Is This Like Drinking HUNDREDS of Bottles Of Hydrogen In A Single Sitting? The Massive Antioxidant Benefits of *Inhaling* Hydrogen, With Dr. Tyler LeBaron & Alex Tarnava.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast—

our machine gives you up to 4% hydrogen gas, which on the extreme, depending on how you're breathing, you'd have to provide over 7 liters of hydrogen gas per minute in order to ensure you can always have that same level of hydrogen.

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

Both of my podcast guests today have been on the podcast before. Actually, Tyler, I think you've been on like 2 or 3 times.

It's been a while. I mean, the first was like, yeah, 2018, and then we've done some other like live stuff or whatever, but yeah.

Yeah, that's right, guys. That's the voice of Tyler LeBaron, the founder and executive director of the Molecular Hydrogen Institute. He's also an incredible athlete, probably right now training for the carry a kettlebell with one arm up the side of a mountain grip strength test with a backflip and pull-ups at the top of the mountain. I don't know. He's a competitive arm wrestler too. And, I'm actually not joking. Tyler is an incredible athlete. Tyler, what's your marathon time?

I mean, the last one I did was a 2 hours and 30 minutes. So, um, you know, I'm, I'm probably, you know, in the 220s right now, I think.

And you almost fit into the category of like hybrid athlete though, because you do the grip strength. You don't do any deadlifting, do you?

Uh, no, I do deadlifts also, just because I want to have that overall strength. I mean, you know, my deadlift isn't, you know, way up there, you know, but I can still hit, you know, I did what, 385, you know, a couple weeks ago.

Yeah. That's respectable. So, 385 and a 230 marathon and a competitive arm wrestler. And, like I mentioned, the director of the Molecular Hydrogen Institute, we're going to talk a lot about hydrogen today for those of you listening in, but not just the same old, same old, put hydrogen tablets in a glass of water. There's some cool emerging science in hydrogen. And, my other guest, Alex Tarnava, has also been on the show. Alex, I'm sure you recalled you shared your crazy story of Healing Your Body Using Molecular Hydrogen and just the whole background of hydrogen tablets and what to get and what to avoid. So, we won't have to rehash a lot of this stuff on today's show because I want people to go and listen to those other shows just so we don't have to spend the entire next hour in review mode. I want to jump into just some of the cool sexy new shit if that sounds good to you guys.

Works for me.

Yeah. Okay. Alright, cool. So, before we do jump in, I guess I'll ask just one review question. Some people may have been hiding under a rock for the past few years and not really heard that much about molecular hydrogen. Let's say we're on an elevator like 0 to 30th floor. Each of you guys in your own words, tell me why it is that you think molecular hydrogen is so darn cool enough for you to actually have this as your main gig.

One, it was such a complex problem when I jumped into it. It was the first thing that as I learned more and more and more, I felt I needed to learn more on the complexity. But two, as the story started to emerge and we're putting together, we're realizing that hydrogen has been integral to us throughout all of evolution. And the mechanism that we evolved to produce it internally endogenously is no longer working properly due to changed diet, disrupted microbiome. We used to consume 100 to 150 grams of dietary fiber per day through 10,000 years of horticulture, we've stripped the fiber from our foods. Now, we consume a fraction of that and it's largely killed a lot of bacteria we need to make hydrogen. So, even if we up our dietary fiber intake, it might make us sick if we go too high, we don't produce as much hydrogen. So really, the only way that we get this critical gas now is exogenously through inhalation or water or bathing. And, we're learning to understand that it plays some pivotal roles in basically our stress responses. So, it really helps keep us in homeostasis and then our bodies in harmony. So, it's not like a miracle for anything, but it helps us correct and heal and adapt to situations and the daily stressors of life.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. I mean, you just listed probably 8 different benefits, Alex. And before I kind of get your take on this, Tyler, I did want to also mention that 2 days ago, and I kind of bookmarked it just so I can mention it on today's show, I saw a recent study indicating, and this was a 6-week randomized controlled trial, that training adults who were drinking hydrogen-rich water twice a day during the resistance training protocol had lower markers of muscle damage. I think they had an improvement in blood lipids as well and enhanced recovery. And, from what I could tell, there was not an impact on muscular strength or development, meaning that unlike a lot of other antioxidants, hydrogen didn't seem to blunt any type of mitochondrial or strength effects of exercise. Did you see that one, Tyler?

Was it in 50-plus-year-old individuals?

Yeah, it was in older adults.

So, I'm an author on that paper.

You're an author on that paper, Alex? Yeah. Oh, okay.

I actually presented this in a poster in Milan last year at an academic conference called ASPEN.

Yeah, the effects of drinking hydrogen-rich water for 6 weeks on exercise-related biomarkers, blah, blah, blah, that one?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, cool.

Yeah, it was an interesting study. And actually, Tyler and I are authors on a different study that showed very similar things in a completely opposite study group in basically high-level elite athletes, Olympic-level athletes. So, we're seeing it in opposite groups. Now, in this group, the placebo group had borderline rhabdo. They had very serious damage. They had a 700% increase in creatine kinase and 1,100% increase in myoglobin. So, they were wrecked. The hydrogen group had no significant rise in either creatine kinase or myoglobin, and it regulated their cortisol response, so their stress response. So, athletes will actually see higher spikes in cortisol after exercise as part of the stress adaptation, and hydrogen corrected that to increase the cortisol after exercise for these uninitiated. So, these were older adults who had no adult exercise experience. It also increased free testosterone and DHEA in that study.

Wow. I don't know, Tyler, what do you think would be the mechanism of action for hydrogen to do something like increase free testosterone? I didn't know it had an impact on the endocrine system.

