Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a PhD in biomedical science and obesity-related aging researcher, debunks myths about vitamin sufficiency, citing 70% of Americans deficient in vitamin D and 45% in magnesium, linking deficiencies to DNA damage, cancer, and cognitive decline via oxidative stress and MTHFR polymorphisms. She critiques flawed studies—like Annals of Internal Medicine’s dismissive multivitamin editorial—and highlights omega-3s (EPA) reducing inflammation and violence, while stress (e.g., fear-mongering media) shortens telomeres. Rogan and Patrick also explore NASA’s microgravity cancer study, caloric restriction’s epigenetic benefits, and the risks of pseudoscience, urging evidence-based nutrition over debunked claims like Dave Asprey’s mycotoxin coffee theory or Brian Dunning’s distorted vitamin skepticism. [Automatically generated summary]
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick reached out to me because she had some things to say about some of the things that other podcast guests had said about nutrition, about health.
And tell the folks what your credentials are, what you do, who you are, and why you are uniquely qualified to explain nutrition and health to these folks.
I did my undergraduate work in biochemistry, chemistry.
And now I'm doing a postdoctoral fellowship on nutrition and metabolism.
So I started out with synthesizing peptides and doing organic chemistry, and I got really bored with that.
And I was an undergraduate sort of student research intern.
So then I decided to try biology out and I went to the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla and I did some research on aging using worms as a model because they have a really short lifespan.
And so it was really cool to do a lot of genetic manipulation and see how that changed our lifespan.
And from there, I was like, oh my God, I freaking love this.
I want to get my PhD in biology.
And I decided to go to Memphis, Tennessee because I wanted to do research on cancer in a St. Jude Children's Research Hospital located in Memphis, Tennessee.
So I ended up going to University of Tennessee to get my PhD, but I did all my research at St. Jude.
Absolutely fantastic place.
And then so I was doing a lot of research using mice and some human cells.
And then I decided I wanted to move on with people.
But I did a lot of work on mitochondria and mitochondrial metabolism and how that relates to cancer and how cells die and how they don't die and what's going wrong with cancer.
And I got a really awesome publication out of it in Nature.
And then I decided that I was really wanting to move on to something different.
During your PhD, you dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, deep, deep mechanism.
Finally, you just keep digging deeper.
I felt like I was lost from what everything meant and what was the significance of it.
You kind of have to do that in grad school because you're learning the tools, how to use tools to answer questions, what kind of questions and how you answer them.
I did really a lot of that.
Then I decided I wanted to take a step back and look at the big picture and Do some clinical research and apply the tools that I learned in graduate school and try to learn some things looking at people.
So now I'm at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute working with Bruce Ames, who's pretty famous for his Ames test, carcinogenicity test, where he basically made this test that could help you figure out whether or not a chemical was a mutagen, meaning if it caused cancer.
And so I'm working with him, and I'm actually looking at...
What causes, you know, I'm looking at a lot of things, but I'm actually fundamentally looking at people that are obese and how obesity accelerates the aging process.
People that are, you know, obese die of all sorts of age-related diseases sooner, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer.
By the age of 40, there's a 14-year reduction in their lifespan, which is, I think, even greater than smoking cigarettes.
So I'm trying to understand fundamental mechanisms like why these people are accelerating their aging process.
And so I'm actually looking at something specifically.
I'm looking at their DNA. So I'm taking blood cells.
So we draw blood from people that have a BMI of like 30 or above or 25 and below, which are considered normal or lean.
And you know, there's problems with using body mass index as a marker for obesity because some people are lean.
Anyways, it's kind of murky, but I'm not going to go into that.
So I'm actually looking at...
So I take their blood cells and I look at their DNA and how much damage is in their DNA. And I kind of want to get into that a little later, kind of explain what that is.
But that's kind of what I'm doing.
I'm also doing some research on vitamin D. And I have a paper that's actually coming out in six days.
It's going to hit the press.
I found that vitamin D actually regulates serotonin.
Right, so 5-HTP can actually cross the blood-brain barrier.
So that can already get converted into serotonin in your brain.
And tryptophan, so tryptophan actually competes with other branched-chain amino acids like leucine and isoleucine to get transported into the brain, and it loses.
Leucine, these branched-chain amino acids, they're abundant in protein.
So what ends up happening if you're not taking something like 5-HDP or something else is that most of the time you're not getting enough tryptophan transported into your brain.
Now, certain things can help alleviate that competition like exercise.
So exercise, you take up a bunch of branched-chain amino acids to make muscle.
So exercise actually boosts serotonin in your brain by allowing tryptophan to get transported into your brain, alleviating some of that competition from other branched-chain amino acids.
You can actually deplete someone's brain tryptophan by giving them a big bolus shake of branched-chain amino acids because then it really outcompetes all the tryptophan that you've...
From your diet.
And within like four or five hours, you can deplete like 90% of someone's brain serotonin And then they do all these like behavioral tests to see what, you know, what the results are, how not having serotonin in your brain impacts behavior and cognitive function.
And they found that it really, there's a lot of things that are, you know, sort of messed up.
If you're not making serotonin, you become impulsive, impulsive behavior, your long-term thinking kind of Like a meth head?
Actually, there's a study where they compared methamphetamine users, cocaine users, and then they depleted just normal people.
They depleted their tryptophan by the meth that I just told you about.
And depleting the tryptophan, so basically depleting the serotonin in your brain, you're scoring just as bad as a meth user.
And actually methamphetamine does deplete your serotonin.
And when you're a regular person that's trying to go online or read books about health and nutrition and what you need and what you don't need, there's so much contradictory information.
There's so many people that tell you, you don't need anything, just a balanced diet.
Well, what's a balanced diet?
Well, then that gets squirrely.
You know, the balanced diet includes grains.
Well, no, don't eat gluten.
Oh, fuck shit.
Gluten's bad.
You know, stay away from eggs.
Eggs contain...
You know, it just gets so weird.
There's so much information.
It's so hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Yeah, you get getting your nutrition from your diet.
Well, that would be ideal, but the reality is we have, you know, the National Institute of Medicine that are conducting these surveys every five years.
They call them the Nutrition and Examination Health Surveys.
It's NHANES. It's very notorious in the nutrition field.
We consider NHANES surveys to be pretty accurate in determining what people are getting from their diet.
And these surveys are telling us, no, people are not getting what they need from their diet.
The majority of Americans are not getting what they need in terms of micronutrients.
We've got this sort of theory that it's hard to do aging studies in people and particularly looking at different vitamins and minerals and what effects they have long term.
But that's one of the theories in our lab that We've shown some evidence of it, is that a lot of vitamins and minerals, they're cofactors for many different biochemical pathways in your body.
If you would just Google biochemical pathways, you'll see this massive image come up and it's just like, holy crap.
Vitamins and minerals are cofactors for enzymes, meaning they need to be there for the enzyme to work optimally.
Enzymes and proteins in your body are doing everything.
I mean, that's what's doing everything our body's doing.
And so if you don't have, you know, there's certain proteins that are important to survive right now, like your sodium, potassium, ATPase.
You know, you want to make sure your heart's getting the right signals.
I mean, if that shuts down, then you're dead, you know.
So, I mean, some of these functions are more important.
You know, I would say definitely most people are not getting enough vitamin D. And that is, it's a steroid hormone.
Okay.
It's a hormone that controls the expression of over a thousand different genes in our body, which is literally like one 24th of our human genome, many of them in our brain.
So what that means is without vitamin D, so vitamin D is so important that we can make it from the sun.
Problem is we're not, we're not doing that.
Most of us aren't out in the sun a lot.
I know I'm not.
I'm always at my computer inside.
And when I'm out, we're worried about skin aging if you're a female or skin cancer.
So I'm wearing sunscreen, of course.
And as a majority of the people from the surveys, if you look at people that supplement and don't supplement in the United States, about 70% don't get adequate levels of vitamin D. And actually, the way we determine what's adequate is based on vitamin D's classical function of bone homeostasis.
So we know vitamin D is important to make sure that our bones don't start breaking down.
But in fact, there's a thousand other things it's doing and we don't know how much vitamin D we need to do those other things.
But to at least maintain that, that's considered adequate.
And that's like 30 nanograms per milliliter of the precursor of vitamin D called 25-hydroxy vitamin D, which is what most people, when you get your levels measured, that's what they measure.
You know, a lot of different things regulate vitamin D absorption, bioavailability, body fat for one.
It is a fat-soluble vitamin.
And so the more body fat you have, the more it's stored in that fat and the less of it can be released into the bloodstream to be then circulated and brought to different organs in your body and then get into the cells to do its thing.
So people that are obese actually require much higher levels of vitamin D because it's been shown that vitamin D bioavailability is reduced by up to 50 percent in severely obese people.
So that's one thing to consider is how much per body fat.
I think generally a good marker is like a thousand IUs per 25 pounds.
But like I said, 25 pounds, you could be 25 pounds of like muscle and muscle.
So I think the best way to really gauge how much vitamin D you need is to just get a test.
If you have health insurance, health insurance pays for it.
There's other places that you can get vitamin D levels tested cheaply, very cheaply.
And it's just so worth it.
I get mine tested routinely because I just want to make sure that my dosing is pretty good.
I personally take 4,000 IUs a day.
Is that a lot?
I think that's pretty standard for an adult that's normal weight and in pretty good shape.
Yeah, I think that's pretty standard.
But I can't say that everyone should go out and take 4,000 IUs a day.
I can say that you should definitely make sure that you have levels in your blood that's higher than 30 nanograms per milliliter, which is above the adequate status.
