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May 22, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:57:05
Joe Rogan Experience #1120 - Ben Greenfield
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ben greenfield
01:30:03
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joe rogan
26:07
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jamie vernon
00:01
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josh olin
00:01
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Speaker Time Text
joe rogan
Four, three, two, one.
Ben Greenfield eats ants.
Just want everybody to know.
ben greenfield
Hey, if I was going to go to Disney as much as you go to Disney, I'd eat a lot more black ants.
joe rogan
Why are you eating ants?
ben greenfield
Well, supposedly, I actually don't know that much about ants.
I'm just eating it because it supposedly gives you energy.
I need a pick-me-up this morning.
We lifted waste this morning and I needed a second boost of energy.
But apparently these ants live in ginseng roots and they have something that grows in their heads that acts as like a nootropic.
It's like some kind of a chemical nootropic.
And it also supposedly is one of these Chinese energy tonics.
It's like the whole, you know, the doctrine of signatures.
You know the doctrine of signatures?
joe rogan
No, what's that?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Boy, that's a stretch.
ben greenfield
Wait till this stuff hits me and then we'll arm wrestle.
We'll find out.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Have you been doing it for a while?
How long have you been taking this stuff?
ben greenfield
That was the third time I've actually used it.
You just dissolve it.
I mean, I used it for a workout a couple of times.
joe rogan
So this is your concoction, right?
You took ground-up ants.
ben greenfield
I didn't grind up the ants myself.
That would have been exhausting to catch that many black.
joe rogan
Did you buy them ground-up?
ben greenfield
I bought ground-up black ant powder.
joe rogan
Okay, Jimmy just pulled up some ginseng ants powder.
ben greenfield
I don't think they're called...
That's where I bought them.
That's where I bought them.
Black ant.
Polyrachis ants.
A key tonic of Chinese herbalism.
joe rogan
But you know what?
The Chinese people are also into the rhino horn.
ben greenfield
It's not just a pre-workout herb.
According to the website, it's a pre-workout super herb.
joe rogan
Oh, a super herb.
ben greenfield
Which is supposedly far more scientifically super than a regular herb.
unidentified
Like a superfood.
ben greenfield
Right, it's like a superfood.
joe rogan
Exactly.
I'm a little annoyed with that word, superfood.
ben greenfield
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.
It's called Flower Checker.
joe rogan
So you read about this ant stuff online, and then you started taking it, and then you mixed it in some sort of a tincture?
ben greenfield
Just vodka.
Yeah.
Yeah, ubain.
That stuff.
joe rogan
Nature's perfect, but forgotten remedy for heart disease.
ben greenfield
Ooh, Bain.
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.
joe rogan
What does he mean by the heart is not a pump?
ben greenfield
Mineral depletion and dehydration.
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.
The book's called Why Your Heart Is Not a Pump.
It's very interesting.
joe rogan
Is it well-received amongst scientists?
ben greenfield
No, it kind of flies under the radar a little bit.
Yeah, but it's an interesting book.
Short book.
It's like maybe 100 pages long.
joe rogan
I thought it was universally regarded as a pump.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
I don't know if you would necessarily classify it as a pump as much as a contracting muscle.
joe rogan
But when you die and then they bring you back to life, they push your heart to make it pump.
Bump, bump, bump, bump.
Seems like a bump.
But I don't know shit.
ben greenfield
Read the book.
It's interesting.
It's interesting.
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.
So we went on this fly fishing trip.
joe rogan
Where's that?
The Clearwater?
ben greenfield
The Clearwater up in Idaho.
So we were near Grangeville.
Most people fly into Grangeville, Idaho.
It's a great fly fishing.
huge steelhead.
And the hike that we went on, we didn't have our phones or anything with us to take pictures of what we were finding.
And we found this enormous, almost like a field of wild asparagus.
Oh, wow.
And my buddy who was with us, he had bear broth that he was like a bear bone broth that he had in this vat back at the cabin.
So we harvested all this asparagus.
And this was before we went out fishing.
And we put all the asparagus into the bone broth and then just left for the day.
And then we came back and we had fish, we had bone broth, we had asparagus, and we all ate this bone broth.
And it turns out that this stuff was not asparagus.
So my kids and I, our heads were spinning all night.
The guy that owned the cabin, apparently he didn't sleep.
He was just like hunched over the toilet the whole evening.
And it turns out this stuff is called, I think it was brassica.
It looks like asparagus, but apparently it has very high levels of nicotine.
So we were all overdosed on nicotine for the next two days on this fishing trip.
joe rogan
Yeah, you should probably be really careful before you eat wild shit.
ben greenfield
That's the only time I haven't used that app to actually go plant foraging.
joe rogan
Who thought it was asparagus?
ben greenfield
We all thought it was asparagus.
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...
No, it's not asparagus.
It's brassica.
joe rogan
Jesus Christ.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
That sounds horrible.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
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.
joe rogan
Well, does Google...
Google image search is like some, there's an application that uses cameras, and if you take a photo of something, you can identify it.
ben greenfield
Right, exactly.
I think that's called like a reverse Google image search or something like that, but the AI doesn't seem to work as well for plant identification.
I would imagine it's looking at the leaves, the shape of the leaves, how it comes off the plant, you know, the veins.
Right.
The opposite versus symmetrical and everything that goes into a plant identification.
I'd rather go with a real person.
joe rogan
Steelhead, yeah, you've got to go with a real person.
You've got to go with an actual botanist.
Steelhead are ocean-bound rainbow trout, right?
They come back and forth.
Do you catch and release or do you eat them?
ben greenfield
This was all catch and release.
joe rogan
It's a real common thing with those.
ben greenfield
There's a certain kind that you can catch, and I'm not a fly fishing expert.
This was like a fun trip with my kids to learn how to fly fish, and we didn't catch any that we could actually keep.
joe rogan
Yeah, I don't understand that kind of fishing.
It's weird.
Take a long trip, go out into the wilderness, go to the river, catch the fish, let it go.
ben greenfield
It's the thrill of the chase.
joe rogan
I get it.
ben greenfield
I mean, it's great for kids.
joe rogan
I've done it with kids bass fishing before.
ben greenfield
You can't do that when you bow hunt.
joe rogan
No.
No, but it's a weird thing.
You're, you know, sticking a hook in a fish's mouth and then letting it go.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
We got them.
Let's let them go.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
They're hard reeling.
That's like a 10-minute fight to get those fish in.
They're big.
joe rogan
Yeah, they're powerful fish, too.
They deal with those ocean currents.
Ocean fish are almost always more strong when you pull them in than freshwater fish.
ben greenfield
They're very strong.
They're stronger than ants, I would imagine.
joe rogan
Go back to this ant thing and tell me what has been the reaction when you take it, how you feel.
ben greenfield
Just like a cup of coffee.
joe rogan
You really do feel like...
ben greenfield
You do feel more energy.
joe rogan
Do you think it's because of the ginseng or is it possibly a placebo effect?
ben greenfield
I think they just live within the ginseng and that makes the story sexier for the website that sells black ant powder.
joe rogan
So you think just eating the ants themselves give you energy?
ben greenfield
I would imagine that you'd have to catch a lot of ants to get what you'd get out of like all the powdered extract that they sell you.
joe rogan
Right, but I mean eating the powdered extract then, just that somehow or another, what's the mechanism for giving you energy?
ben greenfield
There's some chemical that's in the ants.
But I don't know the mechanism of action.
Again, I really don't claim to be an expert in ant extract.
joe rogan
But yet you have a bottle of it.
ben greenfield
I have a bottle of it.
It was in with all my other supplements, and I was packing up this morning and thought it would be an interesting one.
joe rogan
It is interesting.
ben greenfield
To show to you.
Just a giant bottle that says Ant on it.
joe rogan
What is the...
What's the standard way that people take it?
Do they put that into a smoothie or something?
ben greenfield
I think as a powder or as a tincture.
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
I would imagine you could probably put it in a smoothie.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
With your bee pollen.
Your other insect derivatives.
unidentified
Wow.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
What a weird one, huh?
ben greenfield
Yeah.
Anyways, you should have come out and done the Spartan.
I know you were at Disney.
joe rogan
Yeah, I told you I couldn't go, so I don't know why you said I should.
ben greenfield
I told you I couldn't.
Spartan's a little bit more interesting than Disney, in my opinion.
joe rogan
I didn't go to Disney for myself.
ben greenfield
Yeah, yeah.
They have kids races out there, too.
joe rogan
But you were doing commentary or something?
Is that what you're doing?
ben greenfield
I was doing the...
They have commentary all day long at these Spartan races, so I was doing the commentary, and then I raced the next day.
joe rogan
Oh, so you did it one day, so was it a two-day race thing?
ben greenfield
The way they do it, they get probably, I would say some of these races, 8,000 to 12,000 athletes in that approximate range.
joe rogan
So they break it up?
ben greenfield
They go out, they break it up.
There's long races, there's short races.
