Biohacker Ben Greenfield defends extreme diets—carnivore thrives for some (e.g., Rich Roll) but fails others (like Jordan Peterson’s daughter)—while debunking Alpha-Gal myths and detailing NAD+ IV drips ($30K stem cell makeover in Utah) that slashed his biological age. He contrasts Spartan races (13-mile, 8K–12K athletes) with triathlons, praises fasting (12–16 hours daily, 24-hour weekly) for autophagy, and critiques unreliable IgG tests, favoring Cyrex panels. Coffee enemas boost glutathione, but dry fasting’s grossness leaves him unconvinced; genetic variability means one-size-fits-all biohacks rarely work. [Automatically generated summary]
It's the idea that things in nature give you clues, right?
So like when you slice open a tomato, you've got the four chambers of the heart, and tomato is supposedly good for the heart.
Or a pomegranate is good for your blood, and the little pomegranate seeds look like red blood cells.
You slice open a carrot.
It looks like an eye or you crack open an egg.
It looks like an eye.
Those are good for your vision.
Sweet potatoes, which everybody thinks is like a sweet sugary food.
Those are actually shaped like a pancreas and they can actually help to normalize your beta cells, like your insulin producing beta cells in your pancreas.
So you look at, you know, walnuts for your brain and people talk about avocados, right?
Supposedly they look a little bit like an ovary and they're good for female reproductive function.
So you can carry that over from the plant kingdom into the animal kingdom and say that if you eat ants because they're such energetic, endurance-driven creatures that it supposedly will make you stronger.
I like that idea, though, of the doctrine of signatures, like certain things that you see in nature being good for you.
There's one called, I forget the name of this plant, but it's called the insulin of the heart, and it's amazing for decreasing sympathetic nervous system activation and causing you to relax, and it has these beneficial cardiovascular properties in people who are just so driven.
That they tend to have, for example, a heart attack or an MI, and it's not splanthes.
I forget the name of this, but it looks like a heart, and it has all these red vessels that kind of come off it.
It's called the insulin of the heart.
There's an app that my kids and I use to identify a lot of these.
I interviewed a physician on my show, Dr. Thomas Cowan, and he wrote a book about how the heart is not a pump, and he talks about the true reason for heart disease being sympathetic nervous system overdrive.
And what he means by the heart is not a pump, it's a fascinating book, The Shape of the Chest.
I believe it's called like a tetrahedron.
It's something like that.
But basically, as fluid moves through the heart, the action of the fluid actually moving through the heart allows it to pass through the heart and not have to be pumped through the body, but rather the shape of the heart is almost like causing the fluid to move in a vortex.
But the heart, most certainly.
Oh, the heart contracts, but it's less of a pumping action and more of like a vortex flow that it creates.
But this flower checker app, this flower checker app, it's really cool.
You take a picture of a plant.
And then there's a team of live botanists on the other end and within 24 hours they identify the plant for you and you can learn its edible properties, its medicinal properties.
So my kids and I can walk around and take pictures of different plants, different flowers, different things on our land and it develops this online herbarium that then allows you to keep track of all the different plants and what you've learned about them and what they're good for.
So we use that whenever we're identifying plants.
There was one time when we were fishing off the North Fork of the Clearwater.
It was me, one of the chefs who was out of the cabin with us, my kids, and twin nine-year-old boys know a lot about plants, so you always trust them if they say it's wild asparagus.
But I was convinced it was asparagus.
I mean, I kind of tasted it out there while we were out in the field, and it tasted like asparagus, but...
But there's another app called a PlantSnap, and apparently it uses artificial intelligence, you know, like a reverse Google image search to identify a plant.
I've used that, and it's useless.
Anything you take a picture of, it doesn't seem to be able to identify anything.
But this flower checker is just live people on the other end.
You know, it can be kind of a joke, because some people go out in uniforms with big cowboy hats on, and, you know, dressed up as a Spider-Man in their Lycra, and then some people, they have these elite waves where it's actual...
But it is, you know, you can see you move your body in a lot of different ways on these courses.
So it's fun, you know, it's fun to train for because you got to train all your different body parts and you train for power and strength and there's endurance.
The stadium races are cool because you show up at AT&T Stadium where you're going to race and you go up and down and they will turn a stadium into like a three to four mile event.
I mean, that's how many times you go up and down these stairs.
And they have an event for the kids where the kids will go up and down the stairs and the kids have miniature sandbags and miniature spears.
And same thing, it's the kids' events where the kids shoot, they've got 15 to 20-yard shots, and they have a sandbag lift and a run, and then they've got another shot, and they've got burpees up and over a cooler and another shot, and there's a grown-up event and a kids' event.
Yeah, I have friends that have one of those walk-in coolers, and they can set it to a certain temperature, and they hang the meat and dry-age it out there.
Yeah, so I took all the shelving out of the refrigerator and I just put some plywood on either side of the refrigerator and I put these metal grates in between.
And I just laid the meat down on the grates and put the fan on the bottom of the refrigerator so it's constantly circulating the air inside the refrigerator.
And then the temperature controller has this, it'll display.
So in my kitchen, in my house, it'll display the temperature and the humidity.
So I know if something goes wrong, so not all that meat spoils inside the refrigerator.
Because I'll see when I'm inside my kitchen, it'll read that the temperature is getting too high in the refrigerator.
Maybe somebody unplugged the fridge or the controller.
It needed to be reset, which happened a couple of times, but you want to keep an eye on it.
It's a great way, though, to take meat and make it far more flavorful, more tender.
These water buffaloes, like you see the one behind me, a buddy of mine shot one of those in Australia, and he said that he had Cam Haynes, he had a piece of it in his mouth, and he was chewing one piece for a half an hour.
There's this idea, though, that that's good for your jaw.
It's good for your teeth structure.
Oh, for sure.
There's this guy, I think it's Max Mew.
My brother sent me this YouTube video of this guy, but his whole idea is that human's jaw structure, our bone density, our teeth, our trigeminal nerves, all of that don't work as well as they should because we grow up on soft food.
