The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 265. Tyler LeBaron: Hydrogen Water, Mitochondrial Health, Selective Antioxidants, & Longevity

Starting point is 00:00:00 Alkaline water alone is not going to provide benefits. Even if you subscribe to the benefits that we need to maintain an alkaline body, you can't do with alkaline water. Everyone thinks that it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit. So many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4 pH water. Electr hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits to alkaline ionized water. The mechanism that hydrogen uses to leave the body's production of necessary for radicals alone, Reduce the harmful free radicals that we don't need and allow these cellular homeostasis to return.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Hydrogen acts as a therapeutic selective antioxidant. It doesn't change anything with the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances. So for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, what's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water? First, I would just consume it daily. When you drink hydrogen water, you'll... If you've ever spent money on alkaline water, I need you to hear this episode, because Dr. Tyler LeBaron, the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist,

Starting point is 00:01:13 author of over 50 peer-reviewed publications, is about to blow up everything you thought you knew. Here's the truth. Alkaline water's benefits have nothing to do with pH. Nothing. The clinical research shows that when you remove the dissolved hydrogen gas from alkaline water, every single benefit disappears. It was never the alkalinity.

Starting point is 00:01:32 It was always the hydrogen. And what Tyler reveals in this conversation is stunning. In a Japanese clinical trial, adding hydrogen gas to standard treatment, improve cardiac arrest survival from 61% to 85%. We're talking about 24 additional lives saved per 100 patients. Tyler explains how hydrogen works as a selective antioxidant, a redox adaptogen, that targets only the harmful free radicals while preserving the beneficial oxidative signals that your mitochondria need. This is the science everyone is sleeping on.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Don't skip this episode. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And every time I have a guest on the show, I get excited to talk to them about their subject area of expertise. And today's guest is someone I have been really dying to have on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:02:31 He is probably solely responsible for my foray into hydrogen water, hydrogen bathing, hydrogen inhalation, all things hydrogen. I have the deepest level of respect for this guest. He is probably the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist. I would argue that. He has published numerous papers in quality peer-reviewed journals. He holds a PhD in this area of science, and we are absolutely blessed to have Dr. Tyler LeBaron on the podcast today.

Starting point is 00:03:01 And I will say he's also become a good friend. And he was teaching me how to arm wrestle this morning, fully random sidebar, but we had a great workout this morning. And he was giving out, he's a professional arm wrestler, which is, you know, that's banging a 90 degree turn

Starting point is 00:03:16 from hydrogen studies. And so he was teaching Zach Efron and my son and I and all the guys how to arm wrestle this morning. So maybe before the podcast is over, we'll throw in some arm wrestling tips. It's all in the wrist.

Starting point is 00:03:30 That's right. I've just heard that. I don't know if that's true or not. So that's all. I've just given you, all my arm wrestling knowledge in one sentence. But Tyler, I'm so excited to have you on because I think people, when it comes to hydrogen water, hydrogen tablets, bathing in hydrogen, inhaling hydrogen, I think they fall into one or two

Starting point is 00:03:52 camps, in my opinion. There are the hardcore skeptics, and then there are the people that have actually gotten familiar with the science. and so I would love for you to just give my audience some background, you know, your personal story about how you got into this space because it is kind of random, right? I mean, you have a PhD and spend your time researching this smallest, lightest element in the universe and going so deep into that science,

Starting point is 00:04:24 but you've done it, you know. And so I'd love to hear the backsts, story of, you know, what got you interested. Well, again, thank you for having me on your show. I really appreciate an opportunity to educate. It is something very passionate about. I'm honored that you think so much in me. I do. I really do, man. I really stand on the heads of shoulders of giants. I mean, there's a lot of other researchers that are much more expert in their fields than I am. I've just been at this for 16 years. And I am really grateful for my mentors, who, and I go to these conferences in Asia and Europe

Starting point is 00:05:01 and meet with the researchers, and I'm just really grateful for them. And I have a lot of interest, like arm wrestling. I'm a wanted to be professional. I compete competitively, but there's, again, a lot of people who are a lot better than me, and I'm just grateful that I can be on this journey. And with that journey, though,

Starting point is 00:05:18 yeah, you know, I came across this whole hydrogen concept back in 2009. And I learned about it because you probably heard about, alkaline ionized water. Yes. Everybody's drinking alkaline water. Yeah. Which is unfortunate.

Starting point is 00:05:31 We'll get to that. Yeah. But see, I learned about this. And this is, I was always interested in science and just health, but this is before I had, you know, any real science training or knowledge. And but there was some papers on this alkaline ionized water. And I was like, this is interesting. But I want to understand.

Starting point is 00:05:47 I was asking, you know, the different people, like, how does this work? And all the answers were kind of contradicting each other. And then I went to the university and asked my professors, well, how does alkaline water work? You know, why would this help? And they explained to me that it's not going to help. Right. And it wasn't just, you know, making fun of me per se,

Starting point is 00:06:07 but explaining logically the reasons why it's alkaline water alone is not going to provide benefits. And that raised the question then, how is it possible that this water could have any benefits? Which also raises the question. First, before we try to figure out how something works, we first need to figure it out if it works. Right.

Starting point is 00:06:27 And so that was my very first forte or foray into research is I did a little study. It's a pilot study. And I found that drinking alkaline ionized water that was fresh could provide some exercise benefits. Basically I had during lactate thresholds running. The late onset muscle soreness. Yeah, that area. Lactate threshold, they could exercise a little bit longer.

Starting point is 00:06:51 And anyways, this gave me some high. I guess some push that I should want to research this more and try to understand why. But it was in this investigations and reading more of the literature that I came across this article published in nature medicine on hydrogen gas being therapeutic. Now, I didn't understand the significance of that at the time, but when I was talking to one of my professors, a biochemistry professor, he had printed that article off. And he handed it.

Starting point is 00:07:20 And I went to his office. I went to his office all the time. We're always talking about different things. and he had printed that off and he, because he said, and I was really thinking about this whole alkaline-ionized water thing and your write-up,

Starting point is 00:07:30 you cited this paper, pulled it off and had it to me and he says, you know, Tyler, I think there's something here. And when he said that, I just, I felt something inside of me saying,

Starting point is 00:07:45 this is really interesting. This is something I want to research. I want to understand this because hydrogen gas is so easy, to get. It's all over the place. It's not... It's the most prevalent element in the universe, right? It is. Exactly. It's smallest, the lightest, it's highest on the periodic table. Right. It's 10% of our body weight is hydrogen. Yeah, a different form of hydrogen. Yes, that's actually a good point because we want to talk about

Starting point is 00:08:10 and separate between hydrogen gas and the different types of hydrogen. Like hydrogen ion versus H2. Yes, or the hydrogen that's in compounds. And, but let me... Yeah, why don't we impact that first? Then I want to talk about this. nature medicine paper so we can understand why this is so significant, right? Yeah. And throughout this podcast, I just want to say through the outset, you know, I am really happy to be here to educate because it's something I'm passionate about with my research. And it's exciting to see this filled emerging, but often some of the marketing or excitement outpaces the actual evidence. Yeah. And, you know, but if I'm, if I don't come and educate, well, then who's going to do the education?

Starting point is 00:08:51 They might be talking about things that aren't necessarily true or the hydrogen is going to alkalize your cells or something and that's not how it works, right? So I'm really going to try to do my best to stick to the science and help us understand how it's supposed to work. What does the research actually say? And just people can kind of get ground a little bit more, right? Because I think that the preliminary evidence is interesting enough

Starting point is 00:09:16 that it should give us posturally think about it, right? Yeah. Yeah, and so this nature article, I don't mean to cut you off. What was the subject of the nature article? Okay, yeah. Because that is a very serious, for those of you that are not familiar with that journal, that is a very significant, highly regarded peer-reviewed journal. I mean, you don't just throw papers into nature.

Starting point is 00:09:37 Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so basically it was with a scheming reprimation injury. This was specifically in a stroke model. So what they did is they took these rats, and they induced a stroke model. It's called the Middle Sribal Aureole. so they cut the blood supply to the brain and that's going to cause damage. Right. Because you have no oxygen-rich blood going to the brain.

Starting point is 00:09:56 Yeah. And then when you let the blood go back to the brain, well, now that blood is auction-rich and that auction-rich blood goes to the brain and it causes what's known as a reprimusion injury. So you have a schemia and reprimusion. And this, or an IR injury. And this is a major problem with strokes or any time you're cutting the blood supply like that. Well, they used high-reaching.

Starting point is 00:10:19 hydrogen gas and they only use 2% hydrogen gas, which is important because above 4% hydrogen gas is explosive. Right. But if you keep it below that, then it's not explosive and it still had these therapeutic effects. Now, you could probably add this in the show notes and you can look at the figure and you can see this white portion of the brain, the rat brain, and that the white area is the dead area of the brain. And that's when no hydrogen gas was given. or helium gas was also administered and there was no effect.

Starting point is 00:10:53 But when only 2% hydrogen gas was given, it dramatically prevented the brain damage from this stroke model. You don't have to be a scientist to look and see. You can see the difference right there. And then what they did then is to figure out a mechanism is they dissolved the hydrogen gas into cell culture media.

Starting point is 00:11:14 Okay, so remember it's just a gas, it's dissolved in cell culture media, and then they add a some like, mitochondrial toxins and things that would create a lot of free radicals, because that's what happens during the ischemia reprimia reperfusion injury is for radical damage. So the adder some toxins in there, create more free radicals, and they found that hydrogen gas also was able to reduce the oxidative stress that was

Starting point is 00:11:33 going on. Right. So the article of this paper was entitled that hydrogen acts as a therapeutic, selective antioxidant. And it was able to help prevent this brain damage. from this stroke study. So going back to my story, when my professor, you know, had this paper to me and he felt, hey, there's really something here.

Starting point is 00:11:58 That was very exciting to me. And seeing how the study basically ignited the interest in hydrogen research, I went and I looked at all the studies and everything I could find at the time, and there were only 50 or so publications on hydrogen. It's like 1,500 now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. around 1,500 studies of maybe over 3,000 publications in total. I mean, I have authored over 50 publications on hydrogen now, you know, now, you know, compared to back in 2009.

Starting point is 00:12:29 But maybe we should just break down again the different forms of hydrogen, just so we can make sure everyone's on the same page. Would that be helpful? That would be very helpful. I just, I think when we think about water, for example, we already know water is H2O, so water already has hydrogen in it. And that's the biggest blowback that I get when I tell people that, you know, I drink hydrogen rich water every day and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. Hydrogen is already in water. But those molecules are spoken for, right?

Starting point is 00:12:59 I mean, they're already bound. Yeah. So this is like H2O plus H2, H2, H2, H2, H2, right? Yeah, and it doesn't change the chemistry of the water. So if we can actually say there's several different species or forms that hydrogen exist. And let's just go through them briefly. Okay. If you go to the period table of element, you'll see that hydrogen is number one, right?

Starting point is 00:13:19 That's elementary school, hygiene is number one. That hygiene has one proton and one electron, and it's all by itself. That's atomic hydrogen. But if it's just a single electron, it doesn't want to stay by itself. That hydrogen atom is going to want to react with pretty much anything. If it reacts with nitrogen, you can form things like amino acids or like ammonia, right? And hydrogen, nitrogen compounds. It can react with carbon to form hydrocarbons, like carbohydrates, gasoline,

Starting point is 00:13:46 All of these types of these are hydrocarbons. It could react with oxygen to form things like water, H2O. And like what you talked, you used to mention how these other atoms are spoken for. So you look at the water molecule, there's the oxygen, and then hydrogen is attached to the oxygen. So it looks like Mickey Mouse. Right. And then to hydrogens are attached to that oxygen molecule. So it kind of tie it up, right?