Well, it's not huge. I mean, we're not talking about some sort of endogenous luteinizing hormone or something to stimulate the testicular production of testosterone. But when you are able to reduce the amount of oxidative stress and inflammation that's going on, then your cells can work normal again. And a lot of people are suffering from cellular stress. And if you're able to clear out that debris, then you're going— your cells are going to start functioning properly again. And so it's expected that some of these levels will go back up or back down, depending on what we're talking about. And be corrected to go back to homeostasis.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think it kind of makes it a no-brainer in terms of the antioxidant that you would choose to use before or after exercise. Was there anything special about the diurnal dosing, taking it twice a day?

The reason we often do twice a day, now you want hydrogen intermittently, and a lot to, especially as you go to older people away from elite athletes, they can't drink a large enough volume of water. So, we're basically just trying to get the dosage higher. We've been seeing in a lot of these study groups hydrogen is working in a dose and concentration-dependent manner. So, we use the tablets to up the concentration and then we might do it 2 or 3 times a day to get a total dose increase.

Ben Greenfield: Tyler, I didn't really give you a chance to give your elevator pitch for hydrogen. How do you describe it to people?

Tyler Wright: Well, first, we need to know what we're talking about. Hydrogen is a molecule of gas. It's just two hydrogen atoms that are bound together. And that's the craze of these new days, is an alternative energy source. And I am very excited about this area because I've been studying it since 2009. It's been 16 years. And when I went to Japan in 2013 to do research for an internship at Nagoya University, and I was able to meet the actual researchers and then go to their labs and then be part of the research myself, That made me realize that molecular hydrogen has the potential to radically revolutionize healthcare and to provide something that is safe and potentially effective to everybody. And as, as Alex mentioned earlier, it's, it's something natural to our bodies. We have evolved to naturally produce hydrogen gas in our gut microbiome. And so it's not like we're introducing some alien or foreign pharmaceutical substance that could potentially have adverse effects. To your point earlier about antioxidant supplementation with athletes, often what we can see is these high levels of antioxidants can blunt exercise performance or the adaptations more specifically, whereas hydrogen gas does not do that. So that's where my passion comes from, is because of the safety profile is so high. It is evolutionarily linked to and correlated to longer improved health and improved metrics, and it does have this potential to really radically revolutionize healthcare. Yeah.

To expand on what Tyler was saying, there's actually a really interesting paradox with hydrogen and exercise and stress. So, what we're seeing in the literature is when you say rats will do a forced swim test with or without hydrogen, the hydrogen group actually has a higher spike in cellular stress than the control group during the exercise, but they rebound to homeostasis faster, so they're recovering quicker. It's like they're exercising harder and recovering quicker. But in physiological stress, we're actually seeing a reduction. We're seeing an anti-fatigue effect, and we're seeing, say, things like a lower submaximal heart rate doing the same amount of work. So there's an acute spike in the cellular stress to drive further adaptation, while also lowering the total physiological stress. It's very interesting, but this is actually one of Tyler's areas of expertise, so he can probably explain it a bit better than me.

Yeah, it sounds almost like adaptogenic.

Yeah. In one of my earlier publications, and we published in the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, we talked about how the molecule of hydrogen acts more like an exercise mimetic and a redox adaptogen because it really is a modulator of all these different areas. And it's it has this mitohormesis or hormetic-like effect on our cells. So, it's going to mimic some of the effects like exercise or caloric restriction.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Okay. Now, I know a lot of people probably, especially those who have been listening to health podcasts for a while, they've probably heard their fair share of, you know, take these hydrogen tablets and put in a glass of water and that's the way they get hydrogen and that's the way that most people have seen hydrogen get assimilated in the body or delivered. When I was in Vegas, in Las Vegas last year, I went to this conference put on by A4M, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. And, it seems like whenever I go to that conference, which is the Consumer Electronics Show of biohacking in a way, you just see all the different things that are coming down the pipeline like shockwave therapy, peptides and exosomes were a huge one. And then, I was shocked, all the way down to the VIP lounge, which I somehow got into, I think I had a fake name tag, there were hydrogen inhalation machines everywhere. This appeared to be the newest craze. Obviously, it kind of made me perk up a little bit and pay attention because all of a sudden, here's this new delivery mechanism for hydrogen. That people are saying depending on who you ask is the equivalent of drinking dozens or hundreds of bottles of hydrogen water. And then, Alex, after you and I recorded our last podcast and close to the time that I was at A4M, you started talking to me about hydrogen inhalation. So, I don't know who wants to start, but fill me in on this craze. Is it effective? Is it safe? I realize it's kind of a loaded question, but what's the deal with hydrogen inhalation?

I'll start and then Tyler can jump in. So, hydrogen inhalation is, I'd say, additive to hydrogen water. They have different distributions throughout the body. Inhalation is going to get in far higher amounts to your skeletal tissue, for instance, into your lungs, actually to your brain too. Hydrogen water is getting far better into your gut and digestive tract, into your liver. And, through the gut, it will drive certain hormones that have neuroprotective effects like ghrelin. So, they're different for different applications. I think you should do both of them.

Ben Greenfield: When you say you think you should do both, you mean inhale hydrogen and consume it in water form?

Yeah, yeah. That's my thoughts. Now, hydrogen inhalation units hadn't really emerged as being popular for a number of reasons. One, the units that they're using in the large clinical trials are not actually commercial units. The researchers are designing this in the lab.

Tyler has actually had to do this during his PhD program.

