The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 83. Ben Greenfield: The Unconventional Path to Becoming A Superhuman

Starting point is 00:00:00 I think that vegetable oils are a much worse case than sugar. There's plenty of people out there that would say that seed oil thing is fear-mongering. If I have corn dog that has been fried in vegetable oil, I can't just go burn that off, right? Those lipids are used to comprise my cell membrane for sometimes a month, three years on end, accumulating in the body, creating inflammation. I want to talk about some of the ways that we are enhancing the body's ability to heal and police itself. You start increasing red blood cells, hemoglobin, and all of a sudden they start existing in these higher tier emotional states. I mean, it's motivating.

Starting point is 00:00:34 That's one of the reasons your superhuman protocol works, right? Yeah. My sons, they're 16 years old. They take supplements and they do that based on what I learned about their genes when they were 10 years old. And that's just like their supplement stack to give them a step up in life. Where do you see the industry headed? Longevity and anti-aging? Is it bio-optimization? Where do you really see the innovations going? I'll keep this quick. hey guys welcome back to the ultimate human podcast i'm your host human biologist gary brekka where we go down the road of everything anti-aging longevity biohacking and everything

Starting point is 00:01:17 in between and today i'm super pumped to have a very good friend of mine and co-biohacker, an absolute icon in the fitness and wellness and biohacking industry, someone I consider a mentor and a friend. And what's really funny is we did half the podcast before the podcast. We just did. We're like, let's just turn the cameras on because we're so intellectually curious that we started eating each other's face before the podcast. So welcome to the podcast, Ben Greenfield.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Thanks, man. Dude, I'm pumped. And we're in London. I know. Right now. Yeah. Which means we get to have crumpets after this. Well, I don't think crumpets is on the biohacking list, is it?

Starting point is 00:01:56 I think if we put ghee on them, it counts. I think that's how you fix everything. You just put ghee on it. Or grass-fed butter. Ghee on my pizza, ghee on my burritos, ghee on my empanadas. Paul Saladino is taking great offense to that right now. He's like, don't, don't, don't. He'd be okay with it if it was with avocados in it.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Don't diss on my ghee. As long as it wasn't with avocados. But, you know, what was so funny was that Ben walked into the hotel room. We're in London. So we're here for the Health Optimization Summit, which was amazing. Spelled with an S. Yeah. What they do. What, Summit? Yeah. It's always spelled with an S. No, the Health Optimization Summit, which was amazing. Spelled with an S. Yeah. What they do.

Starting point is 00:02:25 What, Summit? Yeah. No, no, no. Optimization. They spell with an S over here. Oh, they do. Yeah. It tells me for a loop.

Starting point is 00:02:32 There's a lot of funny things about the English and their verbology. Yeah, like health optimization. Why couldn't they have a Z? Because they even have the word for Z is Zed. Well, they also, things that are a scheme are actually legal, and it's like a positive thing. It's like we should form a scheme. We should develop a scheme.

Starting point is 00:02:54 I'm like, no, we don't want to develop a scheme. That's a hair shy of a scheme. But here, a scheme is like a good thing. It's a healthy joint venture. Oh. If I tell someone I'm scheming. Yeah, that's great. That's honorable great that's honorable

Starting point is 00:03:05 it's honorable good it's like we should develop a scheme for to launch a new product like we would never say that in the u.s yeah they got all kinds of they got all kinds of stuff over here that's that's a little different it's a little funky mate and bloke and yeah like like if you want to if you're an australian gay if you're in a bar I think Mike is Australian gay if you're in a bar and you actually want to challenge somebody to a fight outside you say

Starting point is 00:03:28 would you like to have a go yeah yeah have a go Mike it doesn't sound like would you like to have a go yeah sure take a piss

Starting point is 00:03:35 you know what I've got a few minutes just take a piss and have a go yeah but it doesn't mean take a piss it means have a drink right yeah I don't know how many people are we offending right now

Starting point is 00:03:43 alright with our Yankee bastardization of british culture our audience in half but one of the fascinating things that we and i know that we're going to talk about so many things i want to go down the road of um what you and i think are some of the most promising things coming out of the biohacking industry it's one of the things that we were talking about before the fire alarm went off um was the the pace of innovation right now in the biohacking wellness, longevity space, whatever you want to call it. Wellness and longevity has become the new luxury. And not only is there a lot of money chasing it, but the efficacy, the science has caught up to some of the stranger, more, you know, esoteric things.

Starting point is 00:04:23 And, you know, we talked about that the regulatory environment's not going to be able to keep up. Obviously, you can't keep pace with the pace of innovation. And so for the consumer... It's like trying to keep up with the Tour de France cyclist who's doping. Right. There's just no doing that. You know, theoretically, they could win seven back-to-back Tour de Franceances yeah right that's never happened but yeah but um so you know you've got the pace of of this market and and you know so what are in your opinion um what are the most promising things you're watching this podcast and you're like man there's so many roads i could go down there's oh my gosh there's red light therapy. For example, you just introduced me to a group out of LA and we did plasma exchange. Therapeutic plasma exchange, yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:12 Which was amazing where they actually took the plasma out of my body and replaced it with albumin. It's like an oil change for your body. Yeah. And I was tired the day that I did it, but the next day I felt amazing. I felt like I was looking through a 4K screen, like I took a limitless pill. But where do you see the industry headed? Longevity and anti-aging, is it bio-optimization? Is it learning to reduce the risk of pathology and disease. Where do you really see the innovations going? I mean, where a lot of money is going is longevity and anti-aging, age reversal, because that's what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech billionaires are most interested in.

Starting point is 00:05:55 So that's where a lot of the money is going. I think if you were to look at some of the things that are interesting right now and still fly under the radar and are still kind of like you know go to go to tijuana or cabo or you know do a protocol that's unproven yet in my in my opinion is kind of like the way of the future you could look at for example um you and i both talked about exosomes before yes i don't know if you saw the study like two weeks ago it was something crazy i believe it was over% increase in lifespan in rodent models with an exosome infusion based on stimulation of the mitochondrial pathways, the PGC1 alpha pathway, which is something that you

Starting point is 00:06:38 could trigger with. This is one of the reasons that high intensity interval training works so well, right? You're triggering that PGC1 alpha pathway for mitochondrial proliferation, meaning better health, better ATP production. But in this study, it was an exosome infusion in mice. And the idea of exosomes, these tiny little signaling molecules, it's actually kind of fun. Nanoparticles. I did my studies at University of Idaho. My master's degree was in exercise physiology and biomechanics okay and when we were looking at cellular function and structure one of the things that my professor this was uh dr dennis dolney at idaho he's showing us

Starting point is 00:07:17 these little vesicles that are coming out of the cells he's like yeah this is basically cellular poop right just like the metabolic waste that cells put out well it turns out fast forward 20 years now that i'm aging myself and exosomes are these same vesicles that we once thought were cellular waste products that it turns out are uh they're considered to be paracrine molecules things that cause cell signaling draw stem cells into specific areas, increase blood flow, allow for intracellular communication. And it appears now they have a lifespan extension effect that could be equivalent or even superior to something like a stem cell infusion. Wow. And a lot of doctors now are combining them with stem cells because, you know, like especially in the U.S. where you're not allowed to expand a stem cell.

Starting point is 00:08:07 You're considered to be a pharmaceutical company if you're expanding a stem cell which is why you got to go overseas if you want to get like the high mesenchymal stem cell counts and you want to take whatever fat or bone marrow or expand it or umbilical tissue or neonatal product and expand it in the US you can't do that but in the US you can take non expanded stem cells and you can combine them with exosomes. And that vastly increases the efficacy and the signaling capability of the stem cell. So one thing that I look at in the biohacking industry is, gosh, like with the studies I'm seeing on exosomes, that's one field I can see taking off even more than it is now.

Starting point is 00:08:41 And what is it? Is it the growth factors, the high molecular weight, high hyaluronic acid? I think it's also important to point out that exosomes don't have DNA. So unlike a stem cell, right, they're not capable of really transmitting a signal. Exactly. Exactly. I believe they have some micro RNA components, but they don't actually contain the DNA. Right.

Starting point is 00:08:58 I mean, I've experimented with them. Have you gotten an exosome infusion before? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Plenty of exosomes. Have you ever done intranasal exosomes? My wife did for asnosnia and parosnia when she had COVID. And what was crazy, Ben, was she had, I still have the video, 18 months, she had no taste, no smell.

Starting point is 00:09:18 And then she got that, remember everybody got that perverted taste and smell where everything was like garbage or trash yeah like better than glp1 for weight loss just don't smell anything it was awful i mean my wife hated it by the way because she she got covid same thing she felt fine except she lost her sense of smell for two weeks and she'd sit there at dinner and just be like i don't even enjoy this same same same with mine and my my wife's thin to begin with and she got real skinny like very very frail. The point where her family was like pulling me aside, like, hey, what's going on?