Starting point is 00:14:10 So again, hydrogen can react with nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, or. Or it could react with another hydrogen atom. And if it did, it would make a hydrogen atom here. And a hydrogen atom here, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. So instead of a water molecule, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. We call that molecular hydrogen. Great. And this is the diatomic gas.

Starting point is 00:14:30 This is what we're talking about. This odorless. It's tasteless. It's flammable above 4%. This is the gas. And when you take this gas and you dissolve it into water, you don't change the pH. You don't change the structure of the water or anything.

Starting point is 00:14:45 So pH, people get confused because when they hear pH, it stands for, in their mind, potential hydrogen. Yeah. But what form of hydrogen? That hydrogen and pH is the hydrogen ion. It's the H plus ion. So if you look at a table of elements again

Starting point is 00:15:02 and you have the hydrogen atom has a proton and electron. If you take away that electron, you just have a proton. Right. That is the hydrogen ion. That's what makes acid base. Okay.

Starting point is 00:15:14 And everyone thinks that it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit. But it sounds like you're going to make the argument that it's the hydrogen driving the benefit. Yes, it's a hydrogen gas. Yeah, hydrogen gas is totally different than alkaline pH. They're totally different concepts. There's no similarity other than we're using the word hydrogen. But the hydrogen ion is just a proton. The hydrogen gas we're talking about is two protons, two electrons, two electrons bound together in a covalent bond.

Starting point is 00:15:42 that is a strong covalent bond. So if you dissolve hydrogen gas into water, it's not going to dissociate into protons and electrons. It stays always with hydrogen gas. It also doesn't structure the water or do any changes to the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas. So if you take, I see you have some supplements here

Starting point is 00:16:03 like Perfect Aminos or electrolyte powder, let's say. If you were to dissolve those as you do into water, it doesn't change anything with the water. it's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances. In the same way, you can take the hydrogen gas, you dissolve it into the water, you drink the water, the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas into the body. Okay.

Starting point is 00:16:23 That makes a lot of sense. So this article initially got you interested, and then you went on this for a overseas, and you started looking at different research institutions, reading about different peer-reviewed papers. You eventually decided to affiliate with one of those and start doing some of your own research. And I've read most of what you've published.

Starting point is 00:16:48 I've also read other publications, you know, on traumatic brain injuries and post-concussive injuries, comparing hydrogen, soaking limbs in hydrogen immediately after a traumatic event versus the current protocol, which is like the Rice Protocol, rest, ice, compress, and elevate. And, you know, some of these were very small trials. some of them or even end of one. But what seems fascinating to me is the number of applications

Starting point is 00:17:17 across the so many different categories, athletic performance, you know, brain health, inflammation, selective antioxidants, PCOS, hormone balance, cardiovascular conditions. I mean, and I want to get into some of those. But so you then affiliate some of these research institutions overseas. Because, so I was majoring in biochemistry, and for one of the degree of requirements, we had to complete an internship. And so I thought, where do I want to do my internship?

Starting point is 00:17:48 I want to do it in hydrogen gas. That would be amazing. There were a couple places in the USA doing things. There were some place in Pittsburgh, Oslo Malinda University. But most of the research was out of Japan. And I got some favorable place. Actually, NASA was also interested in hygiene therapy because of radio protective effects. So I actually had some email correspondence with all these groups.

Starting point is 00:18:07 And they were all, you know, willing to work something out, but they weren't doing a lot of active research. So I realized I really need to go to Japan. And I chose at Nagoya University, where Professor Ono, how I consider it a great mentor of mine, was there. And I researched it at Nagoya University in neurogenetics. And we took hydrogen gas and dissolved it into cell culture media and looked at the effects of hydrogen gas on various cell signaling pathways.

Starting point is 00:18:35 And that's when I was able to meet. a lot of other researchers, I mean, top experts in the field, like Dr. Ota, for example, is a mitochondrial expert. And that is the foundation of human optimization, human performance, longevity, anti-aging, wellness, whatever you want to call it. I mean, most of the really, I would say, sound research that I think is going to move the needle is already inside the mitochondria. Yeah. You know, 110 trillion of these in our body. Another 10% of our body weight is mitochondria. I think few people really understand the significance of mitochondrial metabolism and it's links to all forms of

Starting point is 00:19:15 disease and pathology. At some point, I can't think of a disease ideological pathway that does not operate by either directly or indirectly interrupting mitochondrial metabolism. Yeah, the mitochondria is very important. And we know when we make our energy, for example, we make ATP. They didn't seem triphosphate, right? That's the end. energy currency of the cell. And the mitochondria make up like 90% of all that ATP. And you need about as much ATP as you weigh per day. So if you're 150 pounds, you need 150 pounds of ATP, you know, turnover cycling. So your mitochondria has to turn this out, just recycling very, very quickly. And so it's a core organelle that's not just for energy production, but sensing so many different areas

Starting point is 00:20:00 of redox homeostasis. And that involves an inflammatory response. And that helps understand actually a lot of the reasons why molecular hydrogen has any biological effect or therapeutic effects that we're seeing in some of these studies. So you go over to Japan because I know that you actually authored the paper on looking at alkaline water benefits versus the benefits of hydrogen. Yes, that's the key. That's the one that blew my mind. This one is a very important one because it's not just a study, but it's actually a comprehensive

Starting point is 00:20:33 review article of all the studies that published at the time on alkaline ionized water including a paper that I was involved in and so many groups demonstrated that when you simply remove the hydrogen gas from alkaline

Starting point is 00:20:49 ionized water, the benefits are eliminated. Wow. And that blows a hole in some of the claims that the benefits are alkaline pH. I hope you guys are listening to this. Alkaline water is garbage. And I think so many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4, you know, pH water.

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Starting point is 00:21:41 No, no, and there's correlations. There's no benefit to an alkaline pH itself, but it depends on why it's alkaline. Because if you are to get certain minerals water, for example, a lot of times mineral water is alkaline because it has minerals in them and our balance with, say, bicarbonate ions. But it ends up being those minerals, like some more magnesium, some...

Starting point is 00:22:02 calcium, some, you know, manganese, you know, another trace minerals. I had mineral salts. Yeah, so that's good for you, right? But it's not, again, to your point, it's not because of the pH. And like our body already buffers the pH very well. And in fact, when you... And the range is very narrow. Yes.

Starting point is 00:22:19 Yeah. Yeah, 7.35, 7.45 is kind of what we say. And you know that when you just hold your breath, for example, that urge to breathe, it actually comes because you start to build up acidity. You start to build hydrogen ions, and so you want to excel out, because people can try this. Take a straw, for example, and blow into water with pH drops, and you can see that the pH starts to go down because CO2 dissolves in the blood to create carbonic acid, and that makes hydrogen ions. So in the same way, like when you exercise, you break down your carbohydrates and fats into CO2. The CO2 dissolves into your blood and lowers the pH.

Starting point is 00:22:57 So by you exhaling, you remove that CO2 and the pH is able to help to maintain. That's also why sometimes when you're in shock, for example, people will start to hyperventilate. And you exhale so much CO2, the blood pH starts to go up a little bit too high. And now people can start actually like tweaking their arms or going like these contortions. You start to raise the pH so high that you start to ionize various proteins. And now that the cell membrane potential reaches threshold easier. For example, when you start to get muscle contractions, your alpha motor neurons activate your skeletal muscles.

Starting point is 00:23:33 So you get these contractions, for example. Yeah. And just those small changes in the pH. Yeah, exactly. Because you're breathing the bag, then you're reabsorbing the CO2. You're keeping that CO2 level so you don't raise that up higher.

Starting point is 00:23:45 So point is, even if you subscribe to the benefits that we need to maintain an alkaline body or something, you can't do with alkaline water. Breathing is much more effective, right? And even when you look at like, say, pH of 10, a pH of tan is, although it's alkaline, it's not really a buffer. That's why just a drop or two of lemon juice brings the pH right down. In contrast to say baking soda, which is a pH of 8.1, that can neutralize thousands of liters of alkaline water, but it would take thousands of liters of alkaline water to neutralize the same amount of acid because of the buffering effect.

Starting point is 00:24:21 Right. Okay. So then you, the first paper that you were involved in, was this the paper that was looking at alkaline water? Yeah, that's one of the first, yeah, well, it's one of the early ones. We actually looked at, it was an animal study in NAFLD, and we found that we first did an experiment

Starting point is 00:24:42 where we were using alkaline ionized water. This is a collaboration that I was doing out of a group out of Israel. And there was no benefit. and they were surprised. And I was like, well, what's the hydrogen gas concentration? And they got to figure out how to do that. So they measured the concentration, and it was pretty low. It was like 0.3 milligram per liter or so.

Starting point is 00:25:02 And it's like, I think the concentration needs to be higher because the other studies were using a higher concentration. So now they can measure hydrogen. It took a long time to do this. This was like several year experiment that we were involved in. Increased the concentration of hydrogen using different methods, and then we're able to do two different groups where we could do a higher and a lower concentration.

Starting point is 00:25:20 The low concentration, again, no benefits at all. Even though it had like a negative ORP, it was an alkaline pH, all the same properties, no benefits. The higher concentration did have obvious benefits. So that was published back in 2018, 2019 or so. But we worked on since like 2014 for quite a while. Actually, earlier than that. But the main article is this comprehensive review article. You can look at it.

Starting point is 00:25:46 It's called Electrolize Reduced Water Review 1. and there's two reviews. There's review one and review two. And there's just comprehensive review to go through any question or any thought you've ever had about this area. It goes through the water,

Starting point is 00:25:59 micro-clustering claims, alkaline pH, negative ORP aspects. It just systematically goes through every one of them and conclusively demonstrates that molecular hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits, if there are any, to alkaline-ionized water.

Starting point is 00:26:15 Right. So you also authored a paper, I think, which may be in my opinion the most impactful paper that you've ever authored or co-authored. And that was understanding the exact mechanism by which hydrogen acts inside the mitochondria. And I think it's, I don't think most people absorb what it means to be a selective antioxidant versus an antioxidant. So maybe we could talk about what makes something an antioxidant. You know, what is oxidative stress? and why do you not want to over suppress it?

Starting point is 00:26:50 You know, and why could that be dangerous? And what's unique about hydrogen that it restores this redox homeostasis versus just oversuppressing, you know, oxidative-free rations? So let's do this. So let's go through some history, okay? We're going to go start with that nature medicine publication and then we're going to talk about the benefits

Starting point is 00:27:07 and problems with antioxidants in general, and that'll lead us to this target of hydrogen that we recently published. And that explains everything. I can tell you're so proud of it. You smile when you say, say it, dude. You're proud of that one. I read it too. It was very, very well authored. Well, and again, I'm just, I'm just one of the authors. I was happy to be involved with that paper,

Starting point is 00:27:26 but really the harder research belongs to the other authors. And I was just grateful to be part of it. Because when I was in Japan, back in 2013, is when I proposed this concept. And we stayed in communication, you know, talking about it and working on it for a long time. That's why I'm happy because it's over 10 years of work. A lot of effort went into this. But let's talk about some background information to understand why this is so important. If you remember with that Nature Medicine publication,

Starting point is 00:27:57 it talked about how hydrogen acts is a selective antioxidant. And that's a key word about that selectivity because we don't want just more antioxidants. Because antioxidants aren't necessarily a good thing. And the research has shown that over and over again. and that's because it turns out we actually need free radicals so let's just break this down

Starting point is 00:28:20 and maybe a step back we know that if you too much oxidation is bad so if you take like an apple and you cut in half it's going to turn brown and avocado turns brown you have rusting

Starting point is 00:28:29 all that is literally oxidation right we are breathing right now and that oxygen going into our bodies is oxidizing it's oxidizing ourselves it's also what's driving life

Starting point is 00:28:40 that's how our metabolism works It's oxygen work as at the complex for the electron transport chain, literally consuming the electrons from our foods, making metabolic water, that process oxidation. But see, sometimes during that process and electron transport chain, that oxygen gets consumed prematurely by electrons. It gets electrons prematurely, and that creates free radicals. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:05 Okay, this is going to be really important. So I just want to set this up a little bit more in the mitochondria. This is where we're at. We're going deep into the cell, into the mitochondrial, And you have what's called the electron transport chain, right? And there's four main complexes, complex one, two, three, and four. And basically you get electrons that are passed from complex one, and then those get passed to KU10, actually, ubiquinol,

Starting point is 00:29:29 and then they go to Complex 3. Elections from Complex 2 also go there. They go to Complex 3. So Complex 3 is very important. There's even all these electrons, okay, we're going to come back to this. It's going to be important. So remember, Complex 2 is very important. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:42 Then the electrons go from Complex 3, one electron at a time, a little bit dangerous, one electron at time through Cytochrome C, go to Complex 4, a Complex 4, those electrons typically will combine with oxygen and two hydrogen ions, and you make water. Right. Okay, so you make water inside of monocondri. Exactly, right? During this process, you make what's known as the proton gradient, hydrogen ion gradient. So in the inner membrane space of the mitochondria, you put a whole bunch of preroling.

