Q&A 451: How To Build Muscle & Lose Fat At The Same Time, The Truth About "Natural Flavors", Are Antioxidants Really Bad Post-Exercise & Much More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life show, how to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. The truth about natural flavors in your soda. The antioxidants really blunt your post. Exercise gains and much, much more.

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

All right, Jay, we're. We're quickly approaching what my son told me yesterday is, according to statistics, the most favorite of all American holidays at the time. This is being recorded, at least. Do you know what that is?

Wait, you've got to be kidding me. You're telling me that Thanksgiving is the most favored holiday.

No, Boxing Day. Boxing Day, no, of course. Yeah.

That makes plenty of sense.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's actually Thanksgiving, apparently. I don't know. I don't know who they pulled on that. But it begs the question, do you actually celebrate Thanksgiving, Jay? And if so, what do you bring to the table? What. What wizardry are you cooking up in the kitchen on your end?

So I do celebrate Thanksgiving with the family normally. You know, we. We do like the. I guess more like a family potluck, where my wife's family's pretty large. My family's a little bit more on the smaller side, and we'll do like lunchtime with my family and then dinner with my wife.

No, no, no, no, no. I want to know what you're making.

Yeah, no, I was getting there.

What are you making? Oh, you are getting there. Okay. Okay, go ahead.

What I was gonna say is normally we make dishes for, like, a potluck. We bring it. But this year we are not. But my w. Two things. Number one, she's bringing some beets, and she's also bringing some Mandarin oranges, which is, like, super simple. But these go with, like, a salad that we're making as well. And then we're bringing some dry farm wine, because that is how we are going to celebrate this year. We normally don't. We normally make a much larger dish, but my mom and dad and my wife's mom and dad decided they wanted to just kind of do everything. So we kind of can just show up with a couple of sides that are super simple, some wine, and we're good to go. So it's gonna be like a super stress free Thanksgiving.

Oh, Mandarin oranges and beets and wine. You're gonna severely disappoint all the carnivore enthusiasts coming to your celebration. At least if they're eating your food, watch out. Yeah, well, I got up early this morning to do the Classic brine. I'm the turkey guy at our house. I got a big old 20 pounder from. Actually it's from our friends at US Wellness Meets. Shout out to them. And basically the brine of course is using the power of osmosis, where you get that sodium in the brine. So my brine has salt, it's got brown sugar, it's got bay leaves, it's got garlic, peppercorns, apple cider, vinegar, water. You heat all that up, then you let it cool and then you put the turkey in it, submerge the turkey in it, and you just let it sit for about 20, 24 hours overnight and then it'll go on a smoker on the grill. And I do think that brining is a good tactic. I mean, if I do fried chicken, I'll soak it for 24 hours in buttermilk. With turkey, when you soak it in that salt water solution, it draws the water into itself and it winds up a little bit more juicy and moist. And the brining, I suppose.

I guess the non brining enthusiasts would say that it's a fake juiciness, that it's not real juice, it's just what, whatever got soaked in. But all I can tell you is that, man, when you brine and then what I do is I stuff all the skin with butter and so it gets nice and crispy on the outside. I don't really notice any like wateriness on the inside. But some people will do like a dry brining where they'll just kind of like pre salt it. And I don't think that works quite as well. But basically they say that the salt helps to like move the fluids into the turkey. But I just don't even get what, how a dry brine would actually work without the turkey being submerged. So I've always just gone full on brine. And so that's what the turkey's up to on the front porch right now. The dogs aren't eating it.

Do I completely lose my man? Or maybe we'll say even human Card in letting you and all of our listeners know that I've never cooked a turkey. I've always been afraid of doing it, so I've never done it. Look at me. Little coward.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's manly to admit that it's still pretty unmanly to never have done it, but it is manly to admit it. So you've taken the first step towards a more courageous Thanksgiving in the future. Just do it, dude. I mean, you can always have a backup you can always have some cans of sardines as a backup. Honestly, I think carving the turkey is a more high pressure scenario than cooking the turkey. Because when you're carving it, you're always standing there, they're hungry, your knife goes in, you're about to find out if it's overcooked, if it's undercooked, and then you basically, the first few times you do it, if you haven't carved up a nice bird like that, have to kind of sort of pretend like you know what you're doing. And so it's, it's one of those deals where the. What is it called it, like these electric knives, the electric saw blades, Those things come in pretty handy for carving up a turkey fast.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My grandfather used to have one of those things.

That is the way to go.

Yeah, yeah. So, okay, the, the next three years, I have my goals. Next year I'll buy the turkey and then the following year I'll cook the turkey and then on the third year, I'll give up. I'll get up the courage to actually carve the turkey. So it'll be a three year process, Ben. But that's faster than the process. What the process has been lately, which has been I just don't do any of it.

That's reasonable.

Everybody else do.

That's reasonable. They say slow food is good for you.

That's right.

All right, well, folks, we've got a whole bunch of news flashes that we want to dive into today. And then we'll jump into live questions and answers from. Well, actually, you know what? You guys will ask questions. We'll provide the answers here on the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast. Everything that we talk about, you can find it for Today's Q&A451@BenGreenfieldLife.com451 so let's jump right in. All right, so let's talk body recomposition. This is actually a paper that is not super new. This is actually about 2020 that this came out in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research. But it's this idea of body recomposition, particularly in trained people, which is important, right? Like if you just started exercising, you're going to be able to put on muscle and lose fat at a pretty rapid pace that often kind of, you know, depresses you a little bit later on when that pace slows significantly and you got to start pulling out all these other stops to either build muscle or lose fat or do both at the same time. But the adaptive phenomenon of Muscle mass being gained and fat mass being lost. There's actually a term for that in exercise science. You know what it is, Jay, by any chance?

It's not coming to me. I mean, I just always call it a recomp.

Yeah, you nailed it. It's a body recomp. Right? That's the same. Same, same term. It's just bro say recomp, and scientists say body recomposition, but it' sit's the same thing. So the thing is that there are certain things that come up in this paper that I thought were some pretty good takeaways for folks who want towho already trained. And maybe they've plateaued a little bit, but they still want to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. And they were actually surprising. Probably the two biggest things that leapt out in this study for accelerating body recomposition in trained individuals. They were two things. Maybe I'll just keep quizzing you, Jay. You wanna. You wanna take a stab at what the two items were?

Okay, so I would. I would say that if we're thinking about it from maybe more of an energetics perspective, it's like maybe, maybe including cardiovascular exercise with resistance exercise, and then maybe something nutritionally would be like upping protein intake or reducing, you know, depending on the convince. If it's conventional wisdom, maybe reducing fat, something like that.

