Ketofast Your Need to Know Guide – Part 1 with Dr Joseph Mercola – #588

Bulletproof Radio.

A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that a genetic scorecard now could predict your risk of being obese. Researchers looked at more than 2.1 million genetic variants and created a genetic predisposition score that they think predicts whether you're likely to be severely obese. And in their study, they showed that weight differences came up as early as age 3. And by age 18, if you had the highest genetic score, you weighed about 29 pounds more on average than those with the lowest scores. And if you had the highest score, you were also 25 times more likely to have severe obesity. And high scores were sadly associated with what you'd expect. Increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke. And a bunch of other people said, yeah, right, that doesn't really matter because you didn't account for lifestyle, for instance. Maybe those genetic things are just your predisposition for french fries and gluten. Anyhow, what we've all learned from the world of biohacking is that the environment around you turns those genes on and off. And there are some genes the environment won't affect because whether they're on or off, they do a certain thing. But. But for the most part, you can change all that stuff. And take it from me, going from 300 pounds to about 200 pounds, depending on how much muscle I have at the time, I think you can overcome those genetic things. You just have to find out what works for you. It won't be the same thing that works for everyone, but there's some basic rules you can follow. Now, today's guest is a guy who runs the most popular and powerful online health site there is. He's been doing it since 1997. He's inspired many millions of people to look at the way they manage their lives, to look at their health, to pay attention to many of the things that we now take for granted in the world of functional medicine. He's an osteopathic physician and just realized we can improve ourselves and has been fearless in talking about what works. I'm talking about none other than Dr. Joseph Mercola of famedmercola.com fame. He's a dear friend and just a great guy. Dr. Mercola, welcome to the show.

Hey, it's so great to be with you today, Dave.

I'm recording this episode with Dr. Mercola because he just finished speaking at the 6th Annual Biohacking Conference. The conference is something that I started in San Francisco with 100 people. We had more than a thousand people this year at the conference talking about stuff that works in the body. And Dr. Mercola just completely rocked the audience by talking about some of the things that you've heard on the show. Things like hydrogen, things like emfs and other stuff like fasting and ketosis and things that you may know if you're a longtime listener and if not, Dr. McColl is a world renowned expert on this stuff. And we're going to go deep today. So super happy you're back on the show even though you're just off stage.

Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much for having me at the event. It was literally the best event I ever intended in my entire life. Wow. Without any question, nothing came close. It was like putting 10 Christmases in one weekend. Literally. That is an understatement. I mean, literally, it changed my life in many ways. I mean, one of the biggest is I met Dr. Barry, Dr. Barry Morgelin. And I'm actually committing to his program because of you.

Wow, Joe, that makes me so happy. I love it that you're going to try it. Joe. I have had results from that that I cannot explain using western medicine, but there's something going on there that's real. Now, you just wrote a book called Keto Fast where you talk about ketogenic stuff and also timing this idea. Maybe you don't want to eat after dark. We've had Satin Panda on the show, but you put together a book based on your knowledge as a physician and your just deep research for decades. And maybe we start with what did you learn from writing Keto Fast?

Well, my first book or not my first book, I think I've written a dozen now. But the previous book on this topic was Fat for Fuel, which describes a program to obtain metabolic flexibility and help teach your body to start reburning fat for fuel. Most of your listeners are probably there already, but clearly about 85% of the US population is not. So it was somewhat targeted for the general population. So after finishing that, and I wrote that after it was catalyzed by my journey and seeking to finally understand and integrate this in my own life. But then I was fascinated with the benefits of multiple day water fasting. And at the time before I committed to writing the book or when I committed to, I thought that I would write the book about how to implement successfully a multiple day water fast, typically five days, because I had done it three or four times before I did the book and I thought this was really important. To do. And what I realized after doing the research is that there was probably not a good strategy for almost everyone for a number of reasons. Well, there's a number of good reasons why it is bad, beneficial, and has been beneficial historically for many, many centuries, probably for time immemorial. It's a crucial part of nearly every major religion on the planet, for spiritual reasons, but also for health reasons. And you've got to know that practices like that would not persist unless there was some benefit for them. So there clearly is a benefit to doing this. But what I realize is that we live in the 20th century and in the 20th century, 21st century, sorry, we used to live in the 21st century. But in the 20th century, and certainly extending the 21st, there was the development of all these toxins, industrial chemicals, at least 80,000 and more. Many of them have never been studied for toxicity, let alone synergistic toxicity from having combinations of these things. And most of these chemicals are fat soluble, which means they eventually get stored in your fat cells. And when you're doing a multiple day water fast, you are liberating these toxic chemicals. And that's all well and good, unless you have too many of them. And your detoxification systems aren't up to the challenge of biochemically modifying those toxins so that they can be essentially changed and effective and eliminated and excreted from your body. So. So when you do this multiple day water fasting, I think you're getting too many because of the toxic exposures that we now have. And you also don't have the fuel and the nutrients you need for your liver to properly process them, which is why I think keto fast, or partial fast, which is a hybrid of a few different systems. Kristin Verride's alternate day fast. She's a professor at the University of Illinois, maybe associate professor. And then Michael Mosley did the. No, actually he did his thing to the 5:2. But it was also Valter Longo's work on the fasting mimicking diet. So I hybridized those together to a program that I thought is relatively easy and simple to understand and follow and yet reap the most important benefits that you would achieve by multiple day water fasting.

