Microplastics, Seed Oils, Bad Posture & Why You're Still Sick Despite Doing Everything Right

Alright.

So, if you've been doing everything right and you still feel like something could be missing, this episode could give you the reason why. A lot of people think healing and optimization is about finding the right protocol, you know, the right supplement stack or the right diet or the right biohack. But, the real leverage could be in the layers underneath all of that, the invisible stuff like what's literally touching your body right now on your clothes, how your home is built, what your cells are made of that habits that you're subconsciously running on autopilot every single day. So, this episode is about base layers, and I mean that both literally and metaphorically. I've got Daniel Baird on talking about why the fabric in your undies might be silently disrupting your hormones and what microplastics are doing to reproductive health from the outside in. I've got Katy Bowman on talking about why sleeping on the floor could do more for your joints and posture than any mattress or recovery tool that you might be trying. I don't sleep on the floor, but I definitely have adopted a different mattress after talking with her. I've got Justin Rothlingschoffer on to talk about how a near-death diagnosis at 32 years old rewired his entire approach to health and why tracking HRV is the habit foundation a lot of high performers don't interpret right. I've got Dr. Cate Shanahan to talk about how oils in your kitchen are literally building your cell membranes and why one French fry, according to her, carries the oxidative load of an entire cigarette. I've got Julie Gibson Clark talking about how she rebuilt her health from scratch in her 40s using practical stackable habits anyone can actually sustain. I've got James Purat, this is a fun one, on what Spartan warriors actually train like and why their approach to physical prep still holds up as a blueprint for human performance. So, You can listen to the whole thing. You can jump into the section that resonates most to you. And all the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/RootsOfHealth. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/RootsOfHealth. Let's begin with Daniel Baird talking about the literal base layer, the fabric touching the most hormonally sensitive part of the male body. He will tell you all you need to know about your underwear material and reproductive health. And, we'll go hear what he has to say, which might make you go out and get some different boxers and briefs.

Even though we're only waist up on this podcast, I'm not wearing underwear right now.

I am wearing shorts.

I'm wearing Biore shorts, but I'm actually underwear-free. So, unfortunately, I should have thought in advance and put on some of those brand spanking new NAD's underwear I have up in my closet. But regardless, I'll sit here underwear-free and listen to you talk about underwear. Alright. So, back to your story.

Sure.

So, my name is Dan Baird. I am 28 years old. I'm a longtime health and wellness enthusiast and advocate. I am an athlete. I am a brother, son, student of life. And as of lately, I am an entrepreneur. I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Nads. Nads is a men's underwear brand built on sustainable, better-for-balls principles. We are on a mission to sort of shake up the underwear industry and provide men with organic, non-toxic underwear, a home that is better for their boys below the belt.

Ben Greenfield: So, were you just getting dressed one day and you decided you wanted a better set of underwear or do you have an actual background in underwear? Fashion or science or something like that?

So, when I was 21 years old, I had this weird accident. I actually hit my head on the bottom of a pool and I fractured my C4 vertebrae in my neck. And, that sent me into what was pretty much just a world of inflammation from my skull all the way down into my glutes. And, it caused a bunch of muscular imbalances and I was dealing with crazy trigger points in my body. And, I started to have crazy high levels of inflammation and very high levels of pain that came with that. So, that kind of set me out on this mission to reduce pain management. I started looking at significant ways to improve overall function of health as opposed to what I was used to at the time, which was more athletics and performance. So, I started really looking at what was going on underneath the surface. Right around the same time, I started experiencing symptoms that I thought were a little atypical for a young 23-year-old guy to be experiencing things like brain fog, chronic fatigue, fluctuating energy levels, these crazy high levels of inflammation like I mentioned. So, I finally got to a breaking point where I said, "Enough is enough. I need to start getting some actual concrete answers that I can take action against because I'm tired of regular doctors just telling me, 'You should just throw this Band-Aid solution at it or this Band-Aid solution at it. There's not going to be much you can do.'" So, I met up with the functional medicine practitioner at 23. I really wanted to understand what was going on underneath the surface because I refused to believe that that was the way I needed to live my life for the rest of my days. So, I met up with a guy named Joe Radich up at R3 Health in West Palm Beach who is awesome. And, I've been working with him for about half a decade now. And, that first meeting was very eye-opening because we did blood work and what actually would come back to show that I had a host of things going on sure enough, but the main thing that I thought was pretty alarming was that I actually had low testosterone at 23 years old.

Yeah, which by the way is not uncommon nowadays. Maybe we can get into why, but But yeah, it's shocking but not uncommon.

Right. It's unfortunate. That's the reality we live in. And they're actually kind of in conventional medicine right now, they're lowering that threshold for what adequate testosterone levels are, which is a little bit alarming, but that's a whole other issue. So, at 23, I had low T. I was experiencing all these symptoms. I found out that I had a hormonal imbalance going on and I set out on a mission to optimize areas of my life that might be contributing to this all while trying to bring down the inflammation that I was experiencing. From this injury that I had happen. So, I started looking at things in the environment that could have an adverse response or had an adverse effect on hormonal balance. And then, I started learning about endocrine-disrupting chemicals and how prevalent they are in everyday items like food storage containers, cosmetic products, cooking utensils and supplies, food, produce, you name it.

Even some healthy items, by the way, including eating higher up in the food chain, particularly from fish.

Right, exactly. So, even when you really think you're nailing what you're supposed to be doing, there's always ways where you can try and optimize more. And, it's just like Pandora's box, once it's open, it doesn't shut, right? So, I started learning about where these EDCs, these endocrine-disrupting chemicals were very prevalent in my personal environment. And so, I just started trying to make small switches to try and optimize my testosterone production. And in doing this, luckily the inflammation in my body and everything else sort of subsided. So my overall system health got a lot better and I was able to make positive strides in the world of testosterone. So about 2 years ago, I started looking at clothing that I was wearing to the gym because I thought, you know, the first line of defense to the part of my body that produces testosterone, my gonads, needs to be solid. And, I was wearing 100% polyester compression shorts to the gym every day for the last, I don't know, 15 years. And, 30 minutes of those sessions were in the 180-degree sauna. And then, I started looking at what polyester is made of and I found out that polyester is a plastic-based fabric derived from petrochemicals.

