The Pomp Podcast - #1150 Dr. Richard Huntsman | Doctor Explains How To Increase Your Testosterone

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Dr. Richard Huntsman is a chiropractor with a master's degree in nutrition, he also has a practice that focuses on creating healthier humans by improving their lifestyle and nutrition. In this conversation, we cover insulin resistance, estrogenic foods, testosterone, magnesium, vitamin D, sleep, stress, TRT, & much more. ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th, 2023 in Miami hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of fascinating discussions. We'll cover topics from investing, emerging tech, scientific research, sports, music and more.We have some massive names being announced via Twitter throughout January so stay tuned for details.This will not be your typical event and it certainly won’t be one you want to miss. We’re going to learn a lot, make some smart friends, and as always, we’re going to have fun.Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Dr. Richard Huntsman is a chiropractor with a master's degree in nutrition.

He also has a practice that focuses on creating healthier humans by improving their lifestyle and nutrition on a daily basis. In this conversation, we covered a lot, including insulin resistance, estrogenic foods, testosterone, magnesium, vitamin D, sleep, stress, TRT, and much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Huntsman, and I learned a lot. I hope that all of you also take a lot from this conversation. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you agreed with, what you disagree with, what you liked and what you didn't like.

I always appreciate the feedback, and it helps us build better conversations and better episodes for you. Here is my conversation with Dr. Richard Huntsman. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Dr. Huntsman here with me. I want to talk to you because the testosterone level in America and really around the world has been dropping at an alarming rate. And there's a lot of debate as to why it's happening. Can it stop dropping? Can we actually reverse it? And there's a macro

conversation around society's testosterone level, the average testosterone level dropping, but there's also what you can do on an individual level. And so maybe a great place to start is just like, why has testosterone been dropping so aggressively over the last couple of decades? yeah so it seems like what we're finding they've done studies is we're dropping about a percent per year on average and so that what that means is you know when you're in your 40s your testosterone is about what your dad's would have been in his 60s or what your grandpa's would have been in his 60s or 70s I think the biggest reason comes down to mainly two things insulin resistance which is a

growing epidemic it's the most common condition that people suffer from in the world. And then the estrogenic chemicals that are in our food. And so it boils down to basically we're getting poisoned every day by all these chemicals and our nutrition is just not what it used to be. We're eating way more sugar, way more processed food, all the seed oils that we can get into, but it's lifestyle factors that are driving this down. So what is insulin resistance? Let's start there. You're saying that's one of these two factors. What exactly does that mean? So insulin resistance, I define it with two things. They have to be in a state where their body, it doesn't have to be every cell in the body,

but some of the cells of their body are not responding normally to the hormone insulin. And insulin is what dictates what our body does with sugar. Insulin is the hormone where it'll tell our body, hey, put sugar here, put sugar there. And then the second point for insulin resistance would be that they have too much insulin. so we call them hyperinsulinemia just meaning their body is producing way too much of it and this is what you know if you've ever been told you're pre-diabetic or you hear those types of terms pre-diabetes is insulin resistance insulin resistance will be going on for 10 to 15 years even before someone gets diagnosed as a diabetic and what are the tests that somebody

would take to know whether they're insulin resistant or not the there's two two tests and it's pretty simple it's a simple blood draw you would take a fasting insulin and that that number will range anywhere from it depends on the lab but 3 to 23. i want to see people under seven okay and on a fasting insulin so you'd go in you haven't eaten breakfast they draw your butt the other tests you can do and it's a bit more involved but it's a better test would be what they call glucose tolerance test but you take it with insulin as well so what you do is you go in they take your blood then you drink what's basically the equivalent of a couple cokes that's 75 grams of glucose and then every half hour per hour depending on the lab they'll take

your blood again and they're seeing how is your body responding to that glucose interesting and for a healthy person what would their body's response be and then for an unhealthy person what would that response be yeah so for a healthy person their number you know i would want to see after a meal you know on a glucose test it's different but after a meal typically your insulin will triple so if you're starting at five and we triple the 15 great then we're just going to go back right back down but some people i ran i ran a lady's blood the other day and she's starting at 27. so now she goes and eats something that she's going to spike up to like a 75 or even to 100 if her insulin's not working because it because it can't get the blood out of the sugar sorry the

the sugar out of the blood fast enough and so we're just looking for those levels to spike up for a second and then they come right back down within a couple hours is ideal and if the higher your insulin level is uh like as a base right kind of in normal or fasted time is it fair to say that it's likely to spike even higher like there's an extreme to the spike because you're already starting at this elevated level so if a healthy person spikes 3x an unhealthy base would actually spike four or five x yeah it's definitely definitely possible because the reason they already have that much insulin is their body isn't responding to it that's why we call it insulin resistant right basically these cells grow so big insulin makes them grow insulin makes fat cells

grow and it's the cell saying i'm done i can't take any more and so then that the pancreas which is where insulin comes from has to kick out more insulin to get the same response that it could have if these cells were responding normally i told you before we started that like i'm not a doctor uh i'm super super naive when it comes to a lot of the stuff but i've done enough reading online where like maybe i'm dangerous um and so is it fair to say that like a quote-unquote healthy skinny person that uh doesn't have these like inflated uh fat cells is kind of how i would describe it they can actually accept more insulin process the insulin and therefore uh their body is kind of working as designed, whereas people who have the fat cells who have actually been

kind of enlarged, that's where they are resistant to being able to accept the insulin. Is that like a good way to think about it? Yeah, we'd have to be careful with that anymore because we're finding more and more that there are so many people who are skinny, they look slender, they look healthy, they're still insulin resistant. Interesting. Why is that? It all boils down to what they're eating. I mean, insulin resistance is driven by what we eat. And so these people may be eating like garbage and just for whatever genetically, you know, they won the lottery where they can eat whatever they want and they don't gain weight, but metabolically they're still unhealthy. They've done a, they did a study a few years back where they looked at, I don't know,

I can't remember how many people, but they found 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. 12% are healthy. 12% are metabolically healthy. And the way they were determining that is this way they measure called metabolic syndrome and metabolic syndrome is insulin resistant. So they checked their waist circumference, their triglycerides, HDL, blood pressure. There's a few things like that. 12% of people were healthy in every category and that was it. And that includes obese people and skinny people. Yeah. Is it if it's possible for a skinny person to be metabolically unhealthy, is it possible for a person that is above kind

of the average weight to be metabolically healthy? Yeah, in general, it depends on how much we define overweight, right? But if someone's got an extra 10 to 15 pounds, 20 pounds, yeah, they could be metabolically healthy. Now, if someone's got 50 pounds extra weight, no, I don't care how good they feel. Metabolically, there's something that needs fixed. Okay. And you said the first was insulin resistance. The second major contributor is this like estrogenic kind of food composition. what exactly does that mean so there's there's a bunch of different chemicals that we call estrogenic estrogenic means when it gets into the body it's going to act like estrogen so our cells have these little like receptors that just can take on different hormones take on different

substances right and kind of turns them on some of these chemicals will get in there and they turn on our estrogen receptors now how this plays in the you know context of testosterone would be now as man i have a lot more estrogen activity than i normally should which will suppress testosterone right because the more estrogen in my body the more my body is told don't produce testosterone generally essentially yeah the body is just in a state of higher estrogen so the brain thinks oh i don't need to produce testosterone right now because estrogen is converted from testosterone everywhere all all estrogen was testosterone first and so if the body if the brain sees oh oh, there's a bunch of estrogen around.

Oh, I must have produced enough testosterone. I'm good. I can just skip a step. Exactly. It just starts to shut things down. Now, these chemicals are in our food. They're in our water. They're in our cosmetics, body wash, soap.

You name it, these chemicals are just everywhere right now. And why is that? Is this the food companies that are putting it in there? is it uh just like a natural byproduct of uh them trying to i don't know refrigeration or the way that we filter water or like like it's not like uh things that are actually made to enhance your uh desire for the food like how much on the spectrum of uh conspiracy theory maybe do you think like the actual increase in estrogen in food is it goes to a little bit of both of what you said some of it is like take food coloring for instance that's purely put in there to make

the food more desirable red red 40 and red three in particular are the ones that get pointed to as this estrogen issue the only reason they're putting red 40 in food is to make it look better make it look more appealing you'll find it in a lot of kids food like my wife my wife bought some lucky charms the other day and i looked at the ingredients i said that's got red 40 in that we're not eating that not the not that we ate a ton of cereal anyway but the other the other side of it is like plastics so they use these ingredients in plastics that for whatever reason either they're cheaper or they make the plastic a little better like bpa or phthalates are the two most common and they just leach into the water they they absorb through our skin if we're putting them

on our skin things like that so some of it is just cost i'm sure a lot of these ingredients are cheaper and a lot of these ingredients have been banned in other countries you look at the eu and even china you know a place like that they they have banned a lot of these things in america you know we're not big on banning things and i you know i'm i'm for that generally but some of these chemicals we just shouldn't be using yeah the one example i always use uh almost every single one of my friends has some story where uh they went to a european country at some point in their life uh they ate like absolute not you know nonsense uh they ate the pastries they ate all the bread they like everything that you're not supposed to eat right uh and they came back

and somehow they still weighed the same or less and some people it's because they don't ever move and they were walking a lot or something but there's many people who are like i measure like i took the same number of steps in europe as i did in america how can i eat so poorly but really it boils down to from my understanding it's just like they use better ingredients and so yes maybe you're eating more carbohydrates or breads or whatever uh it's just nowhere near what's actually putting the food in america yeah well and a big part too is the sugar you go eat somewhere outside of america and you eat the same exact food it's gonna taste like half as sweet at times a lot of people come to america and they're like everything tastes sweet because we put so much sugar and then

if we get on the estrogenic side the two biggest ones when we're talking pastries and breads and things like that would be glyphosate which is roundup and atrazine which is another herbicide type you know weed killer atrazine is banned in almost every other country we use it by far the most we use 80 million pounds of it a year in america mostly on corn the next closest country i think uses 200 000 pounds and that's brazil wow yeah like it's it's unbelievable the eu has banned atrazine china has banned atrazine and it is highly estrogenic meaning it gets in the body and activates those estrogen receptors and so if you're eating corn if you're eating it they put spraying on soy as well, if you're eating either of those,

you're getting atrazine, unless you're eating organic. And then glyphosate, which is Roundup, that's the one a lot of people have heard of because of Monsanto and the lawsuits against them over this chemical. It's not estrogenic per se, but it damages the testicles in men. They've tested this in rats.

