Q&A 445: The Best New Anti-Aging Compounds, Gut Healing Supplements, What Ben Would Do If He Got Cancer, The Worst Things For Fertility & Much More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast, the best new anti aging compounds, gut healing supplements, mushroom madness, the worst things for fertility and much more.

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

All right, folks. Well, this is it, the live Q and A of the Ben Greenfield Life Show. And by live, what I mean by that is that we also run this show that we do about twice a month or so, which is a Q and A and newsflash kind of combo not only here on the main podcast feed, but also on Twitter. So. So if you subscribe to my newsletter or you follow me on twitter over@twitter.com BenGreenfield I think it is you will be able to participate live. As a matter of fact, even before we began the recording today, we were having a nice thrilling chat about BPC157 peptides and elbow pain, of all things. However, prior to jumping into a Q and A with everybody who's live right now on Twitter, I also tend to review quite a few little news flashes on episodes like this. So I'm going to be jumping into that and then opening things up for Q and A. Now, just a couple of quick housekeeping notes. You can grab the show notes for everything that you are about to hear@BenGreenfieldLife.com 445 and I realize I said a couple of housekeeping notes, but that's really the only housekeeping note there is. Go to BenGreenfieldLife445 for the show notes. With that being said, we are just going to jump right in to some of the most interesting discoveries of late that I would love to share with you that hopefully will make your life that much better. So we're going to start off with an herb. I suppose you'd call it an herb or a plant that you likely have tasted or eaten that is simple to grow and that is found at just about every grocery store or health food store on the face of the planet. It's called Zingiber officinale. Zingiber officinale. That is to be translated more simply as ginger. Ginger. It's a plant native to Southeast Asia. It's been consumed for thousands of years in Asian medicine and it has a lot of really interesting antioxidant and anti inflammatory and anti cancer and antimicrobial properties. Tastes fantastic. If you want to burn a hole in your wallet, you can also get a tiny, teeny minuscule shot of it for about 20 to $25 at the average cold pressed juice store if you'd like to roll that way. No, I jest, but it is kind of funny. I'll sometimes go to these juice stores where they'll make fresh pressed juices with cucumber and carrot and turmeric. And of course ginger is often in there as well. And I will ask them to just make me a ginger juice. And it's very rare that they will actually be willing to do so. Frankly, most of them are shocked that someone would actually want to drink straight ginger juice. But if you've ever had stomach issues, if you've ever had nausea, if you've ever had high amounts of inflammation and you just pound a big thing of ginger, as a matter of fact, on YouTube, I have a recipe. If you go there and search for my gut nourishing juice, there's the one with vinegar and ginger and turmeric and in cayenne it tastes like complete ass. But if you ever start to come down with a stomach issue, it's absolutely fantastic. What is lesser known though about ginger, and this is what I want to get to today, is a lot of people don't realize that it's a fantastic anti aging and longevity compound. There was a recent study and this study appeared in the Journal of Medicine Cell Longevity. What they looked at was the potential role of ginger and its active compounds for prevent of a wide variety of age related diseases. And what they found in this particular review of the literature is that as many of us know, ginger has these potent antioxidants and anti inflammatory properties. One meta analysis found that across the board it did a fantastic job at decreasing blood markers of inflammation and oxidative stress, particularly C reactive protein. Now that's great, but it also means ginger is so potent that I actually wouldn't be consuming ginger based compounds in the hour or two after you exercise because it appears to be right up there with some of the most powerful anti inflammatory compounds that exist. And so if you consume it too close to an exercise, as with any of these things, it might blunt your natural hormetic response to a workout. Similar to a high dose of synthetic vitamin C or vitamin E or a very long ice bath or something like that. So careful immediately post workout. But the anti inflammatory potential is cool. But then it also has potential cardioprotective benefits. They did a meta analysis of six clinical trials across hundreds of people and found that ginger was fantastic, particularly for blood pressure. When it comes to cardioprotective benefits, you don't hear about ginger as much as garlic being talked about for blood pressure, but ginger is right up there for blood pressure as well. Ginger can improve glycemic control in the context of type 2 diabetes. So it appears to be a blood glucose control agent and is something that you could, for example, consume before a meal in the same way that you might consume a bitter or a digestif. With the added bonus that in addition to controlling your blood sugar, ginger would also of course allow you to digest your food better. So a cluster of factors here based on this meta analysis dictates that if you're one of those people who's into anti aging compounds, maybe you're taking C60 or you're taking NAD or you're using certain peptides for anti aging. Ginger is something you should consider. And because it's so readily available to me, it seems like kind of a no brainer to look into using it with a great deal of frequency as an herb, as a spice and even as a supplement or simply as a tea. And I even if I'm out on a boat, for example, the last time I was spearfishing I just had a few chunks of ginger root and I'd chew on those for nausea. So chalk one up to the anti aging benefits of ginger. Now as I was going through this review on ginger, it kind of got me thinking, oh gosh, what is the latest on a lot of these anti aging agents that are out there? Because it's a rapidly progressing field of study. There was one person who I interviewed and I'll link to my interview with her in the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 445 her name was Sandra Kaufman and she wrote a book called the Kaufman Protocol. Really interesting because she rank prioritizes a whole host of different anti aging agents like astaxanthin or curcumin or a couple of the other ones I mentioned before like NAD and C60 and ranks, which ones are going to give you the best bang for your buck as far as addressing a variety of different aging pathways. It's a great book, but there was a recent study as of May 2022 that came out. It's more of a paper than a study, but it addressed a wide variety of these anti aging drugs or anti aging compounds. Now these would be everything from compounds that would act as calorie restriction mimetics to mimic what calorie restriction would do for you to things that would induce cellular autophagy like the natural cellular cleanup that should be occurring on a basis to things that would protect The DNA meaning terms such as methyltransferase and histone deacetylase inhibitors, which would allow for better function of the DNA with age. And so this article, it's fantastic. I'm not going to go through the whole thing for you, but I can get a link to it in the show notes. It goes into some of the best natural products and supplements and pharmaceuticals that have a good amount of research behind them for increasing your lifespan and