Dr. Rhonda Patrick joins Joe Rogan to debunk myths about sugar (100g/day hidden in protein bars, kombucha) and refined carbs, linking them to gut inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and small, dense LDL particles—especially when paired with saturated fat. She explains hormetic compounds like resveratrol and curcumin (vs. NSAIDs, which double stroke/heart attack risk), stress responses from exercise (lactate boosting norepinephrine for learning) and cold exposure (UCP1 activation in brown fat), and gene polymorphisms (e.g., GSTP1) affecting supplement efficacy. Cryotherapy’s benefits—reduced TNF-alpha, improved glutathione use—are validated despite skepticism, while vegan diets’ risks (B12, DHA/EPA deficiencies) are addressed with evidence of cognitive declines in unsupplemented children. The episode underscores how personalized nutrition and stress management can counter modern health misinformation. [Automatically generated summary]
Sometimes I'll start off with a run, and I don't do long, long runs.
It's like two miles.
Enough to get some brain-derived neurotrophic factor growing, which is a growth factor that helps you grow new neurons.
That's been shown to happen with...
It's more of an aerobic type of exercise.
But then the high-intensity interval training, like sprinting, or I'll do body weight squats, or I'll do push-ups, or these backward types of push-ups, whatever is going to get me doing that high-intensity sort of thing where you're actually producing lactate because your body is using glucose Since you can't get oxygen to your muscles quick enough for how quick you're applying force and putting this energetic demand,
you use glucose and you don't use it inside the mitochondria, meaning you don't need oxygen.
So you do it without oxygen and you make lactate as a byproduct.
Well, lactate's been shown to increase dramatically.
Lactate uptake into the brain increases dramatically.
that type of exercise.
And it's lactate that's fueling norepinephrine release.
So like you're making more lactate to make more norepinephrine in your brain.
So and norepinephrine is, it has an immediate effect of making the connections between your neurons stronger so that you remember things better.
So that you learn better and you remember better.
It's called long term gentiation.
So I was like, I need my brain to work today.
I'm gonna do that stuff.
Yeah.
Whereas the aerobic type of exercise has more of a long term effect because you're making more neurons.
But those those neurons take two weeks to mature.
So like the aerobic training that I did, Those effects will come two weeks from now when I have more neurons.
So the immediate effect of the lactate and making more neoprenephrine is happening right now because right now the connections between my neurons are stronger.
Most people think exercise is good because the exercise itself is good.
No, the exercise itself is not good.
It's actually very stressful on your body.
What's good is the stress response.
We've got a hardwired genetic program that is conserved in plants, insects, bacteria.
You know, primates, humans, we all have this response to stress.
And that response is to try to survive.
I need to stay alive, pass on my genes.
Obviously, the stress response is much stronger when you're younger or earlier in life because your body knows you're not old enough to reproduce for whatever hormones and things like that that are not being produced.
So the stress response, which is like exercise causes stress, thermal stress, like heat, cold.
And then there's all these like compounds in plants that are...
Stressful to us that can induce this.
But it's almost like the brain is preparing for the next time it's going to encounter stress.
It's like, okay, this is war.
I got to gather up the troops.
I got to get this army.
We got to assemble this army because that stress is going to happen again.
I got to be ready for war.
So it kind of makes sense that you're going to have a very profound and positive effect in your brain and also in other parts of the body.
You know, the exercise itself...
It's funny because a lot of people do it to lose weight or mostly to lose weight or become sexually attractive, muscle mass, which has other very important physiological effects.
But people do it because they want to look good.
And honestly, there are a lot of people that say, well, exercise doesn't really play an important role in losing weight.
It's nutrition.
You know what?
They're right.
But exercise has a very important role, and that role is nutrition.
To cause your body stress so that you activate all these really good and awesome genes that are helping you deal with stress.
And guess what?
Stress is happening right now.
Every time you breathe in oxygen, you're making stress.
You're generating byproducts that are very dangerous.
They did a study on volume of people in cities and what effect the volume of people has on how many syllables per minute they say and how many steps per minute they take.
And there's a direct correlation worldwide between higher populations and like you can literally guess if you if you set up a camera on a street and you Record all the people walking by and you get a good number of people and you calculate how fast they're walking and then you record them talking.
Just from those two pieces of data, you can tell how many people are in the city.
I don't know a lot about this, but it's a topic that I'm interested in, you know, because I'm convinced that maintaining muscle mass is very important as you age.
And specifically, I think that the type 2 type of muscle fibers that you do get when you're doing more resistance training, those are the kind of fast twitch.
I think those actually...
You play a role in stability, being able to quickly lose your balance, which is important as you start to get older and you become more frail.
Falling down and breaking your hip, that can take you out.
There's a hormone that's actually released, I think, from muscle tissue called irisin that is released when you're doing resistance training and possibly also during aerobic.
I'm not sure, but it plays a role in helping maintain your bone density as well as osteocalcin.
Osteocalcin is released.
Osteocalcin then gets into your bloodstream.
It pulls calcium out of your bloodstream and brings it back to the bone.
The thing is that most of the calcium that we store in our body is in our bone or teeth and bones and muscle.
But calcium plays a very important role in the bloodstream as well.
So anytime we're not getting enough calcium, and I think something like 38% of the U.S. population doesn't get enough calcium.
So there's a huge percentage of the population that doesn't get enough calcium.
Whenever you don't get enough, your body actually pulls it out of the bone and brings it to the bloodstream so that it can play an important role in endothelial cells and making sure they don't get too stiff.
Yeah, because as you age, if you imagine a lifetime of chronic, you know, calcium, quote-unquote, inadequacy, so you're never getting enough of the calcium every day, eventually that's going to start to build up and you're going to keep pulling it out of your bone, you're going to keep pulling it out of bone.
You know, there's a couple of things that regulate that.
That's one.
Just, you know, obviously just not getting enough calcium so you keep pulling it out of your bone.
And the other thing is not getting enough of the—so doing the types of exercises that you need to do to, you know, make sure you're releasing these hormones that are bringing calcium to the bone, that are, you know, doing that.
And also certain dietary factors can play a role in that.
So making sure that you're getting enough vitamin K— Vitamin K1 is found in green plants.
It plays a role in blood coagulation.
When you have enough of it for that blood coagulation, then some vitamin K stays around the bloodstream and activates osteocalcium and other genes that are able to pull the calcium to the bone.
Vitamin K2 never really goes to the liver, and that's something that's found in...
Fermented sort of bacteria make it.
So, like, you can find vitamin K2 in the Western diet, like cheeses, blue cheeses, fermented cheeses have a higher amount.
There's some in organ meat, like liver, but natto, fermented soybeans are the highest.
It's also high in something else called spermidine, which is able to clear away damaged cells in your body.
And it's through a process called autophagy.
So we're always getting damaged cells.
And anytime we have a cell that's damaged, damaged cells occur just from normal metabolism.
But as our telomeres start to get shorter, The telomeres always take the hit.
So telomeres are those tiny caps on the end of your chromosomes.
And they always are sacrificing themselves because they don't want your DNA to get the damage.
Because if your DNA gets the damage, it could lead to cancer.
So they take the hit.
And as they start to get shorter, it accelerates their shortening because they already get shorter each year.
Then what happens is the cell becomes what's called senescent.
And what that means is a cell just sits around in your bloodstream or in your kidney or in your liver, whatever organ we're talking about, and it's not really alive, so it's not metabolic, but it doesn't go away.
It's not dead.
So what it does, it just sits there and it starts to secrete pro-inflammatory cytokines, which then activate nearby immune cells to fire away nasty chemicals and damage more cells.
So what happens is you start to damage nearby cells.
You can think about, have you ever noticed when you get a gray hair?
So gray hair, you'll get senescent melanocytes, which are the cells that produce the pigment.
You'll get one that's senescent, so it's just kind of sitting there, and it causes a hair follicle or hair to become gray.
And then all the other hair cells around nearby, you always get them near each other.
And part of that has to do with the fact that the senescent melanocyte in this case, which is in the hair follicle, is secreting all this nasty stuff that then damages other nearby hair cells.
It activates this whole genetic system we have in our body called autophagy, which is like self-eating.
So we start to eat the cell and clear it away.
And recently, within the last month, A study came out where scientists actually engineered mice using CRISPR technology to clear away every time they had a senescent cell.
You and I are getting senescent cells right now.
Like, right now.
Sorry, Jamie.
It's happening.
It's happening all the time.
But these researchers did this brilliant experiment where they designed...
They were like, okay, a senescent cell has a certain marker on it.
And so they then said, okay, when this marker gets expressed...
I want you to have these immune cells go and clear it away and eat it.
And so every time there was a senescent cell, the immune system cleared it out and the mice ended up living 30% longer than their normal lifespan.
Pretty cool.
So autophagy it's called.
It's pretty cool.
And there are other things that actually increase it.
Resveratrol.
Resveratrol from...
It's one of those plant compounds that's...
This has been a recent obsession of mine.
But plants make natural insecticides.
And for millions of years, plants have been figuring out a way to ward off insects and fungus.
Because they also want to stay alive.
Just like we do.
And...
They don't actually make enough of these chemicals to kill the insect.
It's kind of like just go away.
So they often affect their nervous system and just kind of make them go away.
But what's really cool is that these compounds in plants, and there are so many different ones, actually have a hormetic effect on us.
So that hormetic effect being in small doses, it activates our whole stress response pathway like exercise does.
Resveratrol is actually made in grape skins and also blueberries make to a much less degree, but it's made to ward off fungus.
Resveratrol has been shown at least in a high dose, like 1,000 milligrams a day, to clear away.
It actually activates this whole genetic pathway that gets activated when you're fasting.
Fasting is another type of hormetic stress.
So when you're fasting, you cause damaged cells to clear away.
You also basically start to turn on all these genes that help you deal with stress because your body's like, oh my god, I can't.
I don't have food.
I need to deal with this.
So you activate all these really good You know, genetic pathways where you're making more antioxidants, you're making more anti-inflammatories, you're making more brain cells, you're preparing just everything good.
So resveratrol kind of is thought of like a mimetic of fasting in a way because it activates like one of these pathways that gets activated and it changes gene expression.
I've been very skeptical of the resveratrol literature for quite some time.
Back in 2003 or so, when it first came into the aging world, I was very skeptical of it.
Mostly because a lot of the studies that have been done in animals, where they feed animals resveratrol, they feed them such large amounts that are just not relevant to humans.
So I was like, well, so what?
But the more I've been reading about it recently, the more I've become a little more convinced that there actually may be something to...
To this resveratrol.
It's activating this pathway called SIRT1, which is globally changing gene expression.
It's epigenetics.
It's activating all these good things and deactivating bad things.
And so it's really interesting.
