Unbeatable Peptide Stacks, Advanced Age Reversal Strategies, How To Banish Anxiety & Panic, Your Brain On THC, Ketones & Ketosis & More: The Most Listened To Episodes Of 2023

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, the reality is, is that you got 85% of the public that will not inject themselves. There's still this level of fear the end user has to overcome, and once they do, I mean, obviously it's simple, right? It's like brushing your teeth.

I don't really do a whole lot. I think what I really win at is every single night is the same, so the routine never deviates.

If you lose mindfulness, your 5 senses, your ability to interact with the world around you, you're inherently going to lose vision, fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

Welcome to the best of the best of the best of the best of 2023. I'm Ben Greenfield, and I have many podcast episodes that I've recorded. As a matter of fact, I've been doing a podcast— I've lost track. I think 17, maybe 18 years, twice a week, and have barely skipped a beat along the way. I've even acquired and attempted to run other podcasts, or podcasts what you might call networks, one the most popular being Endurance Planet, as well as the Rockstar Triathlete Academy and the Obstacle Dominator podcast. But Ben Greenfield Life has really been the flagship podcast from day one, even though it was originally titled Pacific Elite Fitness. That was the name of my personal training company. Later it got rebranded Ben Greenfield Fitness, and now it's Ben Greenfield Life. During 2023, I recorded several podcast episodes that I learned a ton from. I love this. I get to talk to people way smarter than me who would normally never give me the time of day for like 60 to 90 minutes twice a week. It's an amazing way to get educated. Fortunately, you don't have to nail down those people or schedule them in on your Calendly. I do that for you. I have the conversation for you. You get to listen and learn and access the comprehensive show notes that we create for every single show over at BenGreenfieldLife.com.

You can access the show notes for this show at BenGreenfieldLife.com/BestOf2023.

That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/BestOf2023 because indeed, we are going to cover everything from testosterone replacement therapy to Bryan Johnson, the biohacker if you want to call him that, his approach to sleep and his blueprint We're going to talk about vagal nerve stimulation and how to stimulate this nerve in your body that snakes throughout your whole body using some little-known methods with Peter Martone. We're going to talk with Gary Brecka about his Superhuman Protocol and probabilistic mortality modeling as he calls it. We're going to talk about whether weed actually impairs mitochondria and how CBD may or may not help with sleep, ketones and exercise, and new research on these drinkable ketones and much more. Alright, let's do this. In this first snippet from the best of 2023, you may have heard of peptides, you may have heard of things like ipamorelin and tesamorelin. Well, we're going to get into that in this next snip. You're going to learn everything you need to know about so-called fat loss and muscle gain peptides.

My intention for having you on the show today, Jay, was actually to talk about peptides. And we've already taken a deep dive into testosterone and I'm—

But it's good because you have a huge audience. People need to understand this.

I should make sure that I mention again, you guys need to read Jay's book and listen to our previous podcast on testosterone because even though I would love to ask Jay additional questions about estrogens and liver metabolism and some dosing questions, I actually really want to make sure that we talk about peptides today. And, by the way, also read this new book by Darin Olien called Fatal Conveniences. I think it's called Fatal Conveniences or— oh, I got to look at my shelf. It's back there somewhere. Anyways, read it, new book by Darin Olien if you want to wrap your head around some environmental factors that might not be so great from an estrogenic or testosterone standpoint. But, back to peptides, Jay, you sent me this package and I've never really ordered peptides from the internet. Because the general consensus, at least to my understanding, has been issues with purity, issues with some of these pharmacies, and issues with you potentially emptying your pocketbook on what could be very expensive peptides with low efficacy or impurities.

Saline water.

Yeah. You swore to me that what you were about to send me was the equivalent or safe or what I could be getting currently through a physician, which is obviously a little less convenient than just being able to go order your peptides from the internet or from something like this new website. What's it called? Limitless Life website that you've made. So, what is going on exactly with this ability to be able to now order peptides from the internet?

So, first off, I just want to say I agree with you. So, from my personal perspective, As I told you, I've been using peptides since 2004. I always, in the beginning— I mean, first off, in 2004, doctors weren't prescribing peptides anyway. There was no— nobody knew anything about peptides unless you were involved.

Insulin.

Yeah, I mean, exactly. But I mean, from a standpoint of, you know, from a clinical compounding pharmacy prescribing peptides as they have in the, let's say, the last 6 or 7 years, there was nobody that was involved in peptides. Uh, and you got it from like basically being in underground forums bodybuilding, you snack groups and stuff like that. And so, my first foray into peptides was using ipamorelin in 2004. And, it's really funny because I think you know this, I did a podcast in early March on our friends, our mutual friends, Mind Pump, Sal, Adam, Doug, and all those guys. And, we went really, really deep on peptides and it was an amazing podcast for the public and of course, for their audience and for a lot of people.

But, I'll include that in the show notes. They're great, the Mind Pump guys.

They are, dude. And, it was an amazing podcast. Yeah, definitely point to that. It'd be really helpful for a lot of people. But, a lot of people that listen to that, to their audience, heard me talk about Southern Research Company. And, this was the company in Texas that I and everybody else that was using peptides, which there was obviously a very rogue small group of humans back then that were using it, but there were people in that audience that heard that and they were like, "This guy's legit," and they messaged me and they're like, "Whatever happened to them?" And I'm like, "Man, your guess is as good as my guess." But again, 2004 through 2006, I was using ipamorelin through Southern Research Company in Texas, whoever they were. And obviously, again, they were back— I mean, I know who they were without getting anybody in trouble. They were basically the back office operation of a compound pharmacy that was just selling these things on the internet through bodybuilding magazines and underground forums. And dude, ipamorelin was the most profound thing at the time that I had ever used. I mean, next to testosterone. And then, as you know, and we can go deeper on this, and obviously, I write about this in the book with the God Stack and all these other things, testosterone and growth hormone-inducing peptides and of course, human growth hormone itself have a synergistic effect. And so, when you're using a surgically precise dose of testosterone and growth hormone or any peptide-inducing growth hormone like ipamorelin, tesamorelin, and CJC, we'll talk about those. They're just amazing together. So, when I started using ipamorelin, I was like, "Wow, I got leaner. I put on maybe 3 to 5 pounds of muscle. My training was better. My sleep was incredible." But, to originally your question, it's weird because, again, with compounding pharmacies selling peptides through prescriptions with doctors in the last 6 or 7 years and then previous with my experience using research chemical companies, I was reluctant like you to talk about research chemical companies, but Limitless Life Nootropics, the owner who I'm obviously a very close personal friend with, Chris Mercer, he actually does certificates of authenticity on all of his peptides. He also is the only guy I know in the industry. And again, I'll mention names. There's obviously Peptide Sciences is a big and great company. They've been selling peptides for close to, I think, a decade now, somewhere between 8 and 10 years. And they're by far the biggest outfit from a, you know, gross revenue standpoint in the industry for peptides, but they're not testing their peptides. And Chris came to me, you know, 2 years ago and was like, look, man, I follow you, you know, I think you're awesome, blah, blah, blah. Would you be interested in promoting my peptides? Uh, there's a reason I want you to, and here's the reason. And then him and I obviously became really good friends. So fast forward to now, you know, obviously Since the book launched, I have affiliate links in the book, of course, to Limitless. And Limitless has exploded. I mean, they went from doing— I mean, they're basically doing 7 to 8 times revenue a month than they were doing before the book launched. And obviously, the Mind Pump podcast helped. The book is selling like crazy on Amazon, of course. A lot of people, Ben, are looking at peptides.

What's the name of the book?

It's called "Optimize Your Health with Therapeutic Peptides." Okay. Yeah. And then, there's a subtitle.

And so, these Limitless Life Peptides, they have a certificate of authenticity. Are they doing something different that other compounding pharmacists aren't that allow them to maintain that purity?

It's hard for me to answer that because I don't know. This is what I'll say. I don't know of any compounder or research chemical company. We can talk about the difference between research chemical companies and compound pharmacies if you want. I'm happy to. But I don't know anybody that's actually going out on the line and paying an independent third-party company to test their peptides because it costs money, one. And number two, they're using an FDA-registered, DEA-certified lab to do it, right? So whether they're a compounder or a research chemical company, who's actually doing that? Now, again, the compound people will hear this podcast and they'll say, Ben, that's just part of the deal if you're a compounder. Well, is it? I mean, again, who's testing the compounders?

