How To Have Boundless Energy with Ben Greenfield

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

And as we've transitioned into a post-industrial era where it's very easy to sit all day long, we still want to satisfy that primal urge to go out and move, but unfortunately the way we've decided to do it is to do just a soul-crushing workout at the beginning or the end of the day and.

Then have our butts planted in a chair for the other eight hours of the day. And my approach is the complete opposite. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. Last year I turned 60 and I feel better than ever. My biggest overall health goal is not just to live a long life, but to do it well by staying sharp and active. So I'm always looking for ways to continue to feeling great at every age. Now, one of the tools that I use is red light therapy from Joov. Now, it's a super gentle, non-invasive treatment that I do at home, where a device with special LED lights delivers concentrated light to my skin. Red light therapy actually powers up our mitochondria, which are little energy factories in our cells, and helps them turn food and oxygen into the energy that lets us do the things that we love. And since our mitochondria naturally decline as we age, and that leads to inflammation, supporting them means we stay youthful from the inside out. Everything we can do to reduce inflammation is a step towards preventing chronic disease and living a longer, healthier life, and Joovv makes it super easy. I can just sit or stand in front of the Joovv red light therapy device for 10 to 15 minutes a day. They have lots of sizes to choose from. One of them even fits right on my desk. Red light therapy is also an amazing way to improve muscle recovery and sleep and collagen production so you get multiple benefits at once. I use mine regularly and I notice my energy is better and better, that I sleep better, and even my skin looks more youthful and vibrant. It's such an easy tool that I love using it as part of my daily routine. So head over to juuve.com forward slash pharmacy. That's J-O-O-V-V-E.com forward slash pharmacy. .com/Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y to learn more about red light therapy and what it could do for your health. It's a simple way to support better aging without ever having to leave the house. And I hope you'll check out Juuve today. Now my goal with my diet is to use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Now our soils have become depleted. and our digestive systems might be considered compromised by stress and toxins, so they just can't absorb as efficiently as they should. That's why I always use, and I recommend my patients use, a multivitamin and mineral as extra nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all the day-to-day functions our bodies have to perform that our food might be missing. But there are so many products out there I wouldn't go near because they contain artificial fillers or inactive ingredients, so you have to be picky. the one I trust and take myself is athletic greens. They use high quality and highly absorbable forms of vitamins and nutrients from Whole Real Foods. Athletic greens comes in a powder that tastes great and mixes easily with water or smoothies and specifically supports Gut Health, Immunity, Energy and Recovery. And it's not just the vitamins and minerals. It has phytonutrient Rich superfoods, adaptogens, pre and probiotics and digestive enzymes. And I love that they add digestive support in their powder since so much of our immune strength and our overall wellness starts in the gut. It really is the one supplement that covers so many bases that you'd be hard pressed to find something else this comprehensive in one place. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine and I love having it with me whenever I travel. I also love that it's diet friendly whether you're vegan, paleo, keto, dairy free or gluten free. Right now Athletic Greens is offering my audience their Vitamin D3K2 liquid formula free with your first purchase. These two nutrients are also so vital for a strong immune system and strong bones and many of us aren't getting enough of them. I use Athletic Greens Powder and their D3K2 formula to make sure I get extra nutrients that complement my diet. So just go to athleticgreens.com/hymen to get your free bottle of Vitamin D3 and K2 with your first purchase. You'll get it delivered straight to your door and I promise you'll feel the difference Athletic Greens can make in your daily wellness routine. And again, that's athleticgreens.com/hymen. And now let's get back to this week's episode.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about your health and you want to find a way to get peak performance and optimize your body and your brain and defy aging, well, this is the conversation for you because we're talking with Ben Greenfield and his about his new book, Boundless, which I'm really excited to get into, Ben. And I just a little background on Ben. He's a human performance consultant. He's a speaker, New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including things like Beyond Training and Boundless. He played college tennis, water polo, volleyball, bodybuilder, 13-time Ironman triathlete, which is impressive, professional obstacle course racer, and he's been voted as America's top personal trainer. and by greatest is one of the top 100 most influential people in health and fitness. He hosts a highly popular fitness nutrition wellness website, BenGreenfieldFitness.com, with over a million monthly visitors, has great articles, podcasts, and product reviews. So he's the guy. He lives in Spokane. He loves incredible activities like ukulele, spearfishing, bowhunting, planting and foraging and cooking. He seeks to help people to achieve high performance, peak performance, defy aging and live fulfilling, joyful, limitless life, which sounds good. I want to sign up for that. So, welcome back.

But most importantly, if you spell pharmacy with an F, but you say defy aging is defy aging with the, with the pH.

Maybe. So you've been working on this book for three years. And we were just chatting about it. It's a tome. It's 650 pages. Cut out 450 pages. And it's an incredible testament to how much you know and what your goals are, which is to really provide a roadmap for people.

Possibly, or how crappy of a writer I am.

Oh, maybe.

Was it Mark Twain when he wrote the letter? He said, I apologize if I had more time, this letter would have been shorter.

Yeah, sorry for the long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one, right? Exactly. So, this book is about things that you've always wanted to have out there that you always wished existed in a book but never were there. It's a blueprint for upgrading your brain, for optimize your body, for defying aging. So tell us about this book, what sort of drove you to write it and what are the key take homes?

Well, you know, the key message of the book for me is really out energy, you know, having boundless amounts of energy at your beck and call. during the day. Most, most everything I've written before this has been oriented towards performance, towards Fitness, towards muscle gain, towards fat loss, and even towards things like, you know, Iron Man training and obstacle course training and things that at one time in my life, I would have professed to be healthy in a, in a good way to extend lifespan, but now I know much better than that. And you're not doing any more Iron.

Mans because he paid you too much?

No, no. Well, I, I don't know. I suppose if the paycheck were large enough, I might consider sit or hop it back on the bike, but it would need to be some serious incentive there for me to slip back into the spandex and the shammy. But, the idea behind Boundless was I wanted to focus a lot more on things that, especially in the fitness realm, get neglected. Everything from hormone management to gut to the immune system to the brain. and I also over the past three years have just become increasingly interested in the whole anti-aging and longevity field.

Sounds like functional medicine.

Yeah, pretty heavily into that. I wanted to lay out a lot of different dietary approaches and highlight how people can actually determine what kind of diet is right for their biochemical individuality rather than writing just a diet book or a diet prescription. I worked in a lot of fitness concepts, but fitness concepts more focused on longevity, longevity of the joints and longevity of the training system rather than performance at all costs. For example, the strength training session is based on targeting both strength and power. We know based on telomere length studies and power lifters that having this quick explosive wiry strength is good, but the problem is if you use something like CrossFit or Olympic powerlifting or something like that and you're in a very heavily loaded state or you're in a metabolically exhausted state, it can also carry with it a high risk for injury. So, for building strength, I like more of the one of the programs I outline in the book is something very similar to what Dr. Doug McGuff talks about in his book Body by Science. It's very super slow training. 10 to 20 seconds up, 10 to 20 seconds down. single set to failure, you get a really good peripheral blood pressure response, you get the lactic acid trapped in the muscle tissue so you get a little bit of a growth hormone release. You can get very strong with that type of training just one to two times a week. And, of course, you don't get those fast twitch explosive muscle fibers targeted that you want for the longevity component. And so, in addition to that, there's a couple of bodyweight training sessions that you can do each week that are more quick, explosive, powerful, but not under load and not in a metabolically exhausted state. Oh, that sounds good.

