Q&A 448: Hot Tub vs. Cold Pool For Recovery, Shocking News On Thyroid Misdiagnosis, Bad Sleep Mitigation, The Latest Science On Creatine & Much More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life show, hot tub versus cold pool for recovery. Shocking news on thyroid misdiagnoses, bad sleep mitigation, the latest science on creatine and much more.

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

Jay. What's shaking, baby? Hey, man.

Dude, it's. The weather is starting to get like phenomenal.

The weather is starting. Well, there must be absolutely nothing going on whatsoever useful or interesting in your life if your go to is the weather.

No, you got, you got to listen to this. No, no, it actually relates to everything, Ben. So, all right, one of the things, and this is. It's going to be super random, but it's amazing. So one of the things that I did this morning, I was running outside and when I was running outside, the. The sky was like super blue, super clear. It felt like a fall morning, like in the for us right now, you know, again, September, still a little bit hot in South Carolina. Like whatever, 62 degrees, but that's fall for us. Okay, So I was running blue skies. And then I look up over my left shoulder and I was like, what is that? One single cloud? And so I look over and it was one cloud. And dude, it was the weirdest looking thing. It was. The cloud looked like it was morphing. And no, I was, I was not on psychedelics or mushrooms. Basically the cloud was morphing and then I looked away from it because I was just in my own head, looked back up in the sky and there it was again. And I was like, this is just an oddity. But again, this was all. It relates back to weather, it relates back to fitness, everything. It all should make sense 100% to you, Ben, and to the listeners because it's a completely linear story, but I just had to share it with you.

That's about the longest comment on the weather that I think I've had in quite some time. And I don't know if I'll get two minutes of my life back, but it's interesting and might have something to do with this oncoming. Apparently September 24th is right around the corner. There's supposed to be some big psychic crazy week worldwide great reset event that will happen on that day on the 24th.

Yeah, I don't know anything about who predicted that one.

I'm going to be deep in the woods hunting elk. But if I see like fighter jets or black helicopters or anything flying overhead, I'll know. Well, your weather sounds exciting. My morning is exciting. And threatening to be even more exciting. I'm hyper caffeinated today, Jay. As you know, people send me all sorts of crazy things to try. So my friend Mark Bell sent me his fasting gum, which is basically gum that's made of caffeine. And there's some other things in there, I think, like apigenin and rutin and like some appetite suppressants and it tastes pretty good. And again, it's just gum with like 25 milligrams of caffeine. Some other stuff just showed up at my doorstep this morning before we started to record. It says, I'm going to read the can. I've never had this stuff before. It says defiant nitro infused cold brew with functional mushrooms. And it's like cold brew coffee, which kind of kicks one's ass anyways. Even if they're tolerant to caffeine. It is. Yeah, so it says roasted craft coffee, Lion's mane, chaga and cordyceps. Filtered and remineralized. Perishable. Keep refrigerated. Well, it ain't gonna perish. Cause I'm about to suck this stuff down while we're recording. If I start to turn into a motor mouth talking a million miles an hour, Jay, it's because I got 25 milligrams of caffeine in my mouth, an extra 25 milligram caffeinated piece of gum in my back pocket, and then I don't even know how much caffeine is in a cold brew. It's gotta be at least 200 milligrams.

That's a lot.

Yeah, it's a lot. But it's like concentrated. Yeah.

I either predict you're gonna either a get the jitters or two, you're gonna be chased by a running cloud because you're gonna start having psychosis.

That could happen, you know the nitro that's like some of the highest caffeine containing. It's stronger than coffee is what I'm trying to say. Apparently they use a ton of coffee grounds to make it. And so you get a really high caffeine content. But this process nitrogen gas to kind of like bubble it up almost like concentrates the caffeine even more. So that's why if you drink a cold brew versus if you grab like a nitro cold brew, you tend to get way more caffeine. So I'm at the tippy top of the caffeine. I suppose I probably could buy some caffeine powder on Amazon or something like that.

Yeah, you need some L. Theanine or something to offset it, man, because if I had that much, I'd be so jittery. I just respond pretty heavy to caffeine.

I don't need any L theanine. I just need you talking about clouds. We'll be good.

Oh, that's right.

This is the couple times a month where we do a giant Q and A episode. We're going to reply to some questions from our fantastic Twitter audience. The show notes for everything we talk about are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com448 if you're on Twitter with us live and you can learn how to do that if you go to twitter.com BenGreenfield we'll bring you up on stage and you can ask a question if you'd like, as we go along here. So let's jump into the news flashes, shall we? Jay?

Let's go, man.

All right, so let's start here. I was in the hot tub this morning, actually. I've been, you know, as the weather starts to dip, I tend to be more prone after my garage workouts to hop into the hot tub versus the chilly willy cold pool. And, you know, I've kind of pondered before, well, gosh, you know, could I get since it's cold or since it's water immersion, right? Like providing pressure against the skin since there's some amount of blood flow involved, like, theoretically, could I be actually getting some benefits from hot water immersion similar to what I get from cold water immersion when it comes to, like, you know, fatigue or recovery, you know, especially without all the shivers? Obviously, the cold is good if you want to burn extra calories or shut down inflammation or something of the like. But it seems as though hot water could help out a little bit also, especially for something like, let's say, blood flow and removal of some of the metabolites that would normally make you sore? There was a study that came out about this, and in the past, studies have gone back and forth between hot water immersion versus cold water immersion. And in the studies that have happened up to this point, it does appear that alternating cold water and hot water, called contrast water, that's amazing for recovery. I have one workout that I'll do called a workout. It's like a recovery day workout where I'll go, five minutes cold pool, five minutes hot tub, four, cold pool, four hot tub, three, three, two, two, one, one. And man, it's like one of the best ways to manage soreness, this idea of contrast water therapy. But this latest study wasn't looking at contrast, it was just looking at, all right, what happens if you sit in the cold versus what happens if you sit in the heat. And what they used to measure the recovery effects was something called tensiomyography, which detects muscle skeletal it's contractile properties like how fast your muscles contract and also your muscle stiffness. With the idea being that if you could somehow get a higher score on this so called TMG or tensiomyography, it would indicate better recovery, like the muscles bouncing back a little bit faster and you're going to be able to get back to training more quickly. What they found, long story short, was that the hot water immersion seemed to be just as effective as the cold water immersion at promoting muscle recovery. Now granted, again, they didn't look at some of the other things that cold might do like cause extra fat burning or improve blood glucose response the rest of the day or a lot of these other kind of ancillary benefits of cold that we know about. But it turns out that if you don't have access to a cold pool and you need some kind of recovery session, the hot water can be a pretty good option. Like sitting in a hot tub appears to be, despite probably pretty bad for the balls and fertility as we covered I think in the last Q and a pretty decent option for recovery. But it's still not as good as going back and forth from the hot to the cold. So I thought that was kind of interesting to know about.