They can't really run these tests in humans because it's not ethical. So you get these two chemicals, the glyphosate's mainly on our wheat, but also in the corn, and then atrazine. And basically, anytime you eat some grains, you're getting bombarded with these chemicals. What does it do to the testicles? So they've shown in rat studies with glyphosate that it damages what are called the leydig cells or leydig cells.

Those are the cells that produce testosterone. That's just one of the things that glyphosate does. Glyphosate has been tied to cancer. It's been tied to leaky gut, which is one that you hear more and more about where the, you know, just gut dysfunction, basically. and that's why there's there's multiple class action lawsuits against monsanto right now over roundup um would and that's one where it that's one that really bothers me that they use it a lot because a lot of times they are spraying it on the wheat or corn not necessarily because of the weeds but their crops will ripen faster when they spray it with roundup so then they get their

crops quicker higher yield higher yield exactly yeah and why do you think america hasn't banned this stuff is it just there's large corporations they're making more money because the higher yields they have you know less loss because of weeds and things like that and so it's like a pure we use this because people make more money or there are other reasons i think it's a mix i think there's definitely big big food is very powerful um and big food is really linked to you know big pharma not to get too conspiracy but they're very linked their lobbying power is very strong i also think part of it is you know in america we're not big on banning things that's kind of you know we kind of like to take the government out of things at least i do i like

to keep the government out of my stuff and so i think that's a big part of it too is we just don't look at it but the f i think the biggest problem is the fda they move so slowly at anything atrazine we've known as a problem for a while they spent five years doing a study of how much atrazine is in our food and our water it's what's turning the frogs female when you hear it you know alex jones and those saying it's turning they're turning the frogs gay well it's it's not really but frogs are being turned infertile by atrazine what is happening there i don't know i've heard the i've seen the headlines and i was like okay whatever right but i don't know the exact mechanism on how it damages frogs but i do know that atrazine is being shown over and over again to

make frogs infertile make fish infertile and again we can't really study it in humans but it's not that big of a leap to say maybe it's doing damage to us as well the the amount that it takes to harm frogs is something around 200 units in the water our regulations from the fda allow 3 000 units in our water and so we can have 10 times as much they say is safe in the eu zero is allowed in the water you know places like that so i think a big part is the fda just dragging their feet and not doing their job yeah with water specifically um what is like the best practices right so uh don't drink tap water is like i think generally something that people now are starting to kind of wake up to uh it's important to call out that there's places in america that you know

uh jackson mississippi right i think flint michigan had a huge issue as well where like literally the water is looks like it's a third world country right so like those are the extremes outliers and i think everyone kind of uh understands we should immediately address those and like if you live in america and don't have clean drinking water like that's right and we should solve those problems but what you're talking about is not the extremes you're talking about like literally pick any city in america and if i go to the faucet and i take tap water it has these elevated levels of various chemicals that are in it is it simple as like i put my water into like a brita filter thing that i store in my refrigerator like what should people

be doing yeah filtering is key i mean that's bare minimum what someone should be doing get a brita filter get one of those that you put on your tap now they're not the best filters out there that's why they cost you know they're fairly expensive which is great too for someone who who needs that everywhere you are our water has contaminants in it right there's no purely very little pure clean water anymore now if you live in somewhere that's a high ag place like texas or you know some places in the midwest you're going to have a lot more of these type of chemicals in your water but somewhere like here like you know down here in florida i know you've got high levels of estrogen in your water just straight estrogen great it's turning you more feminine um just from birth control

women are taking birth control they go to the bathroom the filtration process that the cities do does not pull out what the chemical called e2 that is birth control and so but charcoal a charcoal filter like a brita will do that it will pull it out so that's in my house i have an under the counter two-stage filter it costs like 200 bucks and that's all we drink that's all we cook with i'll wash dishes with the regular tap water but for drinking water we filter everything and my kids know that we've just trained them where there's some in the fridge they can grab some or they get it out of the tap like and we live in an area where we're considered to have some of the cleanest water in the country yeah out in wyoming where i live i'm still

filtering everything because i just don't want any of that stuff and how big of an improvement do you think it actually does to the water right like i'm assuming you can't get to perfect but it's a pretty big leap if i'm just simply filtering yeah the only way you're gonna get like the purest cleanest water you could get would be through distillation you get a distiller they're fairly expensive they're kind of a pain in the butt but if you want pure clean water that's going to have everything out of it get get a water distilling station how much does it cost you know and on the counter one for you know that'll make about a gallon at a time you're about five six hundred bucks you can get them cheaper on amazon or somewhere like that but they're out of china

and i don't really trust the components if you want like one that's going to do you know 12 20 gallons at a time you're you're into the thousands then yeah um but they're great like i i used to only drink distilled water and i did notice a bit of difference but with a good high quality filter you're still going to get out over 99 of stuff i mean and the the thing with water is you're probably not going to notice a huge difference when you start filtering your water as far as your health goes you're not going to notice this big oh my gosh i feel so much better it's more of a let's just stop doing as much damage as we can it's a compounding thing exactly right you're heading in the right direction now exactly now the water quality

that comes in a water bottle is uh the next thing i want to talk about so compare that to the tap water forget the plastic component of the water bottle right but just like what's actually the water in the water bottle how much cleaner is that normally than a tap in you know any city in america depends on the company okay some of these companies um and i'm not going to call anyone out by name because i don't know but some of these companies literally are taking tap water and putting it in a bottle of water and selling it you know that's what they're doing now if you take a company like i will a company i do like and what i tend to buy when i'm out and about is smart water um and it is more expensive smart water is distilled they they distill their water and

then bottle it and so yeah you'll still get some plastics but i know that the water when it got put in there you know assuming they're not lying about their process is clean and so that's that's where i tend to go you know spring waters and you know all these other companies i just don't know what they're doing um are they i i usually tend to reach for spring water if i can't get a you know if i can't get a smart water um i you know ones that just say you know bottled in atlanta georgia or whatever i tend to avoid those because i just assume they're putting tap water in there yeah and then the plastic bottle what is that doing to the water so if you put clean water and let's say this the smart water you put that in there uh and it's as good as you're going to get you know

kind of pre-packaged uh consumption what does the plastic bottle do to change that water that's so bad so plastic is going to leach into the water for sure when when plastic is heated and there's a liquid inside some of that plastic is going to get in there so and i'm even talking like room temperature it doesn't have to be real hot so when they're being shipped and all that and so everyone knows about bpa most people have heard of bpa and so a lot a lot of companies are moving away from bpa but there's this other chemical called phthalates which actually starts with a p it's pth um phthalates smart water for one if you see if you look at the bottom you know every plastic thing has its you know little recycle symbol and a number number one is has

phthalates that's what smart water uses so i've kind of even like on them like gosh i can't even drink them because now i'm getting phthalates which are very estrogenic again going back to that they turn on your estrogen phthalates they say are the most common chemical we are exposed to every day and that is from plastic and so yeah anytime you're drinking plastic you know bottled water you're going to get some plastic now you have to kind of weigh that when i travel like like i am now i drink bottled water i just know i'm going to get some plastic but hopefully you know hopefully the water in there is going to do less damage than you know you know if i were to drink the water out of the sink yeah uh there's a liquid death right there uh i'm so scared to do

do this but if you grab that well uh let's see what they have because um i'm an investor in this business and had nothing to do with healthy water it literally was cool branding they're gonna go they're gonna sell this right um but in it is water and also they don't have plastic bottles right it's the uh kind of more like a beer can if you will um that one i think may be flavored so it probably has some stuff they even they even say death to plastic on here they're anti-plastic Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're definitely against the big plastic is going down. That's right. We're on board. But I wonder, you know, forget the branding for a second, forget any flavors or whatever. Like if water companies simply put water into a can rather than a plastic bottle, that seems like, based on what you're saying, like that would be a pretty big improvement for most people. I think so. You know, I haven't studied too much the interaction that it would have with, you know, this made of aluminum or something like that. But, yeah, I think it would.

um now cost-wise you're probably increasing your cost quite a bit to do that yeah the less plastic we can use especially from our drinks the better a lot of people will drink their you know coffee through a plastic lid they're just pounding plastic the whole time they're doing that maybe i shouldn't do that now take that little off and even a lot of the straw that's plastic get yourself a metal straw it'd probably be better like yeah it really would and even a lot of those coffee cups that are lined with plastic so you put when you put a hot liquid in some to plastic you're making probably worse uh iced coffee i guess i'm avoiding a little bit of plastic maybe um okay so where else are plastics like really kind of infiltrating our life obviously bottled

water is like a no-brainer it's something that people they go to the grocery store they go to the gas station the airport wherever like they're picking it up they're using it uh they give it to their kids quite a bit right sporting events things like that like it's literally has infiltrated society um are there other big areas where you try to avoid interacting with plastics hey guys what's going on i hope that you're enjoying this conversation but i wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that i'm hosting on march 4th at the miami beach convention center the event is called lyceum miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come i'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the

last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, or Delian and Mike Solana from Founders Fund, Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast, Cody Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking, and billionaire Christian Agermeyer, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up. But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4th.

The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece, where people used to come together, talk about ideas and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person, in real life, once again, after three years of a hiatus from real life events. And so I'm hosting the event.