I want that.

So, yeah, the idea is to have energy and to be fit and to have a body and a brain that responds the way that you want it to, but not necessarily for the goals of peak performance or going out and doing an Ironman or something like that. So, like what PRT talks about, training.

For the Centenarian Olympics.

Training for the Centenarian Olympics.

Exactly, yeah. I'm getting close to that.

I got 40 years to go, so I better start training. Yeah, that's actually, actually, you know, the Centenarian Olympics. One thing I think about is Can you get up after being down on the ground? And one of my favorite workouts that I do is I'll do a little bit of cardio. I did this workout yesterday at the gym, so it's fresh in my mind. And I do, have you ever seen Turkish get-ups before with a kettlebell? I have my kids do this exercise too. And the way I taught them how to do it was with a glass of water. And so you'll hold the water up above your head and from a position laying down flat on your back on the ground, you have to stand all the way up. And technically a Turkish get-up has some pretty strict movement regulations. it's a Russian kettlebell exercise. If you're judging it, you gotta have certain movement patterns. But anyways, you're essentially standing up with a weight or if you're just training for balance or nervous system, a cup of water over the head, and then getting back down onto the ground in a laying position without spilling the water. And without using your hands. Without your arm breaking. Now, one hand, that hand that's behind you, you can use, but other than that, you're basically up and down off the ground and it's incredibly difficult. It's hard to describe on audio, but if someone were to Google Turkish get up and look up a video of.

It, or don't use Google, use DuckDuckGo or Quand. Well, what you're saying is so important because, you know, I remember, you know, my dad, when I went skiing a few years ago, well, many years ago, he died about 91, but he was in his 70s and he fell on the ski slope and he couldn't get up.

Yeah.

And I had to help him up. And I think the reason people end up in nursing homes is not because.

Of disease, is because they can't tie their shoes or can't get out of bed or can't get up. Yeah. So the workout I do, I do a little bit of cardio, like two to four minutes of cardio, and then I do five. of those Turkish get-ups on each side, holding a heavy weight over my head. And then all I do after that is I sit down and stand up 30 times and you want to use, and they did one interesting study that showed the fewer limbs that you can use when sitting down and standing up from the floor, there's a direct correlation between that and longevity.

Okay, I'm down.

Just being able to sit down and stand up. So, I'll do a few rounds of that and your hips feel great because you're getting down and standing up, it's very functional. When I travel, I like very non-cognitively demanding workouts where there's just like two or three exercises and you just do a few rounds and that's a good one.

Yeah, that sounds amazing. Before we started the podcast, you were down on the floor showing me the five Tibetan longevity exercises that you do every morning. So, I was like, All right, I'm.

Gonna write those down. Are they in the book? Yeah, there's a whole chapter on beauty and symmetry, how to optimize your workplace ergonomics in terms of the type of pelvic shaped stools that you can use instead of chairs. There's a very soft mat that I like. It was created by this Swiss inventor and patterned after the Korean rice paddy fields. He'd walk in those and find that his feet grew very strong and his little back pain went away. And so he developed these mats that you can use as standing mats at a workstation. So I've got all these different things you can sprinkle around your office to optimize your your biomechanics during a workday, which definitely plays into symmetry.

So, this is like having a trainer in a book. So, like, in Greenfield's in the book.

Telling you what to do. Yeah. And, the symmetry chapter also has a whole range of exercises and this originated from just exercise I give my clients to do on airplanes and to do when they're waiting for an airplane to take off and to do when they're taking their little movement snacks during a workday, stopping every 35 to 55 minutes to do a few stretches. So, you know, sample exercises are, you know, different moves called foundation training moves that decompress the spine, use your own body to decompress your spine, Eldoa stretching, which is a form of self-myofascial stretching where you're actually kind of pushing through a very extreme range of motion for about a minute and holding just to mobilize the fascia. A lot of different foam roller moves, basically all the things that you can do to kind of get the body moving.

So, is there like a curriculum saying like you have to like start here and do these things or this is a program?

Much of the book is choose your own adventure, but what it is is like here's six different three to five minute routines, whether it's an Aldo routine or a foundation training routine or a certain series of stretches or these longevity exercises. Stop at certain points during the day. Choose your own adventure. Pick which routine you want to do. It only takes three to five minutes. do that and then just get back to work.

So, these are bite-sized forms of working out that have a huge impact that you can do anywhere that you don't have to go to the gym for an hour or two hours. Right. Get all sweaty and messy.

Yeah, I mean, the gym, really our gym culture, not to get too much up on a soapbox, but it's, you know, these hardcore soul-crushing workouts at the gym, you know, normally, you know, 100 years ago would have been relegated to the realm of the warrior, the soldier, the gladiator, the person who wouldn't necessarily be expected to live a very long time but had to be in good enough shape to be very hard to kill. And as we've transitioned into a post-industrial era where it's very easy to sit all day long, we still want to satisfy that primal urge to go out and move but unfortunately the way we've decided to do it is to do just a soul-crushing workout at the beginning or the end of the day and then have our butts planted in a chair for the other eight hours of the day. And my approach is the complete opposite. I think that if you move all day, if you're using standing or treadmill workstations, taking your calls while you're walking outdoors in the sunshine, taking these movement snack breaks, keeping maybe a kettlebell or a dumbbell.

Wait, that's great. Movement snack breaks. We got to pause on that.

That is the greatest idea ever. Movement snacks. Yeah. Snack all day long, but not the way I used to preach as a personal trainer.

I used to preach six to ten.

Small meals a day. I show them a yogurt and carrot sticks, an energy bar.

But yeah, there's no evidence that eating more than two times a day is.

Going to do anything for your metabolism. But the movement snacks, the movement.

So move from actual snacks to movement snacks.

That is a great take on Pearl. The thing with the, with the exercise is if, if you've done that, maybe you keep a kettle bar or a, a kettle bell or, like, a hex bar. Right. I love a hex bar. It allows someone, even with a compromised back, to be able to lift a heavy weight up off the ground. Yeah. Or a pull-up bar for shoulder decompression on, you know, hanging in the door of the office and, and you just. create an environment where you can move during the day as much as possible. And, I think that if you structure things correctly, that formal exercise session beginning or the end of the day should be the icing on the cake. Should be an option. And, if you're training for a triathlon or a Spartan race or an Ironman, something like that, yeah, you do need to go to the gym and do something that would be considered somewhat unnatural because you have an unnatural end in mind, right? You want to go to battle. And so, in a case like that, you got to beat the body, but I think we should structure our days not only for symmetry, but these movements throughout the day. Yeah, I love that. And then, yeah, in the, in the, in that whole symmetry beauty section, I also get into other things like I, I do a, I'm very into, into the face right now, you know, like getting rid of wrinkles, taking care of the skin, things like that. So, I've got this thing I do every week now. I talk about in the book, but I do like a clay mask over the face. I use one of those derma rollers. Yeah. All along the face. then to the clay mask. And then you use like an infrared light, like one of these new photo biomodulation panels, like a juve. There are others, but the juve, like one of these little juve minis that you can keep in your bathroom and you shine that on your face for about 10 minutes. Just listen to an audiobook, listen to a podcast, whatever, and then you rinse.

The clay mask on it. It's amazing. So, tell us more about the juve and the light therapy because people aren't really familiar with that. And, you write about that in the book as a is an incredible therapy for optimizing our body and our brain.

