Blood Oxygenation Tips, Negative Calorie Foods, Self-Testing Your Adrenals & More: Yuri Elkaim's...
Yuri Elkaim discusses energy optimization through blood oxygenation, acid-alkaline balance, and adrenal function. He covers betaine HCl for digestion, how to self-test your adrenals, and why probiotics matter for energy levels.
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YouTube video uploaded October 22, 2016.
Cited as on page 108 of the book (yields 6–8 two-inch squares).
Pupillary light reflex test: in a dark room shine a flashlight at a 45° angle into one eye and watch the pupil for 30 seconds — constriction sustained >20 seconds suggests healthier adrenal response; immediate pulsing suggests adrenal dysfunction.
Aim for diversity of strains and a total of around 10 billion CFU (total per dose) with ~7–15 strains preferred.
An approximate 80% alkaline / 20% acidic balance (80:20 guideline).
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Hey, what's up, everybody? It's Ben Greenfield. I've got my friend Yuri on today's call. Yuri, Elkaim, Elkheim, Elkhay, ime. I don't know. I don't know how to pronounce those crazy. What? European, Jewish, Middle Eastern, E, L, K, I, M, el Kaim. I should probably stop trying to pronounce it so that I don't offend people. We'll ask him in the show. Before we get to Yuri, however, I do have a couple of things, things I wanted to tell you about. I was recently on a TV show. I have to keep it secret, but it will air, I believe, mid November. And in that TV show, I'm wearing a T shirt, a T shirt that I absolutely love and that doesn't have a logo on it because they wanted me to wear a T shirt that didn't have a logo on it. But I am wearing.
The way that I do my clothing is I just stick to specific brands, right? So I've got this new brand and I'm wearing most of their clothing now for my kind of cool looking, tight fitting fitness apparel. Because everybody knows I love me some spandex. No, I'm kidding. They don't do spandex. They actually make apparel that's really comfortable, really soft. Even my kids like kind of snuggling up to me and I'm wearing this fitness apparel. But it also looks good. At least I think it looks good. If you think I look like crap when I'm dressed, when I'm actually wearing a shirt, you should probably stop listening to this particular commercial. But 4 Athletics is the name of the brand, 4 Athletics. So go check out their stuff. They've got shirts, they've got shorts. So the idea idea is they use a crowdfunding model to get you amazing fitness apparel at a fraction of the retail price. And they do it ethically, so there's no waste. And 100% of their stuff is made right here in the US of A. So it must be good. Anyways, you go to fourathletics F O u r athletics dot com, go there, surf around on their site. If you've actually seen me wearing clothes, it's likely that I'm wearing their stuff. So use promo code BEN B N to get 15% off of all stuff from 4athletics. All right? Just do it, 4athletics.com use code BEN15% off. Also, for any of you who are A obstacle racing or B party animals who like Vegas, you should know that I am having a big meetup in Las Vegas, it's not going to be on the Strip. We're actually going to do this off the Strip at a sweet sushi restaurant. We're going to drink sake, we're going to eat amazing sushi. And it's all part of the the Ben Greenfield Fitness meetup that's taking place after the Tough Mudder in Vegas. Now this is coming up soon. This is Saturday night, October 28th. So what we're going to do is we're all going to meet in Vegas, do the race out in Henderson for any of you who want to get on a plane last minute and fly to Vegas. And Saturday, October. Did I just say 28th? I think Saturday is October 29th. Anyways, it's that kind of like Halloween ish weekend. So I'm going to fly down there. I'm going to do the race. I'm going to fly back in time to have Halloween with my family. I think I'm going to be Shaggy from Scooby Doo. I think that's what my children have requested. Anyways, though. 7:00pm we are going to all meet at this place called Tide Seafood and Sushi Bar and just throw down. And that's information for all that. Just go to facebook.com bgfitness and check it out. Come meet up and do whatever people do when they meet up at a meetup and race the Tough Mudder. You got to do both. Honestly, I don't want to see you stuffing your face with sushi rolls and drinking copious amounts of sake unless you also, like, climbed their warped wall and did their monkey bars and ran through the mud and got shocked. All the stuff you do at a Tough Mudder. All right, let's go talk to Yuri in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.
It's just so complex, and I think we just have to do the best we can with the knowledge we have and really listen to our body to kind of navigate our way through this jungle of confusion. There's a very fine line between magic and science, and magic is simply stuff we haven't been able to quantify yet doesn't mean that it' it doesn't exist. Sometimes I get frustrated with the health profession because, you know, you go see somebody who's a specialist in one thing and to that person they have a hammer and everything's a nail.
He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.
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All right, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here, and I have a few, a few little quips for you to think about, such as the following. Your blood is a river. Food shouldn't drain your energy, period. Your adrenal glands need to be stressed. But stressed strategically. Eating less can give you more energy if you do it the right way. Anything that clutters your head strips you of energy and productivity. Movement is life. Excess healing and repair inhibits that movement. And stagnation is death. Increasing energy is synonymous with increasing fertility, health and longevity. So if you decode for yourself an energy increase, the effects are going to be exponential. Well, everything that I just told you are just bits and pieces of what are called the seven commandments of energy that you find in the book that was written by today's podcast guest, Yuri Elkaim. The book is called the All Day Energy Diet. And Yuri claims we're going to delve into this a little bit more and find out whether or not it's really true that you can double your energy in seven days if you actually follow some of the recommendations that he has in this diet. And he goes into everything from blood ph to the digestive system and adrenal systems. He talks about how caffeine can rob your energy, about stomach acid, about probiotics, about drinking when you're eating, home adrenal testing, all sorts of stuff that we're going to cover today because the book is just jam packed front to back with little. It's the kind of stuff I like, little practical tips that you can use, but stuff that you really don't come across in other places. So Yuri has actually been on the show before to talk about things like cellular energy, for example, and detoxification. And Yuri and I have known each other for a long time. I mean, what Yuri? Probably like a decade, probably.
And we've snuggled together while camping.
We have snuggled together while camping, yes. So we've hung out. We're not strangers to one another. I think the first time that I saw you, Yuri, you were running on a treadmill at a gym, at a health and fitness conference that we were both at. And I found out later that you were the guy who had, way back in the day, created Done for you. Treadmill gym workouts that people could download onto an app, right?
Yep. The treadmill trainer is one of our first. First programs.
Yeah. You were ahead of your time, man. That was like one of the first, I think, like, like walk you through a fitness workout apps I, I had ever seen in my life on a treadmill.
It was pretty awesome.
You saved.
We didn't, we, we didn't catch up with all the innovation, but I guess we're one of the initial innovators.
You save people from blowing their brains out on a treadmill. People everywhere.
Totally. I saved myself because I'm like, yeah.
So you, you were a former pro soccer player and we talked about your story a little bit on the last episode that I had you on. So if people want to go back and listen to that, I'll put a link to the past episode I did with Yuri over in the show notes and today's show notes, which are going to be jam packed. You can access@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Seven Commandments. That's the number seven commandments based off of Yuri's seven commandments that he has in this all day energy diet book. But Yuri, one thing that I really wanted to delve into so that people can get to know where you're coming from a little bit better, is that you had a point in your life where all your hair fell out, which I think is a perfect place to start, because I know a lot of guys don't like it when their hair starts to fall out. And I think you went through this on steroids. So. So fill us in on, on the whole hair thing, dude.
Yeah, and just, just so we're clear, this isn't like male pattern baldness that happens when you're like 50. This happened when I was 17. And to give you some context, my dad's Moroccan, so I had a lot of hair previous to that.
And Moroccans, like, where you have like a full on, like Napoleon Dynamite and then some like curly black hair.
Right? Well, I had, I had luscious brown hair.
Okay.
I'll put it that way. It wasn't curly, but it depends, I guess. Yeah, you can go either way. So I had like, thick eyebrows, you know, long brown hair. And then my last year of high school, it started falling out and I was like, what's going on here? This is weird.
You mean like your eyebrows too?
Yeah, it actually started off I was in the shower after soccer practice one night and I was washing my hair, opened my eyes, and then I had like, A handful of hair. And I'm like, that's not normal. So I was thinking, maybe it's the shampoo, but obviously it wasn't. So I looked in the mirror after and I noticed I had kind of like a quarter size patch on my head. And next morning I woke up, had a ton of hair on my pillow. And within the space of about six weeks, I lost all of my hair. Eyebrows, eyelashes, body hair, everything. And so my doctor basically said I had an autoimmune condition called alopecia, but that was the extent.