And— Really?

Yeah. So, right in line with the whole issue of microplastics comes this whole thing about clothing. Specifically what we're putting our packages in, right?

Right. Because we should know, by the way, heat aside increasing capillarization and blood flow to any area of the skin, we're talking about a very thin layer of skin in the testes particularly that's excellent for absorption. That's why a lot of men will use scrotal cream for testosterone enhancement like an AndroGel. Well, similar to the way that You might use a, I don't know, a suppository for a medicine. That's a great delivery mechanism for better or worse for anything that's tucked up against your balls.

Yeah, exactly. The absorption rate of the genitals particularly is the highest in the body, right? So, it's one of those things where you don't have the luxury to just turn off what your skin is absorbing when it's in contact with things whether it's powder, cream, lotion, or fabric or the chemicals that are in fabrics. So, I set out to try and find a pair of underwear that was certified organic, non-toxic, and could actually hold up to the rigors of athletic training because that's such an important part of my life and my identity. And, I really couldn't find one. And, my background in branding and marketing and I had a little bit of the entrepreneurial bug, I just thought, "Hey, this is kind of a hole in the market right here and I think this is something where I can come into the market and make a product that actually makes an impact on people and is aligned with the whole health and wellness theme that has kind of been the theme of my life for a long time." Yeah.

By the way, probably not the greatest tagline for your product, "We plug a hole in the market." I don't know. I like that better.

Depends who you're asking, I guess. Depends who you're talking to. But yeah, so we went out and we started doing research. I contacted my co-founder Steve who's one of my all-time best buddies and him and I are very alike in a lot of ways personally and professionally. So, we decided that this was the opportunity we want to finally sync up on and actually kind of sink our teeth into and explore. And, we started looking at what materials might be best. And, we ended up settling on organic cotton as our preference mainly because of the certification and extra rigorous criteria that kind of already exists in that space, which we can get into in a little bit here. But, long story short, we couldn't find underwear that was capable of what we were looking for that was also better for our packages. So, we went out and we found a way to manufacture it.

You mean specifically that crossover between performance and cleanliness as far as the fabric is concerned? Because there is some hippie-dippy loose-fitting underwear out there, but it's not really great for active enthusiasts or weight training or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. So, we wanted to try and find that blend of health performance, and then the third element is kind of that style aspect. Make something that's still something men want to wear that looks good on them. So, that was kind of the crash background story for NAD's inception. It started out of personal frustration in the market and then kind of just started to take off from there.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. I have several questions about the actual composition of the fabric in clothing in general but especially underwear. But before that, I was just reading yesterday, I don't know if you saw this, study. I think it might have even been a meta-analysis. I don't have it in front of me right now, so it could have been a study of studies, but a shockingly high amount of microplastics directly linked to erectile dysfunction now being found in penile and testicular tissue in, in men. This was just news yesterday.

I feel like in the last 2 weeks we have had some serious development in the world of microplastics. In testicles, penile tissue, and in actual semen itself. And I feel like we're just starting to actually open our eyes to this as a very big issue. In my opinion, I think microplastics pose one of the biggest threats to human health that is kind of out there right now. I don't think it's as known, but I think we're finally starting to get to that point where this is kind of the tip of the iceberg. We're about to really uncover the actual adverse effects of microplastics in the human body. And I specifically think that this decline in men's reproductive health is directly tied to microplastics and then all the chemicals and toxins that are just everywhere in our environment right now.

Ben Greenfield: Next up is Katie Bowman. So Katie talks about what's touching your body to the surfaces and structures your body rests against all day and night. She shows you how the ground level of your home, uh, the floor ripples up into your posture, your joint health, your sleep quality, and your movement capacity. So, she's always fun to speak with. Let's go talk to biomechanist Katy Bowman.

Even our sitting, like, yes, our whole body is inactive when we're sitting, but part by part, a lot of us will lean back in a chair. So, even if you're sitting, you could be more active. Like, there's more active ways of sitting than other ways. So, by removing the back of a chair, scooting forward to the front of the chair, that's a more active, more metabolically active way of sitting than completely outsourcing support to some external structure.

Yeah. A piece of furniture. There's actually a training, a postural device someone sent to me about a month ago. It's called a Back Belt. And, you place it around the back and then there's two straps that go around the knees, then you strap the legs together. So, you're kind of internally hip rotated sitting straight up when you're in a chair. It's a cool little device and I've actually been putting it on occasionally when I do sit to, for example, eat lunch, it's impossible to have a bad posture. Kind of pulls your shoulders back and pulls your back upright and kind of internally rotates the hips again. So, it's a fantastic device for kind of training the posture to be correct when you're in a seated position if you want to call any given position correct, well-seated. But, I don't recall if it was in one of your books or not, Katy. It might have been. I don't I don't know if this rings any bells, but there's this chart. I think you can find it online. It's kind of like the Kama Sutra of seated positions. It's at least a few dozen different ways that one can sit that goes beyond the standard hunched over in a chair type of position. Was that something that you made? I forget. Are you familiar with that one?