And actually, if we look at Studies where they've looked at, for example, all-cause mortality, lowering all-cause mortality, they've shown that huge, large cohort studies they've done, they've looked at the levels of vitamin D and then looked at mortality, dying of different diseases.
People with levels of vitamin D between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter in their blood had the least amount of all-cause mortality, so basically they were living the longest.
Maybe you want to have between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter based on that study.
It's important to get the levels tested.
That's kind of what I like to advocate because it's so cheap and easy.
Preventative medicine, being able to know if we have adequate amounts of these vitamin minerals, it's going to get easier and easier the next couple of decades, I think.
Now, you reached out to me because of people on the podcast saying things that you didn't think were accurate, and you got upset and sent me some videos and some different things that sort of describe what disinformation these people were releasing or erroneous information.
Based on the National Institute of Medicine doing these surveys, we know that's not correct.
And in fact, they've even done surveys where they've We've looked at people that supplement versus people that don't supplement, and people that supplement have much more adequate levels of these certain vitamins and minerals.
So that's already the first thing that's not true.
This recent editorial that came out in the Annals of Internal Medicine It was really upsetting because they were basically saying that multivitamins do nothing, and not only do they do nothing, they're bad for you.
And you actually mentioned that on that podcast that you had with Dunning.
First of all, I think it's one of the most irresponsible studies or the most irresponsible press releases I've ever read because if you actually read what the studies were in comparison to what they're saying, they're saying vitamins don't work, case closed.
But the studies that they did were on Alzheimer's patients not showing any sort of improvement.
People over 65 that had heart attacks not showing any improvement.
I mean, just those two things were Two out of the three tasks that they did, that they're saying that vitamins don't work, when you're talking about a generic multivitamin, too, synthetic multivitamin, like one of those Centrum ones.
So that study was so infuriating because they were giving these guys six...
Okay, this was supposed to be a high-dose multivitamin.
And they were giving them six pills a day.
Six pills a day.
Okay, I take a high-dose multivitamin.
It's one pill a day.
And their total vitamin D levels were like 100 IUs.
Like 100 IUs of vitamin D won't do anything.
And that was considered a high dose.
And their compliance, meaning, okay, you're asking someone to take six pills a day for like 10 years.
And then you call them up every three months.
And did you take your six pills?
Well, I took it yesterday.
So yeah, I took it for the last three months.
They didn't measure any, there was no quantitative biochemical analysis, meaning they Choose one vitamin that's in your multivitamin concoction and see if what you're giving them actually raises the level of that to show that they're A, compliant, B, that you're giving them a dose that's actually doing something.
45% of the U.S. population doesn't have adequate levels of magnesium.
And, you know, I think most people in the fitness community are concerned with magnesium because they're always like, you know, oh my God, I sweated out.
I got to replace my magnesium.
You know, I think that's their major concern or muscle cramping and things like that.
But magnesium...
It's an essential cofactor for DNA repair enzymes.
So let me explain what that is because it's probably like, well, what's DNA repair enzymes?
So, you know, everyday just normal metabolism.
So our mitochondria, they're, you know, taking food that we eat in, whether it's carbohydrates or protein or fat, and they're generating what's called electron-reducing equivalents through this whole Krebs cycle, if you ever learned in biochemistry.
And those electron-reducing equivalents are really important because they have Hydrogen, which has an electron and a proton.
And these electrons get passed along inside your mitochondria, these various proteins, and they shoot out protons at the same time.
And this is basically the way it generates energy to then take the oxygen you breathe in and reduce it to water and couple that to making ATP. Anyways, so these electrons get passed around.
And what happens is they often, because you're taking oxygen you breathe in and making water to generate The energy you need to make ATP, you start making superoxide anion.
You start making reactive oxygen species in your mitochondria.
Every day we're doing this.
We're doing it right now.
I mean, that's the major source of, you know, reactive oxygen species.
I'm sure you've heard of that in your body.
I mean, these reactive oxygen species, they react.
That's what they do.
They react with your DNA. They react with lipids, your cell membranes.
They react with proteins and they damage them.
And what happens when you're doing, it's called DNA damage.
When it reacts with your DNA, You know, sometimes you get like a bulky adduct that's attached on or sometimes you get like an oxidative product, which then can cause a break.
Your DNA is double-stranded and can cause a break.
And what happens is, you know, the cells in different organs, like in your kidneys and your liver, these cells have a limited lifespan and so they have to replicate.
They have to synthesize their DNA, replicate, in order to replace their limited lifespan.
So when the cell then tries to replicate its DNA and there's this funny stuff there, it's like, what is this?
And then sometimes it puts another nucleotide, what's not supposed to be there, and it causes a mutation.
And then you have this mutation.
It's like, okay, well, you can't go back.
Once you have a mutation, it's there.
So if it's a mutation in a coding region of a gene that does something important, then you could really screw stuff up.
And so in order to prevent that from happening, we have what's called DNA repair enzymes.
And they basically take this damage that's there and they repair it.
And those DNA repair enzymes require magnesium.
Without magnesium, they do not work.
They do not work well.
They're very inefficient.
And so if you're not getting enough magnesium, your DNA repairer Isn't going well, and you're probably getting more damage.
But the thing is, it takes decades for this to rear its head.
We've got DNA damage, but you can't look in the mirror and be like, oh, I have DNA damage today.
It's like, well, you can look in the mirror and be like, oh, my gums are falling apart.
I probably have scurvy.
This is something you can't see.
And what happens is, over decades of getting this DNA damage, Because it happens at random places in your genes, eventually you get it in a place that you don't want.
You get it in a gene that's important for controlling cell cycle or stopping bad cells from, you know, dividing and proliferating.
These are called tumor suppressor genes.
And when you get it in one of those, you're screwed because now you got some funky cell that doesn't pass those checkpoints that usually...
Our genes are making sure they don't pass this checkpoint if they're funny.
And then they pass it and they start dividing and proliferating and now you've got this clonal population of cancer cells.
But that takes decades to happen.
So if you're walking around with not sub-adequate levels of magnesium, you're not going to know anything until you're in your 50s or 60s and you come down with cancer.
So now when you read something like this, you know, vitamins don't work, case closed, and you find out this is the research that they did, and this is the conclusion that they came to from the research, that's so irresponsible and so infuriating.
It's, you know, there's a lot of studies out there that have done meta-analyses and shown just the opposite.
You know, it's not like this is the only research that's been done on vitamin and mineral supplementation.
The thing that's really infuriating is the big overgeneralizations they did here.
For example, there is an important case where taking some vitamins and minerals can be bad, and that is when you have cancer.
These people had the opportunity to point that out.
Instead of just saying, oh, vitamins are bad, meaning everyone shouldn't take vitamins.
In my opinion, they should be educating people on, okay, well, if you already have cancer, this can happen to you.
The perfect example is folate.
Folate is an essential B vitamin and...
It's mostly fortified in a lot of our breads and even junk food, like chips.
And I've seen it in chips and crackers and stuff.
So not that many people in the United States are deficient in it anymore.
I think like 14% of the population.
So it's not a huge, huge problem like it was.
However, folate is...
It's essential to make one of your nucleotides in your DNA. Thymine.
Which means...
Without folate, you're not making thymine, and you need folate to basically make new DNA for these new cells that you're making in your body every day.
So when you don't have folate, that can actually cause a single-strand break in your DNA, and it can do the stuff I was telling you about by causing mutations and leading to cancer eventually.
However, if you already have cancer, everything that's good for you, cancer, it's like cancer is on crack, man.
It's like, oh, it's good for you?
Yeah, give me some of that.
It's like they...
They just take over everything that's good because, well, that's their goal, propagate.
I want to propagate and take over.
So with folate, because cancer cells are dividing, they're trying to replicate themselves, they love folate.
They love it because that's what they need to make more DNA, to make more of their cancer cells.
So someone that already has cancer shouldn't be taking high levels of folate.
And really, I think these people that wrote this editorial had An obligation to educate them and specifically point this out.
There's a mechanism why.
Let's talk about it.
Instead of making this huge overgeneralization saying multivitamins are bad.
I think another part of it is that a lot of medical doctors, they aren't trained in nutrition.
They aren't trained in preventative medicine.
They aren't trained to understand the importance of all these vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids.
And how they're cofactors for these proteins and what they're doing long term versus short term.
When they're trained, they're actually trained to understand how different pharmacological drugs act on certain receptors.
It's kind of a different training.
So I think in some cases, when you start talking about nutrition and preventative medicine, a lot of people, if you don't know about it, you get kind of threatened and you feel...
Like, oh, it must be wrong.
I don't know about this.
Kind of like one of those responses.
And I think that may also have something to do with a lot of the MD physicians that were involved in the study.
I think one is absolutely it's a visceral response because there is a load of crap out there and it is hard.
It is hard to differentiate between what's the noise and the signal.
And so some people are just like, oh, it's all crap, you know.
But I think there's also people that just, it's just too much work.
Like, you know, I want to keep eating what I'm eating and I want to believe it's fine and that's what I want to believe and so I'm going to believe it.
I think that's another really, you know, mindset that needs to be changed.
And I think, you know, personally, I would love to see people eating more greens, you know, more of these dark green leafy vegetables, which are rich in many different micronutrients, like vitamin K, folic acid, magnesium.
I can talk about that in a minute.
I think, you know, for people that are just, that aren't going to do that, you know, at least give them a vitamin that's going to give them some of these trace elements and minerals and vitamin D and some of these important micronutrients that they really do need.
Magnesium, you know, so at the very least, it's just, it's an easy way to do it.
You know, one of the reasons why I made a video to this, you know, response to this editorial was because, you know, A, because...
I could have done some scientific paper and gone through peer review.
But, you know, I want to get it to the people.
And it's like, at some level, you know, there's other scientists, they don't really care.
