What's REALLY Inside Lucy Gum and Feel Free Energy Drink, "Hidden" Ingredients in Nicotine Vapes And Candy, & More With Mass Spec Expert Ben Katz

Hey there, this is Erin Ryan. I'm the producer over at BGL. I wanted to give a quick disclaimer for this episode because it doesn't quite sound like the clean and clear audio that you are used to. We had some audio issues. However, this episode was too awesome not to post, so we wanted to put it out there anyway, and we apologize for a little bit of a fuzzy listening experience on the guest end. And we wanna remind you that the episode is also available on YouTube with subtitles if you prefer that way., but it's a unique episode. We haven't ever done an episode like this before, so we couldn't scrap it. We had to post it because we think you'll really like it. So please enjoy this episode.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast.

So chocolate produces theobromine, the major alkaloid, not caffeine. In cocoa nibs, right out of the chocolate plant, it's supposed to be 90% theobromine, 10% caffeine. So then, I start checking like M&M's and I'm like, "Okay, why is the ratio switched? Why is there 90% caffeine, 10% theobromine?" Then, you're like, "Okay, that's a little suspicious." 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.

Well, folks, I don't follow many people on Instagram. I'm not one of those feed scrollers, doom scrollers, whatever you want to call it. But occasionally, I come across some kind of interesting channel. Most of them are arch-based channels or occasionally people doing crazy acrobatic fitness or sports skills. I came across a scientific Instagram channel that I have been nerding out on. I don't even remember who sent it to me originally, but it's fantastic. It takes me back really to my days in college when I used to help run these machines called a mass spectrometry machine to analyze different compounds and chemicals in the lab. And don't worry, my guest will explain what mass is and how it works here shortly, but it's a way to identify and analyze different chemical compounds in just about anything. And so, my guest on today's show, his name is Ben Katz. And Ben has an Instagram channel. I'm going to link to it in the show notes. By the way, Ben, what's the actual handle?

It's Mass Spec Everything. I think if you search Mass Spec Everything, you can find it on Instagram. Yeah, it's just one word, so it's pretty easy to come by.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Mass Spec— let's see, Mass Spec Everything. And by the way, if you're listening right now, if you go to bengreenfieldlife.com/spec, S-P-E-C. I'll include all the shownotes and the links and everything that Ben and I talk about. But basically, he analyzes supplements and drinks and popular compounds that you may or may not have partaken in to see what's in them and if what's in them is actually what's in them and if there's things in them that you might not expect to be in them. And as a matter of fact, leading up to this podcast, I even took 2 things from my own personal stash up here in Spokane. I sent them down to Ben to analyze. He was kind enough to do so because there were 2 things I was getting a lot of questions about. I suppose they might fall under the category of vices. Drink, that's supposedly a blend of kratom and kava called Feel Free. I've had many people ask me about wondering if what's in there is actually what's in there. And then, nicotine gum, this Lucy nicotine gum. So, every time Ben runs something, there's a cost involved, so I didn't send him too much, but I sent him some Feel Free and some nicotine gum. So, on this podcast, I actually don't even know what Ben found out in those. So, I'll be the first to hear it along with you, but all sorts of other things that Ben analyzes. And so, we're going to get into some of his more surprising findings on this show. And again, go to his Instagram channel, Mass Spec Everything, if you want Check out more in the show notes at BenGreenfieldLife.com/SPEC. Ben, welcome to the show, man.

Hey, thanks for having me. It's kind of one of my first podcasts here, so we'll see if I can explain things. Well, I did this Wall Street Journal interview about nicotine pouches, and so that was kind of my first— I guess I'm starting to get a little bit famous here. So, it's not one of these things that I intended, but I think people are identifying with some of the content.

So, it's pretty interesting. With the meteoric rise of Tucker Carlson. And, from what I hear, his relatively hefty addiction to nicotine, it's probably good that you're analyzing all these pouches.

Yeah, yeah. He's definitely on the far side of a proponent of nicotine. And then, the other side of the interview was Chuck Schumer who's clearly very anti-nicotine. And so, I'm trying to— kind of the purpose of my channel is to kind of remain neutral. I like to be the scientist, the analytical chemist, and just to present kind of the facts of what is in things. I've tried to find my own little space where I stay in my lane. I don't want to provide too much medical content because I don't have any really medical background, but I'm, you know, the chemist. So I'm like, I try to be like a trusted resource to try to help tell people what's in things, if people, if products' claims are accurate and, you know, if there's things that aren't supposed to be there. And so, yeah, I try to keep it kind of center, center line, you know.

Yeah, I love it. We'll get back to the nicotine, I'm sure. But I'm just curious, how'd you actually get into this? Did you just like grow up, you know, with a wish list for a mass spectrometry machine for Christmas or something?

Yeah. So, if we start all the way back, I'm an engineer by trade. So, I was biomedical engineer and then I kind of fell into mass spec. Back in the mid-2000s, everybody was interested in diagnostics with mass spec. So, there was just kind of like holy grail dream that you could just take a drop of somebody's blood and put it into a mass spec trauma, and you can diagnose every disease, and you could tell people are healthy or if they were sick. And it turned out over the years, I joined a startup company who was trying to focus on instrumentation and using mass specs for diagnostics, and it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. That's what people have found out. So it's now taken about, I don't know, 20 years to catch up to the dream. Uh, so in the early, early days of mass spec, people were realizing that it was, uh, Bread was kind of complicated, but the degree that you had to get down to to find the real clear biomarkers, there was this order of magnitude difference. And it was really hard to get down to these real minor differences that kind of tell you diagnostic information. But that's kind of changed. So over the years, I've— I went back from a company to academics. I spent a lot of time. I spent 7 years at Kansas State University. So in Kansas, I was doing more agriculture product work and stuff like that. And so that's where I got interested in mass spec of products, supply chain, higher agriculture works. And so it's a lot of, you know, it's a lot of really interesting nuances as you look at how products are made and how crops are grown and how animal health. So you get to see this whole thing and then About 7 years ago, I switched and moved to California here. I'm at UC Irvine. And UC Irvine, I'm more in a synthetic chemistry environment. So I do a lot of medical health stuff, a lot of drug synthesis support, a lot of new therapeutic support. And so I started getting, getting interested in my old roots in Kansas, and I started wanting to run the food-related products and consumer products. And so that's kind of where it started. Coming back towards where people are a little bit more interested in what I'm doing.