Starting point is 00:09:49 And I'm like, look, as nausea brought me up, there's nothing going on behind the scenes with us. By the way, we're coming up with a new diet, the clothespin diet. Just clothespin your nose. She literally would clothespin herself. But my whole point was that she uh somebody told her to take a nasal cannulus now this was an injection this was just with the soft like sponge um that little cylindrical nasal cannulus and fill her nasal cavity lay at 45 degrees fill it with the exosomes and let it naturally drain fill it again let it naturally drain she worked her way through five mls and in in each nostril and i kid you not

Starting point is 00:10:25 40 minutes later she's sitting at the um breakfast counter and i had made eggs and avocado and which she never ate and she took a bite of it and she just started sobbing like pouring tears and i was like taste it because she could taste it and it didn't taste like garbage and she could smell it and it smelled like eggs and avocado and it tasted like eggs and avocado and i actually i still have a video to this day because i sent it to uh my buddies at uh juvex so yeah yeah well first first of all that's that's that's interesting because you know joking aside yeah one of the side effects of glp-1 agonist the injectable GLP-1 agonists that are super powerful, is some people get depression. And part of that might be they've completely lost the dopaminergic stimuli from food,

Starting point is 00:11:13 which is meant to be enjoyed. And when something that's meant to be enjoyed instead makes you nauseous, it's like your wife cried over the eggs and avocado because we don't even realize the emotional sensation that we can experience or the happiness that we can derive from food until we lose taste or until we're taking some kind of a supplement that makes us nauseous in response to food. Later on, I can tell you an interesting story about the, um, about some of these GLP-1 alternatives, but back to the exosomes, you know, your wife did, you know, the equivalent of like the world's most expensive neti pot.

Starting point is 00:11:42 Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can also, uh, what I did was I got one of the nasal sprays. Like an afrin kind of like a mister. It was one of the ones, I had like one of those silver injection nasal sprays for immune function, like when I travel, but I emptied that out of there. I put the exosomes, a little saline solution. It was like a vaporizer. My head went clear as a bell for like two weeks. It was nuts. One vial of exosomes that I went through over the course of two days, just kind of huffing it pretty unsystematically, just whenever I felt like it. Went through the whole bottle in a couple of days, and it was incredible, the increase

Starting point is 00:12:14 in mental clarity. And then I went to India. I did a... Have you been to India lately? Not lately. I did a three-week tour of India. And I mean, the air hazard quality index was above 500, meaning that for me to go out on, you know, one of the walks that I enjoy, cause I love to walk outside two

Starting point is 00:12:32 hour walk is the equivalent of smoking 20 cigarettes. That's, that's how poor the air quality is. Two hour walk is 20 cigarettes. This is literally like, if you were to have that in the U S it would be warning. Don't go outside, you know, stay indoors with your HEPA air filters turned on full blast. I challenge you to transform your life in just three days. Join my three day cold plunge challenge and experience the incredible benefits of cold water therapy for three minutes each day. Immerse yourself in cold water and feel the difference.

Starting point is 00:13:01 Cold punching can boost your energy, improve your mental clarity and enhance your mood. It's easy to join. So head over to theultimatehuman.com, download the Plunge app, track your progress, and connect with our community. Let's do this together.

Starting point is 00:13:13 Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So anyways, I got back from India and I do a lot of underwater swimming and hypoxic holds. And you and I did a bunch of breath work in Miami where we were just holding our breath after the Wim Hof breath ups. I could not hold my breath,

Starting point is 00:13:29 even three quarters of what I was used to. And I could tell I had just a shit ton of lung damage. That lung degradation that fast? Right, yeah. Wow. Well, I was there for three weeks. Anyways though, so I did, there's a lot of things that you would see

Starting point is 00:13:43 applied to COd or lung function um hydration is low hanging fruit but then glutathione vitamin c you know citrus containing fruits um uh and acetylcysteine a lot of the things that would be considered popular antioxidants those are those are really good right function but i talked with a naturopathic doc over in india and what she uses with her patients, especially in Delhi, which is one of the worst areas is nebulizing, uh, a mix of, uh, hydrogen peroxide. And you can do this. Like if you're listening right now and you've been a former smoker or had COPD, or you just want better lung function, or there's some kind of wildfire where you're at,

Starting point is 00:14:20 you take a 3% hydrogen peroxide solution and you mix it 10 to 1 in saline and then you get one of these like you know 40 50 dollar nebulizers from amazon and a nebulizer is just basically turning all the little liquids that you have in the container into micro particles that you breathe in and those saturate your lungs and hydrogen peroxide actually helps out quite a bit with air pollution but i talked with another doctor and they said, well, I've done this successfully with exosomes before. So I nebulized exosomes for a couple of days after I got back from India and my lungs felt great within half a week. And so there, I think that, you know, back to the root of your question, I think that's one field that we'll see continue to explode. And then another one you mean the the field of

Starting point is 00:15:06 exosomes and their applications yeah another one is um and they're very they're relatively safe not relatively they're very safe they're pretty safe yeah yeah they're literally just a signaling molecule you can think of them as like upgrading whatever your body's normal cellular function would be they're about an 800th the size of a normal cell though right so they actually don't ask permission they go right they're very small so cell though right so they actually don't ask permission they go right through the very small so exactly so well so they can permeate just about anywhere in the body and i think that's part of their um you know that's part of their efficacy because the you know they can go into areas of inflammation or they don't have to ask permission across the fossil

Starting point is 00:15:40 yeah like a ghost right that we'll just walk right through yeah exactly so i think that's um i think that bodes well for inflammatory conditions or just like you're talking about the neural inflammation um pulmonary inflammation you know areas where larger molecular size compounds are just not going to make it in yeah i had no clue that the direct impact on lifespan though until i saw that that road that's pretty interesting. I got to look, I got to look that up. Yeah. It's crazy. It just came out. I think it was nature.

Starting point is 00:16:08 Nature. Okay. I'm going to, um, the, the other one, and you and I talked about this a little bit this week is gene therapy, you know, like, it's like the old school CRISPR gene editing that everybody was afraid of. And, you know, rumbles about the Chinese super soldiers and, you know, crazy, you know, growing a third eye, uh, you you know the idea of precision gene editing reversible precision gene editing is very interesting this is something we talked about

Starting point is 00:16:31 at dinner the other night yeah uh with dr cook matt cook yeah and and one leading company in the field uh they're called uh mini circle they've developed a reversible technology it's it's a it's a plasmid-based gene therapy that is targeted to specific tissues it's also reversible it's reversible technically it's like it's like a tetracycline-based antibiotic that you would get injected if you ever did want to reverse it i suppose if you actually did start to grow a third eye or some giant research study came out showing that that it was because because this is some of the stuff we're talking about, this is still, again, back to the root of your question, these are still like the fringes of medicine and things that haven't yet been approved,

Starting point is 00:17:12 but that could be the wave of the biohacking and human science sector. So gene therapy, as of right now, there's only one that's effective that I know of and approved in certain places have done. You, you would still need, like if you're a US listener, you would still have to travel internationally to have something like this done. Like Tijuana, Cabo, Dubai. Those are a few places where I know you can get it done. And, uh, it's an intramuscular injection. The one that I

Starting point is 00:17:40 got is called follow statin. And if you've ever Googled, or if you're, if you're listening right now, you could Google, you could Google myostatin knockout bowl or myostatin knockout mouse or myostatin knockout dog. And you see these massive, just like absolutely swole bodybuilding esque animals who unfortunately, because that, that myostatin therapy actually results in such steep amounts of muscle growth that it can be so anabolic that the animal just dies an early death. Wow. Because similar as bodybuilding, it's like you and I know that being a bodybuilder isn't the healthiest thing, right? Right, not long term. Cardiomegaly, enlarged heart, you know, it's a lot of stress.

Starting point is 00:18:22 It takes a lot more antioxidants for the body to produce, to the muscle to cool the muscle there's a lot of diminishing returns right when it comes to muscle so with phallostatin gene therapy it's a little bit more of a gentler form of that meaning all it is it's an injection that slows down the degradation of muscle tissue, basically. Collagen, ligaments, muscles. But how does it slow down the degradation? Does it stop the body from... There are things that inhibit muscle growth, myostatin. Right, right. So does it inhibit myostatin?

Starting point is 00:18:59 Follistatin is similar to myostatin, in that if you were to trigger folistatin, you would see an increase in muscle protein synthesis. So I believe, I believe the mechanism of action is an increase in MPS. So it's not that you're in inhibiting folistatin, you're, you're stimulating folistatin. So again, a lot of this is just purely anecdotal, but I'm, I'm part of a WhatsApp group of a whole bunch of other people who have had this done. I think there's only a few hundred folks who have actually had it done. And everyone is experiencing the same thing that I've experienced.

Starting point is 00:19:33 I weighed 175 pounds in early March when I was in Cabo and had a nurse walk into the clinic. And she literally goes, hey, do you want to be superhuman? I'm like okay so and she quick intramuscular injection in the left shoulder yeah in the right shoulder and that was it took five minutes i walked out of there and since that day the gym has been easier recovery has been profound i topped out at 191 pounds started training training for a Spartan race with my sons, which involved a lot of running and endurance, went back down to 185 pounds, which I'm at right now. I've never put on muscle that fast in my life. Wow. And that was gene therapy. And so now the next two that are in

Starting point is 00:20:20 the process of approval are clotho gene therapy, which would have a significant impact on cognitive performance specifically. And apparently you see a stimulation of NAD pathways as well. So if you were supplementing with NAD, theoretically you wouldn't need to even take NAD if you had the clotho gene therapy. And then the other one is LH therapy,

Starting point is 00:20:43 luteinizing hormone therapy, which would increase testosterone very similar to taking testosterone replacement therapy and the effects of these gene therapy injections are about one to two years oh wow so you get this injection and it lasts for one to two years right now when you say it's reversible is it reversible because it ends or is it reversible because you can actually because if you were to actually get i actually asked the doctor the doctor that did my procedure was dr khan and i asked him like what if like i get sick and a doctor puts me on a terrible last thing for an

Starting point is 00:21:14 antibiotic yeah and he said well if it's a tetracycline based antibiotic technically you could reverse the gene therapy if you were on tetracycline-based antibiotics. So that is the mechanism via which it's reversed. Tetracycline. Yeah, yeah. So these gene therapies are basically targeting, shutting on or shutting off a certain gene so you get the outcome. So it's precision gene therapy.