Program. And the reason for that is they can become quite explosive. There's already emerging case studies of them blowing up in people's faces. Yeah, because they're explosive concentrations of hydrogen gas that are coming through nasal cannulas and off-gassing around people's heads. So, Tyler and I have started talking about this problem together 7 years ago and have spent 7 years engineering a machine that's both safe and effective that gives a precise concentration of hydrogen below the explosive limit every breath no matter how you breathe because we're not breathing at a constant rate. And Tyler will get a lot deeper into this, but those are the big considerations. Hydrogen inhalation is the future for a lot of purposes. Hydrogen water is still important. But as with any therapy, the two considerations we need to look at is, is it safe and is it effective? And that cannot be said for a lot of these units on the market that are designed by Chinese engineers.

Well, not the stereotype or anything, Alex.

Geez.

What, what, what I'll, what I'll say to that, it's, uh, shouldn't be controversial.

The Chinese government has lower levels of safety regard for their people than the Western world, so they're designing them within the acceptable parameters of their law, not, not of ours.

Okay, so a lot of little questions there. Specifically, even though I'm not an engineer, my engineering mind goes to why is it that inhalation would somehow reach or penetrate some of these tissues that you talked about better like the gut and the liver, Alex, and then how these machines actually deliver hydrogen. Can you speak to that, Tyler?

Yeah. So again, when you take hydrogen water, the water just goes to your stomach and then that hydrogen gas goes to the liver, goes to the venous blood, goes to the heart, and then you exhale 90% of all the hydrogen gas out. So very, a very small amount actually reaches the brain or your skeletal tissues because you just— it goes to the lungs. And if you think about taking a, like, hydrogen water and you just pour it into a cookie sheet, and all the hydrogen gas is going to be gone really quick because it reaches equilibrium with the atmosphere very quickly. The same thing is happening when you take hydrogen water. It's gone quickly. But yet, as Alex pointed out, there's still a lot of benefits to drinking hydrogen water because of the direct effects on the microbiome. Activates second messenger systems and so on. So there are specific benefits from hydrogen water that you actually do not get from inhalation. But when you inhale hydrogen gas, that gas is just dissolved into the blood, and the heart pumps that blood to all your tissues, to your muscles, to your brain, to your big toe and the little toe. It gets everywhere. And again, hydrogen gas is not attached to like hemoglobin or something like oxygen is. It just dissolves in the blood and goes everywhere. And then it can have direct effects on those cells and those tissues. So when we're dosing molecular hydrogen in our research studies, what we'll want to do is make sure that the fraction of inspired air is a specific therapeutic concentration. So it's really easy in cell culture studies. Well, we'll have like an incubation chamber and we'll just fill the incubation chamber with a specific percent of hydrogen gas. Say 1%, 2%, or 3% or 4%. Now, here's the important part. You have to keep the concentration below 4% because once it goes above 4.6%, it becomes flammable.

Okay. I was wondering that, by the way, because I have a hydrogen inhalation machine now. We can talk more about that later. And, it tops out at 4%, which to me, I didn't know if that was low, high, but it sounds like that's a good thing because otherwise it could get explosive.

Yes. It's a very good thing, but there's going to be a caveat with what you're talking about. That's very important, but it's— but, but just to be critical on this point is when hydrogen gas exceeds that 4.6% concentration, it becomes flammable. And that's becomes a very major risk for an individual as well as doing research in the laboratory. So in the incubation chamber, we can just keep the percent. All the hydrogen gas in the headspace is like 2% hydrogen gas. Same thing with an animal study. You have an animal cage, you can connect the hoses of of the gas tank and mix the ratios so that the animal cage is exactly 2%. And now it doesn't matter if that rat is, you know, running around on the wheel or playing. All the air in their environment is exactly 2%. Just like right now, you're exercising and the air around you is 21% oxygen, and we're sitting down and our air is also 21% oxygen, but we're still getting the same fraction of inspired air— the same fraction of inspired oxygen, I mean. It doesn't matter if you're breathing fast or slow. So when we do the clinical studies, the big clinical studies, we actually will use a face mask and we'll connect this to a tank of gas which is exactly 2.3% hydrogen gas or 3% hydrogen gas, whatever it is that we're using. That way it doesn't get diluted, because when you take in a breath of air then if you just have like a nasal cannula in, then you're going to entrain or you're going to take in a lot of the outside air and you're going to dilute the gas that you want.

Right, because there's not a seal between the cannula and the nostrils.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I got it.

That makes sense. And remember that, and that, and that machine, like, let's say a typical hydrogen machine that, that provides you with, say, 600 milliliters per minute. Well, that— most people, we know, like, what's called minute ventilation is how many liters of air you breathe per minute. It's called minute ventilation, and that's going to range between, you know, 5 to 12 liters per minute. So that's— so if you think about, like, let's say 10 liters per minute, 10,000 milliliters, well, if a machine's only providing 600 milliliters, there's no way that you can ever get a therapeutic effect with that. Plus, when it's in your nose, when you take a breath, what if part of the breath is through your mouth and not only your nose? You're going to dilute it. And, what if it's only seen in your mouth?

Which could also happen because, by the way, I've got mine just so you guys know. I have one of those Roxievo light sound machines. Have you seen those where you lay underneath the light and it does weird psychedelic images? Increase theta and delta brainwaves, use it for meditation. And next to that, I have one of those PEMF chairs. So, my H2 inhale machine is sandwiched in between those. So, I'm typically breathing from it while I'm sitting there doing PEMF or laying there, but the light sound machine kind of knocks you out. And, there's a pretty good chance I'm breathing through my mouth for some of that.

So, if you had a nasal cannula, you can understand that you would put— you'd be— you would be diluting all the hydrogen gas, so it'd be below a therapeutic level. We know from all the studies that you need to have at least a 1% hydrogen gas in the air that you breathe, or the fraction of hydrogen gas being inhaled needs to be at least 1%. And in order to do that with a nasal cannula, you need to be anywhere between, uh, 300 milliliters and above, even up to a liter of hydrogen gas per minute to get a therapeutic effective hydrogen gas because we talked about you're diluting all that hydrogen gas by taking your inhalation.

