12 Easy & Practical Ways To Upgrade Your Body & Brain (Ben Greenfield's Live Talk From NextHealth I

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet, from seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

So anyways, the show notes for everything.

That you're about to hear.

I'm going to put those over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com wellness wheel that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com WellnessWheel and also you can go listen to the previous podcast that I did with Dr. Darshan Shah of the NexHealth Clinic, who's just a wealth of knowledge. That one's@BenGreenfieldFitness.com NextHealthPodcast so a lot of things to remember, but it's BenGreenfieldFitness.com WellnessWheel is the shownotes for this podcast. BenGreenfieldFitness.com NexthealthClinic is where you can get 500 bucks off the MRI and all that jazz. And then BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Is where you can go listen to my previous podcast with Dr. Shah. I love what these folks are doing. Today's show, by the way, is brought to you by the brand new Berry Aminos. Essential amino acids are something I've talked about a lot before for maintaining muscle mass, for maintaining anabolism even if you're in a fasted state, for helping with sleep and neurotransmitters, for repairing the gut, for repairing the joints. And we just launched a brand new addictively good flavor over@getkion.com you can take one scoop, you can take two scoops. I dump it straight into my mouth because I'm a freak. But you can also mix it with water. You can mix it into a smoothie. It is one of the best ways, even more thoroughly absorbed than collagen, to feed amino acids into your system. Main Light them, bleed them in. Used to be a secret of the bodybuilding industry back when I was a bodybuilder. And now these things are hitting the mainstream and they frickin work. So we launched a brand new berry flavor. Tested the hell out of it. It tastes amazing. Go to kion getkeon.com and what you want to look for are the berry aminos. They taste really good. This podcast is also brought to you by Organifi Organifi. Because I have to talk sexy whenever I talk about organifi, they made the most wonderful extract that is golden milk. It contains turkey tail mushroom, lemon balm, reishi mushroom, ginger for your achy muscles and joints and to help with your gut. And they also have black pepper which when added to the turmeric, increases the medicinal potency of the turmeric by like 200 times. So it's very interesting and it tastes really good. It doesn't taste like you're drinking mushrooms and turmeric and medicine, even though it is medicine.

It is one of those things that I recommend you sip at night. Mix it with some hot coconut milk or hot almond milk or rice milk or hemp milk or water or what have you. Drink this at night and that's the time to do it. In my opinion, it just knocks you out. So go to Organifi. That's organifi with an I organifi.com and when you use code Greenfield, you're going to save 20% off of anything from our friends at Organifi. So enjoy that and enjoy this episode. You're about to hear again, all the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wellness Wheel Enjoy.

Big hand to Ben Greenfield, everybody.

Thank you. Thank you, guys. This is kind of like almost like a town hall health talk, and I want this to be super interactive for y'. All. So sometimes I'll. I'll give a talk and I'll have like a formal PowerPoint and a, and a suit and tie and all that jazz. But Today, as, as Dr. Shah alluded to, I want to go over this big comprehensive wellness wheel because it's pretty sick you guys can't see it there on that side. But basically there's a whole wheel here that goes over diet and micronutrients and exercise and movement, inflammation immunity. And what I thought would be cool because it's so comprehensive is I just want to give you one or two of my top tips in each of those categories. And I want to make this very interactive. I want to talk about what's specific to you, answer your burning questions, as long as it doesn't have anything to do with the strange growth on your right forearm or something like that. We'll try and keep this relevant to the whole crowd, but it's going to be very Q and A ish tonight. So the way that the Q and A will work is I will dive into each topic and we'll just dwell on that topic. We'll open it up, we'll ferment on it, we'll do some questions on it and then kind of move on to the next topic. So you can at any point, if you have a question, just raise your hand, we'll run a mic out to you, answer your question, and then continue to move on through the wellness wheel. So does that sound like a plan to you guys or do you just want me to talk at you for the next hour? I thought, okay, all right, we'll make it more of a conversation. And I literally just took some notes on, on my, on my phone. This is very, very formal about each of the different aspects of the wheel that I want to cover. I also put a longevity guide. I worked on like a free PDF for everybody here. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com NextHealthTalk BenGreenfieldFitness.com nextHealth Talk is where you can download this, this PDF that's got a whole bunch more I made it to focus more on like the longevity and anti aging piece. So there's a whole bunch more content for you there too, if you guys want some extra goodies. So that being said, we can start wherever we want on this wheel, but I'm going to start at the top under diet and micronutrients. Diet and micronutrients because I get a lot of questions about this. What is the perfect human diet? What should you eat to enhance your health? Should you go keto? Should you go vegan? Should you go carnivore? Should you do alternate day, intermittent fast, fmd, XYZ type of approach? And the fact is, we live in an era of self quantification where in my opinion, every single person in here should be on the diet that is unique for them. Because if you take, let's say like a ketogenic diet, how many of you in here are on the new trendy ketogenic diet? High fat, low carb fasting, sticks of butter in your coffee and coconut oil for dinner? Well, the fact is, I mean, a lot of people have things like a genetic variant, right? There's a genetic variant, APOE 4 4. And it would dictate that you could have a pretty deleterious response to saturated fats and you would do better on a diet rich in Mediterranean fats that maybe only has 5 to 10% of some of those fats that are solid at room temperature. Many people get genetically tested and they've got something like familial hypercholesteremia dictating that even though cholesterol is good, like, I'm not shoving cholesterol into the bandwagon for some people. Cholesterol goes way, way up on a high fat diet. Some people have gallbladder issues, liver issues that limit the amount of bile that they can produce, hence dictating that they're not able to digest the fats as easily. And it's not genetically based. It's just the fact that you have an organ that needs work prior to launching into something like a high fat diet. So in my opinion, when we're talking about the first aspects of this wheel diet and micronutrients, you must choose a diet that's specific to you. Now, that being said, pretty much every single healthy diet, we see some of the same things over and over again popping up, right? In a lot of these blue zones, we see plant intake, right? High wild plant intake. I don't care whether you're high fat, low carb, low fat, high carb, you must eat a high intake of wild plant matter. It appears, based on a lot of the blue zones and a lot of these areas where there's a high number of centenarians, we see high plant intake, we see a very big focus on limitations in glucose fluctuations, something called glycemic variability, right? Eating in a way that keeps your blood glucose from fluctuating during the day, or moving in a way that keeps your blood glucose from fluctuating during the day.

I'll give you one other example. We see that when people eat, they're eating in a parasympathetically driven state, right? You're sitting. Like, I don't sit a lot, but I sit to eat. And I chew my food for a long period of time. And I try to eat in a social setting where I'm surrounded by people and there. And there's talk and laughter and socializing and relationships and a lot of these things that keep you from just like stuffing food really quickly into your gaping maw and then moving on. Like eating when you're driving, eating when you're commuting, eating by yourself when you're toying around on Netflix or replying to emails, etc. We don't see that as a healthy characteristic of a diet that's built for health and longevity. So even though eating according to your genetics, your blood, your biomarkers, your unique body is important, there are also prevailing characteristics that we see over and over again in choosing a diet that's correct for you. And another part of this wellness wheel is, of course, micronutrients. Right? And a big part of the micronutrient piece, in my opinion, is you must choose meals that are not only digestible, but also nutrient dense. What do I mean by that? Take quinoa, for example. Who in here eats quinoa? Which I used to pronounce quinoa until I actually heard someone say it properly. You get like a bag. Let's say you get a bag of quinoa from Costco and you make it. You follow the package directions, and you wind up with quinoa in your turds, in the toilet, and an upset stomach. And you think that this trendy superfood quinoa is something that F's up your gut. When in fact, quinoa, while being very nutrient dense, has to be rendered digestible. You have to soak it, you have to rinse it. In many cases, you can sprout it, and you take something that's nutrient dense. You unlock the micronutrients by making it digestible. You could look at other food groups that are highly digestible, like sugar. Right. Is sugar digestible? Yeah, you start to digest that with the salivary amylase in your mouth. As soon as it hits your. Hits. Hits your mouth. But is it nutrient dense? Could argue no. I mean, there's some things like blackstrap molasses and raw honey and sugarcane that give you some minerals and some nutrient density. But ultimately, sugar, although digestible, doesn't fall into the category of nutrient density. So you choose a diet that's right for you. You customize it based on your body. You follow these themes that we see over and over again in healthy cultures, like fasting, like limitation of glycemic variability, like wild plant intake, like eating in a parasympathetic state. And then you choose foods that are nutrient dense and digestible. In my opinion, probably if we were to choose one diet that's pretty close to being a perfect human diet, if you could tweak it here and there for your needs, it would be something that's very inclusive of a wide variety of food groups. Something like the Weston A. Price diet, where you're eating dairy and you're eating grains and you're eating plants and you're eating fermented foods and you're Eating organ meats, and you're eating a wide variety of foods. And sure, before embarking upon a diet like that, you might need to heal up a leaky gut, you might need to fix a gallbladder, do a liver cleanse, etc. But your goal should be, no matter what kind of diet you're on, to get to the point where you can include as many different food groups as possible. Then you treat the carb fat protein ratios based on you. So that's, that's the first part of the wellness wheels, the diet and micronutrients. Now, based on that, who has some questions about diet in general? Choosing the diet for you? Micronutrients. And let's just run a mic to some of the folks who have, who have their hands up. We'll just take like two or three questions for each section here.

