Science “Lightning Round” With Ben: Burn More Calories, Sleep Deprivation Hacks & More: Solosode 475

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast, a science lightning round, how to burn more calories, sleep deprivation hacks, crazy water facts, spiritual but not religious, and a whole lot more.

I'm kind of obsessed with digestive enzymes. I've been taking massive handfuls of them with just about every portion of protein that I have. Because I've. I'm over the age of 40. I've seen the evidence that consuming digestive enzymes massively increases the amino acid bioavailability of just about any protein that you eat. Whey protein, plant protein, steak, chicken, your beef jerky bar on the airplane, whatever. I actually have a Ziploc bag in my fanny pack and it's always got enzymes in it. Which enzymes? I've got the bioptimizers ones. They're called mass zymes. They increase your absorption of key amino acids and vitamins. You get better digestion, less gas, less bloating. You recover faster, you build muscle faster. And it's my secret sauce. I mean, anytime you see me reaching my fanny pack at a restaurant, half of that thing in the Ziploc bag is just full of bioptimizers. Mass zymes for breaking down protein. So if you haven't yet tried this stuff and you're eating protein, even if you're younger, it helps out a ton. But especially if you're over 40, highly recommend. BioOptimizers.com Ben use code BEN for 10% off. That's Bio Optimizers. B I Optimizers with a Z.com Ben use code BEN for ten percent off. Howdy. Howdy ho. Welcome to today's show, in which I am. You guys often ask me what I do during podcasts. Well, I'm standing on a grounding mat. I'm wearing an infrared heating back belt. I like to wear some of these things that just kind of soothe my body while I'm podcasting. This one's the. What is it? The Biomatte bio belt. Infrared light, tourmaline crystals and infrared heat. Makes the back feel pretty good, actually. I'm leaning, not sitting, but I'm leaning on my mogo upright stool, which just makes my pelvis feel oh, so gooey. And I'm drinking this thing. An update. Hold it up to the camera here. Updates. Energy drink.

Pretty good. It's got like, paraxanthine, which is kind of like creatine's kissing cousin. That's better than, I'm sorry, Caffeine's kissing cousin, which is upgrade on caffeine, in my opinion. It's got Alpha GPC phosphatidylcholine in there, sweetened with stevia. It's a really great blend. Even some L theanine, some vitamin B12 in there. So anyways, I enjoy these things. I like them because you can drink them late in the day too and they don't disrupt sleep. Update. Hold it up there. Update Energy Drink. Not a sponsor of this podcast, but I guess they are. Now all the shownotes are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com 475 and I am recording this the day before I'm about to head over to London. I would imagine this podcast is probably going to come out after I've already spoken in London. But hello to those of you who I'm going to see over at the Health Optimization Summit in London. All sorts of crazy travel coming up and amazing adventures that I'll be hosting everywhere from Croatia to Costa Rica to Portugal to Ibiza. Ibiza. Ibiza. I don't know how to say it. It's like that. Approximately. Anyways, if you want to participate in any of the events that I host all over the world and you want to join me to party and have a good time and eat good food and work out and do breath work and all those good things, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com I believe it's BenGreenfieldLife.com calendar but it'll also be in the show notes if you just go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 475 and then finally, before we jump into the good stuff here, which is going to be basically like a science news flashes lightning round, if you're interested in having me come out and speak at one of your events, I especially have been doing a lot of these corporate executive events where I come to your corporation and I give a talk about how to unlock better levels of productivity and energy and sleep management and overall health for better wealth, which is a very good corollary for a corporation to look into the idea behind making your employees and yourselves healthier using all the latest, greatest biohacks and tools and tricks and tips and tactics that I have and unlocking more wealth for your company. So anyways, go to BenGreenfieldSpeaking.com booking if you want to book me to come speak at one of your events. BenGreenfieldSpeaking.com booking just check that out again. All the shownotes are@BenGreenfieldLife.com 475 all right, so let's jump right in. I Figure we'll start with the Low Hanging Fruit Low, I suppose being an appropriate title in this case because this recent article slash paper that I read was all about push ups. Now let me say this. I'm a fan of pushups. I do a lot of pushups. I like to keep myself in good enough shape to drop and do 100 unbroken, meaning knees not touching the ground. I do star push ups when I'm out in a walk, meaning a push up and then rotate to one side and push up and rotate to the other side. I do squat push ups, which is basically like a push up with your hands elevated on a bench or a chair or whatever. You push up and then you bring your knees down, you touch your knees to the ground and then you come back up to a push up position and you push up again. That's a great one. Shout out to. I think I learned that one from Elastaboy. A link to Elastiboy's programs. Great follow on Instagram. He's a big mobility, you know, active movement guy. Great follow, Great programs. I've been going through his 30 day mobility course. I think I snagged those from his course. Fist push ups where I'll bring my elbow to my rib. A lot of people ask me if I do a lot of fighting. I don't. I would get beat up in a fight most likely. But I do a lot of fist push ups until I got these big meaty hands and high bone density in my, in my hands from fist push ups. I do hands elevated push ups, foot elevated push ups. I even have this crazy rule, all right, this is embarrassing, but if you ever go to a restaurant with me and I walk out of the bathroom a little bit red faced, it's not because I'm constipated. It's because I've either done my token 20 air squats or yes, I will occasionally drop and do 20 push ups and then wash my hands very, very, very, very, very well afterwards and get on the