Q&A 442: The World's Happiest Country, The Newest Exercise Craze, The Latest Longevity Hack, Tips For Terrible Chefs, Building Muscle Faster & Much More.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life show, the world's happiest country, the newest exercise craze, the latest longevity hack, tips for terrible chefs, and a whole lot more.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

Well, welcome, welcome, welcome to Q and a episode number 442. I don't know if it's 4:42. I just kind of pull numbers out my butt. I've been podcasting for, gosh, I think, 16 years now at a rate of twice per week. I, I used to own two of their podcasts, one called Endurance Planet and one that I didn't own, but I ran called the Get Fit Guys Guide to Achieving a Better Body or something like that. So anyways, I have probably recorded, I don't know, I would say maybe 4,000 podcast episodes, but roughly, this is Q and a number 442 on the brand new, rebranded BenGreenfieldLife. Check it out at BenGreenfieldLife.com show notes@BenGreenfieldLife.com 4:42 and this one's gonna be a doozy, as I am prone to say, because it's on Twitter Spaces. We did this on Clubhouse. I'm sorry, I don't want to piss off all the Clubhouse folks, but maybe I've got a little bit of Elon Musk fever because I've decided to jump into Twitter and use Twitter Spaces to record an actual podcast. What's that mean? Well, it means that on today's show, as usual, I'll go through some news flashes from some cool little snippets from the health, fitness, longevity personal optimization news front that I wanted to bring to you. And then after that, I'm just going to jump straight into bringing people live up here from Twitter to ask questions. And so if you're listening to this podcast after it comes out, then please know that you can go to to the grab the newsletter@bengreenfieldlife.com follow me on Instagram or follow me on Twitter or all three if you're a glutton for punishment from me. And you will be the first to find out when we record these live episodes, if you want to join in, they're typically weekdays, more specifically typically Wednesdays, and even more specifically, typically Wednesdays at about 10:30am Pacific that we usually go. Mike's hot, as they say in the recording media industry with this thing. And that means that if you join us live on Twitter Spaces, you'll get to ask a Question, then I'm@twitter.com BenGreenfield I think, is my handle on Twitter. So that being said, let's go ahead and jump in to this week's news flashes.

All right, so the world's happiest country rankings came out. And drum roll, please. The happiest country in 2022. And I have to say, they are pretty happy because I've been there four times. There's actually a great little biohacking event. The biohacking. What do they call it, like a symposium or conference or an expo there? It's in Helsinki. You guess it. It's Finland. As a matter of fact, a lot of these Nordic countries rank very high based on life evaluations from this Gallup World poll that comes out every year. The Nordic country, Finland, and its neighbors, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, they all score quite well on everything from healthy life expectancy to GDP per capita to social support in times of trouble, low corruption, high social trust. Denmark came in number two. Iceland came in number three. Sweden and Norway were seventh and eighth. Switzerland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg took places four through six. Israel was number nine. New Zealand rounded out the top 10 the K ways. And so Finland, interestingly enough, what are they doing up there in Finland that makes them so happy, do you ask? Well, believe it or not, I, for the past three months have been behind the scenes involved in a top secret project. I'm actually producing a docu series on happiness with my friend Jeff Hayes, based out of Salt Lake City, the same cat who's produced docu series like Covid Revealed and the Pandemic Revealed and Cancer Revealed, and this one's called Hacking Happiness. As a matter of fact, we dug into and we identified key factors of happiness. There's a whole bunch that I learned about in this fantastic docuseries. I've literally, over the past three months gotten to interview 40 different people about how we achieve happiness. But a few things that stand out. In addition to Finland having a schooling system that's all based around creative free play, and I think most kids don't start a formal traditional education out there until about seventh grade, up until which time they're pursuing their passions. They're in nature. And I would say that that formative part of upbringing certainly will contribute to happiness. But also, also, here's a few other factors of happiness. As a matter of fact, these are such great factors of happiness that I have them on a mug that I drink my coffee out of every morning. I went to this website called Zazzle, and maybe I'll Put a link for you in the show notes over@BenGreenFitness.com 442 to my big ass mug that I designed on Zazzle with eight factors of happiness. These eight factors specifically coming from one of the largest studies on happiness that was done at Duke University or Duke University. You know what they are? Well, first, number one key factor of happiness, lack of suspicion and resentment. Okay. Nursing a grudge is a major factor in unhappiness. So happy people have a lack of suspicion and resentment. I live my life by that old Bible verse, don't let the sun go down on your anger. Just two nights ago, I recall sending what I consider to be a rude and a short email to one of my employees. And I went to bed at 9:30pm and about 9:45, 9:50pm I'm still laying there, and I could feel something unsettled in my soul. And I thought, geez, I'm letting the sun go down on my anger. I'm going to sleep with a slight thing in my soul against somebody else. And those build up. There's a fantastic author named Jim Wilson. If you look him up, he's written a book on bitterness. I don't remember the name of it. It's about bitterness, and I'll find it and I'll put it in the show notes, but it just goes into how bitterness will eat a hole in your soul. And I've written articles@BenGreenfieldLife.com about how if you look at Chinese traditional medicine, bitterness is associated with bone cancer and some other chronic diseases, even cancer. So I always like.