your health span simultaneously. So I'm going to give you kind of like a lightning fast overview of the best of the best when it comes to things that would help you in the aging game. So the first is astaxanthin. Astaxanthin is a carotenoid. You'll find it a lot of times in the flesh of fish. It can also be used in supplementation. The higher doses are the doses that seem to significantly improve quality of life and length of life. Meaning 40 milligrams or so of astaxanthin daily. That's a lot of astaxanthin. Like I put astaxanthin in the kion omegas product, but it's nowhere near that. 40 milligrams. I think we're at some like 2 to 4 milligrams in that particular product. The flesh or the skin or the exoskeleton of shrimp and krill and crayfish and lobster and crab and salmon and trout. And that natural intense red illumination that you see there, that's coming from astaxanthin. So you'll get quite a bit of it from seafood. But of course you can supplement with astaxanthin as well. The cool side benefit of it, and this is particularly relevant in the summer, is that it acts as kind of like an internal edible sunscreen for skin protection. And I used to do 40 to 60 milligrams of astaxanthin after I'd raced the Ironman triathlon down in Hawaii. And I had a lot fewer skin issues and skin burn and kind of leftover skin damage from that race with the 10 hours of time spent out in the blazing sun in Hawaii. So astaxanthin is one that actually does have a lot of research behind it. Next is curcumin. Curcumin. I think everybody's familiar with it at this point. Interestingly, it's actually related to the ginger family. It's part of that Zingiber officinale family. It's a curry spice that originated in India, comes from turmeric and that's another one that in multiple studies has been shown to cause a lifespan increase. It's also got a little bit of an anti inflammatory effect as well. Now here's what's interesting about curcumin or turmeric. A lot of supplement companies will package it with what's called bioperine or black pepper extract, which allows for better systemic absorption and availability of the curcumin. The flip side of that is that if you're taking curcumin to help with your gut, you would actually not want to combine it with black pepper extract or bioperine. You would want to just consume the turmeric or the curcumin all on its own. It depends on how you want to use it. But just know that if it is not combined with black pepper, it's going to more act on the intestinal microflora and on intestinal inflammation. But ultimately it's another one that has good evidence behind it. The next one was really, really interesting. They actually looked at morphine which is found naturally in poppies. I think a lot of people are familiar with that, but they found particularly in fruit fly and mice studies that morphine supplementation could extend lifespan significantly. And this is interesting. You don't hear a lot of people talk about using morphine to expend lifespan considering the fact that morphine acts as a bit of an opioid. And there are other natural opioids out there, not just poppy ext, for example, you can make poppy seed tea that's not that hard to make. But there are other opioid mimickers. Probably Kratom would be another one that's pretty high up there on the totem pole. Kava kind of falls in that category as well. But some of these endogenous morphine based painkillers seem to have a lifespan increasing effect. I'm not going to give any recommendations on this podcast regarding dosing, but I do want to give a head nod to the fact that there's something about opioid stimulation that seems to extend lifespan. Another one that not a lot of people are talking about these days, but that has more and more research behind it for increasing longevity. Although you do need to be careful with it because it can be difficult on the liver and you'd want to go with preferably the lowest dose possible due to the potential hepatotoxicity of this stuff. It's called ndga. Ndga, it's abbreviated or it's abbreviation for nordi. Hydrogen giuretic acid it comes from a desert plant that's primarily found in the southern United States in Mexico. It's what's called a lignin. And it seems to be really, really good at treating cancer and diabetes and bacterial and viral infections and inflammation. And I'm not really familiar with any particular supplement companies that are using NDGA right now, but it's one to keep your eyes on as something that seems to have some pretty potent life extending benefits. Rapamycin is also listed here. And rapamycin is something that I think has been talked about quite a bit now. It was discovered as an antifungal agent in the soil samples from a little island called Easter island and has been used since as a pretty potent life extending agent. Now the flip side of it is it may actually cause a little bit of suppression of immune function. It's not something that I personally take. The data that I've seen on it have convinced me that probably once I'm around 60 years old or so, it's something that I would probably consider taking. Like middle to late age seems to be a pretty good time to start using rapamycin for life extension. I know many people are using it even earlier than that, but that's one that if you can get over some of the immune system issues. Appears to be something that's just got a lot of data behind it. For anti aging, resveratrol is listed here. I personally think that there's a similar compound to resveratrol called pterostilbene that works a little bit better. But the majority of research has been done on resveratrol. The interest in that began with the so called French paradox where the French population have a relatively low instance of cardiovascular events despite eating a diet high in saturated fats. Well, some folks have attributed that to the red wine consumption which has a high amount of resveratrol in it. But the amount of resveratrol that you'd actually have to consume would dictate needing to drink a lot of wine, which sounds super fun, but could impact your life at a certain point in a deleterious fashion. Resveratrol is also found in grape skins and blueberries and raspberries and mulberries. But supplementation with it, particularly supplementation with it combined with something like NAD or NR or nicotinamide powder or any of these NAD type of agents, seems to be kind of like the turkey and cranberries of the longevity enhancing kingdom. So resveratrol is another one to pay attention to. A few others and I'm not going to list them all, but I want to just rapid fire a few others at you that appear to have really good data behind them. Spermidine, which is now available as a supplement but can also be found in a lot of fermented soy products like natto or shiitake and durian are also fermented products that have a high amount of sperming in it. And sperm itself actually has a decent amount of sperminine in it. And I'll stop there before that one degrades into any type of jokes about consuming your own sperm or other sperm for longevity. Urolithins. Urolithins, they're these intestinal metabolites produced by foods like blackberries and strawberries and pomegranate and tea and walnuts and raspberries. So urolithin is something that some companies that I'm aware of, like Timeline Nutrition is one see, Seed probiotic is another. They're actually packaging these into their products because of urolithin's great potential as an anti aging agent. That's another one I'm a fan of. I actually use that seed probiotic and I also have been doing quite a bit with dried blueberry powders and wild blueberries in my morning smoothie. Not only for the urolithin, but also the resveratrol and some of these other compounds that blueberries can have