Ben Greenfield Q&A: Detox Myths, Amino Acids While Fasting, Muscle Gain Protocols, Cell Phone Dangers & Much More!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, probably the most interesting thing about that was I tested myself and I was actually an antenna when holding my phone. I feel that the protein restricted. No animal type of cleanse is pretty supportive of the whole detoxification. Of course, the problem is that ever since the agricultural revolution, we've been training young people on how to be in roles that essentially will in the future be automated by robots. Hey, I have a kind of unique podcast episode for you today. As many of you know, I've been in Switzerland for the past two weeks doing everything from colonic hydrotherapy to foot reflexology, dry cupping, something called matrix regeneration therapy, hyperthermia, a bunch of different treatments that I wanted to explore to see what kind of elements of European biological medicine are used over there in the treatment of things like cancer and lime and mold. In that process of immersive journalism, so to speak. I also kind of went through my own little liver and colon cleanse, which I felt fantastic following. But while there, I managed to get into room with 26 other attendees who kind of joined me on that retreat and did Free for All Q and A, which I recorded for your listening pleasure today. Now, if you are interested, by the way, in European biological medicine and doing some kind of a retreat or a detox like this yourself, although I have not personally yet decided if I'm going to be going back to the Swiss Mountain Clinic next year just because of other obligations, it's certainly a place that I will be engaged with on repeated visits, but don't know if I'll be going next year. However, you can go anytime you'd like. My friend Robin Openshaw puts on clinics there that are led by physicians and you can just sign up for one. Her website is over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com SwissMountainClinic if you go over there and you don't see any dates for retreats that she's putting on that work well for you. You can also just contact the Swiss Mountain Clinic directly and they'll book you. Tom, I sent you over for the VIP treatment and their website is just Swiss Mountain Clinic.com this podcast is brought to you by something that we actually talk about during the show, and that is Kion. Kion is my company. It is a company that I founded as a way to take all the ideas that I have for pure, efficacious sh, shotgun formulations of supplements and functional foods, along with content and inspiring challenges like our recent meditation challenge and the fasting challenge that we did. We've done a cold water shower challenge and we also have wonderful content there on the blog. Some very, very good content lately about how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Welcome to the official Swiss Clinic healing retreat at her in the Swiss Alps. For those of you listening in on the Show, I have 20 plus odd or so. You're not odd. I mean 20 odd the number of attendees here at this Swiss Clinic healing retreat. We've all been doing colonic hydrotherapy all day and liver detoxification and all manner of other odd Swiss Alps protocols. So if anyone sounds drunk, they're not. They're just well lubed up the butt side, possibly mineral depleted and full of questions. I know that some of you have questions, so for those of you who do, you can just come on up, ask your question. We've got one right here. So come on up and you can say your name if you would like or not. It's up to you.

Hi Ben, it's Robin and I have a question about your kion aminos and my question is, well, two parts shameless.

Product plug.

Perfect aminos anyway, any one of them. My question is how you use them. Like if you take them every day, like five or ten, aren't you increasing MTOR by doing that versus just taking them around a workout? That's the one question. And then if you take them every day, let's say five or 10, and you're keeping track of your protein macronutrients, you only have say more than 50, 60 grams of protein and you have 10amino pills, would that be 10 grams of protein? So two parts.

The second part of your question is the easiest answer because it's very straightforward. One gram of amino acids is one gram of protein, period. And so that's simple. So if you have 40 grams of amino acids in a day and there's 5 grams in a serving or 1 gram in a tablet, that would be, that would count towards say that 60 gram protein goal that you were going for. As far as the MTOR is concerned, any protein can be mildly anabolic, it can upregulate MTOR pathways and essential aminos have been shown to do that. And I've said this before, but if you are in a fasted state, they are non insulinogenic, they're not going to spike blood glucose, but they will. If you're looking for pure cellular autophagy, right, the longevity enhancing effect that you would get by being in a fasted state, they would increase anabolic pathways and limit cellular autophagy as opposed to like branched chain amino acids. The high amounts of isolated leucine in those would actually be insulinogenic and upregulate the MTOR pathways. So if you had to choose the lesser of two evils, it would be essential amino acids. But if you wanted the pure like MTOR deactivating effect of being in a completely fasted state, you would avoid anything. And there are researchers like Dr. Sachin Panda and folks like Dr. Rhonda Patrick who will take that to the nth level and even limit coffee. Anything that will cause an upregulation of the so called incretin hormones, anything that would spark digestion, I mean even, even bitters technically for that reason would, would take you out of a fasted state. But those aren't as anabolic as just like pure protein. So my recommendation is if you're fasted and you want to do a hard workout and you don't want to catalyze muscle to take, you know that that 10 gram ish portion of aminos in your fasted state and exercising in that fasted state is going to be, it's going to give you so much cellular autophagy. Especially if you do as I recommend and continue to fast for a little while after you've done morning exercise. I think the pros outweigh the cons. The one thing I should say is that if you're doing a hard workout in the morning in a fasted state, I've seen some endocrine dysregulation from people who fast for too long after that morning workout. So about the longest I'll go if I've done like a soul crushing morning workout is about an hour before I'll actually have breakfast or some kind of calories or you know, even like a, like a superfood coffee where you know, maybe it's not a ton of calories, but you're putting some nutrients in a morning beverage to kind of string you along until lunch. I think the idea of couching like a 16 hour intermittent fast along with an intense fasted exercise session, even if you're taking aminos before that exercise session, is still going to create some issues from an endocrine standpoint, especially in females. So it's a good question though.

Hey Ben Eric from Vienna, Virginia. So question on detoxification. Since heavy metals and chemicals and pesticides seem to be so ubiquitous for everyone, what are some of the top one or two protocols and processes for eliminating heavy metals and toxins? And then how do you measure success?

