What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger: The Good Side Of Stress

I'm making my family little meal here in the kitchen. Just got back from India, so using a lot of Indian spices, cumin and turmeric and ginger and cardamom and cayenne and chili. But I'm often asked, Ben, don't plants cause oxidative stress? Don't they have built in defense mechanisms that will kill you? Shouldn't we avoid plants and look, you're right. Plants cause oxidative stress. But you know what else causes oxidative stress? Exercise causes oxidative stress. Sauna causes oxidative stress. Sunlight. Radiation causes oxidative stress. Alcohol causes oxidative stress. Guess what? The plant defense mechanisms in this dangerous cauliflower or these sprouts or this loaf of sourdough bread or the lectins in these potatoes, or all of the horrific plant defense mechanisms. And all of these herbs that are obviously going to kill us as we know, guess what? They actually induce cellular resilience. When consumed in appropriate amounts, body can mount its own antioxidant defenses and in fact, spark its own endogenous antioxidant production. When you have small doses of something that will kill you in large amounts. So, sure, running a marathon on the weekend versus running a little bit every day is probably going to create excess oxidative stress. So sitting in the sauna for three hours, getting yourself stripped of electrolytes and minerals and water, yeah, that's going to cause excess oxidative stress. Spending 10 hours at the beach, Absolutely. Look at the skin of anybody that's done that. Oxidative stress. This whole bottle of wine versus a glass of it. Oxidative stress. Plowing through an entire loaf of bread, especially one that hasn't been sourdough. Fermented oxidative stress. Giant grocery shopping cart full of kale for your smoothie versus a little bit of sprouts here and there. Oxidative stress. Burted down all this turmeric. Oxidative stress. But what kills you in large amounts is actually good for you in small amounts. Remember, the dose is the poison. The dose is the poison. So, sure, I could drink Coca Cola all day long and have metabolic disease, but that doesn't mean that fructose is going to kill me. You get what I'm saying? Let me know what you think. Thank you, Tara. That was great.

Now please welcome CEO, speaker, author and health consultant Ben Greenfield. I can't wait much longer. I know I got to be right now, because I can't. I'm on. You guys got like beach loungers. These people in the in the front, they got it going on. Need a little mai tai with a coconut umbrella, Little hibiscus flower. I played that video for you guys because the night before Darshan asked me if I wanted to come talk. I literally had that video going. So immediately when he asked me, I was like, oh, I want to talk about stuff that could kill you, that might actually make you stronger. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today.

I don't know if anybody does kale or broccoli sprouts or alcohol. Well, you're engaging in this process called mitohormesis. Anybody in here familiar with this term, mitohormesis? Mitochondrial hormesis. The idea that something that stresses the body when given in small or large amounts, but could kill you when administered in large amounts could be good for you in small amounts. The response to an acute sub lethal stress. This is from a fantastic paper, and I've got a resources page that I'll give to you guys at the end of my presentation. You can go download these papers for all you like to put your tinfoil hats on at night and read. But an acute sublethal stress, oxidative stress that can temporarily impair or damage mitochondria, but long term can confer a stress response that improves mitochondrial function. I like to think of this as something like kind of harmful but not super harmful. It's like. Like a teddy bear with a potato gun. You know, it's kind of annoying. Might make you a little bit stronger, but it's not gonna kill you. Okay, so this is basically the idea of Kanye's song right now that don't kill me.

There's about 300 reasons I didn't get a record deal. That's one of them. Can't rap. Big can't rap. But anyways, why is this important? Why would this be important in the first place? How many of you in here are interested in anti aging, age reversal and longevity? I am as well. And this correlates quite strongly to the concept of aging. There's this theory goes way back to the 60s, that free radicals and reactive oxygen species.

