How To Use Precision Medicine To Enhance Athletic Performance, Defy Aging, Balance Hormones, Fix Th

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, gut 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.

Well, howdy.

Howdy. How. It's Ben Greenfield. I'm sipping a little.

Did you hear that?

Yeah, that was disgusting, wasn't it? I'm sipping some decaffeinated coffee. It's actually. What is this? Blue bottle coffee. It's pretty good. No, this isn't blue bottle coffee. This is a pour over from Cafe Luxe in Brentwood, California where I'm staying right now. So there, there's your boring fun fact for the day. Decaffeinated coffee actually has all the antioxidants and health benefits of regular coffee with none of the jitters, which considering I'm recording this for you in, is quite convenient. Speaking of coffee, this podcast is brought to you by my company Kion, that has the most amazing antioxidant rich mold free coffee on the face of the planet. We tested it against dozens of other healthy coffee brands, or at least so called healthy coffee brands and it blew all of them out of the water. And furthermore, the cupping, that's what it's called when you're tasting coffee. The cupping profile also crushed the other coffees so you can get this amazing coffee. You can also get my coconut chocolaty bar, my aminos, which is like a shot in the arm pre workout or for recovery or for staving off appetite cravings and a whole lot more over at my website, Kion. And to get 10% off of anything, use code BGF10. The website is getkion.com getk I o n.com this podcast is also brought to you by not coffee by water. Not just any water though. Hydrogen rich water. I've never actually tried to make coffee with hydrogen rich water. I would imagine it would probably work pretty well. Hydrogen rich water is a very special form of water that has hydrogen gases dissolved into it. When you do that, the water has some very interesting properties. It enhances your mitochondrial function, cell signaling, it's an anti inflammatory. It has what's called selective antioxidant behavior. Meaning you could drink this post workout and it's not going to blunt your ability to be able to build new mitochondria or proliferate these things called satellite cells. You can build new muscle fibers. H2 water hydrogen rich water is getting very popular now in the NBA, in the NFL, Major League Baseball, CrossFitters, UFC fighters and even celebrities are using this hydrogen rich water. Anyways, many of the podcast guests who have had on this show drink hydrogen water travel with hydrogen tablets. The unit that I have in my home and the brand of the tablets that I travel with are called Trusi T R U S I I and what Trusy is doing is giving everybody 30% off of their hydrogen rich water tablets. You just go to trusyh2.com Ben like t r u s I I h2trucy h2.com Ben I'll that link in the show notes too and you enter code BEN at checkout. That gives you 30% off. And you can also, if you want to get a hydrogen rich water generator in your house or your office or your gym like I have, then you can also get there. They have this unit called an Elite X which actually allows you to drink hydrogen rich water and also inhale hydrogen rich water. So there you have it. Isn't that cool? TRUSI T R U S I I All right, so you're about to hear an interview with a couple of my physician buddies who are wicked smart and they're in the realm of regenerative medicine and doing some pretty good functional medicine and integrative medicine protocols. These cats are located down in Kentucky. We talked towards the end of the show about how you can come hang with us all in Kentucky at this giant castle for this retreat that I'm going to be doing down there. So stay tuned for the end of the show and towards the middle of the show I have an announcement about a couple of other very cool events. So I'll be back at you here in just a little bit to let you know about those. So there's this quote, it's by Sir William Osler and it's the goes like this, the good physician treats the disease, the great physician treats the patient. That is the quote on the header of the website of my two physician guests today, Dr. Mike Malin and Dr. Matt Dawson. They own this company and also a podcast called Wild Health they're based out of Versailles, Kentucky and Bend, Oregon. These guys reached out to me a few weeks ago to have a little chat about an event that they're having down in Kentucky that we'll talk about later. But when I kind of dug into what they're doing in the realm of what's called precision and personalized medicine, I was blown away. These dudes are involved in genomics and lab testing and microbiome testing and what they call holistic optimization. They're both guys with a pretty good background themselves in sports and performance. And so they're men after my own heart. Guys who are into health, but also into fitness and performance and striking the balance between that and longevity. So I thought, what the heck, I need to get these guys on the show and, and delve into some of the cool things they're doing at their clinics. So Dr. Matt Dawson is my first guest. Say hello, Matt.

Hello. Thanks for having us, Ben. We. I want to start just by thanking you for your podcast in general. We, Mike and I have just learned a ton from you over the last few years. I think you realize the impact that you're having with the millions of downloads you have. But what you may not realize is the indirect benefit to people who may not have even heard of you. People like our patients, who, I'll be honest with you, when I first started listening to your podcast, I thought you were slightly insane with some of the stuff that you said. But then when I would dig into the science, I kept realizing that you were right. And you've really changed my practice. And so I know it's exhausting sometimes to record these podcasts and your travel schedule has got to be crazy, but you're making probably an even bigger impact than you think. So thanks so much for all the great knowledge that you're putting out there.

Thanks. Thanks, man. That was a lot more than a hello. I thought you were just going to pull the old say hello, Matt, and you were going to say hello, Matt, to me. But for those of you who want to know the voice that you just heard, Dr. Matt Dawson, he played collegiate sports, and I'm going to let him fill you in on what he played and how he got by on what he calls minimal talent. But he's a guy who specializes in what's called precision and personalized medicine, and I'm going to define that for you, or let him define it for you. But he's the co host of the Wild Health podcast. His practices, the one that's based out of Lexington, Kentucky, and My other guest is the branch of Wild Health that's based out of Bend, Oregon, Mike Mollen. Say hello, Mike.

Hey, Ben, how you doing?

Oh, you also did not say hello, Mike. You didn't, you didn't spring for the softball I sent you. So, Mike, you're down in Bend, right? Right. Okay. All right, cool. So Mike, the other voice you guys just heard, he actually trained in emergency medicine originally and did a ton of ultra endurance sports, like ultra marathons and hanging out in the mountains and doing a lot of what they do in the hippie state of Oregon. And he's also the co founder of a podcast called the Ultrasound Podcast, which is an educational podcast that trains physicians how to use ultrasound. Geez, you want to talk about a niche podcast? That's about as niche as it gets. But anyway, so these two guys are partnered up and they run Wild Health. So before we delve in, I just have a quick question. Matt, I was intrigued by the section of your bio where you say you learned to play two sports in college even with minimal talent.

What was your strategy there and what did you play?

Yeah, I played in high school. I played most of the sports, but the only ones I was good enough to get any scholarship offers in were tennis and soccer. And I never, I mean, I'm not tall, I'm not fast, not a lot of talent, but I was. I've been obsessed with kind of performance since I was in high school, reading and studying everything I could. And so I did play a couple sports in college. I quickly realized that I wasn't really good enough. I was never going to play those professionally. So I just played a couple years in college and then really kind of changed over to really fully focusing on performance. Went to medical school, and I've still tried to optimize as much of as I can for my body. And then now I'm well out of my prime when it comes to performing. So I'm really focusing on helping other people optimize their fitness and achieve their goals. Whether it's, I mean, when I say optimizing performance, I mean a 70 year old that wants to dance at their granddaughter's wedding or an athlete in a contract year, we're really just looking to use every available scientific method we can to help people optimize their health.

Yeah, we're going to delve into the scientific methods you guys are using over there. But it's kind of funny because I also played tennis in college and then eventually branched out and played for the water polo team and played middle for the men's volleyball team. At the same time, I was kind of prepping for a. For a brief foray in a bodybuilding career. And I was the same way. I was not a naturally talented athlete, but I studied the. Heck, even in high school, I was grabbing physiology textbooks and running up the hills, back behind my house and figuring out how to use barbells and dumbbells and began to delve into nutrition in college. And I was the same way. I think that was my first foray into that oft overused term now called biohacking, where I had to figure out ways to train in a very smart manner that allowed me to get past some of my.