Starting point is 00:30:09 you put a whole bunch of protons there it's pumping against its concentration gradient and then those hydrogen ions are able to go through the ATP synthase enzyme sometimes called Complex 5 but it goes through this enzyme and you makes ATP turns out lots of ATP now as I said oxygen is a strong oxidizer

Starting point is 00:30:26 so you inhale the oxygen is going to bind on your hemoglobin it has some of the iron right on your hemoglobin so it can bind there and that's important because you want to kind of sequester oxygen as much as you can in the blood you don't want to have a whole bunch of oxygen floating freely all over the place all the time. The hemoglobin goes down, goes into like sitting in muscle cells,

Starting point is 00:30:47 and the pH is lower, which is actually going to cause the hemoglobin to slightly shift its confirmation. It's going to allow oxygen to leave the hemoglobin easier. As soon as that oxygen diffuses out, it's immediately get sucked up by the mitochondria. And at Complex 4 and converts into water. That way there's like hardly any oxygen at any time in the cells. Because that oxygen, if it goes in the cell membranes, it's going to cause oxidation. It's going to cut in a cytosol oxidation, free radicals, damage, right? As it goes in

Starting point is 00:31:14 the mitochondria, there's electrons in the electron transport chain, are being transported. But sometimes that oxygen could actually consume those electrons that say at Complex 1, or sometimes at Complex 3, or through the Simoquinone radical that was creative. Kou 10, that enzyme ubiquinol, it can be a ubiquitone radical, for example. And oxygen can be, oxygen can be, get reduced, receive an electron. When oxygen gets a one electron reduction, it's called a superoxide anion radical. Now, that radical, it turns out it's beneficial and harmful. So beneficial to a certain level, harmful at a certain level. Like a lot of species, hydrogen peroxide. Yes, that's another one. You know, very necessary, but it can also be very damaged.

Starting point is 00:32:00 What happens, because hydrogen peroxide comes next, what happens is actually a certain signaling effect that superoxide can do, and then this enzyme, superoxide dismutase, can convert superoxide to hydroproxide, let's say, or to water. And then hydroporoxide also has certain signaling effects it can do. And then there's even a specific ocoporone or protein channel for aquaporin to transverse to do further signaling. And then say like catalase,

Starting point is 00:32:27 so glutathymor peroxidase can get rid of that. So these free radicals are literally produced for specific signaling effects that our bodies literally need in order to have normal, mitochondrial function. So the mitochondria regulates our entire like redox homeostasis. That's the main area. There's other enzymes like the NADPH oxidase or these NOx enzymes and number of the enzymes that make free radicals, but the

Starting point is 00:32:52 mitochondria is very crucial and it plays the largest role in making free radicals. But see our body has developed in ways to create a small amount of free radicals when needed and to do specific signaling. So when we exercise, we're breeding more oxygen. We're using more oxygen. Right. So what happens to the free radicals? They increase. That increase in free radicals, in turn, signals our body to make more mitochondria, to make our muscles work better, to do a whole bunch of signaling effects. That hormetic stress. It's a hormetic stress. Exactly. You have a positive response.

Starting point is 00:33:29 So is it fair to say that we actually don't want to oversuppress oxidation? That's the point. That's exactly right. You've used this terms, redox homeostasis. I want to pause on that first. second because redox homeostasis is this balance between oxidation and reduction, right? And ideally we want it to be in balance. We don't want to over suppress oxidation. We also don't want to over, we don't have too much inflammation or oxidation either. And with antioxidants, you really don't know if you're oversuppressing it or if you maybe you just inadvertently hit the target. But, you know, if you're piling a bunch of vitamin C or beta care.

Starting point is 00:34:09 or something like that into the body. Yes, it's an antioxidant, but I think there's a prevailing thought that, well, oxidation's bad, more antioxidants must be good. Yeah, you hit the nail in the head and the only technicality is technically we don't really want to balance,

Starting point is 00:34:26 we want homeostasis, and the difference is that balance would mean they're equal and that's dead, right? So we can't say that oxidation is just bad, in the same way we can't say reduction is just bad. You need to have both of them. And that's why I like the term redox, because redox means oxidation and reduction. And you want to have that homeostasis.

Starting point is 00:34:45 So our body, I was going through that whole transport chain because we want to see that we are designed to make free radicals to do certain signaling effects, and then our body naturally gets rid of them through our body's natural antioxidants. Right. Now, what happens, though, with aging, with environmental toxins and whatever, what have you, or just... Exercise? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:08 Yeah, or if you're not exercising inactivity, then your natural body's ability to produce antioxidants goes down. Your mitochondria become dysfunctional as well. You start to increase more free radicals. You increase free radicals at the point you are now suffering from oxidative stress, right? That's a bad thing. You don't want the stress. You want a hormetic type of effect, but not an excessive amount.

Starting point is 00:35:32 And so maintaining, again, maintain a redox homeostasis is why it's so important. So our body contains our own antioxidants, right? Glutothion, we mentioned these, right? There's a whole bunch of them. And all plants do the same thing. That's why if you have like your apples, for example, if they're on the tree, they're not turning brown because they also have antioxidants in them.

Starting point is 00:35:54 And that's why when we eat, say, the apples or the carrots or what have you, we get those antioxidants inside of us, these polyphenols that can scavenge some of these antioxidants, or some of the oxidants, right? Now, it turns out, though, that when you basically isolate these potent antioxidants, all of the cells, or you have synthetic forms, and you just ingest high amounts of them, well, that's going to be problematic, kind of what you pointed out, because now we're potentially blunting those fruit radicals that our body specifically produced

Starting point is 00:36:24 so that we could have improved mitochondrial function or mitochondria biogenesis. So when we look at these studies, we can clearly see that if you're eating a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables and so on, then you have your antioxidant, your homeostasis, your redoxys homostasis, everything is good. It's healthy. But when you start to perturb that, either by doing things that are very oxidatively harmful, like, say, smoking, or just environmental toxins,

Starting point is 00:36:51 or you have low physical activity, because low physical activity will result in lower levels of your body's natural antioxidants, okay? Then you have oxidative stress. Right. Also, if you start taking high doses of, say, synthetic antioxidants, then you start to cause a disequilibrium or you blunting, yeah. You blunt those benefits.

Starting point is 00:37:13 So you can actually see a number of, especially in animal studies, but clinical studies as well, a number of them have actually shown that antioxidants might actually blunt exercise training adaptations. Wow. So you don't get mitochondria biogenesis. You don't get improved, say, insulin sensitivity. or if you're bunting the inflammatory response, right, we need these things. We need to maintain the homeostasis.

Starting point is 00:37:37 And so that's why we don't want to just take a bunch of antioxidants. And it's why hydrogen is so different than any other antioxidant. And I want to talk about this for just a second. This is just basic chemistry, actually. But the reason why it's selective is because hydrogen gas does not react with the beneficial free radicals. It only reacts with the harmful ones. That is so incredible that it's, that word selective means it's reacting with the harmful free articles

Starting point is 00:38:04 like the hydroxyl free radicals and not interacting with the beneficial free radicals and allowing the body to just perform that function on its own. Because I mean, there's nothing more intelligent than our own innate, you know, system. You know, that electron transport chain was designed for a reason. It innately knows what it's doing. And it's right there in that same nature medicine publication. It's such a landmark. paper, they took, say, nitic oxide, superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radical formation

Starting point is 00:38:35 through the fenton reaction. And they add a vitamin C or hydrogen gas. And you can see that vitamin C neutralized everything. The good, the bad, everything. So vitamin C is great. It's going to get rid of the bad, but high amounts could also get rid of the good. Right. Okay. Hygidin and gas. When you put that with, say, superoxide or other free radicals, there was no reaction. It That's so awesome. It's thermodynamics possible, but it's kinetically infeasible based upon these rate constants. The hydroxyl radical is so reactive that it will react with anything.

Starting point is 00:39:09 Yeah. Anything that's in its vicinity. And that's really the only free radical that I'm aware of that has no known benefit in the body. Pretty much. Right? I mean... Maybe by accident.

Starting point is 00:39:19 Okay, because ostensibly we'd want to take that as close to zero as possible. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's just because it reacts so quickly with anything. and that's going to cause DNA damage and all sorts of problems. All the other ones can kind of be regulated

Starting point is 00:39:33 and your body have a natural detoxification systems for that like the superoxideous mutase enzyme, right, and all the other ones. So we're going through some of this history. We first see the hydrogen is selected because it can only react with the most oxidative or strongest radicals and most harmful ones, right? And it's small enough, it can actually get into the mitochondria. Whereas again, these other long...

Starting point is 00:39:58 hydro antioxidants, maybe like vitamin E, which is more, it's larger, but it's also more lipophilic. So maybe it can't, you know, easily transfuse into the cytosol and then go into the mitochondria or different areas. Hygiene gas can do that, where vitamin C is more water soluble. So it's going to have a harder time going through the cell membrane. It has to go through a transporter protein. Hygiene gas, again, there's no problem. It can diffuse very easily into the mitochondria.

Starting point is 00:40:25 and there it can help with these free radicals and access to letive antioxidation. There are three ways that hydrogen is helping with this antioxidative process, and that's one of them is it's only going to react with the most toxic hydroxyl radicals if it reacts with them at all. I hope people are picking up on the fact that, you know, how profound that is, because it is the only selective antioxidant that I've ever been able to find in any kind of research,

Starting point is 00:40:55 you know, antioxidants are, you know, abundant, but selective antioxidants, the mechanism that hydrogen uses to leave the body's production of free radicals, necessary free radicals alone, reduce the harmful free radicals that we don't need, and allow this cellular homeostasis to return. I mean, you just can't overemphasize how unique hydrogen is in that way. Yeah. And that's actually, as cool as that is, that's a minor mechanism by which it exerts these

Starting point is 00:41:31 antioxidant effects. Really? The other big one is because it's able to regulate your body's innate or natural antioxidant defense mechanisms. Wow. So it can even bring

Starting point is 00:41:42 redox up? That's right. Wow. So you have like your natural antioxidants, glutathione, superoxid mutase. These are all regulated

Starting point is 00:41:52 by this transcription factor the NRF2 pathways, NRF2 keep one pathway. What happens, this is a protein that's in the cytosol. And when you get oxidative stress that's happening, then you get oxidation of this, like keep one factor basically, and then the NRF2 can diffuse into the nucleus, thereby into the DNA,

Starting point is 00:42:10 and then you get this basically just transcription of your body's natural antioxidants. So it's trying to protect itself. Exactly. Cadillase, glutathione. They all start to increase. Yeah, NRF2 regulates over 200 different cytoprotective proteins and enzymes. Wow. And this is the other cool thing.