There was a study that was published not long ago, a couple years ago, that was done in monkeys, where monkeys were given a high sugar diet and high sugar plus high fat, which is a bad combo.
and they gave them resveratrol you know either gave them resveratrol or didn't and the monkeys that did not get resveratrol um their arteries were like really stiffed that caused their arteries to stiff by like 40 but the resveratrol resveratrol completely like negated that so i was like wow maybe i should start looking into the resveratrol again because it's a little it's a little interesting but um there's so many other plants
There's a book that was written by an Indian scientist called Plant Antifedants.
And it's a very dry...
I mean, it's a textbook.
So it's not something people read.
It's a textbook, really.
But what he does in this book, there's over 900 different chemical compounds in a variety of plants.
He's a plant specialist, so that's his specialty.
And he categorizes over 900 of these compounds where these compounds are potentially going to induce a hormetic response.
And so I know several scientists are actually using some of these compounds that are at least listed in this book to study their effects in mice and eventually in humans.
But some of them, like plumagen, plumagens and black walnuts.
It actually causes a slight stress in our brain and it has been shown in mice to protect against ischemic stroke because it activates all these good things.
It protects against ischemic stroke.
There's another one called galantamine, which is in snowdrop flowers.
Galantamine is also stressful in the brain.
Like I said, these plant compounds are designed to target insect nervous systems, so it's no surprise they're affecting the nervous system of mammals.
In fact, in this case, humans as well.
Galantamine increases acetylcholine production in the brain, and acetylcholine plays a role in learning and memory and It's actually given to Alzheimer's patients, galantamine, to help them remember things, to help them to improve their memory.
Getting it from a hormetic type of response versus, let's say someone designed a drug to activate the acetylcholine receptor, is that you always have these biological feedback mechanisms.
When you start to activate a receptor in the brain...
So pharmacologically, your brain knows.
Your brain's like, oh, I'm getting a lot of this stuff that I don't usually get a lot of.
I'm going to stop making as much of the receptor.
The receptor is what's necessary to have the physiological response.
So your brain's like, oh, I'm just going to stop making as much of this receptor.
But then what happens is if you don't give it that signal, if you don't take that drug, then you've got less of that receptor.
And so you're going to have massive withdrawal.
It's going to be crazy because now whatever acetylcholine you do make, it's not going to have much of an effect because there's less of that receptor there to actually bind to it.
Whereas when you have something like galantamine, something that's a hormetic inducer, what's happening is you're not actually...
anything to acetylcholine neurons or to the receptor or anything directly, it's slightly toxic and part of the way your brain deals with the type of stress that it induces is it goes, "Oh, this is the kind of stress I need to make.
I need acetylcholine for this." For whatever reason, whatever, you know, these plants are doing different things.
For whatever reason, the galantamine is like the one that says, "Okay, acetylcholine." So your body, it's a response to something kind of like triggering it, you know?
And so you're not going to have that feedback mechanism where it's like...
Yeah, I'm just saying a lot of, you know, I mean, the classic example would be opioids, right?
Opioid painkillers.
So when you're taking an opioid painkiller, what's happening is there's a couple of different opioid receptors in the brain.
And the opioid painkiller is kind of like a morphine derivative, which is sort of like endorphin.
It binds to something called the mu opioid receptor, which is what endorphins bind to.
Endorphins make you feel good.
That's also part of the reason why you exercise, why you're wanting that endorphin release.
What happens when you start to make a drug, like morphine derivative type of drug, that goes and directly activates that receptor, binds to it, is that receptor, the mu opioid receptor, you start to make less of it.
And that's been shown.
When you give morphine drugs, you down-regulate, you make less of the receptors.
So now what happens is when you don't have that opioid drug, you know, let's say you had, you know, this much receptor.
You start taking the drug, right?
And now your receptor's going down here, right?
And so now if you don't have the drug, you're down here, and so any endorphin you make isn't going to do much.
You're like, oh man, I need more of that.
And, you know, so you keep having just to get back up to baseline, just to get back up to normal, which is why you can have addiction.
Addiction can be very common with those types of painkillers because of the effect on the mu opioid receptor.
So that's, you know, that's one of the problems.
And interestingly enough, there's another type of opioid receptor called the kappa opioid receptor, I think I've discussed with you before on one of the podcasts because kappa opioid receptor is sort of the opposite of the mu opioid receptor because it actually, when you make something in your body called dynorphin, it's responsible for a dysphoric feeling.
Whereas mu opioids, euphoric, you feel good.
Dysphoric feeling is the kappa opioid.
You make dynorphin because it cools your body.
So when you're hot, when you're, when you exercise, when you elevate your core body, when you sweat, that's a good sign.
When you're sweating, you're making dynorphin.
When you sit in the sauna, you're making dynorphin.
And, you know, when you're working out hard enough that you're sweating, you're physically uncomfortable, right?
You're like, damn, it sucks.
You feel uncomfortable.
And the same goes when you're sitting in a hot sauna and you're sweating and you're getting really hot.
Man, you're just like this.
You feel dysphoric.
Like, that's...
What's happening is dynorphin is binding to the kappa opioid receptor.
Well, the really cool thing about this whole pathway, again, coming back to feedback, biology is so smart.
It always, like, figures out a way.
When you start to activate that kappa opioid receptor, your body's like, whoa, I'm getting a lot of this bad stuff.
I need to, like, make more of these good receptors because I got too much of this dysphoric.
So it actually causes...
It causes your body to make more mu-opioid receptors and it makes them sensitive.
So then the next time you release endorphin, you know, your workout, boom, it feels even better and it lasts, you know.
So that's part of the reason why I know that there's certain drugs that are used to treat opioid addiction, activate the capoide receptor pathway, exercise.
Some people use sauna.
I don't think they understand the mechanism.
But anything that's going to help you with dynorphin, because people that are taking opioids, opioid painkillers, their new opioid receptors are already like down, down, down.
You want it back up.
And dynorphin activating that capoide receptor will do that.
It's been shown in multiple studies, you know, so kind of went on a little rant there, but it's...
That's just like, you know, so the question is, Synergistically would mean, can you then combine two things and have an even more powerful response?
Well, the thing is, is that because these compounds are targeting different pathways, you're going to have some overlap, which will have a synergistic effect, but you're also going to have a diverse...
There's going to be diversity.
So, you know, you're going to have the plumagenin and the black walnuts, the galantamine...
And then you get your apigenin from celery.
You know, apigenin causes your brain to make more neural neurons, neural stem cells.
You get the resveratrol, which is like clearing away damaged cells.
It's also anti-inflammatory.
And then you go and eat your kale and broccoli.
That makes something called isothiocyanates.
Isothiocyanates are very potent anti-cancer.
So, they actually change genes.
We have genes in our body that are able to convert a pro-carcinogen into a carcinogen.
Isothiocinates stop that from happening.
And we also have genes in our body that can deactivate anything that could potentially become a carcinogen.
We're exposed to all sorts of stuff every day.
So activating those genes is super awesome.
In fact, it's been shown in mice.
If you give mice a really high dose of isothiocinates and then you inoculate them, you inject them with tumor cells, They will not form tumors, whereas the mice that are injected...
Yes.
And there's another study that was done in humans and men.
Men that took around...
They ate 250 grams of broccoli or Brussels sprouts.
So isothiocinates are in the cruciferous family of vegetables.
So kale, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choy...
Actually, the isothiocyanates are stored in something in the plant called glycosinolates.
And in order to release the isothiocyanates, the plants have an enzyme called myrosinase, which we have a little bit of it, a little bit in our saliva, a little bit in our gut bacteria, but not much.
And myrosinase is heat sensitive.
So when you heat your You're cruciferous.
You're inactivating about 50% of it.
And it's still good to cook vegetables.
I mean, it's good to get both.
But the raw kale that you put in your smoothie or the raw broccoli you're eating, the raw broccoli sprouts have seven times more.
Because they're a young plant.
Young, again, comes back to that when you're younger, the stress response is more potent because nature wants you to survive.
So broccoli sprouts, isothiocinates are made to ward off, you know, creatures from eating them.
So the younger the plant is, the more they make of it.
And so broccoli sprouts, I used to actually sprout them.
Dude, this is my recent obsession, is these plant insecticides.
I really think, we don't even know what's in these plants, but these isothiocyanates, men that ate 250 grams of it, they actually, in their urine, there's a biomarker of a compound that inactivates Like a certain carcinogen, a potential carcinogen, and they increase that by 10%, meaning that they're doing good stuff, basically.
The isothiocinates are really good for the brain, too.
A type of isothiocinate is sulforaphane, which is in the broccoli sprouts.
It's been shown to help with autism.
It induces a stress response in the brain, and your brain does all this good stuff.
And then there's like apigenin in the celery.
There's garlic, the allicine.
Allicine is in garlic and allicine is...
In order to activate allicine, you have to chop or blend or chew garlic.
Allicine itself is not sensitive to heat, but if you don't chop up the garlic, the enzymes in the garlic, allicinases, won't get activated and won't release the allicin.
Well, you talked about that MRSA case that you had, and I relay that to everybody because my friend Denny had a really bad case of MRSA. And I told him about your situation.
He had it actually after you had been on the podcast the last time.
And I told him his photo is insane.
He's got a photo that I put on my Instagram page of his knee.
I mean, his knee got, within a couple of days, it went from being mildly infected, like what's going on, to he was in the hospital for weeks.
Mercapitans, it's another byproduct of these plant insecticides.
And mercapitans are...
First, they bind mercury very well.
So they will bind mercury and help you excrete it.
So they bind mercury that's in your system and you excrete it.
And they also do something in your brain so that they can actually cross over the blood-brain barrier, get into your brain.
And they're potent antioxidant in the cell membrane, which is...
It's kind of technical, but it's hard to find antioxidants that are in the cell membrane itself.
Most of the time, they're soluble in the cell.
So it's actually very good for your brain.
So I was taking the garlic oil.
Garlic oil would have...
It should have both, both of those.
And I was also rubbing it on my sore topically.
So I was rubbing it on there and taking an orally grapefruit seed extract.
I was taking ginkgo biloba because that was also shown to kill different staphylococcus strains and vitamin C. And I was taking this stuff like every hour.
Yeah, like garlic was, it was like massive garlic.
But the garlic itself, you know, it's antimicrobial, but also there was a study that was recently published.
Men that had like atherosclerosis, they were given 2.4 grams of garlic.
And it actually slowed the accumulation of plaques in their arteries by like 80% because allicin is a very potent anti-inflammatory and it helps the endothelial cells, helps reduce inflammation in the endothelial cells.
It's good.
It's really good.
It just goes on and on.
I don't even know.
There's so many different compounds.
But these are just ones we know of.
They're doing really, really positive and potent things.
I have been obsessed with a certain form of it, this formulation of it.
So I know we've talked about this before on the podcast, but curcumin, there's a couple of problems with the bioavailability of it.
First is that your stomach acid and your intestines, it can't get past that very well.
So it doesn't actually get absorbed.
