Ben's Top Biohacks, Saving Your Carbs For Night, Problems With Keto, The Amazing Healing Power Of Light & Much More!

Howdy, howdy ho. Welcome to today's show. I had the pleasure of giving a dinnertime Q and A talk in New York City at the wonderful restaurant of my friend chef David Boulay over in the Flatiron district in New York City. He has this amazing restaurant that's all designed around healthy ingredients that he handpicks from places like Japan and France. He travels all over the world finding the best of the best ingredients, brings them back, makes amazing meals, and then brings speakers and physicians and nutritionists and even hacks like me me to talk at you while you're eating dinner. We decided to turn the entire dinner into this massive health and fitness and nutrition and biohacking Q and A. And I think you're gonna absolutely dig it. The show notes for everything I talk about. If I mention anything, you'll find it in the show notes. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Bule that's B O u l e y Q a BenGreenfield Fitness Buleqa B O U e B o u L e y Q A that's where the shownotes are at. For everything talk about health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

I'm assuming if people sign their names, I could. I could throw them under the bus. But we have a question from Dr. Drew. So what are the two or three things that you think most improved your health? Dr. Drew, are you saying I was sick? The two or three things that most improved my health? It's tough to choose just two or three, obviously. But I would say three things that I do on a very regular basis that for me are non negotiables to care for my mitochondria and to care for my health are as follows. Number one, light. I'm reading a book right now called the Human Photosynthesis. Very interesting book. Kind of a rough translation. I believe it's out of Russia. But this book is about the pigment melanin and how it kind of simulates chlorophyll. And it highlights how the human body is actually capable of producing electrical energy in response to biophotons of light using this melanin molecule that, of course, we find in our skin and elsewhere our retina. For example, even blood vessels have different photoreceptors that respond to light. This is why one study showed that light, shown even on the back of the knee during sleep, may actually disrupt circadian rhythm. Kind of highlights the importance of making sure your room is very dark when you go to bed at night, so when you walk into the hotel room that's lit up like a Christmas tree, you want to kind of unplug as much as you can. But this idea of light is of course a blessing as well, because we know that exposure to photons of light can amplify our mitochondria's production of ATP. That appears to be something that is even more favorable when we have things like these green and blue pigments circulating in our system, things like chlorophyll, things like this, this, this blue spirulina that we've just considered, even to a certain extent, blueberries and anthocyanins and dark leafy greens and things like that. The combination of colorful foods and sunlight is actually a very, very cool strategy for giving you ATP without eating appreciable enough calories. And I'm not a breatharian, I'm thinking to survive on air, but we can actually produce electrons in response to light, which is very interesting. So number one for me would be light. And that would include both sunlight and exposure to as much sunlight as possible during the day. But it would also include even, you know, because I like to kind of live with one foot in the realm of ancestral living and the other foot in the realm of modern science. And I'm not opposed to the use of a lot of these so called photobiomodulation therapies that you can now find with increasing frequency. Things like light panels, light treatments for the head, intranasal light devices, especially for people. And I know you guys experienced this in New York City quite a bit because I was walking around today. You don't necessarily have days that are full of sunlight. None in Spokane, Washington, same thing that can simulate some of those more beneficial wavelengths of light in my office using these red light panels or the infrared light therapy for your head using infrared light saunas, things like this. So the idea of lights and using biophotonic energy to amplify health I think is pretty underemphasized, especially when you pair that with this concept of kind of eating the rainbow and getting some of these molecules in your bloodstream that respond very well to those photons of light. Some of these greens and blues, particularly number, number two in addition to lights. Another non negotiable for me that I do on a daily basis every day. Did it this morning. I'm actually staying over over at David's place in Tribeca, and the shower gets nice and cold there and I do hot, cold contrast every day when I'm at home, I'm in a sauna every day, always followed up by about two to five minutes of something cold. When I'm traveling, I'm often too busy to drop in one of these wellness spas with the saunas or go to the cryotherapy chamber. But I have a very simple practice when I'm on the road. It's a five minute shower. And I realize there's a little bit of water waste going on there. It's not too much. I make up for that by brushing my teeth with a nearly dry toothbrush a couple times a day. The hot, cold contrast shower is very simple. 