Yeah. Well, first of all, you nailed it on the protein intake. But what's interesting was the amount of protein intake that you need to eat to actually build muscle and lose fat at the same time if you're a trained individual. And the classification of a trained individual varies. This was actually a meta analysis looking at a whole bunch of different studies, but generally folks who are working out just about every day, let's say, and lifting weights multiple days of the week. Well, in the past, I've recommended that your minimum protein intake on any given day for just general longevity and maintenance of muscle mass is about. I'm gonna go with American terms here. Screw all the kilogram numbers. We're Americans. Obviously, we've already established that with our Thanksgiving chat. So 0.5, 0.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight would be the minimum per day. Okay, 0.55 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Now, in the past, and this is why I wanted to bring this up, because it kind of flies in the face of stuff that I've said in the past. But yet the data doesn't lie. Right. 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight would be the top end. Right. So let's round that up just a little bit. Just for simplicity's sake, say 0.6 to 0.8 grams per pound of body weight for protein, and you're probably going to do all right. Now what this study actually found was that the folks who are most successful in gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time were eating closer to 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight, 1.2 to 1.6. So we're talking about a somewhat significantly higher amount of protein than I've even recommended in the past. And this is not something where you just eat it and you build muscle like that, like you're eating this protein, you're training multiple days per week. But 1.2 to 1.6 is actually a decent amount of protein. You know, if you let, let's say it was like one and a half, right, and somebody weighs, let's say 200 pounds, right? We're looking at what, like 350. I'm sorry, 250 grams of protein, which is a, you know, pretty significant amount of protein. So, so yeah, so that's. The first one is a crapola of protein intake, or at least more than I previously recommended. Now the second one is more of like a lifestyle thing, okay? Because remember there, there are two things now. There is a certain, a certain lifestyle practice that if neglected, is associated with a whole bunch of negative hormonal adaptations, primarily through what's called your HPA axis, your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Now these negative hormonal adaptations that occur as a result of this lifestyle practice lead to an increase in cortisol, an increase in blood glucose, decrease in insulin sensitivity, decrease in testosterone, which is obviously going to affect muscle mass, decrease in adiponectin, which is a hormone related to fat burning that is going to deleteriously impact your rate of fat loss and a decrease in growth hormone, which is going to affect your recovery and then also theoretically your ability to be able to gain muscle. That whole dysregulation from an endocrine standpoint would truly be like an anti body recomposition environment. Now the other thing that this lifestyle scenario can cause if neglected is massive rises in the hormone ghrelin, the so called hunger hormone, and significant decreases in the hormone leptin, which is a hormone responsible for, amongst other things, appetite satiety. So I've given you a few clues here, Jay. What do you, what do you think this lifestyle practice is that when tended to and achieved, allowed folks to, especially when Combined with adequate protein intake. Build muscle and lose fat at the same time.

Yeah, well, there's two. I think there's two sides of this coin would be my guess. One would just be general stress management. I think that that's kind of the larger umbrella. But I would say if it was an. An actual behavior, if that's not the specific behavior you're looking for, I would contend that someone who's getting really poor sleep would have a dysregulation of everything you just mentioned.

You nailed it. You nailed it. So basically, long story short is if you want to build muscle and lose fat and you're already trained, you need to be lifting, eating more protein than you probably are right now and prioritizing sleep. And I think that that's simple to say. Right. But a lot of people don't think about that. And they burn the candle on both ends and they maybe restrict calories and do a whole bunch of, I don't know, like cold thermogenesis and electrical muscle stimulation and all the biohack. But it basically is like, eat protein, lift heavy shit, and sleep.

So, yeah, I mean, solid, solid, solid advice. I mean, but to your point, I think a lot of people do neglect that, because if you're a hard charger and let's say you do a couple things, you forget to eat. So therefore, you know, you'reyou're not getting in enough protein, you forget, forget. And I put that in huge quotes both at both times. Forget to sleep. Well, then, yeah, there you go. You're gonna miss out on both of those things. And therefore you're leaving a lot of on the table in regards to muscle gain.

Yup. Yeah. Well, it's kind of related, you know, when it comes to sleep, to another one that I thought was really interesting. This is a more recent paper called the impact of Dietary Factors on the Sleep of Athletically Trained Populations. So again, we're talking not necessarily to the sedentary or the morbidly obese. I absolutely hate that term. It just sounds so dark and dreary. Morbidly obese.

It's a very dark term.

Yeah, we're talking about training people. Probably the type of people, honestly, that listen to the show. People who already kind of like. Like to work out. They're interested in health. They've taken that first step and probably a lot of steps beyond that. And so they don't necessarily need to hear that they need to get off their butt and not go to McDonald's, but they're. They're looking for that extra edge. So what this looked at was the impact of dietary factors on sleep. And it found a few interesting things. We've established the importance of sleep, especially for something like body recomp and bro. But eating at night, how do you eat at night? What type of things would help with sleep? And this was pretty straightforward. They looked at 35 different studies on sleep and dietary intake in primarily athletic populations. And what they showed was first, no surprises here. Late in the day, caffeine ruined sleep and a lot of people don't realize how much is still circulating in your bloodstream. Interestingly, I've gotten onto this new thing I've talked about a few times on previous shows called paraxanthine, which is a metabolite that's broken down from say like coffee. When you have coffee, it gets broken down to theobrominephilline, I think is another one, caffeine, and then paraxanthine. Paraxanthine is like the euphoric inducing, focus enhancing kind of like even like confidence inducing type of molecule that is almost like the anti narcoleptic drug Modafinil, more commonly known as Provigil, that folks would usually stay for like 24 hours in a really good hyperproductive state. But this not only has a shorter half life, it seems to last about four to six hours max. But people will report, and there's been no huge studies on this, but I've talked to a lot of people who will use this as a caffeine substitute when they normally be having their caffeine later in the day. Let's say like, I don't know, 4pm slump, something like that. No issues with sleep and in fact better sleep architecture when using it, which is interesting. So that's just something to know. If you're already on caffeine, you're looking. There's obviously a lot of things you could use to wean yourself off of. Caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, heroin.

Or paraxanthine. Like I mentioned. I'm joking. Really? Crickets. All right, okay.

So I was thinking so. But you know, I, I was like, you never know. Some people, that's what they go to, the cocaine.

I heard it on the show. So anyways, so in addition to caffeine though, what they showed was, and I've said this for a while, so it was good to see this backed up evening consumption of high glycemic index carbohydrates. Right. So all in that spirit of not eating a lot of carbohydrates throughout the day, staying in Fat burning mode. Doing what's called cyclic ketosis and then getting out of that towards the end of the day and doing your big carbohydrate feeding at night, of course, allows for the carbohydrates that amplify serotonin release, which then gets producing melatonin. And you've got a nice little scenario for having your cake and eating it too. And that's what I do is I have evening carbohydrates now. I still am doing some type of movement protocol later in the day, or taking blood glucose disposal agents like bitter melon or berberine or something like that to enhance the glucose disposal, or even doing something like a walk outside in the cold or quick cold soak just to make sure I stay pretty insulin sensitive in the evening because you are less insulin sensitive in the evening than in the morning. But I eat most of my carbs at dinner. When I don't do that, or if I find myself frequently having like midnight to two Amish awakenings, it's usually a sign I didn't have enough carbohydrates with dinner. So that's the first is saving a lot of your carbs till dinner. Now I say saving a lot of your carbs. I should note these studies weren't necessarily looking at people who were saving a lot of their carbs for dinner. They were just looking at how many carbs they had for dinner, regardless of what they had earlier in the day. Day. I am a fan, however, saving your carbs for dinner for the reasons I mentioned earlier, like staying in fat burning mode all day long. But I should note that if you are a true athlete, like a two a day athlete, three a day athlete, maybe a couple of workouts, scrimmage, et cetera, data actually shows that you should replenish carbohydrates post workout if you have another workout coming up in the next eight hours or so. So understand that when I say save all your carbohydrates for the evening, that would be with the caveat that if you're somebody who's training multiple times per day, having carbohydrates post workout earlier in the day is something that I would not avoid if you want to really be in it for the long game, from an endocrine system and a thyroid standpoint and just an overall performance standpoint. That being said, though, more of the carbs in the evening and then the other one was proteins that are high in the amino acid that is so commonly talked about this time of year. And that would be drumroll please.