So the long race was about 13 miles, which on a road half marathon, that'd be like a 105 that an athlete would do on a race like that.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
So it's a 13 mile run.
ben greenfield
So out there with the obstacles and the hills and it's out of Big Bear, which is a ski resort, which I just found out from my wife.
Apparently it's fake snow.
There's like a pond at the top of the resort that they make all the snow with.
joe rogan
Well, it's real snow, but it's artificially created, right?
It's like they make with a snow machine.
ben greenfield
Yes, artificially created real snow made from water at the top of the mountain in a snow machine.
It's not like plastic.
Yeah, it's not foam.
joe rogan
I wonder if anybody's trying to do that.
ben greenfield
To make foam snow?
joe rogan
Yeah, to make some snow.
ben greenfield
Ask them at the mall in Dubai.
They've got something over there.
joe rogan
But I bet it's a snow machine, right?
ben greenfield
It probably is actual snow derived from water.
joe rogan
Yeah, at the mall in Dubai, they have like a crazy hill, right?
Like it's skiing.
ben greenfield
Yeah, they have an actual indoor skier.
They have penguins, an indoor ski resort, everything.
Yeah, so this race, though, for those same 13 miles, it's like two hours, and I think the winner did a 216, 217, something like that.
joe rogan
So you have to jump over stuff?
ben greenfield
So you're going a lot slower.
You've got to carry sandbags and carry big gravel buckets.
It's like doing yard chores and then running to your next yard chore.
You know, barbed wire crawling and hoisting ropes.
But it's good for full body fitness.
Because I used to do triathlon.
When I did triathlon, I was weak, right?
Because you swim, you bike, you run, and I had an engine that could go for days.
But I did my first Spartan race, and I couldn't climb a rope, and I couldn't carry a sandbag up a hill.
So I think it's good for functional fitness.
joe rogan
Here it is right here.
Jamie's got a video of it up there.
ben greenfield
That's a stadium.
That's actually a good way to start.
That's inside of the stadium.
Did it at Dodger Stadium a couple weeks ago.
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
And, you know, you don't have to get muddy, and there's no fake snow, and the stadium races...
joe rogan
He's running with a fucking selfie stick?
ben greenfield
I don't know.
unidentified
Oh, Christ.
ben greenfield
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...
You know, legit athletes.
joe rogan
This is kind of interesting though.
ben greenfield
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.
So it's a good mix of everything.
joe rogan
Hmm.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
I didn't know they're doing them in stadiums.
That's kind of cool.
ben greenfield
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.
So it actually is kind of a cool event.
joe rogan
That's pretty badass.
That looked like pretty badass.
ben greenfield
For the whole family.
joe rogan
Except for his fucking selfie stick.
Like everything must be documented.
You cannot live in this life without people knowing exactly what you're doing at all times.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
Running with a selfie stick.
ben greenfield
I'm taking my kids to one of those train-to-hunt competitions this weekend.
unidentified
Oh, yeah?
ben greenfield
In Bonners Ferry.
So they're going to do their first actual kids.
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.
Those things are fun, too.
joe rogan
Yeah, those are really interesting.
The idea behind them is kind of cool, too, because it lets people know what...
Like, if you're involved in one of those backcountry backpack hunts, it's very much a physical event.
ben greenfield
Very much.
joe rogan
You're carrying, most likely, at least 35 to 45 pounds on your back, especially if you're carrying your camp on your back.
And then you're hiking, you know, thousands of feet of elevation.
You're up and down.
ben greenfield
Mm-hmm.
joe rogan
Climbing over logs and shit.
You're carrying your bow.
There's a lot of physical exertion involved.
ben greenfield
Well, there's a lot of crawling.
A lot of crawling.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
I mean, you did that Hawaii hunt.
Which island did you hunt?
joe rogan
Lanai.
ben greenfield
Lanai, yeah.
I hunted Kona.
I guess it was like five weeks ago.
And on the sheep hunt, because the sheep stay out in the open plains, you'll crawl sometimes for an hour and a half to get close enough for a shot.
joe rogan
Yeah, the final day, I killed two axis buck out there, and the final day, we crawled for at least an hour.
At least an hour.
Like, super fucking slow.
Those things are switched on.
ben greenfield
And it's frustrating, too, with an animal.
Or sheep.
Sheep are not stupid.
They're smart.
Now, they're not as fast as an axis, but that's the most frustrating part, is you'll put on a crawl, right?
Maybe you're 200 yards out, and you spend an hour getting 60, and then the wind swirls, and they pick you up, and they're off.
unidentified
Yeah, that happened a few times.
ben greenfield
And then you just stand up and brush yourself off, and you've got to go crawl again.
joe rogan
Yeah, but, you know, if it was easy, it wouldn't be hunting.
It would just be killing.
ben greenfield
I got one of those jungle scrub cows, I told you.
joe rogan
Yeah, you were telling me about that.
So, these...
Explain to people what a scrub bull is, because...
ben greenfield
Well, apparently, they're just feral cows.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
And they're not all bulls.
There's bulls and cows.
I shot a cow, and I thought...
At first that it was going to be kind of a stupid hunt shooting a cow because the pigs are pigs.
They eat really well because they feed on macadamia nuts.
They're a lot better than the pigs in Texas.
They taste amazing.
joe rogan
Macadamia nuts, huh?
ben greenfield
Yeah, it's very fatty, almost like a nutty meat.
So we did a Cinco de Mayo cook-off, me and my kids, and we took the ribs.
From this pig that I shipped back.
It was like $150 to ship 250 pounds of meat back from Kona.
So I had sheep, pig, and cow and shipped it all back, which is not that expensive.
And the pig was, I mean, it ate better than any pork I've ever had in my life.
unidentified
Really?
ben greenfield
These ribs.
And we blended them up and my kids made an adobo sauce with the peppers and they have a little food podcast.
So we did all this for their food podcast.
Wow.
Oh my goodness, it's like the fattiest, but like a nutty, flavorful fat, because they feed on these macadamia nuts.
You know, there's no grain, there's no corn, and they're just wild and running around out there.
So the pig was really good, but the cow was tough.
It was a tough cow.
On the first day we were out there, I took the back strap and I soaked that in lemon juice all day and that kind of broke it down a little bit.
It wasn't that bad.
But what I did when I got home was I've got a refrigerator out in my garage and I hooked up a temperature controller to it.
You can get this temperature controller that's called an A419. It'll keep the temperature of the refrigerator about 34 to 38 degrees.
So rather than plugging the refrigerator into the wall, you plug it into this temp control unit.
And then you put a humidifier in and a fan, like on the bottom of the fridge.
And then you take all your meat and you lay it out on grates in the refrigerator.
And I left it in there for about three weeks, this scrub cow.
And it develops this hard, gristly coating on the outside of the meat.
And then I took it out and just sliced all this hard, gristly part off of the outside, and the inside of that meat was like butter.
joe rogan
So you're dry-aging it, essentially.
ben greenfield
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
It's a dry-aging refrigerator, but you control the temperature you want about 34 to 38 degrees.
And then the humidity can vary a lot more than that, but I kept the humidity at about 60 to 70 degrees.
And then basically you just slice off all that hard, gristly external coating, and you've got this amazing, super soft, super tender.
And then I just have this vacuum packer, and it's a cool little unit.
You can just cut a bag any size you want, right, for a neck or a shoulder, or like a smaller bag for a backstrap or a tenderloin, and bagged it up.
joe rogan
Yeah, I have one of those vacuum sealers.
Those things are awesome.
ben greenfield
Yeah, but the dry aging was key.
joe rogan
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.
ben greenfield
I don't know what walk-in cooler they have, because I looked into the dry-aging refrigerators, and those are like $5,000.
joe rogan
Yeah, they're expensive.
ben greenfield
But you can get a refrigerator off Craigslist.
That A419 thing I bought, that was like $50 off Amazon.
How big is it?
The refrigerator?
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
Just a normal size refrigerator.
Regular size refrigerator?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And so the food is on grates inside the refrigerator and the fan is on the bottom?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Oh, so you constructed your own sort of...
ben greenfield
Right, exactly.
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.
joe rogan
Especially that kind of meat.
ben greenfield
That meat that's tough anyways.
unidentified
It's tough.
ben greenfield
It's gamey.
joe rogan
Yeah.
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.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's how tough it is.
And this was the back strap, which was, you know, one of the more tender parts of the body.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
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.
We don't have to chew food as much.
joe rogan
That makes sense.
A lot of boxers chew, like, big chunks of bazooka bubblegum.
It gets kind of hard after a while and you dig into it and it develops muscular endurance in your jaw.
Mastic gum is another one.
I've seen machines, rather, where you take a leather strap in your mouth and you hang a piece of weight from it and you're doing this.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
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.
joe rogan
Well, I know that mouthpieces supposedly can maximize the amount of effort that you can put forth.
Like, there's a difference in the amount of strength that you can...
ben greenfield
You bite down.
It's almost like when you shake somebody's hand, you make a fist with one hand, then you shake their hand.
You're stronger.
And that's something that Pavel Zatselin talks about.
joe rogan
Right.
ben greenfield
In his books, you know, about how to generate as much force as possible.
joe rogan
Right.
ben greenfield
Close one fist.
