Ben Greenfield, biohacker and fitness expert, details his 40-oz French press coffee and 33% carnivore diet—fermented sourdough and nose-to-tail meat—while debunking TMAO fears. He advocates infrared saunas (155–170°F) for detox, citing Finnish longevity studies, and contrasts them with dry saunas at 190°F. NAD+ IV therapy (500–1,000 mg weekly) and stem cell protocols—though unproven—boost recovery, while peptides like BPC-157 and epitalon target muscle repair and anti-aging. Personalized diets, genetic testing (e.g., APOE4 for CTE risk), and fasting (12–24 hours daily) optimize health, but processed food elimination drives perceived benefits. Natural biohacks—sunlight, breathwork, Celtic salt—outperform synthetic shortcuts, emphasizing holistic, evidence-backed longevity over quick fixes. [Automatically generated summary]
That conversion to glucose is a different sugar than the TMAO.
So what the TMAO is, is that's going to be present if you aren't getting enough fiber or if your biome is imbalanced.
But what this study a couple of days looked at was people who were eating like a fish and egg and plant-rich diet, and they had high levels of TMAO too, but they weren't deleterious.
They're actually protective because they had the fiber.
Yeah, and I mean, you could do a carnivore diet if you were—there's a few populations that do this, like in Spain.
I forget the name of the sausage, but they'll eat the ruminant, like they'll eat the intestine of the ruminant and get their grasses and their fibers and their plants literally by eating the stomach of the animal.
Yeah, and it's the same issue with methionine, too much of the amino acid methionine from just eating red meat.
Would be deleterious, but if you're getting glycine and some of these other amino acids, if you're eating like nose to tail, right?
Bone marrow, bone broth, all the organ meats, you know, head cheese, Braunschweiger, just like all these different mixes of meats, I think that would be the way to do a carnivore diet.
Yeah, there's a lot of people that are proponents of that as well.
And then there's a bunch of people that are, you know, it's interesting because you've got a, there's a disparity between the anecdotal accounts of health and well-being and then blood work.
The problem is that it's, you know, I don't want to call anybody out and call them lazy, but it's almost like kind of a very easy lazy-esque approach because rather than figuring out how to do, you know, like that sourdough bread, it's slow fermented, the rye and the wheat are in there, but all the phytic acid that would normally inhibit your ability to absorb minerals Is pre-digested by the lactobacillus and all the bacteria in the wheat.
So you've got a bread that's lower in a glycemic index, and it's more easily digested.
Right, and you put the rye in it because it lowers the glycemic index.
And then you've got the, what's it called?
The...
I forget the term.
It's like a gluten digesting enzyme that gets activated with the lactobacillus.
So that's a smart bread.
I mean, it takes freaking 24 hours.
It's not 24 hours, but it's like 15 minutes over 24 hours that it takes to make it.
That's an intelligent approach to food preparation, right?
That's the way that our ancestors or many of the Blue Zones would have treated their foods, fermenting, soaking, sprouting, slow food.
And you can take a lot of these things that would result in, you know, you're talking about Jordan Peterson.
I know his daughter does this as well, Michaela Peterson.
They use that elimination diet, which is the carnivore diet, to clear up a lot of those autoimmune issues, but you could also just render food more digestible or switch to an elimination diet or an autoimmune diet for 8 weeks or 12 weeks, something like the carnivore diet, heal the gut, and then return back to a more all-inclusive eating pattern.
That allows you to eat dairy, wheat, plants, etc.
All these things that would normally damage the gut if the gut is actually leaky.
Some of the gum in the joint stuff might be just as much related to the fact that he's getting a shit ton of collagen, fiber, or not fiber, but elastin and muscle fiber precursors.
He's getting a lot of protein.
I don't know if he's eating bone broth and bone marrow, but maybe a lot of glycine and some of these other metabolites.
So part of it could just be more fuel on board to repair muscles or to repair the joints.
But then the other part of it...
Is that when you eliminate inflammatory products that you're consuming, like let's say you're eating whatever, you know, Wonder Bread and commercial dairy or unfermented soy or any of these things that can actually damage the lining of the gut, you're creating an inflammatory scenario.
And I know you're familiar with the gut-brain axis and how our gut interacts with our nervous system via the vagus nerve.
And when you have inflammation in the gut, that affects neural symptoms, it affects sleep, it affects intellectual performance, and then you've also got the autoimmune component.
If you're actually truly allergic to or intolerant to some of those proteins that wind up in the bloodstream in the presence of a leaky gut, plant proteins, lectins are another one that a lot of people complain about, then you create Almost like a full-body damage scenario.
So the idea is you get rid of all that stuff, you introduce the carnivore diet, and I don't know that there's a lot of components of the carnivore diet that are actually healing the gut as much as it's the absence or elimination of the foods that were harming it.
The Bell Brothers, Chris and Mark, do you know those guys?
Their take on it is, basically, they've never felt better, and these are guys that work out very heavily.
The difference between them and Jordan is probably that, especially Mark as a gorilla.
He's powerlifting and has been doing that basically his whole life.
These guys are...
What their take on it is essentially, at least the way they think, is that most people that are talking about diet, they really don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Even though you might be able to look at it on paper and you might have these ideas about what's beneficial or non-beneficial.
Some people are proponents of vegan diet.
Some people are proponents of paleo.
He's like, until you are actually physically doing something, until you are actually doing something with that diet, and then you report how much better you feel.
the people that are actually training really hard, those are the ones you should rely on.
And he's saying, for him, personally, he's never felt better, never been leaner.
Yeah, and a big part of it, I mean, this just returns to diet personalization and customization as a whole.
You know, we live in an era where you can self-quantify pretty easily with genetics, and you can find out what ancestry you came from, what blood markers that you have, what your gut microbiome looks like.
I think we talked about this on the last show, but there's this idea of eating according to your ancestry and the concept of what are called cold spots, like areas around the world where people have a genetic susceptibility to have certain diseases that they don't actually develop.
Those diseases don't actually manifest because of their traditional diet.
Like you look at like the Icelandic population that carries the genes that would render them more susceptible to something like depression or seasonal affective disorder.
But their diet is very rich in omega-3 fatty acids and DHA, which we know can protect against those disorders.
And you take the Icelandic population and you uproot them and put them in the context of a westernized diet.
know it's a genetic susceptibility but but the idea is that that population probably figured out at some point in human history that if they eat a lot of plants or they eat a lot of fiber all of a sudden people don't have as many issues with their colon right and then you take that same population again strip out the fiber put them on a westernized diet and you get a large portion of the african american population developing colon cancer That's crazy about the seasonal affective disorder.
Probably even more if you come from that population.
I mean, I'm on the Spokane side, but I'm out in the middle of the forest.
I get sun for maybe 10 to 2, and I'm on the north-facing slope, and I work indoors a lot of the time.
I'm typing on my computer, I'm blogging, and so I don't get a lot of sun exposure.
That's where all these newfangled light panels and head-worn light devices and things come in that were actually developed for seasonal affective disorder that actually work pretty well just to keep your mood up.
If you're working indoors, you don't get sunlight exposure.
I saw pictures of the lake where people were taking photographs of the bottom of the lake, like from 100 feet, 100 feet deep of water, you could see the bottom of the lake.
But it's kind of funny because it's actually polluted because of all the mines that they have around there.
Like there's a lot of metals in it because the Coeur d'Alene feeds into the Spokane River and your allotment of fish that you're supposed to eat from the Spokane River is like one a year.
So you walk into the infrared, it's like 155 to 158 degrees, most of them.
There's a couple that'll go up to like 170. Even though the air is cooler, the actual photons of light that are being released by the panels, you're surrounded by infrared panels while you're in there.
Those penetrate more deeply into tissue.
So you wind up getting a deeper sweat.
You sweat for a longer time.
You can stay in there longer because it's not quite as hot.
But you look at like the studies out of Finland, right?
These studies that show four to five year lifespan increases from a weekly sauna protocol of, you know, I think it's like four times a week for 20 to 30 minutes.
And the significant drop in dementia and Alzheimer's and a lot of these mortality risk factors.
And you look at the studies that have been done in athletes where you get almost an erythropoietin, like a blood doping effect from sauna exposure when done post-workout.
You stay in there for 20 to 30 minutes post-workout.
I don't have a dry sauna, but I would like to get a barrel sauna because I have the infrared.
In my basement, it's one of those big ones, like the four-person infrared sauna that you can get into an exercise, you can have more people in there, do yoga, whatnot.