There's a drum roll. And I can answer you too.

Oh, yeah, go ahead.

Tryptophan. Tryptophan, definitely tryptophan.

Tryptophan, such as you would find in milk in fish, particularly tuna. Tuna is a really good source of tryptophan. Oats have it. Cheese, nuts, seeds, your classic charcuterie board with dinner, folks. It's got a lot of tryptophan in it. And then of course, poultry, turkey and chicken have a crapola of tryptophan and in my opinion, are much more satiating than doubting a giant glass of milk before bed. Unless you're a football player trying to put on 20 pounds of muscle, in which case, please proceed as much of that milk as you can. That's right. Or Santa Claus. So Santa Claus must sleep really well because he's getting both milk and cookies. So.

And he's putting in a lot of hours.

Man, I would love to see his aura ring sleep scores. So anyways, both of those. Now those don't necessarily improve sleep architecture. What they do is they reduce sleep latency. Okay? So high glycemic index carbs and proteins high in tryptophan are going to reduce sleep latency, the amount of time that it takes for you to fall asleep. Now, they also found promising results from, although somewhat inconclusive, on three other items that could be used to assist with athletes who are experiencing sleep difficulty. That would be probiotics. And that's interesting because we know, especially based on the fact that when you look at like jet legged rodent models, their microbiome, their gut biome more specifically, is just totally ruined. So probiotics can assist with sleep. And if you're interested in the type of probiotic that I think is best, go listen to my podcast with Dr. William Davis or Google Dr. William Davis yogurt recipe, because that has largely for me, replaced ice cream or anything like that. At night I have a giant batch of it in the fridge.

Every week I get a new fresh batch made. I add gelatin to it to thicken it up. And then what I do is right before we have our family dinner, I take that jar that's in the fridge and I toss it in the freezer so it's kind of like cold and creamy. And then I'll just sprinkle some gluten free granola or some cacao nibs or something kind of crunchy on there, Spiral Lena tablets, you name it, and just have kind of like this little superfood yogurt bowl for Dessert, but the oxytocin that that causes you to release. And also the unique strain of probiotic called L. Rooteri seems to really help with sleep. So probiotics would be one. Cherry juice is another. And that's interesting because tart cherry juice has also been shown to have some implications for assisting with recovery. So that's a good one to know. And then you'll love this J because it goes along with the oranges and the wine that you're bringing to your vegan Thanksgiving dinner. And that would be beet beetroot juice. Yeah.

A lot of people forget about that one. But it's, of course, amazing for performance at altitude. When I used to race Spartan, and not that I was watching the other athletes pee, this was anecdotal and reported, but almost all the top athletes were basically, like, pissing red after the race, not because they had rhabdomyolysis, but because almost all of them knew, like, the secret to performance in the mountains was crap, tons of beet juice or beet juice powder before you'd compete. And it's literally just like liquid Viagra for the whole body. Yeah, same thing for, like, bodybuilders. They know that the vascularity that you get from that with that little surge of carbohydrates, it's pretty impressive. So, you know what I need to do is I need to figure out a recipe to make my yogurt beet and cherry flavored and kind of like kill three birds with one stone. Because I got the probiotics, the cherry juice, and the beetroot juice.

Just add a little bit of the cherry juice and beetroot juice, right? I mean, just mix it in, maybe add a little bit more gelatin to thicken it up after you liquidize it.

And I was thinking maybe something more like, what if you get, like. So you make the yogurt, right? You get some, you know, have like, those bags, like, organic frozen cherries you can grab from the grocery store. You know, keep some of those in the freezer. And then maybe a lot of these companies make like, a beetroot juice powder, right? Like a powdered beet juice. I think. I think organifi has one, actually. You'd want to check to make sure there's not other ingredients in there that are more stimulating. But basically, what I'm thinking is you make the yogurt, right, and you take that out for dessert, and you stir some beet powder into it, right? So you got this nice red, rich, creamy yogurt, and then you top it with frozen cherries. I think that should be in the next Boundless Cookbook. Yeah, you guys just heard it come to life on the show. Yep. Yep. Okay, so that. That'll be in the Boundless Cookbook. I'm taking a note to myself right now. Of course. I'll try the heck out of it first and see if it actually works. But, yeah, maybe that'll be the new nighttime ice cream substitute. Hey, anybody using the ice cream business out there? That's an idea for you. Beet cherry flavored ice cream with added probiotics. And market it as something like sleep cream. There we go.

The next unicorn company about to happen.

There we go. I want a royalty check. All right, so that's an interesting one now. Now we're going to talk about something that is not quite as fun when it comes to nutrition, but something folks should know about because it was an article that hit the Internets recently and was written by a gal named Dr. Kate. Dr. Kate. She has a website where she kind of goes nuts on a bunch of different nutrition principles. And you might actually be familiar with Dr. Kate because her last name is Shanahan. She's been been a guest on my show before. And a lot of times when I see articles come out that seem like they're vilifying certain nutritional ingredients or being orthorexic or myopic, I'm like, oh, this is another kind of, like, food babe type of thing where maybe we're concerned about the. Would she have the article about how Subway sandwiches contain the same ingredient that's found in yoga mats? And it turns out that it's just basically metabolized to water in your body and isn't an issue. However, Dr. Kate's super smart and she's well researched, and her books are fantastic and chock full of really good science. And so when I saw her writing about natural flavors, I thought, okay, well, I should go read what she has to say. So what she had reported was. And I'll link to this one@bengreenfieldlife.com 451 for people who want to take a deep dive into the actual article. But she was getting headaches after drinking.

Can of the Lacroix. Right? The Lacroix soda water. Sparkling water with the natural flavors on the back of it. And so she decided she'd investigate what these natural flavors in La Croix actually were. I'm probably about to lose any potential of this podcast ever being sponsored by La Croix, but I'm gonna proceed nonetheless.

And they've got some Money to do it, man.