And as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to LyceumMiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors. Lyceum Miami is going to be a great time. So come check it out. Come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. i hope to see you there all right let's get back into this conversation yeah it's hard because like

i said plastic is so pervasive um there's some companies that do make chicken you know and they will inject these brines or you know something like that into the chicken before they sell it a lot of times those brines will have phthalates in them not just contamination from the syringe there's literally that ingredient is in what they're injecting so even some of our meat like you just can't avoid it altogether it's impossible like i said they have found phthalates in polar bears you know up in the north pole these these polar bears have plastic in them that they got from eating the salmon that got from the water you know and so i think doing the bare minimum would be to avoid drinking hot drinks out of you know plastic when we can and just minimize the use of

those type of things you'll do you do pretty good because even like if i go buy a steak at the grocery store that's wrapped in plastic there's gonna be a little bit of contamination there it but it's not enough that i'm going to worry about that steak i'm still because i think the benefits of being the steak are going to far outweigh the little bit of plastic that i got in there but the other the other big part would be um cosmetics these products that you know lotions sunscreens that type of stuff soaps even they will have these chemicals so you want to look for phthalate free on labels. And if they don't have it on there, and that's just one of the problems with cosmetics, but if they don't have phthalate free on there, I'm just assuming that there's

phthalates in there. And what are the other problems with the cosmetics? And I actually saw a graphic where I think it had a woman and it was like, you know, women are being bombarded by all these chemicals and it was going through nighttime skin routine, makeup, perfume. It had kind of like the average American woman, here's all the different things. And they were trying to basically compare it to decades ago. Some of this was still there, but some of it wasn't. And so what else are things to be concerned about from a cosmetic standpoint? That would be the parabens is what they're called. And more and more companies are figuring this out. You will see paraben free on a lot. Parabens are used to, and phthalates both, they're used to kind

to help carry fragrances. So if you're using something that has a fragrance in it and it doesn't say paraben free or phthalate free, you just assume it's in there. Um, cause sometimes they're hard to spot on the label. Like I can't even remember all the different scientific names they put on these things to try to hide them. Um, so yeah, parabens again, just they're another one. They promote the estrogen, which in women is a huge problem for breast cancer. Breast cancer is very much an estrogen driven cancer and i you know i'm not going to say that that's why we see rises in these things but it's not helping for sure and so yeah if you're really looking at cosmetics you want to avoid ones that don't say paraben free on them if they have a fragrance

and then another another one that some people are going to hate to hear is lavender what's going on with lavender it has been shown to promote estrogen just like these other ones so lavender in particular they they've looked at it with like young boys even they you know their mom puts the lavender lotion on or whatever lavender is everywhere right everyone likes to smell lavender and these boys will start to get what we call gynecomastia you know where they basically start to grow breasts in these 12 year old boys really and they have linked that to lavender yeah and so i personally as a man i avoid anything with lavender in it um and you know even lavender essential oil i don't think the essential is as bad as some of this but i just don't even

won't risk it i'm just gonna stay away from it so when it comes to lotions and uh i guess shampoos and soaps and like all this stuff do you just try to go for scent free or what do you try to optimize for i i'm lucky enough where i live there's a company that makes soaps makes things like that so i'm i'm mainly avoiding lavender and then with them i know they're making it from goat milk and i know they're just using a few other essential oils that i'm not worried about so i use that that's what i have switched to using what is the name do you remember salt river salt river soapworks um they're out in in star valley wyoming where i live and so that's one one avenue you could take is is going that route i also don't use a lot of cosmetics i i really my wife hates

when i say is i don't wash my hair my hair doesn't need washed it's not getting dirty now if i go work out maybe but even then i really i just rinse it out and clean it out and i'm good to go um and so even on you know my body i don't use a ton of cosmetics i think we use way too much like i said when people lather stuff on yeah i've never been someone who does that i actually uh i've told story before uh i think i was like 27 28 years old i was talking to my wife and she was like uh um where's your face wash stuff and i was like i've never washed my face before she's like what do you mean i was like well the most i had done at that point in my life was like the bar soap right right in the shower and like whatever i got some dirt um and it blew me away in terms of

uh how much people put on the face now face wash i'm sure is not nearly as bad as if you're going and sticking on you know a pound of makeup every day right right um but is there things that you can do uh for example um i know that there's been this huge rise in what i'll call men's skin care So obviously, traditionally, and kind of as a generalization, women have really, really been focused on taking care of their skin. Men, probably not as much. I was like the quintessential example. But there has been this rise now of nighttime skin routines or like lotions to put on your face for the day or whatever. Is that all kind of just nonsense? Or are there maybe like healthy versions of it? What do you think? You can say it's nonsense if you think it's

Well, it depends on what your goal is, right? If your goal is to make your skin look more like a woman, then okay. And I say that because not in a bad way, right? If someone wants their skin to look like that, great, you do you. But these chemicals that are going to be in there are literally turning men more feminine. That's not me saying that. That's scientific journals saying that so i yeah i think the less we're putting on the better because skin will readily readily absorb these chemicals and so i yeah i i'm like you i've never washed my face granted i didn't suffer with acne like my wife did her whole life but i think if she had used less of those things i think her acne would have been better than it was when i was in seventh grade i had really bad

acne like there was like a six month period it was horrible right and it's like uh there's like like a confidence component to it that you're just like it'll get the shit off my face right whatever it's brutal and i remember uh that i went uh with my mother and uh there's these like pads that you could get you could do it and actually would like burn a little bit yeah right because you're putting this stuff on there or whatever and i remember thinking to myself like thankfully after you know six months or whatever i was able to not have to do it anymore but there's people who have been doing that for years right even into you know kind of their 20s or 30s uh they use that and i can't imagine that those chemicals are good for you no right no definitely not good

for you now might they help the acne and that has some benefit for sure when when i work with some of these kids that have acne it's terrible like it destroys their confidence destroys their ability to talk to people but yeah to do that for decades yeah i can't imagine that's doing anything good in the body yeah um what about like colognes and perfumes do you wear any are there concerns around them yeah there are i i haven't i haven't worn a clone since i got married because i didn't feel like i needed to anymore right so i haven't worn a clone maybe my wife would say otherwise but you know i haven't wore a clone in probably 10 years but again it's got a fragrance in it it's being carried by a phthalate most likely and so yeah again you're spraying now if you're just

spraying it on your clothes um you're probably not getting too much so if you're someone that wants to wear some clone or something or some perfume i would say spray it on your clothes don't spray it on your skin would be my recommendation yeah i mean and maybe that's kind of like the the middle ground right is people like hey i don't want to smell like shit but yeah right i also don't want to be basically killing myself right um and then in terms of uh not washing your hair that much use i'll call it a special soap but just kind of a healthier soap is there anything else that you do uh from like a uh personal care or cosmetics anything like that uh that's noteworthy no i mean for me thankfully i've been blessed with pretty good skin and that

kind of stuff i got some latin american heritage and so i personally haven't had to do much other than that and my skin's you know my skin everything stays pretty healthy yeah the um the reason why i originally found you uh on the internet was uh you had this thread and you were talking about how at the age of 24 uh you had a very low testosterone level and you were able to uh increase your testosterone as you got older. Help me understand like, what is the average testosterone level of somebody in America? Or like, what should it be? And then like, what's a low range and a high range just so we can start to understand like how you move these numbers? Yeah. So we'll talk about it in terms of total testosterone, since that's what most people know. It's not the best measure. I

prefer a free testosterone measure and we can get into that too. But for total testosterone, except at 24, 25 years old, I was about 250 nanograms per deciliter. That's really low. That would be considered hypogonadism. What is that? Meaning your testicles are not working like they're supposed to. Literally, you're not producing nearly as much testosterone as you should. The upper range that labs will put on testosterone will be 900 to 1,000, which when we're in our teenage years, boys, we're going to have levels of around 1,000, 1,200, even 1,500 for a really high T kid. And I don't think physiologically there really should be an upper limit. I don't think if someone's at 1,000 and the range says 900, I don't think 1,000 is

bad at all. The average in America right now is going to be between 350 to 450 in most middle-aged men that number should be double that we should be in the six seven hundred range okay and natural we'll just talk about natural testosterone for the moment so no trt none of that stuff but natural testosterone levels can you have too much whether you're a kid or in middle age i don't think so um some people you know try to tie testosterone to aggressiveness and criminality and it's never been really shown to be true and so i really the things that testosterone does Let's go through that. It increases your sex drive. It increases your muscle mass, increases your bone mass, helps you look leaner and, you know, makes your appearance better, gives you better energy, better focus. Like, how can we have too much of that? Like, everyone benefits from that, men and women. Everyone could benefit from a little more of all those things. Yeah. So you went from 24 or 25 to kind of mid thirties and you were able to more than double

your testosterone level. And maybe we can kind of go through like, what were you doing over that period of time to really kind of keep moving the testosterone level up? Yeah. So last I checked my levels, I'm somewhere in the 630 to 650 range somewhere there. And rule says, as I'm getting older, it should be going down. So mine has gone up. I think the biggest key for me was I was in chiropractic school and I was having a lot of focus issues couldn't couldn't really function I couldn't figure out why I went to a friend of mine and he he's a big gluten guy he's celiac he thinks a lot of people have gluten issues so he convinced me to go off gluten for six months now I'm not saying the gluten was the problem I was insulin

resistant and I didn't know I I had stopped working out nearly as much as I had you know in in my undergrad partly because of a back injury i blew out my back herniated two discs ended up walking with a cane for a year and so i just was not active was still eating the same junk that i'd been eating you know pizza for pizza for dinner every night you know we would go to little caesars and eat the entire five dollar pizza by ourselves you know and so inadvertently what i what i've realized is as i took gluten out of my diet it reduced my carb intake massively because i wasn't really replacing it and so my carb intake probably went from 300 grams a day to 75 or 80 grams a day not quite to the ketogenic level but getting in those ranges and so by fix working on

that insulin resistance just by accident everything got better everything my life improved my focus got better my energy was better my sex drive increased and i was newly married at this time we were trying we were trying to have kids is why i started down this down this route of looking at my testosterone and so for me that was the biggest key now i've added things since then where i work out more i lift more weights i've never never been a big weight lift guy i don't love it but i do it now i strength train now at least i'm going to do 100 push-ups a day at least build some of it just work on that muscle and then just cleaning up the diet in general i eat way less sugar than i used to this this estrogenic chemical world that's more new to me i've really started

