How Much Exercise Is Too Much, Why Calorie Restriction May Be A Bad Thing, The Downsides of Hormesis & Other Shocking Health Myth Debunked With Jay Feldman and Mike Fave.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, we're not here to argue that keto diet is terrible. We're saying that the beneficial effects that we may see in some of these states may be from a specific effect and is not actually from the stress effect.

And so when you have obesity or diabetes or degenerative states, you actually don't see elevated levels of ATP. You see the direction of excess substrate, as Mike was saying, toward fat stores, for example.

That's a dogma of exercise, is that you stress the body and it responds by becoming stronger. Are you saying that that's not tr.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

Well, folks, if you. You're worried about whether or not you might be exercising too much or how much exercise is too much or whether all these fads like carb restriction and saunas and cold and calorie restriction are actually necessary for lifespan or maybe a waste of your time, whether this whole hormesis thing is blown out of proportion. Well, you stumbled across the right episode for you. My guests on today's show actually have this entire, what they call a bioenergetics model of energy, and they actually have some pretty strong feelings about problems with hormesis and calorie restriction, fasting and ketogenic diets and cold thermogenesis and a lot of popular supplements and wim hof breathwork and all these things. So I figured I would have them on the show to chat about all this. And my first guest on today's show is Jay so Feldman. Jay, say hello.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me on, Ben.

Yeah, for sure. So Jay's a health coach. He's an independent health researcher. He hosts a podcast called the Energy Balance Podcast, and he studied neuroscience and exercise physiology at University of Miami. Was going to go to medical school, decided not to, and now he just studies this stuff and produces content around it and developed what I mentioned is this bioenergetic approach to maximizing cellular energy. And his other sidekick, or his sidekick on today's show is Mike. Mike, you pronounce your last name? Fave.

Fave.

Fave. I was close. Mine was fancier. Mike Fave is an independent researcher. He's a registered nurse, an rn. So he's traditionally educated in Western medicine, but he does a lot of independent research, spends a lot of time in PubMed and physiology textbooks, and kind of went the western medical route initially to take care of his own diet, nutrition issues, and Wound up going in a completely different direction. Partnered up with Jay, and together, these guys, they address a lot of. A lot of stuff that's against the status quo in fitness and health and nutrition. So, guys, I'm pretty excited to get you on, and I know that probably the two of you have both experimented quite a bit with different diets and different exercise protocols before you stumbled across what you do now. So can you kind of fill me in on the whole back history here of how this bioenergetic model came to be?

You definitely nailed it. Both of us being very interested in health from a young age and especially in the alternative health realm, I think a lot of people get led there after finding a lot of things that don't work in the mainstream. And yeah, so I know for me, I was very much into fitness and nutrition from a young age, and as I learned more and more fell into the low carb sphere, the paleo sphere, the biohacking sphere. And this was right around the time that I actually met Mike and we doubled down on all of that. And you know, we're fans of the, of your podcast, Ben, and oh, geez, you know, implementing a lot of these things that now we are not the biggest fans of or, or don't think are necessarily ideal. And yeah, we, as we kind of further, at least for me, as I went further down that path, I was starting to have more and more health symptoms, promises that I, that I was felt were made and that I was expecting from making a lot of these changes in doing cyclical ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting and working out hard, very, very regimented with our diets. And we were not feeling great to show for it. And so that led to us continuing to research. And we came across this bioenergetic model of health from the work of Dr. Ray Pete and things kind of set off from there.

From the work of Dr. Ray Pete. Who, who is Ray Pete? Cause I've heard his name thrown around a little bit. And like, I, I think I've read some of the stuff that he's written, but I, I don't fully understand who this cat is.

He is a PhD researcher. I think his PhD is in biology. And essentially he's kind of this more obscure, I guess, author who's wrote, wroten quite a few books and texts online. And he discusses this large overarching point of view of, of energy and health and how they interrelate. And he brings in multiple different factors in biology and physiology and then also economics and politics. And he has like this very large view of things, and it's quite interesting. And also, I mean, we seem a lot of it seems to align with our experiences and the different things that we tested out. But I would really recommend checking out his. Some of his work is quite in depth and ties together a huge range of different physiologic concepts.

Yeah. So by the way, this Ray Pete guy, does he have like a newsletter or magazine or a website or something like that? A compact disc or a DVD that you can order in the mail?

No compact disc, but he does have a website, I think, just Ray Pete.com where he has a bunch of articles. And then he also does have a newsletter. I'm not exactly sure what the process is to go off the top of my head to get to it, but he does have a newsletter and he does do podcasts. I think he does one with Danny Roddy, and then he also does podcasts with one radio network, which is Patrick Timpone. Those are the two main places. Then he does, like, random ones with different people, depending on, you know, if they ask him to come on or not.

Okay. Okay, got it. And so, so this bioenergetic model of health that this was developed then, from what I understand, the way you guys have explained it by Ray P. You guys stumbled across this, and up until that point, it sounds like you were kind of doing the kind of the, you know, usual intermittent fasting, paleo ish type of diet, cold sauna, weight training, carb restriction, this type of thing.

Yeah, we were both doing it together in college.

Okay, so maybe kind of like a loaded question here, because there's a lot of variables that we're juggling when we talk about sauna and calorie restriction and cold and all that jazz. And I don't know if you want to tackle them one by one or kind of lump them all into the same hormetic category. But what exactly is it about this bioenergetic model that shifted your view in terms of. Of how you're utilizing these things and. And what'd you do with that information?

Yeah, there. There are a couple of things about it that I think were particularly noteworthy, but as Mike mentioned quite a bit that it is really in depth in. In physiology. And, you know, of course, other views are as well, but I think it's a very cohesive big picture view that also is represented on the very minute picture as well, which I'm sure we'll be digging into as far as what's actually going on in our cells and our mitochondria and on from there. But the larger view here is basically this idea, the bioenergetic model of health is basically this idea that the flow of energy or the availability of energy is what drives biological function. And then if we are, if there's a reduction in that energy availability that drives disease and aging. And so when we're talking about this energy, again, this is not some sort of like spiritual type energy. This is again based in physiological energy production through the mitochondria. We're producing ATP. Carbon dioxide also plays a role there as well. And looking at that as the driver of health and something that, that basically shows itself in all diseases and, and degeneration. And then also on the opposite side as far as driving health and function. And so it, on its basis we'll get into, I guess, the hormesis side, but on its basis to directly opposes the hormetic view, which almost takes an opposite approach of this idea that we want to deplete energy and create stress to support our health.

Okay, so what you're saying is, is we don't want to deplete energy and create stress in order to support our health. I mean, if, if you were to, to talk about kind of like the negative aspects of the bioenergetic model, when.

You boil it down, Ray, Pete's hypothesis for this, which is energy and structure are interdependent at every level, kind of sets the tone for the bioenergetic view, where there's this idea that when you're streaming energy through a system, you can allow for increased complexity of that system, and then with increased complexity, you can produce more energy. So when you're moving into states where you're starting to deplete the energy and whatnot, then you have to rely on these, I guess, stress systems that can start to degrade structure to some extent. So the other, the other important thing about this view overall is it places energy as that forefront linchpin to look at for the multitude of health issues and moves it away from more obscure things, specifically like genetics, which was a heavy dogma. And that's something that Pete talks a lot about in his work as well. So this idea of that maintaining adequate energy flow through the mitochondria allows for continued maintenance and production of structure, and any aberration of that can actually lead to a degradation of the structures through these adaptive pathways.

