Dr. Rhonda Patrick explores how BPA in plastics and urban pollution—like benzene and noise—threaten fetal development, urging caution during pregnancy. She critiques the carnivore diet’s lack of long-term studies, warning of micronutrient deficiencies (vitamin C, E, folate) despite organ meats’ benefits, while citing fasting’s autoimmune potential via gut microbiome shifts like butyrate production. Sulforaphane in broccoli sprouts boosts glutathione and detoxifies pollutants, but contamination risks (E. coli) complicate raw intake; supplements like Prostaphane offer alternatives. Sauna use, even during Sober October, may cut Alzheimer’s risk by 60% and improve vascular health via heat stress, blending science with personal wellness strategies for mothers and beyond. [Automatically generated summary]
Now, being a scientist and having a child, are you cognizant of every single factor that's taking place, like nutrition, all the input, emotional input, environment?
So, and that's another thing I was thinking about in my hotel today because I was making a coffee with one of those paper cups that has the plastic lining.
And like, I don't know what's in the plastic lining, BPA or some of the BPA alternatives, which have also been shown.
Bisphenol A. So to answer your question, there's been experiments done that have shown heat.
So boiling water and putting it in plastic increases the BPA that leaches into the solution, into the water by like 55 fold.
So yes, definitely heating it up is like way worse.
And so one of the things I'm always now thinking about is, you know, going to Starbucks, whatever.
The plastic lining they're putting in those cups when you get your hot tea or your hot coffee, I don't know if there's BPA but there's now studies that have come out and these studies have been done in animals that show like BPS and some of the other BPA replacements also have negative consequences on the endocrine system, on reproduction.
In some cases they're passed on to multiple generations.
Now, how much of that actually translates to humans?
It's unknown.
But there have been studies, at least with BPA, that have shown that you give a person a single dose of BPA and it disrupts their insulin sensitivity.
It also plays a role in causing problems with in vitro fertilization.
So it's disrupting hormones and Things like that.
So I was really cognizant about it during pregnancy because typically we do detoxify it quite well.
The half-life is like less than five hours and we excrete it through urine.
It also comes out through sweat, by the way, which is really good.
But when you're pregnant, for whatever reason, the placenta, you basically take the BPA, it's in your body, and your liver will inactivate it to this more benign compound.
But when it crosses over the placenta, it gets activated again.
And so that's why the effects are much more robust always on the developing fetus.
And so I really made sure I was not drinking anything out of a plastic bottle or anything like that while I was pregnant just because...
At the end of the day, there's a lot of studies that have been done in animals and just how much of that translate, how significant is it, it's really hard to say.
And then the fact that actually aging bottles, like as you, for whatever reason, as a bottle sits, like if you keep using, for example, the study was done with baby bottles.
If you keep using a baby bottle and putting liquid in, as the bottle aged, more BPA was leached out into the liquid.
So for whatever I know, it's just...
So it's another thing I'm thinking about with all, like, my son's stuff.
It's like, everything's plastic, and he's chewing on it.
It's like, you know, at some point, you just can't, like...
It's like, well, you know, you're going to I've put a lot of energy and time, you know, I spent a lot of time with him doing lots of things and, of course, all the nutrition and all that.
Yeah, I've been reading multiple studies over the years about air pollution and, you know, there's compounds in air pollution that are carcinogens like, you know, benzene and there's also the particulate matter and how these, you know, how air pollution is increasing the risk for stroke, heart attack, Alzheimer's disease.
And this is like in dose-dependent manners and of course there's all sorts of confounding factors and you can never really show causality, although some animal studies have been showing causality.
And some of these things are really bad in developing nations that don't have a lot of regulatory regulations on, for example, like automobile exhaust.
And so some developing countries have children coming down with strokes and stuff like early, like young, teenage.
So, and this has, of course, been linked to air pollution.
So it's definitely a concern.
And then there's all sorts of studies talking about, you know, of course, asthma, but, you know, happiness and brain function and all that, you know.
So and it's something like I live off of a busy road and then there's noise pollution, which is another I mean, so it's like something that I've been like, really, really aware of and trying to like move out away from busy traffic areas, particularly for my son, you know, because I'm just very concerned about the health risks.
I wonder also the impact of just being in an urban environment and the fact that it's not really natural and that maybe a person who's an adult could enjoy living in Manhattan and decide that they get a thrill out of living in the city, but for a baby to grow up around all that concrete and glass and all these sharp, hard edges and right angles, that it's maybe not...
healthy brain development or that's not like what your body or your brain is naturally craving.
There's been studies looking at, for example, like people that exercise in a metropolitan area versus like out in like a park nature.
And, you know, all sorts of measurements of, you know, depressive symptoms are measured after exercise.
And the ones that did nature run were far better at, you know, basically feeling happier after the run than the people that did in the metropolitan city.
One of the things about Central Park, when you're in it, you're like, wow, this is weird that this is in the middle of the city, but it's a brilliant move to have this one area.
I mean, you think about how much that real estate would be worth if they decided just to shove buildings in there.
I mean, Manhattan is one of the most pricey real estate places on the planet Earth, and yet in the middle of it, they have this big, open, public park area that anyone could just wander around, sit by a tree.
It's terrible in Manhattan too compared to LA. I think they're probably equally sucky, but the thing that is bothering me is not just the air pollution in terms of like the exhaust fumes and the exhaust and the smells, but also the brake dust.
You know, when I first started paying attention to brake dust, and I would always clean it off my wheels, but I would never think about it.
Like, oh, there's dust that's on my wheels.
I would think, oh, it's just dust on your wheels.
Then someone was explaining to me, no, that's an environmental hazard that you're breathing in if you live in that environment.
When you're around, you know, if you're on Broadway and cars are constantly hitting their brakes around you, there's a puff of that brake dust that's getting in the air with every pump of the brakes.
Yeah, the particulate matter, the stuff that's really tiny and stuff.
I mean, because that's like mesothelioma, right?
You're taking in the particulate matter from like asbestos.
So you'd think there'd be similar mechanisms, maybe not going to lead to mesothelioma, but that there would be similar mechanisms at play that are like, you know, damaging organs.
And it's really nice having my mom in particular, because she helps out a lot with my son so that I can get some work done, too, which is important.
And I really, we could live, you know, a little bit further out.
I mean, there's there are places like that are still within like 40 minute drive to like, you know, downtown San Diego, beaches and stuff that are that are nice and So that is something that we are considering.
My son likes the fire sirens, but there have been times when there have been loud motorcycles and he is...
It's like concern like you can see you look on it like it's you know so so it kind of worries me as well but definitely it's it's it's it's important to get away from that it's like a goal for sure now before the podcast started you were telling me that you wrote a 30 page paper on the carnivore diet It's not a paper.
You know, I think that the most important question really is what is attracting someone to try such a very restrictive diet, you know, that potentially could be dangerous without published evidence or any sort of long-term studies and things like that.
So I think that the first question really is, well, why are people doing this?
And so looking on the internet and try to like read about people's anecdotes, it seems as though a lot of people are drawn to it because they have some sort of autoimmune problem.
And so they try this diet and it improves their autoimmune symptoms.
And that seems to be a real common theme, at least if you look in the blogospheres and stuff like that.
So that's, I think, kind of a good place to start where it's like, well, you know, what are people doing this for?
And then, so that's kind of an important question.
And so further reading about this diet is sort of It's really important when you have something that leads to an effect to understand the mechanism.
Because the mechanism is what's leading to this effect.
And so if you can do something that's potentially not so dangerous or risky, then understanding the mechanism will help you because then you can find other ways to do it.
And so if you look at published studies on people that eat low-carb, high-protein diets, what's pretty common is that there's changes that happen in a variety of different endocrine factors, like you're less insulin, that's changing your satiety and hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin, and people become more satiated and they actually eat less, and this has been shown in multiple studies.
So people actually eat less when they're having a higher protein diet.
Which makes sense too because protein is more satiating as well.
And also There's also been studies on what's called food habituation, where basically, so habituation is when you're constantly exposed to the same stimulus, you sort of have a decreased response to that stimulus.
Where there's been intervention trials where people are given the same food every single day, both non-obese and obese people, versus people that are given the same food once a week.
And the people that are given the same food every single day, they start to eat less calories.
So they start to eat less, naturally sort of to calwork restrict themselves.
It's kind of like a dietary monotony sort of thing.
If you read people out there on the blogs talking about this diet, they say, like, I'm eating less, I only eat twice a day, I'm fasting.
People are talking about that as well.
So I think there's published evidence to kind of explain that, and also there's people saying, yeah, I eat less.
So that's an important point because one thing that's really known to affect autoimmunity is caloric restriction and fasting.
It's probably one of the most well-known technologies that you can intervene and have improvements in autoimmune disease.
So some of that has to do with the fact that you can sort of reset your immune system.
There have been animal studies and human studies, a lot of this done by Dr. Walter Longo at USC. He's done some prolonged fasting in animals, and also there's been sort of like a fasting mimicking diet done in humans, which is kind of a very low-calorie diet that sort of is meant to mimic fast.
And those have shown that you basically kind of Because fasting is a type of stress, you cross over into this stronger stress response where you're not only cleaning away all the gunk inside the cells.
People talk about autophagy a lot when they're talking about fasting.
You clean away things like damaged pieces of DNA, protein aggregates, things like that.
Mitochondria that are damaged get cleared out.
But you also sort of start to clear away entire cells through a process called apoptosis.
And in animal studies, what's been shown is that if you do, for example, a 72-hour fast, you can clear away about 30% of the immune system and replenish it with, like, brand new healthy immune cells.
And literally, like, organs shrink during the fasting and then they, like, re-expand.
Because you're activating stem cells and you're, you know, basically replenishing all your damaged old cells with new ones.
Well, Walter has shown in these animal studies, also autoimmune cells tend to be selectively killed off and replaced with non-autoimmune cells.
So he's also done a clinical study, a pilot clinical study with people with multiple sclerosis doing this fast and mimicking diet for one month, sorry, for one week.
And Their symptoms improved.
