Rhonda Patrick shares her 13-day ketogenic trial, struggling to maintain ketosis despite strict high-fat (MCT oil, sardines in olive oil) and near-zero-carb intake, while noting exogenous ketone esters’ short-lived benefits. Her mom’s tremors and migraines improved temporarily with ketones, debunking sugar’s perceived relief. Patrick also details an 8-week infrared sauna study with Dr. Mason, tracking biomarkers like BDNF and IL-6 in depressed patients, despite limited research on hot-cold cycling’s mood effects. Yet she warns against dismissing supplements or vaccines—VAERS data shows rare risks (e.g., mRNA myocarditis), while flawed studies misrepresent ivermectin’s efficacy. Ultimately, vaccination remains safer than infection for high-risk groups, though long-term immunity and booster benefits remain uncertain. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, let's start off with, well, why did I even want to do keto?
Why now?
I mean, like, this has been, how many years?
It's been trendy.
It's been, like, lots of benefits.
And it's like, why did I start trying it out now?
Well, I've noticed that when I am in a fasted state, so when I'm in ketosis, when I'm, you know, burning fatty acids and making keto bodies and using them as energy, I'm like on top of my mental game.
So I've been doing, like when I have any sort of like podcast interviews I'm doing or whatever, you know, I'm always trying to do them fast.
Like I'm fasted right now.
And so I thought to myself, is this something that could be mimicked by a ketogenic diet?
I mean, he's probably one of the most cited neuroscientists.
But he's most well known for his intermittent fasting studies, like the 5-2 intermittent fasting stuff came out of his lab.
He's also sort of the father of hormesis and like why, you know, humans sort of adapted to be in a stressful environment and how, you know, all these stress response pathways that happen, you know, as a response to that are beneficial.
But anyways, so he was talking about when you're in a fasted state, when you haven't eaten, how your nervous system has sort of evolved to become more focused, more alert.
And that's adaptive because if you can't find food, you have to be alert in order to eat or else you'll die.
So he's talking about, like, one of the main things that happens is this metabolic switch, is what he calls.
So you do switch from burning glucose, you know, as a source of energy, to basically, you know, fatty acids are immobilized from your adipose tissue and go to your liver, and you start to, like, oxidize them and use them from energy, and then you make something called ketone bodies as a byproduct.
Beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate, And most people think about these, well, this is an alternative source of energy.
It crosses the blood-brain barrier.
It, you know, is easily used by, you know, neurons and other cells as well.
But it's actually an energetically favorable source of energy.
So it actually requires energy to use glucose as energy.
To make energy from glucose requires energy.
But beta-hydroxybutyrate That doesn't happen.
It goes into the mitochondrion and it's used without that energy requirement.
So glucose gets broken down into something called pyruvate.
So it takes energy to do that.
And then pyruvate has to be transported into the mitochondria through an active transport mechanism.
And that requires energy to do that.
Once pyruvate gets into the mitochondria, it's then used through what's called the TCA cycle to make energy.
So beta-hydroxybutyrate gets converted into acetyl-CoA, and beta-hydroxybutyrate can just go in without this active transport mechanism.
So you're not requiring that energy to transport it in.
Does that make sense?
So you're making energy, but you're not using as much energy to make that energy.
So that's kind of like what most people are thinking about is this sort of metabolic switch that happens.
And you can imagine most people never do that.
I typically...
I do a lot of time-restricted eating where I'll eat my food anywhere between 8 to 10 hours, and then I'm fasting anywhere between like 14 to 16 hours a day.
And in order to actually go into this metabolic switch, you have to deplete all of your glycogen levels in your liver and muscle.
And that usually takes anywhere between 13 to 36 hours, depending on the person's carbohydrate intake, on their physical activity.
And so, you know, most people never get that metabolic switch.
Most people are just constantly burning using glucose.
And then when you're doing that, any fat that you're taking in gets stored as triglycerides and anipose tissue.
So they're always in this, like, fat storage space.
Instead of a fat-burning state, right?
And so, because most people are eating three meals a day and plus snacks, you just, you never get there.
So with the, you know, anywhere between 14 to 16 hours, that's what I typically was doing.
I'd noticed that, like, I was really mentally sharp.
And so as I extended that out a little bit, it was, like, really clear to me that, like, not eating...
It was good for my brain in terms of I felt smarter.
I felt like I could focus more.
It was noticeable, like a nootropic effect, right?
One of the other things that's probably less well known about beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is one of the major circulating ketones you do make when you're in ketosis, is that it is actually a signaling molecule.
And this was shown by Dr. Eric Verdin.
He runs the Buck Institute for Aging in Novato, California.
Back when he was at UCSF, that beta-hydroxybutyrate activates many different genes, one of them including brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, which I know we've talked about before on the podcast.
But that's something that is critical for, you know, forming new synapses and for learning in memory.
I mean, there's all sorts of things that it does.
But beta-hydroxybutyrate's activating that.
Like, it's not just something that's being used as energy.
Like, it's changing gene expression.
So that got me really interested.
It's like, wow, this is something that, like, could be possibly also activating BDNF. Maybe that's partly why.
I mean, it's a hypothesis, but, you know, it seems like something that people could test and seems kind of, you know, it makes sense, right?
And so that was something that I was like, wow, what if I could do...
So I asked Dr. Madsen, I was like, what...
There's lots of differences between being in a fasted-induced ketosis and a ketogenic diet.
But there's also a lot of similarities.
And the similarities are, one, you're making lots of beta-hydroxybutyrate.
If you do the ketogenic diet right, we can talk about that.
But...
And so I was like, wow, maybe...
And then the other thing that overlaps between the two is that you produce a lot of GABA. GABA is the neurotransmitter that's typically more of an inhibitory type of neurotransmitter.
I'm sure Dr. Dom D'Agostino has talked about this.
I think I even remember him talking about it before.
That GABA is increased on both, you know, ketogenic diet and when you're in like a fasting-induced ketosis.
And GABA is...
You know, it kind of has an anxiolytic effect, so, like, helps calm you a little bit, but also seems to affect, and this is what, you know, some researchers think the reason why a ketogenic diet is so beneficial for, like, drug-resistant epilepsy is through GABA, because it quiets down the neurons that have been excited through glutamate.
So, like, right now, we're, like, having an intellectual discussion, and we're, like, engaged, intellectually engaged, and so glutamate's being fired, right?
It can do a lot of damage.
Having this constant electrical activity, very stimulating, you need something...
If you didn't have GABA, you'd fry your brain without it, with too much glutamate.
So it can cause something called excitotoxicity.
And so GABA kind of counters that.
So anyways, some of the things that I'm noticing now that I've been on day 12 or 13, for one, It's been incredibly hard.
I've been measuring my beta-hydroxybutyrate levels daily, sometimes more than once a day, of course.
To be in mild ketosis, legitimately mild ketosis, I think you want to be somewhere between 0.9 and 1.2.
That's mild to moderate.
I can't tell you how difficult it's been for me to first get to that point.
It took several days and it's like, I think people, probably like 90 to 98% of people that think they're doing a ketogenic diet, they're not.
Really?
I think so, yes.
Because it's not just enough to do carb restriction.
And, like, you need a lot of fat.
Like, you need, especially in the beginning, like, if your body, like me.
So I've always, you know, for the most part, my diet has been what you would call paleo-ish.
You know, I would, you know, like, I would have my protein and vegetables.
And I, generally speaking, avoid, like, the refined stuff.
Refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, right?
But I do eat vegetables, which are carbohydrates.
And I also eat some fruits.
Um...
And so my body's used to, like, metabolizing the glucose and doing that whole pathway, you know, we were talking about, like, from carbohydrates.
And the fat that I'm getting mostly probably is being stored, honestly, as triglycerides.
But it takes a while for your body to switch to that.
And I was surprised how long, because I thought, well, I don't need all that refined stuff, so it should be easy.
It's just a little...
Like, it has been a huge challenge.
And you read about all these foods that are like, okay, vegetables that are keto friendly, you know, like cauliflower, or Brussels sprouts, or a little bit of spinach, or like, I will eat like just a little bit of sauteed spinach, and it'll take me for I will be in like 1.2 millimolar, and it'll take me down to like, 0.7.
So it'll kick me out, just a little bit of something.
And if I'm not eating enough fat, I can't even get...
So I finally was able to...
Now I'm doing butter in my coffee, and I'm just trying to get olive oil on everything, and MCT oil on my coffee, and just lots and lots of fat.
When I started doing that, I was able to get up to 2.2 millimolar, which is good ketosis.
And then, like, I came here.
Traveling is really hard.
I ordered some, like, I had a steak, and then it was some kind of cauliflower mash with, like, cheese and bacon.
And that kicked me down to, like, 0.4.
Like, I was so upset.
So it's just the cauliflower?
Just the carbohydrate and the lack of not having as much oil, I think.
So, like, I have the protein.
So you can convert.
So the thing, like, there are what's called glucogenic amino acids.
And...
Those can be converted into glucose.
Your body has a way.
You need glucose.
Like, you can't, like, your red blood cells don't have mitochondria.
The only source of energy they can use is from glucose.
Your brain, you know, your astrocytes and their supporting cells in your brain are mostly glycolytic.
They mostly use glucose.
You need glucose.
So your body has mechanisms to make it, you know.
You can make it from these gluconeogenic amino acids, which are in protein.
Or you can make it from glycerol, which is like the background of a triglyceride.
Once you become adapted, and this is something that I know Dr. D'Agostino has talked about a lot, where he's got more of a modified ketogenic diet.
He's been in it for years.
He's done a ketogenic diet for years.
He can eat something that's a lot more...
You can have the protein and the keto-friendly carbohydrates, like the leafy greens that are not super carb.
And it won't kick him out.
Yeah, because he's adapted.
You know, you read all these recipes, like, I'm going online, I'm trying to do keto recipes and all this, and it's like, none of them work.
None of them work.
All the stuff that you, like, find in the store that says keto on it, totally not.
Totally not.
Really?
Oh, yeah, because they have too much carbohydrates and not enough fat.
And then they do this thing with this net carb, the net carb, you know, fiber.