Did they see what degree temperature was considered there?

They didn't, I would imagine. You know, the average hot tub is like what, 102 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit right around in there.

Right. So it's about right there.

Yeah. Lower than 102 and you just don't feel it, you know, it's kind of like, you know, like, I don't know, drinking lukewarm coffee. You know, it's just, you want your coffee cold, you want it hot.

Well, at the gym I go to, we have both the option of a hot tub or like a Swedish sauna. I always opt for the Swedish sauna, but I wonder if there's any. I mean, I guess that they would have to do a study comparing those two. They've probably done a study comparing those two.

I suspect that the hot water is going to be better because you get what's called the hydrostatic pressure, the water against the skin which helps you to drain a lot of those metabolites. See recovery, it's so multifactorial. There are so many Metabolic factors. You get hydrogen ions that build up in the muscle tissue. You get inorganic phosphate, you get reactive oxygen species. You have the buildup of these heat shock proteins, which a lot of people think are all great, but the fact is they do accumulate and they can contribute to muscle fatigue. There's even one that's built up that they've looked into recently called ORM or osomucoid. And that's another thing that a metabolic factor that builds up in muscle tissue as it gets tired. It's a protein, it's synthesized in your liver. And so when you have elevated liver enzymes, this kind of correlates to that. And what it does is it basically will build up as a way to fight off fatigue. But that along with heat shock protein, are reactants to fatigue. So you have calcium hydrogen ions, lactate, inorganic phosphates, these hosts of things that build up. And a lot of people are under the impression that it's just like the hydrogen ions kicked off from lactate that make you sore. And other people think it's just the slight muscle tearing or the influx of calcium that makes you sore. But there's a lot of factors, and this dictates that if you engage in an activity that just basically drains the muscles more quickly, it's enormously helpful. And that could be like, gosh, vibration platform, it can be inversion therapy, it can be hot water, it can be hot cold contrast therapy, it can be those fancy recovery boots. There's a lot of options, but kind of in the same way that for the athletes and the clients who I work with, I have what I call the parasympathetic menu workout. Whereas a day, and I just give them a whole menu, you can do cold, you can do hot, you can do massage, you can do foam roller, you can do red light therapy, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. You take your pick. But on this day, you choose two to three of those activities. And of course, as anyone knows, if you have an easy day and you do stuff that makes blood flow on that easy day, even a walk, you'd just recover so much faster. And it turns out that now we know cause science, that hot tub would fit into the mix there.

Nice, huh? Well, interesting. I might have to just mix it up a little bit with the hot tub. No one ever complains about getting in a hot tub, like getting into cold water. Like it kinda just initially sucks. I mean, you feel amazing, amazing afterwards. But there's like that trepidation for a lot of people, like getting into a cold plunge. No one ever complains about Getting into a hot tub there.

There's some people who are kind of like.

Lower themselves. It's like when you pour the bath in the, you know, the bathtub water too hot, it takes a little while. And then fellas, you know what I'm saying? Like when you finally start to teabag into it and you thought it was a perfect temperature and then once the balls hit it, you're like ah, I should have waited. So big babies. Yeah, yeah. But you are right, cold is more difficult. Here's another interesting one. Bad sleep. I obviously am going to have a horrific night of sleep tonight. Considering it's not even noon yet and I probably got 500 milligrams of caffeine in my system. And the half life, what's the half life? I mean even if you're a fast caffeine metabolizer, it's like I think like six or eight hours.

Six hours? Yeah, yeah, six hours.

Like it's not too bad. That'll be 4pm when it, when it wears off. But anyways, counteracting the negative effects of bad sleep or something that we've talked about a lot before about how there are certain things like taking nad, which helps to initiate the same cell repair processes that we're supp. Occur when you are having a good night of sleep and supplement with nad seems to stave off some of the effects of sleep deprivation. The same could be said for creatine. Creatine is another one. The same could be said for like a micro napping strategy where you're taking small brief naps throughout the day on a sleep deprived day or very brief bouts of high intensity exercise, like five to 10 minutes of high intensity exercise. You could get all the way up to like a smart drug like Modafinil AKA Provigil, which off label anti narcoleptic drug which is amazing if you have multiple days where you're just kind of fighting lack of sleep or you just got to push through a big workout or something like that. You still pay a little bit of a biological debt afterwards from all the fatigue that accumulates when you're taking a very strong smart drug like that. But this latest study actually looked at kind of more of the chronic effects of sleep deprivation and its association with mortality. Poor sleep, we know and especially accumulated poor sleep can cause things like heart disease and stroke and cancer. And so this was a large study in which they basically studied. It was like 380,000 plus people. They analyzed them over 11 years and what they found was that the people who Slept poorly, but still were able to achieve the equivalent of about 75 minutes of running or 150 minutes of walking per week, were actually able to stave off a lot of the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation. Which means that I'm not saying this is an excuse to not sleep. What I am saying is that if you're somebody who's just like, you're driven, you have a hard time sleeping. There's even the saying that a lot of the most impactful people from history were tired a lot because they just got up early and they stayed up late and they burnt the candle at both ends. That's how they live their lives. And while I'm not a Navy seal, I'm going to sleep when I'm dead type of guy. Or at least I don't have that mentality. It's nice to know that if you're aerobically fit, if you're cardiovascularly fit, you can eliminate a lot of the deleterious associations, associations of poor sleep with mortality. And then when you know some of these other tricks like take a little nad, take a little caffeine, keep some modafinil around for the real difficult days, make sure you get little bouts of high intensity exercise in. Then teach yourself to micro nap or use a lot of these apps like Nucalm or the BrainTap or. Actually, one of my favorites I've been playing around with lately is a meditation app called Synctuition S Y N C Tuition. It's like plays a little journey story in your head and in my opinion, it's one of the coolest ways to meditate. If you haven't yet checked out that app, you should, but it turns out like be aerobically fit. And that could really help you, especially if you know you're somebody who's just not sleeping as much as you absolutely should.