People were selling those for a while as a way to decrease rating of perceived exertion during exercise, exercise mouthpieces.
And that the advertising on them was that the Vikings used to chew on leather before they go into battle to reduce pain and increase their time to exhaustion.
And so they actually sell these mouthpieces that you bite down on when you're exercising.
But they weren't designed to strengthen the jaw as much as to reduce how hard you felt like you were working during exercise.
And some people swear by these exercise mouthpieces.
The other gum, you mentioned the bazooka, there's a gum called mastic gum.
And I interviewed this guy, Dean Karnazes, who did the 50 marathons in 50 days, and he ran the traditional marathon in Greece, which is apparently not 26.2 miles, it's like 100 and some miles that he ran.
And he would chew this mastic gum, which they do use for jaw strengthening, but it makes you produce more saliva, too.
So when you're running, you know, you can get dry mouth when you're running, and a lot of times you get, you know, you'll be thinking about food, you want to eat.
This mastic gum apparently keeps your appetite satiated and allows you to produce saliva.
And the interesting thing is you can take it out after you're done chewing it and then just like the next day put it back in your mouth and you can chew that stuff for days.
Your cells have exosomes, and they're used as cell-to-cell communicators.
So they interact with cell surface receptors, and they'll actually carry a message from one cell to another, such as, you know, you need to absorb this into the cell, or you need to carry this to a joint, or whatever you'd want to use an exosome for to carry messages throughout the body.
It's part of your, I believe it's referred to as the paracrine system, your body's internal cellular communication system.
So the idea is that if you combined the exosomes with other therapies, like platelet-rich plasma injections, which you do to increase the amount of growth factors available to a specific joint.
They did exosomes plus PRP with you, which I can tell you the full procedure that I did, but I just got that all over my face.
My face five days ago was red and swollen.
Because it was covered with exosomes and PRP injections.
But now I'm a beautiful 13-year-old, not a beautiful 37-year-old.
So the exosomes can be combined with other things like PRP and also with stem cells or with bone marrow.
And that's what I did.
Is that you can get something like a placental cell.
And in my case, they actually took placental cells from this lab called Chimera Labs.
I had this procedure done in Park City, Utah.
This guy named Dr. Harry Adelson.
He had these placental cells from Chimera Labs.
They destroy the placental cell so that there's no actual DNA from some other person that you're putting into your body.
That's considered to be part of the risk of stem cells.
Even umbilical or amniotic, you're still getting somebody else's DNA into your body.
Not your own DNA. So the idea is that you would take exosomes that you've isolated from something like a placental tissue and then you would mix those with your own stem cells.
In this case, what I used was bone marrow aspirate.
They went into both of my iliac crests.
They took out the bone marrow.
They mixed it with the exosomes.
And these videos, I publish both of the videos on YouTube and it's like a It's like a huge syringe full of blood.
Well, the tubes also, you know this, when you give blood, you can give like 19 tubes of blood, but it's not as much blood as it actually looks like because it's inside of that little skinny tube.
She was doing a Facebook Live and answering questions as we went.
Jesus!
So get this, his partner comes in, she takes those same exosomes, after he does ankles, knees, hips, elbows, wrists, back, every part of my, they flip me over.
And I actually had just gotten a concussion because I got in a bike accident when I was down in Austin, Texas a couple of weeks ago.
And so the other thing that I did, this is interesting, because for a TBI, there's all sorts of things that you can do, right?
Like ketones, exogenous ketones work really well for that.
And that's a lot of Dominique D'Agostino's research on concussions.
Yeah.
DHA is another good one.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers, right?
With the high oxygen plus the high pressure.
That's really efficacious for concussions.
But the other thing is stem cells.
And so what I did was I ordered the stem cells that they harvested from my body in Florida.
Because I think I told you about that the last time when I was on the show.
They store...
I have like 30 injections of my own stem cells stored down in Florida that I can use for joints, for anti-aging.
And I also, one of the reasons that I did that was if I'm ever in a car accident, if I ever get some traumatic injury, I can heal myself faster with these stem cells.
And that happened.
I got a concussion.
I was riding my bike in Austin on First Street in rush hour traffic, and a car clipped me on the side.
And I made love to the pavement.
My entire face got torn open.
And I got a concussion.
So I did all these things.
Ketones, DHA, hyperbaric, PEMF. That's also really, really good for concussions.
Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy.
It's used for anti-inflammatory.
It's used for sleep.
It's kind of like grounding and earthing.
There's a lot of interesting studies on PEMF. Also for a concussion.
It enhances your own stem cell production.
It shuts down neural inflammation.
So I did that.
But then also, stem cells won't cross your blood-brain barrier.
So I ordered up this stuff called mannitol.
And if you inject mannitol into your bloodstream, it increases your blood-brain barrier permeability.
So this is what you do in a fighter, a football player, somebody gets a concussion.
You inject with mannitol first and then you follow that up with a stem cell injection.
If the mannitol is already in the bloodstream, the stem cells cross the blood-brain barrier and they go in to heal neural tissue.
I think that some pharmaceutical company or some supplement company is going to make a lot of money in the next 10 years by figuring out a way to make exosomes or figure out some way to do it in a way that is more available to the general population than harvesting it from placentas in some crazy lab.
And my plan, apparently if you jar the joints a lot when they're already kind of weak from the surgery, you can risk tearing a ligament, spraining, straining, doing damage to a muscle that's kind of weak and lax from the surgery.
It's a little bit of time before you actually feel better.
The other interesting one for not only enhancing your own endogenous stem cell production, because it actually would...
You know, a lot of this stuff, it's fringe.
It's expensive.
I mean, you know, that procedure I think is like a $30,000 procedure.
Not everybody's going to go out and do that.
And this is another fringe one, but I want to, I mean, there are ways that you can endogenously increase your own stem cell production.
I mean, and your own stem cell viability and health without actually doing stem cell injections.
Fasting is probably the one that's the most efficacious.
