Killing Fat Cells, Fixing Mitochondria, Growing Superfoods & More: The Official,...

What's up? It's Ben Greenfield. And if you hear strange whirs or clicks or whistles in the background behind not today's podcast, but in this introduction for you, it's because I'm at this place called Peak Brain la. Yes. I have just started into my first three days of optimizing my brain. I know that sounds like a woo woo term, but literally I did what's called a quantitative electroencephalography. If I can spit that out. Qeeg of my brain. And found several areas that could use improvement in terms of everything from executive function to memory to cognitive processing to especially something I really want to focus on attention and distractibility and. Oh hey look, a squirrel. No, I'm just kidding. Anyways though. So we're retraining my brain. So I'm spending three days here and then I go home with three months worth of EEG training tools to actually train my brain both consciously and subconsciously while it I stare at this screen and fly a spaceship. It's kind of like this idea of achieving a lifetime's worth of meditation within several months and it's extremely interesting. Right now all I'm really doing is Snapchatting the story, but if you want to check it out, if you're listening to this podcast at the time that it comes out, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat and you can kind of see what I'm up to. And I'm going to be podcasting a very detailed podcast about what this all involves and what it is. But in case you're interested, the name of the place that I'm training at is called the Peak Brain Institute. The URL should just be peakbraininstitute.com so if you live near LA, I believe they're also up in Orange county and you want to try this out for yourself. Visit them if you call them and let them know, or go to their website and let them know that you heard about them through me. They'll give you the white glove treatment, I think. Maybe, or perhaps you'll just be treated like anyone else walking in off the street. Not a special Ben Greenfield fitness listener. Anyways, what you are about to hear in today's episode is one of the more fun and jam packed and information packed episodes that I think I've recorded ever, literally ever. You're definitely going to want to hit the show notes for this one. It is with. Well, you know what? I'm going to surprise you. You're going to find out who it's with in just a moment. But first, a few quick things. First of all, I was reading Men's Health magazine last night and they have this entire article about this growing movement towards ordering organic buffalo worms. I don't even know what a buffalo worm is. I'm not sure I want to. As well as things like June bugs and grasshoppers and even flies, black flies. While eating flies and worms may sound disgusting, the fact is that insects, and especially crickets in particular, have a higher percentage protein content than beef jerky, chicken, salmon, eggs. They've got all the essential amino acids, twice the iron of spinach, and they are sustainable. Plus, as my kids like to say, crickets don't fart, so you produce 100 times less greenhouse gases than, say, cows. So the idea here, and why I'm telling you all this, is that there is this company called Exo Cricket Bars. Not only do they make these bars, but they make them in a variety of flavors. Banana bread, coconut, apple, cinnamon, blueberry, vanilla. And my favorite, because it defines everything that is American comfort food. Peanut butter and jelly, which is right up there in my opinion, with macaroni and cheese and Big Macs when it comes to American comfort food. By the way, if the folks from Exoprotein are listening in, please do a Big Mac or a macaroni and cheese flavored bar. I would be all over that. But in the meantime, if you want to try anything from Xoprotein, you go to exoprotein.com and when you do, you can get a sampler pack with all their most popular flavors, flavors, everything. I just listed off for less than 10 bucks and that's free shipping included. So that's 33% off. And you can go discover what all the hype is about over@xoprotein.com Ben that's exoprotein.com Ben now, this podcast is also brought to you by, something I've been forced to do more of lately because I had to skip coffee for the electroencephalography treatments I've been doing, getting better and better at saying that word every time I say it. So what I've been doing in the mornings is instead drinking something that kind of sort of tastes like coffee, but that replaces the caffeine. And it's called a chaga elixir. So this is a dual extracted, wild crafted Siberian chaga mushroom extract. Just the fact that it comes from Siberia automatically makes it badass. If anything comes from Siberia, I will take it. Siberian macaroni and cheese, Siberian children, Siberian wives. Siberia just seems like a very gritty, cool place I'd love to visit someday and wander through the frozen, frozen tundra. Anyways though, so this chaga that I'm drinking is Siberian. Not only is it Siberian, it's dual extracted so it's water soluble and also fat soluble, so it gets absorbed quite well. And then it's blended with Eleuthero rose hips and fild mint, which are also fantastic for your immune system. But that complement the fact that Chaga is one of the most potent immune boosting compounds that you can consume. It improves your ability to fight off things like infections and bacteria and colds and viruses. And you just literally rip a packet open and you dump it straight into your mouth if you're gritty and Siberian like me. Otherwise you add it to a cup of water or a smoothie or tea or coffee or anything like that. Anyways though, here is how you get this stuff for a 15% discount. And this is kind of clunky, so put on your thinking cap or write this down on a notepad. Foursigmatic.com that's F O U R sigmatic.com foursigmatic.com greenfield and when you go to that URL, use code BenGreenfield to get a 15% discount. Count it.

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And finally, this podcast is brought to you by the best shave you're ever gonna get. Actually, last night I'm in Beverly Hills like I mentioned, and I went to this place called La Voda Spa. L A V O D a spa. So what I do when I go to the spa and I was with a group of buddies, which makes this all the more fun is I go 15 minutes hot, 5 minutes cold, plunge as times through as possible. I actually spent a full two hours of hot cold thermogenesis last night. You'd think I actually have a life, but I actually have nothing better to do than go from hot saunas to cold pools. And afterwards I happened to come across the little cheap ass drugstore razor in the complimentary locker room part of the spa. And so I shaved with that razor and it really, really sucked compared to my Harry's five blade German engineered razor. I actually had to do it because it's free. I'm horrible at that. If I'm walking at the grocery store and someone has like a sample table there and it's samples that I know are really bad for me. Like say macaroni and cheese, why not? We've already kicked that horse to death, I'll eat it anyways. Because it's free. I'm weird like that anyways, though, so I used the razor because it was free, but I shouldn't have. I should have used my Harry's razor. And the reason I like the Harry's razor is because they are five blades, German engineered razors, and they're like a Cadillac for your face. Flex hinge lubricating strip. I don't even understand half the features on this thing. Ergonomic handle. All I know is it's an amazing shave and you too can take part in the same wonderful shave that I get. If you go to Harrys.com, use $5 code BEN H-A-R-R-Y-S.com and enter code BEN to get $5 off anything to shave your face or any other body part that you want to shave. All right, that is it. I hope you took some notes. That was a long intro. Let's dive into an even longer podcast. And again, an amazing show with the great. I told you I was gonna surprise you, so I will. Let's do this.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

This is a message that has to be spread far away. And I'm glad to have the platform and opportunity to share this with your audience because they need to know about this. This is the difference literally between life and death. And I am not exaggerating in the least. This is every bit as important as the vitamin D topic that I started promoting about 15 years ago. In fact, maybe more important, from the use of these nonstick coatings, there's massive contamination of the groundwater. It's becoming an emerging epidemic in the United States. With these groundwater contamination, it's going to be huge. This is one of the reasons why you want to filter your water.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer, and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power.

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest.

Efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I would say because I, I suck at having mentors and following the advice of other leaders in the health field, that there are, there are a relatively small number of people who I consider to be extremely trustworthy individuals in my life. Who I look to for fitness or health or longevity, people who I would consider to be personal mentors or people who I think put out truly cutting edge health information that's not just kind of like, pardon the expression, vomiting back up stuff that simply appears elsewhere on the Internet. And my guest today happens to be one of those people who I would place on that pedestal, somebody who I really pay attention to when they talk about health and fitness and longevity and nutrition and supplementation and anything regarding the world that we delve into on this show. His name is Dr. Joseph Mercola. You, if you spend much time on the Internet, have probably come across his website, Mercola.com and Joe is a board certified family physician. He saw tens of thousands of patients before he actually turns to what he does full time and something that actually helps a lot more people than his private practice did, I would imagine. And that is his website, which has 10 million unique visitors each month and has 80 million unique visitors each year. It's one of the most visited health websites on the planet for the past 12 years. It's translated into six different languages. It's a wealth of information that's very, very easy to get lost in and spend hours on. So that's at Mercola.com, m E R C-O-L-A.com and he's on the call with me today. We've had a lot of chats recently about everything from optimizing your mitochondrial health to the latest greatest biohacks for optimizing human potential, to fasting to fat loss, to muscle gain, to protein intake to much more. So we're gonna delve into all that today. So I hope you're ready to strap on your propeller hat. Dr. McCart Cola. Welcome to the show, man.

Well, thanks for inviting me, Ben.

And I guess to shorten things up, we'll just call you. Are you cool with Joe? The rest?

Yeah, Joe is fine. Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah. So, you know, this is the second time I've been on your podcast and I'm sorry to say the first time I didn't know who you were. And my new girlfriend, Erin Elizabeth, who you also interviewed from HealthNet News, actually introduced us and she's kind of known for the dead doctors.

Stories and they're actually doing a movie about her. But.

I thank you for those kind words about being a mentor. But I really greatly appreciate what you're doing because you really teach me a lot from ever since that time I realized you are just a golden nut of information. So I've been listening to your podcast ever since, and it's really one of my favorites. I think you're doing a magnificent job out there, Just absolutely incredible and exposing me to a lot of great new stuff.

I'm going to put that on my poster on my wall that says I'm a golden nut of information.

Golden nugget.

Oh, golden golden nugget of information.

Sorry about that.

Or a golden nut. That could work too.

By the way, for those of you listening in, actually, your girlfriend Joe Erin was, I think, one of the ways that we first became associated with one another. And for those of you who didn't get a chance to hear me interview Aaron about Lyme disease, you should listen to that one because that was a fascinating episode. And I'll put a link to that as well as everything else that Joe and I talk about today. If you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com mercola BenGreenfieldFitness.com Mercola Now, Joe, I was just talking about your website and how you get freaking millions and millions of visitors and a huge amount of information on that site. I know it's been around since the 90s and that it's now one of the more popular websites in the world when it comes to health. But I'm always curious about these things because you were just like your private practice physician, and then all of a sudden you've got this enormously popular website. What happened? Were you just like sitting in front of the computer one day and you wrote an article and push it out there? Was this part of a grand vision or how exactly did Mercola come to be?