Yeah. That's in my book, "Move Your DNA." And then, we made a poster of it. We made a separate poster of it because people found it inspiring because it just Again, because we're so influenced by our environment, and that includes how other people behave in a particular environment, like that becomes your construct of how you are to operate as a person, right? So, we have so many cultural cues that promote not only being still but being still in a particular shape that I— it's a— that poster is based on research done by an anthropologist decades ago named Gordon Hughes, who was interested— he was interested too in people not moving and seeing that trend towards less movement. And this was in the '50s and the '60s. And he was showing how many other cultures of the world take rest, you know. So I know there's a lot of talk in the— in, um, sort of the movement interested community about squatting. And if you've traveled in a lot of different places, you'll see that the squat for many people is the preferred way of taking rest. It's an active position, but for joints that have not grown up doing it, it's very difficult to hold a squat for an hour or to sit on the side of the road or wait for a train or hang out and have your lunch in this active squat position. And, that's just one of them. Lots of them are just still resting on the ground. But, when you look at it, it looks like a handful of stretches that you would be given in an exercise class to do, which was my point. My point is we're trying to recreate through exercise what we could be getting during non-exercise time by just positioning ourselves differently. So, I just modified my house to not promote so much, "Ah, just have a seat." just relax in this one particular position. So, by not having that option, and the analogy I like to make is if you're trying to eat better, you don't stock your house with the foods that you don't want to eat, you stock them with the foods that you do want to eat. And, it's the same for the way that I want to use my body. I just put out things that signal and some environmental cue to use me because I am here and it's easier to use me than not.

Right. It's almost like chairs are the chocolate-covered almonds from Trader Joe's that are in bowls around the house when you're trying to get on a better diet. It makes perfect sense. And, it's kind of funny because you talk about subtraction and obviously many people are probably familiar with the idea of subtracting shoes. I think you've talked a little bit about minimalist footwear and strengthening of the feet. That's one perfect example of something that might go beyond a chair-free or a minimalist chair home would be minimalist footwear or at least taking the option to go barefoot or less shod on a regular basis. Another example that I was thinking about as you were talking about the idea of being in the same position biomechanically for long periods of time and the potentially deleterious aspects of that was the same thing for the eyes. You talked about sitting and looking at screens. And, I think some people might notice if they were to watch the video version of this podcast, sometimes I'm looking at the camera looking at you, but I'm often as I'm listening to you and your answers, I'm gazing out this big picture window that's in front of my office. There's a mountain, there's trees far off in the distance, there's trees on another hill that's slightly closer, there's trees right in my backyard, and then there's you on the camera. So, often when I'm recording a podcast, I mean, I'm shifting my eye and my focus on a variety of different distances. So, the eyes aren't in that same static position throughout the day as well. And then, this is kind of related to something I also want to ask you about. Obviously, there's sleep too, right? We're in that position arguably for around a third of our lives or so. And I'm just curious how you arrange the sleeping environment, like if you're also just sleeping on the floor with these cushions propped under your head or what's it look like in terms of your bedroom or your sleeping environment?

Yeah, same. So, I am a ground sleeper just like I'm a ground— sitter. And, I am happy to use chairs when they're out and about. I don't make it a point to only do that, but I want to make sure that I'm always comfortable to be able to sleep.

You mean you don't stand on the airplane the entire time?

No, no. Okay. Although, I will get up and try to walk around just a little bit. Sometimes I will squat in my seat though just to stretch out for a longer flight. So, I have been known to do that. Only when, you know, people I know are sitting by the side. But for, yeah, I sleep on the ground. So we have sheepskins and so we roll them out and, you know, make our bed on top of that and then sleep on what would be, so it's, it's not, it's firm. It's much firmer than any mattress or futon, but it still is comfortable, right? Because it's got some. It's got some warmth, you know, that if you're worried about sleeping on a cold floor and you've got your Cush, I find it to be nice and comfortable, but I'm able to get out of my position better. So like the way I try to explain it is let's say that your particular body, because of it's being in repetitive shapes, it has a hard time getting out of essentially what is a chair shape. Even though you can stand up, if we really broke down what's happening in your joints, for many people, their hips really don't come out of flexion. Their pelvis, like if people deal with what's called an anterior tilt, forward tilt of their pelvis, that is a hip that's not standing up all of the way. The hip is still sort of in a chair. Even if you get your legs straight, the pelvis is coming forward. So, there's just this little bit of chair residue, chair baggage, I've called it different things that's left over in your body. And for many people, when they get into bed, even if you lay out on your back, I guess you lie down on your back, because of the cushion, you're still sort of able to keep some of those flexions in your body. They're being— coddled is not the word that I want, but the cushion is sort of supporting you where your body is right now where the ground is much more of a taskmaster and it makes those parts stretch out, which is why it's really uncomfortable for people when they first start because you can't continue to stay tense in certain areas. So, I sleep on the ground in that way. And then, I don't have a big heavy pillow. Oh, really? Yeah, I've gone down. I mean, and I took 18 months to go from— my neck was really stiff all the time. And I was like, "Why is my neck so stiff?" And then, as you said, our sleep environment is a third of— on the best days, it's a third of your day. And so, I was just realizing like, "Oh, I am sort of propping myself up in a single position and keeping my neck from moving." So, in the same way, if you've been in a car ride for a long time, the hips are stiff. My neck was stiff and it just didn't make sense to me. And then, I just was looking around at, "Well, how do humans— what are other cultures doing?" And I just realized, "Oh, of course. I need more movement even during my sleep time. I need more what I call pressure-related movements. My joints need to be able to go to a broader range of motion than what my bedding will allow." And that goes for my neck. Too. I need to be able to be more— it's like tenderizing a piece of meat. I need to be more supple. I need to be able to fold myself up. And that's why I sleep the way I do. And that's why a lot of my training that I would do is really just making my tissues more supple in general, not only stronger but more supple too. That's so important piece because then you can really adapt to whatever surface you're being given.

As a human.

Justin Rothlingschoffer is next. He gets into his near-death diagnosis. He talks about what happens when you optimize everyone else's habits but ignore your own and how to interpret HRV and why he really relies on that metric so much.