Yeah, well, I mean, light in general is fascinating. I don't know how much you've looked into light. I'm reading this book right now called the Human Photosynthesis and it actually gets into how the human melanin pigment actually operates very similar to the chlorophyll pigment in plants in terms of being able to accept photons of light and generate, I think, for each molecule of water, it's about four electrons. which can then be used to move through the electron transport chain and technically generate ATP-based energy. So that's how our body makes energy. So basically, it's human photosynthesis. Yeah, the electron transport chain is how we make energy, but normally you'd feed glucose into that cycle, right? So you can feed light to make energy. You can use the combination of light and melanin to produce energy. And I had already known a little bit about that idea of some element of human photosynthesis I think it was Sayer Ji who published an article on Green Med maybe five years ago and it really caught my eye. He was talking about how upon ingestion of chlorophyll-rich compounds, you saw a similar effect. Chlorophyll-rich compounds combined with sunlight, so like phytoplankton or green-blue algae or chlorella or spirulina or something like that, but it turns out that just melanin alone, even in the absence of a lot of these green-blue compounds combined with sunlight, can shift you into a state of producing electrons.

So, it's basically a mitochondria like charging the body's battery. Mitochondria are the little energy factories in your cells and they take oxygen and they take food and they burn them and that's how you have energy to run everything. But, what you're saying is that light also can contribute to the rejuvenation of your mitochondria which is central to aging. We're going to get into that in a minute.

Right, and the discussion of melanin aside, we know that certain spectrums of light can activate an element of mitochondria called cytochrome C oxidase. cytochrome C oxidase. And so anything in about the 600 to 850 nanometer spectrum of light, and this would be like red light, infrared light, some parts of far infrared light can fall into that spectrum, but it's normally near infrared and red that are going to target cytochrome C oxidase. It's actually wonderful for the mitochondria. You get a nitric oxide production, you can trigger collagen and elastin production. No really good human clinical studies that I've seen, but a lot of anecdotal evidence, and I Juve has put out some articles on their site about upregulation of mitochondrial activity in Leydig cells in the testes. So, there's an amplified total testosterone response.

If men are using this. Wait, wait, wait. So, you're saying as you shine this.

Red light on you and your testosterone goes up? Yes. So, you take off your clothes in.

Front of these red light panels and.

So you get the skin effect and you also get the endocrine effect. Wow, that's pretty amazing. Testosterone effect, yeah. So, I mean, nothing-- so, you have to shine it on your you guys shine it on new guys. And, there are multiple ways to do it. Like, I actually travel with little mini ones and I'll just lay in bed at night, read a book and kind of tuck it in my crotch and shine it for about 10 minutes. At home, I have one of the big panels and it's at my desk so I can stand at that while I'm working on my desk.

You don't want too much.

It takes 10 minutes a day. Yeah, excess stimulation of some of those nitric oxide synthase pathways and that excess stimulation of cytochrome c oxidase in the mitochondria can generate excess free radicals. So, this is something you could overdo. And, same way, you could overdo UVA.

And UVB from sunlight. So, it's a little too much charge and that creates secondary damage in the.

Body, is what you're saying? Yeah, excess, in this case, it would be reactive oxygen species. So, like free radicals. In response to excess metabolic activity. So, we know any of these things that might induce a mild hormetic effect from cryotherapy to exercise to heat, they.

Would be unfavorable in large amounts. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So, you just said something with a very cool concept, which is hormesis, hormetic. People have no idea what that is. Most people have never heard of the word. And what it means is that when there's a stress to the system, it activates a healing response. So, a little bit of stress, like if you exercise and lift a weight.

It'S going to create a little bit of micro-damage in the muscles, but that makes them stronger. Yes. Assuming you allow them to rest and recover, and the same could be said of radiation. There's even There's one study that showed that the rodents around Chernobyl were living longer than non-irradiated rodents. So, there's some evidence even mild amounts of radiation may be beneficial. This might be partially why earthing and grounding and going outside barefoot and getting exposed to that type of radiation is beneficial. Lower risk of skin cancer with frequent sane exposure to sunlight due to that.

Hormetic effect and building up our resilience.

And, the cryotherapy mentioned which is cold shock therapy.

Yeah.

With the cold, you know, that, that can, that can excessively activate the sympathetic nervous system. It can stress the immune system. It can be too much, but in small amounts, right? You get nitric oxide production and you get that activation of the vagus nerve and you get a little bit of conversion of your adipose tissue into metabolically active brown fat. And so small amounts of cold, good, large amounts, as anyone knows, who's maybe not dressed right for a day of skiing, it can be, it can be stressful. heat, same thing. We know from the Finnish longevity study, the men's longevity study, that sauna is four to five times a week in the sauna and you see a distinct increase.

I do both. I do like a hot steam, really hot, and then I jump in an ice bath.

Well, that's what they left out in that study, I think, because I've gone to Finland and I've gone to the ice baths. They jump in the ice. They'll go in the sauna and then they'll go jump in the Atlantic Sea, stand outside to dry off, shivering, and then go back in the heat and do a few rounds of that. And then, of course, there's the social component, right? They're with, they're with their buddies hanging out. They, when they go in the sauna, you're quiet, you're breathing, you're not in your phone.

So there's, there's some components that, that I think go beyond the sauna. Yeah. And I remember once I was, I was in Maine. I had a friend of mine had a wood-fired sauna, and we literally sat in there for six hours.

Yeah.

And we'd go back out into snow and roll around in the snow. That's amazing. And then get back in the sauna, roll around in the snow. I'd never felt that good in my entire life.

We do that at our house. My kids call them snow angels. And what we'll do is do the sauna. Then as you're walking out trudging through the snow, out to the hot tub, you stop, you do snow angels, you get in the hot tub, you get that tingling in the skin, all that nitric oxide, and you go back out and do snow angels. Yeah, the idea of hot cold, again, for the hormetic effect is fabulous. I talk about this in the book.

A little bit and it's kind of.

It's kind of what a lot of people are talking about right now in the whole nutrition scene is this idea.

Wait, wait, before you get to the nutrition. So, just to summarize, we got movement snacks. Movement snacks. Okay, great concept and idea, and there's lots of those in the book. We've got activating your energy system with light, the right kind of light, like juv. And we have hormesis, which is giving your body different kinds of stresses to activate a healing response, like hot, cold, etc. Very simple. powerful ideas that you can incorporate into your routine. And, I've been doing all these things because they're actually so essential to life. I have a juve, I do movement snacks a lot, and I do hermetic stresses with hot and cold. And, I think it's really how I stay young. I got my telomeres done recently and I'm 60, but my telomeres are 39. So, I think we actually can reverse the biological clock by being smart about these little sort of micro hacks that anybody can do to optimize their health. And your book is just full of these little micro hacks.

It's free. A lot of like, if you think about cold, yeah, you could go pay 70 bucks for a cryotherapy chamber. You could go turn your bath on, go for a walk in the cold, and you could buy one of the whatever $800 light panels, or you can use sunlight similarly. Yeah. Assuming you don't have too many neighbors who are watching you tan your junk out in your backyard. You know, the thing is though, about.

The whole... You live in Spokane.

