398: Top 12 Keto Myths, The Dark Side Of Tabatas, Dad Bod, Healthy Sunscreen Alternatives & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, the top 12 keto myths, the dark side of Tabata training, dad bod syndrome, healthy sunscreen alternatives, and a whole lot more. I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet, from seal fit, kokoro, Spartan agoji, and the world's toughest mutter to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal boho hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding, and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast. Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

So, Ben, you recovering from that nice, long international flight you had?

Hello, Jay. Yeah, just got back from the Swiss Alps, what, two. Two nights ago, and I actually caught a lot of flack on the gram for my somewhat elaborate jet setting gear that I displayed. If folks want to see that, they could just go to my, my Instagram channel, which is BenGreenfield Fitness. But yeah, I, I had all my, all my, all my gear done up, done up proper, all the way down to the undies.

I mean, really though, Ben, have we come to grow to learn anything different about what you're gonna do? I mean, this is kind of you.

Yeah, yeah. Well, well, to put this in context for folks, you know, I realized that I could fly to la, hop on the plane and do pretty good just wearing jogging pants and a T shirt and drinking some of that wonderful water they give you on the flight. But if I'm traveling, like, you know, in this case, I flew Milan to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Seattle, Seattle to my hometown of Spokane. And yeah, I mean, like, I could get by not doing anything, but at the same time, I want to feel good. I've got a. I've got. I'm flying down to Colorado here, just turning around, you know, in two days from now to go compete in the nationals competition for train to hunt. And I like to pull out all the stops when I travel, not only because of that, but also just because I travel so fricking much. Like, I understand folks who are going to a family reunion, you know, once a year, maybe hopping on a plane three or four additional times, but I am literally on a plane these days nearly every single week. So I have to Pull out a lot of stops. And in this case, what did I have? I had my EMF blocking suit, which is basically like an EMF blocking hat, an EMF blocking T shirt, and EMF blocking pants made by this private organization in Germany who's not even producing this for mass sale yet, and hopefully they will soon. But right now they literally just like custom design these, this, this suit for me that looks a little bit different than like the Faraday sleeping bag type of get up you could get from a website, like less emf dot com. But I mean, you literally look like a, a Jedi Master in a, in a white bathrobe when you're wearing EMF type birth control. Yeah, it's like, it's like blue light blocking glasses or birth control for your head. This is birth control for your whole body and gives you lots of funny looks on the airplane. Whereas this stuff I was wearing, it just looks like black pants, a black T shirt, and a black hat. So it doesn't look half bad. The only issue with it is if you go through not the metal detector, but the actual full body scanner, it literally blocks everything on that full body scanner, so you have to get a full pat down afterwards because your entire body just doesn't show up through the stuff. So Fortunately, I fly TSA PreCheck and I fly with that clear membership, so I rarely have to go through those full body scanners. But there is that. That's the only issue I have with that gear, and it's pretty dialed in. It even has, like, little buttons on the bottom of the pants that allow you to connect this little metal alligator clip to anything that's metal when you land so that you can instantly ground yourself or earth yourself without having to necessarily.

That's pretty sweet.

Go for a hippie dippy, barefoot, you get in. So I was wearing that. I was wearing. That's.

I mean, that's pretty sweet.

Yeah, I'm, I, I dig it. I feel better. I feel protected. It's like a. It's like a giant EMF condom.

Yeah, right?

It's breathable.

It's breathable. Okay. Because I just didn't know if it would be like, breathable or heavy. I just, I've never owned any EMF type clothing or gear like that.

Yeah, I just sweat the whole time on the airplane. Just funk it out. No, it actually.

At least your mitochondria aren't dying.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's like a combo sauna EMF suit. The other thing I was wearing was my emf blocking undies, which I think are made by a company called lams. Get getlams.com I think is. Is that company. So those protected my. My man gear. And then what else was I. Was I.

And you need to have those on even with the pants on. You think that's. That's also a good thing to have?

I think so. I just like a little bit of extra protection for the balls. So, yeah. So I was wearing those. What else did I show in that video? Oh, of course I, I wear your glasses. Yeah, I wear primarily just to normalize my circadian rhythm. When you're walking through the airport with all the bright LED and fluorescent lighting, if it is morning where I happen to be traveling, I generally just don't wear any blue light blocking glasses at all because I just want that huge dump of blue light, preferably from sunlight. But I mean, if it's, if it's artificial lighting as I'm walking through the airport, then great. But the rest of the time I wear some pretty intense, like red blue light blocking glasses made by what I consider to be one of the better companies out there as far as the technology in their lenses. And that's raw optics. RA Optics, hands down, man. Yeah.

And they're like, Matt and those guys have made some sick glasses.

Yeah. Matt Marucca, who owns that company. So got the raw optics glasses on with the EMF blocking suit, the EMF blocking underwear. And then I wear a fanny pack. And inside of my fanny pack is my passport and all my valuable items. My, my euro, my cash, my credit cards, all that jazz. But a couple of things in that fanny pack. A, it's made by a company called pacsafe. So it's, it's ke, so a pickpocketer can't walk by with a shiv and rip it open without breaking the blade. And there's a lot of people walking around in the airport with shivs, by the way. And then the other thing I have is, it's. It's RFID blocking enabled. So no hacker can hack into my fanny pack. And inside that fanny pack I also have one of these blue shield devices that scrambles EMF signals. So it's, it's nice for, for scrambling, you know, again, over the crotch, some of the WI fi and, and Bluetooth and cell phone signals that bounce around in the airplane or bounce around in the airport. So I don that fanny pack shout out to my friend Kyle Kingsbury from Onnit, who originally turned me onto the, to the pacsafe fanny packs and Just the, the fanny pack fashion trend in general.

That's coming back, man. That's coming back.

Yeah, yeah. And then as far as supplementation goes, it's pretty straightforward. I drink hydrogen rich water using these tablets and I think we have a question about that later on this show, so we can touch on that later on. But normally I would just have a little bit of hydrogen water at the beginning and at the end of the day. But when I'm traveling on a long haul flight, I'll drink a full bottle of water every hour, like one of those 12 to 16 ounce bottles of water that I can get on the airplane. But I put two hydrogen tablets into each of those, which is a wonderful antioxidant and anti inflammatory. And then I also, for, for the anti inflammation component, take a pretty hefty dose of the ALMS bioglutathione before I take off and then afterwards because that also has some really good mitochondrial support built into it like PQQ, coenzyme Q10 and Mito Q, all of which are really, really fantastic for the mitochondria. So I've got glutathione and hydrogen and, and the other thing that I take just because of the gases that tend to build up in the body when you're up there in the air. So I'm not crop dusting the entire flight with all my methane producing bacteria. I take activated charcoal multiple times during the flight and then also before the flight as well. And another reason I do that is because I just love to eat all that wonderful tasting airplane food that they bring me so I can block the toxins from the Japanese curry beef with the wonderful brownie and the, you know, the bag of pretzels that they bring me. So.

Yeah, well, I, you know, I read recently in this Vice article that you should check out that activated charcoal that you were mentioning. Doesn't work. It's bs. So just wanted to let you know that.