Yeah, I love it. I wonder if there's an inverted U shaped curve here. If it's like there's a sweet spot there and then too much of it will start to kind of throw you in the other direction. I'm sure there is.

We know that for sure. I think it's around. I forget the guy. James o' Keefe did the study on this about arterial stiffness associated with aerobic exercise. And it turns out that you do get a lot of diminishing returns with chronic endurance exercise. If you exceed about 90 minutes per day of aerobic exercise or about 60 minutes per day of moderately intense exercise, that's where you start to build up fatigue. Arterial Stiffness, inflammation, ventricular hypertrophy, a lot of the stuff that dictates that. While that might be a good strategy if you're training to do an Ironman or get Uber fit, you can't synonymize that with health because there definitely is a lot of diminishing returns. I'm talking about working out in your yard all day. I'm talking about like banging out a two hour long treadmill session or doing a two a day Airdyne workout for longer than an hour or something like that.

Yeah, that makes sense. And you said running for 75 minutes a week and then walking for 150, was that right?

Yeah.

Nice.

That's doable. Back to fatigue though, and staving off fatigue. This was another interesting one that just came out recently. I wanted to highlight it a coenzyme Q10. It's really cool. It's an essential component of the mitochondrial electron transport chain. It's a great antioxidant. It's been studied quite a bit. But this recent study looked into the effects of coenzyme Q10 for reducing fatigue symptoms. Because I was just talking about things like NAD or creatine for staving off fatigue if you're in a sleep deprived state. This one looked at Coenzyme Q10 and found that a daily dose of Coenzyme Q10 was associated. And this is a decently large study, about 600 plus participants. It was correlated with a significant reduction in fatigue, particularly a lot of the things associated with chronic fatigue. And I think that the reason for that and what the study authors allude to is the fact that because Coenzyme Q10 does such a good job regulating mitochondrial function, and since so much of fatigue is related to poor mitochondrial function, that coenzyme Q10 is just like food. And amazing for the mitochondria, which has a direct effect in this case on people who have fatigue or chronic fatigue. This is super duper close to my heart recently because one of the highest sources of coins on Q10, the highest that I know of, is heart. Like literally just like eating the heart of an animal. I made heart for the family last night. I'm going to put the recipe out on Instagram soon. But the problem with heart is like with a lot of organ meats, you got to get the gamey flavor out of it and you got to tenderize it. So last night I'll tell you what I did because people should know this because yeah, heart's really high. Liver is pretty high. Liver is actually very, very high. It doesn't even still come near to heart. Fatty fish are pretty high in coenzyme Q10. Some of the fermented soy products like miso and tempeh, those have decent amounts in them as well. And nuts and seeds have a little bit. Nothing comes near heart and liver, honestly. So anyways, I soak the heart in buttermilk or kefir for a day, and then I rinse it and drain it, and that gets all the gamey flavor off. And then for this one, I sous vide the heart at 165. So if you do like a water bath, 165 is a perfect temperature for most organ meats. Really breaks it down nicely, but doesn't get it too tough. And so I sous vide it in a heat safe, plastic resistant sous vide bag for 12 hours in a water bath. Then I took it out and I just threw it on the traeger with a little bit of a rub on it, and I smoked it for about two hours, took it off, and served it up to the family with some primal kitchen ketchup and ranch dressing over a bed of sprouts and a little bit of fried zucchini that I made. And oh, my gosh, it's so good. Like, that's what I'm gonna have for lunch.

Sounds pretty good.

Leftover heart. Yeah.

Did you take. Does it take out the. I guess the tenderizers? It really helped to take out the chewiness because I think that's the hardest part for a lot of people is the chewiness. And I found that, like, if I mince it with, like, other ground beef, it's a little bit more palatable to me, but eating it straight up. Yeah, yeah. Sounds good.

Yeah, it's. It's pretty good. Sous vide's the way to go with hard heart. I've never had better heart than with. But you got sous to be a long time. Long time.

Yeah.