And a lot of these things that are kind of uncomfortable for you seem to increase your body's ability to be able to heal or produce its own stem cells.
So fasting for long periods of time.
Not necessarily fasting with caloric restriction.
I think that's the mistake a lot of people make.
They try to fast and they feel like crap.
But the idea is the benefits of fasting don't come from not eating a lot of calories.
Not eating a lot of calories isn't that great for your thyroid.
It's not great for your metabolism.
You don't want to live till you're 120 and be cold and thin and hungry the whole time because it'd be a horrible way to live a long time.
So the idea with things like Walter Longo's research or a lot of these intermittent fasting type of diets is you fast and you increase cellular autophagy and stem cell production, your own stem cell production, by going for long periods of time without eating, and the magic seems to kick in at about the 16-hour mark.
So I do 12 to 16 hours every day, and then you get even more benefit once you get up to about 24 hours.
So I try to do a 24-hour fast from Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner.
Yeah.
You're getting all the benefits of fasting, but you're still maintaining some amount of anabolism, right?
Because you're still eating as many calories, but you're almost giving your body, your gut, and your metabolism a break in between a lot of these meals.
Yeah, but fasting is probably one of the better ways to increase your own endogenous stem cell production, provided you're going for about 16 hours, and provided you're still eating as many calories as you'd normally eat.
The only kind of caveat to that would be protein cycling.
This is why I'm not a huge fan of the carnivorous diet, where you're eating four to six pounds of meat a day.
So real quick, and then we'll talk about how to make these steaks taste really good.
The idea is that protein cycling, right?
Having a meatless Monday or having, as a lot of religions would do, like the Eastern Orthodoxy Church or the Mediterranean diet, they have certain periods of time where there's complete meat restriction or your protein intake is restricted to fish and eggs, for example.
And the idea is that you would strike a sweet spot between not being in a constantly anabolic state, right?
And not having this mammalian target of rapamycin constantly activated, which would theoretically accelerate aging or in a lot of, you know, rodent models.
Unrestricted protein feeding actually causes aging to accelerate.
So the idea is on your lower activity days, especially for an athlete, you could still intermittent fast and get all the benefits of that, and you could still eat as many calories as you would need to sustain a normal healthy metabolism, right?
So you're not starving yourself, but on the less active days, you would shift to a lower protein intake, right?
So you're talking about like 0.5 grams per pound of body weight rather than what a typical athlete would need, which would be Depending on who you ask, you know, 0.7 to 0.85 grams per pound of body weight, right?
So there's some days where you're high protein, some days where you're low protein, some periods of the week, such as a meatless Monday, or some periods of the year, you know, such as every quarter, you know, for a week where you're eating a plant-based diet or you're restricting meat.
You're basically giving your body a break from being in that constant anabolic state.
And I think that the carnivore diet causes a lot of people to miss out on some of those elements.
And then if you look at the blood work of a doctor who does a carnivore diet, he publishes blood work online.
And I don't know what else is going on with him from a health standpoint, but he had really high blood glucose and really low testosterone and some things that suggest that it might not be healthy to eat just meat.
A workout would suppress your testosterone, that's significantly.
It would increase your HSCRP and your inflammatory markers, right?
Which is why you never want to go to a doctor for a heart checkup after you've done a workout because they're going to tell you you're going to have a heart attack based on the levels of HSCRP. Right.
But, you know, that blood work is just one example.
And I don't want to pretend like that one example, you know, is going to paint with a broad brush the entire carnivore diet phenomenon.
But I just, I think that unrestricted protein intake and unrestricted meat intake probably has an accelerated aging effect on the body.
Name me one population, one blue zone that eats meat and nothing else.
And there's there's actually very few centenarians who are purely vegan for their entire life Because you can if you don't do it the right way build up fatty acid deficits amino acid deficits creatine is one you don't get vitamin b12 DHA but at least it's been studying on vegans Right.
It's a lot easier to just eat a piece of meat to get some of the B12 and some of the other amino acids you're trying to free up by soaking and sprouting and fermenting, which my wife does a lot of.
But I watch her.
She's in the kitchen like three hours a day making vegetables bioavailable.
It takes her hours to make sourdough bread, to actually make a bread where the gluten is pre-digested and it's actually healthy and the glycemic index is lower.
She's not vegan.
She's just a rancher girl and she likes to...
We have goats and chickens and we eat meat, but she's very into like an ancestral preparation of vegetables, deactivating a lot of these stressors that Dr. Stephen Gundry talks about.
And before we podcast, we're talking about Tom Brady and how he does like a no nightshade, no tomato, no potato.
And I'd rather eat those things, but actually figure out a way to render them more digestible and friendlier to the human body.
By the way, there was a study that just came out about stem cells.
They found that carnosine, which you find in copious amounts in a grass-fed ribeye steak, with blueberry extract enhanced your stem cell production.
It was a hugely significant number.
I don't remember the exact percentage, but...
But this combination of polyphenols and flavanols with meat is a good combo.
That's why when I did the carnivore diet, not the carnivore diet, that's when I was eating meat, I was doing lots of salads, I was doing lots of, I had like wild blueberry extract powder, I had these vegetable powders, you know, I was doing a lot of big salads for lunch, flavanols, polyphenols, any of that...
Same thing with the high saturated fat diet.
A high saturated fat diet, like the whole coconut oil thing, is highly inflammatory in the absence of plant polyphenols and flavanols, which is why if you're doing a high fat ketotic diet, it needs to be a plant-rich high fat ketotic diet, otherwise it's inflammatory.
Yeah, I mean, avocados, yes, but I'm talking about more like, you know, doing coconut oil and butter and, you know, your avocado chocolate pudding and all these things, you know, your ketogenic fat bombs and all these recipes that are out there.
But you've got to eat a lot of plants.
And even in the animal kingdom, you know, you see animals when they rip up another animal, like a carnivorous animal, they're eating the intestines and they're eating a lot of the organs that are chock full of what?
Grass, plants, herbs, whatever that omnivorous animal that the carnivorous animal is.
