An Interview With "The Smartest Physician On The Planet": Crazy Biohacking Stacks For Cognitive Fun

And I asked myself, who's taking care of that basic cell? And the truth is, no one is. One of my really big beefs is that we have become too DNA centric. DNA only can tell you what's the possibility that can happen. There's a big misconception right now that carbohydrates are bad. No, it's actually not that. The biggest Missing Macronutrient in the human Diet Ben 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 Sealfit, Kokoro, Spartan Agoji, and the world's toughest mutter to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, freediving, 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, hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver 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.

Hey, I've got a great podcast episode coming your way today with a guy.

Who is not only one of the world's most intelligent physicians based on his iq, but a guy who's doing some amazing things, things in the health industry, Dr. Ted Achacoso. So this one's gonna blow your mind before we jump in. By the way, I haven't been doing many podcast Q&As lately, although I do have some podcast Q&As coming up pretty soon with a brand new podcast host. You can wait with bated breath about that, but because I haven't been doing the Q&As, haven't been doing a very good job letting you know where I'm.

At in the world.

So at the time that you're listening.

To this podcast, I'll be headed down to Austin, Texas. I'll be in Austin, Texas.

From April.

24Th all the way up through the 29th at this fabulous event called.

Paleo FX. I will be sure to link to PaleoFX in the show notes for today's show over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ted or if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Calendar you can see everywhere. I'm going to be all over the world. Get in, check out all the details, etc.

Another place where you can catch me is South Carolina. I'm going to be coming down to.

South Carolina to talk about stem cells and functional medicine. That'll at the end of May, May 29, I'll be down there in South Carolina. If you'd like to come to that event. I'll link to that one in the.

Show notes as well.

And then finally the end of June, if you'd like to come join me and my family in Switzerland for two weeks at a liver detoxification and biological medicine retreat.

We do have a couple of rooms.

Available at that retreat and you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Ted where the shownotes are for today's show and I'll put a link to that as well. So those are all the exciting places that I'll be that you can be at too. This podcast, like all podcasts, is brought to you by the most wonderful website in the world. If you're looking for healthy stuff to buy Kion Kion is my playground for all things health and wellness. I don't know if you've tried our coffee before, but if you want a party in your mouth, grab our wonderful Coconut Chocolatey Nutty goodness energy bar and then get yourself a bag of our antioxidant rich, pure, clean, mold free, 100% organic coffee and have yourself a bar. And you can actually dip the bar in the coffee if you just want a complete Kion adventure. It's amazing.

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Hey folks, my guest on today's show, if you could see the video today, actually has a blue tongue. He has ingested a homemade nootropic that I'll let him tell you about after I introduce to you who this guy actually is. His name is Ted Achicoso. Ted, am I pronouncing your last name correctly? Is it Achozo?

Yes, as it's spelled perfect.

Nailed it. I'm good. Ted is a physician. He's actually quite a unique physician. Not only is he rumored to have one of the highest IQs in the field of medicine, which I'll let him tell you about, but he got a college graduate in biology when he was 18, became an MD when he was 22. And he actually operates a clinical practice called Health Optimization Medicine, also abbreviated home. And he's using a very holistic approach to treat human biology that probably goes beyond what you might be aware of already when it comes to functional medicine. Meaning he is using a mashup of, of everything from computational, what's called neuroethology and biomathematical modeling of nervous systems. He uses metabolomics, epigenetics, bioenergetics, does a lot with the gut microbiota, something called expopozomics. If you don't know what any of these terms are, you will by the end of today's podcast and also delves quite a bit into chronobiology and evolutionary medicine.

He kind of bounces back and forth.

Between Manila, Philippines and Washington D.C. he's the scientific advisor and medical advisor to a host of different companies, investment funds, does a lot in medical informatics and artificial intelligence. He wrote one of the first ever books kind of outlining neural circuitry database for living organisms. And so he's very, very good at piecing apart the kind of, kind of.

The computer esque function of the human.

Body and also the fact that we're a living breathing bag mashup of flesh and blood and tissue. So if you have not yet read any of what this guy has written and you've not yet visited his website, you need to. I'm gonna put a link to everything that he does and everything that he has done, including books that he has written and his website. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Dr. Ted.

As in Dr. Ted BenGreenfieldFitness.com Doctor Ted.

So Dr. Ted, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you, thank you for the wonderful introduction.

You're welcome. Can you fill us in on why your tongue is blue?

Yes. A couple of years ago.

My lifelong interest has been on nootropics and a couple of years ago I was tasked with can there be a short term nootropic that you can take to rev up your brain for a few hours? So I got into thinking and I took a lot of research and at the time the study on effect of short term memory on short term memory of methylene blue came out, but it was a very high dose, like 100 milligrams in humans and it was very effective. Then I took a look at nicotine and I took a look at CBD and I said, well why can't I produce a trochee.

Where you can. The initial design was a gum and I said why can't I produce a troche, do this.

And for people who don't know what a trochee is, can you mention what that is?

A trochee is actually. It's kind of like a sublingual, but it's more like a buccal. You insert it between your upper lip and your gum.

Like a tobacco snus, almost.

Yes, yes. And you don't want the saliva actually to get in it because you want it to get it directly into your bloodstream and the brain. Right. So you don't swallow. And turns out we were giving samples of this in California recently, and there was a VC who actually took it, and she said, oh, my God, the taste of this is really awful. I'm never going to recommend this for investment, and I'm not looking for investment. Right. And then the next day, the person who gave her the turkey said, I thought you didn't like it. Why are you using it? Said, this thing tastes like hell, but it sure fucking works.

Methylene blue is very amazing. I mean, well, it's a pretty potent antioxidant. I think the one thing, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is in higher doses, it can kind of act as a pro oxidant. So you can't use it too much. But for, like. Well, about how long does the nootropic effect stick with you? Because I've found, you know, it gives you several hours, it seems.

Yeah. This combination, you could explain your. You express your. You can expect your brain to rev up for about two to three hours, and then you'll have a calm down.

How much nicotine, nicotine and CBD are you mixing with it?

Nicotine is only 1 milligram because I'm highly sensitive to nicotine. And I said, I'm not even going to put 2 milligrams in just 1 milligram. And you can take, you know, you can divide it into four. So you could actually take 0.25 milligrams of nicotine. So it's not that bad.

And how much CBD?

CBD is about 5 milligrams.

Okay. Yeah. So a nice microdose.

Yeah, it rounds out the edge that's produced by nicotine. You know, nicotine can actually rev up your brain quite sharply and it gives.

A lot of people kind of. Kind of the jitters. That's a very cool stack. I've never put those three compounds together before, but I'll have to often note that and try that out, because I have access to all three up in my pantry. So I'LL give that a go. Now the other thing that I think is quite interesting is I've seen rumors on the Internet that you have a very high iq, that you may be one of the most intelligent physicians around. And I certainly my research for today's interview, listened to some other interviews with you and read some of your work. And you do seem to function pretty well cognitively. But is that true? Have you ever had your IQ tested?