Hey, what's going on, man? Hey, if you've done something like 23andMe, and mine came back like 100% European, now, how do you.

100%, 100%.

No Asian, no, nothing, surprisingly, or anything.

Else, very surprising, a little boring.

But how would you go about picking, like, the diet from 100% European? Do you go back 100 years, a thousand years? How do you figure out what they ate?

What would be your epigenetic mechanisms start to kick in after about two or three generations. You don't have to go that far back. You don't have to do 10,000 years ago, what were people eating in Northern Europe.

But you're going on.

Yeah, yeah, we know that, that folks in that region, they do a lot of fermenting, pickling, curing, high amount of fish intake, high amount of, like, fermented, like, like canned vegetable intake, not a lot of citrus fruits, right? Not, not a lot of starches, you know, lower levels of amylase production in the mouth. So it's. So it's kind of fun. It's kind of like a little bit of detective work. And there are good books that could walk you through the process. Like Dr. Daphne Miller has the book the Jungle Effect, right? Which talks about how to eat according to your ancestry and the type of diet she would put her patients on based off of the area of the world that they came from. And when you combine that with something like a really good, say, food allergy test, some blood and biomarker analysis to see what specific micronutrients or vitamins that you might be deficient in, and maybe even a gut panel, right? Like a microbiome panel where you could look at everything from Your gallbladder, your liver, parasites, yeast, fungus, etc. Etc. Then you could start to put the pieces together. Yeah. You don't have to go that far back in your ancestry two or three generations. If you're lucky enough to have grandparents who are still alive, like, you can talk to them about, you know, what their diet was, what their mom and dad ate, and you really don't have to go that far back. Okay, so awesome. Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. That's actually, you know, total rabbit hole. But that's why I'm not a huge fan. You know, I have, I have a lot of friends who are like families who are like the. This seems like really trendy nowadays, like the nomadic homeschooling, you know, Internet entrepreneur, working from the road type of life. But I think when it comes to setting up your, your gut microbiome, your skin microbiome, a more intimate relationship with the actual biome of the environment in which you're living, the advantages of having like, like, like a home base, like a castle that you call home, and raising your family in the same place where maybe you lived, your parents lived, you know, but like, thinking forward in terms of like a family trust and maybe amassing land for your children in a certain location, like, try to keep. I think there are definite advantages to having a local. A relationship with your local environment, your local family setting, etc. I think that translates to diet as well, so. Yeah. Good question. Yes, sir. Amen. How do you go about testing for a leaky gut and then how you.

Go about fixing it and also specifically.

What you watch out for when it.

Comes to insets and how those react.

With the gut and the stomach lining. Yeah. So in terms of identifying a leaky gut, you could get basically just a stool panel, like Genova Diagnostics, for example. They'll let you go to direct labs or any laboratory testing website. That's something you don't even need a physician to order. You can just order a test and what it'll do is test for parasites, yeast, fungus, but also a lot of inflammatory markers in the gut that could be indicative of leaky gut if you don't even want to test. I mean, in many cases, seeing large food particles or like fatty deposits in your stool. For those of you who run an Instagram channel that shows pictures of your poop, this is something you can keep track of. I know some people that do that, but the idea is you can pay attention to symptoms or you can also just pay attention to markers of inflammation on something like a three day Gut panel. And if you do have leaky gut, typically the fix is combining an elimination diet, right? Something like, like an SCD diet, specific carbohydrate diet or a GAPS diet. That's called a gut and psychology syndrome diet or a paleo autoimmune diet, none of which are diets unless you've got a full blown celiac disease. I think anyone should be on for their whole life. But you do a diet like that for eight to 12 weeks, right? Allow your gut to heal and you combine that with a lot of things that we know help to restore the mucosal lining of the gut and shut down inflammation in the gut, like bone broth, L glutamine, colostrum, chia seed. There's a lot of things that help to restore the lining of the gut. Colostrum is another really good one. And at that point you would then ideally return to a more inclusive diet after you've healed your gut. As far as NSAIDs, a lot of, I think a lot of people are aware nowadays that like ibuprofen and Advil are not God's gift to mankind. Like those things are not that great, especially with what we know about the ability of curcumin and Boswellia and a lot of these more natural compounds to act in an anti inflammatory way, you know, in a much more natural manner. But, but with NSAIDs, a lot of the research is showing that when combined with heat, when combined with movement, you get liver toxicity, kidney toxicity. It shocks me when I talk to like my Ironman triathlon friends who are still popping ibuprofen during the race to quell pain. So I'm not a fan of those in just about any circumstance when there's so many natural alternatives out there. So, yeah, you've got one right here. Yeah, I mean, like Kion Flex, this is one of the supplements I formulated and it's just like curcumin and Boswelli and proteolytic enzymes and all the things you do if you didn't want to do ibuprofen. So thank you for throwing me that softball, by the way, and putting that there. All right, well, we want to make sure we hit every aspect of the wellness wheel. So we're just going to keep on rolling through and I'm going to move on to exercise and movement. Exercise and movement. Again, I get a question very similar to, like, what's the perfect human diet? What's the perfect exercise program? And again, the answer is it depends. It's highly dependent on your goals. Are you like somebody who wants to do an ironman. Are you somebody who just wants to live a long time? Are you somebody who wants to put on muscle? Are you somebody who wants to lose fat? But ultimately, in my opinion, the perfect exercise and movement protocol should expose your body to certain physiological triggers that I think everybody will benefit from. Triggers that have been associated with things like decreased risk of mortality, improved cardiovascular status, improved performance and metabolism, et cetera. So what would those be? There's a few of them. Number one is your maximum oxygen utilization, what's called your VO2 max. I think everybody, every one to two weeks, based on research, should do something that targets your maximum oxygen utilization. This dictates that instead of doing these very short, trendy high intensity interval training sessions that are like 30 seconds, 60 seconds, et cetera, you actually have to move at your maximum sustainable pace for about four to five minutes. Now, this wouldn't be an exercise session that you do every day, but just a couple of times. It would be a couple of times a month, up to four times a month. I do this once a week. You do interval training. That's longer intervals with longer rest periods. An example of that would be four minutes of exercise at your maximum sustainable pace, followed by four minutes of recovery, like a one to one work to rest ratio. And you would do that like four to five times through. That's called your VO2 max. Another area you should target is your mitochondria. The mitochondria respond very well to very short exercise bursts followed by long recovery periods. So you target your VO2 max with the longer exercise sessions and the longer recovery periods. You target your mitochondria with the short, intense exercise sessions and the long recovery period. So this would be like 30 seconds hard, two minutes easy, four times through. Something like that. And as you begin to plan out your exercise program for the week, you're just making sure that you check all of these boxes. Another one that I think everybody should focus on is lactic acid tolerance, which is correlated to growth hormone and testosterone. An example of that is. Anybody in here ever heard of a Tabata set? T A, B, A T, A? These are very simple. They're four minutes long. Everybody raised their hand, made a look of disgust because they're difficult, they burn. But it's 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, eight times through. It's a four minute set. It's fabulous. It's something that you could start and end a weight training session with, for example, or start or end a weight training session session with. It's Called a tabata set. Very good for your lactic acid tolerance. Okay, so we got lactic acid, we got mitochondria, we got VO2 max. Number four would be stamina. I think that everybody at least once a week should get out and do something long in a fasted state. I love to do like a Saturday or Sunday morning hike right where I wake up fasted, go train my body how to burn fatty acids very efficiently, train it how to go for a longer time without feeling fuel. Sometimes this could be a bike ride, sometimes it could be a swim, hike, walk, what have you. But the idea is you're training your body to go for longer periods of time in the absence of trail mix and energy bars. Okay, so those are hitting a lot of your cardiovascular parameters. And then the only other two things to really worry about from a movement and an exercise standpoint would be the strength component, the muscle component. So what I like is at least one to two times a week you lift heavy stuff in a very controlled, slow, very good form fashion. This would be like a super slow exercise protocol or a five by five workout where you're doing five sets of five reps of some full body moves like a bench press, a deadlift, a squat, a shoulder press and some kind of a core movement, right? You don't have to do a lot of those, but doing the super slow strength, I like to do that about two to three times a week. And then the area you won't hit with that is the type of muscle fiber that's very explosive, very fast twitch. So one to two additional times a week you do like a very short like New York Times had a great article on the seven minute workout where you're doing bodyweight training. Very intense 30 second efforts, 15 seconds off or 30 second efforts, 10 seconds off, move on to the next exercise. And when you weave all these together into a program, right, VO2 max, mitochondria, lactic acid, stamina, heavy lifting, and some kind of explosive movement. You're checking a lot of the boxes that you need to kind of like be a Batman of fitness, right? To have multiple skills, to be able to get out and play just about any sport that you want. And as long as you're engaged in low level physical activity during the day, as long as you're like these people who are standing up during my talk as opposed to these lazy asses who are sitting in their chairs, then you're probably going to going to check a lot of the boxes when it comes to the exercise and movement piece. The Only last thing I would say is sometimes mobility is underemphasized, like hitting the foam roller, doing like, you know, the cross ball on the hips, getting a massage, that type of thing. The way I do that is I just wake up for the first 10 to 15 minutes of every day. I'll make love to a foam roller, I'll take out some kind of vibrating exercise gun, I'll hit my quads with a lacrosse ball, whatever. So by the end of the week, I've amassed like 70 to 90 minutes of mobility work that I'll just do in the morning while I'm breathing or listening to some morning audio or something like that. So that's how I weave together all the exercise and the movement component. So based on that, what kind of questions you guys have about movement, about exercise, about fat loss or muscle gain or anything kind of related to this component? Yeah. So quick question. You talked about it on a podcast recently. If you want to, if you are doing early morning workouts, especially, you know, you got to go to work, but you want to stay fasted, what's the best thing to do post workout?