I like the idea of not having beer and burgers all year long and then going off to a retreat like this and doing your big reboot as you know, as the big spring cleanup for all the damage you've done all year long. I think a better scenario is to, as we see in many religious cultures and in the health practices of a lot of cultures, and you know, this is big in eastern medicine as well, some kind of a regular, more focused detox that might involve anything like a Ramadan esque fasting protocol or you know, or an orthodox church type of fasting protocol in specific seasons or as I do four times a year, something like a Valter Longo approach, like doing like a prolon diet of restricted calorie intake or even better, some type of a panchakarma approach. And this is my favorite thing to do is four times a year I use that Valter Longo type of approach of restricting calories to about 40% of what I normally eat. And that's based on the studies that he's done that just four times a year you get an increase in lifespan that's very similar to what you get from a pure fast or from long term calorie restriction. But I don't necessarily do like the meal prep kit that he makes, the prolon kit, it's great. I've looked at it. It's pretty nutrient dense. As far as packaged foods go, it's some of the better of the options. But I instead use more of a panchakarma ayurvedic cleansing approach, which is kitchari stew along with celery juice. You do a little bit of ghee, there's some grapefruit and some olive oil. Very similar to the cleanse that we're doing here at this retreat. And then I do typically something like this once a year. You know, I've done Dr. Dan Pompa's true cellular Detox. I've done this retreat, I've done some fasting protocols, but I like to have one time a year where I take a little bit of a deeper dive. And that would include environmental detoxification, right. There's no WI fi here. We're out in the Swiss Alps, we're getting fresh air. There's not a lot of non native emf. We're drinking amazingly clean water. Right? So. So there's a lot more you get out of living in this scenario than you might by doing your own overhaul at home. The daily detox though, is what I think is the most important, right? Like living a life in which each day you are cleaning up the body. For me, what that looks like is when I'm at home. And I try to hunt this down when I travel as well. I'm in the sauna almost every day getting a deep sweat. I mean, I'm in there like a half hour. I was telling someone earlier at lunch today, there's pools of sweat in the bottom of the sauna when I get out because I'm doing yoga flow and moving my body. I have a dry skin brush in there. So I usually finish by brushing the skin, which is another form of detoxification, kind of brings blood flow to the surface of the skin. I do a coffee enema at least once a week when I travel. I travel with these little coffee enema suppositories called glytamins. And those, those have a similar effect as a coffee enema. And I have some of the more fringe protocols at home. I have a mini trampoline or rebounder. I have a vibration platform and I'll often stand on those type of things. And my little pomodoro breaks as I'm working throughout the day. So I'm constantly keeping lymph flow going. I'm constantly causing detoxification through the body's main detox organ or the biggest detox organ, at least the skin getting that coffee enema once a week. So I think those kind of daily practices or weekly practices kind of move the dial to the point where you're getting that, that daily detoxification in as far as measuring it, you know, we had here at the Swiss clinic more of a. More of a connective tissue measurement using what's called mass spectrometry. And that was that oligo scan that we did. That's a very quick method. I have not studied its accuracy compared to hair, compared to like a urine provocation test for metals, which can be dangerous if you have a lot of metals, because that can free up metals and cause them to circulate through the body. So you want that overseen by a physician. Protocol for a urine provocation test or a blood test like Longevity, owned by Thorne. They just rolled out their home heavy metals kit. That's a blood spot kit. I've done that one a few times. My results tend to be pretty similar from scan to scan. Even the oligo scan here pretty much agrees with what I've seen on hair, on blood, on urine. What Dr. Dan Pompa uses in his true cellular detox is a urine test with. For a specific marker. It starts with an M. I don't recall it off the Top of my head now, but it's a very simple urinary measurement where you're literally urinating into a small plastic cup and then you dip a stick in there and it's giving you a measurement. I want to say it's myeloperoxidase, I think is the one that it measures, which is an indicator of heavy metal status. So there's a few different ways to do it. Right now what I've been using the most is that little box that longevity sends out just because it's, it's simple. I forget if it's@thethorne.com website or if it's on the longevity website, but either way, if you were to Google like Thorne heavy metals test, that's a very simple kit they send to your house, a little dashboard that lets you keep track of your results over time. For me, anything that keeps me from having to go to the doctor or the lab, I just dig home protocols for a lot of these tests as much as I can get them. The urinary amino acids profile called the Nutrival by Genova Diagnostics, that's a fantastic profile because you get a bunch of markers of toxins, fungus, etc. But you also get like amino acids, you get micronutrients, you get fatty acids. So it's kind of like the shotgun approach. And that, that's one that I run often hand in hand with like a comprehensive blood panel. Because the comprehensive blood panel doesn't look at a lot of these major or a lot of these, these minor, these micronutrients and some of those other markers. So that's like a gold standard test in my opinion. But you know, as far as self quantification goes, you know, my, my big test that just about all my clients do that I run on myself are the three day gut test from gifx, which is like parasites, yeast, fungus, along with the specific herbal protocols and pharmaceuticals that those are responsive to. So you know how you would actually address those. I do the Nutrival test, which is the full micronutrient panel. I do the big longevity blood panel that I worked with Wellness FX to design and they just call it the Greenfield longevity panel. And it's, you know, it's your full thyroid, all your hormones, everything like that. And then the other ones that I like are once in a lifetime a genetic test. Unless you're going all crispr on your ass and you know, snipping away genes and things are changing, you only need to do that once, you know, a full genetic test. If you go 23andMe, you're not going to get all your SNPs. But there are other companies like Bob Miller's Tree of Life or I recently interviewed the DNA company. There was also Dr. Danani, who I also interviewed. There's a lot of companies that are testing more SNPs. There's even like Health Nucleus in California that will do the whole genome sequencing. I like some of Those better than 23andMe because you can get access to more SNPs. And then the other one that is more genetic based, that I think is more of a quarterly, if you can afford it, or at least twice a year, even once a year is helpful, is a microbiome analysis of the gut. Either viome or longevity I think are the two best tests for that. So that's kind of like the range of tests that I'll typically run on folks. There are other markers I track like hrv, sleep, et cetera. But that's kind of like the standard protocol most folks get when they first come to me as far as everything I like to see. And those are the same protocols I run on myself for a full panel. Hi Ben, I'm Ivo from Belgium. My question is, since about a year ago I noticed that my nose starts running during exercise, especially while running or sprinting. Apparently this is called exercise induced rhinitis. Do you have any suggestions to relieve this condition? It's kind of funny, I had like an exercise induced kind of flare up once when I took a bunch of probiotics and I went to exercise because exercise will upregulate your histamine response. So you take probiotics. And this was in the heat too, which kind of doubles that histamine response because you have all that blood flow and your body's trying to cool itself. And the histamine pathway is one way that it does that. So I would hazard a guess that that any, anything that would block histamine production in a situation like that would be helpful. Dr. Ben lynch has a product called Histabloc that blocks some of those histamine pathways. Quicksilver Scientific has one as well. There are a few out there. If you were to Google like histamine blocking supplement, the one that I have that I take whenever I plan on having more than one drink of alcohol. My son has seasonal allergies here and I've given him a couple as well. Is that that hista block enzyme? That's the first thing I would try would be something like that. I would also be very careful I mean, in my free diving course I was taught this. We avoided dairy to increase our breath hold time because dairy will thicken the mucus and cause congestion. One of my sons had exercise induced asthma when he was playing soccer as a child. And we got rid of milk, dairy, cheese, everything went away overnight. Right. And I think that was partially because of the mucosal congestion that dairy can cause. So, you know, some of those, some of those elimination type of paths prior to exercise could be helpful as well. Like avoid dairy is really the biggie that will cause mucosal congestion. But I mean, anything that's going to cause a little bit of an autoimmune response could do that. I mean, you could go get a food allergy panel, like a Cyrex food allergy panel and check it for sure, like in a ray 10C. So you've got like, there's like over 180 different food antigens that that one screens for and it's pretty good. That's why I sent my plate back today at dinner to take the green beans off it because that's the one vegetable I'm actually allergic to that I actually create an immunoglobulin response to. Even when I wear this continuous blood glucose monitor, my blood sugar spikes when I have green beans because I actually have this sympathetic nervous system response to it. I've never tried to see what would happen if I ate green beans then exercised, but I assume I would probably have like some coughing, some wheezing, probably a little bit of congestion, maybe something like the rhinitis that you were experiencing some type of an accelerated histamine response. So I would look at dairy and other food allergens and I would also consider short term, some kind of a histamine blocker. Marty from Canada, my question is, is there a threshold between the sympathetic state in the parasympathetic state and how do you know that consciously when you cross over one to the other, there is not a threshold. This is one of the areas where thinking of the body in terms of black and white can get confusing. Like an exercise physiology. You know, when I took all my exercise physiology courses and you know, we went to the lab and people would put, put on their indirect calorimetry gas mask and run up and down on the treadmill, or really not up and down, mostly up on the treadmill and gather gases produced and oxygen consumed to approximate when the threshold occurred at which you switch over into your carbohydrate zone from your fat burning zone. When you actually look at the data, there is no point at which your body goes, oh, gonna start burning all carbs now, right? So it's 80% fat, 20% carbs, 75% fats, 25% carbs, so on and so forth. If you're. And when you get to the point where you're literally collapsing off the back of the treadmill and there's like two attendants there to catch you as you fall off the back in like a really intense VO2 max test to exhaustion, and you look at the data, there is still like percentages of fat being burnt at that intensity. Right? So we hear the word threshold and crossing over and can sometimes assume, well, this is the point which I'm burning all carbs, or this is the point at which I'm burning all fat. That doesn't really happen now with the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. The idea with that is, you know, as we've learned during another lecture at this retreat, your autonomic nervous system is going to, via the vagus nerve, send a signal to your heart. Right? And that signal is specifically sent to the SA node of the heart. So it basically regulates the electrical activity of the heart. So good vagal nerve tone, a healthy autonomic nervous system and good balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system dictates that the vagus nerve talk to the SA node is going to be very clear. You're going to have mild variations in the amount of time between each beat of the heart. Right. And that would then be called a high heart rate variability, that is interplay between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. That is your body's ability to be able to lower or raise the frequency of that signal. In heart rate variability data collection, it's called the low frequency signal, which would imitate the, or reference the sympathetic nervous system and the high frequency, which would reference the parasympathetic nervous system. So when you're feeding those signals into the heart, it's interplay between the two branches. In an ideally tuned autonomic nervous system or in someone who has what we would call high vagal tone, you can switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic very quickly. Right. You, you do not want to necessarily be the dialed in yogi who is in a complete parasympathetic state, but who cannot run from a lion when the lion jumps out. Right. You want to be more like, you know, there's, I forget the name of this weightlifter. There's a whole book about this Olympic weightlift lifter who would sit quietly in the, in the corner of the gym until his time to lift the bar had come. And he would slowly stand from this cross legged position where he'd been breathing in a very parasympathetically driven state. And he would stand and he would walk to the bar and he would take a breath and you could see the hair on his arms stand up and the veins in his neck begin to bulge and he would just rip this weight off the ground. And he was a world champion weightlifter, he was a Russian guy. And that's a perfect example of being able to switch back and forth or transition from parasympathetic to sympathetic very gracefully. But you always have feedback from both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system feeding into the SA node of the heart. And your goal is not to eliminate one or the other, but to instead be able to up regulate or down regulate primarily using breath work. Really that's, that's the best way to do it is to use breath work to activate the nervous system so that you can enter into the state that you want to enter in. So, you know, an example of like Wim Hof esque fire breathing or, you know, or that kind of yogic fire breathing type of protocol. You know, whether it's, you know, holotropic breathing has these elements to it as well. You're getting very sympathetic, right? You're charging up the body, you're creating warmth, you're creating blood flow, you're down regulating cytokines, you're up regulating the immune system, you're pushing your body more into that sympathetic drive. And when you do something like alternate nostril breathing or box breathing or 4, 7, 8 breathing. And really anytime you're exhaling more than you inhale, you are upregulating the parasympathetic nervous system. I think breath is really the most powerful way to transition from one to the other. But you never want to be parasympathetic dominant or sympathetic dominant. A parasympathetic dominant person is that classic marathoner or ironman or chronic cardio athlete who will, you know, they'll send me their HRV data and it's through the roof. And they have extremely high, what would be called high frequency scores. That's one of the scenarios in which a high heart rate variability is a bad thing. That's someone who is, who is parasympathetic dominant. And sometimes you see a sympathetic dominant athlete. And a lot of times the HRV