I'm probably nowhere. My problem is a in the forest so I don't get a lot of sunlight through the trees. Xenohormesis though is also very interesting. This idea that plants have built-in natural defense mechanisms that also induce a hormetic response. And, you know, this has sparked movements like the paleo movement and the carnivore movement and, you know, paleo movement kind of restricting, you know, many grains and soy and some of these compounds that have built-in defense mechanisms. or the carnivore diet takes that even further. And, you know, you get rid of kale and broccoli and cauliflower and most herbs and spices because of that mild amount of damage that these plants can cause the body. But, I mean, when you look at a lot of these blue zones and longevity hotspots, eat all that stuff, vast array of herbs and spices and xenohormetic compounds. Yeah, they're not doing, you know, like, like they're not eating like boatloads of quinoa that hasn't been rinsed and soaked and sprouted to get rid of the soap like irritants. saponins that cover the quinoa and in many cases, the gluten is being slow fermented like a sourdough bread, pre-digested gluten and the phytic acids or soy, for example. Edamame is not quite as good as miso or tempeh or natto because it's been fermented. And so, I think it's proper preparation and deactivation of some of the natural built-in plant defense mechanisms allows you to enjoy those foods shoving aside the argument whether or not those foods are necessary, which is carnivore diet folks will say, well, you get eating a properly comprised nose to tail diet, you get all the vitamins and minerals and everything that you need.

Yeah, liver is far more nutrient dense.

Than any plant food ever. Liver is nature's multivitamin. But, at the same time, plants are fun. It's fun to gather around a traditionally prepared meal and you've got whatever, maybe mom's casserole and grandma salad and some beets and goat cheese and arugula and rosemary. It's like, you know, there's a lot of cool stuff on the planet that we can eat that goes beyond just animals. But I think you just have to be smart. You have to deactivate these built-in defense mechanisms. But even those, because you're never going.

To be able to fully deactivate.

I think they're not necessarily bad. The principle of xenohormesis, these plant-based defense.

Compounds can actually be good for you in sane amounts. Yeah, this is important to sort of come back on this because you know, I had this theory that I kind of made up as I started to learn about plants and the phytochemicals in plants and the way in which they interact with our biology called symbiotic phytoadaptation, which essentially means we've co-evolved with plants using their, quote, natural defense mechanisms that they've developed in response to stress or protect themselves. And those molecules activate healing responses in our body or activate different pathways. For example, you know, when you have a wild plant, it's under a lot of stress.

Yeah. Right.

Organic, more than conventional.

Right. More than the big fluffy, beautiful sugary.

Produce at the grocery store. So, when something's organic or it's wild, it's actually far more nutrient dense. You know, for example, dandelion greens, which you can pick up off your lawn, have, you know, a thousand times more antioxidants and benefit than, for example, spinach, which we think is a superfood, right? Same thing with, you little small, peruvian potatoes, far more nutrient dense than those big Yukon gold potatoes, because they've had to work hard to protect themselves from stress. So we've used those molecules, like the glucosinolates, for example, in the broccoli family that help us detoxify and protect ourselves. All the antioxidant colorful compounds in food are all these phytochemicals, and there are more of them in stressed plants, like wild. And I think, in your book, you talk a lot about aging and this idea of how do we activate these different mechanisms in our body that promote healthy aging and then reverse biological aging. And I want to get into that because, you know, there's a whole chapter on anti-aging in your book, and you talk about everything from peptides to stem cells and NAD, which I definitely want to get into, which is nicotinamide riboside. And that is a very powerful anti-aging compound that is getting a lot of news and press, and people are using But one of the things you talk about and made me think about this because of the explanation, the xenohormesis, are this category of compounds called STACs, STAC, sirtuin-activating compounds. Now, sirtuins for people listening are a super mechanism for regulating insulin resistance and your mitochondrial function and longevity. And those are things when you see these calorie restriction studies or intermittent fasting or fasting mimicking diets, ketone diets, those are all activating these sirtuin mechanisms, which are these master genes that regulate the aging process and health. And, they only come with certain kinds of stress. And, there are plant compounds that activate these. So, maybe you could help us understand a little bit more about that.

There are plant compounds that can activate your sirtuin activating compounds. And, when those are combined with NAD or NAD precursors, it's actually very protective for the DNA because both of those can work together to repair broken proteins, to keep DNA strands being damaged. It's a process called acetylation that these sirtuins act on along with NAD to protect your DNA. And, I'll explain how to get some more of those, but I would be remiss not to mention when you're talking about the wild plants. I'm in full agreement with you. I read a book a long time ago by Joe Robinson called Eating on the Wild side.

And, you forage. That's one of your favorite things, right?

Foraging. And, my family and I plant forage and I do a wild plant pesto. and it's very, very simple. And anybody who has wild plants growing nearby, even the dandelion greens can make this. So, some of the main things I have growing on my property are nettle, which cause a whitetail deer around there just to get fat. Nettle's full of amino acids and fatty acids, the stinging nettle. It's amazing. So, I harvest stinging nettle. I also have wild mint out there. So, you can feel the stem, it's square, you know, roll up the leave in your finger and sniff it. It smells a little minty. so get a little mint and then the dandelion greens, those are perfect. So a bunch of dandelion greens and sometimes I'll swing into our garden and I'll grab some rosemary or some thyme, you know, a few spices. I'll even throw, we grow little stevia leaves and if I want to be kind of sweet, I'll throw those in there. So I come in with my big bag full of wild plants and all you do is you put that in a food processor and you put about a cup of a really good extra virgin olive oil in there and you put about a cup of your favorite nut. I like walnuts for this. Yeah. and then you get some salt. Those are the garlic.

You can do garlic.

I personally eat a low fodmap diet, so I leave the garlic out. And Parmesan cheese is also something that can give it a little bit of umami flavor. But if you want to go dairy free, I'll actually ferment the greens. You can just leave them in a jar and ferment them with a little bit of whey from your yogurt. And they develop this fermented umami flavor if you want to take a little bit more time to make your pesto. You dump all this stuff in the jar, you press go. and you, you blend it for about a minute in this wild plant pesto. When you add the olive oil and the walnuts, incredible. Wow. Okay. When I'm coming for dinner, it's so good. And I'll smear that all, like, on top of a steak. And I'm, I don't need anything else. Just wild plant pesto and steak. And I'm, I'm good. So back to the, the sirtuins, though. So, you know, most people are familiar, actually, with a lot of these or two and activating compounds, you know, red wine and, and blueberries. Yeah. and kale and a lot of the dark purples and greens and reds.

Yeah, and there were a number of studies on the red wine thing on rats where they gave high levels of resveratrol and they were able to, even though the rats were eating badly and not exercise, to transform their metabolism and increase longevity. Not to say you should eat bad and not exercise, but it was powerful. The only problem was what they did was they gave them the equivalent of 1500 bottles of red wine. So, you know, you're not gonna get this from just drinking a glass of wine.

The problem is 85% of resveratrol you buy in supplement form was made from peanut skins, not grape skins. So, there's kind of an allergenic component, too, if you choose your reservatrol wise. I'm a bigger fan of taro still being for those reasons. Molecularly, it acts very similar to resveratrol.

As a stack activator, but it's a lot more powerful and you need less of it.

And, that's often in a lot of combined supplements, for example, with NAD. Yeah, exactly. And, that's what a lot of companies.

Are doing, is they're combining NAD with.

Some of these sirtuin activators and then typically some kind of a methyl donor.

Methionine is like B vitamins, B12.