I love your mindset and we both think that way. It has to be something you're going to actually do, because if it requires you to go to the top of the Himalayas and stand up one leg while you do it, the friction to get there isn't going to happen. So the pragmatic approach to getting Most of the benefits, but experiencing way less of the disruption in your life and the pain. That's the holy grail for people who actually have things we want to do. So walk me through how you do this multiple day variant on water fast. And I want to share with you and with listeners what I've been doing. And let's talk about the pros and cons of these different things.

Okay, well, like I said, it's a variant of the fasting mimicking diet, which is 1,000 calories the first day and then about 700 calories the next four days. So it's a little bit different than that. And it's basically you're using your own food, so it's a lot less expensive than a $600 prolon program. But the way that you do it is you first have to become metabolically flexible. And most people listening probably are. But if you aren't, then the single most important strategy, and the one that I emphasize in every lecture I give now, is to compress your eating window to six to eight hours. And what I've realized actually as I was doing my own keto fast question and answer session, is that we sleep for eight hours. Dave Right, except for you, six and a half hours with your massively improved stem cell makeover that you're able to do that. But most of us, most every other mortal humans are sleeping for eight hours if they want to get their maximum benefits. So why shouldn't we just eat for eight hours and then 16 hours put at rest? Now I tend to go a little bit longer. Not only eat in a six hour window, but maybe it's eight hours. So six to eight hours is the window. And once you're doing that, you really get just doing that and not even paying attention to the quality of the food is going to provide you with enormous benefits. But if you're doing that, you're going to become metabolically flexible, unless you're seriously metabolically impaired, 200, 300 pounds overweight, or maybe even 100, but then it's going to take a little longer. And the way you know you're flexible is that you can look at your ketones and the most accurate way is measuring them in your blood. And when you're able to generate physiologically useful levels of ketone, which is usually about 0.3 to 0.5 millimoles, then you know you're flexible and then you can do this. So what is the program, by the way?

Before we get into the program, some people might not know what that 0.3 to 0.5 is. And the significance, I want to walk through that real quick. Sure. Most of the keto bro kind of cultures, my ketones are higher than yours. I got them up to 3.5 or whatever, which is sort of like saying my blood glucose is higher than yours. The fact you have all these energy molecules floating around that your body didn't suck into your cells might mean that you have a problem. But 0.3 to 0.5 is not considered nutritional ketosis by most people. But it has these massive effects on hunger hormones and it has these other effects on your satiety hormones. And there's a couple different studies that are in both my books. I think you also have the same research in your last book, if I remember right. But that's a magic number and you can get there via a variety of ways. All right, so given that context, this is low grade ketosis. This isn't like the monster ketosis that some people.

No, no, it doesn't have to be that high. And that's a very good point that you bring up, Dave, because there are some challenges with that. And as you become more metabolically efficient, you're tissues indeed are able to utilize those ketones. So you suck them up and they're not floating around your blood. So actually your blood ketones will have lower levels. And it doesn't necessarily mean it's worse. I mean, it's very, very hard for me to get my ketones over three. I mean, I have to fast for many days to do that. I mean, I typically don't fast for more than a day. Well, the keto fast, which I'm about to describe, but even when I take like 50 grams of exogenous ketone esters, the, you know, it hardly stuff that.