You know, there's different things like EAAs and whatnot.

What's your advice for getting the best recovery from the workout and maximizing what you did? Yeah, evidence does show that if you wait to eat after a workout that you actually experience an increase in growth hormone and testosterone. The only exception to this would be if you're getting up in the morning and you're working out in a fasted state, in which case, since you're already fasted during the workout, it would actually benefit you too. Sometime within about 20 to 60 minutes after that morning workout. Assuming it's kind of a robust, challenging workout to eat, to have breakfast. Now, if you're more working out in the afternoon, the evening, earlier in the day, you've already fed, you can actually benefit from waiting one to two hours or more after your workout. And you don't have to take in like amino acids or some kind of supplement like that even in that scenario, unless your goal is muscle gain. Right. Staying in as anabolic a state as possible. So post workout nutrition tends to be heavily overemphasized. The only time I tell people to emphasize it is if you've done a hard workout in a fasted state in the morning, then it behooves you to actually prioritize getting nutrition back into your body. Otherwise, with the only exception to this rule being if you're going to exercise hard again within about eight hours and you got to replenish your glycogen levels and your amino acids and everything. Then you don't have to drop everything and go eat after workout. And you could actually benefit from a hormonal standpoint and a fat loss standpoint by just letting yourself go until your next meal. And I do that very, very often. My scenario is I'll typically I'll wake up in a fasted state. I do easy exercise and then I'll have breakfast sometime within the next couple of hours. And then I do my afternoon or evening workout having not eaten for four to six hours, you know, since lunchtime. And then after that workout, I'll wait another one to two hours until dinner. What are the kind of exercise questions do we got?

Hey, regarding the super slow approach, I've read Doug McGuff's book Body by Science, and he kind of promotes more of a one week approach with needing six to seven days of recovery. And you've mentioned maybe doing two to three times a week. Can you talk about that in terms of are you changing up what you're doing or do you think you could do the same super slow twice a week?

Yeah. Doug McGuff wrote a good book called Body by Science in which he highlights a lot, a lot of the peripheral and central cardiovascular benefits of lifting a single set to failure. Right? Like one single set of chest pressure, shoulder press, pull down, seated row and leg press, for example. And he endorses doing that just once a week. You know, it's like a 12 to 18 minute workout. But he's also working primarily with either a sick or a senior population, right, whose goal is to just stave off cachexia or sarcopenia or loss of muscle. I think that in the general population, who's a little bit healthier than who he is accustomed to working with, you can see better gains in muscle and better maintenance in muscle by doing the workout more frequently than that. In addition, we can't necessarily deny the fact that for some people, including myself, like some kind of lifting or some kind of exercise is almost like meditation. Right. It just feels good to go out and move. And sure, maybe you don't have to lift something heavy and do an exhausting workout like that more than one time a week. But you know, myself included, I just feel a lot better when I'm doing something like two to three times a week and my muscles just feel more capable. So I think that you gotta couch some of Dr. McGuff's advice in light of the fact that he's working with Kind of a population that isn't necessarily athletic and may not even be as robust as the general population.

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Wild caught Alaskan salmon. You also get 20 bucks off your first box from Butcherbox. Very, very simple. You just go to butcherbox.com Ben that's butcherbox.com Ben you, you will be thanking me, trust me. Butcherbox. Oh, by the way, did I mention they have free shipping? Yeah, free shipping anywhere in the 48 states. Delivered right to your door on dry ice. Butcherbox.com Ben hey, you want to talk life insurance? It's one of those topics that everyone knows just a little bit about. But really like if you want to actually buy life insurance, then it's pretty easy to get had to get taken advantage of. And it's hard. Like it can be confusing. And a lot of people, especially life insurance newbies, but many, many folks who just want to make the very best decision on life insurance are using this company now. It's called PolicyGenius. They made this brilliant little website and it allows you to compare quotes, it allows you to get really good life insurance advice and of course, most importantly, to get actual life insurance coverage. The advisors at policygenius handle all the red tape. They negotiate your rate with the insurance company. There's no extra fees, there's no commission. Sales agents, because those people are super annoying. They're just helpful advice and personalized service and they make it easy. They also do disability insurance, they do homeowners, they do auto. It's pretty cool. Handy Dandy little website smart folks over there. So it's policygenius.com policygenius.com the Easy Way to compare and buy life insurance. No matter how much or how little you know about life insurance, you can get the right policy in minutes@policygenius.com so.

The next section of the wellness wheel is sleep. It's sleep. And of course, I could talk about sleep for a long time. And there's of course, all of these rules that we know about when it comes to proper sleep hygiene, right? Sleep in a cool environment. Preferably sleep with as few clothes on as possible. Although you can put socks on because when you keep your feet warm, it allows the rest of your body to stay cool. That's a good little trick. But you sleep with your socks on, wearing as little as possible. You, you keep the room cold. You keep the room silent. Or you pump white noise in through some kind of an app or some kind of a noise player next to your bed. You keep the room dark, preferably. You wear blue light blocking glasses. You install things like red incandescent bulbs in the bedroom so that there's not harsh artificial light. You use the bedroom for sleep or for sex, but. But not a lot else. You don't do business on your bed with your laptop. You don't lay in bed reading books about your career or about things that are going to keep you up at night thinking about them. And a lot of these things are. They're becoming increasingly common knowledge when it comes to sleep hygiene. What I've found, though, is something a lot of people don't go out of their way to emphasize is exposure to as much natural blue light as possible early in the day, getting your ass outdoors as soon as possible in the morning when the sun has come up, and exposing yourself to sunlight early in the day. That was one of the most profound things I've done in the past two years to increase my deep sleep percentages is my blue light exposure early in the day, preferably to as wide a spectrum of light as possible. Now I understand. You know, for me, I live on a slope in the forest. Sometimes it's, it's dark. I don't have a lot of sun. You guys are in L. A. Sometimes you get this thing called smog. You know, first few times that I came to LA and I'd open up my. My curtains in my hotel room and look outside, I'd think it was just like a. Like a Seattle gray, dreary day. And I realized that's just, that's just fricking smog. But there are, there are things like blue light producing glasses, blue light producing ear devices, blue light producing panels, or just light producing panels that you can see, stand in front of or bathe your body in front of to get as much blue light as possible early in the day. But that, I think is probably one of the, one of the top sleep tips that I think flies under the radar is getting out and getting as much light as you can. I mean, like, you know, the, the blue light blocking glasses. Sometimes I will see people wearing those in inappropriate scenarios, like outside, in, in the daytime. Like, you know, for example, Matt, you're wearing your blue light blocking glasses right now. But it is, it is technically, I think the sun has set outside. When the sun has set in whatever area of the world you happen to be in, that's when you should start to limit your blue light exposure. Furthermore, even if it's the middle of the day and you're working on your computer or you're underneath bright LED or fluorescent lights, that's another appropriate scenario to wear glasses like that. Although my, my personal protocol is I use the clear ones during the day, so I'm blocking some of those wavelengths of light. Then I'll switch to like a red or an orange at night. So I've got kind of, kind of two different lenses that I'll use. But ultimately the idea is that, you know, blue light gets shoved under the bus. Sometimes people like, oh, light's going to keep you awake at night. But light early in the day is actually a pretty good thing, especially natural light as much as possible. So what kind of questions do you guys have about sleep?