Yeah. Apparently in 2018, La Croix was sued because they had a substance called linalool, N I n a L O O l in their water. So this is a class action lawsuit against their parent company called National Beverage Corporation for including non natural flavorings and synthetic compounds in their quote, natural unquote soda. They found ethyl butanoate, limonene, linalool and linalool propionate. And apparently linalool is problematic because it's a cockroach incestic ingredient. A cockroach incest. And so I'm not saying that just because something has a cockroach incest decide ingredient, it's bad for you. But at the same time, it does make at least one of my eyebrows go up, that if something is used to kill insects, that it might be something I should at least consider when it comes to something I'm drinking on a regular basis. And so Kate dug in and she did the research and it turns out that linalool is an ingredient that's added to some pesticides. But yet the food industry basically said what was kind of going through my head was that just because linalool is an incesticide ingredient, it's like saying orange juice is just as dangerous as drinking paint remover. Because both orange juice and paint remover have citric acid in them. Them. Right. Like, it doesn't necessarily mean because it's in roach killer that it's bad for you. It just means that happens to be an ingredient. Roach killer might not even be the active ingredient that's killing the roaches. But then she did a little bit more digging because it turns out that she wanted to know whether all these chemicals were added purely for flavor. Now, what she then found was an industry website that advertised flavorings and related products. And the term natural flavors also includes another category a lot of people aren't aware of called flavors with modifying properties. Okay. FMPs and those compounds have sensory enhancing effects. Okay. FMPs that are added to an ingredient would be the type of things that would make the sensory enhancing properties or that are added to a compound would be the things that would make the sensory enhancing properties the ingredients ingredient add to that compound, potentially make that compound something people would want to drink more of. Right, so make it more addictive. Exactly. So it modifies the properties. Basically, if you add linalool to something, it's almost like you're doing a little bit of mind altering and sensory enhancement to the extent to where people want to come back and eat more of it. So these ingredients could go beyond just flavoring agents because they have what's called partial NMDA antagonist activity. That's the same thing that things like marijuana and caffeine have. I can't say I know of anybody who's addicted to cannabis or coffee, but I'm just saying they seem to have this effect on people that make them keep wanting to come back for more. Linalool seems to have that as well. And that's actually one of the ways that it works in the incesticide is it inhibits the effects of a neurotransmitter called. Called acetylcholine, and it acts on their nervous system. And it turns out that it affects our neurotransmitters as well. So when you're reaching for that can of Lacroix, it might not just be the fact that you're thirsty or the can is shiny or it's cold, or there's some other association that you have with it. It might be that there are actual alterations occurring in sensory input and mood and thinking processes that could also be responsible for the headaches that Kate was experiencing when she was drinking Lacroix. These drugs like linalool work very similar to Ritalin or Ketamine or phenylcyclidine. Right. And so it's something to think about when you see natural flavors. I know it can be super intimidating to know what those natural flavors are. A little bit of digging on a food manufacturer's website will usually reveal that. And again, not all natural flavors are bad. But in this case, linalool added to soda water is something that, especially if you're getting headaches or you feel some kind of an addiction or attachment to the soda water that you're drinking may make you want to reconsider that soda. And as Dr. Kate reports at the end of the article, just stick with something like, you know, Pellegrino or Gerald Steiner or something like that. So. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, good thing I don't like La Croix Confession time. Actually, it's like, my least favorite of the flavored mineral. It's not a mineral water. I'm more of a Topo Chico San Pellegrino guy. But why? What I will say, and I was looking this up while we were chatting here, is that my favorite flavor of Topo Chico is the grapefruit flavor.

Like, I love it.

I typically don't drink it as much. I just get the regular, you know, unflavored one. But I do love it, and it is natural grapefruit flavor. So I tried to see if Lena Lul was anywhere on their website or if anybody's written about it. I can't find, find anything. So I don't know if that is a part of their natural flavor composite, but interesting nonetheless because I could see how addicting that stuff is, man.

Yeah, I mean you could always get a built in home mass spectrometer in your basement, just start to test it all out. But you know, it's difficult to know. It's. It's difficult to know. But yeah, National Beverage Corp. Was sued over this stuff. And I wouldn't be surprised, surprise if other beverage manufacturers were using some of these things like linalool oxide and piperonal acetate and other oils and things like that. So interesting. That's the story behind the recall of La Croix and possibly some other issues with the water that you're drinking. So just know just because it's sold at your local health food store and is in a shiny can does not mean it's good for you. So there you have it. I gotta talk a little bit about antioxidants too, Jay, because this is kind of like the protein thing, something I should come back to because I'm constantly reading and I'm as ready as I can be to admit when I've been wrong about something. And one of the things that I've said a lot before is to be careful with.

Antioxidant consumption after you work out. Right. The same reason you should be careful with extreme low temperature, long exposure to cold thermogenesis after you work out. It's such a powerful anti inflammatory that it may blunt the body's own natural inflammatory response to a workout session. Which theoretically is what would cause you to make new mitochondria or target satellite cells for muscle cell hypertrophy or anything else that would be related to the effects that you want to get out of the exercise session. Right. It's kind of like you're blunting the hormetic stress that you were going after in the first place. You're going to burn calories and get stronger or whatever, but you might not build muscle or build mitochondria or have the same beneficial effects of the exercise if you do high dose antioxidant supplementation post workout. Well, there's a couple of guys who run a website called Stronger by Science, which I really like. They come out with some really good articles every now and again and they decided to dig into this idea that antioxidant supplementation would blunt muscle hypertrophy. In this case, the ability to be able to to build muscle. And when they dug into the data, first of all, they did find what didn't surprise me, and that is the initial studies that got this whole discussion going in the first place were done on high doses of vitamin C and vitamin E, particularly post workout. It appears that even though the results aren't super consistent, there's at least enough evidence pointing towards a modest impairment of training adaptations that anything that has a high amount of vitamin C or vitamin E in it is something to be careful with. However, when you look at some of the other polyphenols and phytonutrients with antioxidant properties, not only does it appear that those really don't have much of a body of literature around them for decreasing the effectiveness of a workout session, but they actually appear to potentially enhance the effects of a workout session in people who are training with a great deal of volume and intensity. Which comes as no surprises, right? The harder you train, the more likely it is that you could use a little bit of a nudge of antioxidants. And because you've got so much oxidation going on, those antioxidants may actually be something that quell excessive inflammation, but don't quell the inflammation so much that you don't get a response to the workout session. So what I mean by that is like a high dose antioxidant beverage consumed by someone who's riding a bicycle for 20 minutes three times a week at the gym is probably something that's going to affect the body a lot differently than say like a crossfitter doing a two a day or an ironman triathlete with a sick amount of volume. Right? And so you need to understand that if you're a trained or athletic population, while staying away from synthetic vitamin C and vitamin E still seems to be a good idea, all these other natural polyphenol antioxidant plant based blends for quelling inflammation or having an antioxidant effect may actually be beneficial for you. And furthermore, there is a pathway via which they can cause the nitric oxide to hang around in your bloodstream much longer. Okay, so when you look at like let's say like black currant powder or cocoa powder, or there's another one called pycnogenol which is found in a lot of antioxidant blends. Well, it turns out that this improves capillary density and red blood cell velocity and also enhances the effects of nitric oxide, namely by inhibiting some of the enzymes that will cause nitric oxide to be broken down to the extent to where like your pump and your blood flow and the oxygenation of the muscle could actually be improved with the acute use of antioxidants after workout. And so, you know, whereas in the past, you know, because a lot of times I'll work out in the morning, you know, around like 8:30 or so and by 9:30, 9:45, I'm usually having some kind of a smoothie and I've kind of at the back of my mind been careful not to put too many antioxidants in the smoothie or you know, like swing by a, you know, cold pressed juicery and grab a big, you know, polyphenol flavanol packed juice. Now I'm like, yeah, I think I was.

Probably taking all that data on vitamin C and vitamin E and some of the weak data about other antioxidants and also combining that with the fact that a lot of these studies weren't done in people who were training too hard. And I think that especially after reading this article which I'll link to in the show notes, which goes into all the different studies that have been done to date, I think I'm pretty okay with taking an antioxidant supplement after workout as long as it doesn't have a lot of vitamin C, C and vitamin E in it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, it makes sense. I would, I would, I was curious about this though. So for you, does that mean you don't change your routine or maybe you're just less strict and harsh on not intaking any, you know, additional antioxidants? Or maybe the better question of this is that are you going to now raise the amount of antioxidants that you intake after workout?

