Q&A 447: Is “Feel Free” Energy Drink Bad For You, 25 Life-Changing Health Tips, “Clarogenic” Plant Medicines & Much More!

My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, he walks up to me outside a coffee shop in Malibu. He says, ben, one thing I've done is absolutely transformed my skin, my hair, my nails, my recovery. I've been doing at least 40 grams of collagen a day now. I think essential amino acids are even better than collagen, which is why I do 20 to 40 grams of essential amino acids a day. If you have skin or you have joints, this would be good for you to do so. Higher collagen intake. Higher. Higher essential amino acid intake.

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

Well, hello, this is Ben. It's going to be a little bit of a different episode today because it is just little old moi talking to you about a few hot topics that I've been asked about of late that I felt justified recording a podcast. In addition to that, I've had a giant film crew at my house. Well, they really weren't giants, they were normal sized people, but there were several of them. They were at my house filming what we call a master class. Literally, like we got into gosh, gosh my entire life, but not just like the usual biohacking. And here's how to make a blueberry liver smoothie. It was finances and legacy and purpose and meaning and spirituality. So a ton of fun. But as a result it's kind of thrown apart the schedule a little bit. Meaning that this week's episode is one of those world famous, at least I like to think so, solo sodes. All right, so what am I going to talk with you about today? First of all, this feel free energy drink that I've been getting a lot of questions about that I still use, but I think we should talk about it. Some questions I've been getting about plant medicine, particularly when I dropped that two part series article and podcast about how I'm kind of done with this whole journeying with psilocybin or recommending ayahuasca to people, things like that. I did mention the concept of a certain form of mind expansion and lethal and right brain hemispheric connectivity and kind of how to turn your brain into a supercomputer at least briefly. I call these things clarogenics and get into those. In today's episode I'm going to talk about my experimentation with high dose proteolic enzyme therapy, 25 life changing health tips and a little bit about vibration platforms. Because no discussion on this podcast would Be complete without talking about vibration. So here we go. Let's start with this feel free stuff. So I was probably partially responsible. I'm not saying that to sound hubristic or narcissistic. I just know I helped make the stuff popular. I did a podcast interview with this guy named J.W. ross because I had been introduced to this energy drink by a friend of mine down in Austin, Texas, who handed it to me when I was at his coffee shop. I'll just bust him right now. It was Khalil Rafati at Sunlife Organics. So he hands me this little bottle, this little blue bot. So there's like this euphoric plant tonic that's supposed to give you the same feel good effects of alcohol without getting drunk, but still you maintain some lucidity. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And I just shot it because I consider myself to be immune to just about any stimulant on the face of the planet. Or perhaps due to my history of bodybuilding, need tons of it to actually feel anything. Anyways, I shot it and I headed out. I was actually walking to the podcast that I was about to record and about halfway through the walk I started to feel really good. Fantastic. Actually went and recorded the podcast. Felt fantastic. Great lucidity, clarity, word recall. Felt on top of the world. Kind of felt like I'd had the socially lubricating effects of alcohol with none of the mental downsides. And I was like, all right, this is interesting. So then I started to drink it and I drank a bottle every few days for a while and then I started drinking a bottle a day. And then leading up to my interview with the guy who ran the company. And I'll link to that interview in the shownotes for this episode, which are going to be@BenGreenfieldLife.com that's BenGreenfieldLife.com 447. So I interviewed this guy, J.W. ross, but leading up to the interview, I got up to drinking about five to six of these things per day. I was doing some blood measurements at the time, and I was mainly concerned about whether or not my liver enzymes would become problematically elevated. Well, it didn't. I did notice when I would exceed about two bottles a day, I would get kind of like some stomach issues. I would get constipated often. Once I even got hemorrhoids, which wasn't fun, like bleeding at your butt. I don't know if it was due to that. But then I talked to another friend who that Also happened to once he exceeded two bottles a day. So it's interesting. So I'm not going to stop there though you probably are like, oh, it's never for me if you bleed out your butt. Granted, I was way, way overdoing it and I'll explain that in a second. So the primary active ingredients in this stuff is kava and kratom. Now kratom is one of those things that tends to be very controversial and even goes back and forth in terms of its legality for sale and introduction into compounds, especially supplements. In the US you can go all over the place in most cities and find shops that sell kratom, which is a coffee like extract that comes in different strains, energetic strains, relaxing strains. It's very good for pain. Thousands of people all over the world use kratom their whole lives, especially in Southeast Asia like Vietnam, Malaysia. It's almost like coffee over there. Okay? And this is whole leaf extract. Problem is, and I get into this in my podcast with J.W. ross, which I'll link to in the show notes, once you heavily concentrate the extract from kratom and you kind of depart from the whole leaf extract, it can kind of turn into