Same thing with pork belly. If you pork belly, it's UV it for like 12 hours. In this case, at around 155. And then you finish it with the final saute to get it nice and crisp. Or you can even just use like a. Like a torch, like what you'd use for a creme brulee. Oh, my goodness. Even an air fryer works. Like, we have one of those big old cuisinart air fryers. Those things are so cool because you can get like, a fried or, like a nice crispy skin type of effect without any of the oil. So there you have it. Quenzyme Q10 to the rest of you. Try that one out. If you deal with fatigue, this next one. Speaking of creatine, there's all these different forms of creatine out there, like creatine citrate and malate and easy ester and creatine nitrate and creatine pyruvate and magnesium creatine chelate. It's crazy. It's crazy. And creatine is really one of the most studied molecules out there for everything from mental performance to staving off muscle loss or with age, to strength, to power. I mean, to sleep deprivation. I mean, it's an amazing molecule. But the thing is, a lot of people get the wool pulled over their eyes because none of these forms of creatine. And this latest systematic review in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research backed this up. None of them are superior, despite being much higher priced than basic pure creatine monohydrate. I tell people over and over again, you don't need anything fancy, just basic creatine monohydrate powder, not liquid. All right? These energy drink companies who are putting creatine into their liquids, they're stupid, because creatine degrades to creatinine within like 24 hours when it's in a liquid medium, just like. So you don't want it premixed. You just want a regular old creatine monohydrate powder. And that's literally all that you need. And I think a lot of people will save a lot of money knowing that. Now, that being said, and you still want high quality creatine monohydrate. I think there's this one. So there's a brand name called Creapure. It's made in Germany. And what they do is they supply all these other supplement companies with pure creatine monohydrate, meaning they manufacture it. They use all raw materials that have no traces of any byproducts in them. They get them all tested so it's safe for spores, so you don't become a victim of a doping list. They're vegan, they're kosher. For what's that worth? If everybody really wants some kosher creatine monohydrate, it exists. It's all vegan based. And so I take 5 grams of creapure literally year round. That's actually what we use at Kion is creapure in our creatine monohydrate. And that's basically it. It's just pure creatine and it freaking works. But Please know that you don't need fancy creatine. I think there's still people who are getting marketed like this super overpriced fancy form of creatine. And. And again, this is like, this isn't the first study to show that creatine monohydrate is all that you really need. So just please note that to yourself. You're buying some overpriced creatine. All you need is creatine monohydrate, preferably look on the label to make sure it's what's called creapure, and you'll be good.

Yeah, there's some great marketers out there, and people, they, they. They succumb to it and they end up buying really, they buy extremely expensive creatine that doesn't provide them with nearly as great of a result as the inexpensive, you know, maybe not so sexy monohydrate, but monohydrate, especially if you use creapure. There's a couple advantages that I found that not a lot of people talk about. The one that I would say is that, like, if other forms of creatine, a lot of them just taste like pure ass, like creatine. Ethyl ester. I took that back in the day. I don't know if it tastes any better now, but it was awful. Like, it was like drinking rocket fuel mixed with, like, horse piss. It was, like, so bad. And. But, like, monohydrate is like, basically tasteless. And then creapure, if you do use that, obviously with Kion's version that I. That I use daily as well to give a plug for me, is like, it mixes so easily, like, and you can drink it with anything. And like, if I mix it with just about anything, I don't even taste the creatine in there. I don't even know what's in there. But the results are amazing. So, yeah, monohydrate for the win again.

Yeah, it's crazy. Like, if you look at, like, an ethyl ester form of creatine, like, if you were to get, let's say, like a couple pounds of that, it costs you like, 40 bucks. If you did a couple pounds of creatine monohydrate, it's like 20 bucks. It's really, like, twice the cost. And it's no better. In fact, it's less better, if that's a word. So anyways, choose your creatine wisely and don't overspend. A couple other things I want to mention before we take a few questions from Twitter. The first is super cool website I found. It's called Mytivin. M Y T A V I N. So here's what it does. You go to this website and it allows you to type in any medication that you're on, like amoxicillin or amphetamines or statins or anything thing. Once you type it in, it will pull up all of the different deficiencies from a nutrient standpoint that that particular medication might cause for you. Okay, so let's use, like, I'm gonna go to this website. So my tab. M Y T A V I n. Let's say I type in, like, you know, a lot of healthy people don't use a ton of pharmaceuticals. Let's say metformin. Right? A lot of people use metformin. So we type in metformin and it gives us two results. It shows three studies indicating that people who use metformin tend to be deficient in folate. Right. And so three studies show that it could be beneficial to supplement with folate, like a methyltetrahydrofolate supplement if you're on metformin. And then 14 studies, it says here, show that metformin causes a deficiency in vitamin B12. Right. So right out, it's super useful. Because even if you temporarily. Right. Let's say a doctor puts you on, you know, that's metformin, obviously. So folate and B12. Let's say your doctor puts you on amoxicillin. Okay, so amoxicillin. Turns out when you click on amoxicillin, oh, hey, there's one thing that it significantly decreases, and that's the microflora in your gut. It says that it decreases lactobacilli with the use of amoxicillin, which makes sense because it's an antibiotic. But now, you know, okay, so if I take amoxicillin, when I finish up my. My bout of amoxicillin, I should maybe replenish my gut with more lactobacilli. And so that's another example. Let's try. Okay, Citalopram. I think that is a. Well, that's a little bit more of an antidepressant, but it's also used for relaxation. Okay, so that one causes a 47% increase in melatonin suppression.

Makes sense.

And then also hyponatremia due to salt loss. Right. So deficiency in sodium and deficiency in melatonin. See what I'm saying, though? It's super useful. Just like have this in your back pocket if you got to be on A pharmaceutical because you could know what issues that it might cause and then replenish accordingly. Isn't that cool?

No, that's really cool. I'm surprised that this website is kind of just coming around because this could be quite useful for anybody who just wants to research. Because everything has a trade off, right? It doesn't matter what you put in your body, there's some level of trade off. And especially with pharmacology, we know that side effects run rampant. Every single medication, to my knowledge, has some level of side effect and one of them being how they can cause deficiency. So this is a really cool website that I'm gonna. Not any medications, but if I ever go on one, I know where to go.

Have you ever heard of pharmacogenomic testing?

I have not, no.

I've. I've gotten this done before. I forget the company I went to. You could just google pharmacogenomic testing and probably find it. I think it's what's the lab company? LabCorp. LabCorp would be able to list on their website where you could get this. But I did one. I forgot where I got it. Gosh, I wish I could remember. Maybe I'll find it and put it in the shownotes. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife448, I'll hunt it down. But what it tells you is your genetic propensity to be a responder or a non responder to a host of different pharmaceutical medications. Or very, very similar to this other website we were just talking about. Basically, it talks about how different medications would impact you, meaning they would be deleterious for you. You'd be a responder, a non responder, et cetera. Oh, here's my report. It's called get my DNA, get my DNA. It's called a pharmacogenetic report. And you literally get this giant list of oh, well, maybe this medication is really good for people for a certain condition, like let's say anti ADHD drug or an anticonvulsant or whatever. But for you, it might cause this type of side effect. Like for example, if I ever had to be put on antidepressant, I'm just randomly choosing that. It shows that I actually am basically a non responder to almost every single one listed. But then it says the alternative that my body would be really, really responsive to is called Effexor Venlafax vaccine. Right. So it's really interesting. And again, like, I'm not interesting. I'm not sold on using a lot of Pharmaceuticals. But, you know, armed with the data from something like that website, we were just talking about the myvastatin with like a pharmacogenetic test such as the one from Get My DNA can learn a lot. So pretty cool.