And whatever does get absorbed, it's immediately cleared because your body's like, toxic, no, go away.
So taking curcumin, which is in turmeric, It's in the turmeric plant.
That is...
You can be taking it but not getting a lot.
It's not doing a lot.
So there's this new formulation.
I don't know how new it is.
It's new to my mind.
It's new to Rhonda.
Where they take the curcumin and it's put in a phytosome.
Which is sort of like a liposome.
But it's a little different.
So liposomes contain a chemical compound like...
In the middle of it.
So they have like a phospholipid kind of complex that contains the compound and it's supposed to increase bioavailability because it gets past the intestinal system and also it can just fuse with your cell membrane and just deliver the contents to the cell.
So it can bypass transporters and all this other stuff.
Phytosomes are very similar.
They also have this phospholipid complex.
In this case, they use phosphatidylcholine.
But it also disperses the compound throughout and supposedly it's supposed to be more bioavailable.
I don't know if that's really true, but I have been reading some published studies using this certain formulation of curcumin in a phytosome, which is phosphatidylcholine.
And the formulation has got a patent name.
It's called Meriva.
But, you know, if there is curcumin in a liposome, it's probably working the same way.
I just doubt that dispersing the molecules within the actual liposome makes that big of a difference.
It's more about getting past—so what this does is it gets you past the absorption issue, and it also gets past—because it fuses with the cells— Quickly, it gets past some of the other, you know, getting rid of it quickly issue.
But I've been taking it, like I've been taking at least a gram a day, gram a day of it.
And what got me really hooked on it was a couple of studies that came out, clinical studies that were done Well, first, there was one that showed people that were running downhill, some sort of running downhill that caused delayed onset muscle soreness to happen.
But, and here's the other, like, scary part, is that then I would have long periods of time I'm a very empathetic person, though, people.
I really am.
I'd have long periods of time when I didn't kill the mice, and then I'd have to go back there so months would go by, and then I'd have to go back and do it.
And all of a sudden, I was like, I can't do this.
And I couldn't watch them.
They'd start like...
Breathing, you know, and trying to gasp for air, and I just felt awful.
I know resveratrol, supposedly there's some of it in wine, which they were trying to correlate with the positive health benefits of drinking a glass of wine a day.
Yeah, so a five-ounce glass of wine has about two milligrams of resveratrol, which, if you're talking—oh, the study I talked about on monkeys, they were given, like, 480 milligrams.
That's, you know, you're not going to, like— Yeah, for a monkey.
Yeah, for a monkey.
And you're not going to, like—so you're not going to, like, have that same effect.
And like I said, the 1,000 milligrams was for the clearing away—the autophagy, clearing away damaged cells.
But, you know, these are little chemicals—these are— Chemical compounds that are triggering something in our body and whether it's two milligrams or 400 milligrams, it's doing a little bit of something.
And so, you know, I wouldn't just throw my nose up.
I mean, you're not going to like live 30% longer because of it, because you drink wine, you know, but it's still, you're still getting some, you know?
And there's probably some health benefit as well to this, the mood-altering shift of the relaxing of having a glass of wine.
I've always felt like that's something that we shouldn't really look past.
Having a drink relaxes you.
And just whatever negative impact that alcohol has on your liver or the toxicity, isn't it kind of balanced out, at least in low doses, by the positive benefit that you get from...
It being a social lubricant, relaxing you, things along those lines?
I mean, there are so many different conflicting studies out there with alcohol.
It's good for you.
It's bad.
It's good.
And I think it has a lot to do with genetics and just binge or what else you're eating and just all these other things.
But yeah, if someone drinks a glass of wine, let's say they're wound up all the time.
It's like...
We were talking about this before the podcast, but they're always like, the lion's coming to get me!
You know, it's like, you know, the lion's coming to get me.
I gotta run.
I gotta fight off this beast.
I mean, that's the stress response, right?
You're activating your sympathetic nervous system.
Which is good if you're actually out in Africa and there's a lion.
But if you're not, having that active all the time is actually...
It prevents some of the feedback loops that happen in your brain.
So when you have chronic stress like that, then you start to keep making...
Usually when you make stress hormone, your body's like, oh, I made this, that's enough.
It shuts it off.
So that goes away.
So you no longer shut it off and it just keeps going.
And that can cause you to either be super anxious, where you're like lions there all the time, or the opposite end of the spectrum where you're like totally...
You just don't care about anything...
Uh, you know, and, and you can be like depressed where it's like nothing excites you, you know, you just, you're indifferent.
So having a glass of wine, if that like chills you out and like, you're not so, you know, I, I think that seems like, you know, okay.
If you're having a glass of wine to, to chill out and, Yeah, it seems like chilling out is good.
But exercise would probably be a better way to do it.
Is there any benefit to stressing your body through alcohol?
Like as you were talking about these pesticides that plants produce, they stress your body, you have this response from exercise, things along those lines.
When I was young, I was really dumb, I thought that smoking cigarettes might have a good effect on your lungs because it's like lifting weight through your lungs because your lungs would be like, oh, I've got to process this stuff and it would make your lungs stronger.
Wasn't that, I think that was like what doctors believed.
Really?
Yeah, well at one point in time, I mean, I know that it was in that movie, The Aviator, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie.
When he played J. Edgar Hoover when he was young, Leonardo DiCaprio in this scene was with his mom, and his mom was telling him, you know, that you're frail, you should listen to the doctor and smoke cigarettes.
Like, that was the thing that they used to, doctors used to prescribe cigarettes to people to, like, increase their vitality.
Well, I don't know about, I mean, I don't know what their explanation was, but nicotine, yeah.
Nicotine, I don't want to interrupt, but there is one thing that absolutely does happen from smoking cigarettes that does benefit A certain population of people.
Because when you put nicotine in your body, it totally normalizes something called sensory gating, which is what your brain does.
Sensory gating is your brain filtering out all this other information that's happening all the time.
Like, Jamie's sitting over there.
He's doing God knows what.
But I don't care.
I'm not paying attention because I'm talking to you.
There's noises out here.
There's smells.
So it's like your brain is able to focus in and not...
Keep all these inputs coming at once.
Well, there are people that have problems in sensory gating.
It's genetically related.
It's also there's certain dietary factors that can play a role where they cannot do that.
And so they're getting all this input all the time from everywhere.
So if they walk into a room with a bunch of people, they flip out.
It's like because they can hear all the conversation.
Nicotine negates it for 15 minutes, which is why some people probably are chronically smoking because after 15 minutes, man, they got to get that hit again or, you know, it's coming.
A lot of people that are schizophrenic have a sensory gating issue.
And so a lot of schizophrenics actually, I think, I'm...
This is me totally just throwing this out there.
I think that's likely why a lot of schizophrenics are chain smokers.
But the point that I'm trying to make is that a lot of these compounds that are hormetic, fasting, exercise, doing cold stress, heat stress, these plant insecticides, the key is the dose.
So you don't want to have a huge, huge dose of it.
And with the plants, it's really hard to get a huge dose.
But with exercise, I'm not sure that running 50 miles is actually that good.
That's pretty stressful.
It's not good for you.
You get the point.
With alcohol, it has been shown that in small doses, it can have a slight hormetic effect.
Now, keep in mind, there are other things that can regulate that.
People are different.
We all have different genes.
And so, for example, I cannot recover from a large dose of alcohol Like Dan can, because I have a certain variation in a gene that does not repair damage to neurons very well.
So there are other things to keep in mind, but yes, that has been shown in small doses, at least in animal models, like flies, worms, that small doses of alcohol can actually have a hormetic effect.
To actually define a chemical compound as hormetic, In science, the definition is there's a U-shaped curve.
So when you have just enough of it, you get a positive effect.
But when you go over that threshold, you start to have a negative effect.
And that's what stress...
When we're talking about good stress, we're not talking about exercising all day every day.
We're talking about exercising, pushing past and getting some of that Well, that's a huge issue with martial artists, with the fighters, because they always feel like if they do more, they will have more endurance, and they'll be able to perform better inside the octagon.
Well, I mean, there's some truth to that, you know, you do want to push yourself and your body will, you will have a strong stress response, but you have to recover.
You can't, you can't, you can't, if you, the dose is very important.
So if you push yourself beyond, it's just like, you're not going to have a recovery period, like you're not going to be able to.
Isn't it important then to build your base over a long period of time then?
Because you would build your endurance slowly, where you slowly increase the base, you make sure that your recovery is consistent, and then just keep doing it and monitoring it over a long period of time.
Then, once you have a very high base, then really ramp it up and then go through a long-term training camp.
And even for some of these plant compounds, too, like in that resveratrol study and the monkeys, the first year those monkeys were actually given a smaller dose.
They were given 80 milligrams for the first year, and then the second year they were given 480 milligrams.
Very interesting.
And back to your resveratrol, I don't...
I don't know.
There's so many brands out there that are just utter crap.
They have filler and you think you're getting echinacea, but you're not.
You're getting some kind of magnesium steroid or something.
I'm interested in the resveratrol.
I'm interested in a lot of these other plant compounds.
It's one of the reasons why I like to eat a wide variety of plants.
Celery, parsley.
Oh, there's stuff in apple peels and in green tomatoes, so ursolic acids in apple skin and tomatadine in green tomatoes.
They actually inhibit a gene in your skeletal muscle called ATF4. That gene actually prevents protein synthesis from happening, so it stops your muscle cells from making proteins.
So inhibiting that means more protein synthesis.
And that's been shown in mice, like if they're given really high dose, like 0.27% rosalic acid and 0.05% tomatidine, they can increase their muscle growth by 30% over what they would do if they didn't have it.
I don't, you know, because I've been so skeptical of the field for so long, I've not supplemented with it.
I mean, I did for a little while.
I'm looking back into it just because now I'm interested.
Now I'm very interested.
There's also someone pointed out to me because I did a post on this and they said that resveratrol Resveratrol was shown to negate some of the high-intensity interval training gains or something.
I didn't read the study.
I don't know exactly what that means.
Resveratrol has been shown to actually cause mitochondrial biogenesis and shift muscle fibers to type 1, which are more endurance.
The thing is that resveratrol is not like an antioxidant.
It's not like taking vitamin E. The difference between taking an antioxidant or even taking, like, ibuprofen.
Like, these studies have been done where they've shown that taking, like, ibuprofen or taking supplemental vitamin E, you know, after a workout or while you're working out can blunt some of the positive benefits from it.
And the reason is because when you exercise, you are, you know, you're causing stress.
Like we talked about, you're causing inflammation, you're causing, you know, reactive oxygen species to And this is very important for the stress response.
That's why you have a positive effect.
But if you're taking something like vitamin E, vitamin E actually, it's like a sponge.
It goes around and stops.
It's like, oh, here's a reactive oxygen species or an inflammatory, and it just stops it.
It socks it up.
And NSAIDs, they stop the inflammatory mediators from being produced.