Yeah, I, I haven't crossed that bridge yet. But at this point my philosophy is, yeah, I'm going to worry a lot less about how many antioxidants I'm consuming after a workout and just leave it at that for now. I don't know if I'm going to, I don't know, develop some antioxidant rich smoothie powder to add to my smoothie in the morning or whatever. But yeah, I think it's probably something that people are worrying about too much that they don't really need to worry about that much.

Yeah, it makes sense.

Yeah. Yep. And so that being said, I should note, and I'll link to this, it's super helpful. I just came across this, it was actually from 2010, but it's one of the most helpful, like, papers. I don't know if it's called a paper. I guess it's a report in the Nutrition Journal on the total antioxidant content of more than 3,100 foods, beverage, spices, herbs, and supplements used worldwide. So they went in and did antioxidant measurements over a period of eight years from 2000 to 2008, and found some really good data on the antioxidant content of a whole host of foods and supplements and herbs, et cetera. And so I thought it'd be fun to highlight some of the foods that actually do contain a pretty potent amount of antioxidants if folks are interested in getting a little bit more into the diet. So with beverages. With beverages, some of the big wins were espresso. Off the charts for antioxidants. I mean, espresso is like seven times more than coffee, which doesn't come as a surprise because it's obviously more concentrated volume wise. But espresso was really, really high amongst the beverages. Red wine was also way up there. No surprises. And then I think third in line was green tea. So if you're doing the morning green tea or coffee, one of the reasons you hear why that's so good for you, it's, it's got a lot of antioxidants now with seeds and nuts. What nut? I'll quiz you again, Jay. I feel like I'm putting you to school in today's show, but what nut? If you had to guess, what nut do you think is the highest antioxidants? And I'll even.

Give you a win if you get any of the top three in your guess of which one's the highest.

Okay. So for me, it's like, I will tell you the one that I want to have the highest content of antioxidants simply because it's the one I like the most. But it might be something obscure. But here, here we go. I am going to guess that the number one is the macadamia nut.

Macadamia nuts were not the highest? No. Oh, they weren't in the top three? No.

Oh, dang.

Matter of fact, I don't think they appear on the chart, which makes me wonder if they were even tested. You could be right. And they weren't tested. Right. So some fringe, like those baruca nuts, which I love, love those things are like freaking crack. I doubt they studied those like, or, or like, maybe like tiger nuts. And, you know, some of these kind of like, are peely nuts. So there's, there's some that they probably didn't test. But of the common nuts, walnuts were the highest.

And then that was going to be my second guess.

Yeah, I'm sure it was. And pecans. Pecans and chestnuts were close second. All right, so walnuts, pecans and chestnuts. Thumbs up on those. Those are also a little bit lower in the Omega 6 profile, too. And you know, if you're getting like the. The raw version, they're not roasted with a bunch of canola oil and stuff. Not bad. Walnuts and. And pecans, chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Now, the. The fruits, that, of course, would come as no surprise that there's a whole bunch of them that are super duper high. But of the fruits, I was. I was pretty happy to see what the highest one was because it's something that I actually include in my diet occasionally. And I will give you a. I'll give you a clue. There's an Indian Ayurvedic herb that is often used for people who have constipation or just who need kind of like a little bit of a cleanse effects.

And it contains three different Ayurvedic compounds, and this is one of them. Oh, geez. And it's named after a bird.

Huh? It's named after a bird. Now I feel even more confused. The parrot. Parrot berry.

The gooseberry. The gooseberry.

Gooseberry.

Gooseberry. So if you look at the. The Indian ayurvedic herb. A triphala. T R A P H A L A. I believe that triphala has a pretty ample amount of omelet. Haritake is another one that's in triphala, which is also an active ingredient in our joint support compound at Kion Kion Flex. But then amla is probably one of the reasons that triphala is so potent in terms of its detoxification and cleansing abilities. And amla just blows away any of the other berries out there. But obviously, a lot of people don't have amla or gooseberry in their pantry. It's not that hard to find. You can buy it. You can have dried alma or fresh omelet. But if we were going to go with something that people might have a little bit more access to, there's one called moringa. I think organifi uses that in their green juice. That's pretty high up there. There's another one, hip, like dried hip. That's one that the folks at four Sigmatic use a lot in their mushroom extracts. That one's really high. And then bilberries. Bilberries are wonderful. I've done some plant foraging in Finland, and these little bilberries that grow all over the ground, dark blueberries. And even though the blueberries are pretty high, bilberries were just off the charts when it came to antioxidants. So if you want a few new antioxidants in your diet that are super high, it would be rosehip and then bilberry and this Indian gooseberry. Honk, honk. So. So those are the berries. There you go.

But the more like common berries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, all still pretty decent.

But nowhere near the these ones I just listed. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then for spices and herbs, highest antioxidants. This is one that will make a lot of people happy because it's being used a lot this time of year. It's not nutmeg, even though nutmeg is pretty high. It was in my turkey brine this morning. Clove. Clove. Clove is off the charts. If you don't cook with clove or have clove. I think clove is a fantastic meat rub too, by the way. A lot of times you like that dried coffee rub and a little bit of clove to it. Clove gives a nice flavor profile to a meat rub. And obviously because of its off the charts antioxidant content is also pretty good for, like, some of the carcinogens that would build up during the meat roasting or grilling or cooking process. So clove is really up there. Mint is also incredibly high. You know, in this case, they just use dried mint leaves. But yeah, if you have access to mint, that's another good one. And then allspice. Allspice is way up there as well. So nice few things to think about as far as. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, I'll say. With the mint. I mean, I can just have my. My excuse to drink my mojitos. Now with the dried mint leaves, I'm gonna get a ton of antioxidants in them. So let's go.

And where my mind goes is, gosh, let's take. Let's take this. This yogurt that we decided we're gonna add a little beet juice powder and. And, you know, frozen tart cherries to. And maybe we sprinkle that with a. With a little bit of allspice or mint, toss in maybe some dried gooseberries and handful of walnuts. We've got like this antioxidant dessert. There we go.

That'll be getting a little extensive Greenfield.

Life dessert of the week. So there you have it.

What do you think? Should we take some questions from listeners? We've been going for a little while here.

All right, so let's hear, let's hear from them.

All right, so this is the time of the show when I will bring you up. You can ask your questions. And so anybody who raises your hand, what I'll do is I'll activate you and you can come on and ask your question live. So I'm looking at the screen here and I'll just bring on the first person who raises their hand or makes a request. Who wants to come on? Looks like once again Elon Musk is not here. Disappointing.

Is he doing his own Twitter feed right now? I don't think so.

Yeah. All right folks, who wants to come on? Who's got a question? I see a lot of folks in here. You just gotta raise your hand or make a request to speak. And if you are on the Twitter spaces right now and you raise your hand or you make a request to speak, we will bring you on and we'll take your question right here live. So who's got one? By the way, while we're waiting, you guys, Jay and I did an Instagram live last night and that's still on my Instagram channel and his anuhealth. So you guys can go watch that. We covered some stress related items. We got Gonzalo. Gonzalo has made a request. I'm going to bring Gonzalo on. And what you got for us, Gonzalo?