Well, I've always been passionate about health. I mean, well, not always. It's about the late 60s is when I first started running and been passionate about technology. I took my first computer class in the late 60s, also with programming, and actually went online in the late 60s. That was before the web. That was the Internet. No, actually, the Internet Internet was the Internet started in 60, I think, went on in the mid-70s.

I don't know, whenever Al Gore was born, that's when.

Yeah, So I actually met the father of the Internet once. His name is Larry. I forget his last name, but at least he's acknowledged.

So it's not Al Gore?

No, no, it's not.

Okay.

All right. So anyway, I've been passionate about those two. And for a long time in the mid-90s, I got online on the web and started a website. And I realized I was somewhat frustrated with the patients who would come to see me and Tell me about new innovations that I didn't know about because they were watching evening news and I was in the office seeing patients. So I said, well, let me figure this thing out. So I realized that the newscasters were getting from wire services and that you could access the wire service feeds on the Internet. So I started doing that and learning about it before my patients. And then I realized that I had a different perspective on health than the conventional media did. And I thought that people would like to hear my perspective on that. And I started publishing a weekly newsletter back in 97. And actually for the first three or four years of the site, I didn't sell one thing on the site. I just did it to share information. And actually by the time I generated a half a million dollars in bills, I realized I had to start selling something. It's not going to scale very well.

That's funny. Yeah, the Internet can be expensive, unless you're actually using it.

To put some kind of solution out there in people's hands. By the way, I remember the very, very first time I actually sat down to put information out there on the Internet. And actually it wasn't a blog and it wasn't a podcast per se, it was a video. I was reading the National Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research put out by the nsca. And every single month I would read this thing and I would underline and I would highlight and I would, you know, at the time I was running brick and mortar personal training studios and gyms and I would implement this research into my clients programs. But I wanted to tell the world about it. I felt like it was a waste for me to be underlining all these research journal, you know, golden nuggets to repeat your term. And so I would sit in front of my computer at the end of a long day of training at the gym and I figured out how to upload videos to what was, I guess it would have been 10, 11 years ago, video podcasts on itunes. And I put out a series of five minute videos on itunes before I realized that videos were way too hard. You had to do your hair, you had to do the camera. So then I simply converted it into audio. But if you go back and you listen to like Ben Greenfield Fitness episode one, episode two, episode three, it's just me sitting there with a magazine reading journal articles to people.

Well, you've greatly evolved and really I believe you have one of the best health podcasts out there. I think it's crazy to miss your information because you expose people so many different individuals and you do so well.

I don't know how you come up with these people, but you find them.

Thanks. Well, let's expose people to you. You're actually the first guy who turned me onto this book, Tripping over the Truth about the Metabolic Theory of Cancer. And as I think you know, because we were talking about it, I did a podcast with Dr. David Minkoff down in Florida about this idea that cancer is not a genetic disease, that it is actually something that occurs when you're mitochondria aren't functioning properly. You turned me onto that book. And I'll put a link in the podcast show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Mercola if people want to go listen to the episode that I did with Dr. Minkoff about how practically everything we know about cancer or believe about cancer is wrong. But mitochondria is a big, big part of that. And I think in the discussions that I've had with you, you probably are one of the more well versed people I've spoken to about how to actually take care of your mitochondria, how to optimize your mitochondria, how to fix your mitochondria, how to ensure they're operating properly. So can we delve into some of, some of like the lesser known biohacks or nutrition tactics or supplementation tactics or thing that things that you personally do to optimize your mitochondria?

Yeah, that could be two, three hours. But I'll try to keep it brief.

One of my strategies is to. Well, food is basically a source of electrons. You know, that's how it runs through the electron transport chain in the mitochondria and it produces ATP.

And one of the ways that I capture electrons is I live near the ocean, literally a two, three minute bike ride from the ocean. And I walk on the beach every day for two to three hours. And that's where I read my books. And last year I read Tripping over the Truth and that was the best. I read 150 books last year and that was the best one I read.

You mean are you listening to them or are you holding a book?

Oh, no, no, no. I'm holding the Kindle and reading it. Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So I would fall on my face.

No, you wouldn't. You're one of the most talented athletes I know. No way you would fall.

You don't use the, what's it called, the whisper sync where you actually listen to them?

Oh, no, no, no, no. I'd much prefer reading wow and actually I've done some EEG neuro real time neurofeedback testing and it showed that my reading comprehension has just exploded because of that activity.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna have to try actually holding my Kindle while I go on a walk to see how I achieve this.

Oh yeah, you can do it.

So you must take an ungodly number of steps each day.

Yeah, I was actually doing that calculation because I started running in 68 and made the mistake of engaging in long distance running for 40 years. Over 40 years before I realized that wasn't a wise choice. But lifetime, I've done about a quarter billion steps, maybe 100,000 miles. And one of the best book I read this year was Desk Bound by Kelly Starrett, who I.

Fantastic book, dude.

Yeah. I just can't say that is the best book. And it's an absolute must read for anyone who has a desk job. And he helped me understand that. I knew posture was important, but he helped me understand the biomechanics of it. And a lot of those steps I wound up getting a bunion because I wasn't doing external rotations of my hip properly. So now I do most of that walking with paying very careful attention to the posture externally rotating my hips and getting my feet to walk. Walk properly. And I can, because I'm walking the beach. I can make sure that's the case. I'm not walking like a duck, that my feet are lined up properly.

I want to get back to mitochondria in a second here. But when you read that book, desk bound, because actually I read that book and then I went out and changed a bunch of things. I bought an ergonomic keyboard. I bought this big old ISO eye friendly monitor. I already have a treadmill desk and a standup workstation. But I got one of these stools that you can lean against. Did you wind up making changes to your personal workstation after reading that book? Aside from the walking modifications?

No, I had already made those modifications prior to that. So just that his component was really the modification of the walking, which if you're going to do something again and again on a repetitive basis and you're not doing it properly, you're wind up and injured for sure. So he's got a whole. It's just a magnificent book. As you know, since you read it.

Yeah. We'll link to it in the show notes. So you walk on the beach.

Yeah, so that's a source. And the reason I mentioned that is it's an important tangent because It's a source of electrons, not only actually photons, which are turned to electrons through the photoelectric effect in your mitochondria, but then also through grounding by walking along the water's edge in the water. So that's an important component. And one of the. I'll be eternally grateful for you for exposing me initially to Jack Cruise, who's just been. I've just been enthralled with. And I just a few weeks ago, where I learned about him from one of your previous podcasts. And the man is just brilliant. So he's helped me understand.

Very brilliant. He's actually, I did. One of the ways that you can calculate, speaking of electron potential in the human body, the use of the things that you were talking about, grounding and exposure to negative ions, which you get from running water and trees and many other variables that are outdoors. One of the things that occurs is that changes what's called the redox potential of your body. And you can actually calculate or approximate the redox potential of the human body via magnetic resonance imaging. Mri.

He has a way to interpret that, but I think he's become a little disenchanted with that process because of the radio frequencies that are emanated from it, which have a negative influence on your health.

Yeah. We have an upcoming podcast on the use of MRIs and whether or not they can be used to analyze the human body's health. But when you're talking about walking along the beach, Joe, and getting exposed to negative ions, obviously a lot of people don't have the beach.

Oh, that's correct. That is the ideal. And I wasn't born next to the beach. It's something I learned and as I learned to appreciate health. Being on the beach is fine, but your latitude is also really important. So I was born and raised in Chicago. I did all my formal education from kindergarten to postgraduate residency training within the Chicago city limits. So as I grew older and realized that I became progressively frustrated with the lack of sunshine that I moved to Florida. So that's where I live now. So anyone can. Not anyone, but you can put that as one of your goals, to get down there. So just being in the sun is another important, powerful component. And prior to being exposed to Dr. Cruz's work, my primary focus has been, for the last 30, 40 years, has really been on food and strategic supplementation, but primarily food. So Cruz helped me reconfigure that emphasis. And really, this light exposure is just profoundly important. And we all know, and you've talked about it many times on your podcast about the importance of avoiding blue light at night. That's not hard to understand. But Cruise is really the only one that's helping people understand the that anytime you're exposed to blue light from artificial sources that could be devastating to mitochondrial health. So that includes any artificial lighting and your monitor. I'm standing talking to you in front of a 50 inch monitor that I was scanning it for years and didn't realize it was harming my health because I was looking at in the daytime. But the balance of the light is really predominantly blue, which can be pretty significantly deleterious to your mitochondria in total health health and can actually be a risk factor for cataracts and age related macular degeneration.

Is there. And to set up this question properly, I've talked before about the importance for establishing a good circadian rhythm of getting exposed to large amounts of things like natural sunlight in the morning. Is there a big difference between say like a blue light producing box or a blue light producing device, like staring at your monitor in the morning to wake you up versus going out in the sun. What's the primary difference?

Massive difference. Massive. And the primary one is that when you look at the light from the sun, you're getting the complete spectrum. And primarily it's an equal balance between blue and red. And then of course you have the infrared and ultraviolet and purple and those frequencies, but you're only primarily getting blue when you have an LED monitor or a blue box. You do not want to do that. One of the key strategies is to go out as soon as you get up without shoes on and the least amount of clothes, and just look at the sun if you can, within an hour, rising for at least a few minutes to resync your circadian rhythm. A powerful free intervention essentially. And it doesn't cost you anything. So it's crazy not to do that unless your schedule just absolutely prohibits that.

Okay, so, so basically we're talking about when, when we're outside, we're getting exposed to blue light everywhere. But it's combined with things like uva, uvb, near infrared, infrared and red light.

And red light, yeah. Red light.

Okay, got it. Now these, these computer monitors that have the capability to produce blue light, are you using any type of different type of monitor to reduce the actual exposure to blue light during the day?

No, I'm not. I'm excited to hear your upcoming podcast on that because I may consider switching, but I have a 4K monitor and what I do use right now is F Lux, but not the default settings. F Lux comes out at night. I go in the settings and I turn it on all the time and I put this. And you have to do the advanced settings and you can move it all the way to the left. So you're just eliminating basically all the blue light.