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I can tell you that I began to use what you sent last week and I had forgotten. You brought up ipamorelin, you sent me ipamorelin and tesamorelin. You actually asked me about a few of the things that I'd want to try and I named those two because I did a stint of them a couple of years ago. I think I did two different 8 to 12-week stints of them during the year. And saw profound increases in lean muscle gain and fat loss despite no significant changes in diet and exercise. And, you know, my sleep score has been like 92 to 95% for the past week since I started doing that. I actually do the ipamorelin injection in the morning and the tesamorelin in the evening. And yeah, I had forgotten how unstoppable you feel when you're taking these things. And so, the ipamorelin and the tesamorelin, why is it that that compound or that stack seems to work so well?

Ben Greenfield: That is a really good question. So, obviously, we wrote about that in the book. So, I know you already mentioned Nick. Nick Andrews and I were involved in writing the book. We obviously produced the course which you were so gracious to promote for us last year. And then, we're going to talk about a new course that's coming that's going to be for babies. And then, let's just take a step back before I answer your question. I think you know this, you know, your audience is a lot bigger than mine. I mean, the reality is, is that peptides represent this like new form of, let's call it, quantum healing in medicine, right? And in the last 3 years, regardless of our opinions of what have happened, a lot of people feel burned. They have lost trust in allopathic medicine, uh, they've lost trust in, you know, let's call it the system. And so what's happening right now is a lot of people are coming into, you know, let's just call it collective awakening or mass consciousness, and they're like, peptides! And I don't want to rabbit hole and talk to him about bioregulators, but I know we're going to be talking about that because that's even a bigger thing coming because they're orals and not injectables. But the biggest issue with peptides, as you know, and you just said it, you're like, oh, I injected this at night and this in the morning. Ben, that literally eliminates from our, you know, internal Jay Campbell team's surveys and questionnaires that we do, 85% of people are still too afraid to inject themselves, right? Like, you and I can sit there and we can show them that it's a 32 or 31-gauge insulin needle and you can jab yourself anywhere and you won't feel it.

Basically what millions of diabetics do daily.

Exactly. But again, it's a hang-up. It's actually called tyrannophobia, which is a fear of needles, needle phobia, but it's called tyrannophobia, fear of injection.

Yes, that was a fear of dinosaurs, but makes sense.

It's the craziest name, what it means. Yeah, me too, tyrannophobia. But the reality is, is that you got 85% of the public that will not inject themselves. So, we can sit up here and we can talk about how amazing these things are, but there's still this level of fear that the consumer, the end user has to overcome. And once they do, I mean, obviously, it's simple, right? It's like brushing your teeth, but it's very interesting because that's the biggest bugaboo as I've gotten so deep into this. And honestly, as I told you 4 months ago, and you were obviously very gracious to write the foreword for the book, and I'm very grateful about that. And I appreciate you. As I always say, man, I truly love and appreciate what you do for me.

Embarrassingly, live on the podcast, could not remember the title of the book I wrote the foreword for, but I remember it was quite good.

You talk to a lot of people, bro. It's okay. No, but seriously, truthfully, it's crazy to see how big peptides are becoming right now in the mass consciousness. I mean, I cannot handle, my assistants cannot handle the emails and the messages that I'm getting. And so, I'm letting you know, a forewarning is when this podcast runs, You are going to be getting so many people message you asking you questions, not that you don't already, but you know, about this because this is such a big thing right now. But at the end of the day, injecting yourself is like I said, brushing your teeth. After you do it once, perhaps twice, you're never going to be afraid of it. You're not going to have fear of it. It's something that's very easy to do. It doesn't require any kind of skill. You know, watch one video, listen to me and you talk about it. The next course that I have coming, which is called Peptides Demystified, is going to be a basic intro newbies, total neophyte level course on how to do this with all of the questions that people have that you and I take for granted. Again, how to prepare your needle, how to use bacterial static water, how to inject a peptide, all this kind of stuff. So, it's going to be much more helpful and I will apologize to the audience your audience but the world at large and say, "I really took for granted a lot of the basics because I've been using peptides for so long, but most people have no familiarity with them at all." So, I'm really grateful now that there's obviously you giving me this forum and obviously the Mind Pump guys too to really talk about this because I'm telling you, man, it's mind-blowing how many people are interested in peptides.

Ben Greenfield: I assume for back to that very simple stack that I think is quite excellent especially for any exercise or fitness enthusiast or someone looking for the simultaneous muscle gain and fat loss effects that with ipamorelin in the morning and tesamorelin in the evening, especially based off what I've seen in sleep parameters, that the primary effect going on is a growth hormone-inducing effect?

Ben Greenfield: 100%. And I'm sorry I didn't answer your question. That is the strongest mixture of peptides for exactly what you said to produce size and strength gains and also to minimize fat deposition. Now, as you know and your audience of course knows too, body fat loss and muscle gain is always relative to caloric intake, right? You're not going to magically put on 20 pounds of muscle by using Tessa and Ipamore unless you eat relative to doing that.

Ben Greenfield: Which I have been doing, by the way. I have put on 10 pounds in the past month and a half even though I only began taking these peptides. A week and a half ago.

I can tell in your chest right now, by the way, bro, you're pretty swole.

The impetus for that— thank you— is that I weigh 182 right now after being in the 168 to 170 range for the longest time. And I'm 6'2", so that's pretty light all things considered. And my sons and I have a freediving course coming up and a spearfishing trip off the coast of North Carolina. So, all three of us have been making an attempt to put on a little bit of extra cushioning and insulation, so to speak. My strategy, I interviewed this guy named Michael Chernow about morning routines and habits and he has an oatmeal company. It's like oatmeal with collagen and pumpkin seeds and chia seeds and obviously carbohydrates if you're lean. And if you're a hard gainer, carbohydrates are kind of the secret sauce for putting on a little bit of extra mass. So, all I've been doing is consuming 1 to 2 packets of those 350-calorie oatmeal doses per day. And—

That's awesome.

—my weight gain has gone through the roof. And, the interesting side effect is anyone who's been low-carb or keto has probably experienced is that when you increase carbohydrates, there seems to be a pretty potent androgenic effect. So, despite me not injecting the tanning peptide that my wife is using, I have been waking up multiple times per night with a raging tent pitch and I think it's due to that carbohydrate intake. So, we're rabbit holing a little bit, but that tesamorelin-ipamorelin combo as you alluded to, especially if you're eating adequate calories seems to really move the dial for people who want to put on a little bit more muscle in the gym. But, kind of related to that in the gym activities, there was a peptide I was kind of intrigued with that I believe when I interviewed, I think it was Ryan Smith who runs the True Diagnostics age testing company, had described as something that when he began taking it, added something like 7 inches to his vertical jump, which sounds like a stupid as-seen-on-TV overhyped commercial type of claim, but it was called 5-Amino-1MQ. Is that correct? MQ. 5-Amino-1MQ. I never used it. You sent me a bottle. It's an oral peptide. And so, I began taking that in the morning when I inject the ipamorelin. My workouts have been— so, I use that ARX machine which quantifies force production. I believe what Ryan was saying because I feel like I've all of a sudden sprouted new motor neurons or new muscle fibers or something. But, describe to me what's going on with this 5-Amino-1MQ. I'm very surprised I hadn't kind of started to use it before with the effects that I've seen. It's pretty crazy.

Before I do that, let me just finish on Tessa and IPPA because you nailed it. Tessa and IPPA have a synergistic effect. IPPA is a GnRH and Tessa is the opposite, whatever it's called, the GnRR.

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone. Yeah. Okay.

So, combined, they create massive intracellular water retention, which is going to swell you up. I mean, that's why your boobs are so pumped right now, bro. I mean, literally taking both of those increases, like you said, I mean, combined with the carbohydrate intake, it's swelling your muscles. So, you're going to be a lot stronger and then yes, you will have through your contractile force training with ARX, you're going to have hypertrophy. I mean, it's happening. And, by the way, now that you're using the 5-Amino to swing into that, that's going to be absolutely permanent, just intercellular skeletal mass or lean muscle gain. So, what 5-Amino does is it optimizes and upregulates your mitochondria, right? So, uh, Limitless has two formulations which he sent you both. He sent you the capsules and he also sent you the powder. The powder actually has NMN in it.

You mean nicotinamide mononucleotide, the same NAD precursor many people are using?

Exactly. Okay, right. And he's got the perfect dosage in there. And again, remember, it's a synthesized powder. I mean, dude, we could go rabbit hole right now. We could talk about some of the NMI, you know, supplements out there, which I think are mostly horse manure because I don't think that they're synthesized correctly and I don't think they're in the right dosage. But, without disparaging supplement companies or anything like that, I definitely know because I've used it myself like you have that the effect that you're feeling is totally real. The problem with 5-Amino, and it's not a problem, but in my experience and others, you build up antibodies on it pretty quickly. So, I would tell you that you probably are going to get 4 to 6 weeks of feeling unreal. It definitely does increase vascular density. I mean, you're going to feel stronger and more energized on it. And like you said, combined with IPAM and Tessa, you're going to be diesel. I mean, you're going to be so strong.