Also, a ketogenic diet was done side by side and ketogenic diet also improved symptoms of autoimmunity.
So those both were done in humans.
So I think that understanding that some of these mechanisms that are at play and that fasting itself and caloric restriction both have been shown to improve autoimmunity.
You may be tapping into something there by eating less.
That's one possibility.
In addition, there's been clinical studies in humans where they were basically fasted for 24 hours every other day for 15 days.
So they had like a total of seven days of fasting.
And these were also people with multiple sclerosis.
And there's profound changes in the microbiome that started happening.
And this was in line with basically having a lot of anti-inflammatory cytokines, basically producing immune cells that are really important for preventing autoimmunity called T-regulatory cells, so things like that.
So that's another really important thing to consider is, you know, the microbiome, because the microbiome has been linked to autoimmunity in multiple studies.
I mean, it's been linked to arthritis, it's been linked to multiple sclerosis, it's been linked to other diseases like Parkinson's, which is not really autoimmune.
And the point of this is that, you know, again, understanding mechanism and realizing, you know, there's other potential factors that could be leading to an effect, right?
It's actually, the changes in the microbiome are really important because there's actually been a few animal studies which have led to Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III clinical trials that have been done in humans.
So, humans with multiple sclerosis were treated with minocycline, an antibiotic.
And basically, the antibiotic was shown to improve symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
And because there's good bacteria and bad bacteria that have been linked to autoimmunity.
And getting rid of bacteria, you know, the bad bacteria, is going to probably lead to improvements.
And that's what was shown first in animal studies and then in human trials.
So humans, with multiple sclerosis, taking minocycling for two years.
So basically, they had improvements.
It delayed the onset progression of the disease.
But then after two years, those improvements went away, probably because you're wiping out the microbiome, and eventually you're also getting rid of the good bacteria, and so things are going to catch up, right?
So you may be getting rid of some of the pathogenic bad bacteria with the antibiotics, but eventually you're also getting rid of good stuff.
You know, you may not have those same improvements and that's very interesting.
I think it's a really important point to understand with something like, you know, changes, very profound changes in the microbiome.
When it comes to someone just eating meat, So one thing to keep in mind with the microbiome is that basically bacteria really are good at adapting to their environment.
That's why antibiotic resistance is such a big deal.
And there's been human intervention studies.
When you take a human that goes from a high fiber diet to a low fiber, high protein, or vice versa, you get changes in their gut microbiome that happen within 24 hours.
So within an hour, you actually start to have doubling of populations of bacteria.
And within 24 to 48 hours, you actually start to lose other.
So basically, other bacteria start to die off.
And this is at the species level.
It's really hard to change the phyla.
The phyla is more linked to long-term dietary patterns.
Eventually you can change phyla as well.
But it's been shown that people that go from a more high fiber to a high protein diet, they have changes in their microbiome.
And these changes are a lot of the microbiome bacteria that are fermenting.
A variety of fermentable fibers start to leave and you actually start to get bacteria cropping up that ferment amino acids.
So the amino acids, simple sugars, fats, those are mostly absorbed in the small intestine, but some of them make their way into the large intestine.
And there's a whole, you know, group of bacteria called the putrefactive bacteria, and they ferment amino acids.
And some of these species of putrefactive bacteria have been linked to colon cancer.
They're much higher in colon cancer patients.
Animal studies have shown, you know, causal links where they can basically regressively cause a polyp to form a, you know, a tumor.
And that's because these bacteria are making things called putrescine and cadaverine, which are damaging their genotoxic agents that damage the DNA inside your colon cells.
And so people that are typically eating like an omnivore type of bacteria where they're eating protein and they're also eating fermentable fiber, if they're eating the fermentable fiber that's facilitating the growth of lactic acid producing bacteria, that limits the growth of putrefactive.
So if you're, you know, bifidobacteria, lactobacillus, S mutans, S thermophilus, those strains of bacteria are lactate acid producing bacteria, which you'd be getting if you're, I mean, you'd be facilitating the growth of if you're eating plants with fermentable fiber, you're going to limit the growth of putrefactive because they can't grow with lactic acid.
So it's not like, you know, it's not a huge, huge concern.
But the question is, what happens when you're only eating amino acids, when you're only getting amino acids?
You know, so is there a long term?
So if you're if you're if you're killing off potentially some of this pathogenic bacteria, and you're having this effect with a positive effect, what's going to happen long term?
It's not known.
I mean, this diet, I mean, hasn't really been studied at that level.
There have been a few people that have anecdotal stories about doing it for 10, 20 years that are online, but it's very difficult to track.
I mean, you have to take them at their word for it.
They've eaten nothing but meat for 20 years.
They feel amazing.
But there's not very many of them.
There may be more out there, but in terms of what I've come across, articles, just social media profiles, people have talked about the positive benefits of it.
It seems to me that most people that are talking about the positive benefits are talking about it within a one- and two-year window.
That's what we're really dealing with a lot of.
Sean Baker, Dr. Sean Baker, who is probably the leading proponent of it, or one of the poster boys of it, along with Jordan Peterson and his daughter Michaela.
Jordan Peterson and his daughter Michaela, they're different in that they were dealing with severe autoimmune issues.
His daughters had Two joints replaced before she was 18. Well, she had her ankle replaced before she was 18. I think she had her hip replaced shortly after that.
Jordan has had some pretty severe autoimmune issues and depression.
With both of them, those things were cleared up.
But as you've talked about multiple times before on this show, depression has been linked to disorders in the gut biome.
Yeah, I think, you know, going back to the point, it's like...
There are other, you know, understanding the mechanism is important, and there's a lot of potential confounding factors, right?
And that, with any anecdotal data, is extremely important to consider.
I mean, people can't even, you know, scientists, nutritionists, just people can't even agree on the best diet, because a lot of these epidemiological and observational studies, which don't establish causation, have an enormous amount of confounding factors, and it is It's so hard to control for that.
I mean, just as a perfect example, we've talked about this before in the podcast, but the vegetarian versus people that eat meat.
One of the really large studies that was done, and Dr. Valtolonga was part of that study, looked at all-cause mortality and cancer mortality, and it was lower in vegetarians.
But they decided to take the meat eaters and say, okay, what about within this group?
The people that are healthy meat eaters are people that are not unhealthy.
So they're not obese.
They're not sedentary.
They're not smoking.
They're not excessively drinking alcohol.
Those people, when they took out those confounding factors, the meat eaters had the same mortality as the vegetarian and the same cancer.
So confounding factors are so important.
And with anything anecdotal, you have people that are exercising like crazy.
Exercise has also been shown to change microbiome, independent of diet, in a positive way, where you're actually producing more of the bacteria that are producing things like lactic acid.
So, and fasting does the same thing.
And so you have people that are fasting.
So, you know, it's not like you can't do other things if you're on that type of diet to sort of help with the microbiome.
But I think, again, if there's a way you can do, you know, if there's a way that you can get these benefits without having to do something so hyperrestrictive, and we'll talk about, I mean, I have concerns for that.
can definitely get into that.
But then, you know, why not try that?
And, you know, the thing with, like, for example, doing like a prolonged fast, you know, once a quarter, once every couple of months, depending on how severe your issues are.
I mean, there's been benefits shown with that, like in aging.
Like, you know, so people that have been put on this fasting mimicking diet, they have improved biomarkers of aging.
They increased their lean muscle mass.
I mean, I mean, so, like I said, in animal studies, and you can't directly translate the animal studies to humans because rodents have a really fast metabolism, and if you fast them for 48 hours, they lose 20% of their body weight, where humans only lose, like, 1% or 2%.
Yeah, so you can't, I mean, it's obviously you can't completely translate everything that's done in a fasting rodent to humans, but...
They're definitely, organs are shrinking and then literally re-growing after the fast is over.
Like, it's like this rejuvenation process, you know, and it seems as though selectively damaged cells are killed.
In fact, this whole, like, there's a whole, Dr. Balta Longo showing That cancer cells are really, really susceptible to dying when you do like a prolonged fast or even a fasting-mimicking diet.
And he's shown this in animal studies and he's done a couple of clinical studies where patients with cancer were treated with standard of care, but before their standard of care treatment they were fasted for up to 72 hours.
And what happens, what he's shown in animal studies happens is that because the fasting is a type of stress, all your healthy cells increase all these stress response pathways.
They make more heat shock proteins.
They're increasing antioxidant production pathways, anti-inflammatory.
They're doing all this really good stuff in response.
Cancer cells can't do that.
They're like screwed up.
And so they can't activate those stress response pathways.
So it ends up killing them.
So what you end up happening is that when you're giving another genotoxic stress like chemo or radiation, your healthy cells become more resistant to the damaging effects of the radiation and the cancer cells become more sensitized to the death.
And so what he's shown in his pilot studies in humans is that basically...
The humans that were treated with the standard of care, I think it was chemo, and also fasted, they had less neutropenia, which is the loss of neutrophils, which is the side effect because you're losing normal healthy cells.
They had less of that happening, less myelosuppression.
Anyways, the point is that I think if you can find a way to get positive benefits, you know, without having to do something so risky and potentially dangerous and unstudied, you know, I mean, unstudied in a really scientific way, you know, controlling for confounding factors and all sorts of long term, I mean, just all of that is really important.
Well, this just comprehensive breakdown that you just did is something that's really lacking from a lot of discussion of this carnivore diet and from the proponents of it.
It's almost like a lot of them are going into it blindfolded.
They're like, look, it seems to be working, so I'm just going to stick with it.
But again, when you're talking about most people's cases, you're talking about one year, maybe two years, sometimes even less, where they're having these benefits.
And as you're saying, it's entirely possible that they're setting themselves up for some potential long-term damage.
Well, that was one of the—I mean, I had Jordan's daughter, Michaela, on, who's had some pretty dramatic results from this carnivore diet.
But she's giving, essentially, nutrition consulting to people.
But she doesn't really have a background in it.
And she doesn't have the information that you just distributed.
Like what you just said to all these people listening and the way you're describing the mechanisms and the benefits of fasting and all these different various things that are happening inside your gut and all these different things that are happening with healthy cells and damaged cells with fasting and that this is mimicked by this restrictive diet and that this is all absent from the dialogue.
