Louisa Nicola, a neurophysiologist, reveals that 95% of Alzheimer's cases stem from lifestyle factors like diet and sleep rather than genetics. She explains how resistance training releases myokines such as irisin to stimulate BDNF and inhibit tumor growth, while aerobic exercise boosts hippocampal connectivity. Nicola emphasizes that foundational pillars—sleep for glymphatic clearance, high-intensity resistance work, and omega-3s—are superior to biohacking trends or nicotine pouches. Ultimately, she argues that consistent sauna use can mimic antidepressant effects and promote longevity through heat shock proteins, proving that basic physiological maintenance offers profound brain protection without expensive protocols. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Born and Raised in Australia00:02:33
Hi, Louisa.
Hi, Danny.
Nice to meet you.
Oh, it's nice to meet you too.
So, you're a Greek Australian, is that right?
I am.
Wow, that's a unique combination.
Greek Cypriot, I should say.
Living in Australia, born and raised in Australia, but I live in New York.
Wow.
I know.
It's insane.
So, you said you were born and raised in Australia?
Yeah, I was born and raised in Australia.
My parents weren't, and all my grandparents were born in Cyprus.
How long did you live there before you moved to New York?
Well, I moved to New York in 2017.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Not that long ago.
Australia is a crazy place.
It's, I, I, people might hate me for saying this.
I think it's the best country in the world.
I love Australia.
I think like a huge percentage of our listeners are from Australia too.
Oh, perfect.
Yeah, it's great.
I say best country because of A, healthcare, B, education.
But it's very hard to move forward in a, in a population of 22 million as opposed to America.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they have also some of the best surf in the world.
Oh, yeah.
I love it.
I love it.
Yeah.
And I have a lot of friends who go there like all the time, multiple times a year to surf, like Kira and Snapper Rocks and a lot of the cool places they have out there.
Yeah.
I spent around a month or two months in doing an internship around Snapper.
So, oh, really?
Yeah.
That was back when I was very young.
Yeah.
I got to get out there.
Well, Australia also was like one of the craziest places during COVID, too.
I saw some of the videos on social media of like people being like locked down in concentration camps and like getting their asses beat by cops and stuff.
Yeah.
I was one of those people.
Were you really?
Yeah.
So what happened was I was on the plane coming back to Australia and I was really excited.
And it was while I was in the plane that the government decided, well, the prime minister decided to say, that's it.
Anybody who lands from here on out is going straight into lockdown.
My phone wasn't working on the flight.
We landed and here I was thinking, great, I'm so excited.
I'm going to be able to go and see my family.
As soon as we landed, we had cops.
We had everybody just like stopping us.
I thought we were in trouble.
We weren't allowed to talk.
It was as if we had committed a crime and we just got sent straight into a room and we were locked in this room for 14 days.
That sounds terrifying.
It's terrifying.
I didn't have any air.
I had no idea what was happening.
I just got off a 24 hour flight.
I was hungry.
I was tired.
I was scared.
I had no idea what was happening.
So, what did they do?
What did you do after that?
How long did you stay in that room for?
And did you have to go quarantine in a hotel or something?
Well, no, that was the hotel.
Oh, that was the hotel?
Yeah, 14 days in there.
Oh, my God.
Then they set us free.
The Terrifying Flight Experience00:02:27
That's bizarre.
And now, when you look back into it, and we're not going to get into the whole COVID politics, it's like, how insane?
How insane is that?
It really is crazy.
I mean, we thought it was bad here.
Florida wasn't bad.
I mean, I guess relative to every other state, like everyone says Florida had it the best.
I don't know.
I didn't really travel that much out of Florida during those two years.
But yeah, man, some of the videos just really, really shocked me.
And I mean, there's, I don't know if it's like, because I know Australia, if I'm not, Wrong.
They get like, they do the most of their imports come from China and they do, they're really tight with China.
So maybe that had something to do with that.
But yeah, I don't know.
That was insane.
And so, okay.
So you are a neurophysiologist.
Correct.
When did you get into this kind of stuff?
So I, so first of all, let's define what it is it's a subspecialty of neurology.
So, you know, a neurologist, you go and see a neurologist, maybe you have a headache or.
Maybe suspected of having some sort of trauma from the neck up, let's just say.
A neurophysiologist is a subspecialist.
So you go in to a neurophysiologist if you may have had, suspected of having multiple sclerosis, for example.
Neurophysiologists will hook you up to an EMG, an electromyography, maybe test your nerves, do a nerve conduction study, or better yet, test for epilepsy using an EEG scan.
And I became fascinated with the EEG scans.
So that's my primary modality.
Those electroencephalograms, you know, you put the cap on your head, you've got all these leads coming out.
What they do is they assess the functionality of your brain.
So we've got different brain waves.
You've heard of them alpha, delta.
So we've got these brain waves and We can figure out what's happening in your head and how well your brain is functioning with an EEG.
It's the first point of call if you've had a seizure.
You go and see, you know, a neurophysiologist, see what's going on in your brain.
And so that's pretty much what a neurophysiologist is.
And I got into this.
I started off as a triathlete, actually.
So I was racing for Australia, loved it.
My favorite.
It was the best thing in the world.
My parents told me, you know, you may want to have a backup player because this may not be what you want to do for the rest of your life.
So, I went and studied, I did exercise physiology and then studied mathematics and then I went and studied medicine.
Exercise physiology?
Brain Waves and Seizures00:15:54
Yeah.
Huh.
What is that?
Well, it's like the study of the science and physiology of movement.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I remember I used to read like back in the day, I used to like hear these, this is like 10 years ago, I used to read these Tony Robbins books and he would talk about how, if you do, you say yes and you're Throw your arms in the air, you can change your brain.
Your movement changes your brain.
And I know, like, you know, jumping up and down or doing jumping jacks and all this stuff will put you in a whole new brain state and make you change you from being depressed to super confident.
And that kind of stuff really works.
Yeah.
I remember when he used to say that changing your state.
Your state.
That's the word he used.
Yeah.
I mean, to an extent, it's like, well, yeah, if you're feeling down and you get up and you get a jolt of blood flow to the brain, yeah, you're going to feel a bit different, right?
He just had a way of saying it.
So.
So, like, what is the main thing when you're studying this kind of stuff?
What is like the lowest hanging fruit of issues people deal with that you can help them with?
So, what I specifically look into is Alzheimer's disease.
It's what I'm currently researching and publishing right now.
And I fell in love with that because I did around a thousand brain scans and I was picking up on early onset Alzheimer's disease.
And we can pick up on that, right?
So, we can pick up on a brain who, you know, somebody may come into the clinic and say, look, I'm 50 years old.
I'm 48 years old.
I'm having memory difficulties.
I just, my long term memory is fine, but my short term memory, I just can't remember this.
Sometimes people's names or the street I live on, or I can't remember where my car keys are.
Can you test me?
And, you know, we take them through a number of different tests.
And one of these tests would be a neurocognitive test where we'll put the cap on and we'll take them through a series of cognitive drills and we'll assess their brain function.
And we're picking up on early onset Alzheimer's disease.
So after around a thousand of them, I started to question.
Why do we have so many people in the world who currently have Alzheimer's disease?
Because I don't know if you know the stats, but 50 million people worldwide currently have Alzheimer's disease.
Or maybe it's about 55 million people.
That number is said to triple by the year 2050.
And if you really dig into the research, what you find is that out of that 50 million, only around 3% to 5% got there through genes.
So the other 95%, why are they getting Alzheimer's disease?
Why are we getting mild cognitive impairment if you don't possess the genes that are responsible for getting you there?
Why is that?
That's what we're going to talk about today.
That was the birth of my, you know, really what I do now.
Was there a disparity of people who suffer from Alzheimer's or early onset Alzheimer's, like a disparity between different countries?
Really great question because we know that in Africa, there's a certain part of Africa where they actually have two copies of these genes called ApoE4.
If you have one copy, you get one from mom, one from dad.
If you have one copy, we know that it raises your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.
If you've got two copies, we know it really.
You know, increases your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.
We know that in these populations, in certain groups in Africa, they have two copies, but they never get Alzheimer's disease.
Wow.
Yeah.
Interesting.
And that's all got to do with epigenetics, which is why here in America or in other parts of the world as well, why people don't have these copies.
Maybe they don't have the ApoE4 gene, but they're still getting Alzheimer's disease.
Isn't that insane?
That's wild.
And what I assume that has a lot to do with like diet.
It's got a lot to do with many things like risk factors such as sleep deprivation, diet, lack of exercise, lack of social connection, believe it or not, inflammation, neural inflammation coming from the foods that we eat.
Right, right.
That's wild.
Yeah, that's something you don't really hear about a lot, especially around here.
You never hear like something, you hear people like complaining about being forgetful and people talk about all kinds of things that you can do to improve your health, like exercise and diet, but no one really likes to talk about how that.
Connects to your brain or how that affects Alzheimer's.
People don't really worry about that until they get older.
How young, what's like the youngest person you could find that has this stuff?
Most people, you're right, most people don't worry about it until they're, let's say, 70, and then they go in and they're diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
But we have to remember that Alzheimer's disease and neurological conditions like this, or dementias, I should say, is not a one time stamp or a one time point in time.
It is an accumulation of the previous 20 years.
So, you could be developing Alzheimer's disease in your 30s, in your 40s, and in your 50s.
And because it takes a long time to actually come into fruition, by the time you get your first symptom at around 65 or 70, you've already got it.
It's already too late.
Wow.
It's like, you know, I don't know too much about pancreatic cancer, but I've lost two people in my life from that.
And it's the same thing.
It's like they're fine.
And then out of nowhere, oh, I have this pain.
Oh, you've got stage four pancreatic cancer.
You've got two weeks to live.
How does somebody.
Keep track of their brain health like that?
And I mean, other than getting basic blood work that checks like your lipids and all that kind of stuff, like how would you determine how far down that road you are?
Well, you said basic blood work.
And so I have a practice right now.
So my company is called Neuroathletics.
I've got 10 people on my team, a combination of exercise physiologists and physicians.
And we do comprehensive blood work.
And this is because you will go to your doctor and they will order you just some routine blood work, right?
And what they're detecting.
In a doctor's office, which they'll probably give you 15 minutes to really deconstruct it.
They're just making sure that you're not dying today.
They're not picking up on trends.
And so we have to be mindful to pick up on trends.
And there are a number of different biomarkers from brain chemistry and different blood chemistry biomarkers that can be suggestive of what way, where you're trending.
We can look at lipids, we can look at cholesterol, we can look at B vitamins.
But the first point of call, in my opinion, is to look at genes.
You can do a DNA test.
Starting like 23andMe kind of stuff?
Correct.
You can look and see if you actually have these genes.
Okay, there's three genes that are like if you've got these genes, it's you're going to get familial Alzheimer's disease, right?
So these genes are pre-sinellin 1, pre-sinellin 2, and amyloid precursor protein, right?
But then you've got the ApoE4 genes, and you can test for all of these.
And even if you have these ApoE4 genes, it does not mean that you are destined to get Alzheimer's disease.
But I think we need to have a conversation around getting your genes tested because I didn't know this, but there is a lot of people out there who are scared to actually get their genes tested.
Did you know that?
No, but I imagine there's probably a big barrier to entry to doing something like that because it's, I'm sure it's expensive and it's not like, no, no, it's actually not.
Isn't, I mean, look, I haven't done it.
I did my genes somewhere else.
I didn't do a 23andMe, but I think it's under $100.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Interesting.
So it's actually not that dear.
You can get this.
You can ask somebody who does it.
We do it with everybody at our practice.
And We're really testing for that.
We're testing for a number of different things, but that's the main thing we're testing for.
So that's the first point of call, right?
Then we have to go through figuring out lipids.
And you can also go through and look at neurocognitive scans.
You know, we do a brain scan on most of our clients as well.
I need to do a brain scan.
I have a feeling that the waves will be very mild.
But here's the thing I use the exact same hospital grade EEG on a mild cognitive impairment patient as I would on an MBA, an all star MBA player.
What would be the difference in the brain scan from like a super athlete compared to an average person?
Well, I'm picking up specifically on areas of dysfunction, first and foremost, and we'll go into what that is.
But what I'm picking up on specifically, this brain scan looks at information processing speed and reaction time.
So, reaction time, we have to remember things like your eyes, you don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain.
You don't hear with your ears, you hear with your brain.
So, if you have a well functioning brain, you're probably going to see faster and hear faster, right?
But what if your brain is even better functioning and we optimize that?
You're probably going to see faster, right?
And hear better, therefore reducing your reaction time.
So we can measure reaction time.
We have a stimulus that measures neuronal reaction time.
Really?
Yeah.
So we can actually measure the speed at which you.
So you have a stimulus, like, you know, there's a computer.
So you've got this EEG scan on, there's a computer, maybe a ball will come up and you have to click the button, okay?
Measures reaction time over a 20 minute period or a 10 to 20 minute period.
So, we can measure that.
We can measure visual acuity, how well you are seeing the ball coming onto the screen.
So, an NBA player, this could mean the difference between one or $50 million, right?
Wow.
Because we increase their reaction time, we increase their speed, and we decrease their reaction time and increase their information processing speed, meaning at what time do I know that that is a ball in front of me?
It takes your brain, you know.
0.5 milliseconds, if we can get it to 0.3, they're going to be able to get the ball, pass it more accurately, and in a faster way.
Therefore, making more points in the game, more points in a season, therefore becoming an all star.
So, you're saying, is it possible to improve these types of things?
Oh, yeah, that's what we do.
Yeah.
Like right now, you know, we were talking offline, and I brought some stroke goggles here with me.
Oh, did you?
I brought them on you.
Yeah.
Because you said you were really interested in.
And visual acuity?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm obsessed with it.
I actually had a vision scientist doctor in here probably six months ago, and he was explaining.
He wrote a bunch of books on this stuff, and he's done this research his whole life.
What's his name?
His name is Dr. David Cook.
Okay.
He's based in Atlanta.
Yeah.
And he has a bunch of exercises people can do to increase visual acuity.
Yeah.
And to even like people who have poor vision, like, Say, like 2040, 2050 vision, they can do things like throwing their.
There's a bunch of crazy exercises he has, but he's proven that doing these things for a long period of time, you can actually improve that stuff and get yourself out of glasses.
So if you can do that, then you can also improve even if you have great vision.
The best vision I've seen is in baseball players, they've got like 20 over eight.
Yeah, that's crazy.
And the information processing speed of hitting a Fastball going 100 miles an hour is insane.
And what people still think is yes, you do have to have some level of skill.
