A World Famous Chef Reveals How The Wrong Foods And A Broken Medical System Nearly Killed Him - And Easy, Delicious Ways Change Your Body With the Right Foods.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Foreign.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield with a special guest for today's podcast. And there was actually a recent article in Men's Journal on my guest today. And here's just a snippet of what Men's Journal had to say. Few people have subjected their bodies to as much wear and tear as this Manhattan chef and restaurateur. The mastermind behind the red hot Manhattan restaurant Tertullia and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that properly, and a regular on the Food Network, he has seen it all. He contracted dengue fever on a mountain bike trip across Costa Rica. He was bitten by a vampire bat while cooking at an echo lodge in the jungles of Venezuela, an injury that required an emergency helicopter trip to the closest hospital. He spent five months on a punishing 11,000 mile dirt bike trek from San Francisco to Panama and back. There have been bike races, cyclocross challenges and mountain bike half centuries, not to mention years of brutal 90 hour work weeks in high end restaurant kitchens all over the world. Well, it may sound like I'm about to interview somebody who's just a daredevil chef, but in fact he also has a remarkable journey from fighting back from rheumatoid arthritis and chronic pain and gut gut inflammation and a ton of really serious health issues caused by a combination of bad food and modern medicine, pharmaceuticals, and some of the things we'll talk about today. And he is now well on his way to peak fitness, being in the best shape of his life and completely changing his body, primarily by eating the right foods and fixing his approach to our medical system. So Seamus Mullen is my guest today. He's the author of his hero How Cooking with Delicious Things Can Make Us Feel Better. And Seamus, I want to welcome you to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Thanks Ben. It's great to be here. I'm a huge fan of the show and an avid listener.

Well, I'm excited to learn some really cool lessons from a guy who apparently cooks very delicious food. I know we'll get into that too, how our listeners can cook some of the delicious things that you use to heal your body but first, I want to delve into your story and kind of hear about how you more or less got messed up as far as your body and your gut and your joints go and what you did about it and how your journey progressed.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's been a pretty. Pretty wild journey, as you got a sense of from that article in Men's Journal. And you have to forgive me. I've got a little bit of a cold. So if I sound kind of stuffed up, you got to get over it. I'm getting over it. I'll try not to cough in your ear. But my relationship with food, I mean, with all of us, our relationships with food begins the moment we come out of our moms. And that's the beginning, right. Or perhaps even starts before that. And I was lucky that I grew up on a small farm in Vermont. I was exposed to really, really good food for the majority of my early childhood. And then my parents made a decision because I was living in such a rural environment, to send me away to boarding school. And my brother and I went away to boarding school. And. And in hindsight, I've spoken with my mom about this quite a bit, and she said she knew that when they made the decision for us to go to boarding school, that they were going to lose control over what we were eating. And that was a really big issue for them. And, in fact, I learned that years later, that was a real big issue for me as well. And it was my first exposure to industrial institutional food. I'd had a very, very clean upbringing in so many ways. And it's funny looking back, because it was one of the most positive experiences of my life. Going to boarding school. I met people, people that were just incredible people. But I also think it was the beginning of really a slow kind of descent into poor health, even though I was athletic and I was really fit. When you're a teenager and you're going through puberty and you're going through change, it's really when you really. You need to be nourishing your body more than ever. And in a private boarding school in the late 80s, early 90s, we were eating Cisco junk. I mean, it was total garbage. And I actually got my first real major issue. I got Salmonello in 1991, I think, and there was an outbreak at my school, and a whole bunch of people got sick. And it took me for a really, really long time to get over that. And just kind of when I was starting to feel back on track, then I got dengue fever in Costa Rica 20 years ago. And that was kind of the beginning of what was really, really traumatic for me. The whole time though, I was very physically active and I was an athlete. I was racing moun like semi professionally all through the 90s. But I was still struggling with my health. And it got to a point where in 2001 I got very, very sick in Mexico. And when I came back from Mexico, my health just really rapidly started to fall into the gutter and I didn't know what was going on. I mean, I just felt crappy all the time. My body ached. At this point I was working a lot as a che and I just sort of attributed how I felt to the lifestyle, to my job, my profession, everything that I was doing. And I actually, I would bring this up with my doctor and there was not really any kind of response like, well, you need to rest a little bit more. Never was there any question about what I was eating first of all, or my lifestyle. And then I started developing these really horrible acute flare ups, which I now know are flare ups. I didn't know there were flare ups in my joints and started in my shoulder and then it would go to my wrist or my knee or my hip. And I went to the hospital many, many times to the emergency room and I was just with inflammation that felt like a knife in my shoulder. I mean, horrible pain with no trauma whatsoever. And they'd give me some pain medication and some anti inflammatories and send me home and tell me that there was nothing really wrong with me, just like.

An ibuprofen or an Advil or something stronger than that.