Starting point is 00:21:41 Yeah, so if you stop CRISPR, which has a whole bunch of downstream implications. Yeah, you stop the inhibition, and it would be permanent. If you take it out, maybe you can put it back in. I don't think CRISPR gene editing is reversible as far as I know. No, I don't think it's reversible either. Yeah, because I would think that once you took a cytosine, glycine, glycine sequence out, and you took it out, it's gone.

Starting point is 00:22:02 Yeah, it's gone. So you can't just sort of scoot the DNA and make room for it again. But so, you know, these gene therapies, either turning on or turning off or inhibiting or enhancing, I guess would be the right term. So if you inhibit the breakdown of muscle or you inhibit the inhibition on building muscle then all of a sudden you get these outcomes like what you're talking about 14 pounds of muscle in

Starting point is 00:22:33 what two months same reason you and i would use like protein or amino acids post-workout to increase muscle protein synthesis you're doing something very similar with that gene therapy that's amazing yeah well um and uh and, but you don't feel that you've had any other side effects from this positive or negative, just the muscle besides a little bit of extra wasted time in the gym. Cause, cause you, like I was telling you, I was at the gym, like that week I was visiting the gym in Cabo and I would be there like an hour and a half and look at my clock thinking like 20 or 30 minutes had gone by just because you're enjoying it and you're crushing it a lot of people who get on testosterone replacement therapy

Starting point is 00:23:08 one of the side effects of that is a stimulation towards forward progress towards wanting to achieve things both mentally from a business standpoint physically biologically and so that's one of the reasons that people who aren't testosterone like to go hit the gym. And this, this had a very similar effect as something like that. Like you just feel like going out and lifting. So there's even the motivation is higher. And of course, since you're recovering faster and you're building muscle faster, you know, it's actually, it was, it was incredible. I call it that old school positive aggression towards working out. Yeah. You know, you see people have that all the time. And I think a lot of that comes to from, I mean, I'm sure there's a hormonal component to it, but the alpha male side of things. But, you know, you start increasing red blood cells, hemoglobin, the capacity for the blood to transport oxygen.

Starting point is 00:23:58 You start raising that oxidative state. People have more energy. They've got more oxygen and energy available for elevated emotional states. So it's easier for them to be passionate or elated or joyful or aroused. And all of a sudden they start existing in these higher tier emotional states. I mean, it's motivating. Right. Right. I mean, that's one of the reasons your superhuman protocol works, right? It's PMF to open up the cell membranes and then you hyper oxygenate them and then produce more atp with red light yeah yeah and um uh so i i want i

Starting point is 00:24:27 want to transfer now and talk about some of the ways that we are enhancing the body's ability to to heal and police itself you know i was talking yesterday at the health optimization summit and we started stumbling upon ways to you you know, everybody's talking about cancer preventative measures and, you know, reducing the toxic load in the body. But what about strengthening the immune system that actually is the best at catching metabolically healthy cells that are switching their metabolism to being metabolically unhealthy cells and doing things to really greatly enhance the immune system and giving it support

Starting point is 00:25:06 things like plasma exchange exactly um and um you know you're actually the one that turned me on to that um i had it done in la um i haven't done my post labs yet um but i did have some um mycotoxins um i had a little bit of lp uh little a which which was a concern to me because the rest of my panel looks amazing. Lp little a and ApoB are the two to look at. Yeah, yeah. Lp little a and ApoB. But multiple mycotoxin wise, I had some minor ones, but I'm really gonna be interested to

Starting point is 00:25:41 see if after taking out that plasma and exchanging it with albumin and then retesting, we know how much I dropped some of those little toxic loads. Cause I live in the mold capital of the world, I found out. Dr. Minkoff told me that Miami's the mold capital of the world. It's like, shit, all the places.

Starting point is 00:26:02 So I did see some, I you know uh molds for some little right mycotoxins so i'm going to look at those and i had some minor heavy metals that were just starting to get into the yellow um so have you done the plasma exchange do you see this becoming something that's mainstream i mean right plasma change i mean it is expensive and a lot of times it requires a series of treatments and apparently there's a newer form of it. You and I were talking with a gentleman at the symposium this week who has developed a different protocol, Lumati, which is more of a heparin-based therapy

Starting point is 00:26:35 that is still like a filtration type of protocol. But it's different. Yeah, like dialysis. Different than therapeutic plasma exchange where you're not removing albumin and a bunch of good stuff, but you're filtering the blood very similarly to how you just described. I think that there's definitely efficacy to that when it comes to immune system regulation. The problem is it's expensive and it's hard to get.

Starting point is 00:26:58 And it's still one of those things that, you know, especially for the alternative to therapeutic plasma exchange, you still have to go overseas to do. I think another thing that you have to think about, though, is the actual cellular damage, the cellular membrane damage that can occur if you've had mold, mycotoxin, any type of stealth co-infection like that. And that's another thing you have to target in addition to just getting the bad stuff out. So this is where I think...

Starting point is 00:27:24 Is what is the damage that it caused? Right, exactly. What do you mean, like endothelial damage or what kind of- Like cell membrane damage. So this would be where things like phospholipid therapy or some type of a phosphatidylserine or phosphatidylcholine protocol comes in because I look at it from two different perspectives.

Starting point is 00:27:43 You wanna heal the cells and the cell membranes, and you also want to heal the blood-brain barrier issues that have arisen as a part of that. So there are many doctors now that will put someone on a mold and mycotoxin eradication protocol. Many are not using therapeutic plasma exchange just because it's so fringe and hard to get. They're using a lot of the traditional approaches

Starting point is 00:28:01 of upregulating liver detoxification pathways, sometimes ozone, but usually something like glutathione and N-acetylcysteine, you know, spread throughout the day, which is not that difficult for people who even have like a low budget for this stuff to be able to do, combined with a binder, you know, like activated charcoal or chitosan or chlorella or clay or something like that, that binds what you're detoxifying. And then you combine that with the two primary detoxification pathways that you're doing a lot of sauna, infrared sauna, particularly just because of the penetration of the light more deeply into the body. And then something like a, you know, like an enema protocol, like a,

Starting point is 00:28:41 like a coffee enema protocol to actually get stuff out but then you also have a lot of doctors now using phosphatidylserine IV protocols which help to repair the cell membranes and then there's now there's there's one company I found the other day they're called a NT factor and they actually have a small oral phospholipid based product that you can consume orally to help to supply the body what it needs to heal cell membranes. So the idea is you don't just have to eradicate, you also want to heal. And the eradication protocol could be therapeutic plasma exchange. What heals the phospholipid bilayer? What actually repairs cellular damage?

Starting point is 00:29:19 It's actual, from these supplements like the phosphatidylserine or phosphatidylcholine or even these absorbable oral phospholipids, it would be actually consuming the lipids themselves that are used to comprise the cell membrane. So it's very, very similar to the whole idea of why seed oils would be a prudent thing to avoid based on the fact that they can accumulate in the cardiolipin layer in the mitochondrial membrane they can accumulate in cell membranes that's that's why it's kind of like the you are what you eat type of concept so in the same way that you want to consume healthy fats you can also

Starting point is 00:29:54 consume lipids that help to make that cell membrane even healthier there's plenty of people out there that would say that um you know the whole uh seed oil thing is fear-mongering i get it all the time every time that i talk about um seed oils and i i disagree too i i it's where do you fall it's interesting because what people say is if you look at you know some epidemiological data that you know consumption of some of these polyunsaturated fats rich in omega six fatty acids seems to be correlated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. I am not convinced that they're actually looking at rancid oxidized forms of those oils, which the lion's share of people are consuming when they're eating fried food at restaurants or

Starting point is 00:30:44 cooking with vegetable oil from plastic that's been stored on grocery store shelves. I mean, you've talked extensively, yes, on your podcast about hydroxy nonanol and some of the ways that these oils are actually extracted and the inflammation that it can produce in the body and how long these fats stick around. I mean, there was a time when they would say

Starting point is 00:31:03 two or three months and now I think there's data of up to a few years that many of these lipids remain in the human body. Again, coming back to you are what you eat. And this is why I have just a very, very simple illustration for people. I tell them, well, look, if you were at the fair, if you walked up to me at the county fair, I don't know about you, Gary, but I spent a lot of time at the county fair. I do too. I pretty much lived there. If you walked up to me at the county fair, I don't know about you, Gary, but I spend a lot of time at the county fair. I do, too. Favorite places to hang out. I pretty much live there. Zipper and the Gravitron and petting the pigs.