I mean, if you're going to do like a bottoms-up kettlebell press, right, you can do it with one hand open and press.
Then you close your hand and contract this fist, and it's far easier.
joe rogan
So what is the idea behind that?
It somehow energizes your entire body?
ben greenfield
It's fascia.
You know, your fascia covers your entire body, so if you tighten up one part of it, it causes you to be able to produce more force.
So, I mean, try some time with a kettlebell or a water bottle or a coffee cup.
joe rogan
Well, I always kind of flex my hand outward when I'm doing, like, bottoms-up kettlebells.
ben greenfield
Yeah, but you flex your hand.
joe rogan
Yeah, I definitely flex my hand.
I never just let it sit.
There's always some tension in it.
ben greenfield
It's full body tension.
It's the same reason that you'll see a lot of tennis players or I think boxers do this too, a Valsalva maneuver when you strike.
So you hold your breath, you go...
Yeah, sure.
And it's the same thing.
It tightens up everything and allows you to produce more force.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
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.
unidentified
What?
ben greenfield
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 I bought some, and it's...
joe rogan
See if you can find that shit.
ben greenfield
I think I got it on Amazon.
joe rogan
It's Greek.
Health benefits of mastic gum.
ben greenfield
Yeah, that's what it looks like little rocks.
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.
It's like an everlasting gobstopper.
joe rogan
What does it taste like?
ben greenfield
It tastes like ass.
It's not that good.
But if you have this H. pylori issue, it's supposedly very good for that.
Yeah, look, that one they added...
They added licorice and aniseed and fennel.
joe rogan
So it tastes even shittier?
ben greenfield
Yeah, but it's supposedly, you know, this idea that we grow up on soft food and babies eat soft food.
Yeah, you wouldn't want the capsule.
I mean, the capsule would be good for your...
That's where you've got to be careful, is a lot of companies sell it as a capsule, right?
As mastic gum, as a capsule, but you want the actual gum that you chew on.
That's the exact one I have, that Krenos.
joe rogan
So there's the extract.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's the stuff that you actually chew to make your jaw stronger and to produce extra saliva.
unidentified
Huh.
joe rogan
And do you use this stuff when you work out?
Or do you just occasionally chew it?
ben greenfield
No, I don't like to have gum in my mouth when I'm working out.
joe rogan
You seem like you have so many different things going on, so many different modalities that you're experimenting with.
There's no way you can possibly...
ben greenfield
Yeah, but that's my shtick, dude.
That's what I do is I try stuff and I write about it.
It's not like I'm doing mastic gum and blank ab powder and injections all day long.
joe rogan
But if the mastic gum works, I would think you'd keep doing it all the time.
But it's just like...
ben greenfield
You forget about a lot of stuff, though.
You try out so many things that you forget about.
They're like, oh yeah, I tried that out a while ago.
It was pretty good.
I need to order some more of that.
So yeah, I lose track of all the stuff I try.
I don't have it all systematized in some big Excel spreadsheet.
joe rogan
What are you doing with the exomes?
Explain that.
Because I just got some shot into some tears that I have on my shoulders.
ben greenfield
It's exosomes.
Exosomes.
They're signaling molecules.
So your body actually has them.
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.
It's a beauty procedure.
joe rogan
You're beautiful as you are.
ben greenfield
Thank you.
Thank you.
joe rogan
You don't need to change.
ben greenfield
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.
You can see it drawing out of my hip.
joe rogan
How much bone marrow are they taking out of your hip?
ben greenfield
A lot.
Well, I was out.
I was heavily sedated during the entire procedure.
Well, not heavily sedated.
I mean, I was under.
It wasn't general anesthesia.
It's called full-body sedation.
joe rogan
So you're conscious?
ben greenfield
It's similar to general anesthesia with few of the risks of the actual anesthesia.
I was not conscious.
I mean, all I remember is they said count from 100. Down to zero.
And I got to like 93 and then I woke up.
Yeah, exactly.
So they took the bone marrow from the iliac crest, right?
Which is just like bone broth for your whole body.
It's got collagen, it's got peptides, it's got stem cells.
They mix it with the exosomes, which act as the cell to cell communicators from those placental cells.
This place called Chimera Labs, which in my opinion is just a great sexy name for some kind of a mysterious lab company where you buy placentas.
So, basically, they mixed the exosomes with the bone marrow, and then what they did...
unidentified
There you are.
Oh!
ben greenfield
Yeah, see, that's what it looks like.
joe rogan
That's in your ass.
ben greenfield
Yeah, that's one of the Iliac crests.
You asked me how much they took...
joe rogan
Look how much they're pulling out of you!
Holy shit!
ben greenfield
A lot of it.
joe rogan
That's bone marrow?
ben greenfield
But he did that, like, four times, because he did it twice to each hit.
joe rogan
Dude, are you fucking shitting me?
ben greenfield
This was five days ago.
He told me I was supposed to not do anything for two weeks, but I did that Spartan race.
I armored myself up.
joe rogan
Why didn't you listen to him?
ben greenfield
Well, I was signed up for the race and I had sponsor obligations to actually not...
joe rogan
Oh, dude.
Sponsors can suck my fat dick.
Because that looks like a fat dick they're pulling at you.
ben greenfield
That's how big it is.
I used like four rolls of rock tape.
My entire body was just taped up because I didn't want to ruin anything that he'd done.
So, anyways...
joe rogan
Wait a minute.
What do you mean by rock tape?
What is rock tape?
ben greenfield
Kinesio tape.
You've seen this stuff before.
It's like what you see CrossFitters wearing and Olympians wearing.
joe rogan
Oh, the stuff like when you have tendinitis and shit?
ben greenfield
Yeah, it supports the joints.
joe rogan
Oh, Jesus.
They're going in for another tube after they suck that out?
ben greenfield
They did four of those.
Four of those big tubes.
joe rogan
Jamie, how much do you think you have in your body?
Do you think you have four tubes of marrow floating around someone can pull out of you?
unidentified
I don't know.
What?
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Right.
No, I get that.
ben greenfield
So he and his partner, what they did was he went with that bone marrow, mixed with the exosomes.
They mix it with ozone, which apparently, using an ozonator, which apparently increases the efficacy of the bone marrow.
joe rogan
And you're doing this for no specific injury.
ben greenfield
No specific injury.
No.
This is all just for two reasons.
Number one, anti-aging.
Number two, just immersive journalism.
Just to write about it.
I think this stuff's fun to write about and look into in a study.
And apparently the stem cells stay available.
So this is an over-exaggeration, but it's almost like you'd be like Wolverine or like you recover faster when you get hurt for the rest of your life.
joe rogan
So here he goes, pulling out round two.
ben greenfield
Yeah, for people who are listening to the audio and not watching the video.
joe rogan
It's like a horse dick.
They're pulling a horse dick out of them.
ben greenfield
It's a lot of blood.
And then he injected my entire musculoskeletal system.
He did my cerebrospinal fluid.
He did it all up and down the discs in my back.
unidentified
He did...
joe rogan
Whoa, Daddy!
Are you conscious here?
ben greenfield
I've got needles.
No, dude, I'm totally out.
I would not want to be conscious.
I was just box breathing.
I was meditating.
I'm totally out for this.
And you can see there I have the Iron Man corporate logo on my back.
Technically, that's trademark infringement.
It's the Iron Man logo.
joe rogan
I had Regenicane done in my spine like that and bulging discs while I was awake.
It just feels weird.
It's just an increase in pressure.
ben greenfield
I've done a lot of this stuff before.
I mean, I told you this last time.
I had my stem cells taken out of the fat in my back down in Florida.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
And then I re-injected them intravenously.
And then I tested my telomere length.
joe rogan
Look at this.
They just...
ben greenfield
Oh, this goes on for hours, dude.
Like, I was there for three or four hours.
joe rogan
So they just screw it in and pump those in and then find a new hole.
You're totally out cold while they're doing all this.
ben greenfield
I'm totally out cold.
My wife's in there freaking out.
You can see her somewhere in there holding the camera.
unidentified
Fucking A, dude.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
While you're out cold.
ben greenfield
Yeah, my wife said that was the weirdest part, was they flipped me over.
joe rogan
You're moving.
ben greenfield
And I was just limp like a noodle.
I think she's moving my hand.
See that?
So, then his partner came in, and she's like a sexual performance and beauty specialist.
And I don't want this to turn into another podcast about just injecting things into your dick.
joe rogan
But...
ben greenfield
But she did...
Yeah, but...
She did...
She injected the corpus cavernosum, which is the shaft of your unit.
And then she did the head of the penis.
unidentified
And then she did...
joe rogan
Dude, what are they doing to your face here, man?
ben greenfield
Then she did my face over and over and over again everywhere.
Exosomes all over my face.
And I've seen some 50 and 60-year-old women who have done this, and it actually does seem to have a pretty significant effect.
I don't know how much of an effect it had on me, but I said if they were going to put me under just...
He called it a full-body stem cell makeover.