Ben. Yeah, yeah, for those of you who aren't in on that joke, I spent the past couple of weeks on previous podcasts, which you can get wherever this fine podcast is found, debunking that Vice article. And by the way, for those of you who are wondering, I'm, I'm joking. I don't actually eat the airplane food. I travel with my own generally pretty ketogenic fare because glycemic variability when you're sitting for a long period of time can be an issue. The carbohydrates can contribute to the inflammatory process a little bit when you're Flying and the production of ketones have been shown to be pretty therapeutic for a lot of these inflammatory pathways. So I stay fasted keto when I travel, meaning I'm pretty much just like a handful of macadamia nuts. Usually a little bit of like spirulina or chlorella. Lately I've been traveling with the ample keto powder meal replacement blend, which is kind of nice if I actually want to have a meal in the airport. I can drop some macadamia nuts and spirulina and chlorella into that, stir it all up in a giant coke cup with a, you know, with water added in. And that generally works pretty well. You know, stop by a, you know, whatever, Cinnabon or Starbucks and just ask for a paper cup. They give that to me. I dump the keto ample stuff in there and just mix up the macadamia nuts into that, stir it up, eat that as my fuel. We'll link to all this stuff in the show notes, by the way, over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com398 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com398 where everything else we talk about today is found. Um, I think those are, I think that was everything I went over in that little video, if I'm not mistaken. Did I forget anything?

I think so. No, I know you got everything. I was just wondering because this is something I was curious about. That EMF blocking clothes. Are you essentially just allowing your hands and your face to be exposed when you're on a plane? Other than your eyes obviously, or those short sleeve shirts?

No. I also wear a burqa, so it's just my eyes.

Just try.

No, I actually, I, I do. Okay. I do have, I guess my, my face is exposed, my hands are exposed. But you know, I'm, I, I can only go so far. I'm not going to dress up like a freaking, like COBRA, you know, G.I. joe Ninja on the flight. So yeah, there's a few things I don't put in there.

Yeah. And I feel like it's not the clothes that's going to give you looks. It's probably the red glasses. That's what I've gotten asked about most.

Well, I don't really care because the glasses are so red I can't see people's eyes anyways. So there's that.

By the way, you can't see them. They don't exist.

Yeah. I should mention this new website that I found. I was gonna bring this up during the news flashes, but Heck, I might as well just bring it up now before we jump into the news flashes. And that's emf-portal.org have you seen this website? Dude, I.

What's funny about it is that I knew you were gonna talk about this and I had not come across this until this past week. And so I'm glad you brought it up because I mean, it is loaded.

Yeah. I mean, basically what it is is it is every single clinical study, peer reviewed research, PubMed article, journal article that has come out on the effects of, you know, transcranial magnetic stimulation, EMF signals, 5G Bluetooth, anything like that. It's pretty much all the scientific literature on anything regarding emf. And it is shocking. I mean you can just go there and click the new publications button like right now, if you were to go there, there's publications as up to date as today. Like today it says statistical approach for human Electromagnetic exposure assessment in Wireless Cell networks. Right. And anything you'd ever want to find regarding EMF exposure, for those of you who are still scoffing at the idea of me wearing EMF blocking gear, you can find there. And it's pretty nuts. It's probably the most comprehensive website I've ever found that is all research based on the effect of EMF on organs, tissues. What you do need to worry about, what you don't need to worry about. And it's just basically like a feed that you can subscribe to. I think it's incredibly helpful for anyone who kind of wants to keep their finger on the pulse, pun intended, of everything. EMF and its effects on human health and lifespan. So it's a great website. I'll link to it in the show notes, but emf-portal.org if you just want to type it into your browser.

Yeah, it's got like almost 30,000 publications on there, which is absolutely incredible. So for those individuals who've kind of been doubting this whole EMF thing or kind of see it as maybe woo woo science. I mean, there's legit scientific studies on this site to show the effects that EMFs can have on our biology, on our circadian rhythm, on kind of, you name it. So yeah, totally place to check out.

You know, fertility, cancer, hearing, you know, ears, everything. As a matter of fact, I think the best thing someone could do right now is to quit listening to the podcast enable WI fi on your phone, set your phone in your lap right over your go ads and, and pull up this website and surf through it.

For a little while.

So this is the part of the show where we cover a lot of the latest articles and studies that have come out. I'm usually tweeting a lot of this stuff. Twitter is where I primarily publish a lot of these articles that I discover that's over@twitter.com BenGreenfield whereas as we already established, Instagram is where you can just look at funny photos of me wearing crazy suits on airplanes. But this latest article that came out, the top 12 keto myths debunked. Did you happen to see this one, Jay?

I did see this, yeah.

Okay. So this was published, this article by Virta Health. It actually appeared on Medium. But Virta Health is an organization that's run by, among other people, Sami Nkonen, who is a former podcast guest of mine, fantastic triathlete, very talented individual who, who helps to run this company in the Bay Area called Virta Health, who cares for thousands of patients with type 2 diabetes and primarily uses like a ketogenic low carb approach and has harnessed a lot of data, a lot of big data regarding therapeutic uses of ketosis and a low carbohydrate approach, particularly for diabetes. So this article was inspired by literally 150,000 days of patient care that Virta Health now has over under their belt. And they went through a lot of the things that people talk about regarding ketosis, a lot of the things people question regarding ketosis and we should mention especially for new listeners. I am, although I was pretty bullish on a ketogenic diet for everybody at one point in my life when I was racing Ironman triathlons and ketosis and generally adopting a low carbohydrate approach for myself to manage some of the pre type 2 diabetes symptoms. I was beginning to develop the high genetic propensity I have for type 2 diabetes and also some of the elements of ketosis that I found to be useful for endurance, you know, since it is a preferred fuel for the heart and the diaphragm and can provide for a pretty clean fuel source for the brain as well these days. I am not necessarily convinced that keto is for everybody and nor is there, as you'll discover in the podcast that's upcoming this weekend with Arthur Haynes, much epidemiological evidence that our ancestors really spent a lot of time in a sustained state of ketosis. But nonetheless, there are some benefits to ketosis and this article went into a few interesting notes. So, for example, a few of the myths that they talk about, for example, that keto will deprive the brain of required glucose that's myth number four, and what they describe is that when dietary carbohydrates are reduced, what occurs is that the liver begins to produce glucose via process called gluconeogenesis. And in fact, even in the absence of a large amount of dietary carbs, the brain does not starve of glucose. Generally, our brain needs 20 to 40 grams, depending on how smart you are and how many books you're reading, I guess, of glucose per day. And that doesn't mean you need to eat that glucose per se, because your liver can produce a decent amount of that through gluconeogenesis. However, what I should note in all of this data put out by Virta Health in this article, remember that we're talking about patients with type 2 diabetes who are not necessarily crossfit athletes or marathoners or hardcore exercise enthusiasts with a pretty large throughput of glycogen utilization. Right. So things kind of change once you're burning a lot of calories. And I've said this before, but I have many athletes who I work with who want to adopt a ketogenic approach to fueling their bodies. But they're eating not a standard ketogenic diet or very low carb diet of anywhere from 20 to 70 grams of carbohydrate per day. They're consuming, as I do, about 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates per day. Still far less than what the Gatorade Sports Science Institute or governmental recommendations for carbohydrate intake would dictate. But it's a drop in the bucket when it comes to causing the body to have a high amount of blood glucose or a high amount of glycemic variability. So any of these myths should be couched in the context of these not being hard charging.