I'm telling you, like, if people were to measure...
Their blood levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate, they would know.
And plus, they, like, can give you GI distress and stuff.
And a lot of them have a lot of either sodium or calcium, depending on what it's complex to.
But...
So, one of the things that's interesting about the beta-hydroxybutyrate exogenous ketone esters, and I've tried a few different brands, they all work pretty well.
They'll raise you up.
For example, if you drink the whole serving, most of them are like 30 mils.
They can take you from zero to 3.3 millimolar.
Ketosis that I haven't been able to achieve yet from 12 or 13 days of a ketogenic diet.
You can experience some of the effects, but it also has the effect of lowering your blood glucose at the same time.
And it's like, this is something that researchers are actually looking into, like, oh, this could potentially help people that can't regulate their blood sugar levels, you know?
Would there be a benefit to do that, like say if you were going to do something that was like mentally taxing, if you're going to take a test or something like that, would there be a benefit in taking exogenous ketones?
And is there, when you take these ketone esters, is there a number of them, like is there an amount you can take in a day, the amount of times you can take it in a day?
People, I mean, some of these companies that make them claim you can do it more than once a day.
I know people that do it.
Personally, I think the benefit of the ketone ester is, and I'll tell you what I've used it for.
I tried the mental stuff.
But so getting someone who you think will benefit from ketosis, from a ketogenic diet, Getting them to do it, like, this diet is hard.
It is hard.
It's hard.
I can't, like, emphasize it, like, actually doing it.
Like, I'm telling you, I think people think they're doing it, and they're not.
What they're doing is just a low, low, low-carb diet.
It's different.
Anyways, so, like, convincing someone to do it is difficult.
Like, very difficult.
And so, if you give them the exogenous ketone ester...
They can experience, oh, I would feel this way.
I would feel this way more often if I could, you know, first of all, initially do the ketogenic diet.
So I did this with my mom.
So my mom has two types of motor dysfunction tremors.
She has essential tremor, which is the kind of tremor where, like, you know, you kind of just shake, like, when you're doing something or grabbing, like, you know, some spoon or whatever.
And then she has orthostatic tremor, which is like tremors where if she stands still, her legs shake really fast.
So she can walk fine, but if she's standing, it's really hard.
So she has to not stand.
She has to sit or walk or move.
And with all the research on the effects of ketogenic diets on epilepsy, and then there's also some data, and Dr. Mattson talked about this with me because he actually worked with the late Richard Beach on this, who was, like, the guy who invented the ketone ester.
They're showing that it helps with, like, Parkinson's disease in animal models, Alzheimer's disease.
Like, and that's, you know, something that's a little different than motor dysfunction.
But so I was, you know, I wanted to give her this ketone ester to say, look, the ketogenic diet may be beneficial for you.
Let's see.
And it absolutely helped mostly with her essential tremor, but she noticed a little bit of an effect with orthostatic nerve.
Now, of course, there's always the placebo.
You can't placebo this.
It tastes like shit.
Like, you can't.
Like, I mean, maybe you could, but it's hard to come up with the placebo.
I mean, people drinking this are like, okay, I'm kidding.
If glucose is having a hard time getting into her brain and being used by her neurons, maybe that...
You know, huge sugar rush from the Coke is going to help.
All the more reason, like, there's been, you know, there's been evidence, both animal and some early clinical evidence, that basically you can take someone with, like, early dementia.
And one of the earliest signs, actually, of both Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's, I'm not so sure if it's also dementia, but definitely Alzheimer's disease is impaired glucose, like brain use of glucose.
Like people, like their neurons and stuff are not using glucose well.
And so like naturally, of course, beta-hydroxybutyrate would be an alternative to that, you know?
So anyways, what was I getting at?
Oh, yeah.
Basically...
There could be some effect with the glucose rush for her headache thing.
But, again, the exogenous ketones worked.
They did.
And so I've given it to her, and she's been wanting to do the ketogenic diet.
And I think it just finally took me doing it to get her to start it.
So what I've been doing just these past 12 or 13 days is what I thought was going to really get me in ketosis and be a ketogenic diet, which was protein, avocado, olive oil drizzled all over it, some of the high-fat, low-carb nuts like pecans and macadamia nuts.
And then I thought, oh, you know me, like, micronutrients, I need the magnesium, I need...
So avocados are great, they're giving a lot of stuff like potassium, but the magnesium, which I'm now supplementing with, is something that's been hard to get without my leafy greens.
And my leafy greens have been, like, kicking me out of ketosis.
My multivitamin has all that stuff anyways, but I usually don't have to take extra magnesium because I usually get so much from eating dark leafy greens.
Well, she usually will, like, get some orange juice and, like, eat some oatmeal with fruit in it.
And that's, you know, she's, like, increasing her carb intake, basically.
But still, you know...
For someone like me, even a little bit of carbs that I eat with the vegetables and stuff, it's just, I will crash.
I will crash hard.
I started doing this whole, okay, fasting in the morning, I've noticed I'm more mentally on my game, and then it was like, okay, well, maybe I could just try the ketogenic diet.
Getting the micronutrient intake has been very important to me, and then, of course, I was pregnant and then I breastfed.
I did an extended breastfeeding and all this time I didn't want to do any restrictive diets really.
And then the pandemic hit and it was just like all this excuses.
But I finally got the motivation once it was very noticeable.
Mostly because I've been so damn busy, but I just haven't been...
I actually probably should have been working out more because you can actually kick yourself into ketosis by doing that because you deplete your glycogen stores.
And that's the thing that I'm learning is that, I mean, at least initially, like I said, you know, there's there are people out there that have been doing this for a long time.
And they like, I'm sure they're like, they're much more of an expert, they can tell you exactly what you got to eat.
And when you can switch over to more of that.
But like, I'm learning about this.
And I'm going, holy shit, like, I thought I could just eat some meat and restrict my carbs.
And like, I'd be in ketosis and Dom D'Agostino, he would travel with oysters and olive oil.
So I have sardines in olive oil, and they're like my favorite because they're really high in omega-3.
There's like almost a thousand, there's like 800 or something milligrams of EPA and almost like 500 or something.
There's literally like a ton of omega-3 in my sardines.
And they're in olive oil.
The olive oil tastes a little fishy, but I also have a little chili in it.
So it's like a spicy.
So I've got like four or five of those I brought with me.
Yeah, because they eat smaller fish and it accumulates.
Yeah, so it's accumulating in their fat.
So I always try to eat fish that are lower.
They're high in the omega-3 index.
Wild Alaskan salmon is my favorite.
It's a fatty fish.
It's also great for the ketogenic diet because it's a fatty fish.
it's high in the omega-3 levels and lower in like, you know, things like mercury and stuff like that.
And so, you know, another way, obviously, to get the omega-3s, which I'm like super big on, and there's actually a couple of really cool studies you might be interested in that just came out on longevity, but is to take like a fish oil supplement.
Of course, it's not sustainable like for the entire world we're taking fish oil.
Like, you know, so there's other, we got to figure out other ways, you know, to like get these omega-3s.
Did you know about, you mentioned the wild game, and like, if we could go back to Omega 3, I'd love to, but like, there have, so there, I've looked at some studies.
So when the pandemic hit, I like bought a bunch of like, you know, wild elk and like, claim to be wild, you know?
Well, I was buying that, and then I was buying, like, pasture-raised, this and that, of course.
And so we looked into, like, the differences of, like, you know, looking at, like, vitamin and mineral profiles and, you know, the omega-3 fatty acid profiles and the fat and the macronut protein and all that.
And, like, elk, for example, wild, like, wild elk, like, wild game, like, you're getting.
It's interesting.
It does have, like, higher concentrations of some, like, minerals and micronutrients, like zinc.
Like, so you're getting, like, a much higher level of some of those things.
It has higher levels of omega-3, like, ALA and some of the omega-3 fatty acids compared to, certainly compared to conventional.
But anyways, yeah, I mean, in a way, if you define healthier as more micronutrient-packed, it is.
If you look at it, like the other day I cooked a piece of beef, and then I cooked a bunch of elk, and my family was, you know, we're eating both, and we're looking at the elk versus the beef.
The elk, it's so dark.
It's so dark and rich, and it just...
You can't eat as much.
You get full quicker.
Your body gets satisfied by it quicker.
But it's also just that whatever is causing it to be so dark, it's quite evident when you look at that one of them is more attractive to you.
And before 2017, like that's, for a long time, I was like, the main reason I was avoiding conventional meat was because, you know, these, I don't know what you call them, these farmers, the ones that are growing, like having the cows all packed in and they're, you know, factory farming.
They were feeding them antibiotics, not because they had an infection, but because it made them bigger, right?
I think I looked into this years ago when I was into that whole thing.
I think there is a mechanism that's known, but I don't remember exactly what it is.
It probably has to do with microbiome composition.
Certain bacteria probably go away, and other ones are making you get the energy, because you can harvest energy better from certain bacteria in your gut.
So it probably has to do something with that, but I just don't remember the exact.
So, like, I had a great uncle that, you know, just died of a staph infection.
Like, he went in for, you know, some kind of type 2 diabetes complication, like kidney or something, and got a staph infection while he was in there, and that's what ultimately took him down.
It's a scary thing.
It is.
There was a Nature paper published, like, literally right around, it was like a year and a half ago, and it was, like, titled something like, Some Medieval Treatment to, you know, Antibiotic Resistance or something.
And it was like all these components used in like chimchurri sauce, you know, where it's like garlic and basil and parsley.
And, you know, a lot of these plants do have antimicrobial activity.
And of course, me and my teacher oil, like, especially at the time, after I was like, after I had like had that, you know, staph infection, whatever it was, go away.
It was like, teacher oil, anything, any bump, zit, whatever, teacher oil.
I think gyno masca, though, is like pretty extreme.
I think when guys get it, it's usually...
If it's not from some sort of strange hormone imbalance, it's usually from using steroids.
Because they use steroids and they take so much testosterone that their body expresses...
I don't think it's just estrogen.
It's something else, too.
There was actually...
I was watching a video on it.
It is horrific when they remove it.
Oh my god.