isn't that high, but their low frequency score is very high. And that's a person who has almost no aerobic base, who's very high charged, who has very low parasympathetic nervous system activity. But they have low balance. Right. So you want to kind of have the ideal combination of both. Right. So in my opinion, there's not a threshold that you cross as much as a balance throughout the day in which, in which you're, you're entering into a little bit of more of one or a little bit more of the other, depending on what the situation is. And again, even, even similar to that VO2 max example, when the sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive and you're running from the lion, there's still a little bit of parasympathetic activity. If there weren't, there would be no blood flow to the organs at all. Right. So it's always just a little bit of interplay. There's never any black and white threshold. Ben Noel from the uk, thank you for leading the Swiss adventure. I'm conscious here we are in a place where the protocol is primarily vegetables and vegetarian and you've orientated yourself towards more meat based diet recently. Where do you think the science is currently between carnivore, between ketosis, between vegetarian, between vegan? What's the latest science really telling this? Well, my son, who is not doing the liver cleanse, was sitting across from me at dinner and they brought him a steak and he asked me if I could cut it and I told his mom to cut it because I don't know if my willpower is that good to be able to cut his steak and not take a little bite. And as many podcast listeners know, and as a lot of you guys know, I've been largely following a diet comprised of good organic grass fed grass finished meat, some wild caught fish, some underground storage organs or tubers in the form of sweet potatoes and yams and purple potatoes, a little pumpkin, some summer squash, some winter squash, a little raw honey, red wine at the end of the night skin, a little coffee in the morning, and you know, just kind of like a modified carnivore protocol that incorporates some more tannic, rich beverages and some other little, you know, starch based sources thrown in. I feel very, very good on that protocol. High amount of protein, high amount of red meat, high amount of dairy, high amount of caffeine, high amount of alcohol that can be acidic, you know, and it can create a net acidic effect in the body. We know that food doesn't change the ph dramatically. But we do know based on the. What is it? It's a nitrogen excretion score that measures the renal acid load. The renal acid load measure can tell us that certain foods actually can create a little bit of acidity in the body. And the problem with that is that it can cause you to pull minerals from tissue because minerals are alkalizing. That's why we would add like a pinch of sea salt to a morning glass of water. It's an alkalizing beverages beverage. And in most cases, not all, but in most cases, staying in a somewhat alkaline state or at least eating, you know, avoiding over consumption of acidic foods is a good idea. There are some people that push that to the limit. I mean, I've talked to people who have gotten like alkaline water machines. One woman, her son had a seizure and he was in an extremely high alkalytic state because he was just drinking this water all day long. And she had turned it up to like a ph of, of 9 or 10 or something like that. And so you can certainly get too alkaline as well. As far as your question about where the science is at a. You know, the horse I've kicked to death before on previous podcasts is that there is no one perfect diet, right? I eat a largely carnivore diet. I've traced my ancestry to northern European roots. I've tested my blood and my biomarkers and my gut to show that, you know, I do have a high amount of methane producing bacteria. I don't respond well to raw vegetables. I don't respond well to cruciferous vegetables. My body feels very good as far as all my bloods go when I, when I do get a high amount of protein. I'm also an athlete, so that also helps me out as well. But you know, we have known back to this idea of periods of time in which we engage in mtor restriction just from a pure religious standpoint or a cultural standpoint that, you know, humans have known for thousands of years that going through periods of time in which you change up your diet specifically it usually means caloric restriction or protein restriction, you see some changes. From a health standpoint, if you did that all the time, you'd be cold and libido less and hangry and you wouldn't be able to enjoy perhaps, you know, some of the protein rich foods that, that are just part of, of enjoying life on planet Earth. If you, from an ethical standpoint are okay with eating fish and meat and shellfish and everything else. So I think that the diet that we're following, the plant rich diet that we're following here, is supportive of enhanced cellular autophagy and detoxification. I think that anytime we're introducing a net acidic stuff state, it would hamper detoxification a little bit. I think that none of it's very hard to over consume protein on a largely vegetable based diet because the, all the fiber that we're eating is like protein, very satiating. It's also difficult to overeat in general here, aside from those, those fantastic, probably pretty calorie rich breads that they serve in the morning. At the same time, I could see issues with following a diet like this long term. Not only because you could run into some of the issues many vegans and vegetarians run into, whether it be vitamin B12 deficiencies or taurine deficiencies or creatine deficiencies, or some of the things that you could supplement your way out of, but that you run a higher risk of experiencing on a diet that does not include any animal products. You also, you can, you know, create an issue in which you just never really get into an anabolic state. You know, you're largely catabolic and while cellular autophagy is good, you just don't want to be in that state all the time, you know. And there are also differences from microbiome to microbiome. Right. Like some of the problems with plants is they can be highly fermentable by bacteria. We can see a lot of times on a vegan or vegetarian diet, you know, whether it's a lot of, you know, carbohydrate, dense, rich chestnuts or bread or beets or any of these other wonderful foods that we're eating here. You know, my blood sugar has actually been a little higher than normal here. And it's because I'm just by the nature of me not having access to a lot more, you know, whatever, coconut milk and. Well, I'm actually not doing a lot of coconut milk now. For me, largely it'd be like fish and roe and steak and things like that. But by me not having access to those and needing to kind of fill in those caloric holes with more carbohydrate rich foods, I've seen higher, especially postprandial blood sugar values. They still come down pretty quickly, but they're just, they're higher. So I think we're eating the right diet for where we're at. I think there are times when it's very helpful for the body to switch to a plant rich diet. That Kitchari cleanse that I do four times a year, I mean that's sprouts and lentils and basmati rice and celery juice. There's some ghee in there, but there's really not any animal protein. I do that as part of a cleanse and I feel that the protein restricted. No animal type of cleanse is pretty supportive of the whole detoxification. Hi Ben, it's Andrew from Lucerne, Switzerland. The clinic is very strict about elimination of WI fi signals, cellular signals. I wondered if you looked at the science as to how harmful this really is, whether you've got a view on 5G rollout and whether any devices or tips if you do think it's harmful that you found effective to help protect. Loaded question. I have done podcasts on it. I've talked about the book the Tinfoil Non Tinfoils Hat Guide to emf. I think that's one of the better books out there by Nick Penult, who's also been on my show. I think the data is out there. I think it really is when it comes to. I was talking with Dr. Petra here at the clinic about many, many cases of leukemia and other cancers. She's seen that she feels are direct directly correlated to the high amount of device usage, particularly by children. Bluetooth. I've seen less data on WI fi. I think there's a lot of research on. And if you read a book like Nick's, he's got a lot in there. Both the impact on plants and animals as well as the impact on humans. I'm very careful. I have my entire house hardwired. My hotel room here, because there's no WI fi here is just like my setup at home. I have a hardwired ethernet cable going into the computer with an adapter and I keep the WI fi router completely off. I have found that very similar to the situation that is created when you eliminate gluten. You down regulate a lot of your like your peptidase enzymes and you become more sensitive to gluten. When you kind of cut yourself free of WI fi and so signals, you almost become more sensitive. And I find myself increasingly sensitive. You know, the more I just strip my home of almost all electricity and add some of the devices you alluded to that I'll mention. It makes a big difference. But it also makes me more sensitive when I get into situations in which there is WI fi present. You know, some people hypothesize that perhaps humans will adapt. You know, our cell membranes will adapt. Our calcium channels which are affected by WI fi. So signals will adapt to that. You know, we'll somehow evolve to become more like cyborgs who are just very used to this cell phone in our pocket or the, you know, the chip that Elon Musk embeds in our arm, you know, 10 years from now or whatever the case may be. But I mean, when you look at yeast and fruit flies and even rodents, you know, adaptation like that takes generations. I mean, you know, maybe 10, 12 human in the future that might be the case. But I think for us right now, it's not going to happen in one generation. The type of protective devices that I personally use, I have a signal scrambling device. You guys see me walk around with that big fanny pack. There's a signal scrambling device in there. It's called a blue shield. So anytime I'm around WI fi, that scrambles it. I was telling some of you, one of my clients just did pre and post inflammatory marker testing, tested cytokines, crp, fibrinogen. He just did like a full inflammatory panel Pre and post. 2 weeks Usage of that device and the home device that they have that you plug in and put next to your bed or in your office where there are a lot of signals. And I mean the decrease in that was profound. And that was called blue shield technology. It's called blue shield. B L U S H I E L D I will I'll create like a, like a link for the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com SwissClinicpodcast and anything we talk about, I'll make sure to put notes in there. But that's the blue shield. There's another like, it's like a scalar frequency producing advice that's on the floor of my office right now. I haven't seen as much testing on that. I'm kind of trying it out right now. I think that one's called scalar shield, like S C A L A R shield. It looks cool. It looks like an alien spaceship on the floor of my office. But I haven't done a lot of testing on that one aside from my general HRV when I'm just standing in front of my office at work. Since I've added the blue shield and added that has gone up. I haven't tried both of them in isolation yet or one of them in isolation yet. Sometimes that's the issue with me, is I'll just toss a bunch of stuff in my office and, and pay attention to what happens to my body. But, but I think the Blue Shield's really cool because they have, like, a personal device you can carry and then also home device, and they're creating a 5G device right now as well. So there are a lot of other things you can do. I mean, you can go as far as, like, painting certain rooms with Faraday paint. You know, you can move your bed if you're over a geothermal hotspot. I mean, I did a podcast with Brian Hoyer, called a building biologist and hired him. He came to my home and did, like, full walkthrough and found all sorts of things that could be fixed. I didn't go to the, to. To the farthest degree that I could. Like, I actually didn't use Faraday paint. I didn't repaint areas of the house where he said that there were cell phone towers emitting signals, you know, through the walls that were pretty hefty. I didn't paint yet. It's on my radar, but it, you know, the price tag. I had other things to worry about. The. The other thing he recommended was he looked at a lot of, like, hot spots. And I find that interesting because even here in the lecture that, that ULF gave us when we. When he was walking us through the clinic, you know, here in the Swiss Alps, there's. There's areas, you know, Sedona, Arizona, is a similar region. Some of the Native American springs in the US have regions like this where the Earth emits a higher level of healing frequencies. Like. Like a higher than a Schumann resonance type of frequency frequency. There are apparently, according to this building biologist who did the walkthrough of my home, areas where that frequency could be damaging to human biology. Areas our ancestors would have avoided because they, you know, they figured out that those were spots where people didn't feel good. Right? And I've seen less research on that. But he did make a recommendation, like, move your bed over 20ft. There's, like, kind of a hot spot right here on the corner of the bed. And you're sleeping on this eight hours a night for a third of your life. You shouldn't be on top of this hot spot. I didn't paint. I didn't move my bed. But I incorporated just about every other recommendation that he had, including, probably most notably, the thing I noticed the most when I went through my house with one of those acoustometers you can buy on Amazon. Walk through your house yourself and test things, the dirty electricity filters. I went to the shielded healing website and bought one for every room of the house and, and installed those and, and their filters. If one outlet has it in there in a room like, and. And all the other outlets are on the same, I think on the same breaker, then you're good to go. You don't have to put one in every outlet of the house, just one in. In each room or, or one in. In any outlet that's connected to a specific breaker. I also installed. That one's made by shielded healing dirty electricity filter. We also have solar panels and, and they sell a switch because they're. Or they don't sell a switch. They sell like a filter that filters the switch that switches the solar from what I believe is DC to ac. And that limits the electricity produced there. The dirty electricity produced there in the solar switch. The acoustometer. Probably the most interesting thing about that was I tested myself, my right hand, so I had my son, I held out my iPhone away from the acoustometer on the other side of my body with my left hand and then held my right hand towards the measurement device. And my son held the measurement device and tested me. And I was actually an antenna when holding my phone. As soon as I set down my phone and we retested, it was a near undetectable level of EMF coming off my body. So that's the scary part to me is when you're holding your phone, your phone is using your body as a signal. And I realize that's. That's like, it's not a fun thing to hear that that kind of information doesn't make me popular. But I mean, it's. It's something to be aware of. So, you know, even here, I like the idea that most of the rooms here where, you know, we have our cell phones and in airplane mode, which is fine. Like, I love my smartphone. I've got audiobooks on there. I. When I, when I do have access to WI Fi, I'll go to WI Fi. I'll download as many because I don't want to use. Use my whole cell data plan. So I'll just download like a ton of audiobooks and podcasts and then I can listen to them all in offline mode. So, you know, when I'm walking around here with my headphones in or whatever, my cell phone's in airplane mode, but I'm still getting a ton of use out of it. Right. I put books on there and Kindle. And, you know, there's a lot of cool things about a smartphone that go beyond just the signal, and I certainly use mine a lot. But Most of the time it's in airplane mode, so.