Okay, so what you're saying is maintaining proper energy flow through the mitochondria is able to maintain health, whereas if we restrict energy flow through things like carbohydrate restriction, calorie restriction, excessive fasting, excessive stress via say like energy g depletion from exercising in a low calorie or a carbohydrate deprived state. We would therefore reduce the energy flow through the mitochondria and that would deleteriously impact health.

And that requires a long term view as well. I'm sure we'll dig into it. But sometimes in the short term when you create stress. Not sometimes, almost always when you create stress in the short term, you have a short term burst of energy production and expenditure to deal with that stress. But we'll discuss how in the long term that comes at a cost to this flow of energy.

Okay, yeah, I definitely want to talk about that because that's kind of like the idea behind hormesis is you induce short term stress to induce long term resilience. But the disconnect for me so far is when you say that you can increase energy flow through the mitochondria with say, not exercising excessively, not engaging in excess heat and cold and fasting and beating the body up too much, that you would see an increase in health when in fact you. You know, the way I've always thought about things, guys, has been, you know, excesses of energy results to a host of chronic diseases, right? Like obesity, diabetes, too much ATP.

Too much free radical generation from too much energy production by the mitochondria and therefore by having periods of time where you're limiting energy flow, you would therefore increase mitochondrial biogenesis, you would decrease stress on the heart and other cells, you would decrease the workload by the gut. And ultimately it's kind of like this stoic mentality of longevity, leading even to the joke that I've been guilty of saying this sometimes, that I don't want to live till I'm 160 if I'm going to be cold and hungry and libido less. And I totally get that. But it sounds to me like you guys are almost proposing the complete opposite and a near epicurean approach. Eat as much as you want, don't exercise type of thing.

It's not necessarily that, but I want to touch on something directly that you initially said that you're talking about too much energy or leading to obesity, diabetes, etc. Or too much ATP. And Jay and I talk about this quite a bit in the podcast, but there's a difference between substrate and then also energy production. So what, what we're saying here to a large extent is not necessarily that we want always an excess of substrate, substrate Being fatty acids, glucose, those being the main substrate. We want to make sure that the fatty acids and glucose are effectively oxidized through the mitochondria to produce ATP. Whereas in states of obesity and diabetes and chronic diseases, what you see is an actual breakdown in that process. So they link them to an excess of, of energy per se. But I think the terminology is a little bit difficult when you start conflating energy and substrate because you have, you have a substrate, you have something that's being put into a system and, and then, which will oxidize that substrate and then you have an output of ATP. What we want to do is we want to make sure the substrate is flowing into ATP. We're not just saying, just having like this overall excess of substrate all the time. The other thing I want to touch on is that a lot of you mentioned, you talked about ros, and I guess we make, we'll get, we'll dig into this in a little bit. But in the states of any states where you're driving biocon, mitochondrial biogenesis and all these adaptive pathways, it's happening through ros. So you're inducing higher amounts of ROS in the, the fasting, these different, the cold thermogenesis, caloric restriction to some extent, the plant compounds, et cetera, you're inducing an ROS response. And that ROS response is triggering these other pathways that are then inducing an antioxidant response, which, so you have to first induce more ros. And where you look at, in there are certain studies looking at higher metabolic rates showing less ros. And then also, and we can get into. There's a flip side of this where when you're producing large amounts of ATP, you can have an ROS signaling that can also have an effect. So what, what's going to, what this is going to come down to is like a contextual conversation about what's happening in these different circumstances.

I think on the conceptual level, right. That, Ben, that's what you're discussing is this kind of doesn't jive with how we view organisms and, and health and aging. And so what Mike had mentioned, as far as energy and basically calories being two different things.

Right.

And so when you have obesity or diabetes or degenerative states, you actually don't see elevated levels of ATP. You see the direction of excess substrate, as Mike was saying, toward fat stores, for example. But that's not because you had too much energy. It's actually because there's blocks, various things that'll block that conversion from the calories. The food we take in into energy. And you know, we'll be talking about some of those today as well. But the other, other piece that you brought up, which is a great point, Ben, is basically this idea which is the rate of living theory, which is that the more energy we expend, the faster we age. And that's an idea that's really born out of a very mechanical view of the human body where we only have a certain number of heartbeats or a certain amount of usage of our parts until they deteriorate and then we age and degenerate. And that theory is largely. There's quite a bit of evidence against it, I would say.

Well, if I could jump in real quick, I don't know if the theory is kind of like that whole, like, you know, your heart has a certain number of beats and you don't want to use them up too much. I think that the, I guess what I'm going off of is just like this idea that, you know, when, when you look at a lot of, of the, the inhibition of mitochondrial respiration, you know, which, which you know, which a lot of these anti aging studies everybody's talking about are done on. Essentially what you're doing is you are inhibiting the activity in the mitochondria, specifically cytochrome C oxidase, so you're reducing ATP synthesis. When you reduce ATP synthesis, you're promoting mitochondrial biogenesis and mitophagy or cellular cleanup, which subsequently decreases the reactive oxygen species and the mitochondrial decay. And then the theory, or really, and they've actually shown this and you guys know this, and like yeast and fruit flies and rodent models that kind of like reduces energy or establishes energy homeostasis and kind of like curbs things like the glucose irregularities and the onset of fat cell accumulation, et cetera, that can occur with age. And so that's what I'm trying to wrap my head around is it sounds to me like you're saying, well, no, push as many energy substrates as you want through the mitochondria, increase ATP synthesis. But you know, everything that I've seen seems to suggest that that would promote mitochondrial decay and excess reactive oxygen species production. Not. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. And I think at this point we'll probably have to dig into all that research that you're kind of referring to, because there is a huge, there's a huge vast library of research that this idea of hormesis is built upon. But I think the foundations of that research are really not there. I think that There are some huge mistakes that have been made as far as extrapolating that research to actually mean that stress and reducing energy availability leads to the longevity that we might see from calorie restriction, for example. I think there are a lot of other factors that explain it that actually not only do they suggest that it's not the stress and the reduction in ATP that leads to longevity, but actually even the opposite. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's maybe something to, to start to dig into now.

Well, let's, let's make sure too that we're like talking on the same terms. Because, because when you guys are talking about how the, this hormesis can cause the type of, of stress that might decrease lifespan rather than the type of stress that might increase mitochondrial proliferation or biogenesis or mitophagy or cellular autophagy or, you know, reduction in, in obesity or excess glucose spikes, things, you know, all the things that we think right now or, you know, at least, you know, if you listen to the average or nutrition podcast or read the next greatest longevity book, that's what they're all saying. But I think we should probably establish our terms here. When you guys say kind of excess hormesis, what's the avatar that you're talking about? What's a typical person doing that you think is a mistake? And I say that because I got up this morning, I hadn't eaten in 12 hours, I did a sauna session, I jumped in the cold pool, I did some breath work, I had a smoothie, but it didn't have any carbohydrates in it. Are we, are we talking about guys like me? Are we talking about like the Iron man triathlete who's ketogenic?