20 seconds of cold, 10 seconds of hot, 10 times through. So it's a five minute shower. And when you're alternating heat and cold like this, I mean, this is a trick from athletes. It was, I think LeBron James recently said that was one of his non negotiables for recovery, is this hot, cold contrast because of the nitric oxide that's produced because of the blood flow, because of the decrease in inflammatory products, the wakefulness, the cognition, it stimulates the vagus nerve. But you alternate from hot to cold, or you do a long hot session followed by a cold session. That's also something in addition to light that I play around with every single day. And then the third would be our Mother Earth. I try to get in touch with the planet every single day, whether it's my hands on the surface of the Earth, my body laying on my back on a nice day in the park, wearing these newer grounding or earthing shoes that allow you to walk and still maintain connection to a conductive surface. They often have things like copper plates or copper plugs built into the bottom of the shoes. On Amazon, you can actually buy straps that wrap around any shoes, not just a pair of grounding shoes or earthing shoes. And when you walk around the city and your loafers or your tennis shoes can actually still be grounded. And I make it a point to get in touch with the planet every single day. Because the Earth is chock full of negative ions. It collects them whenever lightning strikes the surface of the planet. And so when you do that, what you're doing is you're treating your body like a battery. Because the entire human body, every cell, it operates on electrochemical gradient, meaning that there's typically a slightly negative charge inside a cell, positive charge outside the cell, and that's crucial for the proper activity of the electron transport chain. That's how your mitochondria are going to be able to make ATP. Now, when you are in a state of exposure to a lot of these positive ions appliances, non native emf like WI Fi, computers, Bluetooth, and a constant state of exposure to those things, you're actually shifting yourself towards a more positive gradient. And one of the best ways to fix that is to get exposed to negative ions. And the way that you do that is by grounding or earthing. There are many companies that sell technologies like grounding or earthing mats, shoes that I mentioned, pads that you can place in your desk. The research goes back and forth and it's kind of controversial about whether or not those type of technologies. If you're in an area that has a lot of power traveling through the ground from substations, for example, such as, you'd find a very metropolitan area like this, whether or not those are actually healthy. But there's no denying that at least getting out into a park or a beach or a salty ocean or anything like that, where you're getting more of these negative ions is beneficial for the body. There's an entire very good book about this called Earthing. I interviewed the guy who wrote that book on my podcast. You go listen to it and it's profound, the effect on wellness and overall energy and health that just simply being outside, specifically in touch with planet you can have in your body. So those, those would be the top three really would be light, the use of heat and cold, and then also grounding and earthing. Those are, those are non negotiables that I do just about every day. There are plenty of other things, you know, such as eating and movement and quality relationships, time with family, all of these other variables. But those are three that come to mind for me right off the bat. So. So great question, Dr. Drew. If you had to recommend one biohacking device to help with calm and sleep, what would it be? I would definitely say anything that stimulates the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve snakes throughout your entire body, it innervates most of your organs, and it actually in a state of fight and flight, in a state of constant sympathetic nervous system activation, the vagal nerve tone can decrease. You can shift towards a state of being constantly sympathetically aroused, like that blessing that we did before dinner that was to shift you into a parasympathetic state so that you would do things that you normally would not do if you were in fight and flight mode. Your body doesn't want to digest food if you're, if you're running from a lion or if you're in battle and so when you take a pause to breathe like that, and when you take a pause to be grateful, and when you take a pause to meditate during the day, you actually shift yourself into parasympathetic. And there are other ways that you can tone your vagus nerve. Singing, chanting, humming, breath work, gargling. That hot, cold contrast that I talked about. There's many ways to tone that vagus nerve. So it's better able to shift, shift between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation. But this question is specifically asking about a biohacking device, like a tool, like a technology. I would consider biohacking to be any element where we use science to somehow change human biology in some way or another. You can