To be honest with you, Ben Greenfield, growing up in Canada, hockey was the rite of passage. And so, I was a hockey player, wanted to play in the NHL. That was my dream. And, I just happen to be blessed with a little bit of talent and was playing at 12 years old with 14- and 15-year-olds. And, my dad said to me after an in particular tough 2-week stretch, I wasn't playing well, and he said, "Son, talent will get you noticed but consistency will get you paid." And, just that one-liner that he said just hit me so deeply because I was like, "How can I become the most consistent version of myself? What does this look like? How do I operate differently than how I am right now?" And, I started to just get obsessed with the habits in which I could understand and the data in which ultimately would lead me down those behaviors. So, I started to wear a heart rate monitor to train. I looked at pulse oximeters while I was sleeping. I got on every medical journal I possibly could and that's what I was reading instead of comic books. And so, all of a sudden, and you have to remember this is back in 1999, I came across this article that talked about heart rate variability. And, I was like, "Hmm, heart rate variability, how to optimize recovery in high training times?" And, I was like, "Well, this might be something that helps me." And so, I just started to obsess about HRV. And so, for the last 26 years, heart rate variability has been something that I've studied very deeply and very in-depthly. And, by understanding the data and by helping to drive decisions, brought me down to the States on a hockey scholarship. It basically put my whole framework of schooling into place, went and got my master's degree, went and did my postdoctoral research in heart rate variability and sleep, went and got my massage therapy license, all the things. I wanted to learn about the body. I was just obsessed in this space. And, after stepping out of the NCAA and into the NHL as a health and performance coach, it was at that moment that I also realized we have all of this information, we have all of this data, but we're not actually using it. We all train the same, we all eat the same, we all recover the same, we all supplement the same, but yet the ownership team, the coaches, they were all wondering why we get sick around the same time or or we wouldn't see the results that were any different than any other teams in the league and there was no different trends in injury rates. And the moment that we started to use data to make decisions, to drive decisions, to determine how we train, to determine how we recover, to determine what we did day-to-day, to determine how we supplemented or how each player ate differently, we all of a sudden became the least injured team in the league, the least sick team in the league, And, we started to perform better as a result. Well, fast forward about 8 years and after having run the health and performance for the best athletes in the world, I realized myself that I had failed to do that for me. And, what I mean by that was I was still fit, I was still running all these races, I was still winning world championships, I was doing all of these things, but I had brain fog, I had fatigue that I'd never had before, I wasn't sleeping. And, I deep down knew innately that something was wrong. I went to all the docs, I went to all the functional medicine specialists, I went to all the naturopaths. They all gave me their big test that I needed to do. They all gave me their supplement protocol. They all gave me their magic potion that I was supposed to go off of. Everybody told me I was healthy, that they didn't know what was wrong, but I knew deep down that something wasn't right. I'll never forget, I was in Chicago, had just finished a workout, picked up a medicine ball, and went to go put it back on a rack. I was at the hotel at the time. And, my mind started to spin, the room started to turn, and I fell. And, the next thing I remember is I was laying face up on a bed.

Oh, wow.

And, I said to the person in the room, it was my wife, and I said, "I can't continue like this. There's something wrong." I went and I got a colonoscopy and an endoscopy. They found 4 polyps, all precancerous in my colon, and they found an ulcer the size of a quarter also precancerous in my stomach. And, he said, "Justin, I'm so sorry. Had we not done this, you would not have seen your 35th birthday. And, I was 32. And, it was at that moment again that it hit me and the Lord just spoke so deeply to me. He said, "At what point are you going to stop serving the audience that you want to and start serving the audience that I've called you to?" And, I knew that the problem that we were solving for those NHL athletes was not an athlete problem but rather a human problem. How do you take ownership of your health? How do you allow data to drive decisions? How do you get more versed on what's going on internally so that you can ultimately take ownership and feel confident in the actions, the behaviors that you're stepping into to just have great health so you can have longevity just like my father told me when I was 12 and I was using that in the direction of athletic performance rather than just health as a whole.

Wow.

Did you have an awareness of any type of genetic predisposition to cancer or anything like that?

Nothing, nothing. And, when I look back on it, Ben, even asking my parents, having it so young at 32, I said to my parents, I said, "Do you guys have any of this? Is this hereditary? When's the last time you guys have gone? I suggest you go." And, my parents literally go, "Oh my gosh, they went right after nothing?" And so, the docs literally had no idea where they had come from. And, when I sat back and I got real honest with myself, and this is how I say this often on platforms and even talk about this in my book is you either earn your health or you earn your illness. And, for me, if I looked at how I was living, over the course of those last 8 years, it was high stress, high pressure, not very good sleep. I go out and I drink on a regular basis. Yes, I would train hard. Yes, I would push my body to the limits, but I wasn't recovering well. I wasn't focused on that because I was so focused on doing it for everybody else, which I think a lot of leaders, a lot of business owners can really relate to is because you're trying to do something that you're on mission for. And so, I want to help you own your health and have this mission without having to give up your health because we can have it all. It just requires knowing and understanding what really matters and understanding your body in an in-depth way.

Ben Greenfield: When you said that the Lord spoke to you, we had an interesting discussion in Napa Valley about the way that you sense or feel or hear that. What's that actually like when you say something like the Lord spoke to you?

Yeah. So, it's a really great question. And, I hear from him often. When I say often, I should say daily. But, it comes from a very deep level of intention of being still and being silent. And, I always start the first 30 minutes of my day is sitting in a sauna and I don't listen to music, don't listen to podcasts, I don't even read, don't journal. I literally just open and I say, "Lord, what do you want me to hear today?" And then, I become silent. And, Irwin McManus says it really well. He goes, "So many people interfere and conflict with hearing the voice of God is because they constantly think that it's going to be a, 'Ben, this is the Lord talking to you.'" But instead, when we get on the frequency of the Lord, he just starts speaking through imagination, through creativity, through epiphanies through connecting the dots through our neurological system and having these mental breakthroughs. And so, every single day as I'm quiet, I get these new ideas, I get these newfound understandings, these epiphanies that quite frankly wouldn't hit before. And so, on this particular day coming out of the hospital, I'm laying in there after hearing this news and I was like, first off, I was like, "Why me? Why now? I'm so healthy in how I live." And, number one, it was to redirect my path and say, "Hey, you can do better." But, number two, it was to take me out— I firmly believe to take me out of the arena in which I was playing, which was the National Hockey League because if I was actually honest with myself, being there and continuing to stay there was more for my ego than it had to do about me serving other people. And, I found my worth in the NHL logo on my chest. I found my identity in that rather than truly serving up to serve people in a bigger way. And so, I think that was my wake-up call and just the clarity that I had of, "Hey, it's time to serve the people that you were called to, not just the audience that you want to serve, the one that makes you feel good, the one that gives you this sense of comfort, the sense of meaning, the sense of pride." put that to the side, and what does it look like to actually help serve and make an impact on a much larger scale of people?