Apparently nobody's ever in the history of the world done this before.
joe rogan
Oh, my God, dude.
ben greenfield
So if I die, that's the one thing I can brag about.
joe rogan
You look great.
This is what I don't understand.
You don't need this shit.
ben greenfield
No, a lot of the...
Well, like I said, a lot of this stuff is...
It's interesting to write stories about and to talk about and tell people what it's like.
I get it.
And then they did that on the face.
What are they doing on your face here?
What is that?
That's exosomes mixed with PRP. What is that device that you're doing it with?
joe rogan
What is that thing?
ben greenfield
I don't remember because I wasn't awake.
joe rogan
Right, but it looks like it's got little needles all over it.
ben greenfield
I think it might be some kind of dermal abrasion type of thing.
joe rogan
Yeah, they're fucking your face up, man.
ben greenfield
I mean, this was a few days ago.
How many days?
I feel like I healed five days ago.
unidentified
Wow.
ben greenfield
Yeah, so I healed up pretty quickly from it.
joe rogan
That's crazy because five days ago was when I was doing my exosomes.
ben greenfield
Oh, great minds think alike.
joe rogan
Dude, that is crazy.
ben greenfield
Actually, what day is it today?
joe rogan
I don't know.
ben greenfield
It's Tuesday.
Actually, no, seven.
Seven days ago.
joe rogan
Mine was Wednesday.
ben greenfield
Anyways, though...
joe rogan
They're fucking your face up, son.
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Would the exosomes cross the blood-brain barrier because they're smaller than stem cells?
They're very small.
ben greenfield
They're very small.
I think they're like 100 to 200 nanometers, which is pretty small.
And I would not be surprised if they crossed the blood-brain barrier as well.
joe rogan
Yeah, one of the things they were saying about stem cells versus exosomes is that stem cells tend to get pooled up in the lungs.
They don't pass the lungs and they get absorbed there.
And they believe that the exosomes being released by these stem cells are the reason why you generate and regenerate tissue.
They think that going straight to exosomes is going to be more efficacious than just going with stem cells themselves.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
So you weren't supposed to do anything for two weeks?
ben greenfield
Not for two weeks.
But I asked the doctor, and I told him I was going to do a Spartan race.
He said, proceed at your own risk.
joe rogan
What would be the risk?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
From the surgery.
But is it really a surgery?
Because they're not cutting you open.
ben greenfield
The injections.
joe rogan
Procedure?
ben greenfield
And I sprained my ankle within a few hours after waking up from the surgery.
I just kind of stumbled and it was extremely lax.
Almost like a pregnant woman creates this hormone called relaxin.
And they get more flexible and they're able to give birth more quickly.
It's kind of that same idea.
The joints and the ligaments become more lax.
So my whole body felt a little bit more like Gumby.
That was why I taped up everything.
I had knee braces on and elbow braces and wrist braces.
And I felt fine during the race.
joe rogan
And this whole procedure was how many hours?
ben greenfield
It was about four hours.
joe rogan
Four hours, out cold, shooting you up.
What does it feel like when you wake up?
ben greenfield
Oh, there's a pretty funny video I posted.
I thought it was funny.
I was trying to speak French.
I told my wife, I'm like, I have a confession to make.
And the doctor's like, uh-oh, here we go.
unidentified
And I'm like, I speak French.
ben greenfield
And then she asked me if I speak French.
And I didn't actually speak French.
And you could see me trying to laugh like I'd made a joke.
Have you ever been sedated?
joe rogan
Yes.
ben greenfield
Yeah, you're kind of loopy when you wake up.
So I don't remember that much.
And I'll be honest with you, I don't notice much of a difference from any of this stuff.
joe rogan
Well, it's supposed to take six weeks.
ben greenfield
Yeah, it's supposed to take a long time before it really kicks in.
And it flares up old injuries.
Like I strain my upper hamstring when I played tennis and that's flared up.
My left knee is flared up.
Like I'm feeling old injuries.
joe rogan
Flared up.
ben greenfield
That's interesting.
They almost like brought back, not flared up like it's red and inflamed and swollen, but I feel it.
I feel my right ankle, which I strained a lot when I was playing tennis.
That one feels, you know, it feels like I mentioned.
It's weak.
joe rogan
It's painful.
They told you that this was going to be something.
ben greenfield
They said that it could flare up old injuries.
That you'd feel worse before you'd feel better.
unidentified
Huh.
joe rogan
That's interesting.
I didn't hear that at all.
But I did hear that six weeks.
Six weeks is the benchmark.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
And that's where the benefit comes from.
ben greenfield
The benefits are not from not eating so much damn food.
The benefits are going for a long time in between your feedings.
So the idea is you'd wake up and the population for which this seems to be the most deleterious are lean active females.
They do not respond well to these long fasts or a lot of time spent doing intermittent fasting.
It's like the cons outweigh the pro for that population.
But for most everybody else, these 12 to 16 hour fasts, preferably up to 16 hours, going without eating.
And then eating as many calories as you'd normally eat.
joe rogan
So do you compress the amount of calories?
ben greenfield
It's a compressed feeding window, right?
So, you know, the guy whose house I was staying at when I was doing the stem cell procedure, Dan Pomp, he's very into this stuff.
And he's a doctor down in Park City.
And he just, he goes all day and then he has a huge dinner at the end of the day, right?
Like an enormous, lovely dinner, you know, a couple glasses of wine and, you know, steak and sweet potatoes.
Yeah, like 3,000 calories for dinner.
And I'm more of like a two meal, you know, light breakfast or light lunch and then just two meals.
joe rogan
I've been doing the 12 to 14 hour thing and sometimes I ramp it up to 16 hours and I do feel better when I do that.
And I definitely become more accustomed to not eating for long stretches.
And sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I almost think, should I just eat?
But then I'll stop and go, well, I'm not really hungry.
I mean, it's really just a matter of habit, a force of habit that I'm even considering eating right now.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Yeah, you were trying that for a while.
You were putting that on your social media, sort of, but you had some vegetables mixed in.
ben greenfield
I was eating one of those big...
Steaks every single night for dinner, just like a bunch of steak every single night for dinner.
For how long?
And this was like 10 days, not that long.
joe rogan
How'd you feel doing that?
ben greenfield
I felt pretty good, but I love steak.
I was eating these bone-in ribeyes.
I ordered them up from Missouri, I think is where their farms are, but they make these...
French cut, grass fed, grass finished, bone in, ribeye steaks.
joe rogan
I'm getting out of here.
Just saying that.
ben greenfield
Remind me, I'll tell you how I cook them.
Maybe I'll tell you how I cook them after we finish the science of the carnivore diet.
Because I'll just forget everything if I start talking about cooking.
I love to prepare meat.
joe rogan
Because I know quite a few people that are doing this now.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Did he have really low testosterone?
That's interesting.
ben greenfield
He had like 200 to 300. Really?
joe rogan
That's really low.
ben greenfield
Yeah, diagnosable hypogonadism combined with...
Almost like borderline diabetes.
joe rogan
Is it possible that he did it after a workout?
He does a lot of rowing, like real high intensity.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Well, here's the difference.
ben greenfield
Dr. Ron Rosedale is a doc who has some good information on that.
He's got a good video online.
joe rogan
What's going on with this carnivore diet is there's no science behind it.
There's a lot of people that are giving it a shot.
A lot of people are finding good results.
But I find that people, when they just change things, there's a period of time where they say they feel great.
And that is absolutely 100% a placebo effect.
ben greenfield
It's the same thing as a vegan diet.
You feel fantastic.
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.
joe rogan
It's been a lot of studies on vegans and we know that if you eat like e3 live you know You can supplement.
ben greenfield
There's a lot of really smart vegans.
There's guys like Rich Roll.
They do things the right way.
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.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's the other thing, too, when people talk about food that has protein in it.
Broccoli has so much protein.
True.
Not really bioavailable, though.
It's just not the same.
Your body doesn't absorb it the same way it does a grass-fed ribeye steak.
Your body absorbs that protein instantly.
It knows exactly what it is.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Avocados, things along those lines.
You can get a lot of your fats from that.
ben greenfield
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.
Pre-digested in a lot of cases.
joe rogan
When you're talking about carnivorous diets, the real issue that I have with it is there's almost no research.
Other than Dr. Baker doing those tests on himself, which according to you are not very pre-digested.
Promising.
I have some friends that are trying it.
My friend Jordan Peterson, his daughter had some serious immune system issues, autoimmune disorders.
And like to the point where she's had, I believe she's like 30, 31. She's had a hip replaced.
She's about to get one of her ankles replaced.
Like serious arthritis, real problems.
The only thing that's been able to clear that up is meat.
Just a pure meat diet.
So with some people, but she might have some outrageous allergic reaction to plants.
ben greenfield
I don't think the meat wasn't the medicine, probably the elimination of whatever she eliminated.
joe rogan
She might have some sort of a real serious problem, some sort of allergic reaction to some plants or to gluten and maybe a bunch of different things.
ben greenfield
That's what a lot of these diets are.
