How To Increase Free Testosterone, Elevating Deep Sleep Levels, Ideal Estrogen Levels For Women & M

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science.

Search the globe for the world's top.

Experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast, everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Oh, well, hello.

I actually have a little bit of an apology to make to you. I am not enamored with the audio quality of today's podcast episode, but the content is freaking through the roof. This is actually part two of the Precision medicine conference that I attended and spoke at down in Kentucky. And so I spoke. I gave a 90 minute presentation on blood and biomarker interpretation. If you missed that podcast episode, you go listen to it. It's over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky not spelled with an I, spelled with an E, even though I said it, Kentucky. But today's episode, what we did the evening after I gave the presentation was myself and four other physicians sat down and did a really comprehensive Q and A from the audience. But we did the Q and A during dinner. People are eating. There was like silverware clanking. The audio wasn't great. We weren't like hooked up to lav mics. It was just one camera with an audio feed. But I thought, you know, what the heck, the information is so interesting that.

I think you're going to learn a lot. I mean, we talk about nutrigenomics, we talk about genetic testing, the apple E gene for Alzheimer's. Man, we went deep. And here's the thing, though. Whenever it's a podcast like this where you may have to like, turn up your volume or maybe make your ears a little bit more sensitive. This might not be one to listen to while you're pounding away in the treadmill or working out the gym, maybe, you know, press pause and save this one for a walk or a time when you're able to focus a little bit more. Because I personally think the audio is not that great. But again, I wanted to give you this, this information. So I hope you find this helpful. And because there's gonna be plenty of show links for you from this episode, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky2 that's Kentucky. The number two to listen or to read the comprehensive show notes that I always create for you. It's brought to you by Kion. By the way, Kion is my playground for creating amazing supplement formulations and everything that comes out of my crazy brain. You can get at Kion, one of the cool things we have. A lot of people like this. It's really popular. It's our Kion Daily Life Bundle. So you get a bottle of my amino acids which are perfect for muscle gain, fat loss, appetite control, sleep. Those things are like a Swiss army knife for your body. They're probably our most popular product. You get our coffee and our bar. It's like turkey and cranberry. The bar is all chocolatey and coconutty and salty and you dip that in a cup of the antioxidant rich can coffee. I'm not kidding. It's like biscotti. I dip the bar in the coffee. If you haven't tried this, it's really good. It's like the old school biscotti in your latte thing, but a healthy vers. And then we have our Kion Lean, which is probably one of the best ways that I've found to manage my blood glucose, especially before a carbohydrate rich meal. I actually pop six of those a day now and it keeps my blood glucose super low. So that's called the Kion Daily Life bundle. You get 10% off of that. Very simple. You go to getkeon.com and you use code BGF10. The Daily Life Bundle gives you coffee bar aminos and Lean BGF10 is your code over@getkion.com this podcast is also brought to you by Organifi. I've talked about Organifi before on the show of late. I've been telling you a lot about their gold powder, which is like a golden milk latte. But they also have this stuff called a red juice. It's a red juice powder. They put a ton of different immune boosting herbs in there that also actually are herbs that have a little bit of an antioxidant anti aging effect as well. A ton of different polyphenols and flavanols from dark rich berries and beets. But it's relatively low sugar also which is cool. So you don't have to spike your blood sugar or suck down a bunch of fructose or make a big mess juicing and cleaning and blending and just put this powder in water or a smoothie or almond milk or whatever, and boom, your daily boost is right there. Tastes amazing. They put a bunch of adaptogens in there. They've got Reishi, they've got cordyceps. Cordyceps, cordyceps. 11 different superfoods. And it's quick, it's easy. And it's also not that expensive. Like, it comes out to being like $3 per juice, considering you'd pay like, what's a red juice out of one of those juice bars now? It's like 1112 bucks that. I mean, you could just literally get a Nalgene, put this stuff in there and get twice the amount for literally a quarter of the cost. So you also get an additional 20% off. You go to Organifi.comBen that's Organifi with an I Organifi.comBen and use code BENG20. And that gets you 20% off of anything from Organifi.

Hi there. My name is James and I'm the editor and the producer of the podcast. And like Ben said in the intro to this show, the audio is a little bit wonky. There's only one microphone picking up pretty much everything. And so I did my best to get all of the extraneous noises, but in particular, the questions that were asked by the audience were particularly difficult to hear. So what I'm going to do is just listen to the questions and I will record them and insert them into the recording and then you'll hear the panel of experts answer the questions for you. Here we go. Enjoy it.

I just thought it'd be great to have him up on the panel as well, just after talking with him a little bit. I know we have a lot of healthcare providers here, so this is not about us as experts telling you anything. This is a discussion. So if anybody has anything to add, we would love to hear it. I'm going to go ahead and go through some of the questions. We had a couple questions specifically for Ben based on your presentation. How does Ben feel about the chilipad long term? If you're sleeping on a 64 degrees, what about the EMS? What do you think about EMS and a chili pad?

How come they couldn't just stick to hair gel?

So, I mean, anytime you have something plugged in next to your bedside, you do need to be aware of any type of dirty electricity that might be kicking off. There are home meters you can use, like an acoustometer for Example, to actually measure that, you can also hire a building biologist. You know, I did a whole podcast with a guy named Brian Hoyer who went to our home and did a building biology analysis of how much electricity was next to the bed. In case of something like a, like a chilipad or any larger unit like that that plugs in next to the bedside. And the chilipad, by the way, it's a mat that circulates cold water or hot water, whatever you want underneath the top sheet. With the idea being that if your core is cooler while you sleep, your deep sleep levels are enhanced and your sleep latency and sleep efficiency is improved.

What I have is a power strip next to my bedside. For the few things that I do plug in and run during the night. I use one made by a company called Belkin and it has its own built in dirty electricity filter. So that's what I do is I just plug everything into that. Everything else in the bedroom is off. And it'll, you know, it's not as good as using like a kill switch in your bedroom, just turning everything off. Some people will literally just flip the breaker and turn everything off or you. Or get a kill switch installed. But I use that dirty electricity filter and it does a pretty good job based off the measurements that I've done with it. So. So that's the way that I do things. Then some appliances, like, what's another thing I sleep on, like a biomat, for example, that like has its own dirty electricity filter built into it. So a lot of companies these days and kind of the biohacking sector, whatever you want to call it, they, they do a pretty good job building in some dirty electricity filtration.

And if you're looking for a building biologist, there actually are zero in the entire state of Kentucky if you're a Kentuckian, which is kind of frustrating. So you have to bring someone in.

On building a house, import them.

I had to bring somebody in, so it's kind of frustrating. But if you're building a house or something like that, it's probably worth it. The chili pad also, I had one my wife and I. That's the one thing we probably argue about most, like the temperature at night. Someone just asked if there's a chili pad for two people. There's not. So you'd have to get two different ones if you want two different temperatures. It produces a little bit of sound though. So if you don't like sound, it's going to be annoying. I don't like sound. So I actually mailed Mine to Mike, who likes a little bit of sound, so it creates some white noise for you too. Just to keep that in mind. Thinking about. About getting one.

You get a his and hers package. I got one for Jessa. It's never been used, ever. Sounds complicated. Yeah.

Do you like it, Mike?

Ish.

I don't know.

For me, I. I kind of like the cooling aspect of it, but it's actually fairly thick, so whenever I'd sleep on my side and have a side sleeper, it would just irritate me because it was just too rough to sleep on.

Princess and the Pea over here.

Very sensitive, delicate guy.

It's good for meat sweats.