Ben, how you doing? Giving you a shout out from New York City. I'm actually heading out to Portland later today with my wife and I'm thinking I'm going to be eating a lot of, you know, possibly some donuts, you know, some other stuff that you know, we might encounter out there. What is your recommendation when somebody goes a little bit off the rails, you know, for like a three or five day trip, especially Thanksgiving, to try to reboot the body and or the brain, you know, starting next week to really get back on track. What's the best way to go about that?

Okay, cool. That's a great question. Especially this time of year. So acutely post cheat meal, massive feeding, etc. You got to sop up some of the vegetable oils and a lot of the rancid fats that a lot of times your cells are getting exposed to. In a scenario like that, donuts, fried chicken, french fries, just kind of, you know, doing the thing and not worrying quite as much and just living a Little when it comes to the nutritional profile of foods you're consuming. Spirulina and glycine, okay, around 5 to 6 grams of spirulina or 5 to 6 grams of glycine, or both help to protect the cells from the damaging effects of high consumption of vegetable oil. Okay, so that's kind of like your first aid pack if you can't access spirulina or glycine. Activated charcoal is also pretty good. And also activated charcoal is pretty good if you're consuming meats of which the source is questionable. Right. Like, you don't know how much metal was in the fish, you don't know what the cattle or the pigs were fed, et cetera. Activated charcoal does a pretty good job sopping up some of that damage. Okay, so acutely you would look at spirulina, at glycine and activated charcoal. One of the best ways for the body to clean itself up via cellular autophagy and the turnover of cells, killing off some cells and restoration with new cells is achieved, of course, via fasting, which I always like. I have Thanksgiving meal tomorrow at 2.30pm, right? So I'll finish my meal depending on how many plates I go back for, you know, 4, 4:30 or whatever. Typically I'll do a 16 to 24 hour fast after the Thanksgiving meal because that's just a really good way to give the gut a break and allow things to turn over. So a fast or a modified fast, you know, such as a bone broth fast or a vegetable juice fast, that's another good idea. And then as far as like a longer term cleanse, let's say we're coming up on January and you want to kick off the year with some kind of a cleanse. I think that Ayurvedic medicine has some of the best cleanses out there. The two that I would point you to for the slightly more faint of heart would be a Kitchari cleanse. Okay, that's kind of like the easier version of a traditional Ayurvedic cleanse. And a kitchari cleanse basically involves eating a certain meal called kitchari, multiple times per day as your main meal of the day, for typically anywhere from three to 10 days in a row. Kitchari is a mix of rice and mung beans. Mung beans being a bean that actually enhances some of the liver detoxification pathways. Sometimes they'll throw in lentils and some other whole grains. Even though I like to keep a kitchari cleanse relatively grain free. And then in many cases you'll eat some easy to digest, well cooked vegetables along with it, like mashed up steamed carrots, et cetera. Again, lentils are sometimes in there as well. Many people will throw in a little bit of olive oil and or a little bit of ghee and also to upregulate the liver detox pathways, a little bit of grapefruit juice. And the reason I like that cleanse is like Kitchari. You can make a giant pot of it and I just like to turn the brain off if I'm doing some kind of a cleanse and just if it's not a full on fast, which is obviously super simple, just don't eat duh. The Kitchari. If you make a giant pot of it and there's a whole bunch of good Kitchari recipes online, you can just have it in the fridge and available as you just do a little bowl of it, same as you would do with oatmeal in the morning. Or if you're going to fast and skip breakfast for lunch and then again for dinner and you just do that for five days in a row. I think one of the better formulated kitchari like cleanses out there is the one formulated by Dr. John Douyard at I think it's this place called Lifespa or something like that in Boulder, Colorado. But he even goes so far as to like package up all the kitchari ingredients and send them to you. Almost kind of like a dried food blend where you can just rehydrate with water. And it's a pretty well formulated cleanse and comes with a little ebook with instructions and stuff like that. So I like John's version. John Douillard D O U I L L A R D His recipe for Kitchari is the one that I've used in the past. I really like it. I haven't ordered his like freeze dried stuff. I don't know if it's freeze dried or whatever, but I haven't ordered the one that he has. But it's like this spice blend that you add to the Kitchari and then the Kitchari ingredients and this pre mixed organic kitchari packet that includes all the things you need plus the spices. So if you wanted just a done for you version that's pretty good if you wanted to go a little bit longer. He actually has a whole 14 day lymph and digestive detox program called the Colorado Cleanse. And I've had a lot of people do that as well who want to kick off their new year with some kind of a cleanse. And that Colorado Cleanse by Dr. John Duyard, if you weren't going to do just like a shorter 3 to 10 day Kitchari cleanse is a good one. Now, I mentioned that that would be for the faint of heart. I'm joking because obviously it takes some fortitude and discipline, possibly almost more than it would take to cook your own turkey. Jay.

To do the Kitchari cleanse. But the next level up would be the Panchakarma. Now, I interviewed a guy named Stephen Cabral on my show a few years ago and he described to me the Panchakarma Cleanse, which is designed again from an Ayurvedic medicine standpoint to purify the entire body. And it is a doozy. Like we went into the details of what a, what a Panchakarma cleanse is on the show with Stephen, but there's basically five different like steps that go into the protocol and they all have these weird Ayurvedic Indian names like purva and pradhan and Pashad and stuff that I can't really pronounce that well. But basically what you're consuming are these different herbs and ghee's that open up the lymph pathways. And then you move on to things that cause amesis, which is literally induction of vomiting and certain oil based enemas that cleanse the colon. So you're basically just like essentially cleansing yourself from both the upper tube and the lower tube. And that part of it is pretty intense. And sometimes you'll want to make sure that you hook up with a lower local Ayurvedic practitioner who could actually walk you through the entire cleanse. And then you're adding some different bitter greens, some different radishes, cloves, cilantro.

It's a pretty intense protocol. I have never done it. I guess I just haven't had the balls to actually do a full on Panchakarma cleanse. I've done a few of the Kitchari cleanses, which are kind of like, I mean, I've probably done like a half Assyrian Panchakarma cleanse, but it is. Yeah, I mean it involves diarrhea and vomiting and so it's a little bit more intense. But the people who do it, and I'll typically do it for anywhere from like, you know, 10 up to 21 days, they swear by it. And I can link to my interview with Stephen Krabal on the Panchakarma Cleanse. But you're going to be drinking a lot of ghee on a regular basis. You're probably going to be using a lot of that triphala powder, that laxative powder that I mentioned earlier. You drink a lot of different teas, but a good Ayurvedic practitioner will actually test your, what's called your dosha, your dominant dosha, and they'll give you teas that are like ginger or cumin or coriander. If you're vada or if you're pitta, there'll be different things in there, like fennel. If you're kapha, they'll be like ginger and cinnamon and clove. And then you're also doing a lot of abdominal massage with oils, like olive oil, for example. And so you're basically having all these herbs, herbs and teas and oils. And then also, like I mentioned, there's some things that make you throw up and some things that make you have some pretty hefty poops, and that is the Panchakarma cleanse. So I would say if you're going to do it, go check out some of the resources that Stephen Cabral has. Again, it's C, A, B, R, A, L, but that would be like the more intense version. So if you're going to choose anything, obviously there's a ton of cleanses and fasts out there. Bone broth and vegetable, vegetable juice and, you know, the fasting mimicking diet and the prolon diet. But I think just a basic kitchery cleanse works for most folks. And if you want to kind of take things to the next level, you could also try a Panchakarma cleanse. What's your favorite way to throw up and have diarrhea? Jay?