Yeah, in some ways both, you know, it's, it's the, it's all contextual. Right. And I think that there's obviously a difference between those two scenarios. And I'm not saying that every, I don't view that everything you're doing, Ben, is necessarily negative. I just think that when it comes to a lot of these interventions like calorie restriction or ketogenic diets or cold thermogenesis, they have some short term benefits that I would say a long term cost. And that has to do with the way that they are creating their effects. And I think that there are better ways to create those effects without the stress. And so when it comes to, you know, something like a ketogenic diet, I think there can be a ton of benefits. And that's, that's unquestionable Right. A lot of people experience benefits, but I think that there are things that can explain those benefits that are not the stress. And what that means is if we identify those factors and let's. Just to oversimplify, let's say for a ketogenic diet, it's a reduction in LPs, which is lipopolysaccharide or endotoxin production, then we can create that same outcome by reducing LPS through other means that don't require the stress of a ketogenic diet.

Okay.

So it's not necessarily that the, the effects of these are all inherently negative, but they all cause stress. And I don't think that stress is beneficial. And so we can create the outcomes without driving that stress. If we're, if we're considering that possibility.

Okay, gotcha. And, and, and, and, and I, I actually do want to get into that, like the better ways to get those benefits without the stress, you just use, you know, lipopolysaccharid example. I think that'd be fantastic to get into. And before we do, though, help me understand, continue to convince me.

Why this model is incorrect, because I still don't have my head wrapped around it, but I'm listening. So keep going on that before we get into some. What the alternatives would be if we weren't going to do calorie restriction and fasting and ketogenic diets and cold and things like that.

Yeah. One thing I want to touch upon here that I think Jay was just getting at is that there's a. The lens of hormesis tends to look at things through. You need to induce the stress to get all of these beneficial effects. And so like, and the beneficial effects are mediated through the stress. So, and the part of the conceptual shift that we're trying to make or that we're making a case for is it's not necessarily that the beneficial effects are coming through the stress. There may be specific effects. And the specific effects is something coined by Hans Selye where there's a specific effect of some type of intervention that doesn't necessarily work through the stress, but it does have a benefit. And so it's. We're not getting to a place. I don't think the argument here is that we're trying to eliminate all stress or anything like that, because it's obviously not possible. But the idea is, is to focus on a specific effect of an out, the specific effects of an outcome, and then look at that in the context of what is the organism's context, what is the state of that individual, what is the beneficial specific effect? And then what is the stress response that's produced in order to obtain this, this, this specific effect and then see kind of like make a cost benefit ratio to that situation and make a determination of is the stress worth the specific effect in this organism's context. And so I guess a good example just, you know, to kind of take it out of abstract terms is if you have an individual who hasn't slept very well and who hasn't had any carbohydrates, wakes up the next morning and then does exercise and is fasting and then does cold thermogenesis, now you're having an additive, an added multiple additive stressful effects on the organism that may actually not be a good thing, or I would argue is not a good thing overall. So it's, that's why like when you say something like, we're not here to argue that keto diet is terrible, we're saying that the, the beneficial effects that we may see in some of these states, like a ketogenic diet, like caloric restriction or like some of these plant compounds may be from a specific effect and is not actually from the, the stress effect. A piece that needs to be clarified here is like a definition of hormesis. What is hormesis? Yeah, and that has been changed. That definition has been adjusted over time. So it started with it. We had like the idea that there's a small amount of a harmful substance can produce some type of beneficial effect.

But what, what, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The whole, you know, theoretical phenomenon of the, the dose response effect, that was.

Something that, if I, if I remember correctly, and this is something that actually Jay showed me was through chemical research looking at like pollutants and the chemical companies looking at pollutants and creating arguments around small doses of mercury have, and other polluting compounds have a beneficial effect because they induce antioxidant enzymes inside the body, like the glutathione peroxidase, et cetera. So that was initial and then it kind of adjusted into this. Like, I think it was the biphasic and triphasic dose response curves where at like low dosages there was a beneficial effect and then, and then at high dosages, negative. And then, or there was the, the triphasic discussion, which was low doses was positive, moderate doses, you kind of equivocal, and then high doses had a negative effect. And it just put things into this context of if you have a low dose of some type of poison or Stressor it was beneficial and just looked at it through that. And then I don't know, Jay, if you want to interject here, because you had a little more experience with going.

Through these different definitions, I think you summated it well. Right. The, it started out looking at very toxic compounds, ionizing radiation, mercury, things like that. Seeing that those actually had a lot of the same effects of the. What's considered to be hormetic now where.

They inhibit certain the idea that like, like the, like the rodents around Chernobyl lived longer, like that type of thing.

And then that's since been extended to things that are not necessarily directly toxic, but rather anything that causes that sort of stress. And it's kind of been further muddied from there. But as far as your question, Ben, as far as what, you know, a way to conceptualize this and a way to conceptualize this idea that we want to be increasing energy as opposed to depleting it, part of it comes from seeing this in all disease processes. Right. So you had cited or mentioned degenerative states. We were talking, let's say diabetes. And that's certainly not a state where you see excess ATP levels. You tend to see actually excess reactive oxygen species levels and a poor response to that. You don't see a proper adaptive response. And a lot of that tends to come because there is a direct inhibition of glucose metabolism, which is what causes the high blood sugar and insulin resistance that's seen in diabetes. So that that process is not driven by excess energy, it's instead driven by a block between the production of energy from glucose to ATP. That is what we would say and kind of what we argue throughout various disease processes, whether it's neurodegenerative conditions or non alcoholic fatty liver disease or autoimmune issues. We argued that that's actually what drives these processes is an inhibition of energy production, excess levels of stress hormones, poor adaptive responses and degeneration that comes with it because we don't have the energy available to maintain a well functioning system.

Oh, okay, so, so, so does that mean that you're saying that like when we do.

Engage in energy intake that is not involving this type of hormetic stress and might involve higher carbohydrate intake or higher calorie intake, that the issue when we see chronic diseases arise in that type of scenario is an improper utilization of that increase in energy that results in cellular damage, whereas in an ideal scenario in a healthy person you would see a really clean production of ATP in that scenario.

Exactly.

Yes, exactly.

Okay, so.

What would cause energy excess that we see leading to chronic disease that you guys say in an ideal scenario would not lead to chronic disease? What would cause that energy excess that we would get through? Maybe not exercising as much, not fasting as much, eating more carbs, less ketogenic diet, et cetera, et cetera. What would cause that energy excess to actually be harmful? Is it just like the type of foods we would be eating or something like that?

And just for clar. The clarification of, of the nomenclature, just I'll be referring to energy as the end product as opposed to the food we take in, because there's that whole conversion process. You nailed it. A lot of the foods we're taking in in our modern world, and these are starting to become acknowledged more and more, such as the excessive polyunsaturated fat intake through seed oils, those actually have some direct effects, reducing the efficiency of energy production or blocking our ability to produce energy along the, you know, at different points of the electron transport chain or of the Krebs cycle. You see the same thing with the effects of gut irritation, for example. So leaky gut has been something that's been discussed for a long time. And part of the reason why that's so harmful is because there are various bacterial toxins that are supposed to be excreted or at least stay in our intestines and not make it into our bloodstream. One of the biggest ones is LPS or endotoxin that I mentioned earlier. And it's really, really effective at blocking energy production at the electron transport chain. And so that's where you end up with this excess calories or excess substrate that's not being converted to energy. It's being stored as body fat, and you're left with less energy. So you're not actually able to function as well. Right. ATP is what allows our neurons to fire. It allows our muscles to contract, and on from there, you know, our livers to detoxify various toxic agents.