Yeah, well, that's the point, is that for most people, you're going to have to experiment a little bit to figure out what works best for you.
And there are people that, especially if you use E3 Live and algae and get your B12 vitamins and your fat-soluble vitamins, you can live off a vegan diet.
It can be done.
But you really have to be careful about it.
But then there's other people where they can't.
And you really have to figure out what the fuck is going on with your own body.
But this carnivore thing, to me, is kind of tweaking me out because I just don't It's like they start talking about the poisons and phytotoxins and all these things that are in plants that are bad for you.
If I'm not in the sauna, then I'm wearing more clothes than I would normally wear when I go to the gym to get my heart rate up and actually get myself into the discomfort of hot for the heat shock protein and the nitric oxide every Yeah, they're doing tests right now at Harvard for hot yoga.
I mean, that's what I do is I don't do the full choreographed 90 minute Bikram yoga, but I have one of these big saunas.
It's like, it's a four person sauna.
And if I go in there by myself, I can do fricking, you know, down dog and pushups.
And I take these, uh, these cats who blood flow restriction devices in there and do pushups and squats.
And those are the research behind those for muscle maintenance with body weight training.
It's very intriguing.
I, I travel with them everywhere, these Katsu training devices, and I just, you know, tie them like tourniquets around my arms, around my legs, and they do a lot of studies in seniors for muscle maintenance without the need for as much joint impact.
But what happens is you get micro damage to the capillaries, you get a big release of lactic acid, which causes you to produce more growth hormone after the workout.
I mean, in my opinion, for body weight training, like, at this point, Katsu training, like, doubles.
In excess or in people like your friend with the immune system issue or people with leaky gut or damage, there might be a period of time where you actually have to Be careful and really careful with gluten, which is a digestive stressor.
And again, even that in small amounts is probably good for you.
They've even shown that kids who get gluten restricted when their kids wind up having more issues with gluten later on in life because their guts might be weaker.
But yeah, lectins and plant phytochemicals and a lot of things that plants use to poison mammals or to cause their seeds to be undigested and pass out through the digestive tract and the stool of the mammals.
They can grow elsewhere.
A lot of that stuff really is, you know, it makes you stronger.
See, all we have up in my land is a tick that, as long as you get them off within 24 hours...
That doesn't allow them to produce the saliva that would make them release their hold on your skin, and it's that that produces yellow fever, not the actual tick bite itself.
So you don't get a lot of Lyme up where I'm at, but I've never heard of this lone star tick.
You take that entire cast iron skillet, you put the oven on broil, and you broil it for one minute on one side, and then you turn it over and you do one minute on the other side.
And then you take it out of the oven and you finish it with butter.
Meaning when you take it out of the oven, you just take the steak off the cast iron skillet, shove it aside, just put it on a plate, whatever.
And you take a pat of butter and you can infuse the butter.
You can use like garlic infused butter.
I just use a plain old grass fed butter.
Put a pad of butter on the skillet.
You let the butter just get to the point where it's melted a little bit and it's not super brown.
You put the steak back on top of the butter, put the burner back on, and you finish it one minute each side.
Let it off.
Let it rest three or four minutes.
That technique is the best technique for the most perfect steak that you'll ever have.
So the pellets go into the hopper, and then at the bottom there's a gear, like a worm drive, that feeds the pellets into that fire at the bottom that comes from an element.
So the element, and then there's a fan.
So once it's lit, the element shuts off, and then the fire is stoked by this fan, and it's all temperature controlled, like very, very precisely.
One of the good things, what I like about this Traeger that I've seen is that it seals up like a Yeti cooler.
Like it's very insulated and thick, so it's really good at retaining the perfect temperature.
And again, you can do it on your phone.
So I get it to 250 degrees.
Then mostly what I'm cooking is wild game, low fat content, and so you want to make sure you don't dry it out.
So I cook it at a low temperature.
I'm cooking it at 250 degrees.
I get it to an internal temperature of 120. Then once it hits 120, I pull it out, You got to open up the grill to test your internal temp?
The idea is that I'm cooking it to a perfect internal temperature of 120 degrees, which will raise both in the Yeti Cooler and also from the searing on the outside.
So once I get the cast iron pan heated up...
The medium-high heat.
I throw that butter in there, and I sear the shit out of the outside for, again, about a minute and a half, both sides.
Wrap it in foil.
Put it in the Yeti cooler for 10 minutes.
It maintains its temperature, and it continues slowly cooking.
So that gets it somewhere around 135-ish, which is what I like.
And we were talking about some of the studies out there on acetylfamipotassium and the potential for it to have neurotoxicity or sucralose to cause things like microbiome issues and death of bacteria in the gut.
And he was explaining how the amount of artificial sweeteners used in that study was just way far in excess of what you get from a diet soda and that what they call the incretin response, like that spiking of the appetite that is attributed sometimes to the consumption of artificial sweeteners like that spiking of the appetite that is attributed sometimes to the consumption of artificial sweeteners only occurs in people who And once they've kind of gotten into, like, a Diet Coke habit, that comes away.
Well, proteolytic enzymes, one of the reasons they work is they break down fibrinogen, and they're almost like an enzyme, right?
That same thing if you have no marinade.
And nothing at all the tenderized meat.
You get your digestive enzymes, your Onnit gut pack or whatever you have around, and you break open the capsules and you sprinkle that on top of the meat.
It's a potent ergogenic aid, but the problem is that it causes gut distress when you take as much as they use in a lot of these studies.
More and more what the studies are doing is you're dosing with small amounts of baking soda for two to three hours leading into your workout.
So my philosophy is this.
If Pellegrino has pretty high levels of sodium bicarbonate in it, which it does, it's got more sodium bicarbonate in it than any of the other bottled waters, like twice as much as Gerald Steiner and any of these other waters out there, I'm kind of dosing with a little bit of a lactic acid buffer all day long.
So anytime I want to jump into a workout, I'm able to push myself a little bit harder.
This foundation called the Molecular Hydrogen Foundation.