You know, I want the people to realize that, you know, because these people like my dad, my dad takes a multivitamin and he listens to the news, he gets his information from the TV, like that generation does.
And, you know, it's just, it's so upsetting that like, all of a sudden, my dad could stop taking his vitamin.
And I don't want him to stop taking his vitamin because it's You know, it's important that he does take his multivitamin.
There are certain, you know, components in that multivitamin that I know he's not getting from his diet.
So, you know, at least let him get it from his multivitamin.
So this study, there was a meta-analysis that included like 30 different studies, and I really read through them all.
And there were a lot of methodological errors, and I point them out in the video where people were just – they weren't measuring levels of any vitamins and minerals and saying – they were measuring some outcome like cardiovascular disease or cognitive function without any – There was no biomarkers saying, oh, look, we gave them this.
This changed.
That's important when you're doing nutrition research.
And that's a really important thing.
And if you look at some of the studies that did do that, for example, when they were giving them vitamin D, they gave them vitamin D to a severely deficient population, which is like 12 nanograms per mil.
That's severely deficient.
We're talking like rickets deficient.
And then after their supplementation, they were still deficient.
They were still less than 20 nanograms per mil, which is considered deficient.
So it's like, okay, well, you're trying to look at this outcome, and yet the dose that you gave these people was inadequate.
You didn't raise their levels to anything that was considered adequate by the National Institute of Medicine.
Yeah, I mean, you can definitely get nauseous if you're taking your vitamins on an empty stomach.
Plus, some vitamins, like vitamin B12, if you don't have an acidic environment in your stomach, if you have too acidic of an environment, then you can't.
I mean, it's complicated.
And also, your gut bacteria also play a role in what you're absorbing, particularly in minerals.
And when you take vitamins on an empty stomach, If they're not attached to fats and proteins and carbohydrates, do they absorb as easily?
I mean, it seems that...
I think there's been research done that shows that your body doesn't really exactly know what to do with vitamins and vitamin form if you take them on an empty stomach with no food attached to them.
And the other thing was he was saying that it was the vitamin C thing that was getting to me too.
He was going on about not needing 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C. And then I looked up some of his stuff and he was also talking about vitamin C not being important or not doing anything for immune function.
And then he started talking about some of Linus Pauling's I can tell you what's wrong with that guy and there's a bunch of things, but one of the main reasons he does what he does is that he grew up Mormon, a very strict Mormon background, and then refuted it and now he's an adult and he's just not gonna take any nonsense.
He grew up with all nonsense and now he's no nonsense.
And I have a unique insight into this because I have some friends that grew up Mormon And now they abandoned it actually in their 40s.
And it's really interesting because they're like children in a lot of ways.
They're a fundamentalist lifestyle, like growing up in a fundamentalist religion where everything is spelled out for you.
And everything is preposterous.
But you've accepted that your whole life.
You've accepted and you're told not to question and you're told to follow the rules of this ideology.
When you get away from that and you try to figure the world out on your own, Your thinking developed in this incredibly fucked up way.
The way you make your connections to things.
Like you have this black and white sort of connection thing going on in your head.
And that's his fundamentalism translated to a fundamental skepticism.
So his skepticism is his fundamentalism now.
He automatically is skeptical of anything that might require additional thinking or curiosity or something that's going to counter what a lot of people intuitively think to be true.
Anything that is bizarre or weird, anything that doesn't seem like you think about someone and then the phone rings and it's them...
Well, their religion becomes just this skepticism.
And instead of it being an open-minded, objective analysis of what's at hand, instead, they just want to stuff it into this skepticism box, you know, and immediately debunk things.
People love to debunk things.
It becomes like a badge of honor.
It becomes like they get a checkmark on their column.
Folate's important to make thymine, you know, nucleotide.
It's also important to, when you eat protein, you know, methionine and amino acid and protein, it gets converted into homocysteine.
And you need folate because it's a methyl donor that then gets methylated and reconverted back into methionine because you don't want too much homocysteine around in your body because it does bad things.
It basically makes proteins start aggregating and it causes vascular disease and cognitive decline.
Anyways, 40% of North Americans Have a polymorphism in a gene called the methylene tetrahydrate folate reductase, also known as the MTHFR, or the motherfucker gene, basically.
But 40% of North Americans have this polymorphism in this gene that doesn't make it work correctly.
And so what ends up happening is they can't remethylate this homocysteine to convert it back into methionine.
So they end up having elevated levels of homocysteine in their blood.
And unless they take more folic acid to sort of compensate from that, they're going to have higher levels of homocysteine in their blood, which will lead to vascular problems and cognitive decline.
So, yeah, exactly.
It's a perfect thing.
It's like how much folate I take versus how much you take or if I'm from Canada, you know, who knows?
I mean, you may have this polymorphism and you have to take, you know, five times more folate than I do.
Well, there's also the variables like how many people grow up and you're in an environment that your biology is not accustomed to.
People who come from other countries and then they're in a specific country that's unique to their biology.
Like what the Native Americans experienced when they were introduced to alcohol.
Like this is not something that their biology was accustomed to and they really didn't have the ability to deal with it.
Whereas the Europeans who had been drinking alcohol for, you know, Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's just there's so much so for someone to say you know you don't need this and you do or it's it's like it's there's so much so much there's so many variables and There's so many components.
If you're eating mostly a protein diet, the different interior types that are in your gut, they've shown that people that eat mostly meat and fat, they're bacteria.
They have bacteria that's geared towards breaking down amino acids, breaking down lipids, metabolizing glutamine because you're given it a ton of it.
But people that eat mostly vegetable, fiber, and carbohydrates, they have a lot of bacteria that is involved in amino acid synthesis and synthesizing these things because they're not getting as much.
But you can take that person that's had this long-term diet and give them meat and within 24 hours they'll start to get that bacteria that starts to break down the amino acid.
So your body is very plastic and it does adapt to, you know, different dietary changes.
I work with someone that's doing a lot of research on the gut.
And so, you know, I get to learn just from, you know, their research and reading on my own About the complexities of it, but it's fascinating how important that bacteria is in our gut and how important certain types are and how that affects the way we respond to disease, the way we age.
If you have basically your innate immune system is being active down there because it's unhappy, causing inflammation, things like having high C-reactive protein has been correlated to depression.
That's actually...
A biomarker that I think could be used with depression is actually C-reactive protein instead of just this vague kind of, okay, I feel this, I feel that.
Well, let's measure your C-reactive protein levels.
Okay, yeah, wow, they're really high.
They've even done some studies where they've They've gotten depressed patients, found that they had high C-reactive protein, gave them like two grams of EPA. EPA is the omega-3 fatty acid that's important for – it's like anti-inflammatory as opposed to DHA, which is most of your brain lipids are DHA. But two grams of EPA a day, I forgot for how long, but they lowered their C-reactive protein and helped with their depression.
The connection between the human body and depression is such a weird one because for so many folks, they go to a doctor, they don't feel good, the doctor gives them an antidepressant, they feel better, and then that's it.
But there could have been so many other factors that could have been manipulated.
Either their diet, their exercise routine, hydrating.
I mean, how many people are fucking just dehydrated and they feel like shit?
How many people get out of a bad relationship and they feel like shit?
How many people have a bad job?
I mean, consider...
What people consider to be, you know, depression.
You know, you're moody.
You're down in the dumps.
You're not feeling good.
You have bad thoughts all the time.
And then consider what's the stimulation that your brain is receiving every day.
Well, you're driving in traffic in fucking pollution to a cubicle where you sit and do shit that you don't want to do all day.
You get home and then you force feed yourself, you know, some terrible foods because you're depressed and you're, you know, just sort of indulging, giving yourself some pleasure and fucking shitty macaroni and cheese or whatever you're stuffing down your face.
This reminds me of a study where they're using telomere length.
So telomeres are like caps at the end of your chromosomes.
That prevent your DNA from degrading and from getting damaged.
People often refer to like the tips of shoelaces like telomeres because they prevent your shoelaces from fraying.
And these telomere lengths, when you're young, they're long.
But each time your cell divides, they get shorter and shorter.
Like with each year, they're getting shorter.
I think you lose like 22 nucleotides a year off your telomeres.
And it's a biological marker for aging.
So the shorter your telomeres are, You know, the shorter your life is, basically.
If you look at telomeres from a young person versus an old person, you can see the dramatic differences.
And stress, stress has been correlated with taking like five years off your telomere length.
And the opposite's been true.
Meditation, they've shown that meditation, there's actually an enzyme that can rebuild your telomeres, but we don't express it in high levels.
It's called telomerase.
But meditation can actually boost the expression of telomerase.
And cause your telomeres to get longer.
So there's really something to that, you know, having a more relaxed, being able to meditate, not having a lot of stress, you know, affecting the way you age, literally, and we have a biological marker for it.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
It's another thing, vitamin D, I wanted to, vitamin D affects the telomere length also.
If you Google vitamin D receptor mice and pull up this image with the, there's mice, aging mice, So vitamin D actually does affect the way we age.
And they did this study in twins where they looked at their vitamin D levels.
They measured their vitamin D levels and they looked at their telomere length.
And they found that those twins with the highest levels of vitamin D also had the longest telomeres that corresponded to actually five years, being five years younger, even though they were twins, their same chronological age.
Their telomeres looked like they were five years younger if they had higher levels of vitamin D. Do you know anything about TA65? This is some sort of a supplement that's supposed to enhance your telomere lengths?
They've done studies showing, again in twins, those that exercise the most actually had telomere length that corresponded to being 10 years younger.
And those that exercise sort of like average compared to those that didn't had an average of like I think four years.
