How To Catch Your Breath *4x* Faster, Get *7x* More Oxygen Than Regular Water & Lower Heart Rate INSTANTLY With Inventor Ian Mitchell.

My name is Ben Greenfield. And on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

We did a thing at a big sports facility in Fort Worth. We called it the Inhale Challenge and we had VersaClimbers and treadmills and things like that. We were getting people's heart rates up to about 150, 160 BPM and then having them drink a can and their heart rate within about a minute, a minute and a half would drop back down in a normal range. It's anecdotal, but there have been people that have asthma that are using this this in lieu of albuterol because it decreases, you know, your heart rate while increasing your oxygenation in lieu of making you jittery and increasing your heart rate and increasing your oxygenation.

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Ian Mitchell has been a very popular podcast guest of mine. He's been on the show twice. You're now a 3-peater, Ian. Congratulations. Woo-hoo! We've talked about, gosh, like frog poison, ozone suppositories, breaking performance records, reversing Alzheimer's, quantum biology. Ian's come out to my house and visited and even showed me how to change the flavor of chicory coffee at a local Crail restaurant and beyond. He is a wealth of knowledge, just in the trenches daily. He's got patents on a variety of different products that you've probably tried out there in the nutrition and biohacking industry. Uh, he developed the first viable gamma ray shielding system for use on spacecraft and space habitats, uh, as well as a carbon-negative concrete that inhibits greenhouse gas proliferation. He's got a bunch of other products, like I mentioned, in the CPG space. But, he recently figured out something really cool that he could do with water. I'm holding what he did right now because I got my hands on a few cans of this stuff. It says super oxygenated water. And, it's kind of funny because Ian will develop these things that if 99% of people on the planet developed and sent to me, I would be like, "Pfft, bullshit." But, he actually knows his way around science better than just about anybody I know. So, Ian, are you ready to geek out and put on our tinfoil hats and talk all things super-oxygenated water?

Yeah, let's do it, man.

Cool. By the way, if you're listening in, the shownotes are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/InhalePodcast, Inhale Podcast. I suppose you've probably gotten a little bit of flak, Ian, about the other meaning of the term inhale.

Well, I tried to get Bill Clinton as a representative for the water, but that hasn't gone down yet.

Yeah, we'll get his face on the camera eventually.

Yeah, if we can get him just sitting there going, "I do now," that would be quite epic.

Well, it's pretty rare that you can get my sons hooked on something and they're drinking. I've been going through my stash super fast because they slam a can of this before almost all of our father-son morning workouts. And, you told me that it would do certain things. We can get into it on this podcast, but I do hyperbaric, I do exercise with oxygen therapy, I use all these oxygen modalities. And, when I drink a can of this, it feels very similar as far as the overall oxygenation. So, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what's going on here and how this thing came to be.

Yeah. So, I mean, we're friends, so you've seen me walk around with my Safety Third t-shirt that my staff made me. And, they gave that to me because I blew the lab up. And, I blew the lab up while I was actually developing the process on how to make this. So, kind of the basics of this is water typically has 5 to 8 parts per million oxygen. This is much, much, much, much, much higher. It's actually like— I mean, you can test it and you'll get well over 180 or 200 parts per million depending on which can you open. We say that it's upwards of I think 7 times, which is really only somewhere around the 50, 60 range. And actually, there's a preponderance of oxygen, so it's much more dense than that. But, my thought was after you open it, there's kind of a partial pressure issue, so it starts to dissipate a little bit just because of equalization of the pressures and the concentration gradients of everything. So, the oxygen that's in the water starts to delocalize a bit. Usually, Because when you're opening a can, you're shaking it. When you shake the stuff, the molecules— the way I actually did this, it's nanoscopic bubbles, right? So, you crack the bubbles down so that they're nanoscopic and then you effectively kind of lock them in position through a whole bunch of bizarro chemistry that I had to create this super weird rig to actually get to work, dropping temperature gradients and increasing pressure gradients and all kinds of weird stuff. But, The idea was to basically make hyperbaric in a can. And, it's great for performance athletics and stuff like that, but really to me, the big benefit is for cancer therapeutics because cancer is an anaerobic condition. And so, that's why hyperbaric therapy is so phenomenal for people with cancer because in a state where there's just a ton of oxygen, it inhibits proliferative rates of cancer. And so, if you do HBOT therapy, it helps with that.

HBOT, for people who don't know, that's hyperbaric oxygen where you climb into the chamber with the pressurized oxygen and you breathe oxygen from a mask.

Yeah. And so, that forcibly pushes oxygen up. If you have a— it's called a soft shell chamber, you can usually go up to 1.3, 1.4. If you've got a hard shell like I have here at the lab, you can go to 3 atmospheres of pressure. And so, that's 3 times the standard atmospheric pressure, but you do it with pure oxygen and you push it into your system, or you can do it the way a researcher named Shai Efrati in Israel did, which I'm sure you know that study because it was a longevity study. And, they showed kind of regression of a lot of the biological markers of aging by doing hyperbaric therapy, 2 atmospheres of pressure, 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week. And, it squeezes oxygen into your tissues. And, they did it an air environment. So, they increase the pressure of the air and then you breathe directly through a cannula and you breathe pure oxygen with intermittent breaks of 5 minutes every 20 minutes. And so, this, I know that everybody doesn't have access to that kind of stuff because the chambers are stupid expensive.

And, I have to admit I do hyperbaric, but I don't get anywhere close to 90 minutes 5 days a week.

