You Have Less Genes Than A Grape (& How To Optimize Your Actual Genetics With "Good Stress") With Jeff Krasno.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, what I found was that if I jumped into a cold plunge before I ate my first bite of food, it had really an accelerating weight loss response and a really good blood sugar management response. I was also fasted for 15 and a half hours, let's say. So that was also gonna reduce my amount of serum glucose, right? And then before I took my first bite of food, I would get into a cold plunge. So what would happen at that juncture is my core body temperature would plummet and my body is engineered for homeostasis. It's engineered for thermogenesis to pull my body temperature back up into that little 98.6 Goldilocks zone. But it would have to make heat to do that. And in order to make heat, it needed an energy substrate. My mitochondria needed to look around and find something to make heat with. And because my blood glucose was low, it only had one option, which was to oxidize fat and use those free fatty acids for energy production to make heat. I think I lost 65 pounds in about 4 months with that little stack.

Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield.

I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Alright, it's official. I'm coming to Melbourne, Australia. I'll be there for a couple weeks, but as a part of this tour, I will be hosting a fantastic public event, One Epic Night at Luminaire in South Melbourne with the team from Saint Haven Private Club. Whether you're into health, performance, longevity, fitness, or any other element of life optimization, I will teach you how to become boundless. It's going to be an incredible evening. Here's what you need to know. It will be June 26th, 6:30 to 8:30 PM, and there will be an option for a VIP experience with me that includes a meet and greet and the book signing. You can get all the details and get your limited seat now at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Australia. 2025. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/Australia2025. My guest today is Jeff Krasnow. He wrote this book, "The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things," "Good Stress," as if that weren't enough, "10 Protocols to Extend Your Lifespan and Healthspan." I get a lot of books like this. Sometimes I see the COVID and I'm like, "Yeah, okay, I know, do hard things." But, It actually wound up being a book in which I folded over a lot of pages and wrote a bunch of questions down. It was so compelling that I decided I want to get Jeff on the show. And, rather than read you his impressive bio, how he got into health and wellness really ties into his backstory in the first place. So, Jeff, first of all, welcome to the show. And, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what got you interested interested in writing this thing?

Yeah. Well, thanks, Ben. I really appreciate you having me on. I know you get a ton of books, so I'm thrilled to make it through the calendar. Yeah. So, I incongruously started my wellness journey in relationship to 9/11. So, I was running a record label. The music industry doesn't really lend itself to health and wellness, particularly in the you know, early aughts in New York City.

Unless you're like Rick Rubin, who's into all this stuff now.

Yeah, fair enough. But he had an evolution. We're both like refugees of the, of the music industry, right? Um, yeah, so I was running an indie label. My office was 2 blocks north of the World Trade Center, at that point what was the World Trade Center, and 9/11 happened., and we were in this tiny little perimeter around what became Ground Zero, sort of cordoned off, and we couldn't get into our office for a couple of months. And it was actually quite an interesting time to be in New York City. It very much sort of reflected the same sort of spirit that we had here in Los Angeles. Like, after these recent fires, there was a lot of generosity. It actually brought out people's better angels, right? But there was also a tremendous amount of grief and sadness. And this period really compelled and propelled people to do some crazy inspirational things. And one of those people was my wife. So she decided to actually start a yoga studio at Ground Zero right above my office. And we got back in there in, God, I guess late 2001. And in early 2002, she put up a tiny little sandwich board on the sidewalk of Warren Street. It said Spirituality Through Sweat. And Ben, this was like a time well before there was like a Tony opulent yoga studio or Equinox on every single corner of New York City.

Might have been even like pre-Lululemon.

I don't know. Totally. Yeah.

And by the way, if she built this above your office, what was your office? What were doing?

Well, I was running this little record indie label, you know, and, um, that was when you were running the record label. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we had, uh, you know, musicians hanging out and smoking weed and whatever, doing all that kind of stuff that you would do. Um, and, uh, but just upstairs, she opened this really humble, tiny one-room studio, and you actually had to take these kind of crooked, cockeyed, lime green stairs kind of right past our office kind of upstairs into this studio. The bathroom was actually in the studio, so it was like the width of a bread box. So, you actually had to go through the studio to take a pee.

You had to be good at yoga to get into the bathroom.

Yeah, basically. Yeah, it was like the width of a bread box. But, it was quite incredible what happened in there, Ben. In a very, very short time, this place became kind of the healing epicenter of Lower Manhattan. And the grief-stricken denizens would climb these little stairs and sweat on their mats and then come out into this tiny little lobby that had a vestibule with a really funky little stained futon on the floor. And I would hang out there with the front desk staff, and I would just witness these people come out, open-hearted, open-minded sort of collapse on this little futon and share their stories and really heal. And this was kind of my first opportunity to have a front row seat to witness the power of somatic practice and spiritual practice, but probably more than anything, community to really bend the arc of people's lives. And I said, man, I got to figure out how to integrate this into my own life. And that propelled me on this journey, really following my muse, my wife, to Costa Rica. She was leading these yoga retreats, and I'd be down there. It'd be like 28 women, 2 gay guys, and me waking up in the morning, doing yoga, meditating, eating the local food, whatever. It was just the food that was there. But then at night, also getting loose and having fun. It wasn't too sanctimonious. And people would be kind of playing music and having just enough tequila and having a good time.

So this was not like the Brian Johnson go to bed at 4:00 PM style.

No, no. This was people really living in the full joyous expression of their life. And I was coming from the music space, so all my buddies and all my friends were starting Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza. So that's my milieu. Was backstage at all those events. And I just had this kooky, crazy idea there in the rainforest of Costa Rica. I was like, what if I could combine what's happening here at this yoga retreat with the scale and accessibility and production values of Lollapalooza? Could I create sort of the world's biggest yoga retreat? And that became Wanderlust. And that took me on a decade-long journey building these festivals all over the world. That was pretty much my introduction to the whole wellness scene.