Starting point is 00:42:26 So intelligent. It's just my numbing. Hydrogen is only going to upregulate NRF2 when the cell needs it. So if you have a cell, we published studies on this, demonstrating that hydrogen can regulate NRF2, but only if there was a stress. Wow. So if the cell is, if you take hydrogen and gas, you put in a cell culture and you measure NRF2 levels from a healthy cell, you don't see any NRF2 protein. changes. You might see some changes in

Starting point is 00:42:55 mRNA, but just because you see something that MRI doesn't mean it's actually at the protein level. But in general, you don't see any real changes at the protein level. But if you were to add, say, environmental toxin, some stressor or something that would normally cause oxidative damage in the

Starting point is 00:43:12 cell, and then you administer hydrogen gas, that's when you see the rescuing effect of hydrogen. Wow. So hydrogen is able to go to the individual cells, knock on the door, and say, okay, how are you doing? How is your reidoxoneostasis, what do you need? Do you need the NRF2 upregulated or not? And so it's only going to basically upregulate the NRF2 pathway in the cells that are suffering from not having enough NRF2

Starting point is 00:43:35 where you want to bring those, say, glutothion levels up higher. Yeah. So this is a key mechanism because, again, yes, superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, these are all good, but again, only if you have it at the right concentration and the right location for the right duration, if you start making to many of these because you have a hyperactivated, say, NOx enzyme system or certain complexes of the mitochondria, that's when it becomes problematic. Hydrogen is able to regulate our body's natural antioxidant so our body can naturally detoxify these oxidants

Starting point is 00:44:10 before they get too high and to help clear them. It's actually using the innate intelligence of the DNA to regulate that system instead of circumventing the DNA and just suppressing it on its own. Yeah, exactly. It's regulating everything. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:27 And then there's a third way. I said there's three ways. We've talked about two so far. The third way is that hydrogen, because it's signaling effects, it can actually help to suppress excess oxidation that's occurring. It's more of a modulator because in some cases, hydrogen is able to, if there's an excess amount of free radical that are being produced, say a complex one of the mitochondria,

Starting point is 00:44:54 or NAD pH oxidase enzymes, these nox enzymes, or neuronal nitric oxide synthesis, where you're getting too much nitric oxide in the brain that's causing nitrous state of stress. It happens in Alzheimer's patients. It happens in autistic patients, ostensibly because of the gut dysbiosis,

Starting point is 00:45:15 but you see very high levels of nitric oxide, which most people think just has a vasodilation effect, which it does, but it can also be a toxic gas. Yes, it is a free radical. It can be very toxic when you have dysregulation. And that's another key area that hydrogen helps to regulate. See, hydrogen gas is it react. I'm so glad I'll take hydrogen water every day.

Starting point is 00:45:33 Dude, if you're not convinced, like, halfway through this podcast, like, I'm going to take something right now. Well, I mean, the mechanisms are very interesting, but we're still looking at the clinical evidence on this, and it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very exciting. But the nitic oxide one is very interesting, because, again, nitric oxide hydrogen gas don't react, but hydrogen gas can regulate its production.

Starting point is 00:45:56 Yeah. And so these different enzymes, if they get too high, like for example, you have superoxide that's produced from the NOx enzyme, and you have high levels of nitric oxide, if those levels get high, they immediately react. I mean, the only thing that slows the reaction is the rate of diffusion. And when they do react, you form perioxy nitrite, which is a strong oxidative molecule.

Starting point is 00:46:18 So hydrogen is essentially preventing that, that formation because it's able to decrease the amount of free radicals that were produced in the first place. Yeah. So you have prevention. But it's not more than just prevention because, as I said earlier, our bodies need free radicals. So sometimes the cells need a little boost. And so in a number of studies, including our own that we'll talk about here in just a second,

Starting point is 00:46:43 we can see that hydrogen gas can transiently increase small levels of free radicals. so it can increase, say, superoxide production for just a little bit. It's a small transit level. That's kind of a hormetic stressor. My point is, is thinking about hydrogen is going to do. Go to this cell, and this is not really accurate, but I'm just trying to explain this kind of a layman idea

Starting point is 00:47:06 because we can look at the cell culture studies on this. So hygiene gas goes to this cell. Oh, you're not producing enough free radicals to have the hormetic stress, right? So we increase your superoxide production. Now that could in turn activate NRF2, you can have higher levels of endogenous antioxidant self-defense system. It goes to this.

Starting point is 00:47:25 Coutrethione, catalyse all these others, right? So that's that cell. Right. The same body. We're talking about the same human. Yeah. Now we go to the other cell, the other, and different organ

Starting point is 00:47:32 or an adjacent cell, who knows. And this one says, oh, you know what? You are suffering from oxidative distress. I'm going to decrease the amount of oxidation that's occurring. I'm going to help suppress or downregulate NADPH oxidase system. I'm going to help decrease amount

Starting point is 00:47:48 of free radicals that are being produced. All right. And then it can go to another cell and it can say, oh, you know, I'm going to modulate your entire free radical production so you have a better homelostasis, right? Or maybe it's going to go into another cell

Starting point is 00:48:04 and it's just going crazy. Schemerepufution, you have hydroxyl radicals being produced just like crazy. And hydrogen gases, if it's there, it can react with the hydroxor radicals and form water. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:15 So you have... Completely neutralizing, the worst free radical in the body. Wow. I mean, it's, I hope mechanistically people are really grasping how incredibly unique that is. It's almost like an intelligent molecule, right? I mean, it sort of arrives and then assesses and can shift its impact based on really what that redox, homeostatic environment needs, an improvement in, in redox, a reduction in oxidation.

Starting point is 00:48:47 And that's just so fascinating because I think. think very often we just have the you know take these blanket approaches um and i did for for years too i just thought man more more more vitamin C IVs more you know more antioxidants less free radicals that's a good thing um but really years ago when i started stumbling upon a lot of your research talking to you getting to know you really going down the rabbit hole of how unique hydrogen is it's not only a part of my routine every day i mean i take it um either immediately before or or right after i do every hyperbaric session because, you know, I realize that in hyperbarics, you know, that excess oxygen, that oxygen singlet could be creating oxidative stress.

Starting point is 00:49:32 Yeah, and it does. And that's how H-Bot tends to work. You literally create a hormadic stressor just like exercise. And you want to get the benefits and negate some of the negative effects. So taking hydrogen therapy, there's some research on this, at least in cell code studies, some very interesting research, helping prevent oxygen toxicity. so you're able to get some of these benefits. Oxygen is a much stronger molecule,

Starting point is 00:49:54 like ozone therapy that people do or hydrogen peroxide. There's a number of things out there that are pretty strong and have serious side effects potentially. Like HBot, going too high, going for too long, auction toxicity is a very well-known thing. Hydrogen seems to help negate,

Starting point is 00:50:13 or negate is probably a strong word, but help to reduce some of those excess side effects so you can still get those benefits. Because to your point, you need to have this, I want to say balance colloquially, but really this homeostasis of oxidation and reduction. And so that's really where the research is, I would say, converging in terms of aging and disease conditions and so on. It's not about oxidative stress or the free radical theory of aging. It's all about redox dysregulation.

Starting point is 00:50:42 And as you get older, as you age, as you have environmental toxins and so on, you get a redox dysregulation. And the problem is that redux dysregulation can happen not only in the same individual, but even in the same organ, even in the same cell. Right. So you can have like one portion of your cell,

Starting point is 00:51:04 say the cytosol that is suffering from an oxidative stress or, say, in the mitochondria, an oxidative stress that's going on. There's too many free radicals that are being produced. But yet another area, you're actually lacking reductive potential. where say like in the endopause reticulum or something you're not able to fold your proteins correctly if you can't do that then you can't protein structure dictates function right

Starting point is 00:51:28 you need to have the correct relox homeostasis and so you can imagine if if the cell itself is suffering from a redox dysregulation how would it be possible that taking a conventional antioxidant that only is unidirectional it's just an electron donor basically is going to help that. Well, there have actually been cancer studies like beta carotene, I think,

Starting point is 00:51:50 where they showed that it went the opposite direction. Yeah, unfortunately, that's exactly right. They found people who smoked a lot when they ate carrots, they tended to, there's a correlation, they tended to maybe live longer and be better. And it just makes sense. Well, yeah, smoking caused a lot of free radicals,

Starting point is 00:52:06 carrots a lot of beta carotene, that's an antioxidant, so they're going to neutralize those. But when they decided to do the study, hey, let's really determine this, they found that those taking the beta keratin started dying faster and getting cancer faster than those on the placebo group. Wow.

Starting point is 00:52:25 And maybe we could talk about the mechanism quite a bit but maybe it's because, again, you're not able to directly address the redox homeostasis or the dysregulation, right? Because you're just providing a bunch of antioxidants but you could still be suffering from a reductive stress in different areas. Whereas hydrogen is totally different.

Starting point is 00:52:44 You don't have that same concern. But that study actually, it's another maybe critical thing for us to think about just logically as well because on the surface it can make total sense mechanistically like, hey, carrots, hydrogen beta-carotene, antioxidant, smoking oxidative stress, we should take it. And that's why we have to be careful when we focus too much on mechanisms like, oh, this is the mechanism, this, the mechanism, that. because just because we can find a mechanism to support something doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be the clinical outcome because the clinical outcome is going to be a summation

Starting point is 00:53:23 of a whole bunch of the mechanisms all living together. You know, I think some of the worst research we do is when we study things in isolation, we look how something behaves in a laboratory and we assume when we put it back into the human body it's going to behave the same way. Right. And very often nothing could be further from the truth.

Starting point is 00:53:40 That's exactly right. And that's also some my skepticism, even with this area of hydrogen research. Like I'm talking about this because I'm passionate about this area and the mechanisms are, I love biochemistry. I love this area.

Starting point is 00:53:53 I'm going to pull us out of the weeds here in a second because I want to, I want to get into some of the more practical applications. Yeah, right? I mean... Which I know is what people want to hear. And we'll do our best to do that, but it goes to my saying. I also have to be cautious because I don't want to be a hypocrite.

Starting point is 00:54:11 Like, oh, this is all the things have it in the cell. Yeah. And then what, but we really want to know, okay, what's the end point? What are the clinical studies actually show? Right. Right. That's really what matters.

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Starting point is 00:54:55 Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Because, you know, anecdotally and observationally, what I have seen from bathing clients of mine in hydrogen gas, by using hydrogen gas myself during intense exercise, look what we did this morning. I'm trying to keep up with my son. His performance in distance racing, you know, he just did 100 mile race. I truly believe if he wasn't powered by hydrogen water,

Starting point is 00:55:25 he wouldn't have completed the seven marathons, seven continents, and seven days, because he had never run a marathon. You know, I've read some of the published research on delayed onset muscle soreness, on lactate thresholds, and again mechanistically, it makes sense, but also practically in the host, it's also making sense.

Starting point is 00:55:46 So maybe we eventually I want to get to how should people take it, how much should they take? Is it safe for everybody to take, you know, a hydrogen tablet, say first thing in the morning, maybe another one in the afternoon or take additional hydrogen if you're exercising intensely, certainly if you're using hyperbarics. But where are the broad applications? you know, does hydrogen water help with hormones and women's health specifically?