It looks like the little thing from Alien that comes bursting out of your chest.
I thought it would just be fluid.
It's not fluid.
It's a mass.
It's a big, thick, meaty mass.
And there's videos of guys getting their gynomastica removed.
It's basically, like, there's a whole culture on YouTube of, like, these steroid guys, you know, that, like, show all the damage that they've done to their body through steroids, and one of them is guys that have had their boobs cut open to take out this gynomastica, and it's just these big, pulpy-looking...
I'm pretty sure that is, unless it's like coming from some strange, you know, weird hormonal imbalance, just a natural irregularity of the body, it's coming from steroids.
It's very common with guys who've done a lot of steroids.
I have become absolutely obsessed with sauna use over the last, I guess it started because of you, and then over the last, through the pandemic, the last year and a half or so, I'm in every day.
Every single day.
It's very rare that I take a day off.
I mean, I have to be wrecked to take a day off of sauna use.
Even when I come home at night, like last night I had a show and I'm out with all these fucking weirdos with no masks on.
So I'm like, as soon as I got home, I cooked myself.
I cooked myself like 15-20 minutes at 185 degrees and just deep breaths.
There's that paper that I sent you about COVID-19 and the therapeutic intervention of using sauna and this idea that When your body heats up like that, you're trying to kill off a virus when you're sick.
If you're sick with a viral infection and your body gets a fever, your body's trying to kill that.
And this idea, this paper is exploring the use of sauna to intervene, to stop it from ever infecting your body, both through your nasal passages, through your airway, and also just through the actual heating of the body.
It also activates heat shock proteins, and heat shock proteins have a role in your immune system response and how your immune system responds.
So it plays a role, particularly in innate immunity.
Which is the kind of immunity that is important when you first see a pathogen that you've never seen before.
This isn't like an antibody type of response.
It's like killing of it, you know, before that.
But there's interesting evidence, I'm sure we've talked about this, coming out of Dr. Jari Lalkonen's lab in Finland.
This was a few years ago, where he looked at sauna use and, like, incidence of pneumonia.
And people that like, so in Finland, saunas are ubiquitous.
You know, most people have one at their house.
Most people use it at least once, you know, at least once a week.
But then you have people that are using it like two to three or four to seven.
And so he always kind of stratifies the data based on like frequency of use.
And he found that people that use the sauna four to seven times a week were 40% less likely to get pneumonia.
And this was after like correcting for all sorts of like other lung diseases and other health factors and Exercise and all that stuff.
At the end of the day, it's a correlative study, right?
But I thought that was interesting because there's also all these other studies that have been done in the 80s looking at the effects of the sauna on the lung function and helping with a variety of factors of lung function.
It's interesting.
There's probably lots of things going on as well.
And as I just gave you, my paper today was published with my co-author, Teresa Johnson, in the journal Experimental Gerontology.
We argue...
that if the title is sauna use as a lifestyle to increase health span, which basically refers to the disease free part of your life.
So in other words, you know, like you as you age, you become more susceptible to things like, you know, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, respiratory problems, all that stuff.
And so we argue that sauna use should be up there with things like exercise and good sleep and good diet, you know, things that are known to improve your quality of life.
There's just tons of evidence, things that we've talked about before, but, you know, talking about the cardiovascular disease improvements, how sauna...
One of the things I'm most excited about, like I've been getting my mom in the sauna...
And she's been sedentary, you know, like, her whole life, basically.
She's overweight, and, like, there's no getting her on a Peloton.
There's no getting her to go for a jog.
Like, it's just not going to happen.
Maybe once, but, like, it's just not going to happen.
And so I'm trying to get her in the sauna because I'm trying to improve her health some way, right?
And It's a lot easier for people, at least I've noticed with my mom, who views it as a spa treatment.
She goes in there and puts some cold water on the hot rocks, and it's kind of like a steam room.
She feels like it's a spa.
But she's also getting the sauna-mimicking moderate cardiovascular exercise.
That's what it does, and we talk all about that in the paper.
But, you know, so people that are, like, sedentary and have been sedentary their whole life, and also people that are disabled.
Like, there are some people that can't go for a run.
There are people that can't even get on a Peloton.
Like, they're disabled, and they can't do aerobic exercise.
I mean, granted, there are some contraindications, like certain, if you have certain, particularly certain heart disease risks, that could be a contraindication, meaning you shouldn't do it.
But by and large, it improves a lot of cardiovascular things.
Can you mitigate those risks by having a slightly lower temperature, like instead of going to 185, maybe going to 160 or something like that, where it's a more mild form of heat?
And this was, you have to like discuss this with your physician.
But like, for example, people that have like arrhythmias, there could be a very mild contraindication with arrhythmias.
And so the question is, you know, Would a lower temperature, like 165, which is what I've been doing for my mom, like mostly because she's not adapted to the heat at all.
And so like, you have to adapt before you can like do 20 minutes at 185. You know, like it takes takes a while for people that aren't used to even raising their core body temperature when they're exercising, you know.
So again, it's mimicking a lot of the physiological aspects, including that core body temperature going up, you know, the blood flow changes going to your skin and sweating, heart rate, you know, your heart rate gets elevated while you're in the sauna, and then blood pressure goes down after.
Like, these things have been compared head to head.
So it does mimic moderate aerobic activity.
And it's, like, the only way that I'm able to get my mom in there.
And then there's, like, the brain benefits, you know.
People that are depressed, like my mom actually has, she's been diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
And you look at, she's got a variety of SNPs.
There are certain SNPs that she has that are consistent, like in the serotonin transporter and things like that.
You can look and see there's evidence that she has things that have been linked to major depressive disorder.
And also she's had a lifetime of being inactive.
And there's a lot of environmental factors at play, you know, like drinking Cokes, like refined sugar, you know, I mean, that's inflammation.
But there's been some evidence from Dr. Charles Rezon.
He was the first to show that like a single what they called whole body hyperthermia, which is basically they were using this really expensive device to elevate people's core body temperature to like 101 degrees Fahrenheit.
I mean, they were doing a fever.
I mean, they were getting hot.
And they had a sham control.
People that were, they were elevating their core body temperature a little bit, so they thought they were getting the treatment, but they weren't.
So it was- How were they elevating the core body temperature?
It's called the heckle device.
It's like this crazy thing that's kind of infrared-ish, where it's doing it through what an infrared sauna would do, basically.
And so they did this in the people that were in the sham control group, which is kind of like the placebo in a way.
And so 70% of those people in that group actually thought they were getting the treatment.
So it was a wonderful placebo.
Because with anything depression, placebo effect is a very real thing.
And people know they're getting a treatment.
They're going to feel better.
Like, yeah, this works, you know?
So it's important to have that control.
And they showed just one, like, one exposure to this.
There was a huge antidepressant effect that lasted six weeks.
We talk, like, Teresa and I talk a little bit about this in our recent publication.
But...
It's also a topic page on my website.
It's Asana.
We have a 20-something page article that is a lot of this on the website.
But part of it could be there's a million things.
So here's the thing.
So Dr. Ashley Mason, she is at UCSF, and she specializes in non-pharmacological treatments for depression or sleep or And she actually trained with Dr. Charles Rezon, and she sort of carried on the torch.
And I'm collaborating with her now, which is really cool, on a clinical trial where she's basically taken...
Forget that device.
It's like $50,000.
It's like all this FDA tape to get it and use it.
So she's found a way to basically...
Get an infrared sauna where people are laying in this like tent with their head out.
And they're in there for a long time.
And they're measuring their rectal temperature and making sure they get up to like 101. And it's like a silicone probe.
It's really easy to, you know, it's not like uncomfortable.
But these people are getting hot.
They're getting so hot that, like, you know, technicians are having to, like, cool them down with wet towels, you know, and, like, while they're in this thing.
Because they have to be in to that degree where they're getting, like, a fever.
But she's done a proof of principle study on people that are not depressed that shows that it's, like, not dangerous, basically.
It's not dangerous.
People will do it.
And that's kind of, like, you have to, like, show that before you can, like, go on to the next step and use it as a potential clinical treatment for depression.
So now the study that she's going to be starting any day, which I'm collaborating with her on, is she's going to be recruiting clinically depressed patients or participants and giving them this treatment.
And it's going to be a dose escalation.
In other words, she's going to try to do it at least eight weeks.
I mentioned the first one was one time.
So once a week for eight weeks.
So they're going to be, you know, see if they can even do this, like if they can handle it, right?
And she's going to combine it with cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, because that's a known treatment to help with depression.
And you can't start any study without giving like a treatment that's known to work because it's like unethical.
But what I'm excited about is the biomarkers that we're going to measure, like, you know, brain drive neurotrophic factor.
That's been shown to play a role in depression.
And it's one of the major things, like exercise increases it, and there's been studies showing hot baths increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF. So, you know, it's like, well, let's see if the sauna's doing that.
Like, that would be one potential mechanism.
And then there's a variety of other, we'll mention, heat shock proteins.
They've been shown to play a role in mood and animal studies, and a variety of inflammatory biomarkers.
Because what was interesting about that pilot study by Dr. Charles Rezon was that he found the people that had the most robust antidepressant effect had higher levels of something called IL-6.
IL-6 is a cytokine.
It's kind of often referred to as like a Janus cytokine because it's like both pro and anti-inflammatory.
It has like both effects.
It's something that is, you know, elevated when you exercise.
And, you know, there's a robust anti-inflammatory response in some cases, like IL-10 and things that are anti-inflammatory.
Anyways, he found people that had the highest levels of IL-6 tend to have the most robust effects of the sauna.
So, a variety of interesting things.
Super exciting because, like, you know, like, if this could be a potential treatment, getting people – and, like, I know you and I have talked about this, like, probably a million times, but, like, getting depressed people to go exercise – Like, it's not easy.
Yeah, so I asked Dr. Mason about this because she's like gone around into different like banyas and stuff in San Francisco and like had her friends like trying to like get the rectal thermometer and see like, do this or do that.
One thing I found is I can't stay in the ice bath as long after I've gotten out of the sauna, which is really odd because I almost feel like I'm going to pass out.