And I'm 6'2", but I can get into a full down dog or get into a lunge or whatever.
You know, you're getting cold and when you take off the blood pressure cuffs, what happens is you've got a bunch of lactic acid trapped in the muscle as you're moving.
And typically you're doing like 30 seconds as hard as you can go.
So you might go in pretty heavy wattage, like 600-800 watts for 15 to 30 seconds and then you recover.
And when you finish and you take those cuffs off, you get this amplification in growth hormone Testosterone, and based on some of the research they're talking about now, stem cell mobilization.
I'm sorry, what would be the equivalent of 100 to 200 milligrams in a human on a rodent model?
A lot of the studies on supplementation, same thing with TBI and concussion.
You hear about DHA and fish oil for that, but you need to take a lot of fish oil, a lot of DHA. If you extrapolate from the rodent models, you're looking at 50 to 60 grams of DHA or fish oil to manage TBI or concussion.
It's a lot of DHA, but if you were going to use a multimodal approach to TBI or to Alzheimer's or dementia, I'm a huge fan of that.
I'm a fan of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Ketosis definitely works.
These light devices that you wear on your head now.
They've got a lot of research coming out on something called photobiomodulation for TBI, and these things produce hertz frequencies at 10 to 40 hertz range.
You place them on your head.
Typically, there's like a probe that goes into your nose, and they've got new research coming out on this for restoring blood flow to the head, increasing your alpha brainwave production, your gamma brainwave production.
It delivers a wavelength of light that is supposed to activate part of the mitochondria.
It's called cytochrome C oxidase.
And when you activate that, you get increased mitochondrial activity.
You get increased blood flow.
You get increased production of nitric oxide.
And this kind of returns to what I was talking about with seasonal affective disorder, where you can use a lot of these new things that are designed to deliver infrared light or light to the body.
To increase mitochondrial density or to increase blood flow or to increase nitric oxide.
And people are now using this for TBI and concussion.
And stem cells as well.
Actually, last time I was on the show, we were talking about how when I got that concussion in Austin, I did a self-administered infusion of sugar alcohols.
I used mannitol.
And then I followed that up with stem cells because I had my stem cells stored down in Florida and also in this lab called Forever Labs in Berkeley.
And I followed that up.
I chased it with a stem cell injection because when you inject sugar alcohol into your bloodstream, it renders your blood-brain barrier more permeable, and then the stem cells can cross over through the blood-brain barrier.
It's more convenient than sitting down and doing an IV. So a push, you would actually have a nurse actually pushing down on the button as things are going?
I started to listen to your podcast with David Sinclair on the car ride over, and he's talking about this NMN stuff, which supposedly, when orderly administered, simulates a lot of what NR, nicotinamide riboside, which is one thing that a lot of people are taking for anti-aging, and NAD, which is what we were just talking about, administered via either...
In most cases, it's IV. There's a couple companies doing like an oral NAD version.
But supposedly, NMN, I don't know if Sinclair has any human studies coming out on this right now, or at least released.
But he's done rodent studies and shown that it's like...
Exercise in a bottle.
The NAD, from what I understand though, and this returns to the TBI concussion piece, crosses the blood-brain barrier easily or more easily than NMN or NR. So if you were doing it for like a cognitive or a neurological effect, you may want to choose NAD. Sounds to me like from the research I've seen, if you were doing it for the exercise effect, maybe you'd choose NMN or NR. Interesting.
The anti-aging effect, I mean, they don't even know in many cases all the pathways on which these things are working.
But most of them are related to these sirtuin pathways, right?
Like sirtuin activating compounds that actually allow your mitochondria to repair more quickly or give your body more antioxidants.
So the idea is they probably all have a pretty good effect on anti-aging.
I like to at least allow for 20 minutes and then you follow it up in most cases with like an IV cocktail, like a Myers cocktail, vitamin cocktail.
Why so?
Supposedly, it does a few things.
Supposedly, it enhances your stem cell mobilization or the activity of stem cells.
It allows the ND to be absorbed to the cells more easily.
So you basically, I mean, the way I do it is I use it like just a butterfly needle, and you do the NAD administration, and then you just unscrew the end of the butterfly needle line, and then you put the vitamin cocktail in to follow up with vitamin cocktail, which takes like 30 to 60 seconds, and then you're done.
The idea is you're supposed to maintain your levels.
And there's even some evidence, and this is kind of similar to testosterone, that long-term use may suppress your body's own NAD production.
So if you're going to start to do it, great.
But you may want to realize that this is something you'd need to do regularly to keep your levels elevated because you may get a down-regulation effect.
One of the very interesting things, though, I did a couple of weeks ago was I went to New York City, and I got NAD from this doctor, Dr. Chen, over there.
But then he infused me with CoQ10 and a bunch of other vitamins to allow my body to make more of what are called Adult pluripotent stem cells.
They're also known as V-cells, very small embryonic-like cells.
Now, if you've heard of parabiosis before, this idea of taking the blood from young mice and transferring that into old mice, there was research that they did at Stanford University on this, you impart essentially enhanced longevity to the old mice.
The idea is that's a non-autologous transfer.
That's the transfer of blood from a young, healthy donor into an older recipient.
And there are companies now in Silicon Valley doing this, like the Young Blood Institute.
For like $8,000, this company called Ambrosia will give you the plasma from a young, healthy donor.
So I didn't want to put somebody else's blood into my body.
So what I did was I had this doc take out a pint of my blood.
And what happens is if you put all these vitamins like NAD and stuff into your blood, it increases your stem cell production.
If you stress the blood after that, it dumps out a bunch of these tiny little adult pluripotent stem cells, which is exactly the same type of cell that you're getting when you do one of these young blood transfers.
So he stresses that overnight in cold.
You can use cold, you could use pressure, you could use anything to increase the stem cell release from the blood cells.
But they get stressed out, they release stem cells, and then what happens is you get them injected back into your body afterwards.
Yeah, but I think, and I don't know a lot about what Regenikine is doing, but I think they're more concentrating the growth factors.
I think they might be doing exosomes.
I know they've got some overseas places where they're doing like a culture expanded or something like that.
But as far as in the U.S., this protocol is one of the few that I know of where you could take your own blood and get a lot of that same stuff that you'd get from Culture Expanded or from parabiosis, like using the blood of somebody else, and you get all these stem cells released into your body.
The other one that I did that worked very well on my knee, Because I have some meniscus issues on my left knee.
I did what's called a nerve hydrodissection.
Have you heard of this before?
No.
Hydrodissection is a protocol where they take a liquid and they use the liquid to act like the scalpel or the knife that a surgeon would use to remove adhesions like scar tissue adhesions or separate a nerve that's causing pain or discomfort or lack of mobility in a certain joint.
But when they do a nerve hydrodissection, they don't have to use something like they'd use in prolotherapy, like sugar water or regular water.
What I had done, and this was at a clinic called BioReset in San Jose with Dr. Matt Cook down there.
and did a nerve hydrodissection, and he used ozone and a placental cell.
It wasn't like a culture-expanded placental cell, which is what I understand to be illegal in the U.S., but just like a regular placental extract.
He did that into my knee, and my knee went from like 25% to 100% in a couple of weeks.
And what they found was that it actually seems to cause some kind of a release of the scar tissue, followed by an increase in the blood flow, which is difficult to get in some areas of the knee.
So, yeah, I mean, if I ever get to the point where somebody wants to scope my knee or something like that, I would I would definitely consider doing that treatment first.
It worked very well, and it was just quick and easy.
Yeah, I kind of question the one thing, because I've asked myself this before, and I don't know if you have.
When you get a protocol like that done and you kind of go easy on your knee because you really want it to work and you start backing off of some of that stuff you were doing anyways, how much of it is you just backing off of what you were doing and how much of it is the exosomes and the stem cells?
So I fine grind coffee and I mix that with black Kona salt, cayenne pepper, and paprika.
And you can just make that rub as thick as you want, put that on the ribeye.
And I've almost switched completely from doing my stovetop sear followed by the quick broil on either side to doing like a one and a half to two hour smoke in the Traeger with that coffee rub on and then just finishing it on the grill with the Traeger.
I've tried a bunch of different rubs on that, but just coarse salt and black pepper works fine for the beer can chicken.
You empty about half of the beer can out.
You open up the beer can, but then you poke a couple extra holes in the top so you get more of the steam so the inside of the chicken gets even more moist.