Yes, there is physiology involved at the trajectory of the bat, the velocity at which you hit.
But what is telling you to swing the bat in that way?
It's your brain.
Right.
And I realized this very early on.
So in 2016, when I was still studying, I had a professor and he's Australian.
And at the time, he was actually the Red Bull.
This was back in 2016.
Red Bull was completely different, but they had a high performance gym, if you will.
I think they've still got one.
It's in Malibu or it was in LA.
They were hosting an event, a high performance event.
This is back when no one was really talking about high performance.
And he actually said, You should come to this event.
It was 2016 in April.
I'd never been to America.
I said, What is this event?
He said, You're going to love it.
He said, And I want you to talk to people about reaction time.
There's going to be elite athletes.
So I went there.
That's where I met a lot of these motocross drivers, Formula One drivers, and NBA players.
Had no idea who they were.
And I gave this talk, and that's when everything started for me.
There was an NBA player who said, Can you help me with my reaction time?
And I said to him, Yeah, well, what are you doing in terms of, you know, brain training?
And he said, I'm not doing anything.
I said, Well, okay, then we can work together.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's wild.
Yeah.
I mentioned to you on the phone, too.
It's funny.
If you look at like some of the most famous successful athletes, like even Michael Jordan or Tom Brady, even for that matter, if you look at like their photos of them, it looks like they're Eyes are almost pointed outwards, especially if you're a basketball player, because they have to, they're on this court and they have to have full court vision as well as maintain acuity on like a ball coming right at them.
But they have to see what's going on way over here in their peripherals and all that stuff.
And I was like, wow, like I wonder if that's something that they have inherently or if that's something that's developed from playing basketball for so long.
Yeah, peripheral vision is a really great field.
So we can, you know, we can train it with these specific strobe goggles, right?
So they're cut into four quadrants and we can black out.
Just the outer portions of it.
Okay.
So you can just see in this pathway, or we can black out the inner portions of it.
So you can see on the outside.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Or we could just do one quadrant up here.
So if we test you, okay, and we're doing all of these different visual acuity, depth perception, all these different types of tests, and we figure out that, okay, in the top right quadrant of your right eye, you just don't seem to see the ball as well.
So we're going to black out every other part of your left eye and every other quadrant of your right eye.
And we're just going to keep the quadrant up here.
Free, and we're just going to get you to throw the ball for an hour a day.
So then you're strengthening that.
Remember, it's just like you strengthen your biceps, we're going to strengthen that specific part of your eye.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
And it's, look, it's not what everyone should be doing, evidently.
Right.
But when millions or tens of millions of dollars is on the table.
No, the guy I was telling you about, David Cook, he actually has a lot of, I don't know about basketball players, but I know he has a lot of baseball players that come in there and they do like visual therapy training where there's like, he was saying they like swing balls and they wear like different color glasses and they try to like see what's going on and read it while it's swinging.
Yeah.
All kinds of crazy stuff that you would never imagine those kind of guys do.
Yeah.
So I, what I really love doing, and this is what we teach as well.
I love doing things such as working on the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is, you know, we've got four lobes of the brain.
And the frontal lobe houses the prefrontal cortex.
It's right at the frontal part of the brain.
And that's involved in all of our executive functions reaction time, focus, attention, inhibition.
So if we can train that, you're probably also going to be a better athlete.
Right.
Yeah, that makes sense.
You said you brought these goggles with you?
I brought them with me.
They're somewhere in my library.
We got to carry on.
We got to test them out.
Yeah, let's do it.
So, what kind of, you currently are working with athletes doing this kind of stuff?
Yeah.
So, I personally, I have got 20 clients on my roster, eight of which are elite athletes in three sports Major League Baseball, tennis, and NBA.
They're all ball sports, right?
Andrew Huberman's Vision Therapy00:02:15
And it's working on mainly vision, is what you're working on with them?
No, actually, it's working on human performance.
So, we do everything from blood, urine, stool, sweat.
We do all of that.
We do brain scans and then we have the exercise physiology component where we're doing VO2 max tests.
Then we're doing the brain scans and we're doing the complete vision, visual acuity, and everything.
Yeah.
Funnily enough, the rest of my clients, the other 12, are CEOs and high level executives.
And you would think, oh, are you doing the same thing?
I'm doing the exact same thing with them.
Yeah.
When it comes to, is it true that the visual cortex is responsible for like, 90% of the neuron activity in your brain or like the neural, what is the word?
It is like, like the you're talking about the occipital lobe at the back of the brain?
Well, like from what I heard, I think I heard Andrew Huberman say this, but he said that the, as far as like the energy that's produced, that it takes to run your brain, 90% of the energy it takes is taken up by the visual cortex.
Most likely.
I mean, I'm not sure about that because I think about, I mean, if he said it, then that's probably true and he's a vision scientist.
Oh, yeah, he is, isn't he?
Yeah.
School of, I think, ophthalmology.
Right.
And he's published a lot of research in vision science.
We know that you've got your eye and the optic nerve goes into your brain and then you process the visual information back here in the occipital cortex.
It then goes into the frontal lobe.
But the frontal lobe is the biggest and houses the most amount of neurons.
The frontal lobe, which is not associated with vision.
To an extent, it is.
But most, yeah, most vision is in the back of the brain.
You know, I think.
Andrew Huberman mentioned that he used to not be able to see in 3D and he like acquired 3D vision doing like visual therapy and stuff like that.
And that's why he got so interested in it.
Oh, really?
That was his.
Yeah, he was a skateboarder as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's interesting because before he was big and famous, I had him on my podcast.
Did you really?
Yeah, very early in 2020.
And he said, Was he just as handsome as he is now?
Yeah.
Yes.
I think so.
I didn't see him with his shirt off.
Cold Adaptation for Athletes00:03:04
I mean, I just posted a photo.
He never takes his shirt off.
He always wears the long sleeves.
Yeah.
But no, I had him on my podcast and he was great.
And we were chatting, and he said to me, You know, there's going to be some big things coming my way soon, Louisa.
And I was like, Really?
And then, like, next minute is on Rogan.
Yeah, that guy's a powerhouse.
The amount of podcasts and videos that he puts out on his channel is insane.
He's a workhorse.
Well, you know what he's done?
He's actually gotten the world to be excited about neuroscience.
Yes.
Yes.
And science and performance protocols and how to really improve performance.
However, because of that, what I think is happening as well is people are becoming, I think there's a lot of dumb things that are happening on the internet as it relates to human performance.
Okay, we can talk about that.
Just some things that are just false information, misinformation.
But what's also happening is people take things to the extreme and become heroic, you know.
And we can see this with cold water immersion.
You know, people are getting jumping into these freezing cold ice baths.
It's like that's really not what you have to do to get the effect.
And you also don't have to get into an ice bath for 50 minutes.
50?
Well, people are getting in there for crazy amounts to try and be this hero, to try and take away from, you know.
to be the best.
I did the best.
I did the coldest and I did it for the longest.
It's like, but that's not really in line with science.
No.
That's funny because I did mine.
When I got my ice tub, I put it at like 35 degrees and I was dying.
And I texted Dom and I was like, Dom, I'm not feeling too hot, man.
My chest hurts.
I've been doing this every day for the last two months.
He's like, what temperature is it at?
I'm like, 35 for 34.
I forget what it was.
Something like that, mid-30s.
He's like, yeah, that's way too fucking cold.
He's like, all the studies are done between 48 and 58 or something like that.
You got to up the temperature.
Yeah, and I usually say if you can get into a bath for three minutes minimum, seven minutes maximum, and do it at between 45 to 50, that's all.
Remember.
Wait, say that again?
45 to 50 degrees.
Got it.
Okay.
Remember, what you're doing is you're trying to produce a stimulus like a hormetic stress.
You're trying to stress your body to create these cold shock proteins, which do many different things, which we can talk about the science of that.
But if you get accustomed to that, you're not going to get the same effects.
Like, if you get cold adapted, you're just like, you're going to get into the cold and your body's going to be like, oh, I know what this is like.
So it's not going to produce the effects that you want it to produce.
So don't do it every day.
You can do it every day just to just be, you know, non heroic.
Just get in there 45 degrees, get in for three minutes, get out.
Right.
Yeah.
And then when you want the big effects, maybe you can crank it down super low.
If you want, yeah, I always bring mine down by one degree every like four weeks.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
But then I travel, right?
I've been in Miami and I will be here.
Like five days in total, I think.
That means I haven't done an ice bath in that long.
So when I go back, it's going to be a bit of a shock to me.
Right, right.
Growing New Neurons00:12:30
Well, that's like with anything, right?
You build up a tolerance to any kind of whatever, even if it's a supplement.
But getting back to the vision stuff, have you ever.
Do you guys do anything with red light therapy?
Not really, not in terms of vision.
But I have a red light therapy panel.
Yeah.
I heard that that literally can rebuild the neurons or like.
In your eyes or in your vision, your visual cortex of your brain?
I'm not sure about that.
However, I will tell you that adult neurogenesis doesn't exist.
Neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons.
And we can't really grow new neurons, despite what anybody thinks.
Where you can grow them, though, is in deep within the temporal lobes.
So the temporal lobes just sit here.
And deep within the temporal lobes behind your ears sits these little seahorse shaped structures called the hippocampus.
And that's where most of our memory consolidation happens.
Memories are formed in there, and we've got neurons in there, and they can grow.
They can grow.
Yeah, we can grow new neurons in the hippocampus.
Okay.
So, we can get better connectivity of neurons in the sub regions of the hippocampus through exercise, okay, making your brain be able to fire better.
But we can't grow, you can't just go out and think that something is going to grow a new neuron in the prefrontal cortex, for example.
Because I'll tell you why.
Think about what happens in a stroke, okay?
A stroke is pretty much an embolism, right?
You will get somewhere in an artery.
Or a vessel, you will get a clot.
That clot will stop oxygen from going through and delivering oxygen into that part of the brain.
Essentially, what happens is you kill off neurons.
Those neurons don't grow back.
Once you've had that infarct, it's an insult.
You have to go to the emergency room and they have to get blood flow going back into the brain.
You kill off neurons, you can't grow them back.
What happens is the areas around that infarct will strengthen.
So, but you don't grow new neurons.
Okay.
So, like the areas around it will try to compensate.
Correct.
And they can strengthen.
Is there any kind of like cutting edge research or science being done to figure out how to grow new neurons in these parts of the brain?
Oh, God, yeah.
I mean, look, for example, let's talk about exercise.
Do you want to go down the whole exercise field?
Sure.
Okay.
Because I love it.
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Verso.
The older I get, the more I'm prioritizing my health.
The goal is to keep my mind sharp and my body strong.
If you've watched this podcast before, you might know that.
I'm very much obsessed with health and longevity and the things you can do to hack your biology to improve performance.
I exercise daily and take my nutrition very seriously, but that can only get you so far.
Science has, or scientists like David Sinclair have now proven that we can reverse aging with interventions that go far beyond healthy habits.
I like to keep up on all the latest science behind this stuff.
That's why I keep up with my friend nutritional scientist, Dr. Dom D'Agostino, and people send me products.
I like to test on myself to see what works and what doesn't work.
That is why I use Cell Being by Verso.
It has scientifically proven ingredients that combat the effects of aging by increasing your NAD plus levels.
That's the stuff that quite literally powers every cell in your body.
I personally have been taking Cell Being every single morning for years now, primarily because it enhances my mood, improves my energy levels, and I just feel like a younger version of me.
Clinical trials have even shown it improves energy, endurance, cognition, fat loss, and better, more efficient sleep.
Verso also publishes third party testing on each batch produced, guaranteeing you get what you pay for.
Head on over to ver.so and use the coupon code DANNY.
It's spelled D A N N Y to get 15% off your first order.
Or just go to ver.so forward slash D A N N Y.
Okay, so we have three different types of exercise that I'm going to talk about.
We've got aerobic, which is your long runs.
Okay, it's around 60% of your maximum heart rate.
Everyone should be doing this, by the way.
We have so many studies that suggest that even walking can improve brain health.
Isn't there like math you can do, like your age divided by?
Something is like what your heart rate should be?
Yeah, it's a really easy way.
It's 220 minus your age will be your maximum heart rate.
220 minus your age is your maximum heart rate.
So let's just say, argument's sake, you're 20 years old.
That means your maximum heart rate should be 20.
20.
So it should be 200, yeah.
So then you can say, well, okay, great.
Well, if I want to look at 65% of my maximum heart rate, you do 65% of 200.
Okay.
All right.
But we're becoming more savvy now.
We've got heart rate monitors, we've got ways of measuring our maximum heart rate.
Right?
So, your aerobic training is you're running, you're long running, you're long cycling, you're long swimming.
This does amazing things.
One, we have a lot of blood flow.
Now, I think that's the key here.
We have to remember what's good for the heart is good for the brain.
So, every time we are getting more blood flow to the brain, we're getting oxygen and nutrients.
That's what we want for survival, right?
And I have a theory that dementia is just a disease of the vascular system.
That makes sense.
Okay.
Well, Alzheimer's disease is a disease of the vascular system.
So we want, so we have, you know, let's just take a bit of an anatomy course right now.
We've got our heart and we've got this big chamber called the aorta.
From the aorta, we've got these two branches that go up into the brain.
We've got the carotid arteries that sit right here.
Then we've got the vertebral arteries.
Okay.
They sit here.
They go up.
Obviously, we've got two on one on each side.
They go up into the brain.
Then we've got branching off of that.
Arteries that go into the brain.
There's a lot of blood flow that happens that gets delivered in there.
And then we've got these little capillaries as well.
They're about a hairline thick, one cell thick.
These arteries have these walls around them that are made of muscle, right?
So it's important for them to stay healthy and strong to deliver more blood.
When we are doing aerobic physical activity, we are strengthening the arteries through blood flow, we're strengthening the heart, we're getting something called. cardiac remodeling.
You can remodel your entire cardiac system through exercise.
But what we are getting the most beneficial effect is we're getting the release of something called BDNF, brain derived neurotropic factor.
So it is a growth factor for the brain and that is the specific growth factor that will grow new neurons in the hippocampus.
So these studies all came out first using mice.
So in around 1999, they did some of the first studies on mice, they got them to wheel run.
And they were determining what this does in terms of brain health.
And they found oh my gosh, these mice grow new neurons in the hippocampus of their brains through the 20 minutes of wheel running per day.
But what they also do is they grow new neurons in all of the areas in the brain.
Wow.
This was just on mice, right?
We're not rodents.
But that was 1999.
So they thought scientists were like, this is unbelievable, right?