They do studies on the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant potential of water that has a lot of hydrogen ions in it.
It's called hydrogen-rich water.
And the cool part about that is that, and the only other thing I know of that can do this are green tea polyphenols, is they act as an anti-inflammatory post-exercise without blunting the hormetic response, that positive, beneficial, stressful response we were talking about with exercise.
And so you can have your cake and eat it too, right?
You get your antioxidants, you shut down inflammation, and it doesn't blunt.
In this case, the hormetic response to exercise would be the proliferation of satellite cells and the production of new mitochondria, which is why you shouldn't take a bunch of vitamin C and vitamin E and some of these high antioxidant compounds post-workout.
Same reason you shouldn't do a cold bath post-workout.
And the idea is that hydrogen-rich water allows you to shut down inflammation without blunting that hormetic response.
Yeah, as far as some people say, don't jump into the cold bath 15 minutes after workout or cryo chamber.
I wait two or three hours.
Two to three hours.
I don't know if Rhonda's basing that on research or if it's an extrapolation or what.
But I wait a couple hours.
Now, the exception to that rule is that if you exercise any closer than three hours to bedtime, it elevates body temperature to the point where it affects your deep sleep cycles.
And one reason for that is because your core temperature is elevated.
So for me, if I do an evening workout, and I do hard later afternoon, early evening workouts quite often, I will still take a cold shower.
I actually have a giant...
I bought one of those endless pools, you know, like those fitness pools that you swim in, and I keep it out in the forest behind my house, and it's just chock full of cold water.
But it decreases your core temperature and allows you to sleep better later on if you do that after an evening workout.
So even though it probably restricts the efficacy of the workout a little bit, It lets you sleep better.
Yeah, my reasoning is that I'm going to sleep way better and the benefits I get from a good solid night's sleep outweigh any loss of benefit from decreasing a little bit of that mitochondrial density and satellite cell proliferation.
I did a podcast recently with Dr. Matthew Walker about sleep and it's kind of changed the way I feel about sleep and the importance of it and how much you need.
I used to think you could just power through and get through with like three, four hours at night and you'd be fine.
It's a small member, but furthermore, there's this guy named Dr. Lickheadle.
Nick Littlehales is his name.
I could have really messed up his name right there.
Dick Littlehales.
Anyways, he's got this concept.
He works with a lot of these European soccer teams.
And what he looks at is not the seven to nine hours of sleep, not how many hours of sleep per night you get, but the number of sleep cycles, right, from stage one to stage five sleep that you get throughout the course of the week, meaning you're supposed to get 31 to 35 sleep cycles over seven days.
And so you might get three sleep cycles one night and five sleep cycles another night.
And he also, I haven't seen research to back this up, but this is what he does with his athletes, is he counts a 20 to 30 minute power nap.
as a sleep cycle.
So technically, you could sleep four hours one night, and then you could do an eight-hour sleep night on a Saturday and a 20-minute nap on a Sunday.
And then you add up all your sleep cycles, and you can use any self-quantification device if you want to actually measure how many times you're cycling during a night of sleep.
And you look at that instead of, am I getting a consistent seven to nine hours of sleep a night?
You look at the total sleep.
I literally just wrote an article about this this morning on my website.
You should listen to the podcast with Matthew Walker because he's pretty in-depth about what's recommended and why and the risk of Alzheimer's for people to get less than five hours sleep a night.
Oh, I have these Normatec boots that I lay in, these gradated compression boots that kind of move the compression from the ankle all the way up to the hips.
I'm sounding like a princess now, but I have an assistant who lives at my house, and she really helps out with a lot of stuff.
She does the banking, and she helps out with bringing stuff to the post office, and she's just there whenever I need her to do stuff.
She's back home with the kids right now, so she's just kind of like a live-in assistant.
And every day, about 12, 30 or 1, We're good to go.
So the idea with sleep, though, is, yeah, if you nap and if you pay closer attention to the number of sleep cycles that you get each week, I think that's more important than getting, like, seven to nine hours a night.
I was at a Finland biohacking conference and there was this tiny little table with one guy that saw this little ring and all of a sudden it's just like everywhere now.
But it's kind of cool because you can pull up your body temperature during the night, so a woman could use this to track her cycles.
It will tell you your heart rate variability, which I used to measure every morning when I'd wake up.
I'd look at my parasympathetic and my sympathetic nervous system score, and then I'd be able to tell if I should do a hard workout that day or if I should do an easy workout that day.
I would imagine if you do a lot of upper body activity, like maybe you're a pitcher, maybe a swimmer, a boxer, someone who's doing a lot of upper body activity, that the arms would be efficacious.
So it's apparently a form of compression that they've patented, unlike a lot of the other boots out there, to where the first time it inflates it measures the diameter of your limbs.
And then it bases every subsequent compression to be customized to the diameter, the girth of your limbs, and pump the blood.
In this case, if you're wearing the feet or the leggings from your ankles all the way up to your hips.
It could get expensive to do that, because now you've got to have two inflation units rather than just one, because you can't plug them all in at once.
That's what a lot of these cryotherapy centers have now.
They've got the walk-in cryotherapy, they've got the Normatech boots, they've got the vibration platform so you can lose weight while you're standing there on the vibration platform.
That's like my one-two combo for having a really good dump in the mornings is there's this herbal blend called Triphala, T-R-I-P-H-A-L-A. And I put about a half teaspoon of that into a cup, and it's super bitter.
So I put some stevia in there or something to sweeten it up a little bit.
And I pour the hot water over that, and you have that at night, right, before you go to bed.
And you wake up in the morning, and you could use a vibration platform.
You could do the Tai Chi bouncing.
That's another thing some people will do, where you just kind of bounce up and down like this.
But my protocol for staying lean, I did this because I used to be 215 pounds and I had to shed a lot of weight to get into Ironman triathlon.
So I did Ironman triathlon for about eight years.
And the way that I stayed lean for races was you get up in the morning and you have a cup of coffee or green tea.