It used to be monitored by the.

US Intelligence. I won't tell you anymore what they are. People are familiar with them because I was measured many years ago when there were four billion people in the planet. I was one in a billion. So there were four of us. Now there's eight billion. So I know only of the fifth who was added. And so there is probably going to be eight of us. Who knows, I probably don't make it to the list anymore.

Were you using your methylene blue though when you took the test?

No, no, that was raw.

So there's so many things I want to talk to you about and in so many areas that you delve into in your clinical practice. But I think probably the best place to start would be you have this abbreviation called Home Health Optimization Medicine and also this abbreviation called HOPE Health Optimization Practice. Can you kind of delve into what those are and the backstory of how you came up with that clinical practice term? Sure.

Health Optimization medicine or HOME is intended for physicians. Right. Health optimization practice is intended for healthcare practitioners. And the reason why I developed those two programs is that there will be more HOPE practitioners than there will be home. And what I'd like to do is to include the whole framework of health management in a disease management practice. So 10 years ago, 10 years ago now, can you imagine, I just finished a two year training. I retrained in Paris. I got board certified in anti aging medicinal medicine over there. At that time, the US was lagging behind in nutritional medicine. So I decided to retrain myself in Europe.

I was an interventional neuroradiologist at that time where I used to say that I poke brains for a living. But.

When I came back, all of the sciences were coming in, right? Epigenetics, bioenergetics, exosomics, microbiota.

Chronobiology, evolutionary medicine. And I said, well, this have increasing impact on my clinical practice. So I said, how do? First it was just for my own personal practice and then I was able to actually clarify the framework enough that many physicians became curious how was I incorporating all of these new sciences that were never taught in medical schools.

Into my own practice. At that time, I also saw that a science called clinical metabolomics was already mature. It was moving away from the research and already encroaching into clinical practice.

Metabolomics being simply studying the metabolites that would be produced during different chemical processes in the body.

Yeah. And.

Those metabolites are now detectable. Right. When I was in medical school, we could not detect any of those metabolites. The other thing that.

And sorry to interrupt. When you say metabolites, you're talking about what you might see, like, on, say, like, an organic amino acids test, like purines and organic acids, free fatty acids.

Or lipid mediators, et cetera, Mitochondrial metabolites, microbiota metabolites, toxins in there. So all of these can be measured in blood and urine, for example, mostly urine. And the other thing that I was looking at, Ben, and very serious mode, was that we are actually very good at treating diseases, diagnosing and treating diseases at the organ level. And they have their specialized cells. But now the technology has moved forward, allows us to take a look at what's going on at the basic cell or the fundamental cell, that one that has a nucleus, mitochondria, microtubules, cell membranes, et cetera. And I asked myself, who's taking care of that basic cell? And the truth is, no one is. And the reason for that is that we did not have.

Diagnostics at the time. Right. So you could do a liver function test, for example, or you could do a fasting blood sugar test. And all of this is like, if a patient comes to you, then the patient already has a flat tire or the engine has already overheated. Right?

Right.

And you go do a diagnostic. Okay. What's causing the flat tire? You can replace the tire entirely, like in an organ transplant. Right. Or you can determine what's causing the overheating of the engine. Like, for example, you have hyperthyroidism and you decide to lop off part of the thyroid. However, as physicians, we were never taught how to maintain the health of the body. We're just always fixing flat tires and overheated engines. But we actually were not taught how to do car maintenance. And the reason for that is that we don't have. Yes. Preventive medicine. We don't have the proper dashboard for it. I called it the dashboard and car dashboard analogy. When in the model T, the dashboard was simply an ampere meter to show the number of amperes that you had for your battery, and it had no key. That was the model T Dashboard. But now we have the modern dashboard that can detect, for example, your tire pressure and can detect your engine temperature even before they overheat. That's a dashboard that we have for health optimization medicine.

Because of the development of the science and technology that we're able to peer inside the cells that we're now able to do this and did not want any resistance from illness medicine. I want this to be part of the spectrum. Here is how you do the health maintenance of the patient, or I call them clients because they're not sick. Right, right. And here's how you do disease management for the patient. So when a patient now comes, I generally maintain their illness medicine doctors. Right. You retain your own cardiologist, your own endocrinologist, and so on. All I do is I know what their diseases are. I take a look at the drugs that you take, I set it aside, and I only take a look at the basic health of your fundamental cell. We're right there at the bottom. The basic cell underlies all of the specialized cells of the body. The muscle cells or the myocytes have their own mitochondria, they have their own nuclei, microtubules, etc. They are specialized cells. But in the basic sense, there is a fundamental cell there that no one takes care of. Okay. And that's how I was able to do the integration into health optimization medicine.

Okay, so from a practical standpoint, what does this look like? Are you saying that when a patient comes in, you're actually tracking all the different metabolites that the cells are producing and then micro adjusting those, or are you giving the patient some kind of a program to adjust those themselves? Or how does it actually work from a practical standpoint?

It's actually very simple. Number one, you measure the metabolites of the entire network.

And is that a blood test or a urine test or urine test?

Usually, but usually it's combined with a blood test. So you can determine also the plasma amino acids, because proteins generally even protein hormones. I was listening to your peptide podcast last weekend, and they are determined only by blood. You can't really.

Do them now by urine. The steroid hormones or lipid based metabolites you can detect via urine.

So this sounds similar to like the ion profile with 40amino acids that you'd get here in the US like by Genova Diagnostics, where it's a blood test with a urine test.

In fact, I use Genova diagnostics quite a bit for their nutrival, which is urine.

And then the plasma amino acids. And I also get the Food allergies, food sensitivity testing. And there's testing, but the process is really very simple. You get those tests, you take a look at the metabolites that are there. You move the metabolites. This is what I call network wide range shifting. You move the metabolites to the ranges when you were between 21 and 30 years old. Because that's considered the golden period for you. Right.

Between which age range did you just say?

21 and 21 and 30.

So in both men and women, you're looking to optimize the reference ranges for the labs that they're getting. Hormones, everything for what you'd see between a 21 and a 30 year old.

30 year old, yes. And yeah.

There are three.

Sort of like optimization ranges. The first one was given by Terry Hertog. He was a pioneer in hormone balancing and he used 25 plus minus two standard deviations. And then there's United States, of course. Mark Gordon said it's the median between 20 and 30 years old. And then of course, achacoso. What they have to say, I say is the 50th to 75th percentile of the values between 21 and 30 years old. Okay, so, yeah, so these are the ranges that we use right now, since we're still establishing that the 50th to 75th percentile, I'm generally using the 25 plus minus the age 25 mean plus minus two standard deviations.

And that's the way. But you cannot move just a single. Like for example, testosterone alone or estrogen alone. That's where we got up like 30 years ago. We gave estrogen alone and suddenly we got breast cancers. Right?