When I get to three minutes in the ice bath after 20 plus minutes in the sauna, my vision is shaky.
So, like, you see those little weird bony growths in the inside of the ear.
It's almost like your fucking skull's trying to protect you.
Oh, that is so nasty.
Inside of ears are so gross.
I got a little...
A thing I bought on Amazon, it's a camera that's attached to an ear cleaner, and you have an app on your phone, and you can actually stick this thing in your ear, and you can see the inside of your ear.
I've got really small ear canals, and I, like, get problems with that.
And also, like, earplugs hurt me because my ear canals are so small I have to, like, get the, like, baby ones or, like, I need to try to get the custom-made ones because, like, I can't wear that.
I wore ear guards all throughout my years doing jiu-jitsu.
Pretty much every time I trained.
I have very little cauliflower.
I have like a tiny couple of little pieces.
But I have friends whose ears are fucking mangled.
And they love it because it makes them look like a badass.
It's a jiu-jitsu thing.
And wrestlers.
It's a wrestler thing too.
It's almost like a badge of honor to have really fucked up ears.
But I have friends that can't...
AirPods, like Apple ones, they don't fit in there.
They can't even go in.
Their ear hole's so small.
I'm like, what can you really hear with those goofy-ass mangled ears?
Because if you take your ears and you just go like this, and then you talk, and then I'm folding my ear, and then go like that and open it, it's very different between what it sounds like, like this, and what it sounds like, like this.
So they're like, their whole life is like, the reason why your ear's shaped like that is so that you can kind of capture sound, right?
It just vibrates on your bones instead of into your ear.
It vibrates on your bone and gets into your head, which is like, you know, if you're in the shower, you do exactly what you were just doing.
You can still hear the rain hitting your skull, it's just your hearing, or the water, I'm sorry, it's just different.
But I'm way curious onto someone who has that ear problem, if this creates a better experience, or if it's just like, yeah, I can hear it now, finally.
But I know quite a few friends who've had their ears operated on, where they literally fillet your ear and then they cut out all the calcified blood, which is what it is, right?
It's like blood pools up in the tissue of your ear and it becomes calcified.
I don't think so because it's not really an inner ear issue, but the outer ear is just horrific.
It's pretty gross.
And so what you should do, what a lot of guys do is they'll get a syringe and right after it happens, like literally I've seen guys do this at the gym where they have a buddy stick a syringe in their ear and suck the pus and blood out like at the gym.
You know, they just have this thing and pull it.
Like see if you can find a video of a guy.
Yeah.
Because it's amazing how much fluid comes out of a cauliflower ear.
So that was like, I was trying to get to the bottom of this.
I had been in the jacuzzi for almost 30 minutes, and I was heat-stressing myself.
But I was still terrified to get any cold, because it was so scary.
So I didn't do any cold at all.
And now, what I do is, I just do, if I'm going to do the cold, like I did a seven-day challenge recently, where I just get in.
Dan does this thing like he gets in we keep it like 49 degrees Fahrenheit and he gets in for like 12 minutes I mean he's just in there like he loves it He does it like first thing in the morning.
Sometimes he does it before bed, helps him sleep.
I'm like in there like one minute and I'm like, because I'm just not adapted.
You know, like I'm not adapted and I don't have as much brown adipose tissue, you know, which, you know, is a good thing.
But you lose it pretty quick.
Like Dan didn't do it for a while and he like, it was harder for him to stay in for that long.
But, you know, when you are going, and this is something like, I've talked to Yari Laukunen about this.
You know, going from the hot to the cold, so in the hot you have vasodilation happening, right?
So you're relaxing your blood vessels, blood flow is increased.
When you go into the cold, vasoconstriction happens.
Like, it's the opposite.
So you're going from, like, dilation to constriction, dilation to constriction.
And, like, you know, a lot of what regulates that is, you know, norepinephrine, which is a hormone and also a neurotransmitter, depending on if you're releasing it, you know.
Um, if it's being released in the plasma versus in the brain, but part of what it does is cause vasoconstriction.
And it's, you know, there's just not enough research that has been done on going from the hot to the cold and certainly not going back and forth.
But in Finland, you know, like at least 10% of the population there of the people that are using saunas do that.
Like they do it frequently.
Not everyone does it, but like a good percentage of people do it.
You know, like they have gone over to Finland and done it.
Um, But, you know, so there's just not a lot of evidence.
And, you know, on the one hand, like, you can feel really good, but, like, there's an amount of stress that, I mean, maybe it's just something from going from the hot to the cold and regulates your blood pressure, right?
I mean, I don't know.
So now I don't do the cold after my sauna because of that.
Right after the sauna, so one of the things that the sauna does is it lowers blood pressure.
So while you're doing it, your heart rate's elevated and your blood pressure goes up while you're doing it.
Same thing with exercise, but after.
Like, pretty immediate after.
Blood pressure goes down.
And this is like one of the reasons why it's so cardioprotective among others is that it really helps regulate blood pressure.
But if you think about it, if your blood pressure is already dipped down below baseline, you know, studies showing that's what happens with the sauna, then you get into something that's vasoconstricting.
Right?
I mean, like, it's got to be like a crash in blood pressure.
I mean, that is something I was thinking, and, you know, it's just we need evidence to show that.
We don't know what it is, but something's going on, and it's interesting that you've had the same effect that I did somewhat.
That's that's what I sometimes I'll do a podcast because I never ever ever get to listen to anything if I don't but the majority of time for me I sit and like it's like my time it's like my my time to like reflect you know sometimes I'll even like rehearse things like a presentation or something and like I've done that for a long time I've done that since grad school listen to sets like comedy sets that I've done because it'll help me like tune in for the next one like I was doing that a lot In
So I would go back and listen to, this was back when I was first coming on, I'd listen to it.
Oh, it was so hard.
It was so hard.
But you learn about the mistakes, things you could do better.
It's really a way to improve in this aspect, your public speaking, and the way you communicate certain things and how you shouldn't communicate them maybe.
Not talking over someone.
That's a big one for me.
Unless you sit down and listen to yourself, it's not the same.
I think mostly the new stuff is the mood, like the actual evidence on depression.
But it really, this review article is just a very comprehensive, you can't, like people don't write review articles that are really comprehensive in a field anymore because like there's no money, you know, no grant money in doing that.
It's like a lot of work.
And so you can't find a good review article that just covers everything, you know, like in a certain field, like with the sauna.
Like, there's review articles on the sauna and cardiovascular health, a lot of that, but this goes into the all-cause mortality, you know, the cardiovascular benefits.
It goes into the brain benefits and some mechanisms like, you know, the effects on the opioid system.
It goes into all these different mechanisms like heat shock proteins and, you know, how you – there's lots of cool figures in there too and how you can basically become heat adapted and some of that has to do with you make heat shock proteins at a lower temperature.
You know, it goes into like what special populations should – Be cautious when they go into the sauna and how long and what temperature and all that you get these benefits that are found in the literature.
It's just a really comprehensive body of literature, I think.
And so I'm just pretty excited about that.
It's also open access to public, so it's not paywalled.
So people can access this article.
They can also go to my website where I have the topic page on it, which is It's written a little...
This is a little different.
It's a little more scientific and we go into a little bit greater detail and it has wonderful figures.
But that's...
I think that's basically the gist of it.
It's not necessarily something new so much as like Very comprehensive and covering, oh, the muscle mass effects.
Like there's studies on sauna, you know, helping preserve muscle mass and how that we talk, we argue how that has effects for, you know, age-related sarcopenia.
And so, and that has to do with heat shock proteins as well.
You know, there are studies showing that if you combine exercise with the sauna, you have even more improvement in your cardiorespiratory fitness than if you exercise alone, which cardiorespiratory fitness is like, you know, it's a big indicator of your physical fitness and it's also an indicator of your overall health.
So, there's additive effects happening with, you know, doing aerobic exercise plus doing the sauna.
I also think there's, you know, potentially additive effects for weight training and doing the sauna as well, where you're basically, you know, you're not only, like, with weight training, you're increasing your muscle mass, right?
There's a growth of muscle hypertrophies happening.
But with the sauna, it's really good when you're not doing that work to basically increase your muscle mass.
It's preventing it from degrading, which is like a balance.
So we just actually released a 23-page article on cold exposure on our website, and it covers all this.
It covers things that we've been talking about, like norepinephrine, but it also covers this exercise training controversy, which I know you know I've talked about in the past, but Yeah.
More of this needs to be worked out, but it seems as though doing an ice bath immediately after strength training, resistance training workout, blunts some of the hypertrophy effects.
And when I say media, it's like five, ten minutes.
I personally think, and this is a theory, it's a hypothesis, this hasn't been shown, but because the cold Really blunts inflammation and it causes vasoconstriction.
Your immune molecules aren't traveling to the site like muscle as much as they would be.
So it's basically dampening inflammation.
Part of the resistance training causes an inflammatory response.
And this inflammatory response, including activation of macrophages, which are a type of immune cell, Is important for the increase in what's called IGF-1.
It's a growth factor that you make in your muscle in response to exercise.
It's important for, you know, protein synthesis and hypertrophy.
And so if you look at graphs of like the kinetics of IGF-1, it peaks.
After about an hour, after resistance training, and then, you know, starts to go back and normalize.
And so I personally think that if you do cold exposure within that hour after your resistance training, you might be blunting that inflammatory effect that's important for IGF-1.
To be honest, we don't have any evidence to know for sure.
I personally think that if you're waiting until later, like several hours later, you're already getting, you know, you're Anti-inflammatory effect has already been activated through the inflammation induced by exercise.
You know, so I can't see why doing the cold would then blunt that because you've already gone through it, you know?
But without actual data, it's hard to know, right?
It would be a hypothesis.
I would think that it would be okay, to be honest.
Well, through your discussions on this podcast and through many other discussions that have come out of that, I think there's been a giant rush, a giant change in the way people think of sauna and how many more people are using sauna.
I can't tell you how many of my friends who never had any interest in using sauna before are now like complete sauna junkies.
Do you know the difference between what the omega-3 index is versus like just measuring your omega-3?
So omega-3 index specifically refers to measuring your omega-3 in red blood cells versus what most companies will do.