So follow on. Question about emf, Is there a, a reliable way that we can measure the impact of emf? To us personally, I know Joe Mercola once talked about maybe something with the channel, the ion channels or the.

Yeah, you can measure it. And Joe's got device, he's measured me a couple of times and as, as would be the case, I've forgotten the name of the device that he uses, but he's basically measuring the, the frequency of the body and it's essentially a higher score is better. It's like a scale of 1 to 10. And people who are exposed to a lot of EMF, they're at like a 5 or a 6. I think he mentioned it on his podcast with me. Yeah, the phase angle. Thank you, Robin. Yes, it's the phase angle measurement. So the phase angle measurement is what he does. Like I mentioned my client who installed the blue shield, he did inflammatory measurements and he's very EMF sensitive. His sleep also went through the roof when he installed those blue shield devices. So it was impacting his sleep, it was impacting his inflammation. And I don't doubt there's some people that are just like some people are mold sensitive or gluten sensitive or lactose or carb sensitive or whatever. Some people are EMF sensitive. It may have to do with the resilience of the nervous system too. It could be this comes back to hrv. And the more vagal nerve tone that you have, the better you're able to handle those things, which once again, kind of solidify. Advise the recommendation to be somebody who's good at breath work, right. Who sleeps well, who has good relationships, who takes cold showers, who does all these things to assist with vagal nerve tone, because that might actually confer a protective effect against some of this stuff. Do you use a Bluetooth headset? I use a air tube for Bluetooth. So it's basically I get it from Defender shield. And it is, it's a Bluetooth device, but the receiver hangs here, not down by your head. And then tubes extend from that device up from that device to your phone. It's also like, if you walk away from your phone, the signal goes dead within like 5 or 10ft. So it's only really useful when you're pretty close to your phone, but you don't want to be tied into a cable. Most of the time. I'll use that. Or there's like the air tube wired headset that you can also use. The problem with that is that I don't like, like it's, it's the type of buds that have a high base. So if I'm exercising, which is what I'm doing a lot of the time when I'm listening to my phone, I can almost hear my footsteps pounding in my ears and it's almost like confusing and annoying. So generally if I'm like exercising using my phone, I just use the cheap ass Apple wired headphones that came with the phone and then I buy these little things called urbuds, Y U R buds off of Amazon and I put those on, I stick them on the end of the phone and that keeps the iPhone headphones in my ear because those things slip out, they're very slippery. But that keeps them in my ear when I'm exercising. And yeah, it's still a wire, but my phone's still in airplane mode. It's not an issue. So that's about, that's about it. The only time I break that rule is sometimes I'll go to expos or conferences like health expos, fitness expos and I just want to go walk the floor. But I also have like calls I need to listen into or an audiobook I'm working through or whatever. And in many cases I have one of these tiny little invisible Bluetooth like devices and I'll use that. Sometimes I'm just walking through just so I don't have to mess around with cables and I can still just like push a button and talk to people just easier. But not, not very often. I, I think Bluetooth is the least damaging, but I still don't even use that very much.

Hi Ben, it's Robin. And question about vaping. I take cbd, but it seems when I wake up in the middle of the night, vaping seems to be the one method that just I feel instant relaxation and could get back to sleep quickly. But I often cough and it often burns and it's making me concerned about what I'm doing and its safety and curious if you have any thoughts about.

Yeah, vaping liquid. Well, first of all, it hits you so fast, which is good, right? That's the idea with vaping is it just hits you right away. You don't have to wait for encapsulation to dissolve or even like it's even faster than the sublingual. The sublingual is pretty fast. Like sublingual is like 15 minutes. And I personally use the oil. I rarely use the vape pen. I have a few of those vape pens from Bio, cbd Yeah, it's just like an oil. You put the oil in your mouth and hold it for me. That works pretty well. A lot of the vape pens use propylene glycol. I'm not a huge fan of that stuff, so I always look for that. A lot of the actual pens burn at a higher temperature, so you get a little bit more of that kind of like burnt feel in your throat. I think there's a little bit of carcinogenicity. Those higher temperature vape pens as well. Some good vape pens will have temperature settings where you can actually adjust the temp to a low, medium or high vape. I've got one that you can use for grass, for wax, for oil, for anything like that. You can actually adjust the temp straight from your phone. So I think it's called like Atlas, something like that. It's kind of like the Cadillac of vape pens. But. But that, that one's nice because I can adjust the temperature. But yeah, some, some of these pens that burn at a high temp and the ones that have propylene glycol, I'm not a huge fan of. I'd avoid them. But yeah, like the pure CBD vape pens that, you know, a lot of them aren't too bad. The, the one from Bio cbd, they mix that with a bunch of other relaxing compounds. They've got like, I think like lemon balm and something else in that chamomile. Bio cbd. Yeah, yeah, they do like vape pens, oils, stuff like that. But I generally just dissolve a little liquid under my tongue and go that way.