Yeah. And just a second before you delve into that, that nutrival test that you talked about, I know that tests things like urine, amino acids and all your omega fatty acids and a lot of your oxidative stress markers like glutathione and coenzyme Q10, et cetera, along with metals and minerals. But from what I understand, that one doesn't test hormones. Are you doing a separate test for hormones?

I do a separate test. I send it to a separate lab.

Do you like a urine test for hormones?

I generally don't do urine tests for hormones.

Except if they do a 24 hour collection.

Okay. Like a Dutch test, for example.

Yeah, a 24 hour collection would be actually a good measure. Right. I generally use the blood for the hormones themselves. Ideally, you use the blood for hormones for the initial testing and then you follow up with urine because then you could see what the utilization of the hormone is.

Right.

So if you start giving hormones to your patients.

Okay, got it. So you were saying about hormones, you can't just look at hormones.

Yes, you can just, you can just give testosterone or you can just give estrogen because they're all in a network. Right. For example, if I give you the.

Steroidogenesis or the pathway for the production of steroid based hormones, like your sex hormones, they come from cholesterol and they become pregnenolone and then you produce progesterone, you produce cortisol, you produce aldosterone from DHEA and then you have testosterone, estradiol and then estradiol. So if you just move any one of them, like for example, you increase the pregnenolone, increase the dhea, you are already going to cause a corresponding rise in the testosterone.

So you cannot just, if you however increase testosterone just like that, it will cause a negative feedback to the brain and say, well, I'm not going to give you luteinizing hormone anymore because you have enough testosterone in your body. And that's the bodybuilder, their post cycle therapy because that whole axis is suppressed. So we have to consider the entire network when you're doing especially hormone balancing. And also in nutrient balancing, you have to move everything. For example, an example of a network that I'm very conscious of in nutrient balancing is for example the antioxidant regeneration pathway. Right. For example, there's a vitamin E that actually has to be regenerated by vitamin C and then by alpha lipoic acid and by CoQ10. So you cannot just increase vitamin E willy nilly without increasing the rest of the.

Items in the antioxidant regeneration pathway because they will affect each other. A big example of this is there's a study done many years ago, it was an 80,000 subject study on prostate cancer and the effect of vitamin E and selenium. And it failed. Well, of course, if you shove vitamin E in there without increasing the corresponding elements in the regeneration pathway, you're just creating a pool of oxidant, you know, Antioxidant. Yeah.

You know, you can cause an oxidation by pulling in a lot of oxidants in there that cannot move, you know, to the next antioxidant.

Right.

So that's what I mean by network wide range shifting. You cannot just shift one, you know, either you shift everything.

Yeah.

Everything else.

Right, yeah. We even had a podcast about that last week about how when you use, you know, high amounts of alpha to cover all from vitamin E in the absence of the natural tocotrienols that you'd find in it that you can actually create almost like a pro oxidant effect. So yeah, it's very interesting. Once you start to isolate compounds and treat with single compounds, when you're looking at a blood test or a urine test, that's usually a very myopic way to approach things, but it's also very complex. And I know you have a background in artificial intelligence, for example, and the use of computational theories on this. Are you incorporating any of that in your practice and kind of using AI engines or anything like that to a assist this process?

No, just a network perspective. The AI perspective will probably come next to develop an automatic reading of these things that are more appropriate for clients and the experience that I've had. But the key parts of the network perspective are the same. There are major nodes in the network and there will be minor nodes, such as there are Google's, Amazon's in the Internet. Right. And you should be careful of those because when you take out one of those.

The rest of the nodes are going to shift drastically. So just using a network perspective.

In this particular way of detection and correction of imbalances, see, illness medicine diagnoses and treats disease, Health optimization medicine simply detects and corrects imbalances. The correction we're doing now at the level of the metabolome, but this doesn't. It's a framework. So if you can prove that, you know, biophysics, you have markers for biophysics, then we down to that level of biophysics. Right. If you, if the level of quantum biophysics come in, then we go down to that level. It's just a matter of bridging the gap between the organ among the organ and then the specialized cell, basic cell. And now you could go to the metabolome that you know, and biophysics, et cetera. So it has become a clinical fr. Really to be able to include all of these new developments in the new sciences that affect clinical practice.

Now with this idea of AI though, what was that you did do because you wrote this book about, I think you called it a connectome for an organism. And I didn't quite understand what that meant. What was that book about?

No, actually.

I was one of the crazy ones where when I entered into the lab here in medical informatics lab, my mentor, who started the entire, who pioneered the entire field of medical informatics globally, asked me two questions. He said, is consciousness computable? I said yes. And then he said, is beauty computable? I said yes. And he said in this lab, you only get to choose one question. I should have chosen beauty, Ben. I could have made lots of money with that one. But I chose consciousness. And with that, I actually.

Cataloged all the.

Synapses that were being by a worm called Canerhabditis elegans, or C. Elegans, which is the workhouse now of anti aging. They use it to turn off anti aging genes and so on.

I built the entire catalog so that you're able to manipulate all the synapses and to see what the networks are doing. And the guy, of course, who started the electron micrograph story is Sydney Brenner. He won his Nobel, I sent him my book, and all I got was an index card that said, thank you so much for all of your hard work. But.

Interestingly, Ben, that book was actually panned by the gods at mit. More like, what is this guy who is a physician? What does he know about biomathematics and computing? Ten years later, they issued an apology saying that my assertions in that book was correct, but I was no longer in the field, right? And then recently I saw that they were reading this book again. So many people were reading this book again. So I called up a researcher. I said, what's the attraction? Why are you reading this book again? Oh, don't you know, Dr. Ted, you built the first Connectome, so now there's a name for it. I called it Neural Circuitry database before, but now it's called the Connectome. And now people are reading it because. Because what used to be called connectionist networks is now called deep learning. So it's all on the label in the marketing now, Ben. When I was doing the work, it was called connection assistance. Right? Now it's being called deep learning.

That's interesting.

Yeah, yeah. And that's my relationship with networks. So I'm very network conscious. I was one of those who gave a plenary speech in 92, and I said, you know, one of the things that you have to be careful about in networks like the Internet is network stability, Right? And my example there is if I fart in California, no one ever has to find out whether or not I farted here in Washington, D.C. because it's irrelevant information, right? And you could see how the Internet rapidly destabilized, right, with all of this information that's around that's not verified, and so on. So.

And so this is what I'm sensitive to, even in the tests of the metabolites, et cetera. What is the clinical significance of this metabolite? And for Those of you who don't know, your listeners, who don't know there's actually a human metabolome database. I know all of you are familiar with human genome database because it's more popularized, but that's one of my really big beefs, is that we have become too DNA centric.