So just a couple more from Ben's presentations. Ben, do you think GPL's mycotoxins are not valid? You know what that means? It's not wheat classification.

A clarification on that.

Do I think it's not valid?

The only reason I mentioned Cyrex as an option was because I was talking about food allergy testing. Like, if you want to get all your arrays ordered through them at once. But Great Plains does a good. They do a good. Yeah, yeah.

Just to do another one from Ben's. Ben, you mentioned 3.8. Thyroid is normally viewed as good, but not optimal. How do you figure out what your optimal levels for any lab result is and should be?

What I specifically was talking about was TSH, and the range was 0.5 to 2 for thyroid stimulating hormone. And I mentioned 3.8 is a value that would be considered normal, but that I would consider high. As far as ideal reference ranges, there's a lot of places you can find them. Dr. Mark Hyman has a pretty good downloadable free PDF on his website. Dr. Brian Walsh, who I mentioned during my presentation, most of his reference ranges are also very solid. If you go to just about any functional or integrated medical practitioner or somebody practicing precision medicine like these guys, they're using reference ranges that are a little bit more appropriate, in my opinion, for not just absence of disease, but actual health. Spanish.

Ben, you mentioned colostrum on your podcast. If you take colostrum on an empty stomach, my understanding is it won't raise your igf. Is this correct or misunderstanding?

I've never heard that. I mean, you take a baby mammal and give it colostrum, it grows. It's an anabolic. I don't think that if it's on an empty stomach versus not there's. There's any difference, but there might be data I'm unaware of. Ultimately, colostrum is great for the gut. It's great if you've been on antibiotics, it's great if you have leaky guts, great if you're trying to put on muscle or increase growth factor or decrease inflammation in the gut. But I don't use it year round just because it is such a potent IGF precursor that you don't want to stay in that cost and state of anabolism.

So there's a lot of questions for Ben, so I've got one here for Mike. Mike, do you care to ask Ben what he thinks is the.

So what is the ideal estradiol post menopause? Someone asked. We talked about estradiol levels being 30 to in the hundreds, premenopausal, but then postmenopausal. Someone asked that question, what about postmenopausal, ideal or physiologic? So that's a great question. So physiologic, we know it should drop basically to zero. The debate is then what do you do about that? Should you replace it? So doesn't that work?

Yeah, we try to replace it back to basically premenopausal levels. We're trying to do hrt.

So there's so many. There's so much kind of, I think confusion around hormone replacement therapy and a lot of debate in general. The 2002 Women's Health Initiative study came out and at that point a large percentage of people were on hormone replacement therapy and after that it plummeted because the primary researchers in that study basically said it increases your chances for breast cancer and many other diseases. But on reanalysis by multiple other people, a lot of that's been called. Even people who are actually involved in primary study, even people who are involved in primary studies said there were a lot of problems with that study. So this is a really complicated question.

And correct me if I'm wrong, But that wasn't BHT, was it? That was just HRT, but like Premarin, you know, like horse urine and bioidenticals. That study didn't take into account bioidenticals.

And there's some debate around permanent versus bioidentical as well. But instead of giving you a five hour answer there what I would recommend and we'll give a short answer in our opinions on it, here is the book. Estrogen Matters is a great entire book on that topic of hormone replacement therapy. That's a great big resource. Deep dive if you want a two to two and a half hour version. Peter T. Has a great podcast with the authors of that book. That's A great summary as well. You can listen to it on two times speed and it's a little over an hour, so you can get into those. But I think our general philosophy is that if it does increase risk for some things like breast cancer, heart disease, which is completely debatable, a lot of people say it decreases the risk, risk for some of those things. That's all debatable. Even if it does increase it a tiny bit, maybe 1 or 2%, the quality of life that it gives women post menopausal is probably worth that. So it's a complex question and answer between a patient and a clinician and it's a lot of shared decision making. How much is it going to increase or decrease my risk for these things? How much is it going to affect my quality of life? So it's a difficult question. We in general do replace hormones for women because.

It just adds a lot to the quality of life and may or may not increase or decrease certain risks. Based on all the studies that you look at. That's one study, Women's Health Initiative. It's a big study, a lot of money behind it, a randomized placebo controlled trial. But there are other studies that contradict it. So read that book, Estrogen Matters, if you want a much longer answer on that. But in general we're not scared to replace hormones for them in post menopausal. We think it really improves quality of life.

Plus you can get horse hearing for pretty cheap around here.

Especially around here.

Yeah.

How does this. This is a great question. I'll just ask it and then let you all dive in. How does a sense of spirituality and spiritual practice play into health and wellness? And I'm going to limit you all I maybe 60 seconds each because that's such a, a big question. You have some summary thoughts on that?

Oh, absolutely. I mean like we know that meditation and yoga and a lot of these things can actually change epigenetic expression. They can lower plasma cortisol, they can improve sleep cycles. And you know, even stepping back and looking at it, apart from the biological effects, we know they do, you know, like a gratitude practice will increase your level of empathy towards others. You know, we know that in the blue zones, almost every single one has some prevalence of a belief in a higher power, some type of spiritual practice. And many of these spiritual practices are also tied into things like fasting and meditation and some type of routine. So in my opinion, the healthiest people on the face of the planet are people who are not only attending to their mind, their body but also their spirit. And I think the spiritual disciplines.

Cannot be on the sides of.

You go through four years of medical school and you get zero. Not just training, but zero thoughts on this in general. And it's such a disservice because it's a huge part of most people's life in general, growing up and even after they're an adult. And it is extremely important.

For our.

Patients at least we try to address this and try to encourage it it.

As much as possible.

We don't push any certain religion or spiritual belief, but it can make a tremendous difference in health. And it's not just us saying that from an ancient standpoint, seeing it even in the blue zones, which is a great amount of evidence, but there's hard science behind it. So what it does your stress level.

I can't summarize it any better than Matt and then have. But I can tell you that just from a personal experience, finding a meditative practice and finding a mindfulness practice has been one of the most meaningful things I've done for my personal health in the last.

It definitely feels. It changes the way that I view the world, the way that I interact with people, the way that I interact with myself.

I see a lot of sick patients in my clinic, strokes with Alzheimer's and people who have negative outlook on life, they're not their own. And basically meditation will improve your outlook.

On life, and then that actually allows patients to improve.

Sometimes this is a little thing that's missing.

That's why they're not getting better.

And with medication and physiology, they actually are able to improve.

I think sometimes physicians, when they they deliver bad news, they almost curse patients until they may have a certain amount of time to live or things like that. That belief in that outlook.

I. I never tell patients that they.

Will not recover, ever.

That's my firm rule. I don't know. I'm not a guy and nobody is. So if you'll tell patient that he's not going to recover, he's not going to recover.

Here's a question that I think Ben has multiple podcasts on. Mike and I have at least one we haven't even released yet. So we're gonna. So here's what I'm gonna do for this question. I'm gonna have here your top three tips. That's it. So the question was, you were talking about testosterone. Free testosterone versus total levels of testosterone. Someone asked a question, how would you increase. You talked about a free percentage of Testosterone being over 2%. If someone wanted to do that naturally how would they increase their free testosterone?

Avoid heavy amounts of endurance exercise and instead do brief spurts of pine casing. Interval training, heavy weight lifting. Oh, I think that's three.

It kind of was three days.

That's next.

Just tip. I would say optimize libido by prioritizing some type of regular sexual experience. Like go out of your way to make sure that you're sending your body that signal at least on like a weekly basis that you're trying to maintain fertility. And that also helps keep your libido up, creates a positive feedback loop. And then I would say there's a third thing. It's that as you learn bound testosterone is a lot of times not bioactive, especially if it's bound to sex hormone binding globulin, not L. Demin. So one of the, one of the best things you can do is make sure that you control your cortisol and your stress. So you're not regulating shbg.