Because both of those can help to mobilize fatty acids from adipose tissue.
And you do this when you're in that fasted state that I was talking about.
So you wake up after a 12 to 16 hour fast and you take the cup of coffee or the green tea.
And then you go exercise or move aerobically.
For whatever time you have available, 20 to 45 minutes.
It doesn't have to be that long.
And the reason that you do it aerobically is because when you wake up in the morning, you already have a lot of cortisol in your system.
There's no need to just stress yourself even more by doing a very hard workout.
I like to ease my way into the day.
I like a non-stressful morning.
Unless I've got a very busy day and I know that I'm not going to get a hard workout at any other time.
I save my hard workout for the later afternoon or the early evening when your body temp peaks and your grip strength peaks and your post-workout reaction time or your post-workout protein synthesis peaks, your reaction time peaks.
Your body is very equipped to do a hard workout in the afternoon or the evening more than it is in the morning.
So the idea is also when you do a hard workout in the morning, you get a lot of times post-workout caloric compensation, meaning you just want to eat everything in sight until freaking lunch.
You're just hungry.
And part of it's probably physical because you empty your glycogen stores more quickly.
Part of it probably is mental.
I fucking punished it this morning.
I deserve to have a few extra slices of bread with lunch.
The idea is I get up, I do the coffee, and then I'll do the 20 to 45 minutes of easy movement.
That might be the yoga in the sauna.
It'll be a walk in the sunshine, so I'm getting my vitamin D. I'll do breath work where I'll breathe in through my nose and do breath hold.
I'm still making my body better, but I'm not stressing it out with a lot of eccentric muscle tissue damage.
And then I finish up that whole session with a cold shower.
So I'm getting a lot of those benefits of white adipose tissue to brown fat conversion in the absence of any inflammation, right?
Inflammation and calories keep the white fat from getting converted into brown fat, which is what you want when you're doing a cold shower or a cold soak or some kind of cold thermogenesis.
And I'm able to stay super lean with that protocol.
You get up, caffeine, aerobic exercise in a fasted state, you finish up with a cold.
I mean, even if you weren't working out, you can stay pretty lean with that type of protocol.
Now for these fasted workouts, If you are going to do a fasted hard workout in the morning, you can stay anabolic but relatively non-insulinogenic without spiking your blood glucose too heavily with something like amino acids.
So it's like a lot of people will do a branched chain amino acid or an essential amino acid.
You elevate your blood levels of amino acids.
It keeps you anabolic.
It allows you to stave off central nervous system fatigue, keeps you from shedding too much muscle, and you just spike your blood levels of amino acids and then go into your workout.
And you can even throw something like ketones into the mix too.
So that's like a very hypo caloric way to get a pre-workout sup in without actually getting a lot of calories in at the same time.
We were talking before the podcast about different athletes and diets and things along those lines, and you were saying that you don't think it's a good idea for a pro athlete, particularly like a basketball player, to be on a ketogenic diet.
And that's exactly what I do, is I'll eat almost zero carbohydrates the entire day.
Plants, starches, fats.
I think I told you about my morning smoothie the last time I was on, and it's just, you know, like coconut milk and bone broth and these precursors to NAD, which is another very, very...
That probably next to stem cells is one of the most potent anti-aging protocols that you can engage in.
NAD stands for...
Nicotinamide, adenine, dinucleotide is what that is.
And I can tell you about that in a second.
I'll just briefly tell you about this cyclic ketogenic diet.
Basically, it's all plants, all fats, no carbs or very low carbs the entire day.
And then in the evening, and this is where the beauty of that scenario I talked about earlier fits in because you've done your hard afternoon or early evening workout.
So your GLUT4 transporters are very upregulated.
You're very insulin sensitive and any carbohydrates that you do eat are far more likely to be shuttled into muscle or liver glycogen rather than hanging around the bloodstream causing inflammation or rather than being, you know, shuttled to the liver and converted into triglycerides.
You're basically using the carbohydrates that you do eat at the end of the day to sock away energy for the next day's hard glycolytically demanding workout.
And so basically you're teaching your body how to be a fat burning machine all day long.
You're restricting any amount of glycemic variability all day long, assuming you're not doing the carnivorous diet because high amounts of meat, it's gluconeogenic.
It can spike blood glucose.
But you're essentially doing lots of plants, a moderate amount of fats.
And, you know, some amount of protein, but not a crazy amount of protein all day long.
And then with dinner, you know, we'll do, you know, Jessa makes sourdough bread and we'll have sweet potato fries.
And, you know, my kids will make rice cakes, you know, dark chocolate, red wine, any of that stuff is all in the evenings.
So that refills your glycogen stores for anything explosive and demanding.
And then you just rinse, wash and repeat the next day.
Anyways, though, the cyclic ketogenic diet allows you to be back in the state of ketosis by that morning easily, and then you just basically maintain that all day long, then you refuel on carbohydrates at the end of the day.
And then there was another question that you asked, oh, about NAD. That's something completely different.
You do the fasted morning aerobic workout, the cold shower, a little bit of coffee or green tea.
And your body's back in ketosis.
It works perfectly.
I'm telling you.
You start your day off like that, and then you end your day with the carbohydrates.
You do the hard afternoon workout, the easy morning workout.
And, like, for...
For metabolism, for body composition, for maintaining fitness, for teaching yourself how to be a fat-burning machine while still refilling the body with carbohydrate stores.
So one way to do it is in a medical clinic, you can get a six to eight hour IV. You bring your laptop in, you work away, and some people do this on a monthly basis.
Some of the guys down at Onnit do it, and they'll have a nurse come in and push it a little bit more quickly.
That's like an hour-long IV. Is it just beneficial to do it short like that?
It's way more uncomfortable.
The shorter you get, the more uncomfortable it gets because you're pushing this stuff into your bloodstream more quickly and it feels like your whole body is on fire.
I mean, you have to box, breathe and close your eyes and meditate.
It's like, have you ever done DMT? It's like DMT, but you're on fire and getting punched in the gut at the same time and you feel like your heart's going to explode.