Resveratrol, curcumin, you know, these plant insecticides, they don't work that way.
They actually are stressful themselves, and so they activate, you know, these anti-inflammatory genes, antioxidant genes, all this good stuff.
So it's very different, you know, than taking an antioxidant or an anti-inflammatory.
Those NSAIDs are...
They're not really good news, in my opinion.
They've been shown to increase heart attack and stroke risk.
The thing with some of these, it depends on the type of NSAID, but with ibuprofen and other ones, so ibuprofen targets, the way it's an anti-inflammatory is it targets one of these enzymes called COX-2.
COX-2 makes leukotrenes and thromboxanes, which cause platelets to aggregate.
They also cause inflammation.
It makes this other chemical that's involved in pain.
So when you stop that enzyme from doing that, then you're going to have less inflammation.
Inflammation causes pain, right?
So you're going to have a pain-relieving effect.
The problem is, is that when you inhibit, again, we get back to biology and feedback loops and, you know, our biology, we've, even though this enzyme COX-2 causes inflammation, it's also...
And anti-inflammatory at the same time.
COX-2 also is important for making sure platelets don't aggregate too much.
So at the same time it's doing something that's making them aggregate, it's also like, okay, let's keep this in check.
Let's make sure it doesn't go overboard.
And it also makes something else that's important for relaxing the smooth muscle cells in your blood vessels.
And also it releases nitric oxide.
So when you block that enzyme, you're blocking the inflammation, blocking pain, but then the smooth muscle cells become stiff and you make less nitrogen oxide, which is important to relax blood vessels.
And that can be bad if you are stiffening your vessels a lot and you have plaques.
So there was like eight different clinical trials that were done.
And this is what made the FDA put a warning label on all ibuprofen bottles is because chronic use increased the risk of stroke and heart attack twofold.
And there was a study that was published a few months ago that was done in animals that showed the mechanism.
So it showed exactly what was wrong with inhibiting COX-2.
I've been very concerned because I know that like almost every female that I know takes it like once a month.
The US Food and Drug Administration is strengthening existing label warnings that non-aspirin, non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs increase the chance of heart attack or stroke.
Wow.
Based on our comprehensive review of safety information, we are requiring updates to drug labels of all prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory.
It seems to be a big problem for women because, like I said, they take it for menstrual pain.
So they're prone to rely on that.
And every woman I know...
Relies on it.
It's like, you know what?
A little bit of pain is okay.
I haven't taken ibuprofen, with the exception of if there's some surgery or something where I'm required to take it.
But I haven't taken it in...
Six years.
Like, I avoid it.
And I just deal with pain, you know, menstrual pain.
And other pain, I just don't...
It's not that big of a deal.
You start to get used to it.
But I got my mom this Mariva, this curcumin phosphatidylcholine complex.
And I told her, I was like, take four of these a day, which is two grams.
She's got arthritis and all sorts of chronic pain.
And I have to...
It's hard for her.
I'm trying to, like, get her on the right diet and all that.
But...
Compliance is an issue, but if she starts to notice some changes with something easy, then it's like, oh, I do see this kind of working, you know, so that's kind of my goal.
But she said it's been helping with her pain, and also she's more mobile and stuff.
I'm actually like, I'm thinking the, it's the, so there was a study, did I talk about this study that was done that compared it to ibuprofen?
So this clinical study that compared people that took the Meriva, curcumin, in the phosphatidylcholine complex.
They took two grams a day, and it was comparable, the anti-pain relief was comparable to 800 milligrams of ibuprofen or 1,000 milligrams of acetaminophen.
The other question that I wanted to make sure that I asked you, because we talked about this through email, was I know that you've done a lot of work on the benefits of sauna and the heat shock proteins from sauna, and I was asking you, because I recently, not recently, but over the last year, I really got heavily into hot yoga, and I'm like, I wonder if that's what's going on here, because I leave these classes, and I swear to God, a fucking asteroid could hit my car, and I'd be like, well, I guess I don't have a car anymore.
Sat Nam, Namaste.
You get so chilled out from doing that.
There's something going on that's akin to some sort of a drug response.
When you're doing the hot yoga, you're making dynorphin.
Dynorphin, so while you're doing it, it's kind of like physically uncomfortable.
You're holding these poses and you're like, ah, you know, it's hot.
But when you get out, because of the whole effect on the mu opioid receptor, you have more of them.
That endorphin that you released or that endorphin you're going to release an hour later when you see your kids or whatever good thing happens, man, it's going to be like awesome.
Well, we had it, like, against the wall, but it, like, wasn't hung on the wall, so it was, like, leaning, you know, because cheap and whatever, just busy.
It's going to cause you to release dynorphin because you're overheating, right?
That's the way your sweat is supposed to help you cool.
So you're also releasing dynorphin.
There hasn't been a study on hot yoga.
I get this question a lot.
There hasn't been a study on steam rooms.
There's been a couple of studies on hot baths or jacuzzis, but not looking at the brain, looking at other things.
Personally, if you just think about the mechanisms, I think that it's very likely, if you're pushing yourself to sweat, if you feel uncomfortable, then you're doing the right thing.
You're releasing dynorphin, you're getting the heat shock proteins, you're getting all that good stuff.
It's also part of the reason why exercise can become addicting.
People always attribute it to the endorphin release.
I actually think it has a lot to do also with the dynorphin.
The pain you experience, the discomfort you experience is very important because you're actually then having that hormetic...
You can almost think of it as a hormetic response because the discomfort is what's causing you to make more of the new opioid receptors that you're more sensitive to the endorphin and you're more sensitive to that feel good stuff.
It's amazing in the winter because in the winter, the water's actually cold because the water here is not really that cold because it's California.
If it gets cold out, it's like 50.
But when it's 50, the water is actually cold.
So like after hot yoga, you get in there, it's really uncomfortable.
It's hard to breathe.
But when I lived in Boston, there was a guy named Bob Caffarella that I used to do Taekwondo with.
This guy in the middle of January would take cold showers and he'd say that it's good for the spirit.
And he was like the only guy that would do it.
Everybody would just stand there and watch and Bob's gonna go in the shower and he would go in the shower by himself and obviously by himself.
We're going in the shower with him.
But this guy would take these cold showers, and I couldn't imagine why anybody would put themselves through something like that.
But I guess he kind of knew, even back then, there was some sort of a benefit to standing in that freezing cold water, not just mentally, as far as your discipline and your self-control, to be able to stand there and force yourself to do something like that, to have that sort of autonomy over your body like that, but also because there's all these different releases, these powerful Endorphin releases that you're getting from that.
Well, once you go in the ice bath and you go back into the sauna, like, and you're in a 180 degree Fahrenheit sauna, it actually feels like room temperature.
And it's kind of like, whoa.
There's something kind of just cool about it.
Like, you just, you feel really, really good.
There were points when I started to get a little lightheaded and spinny.
Yeah, they contain about 10% of what a grape skin has.
So...
The blueberries, what's really good in blueberries is called anthocyanins.
And anthocyanins are produced as a response.
You know, they're a plant insecticide.
They actually, like, they bind to a certain gene.
The anthocyanin itself recognizes, like, a little sequence of DNA and binds to this gene and, like, turns it on.
And this gene is called NRF2, and it's like a master regulator of all these, like, really good DNA repair enzymes.
Antioxidant enzymes, anti-inflammatory, all these good things.
And so I've been involved in a clinical trial for the past two years, maybe two and a half years now, where my colleagues and I, we've been looking, we've been taking blood from people that are, they're obese, their BMI is about 28 or above.
They're obese, they're insulin- 28 is obese?
Well, they also measure...
No, I mean, BMI is...
30 is actually obese.
We moved the BMI down to 28 because it was like we weren't getting enough people.
You have to consider BMI is not a really good measure of obesity because people that are very muscular and short may also have a high BMI. So you have to also look at waist circumference and other factors, which they are doing.
But but there are a lot of obese people.
There are there are a lot of obese people.
And we're looking at a certain percentage of them that are right on the border of becoming type two diabetics.
So they're insulin resistant.
So their body is not responding to insulin, but they're not type two diabetic clinically yet.
And so we're we're getting we're recruiting these people and we've gotten 50 of them and half of them are getting a.
A freeze-dried blueberry powder that's equivalent to two cups of blueberries.
And it's got lots of anthocyanins and all this other stuff that's in the blueberries.
And the other half is getting a placebo drink, which is blue looking, and they put sugar in it, which is...
But you can't give someone a placebo and not taste like blueberry.
Yeah, so there's definitely some things that are lost.
But the specific things that I'm interested in, like the anthocyanins, are there.
But so what I've been looking at, there's other people that I'm working with that are looking at, you know, markers of inflammation, glucose response, like all the metabolic parameters.
I'm specifically looking at people's damage to their DNA. So like we get white blood cells and they're frozen down and then I look at the DNA and the white blood cells and see how much damage there is.
I do it at baseline, so before they start the blueberry powders.
And these people have a lot of damage because they're obese.
Obesity accelerates damage to DNA. Damage to DNA causes all sorts of problems, but eventually it leads to cancer.
And people that are obese have a two-fold increased risk of multiple cancers.
There's this ridiculous article that I read where it's talking about the positive benefits of being overweight where people are trying to justify being overweight and they were Talking about there's a certain illnesses that people recover from better if they're they're overweight and they were there's very few very strange examples they were using to try to justify being overweight and And the article was also partially in response
to quote-unquote fat shaming.
And I'm like, boy, this is just such a weird justification.
It's so bizarre that your very biology, the thing that gets you through life, that people are so intent on receiving mouth pleasure.
Which is all it is.
I mean, that's what you're doing.
You're shoveling food in your mouth.
You're getting mouth pleasure, and then you're getting the response, the physical response to whatever sugars or anything that your body and your gut bacteria are craving.
But so much into it that you're broadcasting it in the form of this really misleading article that was just designed to make you feel better for being overweight and to justify these choices that you've made, which are terrible, Terrible choices.
There's no benefit whatsoever to being overweight, right?
I mean, being overweight is linked to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, increased risk for type 2 diabetes, increased risk for cancer, increased risk of stroke.
It's increased risk of Alzheimer's disease.
So, I mean, having an increased risk for all those age-related diseases is not good.
It's just people that are fat that are just trying to use confirmation bias and lock into whatever small, weird statistic might exist in regards to maybe they get over a cold better or something.
Actually, obesity starts to cause immunosenescence and problems with your immune system because people that are overweight or obese, they have a lot more inflammation in their body and inflammation takes a lot of energy.
Kit notes that fat tissue as well as hormones it releases improves bodily defense mechanisms by providing vital energy reserves and anti-inflammatory agents.
As a result, despite overweight individuals being more susceptible to serious health issues to begin with, they are less likely to die from them than those who are underweight or even with healthy BMIs.