business. So yeah, I probably get about 100 push ups in every day. A variety of different moves and angles. But the reason I'm highlighting all this to you and giving you a few tips on amping up your own push up game sprinkled throughout the day is because they looked at active middle aged men and the risk of cardiovascular disease. Pretty simple here. But what they found was that active middle aged men, and I think we could probably extrapolate this to women, also ladies who were able to complete more than 40 pushups at a Time had a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular disease outcomes including diagnoses of coronary artery disease and major events like heart failure during 10 years of follow up compared to those who were able to do less than 10 pushups. So if you can do 40 plus pushups, it appears to be a very good way to, to decrease all cause risk of mortality related to cardiovascular disease outcomes. And this was a pretty big study on, on a lot of dudes. 1,104 active male firefighters on which they collected data from the year 2000 to the year 2010. So the takeaway point here is you can do push ups anytime. They're beautiful because they are a pretty functional exercise that don't take a lot of equipment. The side bonus is if you're wearing big rubber built up shoe soles that keep you from being grounded during the day. Well, if you drop and do 20 push ups, you're also getting that grounding and earthing effect from touching the beautiful surface of the planet. So do your push ups and hopefully that helps you out a little bit and also do your squats. So this is interesting. A lot of you are probably familiar with this idea of non exercise activity thermogenesis. Engaging in small movements throughout the day that have been shown to do things like keep blood blood sugar stabilized, keep lymph flow and blood flow circulating, allow you to have a slight bump up in metabolic rate, reduce a lot of the biomechanical issues such as low back pain associated with seated or standing positions for long periods of time. Well, here's it, here's what's interesting. 10 body weight squats every 45 minutes. That's pretty easy. Every 45 minutes you do 10 bodyweight squats that could be on a day of work, on a long airplane flight, you name it. During an 8 and a half hour period of extended sitting times, you gotta sit for eight to nine hours a day at work every 45 minutes. Ten squats improves blood sugar regulation better than a 30 minute walk. It's crazy. So what they actually did was they took a bunch of overweight and obese men in this particular scenario. So you have to admit like because they were overweight or obese, they were squatting a little bit more than the average normal weight person might squat. But I still think we can take something out of this and maybe you could do 20 squats instead of 10. But anyways, they compared the squatting every 45 minutes with 30 minutes of walking. And the 30 minutes of walking was basically in that same day that the other group did the squatting breaks and it turns out that the squat was way more more effective. And I should clarify by the way, the walking was broken into three minute intervals throughout the day. So what's that come out to? Rough math? 153 minute walks throughout the day. Well, that's more time consuming than 10 squats every 45 minutes. Also takes you three minutes to do 10 squats, which I doubt. So anyways, the idea here is that it is a shockingly low amount of physical activity that it takes to actually improve blood sugar regulation throughout a day of relatively sedentary activity. Now, related to this idea of brief spurts, brief bouts of exercise during the day, this has also been looked at when it comes to sleep deprivation. Came across another really interesting study that looked at the effects of sleep loss and they were trying to figure out what kind of exercise could allow for you to stave off the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation. So they looked at everything from like glass glucose management to mitochondrial respiratory function to, to tiredness and cognitive function. And what they found was that brief bouts of high intensity exercise, we're talking like 10 to 32nd all out powerful bouts of exercise throughout the day could mitigate the detrimental physiological effects of sleep loss. And again, this doesn't take much. This can literally be kind of similar to the squat concept. Every hour doing 30 burpees or just like going up a flight of stairs as fast as you can or even though I got a green screen back behind me during this podcast, which hopefully they're using to make me look like I'm next to the Eiffel Tower or underwater with the bubbles, I've got a Carol bike. Also not a sponsor of this podcast, but anyways, the Carol bike is cool because it is basically a quick sweat free workout. I get on it, I can do a quick 10 to 15, 22nd max burst during the day. And it's really cool that if you're sleep deprived, brief bursts of high intensity exercise can stave off the effects of sleep deprivation. Let's face it, it's also good to know because it's kind of hard to want to go to the gym when you're sleep deprived for a long formal 40 to 60 minute workout. But just knowing that if you just tell yourself, okay, I'm going to get through this day of sleep deprivation, I'm going to do whatever, 10 burpees every half hour that can have a really significant impact on glucose tolerance, respiratory function, what's called protein synthesis. Because sleep deprivation lower your ability to be able to build and maintain muscle. So these are all cool little hacks when it comes to sleep deprivation. Now what's interesting is you can stack on top of this the two compounds that I have found to be incredibly effective for allowing you to have good cognitive function in a state of sleep deprivation. So one we've got a clue about from a recent study that came out February 28, 2024. One single dose of creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in what's called cerebral high energy phosphates. Right? These little energetic phosphate groups available to your brain during sleep deprivation. And what they did in this was they gave subjects a high single dose of creatine. I'll give tell you exactly how much in a second. And what it did was it improved cognitive performance and processing speed. And the author said partially reverses metabolic alterations and fatigue related cognitive