Starting point is 00:31:31 Dude, you can't turn on Instagram without watching somebody getting flung off of one of those teacup rides. It's like, I don't think I would ever get on one of those. No, thank you. And you see the dude that's running it, too, and he looks like he's just fresh out of a you know a big old fat bag of weed yeah yeah um yeah he's got a couple tats on his face god bless the carnies yeah so anyways though if i tell people if you were to walk up to me at the county fair and offer me like a stick of cotton candy or a corn dog i'll take the cotton candy 10 times out of 10 because that's just sugar right you can eat sugar and you can walk around you can burn it off and go ride the teacup

Starting point is 00:32:06 and get thrown out of that and burn off some more sugar. But basically you can burn through glucose. I mean, yeah, and maybe we can talk about this later, about how my blood glucose hit 200 in the last Spartan race. I definitely want to talk about that. Last week. So we can come back to that and why that may or may not be an issue. But your body can do a pretty good job if you're a

Starting point is 00:32:25 physically active person metabolizing sugar, and you can even make a case for sugar being a sometimes drug. Like if you're going to go throw down a hard workout or do a Spartan or do some highly glycolytic CrossFit workout or something like that, sugar can actually be pretty helpful for enhancing that glycolytic process. It's not necessary, but it can be helpful. And in some cases, you know, for example, in, uh, in endurance sports, uh, even in bodybuilding, you see this, you do glycogen or carbohydrate or sugar deprivation to upregulate the body's ability to be able to pull it all into muscle. And then when competition day rolls around, you eat a whole bunch of sugar or carbohydrates, et cetera. Your body has upregulated the processes responsible for pulling the sugar into the muscle and you just

Starting point is 00:33:06 soak it all up and that's how you know a bodybuilder will sometimes gain 10 pounds between the morning flex off show and the actual evening competition because now that they've weighed in they go eat a bunch of carbohydrates and because they've been carbohydrate depleted for so long your body just soaks all up yeah just sucks iron man triathlon if you train low carb and there's been studies on this training low carb allows you to more effectively use carbohydrates when you get to race day because your body just burns it up so readily just just absorbs it and uses it way more effectively if it hasn't had it for a certain period of time right because it's up regulated all of the transporters necessary, because it's been such a such a, an unavailable commodity that your body

Starting point is 00:33:50 wants to use it as effectively as possible when it does get it, right? So you're saying occasionally, it's actually not a bad idea to do that. I think it's actually, it's actually a cool little hack to go low sugar, go low carb. And then when it's time to do the big workout, or when it's time to like, whatever, go to the beach, and you want want to look swole or whatever the case that you might want carbohydrates for, then you do a carbohydrate feed and your body just soaks it all up. Yeah. But the, um, the, the deal with the, the cotton candy is, yeah, I'll take cotton candy 10 times out of 10, because again, I can walk around, I can burn it off. I can bench press, push up, walk, sprint, whatever. But then if I have that corn dog that has been fried in vegetable oil, I can't just go burn that off, right?

Starting point is 00:34:30 Those lipids are used to comprise my cell membrane for sometimes months or years on end, accumulating in the body, creating inflammation. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that vegetable oils are a much worse case than sugar. Yeah, I think that's true too. I mean, one of the things we talked about before the podcast was not just what happened to you in your race, but I have clients that would start using a constant glucose monitor like what you're wearing. And the first thing that would shock them is that their blood sugar starts rising in the morning upon waking when they haven't eaten right freak out yeah yeah and people freaking out they're like i'm pre-diabetic what's going on

Starting point is 00:35:10 how is my blood sugar rising and i haven't eaten since you know eight o'clock last night and you know we talked about this gluconeogenic response you know where the liver is creating new glucose i think obviously everybody knows that um but you said you were recently um in an intense race yeah i did i did the spartan deca fit and i was wearing my blood sugar hit it was just below 200 about 198 that's incredible during the race you know and and so stepping back and looking at the reason for this and the reason that people might wear a blood glucose monitor or take their blood glucose because they're trying to pay attention to their health, which is a good idea. I mean, I, I mostly wear this thing now, not because I don't know what a certain food is going to do to my body. Cause I've worn it long enough to know how green

Starting point is 00:35:54 beans versus steak versus, you know, Twinkie are going to affect me. Right. Not that I eat a lot of Twinkies or crumpets or cotton candy. Uh, but I wear it because what gets measured gets managed i this is the same reason i wear a ring to track my my steps because if i wear it and i check it at the end of the day i'm going to be a lot more likely to say like take a postprandial stroll after dinner to hit my 10 000 step allotment or if i wear it when i'm sleeping i'll do a better job getting lights out early taking care of my hygiene, just because I like to have a cool score. And when you measure it, you manage it. Want to get an extra hour of quality, good sleep every single night? Let me tell you how I do it. My wife and I sleep on Eight Sleeps Pod 4 Ultra. This is a technology that fits over your mattress

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Starting point is 00:37:21 Transform your nights and elevate your sleep. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. But anyways, the idea is your body has mechanisms to mobilize glucose when your body needs a hit of energy. Even if you don't have exogenous sources of glucose, like a morning stack of pancakes or bowl of cereal, you'll see that blood glucose rise due to the cortisol awakening response, right? You wake up, light hits your eyes, you'll notice if you want to experiment with this and you're wearing a blood glucose monitor, if you have like one of those seasonal affective disorder light boxes, for example, blast your body with light, which I use. I have this pair of retimer glasses back in my hotel

Starting point is 00:38:04 room here in London right now, which blast my eyes with bluish green light when I wake up in the morning. They're called retimers. Yeah, they're called retimers. There's another brand called Ayo, A-Y-O. Both of these glasses are designed to simulate the bluish green spectrum of sunlight in your eyes. When you wake up, they stay on for about 20 minutes and if you are traveling if you're whatever in vegas and can't get out in the sunshine because the buildings are blocking all of that or you're in your hotel room and you got to get some work done you can't necessarily you know put on your hotel bathrobe and wander outside in the sunshine when you first get up

Starting point is 00:38:37 kind of reset circadian yeah yeah and then i i double up i've got another one called the human charger that goes in your ears, and it blasts the photoreceptors in your ears with light. So I'm getting full sunlight on my eyes and in my ears, and since we're all tidy little biohacking schemers here, the other thing I do is, well, when you look at the light spectrum during the day, you've got a certain amount of blue light, somewhere between 40 and 60%. I forget the exact value of blue light from sunlight, you've got about it's around 40 to

Starting point is 00:39:13 50% red light, right near infrared, red light, far infrared light, and then you've got, it's around five, believe it's even below 5% UVA and UVB light, right? So you've got the UVA and UVB, which helps you with the vitamin D3 and the nitric oxide production. Then you have the red light spectrum. Then you have the bluish green light spectrum. So in an ideal scenario, you should be trying to match those spectrums as closely as possible in your indoor living environment and waking environment, which is why if you really wanted to geek out on this... Can you do that though with... Well... They have lights that emit those

Starting point is 00:39:49 wavelengths? You can do it. So first of all, when I wake up in the morning, especially if I'm traveling, I get adjusted to my new time zone way better when I do this. I use the little glasses that make the bluish green spectrum. I put in the ones for the ears as you're telling your brain it's morning you're telling your brain it's morning what are you missing out on if you're using bluish green spectrum and bright like led in the ears the red light yeah the red light so then i also have these red light devices the same ones as you would use for like joints i have a couple of wrap around red light joint devices and I just put those on as well. Okay. So I basically I'm blasting my body

Starting point is 00:40:29 in the morning with red light, with bluish green light and with light in the ears. Right. And if you wanted to do this at home, you would technically, I mean, if you really want to be as, as scientifically accurate as possible with daylight. Yeah, I know. I know some people like to geek out on this in all of the waking, daylighty, working, exercising areas of the house. During the daytime, you want about 75% blue light and 25% incandescent light. If you want to match outdoor daytime as much as possible. And there's two ways to do that. You can either literally go through the cans of the house and have three quarters of them be overhead LED light and you want to use good LED light. So if you look for

Starting point is 00:41:16 LED, you want what's called OLED. OLED is low in flicker. It's low in EMF, and there are companies like Bond Charge or Block Blue Light that actually make healthy OLED lights. And then in the other 25% of the cans, you would put incandescent light. So you're basically matching as closely as possible sunlight. And then in your more relaxing areas of the house, say like the dining room where you're going to have dinner, or a master bathroom. Even the lower levels of light, not so overhead, coming down. Hallway leading up to the master bedroom, whatever. It would be the complete opposite, 75% incandescent, 25% OLED. Right.