That's really like the biggest yoga retreat, Wanderlust?

Yeah. I mean, for 10 years, we were— I mean, in 2016, we had 68 festivals in 20 countries and these were doing 2,000 to 10,000 people per day. So, it was a fairly scaled thing and it ended up almost killing me in the end. That's the unfortunate moral of the story, but it was a pretty amazing journey.

Ben Greenfield: Well, I'm sure my wife is pretty familiar with it. I'm one of those guys who does my own bastardized version of yoga in my tiny little infrared sauna crawl space. She's a little bit more connected to the yoga community than me. I'm sure she's heard of it. Yeah.

I'm like you, man. I have my own little rickety weird sauna yoga practice. I did it every day.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah. I'm going to do down dog and then I'm going to lift this kettlebell and pull on this elastic band. So, paradoxically, you were doing these retreats and I saw that you talked about this a little bit in the book, but I'd love to hear you describe this idea of being involved in a wellness enterprise and at the same time seeing your own wellness decline.

Yeah. I mean, I was really with the best intentions trying to quite literally in this case grow a big tent for yoga. And, I was really just growth-minded all the time. So, I was just chasing the chalice, running around traveling 200+ days a year. I had 3 small daughters at that juncture. I was basically living coffee to wine o'clock. I was eating in airports, so hard to avoid committing plenty of carbicide. And I was just stressed all the time. We took private equity money and I was just very obsessed with proving myself and in many ways just kind of anchoring my own self-worth in the growth of this business. And, you know, by the end of it, I found myself in really, really sorry shape. And, you know, this is what in the book I somewhat glibly call, you know, my journey into wealth and wellness where, you know, I was really overweight. I was about 210. You know, I had all that kind of inner tube adiposity around the middle. I had what my daughters love to call the boobs of man. I was chronically fatigued, brain fogged, irritable, checking my phone every 2 seconds. Essentially everything that we've normalized in our society that is completely at its source abnormal. I was right in the middle of that nightmare. And then, I got a diabetes diagnosis in 2019, 2020. And, And, that was a big wake-up call for me to really change my life.

Yeah. And, is that where a lot of the material that you used to write this book began to kind of come into your life as you took the dive into what you were going to do about all this?

Yeah. I mean, fortunately, I had access to a lot of people that knew a lot about health. So, I started interviewing docs and I think I have interviewed probably 400, 450 doctors in the last 5 years. And so part of it was aggregating a tremendous amount of knowledge about human physiology and the mechanisms kind of under the hood here. But the other part of it was actually just jumping into my own petri dish and becoming my own N-of-1 experiment and, you know, just trying a lot of different protocols and, you know, anything, any pill and praxis and mushroom and modality. I basically tried it in one form or another. And eventually distilled all of that me-search and all of that wisdom from other people into this book. So, yeah, and that's my goal now, just to try to share it with regular people because a lot of this information can be so heady and so geeky that people can't understand it.

Ben Greenfield: What's that mean you interviewed doctors?

Yeah, so I have a podcast associated with my Commune platform, and, you know, I just basically started to interview anyone that would talk to me. So all of our functional medicine friends, all of our integrative medicine docs that we know, um, and, uh, and in some ways it was, it was free, free therapy for me because I got to apply a lot of that wisdom.

I feel the same way about my podcast. I get talk to really smart people who would normally never give me the time of day except since we're recording it, we get to. You said Kommune. What is that?

Yeah. So, Kommune, as I exited Wanderlust somewhat acrimoniously, I was kind of scratching my head around kind of what the next step in my life was. And, in 2018, I had this idea of essentially creating MasterClass but for well-being. So creating an online video course platform with all the top health experts and practitioners. And that's what I went out and did. It kind of started a little bit more in the metaphysical space. So Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson and Byron Katie. And then I met Wim Hof and he came and stayed. And then that kind of led to Mark Hyman and Sarah Gottfried and Jeff Bland and the whole functional medicine world. And Yeah. So, over the last— well, since then, we've created and shot 170 full-length courses here in Topanga. So, contemporaneously to that, my wife and I built a retreat center also called Commune. It's this amazing 10-acre property up in Topanga where Neil Young used to live apocryphally. Or so myth goes. And yeah, we created this amazing retreat center and we built a production facility on site. And so all these amazing people would come and stay and, you know, we'd wake up in the morning, make breakfast or, you know, hot tub, sauna, cold plunge, et cetera, and then just go make great content. And we put that all on one platform and yeah, it's been amazing. It's like a, a great successful business for me.

Is that like commune.com or—

Yeah, onecommune.com. And yeah, if you go over there, you'll literally recognize everyone you know.

I'll put it in the show notes, BenGreenfieldLife.com/goodstress. So, the show notes if you're listening, I'll find the link and put it in there. Okay. So, the book, I want to dive into some of the things I thought were really unique beginning with what really caught my attention in the first few chapters, was these TAO principles, like T-A-O. Is it T-A-O or T-A-U?

T-A-O. Yeah.

Yeah, TAO principles. The first one you say, "You are a flame," and this isn't super esoteric, you start to get into metabolism and science. So, what's that mean when you say, "You are a flame?" Yeah.

