the bone. Vitamin K2 never really goes to the liver, and that's something that's found in fermented sort of bacteria make it.

So, like, you can find vitamin K2 in the Western diet, like cheeses, blue cheeses, fermented cheeses have a higher amount. There's some in organ meat, like liver, but natto, fermented cheeses have a higher amount. There's some in organ meat like liver. But natto, fermented soybeans are the highest. Fermented soybeans, natto? Natto, yeah. They've got like, if you're comparing like cheese or even organ meat to natto, looking at K2 levels, there's no comparison. Natto's got a huge amount. I've never even heard of that stuff.

It's pretty big in the health community. It's also high in something else called spermidine, which is able to clear away damaged cells in your body. And it's called through a process called autophagy. So we're always getting damaged cells. And anytime we have a cell that's damaged, damaged cells occur, you know, just from normal metabolism. But as our telomeres start to get shorter, the telomeres always take the hit. So telomeres are those tiny caps on the end of your chromosomes. And they always are like sacrificing themselves because they don't want your DNA to get the damage. Because if your DNA gets the damage, it could lead to cancer. So they take the hit. As they start to get shorter,

it accelerates their shortening because they already get shorter each year. Then what happens is the cell becomes what's called senescent. And what that means is the cell just sits around in your bloodstream or in your kidney or in your liver or whatever organ we're talking about. And it's not really alive. So it's not metabolic, but it doesn't go away. It's not dead. So what it does, it just sits there and it starts to secrete pro-inflammatory cytokines, which then activate nearby immune cells to like fire away nasty chemicals and damage more cells. So what happens is you start to damage nearby cells. You can think about like, have you ever noticed like when you get a gray hair?

So gray hair, you'll get senescent melanocytes, which are the cells that produce the pigment. You'll get one that's senescent. So it's just kind of sitting there. And it causes a hair follicle or hair to become gray. And then all the other hair cells around nearby, you always get them like near each other. And part of that has to do with the fact that the senescent melanocyte in this case, which is, you know, in the hair follicle is secreting all this nasty stuff that then damages other nearby hair cells. Wow.

That's fascinating. So, oh, so anyways, back to the spermidine. The spermidine actually clears away. It activates this whole genetic system we have in our body called autophagy, which is like self-eating. So we start to like eat the cell and like clear it away and recently like within the last like month a study came out where um scientists actually engineered mice uh using crisper technology to clear away all the every time they had a senescent cell you and i are getting senescent cells right now like

right now sorry jamie it's happening it's like it's happening all the time. But but these researchers did this brilliant experiment where they designed. They were like, OK, a senescent cell has a certain marker on it. And so they then said, OK, when this marker gets expressed, I want you to like have the you know, have these immune cells go and clear it away and eat it. these immune cells go and clear it away and eat it. And so every time there was a senescent cell, the immune system cleared it out, and the mice ended up living 30% longer than their normal lifespan.

Pretty cool. Wow. So autophagy, it's called. It's pretty cool. And there are other things that actually increase it. Resveratrol. Resveratrol from, it's one of those plant plant compounds that's this has been a recent obsession of mine but plants make like natural insecticides and you know for millions of years plants have been figuring out a way to like ward off insects and fungus and you know because they they also

want to stay alive just like we do and they they don't actually make enough of this chem like these chemicals to kill the insect it's kind of like just go away so they often affect their nervous system um and just kind of make them go away but what's really cool is that these compounds and plants and there are so many different ones actually have a hormetic effect on us so that hormetic effect being in small doses, it activates our whole stress response pathway like exercise does. And so resveratrol is actually made in grape skins and also blueberries make to a much less degree, but it's made to ward off fungus. And resveratrol has been shown at least if in a high dose like a thousand milligrams a day

to clear away it activates it actually activates this whole genetic pathway that gets activated when you're fasting fasting is another type of hormetic stress so when you're fasting you cause damaged cells to you know clear away you also basically start to turn on all these genes that help you deal with stress because your body's like, oh my God, I can't, I don't have food. I need to deal with this. So you activate all these really good genetic pathways where you're making more antioxidants, you're making more anti-inflammatories, you're making more brain cells, you're preparing just everything good. So resveratrol kind of is thought of like a mimetic of fasting in a way because it activates like one of these pathways that gets activated and it changes gene expression.

I've been very skeptical of the resveratrol literature for quite some time back in 2003 or so when it was first kind of came into the aging world. I was very skeptical of it, mostly because a lot of the studies that have been done in animals where they feed animals resveratrol, they feed them such large amounts that are just like not relevant to humans. So I was like, well, so what? But the more I've been reading about it recently, the more I've become a little more convinced that there actually may be something to this resveratrol. It's activating this pathway called SIRT1, which is globally changing gene expression. It's epigenetics. It's activating all these good things and deactivating bad things. And so it's really interesting.

There was a study that was published not long ago, a couple years ago, that was done in monkeys where monkeys were given a high sugar diet and high sugar plus high fat, which is a bad combo. And they gave them resveratrol, you combo and they gave them resveratrol you know either gave them resveratrol or didn't and the monkeys that did not get resveratrol um their arteries were like really stiffed that caused their arteries to stiff by like 40 percent but the resveratrol resveratrol completely like negated that so i was like wow maybe i should start looking into the resveratrol again because because it's a little, it's a little interesting. But there's so many other plant, there's a book that was written by an Indian scientist called Plant Antifeedants. And it's a very dry, I mean, it's a textbook. So it's not like something people like read, like, for, it's a textbook, really. But what he does

in this book is there's like over 900 different chemical compounds in like a variety of plants. He's a, as a plant specialist. So that's his specialty. And he categorizes like over 900 of these compounds where these, these compounds are, you know, potentially going to induce a hormetic response. And so I know several scientists are actually using some of these compounds that are at least listed in this book to study their effects like in mice and eventually in humans. But like some of them, like plumagen, plumagens and black walnuts, and it's been, it actually causes a slight stress in our brain. And it has been shown in mice to protect against ischemic stroke, because it's like it activates all these good things that protects against ischemic stroke.

There's another one called galantamine, which is in snowdrop flowers. Galantamine is also stressful in the brain. Like I said, these plant compounds are designed to target insect nervous systems. So it's no surprise they're affecting, you know, the nervous system of mammals. And in fact, in this case, humans as well. Galantamine increases acetylcholine production in the brain. And acetylcholine plays a role in learning and memory. And it's actually given to Alzheimer's patients, galantamine, to help them, you know, remember

things, to help them with their, to improve their memory. But it's just one of those natural insecticides um acetylcholine is a nootropic a lot of people take acetylcholine just from memory well the thing i like about the getting it from um getting it from getting it from a hormetic type of response versus like let's say someone designed a drug to activate the acetylcholine receptor, is that you always have these like biological feedback mechanisms. When you start to activate a receptor in the brain, pharmacologically, your brain knows. Your brain's like, oh, I'm getting a lot of this stuff that I don't usually get a lot of. I'm going to stop making as much of the receptor. The receptor is what's necessary to

have the physiological response. So your brain's like, oh, I'm just going to stop making as much of this receptor. But then what happens is if you don't give it that signal, if you don't take that drug, then you've got less of that receptor. And so you're going to have massive like withdrawal. It's going to be like crazy because now whatever acetylcholine you do make, it's not going to have much of an effect because there's less of that receptor there to actually bind to it. Whereas when you have something like galantamine, something that's a hormetic inducer, what's happening is you're not actually doing anything to acetylcholine neurons or to the receptor or anything directly, it's slightly toxic. And part of the way your brain deals with the type of stress that it induces is it goes, oh, this is the kind of stress I need to make.

I need to steal choline for this. For whatever reason, whatever, you know, these plants are doing different things. For whatever reason, the galantamine is like the one that says, okay, acetylcholine. So your body is, it's a response to something kind of like triggering it, you know? And so you're not going to have that feedback mechanism where it's like. So if you take it in a pharmacological form, a pharmaceutical form. Yeah. I'm just saying a lot of, you know, I mean, the classic example would be opioids, right?

Opioid painkillers. So when you're taking an opioid painkiller, what's happening is there's a couple of different opioid receptors in the brain. And the opioid painkiller is kind of like a morphine derivative, which is sort of like endorphin. It binds to something called the mu opioid receptor, which is what endorphins bind to. And endorphins make you feel good that's also part of the reason why you exercise why you you know you're you're wanting that endorphin release um what happens when you start to like make a drug like morphine derivative type of drug that goes and directly activates that receptor binds to it is that receptor the mu opioid receptor you start to make less of it and that's

been shown when you when you give morphine drugs, you start to make less of it. And that's been shown when you when you give morphine drugs, you down regulate, you make less of the receptors. So now what happens is when you don't have that opioid drug, you know, let's say you had, you know, this much receptor, you start taking the drug, right? And now your receptors going down here, right? And so now if you don't have the drug, you're down here. And so any endorphin you make isn't going to do much like, oh, man, I need more of that. And, you know, so you keep having just to get back up to baseline, just to get back up to normal, which is why you can have addiction. Addiction can be very common with those types of painkillers because of the effect on the mu opioid receptor.

So that's, you know, that's one of the problems. And interestingly enough, there's another type of opioid receptor called the kappa opioid receptor, which I think I've discussed with you before on one of the podcasts because kappa opioid receptor is sort of the opposite of the mu opioid receptor because it actually, when you make something in your body called dynorphin, it's responsible for a dysphoric feeling. Whereas mu opioids, euphoric, you's responsible for a dysphoric feeling. Whereas mu opioids, euphoric, you feel good. Dysphoric feeling is the kappa opioid. You make dynorphin because it cools your body. So when you're hot, when you exercise, when you elevate your core body, when you sweat, that's a good sign. When you're sweating, you're making dynorphin. When you sit in the sauna, you're making dynorphin. And when you're working out hard enough that you're sweating, you're physically uncomfortable, right? You're like, damn, this sucks.

You feel uncomfortable. And the same goes when you're sitting in a hot sauna and you're sweating and getting really hot. Man, you're just like this. You feel dysphoric. Like that's what's happening is dynorphin is binding to the Kappa opioid receptor. Well, the really cool thing about this whole pathway, again, coming back to feedback, biology is so smart. It always, like, figures out a way. When you start to activate that Kappa opioid receptor, your body's like,

whoa, I'm getting a lot of this bad stuff. I need to, like, make more of these good receptors because I got too much of this dysphoric. of these good receptors because I got too much of this dysphoric. So it actually causes more, causes your body to make more mu opioid receptors and it makes them sensitive. So then the next time you release endorphin, you know, your workout, boom, it feels even better and it lasts, you know. So that's part of the reason why I know that there's certain drugs that are used to treat opioid addiction, activate the cap opioid receptor pathway, exercise. Some people use sauna. I don't think they understand the mechanism, but anything that's going to help you with dynorphin, because people that are taking opioids, opioid painkillers, their mu opioid receptors are already like down, down, down.

You want it back up and dynorphin activating that cap opioid receptor will do that. It's been shown in multiple studies, you know, so kind of went on a little rant there, but it's a few things I wanted to ask you. I didn't want to stop you. The first one, go back to resveratrol and black walnuts and all these different things. Do these things work synergistically or do they cancel each other out or is there any problems in combining them? Yeah. Great. That's just like, you know, so the question is synergistically would mean, can you then combine two things and have an even more powerful response? Well, the thing is, is that because these compounds are targeting different pathways, you're going to have some overlap, which will have a synergistic effect, but you're also

going to have a diverse, there's going to be diversity. So, you know, you're going to have the plumagenin and the black walnuts, the galantamine, and then you get your apigenin from celery, you know, apigenin causes your brain to make more neural neurons, neural stem cells. You get the resveratrol, which is like clearing away damaged cells. It's also anti-inflammatory. And then you go and eat your kale and broccoli. That makes something called isothiocyanates. Isothiocyanates are very potent anti-cancer so they actually change genes they they change we have genes in our body that are able to convert a pro-carcinogen into a carcinogen and um isothiocyanate stop that from happening and we also have genes in our body that can deactivate anything that could potentially

become a carcinogen that we're exposed to all sorts of stuff like every day so activating those genes is like super awesome in fact it's been shown in mice if you like if you give mice a carcinogen that we're exposed to all sorts of stuff like every day so activating those genes is like super awesome in fact it's been shown in mice if you like if you give mice a really high dose of isothiocyanates and then you inoculate them you inject them with tumor cells they will not form tumors whereas the mice that are injected yes and there's another study that was done in humans and men men that took around they ate uh 250 grams of broccoli or Brussels sprouts. So isothiocyanates are in the cruciferous family of vegetables. So kale, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choy.

Cauliflower. Cauliflower. Yeah, all that stuff. Brassica. Those are all, they all have isothiocyanates in them. Actually, the isothiocyanates are formed, they're stored in something in the plant called glycosinolates. And in order to release the isothiocyanates, the plants have an enzyme called myrosinase, which we have a little bit of it, a little bit in our

saliva, a little bit in our gut bacteria, but not much. And myrosinase is heat sensitive. So when you heat your cruciferous, you're inactivating about 50% of it. And it's still good to cook vegetables. I mean, it's good to get both. But the raw kale that you put in your smoothie or the raw broccoli you're eating, the raw broccoli sprouts have seven times more because they're a young plant. Young, again, comes back to that when you're younger, the stress response is more potent because nature wants you to survive. So broccoli sprouts, isothiocyanates are made to ward off, you know, creatures from eating them. So the younger the plant is, the more they make of it.

And so broccoli sprouts, I used to actually sprout them. Have you ever tried broccoli sprouts before? I have. Yeah. They're pretty pungent. I've never made them, though. It's really easy. You can order some seeds on Amazon and then get this mesh bag.

And you put the seeds in and then you wet the bag. And you just keep wetting it every day. And after about five days, you'll have broccoli sprouts. It's really good on salads. Not so good in smoothie. I used to put them in my smoothie and it's like, it makes me want to barf. Like it's so gross. I mean, it's really good for you, but it's just like, it's so bitter.

But then again, you know, at that, when I was doing, I've gone through so many different, I'd make different smoothies all the time. My smoothies are disgusting. If you ever ate my smoothies, you'd probably barf. You have no idea. I have done like broccoli sprouts, mustard greens, garlic, and then carrots and other stuff. But that right there, have you ever tried mustard greens? I have had mustard greens.

I've never tried it in a smoothie. You'll think you're drinking hot chili peppers. Well, I put giant chunks of ginger and four cloves of garlic, four large cloves of garlic. Four? Four. Dude, that is crazy. So garlic. All right.

Let's finish the isothiocyanates, but that, it all has to do with these hormetic- I hold that in the back of my mind. I still have another question on top of that. Keep going. Go, go, go. Dude, this is my recent obsession is the plant, these plant insecticides. I really think, we don't even know what's in these plants, but it's like, you know, these isothiocyanates, men that ate 250 250 grams of it, they actually in their urine, you can have, there's a biomarker of a compound that inactivates like a certain carcinogen that could be potential carcinogen.

And they increase that by 10%, meaning that they're like doing good stuff. Basically, you know, the isothiocyanates are really good for the brain too. It makes something called a type of isothiocyanate is sulforaphane, which is in the broccoli sprouts. It's been shown to, like, help with autism. I mean, because it induces a stress response in the brain, and your brain does all this good stuff. And then there's, like, apigenin in the celery. There's garlic, the allicin. Allicin is in garlic, and allicin is, in order to activate allicin, you have to chop or blend or chew garlic.

So if you just throw, allicin itself is not sensitive to heat, but if you don't chop up the garlic, the enzymes in the garlic, allicinases, won't get activated and won't release the allicin so if you try to swallow a whole clove is that what you mean if you swallow a whole clove or some people cook with whole cloves they don't chop them uh-huh so if you want to if you're cooking with garlic chop the garlic and let it sit for like five to ten minutes before putting it in the heat really yes let it sit out like on a cutting board exactly that because that you'll

get the you'll harvest the more most allicin from it. Allicin is another one of these natural plant insecticides. So it accentuates as time goes on? So it just takes a little while for the enzyme to release it. So it takes a few minutes, the enzyme releases it. Even though this plant was picked like maybe a week ago or a month ago or whatever the hell it is? Well, you have to break the walls of the garlic for the allicinase to get released. But more of it releases over time.

That seems so strange. No, it's not that more of it releases. It's just that you have to give it time for the enzymes to get activated and release it. It doesn't take that long. I mean, honestly, if you were to wait like five minutes, you'd be fine probably. But I'm just on the cautious side. I like to wait like five or ten minutes but yeah so you if you just if you just chop the garlic and immediately it's

the enzymes have to get activated and then they chop it up but the nalicin is released so that just that takes a couple of minutes it just seems odd to me that there's a process once it's been picked and it's sitting there it's obviously not alive anymore you know it's sitting in like a little bowl yeah but the enzyme's not active until you break... The garlic's been picked, but it's in a clove thing, right? You have to open it out. You have to get it out of the clove and cut the cell wall to activate these enzymes. When I don't feel good, I chew a whole clove of garlic too. I used to do that. Yeah. It's supposed to be good for you, right? It is. It's antimicrobial. They have very, very potent antimicrobial activities. It kills a wide variety of bacteria.