It's the elimination, not the magic of just eating meat.
joe rogan
But Sean Baker keeps going on and on about how meat heals and meat this and meat that, all carnivorous diet and all these people are trying it.
ben greenfield
It's got a lot of good stuff going for it, but restriction of plant matter, in my opinion, long-term is not a good idea.
And eating meat all the time long-term is not necessarily a good idea.
And eating only plants with the absence of some meat-based protein is for a lot of populations.
Not that great of an idea.
joe rogan
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.
I'm like, okay.
But the issue with that is...
ben greenfield
Some mild hormetic exercise is bad for you.
Sunlight's bad for you.
joe rogan
Exactly.
ben greenfield
All that stuff can go because it's a hormetic stressor.
joe rogan
Is that your body responds to that in a positive way.
ben greenfield
I didn't even show that some of the rodents outside of Chernobyl are living longer from the radiation.
And I'm not saying, like, go move your cabin out next to a nuclear disaster website.
But the idea is that's a hormetic stressor.
unidentified
Right.
ben greenfield
Like mild amounts of UVA and UVB every day.
I actually, every single day, I do cold.
Every single day, I do hot.
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.
joe rogan
They're trying to figure out if hot yoga has the same hormetic stress response as sauna.
Because they know there's been quite a bit of work done on sauna.
Yeah, it's gotta be.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Yeah, I've heard that before.
I haven't really gotten into it, but I'm very big on the sauna to the point where obviously we have one here at the studio that I use all the time.
I just think it's, you know, those stressors that they're talking about as being a negative thing with eating vegetables, I just don't buy it.
I just don't buy it.
People have been eating vegetables forever.
I don't think they're bad for it.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
You ever have that coffee?
Kopi Luat?
You ever have that stuff?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Is it the weasel?
Yeah, the cat, the lemur, eats the coffee and shits it out.
And then they take the coffee and sell it at this outrageous rate.
It's actually delicious.
ben greenfield
It ferments in the digestive tract.
joe rogan
It's smooth coffee, man.
It's very nice.
ben greenfield
But you're eating lemur shit.
There's one that elephants do, too.
It's black ivory coffee.
joe rogan
I'll try that shit.
But I don't want to support the elephant.
I don't give a fuck about lemurs.
You know, I feel...
unidentified
I don't...
joe rogan
It's a lemur?
I think it's a lemur?
ben greenfield
Harvesting coffee beans from elephant poop sounds far more laborious than harvesting...
unidentified
Why?
joe rogan
You get a giant chunk.
ben greenfield
...weasels or lemurs.
It's huge.
joe rogan
It throws it down.
ben greenfield
You probably get better bang for your buck.
joe rogan
Yeah, lemurs, tiny little turds.
ben greenfield
I don't know, but one little...
It's like a needle in a haystack, right?
If it's just a few coffee beans and a giant pile of elephant shit.
joe rogan
You get jacked up, coffeed up, elephants out there shitting like crazy.
ben greenfield
Then you got hyper elephants chasing you as you're digging through their shit, chasing you through the field.
joe rogan
Plus, they probably shit like crazy, just like a person does when you eat coffee.
ben greenfield
Yeah, give them some Elfian.
joe rogan
There it is.
There it is.
Those are coffee turds.
ben greenfield
That's almost like a bunch of coffee beans with a few pieces of turd thrown in.
joe rogan
Yeah, look at that.
Bam, son.
That's Balinese Luat coffee.
So they just feed them nothing but coffee, and they shit it out.
Sort of like we shit out corn, and we can't really digest it properly.
ben greenfield
Yeah, there's a fermentation process that makes the bean taste better.
joe rogan
My problem with the carnivore diet is the same problem that I have with the vegan diet.
I don't think they're being scientific or objective about it.
ben greenfield
They're being dogmatic.
joe rogan
It becomes an ideology.
And the ideology is the meat heals, and meat's this, and meat's that, and meat is the thing.
No, meat is one part of a good diet.
One part of a healthy diet.
And again, for some people.
There's some people that have...
I'm sure you're aware of the Lone Star Tick.
You know about that, right?
ben greenfield
What about it?
josh olin
Do you know about meat allergies?
ben greenfield
No.
joe rogan
Lone Star Tick is a tick that bites people and gives them an allergy to red meat.
It's horrible for a guy like you or a guy like me.
ben greenfield
I'm assuming this is like a Texas tick.
joe rogan
Yes, but it's spreading.
It's spreading across the country.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Well, Lyme is much more prevalent on the East Coast.
ben greenfield
It is.
joe rogan
It's starting to make its way out here.
There have been some Lyme cases out here in California.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
But this Lone Star Tick is a real problem, and it's giving people...
It's something called Alpha-Gal.
Short for Alpha-Gal.
ben greenfield
Alpha-Galactose?
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
It's like a sugar.
joe rogan
So here it is.
It makes you allergic to hot dogs.
ben greenfield
Alpha-Galactose.
joe rogan
Alpha-1,3-Galactose.
Alpha-Gal is the most mammalian cell membrane, so the allergy doesn't extend to non-mammalian meat.
Poultry and seafood are all fine.
Which is really interesting.
So you can't...
Once you get this shit, you're allergic to this alpha-galactose.
ben greenfield
But you could eat ape and human meat, according to the article.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
So you're not allergic to those.
joe rogan
I wonder if you could eat pig.
I wonder if pork...
Well, mammalian.
ben greenfield
Doubt it.
joe rogan
So you could eat ape meat.
So if you want to go to the jungle and have what they call...
Bush meat.
ben greenfield
Crazy.
Okay, speaking of meat, ribeye steaks.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
This is how to make these ribeye steaks taste really good.
So what I do on the rub is like a really coarse salt.
I use a salt called Kalima salt.
Super high in minerals.
joe rogan
It's like kosher salt?
ben greenfield
But it's coarse.
No, it's different.
They harvest it from the Mexican coast and it tastes fabulous.
It's really good.
joe rogan
What's it called again?
ben greenfield
The only salts I travel with and use is Kalima salt and then this stuff called...
C-A-L-I-M-A. C-O-L-I-M-A. And black Kona salt.
Black Kona salt.
joe rogan
From Hawaii?
ben greenfield
From Hawaii.
Yeah, I use that when I cook some of the meat from Hawaii just because it seems right to use salt from the volcanoes in Hawaii.
And I rub cayenne, black pepper, salt, and then to reduce the carcinogens that can form when you cook meat, either thyme or rosemary or both.
joe rogan
Thyme or rosemary reduces carcinogens?
ben greenfield
Yeah, they reduce the formation of, I think they call them, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
These things that form on the meat when you blacken the meat.
Because you want to get a good crisp sear on the outside of the meat.
So it's nice and crunchy on the outside.
So you restrict a lot of the unhealthy effects of doing that when you get some kind of an herb in there like that.
So you take out the meat.
You get it to room temperature.
You put this rub in.
And you take a cast iron skillet.
So I don't do it on the grill at all.
It's a cast iron skillet.
You heat up the cast iron skillet in the oven.
And then you take it out of the oven and you put it on the stovetop.
You put the stovetop on medium high.
And I either use an extra virgin olive oil.
I've used lard before.
joe rogan
Why do you use olive oil when it has a low flashpoint?
ben greenfield
It gives me a good...
No, extra virgin olive oil has a bunch of antioxidants in it.
joe rogan
Right, but it burns easy.
ben greenfield
It has higher resistance to the heat.
It's never burnt.
Never an issue.
Doesn't burn, doesn't smoke.
joe rogan
But when they sear things, that's one thing they tell you is never use olive oil.
ben greenfield
Well, I use extra virgin olive.
I'm part of an olive oil club, so maybe it's because I have really good olive oil.
They ship me three bottles of olive oil every quarter from a different part of the world.
joe rogan
Well, Google that.
Let's find that out, because I've really read, don't cook things at high heat with olive oil.
ben greenfield
Look it up.
joe rogan
Even extra virgin olive oil.
ben greenfield
At this point, all I can tell you is this shit works.
That's how you do it.
unidentified
You're saying high heat.
ben greenfield
He said medium heat, and this says medium heat, too.
jamie vernon
So maybe that's the difference is the high heat.
joe rogan
Maybe, but when you're searing, I would assume that is kind of what it is.
unidentified
So it's not on there for very long.
ben greenfield
Anyways, extra virgin olive oil into the pan.
You heat up the olive oil and you put it on for maybe two minutes max on the cast iron skillet.
You heat up the olive oil.
Then you put the steak on and you do exactly for a perfect medium rare, three and a half minutes one side, three and a half minutes the other side.
Then you take it out and this is where you get, they're probably about that thick.
joe rogan
What is that?
That's an inch and a half?
ben greenfield
Oh yeah, we're on audio.
It's about an inch and a half.
So anyways, it's like when you asked me on the last podcast how big my dick got after I injected it with stem cells.
joe rogan
About that big.
ben greenfield
About that big.
So anyways, then you put it into the oven.