Yeah. Based on that effect you noted, I do with all peptides go 5 days on, 2 days off. And I only use them for short stints during a year, 8 to 12 weeks. And part of that is also based on the research I've seen out of Russia from Dr. Kavintsin. And this might be a good way for us to get into the bioregulatory peptides on the age reversal and also mitochondrial effects and decrease in all-cause risk of mortality with some relatively short peptide bioregulator stints of around 10 days.

Ben Greenfield: Bryan Johnson is a household name these days, at least amongst people who are interested in replacing their blood with that of their young healthy teenager. No, I jest partially. Bryan's actually really smart, really research-driven, and I had a fantastic conversation with him in 2023 that I really enjoyed. And today, we're going to talk about his sleep protocol.

And I assume you're tracking and measuring your sleep because you mentioned that as being something that's really important to you. I'm curious how you set up your sleep. Are there any particular steps that you take to optimize sleep? Yeah.

I mean, it's honestly the number one priority of life because I know from my personal experience, and Matthew Walker said this, that the difference between hope and despair is a good night's sleep. That is definitely the case with me. I mean, life feels doable and amazing with a good night's sleep, and without it, it feels irritable and frustrating. Nothing affects my conscious experience of reality more than sleep. And so, as a result, I make it my number one priority. So, I mean, I basically built my life around sleep. Wow. So, all the things you would expect. I stop eating around noon or so, so I have 10 hours of fasting. That allows my resting heart rate to get to about 45 or so before I go to bed.

Wait, I got to interrupt you real quick. So, all 3 of those meals you're having before noon?

Yeah, yeah. 6:00 AM to noon roughly is my eating window.

So, a 6-hour compressed feeding window. Wow. Yeah. And sorry, one other question related to that before we get back to sleep. So, are you eating that first meal right when you get up or are you waiting a little while till after you've kind gotten that cortisol awakening response?

I drink what I call the Green Giant when I wake up, this concoction of collagen peptides and amino acids, creatine, cinnamon, and spermidine via chlorella powder. I take 100 supplement or 50 somewhat supplements, then I work out, and then I eat breakfast around 7:00, 8:00. I eat my next meal around 9:00 or 10:00, the final meal around 11:00, 12:00.

So, back to your sleeping protocol, you finish eating at noon and that obviously can help with body temperature and I'm the opposite, by the way. I'm hypoglycemic and wake up at 2:00 a.m. unless we have these big glorious family dinners at 7:00. And so, it's a little bit different than me. I've experimented with the compressed feeding windows. I usually have my first meal around 10:00 or 10:30 a.m. right before I jump into a podcast like this. And then, I'm generally kind of shutting off calories around 8:30, but I've got a solid 10-hour feeding window compared to your 6 just because if I eat as early as noon, I can't sleep, but you seem to do okay with it. Yeah.

It's actually better. Yeah. So, you say your first meal is around 10 and your final meal is around 8 or so?

Yeah, exactly. So, leading up to sleep, are you doing any type of anything from biohacks, mats, the cold water devices, supplements, things like that to enhance sleep?

It's really analog. So, it's 1 hour before sleep, I try to turn off So, I'll hang out with my family, we'll stretch, talk, read, watch something, just low-key. But, I try to basically stop the world in its tracks because I know that when I lay down and go to sleep and I work up to that very moment, whatever I'm ruminating on of all the to-dos or some fire that I need to put out or whatever high-stress situation that's on my mind, I'll dream about it all night. I'll have a restless night. If I can have that 1 hour to wind down and just kind of tune out the world, I get high-quality sleep. So, 1 hour is a non-negotiable. And then, I do small things like blue light-blocking glasses. I'll take 300 mcg of melatonin. I don't really do a whole lot. I think what I really win at is every single night is the same, so the routine never deviates. My lifestyle is built in a way where I don't have things that are disrupting like alcohol or I'm not eating pasta or something like that that also have negative effects. I have a blackout bedroom. So, truly, I think just the consistency of the routine, my body expects it and it's in a system now where every night I get high-quality sleep. And, for my entire life, I never could knock out high-quality sleep. It was like a roll of the dice every night. I had no idea what was going to happen. But now, it's just every single night it's high quality.

Wow. What's a blackout bedroom? Oh, just there's no light. Okay. So, it's not full-on EMF kill switches, Faraday cages, stuff like that. It's just no light.

Yeah, yeah.

Actually fancy discovering that. Yeah. I mean, you laugh, but I actually have a kill switch in my bedroom and then a push-button remote control Faraday canopy. I had to make it look aesthetically pleasing for my wife and everything. So, it's like a princess poster bed. And you push the button, you cannot send a text message, you cannot take a phone call, and you're completely cut off to anything electronic the entire night in that thing. And my only complaint about it is it gets a little bit muggy if my wife's at home and sleeping in bed because she's like a freaking furnace with her metabolism while she sleeps. So, I have a little oscillating fan on one of the bedposts and that keeps the air circulating. But, for me, that's amazing because I can just be totally cut off from electricity during my night of sleep and it seems to help a lot. What time do you go to bed?

Around 8:00, 8:30. Okay.

And, I'm assuming you're doing 8 hours? Yeah. Okay. All right, cool. Do you do any napping or siestas or anything like that? Nope.

I try to avoid it because, yeah, it messes things up. Yeah.

Our protocols are a little different because I go to bed typically by the time I get the kids to bed and have done some reading and stuff. I'm usually asleep by 9:45, 10:00, but then I usually get up around 3:45 or 4:00 just because that allows me time for my spiritual practice and my me time and prepping for the day and some of the early work. But then, every day after lunch, usually either in the hyperbaric chamber or on this big— are you familiar with pulse electromagnetic field frequency like these PEMF mats? I am. Yeah. So, I'll lay on one of those or climb inside the hyperbaric chamber and I'll do about an hour of meditation or Yoga Nidra or something like the BrainTap device, which is a light sound hypnosis device. And the reason that I've developed that protocol is it's a little bit of a hack because it buys me an extra hour to an hour and a half every day. Because even though on paper I'm shorting myself on sleep during the night sleep cycle, I'm getting what feels like a full sleep cycle or two in the afternoon with just an hour dedicated to that. So it's, it's kind of, it's not quite that like that Uberman sleep cycle that some people talk about, but it's, for me, it frees up so much productivity.

Do you find it in these rhythms your markers change with these protocols?

You mean sleep specifically or—

Yeah, I mean, just the things you're watching in your measurement, do they track with these things?

Yeah. Typically, as long as I get that siesta in, what I track would be the Oura Rings, resting heart rate, readiness score based on heart rate variability, sleep cycles, et cetera, it does fine. If I don't get that nap in obviously and I'm doing that short of a sleep cycle, everything goes to crap after a couple of days. So, It is kind of hypercritical to make sure my team knows, don't schedule Ben for anything between about 2:00 and 4:00 PM because that's kind of the time that I'm tucked away. So, I understand that.

Hey, so you want to hack stress, you got to go after the vagus nerve. And in this next section, you are going to learn about vagal nerve stimulation and anxiety visualization and motor imagery and how you can all of that to better cope with stress.

And this kind of reminds me what you're talking about as far as like vagal nerve activation and potential downregulation of some of this, the sympathetic activity. These things arrived at my house last night. It's like this nail bed that you stand on that you would use as almost like kind of like an ice bath for the feet for vagal nerve activation. And it's a proprioceptive input. And you've no doubt seen a lot of these acupressure mats and things like that that folks will lie on What do you think about using that as a tactic to kind of downregulate sympathetic, whether a nail bed or an acupressure mat or something like that?

Mark had something similar to that when we did the podcast recently. I think it's essentially the modern-day grounding indoors. I just had a conversation and a consultation with someone earlier today who had vision problems where we talked about grounding and doing some vision training outside is a massive return on ROI for something that you could just do inside. These types of things, it's really the increase in afferent and and efferent signaling through our hands and feet. That's nature's way of ameliorating anxiety. You can view anxiety as spilling over electrical input into brain areas that don't need to be active right now. And mindfulness is using the 5 senses to quiet those. So, when you get outside and ground, obviously, you're doing more than just getting afferent and efferent signaling from your feet, but additionally, you're getting light and all this stuff. But, let's say you're just at the desk or doing whatever, bringing something like that inside, I think is honestly better than doing a whole stretching routine when you talk about return on investment per minute.

Yeah. Have you ever messed around with those vagal nerve stimulators that they use as electrical input to the sides of the neck or sometimes back behind the ears? They're typically these wearable devices that will vibrate or produce almost very similar, almost like a TENS unit, a mild electrical sensation over the vagal nerve area.