This is all absent from the...
And this is one of the things that's disturbing, the most disturbing for me.
It's like...
I get that they're seeing positive results.
I'm not going to deny that.
But when they start saying, you know, plants are bad and there's, you know, like my friend Chris, he's always talking about the war on carbs.
He's also got, Chris Bell, he's got autoimmune issues as well.
He's had both of his hips replaced before he was 35 and, you know, severe arthritis.
And he is...
Leaner than he's ever been and Benefiting greatly from this carnivore diet, but you know he's he's like he talks about like he uses hashtag war on carbs You know and he doesn't eat salad he won't eat greens like he thinks greens are bad for you I'm like man.
I don't not sure that's correct.
I think It's so important what you're saying.
And there's a researcher online that I've been in contact with.
His name is Kevin Bass.
And his...
Bass or Bass?
B-A-S-S. Not sure how to pronounce it.
But he also brought up this possibility that it could be calorie restriction that these people are dealing with.
And that this is essentially some of the same mechanisms that are the positive reactions from fasting that you're dealing with here.
Yeah, I think that is one very strong possibility and that is something, you know, there's lots of hypotheses here and, you know, given all the data and there's lots of positive data about eating plants as well.
That's one hypothesis and that seems to be the one everyone's sort of gravitating to, you know.
If someone's also wanting to reduce their glycemic load and all that, I mean, eating just a modified paleo diet, I mean, I eat something like a modified paleo diet where it's like I'm eating fish, I eat meat, poultry, and a lot of leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables.
Now, you can do nuts, you know, or you can do a ketogenic diet.
Like I just talked about, the study that was done looking at the fasting-mimicking diet in humans with multiple sclerosis, published in the same paper, there was a study that put patients on ketogenic diet for, I believe it was three months, and it improved symptoms of autoimmunity as well.
So, you know, the ketogenic diet, a modified ketogenic diet is also, you know, there's also concerns with that.
Not everyone responds very well.
And, you know, the micronutrient deficiencies have been a concern, but you can actually eat a lot of vegetables, green, good ones that are low in glycemic.
So my concerns, exactly.
My concerns are much, much less.
And it's been studied a lot more.
I mean, at least there's been lifespan studies in animals.
On ketogenic diet, where it's like improving, you know, the way they age, it's improving their cognitive function, brain aging, extending their lifespan.
So, you know, if people are looking for, in addition to, you know, wanting to like help with their autoimmunity issues, you know, there's also if it's like, well, I also just don't want to have a lot of insulin response, I want to lower my glycemic levels and things like that.
It seems like a much better option than than doing something completely unstudied.
Right.
And so, you know, I think that's a really good place to start and obviously not disregarding everyone's anecdotes.
And of course, is also the placebo and nocebo effect, which are very real.
I mean, extremely real.
It's why a lot of drugs don't ever make it to market is because they can't beat placebo.
You know where it's like people think they're going to get a positive response from something.
And the opposite is true.
People think they're going to get a negative response from something, they can.
And what's interesting is that genetics It determines that.
There's SNPs.
It's basically single nucleotide polymorphisms where it changes in the sequence of DNA in a certain gene, makes it function a little differently.
Well, the gene that's really important, seems to be really important for whether or not you're going to have a placebo versus nocebo, controls dopamine, the degradation of dopamine.
So people that are really likely for a placebo response have more dopamine in their brain.
It's called CompT, the SNP. I think we're good to go.
I think they have a gluten sensitivity, which I do think that's a real thing.
I mean, I'm not saying non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
I think there's enough evidence that showed that does exist.
However, there was like this great study that was published four years ago showing people that thought they were, you know, having gluten sensitivity issues.
They were randomized and...
None of them were given gluten, but they didn't know that.
They thought maybe there's a chance I'm going to get the gluten.
I don't know.
I'm being randomized.
Of course, they had a negative response.
They had distended, bloating, pain, but there was no gluten.
So the nocebo effect is also real.
And that's something to keep in mind as well.
If you think, you know, I'm going to have a bad response if I eat these plants...
I talked to a chiropractor who was banking on that.
He was doing something called zone healing.
And the more I pressed him on this, the more he basically said, well, if you believe it, it works.
I'm like, okay, so you're saying that it doesn't work unless you trick this person into believing that it works.
So you're a trickster is what you're doing.
You didn't want to go that far, but that's essentially, there's no real scientific basis to this idea that you press on someone's back and fix their thyroid.
You know what does in the prefrontal cortex is fish oil.
In fact...
Some schizophrenic patients are prescribed a really high dose because their dopamine is lower in the prefrontal cortex and this is sort of associated with a lot of the negative, paranoid, delusional sort of...
Well, if you look at, if you're talking about normal in the sense where what's typically used in like a randomized controlled trial, it's like one or two grams.
Is there a concern about potential heavy metal poisonings when you're taking in fish oil or is that all that stuff, do they know how to filter that stuff out?
It was just accepted, and it should be out online this month, sometime this month.
Okay, so my potential concerns with the carnivore diet.
You know, I think, and I'm sure, I mean, I know this, I've seen it all over the blogosphere, you know, the micronutrients and, you know, they don't really matter.
The RDAs weren't set for carnivores and all this stuff that I've read.
But I think to start out, like understanding, you know, micronutrients are essential, about 30 vitamins and minerals that are really important.
They do run our metabolism.
They are involved in making neurotransmitters.
They're involved in, you know, pulling calcium out of our arteries and bringing it to our bones.
They're involved in all sorts of things.
People...
When they hear the word metabolism, they always just think about, you know, food you eat.
Yeah.
And it's like metabolism refers to a lot of things.
And there's about 22% of all your enzymes in your body require a micronutrient to function.
And this is repairing damage from DNA, all sorts of things.
Really important.
And so there's about 30 of them that are essential.
You have to get them for your diet because you don't make them in your body.
And if you don't get them from your diet, it can lead to health problems and death, actually.
So that's kind of what micronutrients are.
RDA, so Recommended Dietary Allowance.
Those have been set.
A variety of different studies are used.
So there's randomized controlled trials, non-randomized controlled trials.
There's depletion-repletion studies.
There's balanced studies looking at how much of a micronutrient it takes before you start excreting it.
There's cross-sectional studies and there's case studies.
And this is a collaboration between the United States and Canada and some European countries as well.
So a lot of experiments are done to figure out the recommended dietary allowance.
The first thing that's done is the estimated average The SEAR, the Estimated Average Intake.
So that is done by basically looking at any population and going, okay, how much of this micronutrient do we need so that 50% of the population has adequate levels, the other 50% will be deficient.
So there's a bell curve, and so it's literally in the middle of the bell curve.
And then the RDA is set from that to standard deviations above, and it's supposed to make about 97.5% of the population gets enough.
So that's how the RDA is set.
For each micronutrient, it's different.
The experiments that are done are different to look at them.
So there's a few concerns, of course, with an all-meat diet, with particular micronutrients, because, you know, micronutrients, there's a lot of, you know, certain micronutrients that are concentrated in meat, and there's a lot that are concentrated in plants.
You can find some of the ones that are more concentrated in meat in plants in most cases, but it's much better to get it from the meat.
And in plants, it's much more concentrated, you know, and you can find it in some amounts in meat, but it's much, you know, it's a lot easier to get it from plants.
So one of the, of course, the micronutrients that's a concern is the vitamin C, of course, right?
That's the one that everyone talks about.
Vitamin C is a really important cofactor.
A cofactor just means that it binds to an enzyme and helps it work.
It's important for making collagen.
It's important for converting dopamine into norepinephrine, which is important for that flight-or-flight response.
It plays a role in making carnitine, which is important for using fatty acids for energy.
And then it's, of course, an antioxidant.
It also plays a really important role in neutrophils.
So neutrophils are a type of immune cell when they're activated, when you have any sort of bacterial exposure, virus, things that can even come from the gut, you know, like LPS, leak out from dead bacteria that are dying in the gut.
Neutrophils get activated and they soak up vitamin C because they release a bunch of hydrogen peroxide which damages the neutrophil itself and so the vitamin C sort of prevents that from happening.
It plays a really important role in cell integrity and things like that.
So there's a variety of ways vitamin C is transported into the cell and I see reading on the internet a little bit of misunderstanding.
People following the carnivore diet seem to think that because their glucose levels are low, that they're getting more vitamin C in.
So vitamin C, also called ascorbic acid, goes between two different states.
Or ascorbic acid is the reduced form, which is the antioxidant form.
It goes also into an oxidized form, so it's kind of going back and forth.
It goes through about four cycles of that.
The oxidized form is called dehydroascorbic acid.
And there's two ways that you transport vitamin C. You absorb it through the gut epithelial cells.
It's transported into a variety of tissues in the body.
Ascorbic acid goes through sodium-dependent vitamin C transporters.
Those are not dependent on glucose.
There's no competition for glucose.
That's how vitamin C gets into the cell.
And most cells actually transport vitamin C in that form, with the exception of red blood cells, which don't have that transporter.
They use another transporter called glucose transporters or GLUT. And that one does, glucose does compete.
Interestingly, dehydroascorbic acid binds much better.
It actually tightly more binds to the transporter than glucose.
But in conditions like hyperglycemia, like type 1 or type 2 diabetics, they actually don't get vitamin C in the red blood cells and it leads to vascular problems and stuff like that.
So So it's an interesting hypothesis that maybe if you're having, you know, less of a, you know, blood glucose levels are really bottomed out, maybe that there's some salvage pathway.
You're able to help get vitamin C and the oxidized form is going in some other cells that usually doesn't go in or whatever, something like that.
It's an interesting hypothesis, which there's no data on, right?
But the experiments that were done to choose the RDA for vitamin C were done, the more recent RDA, so that it changed back in like after 2000 or 2001 or something.
It's about 90 milligrams a day for men and 75 for women.
They were depletion-repletion studies.
So men were given about less than 5 milligrams a day of vitamin C with their diet.
And this was about a six-month study.
They were in a metabolic ward.