When did you go to. Did you go to your doctor, like the first day or did you. Did you wait until, until it was all gone?
No, it was. I can't remember exactly when, but it was definitely before it was all gone. I. I remember him sifting through my hair and looking at the patches. He's like, okay, yeah, this is, this is what it is. And their diagnosis or their recommendation was like, well, there's really, there's nothing we can do, but we can inject your head of some cortisone if you want. I was like, nuts. That's quite all right. So, yeah, so it just, you know, it kind of ran its course and fell out within about six weeks. And that was really awkward. I mean, you know, going through my last year of high school, where two months previous to that, you know, I'm this, like, heavily coveted jock. And then, you know, two months later, people are looking at me like I'm going through cancer. So that was an interesting transition.
But was it just your hair or was it. Were there other things going on?
Well, the thing is, like, it took me a long time to realize that there was other things going on. So it was really just my hair. Superficially. It took me about eight years to go through the whole medical community to eventually determine that they were pretty much useless. And I went back to school to study holistic nutrition in my mid-20s. And I had, you know, a number of my professors were naturopathic doctors and different alternative healers. And I asked them, I'm like, do you think this condition can be related to my diet? Because I started to clue in that the way I was eating probably wasn't serving me that well. So I was eating a lot of breads past the cereals the way those old textbooks would tell athletes to eat. And just to give you some context, I could easily eat toast and cheese and cereal with tablespoons of sugar on top from morning till night, no problem. And that's kind of what I did with very Few vegetables or fruit for almost 20, you know, for almost 15 years. And I didn't realize the toll that was taking on my body. And when I think about it, you know, when I think back to my earlier, earlier days, you know, 8, 9, 10. I used to have really bad stomach aches to the point of like having to lay down, put my legs up on the wall to relieve gas.
As like terrible asthma. Up until I was in my late teens, really bad eczema and really low energy. Like I was sleeping. Like half of my days were sleep. It was either between like 10 to 12 hours at night or, and, or a one to two hour afternoon nap. And I was like. At the time, I was like, well, you know, it's just because I'm active.
And I was gonna say, is that, is that abnormal for, for a pro soccer player?
Yeah, I was, I mean, having seen, having seen the other side, like after things got better, it was definitely abnormal because I was, I was, I was a teenager practicing playing, let's say, five or six times a week. But it wasn't like six hours a day type of training. Like, it wasn't like ultra marathon type stuff. It was, you know, one to two hours of training or a game. And, you know, it's nothing that a healthy body can't handle. So what I realized eventually when I kind of got to the, to the, to the crux of this basically was like my diet was a major, major culprit of this, which as a result of the foods I was eating, my body was heavily inflamed and I was eating a lot of foods that my body was sensitive to. And over time, my immune system kind of just went haywire. So when I cleaned things up, when I started to learn about nutrition and all this awesome stuff, like, it was like my hair itself within probably three months. And that was because that was a cool bonus. At that point. I was in my mid-20s. I didn't really care too much.
So your hair grew back?
It did, yeah, But I kept it shaped for a long time. Then obviously, you know that I've kind of lost everything again. A couple years ago, I had a vaccination for whatever reason at the recommendation of my doctor when I was taking my oldest son in for a quick checkup. And she's like, yeah, while you're here, just get, you know, get a tetanus shot. I don't know why I did it, but two weeks later my hair started falling out again.
Wait, just like randomly, she recommended a tetanus shot?
Yeah, she's like, you know, while you're here, you might as well just, you know, it's been, you know, 10 plus years. You might as well just get another shot. And I was like, yeah, why not? I don't even know why. I didn't even question that because it's pretty ridiculous. So that kind of prompted things to start happening again and kind of everything fell out. But.
Same thing. Was that like an autoimmune reaction or was that more of like a metal toxicity type of thing?
I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, I've spoken to a lot of people about this, and I think there's. I don't know if there's just one answer to this. I think there's a combination of things. Like there's autoimmunity, which is tied in with leaky gut. There's probably some thyroid issues, some heavy metal toxicity. So I think there's a lot of different angles of attack that could have been looked at. But for me, the hair loss was.
By the time I was 24, 25, it was kind of my claim to fame. Everyone knew me as the guy with the shaved head or no hair. And it was fine. I didn't really care too much about it, but the energy for me was the big thing. So when I started to clean things up, the energy, instead of going from 10 to 12 hours a night of sleeping and still feeling tired, I was waking up after, you know, seven hours, like jumping out of bed, and I'm like, whoa, this is weird. What's going on? Like, I've never experienced this before. And I'm not talking about, like, you know, having shots of espresso or anything. And for. So for me, that was like the real big aha. And by this point, I had retired from playing pro soccer, but I was still, like, super, super active. Like, still playing at a decent level. Not professionally, but several times a week training on my own. So I was active every single day to the same degree I was before. And it was just amazing to see how my body had transitioned to feeling a thousand times better. And I was like, wow, if I had known this stuff when I was playing soccer, you know, at that high level, oh, yeah, what a difference would have made. Like, it was just crazy.
Oh, dude, I. I have the same wishes sometimes when I wish I could go back and, and not stop off at McDonald's for a Super sized Big Mac before collegiate tennis practice every day, because that was my go to, right? Big Mac, super size fries and a Dr. Pepper. And then I'D drive to tennis and. And I would be finishing that as I was walking into tennis. And then sometimes I'd do the. The filet o fish, which was another favorite of mine. Much healthier because it's fish. It's omega 3 fatty acids. Well, first of all, keep your hair short because I think the universe probably has it out for your hair. So I just, I'd just stay bald if I were you, the way that you are now.
Yeah, I live vicariously through my kids, through their hair, so it's all good.
There you go, There you go. They're wonderful. Moroccan hair.
Exactly.
So, as I mentioned in the intro, you have seven commandments of energy in your book. And I don't necessarily want to cover every single one today because there's some other kind of like nitty gritty things in your book that I want to delve into. But the first thing that you talk about is blood. You specifically talk about how blood is a river that carries oxygen to the cells. And so anything that compromises the health of your blood or ruins your oxygen carrying red blood cells is going to deplete you of energy.
When it comes to oxygen carrying capacity. I know a lot of people who listen in, they're interested in that, not just for energy, but even better performance at altitude and better performance in general as far as increased blood volume. But did you come across as you were writing this book, specific foods or lifestyle practices that you think people might not know about or that might fly under the radar that would be the most notorious for limiting red blood cell production or limiting the oxygen carrying capacity of blood?
Yeah. Well, the funny thing is, the reason I wrote this book is because there wasn't much being said about energy. And what was being said was really just like, blend, like have more protein in the morning, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And this book, it flies in the face of convention. Like, I was on Dr. Oz talking about this and they had a. We had to take out part of this blood segment because their board of advisors for all medical doctors were like, well, we're not too sure about this. And that's fine. Like, the unfortunate part is that a lot of this stuff, like, wait, they.
On Dr. Oz, they didn't want you to talk about blood?