Then in the early 2000s, they wanted to replicate this in humans.
So they replicated the exact same study.
And what they found was that humans can't grow new neurons only in the hippocampus.
Only in the hippocampus.
But they did find that they can get better connectivity in the hippocampal subregions.
So just better connectivity of the neurons in the areas around the brain.
They thought that was good.
So this was all from aerobic training, right?
Specifically around 65% of maximum heart rate.
So that's when the 2000s were all about BDNF.
Everyone was talking.
I even remember back in the early 2000s, there were news articles coming out saying BDNF.
Everyone loved it, right?
And ever since then, this gets back to your question earlier pharmaceutical companies are trying to replicate BDNF to try and bottle it up.
Because if you go, right, if we go into a mouse and just inject BDNF into their brain, they're just going to grow a bigger brain, right?
Likewise, if we can inject BDNF in a pharmaceutical grade agent, Into your hippocampus, you're going to have a bigger hippocampus.
We can see that because the more you exercise, the better your hippocampus.
But what would the downside be of just injecting it or taking a supplement?
Well, we can't.
Well, we're never going to be able to.
To do that, which is why exercise serves as medicine.
Exercise is by far, and I want this to really go out there it is by far the best therapeutic agent that can starve off neurodegenerative diseases and the aging process.
Now, what if you're somebody who has neglected this your whole life and now you're in your mid 30s, mid 40s, whatever it might be?
If you start doing this, is this something that you can reverse?
If you have some sort of There is no reversal, right?
Okay, but we have to keep in mind around 25 to 30, that's when your brain fully develops.
Around 30, then your brain begins to atrophy in small amounts.
Now, atrophy is a decrease in muscle cell size, right?
Or a decrease in cell size, if you will.
So you start to get, you start to kill off neurons at the age of 30.
It's just due to the natural brain aging process.
We can see, right, we can see the MRI of a 25 year old brain, and it's nice and thick.
Near the skull, right?
There's just a thin layer of fluid between the brain and the skull.
And then you can see the brain of a 90 year old.
And then that space is really thick between the skull and the brain because the brain atrophies, right?
Exercise, along with other interventions, proper nutrition, proper hydration, and sleep, of course, can slow the progression of these age related diseases.
You're not going to reverse it.
You can't reverse Alzheimer's disease.
Unfortunately.
But you can slow the progression and prevent Alzheimer's disease from occurring.
But you would think with the heart remodeling and getting those arteries that go up to your brain by opening those up and making your heart stronger, that that would help, no?
Yeah.
I mean, it would for the time being, but you would think that that would sort of help repair.
But that's not the case.
Because let me tell you something else that happens.
These arteries, so we've got.
Arteries, which are the big ones that have got the muscles, then we've got veins, which are just one directional pumps, then we've got these little capillaries, or you say in America, capillaries.
These little capillaries are the first things to go in any type of insult, all right, or they're the first things to go in hypertension.
So if you've got high blood pressure, right, what happens is your high blood pressure over time ends up killing off these tiny little blood vessels, these tiny little capillaries.
They end up dying.
So, what happens if you kill off the capillaries in your brain?
Over time, you've got less oxygen and less nutrients going to the brain.
You and I have probably killed them off.
I know, like, you know.
Yeah, I didn't start paying attention to any kind of exercise or health.
I mean, I worked out, went to the gym when I was in my teens and 20s, but I never paid attention.
I ate shit and never did cardio until recently, honestly.
Well, cardio, like I said, is absolutely phenomenal.
And back to this whole chamber of the heart.
What you want is to be able to, with each, you want to increase your stroke volume.
So with each pump, right, let's just say your heart contracts and then it pumps blood.
With each pump, you want to, with less efficacy, so you want to be able to have as much blood flow as possible, right?
Myokines and Inflammation00:09:07
That's if you've got a strong chamber.
If that chamber, which is the aorta and all of the other arteries, if they weaken, every time you do that one pump, maybe not enough blood will go up.
All right.
So it's about efficacy as well.
So the more you train that chamber of the heart, the stronger it gets.
The walls of the artery become stronger.
Therefore, it can push more blood more forcefully with each contraction.
And that's what we want because we want less heartbeats with greater volume of blood.
Right, right.
Right?
So that's what aerobic activity does.
And it's really devastating that 30% of Americans don't meet the necessary requirements of cardiovascular fitness, which is 150 minutes a week.
Yeah, no way.
Not even 30%.
Sorry, I should say no, that was only 30%.
So 70%. of the US population don't meet.
How many minutes per week?
150.
150.
I only do like 20 minutes every other day.
So like 80 minutes a day.
I have just one of those assault bikes, you know?
I only do that for like 20 minutes every other day.
That's pretty short of the quota.
And by the way, an assault bike, you're probably actually getting out of the aerobic zone.
That's hard.
No, I stay right at like 130, 135.
Okay.
My heart rate.
Depending on your.
I try to take it easy.
If I go normal, I'll get up to like in the 140s, but I try to keep it kind of low, like zone two.
Well, for everyone listening, if you're thinking, okay, well, Louisa, I don't know what my thresholds are, right?
The way to think about it is the best training zone for this, this aerobic zone, is when you know that you're working out, right?
You've got a bit of a sweat, but you can have a conversation with somebody.
So your heart is pumping.
Right.
You know, you're working.
It's like when you're working on an incline of a treadmill.
Right.
You can feel it, but you could still have the conversation with somebody.
Right.
That's where you want to aim to.
20 minutes a day.
Yeah.
That's interesting, too.
You know, I've noticed that, like, when I'm doing something like walking or like riding the bike slow or doing anything else that requires some sort of physical exertion, I notice like I'm quicker.
My mind is quicker because I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say.
I'm not thinking about anything.
I'm just like talking, but my part of my brain is occupied doing something else.
It's a weird thing.
It's like the opposite of sitting here, not doing anything.
I'm just sitting here talking to you.
It's like all my energy is going into talking.
But when I'm like only giving 30% of my energy to talking or having a conversation or talking, you know, having whatever, it seems like it flows easier.
There's more of a flow there.
Yeah.
You're also activating your sympathetic nervous system, which is that fight or flight aspect of the nervous system, which is pretty much telling your body to really hone in and focus, okay, on something in front of you because you're under attack, per se.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that's, you know, Danny, that's a really interesting field, this aerobic activity, right?
What I think is actually more exciting, if we fast forward to 2012, there was a really great study that came out by Harold et al., really great team who thought, you know what?
What's the effects of resistance training on the brain?
Because all of the studies have been done on aerobic physical activity.
What are the effects on resistance training?
So what he did was it was a systematic review.
They went and pulled together all of the randomized controlled trials that have been done.
On resistance training.
And what they found was that resistance training produces way more benefits than aerobic training, in my opinion.
Like anaerobic training.
Yeah.
Well, not anaerobic resistance.
So weight training.
Resistance.
Okay.
Yeah.
Weight training.
Yeah.
Isn't that the same thing as anaerobic?
Depends on how fit you are.
So anaerobic is when you're reaching that threshold of above 85%.
Got it.
Yeah.
Which you need that as well.
And we can talk about that.
So this is where my area is.
So I'm about to publish a study.
Like the most up to date study that's done on the effects of resistance training on mild cognitive impairment patients.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, what happens is you will, you know, if you contract your biceps, for example, you're doing a weight within the cells of your muscles, you have these little things called myokines.
They're muscle based proteins.
So, they're just tiny little proteins and they only live in the cells of your muscle fibers.
So, when under tension, once you contract these muscles, what happens is these myokines spurt out.
We've got around 500 of them.
500 of these tiny little bad boys, they're in your muscle.
500 myokines in your whole body?
Well, 500 that we know of.
Hopefully, I'll find another one and call it the Louisa.
I would say 500, but we really only have studied around 50 of them.
They're really beneficial.
What happens is once you contract your muscle, they spurt out of the muscle and they go into the bloodstream.
Once there, they go and lodge in different receptors.
You actually have receptors.
Imagine a receptor just like this.
And a myokine coming and lodging like that.
You've got receptors on your pancreas, on your heart, on your liver, on your spleen, and in your brain.
And these receptors are absolutely phenomenal.
They are what they do is once these myokines go into them and lodge into them, they have beneficial effects on the prefrontal cortex, on the occipital cortex.
They basically help your brain function better, and it can change the structure of your brain.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So, jacked people are smarter.
I mean, I don't know about smarter.
Level of intelligence wasn't really measured.
However, we know that these myokines are actually having an effect on helping with the proliferation of BDNF.
So, there's one specific myokine.
I love it.
It's called irisin, right?
It was founded not long ago, and it was probably 2012 as well.
But irisin comes, they named it after the Greek god Iris.
Iris was a messenger to the god.
Irisin does this.
So when it goes out into the bloodstream, out of the muscle, it goes up.
And remember BDNF, the growth factor?
It actually helps BDNF express itself.
So you create more BDNF in the presence of Irisin, which then helps with the proliferation of new neurons in the hippocampus.
But then you've got other ones.
You've got Cathepsin B, you've got lactate, and then you've got this really wonderful one, which was founded, by the way, by Benta Peterson.
She's incredible in Copenhagen.
IL 6.
Have you heard of IL 6?
It's a pro inflammatory cytokine.
So we used to be scared of IL 6.
We didn't want it, right?
If we, you know, when we got sick, if we secreted more IL 6, it would make us even more sick.
Okay.
It was a bad thing.
We didn't want it.
We didn't want to secrete more IL 6.
What Benter Peterson found was that IL 6 is also living in the muscles.
And when it's secreted from the muscles, it acts as an anti inflammatory.
Cytokine.
So instead of it creating more inflammation, it creates less inflammation.
It helps dampen inflammation.
So it becomes anti inflammatory instead of pro inflammatory.
And this is when it comes out of the muscles?
Yes, when it comes out of the muscle cell.
And why would it do that?
That's just what it does.
And it lodges in nearby organs.
And this is this new phenomenon called the brain body crosstalk.
They're now doing studies on myokines.
And it's a great study.
I put it up.
I did a presentation yesterday.
It was published in CellPress.
They're showing that these myokines can inhibit tumor cell growth in the prostate.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Yeah.
So, that last study you were telling me about, that came out when?
Not too long ago.
It was around five years ago.
Published in Cell Press Journal.
Cell is a very high stringent journal.
And they're showing the effects of these myokines inhibiting these tumor cell growth in prostate cancer.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Which means that, sorry, I just have to say it one more time, exercise can serve as preventative medicine.
Do you notice any sort of, has anyone ever done any sort of like study or analysis of like an NBA player as far as like their, how, how healthy their brain is towards the end of their life compared to somebody else?
Measuring VO2 Max00:02:42
Because as far as like aerobic exercise, I can't think of anybody else who puts themselves through that much, like 90 minutes of straight sprinting back and forth on a basketball court.
I don't know in terms of specific brain health.
However, I mean, I would argue that at Tour de France in that concept.
Do you know why?
Because Tour de France have the highest recording VO2 maxes.
Yeah.
We've got like, you know, VO2 max scores of like 90 for these Tour de France guys.
What exactly?
I mean, I see it like on my watch, my VO2 max, but what exactly does it mean?
It's a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness.
Basically, how much oxygen you can uptake and utilize per kilogram.
So, How old are you?
36.
36.
I mean, I don't know the cutoffs.
I had this graph up yesterday, but we can determine your VO2 max.
I wouldn't determine it using an Apple watch.
We can get more intelligent and sophisticated machines for that, which we do use.
We have a VO2 max device that we use, and you put it on and you perform a 12 minute running test, if you will.
It's horrible.
Really?
Yeah, you basically have to go until you gas out, which is go until you almost collapse.
So, it has something to do with your respiratory rate and your heart rate, like the combination of the two?
And the amount of oxygen that you uptake.
So, how the hell would a watch be able to figure that out?
Well, that's exactly why I would tell you not to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Basically, it's probably calibrating your, you know, when you get to your highest heartbeat, I guess.
So, we've got aerobic training, we've got resistance training.
We both know that they're beneficial.
Caveat with resistance training.
Right, because I have to tell my mother this every day, it doesn't work, you don't get the effects of these myokines unless you're really pushing heavy, really.
Yeah, so you have to be pushing 80% of your one repetition max.
80% of your one repetition max.
So if you can deadlift a hundred kilos, right?
I don't know what a kilo is.
Oh, okay, a hundred pounds.
Okay, whatever.
Okay, we're in Florida.
If you can deadlift a hundred pounds, you want to be doing 80 pounds, got it, right?
When you're working out, you want to be generally doing resistance training.
Four times a week.
Again, going back to what the government says, their recommendations is three to four weeks, four times a week of resistance training.
That's interesting.
So, you would say that the resistance training or the weightlifting is equally, if not probably more important than the aerobic stuff?
Keto, Fasting, and Insulin00:10:18
I mean, both are important.
However, I'm biased towards resistance training just because of the multitude of studies we have now showing its beneficial effects.
Muscle retention or that like muscle mass has some sort of benefit as well.
Like somebody who can like hold on to a lot of muscle versus somebody who has none.
Oh, yeah.
For an example, a female in their 30s who is super skinny and the typical Vogue model fashion type girl, or compared to somebody who actually lifts weights and retains muscle, what are the actual measurable health benefits between those two people?
Well, muscle mass is first and foremost an endocrine organ.
Muscle mass is a storage ground for glucose, right?
So if these two girls.
Right?
You got the skinny one and then the one with muscle.
Let's just say, for argument's sake, they're both the same age and we give them both a candy bar.
Okay, that's full of glucose.
You will see.
So, what happens when you eat?
You get a spike.
Have you ever worn a glucose monitor?
You get that spike.
And then, maybe, depending on how well you can tolerate that glucose, that spike may come down your postprandial spike.
It may come down or it may just stay up there.
The person who has more muscle.
That muscle will uptake that glucose.
It's basically their muscle is like a sink, so it can take in all of this glucose.
Okay, so their post perennial spike will come straight back down.
Whereas the person who doesn't have any muscle, their glucose is just going to be floating around in their bloodstream because it's got nowhere to go.
It's not getting uptaken.
And why is that bad?
Well, we don't want excess glucose because that can lead to insulin resistance.
Because what happens is once you get so insulin is a hormone, okay, and it's pretty much the only hormone that is there served to.
Bring down glucose.
We don't want glucose floating around in our bloodstream.
What happens over time is if you keep having glucose and you keep, you've got your pancreas that just keeps shooting out this insulin, over time, it becomes weak.
So over time, there's more glucose.
Insulin has to, if it's doing it at a one to one ratio, like glucose to insulin, that's okay.