Have you guys seen one of these actually explode?

That's the other part that we— see, when we were doing my research, when I was doing my PhD, we had to use a tank that we would make sure is below the 4% hydrogen gas because we couldn't run the risk of, you know, having an explosion in the laboratory. And there are documented cases in China and Japan and other areas here in the world, but these ones have been documented with the governments where people have been inhaling hydrogen gas like with a nasal cannula in and some ignition source ends up happening and it causes a facial fracture. I mean, literally their nostrils, you know, combusting.

And in one instance, it traveled back into a woman and burned her lungs.

Is this because there's a malfunction within the machine itself?

No, there's nothing to them. No, it means the machine is working great. It's actually providing you with high concentration hydrogen gas. It's just that if there is, if there is a static electricity, some discharge, an energy source or something, then that can travel into the lungs. And I guess actually, to your point, it is possible that if there's, if there's a problem with the machine, like if it's a typical oxyhydrogen machine that they're connected into the machine itself, If there was some sort of spark or something in the machine and that ignited in the machine, then that flame would be carried through the nasal cannula and down into the lungs.

Okay, got it. So, you guys basically engineered a machine that could hold it at 4% that has a mask that has these safety features built in. What else is different about the one that you guys do? It's called the H2 Inhale, by the way.

This is really important because you mentioned there's another machine— there are some other machines out there that will just take and dilute the concentration. So it is, instead of 100% hydrogen gas, it is only, say, 4% hydrogen gas. Now the problem is, when you do that, when you take an inhalation, like when I just, like right now, is we're just sitting here, we take a breath, you inhale around 500 milliliters per second, 500 milliliters to 600 milliliters per second. Okay, this is called the the, the peak inspiratory flow is, is basically what we're talking about. And, and actually, when we look at it, you're closer to like— we do this in oxygen therapy a lot where, where you're, you're talking about a peak inspiratory flow rate of around 35 to 45 liters per minute. That's, that's just the rate. So when you end up inhaling from these other machines, you dilute the concentration down from that 100% all the way down to maybe 0.1%. And if we remember what I said earlier, you need to have at least 1% concentration to be therapeutic. So if you dilute the concentration because of your normal breathing below 1%, it won't be therapeutic. So how do we overcome this? Because the only way to provide a flow rate that was— that will ensure that you're always getting enough of that gas is to provide about 35 to 45 liters per minute of a gas through the nasal cannula. That is, that is really high. I mean, most nasal cannulas can only handle, you know, a few liters of gas per minute. And so we're talking about 35, that's like a That's a totally different type of nasal cannula, actually. But you can't just do that. So how is our machine different? If the reason why— how it works is because we have a reservoir, we have an inflatable bag. So this bag, which is 3 liters, gets filled with exactly the precise amount of hydrogen gas that you decide, whether it's 1, 2, 3, or 4% hydrogen gas. This bag gets filled with that precise amount of hydrogen gas. And then when you take an inhalation at, like I said, a rate of say 35 liters per minute, you're able to inhale around 500 or even a liter or even up to 3 liters in that single inhalation. And every molecule of air you put into your body came from that bag. So, you know what the precise concentration of hydrogen is. And then when you exhale, all the exhalation just goes out the mask. That's because it's a one-way mask. So that, that is the biggest part of the IP is this inflatable bag aspect ensures 3 things. Okay. It ensures that every inhalation you take is therapeutic because it's above 1%. It ensures that it's a precise concentration. It's not going to be sometimes 1%, sometimes 3%, sometimes it's not going to be all over the place. It's exactly what you set it at. And, that way, we can do real studies and real research. And, number 3, it's never going to be flammable.

Tyler, to add, that way people can set their machine to the exact concentration used in the clinical studies because right now they're just guessing. And, some of these studies say in rodents will find for one indication 4% is better than 2%, but for the next indication, 2% might be better than 4%.

Give me an example of that. Percentage versus a lower percentage?

Yeah, so for example, the, the very first study— not the very first one, but the most cited pioneering study— was the Nature Medicine article published in 2007, and it was a stroke model. And they took the rats and they induced a stroke model by cutting the blood supply to the brain, and they administered hydrogen gas to the experimental group or the control And they found that the administration of hydrogen gas drastically prevented the brain damage from the stroke. And you can look at the brain slice and you can tell so easily that there's a whole bunch of white area in the brain, which is the dead portion of the brain, whereas the portion that was administered— or the rats, the group of rats that were administered just 2% hydrogen gas, they had significant protection. All right. And again, how do they administer that? They didn't put nasal cannulas in these rats. They were in a— in this cage, so they would ensure that every amount of air they were breathing was exactly 2% hydrogen gas. But in that study, they also compared different concentrations, and they compared to different drugs. They compared it to, say, adaravone, a medical drug, and hydrogen gas is more effective. But they also compared it to 1% hydrogen gas. That means that when animals would inhale, the rodents would inhale 1% or that fraction of the air inhaled would be hydrogen. They also did 2%. They also did 4%. And they found that 1% was also therapeutic but not as good as 2%. But when you compare that to 4%, 4% was not as effective. In fact, 4% wasn't even as effective as 1%. And that could have something to do with our conversation earlier about this hormesis-like effect of hydrogen. There's a number of questions and anomalies going on here.

Just what I'm thinking about is it could be hard for a consumer to know. Let's say they were doing it for, I don't know, skin benefits versus digestive issues versus sleep. Could you at this point with the research that's out there query GPT about proper percentages to choose or would there be a chart somewhere or is it still just kind of guesswork?