bad News Bears, not only for your liver, but it tends to be really high in heavy metals and it tends to just be way, way too strong if it gets bastardized and concentrated like that. So you could either drink a concentrate of kratom and screw yourself over, or you could drink way, way, way too much of the natural stuff and also screw yourself over. Like anything, most stuff in excess can be poisonous for you. And then the other active ingredient in this stuff is kava. So the kratom they get from Indonesia that they put in this feel free drink, the kava they get from Vunatu, I think it is vunatu. I believe that's how you pronounce that. So kava is like this also I like to think of as Hawaiian weed, right? It kind of is relaxing. Knocks a little bit of the edge off of the kratom. It can give relaxed focus. Many people consider it to be euphoric and also allowing for the same type of heart opening effect as you might get from a psychedelic without having to see pink elephants or go all kaleidoscopy. So kava is interesting also. So this drink, this feel free, is basically five parts kava, one part kratom. And I take a deep dive into the chemistry behind it, which I'm not going to do right now. I'm just going to get into personal experience and some additional comments about safety. We'll get into the whole science behind it in that podcast that I did with the founder and again I'll link to it BenGreenfieldLife.com447 so anyways, the other ingredients in it are pineapple juice for vitamin C, which allows for better deliverability of the active compounds in the kava and the Kratom coconut cream. Same thing, even though the whole bottle of it only has like 10 calories. But there's a little bit of coconut cream in there for better delivery of the fat soluble compounds of this stuff across your blood brain barrier. And then it's just got some stevia in it, just some regular old stevia leaf, like natural stevia leaf. The interesting thing is the coconut cream also kind of acts as a little bit of brain stimulant. So there's a secondary effect of that. Now some people kind of get suspicious of this stuff because if you go to their website it's very hard to find the ingredient label. They almost like hide it. I don't like it when companies do that, but I understand why they're doing it. They're doing it because it has Kratom in it and they don't want to get shut down. And Kratom can be difficult to market. I have another friend in the industry, Mark Bell, who, who sells this stuff called Mindvault that's also Kratom. And it kind of reminds me back when I used to run a CBD company. I'd like change URLs and payment processors all the time and was always getting cease and desist letters and Kratom's kind of like CBD used to be. Even though CBD now you find in everything. I think like gosh, like Coca Cola is putting it into soda drinks and things like that. So anyways, this Kratom kava combo made by Feel Free seems to work pretty well. As a matter of fact, it works really well. I still drink. People ask me I tapered down after the interview with them. I quit drinking it cold cold turkey for a few weeks because I'm like, eh, yeah, I probably overdid it and had too many bottles. I felt a little tired for like three days after I quit using it. Almost like withdrawal effect. Which of course like you'd get that from stopping caffeine cold turkey, stopping nicotine cold turkey, stopping just about anything cold turkey. So the slight withdrawal effect didn't surprise me. I was kind of like ready for it mentally. I figured, hey, if I stop taking a Stimulant. My body's gotten used to it, probably is going to take a little while before it gets used to not having that stimulant in my system. But after about three days it went away and I quit drinking it for a while. And since then I've just kind of off and on stopped drinking it just to make sure that it's not something that my body is becoming dependent upon. So I average about one bottle, I would say every day and a half or so right now. So I go through like five bottles of this feel free stuff a week. It's a tiny, tiny little bottle. You haven't seen it. It's like a five hour energy drink shot. So the thing is that a lot of people have written to me and they've been like, I drank this and I felt like crap. I drank this and my stomach flipped. I drank this and I, I had these withdrawal symptoms and felt like I needed it to get by. And none of that surprises me because here's the deal. First of all, if you look at Kratom very much like coffee, there are CYP enzymes in the liver that are responsible for metabolizing Kratom and there is a wide genetic variability in terms of how that CYP2D6 enzyme is expressed. What that means is that some people will get exposed to the alkaloids, namely the mitragynine in Kratom and, and they will not feel anything at all and they'll have to have tons, like boatloads to feel anything. Other people will taste Kratom and get all wobbly and feel weird and almost feel drunk off of the stuff. So if you're a hyper responder to Kratom, probably like a quarter to a half bottle of this stuff is fine for you. I obviously metabolize Kratom quite well, probably the same way I metabolize coffee. I can drink five cups of coffee and barely feel anything because I'm a fast caffeine metabolizer. I'm also most likely, even though I haven't gone and checked out this part of my genetic snips, a fast Kratom metabolizer. So based on that, if you're a slow metabolizer of Kratom, yeah, you're feel really weird if you drink a full bottle of this stuff. And I'll bet that's what a lot of people were experiencing. Second, when I dug in to the reports of people who are feeling weird with it, they're drinking like three, four, five, six bottles a day. If you go to the website, it says we do not recommend consuming more than one serving parentheses half bottle at any one time or consuming more than two bottles per day. And so I'm getting these emails and texts from people who are