Next up is Cate Shanahan. She's going to talk about how the base layer of your cells, the membranes themselves, are built from what you habitually eat and why swapping some specific ingredients in your kitchen can change your biology from the inside out.

I've heard people talk about this one, HNE. I think it's hydroxy— hydroxynonenol or something like that.

Do you know this one?

Yeah.

It's 4-HNE. That's just the name of a molecule. And, it belongs to a family of very toxic compounds called alpha-beta unsaturated aldehydes. Acrolein or acrolein is another one. Crotonaldehyde from cigarette smoking is another one. And, in fact, when you use these things to cook with, in a restaurant situation in a deep fryer, scientists have tested the amount of toxin that develops when— so they can tell you how much you're getting when you eat fries from a place like McDonald's or Burger King. And they found that the amount of these alpha-beta unsaturated aldehydes is equivalent to the amount in a cigarette, like on a 1-to-1 basis, 1 French fry equals the toxicity of smoking an entire cigarette. So, if you give these to your children, it's like giving them cigarettes. And, it's really— I'm not saying this to blame parents or put shame on any parents, it's shame on the folks who've been claiming that these oils are heart-healthy and promoting them without any regard to the reality of their chemistry and what the toxicologists have been trying to warn. For decades.

What if you just took a bunch of antioxidants?

Yeah, that's a great question. It doesn't work. So, most of the antioxidants that we can eat are designed by plants for plants. They help plants and they help us protect plants from UV radiation and problems that plants face, oxidative stress from being dehydrated, for example, and pathogens, for plant pathogens. So, it has nothing to do with human body's needs. And, the antioxidants that we get from plants, once they get absorbed into our body, they have almost no function and our liver and kidneys basically need to eliminate them. So, while they are useful in terms of cooking like olive oil, the polyphenols in olive oil, it helps to protect the oil while you're cooking it. It also helps to protect the food that you're cooking in your olive oil. So, it helps to prevent oxidation reactions in your food. It also probably helps to prevent them in your gut, helps keep your microbiome from experiencing too much oxidative stress. But, in terms of protecting your cells, they're worthless.

Ben Greenfield: Have you ever heard of this guy, Dr. James D. Nicolantonio, who's written a few food and science books who says that there are certain things, and two that he names that I know are spirulina and glycine, and that those can somehow help to protect the cell membranes against some of the damage from oxidized oils. This is something I came across in his book, and I believe this was in rodent model studies that there was less oxidative stress in response to consumption of vegetable oils with around 5 to 6 grams of spirulina or glycine consumption. I just wasn't sure if you'd come across that at all.

I've seen so much about how this or that little thing that it can be turned into a supplement helps. And sure, it can, but you have to look at the details to understand what are they comparing it to. Are they comparing it to the standard rat chow, which is basically pure processed food? I mean, rat chow, a standard lab animal chow, is basically like feeding people vegetable oil, sugar, refined carbohydrates, and protein powders and then some added vitamins. So, this is why it's important to think about these studies. You can't just take them as, "Oh, therefore this means that," right? You have to approach any question from multiple angles. You can't just take one single study and say, "It showed it, it must be true." And, that's what I've spent my entire career doing. So, I always fact-check everything. And, I also probe the question from different angles. Like, for example, what are they comparing it to? What are these rats eating? What is the baseline diet? And so, if you add a whole food, spirulina is just— it's a seaweed. So, I consider that a whole food. So, if you add a whole food into a diet that is purely processed junk, it's going to have benefits, but that's all there is to it. So, it's not like you need that. It's not like you need spirulina, has any special properties. Any whole food has some antioxidants that, like I say, can be helpful during the cooking process, during the digestive process, but then that's where their utility ends. They do not magically help us recover from a lifetime of vegetable oil consumption and processed food consumption that has promoted metabolic disease.

Ben Greenfield: You talked about how olive oil is processed with less heat. A company like Whole Foods says that they use something like cold expeller-pressed canola oil in like their salad bar or some of their ingredients. Is there a way to somehow have that oil extracted from— I think it's called the rapeseed— and have it not have as much oxidation kind of like Whole Foods is claiming to do?

Yeah. So, they're kind of misleading you there in a very important way and they're mixing up expeller-pressed with cold-pressed. There is no industry standard term in canola as there is in olive oil. Cold-pressed does refer to a specific temperature in the olive oil world, but to my knowledge, it doesn't. And what they do use, I know what they use, is just your standard expeller-pressed. And as I explained actually in the introductory chapter of "Dark Calories," that is a big lie. That expeller-pressed organic just means they didn't use hexane. But everything I said about how the crude oil is toxic and needs to be refined in order to become something that you don't immediately throw up, to become edible, still applies. So, of course, they would mislead us. They want us to think that they're doing something great, but it's not great.

Ben Greenfield: Interesting. Okay. So, there's one thing I was thinking about as you were explaining oxidative stress. I'm curious if you agree with me on this. We should probably clarify that you would be referring to excess oxidative stress because I know that you exercise and I exercise and a lot of people do sauna or they'll have certain xenohormetic agents from plants and herbs and spices. Some people will have a glass of wine at night. All of these are mild forms of hormetic oxidative stress. And you're not saying that all oxidative stress is bad. What you're referring to specifically is the type of irreversible cell membrane damage and biological impacts from the type of oxidative stress that's found specifically in processed vegetable oils.