Well, you talked about that MRSA case that you had. And I relay that to everybody because my friend Denny had a really bad case of MRSA. And I told him about your situation. He had it actually after you had been on the podcast the last time. And I told him his photo is insane. He's got a photo that I put on my Instagram page of his knee. I mean, his knee got within a couple of days. It went from being like mildly infected, like what's going on, to he was in the hospital for weeks. Oh, wow. Massive, you know, intravenous antibiotics, the whole deal. Yeah. Awful. I told him about what you had done with grapeseed extract.

Was that what it was? Yeah. First of all, I should probably clarify. I'm not exactly sure it was MRSA because it wasn't actually cultured. I assume it was because it came back like three times. But so I probably one way or another. It was stuff. Yeah. And so I took a very I was taking garlic pills like every hour. Grapefruit seed extract. Yeah tend to go overboard. Is that good enough? Is the garlic extract like if you're getting from a pill? So, yeah. The question is, there's aged garlic and then there's just regular garlic pills and then there's fresh garlic.

It all depends. So some of the garlic that is aged has allicin in it, but it doesn't have other mercapitans in it. There's other mercapitans that are doing other things. What is mercapitan? Mercapitan, it's another byproduct of these plant insecticides. And mercapitans are, first, they bind mercury very well. So they will bind mercury and help you excrete it. So they bind mercury that's in and like help you excrete it so they bind mercury that's in your

system and you excrete it and they also um they they uh do something in your brain so that they can actually cross over the blood-brain barrier get into your brain and they're potent antioxidant in the cell membrane which is it's kind of technical but it's hard to find antioxidants that are in the cell membrane itself most of the time they're soluble in the cell so it's hard to find antioxidants that are in the cell membrane itself. Most of the time they're soluble in the cell. So it's actually very good for your brain. But so I was taking the garlic oil. Garlic oil would have, it should have both, both of those. And I was also rubbing it on my sore topically.

So I was rubbing it on there and taking an orally grape, grapefruit seed extract. I was taking ginkgo biloba cause that was also shown to be, um, to kill a different staphylococcus strains and vitamin C. And I was taking this stuff like every hour. Wow. Every hour just overloading your system. Yeah. Like garlic was, it was like massive garlic. Um, but the, the, the garlic itself, you know, it's antimicrobial. But also, there was a study that was recently published men that had like atherosclerosis, they were given 2.4 grams of garlic a day. And it actually slowed the accumulation of plaques in their arteries by like 80%. Because allicin is a very potent anti inflammatoryinflammatory and it helps the endothelial cells, helps

reduce inflammation in the endothelial cells. It's good. It's really good. So allicin, it just goes on and on. I don't even know. There's so many different compounds, but these are just ones we know of. You know, they're just, it's, they're doing really, really positive and potent things. Curcumin is one that I've been obsessed

with. We can talk about that later. I take a lot of curcumin. I take that every day. I have been obsessed with a certain form of it, this formulation of it. So I know we've talked about this before on the podcast, but curcumin, there's a couple of problems with the bioavailability of it. First is that like your stomach acid and your intestines, like you just, it can't get past that very well. So it doesn't actually get absorbed and whatever does get absorbed, it's like immediately cleared because your body's like, oh, toxic. No, go away. So taking curcumin, which is in turmeric, right? It's in the turmeric plant. That is, you can be taking it but not getting a lot it's not doing a lot so so um there's this new formulation i don't know how new it is it's new to my mind

new to ronda uh where they take the curcumin and it's put in a phytosome which is sort of like a liposome um but it's a little different. So liposomes contain a chemical compound like in the middle of it. So they have like a phospholipid kind of complex that contains the compound and it's supposed to increase bioavailability because it gets past the intestinal system. And also it can just fuse with your cell membrane and just deliver the contents to the cell. So it can bypass transporters and all this other stuff. Phytosomes are very similar. They also have this phospholipid complex. In this case, they use phosphatidylcholine.

But it also disperses the compound throughout. And supposedly, it's supposed to be more bioavailable. I don't know if that's really true. But I have been reading some published studies using this certain formulation of curcumin in a phytosome, which is phosphatidylcholine. And the formulation has got a patented name. It's called Meriva. But, you know, if there is curcumin in a liposome, it's probably working the same way.

I just doubt that dispersing the molecules within the actual liposome makes that big of a difference. It's more about getting past. So what this does is it gets you past the absorption issue. And it also gets past it because it fuses with the cells quickly, it gets past some of the other, you know, getting rid of it quickly issue. But I've been taking it like I've been taking at least a gram a day, gram a day of it. And what got me really hooked on it was a couple of studies that came out, clinical studies that were done. Well, first, there was one that showed people that were running downhill, like exercise, some sort of running downhill that caused delayed onset muscle soreness to happen. So whatever it was about the running

downhill it's pounding deceleration is that what it is running downhill is rough yeah it's actually easier to run uphill on your body on your body than running downhill is i don't know about your brain though yeah your brain's like oh it's like no i'm done yeah yeah um but it's it was shown to reduce the um the delayed onset muscle soreness by like twofold taking one gram, one gram twice a day. Isn't that kind of subjective though? When you say like reducing soreness, it's so hard to gauge. It is. Absolutely.

That absolutely is subjective. And same with the other, there's another publication where people were given, there's a not, there's a more quantified publication, but that was done in people that had osteoarthritis. They were given one gram. I think it was just one gram a day, not two grams. I think it was one gram a day. And it actually reduced their inflammatory markers by like 68%. It reduced their symptoms, of course. But also, it increased their mobility. So they checked their mobility, increased their mobility by like fourfold. So their symptoms of course but also there it increased their mobility

so they check their mobility increase their mobility by like fourfold so they're actually moving more you know and so that's but it's it the reason may be because of the anti-inflammation properties curcumin is very very potent anti-inflammatory way more you know it acts very different than like typical anti-inflammatories do. But there was a study done in mice where mice were given like a very high dose of not this formulation, just regular curcumin. They're given like 100 milligrams per kilogram body weight, which is like insane. It's like eight grams for 180 pound meal, which is a lot. I mean, it's a lot of curcumin. What does that look like in your hand?

A big pile probably. Yeah, like a cue ball. Yeah. I mean, I did see, because I was kind of concerned about toxicity, I did see one study that was done on people that had cancer. They were given eight grams of curcumin a day for three weeks and there was no side effects. I don't know. It's a lot. It's a lot. I personally think the phosphatidylcholine complex is a better approach. And there's only one proprietary formulation of that? I think there's a Meriva and there's another one someone recently shared with me, Longevitya. So would you recommend the standardized stuff that you get at a regular vitamin store or no? I actually think the phosphatidylcholine complex is superior because of the bioavailability issues and because it is fusing with your cell membrane and getting just the biology all makes sense. Plus there's actual studies showing that it works. And there was another study. So this mouse study where they gave him eight grams, what the whole point of the study was, was they injured the mice.

They like they did some sort of force. It's so fucked up. They put force. It was so messed up. You have no idea how many mice I've killed. Like in my scientific career. I don't do it anymore. I used to.

I'd killed hundreds of mice in graduate school. Don't say this online. The vegans will come. It's for medicine. I would harvest that. I would kill. They don't care.

You're a speciesist. It was so awful, Joe. Like, the awful part about this is like, so I used to go and kill mice to get their organs.

So I would get their livers, which is one reason why I have a hard time cooking liver because I'm like, oh my God, it's rodent liver. Oh no, because the consistency is like the same as beef liver. I get their livers, which is one reason why I have a hard time cooking liver. Cause I'm like, Oh my God, it's rodent liver. Oh no.

Cause the consistency is like the same as beef liver. I get their livers and thymus and spleens. But what the sad part was is that I'd gas them. So I'd CO2 them. And as I was doing this, like every day, it was like, fine, give me some ice. I'm going to gas him. You know, I just, I didn't care. I mean, I was one of those, I don't know what you call it, but the thing that was-

Well, here's the scary thing. First of all, when I first started doing it, it was really hard and I felt really, really bad, like tears. Like I was sad. I was, I was like, I can't do this. Like, you're not going to get your PhD. I'm like, okay, I'll do it. I'll do it.

So I, it was hard for me at first. I totally got used to it where it was like nothing. Like I didn't even think twice. I mean, I had to take a handful and put them in the little box and I'd gas them I mean it was I know it's so fucked up it is but and here's the other like like scary part is that then I would have long periods of time I'm a very empathetic person though people to like I really am just that have long periods of time when i didn't kill the mice and then i'd have to go back there's like months would go by and then i have to go back and do it and all of a sudden i was like i can't do this and i couldn't watch them they'd

start like breathing you know and trying to gasp for air and i just felt awful and so i'm just glad i don't do that anymore i moved on to to humans. Yeah. You take their blood. You take their blood. But it's better for them that way. It's better. Yeah. You're helping them. Yeah. So, you know, the mouse stuff, man, it was, there was you, like when you have to do something and, you know, I was medical science, I was doing cancer research.

I wasn't just like doing it for fun, but it was definitely a strange feeling to like feel that desensitized, sensitized where I'm like, whoa, wait, I've been doing this for like four years. Why am I all of a sudden caring about this again? Just took a little break. Yeah, because I was doing other experiments. Yeah. That didn't require that I had to kill mice and get their liver. So would you recommend taking regular curcumin that you get from a regular vitamin store? Do you think there's some benefit in it?

Yeah, absolutely. Some, but it's just not as much. You're just not going to get as much because, first of all, you're not going to absorb as much of it. And second of all, you're going to clear it away quickly. Is there a better formula of resveratrol? I know resveratrol, supposedly there's some of it in wine, which they were trying to correlate with the positive health benefits of drinking a glass of wine a day. But as far as I understand, it's a small amount. Yeah. So a five-ounce glass of wine has about two milligrams of resveratrol.

The study I talked about on monkeys, they were given like 480 milligrams. For a monkey. Yeah, for a monkey. Which, if you're talking, oh, the study I talked about on monkeys, they were given like 480 milligrams. Oh. That's, you know, you're not going to like. For a monkey. You're not going to, yeah, for a monkey. And you're not going to like, so you're not going to like have that same effect. And like I said, the 1,000 milligrams was for the clearing away, the autophagy, clearing away damaged cells. But, you know, these are little chemicals. These are chemical compounds that are triggering something in our body.

And whether it's two milligrams or 400 milligrams it's doing a little bit of something and so you know i wouldn't just throw my nose up i mean you're not gonna like live 30 percent longer because of it because you drink wine you know but it's still you're still getting some you know right so there's something to that there is there is something but it's not chrysler say he was drinking a box of wine he? A box of wine. He drank a box of wine a night, which they think is like eight bottles.

How did he not die of alcohol? Some people have a weird variation in their gene where they're able to actually convert the alcohol to acetone and acetate, which is ketone. So they actually get benefits from it. it's really interesting

really yeah whoa yeah i don't know i know he'll use his excuse keep drinking well clearly he's got some and if you can drink that much wine and not when he was telling it to us he was like chalking it off like it was no big deal and we're all like wait what what the fuck like a whole box like even brian was like a box even brian a box that's bad yeah a box of wine like a box of wine is for like a large family gathering you know alcohol in in high high doses like that it's not good you can yeah no you're gonna start killing neurons you're it's yeah it's it's not good you shouldn't do the binge where you're taking so much of it but having a five ounce glass of wine with you know two milligrams of resveratrol may not be as bad.

And there's probably some health benefit as well to this, the mood altering shift of the relaxing of having a glass of wine. I've always felt like that's something that we shouldn't really look past. Like having a drink relaxes you and just whatever negative impact that alcohol has on your liver or the toxicity, isn't it kind of balanced out at least in low doses by the positive benefit that you get from it being a social lubricant, relaxing you, things along those lines? things along those lines? It makes sense to me. I mean, there are so many different conflicting studies out there with alcohol. It's good for you. It's bad. It's good. And I think it has a

lot to do with genetics and just binge or what else you're eating and just all these other things. But yeah, if someone drinks a glass of wine, let's say they're wound up all the time. It's like, we were talking about this before the podcast, but they're always like, the lion's coming to get me. It's like, the lion's coming to get me, you know, it's like, you know, the lion's coming to get me, I gotta run, I gotta fight off this beast. I mean, that's the stress response, right? That's the you're activating your sympathetic nervous system. But, you know, which is good if you're actually out in Africa, and there's a lion, but if you're not having that active all the time is actually it, it's it prevents some of the like feedback loops that happen in your brain so when you have chronic stress like that then you start to um you start

to keep making usually when you're making when you make stress hormone your body's like oh i made this that's enough it shuts it off so that's that goes away so you no longer shut it off and it just keeps going and that can cause you to either be super anxious where you're like lions there all the time or the opposite end of the spectrum where you're like totally you just don't care about anything, you know, and you can be like depressed where it's like nothing excites you, you know, you just you're indifferent. So having a glass of wine, if that like chills you out and like you're not so, you i i think that seems like you know okay if you're having a glass of wine to to chill out and yeah it seems like chilling out's good but exercise would probably be a better way to do it yeah what about the is there any benefit to stressing your body through alcohol like as you were talking about these uh pesticides that plants produce they stress your body you have this response from exercise, things along those lines. Is there a response?

Like, when I was young, I was really dumb. I thought that smoking cigarettes might have a good effect on your lungs because it's like lifting weight through your lungs because your lungs would be like, oh, I got to process this stuff. And it would make your lungs stronger. Like, wasn't that, I think that was like what doctors believed. Really? Yeah.

Well, at one point in time, I mean, I know that was in that movie, The Aviator, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie. I've seen that. That's good. No, no, no. That's not the one I'm thinking about. I'm thinking of the one where he was. Can you ask me if you can? No, no, no.

Where he played the asshole that ran the FBI. The guy who wore dresses. Hoover. Yeah, J. Edgar Hoover. When he played J. Edgar Hoover when he was young, Leonardo DiCaprio in this scene was with his mom, and his mom was telling him that you're frail, you should listen to the doctor and smoke cigarettes.

That was the thing that they used to, the doctors used to prescribe cigarettes to people to like increase their vitality. Well, I don't know about, I mean, I don't know what their explanation was, but nicotine. Yeah.

Nicotine. I don't, I know you want to, I don't want to interrupt, but there is one thing that absolutely does happen from smoking cigarettes that does benefit a certain population of people. Because when you, when you put nicotine in your body um it it totally normalizes something called sensory gating which is what your brain does your sensory gating is your brain filtering out all this other

information information that's happening all the time like jamie's sitting over there he's doing god knows what but i don't care i'm not paying attention because I'm talking to you you know there's noises out here there's smells here so it's like your brain is able to focus in and not like keep all these inputs coming at once well there are people that have you know problems in sensory gating and it's genetically related it's also there's certain dietary factors that can play a role where they cannot do that and so they're getting all this input all the time from everywhere so if they like walk into a room with like a bunch of people they flip out it's like because just they can hear all the conversation it's all coming in at once since it's like sensory

overload so a cigarette can negate nicotine negates it for 15 minutes which is why some people probably are chronically smoking because after 15 minutes man they got to get that hit again or you know it's coming a lot of people people that are schizophrenic have a sensory gating issue. And so a lot of schizophrenics actually, I think, this is me totally just throwing this out there. I think that's likely why a lot of schizophrenics are chain smokers because they're self-medicating. That makes sense. But I don't know.

I'm just, that's my two cents. We were talking about nicotine though. You're not talking about the actual act of smoking a cigarette. No, I'm talking about nicotine. Because you could take that in other forms. Right. And nicotine is prescribed. Isn't it prescribed to certain heart patients?

Like, it doesn't have some sort of a benefit? I don't know. On heart function? I don't know. I feel like it does. I feel like there's some sort of a medicinal benefit to nicotine itself, obviously not in a cigarette form. See if you can find that.

Health benefits of nicotine. Yeah. But my dumb idea was that it was like it would stress out your lungs. It would make your lungs stronger. Definitely stress them out. Yeah. But is there any benefit like that with alcohol? Like is there any, like stressing out your body from drinking,

is there any robustness that would be a side effect of that? So here's the thing with anything that's hormetic. So anything that is, uh, the dose is very important. You know, when you have something that is stressful on the body, if you were to be running, if you were to run all the time, all day, every day, and you didn't recover, you die. You know, if you were to sit in the sauna or cold or, you know, so if you were to take like two kilograms of bok choy, you know, you'd have some problems. It's too much. The things that are hormetic. Two kilograms of bok choy would fuck you up? There's like four pounds of bok choy. Do you know how much two kilograms is?