like, hey, these three bottles of feel free are really flipping my gut. I'm like, well no duh, you're drinking way more than the recommended amount. And so that's another issue. You could be a Kratom non responder or a Kratom poor metabolizer. I mean, you don't metabolize it that well. So if you're really funky, number two, you might be drinking too much of the stuff. Number three, if you already have a compromised liver, compromised gallbladder, a compromised gut, anything like this is probably going to cause you to feel funky. And I would actually get your gallbladder and your liver and your gut checked out if you can't do so much as drink like a half bottle of kava and kratom without feeling a little funky. And think about it this way, I mean, a glass of wine is great, has life extending properties, wonderful antioxidants, some amount of nutrient density, but you're kind of a dummy if you hear that and then you go drink a bottle of wine, right? Same thing with weed. Weed is pretty relaxing. Cannabis is pretty relaxing. Like taking a token of vape pen at the end of a day as you settle in for dinner with your family or whatever, I have no issues with that. But if you decide to get blasted and go into full on couch lock mode, it's kind of a problem. That's your problem. You overdid it. You did too much of a thing that's decent in small amounts but is bad for you in large amounts. Running is good for you, right? But if you decide to go pound 20 miles after you hear me say running is good for your cardiovascular system, don't come back to me and complain later on that your knees hurt or that you actually didn't feel good afterwards. So the dose is the poison, the dose is the poison. So the ultimate takeaway for me with feel free is if you drink it stop every once in a while. Because I drink coffee and I totally cut coffee for a week out of every month and switch to decaf just to make sure I'm staying sensitive to caffeine. Same thing. I'll go on a trip and not take any feel free with me. Or I'll spend a few days on the weekend not drink any, go through the first few days of the week not drink any and then Start up again. Probably horrible for their business for people to hear me say, oh well, stop using it quite frequently, but that's my recommendation. And go listen to the podcast I did with them because it's interesting. It's like, yeah, if you don't metabolize Kratom, well, if you have a poor functioning liver and gallbladder, if you have gut issues like leaky gut syndrome, or if you don't metabolize Kratom that, well, this is probably not something that you're going to feel that great with. And then also be aware the serving size is half a bottle, folks. Half a bottle. Okay? So understand that as well. So that is the dealio with feel free. And again, if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com447, I'll link to my original podcast with them as well as anything else that you need to know about the stuff. All right, so let's turn to the next topic at hand that I've been getting asked some questions about, and that is this whole plant medicine thing. So I am not going to kick anymore the horse that I kick to death. When it comes to the dangers that I recognize accompany the current infatuation, it seems with plant medicine. Not only the environmental impact of stripping the Amazon with things like ayahuasca tourism, but the potential for psychosis, schizophrenia, sex abuse, the interaction with what I would consider to be dark entities that you experience a lot, particularly with elements of the plant kingdom taken in high doses, I think it's a very dark interaction or at least opens up the potential for dark interaction with the spirit world. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com447, I'll link to a few podcasts now that I've done that, my two part series and then a recent podcast with my friend Josh Trent. Well, if you paid attention to the podcast or the articles, I said there was one form of medicine, not plant medicine. It's synthetics, no plants involved, that are often called chlorogenics. These chlorogenic compounds don't seem to involve as much dark spiritual energy, yet allow for the same type of mind expansion, altered thinking patterns that one might want for a business or a personal breakthrough. Merging of left and right brain hemispheric activity. Kind of putting the ego on the back burner that one might be looking for with plant medicine, but without the side effects, particularly feeling as though there's the presence of other spirits or seeing entities or things like that. So I was aware of some of these compounds I'd Use some of them. But I'd never really experienced anything like that in the absence of plant matter like say psilocybin or wachuma or something like that, or ayahuasca or even dmt. Anyways, I felt as though I should probably do a little bit of immersive journalism and look into what an experience with these so called clairogenics was actually like and whether or not there was any of this dark energy involved and how I thought it compared to say plant medicine. So I recently, in the past several weeks actually tried some of these compounds via a facilitator who's somewhat hard to find. And if you leave a comment in the show notes, I'm probably not going to tell you who they are or where they live. However, by asking around, you might be able to find such an individual anyways though, so I had a session facilitated for me and it was actually really really nice. My motor function was somewhat impaired the same way that motor function would be impaired, say if someone took a whole bunch of psilocybin or, or LSD or ayahuasca or ketamine or anything like that. However, the experience was very controllable, particularly with my breath. I could control the entire experience with the way that I breathed throughout it. There was no dark energy at all. I didn't treat it as a divination session or a deeply religious experience. Simply I treated it the same