going down that in the last six months or so of getting those things on my diet and i expect that's gonna i'm gonna see more improvement by doing that and then alcohol as well i think you cut out alcohol well or did you bring it back or well no so i actually so so i put that in the thread about that thread was you know i'm giving advice on what people can do i don't drink i never have um in my religion we don't use alcohol and so that wasn't something i cut out but if someone wants to help their testosterone they need to cut out alcohol at least significantly reduce it you know a lot of people are having a beer every day you know and when we were taught we were taught if you know man for have one to two drinks a day would technically in the medical world be

considered alcoholic and so what alcohol is going to do is really going to deplete your b vitamins if you're drinking too much but b vitamins are very needed for healthy testosterone levels they help suppress certain things keep them down so that our body can make more testosterone so yeah cutting out alcohol is a great idea if you want to boost your t and then what about the relationship to weight right because i saw that you said like if you lose weight your testosterone levels naturally go up and this goes back to some of the insulin conversation we started with yeah it goes back to insulin a bit but also just the fat cells themselves can be a problem for testosterone so in men and women too where that testosterone to estrogen occurs part of that is

in the fat cells themselves this is called aromatization so literally the fat cells which have receptors for testosterone testosterone gets to the fat cell and the fat cell says i'm going to turn you to estrogen and then testosterone levels start to decline because literally it's just being converted and so reducing your body weight even 20 pounds can make a significant difference on your testosterone level because you won't get that conversion happening nearly as much really 20 pounds could be a huge huge difference yeah because most people were talking most people are in the 30 to 40 50 pound range and so you know of overweight you know you know sometimes morbidly obese is a different conversation but yeah you draw if you're 40 pounds

overweight and you lose 20 pounds you're going to make a big difference for for your energy for your insulin resistance but also to your testosterone levels yeah i had a friend who told me uh six foot 200 pounds is kind of anyone who can be six foot and under 200 pounds uh and obviously people are optimizing for different things or whatever but like the average person uh that was like a line he's like once you start getting up into 210 215 220 uh for a male he's like literally your height is not increasing right it's just you're going wider and uh there's this like big difference in the physiological components and measurements of your body being under 200 versus over i thought it was fascinating where he was just like yeah every height kind of has a

weight yeah that muscle mass all this stuff kind of changes the number a little bit but definitely being under a certain weight will completely change the way you feel uh and kind of things you do on a day-to-day basis yeah absolutely i mean the biggest so for me i'm you know i'm five six five seven i'm pretty short guy biggest i've ever been is about 210 and i felt terrible when i was that that big and even if i let let myself get up to the 190 192 range compared to where i i feel at 175 even it's night and day difference i have much better energy just every part of my life feels better and that's a 15 pound difference now i ideally at my height i'm probably more closer to the 160 155 range depending on muscle mass but even that difference between 175 and 190

makes a huge difference for me yeah uh you also mentioned sleep uh i two years ago uh was not sleeping at all. Like I was horrible. Uh, and two years ago, I was like, I want to get better at this. And it's probably the single most important thing that I changed in my life, uh, over the last two years. And it's just like sleep eight hours. There's all kinds of fancy stuff that you can try and do. And I probably tried a bunch of them, right. But like literally just sleeping eight hours, I feel like a different person than if I sleep six and a half and what's going on in my body when I'm actually sleeping eight versus six or seven. Yeah. So when we don't sleep enough, our cortisol level will rise cortisol is it's kind of known as the stress hormone right

cortisol increases your insulin resistance so if you one bad night of sleep just one so say you got a young kid i got young kids sometimes you don't get the best sleep and you feel like crap the next day that one night of bad sleep will make you more insulin resistant that next day wow just one night and so imagine someone who's been doing that for decades right it's it's that increase in cortisol cortisol decreases testosterone to tie it back to the testosterone and again also increases insulin resistance and so yeah the key is sleep eight hours like i i these i have so many patients tell me we're like yeah i sleep three hours every night i feel great and like dude you're not the exception to the rule there are some exceptions there are

some people um matthew walker has done a lot of studies on these um he wrote the book why we sleep and yeah there are this is very very small percentage where they do function well at four hours sleep 99.99 percent of us we need eight hours of sleep every night and that's like you said that's the easiest thing people can do to make themselves feel better yeah i think it's ryan holiday uh in one of his books he talks about like most people aren't disciplined to sleep eight hours they don't have the discipline to do it and his point was uh for most people your job your life, your kids, your family, you know, something in your kind of day-to-day requires you to wake up at a certain time. And some people that's, you know, 5 AM, some people that's 8 AM, whatever the

time is, you, you, you got to kind of a hard start. Uh, and so the discipline is actually not when you wake up, it's when you go to sleep and we are programmed as a society to stay up later TV and, and, you know, phones and dinners and like all these types of things. But his point was like if you have the discipline to go to sleep at eight or nine o'clock which just saying someone's gonna go to sleep at eight o'clock they're like whoa you're a weirdo yeah right why would you go to sleep at eight o'clock that's when my kids go to bed yeah right like you're not a kid you're an adult but like having the discipline to go to sleep at an earlier time actually will increase the odds you get eight or more hours of sleep and then that allows you to

wake up the next day you have more energy like like it is this kind of uh circular thing um but it's hard it's really hard for the average adult in america to go to sleep at even nine o'clock well and these these problems kind of compound on themselves too because if you're not sleeping well or if you're not sleeping enough so you're going to bed at midnight you gotta get up at five then you're having all those issues from the sleep but also when we get more insulin resistant when we get more of these type of things well one of the symptoms or one of the things that insulin resistance can cause is sleep issues so now you're compounding the issue by not sleeping and then you're getting more unhealthy so then you can't sleep so yeah i i tell people schedule when you

go to bed don't don't schedule when you wake up i mean we you know you need to know when you need to wake up i gotta get up at 6 30 every day so i need to know i gotta be in bed by 9 30 or 10 because for me i'm one it takes me a little bit to fall asleep takes me a little bit to wind down i need to give myself a window of probably nine hours counting that you know half hour is gonna me to fall asleep and so you really need to plan and i you know i get caught in too my kids go to bed at eight i'm like okay now i can you know do some stuff now i'm free 12 30 1 a.m rolls around i'm like oh gosh i gotta get up at seven and now i know the next day i'm not gonna be at my best you know i try to do those on you know when i have a day off and so it's not as big a deal but

i shouldn't do it physiologically i'd be better i need eight hours every night regardless the two two things i notice uh related to sleep outside of like mood and all that type of stuff is uh one if i don't sleep a lot i eat like an absolute animal the next day yeah and so there there's got to be some relationship maybe you kind of understand the science um and then the second thing is uh i always say that there's like uh people who step on scales and then people who like when you wake up in the morning and you go to brush your teeth and you're just like look in the mirror you pretty much know i'm getting bigger i'm getting smaller right like whether you want to admit it to yourself or not like you know and one of the things i uh i've noticed over

the years is like if i sleep eight or more and especially if it's eight and a half or nine hours uh you feel and psychologically have convinced yourself that you're actually slimmer like your body almost feels like it is uh processing food or i don't know exactly what it is but like it feels like this is more in tune with like the way my body wants to be than if you sleep six hours and you kind of wake up and you feel like shit and then you eat horribly like it kind of compounds on itself yeah and that's not just a mental thing there is a physiologic answer to that interesting to both of them so those cravings you talked about i mean you like garbage the next day that's cortisol cortisol increases our cravings for sugar and that type of stuff so when you get

a bad night's sleep your cortisol is going to be elevated the next day and it's it's again it's a compounding problem because now you're more insulin resistant because you had a bad night's sleep now you're going to eat a bunch of sugar your blood sugar is going to go up you're going to get more insulin resistant that day now i'm not saying one bad night's sleep can make someone insulin resistant forever but the other part on the the slimmer part sleep plays a huge role if someone wants to lose weight they need to be sleeping eight hours every night why is that again cortisol cortisol and another effect of it will make you retain water and so some of that is is the body shedding water but yeah you want to shed that water your body shouldn't hold on to it

And so cortisol plays a big role in managing our weight as well. That interplay between it and insulin is huge. Do you have any sort of like nighttime routine to increase the odds that you're gonna sleep well? I got four kids, there ain't no routine. No, for me, I really don't. No, I've ruined myself in some ways.

I can't fall asleep if I'm not listening to something. So for me, that's what I found in college was I've always struggled with sleep issues kind of since i was a kid i i think i ruined myself as a kid reading i actually i was the type of kid that got grounded from reading because i was reading too late you know you're like my brother i got a brother who literally he's actually a doctor so it's funny but uh uh there was a story where once my parents were worried like we were all sneaking out of the house doing all this stuff and they would go my brother's room he'd be under the covers of the flashlight harry potter harry

potter yes absolutely see me and your brother should talk but uh the what i have done lately um, is I did get a pair of blue blockers, glasses. I notice a massive difference when I use them because a lot of times when I get home, once my kids are in bed, I still am reading a lot. I study a lot. And most of that I'm doing on my phone. And so I just, you know, I know about blue light. I know the damage it can do to your circadian rhythm and your melatonin, uh, hormone. And so I went to a buddy of mine who's an optometrist and had to make me a pair of blue blocking glasses. And they just look like gray glasses. They're not like the yellow tinted one. Yellow tinted ones are fine but i do notice a real big difference in how long it takes me to fall asleep if i put those

suckers on as soon as i get home really so when you get home six seven o'clock whatever uh you're putting the glasses on and pretty much trying to wear them until you go to sleep yeah pretty much and um will you also wear them even if you're not staring at a screen no i i will take them off if i'm not you know watching tv you're on my phone or something then i then i just come off because i i don't need glasses they're not prescriptive so yeah but if i'm i had a screen at night and been i kind of neglected for a while but i've tried to do it better lately um just anytime i'm at the computer on my phone whatever i have i'm trying to have those classes yeah the only two things i've ever done that seem to have an impact and again i i'm always worried that like maybe