Now, some people might not even be aware how mass spec actually works. When I watch your Instagram posts, I notice that, for example, you have to kind of figure out how to liquidify something before you actually use it in the machine. So, explain to me how this actually works.

Yeah, there's kind of 3 stages of getting things into a mass spectrometer. The first one is just an extraction purification. So, you have a product, It's clearly— there's a bunch of bulk ingredients that are kind of fillers that you don't really want to analyze. So you can kind of break it up into small molecules and macromolecules. And so mass spectrometers aren't really that good at real large macromolecules. So let's say you have a filler like a cellulose or like a— just kind of like a material that's taking up the bulk. Those are a little bit more difficult for us to analyze. So the first extraction is I'm really trying to get down to the purified chemical compounds that the mass spec can actually analyze. And so, a lot of that is just kind of experience on how to extract different products and getting them into a liquid solution and to a solvent where you can see the molecules you're interested in. Okay. And so, yeah.

I was going to ask you, you're probably getting there, but I noticed after you do it in a liquid and you put it in the mass spec machine, you see peaks that I'm assuming correspond to certain, if I remember back to college, certain masses of the molecules, right?

Exactly. And so, that's kind of the last step. So, the end of the process, is once you get it into the mass spectrometer, you can actually— you can think of mass spec as kind of like this intersection between chemistry and physics. So we really gotta get the mass molecules from chemical compounds, which are purified, into like this ionized cloud, into a phase where we can actually analyze them in a detector, almost like it's a physical particle, so like physics. And so, yeah, everyone kind of talks about how you got this like particles and waves and things like that in physics. So what we're trying to do is get molecules into a way that we can analyze them inside of more of a physical chemistry piece of equipment. And so there's a lot of complex physical properties and optics behind it. But basically what you're doing is if you think of a really small molecule, let's say that's 100, and a really large molecule, let's say it's 1,000, they—

What are the units when you say 100 or 1,000?

Molecular weight, so grams per mole. So that's kind of like you're thinking about grams per mole of a molecule. These are easy things to look up and do your own research. So if I see something that's had caffeine, you can go to Wikipedia and get the molecular formula and see the molecular weight of the molecule of caffeine. And so that's what I'm looking for. And the mass spectrometer is able to use different separation techniques to get the molecules to hit a detector at different times. And so we get really, really good high-resolution masses, really good mass accuracy, out to a third decimal place accuracy. On the exact mass of these molecules, right? And so we do that in an instrument called a time-of-flight typically. So it's a long drift tube, molecules have time to separate away, and so the longer they travel, the more separation you get and more accuracy you get at your detector. So a lot of this is, you basically, if you see some of my videos, I'm kind of like, I'll step up through low-end instruments to high-end instruments. And so you kind of got to use a bunch of different tools to kind of analyze a molecule in a bunch of different ways to get confidence. Sometimes people have heard about what's called HPLC, so high performance liquid chromatography. And so that's separations. So let's say you do your extraction, you're able to— let's say you're looking for caffeine. So you can go as a chemist, you can look up caffeine solubility. So you're going to go ahead and take your extract and try to extract out the caffeine with something that's soluble in but also try to eliminate all the things you don't want to look at and try to get, let's say, relatively purified compound mixture and extract with hundreds of compounds, you know, all the compounds kind of in the same mass range, in the same class of molecules. But we're trying to take it down from hundreds of thousands of things down to thousands of things. If I sent all thousand things into the mass spec at once, that would be just kind of like a direct injection. It wouldn't give me great accuracy and great It would be too much stuff overlapping for me to see. So that's where this chromatography comes in. And so there's liquid chromatography. We're basically sending that mixture across what's called a solid phase support. So it's a bunch of beads, tiny silica particles that have different chemistry on them that allows the molecules to interact. And so you're gonna elute off of this bound bed and the molecules will separate all out and you can look at them individually in the mass spec. And so that's called chromatography. And so I use two different types of chromatography. I use liquid chromatography for liquid samples. And then I use for the, what's called GC-MS. You guys used to see me do GC-MS a lot. So for the nicotine pouches, I'll use GC-MS. That's called gas chromatography. So in gas chromatography, you could think that all the molecules have different boiling points, right? And so what you could do if you put all the molecules onto a column inside of an oven, you could bake them off as you do a ramp in temperature in the oven, and you could bake them off as individual molecules. So everything would separate based on its kind of its— right? And so that's another way to do separations. Both of these techniques have advantages and disadvantages, right? So, um, and the oven— there was an obvious disadvantage that if the thing doesn't bake out at 350 degrees, if it's too big, I won't see it, right? It has to volatilize for me to be able to see it. And so that's kind of the distinguishing— that's kind of the difference when I decide whether to do GC-MS versus LC-MS. The first decision is, is this compound, um, gonna work in an oven volatilization kind of breakout approach? And there's a bunch of, you know, varying kind of chemical bond issues that you have to work out on that side.

Can you use the same machine for GC-MS and LC-MS?

No, they're completely different machines. And so But the backend, the mass spectrometer, they're different, but they work similarly. So the mass spec side is similar, but typically you would have these instruments are typically like almost fused together. So they're whether they're called tandem or inline analysis. And so the LC instruments are separate from the GC instruments. And yeah, so we typically have lots and lots of instrumentation and some redundancy on the mass spec side.

Yeah, just out of sheer curiosity, not that anyone would want one of these in their office, but how much does something like that cost?

Uh, between $600,000 and a million dollars. So $600,000 to a million dollars for one high-end instrument, um, on the LC side. The GC side is nice because GC instruments have been around a lot longer, um, and so the prices have come down due to competition. And, um, there's a lot of them out there. So I'd say that, uh, the GC instrument I'm using is maybe like between $100,000 and $200,000, and so those are a little bit more affordable. And then there's low-end instruments. So what we'll try to do is we'll try to keep projects off of the high-end instruments to keep the traffic down by using low-end instruments, which are usually in the $100,000 to $200,000 price range.