Yeah. Like, we talked about like potential renal acid load in the blood and ph balance and stuff like that. And they said, well, you can talk about that in relation to the kidneys, but not so much in the blood because the science is, you know, not quite there yet. And to me, like, there's A very fine line between magic and science. And magic is simply stuff we haven't been able to quantify yet. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And the stuff that I talk about in this book is, you know, stuff that I've experienced myself. Obviously a lot of it's research backed as well, but obviously there's a lot of stuff that works that we can't quite explain empirically yet. And I think this blood stuff is one of them. So, for instance, the big thing that prompted me to look into the blood was I had a live blood cell analysis done probably what, 10, 12 years ago. And this is basically where you go to like a naturopathic doctor, okay? They'll take a finger prick of blood and they'll look, they'll show you. I mean, they'll basically show you the, the image on the screen under a live microscope. So you're looking at your blood like living instead of being frozen and sent to a lab. And that, that was like, vividly one of the most shocking things I ever saw because I was like, well, where are my red blood cells? And the naturopath was like, well, they're there. They're just all stuck together. And I was like, what are like. Because I remember, like going through anatomy and biology in school and learning, like, red blood cells are supposed to look like this and they're supposed to flow like this. And it did not look like that at all. And I was like, are you telling me that this is exactly what's happening inside my blood right now? Like this image of like this traffic jam of red blood cells? And she's like, yeah. And you see this, here's some yeast and here's some parasitic activity and all this stuff. And I was like, holy. Because this is stuff that had never been taught before, kind of on the medical side from like, you know, going through a university degree. And then it was a bit more alternative and holistic when I went back to school for nutrition. But I was like, this is fascinating. So I realized that it wasn't so much that, like, we're anemic. Like, there's obviously there's, you know, there's the anemia side of things where if you have blood cell, red blood cell issues, that's a different kind of a different thing than what I'm talking about. But here, what I really started to recognize and kind of dive into is that the red blood cells in our, in our body, like they carry oxygen to our cells, and if they're not able to move freely through the blood, then you're not going to get the oxygen or your cells aren't going to get the oxygen that they require. So it's very much like driving during rush hour traffic where you're not going anywhere versus driving on the Highway 3 in the morning, where you're just like able to, you know, zip down the highway in no time. So if your blood is sluggish, you're going to feel sluggish as well. And that's really as simple as I've kind of tried to make it for people to understand, because most people have never seen their blood like this. Probably most of them won't, or just out of laziness or whatever won't do that with the naturopathic doctor. But it's amazing to see how when you start to infuse your body with things like chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is an amazing blood builder. It actually has the exact same chemical structure, molecular structure as hemoglobin, which is the kind of era, the oxygen carrying molecule in the red blood cells. The only difference is that hemoglobin has an iron core. Chlorophyll has a magnesium core. If we look at vitamin B12, which we know is a very important builder for blood and red blood cells, it has the exact same molecular structure as those other two, but it has a cobalt core. So it's really interesting when you start to look at, well, what helps build our blood. Well, we have to look at things like greens because greens are the greatest source of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the green pigment of plants. So when we infuse our body with greens, specifically things like green juices or smoothies or eating more vegetables, we give our body a greater influx of chlorophyll. In addition, we're also getting a ton more phytonutrients that we normally wouldn't get in a, you know, crappy diet. But again, this is stuff you're not going to hear from most medical, you know, doctors and stuff because they don't even look at this. Because energy, energy is one of those things. It's not tangible. Right. It's very, it's an intangible. It's a qualitative thing. Whereas weight loss, for instance, is. We can see it on the scale.
Yeah.
And so it's a really interesting subject matter. But the reason I say this with a lot of conviction is because, you know, we've helped over. This book alone has helped over 70,000 people. And when you see time and time again, people reporting like, I feel like a new person within a week. It really doesn't matter if there's science behind that, you know, and it's not. I'm not, you know, saying, hey, go stand on your roof and jump upside down, stupid stuff like that. But, like, if there are certain elements that are somewhat controversial. It was controversial when Copernicus said that, hey, you know, maybe the Earth isn't flat. Maybe the sun is the center of the solar system and center of the Earth, you know, so blasphemously. Yeah, exactly. Initially, stuff is met with controversy and like, oh, there's no way this can be true. But, you know, you can't argue results with thousands of people.
Okay, I want to. I want to explore some of the things that you just talked about. So, first of all, a lot of people, when they think that there's something wrong with the blood that would be causing energy issues, they do think of what you talk about, which would. Would be anemia, right. Just a decrease in the amount of red blood cells that you have or a decrease in the amount of this hemoglobin molecule that you talked about. But what you're saying is that there's something called live blood cell analysis, where you can actually use a microscope to look at what your blood cells are doing in real time, and you can actually get this done anywhere. Or do you hunt place?
If you had a. Like, any kind of naturopathic doctor will most likely not. I shouldn't say every clinic, but most clinics would have it. The test will run you, depending on where you live, maybe 100 to 200 bucks. But you know what's really interesting is if you can get a test, look at where you are as a baseline, and then retest a couple months later or a couple weeks later, you know, and assuming you're following the right protocol, you'll be like. You'll be astounded by the change. And when you see how you're feeling, like, if you, like, you're naturally gonna feel a lot better. And when you see that reflected in your blood, you're gonna be like, wow, this is. This is amazing.
So. So you were saying that one thing that happens is, like, your red blood cells all stick together. And you can actually see this when you look through the microscope.
Yeah, it's. It's a phenomenon called a rouleau. So think about a stack of casino chips. That's essentially what they look like inside the bottom. Like, if you do this. This analysis, that's what you'll. You're like, why, why am I looking at poker chips? That's kind of what it looks like, but they should look like donuts floating freely. So it's a very big difference.
What, what makes them stack on top of each other like that?
Well, what ends up happening is that at a, at a very basic level, when the blood becomes out of its kind of normal ideal range in terms of a, from a ph balance, there's a negative charge around the red blood cell membranes that repels red blood cells from sticking together. Right. So they all have a negative charge on the outside, positive on the inside. But what ends up happening is when your blood becomes less, or let's just say a little more polluted or a little bit less ideal, that charge can become stripped. And so what ends up happening is that you have the positive component inside the cell that's now attracted to the, the negative component on some other cell membranes, and things can start to stack together like that. So that's typically how it happens.
Okay, so you're talking about like, blood acidosis.
Yeah, exactly.
So with blood acidosis, I mean, a lot of people will say that you can't change the PH of your blood or that it's a myth. I guess it's not that you can't change the PH of your blood. I'm pretty sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, that science has generally accepted that that blood's PH can change. But I think the area that tends to kind of like, get more debate, especially in health circles, is whether, like, eating an alkaline diet is really, truly going to influence the blood ph. I guess with the argument being that the kidneys are so good at regulating blood ph that any type of red meat or yogurt, too much of that being acidic or, you know, not enough greens or something like that, really isn't truly going to override your kidney's ability to be able to maintain the PH of your blood. And so people will say, well, you can't, you can't fix like a blood acidotic state or, you know, what you described as like blood cells stacking together by just eating an alkalinic diet. What's your take on the whole blood ph argument?
Well, I agree that. Well, I think, I think there's a slight misunderstanding because, so our blood, so on a ph scale, 7 being neutral, our blood wants to be about 7.35, which is slightly alkaline. But I think people get.
Kind of misled in the sense, well, if your PH drops to 7.3, then you're gonna have problems. Well, you're gonna be dead if that happens, because it's an exponential scale. So if it moves from 7.5 to 7.3. Sorry, 7.35 to 7.34, that's an exponential jump. So we're not talking about massive shifts from like, 7.35 to 7.25 and stuff like that. We're talking about very, very minute shifts. And what's interesting is that.
It'S tough to tell for sure. I mean, from the work that I've done and the people that we've been able to help and the studies that I've seen, you know, something called potential renal acid load, which is basically what's happening as the kidneys are starting to filter foods as they're metabolized. And so you have certain foods that give off more of a. More of an acid. An acidic ash.
Okay.
Versus an alkaline ash. Right. So the acidic ones are typically foods that. So the equation for potential for prow, which is potential renal acid load, is protein plus, if I can speak protein plus phosphorus minus magnesium, calcium, and potassium. So those are the alkaline minerals in question in this equation. So what ends up happening is when you have a food that has more protein than phosphorus than it does those minerals, it's considered a slightly acidic or more acidic food, depending on.
So that's where like, a very high protein diet would. Would be considered to result in net acidity.
Exactly.
Right.
So the most acidic things would be cheese, dairy at the top. Then we're looking at a lot of the meats. And then as we get a little more neutral, we start getting into some of the nuts and grains. And then on the flip side, the more alkaline stuff, we're talking about fruits and especially vegetables.
Okay, guys, so you're not saying like. Like the. The meats and the dairies and some of these other things, like the seeds and nuts are bad. What you're saying is that those can result in a blood acidotic state based off what you call the. What you call the potential renal acid load.
Yep.
Okay, so that. That's basically a measurement of how many minerals are in a food versus how much acidic ash that it produces.