And it was determined that it was kind of unsafe to keep going.
So basically, they started the repletion, where they started giving these men vitamin C at different doses.
And vitamin C follows like a sigmoidal S-curve.
So once you kind of deplete someone of their vitamin C, when you give them, for example, 30 milligrams, it isn't really enough to kind of go, it doesn't really raise plasma levels much.
You have to get up to like 100. Once you get up to like 100, then you actually start to excrete vitamin C. But before that, your body's holding on to everything.
You're not excreting anything.
200 milligrams was maximum bioavailability.
And then after that, you start to decrease bioavailability and you're excreting a lot of vitamin C. So the scientists that published this paper, Mark Levy at the NIH, recommended that the RDA be set at 200 milligrams, but it was set at 90, which is literally right before you start to excrete, which was at 100 milligrams.
That data, along with the neutrophil data, there was some neutrophil data that was looked at, you know, how much vitamin C was important to, because neutrophils sop it up, to prevent that hydrogen peroxide-induced damage.
And so that's kind of how the RDA was set.
Now, the question is, with any RDA, like, you know, the important thing to consider is, well, the RDAs are set to prevent acute disease, but what about promoting optimal health?
You know, like, that's really important.
Like, how much of these micronutrients do you need throughout a lifespan to, you know, to maintain optimal health and age well?
So this is something that's really important because a lot of enzymes that require a micronutrient for preventing short-term disease, something that can kill you, there's also enzymes that are required to prevent things that are associated with aging, like DNA damage.
So if there's only so much of a micronutrient around, where is it going to go?
Is it going to prevent DNA damage, which doesn't make a difference until five or six decades later?
Or is it going to make sure you live on to pass on your genes and reproduce?
So my former postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Bruce Ames, sort of proposed this whole, and he has published a couple of foundational papers supporting this idea, which he calls triage theory.
So he's saying that basically He thinks actually a lot of RDAs are too low and that optimal RDAs will account for how much is needed for these long-term functions.
So that's really important to consider.
With the vitamin C, you know, it's really a small amount that's needed to be used as a cofactor for, you know, an enzyme for collagen production.
You actually don't need that much.
Studies were done years and years ago that established like 10 milligrams of vitamin C was enough to prevent scurvy, which can happen when you basically don't have enough vitamin C for collagen production.
And even that's kind of questionable because back at the time when those studies were done, it was before really good analytical assays were available.
So the assay that was done to measure various things, lots of things could confound.
So it may even be less.
Maybe more, maybe less.
It's kind of not known.
So, you know, that is something to consider, as well as the fact that basically there's a lot of biological variation with vitamin C requirements.
And this has been shown in other animals that also require vitamin C, like guinea pigs.
So, like, if you take 100 guinea pigs, and this is, you know, this was published back in, like, 60s or 70s, like, there was, like, tenfold variation in how much each of them required vitamin C they required, even though they were given, like...
Well, I think the best thing is to get it from food.
There's another one that's potentially risky and that is vitamin E. Vitamin E helps recycle vitamin C and vitamin C helps recycle vitamin E. And vitamin E actually Most people think of it as an antioxidant, which it does.
It prevents a lot of oxidative chains.
It kind of breaks the chain of oxidation.
But it also is really important for maintaining cell integrity.
So it's important antioxidant inside the cell membrane.
And so it's preventing a lot of oxidative factors that are happening just from normal metabolism.
You and I are doing it right now.
It damages our DNA. It also damages the lipids in our cell membranes.
And so vitamin E plays a really important role in the integrity of it.
And so the experiments that were done for choosing the RDA for vitamin E were two and a half years long, and men were given three milligrams of vitamin E. So the RDA is 15 milligrams, so they were given three.
And after two and a half years, they started getting hemolysis of their red blood cells because the membranes of the red blood cells weren't being maintained very well.
It took two and a half years.
It's a long time for this to show up.
And so for whatever reason, it was decided that having hemolysis happen lower than 12% is okay.
12% was the cutoff.
And so when they did the repletion studies, it was actually 12 milligrams for the EAR, and they went up two standard deviations and found basically the RDA was at 15. So the question becomes, well, all right, so vitamin E, you can, you know, you can get some vitamin E if you're getting some egg yolk and butter and if you're eating some fish, but you're not going to, it's really hard to get 15 milligrams from those sources.
And then if you're eating that, what about all the other stuff you have to eat to get your other, you know?
Like almonds, like 100 grams of almonds would give you your RDA. Really good source.
So the question becomes, well, okay, what happens if I'm only getting 7 milligrams a day?
Is it going to take 6 or 7 or 8 years before my cell membrane integrity is compromised more?
So there's a lot of important questions to think about.
These RDAs, I would even argue they're set too low in some cases where they're really trying to just prevent things that are like hemolysis of the red blood cells.
So what about all these other long-term effects?
Another one would be like folate.
Folate you can get if you eat, you know, if you're eating like 150 grams of like cooked beef liver every day.
But like who does that?
You know, I mean, and if you're not doing that and you're eating, you got to eat like your 48 sardines to get your vitamin E.
And you got, you know, so it's like it's not easy.
And, you know, I'm not saying you can't get, you know, some amounts of it, but you may not be getting the RDA.
And so, you know, folate plays a very important role in actually making new DNA.
You know, if you don't have folate, you essentially incorporate something from RNA called uracil into DNA.
And all your like DNA, you know, polymerases and stuff are cruising along DNA and see it.
And they make a nick in the DNA.
And it literally, you know, it's a it's a nick.
It's like in your DNA. And if you have it, DNA is double-stranded.
So if you have it on two ends of the DNA, which you do because it's really important to make one of the nucleotides, thymine, then, you know, you're going to have a double-stranded break.
And actually, my former postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Bruce Ames, published a study showing that if you take animals and make them deficient in folate or give them really, really low levels of folate, It causes strands in their DNA just like being irradiated.
Like he compared them side by side.
It was the exact same thing.
And then he published a study that was with humans showing that actually humans that are getting really low levels of folate also had a certain type of DNA damage called micronuclei.
You know, so the question is, well, You know, if I'm getting only so much folate, you know, is it something happening to my DNA? Am I getting strand breaks?
The same goes for magnesium.
I mean, you can get magnesium if you're eating, you know, it's just, then what about the folate?
And then what about the vitamin E? You know, so it's really hard.
It's really hard.
To do that.
And DNA damage, that's something you can't measure.
You're not going to go, your lipid panel isn't going to tell you that.
There's no consumer tests available.
There was a few years ago, a startup tried doing it, but it's really hard because there's, if you're sending blood samples, you know, to a lab to be tested for DNA damage.
I have done many DNA damage experiments on humans, so clinical studies.
I was involved in Dr. Ames' lab.
And I've done studies, kinetic studies, where we took blood out of a patient, measured DNA damage immediately or froze it down or we let it sit on a bench for 30 minutes, 2 hours, 4 hours, overnight.
After 2 hours, all the tons of DNA damage started to come up because it's being exposed.
The oxygen and all that is creating basically DNA damage.
So anyways...
The point is, is that DNA damage isn't something you're going to measure.
You don't feel it.
And you're not going to feel it.
I mean, it's happening in us right now.
We don't know how many, but it is.
We have enzymes that are repairing that damage and those enzymes require magnesium.
We're getting enough folate to make sure that that damage isn't happening.
And again, you can get a good amount of folate.
Liver is one of the best, is a really great source.
But you have to eat it every day and you have to eat like, you know, I guess 150 grams of liver is not that much, but you have to eat it every day.
So it's just really important to consider the fact that these micronutrients are important.
They have long-term effects.
I mean, the two and a half years it took to show the hemolysis in red blood cells, Two and a half years.
So what happens if you're getting a modest amount, not quite three milligrams, but you're getting twice that, or maybe you're getting nine?
You know, what happens seven years from now?
Like, you don't know.
And it's important.
It's your health.
It's important.
So I think that, so those, you know, and there's a variety of other manganese you can also get if you're eating a lot of, like, stomach lining tripe.
Like, you know, the Inuits were eating things like raw, like they're eating raw liver, raw, like raw whale blubber and spleen.
Spleen's a good source.
I mean, you can get vitamin C from spleen.
I think heart disease.
So there's some organs.
Vitamin C, when you cook it, 25% of, you know, it's lost.
So that's why a lot of the muscle meat and stuff, it does start out with vitamin C, but when you cook it, I mean, if you're not eating it raw, then, you know, you're definitely, it's negligible.
There's one young guy who is a carnivore diet proponent that seems to be approaching this in a much more comprehensive way.
He's really big on organ meats, in particular liver and many other things, and he's talking about how these organ meats will be excellent sources of a lot of the vitamins that people are concerned that you're missing from vegetables.
Do you think that that is possible?
I mean, spleen, I guess, for vitamin C. Yeah.
What about just liver or kidneys or things along those lines?
I mean, what are you going to be deficient in if you go the organ meat route?
So I think, you know, there's also other important reasons to eat.
The plants instead of doing just the organ meat and also just doing the supplements as well.
You know, and some of those, the reasons have to do with the fact that microbiome is really important.
So you're getting, you know, the fermentable types of fiber that are really important for, you know, growing all sorts of commensal bacteria in the gut.
Like, we don't know what's going to happen with, you know, someone that's only just eating meat long term, particularly with, like I said, the putrefactive bacteria and all that.
I think they're responsible for some of the really nasty farts.
So that's another reason.
And then the other important thing are the phytochemicals.
There's these polyphenols, flavanols, all these things that are present in plants.
The humans, we evolved eating.
We evolved eating them.
Throughout human evolution, humans were Stressed on many levels.
One, they went through moments of food scarcity where the fasting came in.
I mean, that's important, right?
Now we don't have that.
We can get food all the time, anytime, right?
So that was an important stress that humans have evolved with.
Exercise, aerobic exercise, right?
That's another thing.
I mean, you had to move to get food and run from predators.
I mean, so we evolved exercising, right?
Now you can, so many people don't do that.
We also evolved eating plants and meat.
I mean, we're omnivores.
So we have these, basically all these pathways that are activated when we eat plants and from certain compounds in plants, insect anti-feed-ins.