Yeah. Well, the reality is nobody does. I mean, it's not something that fits in my lifestyle. So, a lot of the things, The part I like about the hacking bit of things isn't so much necessarily finding shortcuts to things, but it's finding things that are more conducive to the lifestyle that I actually lead so I can integrate the things that I think are going to be beneficial. And in this case, I know that a lot of cancer patients don't have access to hyperbaric therapy, but if I can mimic the effects of hyperbaric therapeutics by virtue of just putting something in a can that they can ingest, That's kind of the sweet spot for me. And this, like I was saying, water typically has 5 to 8 parts per million. This is around 180-ish plus. When you drink it, your pulse ox goes up. And I know you've tested it because a lot of people have said this. And so, we're wrapping up a clinical trial right now where basically we took a ton of people with pulse oximeters and it's a simple trial, right?

You mean just like— for people who don't know the pulse oximeter, that's like the fingertip monitor that you can put on that'll measure oxygen saturation. Although a lot of even like— I'm wearing a ring right now. A lot of these rings and wearables now will give you a proxy for that also.

Yeah. And so, there are a couple of ways you can do it. You can actually pull blood and check that, which is a really accurate way to do it. The easiest way to do it is just to put a pulse oximeter, clamp it down on your finger, and then just you sit there for a minute, let your heart rate normalize, drink a can. And, like I said, one of two things happens, either your heart rate decreases or your pulse ox goes up or sometimes both. And, it's really a matter of whatever decreases cardiac loading. So, your body is this incredibly brilliant system of feedback loops. And so, the feedback loops tell you and kind of inform what your body does with things. So, If it takes more load off to increase your oxygen everywhere, you do that. If it takes more load off to drop your heart rate, you do that. Because one of the weird things when I first developed this, I had a can in the car and I had just finished a really hardcore workout and I was panting, just panting, panting, trying to catch my breath. And, I wasn't thinking about it like this at all and I cracked open the can and just downed it just because I wanted water, not because I was thinking about the oxygen component. And, I was breathing and at about the 50, 55-second mark after I downed the can, I was going, "Huh, huh, huh." And, I literally stopped mid-respiration. I thought, "Well, that's peculiar." And, it was kind of my—

Ben Greenfield: Just threw a third long.

Yeah. It was super bizarre because I literally in my entire life never felt anything like that where mid-cycle of respiration, it stopped. And, I felt fine. I was like, "Whoa." That's kind of a bizarre reaction. And so, then I kind of started working through the how behind that occurrence. And it was simply that your body is such a quick feedback loop that the moment you don't need to be pumping as hard to oxygenate your tissues or in the case of post-workout reoxygenate your tissues, it stops. And it literally just, weak, like a line drawn in the sand stopped at that point. And it was pretty epic and I thought, damn, this would be great for athletics too. And so, then we started testing it with Like our mutual friend Todd Shipman who's an endurance runner and he does those 200-mile runs and runs to the bottom of the Grand Canyon then back up then back down then back up again, things that would kill me.

Yeah, one of those guys.

Yeah, one of those guys. I don't think I have the same degree of mental metal that he does.

Oh, I do. I just don't have enough time now.

Yeah. Well, hats off to you guys because I think I would totally puss out on that. I don't think I could actually do that. A 200-mile run would probably crush me. But, I started testing it with Todd some and then I tested it with some freediving people and then a bunch of things. Like, a freediver who tried it, one of the guys got a 40% increase in his breath hold, which those guys are— the reason I was kind of curious to see what would happen with that kind of sport was that they're so regulated in terms of their control of oxygen and their body is really tuned up. So that it controls the flow and really kind of doles it out very, very slowly over time. And so, for one of those guys who's really kind of at the peak of oxygen utilization in terms of how well they do it, to get that big of a shift after one can was kind of crazy. And then, Todd, when he would go out and do things, his heart rate, and then he started giving it to his wife and her heart rate similarly would drop into a zone even after exertion where it was 20 points lower than it would normally be.

Yeah. And, by the way, just a random rabbit hole thought because ketones are preferred fuel for diaphragm, heart, the brain in many cases, and because ketones are also becoming more popular amongst folks who have to hold their breath. Dr. Dominic Agostino did a lot of his early studies on hypoperfusion in divers and I used ketones when I did a freediving course and did pre and post-analysis and I was able to increase breath-hold time by 15 to 20 seconds by taking ketones prior to static breath holds versus not. I would imagine something like this would probably kind of go like turkey and cranberries with some type of ketogenic approach or the use of exogenous ketones.

Yeah. Well, one of the things that— I mean, I can speak directly to that because the thing when people reach out and they ask about cancer, what I typically tell them is the first thing to do is put yourself in ketosis, right? Because the primary driver for that is glucose. And so, cancers basically crave sugar. And then, if you block the sugars, there's kind of a secondary function where they can pull other things like glutamate and convert it through gluconeogenesis, which is just the fancy science way of saying glucose, sugar, neo, new, genesis, creation of. So, it's creating new sugars from proteins. But, you can block all that stuff. I tell people take curcumin, EGCG, and then throw in a little berberine. But, you're exactly right. If you put yourself in ketosis and you use the additional oxygen, that's why it's actually great. And, I always tell cancer patients this if they can get to it for hyperbaric therapies, put yourself in ketosis, then do the hyperbaric therapy. And, cancer is interesting because typically it only exists within a narrow narrow band energetically. So, it actually marginalizes your cells and decreases their output to a threshold where it can propagate. Because if your cell has energetics above that level, it's actually okay and healthy. And, if it goes below that level, it's likely going to die. And, that's not the goal of the cancer, it's trying to propagate. So, it keeps you marginalized but within this very narrow bandwidth. And, if you go into ketosis, the energetics in your cell go up.. And, if you hit it with oxygen, they go up again. And then, if you hit it with red light, you oscillate the cytochrome and they go up again. So, metabolically, it's like a great, as you said, turkey and cranberries.