Heart disease, for example, is four times more likely to claim the life of somebody with a healthy BMI than an individual considered overweight.
The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Insight on Pathogenesis of Lifelong Premature Ejaculation, Inverse Relationship Between Lifelong Premature Ejaculation and Obesity.
Yeah, but you know what?
That's because obese guys aren't getting laid, and they probably jerk off so much they can last forever.
Yeah, and it's also you're trying to help someone.
You want to say, look, we know mechanism, we know there's been studies that show that being overweight causes inflammation.
Your immune system's constantly being active, and that crosses into the brain and causes depression, it causes anxiety, it causes learning and memory problems.
So you may not be working, and that's been shown, you may not be working at your optimum.
You know, being overweight.
You could feel better, you know?
So, it's kind of ridiculous, I think.
I agree with you, and, you know, I have friends that are overweight, and I've always been the person that I feel like I'm lecturing, you know, because it's always, I'm always like, and all these benefits, and I rattle off all this stuff and all this information, and then there's a certain point, it's like, this person probably gets defensive, and Doesn't want to hear it, but I care about them.
And that's actually part of the reason I started making videos and doing what I do with How My Fitness, actually.
Because I was constantly doing this to friends and family members, people I cared about, where it was like, at least if you put something out there, like if you put a video out there or an article or a podcast or something, they don't feel like you're targeting them.
So then you can just go, oh yeah, I talked about that.
Well, it seems to me that there's a certain amount of information just won't get through some people's wall.
Like, they have a wall.
This is what I like to do.
I like to eat cake.
That's it.
And then, you know, like, hey, cake has sugar and sugar is bad and being obese is bad and cancer and blood pressure.
Sorry, that's not getting in.
I'm going home.
I'll have some fucking cake.
It's got a rule.
Like that mouth pleasure that they get from shoving that cake in.
They just can't wait.
And then the craving.
You know, we had talked quite a bit about gut bacteria because of your experience with probiotics and also your experience with antibiotics from recovering from staph infection and how devastating it was to your immune system.
I started going down the rabbit hole with gut bacteria after that because I found it so fascinating how long it took you to recover and how common that experience is from large doses of antibiotics, how devastating it is to the immune system, to overall health, wellness, the way you feel, the way your mood, so many different effects.
One of the things that I found When I was eating a lot of bread and pasta is that I would have a good meal.
Like say I would have like chicken with maybe some vegetables or something like that a nice big healthy meal and I would still be hungry afterwards for sugar.
I would like my body I was stuffed like I ate like a half a chicken I'll eat a half a chicken and my body was like we need a cookie.
like something not a piece of fruit which has the fiber matrix and all these polyphenols by the way polyphenols are plant insecticides it's all we were talking about has all this other good stuff when you take the refined sugar away from that um what happens is when your your gut So your gut digests it, and refined sugar usually is like a glucose...
It's 50% glucose and 50% fructose, and that's sucrose, and that's what's in table sugars, what's in a lot of refined sugars.
What happens is that...
When you cleave the sucrose to the glucose and the fructose, the fructose itself doesn't get absorbed by all the cells.
It only gets metabolized in the liver.
And it does something that's called ATP trapping.
So what it does is it traps ATP, which is the source of energy, and it does this because it's trying to do this whole other complicated enzymatic reaction.
Blah, blah, blah, right?
But what it does is trap the ATP and this sends a signal through the vagal nerve to your brain.
I don't have energy.
And so you don't get satiated.
And so when you eat refined sugars...
This is independent from the gut bacteria craving stuff you're talking about.
I'm not exactly sure how all that works, but what I'm talking about is real.
It's ATP trapping, and it's something that is known to be a cause of why you can eat a bunch of fructose and refined sugar.
And not be satiated.
And so you have to eat more because your body, your brain thinks you haven't been fed because the ATP has been trapped.
It's called ATP trapping.
That's one possibility that could be, could have been happening.
It's really, it's also why a lot of people that eat a lot of refined sugars with sucrose or high fructose corn syrup is the worst when they eat that.
Because then, so when your gut, so the way your gut, okay, let's just, let's compare table sugar, sucrose, to high fructose corn syrup.
Both are bad.
But when you compare the two, because sucrose is got, it's got glucose, I mean, it's got glucose and fructose.
High fructose corn syrup does too, it has more fructose.
But the thing is, is that when the sucrose sees your gut, your gut has something in it called sucrases, which it takes, basically it's, It's slower to cleave and digest the sugar, so it's not like a big bolus that your gut sees.
So it's not as irritating on the gut, because first the sucrases have to cleave the sucrose, and so all this stuff is happening.
Whereas when you get the high-fructose corn syrup, that doesn't happen.
It's a big bolus, and it literally causes a breakdown in your gut barrier.
It's like irritant.
It's an irritant.
The same thing can happen if you take too much of...
I mean, there's lots of other things that happen, but if you take too much like magnesium or something, people can get gut irritation.
It's a big bolus on the gut and it's irritant.
And that's what high fructose corn syrup does.
And there's also then the whole ATP trapping thing is like exponential with high fructose corn syrup.
Okay, here it is the 1970 was first introduced to food and beverage industry of high fructose corn syrup Was first introduced to the food and beverage industry in the 1970s.
That's amazing that that stuff from 1970 until today So in the last 40 plus years has become a massive part of our diets the average this was published in It was like the health organization somewhere in the UK, whatever they call that.
Well, that can happen, but you don't have to have irritable bowel syndrome to have your gut barrier breaking down.
You know, you can have a low level of inflammation, not know it.
But there are certain types of bacteria that can thrive in the condition.
Now, maybe let's say you have a low fiber diet, meaning you're eating a lot of refined sugar.
So it's kind of like the same, right?
You're eating a bunch of refined sugar in place of plants and fiber-rich foods.
There's a certain type of bacteria that can thrive on low fiber, and it's a type of bacteria that I don't know the name of, but they have little flagella, things that move, you know?
Little spermazole.
Yeah, exactly, like that.
And so they'll swim up.
So your bacteria are supposed to be in the colon, the very, very end of your intestines, right?
You're not supposed to have a bunch of bacteria in your small intestine.
Well, they'll swim up to the small intestine because that's where the food, that's where the proteins and the sugars and the lipids are all getting absorbed.
They'll swim up there.
And this is often referred to as bacterial overgrowth.
Small intestine bacterial overgrowth is what the technical term is.
Bacterial overgrowth is actually when your bacteria are starting to grow in your small intestine.
And what happens is when you have bacteria in your small intestine, it releases something called zonulin.
And this work has all been done by Alicio Fasano.
I think he's at Massachusetts Children's Hospital.
He discovered this.
So he's a rock star for figuring this stuff out.
So when you have this intestinal overgrowth, you release something called zonulin.
And zonulin is also what's released when gluten, when your body sees gluten.
Zonulin, it literally, like you have the gut barrier and there's like these junctions with the barrier.
It opens up the junctions, the tight junctions.
And in people that don't have like celiac or they don't have a really, really poor gut health, they close.
It's like a transient.
It's like open, close, open, close.
And so when they open, your inflammatory cells can see the bacteria that's there.
Usually the barrier separates them because what do immune cells do when they see bacteria?
Fire away!
War!
So the small intestinal bacterial overgrowth does that, and so does gluten.
Gluten also causes onulin to be released.
So that would cause bloating and inflammation, things like that.
God, it's so crazy how much your diet actually affects your overall health and how few people really consider it when they're thinking about what they're eating and the consequences of what they're eating.
That's one of the reasons why I actually, I eat a lot of wide diversity because there's lots of different types of fiber.
There's, you know, fiber is not just like one nutrient.
You know, people always tweet at me.
Oh, can I take pectin?
Can I, can I take inulin?
And, you know, which is a type of fiber.
And it's like, well, yeah, you can.
But, you know, these different types of bacteria, there's so many different types of bacteria and they're, they're, We're eating different types of fiber, and we don't even know all what each of them are eating.
We know the best thing we can do right now is to get a broad spectrum.
In plants, there's fiber that are called ligands and cellulose.
In fruits, there's pectins like apple.
Citrus peel have pectins.
Beta-glucans are in mushrooms or in oats.
Resistant starch is in legumes, beans.
There's inulin, which is in plants and also like onions, artichokes, garlic, and all these different types of fiber feeding different types of bacteria.
And the best thing you want is like a diverse bacterial set.
So feeding them all different types of fiber is good.
Plus you're getting all the plant hormetic compounds, And then you're getting all the micronutrients.
You know, you're talking about Candida growth in your stomach and how your gut is responding to all this sugar by this massive production of, or massive, here it is.
Change as easily, you know, so also you don't have a lot of willpower some people are just not good at like saying okay This is what I'm not doing this anymore, you know like this I'm done doing that boom, you know, I mean I don't know how other people's brains work So I don't I don't know what the pull is But I know for me when when I try to quit something like I'm gonna quit sugar Boy that fucking first week or so is hard because the pull it's like there's this desire to cheat go come on man Man,
one cookie's not going to fuck anything up.
It's not going to be that big of a deal.
There's this pull to have sugar.
And when I kicked sugar for...
I've done it twice now, but the first time I did it, one of the most disturbing things was the headaches.
Two or three days in, I was getting these headaches.
I was like, oh my God, I'm getting sugar detox headaches.
That's what it was.
It had to be.
It was the only thing that was different.
I was eating all the same normal things, but I wasn't taking any sugar.
Anything that had sugar, I wouldn't take it.
And I was getting headaches.
And most people...
If you don't have a rock-solid, determined mentality for this type of stuff, it's really hard.
If you're wishy-washy on your diet, well, I'm just going to try to eat healthy.
My friends have told me that before, they try to lose weight.
What are you doing?
I'm just going to try to eat healthier.
You ain't going to do shit.
You're not going to do shit.
Like, you have to have, like, a rigid set of rules.
The lab that I was doing my postdoc in, I've talked about this before, they designed a bar intentionally to try and fill micronutrient gaps in people that are obese.
So it has vitamin D in it, it has magnesium, vitamin K, it has DHA, omega-3, it has all these good micronutrients in it.
And then they try to put some dark chocolate so that it doesn't taste like crap.
Sprinkle a little bit.
There's very little sugar in it.
But, you know, people don't like them because they don't taste good.
How much of that is a learned response as well, you know?
I mean, my my postdoc advisor, Bruce Ames, he's 87 years old, going on 88.
And I've been to many different dinner parties at his house and he's American and his wife is Italian.
So she immigrated here from Italy.
But every single time I go to a dinner party, the dessert is always fresh fruit.
I mean, it's just super normal.
It's always some sort of fresh fruit, metally she'll cut up, and sometimes she'll put a little bit of some alcohol or something on there, like amaretto.
You know, so the dark chocolate's one I think that people that are really craving that can feel good because there's EGCG in dark chocolate, which is what's in green tea.