Superoxide and hydroxyl radicals, and all these things that can build up in the body in the presence of oxygen and cause electrons to run rampant in the body could actually accelerate aging. But it turns out that these can also act as important signaling molecules. This idea of reactive oxygen species signaling. So it's almost as though when it comes to extending lifespan, it's a little bit of a Goldilocks effect, actually. I'm going to go back for just a second here. You can see some of the mechanisms here via which reactive oxygen species could actually induce as this so called sub lethal stressor some amount of cellular resilience. You can see physical activity, exercise, glucose restriction. And glucose restriction seems to be the most powerful part of calorie restriction when it comes to the ability of calorie restriction to extend lifespan. I'll get into more of the details of that later. Reactive oxygen species inducers, or what are called electron transport chain inhibitors, even statins are a perfect example of this. And that might be one of the reasons why statins can extend lifespan in some people is because of that mechanism of action, reduced insulin and IGF1 signaling a little bit related to what Carr was just talking about with that DHEA metformin study and then hypoxia. These are just a few examples of how we can induce an ROS response that could confer longevity. And I'm gonna get into some of the details of this a little bit later on. But it's all based on this theory that again goes back a few decades. The mother efforta theory, mfrta, it actually stands for a mitochondrial free radical theory of aging. This idea that oxidative stress could damage the mitochondria. Well, it turns out that when the mitochondria are stressed, they actually are able to induce an endogenous antioxidant response that long term makes you more resilient to stress. So you can see this graphic here kind of shows what's a little bit similar to a vaccine, right? A low dose infectious agent causes an immune response, eventually increases immune defenses, decreases the levels of that infectious agent staying around long term in the body and then increases health and lifespan. It's very similar with reactive oxygen species, right? You consume them or you create them. You get an endogenous stress defense mechanism, a long term decrease in reactive oxygen species, an increase in stress defense and an increase in health and lifespan. It's kind of similar to this concept of does anybody here wear like a blood glucose monitor? Just 1, 2, 3. Few are a little embarrassed about it. So the blood glucose monitor, if you're tracking that and you get done with let's say like a sauna session or a hard exercise session, is it high or is it low? After you do something, it's high, right? It's a transient increase in blood glucose. But interestingly, exercise, sauna, cold, a lot of these things that would cause your blood glucose monitor to show a very high reading, cause long term stabilization and decreases in blood glucose due to insulin sensitivity and increased up regulation of GLUT4 transporters. And all these things that those mild stressors can cause. And you can think about things that induce a mild reactive oxygen species response. Very similarly transient increase in reactive oxygen species, but a long term chronic lowering of them and an increase in the body's ability to be able to defend itself against excess reactive oxygen species. So it's almost like a Goldilocks effect. The free radical theory of aging would suggest, and this is what people thought for a really long time, that there was a linear dose response curve when it came to your exposure to reactive oxygen species. But it turns out that's not the case. As a matter of fact, it's very interesting. They actually, for a period of time did studies where they gave people large doses of something that would theoretically quell reactive oxygen species or get rid of them more quickly in the body. What would something like that be? What's something that would fight against reactive oxygen species? I believe earlier today somebody said not to get a vitamin C IV after exercise. Kind of along the same lines. What is vitamin C? Somebody in here knows AI it's an antioxidant. It's an antioxidant. So what they did was they gave people large doses of antioxidants, but they didn't seem to induce the longevity enhancing response that was expected. And in some cases it was just either nothing or in the case of gosh, studies on, I think they started back in the 70s with a study on swimmers with people who exercise, a paradoxical lowering of fitness, lowering of the mitochondrial response to exercise, lowering of satellite cell proliferation, all these reasons that you probably shouldn't take high dose antioxidants after exercise. But the idea here seems to indicate then, and this has been backed up by studies in yeast and fruit flies and rodents and suggestive evidence in humans that there is an increase in mortality, as you can see from the curve here, that occurs with a certain amount of moderate reactive oxygen species exposure, then a linear response. But that hormetic response that occurs from the initial exposure to reactive oxygen species shifts that entire curve to the right. You could even theorize that that's one of the reasons that one of the darlings of the anti aging world right now, sirtuins, like dark chocolate and blueberries and pomegranates and resveratrol, that might be one of the ways that they're actually working because they upregulate the body's own reactive oxygen species defense mechanisms. They then allow you to generate more reactive oxygen species, quell those more quickly, get a lot more of that hormetic response, and shift that curve even more to the right. So that would be an example of what, yay, something like dark chocolate could do to you. If you leave with anything today, you'll leave knowing that Ben told you to drink chocolate and drink alcohol.