So there's things that affect the way you age and we have markers for that, biological markers like telomere length that proves your lifestyle is indeed affecting the way you age.
The top panel, these mice are about four and a half months old.
And the one on the left is a vitamin D receptor knockout mouse, which means it can't respond to vitamin D. So it's like not having any vitamin D. If you look at the lower panel, those are the same age four months later.
Look how rapidly that mouse is aging without having vitamin D. I mean, there's lots of things going wrong.
I mean, I told you that vitamin D is regulating over a thousand different genes in your body.
I've got this assay where I can actually measure DNA damage in your body from your blood.
And that's also a marker for age because, you know, the older you are, the more DNA damage you have, and I can measure that clinically.
So what we're thinking is, like, giving people magnesium and seeing if we can, you know, lessen that damage because their DNA repair is working better.
But that would be really cool.
Another thing would be vitamin D, measuring, doing the vitamin D, magnesium.
Yeah, I think there's a few micronutrients that we know of that are really important for long-term effects.
You know, like I was saying, there's often this trade-off where, okay, let's say you're getting some vitamin K, but you don't have enough.
In fact, 35% of the U.S. population doesn't get enough vitamin K. Vitamin K is found in plants because it's a part of their – they need it for photosynthesis.
So if you're not eating a lot of green plants, then you might not be getting enough vitamin K. But vitamin K is often known for being part of coagulation, being important to make your blood clot right.
And that's an essential function.
So I'm sure any vitamin K you're getting is going towards that because you want your blood to clot right.
You don't want to bleed out and have a hemorrhage, right?
But there's other important functions of vitamin K. Vitamin K also prevents the calcification of your arteries.
And so if all your vitamin K is going towards the proteins that are important for clotting, then the proteins that are important for not having calcification in your arteries aren't getting any.
And then, you know, two, three decades later, you start to see this calcification in the arteries.
And in fact, people that are given warfarin, which is a really common drug for inhibiting vitamin K, they end up having problems with calcification in their arteries and stuff.
So, you know...
I think there's a lot to understanding how these micronutrients work that we don't know yet, and we're starting to try to be able to do some experiments to understand them, but the bottom line is that Your body's smart, and if you don't have enough of a certain vitamin or mineral, it's going to shunt it to the one that's going to help you survive now and help you reproduce, because that's what it wants to do.
And these other things, like repairing damaged DNA or having your brain work optimally, you don't have to be that smart to survive.
These things, they probably get the short end.
Vitamins, in my mind, are sort of like a long-term thinking.
You're thinking long-term.
It's like, yeah, okay, well, I'm not walking around with any acute deficiencies, which is what most people think when they're thinking, oh, I have enough vitamins and minerals because I don't have beriberi.
I don't have, you know, these problems that are severe deficiencies.
It's like if you're severely deficient, you're going to have some symptoms that you'll notice.
But most of these symptoms you're not going to notice.
They're insidious damage.
It's happening, you know, a little bit at a time over decades.
It's amazing to me that there's not a center where you could go and get a full workup done and they provide you with a recipe for your vitamin supplementation needs.
You know, I think instead of going to a doctor to try to find a quick fix to get some, you know, you're depressed, so they give you an SSRI. Well, you know, we don't know what the long-term effects of some of these pharmaceutical drugs are in our brain.
Like, they just had this study that came out a couple months ago on antipsychotics.
Which they routinely give people with schizophrenia.
And they found that these antipsychotics, in a dose-dependent manner, cause brain atrophy.
And they followed these people over 15 years.
This is the first long-term effect of antipsychotics that came out.
It was a really big study.
And they showed that these schizophrenic patients, the higher the dose of antipsychotic they were on, the more brain atrophy.
You know, it's like, so here you are giving these people antipsychotics and, you know, 15 years from now, their brain is like literally, it's like atrophying at a rapid rate.
So that's just a classic example of us not knowing what some of these long-term effects of some of these pharmacological drugs that we're doing, especially when it comes to the brain.
There are so many feedback loops.
Like if you're inhibiting serotonin from being metabolized or reuptake, I mean, you've got serotonin sitting around.
Your body starts to down-regulate serotonin receptors, which is how your body responds to serotonin.
You know, it's like there's feedback things going on that I don't think we even understand.
And, you know, one out of ten Americans is taking an SSRI. It's so crazy.
But it's, have they exhausted all the other possible options?
I have a friend who's on an SSRI, and he recently found out that he had been taking Propecia, and he recently found out that Propecia actually caused depression in some people.
It can cause depression in some people.
And he quit.
He quit taking Propecia, and he's starting to feel like maybe that was the cause of his depression in the first place.
But he's on an SSRI now, so now he has to figure out what to do.
Was it the Propecia that caused his depression?
Was it going to happen anyway?
Is it the SSRI that he...
But he also eats a lot of candy and doesn't take care of his body and doesn't really exercise and, you know, he has a shitty diet.
All those things can factor into a low production of serotonin in your mind.
I mean, omega-3 fatty acids, you know, 30% of your brain is made of DHA, which is an omega-3 fatty acid.
And they've shown that actually DHA affects...
The way dopamine is signaling in your brain.
So, you know, in terms of like back to the schizophrenia, people with schizophrenia, you make dopamine in this frontal part of your cortex.
And the dopamine that you make there negatively feeds back on this dopamine that you make in the back part of your brain.
And if you don't have that negative feedback, what happens is that you start making more dopamine in that back part of your brain.
You start to have like negative things like hallucinations and paranoia and things like that.
Yeah, and so they've shown that omega-3, they've actually given omega-3 fatty acids, DHA, to schizophrenics and shown that it actually elevates the dopamine in the frontal part of the brain and helps regulate some of that negative feedback.
You know, and so it's like...
How many people are getting their eating fish every single day or getting their omega-3 fatty acids for their brain every single day?
I mean, I know I am, but I'm pretty much an exception.
You know, a lot of people that are depressed, like I said, the EPA is another big thing because inflammation has been shown to be correlated with depression.
Yeah, I've seen some studies on how EPA, like giving even higher doses of EPA to people with arthritis.
They're inhibiting some of the production of like arachnidonic acid and some of these prostaglandins and things that are involved in inflammation, which a lot of people are getting because they're eating...
you know, they're getting a lot of omega-6 fatty acids too.
So yeah, I've seen studies where it's been shown to improve it, you know.
I mean, they've shown that certain chemicals, you know, especially in the presence of heat, can leach chemicals into whatever is in the plastic container.
I always try to keep oils at 4 degrees in the refrigerator because it slows that, you know, obviously the oxidation process and all those, the heat, you know, is slowed down, so...
So as long as it's just not allowed to be exposed to heat, and as long as you're reasonably sure that the process from the storage in the plant, you know, the canning, the bottling, whatever it is, to storage to store, that it's not sitting out in the sun.
Is that something you, I mean, if you have a bottle of water and it's sitting in your car and it's a hot day, should you not drink that bottle of water because it's been sitting in your car?
I'm emailing you that right now because I had a friend who asked me about it and I didn't know and I felt like you were the perfect person to throw this by.
I've done a little bit of research and I plan on doing more and actually coming out with a report on this, but I'll just talk about what I've done.
I like to dig, really dig, and make sure I'm comprehensive.
When you digest fats, you have to make bile acids to basically be able to absorb them.
Some of these bile acids that you make when you digest fat are carcinogenic.
Deoxycholic acid, DCA, is one that I'm talking about in particular.
So that's kind of like, you know, every time you're eating fat, your body's making this DCA, which damages DNA, damages DNA in your epithelial cells, lining your intestine.
So, you know, that's sort of a drawback, but it doesn't mean you should stop eating fat.
It just means you should be aware if you're eating 60 or 70% fat diet that you might want to consider some of these long-term effects that could rear their head later in life.
Also, eating fat increases IGF-1 because IGF-1 is a growth factor.
You probably have heard of it because in the fitness community, it's sort of like a downstream media or growth hormone.
People are always really excited about having more IGF-1 because it helps you bulk on muscle.
Things like that.
But also, if you have too much of it that you're making over a lifetime, it's a growth signal that tells cells to overcome the checkpoints I was talking about earlier where you have these checkpoints where if you have some damaged DNA that has a mutation, then...
The cell goes, okay, it's time to die.
But lots of IGF-1 there says, oh, I don't have to die.
I'm going to keep going.
So, you know, it's highly correlated with cancer, IGF-1.
Like, that's people that have, like, they have tumors in the pituitary gland.
We've had a few of those guys in mixed martial arts that had cancer of the pituitary gland, and then they had the tumor removed so that they could compete in the United States.
They were competing overseas in other organizations, like in Pride.
They used to allow these guys to fight.
And they would be fucking these literally giants.
We have a guy in the UFC right now.
His name is Bigfoot Silva.
Antonio Bigfoot Silva.
He has that disease.
And he had the tumor removed from his pituitary gland and now he functions on a normal basis.
But he has to supplement his hormones because of that.
And is that a similar thing?
I mean, when you're talking about high IGF-1, is that...
When your pituitary makes growth hormone and then stimulates the liver to make IGF-1, that IGF-1 negatively feeds back on the pituitary to shut it off.
But people that have that sort of problem don't have that negative feedback, and they end up having all sorts of problems.
For one, like even though IGF-1 can actually make your muscle cells insulin sensitive, which is good, growth hormone can cause insulin insensitivity in like your liver.
So they end up getting, you know, having, you know, insulin insensitive liver cells.
Yeah, so I haven't done a ton of research on, like, the differences between just a normal dry sauna, which most of the studies that I read, they're using normal dry saunas.
And so in people, actually in people, people that have polymorphisms in the IGF-1 receptor, it's associated with like centenarians, like living to be 92 and 100. And that's mostly mediated through not getting cancer.