way I would treat taking a nootropic or a smart drug. It was almost as if my brain turned into a 20x supercomputer. There was a little bit of synesthesia that went along with the music that I was playing. And I was of course wearing an eye mask. I journaled for several days with multiple so called downloads or realizations or ideas afterwards, which was great. I could speak the whole time. I was aware the whole time. I knew exactly what was going on in the room the whole time. There were no entities, there was no weird dark spiritual woo woo. It was actually really, really great. And so I would say that despite that, I still think that we need to be very careful sending people the message that they need to say like go do drugs to have a business breakthrough or especially go do drugs to find God or go do drugs to heal trauma. Right. I think that someone who is in the wrong space, mentally or psychologically could go and do something like I did to let's say, deal with some deep dark traumatic issue and potentially experience more trauma or psychosis or schizophrenia or something that might not be that great coming out the Back end. So I would say it's really not for everybody, even the use of these clairegenics, the same way that I'd proceed with caution with plant medicines. However, unlike plant medicines, I don't feel that they're dark or scary or have any type of negative spiritual association with them. They're just basically, it was like taking a smart drug and losing a little bit of my motor function at the same time. But turning my brain into a 20x supercomputer, that's the best way I could describe it. Not like forever. I'm obviously not a supercomputer now, quite obviously, but during the time that this stuff was in my system for about three to four hours.

I was flying pretty fast. From a mental standpoint, I can tell you that. I know a lot of people have been asking me about these clarogenics and the lucidity comparisons between them and plant medicines and how I feel about them. And I would say that they're purely synthetic. They don't have any of the dark energy that one would associate with some plant matter. They're controllable. And I felt absolutely fantastic. So there you have it, There you have it. Let's go ahead and go here. Next I want to talk about my experiment with high dose proteolytic enzymes. Now let me give you a little background. You might be familiar with things like papain. I believe papain is from papaya and bromelain from pineapple, as being two enzymes that are digestive enzymes. But they can also break down things that cause soreness in the bloodstream like fibrinogen. And so they can be very good for the joints or for recovery. The trypsin and the chymotrypsin enzyme that you would find in meat would also fall under that category. Well, there's this stuff called serrapeptase, which is an enzyme that's actually found in the digestive tract of silkworms. So it's what the silkworm uses to eat through and disintegrate a cocoon as it develops into moth. Now a lot of people, for a long time. This was isolated by Japanese scientists in the sixties and oral formulation became pretty widespread shortly thereafter. But anyways, it's been used for pain and inflammation due to its ability to relieve inflammation and pain and swelling. So it's interesting, if you were to eat it with food, it would just eat through and digest the food that you've eaten. But if you take it on an empty stomach, it helps to not only fight inflammation, but what's really Interesting is apparently it can dissolve yeast biofilms. So things like Candida use biofilms as this protective matrix to hide themselves from your immune system. And this is incredibly tough to actually break down. You can get rid of the Candida and solve a biofilm for years, especially if you've had a long standing infection. So apparently what the serrapeptase enzyme does is it kind of like drills through the biofilm membrane and leaves the pathogenic yeast or bacteria like Candida exposed. And so then if you take an antifungal at the same time, like say oregano or coconut oil or even an antibiotic, it would actually theoretically work better because the yeast or the bacteria biofilm has been broken down. Now of course, as you can imagine, you could totally overdo proteolytic enzyme intake and eat away the lining of your stomach or something like that. Think like anything like I was talking about, feel free earlier, the dose is the poison. However, here's what happens. I got Candida. I think I got it from my wife. We're all adults here. So I can say this. I think my wife had a yeast infection down there and I think that by me going down there, I actually contracted it orally. I suppose it could have been oral to, oral communication as well. But anyways, I think a lot of guys can get it from their significant others and then wind up with Candida. So I got Candida and I thought, well, okay, I can use oregano, which is fantastic for Candida, but I know the biofilm's an issue. So I started taking high dose enzymes. I use this stuff, Kion Flex, because Kion Flex, it's made by Kion for joint soreness and for recovering more quickly because it's got a really, really water soluble, absorbable form of turmeric in it called turmerosaccharides. But then it's got this stuff called IU Flex, which is from a Haritaki root, which is actually been used quite a bit in Ayurvedic medicine to help to facilitate recovery. And then it's got all these proteolytic enzymes in it, including serozymes, the same stuff from Serrapeptase from the silkworm bacteria. In the case of Kion, we get it from Aspergillus, which is a healthy fungi. And then we also put this other enzyme blend in Kion Flex called Pro hydrolase, which breaks down protein and increases amino acids in the blood and decreases the big peptides that can be related to inflammatory, inflammatory C reactive protein levels. So there's A serrapeptase and there's the hydrolase and then these serozyme