And you're staying. Yeah. And you're staying in ketosis with 100 to 120 grams, is that what you're saying?

100 to 200 grams. And it's cyclic ketosis. So my approach is I refuel at the end of the day. Generally most of the day, I'm eating a very low amount of carbohydrates. You know, occasionally a few blueberries sprinkled on a, you know, with some. With some fish at lunch or, or perhaps a little bit of like a pumpkin puree, you know, next to. Next to a can of sardines at lunch. But I mean, we're literally talking like, I might have like 30 grams total of carbohydrates by the time I've gotten to dinner. And Then dinner. Yeah, I'll have some, some sweet potato or some yam or some raw honey or more berries or a little bit of red wine or dark chocolate. And based on my own ketone testing and also blood glucose data, there's a pretty brief foray for a couple of hours where I might be burning more carbohydrates than fats and producing fewer ketones. But literally, like by midnight, I'm back into ketosis and generally stay in a very constant state of fat burning while still tapping into the benefits from that carbohydrate refeed of having adequate glycogen stores for the next day's workout. So I think that's a very beautiful scenario for athletes who want to maximize metabolic efficiency but also not spike blood glucose repeatedly. Know cause excess carbohydrate fermentation in the gut, control, you know, potential for, you know, some of the metabolic dysregulation that could occur with, with large carbohydrate boluses spread throughout the day. And, and of course, I'm not saying that this is a performance enhancing technique, although there is some data that, that shows that when you train low and then compete or do your hard workouts high, meaning like low carbohydrate versus high carbohydrate, there's probably a pretty good effect. But instead what I'm saying is that just for general longevity and health paired with elevated performance, or at least performance that's equivalent to what you'd get on a higher carbohydrate intake, it works pretty dang well. So kind of a rabbit hole. But, but a few other things that they discuss in this article is for example, this idea that myth number eight, they say the myth that keto will cause hypothyroidism. What they found in all of their patients was that the mean thyroid hormone T4 was unchanged and they actually saw a decrease in TSH and they cite no evidence that the thyroid requires dietary carbohydrates. Now, I would say again, for an inactive or largely sedentary or at least a non gym rat type of person, this is is the case. But because most of the consults and the blood and biomarker work I do are with active folks, athletes, exercise enthusiasts, et cetera, I have seen in many ketogenic active people thyroid dysregulation and testosterone dysregulation that I heavily suspect is coming from carbohydrate deprivation. So again, I'm not swallowing all of these facts that they put out in this article. Hook, line and sinker I think it's all contextual. I think it's all redemption.

Yeah, I think that's a good point.

Yeah. And then if we could go over one other myth, it's that keto will cause muscle loss. But what they actually found in the folks that they were working with was that the primary amount of weight loss on a low calorie ketogenic diet was fat mass, and there was actually very little lean mass reduction. And this is certainly something I've seen in both calorie deprivation and fasted states, and also in ketogenic states is that there is a large amount of protein muscle synthesis or muscle sparing that can occur. But again, to contextualize this a little bit, that's usually paired with some type of loading protocol. And there are studies going all the way back to, I think about 2008, showing that you can build or maintain muscle with a low calorie approach as low as 800 calories a day, as long as you're loading the muscle with weight training. And I'm not necessarily saying there's not going to be like some endocrine dysregulation that might occur as a response to that if you're doing that over and over and over again, like heavy lifting in a fasted state or in a low carbohydrate state. But there, there is, especially when it's paired with weight training and resistance training, evidence that you can restrict carbohydrates pretty intensively and not risk any type of muscle loss. Probably the best example of this as far as a host of different methods and research would be the folks over@ketogains.com you know, who work with a lot of athletes who are seeking muscle mass or muscle optimization or lean body maintenance. And they're generally able to successfully do that with a ketogenic approach paired with adequate amount of resistance training.

Right. I would just say. I was actually just gonna say that. Just go over to their website and see those guys. You're not gonna say that keto causes muscle loss when you see these guys?

Yeah, they're swole. Of course, I don't know how much that is genetics, but nonetheless, it's an interesting article. And we will link to that one in the shownotes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com398 now, speaking of these nutrition studies, I recently, for probably about the third or fourth time, came across this research article from 1992. But I kind of stumbled across again this week during some literature reviews that I was doing. And I thought it would be worth bringing up again simply because based on those recent VICE articles that I was talking about, whenever you're reading dietary studies or nutrition studies studies, you need to understand that many of them are performed using self reported data. Self reported data. So people aren't necessarily locked away in a metabolic laboratory, you know, getting food shoved underneath the door with every single calorie and macronutrient tracked in many nutrition studies. And they are instead just filling out a dietary report. Here's what I remember I think I ate, and here's how much exercise I think I got. Now the kind of the biggest study on this, and it wasn't even that big, it was like a few hundred people. But it appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine way back in 1992. And the title of the study was Discrepancy between self reported and Actual Calorie Intake and Exercise in Obese Subjects. So these were people with so called dietary resistance, meaning that they were following a diet, but they didn't seem to be responding to that diet successfully, specifically when it comes to weight loss. So what they did was they actually went in and investigated the self reported data with the actual data. And so in this study they used actual energy intake for a period of two weeks using what's called indirect calorimetry, which is where you're breathing into a mask that's measuring carbon dioxide produced and oxygen consumed. And then they were also analyzing body composition. What they found was pretty significant in the folks who had diet resistance versus a control group who did not. The folks who seems to have an inability to be able to respond to diet were, brace yourself, over reporting their physical activity by 50 to 75% and under reporting their actual calorie intake by about 45 to 60%. Meaning that folks could in a nutrition study say that they were eating about 1000 calories a day and burning say 2000 calories a day, when in reality they're eating 2000 calories a day and burning 1000 calories a day. And that is something that I think gets under emphasized over and over and over again in this new nutrition literature is the fact that people just have bad memories.

Yes. No. And this is to me, one of the things that stuck out is this concept in psychology, and especially in social psychology research called the overconfidence effect. And this is basically like an overconfidence bias. So people have their kind of level of subjective confidence, but we know that their level of subjective confidence is reliably greater than the actual objective accuracy of Their judgments. So for these individuals, and the research has kind of been clear on this, is that, you know, if you ask someone, are you healthier than the normative population or do you eat healthier than the normative population? Almost everybody, about 90, 80 to 90% roughly, is going to say yes. So we know that a ton of people are very wrong in their statements. And so when you look at this from like an epidemiological study perspective, I mean, it just has such a confounding variable that leads to mis research, misleading research, if you will.

Well, I can say with a great deal of confidence, Jay, that I am. I'm smarter and better looking than. Than most people. And yeah, it's just.

We should do a research study on that.

I just know that to be true. I'm just smarter and better looking and that's all there is to it. And I also have better dietary control, eat fewer calories and burn more calories on average. So I'm extremely.