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.
joe rogan
That sounds very good.
ben greenfield
It's really good.
joe rogan
That sounds very good.
ben greenfield
It's really good.
joe rogan
Mostly what I do is the reverse sear method with a pellet grill.
I keep it at about 250 degrees.
You ever use a pellet grill?
What I like about pellet grills is you're getting...
ben greenfield
We had a pellet stove when I was growing up.
joe rogan
It's not horrible.
You're essentially getting hardwood that's compressed.
So when they cut hardwood, like for...
This table.
They would take the oak and the sawdust.
They would compress into these small pellets.
And there's a bunch of different companies.
Traeger's a good one.
They make one.
ben greenfield
I've heard they have good grills.
joe rogan
Yeah, they have good grills.
And they also make one that you could use with an app.
What I like about it is you can control the temperature completely with your phone.
There's a thing called a Timberline.
It's one of their new ones.
So anyway, you get these compressed pellets and they go into a hopper.
And then there it is right there.
That's...
What kind is that one?
A woodwind?
ben greenfield
That's what our pellet stove looked like when I was growing up.
joe rogan
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?
No, I have a wire.
I have a wireless.
ben greenfield
I have a wire, yeah.
joe rogan
A wireless thermometer that's connected to it and that's outside so I can always see it.
ben greenfield
That's like what my dry-aging fridge has.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And it's also, it lets me know, it gives me a beep when it hits 120, so I know to go and get it.
So I pull it out of there.
ben greenfield
It is highly technical.
joe rogan
Yes.
Then I pull it out of there, and I use a cast iron skillet as well.
But I cook with grass-fed butter.
So I take the cast iron skillet, I put it probably same temperature, medium-high heat.
And again, when I've got the steak on the grill itself, I'm using sea salt and crushed black pepper and garlic powder.
That's what I usually use.
ben greenfield
No black ant extract?
joe rogan
No, no.
I'm going to try now, though.
So then I take it off of there, and then I use grass-fed butter in the cast-iron skillet once it's heated up.
I sear it on both sides for about a minute and a half, and then I let it rest.
Depending if I'm ambitious, sometimes I'll let it rest.
I'll cover it with aluminum foil and put it in a Yeti cooler, and I'll let it sit in that Yeti cooler for about 10 minutes.
And I pull it out, and it is just fucking fantastic.
ben greenfield
It's not too cold after 10 minutes?
I'm getting so hungry right now.
joe rogan
It's in the Yeti cooler.
The Yeti Cooler maintains the temperature hot and low.
ben greenfield
Can we order steaks?
We should have my wife bring steaks, but I just texted her.
Get out of the shopping mall and bring us steaks.
joe rogan
I have a Yoder pellet grill in the back in the cast iron pan.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, that's the reverse sear method.
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.
I take that bad boy out.
ben greenfield
This is very precise.
This is even more precise.
This is like the sound effects.
It's like beep, beep, beep, beep.
joe rogan
Yeah, I like it.
ben greenfield
Just cooking steak.
joe rogan
Well, I'm a big fan of these pellet grills because you get this real smoky flavor to your food that comes from hardwood, but there's no chemicals.
They compress the hardwood sawdust just with natural sugars, the natural sugars in the sawdust.
And, you know, there's a bunch of different companies.
There's Green Mountain Grill makes a good grill.
I got a Yoder at home I really like.
Again, Traeger is really good.
Most of my friends are using Traeger's because this temperature control thing and the apps are so good.
To be able to use it on your phone, I'm a big fan.
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
Wow, it's amazing.
joe rogan
Yeah, I like the fact that you can...
ben greenfield
It sounds good.
joe rogan
You set it and you can just walk the fuck away from it too and it's going to smoke your meat at 250 degrees and just keep...
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And it has a good, rich, that smoky flavor, whether it's hickory or cherry, you know, whatever you choose.
ben greenfield
The only thing that I have to do, I don't know why I'm like this with a steak, because I still need to dip it in something.
You know, in the same way that you dip a prime rib in horseradish.
So I use stone mustard.
I dip my steak in it, you know, like the stone mustard with a little texture to it.
It's perfect.
joe rogan
I am fucking hungry now.
ben greenfield
It's perfect, I know.
unidentified
God damn you.
ben greenfield
It's frickin' the middle of the day on a Tuesday and I'm hungry.
joe rogan
Stone mustard.
ben greenfield
We went to Maestro's last night and had steak.
joe rogan
That's a good spot.
ben greenfield
It was good.
I had a fascinating, fascinating discussion about artificial sweeteners there with the...
One of the guys who runs Quest Nutrition.
joe rogan
Oh, what's that?
Tom Bilyeu?
ben greenfield
No, it wasn't Tom.
It was Ron.
Ron Penna.
And he was drinking Diet Coke.
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.
Now, this is all brand new.
This is, like, 12 hours ago, right?
So I haven't started drinking Diet Coke.
And I do know they use artificial sweeteners.
joe rogan
But doesn't that sound like a justification?
ben greenfield
Some of their bars and some of that playing in as well.
But he said you could take a shower in Diet Coke and you wouldn't get sticky because there's such a small amount of artificial...
It's like a dusting of artificial sweeteners.
joe rogan
Hmm.
ben greenfield
So actually, it's making, I haven't delved into the research yet, but it's at least made me think last night about reconsidering my stance.
Because what I usually do is I just use Stevia and like Pellegrino.
Like my refrigerator is just full of Pellegrino.
joe rogan
Do you ever try Zevia?
ben greenfield
Because I do a lot of, I love Zevia too.
joe rogan
I love that shit.
ben greenfield
I love it, yeah.
joe rogan
I drink the shit out of that stuff.
ben greenfield
I got in trouble the other day because I'm so into Zevia.
I was doing that Spartan live feed announcing and they're sponsored by FitAid.
And they cut to Cameron.
I had a big old Zevia there.
And we're supposed to be pretending we're drinking FitAid or whatever.
joe rogan
What is FitAid?
ben greenfield
Take the Zevia down.
FitAid, I don't know.
I think it's got proteolytic enzymes in it.
I think that's the main thing.
I could be confusing that with Kill Cliff.
I love that stuff.
joe rogan
We got a bunch of those.
ben greenfield
Which are great.
They break down fibrinogen.
They're wonderful for recovery, these enzymes.
And I don't know how many of them they have.
It's like that...
joe rogan
Blood Orange Kill Cliff, used as a marinade for wild pork.
Holy baby Jesus.
Woo!
ben greenfield
That's like beer can chicken.
joe rogan
Well, that's one of the things.
ben greenfield
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 like a form of ceviche almost, right?
Like you do with lemon and lime and fish.
joe rogan
It's a phenomenal marinade for meat.
That's probably why it works.
ben greenfield
I'm guessing Kill Cliff is the one with the enzymes.
joe rogan
It just tastes so good, too.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's just so delicious.
And you're getting very little sugar.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
joe rogan
You know, it's just deliciousness.
ben greenfield
I like it.
joe rogan
I like it.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
Yeah, but I go with Pellegrino.
Pellegrino is less acidic than Perrier, and it has a lot of sodium bicarbonate in it.
unidentified
It doesn't.
ben greenfield
I don't know if you looked into these studies on baking soda for athletic performance and its ability to be able to buffer lactic acid.
unidentified
Really?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Do you notice a difference between...
unidentified
It's all theoretical.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
I know of zero Pellegrino studies on this.
joe rogan
But do you notice a difference physically between not...
ben greenfield
I feel amazing when I drink that stuff all day long.
unidentified
Really?
ben greenfield
I drink that and I drink this...
It's hydrogen enriched water.
Molecular hydrogen.
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.
joe rogan
Why shouldn't you take a cold bath post-workout?
And there's a certain period of time where they think you should, you could, but you have to give your body a time to adjust.
ben greenfield
For me, I go two or three hours.
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.
joe rogan
Yeah, we talked about that last time here.
I love that idea.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
So when you're doing this late night workout, how long before you go to sleep are you doing this?
ben greenfield
What research has shown is that it's ideal to finish a hard workout within three hours before bedtime if you don't want to Fuck with your sleep.
To mess up your sleep.
Exactly.
joe rogan
But with your cold bath, you can probably mitigate some of your...
unidentified
Right.
ben greenfield
And I go to bed pretty early.
I usually go to bed about...
Usually 9.30, 9.45, I'm in bed reading, and I'm going to sleep around 10, 10.30.
So if I'm not finishing up a workout until like 7.30, which is the case sometimes, you know, I finish work, I'm not...
Getting into the workout until like 6.45, 7. Like sometimes I'm working out closer to bedtime in three hours.
So in that case, I'll do the cold shower.
joe rogan
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.
ben greenfield
You can.
joe rogan
Yeah, but it fucks you up.
ben greenfield
Well, there's exceptions to that.
Some people have this, I think it's the DEC2 gene, that allows you to actually get by on a lot less sleep.
Some members of the population have that gene.
joe rogan
It's a very small member of the population.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
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.
I believe it.
ben greenfield
I'm a sleep hog.