All right, this isn't necessarily something you're gonna put next to the air fryer in your kitchen then.

You know, the dream, everyone asks this question, is like, when am I gonna get a Mass Spec in my house or in my phone? And so my answer to, my question with people Because I get this from venture capitalists all the time and everybody like, we want these things in phones. And I always ask, well, what would someone do with it? Like, what would you use it for? And the answer I get is people, they have this kind of distrust in product labels. They have a worry about pesticides. So typically like these issues that you think you wouldn't really need it in your phone, if there was somebody out there, like that's kind of some of the inspiration of my channel is like, If you had a NASDAQ person you could trust, then you could steer these questions that you have to somebody you could trust, and you wouldn't have to actually have these things in your phone. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of real-time need at the moment for them, like in a cell phone.

Well, wouldn't there have to be a great deal of engineering too to get them down to size?

Because they're pretty large. Yeah, and there's a little bit of engineering, but there has to be new physics invented. So some of the eye and optic physics is just not not able to be miniaturized well enough. And so, there are some, you know, government labs and military labs that have worked on miniaturizing mass specs, and they've gotten them down to, you know, moderately heavy suitcase portable format. But, you know, with one of the mass specs that we have, it's probably one of the smallest. It's, you know, it's like a box. It's a pretty— it looks like a printer. It's the size of a printer. Yeah.

I mean, the ones I've seen are about the size of a mini fridge.

Yeah, so I have ones that are the size of Ben Greenfield's on wheels. I have ones that are 10 feet tall that have these long tops. So they're huge ones. And then the smallest I've seen them get it down, it's almost annoying when they make them small because there's so much equipment in there that when it breaks, it's so compact, it's impossible to get a thing opening. And so the funny thing I did find out is that, you know, on the Mars rovers, they have mass spectrometers. And that's like, they have detection stuff on Mars rovers. So Driving around on Mars right now is a mass spec in the Mars rover. And I was like, you guys gotta choose something really compact. Like, is there a smaller design out there that I don't know about that JPL decided to use? And they said, no, we're using the same, the same printer-sized mass spec that I have. So they based the design off the one that we currently are using. And so that's as small as it gets. If it's on the Mars rover, That's definitely the smallest it's gonna get.

Oh man. And last usage question, then I actually wanna talk about some of the things you've tested. How much does it actually cost to run a sample?

So a lot of times people try to tie in a lot of the instrument cost, instrument maintenance costs to the sample. So the sample itself, if you just looked at the things you needed to run the sample, like a vial is like a dollar, the extraction solvents really aren't that expensive. So just the actual materials cost is really low, probably a couple dollars. But a lot of people try to tie in some instrument maintenance costs. And so I'd say it probably costs between $10,000 and $50,000 a year to maintain an instrument. And so they'll try to parse out some of that cost for operations, just kind of like, you know, mileage on your car when you're driving it. And so it's that, that's, and then technician costs. And so we have set external rates. And so I think it's typically around about $150 a sample if we had an external client.

Okay, okay, got it. Just for folks who are curious about sending Ben stuff, you might want to be—

Yeah, yeah, reach out to me and see if the project works at best. And then I have started, since I get a lot of requests now, the popularity has been a little surprising. I have an external lab partner that I'm starting to start referring people to just because it's just too much for me to handle at this point. Yeah.

Okay, well—

My general allegiance is to academics and research that's published and And so, yeah, it's kind of a balance.

I get it, but nicotine pouches are sexy. People want to see it. Oh, my gosh.

I didn't even realize how many people were using these things until I started asking about it. But, man, they are popular.

Oh, yeah, just as popular as all these inhalers. A lot of people are just waking up and using throughout the day. So, let's start there with nicotine. I'm curious, what are some of the more popular ones that you've tested and what you found?

Yeah. So, my nicotine interest kind of started back with some of this California regulation. So, I worked with the DEA and FDA on some of the regulation around nicotine products. And my first big interest on nicotine is the— I don't know if anyone's noticed, but synthetic nicotine has kind of exploded onto the market. Nicotine for the longest time was tobacco-derived. I think only about 2 or 3 years ago I even saw synthetic nicotine come into the industry and market, you know, the marketplace. And then people started realizing it and started like almost They prefer the synthetic nicotine. And that's kind of the— that was kind of the story that I liked. Okay. So I'm a synthetic chemist. I support chemists. I understand the differences between a synthetic molecule where you would basically get what you're— what's being advertised, right? So if you say this pouch has nicotine in it, it's 100% clean nicotine if it's synthetic. They go through great effort to make sure that the molecule is perfectly clean. Because of this synthetic nicotine industry, at first the extractors— so basically, if you're making a nicotine product that's not a cigarette, where it's just tobacco leaf inside of something, right, or dip, where it's just tobacco leaf in there, but you're selling a vape or a pouch and it's derived from nicotine, derived from tobacco, that means that you're doing my first step, that extraction step. You have to extract the nicotine out of the tobacco leaf and purify it in order to put it into something else. And so that's the part that was really interesting to me. The problem is, is that plants don't produce just one molecule. A plant is a complex metabolism. The secondary metabolism uses a cascade of enzymes and they don't make just one— so they're alkaloids, right? So they don't just make one alkaloid, they make a whole bunch of them in various levels. And so that's the complexity in extracting from tobacco, is that not only do you get nicotine, you get a bunch of minor nicotine-related alkaloid impurities that kind of tag along. And, uh, you could spend a lot of effort and cost, uh, purifying away those impurities. And technically, that's really expensive. And so some companies, uh, do a better job than others in purifying nicotine derived from tobacco.. And so a lot of my first interest was checking nicotine products. The project was started with vapes. I wasn't— the pouches weren't even really on the market yet when I started. And I was just looking to see if companies were telling the truth. If you were saying you had synthetic nicotine, were you actually using synthetic nicotine or were you trying to hide it and say that you were using tobacco-derived nicotine? And so just distinguishing difference was, it was kind of what led me to my interest in nicotine. So that's kind of one of the first things I continue to check when I see these products is the synthetic nicotine claim true. And so it's kind of an interesting difference.