You're probably right on that one.

Yeah. I'm saying that tongue in cheek, of course. Yeah. I mean, it's an issue. So always beware when you're looking at these nutrition studies. But speaking by the way of confidence, let's talk dad bods, shall we?

Let's talk dad bods.

Yeah. So parenting. In the New York Times parenting section, they actually reported on how dudes bodies change when they become fathers. And it goes pretty far beyond just dad bod syndrome because you don't have as much time to exercise with all the babies scattered around the house. They go into some of the endocrine. Yeah, some of the endocrine and neural changes that occur when guys become fathers. Now, I think most people are probably aware of some of the research that's occurred over the past few years on the significant drop in Testosterone, about a 35% drop in testosterone in guys when they. They. There's a slight drop when you get married. Right. Which makes sense because it would kind of resist the drive to seek out another partner. But then there's even a bigger drop once you become a dad again, most likely kind of keeping you around to take care of the kids and making you less likely to wander. But it's pretty intense, the dip in testosterone. But in addition to that, the brain seems to change, specifically the parts of the brain. And you'd probably think this is interesting being in the field of psychology, Jay, Areas of the brain linked to attachment and nurturing and empathy and the ability to be able to interpret people's faces and reactions. All of Those seem to elevate in men once they become fathers. They also produce more oxytocin. You know, that. That feel good chemical that makes you more trusting and less likely to be argumentative and more likely to get screwed if you go to buy a car from the used car salesman. You know, all of this stuff kind of, kind of changes as you become a dad. And this was a really interesting article that just went into the. Into all the neuroscience and the endocrine occurrences in guys who not just get married, but become fathers.

Yeah, no, it was great. And, yeah, especially from a neuropsychological, psychological perspective. I really liked reading the part about how, as men become fathers, their brain changes, especially on their cortex. So the cortex being the outer part of our brain, the most, I guess, the most recently developed part of our brain, whereas women have changes in kind of subcortical areas, which are our more primal areas. So it was super interesting to read this because especially I've only recently been a dad. My son's 18 months old. So I was kind of wondering, kind of from that perspective, why I'm experiencing all this sensitivity and oxytocin now.

I know. Yeah. I think the biggest takeaway for me is that if you're attempting to have children or you've just had a baby, probably the best thing you could do is get your hands on. On a needle that's chock full of tea and start to just get that right. Butt cheek chock full of scars and pox, injecting testosterone a few times a week. I think that's what every new father should put at the top of the totem pole.

It's a must. It's a must.

Have.

Yes, that's what I said. I'm going to start that protocol today.

Yes. Paint the room blue and start injecting testosterone, guys. Now. I just. But at the same time, you know, I've got previous podcasts I've done on natural ways to enhance testosterone, such as, you know, interval training and heavy weight lifting, primarily using your legs, where the highest number of androgen receptors are. Paying attention to intake of things like zinc and creatine and boron and magnesium and other nutrients that are pretty easy to get your hands on, that are far more efficacious than a lot of these, you know, herbal remedies like Horny Goat, wheat weed extract from the far reaches of Pakistan, and then also paying attention to, of course, phytoestrogens in the environment and books like estrogeneration by Dr. Anthony J. And all these different things. So quit Microwaving your food in Styrofoam. Get your cell phone out of your pocket, unless it's in airplane mode. Get some good minerals. It's etc. Do some heavy weight training and perhaps some intense interval training, especially with the legs. And there's a lot of things you can do to kind of battle that gradual drop in testosterone that occurs anyway, but occurs even more so if you happen to decide you want to build a legacy or make a little tiny you. So there you have it.

Indeed.

Now, speaking of interval training, one other thing I wanted to cover in today's news flashes was a very interesting article that appeared@breakingmuscle.com by Craig Marker. And Craig in this article went into the purported dark side of Tabata sets. Tabata sets? You ever done a Tabata set, Jay?

A couple times a week, yeah.

Yeah, they're tough. They're these maximums 4 minutes or about 8 seconds, sets of 20 seconds hard and 10 seconds easy. Named after the Japanese researcher Izumi Tabata, who originally developed this in the 90s and found that there was a pretty significant increase in endurance and also anaerobic performance compared especially to steady state cardio when doing these Tabata sets. So it was kind of like more bang for your buck in a shorter period of time. But the issues that Craig gets into this article is that that amount of stress may actually cause essentially a detrimental effect with long term degradation of mitochondria because it can induce, based on the amount of short term stress, what's called mitophagy, or a process in which, similar to autophagy, the body gets rid of poorly functioning mitochondria and replaces them. And over long periods of time, that may result in a decrease in mitochondrial density. And in addition to that, especially in people who are genetically predisposed to endothelial dysfunction or cardiovascular disease, some of the biggest damage from a heart attack comes after oxygen returns to the heart because the heart has used up all of its phosphate molecules by essentially burning through a lot of ATP. And when that happens, the mitochondria start making free radicals because they don't have enough of what's called adenosine ribose to accept new phosphate molecules. And you also start to make a whole bunch of ammonia, a potentially toxic byproduct, as those adenosine monophosphate molecules are broken down. Now, I realize I just shoved a lot of physiology into the past 30 seconds, but essentially what this means is that there might be some long term metabolic damage and potentially even some heart tissue damage that could occur with Excessive amounts of traditional high intensity interval training, especially in people who are predisposed to endothelial dysfunction or, and you can now determine this based on genetic tests from, you know, folks like the DNA company or Dr. Danani, who I interviewed some time back. You know, we went into some of these, these issues that some people have. And you know, Even in myself, Dr. Danani made the recommendation that I be careful with excess high intensity interval training. And, and this was one of the reasons was just the potential mitochondrial damage and potential heart tissue damage that could occur, especially when this is done in excess, versus a different type of training. And the different type of training is called high intensity repeat training. So high intensity repeat training is still incorporating like very hard intervals similar to Tabata sets, but the intervals never really exceed about 15 to 20 seconds. Right. So you're not building up a high amount of metabolic inflammation or metabolic byproducts, or lactic acid or ammonia. And at the same time, those very intense work periods are followed by luxuriously long rest intervals. Right? So for about every 10 seconds of work, there's usually about 45 seconds of rest. So if you do a 20 second interval, you're recovering for at least 90 seconds. So you, you are able to not only go very hard when you're going intense, but you're also able to restore metabolic byproducts, you know, such as your, your phosphate pool, pretty efficiently during that recovery period. And in addition to that there's kind of a cool like dopamine response, epinephrine and adrenaline response and kind of this feel good effect that occurs when you do this form of, it's called H I R T, which I suppose you could pronounce hurt, which doesn't sound quite as sexy as hit.

It doesn't.