Ben, thank you for being here with all of us. Appreciate it big time, man. I have a question about rem. You know, I know you've talked quite a bit on your podcast about the importance of deep sleep, increasing that. And on my aura data, I tend to get over two hours of deep sleep, but under an hour of REM usually. What do you usually. Is that a concern? And what do you usually do for people in that scenario?

Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of people, they tend to have deficits in deep sleep, not REM sleep.

You know, I think a big part of sleep architecture is related to a lot of those sleep hygiene concepts that I talked about. Being able to bring yourself through each sleep cycle is related to light, is related to the sound in the room, is related to thoughts that might be racing through your head and not doing business in bed. It's, et cetera. Have you ever looked into things like sleep apnea or your oxygen utilization during sleep, anything along those lines? Because one thing that you can do is you can wear a continuous pulse oximeter while you're sleeping and then you can get that data. Some oximeters will give you your oxygenation during an entire night of sleep and you can look at that. And if there are certain periods where your oxygen is dropping pretty rapidly, that could indicate sleep apnea. They'll be pulling you out of normal sleep architecture. And that's something a lot of people deal with. Happens more in like back sleepers than side sleepers. Happens in people who have a lot of mouth breathing or shallow chest breathing during the day. They tend to revert to that at night as well. And there are really good books about this type of thing, like Patrick McCown's book the Oxygen Advantage that teaches you how to begin to breathe through your nose. On my podcast, I've interviewed a guy named Dr. Joseph Zelk and we really geeked out on sleep apnea and how big of an issue that is when it comes to sleep cycles. That's something you could look into. Yeah, yeah. So I would consider something like that.

How's it going, Ben?

Yeah, pretty good, man.

What do you think about the benefits of waking up for the sunrise to get someone's circadian rhythm rolling in the morning versus sleeping in a little bit later until you wake up naturally? Or maybe trying to get to a point where you wake up naturally that early before you wake up?

Yeah. If you're lucky enough to have a lifestyle that allows you to go to bed within about two to three hours after sunset and then wake with the sunrise, that's ideal. That's the way that nature is supposed to operate. However, we live in a post industrial era. Right. Like, I doubt any of you are going to be in bed about an hour from now. Right. We just live in an era where stuff happens at night. We've got all of the magic and the, the convenience of artificial lighting, but of course it's. It means we're constantly fighting an uphill battle because as anyone who has been camping frequently knows, you get tired like at 8 or 9pm and it's pretty rare for you to be up past 10pm when you're camping. But then as soon as you're shifted back into an environment like this, it's pretty damn hard to go to bed soon after the sunset. And it's especially hard to go to bed at say like 10 or 11pm and get up with the sunrise at 5, 5am Right. Not a lot of us are Navy SEALs and Jocko Willink and David Goggins and all these guys, they figure out how to do it. But some of these cats are wired up kind of differently and maybe shortening their lifespan and their recovery and their memory consolidation from some of that shortened sleep. So in my opinion, it depends if you can truly and I, you know, there are some people I work with, they go to bed at 8pm and they get up at 4am and that's great if your lifestyle accommodates that.

And the other issue is a lot of people will say, okay, well I've got four days of the week that I actually can do that. But then these three days of the week, I'm not going to get to bed until 11pm, so I got to get up at 6am or 7am the problem with that is the human body does very well with regular sleep wake cycles. In an ideal scenario, your best sleep data, your best sleep architecture is going to come from going to bed at a frequent time and getting up at a frequent time. That's normal. And like for me personally, that's 10pm to 6am for you it could be midnight to 7am but whatever it is, like having the normal sleep wake cycles is very important. So yeah, it's tough. But in an ideal scenario, yeah, you go to bed soon after sunset, you get up with sunrise. I'm more of like a 10pm to 6am guy, but it's a good question. All right, let's move on to cardiovascular health. Number four, cardiovascular health. There's all sorts of things we can talk about when it comes to cardiovascular cardiovascular health. But in my opinion, the number one thing that you need to consider is the health of your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is what innervates the SA nodes, the electrical cells of your heart. And in an ideal scenario, you've got feedback from your sympathetic branch and your parasympathetic branch of your nervous system feeding into your heart, keeping your heart on cue, having a high, what's called heart rate variability. Who in here knows about or tracks that? Their hrb, their heart rate variability, all that is. And there are devices now, you know, like I'm wearing a ring that does it. A lot of these self quantification wearables now do it. That measurement is the amount of time in between each beat of your heart. It's not your heart rate, it's the amount of time in between each beat of your heart. And in an ideal scenario, there's slight micro differences between Each single beat that reflects a robust nervous system and in many cases a healthier cardiovascular system. Because your cardiovascular system is responding very well to the cues that your nervous system is sending to it. How do you increase the health of your vagus nerves that your heart rate is better able to respond to the cues from your nervous system? It actually comes down to a lot of things that are kind of almost like kind of woo, kind of spiritual chanting, singing hummingbirds, good relationships, getting out in the cold, getting exposed to some heat every now and again.

Good breath work, deep nasal breathing. There are a lot of things that enhance the health of the vagus nerve. And there's technology too. I mean, there's companies like Fisher Wallace, for example, and, and I own a couple of these units. They'll, they'll make vagal nerve stimulators, which typically go on either side of the head. Sometimes they'll be located closer to the neck, but these things actually stimulate, stimulate the vagus nerve and increase the tone of the vagus nerve so that your nervous system is speaking to your cardiovascular system in a more efficient way. Now, in my opinion, a lot of people would experience improvements in their cardiovascular status if they were to focus on good interplay between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. And one example of that would be your heart rate slows when you breathe out, and it speeds up when you breathe in. And in most scenarios, you should be taking a longer time breathing out than you take when you breathe in. And again, books like that one I mentioned, the Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McCown, teaches you to do this. I have this little device called a relaxator that I got out of a book. I forget the name of it. It's like the Art of Breath or something like that by author Anders Olson. And I'll put this thing in my mouth and go for a walk. And what it is, is it's a device that forces you to breathe through your nose and, and then it gives you resistance as you breathe out through your mouth. So it teaches you how to retain oxygen and also retain carbon dioxide at the same time and breathe out very slowly. And when I do this, my HRV goes notably higher. You can also do this, you know, when you're meditating, sitting in the sauna, laying in bed, but knowing how to tweak your vagus nerve and even kind of getting dialed into some of the, some of the neurofeedback apps or rings or self quantification devices that allow you to track your HRV is very prudent. When it comes to your cardiovascular status, especially when combined with some of those exercise tips I gave you. Right. Like high intensity interval training, lactic acid training, VO2 max training. So you're trying to get the interplay between the nervous system and the cardiovascular system. I think that's one of the best things you can do for your heart. What kind of questions you guys have about cardiovascular health?

At one point, you had mentioned in.

A podcast something about fat being oxidized through breath.

So with what you're saying here, have.

You ever come across any studies about, like, singing and fat loss.

If you dance a lot when you're singing? Maybe. No, I have not come across any studies about singing and fat loss, but I can't say I've ever gone on PubMed and looked for singing fat loss. The idea that you're alluding to is the fact that we do lose a great deal of our carbon and the fat that we're burning through the breath, and that's one of the reasons that exercise works, is you're breathing rapidly, you're moving oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, and it enhances fat loss. But ultimately, I can't say that singing, although it's wonderful for the vagus nerve, singing, chanting, humming, like I was talking about, I don't know that it would increase fat loss, but it's great for the vagus nerve and it's great for cardiovascular health. Sing in the shower, baby. One other question about cardiovascular.

Hi, Ben.

Talking about hrv, a lot of people discuss how you can improve parasympathetic tone, but no one really talks about.

Improving sympathetic tone.

Mm.

Any thoughts on, you know, personally speaking? This might not relate to anyone else, but.

If you've got a consistently low lf.

Yep.

And, you know, low sympathetic tone. Any thoughts on what might be going on and how you might address.

Yeah, clarification of a few terms.

When this gentleman says HF and lf, if you were to download, like, a neurofeedback app for your heart rate variability, like, there's one called Nature Beat, there's another one called Sweet Beat, and these will actually give you scores for what's called your hf, which stands for high frequency, and your lf, which stands for low frequency. Now, your HF is indicative of your parasympathetic nervous system score your parasympathetic nervous system health slash tone. The hf, or the I'm sorry, the lf, is indicative of your sympathetic nervous system tone. And the idea is that you would want a high HF and a high lf, which is going to give you a high overall heart rate variability. And if you had a low.