Starting point is 00:41:53 And this obviously sounds really laborious, or you're going to be telling a lot of how many, insert XYZ here, people, does it take to change a light bulb. And so both bond charge and block blue light. Now this is super cool. This is what I'm outfitting my entire new house with an Idaho. Yeah. One light bulb, you put it in and you turn on the light switch once and it does daylight, right? The perfect combination of blue and incandescent for daylight, right? Turn off the light switch, you turn it on again and it does twilight the perfect combination of 25 led 75 incandescent

Starting point is 00:42:26 for twilight like after 6 p.m or whatever and then you flip it on again and it goes full red light so you could literally have your whole house and all you do is flip a switch and it goes to whatever you want for whatever time of day so that that's what i'm going to have in in my new house is just every can will have those bulbs that's so. But if you were to just use the, you know, I'll have like seasonal effective disorder boxes that produce a bunch of, of blue light that really like wake you up. And these are like high flicker, high blue light. This is like the kind of light that you should avoid most of the day. But if you blast yourself with it in the morning, it can really help wake you up. And I have one of these on my desk. The one I have is called a, um,

Starting point is 00:43:10 a beacon 40 and it's literally like looking at a strobe light. And really, I mean, it, it wakes you up. Wow. But if you were to test your blood glucose back to the blood glucose piece, along with that amount of light, you would see a steep rise in blood glucose in the morning. And back to what you were saying is the frustration. A lot of people are like, why is my blood glucose going up in the morning? I haven't eaten anything. I've been good. Yeah. I want to talk about how it hit 200 in a race. Cheesecake for dinner last night. Because you would think conventional wisdom says the opposite. It's glycogenesis. I'm burning glucose. It's glycogenesis. It's the idea that your liver and your muscles to a certain extent will release glucose into your bloodstream any time that it sees a need for energy, for wakefulness, for combating stress, for fighting, whatever the case may be. And this is why when you wake up,

Starting point is 00:43:51 you see that normal cortisol awakening response causing a surge in blood glucose. And if you have a cup of coffee and you look at a bunch of blue light, or especially if you like jump in an ice bath, which some people do, like you'll see that go up even more because you're amplifying that cortisol awakening response. This is even why some people, probably Dr. Huberman being the foremost amongst them who have heard say this, is that if you don't want to get tired earlier in the day, if you don't want to accelerate sleep drive too early, try to stave off that cortisol awakening response. Try to wait a little bit to jump in the cold bath, to have a cup of coffee, to blast yourself with blue light. And this is actually

Starting point is 00:44:28 what I do is when I get up in the morning when I'm at home, because unlike when I travel, I don't have to be on a stage speaking or be in a podcast with fire alarms going off in a hotel room. And so when I'm traveling, I just blast myself right away because I got to get the F up when I'm traveling. But at home, for the first hour when I wake up, my whole home is the way that a lot of people should have their home at night. It's all red light. I keep my phone with the blue light turned off. My screen monitor still has the dimmed light. I don't turn on that blue light box on my desk until about an hour after I've been awake. Because if I just shove too much at my body right when I wake up, I'll get really tired,

Starting point is 00:45:10 like 2 or 3 p.m. in the afternoon because you're accelerating your sleep drive too quickly. So it's this concept of easing yourself into the day. You would also see a lower blood sugar response if you do that, which would result in less of a hypoglycemic drop which would result in you being a little less hangry right when breakfast rolls around or hypoglycemic when you go to the gym at like 8 30 to do your workout and you've already had that blood glucose spike and so you've kind of like you know you've kind of like blown your load for yeah for the workout later on meaning you'd have to that's what i was gonna say like when the workout when are you positioning your workout in that and then um so what do? Are you journaling? Are you

Starting point is 00:45:48 looking at emails? I get up, I pray, I read my Bible, I stretch, I do some foam rolling, and then I start to turn the lights on and stuff. And usually about an hour after I'm awake, I'm in front of my computer making sure there's no email fires to put out. I'm running that, that blue light kind of waking my body up while I'm drinking a cup of coffee. And then I gather the whole family for meditation with meditation as a family, every morning at 7am we have a big team huddle. We gather, we read the Bible together. We pray, we talk about what's going on. You know, one of the boys have jujitsu and tennis and you know, what, what time's dinner and who's making what for dinner. And we just, it's almost like a team huddle and one big giant

Starting point is 00:46:28 hug. And then I go work out after that. So, so I'm usually working out like two hours after I get up. Right. But you see the same thing. I mean, you find that you're, you're, you're well energized and like easing into your day rather than get it. Cause a lot of people just get up and get after the cortisol awakening response, obviously, you know. So there are ways to manage that and there are reasons that you may want to manage that, but you should also not freak out that you're pre-diabetic if you wake up and your blood glucose is much higher than what you'd want to see for a normal daytime value, because that's your biology doing what it's supposed to do, waking you up. You see the same thing though in the sauna.

Starting point is 00:47:04 People go hyperglycemic in the sauna. That's right. Which throws a lot of people for a loop because they're like, well, I heard the sauna was good for my blood glucose and may lower risk of diabetes. Good for insulin sensitivity. Yeah, for insulin sensitivity. You may see the same thing with cold, which again, people think that's paradoxical because you're supposed to see good metabolic stability, you know, as a response to cold thermogenesis. And it is indeed one of the best things to do for lowering blood glucose. Matter of fact, if I'm going to go out to a, to a restaurant, I know I'm going to have what you might consider to be a cheat meal, but I do cold shower, cold soak beforehand. That's one of the best ways, even stronger than weightlifting to stabilize my blood glucose. And then people go

Starting point is 00:47:43 to the gym and their blood glucose will go way up in the gym or this Spartan race that I did, it hit almost 200. That's incredible. But it's this idea of an acute response to an activity that increases blood sugar in many cases results in long-term stabilization of blood sugar in the same way that an acute rise in heart rate from exercise and acute rise in blood pressure from exercise results in a long-term decrease in heart rate and decrease in blood pressure. Right. So in many cases, if you're doing things that cause your liver to dump a bunch of, or to break down a bunch of glycogen and dump a bunch of glucose into the body,

Starting point is 00:48:27 that doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. If you're tracking that with blood glucose, it's a normal response. How long can the liver sustain this kind of gluconeogenic response? Let's say that during intense exercise. If you do the math, you've got... So we all have tens of thousands of calories of storage fat, many of us much more than others, but this is why human beings can go for a very long time at the proper pace without even eating. And you can

Starting point is 00:48:52 train yourself into that state. Yeah, you're going to break down a little bit of muscle tissue. But if you were burning at a low to moderate pace at a fat burning intensity let's say even like 300 calories an hour and you got 20 000 calories of fat to burn i mean you're you're looking at like you know 60 plus hours that you can just go without actually running out of fuel well in comparison your storage of carbohydrates in a steady state is much lower maybe a steady state and then it's kind of funny because a lot of people are like well you're saying i could race an ironman triathlon without eating no you could but it would be a 17 hour ironman triathlon because because like i used to race ironman and it kind of looks good on paper to say well i'm just going to ride my bike at an aerobic pace but in an actual ironman triathlon

Starting point is 00:49:39 if you're trying to go fast there are certain things like a 20 second window to be able to pass another cyclist which means that you might be pushing 200 watts and you have to do a 600 watt surge to make a pass within 20 seconds you can do a 600 watt surge on a bike burning purely fat right so even an iron man is like aerobic aerobic aerobic and then boom anaerobic and then aerobic and anaerobic so right you it's even very difficult to stay aerobic for especially a race that includes cycling or swimming where you're trying to stay on somebody's feet or something like that. Or running for that matter, yeah. But in comparison to the tens of thousands of calories of storage fat that you have,

Starting point is 00:50:17 you have around 400 calories in your liver, and you have around 2,000 in your muscle. It depends on how much muscle you have. If you look at a bodybuilder, they could probably push closer to like 3,500 calories of actual storage carbohydrate in the muscle. So if you look at 2,000 calories, for most people working out hard, you're going to bonker hit a wall after around 90 minutes. That's about how long you could really go without eating which is why for about anything longer you know for for the average person something like a half marathon or a 90 minute gym workout you're gonna feel like crap within 90 minutes and in some people it's even shorter than that especially if you're like a low carb person because you're going

Starting point is 00:51:00 in there with already lower levels of muscle glycogen. Usually your liver glycogen levels are store are full, but it's a pretty short period of time. And this is why even for someone who's well trained, fit, a fat burning machine, whatever, even if you're doing like a long race or a workout, you're still going to need like a slow bleed of carbohydrates to be able to replenish that muscle glycogen or liver glycogen that you're burning through. And this comes back full circle to what I was talking about earlier, how you can actually go low carb to allow yourself to be able to use those carbohydrates more efficiently when they are released and then go higher carb when it's time for the, for the hard workout or the hard race. And really fill your muscles to get that, you know.

Starting point is 00:51:43 Right, right. The visual benefit anyway yeah yeah it's like the sweet spot for me when i got to my last few years of iron man racing i had kind of for the longest time swallowed hook line and sinker the whole gatorade sports science institute have you know 400 to 500 calories of carbohydrates per hour from the sugary sweet fructose maltodextrin mixes during the race. And I instead switched to about a quarter of that and then combined it with ketones, essential amino acids and electrolytes and had the best three years of racing of my life by eating less carbohydrates, just enough to stave off the liver and the muscle glycogen stores from

Starting point is 00:52:25 being emptied and everything else i was getting from the glycogen and carbohydrate sparing nutrients of ketones amino acids wow and electrolytes and that worked perfectly as a race fuel is that what they meant when they said i remember lance armstrong's uh coach saying i i switched him from a sugar source to a fat source. And he was actually a fat-fueled athlete. Yeah. And when people say a fat-fueled athlete, you still need a slow bleed of carbohydrates coming in.