Some of, I guess, my lack of talent. I'm not that coordinator, that athletic of a guy, but I work out hard and I study the heck out of this stuff, and I think it helps out a little bit. And again, I don't want to lead anybody the wrong way. I'm not saying, like, you get past performance decrements by using supplements or by injecting compounds into your body or getting STEM cell or NAD IVs or any of these crazy things folks are doing. Like, you still have to put in the hard work. But where I think the. The value lies is when you also educate yourself, which it sounds like you did, Matt.

Yeah, absolutely.

And study your sport. Study sport specificity. I mean, if you feel like you want to succeed in your sport, whether it's Ironman triathlon or Spartan Racing or CrossFit or anything else, man, sometimes getting to the library helps. Another one of my buddies. And then I'll shut up here shortly and let you guys delve in. Hunter McIntyre. He's a really good obstacle course racing athlete. He's kind of getting into CrossFit now, and a lot of think of him as kind of a meathead, right? He's kind of a goofy guy on Instagram. He's big, he's built, he's buff. And the thing is, when I talk to Hunter, that dude reads a ton, like, multiple books a week. And he's like, studying the heck out of this stuff because. And he's also shared this on a podcast that we have called the Obstacle Dominator. He also is not naturally talented. He told me he sucks at ball sports and he's not that coordinated or not naturally coordinated, but the dude has cracked the code on physical performance. And I know he also is a voracious student. So the only place you and I split ways, Dr. Dawson, is you went on to medical school. I got accepted to a bunch of medical schools, But I went into fitness and physiology and what I'm doing now instead. But ultimately, it's a very interesting consideration, this idea of educating yourself to be able to overcome minimal talent. Off my soapbox. Now give me the overview of how you guys partnered up and launched Wild Health.

Yeah, so Matt and I met about 12 years ago now. We first met in residency in Salt Lake City. We were chief residents and did an ultrasound fellowship together. And then after residency, we started this nonprofit physician education company which focused on ultrasound education for physicians pretty much all around the world, both the developed and the developing world. And during that whole time, we were really interested in health and our own personal performance and have always been a bit competitive about it as well. We're always comparing workout times, ketone levels, different diets, sometimes trying new products and devices, and basically trying to hack our lives, all while trying to do it a little bit better than the other person. But what really made us shift, I think, and become super obsessed with genomics is actually through the process of trying to fix my diet and my cholesterol. So even even though we were ultra marathoners and living what we thought was an optimal lifestyle, I got some ridiculously scary cholesterol numbers back a few years ago. And I'm not talking like, slightly elevated. I'm talking like you're going to die of a heart attack at 50.

So not to rabbit hole too much, but of course, that's a consideration that a lot of people talk about now, how LDL cholesterol is not necessarily reflective of atherosclerosis or cardiovascular disease or risk mortality. But what were you seeing on your lipid panel?

So I was seeing high LDL, extremely high LDL, like above 300 high. My triglycerides were pretty good. And I think that's because I was exercising so much and had a fairly good diet at the time. And my hdl, I'm not sure the HDL matters too much, but it was appropriate. But just really high LDL numbers, when you look at the data, when you get that high, I don't think there's a lot of. I don't think there's a lot of question that that has got to in some way increase your cardiovascular disease risk if you also consider the possibility of inflammation or endothelial dysfunction. Other things that obviously we can control for in lifestyle. But they were high enough for me that I wasn't personally comfortable with that number.

Yeah. And I remember when Mike texted me his numbers, I'm not really, I think, honestly we put too much emphasis on cholesterol in general, but these numbers were bad. Bad enough that we needed a fix. And so what he and I started doing is what we normally do in medicine. We used epidemiology and kind of guess what would work best for Mike, because what's worked best in the studies. But the. The problem we found was he actually got worse. He wasn't in the majority of patients and how they respond and improve lipids. And in the meantime, his doctor put him on a statin, which we were kind of worried about, and he had myopathy and muscle breakdown for that. And it was kind of a bad situation. And around that time, we started diving into genomics. We were looking at the science and thinking, okay, this actually looks like it may be ready for prime time. So these two things were happening in conjunction. And about two years into the experiment, his diet we were really trying to get. We really finally getting his numbers better. We looked at all of his SNPs and about 15 minutes of really looking at SNPs and correlating with what would be his best diet. We realized that the two years of experimentation we could have shortcut if we had had this information at the start and he had a specific SNP also that made him really much more likely to get myopathies and have bad problems from statins. And it was just frustrating to us that it kind of angered us that his physician and other physicians were still practicing based on epidemiology and this trial and erro, instead of first really basing therapy on the traditional history, physical lab work, but also adding in genomic and microbiome data, and we really realized that other people could benefit from this too. Yeah.

Unfortunately, though, that level of precision is not really something that's regularly offered in the medical community. So Matt and I both kind of started reading basically everything we could get our hands on and taken every course we could find and really just sort of immersed ourselves in this top, trying it out on our friends and family. And, you know, we've had some pretty amazing results and basically decided that precision medicine is eventually what we wanted to spend our lives practicing.

Okay, so you guys launched this clinic together, and do you guys practice distance medicine or do you mostly see patients in your clinic?

Patients in our clinic. I mean, we can do this distance. I mean, the way that the genomic, the lab tests, microbiome, all that works. We can definitely. I mean, yesterday I was talking to somebody in Alabama, actually, and so we're just shipping him all the stuff and we'll have the blood drawn done at his house there, so we can do a distance. But in general, we really need at some point, especially at the beginning, to see someone. Because it's not just about the data. We really want to have a conversation, get to know the person, and take a holistic point of view. The data is important, but really want to start with the person and their individual preferences and what's their lifestyle like.

Okay, I want to delve into some of the things you guys do, you know, that you kind of briefly highlighted, you know, like looking into genetics and looking into some quantification, how you actually kind of what's. What's the path that people follow as they work with you? But my first question I have is precision medicine. That's a term that I think a lot of people might not be familiar with. So what exactly is precision medicine?

Well, I think basically it's not treating the patient like a statistic. Just because a study says that, for example, Omega 3 supplements may not show a mortality benefit for a population, or statins are more helpful than harmful, or vitamin D doesn't decrease MI risk, that doesn't mean that the opposite may be true for an individual. So if we were simply treating populations, that's the kind of data that we would want and we'd recommend. But we don't treat populations, we treat individuals. Just as an example that I had two patients the other day who had low vitamin D levels. One of them ate trash all day. And we're basically just going to get his vitamin D levels up by changing his diet, getting him into the sun, feeding him things like shiitake mushrooms that I grow on my farm. I grow more mushrooms than I can eat. So I'm giving him some of those, telling him to lay off the sunscreen a little bit, and then we're going to recheck. The other patient had a pretty good diet, but he had a specific polymorphism that made him unable to make as much vitamin D from the sun. And he had a polymorphism that made him unable or less able to convert the active form of vitamin D active to the active form of vitamin D. And I don't think that I can move the needle very much for him with lifestyle and diet. So we immediately started him on a vitamin D and K2 supplement. So it's the same problem, but these were very different people with different genetics, different lifestyles, and it called for different interventions. And we needed to look at them from many different angles to get the precision treatment. Their lifestyle, their labs, their genomics and then a lot of times microbiome as well. Mm.