One of my philosophies in life, I would say, is to be at peace. The apostle Paul in the Bible says this. Try to be at peace with all men. When they say men in the Bible, they're so sexist, those Bible people. They mean men and women. So I try to be at peace with all men and women. I don't want to be a pushover. You know, I want to stand up for myself and be confident what I believe in. But I want to be at peace as much as I can, and I don't want to have these grudges. So I rolled over, I texted that person, I said, I'm sorry. I sent you a rude and short email earlier today. It was me. It wasn't you. I was having a rough day. I apologize. Please accept my apologize. Please accept my apology. Please forgive me. I'm shutting off my phone now to go to bed. But I hope you get this right. And I Clicked send. And then I turned and rolled over and went to bed. Okay? Because I know that a lack of suspicion and resentment is one key factor of happiness. Another one is not living in the past. Preoccupation with past mistakes and failures leads to depression. Okay? So we don't. I'm gonna spend as long as on all these, as I did on the first one. Okay. Because we got other things we want to talk about too. But basically, you get the idea. You're not an idiot. You hear me? Not living in the past. Okay. So when things go wrong. Yeah. Replay them, process them. Make sure they're not humming away in the back of your subconscious. You know that can lead to low level trauma. Deal with them. Don't shove them down and away, but take care of. Of mistakes. Visit mistakes and then move on. The best way I can recommend that you do. This is my own evening process that I lead my family through as well, of examin self examination. At the end of each day, we ask ourselves, we close our eyes. We play the whole day like a movie in our mind. We ask ourselves, what good have I done today? What could I have done better today? And how did I live out my life's purpose today? We process those mistakes. We process those failures. We write them down. Especially the part about, what could I have done better this day? We write them down, we learn from them, we move on. My wife and I also have this philosophy. I'm giving you guys a lot of philosophies today. Geez, that's. What is this saying that we say to each other? We say, no regrets, only gratefulness. No regrets, only gratefulness. We learn from everything. I had an argument with my wife 20 minutes ago. Okay? Literally 20 minutes ago, I had an argument with her. We got one of these new robot vacuum cleaners. I hate it. I hate it. That's a strong word. But I hate this robot vacuum cleaner. It goes around the house making all the noise, vacuuming all day long, and clean, clean, clean, clean, clean. Then I find out this morning it's got a WI FI signal on it, bombarding my kids and my house with WI Fi. I took my wife out on the back porch and I said, babe, I need a no judgment zone bent. We have that saying with each other, right? Like, we have this understanding between each other. And I recommend this from a relationship standpoint. I say, babe, I need a no judgment zone. You need to let me vent. She said, okay, go okay. And then her job is to just stand there. I said, this vacuum cleaner is driving me nuts. It's go, go, go. It's vacuum, vacuum, vacuum. And then you combine that with all these chairs getting put up on the table and you constantly sweeping and swooping in and cleaning up after me. When I spill my smoothie, I feel like I can't even freaking fart without somebody swooping in and having to clean. And the vacuum cleaner going the whole time isn't helping things. I'm just. I go on and on. Then she just goes. She goes, okay, I hear you. She gives me a hug, we hug, we move on. No regrets, only gratefulness. We learned our lesson. Ben doesn't like the vacuum. Keep the vacuum off when Ben's around. Or maybe we get a new one that you can disable the WI fi on. Okay, Number three. Not wasting time and energy fighting things you cannot change. Okay? Happy people don't waste time and energy fighting things you cannot change. Duh. It's the Viktor Frankl thing, right? We choose to be happy no matter our circumstances. We choose to be content no matter our circumstances. Something that's not into your control, great. You don't have any control over it. Be happy. Smile. All right? No use wasting your time and energy fighting things you cannot change. I'm not saying you need to have learned helplessness here. Right? You don't roll over and just say, oh, life sucks. I can't do anything about it. I'm gonna go curl up on my bed in a fetal position or. Right. Usually those kind of things are things that you can control. Like, I don't know, masks. Right? Be like, I don't know what to do. They tell me to wear the mask. I don't want to wear the mask. I know a lot of people aren't even making you wear masks anymore, but I was using this as an illustrative example. All right? That is in your control, okay? That is in your control. You can take off your mask and can hold up your middle finger to whoever's telling you to put on the mask. Okay? You can do that. That is under your control. If you're on an airplane and it's super annoying you, well, you gotta call an audible there. And maybe you're gonna say, okay, this mask is super annoying me, but I'm not gonna let it get to me. I'm gonna be happy no matter my circumstances. What I'd really love to do right now is stand up and tell everybody how stupid this is, that I need to wear this mask, except for when I'm eating. Because apparently when I'm eating, viruses magically go Away as soon as I pull down my mask to, you know, take a bite and pull it back up again while I'm chewing, then pull it back down to take a bite and pull it back up again while I chew. You get the idea, right? Look, even. Look, okay? And I'm just going to come around and say, I'm Pretty sure even Dr. Anthony Fauci himself chuckles at this. Like, deep down inside, he's got to be thinking, this is ridiculous. The virus doesn't really go away when we take a bite of our peanut, right? But, you know, we have this. This whole idea. What's Robert Malone call it? Mass psychosis or something like that, where everybody else is doing it, so we might as well. That's not what I'm talking about, okay? What? I'm talking about things that you cannot change. All right? My good friend Jay wasn't able to join us for today's podcast because of storm issues and the Internet going down. You think he's at home getting all down on himself, getting all grumpy because he couldn't change the weather because he's not the meteor man, Whatever you call the person who can change the weather. Bill Gates. Because he's not Bill Gates who can change the weather. No, he's not wasting time and energy fighting things he cannot change. Being happy. Be content no matter your circumstances. Be content no matter your circumstances. Choose to be happy. Don't seek happiness. See happiness. See what I'm saying? Don't seek happiness. See happiness. You can be happy no matter what. Number four, Stay involved with the living world. Resist withdrawal and become reclusive during stress. That's what. That's what unhappy people do, okay? They withdraw and they become reclusive during stress. Happy people, stressful times we get with other people. We throw dinner parties. We dance. Ecstatic dance, play, move, hit some tennis balls. Have dinner with your family. Sing some songs with people. Make some music with people. Stamp your feet and clap with people. Stay involved with the living world. Do not withdraw and become reclusive during times of stress. Rely upon your fellow human beings. We aren't lone wolves. We rely upon our fellow human beings. The pheromones they produce, the electromagnetic energies that they produce.