You tested Zyn. What'd you find in Zyn?

Zyn seems like it is a synthetic nicotine product. So I don't see any, in the Zyn products, I don't see any tobacco-related alkaloid impurities. So that suggests that it's fully synthetic. And that's, you know, that's a positive. You know, you don't want to encourage people, you know, I get a lot of flak, you know, at the university. You don't want to encourage people to use nicotine products. You don't want to encourage kids to use nicotine products. However, from the chemist's point of view, people are already using nicotine products. I can't control consumer demand, and that's got to be somebody in the medical profession to go through and tell people, you know, not to use nicotine products. But as a chemist, you want people to be given purified, clean products. So if they're saying that it's nicotine, you wanna make sure that it's just nicotine and there's not— So one of the worst molecules that can be in there is this alkaloid called anabastine. Anabastine's considerably more carcinogenic. It's a really toxic molecule. And depending on which tobacco plant you get your nicotine from, there could be varying levels of how much anabastine's in there. And so that, that's a really good marker. There's other ones, there's like cotinine, there's a bunch of these. If you did your own research, you could look up all these minor nicotine impurities and these other alkaloids that are associated with the plant and how toxic they really are. And so I think a lot of the problems in smoking, it does have a— they're all minor alkaloid effects. And so I think that isn't addressed enough when people talk about it.

Yeah, I seem to recall from your Zyn video, it was just basically synthetic nicotine at, I believe, something close to the amount that they said they had in it, then some kind of a flavoring or a cooling agent. It seems pretty straightforward to me.

Exactly. And so, that's the part that really got me interested. So now, we got a product. It seems like I sorted out with the DEA, FDA, and I had this new regulation. We sorted out the synthetic versus tobacco-derived nicotine. They got the tobacco guys to start cleaning up the nicotine real good. The synthetic guys were allowed to come into the marketplace and sell clean synthetic nicotine. And so now I'm like, okay, I'll keep checking it, but I'm not seeing as many problems with the nicotine anymore. So I'm like, okay, this product advertises nicotine, I can check it, and it seems like most of the time everybody is telling the truth. And so that's why I continue to check them. And the gum that you sent me also is using a clean nicotine source.

Yeah, I sent you the, I sent you the Lucy gum, by the way. Yeah, they have the pouches and stuff, essentially the gum because a lot of people chew it. They've been a sponsor on the podcast before, so I was like, "Yeah, I know a lot of people are using this." So, am I going to lose my sponsorship here from Lucy?

No, I think it's a clean product. I mean, it's a clean nicotine product. It is a nicotine product, but it's synthetic and it does seem to be pure. And so, everything I've looked at from it so far suggests it's as advertised.

Have you ever tested a nicotine product and you were like, "Holy cow, this is not good. It's got one of those carcinogenic chemicals in it"?

To tell you the truth, it's typically vapes. They're getting away with a lot in the vape industry. It's, if you think about it, the pouches, again, I don't know how much people are even checking these on the regulatory side, but on my side, it is much easier to check a pouch because of it being a nicotine salt that's in a powder inside of a pouch. It's a little bit easier for me to do my extraction. The the, the, what is it, the PG, the eGPG vape juice liquid. It's this ethylene glycol, propylene glycol, like liquid goo. And it's a moderately challenging extraction to get the nicotine clean out from away from that, that, that liquid, that e-liquid. And so it's, I've had a little bit, I've noticed more impurities in these e-liquids, but generally over the last 2 years, the whole, the whole sector has seemed to get a little bit cleaner. I've noticed. So I haven't been seeing as many impurities as I used to. So I'm starting to be okay with the nicotine source a little bit more. The reason I started focusing on the pouches is actually the flavors. I'm now more concerned about the flavors than I am— and then it's not this idea that people are talking about. Typically people say no flavors because they don't wanna encourage children to use nicotine products and the kids would like the flavors more than plain.

Right, right. The classic bubblegum flavored 10mg nicotine patch.

Right, you go to any high school and they're still buying flavors. And so the best place to smell flavored vapes is go to a high school parking lot and they're everywhere, right? And so that type of regulation doesn't seem to really work so well. But my interest is the flavors could have toxic effect. And so that's not being talked about enough. There are a lot of mint molecules specifically. So I tried to mention that in my spearmint Zim video. There are definitely some flavors. If you start reading through the toxicity of wintergreen oil, not wintergreen oil, but of spearmint oil, and peppermint oil, there's this molecule called Polo Balm, which is just a kind of like a minty flavor that comes along with the oil. There's strict rules out there about how much spearmint oil you should consume a day because of how carcinogenic and toxic some of these flavorants are. And so some of my concern was in conjunction with the nicotine, some flavors may not be as good as other flavors. And so, I'm trying to kind of almost encourage the push towards synthetic flavors away from natural flavors in the same fashion that I was trying to push the synthetic nicotine over the naturally derived nicotine.

Because with the synthetic flavors, you can dial in much lower carcinogenic potential because you know you're working with—

You can choose 1 or 2 molecules, right? You can say, "These 2 molecules, these are the flavors we're putting in there. We've checked them. We know they have no carcinogenic potential." But then you still see people slip in, they'll say, "We're just using spearmint oil." And that's really obvious. As soon as you see a product with spearmint oil, there's instead of 1 or 2 peaks which are flavors, there's, you know, 30 or 40 peaks which are flavors. And there's a bunch of minor peaks. And it's the same thing. It's like, if you get the flavor from a plant, you get all these tagalongs. And so it— I kind of— the next conversation that I like to have around those types of products is the flavor. And rich flavors use naturally derived— it's kind of weird, right? Because everyone's like, oh, I love naturally derived flavors. Everyone wants natural. But in specific situations where you're not just chewing on like a mint leaf, where there's a lot of extraction chemistry going on and concentration, sometimes naturally derived is not as good as synthetic. At least you don't get, you don't get as much of what you're being told is in there. So it's definitely not as clear.

Right. If you're looking for precision and predictability, then often synthetic is the way to go.