Kilogram? That's a lot of bok choy. Yeah. What does that look like? A lot. kilogram that's a lot of bok choy yeah what does that look like a lot well a kilogram is 1.2 pounds is that what it is i don't know jamie google i think it's 1.2 pounds if i sounds familiar so two kilograms two kilograms says it's about a box a box of a whole box a box of what like a big box yeah but that's a that's not a real measurement. I don't know what a box of bok choy looks like. A box could be the size of this room. That doesn't make any sense. But what is a kilogram?

A kilogram is 1.2 pounds, right? Or 2.2 pounds? Yeah, is it 2.2? Yeah, 2.2 pounds. Yeah, it's 2.2, yeah. 2.2 pounds per, so four kilograms, 8.9 pounds of bok choy. Just Google that. What does that look like?

Yeah, Google four kilograms, just kilograms to pounds. Four kilograms to pounds. People in Europe are like, you fucking idiot. You don't even know the metric system. You don't even know what the rest of the world uses. This is my response, is that we have Google for things like that. 8.8, yeah. 8.8.

It wasn't hard to get, even with my stupid brain. So that will kill you? No, it won't kill you, but it might give you goiter. Goiter? Yeah. Like, it could, because... What is goiter? It could basically cause hypothyroid.

Whoa. Yeah. Really? Yes. That's crazy. Well, the thing about the isothiocyanates, which are in bok choy, is that they're anti-cancer. They're good. When you're eating your kale, and I'm talking two kilograms, again, that's a lot.

Massive amount. It's massive. Nobody in their right mind would ever eat that much kale or broccoli or whatever, bok choy a day. But if you did, the thing is, is that isothiocyanates can compete with iodine transport into the thyroid. And so if all you're eating all day every day is bok choy, guess what? Your iodine is not going to be getting into your thyroid. And so you can have some thyroid problems.

It's just overwhelming. Yeah. And this is with anything hormetic. I am going to answer your question. But the point that I'm trying to make is that a lot of these compounds that are hormetic, fasting, exercise, you know, doing cold stress, heat stress, these plant insecticides, you need, the key is the dose. So like you don't want to over, you don't want to have a huge, huge dose of it, you know.

And with the plants, it's really hard to get a huge dose. But with exercise, you know, I'm not sure that running 50 miles is actually that good. It's pretty stressful. It's not good for you. Yeah. So, you know, you get the point. Well, with alcohol, it has been shown that in small doses, it can have a slight hormetic effect in small doses. Well, it depends. Like, I don't know if these studies have been done in humans yet, but like probably like, you know,

like a small glass of wine, there is a slightly hormetic effect. Now, keep in mind, there are other things that can regulate that, you know, people are different. We all have different, that can regulate that. People are different. We all have different genes. And so, for example, I cannot recover from a large dose of alcohol like Dan can because I have a certain variation in a gene that does not repair damage to neurons very well. So there are other things to keep in mind. But yes, that has been shown in small doses, at least in animal models, like flies, worms, that small doses of alcohol can actually have a hormetic effect. And that's with any the class to actually define a chemical compound as hormetic. The in science, the definition is like there's this there's a U shaped curve. So when you have just enough of it you get a positive effect but when

you go over that threshold you start to have a negative effect and that's that's with that's what stress this when we're talking about good stress we're talking about we're not talking about exercising all day every day we're talking about exercising you know getting you know pushing past and getting some of that well that's a huge issue with martial artists with the fighters because they always feel like if they do more they will have more endurance and they'll be able to perform better inside the octagon or inside the ring or whatever their wrestling mat whatever they're competing on and it becomes a real issue with people because overtraining is a giant factor in preparation because they get to the point where their body can't recover from the work that it's done and their mind and their actual, their mental toughness

and their discipline has actually ruined them because they've gone too far. They started getting chronic injuries. It's a big issue. Right. You know, so there's that tipping point. We have to realize like what is the right amount of work and the right amount of recovery? Versus people who they feel like, well, if you just push yourself further, your body will respond. There's a lot of people that have had that attitude. That if you can just, it'll be hard. You might feel overtrained in the beginning, but your body will compensate. Your body will eventually upregulate and get ready for this increased workload that you've been demanding on it. Yeah, prepare for war. Well, I mean, there's some truth to that. You do want to push yourself and

your body will, you will have a strong stress response, but you have to recover. You can't, you can't, you can't, if you, the dose is very important. So if you push yourself beyond, it's just like, you're not going to have a recovery period. Like you're not going to be able to. Isn't it important then to build your base over a long period of time then? Because you would build your endurance slowly where you slowly increase the base. You make sure that your recovery is consistent and then just keep doing it and monitoring it over a long period of time. Then once you have a very high base base then really ramp it up and then go through like a long-term training camp that makes sense yeah nobody does that though that makes

sense i mean that would that makes logically that makes sense and and not and even for some of these these uh plant you know compounds too like in that resveratrol study in the monkeys the the first year those monkeys were actually given a smaller dose they were given 80 milligrams for the first year and the second year they were given 480 very interesting right they started and and back to your resveratrol like i don't i don't know like i have to there's so many compound there's so many brands out there that are just utter crap they have like filler and you know you think you're getting echinacea but you're not you're getting some some kind of you know magnesium steroid or something. So I'm interested in the resveratrol.

I'm interested in a lot of these other plant compounds. I like to get – it's one of the reasons why I like to eat a wide variety of plants, celery, parsley. Oh, there's stuff in like apple peels and in green tomatoes. So ursolic acids in apple skin and tomatodine in green tomatoes. They actually inhibit a gene in your skeletal muscle called ATF4. That gene actually prevents protein synthesis from happening. So, it stops your muscle cell from making proteins. So, inhibiting that means more protein synthesis.

And that's been shown in mice, like if they're given really high dose, like 0.27% ursolic acid and 0.05% tomatidine. They can increase their muscle growth by 30% over what they would do if they didn't have it. That's insane. Yeah, but they were giving them a huge dose. Still, that's amazing. It's amazing. 30% is like, you know, steroids can't do that. Yeah.

Well, these are now out in the market as nutraceuticals, farm nutraceuticals i guess you call them muscle builders yeah they're all into it but you know but you can eat i like to eat apples i like to i like to make um actually i don't make it i buy it already made but it's to tomatillo sauce have you ever tried that yeah it's like really good on eggs and put on eggs and um every time i'm i'm eating it i'm I'm like, ah, missiles, muscles. How bizarre. Um, is resveratrol something you should take with food, empty stomach? How should you take that? I don't, you know, because I've been so skeptical of the field for so long, I've not supplemented

with it. I mean, I did for a little while. Um, I'm looking back into it just because now I'm interested. Now I'm very interested. I, I, there interested. There's also someone pointed out to me because I did a post on this and they said that resveratrol was shown to negate some of the high intensity interval training gains or something. I didn't read the study. I don't know exactly what that means. But resveratrol has been shown to actually cause

mitochondrial biogenesis and shift muscle fibers to type 1, which are more endurance. The thing is that resveratrol is not like an antioxidant. It's not like taking vitamin E. The difference between taking an antioxidant or even taking like ibuprofen, like if you – these studies have been done where they've shown that taking like ibuprofen or taking supplemental vitamin E, you know, after a workout or while you're working out can blunt some of the positive benefits from it. And the reason is because when you exercise, you are, you know, you're causing stress, like we talked about, you're causing inflammation, you're causing, you know, reactive oxygen species to form. And this is very important for the stress response. That's why you have a positive effect. But if you're taking something like vitamin E,

vitamin E actually like, it's like a sponge. It like goes around and like stops. It's like, oh, here's a reactive oxygen species or an inflammatory and it just stops it, you know, socks it up. And NSAIDs, you know, they stop the inflammatory mediators from being produced. Resveratrol, curcumin, these plant insecticides, they don't work that way. They actually are stressful themselves. And so they activate these anti-inflammatory genes, antioxidant genes, all this good stuff. So it's very different than taking an antioxidant or an anti-inflammatory. Those NSAIDs are not really good news, in my opinion.

They've been shown to increase heart attack and stroke risk. What has been shown? NSAIDs. NSAIDs? Yeah. There's an FDA warning label on every ibuprofen bottle that you can buy in the market. Is that bad for you? So.

Well, it's non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, right? That's what ibuprofen is? Ibuprofen, yeah. The thing with some of these, it depends on the type of NSAID, but with ibuprofen and other ones. So ibuprofen targets, the way it's an anti-inflammatory is it targets one of these enzymes called COX-2. And COX-2 makes leukotrienes and thromboxanes, which cause platelets to aggregate. They also cause inflammation. It makes this other chemical that's involved in pain.

So when you stop that enzyme from doing that, then you're going to have less inflammation. You're going to have an inflammation causes pain, right? So you're going to have an anti-pain relieving, you're going to have a pain relieving effect. The problem is, is that when you inhibit, again, we get back to biology and feedback loops and, you know, our biology, we've, even though this enzymeX-2, causes inflammation, it's also an anti-inflammatory at the same time. COX-2 also is important for making sure platelets don't aggregate too much. So at the same time it's doing something that's making them aggregate, it's also like, okay, let's keep this in check. Let's make sure it doesn't go overboard. And it also makes something else that's important for relaxing the smooth muscle cells in your blood vessels.

And also, it releases nitric oxide. So when you block that enzyme, you're blocking the inflammation, blocking pain, but then the smooth muscle cells become stiff and you make less nitrogen oxide, which is important to relax blood vessels. And that can be bad if you are stiffening your vessels a lot and you have plaques. The plaques can then kind of come off and get clogged. I have a friend who takes that shit every morning. He runs a lot. He runs a lot and he takes it every morning.

And he'll take it before he runs. So he probably. Oh, that's not. First of all, I'll send you the study where it blunted the gains from exercise. Like it really is. I'm talking to you, Cameron Haynes. Get off that shit. I mean, women.

So there was like eight different clinical trials that were done. And this is what made the FDA put a warning label on all ibuprofen bottles is because chronic use increased the risk of stroke and heart attack twofold. And there was a study that was published a few months ago that was done in animals that showed the mechanism. So it showed exactly what was wrong with inhibiting COX-2. I've been very concerned because I know that almost every female that I know takes it once a month. They'll take it. Once a month is still an issue?

For menstruation. If you're chronically taking it every month, you're taking it for a week, one week out of every month, and you're taking it every month. So really it should be reserved for a pretty significant injury where you're in real pain. Yes. In my opinion, look, I don't know, maybe taking it one week out of them. I don't, it's chronic use. And this was, this was done in, you know, there's eight different clinical studies. Chronic use, to me, chronic use is taking it every month. So once a month would be, I mean, so if you get so drunk that you're fucked up and you're hungover and wrecked once a month, that's chronic use then. People take that for hangover?

Yeah. No, if you're getting wrecked, if you're drinking a lot of alcohol once a month, would you consider that chronic use? Yeah. Once a month. Yeah. See, most people wouldn't. Most people think chronic use is like every weekend. No.

So once a month is enough that you don't have enough time to recover from the damage. Is that what you're saying? I think that once a month, if you're going overboard like that, to me, I don't really have any evidence that once a month. In fact, I know there have been some studies that have to look into that. I would think that going out and binge drinking once a month is probably not the best thing. You can handle it more when you're younger. But especially as you get older, our capacities to handle that type of stress are decreased. So to me, especially as you're getting older, you're probably doing more damage by doing that.

What I was getting at, would you be as concerned with someone taking ibuprofen once a month as you would be someone binge drinking once a month? I am concerned about ibuprofen. Wow. But I don't know. I don't know, actually. I've never heard anybody talk about negative effects of ibuprofen. Yeah, ibuprofen, the selective COX-2 inhibitors are even worse, which are, I don't know the brand names for them. Ibuprofen targets COX-2, but it also targets COX-1. So it's not as bad as the selective COX-2 only inhibitors.

But this was big news. It's like, you know, the fact that even the FDA even finally was like, wait a minute, something's going on here. We got to at least put a warning label on these ibuprofen bottles. And when did they start doing that? Probably like eight months ago, seven or eight months ago. Wow. That's very recent. We consider the amount of time that people have been taking ibuprofen.

Yes. And I've been very concerned about my mom. I actually got my mom this Mariva. Here it it is fda drug study wow this july uh strengthens warning that non-aspirin non-steroidal anti-inflammatory uh can cause heart attacks or strokes you're so you're so used to saying things like NSAIDs most people are like what the fuck sorry thanks for reminding me no worries um the u.. Food and Drug Administration is strengthening existing label warnings that non-aspirin, non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs increase the chance of heart attack or stroke. Wow. Based on our comprehensive review of safety information, we are requiring updates to

drug labels of all prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. Now, that says prescription. Oh, that says prescription. But ibuprofen is ibuprofen. So if you take a regular pill that has 200 milligrams, you buy a prescription that's 800 milligrams. I always take four. So four is 800 anyway. So if you take four Advils, it's the same as a prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory.

If I ever take it, which I rarely do, I always just, I'm a dummy. I always just go for the full dose. Dude, I've been, so I got my mom. It seems to be a big problem for women because, like I said, they take it for menstrual pain. So they're prone to rely on that. And every woman I know relies on it. It's like, you know what? A little bit of pain is okay. And you actually like, I haven't had, I haven't taken ibuprofen except with

the exception of like, if I have, if there's some like surgery or something where I'm like, they're required to take it, but I haven't taken it, um, in six years. Like I avoid it. And I just, I deal with pain, you know, menstrual pain, but, and other pain, I just like, I just don't, it's not, it's not that big of a deal. You start to get used to it. But I got my mom this, this Mariva, this curcumin phosphatidylcholine complex. And I told her, I was like, take four of these a day, which is two grams because she's got arthritis and all sorts of chronic pain. And I have to, it's hard for her. I'm trying to like get her on the right diet and all that but compliance is an issue but if she starts to notice some changes with something easy then it's like oh i do see this kind of working you know so that's

kind of my goal but she said it's been helping with her with her pain and also um she's noted like she's more mobile and stuff so just from the curcumin i'm i'm actually like i'm thinking the it's the it's the so there was a study there was a study, did I talk about the study that was done that compared it to ibuprofen? So, this clinical study that compared people that took the Meriva curcumin in the phosphatidylcholine complex, they took two grams a day and it was comparable, the anti-p relief was comparable to um 800 milligrams of ibuprofen or a thousand milligrams of acetaminophen acetaminophen can be bad for the liver it can cause liver toxicity that's pretty awesome that it was comparable yes and comparable as far as the results through subjective um like what was the how did they measure it i don't remember was it inflammatory markers or was it like a subjective i don't i don't think so i don't think the other other ones have measured inflammatory markers with that curcumin phosphatidylcholine but i don't think this

particular study did i think it was subjective but they didn't know what they were getting it was control it was like double blind controlled so they were they're getting something right um so it's just a matter of like them on a one ten, how much relief did you get, that kind of thing? I don't know. I have to look back at the study. I don't remember. It's most likely subjective, though. I have a hard time believing you don't remember anything.

You have so much shit stored up in your brain. I do. It comes flying out. Where do you have room for friends' names and birthdays and stuff? Is it even there? Google Calendar. For like friends' names and birthdays and stuff? Is it even there? Google Calendar.

The other question that I wanted to make sure that I asked you, because we talked about this through email, was I know that you've done a lot of work on the benefits of sauna and the heat shock proteins from sauna. And I was asking you, because I recently, not recently, but over the last year, really got heavily into hot yoga. recently, but over the last year, I've really got heavily into hot yoga. And I'm like, I wonder if that's what's going on here because I leave these classes and I swear to God, a fucking asteroid could hit my car. And I'd be like, well, I guess I don't have a car anymore. Sat Nam. Namaste. Like you, you get so chilled out from doing that. There's some, there's, there's something going on that's akin to some sort of a drug response. Yeah. I think I talked about this before. Because when you're hot, when you're doing hot yoga, you're releasing dynorphin.

The reason you release dynorphin is because it cools the body. And your body's like, when you're heating the body, your body tries to cool itself. When you're cooling the body, the body tries to heat itself, right? Yeah. So this is what's happening. When you're doing the hot yoga, you're making dynorphin. Dynorphin, so while you're doing it, it's kind of like physically uncomfortable. You're holding these poses and you're like, ah, you know, it's hot. But when you get out, because of the whole effect

on the mu opioid receptor, you have more of them. That endorphin that you released or that endorphin you're going to release an hour later when you see your kids or whatever good thing happens, man, it's going to be like awesome. It's going to feel really good. No, it's incredible. It's incredible. That's what I, that's what got me into the sauna in the first place when I was in graduate school. Cause I was, you know, me waking up once a week and screaming and like flying across

the room, punching mirrors and shit. I mean, I literally broke, I broke a mirror with like my butt wow and i was injured dude i was injured for like wait a minute where was the mirror it was like one of those mirrors that you like buy at target and it's like you can stick a full body mirror to see oh so you jumped out of the bed and like threw yourself at it well we had it like against the wall but it like wasn't hung on the wall so it was like leaning you, because cheap and whatever, just busy, whatever. It's serving a function. I can see myself. So I like, it was kind of close to the bed.