Yeah, it's interesting. I have that same polymorphism as do both of my boys, because we've done genetic testing, and so we all take vitamin D, vitamin K. But I guess that's a perfect example of precision medicine, right? We went and gotwe. Gotwe got tested. Rather than simply listening to all of the healthcare advice to take vitamin D. As you guys know, if you take it and you don't need it and you've already got elevated levels, you can increase your risk for things like arterial calcification or just waste money on supplements that you don't need. So the other thing that I think is a big topic now in this idea of this new word, in my vernacular now, precision medicine, is the idea of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence being used to kind of gather all this data, blood data, urine data, stool data, genetic data, and actually begin to use artificial intelligence or online dashboards or things like that to deliver targeted advice. Are you guys aware of any kind of good movement in that realm, or are you using any of that? Are you looking into it? Or is that just like, in its infancy and ineffective right now?

Yeah, you know, I'm really excited about that. I hope so. I think there's a lot of potential there right now. I think the closest we can come to that is the human brain. I would love for there to be a point where a company can take machine learning, take lab data, genomic data, microbiome data, and spit out the perfect diet for someone or a fitness regimen, but it's hard to get the lifestyle factors. Is the person married? Do they have kids? What's their job, all of that. And I think we really do need to have a clinician taking all those things into account right now. I'm really hopeful that in the future, all of that work that we have to do is kind of done for us, and we can get really good recommendations and just talk with the patient and try to implement it. I don't think we're there yet, but I'm really hopeful. I know there's some companies, like Onegevity and a few others that, that seem like they're on the right path. And I'm watching those really closely. But right now, I think the human brain is about as close as we can come to that.

Yeah, I interviewed Dr. Chris Mason and Dr. Joel Dudley from Longevity Health, and I'll link to that in the show notes, by the way, the show notes, you guys, for everything you're going to HEAR they're at BenGreenfieldFitness.com WildHealth that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com wildhealth and I would say of the folks that I've talked to, the folks at Longevity are the closest to cracking the code on taking a lot of this data and actually being able to have a computer spit out recommendations for you, which would take a lot of, a lot of the stress and a lot of the time limitations off of the physician when they can rely upon a smart computer to kind of go through a lot of this data for people kind of related to that. Do you guys have specific tests that you rely like, is there a gold standard kind of range of tests that you tend to run people through when they come into you?

We do. We have the genomics and we use different companies actually, depending on the individual and how kind of in depth we need to go whether or not we need pharmacogenetics or not. And then lab testing, we have a really large panel, all the NMR fractionization lipids, not just the standard stuff. We look at other hormones, vitamins. We've got a couple big panels that we run on people. And then we also do microbiome assessment. And we're not happy exactly with what the microbiome testing is giving us yet, but we think there is some useful information in there. And we have a PhD microbiome biologist on our team who worked at Mayo on individualized medicine, and he helps us kind of interpret some of that data and roll it into all the other data to come up with optimized plan for somebody.

And then depending on the patient, there's some patients that we run through with urinary hormones and then also serum IGA or igg sensitivities as well. So some of it is not necessarily every patient gets the same thing, but we do sort of tailor to each patient based on their symptoms, their complaints, and then what we find on those are tests.

Yeah, for that genetics piece, you know, you said that you'll kind of go to a different place to test genetics. You're saying, like you'll go to 23andMe in one case and then look for another service that tests more SNPs than 23andMe in other cases.

Exactly. So if we have someone that's got some big medical problems, like I'm seeing somebody who's been. He's been all over the country seeing different places and Mayo and Vanderbilt and all these places around locally and hasn't gotten a solution, we do really extensive Clinical lab testing, not a direct to consumer test. But if I have somebody who's a healthy person in general, they want to dive in and they've already done their 23andMe, then we'll show them how to download the raw data and then we'll upload that raw data into several different programs that give us all those SNPs to look at. So we try to tailor it for the individual. A healthy person, we may not need to dive deep and pay the extra money for the pharmacogenetics until they actually need to take a medication or until they get sick or have a problem that we can't solve with the basic information.

Okay, got it. Well, I want to, I want to dive into some of the different things that you guys do for different folks. So the first thing I want to dive into is based on your guys background in exercise and athletic performance, what kind of things do you do for athletic performance optimization? I mean we've talked about a ton of things on this podcast in terms of training and nutrition and biohacks and stuff. But there's a lot of times, you know, things folks like you are doing that our audience might be unaware of or that kind of flies under the radar when it comes to, you know, strategies that athletes and exercise enthusiasts might be unaware of. So what are some of your guys strategies that you found to be particularly effective for performance optimization?

Well, I think it's like every answer that we're going to give you kind of depends on the person that's completely personalized to give you specific examples. Just use myself as an example. I think for most people if you tell them to work out more, that's generally good advice for 80% of the population. But for me I found with my genetics I don't recover as well as most people. Now in residency when we work in 80 hour weeks. I did two to Ironmans during residency and basically crushed myself every day because I loved it. And I didn't realize at the time that it wasn't normal not to be able to bend over and put my socks in in the morning. I just had chronic inflammation, constant pain and I looked like the picture of health. But I had these overuse injuries all the time and I eventually knew intellectually that I needed to cut back. But it really took me seeing those SNPs and that genomics and understanding that I wasn't designed for that type of volume that I was putting in. So I started to back more and more and got from where I was going two hours a Day to now, I limit myself to about 20 minutes per day on average. And I've never really felt better or performed better. So for somebody like me, we're actually teaching them hacks like, yes, I know you're type A, I know you love and want and want to continually improve yourself. But let's figure out some other things that you can do to improve, like sauna. We go over the science on that. Cryotherapy, meditation, you're still going to be pushing yourself mentally and physically, and you can still bend two hours a day. We want to do something that fits your genetics better. And everyone, I think everybody right now is talking about the power versus endurance tendency and developing workout programs according to that.

I mean, just to clarify for the audience, you're talking about genetic tests to determine whether you're a power responder or an endurance responder. And then training if you're a power responder with more power, low rep, high weight, short, high intensity interval training, and if you're an endurance responder training with more high rep, low weight, more kind of, kind of cardiovascular training.

Yeah, we're doing some of that. And I think there's some validity there. I've seen the studies in Great Britain and soccer players and some other athletes where it does make a difference. But I think it's important to realize that probably even more important is the individual person and what they enjoy. I think the data is great to have, but really we want to get people in general just moving and into an activity that they love. That's the most important thing. And then sleep, I mean, I think hacking and optimizing the sleep. We're talking about performance, but almost nothing is as important as sleep. So all of our patients, for example, get an OURA ring. We track their sleep. We have an aura cloud. So each morning a health coach can call them and say, for example, yesterday my resting heart rate normally is in the low 40s. It was mid-50s. I found for myself, if I go ahead and do my planned workout, I'm going to get sick. So I took the day off. I feel great today. I did a good workout today. And that's what we'll do for our patients if they have a poor night's sleep. Not enough rem, not enough deep sleep, then we'll talk to them. What did you eat last night? What did you do last night? And then we can even optimize when they do workouts. You'll hear general advice to maybe not do a workout too close to bedtime. But for some people, that may Help them sleep more. So we'll look at what their dad is that next morning we'll do an N of one experiment almost every night on patients changing things up in the evening when they, what they, when they work out and just over time try to optimize their performance based on how they respond.

I think the data that Matt's talking about is extremely important. When you're talking about elite athletes or people who just work out a lot and are really, really excited about exercise, those people, you know, they're probably not going to change the style of working out that they're doing or the exercise that they're doing based on genetic data. But we can really help manage over training in those patients by monitoring data like Matt was talking about with HRV from sleep data or even just fairly regular laboratory testing looking at hormones so testosterone, estrogen, sex hormone binding, goblin cortisol and markers of inflammation. That data, if you're testing on a regular basis as you're changing your activity level or your specific workout training program, can be extremely beneficial, extremely useful in terms of getting into some serious detail and really dialing in the recovery and optim. I think that the genetics comes into play a lot more with people who maybe are weekend warriors or are more inactive. And in those patients, that's when we can say, hey look, you know, you're a power responder or you're, you're more of an endurance athlete. And we can say instead of putting you on this five by five, we're going to put you on a ten by ten or you're going to do the hiit training versus, you know, you're going to do more regular cardiovascular activity. Then we can really dial in, you know, the biggest bang for your buck. You know, you've only got 20 minutes a day. How are you going to spend it? This is the best way to spend it based on your genetics. And then we'll go back and test that later.