So you have essentially a shunting effect is kind of what you see going on in these situations where you have substrate not being converted to energy. Instead it's being converted to body fat at the same time. That block from the conversion, you have the substrate converting to energy. There's a block at that place, and it could be caused by polyunsaturated fats, could be caused by endotoxin, excessive elevation of stress hormones, et cetera.

So what would be an example in which someone. You guys could use your own diets as an example here, or perhaps your own you know, the way that you're living. As an example of someone who would be in a state of energy excess or someone who's not engaged in as much hormesis but who is producing healthy levels of ATP. Like, like what's this look like when it fleshes out as far as like examples?

Yeah, so we both eat whole food diets that are still based on, you know, getting really great quality food, grass fed, meat eating, organ meats, very nutrient dense.

Right.

We don't issue all of those features of what's considered to be healthy now. Um, but what it does include, I guess in contrast is having carbohydrates relatively consistently throughout the day with you know, maybe let's say every four to five hours or so, three to five hours depending on our needs, whether it's a meal or a snack. And that carbohydrate intake not coming from grains or I don't know, candy or something, but rather generally we focus on whole fruits, cooked roots and tubers like sweet potatoes or parsnips or something like that. And yeah, and then I guess as far as exercise goes, and we'll talk about this maybe in more detail, we focus on exercise that doesn't drive excessive amounts of stress but does still have other benefits.

Yeah, keep, keep giving examples including the exercise. Cause I want to hear, you know, I've heard, for example, you know, and this would be like Pavel Zatzalin's theory in his books, like the Quick and the Dead. Literally in the Quick and the Dead, he's referring to the very short non lactic acid producing exercise sessions, like short 10 second bouts of kettlebell swings, being far superior and advantageous for long term health compared to what he terms the dead, not the quick, which would be high amounts of lactic acid production. You see other models like H I R T taking precedence over HIIT as something that's more sustainable for life, that results in less acidosis, less metabolic acidosis and lactic acid buildup. That would be like, well, high intensity repeat training, going for a walk and every four minutes or so just doing an all out 10 second sprint versus say doing two minutes on to one minute off on a bicycle for 20 minutes or something like that. And so I think I might get at what you guys are getting at here, understand what you guys are getting at here. Reduce stress on the body, yet still a certain amount of movement with a particular focus on reduced amount of lactic acidosis or reduce muscle damage. But, but I would love to hear you flesh it out a little bit.

More as, as far as my personal exercise regimen, it involves a lot of bodybuilding type exercises, you know, a general bodybuilding routine, but there's a focus on recovery and a focus on minimizing a stress response, for example, increasing, like increasing the time between sets etc, and then managing volume appropriately and then also developing muscle tension. And that one of the things to discuss is the idea that there's been an idea around muscle building in particular with exercise where you needed this muscular damage to develop the muscles overall. And what we're kind of seeing, and this is a newer paper I think, by Brad Schoenfeld discussing muscular tension probably being the primary candidate for muscle development, et cetera. So there's, with the exercise, I mean, I don't think like in a acute lactic acid generation during exercise is necessarily terrible, but the, the focus around exercise within the model, at at least from my perspective is around creating that specific effect, that anabolic stimulus on the muscle and trying to minimize the stresses, the, the stress effect of the exercise so that you can optimize and, and you know, depending on your goal for my outcome is for hypertrophy, for building muscle tissue, for building lean mass. So it's, it comes down to that, that view of the model. Whereas another, an alternative model I guess could be something along the lines of I'm going to go into the gym and I'm going to induce as much muscular damage as possible so I can have this anabolic effect somehow from that and, and kind of try to recover from it after the switch when you change your lens from this kind of hormetic approaches. I want to have a specific effect of a stimulus on the muscle through muscular tension with adequate amounts of volume while minimizing a muscular damage and an excessive stress response indicated by cortisol, catecholamines, etc, so that I can recover effectively and then do it again on a more regular basis. So if the lens shift changes, how.

You go about it, okay, so what would that look like? And I think probably just so that people can better wrap their hands with us, at least for me personally, selfishly enough, this is, this is how I understand things. Can you guys continue, but with as much detail as possible to walk me through like the ideal day of someone using like a really good bioenergetic model, but like get super nitty gritty specific with me. I want to hear about like when you guys wake up, what you do, what you have for breakfast when you have breakfast, like how you exercise and you know, maybe I'll ask some questions along the way about why you're doing what. But does that make sense? Can you, can you guys start to flesh it out in terms of like boots on the streets, what you're doing.

After, you know, sleeping, let's say eight to nine hours? Normally I aim for nine, you know, and I'd prefer an earlier sleep schedule. That to me is something that I view as, as essentially my fast. And so normally when I wake up, one of the first things I want to do is break that fast. And you know, I'm kind of saying this, a little tug in cheek, but there is actually something to that. Where the natural rhythm of our stress hormones, they tend to peak right in the morning when we're supposed to wake up. And that is supposed to wake us up. And then ideally they should be pretty low throughout the rest of the day. And so I'll make sure to start off when I wake up with a very easily digesting carbohydrate source to immediately dampen or decrease the catecholamine response or glucocorticoid response.

Meaning. Okay, so you mean like the morning cortisol response. You're trying to dampen that with carbohydrate intake, but you're not concerned about like the idea that the cortisol is supposed to wake you up and jump start your circadian rhythm. Meaning specifically, like, what would you say to a guy like Sachin Panda who's going to be like, you're eating at a time when you've already got this natural cortisol response, you'll suppress that, you're going to delay your circadian rhythm. What are your thoughts about that?

So I guess I view the natural response to be a peak and then it's supposed to basically go down as soon as we have food available, which I think. And again, this comes back to this conceptual view, but if you were to continue without any food available and let that cortisol stay high, ongoing, and continue a long term fast, I think that's a really good way to depress our metabolism. By reducing energy availability, you increase stress hormone production, you reduce the level of the thyroid activity, the thyroid hormones, you reduce the anabolic hormones. I think that that is a recipe toward long term stress and decreased function.

And, and there are some people that argue with you and say like, well, by decreasing thyroid hormone and metabolism and lowering the anabolic response, that you would actually induce enhanced longevity. You've probably heard that before, right?

Yeah. And that's where that rate of living theory comes in. And, and there's. It's another one kind of like calorie restriction, where there's a lot of like, we're attributing the benefit to the wrong thing. And so the, where one of the places that came from is they looked at a wide variety of species of animals, let's say elephants versus mice, and they found that the mice had a very high metabolic rate relative to their size, whereas elephants were very small, like low metabolic rate relative to their size. And of course, elephants live a lot longer, so it must be better. But there are a bunch of confounding variables here. And so what they actually found is that when you look within a species, so look within the elephants, or just looking at different mice, the ones who have the higher metabolic rates actually live longer. There's a couple of mediating factors here, and one of the main ones coming back to the polyunsaturated fats is the amount of unsaturated fats that are in the membranes of our tissues or especially in the mitochondria. And the more polyunsaturated fats are in there, the less efficient our metabolism. And so with, when you're looking between species, it tends to be standard. Let's say, like all mice tend to have about the same level of unsaturated fats in their membranes compared to all elephants. And so that's where you get that difference. The mice are very inefficient with their ability to produce energy. They actually produce a lot of reactive oxygen species and much lower amounts of ATP. But when you look within the species and they have a standard amount of unsaturated fat, the increased metabolic rate actually wins out and increases longevity.