So the idea here, back to pop culture, is not necessarily to get hit in the face over and over again and just stress the body out all day long. So you generate as many reactive oxygen species as possible. Ain't so bad, Ain't so bad, Ain't so bad. You don't want to be all bloodied and beat up like Rocky at the end of the day. It's more like you're a different kind of stallion. Like a wild stallion. You're out in the pasture, you're getting exposed to sunlight, radiation and radiation from the planet earth. A little bit of heat, a little bit of cold rain, you're sprinting occasionally, you're eating wild plants and herbs, taking an occasional dump in your neighbor's lawn.

Everything in moderation. But basically the idea is that you're going through the day in almost like a very ancestral way, figuring out ways to expose yourself to moderate amounts of reactive oxygen species. And let's talk about some of the more powerful ways to do that. Now, I don't have time today to get into some of the more subtle things that could cause this, and I'll link to some research papers, but we could get into, for example, increasing insulin insensitivity or using TOR inhibitors like rapamycin. But I want to focus on some of the low hanging fruit today. So first of all, exercise. Perfect example of a Goldilocks effect. One researcher, for example, that's pretty prolific in the exercise world, Dr. James O', Keefe, has shown that arterial stiffening and early onset of atherosclerosis and other unfavorable things can occur when you exceed a certain amount of moderate to vigorous intense exercise on a weekly basis. He tops out 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity or 75 minutes per week of vigorous intensity. So this would be like your CrossFit neighbor who's doing a two a day wad. Like, that's an example of something that would be past the Goldilocks zone of exercise. This amount of minutes of exercise does not count. What would be considered more of like an ancestral farmer, hunter, gatherer type of motion, right? Walking during the day, doing yard chores, cleaning the garage, parking farther away in the grocery store, none of that counts as these minutes of exercise. I'm talking more about like the frowny faced constipated marathoner who's running loops around the neighborhood all day long. Or that you're the Ironman triathlete like I used to be training for 15, 20, 25 hours a week. That's past the point where reactive oxygen species from exercise are beneficial for you. Hard and heavy strength training. This is new research. This is early as 2023, like really hard pushing yourself to failure. Strength training at as low as more than 60 minutes per week also seems to cause this same effect part, partially because of the buildup of excess reactive oxygen species. Right. So you can start to think a little bit about how you would structure a week of exercise based on some of these minutes, depending on whether you want to hit that Goldilocks zone or hopefully not exceed it. Now a couple of tips here. I already covered. Don't use antioxidants. But it's important to understand that a lot of this stuff, just like alcohol for example, is related to the dose. I think that somebody earlier said, well, don't do the vitamin C IVs. I mean, how much vitamin C is in a vitamin C IV? It's like 10 grams, sometimes, sometimes even more than that. So a lot of the studies that have been done on post exercise antioxidant supplementation show that for example, with vitamin C, it's once you exceed about 500 milligrams, right? So taking your multivitamin or taking small amounts of antioxidants, not a problem. But high dose antioxidant consumption after exercise would be one way that you'd quell the hormetic response to exercise. Another thing is that if you look at a molecule called AMP K in the body and then another signaling pathway called mtor, AMPK elevation increases the ability of the body to upregulate its own ROS defense mechanisms, whereas down regulation of MTOR can also lower the amount, or I'm sorry, slightly increase the amount of reactive oxygen species in the mitochondria. So what this means is that if you do facet exercise sometimes you're going to increase the hormetic response to that exercise. So like a morning fasted exercise session is something that actually fits pretty well into this ROS theory because it causes a little bit more stress on the body. And this is probably one of the ways that calorie restriction works. A lot of people think, and this is something I thought for a really long time, do you think calorie restriction would increase or decrease the metabolism or the respiration rate.