Yeah. And probably a fourth modality would be pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, earthing or grounding, not only to reduce red blood cell viscosity but also to increase permeability of the cell membrane.

Well, I don't know if I sent you the picture from our clinical, but in terms of decreasing the viscosity in the blood and kind of changing the flow. Most people that are listening to this show because of kind of your demographic, most people are going to know that our blood has a tendency to cluster in the presence of toxins or even just EMF fields like a router or your cell phone or something like that. It causes kind of a chain to form out of the red blood cells and they look like these long rolls of red blood cells kind of like coin rolls that are stuck together. And in terms of evolutionary biology, the way we evolved, our bodies are designed to have these perfect little roughly 8-micron happy red blood cells rocking around and they can get to all of your peripheral vasculature and they can get in little spaces and oxygenate everything and deliver nutrients. But if you cluster them, you're hosed, right? And PEMF, that used to be my go-to method prior to this. PEMF was incredible for that. But, if you do this, it's the same effect but it's a little more persistent. And honestly, I'm not exactly sure why it's more persistent.

You mean persistent compared to pulsed electromagnetic field therapy at reducing red blood cell clumping in particular?

Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Yeah. And, it's persistent for a really long time. What I typically tell people like cancer patients and things like that, now that I have access to this, I just tell them take a can in the morning and a can at night. I'm kind of like your kids though. The other thing is I suck them down because I try and put myself every day, no matter what's going down, every single day I try and crush myself cognitively. And, the reason for that is, and I know you know this, but basically every day your brain pumps out new neurons and every day your body kills said neurons through a process called synaptic cleaving. Or synaptic pruning. And, the reason for that is your brain accounts for 2% of your body mass, but it sucks down 20% to 25% of all of your oxygen. So, if like me, you're basically taking an SAT every single day with the amount of new stuff I'm working on and techniques I'm trying to develop and theories and all the kind of cognitive load that I put myself under every day in addition to the standard battery of stuff I'll do like dual n-back and puzzles and all the kind of stuff like mental gymnastics that I literally do every single day. Because when those neurons come out of your hippocampal region, if you put them under a load that they've not been exposed to before, they actually cement in place and your body doesn't synaptically prune them. So effectively, you tool up and you take a 4-cylinder car and you make it a 6-cylinder car and then you make it an 8-cylinder car.. So that if you're trying to redline the thing and you want, say, in the analogy, 400 horsepower, tricky for a 4-cylinder car, really easy for a 12-cylinder car. So, I have tried to consistently for the past few years overclock my brain every day and put it under load in new and different ways, learning juggling, instruments, languages, different things like that.

Yeah, yeah. For me right now, it's guitar and ping pong.

Yeah. Actually, ping pong is phenomenal. Because it does the hand-eye coordination. And, that's the same reason that juggling was really good is because it was something that I wasn't used to and it triggers bilateral communication. So, you have to fire through the corpus callosum and you're really triggering a lot of stress on your brain. And, the two hemispheres of your brain are communicating and that puts an extra load neuronally. And so, your body goes, "Oh, we actually need these neurons," and it puts them in place and cements them there. And, once they're there, they're there. But, like I said, they're crazy resource-consumptive in terms of oxygen load. So, for me, this was something akin to phenylpiracetam where I could take it and that's a— for everybody who doesn't know, that's a really intense nootropic. I could take it and kind of the lights come back on and your brain is juiced up because I don't think the average person isn't going to be doing the kind of physical exertion that you're doing or the crazy kind of mental gymnastics that I'm doing every day. But, if they're not and they take this stuff, then they're going to have just a preponderance of energy and they'll be able to kind of rock through their day with a lot more ease.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure you just called yourself a nerd and me a meathead. But, you mentioned that you drink perhaps even 2+ servings of this on the daily. I probably average a can a day right now. And, it makes me think about ozone. I drink ozone water, a little ozone water generator. And so, I'm getting triatomic oxygen that I'm consuming. Like I mentioned, I also use hyperbaric and I'll even do the exercise with oxygen therapy sometimes where you exercise with an oxygen mask on your face. But, kind of like red light therapy, there is a law of diminishing returns. With red light therapy, with free radical production, with ozone therapy, or even hyperbaric to a certain extent, too much reactive oxygen species formation. I mean, that's one of the mechanisms of action via which something like drinking ozone water works. It sparks the body's own endogenous antioxidant production via the contribution of reactive oxygen species. So, would there be any risk in drinking too much hyperoxygenated water? Because of that?