I love that question. You're a true scientist at heart. Because that, that is exactly the question that we all have and that we can finally start answering because we have access to a machine like this. And so there are some things that we can base it just on what was done in the clinical studies, what was done even in the animal studies, so we can start doing that. But now we can start really doing research to determine, hey, I want skin benefits, so let's do this concentration. I need neurological concentration, so I'll do a 2%. I have you know, cancer, so I want to do 4%. And I think over time we will be able to have like a chart or something so you can really make sure you're getting the precise concentration you want for the correct duration that you want. And the only way you could do that is with this type of machine, because all the other machines with the nasal cannula, you're getting anywhere between a 0 point or less than 0.1%, which is not even therapeutic, all the way up to maybe as high as a 5% or 6% concentration or potentially higher depending on how you're breathing and how big you are, like all these things. So it's not a precise concentration, but ultimately you can do that with ours.

I want to add something, and I'm sure Tyler will have something else to add after this. He mentioned, uh, cancer. And, uh, first and foremost, cancer is very complex. There's a lot of different types of cancer. I don't for a minute want to say that hydrogen is going to cure anyone's cancer. We need a lot more research, but there's a lot of positive research on cancer. Now, for instance, in certain cancer cell line cultures, actually, that Tyler's been an author on, there are instances where a low concentration of hydrogen can actually strengthen the cancer cell, whereas a high concentration can have antitumor effects and reduce cancer. And actually, one of the first papers that was published on the therapeutic effects of hydrogen goes all the way back to the 1970s. I think it was a joint project between researchers at Baylor and Texas A&M. And they had rats in a hydrogen-rich hyperbaric chamber. I think it was something crazy like 7 atmospheres of pressure, and it basically killed the cancer, like wiped it out completely. And this is what we need a lot more research on. And for each population group with each ailment, what is the precise percentage that we should be aiming for, the precise duration of treatment? And now with inhalation, we can finally start answering those questions with this machine we've designed.

Ben Greenfield: Talk to me about the dosing and timing. And, I really probably should have asked you guys this question just privately at some point for the past few months because I've had the machine for a couple of months. Because I tend to be in my lounge for maybe 20 to 40 minutes, I've usually got the mask on for 20 to 40 minutes at 4% just while I'm sitting there meditating or relaxing or whatever. Talk to me about what you know about ideal dosing and timing.

Yeah, at this point there's still no optimal or ideal. We don't quite know yet. We just are basing things off of the clinical studies, what has been shown to be effective, and also looking at a, a, the pharmacokinetics, because it takes about 20 to 30 minutes for hydrogen gas to distribute throughout the body and reach equilibrium.. And we know from cell culture studies, some of the work that I've been involved in, that we can see effects of hydrogen gas in cell culture studies within just a few minutes. But when you're inhaling hydrogen gas, it's gonna take, like I said, 20 to 30 minutes in order for that hydrogen gas molecules to reach the therapeutic concentration in all of your tissues. So at a minimum, you probably want to inhale it for 20 to 30 minutes. And some of these studies, many of them will go for, you know, an hour to a few hours and some even as long as 18 hours. And animal studies, they'll sometimes go several days. So our probably recommendation right now until we have better data is probably a minimum of 20 to 30 minutes and probably, you know, 1 to an hour a day and just kind of play around with that. Every individual will be maybe a little bit different. Until we have more research.

Okay. Yeah, based on the saturation you explained, that makes sense. What about breathing? Do you need to focus on breathing deeply or can you still get good saturation just with your normal breath pattern?

I love this question because breathwork is so popular and there's a lot of benefits to doing these types of breathwork like just these quicker inhales or a double inhale and then a slow extended exhale. If you did that kind of breathwork with any other device using a nasal cannula, you can almost be assured you will not get a therapeutic dose of hydrogen. With, with this machine, because every inhalation you take, whether big or small, fast or slow, you will get a therapeutic dose, and it absolutely does not matter how you breathe. You just need to breathe. Now, I would— I think it's probably a good practice if you can. Yeah, you can do some good breathing, you know, do some extended exhales and you can do all of that. It's not going to increase the rate of saturation necessarily. I mean, I guess there is a— if you increase your minute ventilation more than— if your normal minute ventilation is say 8 liters per minute and now you're going to just breathe more consciously and you're going to do 12 liters per minute. Then yes, maybe that'll increase the rate of saturation from, say, 30 minutes. Now it's gonna be down to 20 minutes, but it's not gonna reach a higher concentration because the— because the amount of hydrogen gas being inhaled is identical. And that's what really sets this machine apart from anything else, is you can always do any type of breathing you want and you'll always get a precise therapeutic non-flammable concentration of hydrogen.

I want to add a few things to this, and this is anecdotal, but we're hearing it from a lot of people. I'm experiencing it myself. Yourself too. Hydrogen does have a big effect on the brain, and I do practice controlled breathing at times. I have to shift gears, triage what I'm doing in real time. I work 100 hours a week between projects. Sometimes I have some time to say work on one of my books, but my head isn't in it. It's racing. I can't calm myself down. I've found that when I take my laptop, go into the room where the inhalation is, put it on and practice deep breathing, that within 10 minutes, 15 minutes, my mind is clear enough to start writing.

Have you placebo-controlled that against deep breathing without the hydrogen machine?

Yeah, but I mean, I know I don't have the hydrogen machine on, so it's not a perfect placebo control. I use deep breathing every day. So, there's another aspect. Again, this could be totally placebo. My wife is 3 months postpartum. She's waking up to pump in the middle of the night every night and she's been finding She can't fall back asleep when she comes to bed with her perfect setup. We have the waves crashing, dim purple light, all the things going, all her pillows, everything's perfect, or a comfortable bed, doesn't work. She can't fall back asleep. So, she started setting herself up on the hydrogen inhalation unit in this chair that is not comfortable to sleep on. It's pretty upright and she is conking out for an extra 2, 3 hours every morning.