So I like flew off the bed and like hit the mirror, like with my butt and broke it. And I was injured for like, it was like two months. I couldn't run. I couldn't do, I couldn't do squats. I couldn't, I was like, if I didn't have the sauna. Did you get cut from the mirror? Is that what you're saying? No, I like muscle, something, tendon. I don't know.

I don't know. I have no idea what I did. All from sleep. All from anxiety, yes. Wow, that's so crazy. But you can see why when I discovered the sauna, I was like, wow, this is because I would go to the sauna. I lived across the street from the YMCA.

And so the YMCA has a sauna. And I would wake up in the morning and I'd go work out or do the sauna, both. So I'd go and I'd sit in the sauna for like 30 to 45 minutes. I mean, I was pushing it. I was so miserable. It was hot.

And there were times where I would like stay in there for 45 minutes. I'm not recommending people do this. I'm just telling you like what I've experienced and I get out for five minutes and then I go back in, you know, so I was like, I just pushed it and I would go into the lab and it didn't matter who was stressing me out, who was telling me what to do, what, or if my experiments were failing. And I was like, Oh my God, six months of work down the drain, you know, like I didn't care. I was like, Oh, okay., six months of work down the drain. You know, like, I didn't care. I was like, oh, okay. I'll have to start over.

I'll have to rethink this. Wow. So that's when I looked and I was like, something's going on. Yeah. Something's going on. I got to figure it out. I want to know. And that's when I, like, started just going into the brain effects on the sauna.

Everyone always focuses on the detoxification and all that. I was like, dude, something's happening in my brain. I don't know why I'm saying dude all the time. It's like a nervous thing. Dude don't know why I'm saying dude all the time. I think it's like a nervous thing. I'm like, dude. Dude. Do you not usually do that?

Not really. Not all the time. I'll say dude, but not like- You're over-duding today? I'm over-duding. You're wired. You're fired up. So do you think that a similar effect is happening when you're doing hot yoga, even though it's not as hot as the sauna?

It's 90 minutes at 104 degrees and you're doing physical yoga, even though it's not as hot as the sauna. It's 90 minutes at 104 degrees and you're doing physical activity. You're straining. Anything that's causing you to sweat is going to cause you to release dynorphin because you're overheating, right? That's the way your sweat is supposed to help you cool. So you're also releasing dynorphin. There hasn't been a study on hot yoga. I get this question a lotin there hasn't been a study on hot yoga i get this question a lot there hasn't been a study on steam rooms there hasn't been a study well there hasn't there's been a couple of studies on hot baths or jacuzzis but not looking at the brain looking at other things um personally if you just think about the mechanisms i think that it's very likely and if you're gonna if you're pushing yourself to sweat if you just think about the mechanisms, I think that it's very likely, and if you're pushing yourself to sweat, if you feel uncomfortable, then you're doing the right thing. You're releasing

dynorphin, you're getting the heat shock proteins, you're getting all that good stuff. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So it is very addicting. It's also part of the reason why exercise can become addicting. People always think, attribute it to the endorphin release. I actually think it has a lot to do also with the dynorphin. The pain you experience, the discomfort you experience is very important because you're actually then having that hormetic, you can almost think of as a hormetic response because the discomfort is what's causing you to make more of the new opioid receptors that you're more sensitive to the endorphin, you're more sensitive to that feel-good stuff. It's funny because that's one of the main things

that people try to avoid in life is discomfort. That is probably if you looked at, especially lazy people, you looked at the primary thing they're trying to avoid, they're trying to avoid discomfort. Yep, yep. Like this morning, i woke up and i was like i have to go to the gym i have to go and i have to like i gotta like push it and i was run i was doing sprinting on the treadmill usually i uh i usually sprint like the last end of my run

but i was just sprinting and i was like so i was doing it i was like oh this sucks this sucks but i have to do it because i'm my brain is going to help, the dynorphin and also the norepinephrine. The norepinephrine, which is you release when you exercise, release a lot of it in the cold. I took a cold shower too. Cold shower was like pretty good as well because the cold also. So norepinephrine, you release norepinephrine when you're exposed to cold because norepinephrine causes vasodilation. And so when you have vasodilation, you actually are losing less heat. I always take cold showers after hot yoga. It's amazing in the winter because in the winter the water is actually cold because the water here is not really that cold because it's California. Yeah. If it gets cold out, it's like 50. But when it's 50, the water is actually cold because the water here is not really that cold because it's California. Yeah. If it gets cold out, it's like 50.

But when it's 50, the water is actually cold. So like after a hot yoga, you get in there, it's really uncomfortable. It's hard to breathe, you know. But when I lived in Boston, there was a guy named Bob Caffarella that I used to do Taekwondo with. This guy, in the middle of January, would take cold showers and he'd say that it's good for the spirit. And he was like the only guy that would do it. Everybody would just stand there and watch him. Bob's going to go in the shower and he would go in the shower by himself and obviously by himself. We're going to shower with him. But this guy would take these cold showers and I just,

I couldn't imagine why anybody would put themselves through something like that. But I guess he kind of knew even back then there was some sort of a benefit to standing in that freezing cold water and just not just mentally as far as like your discipline and your self-control to be able to stand there and force yourself to do something like that, to have that sort of autonomy over your body like that. But also because there's all these different releases, these powerful endorphin releases that you're getting from that. Yeah, it feels good. It feels really good. Is there any danger in going from, say, a hot yoga class to cryotherapy? I would love to know the answer to that. So I've recently experienced, I've gone from a really hot sauna, like crazy hot.

I mean, it was like 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, I had to wear one of those hats. It was crazy hot, like the hottest I've ever experienced. So I went and I was with an acquaintance of mine. And then I went directly into an ice bath. I did four rounds of this. Whoa. Like four.

And it like the experience itself was amazing. Like, I felt really, really good. Really good. After it's over. Euphoric. And during. Really? Well, I was in the cold.

Well, once you go in the ice bath and you go back into the sauna, like, and you're in a 180 degree Fahrenheit sauna, it actually feels like room temperature. And it's kind of like, whoa. there's something kind of just cool about it. Like you just feel really, really good. There were points when I started to get a little lightheaded and spinny. I could do that with your hand. You know, where it's kind of spinny and maybe low blood pressure, low blood glucose. I don't know know something like that but um i'm i'm i'm really wanting to know and i have to look

into the literature you know i put i just recently put out a report and a podcast on cryotherapy and the benefits of cold but i really was hoping to find more on going from hot to cold because mostly one i felt so good and the other thing it did is it reset my circadian rhythm completely. Like I just, I went to bed at like nine 30 and I slept like a baby. It was like, how do you think it did that? I don't know. I think that there's something, I don't know if it was the hot, cold or just the cold. Um, so I, so I did this around 6 o'clock. So it was like right before bedtime. But cold does, you know, there is a regulation of when your body starts to cool itself and it cools itself right before sleep. Melatonin plays a role in that.

When you make melatonin, it actually starts to cool the body a little bit as well. I really don't know, Joe. I was trying to figure it out. People aren't doing studies on it. But it was very real and I experienced it. And is there a difference between doing cold before you go to bed and doing a sauna before you go to bed as far as the results?

Doing the sauna sometimes can actually like immediately keep you up, but also it affects REM sleep and that's been shown in piglets as well. And Dan swears like he would have all sorts of lucid dreams. I Don't remember. I don't really remember that aspect of it, but it does seem to affect sleep So lucid dreams from like the heat sauna something

Probably not maybe maybe something else going on in the brain You also do release norepinephrine from from heat anything that's when you when you're like Stressing your body when you're doing your workout good enough, like any sort of stress, also a stimulation, like novelty releases norepinephrine and that, you know, maybe acetylcholine is being released. I don't know. You know, there's... Well, acetylcholine, it does have some sort of a positive effect on dreaming.

Right. Yeah. A lot of people report really intense lucid dreams from taking a lot of different nootropics but particularly choline someone was telling me about galantamine because i was talking about it before and someone was like oh this causes lucid dreams i wouldn't have known that but there's some yeah there's some some aspect i've heard that from 5-htp as well 5-htp may be beneficial to lucid dreaming something about that's strange because serotonin in the brain um gets you out of it it takes you

out of REM sleep serotonin does takes you out so if you were going to take 5-htp you should take it in the morning then i don't know what the whole half-life and all that. I mean, it has to like, 5-HTP has to then get into your brain and then be converted to serotonin. And I don't know. So it might actually be good to take it at night. And then by the morning rolls around, it's done converting it? I don't know. You don't know. Okay.

Sorry. What would it take to do some sort of a study, like the study that has been done on the sauna for something like hot yoga? How would you do that? Let's see. It depends on what you want to measure. So I think if you want to look at heat shock proteins, you could look at them in blood cells. So you could measure them in blood cells. You could measure norepinephrine.

So you could measure them in blood cells. You could look at, you could measure norepinephrine from, there's actually a biomarker of norepinephrine that is called salivary alpha amylase and it's released in saliva. And actually, it would actually be really, that would be a marker. Like if your workout, if you're pushing your workout hard enough, you'll release more of that alpha amylase. So more norepinephrine. So you could measure that. And then HSPs. So you just have to have volunteers and then sauna. Then you'd have to have a lab, people that are going to take the blood. You have to have physicians involved. And then you have to have people

that are going to isolate and look at the protein. Maybe even looking at gene expression would be cheaper. I'm doing something similar, but not with sauna. I've been involved in a clinical trial with blueberries. Actually, another one of those plant hormetic compounds, there's another one in blueberries called anthocyanins, which is really, really- And blueberries contain a small amount of resveratrol, you were saying?

Yeah, they contain about 10% of what a grape skin has. So the blueberries, what's really good in blueberries is called anthocyanins. And anthocyanins are produced as a response. You know, they're a plant insecticide. They actually like, they bind to a certain gene. The anthocyanin itself recognizes like a little sequence of DNA and binds and binds to this gene like turns it on and this gene is called nrf2 and it's like a master regulator of all these like really good repairing DNA repair enzymes antioxidant enzymes all the anti-inflammatory all these good things and so I've been involved in a clinical trial for the past two years maybe even two and a half years

now where my colleagues and I we've been looking we've been taking blood from people that are they're obese um their their bmi is about 28 or above they're obese they're insulin 28 is obese well they also measure no i mean it's bmi is 30 is actually obese we moved it we moved the bmi down to 28 because it was like we weren't getting enough people uh 30 is actually obese we moved it we moved the bmi down to 28 because it was like we weren't getting enough people uh 30 is technically considered obese wow yeah a lot of obese people then well i mean a lot of people are 30 right you have to consider bmi is not a really good measure of like obesity because people that are very muscular and short may also have a high bmi so you have to also look at waist circumference and

other factors, which they are doing. But there are a lot of obese people. There are a lot of obese people. And we're looking at a certain percentage of them that are right on the border of becoming type 2 diabetic. So they're insulin resistant. So their body is not responding to insulin, but they're not type 2 diabetic clinically yet. And so we're recruiting these people, and we've gotten 50 of them, and half of them are getting a freeze-dried blueberry powder that's equivalent to two cups of blueberries. And it's got lots of anthocyanins and all this other stuff that's in the blueberries. And the other half is getting a placebo drink, which is blue-looking,

and they put sugar in it, which is. But, yeah, you got it. You can't give someone a placebo and not and not taste like blueberry. Right. Is there any benefit to eating actual blueberries versus the freeze dried powder? Yeah. You're getting the fiber. You know, you're you're getting probably that's the main thing, the fiber.

And who knows what other compounds that may be not maybe destroyed somewhat by the freeze dry. I don't really know. Yeah. That's what I would be confused about. I've always been confused about that. And when you see various freeze dried, you know, anything or any sort of dried powdered anything, I always wonder like, how much of that are you actually getting? Like what, what, what's, how much of the actual benefit is lost in this turning into a pill? Yeah. So there's definitely some, some things that are lost, but the specific things that I'm interested in, like the anthocyanins are there. But so what I've been looking at, there's other people that I'm working with that are looking at, you know, markers of inflammation,

glucose response, like all the metabolic parameters. I'm specifically looking at people's damage to their DNA. So like we get white blood cells and they're frozen down. And then I look at the DNA and the white blood cells and see how much damage there is. I do it at baseline. So before they start the blueberry powders and these people have a lot of damage because they're obese. Obesity accelerates damage to DNA. Damage to DNA causes all sorts of problems, but eventually it leads to cancer.

And people that are obese have like a twofold increased risk of multiple cancers. There's this ridiculous article that I read where it's talking about the positive benefits of being overweight, where people were trying to justify being overweight. And they were talking about there's certain illnesses that people recover from better if they're overweight. And there's a few very strange examples they were using to try to justify being overweight. And it was also, the article was also partially in response to quote unquote fat shaming. And I'm like, boy, this is just such a weird justification. It's so bizarre that you're, you're very biology, very, the thing that gets you through life

that people are so intent on receiving mouth pleasure, which is all it is. I mean, that's what you're doing when you're shoveling food in your mouth, you're getting mouth pleasure and then you're getting the response, the, the physical whatever sugars or anything that your body and your gut bacteria are craving. But so much into that you're broadcasting it in the form of this really misleading article that was just designed to make you feel better for being overweight and to justify these choices that you've made, which are terrible, terrible choices. Like there's no benefit whatsoever to being overweight, right? No, I mean, being overweight, being overweight is linked to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, increased risk for type

two diabetes, increased risk for cancer, increased risk of stroke, increased, you know, it's increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. It's yeah. So, I mean, having an increased risk for all those age-related diseases is not good. There's a bunch of dumb articles written about the positive benefits of being overweight. I haven't seen those. See if you can find some of that, Jamie. confirmation bias and lock into whatever small weird statistic might exist in regards to like maybe they get over like a cold better or something it's like it's really dumb actually obesity actually starts to cause um immunosenescence because and and problems with your immune system because people that are overweight or obese uh they they have a lot more inflammation in their body and inflammation

takes a lot of energy. Here it is. Five surprising health benefits of being overweight. Being overweight carries a reduced risk of rheumatoid arthritis. It's because your joints are all greased up. I'd like to see the references on that. Being overweight means you're less likely to develop dementia. Being overweight can make a

stronger immune system yeah see that's one of the things that i had read like what no is it possible hold on is it possible to be fit healthy and fat to be fat stapharian what what does that mean fat staphian what is that what is that word to protect your body from possible harm rendering potential problems harmless even before incursion. To explain on a slightly more plain level, the cytologists are proposing that your extra bulk works like a blubbery barrier. Indeed, the big man Danny Ross, who was stabbed. Oh, that's different. That's someone who was stabbed.

Someone who fell 20 feet. And Lawrence Bell, who's blah, blah, blah, blah, are portly poster boys for the defensive qualities of flat. But that's ridiculous. That's like wearing armor. You know, you're talking about someone like, yeah, physically, if you're that. Stop moving that around, please. Physically, if you have like all this extra fat in your body and something hits you. Yeah. You've got like a wall between you, your actual organs and your bones and this,

you know, this impact. That's so stupid though. Being overweight is linked to increased longevity and recovery time. What? No, no, it's not.

Scroll down, Jamie. It's not. It's actually the opposite. Is it okay to, to fat shame overweight men? Make that larger, please. Kit notes that fat tissue as well as hormones it releases improves bodily defense mechanisms by providing vital energy reserves and anti-inflammatory agents. As a result, despite overweight individuals being more susceptible to serious health issues,

to begin with, they are less likely to die from them than those who are underweight or even with healthy BMIs. Heart disease, for example, is four times more likely to claim the life of somebody with a healthy BMI than an individual considered overweight. This is horseshit. It is. This is not. It's absolutely obvious. There's no studies. Is this the onion?

Is this a farce? No, no. What is the website? The Telegraph? There's a couple other articles,, no. What is the website? The Telegraph? There's a couple other articles, too. It's just the one I figured would have the... Okay, scroll down a little further. Being overweight can mean you're better in the bedroom.

Oh, shut the fuck up. This is a fat guy. Fat guy wrote this. Hormones found in abdominal fat allow men to last longer in the bedroom. Bullshit. I'd like to see the references for any of these statements because actually it's quite the opposite. Being overweight, being obese, it's associated with seven years off your lifespan. Extremely obese is 14 years off your lifespan. Obesity is the number one risk factor for,

you know, heart disease and type two diabetes. It also is associated with massive inflammation. What's this? The Journal of Sexual Medicine Insight on Pathogenesis of Lifelong Premature Ejaculation Inverse Relationship Between Lifelong Premature Ejaculation and Obesity. Yeah, but you know what? That's because obese guys

aren't getting laid and they probably jerk off so much they can last forever. This is a stupid study. Yeah, this is an association. But not only that, premature ejaculation has to do with anxiety. there's a lot of factors involved in premature ejaculation

and what exactly is premature i mean it's a completely relative and subjective term because if you come and you enjoyed it it was perfectly timed it's not premature i mean it's it's just like you didn't hold on i mean the whole idea of holding on as long is a cultural construct, holding on as long as you can. I mean, that's just we've decided that that's a good thing. I mean, obviously, for a mutually beneficial, pleasurable experience for your partner, yeah, it probably lasts longer than, you know, that's what the woman would like. But it's not premature. The end goal is to try to breed, to try to procreate, right? If you get it in there, and as long as you get it in there, it's not premature.