I haven't personally, but one of my best friends in the UK, Shane Jermaine, has with tons of success. I've seen his biometrics and know his routines in life. Really well. He loves it. I've experimented with the PEMF monitors that go through actual vibrational frequencies that resonate, but very similar concepts.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah, those things are super interesting. They seem to relax you pretty well. Now, related to anxiety that you mentioned, for you, how would you define where anxiety actually comes from? And I think about this honestly because One thing that I talked with a guy named Dr. Peter Martone about several podcasts ago was he said that he'll relax himself and fall asleep a lot faster if he avoids future processing and thinks instead back to things that have happened in the past as almost the way to kind of shift a lot of activity in the frontal cortex, I suppose, away from that and away from dwelling upon the future, making me kind of wonder your whole take on anxiety and future processing. You ever thought about that?

100%. So, we don't have a center in our brain for the future. The most sophisticated anticipatory center we have is probably the hypothalamus with anticipatory insulin secretion and stuff like that. And, we're looking at minutes to hours tops. You know what I mean? It's funny when we talk about the best coaches that are just known, they're planning 1 to 2, maybe 3, 4 years tops in advance. Our ability as a human brain to go into the future is is frankly trash, but our ability to be present is quite good. So, if you look at anxiety from a philosophical perspective, a psychology-first perspective, I would say it's putting too much blood flow to future processing using centers that we don't have available for that. And, if I was to look at it from a neurological perspective, I would describe it electrically like I just did a few minutes ago being surplus electricity into unnecessary places in your brain. But we're always coming back to the concept of white noise or sacrificing electricity and blood flow to the key brain areas for it being turned on in inappropriate ones.

So, what do you do about that? Obviously, golfing has a great deal of potential for anxiety or panic to cause issues. I do a lot of bow hunting and shooting and archery. They talk a lot about the target panic issue where you're anxious right before you do a high-risk or very important activity. What are your thoughts on management of anxiety and panic based on what you just described?

The first thing I would tell anybody is recognize it's never going away, it's a good thing. And, even the best athletes on the planet, the best businessmen on the planet signing the biggest deals still experience it. And, just being at peace with that sometimes gives people a lot of support because it's easy to believe that, "Oh, the Walter Paytons of the world, they were never anxious. They just did what they did and they're tough, blah, blah, blah." And, that's an appropriate mindset to have, but I promise you every single great athlete and businessman ever felt just as nervous if not more nervous than you did. The difference was they had strategies and what I call buoys of objectivity to hang on to when they're in the ocean of anxiety drowning and they were just able to survive. So, when you have these anxious moments, the first thing you need to do is reengage with the world around you from your 5 senses. Anxiety often has to do with losing touch, especially like that term I just mentioned is a golf term. It's losing touch of how hard these fine motor skills things are happening. Or, we talk about it in wrestling too. Did you push someone so far that it actually negated the setup of what you were trying to do? The concept of touch goes a long way in every single sport across everything. So, if you lose mindfulness, your 5 senses, your ability to interact with the world around you, you're inherently going to lose vision. Peripheral vision and behavioral decisions and the 5 senses are all a little triangle, if you will, in their ability to function. So, being aware and accepting, being mindful and present are the 2 easiest concepts to chase after. If you want to do something like maybe pull out a few arm hairs or just lightly and gently stroke your hand. And give yourself a light sensation. I talk about the world's smallest violin, rubbing your thumb nail over the little fingerprint ridges of your index finger and force yourself to feel that. It's going to bring you to present because that future-driven perception is certainly what's driven in anxiety.

Ben Greenfield: How do you tackle the idea of visualization and motor imagery? And I've come across a ton of really interesting research lately on kind of like those old— what was it, like the psychosomatic books like the Inner Game of Golf or the Inner Game of Tennis where you could actually improve your stroke or improve your performance by using mental imagery. And, as we all know, probably most notably with the story of Michael Phelps, the swimmer, getting to the point where he could visualize the individual drops of water coming off his goggles. You say that we have a very difficult time future processing or imagining what would happen in the future, I imagine that's a little bit different than visualizing what it is that you want to accomplish or an ideal performance metric. So, how do you deal with visualization? Is that something that you think is actually useful?

100%. The research proves it is. And, there's a balance between spatial ability, that's the skill to participate in visualizations, and the quality of the visualization drill itself. You need to be skillful enough. So, when we look at what that is, on simplest terms, it's like Rubik's Cubes. It's like, can you in your head? Do you know what to do next? Can you see in 3D if we go from white to red or whatever's on the other side? That's spatial abilities as a skill in its most rudimentary sense. It's how can you manipulate these things in 3D in your head. Now, when you add that to Michael Phelps' visualization drill that we just talked about, you're actually decreasing the need to anticipate in the future because you're seeing right here in the present what you believe is about to happen because we understand that faith and belief are inherently actually tied to reality. You would love to believe that there's no research behind faith, prayer, and hugs, but there is very legitimate research behind all three of those things we've seen. So, not only are you using an actual tangible skill, you're actually able to process something that's about to happen better and get ready for it better because you have inherent belief that it's about to happen.

So, from a practical standpoint, how do you use visualization or use it with your athletes or your clients?

So, right away, 100% no matter what, you're starting a spatial skill training regime. And, that's separate from visualization. In my head, I think of visualization as being your sport-specific training and spatial skills are your GPP. So, every single day no matter what, you're going to do some type of spatial game that challenges your ability to manipulate scenes in 3D in your head. Then, we're going to do some sports psychology-like work, conversing, getting to know your athlete self and create specific visualizations that help you deal with the negative performance-related things that can pop up on the field. So, it's maybe you realize that you just get fast and aggressive in periods of time where you don't need to be. We're going to practice a visualization drill that involves speeding up and slowing down time. So, maybe you see the drop of water come really slowly off Michael Phelps's goggle. And then, once it leaves the goggle, boom, back to real time. So, there's a dual training modality that I kind of bring to the table when we talk about training an athlete's brain.

Ben Greenfield: Gary Brecka is a biologist. He's a friend of mine. He's turning some heads in the health industry right now. And, I had a chance to talk with him about some really interesting and kind of controversial work that he did in the insurance industry and also his take on oxygen and its role in disease or the absence of disease. This is an interesting chat and Gary's a great guy. So, here we go.

I would love to hear a little bit more about what got you interested in this because before I came to Miami, you and I talked on the phone and I always thought you were just some biohacker who was interested in the body and eventually took all the things you learned and started to do with other people. But, But you had a very interesting start.

You were in like insurance adjusting or something, a very specific area of insurance, um, which was the science and the predictability of mortality. It's called probabilistic mortality modeling. Okay. So, you know, if we got 5 years of medical records on you and 5 years of demographic data, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month You see, because the database— to the month, to the month—

this wasn't like methylation clocks and Horvath aging and telomeres.

This was just looking at epidemiological data. Epidemiological data. But with the one thing you have to remember that insurance companies have that no other clinical study has, no other medical enterprise has, no other published trial has, um, no medical enterprise of any type has, is that they know the day, the date the time, the location, and the cause of death for everyone that they've issued an annuity, a life insurance, or, or reinsurance policy on, even a reverse mortgage. You wouldn't believe the number of financial services products that are actually based on how many more months you have left on Earth. And so when you have the endpoint, you can trace it back to causality. You see, in a clinical study, we know that, for example, obesity shortens your lifespan by X number of years, you type 2 diabetes shortens your lifespan by X number of years. This is all, um, data that's used on actuarial tables. How do we put somebody on an actuarial table? But when you talk about specific mortality, they have tens of millions of deaths, and they trace that endpoint back to its causality. If this database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would absolutely be catastrophic.

And that information is private?

The insurance companies are the polar opposite of Google and Facebook. They collect voluminous amounts of information, but they don't share it with anybody. They use it to price financial service products against you. I mean, think about it. If they're going to take out a $25 million or $50 million life insurance policy on your life—

We're talking a term life insurance policy?

We're usually talking about universal life policies that are going to last last until the day that you, that you die, right? So they don't expire after 10 years or 20.

They're trying to predict when that date is going to occur so that they don't get stuck with the bill.

Exactly.

But if you think about it, they're taking $25 million or $50 million worth of risk on one variable. There's only a single variable that matters, and that's how many more months do you have left on Earth? How many more months are they going to predict are— that you're— they're going to collect that premium?

Okay. And you're working for one of these companies?

I was actually working for multiple companies. So we did life expectancies and we did these probabilistic models to, uh, to basically take a portfolio of life insurance that, yeah, one life insurance company was going to acquire and, and let them know if the mortality predictions were accurate or not. Okay. Because think about it, if you're, um, if you put $25 million worth of risk on somebody's life and you don't collect enough premiums to offset that risk, because your mortality prediction was wrong.