But essentially it is exactly as I've just described, going for, let's say a long way walk and every, you know, four minutes throwing in a quick 20 second sprint or going to the track and you know, walking 400 meters and then running as hard as you can, you know, or walking 390 meters. Right. And then running as hard as you can for 10 meters. So it's a very interesting idea. I think, you know, for, for long term health and kind of a longevity approach to fitness, that it is more sustainable and also probably more enjoyable. It makes you feel less beat up. Let's not fool anybody. If you're trying to compete in CrossFit or really get super fit for a triathlon or an obstacle course race or something like that, you need to just Bite the bullet and accept the fact that you might actually create some metabolic damage, some mitophagy and potentially, as I've done in myself, create some, what's called cardiomegaly, some amount of, of left ventricular hypertrophy of the heart, some potential atrial fibrillation. You know, I actually personally have, you know, a lot of little heart issues that have crept up as a result of my intense exercise and competition. If I could go back and do anything different, would I? I don't know. I like to compete. I'm almost willing to accept the fact that I might live a few fewer years because I'm out there on the field of battle having fun and going on adventures. But at the same time, I think that some people can overdo the high intensity interval training. I certainly went through a time in my life where I was doing, you know, hit just about every day. Now I'm pretty careful, you know, now I'll do a Tabata set, you know, two times a week, three times a week max. But it's not like I'm going to the pain cave every single day. And the older I get, the more I kind of like this idea of super slow training, functional training, short intense bursts of exercise followed by long recovery periods, more walking than jogging or running, and just generally kind of a more longevity based approach to fitness. Right.

No, I totally agree with you. Are you going to change to the hurt training?

I have since I read this article about three weeks ago, started to replace a little bit bit more of my HIIT training with hertz training and I can tell you it feels pretty good. I know there are other people I've had on the podcast, you know, most notably Mark Sisson and his, his mate Brad Kearns, who kind of have adopted this approach as well. You know, Brad even combines it. He'll do like cold thermogenesis. And he has a whole article on my website, he wrote about this and then follow up that cold soak with some of these repeat sprints and get even more out of the repeat sprints with that approach. But ultimately, yeah, I kind of like it and I feel like I might start to do a little bit more of this as I age, especially for just overall heart health and decreased metabolic damage. So I will link to this article and all the other ones that we've covered in today's news flash over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com398.

Hey Ben, Alex here from Western Colorado, longtime listener and just curious if you help me out in this kind of question I had about skin care, kind of its relevance related to sunscreen. High spf, low spf. I know there's a lot of claims being made by that industry that it can reduce or remove your risk of skin cancer altogether. I just wanted to see if you thought those claims were substantiated in the research. Because I know as far as I've seen, the rates of skin cancer have increased along with the usage of sunscreen. So to me doesn't seem like it's doing a whole lot of good. And I was curious what you use. Do you just limit the sun exposure altogether or do you really work the back end and try to help the rejuvenation after the sun exposure to limit the damaging effects or do you try to use some blockage yourself? What are your strategies? I'd love to hear. Thanks, man.

Well, well, well, sunscreen. Do you wear sunscreen, Jay?

I mean, I eat that stuff. Just copper tone all over the body, three layers per hour. No, I actually I don't wear any. And not for the past like three years or so. I have not worn any sunscreen.

I think sunscreen should be stuff that you can eat. I mean, there, there's.

Oh, no, I absolutely agree, but not Coppertone.

Yeah, my wife and I have made sunscreen before. It's kind of time consuming and I'd rather just buy something healthy. I'll tell you how to find the healthy stuff here in a minute. But like you can take almond or olive oil and you go like half and half that with coconut oil. You add a little beeswax. Then you buy yourself somesome zinc oxide and you throw some antioxidants in there like carrot seed oil or another good one is red raspberry seed oil. Any other essential oils? You want some flavor, some scents. And then you just cook that up in a little saucepan and you let it kind of sit and get solid in the refrigerator. And then you smear it on your body and there you have it. You can literally lick the stuff off your skin. If you need a snack at the beach, that's how it should be. There's a lady named Katie, the wellness mama. I'll link to her how to make your own natural sunscreen sunscreen article because she's got some wonderful recipes on her website and it is important for a lot of reasons. One is the environment. Like, there's a lot of research now showing that a lot of compounds in sunscreen can harm ocean life like coral. And there are 5,000 metric tons of sunscreen that wash off swimmers every year and they're actually finding this stuff in the ocean. It can even cause viruses to develop in the algae in the ocean. That's very interesting. It literally awakened dormant viruses in algae. And some sunscreen ingredients are now banned now in places where they want to protect coral reefs. So if anything, if it's not for your body, do it for the algae. Do it for the algae and the coral, for crying out loud.

That's a good point.