it's placebo stuff versus like actually working um is uh i now try to read before i go to bed i used to be on my computer all the time but like read a physical book um and that seems to help and i'm sure it has a lot to do with the screens and things like that uh but the second thing i'm I'm scared to admit this, but, uh, every night I drink, uh, chamomile tea, but I get it with, uh, has a little bit of melatonin in the teabag. Um, and I don't like, you know, I've traveled to stuff and I don't have it and I don't feel like I'm like missing it or have like a really bad night of sleep or anything. Um, and so I don't know how much of it's just like, it's part of the routine before I go to bed as I drink some tea and then go to bed versus like, it's actually

doing something. How much should people worry if they're drinking, whether it's chamomile tea or something else and especially if it has melatonin in it before they go to bed every night yeah chamomile by itself i will you know great yeah they're for centuries you know millennia people have used chamomile tea to help them sleep like i don't think there's anything around there when you bring melatonin into the picture now i was taught in my nutrition you know program that if you take melatonin you're going to suppress your body's natural ability to produce it right the more i've studied that i cannot find how that mechanism actually works i i have never been able to sufficiently prove that to myself that that is true so depending on the dose you know i i i'm not

i kind of live by the mindset of we shouldn't have to rely on any outside chemical to feel good right but if you're taking a milligram or two of melatonin and i and it gets you to sleep whereas you wouldn't sleep if you didn't take it great take it i want you to sleep that's more important and because melatonin is cheap it's easy to get it's really not going to have any side effects so i i personally wouldn't worry too much about it i told a patient the other day this 17 year old girl that i'm working with she doesn't sleep she'll lay in bed till five in the morning and her parents like we've tried melatonin i said how much have you tried they said oh you know five milligrams i said give her 15 i said yeah like for short term i'm not gonna do that long

term but and i'm not telling people do that but for her i need her to sleep so we can fix her other issues and if she's getting two or three hours of sleep a night it's not gonna happen so i said put her on 15 and we'll see what happens yeah yeah the um uh maybe i should just try the chamomile tea without the melatonin and kind of go from there um while you're sleeping do you do anything like is uh uh environment yeah okay anything like that like what what do you kind of do to optimize for the actual hours that you are sleeping yeah so the i have three pieces of two are pretty common and one's kind of off the wall keep your dark your room dark easy i mean i i live in smaller apartments like my computer's in my room and our modem can be in there and so i

literally take electrical tape and i cover up every light that i can even those little bit of you know little green light that shine on a power brick i cover them all up as best i can so keep it dark keep it cool you want your bedroom cooler at night you know i ours we put it at 67 68 somewhere in there the other piece so i so i'm married so so for people that sleep with someone else in their bed get separate blankets do not share a blanket that is that is my best advice and we've done that our whole marriage but that way you're not being woken up by your spouse or your you know your girlfriend boyfriend whoever turn and enroll and like get separate blankets it will make a difference and then high quality matches high quality pillow are huge yeah um a pillow can

make just buying a better pillow can make a significant improvement in your sleep yeah the um i haven't gone really really deep down the pillow thing and two years ago when i started getting serious about the sleep thing um i was introduced to uh mateo who's the ceo of uh eight sleeps got the uh cooled mattress oh yeah and um i literally knew nothing right and he was like dark cool like the whole thing and he's like that's why we built this mattress so i started sleeping on it that is the only thing that i've done where when i travel yeah i can tell a huge difference yeah and the only way to do all your travel is like you just crank the ac you know and try to make it as cool as you can but what i noticed is not so much uh the amount of time that i sleep but it was

actually the deep sleep right i sleep with a watch on so i get some of the uh uh the measurements i don't know how exactly accurate they are but but um it seems like i get deeper and deeper sleep the colder that it is and so it's funny because like even if you don't have a mattress and kind all the special stuff like you literally can just turn the ac on yeah right and that could be a huge difference in the amount of sleep that you get yeah where i live just open the window you know one degree at my house right now so open up your window you're gonna be as cold as you want yeah temperature temperature and light light exposure are easy things that anyone can do doesn't cost you anything like i said um you know if you don't have ac then maybe there's

an issue there but it'll make significant improvement in your sleep just by making those changes. Um, and then there's the other thing that we talked about, you know, chamomile, melatonin, magnesium can help a lot. I do, if I know it's going to be a rough night, you know, for whatever reason, my mind is wired up or something. I'll, I'll take some CBD and then I'll hit that with some magnesium as well. And that seems to at least help me calm down on those days. I don't do it every day, but what is the magnesium and then what does the CBD do, uh, specifically for sleep? So magnesium, magnesium is one that most people are deficient in should take every day now magnesium is not going to help you fall asleep any quicker for most people

and i take a blended form there's so many different kinds of magnesium but it's going to make your sleep quality better um you're it works on what we call the rest and digest system your parasympathetic nervous system which is where a lot of that repair happens while we're sleeping our brain is repairing everything's repairing magnesium is involved in a lot of those processes and so by giving your body what it needs your rest is going to be better now the cbd you know how the mechanism exactly works i'm not entirely sure but cbd is just known for its calming effects um and so i i'll usually you know i'll take a 25 milligrams of that or something just it seems to when i do take melatonin which is rare but i do take it um if i take the cbd with it

for me it seems to mellow the effects of the melatonin as far as the hangover the next day that you can get some people get that real bad groggy feeling from melatonin the next day um cbd for me completely takes that away yeah i am uh when i was in the military uh this is like one of my deepest darkest secrets probably um we didn't have access to a lot of different stuff right um and uh so when i was deployed a lot of guys got addicted to nyquil because it had that same kind of thing it helped me go to sleep and we were sleeping at weird hours because sometimes we'd go out at night sometimes we got during the day and so you're kind of like off um and i remember coming back and like it was pretty hard to get back to sleeping normal when you're not

used to like you take something and it knocks you out yeah and uh what made me think of it is melatonin i've never had kind of the hangover but you take enough nyquil yeah you wake up the next day you're like ah it's gonna be a tough morning right because you literally do feel that grogginess well in all nyquil the the active ingredient that's putting you to sleep is the same that's in benadryl the the you know the antihistamine and so it's a diphenhydramine or something like that but yeah so and that's the same with like you take a tylenol pm or any of those it's got benadryl in it now benadryl is one if people are relying on that to sleep they need to fix it because it is messing with your brain yeah long-term use of that kind of stuff has been tied to alzheimer's

and dementias and things like that so yeah if you're relying on on nyquil or something like that talk to someone that can help you fix your sleep i used it for like a year probably yeah yeah and it was a thing where once you got back kind of to like a normal schedule and all that um it wasn't easy to get off but it definitely was like hey you probably don't need nyquil to sleep at night yeah um another thing that you've mentioned is zinc what what is that in terms of raising testosterone so zinc zinc is needed to produce testosterone you can't produce testosterone without it and a lot of people just again are we're so nutrient deficient everywhere and and men in particular need need more zinc than women so just taking some zinc can you know and

you don't have to take a lot 50 milligrams to 100 milligrams maybe it has been shown if you're severely deficient it can improve testosterone now some people will take zinc and they're like i didn't notice anything um which it just tells me okay zinc deficiency wasn't one of your issues the other thing that zinc can do will suppress a different hormone called prolactin and and prolactin based on the name it's actually what makes women lactate when they're you know breastfeeding but men have it as well prolactin suppresses the production of testosterone so if we don't have enough zinc and b vitamins and some of these other things to keep the prolactin levels down then we can have a decrease in testosterone from that you've mentioned you know zinc magnesium

a couple of these things like would just a normal daily vitamin kind of like a everyday vitamin replace enough of it or do you think it should be more targeted than that yeah i mean it depends on the company um i work with some some companies that you know their professional lines that are sold by physicians that their theirs are pretty good but most things if we're targeting something like magnesium take separately because most if you're buying it off the you know off the shelf of walmart or something the magnesium in there is going to be a crappy form because it's cheap so it'll be magnesium oxide most likely which is the cheapest form which is basically rusted magnesium it's not really going to help you that much and so for most things i i don't i don't personally

take a multivitamin i think most people don't i don't think it's a bad thing to do um i don't you necessarily need to but if yeah if you're targeting magnesium zinc vitamin d things like that just just take them on their own separately and then uh vitamin d is another thing that you've mentioned before in terms of helping to raise testosterone yeah um vitamin d again is it it's vitamin d is an interesting vitamin right we call it a vitamin it's really acts more like a hormone in the body interesting it's even you know it's it's got that if you look at the actual name it ends in that ol you know ol letters which means it comes from a comes from a cholesterol synthesized that way um and most people i think the numbers on vitamin d is something like 75 80

are deficient and it's involved in so many processes in the body now how it how it helps with testosterone is again it's kind of a building block for some of the things we need to make testosterone so having our vitamin d's optimal vitamin d levels optimal is just going to make that production happen quicker now for someone like me you know i got some vitamin d on my walk over here this morning because it's sunny here where i live it might be sunny but we ain't going for a walk outside in the winter you know and so that's it where i live i i take about 5 000 units a day of vitamin d in the winter um in the summer i don't take as much because i'm out fishing or I'm out doing, doing what I do in the summer. And so I'm really trying, I try to build up my stores

in, in the summer, quite a, quite a lot and spend it. And it doesn't take long, 15, 20 minutes a day out in the sun with your skin exposed, not putting on sunscreens, which sunscreens are a whole different volume, whole different route we could go down, but you'll produce enough vitamin D that you're good for a while. And if you do that all summer, even where I live, you're going to have pretty good amounts stored up. Vitamin D gets stored in the body. It's, it's stored in fat cells and and so you'll be pretty good but you know living in miami if you spend enough time outside you probably don't need to supplement much with vitamin d it'd probably be good yeah yeah and is that what people who live in sunny areas like literally you can just go outside if

you're outside for 30 minutes to an hour you should be good on vitamin d yeah yeah as long as you're not like so as long as you're not covering yourself up with sunscreen while you do it sunscreen is going to block the uv rays our skin converts to things to vitamin d from the activation of the sun. And so if you're blocking that sun, then you're not going to be producing the vitamin D. One of the things, uh, when I moved from New York to Miami that I noticed is, uh, and it sounds stupid, but like I became happier. And, uh, some of those, like the seasonal depression stuff, like I never really believed in that. And then like, I just went back to New York and I was like, oh shit, man, different, different area. Right. Um, but also I think a lot of it was just