deterioration in a state of sleep deprivation. That's pretty cool that just creatine can do that. Now here's the only problem. They were using 0.35 grams per kilogram. Well, pound is, or a kilogram is 2.2 pounds. Right. So if you do the math, you know, that means a guy like me has got to be taking north of 25 grams of creatine to stave off the effects of sleep deprivation. And I don't know why they did this in the study, probably because it was just logistically easier. But they gave these people in this sleep deprivation study 21 hours of sleep deprivation. By the way, that whole dose at one time, I don't recommend that. That's a fast track to disaster pants. And for anybody who's used creatine, you know what I'm talking about. So in order to do this effectively, you would have to take your standard 5 gram dose of creatine. And by effectively, I mean not spending the day on the toilet and pulse that throughout the day. Like you, you wake up, you've only had two hours of sleep, you take five grams of creatine. A couple hours later you take five grams of creatine and you keep going until you get up to around rough math. 0.35 grams per kilogram. Don't worry, I'll put that number in the show notes. Just go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 475 and it'll be over there. But anyway, so creatine pairs very, very well with another compound that I think because it sits stimulates the type of DNA repair and cellular repair mechanisms that would normally happen during a night of sleep can be a really, really good thing to stack with creatine, and that is nad. Any day that I'm sleep deprived, I take extra nad and I take extra creatine. Try it the next time that you haven't gotten as many Z's as you want, I guarantee you're gonna. It's a big, big difference. So nad's a pretty easy supplement to find these days. So is creatine you could use. The ones I use are The BioStack labs Nad and I use, of course, because I, I'm affiliated with the company the Kion Creatine. And that's, that's the stack. So 5 grams of creatine. But you got to pulse that throughout the day. Do the rough math. 0.35 grams of creatine per kilogram of body weight. Now, of course, a lot of people in a sleep deprived state are also curious about the effects of napping. And this was another kind of cool paper that came out recently. They looked at the association between daytime napping and the cognitive and physical performance detriments and fatigue that occur after sleep deprivation. Now, the conclusion here was pretty straightforward. After a night of normal sleep or partial sleep deprivation, a daytime nap between 30 and 60 minutes long has a moderate to high effect on the improvement of cognitive performance and physical performance and the reduction of perceived fatigue. Meaning that a nap is a huge weapon in your weapon box, tool in your toolbox for combating the effects of sleep deprivation. Now, I know many of you because I've talked with many people about this. You have trouble taking a nap. It's hard to take your brain off in the middle of the day and it's difficult to just shut down or you're groggy and fatigued when you wake back up from the nap. And it's hard to start the day again. Now, here's the deal. I take a nap almost every day. As a matter of fact, I have instructed my team not to schedule phone calls, consults, work, et cetera. For me between the hours of 2 and 4pm that's not because I'm taking a two hour nap. It's because after lunch I tuck away and by the time I get up from 40 to 60 minutes of napping or some of the alternatives to napping that I'll describe to you in a second. I need some time to jump in a cold bath, do some stretching, get back up, go through some more work before I'm ready to turn on the phone and jump back into a formal scheduled coffee consult or something like that, because I don't like to jump right into a phone call with somebody when I'm still, you know, digging the nap goo out of my eyes. So anyways, what I do is with lunch I will consume an adaptogen. I like adaptogens because unlike, let's say, you know, weed or marijuana or CBD or melatonin or something like that, they allow your body to turn down the dial a little bit without leaving you fatigued afterwards. Some of my favorites are reishi extract. I'll stir a little bit of reishi extract into the cup of bone broth or water that I have with lunch. There are other adaptogenic blends by a company called four Sigmatic Mushrooms. I like some of their stuff. There's adaptogens like Shilajit, which actually a lot of people use for energy. But I like it after lunch. It seems like it helps me tone things down a little bit. Cool thing about adaptogens is they'll kind of turn up the dial if you need the dial turned up. Turn it down if you need the dial turned down. So anyways, Rishi is good. Ashwagandha is another really, really good one. Tulsi Astragalus. Any of these common adaptogenic herbal blends are really good. And I'll put a few of my favorites in the show notes. But basically I have that with lunch and then sometimes I can't sleep because I've got like 800 emails and the four phone calls from that morning and a podcast coming up and I can't turn my brain off. But what I do is I have a few little tools that I have sprinkled around that I use to be able to shut my brain down in the afternoon. One is nucalm. It is a sound app that can stimulate in a short 20 to 30 minutes, almost a full sleep cycle even if you're not sleeping. I didn't really believe it. I interviewed the guy on my podcast. I look at some of their sleep spindle data, some of the research that they presented on the show, and I feel incredibly refreshed, Even with a 20 to 40 minute new calm session, even if I don't fall asleep. Another one would be this gal I follow on YouTube, Ali Boothroyd. She has fantastic yoga Nidra tracks, which I think Dr. Andrew Huberman has made popular by calling them non sleep deep rest protocols. And very similar to something like the nucalm kind of simulates sleep without actually sleeping, even though sometimes I do fall asleep. I've even downloaded Ali's 8 Hour Yoga Nidra track and use that on an airplane for a Long airplane flight. So anyways, Yoga Nidra would be another one that I like. And then the last one that I use quite a bit for my afternoon nap is this device called the Sensate. It's think of this like a vibrating purring cat sitting on your chest. It ties to your app, the Sensei app on your