Mike.

So I would say decrease insulin resistance. So the best way to do that is to exercise.

We've been already mentioned.

But also to decrease simple carbohydrates in your diet and increase healthy fatty acids. That's going to increase your insulin resistance and improve the percentage of testosterone bounds. That's coming from a binding globulin. And also your testosterone production. And I can't say strength.

That's my other favorite one.

Jude Light. Didn't it mention Jude Light?

Definitely.

As proven by.

Shine tooth light on your testicles at night and work during the day or whenever you like your testosterone production.

What is it? Sleepy death, sleep?

Well, it's basically stress, carbohydrates or insulin resistance and heavy lifting. If you can manage your stress, everything.

Else actually will get better.

Going back to your brain.

I think I care both use my Gambian. Talk about endurance. You've both done endurance events in the past. I have to. And the effect on testosterone?

The lowest my testosterone has ever been was low fat diet with bodybuilding and racing.

And yeah, I think sleep is. Yes.

Someone is asking about the research that's been done on the Joovlite. And here's Ben's answer.

There's some rodent model research on the activity of Leydig cells in the testes. All the human stuff is anecdotal, but anecdotal is anecdotal. It's still right for the example, like personal experience. You know, it helps quite a bit with not just testosterone but also just general blood flow, general capitalization to your genitals.

So Travis There are some studies. If you email me, I'll send you those in the red then. I was 11, 17.

And Ben, you also once mentioned that product that cools like a, like an ice pack.

There's some company called Primal Jet Pack that makes an ice pack literally designed to cool the balls and increase testosterone via that method, which is kind of funny because you get it and it's just like a regular old ice pack. But this says, says for your balls. I'm sure there are bargains great on that.

The fancy ice we have here where.

We have small, medium and large.

If it has a castle stamp on like our fancy ice, it's three.

I want to rudely interrupt today's show to tell you about four Sigmatic. These are mushroom products. So when I want a pick me up, but I don't want a cup of coffee, I take two packets of their Chaga, which also keeps me from getting sick. It's one of the best ways to elevate your immune system function based on some of the proteins that are in the Chaga elixir they make. And then I add one packet of their lion's mane, which is like a pencil sharpener for your brain. It increases bdnf, your brain derived neurotrophic factor when you have a packet of lion's mane. My kids actually have a packet before they go to school every day. But the lion's mane Chaga blend is a really, really great way boost cognitive function to start your day. They have a lot of other mushroom products. The other one I use a lot of is their reishi before a nap to kind of relax myself. That thing is also wonderful. I always have a pantry full of at least their Chaga, their Reishi and their lion's mane. Those three alone are really, really good mushroom extracts. They're giving all the listeners 15% off of all of their wonderful, wonderful elixirs. They even have chocolate over there. Their chocolate's really good too. And it's very simple. You go to foursigmatic.com Ben Ben Greenfield four sigmatic.com BenGreenfield will automatically get you 15% off of all the fine, fine fare from Four Sigmatic. This podcast is also brought to you by Hairy Shave Club. I recently shaved my beard off and so now I'm back to using my five blade razor with my lubricating strip, the trimmer blade, the rich lathering shave gel that they have. It's even got a weighted ergonomic handle. It's the cloth Cadillac of shavers, Shavers razors I don't know what they're called, but either way they clean up the face. Absolutely.

I don't even know what the adjective I'm looking for here is. They make my face as smooth as a baby's butt. The replacement cartridges are just two bucks each, so they don't screw you on the cartridges. They get rid of all the upcharges. They've got over 20,000 five star reviews on Google. They own this world class blade factory in Germany that's been making quality blades for over 90, 85 years. So they know what they're doing. Plus they have a hundred percent quality guarantee. Their 13 value trial set, which you can get for free if you go to harrys.com Greenfield has the Blade with the handle, the lubricating strip, the trimmer blade, the shave gel, even a travel blade cover. It's all there and it's also extremely affordable. They even won the Esquire grooming award last year. So how do you like that harry's.com greenfield that's where you can redeem that trial set offer. Enjoy your shave.

Someone asked about Ashwagandha. How does ashwagandha play a role in cortisol and other adaptogens? Anybody want to take that one or.

It'S pretty simple.

Adaptogenic herb work is going to increase cortisol when it's low and help to decrease it when it's high.

So yeah, that's generally how an adaptogen works is it adapts to the state that your body is in. That's why reishi mushroom extract puts some people to sleep and gives some people great amounts of energy. It just depends on what your body needs at the time.

And I always the adaptogens, they never quite made sense to me. It's kind of hard to wrap your mind around that. But things like chaga, ginseng, ashwagandha, great adaptogens. This person is specifically asking how does it play our role in cortisol? I don't know if we can fully understand you. Look, there's some studies in rats where they look at ashwagandha and it shut down some stress mechanisms and pathways in the brain. And so that probably is how we're working. But regardless of how we're working, it does seem to have a positive effect on cortisol. So adaptogens like mushrooms, some of those superfood mushrooms, ginseng ashwagandha are great. Do you have anything to add?

Everybody responds differently. Some people respond to ritual better, some people respond to ashwagandha better. For example, I, I don't really feel anything, any effects of ashwagandha. At the same time, if I'll take a third year I can go exercise for an hour.

So. But I think I've seen some information why that me but I, I cannot.

Resolve.

Dr. Sean Talbot T A L D O T T. He's got some really good online resources and a good book on the exact mechanism of action to a lot of different adaptogens. So taking these guys in his work.

Here'S an interesting question. How long would a dietary change take to see a change in the omega 3 index? We're talking about omega 3 index. We don't like to see above 8 in our patients. If you're not going to take, I guess we can include just Omega 3 supplements. If it's a dietary change or supplement.

Supplement.

How long did you experience?

Within three months you'll see if you'll eat a lot of fish and very low omega 6s. Within three months you will change your omega 3 index.

Different from person to person though because it depends on how long your red blood cells save your system.

I think three months is a good.

Rule.

To truly change over the cell architecture and the brain could take longer. Well, I mean on testing here, yeah. But for testing, serum testing, you know we're looking at RBC over so that would be you know, 120 days or less.

And the, the fish, the dietary changes you should do. I think you'll probably all know the acronym SMASH fish. Those are great fish. If you want to just do it pure dietary instead of actually adding a supplement. SMASH fish. Or think of sardine, mackerel. Your cold water fishes bottom of the food chain so they're not predators. Bets and bioaccumulation of some heavy metals. Sardines, mackerel, anchovy, salmon and herring. Those are great choices if you just want to look for things like the salmon we have today. Salmon we had today was from a very specific region too. So salmon wild versus farm can be different. So the quality of the source of your fish, your dietary change or your supplement also makes, makes a big difference. So omega 3s. I think sometimes people can fall into a trap and if they just get a cheap Omega 3, they could potentially do more damage than good. So it's important to think about the quality of your source.

That's an extremely important point. You can get oxidation of these omega 3s fairly easily. So not only buying a quality one but also taking care of it, not leaving it out in the sun, eventually putting it in the Freezer or the fridge.

Yeah, I don't know if this kind of Fs up the smash elbow, but I throw a roe and throw oil in there too. So smash your K.

So smash your.

It is very important to realize that Omega 6 is also required for our body. Omega 9s are required for our body. So a lot of people say I'll eat only fish. I'm not going to eat any omega sixes. And then when I look at their blood chemistries, they have very large amount of omega 6s. They have very low omega. I'm sorry omega 3s. They have very low omega 6s. And then the body that cannot work your cell acquires all three of them to function correctly.