EGCG is one of those normal plant compounds that are doing a hormetic response.
It's been shown to cause brain cells to grow.
It's anti-cancer.
It kills cancer cells.
It also is really good for your skin.
It prevents your skin collagenase from being broken down.
You need a certain amount of vitamin E, which is antioxidant.
You need a certain amount of vitamin C, which is an antioxidant and a cofactor.
You need it to make collagen.
But in just the antioxidant form, it pales in comparison to glutathione-related enzymes we have.
Superoxide dismutase, all these like systems that we have in our body that are designed to prevent, you know, these things called oxidation, oxidative stress from happening.
So when you're taking, in fact, some people, they have a, so we have this gene that can use glutathione in our body, takes the glutathione that we make in our body, and it puts it to like prevent damage from happening to our cells.
There are people that have a more active version of this, that if they take vitamin E supplemental, it actually does them harm.
23andMe is a genetic test that tests for a variety of these polymorphisms.
And they give a report that's kind of...
They don't tell you about that gene.
You have to like...
I don't know if Promethease does.
Promethease is a tool that costs $5.
I've talked about it before in your podcast.
You can run your 23andMe data through it, and it tells you all these polymorphisms, what you have and what they mean.
But I also have a tool that's out today, actually.
Really?
It's the beta version of it, so it's basic functionality.
But that gene's on there.
The GSTP1, glutathione one, is on there.
So this tool that I've got out is free.
So people can use it for free.
And I'm going to add, you know, a bunch more genes to it.
But right now there's a basic set of genes that are interesting.
Genes that are involved in, you know, making vitamin D. Can you convert the vitamin D3 you're taking into the steroid hormone or the vitamin D3 you get from the sun?
Some people have a polymorphism where they don't do that as well.
I'm going to give the thousand-high-mile summary of it, where it's basically a way to go and fix a gene that may be, like, let's say you've got some gene that you can't repair, you know...
The alcohol-induced damage as well, which also increases the risk for traumatic brain injury by like tenfold.
It's bad.
So you say, I don't want that ApoE4 gene because it's going to lead to Alzheimer's disease.
It's going to make my traumatic brain injury lead to Alzheimer's disease.
It also does other things.
Well, CRISPR is a technology that can...
Go and recognize the gene you want.
So it recognizes just a small sequence of DNA that you put on it.
So you put this little sequence of DNA because you know what the sequence of the gene is.
And it recognizes its complementary pair.
And it goes in and it cuts it out.
And it replaces it with what you actually put there, which is the right version of it.
So it can go, cut out a bad thing, and put the right thing in.
So it's a way of going...
Instead of...
Gene engineering up until CRISPR, the way it was done was basically you would put a gene in and it would just go anywhere and it wouldn't replace the bad one necessarily.
I want to talk for a little bit about the cryotherapy because this is something that I emailed you when there was a disturbing article that was sort of poo-pooing the benefits of cryotherapy.
And the article was, I thought it was really poorly done, poorly researched.
And it was also, they studied really subjective things like how sore you felt after exercise and whether or not it benefited from that.
But there are real positive benefits of cryotherapy that are measurable.
But the point being, that article came out and all these people were saying, oh, see, I told you cryotherapy was bullshit.
I'm like, oh, my God, what a piss-poor article.
And it was all talking about soreness.
And one of the things that he said that really drove me crazy was you'd get just as much benefit from a cool-down and a stretch after a workout.
I'm like...
Tell that to these fucking people that I see that go there all the time that do it twice a day because they have severe arthritis and it's the only thing that's given them any form of freedom of movement of their hands.
I know a bunch of people that go there that have had some really debilitating arthritis and this has given them relief where nothing else is giving it to them other than pretty severe pharmaceutical drugs or ibuprofen at high levels or what you were talking about.
There's a lady that goes to my thing, but she was raving about how she can finally stretch her hands out.
Her hands had been locked in this position for years.
I mean, the cold itself is a hormetic stressor that is activating a variety of anti-inflammatory pathways, antioxidant pathways, you know, and it's also, last time I think on the podcast we talked about it increases norepinephrine.
Well, norepinephrine itself, so cryotherapy and cold water immersion are two forms of, you know, cold exposure.
Cryotherapy, just two minutes at like a minus 180 Fahrenheit can increase norepinephrine twofold.
That's, you know, twofold over what you were before you went in.
And norepinephrine, in addition to the brain benefits we were talking about, how it makes you feel good, how it helps with learning, it also is a very prone anti-inflammatory.
So it inhibits the production of TNF-alpha, which is So it's kind of like in arthritis, TNF-alpha is kind of like going haywire.
You're making too much TNF-alpha.
And what happens is TNF-alpha is a signaling molecule to your immune cells that says, hey, there's an infection here.
Because that's normally what happens when you release TNF-alpha is because there's some bacteria or something that you need to kill.
And so your immune cells, all they see is the signal.
They don't know that it's because your gut cells and your immune cells in your gut are seeing bacteria because of your poor diet or whatever.
And so that's getting into the bloodstream and causing chronic inflammation.
It doesn't know that.
All it knows is that this means there's a threat.
And so they start to increase the production of your immune cells make hypochlorite, which is like bleach.
So you're making bleach in your body to kill things.
And that's happening That's going to cause some tissue damage.
It's going to cause pain.
They also make hydrogen peroxide.
You make that and your immune cells will make that.
So cryotherapy inhibits the signaling molecule so that your immune cells quiet down because now they're not seeing that signal that says, come on, hey, fire up, fire up.
It's not there.
So that's a good thing to inhibit TNF-alpha.
And like I said, with the collagenases as well.
But there are so many.
I just spent two weeks just researching and reading.
I've been doing some cold exposures, you know, like cold shower and also jumping in the ocean, ice bath.
And I really liked the cryotherapy that I did last time we were here.
And, you know, so I've been very interested in it, like understanding why you feel so good.
And so I did some reading on it.
And there's so many different positive hormetic benefits from doing cryotherapy.
So you have, you know, the anti-inflammatory We're good to go.
You could be taking all the liposomal glutathione you want.
It's not going to matter if you don't have the enzymes active to use it.
So you could take liposomal glutathione and that's great.
You make glutathione inside of your cells.
We can't make as much of it as we get older.
But if you take it and you don't have the enzymes that use it to actually do the good stuff active, then it doesn't matter.
So cryotherapy was shown to activate two different glutathione-related enzymes, which is pretty awesome.
Well, there always seems to be some sort of a rationalization with a lot of the debunking, like whether it's the benefits of exercise, whether it's the benefits of cryotherapy.
It's almost like a rationalization for not doing it.
It's like you're looking for an excuse to not do it and not really very objective.
And there are a lot of scientists that I know that are very smart, extremely smart, but they are in that loop where it's like just they have to debunk and criticize.
And it's like, you know, at some point, huge discoveries are made by like...
Connecting the dots and like getting past that like I mean you have to be critical being critical is very important But you also like I think there's a certain threshold where you just start to like, you know, you get to this like spiral But was also was infuriating about this is the data is out there.
Well, actually, the study that he referred to was a meta-analysis, and it was subjective, but it actually came to the conclusion that there were benefits.
However, it said more studies need to be done because there wasn't large enough sample sizes and the quality of data was poor because there were not double-blinded placebo-controlled clinical trials.
And I have to say to you, what he recited in that article, there was a positive effect of the cryo.
But the problem is that because they...
Follow it up with, oh, well, it's poor quality, basically poor science.
The reality is, is that you can't do a double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial with cryotherapy.
Like, you're going to be cold, and you're going to be put in this chamber where there's, like, cold, or you're not, and you're going to know if you're not as cold.
You know, so anyways, I thought that was ridiculous.
I was just like, whatever, I'm in Oregon.
I'm going to read about...
Because I know, I've experienced that there's definitely something going on.
And one of the things that happens is the norepinephrine.
And when you release that norepinephrine, it activates a pathway inside of your cells that basically causes your energy metabolism to ramp up because you're trying to generate heat.
Basically, your body is saying, I don't want to die.
I need to make heat.
And so a couple of ways it can do that.
One, it can shiver.
And shivering is when your muscles start to contract.
And that...
It requires energy for your muscles to twitch.
It's not very thermodynamically favorable, so it's not a good way to generate heat, but you generate heat because you have to ramp up to twitch.
But then what happens after you've been exposed, and actually this happened to me because we did the cryo twice.
The first time I did it, I was shivering.
The entire time I was shivering.
It was really crazy because I've never shivered like that in my life.
But the second time I went in, I did not shiver.
And after reading about it, what happens is your body quickly adapts.
So you adapt, and what happens is non-shivering thermogenesis.
So the norepinephrine causes your mitochondria, which are the energy-producing little organelles inside of your cells.
Well, it causes them in your adipose tissue to get activated.
And it does this by increasing the expression of a gene called UCP1, which basically...
It freaks your mitochondria out because your mitochondria are kind of like batteries.
They're charged.
They have a negative charge on the inside and a positive charge on the outside.
Well, UCP1 totally uncouples that so that there's no more charge.
And that charge is very important because when that charge is there, your body knows, okay, I've been making energy because the way you make the charge is by making energy.
So when the charge goes away, your body's like, oh my God, I've got no energy.
So it just starts to ramp up fat metabolism.
So it does that, and you start to make more mitochondria.
So you're making more mitochondria in your fat cells, and this is often called brown fat.
So you can actually, the reason it's called brown fat is because when you look at a fat cell under the microscope, if it has more mitochondria, then it looks brown.
So you actually start to burn fat, and you have this thermogenic, because you're burning fat, it's creating heat as a byproduct, so you're warming your body, but it has this nice side effect of burning fat, which people like.
And the more you expose yourself to the cold, the more you're browning your fat, the more you're increasing those mitochondria in your fat, which means the next time you're in the cold, you can tolerate it longer.
So people that have been exposing themselves to cold, like yourself, when you're doing the cryo, you know, often, you actually can tolerate the colder for longer periods of time because you have more mitochondria in your fat cells.
And this allows you to then generate more heat.
So and this has been shown in people, people that have been exposed to cold that they've been shown to increase their their brown adipose tissue by like 38% if they're exposed to 10 days of 50 degree air, like outside air, just regular air.
So like six hours a day out in New York in the, I don't know, pre-winter, fall, I don't know, something like that, being out there for six hours for 10 days in a row.
Men were able to increase their brown adipose tissue by like 38% or something like that.
That's why people from the East Coast or from the Northeast that move to California and then they go back during the winter, they go, oh, my blood got too thin.
Well, there really is like a physical factor of your body not being accustomed to dealing with cold blood.
And that's really how cold got really popularized because people wanted to use it as a hack to lose weight.
So they were like, oh, if I do these cold showers, I use it for the brain benefits because I notice I feel really good and also more focused.
So I like that.
And a lot of people I've talked to have felt the same way.
But then I think the other part of this article...