Yeah, betaine, trimethylglycine, acetyl-L-carnitine, any of these things that are going to contribute methyl groups. Anybody who-- well, we can get to NAD in a second if you want. I can explain that a little bit more. Yeah, I do want to get into that. With the sirtuins, I talk a lot about these stacks in the book and how magical they are, especially when combined with intermittent fasting or restricted feeding windows or some amount of calorie restriction. as far as protecting the DNA, assuming that you have enough NAD because sirtuins have to work with the NAD and NAD levels will dramatically decline as you age. So, you need to have your sirtuin levels elevated but then also have your NAD levels elevated. And, one of the sirtuin activating compounds that there's been a little bit more research on lately that's a very good sirtuin is fisetin or fisetin. Yeah. And, there's multiple sources of that like persimmon and onions. strawberries, especially wild strawberries. And, you can buy strawberry powder and add it to your smoothie. Your strawberries are easy to grow. They grow like weeds, but they're a very, very good source of this fisetin, which is one of the more potent stacks.

Wild strawberries that are out there.

Yeah. And, you can buy the wild strawberry powder.

Wild concentrated strawberries.

Yeah, you can find organic wild strawberries. It's like a yummy way to get healthy and little tasty. Turns your smoothie into a fruit loop. so anyways, the sirtuins are good, but because they need to work with NAD, which is also going to be very protective for your mitochondria during metabolic activity, if you're eating a sirtuin enriched diet but neglecting to keep your NAD levels elevated, you're really shorting yourself from a DNA protection standpoint, which is all the more important now that we know that some of these forms of non-ionizing radiation like 5G and Wi-Fi and non-native EMF may actually impact DNA. And so, if you can do things like get your NAD levels elevated, activate sirtuins, when you get exposed to a lot of this non-native EMF, typically there's a huge influx of calcium into the cells. So, you keep your magnesium levels elevated to battle that, activate some of these other anti-inflammatory pathways. There's one in particular called the Nrf2 pathway. that you can activate with ketones or with being in a state of ketosis. There are a lot of things you can do to protect yourself, but I would say top of the totem pole for the DNA would be sirtuins and NAD.

Okay, let's back up a little bit because people probably don't know what NAD is. So, in the body, there is inside every cell hundreds of thousands of these little factories called mitochondria. They're your power plants. And, as I said, they take oxygen that you breathe and food that you eat combust them. And, there's a whole series of chemical steps and basically a cycle that has to work if this is going to be functioning. And, it's regulated a lot by various genes like the sirtuin genes, DAF-2, FOXO. These are genes that actually regulate the aging process. So, when scientists, and I was recently at an event where I was listening to the head of the Buck Institute for Aging talk about NAD and talk about the mitochondria and some of these genes They literally in by actually helping properly regulate, for example, one of the genes DAF-2 and earthworms, they were able to spend the lifespan of that worm that would be equivalent to us living to a thousand years old. And the things that turn it off are sugar and processed food and toxins and EMFs and Wi-Fi and all the things you mentioned.

So, do you know how old you are in worm years? No. I don't know. I have to come out with that test.

Yeah, worm years. Well, as where people say we could live to a thousand. But what you're talking about is how the science of aging has advanced so far that we now understand the mechanisms and we understand how to play with them in ways through the movement snacks, some of the other things of light therapy, but also through the right nutrients and supplements. And NAD is one of the key parts of that cycle of making energy. And many of us, like you said, decline as we age and there are ways to increase it through various modalities including certain supplements like NAD. NAD, IV NAD people are using.

Yeah, and from a traditional standpoint, you can fast, you can eat a wide variety of fermented foods. There are certain teas like Pau D'Arco, Bark Tea which has these compounds called beta-lapachins in it which are wonderful for increasing your NAD levels. And, of course, you can make sure that you're not turning over NAD too quickly by by paying attention to the level of exposure to non-native EMF, like, you know, turn your phone in airplane.

Mode when you can. I mean, we're in this apartment in New York City, and I look at my Wi-Fi and there's 400 different networks. Like, I don't, you know, I wanted to build a Faraday cage around our apartment. You know, we're actually, we're actually looking at buying a net literally that goes.

Over your bed that, that Shields you from all EM. I can do that.

I'd use paint if you, if you.

Can, if you're like, in your room, Faraday paint. Yeah.

Oh, there's Faraday paint.

Shielded healing has Faraday paint. If you don't want to ruin the.

Feng Shui of the room, there's a canopy around the bed. Okay. That's a good thing to know, everybody. Faraday paint. Faraday is a scientist, a physicist who came up with this concept of Faraday cage, which essentially blocks out all radiation.

And I think it's a powerful idea that we should think about because it does affect sleep. I wear Faraday cage underwear when I'm on the airplane and it's not here yet, I just got a Faraday cage hoodie that I can wear. I pay attention to this stuff, but yeah, part of it is because of the NAD.

And, by the way, mitochondria are the most important thing you need to keep healthy through aging and they degrade the genetics, DNA gets damaged and they're easily damaged, they're super sensitive and we don't know how to take care of them. We don't pay attention to it. It's not something even doctors think about or talk about unless you have some rare disease. But, the good news is, it is the center of the aging conversation and it also is something we know how to deal with and what we can do about it. So, that's what's exciting. And, I spent a lot of time in functional medicine treating people's mitochondrial issues.

With all kinds of modalities including the things you're talking about. Yeah, so, the nicotinamide, it's nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, that's basically NAD. It's unfortunately not very well absorbed if you just take an oral NAD supplement. And so, what you'll find out on the market now are two different forms of NAD precursors, one called NR nicotinamide riboside and the other one called NMN, which is nicotinamide mononucleotide, something, something. Anyways though, NR is actually pretty well absorbed orally and so a lot of supplement manufacturers, Chromadex and Elysium and Thorne, all these people are using NR now as one oral way to boost NAD levels. NNN, you can't necessarily swallow as a capsule, but you can buy sublingual NNN tablets.

They actually sell NNN as capsules.

Yeah, well, they shouldn't because it's not very well absorbed unless it's dissolved sublingually. And, the thing about NNN is more of the nicotinamide will be in the hypothalamus and in neural tissue in response to NNN supplementation versus NR supplementation. So, if you're doing it for the brain effect, I would say use sublingual NMN or use they make these now intranasal NAD sprays. If you just want a quick full-body effect, NR works just fine. But, you want to make sure kind of back to what we hinted at earlier that because NAD is going to upregulate your methylation pathways, you take a methyl donor along with it, you know, like betaine or trimethylglycine or SAMe or something that will make make you feel a lot better when you take the NAD. Now, I see.

And those are supplements you can buy over the counter. These are all things you can buy.

And the NAD sprays, I think, are prescription, right? No, you can buy that alive by Nature. I know has one right now. That's one company that NMN sublingual.

They have a sublingual.

How do you trust the quality in the brand? Well, there. I I know the people who run that company, and they're. They're pretty committed to Quality. and they're manufacturing CGMP facilities and I think they do a good job. However, the NAD levels are still something that I think you should spark a pretty significant increase in prior to supplementation by doing something like NAD-IV. And in terms of increasing bioavailable NAD, nothing beats that, meaning that you actually sit and get a 500 to 1000 mg NAD drip into your system. And, many people do this for one to five consecutive days to top off the NAD levels and then use oral supplementation after that. And, then drop in-- what do people experience? Drop in once a month or once every couple of months to redo an IV to get the levels back up. And, that's what I do. I get an IV about once a month. I take NMN right now sublingually in between those dosings or in between those IVs. And, the other thing that I do is because the one time I know I'm exposed to tons of radiation, inflammation, non-ADVMF, et cetera, is you can get these transdermal patches now that using electrophoresis patch to actually deliver NAD transdermally. And so, I'll wear one of those patches that'll slow bleed about 750 milligrams of NAD into my system while I'm flying. So, that's a very useful way to get transdermal delivery.