Their eyes, their hearts, their brains, their skin touch people. Be with people. Live with people. Stay involved with the living world. Number five. Refuse to indulge in self pity when life hands you a raw deal. No one gets through life without some sorrow and misfortune. All right? Happy people refuse to indulge in self pity when life Hands you a raw deal. Kind of relates to that. Third one, choose to be happy no matter your circumstances. Like, your kid got sick and your car broke and your dog threw up on the floor and your cat pooped next to the dog's throw up. And the. I like how all of my examples include body fluids. And you, you got a call from your significant other that they're pissed at you about, I don't know, vacuum cleaner. Well, you know what? You can either look at life like a sad country music song and you can say, woe is me, or you can just say, you know what? I'm gonna plaster a smile on my face even if I don't feel happy. I'm gonna put a perma smile on until I do feel happy. Because you know what? Life hands me a raw deal. I turn around, I like the guy in the Bible again, the book of job, right? In 24 hour time span, God kills his kids, destroys his home, kills all of his livestock, his goats, his cows, everything gives him a bunch of sores and makes him super, super sick. Cause like, Satan told God, he's like, oh, yeah, I can crack this dude. You watch me. I can crack this dude. And Job goes, you know what? Blessed be the name of the Lord. And his wife's like, you should curse God and die. He's like, blessed be the name of the Lord. And you know what happens? Like, a few pages later, he gets it all back and like twice as much, because God looks down, he's like, yeah, this dude trusts me no matter what. So I'm gonna big time bless him. I refuse to indulge in self pity when life hands you a raw deal. Number six, cultivate old fashioned virtues. Love, compassion, humor, loyalty, old fashioned virtues. Happy people cultivate these happy people. They think about things like love and laughter and humor and compassion and loyalty. They familiarize themselves with those. They plaster them on their walls. We have our Greenfield family mission statement, which ties in all of our family values. Go listen to my podcast with Rich Christensen to learn how we made that with his wonderful Legato family foundation. We just hung our family logo flags on either side of our door last night. I'll post that to Instagram soon. We got our family mugs, we got our family shirts, we got our family hats, all with our logo, our family crest. And all these things show our family values of authenticity and adventure and joy and love. My company, Ben Greenfield Life. All our employees know we got these values, these virtues. We foster them. We talk about them. We have team huddles just this morning or yesterday morning, we had a team huddle about joy, right? One of our values. We dwell on these things, cultivate old fashioned virtues. David Hawkins book. David Hawkins, Healing and Recovery, Power and force. He talks about the vibrational energy of love and peace and joy versus the vibrational energy of anger and fear and shame. Guess which ones vibrate higher. Guess which ones come out your frickin pores. When you generate feelings of peace and love and joy and cultivate old fashioned virtues. It's almost like it covers up. It blankets all the nasty stuff. Love covers all. That's another theme in our household. Love covers all. Shit goes south, you get in an argument, you're annoyed at somebody, you're down, Say I love you. Say I love you. That thing that annoys you, Ben. Say I love you to that vacuum that's driving you nuts. Going around the floor, sweeping up with its stupid WI fi signal. Say I love you, I love you, vacuum. I love you. Love covers all. I love my wife for buying that stupid vacuum. All right? I love her for being a clean freak. I love her for getting all OCD in my space when I'm trying to work and she's cleaning up behind me. I love that. I love it. You see what I'm saying? All right, I think you get it, okay? Number seven. Don't expect too much from yourself, all right? Don't expect too much from yourself.

Great book about this. The Gap versus the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. All right? The expectations that you set for yourself each day can often dictate how happy you are about your day. My. Okay, if you tell yourself, I'm gonna work out today for an hour and you stress yourself trying to squeeze that in and maybe don't squeeze it in, and you get in a half hour and you feel like crap, you're like, I didn't get my workout in. I only moved for a half hour today. Only wrote 200 words today instead of 400 words. Didn't get that time with my kids that I wanted to get in or that tennis game at the end of the day or didn't have lunch. We set all these expectations up for ourselves are stupid. We fabricate them ourselves, right? And then we get sad that we don't achieve them. And look, I'm a goal setter. I'm all about scheduling and rigidity and calendaring. I'm one of those calendar people you'll ever meet, but yet at the same time, I give myself permission. I give myself permission to not get down on myself, all Right. Look at everything as a gain.

Not as they say it, but again, that book, the Gap vs. The Gain. Read it. Read the book. It'll change your life. Don't expect too much from yourself. There's a gap between expectation and ability. That gap between expectation and ability creates a feeling of inadequacy. Eliminate the gap, you eliminate the feeling of inadequacy. Don't expect too much from yourself. Don't expect too much from yourself. And if you do create goals, just tell yourself at the same time, you know what? This goal is amazing. You feel amazing if I achieve it, I'm also going to feel amazing. If I don't achieve it. Life goes on. I'm going to be happy no matter what. Not using that as an excuse to be lazy and a slacker and a procrastinator, but using that as a reason to just be happy no matter what. Nothing's going to get me down. Even if I don't achieve my moonshots, it's not going to get me down. Even if I shoot for the stars and I get to the moon, you know what? That's great. I got to the moon. Win. Don't expect too much from yourself. Number 8. Find something bigger than yourself to believe in. Self centered, egotistical people score lowest in any test measuring happiness. It's like my friend Arthur Brooks said when I interviewed him for this docuseries. He also wrote a great book. Oh my goodness. If you're a man or a woman over 40, you need to read his book From Strength to Strength. So good, so good about how we have this need as we age to progress from fluid intelligence and achieving and learning and mastering skills to crystallized intelligence to mentoring, to teaching, to leading to being a king in our latter half. Find something bigger than yourself to believe in. What's that have to do with what Arthur Brooks said to me when I interviewed him? He said, ben, there's two kinds of people. There's unhappy people. They use people, they love things and they worship themselves. They use people, they love things and they worship themselves. Then there's happy people. Happy people.