So then everyone's like, "Okay. Well, you've looked at every single zin, which one would you recommend?" Right? And so, I typically steer people towards flavors like wintergreen because they found out that wintergreen oil is too expensive, right, to grow wintergreen. And you can make synthetic wintergreen as methyl salicylate, which is like aspirin essentially. That's my joke is that if you take 60 zins, you get a tab of aspirin, right? But since we manufacture so much salicylates already, salicylates are in a lot of products including aspirin. Methoxalicylate tastes just like wintergreen. So, if you look at a wintergreen zin, it's methoxalicylate. It's just like one boom, single line and you're like, "Okay, methoxalicylate, nicotine." I don't know any of the medical side behind methyl salicylate, but I like that when a product is one thing because it's easy to regulate, it's easy to control, and it's easier to manufacture. Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

And I should name, by the way, as you already alluded to that despite this discussion kind of going the direction of cleaner forms of nicotine, folks, it is highly addictive and it can cause things like vasoconstriction, erectile dysfunction, headaches in a lot of people due to the vasoconstriction. You have the addictive potential of simply needing it to get by. There's a lot of things to think about before you— So, yeah. So, check yourself if you are using nicotine.

And for people that already have a nicotine addiction and they're smoking cigarettes or they're using vapes, the pouches are giving a nice avenue for quitting. It seems to be a purer product than a lot of the vapes that I've been checking. I like that they seem to be accurate in the amount of nicotine they're putting in each pouch. And so there's 6mg pouches, which allows you to wean off how many, you know, how many times you're using the vape and keep that higher level of nicotine, and then you can transition down to that 3mg pouch. And so I like products that give people this avenue to quit. Kind of my early, my big recommendation, if you know, it's— you're big enough, maybe the Zyn people that are listening in and, you know, the Roosies Gum people that are listening in, I would love it if a nicotine company sold a zero nicotine product. I feel like, you know, the kids are gonna be doing pouches, right? Like, if there's peer pressure out there, if you sold at the convenience store a zero nicotine pouch Zyn, that had the exact same flavoring as the other ones, it would, it would give that, that avenue for the person to quit, to get off of it finally and to still kind of look cool.

Oh yeah, absolutely. You get the habit, you get the mouthfeel, you get the kinesthetic sensation of opening the can. That's a really good point.

Exactly. And so it's like, what's the harm? And if you're going to, if you're going to force regulation and say, hey, let's try to regulate this thing, the approach I would come at to say, first, all companies that sell zero nicotine products.

Yeah, just call it Zyn Zero.

Call it Zyn Zero. And the cool thing about that is I have so many people comment on the Zyn video, so I'm starting to get this breadth of knowledge of just what people think about them. And it's really interesting. I didn't realize that— I thought it was a very male-oriented product. I didn't realize that the girls, even high school-age girls, were using these things.. And the most interesting thing that I noticed that they kept commenting was that they liked the flavor, they liked the effect of hanging out with the friends and putting the pouch in. The thing they didn't like was that it gave them the jitters, that it gave them, uh, that it burned in their rip, um, and that it made them kind of sweaty. I was like, those are all side effects of just the nicotine. Like, that's, that's like, if you All the things you like are the things that aren't the nicotine. And so, if they were just selling products that are just pouches with no nicotine, I feel like people may make the decision not to even include the nicotine on their own.

Yeah, you make a really good point too about the acidity, the esophageal irritation. A lot of people are on acid blockers and the issue is that the impact on the microbiome and on digestive capacity. If you're chewing gum or using a pouch and then you sit down to dinner, you actually don't produce adequate digestive enzymes, then people get leaky gut, constipation, et cetera. And they don't come full circle and tie that back to the digestive disruption that the acid-alkaline shift from having one of those in your mouth prior to a meal can cause. So, it is important to think about.

Yep. And then, I think people really like chewing gum. And then, gum, I started looking at gum because a lot of the same flavoring agents that are in pouches are in gum, almost to more of an extreme level. And so the next thing that kind of caught my attention was this use of these synthetic cooling agents. Okay, so I talk about these quite a bit. And then at scientific conferences, I talk about these synthetic cooling agents. And so it's kind of a, it's kind of an interesting history behind these. If you guys did your own research, they're called W— they're called— they call them WS-3 and WS-23 synthetic cooling agents. Cooling agents are typically, they're typically used in vapes. And these ones were invented back in maybe the '70s for straight razors, for shaving. And so these are menthol mimics that don't have like a minty, they don't really have much of a minty taste. They just kind of have a cooling sensation. And so what they do is like when you shave with a, I don't shave with a straight razor, but when you shave with a straight razor, it would hurt. But these synthetic cooling agents actually are in the little, the razor strip and it blocks pain. So they're like short-term kind of cooling pain blockers. And so they put them in shaving cream and they put them in things. So all of a sudden people started thinking, okay, vapes, when I inhale and hit a vape really hard, that burns, that hurts. But what if we put synthetic cooling agents in there? Maybe that will allow people to take these big rips of this compound and not have it hurt. And then the same thing with the pouches, it burns. And so they start putting in more and more of these synthetic cooling agents, which typically were originally designed to be a real low concentration, not internal, just external on the surface of your skin. But they've started since, since they went into gum, it kind of gave them that avenue into the mouth and they're like, okay, so gum is not technically considered food, it's kind of considered a confectionery. And so then they gave them that. So they've kind of been able to maneuver these synthetic curing agents through the industry because of how regulation has changed around certain sectors. And so where they were typically early in, it kind of went like They're in shaving products, then they got them into toothpastes and the flossers, and then they're like, "Okay, well, they're already in mouth, so let's put them in gum." And the nicotine industry's like, "Oh, they're already in gum, we can put them in pouches." And so, it's kind of gotten all out of proportion now. And so, these things are starting to be used a lot more.

Yeah. The analgesic effects of mint are so interesting. Yesterday, I was reading a study in which they gave peppermint oil-infused water to runners and significantly reduced time to or increased time to exhaustion and reduced rating of perceived exertion. I even have this menthol spray out in my gym that's meant to be sprayed in the hands then you huff it almost like smelling salts. It gives you a lot of energy. Yeah, it lets you push harder. It does have a painkilling effect.