They'll look at like plasma phospholipid.
And the omega-3 index is important because it's a long-term marker for blood glucose.
Your red blood cells, you accumulate it in the cell membrane, and your red blood cells take 28 days before they turn over.
And so whereas if you were to have some sardines or whatever, and then go get your omega-3 levels measured...
It could be, it could skew the data such that like, oh, I've got great omega-3 levels, you know, because plasma phospholipids are kind of like the short term, like they're really responsive to your diet.
Whereas the actual, it's kind of like HbA1c, long term marker for blood glucose levels versus just measuring your blood glucose levels like, well, you could have just eaten, that's why they're high and So like your HbA1c is like that long-term marker.
So omega-3 index is kind of like that.
Dr. Bill Harris, and he had a collaborator, I forget his name, but they kind of co-invented this back in, gosh, early 2000s or something.
But he argues that The omega-3 index is, like, predictive for cardiovascular disease, like, as much, if not better than, like, cholesterol.
And he's had a couple of interesting studies that came out on mortality and looking at the omega-3 index.
So, like, there's one study that he did was published last April, so a few months ago, and it was, like, 17 different studies included, and he looked at the omega-3 index.
And he found that people that had an omega-3 index above 7% versus on the low end, which was less than 4%, they were 17% likely to die prematurely of all causes, including accidents.
Like, omega-3 is, like, making people not, like, take some kind of risk.
I don't know.
Anyways, I found that fascinating.
That was the first study.
Okay, so you're 17% likely.
So if you're in that high group versus low, so higher than 7% versus less than 4, you're also 21% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.
So that was the first study that was interesting.
And the premature all-cause thing was what got me.
I was like, they're less likely to get in some kind of crazy accident that causes them to die.
So as you and I know, omega-3 affects the brain.
But the other study he just published last June or something, and it was a Framingham study.
Which is also a huge cohort.
And he looked at the omega-3 index and he found, again, people in the high end, like greater than 7%.
They had a life expectancy that was five years longer than people in the lower range, less than 4%.
And this was like after adjusting for all kinds of factors.
Now, remember, most people, they do these dietary questionnaires when they're looking at omega-3, like, how much fish do you eat?
Do you take supplements?
Like, They're measuring something.
Like, this is measured in your blood.
This is a long-term marker.
Like, this is real data, right?
So five-year increase in life expectancy, like, that's huge compared to people, like, you know, on the low end of the range.
And in fact, in Japan, you know what the average omega-3 index of people in the United States is?
Like, 5%.
So you had to be slightly more than that, 7%, greater than 7% to have the longevity benefits.
In Japan, their average is like 10% or more, omega-3.
And mine was 11.7%.
Because I take massive, I take, you know, four grams a day of fish oil, two grams of EPA, two grams of DHA. But anyways, you know, Japan has a five-year life expectancy increase over people in the United States where you're talking an average omega-3 index of 5% versus like 10. Interesting, right?
There's lots of oxidation that's possible from polyunsaturated fatty acids, which EPA and DHA are.
But a lot of the therapeutic studies, like they've done randomized controlled trials showing that you can drop cardiovascular death by 25% if you give people with a various range of heart diseases You know, four grams of a purified form of EPA. It's called VASIPA. It's a prescription strength.
Say it again?
VASIPA. V-A-S-C EPA. And it is a high EPA. It's a purified EPA. And you can get it prescribed from your doctor if your triglycerides are over a certain level.
I don't know what that level is, but it's something that's like a prescription strength, which I actually want to get my mom taking.
But...
So what I'm getting at is the therapeutic effects for many of these cardiovascular-related diseases happen at a high dose, where taking a microalgae, like I don't know how many spoonfuls, like how many tablespoons or whatever you're going to have to take, but probably quite a bit.
That stuff's so nasty, too.
I've never tried...
I've tried like the Carlson's one like a long time ago.
I used to take that.
But, you know, that was fish oil, not microalgae oil, so I've never tried that.
Because when you eat rancid fish oil, you know it tastes like gross.
It tastes disgusting and smells gross.
There's a website called the International Fish Oil Standards, IFSO, and they sort of like, they rank, I mean not rank, they They analyze data from lots and lots of different companies that make fish oil.
And they give you all this data based on concentration of EPA and DHA that's actually in the supplement.
What's called total oxidation levels, TOTOX, and that's important.
You want less than 10. It has the mercury levels, like PCBs.
So they have lots of data.
And you can scroll through their website and look at each product sheet.
And you have to kind of do it often because they update this every so often.
I've put together like I've gone through them all and made an excel sheet on like all the different brands and like again like the concentration and the the total oxidation and the mercury and all that and just I'm actually just getting ready to post a like screenshot video of me doing that like on YouTube showing people and like what I think some of the top brands are I have no affiliation it's just me helping people try to analyze this data because they've said it like a million times on social media and people still What
But the pandemic shuts stuff down, so I'm not sure if he's back up or not.
But he sends it to me.
like the highest quality fish oil I've ever, like, I could get you some if you want to try it, but it's really good.
So they have high EPA and he has high DHA.
And so I take the high EPA, I take two grams in the morning, and then I take the two grams of DHA in the evening.
So I separate them.
I don't know if it's necessary to separate them.
There was some, like, you know, evidence conflicting in the literature, like, oh, maybe DHA, like, if you take it at the same time, can compete with the EPA or, you know, something like that.
That was one of the initial factors that they found with people that were in the ICU with COVID, that a large percentage of them were deficient in vitamin D. Right.
I mean, so the COVID, you know, there are lifestyle factors, I think, that are important for And possibly, you know, helping with severity.
And I think vitamin D is one.
The problem is, like, you know, doing a clinical trial with someone that already has COVID, and then like trying to give them vitamin D, like, you're not going to fix the severity of COVID, like with...
Like, you know, there's been a couple of studies that's like, oh, if you give them an active form, so you have vitamin D3 gets converted into something called 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the liver, and then the liver converts it into the active steroid hormone, which is 125-hydroxyvitamin D.
So you can give them something that makes it so their liver doesn't And there's been a couple of studies showing it helps with people that have already had COVID.
But again, there's a large actual clinical study that's ongoing right now being done by Dr. Joanne Manson.
She's looking at prophylactic vitamin D and, you know, like severity, incidence of COVID and all that.
And so, you know, but omega-3s also.
So Bill Harris, Dr. Bill Harris, he just published a pilot study on the omega-3 index and COVID death.
And of course, this was a small, small pilot.
So it was like 100 people.
And, you know, people with the highest omega-3 index, again, it was in that 7% range.
And this was not statistically significant.
It was because there was a small sample size, but there was like a 75% reduction in COVID mortality.
No telling.
I wouldn't at all tell anyone, I mean, to take omega-3 to prevent COVID or to not die from it.
It would be ridiculous.
I mean, vaccines are probably the best way to prevent yourself from both getting and having a severe COVID. We could talk about it in a minute if you want.
I'd like to.
But the omega-3 thing is really interesting because there was an in silico study That show DHA, one of the main marine omega-3 fatty acids, keeps the spike protein.
So there's a receptor binding domain on the spike protein.
And that receptor binding domain swings around.
It goes from open to closed, open to closed.
And there's like, you know, a few of them on a spike protein, like three or something.
And when they're closed, like this, they can't bind to the ACE-T receptor.
So they can't even latch on.
And there was an interesting study showing that DHA was able to keep it in the closed conformation.
So this was in silico.
Again, grain of salt because it's in silico.
You can't say anything.
But I was like, oh, that's interesting.
Again, for me, I'm an omega-3 enthusiast in a way.
I do think there's a huge effect on resolving inflammation, not just But after your immune system's been activated, there's the protectants, the resolvins, the specialized pro-resolving mediators, the SPMs.
These things are resolving the inflammation so that your immune system doesn't go crazy and become in this hyper-inflammatory.
I think this potentially could be how it's affecting longevity.
I think that inflammation is a major source of driving the aging process.
And there's been studies that have looked at, for example, people that are centenarians, that live to be 100. People that are elderly, so like 80s.
People that are semi-supercentenarians are like 105. And then the supercentenarians, 110. And they've looked at a variety of biomarkers, telomere length, immunosenescence, you know, glucose, HbA1c, cholesterol, blah, blah, blah, like the whole thing, right?
Tons of them.
And the only thing that could predict a person going to each stage to living To be either then a centenarian and then later a semi-supercentenarian and then later a supercentenarian was decreasing inflammation.
Like none of the other things predicted each, you know, going to the next stage.
So that, to me, is very interesting as well.
The inflammation was like a huge predictor of not only like living the longest, but also cognitive function as well.
It was like the biggest predictor of cognitive function.
So, you know, again, it's like...
The omega-3s, to me, I'm convinced that the data is not quite there yet to actually solidly demonstrate that, like, high levels of omega.
Like, we're talking above 7% omega-3 index.
And I don't know exactly what it takes to get there.
Like I said, I have an 11.7 and I take four grams of fish oil all day and I eat sardines and I, you know, eat salmon.
So, you know, it's kind of, I'm like the Japanese cohort.
So I don't know what it takes to get above seven.
But I think that some of the work coming out of Bill Harris's lab is, you know, pretty...
Interesting and I think laying the foundation for, wait, maybe omega-3s, like a therapeutic type of dose.
You know, maybe there's, again, I'm taking an experimental dose.
So part of the concern, and we talked all about this bleeding thing, and he really doesn't think it's that big of a concern, to be honest.
And he talked about how You know, in Japan, like, they're basically like, they have less than, like, where their omega-3 index is high.
They're not, like, bleeding as much during surgery or some stuff.
I don't know.
He was giving some evidence of that.
But it does, the omega-3s do affect your leukotrienes and prostaglandins and things that do affect, you know, like, platelet aggregation and stuff.
But, like, Maybe it could be bad if you have some kind of disorder or you're taking some kind of crazy blood thinning medication.
He argues that's really not even that much of a concern.
The other concern is that people that already have a cardiovascular problem, there's been a small increase in arrhythmias in some of these people and it's not known why.