Right, right. There's a technology called flexscan, the only company I know of that does it right now is called Izo, E I Z O. They make computer monitors, and that actually automatically decreases as much blue light as possible throughout the day. Kind of similar to Flux. But the problem with Flux that I've found, Joe, is that I like to hook my laptop up to an external monitor when, for example, I am writing fiction at night or when I have. When I need to have a larger spectrum of view. And so even though a Flux is on the laptop, it actually doesn't affect the external monitor that you have plugged into the laptop. So there's another piece of software that I installed. It's called Iris Tech. Iris Tech actually interacts with a monitor and does something similar to Flux in terms of reducing blue light. So that's kind of my monitor setup. And like you just alluded to, I'm going to do a podcast on it in the future.

Yeah, I'd like to see that. But for those who don't work, want to make that type of investment into hardware and infrastructure. Is that you? There's a cheap, cheap, much cheaper alternative, which is called the $9 Uvex Blue Blocking Sunglasses, which I call reverse glasses or indoor sunglasses. You only wear them when you're inside. Yep, yep. Yeah.

No, I. I love those glasses. My. My kids wear them, I wear them. We haven't got my wife on board yet. But what about, you know, when you're talking about getting out on the beach? So. So mitochondrial health. You've talked about sunlight, you've talked about grounding for people who can't get outside. Do you have any opinion of these negative ion generators that you can, like, plug into the wall of your office to achieve that, or like a HEPA filter that generates negative ions.

I haven't studied it really carefully, but from what I recall and what I did in the past, that was a useful strategy. You know, if you're exposed to natural negative ions, like being living near the ocean, I think it's an important. Or in a forest, like. Or like where you're at. So I think you're going to get it from nature. So. But it wouldn't hurt. I don't think it would hurt. Got It So there's no downsides as far as I know.

What else are you doing for your mitochondria?

Well, when you're exposed to the sunlight, you're really. One of the ways to capture those electrons is to make sure that you're eating the most important food that you can possibly eat. And you know what that food is?

I'm going to hazard a guess. If we're talking about mitochondrial health, something that has chlorophyll in it, it's a.

Good guess, but not. It's actually seafood food with dha.

Okay.

So you can take fish oil and krill oil and supplements, but it's a much different version of the DHA that you get when you eat it in real food. So making sure you get that on a regular basis. And actually Dominic d', Agostano, who you've interviewed previously, I believe is the one who turned me on to eating anchovies. So I eat anchovies pretty much every day.

So to anchovies. A4. That's kind of interesting actually. I took my kids out on a bike ride last night and we stopped at the pizza shop and had gluten free pizza and I had the Caesar salad with anchovies. But are anchovies a better source of DHA than say sardines?

No, they're about the same. They're equivalent. I just happen to like the salty version.

Gotcha. And when you're eating this much seafood for the DHA to help out with your mitochondrial health, are you doing anything to limit your exposure to heavy metals and mercury and things like that?

Well, that's an excellent question because most seafood unfortunately is contaminated with industrial pollution, primarily mercury and dioxins and PBCs or PBDEs, the fire retardant that's in the ocean. So.

If you eat small fish like anchovies and sardines, it's almost a non issue. Or if you get it from relatively pristine waters like Alaska, So wild Alaskan salmon, if you can be certain it's certified from there, then it's not an issue. You're not going to get contaminated. But later on we'll talk about. I have some just in case detox procedures that if even if I was getting it, it wouldn't be an issue. Okay, got it. Because I think detoxification is absolutely important and just don't. It's almost impossible to live. I try pretty hard but it's impossible to live a clean, healthy lifestyle. You're going to be exposed to these toxins routinely in your environment.

Absolutely. Next week. Actually, it will be a week or two. If you're listening in after this podcast, I was just. When I was competing at the Train to Hunt national championships in Park City, I was sleeping in Dr. Pompa's basement. Dr. Dan Pompa, who's considered to be one of the world's leading experts on cellular detoxification. So we had quite a few interesting chats about that and perhaps you and I can.

Yeah, good. Because I know Dan really well. He's in my small study group so that I've got some people enrolled in the 24 hour glucose monitoring. He's one of them.

Yeah, cool, cool. Okay, so we've got sunlight, we've got seafood, we've got exposure to negative ions. We have exposure to as much natural blue light as possible during the day.

Well, no, no. To avoiding all unnatural artificial light from source. That is the key. I mean, that may be one of the most important health strategies. And I said it's free.

Yeah. Okay. So even more, or perhaps just as important as getting outside, it would be limiting that artificial light so that if.

You'Re inside and there's any light or monitor to put those glasses. Glasses on. So as soon as I get up in the morning, it's dark, I put my blue blockers on and when the lights come off, I can take the glasses off.

Okay, so you don't just wear your sunglasses at night, you wear them during the day.

Good job. Well, not unless there's light on in a house or if I go to the grocery store. The personal trainer I have, he insists on keeping his lights on. He hasn't caught up to this yet. So this morning I have my glasses on.

This is important for people listening in because I know a lot of folks who listen in and you guys probably have already heard me talk about blue light blocking glasses, but I personally don't wear them during the day. I hadn't yet considered that. It really is. It's artificial blue light during the day, not natural blue light. So you wear them. When you step outside, you take them off. But then when you go back inside and you're back inside the office, you put them on. Because the pros outweigh the cons of any type of wakefulness effect you might get from a monitor.

Oh, yeah, you're going to achieve that through synchronization in the morning with the exposure to the bright light from the sun, you know, from anywhere from 8 to 11. That's why I try to do my walking a little bit earlier, before 11 o' clock. I usually walk about two or three hours, so.

Okay, you're changing the fashion habits at the office of just about everybody listening in. Right now people are going to be storing their glasses not just when they get home at night, but Juvex glasses.

Aren'T the most cosmetically elegant or appealing, but you can get more expensive ones. They're only $9, but you can, can get, spend $100 and be more fashionable. Just have a little tint to it.

I wear the Swanwick ones, which actually make you look cool at parties, but.

Yeah, but just make sure that get a blue light that you can see and then put the glasses on. See if it changes the color and the blue disappears. If it doesn't, it's not going to work.

Got it. Okay.

It's got to change that.

What are some of the other things you do?

Well, let me just expand on seafood because I think that blocking the blue light exposure, sunlight and seafood are so critical. I have the sardines or, or anchovies, but I also have shrimp from Alaska and fish roe, salmon.

Wild Alaskan fish roe, or fish eggs, about an ounce every day and maybe a little salmon about maybe one to two ounces. So I think that's key. So I make sure my DHA levels are really high. So the other things.

Can I interrupt you for just a second? Fish roe is not something we've talked about on the podcast before. Obviously it's something someone could probably hunt down in their community. But have you found a specific brand to be better when it comes to something like fish roe?

It's not cheap, it's like $50 a pound. But I get mine from Vital Choice.

Okay.

Vital Choice, Yeah. Not only is it a source of dha, probably the most concentrated source of DHA on the planet from a food source, but it's magnificent.

Dha, phospholipids. Not that same phospholipids you'd get from lecithin, which is omega 6. This is omega 3, DHA, omega 3. So it's unbelievable healthy food.

Okay, got it, got it. Okay, so fish roe. I interrupted you. What were you getting into next?

Let me see. We were talking about mitochondria, right? I think grounding is another component to get electrons into your body. Many people, I'm sure you've talked about it on your podcast, but the point here, most of the grounding devices, they plug into electrical outlets. And I would just suggest invest $10, you get it on Amazon and get an 8 foot copper grounding route. Grounding rod Pounded into the earth and then run a wire. Might have to drill a hole through the wall and fill it with silicon, but then run it into your grounding device. Like I have one for my standing desk and one for my bed, a sheet that I wear at night.

What about these devices that you can plug into a computer that will grow like a laptop grounding cable, like for the laptops that don't have that third prong on them that would normally ground a laptop. Have you seen these that plug into the USB port?

I guess if you use a laptop a lot, it might be necessary. If you only use it periodically like I do, it's not as crucial and important, especially if you're using when you're grounded. But I think if you do use a laptop, and if you're using it on your laptop, it'd be useful to put something between your lap and.

The notebook or the laptop. So I typically use some radiant barrier, which is a really tough type of aluminum foil that prevents some of the radiation from coming through.

Oh yeah, I have one of those. It's called a HERA pad. It's like an anti radiation pad basically that you put underneath a laptop that works really well. Are there any kind of like things that you think fly under the radar? Whether it's. I know you have a lot of biohacks at your home. I think you've told me you have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and some things.

No, I don't. I have something that's far less expensive, but maybe 10 times as effective as hyperbaric oxygen. And it's called ewat. I'm sure you've encountered before as an exercise with oxygen therapy. So they're oxygen concentrators and they blow into a giant bag and you wear a mask and you breathe into it. So it's just full. It must be the size of two, maybe 100 gallons bag. It's pretty big.

And do you do exercise sessions with this or do you just wear it when you're reading a book?

Oh, no, no, it's exercise. I usually do my peak intensity. So we'll get into the exercise that I do, but typically I'll do the sauna three times a week with a very specific detox protocol which I think even is beyond what Dan Papa told you about. If you want, I can go into that now.

Now let's finish up mitochondria. We'll talk detox in a little bit, but go ahead. So you do this hyperbaric or not hyperbaric exercise with oxygen therapy.

Yeah. Okay. That's another useful tool to get the oxygen in there, because oxygen, of course, is the ultimate electron acceptor. When the electrons come in from your fuel or the sun or they're grounding, ultimately it's going to combine with oxygen after generating ATP and then be excreted out as water, hopefully with minimal amount of reactive oxygen, oxygen species and free radicals.

Okay, gotcha. There's a guy in Vegas who works with a bunch of professional cyclists who wrote an article for my site that I can link to in the shownotes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Mercola but he talks about just like going to a local medical supply store, getting an oxygen concentrator, a special type of mask, and some tubing. He has kind of like a D. A dyi.

It's a less expensive version.

So this is similar to something like that.

Yeah, it's just a lot easier. I don't have the time to mess with that. It's like $6,000 for the setup I purchased. But yeah, if you, you know, you could certainly do it. It's. It's not a proprietary or difficult thing to do, but there is a valve on there that actually simulates altitude training. So for a portion of my exercise, I'm like training at maybe 10,000ft. And then. So you basically deplete the oxygen from your system. PO2 on your pulse oximeter might go down to 6 in the 70s or 80s. Then you just boost it up so you supersaturate your blood with the oxygen.