Yeah, it's interesting because from the scientific side, you think about these things as TRP channel modulators, right? So, the most common TRP channel people know about is capsaicin. So, TRPV is the vanilloid TRPV channel, which basically tells you if something's hot and spicy, right? So these are TRPM and TRPA channels, which kind of affect cooling and pain sensation. And so it's kind of neat to see these— you almost don't want to think of them as flavors. They are bioactive molecules that modify how TRPV channels, you know, behave. And so it's really interesting to think about how flavors really do have a bioactive effect and what they actually can do. Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah.

Well, in addition to the nicotine craze, there's a big surge of interest in use of kratom now. A lot of times for the analgesic property, sometimes for energy, sometimes even as an alternative to opioids, as an alcohol alternative. So, I took one of the popular brands. I get asked about a lot of this Feel Free bottles like sludge and little Blue Bottle, supposed to be kratom and kava. And, yeah, I'm curious what you found.

Yeah. So, it's as advertised. I really dug in there and tried to find out if, one, if it's got a synthetic opiate in it because that's the first thing that everybody was kind of contacting me about. Oh, yeah.

People have been asking me if it's got fentanyl in it, synthetic opioids, everything.

Yeah. Everything that I've looked at in it so far and I've done untargeted metabolomics on it, which is really advanced way to send things through database with like 300,000 compounds in it to see if I can pick out anything that really shouldn't be there. But the overwhelming high concentration of exactly what's supposed to be there, exactly what they're saying there. And so it is kava lactones from kava. We can go through some of these kava lactones that I detected and then I'm going to butcher the name, but I think it's called like mitrogenin.

Mitrogenin. That's the extract of kratom. Mitrogenin, which is the— yeah.

Again, so like I was talking before, when you have extracted products, both of these, you could probably make synthetic kaufmannactins, which are a little bit simpler, but mitrogynia has so many stereocenters, it would be near impossible for somebody to synthetically make this compound. So I think it's, I mean, maybe somebody in the synthetic group has published a paper on how to do it, but it's definitely going to be a product that's going to be naturally extracted from the plant. And so with that comes along a bunch of other mitrogynin impurities, you could call them, or just related structures, right? And so it is a classic— the way it looks like when I extracted it out of the field fruit and put it onto the mass spec, it gives you this cluster of peaks that are all right about the same mass, you know, a couple grams per mL different in either direction. And that's a classic plant extract product. So it's for sure a kratom extract. And then the same thing with the kava. The kava lactones are a big cluster of very similarly structured lactone products. And again, it's the same thing where it's just, just one big extracted looking mass of peaks. Yeah.

Did you try to drink any?

I did, I did.

That stuff will light you up.

A lot of these things scare me. I don't even drink that much caffeine to tell you the truth. So, it's sad. All of these things are interesting. But, I had a colleague try it and he said that it made him sleepy. But, I've heard very mixed reviews from people online. I'm not medical, so I don't know the addictive effects of it, but I've heard addictive, I've heard not addictive.

Yeah, it really depends on your CYP enzymes and how you're wired up.

I've heard stimulant, I've heard sedative. It's crazy. It's all over the place. Yeah.

It's kind of like how you could be a fast caffeine oxidizer or a slow caffeine oxidizer based on CYP genetics. Some people feel horrific on kratom, some people feel really dialed in on kava, but then others feel sleepy because it's a little bit of an adaptogen. And then, some people feel like kratom makes them drunk, other people just get good clean energy from it. It varies widely.

Yeah. I've never tried kratom before. I have tried kava. Down in San Diego, there's a lot of kava shops and stuff like that. And so, I've tried kava. It's just a relaxing—

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot less concerns about it, especially from an addictive standpoint than kratom. Have you tested any other kratom products?

I had a kratom project actually. I didn't end up going for it. There's a technique, for neurologists, uh, and pharmacologists where you can actually tell how drugs work. And so that— it's called voltage clamping, uh, and current clamping. And so you can actually, uh, measure a potential across a cell, uh, using like a really, really tiny, uh, microneedle. You can actually like suction on or measure, uh, an individual neuron's potential, uh, and they can do it on channels. So if you're talking about how a specific channel works And so I had a professor that I worked on, he's very interested in a couple different channels. And so we were interested in kratom for a while, about maybe 3 or 4 years ago. And so we had a graduate student that went and got the kratom powder from probably every shop in Los Angeles and we checked them. And so it's definitely a product that's all over the place, especially when you're buying the powders from different shops. I only tested one bottle of the Feel Free you sent to me, but the concentration of the kratom molecules in the Feel Free product was quite— it's a concentrated product, that is for sure. So, that's the thing that I would probably tell people is to start small.

Yeah. I think they have some kind of a fermentation process when they make it to where if you're used to a certain kind of kratom, and then you try that, it comes across as way more powerful.

It seems way more powerful. So, anytime anyone mentions they're doing a fermentation, it typically is just liberating more of the active portion of the molecule. So, when plants typically make things metabolically, they'll stick sugars onto it and things like that which will sometimes deactivate a molecule. And so, sometimes when you do a fermentation, it helps extract and liberate more of the active compound. And so, that's what I'm seeing. I'm not seeing a lot of thylcosylated mucharjun. I'm not seeing— I'm basically seeing it and its hydro and dehydro form, which is just a 2-dalton double bond move. So, it seems to be very much as advertised. Super interesting, huh? Yeah. The kava too. The kava is— you know, in kava, I just had to pull up here. So, a lot of people talk about kava'ain, I guess is how you say it. I saw kava in the sample, but I saw it was yangonin. And I don't know the medical differences, but I'm into it. But the, the yangonin seems to be the most abundant. If you're going to like research the kava lactones, because kava lactones are— they've been characterized like really well. They're very abundant. And so there's a lot of them. Really, there's like really just— it seems like there's just two. There's just like the mitrogene, and then it's got a bunch— it's a hydro, dehydro, deoxo. So things that would happen in extraction and storage can happen to it, but typically those molecules just have ever so slightly different potencies, right? So just like, just like capsaicin, like if you take a spicy pepper and it's an old spicy hot sauce, like it was fermented, it could change the flavor and the spice profile a little bit. But it's just spicy, right? There's no effect that happens. The, the kava is interesting. If you start digging through the kava lactones, they all seem to hit slightly different channels. And with specifically this one, ylang-ylang, it's kind of interesting because it seems to be a CB1 cannabinoid, CB1, CB2 cannabinoid binder. So I don't know much about the— what people talk about with this. And I just, I was interested to see that The yamanin seemed to be the most abundant of the kava lactone.