in them. And so the study goes on and on, or the paper goes on and on. It covers vitamin A and E, kercetin, caffeic acid, rosmarinic acid, genistein, egcg. A lot of these also appear in my book Boundless as far as things that I review. But it's a really, really interesting one to look through if you want to wrap your head around all the different anti aging agents out there and all the different effects that they can have. Now one thing that I should note is that there's one on there, the last one I want to mention to you that's super interesting because a lot of people don't think about this as an anti aging compound. But I've interviewed guys like Dr. John Laurent in the past and we've talked about this and it's melatonin. Melatonin is actually a pretty potent anti inflammatory. It even has, for example, antiviral activity. It has some amount of lifespan extending effects. And in high doses, yeah, it's true, it might actually suppress testosterone when taken chronically. In high doses, however, regularly dosing with melatonin, occasionally dosing with high amounts of melatonin, such as when you're traveling frequently, seems to be something that may not only help to regulate the circadian rhythm and provide a great deal of anti inflammatory and antioxidant type of activity, but it actually acts across a lot of aging related pathways. So chalk one up to melatonin is what would be called a new neurohormone produced by your pineal gland which you can also take exogenously, which has a pretty good anti aging effect. So again, I'll link to the entire article@bengreenfieldlife.com 445 but that's a good one to check out from an aging standpoint. So next, I want to get into fertility. A lot of people ask me about fertility and there was a pretty interesting systematic review that came out that looked not necessarily at the things that could improve fertility, but at the worst things that you could be doing if you want to have a baby or if you want to stay fertile. Particularly this systematic review was related to male fertility in the context of things like hormonal changes and semen quality, etc. Now the paper is called Addiction and Human Male Fertility. What they actually looked at were all the compounds people tend to have some type of an addiction or an attachment to. No surprises here. We looked at things like opioids and cannabinoids, alcohol, cocaine, steroids like androgenic anabolic steroids, tobacco, even caffeine. And because many, many men use one or multiple of of the compounds that I just listed, I think it is interesting and relevant if you are trying to have children or plan on having children, what the effect of these would actually be on fertility potential. So I'm going to give you an overview and my apologies if this is kind of a wah wah wah in the fertility department for you guys. But then I'm going to give you one tip. Don't worry. At the very end, I'm going to give you one tip. A recent thing that I've personally been doing that that's super easy, super cheap, and that you might actually like for fertility. So here we go. Cannabis use, chronic cannabis use has negative impacts on sperm morphology, meaning the shape of the sperm head, which affects the sperm's ability to fertilize eggs, didn't have a lot of other impact on semen parameters. Arguably, if you're producing a decent amount of semen, cannabis isn't going to be that bad. However, I have this personal philosophy that when you look at certain elements of the plant kingdom and their ability to make you slow and Lazy, so to speak, I think. But you could create a scenario in which you have this cannabis plant that does not necessarily want a mammal to wipe it out. And so therefore it would make said mammal lazy, slow, a little bit fuzzy in terms of thought pattern and infertile so that it can down regulate its enemy's ability to be able to consume it. And I have nothing against cannabis. I use CBD regularly, I'll even use THC sometimes. But please know, there's some evidence that it might not be the best for fertility. Another one is alcohol. No surprise here. Alcohol lowers both follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone, significantly contributes to downregulating the fertility related process. And there's multiple studies that have shown people who drink regularly in higher amounts have poor semen quality, period. So that one is one to avoid. And of course there are great alcohol alternatives out there nowadays that dictate that you don't need to drink alcohol to get the same feel good, socially lubricating effects, relaxing effects of alcohol. Two that I would name for you would be, there's a company called Ketone Aid. Ketone Aid makes these prepackaged alcohol like drinks like champagne and Moscow Mules and gin and tonics, but they use ketones as the inhibitory neurotransmitter agent rather than alcohol. So you get none of the toxic byproducts of alcohol, none of the impacts on fertility. They actually taste pretty good. And, and I actually have been having one of those over a glass of ice as an alternative to the organic wine that I usually drink on three or four nights of the week. And I love this stuff. The other one would be there's a company called Nootopia and they're a nootropics company, but they make this powder and it's basically this gamma amino butyric acid powder that you can just put into a glass of water over ice again and drink. And it also has a pretty potent alcohol like effect without the side effects of alcohol. Both of the strategies that I've just mentioned as alcohol alternatives should not be mixed with alcohol. I will warn you, you will feel like you've been, pardon the expression, roofied if you combine a GABA precursor in a pretty decent amount or a ketone, like the ketone esters using this Ketone Aid drink with alcohol. Don't do it unless you want to fall asleep and fall asleep fast and be kind of knocked out. So careful with the combination of those. But it is interesting that there's some pretty good alcohol alternatives out there. Tobacco so tobacco's effects on male fertility are specific to a slightly lower sperm count and some morphological defects in the sperm. So tobacco is another one that you'd want to avoid or use only in moderation if you are interested in fertility. Anabolic steroids. No surprises here. Pretty much every single one. Emperor semen causes hormonal changes that would lower fertility, or both, same as in alcohol, by suppressing FSH and LH in the pituitary gland in the brain. Now, if you're using testosterone or steroids, you could gradually taper off of them and then begin to use two different compounds to bring your fertility back, to make your balls grow again, to do all these things that may have been impaired when you're using the steroids, using the testosterone, the top two for that would be Clomid and hcg. And you want to talk to a doctor about dosage and everything, but Clomid and hcg to cycle off of testosterone or any other steroid is a good way to get your fertility back up after you've been on a compound like that. Now caffeine, that's an interesting one. Some research has connected DNA damage and abnormal sperm morphology to high intake of caffeine. But once you actually look at the data, it appears that when you weed out the high levels of caffeine, it turns out that the lifestyle of people who tend to drink a high amount of caffeine is what is contributing to the infertility. Meaning people who consume a lot of caffeine, they tend to exercise less, they tend to smoke more, they tend to eat more junk food, they just tend to be people with a little bit less self control and temperance in general. The caffeine itself doesn't appear to impair the sperm. It's kind of like the red meat thing. It's like, yeah, well, red