Yeah, that's really cool.

Yeah. All right, let's go over one other before we turn it over to some Twitter questions, and that's thyroid. My friend Dr. Michael Ruscio, who has a podcast on thyroid health and gut health, he's a real expert in those areas. He just sent me a text a few days ago because he published in an open access journal, I believe the journal was called Nutrients. The relationship that he had found, very significant relationship between gastrointestinal health, micronutrient contents and autoimmunity. Essentially, what this paper gets into is the fact that there are a ton of misdiagnosed thyroid problems that are are really related to gut dysfunction. And that's because there are select micronutrients and vitamins and minerals that are essential for optimal thyroid function. Okay. Some of the biggest would be like iodine, selenium, vitamin D, iron, vitamin B12, zinc, magnesium. Another one that kind of flies on the radar called inositol. And any of those in deficiency or occasionally in excess can actually cause deleterious thyroid metabolism or kind of like a hypothyroid condition in most cases. Well, it turns out that some of the best ways to deplete these type of thyroid support compounds or nutrients that would be found in the body are gastritis, irritable bowel syndrome or sibo, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, overuse of proton pump inhibitors or antiacids, and pancreatic insufficiencies like digestive enzyme insufficiencies. And so what Michael writes about in this paper is that there are certain GI therapies that have been proven to increase nutrient absorption. Namely, the ones that he lists are probiotics. An elemental diet which you can look up, but that's basically a pre digested protein and carbohydrate powder that gets absorbed very rapidly in the small intestine, which can help out a ton of in people who have like say Crohn's or irritable bowel, even if it's like a short term administration of that diet. Immunoglobulins. Right. This is like what you'd find in colostrum or some of these compounds that have these helpful immunoglobulin protein isolates. And when you take care of the gut with probiotics, something like an Elemental diet and something like immunoglobulins. What happens is you get the nutrient absorption of some of these nutrients that are missing in thyroid problems, like vitamin B12 and zinc and magnesium and iron, et cetera. And you see a restoration of thyroid function without getting on thyroid meds, but by instead paying attention to the fact that hypothyroidism is often incorrectly diagnosed or over diagnosed, when in fact GI dysfunction is what's at play. Like GI dysfunction, Michael writes, is like 45 times more common than hypothyroidism. So if you have thyroid issues and you haven't really gone hardcore after repairing the gut and replenishing the gut, gut is definitely something you should look into doing. And this paper just really spells it out quite well that if you have thyroid issues, go to the gut, which is very interesting too, because that has weight loss implications. Right? Because if you have hypothyroidism, you have a lowered metabolism and a lot of people will say, okay, well, I need to get on thyroid, or I need to exercise more, speed up my metabolism somehow, when in fact they may want to also, or instead ahead, just try probiotics, an elemental diet and or immunoglobulin therapy. And that might be what the thyroid needs rather than just taking a bunch of thyroid med or thyroid precursors. Make sense? Yeah.

I find it just so fascinating that with the advances in research in this area, we are coming to find that overall gut health just either mediates or moderates so much within our physiology. And if it is left unattended, then we're leaving a ton on the table. Might even be missing kind of the point completely. So this is kind of just yet another study that, yes, it's helpful for those who have suspected thyroid dysfunction, but also just in general, everybody has a thyroid, but also everybody has gut microbiome. And it's just incredibly valuable, if not just imperative, for us to ensure that we are doing what we can to really foster a healthy environment there. So, yeah, great study.

Yeah, I think it's fantastic. Very good information to know. So I'll link to those studies@bengreenfieldlife.com 448 and now's the exciting time. Well, it was already exciting with the 800 milligrams of caffeine circulating through my bloodstream. It's about to get even more exciting because we're going to bring on some questions from Twitter. So here's how it works. If you have a question and you're in the Twitter spaces right now, go ahead and raise Your hand and I'll select you. I'll bring you up and you can ask your questions. So. So who has a question that they would like answered? We've got Iamon. All right, Iamon, go ahead with your question.

Hi, Ben, thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering about motivation in your life. What still motivates you? Do you find it still very important to find motivation and how do you cultivate it?