And we don't always talk about that because just in the standard American diet people tend to get a lot of food. We're actually seeing people will go too far.

I've seen a couple places who are really, really dedicated eating a lot of fish, a lot of fish oil. There are mega threes who are out of the chart of the chart and omega sixes were low.

Practically have to not email, not go.

So hard.

But honestly though, the group we have here, the questions I've gotten, this could be a group that could be. So what the rectus.

Major component of mitochondrial membrane called cardiolipin depends on a certain amount of these so called parent essential oils that gets from you know, borage seed oil, primrose oil and flax and chia and hilwater, including those.

So CGM device, continuous glucose monitor. Dan's got one on.

As far as commercially available CGM devices, do I have any recommendations? Recommendations in general?

Yeah, there's one called the freestyle Libre a lot of people use but I've used it. The accuracy is very questionable. I like the Dexcom series, Dexcom G6 Gold Standard.

Does anybody here worn one or have one on now you do.

I wear the G6 and I was asking him because I've always worn it on the belly because that's what they recommend. And so I'm glad to see that it's just as accurate on the arm because it's a much more convenient.

Yeah, I wear it on the arm. I get the, the, the skin patches from Amazon that allow it to, to stay down a little bit more. And then I also put on top of that a special like a skin adhesive so that I generally don't have any issues when I wear my belly squats, deadlifts, anything like that. Like it just rubs and I don't like it.

What I found shocking is how easily insurance covers it. I mean like there was no question, no eye blink, nothing. And it. I guess that's onto a good job.

So we were talking about that earlier today. Some guys brought that up. What did you have to have to have your insurance covered? Because if you were to just buy this cash price for a year cost close to $5,000 for all the monitoring and the sensors and things like that.

For me, I mean, I guess I still am because I will forever be a type 2 diabetic at the time, but I mean my doctor just wrote a prescription for continuous monitor. I told my mom it's a switch brand I wanted and I was shocked because I mean I reimbursement is my world. Like I'm a nurse, that reimbursement is the world I work in. And it was shocking to me that it. There's not a whole lot of red tape right now. I don't know if it will be as more patients are kind of getting onto them and they're seeing the cost and maybe that's going to change in the next year. But it's just there is a learning curve on how it needs to be written because the transmitter on the desktop has to be replaced every three months. The sensors, you know, they're three every month. And so that's the only learning curve I see is how it needs to be written from a prescription standpoint.

I guess. So that's. So if you actually have a diagnosis of diabetes, insurance is usually pretty good because there's so many complications with that. If you didn't have it, you just wanted to monitor like Ben, then you get into kind of a tricky issue because if we were Mike and I, we had some of these ordered from patients. Someone that has really difficult insulin resistance, probably good even if they don't have diabetes for a few months to see how they respond to food or cold plunge like Dan was just showing us what happens to the glucose after a coke plunge. If you just wanted to do that, it's. It's difficult, it's expensive. If you were to put diabetes on someone's chart it may affect some long term care insurance, some other health insurance issues. So if anybody. Does anybody have any ideas on how to maybe. No, it's just cash or the diagnosis yet. We haven't figured out anything.

I will say Costco. I read an article that Costco's made a deal with Dexcom to where their cash price is much lower than anywhere else for cash. It's still not cheap. I mean but I mean and like he wore mine for a while because I had to change transmitters. So there's like a two week period where the old transmitter worked. And so just to kind of see for 10 days with him, you know, we did that, but buddy system.

Exactly. Eat a lot of Eminem Fremonts, go to your document, see what they said.

But I don't think it's worth having that diagnosis on your charges.

So question from you're talking about IGF testing. Someone asked when is it optimal to test igf? One day after a hard workout or fasting or yoga or all of those and then kind of take the medium.

I believe gold standard for IGF1 is a passive blood.

I think, I think there's some benefits in knowing the range in terms of trying to capture something higher like an anabolic state versus catabolic state. So if you are going to, if you are going to get into that, that would be interesting to know. From my experience, typically it tracks fairly.

Well with insulin systems.

So the higher your insulin, the higher your igf. IGF one is. So most patients, I don't have too much concern unless they've got a little bit. But in that case it could be interesting to look at both the catabolic.

And anabolic state going along the lines of testing time. So should the microbiome test be done at a certain time of day without exercise prior to exercise? Does anything like that affect the microbiome status?

Microbiome changes, but typically it just doesn't once.

Oh, so we have our ESD nutritionist, an expert in microbiome Sarah here. Do you have any thoughts on the microbiome, how quickly that kind of changes in testing in general.

So if you're going to test it.

And I hope that we figure out.

Like the specifics around the testing and.

How useful that is and how to.

Tweak the microbiome to improve health outcomes that it be consistently right whether it's.

First thing in the morning, at the.

End of the day or for women.

Like the same time within the cycle.

Theoretically the bacteria are more active in the morning than at night. Right. I mean we know the bacteria have circadian rhythm. I think you actually called me that. So I guess it would make more sense to test it during the day, last meal or last food.

Most of the research on microbiome response to exercise is chronic, not acute. So I doubt that you haven't done a hard workout versus an easy workout. The day prior or even intermediate prior to the test is going to change that much.

And to be Honest, you all can correct me if you disagree, but I mean, when I look at the data on exercise and athletes and microbiome, I have a hard time sorting out what is like causal and what's correlation, which comes first, exercise in the microbiome. And so I'm not sure exactly how much it matters when you test. But the safest thing is just to test same time. And I doubt you're going to be doing, doing a lot of testing. I mean, it's $300 or so per time, so you're probably not going to test multiple times over the course of a month. But if you're going to test every few months, if you've got a specific thing you're trying to change, like for us, if you're deficient in vitamin B6, we know that's produced by certain microbes in your gut. And so if you're trying to correct that and you're testing every few months, it makes sense to test during the same time in similar conditions in my mind. But I've got exactly zero science to back that up. But it makes sense to test at the same time?

Yes.

How about supplementation prior to. So if you're checking magnesium or B vitamins the day before the test, if you normally take magnesium at night or B vitamins in the morning or whatever, should you not take the supplement for a day or two before the test?

It'll come in four days.

Four days, Stop the supplement?

Yeah, Nutrival and Stecracel, they all recommend four days.

These are great questions. These are difficult questions. And a lot of, just to be super clear, I mean, like, I just want to point out a lot of these questions and we're giving you are our opinions and they're us kind of taking all the research we've read and kind of making some educated guesses. So I don't want to confuse this with hard science and randomized double placebo controlled trials, but these are kind of our opinions based on our reading of the literature.

Okay, so here's a question.

We were talking about parasites earlier. Someone said, my understanding is it's difficult to test for parasites since they release an enzyme once the stool hits the air and this enzyme dissolves the parasites. Is this correct? You all heard of this? I've not, I've not heard of that.

I think that's why you put it in the preservative right away.

What was your answer?

I think when you do the three day, what is it? The GI effect, You put it in the preservative Right away. And then you freeze it.

Yeah.

That tube, why does that not go anywhere?

Well, that's what you're supposed to do.

Follow the test instructions and that preserves it.

I just heard that the knee, that it dissolves it. So I just didn't know. And it's interesting because probably 95% of our patients comes back and they have no parasites. And I'm like, there's no way. And then we do a parasite cleanse and they're releasing tapeworms and round worms. And so I'm just wondering if the validity of that. But besides that, do you do one.

Day or do you do three day tests?

Three day, almost.