But then what I figured out is if you use like a little scalpel or exacto knife and you cut open the skin of the chicken around the outside a little bit and you stuff that with pads of butter and then you do your smoke with the pads of butter inside the chicken, the skin gets crispy, like super crispy.
And so you just, it's like, I think it's like an hour, an hour and a half you cook that one.
And you can't smoke that one very successfully.
Like, you want to run the grill with the smoke on, but you can't super smoke it.
It doesn't seem to work so well.
But that beer can chicken, that's freaking amazing.
In the advent of Instagram, we may be evolving as a species to find these type of things more attractive, though.
Because that's the whole idea with social media is you get a dopamine hit.
Every time you click on the little blue notification button or you look at a new photo, so maybe we're just going to eventually develop a real appreciation for that type of symmetry.
Did you see that Rhonda Patrick tweeted that study about mice and myonuclei and how when they dope mice, they never actually lose the muscles myonuclei.
But this latest one was basically the idea that you retain actual myonuclei in the muscle.
Like they thought for a long time that those just disappeared and went away once you detrained.
But it turns out that they're all still there.
So as soon as you start training again, you build muscle more quickly and furthermore, and this was kind of like the political part of it, is if you've done some kind of illegal performance enhancing procedure or steroids or doped or whatever, you actually would have a higher concentration of micronuclei or myonuclei available. you actually would have a higher concentration of micronuclei or And there was a study even leading up to that.
And this was, I think this was like 2013, like this was a while ago where they took mice and they gave one group testosterone and the other group didn't get it.
And then they spent six months off testosterone.
I don't remember how long they were on it, but they spent six months off it and then they took those mice and they trained them with the training protocol.
And the mice that were on the testosterone but were no longer on it had a 30% increase in muscle mass compared to the other mice that only had a 5% increase on it.
So once again, and this was probably related to that myonuclei thing that just came out in this recent study.
So it turns out that A, you should lift like when you're young because you can build all these myonuclei that just basically hang around your body.
And then B, when they like ban somebody from sport for doping and then they come back and start to compete in that sport again, they still have an advantage.
And it's not, it doesn't have any performance-enhancing benefit in terms of, like, the amount of, the dosage that he's tested positive for.
But it's lingering in his system because the protocols for, um, well, their ability, rather, to detect these metabolites has increased rapidly.
And over the last year, it's just unbelievably more sensitive.
To the point where they're detecting these infinitesimally small levels of these metabolites, and there also seems to be some sort of a pulsing effect where your body releases these infinitesimally small metabolites and then doesn't, so you'll test negative, and then next week you'll test positive, but only for the long-term metabolite, which is an indication that there's no re-administration of the performance-enhancing drug.
And everybody's mad.
There's so many athletes that are mad about it, and From what you're saying and from this study that Dr. Rhonda Patrick highlighted, it's, you know, especially for someone who's willingly taken something.
See, the Jon Jones situation is very tricky because he's so good and he's so dominant that people just assume that he's been doing something his whole career.
And when you catch him, they're like, aha, that's the reason why he's so good.
And it may be, but it also might be he's got phenomenal genetics.
You saw it as knocking on doors at 6 o'clock in the morning, peeing this cup.
And you do hear about positive tests, but the amount of positive tests versus the negative tests is overwhelming.
Way more guys are not doing something.
It used to be the opposite.
It used to be in the 90s, everyone was doing something.
We were just talking about this on the Fight Companion podcast that a big issue is grappling.
Grappling competitions are overrun with steroid users because no one's testing.
The smell test is off the fucking charts.
You're looking at these guys, they're just ridiculous.
Just jacked.
Low body fat, super high muscle mass, and they're training jujitsu all the time, too.
So you would think it would be very hard for them to maintain muscle mass as well as be able to train the way they're training with technique and drills and cardio and all those different things.
And when you look at like ultra runners, anybody who's competing in a non-complex activity in which they might have already developed the ability to be able to be in the zone, right?
They've put in their 10,000 hours of practice and they're able to just kind of check out and go into automatic mode.
When you combine that with the pain quelling effects of something like, you know, in most cases, like a THC CBD combo is what a lot of ultra runners are using.
I'm not sure what they'd use in MMA right now.
But ultimately, you get a good effect, but the loss of reaction time and the loss of the ability to be able to perform complex tasks, which they've proven in flight simulation studies, It dictates that it's still not that great of a drug if you were going to be doing complex tasks.
When they're talking about reaction studies, are they talking about reaction studies for people that are acclimated to taking marijuana?
Are they talking about it with people where they take someone who's a sober person and they introduce them to marijuana and there's this overwhelming effect of it?
Because one of the things that happens to people that aren't accustomed to THC is the freak out effect where they're just like, oh, they're not comfortable with the experience.
After a while, the way it's described, and again, this is all anecdotal, but by people that are accustomed to it, they say you just get good at being high.
And see, the reaction time thing, I don't buy because a lot of strikers, a lot of kickboxers, they train while they're on marijuana.
Sure, but the question is, are they experienced stoners?
Or are these people that are freaking out, and maybe the reaction time is they're spacing out, and they don't know what the fuck this experience is like, and they might have anxiety because of it.
There's a lot of really overwhelming sensations that come with that marijuana high, and a lot of them you call paranoia or oversensitivity, and sometimes you get paralysis by analysis when you're under the influence of those things.
That's what a lot of endurance athletes are, you know, like folks in the ultra-running community using it now.
They'll use a trace amount of THC combined with CBD, like a 4-to-1 to a 10-to-1 CBD to THC ratio.
And I think, you know, now with the Farm Bill and increasing legality, I think this idea of developing...
Sports performance supplements for athletes who aren't competing in sports where that is banned are going to be steered in the direction of high CBD and then some of these other novel molecules like CBG or CBN. I'm not aware of those.
No, they actually are now isolating these in labs, almost like organic chemistry.
And you can take hemp or marijuana and you can actually isolate specific compounds and then combine them.
So you can take like...
You could take like CBG, CBD, combine that with other terpenes from like whatever, let's say lavender and valerian and chamomile and make like a de-stress relaxation type of compound.
Or you could do like a THC, but a THC-8 instead of a THC-9 and combine that with like cinnamon and peppermint, maybe some caffeine or creatine or something like that to make like more of a pick-me-up type of compound.
But I think that's the wave of the future when it comes to a lot of these marijuana companies that are developing stuff for specific goals.
I know a lot of folks that are trying the CBD that use it for inflammation, especially athletes, like it with a little bit of THC. They seem to think it's more effective.
There's some sort of combined effect of the THC with the CBD. Yeah, they call that the entourage effect, when you have all the different terpenes and the endocannabinoids playing together.
I think that's where supplementation is going in general, right?
It's just like we were talking about with diet, how based on your genetics, based on your blood work, based on your biomarkers, that's how you would choose your diet.
I mean, like, you know, like the carnivore diet.
If you're, let's say, like, sub-Saharan African or Southeast Asian and you have high levels of There are genes for salivary amylase.
There's one called the AMY1 gene.
There are genes responsible for you having a higher inflammatory response to saturated fat or a ketogenic diet.
There's one called the APOE gene, APOE34, which I have.
It dictates that even though I personally eat a higher-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, the majority of my fats come from Mediterranean fat sources.
A lot of olive oils, a lot of avocado oil, a lot of fish.
And I do that because my genetics dictate that my macronutrient ratio, my diet is going to be best suited to that specific ratio of fats.
But you could say the same thing with supplements.
I think with supplements now, with all these different places that will self-quantify, like WellnessFX, InsideTracker, and 23andMe, you can take all this data, put it together, and actually determine whatever.
Everybody's saying we're supposed to take 2,000 international units of vitamin D a day.
If your vitamin D levels are like 80 or 90, then that could cause arterial calcification if you're taking excess vitamin D. I had both myself and my kids tested for our genetics.
Like, none of us boys in the Greenfield family actually have the gene that allows us to generate Appreciable amounts of vitamin D from sunlight.
So we all now supplement with vitamin D and vitamin K. My boys, neither of them possess the enzyme or the, I guess it is an enzyme, superoxide dismutase.
It's a gene that allows for increased expression of this enzyme that allows for glutathione production.
So they take glutathione now.
Now, they have the one that results in a lower than normal level of BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, the stuff that's like miracle grow for the brain.
So they use lion's mane extract now before school.