No, no, I was, I mean they were very, very quick to hand out Percocets and Vicodin and you know, hardcore pain medication which got me through it. In fact, with my shoulder, they multiple times would give me injections of cortisone directly into the shoulder to try to quell the inflammation, but no concern or question about what might be causing it. And it eventually got to the point where I had an attack in my left hip that was just excruciating. And when they, I went, my friends took me to the ER and they tried to send me home and I literally, I couldn't walk. I mean, they tried to stand me up on both my feet and I collapsed. The pain was just beyond belief. And so I was admitted to the hospital and, and over the next five days I was just in excruciating pain and under observation, they had no idea what was causing this pain. And eventually I convinced them to give me an mri, which they did not want to do because it's very hard to get approval through the insurance company to get an MRI if there's no real rationale for it. But the mri, basically they had to sedate me to give me the mri. And when I came out of sedation, I was in an operating room and I was like totally confused. I had no idea how I got in there. And my body was covered in. In sharpie marks. They were about to cut me open. And this is pretty insane. Fortunately, my brother was there who has been just an incredible pillar of help in my life. And he said, listen, we have to make sure what they found in my hip is that my hip was full of fluid and my white blood cell count was extremely high. It was like in the 40% or something like that. And so they thought that I had a septic hip, that I had somehow gotten an infection inside my hip and it was going to go to my spine. And they needed to perform what's called a pelvic evacuation, where they basically split you open and they scrub you out and sterilize you and God knows what the effects of that are.

Yeah, that does not sound fun.

No. And button you back together. And that's when my brother said, listen, we need to make sure this is actually there's an infection there before you do that. So they performed a culture and found there was no infection.

Really?

Yeah. And that's when they reached out to every department of the hospital hospital. And the chair of rheumatology came back and said, I think this guy has rheumatoid arthritis. He's got all of the symptoms of it. I need to see him and I want to run tests. And that's when they ran tests on me and I was diagnosed with ra. And then the next seven years of my life have been kind of living with RA and what that meant. So it was pretty intense. Intense road to diagnosis.

Now, you know, as far as rheumatoid arthritis is concerned, I mean, some of that can obviously be genetic, but how much did. Did food inflammation and your gut play a role in this as far as like digging that you did to kind of look into what may have contributed to the flare ups and maybe aggravated the rheumatoid arthritis?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think that for me, when I was diagnosed, I had no idea what the disease was and I didn't know, as most people don't know, that RA is an autoimmune disease and it's a systemic inflammatory disease. So it's very different from osteoarthritis. And as you rightly pointed out, it can be caused by many things. And they're still slow to acknowledge exactly what may be causing ra. And there are certainly genetic markers that can make you more predisposed to it, or so it would seem. But it seems as though, and there's a lot more compelling evidence out there now, that it can be driven by some sort of ulterior infection or inflammation caused within, whether it's in the gut or maybe it's a viral infection, something that kind of causes the immune system to spin out of key. And in my case, I didn't know any of this and I didn't realize any of this until about a year and a half ago. I was very fortunate to be introduced to Dr. Frank Lippman, who practices functional medicine. And Frank was the first doctor I'd ever seen probably in my whole life, who, when I first met him, and I wasn't even planning on seeing him as a doctor, we met socially. He said, what's going on with you? And I kind of told him my story. He said, this is a freaking shame that you've been through this.

And this was just last year.

This is about a year and a half ago. Yeah. And he said, I think that we can get you feeling better. It's going to take a little bit of time, but I think we can help you to feel better. I never had a doctor say that to me before that was willing to actually put his money where his mouth was and say, you can get over this, we can get you past this. And his suspicion was that in 2001, when I got really sick in Mexico, that I contracted parasites?

Really?

Yeah. So he sent me to a parasite.

Did he just like think that right off the bat, based off his experience, that just because the whole parasite to rheumatoid arthritis link seems almost far fetched, unless he'd already known that that could happen.

Well, in his practice, what he's seen with so many different presentations of autoimmunity that there's actually that we compartmentalize diseases. We say, okay, this set of symptoms belongs to lupus and the set of symptoms belongs to ibs, and the symptoms belongs to Ms. And what he really believes is that a lot of times these presentations are different reactions to a similar cause. And if you treat the root cause, then you can, in theory, you can help the body heal and get over some of of these symptoms, rather than just symptomatically treating the issues on the outside.

Gotcha.

And so what he, you know, in my case, it wasn't like, initially like, oh, let me see what you've got going on. I think it's parasites. He went through all of my medical history, looked at absolutely everything, and, you know, I gave you a very kind of Cliff Notes version of what my medical history has been. But I had all sorts of weird things happen to me, you know, from blood clots to an infection in my brain that nearly killed me. All of these things that. That seemingly, to most Western doctors were very unrelated, and they weren't able to come up with any kind of answer. But to Frank, he looked at this and he said, I think there's an infection, and there's some sort of infection in your system that is appearing when your body is compromised, when your immune system is compromised, and it's receding when your immune system is able to handle it a little bit more. But your baseline is pretty crappy. And what we need to do is find out what that is. And so when he kind of poured through all of my medical history and he came to the sickness in Mexico, he said, aha, you got sick and you never really got better. And then your health really started to decline after that. That tells me that possibly something could have happened in Mexico. And what I think it might be is it might be parasites. So that's when he sent me to see a parasitologist.