Ben Greenfield: No. And, the reason for that is, so basically, you've got two things going on there. And, I know you've used the BioCharge product I developed, the ozonated oil capsules. And so, I did quite a long time, couple years of real hardcore stuff in ozone. And, what's interesting there is that's oxidation. And, all of these things are oxidation to a certain extent because oxygen is going to strip some electrons. But ozone specifically, it's really, really heavy duty because that tri-oxygen, the extra oxygen, wants to strip electrons to balance out the charge. Now, ozone is about the third most reactive molecular species. So, the moment you ingest that stuff, it's going into action and it's actually spent in about, I don't know, a couple milliseconds after you ingest it. And, it's exactly the same effect as a process called autohemotherapy where you pull your blood, then you inject direct ozone into it. The blood typically changes from kind of a dark red to a super bright cherry red, and then you reintroduce the blood via IV. And, that does the same thing. You'd think of that as ozonation, but really in truth, what's happening is because those molecules are spent so rapidly, it's triggering an upregulation of oxygen. In the case of the water that you're talking about, you're looking at a really hardcore oxidation, effectively rusting, right? For anybody who's kind of grappling with it, when you rapidly oxidize something, you burn it, you rust it, you strip electrons away. And depending on the violence and the rapidity of that reaction, you get either fire or rust or mild degradation oxidatively in your body. That's really hardcore oxidation. Now, this, because it's just diatomic oxygen, so it's O2. It's actually oxygenation. If the product or the process of oxidation happened every time you were exposed to diatomic oxygen like you are in the air, basically, your lungs would burst into flames in a second.

Yeah, that's true. You'd be breathing yourself into oxidation every time that you're respiring.

Yeah, literally. It's the same thing that happens to people if they accidentally— and I have a friend who did this— accidentally ingested ozone. And, it just about killed him. And, yeah, and very rapidly because it just rips away the alveoli and strips your lungs and can quite literally kill you very quickly. Ozone's great if you do it rectally, but you don't want to do anything that's going to take it directly to your lungs. I mean, you can even do it in your ears, you can ingest it, but if you take it directly into your lungs, you're kind of hosed. And, I mean, to your point, that hormetic stress that you get from exposure to ozone, triggers one certain reaction very rapidly, but the cascading effect of that, we always would say in the literature if you read it, talks about ozone triggering an ozonide cascade that's a persistent effect where these ozonides stimulate your body for about a day. I actually thought that was the case and based a lot of work on that because that's what the literature says. And, I think all of us in the space who work on ozone think that. And, in my case, I thought that, After I started working on the oxygen project, I realized, and honestly, I don't know why it didn't dawn on me sooner, I realized that because that molecular species is so reactive and it's spent in under a second, what's really happening is your body has an oxygen-sensing network, not an ozonide-sensing network. So, the same effects that I saw from the hematology on autohemotherapy where you look at the blood from somebody that's doing autohemotherapy is identical to what you actually see if you look at people doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy or drinking the hyperoxygenated water. Because if you, if you take anything that's, you know, above 80 parts per million, there's that— there's actually a biological threshold. And there's a lot of papers like if you go to the Inhale site, I think the papers are probably linked there because I wrote everything up because there was a biological threshold at 80 parts per million. Below that, there are beneficial effects, but not really that much. If you cross over that threshold, everything kicks off. And it's kind of like saying, you know, I'm going to boil water. Well, I heated the water up to 100 degrees 3 times. Doesn't matter. Doesn't do anything, right? You have to hit that 212 threshold. And if I, in the lab, if I can get the water to 100°C, it boils. If I do 50°C 2 times, no effect, right? So there's a critical biological threshold that you have to exceed And, when you do that, magic sauce.

And, you said the critical biological threshold for oxygen in this case in water is 80 ppm?

Yeah, 80 ppm. Yeah, that's where you start seeing the biggest effects. And, you can see, I've seen really interesting effects and there are a lot of papers on this. And, I think probably the site has all their literature on this that I pulled and collected, things in terms of alcohol consumption. When people drink alcohol, it puts their liver under a burden. And, if they drink oxygenated water and it's above that 80 ppm threshold, it kind of force stimulates the liver and it processes the alcohol out pretty close to instantly.

Ben Greenfield: But, are you saying I could just make a cocktail with Inhale and just do a little mezcal, some lemon, and this, and it's kind of like a detox retox type of thing?

Yeah, it'd be more like a Buzzkill might be the name for that. So, it's not really like if you had that and then you had a shot of Inhale afterwards, yeah, that'd be called Buzzkill. Because you're not really going to get much of the effect of the alcohol because it's going to get metabolized super fast.

Back to the PPM thing, you kind of went through pretty quickly that you figured out a way how to get oxygen in the water, but oxygen is a gas. I would imagine it'd be somewhat unstable. I think you had mentioned to me you don't just open a can of this and leave it sitting out for the next 24 hours and finish it later because eventually the oxygen will dissolve out. But, how do you get it stable to stay in the can and not have it all just rush out when you open the can?

Well, a little bit of it rushes out. That's why I say that on the can, it says 7 times the oxygen, and that's because you can open it and leave it there for quite a while, a couple of hours, and still hit those rates. But, when it starts, when you first crack the can, it's about 3 times as much. And, the other thing, and I know you know this, is when you open one of these cans, there's a bit of a sploosh where water comes jetting out at you. And, the reason for that is those cans are unlike a normal can where there's an airspace at the top, there is no airspace at the top. The can is overfilled, and when the lid goes down, it's actually sealed right then with water being pushed out. And that's because any gap that's to us almost, you know, negligible for an oxygen molecule is like the size of a superhighway, right? So you don't want any space in there because as long as it's in situ and just statically in the water, it can't really easily move out with the can closed. When you open it, yeah, it's going to try and balance out the partial pressure of the atmosphere to the internal part of the can. But, because of the size of those bubbles, there's actually a term, it's called zeta potential. When you overcome the zeta potential, it doesn't just rush out, it actually has a tendency to stay there. One of the easy ways to see this effect is if you put this in a glass or in a glass bottle right out of the gate right after you open it, It looks milky and then it turns clear from the bottom up as the nanoscopic bubbles start to delocalize and move up and you end up with crystal clear water, but it takes a few seconds.