Now you were saying, Matt, that you exercise for 20 minutes a day. What's that look like for you?

Yeah, so I'll just tell you what I did this morning actually. So I got in the sauna this morning. For the first 20 minutes, I've got an infrared sauna. So I tried to kind of relax. I meditated some. I've got a near infrared actually shining through the glass because that does penetrate glass, even though far and mid doesn't. So for the first 20 minutes just do that relaxation first. Maybe there's a little bit more detox benefit. I'm not sure If I believe all of that data. But it's not gonna hurt to relax.

You mean activating the parasympathetic nervous system when you're in a sauna rather than say, you know, hoisting a kettlebell in the sauna?

Exactly. So I actually do both. But yeah, I do that first. So I go ahead and get the parasympathetic. Then this morning I read for 20 minutes after that, and then my last 20 minutes is when I've got a 90 pound kettlebell in there. I did sets of 20 with that where I it takes about 35 seconds per set. I do a two minute rest between and that's about 15 minutes of work. And that just crushes me. So it's a very short, compressed time of working out. But I get several benefits from that hour long. And I'm not over training quite as much as for me going out for a long run or doing a long set of something else.

Hey, it's Ben. I want to interrupt today's show because I have two events that I am bringing to you. One is in the Swiss Alps this summer, and the other one is in Napa Valley this fall. The Swiss retreat is with me and my family in the Italian quarter of Switzerland where we are going to be meeting with some of the best doctors in biological medicine, going on these wonderful hikes in the Swiss Alps, eating amazing, rich, clean food. And we just had a couple of spots open up in that retreat. It was sold out and then we had a couple people who found out they couldn't make it. So we had, I believe, two rooms just open. So if you want to get in on these rooms, head to Switzerland and experience the best of biological medicine while also staying with my family in this wonderful retreat, beautiful place out in the Swiss Alps. You just go to greensmoothiegirl.com BenGreenfield GreenSmoothieGirl.com BenGreenfield because my partner on this event is the green smoothie girl, Robin Openshaw. So she's an expert in detoxification as well. And she's putting this whole event together and I'm gonna be there. You also should know about this runga event. For that you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Runga R U N G A Basically the way that that works is you come together in this amazing hotspot in Napa valley located on 70 acres of forest. It's like our own mini national park. We do mobility, breathwork, sauna, cold therapy, personalized small group training. My wife is there. She does cooking demos and cooking classes. We eat these wonderful, vibrant organic meals. It is an all inclusive retreat, extremely high end, and we've got room for a few slots in that too. So you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comRunga for that. And of course, towards the end of this episode, I'm gonna tell you about a third of the you could go to, but you'll have to tune into the rest of the episode for that. In addition, I wanted to mention that this podcast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. So ZipRecruiter, what they do is they scan thousands of resumes using their matching technology to find people with the right experience and they invite them to apply for your job. Because hiring is challenging. You don't want to dig through reams of paperwork covering your desk. That's annoying. Plus, paper kills trees. But what ZipRecruiter does is they hunt down, they spotlight the top candidates. You don't have to dig through all these profiles and resumes and they find the perfect person for any job that you need to have done. It's so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site in one day. That's pretty good. That's some time hacking, if you ask me. So to get ZipRecruiter for free, what you do is you go to ZipRecruiter.com green that's ZipRecruiter.com G R E E N green. I don't know why I had to spell green for you, but there you have it. This podcast is also brought to you by markpro. What is marcpro? It is this fantastic little electronic stimulation device. It stimulates your muscles, but in a far different way than these like as seen on tv give you six pack ABS electrical mus stimulation devices. No, no, no, no, sir. This thing is built to actually allow your muscle to recover, allow joints and injuries to be able to get blood flow increased to them. And it relies upon a specific waveform that grabs your muscles in a very therapeutic way and it heals injuries super freaking fast. I like to put a little CBD oil or magnesium oil on a wounded spot or a sore spot. I slap these electrodes on and then I'll even cover that with ice so I can turn it up even higher. And it just milks pain out of any part of your body that's hurting. It's actually the only major recovery product that's FDA cleared for pain relief. And it works like Gangbusters. They're giving all of my listeners 10% off. And it's very simple. What you do is use code benarkpro.com and you smell Mark with a C markpro.com use code Ben for 10% off@markpro.com and also don't forget to look at all those events I just mentioned if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com calendar. Yeah, and related to that parasympathetic nervous system sauna type of thing, I've also noticed like if I lay on my back in the sauna or meditate in the sauna, the sweat is different. It actually does feel and I realize this is totally woo. I haven't actually done an analysis in terms of metals in my sweat or composition of toxins in sweat or anything like that, but I have indeed noticed that the sweat feels different. It sometimes flows far more easily. It feels as though the pores are more open. Which sounds counterintuitive because you'd think you'd get hotter doing exercise in a sauna. And I'm talking about an infrared sauna by the way, which is I think is kind of the best one based on thethe, you know, the photonic penetration of the light into the tissue versus a dry sauna or smoke sauna or wet sauna. But I've definitely noticed a difference with that as well. So it sounds like you guys areyou kinda have a multimodal approach similar to the way I work with my athletes, where we're doing HRV data, we're doing sleep data, we're working in things that are passive form of forms of exercise that avoid the need for beating up the body over and over again, like cryotherapy, like sauna, like breath work. And you know, I think as much as it gets laughed at still in, especially in pro sports, which is kind of like a good old boys network where you, you know, you do the barbell and you drink your Gatorade. You know, I think a lot of smart athletes are beginning to kind of tune into this concept of not just self quantification, but also some of these alternative ways to improve fitness or improve performance without necessarily exercising in the traditional sense of the word. So sounds like we're on the same page as far as that's concerned. Another area that I noticed that you guys specialize in is kind of like cognitive performance, brain health, dementia, Alzheimer's. Tell me about that and what your approach to that is.

Our approach, I guess starts out with like everything else, genetic testing, but that's because with Alzheimer's and dementia, knowing your risk is extremely important. So Alzheimer's is easier to treat before the symptoms start. So if you've got an APOE4 gene, that increases your risk of Alzheimer's by three to 15 times, depending on how many of those genes you have. And it also makes Alzheimer's come on earlier, so sometimes as early as in your 50s. And traditionally, people didn't really recommend testing for Apoe because we just thought there was nothing you could do about it. So why would you want to know something bad about your risk factors in life if you couldn't do anything? But we're learning that that thought process is actually wrong. And there is such thing as Alzheimer's treatment and prevention. And the good news is that about 80% of that is the things that you talk about on your podcast all the time and the things that we're prescribing for our patients. It's things like healthy diet, sleep, exercise, detoxification. If you can get all those things right, you're 80% of the way there to preventing Alzheimer's in the future. So Matt and I both read and researched the recode protocol, which is described pretty well in the book the End of Alzheimer's by Del Bredesen. And I actually went on and took some classes by Bredesen so that I'm credentialed to actually apply that to patients. But we've also gone a step further, and we've recognized that the research in Alzheimer's disease is moving forward at an extremely rapid pace. Just recently, there was all these studies and all this news about P. Gingivalis and its role in Alzheimer's.