Okay, interesting. What else do you have around your house aside from an oxygen concentrator to improve your mitochondrial health?

Well, we'll go to that with exercises, some of these other components. But I've got a lot of cool gadgets since we last talked. Well, actually. Do you want me to do that now?

Yeah, let's hear it. Let's have some fun. Open people's eyes to things they may not have heard about before.

Well, let's talk. Here's a pretty cool one. This is not so much a gatch, but you should. And I don't know if you have it, but if you don't, you should is get an induction burner if you cook food. You know what those are?

An induction burner? No, my wife probably knows. My wife's the foodie. She probably knows.

But this is a Ben. This is an absolute must. You know that the higher you cook your food, the more you're going to damage it. Right?

Right.

And it's almost impossible on a gas or an Electric range. You're going to cook it a few hundred degrees. Well, an induction burner is actually the most efficient, efficient way to heat and cook food known to man. You have to use.

Not a magnetic, a metal pot or pan. And then it's a magnetic device. And you can actually control the temperature as low as 100 degrees. You can cook your food at 110 degrees, which is crazy. You could cook steak like the medium rare steak is 140. You can cook at 140. You don't have to worry about it. Like you have to put it in the sous vide. It's just crazy great. So that is a radical way that I've just improved my ability to make healthy food.

Okay, so this induction burner, this just sits on your countertop and you plug it in and do you use a stainless steel pan? Is that generally what you do?

As long as it's metal, it's okay. Obviously, yeah, I don't think aluminum would work, but it has to be a metal pan. And I think those are the ones I have are just stainless steel. And you can get them with a coating. Guess you got to be really careful because most of those coatings are fluoride based and they'll outgas at higher temperatures. Temperatures and really, you do not want to breathe fluoride gas. We just broke a huge story from the use of these, the nonstick coatings. There's massive contamination of the groundwater. It's becoming an emerging epidemic in the United States with these groundwater contamination. It's going to be huge. This is one of the reasons why you want to filter your water with a really good.

Carbon or charcoal filter to get those items out of there.

Really interesting. So I'll ask you about the water in a second. But when my kids are making say scrambled eggs and the morning and they have the, the oil heating on the countertop in thein the cast iron cookware. What you're saying is if I were to have my kids, if I wanted to optimize their mitochondrial health, I would get them, for example, this induction burner to use instead, and it would allow the eggs or that is the perfect example, protein. We don't want to damage.

The worst way you can consume your eggs is fry, is scrambled eggs. That is absolutely terrible. You will oxidize the cholesterol and damage the fats, the important fats and nutrients in the eggs. So I cook My about 140, I think 140 or so, which is well below the boiling point of water. It's 80 degrees lower and it takes a little longer. But if you just plant it, you can cook it appropriately and the whites will turn white. And your yolk is essentially nice and runny. So it's not undamaged. It's actually healthier than poached eggs, the only form that's healthier than poached eggs.

Adding that to my shopping list. Water is obviously important for the mitochondria, as you've alluded to. You mentioned that your choice of water filter, if you were to recommend one to people, would be a charcoal. No?

Well, that's a really complex topic. Ideally, the best choice of water is from a local spring. And findaspring.com is a way that you can do that. That's going to be inconvenient for most people. And if you're going to rely on municipal tap water, the first thing you have to make sure is that it has no fluoride. Fluoride is one of the most toxic things you can put in your body for your mitochondria. It's a dielectric block and Jack Cruz goes into it in great detail. But you definitely want to have fluoride free water. So it's really. Fortunately, that's why kind of getting back to my site I mentioned we didn't sell anything, but of all the profits that we generate, I put 20% back. I just donated to nonprofit entities and one of those entities is the fan group which is committed to removing fluoride from municipal water supplies because it's so difficult to take out. The best strategy is not having your water supply to begin. So if you have a whole house water filter, carbon filter, they're really big tanks, maybe about half the size of a conventional water tank. And if you have two of them, you're getting even bigger. And if the water stays in there for a while, it's just the contact surface area, you'll be able to remove a lot of the fluoride for sure. So that's a big step. And then I take. So I have a whole house water filter that we actually produce on our site and then I filter it through an alkaline water system. And not because I want to alkalize the water, because it actually strikes structures the water and makes hydrogen gas. And the hydrogen gas is far more important than php, so it's irrelevant. It's not about drinking ph mediated water, it's about having the hydrogen ions in there and then having it structured. And then I take it again.

And which structured water filter do you use?

Well, it's just that alkalizer.

Okay. So you just use a water alkalizer. And that passes, from what I understand that that, like, passes water over a metal plate. Plate.

And the series of them, this one has like nine. And you have to be really careful because most of those will have scale that builds up literally after a few.

Yeah, that's what I've heard. You wind up drinking.

Yeah. So I have a device that actually changes the polarity every time it's turned on. So that never gets scale buildup.

What's it called?

I don't remember. It's like it was a Beta. A Beta. I've got it.

Like, it's a water alkalizer. So first you pass through a charcoal filter. Filter. And then after it passes through a.

Charcoal filter, Well, a whole house charcoal filter, which is a significant difference. So that they're big babies. And then the actual alkalizer has another filter in it. But once it goes from there, then I put it into a vortexer. And I don't know if you've heard of Gerald Pollack's work. He's a biophysicist at the University of Washington. But structured water is massively important because water is essentially a battery. And it's the way that once it's structured, the water. Water in our body is primarily structured. And the better you can structure it, the more you're going to generate that energy into your cell structure and improve your mitochondrial function and your general total health. So I vortex mine with a vortexer that we developed for three years, and we still aren't selling it because we had trouble finding a manufacturer to do that. But it's got infrared light, and.

It just spins. It structures it. And then I put it in the refrigerator. Refrigerator is a little less than optimal because it has its own EMF fields. But then I put it over some neodymium magnets to continue the structure and keep it cold.

So these. These magnets are actually in your refrigerator?

Yeah, I just make a little platform for it that I rest the glass container on.

Okay, got it. So you can buy these magnets and you can put them in your refrigerator. And after you've structured your water, you'd put it in, like, a big pitcher, and then you would put it on top of these magnets.

Yeah, they'll help maintain the structure.

Okay.

Water is key. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's worth putting time, effort and energy into optimizing your water intake. It's one of the biggest variables for your health. Gotta get that right now I have.

A little Bit different setup than you. And I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. I use reverse osmosis rather than charcoal because of the finer particle filtration. Obviously I have to remineralize my water and I simply have a reverse osmosis filter that has remineralization.

Does your hold. Do you have a holding tank on yours? That's the key issue.

A holding tank in the reverse osmosis filter.

Yeah. Because usually it's pretty slow unless you have a compressor on it. So you just don't get instant water. It has to fill up. A tank. Usually 5 gallons is under your sink.

Yeah, there's an enormous tank. It's actually out in my utilities room.

I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend that you get rid of that and get a different RO system that has a compressor on it so you get a little higher output. You don't need a holding tank. But I can guarantee that holding tank is contaminated. Contaminated. It just has to be. Yeah. And, and who wants to pain and hassle factor of clean that thing every three months?

Okay, got it. I'm. I'm making a note to talk to my, my water guy about this.

Yeah, you. You want a tank free RO system. I like ro. I think it's really good. And it's less expensive than a whole house water filter for sure.

So it's called a tank free reverse osmosis filter.

Yeah. Or tankless with a compressor. So you get a high output and.

And ideally something pressure because you need.

More pressure than you get from the water water from your house pressure to. Otherwise you won't get much water out. It'll take a long time.

Yeah, I see Aquasana has at least one on Amazon that's reverse osmosis tank free. Now, obviously you need to remineralize. For those of you listening in, reverse osmosis will remove a lot of the minerals from water. So you either got to use trace liquid minerals or use something that remineralizes the water.

It doesn't take all the fluoride out, but that's really one of the better ways to do it. You could use distilled water too, with almost all of it. But Rose.

Yeah. Now the other thing that you mentioned is structured water. And I haven't talked too much about this, but before we go to structured.

Water, let's go back to the minerals. I'll tell you that my best mineral, which I also integrate into my regenerative agricultural process, is extracted from the ocean. And it does. It's extracted through this very complex vortexing process. So it gets all the sodium chloride out and it's basically like 80 minerals that you put in back there. And that's why I vortex my water with. Along with some magnesium citrate and little bit of zinc.

Okay, so you went through that pretty fast. But is that an actual. Is that something that connects to your water filter or is that that like something you would put into a glass?

It's a product. It's a. It's a supplement, essentially.

Okay.

Yeah. Which is absolutely essential for anyone using an RO system and really a good idea for anyone else.

And what is the name of that product?

We sell it aside. It's for ocean minerals. I'm not sure what it is, but I use it primarily. I mean, I buy it by 5 gallons and I use it for my plants.

So you put that in your garden so that the food that you grow is higher in minerals?

Well, actually, I don't put it in the soil. I use it as a foliar spray application because the absorption is just tremendous. I mean, it's just crazy. I mean, I get banana trees growing, giving me hundreds of pounds of bananas every year.

Are they these things called the ionic ocean minerals that are on your site?

To minerals?

Yeah. Okay.

And the reason they work is that they are ionic. They are not. I mean, they're just ions. I mean, they really are absorbed really easily. So that's a really potent and effective form of replacing the minerals that you're taking out with the RO system.

Okay. So if you're using a reverse osmosis system and you're listening in, you would want to use ionic minerals to add the minerals back in.

From the ocean. Ocean.

From the ocean. Okay. Ionic ocean minerals. I'll make sure that I link to these in the show notes, which are growing rapidly, by the way, as we talk. Darn you. You're costing people a lot of money on this podcast who are wanting to optimize their love. But this, honestly, this stuff is fun. I'm all about better living through science. I'm all about.

Oh, I know. That's why I love what you do. I just haven't found anyone else like you. I mean, other than Cruise. You're just incredible. You're a gift to the human race.

Well, before we proceed, I mean, stepping back, back. If my kids are 60 years old and killing it in life, I would love to be 130, you know, standing there watching it happen. I don't know if I did the math correctly on that, but. But yeah, I mean, longevity with optimized Performance and health is a, is a very, very cool goal, I think. And it's, it's achievable.