Ben Greenfield: It's kind of funny you say that, by the way, because I have an Afora water filtration system at my house now and it oxygenates the water. I obviously can't take it when I travel. I don't think it's quite the level that's in Inhale, but when I draw water out of the faucet, The first few times I freaked out because I'm like, "The water's all cloudy." And then, within 30 seconds, it was already starting to get clear. I thought the water was contaminated. It's just the oxygen concentration in water from this water filter.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Ophora has got a great system. I actually really like their product. It's good. And I tested everything that I could find everywhere around the world in terms of things that were oversaturating the oxygen concentration. And Ophora was one of the top. It was at 41, 42 parts per million, which was really good. And, that was pretty much better than just about everything else I tested domestically. There was some other stuff in other countries that were pretty good, but that was just domestically, that was probably the cream of the crop. Again, the unfortunate part there is if you don't hit the right threshold, it's good for you but it's not going to do the exact same things. So, it's kind of persistently like if you have that system in your house, rock on. It's a great system. Drink that stuff all day long.

Yeah. And, not to mention that it's also a 14-stage filtration process. There's a lot more going on than just the oxygen with that.

Well, and restructuring and crystals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You get the oxygen to stay in the water and then you open it. Ideally, would you just want to chug the whole thing right away or can I leave it out for a little while?

I keep it chilled because water at a lower temperature will hold more dissolved gases. So, I keep it chilled and then I crack a can and down the can as quickly as I can. For the trials and things like that, if you're doing something athletic, you're going to want to down the can in 30 seconds to a minute so that you get the biggest boost. And, you can feel it. I mean, very literally, if you down it, I'm sure you felt it.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm hopping on a flight after this. I'll slam a can right before I go through security at the airport just because it's so good for the vasoconstriction and drop in oxygenation that occurs during flying.

Yeah, that's hilarious that you say that, man, because that's exactly what I do is I bring it and right before I board the plane, I hammer back a can and then I get on the plane because they don't have enough oxygen on the plane.

You mean right before you go through security unless you figured out how to let them?

Well, actually, yeah, because it has the super oxygenated water on there, you can actually get it through security.

I've heard that, that you can bring the water if you say it's some kind of a medical thing, but do they still try and pat you down and you got to—

Well, yeah, but they'll just test it. You might spend a can because they'll crack one and test it and then they just swab the outside of it and you're good to go.

Yeah, yeah. Wow, super interesting. Okay. So, in terms of the temperature, I'm assuming if you want to keep it cold that if I wouldn't want to use this for coffee, tea, anything like that, I'm assuming heating is going to really cause the oxygen to dissolve out.

Yeah, heating is basically molecules accelerating. So, that's why a microwave works. You oscillate the hydrogen bond angle and it shuffles really quickly. And, the friction that's released is— that's what you're actually getting the heating from. So, when you heat something up, specifically water, you make it move more rapidly and that movement delocalizes the nanoscopic bubble. So, if you think of water has got this kind of bond angle with an oxygen at the top and the two hydrogens, This is sort of like pickup sticks where all these little diatomic oxygen stack around it and wedge themselves in. And, if you jostle that, they're more likely to come out. This is definitely not something you want to shake, but also because if you shake a can, it will spew water the moment you open it. And, if you freeze a can, it will explode. And, I don't mean minor popping of the can, it will rip the top of the metal off of the can. So, yeah, it's actually pretty cool. And also, if you freeze the water, it's beautiful. So, unlike normal water, if you freeze it, the surface is smooth. This, if you freeze it, it has little circular clusters all over it because of the way the oxygen groups and bonds. Yeah, it looks beautiful. It's really, really beautiful.

That's interesting. But, if I froze it, I don't know anybody would do this, but let's say I froze it and made a slushie out of it, would it still Will the oxygen still be present?

Yeah, you definitely still have the oxygen. If you get it to the point of being slushy—

Oxygenated snow cones in my house this summer.

I'm rocking out to Idaho soon.

Yeah, that'll work. Okay. So, regarding the can, obviously, we've said can a few times. A lot of people in the health sector, their ears kind of perk up and they wonder about the lining, about metals, things like that. Do you take that into consideration with the can?

Yeah, I do actually. I think I'm as concerned as the next guy about microplastics. And, these are BPA-free and that's right now in the current state of things. I looked at the nexus of what the benefit was versus the cost-benefit analysis of everything and say, "Okay, I can get this out to a ton of people at a super low price or I can put everything in glass," which we probably will do at some point in a couple of years. Put a version in glass, it's just going to be an entirely different price point because the shipping of everything is much more expensive and the breakage levels go up when you're transporting things in glass. So this was— I'm not, I'm not trying to be so adherent to all of the tenets that I would love to be able to do and sacrifice the ability to get it out to people. So this is one of those things like Yeah, it might cause a 2% detriment, but it's going to cause a 200% benefit. Okay, fair enough. That's a trade-off I'm willing to do.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, got it. Alright. So, in terms of the effects, you brought up a lot of what it sounds like was kind of anecdotal for you, for freedivers, for Todd who's doing the running, et cetera. Have you done any type of clinicals on it or looked into any research beyond that?