Then it becomes a two to one.
So glucose is coming up and it's like, okay.
I'm more tolerated to insulin now.
So insulin's like, okay, I'm going to double myself.
So insulin's coming out and trying to dampen it down.
Then it comes up even more and it's like a three to one, right?
And that's when you become more resistant to insulin.
Got it.
And that leads to diabetes, type 2 diabetes, when you become insulin resistant.
Okay.
So to prevent this from happening, you don't want a lot of glucose in the bloodstream.
So glucose.
A, you either don't have the sugar or B, you can have a lot of muscle mass, meaning that you don't necessarily go and eat all this candy.
But if you did, it is a storage ground and a sink for all those glucose molecules to go in there.
Therefore, insulin doesn't have to work as hard.
So you starve off insulin resistance.
Now, why do some people, bodybuilders specifically, like to eat tons of glucose and carbs before workouts versus some of them, like Dom, they like to work out and lift weights fasted?
After like hours of being fasted.
Oh my God, there's just so much research around that.
Dom's a keto guy, though, isn't he?
Yeah.
He's a hardcore keto guy.
Yeah, he's hardcore.
Yeah, I know.
Very hardcore.
I mean, look, he's done most of the studies on ketones.
But mainly because it's the best place for when you are doing a, when you want to lift heavy and contract your muscles and be able to lift harder, you need the carbohydrates.
Yeah.
You do need the carbohydrates.
Yeah.
Well, you don't need the carbohydrates, but I'm guessing that bodybuilders, since that's not my world, are ingesting carbs.
Maybe like, I think it's like maybe 10 to 12 grams.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cause I was talking to Dom, like I went down like the keto rabbit hole a couple of years ago and I did it for a couple of years and I felt great.
And then I stopped and I started eating just regular, you know, the regular amount of carbs.
I went like probably 50% carbs, 50% fat, just like a normal diet.
And I did that for about a year.
And I just recently started like really nuking the carbs and cutting them back a lot.
And like right now I'm kind of going through like the fatigue of my body adjusting to that, the quote unquote keto flu or whatever you call it.
It's a keto flu.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm suffering from that right now.
And I was talking to Dom just yesterday about that.
And I was telling him, Look, I'm like, the only carbs I'm eating are before workouts.
I'm only eating like bananas and fruits and stuff before workouts.
He's like, Drop that.
He's like, You don't need any of that.
Cut out all that before the workout.
Go in fasted.
And he's like, You'll feel much better.
You'll recover quicker.
As well as like this stuff, this keto start that he has.
It's like an exogenous ketone supplement that you can drink that basically kicks your body into ketosis.
But he's using fat.
As fuel or ketones as fuel.
Because remember, you have to use the primary fuel source for the brain is glucose, but when glucose isn't present, it will use ketones.
Right, which is better, right?
Well, I mean, it's not better or worse.
It's just depending on who you really speak to.
If you want to use fat as your fuel, then you'll probably do a fasted workout because you've already got a storing of fat and ketones built up.
But if you want to use Carbohydrates as fuel, then you're not doing the ketogenic diet.
Where I see that having a problem is if you're doing the keto diet and then you then go and ingest a bunch of carbs.
Right.
Yeah.
Then you can have problems.
Yeah.
Then you can screw up your system.
You've got to be really strict.
Like, don't like, I can't just, you know, right now in my career, like today, I'm like, I'm just traveling so much.
I don't think I could ever do a kid.
I've tried it though, and I felt great.
Yeah.
I feel better than ever when I do it.
Especially like if I'm doing stuff like this, I want to be able to talk and produce.
Coherent vocabulary, it helps a lot.
And even like drinking these exogenous ketones, it helps a lot too.
But like, I always thought that ketones, like when your body is running on ketones and using that for energy, that I always thought that was the optimal way for us to burn energy and for us to work and for our bodies to burn energy.
Like, if you even think of like animals, right?
Like animals that have to go for days and weeks without eating, they're burning ketones.
Ketones, right?
They're not burning fat, so they have to be like super quick, super reactive, like a cheetah.
I actually was starting to have exogenous ketones, right?
When I was during my exams for intraoperative neurophysiology, and during those, it was last year, and for a week I was just having these ketone shots.
And what I found was that I was able to suppress my appetite for starters.
I felt like I had brain fuel that lasted me all throughout the night.
Whereas if I switched over and I was having, you know, arguments, like some bread or sandwiches or something, my fuel would run out fast.
Yes.
And then I'd have to reload.
Yes.
Yeah.
Have you ever done like a long fast?
Yeah.
I've, I mean, the most I've done, long fast, the most I've done is two days.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I thought I was going to die.
I did five to six days once.
I think like five and a half days was the longest I ever did.
Only water?
Well, I made this like lemonade.
It was, uh, It was water and maple syrup and lemon juice.
And I would drink like close to a gallon of it a day.
Why maple syrup?
That sounds like the Beyonce drink.
No, maybe it might be similar.
What was the name of it?
There was a.
I heard this guy, Kelly Slater, talking about it, and he was explaining exactly what he was talking about.
Kelly would have gotten it from.
I know Kelly.
He would have gotten it from.
You know him?
No, I mean, he's a surfer.
Right.
I know Kelly Slater.
I know of him there.
I've met him a few times, though.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
He probably would have gotten it from Beyonce.
Was there a bit of pepper in it as well?
Yes, cayenne pepper.
Cayenne pepper.
That's the beyonce drink.
Yes.
Imagine that.
Well, I drank the Beyonce drink for the whole week.
Wow.
And I felt better than I'd ever felt, like in my entire life, on day three.
Two, three, I felt miserable.
But on like four or five and six, I felt incredible.
Like it was indescribable how good I felt.
I was even able to go to the gym.
I could play like an hour of full court basketball without getting cramps.
I could do like three times the amount of pull ups I normally did.
I had like insane energy.
It was.
You'd think that that's weird because of maple syrup.
Isn't that just pure sugar?
Right.
What was the point of having the maple syrup?
It's because it was Beyonce's.
No, there was some sort of science behind it.
Like, because your body's not getting any kind of sugar, that you need some sort of sugar to help maintain energy or something.
I don't know.
I know, but I think that that's going to be a really great thing to look up.
I'm going to definitely look that up.
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp.
What are some of the things you want to keep the same about yourself or your life in 2024?
What part of your life are you already grateful for, or what is something that you're already proud of?
Around New Year's, we all get obsessed with how to change ourselves instead of just expanding on things that we're already doing great.
Therapy helps you find your strengths so you can ditch those extreme resolutions and focus on minor changes that can really stick.
For me, it's helpful to focus on wins or positive experiences that I'm already grateful for.
And this isn't just for people who have experienced trauma or PTSD, it's for everyone.
This is a daily ritual I like to use to keep my mind healthy and free of negative influences.
If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try.
It's entirely online and designed to be convenient and suited to your schedule.
Just fill out a questionnaire to get connected to a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists at any time.
Cholesterol Ratios and Arterial Health00:13:06
For no additional charge.
Celebrate the progress you've already made.
Visit betterhelp.com slash Danny Jones to get 10% off your first month.
That's BetterHelp, H E L P, slash Danny Jones.
It's linked below.
Now back to the show.
And Kelly was talking about that there's this plaque that develops inside, like people that just never fast, like over your lifetime.
There's this plaque that builds up inside of your gut and like inside of your intestinal tract.
And then when you fast for a certain amount of time, like four or five days, At minimum, that stuff starts to come out of your body.
Because when you have this plaque lining the inside of your digestive tract, when you're eating normal foods, you're not getting all the nutrients you need from those foods.
So by expelling that from your body doing a five day fast, now after you come back to eating, you're going to ingest some more of the nutrients and vitamins that you get from your normal diet.
Yeah, that's not unlike what David Sinclair, the longevity scientist who's also Australian, says a lot.
Even though in the past few months he's been widely discredited.
But when he does speak about this, we know, and Peter Otega does this as well, when you fast, it basically clears out all of the dead cells that accumulate over time.
We've got programmed cell death, apoptosis, it just happens.
We know the cells die, right?
It just happens.
And they just sit there.
And by going in and fasting, you're inducing autophagy, basically going in and cleaning up.
All of those dead cells.
Right.
But let me tell you, I think I do, you know, this is not my area.
Fasting is not my area.
However, I do think that it works even in a small period of time.
Like, even if you're doing a 12 hour fast overnight, you know, 18 hours, you know, I generally stop eating at around 8 30 p.m.
I'm not eating until 11, 12 the next day.
I just, I'm not a morning eater.
It's called what intermittent fasting?
Call it what you will.
I don't call it anything.
It's just when I just naturally eat.
Yes.
What I know for females, though, who are trying to optimize for performance, I know that females actually work better.
In a fed state when they exercise, it's got to do with like hormones, and you basically because we also have something very different to men, which is a menstrual cycle, we do have to cater for that.
And in the absence of you know food, and if your body believes it's starving, it goes into this fight or flight mode, and you may not ovulate for a month or you may not you know menstruate.
I think that that's a depending on where you are and if you're optimizing for kids or not, you have to be cautious of.
Right, right.
And I know, like, one thing with people who indulge in the ketogenic or carnivore diet where they're reducing carbs, like, one of the things that they have to deal with is high cholesterol, too.
And that's something that happened to me when I did it I got my blood work done and my cholesterol.
Like, my general practitioner saw my cholesterol.
He was like, bro, you need to do something.
Stage 10 heart disease.
Like, you're going to die.
Yeah.
And, you know, I talked to Dom and I was showing it to him.
And, you know, what Dom was basically saying was like, yeah, you can get really high cholesterol from this, but like it all boils down to like the plaque in your arteries.
Like, if you have high cholesterol, LDL or whatever, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
And there's, he said, there's a lot of athletes, like a lot of very high performance athletes that have very high cholesterol.
So let's just.
You keep using the word cholesterol, right?
We have to understand that we've got total cholesterol, we've got LDL, then we've got the HDL.
I'm talking about LDL.
Yeah.
And that's another thing that's wrong with general practitioners where they don't give you the full story, right?
So, this is what we know.
If you've got a high, what you want is ratios.
Again, like I said to you, at my practice, we're focusing on ratios and trends.
I basically want to say to you, this is where you are right now, but in 10 years, you're trending towards.
Cardiovascular disease.
I don't want to say that, but that's what we're trying to pick up on.
Whereas a doctor will just tell you, you're fine now, and then you'll eventually go back in 10 years, they'll be like, okay, great statin, right?
It's like they're optimizing for statin.
When it comes to LDL, right, think of LDL, right?
You have saturated fat, which is present in animal based products and dairy products as well.
So you have your saturated fat and you don't end up getting rid of it, okay?
When it breaks down, It leaves these eventually, leaves these little breadcrumbs, if you will.
These breadcrumbs are your LDL, right?
Your HDL is basically the janitor, okay?
So your HDL comes in and sweeps up all of the LDLs and you get rid of it.
That's why we have our HDL.
That's the difference between LDL.
So if LDL ends up building up, right, and there's not enough HDL, that means that all of these little breadcrumbs are everywhere.
And there's not enough janitors to go in and clean it up.
Now, if you have a really high LDL, right, but you've got an even higher HDL in the ratio of two to one, that's still okay.
I think my HDL is like 40, which is like the low end of normal.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, again, if that is 40, but your LDL is 150, right?
Then that's a problem.
Even we can even see.
I don't think it's 200 LDL.
No.
Yeah.
All right.
So that's where the problem is, right?
Because, and you also want to look at ApoB, right?
Yes.
Yes.
A lipoprotein B, which is, you know, we really want to look at that.
But let's just say you're even at a one to one, that's even not sufficient enough.
Right?
It's so funny because the guidelines, when you go to a doctor, the guidelines actually for LDL are it just has to be less than 100.
Whereas if you really want to be optimized, it should be less than, in my books, 80, right?
And you want to be sitting at a 2 to 1 with your HDL, right?
Your LDL should be about double what your HDL is.
Yes.
Or even another measure is getting total triglycerides to HDL ratio.
Yes.
Which should be a 3 to 1.
So it's all about ratios.
So if you have.
Do you understand?
Total triglyceride should be triple what your HDL is?
Yeah.
No more?
No more.
Okay.
So just think, right, you said you've got a 200, right?
If I said to you, okay, great, but then if you had a 400 HDL, okay, it's high, but it still means that you're at the correct ratios, right?
However, this is where things get tricky.
We now have like hundreds of studies that show that a HDL over 80 is a risk factor for cancer.
Really?
Yeah.
So you want to be really maintaining that.
And then when it comes to arterial health, once again, Right?
If we are building up plaque within the walls of the artery, what are you doing, really?
You're narrowing the artery.
So, what does that do?
Blood flow.
It reduces the blood flow of the brain.
Yeah, it gets it there slower.
Okay.
So, we don't want that.
And then eventually, what happens if you just keep, if it just keeps lodging in the same place, that's what that happens.
And then it stops the blood flow.
And that's an infarct or an embolism.
You know how you have a, you've got an embolism in your heart?
We just call it a heart attack.
Embolism in your brain?
It is called a stroke.
Embolism in your lung?
Same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's weird.
Yeah.
Cholesterol, something I just really never understood.
Cholesterol is good because the reason why I wanted to just get the nomenclature right is because we hear so much cholesterol is bad.
It's like we've been around for how many millions of years?
Right.
Yeah.
Cholesterol is not, we need it.
We actually need it to synthesize testosterone, right?
You actually need it for the synthesis of hormones.
So cholesterol is not bad.
However, It becomes bad and troublesome when your LDL is at a certain place, and we don't really want to clean those arteries out.
And exercise and like aerobic exercise increases HDL, right?
But there's you know what?
It doesn't exercise increase HDL?
It increases HDL, yeah.
But it doesn't necessarily decrease LDL.
Correct.
That's why I was like, I didn't know where you were going with that.
So, yeah, unfortunately, but you know what it does do?
There is a really great relationship.
You can actually, with better arterial health from exercise, there are studies that are showing the The relationship between you're better able to metabolize LDL better.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's actually probably my next task after I put this myokine research out there.
I'm probably going to look at the relationship between LDL and exercise because for me, I mean, I don't eat terribly.
I used to, when I was a triathlete, I was 40 pounds lighter than what I am now, but I was training 45 hours a week.
I have a great relationship with LDL, and I think it's because I've spent most of my life exercising and I still spend a lot of my time.
Doing something.
Yeah.
Right, right.
And there's people that take like injectable L.