You'D think it decreases it, right? Because if you're not eating, the body would kind of want to slow itself down, right? And you do see sometimes with long term calorie restriction and long term carbohydrate deprivation, this is a reason why it can be important for very active people to refeed occasion like refeed in the evenings or refeed, you know, once a week on a Saturday or whatever. You can see long term downregulation of the metabolic rate due to thyroid impairment. But mild to moderate calorie restriction actually appears to increase metabolic rate, increase respiratory rate, increase the activity of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria and increase reactive oxygen species output. And so it's very interesting that when you are restricting calories, you're actually increasing reactive oxygen species and the defense mechanisms that allow you to be able to deal with those. So in most cases it's about 10 to 50% reduction of AD libitum calorie intake. Now, this doesn't mean fasting per se. The reason that fasting seems to work when it comes to extending lifespan is the fact that it's just fricking hard to eat as many calories as you'd normally eat if you have one of these compressed feeding windows. Right? Does anybody in here intermittent fast or have a compressed feeding window? A certain period of time during the day when you don't eat, it's just hard. Especially some people are doing the omad one meal a day diet. And I know some people that do that and they'll have a 2,000 calorie dinner. But I'm eating 3,000 calories a day. And for me to try and squeeze all that in with dinner is very, very difficult. So that's why intermittent fasting can help with calorie restriction is it's just hard to eat that many calories in that compressed feeding window. So it doesn't matter whether you restrict calories or whether you fast or both. But the idea is that regular amounts of mild calorie restriction, one of the ways that induces a longevity response is via the formation of reactive oxygen species. Now a couple of quick tips here. One is that I actually am pretty active, I do fast. And two of the more powerful ways that I've been able to do that are the intake of high amounts of amino acids and ketones. I'm not going to get into the details of those much, you can start to research those for yourself. But amino acids and ketones, and now there's a lot of these so called GLP1 agonists that even I actually found out about the power of some of these after I put this slide together. But for example, Pendulum has one here that's a GLP1 agonist. There's another one I found called Callocurb. These are things that can suppress hunger but don't have a lot of the same side effects as the giant human experiment that is Ozempic and a lot of these GLP1 peptides. So you can use things that will lower your hunger and increase your satiation. And then the other thing that I have written, there is more glycine than methionine. It turns out that increased amounts of the amino acid methionine can actually suppress the ability to be able to form these reactive oxygen species defense mechanisms. Now do you guys know where you'd get a lot? Let's say you were eating an omnivorous diet, where would you get a lot of methionine? Does anybody know? Yeah, muscle meat, right. And this is one of the issues with like you know, kind of, kind of a bastardized version of a carnivore diet where people are doing like rib eye steaks from Costco for breakfast, lunch and dinner or a lot of meat, lean chicken breasts, et cetera. You're getting a lot of the amino acid methionine, but not in balance with the amino acid glycine. Where would you get the amino acid glycine? Yeah, from the skin and the gristle and the organs and the liver and the heart and the kidney and the marrow and all these parts of an animal that we don't eat as much nowadays, but that are chock full of really good vitamins and also higher in glycine. Right. So if you're going to calorie restrict, first of all know that increased methionine relative to glycine will cause you to not get as many benefits from calorie restriction as you're looking for. And then if you need a way to satiate the appetite, try some of these natural GLP agonists, amino acids or ketones. That could be a really good way to get some of the benefits of calorie restriction without being hangry or wanting to chew your arm off. A few other tips for calorie restriction GDAs and CRMs. What are GDAs and CRMs? Anybody know? It's a GDA. GDA is a glucose disposal agent. It allows your body to take glucose out of the bloodstream and shove it into the muscle more quickly. To be used as energy, which means it's going to be used for oxidative phosphorylation, which means it's going to increase the amount of reactive oxygen species and induce a longevity response, while also keeping your blood glucose from being elevated for long periods of time, which is also helpful for lifespan. How about a CRM? What's a CRM? CRM is a calorie restriction mimetic. It's something that mimics the effects of calorie restriction. Yay. Well, you still get to eat cheesecake and steak and all your favorite foods. So calorie restriction mimetics, of course that's not an excuse to eat a bunch of crap all day long, but it is interesting that you can induce a lot of the