Really?
And then you finish and you feel like Superman.
You feel like you have more energy on less sleep.
Your workouts are better.
I mean, it's like fish oil, where when you take a bunch of fish oil, you just kind of keep your fingers crossed that it's working.
It's not like you can feel fish oil and you want to go destroy the world.
So I get it shipped to my house, and I do a self-administered push IV. I do the same thing with Myers cocktails.
So I just shove a butterfly needle into my vein, and then I push this NAD in very, very slowly.
And you can even chase it with a Myers cocktail, which enhances the effectiveness of it, meaning you can do like a...
An NAD, and this is a common protocol in a lot of anti-aging clinics or a lot of, you know, like alternative health clinics, is you do the NAD injection and you follow that up with a Myers cocktail and you feel like Superman.
It's like Sherlock Holmes when Watson tells him his name and he says, I'm going to work hard to forget that because he doesn't want anything cluttering up his head at all aside from his sleuthing.
I'm doing this once a week now, and it's the most painful 10 to 20 minutes of my entire week, but you feel amazing.
And I'm testing my telomere length with this company called TeloYears.
There's another one, I forget the name of the other company that tests your telomere length.
There's only a couple out there.
So it tests the rate at which your telomeres are shortening.
And the two things that have had the most profound effect on my results from that test have been the stem cell injections intravenously and the NAD injections.
My biological age right now, which started off at an age of 37 when I was 34 and then decreased to 35 when I tested again at 36 years old, Dude, Trigger me a biological age.
You can reverse your biological age now.
There is some side effects No.
So the telomere test is a test of your white blood cell telomere length, which is not reflective of every cell in your body, right?
So technically, it's not an ironclad test with a ton of research behind it, but it's an approximate corollary to your biological age.
It's the best we have right now to be able to test telomere length, but I'm not going to pretend like it's a It's a gold standard test.
I'm not aware of a gold standard test for telomere length.
But I can tell you that I feel amazing.
And that telomere length is shortening.
And those NAD injections just make you feel like Superman.
And there's stuff you can do to enhance your own endogenous stem cell production.
We were talking about meat, and I told you about that study where we were talking about the carnosine and the blueberry extract.
That's one.
Chlorella is another.
Colostrum is fantastic for that, for endogenous stem cell health.
Coffee berry fruit extract.
That's another really fascinating one.
You can buy that on Amazon as a powder.
And I put a lot of this stuff in my morning smoothie now.
So when I wake up, you know, I've got chlorella, I've got DHA, I've got this stuff called Pau de Arco Bark Tea, which also enhances your own NAD production.
Colostrum, bone broth.
Vitamin C to enhance the bone broth uptake.
So you can kind of make yourself a little cocktail of ingredients that you just take in the morning without necessarily spending 8,000 bucks on a stem cell and extraction and injection.
Well, what I thought about doing was just making like a supplement or something like that, like where you could take all this stuff and just combine it into a shake or into some kind of a supplement.
But it seems like, you know, someone like you who knows so much about this stuff, it would be a great resource if people could subscribe to something and you guys could put together some sort of a protocol for people that they could follow it on a daily basis.
Yeah, but the problem is genetic variability, right?
Like this whole high-fat diet.
And, you know, I saw yesterday that you tweeted out, you know, my friend Nina Teicholz's data, you know, encouraging the high-saturated fat intake.
And I love her, and I love her approach, and I love the idea that she is getting a lot of people, you know, via lobbying to focus less on grains and a high-carb diet, which I think is helpful for a lot of people.
But at the same time, there are genes, right?
Like the PPAR1-alpha gene, which would cause a little bit of an inflammatory response to high intake of fats or to a lot of saturated fats without a lot of poly or monounsaturated fats.
I think the last time that we talked, we talked about familial hypercholesteremia, where some people, if they shift to a ketogenic or a high-fat diet, it screws them from a metabolic standpoint because they get not only high cholesterol, but high particle count and oxidation of that cholesterol.
There's ways around that.
For example, like a Catavan diet would be what you'd consume if you were eating or if you had this familial hypercholesteroid where you'd eat a lot of tubers and fish and coconut meat and wild plants.
And that's technically like a 70% to 80% carbohydrate-based diet.
Not with a lot of grains, not with a lot of junk food, but that would be a diet more appropriate for someone with that issue.
Someone with a PPAR gene issue, they'd want to eat less of the coconut oil and the butter and the cheeses and more of like the avocados and the extra virgin olive oil, more of the Mediterranean diet approach.
I mentioned earlier the fact that coconut oil and a lot of these saturated fats and a lot of people are inflammatory, so they would want to eat a lot of A lot of antioxidants and flavanol and polyphenol-rich, you know, small, non-sugary berries and dark leafy greens.
And so, yeah, again, you could have a subscription-based service that teaches people a lot of these things, but then once again, you've got to have either artificial intelligence that's screening each person to look at what they actually need, or you've got a real person talking to each person, looking at their labs and saying, okay, this is the one that would work well for you, rather than just saying, okay, this is Ben's smoothie.
You technically have the immunoglobulin reaction to avocados, and there's no bodies in the streets, no evidence that that's going to actually hurt you.
That's the problem is just you would have to go on some sort of a very neutral diet for a long period of time, get your body's baseline established, get your blood work done along the way.
You could probably do like a washout, like a five-day fast.
And that's that new Valter Longo longevity diet is you do, I think it's five over the, no, once a quarter, five-day fasts.
To clean you out, to get all the benefits of cellular autophagy.
And with that particular diet, I was talking before about how long-term calorie restriction is bad for you.
And this whole idea of intermittent fasting with caloric restriction creates hormone deficits and associated with gallstones and all sorts of nasty things happen to your body when you don't give it enough calories.
That's Walter Longo's approach is you do a five-day fast just a few times a year.
And I think in active individuals and athletes, he only recommends like two or three times a year max that you do this five-day fast and you put it in an off-season or recovery phase or some period of time where you're not training heavily.