I know Peter Atia mentioned that he takes some sort of like crazy injection that like reduces your ApoB or like people take it like once, like you take a couple shots a year or whatever, and it's supposed to like, it's the one thing that can actually suppress and down regulate the ApoB.
He's taking an injectable form of that?
Yeah.
I thought he was taking a little statin.
No, he was saying that he, I forget the name of the drug, but I looked it up and it was like $15,000 for a year's worth of it and it was injectable.
Okay.
Look, great because we actually want.
If you could, you know, people are like, but what should our ApoB, if you can get it to zero?
It's the one thing that's useless, right?
Like, we use LDL, but ApoB, we don't have any use for it.
It's the one thing our body produces that just hurts us.
But if you bring down LDL, it'll bring down ApoB, right?
The thing that's scary is the LP little a.
Yes.
The lipoprotein A, which is great.
LP little a.
Yeah, me too, which is great because you only have to test that once in your life.
And it never changes?
And it never changes.
You know, it's great because that's great for you and I.
But you know, when you used to hear like five, six years ago, even 10 years ago, you know, you'd hear about a Tour de France, 35 year old cyclist, healthy as just dropping dead from a heart attack.
You know, people never knew why.
And we now know that it could plausibly be because of LP little a.
Really?
Yeah.
Don't you remember like 10?
I remember back when, I say 10 years ago, but it was around then.
Oh, I did my last race in 2013.
You know, I know that there were so many.
Athletes who were so fit, and I was like, Why on earth are they dying?
They're so healthy.
Yeah, there's so many of them.
Like, I mean, there's not really so many, but like recently, even like LeBron James's kid had like a really like a lifting weights had like a but what was that from?
Some sort of a heart attack.
I don't know, but it's scary.
Well, that's a that's an extreme.
Like, I don't know whether that was drug induced by any way.
I don't know.
Nothing was released, but that's a bit scary.
I think he's 19, right?
Yeah, yeah, he's super young.
And then there was last year that guy that played for he played on defense for the Buffalo Bills.
He just literally dropped.
Dead in the middle of the field, and they had to cancel the game.
Yeah, he's still playing right now.
It's crazy he was able to come back.
Yeah, I his heart just like stopped beating for a while.
Yeah, that's terrifying.
Um, I don't think that that was an LDL or I don't think that was a cholesterol problem though.
A cholesterol problem, I don't think that that was a cholesterol problem.
No, no, people say it's yeah, but you know, you never know.
They don't, they never he never came out and like talked about it.
I think there was an interview where they asked him like what the his.
Diagnosis was, and he's like, I don't want to talk about it.
You know what?
I want to know why do you think if all of this education is out there, right?
You know, Don puts education out, I do.
You've got great guests on here that put great education out.
Why do you think we still have an obesity epidemic or an Alzheimer's disease epidemic?
That's a good question.
If we now know, and like people like Huberman, too, becoming more and more popular and getting millions of views on three hour YouTube videos about vision, yeah, or cholesterol.
I know.
It's hard to believe that they're really.
I mean, I don't see a lot of people in my daily circles that are obese or overweight.
I mean, I could probably think of maybe three people I know that are really overweight.
But yeah, I don't know the answer to that.
Let's look at sleep because I think sleep is super important as well.
Resting Heart Rate and Creatine00:15:30
Sleep is something that we spend a third of our lives doing, right?
And we know that sleep deprivation, Can increase your risk of all cause mortality.
And yet, a lot of us are still sleep deprived.
Why?
I think that that's really interesting.
That is very interesting.
Do you measure your sleep?
I do measure my sleep.
I have one of your aura rings.
Yeah.
I only wear it when I sleep, though.
Rookie era.
But I don't know.
There's a weird placebo effect with my aura ring.
Sometimes I'll wake up and it tells me I slept like shit and I feel great all day.
And then sometimes it tells me I slept great, best sleep I've ever gotten, and I just feel like dead all day.
Yeah.
And there's an actual phenomenon for that.
People who are getting stressed out over their devices.
I suffer from that.
Yeah.
I've got clients who ring me.
They're like, oh my God, Louisa, my HRV is this.
What do I do?
It's like, just listen to your body.
You know?
What is HRV and why is that important?
Heart rate variability.
So basically, it's we let's look at it at the nervous system, right?
The nervous system comprises of two branches.
You've got the central nervous system, which is just the brain and the spinal cord, that is the hardware.
Then you've got the peripheral nervous system.
The peripheral nervous system is all of the nerves that come off of the spinal cord, right?
They come off the spinal cord and then they go into our muscles and all of our organs, right?
And these relay messages from the brain.
To the body, and then also the other way, which is we get messages that come up into, you know, from the body up into the brain.
So, as part of this peripheral nervous system branch, we've got an autonomic branch, and within that sits the sympathetic and the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system.
You've probably heard of it.
Sympathetic is the fight or flight, and the parasympathetic is the rest and digest, right?
So, at any given time, this is where we are.
It's like a seesaw, right?
Is that what you call it in America, seesaw?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're trying to maintain homeostasis, equilibrium, right?
If we get a bit stressed, right, we've activated the parasympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system.
So we're in this fight or flight.
Your body, remember, stress means you've got to run away from danger.
Your nervous system is still evolutionarily there to fight off danger.
That's what it was there for.
So if there was a tiger coming, right, or a lion, you'd have to.
Activate the sympathetic nervous system, which means we're going to shut down blood flow that goes to places where it's not needed.
And I want you to dilate your pupils and I want you to run fast and run away from danger.
That's what you're telling your brain every time you get stressed.
So you activate the sympathetic nervous system when you're stressed.
So you're in this, you're not balanced, right?
And you're activating this when you're even exercising because your heart rate is pounding.
So we're like this.
Then what we want to do is we basically want to breathe a lot to bring us back.
Down into equilibrium.
That's what we're always trying to do 24 7.
We're trying to, if we're asleep, right, we're like this.
The parasympathetic nervous system is activated.
We wake up because cortisol gets released, which is our stress hormone, which wakes us up.
So we know that we've got these two branches.
To maintain a healthy HRV, what heart rate variability is, it's basically measuring the variation between these two branches.
Okay, so if you exercise, Heart rate, you know, we know that our heart rate has gone up, but then if we also sleep, our heart rate has gone down.
But then if we come up, you know, basically HRV, so the higher, the more variation that you have between these two branches, the better.
Therefore, the higher the HRV.
If it doesn't have a lot of variation, HRV is low.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So it does not want you to be 24 hours a day, it does not want you to be in the parasympathetic zone, right?
It does not want you to be in the sympathetic zone.
It wants you to be in both.
And it also wants you to be able to get into sympathetic and then get out of sympathetic.
It doesn't want you to stay in sympathetic for 10 hours straight.
Okay.
So, the reason why it's a good predictor of recovery and also health is because it knows that you have a smart nervous system.
You know how to get into sympathetic.
And then when you're in sympathetic, you know how to get out of that sympathetic zone and activate the parasympathetic zone.
That makes sense?
So, it's basically, well, I think the way it's measured, right, is like the gap between heartbeats, right?
So, you don't want the same amount of time between each heartbeat.
You want a little bit of a different time between heartbeats.
Yeah.
So like if you have a low HRV, what would be the best way to improve it?
Just by exercising and sleeping well?
Can you actually improve it or do you have some sort of genetic ceiling?
No.
You can look, everybody is individual.
Okay.
So my average HRV is about 180.
That's my average.
For real?
Yeah.
Jesus.
I got a high HRV.
But now I've been traveling.
This morning, my HRV was 98, which is like me.
That's a death zone for me.
That means it's like I'm critical.
I remember I got really sick.
I got the flu, I think about six weeks ago.
HRV went down to like 52, and I thought, okay, well, this is my last.
I'm on my last leg today.
Oh my God.
I don't want to tell you what my HRV is.
But everybody, your HRV is for you and mine is for me.
However, you can increase it.
You can increase it by 10 points, like to your average.
What's your average?
My average is like 45.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
If I get drunk at dinner and I go to sleep, like.
And I wake up the next morning, my HRV will be completely plummet.
Yeah.
Oh, especially if you have wine.
Yes.
Yeah, wine is terrible.
The best HRV I've ever had is like in the 60s, sleeping.
You can do this.
What I've seen, because we do this with our clients, you've got to be on a good streak.
You've got to raise it.
You can't just have a good HRV for four days and then just plummet it, right?
You can raise your HRV by becoming fitter cardiovascular wise.
So remember, That cardiac remodeling, so you can get stronger ventricles, but also I know that sleep really increases HIV because it's a measure of recovery, right?
So, if you're if you get your resting heart rate down, which should generally be below 50, resting heart rate should be below 50, um, you'll be have a better you'll be on the track to getting a better HR.
What's yours?
Um, mainly, say if I'm not sick, but mainly it's around 48, 48, 47, yeah.
Is that bad?
Like, so.
People in their 30s or 40s, if they have a resting heart rate of 60, is that necessarily always bad to have a kind of a raised resting heart rate?
Yes.
It's always bad.
I mean, it's not always bad, but if it's constantly that way, we want to look at measures of bringing it down, which is again, basically, it's basically saying that at rest, your heart has to work really hard to pump the blood out.
That's what it's just saying.
So the reason why when you're rested, Your heart shouldn't have to work that hard to pump blood.
It shouldn't have to work that hard.
If it is working hard, at a rest, because you're not using it, you're not running.
So you don't need the excess, you know, you're just at rest.
Your brain isn't really, I mean, your brain's working, but it's shut down.
Your senses are shut down.
You're not looking at anything.
So you don't need that much blood flow.
But therefore, your heart rate shouldn't be at rest, it shouldn't be high.
We want to bring it down.
We want to try and have it below 50.
Below 50, no matter what.
And then, if you see some sort of like intermittent spike up in the 60s, like what would you estimate the cause of that would be?
Like, if it goes up to like 10 beats per minute, say.
Yeah.
And it's happening at night, it definitely like stressed or sick.
Mine does.
Even if I go to bed, so my favorite hours for my body to sleep is 10 p.m. till 6 a.m.
So if I sleep at midnight, my resting heart rate's going to be shot.
Really?
Yeah.
Interesting.
And you can test this with, you know, different types of supplements as well, like to calm down your mind.
You may want to take GABA, gamma amino bruteric acid.
I started taking magnesium L3 in 8 a couple months ago.
Love, but also, I mean, I love it.
I take it too, and I feel like it really helps me get into deep sleep.
However, the research still isn't there on the absolute effectiveness of L3 in 8 and sleep.
No.
No.
I mean, we still don't know if it can truly penetrate the central nervous system, which is what the big selling point is of blood brain barrier.
Yeah, how it can get into the blood brain barrier.
And help calm you down and put you into more of a deep sleep zone.
Yeah.
It's still very early.
We've just got minor studies there.
When it comes to supplements that you like to research, or when you are working with athletes and stuff, like what are some of the main supplements that these people are using to enhance their brain or their processing power?
Well, first of all, if we do a blood test, right, and we see that they are deficient in something, remember, everything has a chemical pathway.
If they're vitamin D deficient, we need to investigate that, right?
Let's just say we have plugged the holes and they're not deficient in anything, which has never happened, right?
Zinc, everything.
Where to from there?
Well, I think that every single person, I don't care what age you are, I really don't, I don't care what pathology you have, I think everyone should be taking creatine.
Really?
Creatine monohydrate is the most widely studied supplement.
It is the cheapest and most safe supplement on the market.
I've interviewed some of the best people that are world renowned for creatine who've done their PhDs in creatine.
They all say that you can get creatine from dietary sources such as meat, liver, eggs.
You know, we know that.
But we also know that it's not as bioavailable because of just the way we're living, right?
So we should be supplementing with it and starting at five grams per day of creatine monohydrate.
That's one of the big things Dom got me into as well taking creatine monohydrate every day.
Without a doubt, I've got my parents on it, okay?
You can kids can have it really women.
Yeah, this the PhD.
Um, Darren told me that there's no cutoff with kids.
I mean, if you are over the age of 45, you should be having it.
My parents are in their late 60s, or my dad is 72, or my mom is 69.
Like, I've got them having it.
I had to convince them they thought it was drugs to start with.
I said it's not drugs.
Why is it the cheapest stuff is always the best for you?
Because it's it's it just is, it's the most widely studied.
Um, so what specifically does it do?
How does it help?
So, first of all, it's a naturally occurring molecule.
Okay, we already have it in our body, but we don't produce enough of it.
It helps with ATP regeneration.
Okay, so ATP is the fuel source, the source of energy production in all of our cells.
We have it in the brain.
So, we need ATP to create energy, to produce anything, just to even be awake, right?
So, when we take creatine, It can help produce ATP.
It helps with cell energy metabolism, right?
So, it can actually help with so many disorders as well.
If you're anxious, it can help you with that.
If you want to produce more neuronal energy, it can help you with that.
My father, he had a stroke a few years ago, and I've got him taking it just to help with better neuron energy in his brain.
It can actually help be neuroprotective against concussions, it can help be neuroprotective against Parkinson's disease.
There's so much research happening now in the neurodegenerative phase, and just today, actually.
I put up on my story on Instagram a really great study that came out to show the effectiveness of creatine monohydrate on Alzheimer's disease patients.
Because Alzheimer's disease patients can't produce energy in certain areas of their brain.
Really?
Of course, because their brain now is full of plaques and tangles and these towel proteins, and they've built up and they're blocking certain areas of the brain.
So you can give them creatine, five grams a day.
How much is that like a spoonful?
Yeah, generally they're coming in a spoon.
And you just drink it in water?
Yeah, you can have it however you want.
You can have it in yogurt if you want.
It's got no taste.
And you can go up from there and have 10 grams, if you will.
Really?
Yeah.
You can't overdo it.
You can't.
And I mean, you don't want to have 100 grams.
There is no science or evidence that shows that it can actually cause hair loss, which I know people are really scared about that, or that it can cause kidney damage.
Why would people think it causes hair loss?
Oh, so maybe just because of the DHT pathway.
People think that.
Or the androgens.
Yeah.
So people think.
Oh, because it increases testosterone, doesn't it?
Yeah.
So there is no hair loss.
There is no kidney damage.
There have been so many studies.
There was actually one great study on bone density in women, and they tracked them for two years.
And they got them taking, I think, seven and a half grams of creatine every single day for two years.
There was no stopping, there was no cycling, there was no loading.
They increased bone density, right?
But they also said, you know, In the study, there was no heart defects, there was no kidney damage, there was no liver damage, there was no hair loss.
These are women taking it for two years.
So these are just myths that are out there.
That's fascinating.
Creatine, that's the first one.