phone. You select an audio track and they're all very soothing. They range anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. And then you put it on and the thing vibrates in conjunction with the audio track. It's incredible. It'll lull you back to sleep. If you wake up at 2am it's great for an afternoon nap. I love to use it on airplanes. It's pretty affordable. And what's cool about it is that about every month they add a couple new tracks to the app. So you can constantly be kind of changing things up so your brain doesn't get used to a certain audio sequence and start to engage in what would be called like anticipation of the actual audio which can keep you awake because you know what's coming up next in the song versus your brain being a little bit of, in a little bit of a confused state about what part of the audio is coming up next. So you relax a little bit more. So those are a few things that I'll use is the nucalm, the Yoga Nidra or the Sensei device. And what I like about any of those tools is they're also free, fully portable for when I'm traveling because I also nap when I travel. So anyways, head nod to napping. And it's a, it's a fantastic way to combat the effects of sleep deprivation. Now if we're going to be talking about sleep, few other interesting things. So eating at night. Eating at night. This was a prospective cohort study that found that eating during the night is associated with an increased risk of all cause mortality, especially among people who eat the majority of their day's calories in the evening. Now this is one of those things where you know, even though this study had 41,744 participants in which they looked at all cause mortality, cancer mortality and diabetes mortality, you always gotta dig into the study just a little bit. And the reason for that is also related to the alcohol study that I'll bring up with you next. The reason being is that if you actually look, look at the study, some people think nighttime eating is having a big dinner. In this case, nighttime eating was defined as eating and often in many cases eating the majority of the day's calories between 10pm and 4am Meaning this is most relevant to those of you who are doing midnight snacking, maybe not intermittent fasting after dinner and waiting until breakfast to eat, having half a pound of ice cream, you know, at 10pm right before you hit the stage sack. That is what is classified as nighttime eating in the literature. Do not use this news flash as a reason to like skip on dinner per se, but instead to question any late night snacking habits that you have. Because a lot of people can handle not eating between 10pm and 4am but it does turn out that if you are eating between 10pm and 4am especially, especially an appreciable amount of calories, there is definitely an increased risk of all cause mortality. So A, it's good to know, but also B it's good to know that if you see this headline saying eating at night is going to kill you, make sure that you understand that it's between the hours of 10pm and 4am that it appears to be the most detrimental related to that. At the same time, another study recently came out showing altered sleep architecture following pre sleep alcohol intake. And again, a few people sent this to me. They're like, bro, you're going to keep having that, you know, organic glass of wine with dinner or you know, a little mezcal tequila with some, you know, citrus salt, electrolytes on some soda water and a squeeze of lime. And after reviewing the study, I think that I am comfortable continuing my habit of a little bit of a hormesis inducing microdose of alcohol with dinner. Not only do I enjoy the taste, the palate cleansing aspects of it, but I think that the endogenous antioxidant protein production of antioxidants like glutathione and superoxide dismutase, along with epidemiological data indicating small amounts of alcohol without binging on a relatively frequent basis is good for you and could decrease risk of all cause mortality. I'm comfortable continuing to do that. But what this study actually did was they gave people the equivalent of three drinks of Everclear, AKA vodka immediately prior to them hitting the sack. So the only real takeaway here for me is don't drink a bunch of pure spirited alcohol right before you go to bed. And possibly a bigger takeaway is if you see a study saying that alcohol will disrupt sleep. Look into the dosing, look into the timing, right? Because we do know alcohol causes big flood of gamma aminobutyric acid inhibitory neurotransmitter that when that flood wears off can cause you to wake up and have poor sleep architecture after about 1 or 2am A glass of wine with dinner at 8pm is highly unlikely to do that unless you're very alcohol sensitive and you rarely drink, right? So my rule is one drink a night. Occasionally if I take my wife out to dinner on a hot date or I'm at a big function, I might have a pre dinner cocktail and a small glass of wine with dinner. Even that's pretty few and far between. And I have to admit even with that I notice an impairment in sleep. One last thing is that I want to give a shout out to my friends at Mind Pump. Not one last thing to this podcast. Don't worry, I got a few more takeaways for the podcast, but my friends at Mind Pump had a fantastic podcast on sleep with another friend of mine, Dr. Kirk Parsley, the sleep doctor. I will link to it in the show notes called How Navy Seals and High Performers Stay on Top of Their Sleep. Early on when I was first learning about sleep, Doc Parsley taught me a ton in podcast interviews with him and side discussions with him and I highly highly recommend It's Mind Pump episode 2245. Mind Pump guys are super cool friends of mine. But yeah, if you want to to top off a little bit of your your understanding of sleep, sleep deprivation and sleep hacks, check out that episode. So moving on from sleep, why don't we dive into the woo woo a little bit. Dive into the woo Woo. How about EMF for your head? I was recently in Austin, Texas. Did the Spartan Decorace down there with my sons. Fantastic, fantastic race. It's inside a conference center or an event center, an arena and you do 10500 meter runs pretty all out with a fitness station between each. Kicked my butt. Ate me up and spit me out super sore afterwards. But man he was a blast. Highly recommend. If you need a goal to get fit, check out the Spartan decafit series. But anyways, afterwards