P. Gingivalis?

Yeah.

That's a bacteria in your mouth that has been found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's. And now they think there's a significant link to it. We're trying to partner with people so that we can basically use research like that as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting 15 years for randomized controlled trials to take place. We want to use it on our patients who need it now.

Yeah. One of the first dentists to publish that data was quite a while back. It was Dr. Pam Stein Van Ar. We actually added her. She's our Director of Oral health at Wild Health. And so we take the Recoil protocol, and then we'll take Dr. Stein Van Arsdahl. If we have a difficult patient who the Recoil protocol is not working on, and then surely looking and kind of address the oral health, shutting down that fire in your brain and Inflammation from maybe bad oral hygiene. And then we also have Dr. Angley Lynn, who's one of the top researchers in the world in Alzheimer's, and specifically, she has great studies on a ketogenic diet and really has kind of unpublished literature on just how much of a metabolic disease this. We have scientists like those and Dr. Battaglioli, the microbiologist on our team, who, if we have a difficult patient that the recoil protocol is not working on. The reco protocol is a very personalized and precision approach, but sometimes we need to take it a step further and really involve those scientists in looking at the data and seeing what are we missing here? How can we really affect this? Because it's such a horrible disease, we're really trying to kind of throw everything at it that we can.

Yeah, there's that new documentary, Root Cause, that talks a lot about. About Alzheimer's and the link between that and the mouth and the microbiome. And then I was reading a Fortune magazine article, and I'll link to it in the show. Notes about something called beta methylamino L alanine BMAA and about its role in neurodegenerative conditions. And this was fascinating. They actually found this neurotoxin that was present in the food chain of these people. They were like the indigenous population of Guam, and they were getting a lot of Alzheimer's and dementia like symptoms because they were eating, I believe, a diet that included, like, flying foxes or bats, which had very high levels of this bmaa. And it turns out that apparently BMAA might be something that's also increasingly present based on toxins and bad water and some of the pollution of algae and water, et cetera, it's winding up in food supplies in Westernized societies as well. Like, even if we're not eating, eating bats per se, especially like seafood algae, spirulina, shellfish, like, a lot of these seem to be turning up with higher levels of bmaa. So that's a very recent article, but had you guys gotten tuned into that at all?

Yeah, I read that article. It was really interesting to me. I get a little bit concerned that it's similar to so many other quote, unquote, causes of Alzheimer's that we found. It's really one thing that maybe causes inflammation and contributes to the disease, but it's such a multimodal thing. I mean, Dale bredesen talks about 36 different things and these 36 different holes in your roof, and you got to plug all the holes. I do think that's something that can lead to it and can accelerate it. But we really do think we have to take a really holistic approach and do really extensive testing to identify the root causes. Causes for each individual. But yeah, that was a fascinating article. It's really, really cool stuff.

Yeah, sure. And for those of you who may not want to read the entire book by Del Bredesen called the End of Alzheimer's, even though I think it's an absolutely fantastic read for anyone who wants to tune into this, there was a recent article called Reversal of cognitive decline in 100 patients in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. And it kind of lays out like literally 100 different case reports from Dale Bredesen. These weren't clinical studies. These were just multiple people that responded to his, I think. What'd you say? Just 34 different things that he does.

Yeah, 36.

Yeah. It's like hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber and high levels of DHA and a ketogenic diet and, you know, photobiomodulation, like these laser lights on the head. And you know, a lot of times allopathic medicine scoffs at these type of approaches because it's very difficult to do like a double blinded clinical study on 30 seconds, six different treatments. But the fact is, I mean, he's got the proof in the pudding right there. This stuff is working. But it's one of those things that again, like a lot of doctors aren't putting into practice simply because it's very difficult to say any which one thing is working. And so it throws some people for a loop.

Yeah. And we're just interested in what works. And his approach seems to be working. And so we're all for it. And the problem is it's. I don't know if it'll ever get really massive NIH funding or other things like that, because the money in the research goes into finding the magic pill, the magic bullet. And I just don't think we're gonna ever have that in Alzheimer's disease. It's gonna be something that's gonna be more lifestyle and diet and interventions that are gonna pay a lot. But it works. I mean, he's proving it works and we're trying to practice according to that and just do what works for our patients.

Yeah. Okay, so that's your approach to athletic performance and also to cognitive performance. Now, what about anti aging and longevity? I mean, this is a huge interest now and I know a lot of folks and you kind of have a little snip on your website about how anti aging medicine is something that you guys do. What kind of things do you do to enhance longevity or to allow people to feel better as they age?

Well, I mean, I think you're the king of that space. I mean, your podcast, you've got a lot of great stuff on there. But for us, kind of the general approach is I think when people think about anti aging treatments, their mind immediately jumps to compounds and molecules like metformin, resveratrol, rapamycin, nicotinamide, riboside, things like that. And don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of some of those for some people. But to me, the ultimate hack is when I can find an ancient practice that's been done for thousands of years that simulates one of these compounds which we've seen, the scientifically proven biological mechanism, for example, rapamycin. We know that rapamycin works because it inhibits mtor, it induces autophagy. But we also know that fasting does the same thing in every religion in the world. We've got got does fasting and has done this for thousands of years. And we find it really prevalent in longevity hot spots. So even if there's great data and safety profile for rapamycin, we still don't have that level of experience with it like we do for fasting. And it's personalized. My mom and dad, for example, everybody asks us about metformin. Should we all be on metformin? And for me, not yet my mom and dad, absolutely. But I personally, I'm still young enough that I am concerned about longevity. I've got four kids. But I'm also still pretty concerned with performance. And there seems to be a bit of a trade off with some of these molecules. So for me, like with metformin, I've decided to revisit the data when I'm 40 and see if my goals have changed just enough that I start taking at that point. So we really try to make a personalized decision about each of these compounds and molecules for each individual person based on the trade offs, the risks and benefits, and that person's kind of lifestyles and goals.

Yeah, that's interesting what you say about rapamycin. You ever heard of spermidine?

I have, yes.

Yeah, it's like a polyamine. You get it from, well, you find it in semen, as you would guess with the name spermidine, but you can get it in like old stinky cheese and fermented soy products like miso and natto. And it appears to work on the same cellular autophagy mechanisms as Rapamycin does. So that's another one that you could throw into the mix along with fasting is just eating fermented soy products and aged cheese or good. I like the European cheeses because they're higher in the protein or they're lower in the A1 protein, which is a protein associated with autoimmune disease that we get with cows bred in America. But if you get your cheeses from Europe, a lot of times it's a two cheese, you can get a good aged cheese. And most of the cheese I ate is only like a European cheese, which you can, which you can of course buy in the US but you can also kind of look, kind of look into if you're getting a cow cheese with a goat cheese, it's not as much of an issue. But, but spermidine one, a lot of.

Good spermidine jokes I think we'll probably avoid.

Yeah, now. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Guys, you can, you can tell your, your, your women that spermidine is actually a known longevity aid. So the, the thing about metformin, you mentioned briefly that it be, might, might diminish performance. But have you seen any research? Because, you know, the story is that it can inhibit some of the activity of the, of the complex one in the electron transport chain and that that might reduce your ability to produce ATP during exercise. But I'm curious, have you guys actually seen any studies done in athletes who take metformin or anything like that?

No, I haven't. And it's just what you mentioned. Yeah, the mechanism there makes sense that it may have some kind of mitochondrial function, functions that as someone who's really trying to improve performance that I wouldn't really necessarily want, I don't have any data saying that action is going to mess that up. And so like I said, for me, I'll probably start taking it pretty soon, but I'm just not there yet. It's just that hint of potentially some problems is what makes me at least think about it before I just put everybody on it.