They're in plants.
And when humans eat them, they basically activate a variety of really, really important stress response pathways.
A lot of these pathways get activated by exercise and fasting as well.
So there is a lot of overlap between them.
But I see a lot of people on this carnivore diet talking about how they're so bad for you.
If they would take the time to actually read studies, like human studies, where people are given a lot of these insect anti-feedant compounds, things like isothiocyanates, like sulforaphane, curcumin, resveratrol, anthocyanins, and there's tons and tons of them.
You know, they would see that there's beneficial effects that happen and there's a lot of mechanism for why that is.
You know, so, I mean, the sulforaphane is one that I like to talk about.
And there is tons and tons of human intervention data where people are given either cruciferous vegetables or they're given broccoli sprouts.
Broccoli sprouts are a really great source.
Cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cabbage.
Fermented cabbage, Brussels sprouts, you know, all that stuff.
So broccoli sprouts have, like, anywhere between 10 and 100 times more.
A lot of that work was done by Dr. Jed Fahey, a friend of mine.
He's at Johns Hopkins.
Very great scientist, does a lot of research on sulforaphane.
But, you know, if you look at intervention trials, we were talking about air pollution.
Like, there's an intervention trial, there's more than one, in humans, showing that if you give humans broccoli sprout extract for seven days, they start to excrete benzene and acrolein, benzenes in air pollution.
60% on day one.
They start excreting it in their urine.
You're just getting rid of that.
And that's largely because sulforaphane activates a variety of enzymes, one called phase 2 detoxification enzymes, which are important for getting rid of potentially harmful compounds.
It inactivates phase 1 biotransformation enzymes, which are enzymes that are able to take a pro-carcinogen and turn it into a carcinogen.
So, you know, there's intervention trials in humans that it's, you know, men that were given broccoli sprout extract lowered their biomarker for prostate cancer by like 86% or lowered the doubling rate of it by 86%.
You know, so this is like, this is important.
There are studies showing that humans given, for example, two different studies showing that humans given 300 grams of Brussels sprouts a day.
One, they increased a really important antioxidant in their plasma called glutathione by like 1.4 fold.
And they decreased oxidative DNA damage in their blood cells, DNA damage that we were just talking about.
They decreased it like by 30% or something like that.
Two separate studies, Brussels sprouts.
And I see people like, you know, talking about the carnivore diet and how sulforaphane increases DNA damage.
And they like reference this in vitro study where they dump sulforaphane on cultured cells in a dish.
It's like, you know what else is going to do that shit?
Heterocyclic amines from the cooked meat you're eating.
So if you dump something at a high enough concentration, yeah, it's going to fuck it up.
But we're talking about humans ingesting.
If you were to exercise nonstop and not rest, it would be toxic.
If you were to fast and not stop, it would be toxic.
Like, you know, so how some of these pathways are working is that the dose that they're given, you know, eating, it's almost impossible to eat the kind of dose that it would take to cause severe damage.
And you know what?
You would get sick.
You would know.
You'd be like, wait a minute.
So, I mean, I think that using that as an excuse is really...
First of all, they should read the studies.
And there's so many more studies.
It's been shown recently to increase glutathione in the brain.
Human intervention studies, humans that were given sulforaphane extract, increase it in their plasma and in their brain.
Glutathione is one of the major antioxidants in the brain.
It plays a major role in traumatic brain injury.
Brain aging.
I mean, this is important.
Like, this is a possible therapeutic intervention.
It's been shown to randomize placebo-controlled trials to improve autistic symptoms in adolescents.
Open-label trials, it's been shown to improve autism in children.
I mean, there's just study after study after study, and I'm just talking about the human ones, and there's more.
There's also lots of animal studies where they're feeding them mega doses, and there's like positive benefits.
There's been studies, you know, feeding humans large doses, like something equivalent to like 70 or 100 grams of broccoli sprouts, which have a lot more sulforaphane than like Brussels sprouts do.
And there was no toxic side effects in the liver, thyroid.
That's one concern people do have.
If you have hypothyroid, sulforaphane can compete with iodine for transport into the thyroid.
I don't think that's usually an issue.
It certainly doesn't seem to be an issue in healthy people.
But, you know, iodine is found in seafood.
I mean, you know, there's sources of iodine you can eat.
So maybe someone with hyperthyroid might want to make sure they're not eating like tons.
Like you're not like, you know, kale smoothie after kale smoothie after kale smoothie.
Like, you know, make sure, you know, just if you're having your Brussels sprouts with your elk meat or whatever, you know, I don't think it's a problem.
There's one, there's a real cursory examination of data, and then there's confirmation bias, and the combination of the two of those things.
They find one thing that sort of kind of vaguely supports what they want it to support, and then they run with it and they talk about it as if they're experts.
Yes, and this is one of the reasons why I'm so happy that you're talking about this because you can give people a real comprehensive understanding of all the different things at play.
And one of the things that I get from you when I talk to you about nutrition is it's mind-boggling how many different factors are going on simultaneously in the human body when it comes to nutrition, Absorption in the various stages of the body and how it can vary with different people.
I mean, there's so much going on.
So when someone just starts talking about vegetables are toxic, like, oh, Jesus Christ.
And if you look under hashtag meat heals, there's all these people telling these stories about how they lost all this weight and they did all this this, and their health benefits.
But they only want it to be because of the consumption of meat only.
They think that it's because of the singular aspect of their diet and the fact that they've eliminated everything else.
but they don't do any studying of elimination diets.
They don't do any study of the prolonged benefits of fasting and all these different things that you're talking about, which I think are...
These are all factors in this really complicated thing that's going on that most likely has something to do with their gut biome and their immune system.
It's just important to approach this like a science, you know, and not like a religion, like you said, where you want to believe something.
And so you just find, you know, this study that I also see circulating around that why plants are really bad to eat.
They're mean.
The insect anti-nutrients or pesticides.
It's from my former mentor, Dr. Bruce Ames, who spent his entire career advocating micronutrients from vegetables and from meat and from fish.
It's so ironic.
But if you actually read the paper, Not only does it say it doesn't, you know, these insect anti-feedants like sulforaphane don't cause cancer, but it also has a whole section on heterocyclic amines from cooked meat.
So if you really want to use that paper as an argument, why to not eat plants, then maybe read the paper and realize, oh, it's also talking about heterocyclic amines as well.
The point of the paper was like, I'm getting a little emotional.
The point of the paper was basically not to worry about some of the amounts that you're being exposed to with some of these natural insect anti-feetants that are found in plants.
And some of the cooked things in meat, as well as some of the pesticides that are found, synthetic pesticides, basically that they're in such small amounts.
So that was kind of the point of the paper was back in the 90s.
But I just think that it's a little, I don't know, hypocritical to use a paper, you know, as like, and literally, it's like, I mean, it's like proliferated everywhere.
I see this paper all the time.
It's like, well, did you read the paper?
Because it has a whole section on On the insect antifedids from coffee, which a lot of people drink, and also from meat.
Right, which is what's going on with a lot of this stuff.
And this is what I'm concerned with.
I keep seeing all these people like, hey, I'm going to try the carnivore diet.
Hey, try the carnivore diet.
I tell you, it's amazing.
And I'm just sitting here shaking my head.
I'm like...
This doesn't make any sense.
Why would you want to eliminate a massive source of bioavailable nutrients?
And then when they're talking about the negative consequences of consuming vegetables, that there's different sort of toxic elements, I do remember you talking about how these stressors can actually have a positive and beneficial result when your body reacts to these stressors.
It's exactly how heat stress from the sauna works.
And it's how these phytochemicals, I'm calling them phytochemicals just as like a generic category, but they're compounds that are made by plants to ward off insects.
And we evolved eating them and they activate acidity.
Amazing stress response pathways in humans, in our brain, in multiple, in blood cells.
I mean, it's just human intervention trials showing this.
So you're going to miss out.
We evolved with it.
We're supposed to be stressed by exercise, by fasting, doing the time-restricted eating.
We're supposed to do that, and we're supposed to eat.
A gi is a kimono, this white or, you know, multicolor.
You could wear it different colors now, but they start out with white.
And a lot of people learn their jujitsu grabbing onto the gi, you know, like sort of a judo gi or, you know, karate gi, and utilizing it as part of the grappling technique.
And then no gi came along.
And what no gi is, they use rash guards, they don't grab the clothes, and they concentrate on control of the body with underhooks and overhooks and gable grips and things along those lines.
And it became a religious battle between gi and no gi.
And I remember sitting there watching this, and it was a problem.
Because people would get angry, like, what camp are you in, bro?
And I train both.
I have a black belt in the gi.
I have a black belt in no gi.
I train both of them.
I think there's benefits to both of them.
But there was this weird thing where you were supposed to choose sides.
It's since alleviated and people realize how preposterous it is.
But for a long time, like for years, the jujitsu community was split, where people were angry at people who wore the gi, or angry at people who wore no gi.
Like my friend Eddie, Eddie Bravo, who teaches no gi, people were angry at him for teaching a system of jujitsu that didn't involve a certain type of clothing.
It's the same mindset.
People just want you to believe what they believe only and they get rabid about it.
They get crazy.
And I'm seeing this with this carnivore diet.
And I think there's a psychological aspect to it that you were talking about in terms of this placebo effect that I think they feel like, I've never felt better.
And then there's also, well, if you are doing this as opposed to the standard American diet, I think you have the same sort of response that you have when people are talking about the positive benefits of the vegan diet.
I think if you have a vegan diet in comparison to eating chips and fries and soda, yeah, you're going to feel fucking amazing.
There's some great positive cognitive benefits for that.
I've really experienced that.
It's hard for me because what knocks me out, ironically, what knocks me out of ketosis, most of my diet is fairly ketogenic except I eat too much meat.
So I'm eating who knows how many grams of protein that is.
It's something insane.
But, I mean, I don't think it's a placebo effect, because I've been doing this for years now.
I feel pretty fucking good.
You know, and we're doing this fitness challenge now.
That's what this thing is.