Ah, yeah, man, just two fingers down the throat. No, I'm kidding. So I. Yeah. Well, the thing that I would say for Gonzalo and for a lot of people is also just not forgetting those acute things in the moment that we know that can help with aiding in digestion and reducing, you know, glycemic variability. So things like, you know, I mean, I can't believe you didn't mention Ben. Like in the moment, taking some kion lean or some dihydroberberine prior to the meal, you know, getting a walk after your meals done, like step away from the family for 20 minutes or have them go along with you, maybe knowing for six minutes. We've talked about even shorter time frame of walking. I think taking some digestive enzymes can also be helpful. And then, like, for me, I'll Kind of like up my sauna intake after like a really like kind of chaotic meal day, you know. So like the next day I'll just get in like a really nice extra long sauna where I just sweat that out, if you will. Yeah, and I like doing that. The other thing too that I'd mentioned I found I did this last year and I actually did it again this year or I'm going to do it, I'm gonna put it on tonight is I'll actually put a CGM on during kind of like the holiday season because I find that if a contrast continuous.

Glucose monitor for people who don't know what that is.

That's right. That's right, A continuous glucose monitor. So like levels or you know, sickness, nutrients, any of those companies make really good platforms. But I'll put one of those on basically as a level of accountability. So it's like, okay, listen, I want to live it up and have a good time, but I also just like want something there that will remind me like, hey, yeah, this actually does impact you at a certain level. So like don't go too crazy, allow yourself to have fun. You're going to see, you know, some things that maybe you wouldn't like to see in an everyday basis, but it's an exception because it's the weekend. But I just help. I found that the things like, you know, dihydroberarine and kion lean digestive enzymes can really help in helping to stabilize blood sugar during the kind of acute phases of eating. A lot more processed carbs and yeah, a little bit more vegetable oils and stuff. So yeah, those are, those are things that I would just add on there kind of more. The acute strategies.

Yeah, you made me think about a couple of things. First of all, times two on the sauna. Wonderful. Especially the infrared sauna because the light photons, even though it's not as traditional as a dry sauna, and I know all of you Finnish folks out there might consider this to be a bastardization of sauna culture, you do get a little bit of a deeper cleansing sweat with the addition of the infrared. So yes, on the sauna. And then even though you mentioned a lot of other things there, Jay, like taking berberine or bitter melon or, or Kion lean or things like that before the meal to lower your postprandial blood glucose and doing things like post meal walks, things along those lines, I think that there's one other thing that flies under the radar from a liver standpoint that's like the hangover pill. That barely anybody talks about. That works amazingly effectively. It's dihydromyricetine. Dihydromyricetine. You should be able to find it as abbreviated as dhm. That's not like a brand. It's the actual molecule. It's called dihydromyricetine. I mean if you, if you look at the studies on it for anti alcohol intoxication and liver cleansing, like it's crazy. I mean, and, and you can take this stuff and again, it's just like a cheapo looking bottle on Amazon, you know, horrible marketing. Somebody needs to take it. As a matter of fact, I think you know Jordan Peterson. Yeah. I believe I heard his daughter, Michaela Peterson talking about how she's going to start up a supplements brand and start off with a hangover pill. And that's basically what it is. It's dihydromyricetine, dhm. And so you get this stuff. I always have a bottle on hand. Not because I drink heavily, but because occasionally. Well, case in point, I had a stem cell injection several days ago and the knee swelled up and got kind of painful. And so there was one night where I needed to take a little bit of oxycontin and I absolutely, the next day popped a bunch of DHM to cleanse out my liver. Right. So if I have to take a pharmaceutical or if I've got elevated liver enzymes, anything like that, that dihydromyricetine, that's like another one like have in your back pocket, especially over the holidays. I almost forgot about that one. But that's a, that's a good one too. So we'll toss some links and some resources in the shownotes@bengreenfieldlife.com 451 I've got Jim coming on. Go ahead, Jim.

Great show. I two things. One, you were talking about flavoring your.

Yogurt. Have you tried cardio miracle? I've used that a couple of times to flavor my yogurt.

No, but I'll look into it. Cardio miracle. Yeah. Okay, thanks. All right.

Second, you were talking about sleep. I've heard on other podcasts what you're thinking about stress. I've heard more and more that stress levels are through the roof nowadays and that could be causing more health effects than lack of sleep.

Oh, well, we happen to have Dr. J. Wiles on and he's, he just so happens to be an expert in stress and stress management and look like obviously we could make a little bit of an echo chamber here. I don't think it's News flashing. But that stress is bad for you and might even be as bad for you as a lack of sleep. But are you asking, Jim, like, is stress bad for you? What exactly are you asking?

No, I guess, how do you reduce it? I guess one of the podcasts, one of the doctors I was listening to is saying to take like 40, 60 milligrams of melatonin to help you sleep and reduce the stress at night.

Okay, all right, cool. You make this one fun because obviously, Jay, correct me if I'm wrong, we have talked about stress and stress mitigation strategies until we're blue in the face. And so I'm gonna turn this question just a little bit, Just a little bit. And I'm gonna ask you this, Jay, and then you can put me on the spot and ask me the same thing. But when it comes to stress mitigation strategies, meditation and yoga and sleep and HRV tracking and blah, blah, what is one stress mitigation strategy that you think flies under the radar or that you found to be like super duper surprisingly effective for you, that you wish more people knew about or that you wish was being talked about more right now? And I'm, you know, I'm fully aware that you own a company that specializes in devices sold for stress management, et cetera. And I don't want to turn this into like a fox guarding the hen house type of scenario, but pick from anything. Again, like if you were to just say, hey, more people should know about this, period, this is going to super surprise you, what would it be for a little known stress management, but highly potent stress management tactic that you know of or use?

Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay, so that is such a difficult question for me to answer because I have a thousand things. And so, you know, the thing that I would mention here, I don't know if necessarily it's flying underneath the radar. I would say it is absolutely flying underneath the radar with the common individual, kind of like the common day person, not the health optimizer or peak performer. Like, I'm going to mention what I'm about to mention and it's going to be like, yes, we understand, understand this, but I think though, that it bears repeating. And so I'm just going to throw this out there because again, I don't think it's a newsflash to anybody where maybe when people hear me say this, they're gonna be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense that he's gonna say that. But me, it is 100% learning how to self regulate it is Learning how you in the moment without any other type of technology, without any other type of, you know, self quantification or biometric tracking, it's with no type of indication from anything else, just learning how to tune in to what the body is telling you in that moment and then regulate it in the moment so that you can condition a different response than what you might normally condition or might normally engage in when you experience stress. So for me, the single greatest thing that we have access to at any given time is changing the mechanics, it's changing the chemistry, and it's changing the cadence. Intensive breathing. So again, it kind of comes down to breath work, but not necessarily dedicated breath work. I think that is really important to have a dedicated time, but I think that informal practice is just as important. So recognizing when the body is really kind of relieving itself of that break and getting more revved up from a sympathetic nervous system standpoint and just simply telling it to do something different than what you would normally normally do, which is dialing down that stress response with breathing and changing your cadence.

Okay, that's it. Okay. Yeah. So for you, it's like, like awareness and then change of the cadence. That's it. Okay. For me.

I'm going to.

I'm going to list three. I'm going to cheat. I mean, list three.