Shitty business model.

Kind of a really shitty business model. And if you want to know how accurate they are, just look at the last financial services crisis. We had 364 banks failed. Not a single life insurance company failed. Not one. Really? Not a single life insurance company failed. This is how accurate and well-reserved they are because they have perfected the science of mortality.

So what'd you find out?

If I was to boil my entire career down to one sentence, I say this all the time, it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease.

Presence of oxygen is the absence of disease.

Yes, we didn't— we did not find a single disease etiological pathway that did not either have its roots in the absence of blood oxygen or was not severely exacerbated by the absence of blood oxygen. Can you give me an example? Um, hypoxia You know, all cancer begins in a hypoxic environment. Um, type 2 diabetes begins in a hypoxic Warburg effect, cancer generating energy anaerobically, producing lactic acid, tissue acidosis, and springing upon you to create that angiogenic effect, okay, to eventually provide oxygen to grow a tumor. But the genesis of that tumor begins in hypoxia, okay? I mean, how does cancer decide where it's going to metastasize to? It looks for a focal area of hypoxia and it sets up shop in that area, okay? And if you look anemia, sedentary lifestyle. These are leading causes of all-cause mortality. Sitting is the new smoking. But why is sedentary lifestyle, um, and why is sitting become the new smoking? Because sedentary lifestyle is a foundation for hypoxia. The less we move, the less we breathe, the more poorly we manage oxygen, not only the faster we're accelerating towards the grave, but the faster the parabolic curve of all-cause mortality. So we could predict the onset of and the severity of disease based on your hypoxic condition. If you have anemia, for example, um, and it's non-responsive because you have the MTHFR gene mutation, you don't respond to folic acid, you only respond to methylfolate, for example, um, and you have a cardiovascular condition, atherosclerosis, arterial sclerosis, you can predict how much more quickly that will accelerate based on a normal table of atherosclerotic progression. Really? Okay.

And, I know if I'm wondering this, other people might be also, but of course, we seek out in some cases as health enthusiasts hypoxia. Like, you and I when we were doing the breath workout on the Porsche, we got to certain sections where we were blowing all of our air out and holding that for as long as possible. Or, some people people will do— I don't know if you've ever been in a CVAC chamber, which is hypoxic, or I even do like you do exercise with oxygen therapy, but I have a little switch on that therapy device I use that pulls me into hypoxia, gets my pulse O2 down, my blood oxygenation down, and then it goes back up once I get that surge of oxygen. But, you're not saying that all hypoxia is bad, right? Because it seems like there's a kind of a hormetic effect to having periods time with low oxygen?

No, systemic hypoxia is bad. Okay. Long-duration hypoxia is bad. Short-term exposure to hypoxic conditions or even altitude can actually improve oxygen transport. You look at the way that a healthy body responds to a hypoxic condition, it increases erythropoiesis, right? So that increase in erythropoiesis offsets altitude. Okay. But if you weren't offsetting that altitude and you put yourself in a hypoxic environment, your body didn't offset that oxygen deficit, you would have severe long-term consequences for that.

Now, besides a hypoxic state— and this might be a loaded question, I don't know, uh, but I'm sorry, besides a sedentary state like you alluded to with the sitting is the new smoking— what type of other factors have you identified that seem to be pretty associated with people being in this hypoxic state?

Anemic conditions, um, age-related sarcopenia that actually collapses the, the respiratory rate, the respiratory volume, muscle loss, and the inability to carry oxygen due to lack of muscle.

Yes. Okay.

Lack of— I mean, muscle is our metabolic currency. Yeah. I mean, there's a direct correlation between early onset disease and even early onset death and, and your, your muscle volume, your percentage of muscle that you have. I mean, muscle really is our metabolic currency. We're realizing now that muscle is more important in older ages. Yeah. And flexible.

I've been starting to pay attention to that. Dr. uh, Gabriel Lyon, who does a lot of— she calls it muscle-centric medicine. I think she's writing a book about it. I'll have to get her on. I'm a big fan.

I follow her on Instagram too.

Yeah. So, so sarcopenia or loss of muscle would be one thing associated with hypoxia, sedentary lifestyle, anemia.

And I assume by anemia you don't just mean low iron. I don't just mean—

so like, because there's that guy Morley Robbins now, he talks a lot about the iron-copper ratios and the issue with some people supplementing with iron and it causing things like hemochromatosis without adequate copper on board.

So I assume it comes down to more than just like supplementing.

Yes, it comes down— I mean, that's a broad category. Okay. I mean, there's a lot of people that we would find that had an anemic condition, low red blood cell, low hemoglobin, and they were non-responsive to therapy. So for example, take a, take a patient that has a homozygous MTHFR gene mutation. They're, they're poor folate metabolizers. These people don't respond to conventional therapies— folic acid, B12, and iron— which is normally what they would give somebody who's in an anemic condition. And so these become chronic. And now chronic anemia, if you look at the type 3 diabetes, one of the early links to Alzheimer's— in fact, in my 22-year career, I didn't see a single early onset Alzheimer's patient, not one. That did not have at least 10 years of elevated blood sugar prior to. And, oh wow, this myth that people are losing their memory is not really true. Um, they're losing access to their memory. So it's not the memory that's actually fading, it's the access to the memory that's fading because the neurosynaptic junctions get full of eventually amyloid plaques. Um, but that viscosity changes a long time before you actually have these issues with memory.

Which is why a more stable source of fuel like ketones or coconut oil, et cetera, can be very beneficial for Alzheimer's or dementia because it's staving off the diabetic condition in the brain. You know what else I think?

Insulin resistance in the brain.

And I don't know if you've thought about this much at all before, but I think part of it in addition to the presence of too much carbohydrate and glucose in neural tissue, It's also the lack of choline precursors that one gets from lots of healthy fats. There's a guy named Duane Goodenough who wrote a book called "Breaking Alzheimer's." And, that book goes into plasmalogen deficiencies, plasmalogen being these tiny fat-based molecules that he has found are heavily associated with onset of this type 3 diabetes. Turns out that the main precursor for plasmalogens is the type choline that we'd find in eating a lot of grass-fed beef or walnuts and other seeds and nuts and avocados and olive oil and all these things we know are healthy for the brain. So, it's kind of like that one-two combo of sugar excesses and plasmalogen deficiencies that seems to result in this type 3 diabetes onset. No question. And so, back to the oxygen piece. So, we got a sedentary lifestyle, We got sarcopenia. We have some form of anemia. Not necessarily everybody needs to go rush out and buy iron, but something related to MTHFR or iron copper. That's why I put raw liver in my smoothie every morning, which I'm going to get you on the bandwagon for.

I'm not quite there yet.

I made you a smoothie this morning.

I feel pretty good right now.

We'll get to the smoothie eventually because we got back from the walk and then we eventually got to that. But what other biggies? Well, we're talking about the reasons for hypoxia, do you think you could recognize as the main ones for people to think about if there's any others?

Poor methylation, um, poor, poor, um, poor use of mitochondrial nitric oxide and oxygen at the mitochondrial level. Okay. And if you look at older ages and respiratory volumes, um, you know, one of the things that we would look at is the how well they ambulated. So if you take a patient that had um, we had what was called morbidities and comorbidities. Okay, so if you had a certain disease condition, if you had type 2 diabetes, and, uh, you would get a diet— you would get a debit. If you were morbidly obese, you would get a debit. If you were hypertensive, you would get a debit. Um, but if you put all of these debits into the same body, it's not 1 1 1 3, it's 1 1 1 10. And so we realized that the presence of oxygen was the absence of disease, and that the deficiency in oxygen was the presence of a lot of diseases— not only the onset of, but the severity of disease. And towards the tail end of my career, we started to delve deep into methylation pathways. And I think that methylation is one of the most overlooked areas in all of modern medicine because it doesn't assume that what goes into your body and goes into mine and goes into everyone listening to this podcast is treated exactly the same. Yeah, right. That's the biggest fallacy in modern, modern medicine.

If I was going to come to you, how would you test me for methylation? Is this like one of those salivary genetic tests?

It's a salivary genetic test, methyl detox profile. Okay. You can get way down the rabbit hole of methylation. Uh, so what I prefer to do is look at the big 5 genes of, uh, actionable genes of methylation, because it's no use looking at genes where you can't supplement for their deficiency.

Right? So, you know the actual—

would this be the alleles that you're looking at?