Like, biologically speaking. It sounds like it's pretty subjective, their definition of premature. Yeah, I mean, what does that mean? The idea that you can connect all those things and say that there's some sort of a positive benefit to being fat, that's clickbait bullshit. That's what that is. Yeah. There's, there's very strong evidence of everything, the opposite of what you just read. Like, like I just don't even, I really just don't even know where they, that came from. Maybe some crappy associative studies that were done, but I mean the large the large body of the literature shows the opposite.

But isn't that confusing when you see things like that, like in the Telegraph that probably got read by a million plus people or more worldwide, probably even more than that. That's irritating. It's crazy. Yeah. But those are the kind of articles that people would use to justify their poor life choices. And this was the same kind of thing, not that article in particular, is what I'd read about when someone was talking about fat shaming. I'm like, come on, man, there's no such thing as fat shaming. Look, it's rude to be mean to people. Yeah, it's rude to point at someone and laugh because they're fat. But to suggest that someone being overweight is bad for their health is not fat shaming. It's just just fact. Yeah. And it's also you're trying to help

someone. You want to say, look, we know mechanism. We know there's been studies that show that being overweight causes inflammation. Your immune system's constantly being active and that crosses into the brain and causes depression. It causes anxiety. It causes learning and memory problems. So you may not be working, and that's been shown. You may not be working at your optimum, you know, being overweight there. You could feel better, you know? So it's, it's kind of ridiculous. I think I, I agree with you. And, you know, I have friends that are overweight and I've always been the person that I'm all, I feel like I'm lecturing, you know, cause it's always, I'm always like, and all these benefits and I rattle off all this stuff and all this information. And then

there's a certain point, it's like this person probably gets defensive and doesn't want to hear it, but I care about them. And that's actually part of the reason I started making videos and doing what I do with how my fitness actually, because I was constantly doing this to friends and family members, people I cared about where it was like, at least if you put something out there, like if you put a video out there or an article or a podcast or something, they don't feel like you're targeting them. Right. So then you can just go, oh, yeah, I talked about that. You should go check it out. And you know what?

It does. It seems because people would get less defensive. Yeah. Well, it seems to me that there's a certain amount of information just won't get through some people's wall like they have a wall this is what i like to do i like to eat cake that's it and then you know like hey cake has sugar and sugar is bad and being obese is bad and cancer and blood pressure and uh sorry it's not getting in um i'm going home i'll have some fucking cake let's get it's gonna rule like that mouth pleasure that they get

from shoving that cake in they just can't wait and then the craving we had talked quite a bit about gut bacteria because of your experience with probiotics and also your experience with antibiotics from recovering from staph infection and how devastating

it was to your immune system I started going down the rabbit hole with gut bacteria after that because I found it so fascinating how long it took you to recover and how common that experience is from large doses of antibiotics, how devastating it is to the immune system, to overall health, wellness, the way you feel, the way your mood, so many different effects. One of the things that I found when I was eating a lot of bread and pasta is that I would have a good meal. Like say I would have like chicken with maybe some vegetables or something like that,

a nice big healthy meal. And I would still be hungry afterwards for sugar. I would like my body. I was stuffed. Like I ate like a half a chicken. I'll eat a half a chicken. And my body was like, we need a cookie. I need a cookie. Come on, man.

Give me a cookie. Like I need some ice cream. There was some gut bacteria craving. And that's what it seemed like. It seemed like some bizarre craving. It wasn't a craving like I needed more calories were you eating these at this like was this would you typically eat something yes refined sugar yes oh okay well yeah well something this is an interesting effect and sorry if i cut you off but something that does happen when you eat

refined sugars like something not a piece of fruit, which has the fiber matrix and all these polyphenols, by the way, polyphenols are plant insecticides. It's all we were talking about. It's all this other good stuff. When you take the refined sugar away from that, what happens is when your gut, so your gut digests it, And refined sugar usually is like a glucose, it's 50% glucose and 50% fructose, and that's sucrose. And that's what's in table sugars, what's in a lot of refined sugars. What happens is that when you cleave the sucrose to this glucose and the fructose, the fructose itself doesn't get absorbed by all the cells. It only gets metabolized in the liver. And it does something that's called ATP trapping.

So what it does is it traps ATP, which is the source of energy. And it does this because it's trying to do this whole other complicated enzymatic reaction, blah, blah, blah, right? But what it does is trap the ATP. And this sends a signal through the vagal nerve to your brain. I don't have energy and so you don't get satiated. And so when you eat refined sugars, now this is independent from the gut bacteria craving stuff you're talking about. I'm not exactly sure how all that works, but what I'm talking about is real. It's ATP trapping's it's something that is known to be a cause of why you can eat a bunch of fructose and refined sugar and not be satiated and so you have to eat more because your body

your brain thinks you haven't been fed because the atp has been trapped it's called atp trapping that's one possibility that could be could have been happening it's really it's also why a lot of people that eat a lot of refined sugars with sucrose or high fructose corn syrup is the worst when they eat that. Why is high fructose corn syrup the worst? Because then, so when your gut, so the way your gut, okay, let's just, let's compare table sugar sucrose to high fructose corn syrup. Both are bad. But when you compare the two, because sucrose is got, it's got glucose.rose is got it's got glucose i mean it's got glucose and fructose probably fructose corn syrup does too it has more fructose

but the thing is is that um when it when the sucrose sees your gut your gut has something in it called sucrases which cleave which it takes basically it's it's slower to cleave and digest the sugar so it's not like a big bolus that your gut sees. So it's not as irritating on the gut because it has to first, the sucrases have to cleave the sucrose. And so like all this stuff is happening. Whereas when you get the high fructose corn syrup, that doesn't happen. It's a big bolus and it's like, it literally like causes a breakdown in your gut barrier. It's like irritantant it's an irritant the same thing can happen if you take like too much of um i mean there's lots of other things that happen but if

you take too much like magnesium or something people can get gut irritation it's a big bolus on the gut and it's irritant and that's what high fructose corn syrup does and there's also then the whole atp trapping thing is like exponential with high fructose corn syrup so there's more fructose it's compounded there's more fructose. It's compounded. There's a bunch of different factors. Yeah, there's a bunch of different factors. Of course, the fructose is very different in fruit because the matrix, the fiber, it's

digested differently. It's completely different than taking table sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Who was the monster that extracted that stuff? I mean, it's so bad. When was that done? When did they figure out how to do that? I mean, it's so bad. How, when was that done? When did they figure out how to do that? I mean, they used to do cane sugar, right? Was it World War II?

I don't know. I don't know. I know there's people that are super into all that stuff, but yeah, it's cheaper. That's why. It's cheaper and it's hidden. It's in everything. You go out and go to a Chili's and think you're going to eat healthy. You order a salad and there's like 60 grams of sugar in their Waldorf salad because it's all in the dressing.

High fructose corn syrup. That's insane. Okay, here it is. The 1970s was first introduced to food and beverage industry. High fructose corn syrup was first introduced to the food and beverage industry in the 1970s. That's amazing that that stuff from 1970 until today, so in the last 40 plus years, has become a massive part of our diets. The average, this was published in, it was like the health organization in somewhere in the UK,

whatever they call that. There's some health organization in UK that did a press release and said that the average five-year-old consumes 50 grams of sugar a day oh my god sorry yeah 50 grams is it 50 grams a day or is it 50 grams a year yeah no 50 grams a day it's 50 grams a day which was their weight it was okay now i'm remembering it was yeah it would be awesome it was 50 grams a day which was the average of of their entire body weight of a five-year-old. A year. A year. So if you have a bag of sugar the size of a five-year-old, that five-year-old would

eat that in a year. Exactly. Jesus Christ. And I did some calculations. It comes out to like a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks, which has like 64 grams of sugar. Oh my God. It's crazy. Oh my God, everything.

grams of sugar. It's crazy. Oh, God. Everything. There's a particular type of gut bacteria that craves sugar and that thrives on sugar, though, isn't there? Yeast are thriving on sugar, but they're not gut bacteria. There was like a documentary, an online thing that I watched on the various documentary on different gut bacteria that attracted to. So I don't, maybe this is, I know that so that your gut bacteria, what, what they eat is fiber. And they're mostly in your colon.

And so when you're, when you eat a fiber deficient diet, proteins, lipids, you know, sugars are all absorbed in the upper intestine, but your bacteria in your gut starve. And in order to stop themselves from starving, they start to cannibalize the gut barrier that they live on because it's got carbohydrates. And so low fiber diet can cause massive gut barrier breakdown. It's actually the most, in terms of magnitude, the most potent thing that regulates gut health is fiber. Wow. So is that like irritable bowel syndrome, things along those lines?

Well, that can happen, but you don't have to have irritable bowel syndrome to have your gut barrier breaking down. You can have a low level of inflammation, not know it. But there are certain types of bacteria that can thrive in the condition. Now, maybe that maybe let's say you have a low fiber diet, meaning you're eating a lot of refined sugar. So it's kind of like the same, right? You're eating a bunch of refined sugar and in place of plants and fiber rich foods, there's

a certain type of bacteria that can thrive on low fiber. And it's a type of bacteria that I don't know the name of but they have little flagella things that like move you know little sperm yeah exactly like that and so they'll like swim up so your bacteria are supposed to be in the colon that very very end of your intestines right they're not supposed to be you're not supposed to have a bunch of bacteria in your small intestine well they'll swim up to the small intestine because that's where the food that's where the proteins and the sugars and the lipids are all getting absorbed. They'll swim up there. And this is often referred to as bacterial overgrowth. So small intestine bacterial overgrowth is what the technical term is. Bacterial overgrowth is actually when your bacteria

are starting to grow in your small intestine. And what happens is when you have bacteria in your small intestine, it releases something called zonulin. And this work has all been done by Alessio Fasano. And he's, I think he's at like Massachusetts Children's Hospital. And he discovered this. So, you know, he's a rock star for figuring this stuff out. But so when you have this, this intestinal overgrowth, you release something called zonulin. Zonulin is also what's released when gluten, when your body sees gluten. Zonulin, it literally like you have the gut barrier and there's like these junctions with the barrier. It opens up the junctions, the tight junctions. And in people that don't have like celiac or they don't have a really, really poor gut health, they close.

It's like a transient. It's like open, close, open, close. And so when they open, your inflammatory cells can see the bacteria that's there. Usually the barrier separates them because what do immune cells do when they see bacteria? Fire away, war. So the small intestinal bacterial overgrowth does that. And so does gluten. Gluten also causes onulin to be released but um so that would cause like bloating and inflammation you know things like that wow god it's just so it's so crazy how much your diet actually affects your overall health and how few people really consider it when they're thinking about what they're eating

and the consequences of what they're eating. And your brain. They just eat what tastes good. And your brain. Your brain health. You know, having low inflammation is key for your brain. All these different factors that are playing on inside your body. Like all this stuff.

I know. Yeah, I know. I'm eating a diet that's high in fiber. That's one of the reasons why I actually eat a lot of of wide diversity because there's lots of different types of fiber. There's, you know, fiber is not just like one nutrient. You know, people always tweet at me, can I take pectin? Can I, can I take inulin? And, you know, which is a type of fiber. And it's like, well, yeah, you can, but you know, these different types of bacteria, so many different types of bacteria and they're, they're eating different types of fiber.

We don't even know all what each of them are eating. We know the best thing we can do right now is to get a broad spectrum. There's fiber in plants. There's fiber that are called ligands and cellulose. In fruits, there's pectins like apple, citrus peel have pectins. Beta-glucans are in mushrooms or in oats. Resistant starch is in legumes, beans. There's inulin, which is in plants and also like onions, artichokes, garlic.

And all these different types of fiber are feeding different types of bacteria. And the best thing you want is like a diverse bacterial set. So feeding them all different types of fiber is good. Plus you're getting all the plant hormetic compounds. And then you're getting all the micronutrients, magnesium, vitamin K, folate. These are things that people are deficient in. So I try to do that. And then I eat meat.

I think there was a – now that I'm thinking about it, I think it was kind of like an infomercial. You know what I'm talking about? That Candida video. Yes. That's exactly what it is. It seems like it was at the end they were selling a product, but I don't think I made it that far. It was long. 35 minutes.

Yeah, it was really long, and it was disturbing. You're talking about candida growth in your stomach and how your gut is responding to all this sugar by this massive production of, or massive, here it is. So that's what happens, right? Sugar, the cause of candida. Candida, cause of cancer. And sugar has been shown, right, to accelerate cancer growth? Yes. In fact, there was a study that was just published recently where it caused breast cancer cells to grow like four times faster.

Whoa, four times faster from sugar? Yeah. Fuck, man. Ref yeah refined sugar not from my wife's mom she's a lovely lady but she loves sugar she puts sugar in everything she makes kale salad and you eat it you like you're eating candy like everything is sugar like you know it's like from her era that's what they did they put sugar in their cornflakes everybody put sugar and everything and they felt like it just made things taste good. Like you're eating healthy food and it's got a little sugar on it.

You know, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Remember that? Yes. You know, and it's just so disturbing that people grow up thinking that this is a way to eat. And it just, nobody told them.

Nobody warned them. And, you know, she's in her 60s now and that's just how it goes. Wants to be autonomous. It's hard to... God, it goes to be autonomous it's hard to god it's hard to tell people yeah i've got i've got loved member loved ones that i care about that are also addicted to sugar and i try try hard um it's it is hard especially the older you get when you're you're stuck in your ways your brain's not as able to kind of change as easily

you know so also you don't have a lot of willpower some people are just not good at like saying okay this is what i'm i'm not doing this anymore you know like this i'm done doing that boom you know i mean i don't know how other people's brains work so i don't i don't know what the pull is but i know for me when when i try to quit something like i'm gonna quit sugar i'm boy, that fucking first week or so is hard because the pull, it's like, there's this desire to cheat. Go, come on, man. One cookie's not going to fuck anything up. It's not going to be that big a deal. Like there's this pull to have sugar. And when I, um, kicked sugar for, I've done it twice now, but the first time I did it, one of the most disturbing things was like the headaches, like two or three days in,

I was getting these headaches. I was like, oh my God, I'm getting sugar detox headaches. Like that's what it was. It had to be. It was the only thing that was different. I was eating all the same normal things, but I wasn't taking any sugar. Anything that had sugar, I wouldn't take it. And I was getting headaches.

And most people, if you don't have like rock-solid, determined mentality for this type of stuff, it's really hard. If you're wishy-washy on your diet, well, I'm just going to try to eat healthy. My friends have told me that before, they try to lose weight. What are you doing? I'm just going to try to eat healthier. You ain't going to do shit. You're not going to do shit.

You have to have a rigid set of rules. You can't say, I'm just going to eat eat healthy because then you'll decide you're eating healthy. But fucking cupcakes not going to hurt anybody. And then you'll eat that cupcake and that'll kill all your hard work. I had no idea that you were eating refined sugar like this whole time. I thought you were you're always like vegetables, meat. Yeah, I would occasionally I would dive in. I mean, it wasn't like a real problem, but it was enough that, see, if you eat protein bars,

like the ones that Jamie was eating over there, what does that have to do? I love those goddamn things. These things are great. They taste awesome. They're called pro bars. I first found out about these suckers when I went hunting. Oh, come on. Is that real?

This fucker has 21 grams of sugar in it. This is crazy. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's everywhere. It's hidden everywhere. That is goddamn crazy. This is 21 grams. You're only supposed to have 25 in a day.

Yep, exactly. The whole day. Yeah, according to World Health. This one yummy bar. Fuckers. That's it. That's your added sugar for the day. I eat two or three of those in a setting.

Yeah, that's way too much. After I worked out, I would eat two of those. In the morning, if I was headed over here and I didn't have time to eat, I'd throw two of those down and a kombucha. So the kombucha's got 10. 10? Yeah, for grape. Grape kombucha has 10. Plain has five.

So I prefer plain, but sometimes the grape was all I had left. So I'd throw down a grape. That's 10. I'd throw down two of those. That's 41 or 42. Jesus Christ. I mean, 52 grams of sugar on the way over here, which is twice what you're supposed to have in a day. And then I might have a piece of cake.

I might eat real healthy and say, I'm eating real healthy. And someone, ooh, you want some apple pie? Fuck yeah you do you want ice cream on it why not and then what's that that's probably another 30 40 50 60 70 so you're winding up with a hundred plus grams of sugar in a day right yeah and this this this stuff is causing inflammation in your gut it's you know the more at least with you you were still getting some of the good stuff, though. It's not like you were eating a fiber-deficient diet. Yeah, no, I was eating healthy on top of that. Which is better than most people that are eating that stuff.

Fucking 21? Yeah. This is crazy. It's crazy. This is crazy. There's a thing called a Lara bar. You ever heard? L-A-R-A.