Really?

Yeah, Always it's the same price.

But I like to test for so many other reasons because it gives you so much information. I just find it interesting that so many people don't have parasites, but yet when we put them on a parasite cleanse, you know, within nine days they start releasing parasites.

It's a great observation. I mean, every test that we do in medicine, we think about. I think a lot of times people think about testing being similar to a pregnancy test. Like it's a positive or negative, close to 100% sensitivity and specificity. But very few tests that we do really have those operating characteristics and they have sensitivities and specificities that are all over the place. So it's very valid. We can make that observation until they.

Think about that in mind.

So.

Good point. Okay, here's one that we could talk for a long time on because we can have podcast on this. So again, top three tips here. I'm gonna limit you all to what are key factors to getting quality deep sleep. You said deep sleep, so let's specify deep sleep.

Well, I think Ben has a phenomenal article in this.

I think you cover pretty much everything. 10,000 word article on my website I published last week. If you go to my website, do a search for deep sleep, there's like half a dozen other articles on it. Top three, I think would be cold. Like making sure you're sleeping in a cold environment and even lowering the core tent prior to bed. Not eating a heavy meal right before you get to set number two. I found. We talked about this on the podcast yesterday that hasn't been released yet, but higher amounts of CBD oil, so you can talk about quite a bit, or CBD supplement, like in the range of anywhere from 60 to 100 milligrams of CBD. And.

Let me think, probably.

Probably a third. I would say if you ask like some good Comfortable sleep phones or headphones. Any of these kind of binaural beats that are designed for deep sleep. Those help me out quite a bit. So those are three.

What kind of headphones are you talking about?

There's a company called Sleep Phones. I saw that.

But isn't it required for it to.

Go to your phone?

Yeah.

Okay.

I was just looking for some Bluetooth or something.

I wouldn't be wearing Bluetooth on your head all night.

Yeah.

Try.

Try Cold Tones.

They have a separate CD for sleep, and I found it's very, very useful. You listen for about 20, 30 minutes.

Put it into a CD player.

Yeah. You plug it in and then you put in. Put it inside and sleep. Okay. Yeah, it's very helpful.

That same gotta be composer for that says, don't wear headphones. Have a speaker on either side of the bed. Get a similar effect.

Yeah, I was just gonna say a regular exercise routine, I think, is important to optimize your deep sleep as well as avoiding alcohol. I think it's extremely important.

And then I think, you know, Ben mentioned it briefly, but I think. I think there's something definitely to be said for a fasting period prior to bedtime, preferably greater than three to four hours. Actually, the longer you can make that period, the better. I think the one problem with the intermittent fasting phase is that everyone's pushing their feeding time till later in the day, when, realistically, in order to optimize sleep, in order to optimize compromise, insulin resistance and your skin rhythm, you should be pushing into earlier in the day. So you should wake up, it's bright outside, you should eat, and then you should stop eating sooner in the day. Fast during the evening. Realistically, that's harder to do socially with family and everything like that. But in terms of deep sleep, in terms of insulin resistance, in terms of your circadian rhythm, all of those things are benefited significantly by a longer fasted period.

Also realize that there are different reasons.

Why people not sleeping.

So you kind of really need to address that. A lot of people have a lot of anxiety and stress. And I found valerian root and chamomile tea would be just perfectly covering them. At the same time, if they have stronger issues, if they have some significant problems, then CBD oil would be fine. Again, sleep hygiene is very, very important. There's no question about it.

Some people have, you know, melatonin and cortisol imbalances that need to be drank. There's tons of different reasons you go to sleep. It's a huge aspect of your Life, just like cardiovascular disease, there's not a.

Single pill that we can give you.

To reduce your risk. Just staying with sleep. There's not a single thing that we can tell you that's going to improve your sleep.

And then we have not talked about it this time. But blue lights are destroying your melatonin, so you really need to have blue blockers after sunset to allow your melatonin to build up. And if you chronically have been really poisoned by blue light, then it will take some time for your.

Do you find those patients that are low carb or ketogenic have deficiencies in magnesium? So any other questions out here too? But I guess this is kind of an experience question. You found people on a low carb or ketogenic diet are deficient in magnesium. Now I'll kind of read in a little bit with this question. I'm assuming the person asking this is thinking, okay, leafy greens are really high magnesium. A lot of vegetables are high in magnesium. So.

Well, it depends on what kind of ketogenic diet you eat. If you eat bacon and eggs and meal, then you probably will be at the same time. If you're getting really high plant based ketogenic diet, then probably not.

Ben's gonna walk around, take food off everybody.

You guys are banging things out up there. I don't really know what to say.

I mean, magnesium, I mean you get in liver organ meats, there are a lot of great sources of magnesium that aren't plant based. But also in my experience, I haven't, haven't seen that at all. Low magnesium, has anybody seen that? The person who asked that question, is that an experience that you've had? I'm sure you're asking.

What I see more is that people acid to break the mineral bonds of hot, you know, part from the vegetable that they're eating, their digestion.

So you say. So more of a digestion issue of absorbing the magnesium.

I think one of the issues too is that glycogen carries a certain amount of electrolytes in water. And so once you dump a lot of glycogen, you can dump a lot of minerals and people get keto flu, etc. And that actually can be helped quite a bit with electrolyte supplementation. So.

All your minerals, not just magnesium, but they all take a little bit of a hit. Dump that like.

Yeah, we have a patient right now who's been emailing on RICO protocol and having some issues with kind of cramps at nights and things. Emailing started a ketogenic diet and my assumption we're trying to correct right now is that it was more related to the glycogen depletion, some dehydration, maybe some supplementing with magnesium, but it was really probably more dehydration than anything else. Chris, did you say you have patients where you've seen that? No, I asked the question.

I was just curious along those same lines. We use a lot of no salt with which is potassium chloride, along with sea salt as a supplement in our water. I haven't really seen a lot of that came we. Dr. Berry was the one that recommended that. I haven't seen that many other places. Is there a harm in using no salt like calcium chloride specifically? Yeah, it's all it is is potassium fluoride. And so. So you cannot even begin to scratch the surface if you buy a potassium supplement with the amount of levels that's in no salt, which is a huge amount. And so we dump a quarter teaspoon of that in water and it seems to really make a big difference for energy level. But I also want to make sure that we're not doing something that's harmful because I recommend it to everybody that I work with if they're doing the keto diet.

Sometimes good renal function. I mean, it's a water soluble thing. Your body's gonna handle it.

That's all it is.

Those were incredible questions. You'll probably have more. What other questions? Yeah, we're like total geeks about this stuff. We love talking about it. So what other questions do you have and do you have any specific comments on the things that we said? You may disagree with or see contradictory evidence. Because my favorite thing in the world is to be wrong. Because that's when we're learning. So any.

Here.

Someone is asking Ben about some comments that he made recently about having high cortisol metabolism and what he's doing about that if he's following a ketogenic diet.

I follow a strict ketogenic diet for years. I. I have a pretty simple protocol. I just don't eat many carbohydrates at all until the very end of the day. I do a carb refeed at the end of the day. It restores my glycogen levels for the next day's workout. I test my ketones. Usually takes a couple hours to kind of get back into ketosis and that works well for me. I have some clients I coach who aren't as physically active for me, sometimes they just have like a Saturday or a Sunday where they're doing most of their carbs on just that one day and staying in a freezer, taking ketosis otherwise. But it all depends on activity levels to a certain extent. Is there any merit to the. Those like low carb causing HPAs?

Sure.