So, this is where I try to bridge kind of Eastern mysticism with Western medicine. The Buddha 2,500 years ago had this revelation under the Bodhi tree that everything in the universe was impermanent, everything was changing all the time. And when you look at human physiology, that also actually applies to Ben's body and Jeff's body and everyone who's listening's body. And sometimes I like to underscore this idea with analogy, by analogy with a lighter or a flame. So, you know, when you actually have a lighter here, for those people that end up watching this on video, But, you know, if you spin the flint wheel on a Bic lighter, you know, there's an ignition and there's a combustion process. And that's really just like a chemical reaction between oxygen in the air and the fuel source in the— in this lighter, which happens to be butane, the chemical formula of which is C4H10. Right. So if I were to light the lighter, you know, you would see this flame. And really what this is, it's just energy., and there's some byproducts here, which is like water vapor and carbon dioxide, right? So, boom. So if you were to look at that flame, you know, you recognize the flame itself by the form. It's flickering a little bit, but you instinctively know that all the molecules that have made up this flame have moved on. Like, they've just moved on, right? They've just gone away. And that can help you understand really the nature of your body because your body also is a chemical reaction. It's using oxygen from the air. Similarly, it's using also a hydrocarbon fuel source in the, in the form of glucose or fats, right? These are long-chain carbon molecules and it's producing energy and actually with the same byproducts, which are water and carbon dioxide. And so what you really actually see here is my form that you recognize day to day. You say, oh, that's Jeff. But, if you really actually understand the mechanism under the hood, you realize that everything about me has moved on. I'm nothing but change. In fact, I'm 7 octillion atoms. You and I are experiencing 37 billion, billion chemical reactions per second. So, what the Buddha intuited kind of under that Bodhi tree that everything is always constructing and deconstructing, that is also incredibly applicable to you and your body. And, when you realize that you are just constant change, that is actually quite empowering because a lot of us end up just feeling like we're fixed stable selves and we become married to the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and we really don't think change is possible.

You mean something like I have bad knees or I have elevated liver enzymes or I've got a slow metabolism or something Yeah, exactly.

Like, I have a slow metabolism the way, like, I have an ugly sweater or something like that. It's like, no, you don't have a bad or slow metabolism. Your metabolism is a process and not a product. And when you actually truly grok that, there's so much agency to it because you realize that you have some power over your life moment to moment. So I really enjoy understanding the metaphysical by patterning, by witnessing the patterns of these metaphysical ideas in the physical. And impermanence is a big one.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, it reminds me of an interview I had yesterday. We were talking about these new microbiome tests for the gut. And I said, "Well, it's odd that you get this whole printout of the foods that you're not supposed to eat, based on your gut bacteria because technically by changing your diet, for example, introducing dietary diversity and maybe mainlining some sauerkraut and taking a probiotic, et cetera, you can actually alter the gut bacteria such that the foods your bacteria weren't equipped to eat, all of a sudden they are equipped to eat because you change your microbiome. And, a person who doesn't understand this concept that your body is aflame would say, "Oh, I can't eat these foods for the rest of my life. My gut bacteria just can't handle apples, so they're out the window." Well, no, you can train your bacteria to actually like that food.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. And look at that bacteria, those single-cell prokaryotes that are nestled down mostly in your colon, but now they're finding them in every organ of your body, on your skin, even in your aura. But those 39 trillion gut bugs, they're turning over every 4 minutes to 24 hours. They're nothing but change. And there's like 16 times more DNA in those gut bugs than in your own genome. So again, we're really just these impermanent creatures. And I think when we when we really embrace that, there's a lot of opportunity.

Dude, I can't gloss over that. Did you say there's gut bugs in the aura?

Yeah. Well, so yeah, so there's— well, I wouldn't say gut bugs, but there's bacteria that's actually kind of floating around you that's not necessarily like connected to your skin, right?

If I go out for Mexican food, there's a lot of bacteria floating around me, I can tell you.

That's for sure. Maybe, and some hydrogen sulfide too might be emitted. But, but yeah, I mean, this is the thing. It's like every hug that, that we have with someone, every door handle, you know, obviously, you know, with more intentional exogenous diet, like, you know, we make sauerkraut here, you know, you're changing your bacterial makeup. And, you know, we've outsourced so much of our function to these bacteria. And so we're living kind of in this interdependent holobiont, like, It really violates kind of our sense of self because we feel like we're this stable, reliable self that's separate from our environment, but nothing could be less true. We're totally interdependent with our environment and we're changing all the time.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Okay. So, we can change. That's super empowering. And then, you have this second principle The Interdependence Principle. And in that chapter, obviously, folks, read the whole book because we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of every single principle, but new word in there. And this was interesting to me because I got an exosome injection actually last week, which is great for longevity and for healing up some bum tissue. But you say in that book, You don't say exosome, you say exposome. Use the word exposome. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Exposome. What's the exposome?

Yeah. Well, I need to just attribute this. This is a word that I pilfered from Dr. Mark Hyman. This is where I first heard it in a sauna, I think, somewhere. And, this word really has to do with the second principle, which was central again to Buddhism of interdependence. So, the Buddha saw the entire universe as this interconnected mutually dependent web. And again, this violates our sense of identity because Ben and Jeff and everyone else listening generally associate ourselves with this locus of consciousness, generally crouching somewhere behind the eyes, kind of wrapped up in an increasingly saggy bag of skin, very, very separate from the world around us. But what the Buddha said is like, no, you're not separate from your environment. In fact, you're inseparable from it. And the word exposome really underscores that idea. So the exposome can really be understood as the sum total of all of your environmental exposures. And, and this could be diet, it could be relationships, it could be trauma that you had as a child, it could be your exposure to toxins, it could be other pathogens, it could be even just the screen time. That you spend, you know, with your phone or in front of your TV. And the idea here of why the exposome is so important is that the overwhelming majority of chronic disease is not attributable to our genes, it's actually attributable to this exposome. It's the exposome washing over our genes that actually contributes to chronic disease or great health, thriving health. And so this realization that you're not really separate from your environment, you're sort of an organment or an environism, that it's one thing, is again incredibly empowering. Because if you're changing moment to moment in relationship to everything that's around you, to your exposome, then you can alter your environment to some degree to push yourself on that trajectory towards healing, towards becoming whole, towards thriving in greater health. And so, that's the concept of the exposome.