Look, I don't want to kick the horse to death, but a big, big part of motivation, what inspired in Okinawa would be called, like your ikigai, a reason for getting out of bed in the morning or in Italy, or playing the Vita, is indeed having a purpose statement for your life. Developing a purpose statement based on what makes time go by quickly for you, what you enjoyed doing when you were a kid, what puts a big smile on your face now, what kind of things you're good at that seem like they just come easily to you, even if they're hard for other people. There's even books like the company slow co s l o w w co has an ikiguy 2.0amazing workbook to kind of learn a little bit more about. About what you're good at, what you're passionate about, what your purpose is. And that's incredible for motivation, to have that purpose statement, to have that. Why, I might be preaching to the choir because I think a lot of people are aware of this, but I think that in addition to that, let's say you have your purpose statement. It's a single succinct purpose statement that you've memorized and that can get you out of bed in the morning. There's also biochemical components that are associated with, with motivation, particularly dopamine. Right. Dopamine is more than just say, like a feel good neurotransmitter. It's actually something that can be incredibly motivating. And if you're deficient in dopamine because you've been overstimulating, or you can read a book like what's it called, Dopamine Nation about this, that you haven't really fasted from dopamine enough, it can really inhibit motivation. And there are ways to boost dopamine levels. Some are more, I guess, straightforward, like getting a good night's sleep or working out or listening to music. But there are even supplements like Mucuna Dopa, or the company Nootopia has one called Dopa Drops. And sometimes if you elevate dopamine with something like that, you can be incredibly motivated you can also lower the rate at which dopamine is degraded in the synaptic cleft with some of these nootropics or smart drugs even like that. Anybody who's taking that Modafinil that I talked about earlier, that Provigil knows you'll go the whole day just. Just like checking stuff off a checklist without stopping, like a freaking semi truck flying down the highway. It's almost too much dopamine. You kind of crash afterwards. But there's a definite biochemical component to motivation. And then I would say, honestly, in addition to something like neurotransmitter repletion, there's nothing to amp up and flood your body with dopamine, in my opinion, like the. The post cold bath or post cold soak effect that you get. And I mean in terms of just like flipping the brain circuit for motivation almost instantly. There's nothing quite like a cold bath, in my opinion. Even though there are other ways to increase dopamine, that's definitely something to pay attention to. And I suppose one last thing I should mention is that the mere act of having a checklist or having a calendar or having things written down and then rewarding yourself by having checked off those things from the list is. Is an automatic dopamine trigger in and of itself. So checklists and checking things off a checklist can be a really, really good way to keep yourself motivated. And you keep coming back to it each day and finishing little pieces here and there. And that can be incredible for motivation as well. Those are just a few random things that come to mind, of course. Jay, you're the brain expert. You got anything you would add?

For sure. So, as a psychologist, the thing that I have spent most of my life doing is helping people find. What is it that motivates them? What helps them get out of bed? What is the. That is going to really be the purpose behind why we would change? There's something I posted on Instagram and Twitter pretty recently where I said, like a lot of us in the health and wellness space, we say that we want longevity. We're doing all of this for health and wellness reasons, but mostly because we want longevity to live a longer life. And I think that's actually not the best question asked. I think the best question asked is, why do you want longevity? And I think we should ask why until we cannot ask why anymore. Well, maybe I want longevity because I want to live a life of value, of meaning, and of purpose. So I think that's a better response than I just want Longevity. But for me, when it comes to motivation, I have two things that I wanted to highlight. One would be my favorite quote in the entire world, and it's from Marcus Aurelius. So Stoic philosopher led the Romans, and he said here there was a term that the Stoics use, but also there's just a term in philosophy called memento mori. Remember that you're mortal. And the quote is, is. Is that you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do, what you say and what you think. And this is a moment for us to think about how short life is. And that for me is the primary motivator. I know that life is short. I do not have. I have a number of breaths on this earth, and it could be the one that I take in just a second. And so, because if I live a life with that in the back of my mind, I'm going to stay motivated to keep going because the next moment could be a moment that I leave this earth, it could be the next moment that my kids leave this earth, my wife leaves this, leaves this earth. And it's very sad to think about, but it's also very motivating because I want to cherish every single possible moment that I have. And so I use that as my primary motivator. The other thing, Ben, that I love that you talked about was that mission statement. And one of my favorite books of all time is by a guy named Simon Sinek. It's start with why. And it is really helping us to identify, like, what is our why in life? Like, what do we want our contribution to be in life and how do we want that to impact our, ourselves, our family and others. And the way he kind of helps guide people throughout that book is to develop that. What you said, Ben, mission statement. So mine is, is I'm here on earth to help guide others to find daily contentment so that they can live a life of joy, peace and hope. And that is why I created Hanu. That is what I why I'm a psychologist. Like, I want people to find just daily contentment so that they experience what true joy is, what true peace, and just have hope in regards to their overall mental well being. So I think that that's a huge piece of motivation is wa up every single morning and reciting to yourself what your mission statement is, what is your purpose statement, what is your value statement, and then let that guide you. So I know that was a mouthful, but I think that that is just a powerful way to start. Remember that you're Going to die. And then also remember that every day has to be congruent. You have to live a life that is congruent with your why statement.

Yeah. Related to the death piece, by the way. I don't know if you saw this. I recently posted to Instagram, but I use that Nifty app called FaceTime app. And I took a picture of myself.

Oh, I did see that.

And then I made myself look old folks, go check it out if you want to. It should be one of the Recent photos@instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness But I did this and then I printed it. Kinko's on canvas. And the old me I'm looking at right now, the old me is hanging on my office wall. So when I look at that, it reminds me, like, time is finite. You gotta have priorities. You can't just do everything in life. You gotta pick those things that are gonna be the most impactful. They're going to allow you to love other people the most, that are going to allow you to really pursue your passions in a way that you know is going to leave this world a better place and leave you on a deathbed with no regrets. But man, having that photo is super impactful. Then the other thing that we've done is we have a playbook for the Greenfield family. And I'll link to my podcast with them in the show notes. But if you go listen to my podcast with Rich Krishensen, we get into how to have a playbook for your family. How to create legacy. A family constitution, a family trust, a family bank. But within that playbook, we have the entire Greenfield family's end of life directives. Each of us, even my 14 year old sons, they've written out their entire memorial service, their funeral, their deathbed moments, their end of life directives, what they want to do if they wind up in the hospital. Everything is in there, along with my wife's directives and my directives. So we have this practice of just basically thinking of our death, riding our obituary, having old photos of ourselves around. And that may seem disappointing and depressing if you look at it the wrong way, but really it's empowering once you realize, oh, hey, you know, even, you know, like, I'm, I'm a Christian, I believe I'm going to live forever, you know, in a new heaven, a new earth and a new body. But at the same time, for, for this life right here, man, reminding myself of my own death, at least my, my death, of this body that I'm in right now it's incredibly motivating. So, yeah, you're right. You're right. The Mento Mori piece is pretty, pretty important.