meat can cause cancer. But basically it's because, because the majority of people are eating a lot of red meat, are consuming fast food, are aware that red meat might be an issue and have made the choice to eat it anyway. So probably have other unhealthy lifestyle patterns are consuming processed red meat. So there's not a lot of evidence eating organic nose to tail grass fed grass finished beef is going to kill you. But in general, people who eat high amounts of red meat tend to painting with a broad brush, have less healthy lifestyles. And the same could be said for high amounts of caffeine. Long story short is you want to be really careful with alcohol, with anabolic steroids, with tobacco and with caffeine. And I should mention also that opioids seems to have a little bit of a deleterious effect on fertility and also cocaine. So for all of the crackheads out there listening to my podcast who want to have little babies running around the house, you may want to be careful with the lines of cocaine you're running every night. So anyways, I will link to that study as well if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 445 now related to, I suppose the longevity that we were talking about earlier. Here's an interesting one. This was a paper that looked at what's called a Darwinian fitness indicator, meaning if we look at something that would be a ubiquitous measure of health and vitality and seems to be something correlated to high levels of androgenic hormones, high levels of fat free body mass or muscle, and high reproductive fitness in general, guess what guys who are out there bench pressing and squatting at the gym, or running up hills or doing crunches or all the other things that we might do to make ourselves sexier, guess what is at the top of the totem pole when it comes to correlations between physical attractiveness, courtship display, sexual behavior, reproductive fitness, overall strength, and also longevity. Drumroll please. It is hand grip strength. Hand grip strength. It's probably because guys who work with their hands frequently tend to be better preparers and providers, and nowadays those same folks who a hundred years ago would have been farming and carrying and hauling and swinging swords, they're now parked in front of computers. But that doesn't mean you can't still train your grip strength and experience some of the benefits of training. It's I mean you can do pull up bar hangs, you can do Captains of Crush grip strength devices, you can use deadlift bar, you can do kettlebell swings. There's so many ways to train your grip and I'm not going to get into all of them right now. But the fact is, if you're not doing something, preferably almost every day to exhaust your grip strength, then you're probably missing out on some of the benefits from just an overall life quality standpoint and sexual quality standpoint. So just to paint a picture for you, like I hang from a pull up bar every day for as long as I can and a lot of times while I'm talking on the phone or just talking to my kids, whatever, I've got little pull up bars and rings hanging all over the place. I always hang from them at least once per day for as long as I can. Typically it depends on the Day what I've done the day before. It's three to five minutes hang from a bar. I keep the Captains of Crush hand grip strengthener devices in the glove box of the car. So anytime I'm driving, I can do hand grip strengthening exercises and kind of kill two birds with one stone. I drive safely. I'll put at least one hand on the steering wheel. Yeah, I do break the 10am 2pm rule that I was taught in driver's ed, but one hand will be doing grip strengthening and I'll go back and forth between hands. Another perfect example would be farmer's walks. I do a lot of these with my sons. We'll just basically do a workout where we'll do farmer's walks all around the house. Great father son workout. Drop and do push ups. Once we make it all the way around the house, pick up the dumbbells or the kettlebells again, do another round of farmer's walks and do like six to eight of those. So that's just one other example of ways that you can train your grip strength, but especially if you're a guy. And of course there's a lot of benefits for women as well. But especially if you're a guy, if you're not focusing on your grip strength, on your hand strength, on your finger strength, you should consider doing it. And again, a company like Captains of Crush, for example, they have a lot of really fantastic devices for doing this. Or you could just play the guitar a lot. That would also help. I'm actually not kidding. I'll sometimes pick up the guitar after having not played it for a while and find that my grip actually will get more tired than I'm accustomed to playing the guitar. So there's even that. Pick up the guitar, the violin, the ukulele, and you'll be sexy and live a long time. All right, so the next one that I want to get into is this whole idea of a plant based diet. I thought this was really interesting, so I wanted to give a head nod to it. A plant based diet is generally correlated with just higher levels of health biomarker. For some reason, we're still convinced that vegans and vegetarians and people who eat a plant based diet tend to be healthier. Well, there is something to the fact that vegans and vegetarians are more aware of what they're eating. What gets measured, gets managed. And so you do see some amount of corollary between in some populations, plant based diet and longevity. But what this paper got into was that health biomarkers are more closely linked to diet quality attributes than to plant based diet categorization. What that means is that because plant based diets can include highly processed, less healthy foods, savory snacks, pastries, sugary fruit drinks, far different than say the plant based diet that I don't know, Adam and Eve would have been eating in the Garden of Eden. It's not necessarily synonymous with increased lifespan. So what they looked at was what happens if you look at plant based diets that have a higher quality in them versus plant based diets that are more like the soy, tofu, sugary fruit drinks, snacks, pastries, packaged fruits foods, highly processed foods. Turns out that the health biomarkers such as fasting insulin and triglycerides and triglyceride to HDL ratio and blood folate levels, they tend to be more favorable in people who adhere to a plant based diet for an extended period of time. But basically the diet quality is what matters the most. Meaning you can do a plant based diet and you can ferment and soak and sprout and include mushrooms and supplement with vitamin D and vitamin B12 and creatine and basically do everything right and actually have a great deal of health benefits from that. You can also do a plant based diet the wrong way. But basically it turns out that all of these health attributes that we attribute to a plant based diet, they are actually based on the fact that it's simply a higher quality diet, not necessarily the fact that that it is the plants that are being eaten. So essentially, long story short, and this might seem like a Mr. Obvious statement, but it's that not all plant based diets are created equal. And you can actually be super unhealthy as a vegetarian or a vegan. And you can also be super healthy as a vegetarian or a vegan. It just depends on how you comprise your diet. So just something to think about when it comes to like a vegan or vegetarian diet, I suppose, because I kind of briefly alluded to it, there are a few things that I think if you were going to eat plants for your general diet or just for a short period of time as a body reboot or whatever you'd want to call it, there are certain things that you can do to.