Use things, love people, and worship God. Happy people use things, love people and worship God. All right, get that. So we don't use people, love things, and worship ourselves. We use things, love people, and worship God because we found something bigger than ourselves to believe in. Life is pretty magical when you live it as though you're in this Magic, J.R.R. tolkien esque Medieval story with fairies and goblins and elves and orcs and dragons and hobbits and this magic story written out for your life and sacredness and, and the idea that certain things don't happen by accidents and quantum physics dictates that the dream that you're having might be the same dream someone else is having halfway across the globe and you're exchanging photons of energy and that things like distance healing and teleportation and, and, and, and, and, and hands on healing and invisible energy coming from our hands and all these crazy things can exist. And anybody who's done maybe plant medicines like, you know, ayahuasca or DMT or psilocybin or something like that, you've seen this other world that's like existing outside of us, this other spiritual dimension. And you know, if you've ever engaged any of those things, or you perhaps you've been praying and anointed with the Holy Spirit and caught up deep in prayer and a vision of God and you're like, holy cow, there's something bigger out there that exists outside of me, man. It's a magical way to live compared to being a bunch of chunks of flesh and blood on a small rock floating through the planet, figuring out who can f the most and have the most cars and get the biggest house and put the most money in the bank and then you die. Game over. Geez, I like the magic life better, even if it's silly. You know what? It's Pascal's Wager. You ever hear Pascal's Wager? It's like, yeah, maybe God doesn't exist. Maybe there's no big guy in the sky. Maybe magic doesn't exist. Maybe sacredness of nature doesn't exist. Maybe plants don't talk to each other. Maybe there is no creator. Maybe there is no complexity of life. Maybe we all evolved. Maybe. But you know what?