So I like the idea of doing a genetic test and doing a blood test and looking at what your ancestors would have eaten if you happen to have, I guess, kind of like a clean enough to interpret ancestral profile to be able to say, well, here's, you know, I'm mostly Northern European, so this is what I'm well, here's, you know, I'm mostly Northern European, so this is what I'm going to You combine all that stuff, I think, you know, return to your question about the carnivore diet, that's the way to eat.
Very similar like if you had familial hypercholesternia, you know, and you get on like a ketogenic diet, for example, and your cholesterol goes up to 500. I mean, it's something that just doesn't agree with a lot of people.
It's so difficult for people, especially if they don't have a lot of research in the field, if they haven't read a lot about it, to try to determine what's the best diet for them.
Yeah, there are specific characteristics, though, that regardless of macronutrient ratios and regardless of food composition, you see over and over again in centenarians or in people who are Living in a blue zone or people who have the absence of a lot of disease risk factors or high risk of mortality.
Like, we see regular periods of caloric restriction, like at some point, either a compressed feeding window, or intermittent fasting, or like, you know, the Mediterranean diet, everybody talks about goat cheese and olive oil and fish and eggs, but not a lot of people talk about the religious aspect of that.
That includes certain periods of time where you fast, certain periods of time where you don't eat meat, certain days where you aren't drowning all your food in olive oil, right?
And so in terms of other characteristics that you see, glycemic variability, you see very low periods of glucose fluctuations occurring throughout the day because you see very low periods of glucose fluctuations occurring throughout the day because of a high intake of either fiber or legumes is a big one that you see in
like high intake of things like lentils and split mung beans and a lot of these things that get thrown under the bus now where we're talking about I'm not aware of that.
So the issue with lectins, and this is based on a book that was published, I think about two years ago, called The Plant Paradox by Dr. Stephen Gundry.
And he talks about how lectins are these built-in natural plant defense mechanisms that are in primarily plants and seeds and the skins of certain fruits and vegetables that will cause your digestive tract to become damaged or give you a deleterious or inflammatory response to that food.
Kind of a similar argument as the paleo people make, right?
They say, well, you don't...
Don't eat dairy because that could have inflammatory proteins in it that might cause an autoimmune reaction.
Or don't eat bread because of the gluten and phytic acid.
But when you step back and you look at a lot of blue zones, a lot of longevity hotspots, a lot of centenarians, you don't see avoidance of these foods.
You see smart preparation of them.
When you hunt, you don't set up in a tree with a dagger in your teeth like Peter Pan and jump out of the tree on the back of a deer and just start eating the deer.
You have to go through a pretty long process of tracking and stalking and hunting and field dressing and quartering.
And even then, there's a pretty intensive cooking process and we do things like You know, like coffee rubs and things to decrease the amount of carcinogens in the meat when you cook it and we dry age and you'll take the organ meats and soak them in lemon juice or buttermilk to remove the gamey flavor and blah, blah, blah.
Well, coffee, rosemary, thyme, a lot of these things that we use as rubs, one of the benefits of them is they decrease the formation of a lot of these carcinogenic compounds in the meat, like the burnt, charred components of the meat.
Anything that's an antioxidant, and you could just go in your spice cupboard and start to make up rubs based on this concept.
Anything that would be, you know, these sirtuin precursors that people are talking about now for anti-aging, like blueberries and red wine and dark chocolate and dark purple fruits and berries, etc.
You dry those, you powder those, that's a great rub, right?
Because all of a sudden you're decreasing the carcinogenic aspects of burnt meat or charred meat or heavily cooked proteins particularly.
So the idea is you want to prepare your food in a manner that renders it digestible and that unlocks the nutrients.
And so when we talk about dietary customization, not only do you see calorie restriction, compressed feeding windows, fasting as one element that regardless of the diet that you choose has been shown to improve health and lifespan, but you also see low amounts of glycemic variability. but you also see low amounts of glycemic variability.
You see a high amount of emphasis placed on rendering the food digestible, again, no matter what it is that you're eating.
And so whether you're eating a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet or a high carb, low fat, high fat, low carb, what have you, the idea is you try to choose real recognizable food.
Then you render that digestible and you eat as many different food groups as you can eat based on self-experimentation primarily until you land on that diet that works well for you.
And if you can combine that with self-quantification, blood, biomarkers, look at your microbiome, look at your genetics, I mean, there's no reason that most people shouldn't just be able to eat the diet that works for their body.
And then you just go to Sean Baker's Instagram every day and you hashtag meat heals and you're like, yes, meat's healing me and you start believing it.
Well, the carnivore diet people are the exact opposite of the vegan people.
They're the same but different.
They're all just preaching that you should only eat meat and meats the thing and they're mocking vegans and the vegans are mocking or saying disparaging things about People who eat meat.
It's the fact that when you start on a highly restrictive diet, that tends to be dogmatic, too.
Like, I'm going to only eat meat, or I'm not going to have meat, and I'm going to only eat vegetables.
You feel pretty good.
Like, you feel a difference.
It's impossible not to feel a difference once you go completely myopic on your diet and have a very limited number of food choices.
But we know that vegans build up deficits in creatine, in taurine, unless they're eating algae and stuff like that, in DHA, in EPA, in fatty acids, in amino acids, long-term deficits in cortisol, which affects your cell membranes.
You can definitely do it right.
I mean, there's dudes like, you know, frickin' Rich Roll, right?
Like, great guy, and he's into, like, the, you know, fermentation, soaking, and sprouting, and superfoods, and, you know, it's honestly kind of expensive and time-consuming to do a vegan diet the right way, but you could do it.
A lot of people don't.
But if you're not careful, you build up deficits long-term, even though you feel really good short-term.
It's the same thing with something like a carnivore diet.
You're probably going to build up some kind of microbiome bacterial deficiencies unless you're eating the intestines of ruminants or, I suppose, supplementing with some kind of really good probiotic.
Well, it's just fascinating because they find these people that have been doing it for 20 years.
They pull these folks out of the woods.
Like, look, we've got this one guy who's been doing it for 18 years.
Look how healthy they are.
They show someone doing chin-ups.
But the reality is you don't really hear about that diet, or you didn't really hear about that diet until like three or four years ago.
And much more so over the last two years, probably because of me, accidentally, having all these people on and talking about it.
And people like Jordan that have had...
Look, it's impossible to deny the benefits that he's gotten.
The guy looks fantastic.
He lost a tremendous amount of weight.
But to your point, that is most likely because of an elimination diet and whatever was fucking with him before.
And I think, you know, most people that start off with a poor diet and then switch to a restricted diet, they're just going to be better because they don't have the stuff that's poor.
They don't have the trans fats.
They don't have all the sugar.
They don't have all the nonsense.
It's probably causing a good deal of the information in the first place.
So by eliminating all those bad things from their diet and then concentrating on the only one thing that they're eating, you think the one thing they're eating is causing all the benefits when it's probably the lack of the bad things.
And you look at a clip, like there's clips of me online, and the clip is like a minute long, and it seems like, oh, look how easy.
You don't see stalking in for hours, you don't see the hundreds of hours of shooting arrows, the coaching from John Dudley, all the reading archery articles, and keeping your mindset clear in the moment.
They're about 45 now, which is going to be enough.
That's enough if you have a cut-on contact problem.
Yeah, but I mean, they're still, when they draw, they're pointing up and So they've still got a couple more months of training to really get dialed in.
But yeah, it's difficult.
I still haven't even gotten my elk bowhunting.
My last time I spent six days up in the Colorado mountain range in the, what do they call it, the Santa de Cristo range.
And on the last day I finally came in on elk and it was dark and I shot and I missed.
And that was after seven freaking days of trying.
And you walk out or ride your horse out completely empty-handed.
Because those moments like that when you're hunting for six days and you're just trekking through the woods 20 miles a day and you're exhausted and you finally get that one moment.
There's so much weight on that moment that it's so difficult to stay focused entirely on the task of executing the shot perfectly.
And there's methods.
There's a guy named Joel Turner who has a website called Iron Mind Hunting.
He's an instructor for first responders and snipers and things along those lines.
His methods, it's all about keeping the difference between an open loop system and a closed loop system, being able to control it and stop it and stop the process anytime you want, and keeping yourself in that versus like a baseball bat swing, which is once you start swinging, you're just swinging.
And the idea is to maintain the present and to have a mantra.
And he gives you a mantra to chant and to think about it in terms of controlling all of those movements.
So you are in control constantly of your movement.