So basically, and again, you, you said the one with the, with the greater reactive oxygen species wins out.

The. No, the one with the greater metabolism, the higher energy expenditure in this within a species, which actually does, as Mike said, tend to result in lower reactive oxygen species.

And how does it, how does it that a higher metabolism result in reduced reactive oxygen species? Right, because. Because most people would say, well, by increasing throughput, you're going to increase reactive oxygen species just because a lot of times the Ross will serve as even, just like a signaling molecule, as a paracrine signaling molecule for certain functions in.

Different states, you'll have different amounts of reactive oxygen species. When you have a higher throughput through the mitochondria, you can produce more reactive oxygen species. But in that circumstance, you also have, if it's moving through effectively in producing ATP, you'll have more ATP. Whereas in other situations with a lowered metabolism and you can have less throughput. Or if you're changing from a carbohydrate oxidation to a fat oxidation, you can actually cause an issue in ratios between NAD and NADH. That can create issues at Complex 1, and it's related to FAD and FADH2 as well. But you create issues at Complex 1 and then you generate the reactive oxygen species through that complex one, and then you can trigger an adaptive response that can upregulate uncoupling. So there's, there's two scenarios, right? If you have a situation where you generate, you're oxidizing glucose, you're oxidizing substrate, you're producing that large amount of ATP, then when you start to have a buildup of ATP, then you can adjust that proton motive force at. At pace, which is the enzyme that basically takes the protons from the inner compartment of the mitochondria and moves them through to generate ATP. You'll build up more proton motor force, the protons kind of get backed up inside the mitochondria, and then you generate more ros. This is a very different state than if you were to have a situation where, say, you're oxidizing larger amounts of fats, and the larger amounts of fats have a, create more fadh, and then that FADH basically creates an issue with the ubiquinone inside the mitochondria that jams up complex one. Now you have a lot more ROS coming out of complex one, and then you're triggering a response where you have less ATP production and you have, and you still have ros. And in both situations, you can get uncoupling, which is essentially where you're diverting the protons out through the uncoupling proteins and then you're not generating ATP, you're generating heat. So the characteristic difference that we're describing here in these situations is related to whether you have larger amounts of ATP or not. And in the presence of larger amounts of ATP, the ROS signaling may not necessarily be a bad thing. It can actually be a good thing. And then you also can see that uncoupling effect.

And what you're saying is that carbohydrate restriction and excesses of fat will result in the ATP along the electron transport chain being generated in such a manner that you see a downregulation of atpase and almost like a gumming up of metabolic machinery and a difference in terms of the high ATP, high reactive oxygen species favorable scenario versus the low ATP, high reactive oxygen species unfavorable scenario.

And that's not particularly controversial either. I know it sounds like we're saying something here that many people would disagree on, but this is the exact purpose, you know, arguably, of fat oxidation, where when we're in a starvation state, it's meant to create a lot of reactive oxygen species that are meant to signal the slowing of respiration in order to allow us to survive for a longer period of time. And so the. When we're in a state like that, the reactive oxygen species are the bottleneck that stop respiration from functioning properly. Whereas in the other state where we're producing a lot of ATP, the ATP is the bottleneck, as you said, Ben, that leads to an increased reactive oxygen species for, you know, after you have the elevated ATP levels so much that it kind of slows things down, and then you can create the uncoupling. So what Mike was kind of saying, you can have uncoupling in both states driven by reactive oxygen species. One you have high ATP and the other one you have low ATP, and one is driven by stress and one is not. And that's really that difference that we're seeing.

We got to the point where you're giving yourself a nice, long, luxurious sleep period. You're viewing that as your fast, which sounds like it's about maybe anywhere from 8 to 12 hours in length, depending on when you finish dinner, because you said you're sleeping eight, nine hours in that range. And then you actually do have carbohydrates when you first get up. And then, then what happens? And I don't mind if you guys bounce back and forth because it sounds like you're kind of sort of doing something similar for me.

I generally leave a leave time between meals because I had digestive issues from surgeries and stuff. Not in the past. So there's the migrating motor complex. I'll leave about three hours to optimize that for myself. And then I'll. I'll eat basically every three hours. And the meals that I'll have will contain a decent amount of carbohydrate, a decent amount of protein, and a decent amount of fat. So as a very specific example, a meal. So, say for breakfast this morning, I had maybe a couple ounces of dried goji berries or other dried fruit like dried pineapple. And then I had some. I had some juice, maybe 12 to 16 ounces of juice. And then I had a nice piece of red meat, and I had a side of cooked vegetables with butter. So that would be a general meal for me. And part of the ideology around that meal. There's a couple pieces there that, that are more specific. Like for example, the combining of plants with meat to adjust micro, the effects in the microbiome. Because adjustments in the microbiome is a huge piece of the bioenergetic point of view to lower endotoxemia. I know there's going to probably be a question coming in about saturated fats and endotoxin and we can talk about that. And then also I want to make sure that I'm maintaining my blood sugar between meals so I'm having adequate amounts of carbohydrate, with adequate amounts of fiber, adequate amounts of protein and adequate amounts of fat so I can maintain my blood sugar and prevent blood sugar dips. And then I'm eating in a frequent enough manner so that I'm also maintaining my blood sugar adequately. At least for me. That's kind of the rhythm I go about things. And I, I, I let you speak for yourself, Jay, but I think we're kind of similar.

Oh. So it sounds like, just real quick, before Jay jumps in and adds any of his little things that he does, it sounds like it's kind of like a, almost like a grain, or at least low grain, maybe even close to a grain free, kind of like higher carb, nuts, seeds, berries, meat, juice, type of paleo ish approach. But the difference being that unlike a typical crossfitter fasting, hormesis, extremely low carb paleo approach that involves a lot of lactic acid coming out the eyeballs during the workouts. And again, you guys, correct me if I'm misinterpreting anything here. It's instead, basically, again, not vilifying carbohydrates, including your fruit, fruit juices, having meals that are spread throughout the day to where you're never really getting that hypoglycemic going in and exercising, but not choosing the type of workouts that produce a lot of burn, a lot of lactic acid, a lot of lung sucking type of stuff. The performance enthusiast might engage in a luxurious amount of sleep. And then I guess one thing I might be missing out on here, and first of all, let me know if I'm on the right track as far as interpreting what you're doing. And second of all, what about the things like the heat and cold and the sunlight and grounding and earthing and you know, some of these things like the biohackers slash paleo folks might be doing?