Wow. So this is a year and a half ago. You go to the parasitologist, you've already got this rheumatoid arthritis that you've been living with for how long was it at that point?

Well, diagnosed for seven years, but living with it in terms of symptoms for at least 10 and for seven years on pretty hardcore medication. Everything from chemotherapy drugs and prednisone to biologics, autoimmune, immunosuppressants, all that stuff.

Okay, so the parasitologist actually finds that you have a parasite.

Yeah, he finds that I've got not one, but I've got a whole colony of them living throughout my body, throughout my digestive tract. And so what we end up doing is first a very kind of heavy artillery job of trying to wipe those guys out, which is pretty unpleasant. But we definitely made really good progress, but I still didn't feel a whole lot better.

Well, I've had a parasite before and been given by my naturopathic physician a basic bear, brine, goldenseal, kind of Chinese herb complex to successfully knock it out. But, you know, and this was, in this case, a Blastocystis parasite. And that is actually something that's pretty common for even a lot of folks who are just living in a regular old, you know, American or Canadian or kind of safe city to, quote, unquote, safe city to have for you. Was this issue because you were off, like, you know, in the wilds of Panama and Costa Rica and Venezuela, or were these type of things that were found in your body something that were relatively common for a physician like this, Dr. Frank Lippman, to actually come across?

I think in my case, it was something that I developed a very long time ago and contracted in a tropical environment. And then just over time, the issue actually, I think, is probably less so the parasites, because a parasite doesn't really want to kill you, it wants to live off of its hosts. But unfortunately, parasites are not. They're not alone. They create a lot of bacteria. There's bacteria that live on them. And that's really where I think the issue was. And I think that's where what's really fascinating to me is this whole notion that the bacterial kind of movement in medicine, and that's really. I mean, I think that that's the future of medicine. I. I had a meeting a couple weeks ago with Dr. Dan Littman, who's a researcher at NYU, and he recently published a paper linking specific gut bacteria in rheumatoid arthritis patients. And it's the first real conclusive study to link the two together. And he and I were talking about kind of the future of medicine. And he feels very, very, very, very. He convinced that shortly we're going to be using, we can call them probiotics now, but basically bacterial implants or fecal implant or bacterial seeding to change. Because he's been able to see someone's microbiome go from 90% dominant with one bacteria to 10% subordinate. Change overnight by changing the diet.

Yeah. The infamous poop pill.

Exactly.

Well, you know, I get what you're saying, that there are multiple ways to get to a gut imbalance or an imbalance in your bacteria or what's called your gut flora. And in your case, it turns out that a big contributing factor was this parasite. So before we jump into how you balanced your gut and some of the things you did to address the gut flora issues created by this parasite, because I know a lot of listeners out there actually have joint pain and brain fog and a lot of issues that could be related to gut flora. And I think what you say will help them out. What'd you do about the parasite? Did you take some kind of a pharmaceutical. Did you use herbs or what was the protocol for that?

Both. Yeah, both. We used both herbs. The idea was to use a heavy duty pharmaceutical to wipe it out and then backing that up with herbs and supplements and at the same time doing a very kind of gut healing anti inflammatory protocol with supplements and diet at the same time. And it really was. I mean, it's funny, Frank told me, I think it's going to take six months until you feel better. And it was almost six months to the day that I woke up one morning and I literally had like a hallelujah moment. I woke up and I was like, oh, my God, I'm not in pain. It was the first time in 11 or 12 years I'd woken up and not been in pain. It was absolutely amazing. I mean, my wife literally cried. She had never heard me say that. I mean, for years when people ask me how I was doing, I'd say, I'm okay, I'm all right. You know, literally the notion of actually feeling great was something that was so foreign to me and I'd completely forgotten what it was like not to be in pain. Yeah.

Wow. So the rebalancing of the gut, you'd obviously been on prednisone, you'd been on a lot of things that I think our listeners might already be aware of can do a number on your gut and your stomach. What did you go about doing as far as balancing your guts? You know, what kind of gut healing protocol kind of worked for you?

Well, I mean, the first thing was to try to reduce any inflammation via the foods that I was eating. So that involved a strict kind of elimination of anything that was processed, which I was already not. I mean, I wasn't eating very much processed food, but cutting back on processed carbohydrates and then really just getting almost most carbohydrates out of my diet.

You were still cooking, living as a chef at this time. Right? Okay.