Is that because there's some type of sedative parasympathetic activating effect of hydrogen?

There's a lot that could be said about that. But, when your body is out of homeostasis and it has a dysregulation of your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, it's not going to work as it should work. So, you might be totally chronically fatigued, but your sympathetic activity is, is too much. And yes, hydrogen, you know, due to all of its mechanisms on the mitochondria, the energy level, the, the cellular stress, oxidative stress, the inflammatory effects, all of these can contribute to the cells functioning correctly or properly now. And so now can help your, your organs and your body and your system start integrating correctly. So you can get back to homeostasis and then you can fall asleep like you should.

I briefly alluded to this earlier, but even at that event, a few people came up to me and told me this is like drinking hundreds of bottles of hydrogen water. Is that a fair comparison? Does it not even matter because they're different delivery mechanisms going to different tissues like Alex was saying, or could you make a comparison at all between this? And one reason I'm asking just so you know is some people are like, well, I'm going to take the money and buy a hydrogen machine. I'm going to quit buying tablets. And then, are they going to miss out on something from not using tablets? You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I'll just briefly say that it's probably best to think of it as an apple and orange comparison. They really can't be compared that way. Now, you can attempt to compare things in the sense that how many milligrams of hydrogen are in the water you're drinking versus how many milligrams of hydrogen there are in an hour-long inhalation session. And in that case, yes, you are getting hundreds of more— hundreds of times more hydrogen from inhalation session, but the effects are materially and distinctly different. And one of our— the first publications actually is out of the lab I was at in Nagoya University as well, when they actually looked at the, the effects of hydrogen gas inhalation and drinking hydrogen water, and they come— and a combinational effects. And indeed, in this study, they found that there are certain things that were changed from drinking hydrogen water that were not changed from inhalation and vice versa. And there was an additive effect on some of those markers as, as well as other effects that happen when you did them both. And this just makes sense when we go back to the pharmacokinetics of different methods, because again, with hydrogen water, you're mainly getting that into your GI tract. And it's going to the heart and the lungs and you're, and you're losing it. So all the benefits to the brain and the other tissues of the body from hydrogen water are likely due to other second messenger systems like improving the microbiome, induction of gastric ghrelin secretion, as Alex mentioned earlier. And whereas inhalation, you're getting the direct effects, your hydrogen gas is going directly to the brain. You can measure concentrations in the brain and it reaches a therapeutic threshold to directly induce changes in the brain and the skeletal tissue and other organs and so on.

Okay. Another engineering type of question, why is it that I fill this basin that's attached to the machine with distilled water?

Yeah. That's because it uses the process of electrolysis, which is by definition the decomposition of water to hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. So, The water becomes a source of hydrogen gas because water is just H2O. So you split the water molecule, you get hydrogen gas. The oxygen gas is vented out into the room air, and then the hydrogen gas is, is what you end up— is what ends up going to the inflatable bag with a specific ratio so you can dictate what the concentration is and so on. Now you want to use only distilled water because you go through the electrolysis process, the chamber, and that uses platinum electrodes, and it's a proton exchange membrane. And you want to have very clean, very pure water, distilled water, because the minerals will, will damage the, the membrane, because the membrane itself acts like an electrolyte. Uh, you know, otherwise in electrolysis, you typically have to have ions in the water, but with this type of technology, um, you don't, you don't do that because the membrane itself acts as the electrolyte. So that's why it's require to have distilled water.

Okay. Pause here for just a second just for people listening. I am taking show notes. They're going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/inhalehydrogen. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/inhalehydrogen. So, shifting focus just a little bit here, guys, it was actually at that same expo that I also saw a little bit lesser trend but still a trend because I think I saw 3 booths talking about or showcasing this, transdermal absorption of hydrogen, like these hydrogen baths. Have you guys seen these?

Yeah.

Yes. Okay. Is this science? Is there a thing to transdermal absorption or talk to me about that?

I mean, with the tablets, I have IP and we manufacture larger bath tablets and getting them larger and more effective. We have 2 clinical trials and a few case studies on them. We're seeing some quite remarkable benefits. We do need bigger studies to continue replicating this. But, for instance, we showed equivalency to RICE protocol after grade 2 ankle tears in pro soccer players. So, rest, ice, compress, elevate. And actually, if you look at the data, there was multiple strong trends that the hydrogen bath was significant, was trending to be better. Than the Rice protocol. I know the researchers were not expecting that. And, if they'd recruited another 4 people, they think they would have been able to show that hydrogen bathing was potentially preferred over Rice.

Yeah. Geez, I wonder what would happen if they would have been inhaling hydrogen while taking a hydrogen bath.

We don't have good pharmacokinetic data on what is going to get to the soft tissue better, inhalation or water. I suspect, like bathing in hydrogen water just from the visual effects we see.

I was kind of joking. I know there's going to be at least one biohacker listening in who's like, "I'm getting a hydrogen bath," and there's going to be a hydrogen inhalation machine hanging above it with a glass of hydrogen tablets next to that on my bath caddy. Have you taken a bath in the hydrogen water, Tyler?

Yeah. I mean, that's— I was like over like 10-something years ago, you know, when this was coming out.