Make it healthier, I suppose. So the main things would be eat whole foods, don't live off plant based meats or lab grown garbage, or tofurkey or fakin or anything else. Basically insist on having your food as close to nature as possible. Eliminate grains as much as possible, because the phytic acid in the grains can reduce absorption of minerals. That's really the main reason. It's not the gluten and the lectins as much as the phytic acids, I think are the main problem. So you can choose legumes like beans and lentils and nuts and seeds and potatoes and squash and beets and carrots and turnips and rutabagas, et cetera. But I would not base a plant based diet on grains. I would avoid all industrial seed oils because following a plant based diet is going to increase your linoleic acid content already and you don't need any more seed oils added into the equation. So you want to use avocado oil and coconut oil, macadamia nut oil, red palm oil, extra virgin olive oil. But I would actually be pretty careful with any of the seed based oils like canola oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, et cetera, like I mentioned earlier, because they're a rich source of vitamin D. And a lot of plant based dieters don't get vitamin D. Mushrooms are something I would definitely include in a plant based diet. More on mushrooms later because I want to mention something about mushrooms which is super interesting. You want to sprout any grains that you do eat, and legumes and seeds and nuts. Sprouting is not only going to reduce or mitigate the phytic acid issues, but it can do the same for gluten. It can lower the glycemic index. So it's kind of a pain in the butt to have to sprout and soak and ferment your foods. But slow food prep for a vegan or vegetarian is a good game changer. I suppose, pun intended there, because I think there's a documentary called that, but that and then soy as well, which is a reliable source of protein and calories for plant based dieters. But you want to eat more traditional fermented forms of soy like tempeh and natto and miso and fermented tofu and things like that, which is also going to give you a lot more of the vitamin K2 and then you want to supplement if you can. Main supplements would be like I mentioned, creatine and vitamin D if you're not eating mushrooms, mushrooms and vitamin B12, but then also DHA because humans just can't convert plant based ALA into the longer chain marine based DHA, which is a super important omega 3 fatty acid, carnosine, which is a nutrient you're only going to find in meat, which helps with things like mood regulation and psychological Health taurine, which kind of falls in the same category as carnosine. Iodine. Because unless you're a plant based dieter, you're eating a lot of seaweed, you're probably not getting enough iodine in your diet. Zinc. You get a lot of zinc from shellfish. I think if you were plant based, if you could eat just a little bit of shellfish, like a few oysters a week, it'd be enormously helpful. But if you're not zinc and then some form of bioavailable amino acids, obviously I'm a huge fan of the kion aminos for that. That's vegan. And a lot of the plant based dieters I work with, they're doing 60 grams of that a day, the athletes especially. And it's as though they're getting the equivalent of a steak every day, consuming that stuff. And then nutritional yeast is another one to think about just because it has a ton of B vitamins in it. It's got this nice cheesy umami flavor and that's another great source for vegans or vegetarians. So just a few things to think about if you are going to follow more of a plant based diet. Now, before I keep going, I should mention I left you hanging there with what I was going to say about fertility. I was going to give you one of their tips. Tip regarding fertility. Totally backpedal here for just a second. But icing the balls, keeping the balls cool, avoiding saunas and hot tubs as much as possible. But there's a lot of these companies like Snowballs Underwear is one that I can think of off the top of my head. And also things that you can find on Amazon, for example, that are overpriced ice packs for keeping your balls cool. Well, I thought, gosh, why do you need to spend the money on the overpriced stuff that's specifically designed for the balls? And you could just get a couple of ice packs and cool your balls that way. So what I did was I just ordered some of these tiny little circular shaped icing discs that can be used for any joint on Amazon. I think it cost me maybe like 14 bucks to get a package of 10 of them. And they're like the perfect size for your balls. And what you do, guys is you'll just pull on your boxers, preferably boxers, because briefs aren't that great for blood flow to the balls. And then you put a couple of these, you just cradle one under each ball. And what I'll do is just when I sit down to Eat breakfast or lunch. I will literally just ice my balls for the 15, 20 minutes while I'm having breakfast or lunch. And it's super easy. Research shows that it may also increase testosterone. It's great for fertility. Feels kind of good, too. Honestly, it just feels good to cool your balls. Nice and refreshing. So that's one thing. The other thing that's really interesting, and this might be a little bit of information overshare, but you may have heard of this thing that women do called yoni steaming, where they'll make a pot of hot tea with special herbs in it and then squat over that. Sometimes they'll place it inside what's called a steam sauna and steam all the pelvic musculature in the genitals. And it's super refreshing and nourishing and great for everything from prolapse to incontinence to increasing blood flow to that region.