Was the effects of it blunting some of the strength training.
And, you know, I talk about this in this report that I wrote or in the podcast that I released on, and it's so complicated.
I had to, like, sit there and literally just read for, like, two weeks to try to figure it out because, you know, the problem is that exercise is a hormetic stress.
Cold is a hormetic stress.
So exercise itself, you need some of the inflammation.
But the inflammation that's happening happens while you're exercising and up to one hour after.
One hour after, that's when the whole hormetic response kicks in.
And this has been shown in multiple studies.
One hour seems to be when the anti-inflammatory response kicks in.
So you've generated the inflammation and then now you've got the anti-inflammatory effects.
If you do a cold exposure within that hour after exercising, it's possible you may blunt some of the inflammatory effects that the exercise is inducing because the cold is activating anti-inflammatory genes too early.
Now, I don't know that for certain, but I do know that there was one study that showed strength training if you did cryotherapy immediately after.
It was actually cold water immersion, which is not the same as the cryo chamber, that it blunted some of the anabolic signaling.
And so there was like some of the muscle mass was not gained.
But, you know, there's other studies that have been done that have shown, for some reason, all the endurance guys, they always wait an hour.
It's kind of weird.
So what I'm wondering is if people that are doing this research, like, Sit down, take a step back.
You know, people are always in this, I gotta publish, I gotta publish, you know.
There's a real big publish or perish mentality in science where it's like, your bread and butter depends on you publishing.
And so you're just constantly trying to get that data out there.
But you really, I think...
Things are so complicated.
Just sit down, take a look at everything that's out there and start to go, wait a minute.
There's lots of little details that need to be considered to design this trial correctly.
So I'm hoping that, at least for those people doing strength training, that they'll do one where they actually wait until an hour.
Because there's been other studies where that strength training in combination with cryotherapy done much later, even the next day, there were actually benefits, performance benefits.
Like they were able to do more of those leg curl things.
You know, so, you know, I don't really know what's going on, but what I do know is that it seems as though it's very likely that doing the cryotherapy, like, immediately after...
And now, then again, if you're talking about someone that's doing, like, there's been studies that have been published showing that people that are doing two bouts of exercise, so they're, like, riding a bike and then they're waiting, whatever, 30 minutes, and then they go and...
Run or something.
If they do cold water immersion in between those, they actually have performance enhancements.
You know, if they wait...
Sorry, if they do it between two bouts of exercise.
Some of that's due to the fact that the cold water...
It seems to improve heart rate variability.
It's actually been shown to improve it by like two to threefold.
So heart rate variability is the change in oscillation between heartbeats.
And it's also people...
People judge the heart recovery from a workout.
So as soon as you're done with an intense workout, the ability of your heart rate to lower immediately within minutes, that's like a marker of heart rate variability.
And it's supposed to be good because your heart's able to deal with these stressful changes, you know, because when you're making cortisol or something, your heart starts racing more or some of these other stress hormones.
So it's been shown to improve that and being able to have your heart rate slower right after a workout and then you're immediately going to do a workout again, you could imagine there would be an performance enhancement with So, there's also a difference in the physiological response between cold water immersion and cryotherapy, right?
Well, it depends.
There are differences in the ability for those two different modalities to extract heat from the body.
If we're talking about submerging ourselves in cold water up to our shoulders, Water or ice is much better at extracting heat from the body than air.
But surface area also plays a role in the temperature change.
So if you're sitting in cold water that's 57 degrees, that's not as cold as going into a minus 180 or whatever cryo chamber.
But you can also sit in the cold water for a lot longer.
But a lot of the effects are mediated from norepinephrine.
But listen, 20 seconds at 40-degree versus two minutes.
So imagine staying in the water for five minutes.
And this has been shown.
So if you have someone that stays in water, 57 degree water, for an hour, they increase their norepinephrine by fivefold instead of twofold.
So you have a more robust response.
So it could be good, but it could be bad.
If you're talking about doing it right after a strength training session and jump into cold water for five minutes, that could have some very potent anti-inflammatory effects.
So there have been studies that have shown that cryotherapy lowers C-reactive protein, which would be an inflammatory marker, and then the glutathione-related enzymes going up, and also superoxide dismutase, that would be a marker for inflammation because there's also decreased inflammation when you have more of those.
So cryotherapy does.
And then also there's been measurements of TNF-alpha going down, like I said.
Also another Marker that macrophages release, macrophage, inhibitory protein or something.
Some inflammatory molecule that's made.
There's less of it when cold water...
I can't remember if it was cold water immersion or cryotherapy, but it's cold exposure.
And that was mediated through norepinephrine.
Norepinephrine mediates a lot of stuff.
It's mediating the brain effects.
It's mediating the thermogenesis.
It's anti-inflammatory.
It's anti-pain.
People get injected with norepinephrine in their spine to alleviate pain.
Like I said, there's the bad article that was the anabolic blunting effects, which was done immediately after exercise, which made a huge splash because it's like, whoa, your gains.
And then you have the hardcore, very skeptical people that are like, well...
The quality of data, you know, well, the thing is, is that there's a large body of data.
And sometimes if you can't have a double-blinded placebo-controlled trial, then you have to look at mechanism.
You have to look at animal studies combined with human studies.
You have to understand what's going on.
You can't refute the norepinephrine.
We know that norepinephrine is doing all these things, you know.
So I think you just have to be very comprehensive, especially when there's the argument that there's no placebo-controlled trials or It's too subjective.
But there's lots of ways that it's not subjective.
And this has been measured in people.
People have measured C-reactive protein.
They've measured these enzyme activities.
They've measured these inflammatory molecules in people, also in animals.
When I say that there are absolutely health benefits from doing cold exposure for your brain, anti-inflammatory, for thermogenesis.
This is actually a target.
I know a lot of researchers that are working on this.
They're trying to find a way to pharmacologically brown fat because it increases fat burning and weight loss.
So the fish oil, it was two grams of EPA and one gram of DHA. And it increased fat burning by like 27% or something during exercise.
And then at resting, it increased it by something in the teens, 17 or 13%.
And that was just at rest, fat burning.
And the way it was shown, the way it did it was by increasing UCP-1.
and uncoupling the mitochondria and causing, you're basically causing your fat to make more mitochondria and browning the fat.
Super cool.
I've been taking high doses official, but yeah, to answer your question that the plant version, and this is always a problem with the, I get this question a lot from people that are vegan or vegetarian, you know, they're like, well, I get my omega-3 from the plant version, alpha-linolenic acid.
And actually there's a lot of important things to consider.
One is that alpha-linolenic acid is poorly converted.
All these are long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Alpha-linolenic acid is 18. EPA is 20. Eicosapentaenoic acid, which is found in fish.
And then DHA is 22. So basically, your body will take the alpha-linolenic, which is in plants, flaxseeds, Walnuts.
And it will start adding carbons on to make the other ones because you need the other ones.
30% of your brain is made of DHA. I mean, DHA is very important.
But the thing is, is that men actually only convert about 8% of alpha-linolenic acid into EPA and only 4% into DHA. Not very much.
Now, estrogen actually can increase the gene that converts those because...
Women are the ones that are, you know, carrying the child and DHA is very important for the developing brain.
Very, very important.
So it makes sense that nature would make a way to be able to do that with the plant version.
But the thing is, is that there's been a study that showed that people that take preformed ALA, alpha linoleic acid, have to take 33.5 times more than preformed DHA or EPA to get the same amount of DHA and EPA in the brain.
It's a lot.
There's a lot.
So there are ways around...
There are vegan or vegetarian-friendly sources, which would be microalgae oil.
I personally think that vegans and vegetarians should take microalgae oil.
If I was a vegan, which I can't ever see myself becoming one, but I would absolutely take that.
But the ones that are eating healthy, they're getting a wide, broad spectrum of plants.
They're getting different fibers.
They're getting the good micronutrients in plants, the magnesium, the vitamin K, the folate, vitamin C. And they're getting all the hormetic compounds in the plants.
So those are really good things.
But the problem is...
Um, is that they're, they're more nutritionally deficient in things that most people in the Western world are not because the problem with the, like the United States in general isn't that we eat enough meat here.
Most people, unless you're vegan or vegetarian, people are eating enough meat.
The problem is people aren't eating enough of their greens.
And so I usually focus on micronutrients that are found in greens because that's what people are not getting enough of.
But there are important micronutrients that are in meat, um, That vegans and vegetarians are more subject to being deficient in.
B12. So B12 and iron are two really important ones.
Both of these are very...
So B12 is very important for...
The production of neurotransmitters and myelin in the brain.
Both iron and B12 are.
Most people think of iron as being important for your blood cells, and it is.
It's bound to something called heme, which is a protein inside hemoglobin that's important for transporting oxygen to your tissues because you need oxygen to make energy.
So, but the other thing that Iron's doing is it's also important for making myelin in the brain.
Myelin is what surrounds the axons of your neurons and it allows them to communicate quickly.
It allows electrical signals to It signals to be transported quickly.
So that's important.
And then it makes neurotransmitters.
Like you need iron to make serotonin in your brain.
And it's one of the reasons why during pregnancy, iron is very...
Like if you have iron deficiency during pregnancy, it can cause abnormal brain structure.
It can cause like birth defects because it shapes the structure and the wiring of the brain.
So that's, you know, obviously here...
In the United States, we have supplements, we have access to supplements, and you can take a sublingual B12. It's a little bit of a different world than it is somewhere in a developing country.
Because they're eating a variety of things that have the bacteria.
Like there's certain strains of mushrooms that have it.
If you're a vegan or a vegetarian and you're just eating those mushrooms, you'd have to eat an enormous amount to get the RDA. But it's more concentrated in animal meat, which are constantly eating it.
So it gets concentrated in their tissues because B12 is required as a cofactor for a lot of enzymes in multiple organs, including their muscles.
You know, every time they're eating whatever has the B12 on it, they're concentrating it.
So there are certain types of bacteria that make B12, but I don't think vegans or vegetarians can just get it from that.
They have to eat a lot of it, like one of those crazy— So the argument that a vegan can get enough B12 from just a standard vegan diet without supplementing, you don't buy that?
So there's a few researchers, UCLA actually is where, I think one of them just retired, but there was some researchers at UCLA that were studying the effects of B12 and iron deficiency hormones.
On cognition, on, you know, learning, cognition, behavior.
And there was a bunch of studies that were associative studies, like that crappy, premature ejaculation, obesity, where it's like, you know, these two things are associated, but we don't know if it's causing.
And so there was an association with low B12, low iron, and poor IQ, lower IQ, poor cognition, poor behavior, and But there was no real causal, you know, role identified.
And so there's a couple of researchers at UCLA that did two different clinical trials, where there was 12 different schools in Tanzania that were selected.
And these clinical trials lasted two years, and there was two of them.
The first trial was 575 kids or around 600 and the other one was like 370 something so closer to 400.