There's nothing wrong with believing the opposite. It doesn't hurt anybody to believe the opposite. Unless you're one of those stupid old crusader, I don't know, the old Catholic church. He made people pay for their sins and tortured people. Yeah, any religion, any person can be bad. But I mean for the most part, believing in God and believing in magic and believing in the sacredness of nature and believing that plants could talk to people and people can talk to plants and there's a whole spiritual dimension around you. Most people I know who believe in that are like better off for believing in it than for not believing in it. Right. And frankly, I know I'm painting with a pretty broad brush here, but most like atheists that I know who don't believe in anything bigger than themselves and bigger than humans. They're like not very happy people. I know I'm painting with a broad brush there, but for the most part they're not very happy people. All right, so those are the eight key factors of happiness. The eight key factors of happiness. I'll link to them in the show notes if you want to review them. If you want to review them. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 442 but once again, lack of suspicion and resentment. Not living in the past, not wasting time and energy fighting things you cannot change. Stay involved with the living world. Refuse to indulge in self pity, cultivate old fashioned virtues, don't expect too much from yourself and find something bigger than yourself to believe in. All right. Apparently the people in Finland do a pretty good job of that. All right, so a few other few other things before I take a few questions here from Twitter spaces for anybody who's still hanging with me on Twitter. A newest research proven flavor of exercise that allows for impressive results without inflammation or muscle damage. It's the new thing, people. It's not high intensity interval training hiit. It's high intensity functional training. H I F T. Brand new study from the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research and a whole bunch of physically active volunteers do eight weeks of an H I F T program three times a week. All right, they did four rounds of a nine exercise circuit. 30 seconds hard, 15 seconds easy. This is very similar to what you might experience if you walk into what's the one? F45. Those F45 classes, they actually get pretty close to doing something like this, right? But you can, you can do it. And you know you can set up a circuit, for example, in your home. Let's say kettlebell swings, burpees, bear crawls, high knees, dips, jumping jacks, overhead press and body weight squat, maybe a bicycle crunch. I'll link, I'll actually link to a, to a high intensity functional training workout. Okay, you set the timer. Thirty seconds of one exercise, as hard as you can go. Fifteen seconds off, move on to the next exercise. Thirty, fifteen. Move on to the next exercise. 30, 15. Well, this recent study showed that all these people who did a workout like this had massive improvements in cardiorespiratory and neuromuscular physical fitness. But they did not have significant inflammation or muscle damage. Alright, so they were stressing out their bodies, they were getting fit, but it wasn't resulting in a whole lot of inflammatory and muscle damage markers. And that's great. That's wonderful. It's gonna get you to the Olympics. No, no, you gotta, you gotta create some, some inflammation and muscle damage if you want to be like posing on stage as a bodybuilder or competing in the Olympics. But if you just want to stay fit, heck, that's easy enough. Choose nine full body exercises, string them together in a circuit, four rounds, 30 seconds on, 15 seconds off. I'm kind of sucky at math, but I think that's like a 20 to 25 minute workout easy. So it's h I f t if you're a personal trainer listening in or somebody who just wants the minimum effective dose of exercise, look this stuff up. H I f T. I'll link to the study in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 442 I'll also link to a sample workout. 20 to 30 minutes max functional, high intensity functional training workout anybody can do. And the cool thing is less recovery implications, less need to go suck down your blueberry antioxidant smoothie and go pay $70 to get into a cryotherapy chamber after you're so sore. Right. You know, you bounce back quickly from these type of workouts that don't beat you up. Alright, so there you have it, H I f t the newest research, proven flavor of exercise that allows us for impressive results without inflammation or muscle damage. Alright, so I told you I'd tell you about the latest longevity hack. Here it is, here it is. This is the newest one. This is, this is, this is a study where they took mice. They took mice and they looked at the mitochondria. They took these mice. About halfway through these mice's mouses mees lives. Okay? That's when mice begin to show a drop in glutathione levels and they develop mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress. For a mouse that's about 65 weeks, okay, it's about 65 weeks of age when this happens to a mouse, right. In humans, let's say that's around 40. Okay, let's say it's 40. And so what they did with these mice, soon as that drop in glutathione started to occur, they started to replenish a couple of things that are responsible for maintaining mitochondrial function and maintaining glutathione levels and decreasing oxidative stress, particularly the type of oxidative stress that affects these animals. Heart and liver and kidneys. Okay. And so they actually found the heart, the liver and the kidneys all had glutathione deficiencies, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction and abnormal mitophagy. That's a difficulty in disposing of damaged mitochondria. It's like the body can't clean itself up anymore. Alright? The little automatic vacuums rolling around and those mitochondria aren't going anymore, okay? I mean the WI fi and the little self mitochondrial vacuum cleaner cleanups broke. All right, so what they did, what they did was they totally reversed these issues in a pretty potent life extension formula where all they did was they combined two molecules. Glycine and N acetylcysteine. Glyco, glycine and N acetylcysteine. They put those two molecules together, they gave them to the mice and reversed the aging process. Well last I checked you can get glycine and N acetylcysteine. Even though the FDA recently cracked down on N acetylcysteine you can still find it for not that much money on Amazon. Okay? So when I saw this study I'm like well geez, glycine and nac. Now I already take the kion amino so I get enough glycine precursors and, and actually I don't use N acetylcysteine. I use a form of glutathione that's called olmsbio glutathione. It's PQQ CoQ10 and glutathione and like this little orange creamsicle thing. I'll link to it in the show notes. That's what me and my sons take because all three of us have the. We got our genes tested by the DNA company. It turns out all three of us possess the SNPs that basically make us less likely and less able to produce our own glutathions. We all supplement with glutathione same thing with brain derived neurotrophic factor. Me and both my sons don't produce adequate levels of this stuff. That's like miracle grow for the brain. So all three of us supplement with lion's mane extract. Okay, I'm all about genetic testing and then filling in the gaps based on what you find from genetic testing. Go listen to my interview with Dr. Mansoor Mohammed at the DNA company to see what I mean about and to learn more about that. But basically yeah, glycine and N acetylcysteine. Glycine and N acetylcysteine and we're getting along on the two. So I'm not going to give you all the exact amounts and Ratios and everything. I'll link to the study. I did reach out to my friends at Thorne. Those lazy bastards. You guys, if you're listening in, Paul will get back to me on that email because I emailed my friends at Thorne and I asked them if they made it. We don't make it at Kion yet, but I think there are a couple companies that make glycine NAC 1, 2 combos. If you have your favorite source, let me know over in the shownotes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 442comment over there. And hopefully anybody who's found a good source of glycine and N acetylcysteine, preferably both put together. Because I'm lazy. I don't like to buy too many supplements. Let me know because this study looks pretty promising. Pretty promising. All right, so another article that came out that I thought was just great for people who suck at cooking. I suck at cooking. I'm a total imposter. I wrote a cookbook and I suck at cooking, you guys. I wrote a freaking cookbook. And still every time I get in the kitchen, I start to make stuff. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I hope this turns out okay. And I wrote a cookbook. But anyway, so this article is great. It gets into a whole bunch of little tips for people who can't cook or who struggle with cooking. So, for example, I realize this flies in the face of what I recommended when it came to getting rid of wifi in the house and not having a smart home and wi fi enabled vacuum cleaners rolling around on the floor all day. But one is to basically get a smart speaker, okay? A smart speaker in the kitchen. You say to it, you can like, set timers, go Alexa, you know, set timer for 10 minutes, convert units, right? Convert, you know, quarts to ounces for me or teaspoons to milliliters for me. Buy thyme and rosemary at the grocery store and send that to my phone, right? So a smart speaker in the kitchen when your hands are busy doing other stuff. And you can even tell the smart speaker to play a different type of music. You know, we're real in the kitchen. So that's one thing. That's one thing that can be useful. The next is to basically begin to get out of the practice of the leftovers trap, okay? A lot of people eat leftovers two, three, four nights in A row. Now, what I do instead is I elevate the leftovers, okay? So first of all, if it's more than two days, I toss it or it goes to the dogs or it goes in the compact compost pile. Because leftovers are a significant source of histamine issues, okay? A lot of people feel crappy, they feel unhealthy. It's because they're eating too many leftovers. And a lot of foods, they develop a lot of histamine inducing molecules when they sit for long periods of time. So first of all, I go through leftovers pretty quick because I don't want them in my refrigerator for more than two days. But like, I made brisket the other night, okay, made brisket. Next day I've got leftover brisket. What do I do? I don't take anything out to thaw for dinner, but I take the brisket, I drench it in olive oil and salt, a little bit of raw honey and some beef suet. Beautiful, beautiful fat. I broil it in the oven and get it nice and crispy. I cut it up with scissors in the little chunks and I wrap it in the siete coconut flour tortillas with a little bit of radish and some primal kitchen sauces and some of my friend Joey's, Joey's hot sauce. I made myself brisket tacos. Right, with the leftovers, I didn't just take the brisket out and eat it. So either turn your leftovers into a different meal or just get rid of the idea of leftovers. So leftovers, that's a great thing. You take leftovers and make new meals out of them. I hope that makes sense. Another one is looking for formulas and then adapting them. Looking for formulas and then adapting them. Okay? That means that with a few judicious changes, you can exchange your mileage from one recipe. So, like, you can swap chickpeas for butter beans. You can swap coconut milk for tinned tomatoes. You can swap turmeric for oregano. Okay? The best book to read to wrap your head around this is Salt, Sugar Acid Fat. The book Salt, Sugar, Acid Fat is a wonderful book because it teaches you more about the chemistry of cooking. You know, my sons have a cooking podcast, Shameless plug. It's@gogreenfields.com two episodes a month. They teach you all these cool, cool cooking concepts. Couple of 13 year old boys, they teach you this stuff, all right. And what you'll find if you watch them is that they're always teaching you, like, how to make cool little Substitutes. All right, Throw a little bit of this in, throw a little bit of that in, Substitute this for that. Substitute some kind of coconut cream instead of regular milk, or substitute, like, a shaved carrot for Parmesan cheese. There's all sorts of cool little things you can do once you open up your mind. This article gets into all that. I'll link to the article in the show notes, then one other, and I'm just gonna throw one more, is find a source you can trust. Okay? A lot of Google search results for recipes. That's just good SEO. And there's a lot of bad recipes out there. Believe it or not, we have this human cognitive bias where if it's written down and it's on the Internet, or if it's in a book, we assume that it's true and right and just. And it's not. It's not. When I read books, I'm constantly telling myself, this author could be full of bullshit and just found a publisher who is willing to publish this. Nothing I could be reading right now could be true. Right? The only book I ever read that I assume is true is the Bible, because I believe that's the inspired word of God and is like, absolute truth. Aside from that, every book I read, I'm like, this might be one big, steaming, stinky pile of bullshit. That's the way I approach books. Like, I'm skeptical. Not in a bad way. I'm just like, I. I read and I'm. I'm constantly asking myself, is this true? Can I know this to be true? Right? And so same thing with recipes. You know, when you find a recipe online, it doesn't mean it's good, but. But my. My way that I search for recipes is I use the search term best, which is amazing, by the way. What I mean by that is if you do a search and you say, instead of searching for, like.