For basically better orgasms, et cetera, et cetera. But I actually have been trying that out and, guys, it actually feels really good. I guess the best way to describe it is you feel as though you get better bowel movements and you're more well hung the rest of the day. The steam doesn't seem to be so hot that it impairs fertility or something like that. But a couple of times now, well, I guess I've done a total of four times. I will steam my balls and my anus and my perineum for about 10 minutes in the morning, and it feels really good. And if you look it up for guys, it's called lingam steaming. For women, it's called yoni steaming. I might even do a podcast on it at some point. But there are different companies like Amazon, you can buy these yoni steaming or lingam steaming devices. I don't do that. I just use a Dutch pot. I make water. I put it underneath my squatty potty, and I just squat there for 10 minutes while I'm reading a book. Book. And anyways, the weird things that we do that turn out to actually feel pretty good and be kind of beneficial. So there you go. I'll bet you did not know that you were going to learn about steaming your lingam, fellas, or learn about yoni steaming on today's show. But there you have it. Okay, a few other things I want to get into, and I'll be kind of quick on these so we can open it up to Q and A soon. This systematic review found evidence that supplements like bovine colostrum and glutamine and single strain probiotics and nitric oxide precursors and antioxidants. Certain forms of them could reduce exercise associated gut damage and limit gastrointestinal symptoms during exercise. So what I'm getting at here is that when you exercise, and particularly when you exercise in the heat, the gut becomes more permeable. Not only that, but excessive sympathetic nervous system stimulation, particularly via exercise, often flies under the radar as one of the main causes of irritable bowel syndrome in people who are fitness junkies, who love to go to the gym but yet have gut issues later on in the day or seem to have a hard time digesting food. Well, the fact is you can have your cake and eat it too. You can exercise hard and still be a foodie. But there are certain things that you should include on a regular basis in your diet. This particular analysis looked at 27 different studies that included a wide range of supplements that have been used to reduce gut cell damage and permeability during exercise. Here are the best ones that you would want to weave into your diet. Glutamine Very simple. Five grams of glutamine powder. Up to three times a day. You can simply do a scoop before each meal. Great for irritable bowel syndrome. Colostrum. You can put a scoop in your mouth at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day, hold for about 30 to 60 seconds. Helps to seal up the damaged lining in the gut. That one's another one that I would include, especially if you like to exercise and you have irritable bowel issues. Probiotics turned out to be pretty good, but remember, and I think I mentioned this on a previous podcast. No, it was actually to my I do like office hours with the Ben Greenfield coaching group once a month and I went over this data with them the last time. But probiotics need to be rotated like every three to four months or so in terms of switching to a new probiotic and also looking at the strains that you're using. All the probiotics I did for different strain numbers like R2, D2 and C3PO, you can actually look these up and see whether or not the probiotic that you're taking is indicated for the reason that you're taking it, like constipation or diarrhea or durable bowel or better digestion, et cetera. If you want to wrap your head around that more, listen to my recent podcast with Dr. William Davis where we talk about the difference between all the different probiotics out there and some of the Better ones, particularly this L. Rooteri strain that we talk about. And then it turns out that nitrate or nitrite precursors seem to also do a pretty good job. This would be like beetroot extract, watermelon extract, citrulline, arginine. A lot of these seem to also improve gut performance in people who exercise a lot. Now, just remember, when it comes to nitric oxide and these nitrate and nitrite precursors, they don't work if you drink a lot of fluoridated water or you use a lot of antibacterial mouthwash because you nuke the biome in the mouth that is responsible for the conversion of these into nitric oxide. So long story short is if you want really good blood flow, don't use fluoridated toothpaste, or at least avoid high amounts of fluoridated toothpaste. And be careful with excessive use of mouthwash. That's just a total aside. So, anyways, I'll link to that review, but basically you should be weaving those supplements that I just mentioned, glutamine, colostrum, probiotics, and nitrate or nitrite precursors, into your diet if you exercise or if you spend a lot of time in the heat or if you have a high amount of stress and you also want to eat food and not have endothelial damage and gut permeability and irritable bowel related to that. Okay, the next one. Baby food. Baby food. So this was kind of a shocking article. Baby food pouches are more sugary than Coca Cola. Dentists warned amidst a epidemic of tooth decay. The British Dental association, the same association, who I reported on earlier, found that all these charcoal toothpastes and charcoal powders, when excessively used, can wear down the enamel in the teeth. Well, they looked at these food pouches and they found that more than a quarter of these baby food pouches have more sugar by volume than Coca Cola and soft drinks. These are the common fruit based pouches that you'll see sold by a lot of baby food companies that use sugar fruits like bananas, for example, as the primary ingredient. And the problem here is that these compounds, these fruits and these added sugars to the baby food. It's not like sugars are bad. I took my sons to the Jim Gaffigan comedy show last night and I bought them both, like this giant thing of pomegranate sorbet. They probably had like, gosh, like 600 calories of pure sugar last night while watching the comedy show. I'm not that worried about that. Happening every once in a while. I mean, they're playing two hours of tennis this morning. They're gonna burn it off, they'll be outside all day. Yeah, we don't do that every day. But I don't think sugar is the devil. No, I wouldn't have let them touch it if it would have had vegetable oil in it. That's a much, much bigger issue because that's what their body's going to use to make their cell membranes. Sugar is not that big of an issue. But the problem is if it's a staple in the diet, especially in the baby's diet, not only is it training the palate to really want these hyper palatable, sugary sweet foods, but it doesn't offer the actual fatty acids and nutrients necessary for the formation of teeth and the jaw and the hair and the skin and the nails. And ideally, a growing human being's diet needs to be very rich in omega 3 fatty acids, in bioavailable iron, in what are called conjugated linoleic acid, in organic vegetable based compounds, in a lot of these things that are nearly impossible to find in baby food these days. So you either make your own or there are companies. There's one called.