Yeah. And that's another kind of challenging piece of it for me is that as a chef, you have to taste a lot of food and you end up not really eating at regular intervals, which is not. I don't necessarily think you have to eat three square meals a day. In fact, I think that's kind of a weird convention that we've invented. But I do think you need to be very considerate about how much food you eat and when you're eating that food and when you're. When your main preoccupation as a cook is to make sure that everybody else's food tastes really good. You end up eating a lot more than you necessarily need to and eating when you don't necessarily need to, like late at night, right before going to bed. Which also didn't help me balance my gut. So a big change for me was just being really considerate about how and when I was eating and then eliminating things like sugar and gluten and carbohydrates from my diet.

Now, obviously elimination is kind of one key to healing the gut, but there are obviously other things you have to do to like, you know, he'll heal the lining, heal the cells, you know, basically seal up the cellular junctions, all this stuff. What kind of things did you do from that standpoint?

Well, I used, I mean I took and I still take L, glutamine, I take krill oil. A lot of supplements. I took on a daily basis, anti inflammatory supplements, things like curcumin, high doses of curcumin, cat's claw, Amazonian cat's claw. I started looking, going back about a year and a half ago, I started looking at my blood panels very, very regularly and seeing where I was deficient, what I needed to increase. Doing this in conjunction with Dr. Lipman, making sure that I was taking, I been taking high doses of vitamin D with vitamin K for now over a year across the board. Just initially a cleanse that was two weeks and then went into another four weeks. So it ended up being about six weeks of just really gentle food consumption coupled with a lot of anti inflammatory supplements.

Okay, gotcha. So you did a cleanse, you did kind of a gut reboot, you did this gut healing protocol. Were there other things that you did to heal your body from the inflammation caused by rheumatoid arthritis and years of unhealthy eating and parasite?

Yeah, I mean, I did. Movement became really important to me. Certainly acupuncture helped a lot for I would say about nine months. I was doing acupuncture at least once a week and focusing mostly on major sort of both digestive and immuno points, body work, whether I was doing art. I mean, a lot of the issues that happen with joint inflammation are muscular imbalance and lack of mobility. And I've had major, major inflammation in my, my shoulder and my knee and my hip, as well as multiple spinal surgeries, knee surgery, all these sorts of things that end up developing a lot of scar tissue. So all of that really helped a lot. Doing bodywork and movement. And then for me, getting back and exercising again, which was really a Huge win for me. About, I would say in May of last year, I got on my road bike for the first time in years and I rode 10 or 15 miles incredibly slowly. And I thought, oh my God, this is incredible. I can actually ride a road bike again. And over the next two weeks, I rode every day progressively a little bit further, a little bit faster. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to ride my mountain biking. And I dug up my old race bike from 1999, and I went out for a mountain bike ride, which is. Has. Is my favorite thing in the world, riding a mountain bike. There's nothing I enjoy more than that. And, and it was a revelation. I was going over drop offs and jumping over logs and things that I never thought even three months before I would be able to do. So I promptly went out and spent a fortune on a brand new mountain bike.

Now, didn't you actually get back surgery at one point in your life?

I've had back surgery twice.

So you've had two back surgeries. But were those back surgeries done back when you were doing all these things like cycling and, and extreme exercising and adventuring and things of that nature?

Nope. All of that happened while I was really sick.

So I have a question for you. Would you have done anything differently, like 10 years ago in your exercise routine or in your workout protocol to avoid getting those spinal surgeries? I mean, with what you've learned about movement and exercise, I mean, kind of going above and beyond just the gut stuff. As far as your exercise routine, what have you learned? What would you have changed?

I think the main thing I would have changed, and I know that you're a big advocate of this, is getting away from just being in a single position and doing single repetitive motions. One of the challenging parts about cycling is that you're in one position for a very long period of time. And while it's good for certain muscle groups, it's not necessarily good for overall body mobility. I think if there's one thing that I could have, I've recently, and I say recently in the past nine months, I've kind of discovered the squat. And the squat, to me, is, I think, something that would have saved my life. I don't think I would have had back surgery if I had been doing squats in my teens and twenties.

Just like back squats with a barbell on your back or different forms of.

Squats, all kinds of squats. I mean, I think even more important than weighted squats are just the notion of squatting. If you think about any other culture in the world, they do almost everything in the squatted, Whether from you're going to the bathroom, giving birth, socializing, eating, cooking, planning a hunt. All of that happens in a squatted position. And most Americans can't get anywhere close to ass to grass. And I know that I certainly couldn't until very recently. Our hip flexors, our psoas, the front muscles of our body, which really play a huge role in supporting our spine, become atrophied and shortened by spending so much time in chairs, by spending so much time in supportive furniture, by not moving and getting in and out of that squatted position. I think that one exercise and that one kind of modality would have really helped me prevent having back surgery.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, kind of tying together this with the gut. It's interesting that a lot of times avoiding that squatting position can create quite a bit of colonic issues too, as well as things stay inside your large intestine for longer periods of time, that can create some toxicity issues in folks. And I've actually found with myself and with some of the folks who I coach, that when you train your body to have a morning bowel movement and you just make that happen, whether it's doing magnesium and vitamin C in the morning, whether it's using one of these squatty potties or using a squatting position, but basically getting yourself into that habit, but you actually feel a lot better during the day if you can get complete elimination in the morning. It's really, really interesting.