My personal paradigm is essentially paleo. I don't do well with dairy. I know that's big in some of the bioenergetic point of view, I'm allergic to it, but it is optimizing those things. The, the diet is focused around getting enough nutrients to optimize function, right. So it's, I want enough carbohydrate so I can keep my stress hormones low like the catecholamines, et cetera, and to allow for optimal brain function. Then I also want to have enough fat so I can produce enough steroid hormones like testosterone. And I also want to have enough protein so that I can adequately stimulate protein synthesis in my body. So I want, it's about hitting thresholds and then it's also about nutrient density. Right. I want to have enough nutrients so I'm hitting particular thresholds. And then it's also about, you know, some of the, the beneficial effects in the microbiome. So there's optimizations of all of these things and seeing as all of these things as necessary and beneficial and required for certain, for certain levels of function. And then as far as like sunlight, huge fans of sunlight, huge fans of grounding. Grounding, as you discussed. Yeah, those are, those are all part of the entire picture. A lot of the picture is around minimizing some of the unnecessary stresses and, and optimizing a hormonal profile as well. So keeping your, your catecholamines, keeping your glucocorticoids low and optimizing androgens, optimizing thyroid, optimizing dopamine, et cetera, all of those types of things. So shifting into this more anabolic pro metabolic perspective and less on the stress hormones, relying on these stress hormones for these different pathways, I, I guess a large, an important view in this situation and I guess a heuristic. The way I, I kind of view it is the, each one of the stress hormones, like your glucocorticoids, your or your catecholamines or aldosterone, they all release some type of component that your body needs to function. So for example, cortisol will increase sugar, adrenaline will liberate fats and sugars as well from glycogen, your aldosterone will liberate or help to retain different minerals. So it's when you have adequate amounts of these different things, you don't need to rely on these hormones. And so you see this in research as well.

Right.

If you have somebody who's training, you give them adequate carbohydrates, you can get a lower cortisol response and you can optimize the testosterone to cortisol ratio. So it's about not. And that's where the energy and structure piece comes in as well. Right. Because when you use these adaptive hormones and you're liberating, for example, say you need to do gluconeogenesis, you need cortisol for your gluconeogenesis, then what, what do you have to break down for that? That's amino acids. So you're, you're having to break down stores of your tissues to provide the energy instead of taking them, or the substrate to produce energy instead of taking them exogenously. So that's kind of a, I guess, a heuristic around the view to some extent.

Okay, got it. And would you say like a, like a professional athlete, an Olympian, maybe an Ironman triathlete, CrossFit competitor, et cetera, they probably aren't going to want to listen to some of your advice. Right. I mean, because, because I assume that you acknowledge the trade off between the longevity afforded by your approach versus the necessity for metabolic acidosis and perhaps the type of hormetic stress associated, especially the hormetic stress induced by exercise that some of these folks might be putting their bodies through. So.

Not necessarily.

Okay.

I actually think that it's even more important if we are going to be, or if we're going to be doing something, if we're going to make a sacrifice for athletics or fitness or a sport, it's even more important to make sure that we are calculated, I guess, or paying attention to how we are reducing stress as much as possible. So again, the, the kind of. Our issue with the hormesis, which what we're kind of skirting around, is that the stress is not beneficial even for athletic performance. So basically, and again, I guess there are some nuances here, but let's take somebody who's a power lifter. The benefits that they tend to derive come from, as Mike was saying, the mechanical tension put on the muscles by the resistance training that they're doing that signals for muscle growth, improvements and strength, you know, the neurological connections. And I would argue that that happens despite the stress, not because of it. And so for someone in that situation, if they are favoring excess or high amounts of activity, I would say it's even more important to make sure that you're supplying adequate fuel, including carbohydrates.

Oh, I totally agree with that. But, but you, I mean, gosh, like, you probably realize this, Jay, but you, you. You might have induced a collective sai moan head slap amongst any of the strength conditioning coaches listening in when you said that the response to exercise from a, you know, we're talking about a lot of mitochondria, muscle gain, whatever occurs despite the stress, not because of it. Because like that's kind of like, you know that that's a dogma of exercise is that you stress the body and it responds by becoming stronger. Are you saying that that's not true?

Well, so we have to define stress there. Right? So stress, I would say is not just stimulating the body body, but it is creating a stress response. It's depleting energy and increasing stress hormones, creating metabolic damage.

Yeah. Okay, so you're saying. Yeah, that's a subtle nuance. You're not saying the stress induced by say like pushing your body from 135 pound overhead push, press or clean and jerk to 155 pound. You're saying the stress involved by finishing a workout like that and then going out and not eating anything for two hours and shorting yourself on sleep so you can get up in time to do your sauna and your cold plunge and, and, and you know, restricting carbohydrates just so you don't get fat, that type of thing.

It does flip a lot of the general perspective on its head, right. That we need to be fighting against our bodies. We need to be putting ourselves into these really whether I would regard them as harmful, at least difficult, stressful situations in order to grow, as opposed to that growth being a product of a really enriching environment that supports our energetic capacity and allows for us to still move forward, but in a different way. And so you mentioned like high level endurance athletes and I think without a doubt that is a situation where you are going to be sacrificing some modicum of health for that sort of performance. Um, but I would still say the, the more that we can kind of oppose that the stress induced part of it, the, the better.

But, but you're, what you're, what you're not saying, just to clarify, is that athletes shouldn't go out and do hard workouts.

Yeah, not for the, not for that goal. If their goal is to improve their performance, then yeah, hard workouts are going.

To be a part of that.

What we're saying is that we should optimize the athlete so that the athlete can get the most out of the specific effects of their training and minimize the stressful effects on the system. Because, and I guess we haven't really discussed it yet, but the stress is cumulative. So there are the stress overall as a cumulative effect on the system and the. Something discussed in like general adaptation Syndrome, which is Hans Selye's model, is that you can have all these different types of stressors and they still move through the same pathways. So there's the, the idea here is not don't work out or if you're focusing on performance, don't do hard workouts. It's optimize your, for your performance. So do your workouts that are necessary to achieve your goal and there may be some sacrifices involved there, but then on the back end, optimize recovery as much as, as possible so that you're able to actually effectively handle the stress. And then another part of the argument is that it may not be and depending on the situation, but in a lot of situations it may not necessarily be the stress itself that is driving the beneficial response, it is the specific effect. So for example, in your overhead, with the overhead press, the tension on the muscle in the overhead press may actually be the beneficial stimulus that you know, that's stretching the customers which are just like the, the different components that connect the muscle fibers. It's causing a response there that's signaling the muscle fibers, hey, it's time to grow versus like we need to rip the muscle up and damage the muscle so that it then repairs and then it grows. So it's a questioning of, of that nuance there where it's like maybe we don't need to actually induce this, this stress and damage to get the beneficial effect or that's not the primary focus, the beneficial effect. It's just an unavoidable aspect that's there.

Right, right. So it sounds like when Cellier defined general adaptation syndrome, which defines how an organism reacts to stress and defined kind of like those, those three stages, the initial shock, the resistance and then if the stress persists, the exhaustion. What you're saying is initial shock, fine resistance, fine, persistent stress that leads to exhaustion to be avoided. Yet something that a lot of modern day health enthusiasts, especially those pursuing either the pointy edges of longevity or performance, are actually still doing.

I would also say that even if you can create an environment that allows for the same goals that you're trying to achieve without even creating the initial parts of that stress response, that would be even better. So that's kind of coming back to let's say a keto diet. I think it would be much better to get the benefits that people are having there without the stress that's caused, without having to go anywhere on that general adaptation syndrome.