things which are additional enzymes. So all of those are in the Kion Flex. And I thought, okay, I'm just gonna take a bunch of this. You're supposed to take just three on an empty stomach in the morning or in the evening. So I started taking 12 a day. I've talked to other people, like my friends at Bioptimizers. I think it was Wade Lightheart I was talking to who was taking like 40 a day or something like that of protein digesting enzymes. For some of the same reasons I thought about taking high dose Kion Flex like the impact on biofilm, the potential impact on soreness, the potential impact on joints and recovery. I got to tell you, it not only worked like gangbusters in terms of relieving Candida symptoms because I've had Candida before, faster than I've ever experienced in my life. It's not advertised for this. I don't even think it's indicated for it. But it worked for me at least. But the other thing was I felt so, so good from a joint standpoint with this high, high dose proteolytic enzyme. My stomach felt really, really good. So it wasn't eating through the lining of my stomach. And even though I'm not going to take 12 kion flecks a day for life, I'm throwing it in there every now and again. A couple days a week I'm taking giant handfuls of proteolytic enzymes and I actually feel really, really good with it. It so it actually is interesting because serrapeptides has been looked into also for the management of upper respiratory conditions, bacterial control and of course fighting inflammation. So I think I'm just getting this massive anti inflammatory dose, breaking down biofilm, giving a ton of TLC to my joints. And so you could go read the whole article that I wrote about the new formulation of Kion Flex because this is a supplement that I helped to make. But I never really, really took it high dose. Now that I'm taking it high dose on a couple of days a week, I think I'm going to keep doing it. It seems to work really well and I feel really good with it. And especially if you have Candida or yeast or fungus, I would totally look into it. All right, so that's my little experiment with high dose proteolytic enzymes. So the next thing that I want to bring up was just I guess from a basics of looking, feeling and performing. Amazing. Written by a Person who I really respect, even though he's controversial and kind of a lightning rod. We're 25 tips. 25 tips that this guy had generated over 25 years of research and healthy living. And I want to share. I'm going to do like lightning round and then I'm going to give you the URL if you go to BenGreenfieldLife447, if you want to take an even deeper dive into this stuff. But basically this was a fantastic treatise on the 25 top things that this guy had learned over 25 years. I'll give you his name at the end. All right, you might know by the time I get done. So here we go. Tip number one Time restricted eating. For metabolic flexibility, I do this. I recommend you do it 12 to 16 hours without eating every day. For me, that's 365 days a year, starting in the evening. Most of it's while I'm sleeping. Then I have a late breakfast for men, 12 to 16 hours for women, namely premenopausal women, 10 to 12 hours every day. So good for you. So much science behind it. So good not only for longevity but also metabolic flexibility. That's number one. Number two, ruthlessly eliminate all seed oils from your diet. Period. Get rid of them. No ifs, ands or buts. I've also done that and it's pretty amazing when I do get exposed. Such as, say like the Whole Foods Hot salad bar I use, as I recently posted on Instagram, spirulina, about 6 grams and or glycine, about 5 grams. That mitigates the damage from vegetable oils if you do happen to have them. Number three, incorporate blood flow restriction training regularly, which I do. As a matter of fact, when I travel I throw these super lightweight BFR bands or Katsu bands in my bag. I strap them on, I'll put them on my arms and my legs. Do 30 push ups, 30 squats, 10 pull ups, a few lunges, a core exercise, some elastic band, overhead presses and I'll just do as many rounds as possible that for like 20 or 30 minutes. Then I've have some time left over. I go on a walk with the band still on and that's like my go to because it allows for your body to experience the same response as it might get from heavy lifting with no access to heavy weights or a crappy hotel gym. It just works. And then when I'm at home I have this thing called a Vasper. You can google it or I'll just put a link to an interview that I did about it and it's a 21 minute workout that is a blood flow restriction workout. I do that three times a week and that's just about the only cardio I do at home, aside from occasionally hitting the Airdyne bike. So blood flow restriction training, if you're not doing it yet, or what they call Kaatsu training, do it. Number four, regular sunlight exposure. Way more important than vitamin D intake. As a matter of fact, you're probably not getting as much from oral vitamin D supplementation unless you have the gene that impairs your ability to be able to make vitamin D from sunlight exposure, which I personally have. But it's not that common. Otherwise. Sunlight exposure, preferably early in the day, preferably for anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours. As early today as you can get it. Wear as little sunscreen as possible unless you're prone to burn. Totally agree with that one too. Most of us, especially men, need to donate their blood on a regular basis. Iron is not necessarily good. Test your blood regularly. There is a thing that rusts you from the inside out. It's called hemochromatosis. If you test your iron, if it's too high, donate iron. Make sure you get enough copper in your bloodstream, such as by eating organ meats. Balance out the iron and consider also a little bit of sweating and a little bit of endurance exercise to continue to get rid of iron. Eat adequate protein. Yes, extremely important.