You know, let me think here, Ribeye steak. Ribeye steak reverse sear recipe, you search for the best ribeye steak reverse sear recipe. Or instead of searching for homemade macaroni and cheese, you search for best homemade macaroni and cheese recipe, and you usually get better results. But the other thing that I do now, even though I'm not a paleo diet person, usually I find if I append the word paleo when I'm searching for a recipe like sweet potato fries Paleo or macaroni and cheese Paleo, right. By adding the word paleo, you usually come up with healthy results that don't have a lot of the vegetable oils and the grains, the added sugars and things like that. So that's my hack. Because I use the word best and I use the word paleo. I don't use those two together a lot. But now I'm thinking about. I probably should, right? Why wouldn't I search for the best homemade Paleo macaroni and cheese? Dude, I don't know. May have to try it. My computer might explode. We'll see. All right, so I'll link to this article in the show notes, though. But it's just. It's a great article for crappy cooks. It's a great article for. For crappy cooks. All right, and. And yeah, I'll just stop there because there's so much more in that article. But I also want to leave time for a few questions from you guys. All right, last news flash I wanted to get into, and this one was kind of cool. So what they looked at was an aggregated global food composition database. And they found basically that micronutrient deficiencies remain widespread globally, especially in low and middle income countries and among population groups with increased needs like athletes or pregnant women or breastfeeding women or elderly people. And so what they found was there were certain foods, certain foods that you should and could include in your diet that are going to ensure that you don't turn into someone who is micronutrient deficient. And sleep issues, obesity issues, weight gain issues, thyroid issues, endocrine hormone issues, fertility issues, a lot of them arise from micronutrient deficiencies. So here's the list of foods that you should just basically have in your house. Okay. And I was very pleased when I read this article because we eat a lot of these foods in our house. Okay? These are weird. These are not gonna be the foods that your neighbor has in their pantry or fridge. But if you heed my words, this is some of the cool stuff that you should have around. So if you want ideal micronutrient density, add these to your grocery shopping list and have them in your house and learn to cook with them. Okay, you ready? Here we go. Organ meat. All right. Liver, heart, kidney, spleen, pancreas, all the weird stuff. Okay? Small fish, that's like sardines, herring, anchovy, mackerel, you know, buying a bunch of wild planet food type of canned tin stuff. Okay, so organs, small fish, dark green leafy vegetables. And yeah, I know there's some issues with like, kale and spinach and uric acid and, you know, digestive enzyme inhibitors and excess levels of goitrogens. But you know what? You can cook this stuff down. You can steam it, you can mash it, you can puree it. You can even get, like, the powdered version from guys like Dr. Thomas Cowan. Thomas Cowan's Powdered Dense Vegetables. I do a lot of those because I don't like to eat a lot of the raw roughage and fiber. But dark green leafy vegetables or like, the powdered, you know, pulverized version of those. Really good bivalves and crustaceans. Okay. It's like oysters, mollusks, clams, lobsters, crab. Stuff's actually pretty nutrient dense. Just get it from clean waters. I use this company called Seatopia. I get a giant box of seafood and bivalves and crustaceans actually sent to my house. And super clean, all source from really clean waters. Okay, let's see. Topia. There's my tip for you. I interviewed them too, on my show. I'll link to that podcast. Goat High Raise goats. We have goat milk. We don't kill them very much for their meat, but goat meat is also really good.

Beef eggs. Do you like how I did that? I just talked about killing goats. Like, it was. No, like, we actually don't kill any of our goats. Our goats are milkers, and they're pets, okay? So at the Greenfield house, we aren't out there with, like, machetes cutting off goats heads in the morning to make ourselves a goat omelette, mutton, you know, for dinner. That's just not us. We're not those people. Beef, eggs, milk. Not like the nasty, homogenized pasture. I stuff, like, good, dense raw milk, mutton and lamb cheese, goat milk, pork, yogurt, pulses. That's like legumes, stuff like that. Teff, amaranth, millet, quinoa, that type of thing. Okay, so I'm gonna go through this list one more time. Organ meats, small fish, dark green leafy vegetables, bivalves, crustaceans, goat, beef, eggs, milk, canned fish, mutton, lamb cheese, goat milk, pork, yogurt, fresh fish, pulses, teff, and canned fish. I think I was redundant there a couple. I think I said canned fish, like, four times, maybe five times. Maybe. I'm a sardines fan. I don't know. Maybe I'm just thinking about sardines too much while I'm recording here. But anyways, so you include those in your diet, people, and you will be healthy. You will cover your micronutrient bases. All right? Don't be food phobic. Open yourself up to a wide variety of different foods. And you'll absolutely love it.

Hey, what's up, Ben?

How you doing? I'm doing good. Doing good.

Good, good. So, two quick questions. One on methylene blue. Have you seen any studies about maybe the downside of having it at an extended period or over period of time?

Yes, you, you can overdo with methylene blue in the same. It's a similar mechanism of action if you overdid infrared light and go ahead and mute yourself while I'm replying, if you can. So what I mean by that is that that you can get excess reactive oxygen species formation with any of these things that support increased activity of cytochrome C oxidase in the mitochondria. Okay. And because of that, too much can cause neurodegeneration and can cause some issues when taken in excess. Okay. Now methylene blue, like we talked about in the last show where we were kind of like busting some of these myths that have exploded on the Internet recently about people taking fish tank cleaner and how it's a waste of time. We established that methylene blue improves mitochondrial function, improves memory consolidation, protects nerve function, acts as a little bit of an antimicrobial. But yeah, it can cause a little bit of excess reactive oxygen species. The other things that it can do is very large doses, it can kill off your gut bacteria. Okay. It can interfere with what are called monamine oxidase inhibitors. Alright. So that basically means that if you are consuming supplements like antidepressants or a lot of SSRIs, things like that, you should be careful with methylene blue. It should never be combined with antidepressants because you might develop serotonin toxicity or serotonin syndrome. A couple of other things you'd want to be careful with with excess methylene blue is that it might increase blood pressure and it might even affect your taste. Like affect your taste in similar ways like Covid would affect your taste. So few reasons to be careful with methylene blue, but for the most part, like small amounts of like a pharmaceutical grade methylene blue shout out to my friends at troscriptions. They make one that's great. You just kind of dissolve it in your mouth. I have no issues with. But yeah, in high doses there can be some issues with excess methylene blue. So, you know, I would say if you're, if you'reif you're pooping smurf shit, then you're probably taking too much.