actually use what are called vagal nerve stimulators. There are companies that sell electrodes that are typically applied to the temporal lobe, sometimes right underneath the ear, and they actually stimulate the vagus nerve with a signal that shifts it towards parasympathetic. A couple such devices that I own and I've used and I can vouch for because I've used both of them. One is a device called the Circadia, which was designed for sleep by a company called Fisher Wallace. But it works so well for sleep. If you're busy at the end of the day and your thoughts are racing or you want to settle down for a nap midday and check out from all the, you know, all the hubbub at the office, you apply this Fisher Wallace device. It runs about 25 minutes and it shifts you towards parasympathetic mode. The other one that I use, and this one I use more now, it's called a new Calm Nu Calm. And this is also a vagal nerve stimulator like device, but it also is paired with, with an app that creates special beats that kind of lull you into a very relaxed state. And man on, on an airplane or any place where I need to get a good 20 to 40 minute power nap, it's got a, the only sound, I'm kind of an 8020 guy. I will just use the 20% of any device or technology or strategy. Gives me 80% of the results. It's got like 10 different tracks on it, but all I use is the power nap setting. And I'll play the power nap setting once If I have 20 minutes, twice if I have 40 minutes. And it works like gangbusters to relax you and to, as this question says, help with calm and help with sleep. And you know, there are again, plenty of other things you can do for Sleep. But when it comes specifically to a biopacking device, that's the first thing that comes to mind would be something like the official wall circadia or the, or the Newcom device. All right, Joovv Joovv J O o V. If you're regularly using the joovv that's a photo, that's one of those photo light devices and had a tumor that you weren't aware of, what do you think would be the effect of the light on the tumor? Tumor? I have no freaking clue. I don't know. I mean I should say this, I'm not a doctor, please don't misconstrue this as medical advice but some of the things that I would do if I had cancer are a lot different than what I would do if I did not have a pre existing tumor or cancer. For example, protein intake, right? Protein intake is wonderful for activating MTOR and shifting into an anabolic state and saving off sarcophagus and loss of bone density and maintaining strength as you age. But if you're eating a lot of protein and you already have a tumor, and this was demonstrated in that book, the China Study which is full of flaws but it is true that in that study they gave rats in which they had induced a tumor high amounts of casein protein and caused the tumor to grow. Right. So I'm a fan of a moderate to slightly high protein diet but if I had cancer all that would go out the window. I'd be in a low protein, low carbohydrate, high fat, high plant diet to shift myself into a state of ketosis, to get my body all the nutrients that it needs for fighting off cancer, for alkalizing the body to keep cancer from a lot of glucose substrate to be able to burn. But that is a diet I would use for cancer, not a diet that I would use for my normal day to day energy sustenance. There are other examples such as amino acid supplementation, there are that I would avoid if I had cancer again because it would shift you towards a more progress state. And as far as light goes, you know, technically it is going to induce a little bit of what would be called angiogenesis which is going to increase the growth of capillaries and could technically feed more blood vessels to tumor. So there's a wonderful book written by a guy who runs the anti Angiogenesis Foundation, Dr. William Lee. He's a very good book called Eat to Beat Disease. If you're into food, you're into health, it would be a wonderful book to add to your library. And in that book he gets into a lot of foods that are actually anti angiogenic that would keep some of that pro cancer blood vessel growth from occurring. So it'd be a good book to check out to get more into that. So good question. You'll notice how I'll just steer these questions away from the actual question and shift towards something that's a little less than iffy. All right, so this question says when you refeed at night with carbohydrates, what and how much do you eat? Well, that's a great question. I, I personally don't eat. How many, how many of you here listen to my podcast by the way? Okay, so a lot of you might know this. I, I don't eat any carbohydrates until the nighttime. I save all my carbohydrates for the evening. The reason for that is multifold. First of all, a little bit of carbohydrate night can help with your serotonin production, so you sleep a little bit better. And assuming that you've restricted carbohydrates the rest of the day, it's not going to have a huge impact on your triglycerides or on things like, you know, non alcoholic fatty liver disease or something like this. Because if you've not been eating carbohydrates all day, your liver glycogen stores are a little empty, your muscle glycogen stores are a little empty, and your body just sops up those carbon carbohydrates to be used for the next day's