What do you notice from this?

Do you have any difference in how you feel? Your cognitive performance? Better energy? Better energy would be the biggest one. The NMN, if I take that prior to a workout, I get almost like a mild flushing reaction, like a little bit of better blood flow. So, there's that. The DNA protective effect though is something that I think is best measured with what you're using to monitor your longevity, telomere length analysis or one of these new methylation clock analysis because some of these things you don't know they're working until you can actually see the effect that they're having on telomeres or on DNA protection. So, I mean, my last SpectraCell Telomere Analysis, it was nine years old as far as biological age. And, one big change that I made was doing NAD for the past two years using that method that I just described to you. Nine years old.

Nine years old.

And, how old are you doing the I'm 38. Okay, that's impressive. So, who knows when you're stacking all these modalities what's actually working, but ultimately, the NAD, I is even if you're not doing IVs or patches or whatever and you're just taking oral NAD, if you're doing that and including sirtuin-rich compounds in your diet and some methyl donors, that's a pretty good stack for longevity.

Wow, that's a lot of information. So, in order to upgrade your mitochondria and help you live longer, have more energy and repair your DNA, you're talking about using NAD in different forms, NMN, sublingual patches, IVs, which is available now more and more clinics around the country, including our Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, where we practice. And, you're talking about adding various compounds that are like the red wine, but that you can actually get from strawberries and wild strawberries and other plant foods. And then, you're also talking about adding things that help with a cycle called methylation, which is a really critical cycle in your biology and your biochemistry that is going on thousands, millions of times a second. Yeah. And it needs helpers and things like SAMe, primethylglycine.

And if you're drinking the wine, same as you were talking about with stress and wildness, drink a wine that has been from a grape that's been grown under stressful conditions. Like a lot of big California cabs in Merlots, they heavily irrigate their crops. They're developing a sugary, sugary, kind of soft that is low in antioxidants that hasn't been stressed as much. So, we've now gotten the health sector companies like Dry Farm Wines, for example, that are doing more of like a low irrigation grape crop. If you look at countries like New Zealand or Italy or France, when you had a steakhouse, usually those are the type of countries that are still using old world biodynamic methods with low irrigation. you can even consider the wildness of your wine.

Okay, now I want to talk about diet and sleep. So, in your book, you talk about how obviously there's no one diet for everybody and that you need to figure out what the right diet is for your body. But, there are some common themes. So, tell us what those are and how do people figure out how to eat for themselves?

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, all the way back to Roger Williams' book, biochemical individuality. I mean, there's a vast array of different sizes of livers and stomachs and there's different rates of excretion of uric acid and vitamin D and all sorts of different ways that we respond to different vitamins and nutrients and a lot of that is based on genetics. And so we cannot say that, let's say, a ketogenic diet that might have helped your neighbor lose 20 pounds is going to be appropriate for you because maybe you have familial hypercholesterolemia. Or maybe you have an FTO gene that predisposes you to gaining weight in response to high levels of saturated fat. Maybe you've got poor liver bile production or gallbladder bile release or there's something going on that makes a high-fat diet very unfavorable for you. And, the same could be said for whether you're maybe you're an under-methylator and trying to get by on a largely plant-based diet when in fact you need a lot more methionine and methyl groups that you would get by including meat in the diet. And so, there's a great deal of individuality with diets. That's why I've never really written a diet book just because it's so hard to actually dial in a specific diet. Even in Boundless, I actually outline 13 different diets from the Wallace Protocol to the Plant Paradox Protocol to the Paleo Protocol to the Carnivore Approach, all these different approaches. and then walk people through how they would find based on genetics, blood testing, stool testing, urine testing, food allergy testing, which diet is going to be appropriate for them. And even then, it might be a transitory diet or maybe you have leaky gut and autoimmune issues and high levels of mercury or something that's going to require more of an autoimmune or detoxification approach for 8 to 12 weeks before you progress into a more free diet or a diet that might be less restrictive. So, ultimately, a great deal of individualization is necessary with I think probably the most important first step being to look at what your ancestors ate and try to in some way simulate that if you can. I mean, if it's the lowest hanging fruit, it's a very simple 20% of calories.

Well, my ancestors, meaning the ones in the last last 100 years or 200 years because they're all Jewish food.

Yeah, 200 years from now if I say that my ancestors were eating at McDonald's, right? Yeah, 7-29 cent hamburger.

I'm not sure all the blintzes and, you know, all that stuff is good.

But generally, you know, you can look at things from an ancestral standpoint, say, okay, I'm largely Northern European. I'm probably going to do okay with things like fermented foods, salted foods, fish, meat, Etc. Or maybe I, you know, I come from more like a Southeast Asian or Sub-Saharan African ancestry, so I could do better with a little bit the citrusy fruits, maybe some of the higher carbohydrates, coconuts, purple potatoes, things like this. So, you can get some decent idea of your basic ancestral food choices just from knowing where your ancestors came from. But, I think it's smart to delve more deeply into that, get a good blood test, get a urinary hormone test.

Most of us are mutts these days.

That's the problem.

I mean, I'm like 99% 90% Jewish from the Middle East. I'm lucky I'm like one thing.

Right.

But most people are not.

Which might actually allow us to be more free with our diets, who knows? It's difficult to say, but ultimately you do not want to assume that whatever the prevailing diet is from the most popular book in the bookstore is going to work for you at this point in your life.

I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body.

Customized, yeah. That being said, as you alluded to, there are prevailing characteristics of just about any successful diet, including those we see in longevity hotspots, you know, like Nicoya or Sardinia or Okinawa. And a few of those components would include some element of caloric restriction or fasting. Even look at the Mediterranean diet, right? Which we've bastardized in the US to be, you know, as much goat cheese and olive oil and fish and, you know, even, you know, red meat and spoonfuls and spoonfuls of nut butter and, you know, eight handfuls of almonds during the day. when in fact a traditional Mediterranean diet, if you look at the Orthodox Church and the amount of fasting and religious observations on that diet, there's huge amounts of protein restriction. Certain days of the week where olive oil isn't even consumed, you see almost like a press-pulse cycling of times of the year when you're eating adequate calories and especially adequate protein than times of the year when there's protein restriction, meat restriction. calorie restriction. So, almost every single diet has some element of calorie restriction, whether it's intermittent fasting or some religious observation of fasting, some element of protein restriction, not year-round. But there's always something.

It's like a reset and it actually resets your biology.

Right. And for me, I fast 12 to 16 hours every day, overnight 12 to 16 hour fast. Once a quarter, I do a five-day calorie restriction. similar to Valter Longo's fasting mimicking diet where just for five days I eat about 40% of the number of calories I would normally consume and then one to two times a month I do a 24-hour dinner time to dinner time fast. And for me that's sustainable all year long. It's easy to remember. There's nothing super, there's no 10-day water fast involved. It's just I can sustain that throughout the year. So fasting is one component. Another component is eating in a parasympathetic state. usually with people.

You mean when you're relaxed?

When you're relaxed. Yes.

Eating in your car on the way to work.