There are other issues too. I mean, Oxybenzone, that's one of the most common endocrine disrupting chemicals in most sunscreens. That's one issue. Another issue is the vitamin D factor. Your body actually needs exposure to the sun to formulate vitamin D. And you know, there are a lot of other issues we could delve into when it comes to sunscreen. As a matter of fact, there are multiple ingredients left listed on the wonderful website Environmental Working Group, which I use to vet just about any personal care product I use. If anybody doesn't know about EWG.org you need to add that and that other website that we mentioned earlier, the emf-portal.org to your list of websites to kind of pay attention to because they're both fantastic for knowing about things in the environment that could be harmful to you. So Oxybenzone is probably the worst just because it's a very potent anti androgen that can really throw off especially estrogen balance. But there are other issues as well that go beyond oxybenzone. There's one called homosalate and pretty much a lot of these other salates. Titanium dioxide seems to be a little bit more dependent damaging than zinc oxide, which is why zinc oxide is the one that's, that's recommended for a lot of natural sunscreens. But you can get a whole list of chemicals that are linked with hazard data from the EWG website. As a matter of fact, Outside magazine earlier this year had a wonderful article that I'll link to in the show Notes called Is Sunscreen the new Margarine? And they get into the issue with, of course, the importance of vitamin D, the increasingly common low levels of vitamin D that we see in people's blood and the fact that sunscreen seems to be associated with a lot of those low vitamin D levels. But they also get into some of the very interesting research that shows, for example, people who work in the sun for long periods of time have lower rates of melanoma than the weekend sunbathers who get out for a lot of time, you know, burn A little bit get their tan on and then don't spend a lot of time outdoors the rest of the week. Well, it turns out that consistent, healthy exposure to the sun is actually protective against skin cancer, whereas of course, burning is not. And so being out in the sun every day is not necessarily bad. And as a matter of fact, one of the 2016 studies that they cite from the Journal of Internal Medicine, the research head of that study puts it like this. He says avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking in terms of life expectancy. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be careful with excess UVA and UVB exposure, but frequent daily doses of sunshine seems to be pretty prudent as long as you're covering your bases in terms of an ability for your body to be able to fight some of the potential radiative damage. Which I'll get into in a second about how you could potentially protect yourself from UV radiation. You of course want to do things like protect yourself from excess UVA rays in the absence of uvb. This means avoiding tanning beds with the traditional UVA bulbs. And if you are going to use tanning bed, use like a collate and maxi twist bulb or a UVB bulb based tanning bed. So you get a lot of vitamin D production without the issues of the UVA radiation. If you're on an airplane, you know, close the actual shutter on the window because all that's going to come through the window of that or a car is going to be UVA radiation. Like if I'm on a long car trip in the sunshine in the middle of summer, I will put on sunscreen even though I'm not, you know, outside in the sun. I'm inside in the car just because of the amount of UVA rays, which are the ones that actually can cause skin cancer that come through the window, while the UVB that balances that out is actually blocked. So those are a few of the best practices when it comes to sun protection, you know, as far as excess sun exposure goes. But then there are a few other things that you can do as well. You know, for example, Arthur Haynes, who I am releasing a podcast with in a few days. He discusses in his book A New Path and also on an article that I'm going to publish from him next week about some of the plant protective compounds that can protect you from UV radiation. So in that article he gets into how UV, UV radiation, like natural amounts of UVA and UVB not only assist with vitamin D3 production, but also help you to produce what's called melanocyte stimulating hormone. And that's a polypeptide. It allows for skin pigmentation, but it also can contribute to sex drive and libido, which is why you often feel more like having sex in the summer or when you're, you know, on a trip to the Cross Caribbean. Or maybe that's just because your loved one is wearing a bikini more often, I don't know. But either way, Melanocyte stimulating hormone is 1 beta endorphins, which are natural opiates and function to regulate pain. Those are also produced in response to sunlight, substance P, which promotes blood flow and regulates immune function and mood disorders like a natural vasodilatory substance. And another vasodilatory substance that protects your against hypertension and inflammation, called calcitonin gene related peptide. Those are also produced in response to sun exposure. And then there's adrenocorticotropic hormone, which regulates your cortisol function and helps to modulate immune function. So there are a lot of things that go beyond vitamin D that you're getting shorted on if you're just slapping on sunscreen or avoiding the sun. Now the other thing, of course, course, is how you can actually protect yourself from some of the excess UVA damage or UVB rays that might occur if you are spending a lot of time out in the sun. And that comes down to what are called proanthocyanidins. Pro anthocyanidins. And these are chemicals that you find in berries, that you find in things like grape seeds and rose hips and pine bark and some different types of fruits. And this even includes things like resveratrol, which you'd find in grapes and cranberries and wine and different plants like sheep sorrel and knotweed. And the idea is that these things help to protect you from the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. Another one is rhodiola. Rhodiola can not only protect you from things like chemical radiation or nuclear radiation, but also sunlight radiation. Another one is apigenin, that's a flavonoid that's also found in things like chamomile and apples and oranges and celery and onions and endive. And if you're eating a wide variety of especially wild plants which have upregulated amounts of apigenin and proanthocyanidins, or you're supplementing with some sort of supplement that includes the extracts of these, then you're going to really Step up your ability to be able to protect yourself from radiation. If you're a carnivore type of person, I even encourage you to do as I do and do something like use some of these. What I use are Dr. Thomas Cowan's vegetable powders, which are extracts that have a lot of these compounds that allow me to get a lot of the plant protective compounds without a lot of the fiber and a lot of the potential like phytic acids and lectins and glutens that I'd get if I were just eating plants in their raw form. So Those are called Dr. Thomas Cowan's vegetable powders, and I'll link to those in the show notes. But ultimately, those are going to be really important when it comes to protecting yourself from sun damage. And then another one is astaxanthin. I first started using this stuff when I was racing Ironman triathlons down Kona. I take about 20 grams. I think one year I used up to 40 grams of astaxanthin, which is basically, it acts very similar to some of these flavonoids and plant polyphenols that I mentioned. And it can actually upregulate specific antioxidant activity against sun exposure. It's almost like internal sunscreen. It comes from krill, is usually where this stuff is harvested from. But it's like this dark red substance. The fish oil that we sell at Kion, for example, has a whole bunch of astaxanthin in it to keep the fish oil from rancidity because it acts as an antioxidant. But it's also wonderful if you're spending a lot of time out in the sun. So if you're doing all of that stuff, then the need for hefty doses of high SPF sunscreen becomes a lot less important. Now, do I use sunscreen? I do. I primarily use it on my face because even though I really like the vitamin D exposure and I'll take my shirt off in the sun, I'll get as much skin exposed to the sun as possible. I just don't want to accelerate facial aging. And no matter which way you look at it, you are going to wrinkle more, even if you're spending lots of healthy time out in the sun. And so I use natural sunscreens on my face quite a bit and rarely put sunscreen on the rest of my body, unless I plan on being out in the sun for a long time, like a day of boating or even back in the day when I would do, like, a long Ironman Triathlon and be out in the sun for 10 hours. And even though I'm not brand loyal to any specific brand of sunscreen, I usually go to the Environmental Working Group's website and just get something off of their guide to sunscreens. And I'll link to their, their full sunscreen page and you just, you know, just scroll through their list, find the one on their list that you can get the best deal on on Amazon or wherever you happen to, to buy stuff. And I think that's a, that's a pretty safe way to go. Whether it's like, you know, I think Badger brand is one that I have right now, but there's a whole bunch of, of different organic sunscreens you can get.

Right. And in an effort to not get too long in the tooth here, but I do want to. And never. Not to get in on a rant, but one of the things that I think has been unfortunately sold to us, and this is gonna sound a little bit like Dr. Jack Cruz, is a half truth when it comes to sunlight and sun exposure. And we see it kind of all over the media, all over the news, where we're essentially getting this message that the sun is bad, don't go out in the sun without any sunscreen. And we have to kind of, you know, think of where that comes from. And I don't think it comes from necessarily always a bad place. Sometimes there's financial concerns there, but I think that there's just half truth missing. And so for me, it's, it's not that I don't wear sunscreen because I don't, you know, I think it's going to necessarily be the worst thing for me. I just choose not to do it because if I want to block myself from the sun, I'll just simply either cover up my body or I'll go under, under shade for a while. And for me, I've just noticed substantial changes in my overall health by just getting full spectrum sun, especially in the morning and then in the evening in, you know, with, without any, without any clothes on except for pants. That's, that's my, that's my go to.

Yeah, that's pretty extreme for you to wear pants. Most, most of our listeners don't wear those too often unless they're on airplanes and they're EMF blocking pants. But yeah, I have a whole article on my website that was based on, based on a combination of both the research on circadian rhythm regulation, but then also the studies that came out last year on insulin management and even a shrinking of some different forms of subcutaneous white adipose tissue in response to sun exposure. It turns out that sun might actually be kind of like a mild weight loss aid as well. And I'll link to that article that I wrote in the show notes. It's called Sunlight Makes yous Skinny Blue Light Makes you Fat. And I get into a whole bunch of different ways to not just optimize your sun exposure, but just, you know, your, your home lighting and your office lighting and just lighting in general. It's probably one of the most comprehensive articles I've written on, on sunlight. So I'll link to that along with Arthur Haynes book A New Path where he talks about different plant compounds that protect against sunlight. I'll link to Dr. Thomas Cowan's vegetable powders, all that stuff. If you just go to the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 398 hey Ben, I was.

Curious about food grade hydrogen peroxide and the one minute miracle.

It's something I do every day.

I've been doing for a few years, drinking water.

It's basically oxygenated water. I read a lot of great stuff about it and I. No, you didn't really touch on that at all through the water podcast. And I just want to know if it's something you think has any value or. Yeah. What your take was on it. Thank you. You know, I went for a long time thinking that hydrogen peroxide was just the stuff my mom put on cuts and it kind of bubbles and stings a little bit. Put in your ears, get an ear infection.