Yeah. Well, that would certainly explain a lot of the anxiolytic effects of kava if it's interacting with the CB1 and CB2 receptors like that. Did you ever test anything that was a huge shocker for you? Like, the peaks that came up really were way off of what was advertised in the ingredients or things were in it that were way different than what you expected?

I got two interesting stories I could tell you. Okay. So, the first one which is kind of more relatable to everybody is caffeine. I've been really interested in caffeine. Again, it's another molecule that's made synthetically and in massive amounts for Coca-Cola, right? So they call that caffeine anhydrous. Since caffeine can come from multiple different places, they've made strict naming ingredient names for them. So if it's caffeine anhydrous, it's synthetic caffeine made synthetically from usually, I think, urea manufacturing. And that's what you see in soft drinks in Coca-Cola. But you could also have naturally derived caffeine. And typically the required on-label ingredient to say naturally derived caffeine, right? And that'll be from tea or green coffee. And you can have minor xanthines that come along with it. So minor nicotine, minor caffeine impurities. The thing that was interesting to me is I started checking chocolate. I got young kids. My kids love chocolate. I'm like, okay, so chocolate. Is a caffeine source, and that's pretty well known and that's trusted. And everyone— anytime you tell people that there's caffeine in chocolate, they say, well, caffeine is supposed to be in chocolate. But there is a published ratio. So caffeine— so chocolate produces theobromine. Theobromine is the major alkaloid, not caffeine. In cocoa nibs right out of the chocolate plant, it's supposed to be 90% theobromine, 10% caffeine. And that is the way the plant's metabolism is supposed to produce. And the theobromine is the molecule you want. That's your chocolate. That's what everybody's after.

Yeah, maybe arguably a little bit of the paraxanthine in there has a similar effect. But yeah, theobromine is the big hitter.

Yep, that's the one you're after. So then I start checking like M&M's and I'm like, okay, why is the ratio switched? Why is there 90% caffeine, 10% theobromine? And then you're like, okay, that's a little suspicious. And so you're like, okay, maybe it's something to do with coffee, with chocolate manufacturing. So maybe it's Hershey's isn't being malicious. Maybe, maybe it's chocolate manufacturing. So let's step it back a bit. Let's go to cocoa powder. So cocoa powder is called cocoa powder, but it's not just cacao, it's cocoa powder. And then some people will label it cocoa mass. And so they'll check, like, let's say Trader Joe's Cocoa powder versus Hershey's cocoa powder, and the ratios are different. And you're like, oh, something's going on in the cocoa manufacturing. And then you'll get cocoa liquor, and the cocoa liquor fraction will be slightly different too. And so you're like, okay, so there's maybe an effect in manufacturing chocolate for different products that's causing some of this increased caffeine.

And now we know why when kids are running around hyper on Halloween, it might not just be the sugar, might be all the caffeine in the M&M's.

And so that's what I started doing. So then I'm like, okay, Okay, do other people notice this? Are people like checking caffeine levels in candy? Because I'm not the first one that's probably thought about this. And it turns out there are a lot of websites out there. I've been trying to work through and validate a lot of their numbers, but candy bars have altered levels of caffeine. It's all over the place. And so that was my first really interesting thing that I found is that some candy bars and candy I shouldn't give to my kids and some candy It should be okay to give to my kids. And, it doesn't seem to— everyone's like, "Oh, you're giving them dark chocolate." That doesn't seem to be— if milk chocolate M&M's has adulterated high caffeine, then we really should start going through and checking caffeine levels.

Yeah. And, by the way, obviously, dosage is an issue here. You say M&M's have caffeine. Let's say there's 100, 150 milligrams in a cup of coffee. How much are we talking about in an average serving of M&M's?

That's something I'm not going to comment on yet. I bet we're trying to get to the bottom of it. And so we're working on quantitative assays. The way that I'm going to approach it, we could talk about though. So I'm thinking that we do it by serving, right? And so it's kind of frustrating. Okay, how do you even normalize that? Because there's like, you got one product is an energy drink and one is a drink and the other one's a powder and another one's like a, you know, like a candy. And so we decided we'll go ahead and start looking at this, but we're going to start doing it by serving size. And so would you say that a serving size, a recommended serving size of M&M's would have more or less caffeine than a cup of coffee? And so that's the type of things we're trying to investigate. So, yes, stay tuned on the channel. We're trying to get more quantitative. Originally, my channel was not trying to be quantitative, but I keep getting a lot of quantitative questions. And so I think I'm mainly originally interested in this proper chocolate ratio. So I'm trying to check products right now, not quantitatively, but just trying to see which products have what look like adulterated ratios. So I'm trying to see, like, do you have more theobromine than caffeine in your chocolate product? And so there are products out there that, like, okay, so the most interesting one is this Kinder Egg. So these kids love these Kinder Eggs. They're advertised for them. There's like a toy in it, right? It's down at the kids level in the grocery store. So they're always asking for them when you check it out. And so, this is 100% absolutely a product designed for children. So, if that has adulterated caffeine, then we got a problem. So, that was one of the first ones I went to and I was happy to find out that the Kinder Egg has the correct ratio of theobromine.

Good. So, Kinder Egg is not going to suppress bone mineral density or stunt growth or make them grow crazy.

Yeah. So, that's kind of where I'm at at the moment on that project. And we're trying to dedicate more time this summer, to quantifying everything. Um, it takes a bit more work to get to the quantitative level. You use an instrument called a triple quad mass spectrometer, um, which is kind of a dedicated quantitation instrument. Um, and so it's a little bit more work to get to that, but that's, that's kind of the direction we're going.