Ben Greenfield: Not that I want to kick this horse to death, the whole concept of your poop, your gut, your gut bacteria, but that is one thing I like about the tests that look at the gut is because you can see, hey, I have pathogenic bacteria, I have perhaps viruses that aren't serving me, maybe parasites, yeast, fungus, et cetera. This is why a lot of functional medicine is I'm sure you've probably discovered interviewing all these fantastic people starts with the gut. But, when you look at data like that, you can kind of tell if somebody's getting most of their exposome and exposure in airports, a highly urban environment, crowded and packed trains and buses full of humans, or if it's more of a farm animal, goat, chicken, dirt, grass, sunshine, earth, swimming in lakes, rivers, and oceans type of exposome. And, I just know this from personal experience, I've done gut tests when I've been in hefty urban travel living out of Airbnbs and in hotels and done the same tests when I'm at home here where there's alpacas and white-tailed deer on the horizon and goats and chickens all over the place and the swimming pond and really good clean high dietary diversity. Night and day difference. And, it is almost like I am what I am living around.

100%. And, when you begin to mimic the conditions in which you evolved, you tend to test better and just feel better. And, it's really all of the influences of modernity whether that's environmental toxins and PFAS and microplastics, or on the food side, ultra-processed food, refined grains and starches, et cetera, or toxic relationships, et cetera. All of those things will combine to create a more caustic environment in which all of your markers are going to look worse, but you're just going to feel worse, period.

Yeah. And it's not as though you do have to just move out to the sticks and become a redneck. You can live in let's say a downtown Los Angeles loft and still maybe choose to go to the park a couple of times instead of the hyper-clean chemically gym every single day. And, you can maybe get a pet if it's allowed. And, if not, maybe walk a friend's dog and you can use maybe some plants instead of some space-agey HEPA air filtration units in your home and just use a few little things to begin to increase that connection to Earth, which I think is probably the most important part of this whole concept of the exosome.

You got it, man. You got it.

Okay. So, also related to this concept of your genes, this surprised me. I don't know if this is true. You write it in your book, so maybe it is. You can tell me. You say we have less genes than a grape.

Yeah. I'll specify a grape plant. Yeah. So, This was, yeah, an eye-opener for me. I think Zach Bush was the one that initially pointed this out to me. We were at an event, I was pushing a grape around a plate and he's like, that thing has more genes than you. I'm like, no way. And then I had to go check it out and he was right. You know, a grape plant will have about 30,000 to 35,000 genes and a human has about 22,300 genes, more or less the last we counted. And again, this really violates our instincts because here we are, the most sophisticated creatures supposedly in the history of the universe, and we have less genes than a grape plant or about the same as a guppy and the same as a pig, et cetera. So what's going on here? Well, we assumed that given how sophisticated we are, we would have hundreds of thousands of genes. And this really propelled what's known as the Human Genome Project, which was this massive international cooperation that started in the '90s to map the human genome. And this was really spurred on by this concept of genetic determinism. Like, ever since Watson and Crick and there was a woman, Francis Rosalind, I believe, discovered the structure for DNA, the double helix, in the 1950s, we basically assumed that if we could map the human genome and find every gene that was responsible for every behavior, every trait, and every disease, and once we were able to do that, hallelujah, we'd be able to solve for all of those things. And then we went out and mapped it in this incredible international effort, and it came back that we had less genes than a grape plant. And this was incredibly confusing and perplexing, right?

Slap in the face for us complex.

It was like, shit. And it really put, you know, it started to put a nail in the coffin of this idea of genetic determinism that our lives are completely determined by our genes and that our fates are written in the stars of our genetics. And this gave rise to this emerging science of epigenetics, right? That it, it's really how the genes express, again, in relationship to the exposome, to the environment, that actually determined most of human health and thriving, and on the other side, disease. Now, of course, we know many examples where our genetics can predispose us to certain kinds of diseases, like two presentations of the APOE4 allele, for example, will, I think, give you an 8 times higher chance of developing dementia or Alzheimer's, et cetera. So there's— right, you can load the gun with the genetics. But really what we have found in combination with the microbiome, with neuroplasticity, that the brain also changes in relationship to its environment, that it's about epigenetics. It's actually about our genes changing their expression in relationship to all of these other things, into the food we eat, the relationships that we have, the trauma that we experience, the the air, the water, how we move, et cetera. And again, I think that it sounds a little scary on some level because we're not fixed. But I think at the end of the day, it's empowering and provides a lot of agency because if our genes can misexpress and hypermethylate and all these kinds of things, then we can also impact them for the best possible expression.

For me, my loaded guns are diabetes, your blood sugar management, which I'm guessing yours might be too based on what you were saying, colon cancer, and then detox pathways. Those are 3 big red flags for me. So, I'm really careful with my personal cleaning chemicals or personal care products, household cleaning chemicals, glutathione support, what my diet looks like from the colonic support standpoint. And my carbohydrate metabolism. So, have you done genetic tests and made little tweaks for yourself?

Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, I have a couple what are called SNPs, so single nucleotide polymorphisms. They're basically the mutations that show up that might predispose you to something. I tend to have one for caffeine. That was a weird one that came back that I have a tendency to overconsume caffeine, which was a very strange when they get back.

Wait, so it's not like how fast you metabolize it, it's like how much you might be addicted to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a very strange one. I'm not— yeah, I can't remember what the code on that particular gene is. And yeah, and for certainly for carbohydrate metabolism and blood sugar management, that was definitely one that came back and that made sense. And of course, then that gives you the microscope to shine the light of your conscious attention on the areas that you need to focus on.

Yeah. Well, what's the lowest hanging fruit for you for blood sugar management?

I basically have a little protocol stack that is my blood sugar management protocol stack, which is a combination of a very keto-focused diet. So macronutrient ratio that is high protein and low carbohydrate. Makes total sense, right? An intermittent fasting protocol, a cold therapy protocol that's cadenced in a very particular way, and then a resistance training protocol. And those 4 things stacked together really do quite an amazing job at blood glucose management.