Me and my friend Bert Kreischer, my friend Tom Segura and Ari Shafir, for the month, we have to see who burns the most calories and gets the most MEPS. This is my zone thing.
And also it's important, like the fact that the nocebo thing, experiencing bad things, also things when you change your microbiome and you're going a long period of time with just eating meat.
I mean, vegans that eat meat or people that are on a low fat diet that eat fat, they experience negative effects.
I mean, because there are microbiome changes that do occur and can lead to discomfort and those things will eventually go away.
But that is also something to consider.
Like, so there may be a nocebo on top of actual things that are short term.
And it's not just people that eat meat and then all of a sudden eat some plants.
They're like, I knew it, you know.
There are changes that take some time, a little bit of time in the microbiome that may be happening because, you know, definitely vegans talk about the same thing.
People on a low-fat diet that eat a high-fat diet say the same thing.
I mean, the microbiome does change depending on your diet.
And, you know, if you're eating a low-fat and then going to a high-fat diet, you know, you're making bile acids and things like that.
And, you know, if you don't have a microbiome that are resistant to that, you can start to have the microbiome being killed off and then it can cause inflammation.
You know, going from the plane, I mean, you're basically selecting for if you're eating a bunch of protein, you've got a lot of putrefactive bacteria, maybe less of the other.
You know, maybe it takes some time.
To be able to, like, ferment some of those, you know, complex carbohydrate fermentable fibers and stuff.
So I think that there's the mechanism.
I mean, it's not even easy to figure out a mechanism, but there's usually a mechanism and an explanation for things.
And, you know, sometimes you have a hypothesis and sometimes it's right and sometimes it's not.
You know, it doesn't mean what you're experiencing isn't real.
It just means that you didn't understand why you were experiencing it.
So a prolonged fast, technically in humans, according to Dr. Valjolongo, he thinks that it has to be more than 48 hours.
So you can do like a 72-hour fast.
And my in-laws have been doing, they've done like a couple of three, three and a half day fasts, and they're getting all sorts of massive improvements in a variety of biomarkers, you know, lipid and glucose and inflammation.
You know, a lot of things that I know carnivore people are talking about as well, but could be getting the same thing with fasting.
I mean, you know, you certainly, I think that if you're doing, if you're not eating any food and you're just doing like a water fast, you certainly, it could be more dangerous and should listen to your body.
And if you feel really sick or your heart's racing, you just, you should eat.
There's a fasting mimicking diet where people can, this is something Walter Longo has published on in humans and study humans as well as animal data, where it's like a very, you know, like the first day it's like a thousand calories, and the second through fifth day it's like 700 calories, and then they're broken up where it's like the first day it's like, it's very much a low sugar, low protein, high fat, modest carb kind of diet.
But yeah, you can do like, you could definitely do like an avocado if it's like the whole day.
And then some people have sort of done modified versions of it as well, like where it's a little more ketogenic, like they've adjusted the carbohydrate and fat to be a little more of the ketogenic.
And like I said, the study that was published in parallel with the fasting mimicking diet study, the fasting mimicking diet they did for three months, but it was only one week that did the fasting mimicking diet.
So the other, you know, part of the three months they were eating a Mediterranean-like diet.
The other people, which was in Germany, they were on a ketogenic diet and they were on it for three months and they experienced improvements as well.
So, there's definitely ways to tweak it.
And actually, getting to the Alzheimer's, the guy that I interviewed, Dr. Dale Bredesen, he is published extensively and also has a lot of clinical experience.
Where he's trying to understand the mechanism of Alzheimer's disease and I'm getting to this for the ketogenic is going to come back eventually.
So he tries to understand a lot of the underlying mechanisms for Alzheimer's disease and in his clinical experience he sort of sees there's subtypes of Alzheimer's where you can get like patients that have a really high inflammatory where they've got lots of inflammatory biomarkers They also have this high fasting blood glucose and their little like, you know, high fasting insulin.
But then you can get the same sort of metabolic effect where you have people that are kind of on the insulin resistant spectra, but without inflammation.
There's that subtype, and then there's another subtype where it seems like a big environmental component, like toxic stuff people are being exposed to.
And that leads to a much, much earlier diagnosis in Alzheimer's and a sort of different phenotype.
But he has this really aggressive and very thorough protocol that's on the individual level where he has tons and tons of biomarkers that are measured.
One is the fasting blood glucose.
It should be less than 5.5.
Actually, it's HbA1c, which is a three-month marker of fasting blood glucose.
It should be less than 5.5.
Fasting insulin should be less than 7. He's got your high sensitivity.
C-reactive protein should be less than 0.8.
And then he has a variety of other inflammatory biomarkers that are also measured.
And a variety of other things.
He looks at a lot of different micronutrients.
He looks at homocysteine.
Homocysteine is really important because there's publications showing that if you lower homocysteine, he actually published this in one patient.
It reversed the hippocampal atrophy, which is kind of amazing.
So it's not really known exactly what the mechanism is, but so that's something he looks at.
And he does this diet, this like...
Diet, this whole lifestyle change.
I mean, improving sleep, exercise, and he gives them all sorts of vitamins and fish oil.
But on top of that, he has this diet that he...
It's kind of like to lower the inflammation and improve the insulin sensitivity and blood glucose and all that, where he puts them on a diet that's kind of like...
He calls it Ketoflex, but it's kind of like a ketogenic diet, modified ketogenic diet, but a lot of the fats are coming from, like, plant sources.
So, like, avocado, nuts, olive oil...
He treats meat as a condiment, and basically he's getting improvements with this type of diet, lowering inflammation, improving all sorts of metabolic things.
So it's really interesting.
I've read a lot of his studies because he publishes a lot on Alzheimer's disease and mechanisms, and he's got a book out as well where he kind of goes in depth about it.
So it certainly seems very interesting that he's actually been able to not only delay Alzheimer's disease but reverse it.
And he has published a couple of published studies where people were able to go back to work and actually in some cases their brain atrophy kind of stopped and it started to reverse where they were like growing more neurons.
And so the publication was like the original one I had read, which got me interested in his work in the first place.
When I saw that, I was like, holy crap, this is amazing.
It was only on 10 patients.
It was kind of low.
He says now he's got like 50 more that he's getting ready to publish.
And then he's, you know, got this whole protocol where there's like just he's got like thousands of patients where they're like kind of treating this sort of individual way.
They do genetic testing, blood testing and all that stuff as well.
So it's very interesting because it's, you know, he's basically showing the important interaction between diet, lifestyle, and potentially genetics.
And this is kind of where my paper comes in.
Because there is a gene that increases the risk for Alzheimer's if you have one copy of it.
So you get two copies of every gene from mom, one from dad.
If you have one copy of it, it increases your risk for Alzheimer's disease by like two to three fold.
If you have two copies, it could be anywhere between 10 and 15 fold.
So it's like really, it's called ApoE4.
It also increases your chances of having a really poor outcome if you have any type of TBI. And people with that allele and have TBI, multiple TBIs, definitely are much more likely to come down with some sort of neurodegenerative disease.
But not everyone with it gets it.
So there's like this, like, what's going on here?
You know, there seems to be this clear, you know, gene-environment interaction going on.
And so I was really interested in this because I found out I had one of these alleles.
And of course that got me really concerned.
One of the things that's really, really important is sleep because sleep is one of the ways you actually clear away amyloid plaques from your brain.
Your brain actually swells during sleep.
You squirt cerebral final fluid into your brain and you basically clean out amyloid plaques and a bunch of other gunk that's built up.
So we talked about this in detail because basically that is one of the major ways you clear amyloid plaques, but the other way is through an ApoE-mediated mechanism.
And ApoE4 Does it like 20-fold less efficiently than someone that doesn't have it.
And so they rely on sleep.
And there's all sorts of studies with ApoE4 showing sleep is a major modifiable risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.
If you have ApoE4 but you're getting good quality sleep, you have like the same risk as someone that doesn't have it.
And so I was like, gee, you know, of course I was thinking about this the entire time that I had my son and I was like not sleeping for months.
But anyways, the other thing that I looked into in my publication, and this is where another sort of diet gene interaction comes in, is that there's all sorts of clinical studies showing that people with ApoE4 benefit from fish, eating fish, where they can basically have improved pathology in their brain, have where they can basically have improved pathology in their brain, have improved symptoms of But when they take fish oil, if you take fish oil and give it to people with dementia, only the people without ApoE4 benefit.
For some reason, the ApoE4 people aren't benefiting.
And if you look into the literature, animals that were given human ApoE4 versus human ApoE3, the DHA doesn't get transported across the blood-brain barrier very well with ApoE4.
So it's like, what's going on?
There's some sort of transport defect.
And DHA in the brain is really important.
It's been shown to play an important role in human studies, but a lot of animal studies and human studies have been shown to increase amyloid clearance.
In humans, it's been shown to decrease tau tangles.
And also, it's really important for glucose uptake into the brain because it regulates the transporters, glucose transporters.
So tau tangles form inside of neurons, and they disrupt a process that's called microtubule transport, which is where basically it's the neuron system for transporting fatty acids, all sorts of goodies, energy to the To the synapse, where synaptic transition is happening.
Tau tangles basically disrupt that whole thing.
Amyloid plaques form outside of neurons in the extracellular space, and they can disrupt synapse formation.
They're thought to form...
As a protective mechanism against viral, fungal, or bacterial infection.
So it's kind of like, you know, that's the reason why they're forming, but it's just a matter of clearing them out and also how your brain's able to, like, deal with the amyloid plaque burden and ApoE4 is not able to deal with it very well.
So the DHA transport thing is basically what I published has to do with the interaction between different forms of DHA and ApoE.
There's two different ways that DHA is transported across the brain.
One is when it's like in a free fatty acid form.
It's bound to albumin, and it requires an intact blood-brain barrier.
Specifically, the outer membrane of the blood-brain barrier needs to be intact.
Because it goes through passive diffusion.
Well, if there's a disruption in the blood-brain barrier, then the DHA isn't going to be transporting very well in that form.
And it's been shown that ApoE4 actually disrupts that very thing, the outer membrane.