I, I don't think you can get both goals at once. I was going to go into this later, but you, from my understanding of the metabolic physiology, you're going to have, have to optimize for our performance or longevity. It's difficult to do both because the metabolic pathways with MTOR and ampk, you just can't do that. Yeah, one or the other. So at some point I've transitioned a While ago, I'm 20, 30 years past my competitive days and you're still engaged in them. So I'm in the longevity mode now.

Yeah. Okay. Well, hopefully we get a chance to tackle that. But I also, before we leave the topic of water and then I would like to perhaps move on past mitochondria and talk about a few other things that I, that I know are important here. I don't think we talked about this much, but my dad's business, my dad's career is. He actually travels to large agricultural facilities and farms and installs structured water filter systems for farms and in agricultural settings to allow livestock to be more healthy and to allow plants to grow more readily. And you talked about a vortex and how it's important for water to say, you know, pass through a series of glass beads, et cetera. My dad is the person who sent me Gerald Pollock's book, Fourth Phase of Water.

Fourth Phase of Water. Excellent book, Strongly recommended by.

Which is a great book. And yeah, he has. His website is greenfieldnaturals.com and he has these enormous structured water filters that. And that's what I have is a whole house structured water filter. But he first introduced me to this concept. I thought he was nuts. I thought he was a kook. And then I started to dig into this and I read this, this book, you know, written by University of Washington researcher Gerald Pollock. And now there's a brand new book. And I don't know if you've seen this book, Joe. It's written by Dr. Cohen. I forget it's C O W A N. I forget his last name. But it's about the heart and it's about the fact that we have been.

Is it Tom, Is it Tom Cohen.

Tom Cohen's book about the heart?

Actually, I think it's Cohen. Yeah, he's a very interesting guy. Weston Price, he's one of their. He's connected with them. I've interviewed him.

Fantastic book.

And he goes into how really intriguing concept.

It's Called Human Heart, Cosmic Heart. I don't even know if it's available for sale yet because I just finished reading my review copy. But that book goes into how the heart is not a pump as much as it is a special shape that allows fluids to move through it if those fluids are structured properly. And one of the things that he says is the best thing that you can do for getting fluids to move through your heart efficiently, for blood to move through your heart efficiently, is for that blood to be hydrated with structured water. He does a great job of explaining it in the book, but it really hammered home that same point that Gerald Pollock makes in his book.

And your readers can prove it for themselves. All they do is do an experiment, grow some sunflower seed sprouts with structured water and regular tap water and see what the difference is. You'll see a magnificent shift.

No, it's crazy. When I travel, I always just buy glass bottled Pellegrino or Perrier or Jerry.

That's about as good, right? That's about as good as you can do on the road. Yeah.

When I'm at home, it's just my water is so pristine. It makes such a big difference. Now, speaking of the heart, I suppose this would be a good segue. I've seen you talk a little bit and I haven't seen a lot of people talk about this, about the link between iron and heart disease. And we've got a lot of athletes listening and we've got people who. Who take iron supplements, some people who even think, you know, that the more iron the better. What's the deal here with iron and heart disease and iron levels?

Well, it's actually related to mitochondria because you know what the most mitochondrially dense tissue in the body is, right? It's the heart.

Yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, I suppose when I. Dr.

And then the brain is number two. So it becomes a really important issue. And here's where it's such an. This is a message that has to be spread, spread far and wide. And I'm glad to have the platform and opportunity to share this with your audience because they need to know about this. This is the difference literally between life and death. And I am not exaggerating in the least. This is every bit as important as the vitamin D topic that I started promoting about 15 years ago. In fact, maybe more important. Now, let's discriminate between two groups. First, you have premenopausal women who are still menstruating, and children. Those women are Typically those groups, that group is typically, usually iron okay or iron deficient, may need a supplement. Those are about the only groups that do. Or if someone has an acute bleed, would be the other exception. But for almost any adult men or any woman who's past her menopause and not menstruating anymore, high likelihood, I would say probably 95% or greater that they're going to be iron overloaded.

And our body was not designed to excrete iron on a regular basis. It conserves it, it keeps, it doesn't get rid of it. The only way you lose iron is through losing blood. And so the studies have been done, people who donate one, two, three times a year, live significantly longer, have less heart disease, less cancer than those who don't because they are lowering their iron levels. Now, why does that work? Why should it work? And let me just go through the metabolic physiology. When you have these electrons from food, it goes in and it's hopefully is transferred to oxygen and you create water. But maybe 5% of the time it goes through these reactive oxygen species. The first one is superoxide, which then gets converted to peroxide and then ideally from peroxide to water. But there's a side path that it could take. If iron levels are high, especially in the inner mitochondria, there's a reaction called the Fenton reaction. And the iron will combine with the peroxide and form superoxide free radical, which is the most toxic free radical known to man. Decimates your mitochondrial. So membranes and proteins and DNA. The last thing you want to do now you need some. But if you have, if you have high iron levels, you're going to catalyze that reaction and you're going to create massive free radical damage as a result of that. So the key, so the key, how do you figure this out, right? Simple, simple blood test. You can actually get it online without a doctor's prescription for $39. It's called Ferritin F E R. You can get a tibc, total iron binding count.

So you would measure ferritin, the iron storage protein, and not actual iron?

Absolutely. That's the one you need. That is the measure. Do not use any of the others, just use that one. And what are the goals? You should be below 80. If you're below 20, it's too low. You got to take a supplement or have some type of natural food like red meat, which would be a really good source of iron. But ideally I would say somewhere between 40 and 60, which interestingly Ben, that's about the same range as vitamin D levels. So it's easy to remember 40 to 60.

40 to 60 is what you're looking for. Not your iron levels, but your ferritin.

Levels, ferrierin levels, which is an indirect measure. Ferritin, as you mentioned, is an iron storage protein. So that's probably the best way to find out if you're in the sweet spot.

And this is a test you could order through Direct Labs or Wellness FX or something like that. Yes, absolutely.

Almost anyone has a life extension that you don't. I think also for $39.

Oh, okay. Got it. Now, in terms of iron, why wouldn't you measure iron in addition to ferritin?

It's just not as accurate. I'm not sure I forget the specific chemical reasons why, but ferritin is the one to go with. There's a good book earlier this year called Dumping Iron that I read that is written by a lay journalist, but it really goes into it in great depth. Dumping iron.

I think it's called Dumping Iron. That's great. Any book that has dumping in the title has got to be good. Okay, Dumping Iron. I'll link to that one in the show notes. And then finally, you mentioned giving blood.

I know that giving blood. This might return to your whole performance versus longevity piece that you mentioned earlier. Decreases VO2 max. Decreases VO2 max by anywhere from 6 to 8%. I know because I've looked into this and kind of timed when I go in for my fancy big blood panels based off of when I might happen to have an upcoming race. But do you. So first of all, you give blood multiple times a year? Correct?

No, because I'm a physician, so I have the opportunity to titrate. For me, giving blood is too much.

Okay.

You know, so that's 16 ounces. So what I do is I have a. Essentially a phlebotomy kit. I ordered some capillary tubes and some big syringes and I just take out four ounces, usually about every. It was every four weeks. Now I'm down to every six weeks because I just got my. Finally got my ferritin below 60. It was like 55 the last time I checked it.

Okay, got it. Don't try that at home. People. People. But basically.

But it's ideal. But it's not hard to do. There's lots of phlebotomists around. So, I mean, that would be the ideal way. And you don't have to hassle factor or the inconvenience to go into the center. But you should also know that even Though the blood donation sites that are all over the country may not understand it, they have to, by law, allow you to do what's called a therapeutic phlebotomy, essentially to donate your blood, because many people, maybe 30%, 50% of people, can't donate their blood because of some type of previous health condition.

Okay, got it. Do you do anything or do you recommend people do anything after they give blood, aside from drink lots of water and take on lots of electrolytes to kind of. Returning to my question about the decrease in VO2 max, like, return to performance quickly.

Good. You know, definitely plan some downtime, because that's a lot of blood. That's why I only take out 4 ounces at a time.

Okay, got it, got it. And how many ounces do you lose when you say, like, go to Red Cross and donate blood?

Sixteen. A pint.

Okay. Yeah, so that's. That's a significant difference.

Yeah. So I take out a pint over four months.

Or you can just be a geeky biohacker like me and do enough blood panels to where you're constantly filling tubes.

Well, you have to take. Now you'd have to take a heck of a lot, because I tried doing that with tubes, and it's just. It's only like a. It's a third of an ounce in one of those tubes. So you'd have to. It's a lot of tubes.

Yeah, exactly. Even the fancy wellness effects panels. Those are about 19 tubes or so of blood. Interestingly, though, I have noticed a decrease in performance for few days after I do that blood panel.

Yeah, you will. At your level as an elite athlete, there's no question you will.

So one other question that I have. But before, I want to turn to some of your thoughts on fasting and protein intake, because I've seen you talk about that is we touched briefly on electromagnetic field exposure and negative ions and things like this. So in terms of these devices and biohacks and things like. Like that, are there certain things that you stay away from? Because I know this is a constant argument in the health sector is, you know, from Fitbits and jawbone devices to, you know, to even, like, these grounding and earthing things. Right. Like earth pulses and things that produce pulsed electromagnetic field frequencies. What's your take on that? Do you use one of these biohacks?

Oh, absolutely. There's no question about it. And actually, there's two that I use from you that I actually stopped using, because after I connect with Cruise, one of them was the Delta Sleeper, which Did not work for me. And I'll tell you. And I used it to increase my deep sleep because my deep sleep sucked. I mean, I was getting from zero to three minutes a night. That was about. But now I finally got up to 40 minutes. So I can tell you how I did that in a moment, which relates to the answer of your question. But I tried the Delta Sleeper and I returned it. Then I tried. What are some other. Oh, oh, the Oura ring. I love the Oura ring. In concept, it's only 1 milli watt of power, but it actually submits its radio frequency. So Cruise doesn't like those at all. So I'm in the process of finding a different one, but I don't know anything else to measure my deep sleep at this point.