Well, you develop your own, but the idea is to talk yourself through it.
Don't let your excitable mind take over.
Oh, Jesus!
You freak out and you pull the trigger and you shoot fucking over the thing's back and you don't even know what happened.
I go through all the steps in my head that I'm supposed to do.
I actually modified his and went to John Dudley's.
So he has his own one, which is draw back and aim, get it done, watch it to keep it.
And the whole idea is just keeping those things in your head so you have one thing.
But with Dudley, I go through all the different things that he says, like draw back, tip of the nose, center the peep, center the bubble, pull through the shot, pull, pull, pull, let the shot break.
And so I go through all those things in my mind.
But the whole idea is to not allow the freak out.
Because the freak out is what causes the target panic.
And when you have that itchy trigger finger with the finger trigger, I've done it.
I mean, I've seen it.
I've done it.
I've seen it.
I've heard it.
Everybody does it.
The arrow goes in the spot where you're yanking it and you're pulling.
Like, they do have part of it as like that, like an obstacle course race with your bow, but then part of it, too, is just a 3D shoot.
like a 40 target 3D shoot where one shot might be, I'm facing you, but the target's behind me, and you've got a 10-second time span to draw, turn, and shoot.
Or you've got to take a shot seated through the trees at 40 yards and then within 20 seconds do a shot at 60 yards.
But Dudley would tell you that that is going to cause target panic, that that whole thing of shoot now, that you should never just do that, that you should always execute the shot correctly.
He doesn't even like this fucking game, this thing, this techno hunt that we've done.
He thinks that that thing causes target panic because you only have a brief window and you let go.
He believes that you should concentrate entirely on the correct fundamentals and execution of archery and then with time and understanding of the situation and the experience of hunting itself, then when those moments present themselves, you're going to execute correctly.
Interesting.
Whereas when you have this like 10 second, you got to turn and behind your back, ready, go.
You're like, ah!
You're just going to hit that.
You're going to hammer that trigger.
You're going to put that pin on the target and hammer that trigger.
And that's just, you are emphasizing all the wrong things that you could do when you're hunting.
Last one I did, we had a parrotfish down in Hawaii stuffed with avocado and mango, coconut oil, baked it in the oven with macadamia nut, like encrusted macadamia nut.
No, there's lactic acidosis, and it inhibits the electron transport chain in the mitochondria, which is fine if you want to down-regulate metabolism and live a long time, but not if you're an athlete.
You don't want to inhibit mitochondrial respiration necessarily.
Vitamin B12 deficiencies.
It's derived from French roux in physicians for hundreds of years, been using it, but in limited quantities because it induces nausea.
So you get gastrointestinal disturbances.
My take on metformin because I've been looking over the past year into a lot of these anti-aging compounds that people are now using or talking about using like rapamycin and metformin and NAD and a lot of these sirtuin precursors.
But metformin And rapamycin, actually, for different reasons, because that's an immune system suppressor, are two that I don't think I would ever take.
Because with metformin, there are a variety of natural compounds that reduce blood glucose and improve insulin sensitivity in the absence of that, like berberine, curcumin, apple cider vinegar, Ceylon cinnamon, bitter melon extract.
My blood glucose would spike in the mornings, like clockwork, about 8 a.m.
every morning.
And I was trying to figure out, like, why is my blood glucose going to 120, 130 every single morning?
Well, I'd have a cup of coffee in the morning.
And even though I don't put cream or sugar in my coffee, I just drink straight-up black coffee.
Coffee actually causes your liver to engage in something called glycogenolysis.
So you actually release glucose into the bloodstream, which is a good thing.
That's why you drink coffee.
You want that cortisol release, that glucose hit.
Maybe you want the flavor and the antioxidants, too.
I would get a blood glucose response from coffee.
Another one that surprised me was green beans.
You talk about legumes, you talk about slow-release carbohydrates, and it falls into that category, but my blood glucose would go up whenever I'd have green beans.
So I actually got a food allergy test through this company called Cyrex.
They do a really good food allergy test that doesn't give you this big...
Laundry list of false positives like the ELISA and the ALCAT test, like the skin prick test.
You just get a very small number of foods that you're actually allergic to.
Because a lot of these other tests, they'll show a bunch of antibodies to food, but it's antibodies to food because you're eating that food.
So many people will be like, dude, I'm allergic to eggs.
I got a test on allergic to eggs and I'm depressed because that was a big staple in my diet.
Well, it's only showing that you're allergic to them because they're a staple in your diet.
So basically, if you're eating a lot of eggs, you actually have a lot of egg proteins circulating in your bloodstream.
And if you get a food panel, you actually can very readily produce, like a food allergy panel, you produce antibodies to the egg protein.
And they say that you're allergic to the egg protein when in fact you just have a lot of egg proteins in your system because you've been eating a lot of eggs.
And sometimes they'll even test the white blood cell reaction to a raw egg, not a cooked egg, right?
And so your white blood cells are going to react more readily to a raw egg versus cooked egg, a raw chicken versus cooked chicken.
I don't think a lot of these food allergy panels are that accurate for that reason.
I think they're just giving you a laundry list of foods that you may or may not be allergic to.
But this one, it's called Cyrex.
I have no financial affiliation like that with this company, but I just think they do a good job with their testing.
You got to order through a physician.
And I ordered this test, and I was allergic to almost nothing.
Like, barely anything would spike for me.
Kind of like a moderate spike for gluten.
Green beans, though, were off the chart.
Off the chart.
So, that continuous blood glucose monitor was actually able to tell me that I was eating something that my sympathetic nervous system was responding to.
I was going to fight and flight mode, releasing a bunch of glucose, and I never would have really known that or gotten a clue about that unless I was wearing one of these continuous blood glucose monitors.
I'm not going to wear it my whole life, but I'm going to wear it.
My plan is to wear it for a year to just learn a lot about the foods that I usually eat, what they do to my body, what certain workouts do, what certain supplements do.
But returning to metformin, I started to use a lot of these things like berberine, like curcumin.
You can do a shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal.
Take a couple of teaspoons of Ceylon cinnamon in your smoothie.
And these things actually have an effect on blood glucose that mimics what you're trying to get when you take metformin.
To me, I want the marriage of performance and longevity.
I don't want to live a long time if I can't kick ass and feel good.
I don't want to be cold and hungry and libido-less and live till I'm 150. Even if that means I'm going to live till I'm 145 instead of 150 because I've got more muscle mass or whatever.
I want to feel good.
So whenever I'm looking at a compound like that, I'm questioning whether or not it's the best way to go if it's going to inhibit my actual performance.
Yeah, but you could say that about a lot of these things.
I mean, like cryotherapy chambers, right?
I mean, you look at the Cherokee Native American tribe would dip their babies in icy cold water until they were like two years old.
Or there's the viral video footage of the Siberian school children.
I don't know if you've seen this one.
They rush out into the snow during recess in their underpants, and they dump cold water on themselves and run around in the snow and then come back inside.
And in Iceland, based on some of the research that was done a few decades ago on immune system, they let their babies sleep outside in sub-zero temperatures in strollers.
When I go to Finland, they've got the Men's Finnish Sauna Society.
There's no cryotherapy chambers.
It's just old school saunas.
Then you go jump in the sea and you dry yourself off in the air.
Then you go back in the sauna.
So, you know, a lot of these things.
There's natural alternatives.
And I get flack a lot of the time because I'm, you know...
I'm one of these so-called biohackers.
I have the laser lights in my office that I shine on my balls and I've got the The lights that go in your ears, and I've got the stem cells and IVs and injections, but I always, always want to make sure people know that you go after the natural stuff first.
Natural ways to get cold, natural ways to get hot.
If you're going to buy some expensive pultzed electromagnetic-filled mat, you sure as hell will be perfect.
Better be going outside barefoot, right?
Or camping, or sleeping outside, or learning how to earth and ground in a more natural way.
Yeah, there is research, especially in terms of a reduction in inflammation and improvement in joint comfort.
That's a very interesting one.
And then when you take these same frequencies, so the Earth naturally emits somewhere in the range of about 3 to 100 Hz electromagnetic frequencies, like way lower than the million Hz frequencies you're getting when you hold your cell phone up to your ear.
We're walking around on basically a giant electrical mat.
Like, there's radiation and electromagnetic frequencies released by Earth.
And the idea is that these fancy devices now, these mats that you can sleep on or do therapy on, there's...