Tastes like gasoline, right?

Yeah. So anyway, you get your metabolically flexible as determined by blood ketone level 0.3 to 0.5. So you've got this restricted eating window. In my case it's 9am to 3pm, maybe it's 10 to 4, 10 to 5, you know, it's in that range. So you've done it, you've eaten your, you've been doing this for a month and you wake up and it's. And then you get to 9 o' clock in the morning, wherever your eating time is. And you would normally eat your regular meal. Well, instead of eating your regular meal, you have a very small meal. It's usually between 300 to 500 calories based on your lean body mass, which is about 3.5 times your lean body mass. And those calories are very specific calories. I think this is the key. First of all, there's low carbohydrates, very low carbohydrates to inhibit autopsy. So less than 10 grams, you know, essentially none, almost. And then the fat's actually low too, but it's only low because you want to keep the calories low, because high calories will activate, will inhibit autophagy. So the bulk of the calories though by volume certainly is protein. But it's a very specific type of protein. It may be 30, 40 or maybe even a little more grams of protein, which is quite significant. But I think it's useful because it's going to give the fuel that your liver primarily requires to facilitate the detoxification process. But the proteins and are really low levels of branch chain amino acids. And a good example of that would be collagen protein or bone broth, which has mostly glycine, proline, hydroxyproline, very low branched chains and so much ideal form. And I use fermented chlorella, which doesn't have the glycine, but it still is low in the branched chains. And we have a vegan protein powder that I use also which is also very low in branched chains. So I have like 40 grams of that one meal and that's the meal for the day. And then you don't eat for 24 hours. So essentially the next day you wake up and it'll be like by the time you eat the next meal, you'll be at least 42 hours where you've only had 3 to 500 calories. And a number of things will occur in that are physiologically significant. One is that you will maximally activate autophagy. Maybe not maximally, but close to to max. It might be 80, 85% because you'll get probably getting more in multiple day water fast, but not significantly more, especially considering the downsides. So a few other things will happen. Typically you'll lose weight. I lose about 4 pounds of weight every time I do it. Most all of it's water because you're depleting your glycogen stores and your glycogen requires water to be stored. So when you're burning it, you're going to urinate the water on, you're going to lose weight. So it's not lean muscle mass you're losing, it's primarily water. But then you'll also have increased, radically increased your growth hormone levels by 2 to 300%, which is a profoundly important physiological benefit that you can absolutely take advantage.

Is that the collagen or the fast that's doing that?

No, that's the fast.

Okay.

It's the fast that's an artifact of fasting, does a lot of other good things. DPH increases nad, and I can tell you about the mechanisms if you're interested. But anyway, so your growth hormone is elevated. It's not typically a problem. It's not like injecting growth hormone, because when your growth hormone is elevated from fasting, your growth hormone receptors are inhibited. So you don't get the active, you don't get the increase in IGF1, but you still have elevated growth hormone. So that when you wake up in the morning, you can do a strength training workout and you can just crush it, absolutely crush it in a fasted state. And then when you get home or when you're finished with your workout, as soon as you can, then you feast and you activate mtor. You go into an anabolic phase where you have lots of branched chain, immun, amino acids, glutamine, colostrum, things that would really build your tissue up and carbohydrates. So carbohydrates, healthy carbohydrates, like fruit, will raise your insulin levels, it will decrease ampk, they'll activate mtor, and the branched chains will also activate. Because there's a number of different ways you can activate mtor and you just don't want to do it with one way. Do it with multiple ways and then you can get maximal.

Yeah, I wrote about something, I called it, I called it either stacking MTOR or tripling down on mtor, because the way MTOR works and you want MTOR to build muscle tissues, this is for people listening. If you haven't heard about mtor, you need it in order to build muscle. But if it's chronically elevated by eating too much animal protein all the time, you're not going to like what happens. It's really bad for you. So it should be low most of the time and then spike. You get muscles and then it goes back to low. And that's what Dr. McColl is talking about here. The three things that work to really push MTOR down, what you want to do is push it down. It's like a spring. You load it up, you load it up, you load it up and then you let the spring go and it spikes. So fasting suppresses MTOR so it'll spike back up. Coffee is shown in studies to suppress MTOR and exercise does that. So what Dr. Mercola is describing here is very similar to that idea of tripling down on your mtor and you do all those things and working out in a fasted state. The way you just said, it's profound. Because I would say before the workout, have some coffee. Oh, absolutely.