activity. And it's burning fatty acids and producing a lot of ketones the rest of the day. So it's almost like a cyclic low carb or a cyclic ketosis based diet. So it's a very good way to increase your metabolic efficiency to kind of turn yourself into a fat burning machine by not eating a lot of carbohydrates, then eating all your carbs in the evening helps with sleep. The other thing is, of course, as you guys know, you're sitting around right now. Dinner a lot of times is the most social meal of the day. And I think the people who follow the rules of dinner like a popper, not eating any carbohydrates at night. The problem is it really flies in the face of social enjoyment. So if you're, you're good all day long, a lot of times you can kind of let yourself go a little bit more in the evening because again, you have empty muscle glycogen relatively Empty muscle glycogen and pretty empty liver glycogen stores. So your body's going to use that glucose rather than converting the triglycerides. It's storing this fat and adipose tissue. It's going to actually restore your liver and your muscle glycogen levels. Now it is true that you are more insulin sensitive in the morning. From an endocrine standpoint, your body is better equipped to be able to handle carbohydrates in the morning without a steep blood glucose response or without a long time of that glucose remaining in the bloodstream. But you can induce a state that's very much like that in the evening. You guys know how you would do that exercise, right? So for example, I walked over here from Tribeca, right? So I got a good brisk 40 minute walk in before dinner. Timing a strength training session or high intensity interval training session, or even a brisk walk like that right. At 5 or 6 or 6:30 before dinner pushes you into a state of insulin sensitivity very similar to what you would be at in the morning. And so again, if you save all your carbohydrates for evening, it kind of behooves you to do some type of exercise later on in the day, especially timing it before you have dinner. So there's a variety of reasons that I do the carbohydrates in the morning now, how much and how many. The quality of the carbohydrates always very good. So I'm not talking about the Twinkies donuts pizza diet in the evening, right. For me it's always like butternut squash or roast pumpkin with a little raw honey, or you know, some of my wife's lovely fermented sourdough bread with some grass fed butter on it. Some of the wonderful clean type of crackers and breads that we had tonight, usually with dinner or after dinner, a little bit of dark chocolate, sometimes with dinner, before dinner, a little bit of red wine, right? So all, all recognizable carbohydrates, carbohydrates that are typically cellular. You guys have heard of cellular versus acellular carbohydrates? Acellular carbohydrates are carbohydrates that have been heavily processed like wonder bread. White rice would be another example. A lot of the sugars that you find isolated from the actual cells in which they're supposed to be accompanied. Quinoa, amaranth, millet, good fermented bread, squashes, underground storage organs like tubers, purple potatoes, yams, all of these are cellular carbohydrates they're more nutrients, nutrient dense, and they're processed by the body in a way that does not as significantly rise blood glucose. So if you get a chance at some point, you look up acellular versus cellular carbohydrates and consume cellular carbohydrates as a lion's share of the carbs that you take in. Certainly there's, there's some situations, like I talked about chocolate, right? Like all chocolate has a little bit coconut sugar or sugar in it or some acellular carbohydrate, but it's trace amounts of that. And the actual, the large portion of carbohydrates with dinner is typically cellular carbohydrate. As far as how many, here's the deal. We know that the liver can store about 400 calories of carbs. So if you've been eating a low carb diet all day long and you've been relatively active, your liver glycogen stores are going to be pretty empty. So most people, men or women, can handle about 100 grams of carbohydrates with dinner in this scenario. And an active person who also has some kind of empty muscle glycogen levels going in. I mean, I have some athletes who I work with will have 250, 300 grams of carbohydrates with dinner and be just fine as far as their blood glucose levels, their hemoglobin A1C levels, the amount of ketones that they produce. So it's kind of dependent on activity levels. But typically if you want all the glucose that you need for your joints, for your hormones, for a workout the next day, etcetera, usually starting with somewhere around 100 grams is a pretty good goal to shoot for, assuming you're active and you've been restricting carbohydrates the rest of the day. So it's a great question. A lot of places we could rabbit hole on. That's a good question. All right. What can be done to rid the body of glyphosate or to mitigate exposure? Gosh, that's such a good question because how many of you heard that story of your friend, you who travels to, to Europe or to say, Italy, has pasta and has bread and comes back and like, I feel great. Didn't gain weight, stomach didn't hurt. I had, you know, all these gluten, glutenous products, but I felt