The amount is very, very basic. 0.55 to 0.8 grams per pound per day. That's what I do. I throw in a bunch of essential amino acids like I do 20 to 40 grams of essential amino acids a day because I feel amazing on that stuff. It's like the Swiss army knife of supplementation. But basically get adequate protein. Most people don't. Most people are protein phobic because they think it's going to shorten their life. And that's who we Sauna, regular sauna. Perfect. 3 to 5 times a week, 20 to 45 minutes. Heat stress is so good for you, as is cold stress. But this guy listed heat stress as number seven. Number eight, drink hydrogen rich water every day. I do that big mason glass jar when I wake up in the morning. It's one of the most potent selective anti, inflammatory and antioxidant agents that exist. I have a big glass of it every morning. And if I'm on a long haul flight, I pop those things in just about every bottle of water that I have on a long haul flight. Number nine, sleep Enough, of course, but this guy gets into keeping all electronic devices away from the bed, period. And I totally agree. Number 10 related to that, minimize EMF exposure. This guy actually wrote a book called EMF'd. I'll link to it in the show notes. It is one of the best treatises that I know of for limiting your exposure to power lines, wiring errors, radio frequencies from smart meters, cell phones, wi fi, like transient voltage spikes, AKA dirty electricity gets into all that. So I would definitely read that book and read the article because the article goes in a lot more detail. Get rid of all your non stick cookware. All right, a lot of people don't think about this, but if you cook in your kitchen, you're getting a ton of polyfluoroalkyl PFAS substances when heated. Ton of people, even healthy people have not yet gotten rid of their non stick cookware. Get rid of it. Number 12, address high blood pressure. I think one of the best ways to do this again is regular heat exposure. Regular sauna, especially infrared sauna. A lot of people have blood pressure issues and don't even know it. Especially in our modern post industrial stressed out era that we live in because we're special snowflakes and we're more stressed out than anybody's ever been. Right? I'm just kidding. Human beings have always been stressed. It's just that now we know how to measure blood pressure and we're empowered to do something about it. Number 13, stop tech from surveilling you by protecting your privacy. This one's kind of important. It's like basically this guy's super into like, don't use Google, use virtual private networks. Use DuckDuckGo as your search engine. Use things like Brave as your browser. These are decent tips, I think. I don't get too geeked out on that, but I think it is pretty important when it comes to censorship and propaganda and AI driven social engineering to at least be aware of that stuff. You know, the invisible manipulation of big tech. All right, let's take off our tinfoil hats now move on to number 14. Use melatonin regularly. Huge fan of that. Go listen to my podcast with John Laurence to learn why melatonin is so important. So good for your mitochondria, so good for inflammation. Mitochondrial dysfunction is a hallmark of most chronic diseases and melatonin is very important in the mitochondria, more than most people know. Related to that, use methylene blue regularly. This one flies under the radar, but it's actually fantastic as a metabolic enhancer. Especially when composed or when combined with, with infrared light. So methylene blue, I love that tip. That's another thing. It's like the Smurf mouth thing. People in the health industry get thrown under the bus for it, but it actually works really, really well again for metabolic enhancement and mitochondrial respiration and ATP production. Number 16. And this was the same tip given to me by a guy named Mark Sisson six years ago. He walks up to me outside a coffee shop in Malibu. He says, ben, one thing I've done is absolutely transformed my skin, my hair, my nails, my recovery. I've been doing at least 40 grams of collagen a day. Day. And this guy says, number 16, boost your collagen. I agree. Now, I think essential amino acids are even better than collagen, which is why I do 20 to 40 grams of essential amino acids a day. But whether it is collagen or whether it's essential amino acids, especially if you're aging or you have skin or joint needs, or you have, let's say if you have skin or you have joints, this would be good for you to do. So. Higher collagen intake. Higher essential amino acid intake. Number 17. Be prepared for emergencies. As a matter of fact, this is a big part of the Ben Greenfield Life masterclass that I did. I taught people how to secure your water supply and what things to stock away for food in your pantry. And thinking about things like weapons and self defense and personal survival. Be prepared for emergencies. So many people are not. And obviously I'm not going to get into this on the podcast, but if you're not yet thinking about that, let me put it this way. Here's where to start. Get a bug out bag. Now, if you just went, you have no idea what I meant when I said bug out bag, then that's the first thing you need to do, okay? Get a bug out bag or make yourself a bug out bag and keep it in a place where you can grab it if shit goes south. Okay? That right there will kind of at least get you digging into this a little bit more and thinking about it a little bit more. I actually have a four hour assault rifle course coming up in two days, for example. So I'm