Starting point is 00:52:55 As a matter of fact, beta-oxidation, the process of burning fat, still relies upon trace amounts of glucose. So you still need glucose, but you need less than what you would think of glucose. As a matter of fact, before we started recording, we were talking about the low-carb, ultra-endurance athlete, Zach Bitter. Right. Zach and I and about a dozen other athletes were part of a study at University of Connecticut. I think it was about six years ago. It was called the FASTER study. of Connecticut I think was about six years ago it's called a faster study and it literally rewrote exercise physiology textbooks because what they did was they

Starting point is 00:53:29 had a high fat ultra ketogenic group like we're talking like 10% carb intake like very like almost that was therapeutic ketogenic yeah I was in that group and then they had another group that was eating the the standard stereotypical around 55 to 65% carbohydrate intake diet. And then they had us all go into a lab at University of Connecticut. They did muscle biopsies. They did bloods during the entire protocol. And so I arrived the night before, checked into my hotel, went over to the lab. They punch holes in both the thighs. And so they do

Starting point is 00:54:05 the muscle biopsy have you had a muscle biopsy no but i've had an 18 gauge to the thigh and it's it's like it's about an 18 right yeah is it 16 yeah it's it's a big needle yeah it might it might even be bigger than that because they literally have to pull the muscle like a guillotine out of the thigh and then they did the back of the leg as well and then they did a fat biopsy to look at that the composition of the muscle and the fat and then and you of course volunteered for this i was getting a thousand dollars which for me at the time was a lot of money my french that was a lot of money plus i was training anyway so i'm gonna do this times were tough around that training session and you paid a thousand dollars get a free plane ride to university of connecticut sounds great so anyways

Starting point is 00:54:45 i i show up they do the muscle biopsies that night they have you do a vo2 max test going as hard as humanly possible to see your maximum oxygen utilization then the next day you wake up you've collected overnight urine you do a stool test and then we got our pre-race meal which was run strawberry in a six ounce cup of heavy cream. So that was what they gave the ketogenic people before putting us on a treadmill. And this is the worst part. No TV, blank white wall,

Starting point is 00:55:15 run on the treadmill for three hours as hard as you can. Three hours? Yeah, three hours. Yeah. So I did 23 miles on the treadmill, just staring at the wall. Oh my God. And you've got the mask on for the indirect calorimetry the whole time to see how much fat and how much carbohydrate you're burning, along with the cannula attached to your arm for collecting the blood while you're running

Starting point is 00:55:37 for three hours. So anyways, leading up to that point, if you were to read the textbook, it says the maximum amount of fat that a human body can actually burn during exercise is one gram per, I'm going to have to remember what it is. So one gram, so it would be one gram per minute, one gram of fat per minute. And we were on average, and some people were as high as 1.8, but on average as the ketogenic group, we were burning 1.5. So what we showed in that study was that by switching to fat as a fuel, you're actually able to burn more fat during exercise. So it was very interesting, showing that you can have that glycogen sparing effect. So you're able to burn more fat during exercise. Right.

Starting point is 00:56:19 You're able to actually increase your body's fat oxidation ceiling during exercise, which would mean if you're... And I'm not like a full on like keto enthusiast, you know, I, my typical diet is You could be more efficient at burning fat. You can train your body to be a fat burning machine. That's undeniable now. Like there's, there's no question about it. Science has shown that that study has shown that that doesn't mean that a strict ketogenic diet is great. As a matter of fact, you should have seen what happened to my testosterone and my thyroid during those 12 months. Thyroid plummeted because my body, you know, carbohydrates are necessary to a certain extent for proper thyroid function. So my body was getting this starvation signal for a year.

Starting point is 00:56:57 So my thyroid stimulating hormone went through the roof and my free T4 plummeted. My testosterone also got down into the three hundreds because again, my, you know, the human body is smart. We're in a time of starvation and famine. It's not a good time to make a baby. So we're going to reduce testosterone production. And it took me a year and a half to get my values back up by doing what I do now, which is I don't eat that many carbohydrates the entire day, keeping my body in a relative state of fat burning, keeping energy levels stabilized. So I'm not besides that cortisol awakening response and my workout and sauna session, getting a glucose spike. And then at the end of the day, I eat as

Starting point is 00:57:37 many carbohydrates as I want to a certain extent. Usually it's about 200 to 300 grams of carbohydrate. The advantage of that is that carbohydrates assist with serotonin production, which can help you to produce melatonin. So you get a better night of sleep if you have more carbohydrates in the evening. And when you said more carbohydrate, what's the typical meal look like you like we've eaten so far today, I'm having like, like today, I had a bottle of ketones and a protein powder that i mixed up and then you know normally if i was at home it'd be more like a like a high fat high protein post-workout smoothie coconut milk clean way this was something i got at the uh at the conference it was like a like a

Starting point is 00:58:16 bone broth protein like a mint chocolate bone broth protein so when i'm at home it's like it's like a like a high fat high, high-protein smoothie. Lunch is typically like some roasted vegetables, some leftover meat from the night before, maybe some seeds and nuts, maybe a can of sardines. And then dinner, that's when I'll have sweet potato fries, carrot fries, beets, parsnips. We do a lot of like so-called USOs, underground storage organs. I just think they're metabolized a lot better. I don't do as well with grains and bread. My wife makes like a slow fermented sourdough

Starting point is 00:58:51 bread that's pretty good. I a little bit of wine, my dessert is usually like a homemade yogurt with some dark chocolate and some blueberries. And so I have all that in the evening. And some people will say correctly why have your carbohydrates in the evening right because your body is more insulin sensitive in the morning partially due to that cortisol awakening response and that and you you can that that is true your body is more insulin sensitive earlier in the day however you can induce a state of artificial insulin sensitivity later on in the day. However, you can induce a state of artificial insulin sensitivity later on in the day prior to that carbohydrate refeed and have your cake and eat it too. And so this would include like a cold bath in the later afternoon or the early evening or a cold shower or cold soak. It can be saving your weight training or whatever your harder workout for the

Starting point is 00:59:41 day would be. It can even be as simple as like a five to 10 minute pre meal stroll. Right. And you can also use glucose disposal agents. This would be like bear brain, bitter melon extract, even if you had a restaurant, like a little bitters and lemon juice and some soda water, but all of these glucose disposal agents will reduce your post perennial glucose spike. So yes, you're more insulin sensitive in the morning but humans are smart we can figure out ways to make us more insulin sensitive in the evening right have stable energy levels during the day then have the carbohydrates at the end of the day and kind of like have our cake and when you and you carbohydrate load do you load you're not really carbohydrate loading per se you're just having your if you were looking at my diet it's still low i mean like 30 carbs

Starting point is 01:00:25 okay so i'm still and pretty low carb but not like the five to ten percent like therapeutic ketogenic low carb right and is that just because you feel better on i feel better i've got more stable energy levels i get less of the hyperglycemic hypoglycemic and then i also you know i i think and i know you feel the same way testing your genes is empowering i mean very empowering you're on a ton and you can find out what kind of fatty acid metabolizer you are you can find out what kind of carbohydrate metabolizer you're kind of caffeine metabolizer you are yeah my wife finally bit the bullet and did her gene testing you know my sons and i have all done it my my sons, they're 16 years old. They take supplements.

Starting point is 01:01:05 They have poor glutathione pathways. They both take glutathione. They have poor BDNF pathways. They both use lion's mane extract. Both of them are poor methylators, and they use a liver extract in the morning. So they just basically take a full desiccated liver powder extract, and they do that based on what I learned about their genes when they were 10 years old.

Starting point is 01:01:27 And that's just like their supplement stack to give them a step up in life. I think they also do sauna. They do endurance exercise for the B and F piece. And I have them avoid grains and cereals that are fortified with folic acid because they're, that's just what they're doing. Do they eat grains or cereals anyway? I mean,

Starting point is 01:01:43 they bake. Yeah. They bake. Oh, they do? Okay, cool for them. Ever wonder how elite athletes recover faster and stay energized? It's the science of cold water therapy. Hi, I'm Gary Brekka, and I want to introduce you to Plunge. Plunge helps to soothe your sore muscles, boost your energy levels, and improve mental clarity. It's a powerful way to support your immune function and enhance your mood. Ready to transform your health? Take the Plunge. Change your life. Visit plunge.com and shop now. It's really hard being a low-carb guy because my entire family, so at least two days a week, there's a giant fresh baked pan of sourdough gooey frosted cinnamon rolls that my wife makes for the boys and i gotta walk past those on my way to the gym in the morning my sons may they had a cooking

Starting point is 01:02:34 channel a cooking show on youtube for six years they make things like pasta and pizza and scones and biscotti for breakfast and for lunch meaning meaning they bake and they cook. And so my, like everybody except me in the house is basically just like a total carb head, except me. But, but they also use a lot of natural grains, natural flours. They still are eating things that are Yeah. I mean, they're, they got screaming high metabolisms. I'm damn them. So we, we use, we use a, a love and logic parenting approach, meaning we educate our sons about the consequences of any decision that they might make and then let them deal with the consequences. And it takes more time as a parent to do that.