Hi, it's Sue, Louisiana. You probably haven't had time to address the. I think it was the viome results that you had. I know there was a lot of. Just because we brought up the topic of protein. So there were some issues that they found about your metabolism of protein. So given that we were just talking about how much protein you intake, do you have any concerns about what they were finding and how might you address those?

Yeah, they were finding some of the, I guess the genetic microbe expression for protein digesting bacteria was low or altered in some way. I was literally just looking over those results on, on the, the plane trip over. The long story short is that some type of protein digesting enzyme would be a good idea for me. You know, like just like a full spectrum protein digesting enzyme, you know, the use of bitters, a lot of that stuff. I already do. I have to admit that, you know, when it comes to like companies that Produce enzymes, like, you know, Mass Zymes is one that's pretty popular. I could take a bunch of those before I'm eating steak and fish. And after seeing those results, it'd probably be a good idea for me. Pretty soon I'll be, you know, and I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but my, my steakhouse Ziploc bag just got that much bigger because I already, you know, because I travel a lot, and when I travel, like, a lot of times, you know, it's on the house for, you know, whoever. Whoever's hired me to come travel. And they're usually paying for my meals or whatever. And so usually I'm. I'm working at my hotel. I. I Google steakhouse look for whatever on Yelp has the highest reviews near me. I go to the steakhouse and I sit there. I, I, you know, saddle up to the bar and, you know, watch the game on tv, chat up a few folks at the bar, order a big rib eye. But inevitably, I know I'm going to get a cocktail, right? Because all the steakhouses have amazing cocktails. I usually want a glass of red wine with my steak as well. So that's like a twofer on the alcohol. I usually, when they bring out that wonderful bread basket, will have a little bit of the bread too, and then steak, right? So currently, when I go to a fancy steakhouse, I've got the hista block, which I mentioned earlier, for the alcohol, because I'm going to have two drinks. So I take a couple of Histoblock, and this is actually the stack I sent. I work with a lot of CEOs and stuff. They're always at these big steakhouse dinners. So we do two Histablock, do two Kion Lean, right? And that helps clean out the liver as well with the Rock Lotus extract in that. And the bitter melon, if you're grabbing that bread, will help to lower the glycemic index of the bread. And speaking of the bread, four of the Gluten Guardian, right? So Gluten Guardian, the dipeptidopeptidase, and that digests all the bread. So I got Histabloc, I got Kion Lean, I got Gluten Guardian, I've got the four charcoal capsules back at my hotel on the bed stand to take right before I fall asleep. And so now I got to add into that whole Ziploc bag the protein digesting enzymes. But it's just better living through science, right?

Hi, Ben, it's Robin. And I'm wondering if you know anything about lo ferritin and what might be the causes of it. Mine started initially a couple years ago, very high and I donated blood and then it stayed in the range of like 50 or something and slowly it's been dropping and then it went from like 17 to 10 to 9 and now it's gone up a drop. But now it looks like my hematocrit and it's starting to affect my hematocrit and hemoglobin and I have no idea like what be about.

Yeah, usually my concern is more, you know, especially in men, high ferritin often combined with high iron. Because, you know, as I discussed in my podcast with Dr. Mercola, you're essentially looking at peroxide radicals created from the excess iron. If ferritin is low. A lot of times that's something I look at from a dietary standpoint, you know, the consumption of foods that would elevate ferritin, which is an iron storage protein. So meat that's rich in heme rich iron would be one of the better ways to do that. You know, like good grass fed grass finished organ meats, red meat, et cetera, you know, within moderation. Obviously you don't want to overdo anything due to the MTOR activation we talked about a little bit ago. But aside from that, one of the only things that could cause that is very high red blood cell turnover. Meaning like doing a lot of endurance, doing a lot of chronic cardio over training. I know you're not like a professional athlete or anything like that. I'm not sure how much you were training or how much red meat you were eating, but that's the only thing that I know of. Now there's a form of ferritin called ferritin pyrophosphate that I've seen some people use very successfully to bring their ferritin back up if it's low. There's a company called Fernando Floradix F L O R A D I X and you can buy this. It's like a liquid shot. It actually tastes really good. You can get off like Amazon. I would caution, especially again you guys out there, you know, if your ferritin tests, let's say on the lab reference ranges a little bit low and iron is maybe, you know, medium or slightly below medium, I wouldn't necessarily rush out as I used to think that you should, to take a bunch of iron or to take a bunch of ferritin because it turns out that that may actually be an age accelerating factor and may increase Your risk for things like hemochromatosis and peroxide radicals. So for a woman, a little bit less of an issue. But I'd look at red meat, potentially ferritin supplementation. I don't know what your iron is like, but iron bisglycinate is a non constipating form of iron because a lot of iron supplements are constipated. But like Thorne has one called iron bisclycinate. And that's often what I'll use if somebody has like low iron, that's what I'll recommend to them. So, and sometimes you pair that with something like the Floridix, the ferritin pyrophosphate supplement. So that's, that's about all the insight I can give you. Although I should say there may be other reasons for low ferritin that I'm unaware of. And I know in many cases ferritin is something that is closely correlated to gut health. So that might be another thing to look into. I know that's another marker often used to track things like gut inflammation. So. Yeah.

So, Ben, this is Eric. In the first part of the podcast we talked a lot about detoxification. How does one know that they're actually ready to begin the process of detoxification of heavy metals and environmentals? And is there a specific measure like blood test, urine test? Do you could confirm that your metabolic pathways are ready for that kind of process?

That's a good question. I mean, I've heard some practitioners say that impaired methylation might inhibit your ability to detox and that you'd want to take care of methylation issues. Like if you took like a genetic test and you carried the SNPs responsible for you not methylating properly, like you have the so called mother effer gene, that would be one to look into. Like make sure you have adequate methylated folate from yolks and liver or like a methyltetrahydrofolate supplement. That might be one thing, I would say. Other things that could limit it would be like when you think about toxins being released primarily through the skin, right. Especially for a lot of your heavy metals. And then just about anything that passes through phase one one and phase two, liver detox would be the urine, the stool and then also the skin. So if you have, let's say impaired renal function, right. That might be something to look into. Like make sure you make sure your kidneys are actually healthy. And you know, there are tests that you can run for that, like urine marker tests for kidney function. You could look at also just general gut health. Like, let's say you struggle heavily with constipation or you struggle with, with even something like, say like prolapse or pelvic floor disorders. That could make doing things, you know, like an enema protocol or coffee enema potentially very uncomfortable or almost impossible. That would be another thing to look into, would just be like general anatomical health of the colon and the pelvic floor. You know that most, most people sweat just fine, I really don't think. I mean, I suppose some people have like hypohidrosis and can't sweat, but you'd still eliminate things via your urine and your stool. So you look at methylation, you could look at kidney function, you could look at stool function. Most detox protocols are already loading you up with things that support phase one and phase two liver detox. Most also usually include some kind of a binder. Right? Like here at this particular retreat that we're at, we're doing more like liver treatments than we are like hefty supplementation protocols. But many, many of the supplement protocols like I use, for example, Chris Shades Push Catch detox from Quicksilver Scientific. And that's like a phase one, phase two detox support that you take, that's like a liquid shot on an empty stomach, and then a half hour later you take a bunch of a binder, you know, like an activated charcoal. And so if you didn't have access to something like that or hadn't done something like that prior to a detox like this, you'd probably get a little less out of it. Right, because your phase one and phase two detox pathways aren't quite working as well as they could be. So those are a few of the things that I would look at. I don't think there's any one specific test, but obviously if you test high and heavy metals or you test high in liver enzymes, for example, you know, you've identified yourself as a candidate for whom a detox protocol would be appropriate. And as we all know from getting tested here, from tests we've done previously in the past, I've talked to many of you and, you know, a lot of you are here because you tested high for metals or because you had impaired liver function or some reason like that. But those are a few things I would look at.

Ben, this is Diane. I'm just following up on Peter's question, and it's about the five letter acronym that everybody's heard of, but no one really knows what the heck it is. What is An MTHFR gene. What is an MTHFR mutation? And should anyone care?