same cellular mechanisms as calorie restriction with some of these CRM. So an example of a gda, something that will get glucose out of the bloodstream and shove it into the muscle more quickly to be used as energy. Something great to have before you go out to a steakhouse at night or before a big party or before you're going to have a bunch of Halloween candy or whatever it is that's going to increase blood glucose. But bitter melon, berberine, Ceylon cinnamon, cheap shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal. A mineral like chromium, aclonia, cava. These are all ingredients that you'll find in a lot of these GDA compounds. As far as CRMs, I have them listed there, right? You got resveratrol, sulforaphane, niacin, berberine, rapamycin. That's one of the reasons that rapamycin works is it not only down regulates a little bit of the MTOR pathway, but also acts as a calorie restriction mimetic. Even metformin. It's a very powerful calorie restriction mimetic. I don't like some of the side effects of metformin. It can cause a little bit of an inability to respond to exercise, similar to taking high dose antioxidants after exercise. But it is a pretty powerful calorie restriction mimetic. Done for you. Examples couple that I use Kion Lean. Full disclosure. I have a company, a supplements company. It's Kion, but Lean is bitter melon extract and chromium. It's a glucose disposal agent. Another one I just started experimenting with recently. I'm probably going to have these people on my podcast. I do a podcast a couple of times a week where I interview super smart people. I've been doing it for 17 years. That's where I've learned most of the stuff I know is just interviewing people who would normally not give me the time of day, but I get to talk to them on a podcast. So mimeo is another one that I recently found out about, and that one also is a very, very powerful CRM. So those are a couple examples of how we can use calorie restriction Temperature Stress Anybody been out in the sunlight and sauna or in the cold plunge? Turns out that both hyperthermia and hypothermia can both induce this reactive oxygen species longevity enhancing response that we're looking for. So the heat does this via the production of heat shock proteins. Those up regulate the reactive oxygen species defense mechanisms. And then the cold does this via a calcium influx that occurs as your body tries to get warmer, which causes an increase in reactive oxygen species. So by using hot and cold on a regular basis, you're getting two different mechanisms of action to induce this longevity enhancing response. That's one of the reasons why a robust hot cold practice is so, so useful for anti aging and longevity and age reversal. So four to seven times per week, frequent doses of heat as well as frequent doses of cold are good short quick bouts in cold water. Which is even better than cryotherapy by the way, because of what's called the hydrostatic pressure of the water against the skin and then frequent forays into the sauna. So what this would look like would be anywhere from four up to seven times a week. You can get in the sauna for anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes. I've got 30 minutes on there, but depends on the temperature, whether it's infrared, dry, et cetera. And then with cold, I mean I've already been in that cold plunge twice today, right? Super quick bouts of the cold, 30 seconds, one minute. It doesn't have to be these really, really long like five to ten minute shiver fest. And in fact the sympathetic nervous system and stress hormone response to those long bouts of cold can be a little bit paradoxical. It can exceed the Goldilocks zone, just like you can exceed the Goldilocks zone with exercise. But frequent forays into the heat and the cold are fantastic for inducing a lot of these mechanisms. A few quick pro tips on this. If you want to get hotter and you don't have a lot of time for the heat, you can use thermal burning agents prior. I'll give you one example. If you go use the pepper grinder at my house, there's secret it's not actually black pepper in there. It's something called grains of paradise extract. You can buy it just organic grains of paradise pepper extract on Amazon. It increases metabolic rate, increases the body's temperature. And you sweat buckets if you use that even in just hot water prior to getting into the sauna, there are other things that you'd expect. Cayenne embrocation creams. I discovered this when I used to do a lot of cycle racing. We'd put this on to keep the muscles warm when you were cycling in cold weather. But any of these things can increase the sweat response and cause your sauna to be more effective. In the same way that you could take things to make the sauna more effective, you can take things to make the cold more effective. A lot of these are called brown adipose tissue converters. These don't necessarily work on the reactive oxygen species mechanism, but they can increase your ability to to be able to burn calories and generate heat in response to the cold. I have them listed there. Grains of paradise is one by the way. Bitter melon, even melatonin. There's a lot of different ways that you can make the heat and the cold even better. And then anything you take that's going to increase