Eating in your car while you're at a meeting or a lunch. Even, you know, last night I gave a dinner talk and everybody's talking and chatting. They bring out the food and they're ready to dive in. I'm like, wait a minute. We have all these people who just walked in. They've been at work all day. They're stressed out. Half of them were checking their emails on their phone when they still walked in here. You don't just sit down and eat in that state, you know, and at our house, at the Greenfield house, we all take at least three deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth, and again and again, and then typically we'll say a blessing over the food. And then once the meal begins, it's all fun and games. We play table topics and we have all these different card games, exploding kittens and unstable unicorns and bears versus babies and all these games. It's funny, all our cards have little grease stains on them and stuff because we're always playing cards while we're eating. But this idea of eating and not just a relaxed rest and digest parasympathetic state, but also eating with people in the presence of others, not hunched over your computer, having a salad or huffing down an 800 calorie smoothie before you know it, it's gone because you've been looking at your emails the whole time. That's another component. We also see, as we also talked about, typically a large inclusion of a wide variety of wild A lot of these xeno-hormetic compounds.

It's hard to get for people on these diets, but it's great.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, farmer's market, community supported agriculture, patio gardens.

I was saying you eat weird food is what I say.

Yeah. Eat the weird foods. Yeah. Assuming a weird food is not a coconut encrusted deep fried Twinkie. Yeah, I would classify as weird. And if I could throw probably a couple more in there, it would be typically not having a very a large meal close to bedtime. That's another one. Two or three hours before bed. I mean, you asked about sleep. It's one of the best ways to keep your body's core temperature low while you sleep. And, if you do have a late dinner, like I had a late dinner, my dinner ended at like 11 last night, I'll get cold or I'll go for a walk. I'll do something that'll get that core temperature back down. So, last night I took off my coat, I went for a brisk walk. I walked for 15 minutes before I got my Uber back home or hopped on a taxi back home just so I could get my body's core temperature down. cold shower, cold soap, anything like that, if you have to eat a late meal is a good idea. Ultimately, there's about 12 different factors that I go into in the book that are prevailing characteristics of all of these areas where no matter what the diet is, whether it's a plant-based diet in Loma Linda or fish and rice in Okinawa, there are certain principles that you follow such as fasting, eating with people, not having huge dinners right right before bedtime that no matter what diet you're eating will allow it to be more successful.

Amazing. So, in terms of the whole vegan meat thing, I think we talked about these blue zones, but the truth is they did eat meat. Aquanaz eat pork and in Costa Rica they eat a lot of guinea pigs.

Oh, yeah.

They're not vegan.

The trick with meat, in my opinion, is that when you look at mTOR activation, two different compounds, are going to be okay.

Mtor for people listening is essentially one.

Of the regulatory factors around anabolic switch that if excessively activated can accelerate aging but if activated within reason can do things like maintain muscle, maintain bone density, allow for repair, allow for recovery, libido, hormones, et cetera. But if it's constantly activated, that's a constant state of pro-growth that can accelerate aging. Well, the two things that you want to be careful with if you are including a lot of meat or protein the amino acids in your diet is extremely high amounts of leucine and very high amounts of methionine. And so, with methionine, you would get that if you were eating a carnivorous diet, but the lion's share of the animal-based foods that you were consuming were derived from muscle meat rather than from things like bone broth, bone marrow, organ meats, liver, kidney, heart, these foods that are richer in not only some of the nutrients returning back to liver being nature's multivitamin, also in glycine, an amino acid which helps to balance out those very high amounts of methionine. So, if you are going to include meat in your diet, I think it's important to eat nose to tail and.

To learn-- most people don't like it.

They prepare their organ meats properly. They call it awful for a reason. But, I mean, and if you don't like to do that, there are companies like Paleo Valley or Ancestral Supplements that.

Are selling now liver powder.

You get a liver shake. Oh, they got prostate, brain, heart, like you can just take and I'll use these a lot of times when I travel because I don't do a lot of organ meats when I'm traveling. So ultimately that's one issue. The other issue is high amounts of leucine. And this is something I think is a bigger problem in the fitness world because any supplement manufacturer knows that a good way to make money fast is to sell branched chain amino acid supplements, which unfortunately in the literature have not been shown to be that great at all for performance or recovery. It's just basically glorified flavored water. but it's isoleucine, valine, and leucine in branched-chain amino acids. And so, if you're relying upon a lot of these popular protein powders that are adding extra BCAAs to the protein powder, if you're using BCAAs when you go to the gym, there's now a bunch of different companies that are putting BCAAs in there, like a Bang Energy drinks and some of these others, they're adding BCAAs to the energy drinks.

So, you're not getting all the artificial sweeteners and everything else, but you're also getting a ton of leucine.

And leucine is another potent mTOR activator.

But it also helps muscle synthesis. You can't build muscle unless you have.

Adequate leucine, which is not so much in plant foods. It can, but you don't want it in excess. I think a lot of people are getting too much methionine and too much leucine when they should in fact be getting more glycine. And so I think if you are going to eat a meat-based diet, and you know I love meat. I bow hunt, I prepare meat all the time. My wife does a lot of the cooking at our house, but if there's a a steak or a chicken or a fish that needs to be cooked, I'm the man or an organ meat. And so, I eat meat but nose to tail and I'm cognizant of methionine versus glycine versus leucine consumption.

So, how do you fix that? So, what are you saying? You stay away from muscle meat?

No, you sacrifice some of the muscle meat consumption and instead include things like bone broth, liver, kidney, heart. organ capsules. You can supplement with glycine. You can use-- so if you supplement.

With glycine, you'd offset the effects.

Is that what you're saying? You can offset some of the effects of methionine. It's your methionine glycine ratios. And all this is in your-- for example, when I sit down to lunch, I have lunch typically for me, lunch will be like some-- like a little bit of these days, I'm eating a lot like pumpkin, squash, some of these underground storage organs, typically a little bit of ferment on the side like a kimchi or sauerkraut in the some sardines or anchovies or herring or salmon. But, I now have after seeing a lot of this stuff about glycine, I have a big cup of bone broth with lunch. So, I'm getting that glycine in as well.

Yeah, glycine is very important for detoxification as well.

Yeah, absolutely. The joints.

Very powerful. Yeah. Okay, so what about the other things that we care about like sleep and brain performance and how do you help people address sleep and sort of maximal mental performance.

We could tackle them one at a time, but sleep is pretty straightforward. I mean, we know that you need to be in a dark environment, you need to be silent, and typically it needs to be at a low temperature. Most people can wrap their heads.

-Cold room, eye shades, earplugs.

-Yeah, basically. But there are a few kind of nitty-gritty details. Like, for example, if you use something like one of these new pads that you can use to circulate cold water under the bed. Chili pad, I have one. Chili pad, they're amazing.

I set mine at 55 degrees.

I sleep like a baby. If I'm traveling, like here, you know, New York, I sleep with the windows open all night. You know, we're here in January, so the room gets nice and cold. It'll dip down into the 50s and it's perfect, but a very cold environment. How's your wife like that? Makes her snuggle up. But the chili pad actually has a his and her side, right? So my side's a 55 and she doesn't even turn her side on actually. But the other thing you do is you can wear wool socks and wool socks actually causes vasodilation that helps to cool the rest of your body while your feet stay warm. So that's kind of a hack even if you don't have a chili pad or a very cold room. And of course, if you have a late meal or a late exercise session, figure out a way to get yourself cold. Take a cold shower, go for a walk in the cold, brisk weather. or do a quick cold soak, hop into a cryotherapy chamber if you're at one of those fancy gyms, but figure out a way to decrease your core temperature before bed all the more if you've exercised hard or eaten a lot of food within three hours prior to bedtime. So, that's one thing is the actual core temperature you pay attention to not.