I'm glad you brought it back to that because that was like an outstanding question. I wanted to ask, earlier on you said there are better way to get the benefits without the stress. So we've established that some of the stress is beneficial, yet excesses of stress are probably being overdone and are not beneficial. So what are some of the ways that we could get the benefits? And you could use the example of the ketogenic diet that you were just starting, or other examples if you would like to getting the benefits without the stress. How do we do it? What's, what's the magic?

We could start with keto. I mean, another easy one is maybe caloric restriction. There's a handful of, of variables that they've attributed caloric restriction to that are not stress. And I think that's really key. So just a really easy example. We know that a lot of the caloric restriction studies in rodents, part of their benefit actually has to do with the restriction of particular amino acids. And they find that they don't need to calorie restrict if they just restrict methionine levels and it causes the same lifespan extension. And even more than that, they found that you don't need to restrict some methionine levels if you supplement with glycine. So here's a very practical takeaway here, which is that A, the calorie restriction was not beneficial because of stress, but rather some confounding variable. In this case, the restriction of a certain amino acid called methionine, which can be harmful in excessive amounts. And then B, if we just restrict the methionine or just add in some extra glycine, which we can do very easily by eating foods that are gelatinous, that have collagen in them, or just adding a collagen supplement, we could potentially get that same benefit without needing any of the stress.

Yeah.

Yep, that, that makes sense. So that, that would be like excess. Well, it seems like it's more like the protein restriction instead. What you're looking at is a little bit of methionine restriction or even just not even focusing on methionine restriction, getting glycine and collagen, gelatin and things like that in instead. Have they ever done any studies on that? Like, like comparing methionine restriction and longevity with methionine adequacy and longevity with the methionine adequacy, actually adding in things like glycine or collagen or gelatin or things of that nature?

I think there's a rat study where they used glycine and they found that. I don't think it was the entirely the same benefit, but they got a large benefit from just having adequate glycine or whatever their adequate determined level was in the study compared to methionine. The other thing I want to point out here, just with methionine restriction or even some of the caloric restrictions in some of these studies, they may not directly also be applicable to humans because they have to start these restrictions in rats at a younger age and it leads to loss in body size and things like, and muscle mass, etc. That when you're like for example, there's some contradictory evidence where they say higher protein in older adult adults is actually better. And, and as far as decreasing mortality related to lean mass, sarcopenia, et cetera. So some, and I guess this also goes with like talking about the C. Elegans caloric restriction studies. Some of the effects there, but some of these effects that we also notice inside the lab may not be beneficial. For example, if we, you take olderly elderly people, you decrease body size and they have sarcopenia, you're decreasing muscle protein synthesis through this caloric restriction or, or these restricted methionine diets, you can wind up increasing frailty which predisposes towards mortality in that older age. So you may not realize those benefits of the intervention. So I think that's important to put it in the context of what you actually have going on in real life. But yeah, there are, there is a benefit with, with glycine addition to the diet in a certain excess over methionine.

And then what about like we haven't talked too much about this but like heat stress and cold stress. What do you guys think about it? And if you're kind of down on it, are there also ways that we could get the benefits of those without actually stressing ourselves out with things like sauna and cold tubs?

Part of it comes back to what are we actually looking at as potential benefits there. Normally what I'm seeing with something like cold thermogenesis is a, an immediate increase in energy expenditure. You know, the increased activity of the brown adipose tissue. I don't know if there's anything else you would add in there Ben.

Increase in cold chalk protein, probably the blood glucose disposal effect. It is kind of like one of the best non supplement or herb based glucose disposal agent type of practices that you could do. Increase in vagal nerve tone, increase in. And this is a little bit more anecdotal. I suppose that whole idea of doing something hard makes everything else feel easier but better. Stress, resilience the rest of the day emotionally, mentally. Uh, so those would be a few of the biggies.

And, and I do want to add a large caveat here, a caveat which is that a lot of things that are hormetic or stressful do have that quote, mental benefit, you could say, where you're more resilient to stress. Whether or not that's a good thing, I think maybe we'll discuss. But when it comes to cold thermogenesis, I, I see it as a rather generic stressor that as you said, Ben, leads to those sorts of activities. And I think this is one of the situations where the benefits that we're looking at here aren't necessarily really benefits. We're more characterizing the end point as something that's beneficial with some underlying assumptions. There's a lot of ways that we can drive stress to increase short term energy expenditure and might not activate the cold shock proteins. But just as another example, we could drink a lot of plain water without any electrolytes in it. And that will, you know, a lot of people will say that drinking water increases your metabolism. And it does. I mean, so to speak, the way that it does it is by activating the sympathetic nervous system, activating the catecholamine response and activating the RAS system as well to maintain electrolyte balance. And so these are aspects of stress that when we consider the endpoint of just increased energy expenditure as beneficial, we would consider the intervention to be beneficial. But I think the question mark here is whether just wasteful energy expenditure is actually beneficial. And so there's a model put forth, I don't remember what the. He recently wrote a book, I think, called Burn, but he talked about this constrained model of energy expenditure and he was looking at people who are undergoing high levels of exercise. And instead of what's considered the additive model, where you just assume that the more and more energy you expend, it just adds and adds up. So if you do another thousand calories of exercise now you're burnt. You went from burning 3,000 calories a day to 4,000. But we actually found is that that's not the case and that this energy expenditure is constrained and there's limits there. And so you burn that extra thousand calories of ex from exercise or cold exposure and you don't actually burn 4,000 in total, you might only burn 3,500. And that other 500 is coming from energy that would be used to support the, the health of the organism, to support the structure. And they found that in, in animal Models that they do this, it suppresses reproductive activity, it reduces the body's capacity to repair, it lowers lactation and nursing females.

So what you're saying is, is basically like the body engages in these robust conservation mechanisms in response to either excess energy restriction or energy burning.

Exactly. And so I think there's a lot of really great ways to increase glucose usage and to use energy that don't. That aren't. So I guess I would say wasteful in a way that this is where it's coming at the cost of other areas of our health.

I think it's important to keep in mind that the body does have a degree of finite ability to produce energy. Right. There's only so much food that you can absorb in a day. There's only so much output of energy that you can put in the mitochondrial through the mitochondria at a unit of time. And so when you have a situation where I think the. Another important piece to add on to that is context. Right. If you have somebody who's overweight, and if you view overweight as an issue where you're not oxidizing or producing energy appropriately, and now you're just taking your substrate and the person is initially putting into fat storage, but now you're just burning it through cold thermogenesis, we still haven't fixed the problem. So you have the situation where the body can only produce so much energy at a given time, and it's what can that energy go towards? Right? You have men, you have brain function, you have replenishment of different components inside the muscle, like glycogen, you have tissue repair, you have the general functions of all your organs overall. So it's like, where are we allocating this energy? What's the underlying problem that's leading to a misallocation of energy among people with metabolic syndrome? And if, if the problem is that they're not producing enough energy, do we just want to dispose the substrate that's coming in through uncoupling, which is essentially just moving it through heat, or do we want to fix what's going on at the mitochondria and have them adequately produce energy at their cells overall, and then when they have enough energy on board, they have that adequate amount of ATP, then they uncouple.

I think I'm beginning to wrap my head around your guys's model because, like, if I were to ask you about, let's say, intermittent fasting, which I have a hunch that you'd be down on the traditional, like 12 to 18 hour fast with the 48 hour compressed feeding window. Am I correct?