Yeah, there's an interesting bin, a Japanese practice. I forgot what it was called. Michael Easter wrote about it in his book the Comfort. But basically a lot of Japanese will meditate, like all day, like basically on their death. And it sounds so depressing, but for these individuals, they talk about just how incredibly motivating and how passionate they become when they realize and remind themselves, like, listen, like this thing right now sucks, this obstacle or this barrier that's in front of me is really difficult, but I'm going to use it to help me to grow. I'm going to use it because I know that if I let it tear me down, I am taking all the, this precious time away from my life. And the last thing that I want is to be on my deathbed whenever that comes, whether it's on the next breath or it's, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 plus years down the road. I don't want to sit there and have that regret that I spent all of this time and wasted on things that really were not fruitful, were not powerful for my life. So I think it's just an incredibly valuable thing that if people are not doing that, meditate on death. It sounds weird, but I think you'll find benefit and growth in that area.

Yep, yep. I agree. It's called maranasati, the mindfulness death of Buddhist. It's Buddhist, but I think it's also Japanese. So. Yeah, that's awesome. Let's go ahead and let's, let's take another. Let's take another question. Ask her if you want to raise your hand. We'll bring you up on stage here on Twitter Spaces, and you can ask your question. Who do we got? Live Q and A, just like the old timey radio shows. We've got Beldes, Vel, Valdes, Tita, and I'm going to add you as a speaker, Valdez, in just a moment. I'm going to bring your audio. You up. All right, go ahead. What you got for us, Valdez?

Hi, Ben. Hi, Dr. J. Gosh, where do I start? I, I think I've followed you, Ben, for quite a while now. Really impressed by just all the work you do and just your commitment to just health in the health and wellness space. I read your article a few weeks ago about what kinds of supplements people should take and sort of the necessity of supplements. You highlighted a number of supplements and you highlighted how, how chaotic it can be for wannabe biohackers like me or other people in my area who want to optimize everything down to the T in terms of, like, what to take, when to take, and just managing all these bottles and cabinets. And I know you recommend a number of supplements, but I think there's still a challenge. Like, I wanted to know, how do you sort of manage sort of not only, like, how much you're spending on supplements, how much you're taking, how they're interacting with each other. Like, can you, like, visually see all the things you use and sort of understand sort of the history and, like, sort of track your progress based across all these supplements that you're using? So I'm just curious. And Dr. J, feel free to take this as well. I think everyone takes supplements. I'm curious, just really, how do you manage yourself and the supplements and your intake?

There's nobody I've ever seen that doesn't benefit from lysos, say, well, if I could name three Creatine, magnesium, and a good fish oil. And the data behind those three is incredible. So there are certain supplements where I'm just like, yeah, for insurance, just take the ones that are really well studied, can't go wrong. And namely, the top three for those would be creatine, magnesium, fish oil, and if you're not eating enough protein, you could probably throw essential amino acids in the mix. Everything else to go straight to the meat of your question, I test, right? Not only do I track on a daily basis my heart rate variability and my sleep scores, but then I do a blood test at least four times a year. I do a gut panel at least once a year. I do a salivary hormone panel at least once a year. I do a genetic test, which is like, once in a lifetime. I do a urine test for hormones about once a year. And those are a few of the biggies in a micronutrient evaluation called a nutrival once a year. And so I test what I'm low in our plans. This is the same thing I do for all my clients, right? Anybody comes into me to be coached and who wants actual nutrition and supplementation help, we do a ton of testing beforehand to customize what the nutrition supplementation program should look like. There are certain supplements that you're not going to show as deficient in, but that are kind of related to issues that you might have. Let's say you test with high blood glucose and high hemoglobin A1C, indicating you have some amount of glycemic variability. Well, your test is necessarily going to say, oh, you're deficient in Ceylon cinnamon, you're deficient in apple cider vinegar, you're deficient in bitter melon extract or something like that, or berberine. But yet we know, okay, this is the supplement that's going to help to cover those bases. The same might be said for testosterone. You test low in testosterone and typically that doesn't mean that you go take testosterone instead, it means, oh, well, we got to look at zinc, we got to look at boron, we got to look at magnesium, we got to look at clinical creatine, we got to look at dhea, we got to look at minerals and some of these factors that kind of similar to thyroid dysfunction that I was talking about earlier would be things to look into replenishing from a testosterone standpoint. So, I mean, I think too many people waste way too much money on supplements. Some people probably have an extra, let's say $200 per month of supplements they're taking that they don't really even need to take because they weren't willing to fork over the cash for $1,000 in testing. Testing that if you do the math, over the course of five months you've already wasted via spending money on unnecessary supplements what you would have spent on one test that would tell you for the next year or longer what kind of supplements you should be taking. So that's my approach. It's just very data driven. And then that's paired with a few things that I just know everybody benefit from. And again, that's primarily creatine and magnesium and fish oil and probably essential amino acids. So I don't know. What would you add?

Jay, My approach is very, very similar to yours. I love the point that you make. I never thought about it that way, but it's, it's a very valuable point that a lot of people will complain about the price that it costs to, you know, do a nutrisense. Not a nutrisense. What's the nutrival? Or do one of the, you know, tests that looks for these deficiencies or looks to see how you might could supplement to help optimize health and well being. Yet they'll go out and just drop an exorbitant amount each month that compiles or compounds and adds up. So I really like your point there. Yeah, testing is key. I tend to be a very much a minimalist when it comes to supplements. It's funny, Ben, I take the three that you just mentioned, magnesium, I take omega 3s and then I Will take creatine. But the one that I add on, which is kind of like, I would. I would say limited in the summer, more in the winter, would be vitamin D3. That's, like, the only additional one that I added onto there. But other than that, like, there's some things that I'll cycle in and out of, like, you know, for. Maybe we're helping to optimize sleep, or I'm going through a struggle, you know, with that. But I just tend to rotate a lot as well. The. The. There's like the four staples, basically, but then I'll rotate stuff in and out. But testing is key here. I think that, you know, it's the supplement industry. It's very easy to get caught up in all the sexy marketing and ads saying that they can help with this, this and that and that. They have all of these studies, and maybe that is the case, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you need it right now.

Now.