I didn't get to that part, but I'll.

You have that in there as well. Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

And then bam, the MTOR goes up and yeah, you do put muscle on better. And I love. You mentioned glutamine, but glutamine will take you right out of ketosis, right?

Well, yeah, but do you do this after the workout?

Exactly. You're okay to go out of ketosis because you just worked out. Right.

So all the supplements, I said glutamine, branch chain, amino acids, fruit, you don't do those in the fasting phase. You do those after you've worked out. But you're absolutely right. Coffee is so beneficial because it's full of polyphenols. Now, healthy coffee, of course, because you don't want the toxins and the kind that you promote and free of mycotoxins and other things. But there's other polyphenols, like raw coconuts, EGCG from green tea. And I use a wild apple that's harvested from Europe that has much even higher concentrations of EGC and other similar polyphenols. And then I like the pomegranate peels. Most people know pomegranates are healthy, but the peels actually has 90% of the polyphenols. And there's two really good ones in there, ellagic acid and ellagrotannins. And when you eat them, your microbiome converts them to urolithin A, which is a powerful, powerful mitophagy benefit. These pomegranate peel powders are some of the most profound polyphenols out there, in my view.

What's really cool, you can get a VIOME test. And Naveen Jain was also on stage at the Bulletproof conference, and he found that about 30% of people don't have the bacteria in their gut to metabolize ellagic acid, which comes from pomegranates or from raspberries. And so if you have that test, it actually tells you whether you're going to be able to convert that. And I would imagine, although we don't have the evidence yet, that if you take that stuff regularly, you'll actually grow the microbiome that can do that, which is also interesting. So if it was never present in your diet, why would you have bacteria that could do it? So this is one of those ways you change your gut bacteria to be healthy if you take that stuff regularly. And I like the apple polyphenols as well. These are important things. And you're bringing up something that kind of annoys me about fasting. There are some purists who say, well, the lab studies on rats were done with water only.

I know.

Therefore, we can only do water in our fast. And here's the thing. This is in the bulletproof diet in 2014, something called fasting induced adipose factor, or FEOF. And your liver makes this stuff. And when you're fasting, it says, oh, burn extra fat. And when you have extra carbs present, it says, store extra fat. Unfortunately, your microbiome wants to make sure that the walking petri dish that is you, from your gut's perspective, it wants to make sure that you have extra fat and that you're not going to run out of energy. So it'll amplify your fee off levels. And what does the good bacteria in the gut eat? The stuff that keeps you thin? It eats polyphenols. So I don't know. But when I'm doing my quote water fast, do I want to have green tea? Do I want to have coffee? Do I want to have polyphenols that don't have substantial amounts of carbohydrates or protein present? I think that there's a great argument for it and I feel better and perform better when I do it. So I love it that you're calling that out, too, because water only fasting isn't necessary. It's better to do it with tea or coffee or cacao even, than not.

Small amounts of protein that's not going to activate any floor. So that's the conclusion I reached after reviewing literature. It's really clear if you seriously investigate this. But there's other polyphenols, too. You've got curcumin, you've got berberine, quercetin, and there's probably another half a dozen I'm not thinking of right now. But here's the thing, David. This is what I figured out, actually, even after I sent the draft of the book to the publisher. Is that autophagy? And I'm pretty confident this is true. It's not something you want to activate all the time.

No, no, no, no.

So, and I would be taking these polyphenols, like, nightly, like when I went to bed when I was activating through an intermittent fast. But then I realized, no, not a good strategy. And I'm only doing it twice a week. So I take all these polyphenols when I do the partial fast, when I really upregulate autophagy twice a week. So I take it before I go to bed, where I've had like 30 hours of the fast, and when I wake up, because I'm still not going to eat for another four to five, six hours. So I get two blasts of the polyphenol hit at activating autophagy.