All oxidative stress is potentially bad. And, don't be confused by the fact that some of it has adaptive benefits. That's just us adapting to this danger of metabolic— of oxidative stress. But, what I'm referring to is the uncontrolled excessive oxidative stress that are when we have where it causes dysfunction. And so, there really isn't a term to describe when oxidative stress goes from the expected normal amount that our biology is capable of handling to not, right? But that's where diseases can occur. And so, the more that you expose yourself to oxidative stress, the more diseases you're going to get. But it is oxidative stress that eventually kills us. So, if we could just evaporate the the reactions that cause oxidative stress, there weren't any, we wouldn't die. We wouldn't die in 100 years, it would take a lot longer, theoretically, right? It's an experiment that you just can't run, but that's what I would guess.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. So, tell me if I'm thinking about this the right way. This whole mitochondrial free radical theory of aging would dictate that certain amounts of oxidative stress cause an endogenous antioxidant response such as sane, reasonable amounts of exercise. And, that endogenous antioxidant response winds up in the long run protecting you against lifestyle and stress-based oxidative stress that allows exercise to have this life-extending effect when done in moderation. But what I'm thinking about here, and this is at least the way I'm processing this as you're talking, the oxidative stress from something like vegetable oils, unlike exercise, is actually introducing a compound into the body that is not only causing oxidative stress, but that is sort of being used as a building block for cell membranes and components in the body. That would dictate that you're actually creating a biology that's more susceptible to damage without actually sparking something like endogenous antioxidant production or something like that?

Yeah, you can look at it that way, but that I think is more complicated than the way I look at it. And so, the way I look at it is exercise is healthy for a variety of reasons. And exercise One of the things that it does is it increases blood flow and it stimulates hormone release, but it's not all through oxidative stress. There's multiple things going on here. And, if we look at it, again, we can't look at all of life through the lens of just one process. And, oxidative stress is extremely important to understand, but there's other things going on. And so, exercise is the same thing. Essential for health. You really cannot be healthy if you never exercise. So, it's not because of the oxidative stress, it's because of the other things that are possible for our bodies to accomplish due to exercise like muscle growth and the generation of necessary blood vessels and the generation of necessary hormones for optimal health. So, that's how I look at it.

Ben Greenfield: Next up is Julie Gibson Clark. Julie draws everything that we've covered so far, environment, habits, nutrition, into a lived example of what sustainable health transformation actually looks like. I think she holds a pretty high spot in what they call the longevity or the rejuvenation Olympics. So, she's doing something right. Let's go talk to Julie.

We could walk around a bit of a longer block if you don't mind because longevity, I only really heard about since 2017, but my interest in health and performance and nutrition, that was probably as early as, gosh, I was 8 or 9 years old. And then, we can get into the Rejuvenation Olympics and how I got into that a little bit later if that's okay.

Yeah, for sure. We got time.

Okay. So, I was a swimmer when I was younger. I think my older sister was a swimmer as well, so I started pretty young. She's 8 years older than me, so I think I was maybe 6, but somewhere around age 8, 9, my dad would go to my swim meets with me and he'd be like, "Okay, you've got the 100-meter fly coming up in 30 minutes. Let's give you X amount of a Snickers bar." and, you know, you need the glycogen load for your muscles. I'm 8 or 9.

You're reminding me of me yesterday at my son's jiu-jitsu tournament. I'm like standing there with a massage gun doing his thighs and getting a little bar so he times it properly. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah.

So, that's totally my dad. And, you know, it just— but I did feel better in those races because obviously I was practicing all week. But, you know, these races where I had the sugar in me or the "glycogen load," I was like, "Whoa, I can kind of really go faster. This is interesting." So, it just kind of impressed on me that there's some relationship between nutrition and performance. And then, just kind of watching him as I grew up, I mean we're talking late '70s, early '80s, he's making smoothies and what I probably call protein lattes. We called them concoctions then. It was like, "Oh, Dad, what are you mixing up now?" And it was like And he was reading, like, newsletters on nutraceuticals and things. And, you know, that wasn't— I mean, it was part of his career, but not necessarily the focus. So, anyway, fast forward to my 30s. And, again, kind of considering myself somewhat healthy, but I had gone through a really stressful period, 36 months. I was married, divorced. I moved about 4 times. I left my career that I had gone to college for. I was an engineer. And with not really knowing what I was going to do next. I had really bad acid reflux, extremely bad. And what happened? I was told I had 2 lumps in my left breast and a man tried to kidnap me at knifepoint. So, I was just excessively stressed. I went to my doctor for the acid reflux and she said, "Well, why don't you just take an antacid every day and you'll be fine?" And I was already on an antidepressant that she had prescribed and I just thought, "This doesn't seem right. I think there's a better way to fix this problem. Let me at least try." I was in Portland, Oregon at the time, so this is around 2000. And, I went to see a naturopath to just see if they had any ideas for me. And, sure enough, she said, "Well—" The first thing she said is, "Get off all wheat and dairy." "Oh, okay." So, 2 weeks later, acid reflux completely gone. I went to see her and she said, "We could probably help you get off that antidepressant if you were interested in trying." And, I was kind of past all the things that preceded needing that. So, I thought, "Yeah, let's give it a try." And so, that was kind of the first time I was introduced to this idea of nutraceuticals as a protocol and that they could help your brain and body. So, that was very successful and I went on to really kind of take my health very seriously from that point forward from age 30. So, fast forward to my 40s and I'm exhausted, my hair is falling out, and I'm thinking, you know, I work out every day. I eat what I thought was a very healthy diet, a vegan diet. You know, I was constantly researching nutrition and what to do. So, I was really mystified as to why I felt so horrible. And so, I went to see— a friend of mine had said, "You know, you should probably go get tested for heavy metals." So, she had a doctor who was like, more— it wasn't called functional medicine doctor at that time, but it's, you know, she was basically practicing functional medicine, right? And tested me for heavy metals. And sure enough, you know, those were like— there was just tons. I mean, everything from tungsten to lead to mercury to, you know, all kinds of— so that's, you know, um, was clear that that was what was causing the issue. And, um, we— I went through chelation therapy, probably about 15 rounds of chelation therapy, and somewhere around like round 6, it was because you do them on a weekly basis, somewhere around week 6, I remember driving home and it was like this fog had lifted from me. And, I thought there really is something to what she's doing. I mean, obviously, I could see that the metals were kind of coming down to healthier levels.