The genes and their suballeles. So, for example, MTHFR has two big alleles, C677T, A1298C. Those are the big known ones. Okay. But, you look at people that have homozygous breaks, meaning both parents gave them the gene mutation. Okay. And, depending on where that allele is, they have a predictable deficiency. And it's that deficiency that leads to some of the most common conditions that we accept as a consequence of aging. I mean, most people listening to this podcast are walking around right now somewhere between 55 and 60% of their true state of normal. And what, what I mean when I say that is if they haven't looked at their own methylation pathways, if they're not supplementing for certain deficiencies— I'm not a huge believer in just supplementing for the sake of supplementing. I believe that we supplement for deficiency in the human body, and when we do, magnificent things happen. You know, the majority of disease that we believe is genetically inherited disease doesn't have a genetic link at all. The majority of, of disease that's passed from generation to generation— hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hypercholesterolemia, um, hypothyroidism, depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, these conditions that run in families do not have a gene directly associated with that deficiency. Okay. What they have is a methylation pathway deficiency. Okay. And so what this means is they can't refine a certain raw material. They can't turn folic acid into methylfolate.

Now they have a deficiency in methylfolate, which is why if you're having like a multivitamin or a cereal fortified with folic acid, it could be doing you more harm than The worst thing—

I mean, most people don't even realize that folic acid is an entirely man-made chemical, right? When you can't find folic acid anywhere on the surface of the Earth, it doesn't occur anywhere naturally in nature. Neither does, you know, the most common form of B12, right? Cyanocobalamin, hydrogen cyanide-based B12. You know, 3 forms of B12 occur naturally in nature: the adenosyl, the hydroxy, and the methyl. But the cyano, the cyanide-based form form, which generally comes from human sewage, um, from the sludge from human sewage. When you bind hydrogen cyanide to the cobalt metal and create a B12 molecule, the body not only doesn't recognize that but has to convert it into a natural form of B12 to even use it. So a lot of times our supplements, because we use something called single-dose toxicity in the United States, We're one of the few civilized nations in the world that uses single-dose toxicity, right? Which means that if I give you something in a capsule or a pill and there is some arsenic in there, or there's some hydrogen cyanide in there, or there's some other toxic chemical in there, as long as it doesn't have an effect on you in that dose, then it's safe to give it to you. Oh, but we don't take into account cumulative dose toxicity. Right? Nobody gets mercury poisoning from one sushi meal.

Yeah, we don't test what happens over time is what you're saying.

We don't test what happens over time.

By the way, did you see that B12, one of the synthetic forms of it, is constituted from human sludge? Like, human sewage?

Yeah. What do you mean? So when we process human sewage, uh, there's a foamy yellow substance that they discard, um, and it's called sludge. And that sludge is, is almost purely hydrogen cyanide. And so we can take that sludge— not, not we, certainly not me— but you can take that, that sludge, you can dry it into a powder, you bind it to the cobalt metal, which all B12 is cobalt metal, um, you bind it to the cobalt metal, and now you have cyanocobalt and cyanide-based B12. Wow. And I— and a lot of people say, oh Gary, it doesn't matter, that dosage won't harm you. But it's, again, it's not the— or the dosage determines the poison. That's not true. The cumulative dosage determines the poison. If you're okay putting small amounts of mercury in your body every day, it won't be the small amounts that you put in every day. It will be the accumulation of that heavy metal that causes toxicity.

Okay, got it. So yeah, obviously we can talk about methylation alone for a couple of—

yeah, way down the rabbit hole.

I want to give people the, the big bird's-eye overview of some of these issues you're related to hypoxia. So, we talked about sedentary lifestyle, we talked about sarcopenia, we talked about the methylation issues and anemia-related issues. One thing I've noticed that you're also very keen on is light exposure. Is there a link between light exposure and a hypoxic state?

Well, there's not a direct link between light exposure and a hypoxic state, but most people don't wake themselves up in the morning. They use stimulants to wake themselves up instead of waking naturally.

Interested in what THC does to your brain? You'd be surprised, as well as what CBD can do for sleep and insomnia. We're going to explore that in this next clip.