we're walking through Austin. We walked past the sunglasses store and I looked inside and I saw these new Ray Ban stories and I was walking along with my sons. I'm like hey check out these glasses. So we went in and we put them on. We could take a picture with the glasses that then sent the picture to our phone and listen to music and do videos and use Siri. So these new Ray Ban stories are kind of like the old they call the Google glasses that didn't really take off and had the huge fifteen hundred dollar price tag. Well Facebook collaborated with Ray Ban on a similar concept. These so called smart glasses, and they don't actually come with a big price tag on them. These are smart glasses that contain Bluetooth and WI FI functionality. Now, I've expressed in the past my concern about, you know, despite some of the cool socializing and communication aspects of VR and perhaps even some of the skill acquisition or fear defeating ways in which they can be used, they have to emit a pretty large amount of EMF radiation to communicate with the source of the WI fi or the Bluetooth. Now, Bluetooth devices emit the same kind of EMF that your cell phone, your microwave, your smart meter and your WI FI router emit. It's at a little bit lower intensity. But yet wearing glasses like this all day long could potentially be a problem, even if the wifi, which is a significant problem, is turned off. To understand why you may want to avoid some of these VR headsets and smart glasses, you need to understand something called the SR SAR Specific Absorption Rate. The Specific Absorption Rate is a unit of testing that tests how much EMF your body will absorb while using an electronic device. And all the governments worldwide, not all of them. I suppose there's probably some fringe governments that don't really care that much about S guidelines. But governments that regulate sales in their country, including the U.S. have SAR guidelines that electronics manufacturers have to comply with in order to sell their product. So I think that's important. A lot of people would like to know how much EMF they're getting from their gadgets and the health risks of going above, say, the government set limits. But the problem is that the SAR doesn't measure how much EMF you get from your gadget. It takes instead a mannequin and tests how much EMF the mannequin receives from the gadget. This mannequin actually has a name in EMF research. It's called a specific anthropomorphic mannequin. SAM Specific anthropomorphic mannequin Special mannequin. They designed to be the equivalent of a 6 foot 2 inch tall, 220 pound man. That's important to know because that's bigger than about 97% of the population and especially bigger than children who are wearing, say, glasses and VR headsets. Now that means that 97 of the population is going to absorb more EMF than the SAM man. But if you dig into the specific absorption rate that they found when testing the Ray Ban story, you can see that the Ray Ban actually hits a SAR of 1.11. 1.11. Now, the SAR limit set by the FCC in America is 1.6. It's measured in watts per kilogram over a gram of actual tissue. So that means that the SAR limit for the ray bans at 1.1 is below the danger limit set by the government 1.6. But you gotta remember that danger limit is on a 6 foot 2, 220 pound man and not necessarily a little kid or a small woman wearing this EMF headset around their face. So I think that first of all there's a lot of issues with Even just having 1.1 SAR blasting your face all day long. Even though it might be cool to occasionally wear these, I don't know, during a tennis match or something like that. So you could listen to music and take photos of the tennis ball as you're playing. Could get a little distracting, but that's the first use case I think of. But you can also go to a pretty decent website. It's called shieldyourbody.com FX that shield your body.com forward/the letter F the letter X. And it is an app that actually lets you see what you're absorbing in terms of EMF when certain things are being used by your body. And we can see with the ray bans what actually happens when you're connected to 2.4 GHz Wi Fi on the Ray Bans. And again it's 1.11 SAR. What I like about this app, and again I'll link to it in the show notes also is you can look up different devices and see what you're absorbing with both WI fi turned on and Bluetooth turned on. The SAR when the Bluetooth is turned on but the WI fi is off on the ray ban stories is 0.76. The only problem is that the app also pulls up research that shows you what that specific absorption rate correlates to in research. And even with Bluetooth at 0.76 around your face during the day, there's 153 separate studies showing neurological and physiological health problems. So I'd be concerned about that. Now there's hundreds of research studies showing the health effects at or below 1.11, which is what you'd get if you had the WI fi on on your smart glasses. So I would exercise extreme caution with any of these so called smart glasses. And the main reason for that is non ionizing EMF radiation that can cause DNA damage. I use the term DNA damage. I used it earlier and I was talking about sleep deprivation and nad. That's Simply defined as an alteration in DNA structure capable of causing cellular injury and reducing viability or reproductive fitness of an organism. Okay, that's what DNA damage is. Now, experiments have looked into non ionizing EMF radiation and DNA damage and it is an actual issue. So for example, one study by Li and Singh found exposure to a 60 Hz magnetic field can initiate an iron mediated process that increases free radical formation in brain cells, leading to DNA strand breaks and cell death after about two hours of exposure. Okay, so again, you could use glasses like this for short periods of time, just in the same way you can stand by a WI FI router or use your phone for short periods of time. But, but once you get past about two hours, there are some significant health effects. They've also looked at EMF effects on blood brain barrier and found that constant EMF exposure and I talk about this a lot in my book Boundless, especially the updated version coming out in January, we went through a lot more of the EMF and even the 5G research. Cell phones, laptops, tablets, WI FI routers, smart meters, they loosen the blood brain barrier integrity. Now that's a wall that keeps unnecessary fluids away from your