But there is an interesting tradeoff, and I think that...
In lower organisms, the reason is that having that reduced insulin signaling helps them deal with stress.
They have an increase in gene expression for various different genes that are antioxidant genes, like glutathione reductase and things like that.
And also in genes that help them take care of proteins and increasing neurotrophic factors.
I'm not sure if the same benefits are true in humans.
In humans, mostly, I think they're not getting cancer because of having lower IGF-1.
Well, here's the answer about amino acids and growth hormone.
Apparently, there's a PubMed study on it.
And they're saying that specific amino acids such as arginine, lysine, and orathine can stimulate growth hormone release when infused intravenously or administered orally.
Many individuals consume amino acids before strength training, workouts, Believing that this practice accentuates the exercise-induced growth hormone release, thereby promoting greater gains in muscle mass and strength, the growth hormone response to amino acid administration has a high degree of Interindividual variability.
It is administered by or occurring elsewhere in the body than the mouth and elementary canal?
What's an elementary canal?
God damn it.
There goes fucking confusing shit.
Okay, anyway.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Leads to increased circulating growth hormone concentration.
Oral doses that are great enough to induce significant growth hormone release are likely to cause stomach discomfort and diarrhea.
Boom, son!
During exercise, intensity is also a major determinant of growth hormone release.
Although one study showed that arginine infusion can heighten the growth hormone response to exercise, no studies found that pre-exercise oral amino acid supplementation augments growth hormone release.
Further, no appropriately conducted scientific studies found that oral supplementation with amino acids which are capable of inducing growth hormone release before strength training increases muscle mass Hmm.
I know, I have a friend who just can't fucking pack on muscle.
The guy will lift weights all the time, he lifts heavy, he can't gain weight, he gets a little stronger, but he just can't pack on muscle.
Then I have other friends that they just look at weights and they're...
Just grow.
It's crazy.
It's like some people, they just have that mesomorphic body structure, and they start lifting weights, and their muscles just start expanding and growing, and they just start getting bigger.
And other people, they have that ectomorphic thing going on, and they just can't pack it on.
So how would you...
With those factors, I mean, you'd have to know exactly who you're doing.
You'd really have to judge it intensely by the individual alone.
So it's an interesting trade-off because oftentimes growth hormones are associated with what you want more of it because your growth hormone levels go down as you age and It causes muscle atrophy and your brain atrophy in a sense too.
I think it has to do with more of supra-physiological levels of growth hormone, like people that are injecting growth hormone.
When you make growth hormone from your pituitary and then that stimulates IGF-1 to be made in liver, that then inhibits the production of more growth hormone.
I mean, that feedback's there for a reason.
And so if you just keep injecting it, you're sort of overcoming that feedback because...
Well, your body, you're giving it growth hormone.
It's not making more.
Even though there's IGF-1, they're saying, shut it off.
And I think he probably takes a truckload of pharmaceutical drugs every day in order to achieve that physique.
But his stomach, that's like apparently one of the things that happens when you take massive amounts of growth hormone is they literally bulge out like they're pregnant.
Well, the bodybuilding industry or the bodybuilding as a sport is so fascinating to me because essentially you're dealing with these chemical projects.
Because that's what they are.
They're chemical projects.
They're not humans.
I mean, when you look at a guy like Ronnie Coleman, you don't get that big.
A normal guy doesn't get that big.
I mean, you can get big.
I had a friend who was a total natural bodybuilder.
There's photos of him in his gut.
That's so crazy.
It's so bizarre.
And, you know, I used to think that that was just big stomach muscles.
I used to think that he did a lot of abs, so his stomach muscles were huge, until I actually read that their organs grow because of all the hormones that they're on.
Yeah, well, people get diabetes from it, from overuse of growth hormone.
Now, the idea that there's a whole sport dedicated to shooting as many chemicals into your body and turn you into some freak of science, that's a strange sport.
Yeah, there's apparently, there's quite a few studies that have been done, not just on the mice, but also on dogs and cattle to try to figure this stuff out.
Okay, abbreviated myostatin, also known as growth differentiation factor VIII, abbreviated GDFVIII, is a protein that in humans is encoded by the MSTN gene Myostatin is a secreted growth differentiation factor that is a member of the TGF beta protein family that inhibits muscle differentiation and growth in the process known as myogenesis.
Myostatin is produced primarily in skeletal muscle cells, circulates in the blood, and acts on muscle tissue by binding cells.
A cell-bound receptor called the activin type 2 receptor and animals lacking myostatin or animals treated with substances that block the activity of myostatin have significantly larger muscles.
And this could be of economic benefit to the livestock industry.
However, these animals require special care and feeding which offsets the potential economic advantage.
Yeah, so a gene-encoded myostatin was discovered in 1997 by geneticists Dr. Sei Jin Lee and Alexander McFerron, who also produced a strain of mutant mice that lack the gene.
And these mice have approximately twice as much muscle as normal mice.
There's been a couple cases where they've documented children have it.
In 2004, a German boy was diagnosed with a mutation in both copies of the myostatin-producing gene, making him considerably stronger than his peers.
His mother has a mutation in one copy of the gene.
And then in 2005, an American boy was diagnosed with a clinically similar condition but with somewhat different cause.
His body produces a normal level of functional myostatin, but because he is stronger and more muscular than most others his age, the doctors believe that a defect in his myostatin receptors prevents his muscle cells from responding normally to myostatin.
And that is what I've heard that they are trying to develop.
A myostatin inhibitor.
And that myostatin, producing myostatin, regulating the size of your muscle tissue, if they could come up with a myostatin inhibitor, it would increase the size of your muscles.
Well, do you follow genetic manipulation or studies on genetic manipulation and the potential for what they're figuring out these days?
Because it seems incredible, and it seems that the...
The future is going to be so bizarre when you deal with the idea that the exponential increase in the ability to change things and to alter the human body is just going to continue.
As long as society allows this research to continue, as long as we don't blow ourselves up, this work is going to continue to go on.
There's going to be more breakthroughs.
There's going to be more significant increases in the capacity for change.
I mean, who knows what the fuck it's going to be like just a decade, two decades from now.
We've already made some major advances in the stem cell research, which to me is one of the most important, you know, because if we can get to the point where we can replace our damaged motor neurons or, you know...
Make sure we're not getting Parkinson's disease.
I mean, I think that's a huge, you know, that's a huge thing in helping us, you know, extend the quality of our life.
Yeah.
You know, because you don't want to nourish our disease.
I would like to see a study on someone who follows the exact protocol that science, that someone like you would prescribe to him or her, and that they do it over a long period of time and they have a twin that doesn't do it.
They did it in monkeys, you know, and it was like a...
27 year experiment, I think, where they, so caliwork restriction is known to extend lifespan in lower organisms and also in this monkey, monkeys they did, where if you give a monkey 30% less food than it would normally eat.
So you basically let the monkey decide what it would eat.
And then you say, okay, I'm going to give them 30% less of that every day.
And they did this for like 27 years.
Can you do a Google search on caloric restriction monkeys and just like pull up the image that compares them?
Yeah, so he looks like he's lost less muscle, less muscle atrophy.
I mean, so what they found, they've done, like, these gene profiling expression arrays where they can measure, like, thousands of different genes at once.
And they've seen that caloric restricting actually changes the expression in, like, thousands of genes.
And so it helps, like, you know, genes that are involved in, you know, protein degradation, protein synthesis, like, all these things are changed in these caloric restriction monkeys.
Genes that are involved in, like, you know...
Growth factors in the brain, those are upregulated.
Inflammatory genes are downregulated, so it's like, you know, 27 years less of constant inflammation going on.
And so it's very interesting how—and there's a couple of theories as to why these monkeys age better, why caloric restriction, you know, can help the way you age.
And one of the big theories out there is that there's sort of like a hormetic response.
So hormesis is basically where you have like a low level of stress, like a little bit of stress.
And that stress then helps you Changes the expression of genes that are involved in stress, and so you basically can then deal with stress later.
So it's kind of like conditioning your body to deal with stress by giving it a little bit of stress.
And this is kind of the same thing with a lot of xenobiotics, like plant polyphenols, catechins, these sorts of things.
That's how they work.
They actually, you know, they induce this hormetic response where they increase the expression of stress-resistant genes that we have in our body that help us deal with protein stress, with, you know, reactive oxygen species stress, with all these different types of stress.
And because we're increasing the expression of those genes, we're dealing with stress better every single, you know, every single day in that case, you know, for 27 years.
And so it's very, this whole idea of hormesis is very interesting where you're sort of giving your body a little bit of stress, like, Like exercise is stress and it's a little bit of stress and it does the same thing.
But that whole field of epigenetics is just so fascinating how, you know, things that you eat, what you do can actually change the expression of genes and this actually affects the way you age.
And really what's interesting, not only does it affect the way you age, it affects the way your children that you haven't had yet age.
Epigenetics is basically causing a change in your gene.
They're factors that sit on top of your genes, basically, to give you a very simplistic topical view.
They sit on top of your genes, like methyl groups or acetylation groups, and they activate your genes.
When they activate your genes, they turn them on, and so the genes become what's called express.
They're expressing the genes.
When they're expressing the genes, They're doing what they're supposed to do.
And other factors can sit on top of them and turn them off.
And even though the gene is still there, it's like it's not there because it's not being expressed.
But these epigenetic factors don't actually alter the DNA nucleotide sequence like a mutation would.
So that's the difference.
A mutation changes the DNA nucleotide sequence.
Epigenetic factor, this thing can be modulated, and it doesn't change the sequence.
It just changes how much of that gene is being active or not active.