Lf, that would indicate a low sympathetic nervous system tone. Now, there are certain things that stress or that train the sympathetic nervous system. Sprinting is one example. Or like running from the lion, running from the tiger for very brief bursts, like 10 to 30 seconds. I've used these apps to track my sympathetic nervous system stress during exercise. And you know the one exercise that stresses sympathetic tone the most? It's a back squat. A back squat barbell on your back, performing a back squat. So I actually go out of my way to include back squats as part of my workout, because that's a great way to get your sympathetic tone going. Basically, anything that makes you feel as though you're being attacked by a cougar or running from a lion. And in moderation, right? Not like chronically throughout the whole day, running from all the lines, jumping out from the email inbox in your computer, but just brief periods of time spent doing that with long recovery periods. That's the way that I would go after sympathetic tone. And if you do that and also combine that with some of the other exercise things I talk about, like stamina for your parasympathetic tone, slow eating, relaxation, meditation, breathing, you're kind of hitting both elements of the nervous system. But do you.

Do you think that low sympathetic tone is indicative of any, you know, any particular health concerns?

It could be. I mean, you. You can always get an ekg, you know, like a stress EKG and a resting EKG.

From a physician and find out if you actually have, like, paraventricular contractions or other electrical abnormalities of the heart. But that's. That's something you would actually have to have overseen by a physician.

So.

Yeah. Okay, let's go. Let's go to number five. Brain health. Brain health. I suppose the soapbox that I want to get on here. How many of you in here take smart drugs, nootropics, microdose with LSD and psilocybin, lion's mane, all this stuff. Like, a lot of people are doing that these days. But what you have to realize is that the mechanism of action for many of these compounds is they flood your synaptic clefts with dopamine and with serotonin neurotransmitters that in increasingly high levels can render you increasingly or increasingly insensitive to the action of those compounds. Meaning constant stimulation, even with something in a bottle that says it's good for your brain is gonna make you Think, think faster and be smarter and improve cognitive performance and IQ and executive function. The idea is still that you are robbing Peter to pay Paul. You're still flooding yourself with neurotransmitters. And if you are depending on that for daily energy, then the world of smart drugs and nootropics is not doing you any service. And I find that myself, and probably many of you have experienced this as well. You wake up and once you've started to use whatever it might be, caffeine, nicotine, lion's mane, you know, any of these different stacks, from siltep to qualia to alpha brain to, you know, there's like a million of them out there and I know a lot of people are taking them. The problem is, if that becomes like your daily multivitamin, there's an issue. You are creating dopamine and serotonin excesses or deficiencies that closely mimic what you'd be getting if you were to be using like a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or some other antidepressant on a daily basis. So if you are finding yourself reliant upon those compounds, in my opinion, you need to back off and dial in your sleep and your energy levels first. For me, the best way to do this is I love to camp and I love to hunt. And when I go off on a camp camping trip or a bow hunting trip, I go very usually there's like pack weight specifications, etc, like, you know, like my, my next hunt is 10 days long up in Alaska, I can only have £50. And once you add up my, my gun and my bow and my food and my clothes, like, I can't have like eight bottles of supplements in my bag. So I got to just strip myself down and go with nothing and just focus on sleep, breath work to control cortisol and to allow myself to relax. Consumption of good plant foods or wild meat, to be able to get my multivitamins and my minerals and ultimately having those periods of year of the year where you strip down, where you switch to decaf instead of regular caffeine, where you choose times when life isn't as busy and you're able to wean yourself off of all these things that are stimulating neurotransmitters, that's smart because we live in a society that's dependent on stimulants and it creates this scenario of uppers, downers, right? Like maybe you're not, whatever, doing crack cocaine during the day and taking Valium and Ambien at night, but maybe you are drinking Three cups of coffee and taking some kind of a smart drug and then hitting the vape pen and taking the CBD and the melatonin at night. And that's the roller coaster ride that you're on. And frankly, pardon the expression, the language, but that F up your neurotransmitters. And it's something that you should think about weaning yourself off of because I see this too much in the society that we're living in, where all this stuff is so readily available and so inexpensive. So when it comes to brain health, I think that that's one of the number one things that you can do. What kind of questions do you guys have about the brain? Yes, sir.

So I think I. Well, again, thanks for being here, Ben. It's great to have you. And I guess the thing, I'm just wondering. We're in a city, for those of us who live in la, who don't live in, like, nature, in an environment, we're constantly exposed to this sort of high stress, you know, like our nervous systems are. People don't even realize it, but we're kind of in a cognitive state where we're in a high stress environment all the time. Traffic, people, smog. So do you have any, like, neurohacks or any of the sort of brain hacks or cognitive strategies you think, or anything, you know, to sort of help us mitigate that?

I think the number one thing that people do not teach themselves is proper breath work. Everything from alternate nostril breathing to box breathing to nasal breathing, to even working with some of the breathwork training devices that I talked about, like the, like the relaxator or the power lung or any of these things that train you how to use your prana, how to use your breath work to control your physiology. In my opinion, if you can control your cortisol with deep breathing before bed at night, rather than whatever the phosphatidylserine that you take to lower cortisol. And if you can amp yourself up pre workout with a round of Power Breathing or Breath of Fire rather than a cup of coffee or some other stimulant, then you're tapping into what the human body has built in to deal with a lot of these stressors. I do a lot of that. I do a lot of very quick meditation cycles. Like even, even just back there, just now in the room, I flipped on Brain FM for 10 minutes, right? And there are other apps like Ziz and Sleep Stream and others that will just play some relaxing beats in your ear and you just Dwell with those like 10 minutes, you breathe your way through it. And I'm okay with combining technology with some of this breath work and some of this relaxation. The other thing I use quite a bit is light sound devices. Like I use one called a David Delight, Mind Alive. It's flashes of light, it's sound, and it's a little bit of vagus nerve stimulation, like cranial electrical stimulation, and you just go dead to the world for like 15, 20 minutes. It hits the reboot button, then you come back and you go to work. There are other similar devices like the BrainTap, like the NuCalm, but ultimately those kind of devices work pretty well too. So use breath work and even look into, into technology as an alternative to stimulants.

So, okay, great, thanks.

Great reminder, digestive health, because I already kind of covered what I wanted to say, especially regarding nutrient density and digestibility with what I was talking to you about food. What I'm going to do is move from digestive health, which would be number six, into hormone health, into hormone health. Probably the number one thing that I see people doing that I think has a pretty profound impact on hormones is this cycle. Once again, we see a lot of these cycles that we get into of over training and under eating. I am shocked by the number of people who come to me for like a consult on their testosterone levels or their progesterone levels or their lack of libido or their lack of energy. And they've got their CrossFit workout, their hot yoga session, their soul cycle session, their intermittent fasting, their 24 hour fast, their commute to work, their afternoon walk. They're doing all these things that theoretically are kind of a good idea, but they've piled too many of them on their plate. We live in an information age where FOMO can cause you to over train and hormonally deplete yourself, right? Like when I go to, I was just in New York City, right? And when I go there, like everybody knows I'm a fitness guy. So I get the cryotherapy gym offering me a free pass and the spin session reaches out and then two people contact me about the workout that they're doing that morning. And you know, same thing when I go to Boulder, like somebody wants to go on a bike ride, but then somebody else wants to do a swim. And I know people who, who will say yes to all those sessions. And then when you combine that with healthy eating, which by definition a lot of times exposes you to fewer calories and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But when you marry that to this intense lifestyle of over exercising and almost being afraid of missing out on an exercise session or missing out on the ability to build muscle or lose fat, I see over and over again these hormonal issues. And the number one way that I've found to fix that is to equip yourself with the ability to be able to make your body better in the absence of burning calories or a hard exercise session. So what do I mean by that? I have recovery days now that are completely devoted to either spirituality or cardiovascular blood flow, or something that involves making my body or my brain better, which what I've identified is usually the reason that I'm doing the exercise session in the first place. I crave some kind of self improvement, which is almost like a built in human desire. So what does that look like? Well, it means on a day where I would have normally lifted weights and done a high intensity interval training session, I might instead lay on my back in the sauna for 45 minutes and do breath work and finish with another 10 minutes in a cold pool or in some kind of a cold session doing more breath work and then later on that day hit the foam roller. Or I might have those days where I'm just out on a walk in the sunshine with my kids or out on an easy hike. I'm constantly asking myself, is my body fully recovered or am I simply jumping into yet another exercise session to scratch that exercise itch? The same can be said for food. I intermittent fast. I do a fasting mimicking diet four times a year. I do a 24 hour fast one to two times a month. But I also have certain periods of time where I refeed and I frickin mouth stuff. For me, because I'm still competing as an athlete, every evening I refill my body with carbohydrates every single evening. For me, I'm eating 100 to 150 grams of carbohydrates. So I'm cyclic keto. I'm burning fatty acids all day long. Then I'm replenishing my body, allowing my endocrine system what it needs to rebuild by doing an evening refeed. Some of my clients aren't as active as me. Some of them aren't training for Spartans or triathlons or things like that. They're doing a weekly refeed, right? Like they're having like a Saturday night where they're going out to their favorite restaurant, just eating as much food as they want. I don't call this A cheat day. Right. Because the problem with the cheat day is people get into that mentality that they're going to go to Chick Fil A and Domino's pizza and eat all their favorite guilty foods and comfort foods from when they were a kid. But the problem is that a cheap A cheat day is not a cheat day. It turns into almost a cheat month because the inflammation from a high vegetable oil, sugar laden meal that will stay in your digestive tract for about 19 days, meaning when you cheat and you go out to like crappy shitty pizza, that's not just with you for that one day, it's with you for a long time. So understand there's a difference between refeeding and refueling the body and taking care of it and resetting the metabolic rate and keeping your thyroid from downregulating by giving your body lots of really good nutrition food, nutritious food, and cheating on crap food. Like if I cheat, I don't want to cheat on dog crap. I just want to cheat on more of the rib eye steak and the sweet potato fries and the dark chocolate and the red wine and the good stuff. And when you combine allowing yourself to nourish your body with really good healthy food on a frequent basis, combined with periods of stoicism and fasting and lower calorie intake, and you allow yourself to do all the high intensity interval training and the heavy lifting, but also have those patterns in your life where you have ways to make your body or your brain better without beating yourself up with exercise. And this can include things like music, poetry, writing, fiction, reading fiction, doing a lot of the things that actually still result in a release of dopamine without necessarily requiring an exercise session. Then you allow yourself to avoid a lot of the hormonal depletion that can occur from getting in that cycle of over exercising and being on a constant diet. So I think that's how you keep your hormones optimized. That being said, what kind of questions do you guys have about hormones?