And in fact, if you look at, for example, AFib, the end result of AFib that's bad is stroke.
And omega-3s have been shown to reduce stroke incidence.
So it's like, well, if it was, like, really causing AFib or doing something bad, then, like, you should see an increased stroke incidence or, like, no effect.
But no, it decreases stroke incidence.
But it's not fun having AFib.
And, again, this is super, like, preliminary.
It's not really known.
It's like we got to, like, repeat that.
So, you know, it could be that taking very, very high doses.
In the studies that that was found, they were taking 4 grams of pure EPA. So it could be maybe there's something to super high doses we don't know about.
This is so fascinating to me that as long as people have been studying nutrition, as long as people have been studying the human body, that there's still so much speculation as to what you should take and when you should take it and how much.
And people like you who study it constantly are still learning new things all the time.
Almost every time you come in here, you're like, okay, so there's a new study, and then you're telling me about this and you're telling me about that.
And it's really kind of wild when you think about the average person That I would venture to say, I don't know what percentage of the average population even takes vitamins.
Or get a doctor that concentrates on that and go to him when you're dealing with like ankle surgery or something.
But don't go to him.
He's a technician.
You know, he's not a nutrition scientist.
It's just like they're completely different fields of study and they're so comprehensive.
That's what's crazy about it.
Like every time I talk to you, you don't even have any notes in front of you and just rattling off this shit and it's like it's constant and it never ends.
There's constantly new studies, there's constantly new benefits that are unearthed.
It's like, it's so hard to keep abreast of all this stuff.
And not to mention the fact that doing clinical trials in nutrition...
So a lot of physicians, they're used to the gold standard, the randomized placebo-controlled trial.
And it is a gold standard.
It's the best thing you can do to see if a treatment is working, right?
Or if X comes out of...
Or if Y comes out of X or whichever way it is.
But the problem with nutrition is that everyone has some level of this...
Nutrient X in their body from their diet.
And so you get these studies that there's no quantification of anything.
There's questionnaires like, how much did you eat?
How much vegetables do you eat per week?
And it's like, oh, I eat X amount.
And then it's like you actually measure something like a biomarker like You know, beta carotene or, you know, something, and you realize, oh, they eat a lot more vegetables than they thought, or they eat a lot less because it's a biomarker, right?
So you have these questionnaires or, you know, the clinical studies are being done poorly.
Not only is it hard to keep up with the data, you have crappy data with salacious headlines like, oh, vitamins do nothing.
But, you know, the reality is the study is like, okay, we never measured anything.
We didn't measure, you know, vitamin D, which you can make from the sun, and everyone has different levels at the start of the study.
And we gave them a supplement where it's like, you know, 400 IUs, where it doesn't even raise your blood levels, anything.
And then we looked at this endpoint, X, like cancer incidents.
We didn't measure anything after.
And it's like, you know, like, that's a terrible study.
You know, but makes the headlines and, you know, there are some healthcare practitioners that read those and then they get this idea that, well, they do nothing because I read that study they did, you know.
And in some cases they're randomized placebo-controlled studies where they are giving a placebo and they are randomizing it and they're doing all that, but they're not measuring the blood levels.
They're not measuring anything.
So, you know, there's all sorts of problems with that.
And I think they're...
It's hard to do.
It's hard to solve.
Clinical trials in nutrition need to be designed better.
They do.
You need to quantify everything.
You need to quantify these nutrients.
Drugs, people don't have that to start with.
You don't have to quantify anything.
You just give them the pill.
Yeah, it's going to raise their levels because they don't have any of it.
And then if you think about like to have your immune system in check, to have your body functioning in check, to have your muscle repairing correctly, to have all these factors and to have all your nutrient levels balanced and adjusted accordingly and to make sure that you're getting All your needs as far as your essential fatty acids and your vitamins and your nutrients and your minerals and all these different things.
It's so complex.
There's so much going on and so few people are on top of it.
Just overall health is so important, and yet there's so little consideration given to it by most people.
And it's one of the most confusing things about human beings.
Like, when people are sick, the thing that they want more than anything is to be healthy.
Like, oh my god, I wish I was healthy.
But then, once they get healthy, they go back to the same eating habits, the same sedentary lifestyle, drinking alcohol, cigarettes, all the same shit that got them in the mess in the first place, and they don't change much about their nutrition, they don't change much about their exercise habits, when it has such a massive effect On the quality of your life, the longevity of your ability to exercise.
I'm 54 now, and I really haven't lost any ability to exercise rigorously, to do it the same way.
One of the things I did is I completed that Israeli protocol for hyperbaric chambers where you did 90 days.
I did 60 sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days.
Lengthen your telomeres that's appropriate to or approximate to a 20-year decrease in your biological age.
I did that.
I just did it.
I just finished it.
And I feel great.
I don't know what it did.
I mean, I didn't really measure my telomeres and I probably should now, but there's definitely something that happens.
When you do something like that.
But who the fuck has time for that?
Who's going to do that?
How many people are going to be committed to going to some stupid place and lying in a metal chamber for 90 days?
I'm definitely an outlier in what I practice and that I'm dedicated to it.
But it's also because I don't like being sick.
I haven't been sick in 11 years.
Plus, it's been at least 11 years.
But it's because of actions, because of things I do.
And I just don't understand people that don't want to be healthier, and I really wish it was more accessible.
I really wish it was much more common to get comprehensive blood work, and much more common to get nutritional counseling, and much more common for people to be rigorously exercising, to do it on a regular basis, and to realize that when your body is more resilient, When your body's fit, when your cardiovascular shape is higher, you're just better off.
And I do think even with, you know, COVID-19, there's obviously data showing that, you know, people that are obese or have a comorbidity, they're more likely to have a severe form of it.
And it's like twice as much in some cases, you know, it's not like, you know, something like a vaccine would do.
But it definitely plays a role.
And, you know, it should be a motivating factor.
But, you know, since we're on this topic, can we talk a little bit about vaccines?
Because it's something I have seen a lot of misinformation, like, on everywhere.
Facebook, on, you know, different news media outlets.
And I think there's really, like, some main ones that I just feel are...
Causing harm.
And so there's really eight of them.
We don't need to talk about all of them.
But I think the eight really are that, you know, SARS-CoV-2 is not that bad.
COVID-19 is not that bad.
And, you know, vaccines basically don't prevent transmission.
Spike protein from vaccines are cytotoxic.
Therefore, they're really bad.
That vaccines are going to cause something called antibody-dependent enhancement.
Which is going to make you have a more severe disease.
There's the vaccines are going to cause infertility.
There's the vaccines are going to cause a more virulent strain or variant.
And then there's one more that alternatives to vaccines exist right now that are just as good.
And I think that there's a few of those that are really, I mean, just like blatantly, they're wrong.
All of them, I think.
But I mean, you know, there's some that are more important than others.
And I think that I would like to talk about them.
You know, I think first and foremost, there's like two groups of people, mostly.
One thinks COVID-19 is bad, wants the vaccine, and the other one that thinks it's not that bad and that the vaccines may be harmful.
I personally, interestingly, the only, I know a lot of people that have gotten vaccinated, and the only person that I know that had something was like, she had a headache for like a week and a half, and then it went away.
Oh no, another person I knew had nausea for a couple of weeks.
They were nauseous more frequently, but it went away.
So, you know, people react differently, obviously.
When you're giving, you know, more than 169 million people are vaccinated, right?
I mean, that's half our adult population is vaccinated, fully vaccinated with COVID-19.
And it's not zero risk.
Some people are going to have an adverse reaction.
And they do.
It's a big world out there.
If you were to give 169 million people a peanut or a shellfish, some people are going to have very adverse reactions.
Some people are going to die.
It's a big world.
But with the stroke or the heart attack, you have to...
So if you're trying to compare, for example, Let's say, you know, you're looking at actual COVID-19 deaths and from heart attacks and strokes, and you're looking at the vaccine adverse events reporting site VAERS, right?
And that as well.
You know, you have to realize that basically in the United States, in 2017, there was a publication in the Journal of Circulation.
Someone dies from cardiovascular disease every 30 seconds in the United States.
Every 30 seconds.
Most of those people are above the age of 50, and certainly most are above 65. But every 30 seconds, someone's dying from cardiovascular disease.
Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a stroke.
I think there could be a variety of causes for it.
You know, so there are people...
And most of it, this is happening in teenagers to like 50. Most of the people that are older are not getting this long-haul COVID. It's like happening in people that are mostly not being hospitalized.
People that don't get hospitalized originally, like, they have mostly, like, pretty mild symptoms, in some cases even asymptomatic.
You know, there was a study published in The Lancet, like, last year, showing there was a seven-fold increase in stroke incidents in people under 50 in the United States compared to the year before that, before the pandemic start.
Yeah, there was an average of 4.0 additional conditions or causes of death for data on deaths involving COVID-19 by time period, jurisdiction, and other health conditions.
Yeah, but the concern is what vaccines, the negative effects, what people are worried about, I think, is young people that are healthy that have negative effects, like that have had strokes or that have had thrombosis or myocarditis and those issues, right?
But I mean, you know, if you again, even just looking at the deaths in every age group, even like, you know, people that are in my age group, 40 to 49, you know, there's 20,000 deaths that have been linked to the confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Well, if that's true for all ages, then yes, people with comorbidities are more likely to die.
But also younger people, like I said, they're more likely to get, you know, these long haul symptoms where I've known so many people, you know, that they've gotten like their loss of smell or taste has been like several months.
And there's now studies showing that, you know, if you, there was a huge study out of the biobank, UK biobank data, where right before the pandemic started, MRIs were done, brain scans on like, almost 1000 people was like over 800. And then the pandemic hit.
People got COVID, some people didn't, whatever.
So they brought the same cohort of people back in for a brain scan.
And, you know, basically they corrected for people.
So they had people that they compared people that were the same age, same gender, same sex.
And then they also timed between scans.
And they found that both mild and severe COVID-19 cases caused a Right.
Right.
But people that had mild cases that didn't go to the hospital had it.