Oh, yeah. I mean, the squatty potty has changed my life. It's an incredible, ridiculously simple device. But the other thing that's great about.

And by the way, for people who don't know what this squatty potty is, it's this little device that you just kind of, you shove it up against your toilet and it's this nice looking stool that you pull away from your toilet when you're ready to go to the bathroom and allows you to get in a squatting position without, for example, like, perching in a squatting position on top of the actual toilet bowl, which can be either uncomfortable or gross or both. Or break the porcelain.

Yeah, it's the stool stool.

Yeah, exactly. So sorry to interrupt. What were you saying?

No, but I mean, the squatty body is great, you know, and that I totally agree with you. And it's something that I've, you know, I got turned on to, I think, through your podcast last summer, and I've since bought Them as gifts for people who think that it's kind of an odd gift. But then thank me and write me months later telling me how much better they feel because they use it every day and they can't. Actually. I have one friend who now, when he travels, he takes his suitcase into the bathroom and uses it as a squatty potty because he can't travel this potty. But you're totally right. I mean, that squatting position, that's how we're designed to eliminate. It's how we evolve to eliminate. And that movement at the same time, it also, it does so much to stabilize your core. So it's one of those kind of functional movements that I think really would have helped me from having spinal surgery.

Yeah. So you turned your body around with gut healing supplements, with kind of fixing the diet with what sounds like kind of an autoimmune protocol where you were eliminating gluten. And I assume you made some adjustments as far as soy and dairy and eggs as well.

Yeah, for me, dairy and eggs, I actually think eggs are wonderful. Eggs are one of my favorite things in my diet. And dairy is something that certainly when I was going through the healing process, I eliminated. But then I've added back in, and I do bulletproof coffee in the morning. I'm a big fan of grass fed butter.

I found you're able to add some of those things back in now that you've healed your gut.

Well. Dairy, yes. Gluten, I'm not really interested in adding back in. It's one of those things that once. It's a very. It's, you know, it's an incredibly addictive substance. Once you've. Once you've kind of broken the habit of eating it. And I think a lot of carbohydrates are the same way when you've broken the habit of eating them. At least for me, I look at. When I look at stuff that I would have. Would have craved a year and a half ago or two years ago, I now kind of look at that as being like a slippery slope back into what I call hellness, you know, from wellness to hellness. I don't want to go back there, so I'm not really interested in it. And then corn and soy, those are both inflammatory foods. So corn is something that it's hard for me to pass up. Sweet corn in the height of summer. We've got amazing corn around here. And I do love a really good handmade tortilla, but I just eat it in moderation, so it's not Something that doesn't form a big part of my diet.

Yeah, and that's an interesting point you make about gluten and addictive potential because you get these gluten exorphins that are formed during the digestion of gluten and those are opioid peptides. I mean they're very similar to opiate addictive drugs. So it's in, for example, modern wheat that's bred for high yield crop where you get really concentrated amounts of wheat germ agglutin and that can be wonder bread can be incredibly addictive, as can pasta and all the other derivatives used from that wheat. So you are a chef. And I would be remiss not to, when I have a world class chef on the podcast, start to talk about how we can actually heal our gut and address inflammatory issues or make sure that we're not creating inflammatory issues but not feel like we're eating cardboard. So I know you have a cookbook and of course I'll link to that in the show notes if people want to check out your hero food cookbook. But can you start to share with with some of our listeners some easy recipes that they could get started with that are just safe but also kind of delicious that maybe go above and beyond just like, I don't know, drinking coconut milk or something?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, well, coconut milk is great and I'm a big fan of everything coconut milk, it just gets old sometimes all by itself. It does get a little old, yeah. Although I slather it on my body in copious amounts and the oil at least. But yeah, there's so much great stuff that you can eat that is really, really good for you and full of good fats and full of good anti inflammatory properties that are delicious. And it sometimes does take a little bit of thinking outside the box. I mean one thing that I love to make, and it's a really simple kind of condiment that you can have around, but you can also use it to fold into. If you do eat rice, you can fold it into some rice or you can spread it on some grilled steaks, it's a kale pesto. And you just use a good, I mean if you've got a Vitamix or you have a Magic bullet or you can do it in a magic bullet, you can do it in Vitamix. Any food processor will work really well with a high speed. It's literally just kale and anchovies and your favorite nuts if you want to use. I actually like putting macadamia nuts in them. In it, because I think they've got great oil and they're really just. They're one of my favorite nuts to cook with. A little bit of olive oil, some vinegar. If you want to throw in some hard cheese, you can throw in some hard cheese. And you pulse that up, season it with salt and pepper, maybe a little dried chili, and you have this incredible pesto. But it's made with kale, which is obviously a dark, leafy green, and it's got all sorts of great stuff in it. You've got anchovies, you're getting good fats, you're getting good Omega 3s. You've got Macadamia again, you've got another great fat. You've got olive oil, great fat, a little bit of vinegar, which really, if you want to go take it to the next level, you can use a living vinegar like a Bragg's or something like that, that has the mother in it. And then you've got this incredible kind of a superfood that is a condiment you can use.