First of all, I just want to plug your gratitude journal because I feel like that really helps in so many of the areas we've already talked about. Just to start your day and get in that state it brings you.

Yes. And gratitude also helps you to love yourself each day. Right? And self love. Important part of not beating yourself up.

So on the hormones for the thyroid, I know you went through a period where when you were ketogenic and exercising and doing that period of your life, you kind of thrashed your thyroid. I've done similar things to Mine. And I'm wondering what you did to repair it. And then also, now that you're doing a little bit longer fasting instead of just your, you know, 12, 14 hour intermittent, how is that going for you with your thyroid? Are you having any issues with that?

Yeah, I had a lot of issues with thyroid and with testosterone when I was doing more of an endurance training protocol, burning a lot of calories and also kind of congratulating myself on a strict ketogenic diet. To get adequate conversion of T4 into T3, for example, inactive thyroid hormone to more bioavailable active thyroid hormone, you need some amount of glucose. In the same way, high amounts of cortisol can decrease that conversion and lower your thyroid activity. I mean, so can other things like intake of foods that you might have an immune reaction to, like high amounts of wheat or soy or dairy or things like that. But ultimately, what I started doing the thing to make the biggest difference for me was a daily, like a nightly carbohydrate refeed. Just allowing myself to eat as many carbohydrates as my body was craving. I mean, Khalil saw me. I wandered into Sunlife tonight, and I had a couple of donuts and a big sugary coffee, and I probably had 150 carbs over there as soon as I walked in. But those are really the first carbohydrates that I had the whole day. So identifying that my body responds very favorably from a thyroid standpoint to those type of refeeds, at the end of the day, that made a big difference, not only with thyroid, but also with testosterone, especially when combined with reducing a lot of the chronic cardio. So that's what made the biggest difference for me, along with one other thing that I did and that was shifting my diet. Like, I'm omnivorous, right? Like I eat meat and vegetables. But I began to shift my meat intake towards a higher intake of not just the red meat, right? So bone broth, bone marrow, organ meats, head cheese, Braunschweiger liver, thymus. Like a lot of these more ancestral cuts of meat that we call awful off fal, not awful, that are just fantastic for your hormone status. So that's how I kind of tackle that.

Now that you're fasting, you're finding that you've healed enough?

Oh, yeah. Because I fast and I feed, right? Remember, fasting is not necessarily synonymous with calorie restriction. Fasting is synonymous with compressed feeding windows. The only time I fast with calorie restriction is on a quarterly basis. Now, I'll Spend five days with a lower calorie intake. Based on the research from Valter Longo and his longevity diet, where you eat about 40% of your normal calorie intake, get an increase in growth hormone, get an increase in testosterone, There's a lot of benefits to that. But it's just five days, just four times a year. All the rest of the time, even if I'm fasting for 16 hours a day, I'll sit down to dinner sometimes and punish 2,500 calories easily and another thousand at lunch.

Loving your body with food is fine. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. Okay, so number eight, the eighth part of the wheel is stress and inflammation. Stress and inflammation. Now, I already talked about one of the best ways to control stress. Does anybody remember what that was? Breath work, right? Knowing how to use your breath to control your stress. The other thing that I think is the biggest component when it comes to the stress and inflammation piece is oils, and specifically vegetable oils. I am far more careful with those than I am with sugar because I can burn sugar, right? Like you can metabolize sugar, your body has sugar in it naturally. Your liver stores sugar, your muscles store sugar in the form of glycogen. They release that sugar is not bad. High amounts of sugar hanging around the bloodstream for a long period of time is an issue. But sugar, sugar in and of itself is very naturally metabolized by the body. However, oxidized vegetable oils, heated oils are not. And it's shocking how many of us wander into a restaurant where our steak is 60, 70 bucks a cut, the salad's $30.

A decent California sized, tiny little piece of octopus is like 40 bucks on your appetizer. And we think because it's like small portions are pretty or nicely plated or expensive, that this must be healthy food. When in fact, if you wander into the back of that kitchen, they're cutting their olive oil half and half with canola oil. You're getting food that's drenched in non grass fed butter. And you've got sunflower oil and safflower oil. And package healthy foods at the newsstand at the airport that say that they're apple chips. But you look at the label and the apple chips have vegetable oils in it. I think that the best thing that you can do to reduce inflammation is to ruthlessly be cognizant of the vegetable oils. And I ask the restaurant, hey, those roasted Brussels sprouts that I've been getting for the past five years, and the appetizer, my Favorite restaurant. What are those cooked in? Turns out it's usually canola oil on the pan in the back room, right? And that doesn't mean you have to stop eating Brussels sprouts at that restaurant. Like in many cases, especially better restaurants, they'll use an extra virgin olive oil, they'll use a butter, they'll use a more stable oil. You just have to ask. But you need to begin to be cognizant that even, you know, I recognize that probably a lot of you in this room are not, are not, you know, eating out at Domino's Pizza every night. But even if you're eating what you would consider to be very healthy food, healthy packaged food, health or healthy restaurant food, a lot of that stuff is drenched in oils that are highly inflammatory. Because consider this. Your body has to take the oils that are part of your diet and use that to make your cell membranes, use that to make your tissues where you metabolize sugar. You don't do that with oils quite as much. Those actually make up your body, right? You are what you eat, especially when it comes to oils. You are even what you eat 8 when it comes to, you know, what kind of oils or grains or inflammatory products that the animals that you're eating were exposed to. So the number one thing that you can do, in my opinion, when it comes to inflammation is to be ruthlessly cognizant of the type of fats and the type of oils that you're putting into your body. And high heat, right? Like, you could take a really good oil, but if you, if you cook the hell out of it, then that, you know, at home, if you're cooking oil, it starts to smoke. That's a bad sign. Different was like, you know, I'm part of an extra virgin olive oil club and sometimes I'll get an oil from Australia and it'll start to smoke after like one minute on medium high on my burner and then another oil because it has a higher amount of polyphenols and antioxidants, it's more heat stable. So you really have to have to look into the oils that you're using and identify those that are actually heat stable. Because, yeah, you can even take a, take a good fat and oxidize it if you don't treat it well. So, I mean, the same could be said for fish oil, right? You get a really good bottle of fish oil, but if that thing gets hot in the, in the trunk of your car or if it's just like open in your refrigerator for a long Period of time and goes rancid all of a sudden. Those wonderful Omega 3s aren't doing your body any favors. So, yeah. What other questions do you guys have about stress and inflammation?