Doctor, what about stem cells?

I think that's another one where the jury is out. But I mean, we are in certain cases using exosomes and stem cells for our patients. I mean, it's something that, it's a risk, benefit thing. I mean, a normal healthy person like us, I would be a little cautious, but someone who's got some real major health issues, sometimes it's going to be worth it. So it's something that we're offering, but it's a pretty intense discussion with the patient to see if it's right for them. And it's kind of a shared decision making things. We try to go over what the potential risks could be, and if they want to go for it, then we're not really paternalistic physicians. We don't really, really try to push a patient one way or the other. We try to lay out the risks and benefits. And for some patients, it makes sense.

Now, do you have like a specific type of stem cell that you use, like amniotic versus umbilical versus placental or fat or bone?

So we're working with an orthopedic surgeon who will do some bone marrow aspirates and we'll spin that down. We also do some prp and that's kind of a similar mechanism as well. And then exosomes from chimaera, we use those. I think you get a pretty similar effect just with the signaling from the exosomes and simulating your own stem cells as you would from these other types of stem cells. And honestly though, too, we love to activate your endogenous stem cells through fasting, like we mentioned earlier, and other mechanisms where we can do it without as much of the risks.

What other mechanisms aside from fasting?

I mean, that's the main one. I mean, anything, a lot of things, like even dry needling that people will do, a lot of that is similar to prp. I mean, you're causing some damage, you're activating stem cells. So dry needling, fasting, those are the main two things.

A lot of good research on pulsed electromagnetic field therapy for that, like using these PEMF devices which are readily available to the general population. There are pockets of stem cells found in bone marrow. And for example, you can take a PEMF device to like the long bones and the femur and kind of enhance some stem cell production or do that prior to a stem cell procedure to have more, more available stem cells or increase stem cell mobilization. I mean, that's again, a lot of people, like, I couldn't, could never do that. Where do you find the time? Well, like I have a PEMF device. I just slap it on my femur while I'm standing and working during the day. I use kind of a high intensity one called a PA pulse centers unit for that. But I mean, it does the trick. It just vibrates your legs and you can feel literally like as you know, haven't done an ultrasound podcast Mike, like some of these things you can feel in your bones when those, when those waves hit you.

Yeah, you can even hear Them in your brain? Sometimes if you're ultrasound in your brain.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So in terms of any type of. Of kind of when we're on the realm of anti aging and longevity and talking about supplements and things like that, do you guys each personally have any kind of supplementation regimen or must have go to nutraceuticals or supplements or even medications that you use on a daily basis?

Yeah, definitely. Unfortunately it changes on a weekly basis. But I do have a daily basis of medications that I'm using. The things that I'm really into right now are Ashwagandha. I've been taking that fairly regularly due to the reason that, or for the reason that I've got an APOE4 gene. So I've sort of bought into the research on that suggesting that there could be some protection for the development of Alzheimer's. And also the other one I've been playing around with is phosphatidylcholine, trying to use that for liver detoxification.

And I've been playing around with that a little bit. Although I haven't had a chance to recheck labs to see if I've had any improvement in lfts from that one. But I'm really interested in getting some labs done on Friday to check that out and see how that one worked. But yeah, lots of different supplements. I'm always playing around with something new and then testing to see how my laboratory tests respond to it. Most significantly with testosterone. Testosterone actually is the one that I've been playing around with the most, I think.

Now I want to ask you about testosterone here in a second. How you're measuring that and what kind of measurements you do and how you kind of time those supplement intake to actually get good information. But with Ashwagandha, I'm actually a huge fan of Ashwagandha. I mean, it's got a lot going forward in terms of reducing blood sugar levels and modulating cortisol and even in some studies increasing testosterone and fertility. But there are different forms. Probably the one that I think is the best and it's important that people understand not all forms of herbs especially are created equal. And there's one called KSM66 that like a lot of good supplement companies will use. And that's like an Ashwagandha extract that's very high, concentrated, very bioabsorbable. They use only the roots of the Ashwagandha plant for that one. I actually use this supplement, people have probably heard me talk about this before, called Tian Qi. And that's just got a ton of this KSM 66 form of Ashwagandha in it. And that in my opinion is the best way to go if you're gonna use Ashwagandha is look for a supplement that's got KSM 66 in it. But back to the testing. When you're testing a supplement, do you allow a certain number of days for it to build up in the system before you go and do some kind of a test? And also kind of a two part question, you mentioned testosterone. How are you monitoring testosterone in response to some of these supplements that you're using?

Yeah.

So definitely want to allow for some time for the supplement to build up in your system. I generally think that it takes about five days of taking a supplement to get it to what we call steady state. So I don't want to test too early. And then also you have to account for if there's any response from the body. So especially when with hormonal balances, I think that it does take a decent amount of time to see some response in your hormonal balance and altercation of your HPA axis and all that. So I tend to only test about every month. Otherwise I get a little, not only do I get a little too obsessive about things and change too quickly, but also I want to give my body a chance to sort of reset and then reinitiate the production of that testosterone. And I've found that that may even, even I might not need to wait quite that long. But it seems to be a fairly consistent time frame to see an appropriate response. So, you know, for example, regarding the testosterone, for a while there I was, you know, I got my testosterone first checked a couple years ago. I noticed that it was low, it was in, in the 2002 range and I was pretty asymptomatic with it. But I was like, you know, that's unacceptable. I don't want it that low. I definitely want to, want to play with this. So I started doing, doing some self experimentation and I started off with supplements first because I feel like that was pretty much like the easiest thing to do and if I could find one that worked, then great. So I tried a few things. I tried dhea, I tried fenugreek, I tried some ashwagandha, lots of different things and basically found little to no response.

And then I tested with basically a month of doing nothing but trying to sleep better, working out less. So I decreased my endurance from six to seven times a week to three or less. I increased power movements And I increased strength training. I started using a Joovelite on a daily basis, and I started sleeping and tracking my sleep with an Oura ring. And within a month had a doubling of my testosterone, which is. I mean, way greater than I got with any other supplementation. I think that's.

That's kind of like the. The Alzheimer's stuff, though. You know, it's tough to say which one thing worked, but sometimes it doesn't matter, right? It's a multimodal approach, and you can simply. Rather than saying the Joov Lite worked, you can say this cluster of strategies works. Right, Exactly.

And I think if we can get patients there, then it doesn't really matter how we get there. We just have to find the right combination of things to get the patient to the right place. And I think looking back on it now with the hindsight, you know, I realized, like, I was working out way too much. I was over training, I wasn't sleeping enough. You know, I mean, it's like all the basics were off. So why try fixing it with supplements when the basics aren't even there in the first place, Doctor, when in our.

Current world we live in is basically designed to make our hormones be out of whack? We've got horrible sleep schedules. We have hormones in our meat, all the interrupting compounds that are in our lives, the stress of our busy lives. And when I think about all that, it's honestly surprising to me when someone does have perfectly balanced hormones. The answer, though, I think, isn't to start chasing our tails and to put everybody on hormone replacement therapy and slather the body up with testosterone cream. The first step is testing to see if there's an imbalance and then a conversation and education with the patient, because we usually can identify the biggest cause of the disruption just by going over a quick checklist of. Okay, how do you sleep? We'll look at the sleep with ora ring. What are your dietary habits? What's your normal daily activities? What's your workout regimen like with mice? And we know all those hacks to improve testosterone. And we've got a lot of things that we can try, but we need to identify the root cause first and then spend some time on lifestyle before we even discuss any sort of hormone supplementation or anything like that.

How do you measure testosterone?

Combination of serum and urinary hormone metabolites.