I don't know because I know people that supplement that exercise that have had were diagnosed with they had a mild case and they were diagnosed with POTS you know post postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome where their heart was racing like tachycardia was racing just uncontrollably they were dizzy couldn't had no energy I mean this was months and they finally got diagnosed and it's like a lot of people coming out with this but you know Do you know anybody that had COVID and got
Well, there was a study in Israel, kind of going back to the stroke thing, that found...
This was published in...
What was it?
Maybe April 2020 or something?
Maybe July.
I don't know.
It was still 2020. But they looked at patients that were coming in for stroke, and these were younger than 50. And like 30% of them had had COVID, didn't know it because they were asymptomatic and they were younger people.
So it's like you'd think, well, if they had four comorbidities, they had COVID, they'd know it, right?
So they were coming in for stroke.
And they had no idea they had COVID until they were tested.
Because they had a stroke.
Exactly.
Interesting.
So getting back to like, you know, so there's reasons that I personally think that people that are younger and healthy should get vaccinated.
And for one is because...
For most people, the vaccines are safe.
And I mean, we just have data to show that, you know, we have hundreds of millions of people that have had the vaccines we're getting in the United States that have been vaccinated worldwide.
The second, you know, it's just hundreds of millions of people.
But also the fact that...
You know, some of this stuff where you're talking about spike protein and you're worried about spike protein.
So this is important because the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a different spike protein than what's in the vaccine.
So when the vaccines were made, these are ones in the U.S. So this is both mRNA vaccines, the Pfizer-BioNTech and then the Moderna as well as Johnson& Johnson.
The protein itself is locked in a conformation.
It's called pre-fusion, which is kind of like closed together.
And typically what happens when viruses like interact with our cell membrane, they elongate.
It's called post-fusion, a post-fusion viral complex, and changes structure.
And so the actual, both the mRNA vaccines and Johnson & Johnson locked the spike protein in the prefusion confirmation.
They inserted two proline amino acids and kept it locked.
It's a different protein.
It's a different structure.
It can't open up.
We don't know.
Like there's no evidence that these studies that have, one that you're talking about, the Salk Institute, the other ones that they have injected spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus into tracheas of hamsters and also mice.
There's been some in vitro studies showing the spike protein is harmful in those studies.
And it's binding to the ACE2 receptor.
And once it binds, it can undergo fusion and endocytosis.
But we don't know if the spike protein from these mRNA vaccines are doing that.
If you're going to make that claim, it's a different spike protein.
I think the other part of that is that people are concerned that the mRNA vaccines don't stay in the deltoid tissue and they're somehow getting into circulation and causing havoc, you know.
Here's the thing.
These mRNA vaccines, they're basically encased in this lipid nanoparticle and there's some other things in there with it.
But generally speaking, when they're injected into the muscle tissue, the lipid nanoparticle has a half-life of a few hours.
A few hours.
Long enough to protect the mRNA from degrading.
The mRNA, again, the half-life is, you know, anywhere between some 72 hours or maybe like a little longer.
And the spike protein itself that's made in your cells speaks after 24 hours and then it goes away after 48. The concern from people that the spike protein from the mRNA vaccines or even just the whole mRNA vaccine itself, the whole lipid nanoparticle with the mRNAs, like going to other tissues, comes from studies that were done from Pfizer.
And it was kind of leaked out, and these studies were called biodistribution studies.
And they injected in—they did rats and they did mice.
And the rats, they injected 50 micrograms of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
So humans, we get 30 micrograms per injection.
They gave the rat 50. So, you know, how big is a rat?
You know, they're getting almost twice as much as a big human's getting.
If you look at the rat equivalent dose, 50 micrograms is 10 times the rat equivalent dose.
They were doing that intentionally for safety and to see what happens when you give 10 times, like, a high dose.
And what...
What was found is that you could see they radiolabeled the lipid nanoparticle.
And you could see some radiolabeled parts in other organs.
Like, you know, you'd see it in the spleen, the liver, you know, the bone marrow, a little bit of other organs.
But again, this is 10 times the dose.
And this was a radiolabeled lipid nanoparticle.
And typically, you know, when you inject something into like your muscle, you've got lymphatic system.
Lymph is like surrounding it.
Lots of immune cells are there.
And so what ends up happening is you have like dendritic cells immediately when something foreign, like this lipid nanoparticle, they chew it up into pieces.
And through phagocytosis, it's like, you know, it gets taken to, you know, liver and stuff for like metabolic purposes, right?
So we don't even know what that was, not to mention the fact that it was, you know, 10 times the dose.
How is it going to get into the circulation that's weird?
There have been some earlier studies on mRNA vaccines that have shown when you directly inject it, like if you do it like intravenously, it goes to the liver.
The mRNA vaccine goes to the liver and your liver tries to get rid of it.
The same bio-distribution study also injected mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech into mice.
But this time they did the animal equivalent dose, which was two micrograms.
And there was a little bit found in the liver 24 hours later, but it was gone by 48. Nothing.
And there was no other organs that at least that they showed.
I mean, presumably if they were showing up in other organs, they would show that, but like in the animal study.
So that's one piece of evidence.
The other one I've seen going around is like there was a small study, 13 people, and they were looking at the antibody response to vaccines.
And within these 13 people, they used a test called the Samoa, S-I-M-O-A, to measure spike protein and the S1 subunit of the spike protein.
And they found that three out of 13 people had, they could detect spike protein, and 11 out of 13, they could detect some of the S1 subunit.
But it turns out, like, this test, the Samoa, is really good for looking at, like, IgG, you know, antibodies.
But when it comes to actual spike protein, it's 25% false positivity rate.
So another study showed this.
You could take people pre-pandemic, run this test on them, and they'd show, like, they had spike protein.
It's an inaccurate test for spike protein, definitely for spike protein, but also for the S1 subunit.
So I don't think you can make a claim that because you have 11 out of 13 people showing this, using this test, that's the only study that's shown that.
That, to me, is like, you can't make any claim from that.
So these are mRNA vaccines, and they do elicit a pretty strong immune response, and that's why they've been so effective.
I guess I should say the efficacy, if you're looking at clinical trials, in terms of preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to Johnson& Johnson initially.
But Johnson& Johnson uses an adenoviral vaccine.
So this is the first time adenoviral vaccines have been used, you know, widespread.
Like they've been used in clinical studies dating back to like the 90s or 80s or something like that.
But I was looking at some of those research studies, and there seems to be a link between blood clots, thrombosis, and the adenoviral vectors back then, back in those studies.
And I don't think they're understanding.
It's still kind of rare.
I mean, it's still rare.
And again, you know, COVID is causing blood clots in people, even people that are healthy, you know, like people that are getting a stroke.
So, you know, I don't know what it is, but it's still pretty rare with the adenoviral vaccines and the thrombocytopenia and things like that.
The myocarditis, again, still pretty rare, and that's with the mRNA vaccines.
Inflammation is playing a role in that, and why that is, I don't know.
Younger people, children and adolescents are more prone to myocarditis from viral infections.
It probably has something to do with their immune system being so much better, and when you activate it, maybe sometimes in some people...
You know, there's too much of it going on.
I don't know.
I don't think this is linked.
I don't think that you're going to find, you know, the spike protein from the mRNA vaccines are like floating around in your vascular system and like going to your heart and like finding on...
Well, I mean, in theory, yeah, it is.
But, you know, again, like, the spike proteins from the mRNA vaccines are different from SARS-CoV-2.
He's the one that basically did this two-point mutation and kept the spike protein in the prefusion complex.
And this was work that he had done previously with RSV, respiratory synsexual virus, is what every kid gets, right?
And if you want to hear about a vaccine tragedy story, that's the poster child.
There were clinical studies done back in the 1960s on RSV vaccines.
And I don't remember the number of people in the actual study of infants and toddlers, but 80% of the infants and toddlers that got the vaccine and then were naturally exposed to the virus got hospitalized and a couple died, versus 5% of the infants that did not get the vaccine and were exposed.
So the vaccine, we know now from what was happening in that sense, was that the vaccine was causing something called antibody-dependent enhancement.
And what that is, there's two ways that it can happen, but one of the things, and it's induced by vaccines, one of the things that can happen is it can make viruses come into your cells, like, better.
So you, like, more viral particles, you get infected.
The other way is, and this is what was happening with RSV, is it basically causes your immune system to become, like, more...
More dangerous and active and be more harmful after you're exposed to the virus where the vaccine is supposed to be protecting you from.
And for a long time, and I know I think Jason was involved in figuring this out, Dr. McLellan, that it's the post-fusion antibodies that you make from a vaccine that can cause that.
Because the post-fusion, remember there's two confirmations of the – a lot of times these viral proteins do that, including the spike.
The post-fusion ones are not as – they're not as good at actually protecting you from the actual virus, but they like – they kind of in some cases can even mask it or like, you know, become harmful.
Anyways, they know now that the post-fusion antibodies play a big role in antibody-dependent enhancement.
And those are not antibodies that are being made in All the vaccines in the United States.
AstraZeneca didn't do this, 2-proline mutation change, but the vaccines that we're using in the United States are.
And so the antibody-dependent enhancement theory that's going to happen, that people that are vaccinated, they're all going to be really sick.
They're going to be sicker than people that just get the virus.
It's misinformation that's like, you know, so for one, you'd be seeing the hospitals fill up with vaccine people and not unvaccinated, which is what we see.
I was reading something today about that, that the majority of the people that are hospitalized in Israel were vaccinated, and they're attributing that to the higher rate of vaccinations in Israel, and that the idea that these vaccines have a waning life of effectiveness So that after, you know, six to seven months or however many months it is, that they're not as effective and then you're seeing people get sicker.
They had a breakthrough study that was published in New England Journal of Medicine.
They showed that basically...
You could take healthcare workers that were vaccinated and measure their antibody level, neutralizing antibody levels, like, a week before they became infected.
Or, like, you'd look at their antibody levels a week before they came down with a breakthrough infection.
And it predicted the breakthrough infection.
In other words, people with lower neutralizing antibodies were more likely to get this breakthrough infection.
And then another study was published by Miles Davenport Group, It was published in Nature Medicine, where he did some kind of modeling and found you had to have six times more neutralizing antibodies to protect from actually getting infection than from, like, you know, being hospitalized as well.