I mean any, any highly restrictive or myopic diet I think can cause some HPA axis issues. I mean honestly on, on two levels. Number one, stress about eating, having kind of more thorexic approach to diet and then B, you know, the glucose deprivation to a certain extent. We just touched on a lot of the electrolyte depletion can occur and result to that.

I think it's good you said you talked about what you did, but then you talked about what some of your clients do because it's important to note that nobody else has been Greenfield. So his diet that works perfect for him is not going to be a great experience. But we all have to think about your activity level compared to a pro spartan racer. It's going to be different for everybody. So it's a great guideline, but it's good to have a guide or at least be testing like Ollie saying, been talked about before to really measure yourself and figure out what works best for you as well.

Someone is now asking about a colonoscopy, if that's the best way to reset the microbiome.

I don't think it works it out. I mean unless you take antibiotics, few bugs are.

Well, they're in what's called a biofilm. So if you've ever had like a really dirty dish, you know that, like that you have to scrub the hell out of it to get the, get the crap off. That's a, that's sort of a biofilm.

Right.

So it bugs in your colon.

The bugs in your colon are, are basically inside of biofilm. And as that, as that, you know.

Whatever the specific thing you're taking is, whether it's a maxitrate or, or whatever, you know, the giant gallon of whatever it is, that's it. That is not going to dissolve biofilm. So it's not, it's not a surfactant.

Is what I'm getting at.

It is it's going to basically clean up all the large pieces of poo and leave the biofilm just happy as ever.

So you shouldn't have.

I have pretty significant microbial diversity. I do a coffee enema one to two times a week when I travel A lot of times I'll do like a glycerol enema if I've got travelers constipation or like that zero Issues with microbial diversity. If you were concerned about that. I mean it's pretty simple to actually do a probiotic enema. You can take probiotics, put it in coconut water, let it ferment for about six hours and literally just infuse and hang it upside down for about 20 minutes or in some kind of converter position. You can actually do a little bit of a colonic repopulation using that approach.

I just saw someone mouth oh my gosh when you said that.

Fun with your butt.

I have a two part question.

Maybe even three part. So what would you do for a patient who has, who gets the common cold and is it personalized based off of their DNA and their blood and all that? Or is it if you have a common cold, here's what you need to eat and supplement with or medicine, you know medicine is the first part and then first two parts in this third part is if it develops into an ear infection or a sinus infection or a bronchial whatever, how do you naturally heal it without antibiotics?

So any sort of commonly called usually as a viral infection, it's self limited should get better. If you want to support your system in general there are so many things we can talk about just about supporting your immune system with adaptogens like we talked about. Chaga, vitamin C. A lot of medical doctors may poo poo that but there's pretty good evidence on high dose vitamin C for myself personally if I wake up with my order ring that has my HRV gallon of my 40s and my resting heart rate is in the 50s, I know if I don't feel bad, I'm going to be feeling bad.

And your temperature, your temperature.

I'm going to take a lot of vitamin C and I'm going to just simple thing, rest, take it easy, don't stress your body out. It's telling you it's going to be busy fighting this off. So you want to give us some time and some support. That'd be my general advice on just wellness. I mean sleep rest.

I don't think there's any reason not to take antioxidants.

Vitamin C. I have a protocol that.

I basically take 30,000 units of vitamin D. I take at least one or two grams of vitamin C and specifically vitamin C. It's a first vitamin C of L ascorbic acid, not ascorbic. L ascorbate, not ascorbic acid. Then I do chaga, then I do sauna and I hydrate myself like that. And typically within.

Within the or so.

I get that.

Chaga sauna, electrolytes, vitamin D, vitamin C, all of those are spot on. The only other ones I, I'd throw in there that I've found to be very effective, be zinc acetate lozenges, like dissolving those so that you get some of that intranasal absorption, like 4 to 6 of those loss edges per day. B propolis, which is, which is very, very effective. And then finally oil oregano. So I know it's a lot of stuff, but I would say those would be the biggies I found in terms of the home first aid kit for colds and flu. Can you ask?

I was just gonna go ahead and.

Hit the antibiotic question.

Let me add, the data is convincing that antibiotics for sinusitis, ear infections, virtually no benefit. Majority of sinusitis is not bacterial based, it's viral based in the first place and antibiotics are not. So if anything for ear infections, antibiotics might decrease the symptoms by about 12 hours. And when you, when you compare that to the risk of your gut and altering your microbiome to cause dysbiosis. In fact, my son just had bilateral ear infections. I fought tooth.

Because I think it's a constraint.

Mike, he said there's no benefit. And you also talked about a little bit of fit about the 12 hours. So it's important to talk about risk and benefit. Like if it's a few hours of symptom relief, you have to compare that to the problems that it causes. You go to. There's a great website called dnnt.com, the number to treat.com. so it talks about the small benefit brand bio, maybe ear infection or sinusitis or even strep pharyngitis. They talked about the downside and then nobody to harm also. So even though maybe you get a little benefit from those things, the harm that you get is much greater.

Let's also be clear too that there are times for antibiotics. While we spend a lot of our time talking about how bad antibiotics are for you, sometimes patients have to be on antibiotics or they're going to die.

They say millions of lives. It's extremely important.

The problem is the pendulum is swung all the way towards antibiotics for convenience of providers and patient comfort. And it doesn't have enough conversation in it about what are the risks and benefits of taking medication.

Yeah, it could be placebo, but I've had infections for weeks and I get our antibiotic and I'm cured like in.

A day or two.

It's like almost.

I don't.

It's a Valid experience. But if you look at all the data, the doctor would suggest, if you look at all the big meta analyses, things like ear infection, it may reduce like the symptoms from like five days to four and three quarter days. Mine said 12 hours and stuff that's in like six hours. Like it's a really small window that it actually helps. And what happens a lot of times too is people try to hold off a lot and they think antibiotics late, which is kind of getting better already.

So I mean that's not to say that you didn't have a valid experience or the antibiotics, antibiotics that necessarily improve your experience. It is definitely patient dependent in a situation.

And the problem with your experience is also there's a time, the time is issued. So you may have a little bit of benefit. What you may not have associated with antibiotics is if you take one course of antibiotics, your chance of having anxiety and depression next year increases about 17 to 24%. Two courses increase that about 40, 45. So if you felt anxious six months later, you're not associating that with antibiotics. You're not incorporating that part of the experience into the equation. So a lot of the problems from something like antibiotics are going to be temporally unrelated to when you take them. So that's why the studies on these things are important too, things that you did not just experience.

The best way to prevent colds is to take cold showers, everyone. That's where bio. I have not had a cold for.

Three years, since I started doing that for three years.

And water here is very, very cold.

It's a pretty dang good tip. I travel a good two to three weeks out of every month. I'm on the road all over the place. I'm rarely sit like two times in the past five years. And I'm cold. Shower, morning and off people too.

See, I love my hot showers, but it killed me when Matthew when we're getting ready to close the pool, he's out there and I'm like, good God, he's out there.

It's freezing cold.

He's out there with his little elastic things on, swimming against the current. I'm thinking I would have already been frozen. But it's funny to me because I had a cold right before Christmas. And for those who don't know, I work for the Kentucky Castle and I'm very busy, so I did not have time to get sick. I have a very low immune system, so sometimes I feel like I always take antibiotics to prevent. But I also have chronic bronchitis, so it's Like, I go to a sinus infection, but I can have bronchitis for.

Three to six months.

I'm still coughing for my last one. So I go to Matthew to tell me I'm getting sick. Da, da, da, da. Take, you know, this amount of vitamin C. That's not what I wanted to hear. I need a prescription pad thing. Let me get an antibiotic, get a shot. Let's kill this now. And so I do the vitamin C. But I will say that it worked and I felt better without having to go.