The tight junctions that bind the outer membrane of the endothelial cells that line the blood-brain barrier.
And so it's quite possible that that is why DHA is not getting into the brains very well in ApoE4 carriers.
There's another way to get it in, and this is through a transporter that uses something called lysophosphatidylcholine DHA, which is a phospholipid form of DHA. It forms from phosphatidylcholine DHA. The transporter is called MFSD2A and it basically takes the DHA and flips it down across the outer membrane into the inner membrane of the blood-brain barrier so it bypasses that outer membrane and then it gets transported in.
So if you look at animal studies that you delete that transporter, like 60% of the DHA is not getting into the brain if you give animals DHA. Humans with variation in that gene that makes it less active have a form of neurological disorders and neurodegenerative disorders.
So it's obviously very important to get DHA into the brain through that mechanism.
Well, it turns out if you consume DHA in phospholipid form, you actually form more of lysophosphatidylcholine DHA. And that's because basically Where the DHAs are on a phospholipid, they're in multiple carbons, and one of them can escape a lipase in the pancreas, and so basically you can form more of it.
So phospholipid form DHAs in fish, but it's really abundant in fish roe, like super abundant, like 30 to 70% of DHA that's found in fish roe, which are fish eggs, a variety of different kinds, are in phospholipid form.
So I'm basically, you know, that's one way to get more phospholipid form, but also DHA consumed in like triglyceride form, which is what a lot of fish oil is, also forms.
It also forms DHA lysophosphatylcholine, but you just need more of it.
So it's also possible that some of these clinical trials showing that, you know, fish oil failed was because they were using, like the dose they were using was two grams.
And like I said, there's that fish oil standards program you can look up and there's a variety of different fish oil supplement brands that are on there.
The other thing is like there was just recently a randomized, very, very large randomized controlled trial published on four grams of one of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and other marine organisms, EPA. And they were given four grams a day for five years, 8,000 patients, randomized placebo-controlled Different countries.
And it reduced, and these actually were patients that had high triglycerides and also were on statins.
It lowered cardiovascular disease risk by like 28 or close to 30% or something like that.
You know, so that was a high dose, and that was five years, pretty long follow-up, and it was a randomized placebo-controlled study.
I think it was called the VITAL-IT study.
But, you know, the other thing that I think people are worried about with really high-dose fish oil is the potential for blood thinning, because it does inhibit thromboxanes and prostaglandins and leukotrienes and things that are important for, like, you know, clotting.
You know, I've been taking a really high dose for like over a decade, you know, of fish oil.
I've been taking not always six grams, but I've been taking a high dose for quite a while.
But the NAD by intravenous method, it's supposed to be a much more potent form of it.
And the people that I know that have tried it, like the guys at Onnit, someone will come down to the Onnit labs a couple times a month and a bunch of the employees will sign up and get zapped.
Before I forget, I did want to ask you about, circling back to this whole carnivore thing, one of the suggestions was that, is it possible that some small percentage of the population would actually be allergic to a lot of plants?
So is it possible that someone would be allergic to both cruciferous vegetables and, you know, a bunch of other like celery or cucumbers or things along those lines?
I think that people can have, you know, with like a variety of different issues like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in their intestines, you know, people that are sensitive to like FODMAPs, those things.
What is a FODMAP? I don't have fructose, oligosaccharide, like I can't remember what it is.
So is it fair to say that when people are describing this and they're saying that it might be possible that there is a small percentage of the population that's allergic to plants, that really what you're dealing with is a small percentage of population that has a significantly impaired gut biome that is finding benefit to eliminating these plants,
This strict elimination diet, being on this carnivore diet, which also has calorie-restrictive aspects to it and even fasting-restricted aspects to it, that this is why they're experiencing this positive benefit and that perhaps one of the ways they could fix their gut biome would be some sort of prolonged fast or something along those lines to try to fix the problem at the root source instead of Maybe what the carnivore diet would be is like some sort of a
And I think that the study I was talking about, the 15-day intermittent fast where people with autoimmune disease were fasted for 24 hours every other day, they had changes in their microbiome that were in line, very interesting changes.
They actually grew bacteria that are very important for producing things like Butyrate, which helps make T regulatory cells.
It's a signaling molecule that helps your immune system produce more T regulatory immune cells.
And the thing that was so interesting, and it's a question I had had for so long, was like, what happens to the microbiome when you don't eat?
Are you getting a selection for mucin-degrading bacteria, which are degrading a certain glycoprotein that lines the gut?
And the thing that was so interesting about this study was that they did this metagenomic analysis, and they found from fecal samples that Within the existing microbiome, it was increasing the production of ketone bodies themselves.
And that was fueling, because your gut cells and also a lot of the beneficial bacteria like things like butyrate, lactate, propionate, acetate.
These are some of the short-chain fatty acids.
Butyrate's the big one in the gut, for the gut.
Gut cells, like 80 or 90% are using butyrate.
But fasting was increasing all these ketone bodies.
So it's kind of really interesting because...
For one, it basically increased the diversity of this beneficial bacteria.
Yeah, because it is an interesting way to hack your system is that these exogenous ketones like Kegenix, or that's one that I use for a few other companies that make these, they do put your body in a state of ketosis.
I didn't use it today, but the reason why I didn't use it today...
So I started using it for podcasts or big talks or anything.
And the reason I didn't use it...
Today is because the flip side is, because I'm not in ketosis, I'm not on a ketogenic diet, it lowers my blood sugar levels really dramatically.
And this has been published.
There's mechanisms that are trying to be explored to understanding why that is, and possibly as a therapeutic treatment for Type 2 diabetes and things like that.
But so once the ketones wear off, which they do after a couple of hours, I crash because my blood glucose is low and I don't have the ketones there to compensate, right?
Whereas if I was already in ketosis, then, you know, it wouldn't matter because I'd already, I'd be in ketosis.
I mean, there's, you know, possibly the glucose is being spared in my brain for other things.
That's, you know, because now the ketone, the beta-hydroxybutyrate is being used as a source of energy and glucose is being used.
I mean, glucose sparing does occur a lot of times in the context of making more glutathione because that's, glucose can be used for energy or can be used to make glutathione.
And The pathway that it does that is through a pathway called the pentose phosphate shunt.
And that pathway takes glucose and makes something called NADPH, which is then used, which is necessary to make glutathione.
So I don't know, maybe there's some kind of, because you know what else does it for me?
Sulforaphane.
Sulforaphane gives me major anti-anxiety effects and like cognitive like I feel broccoli sprouts consuming broccoli sprouts does affect glutathione in the brain.
Glutathione, first of all, gets destroyed in the gut, but even if you were to get it into your bloodstream, there's no transporter for glutathione to get into cells.
So, you want to make...
I mean, you can get the precursors to make it, and you can increase...
Like, the way broccoli sprouts does it is it increases enzymes that make it.
So, you're making more, and so that's how you do it.
So what would be a good idea, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, would be a large plate of Brussels sprouts or broccoli sprouts with some sort of a ketone supplement.
Or if you're in ketosis, whether that's fasting, time-restricted eating, you know, so that's something that I do, so I am definitely trying to get my ketosis in, or you're on a ketogenic diet and you're getting...
So the question is, I'm not sure...
The glucose-sparing stuff, that's been shown in animals, so I don't know how much of that is, you know, translatable to humans, what effect.
I mean, you always have to have evidence to say something definitively.
But animal studies do show that there is a glucose sparing effect when you have ketone bodies.
But do you think you could mitigate that with maybe some sort of a glucose?
Because one of the things that they say to take when you're taking those ketone salts or ketone esters, the really potent ones, is to take them with glucose.
So if you're going to put it in a shake with other things, you want to blend it up first because – The enzyme, myrosinase, that has to come in contact with the precursor of sulforaphane, glucoraphanin, has to be in contact with it.
So it's diluted out if you have like a big, all this other stuff.
So blend it up first and then add your other stuff.
But I've been taking a supplement I got from France called Prostaphane, which is, there's published studies on it, and it tastes like broccoli sprouts.
And I've been taking that right now just because of the potential risk for contamination.
And also, from ones we made at home, if you have to be really careful, if you have too much water around it, if it's too much heat and condensation and all that stuff.
Plus the precursor that is important for forming sulforaphane, you actually have bacteria in your gut.
And this is something that Dr. Jed Fahey talked about when I interviewed him.
He was talking about there's certain strains of bacteria in the gut that convert, because they have the enzyme myrosinase, and they convert it into sulfurophene in the gut.
So you can actually get a certain amount.
He also mentioned that you can take mustard seed powder and sprinkle it on top of your cooked Brussels sprouts, your sautéed kale, which is, this is what I do, because I eat sautéed kale and stuff.
I also have raw, I eat raw kale, but mustard powder has the active enzyme, so you can consume that with it.
Oh, okay.
That's the other thing.
Like I mentioned, the supplements I'm taking, there is one out there also that has a lot of the precursor and some of the enzyme, and so you can get a modest amount of...
And this is what was used in the most recent autism study.
May I ask you before we get going, is there a difference, because this keeps coming up, is there any beneficial difference between infrared versus standard?
Well, a lot of the studies that I refer to and that have been published have been using a standard, right?
And they definitely work differently.
I mean, the standard hot sauna, you're heating up the air and you're getting hot.
Whereas the infrared is like, it's like using, it's like wavelengths that are like, you know, stimulating electrons that are sort of changing things and heating up you from a different sort of way.
But I do think that the key is the heat stress itself.
180 for 20 minutes is sort of like a lot of studies published by Dr. Jari Laukunen in Finland.
He's shown a lot of benefits.
A lot of his studies have been observational, but he's also done some intervention trials as well.
The observational studies, we've talked about improvements in cardiovascular-related mortality.
Literally, people do it four to seven times a week.
They have a 50% improvement in cardiovascular-related mortality.
Yeah, three to four times a week.
Two to three times a week is like 24% improvement.
So like a dose-dependent manner, Alzheimer's disease as well is like reduced by like 60% if you do it four to seven times a week, all cause mortality.
But he's also done some intervention studies showing that like there's improvements.