And these epigenetic marks are regulated by what we eat, by stress, by exercise, by all these various factors in our environment.
And so that's one study where they've changed in gene expression from caloric restriction.
They've done – and I heard someone on your podcast talk about this study.
It's a Swedish study.
There's been a few of them that have been done where in Sweden they keep like extensive records of people's – there's records of what they eat.
What diseases they've had throughout their life when they were born, if they were depressed, what they died of.
I mean, they're very extensive, like, records on people and also they have extensive, like, agricultural records.
So they can say, like, during this part of, you know, the country at this time of the year there was a lot of famine or there was a lot of, you know, there was a great crop harvest.
And so particularly this northern part of Sweden called Norbutyn, Sweden, back in, I think it was like the 1800s, they looked back.
During this period of time, for whatever reason, it was hard to get in and out of there.
And so people were really dependent on the crops that were there.
So if there was a lot of crops and it was a good harvest, people really gorged themselves.
They overate.
And if the harvest was bad, there was a famine and people really, they sort of were calorically restricted.
They basically didn't get to eat as much.
And so a lot of these Swedish scientists decided to look back and see, well, what effects did that have on future generations?
So it's kind of like Is there a transgenerational, you know, epigenetic effect on longevity?
So let's look at these people that grew up during the famine versus feast years and let's look at their children and their grandchildren and see what diseases they had or how long they lived.
And, you know, it's not like It's not like a controlled study.
I mean, it's very correlative and there's a lot of factors missing, but it's still very interesting.
What they found is that males that were between the ages of 9 and 12, and if they were 9 and 12 during the famine years, they had children and grandchildren that lived on average about seven years longer than the grandchildren of those that grew up during the abundance years.
And when they corrected for socioeconomic status, meaning, okay, rich people kind of ate well no matter what.
When you correct for that, when you have people from the same socioeconomic status, those grandchildren of the men that were between the ages of 9 to 12 during famine years lived 32 years longer, which is like crazy increase in lifespan.
And they also, they had more studies coming out where those grandchildren were one-fourth less likely to get type 2 diabetes and also cardiovascular diseases.
So it was like, why do you have to be between the age of 9 and 12 and a male?
Why growing up during that part of the famine, how does that affect your grandchildren's lifespan?
And we can't really tell you why, but there's some sort of theories as to why.
During that time period, there's something, you know, you're prepubescent right before you actually get that growth spurt.
And they think there's something to do with the sperm DNA that gets changed.
A little bit of stress, a little bit of hormesis possibly, a little bit of stress changes the expression in your sperm genes, and that gets passed on.
Back to the epigenetics study, something even as complex as, like, learning and memory can be modulated by your environment.
This was a mouse study where they took mice that were transgenically...
I'm modulated to get neurodegenerative disease.
And so they put these mice, usually when we work with mice, they're in this cage that has bedding, it has some food and water, and that's about it.
There's not a lot of stimulation, not a lot of exercise.
It's really kind of sad.
But they took these mice and they put them in what we call an enriched environment.
So they gave them all these toys that stimulated various regions in their brain, like the cognitive region, motor region, somatosensory regions.
And what they found was that these mice scored better on learning and memory tests.
And not only did they score better on learning and memory tests, they increased the expression of a gene that's involved in long-term potentiation.
Long-term potentiation is a signal that you're making when you're learning.
You need to remember things.
But the really interesting thing about this study was that these mice that were genetically engineered to get neurodegenerative disease had offspring mice that were also Genetically engineered to get neurodegenerative disease, but were not put in an enriched environment.
So they were put in that boring cage where they had no stimulation.
But they had still increased that long-term potentiation gene.
That epigenetic factor was passed on.
In this case, it was through the egg, through the female line, to the offspring mice, which had the same learning memory benefits, even though they weren't exposed to that environment.
So, I mean, just having cognitive stimulation, just using your brain more and exercising more, Can affect the expression of your genes and that can actually get passed on.
I mean, certainly, you know, the environment plays a component in those things, but, you know, the epigenetics, we're just sort of starting to understand epigenetics and how it works, and it's complicated.
I try to do what I can to make myself work better, cognitive-wise, and also try to basically age better.
You know, it's certainly, like, we can do things, like, now.
But just, yeah, like you were saying, genetically changing someone's, like, literally, like, you know, making someone's muscle grow like that by, like, giving them an inhibitor of a certain myostatin receptor.
I mean, that's, like, hardcore stuff that, you know, we don't really know what the effects are going to be of doing things like that long term.
So intelligent that he sort of, like, factored in a lot of things like, well, you know, people live, people die, you know, remorse and guilt and all these things are really just byproducts of human culture and our correlation to, you know, cause and effect and our reactions to each other.
I mean, he took away all the joy and fun, the zest of life.
Yeah, thinking about the things you can't control.
Sometimes I get these what I call OCD spikes where if I'm driving on the highway, I start to imagine all the possibilities that can happen, like all the things that can happen with all the cars.
And there's moments where it's so overwhelming where I just can't drive.
It's too much.
So my husband ends up driving me around a lot on the freeway.
I sometimes obsess over what I can't control and the fact that there's all these people and I'm like, they're doing all these things and all this could happen and all these possibilities and then it's like, okay, it's like overload.
I had a moment when my first daughter was born where when I was in the hospital in the moment she came out of the box I was thinking like how many different people are being born right now simultaneously all around the world and if you could see that on a giant screen I mean, it would look like an invasion of babies.
If you could see the millions of people, no doubt, being born all over the world at the same moment, just...
Isn't that sort of the issue with – one of the main issues with paying attention too much to bad things in the news?
And I've talked about this many times.
I think we have a real problem with digesting 7 billion people's worth of problems because – Anytime something spectacular or horrific comes up from all over the world, we get it and we absorb it.
And it sort of alters our idea of what the world is.
Oh, the world is a scary place and it's filled with evil.
Really, the numbers are pretty against that.
The numbers, like, throughout your day, you experience very little violence.
Throughout your day, you experience very little horrific crime.
It's very, very rare in most parts of America, unless you live in a terrible neighborhood, to experience the kind of shit that you see on your news feed or your Twitter feed.
All day, every day.
It's not an accurate expression because it's based on such an insane number that you're not supposed to be correlating.
You're not supposed to be looking at a 7 billion people number.
You're supposed to be looking at a tribe of 150 people.
I mean, that's what our brain, that's what the Dunbar's number is.
We don't really know what the fuck to do with 7 billion people's worth of information.
So we become these paranoid messes when we start thinking about all this horrible shit that's happening, but you're talking about a A fucking planet worth.
I mean, literally a planet worth of information now.
And it's like, that's the same sort of thing.
Just freaking out, thinking about all the variables that you can't control.
We're not designed for that.
Is it possible that the epigenetics of living in this life will alter our genes and our expression of our genes so that we can accept this kind of information?
Or even just fear-mongering, you know, just going on the Alex Jones website, just paying attention to all these people that are doom and gloom, new world order, they're fucking chemtrails, they're Putting caskets out in the FEMA camps and getting ready to mass kill people.
They don't have anything other than immediate concerns, which is kind of what we're designed for, right?
I mean, when you look at the genes of human beings and the amount of time that we've been in this particular type of a society and the amount of time that we've been essentially hunter-gatherers, I mean, there's no comparison.
We have just a long stretch of time where we were just living a very specific way.
And then over the last couple of hundred years, things radically shift in a very strange and new direction.
And then we find ourselves where we are now, from the invention of the printing press to the fucking Twitter feeds and internets and Facebook.
But then there's also the issue where you can't really go to space for very long anyway.
Because if you do go to space, your body doesn't really...
Your body's really not designed to be in a zero-gravity environment.
We had Commander Chris Hatfield on the podcast, one of the guys.
How long did he go to space for?
166 days or something crazy like that?
And he came back and he was describing the horrific moments where he first stepped out of the...
the pod or whatever it is that you land in and was walking on the ground for the first time, getting nauseous and throwing up and your body's just so not used to being in gravity and standing on the ground.
You've just been floating around for so long that your body's just totally baffled.
And he said it was horrific.
I thought it would have been a wonderful experience.
Like, what is it like when you finally touched on the ground, you've been up in space for so long?
It's so endlessly fascinating when you find out what has been learned about the body, how many studies have been done, what information is out there, and then yet how much we need to learn, how much there is to know, how much there is to discover.
It's just we're not even close.
We're not even close.
We're just learning, which is...
Again, why it's so infuriating when you read, you know, vitamins don't work, case closed.
Well, it's not an accident that we've isolated vitamin C. It's not an accident that we know that vitamin B12 gives you energy.
I mean, this is science that created all this.
So all these no-nonsense people, there is a lot of fuckery when it comes to vitamins.
There's a lot of fuckery when it comes to nutrition.
You're always reading about some...
False claims that this company has or that company has or these pills have.
We hear about things all the time when it comes to nutrition and supplementation, especially when it comes to athletic supplementation, things that are purported to deliver amazing muscle growth.
They've found that a lot of those things that are purported to give muscle growth were erection pills.
Here's a perfect example.
You know what those things are when you...
There's a Cialis and Viagra.
They just sell it as some herbal supplement, but they put in pharmaceutical drugs.
They buy that shit in bulk, and they sell it, and it actually does work.
But they're pharmaceutical drugs.
But because of the fact that the restrictions are so small, and the punishment of doing that is so small...
We had Aubrey Marcus in from Onnit.
Who was describing the whole process of one of these companies gets caught selling Viagra as one of these herbal sexual stimulants.
I mean, there was a study that came out not long ago.
They showed that like 70% of like herbal supplements on the market aren't actually what you think they are.
So in a lot of cases...
People are just putting some other plant in there, and it's like you think you're getting echinacea, and it's some other crap.