So I think that testing is imperative and not just kind of buying everything under the sun and taking it always until you have a complete medicine cabinet. That's 1,000 bucks a month even, because I've heard people going pretty nuts with this stuff. It's just best to spend a little bit more money up front, test it out, and then take it from there.

Yeah, I agree. All right, well, we crushed that one. Let's do one more question. Let's do one more question. So, Jill, we're going to add you. You and Jill, go ahead and ask your question.

Hey, thanks so much. My question is I'm a pretty. Pretty skinny guy around 140, 145, and trying to implement the strategies you talk about, Ben, I find it very hard to get enough protein. I really want to grow lean muscle and. But still stay healthy. And, you know, all the longevity stuff still very important to me. And I find there's like. So my question is, what's the right balance between. Between getting enough protein and doing stuff like intermediate fasting? Is there. Is there a cost of. Of getting this lean muscle on the account of longevity? Because, you know, taking into account that you can only absorb, right, like, like 40 grams of protein in a meal.

So, yeah, about 40.

So trying to do it in two big meals, it's like, it's probably not enough. Should I do, like, three, four meals? And then does it. Does it cost on longevity? That's kind of like what I'm trying to figure out, the balance. Thank you.

When you look at muscle maintenance and the association between maintenance of lean Muscle and longevity. I think many of the people who are restricting protein as a longevity hack are a missing out on much of the goodness of life that would be associated with say grass fed steak or bone in pork chops or nice roasted chicken. But then they're also basically winding up frank frail and pardon the expression, easy to kill and fragile with age because of the protein restriction. You have that one element of the long lived person who's cold and hungry and libido less and then you have the other long lived person who's just big and buff and not hyper buff like a bodybuilder because that's a lot of extra muscle to carry and to cool, but who does have a decent amount of strength and grip strength and, and rugged power and functional fitness. And I would much, much rather see someone eat adequate amounts of protein, not engage in excessive fasting and lift heavy things than restrict calories, restrict protein and have a little bit more of like a, I don't know, like a Gandhi approach to living a long time. I just would rather be very robust and strong as I age personally. And so because of that I eat even if it's a low protein day. I get 0.5 to 0.6 grams of protein per pound of to body weight. Now the thing is, people who do accept the fact that protein and muscle is good for you often overdo it. They don't realize that you top out about 0.8 grams per pound for benefit. Even though I know a lot of people are doing like one gram plus a pound. There's a few fringe bodybuilding studies that have shown if you're like living in a gym, you can do pretty well by amping up protein intake a little bit above that, 0.8 grams per pound for the average person. Most people, 0.55 to 0.8 grams per pound pound of protein works. Now the absorption issue, if you're doing like intermittent fasting or two a day can become an issue because that might top you off as you noted Jill, at like 80 grams of protein. If you can only absorb 40 grams at a time and if you're looking at let's say trying to get 0.8 grams per pound, well in a case like that then 80 grams, you know, let's see, weigh I don't know, like £180 and you find out that you should be ideally getting, I don't know, let's say about 120 grams a day of protein. Well, two 40 gram protein feedings leave you with 40 grams to catch up on. That's where you can throw in more digestible, absorbable forms of protein during other times of the day like collagen and probably top two would be collagen and essential amino acids. Right. And so a lot of times if I haven't reached my protein allotment for the day and I know I'm kind of low on protein, hey Ben, I'm aging. I want to stave off muscle loss. I'll do a few scoops of kion aminos for example, or I'll have something collagenous like a few scoops of gelatin or collagen or some of my homemade gelatin infused jello that I make and I'll include a recipe for that in the show notes. But basically I am of the persuasion that yeah, excessive protein restriction while being a longevity hack, can result in enough muscle loss, loss and loss in grip strength and a host of other factors associated with longevity to where it might not be the best way to extend lifespan versus lifting weights and eating adequate amounts of protein. I think the people who make the mistake are the people who eat a bunch of protein and don't move enough or don't lift enough. Right. And that would be the person, I don't know, like somewhat sedentary executive following an Atkins diet. Right. And eating protein, protein, protein all day long but not really exercising or converting it, so to speak, in the first muscle. So anyways, you got anything to add, Jay?

Nah man, I think you covered that one pretty well.

Yeah. Well, thank you, that was great. I appreciate all of your contribution, especially your brevity there, Jay. I'm working hard today, working on eating a steak. I think we should probably pull it there because we actually covered a few distinct questions. I really appreciate everybody on Twitter and the questions, questions that you've asked. And again, you can access all the shownotes@bengreenfieldlife.com 448 we like to give out something nice to those of you who have left a cool review anywhere podcasts are found. Where you find this podcast, if you leave a rating, if you leave a review, it helps out the podcast tremendously and I love to see those reviews come in. Speaking of motivation, it helps give me motivation when I see your comments, your reviews and your feedback. And so this is the time on the show when we give something away by reading one of the top reviews of the past couple weeks. And if you hear your review red, just email me your T shirt size, email gearngreenfieldlife.com and I'll get A cool little gift pack out to you. So, Jay, you want to take this one away with this week's review?

Yes, sir. Got one. So this comes from conscious marketing and pr. I'm giving you some marketing and PR right now. Conscious marketing and pr?

Yeah, Promo in there.

That's. That's probably what they did. They're like, man, maybe I'll get on and read it. There we go. But they, they labeled this review highly insightful and says, listening to this podcast, you always take away valuable nuggets from each episode. I appreciate the variety of the content. So thank you very much for your review.

I like that. Yeah, pithy. Pithy, potent. Kind of like your thoughts on protein, Jay.

That's right. I like the way you think. Conscious marketing and PR.

Consciousmarketing and PR.com.org call 800-conscious marketing. Anyways, email gearngreenfieldlife.com Mr. Conscious Marketing or Mrs. Conscious Marketing and we'll get a handy dandy gear pack out to you. In the meantime, for everybody else, thank you so much for listening in. Thank you for all your questions. For those you on Twitter spaces, we love you. Doing these live are always fun. And Jim Jay, until next time. I'll see you on the flip side.

See you next time, bud.

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.