Yep. Based on the protein and phosphorus inside. So, for instance, like, kale has very little protein and phosphorus compared to the alkaline minerals that we talked about versus a piece of steak, which is going to have high protein, high phosphorus, and fewer of those alkaline minerals. So it's gonna be a slightly more acidic. So the goal is not to be like, well I'm gonna, I'm just, I'm gonna be 100 alkaline because there needs to be some balance. And the recommendation is basically 80, 20. So you want to be 80 alkaline, 20 acidic.
Where's that recommendation coming from?
That's basically coming from. What's actually interesting about this is that, you know, if you look at any of the research in the alkaline diet, stuff like Most people recommend 80, 20, I don't know if there's a rhyme or reason to that. But you know, we tend to observe about, within the all the energy diet, it's like a, it's kind of like an 8020 with, you know, 10% floating for more liberal foods and stuff like that. Again, there's no hardcore science to say that's the specific ratio might be 75, 25 for certain people, who knows? But the whole idea is to basically get more vegetables, more plant based foods into your body.
So basically like Michael Pollan says, eat. What does he say?
Eat more plants, Most of them raw.
Yeah. Well, no, he says something else like eat more or eat less food. How does he say? Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much.
I think he says eat less. Something like that. Eat more plants.
Okay, so you're saying it's about 80, 20. And so what you're arguing would be that the food can actually, based off of what's called the potential renal acid load.
Change the PH of the blood or at least require the kidneys to produce from what I understand, like more bicarbonate ions which would allow. Which would buffer the acid in the blood.
Yeah, exactly. And there's been some interesting studies that have shown that within four hours of consuming a higher alkaline meal, there's actually a shift in the PH in the urine. So it happens very rapidly. And that's why a lot, that's why.
A lot of shift in the PH of the urine. But is that the same as a shift in the PH of the blood?
Well, it's, I mean there's a trickle down effect, right? It's not, it's, it's tough to say if it's exactly the same proportionate change from blood to urine to saliva. But what's happening is, is over time, throughout the entire system, things are starting to improve where they need to be. Because the other thing in addition, it's, you know, like within the body, it's like nothing is compartmentalized. Right. So it's tough to say that it's only because of the alkaline components of vegetables that you have more energy. The other thing is you're getting more phytonutrients in, you're getting more water into your body, you're getting different elements of these foods that are so important for our overall well being. And so it's tough to say that it's just one thing or because of that one thing inside a human body.
Okay, got it. So you could basically keep track. You could get urine test strips and you could test your urine and see the acidity or alkaline of your urine if you wanted to self quantify this. And then that would be somewhat correlative to what your blood might be doing. Or at least it'd give you clues as to what your blood acid alkaline state might be.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, we have our energy greens, which is our kind of our formulated greens powder. With every order, we send people a ph testing kit so they can test their saliva, they can test their urine. And what we recommend is just kind of look at like if you almost like keeping a food journal, right? Track your ph over a couple days or a couple weeks and notice how you're feeling overall and how it relates to that pH. It's not going to be, you know, cause and effect, but there's going to be a correlation there that as things start to regulate to where they need to be, you're going to feel a lot better. And yeah, I mean, the body knows how to kind of bring itself back into its state of homeostasis, assuming you were giving it the right building blocks.
Do you ever send people this greens powder and they have no clue what the urine test strips are for?
Like, well, we, we walked them through that. Right. So let them.
Little breath, little breath mints, little, little.
Scoops for the greens. What the heck is this for? Yeah, we've got a little tutorial video for them.
Okay, cool. So, yeah, I guess coming full circle here, the way that I like to think about it is, you know, even if your kidneys are doing a really good job regulating the ph of your blood and they're producing bicarbonate ions to buffer your blood, you actually do have to use minerals in order to generate a lot of those bicarbonate ions in order toto shift your body back into that alkalinic state. And I think the concern for me is that if I eat too acidic of a diet, right? Red meat every day, dairy for breakfast, lots of eggs and seeds and nuts. But leave out some of the stuff you talked about, like chlorophyll rich foods like Kale or alkaline foods like, you know, even, even lemon and things like that. You're just basically requiring your body to have a higher mineral turnover. You're potentially stripping your body of minerals necessary for, for, for bone health and metabolism and things along those lines.
Yeah, and I think there's, you know, I talk about this in the book, and here's like another controversial area, which is this. You know, I recommend eating more of these plant foods in their raw state. So having more salads, smoothies, juices, stuff like that. And there's again, like an unquantifiable life force, life energy to these foods because they haven't been bastardized, they haven't been pasteurized, treated, chemically, altered, heated. So you have this, you know, this natural energy that emanates off living things that simply doesn't exist when they're cooked. And I think, again, this is something we can't really quantify. Although there's some amazing photography that shows the energy coming, coming off, for instance, a raw piece of food, a raw broccoli versus cooked broccoli, and the difference in energy coming off that food. Again, you go to your doctor, they're like, oh, this is quackery. Right. But again, is it based on.
Are you talking about these GDV cameras, the gas discharge cameras that allow you to film the biophotons of energy coming off of food? Yeah, those are interesting.
Yeah. I mean, maybe at our current state of understanding right now, it seems like quackery, but maybe in 50 years they'll be like, this is the way it is, you know.
Yeah, I think it depends. I mean, some people are prone to, like, uric acid crystal formation or gout, or even, like, you know, buildup of goitrogens from, say, like, you know, kale, for example, or some of these cruciferous vegetables like you mentioned, like broccoli. And I think in, in my opinion, light cooking, steaming, blanching, stuff like that with, with some of those foods for those people who might have digestive issues. In my opinion, the pros outweigh the cons for stuff like that. And then, you know, I, I had a raw kale smoothie this morning. Morning. And I'mI personally do most of my vegetables raw. And then there's a few that I'll cook, like tomatoesi'll cook those down toto improve the lycopene content. Because, you know, I'veone of the reasons I eat fresh tomatoes every day is' cause I've done genetic testingi've shown that I have higher than normal risk for prostate cancer. So I go out of my way to get really good absorbable lycopene. But I mean, the way that I think about it is, you know, was it like a local organic vegetable that didn't get shipped on a jet and hasn't been stored for, for several weeks on a grocery store shelf versus was it, you know, some, you know, like, like a wild plant I picked from my backyard and briefly cooked. That in my opinion, still feels as though, and I know this sounds woo woo just saying the word feels, but it feels as though it's got pretty good, pretty good energy to it.
Yeah, no, I agree. Like, it's funny because like people have asked me like, you know, because I talk a lot about the importance of greens and they're like, well, what if I've got like a thyroid issue? Should I have kale in my smoothie? I'm like, honestly, there's only one study that I've seen in all my research and from asking other people, you know, naturopathic doctors in their research and they specialize in thyroid and adrenal stuff. And the one, it was a case study actually. It was a woman in her 70s who was eating it was upwards of like I think it was ended up being about 5 pounds of brassica vegetables per day. And that started to have negative consequences on her thyroid. So that's more than excessive for the average person. And no one is ever getting close to that even if they don't have a thyroid issue. So I have no problem eating those foods in their raw state. But here's the thing, like who's eating broccoli or cauliflower? Brussels sprouts raw. I don't even eat them raw. I'll steam them, I'll put them in a soup like you said. I don't care if it loses some of its nutrient quality. I would rather have the broccoli steamed than not eat the broccoli. Yeah, right. I'm not gonna fuss about having kale in my fresh pressed juice because there might be some goitrogens which have zero impact really on my thyroid versus all the amazing cancer fighting friggin phytonutrients it has.
I think we can get pretty orthorexic like, like you know, grasping at straws when it comes to are you going to eat your vegetables lightly blanched versus versus raw. But I mean the big picture here is that you got this live blood cell analysis and you noted that not necessarily anemia, but other issues like red blood cell stacking and you even mentioned like parasites that you could see in your, in your blood with one of these yeasts.
Parasites. All sorts of little like little critters in there. It's like what, like what is going on? I'm telling you, if you want motivation to eat better, like have a look at that. I mean it's crazy.