There's going to be over the next 10 years, this huge amount of science that looks at which polyphenols do what and which combinations of polyphenols do what for you, based on what gut bacteria you have present and based on what genetics you have. And this is an incredibly complex data science thing to unpeel. We can only do it with big data and with the ability to measure all of those things. So when we have enough human genomes, enough gut bacteria genomes, and enough of this, it's the same thing we've been doing for the past 80 years with amino acids. What does amino acid number one do? What does tryptophan do? What does tyrosine do? What does glutamine do? And then, oh, what happens if you put two of these together? And then there it's even more complex because if you glue two of them together into a di or a tripeptide, like collagen, tripeptides in collagen do something different than the amino acids in collagen, and you go down this rat hole of complexity. But what you've done in keto, fast, and even just some of the basic principles of the bulletproof diet, only have fat in the morning in order to extend that effect of that break fast, because even though you got energy, you didn't activate any insulin, you didn't activate any protein digestion, all those things are the very beginnings of what we're starting to learn about what this big variable in our environment, the food, is going to our body. And when someone talks to me about calories, I just kind of want to laugh. Like, what kind of calories? I mean, candle wax is full of calories, but I'm pretty sure it's different than drinking gasoline, which is also full of calories. They're just not all the same. You can't even think about it that way because it's like below Reader's Digest level of simplicity of thinking about nutrition. But your doctor still says calories. So I'll get off my Soapbox, you already know all this stuff.

No, but it's important to repeat it for the listeners. And there's no question. And I really greatly appreciate your. You're being a leader and helping the community understand this because not many people are teaching this. And you know, you really. That's what I really, really value about your, your approach and your ability to network with individuals who understand this at a deep level. Because it's hard to tease out. You know, it really isn't. Really isn't there. But the two other polyphenols that are important that I forgot.

Oh yeah.

Were fisetin and resveratrol. The other two.

What about apigenin, is that in it for you as well?

Apigenin is an interesting one. It is, it is useful. It's hard to get in high concentrations. Fisetin you can get pretty high. You can get milligram quantities. It's hard to get milligram quantities of apigena. Typically I guess you can, but I haven't found a really good source of it. But it inhibits CD38 and CD38 is an enzyme that's outside your cells and is one of the biggest extracellular consumers of nad. And interestingly so that you would theoretically increase NAD if it worked. I mean, that's what Sinclair believes in a lot of others. But here's the cool thing, actually I'm reading Sinclair's new book that comes out in a few months and just read this this morning because I didn't realize the mechanism. But we know that fasting will increase your nad levels by 30%. So the need for apigenid is kind of diminished. If you're already increasing it by 30%, why do you need to do that? And you know, the mechanism is that it upregulates the rate limiting enzyme in the salvage pathway. So essentially the converting nicotinamide back to nad and that's nampt that enzyme. So that's how fasting works, which is an interesting way.

Now fisetin is available in capsules. I use it in a couple of the formulations I've created. And I've taken fistin for a very long time. I think the most common source is seaweed or strawberries, if I'm remembering right.

No, I think most of it. I thought it was called fisetin.

Yeah, I could.

Yeah, yeah. But the primary source is from some Australian pine tree. I mean, in food the highest source is strawberries.

Yeah, but oh, the supplements don't come from strawberries.

Yeah, they do. They do not. I could Never find a source that wasn't from this. Australian pine needles. But interestingly, it has a very poor absorption fisetin. And so I. You know how I take my. My fisetin? I was. Do I. Doing intrarectal fisetin.

You know, I'm just gonna have to say this, Dr. Mercola. That's gross. No, I'm kidding. Guys, listen. IVs work really well. IVs require a needle going into your vein. If you take certain nutrients and you put them in. Not your mouth, the other end, with the right things, they will absorb as well as an intravenous nutrient, and it's cheaper and less painful. So Dr. Mercola is not alone in this. So do tell. Do you have a recipe?