I. I keep giant boxes of this baby food in my pantry and have it with my lunch nearly every day. It's called Serenity Baby Foods. And for example, like the one I had yesterday, the ingredients are organic kabulka squash, grass fed bison, organic spinach and organic olive oil. And that's it. If you look at, you know, they have a salmon version, they got a grass fed beef version, they got bison, they got turkey. Those are the type of baby food pouches that a child should be consuming, not these sugary ones with the equivalents of coke. Now even that being said, I think that the use of baby food pouches, liquid baby food and non chewable foods is an issue. Like your kids should be chewing as soon as they possibly can to allow for the proper jaw formation, the proper resting of the tongue and the palate, the proper formation of the teeth. Humans too, we simply don't chew enough, meaning human adults. So make sure you're encouraging your baby, your child, you yourself, to chew, chew, chew, chew, chew. But then if you are going to do baby food pouches, if the child is still on liquid diet, et cetera, at least chew stuff that's high in fats, relatively high in proteins, and doesn't have a lot of these sugars in. So always look at the label, especially if you're a parent. And you're getting your baby food. Understand, most of it is super duper sugary. And I'll link to that one too@bengreenfieldlife.com 445 I mentioned I was going to tell you something about mushrooms. So you may have seen documentaries like Fantastic Fungi. You may be familiar with some of the things I was talking about earlier in terms of mushrooms being one of the few plant based sources of decent amounts of vitamin D. But this article is super interesting. They did a mathematical analysis of the electrical signals that mushrooms send to one another, and they identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech. Okay, so mushrooms aren't these silent, relatively self contained organisms growing on the floor of the forest. They're actually pretty robust communicators. And they've even shown that the firing rate of these electrical impulses that mushrooms communicate with via these long underground filamentous structures called hyphae. It's the largest living organism on the planet. This mushroom, the mushroom hyphae. They've shown that when the hyphae come into contact with wood, they use electrical language to share information with partners such as trees. So literally trees are talking to mushrooms via these electrical spikes generated under the ground. And they've actually studied this now via tiny microelectrodes and found that there are even fungal word lengths, vocabularies of up to 50 words that these mushrooms use to communicate with one another. It's super interesting. It's probably one of the reasons that even though you probably heard me do my plant medicine podcast a couple of times recently, I'm not a fan of taking a bunch of magic mushrooms, then laying flat in your back and just putting on an eye mask and listening to music and tripping. I think you do open yourself up to a spiritual portal that a lot of people are unaware of and the potential for psychosis, for dark influence, et cetera. But using small amounts of mushrooms to increase sensory perception and awareness, or consuming mushrooms combined with lion's manes and nitric oxide precursors and things like that for better workouts or again, better sensory awareness or perception or social situations. It's almost like mushrooms are really good communicators that make your body also a good communicator. And I think that that might be one of the reasons that God put mushrooms on the planet in the first place, particularly magic mushrooms or these fungal mushrooms rooms, is that when you consume them, you can take on some of their communication enhancing capabilities. I realize it's a little bit woo, but it's super interesting that not only do these things communicate, but when you ingest them, they allow you to communicate better via some of the electrical signals that are being propagated by the hyphae in these mushrooms. So super interesting, super cool stuff. All right, the last thing and then I'm going to open it up for Q and A. For those of you who want to know how you're supposed to correlate your calorie intake to your activity goals, to your goals for body weight. Let's say if you're trying to lose weight or gain weight to know how many more calories you should eat per day, how many fewer calories you should eat per day, how many calories you're burning per day, and you don't have the money or the time or the know how to go to some fancy lab that's going to test that all for you, and you just want to do it from the comfort of your own home. There is a really, really great calculator that I discovered a couple weeks ago on the website for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases website run by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services. It is so easy, so simple, and such a great way to find out what your target calorie goal should be per day to do things like lower fat, adjust bmi, gain muscle. It allows you to put in your physical activity levels, your height, your age, your weight, weight, your sex, your goal weight, how many days you want to reach your goal by like by my wedding next June, I want to lose 10 pounds. How many calories do I need to eat per day? Starting right now to be able to do that. And it's super cool. Really great calculator. I'm going to link to it in the show notes. It's a long URL. It's like niddk.nah.gov bwp alphabetsoup but if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 445 I'll link to this calculator because it's super fantastic for really useful for determining calorie intake, activity, expenditure, et cetera. So check that one out. It's a good one. Again, I'll link to it BenGreenfieldLife.com 445 along with all of the other interesting anecdotes that I've been mentioning for the past hour. And that being said, if you would like to raise your hand, I'm going to take a few questions now live. So go ahead and raise your hand or make a request to speak if you would like to come on and I will bring you on as a speaker. Okay, Reid, I'm going to bring you on. Reid. What's up, Reid? Hey, Ben, thanks for having me up. I have a question about fasting and how often you fast and to what intervals you recommend doing that for. Okay, cool. Great question. So fasting is.

I'm kind of a fan of this concept of what's called a high energy flux, flux lifestyle. And I'll get into what I mean by high energy flux on probably the next podcast I'll talk about it. But I'm a fan of eating an ample amount of calories and kind of enjoying your food and not excessively restricting calories or carbohydrates and pairing that with a very physically active lifestyle. There's actually a lot of evidence to show that's really great for the thyroid and the hormones, for the metabolism in general, as opposed to continually restricting calories, having super compressed feeding windows and as a result being a little less active or doing that and just having the mental willpower to stay active and taking the hit on the thyroid and the endocrine system that that can cause. So I eat 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day, super physically active. I take.