fine. Well, sometimes a big reason for that can be because especially in the US the gluten that we're consuming is accompanied by Glyphosate because many of the crops that contain gluten are sprayed with herbicides and pesticides size in the US and glyphosate is capable of rendering your gut walls slightly permeable. So these gluten proteins, these large gluten proteins don't stay in the gut. They can pass into the bloodstream and cause some immune reactions, some inflammatory reactions. And so that's why if you are going to consume gluten, rule number one is don't consume gluten from a crop that's been sprayed glyphosate. So if you don't know that it's organic or non gmo, I really wouldn't be going near wheat or any gluten containing product. Just about most grains have trace amounts of gluten in them. Except millet is one of the safer ones if you want to play it totally safe. The other thing is that there are certain compounds that can help to render the gut less permeable. They can be used to heal the gut. One is colostrum. That's the first part of a mammal mother's milk. And some supplement companies will harvest colostrum goats from cows. And upon consumption they've got some really interesting studies. Even athletes who are exercising in hot weather, that's one of the worst cases of a glyphosate to render the gut wall permeable. They'll feed them colostrum before this exercise in hot weather and gut permeability significantly decreases. So colostrum is fantastic for the gut. Another one is called lignite. Lignite is a soil based probiotic so extract. And there's a company called Ion Biome that makes lignite and my kids use that because we are exposed to glyphosate no matter what. If we're having produce or grains or anything like that, even though we're very careful and we just trace amounts. So my kids have a shot of lignite every day. They also, if we are going to go to one of the restaurants we like, there's one in Spokane that has these wonderful like popovers, these bread popovers with this lavender butter. That's amazing. Nothing like the grass fed butter here, David. But they're, they're pretty damn good, these popovers. We always travel to restaurants with this stuff called gluten guardian. It's basically an enzyme called dipeptidyl peptidase and it pre digests any gluten that you eat, just turns it into soup. So even though you're still getting Exposure to the glyphosate. You take this gluten guardian before you have a bunch of gluten containing food. Even if it's a non glyphosate, gluten containing food usually digest it far easier. And also, by the way, speaking of blood glucose and the carbohydrate thing, I almost forgot to tell you guys this. The two best ways to plummet your blood glucose after a long meal, like this postprandial stroll, like going for a walk. And it can be as little as 10 minutes, right? So for example, if I take the subway home tonight, I'll just like skip two subway stations and take one that's 10 minutes away instead of one around the corner. The other one is cold. Okay. It doesn't have to be a cold shower. It could literally be like a brisk walk in cold weather. So you guys are in a perfect scenario right here when you leave to, you know, maybe walk out 10 minutes before you call the Uber or walk on, walk around the block once before you go to your car. It's actually a very good way to drop your post cranial Lucas. I do that a lot when I'm traveling on big dinners, I always take a quick walk after a meal. If I'll nap on a car with a bunch of people right at the front of the restaurant, I will sometimes bite the bullet and like take a cold shower before I get home and go to bed. The nice part about that is the cold actually really enhances your deep sleep levels too. When sleeping in the cold room or sleeping cold, it's one of the best ways to sleep solid. My rule for sleep is if there's slight resistance for me mentally to removing my clothing before I get into bed, the sleep temperature is perfect. Take off these clothes and do it. That's a good sleep temperature. All right. How important do you think it is to eat seasonal local food? Pretty important, but you have to live a little too. We do live in a magical age with our giant jet planes that fly across the sky. And we've got the ability to be able to import wonderful foods from South America and get coffee from Costa Rica. So, yeah, I've got avocados at my house. I got some coconut milk, I got coffee. But 90% of what we eat, we go local farmers market, growing garden beds. I hunt a lot of our meat. We get as much as we can locally. We'll look up local csa. So it's just better for the body. The cool thing is all that food contains bacteria that's good for Your biome and specifically foods that are full of the bacteria that supports your biome based on your local environment. It's actually good for your immune system where you live. And if you're raising children in that environment, their immune systems become very capable of handling any type of viruses or immune system salents. In the environment they're growing up in, they're eating a lot of that local seasonal food that has that local bacteria. All right, what is your take on psychedelics? Bring them on. I think that psychedelics, honestly are used very irresponsibly these days because people are doing psilocybin, MDMA and