You only gave me one. The stress expert. You son of a gun.

It's good to be the king. Podcast. Get out. Okay. I make up the rule. It's like Kelvin Ball. Okay, so the first is apnea while working, I think is very common, and it's something that I recognized in myself. Holding my breath a lot while checking emails and doing tasks. And I haven't used your device, Jay, the Honu device worn as a chest monitor to realize, like, how low my HRV could get in situations like that. And so I found this, like, this little, like, timer. It's called a resonance breathing timer that will go off every five and a half seconds because they've found that heart rate variability in almost every human being on the planet goes up and stress goes down at a frequency of about five and a half seconds in and five and a half seconds out. And there's a variety of apps out there. Like, there's one called Resini res o n y. There's a book called Resonance breathing. And that one actually had, like, a downloadable audio in it that I literally just put on my computer as an MP3. And I played it for, like a month every time I was working. And it was literally just like, Every five and a half seconds, ding.

Ding. And so all I knew was, okay, when it goes off I breathe in and when it goes off again, I breathe out, and so on and so forth. And so that's one is work apnea. The second is there's an another app called Othership. It's like a breathwork app. And they have very quick like, they have really long sessions, like 60 minutes or whatever, but they also have really short, like two to five minute sessions that you can just step away, you put the headphones in and two to five minutes doesn't sound like much, but it just frickin works. And I wish more people knew, like, oh, you only need two or five minutes. You don't have to like sit down and get your organic meditation cushion and snort ketamine and you know, and then have your ice bath prepped and do like 45 minutes of breath work. Now it's like two to five minutes, super quick touch in. And then the last is, I wish more people knew how much low level anxiety exists when you are in any type of relationship issue or there's something that is wrong between you and somebody else in your life and it just ticks away at the back of your mind so sometimes without you even realizing it. And I think that for many people that is typically someone you live with, spouse, loved one, a child, a parent, etc.

And I was even thinking about this last night, like my wife and I, since we started doing this, I could probably. And we've been doing this for three years, we've probably only ever had like maybe three disagreements that I would consider to be stressful or mildly anxiety inducing. We just don't fight like at all since we started doing this. We pray every night before we go to bed. We pray every night. It's not, it's not necessarily because like, you know, and yeah, I mean like God helps people and you know, and he helps infuse more love and peace into a scenario when you pray to God, etc. But I think even more than that, when two people come together in a spiritual space, it's very hard for them to do that with a clean conscience when they have issues that exist between them, little lies, little shortcomings, little bickerings that occurred earlier in the day. But like my wife and I, we pray every night. You can all we automatically know if there's anything going on because it's kind of like this resistance to prayer. And then we're just like, oh, hey, do we need to talk about this or do we need to talk about that or hey, what came up early in the day. And it almost gives us this touch point every single day. And obviously if you're working at a business with your coworkers and they're who stresses you out, I don't necessarily expect you to gather on the water cooler and pray, even though that would be amazing, probably.

But identifying relationships where there's an underlying low level of stress and anxiety being produced and then actively and systematically addressing that, I would say that with a loved one, it's definitely prayer. It's just like it's magic. And when I say magic, I actually mean it's like the proper use of the term magic. It's like there's something invisible spiritual going on that just takes away all the relationship stress. And then the other one would be, and this is again, a little bit more of a spiritual approach, this idea. There's a verse in the, in the Bible that says love covers a multitude of sins. And we have this saying in our house in the greenfields that love covers all. You're going to fight, love covers all. You have a disagreement, love covers all. And love means forgiveness. Love means like saying to that person, I love you. Love means, no matter what, doing something nice for that person. Love means stepping back from the scenario and looking at it and asking yourself not how can I be right? What can I do to like fix this right away? What's that person done wrong that I need to gather up and talk to them about and bring them all my griefs against them about, but instead, how can I love this person? Literally? Almost like that same concept of love your enemies. It's the same like love any situation in which stress and anxiety is being produced and just watch what happens. That also can be magical where you're just like, hey, I'm gonna figure out how to pour as much love into this scenario as possible. And so what I mean by that is, you know, if I have, let's say like a, a coworker who I disagree with on, on a certain business aspects, I will often just say, hey, I'm gonna like send this person something super nice and uplifting. I'm going to do something nice for them. I'm going to check in on them and see how their day has been going. I'm going to just basically go out of my way to smother this entire situation with love. And it works. So long response. But that's, that's what I'm gonna say.

No, I like what, I like what you said there that Ben, because I think the core of it comes back to, to who we are inherently, which is relational beings. We're communal beings. We are meant and designed to be within the context of relationships. And I think a lot of times when we're anxious or we're stressed, a lot of people want to isolate because they think that I just don't need to be around anybody. I can kind of carry this and do this on my own. But what we find is that open communication, good quality time spent with individuals, this can significantly, significantly help people in so many ways, both psychologically, relationally, spiritually. And we see this manifest in studies where people who have really good relationships tend to have higher heart rate variability, lower resting heart rates. Obviously subjective quality of life is way higher. So I think that it's, it's an underrated one, that social isolation isn't kind of the best route for people to go. Maybe you need a small period of time, but the incident, you should always re. Seek engagement with your community, whoever that may be. So I really like that one. Oh, and by the way, Ben, not to do a little shameless plug for Hanu, but the resonance breathing stuff, we do have that built into the app so you can engage in resonance breathing even if you don't have your device on. That helps to do biofeedback. But yeah, it's, it's there. And you can take the resonant frequency assessment to find out what is your optimal breathing rate for optimizing heart rate variability. So, yeah, there's my plug. I'll be done with that now. But it was reasonable.

Well, I didn't know that was in there, but that's good to know. Threw you a softball on that one. Okay, so. Oh, and by the way, the 80 year recent Harvard longevity study did show again, relationships trumps everything. Everything including, including gooseberries. So we do like to give things away to people who leave this podcast a nice review or ranking. And this is the time on the show when Jay reads a nice review. And if you hear your review read, you just email me gearngreenfieldlife.com that's gearngreenfieldlife.com with your T shirt size and we will send you a really cool package with a gift box with a T shirt and a cool Ben Greenfield Life water bottle and a beanie and all sorts of fun stuff. So, Jay, you want to take this next review away?

Yeah, we gotta. We have a fresh one today. This one actually was either written or published today or maybe, maybe both. But this one came from Sky S K Y Eemily and they titled this review. You need to Listen to this podcast so Skyemily says. Ben, I have been listening to your podcast for about three years now and I have learned so much about health, fitness and longevity. I love sharing your podcast with my friends and family. Realistic advice that truly works followed by three thumb sign emoticons.

Realistic advice that truly works I like versus realistic advice that that falsely works or unrealistic advice that truly works. Yeah, I like it. Well, go ahead and email what was the name again? Skyemily sky emily email gearngreenfieldlife.com we'll hook you up. For the rest of you, thanks so much for joining us on Twitter Spaces A couple of times on Wednesdays each month we do this, so if you want to know when we go live, just subscribe to the free newsletter@bengreenfieldlife.com to those of you who are listening to this episode, I suppose it would be close to Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. To those who listen after I'm sorry, you probably messed up your turkey brine because you didn't listen to this. But if you're Jay, that doesn't matter because you just eat some oranges, some small oranges and beets and a thimble of wine. Just like the Pilgrims. All right folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. J.T. wiles signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. 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.