Starting point is 00:56:16 And how does hydrogen water impact athletic performance? So I want to finish the mitochondria story briefly because I'm going to refer back to that as I adjust all of these things. And the summation of everything is back to the mitochondria, the mechanism, and to that paper that you mentioned. We published a paper in Redox Biology with my collaborators in Japan,

Starting point is 00:56:39 Again, the real research is behind this. I'm just happy that I was involved since 2013, actually, on this project. But Redox Biology is a top journal, but what we found was that hydrogen specifically targets a specific protein in complex three of the mitochondria. So remember with the electron transport chain? In complex, there's a specific protein called the risque iron sulfur protein or the risk protein, and it transfers an electron, one electron at a time.

Starting point is 00:57:09 ubiquinal comes in, gives an electron, then the risk A, one goes to risk AISO4 protein pathway. When hydrogen gas targets this protein, it actually stops it from working. Basically, it causes a change in this protein that sounds from working. This is a stress. This is because you're not able to transfer the proteins. The mitochondria quickly recognizes the stress and you start to see increases in some superoxide levels. So a slight transit increase in superoxygen production. You have an initial drop in ATP levels.

Starting point is 00:57:44 That quickly causes the mitochondria to respond, to regenerate, and rejuvenate its mitochondrial function. And then the risk or the iron, the sulfur protein levels, they come back up, even higher than they were. ATP levels go back. Follow that with exercise. As soon as you start exercising, what's the first thing that happens? you start producing free radicals. Right. Your ATP levels drop immediately just very quick.

Starting point is 00:58:12 That's why creatine phosphate kicks in very quickly, right? All these similar things start happening. And then later you start having an increase in everything. So you get the mitochondria biogenesis, right? So one of the main targets of hydrogen gas seems to be this risque iron sulfur protein in complex three of the mitochondria. So mitochondria is a prime target of hydrogen. And based upon that, we can understand.

Starting point is 00:58:35 understand why hydrogen is able to regulate redox homeostasis. Produce some free radicals when needed, suppress free radicals in other cases, activate the NRF2 pathway, increase mitochondrial regeneration, rejuvenation, ATP production, all the cellular things that are needed right there in the mitochondria and now we have

Starting point is 00:58:53 one of the mechanisms of how hydrogen specifically does this. Wow. Wow. So now let's go to these practical applications because I want to refer back to this, that target. And we can can understand how hygiene gas would be doing some of this based upon understanding of the mechanism.

Starting point is 00:59:11 Yeah, so maybe we start with athletic performance. Sure. Right? Because, you know, vast majority of my audience is exercising on a regular basis and they're either taking hydrogen water or they're not. I take hygiene for all my exercise. Yeah, so do I. And I absolutely unequivocally notice a benefit.

Starting point is 00:59:31 So does my son. And so does every athlete that I work with. So there's a couple points. The first one I want to point out is when it comes to athletic performance, we call it an ergodogenic effect, okay? We first, whatever we do, we first don't want to make things worse. Right. And that is a major concern that a lot of new emerging technology supplements,

Starting point is 00:59:55 you know, fad concepts come in, where they could potentially negate some of the specialized benefits. We talked about earlier how, in some studies, show that taking antioxins can actually blunt exercise performance because maybe you're blunt those fruit radicals that you need. Taking insides, anti-inflammatories, same thing. That could potentially blunt exercise benefits. Cold water immersion immediately after strength training. That's another good one. Yep, exactly. So when it comes to hydrogen therapy, we can very confidently say actually that hydrogen at least does not negate exercise benefits. It doesn't impair exercise performance.

Starting point is 01:00:35 So that's number one. If there's a question, maybe you should really be cautious before you try to do any intervention. Hygidin doesn't do that. And we can think about the mechanisms. It doesn't react with other free radicals at all. It can't do it.

Starting point is 01:00:49 It's only going to regulate the NR2 pathway when there's a serious problem going on. It actually can increase superoxone production similar to exercise. And then we look at the studies. If we look at the animal studies, for example, with exercise. So combinational studies,

Starting point is 01:01:04 we actually see that during the control, of course, there's no increase in mitochondrial biogenesis. We look at a marker of PGC1 Alpha. There's a paroxysome proliferator, active receptor, co-activator 1 alpha. That was a mouthful. There's going to be a test on this later, so I hope that everybody got that. But this is the master target we want to activate.

Starting point is 01:01:24 Things like AMPK can activate this, which AMPK gets activated and you break ATP down. You get some A&P levels. The A&P can activate A&PK. Calcium is another one that can activate this. this, but you want to activate PGC1 Alpha, and exercise does that really well. PGC2A1 Alpha in turn can increase things like mitochondria biogenesis and vascular industrial growth factor and a number of other things.

Starting point is 01:01:45 So, hydrogen. When you do exercise and you combine it with hydrogen, you see PGC1 Alpha levels increase. Actually, they increase even more than exercise alone. Wow. When you do the same exercise with vitamin C, you see PGC2N alpha levels. levels decrease. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:06 It's not selective. This is critical to understand. This means that hygiene is not impairing exercise performance, and if anything, it might act as an exercise memetic to help to improve exercise performance, especially over the long run, because you see increases in PGC 1 alpha. Wow. So this is animal studies, and it makes mechanistic sense based upon the mechanisms I just talked about in these in vitro studies, so culture.

Starting point is 01:02:31 Now we look at the clinical studies. there's a breadth of studies on exercise performance. I've read them in swimmers. Elite swimmers. I want to say another one in elite soccer players. Yeah, that's right. So I've read some of this research. And more discussed like delayed onset muscle soreness,

Starting point is 01:02:52 but it also discussed performance, recovery. I don't remember if we went into specific mechanisms. But, I mean, I don't know that I have read a negative research publication on hydrogen. I'll just put it that way. It depends on the definition of negative. There are a number of papers that show there are no benefit. We published an article. One of my first articles actually when I was doing my master's is we, we, there's a lot of

Starting point is 01:03:19 people who are saying that their VO2 max was increasing when they'd take in hydrogen water. And, you know, it was a simple study because we know exactly how to measure VO2 max. It's a little more complicated. We'll say VOT2 peak for those who are exercise physiologists. But we looked at this and we found that there was no increase in the VO2 peak of following acute submutation with hydrogen. And mechanistically, that wouldn't be expected. But in that case, it would be like a negative study.

Starting point is 01:03:47 However, we did a sub-analysis of some of the, like the exercise, look at the exercise in heart rate at lower exercise intensities, we can see that the heart rate was a little bit lower. And there's changes like in the respiratory quotient or the respiratory exchange ratio and the number of other changes. And other people have reported on this too showing that actually hydrogen,

Starting point is 01:04:11 even in acute dose of hydrogen water might be able to help with some of the athletic performance, whether hydrogen water or high in inhalation. Well, did in the swimmers and it did in the soccer players. Yes, exactly. And some of the soccer players, they took it for like a week, but they was not at a V-E-Refuge.

Starting point is 01:04:26 CO2 max, it wasn't a max effort. Okay. So we're probably not going to see a change if you just take one dose of hydrogen and you go for a peak performance. Right. But you might see even just one dose of hydrogen and you can see at like a kind of a lactate threshold, a pretty high intensity, you can maybe exercise for a longer period of time, maybe do more balance of exercise.

Starting point is 01:04:49 And probably those benefits are going to be more significant when you do a longer dosing protocol because again, just like exercise, it takes time to activate mitochondria biogenesis. So by taking hydrogen water, you want to recover quickly. Because that's like the number one thing that comes to athletes is you want to recover fast. Why? So you can train again. Right. It's volume dependent.

Starting point is 01:05:12 And the volume is limited by how quickly you can recover. And so by taking hydrogen water, if we can improve the infamatory response, we actually can see that an acute dose of hydrogen often will increase superoxy production and, you know, inflammatory markers like interleukin 6, for example. And then it goes back to baseline faster and lowers that chronic low-grade inflammation, lowers that chronic oxidative stress. Which is why it has a positive effect

Starting point is 01:05:36 on delayed onset muscle sorenness. Yeah, there's a number of... That one is, there's a lot of potential mechanisms that could be going on with that. And more research than you need to be done because a lot of those studies are still pretty small, right? But we can see, though, in the studies that have been done where hydrogen does seem to exert

Starting point is 01:05:53 like an anti-fatigue effect, right? but able to exercise, let's say, Yeah, there was a scale where they rated the... Yeah, the Borgs effect or the RPE. Yeah, yeah, where they rated the actual level of intensity, level of perceived effort. Yeah, the perceived exertion. Perceived exertion.

Starting point is 01:06:11 Yeah, the level of perceived exertion. And in nearly all of those cases, their level of perceived exertion for the same bout of exercise was lower. Yes. So, I mean, that's clearly something that would, in my opinion, improve athletic performance. Yeah, you can do it again. But those are also correlated with changes

Starting point is 01:06:29 and say lactate levels. Those levels are also lower. Right. Which, you know, the reason you make lactate in the first place is because there's a mismatch between the how fast you need ATP and how quickly your mitochondria can make ATP. So if you need ATP fast enough,

Starting point is 01:06:45 or faster to which a mitochondria can provide, you have to go through glycolysis and you start producing lactate. Yeah, you got to use carbon dioxide instead of using oxygen, right? Yeah. Well, it's not the carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is only produced during the, during the TCA cycle, the citric acid cycle. Glycolysis doesn't use oxygen or anything.

Starting point is 01:07:03 It just breaks down your glucose molecule. And in order to continue driving, the end part of glycosis is this molecule called pyruvate. And then pyruvate normally enters into the citric acid cycle and then gets converted to acetylchate and then citrate. You do the whole citigal cycle. Then you make NADH molecules. Then you go to the electron transport chain,

Starting point is 01:07:23 complex one, two, there's three. Netflix 3, right? This whole process takes quite a bit. Makes a lot of ATP. One glucose molecule can make 30 or 32 ATP molecules. You can use oxidative phosphorylation. But glycolysis only makes like two net ATP. But it's a lot faster.

Starting point is 01:07:39 Like, you know, I don't give you numbers, but it's a lot faster. So if you can't oxidize pyruvate fast enough, then you convert pyruvate to lactate. And that's important because lactate production allows glycolysis, to continue going. So lactate production actually delays fatigue.

Starting point is 01:08:01 It allows you to continue exercising. It prevents or delays acidosis, for example, because the whole purpose of lactate production is you're actually regenerating a molecule that you're familiar with, NAD plus. NAD plus derives glycolysis. And if you convert all your NAD plus to NADH, you can't do glycosis anymore.

Starting point is 01:08:20 So by converting pyruvate to lactate, you convert NADH to NAD plus, NAD plus can drive from glycerolohythylosate can cause that oxidation to 2.3 bisphosphal glycerate. So you get NAD plus being produced. So in these studies where lactate levels are lower, there's a couple potential things that are going on.

Starting point is 01:08:42 Number one, maybe because you're at this exercise intense that you need X amount of ATP and so maybe what's happening is the hydrogen helps your mitochondria function better, so you can provide the amount of ATP you need via oxidative phosphory through your mitochondria as opposed to anaerobic glycolysis. So in other words, it's just, again, to pull us out of the weeds,

Starting point is 01:09:08 it's allowing you to exercise at the same intensity for a longer period of time. Yeah, exactly, either because of improving. That's anecdotally what I notice. That's right. And my son and every athlete that I put it on. I mean, I paid them in hydrogen water. I have them consume hydrogen-rich water.

Starting point is 01:09:23 and I have hundreds of clients that by bathing and consuming it have both reduced their pain, improve their recovery, and increase the duration that they can exercise at a high level of intensity. And this has been in a number of UFC fighters and a number of professional athletes that most people watching this podcast would know that perform at a very high level and now they would swear by it. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. And the research is still ongoing with that.