constantly trying to, to add a few feathers in my cap when it comes to self defense. Number 18. I love this high dose digestive and systemic enzyme intake, okay? And this gets into how it's good for blood clots, how it's good for circulatory health. You may have heard of these things that people have been doing lately that might increase the potential risk for abnormal blood clotting. That might be another place where these enzymes fit in. Fasting conserves enzymes so you naturally get a little bit of an upregulation of these fibrinolytic enzymes when you fast. But taking them regularly, I was happy to see this guy recommend it because like I said, I've been doing them high dose regularly use vitamin C protocol regularly. I'm a total fan of that. I do a vitamin C IV kind of like self administered push IV. I get them from fast vitamin IVs I do one a week and then I take Jigsaw health adrenal cocktail which is really absorbable vitamin C. I do two giant scoops of that in that morning glass of water that I have that has the hydrogen in it. And yeah, I'm a huge, huge fan of whole food. Vitamin C for the immune system, for sepsis, you name it. It's such a lifesaver. Hydration, duh. Everybody always says we got to drink more. I'm just going to skip that one. We know we got to drink more B vitamins for brain health. A lot of people do not get bioavailable forms of B9 for example methylfolate, B6, B12, B1, B2, B8, especially if they're vegetarian or vegan. A lot of people are not aware of the host of issues associated with vitamin B deficiency considering that a well formulated vitamin B compound like Thorne's multivitamin they do. A great one is to find if you're not supplementing with vitamin B like boy you should. It doesn't get a lot of attention because it's not sexy like vitamin D, but you should. Number 22, don't be afraid of cholesterol. Totally agree with that. Drives me nuts when I still see people even in the health industry writing out ldl, the so called bad cholesterol. No, just say LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol. Technically it's a lipoprotein anyways though. So LDL don't fear LDL fear instead high blood glucose, inflammation and high triglycerides, all three of which can cause that LDL to become atherosclerotic and go from being sufficient for heart disease to necessary for heart disease. Number 23, use Quercetin if you need any type of respiratory health. That one. I saw this person start to post a lot during COVID and I would agree degree it helps to shuttle zinc into your cells and it's actually really really effective against viruses. And it's a potent antiviral in its own right. Quercetin. Quercetin. So look into it. Q U E R C E T I N. Also fantastic again for respiratory health. Number 24, care for your brain. He's got a whole list of fats in there and things for the brain. Well I'll list them super quick then go read the article if you want. Best way to care for your brain. Get enough dha, get enough epa, get enough choline, get enough phosphatidylserine, get enough carnitine, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and MCT oil. Ketones and probiotics. Forgot about probiotics because of your gut brain connection. And then last one, astaxanthin. When I interviewed this gal, Sandra Kaufman who put together this book where she ranked prioritized the best anti aging agents in existence, astaxanthin was like near the top. You get it from microalgae. It's actually in kion fish oil. Not in very high amounts, just a little bit to keep the fish oil from getting oxidized. But I used to do like 40 to 60 grapes grams of astaxanthin when I race Ironman Hawaii because it really helps as edible sunscreen because it's a skin protectant, it's a carotenoid, but it does a lot of other stuff. So if you haven't yet looked into astaxanthin you're getting some if you're eating pink fish, things like that. But if you're not supplementing with astaxanthin you should actually think about it or at least try it for a little while to see how you feel. I would recommend starting at around 5 grams or so but you can take up to 40 grams a day. It's pretty cool stuff. I think there's only one or two grams in the kion omega fish oil oil so you'll need a little bit more than what's in there. But anyways, astaxanthin is another one. So I'm going to link to this whole article because it takes a deep dive into everything that I was just talking about. And the author was, you probably guessed already, Dr. Joseph Mercola. My friend Dr. Mercola who's really smart and also very controversial and sometimes gets very, very tinfoil hattie. But I love him. He's amazing and he's usually right about everything just 10 years before it actually happens. All right, so BenGreenfieldLife.com447 I'll link to that. That last thing I want to talk about, because I was using it today and there was a great little article that came out about it, and because I use one of these just about every day for like a warmup and also in between my sets when I'm exercising, I thought I should give this latest study a head nod. It was on vibration training. Specifically, it looked at what happens if you stand on one of these vibration platforms before you go out and exercise hard. Now, I expected that it would result in more muscle damage because one thing that happens when you're on a vibration platform is it increases the motor neuron recruitment and the number of muscles that you use in any exercise that you do after. Which is why people can say squat more or sprint faster after they stand on the vibration training platform. But it