Second one is EPA DHA, which is omega 3 fatty acids.
Say that again slower.
Omega 3 fatty acids.
Okay, EPA DHA?
Yeah.
Okay.
So omega 3 fatty acids that come from fatty fish like salmon and mackerel contain three parts.
They've got ALA.
There's EPA and then there's DHA.
The brain is fat and water.
It's around 60% fat, 40% water.
That's what your brain is made of.
In that fat zone, in the 60% fat zone, around 30%, 20% to 30% is DHA.
Really?
Yeah, so brain tissue is abundant in DHA fat.
I could imagine that a lot of people are deficient in that.
Vitamin D and Omega-3s00:11:33
Yeah, so you can actually, there was, they did this great, all, All cause mortality risk factors paper.
They brought it out like three years ago.
And basically, they listed the new list of risk factors that lead to death.
Hypertension, right?
You know, chronically high blood pressure.
Smoking is a risk factor.
They then put in EPA low omega 3 index.
So we now have a low, if you've got a low omega 3 index, which is a measure of omega 3s in the red blood cell, a low omega 3 index.
Of 4% or less, which is what the majority of the U.S. population has, is a risk factor for all cause mortality.
So you want to be on that scale.
You want to be on 8% or more.
I don't think I've ever had that specific, like my EPA or DHA measured in a blood test before.
You can do it.
It's called the Omega 3 index.
But looking at how abysmal my cholesterol is, I eat a ton of fish, by the way, and I also take EPA, I take fish oil supplements.
Yeah.
You may very well be up there.
Even though you're eating a ton of fish, we are in America.
So it's not sometimes the best source of getting EPA DHA.
American fish?
Yeah.
Really?
Well, farmed fish.
Most of it's farmed.
That's why.
Oh, well, I live in Florida.
Most of my fish is caught right off the beach here.
Are you sure about that?
In the Gulf.
Yeah.
You're doing it?
No, but all my friends do.
Oh, well, then that's great.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, some of us who live in New York, we're going to Whole Foods.
What about canned fish?
That's not as good.
Like people who get like, because I know Dom eats a lot of canned, I'm not talking about Dom the whole time, but I know he eats a lot of like canned mackerel and canned sardines.
Yeah, no, you can get a lot of the EPA DHA from there too.
You can.
Yeah.
Then you've got to worry about the mercury content, but that's fine.
Right, right.
The mercury is in like the big fish, the big pelagic fish like tuna and stuff like that.
Yeah, correct.
So you want to be making sure that you're getting a really great dose of EPA DHA.
We also know that we're now getting studies again to Alzheimer's disease.
So amyloid beta, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, these amyloid beta.
Causes these plaques to build up and basically clump together like this.
We are now getting early studies in humans to show that omega 3 fatty acids, EPA DHA, at around 5 grams a day can go through and ameliorate these plaques.
So we're now even seeing the effectiveness of EPA DHA on the brain of Alzheimer's patients.
And the myeloid plaques can reverse it?
No, not reverse it.
Basically, ameliorate some of the plaques and break them down better.
Okay.
Yeah.
Like metabolize them better.
Yeah.
Correct.
That's fascinating.
And you've got to think we've got, you know, our cells need to be moving around.
We've got trillions of cells in the body.
We've got around 87 billion neurons in the brain.
And you want them to be able to be fluid and move around.
And that's what EPA DHA does as well.
It helps with cell membrane fluidity, the outer shell of the cell to be more fluid.
And, you know, it's just, I mean, I think I'll go to my grave telling people to take creatine and EPA DHA.
That's awesome.
What about nicotine?
So let me give you a background on this.
I had this guy in here who is a He's a brain scientist who he does like these studies on like psychoactive drugs in the brain.
He's based in the UK.
He came in here and he had these little nicotine pouches he was putting in his lip.
I'm like, what is that?
And he's like, how the Japanese writing on it.
And he's like, it's nicotine pouches.
I'm like, really?
I'm like, you do that and you're a brain doctor or scientist?
And he's like, yeah, it's neuroprotective.
He's like, it fights against Alzheimer's and all this stuff.
And he's like, makes you more sharp when you're talking and all this stuff.
And then I started buying it.
I got these little Zen cans.
Oh my god.
Now I'm like addicted to them.
So I'm like worried.
I'm like, is there any downside to this?
Apart from addiction.
I mean, only addiction.
I know it increases focus.
I have good, I can control myself.
I have discipline.
So I only do like a couple of them a day.
But I know like a lot of people do like a lot of that, like a ton of it.
And they mix it with vaping and stuff like that.
But are there any downsides to nicotine without the inhalation of like vape, like people chewing gum or using the pouches or anything like that?
Downsides, I mean, again, it's not my field.
I've actually never personally taken it, but there are so many people taking it.
I know that even Andrew has spoken about this, and I think Peter Atia has spoken about this as well about taking nicotine to help with focus and vigilance throughout the day.
Yeah, I heard there was a guy who won like a Nobel Prize, and when he was studying for his research, he would chew nicotine gum all the time.
Really?
Yeah.
No, I mean, some guy at Stanford.
Yeah, I think, you know what I think it's doing?
I think it's, again, right?
There is no point in doing any of these things unless you've got the three.
Pillars of health down pack, unless you're sleeping well, restorative sleep, unless you're exercising appropriately, and unless you are getting the right macronutrients and micronutrients, there's just no point in taking any of these things.
You've got to get your things in order first, and everything else is an accessory.
That's what I call it cold water immersion.
Albeit I've got a plunge in my apartment, it is just an accessory.
I can't cold plunge my way out of bad dieting.
Right, right, right.
You know?
Is there any neuroprotective things that you're aware of when it comes to nicotine?
No, but that's just me not being, yeah.
Okay.
Because it's not my line.
It could maybe, there could be early research on neuroprotection using nicotine.
I mean, I would need a lot of evidence to show that that is neuroprotective.
And is it, do you know about any sort of effects with nicotine on like the heart and the arteries?
No.
I heard it's vasoconstrictive, a constrictor.
Well, why would that be a good thing?
No, it wouldn't be a good thing.
Yeah, exactly.
It definitely wouldn't be a good thing.
But I wonder if it's like, does it only do that when you are taking it?
Or does it fade away when you take it?
Or does it stay there forever?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it would stay there forever because there'd be vasodilation after that.
However, I think if it is causing that, then what's the point?
Like, why are you having it?
Why am I taking it?
Yeah.
Just because someone said, hey, it's great, I like it.
And I tried it once.
I'm like, hmm, this is nice.
I feel like, I feel great.
I'm energized.
And then you sound like the rest of the population on Instagram who are like, oh, this person said this works, so I'm going to take this.
And it ends up being detrimental to their health.
Yeah, there's lots of Instagram people too who make funny videos about taking Zins and they'll pack their lips full of them.
And it's become this trend.
Wow.
You can just buy that off the counter.
Yeah.
As long as you're 18?
Any gas station.
Oh, great.
Have you heard of a guy called Freezer Tarps?
No.
Oh, my God.
You've got to look him up.
He's on Instagram.
He actually lives in Tampa and he's a.
What would you call him?
He's a nicotine pouch influencer.
He's got millions of followers.
Okay.
Because I guess it's like this.
I guess there's a good.
The good side of it is that it's like helping kids get away from the vaping stuff.
So now they're doing this.
And I think this is probably better than inhaling all those vape chemicals.
But it's wild to see it take off in like all the young people are like obsessed with it right now.
I think like when it comes to having anything exogenous, it's like where are you getting your information from first and foremost?
And do you know how.
These compounds and molecules, right?
It takes a lot of time to study this and what it actually does in the human body.
I wouldn't take somebody on Instagram and just think it's good for you.
Let's, for example, for argument's sake, let's just talk about vitamin D.
Okay.
40%.
By the way, Steve, find a video of freezer tarps so we can show her.
Vitamin D, most of the US population is, I think 40% is vitamin D deficient.
Right.
Right.
It could be more.
Vitamin D is a hormone, right?
It's both a vitamin and a hormone.
But what happens is, okay, because I just had a, I just was looking at blood work before I came here of one of our clients, low vitamin D, right?
I was looking at his report.
He had a really low vitamin D, which is around 20 nanograms per deciliter, right?
And we want it to be up at around 50 or 60.
What happens is most people will get a vitamin D score and they'll be like, okay, I want to go through and I want to take 5,000 IUs of vitamin D. My doctor told me I had low vitamin D, so I've got to go and take vitamin D tablets.
Or most people are just taking it without knowing their true measurements, right?
But what we don't realize is that In the body, you have to ask your body every time you get any type of score, you have to ask your body, Why did my body think it was a good idea to lower vitamin D?
Right?
And if you look at what happens in the body, if you know your cellular biology, we know that vitamin D actually gets lowered in the presence of lead or in heavy metal.
So if you've got heavy metal or lead in your system, vitamin D, because vitamin D binds to lead, right?
But we don't want the body's smart, it's like we don't want this lead, so let's lower vitamin D in the body.
Until we excrete this lead.
So, what happens is if you've got low vitamin D and you have lead in your system, but you don't know about that, you go and take a bolus of the sun pretty much.
You go and take 5,000 IUs of vitamin D.
So, you're bringing up your vitamin D levels in your body, but you're also bringing up the lead.
So, you have to be really careful with just taking supplements.
Just because they're over the counter, they are there for a reason.
Like they are present, they are micronutrients in the body, they are hormones that you are ingesting, and you don't know what it's doing unless you have a really, really Smart practitioner.
And you're not supposed to take vitamin D without K2, right?
I mean, it's not supposed to.
It just helps with the absorption.
But yeah, I mean, I take a vitamin D supplement every day.
I don't have high lead, but I do have low vitamin D. Really?
I swear it's because I live in New York.
I thought, because when I got my blood work done, I had like off the charts vitamin D. What was it?
I could pull it up.
It was like.
But like, so I was taking.
I was just like.
Taking vitamin D supplements every day just because I thought it was good.
Just because you thought.
Yeah, just because I didn't want to get sick, you know.
And I have two kids that are always like getting colds from school and bringing it home.
And I was just trying to like keep myself from catching anything.
And I was like, oh, you know, everyone says vitamin D is great.
I should supplement it with every day.
And so I was taking vitamin D with K2.
And I got my blood work done.
And my vitamin D was like, my vitamin D was like through the roof.
Like, what are you doing?
But I don't think it was ever low.
So, like, do you think there's.
I mean, if it was, I mean, look, it's fine.
It probably wouldn't be like, I mean, if it was over 100, maybe it's like crazy.
Do you think there's any negative effect of having too high vitamin D?
Probably.
I mean, the, I know the, I know there's no cutoff limits to my knowledge, but I don't think that it's like, I don't think it'd be necessarily good to have something like maybe over 200.
Questionable Protocols and Supplements00:12:27
Right.
I can't find it right now.
It took me forever to go through it.
But no, yeah, it was like, it showed the reference range, and mine was like in like above, like in the red.
Okay, for too high, and you stopped taking it?
Well, I started taking it.
I take it like now, I take it like every couple days instead of every day.
Okay, good.
And, you know, blood work's really easy.
You can check it.
We have a turnover of red blood cells every 120 days.
You're like basically getting a new batch of red blood cells, so you can check it.
And every time I get my blood work, there's like at least one marker that's like way off.
That's like either my liver or my kidney or my white blood cell count.
There's always something that's off.
Yeah.
Do you find the video of freezer tarps?
White blood cell count could also be.
Yeah, there is.
In the presence of.
an infection.
That's the guy right there.
They're short right there.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's see what we got here.
Yeah.
Go to the one below that.
Where he's like has the hat on and the crazy face.
When Coach makes the fella's condition.
So, yeah, he makes these like goofy videos, like golfing and like working out and stuff like that, and just like joking about the nicotine.
He's funny.
He lives around here, but he's got tons of followers, and all he talks about is fucking nicotine pouches.
That's, yeah, that's, I mean, I don't understand this whole follower generation.
It's like.
Well, it's because all the young, all the young, like young people now, like in their early 20s, I know, like my young cousins and like friends I know, they're all.
A ton of them are on those vapes, like the jewels or the little vape stick things that people are in.
That's so freaking scary.
That stuff's got to be really bad for you.
But the fact that this stuff is becoming popular, there's got to be a correlation there.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm just seeing the craziest shit on Instagram going viral for no reason.
Things that don't even matter.
I actually just debunked some guy on Instagram.
He's now part of the health crew.
And he's saying, he's selling this protocol.
Which says, you know, I can increase your life, okay, your life expectancy if you buy my $150,000 protocol.
Within this protocol sits a PMF, PEMF, PEMF mat, which is a, you know, these electromagnetic pulses that just, you know, you can sleep on it and it just basically mimics you being out on the grass.
It's a red light therapy bed, like just the most ridiculous things.
And what upsets me is that so many people follow him and so many people are buying these things and it's vulnerable people who believe that they're going to get.
Increase their life expectancy or increase their lifespan by doing these heroic things by just instead of doing the basic things.
I question humanity and psychology.
It's like, why not just exercise?
Right, exercise will far outweigh any pemph mat if that's what it's called.
You gotta make money from exercise, you gotta sell something, you gotta sell supplements.
You know, Liver King, right?
Yeah, I mean, he became like the most popular thing on the internet when it came to like in the health community for a long time.
And he was saying that, oh, I get these muscles from you know, walking outside barefoot, getting the sunlight, eating testicles, eating liver and testicles, right?
Yeah.
And then everyone found out that he was on steroids and that he was taking like crazy amounts of steroids and peptides and HGH.
Like he was spending $30,000 a month on all this stuff he was taking.
Yeah.
I saw a video of him a week ago, actually.
And he had, you know, he was wearing these little patches that stimulate your muscles, right?
We used to use them in training, Triathlon, if like we're on a long haul flight or if we had, you know, broken our ankle or something like that, just so we wouldn't lose any muscle mass.
And he had it on his chest.
But let me tell you, he looked so bad.
It was as if he was dying.
Really?
Yeah, it was.
I've got to send it to you.
He looked so bad.
I thought.
Maybe you can find that, Steve.
Yeah.
Liver King's his name.
All right.
Yeah, he looked like this video of him.
He was.
It looked like.
Okay.
And somebody actually shared it saying he's not going to be with us for much longer, guys.
Yeah.
He looks odd.
He's like super.
He's like super red looking.
Like he's got this like.
There you go.
That's it.
There's the video.
The fourth one to the right.
Yeah, that's it.
The Daily Mail.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, he looks like he's dying.
Can you play the video?
Yeah, it's got to be on this.
After his health is being questioned.