Starting point is 01:09:52 And I think we'll start to see some of the differences in the mechanism because when you drink hydrogen water, actually a lot of that hydrogen gas has excelled out of your lungs. So a lot of that doesn't actually reach the muscles, yet we still see these direct benefits. Versus, say, inhalation of hydrogen gas, that's going to have some different effects as well. But they both have very, you know, obviously benefits

Starting point is 01:10:13 that we see when you look at the clinical studies. So let's go through some, again, I want to pull this out of the weeds. So now you know the mechanism. I want to pull this out of the weeds. I want to talk about women's hormones and women's health, PCOS, and hydrogen-rich water. We touched on athletic performance. There was also a really interesting article published in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. And in this article, I think it was a six-month study.

Starting point is 01:10:47 They broke these gerontology patients into two categories. one drank hydrogen rich water, one did not. They used tattoo markers for methylation. They measured like sit-stand ratios. They also measured different cognitive scoring, short-term recall, learn memory. There were a number of different measurements for cognitive function.

Starting point is 01:11:16 And it seemed to universally improve the hydrogen-rich water side significantly across all of these markers. That was another one that really piqued my interest in hydrogen water because a lot of studies are in young athletes like 22-year-old soccer players,

Starting point is 01:11:39 25-year-old competitive swimmers. But here you have a population that's deconditioned. They're not out there sprinting. And part of their protocol wasn't to change their exercise. regiment, yet they had exercise benefits. Yeah. They actually, I'm calling it sit-stand ratio.

Starting point is 01:11:58 There's another term for it. And that was another study that really drew my interest to hydrogen rich water because that was the only intervention that they made for that six-month period of time. Yeah, and I'm familiar with that study. It wasn't one of the ones that I participated in, but I know the authors, the researchers. And, yeah, it was a very powerful study because to your point, this was number of one, it was a longer study. They're using the hydrogen-producing tablets, and so you get a pretty high dose of hydrogen, which is important because sometimes some of these studies, they use hydrogen

Starting point is 01:12:31 water, but the concentration, you know, it may have found more effective benefits if it was a higher dose. Yeah. This is one of the potential trends. We found this in metabolic syndrome study, for example, when we can talk about later. But that study showed, you know, some of these potential benefits that you already mentioned. And it was like six months. It was a pretty good duration. And that makes sense when we think about the mechanisms. Hygidin is not a super powerful molecule.

Starting point is 01:12:59 And that's what makes it largely safe as well. And so it's going to go in and it has these effects in the mitochondria and in the cell. And it's this long-term benefits that we start to see. So that's why going longer like for six months, you might still see more of these benefits. And also it's why it gets me excited because, yes, I'm very interested on the mechanisms of the biochemistry just because I like to see how things work. Clearly you are.

Starting point is 01:13:24 But we want to know that those clinical endpoints. And here we're showing that it's translation, it's being translated, right? There's translatable between the cell culture to animal studies and then finally to the human studies, right? And like I know you mentioned with the women, with that PMS and, you know, PCOS as well. You know, more research needs to be done on this.

Starting point is 01:13:47 I was involved. I help author one of those studies, but it's more of a subjective type thing that we looked at. And it does show favorable effects. So I wouldn't say, you know, hydrogen is like a hormone or Nestle mimics those things. Of course.

Starting point is 01:14:03 But again, by helping to improve the terrain, the cellular terrain, and, you know, the inflammatory process and oxidous stress, you can start to help maybe regulate things that are really outside of homeostasis. So really think about hydrogen as a homoestatic adaptogenic regulator.

Starting point is 01:14:21 Yeah, yeah. You also are in the 24-week metabolic syndrome. Yeah, that was the one. This I find fascinating because the vast majority of Americans with chronic disease have metabolic syndrome, and the vast majority of my deconditioned clients have metabolic syndrome. 41% of children have metabolic syndrome. You know, 52% of adults, I mean,

Starting point is 01:14:47 you know, we become the sickest, fatest, most disease or the nation in the world, despite the fact that we spend $5 trillion a year on health care, largely because of metabolic syndrome. And, you know, metabolic syndrome is a combination of things, you know, hypertension, high triglycerides, poor insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance, obesity. And that was another one that was very fascinating to me.

Starting point is 01:15:11 Can you talk about what happened to those patients, what changed and what, if anything, surprised you? And what does this mean to 100%? of millions of Americans that are suffering from metabolic syndrome. Yeah, this was, it was a six-month study.

Starting point is 01:15:23 It was conducted in India with some of my colleagues there and it was a pretty big undertaking. We used the hydrogen-producing tablets in the study because we could provide a high, consistent dose of hydrogen. Which, by the way, is why

Starting point is 01:15:36 I'm not a proponent of the hydrogen bottles any longer. I used to be a big proponent of the hydrogen bottles. I'm not a believer in those anymore. I noticed that the proton exchange membranes will break down over time, the seals would break down over time. A lot of these would, you know, if you didn't clean it regularly, you would get almost like mold in the bottom. And then

Starting point is 01:15:58 because there were so many Chinese fakes on the market, you know, I had clients that actually had these things explode on them. And to get a relatively low dose of hydrogen versus getting like 12 parts per million or 13 parts per million from an elemental magnesium tablet, I mean, that it's apples and oranges, even cost-wise. And I hadn't seen any studies using hydrogen bottles. I'd had them, I'd seen them with hydrogen inolation, hydrogen tablets. Maybe there were some with hydrogen water bottles that I'm unaware of. But I haven't.

Starting point is 01:16:31 Yeah, I mean, the bottles can work, but there are a number of caveats. I think you mentioned all of those, right? There's some bottles that are okay, but then the longevity of those. The nice thing about the tablets, just for research purposes, is it's a lot easier to give a client a bottle of tablets and teach them exactly how to use it, and we know they're getting a, at least a minimum. Same dose. Even if it's not exactly the same,

Starting point is 01:16:54 we know they're at least getting a certain amount of hygiene in order for it to be clinically relevant. A minimum threshold, okay. Yeah, hitting that threshold. Yeah, so can you talk a little bit about the metabolic syndrome? Yeah, so all those, yeah, so this paper, it was actually, it was both surprising but also expected, because there were a number of other studies already on the metabolic syndrome area,

Starting point is 01:17:14 but we were using a higher concentration of hydrogen and a longer duration. And what we found was we found improvements inside triglycerides in cholesterol levels in the ratio, for example. We found decreases in some of the inflammatory markers in oxidous stress. Maybe something that was surprising was there was,

Starting point is 01:17:38 the BMI was lower, which specifically because of weight loss, those soon to be a more just fat loss in the Hygid and you just converted half of my audience right but that one really better fat loss well it wasn't a primary

Starting point is 01:17:54 endpoint but it's something that was observed and this has actually been shown in a number of studies where there seems to just be some modest weight loss specifically from fat mass and potentially an increase in lean body mass and it's interesting so there was

Starting point is 01:18:10 a you'll probably like this this is really interesting but there was an animal study, it was published in a journal of obesity, I believe, was the nature publishing group also, or it used to be. But in this study, they used a leptin-deficient mice. So leptin deficient, leptin is a hormone that makes you feel full. And so if you don't feel full, you want to keep on eating. And so these mice would overeat and they're fed a high-fat diet. But they would blunt leptin so they wouldn't have a satiation response. Exactly, so they just keep on eating. Well, those given the hydrogen water, they like were so much.

Starting point is 01:18:44 much thinner than the other rodents were. It was just, I mean, those pictures in the article, you can just visibly tell the difference. In fact, the drinking of hydrogen-witch water in this case was equivalent to like a 20% chloric restriction. Wow. And mechanistically, they found that hydrogen increased FGF21 or Favoblasts Growth Factor 21, which increases energy expenditure, which is, again, something that happens in the mitochondria. So it's metabolism improves metabolism.

Starting point is 01:19:12 And wasn't there recently a paper? you might have been involved in it, comparing it to gLP ones. Oh, yeah, there was a study on that. I wasn't involved with that paper, but that was interesting because hygiene seemed to have some benefits in terms of basically helping restore some of the loss sense that can happen with like obesity or whatever. So you can have basically the right levels that you would otherwise,

Starting point is 01:19:39 you're supposed to have. And maybe that's helping to regulate somebody's weight or their satiety or just their perception, their desire. There's a lot of hygiene is very multifactorial because of what it's doing to the brain, what's doing to the gut and what that in turn is going to do the brain. And then if that's going to change, then you're going to have your dietary habits will change.

Starting point is 01:19:59 That's further going to change your gut microbiome. And then you might feel like exercising, you have more energy because improving the mitochondria. And now if you start to exercise, and we see in some of these studies, or they're taking hydrogen and water, and write down the journal, I feel like exercising more.

Starting point is 01:20:13 I walked more, which is kind of a confound, but it's also that's very interesting that people are wanting to just move more and do things more. And that's very important for overall health. Well, you know, there's also a link between the reduction of fiber in our diets over time and the reduction of this production of hydrogen gas. Oh, that's a very interesting correlation. And yes, basically, if you have a healthy diet,

Starting point is 01:20:41 If you have a healthy microbiome, healthy microbiome. Yeah, if you have all these are healthy and good, you naturally produce a lot of hydrogen gas. Actually, you can produce up to, you know, I don't know, over 10, even 13 liters of hydrogen gas a day. You know, just by having a microbiome with a lot of fiber, right? Now, a lot of that hydrogen gas is not,

Starting point is 01:21:06 is going to be consumed by other bacteria. It's going to be lost in flatulents. So you don't actually get a lot of, Lost in fletulence. I love the scientific term. And it's explosive. It's busting ass. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:19 Yeah. And explosive. Because it's above 4%. Yeah. But, you know, it is interesting when you look at some of these studies, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, a lot of neurological conditions. They tend to have lower hydrogen gas in their air, in their excelled air. Their breath, hydrogen gas is lower. and when you look at

Starting point is 01:21:40 my colleague university they looked at their proxomacist's patients and in their bacteria and their fecal matter was actually had less hydrogen-producing bacteria than those who don't have those diseases.

Starting point is 01:21:53 So again a very strong correlation again correlation is not equal causation of course but these are important correlations that you would expect to be that would exist if there were a causative factor going on right? Same thing with the Japanese centenarians right Those who become centenarians, they have higher excelled hydrogen gas levels than younger people who, you know, don't end up living as long, basically.

Starting point is 01:22:20 Listen, there's what I share on this podcast and then there's what I share with my inner circle. If you've been following me for a while, you know how I hold nothing back here. But my VIP community, that's where the real magic happens. Picture this. You're struggling with energy crashes, brain fog, or just feeling like you're not operating at, your peak and you don't know where to get real answers. But here's what really sets this apart. You're not just getting my insights. When I have incredible guests on the podcast, VIP members get to submit questions for a private podcast segment. So that world-renowned expert

Starting point is 01:22:52 we just interviewed, you get exclusive access to their knowledge, tailored to your specific situation. This section is under the private podcast section in the ultimate human community. And speaking of exclusive, you're getting my personal protocols. The exact tools I use for water fasting, gut optimization, and morning routines that have taken me decades to perfect. This isn't theory. This is what works in the real world. The community launches challenges throughout the year where you get direct access to me and my network of experts.

Starting point is 01:23:19 It's like having a personal health advisory board for less than $100 a month. Your health is your wealth and this investment pays dividends for life. Join the VIP community at the ultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP and step into your ultimate potential. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. So for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, what is their entry point? What's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water if they've never consumed it before? Well, I guess it's pretty simple.

Starting point is 01:23:49 One hydrogen tablet a day, started in the morning, take it with food, take it without food, take it before exercise. How would you tell somebody who's compelled maybe after listening to this podcast to say, I want this to your team? to say, I want to add this to your team. That's kind of my first thought is, first, you know, what does the research say? Like, what does your situation and circumstance at, right? Because, you know, hydrogen is not proven. That's kind of anti-science also, like, we don't prove anything.