DNA only can tell you what's the possibility that can happen. Right? But when you're at the level of metabolome, you're actually seeing what's happening based on the physiological and environmental influences. You could see the influence of toxins, you could see the influence of lack of sleep, you could see the influence of poor eating and so on. So it's more clinically relevant to say something to your client or to your patient about it rather than looking at the genes. Interestingly enough, you know, for example, I had patients or clients who came to me, said, Dr. Ted, we want to get tested for the Alzheimer's gene because three of our aunts have Alzheimer's. And true enough, these are sisters. They both had the alleles for the Alzheimer's gene. And interestingly enough, the recommendation of the company, this was a company out of Luxembourg. I have already been giving those supplements to them three years earlier.

Right. So.

This is quite an interesting validation of what the whole health optimization medicine practice can do.

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You're working in not just this clinical metabolomics, but like I mentioned in the intro, you kind of have like seven pillars that you use in addition to those. Your six are epigenetics, microbiota, mitochondria, exposomics, chronobiology, and evolutionary medicine. I'd love to briefly touch on each of those. I know you also want to get into like some practical aspects because you have some very cool kind of biohacks you do yourself that go beyond just turning your mouth blue. But can you kind of kind of give the overview of each of these other pillars of your practice? I Think it'd be very interesting for folks.

Sure. The main pillar, of course, is clinical metabolomics, because that's where you do the detection and correction. When you do detection, for example, of the metabolites, then you use the labs like Genova and other laboratories out there that can perform metabolomics testing.

In fact, Ben, I pushed for the. There are less than 10 of the comprehensive commercial laboratories worldwide and a push for the building of one in Southeast Asia. It already did a soft open last June of last year, but that's the main pillar. And then if you want to do therapeutic metabolomics, then if you could see, for example, you're deficient in the Following Cofactors, like B6, 9, 12 and so on, it actually comes with a recommendation of how much to give the patient or the client. So that's the core of the. So that's one of seven. And then if you go to, for example, epigenetics. Epigenetics is a really wonderful and interesting science that has come to encroach in clinical practice. And it simply defined genes are not your destiny, right? And there are.

You're able to change genetic expression without changing the gene sequence themselves. In other words, you can change the way by which your genes are getting read. And how do you do this? There is an epigenome, meaning your DNA is actually wrapped around proteins called histones, right? And depending on.

Particular substances, like, for example.

They can actually turn on and off certain genes for you without actually affecting the gene sequence itself.

For example, the famous case is Angelina Jolie, right? She found out that she had a breast cancer gene and she had her breasts lopped off. And actually that can be resolved with epigenetics and shut off certain cancer genes, et cetera. And what's interesting then is that it is heritable. You can inherit this if you live a healthy lifestyle before you even get pregnant.

All of those cancer genes that you shut off, your child will actually inherit them. So it's a different mechanism of inheritance altogether. That's epigenetics. Many of the foods that we eat are actually.

Epigenetically influences resveratrol, for example, or garlic.

Or even sulforaphanes from broccoli. These are called.

Histone acetylators. They shut off certain cancer genes and they turn on certain protective genes, whereas turmeric and so on. These are methylators. So we can influence the genes and their expression not by a CRISPR technology or anything like that to alter.

You're instead altering the expression. So in your practice, are you basically doing a genome sequencing and then making nutritional recommendations or supplement recommendations or lifestyle adjustments that would diminish the potential expression of genes that might be deleterious.

Not yet, Ben. And the reason for that is actually quite simple. Well, it's expensive. The second reason for that is actually that, for example, I'll give myself an example.

I have always been low on vitamin B. Okay, and what do you do when you see in your metabolomics test that you're low on B9? You just give it as a supplement. Right. And then I confirmed this with a genetic test that shows that, well, okay, I'm actually a slow methylator. So that's the key, is that you can do something immediately with metabolomics test for you don't know whether or not the gene is going to get expressed in a genetic test. So I'm a little bit more.

Right. But you could take steps. One could argue there are beneficial bacteria that you could take in a probiotic form that would increase expression of folate or folic acid. Like you supplement with Lactobacillus strains and, you know, to take a methyltetrahydrofolate, you know, things along those lines.

Yes, but as I said, you could also make the deduction from metabolomic cells. I'm not saying don't take it. You know, I usually take. I took mine to verify what my metabolome was saying. And, you know, there were. I saw a lot of genes were actually suppressed by my current lifestyle. So that's epigenetics. And then the other pillar is bioenergetics, where we focus on mitochondria. In fact, this is the thing I got known for.

I was on a plane going to Iceland and this passenger said, you're the mitochondria doctor. Actually, I'm not. But.

What'S important there is that people always forget that we're always in symbiotic relationship with our environment, right? So we breathe out carbon dioxide and water. The plants take it in and with sunlight then gives us oxygen.

For us to breathe. So it's a system that's actually very much tied into an environment. We're also yoked to sunlight and so on. So in terms of our circadian rhythms, but that is that bioenergetics, we focus on.

That lack of energy. If you imagine a Citibank that suddenly lost energy or power, what happens, right? It shuts down. Garbage is not collected. You get cancers or Parkinson's.

There is no military that can be deployed because there's no energy to power them up. So you get cancers, cancer cells. And so energy is actually a fundamental perspective when you're looking at more or less the bioenergetic anatomy of the person. And that's, you know, you have 100 quadrillion mitochondria, I mean, and those are basically bacteria that are living inside your cells. You know, you have an average of about 500 of them per cell, except for red blood cells higher in the brain and in the liver, one to 2,000 per cell. So. So someone ought to take care of them. And we take care of them in health optimization medicine. Right?

Yeah. So with mitochondria, are you pretty much using something like that Genova nutraval test to look at markers of mitochondrial health? And then I know that you have some tips you want to give us when it comes to photobiomodulation and hydration strategies and things like that. But then basically you're prioritizing stuff like that if you see mitochondrial dysfunction or markers that would indicate mitochondrial dysfunction.

Yes, I do. You know, Ben, for example, in photobiomodulation, right, we used to think that it was a complex four of the mitochondria that actually absorbed the light via chromophore, et cetera. Turns out it's the wrong wavelength. And just two years ago it was elucidated that actually red light.

Actually makes the water around the ATP synthase, which is the gear that produces, that uses up the gradient, the proton gradient, to produce ATP. Right.

It makes the water around it runnier so that it can spin faster. And now we see that we've moved away from a perspective of light actually getting absorbed by mitochondria into actually light getting absorbed by the water and making it runnier. So these are the kinds of things that, since you know this now, then you can prescribe, you know, like for example, infrared light to your clients or patients.

One of the best things you can do for your mitochondria is wake up, drink a giant mason glass jar. This is what I do. Giant mason glass jar of I use hydrogen rich water that's structured so it's very, very well absorbed. And then I stand in front of a light panel while I'm working on my emails for about 20 minutes. And it's a great way to charge up ATP synthase at the beginning of the day. I mean, it works fantastically for mitochondria.