We've done it. We've done it. We were doing it together.

Okay. Then you would say that rather than giving your gut a break by choosing an activity that could produce excess stress from an energy restriction standpoint, or even just a long term hypoglycemic standpoint, you could instead eat a diet that's got a really high amount of digestibility and a lot of good nutrient density, without a lot of things like toxins or the type of saturated fats that might lead to lipopolysaccharide formation. And therefore, you would get a lot of the benefits that people are looking for in terms of gut healing from intermittent fasting, from a different approach altogether. Or for example, I suppose you could also say with something like heat stress, maybe a different take on your model would be that if you're looking for the benefits of something like increased heat shock proteins or insulin sensitivity and blood sugar management, or perhaps some of the circadian rhythmicity benefits or things like that that might come from heat stress, then you must bear in mind that stress is stress is stress, and that if you are going to engage in a practice like that, you shouldn't pair it with things like water restriction, electrolyte restriction, mineral depletion, excess time spent in the sauna, and may want to consider that on the day that you do the sauna. That is actually a day on which you add that to your total stress score for the day if you want to, if you want to actually engage in something like that. So it sounds to me like it's just a matter of paying attention to the nature of the stress that you're putting on your body, mitigating excess stress as much as possible, and then really putting the body in a state where it can restore and recover as much as possible in those situations in which you do engage in something that we might traditionally consider a hormetic stressor, even though, based on your model it's probably not hormesis in the traditional sense of the word that we're experiencing, but other benefits from that activity that aren't necessarily, you know, the traditional Hans Selye stress.

Model related to a large extent.

Yeah, I feel like I'm understanding, guys. I feel like I'm wrapping my head around it after. After an hour of talking. Yeah.

I just want to say that in some of the models though, like, I think some things that are producing, like I wouldn't go out of my way to certain situations for, like, for example, with a heat Exposure Right. When you're inducing these heat, heat shock proteins, the question for me is why? Why when you put yourself under heat, are you inducing a heat shock protein? Why do you need to have these heat shock proteins come over, create the, the, the proteasomes and then fix those proteins? Because you're inducing damage to those proteins. Now could there be off target effects where you, while you upregulate that process, you're also upregulating, perhaps other damaged proteins perhaps? Sure. But the question is why? Why are you elevating it in the first place? And if it's by doing that damage, then I question for example, is that, is that damage good in the long run? Is that necessary in the long run? Even though you're getting this beneficial effect through this, this, this adaptive process with those proteins?

Right, I hear you. And, and my response to that would be that the, the stress is a trade off. Like, like the nature of the damage done is a trade off for how good you feel and the improvement in insulin sensitivity and the better sleep and some of the things that stress does for you. And so I think probably it comes down to almost like the vernacular, the semantics behind it, rather than saying sauna is good for you could say based on your guys model, sauna is bad for you. The things that it's helping you out with are pretty decent. So just make sure that as much as possible you not overdo the thing that's bad for you and you try and fix as many of the issues that might be causing through mineral replenishment and water intake and proper hydration and everything else. But basically a lot of these things that we are telling ourselves are good for us, are in fact not that great for us. And we need to bear that in mind.

Yeah, I mean I would say also if we can get those same benefits to our feelings of well being or our insulin sensitivity without the stress, that would be great too. And I'm not necessarily anti sauna, but if we were to take some of the other examples that I think are more clear, let's say, I don't know if we were to take Wim Hof breathing right where we are driving, very clearly a short term stress response by blowing off our CO2 which creates respiratory alkalosis, which creates hypoxia at the cells so they can't produce energy, cause they can't absorb oxygen due to the bore effect is like people might feel really good after that. In the same way that maybe if they had a cup of coffee when they were fasting or they did a fasted workout. But there are costs to those things. And when we orient our bodies toward something that has a stress cost, I think it comes at the cost of our potential, our potential complexity, our potential function that comes along with longevity as well. And so I'd much prefer, you know, through this view, considering that the stress isn't beneficial. We can orient ourselves toward different ways of improving insulin sensitivity, let's say that aren't stressful and still make you. Should make you feel good.

That makes sense. You guys, have you guys ever written down much of the stuff or do you have a book or anything about it?

I've got a. A couple of articles that could be a book on horn. There's a. A part one and part two. They're pretty long.

Okay, cool.

I'll.

I'll find them and I'll link to them in the shownotes, which I'll put@BenGreenfield Fitness.com Energy balance that last thing that you said, Jay, reminded me of something that I read in a book by Derek Sivers called How to Live. Uh, it's basically this idea that most actions that we take are in pursuit of emotions. So you think you want to take action or own a thing, but what you really want is the emotion that you think it'll bring. And so what Derek says in his book is like, skip the actions, go straight for the emotion. Practice feeling the emotions intentionally instead of using actions to create them. If that makes sense. Right. So if you're, whatever, doing a sauna to feel happy, why don't you just tell yourself be happy and then smile and induce happiness? It's kind of an interesting thought experiment, but when you were saying, oh, of that last statement, it just kind of reminded me of that line from Derek Sivers book How to Live, which is, it's an interesting book. I don't agree with everything in it, but it's a good read, I think for a little proverbs like that. Well, you guys, this is so interesting. I mean, it just kind of gets the wheels turning. And I know whenever I do a podcast like this, it's like an ongoing discussion where people jump in and they'll leave more comments and questions probably for you guys too. In the show notes@bengreedfulfitness.com energy balance my intention, and I hope I've achieved this for getting you guys on, was to just throw like a warning signal out there for people who really are overdoing it because I see it a lot and help people better understand what's going on with hormesis and the idea that it's not like, you know, it's not like you should live your life by the mantra what doesn't kill you makes you stronger because what doesn't kill you can also kill you. You know, just slowly, paradoxical as that might sound. So, and, and you know, and you're, you're talking to a guy. You guys know this, like, I'm known as like the masochist iron man, you know, beat up my body. And you know, I don't, I don't necessarily have that, that target of living to 160 or anything because I've acknowledged that a lot of the stuff that I do to feel good, like sauna and ice bath and stuff, you know, maybe it does have a little bit of a detrimental effect. And, and I'm always learning and I'm always studying and yeah, maybe I'm getting old, but I'm also kind of always trying to find ways to learn, live life and get the benefits of health without necessarily beating up the body too much or creating excess stress or time spent just caring for oneself. And as we talked about earlier, lying hungry and cold and libido less inside a hyperbaric chamber or something like that. So anyways, I appreciate you guys coming on and sharing all this with us and I'll link to all your stuff in the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com energybalance and we appreciate.

You having us on and having an open mind and listen and, you know, giving us the floor to be able to talk about these things. Yeah, it's really awesome.

Well, I appreciate you guys.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Keep up the great work, keep doing what you're doing, keep, keep pioneering cool new thinking patterns that help people out and, and for everybody listening in, until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Mike Fave and Jay Feldman signing out from Ben Greenfield. I keep saying fitness.com but we just rebranded to BenGreenfieldLife.com my apologies to everybody listening. Don't worry, there's a permanent redirect. So when I mess up, which I probably will do for the next year OR so, it's BenGreenfield Life.com thanks everybody for listening in. I'll talk to you later.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it. Or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.