I think there's a whole opening for people to actually do some DNA barcoding where you can actually test what's in a supplement and start a company where it's like, I've tested these supplements, and they're actually what they're saying they're supposed to be.
Because it's like you've got a huge...
When people are trying to buy certain supplements and then they're not even getting...
What they think they're buying, regardless of whether or not there's any science to back up with what they think they're buying isn't doing anything.
I mean, the point is they should be getting what they think they're getting.
Yeah, there's a difference between, you know, not having certain vitamins and minerals and fatty acids in your diet and things that can...
You know, it affects your immune system.
It affects cognitive...
It affects all these different things.
And then taking all this other crap that I don't know...
People like the idea of some exotic thing isolated from somewhere.
And it's like, oh, it does this because it's exotic.
And, you know, the reality is people...
They should be focusing on what they're not getting that's essential for, you know, things that we know that's essential for the, you know, proteins in their body to work.
And so a lot of that homeopathic stuff, it gets mixed in with the vitamins and minerals too, and that's really irritating because it's really, they're two different things.
I mean, I haven't really done a ton of research into understanding why, but yeah, it's interesting how your brain can make yourself think that something's working and you actually can force yourself to be healthier.
I mean, the human being is like, a human body is to me essentially like the most incredibly complex computer ever and we don't have a guidebook for it.
I mean, when I started researching these studies on the effects of depleting tryptophan from your brain and how normal people all of a sudden become impulsive violence and impulsive behaviors and recidivism.
So they'll do these tests where they're punished for doing something wrong and they'll keep repeating the same thing.
I mean, I was like, I can't believe you can change someone's behavior by depleting tryptophan.
Like, that was really, you know, amazing to me.
And, you know, the way that nutrition affects your brain function in general and behavior is really interesting to me because it suggests that we have to some degree some control over our cognitive function and behavior.
And I think that we should be optimizing that as much as we can to, you know, perform better, to have better cognitive skills and to also better society by behaving better, you know.
So, you know, they've done studies with like school children where they've given them like omega-3 fatty acids and multivitamins.
And it's absolutely, you know, affected their IQ scores in some cases by like dramatic effects.
there's been studies showing that giving these people a multivitamin and omega-3 fatty acid.
So it's hard to pinpoint what's specifically in it, but I think it's a combination of everything because these pathways are all working together.
But it's affecting their – what I think is happening is it's also affecting their serotonin.
And so they're not as impulsive.
It's more like long-term thinking.
It's absolutely fascinating that you can actually, through nutrition, affect someone's behavior.
There's another study where they had given prisoners omega-3 fatty acids and it affected their aggressive outbursts.
You know, because that's a whole other topic.
You know, you've got a population of people that's incarcerated and knows what they're getting fed, probably deficient in multiple micronutrients, including omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D. Unquestionably.
We had a guy on recently, his kid, War Machine, an MMA fighter.
John Copenhaver's his real name, War Machines' fighting name.
Pretty cute.
And he was talking about a year that he did in prison where they gave him 1500 calories a day and it was horrible nutrition and just how his body just felt like it was wasting away because of it.
They're going to say, listen, if you want to give people nutrients and vitamins, give it to poor people.
Give it to poor people that haven't committed crimes.
Don't give it to prisoners.
Don't try to fix prisoners.
I see what you're saying.
I see your point of view, but I see how people are going to say, if you're going to start somewhere, don't start with people that have already fucked up.
Yeah, we should definitely start with – we should definitely give them to poor people also.
I mean we need to make sure that these people that can't afford to eat all these greens and fish every day, we can at least give them a fish oil pill and vitamin D pill and multivitamin to help give them some of those micronutrients, particularly the children that are not doing well on their cognitive tests and particularly the children that are not doing well on their cognitive tests and And it's like people don't want to ever think about the fact that nutrition plays a role in that.
It's not just all genetics.
It's not all environment and in terms of being abused or – I mean that definitely plays a role for sure.
But there is a component of nutrition that we can control to some degree and it's a cheap solution.
Vitamins aren't that expensive.
I mean, relatively speaking, you can get an omega-3 pill, vitamin D pill, multivitamin, and it's not that much money a month.
I listened to the podcast that you had some time ago, and he's got good information.
I don't want to say otherwise, but I wanted to correct that because he had said that the children from the well-fed population The ones that were grandchildren of the well-fed children got type 2 diabetes less.
This guy is selling coffee, and now we're selling this coffee through Onnit that was...
Supposed to be the cure to this issue of mycotoxins.
No, you're actually drinking Hawaiian Kona coffee that I started drinking right after we got our results back on the mycotoxin tests.
His contention was that 70 plus percent, whatever it was, of all coffee is infected with mycotoxins and they make you sick, they make the coffee taste bitter, they make you feel bad.
I took too much of this at face value and He parroted a lot of the things that he said.
And then we decided to start looking into it ourselves.
Well, they've known about mycotoxins in coffee for a long time.
There's a PubMed study from 1980 about mycotoxins in coffee.
It's always been an issue.
But they've been able to resolve that issue with wet processing.
Wet processing, they know how good coffee providers know how to eliminate this from coffee.
We tested four random coffees.
Well, two random.
One Starbucks, one random bag from Whole Foods, One coffee that we sell, which is the upgraded coffee that Dave produces, which is good coffee, good single-source coffee, and another one called caveman coffee.
None of them tested positive for mycotoxins.
And so if 70% of all coffee has mycotoxins, and we had three bags other than the upgraded coffee, none of them are taking his upgraded quote-unquote bulletproof process Which he won't reveal what this process is publicly.
And so I kind of feel like there's some bullshit there, for sure.
There's no way we're just going to find four bags of coffee and test them.
So our friend Tate, who runs Bulletproof Coffee, he tested two bags, and his coffee and this upgraded coffee, and allegedly he found below threshold levels of mycotoxins in Dave's coffee.
So I didn't, you know, I didn't conduct that test.
I wasn't a part of that test.
I don't know if it's right, but what the fuck, you know?
Like, I feel like when you're a guy who's running on and doing these kind of interviews and spewing out all these facts, you have to be really fucking careful, you know?
You have to be really fucking careful that what you're saying is true.
And if what you're saying turns out to not be accurate and I find out you're profiting from what you're saying, It becomes bad.
It becomes a real problem.
And that's where we are with this upgraded coffee thing.
We still sell it at Onnit because it is really good coffee, but we've removed all the literature on the mycotoxin issue, all the literature on that.
Because when you talk to the people that are in the know in the coffee industry, coffee growers, people who grade coffee and rate coffee, they actually have a rating system that is, you know, like you get a 94, 95 if you have excellent coffee.
Well, your coffee loses points if it tests positive for mycotoxins.
They test it.
So he sort of created this issue and made this issue out to be like, there's a reason why you have bitter coffee.
Like I said, aflatoxin is one thing that certainly can cause cancer.
I've never really been that concerned about mycotoxins in my coffee being a carcinogen.
I'm more concerned about my own metabolism generating reactive oxygen species because that's generating more You know, reactive oxygen species than some mycotoxins in the coffee, and that's, you know...
And, you know, he claims that he's telling the truth and he claims that, you know, if you sign a non-disclosure agreement, he'll show you all his, you know, all his testing methods.
Like, But it seems to be bullshit, and I feel bad because I like the guy, and I think that, first of all, he's a collector of ideas.
He doesn't have a formal education in nutrition.
This is not something that he's got a PhD in.
He's not you, essentially, is what I'm saying.
So, you know, when I talk to you about it, I'm getting it from someone who went to really good schools and you do research every day for a fucking living.
And like I said, I'm not an expert in mycotoxin, but I've sort of not really been worried about it in coffee just based on the little bit of reading that I've done.
But what Tate, my friend Tate in Caveman Coffee, found in his is below threshold levels of two different types of mycotoxins, which is not going to affect you at all.
This whole lectin thing is another thing when you're saying heat, you know, that something destroys...
The roasting process destroys the mycotoxin.
Well, there's this whole thing with lectins, too.
That's a big...
I don't know who started this lectin thing.
I think maybe Mercola, Mark Mercola.
But I think he talks about it also.
And it's like, oh, you can't eat beans because beans have lectins, and lectins cause an immune response in your gut, and this is going to cause leaky gut.
And that's not the whole story.
It's a little more complicated.
Lectins are inactivated by heat, and so unless you're chewing raw kidney beans or raw lentils, you're probably not activating an immune response in your gut.
And actually, beans are really high in fiber, and fiber gets broken down into short-chain fatty acids, which actually prevents the immune response in your gut.
So it's actually doing the opposite.
Some people have good information, but they also have some bad information.
And Yeah, I agree with you.
You got to be careful.
I mean, anyone that's offering you like a magic bullet, like this is it.
Roasting doesn't actually destroy mycotoxins, but it does destroy the mold.
70 to 80 percent of it in some cases.
So it's another one of those cases where there's too much to know, there's too much to learn, and I have a guy on who says he's an expert, and some of the things that he says seem to be bullshit.
And that's the big one, that everyone has mold in their coffee except me.
I know how my super secret way of getting rid of it, but I fucking bought it.
So here we have a problem that we've allowed to be created, but I'm not drinking it anymore because of that, just out of general principle.
Well, not only that, a lot of people buy it based on this premise that has not been proven, that most coffee has mold in it, with no fucking evidence whatsoever to back that up.
There was one test that showed that in the bitterness area, there was one test that showed that mice, when they were given saccharin infused with mycotoxins, tended to avoid that saccharin with mycotoxins.
But saccharin is a sweet thing.
I mean, it's a sweet product.
And who knows why they're avoiding the taste of the mycotoxins?