like pure sunlight. Right. And again, I don't know what the science exactly is, but like you feel if you can go outside and there's sun for whatever reason, maybe it's just me personally, like people are different, but you definitely feel happier. And I'm wondering if there is science behind that. A big part is vitamin D. I lived in the Northwest for a while. I went to school out in Portland. So we were out in Northwest for four or five years and seasonal affective disorder is huge out there. Now in Portland, it starts raining and, you know, end of October, early November, and it doesn't stop. And you don't see the sun until like May, you know, like it can be brutal you can literally go weeks without seeing the sun at least where i live right

now it's cold but we we get sunlight and so that those depressive disorders are huge up in the northwest and a big part the biggest evidence points towards vitamin d levels um and yeah taking it in a pill form is your liquid form is not you know not ideal but if you let it it's better than knocking any at all um so that's that's why i supplement it myself what about stress reducing stress uh can drastically increase testosterone levels as well that goes to the cortisol conversation yeah so when you're when you are stressed out when you're not sleeping well all those things that increase our cortisol cortisol actively suppresses testosterone and so if your cortisol is high your testosterone is going to go down and again if cortisol is high insulin

resistance is going up so it's that cortisol testosterone balance that you're trying to find And so, yeah, reducing your stress is huge. And that's easier said than done for some people. You know, if your job is the biggest stressor in your life, not everyone can just quit their job. I've had conversation like that with patients. But again, the best way you're going to reduce your stress is sleeping. Yeah. The maybe like the extreme example of like a Warren Buffett who sits and I think he says to read 500 pages a day.

Right. Yeah. Pretty stress free life. Yeah. Versus, you know, you can imagine like the most stressful job in the world. how much of it is uh a warren buffett where you know he's doing it every single day and it's like pretty low stress versus the compounding effects of like high stress every day like is there a balance where maybe you don't want like zero stress uh and it's actually healthy to have

some stress sometimes but on the balance you want to have like a lower stress life like how do you think about that hey guys i hope that you're enjoying this conversation as you probably realize we don't run any ads on this show. That's right. All the other podcasts, all the other YouTube shows that you watch, they have advertisers. We don't have any direct relationships with advertisers. And we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that, though, we have a team. And if you'd like to support us, one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that I write to about 235,000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets, business, technology, and Bitcoin.

Just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there. I'd love to have you join us. And it's a great, easy way to support the work that the team and I are doing on a daily basis. All right, let's get back into this conversation. Well, if you're offering me Warren Buffett's life, I think I'll take it most days. But yeah, I think the lower stress the better,

but some people thrive on stress too, right? These high, just active individuals, they're like they need that to to mentally they need and now maybe physiologically it's been some things but yeah i think finding that balance of where you're pushing yourself and increasing that stress but we need to increase our stress tolerance right so the stress tolerance would just mean that you can handle more of it and not crash because of it and that goes to just finding these balances the other thing in talking in the testosterone conversation is that the more testosterone you have the better you can do in those situations because it's literally having some effects on

the brain um on the amygdala the amygdala is where like our fear center is and and things like that it makes you want to push and want to drive if you have more testosterone so then you are going to work better in those high stress situations there's something else that you uh talked about and i'm going to butcher how i pronounce this but uh it's ashwagandha ashwagandha ashwagandha ashwagandha there you go um and what you said about this was actually pretty surprising it can increase testosterone by 20 it can increase sperm count by 170 these are like big numbers what is that so ashwagandha is an herb um it's been used in i think it comes out of india um somewhere somewhere back you know that that area it's been used for you know millennia by people

over there for all kinds of ailments but what they found is it the way that it helps testosterone and sperm count in particular is it has a protective effect for the testicles actually testicles are where these are made and it does that through an antioxidant effect so it's reducing the amount of oxidative what we call oxidative stress in in the testicles and everywhere in the body but ashwagandha is probably the most studied herbal type thing on testosterone they've done many many studies and generally the studies are favorable um that particular study i cited again showed 20 improvement those men and they were testing lower testosterone men right and so someone you know like you know someone that's got optimal levels already or in five six hundred range they're

probably not gonna notice a 20 increase but they they'll they'll have some some increase from ashwagandha for sure and what form do most people take that is that like a capsule you can take ashwagandha tea i think i don't know how it tastes like hay or what but yeah you know but um yeah most time it's gonna be capsules and things like this and maybe even some of the other vitamins um when people hear that it increases your testosterone level they think well if i take it does it almost have like a caffeinated effect where it'll make me hard it'd be harder to go to sleep and therefore i shouldn't take it at night and i should take these in the morning or does it not really matter it shouldn't because it's not having an immediate effect like someone's

gonna take ashwagandha even for a few weeks probably before they're gonna notice a difference or you know tanga ali is another one you hear a lot about and it can boost testosterone quite a bit but it it shouldn't have that type of effect okay what about caffeine's impact on testosterone is it uh something that helps or something that hurts it that's actually i'm not sure on that that's that's not one that i've studied um i again i go to if you're having to rely on caffeine every day um to function you got something metabolically we need to work on you shouldn't have to rely on on it, but yeah, as far as testosterone goes, I'm not sure. Yeah. It's interesting because I saw a, um, I've signed a couple of studies and again, uh, my uneducated brain reads this stuff, right?

I'm like, I think, I think I get the main points, but, uh, one of the things, um, that they're now claiming is that actually drinking a certain amount of caffeine, usually through coffee, uh, to, you know, two cups or so can help in long your life. And so it's from like a longevity standpoint, which, okay. If you're optimizing for that, that's great. But I also do wonder then, you know, when you introduce it, especially if you drink a lot of coffee, right? What are you doing to the physiological components of your body, which then potentially changes your cortisol levels or these other things that then can like have the knock on effects. And so I've always joked that like the human body is kind of like the economy, super complex. We all think we

understand it, but nobody actually gets it. Right. Right. And so that's one that I don't think I would change my caffeine intake necessarily. Right. But it would be interesting to understand how it has an impact on testosterone yeah and i i've seen those same type of studies that show longevity and we talked before the show like i don't drink coffee personally i never have but when we talk a sleep issue some of these people that come into me saying they're having sleep issues and i say well when was your last cup of coffee i had one at four four in the afternoon there you go that that's why you can't sleep so i just tell people be be careful don't don't drink your caffeine 12 hours before you gotta you know 12 10 to 12 hours before you got to go to bed

be done with your coffee or your tea or whatever you're getting your caffeine from. It is one of the things that, uh, I haven't measured, but like you just intuitively learn your body. Uh, I drink, you know, I wake up six 30 ish, seven o'clock. Um, I usually don't actually drink coffee until eight 30 or nine. And then I used to drink a coffee at like one o'clock And I noticed that if I don't drink that or I just move it to like maybe 10, 30, 11, huge difference. I started to realize I was sleeping better. And again, you know, small brain, you're just like, okay, I guess like it must be that. And so you just kind of like slowly learn your body, right?

And you start to change your habits so that you can at least give yourself a higher probability. I think that's like the average person is like, look, I'm not a professional athlete. I'm not, you know, getting paid for better or worse sleep or whatever. but like if i can increase probabilities i'll do that because it's just going to help me you know over the long run yeah well and i would say everyone you you are getting paid to have better sleep right i mean think think everything you got going on your business and all that like my business suffers when i don't sleep well enough you know and a lot of people will have that 1 p.m 2 p.m cup of coffee because their their energy's crashing that tells me you probably got a blood

sugar issue let's let's fix your blood sugar issue make sure you don't have that afternoon crash then you're not going to need that coffee and then along the way it's going to help your sleep too yeah the next thing i want to talk about is metabolism and what is the relationship between testosterone and metabolism is it as simple as higher testosterone faster metabolism yeah generally um now how they interplay exactly one with another um it's kind of complicated but and to the point where i don't even understand a small small brain over here too But the things that affect metabolism that are going to decrease your metabolism are the same things that are going to decrease your testosterone in general, the cortisol, the insulin resistance. So by working on those things, essentially your testosterone, your metabolism are going to boost together.

Now, if someone gets on TRT, you know, they're going to notice a big improvement in their energy, which is metabolism, right? To define metabolism simply, it's your body's ability to produce energy. and so when yeah when you take trt you start raising your testosterone your energy levels are going to increase because your body's going to be functioning more efficiently mm-hmm you laid out eight foods that people should eat every single day to increase their testosterone and or a metabolism and when i read through these eight foods to increase your metabolism some of them i was like okay got it right expected some of them i was not expected so let's just start with uh the first two steak and eggs i think obviously the food pyramid would

tell you don't do that yeah yeah how do you kind of think about steak and eggs for metabolism so everything every not every but most dietary recommendations i'm making are in the context of i want your insulin to go down so that's particularly for steak and eggs i want you eating more protein less carbohydrates because protein will minimally spike your insulin a little bit but it's going to be a very short spike and it's going to come back down carbohydrates are gonna push your insulin way up and stay up there so that's part of why I would say steak and eggs but also steak and eggs both very high nutrition like not just the protein and the healthy fats a we have they're full of vitamins like