Yeah, no, I'm not that far. I bet it just. I spoke to you in the fall time about a condition I was dealing with for a couple years and one of the things they thought it was was bartonella. So one of the protocols was 50mg morning and at night for at least, it was at least like six months. It was a long time. So that's, that's kind of, you know, where I was at.

But.

All right, that's helpful, I appreciate it. And one, one last question. My Cousin, he's like 20 years old, had a dirt bike injury when he was younger, broke a piece of his wrist. Never like fixed it at the time, and basically a piece died off. So now he's doing a surgery next week, six hours, pulling knee bone, putting it in the wrist with the intentions of hoping that the bone regenerates. And then if it doesn't, it's potentially like a real like very difficult surgery. So one thing that, you know, I was talking to the guys that bioreset mentioned it and they were like, definitely TB 500, BPC 157. Any other regenerative practices besides maybe using like a juvelite that you would recommend for him after for, you know, trying to get that regeneration to happen?

Well, first of all, Sire G, I think has one of the best books out there for stuff like this. It's literally called regenerate and it's a fantastic book. And it would include some strategies for what you've described in your cousin, which technically the medical term for this, you probably knew this. It's, it's avascular necrosis. Avascular necrosis, it's a, it's a bone disease. It's characterized by death of the bone tissue. Usually it's like a temporary or permanent lack of blood supply to the bone tissue. And so what you want to do is you want to increase blood flow to the bone. Believe it or not, stem cell injections have been shown to be beneficial for avascular necrosis. The BPC157, that's more acting on some of the anti inflammatory pathways. It may work. TB500 usually works on like collagenous tensile tissue, elastin fibers, things like that. I'm not 100% convinced that those two peptides would necessarily be the best way to go. Really what I would be focusing on would be blood flow. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, fantastic for that. Infrared therapy, wonderful hot, cold contrast, anything that's like a vasodilatory supplement. Beetroot extracts, niacinamide, fricking Viagra. Right. Fix your wrist and get permaboners too. Who' swhowshohe's gonna complain about that. But. But then, yeah, but then stem, stem cell injections also, they have been shown to help out with some of these degenerative conditions. And so that would be another one to look into for the avascular necrosis. But because avascular necrosis is really related to blood flow, I'll be focusing on some of these things that can increase blood flow, namely, like my top for blood flow. Pemf, the pulse electromagnetic field therapy, the infrared therapy. You know, infrared therapy, 20 minutes once a day is fine. Over the treatment area, a couple times for 10 minutes is fine. PEMF, couple of times a day for 10 to 20 minutes is fine. I like the pulse centers unit. The guy, Dr. William Pollock, p A W L U K. He also makes some really good PEMF units. Niacinamide. You can just get like niacinamide powder off of Amazon for dirt cheap. If you're spending all your money on NAD supplements, you know, you could just use that instead of, you know. Yeah, beetroot extract or beetroot. You know, it's also, also really good one. And then a hot, cold contrast. You know, one of my favorite, one of my favorite recovery protocols. Five minutes in the hot tub, five minutes in the cold, you know, cold shower or cold. So cold pool, whatever. Four minutes and four minutes of cold, three minutes, three minutes of cold. Two, two, one. One great hot, cold contrast workout. You know, in addition, just like the typical shower, you know, five minutes of 20 seconds hot, 10 seconds cold, cold. Or if you're a Glutton for punishment, 20 seconds cold, 10 seconds of hot. But anyways, yeah, the hot, cold contrast is great for blood flow as well. So, so good, good questions, man. Good questions. Let's, let's bring somebody else up on stage here. Do you recommend cold showers or sauna if you are suffering adrenal fatigue or HPA dysfunction? Oh, hpa, adrenal fatigue or HPA axis dysfunction. Do you do the sauna and the cold shower thing? Well, you know, it's interesting. I, you know, it's, it's. I just interviewed and I didn't release the podcast yet. These guys at Jay Feldman and Mike fave about their bioenergetic model of stress. And this idea that, you know, when you look at Hans Selye and him stressing out all these mice and them developing like this adaptive response to stress. Well, there's kind of like eustress or good stress, positive stress that elicits a good result in terms of the, the body developing resilience. And bouncing back stronger and developing better blood sugar sensitivity or the ability to burn fat or better circadian rhythms from things like small amounts of heat or cold or exercise or plant toxins, things like that. But then there's a law of diminishing return where this stress becomes exhaustive. Usually when stress becomes exhaustive is when you're stacking too many of these things. We're talking about the stereotypical person who gets up after being fasted for 18 hours and does their breath work and their sauna and their yoga and their cold pool and their enema and then eats 200 calories for lunch and then fasts until dinner and does a cold soak before dinner and has dinner and goes to bed at 8 but gets up at midnight to swing a few kettlebells and go back to bed. The typical person, just like orthorexic about food and fitness. However, for most people, even people with HPA axis dysfunction or adrenal fatigue, small amounts of sauna and cold, especially if you're eating adequate calories, adequate carbohydrates, caring for the body, adequately recovering, getting enough sleep, et cetera, it can be somewhat restorative. You know, I think that, you know, when you're looking at a lot of this stuff, the dose is the poison, as with most hormetic stressors. So would a 60 minute sauna session followed by 10 to 15 minutes of cold therapy be excessive? Probably would do in 15 to 30 minutes of flow yoga in the sauna or sitting and reading a magazine and then taking a quick 2 to 5 minute cold shower in the morning as a way to jumpstart your day. Be off? I don't think so. So of course you can track, you can track your hrv. You can use a Dutch hormone analysis, a Dutch urinary hormone analysis to see what your hormones and your endocrine system are doing. You can pay attention to your sleep parameters, you can pay attention to your profile of mood state scores. You know, a lot of times your body knows your body keeps the score, as that book goes. Book title says. But anyways, you know, for the most part, painting with a broad brush, sauna and cold pool are not a big no no for people with adrenal fatigue or HPA axis dysfunction. Just make sure you're well slept, well fed, caring for the body, engaging in plenty of self love and not viewing these as ways to beat up the body, but rather as simple ways to jump start and get a little bit of energy for the day. If something energizes you and doesn't exhaust you, you know, when you finish it, if you're just dead dog tired and depleted and shriveled up like a raisin from all your sweating and shivering from all the cold, yeah, it's too much. But if you're just like, oh, yeah, I feel great. Ready to start the day now. And that's. That's kind of how you want to feel on that case. It's fine, I'm pretty sure. So.