Go through the whole, you know.

But I will say I was against it at first.

Yes, it did.

I didn't have to go to the.

Doctor and go to the whole R.

Or steroid dose pack or anything like that.

I just had to do as Matthew said, as long as your stomach can handle taking it, do it.

So.

Yeah.

You had a question, Jim?

I did.

So whenever I feel like I'm getting sick, and I'm lucky I've never had the flu, I get sinus infections and I get strep throat. I mean, if someone in this room has strep throat, I'm gonna get it against one of these people. But I try to fight it with my own immune system beforehand and, like, take certain vitamins, make my tea everything. But you say, like, sometimes you do need an antibiotic. And I guess I'm asking in what certain circumstances, as an individual who doesn't want to take an antibiotic should think, okay, maybe I should go.

We need to work on you, your immune system. Now, when you don't have stress trouble, if you have sexual. It's actually better to take a layer because there are so many complications related to sceptros, including myocarditis, including potentially meningitis.

You don't want that.

Definitely.

It's kind of bad.

So is that a certain.

Just work on.

I haven't had it in years, but that's just an example of something that I do tend to catch if someone nearby has it.

So it's.

I guess what I'm asking is, in what circumstances should you say, okay, I should go see someone for an antibiotic as opposed to trying to take care of this myself?

Yeah, that's difficult. Yeah, exactly. I mean, every situation is so different. I don't think there's any certain things. Okay, now I'll go see somebody. If it's someone who you trust and you trust their opinion, I think you receive them, then have that exact discussion.

Thank God I worked for you.

On the sacred.

I will say, like with our pediatrician my 8 year old, we've seen her since he was 2. I told him front, if I bring him in, I don't need to walk out of here with a prescription to feel like I have value in my business. And I think that's important for all of us, for whoever we go to see is because I think there's a lot of parents that feel like they wasted their time if they go to pediatrician, had a sick kid. They don't walk out with a prescription that I know I can trust if I do walk out like maybe four times my son has had an antibiotic in these eight years and I know that those four times he needed it versus the other times, she's like, yeah, it's going to last you up to two weeks. And sure enough, on that two week mark, that fever stops and you move along.

Yeah, it's great to communicate that with your physicians. You're not expecting a prescription that takes a lot off of their shoulders and they know they can have an honest discussion with you about whether it's needed or not.

This is a question regarding how to deal with fainting episodes that are related to stress. Best ways to deal with those or to prevent them.

I've come at it from the standpoint of improving vagal nerve tone, and there are a variety of methods to do that.

There are devices like vagal nerve stimulators like the Fisher Wallace circadia or the New calm device, or the David Delight Pro or any of these light sound therapy devices that assist with vagal nerve tone. Also, practices that would traditionally be used to manage stress can help. Chanting, singing, humming, meditation, yoga, cold exposure, particularly cold water face dumps can help out quite a bit. There's a lot that you can do to improve vaginal nerve tone. I have a podcast called 32 Ways to Stimulate your vagus nerve, which I cover a lot of that stuff.

But yeah, I, I think one of the biggest ones actually. So you can kill two birds with one stone. You know, as the doc over here alluded to, you know, for the immune system with cold exposure and getting, getting your face underwater, doing like a cold water face dump or a cold shower every day can really help with vagal nerve tones. Matter of fact, that's one of my top ways to improve heart rate variability.

You all talk a lot about the chaga.

What about the kombucha and sauerkraut? Is that a really good way without the testing to add in probiotics?

So actually on the back table there is sauerkraut for you all to take as a gift. So today has been a packed day. What I plan to do with each meal is I wanted to actually go over some of the foods that we were eating and talk about the nutrient density and what they do for you. And we didn't do that because we've had so many. We had, we had to learn about bourbon so we had a busy day. So we actually do have some sauerkraut back there. But that's a great way that to improve your microbiome.

Very convenient. Sauerkraut's excellent kombucha. I think the Adventist is a little less convincing, but it's, but it's still.

Very low risk even without the testing.

That you're talking about that we need to do. It's beneficial to eat that and drink that kombucha. It can be, it depends, like if you have yeast or fungal issues, if you have mold and mycotoxin sensitivity, you can have a pretty pronounced histamine response to a lot of those foods. I feel pretty good on some foods like sauerkraut and kefir and kimchi. I feel like crap when I drink a lot of kombucha. So many of these ferments you have to experiment with, pay attention to the way that your body feels. And in my opinion, if you do have any issues with some type of bacterial overgrowth, sometimes the cons outweigh the pros. Same can be said for either a genetic based histamine intolerance or histamine sensitivity brought on by mold and mycotoxin exposure. So it's kind of a deep rabbit hole, you know, ferments that I think some sometimes get put on a pedestal and a lot of people use them and wind up feeling worse on them. So there are some people that just have to use like a probiotic strain, like a probiotic supplement that's a non histamine producing probiotic or they need to just do say like a dairy based ferment or a non kombucha based ferment. Like there are so many bacteria in a lot of these compounds. You do need pair attention to the way your body feels and symptoms when you begin to use them. I struggle with a lot of joint pain and so forth and I, I started doing the kombucha regularly but it.

Didn'T seem to really affect that much.

And that's the reason I was curious.

There's a lot more that goes into.

Your, your, your, your microbiome health than just probiotics. There's also prebiotics there's.

This concept of is there any dysbiosis? That sort of stuff doesn't change overnight. And sometimes it does take really aggressive prebiotic administration or probiotic administration sometimes to change that and also lifestyle factors as well. So there's just so much that goes into it and I think it's hard to. It'd be great if you could just drink food cha and feel better. But if your inflammation is truly coming from your gut, it may take a little bit of a deeper dive to figure out what it is.

And as we said a few times, your experience is valid. Do the testing, read the science, try to make good educated decisions. But if something that breeds you through doesn't breathe, it's good information. I do great with kombucha.

I crave kombucha frequently.

It does something good for me. If it does it for you, then I love it. I just can't tell.

But I beneficial results.

Very valid reason to drink it as well.

Now a gentleman is asking the panel their thoughts on a five day fasting mimicking diet versus a three day water fast.

Great thing about the fasting, mimicking diet is a good science behind.

So we can't argue with those results in that science. 3 day water fast I think is really great as well. But that's hard, that's difficult. I think if you can do that, you're a physician. So if you're doing that and you're kind of monitoring and watching yourself, I think that's a great way to really stimulate some massive autophagy and get some good benefits from it as well.

I don't think it's clear though that there's more autophagy with one than the other. I mean, we don't really truly know how to measure autophagy, so we have to sort of estimate it. My best guess in terms of estimation is looking at looking at ketones. If you're coming from a non ketotic state, going into a ketotic state secondary to fasting, then if I were you and you were trying to decide between two, if one doesn't necessarily feel a lot better, then I would look at your ketone response over a couple of different fasts in either direction. See when you have the ketone response the fastest and how deep you go into ketosis, because that's probably our best. In my surrogate for autophagy, outside of another measurement.

Just measure. I mean we all different. That's why they have precision medicine. You have to measure your response. What works for me, what works for them does not work for you and vice versa. You have to measure yourself. You need to figure out where you.

Are in that spec and it depends.

On your goals as a person too. So like my, my father and I, we both going to do a fasting protocol. I'll try to stimulate autophagy. I'm probably going to be more of a fasting mimicking diet. Maybe have some bone broth or some calories in the evening just to. Because I'm not.

As concerned about going deep into top. I'm 20 years younger than he is. For him it's probably a little more important, getting a little more intense. But I'm still trying to perform and do certain things and so those calories.