Yeah, that's just one of the hacks. As I said, it's a simple hack. You don't need to take any supplements for it. You just flip on the switch of A light. And you're wonderful. But you have to be mindful of your water intake. As you said, drink hydrogen rich water. I have remineralized reverse osmosis water that is actually vortexed into structured water.

Another hack that you can do is you could use your infrared light. You actually put your water on top of that infrared light for about 20 minutes and you actually have structured water.

It does. The only reason I don't do that is because now that I drink hydrogen rich water in the mornings, that hydrogen gas will kind of diffuse out of the water after about 10 minutes. And so I drink it pretty soon after I pour it. But yeah, if you wanted to and you were listening in, yeah, you can take a little pinch of sea salt and put that in a glass jar. And if you have one of these light panels or even the sunlight, you know, put it out there and either go out and do some, some nude sunbathing in the morning or else use one of these light panels right after you've had a whole bunch of that water. And it's an amazing way to support your mitochondria. So you've got clinical metabolomics, you've got epigenetics, you've got the mitochondria.

Those are three of the pillars.

Yeah, bioenergetics. Yeah. We have microbiota. You have the microbiota or what I call the gut immune system. The biggest change from my time in medical school to now, Ben, is really that we were taught before it's the bone marrow, right? Now we know it's the gut that's allowed largest immune system in the body and it's the microbiota. 78% of your bacteria are actually in your gut. And they teach your immune system what's foreign, not foreign, and so on. That's why you see in patients, for example, who were born by cesarean section because they didn't have the proper inoculation with the vaginal organisms by spontaneous vaginal delivery, they are prone more to allergies and other immune diseases because there's improper activation of the immune system. Now this information was not available to us before. It's only available to us now.

What the more enlightened obgyns are doing now is that if they're doing spontaneous vaginal, they're doing cesarean section. They put in a gauze in the vagina and then they deliver the baby by cesarean and then as the head is coming out, they rub the gauze in the face. So yeah, hopefully to do the in a proper inoculation Yeah, I wish I'd.

Known about that when Jessa got a C section. I mean, we wound up doing a lot of breastfeeding, of course, and the kids spent a lot of time outdoors in the dirt because we were digging up the whole backyard, you know, getting rid of all the grass and plants, planting a garden when they were born. So they got a pretty healthy biome exposure. But that's a very good idea. Are you doing much in the way of. There are a lot of companies like Longevity and viome popping up now doing these whole microbiome sequences. Are you getting into that at all?

I use Genova's GI effects.

Because it's a lot more practical for me to take a look at it. They already have a good summary. If you have an inflammation, if you have a.

There are standard markers now that are being recognized by illness medicine. Like, for example, calprotectin is a marker for intestinal bowel disease. You could take a look at.

The immune status very quickly. You could take a look at pathogenic organisms.

I like that one because it's not a genome analysis. It just gives you direct measurements of your fecal secretory IgA and pancreatic enzymes, et cetera.

It's.

It's less data, but it gives you, from an immediate clinical standpoint, a whole bunch of actionable information.

See, when I developed the home framework, Ben, this was on my mind. So a patient is sitting or a client is sitting in front of you. What the fuck do you do? Right? I am not going to get into the didactics of everything else. I'm just going to take a look at what your basic cell is doing and what do we do about it? So they do have. So you can balance those. And what's nice about is they do have the genetic sequencing. Now, you could get the expanded list and you could see it. But what they have in there, too, is your sensitivity to natural antibiotics, like, for example, for berberine or oregano oil or uva uracea and stuff like that. And you could give those as.

An alternative for your patients taking care of.

It tells you which parasites or yeast or fungus you have are sensitive to which specific herbal compounds, which can be very useful. If you know that oil of oregano that you're taking is ineffective, but UVA ursi would be, then it definitely helps you not waste your time or your money. So I do like that test. Now, what about exposomics? What are exposomics?

Exposomics is the sum total of your exposure, exposure to your own lifestyle and to the environment and includes even your exposure when you were in utero, meaning when you were still being gestated. Right. So. Or while your mother was in pregnancy with you. So it includes like your alcohol exposure, like fetal alcohol syndrome, for example, for mothers who drink. Right. And then when you get older, your exposure to your tobacco.

Your lifestyle, if you run, you know, Ben, I used to run six minute miles. And you know, my HSCRP was through the roof at the time my body was so inflamed. But.

The thing about experiments is that it shows how your environment interacts with your genome to produce something called a phenome. Note I didn't say phenotype. Right, it's called a phenome.

So this is the. This will include now your toxins. And that's why I like the Genova test for this is that it includes, for example, your exposure to gas fumes. Like, for example, if you sit in traffic all the time. You know, in Manila, we sit in traffic all the time. You know, for when I'm there, I'm there 30 days, every quarter. And you should come then. But you don't want to sit in traffic. For my clinic is like 0.6 miles from my hotel and it takes me 45 minutes.

I want to come down there sometime. One of my key employees works in the Philippines, based out of Manila. So I do plan on coming down at some point. But you actually test the exposomics using that same nutrival test we were talking about earlier for lead and mercury and arsenic, etc.

Mercury, yes. And the nice thing about that is, is that, for example, when they test for mercury, they don't test your serum. They open up your blood cells and see how much mercury is in there.

I remember this when I was taking my board exams in Paris, I was asked.

What is this magnesium? What do you do with it? It was intracellular magnesium. They asked me a question which was, I assumed was rhetorical. He said, why do you Americans like testing for serum magnesium? It doesn't mean anything. And that stuck to me. It's like, yeah, actually it's just a means of a mechanism of transport. If you get serum magnesium, right, but if you take it from a cell, then you actually see how much of.

A lesbian is a cell. Or a buckle, like a mouth swab can give you a decent idea. The interesting thing about the exposomics, though, is that that ties back into the epigenetics. Like. Like if you look at tobacco smoke, for example, you smoke, you change your methylation of a few different Genes, and that actually can permanently affect genetic expression in your offspring and affect their methylation capabilities. So that's some pretty important stuff to actually be looking at.

Yeah. In fact, there's a wonderful slide. The image is out there in the Internet where there's a mother who smoking and then she's passing on her.

Genes and her epigenetics to her daughter and her daughter's daughter, because the reproductive cells of the daughter's daughter will have it. So you're affecting three generations. There's a grandmother, the mother and the grandchild will from the smoking grandmother actually shows the effect of epigenetics. It's actually pretty cool.

When you're looking at exposomics, are you incorporating any specific tactics to clear up toxins.

Like a detoxification protocol that would involve certain supplements or medications or techniques?