blood flow, Niacin, Viagra, anything that has sildenafil in it, beetroot extract, these are all fantastic before the heat or the cold. To make those sessions more effective, they're just causing vasodilation and increased blood flow. So. So you get better sweat response, you get better cold regulation response, et cetera. Okay, the next way that you can induce a reactive oxygen species response is via the use of high amounts of oxygen or low amounts of oxygen. What you see up there on the slide are a couple of quotes from a paper that gets into the effect that large amounts of oxygen can have on the reactive oxygen species response. And then hypoxia kind of causes this defense response. Just like heat and cold are kind of like the turkey and cranberries of temperature regulation, it turns out hyperoxy and hypoxia are kind of the turkey and cranberries of the oxygen regulation environment. So how do you do this? You could start with cheap and easy ways, right? Like breath work. Because in breath work a lot of times you're hyperoxygenating and then letting a lot of oxygen out of the body. Who did my session this morning out in the lawn, the ungodly hour of 7am right? What did we start with? We did some Wim Hof style breath work. We hyper oxygenated our bodies. We ended with a Long breath out. And we were engaged in hyperoxia and hypoxia. That's pretty mild, though. You can use apps that walk you through this, like a dj, like Othership or Breath Source. And those are fantastic, as are static apnea tables like free divers would use. But if you want to cut straight to technology, there's some very, very cool ways that you can pull this off with technology. Many of you are probably familiar with hyperbaric chambers, like the kind they have at NextHealth. Here I've got a soft shell hyperbaric at home. That's oxygen under pressure. But you aren't experiencing hypoxia in that environment. So you aren't getting the best of both worlds, even though hyperbaric is good. The two ways that you can get the best of both worlds is via what's called ewat, which stands for, anybody know? Exercise with Oxygen Therapy. Exercise with Oxygen Therapy. So this would be a unit like the live O2. I've got this next to the exercise bike in my garage and allows you to flip from hyperoxia to hypoxia with the flip of a switch. So you're basically saturating your tissues with oxygen and then cutting off oxygen, then saturating them again. And it's a fantastic way to train. And you get an even better benefit than you do with hyperbaric when it comes to the reactive oxygen species response. The other way you can do this is in more of a sedentary environment. There's another unit called the cell gym, and this uses IHT intermittent hypoxic training. So it's very similar to that liveo2 that I just described, except usually sitting in a chair and drinking a Mai Tai with a mask on. And it's going back and forth from hyperoxia to hypoxia. And a lot of people will do breath work, meditation, et cetera during that. But those are a few things you can buy for a home gym or an office or your Zen den or wherever you like to do this stuff at home to play with oxygen and get this benefit of ROS activation through the use of oxygen. Okay, I got a couple more for you, two more for you. Plants, herbs and spices. This is what is actually called a xenohormetic response. X E N O xenohormetic response. Now, of course, there is a big surge right now in the diet and nutrition industry of people naming all the different things and plants that could kill you. And it is true, just about every plant is chock full of things that could kill you, especially if you ate too much of those plants or you didn't have the proper amount of endogenous reactive oxygen species formation due to maybe excess oxidative stress from another activity, like too much exercise or not doing enough other things to increase these defense mechanisms. But in small to moderate amounts, and especially in people whose guts are able to handle plants, people who don't have leaky guts, people are heavily stressed people have the time to slow down and chew your food like a cow. Plants and herbs and spices contain a lot of poison that in small doses can induce a hormetic response that makes them good for you. And this is why you'll see a lot of people who tend to be healthy and live a long time eating a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices. And there are exceptions to that rule. One speaker here, I learned from Dr. Stephen Gundry. He told me in my last podcast with him that the longest living country in the world is actually Andorra, this tiny little country between Italy and Spain. And their diet consists primarily of like fermented beef sticks and sausages and not necessarily plants and herbs and spices. But I would say that's an exception to the rule in most cases. This xenohormetic response that you get from a diet wide with a wide variety of produce, it's actually good for you, right? Turmeric, ginger, curcumin, all these different spices and herbs you can sprinkle into your food. As you saw me say in the video, this doesn't mean giant grocery shopping cart full of kale that you make a smoothie with every morning. But working these things in and rotating into the diet on a regular basis induces this hormetic response.