Bragg's makes a living vinegar with a mother in it. Like kombucha.

Yep.

Interesting. You can just get that at the grocery store. From Bragg's brand vinegar.

Yep. They're apple cider vinegar with the mother has a mother in the bottom. We use it to start other vinegars. So when we make vinegars at the restaura, we actually use that mother as the starter for our vinegars. And then the Braggs. I have three bottles in the house. I have one bottle in the shower. So when I wake up in the morning and I'm taking my shower and doing my hot and cold contrast showers, I take a swig of Bragg's apple cider vinegar, and then I use it maybe twice a week to actually wash my body with it so that I'm balancing my external microbiota, if you will.

Can you get that online or is that more like at a health food store? You get it from Amazon. I'll take some notes here. I'll get some notes for people. Things like the squatty potty and the apple cider vinegar and maybe some of the recipes you send over in your books. Folks can check this stuff out. I'm taking notes as you go.

Cool.

Okay, cool. So we've got kale pesto.

Yeah, kale pesto.

Can you give us a couple of others?

Sure. I mean, if you're down with eggs, which I'm down with eggs, as long as they're from a really good source, and that's something that, I mean, this is a whole other conversation. We could have a whole podcast about labeling and what the difference is between pasture raised and cage free and vegetarian feed and all this stuff. In my opinion, your best bet is to try to find someone who has chickens or better yet, have your own chickens, which is a little challenging in New York City, but I do know some people that do it and just, I mean, chickens, first of all, they're not vegetarian. So I think it's kind of odd to feed them a corn and soy based vegetarian diet, even if that is organic, and then label it as something that's healthy. So if you can find chickens from a farmer's market that are really literally free range chickens that are out in the pasture eating bugs and grubs with a natural diet, that's the chicken you want to be eating and that's the egg you want to be eating. So some eggs that are just soft scrambled and what I do, I make scrambled eggs very frequently. So what I do with scrambled eggs in the morning is I'll take maybe three really good eggs, I'll lightly whisk them up, I'll put a couple of knobs of grass fed butter from a local dairy that we have here in upstate New York right into the eggs while it's cold. And if you do it with the butter cold into the eggs, when you're.

Uh, oh, I'm sorry, it sounds like my home is burning down. Oh no, but that's okay. Everything's fine. That was a quick one. Quick fire. Good. Sorry folks, just for our listeners, that probably won't even be edited out, but there you go. So sorry about that. Seems Seamus, you're talking about the eggs.

Yeah. So when you, if you add some cold grass fed butter into the eggs, when you go to scramble the eggs in the pan, the butter will just slowly melt and it'll actually emulsify with the eggs and you'll get a really creamy egg versus like separating the fat. So we've got some butter, we've got some good eggs, a little salt, I'll then add in some chia seeds and I'll let that bloom for a couple of minutes in the eggs before I scramble it. Maybe take a clove of garlic and grate it on a microplane into the eggs and then I'll add a little bit of some greens in there. If I have kale, I'll just mince it up really finely, maybe throw in some mustard greens, anything, any bright green that I just want to gently cook a Little bit in the eggs and then melt some butter and olive oil in a cast iron pan, medium low heat and just slowly scramble the eggs. And I always use a rubber spatula when I'm doing it so that I can get all the eggs off from the bottom of the pan and then just throw in some avocado at the end and you've got incredible, very fat laden, great protein, good veg. Breakfast or lunch? I mean I typically don't really eat breakfast. I'll have this when I come home from a bike ride, maybe late morning, like 11:30 or so.

Yeah, love it. For the folks who are out there working out, exercising, who are maybe going out for long periods of time and want something non inflammatory, something kind of real food ish that they can use before or during their exercise session. Do you have anything like that that you take out with you on your bike rides?