Like, I've got one in my basement that just packs a punch.
Like, he was used in the racehorsing industry for a long time.
But it's got attachments like coils and pads that you can attach to your knee or attach to a bum shoulder or whatever.
I'll just sit in there and work on my computer.
I get a massage on it every week for a couple of hours.
So it's taking the same frequencies you get from the earth and just magnifying those, just delivering them in a more concentrated manner.
The same thing with like an infrared light panel.
I don't know if you've seen these before.
They deliver near infrared, far infrared, red light.
People will strip off their clothes and stand in front of these things to get more collagen production.
Or in the same way that that light that I was talking about for your head can enhance mitochondrial activity in neural tissue, your balls are basically little eyes.
They have photoreceptors on them.
They respond to light.
You can actually increase mitochondrial activity in the testicles, the Leydig cells in the testes, to increase testosterone or increase sperm production.
Go outside and you sunbathe nude or you'd use one of these lights and just stand in front.
Like I literally, I look like an idiot at work, but this is what I do.
I've got a light panel in front of me.
I'm at a standing desk.
I work at a standing desk.
I've got a light panel behind me.
And every day for 20 minutes, I just take my clothes off at work and I stand sandwiched in between these light panels.
And it basically blasts me with this red light.
But I also go out in the sun.
If I've got the option to do that versus get outside in the sunlight, I go out into the sunlight.
If I've got the option to take berberine and bitter melon extract instead of metformin, I'd rather take the berberine and the bitter melon extract.
So I think it just strips up down and go as natural as possible.
And then once you step up to the more advanced anti-aging strategies or biohacking strategies or what have you, you still have to look at those with a skeptical eye.
And ask yourself whether or not those are really safe or if they have side effects that might, in many cases, limit your physical performance.
Well, the whole sitting is the new smoking thing I disagree with.
I think sitting is just fine.
It feels natural to sit.
It doesn't feel like you're breaking some rule of the human body to sit down.
We're sitting down right now.
It feels pretty good.
The problem with sitting is that that is the posture most people are adopting for eight hours per day.
The best position to be in when you're working would be whatever position you're not in at the moment.
When you look at weight training, this would not apply to hypertrophy, which would dictate that you want to hit a muscle over and over again using the same angle with increasingly difficult loads.
But for metabolic Training, you would want to actually throw curveballs at your body.
The best workout, therefore, would be the one that you're not doing right now if your goal was just to limit any type of metabolic efficiency.
So the idea with the standing desk is I have that to give me yet another position to be in during the day.
So I've got a TrueForm treadmill, and I had TrueForm modify it to take the dashboard off.
So I've got that in front of my standing workstation, and then I've got one of these balance boards that I can stand on, and I've got like a stool that I can lean against.
So I've got all these different positions that I can be in during the day, and then I've got that Pulse Center's chair in my office that I can go and sit in.
So every 25 minutes, I'll just shift to a different position.
And my stand-up desk is a hand-cranked stand-up desk, so I can crank it up and down if I do want to sit at my desk.
It just works.
It's the idea of hacking your environment, of equipping your environment to be in as many different positions as possible.
So I think that's the key to feeling good at work, especially when you're stuck indoors.
The one, like in our boulder offices for my company, we've got the stand-up desks that go...
You push a button and they go up and down.
But then what we have is just scattered around the office.
A few of those mats.
We've got some of the...
I don't know if you've seen these fluid stance things.
They're kind of like skateboards that you stand on top of, but they're not...
They're not as gnarly as a balance board, so you can still focus while you're standing on top of it.
We've got different stools, different chairs that will go up or down.
So again, even if you're in a corporate office, it surprises me how many people in their corporate offices don't equip their employees just to be able to move during the day.
When I use a regular office chair and I sit for long periods of time, I get that center back pain from just poor posture, just sitting in a curved stance or a curved position.
See, I can't do a lot on the treadmill desk production-wise, but if somebody's interviewing me on Skype on a podcast or I'm doing a consult call with somebody, reviewing blood work or something like that, I'll be walking on my treadmill and then I've got my microphone in front of me and I have this program called Dragon Dictation.
And Dragon Dictation allows me to talk via a headset, and then it'll type the words on the screen.
I write when I'm just completely alone and quiet, staring at a computer because I want to spend time on each individual word and really concentrate on what the fuck I'm saying.
Because most of the time I'm writing stand-up, so I need to bounce it back and forth.
And to talk it out is not really the right strategy.
I'm working on a book right now, and what I've found is, for me, I have to have a triggered environment, like a place in my house that when I go to that place, that's the place where your mind says, okay, this is the writing spot.
For me, it's this chair in the corner of the living room outside of my office.
As soon as I get into that thing, It's like writing mode.
Yeah, that's the idea behind all this new research they're doing on morningness, eveningness, chronotypes, different people being night owls versus morning larks.
There was a study I was looking at yesterday about the response to an inflammatory stressor.
I don't remember what the stressor was, but when a morning type is stressed out in the morning, they handle it better than when they're stressed out in the evening.
And vice versa.
And it's very interesting, this research on chronotypes.
I like the idea of just being able to shift your circadian rhythm, because I travel a lot.
Like, I haven't been home in 17 days.
I've got two more days on the road, and then I'll be home.
But when I'm going east to west or west to east, I use light a lot to reset my circadian biology.
I call it a...
These are cues that regulate your circadian biology.
Eating is one.
You want to wait to eat until it's actual meal time in whatever area of the world that you're traveling to.
If you arrive in New York City from California at 3pm, you don't want to eat a bite of food until 7pm when it's actual dinner because that helps to regulate your circadian rhythm.
Movement is another one.
You want to get outside, go for a walk, go for a swim, go hit the gym.
And that one makes like this greenish blue light that's not damaging to your retina, but that just blasts your entire skull with light.
So I've got light on my eyes, light on my ears, and light on my head.
And I'll flip those lights on back in front of the body.
And that's my home setup to get my circadian rhythm restored.
So what I do is if I've been back east...
And my body at 4 a.m.
Pacific Time is telling me it's 7 a.m.
because I'm on Eastern Time.
My circadian clock is on Eastern Time.
What I do is I wake up.
I'm not going to lay in bed for three hours waiting until the time when I actually do want to get up.
What I do is I wake up, I get out of bed, and I put on those blue light blocking glasses, the ones that you're supposed to wear at night, like the yellowish-orange lenses.
But I block all light.
So I'm basically just walking around in a pretty dim setting in my house.
I'll make coffee sometimes or have some water, stretch out, get some work done.
But I've got the light blocked the whole time.
And then, whenever the time rolls around, when I actually want to start waking up, let's say I'm like 6 a.m.
I don't want to wake up at 4 a.m.
I want to wake up at 6 a.m.
Then I'll go down to my office and I'll put on the eye thing, the ear thing, the head thing, the light in front of me, the light behind me.
So my protocol now is 12 to 16 hours of intermittent fast every day.
Christmas, Thanksgiving, whatever.
As soon as I stop eating, I'm competitive.
I'll set my watch.
If I finish eating at 8 p.m., I don't eat again until 8 a.m.
If I finish eating at midnight, then I don't eat again until, you know, if I get up at midnight for a snack, I won't eat again until lunch, at least 12 p.m.
So I do that every day.
And then what I started doing, once Walter Longo came out with his research on the longevity diet and this whole idea of a fasting-mimicking diet, inducing cellular autophagy and enhancing longevity to the same extent as if you were just do like a pure water fast or stop eating.
So what you do is on a quarterly basis, four times a year, you restrict the normal amount of calories that you would eat to 40% of what you'd normally eat.
So maybe you're just dropping one meal, or for every meal that you eat, you're eating a little bit less.
And you do this for five days on a quarterly basis.
I started doing that last year, and I just have like this stew that I make with split mung beans and basmati rice, and it's called khichri.
It's an Indian Ayurvedic cleansing stew.
Dr. Longo's company, El Nutra, sends out these kits called Prolon kits that are all done for you, but I just wanted to make my own stew.
That's easy for me.
I put a little coconut yogurt on it, and that's just breakfast, lunch, and dinner for me for five days in a row.
It's almost like a seasonal cleaning.
So you do that four times a year, and the only other thing that I do is one or two times a month.
I try to go from Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner without eating.
So it's almost a 24-hour fast.
And with those three things, 12 to 16-hour intermittent fast, the quarterly five-day modified fast, and then the 24-hour fast one to two times a month, that's sustainable for me.