Oh, you, you did it, you did in Serbia too when you went to—

yeah, yeah, yeah, that was some of the researchers. I also did in Serbia, that was just a couple years ago. But, um, yeah, one of the— there's a lot of benefits of hydrogen on the skin, and some of the, um, earliest studies, uh, with some of these like natural spring waters that contain hydrogen gas, some of those benefits that were noted on the skin could— was probably due because of the molecular hydrogen. And the concentration with the bath water doesn't have to be as high because when that hydrogen water— when the hydrogen in the water is, is low, it's coming in direct contact with the skin. So it only has to be like a few, you know, parts per billion or micrograms, you know, per liter. And that's enough because it's directly on the skin giving those benefits. But if you talk about systemic benefits, like actually getting the hydrogen gas to, to go transdermally and into the bloodstream, then you need a much higher concentration because it's gonna follow its osmotic gradient, so to speak. But you also have the diffusion principles, and there's a barrier of the skin that's gonna take a higher gradient in order to get the hydrogen molecules into the skin. But yeah, I've done it. I think it's a great way. But, but surely with inhalation you will reach those concentrations in the tissues faster than you will with bathing just because you're going through the lungs. And the lungs by definition is the most effective way to dissolve a gas into a solution.

Okay. All right. Got it. My friend Gary Brecka, he's always got something that he's talking about. And I think lately he's really amping on the idea of just the 3 main things, hydrogen tablets, Baja Gold sea salt. I think the third one's amino acids. And, I actually like Gary, I respect him. I think there are certain things that if you do them stack well together, like he also is the guy who kind of gave me the idea of stacking PEMF with oxygen with red light therapy. And, I actually really like that protocol and feel really good when I do it. But, for you guys, if you could do your own little stack and say, okay, these are some of the things that you should/could do to enhance the effects of hydrogen? Whether you're inhaling it or drinking a glass of hydrogen water, what do you think are some of the things that if someone were really focusing on that would also really help move the dial in conjunction with that?

I'll touch base and Tyler can add because we've actually talked about this a lot recently. There's actually a chapter in my book that's coming out in a week or so. It's just going through formatting. It's called "Stress Hack" that talks about stacking various hormetic agents and the complexities around them. I think it's going to be different for every person and every person each day. That's just how stress works. I call hydrogen perhaps the only universal stacker. In every instance with these other hormetic agents that it's been tested with, hydrogen has potentiated their benefits and mitigated their potential damages. So, that's my thoughts there. Yeah, I know Gary loves it. I've been on his podcast. He's a customer, he's a friend. We talk often. Him and Tyler talk often too. I think hydrogen and red light, for instance, is great together, hydrogen and exercise. I do my hydrogen all the time. And actually, just this last weekend, it was very lucky that I was having a little bit of a not a bachelor's party with my friends because it wasn't a party, but my wife and I got married a while ago, but we're finally having the ceremony this coming weekend. So, for our party, we were going to a Nordic spa with sauna, infrared sauna, and 1 Celsius cold plunges. Well, on the way there, we got T-boned by a reckless driver. That crossed forwards. Yeah. And, burns from the airbags, bruises, all banged up. And, I doubled up on the hydrogen tablets. I hit the hydrogen inhalation. I spent 2.5 hours doing infrared sauna, cold plunge, infrared sauna, cold plunge. I feel fine now. That was 2 days ago, a couple days ago.

Geez, man, that's crazy. Maybe God didn't want you guys to get married. I'm joking. No, seriously, that's scary. I'm glad you're okay. I guess it makes sense though with the anti-inflammatory benefits of hydrogen that would have kicked in and helped. So, you're saying things like red light, contrast therapy, hydrogen, those are some of the tools in your bag?

Yeah. I love sauna. I love cold. I love heat. I love cold. I love red light. I like hydrogen. I love exercise. I'm sure Tyler's not too far off.

What about you, Tyler, especially being the competitive arm wrestling uphill kettlebell carrying marathon champion that you are?

It sounds so interesting when you exaggerate my ability.

How do you unicycle?

I'm pretty conservative when it comes to a lot of the different biohacks and things that are out there. I'm skeptical. I think I'm very concerned about potentially harming my performance by, uh, haphazardly trying new things. Just like with antioxidants, we know research-wise, mechanistically-wise, it's like, hey, yeah, we should take more antioxidants because oxidative stress impairs recovery. And then we know the data now shows the opposite. Same, same story with anti-inflammatories.

Yeah, and if I could interrupt you real quick, it's not that you should take more antioxidants, it's that your cells should have access to more antioxidants, but it's better for them largely to be endogenously produced.

Yeah, because your body's going to regulate them. You also can't just take more sulforaphane or something because that could potentially constitutively activate Nrf2-Keap1 pathway, or if you do genetic mutations, this has been done several times and it still does not help. So, even if it's endogenously produced, it doesn't save you from the potential damages of these high levels of reductive stress, basically. And so same story for anti-inflammatories, same idea for people who originally were promoting cold plunge as the best way to recover from exercise and get adaptations or something. You know, now the research is also pretty clear that that's not the best way to do— there's still benefits of doing that, different ones, but not the ones that were originally claimed. So I'm just trying to say that for me, when I'm going to take something, I'm very cautious, skeptical, and conservative. So, I don't do a lot of stacking or things, but there are things like red light. I think that because that's like being out in the sun, for example. Well, there's some differences, but there's some things that mimic nature a lot that we should be doing anyways. And stacking things like with exercise that I already like to do and we already know what the research is on hydrogen, that's very important. I would say that for anybody who is really on the fringe of biohacking stuff, or they're like, hey, you know, there's preliminary ideas out there, there's mechanistic concepts, I think this might work, I'm gonna go ahead and try it— those are the people that should absolutely be taking hydrogen. Because if whatever they're doing, that whatever intervention it is, ends up causing problems and negating benefits and causing harm, hydrogen would have been there to help reduce those potential negative adverse effects and ideally potentiate the plausible benefits.