I went until today thinking that.

Yeah, yeah, no, there's a lot more to it. A lot of people are into like drinking hydrogen peroxide again, like hydrogen peroxide, IVs or infusions. And it's based on this idea that our bodies actually produce hydrogen peroxide. And a lot of people aren't aware of this. But what that means is that when you're engaging in mitochondrial production of ATP, one of the byproducts of that is a singlet oxygen radical and also the production of superoxide dismutase or superoxide radicals. And both of these are pretty dang damaging to tissue. You know, they can act very, very similarly to free radicals. Now, hydrogen peroxide is not a free radical per se. It's different than a free radical. It is a little bit of a reactive oxygen so species. But it's not as potent as say like superoxide or like a singlet oxygen molecule. And as a matter of fact it turns out that one of the reasons that the cells produce hydrogen peroxide or convert superoxide into hydrogen peroxide is not only to keep superoxide from producing the high amount of reactivity and cell damage that it can cause, which it would. Which is one of the reasons that some of these oxide molecules can very effective at keeping wounds from getting infected and killing bacteria, et cetera. But hydrogen peroxide actually acts as a cell signaling molecule. So the best way I can explain this is that when normal cell metabolism occurs, you're always going to be generating a little bit of hydrogen peroxide in the electron transport chain. When you do that, what the hydrogen peroxide can do is act as a cell signaling molecule. So, for example, one of the things that it does is it kind of shuts down incoming energy into the actual cell, so it can keep glucose from entering the cell membrane. And that would limit. It's almost like a feedback mechanism. It says, okay, we're producing ATP. We don't need as much glucose coming into this cell. So it can limit the amount of glucose, glucose that enters into the cell. It can also limit the amount of fatty acids that come into the cell as well. It essentially is just almost like a stopgap that says, hey, this cell has enough energy. So let's go ahead and block glucose and fatty acids from entering into this cell. Which actually, you know, just based on that kind of gives me pause, especially for people who have a high amount of blood glucose, like a. Like a diabetic, from excess hydrogen peroxide intake. Because you could theoretically, by getting a hydrogen peroxide infusion, actually create almost like an artificial signaling to your body to not uptake glucose and not uptake fatty acids, and could actually produce a scenario, you know, theoretically, even though this hasn't been studied, of too much glucose hanging around in the bloodstream, because you're almost like blocking some of that natural cell signaling that's occurring as your body is naturally producing hydrogen peroxide, but it's used in other areas of the body as well. For example, hydrogen peroxide is also very, very important for proper thyroid function. It actually plays a role in the ability of the thyroid gland to be able to generate proper thyroid activity. And so one of the ways that that happens is that as you're making thyroid hormone, you actually make a ton of hydrogen peroxide. That's why thyroid gland, or the thyroid gland has a very high amount of selenium in it, which is an antioxidant, because as you're producing thyroid hormone, you're making a bunch of hydrogen Peroxide, too much of that can cause excess oxidation. So you actually need adequate amounts of selection selenium and kind of, to a lesser effect, glutathione, to be able to protect yourself from some of that potential excess oxidative damage that could occur if you have normal thyroid activity and then the hydrogen peroxide that's produced as a part of that. So then you could also think, well, okay, if you're taking a whole bunch of hydrogen peroxide or supplementing with hydrogen peroxide, or you're getting these trendy infusions or IVs with hydrogen peroxide, you would also want to make sure that you have really adequate selenium status and glutathione status to be able to take care of some of the potential oxidation and cell damage that could occur from all of that additional hydrogen peroxide that you're dumping into your body on top of what your body already makes. There's also some evidence, by the way, that vitamin E may be another thing that really helps to protect cell membranes from oxidative damage related to hydrogen peroxide. But as far as the good part of hydrogen peroxide, we know, for example, that lactobacilli, like some of our natural bacteria found in the colon and in the vagina, can produce hydrogen peroxide. And that can destroy harmful bacteria and viruses. It can prevent bladder infections and colon disease. And that's why a lot of people do like enemas with hydrogen peroxide. And again, the way I think about this is, well, if you have, if you have a good gut flora, maybe you're producing enough. Anyways, I'm not necessarily convinced based on the research I've seen, that you need extra hydrogen peroxide for an even greater effect. Unless you actually have like some kind of a full blown infection or fungal or bacterial overload, in which case it might be beneficial. But I'd still be taking selenium and glutathione and vitamins, vitamin, et cetera, if I were using that as a strategy. There are other medical conditions it's been shown to be helpful for, like emphysema. And congestive lung problems seem to respond well to intravenous infusion of hydrogen peroxide, because basically what happens is the oxygen produced from the hydrogen peroxide can bubble up between the membrane lining and the lung sacs and the mucus. And so patients will start to cough and expel that extra. That extra mucus. And the peroxide kind of clears the lung surface and can destroy some of these bacterial infections. So there are some medical conditions that may also respond pretty well to hydrogen peroxide. And then of course it can be used in like, you know, many people will have like these DIY cold tubs or cold soaks like chest freezers that they'll use hydrogen peroxide as a cleaning agent in. And you know, it be can be used to clean kitchen counter or stuff like that, or topical wounds. But what's very important to realize is that this stuff can be really damn dangerous. And it's a very strong oxidizer and if you don't dilute it, it can be fatal. It can cause a lot of neurological damage, it can cause damage to the upper GI tract if you're taking it orally. So in most cases the recommendation is to use what's called food grade hydrogen peroxide, which doesn't have a lot of the additives and artificial compounds that non food grade hydrogen peroxide would have in it, but then to actually dilute that food grade hydrogen peroxide. So usually folks will get like 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide and then dilute that. Usually you'll mix certain number of drops of that to water or some people like to use aloe vera juice or aloe vera gel. And then you use that dilution as something that you take orally, like a few drops a day or some people use that in like an enema solution. But again, for me the issue is the potential for excess oxidation and the absence of adequate glutathione, selenium and vitamin E and the question of whether you might disrupt the natural cell signaling process that relies upon the natural hydrogen peroxide that you already produce. And I just have yet to see enough clinical data showing, besides a few of those small samples that I mentioned, like emphysema or lung issues or potential colonic infection, that this should be like part of a regular kind of practice that would be done daily on a consistent basis. I just think it's playing with fire when there's not a ton of data on long term effects of long term hydrogen peroxide usage.

Right, good point. Just kind of a follow up to that. And I learned a lot there, which was great. But I utilize hydrogen peroxide, just straight up full hydrogen hydrogen peroxide as a cleaning agent. And since my skin is obviously a essentially a large mouth, is that something that people should be worried about cleaning with this stuff and skin exposure to hydrogen peroxide?

Well, inhaling it can cause some issues. Contact with the skin, if it's not diluted, can cause skin burns and actual skin damage just because of excess oxidation. So Yeah, I mean, kind of need to treat this stuff like bleach. I mean, be careful with it, use it in properly diluted amounts and understand that just because it's clear and colorless and odorless, that does not mean it's great to just shoot up your butt and throw willy nilly all over your house and suck it down through a straw. So I'd just say be careful. And that's my take on hydrogen peroxide.