turns out that standing on one of these things before you go exercise seems to actually attenuate the symptoms of exercise induced muscle damage and it seems to result in less delayed onset muscle soreness. They mentioned in the study how they think that when you stand in a vibration platform before you work out or before you go to an exercise, it results in a more even distribution of the loads across your body. And so that might attenuate disruptions of certain muscle fibers because you're not asymmetrically loading your body, if that makes sense. I don't know if their theory is right, but if you have access to a vibration platform, like I mentioned, I'm on mine every day. I'll go stand out before workout. If I got poop in the morning, I'll go out there sometimes and have my cup of coffee or my water and combine it with vibration. And by the way, trampolining could also work for that. Just shaking your body Tai chi style up and down. It's been shown to assist with reducing visceral abdominal fat, which I always thought was a joke, seeing women at the gym standing on a vibration platform with a giant Jamba Juice in their hand, which probably isn't the right use of it, but it's resulted in a 25% reduction in the appearance of cellulite on thighs. I have a big article about vibr vibration training on my website that I'll link to because it does a lot of stuff amazing for strength training, especially in seniors who are aging, you maintain muscle more, probably because it also increases growth hormone dramatically. I mean, there was like a 400% increase in growth hormone in one study in which they were destabilizing the muscles with vibration training, which is crazy, crazy high. So something's going on with growth hormone when you vibrate your body. And then there's the recovery component that I just talked about. There's been multiple studies before this one, one that found better recovery, but this one was a great study and just backed all those up and reminded me that I should probably mention vibration training on my podcast because I haven't been talking about it a lot lately and it's really, really good. Increased production of nitric oxide, blood flow, improved circulation, improved skin tone. And then like I mentioned, Dr. Mercola in his article was talking about reduction of blood pressure. Well it seems to be amazing at reducing blood pressure specifically if you're like doing a few I Love this. A 60 second set holding a static squat position with the knees bent to 90 degrees with the vibration platform on. That's what I'll do sometimes in between upper body sets. And it's actually been shown to significantly increase blood flow and oxygenation and decrease blood pressure when you do that. Ton of results on blood pressure lowering and decrease in arterial stiffness with people who regularly stand on or use a vibration platform, either standing out and doing exercises on on it or just like getting into an isometric squat or doing push ups with your hands on it. So I use one called a power plate which works really well. Uses what's called vertical vibration. There's different forms of vibration but the power plate moves in a more three dimensional motion which is actually why they cost more than other vibration platforms because they're moving in a different range of motion. But in terms of the hertz frequency settings on it and the rotational vibration nature of it, I totally back that one up as a really really good one one. So I'll link to the article and the podcast that I did about that if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com447 Wowza okay, so we covered feel free, don't do too much of it and if you don't feel great with it, understand that half a bottle is the actual dose but it's not going to kill you. Okay. Unless you're taking a whole bunch of it or you're super sensitive to Kratom or you have a bad liver gallbladder, better stomach function. Like I just mentioned, use vibration training if you haven't looked into it yet. Might be a cool upgrade for your home gym or talk with your trainer about adding it to their gym if you have a trainer. My updated thoughts on high dose proteolytic enzyme fan not all the time, but I'm doing a couple times a week now. 6kionflex in the morning, empty stomach, 6 in the evening, empty stomach, and then, oh, the plant medicine thing. I'll give a thumbs up to these clarogenic synthetic compounds for people who are ready for that, who aren't using it to deal with intense trauma, or who aren't already in some kind of a dark place. But if you're in a good place spiritually and you're not somebody who's going to be triggered or anything, I'm okay with something like that for just again, turning your brain to a supercomputer for a little while and come up with new ideas. I'll probably keep doing something like that once a year or so, just to drop in and think in a new way. So anyways, that's interesting. Again, again. BenGreenfieldLife.com 447 thanks for listening in. I hope you enjoyed this little solo, so I hope it made your life better in some way. I love you. See you on the flip side. So there's two events coming up. You go to both of them. I'm going to go to both of them. Obviously I'm going to fly to Texas, then fly over to Lexington. The Texas event, called Runga, is October 13th through the 15th. The wild health one is October 22nd. Go to both. I am. Obviously you can also check BenGreenfieldLife.com calendar for all of the events that I'll be teaching at this year. So I hope to see you there.

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.