So total we're talking a total of about a thousand children school children like these were elementary school children.
And the typical thing they eat in Tanzania is it's like a porridge.
I forgot the name of it but it's a porridge and it has vegetables.
It has beans and it has corn and that's their standard porridge.
And so the trial was designed where these school kids, they were given a snack every single day for two years.
Either the porridge, or they got the porridge with a glass of milk, or they got the porridge with meat.
And every three to six months, there were arithmetic and reading tests done.
So they were looking, trying to measure, you know, cognitive performance.
They measured physical performance and muscle mass.
And what the results were of this study was that the porridge with the meat, so the school children that were eating the meat with the porridge, scored better on math arithmetic.
They scored better on reading tests.
They had more muscle mass and they grew more than the other school children that did not get the meat.
And they also, so that's all quantitative, they also performed They were more likely to exhibit leadership qualities out in the playground.
That's a little more subjective, but still interesting.
So the bottom line here is that, you know, obviously in Tanzania, they're not supplementing, they're not, you know, taking B12 iron.
They're also, there's also essential amino acids that are present in meat, which our bodies can't make, you know, which are found in some, you can find some plant sources of it, like quinoa or hemp seed has it, but they're not supplementing with that stuff over in Tanzania.
So if you don't have access to those things and you're just eating vegetables and beans and corn, then you will have nutritional deficiencies and other things.
Now, the question is, if those children were given a B12 supplement or iron, would that have made a difference?
Probably.
Probably would have.
I mean, there's been studies in the United States that have been done on school children that have been deficient in certain micronutrients, and they were given a multivitamin and an omega-3 supplement, fish oil.
And only the ones that were deficient to begin with improved, like, did better on reading and arithmetic tests.
So there's definitely, you know, an argument to be made there.
But I think...
I think for vegetarians, we live in a very different time.
Obviously, there's protein powders and quinoa and hemp seed and B12 sublingual.
Well, with iron, it's kind of tricky, I just want to mention, because, you know, iron, a lot of vegans think that they can get their iron from their diet, because iron's also found in beans.
It's in plants, it's in spinach, but the way it's bound, it's bound in something called phytate, which we cannot digest.
And so the bioavailability of iron is 1.8 times less in plant form than in meat.
Meat, it's bound to something called heme, which gives blood cells their red color, which is why red meat has more of it.
But people that are vegetarian, that think they're getting enough iron, I really think they should get their levels measured.
So women lose a lot of iron during menstruation.
So the RDA for iron for men is 8 milligrams a day, for women it's 18.
So already on top of that, if you're a vegetarian or vegan, multiplying by 1.8 is already important if you're just getting it from food.
Because the bioavailability of the iron is almost twofold less than from meat.
So that's one thing to consider.
And the other thing is also athletes.
So when you're like an endurance athlete, you actually – hemolysis occurs, red blood cells, lice.
When you're doing, like, very intense endurance training.
And so you lose iron there, too, because you're losing red blood cells.
Iron's tricky because you don't want too much of it.
It's like, if you're supplementing, like, it's not...
There's no guesswork here.
There's no guesswork with iron.
Having...
So having too much...
When you take too much free...
Supplemental iron, it can cause free iron inside your cells, and that is dynamite.
It reacts with enzymes in your body, and it screws up energy production.
Vitamin C dramatically increases the absorption of non-heme iron.
So iron that's not found in meat.
So even actually people, vegetarians that are eating a bunch of beans, legumes, first of all, they need to eat 1.8 times more than they would have meat.
But they also, if they eat it with citrus fruit or have some berries or broccoli is high in vitamin C, have it with your beans.
That would make a difference in increasing the bioavailability of the iron.
That's a fascinating aspect of food supplement or supplementation is eating it with the right foods and making sure that you, you know, some things you don't want to eat with any food at all and some things you want to have on a full stomach.
Or you want fat like the fat soluble vitamins, carotenoids, even vitamin D. The vitamins that are soluble in fat are the bioavailability is increased when you take it with fat.
And so that would be another one, actually.
A lot of vegetarians probably think they're getting enough vitamin A because beta carotene, which is in plants, can be converted into vitamin A. Vitamin A is actually...
It actually becomes a hormone, and it works much like vitamin D. Not quite the same, but it does change.
It activates genes, turns genes off, does all this stuff.
So it's very important for immune function, for your eye, for vision.
But the bioavailability of beta-carotene is very low.
We don't absorb it very well.
Fat increases that bioavailability, so taking it with fat because they are fat-soluble.
The carotenoids, beta-carotene is fat-soluble.
And also, there are gene polymorphisms that People have.
So they don't convert beta carotene into vitamin A very well.
Like my brother-in-law has one where he doesn't at all very well.
So he has to actually get vitamin A from an animal source.
Or you can get retinal acetate.
I don't know.
I think it's synthetic.
But that's something that some vegetarians may consider.
Not all of them, but some.
Just considering whether or not they have that gene polymorphism.
I think the main ones are iron, B12... Omega-3.
And vitamin D, you know, 70% of the population doesn't get enough vitamin D. But vegetarians often think they're getting enough vitamin D because you make it from the sun.
But, you know, the problem is that so many factors regulate that because...
So UVB radiation has to hit your skin to make it.
And so if you're wearing sunscreen or you have a lot of melanin, so if you've got like dark pigmentation that blocks it out, latitude where you live, so UVB rays don't hit the atmosphere at certain times of the year in certain regions.
So you're only three or four months out of the year can make vitamin D from the sun.
And then age.
As you get older, a 70-year-old makes only 25% of the vitamin D that they made when they were 20 years old.
Yeah, so that's a very confusing literature, I think.
Saturated fats in and of themselves aren't necessarily bad, unless you have...
There are certain gene polymorphisms in...
So PPR alpha, PPR gamma, FTO genes.
If you have a gene polymorphism in one of these three genes...
Because when you eat saturated fat, it needs to be metabolized, transported to the right place.
You don't want it just sitting around as fatty acids in your bloodstream.
Well, those genes that I just mentioned, they play a role in doing that.
Some people don't activate them very well.
And so if they have a high saturated fat and a low poly or monounsaturated fat intake, they can actually have increased type 2 diabetes.
They can have poor glucose response because fatty acids are sitting around in their bloodstream and antagonizing the insulin receptor, doing all sorts of things.
But if they have a higher polyunsaturated fat, which is found in fish or nuts or monounsaturated fat, so avocados, nuts, olive oil, if they have a higher ratio of those, then it activates those genes more.
And so they don't actually have those negative effects.
So that's one thing.
But that's the smaller thing.
The real problem with saturated fat is actually sugar.
The problem is that saturated fat increases the production of LDL cholesterol, which isn't necessarily bad, unless you have massive inflammation from eating refined carbohydrates, and specifically from eating sucrose or fructose corn syrup.
And this has been shown actually a colleague of mine, Ron Krause.
He's a brilliant cardio cardiologist.
And he's actually one of the guys that he discovered a test to measure what really the bad part of cholesterol, which isn't just LDL.
It's actually a small, dense particle.
And that small, dense particles formed only when you have the saturated fat plus the high fructose corn syrup or the refined sugar because it's causing inflammation.
So I did a podcast with him.
It's a little technical.
But like my mother-in-law, she watched the video and she had done a lipid panel where her physician had measured her LDL particle, measured particle size, measured triglycerides, all these things and wanted to get her on statins because she had really high cholesterol.
Turns out, I knew why she had high cholesterol.
She has high cholesterol because she has gene polymorphism in the ApoE4, which prevents cholesterol from being recycled.
So that's why she has high cholesterol.
So she watched this video and she learned all about the particle size and that it's the small dense ones that are really an indicator of cardiovascular disease.
And her small dense were like, she had none.
It was all the good kind.
LDL cholesterol is important because anytime you make a new cell, you need cholesterol.
Cholesterol is made of cell membranes.
Every time you're making a new kidney or liver cell, you need cholesterol.
When you have damage, when you hit yourself or you're doing your workout and your muscles get a little damaged, you need cholesterol there to repair that damage.
So you need it.
If you don't have it, you're in trouble.
But anyways, the point is that the saturated fat, that's why there's so much confusion.
It's because, one, gene polymorphisms.
Two, People are now starting to tease apart that it's actually the combination of eating refined carbohydrates and saturated fat.
If you just have the saturated fat and you're eating vegetables and good things as well, then you're not going to have all that inflammation.
You're not going to make small, dense LDL particles.
I talked about this with you last time.
That's what makes the small, dense LDL's inflammation.
So when you have the small, dense, because a certain protein gets obscured, it causes it to stick to the walls of your blood vessels very easy.
So that's kind of the danger, because then you start to accumulate a plaque there.
So this totally makes sense when you talk about the amount of heart disease that exists in people that have this typical American diet, which is high in saturated fat, but also high in high fructose corn syrup, processed sugars.
I mean, here's the thing, and this is the problem with all those studies, those studies that are correlations, is that you're looking at Yes, they're eating meat.
Yes, they're eating saturated fat.
But they're also not eating vegetables.
They're also eating cake and crackers and chips and hamburger buns and all that stuff.
Some people can have a problem when they have too high of a saturated fat intake, even if they're eating other healthy stuff.
Like I said, because the gene that's activated that helps metabolize the fat, break it up, transports it to where it goes, isn't getting turned on well.
Well, those genes get turned on by polyunsaturated fatty acids.
And so if you eat a ratio, if you're eating saturated fat, which is dairy, you know, some pork, I don't know, red meat, mostly, like, if you get a lean cut, it's not even actually that high in saturated fat compared to dairy or cheese or butter.
The other thing is that people actually will notice there's a problem if they're eating a lot of saturated fat and they have one of those polymorphisms.
They start to gain weight.
They start to have bad lipid profile.
They start to, and they're like, they know, like, well, I've been doing this.
I measure.
I know.
It's bad.
Well, they don't realize it's possibly because they have one of those gene polymorphisms.
If they increase their polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, it may actually not be a problem.
Because when you're stressed, your body starts to make cholesterol.
It makes BLDL lipoproteins, which have cholesterol in them, because it sops up...
It sops up what's called endotoxin, which is released when you're stressed or inflamed.
And you want to sop it up because it can cause lots of damage.
So you start to make cholesterol.
And what ends up happening is when you're inflamed, your body will turn off the production.
It basically starts making something called malonyl-CoA, which is important to make these very low-dense particle lipoproteins I was talking about.
But what it also does is it inhibits your body from being able to metabolize fat with the exception of medium-chain triglycerides because it inhibits the transporter.
There's a transporter on mitochondria called CPT that is inhibited when your body's inflamed because it's making that malonyl-CoA.
And when that transporter is inhibited, you're polyunsaturated, you're saturated, all like 99% of the dietary fat you take in is not getting used.
So it gets stored or it's like you have fatty acids in your bloodstream and can raise triglycerides and things.