brain. So that means fluids, like say albumin protein can easily enter your brain. And that can lead to issues like risk for epilepsy or multiple sclerosis, Ms. So EMF exposure we know, can cause things like headaches, migraines, changes in sleep habits, depressive symptoms, loss of concentration, loss of memory, especially in people who are a little bit more sensitive to it. So ultimately, I'm not comfortable with the EMF levels that you find in some of these smart glasses. And I would be pretty careful with them. And a lot of these headsets, from the Echo frames to the Apple AR headset, to the NREAL AR glasses, to these Facebook Ray Ban stories that we're going to see increasingly rolled out. I am not confident that they're safe. And so if you've been thinking about them for yourself or for your children, I would say if you get them, use them infrequently and definitely don't use them for more than two hours at a time. And I'll put some of this research and even an article that kind of goes into some of these measurements and what they mean a little bit more if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 4:75 all right, well, I told you that we were talking about the woo woo. So I also want to bring up this really great Twitter spaces, not that I listen to a lot of Twitter Spaces. But this is interesting. It was about the mystery of water. Much of my family's in the water business, which is why I find this interesting. My father, may he rest in peace, he passed several months ago, but he was so into water that he went from being a coffee roaster and espresso machine repairman and a coffee shop owner who found that the most valuable aspect of affecting of coffee's flavor besides the bean quality was the water in which the coffee was extracted. Well, he went on to start a water filtration company that still exists that my brother and my sister now run called Greenfield Water. But they do a lot of structured water filtration as a part of their device systems. Whole house pour overs under sinks, you name it. And this Twitter space has got into some really interesting information about water. For example, the structure of the water, how the molecules are organized is much more important than the chemical composition because water molecules can join together in groups called clusters. And, and what scientists now believe is that these clusters can work as a sort of memory cell in which water can record the history of what it's been exposed to. I warned you this is going to be a little bit woo woo. But it is very interesting when you look at how water might respond to say like loud rock music versus classical music or prayers versus negative emotions, or how even in something like homeopathy, very, very, very, very weak dilution of something that is placed into water can actually cause you to have some of the same effects as a stronger treatment of that compound itself. Probably just totally bastardize the entire field of homeopathy, but that's roughly what I'm getting at. I haven't interviewed a guy who has a device called the Infopathy device, which blasts water with the frequencies and lights associated with certain molecules like stem cells or testosterone or bitters and digestive enzymes and passes those along to the water, resulting in the water being a weak dilution of some of those compounds. Based on the memory of water. They even cite in this particular Twitter spaces experiments that have shown DNA transduction is possible, meaning that water can retain and transmit DNA signals. And this could be important, this water memory theory in the detection and treatment of diseases like autism, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, different cancers. So keep your eye on the field of water therapy. We know that using structured water and this has been shown in research. I've seen lots of data just from the farms that my dad and now my brother has worked with. It makes vegetables ripen faster. It increases the amount of useful microelements and vegetable proteins. So animals on farms grow better when they are consuming produce grown in structured water and drinking structured water themselves. The reason I have a whole house structured water filtration system in my home and the whole idea behind water being able to carry information and being able to carry energy is probably one of the reasons that structured water seems so beneficial. And even with irrigation, they found 20% less water is needed when structured water is used versus ordinary water to actually grow a crop. So this is kind of concerning because if you look at nature and river and streams, they flow along a curving course, piling over rocks, etc. And it's very structured. The water is when it's in that environment. But water that's in a closed loop system, such as in many cities, water that flows in a floor panel heating system that basically creates an unstructuring water that's stored in municipal water supplies. This essentially poll pollutes the information of the water. I realize again, this sounds kind of woo, but the idea is that water loses the ability to carry packets of energy and may become less hydrating in those scenarios. The podcast also goes into deuterium, deuterium water and what radioactive radiation does to water. Basically what you see is a destruction of the water and an increase in the deuterium concentration of the water when water is exposed to radiation, herbicides and pesticides. In addition, the deuterium that your own body is able to deplete, that or the, the, the, sorry, the low deuterium water that your body is able to produce when you're not eating a lot of starches and sugars, allows you to battle some of those effects of deuterium coming in in the water. Now, deuterium is a very, very heavy isotope that's similar to hydrogen. So it can kind of in a sense gum up the metabolic machinery, the mitochondrial machinery, if it is deuterium instead of hydrogen. And it turns out that if you're not careful about your water sources or the amount of sugar that you're consuming, your body can become overloaded with deuterium. And I have another podcast I'll link to in the show. Notes all about DDW water, deuterium, depleted water and its health effects. So this particular Twitter spaces even goes into water and prayer, meaning that the frequency of vibration in prayers in any religion, in any language, they claim is about 8 hertz. And that corresponds close to the frequency