Yeah, probably the best resource ON this is Dr. Ben lynch and his book Dirty Genes and also his company Strategene, which tests not only for that mutation, which is called the methyltetrahydrofolate reductase, I think is what the R is mutation, but also tests for eight additional mutations, like nitric oxide pathways, like glutathione pathways. And the reason he tests for those particular genes is they're the ones that most often impair some type of metabolic function or accelerate aging or inhibit detoxification. And the MTHFR gene is one that would impair methylation, which essentially affects DNA expression. The addition of a methyl group to a compound in a body is responsible for a host of different metabolic functions. So essentially you're talking about impaired metabolism when you have an MTHFR mutation. Does that kind of answer your question? I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's the impaired ability to methylate. It would absolutely affect your supplementation protocol if you had an impaired ability to methylate, because in many cases you get a lot of your sources of folic acid converted to homocysteine, which can be an inflammatory marker. So someone with an MTHFR mutation who is supplementing with folic acid or eating a lot of folate sources, who does not also have some type of methyl donor presentation, for example, like, like a multivitamin with methyl tetrahydrofolate, they would actually be creating excess homocysteine there. There are other compounds that can assist that pathway. You know, like a bioavailable form of folate, such as you would find, like organ meats, for example, that can help out a little bit. Like a synthetic form of folic acid is usually bad news bears for someone who, who has that mthfr gene. But Dr. Ben Lynch, I interviewed him a while ago and we went into this in pretty good depth about all these so called dirty genes. But essentially, for impaired methylation, one of the best things you can do is use a bioavailable form of methyltetrahydrofolate, eat a lot of organ meats, some amount of dark leafy greens, stay away from synthetic folic acid. Those are some of the things that can help.

Hi, Ben, it's Allison. My question is, are there one or two things you can talk about that are kind of on the horizon in the anti aging sphere that we haven't quite heard about that have piqued your interest?

Yes, absolutely. Okay, so some, some of the cool Things I think are up and coming that we're going to see talked about a lot. Some, some folks are already kind of exploring these areas, some not quite so much. So for example, any, any form of NAD that's, that's going to continue to explode in use and popularity because it's so effective and because NAD levels decline so rapidly and so significantly as you age and since that's a crucial part of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria, you're talking about limited mitochondrial function, especially as you age. That's why it's huge in anti aging circles and generally amongst people, you know, now a growing number of athletes who just want to enhance mitochondrial function. So NAD patches, NAD IVs, nicotinamide riboside capsules or NR capsules, because that's actually able to be converted into NAD even after it goes through gastric absorption, sublingual NMN sublingual forms of nad. All of these will, will continue to grow in popularity. Another one would be deuterium depleted water because we know that the isotope deuterium, which we are more and more exposed to, whether it's due to radiation, whether it's due to herbicides, whether it's due to pesticides, whether it's due a high amount of sugars and starches in the diet, which can impair beta oxidation or burning of fats, and we know that the body produces, uses its own deuterium depleted water when you're burning a lot of fats as energy. Basically. I think that, that these ddw water generators, DW bottled water, which currently costs like 11 or 12 bucks a bottle because it's freaking imported from I think primarily Romania and to a certain extent Russia right now. So, so it's hard to get, it's expensive. I think it'll become far more affordable and kind of like hydrogen rich water has exploded popularity of late. I think deuterium depleted water will, will be very, very similar. I just started ordering it from Robert Slovak, that water researcher who I interview because he has it available in 2 liter canisters. So I can add that to my hydrogen water generator and basically be drinking hydrogen rich deuterium depleted water. Which is great because, because deuterium is, you know, it's basically like a form of hydra hydrogen, but it's, it's massively heavier. Right? So it displaces hydrogen. It will disrupt the electron transport chain because of that. So if I'm getting extra hydrogen at the same time, water that's depleted in deuterium, that's like the Best of both worlds. So I think dw, I think nad, I think some forms of autoimmune control, like we know over 50 million Americans right now have autoimmune disease and we know there are things out there that can assist greatly with autoimmune issues. I mean, obviously diet is one of the biggies, but supplements like mistletoe extract, mistletoe IVs, that's one thing that you can't even really get a good form of mistletoe without a prescription right now in the U.S. but in Canada, I know there's one form of mistletoe that you can get similarly would be like low dose naltrexone. That's another thing that's very, very good for modulating the, the autoimmune system. It also flies under the radar, but I think we'll see that and mistletoe more heavily used in alternative medicine. You know, a lot of the stuff, you know, keto, cbd, infrared light, like, you know, we kind of, kind of are aware that a lot of that's popular anyways, possibly some of the treatments that, that we're doing over here at this, this retreat, like some of the European and biological medicine treatments, I think different forms of hyperthermia that go beyond saunas. I could see those very much catching on. Apparently I have a lovely three hour session tomorrow morning where I'll be sweating like a pig. But apparently it's wonderful for detoxification any of these things that enhance mitochondrial health and in many cases are stacked together like using infrared light, but also at the same time using something like methylene blue, which will enhance your absorption of that UV light by the mitochondria. Upregulate cytochrome C oxidase, produce more ATP. I think stacking different supplements and modalities with biohacks will be another thing a lot of people do. Like a niacin, lion's mane, psilocybin stack with your sauna or a methylene blue stack with your infrared light therapy. You know, many people who are getting NAD IVs using NAD patches will combine those with like a coenzyme Q10 or some type of a high dose vitamin C or a vitamin complex mix. So I think some of that stuff's cool as well. You know, I kind of sort of covered a little bit of that in my podcast with the, with the biohacking guys from Finland. And then I think EMF mitigation might be another big one. You know, mitigation of the biological fallout from 5G from Wi Fi just from general, you know, non native EMF exposure overall. Like we've talked at this retreat about different devices that produce almost like a frequency that will, that will scramble some of those signals. Different devices that can help to heal the body after exposure to some of those signals. You know, the continued use of dirty electricity filters, more and more people hardwiring it their Internet, doing a building biology analysis of their home, switching to a form of light that's more biologically friendly, like incandescent light, paying attention to air and air quality, paying attention to some of the water quality that we were just talking about. I think some of that stuff will be big and then who knows what's going to happen with stem cells. That's another thing that exploded in the past of years, Couple, couple of years. I personally really like the idea of these very small embryonic like stem cells or adult pluripotent stem cells. The idea that you can harvest your own blood, stress it, upregulate the amount of stem cells that are produced and then readminister that along with exosomes so you don't have to get your own adipose tissue taken out, you don't have to harvest your bone marrow, you don't have to go to like you know, Mexico or Panama to get like placental a expanded cell. You're just taking your own blood, increasing the stem cells, adding exosomes as a signaling molecule to that and then putting it straight back into the body. I think procedures like that compared to just like harvesting stem cells and injecting them are probably going to be a lot more palatable for folks. So yeah, could probably go on and on and just brainstorm about a bunch of stuff, but those are a few that come to mind, at least right away.

So my question is regarding carbon 60. Some folks that are producing it have touted it to be more of an 270 times more powerful than for example vitamin C. But it's great at enhancing mitochondrial function, soothing the gut, helping with detoxification. Just curious if you've tried it or if you just have any thoughts on its efficacy.

Yeah, C60, also known as buckyballs. I think buckminster for cholerine was the discoverer of it, if I'm not mistaken. For the reasons that you've just outlined. It is something that there's quite a bit of chatter about right now in terms of the supplementation, biohacking, anti aging sector. Typically it is combined with olive oil because from my understanding there's some amount of toxicity if it's not mixed correctly or administered in the right doses. And so you can find it right now on Amazon, you know, C60 usually packaged with olive oil as a supplement. I currently have on the podcast deck, so to speak, a guy lined up who is kind of like the world's leading researcher right now on C60. I'm waiting until after I interview him and get to ask him all the right questions about dosage, about purity, about sourcing, about mechanism of action to decide whether or not I'm going to try it. There's a short stint like five years ago where I bought some, you know, it was off one of these websites that I'd researched about C60 and tried it and I didn't notice anything, you know, right away. But I also wasn't doing a lot of self quantification of, you know, just parameters like, like inflammation, for example, or doing a lot of testing in response to it. But of the few molecules that are technically not produced by the human body. So it's not something that we make, but it seems to have a very beneficial effect, particularly on mitochondria. So it's one of those few things that I have a hard time if the dosage is proper, finding a lot of bad things about C60 and a lot of good things about it. So although I'm not supplementing with it yet, it could be, I think I'm interviewing this guy in like two months. And after I interview him, I'll probably start to start to look into supplementing with it if the data is convincing enough, after I talk to him. So it's kind of one of those, stay tuned. But I'm pretty bullish on it, so we'll see.

I remember hearing on one of Your Q&As quite a while back talking about how you shouldn't eat fat, even healthy fats with starches. And I remember the subject came up, well, would you then not put butter on a sweet potato? Right. Or olive oil, or eat chocolate with berries? And I was surprised that even those kinds of seemingly healthy combinations I remember being, or I thought I remember being talked about, could cause fat oxidation and insulin spike.