Starting point is 01:03:13 I have a parenting book called Boundless Parenting. I talk about this approach a lot in my book. And so the idea is that through education, you make sure that they know what's going on and then they make the choice. And yeah, my sons will have a cinnamon roll, but they won't eat the whole pan. But the idea is you educate them and then you let them make the decision. So yes, they have carbs, but they're also responsible. I mean, they're lean, they're mean, they're working out, they even know when to time them. And so I'm not that concerned about, about them eating in a different way than me, but my genetics, super high risk for type two diabetes and for horrible

Starting point is 01:03:49 glucose management, super high risk for cardiovascular disease. We were talking before the podcast. I do the CT angiography panel for my plaque. I now do a carotid intima media thickness score. I love this one. You were talking about the carotid intima media thickness score because love this one you were talking about the carotid intermediate um thickness score because it's you know putting that radioactive dye into the body for which you would need to do for ct angiography yeah you have to do it for ct angio with contrast but the um uh you know just philosophically that's not like something that we're yeah into right um and uh so you found some some occlusions right um you had you said you had a percent eight percent i personally had eight percent blockage and i think it was just you know i spent 20 years of my life just masochistically racing all over the world in ironman triathlon

Starting point is 01:04:36 i raced for you know for for reebok for spartan racing for four years before that i was doing bodybuilding i was doing open water swimming. You know, I've basically been competing and pushing my heart for years and years. And there is a law of diminishing return. I mean, if you look at the research of Dr. James O'Keefe, I mean, it actually tops out about 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise per week and about 75 minutes of super intense exercise per week, at which point you start to see atherosclerosis, arterial stiffness, inflammation, plaque accumulation. And so despite me being healthy and fit with a high VO2 max, when I say healthy, but healthy by outside perspectives and fit and high VO2 max, I did a number on my heart. And so when I did my first CT angiography,

Starting point is 01:05:22 I was very concerned about the level of plaque, both stable and unstable. And then there's a great book. It's called Prevention Myths. I don't know how old it is, but it goes into a lot of these diagnostic imaging tactics for the heart. And I got exposed in that book to the concept of a CIMT, which is a carotid intima media thickness score.

Starting point is 01:05:42 This is a non-invasive ultrasound of both sides of the neck that correlates with 97% to 98% accuracy the plaque that you would see on the more invasive radiation-based CT angiography. So you can look at this intima media thickness score and gauge the level of corrosion. And exactly correlate it. So there's really two different ways that you could get away with not doing a ct angiography even though i think if you have a high genetic risk for cardiovascular disease getting a ct angiography and specifically getting one called the clearly scan which is an ai-based diagnostic imaging of the heart that gives you a like a full like 3d picture of the

Starting point is 01:06:21 entire heart i think that's smart if you have high risk or if you're like like me like a male who has really pushed their body for a long period of time and what do you do if you find out that you've got blockages well i'll i'll tell you um but if you've done the ct angiography or if you want to get an idea of what's going on with the plaque but you don't want to do the CT angiography, pretty much the only two methods I know of that will give you an approximate corollary for plaque accumulation is that CIMT score, which the only problem with it is the practitioner skill and technique and the practitioner interpretation of it will dictate the effectiveness of the accuracy of the results. There's one website that is called Vasolabs, V-A-S-O labs. And they have a directory of practitioners who have been trained pretty well on how to use the CIMT properly.

Starting point is 01:07:16 Oh, cool. And you could do that every week if you wanted to. And so that's what I'm using now to track my values, which are decreasing, by the way. But the other one that you can use is a blood test that your doctor can order for you. It's only been around for about a year and a half. It tests four different proteins that correlate to plaque accumulation. It's called a heart panel. It's by a company called Proventia. So the H-A-R-T panel. H-A-R-T. Yeah, the H-A-R-T panel. They have a few different panels, but the H-A-R HART or their CVD panel is the one that can test for plaque accumulation. So back to your question, let's say you test and it's high. Well, if you're just looking at it from a lipids standpoint, and you have, you know,

Starting point is 01:07:57 like you were talking about elevated LPA or elevated ApoB or, you know, high small particle count or just super elevated cholesterol or let's say like a high triglyceride to hdl ratio this is called atherogenic index that's right that in and of itself which i don't have i have a low triglyceride to um hdl ratio but i have the lipo little a right right exactly genetic predisposition yeah so So I showed a slide at my talk yesterday at the Health Optimization Summit with the heart health stack that I used to take a lipid panel that was lit up like a Christmas tree along with elevated plaque to a lipid panel that is near perfect with decreasing plaque. I used vitamin K, all three forms of vitamin K. All three forms of vitamin K. And there are different companies that make it, like Designs for Health has one. It's called Tri-K.

Starting point is 01:08:50 I used a vitamin E, but a specific form of vitamin E called tacotrienols. Interviewed a great researcher named Dr. Barry Tan, and it's derived from the annatto plant. That is also something that Designs for Health has. So vitamin E and vitamin K, the holy trilogy of vitamin D and magnesium along with K. So the vitamin D isn't absorbed because vitamin D taken willy-nilly in high amounts can actually pull calcium into the arteries. Right.

Starting point is 01:09:19 So vitamin D, vitamin K, and then magnesium, specifically magnesium glycinate. That would be a very, very good one for heart function. And then natokinase or any other proteolytic enzyme that helps to break down the plaque. And natokinase is probably top of the totem pole. But any proteolytic enzyme formulation, like WOB enzymes, anything that has like serrapeptase in it, anything like that, that's like a proteolytic enzyme. And throw that in there. Ginseng, red yeast rice extract, which is almost like nature's statin. And then something for nitric oxide. I realize this is a big stack. We're

Starting point is 01:09:57 talking like nine or 10 different things. But if you really, truly want to just throw everything at your heart, this is the stack. Something for nitric oxide. I've been using one by Calroy called Vasconox, which is a nitric oxide precursor, but there's a lot of different companies that make things for nitric oxide. And then the last one is something for what's called your endothelial glycocalyx, which is the lining of the blood vessel that can also become damaged. This would be something that is sulfur-based. That's usually sulfur-based compounds that help to heal the damage to the interior of the line. So it's called the endothelial glycocalyx. And there is another product made by that same company, Calroy, that is called, I believe it's called Arterosil. Arterosil.

Starting point is 01:10:44 A-R-T-E-R-S-I-L. Okay. That's the stack that I've been using for about six months. And I've been watching my lipid panel absolutely transform with that. I was already eating a somewhat low carb Mediterranean diet. And then the last thing is that I did a consult with a doctor who showed me 400 different case studies with patients who he'd worked with, with elevated plaque, who he had not only slowed the progression, the progression of, but actually decreased the plaque. And that was through the use of a PCSK9

Starting point is 01:11:17 inhibitor, which basically affects the density of the LDL receptors. It's a twice a month injection. If you have high plaque, your doctor can order it for you. You can have it covered by insurance. My out-of-pocket is still around $300 a month for it. So it's not super inexpensive as products go. But for me, that peace of mind that I'm actually melting away the plaque with the PCSK9 is worth it. So that's twice a monthly injection. Many doctors will combine that with a low dose statin. And I think a low dose statin in some cases, despite a lot of people not liking some of the muscle soreness effects of statins and some evidence that there may be decreased efficacy in

Starting point is 01:11:56 some circumstances, I'm a genetic non-responder to a statin. You can test this on your genes. If you're a genetic non-responder and any doctor worth their salt should test that before they put you on a statin. You don't even need to be on a statin. But if you are a statin responder, then a low dose of what's called rosuvastatin and azetamide can be thrown in there with the PCSK9 to affect the heart even more when it comes to decreased plaque. And are you permanently on these or you get rid of the plaque and then you kind of stay on? No. As soon as I see my plaque normalize, I'll get off the PCSK9. I will stop the red yeast rice extract, which is kind of like nature statin. And genetic non-responders to pharmaceutical statin still seem to do okay with the red yeast rice extract. I'll keep up the endothelial glycocalyx support because I think it's smart just as a lifestyle strategy.

Starting point is 01:12:43 And what is the endothelial glycocalyx support is that called endo calyx or that one's called arteriosil yeah that yeah and um if you were eating a bunch of sulfur rich foods you know like like cruciferous vegetables and things like that you'd still get some support um but it's interesting because glyphosate herbicides pesticides those actually strip sulfur from the body yes a lot of people are already sulfur deficient based on that. And, um, a lot of, a lot of the other ones, you know, vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium, they're so good for you anyways, that I'll probably be on a stack like that for the rest of my life. Yeah. Yeah. So, so anyways, coming full circle, um, you know, that that's, that's what I did for the heart. But the reason that I do the low carb is because in addition to testing for the cardiovascular disease,

Starting point is 01:13:27 I also tested with a high risk for type 2 diabetes. So I'll continue to be cognizant of carbs for the rest of my life, except if I'm at the fair and somebody gives me cotton candy. I'm going to go ride the Gravitron. Yeah. Now, are you a berberine taker? Do you actually? Berberine is great.