Because what I'll do is I'll have dinner on Saturday, and then I'll wait the whole day, and then I'll have a big Sunday dinner.
And honestly, it doesn't affect the workouts that much because the magic of fasting seems to be the compressed feeding window and not the calorie restriction.
This returns to not wanting to be hungry and cold and libido-less if you're going to live a long time.
So the idea is that you could fast from Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner and have a giant ribeye steak, sweet potato, fry, red wine, dark chocolate.
Halo top ice cream, whatever you want.
At the end of the day on Sunday, eat 3,500 calories and then you're topped off and you're ready for the next day and you have a long period in which you're engaged in cellular cleanup, cellular autophagy, but you kind of get to have your cake and eat it too because you have a bunch of calories at the end of that.
I was actually surprised you didn't ask me when I brought in the sourdough bread and the coconut macaroons and everything if they would take you out of ketosis or break your fast.
I get that question a lot now.
Well, of course it does.
No, but people want to know if the butter in your coffee, you know, putting 800 calories of butter in your coffee is going to break your fast.
Basically, the idea is if it has calories, it breaks your fast.
If it doesn't have calories, it doesn't break your fast.
Because you get the anabolism, about 10 grams of essential amino acids, and then the ketones.
What I've been doing is a shot glass of this stuff called, it's Ketone Aid, and then there's another company called HVMN that does like a, they all taste like ass, but you combine those with like a little bit of amino acid, so you have high ketones, high amino acids, but neither of those are insulinogenic, so it still keeps you in a relatively fasted state if you want to go to a hard workout or maintain muscle.
But the other one, the lion's mane, what I've been doing...
I'll do this about two times a week.
Just take a very small amount of psilocybin, about 0.2 grams of psilocybin, and you take two packets of that Lion's Mane, the Four Sigmatic Lion's Mane extract, and then anything that increases blood flow.
So it could be like beetroot, any nitric oxide precursors.
You could probably try Shroom Tech.
Niacin.
A lot of people use niacin.
But you combine anything that increases blood flow, a couple of packets of the lion's mane, and then about 0.2 grams of psilocybin, and the cognitive pick-me-up you get from that is profound.
I mean, you know that psilocybin increases your sensory perception, your ability to pick out color, smell, sense temperature, etc.
But just for getting through a day of work, or even like going on a long hike, or I would not be surprised if our ancestors used psilocybin for hunting because you actually do get a pretty good increase in sensory perception, smell, and sight from it.
Well, it's like that, we were talking about this last time, that doctrine of signatures, the idea that what things look like in nature could actually give you clues about their benefit for the body.
And when you find lion's mane, I don't know if you've seen it in nature, but it looks like this cluster of axons and dendrites.
I have yet to actually find it in nature, but apparently you can find it up in the inland northwest where I live.
Anyways, though, comfrey, they call it knit bone, and the roots look like knuckles and joints and human bones, and it's very good for healing up fractures or for making, like, a plaster for your joints.
Well, what that pharmacy in Kauai does is they grind it into a powder, and then you reconstitute that with water, and you smear it, like, over a shoulder joint, and you could just use, like, a T-shirt or whatever to hold it on there or an ace bandage, And it actually increases the speed of bone healing or joint healing, like it's an anti-inflammatory.
They do like a muscle cream with it too, made out of the comfrey.
So it's very interesting.
There's all sorts of different things in nature that give you clues, like the carrots and the eggs for your eyes, the walnuts for the brain.
So you put your CBD oil on, or your magnesium, or your Arnica, your Tramil, whatever it is that you're using, and you rub that in, then you put the electrodes on top of that.
And then you put an ice pack on top of that.
So it's three things.
You've got the cream or lotion, you've got the electrodes, and then you've got the topical thing that holds it on, and the electricity drives the anti-inflammatory deeper into the tissue.
So it enhances the effect of a CBD oil or a magnesium, and the ice allows you to turn up the electricity to a higher level without getting uncomfortable.
So I do this at home.
I use one called a Mark Pro and just kind of surround the area that's actually torn or that's painful, and I'll do a rub like that.
But you're right, CBD oil works amazingly for that.
Yeah, that stuff is, it's remarkable because it's, you're putting it on the surface of your skin and it's weird how it can get all the way deep into a muscle or into a joint.
That's why some of those personal care products are kind of scary.
But CBD. Personal care products?
Yeah, like personal care products, like parabens and phthalates and phytoestrogens and endocrine disruptors and stuff like that in them.
I mean, they've done studies where guys will take a shower with the average shampoo that's got parabens and phthalates and these things that can be endocrine disruptors or phytoestrogens, mimic estrogen in a man's body.
And they actually, within a short period of time after taking the shower and using these care products, you can actually detect this stuff in their urine.
Like your body's actually soaking this up and absorbing it.
There's a very interesting book.
I interviewed this guy on my podcast.
It's called Estrogeneration, about how many guys have really high estrogen levels now from primarily their personal care products or their household cleaning chemicals.
Like when I raced for Team Timex, we used to train out at the Giant Stadium in New Jersey, and I go in the locker room there, and it's just like this.
You'd think that the peak of performance in professional sports would have started looking into, by this point, how could you keep testosterone as high as possible on a male athlete's body?
Right.
But you walk into the bathroom and it's just like every endocrine disruptor known to man just like lined up in a pretty shiny row there on the shelf in front of them.
You know, the shaving cream and the shampoos and the spray deodorant.
Like, there's some of the stuff on stem cells that admittedly are a little bit of, like, a venture into human experimentation without robust evidence of safety.
Or, you know, in some cases you could argue that placental or umbilical or amniotic cells are so young and so pluripotent, you know, and if they don't have the DNA in the nucleus, which apparently they can kill off somehow, which is how they make exosomes, you're not getting somebody else's DNA. You know, it's just something your body would have made anyways and recognized as self.
So, yeah, sometimes, though, I probably have taken it too far with a few of those things.
But the CBD that you were talking about, I'm a huge fan of.
So, CBD... Can enhance your deep sleep cycles, which is when a good majority of your neuronal repair and recovery occurs.
THC allows you to sleep, and it actually decreases sleep latency, how long it takes you to fall asleep, but it does reduce the amount of time you spend in deep sleep.
So if you're one of those people whose mind races, who's hypercharged up and you've got to get to sleep at night, use THC. Hit a vape pen or whatever, but know that you might miss out on some of the things you want during deep sleep.
Memory consolidation, neuronal repair and recovery.
You know, nervous system repair, but it's still pretty decent sleep and you're not getting as much of a reduction in deep sleep as you would get if you were to be taking like Ambien or Valium or something that's literally just like a sledgehammer for your frontal cortex that knocks you out, but you almost get no deep sleep.
So if you do this, if you were to get like a sleep tracker and test your deep sleep levels, you would find that with CBD, you don't fall asleep as fast, but you get higher deep sleep levels.
And then with THC, you can fall asleep faster, but your deep sleep isn't quite as high.
When you consider that CBD can counteract a lot of the effects of THC, then that means that what you could try is take THC to allow you to fall asleep faster, but then pile a whole bunch of CBD on top of that.
I've done that before, too, where you just take a hit on a vape pen, then take a bunch of CBD, and you shoot for the best of both worlds.
Yeah, folks that are taking Ambient, I mean, especially people that are doing it virtually every night, that has got to have a profound effect on your brain's ability to recover.
I think there are a lot of people shorting themselves on life who are taking Ambien or Valium.
I mean, I think to start with sleep, you need to rely on your body's own internal chemistry.
And that would be breath work.
Like I think everybody, before they start taking whatever, phosphatidylserine and adaptogenic herbs and all this shit for cortisol, and before they start taking Valium or Ambien or anything else for sleep, you should learn how to control your physiology with your breath.
I think that's the most powerful way to do it.
Prana, your chakra, whatever you want to call it.
Being able to do things like breath work, box breathing, alternate nostril breathing, even holotropic breathing.
You can go some very interesting places in terms of DMT production by the pineal gland by just doing holotropic breath work.
There's a lot of very interesting things that you can do with your breath, but I think that for getting to sleep or for decreasing stress, you start with the breath.
And then you start to introduce some of these other molecules.
But Ambien and Valium, like in the era of readily available CBD and all the other sleep compounds that we have available, like valerian and passionflower and chamomile, and all of those are what are called gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA precursors.
They produce inhibitory neurotransmitters.
I don't understand why people are still taking Ambien and Valium.