Starting point is 01:24:18 In science, we tried to prove things our fault. And if we can't prove their faults, then it increases the probability that they're probably true. Yeah. But we never really know if it's true. Right. Right. And so I guess, first, I'm just saying we don't want to. I don't want to misrepresent, like, the emerging studies is like, yeah, 200 human studies,

Starting point is 01:24:37 but they're kind of all over the place from universities all over the world, not like just a focused look at this specific primary endpoint so we can make this specific claim or whatever, right? So there needs to be more research to really categorically say, yes, if you do hydrogen, you will have this benefit, this is what it is. Right. Instead, I think that people should have an informed consent. They should understand, hey, there's an emerging area. The safety is very high.

Starting point is 01:24:59 the research looks promising, especially animal research, but the number of clinical studies look good. And if you have the funds, the discretionary means to try, then by all means, you can try it. I believe the safety is high enough that you can do that, right? And so if that's you and you do want to try, then I guess if you're going to try the hydrogen tablets, for example,

Starting point is 01:25:21 then, yeah, you actually only need one. In fact, most of the research, just one tablet will provide you more hydrogen than the majority of all the clinical publications. Wow. Because most of them do not use hydrogen tablets. But that's starting to change because the hydrogen tablets have been now used in clinical research a lot.

Starting point is 01:25:41 Because they're just they're convenient and you provide a very high dose. And now there's looking at some of these studies that potentially dose-dependent effect. And if you also look at the translational effects, so animals, they drink a lot more water compared to us. I mean, like we'd have to be drinking like over a gallon of water a day, you know, to drink the equivalent to what an animal would, a rodent. So they're getting a lot

Starting point is 01:26:04 more hydrogen. And so maybe one of the reasons that they are more responsive to the benefits of hydrogen is they're also getting a higher dose. There's a lot of other metabolic factors as well. But there's some trending in some case when the higher dose is beneficial, which is why a lot of researchers are choosing to use hydrogen tablets. And there are some studies that show that a high concentration is not more effective than a low concentration in that specific area. But there are other studies showing that a higher concentration is more effective in those specific areas. But there are no studies for hydrogen water. There are no studies where a higher concentration is less effective than a lower concentration. Now that's not true for

Starting point is 01:26:47 inhalation of hydrogen gas. So if you're going to do it, yeah, that's 2 to 4%. So if you're going to do it, you, taking a tablet that's 12 parts per million, and when would you consume it? First thing in the morning? Yeah, first I would just consume it daily. Yeah. Like we just think about what's the easiest thing, just consume it daily. And then if you want to be, okay, figure out some regimen or whatever, we don't have enough research to really say this is going to be the most effective.

Starting point is 01:27:14 Right. For example, you can take it fasted. There's IADs. If you take it fasted, well, then maybe you don't have any noise in your blood or whatever, and that hygiene gas can directly cause the signaling, and you can get those benefits, take it before your exercise. But you could also argue... I take it before I exercise every time.

Starting point is 01:27:30 Yes, and that makes total sense. Is that when you take it? In general. I feel like I do hydrogen water before exercise and I do like inhalation of hydrogen gas after like a post exercise. But you can do... There's arguments both ways,

Starting point is 01:27:44 and we just need more clinical research to see if there's really any difference. So you're just saying, just take it to it. Just take it because it's not like caffeine. If you want the benefits of caffeine to help you exercise, you actually take it before you exercise, right? That's not true with hydrogen. Hydrogen is going to provide a benefit

Starting point is 01:28:01 that kind of stacks on top of itself over time. Because we start to change gene expression. We start to change the function of mitochondria. So we start seeing changes over time and they become more and more. Consistency is the most important. And now if you're really thinking about something important to you, then yeah, take the hydrogen before you exercise.

Starting point is 01:28:20 but for that matter, take the hygiene after you exercise also. So you can safely take a number of these, say, tablets. There's no safety concern what comes to hydrogen gas itself, just pure hydrogen. There's really no safety concerns. They've been using hygiene and gas to prevent, say, decompression sickness since the 1940s at orders of magnitude higher than what you would ever talk about therapeutically, you know, dissolving a gas in water and then drinking there. So there's not a concern there.

Starting point is 01:28:48 You just start running up against, you know, how much magnesium can one tolerate, for example. So you can, you know, probably take it. Because there is a trace amount of elemental magnesium that remains after it ever passes. Yeah. Right. It's not a therapeutic dose of magnesium either, but it's... Well, not necessarily, because most people, see, most people are only getting around three, 400 milligrams of magnesium.

Starting point is 01:29:08 Most people are deficient. Or more in magnesium. So simply by taking one or two tablets a day, you're literally no longer being deficient. And that's, that can literally more. move the needle, just not being deficient in magnesium. And I would suggest that the research indicates, at least my interpretation, that taking closer to around 700 milligrams of magnesium is probably better for you.

Starting point is 01:29:28 So taking several tablets a day, yes, you get the benefits of hydrogen, but I'm just saying you also are getting some of that magnesium as well. And that could help move that needle a little bit more. Because magnesium we know has a lot of benefits too. Now, what is like really exciting you about the research in the hydrogen because as I've poked around the research, you know, I've seen it in concussive injuries, you know, comparing it to the standard protocol for concussive recovery and being magnitudes better than the standard protocol. I've seen it

Starting point is 01:30:09 used to soak limbs immediately after injury compared to the rice protocol, rest ice, compress, and elevate. There seems to be significant indications in cognitive studies, the Journal of Experimental Gerontology, there seems to be significant impact for delayed onset muscle soreness and maybe blunting the lactate threshold for athletic performance. You know, I certainly think that making it a part of your daily routine definitely not going to have any negative side effects,

Starting point is 01:30:42 and there's this whole host of selective antioxidant benefits that you're not getting from your regular, you know, ingestion of antioxidants. I will say that, again, anecdotally, I have seen the greatest impacts from people that are bathing in it in terms of like immediate benefits. Like, you know, Sage, my wife has an L5S1 fusion. And so when her back acts up,

Starting point is 01:31:12 it travels right up her spine and she literally just cannot sleep. It locks up when I remember her back. It's like as hard as a rock. But if she gets in a 25-minute hydrogen bath right before bed, she'll sleep seven hours. And I put Navy SEALs in there. I put Sean Ryan in there. He called me the next day.

Starting point is 01:31:32 It was like, dude, this is the first time I got eight hours sleep in 15 years. The first time I woke up in no pain in 15 years. And it, you know, maybe lasted 48 hours. I put arthritic patients in to these tubs, bathe them in hydrogen, 25, 35 minutes. No one's ever gotten out of there and said, I feel the same or feel worse, almost without exception, related to inflammatory conditions, knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back. There seems to be an immediate benefit for people in pain, inflammation, like, you know, range of motion. And I have seen this so many times and so consistently that I'm absolutely convinced. And so what are your thoughts on that?

Starting point is 01:32:19 That's exciting. I mean, you know, it's interesting because... That's exciting. Well, it's interesting, though, because what you're talking about is your experience. Yes. Yeah, and I want to be cautious to say exactly that. Yeah, and these, I guess we could terminate anecdotal evidence, which is not something we just throw away, but it's anecdotal, but it's still a form of evidence.

Starting point is 01:32:40 By the way, eczema and psoriasis, too. Yeah. In front of my eyes. I've seen it. And there are actually some case studies on those areas also, right? So there can be some mechanistic sense to some of these things. But bathing doesn't have as much research as, say, drinking hydrogen water or inhalation. So I have to be a little bit more cautious than what I can say, what we see clinically.

Starting point is 01:33:04 Mechanistically, I could see how some of these examples make sense. You know, you get in the water, and immediately hydrogen gas, the smallest molecule. I mean, it can penetrate the skin and it can actually get into those areas. Almost like it's not there, right? I mean, it's transdermal, yeah. Yeah, it goes to transdermally. I mean, it's still, we don't go into some of the Brownian diffusion aspects. No, please don't.

Starting point is 01:33:29 I'm just kidding. But it can get to those areas. And, you know, we can see effects, like in our research, we found that hydrogen, influence the mitochondria within as little as two minutes, right? So we can see effects immediately. And when you drink hydrogen water, you're influenced in the microbiome, and you see excelled hydrogen gas within just a couple of minutes also. So hydrogen gas is going to the body.

Starting point is 01:33:54 But again, the concentration is probably not very high, if at all, in, say, your knee or something after you drink hydrogen water. So the benefits to the knee come through other mechanisms, other second messengers, other things that are happening, versus if you were to bathe directly there, or if you were to inhale hydrogen gas, now that hydrogen gas is getting fared into the blood and getting into those joints specifically.

Starting point is 01:34:16 So those are different mechanisms, and they can be supported by mechanisms, actually. I mean, I've seen it so consistently. Yeah, which is why I think you can't necessarily what's better, bathing or drinking or inhalation. Right. You know, really, if you can, you should do all of them. Right.

Starting point is 01:34:35 I would say most of the research is on hydrogen water and inhalation. Right. And bathing is starting to emerge. And that's becoming maybe more popular. But mechanistically, we understand how hydrogen gas works on the mitochondria level. It's effects on signaling, calcium signaling, for example. So some of these can start to make sense. Probably is why some of the exercise benefits.

Starting point is 01:35:00 So let's talk about inhalation. because hydrogen is amazingly effective at very low doses. I mean concentrations, 2 to 4%. Yes, yes, and we don't want to get confused because the concentrations in water is very different than inhalation. Because we want to reach at a certain micromolar level, several micromolar's in the bloodstream. When you drink hydrogen water, you only have, you know,

Starting point is 01:35:28 let's say you're going to drink this, you're going to get around 3 to 4 milligrams of hydrogen gas dissolves in the water. You drink that. It's going to be diluted by your body. By the time it gets into those areas in your, like a portal vein and your liver, you're going to be around, you know, 5 to 30 micromolar concentration. Right. we see in the research in the animal studies so that nature medicine publication again that was 2%

Starting point is 01:36:04 hydrogen gas now this is some of the most most powerful and interesting area of research i'm going to get to some research going on in japan right now with with with hygiene and gas that nature medicine publication was 2% hydrogen and gas then they looked at a stroke so an actual clinical so that was an animal study of stroke they used actual human studies in 10 years later in 2017 and they did a safety study and a comparison to see how effective hydrogen gas was. Again, about 2% hydrogen gas. Okay. And in this study, they found that inhalation of hygiene gas compared to standard treatment,

Starting point is 01:36:43 a standard drug, hygiene gas was more effective at improving the National Institutes of Radiant scores of the stroke and a number of other parameters. But it was essentially more effective in all those parameters. Right. So again, this scheming of profusion injury, free radicals, oxygen. to damage, right? Inflammation. And lungs are an excellent delivery mechanism directly into the blood too. Exactly, yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:05 And that's important clarification too because hydrogen gas, unlike oxygen, does not bind under the hemoglobin. It doesn't get carried through a specific protein. It just dissolves into the serum of the blood. Yeah. And then as it's dissolved at that, you know, 5 to 20 micromole of concentration, it reaches

Starting point is 01:37:21 the target organs, has its effect. When you stop inhalation or stop administration, then it goes back to baseline within an hour. So like when you drink hygiene water, all the hydrogen gas is gone after an hour. The benefits remain for like 24 hours or potentially longer if you were constantly doing hydrogen water. So same with inhalation. It's gone after an hour or so, but those benefits remain. So they also looked at in animal studies in post-cardiac arrest syndrome and animal studies, and they found that the 24 hours survival,

Starting point is 01:37:53 in 24 hours in the control group, about 43% survived. When you do the normal therapy, which is targeted temperature management. So basically cool the body down like a therapeutic hypothermia. Then you have 77% survived. Wow. That's why that's a normal treatment. When you did hydrogen gas, 92% survival. Wow.