Yeah. And, by the way, for people who might not know chelation therapy, what would an average session of chelation therapy look like?

So, I would sit in a chair, it was an IV therapy with— and I'm going to get this wrong. I don't know if it was EDTA or I think it was EDTA, not DMPS. There's two chelators. And so, that was day 1. And then, the very next day because it chelates out all your minerals, so you have to go back and then have them replace all your minerals the next day.

Right. This isn't like a DIY take EDTA at home type of detox. You got to be careful with those type of things.

In fact, I won't get into the story, but definitely please do not do this on your own. You have to do this with a doctor who's monitoring all your different levels. And because I kind of went sideways at one point and it really caused some hormone imbalances, and that was just in one session with one day, you know, how it kind of went off. So definitely do not do this without the help of a doctor, for sure. Um, so at any rate, I— that's when I really, um— and she was also looking at my blood and saying, you know, this vegan diet is not helping you. And so, again, nothing wrong with that diet, it just was not for my body and my genetics. So, that's when I really kind of started taking things seriously. And, once we got all the metals down to kind of "safe levels," there was still a lot of them. And, I just kept thinking, "Isn't there a cumulative effect of having so many different ones?" So, I thought, "Well, enough chelation therapy, let me start just kind of naturally detoxing, looking at what are natural chelators and started researching it. And, that's kind of when the ball really started rolling. My dad was an astronaut on Skylab 3. He was— Oh, wow. And, this is like you got to go back to mid-'60s. And, up until that point, the space program had always been military guys. And, they placed an ad, my mom found it in the newspaper that NASA was was looking for scientists for their next mission. And, this was the Skylab mission. So, 2,000 guys applied and of those 2,000, 3 made it and one was my dad. And, he was just a scientist. He wasn't military. He wasn't— although he was on the football team probably in high school and college, but he wasn't a military fighter pilot or anything like that. So, he was always really into his health and performance. And, I think that's where the motivation came from that we were always told you could do whatever you want, be whatever you want, you just got to work for it.

Okay. So, you did the metal detox and then you started doing your own stuff.

Yeah, I started just because now the internet is a thing and I'm looking up detox, I find the work of Dr. Klinghardt. He's up in Washington. I don't know if you've—

Yeah, Dietrich Klinghardt. He's great.

Yeah, he is great. And then, Russell Blaylock, Mercola, and then from Mercola, all his different people that he would have on and I would go and read their books. So, again, fast forward, I learned about fasting through— well, I was following the AIP diet.

AIP kind of led me to Rhonda Patrick. AIP, autoimmune paleo.

Correct, yeah, because my family, my mom's family has quite a bit of autoimmune diseases. So, I thought, "Let me follow that," which is so restrictive. But, at any rate, and then eventually was led to— was it Jason Fung's fasting? And then, when I heard about the fasting mimicking diet, I thought, "Well, this sounds great because I can actually eat a little bit." So, Valter Longo's fasting mimicking diet, and that's the first time I heard about longevity. And then, started like, "Ooh, what is this? How can I be healthier, have a completely healthy life?" lifespan. So, eventually found David Sinclair and then I learned about senolytics, which again, I thought, "Oh, that sounds like detoxing zombie cells, detoxing. Let's do that. That sounds interesting." So, that led me to— I'm going to maybe mispronounce this, fisetin, that ingredient fisetin.

Yeah, fisetin, fisetin, tomato, tomato. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And, I started researching that. And, in the process of researching that, I learned about this company called NOVOS and the product. When I researched their product and all the different ingredients, I was like, "Oh, these are other things I'm reading about, glycine and rhodiola." And, I was already taking magnesium.

Ben Greenfield: And, NOVOS is— I think I mentioned before on the show, N-O-V-O-S. They actually have what I would consider to be a pretty good longevity test, the NOVOS Age. And then, they've got— yeah, it's like a supplement that covers a lot of the bases that you would expect for anti-senescence, for longevity, et cetera. I actually have some in my pantry. They have a powder and then they have a capsule.

Ben Greenfield: We're going to end with inspiration from James Puratt. The Spartans built an entire culture around physical mastery where environment and habits and training were inseparable. And James shows what becomes possible when Every base layer from how you move to how you live is deliberately designed for human potential and legacy.

Ben Greenfield: It's really hard to narrow it down obviously, but you're always going to have those 1 or 2 cultures that maybe kind of speak to you a little bit more than anything else. And for me, it's pretty much the Spartans and then certain Native American warrior cultures like the Apache and the Comanche. The Spartans, I think, particularly, I find them interesting because it's— I mean, you could argue there's eras and clans within the samurai era where maybe you can see something comparable. But, for the most part, the Spartans are really the only time that we see in human history what is a culture completely devoted to war and physical perfection and war look like. And, I mean, it's everything. Everything that they did for centuries was just dedicated to becoming physical apex predators on the battlefield and in the Olympic Games. I mean, I think there was something like there were entire— it'd be like 80 years that passed where no one won a pankration gold medal except for Spartan. That's just an insult of dominance.

The pankration was like the ancient form of MMA, right?

Yeah. It's literally just, I mean, no holds barred MMA, punching, kicking. There were knockouts. Apparently, The ancient records say that submissions were more common than knockouts, but knockouts were pretty common. And, the thing was there were no time limits or weight classes, so you went until one guy literally physically could not go whether it was due to he was just too fatigued to defend himself and he got pounded out or choked out, whatever. But, there were no rounds and no weight classes.

It sounds kind of like this football match that I took my family to in Italy. Yeah, the Calcio, the Storico Calcio, we went to it. It's basically I think it's like 25, 30 guys on either side and the only object of the game is to get the ball from one end of the field to the other and throw it over the fence. And, pretty much anything is allowed: punching, kicking, holding, dropping, wrestling, grappling, anything. And, it was a spectacle, man.