Okay. And I know you talk about cold in the part about good stress, but I'm intrigued. What do you mean cadence in a particular way?

Yeah, so weight management was a really big component for me, particularly as I was turning my health around, and it was very interrelated with my blood sugar dysregulation, um, because basically I became insulin resistant. My cells weren't using glucose really for energy production, and instead they were storing that glucose primarily as fat, and that really showed up on my body. It's a very simplistic way of looking at it, but just for the sake of this conversation, we'll just stop there. So, I was experimenting with all these different protocols. And what I found was that if I jumped into a cold plunge before I ate my first bite of food, it had really an accelerating weight loss response and, and a really good blood sugar management response. And as I began to unpack the mechanism, this is where I landed, which was like I converted my diet over to a relatively low carbohydrate diet. So I didn't have a lot of— I was reducing my blood glucose. I was also fasted for 15.5 hours, let's say. So that was also going to reduce my amount of serum glucose, right?. And then before I took my first bite of food, I would get into a cold plunge. So what would happen at that juncture is my core body temperature would plummet, right? And my body is engineered for homeostasis. It's engineered to, for thermogenesis to pull my body temperature back up into that little 98.6 Goldilocks zone. But it would have to make heat to do that. And in order to make heat, it needed an energy substrate. My mitochondria needed to look around and find something to make heat with. And because of all those reasons that I, I talked about before, my blood glucose was low. It only had one option, which was to oxidize fat, essentially burn, to convert triglycerides into free fatty acids and glycerol, and use those free fatty acids for energy production to make heat. And so I found that little cadence that stack with that particular cadence to be incredibly effective. I think I lost 65 pounds in about 4 months with that little stack.

Ben Greenfield: This is crazy. So, Jeff, you and I didn't talk about this before the podcast. In 17 years of podcasting, I've never come across anybody besides me who has talked about this strategy. There are no long-term human clinical research studies on this. I don't know if you've seen it. So, I have this book called "Boundless." And, in that book, in fat loss section, one of the prime strategies I teach is called Strike, Shiver, Stroll. It's very similar to what you described. So, step 1, strike, is to consume something that will enhance fatty acid oxidation and white adipose to brown fat tissue conversion. Caffeine is the lowest-hanging fruit, EGCG from green tea, berberine, grains of paradise pepper extract. There's a whole list of about half a dozen different things that you can consume that you kind of want in your bloodstream. And then, I believe I just said Strike Shiver Stroll, it's Strike Stroll Shiver. And then, you go for an aerobic session, walk around the neighborhood, quick swim, yoga, whatever, but 20 to 40 minutes of something that's easy, aerobic, and conversational. So, you're stepping up fatty acid oxidation and then you finish with about 2 to 5 minutes of cold because at that point, you are, as you've just elegantly described, in a low glucose state, you're able to grab calories from fat to convert them into heat via mitochondrial uncoupling, and you see these rapid transformations in weight loss. Sometimes people push back and say, "But Ben, where's like the 20-week-long research study on the people who did this and the people who didn't do this?" But, as you've just said, Jeff, and again, you're the first guy who I've ever heard talk about this, besides me, it works like gangbusters.

Ben Greenfield: It's crazy. It's funny because I've had the same situation where I can understand the mechanisms at play, but I cannot find any studies to support it. So then, it just becomes anecdotal and I always couch it in like, "This is what worked for me," et cetera. But, it's great to meet finally a brother that's experienced something similar.

Somebody else is willing to hold up a middle finger to the science and still—

That's right. It's great.

It's awesome. Obviously, thermal stress is, I think, in a way related to this idea of ancestral mismatch, right? We live in an era in which we really don't experience the stressors of heat and cold. And, I think the way you describe it, I forget which chapter, but you say something like, "Culture is fast." Evolution is slow. And I think it's kind of related to this and a lot of other topics related to stress in the book. But what do you think of, or what do you mean when you say that culture is fast, evolution is slow?

So our genome has evolved over millions and millions and millions of years, right? So like unfathomable periods of time that we can't even really get our heads around. It's been about 7 million years since we split off from apes and bonobos and chimpanzees went the other direction. And then you know, Australopithecus went down here and Lucy, which is, you know, the kind of the human hominid Eve, if you will. We have almost the exact same genome that we did 3.5 million years ago. And certainly over the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens existence, our genome has barely, barely altered. So evolution is very, very slow. And, you know, the way that evolution works is that essentially there are, you know, certain mutations that end up being more adaptive towards human existence, and then nature selects for those traits and then begins to iterate and whatever produce eventually Ben and Jeff. And that takes an awfully long time. So we know that that evolution is incredibly slow. But then you look at culture, and culture for Homo sapiens was actually very stable for a very, very long period of time, right? For hundreds of thousands of years on the savanna and the Serengeti, we lived within similar environmental conditions, you know, periods of abundance balanced by periods of scarcity. Exposure to great fluctuations in temperature, immersion in nature, getting light at certain times of day that really formed our genomics because we're always evolving in relationship to our environment. In the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, but really, really accelerating in the last 50 to 70 years, our culture, has changed so much. Our food system, the way that we operate and live day to day. I mean, we're, we're sedentary beings largely. We live in thermoneutral environments that are controlled by digital thermostats. We have always available calories, generally in the form of nutrient deficient, ultra-processed foods. We live completely separate from nature. We think we're separate from nature too. We live highly individualistic lifestyles and not communal lifestyles. So, we've essentially changed all of these huge aspects of our life.

Not to mention, by the way, we have shoes, really nice big built-up rubber-soled shoes. And, I realize that sounds silly, but that plays a major role also.