Yeah, I do. I can share it with you. But the fisetin has very poor oral absorption. And I use the same strategy. There's two nutrients I take transmucosally because the rectum is full of mucosa, which has essentially very similar absorption rates as intravenous. Not quite, but close to 80, 90%. So the other nutrient I use is nicotinamide riboside, and that's my favorite NAD plus precursor, in addition to niacin, which is like dirt cheap. And I take pretty much every day, but only 25-50mg. A small, small amount, not certainly, you know, larger than that, because that's about what you normally lose per day in the salvage pathway. But nicotinamide riboside is actually an interesting nutrient because it's. It's natural. I mean, it's in breast milk. So this thing is not some exogenous, crazy chemical. It's totally natural. Yeah. And you've interviewed Charles Brenner before, who was actually at your event, and I attended his presentation. So I talked to Brenner after his presentation because I was trying to ask him, and he wouldn't pick on me for whatever reason. But anyway, I cornered him after the presentation, and I said, listen, what do you think about if you swallow NR orally? There's no question about it. The vast majority of it's going to be methylated by your liver. That's why the NAD levels are really high in your liver after nr. Now, you do get some other systemic benefit, but I think it's minimized because of the methylation process. So I said, what do you think about using it transmucosally through the rectum? And he just, like, I never thought of that. Or just like, I don't know who's going to do a rectal, you know, so he had no clue about it.

And just for people listening, we're talking about something the size of a pencil eraser. It's not like a horrible, uncomfortable sort of a thing.

Yeah. And so I'll tell you how I do this. So you buy the raw materials, and there's a number of companies that sell nr, and fisetin is available from a number of companies. So you just get it and you put in one normal dose, an oral dose. And the way you do it is you get a candy mold on Amazon that's made out of silicone. And the one I use is. I don't forget the name of it, but it has 66 wells. And the actual mold looks like an inverted candy. Hershey's Kiss. It's a little triangle.

I thought you were going to say Christmas tree for a minute there, Alex.

No, no, no, no. Hershey's Kiss. And about the same size as a Hershey's. So that's maybe a little smaller because it doesn't have as wide a base. It's more of a cylinder. And it's a candy mold, actually. And you fill it up with. You melt some coconut oil. In the summer, if you're listening to this, it won't be an issue because it's usually liquid at room temperature. But if it's winter or cold, then you have to heat it up and you pour it into the well, and then maybe halfway, and then you open the capsule and put it into the well, and then you fill it up with coconut oil again, and you fill all the wells up, and then you put in the refrigerator. Now, my time's a little bit too valuable for me to do this, so I pay someone to do that for me. And then you keep it refrigerated. And then I do it twice a day. Not the fisetin. I only use the fisetin because it's polyphenol during the fasting, but the NR I use every day, twice a day, and just do it intrarectorally. The key here, though, it's a cylinder, so you don't want it. You would think you'd put the pointy in first, but you actually put the base of it in first, otherwise it tends to pop out.

You can also, just. On Amazon, you can search for a suppository mold and have little things that are designed with more of a teardrop shape.

Yeah, yeah. And that'll work, too.

Yeah. I'm just like. For people listening who are going, wait a minute, are you serious? But bottom line is, if you get maybe 10 or 20 times better absorption that way than you do from swallowing the pill. Let's talk about money.

Yeah. Yeah.

Do you want to spend 20 times more and swallow 20 times more supplements or do you to be really effective on that front?

It's not even just the economics. I mean, because there may be some concern about the metabolites of this stuff. We just don't know, especially with some of the polyphenols or even nr. Who knows what methylated NR is going to do. I mean, studies have never been done, so we're in new territory. But we know that NR itself, as it gets into your system systemically, is really safe and highly beneficial because it will increase your NAD levels. And there's lots of studies on NR benefits, even not use transmucosally.

So you mix coconut oil. I've used cacao butter or coconut oil.

Yeah, either one will work.

And then you put it in the freezer so that it's cold enough that it solidifies. And both of those. Cacao is interesting because it melts at exactly the temperature of your body, which is why chocolate has that cool. When it's real chocolate, not made with wax, it has that kind of cool mouth feel. And then coconut oil melts at a lower temperature than your body, so it has to be relatively cool. Otherwise the whole whole thing gets liquidy. So I prefer cacao butter with a.

Little bit of oil. That's a good improvement in the system. It's a little pricier than coconut oil and you almost always have to heat it to put it in there. But it's a more elegant solution. There's no question.

I will admit I don't do most of my vitamins that way, but I certainly like things like sod and catalase, which are important for dealing with excessive free radicals after are flying and things like that. I have no problem with transmucosal delivery systems, we'll put it that way. But there may be some supplements where you wouldn't want to do this because your levels could get too high and even be unsafe. So I would just encourage anyone who's thinking about doing this. Don't go out there and take everything in your vitamin cabinet, or even worse, your pharmaceutical cabinet and blend it all up because you're playing with. You need to know that it's okay to have a high dose of it and just, you know, be careful and pay attention.