Yes, I actually do. In terms of detoxification, my focus right after giving you your supplementation, I give you a targeted supplementation. If you don't need vitamin A, we don't give you that. If you don't need C, et cetera. In fact, I have custom packets here it is morning, noon and night. And patients will say, hey, Dr. Ted, I promise I'll eat properly, et cetera. But from experience, Ben, you know that they never do you take your supplements. So after that, the main focus that I do is actually focus on the gut and do a gut cleanup. And I have a gut cleanup protocol because you eat every day. And so I give them particular ways of actually how to eat and timing of the eating and so on and so forth and the quality of food that you eat to minimize toxins. And then give them, of course, lifestyle advice, like, for example, you know, you go to fresh air environment. If your methyl tert butyl ether is high, you know, you could check out whether or not they are getting takeout food from plastic containers or from styrene containers, because you could see the metabolite there rising. Also, you know, when you're on the go and people are still using styrofoam cups and stuff like that, you know, they. They ingest that. So. So you could already give lifestyle advice.

Just from looking at those toxins that are in there. And interestingly, Ben, one of the most neglected toxins out there is light. You know, phototoxicity. I know that people are aware that blue light will fuck up your sleep and so on, but.

In my room, essentially, when you wake up, you essentially program your lights to emit more increasing blue lights until the middle of the day and then more Increasing in the red frequency as the sun sets.

Yeah, I kind of do that. I use some blue light in my office, but because it can be a little harsh to the retina with the flicker, etcetera, I combine it with red light. So if you can use a red incandescent bulb and then also have one of these blue light producing devices, so you get. Basically you're just trying to match the full spectrum of sunlight as much as possible. Obviously getting out in the sun is the very, very best thing in the morning. But you're right, a lot of people think blue light bad always, but it's really at night that it's bad. And getting it during the day, especially along with these other infrared spectrums, is actually quite good for your circadian rhythms.

Yes, and I'd like to emphasize this again. We only think that lifestyle factors is in what we eat and what we drink and so on. We don't consider environmental modification as part of that. You know, we have created an environment that's no longer suited to our make and model. You know, our avatar, our meat avatar, is of a different make and model from the world that we have created. We're paleo people or hunter gatherers. Then we created this extremely modern world. So there's an impedance mismatch between the world that we've created and what our bodies are actually suited for. And in health optimization medicine, you would like to match what your body is suited for. But hey, we're intelligent beings, we have the proper technology to do it, or at least the beginnings of why don't we modify our environment to suit that of the make and model of the human body? Right, so you can modify the lighting system in your house. You could change your drinking water.

You could have an air filter to clean up the air in your house with a proper humidifying settings.

Yeah, and even noise pollution is of course a big issue as well. You know, that's another one.

To pay attention to. And I think a lot of people don't view those type of things as toxins, but they certainly can add up over time.

Ben, you have highly intelligent listeners in noise pollution, and I would just like to challenge one of them to please invent me what I've always wanted. I want.

An earplug that actually cuts you off at a particular decibel. So far I haven't found one in the market. You could hear everything up to a particular decibel and then after that it cuts you off at that decibel.

Yeah, there is one. It's called the I Believe it's the focal or the focus or something like that. I'll find it. I actually own some. They were designed for rock concerts to allow you to hear the rock concerts, but then they block out everything else past a certain frequency. They're very expensive earplugs. You know, they're like a $30 set of earplugs, but. But they actually work pretty well. I need to. I'll see if I can find them and put a link to them in the show notes. If I remember where I got them. They're actually up in my bedside right now. So I could probably go up there and find out and add those to the show notes. But. But yeah, that's a good idea. They do make them because here in.

D.C. you know, when you cross the street, you know, and you know, we have the second busiest fire station in the country and man, we have high pitched sirens here, unlike in Europe, you know, they use dudu. Du. They says low pitch. Right here in the United States we have a very high pitched sirens. And I want them cut off, you know, because I end up really plugging my ears with my fingers. But anyway, just for noise pollution.

Yeah, okay, so I know you get into. I know we've got a lot of stuff to talk about. I want to hit on a few other things. You get into chronobiology and evolutionary medicine as well. Those are like your sixth and seventh pillars. But you know what I would love to do, because I'm sure this stuff will kind of work into that is I would love to ask you a few specific questions related to a few very interesting things that you do that I'm intrigued with. For example, you have what you describe as kind of like the Rolls Royce.

Of jet lag hacking, which is of.

Course linked to chronobiology. You travel a ton between Manila and Washington D.C. and your other travels and conferences. I would love to hear you describe your jet lag protocol.

Okay.

I rely heavily on hormone balancing.

Ben, and that's really the Rolls Royce of jet lag therapy. So imagine me coming in from Washington D.C. and going to Manila. Right now there's a 12 hour time difference, right? So midnight here, I will be having lunch there. And of course my gut is asleep and my microbiota are also jet lagged and they would be asleep. So what I do is I actually work on.

Seven major neuroendocrine nexuses. So I hack my melatonin. Of course, my melatonin goes in at nighttime over there and my growth hormone I actually inject. I Pulse it four times a day. Because for men, there is a natural pulsing.

Action of growth hormone in men. In women, it's more slightly a bleeding tendency. They do have some minor pulses, but in general, they have a more stable level of growth only for men. So.

When I get there, Ben, I have to see patients right away. So I even inject in front of my patients. I said, if you want me to have this kind of performance in front of you and have a clear head in terms of treating you, I inject in front of them. And also to remove their fear of injecting. One patient said, Dr. Ted, it's just an injection. It's not surgery. And then I actually use my thyroid hormone goes in the morning.

Because when you wake up, your thyroid hormone level rises, right? It revs up your body, and your skin is actually supposed to be hit by sunlight. And what many people don't know, Ben, is that when we were in medical school, we were taught that ACTH, or the adrenocort picotropic hormone, which induces you to produce cortisol, was only produced in the brain. It was just as recently as five years ago when they found out that melanocytes.

In the skin actually have pro opio melanocortin, which can actually produce ACTH and induce you to produce cortisol. So when sunlight is supposed to hit your skin in the morning and it will wake you up, so your thyroid hormone and your cortisol levels actually rise almost at the same time, almost instantaneously. Right. So you time it at the time that you actually want to wake up.

So.

I have four doses of decreasing cortisol, and I only do this for about five days.

And so you're dosing after a period of heavy jet lag, you're actually dosing with cortisol?

Yes, I am dosing with cortisol.

And that's an injection?

No, no, no. This is hydrocortisone tablets.

Okay, gotcha. Those are prescription only, I assume, tablets.

Yes, they are prescription.

And then, of course, if it's a day for injecting your testosterone, I inject subcutaneous testosterone twice a week. Very low dose. It's 50 milligrams subcutaneous. It's just 100 a week.

It was just elucidated recently that men actually have two curves in a month of their testosterone levels. It's two weeks in duration, whereas women is usually 28 days. Right. So there's actually.

Two peaks in a month for men. And we try to simulate that physiologically. And that goes in the morning because testosterone will wake you up, up also.

And then.

For each meal, you have to make sure that your enzymes are actually supported because your gastrointestinal system is also asleep. Right. So you have to take your gastrointestinal enzymes. And also that's where I take my spore probiotic during those meals. I raise my spore probiotic intake during that time.