No, that's huge. I mean, I'm wearing my Vivo Barefoot right now, which is essentially trying to mimic some sort of Paleolithic shoe. I mean, that's a totally great point because for hundreds of thousands of years, we used very, very minimally-soled shoes generally made of sage bark or of reindeer hooves or wherever we were living and evolving. And, what we've done in the last 50 years is essentially put our feet inside of casts. And, it's like if anyone's ever broken their arm, they know what happens to their musculature when you put your arm in a cast, it completely atrophies. And now, we have a whole population walking around with essentially atrophied muscles in their feet and ankles because they've been wrapped in plastic and vinyl or squished into these tiny little toe boxes.

So, this is gross right now. People are getting a gag effect, but I wear nothing and then I wear toe spacers to adjust the 30 years I spent kind of effing up my feet with the narrow toe box approach.

Totally. And, when we push the toes together like that in a tight little triangle, we essentially lose the pivot capability of that big toe, that big toe which is actually designed to be this biomechanical masterpiece to take so much body weight and to push off and to pivot, we actually just undermine the usage of that. And then, yeah, we think like no big deal until we're 75 and we fall and then we're really screwed, right? And so, you know, this is, again, that's a perfect example of an evolutionary mismatch. Basically, our culture has hijacked our biology, sometimes on purpose, sometimes for profit. But, and it's really this obsession with chronic convenience and ease that's leading to this inconvenient truth of a lot of chronic disease. And, this is where we have a real friction and tension because of that reason that evolution is slow and culture is so damn fast.

Right. And hence, good stress. I mean, this is kind of like the premise of your book. Let's try and fix this ancestral or evolutionary mismatch a little bit by making things a little bit harder on ourselves again.

100%. And really, it's in many ways trying to mimic the Paleolithic conditions in which we evolved, which included a good amount of physiological and a little bit of psychological stress. And, you know, I'm sure many listeners on your show are very familiar with this concept of adversity mimetics or eustress, et cetera, that it's built on the shoulders of hormesis, basically this phenomenon that the right dosage of stress can confer a benefit. And we know this in so many different ways in our life. Like, the most obvious way physiologically is like, you know, you overload a muscle, you rip you kind of microtear the fibers in that muscle, right? And then you give it enough rest and you eat enough protein. And what happens to that muscle? It grows back bigger and grows back stronger. And that is the premise really for good stress, is that in the right dosage, the body has incredibly adaptive response to stress.

So using yourself as an example, I would imagine after reading your book that your day is just kind of like littered with miniature periods of good stress or hormetic stressors throughout the day. You mentioned cold plunging is one of those. What are a few others? If I were to follow you around your house and to your office, just kind of creep on you and ghost you during the day, what kind of things would I see you doing that you would consider to be, "Well, this would kill me if I did a whole bunch of it, but this is actually introducing cellular resilience by me doing little bits of this." Yeah.

And, some may seem a little bit less stressful than others, but I'll get up, I have a non-negotiable morning, which is I get outside right away. I usually have like an espresso. I get outside, I get morning light in the first kind of 20, 30 minutes of my day, and then I go right into my contrast bathing kind of scenario. So I will get in a sauna, I will get in a cold plunge. I'll usually go back and forth a couple of times depending if I have the time. I'm fasted in this period. I'll generally eat around 10:00 or so. I try to maintain a window, kind of consumption window between 10:00 and 6:30, 10:00 and 7:00, depending about my kids and when they're going to eat. So, that's sort of cold therapy, heat therapy, intermittent fasting, light therapy. Obviously, there's a resistance training protocol that I follow. I try to do a lot of walking. I have a whole kind of philosophy around movement, et cetera. But then, there's other things that are a little bit more bespoke. So, yeah, I do the barefoot shoes thing which I've really gotten to be quite used to. And, it's really quite amazing how much more sensitive my feet are. I just feel the ground in a way that I never used to. I will also almost always eschew chairs and squat, like do a resting squat instead. And that was a huge one for me and solved so many issues related to my lower back pain and knee pain, et cetera. So, you know, like at night, you know, if I get pulled into doing something with my kids or watching something, I'll do it within a resting squat.

Ben Greenfield: By the way, I wait for the airplane to arrive in a squat. There's so many situations where we are expected societally to sit including every doctor's office, paradoxically every chiropractic's office, every dentist, everywhere you go they say, "Please have a seat." And, 9 times out of 10, I politely decline. I pretty much sit if I'm going to have a meal or I'm stuck on an airplane.

Ben Greenfield: I mean, yeah, the first thing you get to into a hospital whether you need it or not, they put you in a chair with wheels, a wheelchair. You're like, "I don't need this." Yeah. I mean, then there's other little cool things like I have a kind of deliberate hypoxia. Obviously, again, let me frame this in the dose makes the poison. So, right, too much hypoxia. The podcast is over quite quickly. But it's an example that too much of anything is not going to yield a good response. So hypothermia is no joke, right? But the right amount of cold confers a great benefit. There's so many different benefits there. And that's also true with the right amount of hypoxia or hypercapnia. So you build up a little bit of additional carbon dioxide, You have these amazing little chemoreceptors kind of near your carotid arteries. They sense that, that abundance of carbon dioxide, they give your body a signal to produce more EPO that produces more red blood cells. The red blood cells, of course, are the couriers of oxygen to your mitochondria for energy production. So when you— this is, of course, why athletes often train at high altitudes where the air is less dense and the partial pressure of oxygen is lower. Because your body has a natural adaptive response to that stressor and actually your mitochondria become more efficient and you have more red blood cells. So there's so many of these little kind of deliberate stressors that you can now self-impose into your life to really better align the way you live with your design, with your engineering.

Any deliberate xenohormesis going on there?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is an interesting category and I think there'll be more data here, you know, over time. But I think what you're referring to is this whole kind of classification of plants, herbs, spices.

Yeah, plants.