That's just an ad.
But look, there he is.
He's very unnatural looking.
He looks like he's dying, right?
Yeah, he doesn't look healthy.
Oh, after this, these are the stats.
How many people are following him?
Didn't he make $100 million from selling his ancestral diet?
Yeah, he sells the liver supplements, which, like, look at him.
Look at his face.
Yeah, he looks rough.
I don't know what he's talking about.
His veins are like garden hoses in his arms.
I'm also looking at his face.
Yeah, his face looks weathered.
But that's the thing with this kind of stuff.
He's clearly a charlatan that's promoting some sort of supplement he's using to make money.
And he's not telling the truth on how he gets that physique or how he gets those big muscles because he's injecting insane amounts of steroids.
But at the same time, he's also talking about the good stuff, like exercise, eat organ meats, which are good for you, get outside in the sunlight, do all this stuff.
So he's promoting a healthy lifestyle.
But at the same time, he's also just throwing in this little white lie in there that's just misleading people, and people get really mad about that.
How many people are doing that?
What?
Instagram and social media, this whole notion of people selling products and not really knowing what they're doing.
This, you know, one particular man who I know works, you know, with, I think he worked with Dana White.
I don't know even if he's been to college or anything, but, you know, he's promoting this lifestyle that it's, he just says the craziest things.
Like he actually said that the brain is a non metabolic organ.
Who is this?
Yeah.
His name is Gary Brecker.
Gary Brecker.
Yeah.
It's, yeah.
He was actually just on Joe Rogan this week.
Which is what?
Yeah, it's upset a lot of people.
Wow.
So he is, so he helped Dana White, but he's actually got a business with this dude.
Yeah.
Oh, I've seen this guy all over Instagram and YouTube.
So this is the guy.
Okay.
So Dana White was really unhealthy for a long time.
And then this guy apparently started working with Dana and like changed his diet, gave him a bunch of stuff to take, and like figured out something within his DNA.
He talks about some sort of DNA structure.
It's methylation.
And it is.
It is so insane because it's like he put Dana White on a $150,000 protocol.
And I'm telling you, you can put anyone on that damn protocol and they will get benefits from it.
He's not doing anything outrageous.
Like he didn't give him any type of magic pill or cure.
And by the way, if you listen to what he says, he's been debunked by scientists, by physicians.
The things that he says are so outrageous.
That's the thing.
You know how you can get some people that it's like, okay, maybe that was an honest mistake?
Can you find his website?
He says the great.
Yeah, we can look at his protocol.
Let's see what the main thing he's saying is.
There he is, GaryBrecker.com.
I don't like giving him any airtime.
So he works with Grant Cardone.
Oh, no.
Stop it.
Grant actually is the grifter king.
So Grant and him own 10x health, and that's how he's become famous.
You know, Grant comes to this town every month.
Because the Church of Scientology is right down the street from here.
He's a Scientologist?
Oh, yeah.
What?
He's one of the biggest Scientologists.
No.
Yes.
I didn't know that.
Yep.
It's funny because he's married to a Greek woman.
Is he really?
Yeah.
Helena is Greek, and I would think that she would get him to a Greek Orthodox church.
That's Grant's wife?
Yeah, I would think that she would get him to a Greek Orthodox church.
So scroll up to the top.
What is it?
Okay, scroll down a little bit.
No, no.
Gary Breca is a professional human biologist and co founder of 10X Health.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
As a human biologist and co founder of 10x Health, Gary does more than just guide the company's global wellness vision and direction.
With more than 20 years of biohacking and functional medicine experience, he is obsessed with the function and performance of the human body and finding innovative ways to help people achieve absolute.
Wow.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
That's a major red flag that he works with Grant Cardone.
So, what is he saying?
Like, what is he doing that is so cutting edge?
No, it's nothing.
He's not doing anything.
He's doing a basic methylation test.
So, for example,.
In order for you, once you ingest vitamins, okay, or ingest food, they get broken down, methylated, right?
And then we're able to use them for different things.
Now, if you have certain genes that don't allow you to methylate certain vitamins, it's going to be detrimental, right?
So if you have this one gene, okay, and polymorphism in the gene called MTHFR, they call it, you know, They call it a certain type of gene.
Have you heard of it?
They call it the motherfucker gene.
The motherfucker gene.
Yeah.
Okay.
So if you have that, it means that you cannot methylate, break down certain types of B vitamins.
Okay.
Okay.
We need B vitamins for brain health, for cardiovascular health.
But what happens is if you can't break those down, what you'll see in your blood test is you'll see a high homocysteine, right?
And high homocysteine is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and for dementia.
We don't want it.
We want to bring homocysteine down.
So, if you have this MTHFR gene, it won't allow you to methylate B vitamins.
And if you can't get B vitamins in your system, okay, you can't uptake these B vitamins, your homocysteine will rise and a lot of other complications happen.
So, if you find that out, okay, that's great.
A lot of people have that gene, right?
So, you can go through and give them methylated B vitamins, right?
We know how to do this, it's standard practice.
So, he's going out and selling this cure for.
Disease, and this is his protocol $7,000 10X Pro Plunge.
But if you go down to get the whole thing, I think it ends up being like 150K.
Stop it.
Yes.
Scroll down, see what else he's got.
You have to go down.
I think you have to go.
He's got red lights, he's got sauna, 10X sauna.
Yeah, you have to go on his actual 10X website.
They're there.
Go visit the partner.
Click on that.
So, yeah, come down.
It'll give you the.
There it is.
Holy crap.
Was that a tanning bed or is that a red light bed?
That is a red light bed.
Look at this human protocol.
Is $102,936.
And he's got his own red lights, superhuman protocol with red light panels, $15,000.
Absolute junk and ridiculous.
That's more money than Juve.
He is selling dreams.
He's selling dreams to vulnerable people and making so much money on that.
I mean, the markup on that.
Who needs a red light bed?
Accessories.
These are accessories.
People in Africa.
Who have two APOE4 genes are living a long life.
They don't have these beds.
They're spending time out in nature, in sunlight.
They're exercising.
They're not eating demolished foods.
And let me tell you guys whoever is buying into him is just making him richer.
He's got like this.
I mean, who the fuck's paying $132,000 for a red light bed?
Danny, you'd be surprised.
If you're spending that much money, it probably doesn't mean that much to you, honestly.
But this is what I mean.
But if you have that much money to spend on that, anyone can push the needle for you.
Sleep Quality and Deep Rest00:11:14
In terms of health, right?
This is, it's just bogus.
Like, this is just accessories.
I can't say that word enough.
Yeah.
And he's selling a methylation test that he's like, oh, whoop-de-doo.
It's like any freaking practitioner can do, and most practitioners do do methylation tests.
It's not a, I mean, we do it in our practice.
It's just, it's not a, it's not the whole, like, it's not some sort of like, oh, wow, you know?
It's nothing to write home about.
Yeah.
Anybody who has like a crazy paywall to like learn all the secrets of, you have to be very skeptical of that.
But I do know that if it wasn't for Grant Cardone, he probably wouldn't be where he is today.
Yeah.
Grant Cardone's a whole nother rabbit hole we could dive down, but we don't have time to do that today.
Stick to the health.
Yeah, he's one of the biggest Scientologists, and he's always here in Clearwater.
He's always on his Instagram, filming himself, being right down the street from here, going to the big church with the gold plated Church of Scientology.
He's a wild character.
Yeah.
So stick to the basics, which is sleep.
Exercise and nutrients.
We actually didn't get into sleep.
We didn't?
No.
We didn't get into the, just the, I think one of the best things to touch on is the, what happens during deep sleep.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So you track your sleep, you see slow wave sleep.
So we've got.
I get like an hour of deep sleep a night.
Yeah.
We've got stage one sleep.
That's when you're falling asleep.
We've got stage two.
That's when you're in light sleep.
We've got stage three.
It's called non REM sleep.
That's, that's deep sleep.
Okay.
Deep sleep is so important for two reasons.
One, We get the release of growth hormone.
Growth hormone is where we get responsible for protein synthesis, for example, okay, muscle regeneration.
And we get testosterone released during that timeframe as well.
But we also get something really fantastic in the brain called the glymphatic system.
So the glymphatic system is like the lymphatic.
Lymphatic?
Yeah.
So if you heard of the lymphatic system in the body, it's the same in your brain.
So it's actually like a sewage system.
So what happens in the brain, we've got All these little brain cells, right?
I said we've got 87 billion neurons.
We've got a certain specialized brain cell called the glial cell.
It comes from the Greek word glue.
Basically, they stick between the other neurons, okay?
And they hold them.
They stick between these two neurons.
During deep, slow wave sleep, what happens is they shrink in size.
So these glial cells get smaller, and your brain has cerebral spinal fluid, right?
And the cerebral spinal fluid washes all through the brain and it washes out the toxins and debris.
One of the debris that it washes out is amyloid beta, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
So you are in deep sleep, you activate the glymphatic system, which acts as a sewage system and a waste removal system for all of the dead products in your brain.
And then you wake up and you feel fresh.
And if you do this over and over and over again, you can keep clearing out these toxins.
If you keep sleep depriving yourself and you don't get into deep sleep, what's going to happen?
All of these little toxins are going to keep building up, building up.
Building up.
Just like compound interest, they build up, they accumulate, and then they rot your brain to an extent.
Right.
So that's the link between sleep and Alzheimer's disease.
This is why it's super important to be optimizing for deep sleep.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
And then we're talking about circadian rhythm and stuff and making sure.
Yeah.
So the screens and the phones are really important with that.
Like when I'm laying in bed, like an hour before I go to bed, I turn on my red lights and I bounce them off the wall and I fill my whole bedroom with red light.
Oh, really?
So you've got an optimized room.
That's supposed to cut down the blue light and help you sleep better.
Correct.
Yeah.
Although I don't know if it helps, but I feel like it helps.
Yeah.
And it's interesting because sleep can be completely destroyed with one glass of wine.
And we know that.
But you know what?
Actually, getting into now, spreading the information about wine literally killing you.
Yeah, when I say that, let me not get too ahead of alcohol, I should say.
Alcohol is really so.
What happens when you ingest ethanol?
Ethanol ends up breaking down into acetylaldehyde, and acetylaldehyde is literally poison, it will kill cells.
So, we also need to have a conversation about what alcohol is doing to you.
We know that it already increases.
Your risk of breast cancer, all right, in females especially, but it's also killing off your brain cells.
We've seen like numerous studies, like a UK biobank study that showed there was like over 35,000 brains that got tested in relation to alcohol.
And they found that people ingesting moderate drinkers, which were seven drinks a week on average for women and 14 drinks on average a week for men, they found that the alcohol actually destroys the gray matter.
Of the brain, which is where the cell bodies of the neurons are, and it interferes with the white matter of the brain, which is where all the information processing speed happens.
Really?
And there's so, okay, when I'm thinking about this, I think about like most people who are young like party and drink a lot.
Oh, yeah.
So, what if they get older and they kind of stop doing that?
Is it too late?
No, it's not.
It's never too late.
You can't reverse anything, but just keep in mind that it's your brain is still forming until around 25 to 30.
Okay.
So, I just think to myself, I, you know, because I do love wine, but I limit.
I do two glasses a month.
A month?
Really?
Strictly?
Mm hmm.
Wow.
Yeah.
If that, yeah.
That's discipline.
It's discipline, but when you really understand the science behind it, it's like, why would I want to do that to my body?
Yeah.
I really started paying attention to it once I started tracking my sleep with the aura ring.
Like, once I saw how fucked my sleep got when I drank.
Exactly.
That's really what made me cut it back.
Right.
And it's not just messing up your sleep, okay?
It's messing up your sleep.
Okay, which is bad for you, but it's also killing cells in your body.
And it's also increasing your risk of breast cancer.
And not just that, it's also down regulating so many different genes and up regulating other genes that are not good for you.
Right.
Yeah.
Have you ever heard of a lady named Shauna Swan?
No.
I had her in here a few months ago.
She is an endocrinologist who wrote a book called Countdown.
And she basically conducted all of these studies, like 10 year long studies of.
Testosterone level and sperm counts in men across the country.
And basically, what she determined is that sperm count is going down by like 2% per year in males in the US between like the early 90s up until now.
Or I'm sorry, the early 90s up until like 2005.
And from 2005, that's when it was 1%.
But now in the last 10 years, it's been like up to 2%.
That combined with testosterone levels have been going down in men.
So, like, she was saying that like, Your average 30 year old now will have like 50% of the testosterone that a 30 year old would have had in the 50s.
And she said that it all has to do with like pesticides and plastics, the phthalates that are in like the plastics, like plastic water bottles and.
Endocrine disruptors.
Endocrine disruptors, yeah.
That scared the shit out of me.
Well, we do have a nationwide deficiency, which is, I think it's classified as 350 or less, yeah.
Which do you let me tell you?
I am testing absolutely every single person that comes to our practice, it's standard for us.
Many of the men are around 350.
I've had one that comes in at 250.
It's insane.
Yeah.
And how, like, how, like, that is, I think, like, hormone levels are something people don't really think about a lot, but the hormone levels have, they're, they regulate so many other things in the body.
And they're like, that's been responsible for heart health, brain health, everything.
Absolutely.
And, like, you know, you need, there's also precursors to hormones.
So we've got DHEA.
They call this the hormone of youth because it's really high and, you know, In adolescents and young adults, and then it dissipates as we get older.
And we need this for the synthesis of testosterone.
And DHEA, surprisingly, if that is low, it's also correlated with REM sleep.
REM sleep is also going to be very low.
Really?
Yeah, it's funny.
I had a patient who had really low DHEA.
We started supplementing with DHEA, and she's like, Louisa, my REM sleep has increased.
I was like, that's insane.
And that's when I started.
She didn't even know about the study.
She was taking DHEA.
Yeah, and then it started to increase.
I thought that was something only men took.
No, gosh, no.
Okay.
No, DHEA is like, it helps create hormones.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
All hormones, estrogen and testosterone.
It can, yeah.
Oh, okay.
I thought it was just specifically for testosterone.
So these guys who are getting like these, it's funny because you see like so many fertility problems, you know, which.
A lot.
Yeah.
And it can be attributed to low testosterone as well.
Hmm.
Yeah, and the direct correlation between that and sperm count and the population decline, like the growth in population, is crazy scary to think about.
And how you would even go about reversing something like that in the world we live in when everything is just about making stuff cheaper and making more profit off of consumer products.
I've got cousins who are still in Cyprus, right?
I've got a lot of family who still live there in Cyprus.
I don't know if you've ever been, if you know too much about it.