I'm a sleep hog.
joe rogan
What are you getting every night?
ben greenfield
I am for 24 hour cycles getting about 8 hours, which means like if I sleep 7 hours, I take a 20 to 45 minute nap in the afternoon.
joe rogan
That sounds perfect.
ben greenfield
I'm a big napper and my naps are very elaborate.
joe rogan
Well, you're also, you work out extremely hard.
ben greenfield
Yeah, I mean, I'm not working out as hard as some of these pro athletes who are needing like 10 hours of sleep a night.
joe rogan
Right, but for the average person.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
And I lay on this bio mat, which is like laying on a warm teddy bear.
It's like this mat that makes infrared rays, so it's like an infrared radiation mat, almost like a sauna.
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
And then I've got these binaural beats.
It's an artificial intelligence-based audio that confuses your brain and lulls you into this total state of relaxation.
It's called Brain FM. So I lay on my back, and I've got the boots on, and I have the mat on.
joe rogan
You do this every night?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
How would you know how many sleep cycles unless you're monitoring it?
You'd have to monitor it.
Is that what you're monitoring with?
You got one of those?
ben greenfield
Yeah, I use one of these.
And the ring's pretty accurate.
I mean, it's...
It's not as accurate as a sleep lab study, but it's accurate.
joe rogan
Kevin Rose tried to get me to wear one of those things.
ben greenfield
Yeah, it's big.
They've got another one that's smaller, but I don't mind it.
joe rogan
It seems very rock star-ish.
ben greenfield
Yeah, it does.
joe rogan
Very jeans-like.
ben greenfield
Yeah, exactly.
I need a lot of necklaces and bling to go along with it, but it works.
I found it in Finland like four years ago, and I bought it, and I've really been using it ever since.
It does like my sleep temperature.
unidentified
There it is.
joe rogan
Oh, it shrunk it.
ben greenfield
Yeah, that's the littler one.
joe rogan
Smart ring that helps you get more restorative, whatever.
ben greenfield
It just redesigned it, yeah.
joe rogan
Oh.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
Yeah, the Aura.
I wish I'd have invested in the company because they seem to be like everywhere now.
joe rogan
How does it help you get more sleep?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Is that a diamond?
Are those diamonds?
ben greenfield
I don't think.
joe rogan
What is that?
Is that light?
ben greenfield
I don't know if they're real.
joe rogan
Is that bling?
Are they trying to say it's bling?
That's bling.
That's diamonds.
ben greenfield
They're blinging it up.
joe rogan
Letting bitches know.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Do that through your ring?
ben greenfield
Well, now the ring, it measures it all during the night.
It does five-minute measurements throughout the night while I'm asleep.
So I wake up, I can get a running average of my HRV. And you're getting this on your smartphone?
And then it pairs that with how hard I worked out the day before, my heart rate, my body temperature.
And then it tells me, here's your readiness score.
So if my readiness score is at like 60%, then I'm going to go in the sauna and do yoga.
And if my readiness score is like 90%, I'll go out and do the obstacle course at my house and swing kettlebells and...
And beat up the body a little bit more.
So it's pretty useful.
joe rogan
Is it ever at 100?
ben greenfield
I've never seen it at 100. What would that mean?
joe rogan
Like, why wouldn't it be at 100?
ben greenfield
I bet if I took a two-hour nap on that mat with the boots, it would probably get up to 100. Those Normatec boots, they sent them to me.
joe rogan
I sent them to my friend Cam.
I'm not wearing them.
I just don't...
ben greenfield
Cameron Haynes.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
But he runs a lot.
They're probably good.
They have them for the arms and the hips, too.
You can be like a giant marshmallow man.
joe rogan
What does it do for you?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
There it is.
ben greenfield
Yeah, they look kind of silly and they're kind of hard to get on by yourself.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
So that would be one more thing for my assistant to have to help me with.
joe rogan
What is it doing again?
ben greenfield
It's gradated compression.
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.
joe rogan
You had a picture, was that Lomachenko in one of those earlier pictures?
No, it was another one earlier than that.
ben greenfield
I mean, your legs feel light as a feather after you use them.
joe rogan
And so this compression, like as it's doing the compressing, what is it doing to the legs by just compressing?
ben greenfield
It's pumping blood, like up and away from all the extremities.
joe rogan
Just moving it around better?
Is that the idea?
ben greenfield
No, it's moving it back up to your heart, just circulating blood throughout your body.
joe rogan
So it's almost like an additional heart.
ben greenfield
It's like a massage.
joe rogan
Like a massage.
ben greenfield
I don't know if it seems more intense.
If the heart is not a pump, then it's not like an additional heart.
joe rogan
I'm not sure if I buy that horse shit.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
Anyways, though.
So, they work, though.
And they're incredibly relaxing.
It's almost like someone's massaging you while you're taking a nap.
joe rogan
Seems like a good thing to do to watch TV with.
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
Well, you can kill two birds with one stone.
Look at that!
joe rogan
Woo!
ben greenfield
Oh, wow.
He's got the full meal deal.
joe rogan
This guy has the arms on.
ben greenfield
He's got the legs on.
Now, this is a little bit...
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.
So that's a spendy setup.
joe rogan
Well, that's the UFC featherweight champ.
ben greenfield
Well, if he's the UFC featherweight champ, he can afford the Cadillac of Marshmallow Man suits.
joe rogan
Well, he's at Honolulu cryotherapy getting his freak on.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Yeah.
ben greenfield
Burn a lot of fat.
joe rogan
What do you think about those things, those ultrasonic things, you know what I'm talking about?
What are those called?
No.
Turbosonics.
You ever seen those platforms?
ben greenfield
They're a vibration platform.
joe rogan
Yeah, they go through like a whole cycle.
Yes.
ben greenfield
When I was in Park City.
I did one of those, yeah.
It makes you feel great.
Dude, I had to go take a shit right after.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
joe rogan
Bust it all loose.
ben greenfield
Seriously.
No, I'm serious.
I was on that thing for like eight minutes, and I said, excuse me, and I had a glorious dump afterwards.
joe rogan
Yeah, just shaking all your pipes loose.
ben greenfield
I have a mini trampoline at my house, and I jump up and down on that thing in the mornings, and it gets everything moving.
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Skip rope.
ben greenfield
Or you can jump on a trampoline.
You can probably skip rope, too.
And that one-two combo just gets things moving amazingly.
joe rogan
Have a couple double espressos before that too.
unidentified
I do a hot cup of coffee in the morning.
ben greenfield
I don't put anything in my coffee.
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.
joe rogan
Well, the way you can really tell is jujitsu.
My jujitsu training in the morning, I'm way weaker.
I just don't feel the same.
In the afternoon, you have much more energy.
ben greenfield
Yeah, exactly.
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.
joe rogan
And this is what you did specifically to try to lose weight?
ben greenfield
I did it originally to just shed muscle.
And then I would do really long, catabolic, chronic cardio, endurance workouts, which are not that great for you.
Just trying to lean out.
Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan
So when you were doing this, were you calorie restricting as well?
ben greenfield
I was calorie restricting.
You'd go to bed at night and you'd be staring at the ceiling hungry.
You're trying to lose weight, right?
joe rogan
So your body starts eating yourself.
ben greenfield
Your body starts eating yourself.
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.
joe rogan
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.
ben greenfield
On a ketogenic diet, yeah.
I don't think that a strict ketogenic diet is a good strategy.
I think that a cyclic ketogenic diet would be the way to go for something like that.
joe rogan
Yeah, Zach Bitter...
ben greenfield
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.
So that's a cyclic ketogenic diet.
joe rogan
Now, this is cyclic in one individual 24-hour session, but are you experiencing states of ketosis during the day with that sort of diet?
ben greenfield
Absolutely.
So I have a device called a Level in my office, LEVL, and it's a breath ketone device.
It's just quicker and more convenient than a blood stick.
joe rogan
Is it just as effective?
ben greenfield
Long-term, it's a good proxy.
It's a good approximation.
LEVL. Yeah, LEVL. There's another one called the ketonics.
And you can get, you know, just like a, you know, a ketone monitor, a blood ketone monitor.
But if people don't want to do a blood prick every day, you know, I type.
I don't like having the band-aids on the fingers when I'm trying to write things on my lap.
It's just, it's easier for me to just breathe into a tube when I walk into my office.
unidentified
There it is.
ben greenfield
I'm easily...
joe rogan
Breathe, measure, track and adjust.
It's so weird how this has become such a massive part of culture these days, measuring your ketones.
You just constantly hear people talking about it and it's so fatty.
Yeah, I get it.
unidentified
It's funny.
ben greenfield
Fatty.
I didn't mean it.
joe rogan
I just said it and I had to explain what I was saying because it sounded weird to me.
ben greenfield
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.
But that's the cyclic ketogenic diet.
That's how it works.
joe rogan
So your body, having those carbohydrates at night, knocks you out of ketosis, right?
When you're eating the bread and all that stuff.
ben greenfield
Yeah, your blood glucose will rise.