Yeah. Well, there's actually been a lot of research to date. I don't think anybody other than us has actually done an IRB clinical trial on it. We're just wrapping that up now. But, it's one of those things we're doing it really specifically just to prove the point, incontrovertibly say, "Yeah, it does this," because I've already done this with so many, probably at this point a couple hundred people with pulse oximetry and looked at it. And, it's always the same. And, the effects are even more pronounced. We did a thing at a big sports facility in Fort Worth and we called it the Inhale Challenge. And, we had VersaClimbers and treadmills and things like that. And, we were getting people's heart rates up to about 150, 160 BPM and then having them drink a can and their heart rate within about a minute, a minute and a half would drop back down in a normal range. And, that was just leveraging what I had done accidentally on my own. It was just kind of like, how do you explain to people what the effect really is? Well, if they're just standing there, they're going to feel a little bit of a head rush, but they're not going to notice the full benefit of it. But, if they're putting themselves under a real hardcore load, they will see the benefit very quickly.

Okay, interesting. I know we got to be careful with claims. You're the guy who brought up cancer. You already opened up at least one can of worms, pun intended. But, what about COPD? Is there any logic to the idea that this might be something useful for that?

Yeah, I do. There are people who have asthma that, and again, I will say no claims and it's anecdotal, but there have been people that have asthma that are using this in lieu of albuterol because it decreases your heart rate. While increasing your oxygenation in lieu of making you jittery and increasing your heart rate and increasing your oxygenation, which is kind of a best of both worlds. If you can get your parasympathetics to kick in and you're kind of in a more relaxed chill space and you can oxygenate yourself, you're better. I mean, what people don't really realize is one of the things I leverage to do this is every single person listening to the show has consumed all of their oxygen in a liquid format. Right? Every person here while in utero consumed all of their oxygen as liquid. So, the entire network is still there to be able to do that. You can use its aquaporins. You can use aquaporins to shuttle oxygen into your system through the cell membrane. And everything's still there, it's just dormant. Once we transition over to our lungs, we just stop using all of our systems. Biology is really beautiful because— and I know you've heard me say this, but if you're working on biochem or biology and you look at a human body and you're not dumbfounded by the complexity of it and the brilliance of it, you're not paying attention because we have all these primary, secondary, tertiary functions where you don't just have to get energy from eating food and breathing, You can pull it from red light. You can literally pull it from high-frequency static electric fields. There's so many backup systems that we have.

Ben Greenfield: Did you see even that recent study that showed that vitamin absorption was occurring via inhalation through the air? No, it came out like 3 weeks ago. They were seeing that when they infused air with certain vitamins that were absorbable via the lungs that they were increasing nutrient status in people. I reported on it in, I think, Podcast 384. I talked about it. I don't know if that one came out yet, but yeah, it's fascinating.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. I'll look that study up. That's very cool. See, but that's the thing. I mean, that's the brilliance of the body, the way we are developed and built. There's so many loops that you can go through where if you can't do this, you can do this. And, if this fails, you have access to this. That's why when you look at people kind of in end-stage failure at the very late part of their life, things happen systemically. You can, you can basically go, okay, this is going to fail when the load of this transfers to the load of this, then this will fail, then that happens. You know, and it's kind of like the Rube Goldberg effect biologically where, you know, the marble rolls down, hits the pinwheel and throws something else out. But that can also work in kind of retrograde to our benefit, right? We've got all these other systems that are there for that purpose. But we don't typically use them. That's why I love red light therapy is kind of like you said with regard to ozone, it triggers a response that's beneficial to a point and then there's too much. I mean, definitely you can do things in excess specifically with hyperoxygenation, red light therapy, things like that. They fall under a category of a thing called a biphasic.

It's a new term I learned the other week called overhacking.

Yeah. Oh my God, man. I know so many people who do that. Well, it's actually very interesting.

I'm not Okay, I interviewed the folks from MeScreen who are doing new blood-based tests on mitochondrial efficiency, mitochondrial health, and free radical leakage. And, they actually are finding in a lot of the biohackers that they test, just did this interview a few days ago, I didn't release it yet, that they're actually kind of creating excess ROS and reducing mitochondrial efficiency through typically excessive hormetic stressors, whether that be light, electricity, oxygen, et cetera. So, there's a lot of diminishing returns for sure.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, 100%. So, all that stuff, I mean, when you trigger a hormetic stressor, your body responds typically in a good way. But, if you do it too much, yeah, it overloads. It's that the term that we would use is a biphasic dose-response curve. So, you do something beneficial. And, Mike Hamblin at Harvard did a lot of really good research on this. It's basically you You put energy into the system, it helps you, helps you, helps you, helps you, helps you. Then you overload the system and it drops you lower than you were when you started, which is why, you know, we've talked about this. I always recommend people doing red light for hair growth. If they're going to do it just a couple of minutes a day, that's fine. But if they're going to do it for a pronounced period of time, like, say, 20 minutes or something, 12 days on, 7 days off, 12 days on, 7 days off, because you avoid that biphasic dose response drop. And you go up, then you wait, then you go up again. So, instead of dropping, you plateau.

It's like classic exercise-based periodization, stair-stepping effect for fitness.

Yeah. And, you see that over and over because that's how we're built. GLP-1s, a lot of people have the same response with that. They'll get on things like tirzepatide, they'll lose a lot of weight, and then they plateau. How do you break that? They refeed. They hit themselves with a carbohydrate load and then they actually start moving again. But you have to allow for that plateau, otherwise bad things happen.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, that might even be why, and I was thinking about this when you were talking about a ketogenic approach to cancer, that a guy like Thomas Seyfried has made a pretty strong case for press-pull cycling with glucose so that you don't get to a state where you don't even have enough for proper immune function or T-cell regulation. So, it's almost as though you adopt a ketogenic approach, and this is typically done under medical management, but there are certain times of the ketogenic period during which you refeed with glucose.