Are probably a little more important for me.

So it just depends on your build and someone that some people have trouble keeping weight on. Most people fasting limiting diet, they get a little more muscle sparing than just.

A water over fast as well.

Yeah.

Ben, are you still doing the NAD injection that burns for 15 minutes?

Burns, burns, burns.

No.

Pretty uncomfortable. I switched to patches. Yeah, you get a slow bleed patch over like six hours. Say you can still deliver like 500 milligrams, just spread over six hours. You still have to go to clinic to sit under an IV for you know, six or eight hours or whatever. And yeah, I mean I am a fan of based on the fact that your NAD ratios tend to become a little less favorable as you age. And it appears to have some pretty good effects on the human body and on mitochondrial function of getting NAD into the diet. You can use like fermented foods, fasting and different forms of tea to do it. But you know, I feel pretty good when I made my mess up into my system. My sleep cycle cycles, my energy levels a lot. So I just don't do the injections anymore.

You get it through a doctor?

Yeah, yeah, I get it from the NAD clinic in San Diego. And.

Right now, I mean I've messed around with everything like the NAD injections and nicotine, my drive to side nmn NAD supplementation. Right now all I do is once a week an NAD patch which is about 500 migs. And then I drink that pow mark tea pretty much every day. I have my little bit of powder with some other kind of autophagy inducing compounds like kerosene, glycinel.

It's pretty.

What's that?

500 is pretty.

No, 500 is pretty decent dose for, for an ED, but I mean aren't.

A lot of people taking that orally daily?

That's a. That's a hefty oral exact. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also a difference when we made hot directly and what's to be a lot of oral and liver loss. So if you were to take like Trudiagen or Lium spaces, I think Those capsules are 150, 200 milligrams tops. Recommendations one a day. So you know you're. You're doubling or tripling that and main body directly to the blood symptom. So there's a totally different effect. Some evidence that might do better getting into the cells and particularly in the neural tissue when you bypass the gastric absorption.

And you're recommending that to most of.

Your clients now the patch clients who want to use NAD but don't want a lot of the discomfort of an iv. Yeah, works pretty well.

Okay. Yeah, I'd love to feel that superman burn actual the superman effects after the bird.

Right.

Questions? Any others?

This question is about exercise induced hypoglycemia. That is not for a person who is diabetic. How to deal with it.

Eat and also don't eat. I said eat during exercise. Like save your feeding for during exercise. Don't eat right before. Like wait till you get 20, 30 minutes into the session and use like some kind of bar or goo or other. You know, you can even use like amino acids or ketones or something else. But generally you go out, you eat your pre workout meal, you start to work out, you get that hypoglycemic drop from the insulin release from the meal you've had. And the trick is to just because I experiment with this a lot when I was just racing triathlon at three workouts a day. You just don't eat before the workout. Save your sacrifice. Save your meals. Literally during the actual workouts.

I've been doing like the applesauce crusher.

Like a little pouch but doing myself army thing.

During exercise.

No, that's the least your worries.

During exercise. I mean you gotta.

You're doing pretty intense exercise though. You're shunting away from your gut the amount that you're able to absorb. So maybe having some fat before as well. Especially if you have gut issues. I think we were talking maybe some gut issues. So if you have gut issues then during exercise is great for d with no gut issues. If you got gut issues, you probably want to think ahead a little bit.

It'll be interesting to see what ketones do because theoretically that would actually decrease your blood sugar.

Yeah.

So I'd be interested to see if you'd like actually pass out, like.

Decrease.

What you shouldn't get.

You don't care what your glucose level is. You hear how you feel when your glucose level.

So ketones should help, help with that really good. Do ketones glucose at the same time?

Yeah. Take like a shot of HB and then. And like a gel pad. So you dump an altose in your system at the same time as ketones and yoga.

Yeah.

So those ketone esters are the kind.

Of high, pricey ones.

You can use the salts too.

This question is for the panel. He's asking if they have ever had consistently bad sleep because of their work schedule and family. Family obligations and stuff like that and what they do to counter it and get the best sleep possible.

Based on the evidence that I've seen, a few of the things that mitigate the effects of a lost night of sleep. Number one is brief spurts of high intensity interval training. We're talking like five to ten minute brief spurts of high.

Blasting yourself large amounts of artificial light, like blue light in the morning to reset your circadian rhythm. And you can do the same with sunlight or a blue light blocks or, you know, any of these devices like the human charger or the re timer to reset your circadian rhythm and induce sleep onset at an earlier time.

Regular meal timing. Don't skip breakfast. That'll also be a good circadian cue. And then other than light and exercise and meal timing.

Those are really some of the big issues when it comes to kind of like renormalizing sleep architecture.

So I do other times in your life with young kids and other times when it's just not going to be optimal. I think it's important too to about talk to people about not freaking out about that. I mean, do whatever you can to mitigate it, but don't cause extra cortisol supplies.

I want to just embrace it. Start drinking monster drinks.

You got to go all in if you're going to do it.

Adderall.

I mean, there are, there's a little bit of chemistry that goes into it too. I mean like night shifts or other times if you have to be up during the day and you had a bad night shift before even like just thinking about the half life of some things like coffee. A lot of people drink coffee a lot to combat the effects of a lost night's sleep. But then you got a half life of maybe six hours. So then you're hurting to sleep the next night. So this may not be like a common. You talk about smoking. This may not be a common thing you may hear, but a little bit of nicotine gum, potentially, instead of coffee, if you get a half life of one or two hours may help. For me, the ketone esters, like we talked about, if I have a bad night sleep because my 1 year old is up, and then I have to do something where I got to be mentally on the next afternoon, instead of coffee, I may try the ketone esters or a little bit of nicotine gum. It's got a shorter half life, so I don't affect the next day and.

I'm going for the same thing. But instead of doing that, I exercise, which is basically giving me the same response. I get some PDF in the exercise, I get some ketone production, you know, I'm getting some stimulation just like you would get from nicotine just from exercise. So similar sorts of stuff in terms of how do you manage it from a lifestyle standpoint to decrease the risk associated with it. The thing that I'm most convinced about is to not alter your diet and the rest of your lively habits outside of your circadian rhythm. So if you are up all night, for whatever reason, don't eat while you're up all night. So stay to your regular eating schedule. Don't change it for being up on either or for whatever is altering your rhythm. Try to, try to stick to your regular daily habits in terms of eating, exercise, and the rest of your sleep as best you can outside of that time where you were augmented. And I think that in the long run is the best shot you have at increasing the negative effects of not getting enough sleep, whether it's REM or.

Yeah, a lot of this stuff works for jet lag too. And this is probably my last comic, so I want to hang out with my kids a little bit before I get them down to bed for the night. But, yeah, drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, take some modafinil, hit the aerosol bike, and you're good to go.

Make sure you do.

Make sure you do so under copious amounts of artificial light.

Don't smoke a cigarette.

All right, Ben's gonna hang out with his kids. We'll be here a little while longer if you all have questions. So thanks for coming. This has been a lot of fun for us. And yeah, we'll be here if you have any more questions. Thanks so much.

Thank you, guys.

All right, folks, I know that.

I know the audio wasn't the greatest on this episode, but I really hope you got a lot out of it. I'll put all the show notes, including links to the websites of all the different, you know, the doctors and the Kentucky castle where this thing was recorded, and the original episode where I spoke leading up to this particular Q and A. I'll put all that over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky2 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kentucky 2 so thanks for listening. Have an amazing week. I hope this has been helpful for you.

I love you.

Later.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

It.