And the Pfizer vaccine, so there was a huge study that came out of the Mayo Clinic, and this was, like, recent.
It was, like, multi-states.
25,000 people and one, I think, there were 25,000 people that were vaccinated.
And they looked at whether, oh, and 25,000 people that were unvaccinated.
And it was looking at, you know, effectiveness.
Effectivity of the vaccine.
So in other words, protecting you from actually getting the infection and then like protecting from severity, so hospitalizations.
And so this is with the Delta variant because everything's changed now with Delta variant, right?
I mean, like these vaccines were much more effective at preventing infections with the Alpha variant being dominant, which was the dominant one before July.
How do they know when you get infected if you have a Delta variant?
Because the friends that I've had that have gotten sick with COVID, particularly ones that have already been vaccinated that got sick afterwards, they didn't test for what variant.
But, like, getting back to that, you know, with the transmission and looking at, you know, overall transmission, like, even aside from something called onward transmission, there's two types of transmission.
Like, the vaccines are protecting...
People from getting this virus because there's still some effectiveness of them.
They are.
It's reduced, but like when you have, you know, it's still, you know, 40% of the people that have the Pfizer X amount of months later, again, neutralizing antibodies probably play a role in that, you know, if you have more, if you're younger.
So there's all sorts of studies showing that older people make less neutralizing antibodies with vaccines.
And also time.
Of course, they wane over time.
But there's lots of studies showing that people in the hospitals are older, of course, the ones getting the breakthrough infections.
And so these vaccines are still preventing overall transmission.
There's also onward transmission and that's where a lot of this new stuff has come with Delta where there's been some, you know, the CDC put out some data and then there was a study, a big study out of the UK where they measured peak viral levels in vaccinated people and compared it to unvaccinated.
And peak viral levels were the same in terms of, you know, how much virus they were shedding.
But The virus basically, you know, it's replicating for a number of days and you're shedding for a number of days.
It's not just peak.
It's not just the first, you know, few days.
It continues on.
And so a Singapore study looked at that.
They looked at, this was, you know, not a huge study, but this was with the Delta variant.
And they saw that while the initial levels of virus were the same in both vaccinated and unvaccinated, vaccinated people cleared it quicker.
They cleared it faster.
So they weren't shedding for as long of a time, which would also suggest that if you were to take a random sampling of the population, not people that are going in and seeking health care, in which case people that are going in and seeking health care, they're like getting their peak viral infection, right?
There's a REACT study.
It's a real-time study that's going on in the UK where they get all this data real time.
They also found if you take a random sampling of people...
Vaccinated people have less viral, this is with Delta, they have less viral load than unvaccinated, which is what you expect if vaccinated people are clearing it quicker.
So there is even some evidence to suggest that even with Delta variant, vaccinated people are somewhat still even affecting onward transmission as well.
In other words, you know, preventing the transmission through just your infectiousness, making other people sick.
But if there's these issues that you were talking about with people that even have very mild cases, that they're developing these problems with brain matter and all these different issues, these are still happening to people who are vaccinated who get COVID, right?
Well, there was a couple of days where everybody around me got it and a couple of days of my workouts felt really shitty.
And I just took it real easy.
And I continued the same stuff that I always do in terms of my protocol, like with the sauna and all the other stuff that I do and vitamins and supplementation.
If the effectiveness wanes of the vaccine over six months or however much time it is, And you need a booster.
Do we have any information or any data as to what the effects of the booster is?
If we have the information about the second dose of the mRNA vaccine being more difficult for some people to tolerate, they have more difficult side effects.
Do we have any data about what a third shot is going to be like or possibly a fourth or ongoing?
And is there a point in time where it's going to be detrimental to your health to continue getting booster shots?
I think in my opinion, and again, I should have said this earlier, I am not an infectious disease expert.
This is my opinion.
I know you're interested in my opinion.
It is my opinion that elderly people and maybe those people with the four comorbidities or two or whatever it is, any comorbidities probably, those people are, what we're seeing in hospitals right now, most of them are people that are immunocompromised or older.
And they might benefit because they have a lot to lose if they get COVID. They have a lot to lose.
They have their life, potentially, right?
So there may be an argument for people to get a booster.
At that age.
I'm not sure there's an argument for people like myself to get a booster.
I do think that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that neutralizing antibody levels can predict whether or not you get the SARS-CoV-2 infection.
In fact, if you look and compare at people that have had natural immunity to people that have just been fully vaccinated, they're pretty equal in terms of as likely to get a breakthrough infection or reinfection.
But if you take a person that has natural immunity and then they get a vaccine, they have something that is referred to as hybrid immunity and they're like 2.3 times, three, four times less likely to get it.
I personally don't, and this is probably controversial, but I don't, I think, you know, an individual has to decide and, you know, the CDC is saying people that have had natural immunity should get vaccinated, but I don't see any reason why they have to.
To be honest, unless they're just terrified and don't want to get it and maybe they have that four times comorbidity or something like that.
In all fairness, he's the only one that I know that had an adverse side effect that was also vaccinated and had COVID. All the other friends that I've had that were vaccinated after they had COVID had no problems.
What do you think about prophylactic use of certain medications?
Like the big and the most controversial one is Ivermectin, of course.
They use it in Argentina with critical care workers and they use it prophylactically and they had a very high success rate with using it prophylactically.
And there's some real controversy because there's no real studies.
There was something that just came out recently out of India and India's use of ivermectin, but there's not something that there's like real rock-hard data that you can show that points to the effectiveness of it.
But you have like the frontline critical COVID care workers who, you know, like Pierre Corey, Dr. Pierre Corey, who's promoting the use of ivermectin and many other people that also have shown they've had good use of it.
But it's very controversial, right?
Like a lot of people don't even want to prescribe it.
A lot of doctors, they don't even want to hear about it.
So I have done a lot of sort of trying to read the, like, I don't have the anecdotal evidence that Dr. Pierre Corey has in treating frontline COVID patients.
I don't have any of that anecdotal evidence, none of it.
So all I can do is look at data and data that's, you know, either preprint or data that actually has been peer reviewed and published.
And what I see, and I mostly see that a lot of people doing this on websites.
They're, like, aggregating all this data and putting it together.
But there's, like, some major, major problems with the way they're showing the data.
That is, like, it's a big concern.
The one is that, you know, people are using different, obviously, doses, but there are different co-interventions with both the treatment group and the control group.
So you have people getting ivermectin, or you have people getting ivermectin and azithromycin, or you have people getting ivermectin and doxycycline, or you have people getting ivermectin, you know, azithromycin, they're getting, like, anticoagulants in some cases, they're getting vitamin C, they're getting the kitchen sink, okay?
And then you have the control groups.
Very considerably.
They're getting, you know, maybe in some cases, in the best case, a placebo, or they're getting, you know, the standard of care treatment, or they're getting hydroxychloroquine, or they're getting hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
Okay?
So you have a bunch of different treatments and co-treatments happening with each group.
And you have people aggregating all those together.
And that's just part A. Part B is you have different endpoints being measured.
You have like time till negative real-time PCR. So like basically viral clearance, right?
When you get negative.
You have people looking at hospitalizations.
You have people looking at mortality.
You have people looking at, what's another one?
Okay, the prophylactic endpoints.
And then people just like aggregating stuff together.
Oh, there's an improvement.
And they're aggregating all these studies together.
And then the other problem is that you have, and it's kind of something you alluded to, is that you have small, small sample sizes in such case that the incidence of something is going to be so small because the sample population is so small.
So I'll give you an example.
Like, you have 50 people in one group and you have 64 in another group.
And two out of the 50 people were hospitalized in the control group, but zero were hospitalized in the ivermectin group.
That is such a low incidence of events that you can't be certain.
But they take that and aggregate it with all this stuff.
Not only that, and I think this is what's putting people off.
You said doctors and stuff.
There is a huge overstatement for whatever reason.
Maybe it's because people have anecdotal...
Maybe they're treating patients like, I know this works.
Maybe they're passionate about it because of that.
Or maybe there's also people that are pretty much just not wanting...
They think vaccines are harmful and they want to find something else they can champion.
So I think...
They're doing harm to the ivermectin world by sensationalizing it and making it like this miracle thing.
Because it is doing harm.
And I had a knee-jerk reaction at first.
It was like, oh, no, I know this is like, you can't say something's 99% effective.
Like, no clinical trial known to human history has ever shown something 99% effective.
Right?
So that was like a red flag.
But, you know, so there's a couple of things here.
There's therapeutic treatment with ivermectin.
And then there's prophylactic, right?
Taking it if you know you've been exposed, in which case I think is a little more reasonable than like, I'm going to take it instead of a vaccine, in which case there is no evidence that ivermectin is going to protect you from getting it like a vaccine or prevent you from being hospitalized by vaccine.
There's certainly, I don't even know if there's any evidence on Delta variant.
So that's another issue, but My opinion is that when I look at all the data, I see like, you know, you'll see like, again, it's like all over the place.
They're using this and that.
But just forget all that.
And, you know, it seems to me like there's huge variation in, you know, things like mortality.
Which makes sense.
I would think something like this would be more effective if you give it earlier on and you're preventing from, you know, severe hospitalization or something like that.
And that one got withdrawn because there was a falsification of data.
They were enrolling patients.
Patients had died, and they were enrolling them after they had died.
It's like, okay, that was not right.
So I do think, it is my opinion, I've known people, not knowing them personally, my family has friends That were taking ivermectin that was prescribed by a doctor.
By the way, taking animal-grade ivermectin is a huge...
Like, that could be bad because the dose is way off.
Way, way off.
And people are doing that and they're getting harmed.
I think people should make that decision based on information.
I hope they choose to.
I'm not telling someone to do something, but I hope they choose to.
It is the safest way to protect yourself from this and also to help us get our society back to normal and also help not overwhelm ICUs because you don't want to get in a car accident or have a heart attack if the ICU is full.
It's called foundmyfitness.com forward slash JRE. It has timelines and notes to every podcast we did with references to a lot of the stuff talked about.
For all other nine of them and soon to be this one as well.