I've started calling eggs just like little multivitamins in you know in food form like people think of them as protein and cholesterol but they've got vitamin A and selenium and all these other things in them so state and eggs are eggs are like my favorite food too so i i try to eat three to four a day minimum um and a lot of times like five or six with a steak you know um and just keep my body low insulin with those meals and we get kind of into the weird parts of like are these just normal eggs are they like organic cage-free eggs are they like egg whites no not egg whites never i mean i'll eat an egg white but the yolk is where most of the nutrition is right the white is the protein so we need both

how much from a nutrition standpoint does it matter you know cage free versus you know not i don't think nutritionally it makes a big difference now as far as talking chemicals and that kind of stuff that can be in the eggs yeah your organic free range are probably going to be a lot better and you know where i live a lot of people have chickens and i i have people come to my clinic and pay me in eggs and i love it you know are you serious oh yeah it's absolutely like you know they'll all pay them you know i you know pay oops i pay them you know four dollars per dozen that they bring me so they want to pay off their whole visit in eggs great bring me eggs yep yeah i do it all the time and then you go ahead and just make the eggs and you're good to

go oh yeah i love that yeah i need to move on yeah uh apple cider vinegar yeah i don't even know what that is but you're talking about uh taking some of this or drinking some of it before you eat a meal to help with like justin explain what's happening here so that's going to do two things it's going to it is going to increase your acid production a bit which is great you know a lot of people anymore are on these antacids you know they get heartburn all the time for for a lot of those people it's actually they don't have enough stomach acid in their system and it sounds counterintuitive but it's just because they're they don't have enough acid to actually close all the valves and stuff so they get acid up into the throat what apple cider vinegar is going to

do is get you get that acetic acid that's that's the chemical in there that does the magic so kind of any type of vinegar will do apple cider vinegar is just known for it and it's been studied it's also going to decrease your insulin response they did a study where they took i think like 50 or 60 diabetics and half of them just did their normal thing they were the control group the other half they added in i think it was two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar before each meal the group that did the apple cider vinegar over the course of the study lost like five to six pounds on average the group that didn't lost nothing they didn't change anything else it's just literally literally they had them take the apple cider vinegar and it's because of

the acetic acid has some interplay and it's this isn't fully understood but it has an interplay with our blood sugar to keep that insulin level from spiking and so you're becoming less insulin resistant literally by taking apple cider vinegar and one to two tablespoons right before you eat now some people they struggle with that because you know it's it's vinegar right so it's pretty acidic so i'm just put it put that in some water shoot it right before your meal it's you're going to notice an effect and do that every meal yeah ideally ideally if you can yeah um it's just fascinating avocados yeah avocados um avocados help metabolism because they're healthy fats um the the the monounsaturated fats in there we need those to make hormones

if you're not making hormones your metabolism is going to tank every hormone is made from fat every hormone is made from fat and so when someone's saying low fat low fat low fat no let's eat more fat let's more healthy fat right and avocados are just a great source of that that kind of stuff to give your body what it needs to make um you know our hormones and the other things it needs to do and then what about chili peppers and oily fish these two fish i was like okay we're starting to get into areas where yeah i would expect but chili peppers was not something i expected yeah chili peppers is an interesting one they've just shown that eating the so the the active ingredient in those are the spicy ingredients capsaicin right and so what the

mechanism entirely is again they don't really understand but they have shown that chili peppers can boost your metabolism and i may have said in the post but i think it was something like 10 maybe um and it's a it's a short-term effect but putting some spicier food does seem to have an effect on metabolism and chili peppers obviously uh being a food but what about things like uh hot sauce on the eggs like that i've heard people be like oh that you know speeds up metabolism or whatever is there any science that seems to back that up i mean it may just go to the same with chili peppers i i don't know the last time i ate eggs without hot sauce on them you know i'm the type i've got 20 hot sauces in my fridge you know i i'm kind of a hot sauce nerd but yeah i

definitely isn't going to hurt you know as long as it's a hot sauce that's not full of sugar and you know that was all those caveats but yeah it could be because of the chili peppers yeah it's just fascinating uh one of the uh things as i've learned more and more about uh kind of science and biology and a lot of like the diet and workout stuff and everything is uh the military actually has a lot of this stuff like kind of built in uh you'd be very hard to walk into any chow hall on any military base and not see people eating eggs like pouring hot sauce on them and i used to always think it's because there wasn't a lot of condiments right right maybe there's some more signs yeah there you go yeah um and then the last one is ginger which uh i've never really heard

anybody talk about what's going on with ginger ginger's doing doing a couple things um ginger is an antioxidant um it's also going to help you know ginger is very soothing to the gut so if there's some gut issues it's going to help with that and then i think ginger kind of works on that a little bit of the same principles as chili peppers it's a very warming um you know root it's got kind of those same bioactive chemicals that are just going to speed things up a bit and just get things going and we've talked a lot about like raising testosterone uh increasing metabolism uh naturally when people start to hear this stuff i think there's been this explosion of interest and like well why don't i just artificially supplement my testosterone um and from my

understanding there's pills you can take there's things like trt um there's you know all sorts of uh uh human growth hormone whatever how do you just like if you were just starting out trying trying to understand what even the options were like what does that spectrum look like yeah so most most testosterone boosters that you hear about on the radio or you see on a late night commercial those are garbage man most of those aren't going to be doing much um so as far as like actually replacing now some of the supplements that we've talked about with the tanga ali and ashwagandha and even fadoja agresta some of those those actually do have have some benefit but if someone's looking down the testosterone route i mean the the only one that's really going to get

those big improvements as far as if we're talking the pharmaceutical side of things is going to be the trt now i always encourage people to go down the natural route first let's work on your nutrition let's work on your exercise and try to boost it these you know more natural ways but for some people the effects of that low t are so great and affecting them so much or if they're old enough if in their 50s or 60s then yeah maybe go have a conversation with with a testosterone specialist now if you're if you're going down there you want to talk to someone that has been doing it for a while that knows what they're doing because it's more complicated than just hey give yourself a shot you know once a week like you really need someone that knows what they're doing and as

somebody kind of goes down that path once they start are they pretty much signing up to be doing this for the rest of their life pretty much once you start injecting you know synthetic or you know an outside source of testosterone if you're if you go down that route yeah you're signing up for a lifetime treatment what is the uh side effect if you start and then you come off of it is your body just like shutting down testosterone production and so it's hard to restart it yeah it probably depends on how long you've been on it now if someone's been on crt for a month or two and they jump off they're probably gonna be okay um again talk with your doctor but that is the issue So when you're injecting that testosterone, and they inject a high amount, average male will produce 7 to 15 milligrams a day.

A lot of the ways they do the TRT is they'll inject like 200 milligrams at a time. And they're doing it like once every other week or once a week type of thing. So physiologically, that's just a massive boost of testosterone in the system. And so that goes up to the hypothalamus, which is what kind of starts all this up in the brain. and the hypothalamus says i'm good we don't need to produce any more testosterone and so you start to get that feedback loop of i just don't need to produce it and you're literally your hypothalamus will shut down that pathway what about human growth hormone igf1 like there's all these things that um you know when you play sports you hear professional athletes all trying to do all kinds

of crazy stuff whatever um what are those and how are they related to some of the testosterone stuff Yeah, so human growth hormone, it's kind of produced in kind of the same pathway as testosterone. It gets to the point where there's a chemical called THEA that gets converted to another one, and then they can go to human growth hormone or testosterone or estrogen. The reason a lot of these athletes are taking it or, you know, doping with it is their recovery is much faster. It's not so much, there probably is some performance boost as well, but it's the recovery that these guys are really looking for. You know, as far as like the effects on, um, testosterone, I haven't really looked

into, you know, what supplement or what taking that can do, but yeah, it's definitely not something that most people need. Um, if you're going down that route, it's usually, you got something really majorly wrong medically. And so your doctor's prescribing it for those reasons. If you're supplementing it outside, you're, I think you're running the same type of issues where your body's going to start shutting that down as, as we get older, we shouldn't make much HGH.

anyway um most of our hgh is is made during puberty and when we're really growing and so doing that synthetically yeah the brain's just gonna start shutting things down that i don't think we want um trt i don't think is necessarily directly connected but uh there's a lot of guys who um maybe they never talk about it but like they're bodybuilders or whatever and they take a lot of steroids and you just kind of look at something like all right that's probably not physically possible without you know some supplementation um and we've seen as a number these guys have died in their late 40s early 50s you know just earlier than you would normally expect and definitely than the average life expectancy what is the understood kind of impact

of any of these synthetic things on like longevity yeah i i'm not sure how much we really know a lot of these things are newer right but trt actually if it's done right can improve longevity interesting because they're getting themselves as long as it's done right and you know under the guidance of a doctor they're getting their levels to a better physiologic space so their body's working better their metabolism is working better all those things um bone mass increase muscles muscle mass actually and like muscle strength is can be a predictor of longevity now these bodybuilders and they are so metabolically unhealthy most of them that i wonder i don't know how much is the steroids versus how much is the fact that you're at a two percent body weight human body is not

made to be at a two percent body weight right and so the things they are doing to look like they do um i think play a massive role as well they're just wrecking their their hormones by doing all that a lot of those guys they get to the point where they can't produce like any of their hormones anymore because they've been so low fat and low calorie and all that that they do for so long that it just completely wrecks them yeah it um it is this kind of crazy thing of like the the extremes may not be the best thing. What is your like daily diet, right? You mentioned steak and eggs and some of this stuff. Are you like just, you know, Sean Baker literally eats one steak and like, that's it. I love talking to him because he was just like, no, literally like

salt on the steak and I drink water and that's it. And what can be more simple, right? I mean, like literally I was like, I'm envious of that. But what is kind of your daily look like? And especially because, uh, you're what I would consider like more like a normal citizen where you have four young kids, you you're, uh, have your practice, right? Like you, you, you've got all this stuff going on. So it's not like you can just say, Hey, I'm gonna eat one meal a day. And it's this one thing, right. Um, you also have to almost like deal with feeding your kids and all that. Like, what does that look like? Yeah. One part of it for me too, is I love to cook. Cooking one of my main hobbies um most days i'm skipping breakfast um i tend to i tend to fast you know

people call like an 18-6 fast i don't really focus on it but i i wake up and i feel good i don't feel i need the um for lunch i'm eating something high protein um i try to get 50 grams of protein at lunch 70 if i can um and and that's coming from chicken beef pork whatever i'm not too picky on that and i don't tend to eat any carbs with lunch um if i am going to have some some carbs that's going to be with dinner and even lately a lot of times i just feel better when i don't eat a lot of carbohydrates the way i'm built i i am very prone to insulin resistance my whole family we we struggle with it and so i try to keep my carbs really low i i'm not always in ketosis you know the ketogenic side but maybe i'll have a little bit of rice with dinner but most of the time i'm