This is not a brand new study, but it's one that recently came across my radar because there was a doctor on a podcast who said that THC was really bad for your brain, that cannabis, that weed was really bad for your brain. And there's multiple people, probably most notably Daniel Amen, a great researcher and physician when it comes to neural health, who really says that cannabis is about the worst thing you can do for your brain. Now, I am not completely against cannabis. I think especially high THC cannabis is good for painkilling. It could even be used as an alternative to opiates in many cases in smaller amounts. I think it's good for creativity. I think that especially for female orgasmic experience. It's wonderful for sex. So, I think there's a time and place where THC fits in. But, despite its potential therapeutic use, this study basically highlighted the fact that cannabis, especially high THC cannabis, appears to be a risk factor for ischemic stroke in young adults, which is true. And so, they evaluated the effects of THC on brain mitochondrial function and oxidative stress. Which are key factors involved in stroke. They didn't do this in humans though, they did it in rodent models. Now, let me fill you in on what this all means. So basically, when we look at the mitochondria, they're the main source of ATP production. They're particularly involved in the balance between cell survival and cell death. And most cell energy get through something called oxidative phosphorylation, which is a process that requires the action of a set of enzyme complexes located in a part of the mitochondria called the inner mitochondrial membrane. Now, this, this inner mitochondrial membrane, as it produces, as it produces energy, basically it's leaking a certain number of free radicals, a certain amount of reactive oxygen species, and that's normal. They're even used as signaling molecules. You know, it's a reason that— in people who over-exercise and have excessively high metabolisms and eat too much food, they wind up with a lot of free radicals, a lot of inflammation, a lot of these reactive oxygen species. Well, what they wanted to look at in this particular study was whether THC would increase that reactive oxygen species production by the mitochondrial in the brain and contribute to the toxicity or perhaps the ischemic stroke risk of of something like cannabis use in young adults? Well, turns out that when they looked in vitro in the brains of mice and rats, so getting little, little mice and rats high, uh, what they found was a really significant increase in free radical leakage in the brain after THC exposure. That's— that supports this idea that a fraction of the electrons that reduce oxygen to reactive oxygen species in the respiratory chain are much greater in the presence of cannabis. Okay, so, so your brain basically goes into free radical overproduction hyperdrive, at least theoretically, when exposed to high amounts of THC-containing cannabis, especially if you're a little mouse. However, uh, you know, the, the brains of mice and can give us clues as to what occurs in the brains of humans. I would love to see a study on the effects of cannabis in the brain, what's called in vivo, in humans via both intravenous as well as inhalation and edible-based routes. But when I saw this, you know, and I saw that not only do we see THC-related neuronal damage, but you also see this increase in brain reactive oxygen species production, Got me thinking about a few things. First, regular frequent THC usage, this is yet another nail in the coffin that suggests that it's not the best thing for your brain, really isn't. There's a time and a place just like there's a time and a place for a cocktail and there's a time and a place for a donut, but I would not really, if you want to prioritize your mental health, be a frequent user of THC-containing cannabis. The same might not be said for CBD, which actually has some great anti-inflammatory antioxidatory properties. But then the other thing I would consider is in the same way that I recommend that if you're going to have vegetable oil, sauces, dressings, et cetera, and I don't even like the Whole Foods salad bar with their cold expeller-pressed canola oil or whatever, there are certain protective compounds that can help with that. Spirulina is one. Glycine is another. Those can help to kind of mop up the damage from something like vegetable oil in terms of what it does to the cell brain. Well, if you are going to use THC, and perhaps you see where I'm going here, a high intake of antioxidants, and I revealed a whole bunch of the highest antioxidant-containing foods like clove and allspice and gooseberry in Q&A 451. So that might be a good one for you to go back and listen to and look at the chart of. I would, I would consider stepping up the antioxidant intake on any days, which should be few and far between anyways, in which you're exposing your brain to a high amount of THC because there's some pretty good evidence that you're going to really ramp up your reactive oxygen species production in a case like that. So, A, be careful with your THC usage. B, I would use a lot of antioxidants if you were going to use THC. Now, I did mention CBD, the non-psychoactive component or one of the non-psychoactive components of THC, And this, this was interesting. I figured while I was talking about cannabis, I'd bring this up because it's a brand new study. They looked at the use of CBD, cannabidiol, in the management of insomnia. And, uh, what, what they did was they had a bunch of studies, 34 different studies that they looked into, uh, several of which use CBD predominant therapy and some of which used CBD in a certain ratio with THC, usually an equal 1:1 ratio. Now, what they found was that CBD alone or CBD in a 1:1 ratio with THC could be quite beneficial in alleviating the symptoms of insomnia, which is great to know. Now, here's what this paper didn't mention. THC can actually— and I'm not intentionally throwing cannabis under the bus here, THC-containing cannabis, And, and I don't have anything against it. Again, for, for the right time and place, I think it can be a good molecule to use for things like creativity and sex and painkilling. But what they fail to mention in this analysis is that THC across a wide variety of people can cause a real decrease in both deep sleep as well as dreaming and memory consolidation during sleep. And if— and this is what this study kind of speaks to me concerning— if CBD can give you just as good an amount of sleep without deleteriously impacting sleep architecture in the same way that THC does, why not use CBD? And I use CBD pretty regularly for sleep. I have these little gummies I get from Element Health. I actually recently interviewed the folks at Element Health about these things, and I think they work very well for for sleep. They're full-spectrum CBD, so they have a very, very small amount of THC in them, but you'd have to eat a ton of them if you were going to, say, get high. And then they have a little tincture, like a little dropper bottle with tincture. And so CBD, I think it is great for insomnia, but I would not use CBD with THC in it when you're able to just get the CBD and isolate, or at least a full-spectrum CBD. But speaking of insomnia, because it is something that I occasionally get, I would say about 2 or 3 times a year I'll come down with a multi-day bout of something very closely resembling insomnia. Uh, and usually it occurs after I have returned home from a bout of international travel and my circadian rhythmicity is just all messed up. Well, one of the things that I have found to be super super duper helpful for me, and I believe I heard about this originally from Dr. Andrew Huberman, is this non-sleep deep rest protocol, also known as yoga nidra. Chronic insomnia is something that has been looked into in terms of how it actually responds to a yoga nidra practice. And for me at least, yoga nidra, if I wake up in the wee hours of the morning, can't get back to sleep, and don't want to take some kind of a supplement or don't I have one or if I just want to lull myself naturally back into a sleep or a sleep-like state, works very well. The way that I do it is I have a track. So, I have the Muse app on my phone. I have another one called SleepSpace. I also have a couple of just downloaded YouTube tracks on my phone. And, all of them range from 10 to 40 minutes in length, but they're all Yoga Nidra tracks. And essentially, a big, big part of it for me at least is this body scan. Where you're scanning your feet and relaxing your feet, then moving up to your ankles and relaxing your ankles and your knees and relaxing your knees. Typically, I'll get up to about my hips and then go dead to the world. Sometimes, I will stay awake and alert enough to go all the way up to the top of the head. And even if I don't fall asleep or lose track of myself or my mental awareness by the time I've got up to the top of my head, it is still incredibly relaxing and it does seem to provide the feeling of having slept without necessarily having slept. And it also occasionally just lulls you back into a state of sleep because it's difficult to ruminate on the type of thoughts that would normally keep you awake if you're scanning your body and going up and down your body because it almost distracts your thoughts from doing other things. It's kind of like this concept, there's a device out there. I don't like it because I can't sleep with things wrapped around my head that well, but there's a device called the Ebb, E-B-B, and it circulates cold water through this device that you wrap around your head based on research that shows that cold water can shift blood away from the frontal cortices of the brain and allow for less thought rumination to keep you awake. And I have one I've tried. I wake up with it all cockeyed and halfway hanging off my head and wires coming out. And then maybe there's a way to eventually design something that's a little bit less invasive but nonetheless, Yoga Nidra seems to give me a very, very similar experience. And it's also useful to be used as, say, a nap, for example. So anyways, I just wanted to point that out when it comes to insomnia. And then, the other thing that I've found lately, and I don't know if I've talked about it on a podcast before, but I feel like it gives me a similar experience as Yoga Nidra. It's a meditation app that somebody told me about a few months ago and I've been using it and I really like it. It's called Synctuition, S-Y-N-C-T-U-I-T-I-O-N. It's dozens and dozens of different journeys. You almost get a similar effect as though you've done some kind of, I don't know, a plant medicine journey or deep breathwork. But, the way that the sounds are engineered, And the fact that there's a specific theme for each mini journey, like the one I did today was about the miracle inside of each of us. The one yesterday was called Destiny. You start at level 1, you go all the way up to level 7, and they increase in advancement in terms of the binaural beats that are used and the intensity of the protocol. And I've made it all the way up to level 7 on this thing and done almost every meditation in it. And I love it. Each meditation lasts about 22 to 27 minutes, which is a nice little sweet spot for me. And I usually do it when I'm laying in bed. Let's say I wake up at 4:00 and I don't want to get out of bed till 4:30, I'll switch on Synctuition, just lay there either snuggling with my wife and playing it in the track or else I like to put a pillow underneath my knees and just kind of lay back and have my head cradled and do it that way. But, this Synctuition app seems to work really well. And sometimes, I'll fall back asleep and stay in bed. So anyways, Synctuition is also an interesting one. So, CBD, Yoga Nidra, Synctuition. There are many, many other things that can help with insomnia and help to support sleep. I mean, my supplements company Kion, we have a fantastic sleep product called Sleep, fittingly enough. It takes a little while to hit your system, like 20 or 30 minutes. So, what I do is I actually take the capsules even though there's a sleep powder as well. I just have the capsules at my bedside right now and I just chew on them and let it dissolve under my tongue. And, I feel like it hits me in about 10 minutes. And, it's just a few different relaxing compounds like theanine and tryptophan. So, Kion Sleep seems to work well, but I also— I love to find things that don't require me to be attached to some kind of chemical or supplement to sleep. And, I think that Yoga Nidra or the Synctuition app alone or in combination with something like Kion Sleep or CBD are really fantastic solutions for people who want to sleep better because who doesn't want to sleep better and who hasn't occasionally had to deal with a a lot of frustrating insomnia. It's probably one of the most frustrating things I've had to deal with. And again, fortunately, only pops up a couple times a year.

Ketones, they're a hot topic. They have been for like 278 years. But ketones and how to use them properly for performance, well, that's what we're going to tackle in today's snippet. If you want to unpack exactly how to use these drinkable ketones effectively, you're going to learn right now? To the exercise piece.

Yeah. Like I mentioned, early on in the Ironman days, I was experimenting with ketosis and all I had available to me was MCT oil because a lot of these ketones were very expensive. And so, initially, I was mixing MCT oil with a small amount of carbohydrate, like 1/4 of the amount of carbohydrate that I'd normally use. Initially, I was using this stuff called UCAN. The problem is that it's a very resistant starch, even though it results in a slow release of blood glucose into the fuel. Sipping that over 10 hours of an Ironman triathlon, the fermentation and bloating by the end of the race is horrific. It literally looked like I was pregnant by the end of the race. And, maybe it's because I just have trouble breaking down resistant starch. And, it's still the case for me. If I have a lot of those green banana starches or cooked and cooled rice or anything like that, I get horrible gas. It might just be my GI system, but the UCAN didn't work for me. So, I found that a longer-chain starch, GlycoFuse was one that I was using, Vitargo is another. These are longer-chain potato-based starches, like way longer than maltodextrin. I found that by using about 1/4 of the recommended dose of that, it's around 100 calories per hour. And, to contextualize that for people, a lot of recommendations for a guy my size would be 300 300 to 400 calories of carbohydrate per hour. So, I was doing one quarter of that for getting a little bit of the slow bleed of glucose into the system. And then, I was combining that with electrolytes and with amino acids. Now, early on in my racing days, I had a lot of conversations with Dr. Peter Attia, and he highly recommended to me if I was going this ketosis route to use branched-chain amino acids as an alternative fuel. I later started to use essential amino acids because I found those to be superior. And that might sound like the fox guarding the henhouse because I have a company now that sells essential amino acids, but nonetheless, they worked for me. That's actually one of the reasons that I began selling them at my company, Kion, was because I was using them so much in my own racing and using them with all my clients, my athletes. So basically, in my water bottle and then in my little run bottles on the run belt for the marathon, I had, in the case of the run bottle, very thick mix, in the water bottle for the bike, a diluted mix of MCT oil, essential amino acids, a long-chain starch but in low amounts, and then electrolytes. Later, when I got my hands on ketones, I simply replaced the MCT oil with the ketones. And that was just the most fantastic fuel ever for Ironman. Like, I could just go and go and go. And the way that I raced is when I got to the point in the race where I knew that I could go anaerobic, and this was just based on testing, I knew that with about 10 to 13 miles left in the Ironman, at that point, I could pull the parachute cord and shift into glycolysis, turn up my intensity, and go at full steam to the finish line. At that point, I switched to just drinking Coca-Cola from the aid station, just pure sugar. Because I'm like, "Okay, shift into pure glycolysis." tells us now I've spared glycogen this long in the race, so now I can shift to glucose and the stuff that's in Coke, really fructose, as a fuel. Plus the caffeine and the coldness and like the comfort food taste of the Coke, it just strings you through that last— with the carbonated— yeah, it's a— well, no, it's flat Coke. All right, it's flat Coke at the aid stations. So anyways, that was my jam for Ironman. It worked fantastically, by the way. And I'm still surprised, at least to my knowledge, that no company has come out with like a powdered mix of like some kind of ketone or MCT with a high molecular weight starch with electrolytes with essential amino acids because that— it's the most amazing endurance fuel I've ever discovered. But to my knowledge, like I was doing, you still have to kind of mix that all up yourself in the kitchen. I would literally have a blender, blend it all, and pour it into my water bottle.