And then what you all have been waiting for, I know, all day long, can I have alcohol tonight?

So here's the thing. The dose and the volume at one time is important. You heard me say in the video that running could be pretty good for you. And one of the reasons is that running produces oxidative stress. But there's a big difference between running two or three miles a day and running 27 miles on a Saturday. One can create World War II in the muscles and one creates just enough of a response that you're able to bounce back from. And alcohol is very similar. The consumption of alcohol causes the body to upregulate its production of antioxidants, things like superoxide dismutase, glutathione, and if you have seven drinks at a time, the amount of acetaldehyde and toxins and poisons and ethanol that you're consuming will indeed cause you to cross over that Goldilocks zone. But low to moderate amounts of alcohol, and I'm not talking about alcohol use disorder, you can see what I've written there. And that's actually from a paper by Chris Masterjohn where he took apart every single study on alcohol consumption. You cannot lump the studies that show seven drinks at a time are bad for you with other studies that show anywhere from half a drink up to two drinks a day on a low to moderate basis is good for you. Right. So it's all amount, all about the amount of alcohol that you drink at one time. And I would say to a secondary extent, what else is in the alcohol like pesticides and herbicides and the high fructose corn syrup and that margarita mix, et cetera. There's a lot of confounding variables here, but ultimately it appears from most of the studies on alcohol that consumption of low levels of alcohol, meaning up to one drink per day, is associated with a 26% lower risk of heart disease and a 24% lower risk of all cause mortality. So I drink, I have a drink a day. I think somebody was starting to applaud for the fact that they can have a drink today. So I have about a drink a day glass of organic biodynamic wine or a little bit of a clean alcohol like a mezcal tequila or a gin or a vodka with a little soda water and lemon. I still do things to sop up the potential damage. Like I'll take a supplement called dhm, which is like an after party capsule, or another one called Zbiotics, which is like a probiotic. And these help to digest acetaldehyde, one of the toxic byproducts of alcohol. Because even though I'm getting a lot of the kind of reactive oxygen species induction, I still want to be able to soak up some of the side damage that could occur. I mentioned I choose clean products, I rehydrate, I use minerals, I'll even use things like spirulina and glycine if I've been out, been out to a big cheat meal at a steakhouse or something like that to soak up some of the damage because believe it or not, I do live a little. And a lot of people will hear that and be like, well, why do you drink alcohol at all if you got to do all these things to mitigate the damage? Well, I got news for you, like I drink water and I take electrolytes After I sauna to rehydrate my body, I sit in recovery boots and I get a massage after a hard exercise session to be able to bounce back faster from that. Right. I'll jump around and do some jumping jacks or some burpees after I get out of the cold to warm up from that. The fact that you do certain things to accelerate the benefit or decrease the risk of a certain activity does not mean that that activity is still not conferred benefit. Right? So I am on board with the idea of anywhere from a half up to two drinks of alcohol, and it's slightly higher for men than it is for women. Yay, fellows. And so the idea here, though, is that a lot of this is dependent on your history. Whether there's a history of alcohol use disorder, there's a lot of social side effects of alcohol that you do need to take into consideration. But in the long run, I'm not going to judge you if you guys are out there at the cocktail party drinking tonight. And as Arnold said, who's ready to party? So I do have slides available for you guys@bengreenfieldlife.com yposummit24 I a lot of times cover research really quickly, but I want you guys to be able to dig into it for yourselves if you want to, as well as access any references or resources that I mentioned during my presentation. Thank you guys so much for coming, especially you lazy folks in the front sitting on the beach loungers and yeah, come, come buy me a drink tonight. Thank you.

Can only make me.