Speaking of oils and inflammatory oils, what do you think about deuterium content of foods and water? Because these oils happen to have the highest deuterium content of any food on earth.

Yeah.

So, yeah. How do you find that relates to this picture?

What Matt's referring to is deuterium. And deuterium is this. It's an isotope that we're finding in increasing quantities, especially for example, in produce that's laden with pesticides and herbicides or grown in mineral depleted soils and in a lot of non organic meats, processed oils, et cetera. And the problem is that that displaces hydrogen in the body, so it can affect things like the electron transport chain, your mitochondria. And there are even companies now selling things like deuterium depleted water or trying to figure out ways to test your deuterium and determine whether or not you're somebody who needs to be really limiting deuterium. Now, interestingly, if you are being cognizant of your glycemic variability, how much your glucose fluctuates during the day, potentially eating something, not necessarily a strict ketogenic diet, but at least allowing your body to churn out ketones, you wind up kind of creating a lot of your own deuterium depleted water. So I'm not convinced that you got to spend like 10, 12 bucks on a bottle of deuterium depleted water. But it is something that I think is becoming an increasingly common issue, is people have just too much deuterium built up in their bodies. And there are companies now that will actually test your deuterium levels. It's like a breath test that you can order to your home. I forget the name of the main company that's doing it now. Signature Health. Yeah, yeah. Signature with a C. Yeah, so. So deuterium. A lot of people are not talking about that. A lot of people don't know about it. But. But DW deuterium depleted water or looking into deuterium levels, that's actually something.

That'S kind of the talk of some of the people who are at the forefront of health and nutrition now. So it's definitely something to be cognizant of. Okay, let's go to number nine. Number nine of the wellness wheel is immunity and cancer. Immunity and cancer. There's a lot, of course, that we could talk about with any of these Components of the wellness wheel. But I think that when it comes to immunity, one of the best things that you can do is to be aware of lymphatic flow and lymph fluid. Like, I am constantly asking myself during the day, have I moved my lymph? Have I done things that will allow for lymphatic drainage? What are some things that can do that? I like rebounding. I like Kundalini breathwork that's combined with movement and breath holds and more movement. Vibration platforms are another example. These are things that you can equip your home or your office with to just keep your body circulating. Lymph flow throughout exercise will do it. But of course, you need to be careful that you aren't relying upon heavy exercise sessions because of what I explained to you about hormones as the number one way to move lymph fluid. I mean, there's no reason that you can't have a little balance board at work or a vibration platform or a mini rebounder that you jump on at certain points during the day. You walk or you stand up whenever you're talking on the phone. And you even focus on, for example, like, sleep positions that enhance your lymphatic drainage, like sleeping on your side, which we now know is one of the ways that you engage in what's called glymphatic drainage, which is detoxification of the brain and the neural tissue as you sleep. So being aware of all these different ways that we can move lymph through the body, I think is very important. And there are ways that you can. You can kind of move a lot of the lymph through the gut as well. There's a really good ayurvedic physician named Dr. John Douillard. Dr. John Douyard. He operates out of Boulder, Colorado. He has a really great book called Mind body Sport. And he has a lot of ayurvedic protocols in there that are fantastic for the immunity of the gut. One thing that he does is decoction tea, and this is something I make at home. It's marshmallow and licorice root. And I'm. I'm blanking on the name of the last compound. It's marshmallow licorice and slippery elm. Slippery elm is the third component. And you just basically make a vat of that, and you boil it down. You put several cups of water in, and you boil it down until there's just two or three cups left. And it's almost like this slimy mucus type of tea. Fantastic for the mucosal lining of your gut, because your gut is where a lot of your immunity resides. And when you're doing things like that, combined with movement and vibration and rebounding, I think it's one of the best things that you can do for your immune system. And then when it comes to the cancer piece, which is, of course, intimately tied to immunity, probably one of the biggest light bulbs that went on for me when it came to cancer Was when I was in Galilee, Israel, and I had a chance to sit down with a guy who was a former professional basketball player who came down with cancer and his realization. And you'd have thought I'd have realized this before, but this is my first exposure to this idea that's prevalent in traditional Chinese medicine, for example, that cancer is very much tied to emotions. And this was a very competitive type a guy. He had a lot of hatred and anger and bitterness and relationships that he hadn't resolved in his life. And there's this idea that cancer can begin by simply these type of things that get built up in the bones and built up in the tissue. And it's related to these emotions that Dr. David Hawkins, in his excellent book healing and recovery, would refer to as the emotions that vibrate at a lower frequency, like anger and fear and shame. The three emotions that rank highest in that book by Dr. Hawkins are peace and love and joy. And I actually have this mantra that I'll repeat to myself during the day. Peace, love, and joy. Now, peace to me. Peace to me means that I ruthlessly eliminate hurry from my life. Like, I'm constantly in this state where things are going to be okay. I don't have to get everything on the checklist done. I don't have to jump out of bed in the morning. I can lay there and do my breath work and do my gratitude journaling. Love means that I go out of my way to sacrifice and to love others, right? And it doesn't feel like sacrifice when it's truly love. Like, when I. I don't want to. When my wife pulls up in the pickup truck from the city that she drives to each week, and it's just overflowing with alfalfa bales, and I know that they itch her skin. And I've got, like, 10 phone calls to make, but all of a sudden, there's a huge pickup truck full of alfalfa that I gotta haul down to the barn. Like, for me, I love my wife. Like, I want her to be happy. I don't want her to lay awake at night with her Legs itching from alfalfa. So I grab the alfalfa bales and I go out there and I move the alfalfa because I love her. Right? Like loving others and having love in your life and going out of your way to sacrifice up for others. And even that gratitude journal I do in the morning, I write down one person who I can pray for or help or serve that day. That's very important. And finally, joy, like laughter. I think many of us just move through the day without smiling, without laughing, without figuring out ways to crack jokes and make people happy and be funny. I mean like working peace and love and joy, specifically those three. Figuring out ways to weave those into every day, I think is one of the best things that you can do for immunity. And as much as as many, you know, modern western trained docs would laugh at this, I think it's one of the best things that you can do for cancer as well. So when it comes to immunity and cancer, what kind of questions do you guys have? Okay, speaking of immunity, than what you think about this, like exposure to dirt and I also recall you kind of consuming some sort of Chinese roundworms or something. Yes, yes, exactly. I think that that's something that next health here needs to begin doing is pig whipworm and rat rat tapeworm treatments. That's called helminthic therapy. And you actually can. I have a whole article on this on my website for immune system modulation. And I travel a lot and I've found that this actually helps me quite a bit when I travel is I actually, I use helminthic therapy. I have vials of pig whip worms and wrap tapeworms in my refrigerator. And I take a dose of that about every two weeks. But I don't think that everybody, you know, I'm on the road sometimes for like 20 days out of every month all over the freaking planet. So my immune system takes, takes a hit. I think getting outside, getting into the dirt, doing some of your workouts in the park that include things like bear crawls, laying down in your back in the grass, even using like a soil based probiotic, for example, these are also things that bring us into closer connection with mother Earth. And yeah, absolutely. A big part of immunity is the biome. So getting out there, maybe even not showering and bathing as frequently, or when you do just using water and not lots of soap, I think we could all benefit just a little bit from smelling like hippies. So we might get sick a little bit less. So yeah, it's a good point. Okay, so number 10 is detoxification. Detoxification is very much related to that immune system component that I talked about. And your body has built in detoxification mechanisms, right? Like your kidney, your livers, your colon, et cetera, et cetera. And the three main ways that you detox, really, that I think everyone should do during the day is breathing, pooping and sweating, right? Like those are our three real elimination organs is out our ass, through our skin and out through our mouths, right? So breathing, that would be frequently moving, right? Like I've harped, I've harped on breath work multiple times. Not just breath work, that's vigorous working in things like Kundalini breath work or Wim HOF style breath work, but also this component of regular bowel movements. I do a coffee enema one to two times a week when I travel. I use these little coffee enema suppositories called glytamins that do something very similar. It's glycine and caffeine and some of these things that are fantastic for maintaining my gallbladder's bile production and the peristalsis in my gut and my liver health. So this idea of not being afraid to put things up your butt that clean you out and let things frequently come out your butt that clean you out, I think that that's another very, very important of the detoxification piece. And then finally sweating, right? Like we know there's a lot of research on reduced mortality risk from people in Finland who are sweating four to five times a week. I go out of my way to sweat at least four to five times a week, either in a sauna or if I'm not able to get into the sauna, I'll wear extra clothing to the gym to get a sweat on. If you think back and you can't think, think of the last time you were drenched in sweat. You're probably not using your body's largest detoxification organ properly. And you know, there are now companies like Biomat and Higher Dose and ways that you can, even with a very small footprint, introduce sauna therapy into your home. And yeah, there are other companies like Clearlight and Sunlighten and, you know, people doing infrared saunas that take up a pretty small space in your home or your garage. But we live in an era where figuring out how to sweat shouldn't be that hard. You breathe, you sweat, you poop. And I think those are the three most important things that you can do for your detoxification. Now I know that the talk is starting to get to the Point where we're a little bit long in the tooth and I want to still cover the last two aspects of the wellness wheel. So now I'm going to keep moving through without Q and A, but we'll have a chance afterwards to chat a little bit, I'm sure. And that way if you do need to take off after the talk, you can take off. So number 11 is aesthetics. Aesthetics. Think of this as like symmetry. Think of this as beauty. Think of this as just looking good. We know we live in an era where we're judged. I mean we're in freaking California where this is truer than just about anywhere else. Right. Like your career, your salary. The way that people judge you is not only based on what kind of car you drive, but the way you carry yourself. The same symmetry of your body, your facial structure, but you also in the same way, when you focus on fertility and hormone balance, you feel better. You live a longer time. When you focus on your symmetry and your beauty and your self care, even if that includes smelling like a hippie because you're not showering as much, you actually do directly enhance your longevity, your lifespan and your health. Anybody in here familiar with Weston A. Price? I actually mentioned that diet earlier. Yeah. He, he discovered this substance called Activator X. Activator X is something that was prevalent in the diets of a lot of these ancestral hunter gatherer tribes eating their indigenous diets. And it turned out that activator X was the fat soluble vitamin, Vitamin K. And vitamin K along with vitamin A, vitamin D and vitamin E are some of the most important things not only for children and newborns to enhance their symmetry and their beauty, but also for adults to develop good bone density. Now the two things that I think are incredible for symmetry and I'm working on a new book and I have an entire chapter of the book. This chapter alone is like 80 pages long on different ways to enhance beauty and symmetry. But what comes up in that chapter over and over again is high amount of vitamin K intake from things like organ meats, marrow, grass fed butter, fermented soybeans like natto, and a lot of these foods that we aren't eating as much of these days. But also something I've already, I've already, you know, a horse I've kicked to death multiple times. Proper breathwork patterns, deep nasal breathing, avoiding shallow chest breathing, avoiding some of these breathwork patterns that we now know do things like develop recessed jawlines and improper head carriage. And especially when you combine that with always looking on our phone, being hunched over a computer. We really developed this scenario where we're actually not in a very symmetrical position and also not giving our body the nutrients that it needs for symmetry and bone density. So when it comes to symmetry and when it comes to beauty, I would encourage you to eat a fat rich ancestral diet. And if you're one of those people who falls in the category that I talked about earlier, familial hypercholesteremia, or one of these people that responds deleteriously to a high fat diet, you can still supplement with multivitamins that contain vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, learn proper nasal breathing. These are the type of things that enhance symmetry and enhance beauty. And I think aesthetics.