Only the bedroom but also the sleeping surface, the breathability of the mattress.

I've got to tell my wife that because she likes it hot. I like it cold. But, I do have a chili pad which has improved our marriage. that would be a saving grace for you. Yeah. And then with light, you know, a lot of people know not to look at screens now. Like, like, I think that's pretty common knowledge. Is the blue blocker glasses? Don't stare at a computer screen or if you are, wear your blue light blocking glasses, put your phone in night mode. But a few areas where I, well, two, two in particular, I think could be better paid attention to. Number one would be when you're in your bedroom at night, maybe you take off those glasses or you get up at in the evening to go use the master bathroom, or you turn on the lights in the master bedroom, you're just basically getting blasted with all that same light you were trying to restrict from your restricted screen usage. So what we did in our room, our master bathroom, my kids' bedroom, and my wife's and mine bedroom was we replaced all the bulbs with red incandescent bulbs, which simulate something more like torch lights or a sunset, and so it's you don't get that that big rush of blue light if you happen to get up in the morning and use the restroom and not that I would ever get up at night to take anything out of the refrigerator. But, just in case something like that were to happen, you open the refrigerator, big blast of air. But, you're not supposed to eat in.

The middle of the night.

Well, you know what though? The blue light thing really that becomes a rule when the sun sets in whatever area of the world you happen to be in. So, even as you're cleaning up the kitchen after dinner at 8:30 p.m. and you open that fridge over and over again, just getting blasted, blasted, it's true. So, I got some of that red light tape and I covered the light in the refrigerator with some of that same red light tape that restricts the.

Blue light in the refrigerator. Well, it's fascinating. There's a book called Lights Out I read years ago about how the development.

Of the light bulb was the beginning of a lot of our chronic diseases. Sugar and T.S. Wiley, Sheep Show, Sugar and Survival, I think that's called. Yeah, it's a fascinating book. Anyways though, so that's one thing is your actual light bulb and what you're choosing for light bulb. I like red incandescent for that. And then the other one is the fact that your circadian rhythm, your sleep cycle doesn't start when you're getting ready for bed at night. It starts in the morning when you get up. And so getting as much natural sunlight or even blue light as you can in the morning. So what I do in the morning is I think, okay, let's simulate what our ancestors would have done. Look at your iPhone right away. If I would have gotten up, I would have first seen the sunrise, right? So, yes, I will not be opposed to looking at screens, looking at the phone, et cetera, but I put my blue light blocking glasses on in the morning. So, everything I'm looking at is kind of red, like the sunrise. And then typically around 7 or 7:30, I take those glasses off and all of a sudden I'm getting full daylight, I'm getting full blue light from the computer screen, full blue light from the iPhone. so I'm jump starting my circadian rhythm at the right time of day, but you ease yourself into it. You put the blue light blocking glasses on in the morning, then you take them off as you get around 7-7:30 and then you let yourself get exposed to blue light and computer screens and sunlight and everything else. So, you blast yourself with light in the morning. And, those are a couple of the biggies for light and for cold and then for the silence piece, it's foam earplugs. dogs get a good, I like an app called Sleep Stream. It's like a DJ first. It's got white noise. It's got a brown noise based on some research they did at Stanford.

Apparently, pink noise is the best.

I think Faraday Paint is also up there with things like that. Pink noise and Faraday Paint. That's right. Yeah. So, the silence piece is it's a little bit easier to wrap your head around. And then finally, just the last thing is similar to eating. Activate your parasympathetic nervous system. you know, you know Dr. Andrew Weil and I interviewed him on my podcast and he talked so much about his 4-7-8 breathing and I actually do 4-8 breathing. I find that seven count hold when I'm breathing myself to sleep at night is a little much. But, so I just do four count in, quick pause at the top, eight count out and I can lull my sleep latency because I use the, the aura ring to measure my, my sleep latency. and see, it's about three to five minutes.

That's pretty cool.

I literally get in bed for eight breathing and I'm out like a light.

That's great. Yeah, that's great.

Force. That means you breathe in slowly to counter for four. Breathe out slowly. As you breathe out for eight, I mean, speaking of longevity, just having long breaths out, because what it does, it trains CO2 tolerance. Right. Your body holds on to more CO2. And we know all these long-lived animals from the bowhead whale to the naked mole rat, they all have very high CO2. CO2 tolerance. So, if you can breathe through your nose when you're working out, when you're out walking, you can take longer exhales than inhales, you can always be cognizant of breathing out longer and more than you breathe in, you can train yourself to enhance longevity through CO2 tolerance.

That's fantastic. So, Boundless is full of all these amazing tips, hacks, and tricks and actually incorporating the science into practical things that you can every day to perform better, feel better, live longer. Sounds pretty darn good.

Yeah, it's...

I'm going to get my copy right now.

I think you're getting a copy. I think I sent you a copy. You don't have to get one, but if people are listening in, I would encourage them to get one. I'm pretty proud of it. It took a really long time to write and I tried to make it practical, but I also tried to weave in a lot of the sexy stuff. Like yeah, there are like $40,000 biohacking tools in there. And, there's crazy supplementation protocols for microdosing with psychedelics and plant medicine journeys all the way in.

Oh, wow.

This is like the one-stop shopping. The basics.

So, it's kind of a little bit of everything. So, you've basically taken all the things that people are hearing about in the news, the media, on blogs, and you put it into a coherent book that people can follow, relook at the science behind it.

I'm sure there's tons of references. Made a huge webpage for every single chapter. So, when you read a chapter, you go to the webpage, it's got all the books, all the articles, all the, everything you can use to take a.

Deeper dive into anything that's been discussed.

Deeper than the 650 pages? Even deeper than that. And, I put all, 450 pages got cut from the book, I put all those on the website, too.

So, I pulled out all the stops on this one. So, everybody go to boundlessbook.com to learn more about boundless, upgrade your brain, optimize your body, and defy aging. Ben, you've been an incredible guest. I learned so much from you, and I think I think if people pay attention, they're going to feel better, look better, live longer, and have a great life because that's what it's all about. It's not a red light on their junk. It's not just about optimizing your mitochondria. The whole point of this is to live a joyful, connected, meaningful life.

It's such a good point. I mean, you and I, I think we both know there's 110-year-old cigarette smoking, gin chugging grandmas somewhere in Sardinia who aren't necessarily living the model of perfect health as we would define it by Western longevity standards, but they're happy. They have friends, they have a wonderful social life. It's true. It's a big part of it.

Although they're probably part of the one or two percent who can smoke and drink and live forever.

I would imagine that their genes are probably turned on pretty dang high.

It's so exciting. But it's exciting to live in this time because the science is advancing so far and the average person can actually take advantage of the science. Unfortunately, most healthcare is not focused on this or focused on disease. you're talking about how to create optimal health, and that's essentially what functional medicine is. So as you were talking, I'm like, wow, this is really awesome to hear you talking about the principles of functional medicine in a way that are accessible and people can get to and transform their lives. So thanks for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy, Ben. Cool. And if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman.

So, two quick things.

Number one, thanks so much for listening.

To this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I'd really.

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