Hey, it's Ben. I'm interrupting you. And yes, this is Ben. In case you hadn't figured that out by now. I'm interrupting you to talk to you about standing up. Are you sitting down right now? Then you should stand up. Are you sitting down working hunched over a computer? Then you should maybe stand up or lunge or kneel or do anything that this little contraption that I have in a couple rooms in my house allows you to do. You probably already know that when you stand you burn a lot of extra calories. You burn an extra 650 calories per week. But what they don't tell you, those bastards, they don't tell you this. Standing increases your production of brain derived neurotrophic factor so you actually get smarter when you stand. Standing also lowers your blood pressure, it lowers your blood glucose levels. I bet you didn't know that. So it actually has a diabetes protecting effect. But, but more importantly, in terms of the lowering of the blood sugar, I think it enhances things like ketosis and fat burning. They did a recent study at Texas A and M that showed you have a 46% increase in productivity when you're standing. And the cool thing is this little thing is called a varidesk. It goes from seated to standing, to seated to standing to kneeling to lunging, to anything else you want to do with the flip of a button. Super easy to use, super portable. You can put it anywhere in your house. And they have different models. Like you don't have to get their little sit down stand. You can get their full on workstation. If you're one of those day traders that has 8 billion screens that you look into as you make copious amounts of cash. Use averadesk and they can fit into any workspace, home office corner, office cubicle corner or even like I mentioned, a full on desk replacement for a serious trader. So you can check them out and you get a 30 day risk free guarantee by them. And the place that you want to go to is varidesk.com var I desk.com varidesk.com and that's it. That discount and everything will just kick right in when you go to varidesk.com youm don't have to enter any special code or anything like that. How uncomplex is that for you? And then also the other thing I want to tell you about was I recently competed in the Ultra Beast World Championships for Spartan. The guy that won it, his name is Hobie Call. He has trained and I don't know if he qualified for the Olympic marathon trials. I think he qualified for the Olympic marathon trials, didn't wind up racing for the Olympics, but wound up getting into obstacle course racing. And his secret is that he trains a lot less in terms of running than a ton of marathoners who are just as fast as him and obstacle racers who are just as fast as him train. And one of his little secret training methods is he uses weighted vest. He does like treadmill hill repeats on a weighted vest. And he'll do like his obstacle training and his monkey bars and his pull ups using a weighted vest and push ups and bear crawls using a weighted vest. And the reason I'm telling you all this is because I think the best weighted vest on the face of the planet is this one that it's really snug. It wears like a T shirt like super close to your body so the weight is evenly distributed. It's called a hyper vest. Hypr vest, hyper vest. And you can get them in different sizes so you can get small, large, medium, extra large. And you can get any amount of weight that you want and remove or add weights so that you could do anything from like burpees and clapping push ups to pull ups to just like going on a run or doing treadmill sprints wearing a vest so that you too can win Spartan World championships Anyways, you can get that and anything else fringe fitness related as well as supplements, personal care, apparel, functional foods like coffee and whey protein and coconut oil, you name it over at onnit. O n N I T and all you need to do is go to onnit.com ben10 get 10% off all the stuff over there and I would get a weighted vest. So onnit.comBen10 and you'll get 10% off of your next order from Onnit. So check it out. And now let's get back to yur.
There's a lot of controversy about live blood cell analysis. I mean are you aware of this, like how Quack Watch has stories on it and how some people will say oh, any red blood cell is going to clump once it touches glass and gets taken out of the body. So pretty much everybody who gets it ever Done. Is going to feel as though their red blood cells are clumping when they're really just fine.
Sure. Until you see the healthier version of it. And it looks just fine.
Oh, really? So, so you did like follow, you did another live blood cell analysis after you made these changes?
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, I, I'm almost at a point now where I've been doing this for like a long time, 20 years. And I'm not, I'm not in the, I'm not in the game of convincing people anymore. I'm like, listen, if it's, if you don't want to, if you don't want to do it, that's, that's cool. Like, continue doing what you want to do. But for I, there's double standards. Like when you have a medical community that pushes drugs that have some very, very scary side effects, I mean, most people don't even know about. I don't know if you know this thing called the number needed to treat. It's a number that pharmaceutical companies have on every class of drug and every kind of specific drug, which is basically how many people need to take this drug before it helps one person. So for instance, the cholesterol lowering medications, like the Lipitors of the world, they have an NNT of between 300 and 1,000, which means 1,000 people need to take the drug before it helps one person.
Wow.
And this is stuff that is not disclosed to the public. Your doctor's never going to tell you this. They're going to simply say, yeah, you should be on this because that's just the way it is. So when people talk about, yeah, this is quackery, I'm like, well, why don't we look at our medical system and the real quackery that's going on in pharma and the fact that the medical hospitalizations and misdiagnoses are the third leading cause of death in North America.
Preach it, brother, preach it. I'm gonna rip you off your soapbox though, because I have a lot more questions to ask you. But. So you like chlorella and you like vitamin B12 for simulating the hemoglobin content of blood and then you like limitation of too many acidic foods and you have kind of like an 8020 approach when it comes to, to, to alkalinity versus acidity.
Yeah, I mean like a simple way to think about it is if you have a plate of food, let's say you've got a steak, just make the rest of the plate some good Veggies. Right. Maybe some sweet potato, maybe, you know, some leafy greens. It's not rocket science.
Yeah. And wine, for sure.
Exactly. And then chocolate cake.
Chocolate cake. Dark chocolate. Raw chocolate. We'll talk about raw chocolate later. You actually have a cool part about raw chocolate in your book. But I wanted to ask you also about the digestive system. So you talk a little bit about how you recommend eating foods that provide more energy than they actually require to digest. What do you mean by that? Would that be like celery that all the sorority girls eat to lose weight?
Celery is actually one of those things that I think, based on, like, the negative calorie nonsense that was going around for a while, require more energy than it provides. So based on the amount of fiber, I guess to break it down requires.
More energy to digest than the actual calories that are in it.
Yeah, yeah. So what I'm talking about is, like, think back to, like, Thanksgiving dinner. Like, I remember Thanksgiving as me eating a ton of food and falling asleep at the table. For me, that's Thanksgiving. Yeah.
Highlighted right here.
Right there, exactly. So what happens, like, when we're eating such an onslaught of food, our stomachs are overwhelmed with stuff to work on. And that's a very extreme example. But if we look at the foods that are most complex, so our stomach ideally should be very acidic because it predominantly breaks down protein.
Right.
So if we look at something like an egg, when you take a raw egg and you put it into a frying pan, what happens? It, like, coagulates, it comes together and it hardens.
Right.
The protein matrix, naturally, because it's coming together, comes. You know, think about it, like, it's kind of, like, sticking together. So the protein itself becomes slightly tougher to digest. That's why it's a little bit tougher to, you know, break down and digest a steak than it is a protein shake. Right. Because if you have, let's say, a protein powder, the protein powder is basically in the form of amino acids in a lot of cases, versus the steak, which is complex proteins that have to be broken down into polypeptides, then bipeptides, and then the single amino acids. And for most individuals who are, I would say, over the age of 15, we're simply not producing enough hydrochloric acid in our stomach so that our stomach is efficient enough at breaking that down. So what ends up happening is you have a.
Let's say, I'd say over 15 or.
50, like, 1 5. Like, I would say when I was 15, not knowing this at the time, but based on how I was eating and abusing my body with food, there's no way my stomach was working properly.
Okay, so you're not, you're not saying like the body is somehow inherently broken and, and shuts down when you're 15 years old. You're saying if you eat a crap, a crappy diet and Even if you're 15, you're going to decrease your ability to produce stomach acid.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, it's, it's unfortunate because stomach acid is, if you have an underactive stomach known as hypochloridria. So you're not producing enough stomach acid, you're going to feel tired, sluggish. After kind of a heavy protein meal, you might get some belching and burping and a bit of gas as well. What ends up happening if you can supplement with like a hydrochloric acid, like a betaine hcl. And you do that with a protein.
Based meal that says Bethane B E T A I N E. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. I mean, most people feel a heck of a lot better than if they didn't have that. And that's because they're giving their body some exogenous help to get more acid in there to help break down that protein. And so when you can kind of realize, oh, wow, this is making a big difference for me, then you can start kind of following us. You know, a little bit of a protocol, if you will, to really kind of start building up your HDL again. And the reason that's important is because if you're not digesting your food properly, then you start getting larger food particles seeping into your, the lower parts of your digestive system where they can start to irritate and inflame the guts. And that can lead to things like leaky gut, which can open up pores into the blood and lead to inflammation and immune issues. And it's a whole cascade of events. And it all starts with digestion. So starting at the mouth, you have to chew your food really well. It's almost like the benefit of having a smoothie is that the blender is like your mouth. It pulverizes everything into a very easy to digest format.