I keep my Oura ring in airplane mode. That's the way that I do it is you can go into settings. That's the only. That was my very first question when I talked to these folks. And if you're listening, you have no clue what these. Just go to my site and search for it. I podcast with these guys. But the very first question I asked them was, what do you do about the Bluetooth signal that most of these devices emit every one to three seconds? And you can actually place it. You sync it to your iPhone app and you go into settings and you can put it in airplane mode. That's why it's so freaking expensive. Because it has this built in computer that collects data without actually producing the frequencies.

I can't.

I've got.

I'd never wear jewelry. I haven't worn jewelry in 30 years. And I get so many compliments on the ring. They just like it as a piece of jewelry.

It's like, yeah, it looks like a cool magical rock. But did you know that you could put it in airplane mode?

Yeah, I knew that and I forgot about it. Thank you for reminding. As soon as I get off this, I'm going to put in mine in airplane mode.

Yeah. So that, that's what I do is I put it in airplane mode. The other one. So tell me about the. Tell me about the Delta Sleeper because I'm interested to hear your take on it. And I wear it. I wear it every night. So I put it on my collarbone every night. Night. And it is. It's pulsed electromagnetic field frequencies. The idea being that it sends a signal from your brachial plexus up to your. Up to your brain for about. It emits for about 22 minutes when you press the little button to Turn it on to put you into deep sleep. So tell me what your take on it was.

Yeah, I didn't like it too much because it was real hassle factor to put an adhesive all the time and keep it on turn. I just didn't like the design at all. But if it worked, I would have no problems with it. Thing is, it's this radio frequency device and Cruise really opposes those and I didn't see an improvement in my sleep with it.

Well, Dr. Cruz was bugging me about that. He told me.

Yeah, I know, in Norway. He's telling me. But I just talked to him this week.

Should we delve into this or is this too much of a rabbit hole for the podcast?

No, no, it's a rabbit hole because there's a lot of other things I want to go on. But what can you do that's keep it focused on the positive? So one of the things he recommends, and I had it in my. I purchased 15 years ago and was my addict for the last 13 years or so, is a magnetic sleeping pad. He likes the one from Magnetico. And interestingly, that's the one I had purchased. So I started using that as a static magnetic field to sort of insulate and mitigate some of the effects of the EMFs that you're exposed to, but also to really structure the water in your body. It's just a magnificent thing. So I did that and I combined it literally with blocking the blue light during the day from all artificial sources, you know, not just at night. Those two combinations. I'm sleeping 40 minutes of deep sleep now.

Wait, so it's a magnetico plus the what?

It's blocking the blue light.

Just blocking blue light from artificial.

From artificial sources, not from the sun.

That's your one, two combo. That's your 80, 20.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And these magneticos are like sleep sleep pads that you put underneath your.

Yeah, they're heavy. Fact. Like if we're a queen size bed, I mean there's. There's four pads and the, each pad weighs about 75 pounds. I mean these are just full of magnets. So I don't think your wife's going to like me too much when you.

Well, I use a buy. I have a biomat and I use that.

Well, that's another pemf.

The, the biomat, it's not. Yeah, they've got a, they've got an EMF blocker that, that the unit plugs into and it's, it's a, it's a relatively low frequency. So if you look at some of these, like if you look at the Earth's magnetic field, that's like about 3 to 6 milligauss or so. And if you look at something like a Biomat or something like that Delta sleeper device, it's an extremely low gauss field.

I get it. I get it. But I would, you know, I am not the expert here. I would definitely talk to Cruz. That's his ball of wax. And he will have a very extensive discussion with you. And I think he'll convince you.

I'll talk to you.

I would encourage you to try the static magnetic field and blocking the blue light throughout the entire day from artificial sources. And I will almost guarantee your deep sleep will go up.

Okay, I'll try it. One last thing I got to throw in there. Did you know that in the study that they did on non native EMF exposure and cancer, and I actually haven't had a chance to talk to Jack about this yet, but I plan on it. So they did a study in mice. Mice, and they used an intensity of. It was nearly 10 times of what you get exposed to with one of these pulse electromagnetic field devices. And then they bombarded the mice with gamma radiation to give them cancer to see if they were more susceptible to getting cancer when they got blasted with non native EMF at levels way higher than what you get exposed to with these lower frequency devices or the planet Earth. So the study itself was. It's kind of like the China Study, Right. Where they say that. That this might be a good way for us to get into the talk about protein and cancer. But they say that, you know, the China Study says that excess animal protein can give you cancer. But what they failed to note was that they gave the animals a bunch of cancer and then gave them the protein. It wasn't the protein that caused the cancer.

Oh. And it was terrible. And it was terrible protein, too.

Oh, it was horrible protein. Yeah.

So there's a lot of flaws.

Yeah. So, yeah, if you already have cancer, cancer, then dumping copious amounts of horrible protein into your body, of course, is going to make the matter a little bit worse. But anyways, we digress.

We can have that discussion with Jack. Yeah. But let's get back to this cancer thing, which is one of the reasons that Travis book changed my life. I mean, that's really what turned me into a mitochondria.

You mean the tripping over the truth?

Tripping over the truth by Travis Kristofferson. Yeah. So what I got from that and really had a fuller, deeper Appreciation and this is where the divergence between performance and optimization for long term longevity comes is how much protein you're going to take. So for me, I'm about 175 pounds and I seek to have somewhere between about 65 grams a day, almost always under 70, which isn't going to give me a lot of muscles, but it optimizes this protein, well pathway called mtor, which is sort of a million targeted rapamycin. I think if you talked about that before on the show.

Yeah, a little bit about how excess protein can basically increase the rate at which telomeres shorten. Has an aging effect.

Yeah, that's a side effect. But you know, there's a few important metabolic pathways. One is insulin, leptin, IGF1. And when those levels are high, you're going to stimulate mtor, which is going to suppress mitophagy or an autophagy, which is going to increase the risk of cancer. And conversely, it will also decrease ampk because AMPK and MTOR go hand in hand. Hand.

So you will die early if you have consistently high mtor. No question about it on the converse. If you can increase your AMPK levels higher and suppress mtor, you'll live longer. And there's some interesting strategies will do that. You know what some of those are?

I would guess protein restriction might be one of them.

Protein is probably the main one, but some other really great ones and one that you're very fond of, that is one of your big pain passions.

Intermittent fasting.

Well, no, you're bigger than that.

All right. Exercise, weight training specifically. Is that what you like for the anti aging effect?

No, I think any exercise will work. Weight training can do it. It'll give you specific things. Actually, weight training is a little bit complex because that will tend to stimulate MTOR in an anabolic state.

Yeah, that's a head scratcher for me because I've seen that same data, Joe, about how weight training will upregulate mtor. But when you look at the studies that look into the strength training effects on telomere length, they actually find that in athletes who have overtraining and what's called exercise associated fatigue, high levels of crp, high levels of inflammation, et cetera, they find abnormally short telomeres. But then when you look at. They did a really interesting muscle biopsy study on powerlifters. So power lifters lift a ton of weight, but not like a bodybuilder. Right. They don't damage, they just lift a lot of weight really fast, really explosively and then they put it down. And what they found in powerlifters was not only were they significantly higher than non weightlifters, but they were way higher than actual weightlifters. Like traditional bodybuilding style weightlifters, like doing squats and deadlifts, very explosively heavy for short periods of time. So it depends on the amount of muscle damage that you do is what it looks like.

Yeah, yeah, but just exercise in general, we will do it as with fasting, as you mentioned. And there's another interesting supplement called resveratrol, which increases Sirtuins, which increases PGC1 Alpha and secondarily my top mitochondrial biogenesis. Resveratrol. Yeah, resveratrol will do it. But then there's this other one that we both know about which is nad.

Yes.

Which you hit.

You filled me in big time on that, but go ahead.

Well, it's actually I learned about it from a podcast that you were interviewed on. I just saw it the other day with self help. And he also interviewed this guy named Vince Guillermo, who's in his 80s and he sounds like he's in his 50s. He's just really mentally clear and a great aging researcher and found out that beta lapachone increases nad. And what the heck is nad? Well, if you've taken biology, you know, it's an electron transfer. It's responsible for shifting shuttling electrons in the mitochondria. But also it has some very important signaling function. It's sort of a sensor for disease, disease and stress. And as we age, the levels of NAD go down by about 50%. So a really good solution. In fact, most of the anti aging researchers that I study are absolutely firmly convinced it is the single most important molecule to upregulate. No question about nad. That's why I was so fascinated with your interview on it, which really focused on using it intravenously, which is obviously not a good why solution for everyone. I mean, it was interesting how.

It rescued some people. I'm sure it's expensive as heck, but you want to.

Turn those NAD levels around. And one of the most effective ways I found was through Vince and it was the use of this T. Paul D arco, which is loaded with something called beta lapachone. And then I sent you the information on it and actually what I initially did was purchase some of the like tree bark and gave you a link for that. But since that time I found that there's these magnificent powders that actually dissolve and you can't taste, you don't get the tree bark in your teeth, and you can actually absorb it even better. But most of these.

Biomolecules tend to be poorly absorbed. So one of the strategies I do. And maybe we'll have time to get into some of the foods that I use, but I use krill phospholipids, which is not yet commercially available, but you could easily substitute sunflower lecithin, organic sunflower lecithin. And I spin it in my immersion blender when I'm making my smoothie with that beta lapichone that I soak in water with some of the seeds that I'm consuming for my meal for maybe overnight or eight hours. Then I spin it with the phospholipids and I make essentially liposomes, which basically explodes the absorption of these molecules into your cells.

Yeah. It can get through the phospholipid cell membrane and have that antioxidant effect in the cells when you blend it with a fat like that.

Yeah. And even past the blood brain barrier, too.

It's kind of funny since you told me about that. I actually have an assistant who helps me out with some things here at the house. And I set out a piece of paper for her yesterday and told her, okay, take this, blend it in the blender for three minutes, put the sunflower. Leslie. She's like, what the heck am I doing? Just trust me. I'm gonna live forever. Do this. Leave the mason jar in the fridge. And then what I do with that mason jar full of this. This tea extract that has the concentrated. The beta lapachone in it that you were talking about to increase your levels of NAD is I'll just use that as a base. Right. For smoothies or put, you know, a little bit in tea. So.