Yeah. Well, and Tom Seyfried's stuff is really good because he's using a thing called DONS, which is 6-di-azofuranorleucine, and it really suppresses glutamate uptake. And because, like I was saying earlier, that's part of your problem, right? Like, you can block sugars in ketosis, but your body will still trigger the production of sugars from proteins. And he uses a thing called DONS, or that's the acronym for it. To inhibit that. But you can also— Dons is a little tricky because it can completely block it, and that's why they pulse press it and do a cycle like that. But if you completely block it, it will kill you. And so my take is, do you— you can hit sort of similar effects with curcumin. So I recommend people take nano curcumin and EGCG from green tea, and you get a very similar effect in terms of glutamate inhibition.

Assuming you're looking for systemic effects from the curcumin, for people who use it for gut inflammation, I think the use of bioperine or black pepper along with it isn't something you'd recommend because that will increase absorption from the gut into the blood. But, in the case of what you've just described, you'd want a very bioavailable form of curcumin or tumorosaccharides or something like that, or you'd want to take it with black pepper.

Yeah. And, I'd recommend it because the nanoscopic size, basically, you can fit more through membranes just if you break the size down. So, nano curcumin, I typically tell people to take a— there's a soluble version that I tell people to take.

Is that a certain brand?

Yeah. I'll send it to you. You can link it in the shownotes if you want. Okay.

Yeah, cool. I will. Shownotes, by the way, for folks listening are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/InhalePodcast. Ian, I know you're always up to all sorts of interesting things at your super-secret Batman labs. Are there any other projects beyond superoxygenated water that you've been working on or any insider things you're able to reveal?

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Okay. So, very shortly, we've got one, it's a sleep aid. And, I did this because so many people have asked me about, can I do something to help with sleep? So, I came up with a little shot that's a sleep aid. And initially, We tested it with some of the guys at the lab and then a couple of people who had actually diagnosed insomnia and it worked, right? It would actually knock out the insomniacs and they were fine, but it changed everybody's dream quality and it was a little too vivid. And then, the people who were normal that took it, we jokingly started calling it Trank Dart.

Didn't show up at the office the next morning.

Yeah. Yeah, there was an absence of people. Yeah, no, even the people who always are up super early to exercise and everybody's on point, they couldn't move.

They were like, "Ugh." Dude, what are you putting in it?

That actually was a combination of two of the components that were triggering that part. And, it was kind of a process to work it backwards to figure out what got the right effect but didn't hit that. That was valeric acid and 5-HTP.

So, valerianic acid, would that be the concentrated version of what you find in valerian root?

Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. So, that kind of takes the edge off. But those two things, there was a ratio that needed to be adjusted and there is kind of a sweet spot. And when you hit the sweet spot, it works like a champ, puts everybody to sleep, they have good dreams, but it doesn't feel like they're just waking up in another reality. And then, they can get up in the morning as opposed to being just absolutely hammered.

And are those the only two components, HTP and valerianic acid?

No, there's, there's like 8 different things in there. And it's, you know, and sleep, not shockingly, is a relatively complicated thing because you've got a lot of different stuff going down in a lot of different systems that you have to kind of tap and adjust and loop in. Um, and so to modulate all those different components, I, I always try and do things in terms of like the minimum effective dose and also the, the minimum number of constituents and whatever I'm putting together. To get the right yield. And so, sometimes I'll start with a much larger list and then kind of reductively I'll go down and pare it until I can get the same effect but without something. Just take out— like if I find a compound, like one of the other things in there is alpha-GPC, the glycerolphosphorylcholine. And, that actually replaces a couple of other compounds. So, I just keep paring down until I figure out a way to do it that's efficient so it doesn't put a bunch of extra stuff in your body.

So, when will people be able to purchase Trank Dart?

Probably beginning of March, they'll be able to get it.

Yeah. So, maybe 3, 4 weeks after the show comes out.

Yeah, about a month after the show airs. Okay. It should be up on the site. And then, the other thing that I've been kind of jazzed by is we were working on a process to eliminate type 1 diabetes. And, that's a cool one. And so, we've only done it once but it worked and it was a relatively simple procedure, but more will be coming on that. I have the second person doing that will be here tomorrow.

Oh, and is this a supplement that you've designed or something different?