Who knows if their bodies have figured out that it's fucking poison?
I mean, I don't know.
But running around saying that the reason why coffee's bitter is because of mycotoxins is just stating it as a fact.
I fucking read more about coffee over the last three weeks than I've ever wanted to read or thought I would ever have to.
But coffee experts, here's where it gets pretty clear.
All call bullshit.
All of them call bullshit on what he's saying.
They all call bullshit across the board.
Not just coffee providers, not just coffee growers, but coffee tasters, coffee experts.
Across the board, think that what he's saying is horseshit.
That's usually a good sign.
This one guy who's not even a fucking nutrition expert, doesn't have a PhD in nutrition, He comes along with these incredible claims and also has this incredible method to alleviate this ailment.
It's one of those classic examples.
Create a problem and then offer a solution.
Profit.
It seems to be what's been done here, whether or not it's intentional or not.
I don't even think it was intentional, but I think that he's one of those guys that once he goes down a path To say he was wrong or to try to...
I don't have time to deal with this shit, but I'm obligated now because I got thrust into this situation.
It's nice to talk to someone like you to clear up some of the misconceptions of health and nutrition and to find out what's real and what's not and what are issues.
When I talk to a guy like Brian Dunning who's like, you don't need vitamin C. You don't need this.
You don't need that.
But look at him.
He's fucking totally out of shape.
He's fat and just not taking care of his body.
He's a no-nonsense guy who got fucked because he was a kid and he was raised a Mormon and now he's trying to counteract that by being a skeptic.
I mean, that's really essentially what's going on.
But that guy can fuck with people's heads because he's not an expert.
So, he really shouldn't be reviewing scientific literature, in my opinion.
He needs to get some people that really know how to do that if he's going to start trying to critically analyze science.
That's my opinion because I've read some of his stuff where he's trying to critically analyze it.
For example, this Linus Pauling, he's got something on his website talking about how vitamin C has no effect on cancer incidents or can help, if you already have cancer, can help kill the cancer cells.
And he puts up these studies by the MyoClinic That, you know, couldn't repeat these early studies that were done by Linus Pauling and Cameron, I forgot his name, anyways, in the late 70s.
But, you know, anyone that's a scientist will look at that and go, oh, Pauling and Cameron gave their patients, their cancer patients, vitamin C intravenously.
And they did that for a reason, because you can only horribly absorb so much vitamin C and it'll get into your bloodstream.
But intravenously, you can, like, You know, raise it to like millimolar, you know, concentrations.
And so the two myoclinic studies that repeated it, repeated it in quotations, gave them orally.
And so, you know, you can't repeat a study and change the method of administration from oral to intravenous and say, oh yeah, we repeated the study and it didn't work.
So when you're critically analyzing data, you need to focus on those sort of details because they're actually really important.
And a recent study just came out like two weeks ago where they took patients, female patients that had ovarian cancer, and they gave them vitamin C intravenously, and they were doing their standard chemo.
It's really hard nowadays to do any sort of unconventional cancer treatment.
That's not, you know, because it's like you don't want to just kill someone.
I mean, it's hard.
So anyways, they did it with the chemotherapy, and it actually...
It killed the cancer cells better, and it also alleviated a lot of the negative symptoms associated with the chemo.
And this was published in Science Translational Medicine, which is a pretty good journal for translational research, in fact.
Well, Brian has several problems with some of the things he puts out.
You know, he's accused me of being a pseudoscience shill.
And even after the podcast, where he came on and had all these...
Really ridiculous accusations that he threw at me on his website, and we talked about them one by one, what I believed and what I actually didn't believe, what I said and what I didn't say.
And hereafter, basically just...
Tapping him out mentally for three hours, just over and over and over again.
You're wrong here.
You're wrong there.
This is silly.
This is dumb.
This is poor thinking.
He went and wrote this really distorted thing on his website, this really bizarre account.
I mean, he was very kind to me.
He said I was nice and funny, but here's why he thinks I still promote dangerous pseudoscience.
Well, if you look at the videos that that guy puts out himself, he's got this video on fracking and how safe fracking is.
No need to worry about fracking.
And he's got this really hilarious smug video on the reality of fracking or hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking fucks up environments permanently all throughout the world.
There's been over a thousand instances of poisoned wells in this country because of fracking.
Documented, documented instances of poisoned wells.
I mean, they've fucked up huge parts of this country pretty much forever because of fracking.
First of all, your music makes you want to kill babies.
unidentified
...discovered that their well had been drilled directly into a shallow natural gas deposit.
This is common.
It's not a problem if the well is properly vented.
Theirs wasn't, so gas got into their water.
How do we know it had nothing to do with fracking?
Water wells range in depth from a few meters to a few hundred at the very deepest, but fracking takes place kilometers deeper, past numerous layers of bedrock.
Years of study have proven what geologists have always known.
There's just too much distance of solid rock between the two regions for any seepage to take place.
He's just parroting the words of the people that have been paid by these companies that are making fucking trillions of dollars to say.
I mean, that's what he's doing.
These piss-poor studies, these people that have been documented on all these various documentaries.
There's the two ones on the Gasland 1 and Gasland 2, but then there's also people that have done interviews and showing how they can light their fucking water on fire now and showing how their wells are poisoned.
People who have been really made deathly ill by drinking what they thought was filtered water, but it's not filtered enough because some of the chemicals from fracking got into the water.
Proven that those are the specific chemicals that are in their water that got there from fracking.
He's just one of those fucking guys, those no-nonsense guys.
If you just Google dangers of fracking, there is a tremendous amount of information out there about fracking, about what's bad about fracking, about the dangers.
And I had Peter Schiff on the podcast, who's an economic genius, very smart guy.
But also owns fracking companies.
And he was talking about it, and when I brought it up to him, he didn't deny the dangers of it.
What he said was, look, those people got money, and they got millions of dollars because of that.
Like, that's a great thing for them.
Like, in his mind, millions of dollars is okay to poison places forever.
I mean, I'm no fracking expert.
I don't claim to be a fracking expert.
But if one fraction of what is said about fracking, the negative aspects of fracking is true, It's a tricky thing.
It's a very tricky thing.
Yes, we could use the natural resources.
Yes, it would be nice to not be dependent on foreign oil.
However, if you really are destroying thousands of wells, if that really is documented, if really people are getting sick from drinking water that's contaminated with the very chemicals that they use for fracking...
You know, that doesn't seem like it's good.
That seems like that's something that most people are not aware of.
And when you find out who are the people that are funding these studies that are saying it's safe and where's the money all coming from, a lot of it's coming from these oil companies.
A lot of it is coming from these oil companies.
And the reason why these laws are in place in the first place, a lot of it is because people have been greased.
A lot of it is people have been paid off.
They understand that there's a lot of money to be made in this.
And they've allowed the doors to be open for these companies to come in and fuck up giant parts of the country forever.
Not according to Brian Dunning.
Don't worry.
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Hydraulic fracturing takes place kilometers into the earth.
You know, I haven't seen all your podcasts, but I can tell that you don't seem to be a promoter of pseudoscience.
You seem to be an inquisitive person that likes to critically think about things.
And you're also very open-minded.
So it's like, well, what if?
Let's think about how this could be working and what if it is true.
There's a difference between thinking like that and pseudoscience where you're just crazy and you're thinking all – I don't think he can see the difference.
Well, and the people like that, along with people like Dave Asprey who got the information on the study, the dietary study incorrect, it's a real problem with those guys because they're not a guy like me who's not a fucking expert in anything.
Look, if you ask me questions about martial arts, If you ask me questions about stand-up comedy, I can give you the opinion of an expert.
I'm a true expert in those very small areas.
That's it.
When you talk to me about anything else, I'll go, I fucking read some shit online.
I read a book.
I'm not an expert.
But when people start spouting shit out as fact, I'm learning on this podcast that there's a big responsibility to that.
I'm learning how the pitfalls of having people spouting things as fact That aren't necessarily factual.
Like I said, you know, he also talks about the lectins and the beans.
And it's like...
They have some good information.
There are some good things that they say.
But there's also some information that's totally wrong.
And the problem is people think because they have one good piece of information that everything they say is right and it's not.
And that's where you get this parodying where it's like, well, there's a meme now.
It's like, I don't know who started it, but someone started it and it's not accurate.
They didn't dig deep enough.
They don't understand enough of the science behind it.
And so then you get everyone following this, this big following, and it's like, you know, like, how do you come in and say, okay, look, this is how it's really happening.
And that's kind of what I'm trying to do in some degree.
It's not easy.
And I'm doing it in my spare time because I'm also still doing research.
So on weekends, I'm writing articles and making videos instead of going out and enjoying the Bay Area.
That's kind of like a Kickstarter, but you can contribute like 25 cents a month, and that's to help me pay for my podcasting, like to host my podcasting.
And it's really just to help me continue doing what I'm doing, like on weekends and in my free time.
And lastly is signing up for my newsletter.
I know that's not that cool these days, but I actually put a lot of good information in my newsletter.
I'm going to put this link to this new study on Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And this paper on serotonin is coming out in a couple of weeks, actually six days.
It's so important to me to have people like yourself that are actual experts with legitimate credentials that can separate and clear the fog on a lot of these issues.
And I'm fucking not tolerating this anymore.
If someone comes in and they have all these claims and they don't have information to back up their claims, I'm just going to fucking kick them out.
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That's it for this week.
Next week though, lots of cool people coming in, ladies and gentlemen.
We got a lot of shit happening and thank you for all the love.
All the love on Twitter, all the love on Facebook and all the positive responses that we get and all the cool people that I meet that tell me how much this podcast enhances your life.
It enhances mine too and it would be nothing without you guys.