Yeah, yeah. But you might want to get the powdered version rather than sort of the. I mean, there's a really fine powder that I think it's going to be even better absorption when you put it in water. You'll get almost. You'll get a lot better distillate from.

The powdered version of the powder.

CO T. Yeah, we're going to actually probably have it on the site. So I got. I don't. I can't give you a link to buy it because I don't. I don't even know where we got it from, but I didn't even know it existed. But it does exist.

Okay, got it. Well, for now, for those of you listening in, I'll put a link to the podcast and the article that we did on. On NAD and The use of this pouty arcot and. And using that as yet another little anti aging slash health protocol you can throw into your routine in addition to some of these other things that we're talking about.

And the researcher figured that out was David Sinclair, who's from Harvard. He's actually the guy that discovered resveratrol. And he's. He's really probably one of the biggest proponents of NAD plus. And he's got. You could just look up his name in NAD plus. And he's got his own product, which is called nicotinamide riboside, which is kind of expensive. And I don't. It's just way. It's too impractical from my perspective because you need too much.

I just, I just think it's badass to blend up the bark, it seems.

Yeah, yeah. So that's important. But here's another strategic. This is part of my detox. One of the things I do with my sauna before. And I don't know if you're doing this, I take 4 grams of niacin, not the time release, just niacin and 15 grams of ribose. D Ribose. So they actually kind of combines to form the nicotinamide riboside prior to the sauna. It increases NAD plus.

Okay. So in the past, what I've done when I've gotten into the sauna to help to Lysol fat cells, which I believe is what you're going after with something like the niacin is I've used the.

No, no, no, no. I actually increase it for vasodilation to make sure those. Those waves penetrate and really help excrete. Help remove the toxins. It's more for a detox.

The toxins are coming out of fat cells. When you do that. Right To.

Yeah, but you know, you and I don't have much fat. I mean, we're looking at 8, 9%. What are you, 5%?

Actually, based on the most recent MRI we were talking about, I'm actually at. At 3%.

I may need to increase it a little bit bit.

Anyways though. So. Yeah, I took the niacin by Thorne. It's called Nia Safe, the inositol hexa niacinate because it's a little bit easier on the liver and you don't get as much flushing. But you touched on something very important. You're combining niacin with. What did you say? To increase your NAD levels?

D Ribose, which is another magnificent. Yeah, it's a sugar. It's a 5 carbon sugar that is actually used in the construction of nucleotides and is an important protocol for almost all mitochondrial improvements.

So you take D ribose, and then you take niacin, and then you go and do asana.

Now, listen, it took me a while. It took me a few months to build up to 4 grams. Anyone listening to this? You don't want to start at 4 grams. I mean, so you start, like, at 25 milligrams or something and work your way, way up. But, yeah, so I think that the combination. I don't know for sure, but it seems to make sense because that's exactly what nicotinamide riboside is. It's nicotinic acid and ribose.

Yeah, that makes really good sense. Interesting. Okay, well, I'll link to that strategy, that protocol, in the show notes. And related to that, you also exercise. I know, but you have a specific form of exercise that you're a fan of. Can you tell me about the exercise or the workouts that you do? Other. Other than walking billions of steps each month while reading your Kindle, what else are you doing? How are you maintaining muscle and things like that?

That's a quarter billion over a lifetime. So that's a lot. Yeah, so I do a lot of things. I have a personal trainer. Once a week, I do strength coaching or strength training with him. I just did that this morning. The other day, I will do functional training, and then I'll do a day of strength training at home. And I've actually, I love that book you recommended, Starting Strength by Mark Ripito. I couldn't recommend that better. I mean, it's just. I've never seen a more incredibly detailed orientation on how to. How to lift weights properly.

Great, great treatise.

100 pages on one lift, right? Crazy.

Yeah.

So you understand everything. So I use that. I, you know, I do the overhead squat, the dead. The deadlifts, the no over overhead press, and a regular squat, and then dips and.

Okay, so you do full body multiple times a week. Is that your.

No, just once. Just once.

And then you walk.

I have a power play, too.

Okay.

So, you know, and one of the things I learned with Kelly Starrett's book is that my external hip rotators were tight. So I try to get. I'm trying to get into the lotus position, which was a real challenge initially. So I don't know if you can do that, but, you know, so I.

Did a Saturday Night Live episode with Will Ferrer Carol, where he's in yoga class trying to do uncouth things to Himself. Is that lotus position?

I don't. I stopped watching Saturday Night live in the 70s.

All right, so you're doing a strength training routine once per week, like a full body compound strength training routine. Are you using a set or rep scenario? Like a four reps, six reps, kind.

Of what Mark describes. Do a set of five and then just increase the weight. Okay, gotcha.

And you also have like a high intensity workout program, like a cardiovascular program as well, am I correct?

Yeah, well, you're the exercise. You're the expert on exercise. I mean, it's crazy for me to talk about that, but what I do is I think the little tweak on it is I combine it with the ewat, the exercise with oxygen therapy and the oxygen concentrators.

That's right.

So I will do that. I do that after the infrared sauna. So I'll do the infrared sauna. I use mine. We have a low em, emf, full spectrum infrared sauna. I get it up to crank it up to about 130, 638, going to for 15 minutes. I do a cold shower, then come back in for another 15 minutes and I do the EWAT for 30. And then during that ewat, I'm doing either recumbent bike or an elliptical peak training. So I'll warm up for three minutes and then go out. I got it down to 20 seconds and I'll relax for 140 and just do multiple sets of that. And then for the rest of the 30 minutes and then. Okay.

Okay, gotcha. Why do you do the sauna before instead of after?

You would intuitively you think it would be before, but.

My personal physician actually.

Who'S guiding my. One of the challenges I'm taking it with, they said it would be better for me to do that. And he did some pretty exhaustive testing and said that.

You mean better to do the sauna before or to do the sauna after?

Sauna? No, sauna before for me.

Okay, gotcha. The reason I ask is like, I really like. So I have a sauna in my gym and I'll turn that on sometimes for minus too. A half hour before I'm gonna go train to heat up the muscle tissue you can get in. It's like a warmup. And those infrared rays, as you alluded to earlier, those penetrate tissue so you get a really good muscle warming effect. But the study in which they've shown that sauna can actually increase erythropoietin production almost similar to blood doping with epo what they did with that group was they had a group do a training session to exhaustion, and then. And then after the training session, they had him sit in a sauna for about 30 minutes. And this wasn't an infrared experiment. It was just a dry sauna. So what I try to do is, I try to. If I'm going to combine sauna and exercise. I actually, actually, Dr. Pompa and I did this in Park City a couple days ago. We went to the gym, we did a weight training routine, but then we got in the sauna afterwards to get that. Almost like that. Blood doping effect.

Yeah. Well, see, this is where we diverge. You're optimizing performance. I'm optimizing for longevity. So I don't need to be. I'm not doing Spartan races at parts of city.

Yeah.

So, you know, I don't need to have my EPO up. I want to. I'm doing it for other reasons.

Right. Okay. That makes. That makes sense. And it is really good warming up as well.

Yeah. So I take my. Let me just finish the detox because I do some interesting things that Dan doesn't. So I. I don't think he's doing the niacin and the riboside, the ribose, which is an important component. But I also, I use his cyto detox, which is great. It's available in his group. I'm sure he'll talk about it again.

What I use now as well. And yeah, if you weren't.

You needed to. You needed to be on Cyto Detox. No question.

For those of you who have no clue what we're talking about, wait until next week. I've got 90 minutes with Dan where we talk about cyto Detox. But. But go ahead. What were you saying? What else do you do?

I just do cyto detox and I use parsley. I use chlorella, and I also use something called IMD from Chris Shade. I don't know if you've interviewed Chris. He's probably the top. If you haven't, you should. He's the top metal detoxer probably in the world. He's got a PhD. Chris Shade, s H A D E. He's in Colorado and his company's called Quicksilver. Okay.

Oh, that's funny, because I was at a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado, last week, and I was talking to this big, tall gentleman.

I think that's where he's at.

This big, tall Indian gentleman walked in and this guy's job is he is like a TV show. Host where he goes to people's houses and completely reinvents their entire route routine. It's called Doctor in the House, I think is the name of the show. So I'm standing there talking to him, and this other guy comes up and he starts talking about metal detox. And he said, well, I've got this really unique form of detoxification. And I asked him what it was and he said it's called Quicksilver. Is this the guy you're talking about?

Oh, yeah, same guy.

That's crazy. I ran into him in a random coffee shop last week.

Tim Ferriss just interviewed Tony Robbins. Released broadcast interview last week or the week before last class. And at the end of the interview, he talks about how Chris Shade saved his life because Tony early on ate tons of salmon or seafood that was just loaded with mercury. He had one of the highest levels Chris ever tested. So he basically put on Detox Fordham. It changed his life. And he gives him a big shout out in Tim's interview.

Yeah, Quicksilver. So they make glutathione and they make.

Yeah, well, they make liposomal glutathione. And I'm not sure. I mean, it might be good for. For the detox, but I also use alpha lipoic acid when I'm doing that on those days.

Okay, so Quicksilver Scientific is the name of the company. And you said what you use from them for your detoxification is.

Actually, I don't use any. Oh, there's this other one. It's called imd.

Imd, okay. Yeah.

That is the most potent supplement known to man to extract metals and mercury out of your body. It's just. It's like. It's like 20 or 100 times more than chlorella. It's just crazy. And you need like a. About an eighth of a teaspoon.

And that's made by this company, Quicksilver Scientific.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I use. Imd.

Okay, got it. So I'll put a link to some of this stuff in the notes. So that's your detox protocols. You do a lot of these things like the parsleys and the cilantros and things that help the detox. Then you do this imd, and then you do the cyto detox and niacin.

Yeah, and the cyto detox. And I think that's. I think it's the. I don't know anyone that's doing that. I kind of put all these things together. You do the.

Is that every day?

No, no, no, three times a week.

Okay, so just three times a week you have certain days where you'll take these supplements that help you to detox.

I don't think you should be doing that detox every day. It's not a wise strategy.

I tried it. I tried that cyto detox every day and it just destroyed me. I had to bath.