I hear you. I mean, the best that my gut ever feels is when. And my wife hates this because she's a total foodie and cooks amazing meals. But I'll have some days where I just blend everything. I literally have a smoothie for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And it's kind of boring and it's not Quite as good as cutting up that steak and biting into a sweet potato fry. But I mean, as far as digestion goes, especially if I'm hard in training and having to eat a lot of calories, it's one of the only ways to do it. And I make my smoothies thick, right. So I gotta eat them with a spoon and even chew the actual smoothie. But yeah, I mean, you actually get, if you're trying to eat 4,000 calories a day, say you get more tired, you get more sleep, you get more brain fog, you need more naps. When you, when you unfortunately do like the, the big ass salad for lunch with the steak on top of it or, or you know, just like a giant meal with protein that you have to break down and digest versus just a smoothie.
Yeah, I mean like it's, it's so true. Because if I think most of us inherently know this stuff and sometimes we're just all, oh yeah, that makes sense. If you go to like any conference after lunch, just have a look at the audience, you know, in the office, have a look around. Like people are dozing off their computers and there's a reason for that based on what they're reading, but also because of the fact that their, their digestive system is just simply just, it's like a rebellious child. It's like, listen, I'm not, I'm not doing this anymore. Stop, stop killing me and let's, let's have a discussion.
So you're saying you take betaine HCL with the meal. How do you know though, how you, how much HCL to take? Like, like how do you get to the point where you aren't taking so much stomach acid that you're just giving yourself heartburn.
Yeah. So you wanna, so you can do a simple protocol and again, check with your doctor before doing this. So what you would do is you would take however many hcl you would need a couple minutes before a meal that would induce a slight burning sensation in your stomach. Now I say slight in the sense of like, you don't want to create an ulcer here. Okay. So a few. Once you feel that slight burning sensation, that's kind of your, your threshold. That's kind of your upper limit. So for me, for instance, it's like eight. So I was taking like eight. And I would take eight and eight before most of my heavy protein capsules. Yeah, eight capsules.
But just before, just before protein rich meals.
Exactly. So like if you're having, you know, something like, you know, just like a, you Know, not a heavy meat or protein based meal, not that big of a deal, but if you're gonna have Thanksgiving dinner, like, definitely ramp up for it. So I would, for instance, take eight capsules. I'd get that slight burning sensation. I'd do that the next time I have a similar meal. And I would do that on a daily basis. You get to the point where eight capsules.
You can kind of taper down to seven. And what you want to do is you want to get again to seven, slight burning sensation. Get down to six. Slight burning sensations.
What's going on there when you're tapering down? Well, why are you getting less acid? Why do you get by with taking less hcl?
Yeah, so what ends up happening is you're kind of training your system, your stomach specifically, to produce a bit more of its own hydrochloric acid. So you don't need as much externally to get in, you know, the, the necessary amount. So you're able to taper down from, let's say 8 to 5 to 4 to 3, and eventually, you know, maybe just one or two or maybe none at all. So again, for everyone it's, it's a different process. It might, it might take a couple days for some people, a couple weeks for others, but it's, you know, for, it's interesting just to kind of, and you know this more than anyone else, just to kind of experiment on yourself and, and see how your body responds and really find what's going to work best for you.
Okay, gotcha. So you just start with a whole bunch of hydrochloric acid with a protein rich meal and you do that for a few days and then you gradually decrease the number of capsules that you take. But you would start by taking as many capsules as is necessary to make you feel like you're just slightly acidic and then take one capsule less than that.
Yep, exactly.
All right, got it. So you're not talking necessarily about eating like negative calorie foods like celery and jicama and miracle noodles and all these things that don't have calories but might require more calories than they're in them to digest. You're talking about basically giving your body a step up with things like hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes to take real foods that actually do have calories and allow you to digest them.
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense that a blueberry is going to give us maybe a bit more energy than it's going to require to digest versus a steak. I Think just intuitively. That makes sense for us looking at things like smoothies, giving your digestive system a slight breather by liquefying some of your meals so you're getting a ton of nutrients in without all the burden of digestion.
And although I should throw out there that I am a huge fan of this negative calorie salad type of approach, where I will take. This is probably what I'll have for lunch after this. I'll take a bunch of miracle noodles or shirataki noodles, right? Like Japanese yam noodles that, that are basically just all. They're all colon mass. Right. They're all just insoluble fiber. And I'll throw those on top of a bed of vegetables with like some jicama and celery and carrots and you can get a huge pile up of food in a bowl. And it's kind of funny because it's like zero calories. So make sure that you gradually amp your way up to that though, if you, if you want to be kind to your colon, because it's a lot going through there. So I want to talk also about adrenals, because you're big on the adrenal gland. You talk about adrenal fatigue, but adrenal fatigue, to me it seems like it's kind of a catch all term. Right. And what I mean by that is sometimes people's adrenals are shot due to excessive inflammation. Or some people, it happens when, you know, for example, you have some type of gut issue, such as leaky gut, which you referred to. Sometimes it can be like a hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis issue where, you know, your thyroid gland begins to shut down due to excessive stress or due to, you know, concentrated forms of gluten, et cetera. Like when you talk about adrenal fatigue, what's your take on it? Like, how do you kind of pick that apart?
Yeah, I mean, the way I see it is like adrenal fatigue is like underactive thyroid, as is like leaky gut to the medical community. Right. Is if you go to your doctor and you say, I have adrenal fatigue, they're like, okay, whatever. They don't recognize it as a medical condition. Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Essentially what, like, what ends up happening is like your adrenals, because of the life we live, which is high stress, high toxicity, high stimulation, all of those are. They're kind of inputs into the adrenals and the adrenal glands are. If you think, if you Think about them, they're the size of a walnut. So very small glands that are sitting on top of your kidneys. And over time, when we compound emotional stress, physical stress, exercise obviously being a big one with the wrong foods, inflammation inside the body, lack of things like vitamin C or certain B vitamins that support the adrenals, all of these things are stressors on the adrenals. And over time the adrenal glands naturally pump out cortisol and epinephrine, or adrenaline, if you want to call it that, that help us deal with stress. But when you're constantly putting stress on the body, eventually they can't keep up with the demand and they kind of, you know, they fall into, listen, I'm just, I can't do this anymore. I'm a little bit tired, if you will.
Yeah.
So you know, I didn't realize that I had adrenal fatigue. There's different stages. There's you know, stage one, two, three and four. But thinking back when I was playing soccer, I was, I was a goalie, so wasn't physically exhausted, but emotionally I was exhausted after every game because I was, I was, you know, there's so much shouting and commanding and kind of coordinating the team and you're like, you're in the game just from a different perspective. And I would be like, I'm like, I am friggin exhausted after standing in net for 90 minutes and I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. And then I learned about this stuff and started to figure out how the body works. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. Because when you have adrenal fatigue, there's a couple things that happen. First of all, you have a very tough time recovering from emotional upset. So for instance, if you're in a fight, like an emotional fight or a bear jumps out of a tree and scares the out of you, that's like a huge charge of adrenaline and your body has a very tough time recovering from that. So for instance, you might feel very tired after emotional upset. You might feel very tired after just an ordinary workout or a workout that maybe a couple months ago was no brainer. So you just feel more tired than you think you should be feeling based on the situation. A couple other things might be low blood pressure upon standing. So lightheadedness, this is not the, you can have this lightheadedness if you have low blood pressure in general, but adrenal fatigue would be another reason that you might have it. So there's, there's a few things going on Here and essentially your body can't cope with the stress that is is being imposed upon it. And that becomes a big issue because then you feel tired all the time, you're more susceptible to colds and illnesses, your body just feels achy and sore all the time. So it's just not really good. Yeah.
The more I learn about adrenal fatigue, and this is something that, not to play devil's advocate too much here, but when people talk about it just being the adrenal glands or just being like you say, the walnut sized glands on top of the kidney, there's so much more that it seems it's so multifactorial. Like sometimes it can be you're tired but your adrenal glands are working just fine. However, you have poor probiotic status or gut flora status, so you're not producing dopamine and serotonin properly or you have heart damage. So you've got a bunch of electrical instability in the heart. So your sympathetic nervous system is not able to be activated to the same extent. Or again, maybe your adrenals are fine, but you've got.