LSD and ketamine. And Burning man is becoming so popular. And books like Michael Pollard's Change of Mind and Stephen Kotler Stealing Fire has everybody, you know, off doing their 38 ayahuasca session, you know, sitting with. With, you know, some shaman in their apartment doing mdma. And the problem is that, like, plant medicine takes hard work. There's a lot of integration. There's a lot of journaling, there's a lot of preparation going into properly structured plant medicine or psychedelic ceremony, and a lot of preparation going out. And I will do plant medicine like. Like, not. I'm not talking about, like, microdosing with a little psilocybin and lion's mane or something like that, which is actually great for cognition. Microdosing with a very small, like 1/10 of a trick dose of LSD. Very good for merging the left and right hemispheres of the brain, allowing for creative and analytical thinking. But when we're talking about getting yourself into an actual psychedelic state in which technically, you've lost control, you're journeying, your ego has dissolved, you're incapable of being fully present and lucid, that's something that you need to approach very seriously. I will do something like that about once a quarter. And typically I'm journaling and listening to a digital recorder that recorded what I said during that session, if I said anything. And then transcribing, writing that down and sitting with that and analyzing that. And there's a. There's a dieta going in, fasting from many different compounds like alcohol or certain forms of meat. I mean, you approach this stuff religiously. This is not a. About going with your buddies to Costa Rica and doing ayahuasca, right? And then, you know, laughing about, playing right home about the cool visions that you're selling. Right? This stuff takes integration, it takes journaling, it takes preparation. But in a. In a proper set and setting, I'm not opposed to the use of psychedelics if there's a specific intention. Otherwise, I think that it just becomes a party drug that exhausts your serotonin levels and mess up your receptors and your sensitivity to neurotransmitters. So it's something you need to play very carefully with. But I'm not against it. I'm certainly not against like small, responsible microdoses.

So.

All right. When you are trying a new diet product or workout method, how long do you try it for before you feel you can give an accurate assessment? It totally depends. I quantify a lot. I quantify a lot. And I'll tell you what I do to quantify and keep my finger on the pulse of all these new things that I'm trying. You, you guys saw the book back there. It's hundreds of pages, biohacks and supplements and tools and toys. And what I used to gauge my own body is I track my, what's called my heart rate variability every day. Heart rate variability is the measurement of that sympathetic and parasympathetic tone. I was talking about your vagal nerve tone. I use this ring, it's called the oura ring. For that there's a wristband called a whoop that can work well for that. There's also a real time measurement that you can use using something like an elite HRV or a nature beat. But tracking HRV is trickle down from like professional European sports where they're always on the cutting edge, especially European football. And they've been tracking HRV to predict illness and injury and performance metrics for a very long time. But now it's something that via wearable devices that are relatively affordable, most people in general population can track things like HRV and it can predict illness, it can predict injury, it can predict whether or not a supplement was good for you, bad for you. It can give you clues about what kind of diets and foods agree with you. And you're simply tracking that value and seeing it's going up, which is good, or down, which is less favorable each day. So I track HRV on a continual basis. I also track sleep. I use the same type of devices to track my sleep sleep, my deep sleep cycles, how long it takes me to fall asleep, how restful I am, whether it's three or five glasses of wine that throws me out of deep sleep cycles. And you can even track just about anything. We have a big tracker in the audience right here, Quantified Bob, right local guy, he quantifies everything. What's your website, Quantified Bob? Just quantified Bob. Yeah, he tracks a hell of a lot more than I do. So we've got, we've got sleep, we've got hrv and then as far as like blood measurements, things like that, it's very simple. I do a quarterly blood panel. There are companies like Wellness FX or Inside Tracker that will allow you to get that blood panel access to a nice slick PDF or dashboard that shows you all that data. And it's pretty easy. You go out to a lab that's somewhere near your home and you get a blood draw and you have the results within a week or so. There are other companies like Thunder Thorn that are now allowing you to do that in the comfort of your own home via tests that they send you using much, much smaller amounts of blood. So a blood test on about a quarterly basis. I do a stool test about once a year looking for yeast, parasites, fungus, gut inflammation, anything that would affect the gut. For that I use a company called Genova Diagnostics. And it's a three day stool panel because you want