They're so yummy. They're so good. But it makes it look like you're eating something healthy It's like the wrappings earth toned. It's like ooh. I'm like. I'm doing yoga in a bar Most of those bars are really candy bars You know I think quest nutrition is probably like fire if I were to say that there's anyone that make makes a bar That's like not a candy bar, Quest has some decent ones. Well, Primal Kitchens has a really good one. It's a nut bar with dark chocolate and it has a tiny amount of honey in it. It's less than four grams.

I'm pretty sure less than four grams of sugar per bar, but it's mostly almonds and dark chocolate, like a little bit of honey. Those are really good. It's not sweet at all. I like those. And a lot of times I'll eat meat bars. There's some bars. What are the ones we have back there?

Yeah. What are those ones we have in the back, Jamie? What are those things called? Bison bars. Yeah. Well, not just the ones that we sell it on. What are those other ones that I bought? I bought some other ones that are really good.

But even some of those have fucking sugar in them. It's just amazing how sneaky they are with that goddamn sugar. It's in condiments. It's in hot sauces. It's in. Yeah. These things right here. So these fuckers.

This is. So this. I got these goddamn things. These paleo simplified. I'm like, oh, got a paleo bar. Paleo doesn't have any sugar in it. Bullshit. It's got a lot of goddamn sugar in it.

All these fucking things at 15 or 19 or, yeah. Yeah, this one is 20. Jesus Christ. The lab that I was doing my postdoc in, I've talked about this before, they designed a bar intentionally to try and fill micronutrient gaps in people that are like obese so like it has it has vitamin d in it you know it has magnesium vitamin k it has dha omega-3 it has all these good micronutrients in it um and then they try to put some dark chocolate so that doesn't

taste like crap um and sprinkle a little bit. There's very little sugar in it. But, you know, people don't like them because they don't taste good. This little fucker has 22. This little thing. Crazy. You shouldn't eat that stuff. This disappears in my hand.

This little tiny thing has 22 crisps. Imagine how many people are eating this stuff. This is fucking sugar. These fucks. I think the best thing you can do is eat whole foods. You can eat vegetables. You know, fruits is eat whole foods. You can eat vegetables. You know, fruits are not that bad. You can eat a pear, an apple.

You can eat berries, strawberries, all these things. They have a variety of different good polyphenols, these plant insecticides. They've got fiber. They've got some micronutrients, you know. And they taste really good. And they taste good. Like a peach, a really good peach. Oh, my God.

They're delicious. And it's something that we've peach, a really good peach. Oh, my God. They're delicious. And it's something that we've gotten so, we've just gotten so used to it. We take it for granted. You know, if you had a dessert and it tasted like a delicious peach, you'd be like, ooh, this is a wonderful dessert. Yeah. But because it's a peach, you're like, ah, it's good for you. Yeah. It's almost like we want that bad for you rush.

It's like we're naughty on top of the fact that we're we're eating something we're getting like the mouth pleasure from it and we're also getting the naughtiness like oh the cake oh chocolate cake how much of that is a learned response as well you know i mean my my um postdoc advisor bruce ames he's 87 years old, going on 88. And I've been to many different dinner parties at his house. And he's American and his wife is Italian. So she immigrated here from Italy. But every single time I go to a dinner party, the dessert is always fresh fruit. I mean, it's just like super normal. Like it's always fresh, some sort of fresh fruit, medley she'll cut up and sometimes she'll put some a little bit of some alcohol or something on there um like amaretto

or you know but it's always fresh fruit and that's like they've been doing this for 50 years like that's been their dessert fresh fruit you know it's not as good though that's the problem it is good chocolate cake is better dark dark chocolate's good Dark chocolate has a lot of good stuff in it. Yeah. You know, so the dark chocolate's one I think that people that are really craving that can feel good. Because there's EGCG in dark chocolate, which is what's in green tea. EGCG is one of those, you know, normal plant compounds that are doing a hormetic response. It's been shown to cause brain cells to grow.

It's anti-cancer. It kills cancer cells. It also is really good for your skin. Prevents your skin collagenase from being broken down. And it has a really high rating of antioxidants, right? Well, that's what I'm talking about. People get confused. Antioxidants, there are antioxidants in fruits and and vegetables but in dark chocolate the antioxidants are the hormetic compounds that are causing your antioxidant genes to be expressed it's a big difference okay and there's really like there's no comparison like if you're you know you need a certain amount of vitamin e which is antioxidant you need a certain amount of vitamin c which is an antioxidant and a cofactor, you need it to make collagen. But in just like the antioxidant form,

it pales in comparison to like glutathione related enzymes, we have superoxide dismutase, all these like systems that we have in our body that are designed to prevent, you know, these things called oxidation, oxid oxidative stress stress from happening so when you're taking in fact some people um they have a uh so we have this gene that can use glutathione in our body takes the glutathione that we make in our body and it puts it to like prevent damage from happening to our cells there are people that um have more a more active version of this that if they take vitamin E supplemental it actually does them harm

really? yeah because what happens is the body goes oh I've got this vitamin E it's doing that job and so the enzyme doesn't get active when you have the stress there the enzyme's not active

there's a certain gene polymorphism in the GSTP1 gene. So how would someone find that out? Would they have to do a 23andMe? 23andMe is a genetic test that tests for a variety of these polymorphisms. And they give a report that's kind of, they don't tell you about that gene. You have to like, you can, I don't know if Promethease does. Promethease is a tool that's like, it costs $5. I've talked about it before in your podcast. tell you about that gene you have to like um you can i don't know if prometheus does prometheus is

a tool that's like it costs five dollars i've talked about it before in your podcast and you can run your 23andme data through it and it tells you all these polymorphisms but that what you have and what they mean but i also have a tool that's out today actually really that's uh it's it's the beta version of it so it's's basic functionality, but that gene's on there, the GSTP1, glutathione 1 is on there. So this tool that I've got out is free, so people can use it for free, and I'm going to add a bunch more genes to it. But right now there's a basic set of genes that are interesting, genes that are involved in making vitamin D. Can you convert the vitamin D3 you're taking into the steroid hormone or the vitamin D3 you get from the sun? Some people have a polymorphism where they don't do that as well.

There it is right there. There it is. Rhonda's genetic report. FoundMyFitness.com forward slash genetics. It's amazing to me that every time you come on the podcast, there's new shit that I have to remember. And it seems like you're constantly learning things. That's what's crazy is you've been studying this for so long, but it's just you're at the tip of the iceberg. It seems like there's no end to this.

There's no end. We need CRISPR so that I can keep learning. It's like infinite amount. I mean, I've got- Well, explain CRISPR for people who don't know what that means. It's a relatively new method of altering genetics. I'm going to give the thousand high mile summary of it, where it's basically a way to go and fix a gene that may be, like, let's say you've got some gene that you can't repair,

you know, the alcohol-induced damage as well, which also increases the risk for traumatic brain injury by, like, tenfold. It's bad. So you say, I don't want that ApoE4 gene, because it's going to lead to alzheimer's disease it's going to make my traumatic brain injury lead to alzheimer's disease you know it's so and also does other things well crispr um is a technology that can go and recognize the gene you want so it recognizes just a small sequence of dna that you put on it so you put

this little sequence of dna because you know what the sequence of the gene is. And it recognizes its complementary pair. And it goes in and it cuts it out. And it replaces it with what you actually put there, which is the right version of it. So it can like go cut out a bad thing and put the right thing in. So it's a way of going, instead of gene engineering, up until CRISPR, the way it was done was basically you would put a gene in and it would just go anywhere and it wouldn't replace the bad one necessarily. So this is kind of like a whole new field. It's like it's like. So anyways. Yeah.

And there's a radio that podcast on that as well. It's spelled C.R.I.S.P.R. Right. And if you're interested in it, listen that Radiolab podcast because it's amazing. And it's also interviews of people who discovered it. Right. Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley. Yeah.

I listened to some of that. It's good. I think they do a really good job explaining it to people so that they can understand. I want to talk for a little bit about the cryotherapy because this is something that I emailed you when there was a disturbing article that was sort of poo-pooing the benefits of cryotherapy. And the article was, I thought it was really poorly done, poorly researched. And it was also, they studied really subjective things like how sore you felt after exercise and whether or not it benefited from that. But there are real positive benefits of cryotherapy that are measurable. Yes, and that have been measured.

Well, first of all, that article that you're referring to from that, whatever website it was, but the article was a— Well, Steve Novella is a guy, and I think what he did is he rushed to put this article out because that woman died in Las Vegas from cryotherapy. And it was a really tragic incident. She was by herself. There's two different types of cryotherapy, one of the things we should point out. First of all, I don't have any, as I've been accused of this, I should just say right now,

I don't have any vested interest in cryotherapy. I don't own any of it. I don't make any money from it. Nothing. I enjoy the benefits of it, and I use it. But this woman who did it, she did the type, there's two kinds. One of them, it goes from the, nothing. I enjoy the benefits of it and I use it. But this woman who did it, she did the type, there's two kinds. One of them, it goes from the neck down. So you stand in this booth, your head is above breathing in normal oxygen, but below you is liquid nitrogen. You

can't breathe that stuff in. That's why your head is not under. If you do breathe that stuff in, you don't have any oxygen, you'll black out.'s what happened to her she did it by herself it was poorly set up and apparently she was quite short so her head was kind of below um the the the limit where you're supposed to be so she was breathing in the liquid nitrogen and she fell asleep and blacked out see she went to one of those types i thought she was in like no full on no no the full-on ones are much rarer and what the full-on ones do is they super cool the air with the nitrogen so the air itself is pumped in really that's what i did yes that's what you did and that's what we're going to do today too if you have the time i loved it okay i loved it um that one you can breathe in it's just fucking unbelievably

cold okay so the one that she did it was she set it up by herself which you're never supposed to do you're always supposed to have supervision so it wasn't whether or not i mean she's the only person i've ever heard of that's died from this and it's a horrible tragedy committing suicide no no no she was just worked there and sometimes women will um they'll put their face under it because they want the effects of a cryofacial because cryofacial has been shown to improve collagen and tightens your skin. Cryotherapy actually prevents, it inhibits enzymes that break down collagen called collagenases. And that's actually part of the reason it helps with arthritis because collagenases break down collagen and they break down like, you know, the tendons, collagen around the tendons and stuff, and it can cause arthritis, arthritic pain. So doing, it would make sense why you'd want to do something cryo because it would have an effect on your skin. Yeah. Women love it when they get

their face done. Apparently they get, or vain men too, or any man, well, you don't have to be vain to want collagen. But the point being that article came out and all these people were saying, oh, see, I told you cryotherapy was bullshit. I'm like, oh, my God, what a piss poor article. And it was all talking about soreness. And one of the things that he said that really drove me crazy was you'd get just as much benefit from a cool down and a stretch after a workout. I'm like, tell that to these fucking people that I see that go there all the time that do it twice a day because they have severe arthritis. that I see that go there all the time that do it twice a day because they have severe arthritis and it's the only thing that's given them any form of Freedom of movement of their hands like I know a bunch of people that go there that have had some pretty

debilitating arthritis And this has given them relief where nothing else was giving it to him other than like pretty severe Pharmaceutical drugs or ibuprofen at high levels or what you were talking about I guess a lady that goes to my thing, but she was raving about how she can finally stretch her hands out. Like her hands had been like locked in this position for years. Yeah, it has. I mean, the cold itself is a hormetic stressor that is activating a variety of anti-inflammatory

pathways, antioxidant pathways, you know, and it's also last time, I think, on the podcast we talked about it increases norepinephrine. Well, norepinephrine itself, so cryotherapy and cold water immersion are two forms of, you know, cold exposure. Cryotherapy, just two minutes at like a minus 180 Fahrenheit can increase norepinephrine twofold. That's, you know, twofold over what you were before you went in. And norepinephrine, in addition to the brain benefits we were talking about, how it makes you feel good, how it helps with learning, it also is a very prone anti-inflammatory. So it inhibits the production of TNF-alpha, which is very, it's kind of like in arthritis, TNF-alpha is kind of like going haywire. You're making too much TNF-alpha. And what happens is TNF-alpha is a signaling molecule to your immune cells that says, hey,

there's an infection here because that's normally what happens when you release TNF-alpha is because there's some bacteria or something that you need to kill. And so your immune cells, all they see is the signal. They don't know what's causing it. They don't know that it's because your gut cells and your immune cells in your gut are seeing bacteria because of your poor diet or whatever. And so that's getting into the bloodstream and causing chronic inflammation. It doesn't know that. All it knows is that this means there's a threat. And so they start to increase the production of your immune cells make hypochlorite, which is like bleach. So you're making bleach in your body to kill things. And that's

happening chronically. That's going to cause some tissue damage. It's going to cause pain. They also make hydrogen peroxide. You make that and your immune cells will make that. So cryotherapy inhibits the signaling molecule so that your immune cells quiet down because now they're not seeing that signal that says, come on, hey, fire up, fire up. It's not there. So that's a good thing to inhibit TNF-alpha. And like I said, with the collagenases as well. But there are so many, you know, I just spent two weeks just researching and reading. I've been doing some cold exposures, you know, like cold shower and also jumping in the ocean, ice bath. And I really liked the

cryotherapy that I did last time we were here and you know so I've been very interested in it like understanding why you feel so good and so I did some reading on it and there's so many different positive hormetic benefits from doing cryotherapy so you have you know the the anti-inflammatory part and this and also, it's been shown that doing like 10 sessions of cryotherapy in a row, it increases the expression of glutathione reductase by twofold. And another glutathione-related enzyme, glutathione peroxidase, by like 68%. And these enzymes, like you could be taking all the liposomal glutathione you want. Like it's not going to matter if you don't have the enzymes active to use it.

So you could take liposomal glutathione and that's great. You're increasing, you know, you make glutathione inside of your cells, but we can't make as much of it as we get older. But if you take it and you don't have the enzymes that use it to actually do the good stuff active, then it doesn't matter. So cryotherapy was shown to activate two different glutathione-related enzymes, which is pretty awesome. So it would enhance your body's ability to absorb glutathione. No, it doesn't enhance your body's ability to absorb it. It enhances your body's ability to use it.

So if you're taking it, liposomal glutathione, and then you're using cryotherapy, it would enhance it? So what I'm saying is that the liposomal glutathione that you take, all that does is increase glutathione inside of your cells. Glutathione inside of your cells does nothing without enzymes that use it to basically sequester damaging inflammatory things. And the cryotherapy increases... Increase, activates the enzymes that use it so it's

like great i have all this glutathione sitting around in my cells that i've been taking and i also now have the enzymes that use it to do good stuff now are being turned on okay though what was very interesting is that it took like multiple sessions before before those got like 10 to 20 10 in one at least 10 and 10. And then the other study was 20. So was it consecutively? 10 days in a row. Yeah. 10 days in a row. But the first day I didn't do it. So that, that was also very interesting. So it's almost like your body's saying, okay, this crazy fuck is going to do this.

It's an adaptive response. Yeah. Yeah. Your body's preparing for war. It's like, it's stressful. You know, it's a stressful response. The other thing that's really cool that we didn't talk about last time in the podcast is the thermogenic effect. When you when you release norepinephrine. So that's I keep going back to that because it's like you can't refute that. Steve Novella. No one. No debunker.

No skeptic. No, I don't care who you are. You can't. It's just it's consistent in every type of cold exposure, period. It's it's it's consensus. You release norepinephrine. Well, there always seems to be some sort of a rationalization with a lot of the debunking, like whether it's the benefits of exercise, whether it's the benefits of cryotherapy. That's almost like a rationalization for not doing it. It's like you're looking for an excuse to not do it and not really very objective. Yes. That was, which was disturbing about us. Like, this is like, you're poo pooing something that's offering people great. Yeah. Yeah. I,

it was clear. I mean, after I, especially, especially after the two weeks of research, I mean, I think there's a kind of mentality when you're, sometimes people like to think I'm a debunker and I'm not i am i am intentionally like because if you get in this mentality of always debunking something you're it's like this spiral and you can't see the good like you can't keep an open mind to like get past your like what's in your box that you know and that's very dangerous i think that intellectual blind spot it is and there are a lot of scientists that i know that and that's very dangerous. I think that, and I think a lot of- It's an intellectual blind spot. It is. And there are a lot of scientists that I know that are very smart, extremely smart,

but they are in that loop where it's like, just they have to debunk and criticize. And it's like, you know, at some point, huge discoveries are made by like connecting the dots and like getting past that. I mean, you have to be critical. Being critical is very important, but you also like, I think there's a certain threshold where you just start to like, you know, you have to be critical being critical is very important but you also like i

think there's a certain threshold where you just start to like you know you get to this like spiral but well it's also what was infuriating about this is the data's out there this is not like it's not like there's no data it's like he made a cursory examination of the evidence and what he chose to focus on was it was so subjective he focused on a study that tested muscle soreness post-exercise with cryotherapy. Well, actually, the study that he referred to was a meta-analysis, and it was subjective, but it actually came to the conclusion that there were benefits. However, it said more studies need to be done because there wasn't large enough sample sizes, and the quality of data was poor

because there were not double-blinded placebo-controlled clinical trials. And I have to say to you, so they're actually, what he recited in that article, there was a positive effect of cryo. But the problem is, is that because they followed it up with, oh, well, it's poor quality, basically poor science. The reality is, is that you can't do a double-blinded placebo-controlled trial with cryotherapy. Like, you're going to be cold, and you're going to be put in this chamber where there's, like, cold, or you're not, and you're going to know if you're not cold. You know, so anyways, I thought that was ridiculous. I was like, whatever, I'm in Oregon.