Very high TSH and very low T3 and T4. How do you kind of address the fact that adrenal fatigue is not just about taking adaptogenic herbs or not just about, say, focusing in just on the adrenals? Because sometimes I feel like the adrenals are like a horse that gets kicked to death.
Yeah, totally. I often tell people how you heal anything is how you heal everything. So if you have adrenal fatigue, it's going to trickle. Well, that could be a trickle effect of leaky gut. It could be a host of things. Right. But it's also going to trickle into like thyroid issues and, you know, other things. So when you are looking to deal with one specific issue, it's like somebody looking for a liver cleanse. You're not just going to cleanse your liver. You're going to improve like every other system and organ in the process of doing so. So, you know, with the adrenals, taking adaptogens might help. And obviously in some cases they do. For instance, like licorice root is well known to increase the half life of cortisol. So if you've got low cortisol, which is a hallmark sign of adrenal fatigue, what that's going to do is it's going to increase the amount of cortisol or allow the cortisol to stay at a slightly higher level in the blood for a longer period of time. Things like MACA are well known to help rebalance hormones a little bit and support the adrenals. Ashwagandha is well known as well. But then you also look at.
How do things like vitamin C which are really important for adrenal function. It's not just vitamin C is only going to work on the adrenals, it's going to help everything else out. Or the B vitamins, which are really important for the adrenals as well. They're going to support the blood, they're going to support the nervous system. So again, it's very tough to have a laser guided missile inside the body that only does one thing without impacting positively or negatively a lot of other things as well.
Yeah, that's the tricky part. I mean, I was talking to a gal last night in a consultant and she was doing everything she could to lose weight and she's like, what's the reason I can't lose weight? And I told her, well, when we step back and we look at the fact that you're not eating a lot of food and you're exercising a decent amount, it's not lack of activity or too many calories, but we could look at estrogen dominance, we could look at thyroid imbalances, we could look at autoimmune, we could look at even like organic amino acids tests to identify specific things that are making it so your Krebs cycle can't spin quite as quickly from arthenine to orginine to any number of different amino acids. I mean, there's so many factors that you have tothat you have to take into account when it comes to, you know, something like the adrenals or something like lack of weight loss. You know, I, I want to make sure that folks listening in know it's, you know, it's, it's sometimes not that, that simple.
Well, it's, it's true though, because I mean perfectly. Like, I think a lot of times we tend to compare the human body to like a car or a machine. I had a punctured radiator in my car.
Or a computer program.
Yeah. And they're like, well, you have a punctured rad, let's just replace the rat. I'm like, okay, cool. And then they did that and they found like something else that was wrong, but they just, they were able to fix that. Like it would be nice if it were that easy in the human body. And that's why, like, sometimes I get frustrated with the health profession because, you know, you go see somebody who's a specialist in One thing and to that person they have a hammer and everything is a nail. Right. Like I went to see, I told you about this. I went to see a chiropractor before Hawaii and I had like this, you know, this hip issue, low back issue which by the way has totally resolved itself since then, which is, which has been amazing. But like his diet, his, his prognosis for the issue was you're basically deficient in manipulation. Right. So you haven't been cracked enough. That's why we need to put you on a three times a week cracking plan to get this back in order. Of course, that's the same advice he would give to every single person coming into his clinic.
Right.
And I think that's a massive disservice. And that's why like, the more I've, the more I learn about nutrition health, the more I realized I really don't know anything. Like, it's just so complex and I think we just have to do the best we can with the knowledge we have and really listen to our body to kind of navigate our way through this, this jungle of confusion.
Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, that was a great philosophical discussion that we just had and hopefully for, for the listeners that we have left now, a few, a few of the things I want to get into. You talk about how you can actually test your adrenal function at home like without necessarily going out. You know, not that it's bad to get like a, like a Dutch urine test is the one that I recommend for folks now to get like a really true running 24 hour evaluation of cortisol and testosterone and DHEA. It is in my opinion the gold standard. However, I've been cold lately. This is a perfect example and I'm wondering if it's because the temperature is dropping or if it's because I might have some type of thyroid issue. So I'm doing over the next few days what's called the Broda Barnes temperature test, which is just a simple morning oral measurement of your temperature to determine whether thyroid is functioning properly with a very easy self quantification method. There's something else you talk about in your book that you can do that's similar for the adrenals. Can you go into that?
Yeah. So I, I would say this would be a, before you call your doctor, do this type of test because it's going to take you 30 seconds to do so and it's free, assuming you have a flashlight. If you don't, then pick one up for a couple bucks. So what you want to do is, it's called a pupillary light reflex test. So what you're going to do is you're going to go into a bathroom and you're going to look in the mirror, you're going to close the door, make sure everything's pitch black. You're going to stand in front of the mirror, and then you're going to take a flashlight and you're going to shine it at a 45 degree angle to one of your eyes. And then you're going to watch your pupil for 30 seconds. So here's what should happen in a ideal scenario. So when you're in pitch black, what happens to your pupils? They dilate, they open up to allow more light, your field of vision. And that's normally what happens in darkness. Now, when you shine a light at your eyeball, that's a stress, right? And it's assigned to say, hey, listen, we have enough light so we can constrict the pupil. So that is partially instigated by the adrenals, because that stress of light is going to pump out a ton of adrenaline from the adrenal glands to constrict the little muscles around your pupil. So what happens here is if your pupil stays contracted or constricted for more than 20 seconds, that is a good indication that your adrenals are okay. If the pupil starts to Pulse after about 10 seconds, that's, you know, slightly okay function. If it pulses more or less immediately, then so it kind of like it constricts, then it opens again even with the light shining at it. Then you know you've got some adrenal stuff to look at. And then you may want to look at getting a more elaborate test to confirm that.
Why does the pupil move around like that if you're adrenally fatigued?
Because the adrenals can't basically get enough adrenaline to those small little muscles around the pupil to keep them activated and constricted.
Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I've always, always thought it was like a combination of blood pressure and adrenaline or there's another one that you get. I believe it's aldosterone, the ability to maintain normal blood pressure. And that one falls also when you aren't producing enough adrenaline. I think that one might also be responsible for pupillary contraction. But it's a simple test. I've done it before and I've done it when I've been in hard and heavy training. And you look at it with the flashlight and your pupil, it's kind of freaky. It starts to Bounce around a little bit and you realize, hey.
I might need to take a rest day or give my body the ability to bounce back and produce enough adrenaline. But it's a very simple test, so. And you said it was called a pupillary what test?
Pupillary light reflex test.
Okay, pupillary light reflex test. A few other quick questions if you have the time. One thing that you mentioned in the book that I hadn't seen before was probiotics. You talk about what you should look for in a good probiotic, like specific strains and a specific. This surprised me, like a specific probiotic count. Can you give people a few guidelines as far as probiotics and probiotic choice goes?
Yeah, I think to keep it simple, like look for as many strains as possible and as high a number as possible. So I usually recommend about 10. Well, yeah, about 10 billion CFU so called colony farming units.
And 10 billion is a lot, like a lot of the stuff you find at Walgreens is like a million or five million.
A million? Are you talking about a billion or a million?
A million. Like you'll see very, very low like below 1 billion count probiotics a lot of times in like the average health food stor.
I don't know what you guys are seeing in the States, buddy. Up here in Canada we have some good stuff.
Do you? Okay, cool. I've had a hard time like hunting down really good stuff that, that's close to that 10 billion count that you talk about.
It's interesting. Yeah. Because for us, I mean, most health food stores like it, like I would say a lower grade probiotic would be like a billion CFUs.
Darn Canadians.
I know. I don't know, maybe it's the fda, who knows. Right? So it's, I mean, and you've done a lot of work with like gut health and stool and stuff. So what's interesting about all this, this research in gut health, which I really think is going to be the future of a lot of this stuff is it's not so much how much probiotic you're taking, it's really a combination of the quantity as well as the diversity. So you want to like, if you're just taking like a Lactobacillus acidophilus, like that's going to work in one very specific area of the digestive tract versus, you know, other strains have different functions at different areas of the, of the system. And so you want to be getting in a good amount. And you know, for instance, some of the probiotics that we've been Using will get anywhere from like, 10 to 15 strains, and they might be about 10 billion CFU each. And, you know, so that's. That's a really good, you know, kind of indicator.