I've found that if my brain is racing, just completely concentrating on breathing in and breathing out and concentrating on just the breath itself, like really being cognizant of it and slow breathing Deliberate breaths in and out and in and out.
By doing that over long periods of time, I've found that I can pretty much conk myself out.
They'll use clay for parasites and, you know, dogs will eat grass for stomach issues.
And, you know, I guess birds now are putting, like, We're good to go.
So it's not like supplementation or self-medication or the whole creation of pharmaceuticals is something that's unnatural or not an acceptable human activity.
But once you start to use it as a crutch, I think that's where you run into issues.
Like once you deny the human body's ability to be able to heal itself or to be able to decrease stress on its own, you begin to rely on these exogenous chemicals, I think that's where you start playing with fire.
I just wonder what's happening to people's minds over long-term use of this stuff where you're not going into these deep sleep cycles and you're using it every night because essentially once you get hooked on it, a lot of people have a really hard time sleeping without it.
I mean, it's the same thing with, what's it called, glymphatic drainage, like this new drainage system for the brain that they've just discovered in recent years.
This idea that you actually detoxify the brain during these sleep cycles, and it's even enhanced when you sleep on your side.
They even looked at sleeping positions and this thing called glymphatic drainage.
And when you're not going through proper sleep cycles or you're constantly waking because you're on your back and you have, you know, a lot of people have sleep apnea where you'll look at their sleep charts and they'll frequently wake during the night or you'll see periods where they just get ripped out of deep sleep.
Yeah, you wake up and you don't have memory consolidation or you don't have the type of neuronal repair and recovery that you'd want or, you know, you can even short yourself on muscle repair.
And there's probably a lot that we don't know about just dreaming and its ability to be able to do things like help form memories or make learning or experiences more deeply rooted.
But yeah, I think sleep architecture is something that just gets super fucked up in a modern post-industrial era.
We've got access to pharmaceuticals that just take a sledgehammer to our heads.
And it's also, there's been a lot of work done on actually going to sleep with a problem.
This whole idea of sleep on it.
Like, there's actually something real to that.
That works.
There's some cognitive balancing that's going on while you're sleeping, where your mind is actually going over whatever issues you might have and trying to come up with a problem during sleep time, during your subconscious.
You don't want to know how many times now, and I'm learning this as I get older.
That you delay a decision, or you delay replying to an email, or delay responding to a text message, or what have you, until you've gotten a full night of sleep on it.
And the clarity that you get after that, I mean, you just, basically, you think about it a little bit before you fall asleep, then you go to sleep, and you wake up with such a better answer.
The same thing with walk on it.
Like, walk on it is another thing.
We know you make more nerve growth factor and more brain-derived neurotrophic factor when you walk while you're learning.
I recently gave a TEDx talk I made the whole TEDx talk and I learned the whole thing while I was walking up on the farm road back behind my house.
I just walk up through the forest, pop out in the sunshine, walk up and down that road, and just listen to my TED talk on my earbuds and give my talk.
It's amazing for the brain.
But yeah, I agree.
Dwelling on something before you go to sleep, it does the trick.
If I do that, I always have a response the next day that's kinder, less emotional, more understanding, friendlier, reciprocating, any sort of good vibes.
It's really interesting.
It's really interesting how there is some sort of a wisdom that's imparted on you while you're sleeping.
And now what I do is I'll think about what it is, but I am a big fan of fiction before you fall asleep.
It just lets you escape to a whole different world.
I took my kids on this giant tour of New York City.
We went to Chelsea Market.
Highline Park and the Empire State Building and Ellis Island.
We just did it all.
But we went across the street from Central Park to the New York Historical Society, where they had a Harry Potter exhibit.
We walked in there.
I've just always been resistant to the Harry Potter phase.
I've never read the books, never watched the movies, but my kids really wanted to go, so I took them.
And when I walked through there and saw all the research, the deep research that J.K. Rowling did on alchemy and herbology and the history of magic and wizardry, and she actually took a deep dive into all this stuff.
She pre-planned out all seven of those books before she even wrote the first one.
And all of her original manuscripts were in there and her letters back and forth to the editor and to the publisher.
I walked out the other end of that exhibit.
It took us about two hours to get through, you know, just looking at everything, thumbing through everything.
It was one of those things that was at the New York Historical Society.
But, you know, a lot of these, they'll do an exhibit and it'll kind of go in and out during the year.
So I doubt it's still going right now because this was like three months ago.
And we walked out, and my kids are like, Dad, this is the Gryffindor wand, and this is the Dumbledore's wand, and the Gryffindor sweater, and the Slytherin sweater, and I just started buying them all the sweaters and the wands, and now I'm reading the book.
So I'm halfway through Goblet of Fire right now, and I'm actually digging it.
I actually had a couple of research studies on that last year that showed an improvement in the diversity of the bacteria in your gut with pistachios.
That's one of the nuts that's good for your body, probably because of the fiber content in pistachios.
But grass-fed...
First, grain-fed is primarily the omega-3 fatty acids.
Many have less of the arachidonic acid, less of the potentially inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids.
There's probably part of it being that grass-fed, grass-finished beef is generally raised on a farm that's using less herbicides, less pesticides, raising their meat in a more sustainable fashion, giving it less hormones, giving it less antibiotics.
That's painting with a broad brush, but generally grass-fed, there's more to it than just the fatty acid composition.
It's just a Well, better health-wise.
Grain-fed beef, I will not lie.
You can have a pretty damn tasty fatty cut of grain-fed beef.
And he has this wonderful restaurant where he brings doctors and nutritionists in, and they teach you about certain aspects of the food that you're eating.
Like, I did one there on longevity.
Mm-hmm.
I taught about having bitters before your meal to reduce your glucose and your insulin response to the meal and the use of sweet breads for your thymus gland to increase the activity of your immune system to a lot of these polyphenols and antioxidants from the purples and the greens and the blues.
There are these things called uncoupling proteins that actually get activated with cryotherapy and cold water immersion But that also are something that get activated with the consumption of...
It's like a sea urchin.
It's like a sea urchin foam that they did at this dinner.
But basically what he does is he'll partner with the physician or the nutritionist or whatever and make this amazing four-hour, five-star meal that's designed to enhance the health effects or whatever it is that you just learned about.
I was with a group of doctors a couple of months ago in Park City and this guy, one of the guys that was there, he's like a water and a salt expert.
And he did what's called a mass spectrometry analysis of all these popular salts, like Himalayan sea salt, and black Kona salt, and Aztec salt, and Mexican salt, all these different salts, and analyzed them for their mineral content, because you want high mineral content, but their metal content.
We know that iron, especially in guys now, we're finding out it's not that great.
It's oxidative.
It can cause damage.
It's associated with inflammation.
We know that metals and microplastics and all these kind of things are winding up in the food supply.
But top of the list, in terms of cleanliness, and Celtic salt.
My wife gets pissed because she'll make these amazing meals, and the first thing I do is I just pull out the salt and just cover everything in salt.
But I think it's because I excrete a lot of salt.
When I raced for Timex, they brought in a bunch of physiologists to test our sweat sodium analysis, meaning that they measure how much sodium you excrete for any given volume of sweat.
And this kind of returns to that whole genetic thing.
Like, when you look at people of a northern European ancestry who would have come from a population that did a lot of fermenting, a lot of curing, a lot of pickling, we would develop some pretty robust sodium excretion mechanisms, right?
Because we're preserving our food with salt.
You don't want all that salt to build up in the body because, you know, theoretically you could increase blood pressure.
You could cause some damage if you have too much salt.
And when you look at other folks who didn't, you know, people who would, for example, sweat a lot and live in a hot environment, you know, like whatever, South Africa or a very hot region of the Philippines or whatever, they would have some pretty robust salt conservation mechanisms to be able to hold on to sodium and hold on to salt because you're sweating more.
Well, my sweat-sodium analysis revealed that I lose like two and a half times more salt in my sweat than the average person.
So I think that dictates to a certain extent almost my craving for salt.
When I was racing Ironman triathlon, I would lay awake at night and I could feel my blood flowing.
Pounding in my ears after a day of training.
And I started using salt heavily.
And one of the first things that happens, because salt regulates aldosterone, which is one of the compounds that regulates your blood pressure, all that went away.
Like I could fall asleep at night, you know, when you lay your head down on your pillow and I couldn't hear the blood pounding in my ears.
So for about four years, I've just, I've been salt on everything.