I'm going to read about this stuff, because I know, I've experienced it. There's definitely something going on. And one of the things that happens is the norepinephrine. And when you release that norepinephrine, it activates a pathway inside of your cells that basically causes your energy metabolism to ramp up because you're trying to generate heat. You want basically your body wants this. Your body is saying, I don't want to die. I need to make heat. And so a couple of ways it can do that.

One, it can shiver. And shivering is when your muscles start to contract. And that it requires energy for your muscles to like twitch. It's very it's not very thermodynamically favorable. So you it's not a good way to generate heat, but you generate heat because you have to like ramp up to twitch. But then what happens after you've been exposed, and actually this happened to me

because we did the crowd twice. The first time I did it, I was shivering. Like the entire time I was shivering. It was really crazy because I've never shivered like that in my life. But the second time I went in, I did not shiver. And after reading about it, what happens is your body quickly adapts.

So you adapt, and what happens is non-shivering thermogenesis. So the norepinephrine causes your mitochondria, which are the energy-producing little organelles inside of your cells, well, it causes them in your adipose tissue to, like, get activated. And it does this by increasing the expression of a gene called UCP1, which basically freaks your mitochondria out because your mitochondria are kind of like batteries. They're charged. They have a negative charge on the inside and a positive charge on the outside. Well, UCP1 totally uncouples that so that there's no more charge. And that charge is very important because when that charge is there, your body knows, okay, I've been making energy

because the way you make the charge is by making energy. So when the charge goes there, your body knows, okay, I've been making energy. Because the way you make the charge is by making energy. So when the charge goes away, your body's like, oh, my God, I've got new energy. So it just starts to ramp up fat metabolism. So it does that, and you start to make more mitochondria. So you're making more mitochondria in your fat cells. And this is often called brown fat. So you can actually, the reason it's called brown fat is because when you look at a fat cell under the microscope, if it has more mitochondria, then it looks brown.

So you actually start to burn fat and you have this thermogenic, because you're burning fat, it's creating heat as a byproduct. So you're warming your body, but it has this nice side effect of burning fat, which people like. And the more you expose yourself to the cold, the more you're browning your fat, the more you're increasing those mitochondria in your fats, which means the next time you're in the cold, you can tolerate it longer. So people that have been exposing themselves to cold, like yourself, when you're doing the cryo, you know, often, you actually can tolerate the colder for longer periods of time, because you have more mitochondria in your fat cells. And this allows you to then generate more heat. So and this has been shown in people people that have been exposed to uh cold that they've been shown to increase their their brown

adipose tissue by like 38 if they're exposed to 10 days of 50 degree air like outside air just regular air that's it 50 degrees all day 10 days so like six hours a day out in like you know new york in the i don't know pre-w the, I don't know, pre winter or fall. I don't know. Something like that. Being out there for six hours for 10 days in a row. Men were able to increase their brown adipose tissue by like 38% or something like that. That's why people from the East Coast or from the Northeast that move to California and they go back during the winter.

They go, oh, my blood got too thin. What really is, there really is like a physical factor of your body not being accustomed to dealing with cold weather. Yeah, you adapt, you adapt. And that's what brown adipose tissue. And that's really how cold got really popularized because people wanted to use it as a hack to lose weight. So they were like, oh, if I do these cold showers, I use it for the brain benefits because I notice I feel really good and also more focused. So I like that. And a lot of people I've talked to have felt the same way. But then I think the other part of this article was the effects of it blunting some of the strength training. And, you know, I talk about this in this report that I wrote or in the podcast that I released on,

and it's so complicated. I had to, like, sit there and literally just read just read for like two weeks to try to figure it out because you know the problem is is that exercise is a hormetic stress cold is a hormetic stress so exercise itself you need some of the inflammation you need the bad stuff to get the good stuff that's how it works right but you know the inflammation that's happening happens while you're exercising and up to one hour after. One hour after, that's when the whole hormetic response kicks in. And this has been shown in multiple studies. One hour seems to be when the anti-inflammatory response kicks in.

So you've generated the inflammation and then now the cold is activating anti-inflammatory genes too early. Now, I don't know that for certain, but I do know that the study that showed, there was one study that showed strength training. strength training, if you did it, there were if you did cryotherapy immediately, like immediately after cold, it was actually cold water immersion, which is not not the same as the cryo chamber, that it blunted some of the anabolic signaling. And so there was like, some of the muscle mass was was not gained. But, you know, there's other studies that have been done that have shown, for some reason, all the endurance guys, they always wait an hour. It's kind of weird. So what I'm wondering is if people that are doing this research, like, sit down, take a step back. You know, people are always in this, I gotta publish, I gotta publish, you know, there's a real big publish or perish mentality in science, where it's like,

your bread and butter depends on you publishing. And so you're just constantly trying to get that data out there. But you really, I think, things are so complicated. Just sit down, take a look at everything that's out there and start to go, wait a minute, there's lots of little details that need to be considered to design this trial correctly. So I'm hoping that at least for those people doing strength training, that they'll do one where they actually wait until an hour. Because there's been other studies where that strength training in combination with cryotherapy done much later, even the next day, there were actually benefits, performance benefits. Like they were able to do more of those leg curl things.

I don't know what they're called. Leg extensions? Yes, leg extensions, those. So I don't really know what's going on. But what I do know is that it seems as though it's very likely that doing the cryotherapy immediately after. And now, then again, if you're talking about someone that's doing, like there's been studies that have been published showing that people that are doing two bouts of exercise, so they're riding a bike and then they're waiting, whatever, 30 minutes, and then they go and run or something. If they do cold water immersion

in between those, they actually have performance enhancements. You know, if they wait, sorry, if they do it between two bouts of exercise. Some of that's due to the fact that the cold water, it seems to improve heart rate variability. It's actually been shown to improve it by like two to three fold. So heart rate variability is the change in oscillation between heartbeats. And it's also people, people judge the heart recovery from a workout. So as soon as you're done with an intense workout, the ability of your heart rate to lower immediately within minutes, that's like a marker of heart rate variability. And it's supposed to be good because your heart's able to deal with these stressful changes, you know, because when you're making cortisol or something, your heart starts racing more or some of these

other stress hormones. So it's been shown to improve that and having, being able to have your heart rate slower right after a workout, and then you're immediately going to do a workout again, you can imagine there would be an performance enhancement with that. So there's also, there's a difference in the physiological response between cold water immersion and cryotherapy, right? Well, it depends. You know, if you're, there are differences in the ability for those two different modalities to extract heat from the body. You know, if you're, if we're talking about submerging ourselves in cold water up to our shoulders, water or ice is a much better, it's much better at extracting heat from the body than air. But surface area also plays a role and

the temperature change. So if you're sitting in cold water that's 57 degrees, that's not as cold as going into a minus 180 or whatever cryo chamber. But you can also sit in the cold water for a lot longer. Yeah. Most guys do it for 15 minutes. I think that there has been a study that compared the norepinephrine release 20 seconds at 40 degree water up to the shoulders is comparable to two minutes at minus standard something 180, minus 180 Fahrenheit. For norepinephrine. For norepinephrine. But a lot of the effects are Fahrenheit. For norepinephrine. For norepinephrine. But a lot of these effects are mediated from norepinephrine.

But listen, 20 seconds at 40 degrees versus two minutes. So imagine staying in the water for five minutes. And this has been shown. So if you have someone that stays in water, 57 degree water for an hour, they increase their norepinephrine by fivefold instead of twofold. So you have a more robust response. So it could be good, but it could be bad. If you're talking about doing it right after a strength training session and jump into cold water for five minutes, that could have some very potent anti-inflammatory effects.

So the best way to handle it would be to wait at least an hour. I think. Yeah. That makes sense. What about anti-inflammatory markers in the blood? So there have been studies that have shown that cryotherapy lowers C-reactive protein, which would be an inflammatory marker. And then the glutathione-related enzymes going up and also superoxide dismutase, that would be a marker for inflammation because there's also decreased

inflammation when you have more of those. So cryotherapy does. And then also there's been measurements of TNF-alpha going down, like I said. Also another marker that macrophages release, macrophage inhibitory protein or something, some inflammatory molecule that's made. There's less of it when cold water, I can't remember if it's cold water immersion or cryotherapy, but it's cold exposure. And that was mediated through norepinephrine. Norepinephrine mediates a lot of stuff. It's mediating the brain effects. It's mediating the thermogenesis. It's anti-inflammatory. It's anti-pain. People get injected with norepinephrine in their spine to alleviate pain. Yes, because it's anti-inflammatory.

Wow. Jesus. There's probably other things going on as well. So just science, just the hard science. There's plenty of evidence that there's benefits to cryotherapy. Oh, yeah. So why would anybody write an article like that? Like I said, there's the bad article that was the anabolic blunting effects, which was done immediately after exercise, which made a huge splash because it's like, whoa, your gains.

And then you have the hardcore, very skeptical people that are like, well, the quality of data, you know. Well, the thing is, is that there's a large body of data. And sometimes if you can't have a double-blinded placebo-controlled trial, then you have to look at mechanism. You have to look at animal studies combined with human studies. You have to understand what's going on. You can't refute the norepinephrine. We know that norepinephrine is doing all these things, you know. So, I think you just have to be very comprehensive, especially when, you know, there's the argument that there's no placebo-controlled trials or it's too subjective. But there's lots of ways that it's not subjective, and this has been measured in people.

People have measured C-reactive protein. They've measured these enzyme activities. They've measured these inflammatory molecules in people, also in animals. animals you know so there's i i'm confident when i say that there are absolutely health benefits from doing cold exposure for your brain anti-inflammatory for um for thermogenesis you know being able to you're if you can this is actually a target a lot i know a lot of researchers that are working on this they're trying to um find a way to pharmacologically brown fat because it increases fat burning and weight loss. So with a pill? Of course. People always try to do that with a pill. I prefer the cold exposure,

but other things do it. Fish oil was shown to recently do that to increase brown adipose tissue. Just fish oil and plant-based omega-6s and 3s? No, no, no. So the fish oil, it was two grams of EPA and one gram of DHA. And it increased fat burning by like 27% or something during exercise. And then at resting, it increased by something in the teens, 17% or 13 percent and that was just at rest fat burning and the way it was shown the way it did it was by increasing ucp1 and uncoupling the mitochondria and causing you're basically causing your fat to make more mitochondria and browning

fat super cool i've been taking high doses official but yeah to answer your question that the plant version and this is always a problem with, I get this question a lot from people that are vegan or vegetarian, you know, they're like, well, I get my omega-3 from the plant version, alpha-linolenic acid. And actually, there's a lot of important things to consider. One is that alpha-linolenic acid is poorly converted. All these are, these are long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, alpha-linolenic acids, 18, EPA is 20, eicosapentaenoic acid, which is found in fish, and then DHA is 22. So you basically, your body will take the alpha-linolenic, which is in plants, flax seeds, walnuts, and it will start adding carbons on to make the other ones because you

need the other ones. 30% of your brain is made of DHA. I mean, DHA is very important. But the thing is, is that men actually only convert about 8% of alpha-linolenic acid into EPA and only 4% into DHA. Not very much. Now, estrogen actually can increase the gene that converts those because women are the ones that are carrying the child. And DHA is very important for the developing brain, very, very important. So it makes sense that nature would make a way that showed that people that take preformed ALA, alpha-linolenic acid, have to take 33.5 times more than preformed DHA or EPA to get the same amount of DHA and EPA in the brain. It's a lot. There's a lot. So there are ways around.

There are vegan or vegetarian-friendly sources, which would be microalgae oil. vegan or vegetarian friendly sources, which would be microalgae oil. I think that I personally think that vegans and vegetarians should take microalgae oil. If I was a vegan, which I can't ever see myself becoming one, but I would absolutely take that. Why do you not see yourself ever becoming one? Because there are important micronutrients in meat that are important for a variety of physiological functions, including the brain, red blood cells. You can supplement with some stuff, but I haven't convinced myself not to eat meat. So I think with vegans, what they're trying to do is come up with sort of an ethical workaround.

They're trying to figure out how can you be healthy and live a vegan diet and is it healthy enough? And most of them, at least the hardcore proselytizing ones, seem to think yes, and they want everybody else to do it too. Yeah. There are a lot of benefits. There are a lot of positive factors to eating a more vegan-like diet. All the fiber you're getting. Vegans, I mean, I do know there are some vegans that eat a lot of processed junk. So they're all, you know, not everyone that's vegan is healthy, but not everyone that's omnivore is healthy. But the ones that are eating healthy, they're getting a lot of, they're getting a wide, broad spectrum of plants. They're getting the different fibers. They're

getting the micro, they're getting the good micronutrients in plants, the magnesium, the vitamin K, the folate, vitamin C. And they're getting all the hormetic compounds in the plants. So those are really good things. But the problem is that they're more nutritionally deficient in things that most people in the Western world are not. Because the problem like the United States in general, isn't that we eat enough meat here. Most people, unless you're vegan or vegetarian, people are eating enough meat. The problem is people aren't eating enough of their greens. And so I usually focus on micronutrients that are found in greens because that's what people are not getting enough of. But there are important micronutrients that are in meat

that vegans and vegetarians are more subject to being deficient in. Like? B12. So B12 and iron are two really, really important ones. Both of these are very, so B12 is very important for the production of neurotransmitters and myelin in the brain. Both iron and B12 are. Most people think of iron as being important for your blood cells, and it is. iron and B12 are. Most people think of iron as being important for your blood cells, and it is.

It's bound to something called heme, which is a protein inside hemoglobin that's important for transporting oxygen to your tissues because you need oxygen to make energy. But the other thing that iron is doing is it's also important for making myelin in the brain. Myelin is what surrounds the axons of your neurons and allow, it allows them to communicate quickly. It allows electrical signals, signals to be transported quickly. So that's important. And then it makes neurotransmitters like you need iron to make serotonin in your brain. And it's one of the reasons why during pregnancy, iron's very, like if you have iron deficiency during pregnancy, it can cause, um, abnormal brain structure. It can cause like birth defects because it shapes the structure and the wiring of the brain. So that's, you know, obviously here in the United States, we have supplements.

We have access to supplements. And, you know, you can take a sublingual B12, you know, and so it's a little bit of a different world than it is somewhere in like a developing country. But B12, it's animal-based. So how are they getting plant-based B12? Is there a plant that has B12 in it in large numbers? So B12 is actually made by certain strains of bacteria. And the reason it's high in meat is because animals are predators, and so it gets concentrated in their muscle. It gets concentrated in animal tissue.

But what about animals that are herbivores? I mean, is it still existing even if they're not predators? Yeah. Because they're eating a variety of things that have the bacteria. Like there's certain strains of mushrooms that have it. If you're a vegan or a vegetarian and you're just eating those mushrooms, you'd have to eat an enormous amount to get the RDA. But it's more concentrated in animal meat, which are constantly eating it. So it gets concentrated in their tissues because B12 is required as a cofactor for a lot of enzymes in multiple organs, including their muscles.

So every time they're eating whatever has the B12 on it, they're concentrating it. So there are certain types of bacteria that make B12, but I don't think vegans or vegetarians can just get it from that. They'd have to eat a lot of it, like one of those crazy... So the argument that a vegan can get enough B12 from just a standard vegan diet without supplementing, you don't buy that? No, I don't. So there was a study that was done in Tanzania. So there's a few researchers, UCLA actually is where,

I think one of them just retired, but there was some researchers at UCLA that were studying the effects of B12 and iron deficiency on cognition, on, you know, learning, cognition, behavior. And there was a bunch of studies that were associative studies, like that crappy premature ejaculation, obesity, where it's like, you know, these two things are associated, but we don't know if it's causing. And so there was an association with low B12, low iron, and poor IQ, lower IQ, poor cognition, poor behavior. But there was no real causal, you know, role identified. And so there's a couple of research at UCLA that did two different clinical trials, where there was 12 different schools in Tanzania that were selected. there was 12 different schools in Tanzania that were selected.

And these clinical trials lasted two years, and there was two of them. The first trial was 575 kids or around 600, and the other one was like 370-something, so closer to 400. So we're talking a total of about 1,000 children, school children. These were elementary school children. And the typical thing they eat in Tanzania is it's like a porridge. I forgot the name of it, but it's a porridge. And it has vegetables, it has beans, and it has corn. And that's their standard porridge.