Even a single dose of doing the sauna, improvements in the ability of your blood vessels to contract and expand with pressure changes, which is important.
So it's like vascular compliance, it's called.
Improvements in blood pressure, decreases in C-reactive protein, inflammatory biomarker.
Other studies have been showing recently in humans Increase in mitochondrial biogenesis, growing new healthy mitochondria, improvements in mitochondrial function, and then also improvements in anti-inflammatory cytokines being increased.
And these are all intervention trials as well.
People that are doing it before doing a workout, which is interesting because I've always done it after.
So yeah, so it's actually a nice placebo-controlled study.
But what he found is that even a single treatment, these were in people that had major depressive disorder.
It improved depressive symptoms like even a week after.
And this was just a single, you know, exposure to the sauna.
Well, the sauna.
It's not actually a sauna.
It was like this heating device.
But he also measured their cytokine called IL-6, which is something that's released from exercise.
Muscle tissue releases it, spills out into the bloodstream.
And it's part of the inflammatory response, part of the inflammatory aspect of exercise.
And in response, there's a whole anti-inflammatory effect.
And so what he showed is that actually people with more IL-6 that happened, the better they had antidepressant effect.
So it's super interesting because, again, exercise does that.
In fact, if you give people NSAIDs or like, you know, so non-steroidal and inflammatories before exercise, it actually blunts the IL-6 production and it blunts some of the positive benefits like insulin sensitivity.
So the IL-6, although it's an inflammatory cytokine, it's kind of like this sort of pleiotropic one that like it's released.
In muscle tissue, it's released and it seems to like increase Have a big anti-inflammatory response that happens in response to that.
So it was really interesting because the inflammation seems to be really important for depression and that the sauna was like, you know, basically lowering markers of inflammation.
So it's been shown to lower C-rect protein and then also increase IL-10.
So it's a very interesting kind of connection between mood, heat stress, and then, of course, exercise does the same thing.
Exercise does elevate your core body temperature and heats you up.
And I asked Dr. Rezon, he thinks that things like the sauna, hot yoga, hot bath, steam room, all those things are pretty much can give you the same effect.
I'm pretty sure that yoga does the same effect with hot yoga because I have that same feeling when I get out of a hot yoga class.
This is like really good alleviation feeling.
My mood feels elevated.
I feel happier and it feels different than a regular workout.
Like regular workout does that but it seems more an alleviation of stress.
Like I've expelled the excess energy in my body and I can relax and there's certainly some sort of Some sort of a positive hormonal effect after it's over.
Some endorphin rush.
But it's not the same as the yoga.
The hot yoga, I think, is very addictive to people.
And the thing about yoga is that it's only 104 degrees in the room, but when you take into account the extreme condition of, like, the exercise, extreme stress that you're putting on your body, a lot of it is, like, really difficult balancing and you're straining and all your muscles.
You're fucking sweating.
And you're not sweating, like, 104 degrees.
You're sweating just like you're sweating inside the sauna.
But the endorphin, you dump a bunch of endorphins with the sauna as well, like tons and tons.
And then there's the whole, you're making dynorphin, which is the sort of opposite of endorphin.
It's responsible for that.
I'm so hot.
This feels like awful.
And that changes some of the, at least in animal studies, it's been shown to change the sensitivity to endorphins from the receptor standpoint.
So it's kind of interesting.
That's kind of initially what I originally was looking into when I was noticing all these benefits from the sauna.
But that's really cool that you're doing it because there's so many studies now showing that there's benefits on the cardiovascular health, also on neurodegenerative disease, depression, I mean the anti-inflammatory effects as well.
Right now I've been taking hot baths just because I haven't...
We're trying to get to the point where we have a sauna, but I think we're going to get there soon.
Hot baths have been really doing it for me as well, where I'm like submerged with my shoulders.
I mean, you can't, like if you start putting your arms and legs out of the water, like it doesn't count because like you feel cooler.
If you like stay underneath, I mean, you start freaking out.
Your heart starts raising.
I mean, it's like the same effect that happens where you elevated heart rate and all those sort of similar mechanisms kick into play like they do when you're in a sauna.
I mean it's not you're not taking in a drug but you're so chilled out you know and you do have a weird psychedelic state that you achieve when you're it's like a very extreme form of meditation in a lot of ways because of the fact that you're not feeling your body at all and it's you're only experiencing whatever's going on it's like your brain detached from all the input of the body.
that have been done on like long-term meditators or even just people that haven't meditated.
And then they're put in like some like eight week trial of meditation and how there's like immediately all these changes in brain activities start to happen.
Yeah.
Like that are, you know, basically in line with good brain aging and improved, you know, all sorts of measure measures of improved cognitive function and stuff.
It's super interesting.
It would be really interesting to see how that differs from...
Well, meditation in conjunction with the tank, I think, is really the key.
I think the tank allows you to achieve a state of your physical body You don't ever completely eliminate the sensory input, but you diminish it so significantly that that environment is not available anywhere else on Earth.
Well, you're floating, so you don't feel your body.
Your water is the temperature of your skin, the air is the same temperature as the water, and you feel like you're just flying through infinity.
I feel like my brain has way more resources available to it.
If you and I were having this conversation and we didn't have the headphones on and there was a jackhammer next to us, it would be really distracting.
You'd want to get away from that jackhammer.
Like, let's go talk over here.
You'd want to get away as far as you could.
But everything is a distraction.
Like, the seat on my butt is a distraction.
The shoes on my feet are something I'm thinking about.
The watch on my hand.
There's all these different things that are distracting you.
But when you get in that tank, there's none of those things.
You're just...
You settle in and once you settle in you touch each side so that you can you know because you get in the waters like a few whip ripples and little little waves and then you touch each side so you calm everything down and then I sink into the water and And then I take some deep breaths, and then I slowly bring my arms in the middle, and then I chill out.
And I've done it so many times, my body goes, okay, here we go again.
It's not like, whoa, what is this?
This is so weird.
I've done it so many times that my body gets into that state very quickly.
But if I take time off, and I do, sometimes I'll take weeks or even a month off, and then it's a little more weird at first.
Like, oh, we're doing this again.
Oh, I haven't done this in a while.
But when I do it consistently on a regular basis, two, three times a week, then I could just sink right into it.
But some people, particularly people with schizophrenia, they don't filter that out.
And so they get an overload.
It's called sensory overload.
And so they oftentimes can't go into a room with a lot of people.
They don't want to go off by themselves or whatever.
So I wonder if there's any sort of benefit for doing something like that where you're not, you know, the sensory inputs kind of like, if you could kind of train your brain a little bit.
I also sometimes use the sauna for that where I'll like have something like prepared.
I used to actually before giving a presentation, I would go in the sauna and I would go through it in my head, you know, so it's like, you know, that was something that that I used to do a lot.
That's a step, but I think the float tank is the ultimate.
And right now, there's a really interesting podcast that's available.
I've talked about this podcast before, Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
They have an episode right now, this week, that is about John Lilly.
Who is the psychedelic pioneer who created the sensory deprivation tank.
And he also is a pioneer in interspecies communication, figured out how to communicate with dolphins and did a bunch of weird psychedelic research with dolphins.
There it is, from the vault, John C. Lilly.
A really amazing, amazing guy who...
I mean if you go but they go deep into the history of his his career too, which is just Very varied fucking really strange guy, but I think his great contribution is not just Understanding the sentient nature of dolphins and how incredibly complex their language is and how smart they are but also the sensory deprivation tank which I think is It's one of the most underutilized tools For consciousness.
For exploring consciousness.
And just for relaxation.
And for me, for examining ideas.
If I have an idea.
Like I used to do a lot of jujitsu in there.
Like I would go into the tank and I would go over moves.
Yeah, and I would do that to get me to this relaxation state.
Or I would go over a joke that I'm struggling with or a comedy bit.
I'm like, what is a better way to say this?
What's the best way to get this across?
I'm saying it this way, but it's offensive or it's blunt and it's not the funny part.
I'm taking a shortcut.
Maybe I... And then I would go over it in my head.
And then eventually, once I would do that, I would get to this relaxation point where then I could just concentrate only on breathing.
So after I've worked out all the things that are bugging me, and sometimes it would be like a seminar on my life.
I'd get in there, and then as soon as I close the tank door and lay down, I'd take a few deep breaths, and then I'd be like, okay.
So here's what's wrong, fuckface.
You're doing too much of this.
Clean your goddamn office.
How come you only get 8 out of 10 things down on your to-do list?
That's bothering you.
You know, you need to spend an hour a day just doing this.
And instead of drinking coffee and looking at your phone before you work out, just fucking work out.
Just get in there and you're wasting 20 minutes doing that.
That 20 minutes, you could have been done 20 minutes earlier, and then you wouldn't have to rush over here to do the podcast.
And it's like it starts sort of giving me almost like a subconscious renovation.
You know like just so it's just sort of like it's okay like this is There's all this stuff in your subconscious is disturbing you and here's why it's disturbing you because you've got all this clutter So let's clean this shit up clean it up get it together and it's been responsible for I think a lot of my focus and discipline like understanding the significance of that focus and discipline and it's not just like To be a tough guy or to just go out there and kick ass.
It's more like to absolve yourself of brain clutter.
And then once you get in, it's almost like a mantra.
You're managing the motion of your body and then the breathing.
And then once you get it all synced up, if you're in good enough shape that it's not like a titanic struggle with every lap or every stroke of your arms, you can get into this sort of meditative state that a lot of people achieve with running or even just like sitting there breathing.
Some of the other interesting stuff is just doing that, sit there, sit still and breathe, changes the activation of enzymes and stuff like telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres.
It literally activates telomerase.
It's so fascinating how certain things...
I wouldn't imagine doing that would actually change telomerase.
And whenever I talk to you, I'm more and more sort of aware of that because there's so many different things and so many different mechanisms in terms of nutrition and nutritional absorption that I just – I'm so ignorant of.
And so I hear all these things and I'm like – I'm trying to – Trying to get a map of the territory.
Yeah, there's a lot of show notes and summaries and definitions that help people understand some of the stuff if they don't understand everything that we're speaking about.