Yeah. I would caution you to reconsider the sod and catalase. Those are two important antioxidants. SOD is A dismutase for superoxide to transmute it into hydrogen peroxide. Then catalase to take the peroxide to water or. Well, yeah, water, ideally. So the danger of doing that is those are really important signaling molecules, and you're kind of playing with fire, in my view. And the better way, I believe, is to upregulate the hormones them hormetically. And there's some very elegant ways to do that, the best probably being molecular.

Hydrogen, more so than ozone therapy. Interesting.

All right, ozone may. But I'm not familiar with it. I just haven't studied that perspective. But there's a number of intriguing molecules. Biological molecules will do it. Molecular hydrogen is one. And then you've got sulforaphane, which of course is from. From broccoli. Broccoli sprouts. But it not only upregulates the NRF2 pathway, but it does something really intriguing that we're going to talk about, which is one of the other benefits of fasting. And maybe we can delve off here.

I think we need to tell people what SOD and catalase are, just because I think people say, what the heck is going on here? And I have too much SOD horror story as well. So why don't you share what sod and catalase are, what they do, and then we'll talk about how to manage oxidative stress.

Well, they're essentially antioxidants and mostly produced in your mitochondria because that's where they're mostly made. Because most of the superoxide is produced in the mitochondria. It's an artifact of transferring the electrons to the electron transport chain. And that's part of the process. And normally, interestingly, this is an interesting side effect or tangent is that if you're metabolically healthy, like you and I are, most of your listeners, you're going to. It's not a perfect transfer of those electrons from your food to energy. You're going to leak about 3 to 5% of the electrons out, and they'll develop superoxide, which sod. Superoxide dismutase transmutes to hydrogen peroxide, and then the peroxide is neutralized by catalase to water. So that occurs normally in mitochondria. But if you're metabolically inflexible and you're primarily getting your food and most of your calories from carbs, especially unhealthy carbs, then you're going to generate. Instead of 3 to 5%, you might generate 40% more. So you have Increased oxidative stress, just burning your fuel for energy, which is crazy. You know, oxidative stress is a prescription for disaster, unnecessary oxidative stress. You need some because they're really important biological signaling molecules. Which is why I get back to the other argument, why taking exogenous antioxidants like this LD or catalyst may not be a wise strategy. Because you're like playing God almost and you're trying to figure this thing out. Rather have. My approach is to let your body figure out if you need it by giving these biological molecules. Because molecular hydrogen just doesn't frivolously increase your sod or catalase or glutathione. It assesses exactly what the parameters are of your biological damage. And if you need it, if you have excessive oxidative stress, it will dissociate from the keep one protein which gets it active and it goes into their DNA, activates the antioxidant response amounts. The are genesis and will help your body make those antioxidants almost instantaneously. So you've got it right where you need it in the cells in the mitochondria so that you can neutralize that oxidative stress. So I think it's wise to let your body do the heavy lifting rather than you try to micromanage it.

I very much appreciate and support that perspective. Healthy mitochondria ought to be able to make enough antioxidants to handle, handle their own stuff. When I was £300 and I had serious metabolic derangement for a variety of reasons, including the time I was a raw vegan for a while, and not to mention toxic mold exposure and heavy metals and eating lots of the wrong foods and all the other stuff. But I did find antioxidants like those were helpful. And as I got metabolically healthy, I said, I'm going to try suppressing SOD and take some, some supplements that are specifically targeted sod. So I did this for four days and I have not felt that wrecked in so long because when you don't have enough free radicals generated by your mitochondria, they downregulate their function. So within four days I felt like I was making a third as much energy as I should. And I mean, I really was just, man, I have to put one foot in front of the other today, which is not my characteristic state. So I don't take those, those supplements at all. Except after I fly, you have a very large spike in free radical production that isn't really good. I found that a relatively low dose transmucosal SOD and catalase does make a difference for me, but only on a functional use when I knew I just did something unnatural to my biology. Taking a long flight is not good for you, but potentially, if I was breathing hydrogen or doing some other hydrogen stuff, maybe I wouldn't even need to do that. But it's been working for me so far. But it's one.