Dude, there's a very small percentage of the population on Earth that will ever see that with their own eyes. That's awesome that you got to. Yeah.

And, of course, there's ambulances and people getting drug out on stretchers throughout the game. It took a good 45 minutes for the actual game to start due to riots and fights and the false starts. But, once it got going, holy cow, it was incredible. I was just going to ask you a little bit about the way that the Spartans trained if you've been able to dig into and find out what an average training day would look like for a Spartan warrior.

So, it's really interesting because what we have to understand contextually is that the Spartans were enigmas and mysteries even in their own time. They spoke a different language than the other Greeks. They were from a different wave of immigration. They were from an older population on Greece that was there, the Dorian Greeks as opposed to the later Messenian Greeks that say most of the other ancient Greek city-states were descended from. So, Spartans really, they were kind of ancient mysterious, you know, in 500 BC. And, they didn't let people come into their country unless they were invited such as emissaries from other countries, certain messengers. They were extremely xenophobic in general or worse, but it was like they were very tribal, clan-like in their own way. But, yeah, no, definitely no open borders. But, having said that, we know— well, my approach, generally most people when confronted with this question would either avoid it or just kind of make some shit up. That wasn't good enough for me, not even as as integrity as an author but just my curiosity. So, I started looking at like, okay, let's start with what events that they won because they would compete against other Greeks, right? And, if you're winning an event, it stands to reason. So, we started there. Then, I went to some of the visitors and some of the people that would go, particularly when the Athenians would be trying to court the Spartans to join a war against the Persians or against whoever, you know what I mean? They'd send messengers and they would see sometimes the Spartans would even do a little psychological thing where they'd arrange a training session in front of visiting dignitaries just to be like, "Yeah, this is what our guys can do." You know what I mean? And so, they knew that they were like wrestling, grappling were huge. I'm sure you're familiar, but many listeners might not know what a haltier is, which is like a stone bell/kettlebell. They came in many different shapes, but it's kind of a unique hand weight carved from stone. And, the Spartans were big on using these for traditional, say, dumbbell kettlebell liftings, but their main thing they used them for was a primary thing they used them for was jumping weights. They do long jumps and high jumps carrying these dumbbells in their hands. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, very cool. In short, plyometrics were a big part of Spartan training. Yeah, weighted plyometrics though. Weighted plyometrics. And so, part of this, and a lot of people today will think, "Oh, you shouldn't load your joints underweight." And I mean, maybe I'm biased as a weighted runner, you know what I mean? But, it's like anything else, you apply a gradient of progression just like someone shouldn't deadlift 500 pounds if they've never deadlifted or squat 500 pounds, they've never been under a squat bar. Obviously, that would be bad for your joints too. So, if you're building up to doing this the right way, and then of course, there was a race in the Olympics, in the ancient Olympics called the hoplomachus. And this was basically a— it shifted a little bit, but generally, it was a 200 to 400-meter foot race in full armor carrying a shield. And, the Spartans were dominant at this event. There's ancient records that they're dominant year after year. And basically, you're running in a breastplate and greaves with a solid aspis shield or an ancient bronze-covered oak shield on one arm. And, I've never tried anything like this, but I cannot imagine how hard it would be to stabilize the asymmetry and weight from having one unburdened arm and one arm carrying a 22-pound oak shield and the size of it, the awkwardness, and then the actual armor. But, the Spartans were savage at this. And apparently, there's some rumor that this event was actually started with an ulterior motive in the Olympic Games. And that was to get the ancient Greek hoplites very, very good at running across a 200 to 400-meter range, which is coincidentally the effective range of the Persian bow, which was the main weapon of the Persian armies that were their main threat at the time. And so, Basically, the idea was like some clever guy was like, "Hey, let's create an Olympic event, but let's make it really, really convenient for getting our guys to run across to neutralize Persia's biggest weapon in case it comes to a fight," which it did. And, there are like the Battle of Marathon, that was a big part of what happened. Basically, the two armies, the Greek and the Persian army stood and looked at each other across a beach for 2 days. They line up, they just kind of mad dog each other and then be out there for hours and then they'd go back to camp and no one was really willing to make the first move. And then on the third day, there was a Greek general who just like his omens, either he woke up and ate his Wheaties or the omens were right, whatever it was. But he just, when the time was right, he just kind of, they were standing there, he just like gave his men the order to raise shield and he just said, "At them." Just two words, "At them." And the entire Greek army just rushed and they just, the same thing, it was just a dead sprint. 400 meters across through the arrow fire and they smashed into the Persians. You're going to take losses no matter what, but you're sprinting across that space. It's only time for the Persians to get off a couple of volleys and then you got armored guys who are bigger and stronger than you on you with spears and you have a wicker shield and a dagger and your bow is now useless. And so, yeah, that was a pretty cool story. And then, of course, that's the origin of the marathon too.

I'm just curious what you think of that 300 Spartan workout that was going around for a while.

I don't even know if I've seen it, but I'm going to guess that probably wasn't a hugely historically accurate representation of how they train.

Yeah, it's like deadlifts and— I forget the whole thing. I did it with my sons. I told my sons that we could watch the Spartan movie, which I think might be based on that battle you were just describing. It was. I love that movie. I took them in the garage. I said, "You guys do this Spartan workout with me. If you can finish in an hour or under, we'll go into the basement and watch the movie." So, they did the whole workout and then we went into the basement and spent half of our time down there with their eyes covered or with a blanket pulled up over it because I kind of forgot how intense the violence and some of the other portrayal of graphic imagery gets in that movie. But yeah, I think the workout probably doesn't come close to what you just described.

I hope you enjoyed that episode. All of the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/RootsOfHealth. BenGreenfieldLife.com/RootsOfHealth. Leave a rating or review wherever you find the show, YouTube, Spotify, or elsewhere. Thanks so much for listening in. Do you want free access to comprehensive shownotes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting-edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more, check out BenGreenfieldLife.com. It's all there, BenGreenfieldLife.com. See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like, or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like, and/or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So, hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review if you got a little extra time. It means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.