You said there was one other thing though that you found shocking. I'm curious if you got one more.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so it's going a completely different direction. Uh, there's, uh, okay, so I checked hot sauce.. And I was originally just looking at hot sauce because it's kind of interesting. And I found a compound called diphenylamine. So diphenylamine is— it sounds nasty, right? It's like, what is this thing? It's a synthetic molecule that's sprayed on fruits and vegetables. And so it's what's called a growth regulator. So what happens is you harvest your apples, let's say, and then if you're at a farmer's market, they'll bring it to you and you'll eat the apple right away, so we don't have to spray it on there. But typically apples are put into cold storage and then they're brought to the grocery store out of the freezer, and so this— or out of the fridge. And so this going into a cold storage and then coming back out of the cold storage, most fruits and vegetables get spots. So they will get these little brown spots on them just because they went into the fridge and came out of the fridge. And so there's this compound called diphenylamine that you could just literally spray all over fruits and veggies and that will prevent them for having this cold storage problem. And so I started seeing that on just— it tracks through like the hot sauce and the applesauce into like— and so I was like, wow, they're really putting a lot of this diphenylamine onto apples and peppers and And so, that was something that, again, I have to get back to it and start trying to figure out the real levels. But, it was really concerning. It was something that you could do your own research on the internet about DPA on fruits and veggies.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. Are there health concerns with DPA?

Yes, all over the place, people talking about DPA. And, it's The concern I have is that it's not being reported, right? That it's not an active topic of conversation that you could maybe try to have options for people that don't want DPA, right? And say, hey, I don't really care if there's brown spots on my apple, just don't do it. But since it's a post-harvest regulator, I don't think you I don't think it's not organic. That's the weirdest thing, right? So organic applies to how you grow the produce. Once you harvest the produce and you spray it with a post-growth regulator like DPA, I still think it qualifies as organic. And I'm maybe not the expert on—

I'm pretty sure you're right that certified organic refers to herbicides, pesticides, filters, pre-harvesting.

Exactly. But this post— so that was the next thing that I really wanted to investigating more is kind of this broad use of post-harvest growth regulators that have been making it into fruits and vegetables. And so a lot of, you know, a lot of people are very health-oriented and they're like, all right, I'm just going to eat clean, clean meat and fruits and vegetables and cook all of my food at home. And so I want this knowledge to be out there so people realize that there's sometimes a little bit more to the picture on fresh fruits and veggies. Specifically around the cold storage issue. And so maybe there's this need for, I don't know, just kind of another option. So people are really focused on the way produce looks, you know, it needs to look so perfect. And so maybe if there's this, you know, maybe if the, that the consumer wants changes, then the market will change. And so I'm a very big proponent of consumer-oriented change. If the people are like, hey, we don't want these red regulators on there anymore, We don't care if there's spots, give me an option, then the market will fill that, fill the void. And so that's, that's kind of just trying to get that idea out there that there is this whole category of post-wrath regulators that, that could be on even organic fruits and vegetables.

Do you get many people sending you supplements like capsules, tablets, soft gels, things like that?

Yeah, I've been, I've been slowly thinking about getting into that. I'm not going to I'm not doing synthetics at the moment, so I started looking at creatine. I've started looking at caffeine, like pre-workouts and things like that. And I just started branching into mushrooms. And so my next one I'm going to look at is lion's mane mushroom. There's been so much— I've been getting it on, on social media as well. So much people, so many people talking about lion's mane and, and the effects of effects of it on cognition and memory. And so, to me, it's surprising that a lot of these mushroom products are on the market because of how labor-intensive it is to grow mushrooms to a fruiting body. And so, anytime I see this kind of disparity where there's low-price, large-quantity products that come from the natural source, I start getting interested because I want to check it to make sure that it's legitimate and that consumers are—

Yeah, yeah, you're on the right track with mushrooms because it can be grown on a starchy, cheap medium and wind up with a bunch of—

Yeah, it could not even fruit, right? You could be growing up mycelia in a spinning, spinning culture and that could be what you're selling. And so in mushrooms specifically, there's a lot of kind of maturity issues of a mushroom to actually produce the secondary metabolites that you're active. And so for a chemist, it's great. I could just take the powder they give me and check for them all through itself and be like, hey, does this actually have eritacines in it? Or was it not? And so, that's kind of the direction I'm going to go. So, I have started looking at supplements and confirming some things, but I'm mainly focused on natural products right now.

Yeah.

You, good sir, are doing the world a very interesting service. And I'm hoping that my listeners get a chance to check out your channel. I assume that's one of the better ways to support you is just go follow you and pay attention to what you do.

Yeah. At the moment, I haven't I've tried a couple avenues to— I've been like dabbling in monetization, but right now I haven't really focused a lot of monetization. So it's more just follow me and, um, you know, just continue enjoying the content and interact and reach out. I learned a lot of the positive from all this is I learned so much from people commenting. A lot of people think that, uh, even— yeah, I'm not even that big of an influencer, but they first don't read messages and comments. Uh, I take time to try to go through everything and respond to it myself. I've been keeping everything in-house and trying to manage things on my own. And so, I like hearing what people say. I like hearing people's opinions and suggestions and it helps guide some of the interest of what I'm looking for. Yeah.

Well, the page for everybody listening is Mass Spec Everything on Instagram. And, I'll link to that and other things we talked about like nicotine and kratom podcasts, other similar things I've talked about if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/SPEC, S-P-E-C. But, Ben, in the meantime, keep going, man. It's an incredible channel and I enjoy watching your videos.

Alright. Thanks for having me on.

Alright, folks. I'm Ben Greenfield along with Ben Katz, the Mass Spec Guy, signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com/SPEC, S-P-E-C. Have an amazing week.

Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting-edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life, and a whole lot more, check out BenGreenfieldLife.com. It's all there, BenGreenfieldLife.com. See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like, or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then Again, huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like, and/or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings, and the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you.

So, hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review if you got a little extra time.

It means way more than you might think. Thank you so much. 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, 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 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.