Yeah, I have a similar alcohol. I use the Thorne Biogest and then the seed probiotic, which has some other antioxidants and some pomegranate seed extract in it. So you get a big release of urolithin A, which is very protective for your mitochondria. And I combine those two. I don't use those at all when I'm at home, but when I'm traveling, I'm a huge fan of the gut support. It also helps with the whole kind of traveler's constipation piece.

Yeah. A friend of mine, Kieran Krishnan, who has microbiome labs, he has this spore probiotic which they're testing in the UK and they have tested, they've come back with clinical samples. That's what I use. I think here in the US it's called Omega Spore Biotic. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but.

They also. I think that they also produce it as a thrive probiotic or something like that.

You have to make sure. One thing that I do, Ben, aside from.

Making sure that I take.

My enzymes with meals and my probiotics, et cetera, is that I have one meal that's relatively constant in the time zones. So here I have, here I'm in Washington, D.C. right now and I eat my dinner at around 7:30pm so if I am in California or in your neck of woods, I would be eating around, you know, 4:30pm.

And if I'm in Europe, I'll be eating around 10:30pm and in the Philippines, I would be eating around 7:30am so there is one anchor meal that anchors me in the different time zones. Otherwise I would really be fucking up my gut. Microbiome.

Yeah, that's something I do too. Like, even if I land in Tokyo and it's 2pm, I'll wait until 7pm for any meal at all because food is so good at aligning circadian rhythms. And I do a lot of intermittent fasting. But after I've been traveling a lot, I really do prioritize breakfast when I'm at home. Because if I can get breakfast in sometime between about 8 and 9:30am it also does a really good job at rebooting my circadian rhythm, so that works well. Now, what about. I think you had mentioned to me that you're using erythropoietin and some kind of oxygen concentrator. Is that part of the jet lag protocol or is that something different?

I actually.

Read about aerotoxicity.

A while back, and it's come back in the news where the cabin air in the. Since we both are in airplanes, a lot is actually mixed with engine air, Ben, and I hope you know that. So.

You'Re actually breathing slightly toxic air when you're inside airplanes.

I know.

It's like a prisoner. Yeah. And so what I do is that I have an oxygen concentrator. You can buy a portable one if you want. I have an oxygen concentrator that I actually breathe into about 20 minutes, three times a day, if I can do that. Otherwise I do it right before bedtime. I do 40 minutes right before bedtime. Now, the EPO is an experiment of mine because I'm a big fan of microdosing. Right. What if you microdose hormones? And I said, well, what is the one that we lose as we age? We lose our oxygen carrying capacity. Really? And so I said, well, okay, why don't we address a part of that, which is why don't we increase G even just very slightly, the number of red blood cells that you have, so you have more oxygen carrying capacity by virtue of having more red blood cells. The standard dose for EPO is around 400,000 IU in a single injection weekly. And I am doing a small injection of 400iu daily. And I've done this for two years because one of the things that I do, Ben, is I try everything on myself first before I try it on my patients or clients, so I know exactly what they're going through. And I've done this with everything, all hormones and all supplements except for estrogen. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. And with the epo, with this oxygen concentrator you're using, can you actually buy without a prescription, like a portable oxygen concentrator that you could pack into your travel bag?

Absolutely, absolutely. They're approved for travel.

Is that the type of thing someone could just get on Amazon, or do you need a prescription?

No, no, no. You can get in Amazon. You could just type in portable oxygen concentrators and out come the portable ones.

That's a very good idea. So you travel with that. You don't use it on the airplane, but you use it when you've arrived to wherever you're going.

Yeah, when I'm going or when I'm on a layover, since I carry it in my person. Or when I'm in a layover, which is usually the case. Right. There's no straight flight from Washington D.C. to Manila.

Yeah, that's a very good idea. I never thought of that.

Yeah.

Okay, so you're micro dosing with EPO and using an oxygen concentrator.

And then you're also using some of these peptides and hormones. You're playing around with light and then with food. Anything else interesting that you do for your circadian biology?

For my circadian biology, of course. This is what I call sleep hygiene. Right. I have saying which I created 10 years ago. I tell my patients and my clients your day begins at the time that you sleep. It's not at the time that you wake up. This actually predisposes them to treat their sleep as the first item in their living rather than something that's last and disposable.

So then it assumes importance to them. Right. So choose a time that you sleep. Make sure that you put your phone in a basket outside. That's regular advice. Now it's totally darkened room and so on, and the temperature of the room, et cetera. All of those of course are environmental modifications that you can do and those are well known.

In order to hack the sleep. One of the peptides that I use, for example, I have an OURA ring and I track my deep sleep. If I see that my deep sleep is getting out of whack, then I inject myself for a few days with deep sleep inducing peptide, which simply increases your delta sleep.

Yeah, that dsip.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I talked about a podcast with Jean Tremblay Francois, that last Peptides podcast, he's into that too.

Yeah, I've been using this Peptides Ben for about eight years now. It's only getting into the mainstream consciousness right now, but they're in existence.

Is that something you can safely use all the time or do you need to be careful with your sleep architecture using something like DSIP all the time?

What I do is I take a look at my sleep data and since I can't myself to an EEG all the time, I do have an EEG here at my house, but.

I just rely on my OURA ring to take a look at how I'm sleeping. And then if my deep sleep is really going way out, way too low, then I start injecting until it actually comes right back up and then I stop so it's more regulated by my data, data in real time rather than, you know, continuously using it.

Yeah, interesting. Okay, got it. A couple other questions I wanted to ask you. In the time that we have, food is of course very important. I know that you do quite a bit with dietary prescription, dietary tracking and your own diet. What are some of the major takeaways you could give to people in terms of unique things you're doing with your diet or the biggest things you found to be dial movers?

Okay, Ben, ten years ago, I already instructed my patients these things. I said, it's very difficult to change the what you eat. And for new clients it's really, really difficult. Right? So I tell them, make me a promise. If you cannot change the way you eat, at least give me a time where you actually eat. So I call it an eating window rather than a fasting window. Because fasting sounds so deprived, right? So give me an eating window. And before, the studies on mitochondria said that the 12 hour fast is actually sufficient to induce mitochondrial biogenesis. So I encouraged my patients to do a 12 hour fast. And then I said, okay, why don't you do a carbohydrate fast until noon? So that's 16 hours, right? So that you could mobilize the fat that's in there. And there is a study that actually consulted for in Europe where they actually did this. But what I did was I actually incorporated growth hormone injection in the morning, a very small dose of growth hormone injection in the morning, before they went on a brisk exercise for 40 minutes and increased the lipolysis, especially of the visceral fat.

That study was actually quite well done. And as I tell, I like to tell other doctors, because a journal isn't written in English doesn't mean that it's not valid, right? You have to learn how to read your Russian or your French or your Spanish, or have them translated anyway. So time regulation, I know you do intermittent fasting, etc. But I want everything to be complete within a day because I'm concerned about my client. I don't want my patient to remember, hey, is today fasting day or a non fasting day? Right. I want my patient to remember, okay, from this time to this time, I can eat first, I allow them to eat whatever they want, and then they feel so much better. And then they say, okay, what else can I do? So there's a snowball effect, which is actually great, right?