Hey, Ben Greenfield, this is Kathy coming to you from Boise, Idaho, and I have a question for you today about hydrogen rich water. I've heard you talking about it a bunch lately on the podcast and my question is if someone has sibo or hydrogen dominant Sibo, is hydrogen rich water or the tablets going to be contraindicated for that person because they're just adding more hydrogen to their situation. Really curious about this. I know a lot more people are suffering from sibo than realize, so would love your thoughts on that. Thank you so much for an awesome show.

I have indeed talked about hydrogen rich water a lot lately on the podcast. Not to be confused with hydrogen peroxide. Right? Right. Very big difference. No oxygen. It's just hydrogen. Hydrogen water is basically water. It's got an H2 molecule in it. And I have a whole podcast on this. I'm not going to kick this horse today, death, because you can go listen to the whole podcast. I did on all of the research, literally thousands of studies that have been done to date on hydrogen water. Go listen to my podcast@BenGreenfieldFitness.com All Things Water with Robert Slovak. We get into the antioxidant effects, the brain protective effects, the, you know, adjustment of metabolic syndrome issues, you know, the enhancement of energy metabolism, the, the anti cancer potential, the, the skin health potential, the, the heart protection potential, all the different beneficial effects of hydrogen water. And why I mentioned that I drink, you know, I travel with the tablets, use the tablets all the time, especially when on the airplane every single day for the past year. I'm a huge fan of hydrogen rich water and there are a lot of different places that you can get hydrogen tablets. Right now where I'm sending most people is actually Dr. Robert Slovak's website for hydrogen water. So I'm, I'm kind of starting to, to send more people to like the, the, they call it active H2. That's Robert Slovak's website. I like his website because you can get like the Quinton hyper mineral stuff, some of the different water filtration units that we talked about in my podcast with him. So you can get like raspberry, they have like a blue raspberry flavored hydrogen tablet and then a regular hydrogen tablet. And you just add one or two of these to a glass of water, let it dissolve for two to four minutes, drink it down and you're good to go.

But as Kathy, and let me say too, they're running a huge sale right now. So when people listen to this, go to, it's you buy two bottles of that active H2, you get one free. And I know you've got a coupon code too. So go, go do it. I've already, I mean I spent way too much, much money on that website and funded probably their next year's worth of needs after that podcast. So go listen to it.

They should hire you. They should use ZipRecruiter and hire you. That's right. I'll link to their website and throw our coupon code in. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com398 anyways though. So yes, there is such a thing as hydrogen consumption consuming bacteria in the gut. And in many cases you see an upregulation of the type of bacteria that can essentially utilize hydrogen in its metabolic processes and it could theoretically cause an actual continued overgrowth of these type of bacteria, which is what Kathy's alluding to. And one of the common tests for C placebo is a hydrogen breath test in which you're actually consuming it, usually a lactulose or some type of sugar based solution, and you're measuring how much gas, typically the level of hydrogen or the level of methane, that your bacteria produce over time using one of these so called breath tests for small intestine bacterial overgrowth, which can of course produce constipation and bloating and gas and all sorts of issues if you have it. When you look at any research that's been done on the consumption of hydrogen water, it's very interesting because I was able to dig into some of the studies, especially on the gut bacterial balance in response to administration of either inhaled hydrogen gas or consumption of hydrogen water. And in most cases it seems to have a very beneficial effect on, on gut inflammation. And when it comes to hydrogen utilizing bacteria appears to actually balance out the hydrogen utilizing bacteria. Meaning that almost like paradoxically, the consumption of hydrogen rich water seems to actually down regulate activity of that bacteria while at the same time reducing occurrence of things like diarrhea and constipation in folks who have sibo and also shifting the digestive competition or the bacterial composition of the gut towards a more favorable profile. And probably one of the better examples of this was a study that was done last year. This was a rodent model on mice with irritable bowel syndrome. This is a pretty big study study in which they found a significant decrease in gut inflammation measured via protein in the blood called TNF alpha, a drop in a host of other oxidative stress parameters, and also a general improvement in overall gut flora and colonic health in the mice. I personally have had SIBO in the past and have never experienced any gas or bloating or digestive issues in, in response to hydrogen water consumption. And so even though the thought pattern seems to be logical in that, could you just be feeding the hydrogen utilizing bacteria in your gut? I also ran this by Tyler Lebaron, the head of the Molecular Hydrogen Foundation. He could not find any data showing that it does. The few studies I found actually showed a modulation of the hydrogen producing bacteria bacteria. So ultimately it's not something that I would worry about much. I don't think hydrogen rich water can feed SIBO bacteria in the gut. So I will link to a few of these studies if you want to review them over in the show. Notes. There were three of them in full that I found that actually investigated the conception of hydrogen rich water on gut flora. So I'll link to all Those over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com398 if anyone, any, if any geeks out there want to actually, you know, don their white lab coats and their, their funny looking glasses and dive into the research. But I'll put all that in there and, and yeah, that's my take on hydrogen rich water.

No, that's really good to know because it has so many, I guess you could even say medicinal properties molecular hydrogen does. So it's good to know that there's really no correlation of kind of increasing, kind of the negative effects of SIBO with usage.

Yeah, yeah, I don't think it's something to worry about. So that being said, I guess we've kind of been going for a while. But of course, as we always do at the end of the show, we like to give shit away, so. That's right. Do we have someone who's left a review in itunes who we can send a cool gift pack to?

Oh, we do. Mr. Or Mrs. H.K. green 25, you will be receiving some great stuff as long as you write into us. But this is called the Library of human performance. And HK Green 25 says, I refer to this podcast show as the Library of Human Performance because that is exactly what you get. A library full of incredible information, facts and resources from renowned and expert individuals and all things human health and performance. I have used this podcast and the contents included therein as a resource for my own human optimization journey and in my studies as a current public health major student. In fact, I use as much information from the show as I do the textbooks because the information is more up to date and has been field tested by doers, not just researchers. Good review.

Wow. They even use the word therein. That's pretty.

I know, I know. Actually I was gonna pause and say something smart ass about that but then I was like yeah, let me just proceed.

It's very Shakespearean. So just based on that we should send them a gift pack so you'll get a sexy BGF T shirt, BPA free water bottle so you don't get man boobs if you are a guy we don't even know. And what else do they get? A toque? A beanie. A really cool beanie. BGF beanie. That's right for all the snowboarding you're doing this summer. So if you are listening in and you left this review, just email gearngreenfieldfitness.com with your T shirt size. We'll get that out to you. And then if you would like to support this show, if you want to get your, how do you say, hat thrown in the ring for receiving a gifts pack yourself then go to go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you happen to listen to podcasts, Castbox or Overcast or Spotify or Pandora or wherever. Leave us a flippin great review and we will. We'll get you in the running for a gift pack. Helps us support the show, helps our rankings. So feel free to go Leave us as many stars as possible. So also all of the show notes you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 398 and Jay, I think. I think we've been on the phone for long enough. I think we should hang up, call this thing good.

I think we have I need to finish my bottle of garlic dining.

That's right. And go work on your Go work on your dad bod. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, Fat Loss performance and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.