Starting point is 01:13:44 I think it's great, too think that would fall into the blood i've seen some side by sides where it's right up there with glucophages especially that's a very very effective form of berberine um i don't think anything beats cold therapy as as nature's blood glucose disposal agent yeah but um full disclosure i use bitter melon because i i am affiliated with the supplements company Keon, and we have a blood glucose disposal agent and it's called Keon Lean, and that has bitter melon in it. And so that's very similar to berberine. It's bitter melon, chromium, and vanadium. So it's three different blood glucose stabilizers. Okay. So I think that people have a fundamental misunderstanding of managing blood glucose and looking at a lipid, I mean, looking at a glycemic profile

Starting point is 01:14:26 and not really looking at the hemoglobin A1C, but looking at the glucose and looking at insulin. I mean, what do you think is a, for somebody on a, looking at their panel for longevity, where should fasting insulin be, hemoglobin A1C? When somebody is looking at a lipid profile or looking at a glucose profile you know glucose hemoglobin a1c insulin what should they be looking for in terms of like a fasting yeah glucose it's tricky because in most people i like to see it somewhere around the 80 to 90 values. You don't see

Starting point is 01:15:06 it drop below 80, like 80 to 90. 08.90 on glucose. 08.90 on glucose. Yeah, yeah, for your glucose test. But if you are a low-carb person, your body actually naturally maintains slightly higher levels of blood glucose because there's less available from a glycolytic standpoint. So if someone's low-carb or keto, they're often metabolically fine at 9 to 100 for blood glucose. What I'm more concerned about is, does the blood glucose spike above 120 regularly during the day,

Starting point is 01:15:37 especially postprandial, and does it return back to normal resting values within about two hours? So if you're eating throughout the day and that's more about insulin sensitivity yeah that's basically what insulin sensitivity now you're seeing consistent spikes above 120 and you're also seeing that it's staying up or not returning back to whatever your normal resting values were within two hours that's when you should step back and look at either dietary adjustments, lifestyle adjustments, supplement adjustments like glucose disposal agents, et cetera. The hemoglobin A1c is also tricky because if you are an athlete, and especially an endurance athlete with a high amount of red blood cell turnover,

Starting point is 01:16:15 that three-month snapshot or supposed three-month snapshot of your blood glucose values is not going to be as accurate. And so in many cases, people who are like endurance athletes or in some cases, even people who do a lot of sauna, will see a hemoglobin A1C above what I would recommend, which would be above about 5%. But in those people, if they're, and this is why you always gotta ask, like are you an endurance athlete,

Starting point is 01:16:38 are you doing a lot of sauna? Because a lot of times in those people, if they have a high hemoglobin A1c it's less concerning so yeah and they'll be five five right five six right on there on the cost of pre-diabetes right and then of course i mean you know as you know i think it's just as important to pay attention to to homocysteine to interleukins to hscrp to ck to anything that indicates a chronic state of inflammation CRP because the inflammation is what's going to be more likely to cause the blood glucose to potentially become atherosclerotic I was just gonna say and so so I would pay attention to inflammation just as much

Starting point is 01:17:21 as blood glucose understand you know as we've hit on multiple times your blood glucose is going to spike during the day don't worry about that pay more attention to does it return to resting values right and is it stabilized throughout the day once it's returned to resting values unless you do exercise cold heats or a meal yeah does it return that resting values what's your human c? And what's your fasting insulin? And make sure you're not insulin resistant. I've read a study. Jump topic, but we're on the topic. Before the fire alarm went off again.

Starting point is 01:17:53 We should just tell people in case we found stupid. Every time Ben insults the English, they fire up the fire alarm. We don't have Alzheimer's. We don't forget about what we're saying. The fire alarm keeps going off every time we throw an Englishman under the bus. And it is freaking loud. Yeah. it's a politest voice though would you please make your way please put down your tea if you've got some time if you wouldn't mind going to the fire it's not too much of an inconvenience please uh yeah avoid the lift is going to burn to a cinder if you would kindly make your way out and we would appreciate it so lin 28a and lin

Starting point is 01:18:29 28b cold shock proteins solicited during the uh you know cold exposure cold cold water immersion having um a direct impact on insulin sensitivity and i say that you know my belief is incorporating cold water immersion is a great way to actually enhance fat loss now not because there is a randomized clinical trial that directly links cold water exposure to fat loss but when you look at improving insulin sensitivity activation of brown fat which is essentially exchanging a calorie for heat, right? So there's a cost to returning your body temperature to normal. The shiver response, improving your metabolic rate, vasoconstriction, vasodilation, driving blood and oxygen into the core.

Starting point is 01:19:18 All of these things are- Appetite regulation, endocrine system regulation, including pre-workout testosterone increase when done pre-workout. Yeah, there's a pleiotropic load of benefits. That's what I'm saying. So I don't actually need an independent study to prove the weight loss side of things. And anecdotally, we're seeing it in hundreds and hundreds of clients of ours coming through our clinic. Don't forget our clinic.

Starting point is 01:19:38 You know the people who do need the independent research study, though? People who don't like the cold. But, bro, I'm pretty sure. It's so true. who don't like the cold but bro I'm pretty sure yeah I don't know I don't know yeah you just don't want to get cold yeah you just don't want to get called let's go down South now shall we to the down South South yeah what was going on there oh the prostate thing the prostate thing yeah so um I So I'll keep this quick. Yeah. I went down to one of our mutual friends, John LaRance, who's like the cowboy of alternative medicine down south in Sarasota, Florida. And we were on a walk that morning before I was supposed to go over to his clinic and give a talk.

Starting point is 01:20:22 And I was like, Ben, I have this brand new protocol for prostate health in men, which is of course an issue. He said, have you ever tested for high PSA? And I said, no, actually haven't tested for high PSA. Do you get up at night increasing frequencies to urinate? And I said, well, yeah, I actually do. I remember when I used to just sleep through the whole night without getting up to pee, and now two or three times I get up at night to pee.

Starting point is 01:20:42 And so John, bless his little heart, came up with this idea that, well, what if we just put methylene blue and ozone into the prostate as a way to address all of these issues? So stupidly, I said, okay, I'll, I'll, I'll try it. Um, I'm like, he's like, yeah, a little sore for maybe, you know, an hour or so afterwards. So anyways, I lay back on the table, uses ultrasound guided imaging to take a god awful long needle. I mean, the thing must have been like six inches long. You saw the video. I saw it. Jams it into my prostate.

Starting point is 01:21:16 Into the abdomen. From the front, using ultrasound guided imaging. So you can see the prostate right up there on the screen. And then injects the prostate with ozone and methylene blue. And it hurt like a mother. Yeah. Yeah. You can hear a dolphin clap.

Starting point is 01:21:31 That's like. Yeah. Yeah. And even afterwards, I was like sitting in the chair in his like his little recovery room afterwards. And he was off seeing another patient. I texted him like, John, you have anything to control the pain? And he comes back in like 50 minutes. He's like, well, I have these kratom capsules. And I'm like, I'm not going to take freaking kratom because that'll probably make it worse, and the room will get all wobbly. So I just sit there with an ice pack on my crotch,

Starting point is 01:21:58 and then I finally get up to pee. And it was the craziest sensation ever because not to be crass i'm basically like pissing air pissing ozone and so my nighttime urination went down it's an interesting procedure but that is the that's the methylene blue ozone story i don't think it has any human clinical trials on it proceed at your own risk but if you do get up a lot at night to pee you're concerned about high psa it would fall into the, kind of like where we started this podcast, full circle, as something interesting, unproven, but maybe the frontier of medicine. I don't know. Wow.

Starting point is 01:22:35 Yeah, the barking elephant. And that's why I love having you on the podcast. And I've run yours, you've run mine. I wanna run this again sometime. The London version, I think is hilarious because of all of our interruptions with the fire alarm. But thank you for coming on. And I wind down all my podcasts by asking every guest the same question. There's no right or wrong answer to this question. And that is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I mean, I kind of think of you as one. Yeah. Look, I think that to be the ultimate human, that you need to have found satisfaction and happiness and meaning. Because I know a lot of

Starting point is 01:23:22 unhappy people who are doing things that would theoretically make you ultimate, all the cold, all the heat, all the weight training, all the biohacks, all the barking elephants, you name it. And they are still unsatisfied there. If you go back into ancient philosophy and you look at the work of, uh, St. Augustine or, or, uh, uh, Pence's or, uh, or C.S. Lewis, they all have this concept of an eternal hole in your soul and you can throw everything into that hole. But because that hole is eternal, you will never be satisfied with all the homes, all the money, all the wealth, all the women, all the men, all the fame, all the power, all the biohacks, all the health, any of that, until you have found something eternal to put in that eternal shaped

Starting point is 01:24:12 hole. So I think that to be the ultimate human, you actually need to have found a meaningful relationship and fostered that meaningful relationship with the intelligent being, the creator who put us all here. And that's why I think that one of the very best things that you can do before you consider all of the very, very cool things that you and I talk about all the time is carve out some time in the morning or in the evening, drop to your knees, pray, open up my own handbook for life, the Bible, read a few verses. Even if you've never read it before, you'll find wisdom. It'll speak to you. And I think that to be the ultimate human, you need to have the ultimate relationship with God.

Starting point is 01:24:56 Amen. Man, that was great. Where can my audience that doesn't know who you are with most of my audience is going to be familiar, but where can they find you? Where can they find out more about you? Where can they get your latest book? You've got, I just wrote a foreword for your newest upgraded version. Thank you. Yeah, the upgraded version of Boundless 2.0. It's being the Bible. It's the Bible of biohacking.

Starting point is 01:25:15 Yeah. Just my website, bengreenfieldlife.com. You can find me there or Google. bengreenfieldlife.com. They can find out about the book. They can preorder. Yep. And your Instagram is uh ben greenfield

Starting point is 01:25:28 fitness fitness yep okay ben greenfield fitness or ben greenfield life.com ben thanks for coming on brother cool man love you bro appreciate it and as always guys that's just science

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 83. Ben Greenfield: The Unconventional Path to Becoming A Superhuman

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