It'S not something that's included in a wellness wheel like this very often, but I do think it's very important. And then finally, there is longevity. There is longevity. I think this is a great place to finish. How do you live a long time? And let's make this one into a quiz. If we look at all the blue zones that Dan Buettner wrote a book about, these areas where there are higher than average number of centenarians of people living a long time, there are actually five characteristics that tend to overlap between nearly every single one of these blue zones. Who knows what those five characteristics are? Who can name a few? Yes, sir, back there. No smoking is one correct. No smoking. That one's pretty easy to wrap your head around. And in addition, if you have been smoking, best way to undo a lot of the damage is an intake high or a diet high in intake of things like flavonoids, polyphenols, dark purple, blue, dark red, green type of foods, along with taurine. Taurine is another. It's a supplement that can vastly enhance your ability to be able to recover if you've been smoking for a while. From a cardiovascular standpoint, somebody else had their hand up. Yes.

Yes. Low level physical activity throughout the day. Not necessarily a CrossFit water spin session, but just usually outdoors. Low level physical activity. Hunting, gathering, gardening, walking, hauling alfalfa, you know, what have you. That does not mean that you shouldn't go to the gym. We live in a post industrial era where our asses are sometimes planted in chairs. We sometimes have to get out and do something harder to battle the fact that we're commuting, that we're sitting, that we might not be lucky enough to be a construction worker or a painter or a gardener or a hunter, but figuring out a way to simulate that somehow in our lives with Standing a lot. Treadmill workstations, walking, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, et cetera. Yeah. So no smoking. Low level physical activity, preferably outdoors. What are the other three?

Community relationships, Love life, social times, having dinner with the family, not being by yourself. Understanding that Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat do not scratch our ancestral itch to be able to look people in the eyes, be with humans, be with flesh and blood, be in a tribe. Right. Like all of us standing in here in this room right now, we are part of a tribe. Our tribe is that we're interested in health. We're interested in longevity. We're speaking the same language. We're sick and tired of being sick and tired or being in a world that is sick and tired. And so we all are kind of a tribe. Like, we speak the same language. You're enhancing longevity right now just by being in a room of real flesh and blood, people who are interested in some of the same things that you are. And that's. That's. That's a big key. What are number four and five?

They're related to diet and nutrition, although purpose is important.

High wild plant intake. Yep, that's another one. High intake of foods that are bitter, foods that are wild. Foods that are not necessarily the big, sweet, beautiful, fluffy produce that we get from the grocery store, but instead some of the ugly stuff that we grow in our backyards or that we get from the farmer's market. The stuff that may not taste super sweet, but that's kind of bitter, kind of spicy, kind of herbaceous. These things pass on via something called xenohormesis, their protection onto you. Your cells become stronger when you consume these kind of compounds. So, yes, wild plants eating a lot of rosemary and thyme and nettle and cilantro and herbs and spices, and just really knowing how to dress up your food in that manner. And then what's the last one?

It's another nutrition one.

A lot of Paleo people don't like this one.

High legume intake. High legume intake. So legumes would be things like lentils and seeds and nuts. And yes, they can be damaging to the gut, but if you prepare them properly, if you learn how the. The art of fermentation, slow cooking and slow food prep and soaking and sprouting, then you render these more digestible by your body. And in addition to that, I don't necessarily think that it's something magical about the legumes, but rather the fact that these are slow carb foods. Right. Like, they don't cause big fluctuations in blood glucose like sugars and starches and breads and a lot of these sweeter or more processed and packaged carbohydrates that we find in a westernized diet contain. So returning to our roots of like slow carbohydrates, like slow fermented sourdough bread and split mung beans and lentils and seeds and nuts that have been treated properly to reduce their, their phytic acid and their lectin content. So, yeah, low level physical activity during the day, social love life, relationships, lack of smoking, controlling your blood sugar by eating carbohydrates that are slower release like legumes and then a high wild plant intake. Those are five of the best things that you can do to enhance your longevity.

Like stem cells and all the very cool anti aging protocols that you can get at a place like this. Those are great, but those are the icing on the cat cake, right? You still gotta get out in the sunlight and go outside barefoot and be with friends and sweat in the sauna and get, you know, take a cold shower at home and do a lot of these things. And once you've done these things, that's when you delve into, you know, all the cool shit that you get to do at a place like this. So ultimately, that is the wellness wheel. That is the wellness wheel. There's, of course, you know, we could dive into all this stuff in a lot more detail, but I wanted to give you guys the big picture. And I also want to thank each and every one of you for making a commitment to your health, for coming here, for discovering a place like this that can enhance your health, for coming in and listening to my message. What keeps me going, reading for hours every morning and not paying attention to politics or the blockchain or Hollywood, never seeing movies or anything else. What keeps me really driven and very curious about this stuff are people like you, who want to make their lives better. And if I can make a difference in just a few lives with my life, that's my purpose. This brings me a lot of joy. So thank you guys for being here and allowing us to do this all together.

Hey, that's it. Thanks for listening to the show.

You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at Bengreen.

Where there's plenty of other goodies from yours truly, including the very helpful Ben recommends page.

Now, one last thing.

Please know that all the links, all the promo codes, pretty much every resource that I mention to you during each episode really helps to generate income for the podcast and kind of helps to float this thing and enables me to keep spending the time to bring in the content every week. So be sure to to use the links use the promo codes use all of those goodies too. All right, thanks for listen.

Hey that's it. Thanks for listening to the show.

You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mention over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com where there's plenty of other goodies from yours truly including the very helpful Ben Recommends page.

Now one last thing thing, please know.

That all the links, all the promo codes, pretty much every resource that I mention to you during each episode really helps to generate income for the podcast and kind of helps to float this thing and enables me to keep spending the time to bring you the content every week. So be sure to to use the links use the promo codes use all of those goodies too. All right, thanks for listening.