And then the.

For those who actually have food sensitivity testing, I remove those foods that they're sensitive to right away to decrease their intestinal inflammation and decrease a leaky gut.

How about how are you eating?

I eat in what I call, and this is the first time I'm going to say it out loud is that.

I do what I call micronutrient optimized macronutrient targeted eating. So micronutrient optimized means I get myself tested and see what micronutrients I am deficient in and I supplement those because there's no way that I could catch up with that with food because I know what my lifestyle is. And then macronutrient targeted diet means that I target my intake of the macros according to my activity of the day. So if I'm doing weights today, then it's more protein oriented. If I'm doing, I'm just sitting around.

Doing computer work, then it will be more fat oriented, right? And if I'm doing a lot of aerobic carbohydrate oriented. And the way I tell this to my clients is actually make your fattiest meal as your first meal so that your.

Lipolysis continues right after fast. Make your second meal, which is if you're doing the first meal at noon, your second meal is around 4 o'. Clock. Make it high fiber carbohydrates. There's a big misconception right now that carbohydrates are bad. No, it's actually not that. The biggest missing the most rapidly.

Disappearing macronutrient in the human diet bin is actually fiber and fiber is a carbohydrate. So have a high fiber carbohydrate second meal and your third meal which is around 7:30, you can have a proteinaceous.

Diet unless you have IBS or other inflammatory gut issues. I found that some of the insoluble fiber presents difficulty for quite a few folks. Like a lot of the dark leafies and raw vegetables and things like that.

So you introduce those slowly, right? You introduce those slowly to. But you know, Ben, from experience, even without sensitivities or before they, you know, after their blood is drawn for sensitivities, I immediately take them off all milk and milk products and all grain and grain products.

And for people with arthritis, I noticed that even if they don't get tested.

Within six months, the pain has actually diminished significantly. But I don't want to say. One of the key things about health optimization medicine is that we have no claims. We simply detect and correct imbalances inside your cell in the metabolome, any benefits, beneficial effect like removal of pain, etcetera That's a beneficial side effect to us. That's why we don't have any quarrel with illness medicine. Right. I don't like to quarrel with them. I'm saying that we are the health maintenance component. You are the. We are the health management component. You are the disease management component. Right. Of a spectrum of health.

Are you one of these people that puts a lot of crazy stuff into your morning coffee?

Yes, I am. I am. Initially it was a simple black coffee, and then I started putting in, you know, everyone puts in some MCT oil. Now. I put MCT oil powder. MCT oil gives me the runs. You know, even 14 teaspoon will do it to me. But the powder is all right with me. I put.

Powdered cellulose about a scoop of powdered cellulose.

Which is.

An insoluble fiber. It doesn't cause gas or bloating or anything.

Why do you put that in your coffee?

Because the average requirement for fiber is about 34 grams a day. And I would like. I try my best to reach my 34 grams a day. So I could poop icy.

With the changing microbiota and travel and everything else, the kindest thing that I could do is actually to provide my body with a scaffolding by which the microbiota could actually something about. And then I put in a scoop of collagen fiber. I know that you're. You know about that, so, yeah, that's a cool mix.

And by the way, I should tell you something. I don't think I've talked about this on a podcast before, but. But I found that vagus nerve function and the activation of the sympathetic nervous system that occurs especially during travel and when you're stressed out seems to have an impact on the ileocecal valve and also on relaxation during bowel movements. And upon a little bit of research of late, it turns out that acetylcholine and choline precursors help out quite a bit with that particular issue. And if you're stressed out and traveling a lot, like a megadose of choline seems to help out quite a bit. And there's even this supplement I recently discovered called parasim, as in, like, parasympathetic. And it was developed by somebody who originally relied upon nicotine to kind of almost like induce a bowel movement. They're using, like, a nicotine patch over their ileocecal valve. And then they realized that, like, large doses of acetylcholine could have the same effect. And I tried that out and it was almost like too much. I literally just filled the whole toilet bowl during my last bout of travel. But something was working. So I'm actually, I'm kind of researching it right now. But just as an aside, that seems to have quite an effect as well, kind of targeting the vagus nerve and some of these acetylcholine receptors.

I actually take C choline.

Daily. And that's because that's part of my hack for my brain function. Right.

I'd like to maintain my neurotransmitter levels, my levels of dopamine, for example. I take mucuna pruriens about three times a week to maintain my levels of acetylcholine. I take either alpha GPC or cyticoline every day. I take five HTP nightly, anywhere from 25 to 50 milligrams for the serotonin metabolism and dopamine gets converted to epinephrine. Anyway, so that's how I do things. If you want a medical hack for raising your dopamine and focus levels, you could start using drugs like selegilin, for example, which will inhibit the degradation of dopamine, like depranil. Yeah, depdepranil. You could do that. You know what my favorite hack is, Ben? When we really have to focus and have to finish a lot of stuff, I microdose LSD and I take 1/4 tablet of Depranil and that puts me in the zone practically the whole day.

Yeah, yeah. LSD or even plsd, which you can get from the Lysergy website. That's pretty powerful stuff. I always have a little bit of that in my fanny pack. If I need to power. I'm very careful because I don't want to imbalance my dopamine and serotonin levels. But about, I would say once every three to four weeks or so I'll use that. And it really helps me power through like a creative, analytical day. It's very interesting stuff. Well, you know what, there is so much more that we could dive into and I really want to encourage people to go to your website, even if they're a physician practitioner or just a non physician who's very interested in kind of this idea of preventive medicine and the very unique approach that you have to it. So I'm also going to link to everything we talked about from your methylene blue CBD nicotine stack to some of these tests that you're running to. By the way, I found those earplugs, they're called V Modas. V Moda earplugs, and I'll put those in the show notes as well. So if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com drted I'll link to Ted's website and everything that he's doing and also everything that we talked about in the show, because this is one of those episodes. Kind of a treasure trove of interesting information. And you are one interesting cat. Dr. Ted, I want to thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you. An old cat, but my telomere age is 32. I'm 50. I'm 57.

That's pretty good. Yeah, I'm 37 and I'm at 20, but I would love to be in my 30s when I'm in my 40s. So, yeah, that's a. A good goal to shoot for.

Well, one of my best patients who has been with my care for about eight years now, he's 71 and his telomere age is 22. So there's hope yet. Thank you very much, by the way. And I do this all the time in all my lectures. I thank all the podcasters for preparing the minds of all the people of the listeners to be ready, in fact, for health optimization medicine. I mean, without you guys, it's very hard to educate the people. So thank you for the work that you do.

Awesome. All right, man. Well, thanks so much for coming on. And again, folks, shownotes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Dr. Ted and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Ted Achicoso signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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