So each different strain. So it's not just like 10 billion microorganisms or 10 billion CFU and the total probiotic, it's like 10 billion of each strain.
No, it's 10 billion total. So it might be like 5 million of this, 100 million of that one.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah. But the key is, because they all have different functions and rules. Like, you want to get a good diversity in there.
Yeah. So Lactobacillus acidophilus. You go over some others in the book, like Rhamnosis bulgaricus plantarum casei, and then some of the bifidobacterium, like Bifidobacterium longum and Bifidobacterium breve, which sounds like a great coffee drink.
Exactly. I'll have a breve, please.
Thank you. The interesting thing is, when I look at people's gut tests, a lot of times they'll have a whole bunch of one probiotic and then be deficient in a host of 20 others. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm all about variety, like sauerkraut and kefir and kombucha. But I think you make a good point in the book that if you're looking at the label of your probiotic, there should be. You've got at least seven different strains listed. So it's both the number of strains and then also, as you just mentioned, like, the count. Right. Like 10 billion plus for account, or at least getting close to that.
Yep, exactly.
All right, got it. One other question before I ask you a recipe question. That is water. You talk about not limiting water intake. That's a double negative. That didn't sound right. You talk about avoiding the limitation of water intake when you are eating. Why is that?
So if we go back to our discussion on stomach acid, if you think of. Let's. Let's take a glass and let's pour fictitious stomach acid into that glass and just imagine that glass being half full or half empty, depending on how you look at it. Now fill the rest of that glass up with water. So what is that. What is that going to do? It's going to dilute the amount of stomach. It's going to dilute the effectiveness or the potency of the stomach acid in that volume of liquid. Now, so think about that in your stomach and what's happening Is if you're drinking a lot of liquid, especially water with your meal, you're diluting your stomach acid. And that's gonna make it more challenging for you to. Or your stomach to really do what it's supposed to do, which is to digest protein. So if you're gonna have water, have, you know, a good amount before you start eating. Cause actually if you drink, you know, one to two cups of water before your meal, studies have shown that actually decreases appetite quite significantly. So you're not going to eat as much. Plus you're going to get water in without the impedance of food in the way, remember? Because just again, think about food sitting in your stomach and then you've got water on top of it. It's going to be very tough for that water to get through. And it's going to sit in there and dilute the stomach acid and certain gurgling and do some, you know, you're just going to feel a little bit off. So if you're drinking with your meal, take little sips just to kind of moisten your food. And what I would recommend is actually have with or before your meal, if you're having water, have it with lemons, like squeeze lemon or. And. Or apple cider vinegar in the water. Both will actually help stimulate hydrochloric acid. And both. Sorry, specifically hydrochloric. Specifically apple cider vinegar helps to stabilize blood sugar levels through its acetic acid, which is awesome for diabetics and pretty much anybody in general. And.
It'S just an overall awesome health tonic.
Kombucha can do a little bit of that as well.
Yep.
Similar acidic effect. Yeah, water. I didn't really think this was true until I started to dig into the research. And there was one really interesting study they did where they actually gave people water and then gave them. I believe it was like antacid. Right. Like acid reflux medication. And what they found was that water actually made the ph of the stomach way more alkalinic. And it did. So the increase in alkalinity happened after just 60 seconds. And when folks took an antacid, didn't help much. It took maybe two minutes to increase the pH. But I didn't really realize water actually has been quantified to increase gastric ph to decrease gastric acidity pretty significantly. And I used to be one of those guys who thought drinking your water with the meal was one of the best ways to kind of move stuff along and keep it digesting. But it turns out that especially if you have digestive issues, the Pros outweigh the cons versus, as you just alluded to, doing a little apple cider vinegar tonic, or taking very, very small sips of water, or doing kombucha or any of these other things that are actually slightly more acidic and aren't going to influence acid vagidity in the stomach.
Exactly.
To this great extent. All right, I have a million, billion possibly dollar question for you, since you're all about the billions up there in Canada, apparently. Your raw chocolate recipe. You have a raw chocolate recipe in the book. Can you go into your raw chocolate recipe? Because this one looks amazing. I have yet to try it, but it looks amazing.
Yeah, this is pretty dangerous. Okay. So you may want to grab a pen or pencil for this or you can get the book and it's Inside on page 108. So this will make.
6 to 82 by 2 inch squares. So just think about whatever that size would be. So you're gonna have half a cup of cacao nibs, half a cup of cacao powder.
We're not talking about like Hershey's, you know, stuff like this stuff.
Alkali. Alkali free. Actually. That's the way to go with cacao powder. Like if you buy it, do a search for alkali free.
Yep, exactly.
About three quarters of a cup of raw cashews, one tablespoon coconut butter.
Nice.
Half a cup of agave nectar or honey. Agave nectar, you know, depending on whatever.
Honestly, if it were me, I'd probably use stevia.
Yeah. But the thing with the honey or the agave here is that it gives it a little bit more of a glue to come together. So that's why it's tricky sometimes when you're substituting sweeteners in sweets, because you need that binding substance that honey is really good for.
That's okay if it doesn't form into tidy little chocolate squares, because it sounded to me like I'd probably eat the whole thing in one fell swoop anyway.
Just out of the bowl. Just out of the bowl with a spoon.
Go ahead.
And then finish that off with one teaspoon of vanilla. And there you go. So what you would do is you'd put everything in a food processor or Vitamix, whatever you want, blend it until it's thick, you're going to remove it and then you're going to basically lay down on a cookie sheets into a flat ish type of setup. And then you would put those in the freezer or the fridge before serving. So it's a raw chocolate and it's Awesome.
I like it. I like it. Sounds amazing. It's definitely going on the list of things to make this week. I'll try the Stevia edition and see if it holds together or if you're listening in. And if you know of a good way to make the chocolate hold together without necessarily using the evils of fructose, even though honestly, small amounts of raw honey, it's not going to kill you.
Then leave your comment over in the show notes. The shownotes for today's show are at. And don't stop listening yet because I've got a free cookbook for you. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Seven Commandments. That's the number. Seven Commandments. And when you go there, or if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com free cookbook, you're, you're giving folks the actual cookbook that, that goes along with this diet, right?
Yeah. So what we did is. And you were gracious enough to contribute a few recipes to this. We wanted to basically when we released this book, we wanted to kind of hook up our readers with some more awesomeness because we knew that, hey, well, there's recipes in the book, but I'd like some more. So we created this All Day Energy Diet Cube community cookbook where we created 67 recipes. We brought in some of our esteemed friends in our space, including yourself and a number of others to contribute awesome recipes that all jive with the philosophy in the All Day Energy diet book. And we decided to actually, it was so successful when we released it initially as a digital kind of download. We decided to print a lot of copies this past summer. So we have a number left. And, and it's a full color beautiful cookbook, 67 recipes. And we're giving away for free just to cover the cost of shipping, just because we have a bunch left over. So we're gonna hook your listeners up with that. We got lucky. Awesome.
We got lucky. I love it. Cool. So what I'll do then is I'll set it up so you guys, if you're listening and you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com freecookbook and get the book. But I recommend because I know if you're listening in, you're a smart cookie and you actually like to educate yourself, educate yourself with the All Day Energy Diet. Get the book because it goes into a little bit more detail about some of the stuff that Yuri and I talked about. And then I'll link to that in the show notes along with some of the other things that we discuss like live blood cell analysis and digestive enzymes and the free cookbook and all that jazz. So just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Seven Commandments. That's BenGreenfulFitness.com the number Seven Commandments. All the goodness is there. Enjoy the book, enjoy the free cookbook and leave any comments or questions that you have and either Yuri or myself will jump in and reply. So, Yuri, thanks for coming on the show today, man, lack of hair on your head and all.
It's been a pleasure, buddy. Thanks for having me.
All right. Cool, man. And avoid any tetanus shots in the future, by the way.
I will. Yep.
Cool, folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfield and Yuri Elkaim signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.
You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.
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