Yeah, primarily that's in reference to a potential oxidation of cholesterol particles if cholesterol is elevated in response to a meal, simultaneous to blood glucose being heavily elevated and B formation of lipopolysaccharides, which can essentially act like endotoxins in gut tissue with a high fat, high sugar meal. Now, in particular, this is the thing you're most at risk of with a high saturated fat meal meal that's combined with a high glycemic index carbohydrate. Okay, so like a big fatty cut of steak, sorry, everybody. With a giant basket of sweet potato fries, right? That is something that could actually cause oxidation of cholesterol and lipopolysaccharide formation, especially in people who have compromised guts or already have like an elevated cholesterol response or you even have a genetic response to saturated fats that renders them to have a higher inflammatory response to saturated fats. Having something like. Let's use another example. Let's say you eat a carbohydrate, but it's a low glycemic index carbohydrate, like let's say millet grain with olive oil, which is relatively low in saturated fats, along with a low glycemic index carbohydrate. That is less of an issue, as is something that. That's high glycemic index, but low glycemic load, meaning even though it does spike your blood glucose a little bit, that it's a very transient blood glucose spike. So let's say you have like, you know, a side of watermelon gazpacha with your salmon, for example, like a nice fatty cut of salmon with, with like a watermelon gazpacha or a handful of blueberries or something like that. That also not that big of an issue, but something very starchy. High glycemic index in combination with a very fatty, rich meal. That's why ice cream is one of the worst things that you can eat if you're concerned about your general health, because it's just basically oodles of, in most cases, saturated fats. Also dairy in many cases, which causes an enhanced inflammatory response in a lot of people with sugar. Right? So that's, that's why I make my own ice cream. Right. It's collagen, it's egg yolks, stevia, little cacao. I blend some coconut milk in there, usually throw in some cinnamon, typically a couple spoonfuls of nut butter. And. And so it's. It's great, but it's. It's basically a lot of really great fats, but without any of the, of the sugar that could cause the potential gut issues. I had a, you know, half pint of ice cream and I am a roll wrecked and I don't feel well. I can mow through a lot more than half pint of that stuff and feel, aside from the calorie count, pretty amazing. So, yeah, it's high saturated fat. With high glycemic index or very starchy carbohydrates that you want to be careful with, which is unfortunately a pairing in many elements of a westernized diet. Think about your Thanksgiving dinner, your steak and fries, your hamburger, etc. So, yeah, order, order your hamburger on lettuce and, you know, substitute something like pesto or berries for the sweet potato fries. So surprise. Very few questions about exercise or movement or biomechanics. You guys know, like, that's actually my. My specialty is not. My specialty is not medicine. It's not my. My specialty is movement, neck. That's. My degree is in biomechanics and exercise physiology. That's what I can actually speak most intelligently about. But I rarely get questions about that. I don't know why people just want to pop pills. All right, so this is a follow.

Up to that comment. How does a skinny guy apply good biomechanics and nutrition to gain muscle mass?

Yeah, hard gainer. And I also am somewhat of a. Of a hard gainer. And typically you use something very similar to a periodized approach that a typical bodybuilder would use to put on mass. And this is exactly what I did when I put on 35 pounds in college. You know, I got up to 215 pounds. And it was basically almost like a Dan John type of stronger by science approach. You know, you look at a program like Westside barbells or a five by five protocol or Dan John's protocol or one of Mark Ripato starting strength protocols, and you're essentially just doing heavy loading, right? It's a lot of barbell work. It's a lot of low rep, high weight work, not a lot of volume. And you're essentially building a foundation that doesn't put a lot of mass on your body, Puts a little bit of mass on your body, but increases bone density, increases the integrity of your structures, increases your ligament, your tendon strength, et cetera. And then you progress from that. Usually you'd spend anywhere from three to four months on that protocol, and then you switch to more of a hypertrophy protocol where you're upping the volume, you're doing multiple sets of 10, 12, 15 reps to absolute failure. But you're building a foundation of mass and strength first. Not starting with the lightweights and progressing to the heavyweights. It's almost like you're starting with the heavy loading, proper biomechanics, learning the big compound lifts like cleans, squats, you know, benches, push press, all the basic, almost like Olympic lifts or you know, standard weightlifting exercises and then you're stacking on top of that. The actual muscle building where you're progressing to, you know, instead of five sets of five squats, you're progressing to five, five sets of, of 12 squats with often a slightly lighter weight. Right. So you essentially are putting mass first or strength first and then your hypertrophy you're building on top of that. So for example, when I was bodybuilding, what I started off with was just three times a week, full body strength training protocol, just like super heavy, you know, I was in the gym for like two hours and then eventually that turned into more of a body split approach where I was just like targeting certain muscles muscles but using more of that, like you know, five sets of 10 of 12 of 15, etc. The other component is of course the calorie component. If, if you're a skinny guy who wants to put on weight, usually your protein intake is at least 40% and you are eating a lot of calories. A lot of people think that's going to make them fat. Typically with lean guys, hard gainers, you don't see that as much. Like I was eating 6,000 calories a day and maintaining 3% body fat when I was bodybuilding just because I was lifting so much and converting that into muscle. So it's higher protein intake, tons of calories and then lifting heavy at first, then transitioning into more of like a hypertrophy type of, type of phase. So that's the way I would approach it. So and right now I'm kind of in a muscle gain phase myself, but I'm also, also trying to maintain my, my cardiovascular endurance at the same time. So for me it's like I have a heavy lifting day and then the next day is more like high intensity interval training, you know, working on a few trouble spots, working on you know like the glute meat and the core and some of the areas that, that tend to need a little bit more TLC and then going back into heavy lifting the next day and just going back and forth and back and forth. And then a lot of the aerobic stuff is just like going on long walks while I'm making phone calls and stuff like that. And that kind of keeps you from, from gaining much fat while you're eating that many calories. So yeah, it's generally, generally how to do it as far as supplements go. Creatine is good, it's excellent for that. HMB and ATP, that's a pretty good stack as well for adding on muscle. You can look up both of those HMB and ATP peptides right now are, are enormously helpful for muscle gain and simultaneous fat loss. Like tesamorelin is one, ipamorelin is another. IGF LR3 is another. These are all like peptides that you can order inject with an insulin syringe. And I mean, they can accelerate the process like gangbusters. So that's another thing to look into would be the use of peptides. So, yeah, a little bit of better living through science, a little bit of heavy lifting and eating a lot of food. So, yes, sir. Ben, have you had success with other types of massages except the typical deep massage? I was telling you guys earlier I was crying today during my massage because I told her, go deep or go home. I just breathe through it and go to a happy place. I have always felt better with deep tissue massage. And I know there's a lot of therapists probably listening to the podcast who are going to argue about fascial damage or connective tissue damage or the same people who say don't use the hard foam rollers, use the soft ones because those just kind of mobilize and introduce blood flow to the fascia without matching your muscle against your femur or without causing connective tissue damage or something like that. I get the argument, but just subjectively I can tell you that I always stay the most injury free and feel the best biomechanically when I get deep and freaking really deep, deep, deep tissue massage. I mean, I was talking about this on other podcasts recently. Once a week I get a really long massage. Wednesday nights, like around 9pm I have a massage therapist come to my house and she's there for two and a half to three hours. So I go to bed like 11:30 or midnight and I lay on my Pulse Center's PMF table. I jack that thing up to the highest intensity it can go. So my whole body's, you know, essentially that's like opening and closing my cell membranes, right? So I'm essentially exercising my cells and increasing blood flow. While I'm laying on that thing, I've got a speaker on either side of my body just blasting myself with healing frequencies. I use Michael Tyrell's whole tones. That's like my track of choice. So I've just got, I basically got sound healing going at the same time. I have of course, like essential oils that I'm diffusing. And typically I'm using like an almond oil with essential oils as a, you know, I'm using almond oil as a carrier and then essential oils mixed into that. And I order this essential oil mix from this company out of Ashland, Oregon called Essential Oil Wizardry. And they have one that's called, it's a pain control formula. It's not icy hot. It's like. I forget if you're the other website. It's like their main one for muscle pain. It's like a menthol type of solution. And then I get. Their other one is called, it's like the three wise men. It's like gold, frankincense and myrrh. And for some reason those just make me feel amazing in that almond oil carrier. And then I basically smoke essentially the equivalent of a joint. You know, I get, take a few hits on a vape pen. So I get a little THC in my system and then I take a microdose of ketamine which is basically like an anesthetic. And then I just go dead to the world. And she works on me like a limp rag doll for like three hours. And that it's, it's, it's the most amazing part of my week. I don't know, my wife would probably say I should have other most amazing parts of the week, but that's, that's, that's a highlight of my week because the next day all I can do is just like walk and sauna and swim. Like I, my muscles are sore after that. But then like two days later I feel like a 16 year old boy. Like everything just moves free. Like, like there are, there's no pain anywhere. It feels amazing. And then I just go f up my body and lift and run and train for the next six days. And then she comes again on the next Wednesday night. So that, that's my style of massage. I get the argument against deep tissue massage, but I'm just saying that's, that's what works for me.

So I'm wondering what you recommend to enhance recovery from exercise and also to. To heal faster from injuries.