Yeah, exactly. Known as xenohormetins. And You know, the idea here is that the plants do this dressing for you, and then that benefit is actually conferred when you eat them. So, you know, I'll just try to poke at that concept for a second. So one of the most famous xenohormetins are grapes because vintners or winemakers actually naturally stress their grapes, not, not for this reason, but for taste. But But, you know, in the skins of grapes, there is a compound known as resveratrol, which is a compound that plants naturally develop as a, as a protective measure against fungi. So resveratrol was studied at some length by the famous Australian biologist David Sinclair, who gave resveratrol, I believe, initially to yeast and to maybe eventually to mice in vivo studies. And showed that it stimulated the sirtuin pathway that then led to, to greater longevity. I think the jury is still out on whether that actually translates to humans or not. But the idea is that essentially plants have this quasi-immune system. They develop these protective compounds. We often label those protective compounds polyphenols. And then when we eat them, there is a, there is a benefit that's conferred. And you've already mentioned a few of them, I think, like EGCG and green tea could be considered one. That's a very potent one. Quercetin is another, like curcumin is one, luteolin. And, you know, a lot of these are anti-inflammatory, sulforaphane or— yeah, like a lot of them are anti-carcinogenic. So, so yeah, I feel like, you know, again, I try to ask myself this question every time I'm looking for an answer about health, which is how did I evolve, you know, and how can I actually align the way I'm living with the way that I evolved? And, you know, we evolved eating 800 different kinds of plants and seeds and tubers and some wild game.. And that's a pretty good blueprint for, I believe, you know, how we should eat now. Yeah, we don't eat all plants because some plants will kill us. Like famously, I think hemlock killed Socrates, right? And then some plants actually are beneficial, but they have toxic elements to them. And then some plants have just the right amount of toxicity that they actually stimulate a response in the body that might be short-term stress or inflammation but long-term gain.

Ben Greenfield: You can typically get better xenohormetic balance by fermentation, soaking, sprouting, rinsing, draining. A lot of those things will get rid of the highly concentrated problematic, let's say, like, you know, lectin, gluten, saponin components and still expose you to some of the xenohormetic agents in the plant without painting the back of the toilet seat or whatever. So, yeah, I think that it's slow food preparation of a wide dietary diversity. It's not like you just go out in the field and start mowing down stocks of wheat or whatever. So, what about alcohol? Would that fit into the hormetic category for you? Yeah.

I don't think I would categorize it there. I mean, I don't drink regularly, but I will drink occasionally and I really think about it as a tool or a method to induce a different mental state. Yeah, obviously it is a carcinogen. The way that the body metabolizes ethanol into whatever it's called, acetal, acetaldehyde or whatever, you know, is highly toxic. And I would never recommend that people drink regularly or for recreation. But I think that in the right times and moments, if you're looking for something to essentially inhibit some of your social weirdnesses and promote GABA and dopamine and kind of depress the prefrontal cortex that is constantly kind of in this risk assessment mode and And I think that alcohol can from time to time be something that can allow for a lot of social connection and bring something out in you that you might be inhibited otherwise. So, but I would just say not very often.

Yeah, I think my take on it is very small doses frequently without ever engaging in large doses. If you look at the xenohormetic-like induction of things like superoxide dismutase or glutathione peroxidase. It does seem to act in a similar way with a pretty low tolerance level, like 0.3 to 0.5 servings would be the average daily amount, which might come out to whatever, 4 non-fishbowl-sized glasses of a good organic biodynamic wine with supper a few evenings a week. And, I think you can get a little bit of that good stress component from it as well. Problem is, as you've just described, there are such hefty social implications. And, unlike kale, it does have potential psychoactive properties. So, yeah, you have to check yourself much more carefully.

Ben Greenfield: Well, now they're making non-alcoholic beverages that are so tasty that I almost really just don't miss it at all.

Yeah, that or half my friends are just doing magic mushrooms instead. So, to speak of the social component, obviously, this isn't a news flash for anybody. You even highlight in your book how social isolation and loneliness can cause a whole bunch of issues in terms of blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol, sympathetic nervous system response. And, I didn't realize this until I read it in your book, but even genetic alterations that allow for increased expression of inflammatory-related genes and decreased expression of immune-modulating genes. And, I was thinking about this, and this is just a thought experiment really, Jeff, but would you consider social engagement to almost be a form of stress? Because yes, you could say loneliness would kill you, and I think that's pretty obvious to a lot of people based on the ancestral idea that isolation from your tribe could result in death in the jungle. But, as anybody knows, you get butterflies in your stomach, you get scared talking to new people, sometimes you get nervous walking into a room. And, I almost could see us chunking getting out there and being socially active as one of these good forms of hormetic stress.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's really interesting, Ben. And, I think more and more that's true, particularly as we've become so atomized. I mean, I have 3 daughters. I see them kind of buried in their room a lot. They're getting their intimacy from their phone or from chat, et cetera. And that is in some ways obviating their need to go outside and interact with the outside world. So I think a little bit of exposure therapy, if you will, through being in social situations can definitely be categorized as a good stress. I mean, we know that feeling if you've ever done public speaking, which I know you have, that there are those butterflies in your stomach. But the moment that you step on stage, right, you get into flow. And the more that you do that, the easier it becomes to step on stage and actually push yourself into high-pressure situations. And so, yeah, I think that in a world that's kind of characterized by individuality and loneliness, social interaction might be considered a good stress. And it's so ironic because I think Gabor Maté told me this one day. He's like, if you would map the entirety of human history across one day, we lived communally for 23 hours and 54 minutes of it. We're simply not wired to be atomized separate individuals, but that's where so many people find themselves now. I think there's a statistic in the book that just— I had to check like 9 times, which is 58% of Americans report eating every single meal of the day alone. Yeah, I think it is a good stress. I mean, this is what I'm always pushing for, Ben, which is what I've found is like the signature of health tends to be balanced. I mean, in the human body, we think of that as homeostasis, but psychologically we think of that as a certain kind of centeredness, right, where we become semi-untriggerable. Certainly we can see it in ecology when there's the right balance between different species. We can see that in economics where there's a thriving middle class, where there's the right balance of economic and wealth distribution, et cetera. So healthy systems always seem to cluster towards the middle. And I think that's also true for our social lives. Like, being an introvert is not a bad thing if you can actually be comfortable with yourself. Alone, I think that that's really, really important. But also, you should be adapted to being able to be in groups of people and be connected. I mean, one of the biggest determinants of human longevity and happiness is the strength of your social bonds. And so if health lies somewhere in the middle, you have to kind of balance between being an extrovert and an introvert and this idea of being an ambivert. I think is interesting. And, that's probably where the healthiest social life or social approach to your life lies.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, you're absolutely right. I believe the research at Harvard on longevity over 80-plus years on men, isolate for all confounding variables. And, I would imagine it'd be just as strong for women knowing the social prowess of women. That, yeah, the number one factor was the quality of your relationships. And, of course, this isn't to vilify the spiritual disciplines like silence, solitude, meditation, et cetera. I certainly think those play a role, a very strong role in life's happiness, purpose, and knowing yourself. But yeah, you definitely shouldn't move to a pristine Himalayan mountaintop for the rest of your life. As clean as the air is and as much hormetic hypoxia as you might get. By the way, Jeff, I was counting. Let's see, Jeff's average day: thermal stress, UVA, UVB, fasting, weights, movement, gravity, biomechanical stress, oxygen deprivation, xenohormesis. So, Jeff on any average day is getting 11 different stressing agents that he's exposed to. And, I suppose if you were to count things like plants with each meal, possibly more than that. So, as you can see, folks, I mean, it's kind of like brushing your teeth, right, Jeff? As you start to weave this stuff into your day, you spend your whole day mildly stressed with good stuff but not too much.