Yeah, and one of the things that I do is I take, I actually take coconut oil with me on my bike ride. And so if I'm, if I'm, you know, if I'm doing, if I'm riding in a fasted state, which I'll usually do is I'll start my workout in a fasted state. So I'll have, I mean not a true fasted state because I'm having bulletproof coffee and I'll take branched chain amino acids before I go out and then I'll go for a ride. And on my ride, as I am kind of fueling along the way, I'll have some coconut oil in a little squeeze tube. I'll take macadamia nuts, beef jerky. I'm a big advocate of eating real food on the bike. I'm not a professional competitor, I'm not an elite athlete. I'm just out there trying to hammer and go as hard as I can. But I also want to make sure it tastes good. So I'll take stuff like that. I stay away from the dried fruit, I stay away from the energy bars and things like that that are going to really affect my sugar levels. And I've really noticed in the past nine months to a year because I do, I check my blood sugar periodically. I was doing it really, really frequently and now I don't need to do it quite as frequently as I've been able to dial in my diet. But I did notice for a long time if I ate more carbohydrates the day before a workout, I would need to eat more carbohydrates and get more sugar in my body. When I was Working out. Otherwise I'd feel the glycemic spike and then I'd feel myself kind of crash and I'd have that feeling of bonking. And you know, I haven't touched wood. I haven't bonked since becoming really a fat burner. I haven't bonked at all. So I can go out and do. I mean, last week I did a 75 mile ride with a group of guys and we were riding hard and I didn't eat anything during that whole ride and I felt fine.

It sounds like you've really kind of tapped into almost like that biohack of fat adaptation and turn yourself into a fat burning machine and, and being able to get away with just a little bit of coconut oil and something like that during the long sessions. And that kind of leads me to another question that I wanted to ask you because I know that you listen to this show and you probably have used some of the biohacks that I've talked about. But you're preparing for, I believe. Are they mountain biking races that you're preparing for?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the big one that I'm preparing for is, is called La Ruta de los Conquistadores and it's a three day mountain bike stage race in Costa Rica and it starts on the Pacific coast in Jaco and then it goes and ends on the Atlantic coast in limon. So it's three days, it's about 60 to 70 miles a day, but it's all off road. But the real challenge is that it's 29,000ft of climbing over three days.

Nice.

So it's a lot. It's a really intense, intense ride.

So what kind of things have been kind of working for you in your prep for that? And I know you're doing one other event you told me about, it was South Africa, is that right?

Yeah, that's actually next year I'm doing before kind of leading up to Costa Rica, I'm doing quite a few local races like I'm doing next month I'm doing a 50 mile single track mountain bike race. In May, I'm doing the Gran Fondo, New York, which is a hundred mile road race. So I'll be doing periodic races. Maybe once a month. I'll probably be doing an endurance race as I lead up to November, which is when the race in Costa Rica is. And as I get closer, I'll do a few two or three day back to back hard efforts just to get ready for that race. But then next spring in March of 2015 is the Absa Cape Epic, which is kind of the granddaddy of all epic endurance mountain bike races. And it goes across South Africa. It's about 700 kilometers. So that's a serious race in many ways. I think La Ruta, even though La Ruta is going to be incredibly hard, that's sort of like the warm up for it.

Aside from fat adaptation, any other biohacks from an exercise standpoint or nutrition standpoint that you're finding to be effective right now?

Well, one of the things I've really been amazed by is the power lung and I've been using that quite a bit. I use it at least twice a day and I've been able to see on a lot of the climbs that a climb that historically, even a week prior to using power lung was challenging for me.

For folks who don't know what that is, it's a spring loaded, resisted breathing device that you use typically not when you're exercising, but when in your car or sedentary.

Exactly. And that, you know, I've been able to see also in looking at charting where my heart rate is on, you know, one specific climb that I use is a good kind of. It's a good test base for me because I know how long it takes me to climb it. I know exactly where my heart rate's going to be throughout the climb based upon my effort and what my wattage is and everything. And I can look at that and see major progress week to week that I know is above and beyond just my fitness improving, that it's coming from greater anaerobic strength. Excuse me, aerobic strength from using the power lung. So that's been a device. I've been using earthing sheets for about eight months or so.

Earthing sheets?

Yeah.

And those you're putting on your bed and then plugging into the grounded outlet on the wall.

Yep.

And what do you notice when you use those?

Well, I sleep a lot better. I have much more kind of deeper sleep. As I track my sleep, it seems as though I'm spending more time in rem. I'm getting less interrupted sleep and when I do wake up, I fall back to sleep much more quickly. So that's helped me. One of the things that's been kind of challenging.

Gotta get you on the biomat man eventually.

I know, I really want to.

It's even more natural than like an earthing sheet because you still get some electrical pollution, like some dirty pollution. At least in the United States when you're using an earthing sheet. Feet and the. The BioMed actually has an EMF blocker built into the unit that travels between the electrical outlet and the mat itself.

Huge.

And I finally, for the first time last night, got my wife to sleep on it, so. Oh, yeah, there you go.

It doesn't. It doesn't cover the whole bed. It's just. Just sort of under your. Your area of the bed, or how does it work?

You. You put it underneath the. Well, what I do is I put it underneath the. The comforter. And so I've got one comforter on top of the biomat, then one, then a sheet on top of me, then a blanket on top of that. So there's a little bit of padding between me and the biomat, so.