I think a lot comes with the body weight match data as well because, you know, if you have everything already blended, then And then let's say if you have to increase the ketone dosage, then you have to take more, but then you're also increasing the other stuff.

Yeah, that's true based on what we talked about before in terms of ketone sensitivity and you don't want to shove yourself over 3 millimolar into it. Right, right. It's a good point. So anyways, the thing that happened was later on when I got out of endurance racing and got into a sport that's more anaerobic plus aerobic, namely obstacle course racing, in a Tough Mudder, I thought, "Well, gosh, why don't I increase the levels of both substrates simultaneously, elevate my ketone values and my glucose values?" Which I think, as you noted earlier, could be like an unnatural state for the body to be in, but an amazing performance hack, right? Elevated blood glucose and elevated ketones. Crushed the Tough Mudder, won the race by a country mile, and felt like I was on rocket fuel the whole time by mixing gels, like fructose maltodextrin gels with ketones. And then, I was like, "Oh, this could be used for what might be considered anaerobic performance as well." Not necessarily a full-on 30-second all-out sprint, but carrying sandbags, climbing ropes, hauling over obstacles, and then running aerobically, and then going anaerobic again and back and forth. Worked fantastically for that. Now, my question for you is that I saw before our podcast that there was some new research out on ketones ketones related to anaerobic performance when traditionally they've only been associated with aerobic performance. So, explain to me what's going on now with ketones and anaerobic performance.

Yeah. So, first and foremost, because ketones are so much more related to fats, because fats break— broken, you know, gets broken down into ketones, and then we metabolize it, right? So, then automatically we are thinking that, okay, it must be good, better for endurance, is for endurance, we want to tap into that fat. Like you said earlier, RER, you want the RER to go towards fat metabolism instead of glucose. Because glucose will always be king when it comes to anaerobic, because glycolysis gives you that fast ATP without even having to use any oxygen. Right? So, that's why nobody has done anaerobic performance on ketones. But then, we decided, you know, HVMN, as usual, we do some crazy things. We do things that no one wants to do, and let's see what the science says. And we partnered with University of North Georgia, one of the best military college in the US, to look at effect on Ketone IQ with carbs in anaerobic performance. So, what we have done is that we put participants, 18 to 24-year-olds, on a 5K run. Immediately after the 5K run, we put them on a stationary bike, ergometer, and they went through the anaerobic Wingate test.

So, for those of you— Oh, jeez, you guys are cruel. I know. Explain the Wingate test to people because, I mean, 5K is tough, but Wingate is really tough.

Yes. So, Wingate— So, these participants have to go through 5 bouts of 10-second sprints on that bike at 7.5% body weight as a load, as a resistance.

7.5% of your body weight. So, like for me, I'd have 150 watts, something like that. Yeah. Wait, was that the wattage or was that the resistance?

It's the resistance. Oh, it was the resistance. There was a resistance. So then during that 5 bouts, they have 10-second sprint, 30-second rest, 10-second sprint, 30-second rest, 5 times, right? And they got their ketones measured. So they had ketones before the 5K run and then topped up after the 5K run.

Okay. Okay? But after the run, but before the Wingate.

Yes, correct. And so we just submitted this paper on that.

You hear that crinkling, by the way? I'm opening up another ketone shot. Oh, you want one? Are you—

um, well, yeah, sure, why not.

All right, um, here, cheers. Hold on, then keep going on this test. Yes. Yeah, let's do another one. So let me figure out what my upper— this is gonna be more ketones than A, I've ever had in my life in one sitting, and B, definitely more than I've ever had on a podcast. Well, but I'm doing this because I want to keep tracking.

Let's see how—

I want to keep tracking the blood glucose too as we're down here and just see what happens.

All right, cheers. How smooth you are and Hmm. So, during this Wingate test, they were asked to go as fast, as hard as possible, right? And we just submitted this manuscript to Frontiers in Physiology, and they're under review right now. Okay. And we saw increase in average power, peak power, and velocity. So, not only these people are paddling harder, they're also paddling faster. And on top of that, we also measure fatigue levels. Because as you go through that 5 bouts of exercise, you are inevitably going to be more and more fatigued. Yeah. People who are on Ketone IQ and carbs, they experience less fatigue than those on placebo.

I would hypothesize that part of this would be due to the glycogen-sparing effect that occurred during the 5K run, meaning you're burning less glucose during the 5K run. Is there anything else going on there? Like, had you ever thought about doing just the Wingate without the 5K run, for example?

Great question.

And I did ask that. So, the reason why we did the 5K run is because a lot of other studies also did that 5K run and they saw no difference. And, we want to sort of replicate that to build on top of that because otherwise, other scientists would just scrutinize the paper and say, "No one has done this. You can't compare to anyone." So, that's the reason we did the 5K. So, the next step is definitely better to do just the anaerobic and see what's the difference. And, during the 5K run, You were right, we did measure the RER, and people on Ketone IQ and carbs have significantly lower RER, meaning they are burning more fat than glucose. So, in the placebo group or glucose-only group, we are looking at about 0.94 RER, whereas the Ketone IQ and carb group, we are looking at 0.89. Okay.

RER, by the way, for those listening, is respiratory exchange ratio. It's indicative of the amount of carbohydrate carbohydrates compared to fat that you're burning. Higher RER means more carbs, less fat. Lower RER means more fat, less carbs that you're burning.

Yes. Okay. So, they're burning more carbs and that is expected. And as you said, it could be the glycogen-sparing effect. And also, because we measure the level of blood ketones before the 5K and after the 5K, and we saw a decrease in the ketones. So, together with the RER plus the decrease in ketone levels, we can assume, or we can, you know, insinuate that these people are burning the ketones, are oxidizing the ketones as well. However, we are not sure if the ketones are being burnt in skeletal muscles, in your heart, or just simply lost via acetone in the breath. Okay, so that's, you know, whoever who's listening in terms of researchers, that's the next step we got to, got to measure, right? Like, what are we measuring? What are we looking at? At muscle biopsy, You know, then we can look at really the glycogen sparing effect.

What about, what about the brain?

Like, is there anything going on in the brain?

I was just about to say that. So, so the next reason that we think that could be why these people are performing much better at anaerobic exercise is not simply the glycogen sparing effect, because this could have a potential analgesic effect on the brain. So basically, it's a pain tolerance increase after taking Ketone IQ and carbs during this? Because the whole Wingate test is meant to elicit a huge shift in pH, i.e., lowering the pH, increasing lactic acid buildup, and having excruciating pain and possibly vomiting and pain in these sort of like target muscle groups. Having said that,— if people are able to push through that, push harder and faster, and feeling fatigue less, then it could possibly have a direct effect on the perception of pain itself. Now, if you compare this to ketonester, it may not be a good combination because anaerobic itself, like I said, it's meant to elicit a huge shift of pH, and ketonester on its own, is able to already drop pH so much, accelerate that pH shift. Yeah, that people might just feel really awful. And coupled with the bad taste, they might actually have GI issue, which could also lead to an overall decrease in performance in the study, which a lot of studies have showed. Um, they— the drop in performance is because people started vomiting, started, you know, not doing— not feeling well in general.

Now, one of the reasons that you see kind of like a shift in focus sometimes after you work out is, I think, in some scenarios, probably due to an increase in blood ketones due to potentially glycogen exhaustion or increased fat utilization. But then, there's also this idea that in addition to ketones being one of the preferential sources of fuel for the brain, lactate is another. And, you see lactate crossing the blood-brain barrier and being used as an alternative fuel to glucose for the brain. All right, thanks for listening in.

Again, the show notes are at bengreenfieldlife.com/bestof2023, best of 2023. Leave the show a ranking or rating or review or whatever other R-word you want to call it wherever you listen to find podcasts. It helps me get better guests, it helps me improve the show, and it helps me feel good about myself when I sleep at night. So Leave the show review. And again, show notes are at bengreenfieldlife.com/bestof2023.

Want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup, cutting-edge research and articles, my top recommendations for everything that you need to hack your life, and much more? Visit bengreenfieldlife.com.

In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items, but the price is the same for you. And sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases because I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion LLC, the makers of Kion-branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support, and with full authenticity and transparency recommend in good conscience. I personally vet each each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body, and spirit, and I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So, there's your fancy legal disclaimer.