Yeah, yeah. Let's say I'm listening, I have a whatever, a lounge, a study desk, I want to get one of these machines and just passively use it during the day. What's the damage, fellas? What are we talking here in terms of cost? I mean, I mean, sorry, I mean the investment.

Yeah, yeah. We thought long and hard about this. Now, I've invested 7 figures, we've spent 7 years engineering this, but at the end of the day, Tyler's an academic and I live in the forest and like nature and like cooking for myself and going for walks. Neither of us are doing this to get rich, we just want wide access. So, a lot of our competitors with other machines are 3 to 5 times more expensive than we are. And less therapeutic and potentially explosive. So, we set it for $4,999. It's about the lowest we can go with all the tariffs and everything. And, by the way, we had set that price before the extra tariffs came in and we just are taking less profits and keeping that price.

Ben Greenfield: So, it's basically like that would be your investment in your home medicine cabinet for inflammation and oxidation, a lot of the other benefits of hydrogen if you wanted to really concentrate it in what sounds like probably the most efficient way to get it in.

Yeah, I'm personally very excited about this. I've been at this research and things for 16 years. This is the first time I have officially endorsed a product that I've really been part of this.

That's true actually, dude. I've known you for a long time. I actually haven't seen your face on much. This might be the first time. I think you're right that I've seen you like really get behind something.

Yeah, and that's ultimately because it's not that we have so much clinical research that we can tell you absolutely this will have these benefits, but the data looks very promising. There are people who want to use it, and if you want to use something, you should keep two principles in mind. Number one, are you getting enough? Are you getting what is delivered in clinical studies? And number 2, is it safe? And I know of no other product where you can inhale hydrogen gas and you can ensure that every breath is therapeutic and it will always be safe, that you can't accidentally or even unintentionally misuse the product in a way that can be flammable or harmful. And because of that, I feel not only happy but in some, some way even ethically obligated to say this is the product that I endorse. I'm not saying that other products can't work and won't work, but for these reasons that every inhalation is therapeutic, that could also explain why some people try other devices, they try inhalation and they don't receive any benefits. It's possible because they were not getting enough hydrogen. And then they— you get— and you see this all the time, there's a lot of people out here who try to lower flow rate hydrogen And when they went to a higher flow rate, they got benefits. Well, when you do the dilution calculations, when you do the math and you look at the peak inspiratory flow rate and all of this, you find that it's because the lower flow rates they were using before was not giving a therapeutic effect. And now they're using a new machine which gives them maybe 1, 2, maybe even 3%. Our machine gives you up to 4% hydrogen gas, which on the extreme, depending on how you're breathing, you'd have to provide over 7 liters of hydrogen gas per minute in order to ensure you can always have that same level of hydrogen. So there's, there's a lot to be said about that. And that, that's because I'm excited. That makes me very excited about this whole area. And especially from an academic perspective, now we can really do a lot of research from cell culture studies, animal studies, and human studies all around the world, because we have a machine, a device to deliver this hydrogen in a precise, controlled, nonflammable way, which really is not— was not possible before without contacting a major gas company and asking to make a specialty of gas, which is extremely expensive and very difficult to do. And now it can be done.

Yeah. Well, Tyler, you had me at nonflammable. That's, that's pretty high in my book of things I don't want happening when I'm relaxing in my lounge is an explosion. I might also actually try this for sleep, move it up by the bedside and slap it on and see what happens when you breathe it for 8 hours. And, my wife always loves it when I have sexy tubes coming out of my face during a night of sleep anyways, so it'll happen.

Well, just about the flammability, this is really important because there's going to be hundreds of people who use these very explosive machines and they never have a problem. And so, I'm not saying that if you have one, it's going to blow up or something, you're going to hurt yourself. It's just the fact that it does happen.

You're just saying it might.

Yeah, I'm just saying that it might. Just like somebody who smokes, they can be 100 years old and they still didn't get lung cancer. And so where do you draw the line? And ethically, what can I specifically say? And I will say when it comes to the flammability, we should consider a few things. Like you've heard the sad stories with the hyperbaric oxygen, like with a child that was inside and a little bit of static electricity. Well, that was a major explosion. I remember oxygen is an oxidizer. It's not a fuel. It's, it's just an oxidizer. It's not flammable. Hydrogen gas is flammable.

And the Hindenburg.

Yeah. It's the Hindenburg. And in fact, the amount of energy to ignite hydrogen gas is lower than the amount of energy needed to have static electricity, a spark. And so, I mean, you can just imagine, Ben, you're out, you're at your you're in your office or whatever inhaling the hydrogen gas with a nasal cannula and your son comes from behind all static electricity charged up and goes to touch you on the nose.

I get it. Just stop. People get the idea. You may Deadpool yourself. You may die. You might die.

I was going to say neither Tyler or I think it's going to happen to every person or even most people. And the thing is we're seeing these reports even when it's not that popular. Say it's happening to 1 in 1,000 people. Well, that is way too much from our Western standards of ethics, but in China, you can get it. It's legal. And that was my point earlier.

Yeah, yeah. Alright. Well, we've lost all of our sponsors from the Chinese engineering complex now, Alex. Guys, this is actually pretty fascinating. For those of you listening in, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/InhaleHydrogen. The machine's called the H2 Inhale. I've had mine for a while. Full disclosure, these guys gave me one to mess around with. You guys actually gave me a beta test unit and then I think I've got one that works even better now. So, thank you. And, if you're interested in trying one out, I've got some discount codes and stuff on these. Go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/inhalehydrogen. You'll find them there. And guys, thanks so much. You're my two biggest sources of knowledge on all things hydrogen.

Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Alright, folks. I'm Ben Greenfield along with Tyler and Alex signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com. Have an amazing week.

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