Gotcha. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, no, I gotta.

Sorry, you're gonna mention something else?

Well, the only other thing I was gonna mention, which is not really a specific biohack, but it's a challenge for me because I do. I have to travel quite a bit. As you can tell, I'm a little stuffy right now. And that's a direct result of traveling every time. I was telling you before the podcast, every time I fly on an old plane, an MD80, the past four times I've flown on an MD80, I've gotten sick.

And the ones that don't have the HEPA filter on them.

Yeah, there's no real filtration system, and so you're getting just kind of recycled, stale air. And what's really bizarre to me is that every time that this has happened, I have been able to feel, the instant I got sick, I'd take a breath in, and I suddenly feel something out of sorts in my throat. And I know in that moment that I'm getting sick. So I foolishly, this last trip, which was a very short trip, I thought, oh, you know what? I've been doing so well with all my travel hacks to avoid jet lag and to keep from getting sick, because I've been traveling a lot for the past six months, and I haven't gotten sick at all, except for when I do these short trips on these old planes. But I thought, oh, I'll be fine. And then, of course, I flew and I got sick. But one of the things that's been really amazing for me is, you know, is figuring out how to kind of overcome jet lag. And that's made it easy for me, so that when I am, like, say, flying to Europe to hit the ground in the morning and immediately do a workout at 9 o' clock in the morning and feel good and then by 10 o' clock at night I'm on European time and I've fallen asleep and I feel fine.

Interesting.

So that's been really, really cool. Have you used these no jet lag pills?

I have used no jet lag before and they work really well if you take them according to instructions is what I found. So as soon as the flight leaves and then about every two hours during the flight and then when you land. And yeah, it's a homeopathic Asian remedy designed. I found them in the Hong Kong airport for the first time in like a Chinese herbal medicine outlet and tried them. And they've actually got a lot of kind of things that, that are traditionally used as like neurotropics and smart drugs and brain anti inflammatories in them, which is I suspect why they work, you know, Club Moss and things of that nature. But yeah, they actually for international flights. I like those.

Do you think it's because they're because of the EMF waves that they're blocking out or they're helping you deal with them? Is that part of the equation when it comes to dealing with jet lag from them? Because I have to think that. But I house like three or four boxes of seaweed before I fly and I think that that really helps.

Yeah, it can help to shut down some of the inflammation that results from solar radiation, but I suspect part of it is simply regulation of circadian rhythms and some of the neural inflammation that can happen just by traveling across multiple time zones as well. So probably a combination. But yeah, man, we could keep going on for a while. I think what I want to know though, for fol who are listening in, who maybe just want to go visit one of your restaurants and taste some of your food. Where can people go right now if they happen to be in an area where you're at and they just want to taste some of your cooking?

Sure, absolutely. In New York City you can come to either of my two restaurants, Tertullia, and the website is tertulianyc.com that's T E R T U L I A n y c.com and you can probably put that in the show notes. And the other one is El Colmado and that is Atapas Bar. So the two are. They're both Spanish restaurants. I lived in Spain for a number of years. And while we don't bill either restaurant as being a paleo restaurant or a health food restaurant per se, you'll find that for people that are conscientious about how they eat. There's a lot of offerings there, and we're scrupulous about where our products come from and our ingredients come from. We have relationships with farms throughout the Northeast, and everything is seasonal and locally sourced. So when you're, you know, if you're concerned with eating well, they're really great places to come. And they're both very fun restaurants. And I've got a few other projects that are in the works.

So if I pull those up on, like Yelp or Urban Spoon, they're going to be okay?

Oh, yeah, you'll find them.

Just making sure.

Yep, absolutely. Okay, cool.

And what else were you going to say?

So I've got a couple other projects coming on board, one in Europe, which will be the open this summer, and I can't really talk about that quite yet, but it is the reason for me traveling back and forth a lot. And that'll be announced probably another month or so.

How do you spell. I've got the tertullia pulled up because I'm putting links in the show notes for anyone who lives in the New York area. I've got the tertullia one pulled up. How do you spell the other one?

The other one is El Colmado. So it's E, L, C, O, L, M, A D, o. So it's two words. It means the grocer. The URL is mark.

Okay. El camontonyc.com Got it. Okay. Well, fantastic. This was a great time and I hope this will be really helpful to folks. And of course, if you have questions or comments or feedback or you want to check out anything that we talked about, then head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com check out the show notes for this episode if you can't find them because you're listening to this at a date much later than when the podcast comes out or something like that, you can just do a search for Seamus Mullen. You spell his first name S, E, A, M U, S, Seamus and Mullen. M, U, L, L, E, N. And you can also, of course, Google him and find his website and everything as well. So Seamus Mullen. All right. Well, Seamus, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Thank you, Ben. It's been great. It's awesome. So glad to be here.

All right, folks, until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and Seamus Mullen signing.

Out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

It.