Yeah, that's right. It's like weaving up adaptive habits. You start to stack these things into your life till they become kind of second nature, but they don't, of course, want to become too second nature because the second they become too comfortable, they actually lose their efficacy. So every day there's a commitment to leaning into the edges of your discomfort, and that can manifest in a whole bunch of different ways. I mean, I've started to actually really embrace hard, stressful conversations, for example. And these are the things that we avoid in our life because we don't want to have these stressful conversations. But almost every time on the other side of them, there's the world that we imagine is possible. And so sometimes I think about that, you know, of jumping into the ice bath of stressful conversations. It's very similar. You know, you get that epinephrine rush, you think you're going to have this panic attack, and then you have this moment available to you to actually put some top-down pressure on top of that involuntary bottom-up response and actually to sit there in an emotionally regulated place and have a conversation with somebody that doesn't agree with you about something or that you have to excavate something that's happened in your past. And I find this to be incredibly helpful, particularly with family and friends.

Yeah, I agree with that. The idea that discomfort can become routine and those things that were once uncomfortable might need to be switched up a little bit. A cold soak could be a cold shower, dry sauna could be an infrared, barbell back squat could be a goblet squat. You might switch out berberine for bitter melon extract, throw curveballs at your body. I think it was Dr. Andrew Huberman who recently popularized the notion that the fear responses in the brain activated by novelty, for example, in the gym, are also responsible. In this case, I think he was talking about the anterior cingulate cortex for the neuroplasticity that you get. And, if something isn't challenging enough, even if it used to be, or if there isn't mild cognitive resistance to doing it even if there used to be, you're no longer harnessing the full neural benefits of doing it.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, super interesting. I mean, you can apply that same idea to learning too. I mean, I'm 54, right? So, I think I'm probably a little older than you, but But I really actually now relish the idea of being confused, which often happens, especially when I'm learning new things. So I've taught myself how to play piano recently. I'm constantly challenging myself with new languages. I'm constantly curious about human physiology and Eastern metaphysics, et cetera. And oftentimes I hit the wall and I'm like, I don't understand that. I can't technically do it. And it is that stress of constantly recommitting yourself to something that you don't understand or something that you're failing at, and then finally getting the thing that actually releases this sort of soup of neurotransmitters that then reward you and motivate you and then actually codify that knowledge such that then you move on and then you keep going. And this is the great process of life, right? We just keep challenging ourselves.

Absolutely. I spent 15 minutes with smoke coming out my ears from my laptop last night trying to learn percussive slap on the acoustic guitar. And then, a half hour later, I'm out by the pond with a smile on my face walking around doing percussive slap. And, the geese out there were looking at me weird. I'm like, "Hey, I can do it. I can do it. I can slap. Look, I can slap." But yeah, you're right. Yeah. And then, tomorrow night, I'll hunt down a new skill.

Yeah. I used to manage this incredible young guitarist named Khaki King. So, if you're looking for percussive techniques on the top of the guitar. Check her out.

Yeah. Noted. That's going out on the ever-loving Post-it note. Jeff, this is fantastic. The book, for those of you listening in, is "Good Stress." Jeff Krasno, K-R-A-S-N-O, is his name. I'll put the information about Karmune, link to the book, everything else that we talked about And, that'll be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/GoodStress. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/GoodStress. Jeff, thanks so much, man. This is awesome.

Yeah, you're the man, Ben. I really appreciate you and everything you're doing. And, it's just quite amazing to see the community that you've built. So, very grateful to be with you.

Cool, man. Thanks for tuning in, folks. Have an amazing day. Ben Greenfield: Alright, it's official. I'm coming to Melbourne, Australia. I'll be there for a couple weeks, but as a part of this tour, I will be hosting a fantastic public event, One Epic Night at Luminaire in South Melbourne with the team from Saint Haven Private Club. Whether you're into health, performance, longevity, fitness, or any other element of life optimization, I will teach you how to become boundless. It's going to be an incredible event, here's what you need to know. It will be June 26th, 6:30 to 8:30 PM, and there will be an option for a VIP experience with me that includes a meet and greet and the book signing. You can get all the details and get your limited seat now at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Australia2025. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/Australia2025.

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