Yeah, let's go ahead and go with. Let's go with one more question here. It's kind of a broad question, but do you have anything you recommend for, like, kind of reversing muscle atrophy? Reversing muscle atrophy. There can be a variety of causes for muscle atrophy. We talked about the avascular necrosis, and that's more for bone. But it's, you know, it's a blood flow issue, and it can be blood flow and hypoxia in the muscle. It can be, of course, lack of physical activity, can be aging and can be malnutrition, some of those micronutrient deficiencies that we talked about earlier. It can be even things like muscular dystrophy. Right. Muscular dystrophy. And then, you know, so it can be definitely genetic. Genetic and genetically related. You know, spinal muscle atrophy is. There's. That's a genetic condition. You know, there are other conditions, like als, Lou Gehrig's disease, which damages the motor nerve cells that control the muscles, Mississippi. That's when your body's immune system attacks the central nervous system, causes issues with the nerve fibers. The nerves don't fire properly. The muscles don't fire properly. The muscles atrophy. Okay? Myositis, that's inflammation of the muscles, and that can cause muscle weakness and muscle pain. A lot of times that'll occur after an infection or as a side effect of an autoimmune condition or as a reaction to a vaccine. I said vaccine. I don't know why all these podcasters are afraid of saying the word vaccine. They're like, I don't want to get canceled. You know what? Cancel me. Yeah, I said that vaccines could potentially cause atrophy. Cancel me. Go ahead, go for it. I don't care. I'll pop up somewhere else anyways, though. So the idea is that what do you do about it? A lot of things can cause so adequate protein. That's definitely. I'm a huge fan of essential amino acids and maintaining a high amino acid pool and also a high ATP pool. There Are certain companies, like Ian Mitchell's wizard sciences company that makes this stuff called Ampogen, which is like an ATP replenisher. They make one called Olympic Rx, which is an ATP replenisher. You can buy ATP on, like, Amazon. Okay. Then Kion makes creatine and aminos. Those two are fantastic for staving off muscle atrophy. I'll be interviewing that guy Ian Mitchell on my podcast. I think in a couple of weeks. You can listen in to that one soon. But maintaining adequate ATP levels, maintaining adequate amino acid levels, maintaining adequate creatine phosphagen levels, keeping those pools elevated. Okay. Resistance training, weight bearing resistance training. If you can't do that. Oh, my gosh. Electrical muscle stimulation using one of those catalyst electrical muscle stimulation suits. Holy moly. That will build muscle like nuts. I do a session on that twice a month and I swear my muscles are bigger within like five days after. I can only do it twice a month because I'm so sore afterwards. Right. As a matter of fact, it's my hack. If I'm. If I know I'm going to have a few super busy days where I can't work out that much, I'll just do a catalyst session. And I don't even want to work out because I'm so sore. So. Electrical muscle stimulation can be really, really good for that. Sauna heat stress has been shown to be able to maintain muscle even in a state of inactivity or when you can't load on a joint due to an injury or something like that. Okay, so that's another good one. And again, like, I'm assuming that this would be a case where you can't necessarily weight train. Okay. And then just maintaining blood flow, a lot of the stuff I talked about with avascular necrosis, you know, blood flow precursors, you know, beet and arginine and. And.

Pemf, Infrared sauna, infrared light, anything like that. But in my opinion, if I could choose two modalities to decrease atrophy and bounce back muscles fast as possible, it'd be, go get some amino acids and creatine and ATP, son, and then add some electrical muscle stimulation into the mix. That's assuming you can't just lift heavy shit in the gym because there's some other issues going on that's keeping you from biomechanically being able to do that. And like, if you were to do like a, you know, two or three electrical muscle stimulation sessions a week and just like jam on the amino acids, like 40 grams of amino acids a day, in addition to about 0.8 grams per pound of protein a day, 5 grams of creatine a day, and keep the ATP levels elevated, you'll stay swole or at least you'll keep those muscles from atrophying. This is not medical advice. If you've got Lou Gehrig's disease or something like, go to a doctor and talk to someone who actually has a Dr. T shirt on at least, which would not be me. Don't trust me because I'm not a doctor. I'm just a podcaster. So anyways, yeah, those are my tips. And gosh, you guys, an hour went by fast. An hour went by fast. But I'm going to put all of the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 442 if you or Ben, I should say BenGreenfield Life BenGreenfieldLife.com 442 we gotta really get on that bandwagon of Ben Greenfield life. So anyways though, yeah, leave your questions, your own tips, your comments, your feedback over there. Thank you to everybody who joined me on Twitter and subscribe to the newsletter@bengreenfieldlife.com or follow me on any of the social media channels to find out when we go live with these live episodes. And I think that about wraps it up. I feel a little lonely without my podcast sidekick, Jay. Hope he's okay down there in the storms and the hurricanes and the tornadoes and the flash floods and whatever else is going on in his backyard. All these acts of God that are keeping him from achieving his full potential. But he's happy nonetheless. Or at least he will be after he listens to the tips I've given in this episode. All right, you guys, I love you. Thank you for listening in. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com 442. Have an amazing week.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.