It's a little island off Greece.
No, I've never been.
I want to go.
I've heard great things.
Oh, it is absolutely gorgeous.
Everything is fresh, right?
Everything, they just catch it.
No one over there, my cousins, I've got a cousin who is 43, turning 44, and she's pregnant.
And she's, and it's, you know, so many women here in the U.S., it's like 43, 44, you wouldn't hear of them falling pregnant.
They're just over there, just, you know, falling pregnant.
And that's late to get pregnant, right?
I mean, yeah, apparently, yeah.
So, but she just naturally just fell pregnant.
There's no problems over there.
Really?
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Yeah, because another thing that she mentioned in that book was she said, I don't know if she correlated with other countries, but I think it was in America, she said that once a woman passes the age of 35, I think, that the percentage chance of her giving birth to someone with the chromosome, what is it, the Down syndrome chromosome or whatever?
21.
Yeah, it goes up by like 80% after the age of 35, which is crazy.
Yeah, that was in her book.
Concussions and Brain Safety00:06:46
I mean, I'm not sure.
I know a lot of people who are having like, pretty healthy pregnancies yeah yeah yeah, it's becoming a more popular thing to happen later, especially with like people focusing more on like, I mean nowadays people, they're not getting pregnant as young as they used to.
Generally, I think people are especially women have, like you know, careers and they make more money than men.
You know what I mean like in the relationship, so they're not going to be like, they don't want to be raising children or whatever, until they get older.
They realize some of them that I know they like their biological clock tells them like oh, it's time for me to have a baby.
But um, I think I'm finding what I see is that so many women now are having children around 38, 39.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I live in New York, so it's a bit different.
Yeah.
New York's way different.
Yeah.
Different.
Yeah.
I know concussions are big in lots of sports, but do you deal with people like that?
Yeah.
I know CTE is a crazy thing, right?
Yeah.
Which can't be diagnosed until they're dead.
Until they're dead.
Yeah.
I was going to use a nicer word.
Concussions are huge.
I think we're not, that's another thing that we're, you know, missing.
I'm against the NFL.
I stopped working with NFL players.
Really?
Yeah.
Specifically because I was doing so many brain scans on them.
That was actually my first sport.
And I was just seeing so many dysfunctions.
I'm like, listen, you've, like, you need to stop.
You need to stop.
They just couldn't.
They're like, I can't.
They're like, I feed my family.
I feed, you know, 10 people that I'm taking care of.
I can't just stop.
I'm like, well, it's just unethical of me to give you anything else other than telling you to stop.
I know so many people who are just getting their head bashed in, okay?
And then they're not properly recovering from it.
To recover from a trauma like that, you'd need to heal your brain for a very long time.
It doesn't take a week.
And I know that these concussion protocols are just not in line with.
Player health and safety.
I know that concussions, multiple concussions, can really damage the endocrine system.
And I know there's been studies that show, like people like fighters and NFL players, their hormone levels crash after multiple concussions.
It can cause everything from depressive like symptoms to early cognitive impairment, psychosis, even worse, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
How many players do you know that have actually committed suicide and you find out you cut their brains up?
It's like, well, they actually had CTE, which is repeated hits to the head.
Right.
Which end up in neuronal death.
And it mimics the brain of an Alzheimer's disease patient because you see these big clumps, you know, and their brain is just.
I just don't know why you would voluntarily put your kid, especially a kid whose brain is still forming, into a sport where you're actually hitting them, hitting their heads with each other.
Yeah, it's a violent sport.
Hasn't there been some stuff done on treatment of that with like.
Hyperbaric oxygen chambers?
Yeah, so what HBOT does, 100% oxygen, it helps the healing process, which is great.
A, it depends on when you actually got the trauma to your head, because once you get through trauma, right, you've got this 24 hour to 72 hour window to really make a difference.
And there's been many people who are actually experimenting with ketones, post traumatic insults, like within the first 72 hours, just feeding the brain ketones, ketones, ketones, so that can heal faster.
They're getting them in hyperbaric oxygen chambers to get the most amount of oxygen to be delivered to the brain.
They're doing things such as cooling the brain to cool it down from injury.
So they're putting their heads in buckets of ice and putting a snorkel coming out of their head just to cool it down, putting ice on their neck to try and really cool down the brain and heal it and recover it faster.
However, it's just, it's like I understand the sport and I know it brings so much happiness.
To the lives of many.
The Super Bowl is amazing.
But yeah, you've got to think about player health and safety, which, by the way, on the topic of concussions and Darnold White, he's introduced this sport called slap fighting.
Really?
You don't know about that.
How did I miss this?
Are you kidding me?
He's basically, he's.
Oh, you mean where they slap each other in the face?
Yeah, is that what it's called?
It's not like fighting, but they.
Slap, slap.
They stand there and they slap each other and see you can take the hardest slap.
That's wild.
Which is, you know, ending in edema all over people's faces, but not just that.
Concussions as well.
Imagine getting slapped that hard.
And I don't even think the prize money pool is that great to warrant something like this.
It's just unbelievable.
It's like, why is he doing this?
What's it called?
Power slap.
Top five.
Oh, knockouts.
Jesus.
Yeah, you just stand there defenseless.
Oh, see what I mean?
Oh.
I mean, you have to be pretty desperate to get into something like this.
There's girls doing it.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
They're smacking the shit out of each other.
Okay, this is number three.
Oh, do you see his head?
That boy is insane.
Like, how many.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
God dang it.
Why do they powder their.
Oh, so it doesn't stick, probably, huh?
Yeah.
It's the slip.
He's out.
Oh, at least they caught his head.
Yeah, but they've just concussed them.
Yeah, that is bizarre.
Dana White's doing that.
Yeah, he's doing that.
Wow.
Imagine being that rich that you think, let's see how people can just voluntarily give themselves brain damage.
People love violence.
It is encoded in our DNA.
Is that what it is?
Because I don't think violence is like the most compelling form of entertainment to watch.
Like, Roman gladiators fighting to the death was like the first form of entertainment, right?
For, for, yeah, in civilization at least.
Yeah.
And it's like that's the highest stakes.
Yeah.
I often think if you've been given the education, which, you know, we should be educating players on, you know, the health and safety of their brains and knowing that, hey, this knock to your head.
At this velocity, because you've got to remember as well a concussion, you don't just hit your head and then you concuss.
A concussion, you have to get it at the right place and the correct velocity.
You could just get a hit to the head.
It doesn't mean you're going to be concussed, right?
So it determines, it comes down to velocity.
But if players are aware of that and they're also aware of the magnitude and they're also aware of, hey, you just got hit in the head, this is what your brain is doing right now, and this is what it's going to do in the next year.
Heat Shock and Sauna Benefits00:09:21
If they still know and they're voluntarily going out there, then it's up to them.
That's your.
They can't tell me how to live my life.
They're not going to say you shouldn't do this.
So, yeah, I mean, who knows how aware they are of what actually happens before they get into the NFL, but like a lot of them, like, grow up with a dream of doing that and like getting into that and making that.
And plus, you're making millions and millions of dollars.
Not saying they shouldn't be paid more, they probably should be paid more, but you know, there's a trade off that they're making a choice.
And there's definitely lots of science and evidence and documentaries, proof of the brain damage that happens to people and people going postal and Committing suicide and killing people and beating their spouses.
And it's a laundry list of problems that happen with brain damage.
But yeah, I don't know.
What about what I wanted to ask you?
I wanted to ask you about one thing we didn't talk about was sauna stuff.
Love it.
You love sauna?
Oh, yeah.
Where, you know, the amount of benefits.
Speaking of brain damage, can't you damage your brain in the sauna?
Can't you cook your brain?
I mean, depending again, how heroic you want to be.
Yeah, I mean, what was it?
What's her last name?
Platt, where she put her head in the oven.
Who?
The one who, is it Sylvia Platt or something?
She put her head in the oven.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know why I even brought that up, but it just reminded me of it.
Is there any evidence of like damaging brain tissue by being in the oven?
Oh, Sylvia Platt.
What did she do?
Did she do something regarding an oven and putting her head in the oven?
I'm pretty sure she did.
There we go.
Oh, wow.
They found her dead with her head in the oven.
Oh.
Having sealed the rooms between her.
So yeah, you don't want to silver Sylvia Platt yourself.
She's dead with her head in the oven.
Having sealed the room between her and her sleeping children with.
I read about this in a book, actually.
She was 30 years old.
Whoa.
Yeah, that's.
I don't know why.
Was she evidently.
She must have been depressed.
Yeah.
Oh, look, it says up the top, although Hughes does not know the name of the pills explicitly.
Whose book did I read about her in?
I think it was like Malcolm Gladwell had a book about her.
Yeah, he wrote a book about mental health and people who commit suicide.
And some people don't really want to do it, or they'll do it to where they'll do something to where they know there's a chance of survival, that there's not a 100% chance they're going to die.
Like swan dive off of a skyscraper, right?
Then you know you're going to die.
But then some people do stuff where it's like, I'm not really sure if I want to do this, but I'm in such a dark place right now that this is like spur of the moment.
Maybe I'll live.
I'm like, I'm on the fence, but I'm going to try it.
And that's when people were like putting their heads in ovens.
I think it was in England where that happened.
That's really sad.
Yeah, it's super sad.
Okay.
So I don't know where I was going with that.
That was part of the book.
We got there.
Yeah.
We got there because you said, can you cook your brain?
More than likely, you could possibly, yeah.
But we're not going to the extremes.
Just the same way, people actually can die from jumping into those really cold rivers, and your heart rate can slow down immediately.
You can actually pass out.
There's actually been, I think, 13 deaths from cold water immersion because people jump into the cold, ice cold lakes and they get in and they're so cold that they pass out and they drown.
So it's the drowning that actually kills them.
That kills them.
So.
So, yeah, again, we've got extremes.
But now let's talk about the beneficial effects of heat shock proteins.
These heat shock proteins can go in and induce FOXO3, which is like a transcription factor for it's like a longevity gene, if you will.
And I've actually read research on these heat shock proteins going in and mimicking cardiovascular workouts.
So, the same benefits you get.
To your cardiovascular system from running and cycling for long periods of time, you can get from the sauna.
The main reason I like it is for the excretion of some of these heavy metals as well.
Now, is there any other benefit?
Like, because people, it's obviously like a vasodilation that's happening, right?
It's dilating all of your arteries and everything.
But then when people do that and they go into cold, that's like, that seems like it could be bad.
Yeah, actually, there's no, there's not that.
I know that people like to do hot and cold, hot and cold.
Going from, you know, hot and then going into cold, it's not a big thing.
But stressing your system from doing hot and then cold and then hot and then cold and vasodilating and constricting, it's actually not really.
There's no like evidence to show that that's doing well.
It could be just a placebo where you feel, you know, you feel the effects of one thing and then feel the shock of another thing.
Right, right.
This, I think it was like a Swedish or Norwegian study that was done with the saunas, the like a 20 year study on sauna.
Was that only, do you know if that was only with sauna or was that there was no cold involved?
There was no cold involved in that, no.
It was like what, like 20 something minutes or like an hour a week.
Actually, there's, you know what they're doing now?
There's a really great guy, a doctor named Dr. Charles Raison.
I had him on my podcast.
He is a psychiatrist and he works with like major depression.
And what he's doing, and he's actually shown this, if you can get, what he did was he randomized like, I think it was like 20 patients that he had who've got severe depression, who are on everything, SSRIs, everything, right?
Near suicidal people.
And he got one cohort to, You know, be on drugs and keep taking their SSRIs.
And then he got another cohort where he gave them like a sugar pill, okay, just a fake drug and pretended to give them an SSRI.
And he got them in the sauna.
And he showed that the people who weren't taking the real SSRIs, they actually mimicked the SSRIs and got them off having.
Was it like a placebo?
Well, it wasn't a placebo because you're actually inducing the same effects, the neurotransmitter release, from getting into the hot sauna.
So he showed that you can actually get people off taking medication in depressive patients through going into a sauna, albeit it was every day.
And I think.
I think it was like a harsh amount.
It was like two hours a day.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So it was a long, I don't think he did it all at once.
Maybe he was doing it in like 40 minute increments, but he showed that the effects can actually help mimic an SSRI.
Wow.
I've heard of that with cold water, but I haven't heard of that with sauna.
And cold water too.
I think there's less evidence around cold water.
I know with sauna, there's a lot more evidence.
And he's really working towards actually getting saunas into hospital settings.
So as far as like sauna, like duration and temperature, like what do you think is optimal?
40 minutes.
It depends.
Have you got a.
Do you get into the red saunas or a dry sauna?
A regular sauna.
The one that gets.
Not the infrared.
Not the infrared, yeah.
Traditional.
Yeah, traditional sauna.
That's even hotter.
So you can get the same effects if you're getting in there for around 30 minutes.
Is the infrared better?
It's not better or worse.
Okay.
Okay.
I prefer the infrared, okay, but it just takes longer.
It takes like.
You need to stay in there for around 45 minutes because it takes longer to heat up.
Whereas if you're in the.
Traditional saunas, it's you're already hot.
You go in, you just put the water on, it's hot already.
I like the traditional because you just pour the water on the rocks with like the little scents or a little whatever and like it steams it up and it makes it smell nice.
What temperature are you getting to?
Like 160.
I was gonna say, yeah.
And these, um, the infrared, 160 is great.
Um, 170, the infrareds are getting up to around 170 as well.
Some people do like 200.
I don't know how the hell you do that again.
Why?
I don't know.
Yeah, just to impress everybody.
Exactly.
So, is there a level or a temperature of diminishing returns that you know of?
Not diminishing returns, but you don't.
There's no.
I mean, unless you're doing it every single day and you're becoming adapted to the heat, then you can increase it a little bit because remember, it comes down to your core body temperature, not the temperature of the ambient temperature.
So, the best way to actually do it is if you've got a thermometer and you're measuring your own core body temperature while you're in the sauna, get it to a specific temperature.
A specific temperature and then stay in there for 20 minutes.
And you can release these heat shock proteins that are just so beneficial for you.
Wow.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Well, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me, Danny.
This was fun.
I've been doing this.
I really appreciate it.
This was fascinating.
I haven't done a podcast like this in a long time, so this was refreshing.
Tell people that are listening and watching where they could follow you and watch your videos or whatever you got online.
Yeah, I've got a podcast called The Neuro Experience.
I have a YouTube clip, albeit it's a small YouTube.
Channel Louisa Nicola, and I hang out on Instagram quite a bit.
Louisa Nicola.
Okay, yeah.
And you did a podcast with Dom a while ago, right?