just eating the protein i i don't go as far as dr baker does with only eating steak and eggs like that's that's what and right now it's carnivore months i've seen dr baker's post like he's like oh i ate this whole prime rib for day 15 you know but uh yeah i any on a weekend i'll i'll have a piece of pizza i'll have some but i i try to keep that stuff to a minimum most days i'm eating high protein moderate fat and pretty low carb what do you do with your kids because you know i've got a young daughter and uh she's just now transitioning from all you know breast milk and milk and all that to now like starting to eat solid foods and uh there's this like weird thing where uh you want her to eat right you want her to learn like you know she's using a fork now and like okay here we

go but also you're like hey i don't want to just give her a bunch of like high sugar foods right that seem to be kind of the standards like how do you think about that and especially because you have some kids that are a little bit older you know as kids and then you've got some that are still very young yeah so so my kids are probably a little different than they grew up with me you as their dad so we start from a young age i mean the first food that my kids are given is egg yolk you know when we're starting transition to more real food i give them egg yolk and maybe mash it up with some sweet potatoes something like that so i start them right away but my boy my oldest he's seven he's he's getting to be more like dad where we'll be eating you know i'll make some curry or

something and so that'll be some rice and he'll just say can i just have the chicken and i just say sure yeah go for it like i don't i don't care but yeah i we try to just for my kids we don't have a lot of junk in the house there's usually a bag of cereal or a box of cereal um but my kids don't eat every day my kids will do they do pancakes quite often and we're trying to make those higher protein pancakes where ideally there's maybe a whole egg per pancake type of thing and so so we try to mitigate that and kids can get away with you know eating more more carbs and stuff but yeah the big thing is just avoiding the junk with my kids they we don't have candy in the house we have ice cream only for a special thing you know if it's my you know my wife's

birthday was a couple days ago we had some some ice cream but it's just finding that balance right i don't want to be the the one who's like you know my kids never touch sugar ever because i think there's a place to have a treat every once in a while but um yeah for the most part my kids know the rule at my house is not you have to eat your vegetables the room my house you gotta eat your meat once you eat your meat you can be done if you want to be done and you get enough meat great and i i portion there i give them about what i think they need and a lot of times i'll ask for more if they don't great they still got enough like yeah i mean i'm not like i'm not as far as some guys on the anti-vegetable route but i i don't eat vegetables very often i don't make

them very often personally mostly because i don't like them but i don't think it's bad to eat them but in our house we don't need a lot what is the like anti-vegetable argument a lot of it on on those guys would be some of the chemicals in the vegetables the oxalates the the phytic acid um the you know just just the chemicals that the the plants have for protection lectins gluten some of that stuff right um and there there is some there are can be some people who are real sensitive to oxalates for instance oxalates you're going to find in like spinach and kale and more your leafy greens but but if someone wants to eat those that's easily mitigated steam your spinach the oxalates are going to break down um so that's the biggest argument that people have um i do

tend to think that fruit is is less harmful in general again i'm not saying vegetables are harmful but fruit isn't going to have as much of those chemicals but you add in the fact that our fruit has been so manipulated to be so high sugar now you have a little bit of issue there but if someone's eating fruit vegetables and meat i think they're they're going to be pretty healthy one of my biggest conclusions in talking to a bunch of people with all kind of different perspectives is like the zero to one improvement is like get off processed foods right and get more like natural food and then uh there's tons of variations between meat and vegetarian and fruititarian whatever um but uh but but really getting out of the processed food uh being the main you know

components of a diet is probably the single most important thing that's the single best thing that people can do just get the junk out i would say get the junk out increase your protein is where you're gonna find the best bang for your buck you'll probably get 80 90 of the improvement you could get just by making those two changes the last thing i want to talk about is where do you get your information from one of the things that uh somebody like me who's more of kind of a layman trying to learn about this stuff interested in this stuff uh not just for myself my wife my kid right uh my other family members is you go on twitter and it's hard to tell who's real who's not right um you go even online and you know i was talking to somebody yesterday uh who swears

by a specific diet and the american cancer society literally labels that uh kind of perspective of the world as quackery i was like okay i'm a chiropractor i'm used to that term i've heard that one before right so like as you're kind of like looking through all this stuff uh how do you maybe like what are the sources of information that you turn to and then like when you come across a new source or they're like a framework or somebody you use to evaluate just to let again increase the probability like what you're reading is actually valuable versus not yeah most one rule dumb as if it's in you know new york times or washington post or any of those i i think it's probably bs you know like because a lot of times they're cherry picking these studies that they're

quoting now i might see a headline and then i'll go read the study you know i and i have studied enough that i know how to interpret a study right so the things i'm looking for when i'm reading those studies is who funded this number one a lot of times these pro you know anti-meat pro vegetable study for instance like they're going to be funded a lot of times by organizations that are by the broccoli association exactly yeah yeah yeah these organizations that are anti-meat in general right and that doesn't mean that your study's bad but it introduces some bias you know things like that so that's one thing it's hard like say you go on twitter and how many nutrition bros are on twitter you know that read a nutrition book once and now they're an expert and not say they're

they're giving bad advice but you just gotta give it the what i call the sniff test right if it smells if it smells funny it probably is it's probably bad throw it out i i study guy benjamin bickman is one anything that guy puts out now he's more on the insulin resistance he's a great source if you want to learn how to be healthy study dr bickman's work he's a professor at byu and guys like Sean Baker, I just, you know, I love Dr. Baker. I've read his book too. I just read a lot and I try to find the trend. The trend right now, the more we're learning is higher protein is probably the key. It used to, for the last handful of years, it's been ketones, you know, keto, keto, keto, keto, everything. And I think keto is great too, but you just got to pull what resonates with

you out of what you're reading. Cause there's going to be something good and almost anything puts out but like say it's it's really hard to know the biggest thing is who's saying it you know when i have a you know you get the extreme with dr baker who's straight up carnivore dude has only eaten meat for like seven years and then you get some of these people on the complete opposite side of their straight vegan one thing i appreciate about dr baker is he's not telling everyone you gotta eat like i do yeah i i did right he made that very clear he was like look this works for me some people they don't like it they don't want to do it whatever he's like that's fine but like this works for me that that's what i appreciate about dr baker is he found what works for him

and he recommends it generally and he's seen it helped a lot of his patients but he allows that nuance of if you feel better eating some vegetables and fruit great do it whereas you get the the extreme opposite side the vegan side a lot of and there are vegans that are the same way right there are vegans that'll say yeah i feel better eating this way and if that's the case great good you i i tend to disagree i think it's an unhealthy way to eat but you get the others that and there's that moral ethical conversation when we talk talk with a lot of in the vegan community but a lot of them you know the meat is murder never eat meat it's killing you killing you like now see you're coming from a bias as well because they you know they don't want to harm animals and i can

appreciate that but the source is going to be your biggest key of yeah it's interesting that when you actually look at the studies you go and you see who funded is one of the biggest things you look at yeah have you ever seen a study funded by someone and it went against what they believe yeah it happens i mean a lot of times if it's a true science organization then yeah they just they just but this gets into the realm of what gets published and what doesn't a lot of times this happens all the time where they will do a study they won't like the result they don't publish a study so you never even see that study you never even see some of these negative studies like of the of the things that get published it's like over 90 percent of them

are positive you can't tell me over 90 percent of studies are positive there's not and and so there is that bias there as well so you have to take some that with a grain of salt when you read study but yeah most of the time just looking looking where some biases might be and even like you know if you're reading an article in a newspaper something pay attention what you know is this author someone who's written a lot about you know anti-meat or pro this pro that like you'll you'll find the biases and then they're gonna be cherry picking so the biggest advice i could give someone is just read a lot just study a lot read a lot of books read a lot of articles and you'll start to find a trend um that works for you you have one or two books that uh you suggest

if people are interested in health testosterone metabolism like are there one or two that stick out to you the biggest one that i recommend to everyone is actually dr bickman's book it's called why we get sick um dr bickman has been studying insulin resistance for 20 20 plus years i think like say he's a professor down at brigham young university in utah and that one is the key to insulin resistance is tied to every pretty much every chronic disease and is the cause of a lot of them so someone reads that book they can better understand what insulin resistance is and how they can help it dr bickman goes into that as well i do tell people to read the carnivore diet which is dr baker's book i think it's a great one the other one as far as like health goes i tell people

to read is why why we sleep which is by matthew walker who's a neuroscientist um i think cal berkeley or stanford he's out there in california but um that's just a great one of learning how important sleep is for your health uh that all three of those are uh are great books i haven't read uh why we get sick so i'm gonna pick that one up and yeah and now you uh you gave me a reading assignment which i always appreciate yeah um where can we send people to find you on the internet if they want to learn more uh either about the chiropractic practice or some of this other stuff yeah so my chiropractic practice is in wyoming if anyone's ever driving through star valley wyoming on their way to jackson stop in star valley it's it's great but online is you

on Twitter is the easiest way to get me. It's just Dr. Rich Huntsman, um, on Twitter. And then I do have a website that's drhuntsman.com. And I've got a couple of things on there, some guides of things to avoid if people want to learn more about the plastics and that stuff, things to avoid to help their testosterone. There's a free guide on there that they can download. Um, and I also, you know, I help people, I help people with this kind of stuff. Like I do virtual coaching and that kind of stuff. So people want to reach out to me on Twitter. That's, that's the best way to get me. I feel like I got a masterclass today. I really appreciate you coming and talking to me answering all my dumb questions. But you're doing some amazing work. And I think that just more

people who get educated, right? I always look at this as like the first step is kind of educating themselves on what are the potential downfalls of things that they're doing in their daily life. Some people will change, some people won't, right? And that's okay. But if you've got the information, at least you got, you know, the opportunity to change and really just comes down to kind of like, do you want to or not? Right. No one's going to hold a gun to your head and say, filter your water. Right, right. At least not yet in America. And so we'll see how it goes, but I really appreciate the time and I hope that everyone goes and checks out you both on Twitter and at the website. We'll do it again in the future. Yeah. I appreciate you

having me.