And that scenario would allow you to get a lot of the cellular autophagy and the cleanup benefits.
There aren't many times during the year when I can point out a five-day slot in my schedule where I'm not hunting or competing or working out or doing something that requires me to need calories or else I'm already skinny.
I can't go for a long time without eating and my metabolism is sky high.
So what I do is a 12 to 16 hour fast every day.
Not a calorically restricted fast, but just 12 to 16 hours without eating every single day.
On the lower activity days, I take in less protein and I restrict meat.
So on the days where I'm not beating up my body too much, like a Wednesday and a Sunday, which are more recovery days, those are the days when I do...
I call those my self-love days.
I do clay masks and coffee enemas and infrared therapy.
The coffee enema not only cleans out your colon, but it causes your liver and your gallbladder specifically to increase bioproduction.
It upregulates your glutathione production, your endogenous glutathione production.
And so you're increasing your own production of antioxidants, and it also causes peristalsis, which you just move stuff through that's kind of moving slowly.
So once a week, Wednesday mornings, I get up.
My wife makes coffee every morning.
I have her make an extra pot.
I just leave that out on the counter until it gets to room temperature.
And normally when I'm drinking my coffee, I'm going through all my morning research and articles and everything.
I have a standing desk in the basement.
But instead I go and I lay on my right side on the bathroom floor and I keep coffee in there for about 20 minutes while I'm working.
And my best dumps are when I'm hunting or I'm camping.
You hold onto a tree and you kind of lean back and it's perfect.
So on those days that I'm doing coffee enemas or sauna or any of my weird woo-woo things that don't involve workouts, I do protein restriction because I'm not beating up my body that much.
Coffee enema doesn't cause a lot of eccentric muscle tissue damage unless you've done something horribly wrong.
So, I basically have those days as my lower protein days, and then once a week, and this would be unless I'm traveling, because it's harder to do when you travel, I do a 24 hour fast.
Saturday at dinner, you stop eating, sleep all night, all you gotta do is skip breakfast on Sunday, and skip lunch on Sunday, and then have dinner on Sunday night.
And that's pretty easy to do.
And so I get the benefits of the longer fast, right, because a lot of those cellular autophagy and endogenous stem cell production benefits don't kick in until you're about 16 hours in.
So I get that benefit once a week, even though for me, really, it comes up to about twice a month that I'm actually at home because I travel so much doing that full 24-hour fast.
And I do a lot of work that day.
I play with my kids.
I just fill things in throughout that day to keep my appetite satiated.
And sometimes I'll do some of those...
New ketone esters and sometimes we'll do some amino acids or a cup of bone broth.
It's kind of sort of cheating, but it's a speed bump for a skinny, high metabolism guy like me to have a cup of 40 calorie bone broth in the middle of the day during a 24 hour fast.
Technically, from just a pure, very simple physiology standpoint, your body would need to utilize those ketones for energy before it would turn some of your own acetyl-CoA derived from your fat into extra ketones.
But I just like the way I feel while I'm fasting using these, especially like the newer ketone esters.
You are going to get a huge performance advantage by taking them with glucose, but that's also, it's an ancestrally inappropriate state for the human body to have simultaneously elevated levels of blood glucose and elevated levels of blood ketones, because traditionally we'd have elevated our blood ketones through fasting.
And while I'm okay with elevating blood ketones via a non-ancestral route, such as the consumption of these ketone esters designed, you know, by the U.S. Department of Defense for soldiers in battle who have to go two or three days without eating or for, you know, Tour de France riders have been using them for a while.
The idea of consuming glucose along with those ketones and spiking blood glucose, which can have a little bit of an inflammatory oxidative effect, is not something I would do unless I were in a race or in a really hard, demanding workout.
That's where something like that, you can use like rocket fuel.
And that's actually a very good mix.
Some kind of like a fructose maltodextrin blend, which the Gatorade Sports Science Institute has shown allows you to get a really high absorption of carbohydrates rather than You know, just maltodextrin or just glucose or just fructose.
Then you add in ketone esters on top of that, and then to stave off what's called central nervous system fatigue, the crossing of tryptophan into the brain, which kind of makes you feel, you know, turkey dinner sleep effect during exercise.
You throw essential amino acids into that.
So you've got amino acids, ketones, and glucose, and that mix is...
Coffee or the consumption of anything from a circadian biology, right?
24-hour circadian rhythm.
You've got multiple circadian rhythm cues.
One is movement.
So when you travel and you're jet-lagged, movement helps you normalize your biological clock.
Another is light, right?
So exposure to high amounts of morning sunlight or using one of these newfangled hacking devices like the eye light or the in-ear light.
That's another circadian cue, right?
Eating, or really the consumption of anything, supplements, coffee, tea, etc., that's also a circadian cue.
There's a researcher, Dr. Sachin Panda, who's got some really good research on circadian rhythmicity.
And what he says is that the consumption of anything...
Can disrupt circadian biology if you're fasting for the purposes of regulating your circadian rhythms.
Maybe you've got insomnia, poor sleep patterns, inflammation due to lack of sleep or lack of, you know, the lymphatic drainage and consolidation of memory and everything that occurs during deep sleep.
Your sleep is more or less fucked up.
That would be a situation in which you just wouldn't want to eat anything during a fast.
But if your fast is for the purposes of, let's say, fat loss or even some of the endogenous stem cell production benefits of fasting, an acaloric cup of coffee Is not gonna cause any issues and furthermore if you're concerned about like the cholesterols in the coffee use a paper filter because you're gonna filter out most of the cholesterols as well versus like a French press or You know or a steel filter.
So ultimately, the coffee is not an issue unless you're putting a bunch of stuff in it.
Right.
And then, even though it is admittedly non-insulinogenic, and it's actually quite a kick in the pants, as you know, you know, when you blend fats with coffee, you get the kaffestal and the kawail, they cross the blood-brain barrier, they amp you up psychologically, you're also getting, your body has to burn those calories before it burns a lot of its own calories.
So, that's not something you would do well in a fasted state.