And so what the trial was designed with these school kids, they were given a snack every single day for two years. Either the porridge, or they got the porridge with a glass of milk, or they got the porridge with meat. And every three to six months, there were arithmetic and reading tests done. So they were looking, trying to measure, you know, cognitive performance. And there was, they measured physical performance and muscle mass. And what the results were of this study was that the porridge with the meat, so the school children that were eating the meat with the porridge scored better on math arithmetic. They scored better on reading tests. They had larger, they had more muscle mass and they grew more than the other school children

that did not get the meat. And they also, so that's all quantitative. They also, they were more likely to exhibit leadership qualities out in the playground. That's a little more subjective, but still interesting. amino acids that are present in meat, which our bodies can't make, you know, which are found in some, you can find some plant sources of it, like quinoa or hemp seed has it, but they're not supplementing with that stuff over in Tanzania. So if you don't have access to those things, and you're just eating vegetables and beans and corn, then you will have nutritional deficiencies. The question is, if those children were given a B12 supplement or iron, would that have, you know, made a difference? Probably. Probably would have. I mean, there's been studies in the United States that have been

done on school children that have been deficient in certain micronutrients, and they were given a multivitamin and an omega-3 supplement, fish oil. And only the ones that were deficient to begin with improved, like did better on reading and arithmetic tests. So there's definitely, you know, an argument to be made there. But I think, you know, I think for vegetarians, you know, we live in a very different time. Obviously, there's protein powders and quinoa and hemp seed and B12 sublingual. And what are they getting B12 from if it's a vegan based B12? I don't. Oh, is that like, Is it possible? I thought it was just like methylcobalamin. So I don't think that there's, it's not meat.

It's just, it's just synthetic B12. Okay, so how are they synthesizing it? I don't know. You're going beyond my knowledge base there. Okay, but so it is possible to get both iron and B12 from... Yeah, so B12 is, I mean, a lot of vegetarians supplement with B12. I mean, they know, and sublingual is important because there's also gene polymorphisms that affect the way your gut absorbs B12. So people have to bypass that.

You can put it under your tongue. So sublingual is the optimal way to take it. Yeah, I think for anyone. So if someone's a vegan, what are the supplements that they should take? You think B12, iron, what else? Well, with iron, it's kind of tricky. I just want to mention because, you know, iron, a lot of vegans think that they can get their iron from their diet because iron is also found in beans. It's in plants.

It's in spinach. But the way it's bound, it's bound in something called phytate, which we cannot digest. And so the bioavailability of iron is 1.8 times less in plant form than in meat. Meat, it's bound to something called heme, which gives, it gives blood cells that are red color, which is why red meat has more of it. But people that are, that are vegetarian, that think they're getting enough iron, I really think they should get their levels measured. So women lose a lot of iron during menstruation. So the RDA for iron for men is eight milligrams a day. For women, it's 18. So already on top of that, if you're a

vegetarian or vegan, multiplying by 1.8 is already important if you're just getting it from food, because the bioavailability of the iron is almost twofold less than for meat. So that's one thing to consider. And the other thing is also athletes. So when you're like an endurance athlete, you actually hemolysis occurs, red blood cells lyse, when you're doing like very intense endurance training. And so you lose iron there too, because you're losing red blood cells. Iron's tricky because you don't want too much of it. It's like,

if you're supplementing, like it's not, there's no guesswork here. There's no guesswork with iron. Having, so having too much, when you take too much free, like supplemental iron,

it can cause, you know, free iron inside your cells. And that is like dynamite. That's like, like it reacts with enzymes in your body, and it screws up energy production. It causes lots of damage. It's really, really bad. It's really bad to get too much iron.

So this is supplemental iron, not iron from actual food-based sources. Not iron from food, no. It's tightly regulated. But when you start to do supplemental iron, yeah. So I think that, and then there's gene poly, some people like Dan has one. I've seen lots of people's DNA where they have, there's a variation in a gene that can lead to too much iron overload. It's called hemochromatosis.

And it is very common. And if you have one of those genes and you're taking supplemental iron, you have even more free irons. It's very bad, very bad. So I think that people should definitely, and I don't know what all the blood levels, there's different markers that you can measure, your physician will know. I mean, but getting iron levels measured is important if you're going to start supplementing. And when you do supplement with iron, is it important to take it with food, with fats? What is the absorption? When is it? Vitamin C dramatically increases the absorption of non-heme iron. So iron that's not found in meat.

So even actually people, vegetarians that are eating a bunch of beans, legumes, first of all, they need to eat 1.8 times more than they would have meat. But they also, if they eat it with citrus fruits or have some berries or broccoli's high in vitamin C, have it with your beans, that would make a difference in increasing the bioavailability of the iron. So that would be important. That's a fascinating aspect of food supplementation is eating it with the right foods and making sure that you, you know, some things you don't want to eat with any food at all and some things you want to have on a full stomach. Or you want fat, like the fat soluble vitamins, carotenoids, even vitamin D. The

vitamins that are soluble in fat are, the bioavailability is increased when you take it with fat. And so that would be another one, actually. A lot of vegetarians probably think they're getting enough vitamin A because beta carotene, which is in plants, can be converted into vitamin A. Vitamin A gets, is actually, it actually becomes a hormone and it works much like vitamin D. Not quite the same, but it does change. It activates genes, turns genes off, does all this stuff. So it's very important for immune function, for your eye, for vision. But the bioavailability of beta carotene is very low. We don't absorb it very well. Fat increases that bioavailability.

So taking it with fat because they are fat soluble. The carotenoids, beta carotene is fat soluble. And also there are gene polymorphisms that people have. So they don't convert beta carotene into vitamin A very well. Like my brother-in-law has one where he doesn't at all very well. So he has to actually get vitamin A from an animal source. Or you can get retinal acetate. I don't know. I think it's synthetic. But that's something that some vegetarians may consider. Not all of them, but some, just considering whether or not they have that gene polymorphism. I think the main ones are iron, B12, omega-3, and vitamin D. 70% of the population doesn't

get enough vitamin D, but vegetarians often think they're getting enough vitamin D because you make it from the sun. But the problem is that so many factors regulate that because UVB radiation has to hit your skin to make it. And so if you're wearing sunscreen, or you have a lot of melanin, so if you're you've got like dark pigmentation that blocks it out, latitude where you live, so UVB rays, like don't hit the atmosphere at certain times of the year in certain regions. So, you know, you're only three or four months out of the year can make vitamin D from the sun and then age, you know, as you get older, a 70 year old makes only 25% of the vitamin D that they made when they were 20 years old. Wow. Yeah. So all these factors play a role and there is a vitamin. I know

I was talking to Rich Roll about this because vitamin D supplements, D3, the plant form is D2. It's made by mushrooms. Mushrooms also make vitamin D when they're exposed to sun. The plant form doesn't get converted into the hormone very well. And also, there's been two recent studies that have shown that D2 may actually inhibit D3's function in muscle. So it actually has negative effects in in muscle tissue taking too much d2 yeah so d3 is the is the best supplement form um and most of the d3 on the markets from lanolin which is like secreted from sheep skin or something i don't know yeah i don't

think that's vegan friendly but there is there is a a type of algae, lichen, that makes vitamin D. Lichen's an algae? I don't know what it is. It's like a white plant. Is it? It's a weird, funky stuff that grows in Alaska. Okay. Yeah, it's like a moss almost.

Pull that up, lichen. Yeah, it's something that I know caribou eat a lot of, black-tailed deer. It's like a white, tasteless sort of a grass that they exist on. Not a grass, but almost like a – it's weird. It's a weird plant. Here, I'll show you. That's what it looks like. What is that, Jess?

It is kind of weird looking. Yeah. It's weird stuff. Yeah, you find it all over the place on Prince Edward Island in Alaska was the first place I came in contact with it. And I was like, what is this? And they were like,

this is definitely not algae. Black-tailed deer eat a lot of some kind of a plant. Yeah. So you can get D3 from that. Yeah. There's a company that makes D3 from that. So there are vegan friendly sources of it. So if,

if they do want to eat vegan, it is possible to get a fully balanced diet. And then the protein would be the other thing, right? Yeah. Because the essential amino acids are typically found in animal protein. So those are like leucine, isoleucine, tryptophan, phenylalanine. I don't know. There's nine of them.

They just exist in really low doses in most plant-based proteins. Is that what the problem is? No. Yeah, very, very, very low doses. But you can get some that have higher doses, like hemp seed and then quinoa. So those are the only two? No, I'm sure there's more. They're the only two I know of.

Right. So they have really a full amino acid profile. Right. And they have the essential ones that you need. And keep in mind, the essential proteins, the branched chain amino acids, that's what's actually taken up into muscle cells. And there's been studies that have been done just doing plant protein without the essential amino acids. You can't gain muscle mass after doing strength training. Like you can, if you take in, um, the essential amino acids, because that's, you need those to be taken up into muscle to, to build proteins.

Well, there's some of the weird vegan arguments that they repeat almost as if it's fact, but that's not. And one of them is that saturated fats and that saturated fats are somehow or another bad for you. Yeah. So that's a very confusing literature. I think saturated fats in and of themselves aren't necessarily bad unless you have, there are certain gene polymorphisms in, so PPR alpha, PPR gamma, FTO genes, if you have a gene polymorphism in one of these three genes, because in order to, when you eat saturated fat, it needs to be metabolized, transported to the right place. You know, you don't want it just sitting around as fatty acids in your bloodstream. Well, those genes that I just mentioned, they play a role in doing that. Some people don't activate them very well.

And so if they have a high saturated fat and a low poly or monounsaturated fat intake, they can actually have increased type 2 diabetes. They can have poor glucose response because fatty acids are sitting around in their bloodstream and antagonizing the insulin receptor, doing all sorts of things. But if they have a higher polyunsaturated fat, which is found in fish or nuts or monounsaturated fat, so avocados, nuts, olive oil, if they have a higher ratio of those, then it activates those genes more.

And so they don't actually have those negative effects. So that's one thing. But that's the smaller thing. The real problem with saturated fat is actually sugar. Yeah, the problem is that saturated fat increases the production of LDL cholesterol, which isn't necessarily bad unless you have massive inflammation from eating refined carbohydrates and specifically from eating sucrose or fructose corn syrup. And this has been shown. Actually, a colleague of mine, Ron Krause, he's a brilliant

cardiologist. And he's actually one of the guys that discovered a test to measure what really the bad part of cholesterol, which isn't just LDL, it's actually a small dense particle. And that small dense particles formed only when you have the saturated fat plus the high fructose corn syrup or the refined sugar because it's causing inflammation. So I did a podcast with him. It's a little technical. mother-in-law, she watched the video and she had done a lipid panel where her physician had measured her LDL particle, measured particle size, measured triglycerides, all these things, wanted to get her on statins because she had really high cholesterol. Turns out, I knew why she had high cholesterol. She has high cholesterol because she has gene polymorphism in the APOE4,

which prevents cholesterol from being recycled. So it's not, that's why she has high cholesterol. She has high cholesterol because she has gene polymorphism in the APOE4, which prevents cholesterol from being recycled. So it's not, that's why she has high cholesterol. So she watched this video and she like learned all about the particle size and that it's the small dense ones that are really an indicator of cardiovascular disease. And her small dense were like, she had none. It was all the good kind. It was all the LDL cholesterol is important because anytime you make a new cell, you need cholesterol. Cholesterol is made of cell membranes. Every time you're making a new kidney or liver cell, you need cholesterol. When you have damage, when you hit yourself or you're doing your workout and your muscles get a little damage, you need cholesterol there to repair that damage. So you need it. If you don't have it, you're in trouble. But anyways, the point is that the saturated fat, that's why there's so much confusion is because one,

gene polymorphisms, two, people are now starting to tease apart that it's actually the combination of eating refined carbohydrates and saturated fat. If you just have the saturated fat, you don't have, and you're eating vegetables and good things as well, then you're not going to have all that inflammation. You're not going to make small dense LDL particles, which I talked about this with you last time. That's what makes the small dense LDLs inflammation. So when you have the small dense, because a certain protein gets obscured, it causes it to like stick to the, um, to the walls of your blood vessels very easy. So that's kind of the danger. Cause then you start to accumulate a plaque there.

So this totally makes sense. When you talk about the amount of heart disease that exists in people that have this typical American diet, which is high in saturated fat, but also high in high fructose corn syrup, processed sugars. And low in vegetables. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. And this is the problem with all those studies. Those studies that are correlations is that you're looking at people that are eating, yes, they're eating meat. Yes, they're eating saturated fat,, they're eating saturated fat, but they're also not eating vegetables. They're also eating cake and crackers and chips and hamburger buns and, you know, all that stuff. Sedentary lifestyle.

Sedentary lifestyle, all those things. So, you know, these studies, like you have to really take it with a grain of salt and especially for healthy omnivores. Like I said, there are vegetarians that are unhealthy that eat a bunch of processed. There's also very healthy vegetarians and vegans out there. Well, there's a lot of unhealthy omnivores. I mean, if you were to go to the DMV where someplace everyone has to go and take a survey, how many of them eat meat? Well, probably 95% of them are going to eat meat. And then you ask them, what's their vegetable intake? You know, what's your refined, how many refined

carbohydrates do you take in? How many, you know, they're all going to be not eating vegetables and they're going to be eating their cake and chips and, you know, their hot dog buns. So to blame it all on these, to blame it all on saturated fats is wrong. It is. You know, some people can have a problem when they have too high of a saturated fat intake, even if they're eating other healthy stuff. Like I said, because the gene that's activated that helps metabolize the fat, break it up, transports it to where it goes, isn't getting turned on well.

Well, those genes get turned on by polyunsaturated fatty acids. And so if you eat a ratio, if you're eating saturated fat, which is dairy, some pork, I don't know, red meat, mostly if you get a lean cut, it's not even actually that high in saturated fat compared to dairy or cheese or butter. There's just so much misinformation. So many people spout out this misinformation as fact, too. It's just so frustrating to communicate with people about it. Yeah, it is frustrating. The other thing is that people actually will notice there's a problem in their,

if they're eating a lot of saturated fat and they have one of those polymorphisms, they start to gain weight, they start to have bad lipid profile, they start to, and they're like, they know, like, what? I've been doing this. I measure it. I know. It's bad. Well, they don't realize it's possibly because they have one of those gene polymorphisms. If they increase their, their polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat

may actually not be a problem, but. And cholesterol in and of itself is not a bad thing. It's just not. No cholesterol. You need cholesterol. You need it. You need it. Like I said, No, cholesterol, you need cholesterol. You need it. You need it, like I said. You need your own body's production of it. Yes. But you also need to take some in.

Yes, exactly. Well, taking in dietary cholesterol doesn't even raise your body's cholesterol. Saturated fat will raise your body's cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol from eggs doesn't like, it's like nothing. It doesn't do anything. Did you see that, Michael Shermer? Ron Krauss showed that. So, yeah, no. Taking in dietary cholesterol doesn't even, like, move the dial for your body's cholesterol production.

It's so funny because so many people think it does. You know what really moves it? Stress. Stress dramatically increases cholesterol production. You know why? Because when you're stressed, your body starts to make cholesterol. It makes BLDL lipoproteins, which have cholesterol in them, because it sops up what's called endotoxin, which is released when you're stressed or inflamed. And you want to sop it up because it can cause lots of damage.

So you start to make cholesterol. And what ends up happening is when you're inflamed, your body will turn off the production. It basically starts making something called malonyl-CoA, which is important to make these very low-dense particle lipoproteins I was talking about. But what it also does is it inhibits your body from being able to metabolize fat with the exception of medium-chain triglycerides because it inhibits the transporter. There's a transporter on mitochondria called CPT that is inhibited when your body's inflamed because it's making that malonyl-CoA. And when that transporter is inhibited, you're polyunsaturated, you're saturated, all like 99% of the dietary fat you take in is not getting used. So it gets stored or it starts, it's like you have fatty acids in your bloodstream and

can raise triglycerides and things. So it can be really bad. But MCTs bypass that. MCTs don't need that transporter. We just blew through three hours again. Yeah, that's awesome. Blew through it. Feels like it was 20 minutes.

It's crazy. It really is crazy. Yeah. These are ridiculous conversations. Thank you very much. You're awesome. Dude, thanks, Joe. As always, I'm going to have to go over this 50 times with a notebook to try to get half of it.

Foundmyfitness.com. Foundmyfitness on Twitter. What else? Yeah, the genetic tool I've got. People can check that out. Foundmyfitness.com forward slash genetics. And then I've got a podcast on iTunes. I did the cryotherapy.

I talk all about that. I've got some. And how do they get to that? What is it? On iTunes. What's it called? Found My Fitness. Oh, it's good.

Stick to one brand. Yeah. Thank you so much. You're awesome. I can't say enough. Thanks, Joe. These are the best conversations. I look forward to them.

And I'm really, really appreciative that you do these. Thank you so much. Bye, everybody.