Probably the top things that I use right now I have a vial of BPC157 and TB500 peptides in my fridge and will inject a megadose systemically. Doesn't have to be near the joint but I mean like a mega dose systemically. So I'll use like 2000 of BPC and I think it's like 3 or 4000 of TB whereas standard dose is like 200 micrograms of BPC. So I just blast myself with that. Typically I'll take 12 to 15 capsules of KION Flex which is just. It's like a shotgun anti inflammation inflammation formula with turmeric and cetyl myristoliate for your synovial fluid and some proteolytic enzymes. Just all the stuff that helps to accelerate healing. Double up on my amino acids. So I take a ton of establishment essential amino acids as well. Usually about 40 grams. If I'm injured I use a lot of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. I have the pulse centers unit like I mentioned earlier. Let's say I want to get a massage on. It comes with little coils that you can plug in and just like wrap around a knee or wrap around a shoulder or any joint that's, that's kind of beat up and sore. I do a lot of infrared sauna and a lot of juv light like just blast myself with lights. So I'm warming the tissue, increasing blood flow without necessarily like running or weightlifting or something like that. Do a lot of like water and non weight bearing type of exercise typically like yoga, swimming, et cetera. Typically I'll dump like several pounds of magnesium bath salts. I get these bath salts from ancient minerals that I'll like. They're huge heavy bags and I'll put, put two of those in the tub and fill it up with very hot water and I'll stay in there for about 20 minutes but then I leave the bathtub full because you'll do that in the evening before bed and then in the morning when I get up because I want to get the most. The salts aren't cheap. Right. And if I'm going to put two whole bags in there. So in the morning I'll get in and just jump in the bath again. It's a little colder but I won't shower after I do that. So the magnesium stays on the skin and continues to absorb. And then if it's a spot treatment. The last thing that I really like to do is electro stem. But I learned this from a guy who would use this protocol a lot on, on Tour de France cyclists he works with. I think he worked with Team Radio Shack, Jeff Spencer and he would put like a topical anti inflammatory right. Like arnica or magnesium. I don't think he had topical cbd but that would be another option. And then you put the electrode patches of like a compact or a mark to or any other electrostim device on top of that oil because that, that current is going to drive the oil more deeply into the tissue and because the electrical current can be a little uncomfortable. Right. If you, if you Jack it up to a frequency that's really going to cause a lot of blood flow. Once you've got the lotion and the electrodes on that, you wrap that with ice, Right? So essentially you're able to jack up the electrostim to a higher level when you have the ice on there. And you can do that two to three times a day for about 15 to 20 minutes. And that's really, really good at accelerating the recovery protocol as well. So there's a few things that I do. Some people really, really swear by fasting. I do agree that not eating a lot of inflammatory foods is good, but you need to strike a balance between, like, not having enough nutrients in your body, which fasting. I realize that fasting will shut down inflammation and increase cellular autophagy and maybe help with healing a little bit. But personally, when I'm injured, I don't like to fast unless I'm so injured I just can't even move or exercise or something like that. So I think it's better to just like, eat really, really good quality, clean, healing foods. Turmeric and bone, broth and berries and high antioxidant foods, things like that.

Hi, my question is for Dean at home, and he had a question about cell phones. Whether you could leave them by the bed in airplane mode or if it was better to shut them down. Totally.

I think it's okay. One of my friends who works for Apple told me that when your phone is in airplane mode, Apple still has a way of locating your phone, which would mean there's still some kind of a signal present. Or maybe I don't know my electronics enough to understand whether or not there'd be some way for them to find it, like some internal chip that only transmits a signal if they beam a signal to it or whatever. And maybe he's wrong, but. But airplane mode is pretty safe. I mean, I have an acoustometer and I've tested my phone in airplane mode, and it's. I told you earlier in this podcast about how the phone will use the body as a signal. And I don't get a signal when it's in airplane mode. So I think you're fine as far as that's concerned. However, you talking about the phone made me remember that Andrew, who's not present because he had to go into his son's graduation somewhere else in Switzerland and left us today, he did email me with a question and I told him I would reply to it on the podcast. So here is Andrew's question. First of all he says, Our two fantastic boys, Scott and John, are 12 and 11 years old. Hi, Scott and John. What's going on, guys? He wants me to give them some advice or give some advice to parents of kids just about to reach their teenage years. What are key things parents can incorporate from all of your research to have them grow strong and healthy as they become young adults? You know, I don't know if this is more like a, you know, how kids should eat healthy and train question versus how to just like grow a good young human in this day and age, but I'm gonna go with the latter because it's been on my mind a lot, you know, now that I'm unschooling my own boys and, you know, I think it was Yuval Nohan Harari and I may have totally butchered his name, who wrote in the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century about how kind of like the well equipped human of the future will be able to adapt on the fly in a very resilient and non stressed out manner to things like job displacements, you know, via elements like artificial intelligence and automation. Being able to create a new career for themselves on the fly. Being able to think on their feet and make decisions very creatively and not necessarily think inside a box or think in terms of predictable patterns. And of course, the problem is that ever since the agricultural revolution, we've been training young people on how to be factory workers, how to be farmers, how to basically be in roles that essentially will in the future be automated by robots. Because if you think about it, really much of the educational system is designed to churn out a little robot. And of course there are, there are forms of education like Waldorf and Montessori and some very good private schools that do have a great deal of play and creativity and alternative problem solving and real world experience woven in. But I think that the best way for a child to learn is to experience life, to learn through life. Life. That's the way we're now raising our boys. Their entire mathematics and woodworking and, you know, nature curriculum this summer is building a tree fort, right? I have a guy coming over to the house twice a week because I'm not so great at woodwork and I'm not, I'm not a builder, but he's training them and me to a certain extent on just basic building knowledge, right? Like how to actually construct, construct a well designed building using math and using, you know, things like woodworking skills. When I was a young man, my parents actually kind of had this you know, because I was homeschooled K through 12. My job was supposed to be until I pulled a complete 180, shocked and probably upset my parents a little bit and decided to go into exercise physiology and play collegiate tennis and just, you know, forego what I had originally been kind of getting groomed to do for two years prior to that, I was just supposed to go live with this Microsoft computer programmer and he was going to teach me all about video game design, you know, And I was at the point where I was taking apart my hard drive and repairing my computers and using little video game design tools that I found online. I was going to go apprenticeship with this guy and just learn to be a programmer, right, without going to college, but basically just hang out with this dude and he'd teach me how to program, teach me what I need to know. You know, in a couple of years, my kids are going to go work at a superfoods farm in, in, in Hawaii for three months, right? They're going to learn how to grow plants, how to make tinctures and powders and all sorts of amazing compounds out of them. And, and when you look at something called the cone of learning, which you can, you can Google and look up the. The very, very worst way for a human to learn is through books. As a matter of fact, the Farnham street newsletter, which I subscribe to, which is a fantastic weekly newsletter just chock full of wisdom and books they've discovered and ways that people learn. In this last issue, just this past Sunday, they included an article about why books don't work and also to a certain extent, why lectures don't work. That transmission of information without experience is shockingly ineffective. You ask someone about some massive book that they've just read, and often they. The amount of things or takeaways that can tell you from that book spans about 30 seconds. And that's about it. Whereas books that actually have interaction experiences, things that you must learn or experience or teach as you go through that book, they educate you far more effectively. And as a matter of fact, above the cone of learning, above books, is movies and documentaries. Like, it's better for your child to watch a movie about American history than to read a book about Abraham Lincoln. And of course, at the very top of the cone, or the two things at the top of the cone are actually experiencing that, right? Like, you know, that that might be putting them into a theatrical play where for two months they're actually preparing for a play all about Abraham Lincoln, right? Or going and visiting, you know, The Mount Rushmore or somewhere, you know, some site of American history. And at the very top is teaching, right? Like putting your child into a situation where they'll teach. So river and Taren now on a monthly basis are teaching a cooking class in our local community where kids show up, they buy a ticket, river and Taren teach them how to cook a recipe. You know, there's a video camera and there's handouts and that, you know, compared to them reading a cookbook, compared to them watching Top Chef or Master Chef even compared to them cooking in the kitchen, with would be the very, very best way for them to learn. Because when you know you have to teach it, you learn at a dramatically more efficient pace. So I think that the best way to equip a child is to have them learn via life experiences, not necessarily from books, although those can be a supplement to learning and to ensure that they are able to make decisions on the fly in a very resilient, free thinking manner. And some of the better books for this, and I'll finish with this, would be the book Unschooling to University, a relatively new 2018 title. So it's relevant. Any of John Holt's resources, as well as John Holt's website, which you can find online by just Googling John Holt. And he has a fantastic website that goes into, you know, essentially the failures of the modern schooling system and how a child should learn instead. The book Free to Play, Free to Play is an excellent book that goes into how some institutions have indeed reinvented themselves to allow children to learn through just free, creative play. And that book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century isn't really that bad either. Those are a few resources though that I've read and that I use. So I know this just kind of turned into a podcast on education, but yeah, those are some of my thoughts for Andrew. And again, hello to Andrew's boys. So I think that's probably good. I know you all have been detoxing like champs all week. You might be a little tired. I want to go for a walk or relax or meditate or do what you're going to do tonight before yet another wonderful morning in the Swiss Alps. So thanks for being a part of this podcast and to all of you listening in, thanks for listening. You can, of course, leave your questions, your comments, your feedback@BenGreenfieldFitness.com SwissClinic1 well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show 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, 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.