of the earth's magnetic field, which is around 7.8 hertz. And so this is the reason that they think that praying over food that contains water or praying over water may actually alter the vibrational frequency of the water. And this is why we have the concepts of things like holy water or healing waters. And actually, actually look at some of these waters under a microscope. The crystals look different. The crystals of tap water look kind of chaotic. And the crystals of this so called holy water has a very like symmetrical form, almost like a six pointed star. It's really interesting. There's, there's so many things that I think we have yet to learn about water, but basically I learned a ton from this Twitter spaces. I'll link to it in the show notes. But it's called the Mystery of Water Special. So if you're into water and you want to shock some of your friends at a cocktail party or have them ask you what, where you left your tinfoil hat that you should have been wearing that evening, tell them about this water episode. All right? And then finally, before I fill you in on a recent anecdote from a lipid panel that I recently had done a great article about spirituality and health. Now, I am both spiritual and religious, right? I am, you know, I pray, I meditate, I journal, I sing, I read scriptures. But I also am religious, right? I go to church. I'm technically a reformed Protestant and grew up in a Christian Protestant denomination. And there's a long list of social determinants that we know matter for health outcomes, right? Employment, income, social support, race discrimination, education, the community or neighborhood that you live in but you don't see in the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health. Yes, that's a thing thing, religion and spirituality. However, some people think that's because there's not a lot of research around the impact of spirituality on health. And that's not the case. There was a recent 2022 systematic review in the Journal of the American Medical association that I recently came across. It documented 215 studies, each of those studies with a sample size over a thousand. People use longitudinal data to evaluate the relationship between religion and health. And then there are also meta analyses, large longitudinal studies, including Harvard's Nurses Health Study, and other documentation suggesting that being spiritual and religious may be superior to just being spiritual on your own and walking through the forest and talking to God. As a matter of fact, weekly religious service attendance is longitudinally associated with this means, like going to church every week, lower mortality risk, lower depression, lower less suicide, better cardiovascular disease survival, better health behaviors, greater marital stability, happiness, and even purpose in life. Now, a lot of people question whether religion is A cause or a correlate for these improvements. Right. But if you look at studies which control for baseline health and adjust for a ton of other social and economic and behavioral compounding variables, it provides strong evidence for attendance at a religious service not being correlated with all these things like lower depression, less suicide, and better cardiovascular disease survival. Meaning, like whatever, if you're more rich and more healthy and have greater marital stability, you go to church. Rather, it's a cause. It seems that religion is a social determinant of health that has been fleshed out in multiple large research studies. So I think that failing to consider religious community in thinking about public health can really impede our understanding of the health of populations. Like if you extrapolate the Nurses Health Study data, that suggests about 40% of the increasing suicide rate in the United States from 1999 to 2014 could be attributed to declines in attendance at religious services during that period. There is another study that suggested that declining attendance at Church from 1991 to 2019 accounted for approximately 28% of the increase in depression seen amongst adolescents. And we can't ignore those trends. So there was another recent major review in the Annual Review of Public Health and that looked at suicide and it completely omitted the questions about religion and spirituality. Even though I do think that based on what I've seen, the neglect of religion in public health conversations needs to change. Now I'm going to put a resource for you in the show notes. I printed this off and I spent about a week reading it with my family. It's from a website that I like called the art of manliness and it's titled why you should go to church. Even if you're not sure of your beliefs, why you should go to church, even if you're not sure of your beliefs. And it goes into all these benefits of church attendance, a greater social support, a chance to remember and reorient and reflect. And recenter at the beginning of the week, building of discipline, creating a rhythm of ritual and routine resulting in stronger marriages and man, the studies on that are probably some of the strongest when it comes to church attendance and stronger marriages and stronger relationships. Development of successful and well rounded children, the chance for communal singing that even impacts the vagus nerve. For all you nerds out there, it's fantastic for the nervous system, connects you with people from all different walks of life who you might norm, not normally, otherwise have sung, socialize with, contributes to greater free thinking and diversity of ideas. And that's how you wouldn't think that people who go to church have greater diversity of ideas. But it turns out that because religion is a voice in the marketplace of ideas, and if you're truly dedicated to hearing and understanding all of them, then engaging with religion actually contributes to again, greater free thinking and diversity of ideas. We see a lessening of bitter partisanship in people who have church attendance, ample opportunities for a greater amount of service, and again, these are causation, not correlation based studies when we look at this stuff. So anyways, I will link to the full article. I recommend you print it and read it yourself or read it with your family. Again, it's from the Art of Manliness. Great website and it's called why you should go to church even if you're not sure of your beliefs. So that all being said, I want to finish with this and.