No, it's not. It's actually— so, that's When you look at something that, like in the case of that, it's right at— typically, it's thought of as an autoimmune response to beta cells in the pancreas. And, you can't, at least in my experience, you can't necessarily hit a problem head-on, which is one of my issues with the way that we do things in allopathic medicine a lot and standard kind of Western chemistry is we try and use just a bigger and bigger and bigger hammer to crush one thing. And, that's not how the body works. You need something that's appropriate and usually it's multifactorial. You have to look at all of the different components. So, that's a combination of peptides and exosomes and a couple of other super magical things that will be coming out shortly. We're going to publish a paper on it. And, it's really— yeah, that actually made me happy because— and I know I sent you the the text from the person that did this. She had been a type 1 diabetic for 33 years. And, that was awesome to me, straight up cool. She was dumbfounded. Literally, she texts me every day because she's continuing to track all of her numbers and everything. And, it's pretty epic. And, I actually, with that, because what happens is you you retrigger the beta cells in the islets of Langerhans inside the pancreas and they start to proliferate again. And then when that happens, they start growing and they're producing their own insulin. And honestly, it's an easy thing to test for because in the case of type 1 diabetics, they are diabetic, they don't have C-peptide produced in the pancreas. And then when you can trigger a lot of C-peptide, you know that the pancreas is actually producing insulin. Which is something that's easily tested for because if they're just taking exogenous insulin, that doesn't happen, right? You don't get the C-peptide component from the pancreas. And so, it's kind of— even when I was talking to the doctor about doing the full-scale clinical trial on it just so I could suss out the validity of it and publish with something larger, I was asking about what we needed to do for a control. And, basically, the result was we don't need a control. You have 1.8 million people in the control already. It's all of the other type 1 diabetics. It's not something that you have this idiopathic healing process where spontaneously you're great again and you're all healed. That just doesn't happen. So, if you take someone who's type 1 and you trigger a cessation of their type 1, then you're back. And, it's an interesting process because there were a lot of components that sort of blew me away after the fact that honestly I just never thought about. One of them was the woman who had the procedure, after the fact, she was texting me about her blood sugar numbers and she said, "I smelled a fig candle from Whole Foods and my blood sugar dropped 20 points." And I thought, "Wow, that's okay, that's weird." And so, I texted her back and said, "Smell a cupcake." And so, she smelled a cupcake and her blood sugar, and this was like a day later she did it so she could renormalize, her blood sugar dropped 40 points. And I thought, I was like, "What the hell? What is going on?" But then, I started thinking about it. Historically, the way our body evolved, the only time we would have smelled something with that much sweetness is literally if we had a very overly ripe fruit in our hand and we were about to eat it. So, biologically speaking, there's this olfaction component that when you olfactually trigger it, your body starts predigestion. It's getting ready for whatever you're about to consume. That was kind of a So, that was a strange one.

That's fascinating. And, would that have been an insulinogenic response?

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is.

Olfactory-based insulinogenic response, huh?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know, right? I mean, that's the kind of stuff I love about this because it's not something I can go to Google or PubMed and look up research on.

Hopefully, it works if you can smell a steak to build muscle.

That would be great. You'd see me walking around with that attached to my nose all the time. Yeah.

How far are you in terms of being able to release that data, those findings, or that protocol to the general public?

Ben Greenfield: Well, so we're going to do more testing on it so we can have one definitive endpoint and do a clinical trial on it. I've already released it to a few doctors in terms of how to do it. So, it's out there. So, it's going to be coming at some point. Really, that's one of those things and it's stupid easy. It's not some crazy complicated thing. My real concern with that is anytime you shake up an industry, we all have this kind of naivete about thinking that everybody wants everybody else better. Unfortunately, that's not the case because when there are a lot of entrenched monetary interests in play, things get dicey. Like with type 1 diabetics, there's 1.8 million of them in the country. The average annual expenditure is $27,500 per patient, which accounts for $49.5 billion of annual revenue to companies, right? Mostly pharma companies for production of insulin and peripheral material. The patients want it gone. The people who are impinged biologically because of that want it gone. But the guys who are tracking billions of dollars to their bottom line, they 100% do not want anything to shift, right? They, I mean, they, they may back a foundation or say like, yeah, we're working on, you know, this or that. But then they publish papers like Living with Type 2 Diabetes. And I know you know this, but like read Jason Fung's book. He's a good doctor. He's a nephrologist. You don't want type 2 diabetes, fast.

Fasting, macronutrient ratios, exercise.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's something that with the current technology we have, very easily dealt with. There's kind of a contrast of insulin sensitivity and insulin receptivity. And when you hit those balances, you can really help people. With this, it'll be out next year, early next year, because I've already started disseminating everything, but I figure it'll take probably a full year to do all the clinicals and all that stuff. And, it's cool because everything's autologous, everything is just 90 minutes at my lab, out the door, done.

Yeah. Wow. Well, I'm super excited to see it, man.

Yeah, me too, man. That's one of those things, it's moving the needle. I used to have this big thing on the board. The motto for the company is "Move the Needle." for Wizard Sciences. And I, I had this thing that said, you know, fix the people, break the system. Because intrinsically, you know, good, bad, or otherwise, I, I'm, I'm going to try and help. That's just, that's how I'm wired, right? Like, pick your fight, and that's my fight.

Yeah, well, you're doing it in a very, very unique way. And for those of you listening, and I'll link to Ian's website Wizard Sciences, but also if you want to try this stuff— actually have a plane to catch, I'll start wrapping up so I can go try getting through airport security with one of these and maybe stash an extra one just in case. But, you can get it. I'll put links in the show notes. We got discount codes and everything. Go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/InhalePodcast. And then, Ian has so many other cool products at Wizard Sciences. I'll just link to all this stuff as well as the two other wide-ranging podcasts that I did with him. So, Ian, until you get your butt out to Idaho, I'll say goodbye, but dude, this is incredible and I really think folks should try this.

So, people—

Thanks, Ben.

I love this stuff, man.

In this setting, inhale. Permission granted to inhale.

Alright, much love, Ben. Take it easy, man. Good to see you.

Alright, folks. Shownotes at BenGreenfieldLife.com/InhalePodcast. Thanks for joining. Try this stuff out for yourself. Keep me posted on what you think in the comments section where you can leave your feedback, questions, anything else else you want to run by me and Ian. I read all those comments, so feel free to pipe in. Have an amazing week.

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