Okay, gotcha. Like a Dutch test or. Yep.

Yeah, we used it. We to used the Dutch test. That's actually my. I'm not as sold on the Dutch test for men. I still think it's beneficial, but it's. I mean, I think it's key for women.

Really? Why is that?

Because for multiple reasons. So with women, you know, especially perimenopausal and premenopausal women, there's so much fluctuation of estrogen and progesterone throughout their cycle that if you just do a single serum test, it really you. Unless you know exactly what day of their cycle cycle they're on, it's a very little benefit. And you also don't know how they're responding throughout the rest of their cycle. Dutch offers a test where you can basically get urine every single day for the entire cycle, and you can map out their progesterone and estrogen changes throughout the entire cycle. So I think it's extremely beneficial in determining if somebody's got estrogen dominance or if their estrogen's getting too low.

It' sit's just a totally different way than just a single serum test. That makes it much more easy to figure out how to intervene.

Yeah, I actually like it for guys, too. I mean, for those of you who don't know, the Dutch test is measuring. It's a urine test. I have a whole podcast on it. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com WildHealth and I'll link to. Actually, I've got two big podcasts on the Dutch test. But in a nutshell, it's a urinary measurement. You're peeing multiple times per day. Then you send it into the lab, and what you get back is not just your levels of, say, testosterone or cortisol or melatonin or estrogens or progesterone or any of these other things that are being. Being produced by your endocrine system, but you'll also get kind of like the upstream metabolites of those and the downstream metabolites of those. You could say, well, hey, my cortisol is high, but my cortisol is high because I got a bunch of cortisol metabolites. And, you know, it appears that maybe cortisol isor, low cortisol metabolites, right? Like, cortisol is getting produced. It's hanging around the bloodstream. And maybe it's not that I'm producing too much cortisol, it's just not getting broken down in the way that it should, which can indicate, you know, things like a hypothyroid issue or something else interfering with normal cortisol metabolism. So rather than you just saying, I gotta figure Out a way to lower my cortisol? Well, no, maybe you need to. Maybe need to work on your thyroid or maybe you need to adjust your diet. And so there's all sorts of very interesting data you can collect from it. But I'll link to that one in the show notes if you guys want to learn more about the Dutch test. Another one that you guys, I know, kind of specialize in is cardiovascular health. When it comes to cardiovascular health, what are some of the big things that you do with your patients?

Well, there's, I mean, so many. In a lot of ways, it's similar to dementia in that there's, you know, it's multifactorial, there's lots of things that are causing cardiovascular disease. And it's also a huge problem. Right. I mean, just like dementia affects a huge part of the population, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer. So it really requires, unfortunately, a very multimodal approach, again, where the primary interventions probably account for about 80% of the benefit. And those include things like diet and lifestyle interventions. But what we try to do is, is focus on three primary areas, and I think these are the sort of the primary factors for cardiovascular disease, and that's inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, and a high LDL particle count. I think those three things are the three things that most people would agree are the cause of most cardiovascular disease, and we want to attack each one of those directly. So inflammation, for example, a complicated chronic disease process can originate from all kinds of different things, from overtraining and running too much much to food sensitivities and a leaky gut. So really taking a very broad approach to identify the presence of inflammation and then trying to figure out how to correct it. It's a tough. But it's a crucial part of the process. Endothelial dysfunction. Now, this one's a little bit harder to test for. Requires some sort of hard to find lab tests, but it's fairly easily treated in that you can treat people's blood pressure, you can get them to start using the sauna, you can have them eat chocolate, you know, polyphenols, things that can improve your endothelial dysfunction and improve the amount of nitrous oxide in your endothelium. And then there's cholesterol. So I mentioned cholesterol earlier. This one is challenging and really has to be personalized. Each patient. There's lots of patients out there that absolutely want nothing to do with a statin. And I personally hate putting people on medications, especially if it's going to be.

For the Rest of their life.

Life.

I understand how you know what kind of burden that is, but sometimes the risk is too great and they really do need to be on some sort of medication to reduce their cholesterol. But if we are going to go down that route, then I want to do that from a very precise, in a very precise way so that we're actually treating the elevated cholesterol based on the reason for it. So is it because you produce too much, Is it because you absorb too much? Or is it because you don't clear enough? There are specific medications that act on each one of those particular processes in the body. So rather than just throw everybody on a high dose statin, why don't we figure out why their cholesterol is high in the first place, try some lifestyle and diet interventions first and if those don't work, then put them on the medication that actually attacks that specific reason that it's elevated as opposed to just throwing everybody on a statin. So it's all very nuanced, unfortunately, and I'm not sure I can give you a specific way that we go about it, but it really does take a holistic approach to try to attack something as huge as cardiovascular disease.

Are you guys familiar at all with Dr. Thomas Cowan? So he's been a podcast guest on my show before and I'll link to a fantastic article that kind of summarizes his approach to heart disease. But he throws in a few things in addition to like the inflammation and the endothelial dysfunction and the cholesterol that you had talked about. Number one is he looks at autonomic nervous system like he does a lot with heart rate variability testing and looking at issues in terms of like sympathetic nervous system versus parasympathetic nervous system balance. And even has kind of a little known plant extract that he uses. It's called the insulin of the heart. It's a seed extract from something called, I think it's pronounced strathanthem, something like that. But I'll link to a picture of it and to what exactly it is in the show. Notes for people listening in. But he's actually got a lot of success with using that to balance specifically a decreased parasympathetic tone and excessive sympathetic activity. So he does that. And then he also has an entire book that I actually caught a bunch of flack for when I mentioned on a Joe Rogan show because a lot of people came out of the woodwork saying it was woo science. But it's a book about how the heart is not A pump, and how the heart instead relies upon vortices of fluid and the way that those vortices of fluid move through the heart. Heart can, depending on the integrity of the fluid, allow the heart to be able to move fluid more easily in and out of it. That's a very basic, basic description. Read the book if you want to really take a deep dive into it. But he, based on that, ensures that his patients are using a really, really good mineral and also really, really good clean water and even water that's like structured or been exposed to infrared light to improve its actual ability to be able to create what's called an exclusion zone, like be able to travel through vessels more readily in the same way that fluids would travel through plants. And the last thing he tackles is metabolic acidosis, meaning that he's kind of trying to limit the glycolytic shift that would happen when the cells start to build up lactic acid and surrounding tissues. And he gets into kind of how the buildup of lactic acid and myocardial tissues can be one of the things that causes angina or myocardial infarction. And for that he does adjustments, for example, to diet. He tries to do things that would limit lactic acidosis. Speaking of metformin, that's one of the issues with metformin.

And he's also kind of big into this Weston A. Price diet. You know, he's written a lot of books with Sally Fallon, who heads up the Weston A. Price Foundation. And that's a, that's a diet that he has a lot of success with in his patients. And so he'd be an interesting guy for you guys to look into.

That's really interesting. The heart rate variability stuff I find really, really intriguing. I'm interested to see now that we're gonna, obviously these companies are collecting tons of HRV data on people. If there's, you know, any true correlation between cardiovascular disease and the cause, that's a, a great way of looking at parasympathetic versus sympathetic tone. Right.

And is your heart rate variability and.

Whether that's increasing or decreasing?

Dr. Yeah, exactly. Now, you know, speaking of the Wesson A Price diet, do you guys have a, like a specific diet or nutrition plan that you recommend as kind of like one of your go tos that you find to be successful in a high number of patients, or do you have a specific way of going about identifying the perfect diet for each patient?