Starting point is 01:38:16 When you combine it to, 100% survival at 24 hours. You're kidding. That's huge. Why isn't everybody talking about that? Well, it was an animal study. There's an animal study. Okay, but this was enough. That was enough to get the Japanese government

Starting point is 01:38:29 to approve hydrogen as a class 2B medicine for the study of hydrogen in post-cardiac arrest syndrome patients in hospitals. When do you think that study will be? That's already been done. I'm going to tell you the results. Okay, good.

Starting point is 01:38:43 That approving. Do we wait at the whole podcast for this? We should talk about this minute one. Messing around with the free radical, you know, stage four of the, you know, electron transport. This is the meat. Yeah, this is, but I understand those mechanisms

Starting point is 01:38:59 helps us understand these observations, right? So the Japanese approved this so they could do a study. And it's not approval like now they're going to use it in the hospitals or whatever. It's just so they can actually do a study because you have to make sure this is safe. You're talking about people who are coming in comatose, who are already on the verge of death, and then you're going to do some other radical therapy. You've got to get approval for that. Right.

Starting point is 01:39:20 All right. So they gave this approval. It is a major study undertaking 15 different hospitals that were involved, but then COVID happened. Oh, my God. Gosh. So unfortunately, the study got truncated, and so it wasn't... And they all died because they were vaccinated. I'm just kidding.

Starting point is 01:39:37 But they didn't go as long as they wanted to. But we do have some of those results. Wow. And basically the couple of the endpoints, so they used 2% hydrogen and gas, all right? Again, this was not with a nasal cannula, we're like, you know, so many milliliters of flow rate. This was like with a face mask, a tank of exact, precise concentration of hydrogen. because remember 2% seem to be more effective than 4%. So you really need to control everything

Starting point is 01:40:03 and you can't have it be funnable. It has to be below 4%. Right. Or else you can't do the study. Yeah. Okay, so in the study though, they looked at a couple of things, but I was going to give you two main results.

Starting point is 01:40:13 The 90-day survival, because typically after post-cardiac arrest syndrome, you know, yeah, you're able to resuscitate the person, but then the survival is not very high because it has so much damage, they end up dying several days, weeks later. Right. They looked at the 90-day survival.

Starting point is 01:40:28 survival. And in the hydrogen, no, in the control group, the control group, I think there were about 77 patients. It was going to be like 380 or something patients, but it got truncated. But there was like, in this study, there was a 61% survival in the standard treatment group. And in the hydrogen group, it was an 85% survival. Wow. So if you had 100 subjects, 61% survived with Santa treatment, 85 lived.

Starting point is 01:41:03 It's like, what, 24, you know. Right. I mean, that's a pretty significant. This is people's lives. This is an actual study. Yeah. So they, these people are alive. Wow.

Starting point is 01:41:16 Because of hydrogen gas. Wow. And then the primary endpoint was improvements in neurological scores that they were looking at. And in the standard treatment, it was a 39% improved neurological scores. And in the hygiene treatment, it went up to 56%.

Starting point is 01:41:35 So still a pretty big difference. Now, because the sample size is a little bit smaller, this statistically did not reach statistical significance, but still, 39% improvement versus 56% improvement was a pretty big... That's a massive improvement. Especially when you consider that there was... the survival increase from 61% to 85% was more.

Starting point is 01:42:00 So more people who are maybe on the verge who would have died anyways, they also survived. And yet you still saw an increase in the neurological improvements. Wow. So this really has gathered a lot of people's attention. And so there's a lot more research

Starting point is 01:42:15 that's being going on in this area. And then that's, these are comatose patients. I mean, they're inhaling hydrogen gas, right? Wow. Now, more research, of course, is going on in this area and but but it's trending because I believe that you know there's a lot of corruption and problems with like the FDA and like all this kind of stuff and everything but but that corruption is is everywhere it's not just with these organizations right but I I do believe and maybe I'm just

Starting point is 01:42:45 too optimistic but I believe that if we had true good concrete evidence with clear primary endpoints, then hygiene therapy could be a standard care. But in order to get that approval, we have to have that evidence. And how do we have that evidence unless we do the clinical studies? Why are the clinical studies going to happen unless we educate people about it? And that's really what I'm here today for. I want to educate people about what's going on, allow people to have their informed consent, we can raise the awareness about this.

Starting point is 01:43:19 This is going to allow for more research to happen. And if Hygidin really can radically revolutionize healthcare, wouldn't you want to know? Wouldn't we want to use it? Again, something is so safe, so simple that's affordable to anybody. Right. And that's precisely why we're working on this education, right? And that's ultimately why, as you know, I helped to invent that inhale H2 unit. The entire purpose is not because we know this is going to cure every disease known to man

Starting point is 01:43:47 is because we want to do clinical research. I care about you working on educating everyone about it what we want to do clinical research and now we can do that without tanks of this gas and everything explosive and we can model the concentration and make sure it's therapeutic

Starting point is 01:44:04 and so that's the whole idea behind inhale H2 is initially it was for clinical research and then with Alex is like people actually want the unit there are people right now today who would want to use this 100%

Starting point is 01:44:18 and so everyone listening to things podcast probably once you get hydrogen water which we see those benefits and we have inhalation so a really nice combination and but I believe people should understand the limitations and the preliminary evidence that that's how you overcome skepticism because being skeptic is so important yeah that's how you prevent falling victim to a scam right being skeptic means that you are open-minded not so open that your brain falls out right I think that's oberg's dictum or something but that means specifically that you do not reject the information without first evaluating the evidence

Starting point is 01:44:56 and you don't accept the information without first evaluating the evidence. You do both, right? And so I want people to know what the evidence is and we're not claiming that it's going to care of a disease that we have all this evidence that's the antithesis of science. No, we're just saying, hey, this is what's shown in the animal studies, the emerging clinical studies. If it makes sense to you, if you have the desire and the monetary means, well, then you can give it a try. And now you have options available. You know, and I was doing my research and doing a PhD,

Starting point is 01:45:27 I remember seeing some of the results. And you were like, damn, I wish I had one of these. I wanted to get into this study. We had to take a medical grade hydrogen gas with the exact percentage, and I'm thinking, why not? Yeah. Yeah. I inhale that stuff, you know?

Starting point is 01:45:46 And I want this. Same thing with making hygiene water. I would make hydrogen water in the laboratory. And so I read these papers. I look at the research and I'm like, we know this is safe. Maybe it can help me. And so I want to try it.

Starting point is 01:45:59 And so I would use it. And so now they're like these tablets or this inhalate's two machine. People can use it and they can get clinically relevant doses that we use in the clinical studies if you want to do that, right? But I would not say that, I would not say the evidence is so compelling

Starting point is 01:46:15 that you should do hydrogen therapy instead of, say, go to the gym. Like, if you have the choice to go to the gym or just drink hydrogen water, dude, come on. Go to the gym, right? But if you're not able to exercise at all, for whatever reason, you're so busy and you have the discretionary funds,

Starting point is 01:46:34 why not try hydrogen water, which acts as an exercise in a medic according to some of these animal and early studies, right? If you, again, if you have the choice to... Or do both. If you're going to... Or do both.

Starting point is 01:46:44 I don't have a single client that I don't write. recommend take hydrogen water. And that's why I'm so glad that you're here to sort of return, you know, the noise to the balance of, you know, what are the claims that, you know, we could make based on the research today. And then where does the research look like it's heading? And I think the nicest thing is that the research indicates that it's extraordinarily

Starting point is 01:47:08 safe and offers plethora of benefits even though there's additional research needs to be done. doesn't impair performance. It doesn't make things worse. The emerging evidence in animal studies is very promising. The emergency evidence in clinical studies is very promising. It makes mechanistic sense. But of course, I would not say that hygiene therapy is more important, or there's more evidence than getting your sleep right or exercising or maybe sauna.

Starting point is 01:47:35 Sleep, whole food diet and exercise. Those are the foundations. But if you can do both of them, if you can do all of them, and you have the discretionary means to do so, I believe that people should have, should build to make their own choice to do that. And luckily, there are good products on the market now where people can make that informed choice.

Starting point is 01:47:54 Right. I agree. Tyler, this has been amazing, dude. You know, I know it was very granular for a lot of folks, for my super nerds, which is probably half of my audience, they're going to love this for the Andrew Huberman's out there that really want to know the mechanism. They're going to really enjoy this.

Starting point is 01:48:12 I've been a huge proponent of your research. I've been a huge proponent of hydrogen water. My family drinks it. My parents drink it. After that, experimental gerontology clinical study, I put both of my parents on it. They've been on it, you know, the entire time since I read that study. I think that was published in 2018, November 2018. But I'm really deeply appreciative of this because even though we went very granular on the science,

Starting point is 01:48:41 I think people understand now why this is such a unique molecule. Maybe they understand what the difference is between an antioxidant and a selective antioxidant, which makes hydrogen so unique. It's almost like this miracle molecule with how it reacts in the body. So if my audience wants to find you, where can they find out more about you? Are you on Instagram?

Starting point is 01:49:05 Yeah, yeah. You can find me on Tyler W. LeBaron on all channels. Okay. So Tyler W. the Baron and... I'll link your research to, you know, in the show notes, I'll link your hydrogen ventilation machine, the show notes. But I always wind down all my podcast by asking my guests the same question. So you probably know that this question's coming.

Starting point is 01:49:26 Oh, no, I'm worried. Oh, yeah, no, everybody gets the same question. There's no right or wrong answer to it. But before you do, I want to end with this. Okay. want to change the narrative that hydrogen is not just this antioxidant. There's a butlet of antioxidants out there.

Starting point is 01:49:46 Think of it as a redox adaptogen that benefits to mitochondria. Yeah, that's a great way to frame it. So what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? That's a great question. I think a lot of that comes from within

Starting point is 01:50:05 something divine aspect about that. to be the ultimate human means you are reaching your full potential has nothing to do with being better than anybody it's just are you making changes are you being better today than you were yesterday and that is in all aspects of your life how do you treat your neighbors how do you are you making the world a better place are you improving this this this gift that we have of our body Are we, you know, we say if knowledge is our power, then learning is our superpower. Are we learning? Are we doing these things? I think to be the ultimate human, we have a balanced life where we're trying to become the ultimate to reach that potential and all those things. And it's not necessarily that we reach our potential, but we're striving for that. We're just making these small changes, just like hydrogen, a small molecule, but it's constantly there, just slowly getting better.

Starting point is 01:51:09 and better and better. It's not trying to brag or anything. It's just always there. And that's really kind of what we should do. I think about to sum it up is just being incrementally better in all the aspects that we can on a daily basis. Man, phenomenal.

Starting point is 01:51:26 We're going to head over into my VIP group now. The VIPs are the only ones I tell who's coming on the podcast before they come on the podcast. And so I let them know you were coming. They were super excited. There's a whole host of questions for you. If you guys are interested in becoming an ultimate human VIP, just go over to theultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP.

Starting point is 01:51:44 We'd love to see you in there, private podcasts, one-on-ones with me, ask Gary anything. There is a 10-month course on becoming the ultimate human version of yourself. It's entirely free. It's all inside of the VIP community. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We're going to have Tyler back again for sure. As you continue your journey on hydrogen, I want to keep people up to date on your research and the emerging research and some of the new findings.

Starting point is 01:52:08 would love to see if this study in Japan ever gets completed. Oh, that one is completed. Yeah, I mean, oh, the one before COVID. Yeah, no, it's done. Yeah, published in Eclinical Medicine. I'll last publish that one. So we link that one, yeah. And until next time, guys, that's just science.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 265. Tyler LeBaron: Hydrogen Water, Mitochondrial Health, Selective Antioxidants, & Longevity

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