Yeah, you don't want to do that. Yeah, yeah, you don't want.

Okay, gotcha. So I know that you garden, you have your house there on the beach. You've got all these kind of interesting biohacks. What are some things that we haven't talked about that you think would be intriguing to people as far as practices that you have in your life that more people should know about, in your opinion?

Well, for biohack I use the, I referred to it earlier, the continuous glucose monitoring made by Dexcom and Dan and his group of physicians. I think there's about six or eight of us now that are going to do this and I've been doing it for about six months and it's really intriguing. It's opened my eyes with hers.

This is the glucose monitor that you put underneath your skin and it does 24 hour glucose, is that correct?

Yeah, you change it, change the sensor once a week, but yeah, it gives you continuous readout. Now obviously that's freak radio frequencies coming out of your body, but I want the data, I want to know what type of food I'm eating that's going to impact it. So what I've learned, I've learned a lot of great things from this. It's like we talked about fasting. I think fasting is great, but ideally it's intermittent fasting. So how long do you intermittent fast? When I initially learned about it, I was telling people breakfast is not the best meal of the day, it's the worst. Now I've reversed that position. I think best fit is an important meal, but the most important meal is the meal that you're going to consume before your biggest exertion of energy. That's when you need the biggest amount of calories. But I think if you're going to restrict calories to a six to eight hour window, I think it's most important that you restrict them before you go to bed. At least three hours, maybe four or five. I actually go for five hours if I can, sometimes six, six before I go to bed. Why? Because you are metabolically the least metabolically active when you're sleeping. And why would you even think about putting fuel generating ATP that You can't use. That's going to clog up your system, create reactive oxygen species, secondary free radicals.

I answer that question if you want to get swole. Actually, when I was a bodybuilder, that's what I would do is tuna with ketchup and relish like three cans before bed.

Well, see, this is where we diverge. It's not right or wrong wrong. You want to get swole. I want to get. I want to live.

I don't want to get swole anymore. Now, you know my philosophy, Joe, is.

I make no argument that doing an Iron man or a Spartan, you know, I'll be doing a Spartan Ultra Beast next month, you know, 26 miles of just, you know, eight and nine hours of suffering out in the forest. I don't argue that that is not potentially stripping a few hours, if not days, if not weeks off my life. I think my take on it is we have to strike an ideal balance between living this limitless, bold, edgy, exciting life, but also not completely destroying ourselves as much as possible. Finding that balance between longevity and performance. No question for those people who are tempted or hardwired to just want to go out. Yeah.

And there's nothing wrong with it. Right. And it may be a certain phase of your life. So I certainly engaged in that. There's no question. And I kind of have regret it now. But I did it and it was fine. So my other passion we mentioned, one that you share is regenerative agriculture. So I live close to the beach, not on the beach, but most of my soil is sand. So a few years ago I put half a million pounds of wood chips on there and it's converted to some real nice deep soil. But before I put the chips on, I used something called biochar, which, you ever heard of biochar?

Biochar, no.

Yeah. It's incredible. It was originally called terra preta, which was developed by these ancient Indians in South America and thousands of years ago. And they had the most fertile soil on the planet down there. And it's actually, you can still buy some of that, but it's essentially when you decompose biomass anaerobically without oxygen and it converts to this essentially like graphene type carbon structures that form these magnificent hotels for the microbiome in the soil. And it lasts for centuries. So it's an incredible that. And I use these ionic ocean minerals as a foliar spray. And I'm telling you, I'm creating a lot of food in my plates. I've got like 60 fruit trees. This is crazy. I've got olives, avocado, pecans, macadamias, mangoes, bananas, tangerines, figs, cherries, peaches, apricots, plums, mulberries. And those are just the trees. And these cherries I've got. I live in Florida, so they're called Barbados cherries, but they're actually. The other name is acerola cherries. Have you ever heard of them?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Unbelievable. Ben, These. These trees produce six months out of the year. I'm picking literally 50 to 70 or 80 cherries a day. Each cherry has 80 milligrams of vitamin C. Yeah.

Acerola cherries for vitamin C, I mean, they're unparalleled. But this biochar, is it just basically like probiotics for the soil?

No, no, no, it's not a probiotic. No. It's a structure that the bacteria can. And the other microbes in the soil can hang out, out in. It's like a hotel for them. So by itself, it's not any good. It has to be sort of charged and it doesn't work right away. It takes months, maybe a year or so before it really gets inoculated with the microbes. So once it's in there, it's unbelievable stuff. I can send you some links to the books. It's just incredible. Ideally, you want to purchase. It's heavy. I put like 4, 6 tons on my property into the soil.

It basically will last the rest of your life. It's. It's the fertilizer that never quits. I'm looking.

The microbes are decomposing the nutrients in the soil and feeding the plants. It's all about optimizing the microbes in the soil.

I'm looking out my window right now. There are eight raised garden beds. And my wife is actually out there right now. I want to rush out the door right now and tell her to get her bioshar and the ionic ocean minerals.

Because the ionic ocean minerals is right away. But the biochar, you have to integrate into the soil. You have to be careful, make sure it's activated because you don't want raw bio. That'll make things worse. Now, for anyone listening, they say, wow, well, you can't do that. Well, yes, you can. You can do things like sunflower seed sprouts, which is 30 times more nutrient dense than even organic vegetables in your wife's raised beds. So you can grow those in a college dorm room easily.

Does the biochar. The soil conditioner does it come with instructions on how to apply it properly so that you do indeed use it in the correct manner.

Yeah, it's not that hard. You can just look it up online. It's pretty straightforward. The major caution is that you don't want to use raw biochar because it has to be ideally combined with compost and recharged because it's just too. It's just not good for the soil initially.

Yeah, we do a lot of composting.

There's nothing better. It's incredible. You can read miracles on biochar, but it lasts centuries. It does not give out.

Okay, gotcha. We have plenty of goat and chicken poop outside that my wife compost with food scraps from our kitchen. And I'll talk with her about this biochar and she's really keen on gardening and geeks out on this stuff all the time. So I think she's going to really like this. There are obviously hours and hours that we could cover on everything that we know and do, but go ahead, throw one more at us.

This is the last one is the brainwave entrainment that I mentioned earlier, EE real time biofeedback. But I know you're really passionate about sleep. And I use a company called clearmind, I think, and it's a professional unit. I think it's less like 20,000 and their home units are like 6 or 7,000 or somewhere in that range. But maybe it's 1500. It's $1500. But they've got these sounds in there. I'm in the process of really seeing if they can make it really inexpensive and just give people the sound waves. But you can put them on these heads, headphones. Unbelievable. These signals, they entrain your brain. The waves to come down to delta and it's like a half hour program. And I swear I put it on like every night. Now, I usually don't have problems falling asleep, but literally in 10 to 15 minutes I'm asleep and I wake up like two hours later and realize that every time I never listen to the end of the program because I'm just falling asleep, it hit me in a delta boom. So. So I know that's clearmind.

They will sell you like neural systems. But what you're saying is all you're doing is you're just using like an audio that they have on their website.

No, it's not on their website. It's a home unit. It's called the Focus unit that you can have these programs because basically they do an EEG recording Like you're doing. I think you do it in a different company where they take the tracing of your brain waves and then they give you real time biofeedback so that you can train those waves to be more optimal configuration, which is what I'm doing also. I do that every night for about 30 minutes now.

I see it. It's on their website. The NI Focus unit, the personal brain trainer for home or on the go.

Right.

Okay. Cohen.

Yeah, it's too expensive just to do that, just to get that one program. So I'm talking to the company to see if we can just sell that one unit for the sleeping because it's just. I cannot believe how effective. I just. I thought it's like almost magic. Magic. I would just get you to go to sleep. It's like instant.

Yeah. I'm actually flying to LA tomorrow to spend a week at Peak Brain la where we're going to be doing three to four hours of neurofeedback a day to basically rewire areas of my brain that have poor blood flow to the brain, from everything from concussions to spartan races to life to toxins in general. And then I come home with their little $20,000 God cap or whatever you want to call it that you train with for a long time thereafter.

It's a good. Yeah, that's what the clearmind costs too. But the one last thing is like, when you're flying to la, use the Cyto detox. Use it at a high level because that will definitely help the free radicals. No question about it. But you know what's going to be even better than that? And you and I are both going to get it. It's not available yet, but I think you know the Quantlet.

Oh, the Quantlet bracelet. Yes.

Yeah, I'm getting one from Ruben next month. He's coming down.

I have a huge podcast on the Quantlet and I'll link to and shown us this for those of you listening in it, it basically exposes your blood to both light and cold and it just sits on your wrist. So, yeah, it's.

Yeah. And the cold is a form of magnetism, it's called, you know, that basically induces changes in your body. Super cool.

I'll link to that podcast as well. Tons of stuff. Tons of stuff.

You guys, we could spend another two hours and we just think. We didn't even have the diet stuff. Oh, yeah. Which is my major expertise. We went all on the other stuff.

So anyways, first of all, for those of you listening in Dr. Mercola will be back for sure. I guarantee it. I will twist his arm. I actually plan on going down and seeing him in Florida at some point in the next few months. So it might even be one of those fun little face to face podcasts that you guys get to listen to every now and again. In the meantime, though, if you want to delve into all the goodness that we went through in today's episode, episode, everything from biochar to the starting strength book to the water filters to blue light blocking glasses, everything we talked about along with Dr. Minkoff or Dr. Minkoff, Dr. Minkoff's episode will be in there too. But Dr. Mercola, there's too many Dr. M's I talk to these days. All of that go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Mercola that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com mercola and check it out. And I would also highly encourage you to go to to mercola.com as well and check out their newsletter. Check out some of the articles that there's tons of cutting edge stuff over there. If you didn't get the idea that that Joe's on the cutting edge, you now know that he is. So Joe, thanks for coming on the show, man.

All right, well, thanks, Ben. Look forward to connecting one time.

All right, folks, yes, personally I will be in Florida.

Good luck in your race and definitely take that side the of D6 when you're on the plane. That's one of the probably the most important ways to protect yourself. And you got it. So use it.

It will go into my bag. It will be packed tonight.

All right, sounds good.

All right, folks, well, thanks for listening in. I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Joseph Mercola signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sa.