I know I've been doing a lot about heart health and a lot about how even up to a year ago my lipid numbers were lit up like a freaking Christmas tree. My Apple B, my LP elevated plaque high triglycerides low hdl. Just a ton of issues on my lipid panel and I've highlighted on several podcasts what I've done to go about addressing that. Taking niacinamide and nad taking nitric oxide Support for vasodilation using something called arterosil for the support of my endothelial glycocalyx, the lining of my vessels. Taking a couple grams of fish oil each day. Taking Vitamin K Recently I had a fantastic podcast on vitamin K. I didn't realize how important vitamin K is for heart health, but it's way up there. All the more so if you're taking vitamin D. Because excess vitamin D can pull calcium into the arteries, cause arterial calcification vitamin K and secondarily magnesium can help to stave that off from occurring. Taking proteolytic enzymes, very similar to nattokinase, and taking magnesium before I go to bed at night. Speaking of magnesium, these are all part of the heart health stack that I've been using and I'm going to publish in the show notes what my results this would have been about four weeks ago actually look like. My lipid panel is pristine. The only thing that's still slightly elevated are my triglycerides, and that's actually very common in what are called lean mass hyper responders, which I am Because I eat a low carbohydrate diet, my body mobilizes a little bit more triglycerides to use as a fuel, but my HDL is high, my Apple B has dropped my Total LDL has dropped. Well, the HDL has gone up. My lipid panel looks really, really good and I actually think that this stack that I've developed is fantastic for anyone concerned about heart health. Now if you have plaque and significant plaque which you can measure with something called a clearly CT angiography or something that if you don't want the radiation, the hassle of a CT angiography, there's also something called a CIMT Carotid Intima Media Thickness score. It's a non invasive ultrasound scan of the neck which can correlate pretty well to telling if you have plaque accumulation in your heart. Well, if you do test and you have high levels of calcium or plaque, you may still need to either take a lot of statin. If you are a genetic statin responder. I'm a non responder so I'll take a statin. Genetically you can look at your statin status or you can use a twice monthly injection called a PCSK9. So what a PCSK9 does is it causes degradation of some of the LDL receptors so you basically get more, more of the cholesterol rich LDL particles out of the plasma. So basically that can be a really, really good way. And I, I've talked with a few different doctors who use it successfully in their patients to reverse plaque accumulation or slow plaque accumulation. That's the only other thing that I'm doing in addition to the stack I just told you is twice a month I do a quick injection in my thigh of a PCSK9 inhibitor and I'll be going in for a repeat plaque evaluation quite soon. But my last CIMT that I did looks really good. There's a great book by the way. I'll link to it in the show notes. If you want to read about some of these heart tests and how to interpret them. It's called Prevention Myths. Prevention Myths. But anyways, I partnered up with this company called vitaboom. Vitaboom V I T A boom. And what we did was we took all of the different things that I'm using for heart health and put them into one box, one stack that you can just take all at once. So not wanting this to turn into a giant commercial, but I get asked about this so much that I just wanted to put them all into one stack so I can tell you the exact stack content. It is nattokinase antioxidants, something called the NRF2 inducer which is for the endothelial glycocalyx, nitric oxide support, vitamin K2. Vitamin K1 red ginseng root niacin, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 omega 3 krill oil and magnesium glycinate. So basically all of that is in one packet for everything you need for heart health. So if you want that literally just came out, you go to Vitaboom.com Ben vi ta boom.com Ben I bring this up because it's important. I'm often asked about this and got to send people to the four corners of the planet to get what they need for heart health. And this kind of solves that problem. So again, it's Vitaboom.comBen Anyways, check out BenGreenfieldSpeaking.com booking if you want to book me for an event, check out the shownotes for the calendar of everywhere I'll be At the world, in the world, at the world, around the world, on the world. BenGreenfieldLife.com 475 Leave your comments, leave your questions, leave your feedback. Wherever you're listening to this podcast, leave it a rating or review if you enjoyed it, made your life better somehow, if you learned something new. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldLife.com signing out. Have an amazing week. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, My weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more. Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.