You're not going to be shuttling a lot of acetyl-CoA, which is the precursor to ketones and to ketone generation.
joe rogan
And then you're going through a 16-hour fasting cycle.
ben greenfield
But then you have a 12- to 16-hour fasting cycle.
You get up.
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.
It's a beautiful scenario.
joe rogan
Also, I just think there's some benefit in enjoying what you eat, too.
Not constantly worrying about your...
Glucose levels and ketones and all that stuff.
I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a little bread or a little pasta or something like that every now and again.
ben greenfield
There's nothing wrong with it.
I mean, it's also my beef with the carnivore diet.
I like sweet potato fries and I like...
Like cauliflower, rice, like, you know, all sorts of different plants and vegetables.
Now, this NAD, you can get these injections or IVs now.
And it is something that enhances your own stem cell proliferation.
But it is one of the most potent anti-aging molecules you can put into your body in terms of decreasing the rate at which your telomeres shorten.
So you've probably heard a lot of these sirtuin-rich foods like blueberries and cacao and chocolate and resveratrol.
And a lot of them work.
But the most powerful of any of these is NAD.
And your NAD to NADH ratio is highly reflective of your telomere health.
And these are the most horribly painful and uncomfortable injections or IVs you would ever get in your life.
You can do it orally.
There's a capsule.
There's companies like Elysium and Niagen that sell NR. I take that stuff.
I take Elysium.
Nicotinamide riboside.
It's a precursor to NAD, but it doesn't hold a candle to just mainlining it into your bloodstream.
joe rogan
And how do you get it?
ben greenfield
Where do you get it from?
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.
Six to eight hours of NAD? It's a long drip.
joe rogan
You do it on a monthly basis, so they just pick a day a month.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Is it painful?
ben greenfield
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.
It's even better than black ant extract.
joe rogan
Where are you getting this?
ben greenfield
So you can get it too.
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.
joe rogan
And Myers cocktail is again?
ben greenfield
That's just vitamins, right?
It's like, you know, vitamin B. IV infusion?
Yeah, it's IV infusion of vitamin B and sometimes a little nootropics in there like lithium and stuff like that.
joe rogan
Just too much to remember, man.
How do you keep all this shit in your head?
ben greenfield
I'm a complete idiot about anything except health and nutrition and fitness.
I don't know.
I don't watch TV and I don't follow politics or anything like that.
joe rogan
Good for you.
ben greenfield
I just study health.
joe rogan
Keep the poison out.
ben greenfield
Yes, exactly.
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.
joe rogan
So is there an NAD place in LA where I can go and do this?
ben greenfield
Yes.
I was speaking with somebody yesterday about this, and he asked me if I could find a clinic, and I found one in Beverly Hills.
And it's...
Probably one of the long IVs.
So you want to wait till we have some computer work to do and you can sit on your laptop and just kind of get stuff done.
joe rogan
Six to eight hours.
Or you could just listen to podcasts.
ben greenfield
Or you can push it in in about 15 to 20 minutes.
And you can have a nurse practitioner do this.
And then there's some clinics that will do it.
It's called a push IV, an NAD push IV. So I'm doing this.
joe rogan
It's just as beneficial, just more painful.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
So do you think it's a combination of the things?
Or would you attribute it more to the NAD? That's the problem with the shit I do, dude.
You do so many different things.
Yeah.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Have you thought about like having some sort of an online thing where people could subscribe to a protocol and you would, you know...
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Some sort of a powder or something?
ben greenfield
Yeah.
And I mean, some people who don't understand the supplement industry or formulation say, well, why don't I just put all this stuff in a capsule?
But I mean, one compound can decrease the absorptability of the other compound or, you know, one compound will create it.
You know, an acidic or an alkaline scenario in which the other one doesn't work well.
So it would require a lot of testing.
But ultimately, you know, at this point, I just blend it all in a blender and kind of keep my fingers crossed and dump it all into my big-ass mug.
joe rogan
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.
ben greenfield
They could.
But, you know, you're creating more work for me.
joe rogan
Yeah, I'm sorry, dude.
ben greenfield
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.
Everybody should be drinking this.
joe rogan
Yeah, I went to this one thing once where they monitored my blood and I abandoned it immediately because they told me I shouldn't have avocados.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
ben greenfield
Yeah, that's an IgG food allergy test.
And the problem is that you produce a lot of these immunoglobulins to foods that you eat a lot.
So people will be like, I love eggs.
And they do this test and they walk out depressed with their tail between their legs because they can't have avocados and eggs anymore.
And it's because they were eating a shit ton of avocados and eggs.
joe rogan
It's dumb, right?
ben greenfield
Yeah, there's one called a Cyrex food allergy panel.
You don't get this huge laundry list of foods that give you false positives.
It's a pretty accurate test.
That's the one that I use.
joe rogan
I just knew it was nonsense.
I was like, I feel great.
I eat avocados all the time.
This can't be anything other than nonsense.
ben greenfield
Yeah.
Well, it's not nonsense.
joe rogan
It's nonsense in the sense of the recommendation.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
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.
ben greenfield
Whatever, rice for a month and then get it taken, you know, no proteins at all.
joe rogan
And even then, what would that do with your blood?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
What about long-term, like, you know, when people go on those five-day fasts, like Dom Dogg-Sino's?
unidentified
Right.
ben greenfield
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.
And theoretically, you could do that, right?
And then go get your food allergy tests.
unidentified
Right.
ben greenfield
And then see what kind of proteins are floating around in your bolster.
joe rogan
And you're doing a 24-hour fast how often?
ben greenfield
What works for me?
Because I don't do well not eating for five days.
I'm too active.
Like, I just have too much shit going on.
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.
joe rogan
Coffee enemas?
ben greenfield
Self-produced?
Dude, for upregulating your own glutathione production, your bio...
You feel clean as a whistle.
joe rogan
Plus, it's the best way to get coffee up your butt.
There's no other way.
ben greenfield
Yeah, you do get a lot of caffeine absorption, too.
No, but I'm serious.
If you've never done something like that and experienced what it feels like to just be completely cleaned out, it's a pretty good feeling.
joe rogan
So what does it do to you?
ben greenfield
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 then I get up and you just let it all out.
joe rogan
So you lay on your back with the coffee?
In your butt?
ben greenfield
I get a stainless steel and I'm a bucket.
So you're not injecting plastics.
So you're not injecting plastics up your butt.
And then it's about a quart or so of coffee in the backside with this tube.
It's a lot of coffee.
joe rogan
Jesus!
ben greenfield
And then you lay on your right side for 20 minutes and then you get up and you let it all out.
And, of course, I have the Squatty Potty, so it comes out more easily, of course.
You know, have that kink in your corner.
joe rogan
I got one of those.
ben greenfield
And everything comes out, and you just, you walk away just like whistling with a big smile on your face.
joe rogan
That Squatty Potty is legit.
ben greenfield
And you feel wonderful.
The Squatty Potty works, yeah.
joe rogan
We really should be shitting into a hole.
When I don't have one, I perch.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
That doesn't count as breaking your fast?
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Would the ketone esters also break your fast?
ben greenfield
They're acaloric.
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.
joe rogan
And the ketone esters, aren't you supposed to take them with glucose?
ben greenfield
No.
joe rogan
No?
ben greenfield
No.
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...
Just pure rocket fuel.
joe rogan
Yeah, you talked about that last time.
You said it was like being on steroids, that having glucose in your system with ketones is just fucking crazy.
ben greenfield
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
joe rogan
Now, when you go on these fasts, if you drink coffee, does coffee break your fast?
ben greenfield
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
joe rogan
What about water?
ben greenfield
Water, I think, is completely allowed.
Now, there are some people who do dry fasting.
That would be popular for people who have candida or yeast or fungi.
They would claim that a moist environment would allow the bacteria to flourish, and so some of those people will do dry fasting.
I know a guy who does dry fasting with autologous urine therapy, where he does a dry fast and in the morning he drinks his urine.
And that's some old Ayurvedic cleansing technique that I don't personally do.
joe rogan
You ever try it?
ben greenfield
I did try it, yes.
Of course I tried it, dude.
Yeah, it doesn't...
It's not the best.
Yeah.
Actually, the temperature got to me more than the taste.
Just like the warm hotness, it just...
joe rogan
Fresh from the tap.
ben greenfield
It felt too alive.
Yeah, it was just...
unidentified
Yeah.
ben greenfield
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.
joe rogan
Ben, I gotta wrap this up.
You're always a mindfuck, dude.
Every time you come in here, I have to pause after the podcast and try to, like, capture little bits of information.
ben greenfield
I want steak now.
That's pretty much my main takeaway from the past couple hours is I want a frickin' steak.
joe rogan
Tell people how they can get to your website.
Tell people how they can watch your videos.
ben greenfield
Go read that sleep article.
It's good.
BenGreenfieldFitness.com.
Or just Google Ben Greenfield.
joe rogan
And social media...
ben greenfield
There's Ben Greenfield.
There's not a lot of us Benjamin Greenfields out there.
joe rogan
Benjamin Greenfield, you're a bad motherfucker.
Appreciate you, man.
Thanks for coming in.
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