15,000 to 20,000 steps a day. I work out almost every day. I'm jumping in out of cold baths, I'm getting out of the sauna, I'm just moving and grooving all day long. Even right now I'm talking you guys, like I'm standing up, sometimes I'm walking. And I still incorporate fasting, but based on this high energy flux lifestyle, what I found is the sweet spot. And I encourage a lot of my clients to do this as well. For women, 10 to 12 hours overnight intermittent fast. For men, 12 to 16 hour overnight intermittent fast 1 to 2 times per month, 24 hour dinnertime to dinnertime fast. So that you get a lot of the cellular autophagy benefits that really don't kick in until you've reached about 16 hours or so of fasting. And most people for an intermittent fast overnight, they aren't getting that length of time. And then once a quarter, okay, like once in the spring, once in the summer, once in the fall, once in the winter, you do about four to five days of some type of cleanse or extended period of calorie restriction, such as a prolon based fasting mimicking diet, or a juice cleanse or a bone broth diet, or even a water only fast or a protein restricted diet. And that's generally like, that's how I've done things for the past four or five years. I'll repeat that. Women, 10 to 12 hour intermittent fasts, overnight daily, 365 days a year is fine. Guys, 12 to 16 hour overnight fast one to two times a month, 24 hour dinner time to dinner time fast once a quarter. A quarterly cleanup of four to five days of modified diet of reduced calories, reduced protein, and some form of like a cleanse. And that's really. That's it. I mean, I would say the only other thing I'd throw in there is probably one of my favorite cleanses for those quarterly cleanses is made by Dr. John Douillard. He has one called a five day short cleanse. It's more of like an ayurvedic based cleanse with ghee and olive oil and grapefruit juice and stuff like that. That's a really good one. So is the fasting mimicking diet, which you need to get packaged? In my book Boundless, I talk about how to do a DIY fasting mimicking diet if you didn't want to order the packaged foods from a company like Prolon. But that's basically how I structure the fasting component. So, yeah, great question. And it's super simple. Laying things out like that. It just fricking works. So great question, Reid. All right, let's do another question. All right, Natalie, you can unmute yourself and then go ahead and ask your question. Hi, my name is Natalie. I was wondering if you had a family member who had bone cancer, what would you recommend or send them to explore? Well, that is. Well, it's obviously kind of a loaded question because I'm not a doctor and obviously you can't take this as medical advice. There's a lot of. But I'm going to give you a rundown of the biggies. Okay. First of all, from an informational standpoint, I would recommend three resources to you. Dr. Nasha Winters, I think, is one of the best cancer docs out there. She has a book called the Metabolic Approach to Cancer. Fantastic read. I would grab that and go through it asap. The diet in that book, the recommendations in that book, the supplements in that book, the approach in that book are fantastic. The next one that I think is a fantastic addition to Nasha Winter's book is called the Cancer Revolution, a groundbreaking program to reverse and prevent cancer. Okay. There's a section that has the exact meal plan that I really dig for cancer. It's got everything from emerging alternatives to chemotherapy. Drugs, diets, lifestyle hacks, et cetera. That's also a really good book. I forget who wrote that one, but that's fantastic as well. And then finally, from an informational standpoint, actually I'd throw two other things out there for an informational standpoint. One would be the website Moss Reports. M O S S reports at. I think it's just mossreports.com, extremely helpful site with a bunch of comprehensive downloadable reports on alternative remedies for a wide variety of cancers. Okay, so that's Moss Reports. In addition to that, the last guy I would look at is actually the last two guys I would look at would be Dr. Thomas Seyfried and Dr. Thomas Cowan. Now that first guy, Dr. Thomas Seyfried, he actually has a really interesting kind of like press pulse approach to managing cancer, along with a few off label pharmaceuticals that are used as alternatives to chemotherapy agents. And there's a company called care oncology@careoncology.com that incorporate a lot of his recommendations. Dr. Thomas Cowan. I would just go and do a search on my website and listen to the podcast that I did with him about cancer, Cancer. So he's really good also. So those would be places to dig into more information. Now I'm going to rapid fire the other things that I would personally do if I got a cancer diagnosis today. These are the things that I would personally do. Okay, I would begin daily frequent consumption of hydrogen enriched water. I'm not even going to give you the research behind all this because I don't have time. I'm just going to tell you what I do. Just trust me on this one. This is what I do. I'm not even getting into the science. I'm just going to tell you. Daily consumption of hydrogen enriched water using hydrogen tablets or hydrogen water generator, Daily consumption of deuterium depleted water, which you can use as the source for your hydrogen water, and then daily consumption of Quinton hypertonic minerals. I would do two to six cups of organic bone broth every day while following a low carbohydrate or a ketogenic diet. But into that bone broth I would add specific anticarcinogenic plants and mushrooms that are medicinal plants and mushrooms, most notably chaga ashitaba, turmeric, burdock root, mistletoe, melatonin, Digitalis and Strophanthus. Dr. Thomas Cowan has a company called Cowan's Vegetable Powders. They have a lot of that stuff in really good organic heirloom variety powdered extracts that they send to your house. In miron glass jars that you can mix into your bone broth. I would use all the ones that I just mentioned and just hit rewind and listen again if you need to see those. Or I'll put all this in the show notes as well. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 445Liberative Daily use of the cold pressed oils from Andreas seed oils in particular the flax and the black cumin are the two that I would focus on. Daily use of either NR or NAD or NMN or regular NAD patches or NAD IVs. Frequent high dose vitamin C along with vitamin C IVs and if you can get it done, ozone treatments for the blood like ozone plasmapheresis. Regular use of electrical medicine particularly rife therapy, PMF therapy and hyperthermia using some of these therapies. I like the the bio charger for this. There's the biomat, there's a Royal Rife machine, Pulse Centers makes a PEMF machine. But the use of electrical modalities is underrated for cancer management and I would consider that as well Frequent use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers hbot. You can get soft shell chambers from a company like HBOT USA and use on a daily basis for 30 to 90 minutes daily infrared sauna for the hyperthermic effect for 20 to 45 minutes daily coffee enema. I realize this is stacking a lot of stuff, but I'm just telling you, if I had cancer, this is what I'd do. Daily coffee enema. Complete elimination of non native EMF like WI fi, Bluetooth, significant smartphone usage, et cetera. Just cut out as much of that tech as possible. Complete emotional detoxification focused on gratitude and prayer and meditation and relationships and de stressing. And then the use of some of the mixed tocopherols and tocotrienols I talk about in my podcast with Dr. Dr. Barry Tan. Particularly the annatto compounds that we talk about. I would also include those as well. Okay, I realize it's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of stuff. But that's everything that I would personally stack if I had cancer. Based on everything I've Learned in my 20 years of talking to really smart people about this, interviewing a ton of people on cancer. Those are the things that I would do right away if I had cancer. Sister, brother, mom, dad, whatever. That's the full protocol that I would start into right away. I hope that's helpful. I realize it's a lot. I realize some of that stuff's outside the box but that is where I would start. So I hope that's helpful. I'll link to all this stuff@BenGreenfieldLife.com 445 all the studies, all the articles, everything you need to know. Thanks for listening. Thanks for everyone's support. I love doing this. I love helping people out. I hope you have found this valuable so you can check everything out@BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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. 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.