Yeah, so. And I don't think there's one specific diet that we would recommend. You know, I don't think Matt and our diets could be any more different. I'm basically eating mostly vegan and he's. And he's mostly in, like, you know, ketosis on a, on a fairly irregular basis. But what we try to do is use genomics to sort of figure out what your predispositions are so that we can kind of get a leg up and figure out exactly how you're going to respond to certain diets. For example, we'll look at things like people are alpha, people are gamma snus SNPs, FTO SNPs. Figure out those patients who have those SNPs are going to more likely have a negative reactivity to saturated fat diets or high saturated fat diets and probably do better with polyunsaturated fats. So those patients we're probably not going to put on a high saturated fat diet. We're probably going to choose something that's got higher polyunsaturated fats so that we reduce their likelihood of insulin resistance and inflammation, cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

But again, I think it's important to talk to the patient, though. I mean, the Weston A Price, if you had to put a not name on a diet that's probably as good as that and the Mediterranean diet. But I'm not going to. Even when we do the genomic testing, I'm not going to recommend the quote, unquote, perfect diet for someone, even if it is the perfect diet for them, if they're not going to adhere to it. So we start with what the person likes. If we identify 100 foods, for example, that they like, then we're probably going to be able to pick 20 to 40 of those that aren't going to be harmful and then combine the genomic, the microbiome and the lab data to kind of back them into a good diet that they can enjoy their entire life, which to me is better than a perfect diet on paper, that they're going to hate their life when they're eating it and they're simply going to stop doing so. I think the Weston Lake process is a great diet, but we do try to drill down a little more and talk about someone's preferences and their genetics and then figure out for them what the best is going to be.

How do you guys eat? What's your diet look like?

Matt? Yeah, I eat. I'm trying to figure out how to summarize it the best. I do eat ketogenic quite a bit. I cycle in and out of ketogenesis I think there's some big benefits to ketones, but at the same time, I'm just a huge fan of plants in general. It's a plant based diet, but I try to get ketogenic as often as I can. The way that I do that is a really compressed feeding window. So each day I've got kind of a fasting period. As small as I can get that feeding window, the smaller the better, and then just as much as nutrient dense as possible. So plants I never eat really breakfast, I usually eat by around noon. I usually try to break my fast after a workout. And then even my diet, my first meal of the day around noon, it's usually something that's pretty fat based, like some bone broth, maybe some almonds and some walnuts. And then the evening I eat just a lot of greens. So a lot of crucifers, a lot of greens. Usually I've got a instapot concoction I have most nights. If I don't have sardines, then I'll just eat this instapot concoction of a lot of wild mushrooms or mushrooms that I grow. I grow about a dozen different varieties of mushrooms on my farm. So mushrooms, vegetables, bone broth and Oregon. And then organ meat, that's, I mean, organ meat. I try to stay away from muscle meat as much as I can, but just really nutrient dense food in a compressed time window I think would be the best description of what I eat.

Okay, okay, got it.

I think I'm really fortunate. I think I'm really fortunate. Where I live, there's a lot of great farmers around who raise their animals in a very humane way. And so when you combine organ meats of either wild game or these animals with these wild mushrooms that are in season, or the mushrooms that I'm growing that I'll dehydrate throughout the year, so I have them all year. We're in a really nice environment for producing a lot of our food in a sustainable and nutritious way.

Now, down there in Kentucky, you also, from what I understand, understand, and I mentioned this briefly in the introduction, but you have like a castle that you work out of, is that correct? Like, is your medical clinic in this castle or what's the deal with the castle?

Yeah, so we basically have a castle in Kentucky. It's a boutique hotel and it's a farm to table restaurant. It's set on 110 acre organic farm. We've got a working saddlebred horse farm there, a giant organic garden, chickens, we get eggs from every day. We've got got goats, a culinary mushroom garden in the forest in the back, a truffle orchard where we're producing these European truffles inoculated on oak trees. And it's a pretty cool place. And honestly I'm really pumped to show you. I know you're coming out April 6th.

I'm bringing my family down on April 6th, but when I'm bringing my family down, this is an actual like I know both you guys are going to be speaking and talking about a lot of this stuff and walking people through it, hands on. You've been kind enough to bring me down and my family down as well to present to people for like a good, like it's 9:00am to 1:00pm so you know, for those of you in the Kentucky area who want to come, come check this thing out, a bunch of discussions and presentations and what else are people going to be able to do there? Like how's this, how's this event going to work on April 6th?

Yeah, we like to educate people. We like to have a good time too. So. So it's going to be a great day. So if you go to wildhealthpodcast.com events, we got a description there. But really our goal is to educate people kind of with two goes. So we want to give people the knowledge to apply a lot of this for themselves. So the things we're talking about now we'll dig deeper into have you drop some of your mad knowledge on people and we'll talk a lot about how you can do a lot of this on your own with direct to consumer options or if somebody really wants to find a clinician to help guide them them, we at least want to educate them enough so they know the right questions to ask about physicians, to pick the right person and then to take some basic steps and not fall into some of the traps of direct to consumer testing and a lot of the self quantifying things that people can do. So yeah, we'll go nine to one with education and then after that, after the three of us kind of give real world examples and go deeper into these topics, we're going to take a field trip to what I think is the most beautiful horse racing track in the world, which is like, which is less than five minutes from the castle. Then after that we're gonna come back for dinner, we'll probably do a bourbon tasting. We have a bourbon steward in residence at the castle who's the only professor, he's the only professor of bourbon studies in the world. And he's gonna do some. He'll do some pallet training with us. And then after that kind of social lubrication of the bourbon tasting, then we'll do a Q and A where people can ask you their questions or us their questions and really dive into this even more. I think it's gonna be incredible. I think the thing I'm most excited about is I don't know how much room we'll have for this, but I think your kids, we're gonna go forage in the woods and then your kids are gonna teach us how to cook some.

Yeah, river and Taryn are coming down. They're gonna teach a cooking class. So for people who want to bring their children, this thing's fully open to kids as well. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. We'll go and forage some on. I've got some wooded acreage off side of the castle, so we'll go. My daughters, Madeline, Avery, they're nine and seven. They love to gather wildfield. So we'll gather some wild foods and then your boys will show us how to cook it deliciously. I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

Amazing. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So for those of you listening in, you could. Where would people fly into if they wanted to do it? What city?

Lexington. So lax. It's literally three minutes from the castle. So you land there. I mean, you can pretty much see the castle when you land almost. It's really close. So, yeah, land. Come have a good time with us and learn some. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Awesome. Very cool. I'll link to that in the show notes. I know, I know registration is pretty limited, but once this podcast comes out, usually folks have about two or three days to act on these things. I find before stuff just fills up, but I'll link to that. I'm also going to link to your guys. Fantastic website and podcast in the show notes. And everything we talked about, from the Alzheimer's research and the book by Dale Bredesen to my podcast with Longevity Health, to the Ashwagandha and the Dutch Test and the Dr. Thomas Cowan podcast, everything I discussed, I'll put a link to in the show notes. And again, that's going to be at BenGreenfieldFitness.com WildHealth Matt Mike, this has been very interesting and I think opened up a lot of people and hopefully even inspired some physicians to expand their practices and start to do the kind of all inclusion inclusive approach that you guys do. So, so thanks what you're doing and keep up the good work.

Thanks. I've. I've been taking notes. I can't wait for these show notes because you mentioned several things I want to dig into more. So thank you.

Yeah, well, you guys got my email. You can always pick my brain more if you need to. So, anyways, I'm Ben Greenfield. Thanks for listening in. This was Dr. Matt Dawson. Move I can talk. Dr. Matt Dawson and Dr. Mike Mullen of Wild Hell Health in Versailles, Kentucky and Bend, Oregon. Look these guys up. Show notes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Wild Health have an amazing week.

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 recommendation 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.