to look at how the stool is changing from day to day. It's nasty to think about, but since you guys have done with dinner, most of you, especially the chocolate souffles, if you have a parasite or something, it'll hatch and it'll release eggs, but not every day. So you want to test for three days in a row if you're going to do a stool panel and you want to look for everything that could be going on in your gut. So do a stool panel DNA test. That's something that technically, unless you're messing around with CRISPR technology and changing your genes, you only need to do once in a lifetime. But I think it's very good data. And typically I'll take my DNA data and 23andMe will only give you access to a certain amount of health metrics. So export that data to a company or website. Like one that I like is called Strategene S T R A T A gene. And if you guys don't something to write things down with, we're recording all this, you'll get access to the reporting later. But Strategene will identify all the different dirty genes. We'll say like, okay, you don't produce enough glutathione, so you can use glutathione supplementation or you have poor conversion of sunlight to vitamin D, so you might be a candidate for vitamin D supplementation. So it gives you a lot of really good actionable data. And then finally, in addition to Blood, gut and DNA. A couple of other tests that I really like is a urinary test for hormones. There's one called a Dutch panel that will test your hormones and your neurotransmitters. Pee on a stick for five times during the day, tells you a ton about your body. And the last one is a really good food allergy panel that's not going to give you this big laundry list of false positives that you need to avoid that you hang in the refrigerator, but instead identifies with pretty laser like precision which foods you should not be eating based on a true allergenic response or food intolerance. That one's called a Cyrex panel. C Y R E X. So those. That's an example of the type of panels that I'll kind of keep my eye on. Some need to be done very frequently like a genetic test or food allergy test. Some I do regularly like a blood test or a hormone panel. And then some I'm doing every day like tracking HRV and sleep. With all these metrics I'm able to really truly see the impact that a certain lifestyle change or dietary change or exercise change up is having on my body. So those are a few of the ways that I self quantify and kind of as far as how long I try something out before I feel I can give it an accurate assessment. That totally depends. Like if I'm taking a nootropic or something for mental function, I know within a couple of hours, right. If I'm taking something that kind of builds up within the body like a new multivitamin or something, it's typically from one blood test and a full quarter before the next blood test before I'm actually looking at that data and seeing how it affected me. All right, what's my favorite health related gadget? Favorite health related gadget? All right. It varies, but right now I'm wearing a gadget that I'm really liking. It's called an Apollo. It's on my ankle right now. An Apollo was developed by a guy who works with a bunch of different neuroscientists and also does research with the Maps foundation on psychedelics. He's done a lot of research on trauma and he has developed a device that emits a non audible sound signal that travels up the long bone of whichever limb that you happen to have placed it on to induce a specific function. So using a phone app, you can set it to sleep, or you can set it to relaxation, or you can set it to meditation, or you can set it to social and open. You can set it to wake up and it's called Apollo. I think it launches like next week actually. I'm actually trying out the beta phase over now and I have an interview. The guy coming out next week, David Rabin, you guys should listen to that interview because it's actually fascinating device. This is important to me. The Bluetooth and any WI fi signals or anything like that can be disabled on it. So once you activate it from your phone, you can set it into kind of dead mode or airplane mode. It just runs on its own. So that's, that's something I really like right now. It's called Apollo and it uses sound waves to induce a specific emotional reaction. So it's kind of slick. So that's the first one that comes to mind. P.S. told me to avoid coffee. Can't. Issues with cortisol, inflammation or adrenal glands. I don't quite understand the question. But I can tell you that my approach to coffee is that it's, it's tasty effective stuff. But it is, it is not without it's devices. Meaning that because it can really activate or bind to these adenosine receptors and tissue adenosine is the molecule that makes you sleep. The more coffee you drink, the more adenosine receptors your body has to make for the coffee to bind to, for the caffeine to bind to. And so what happens is it gets harder and harder and harder to fall asleep the more and more coffee use over time or the more regularly they use coffee over time. And this is even if you're using coffee in the morning, right. A lot of people will say I'm just not going to drink coffee afternoon and I'll be fine. But if you struggle with your sleep, a lot of times it's because you've over saturated those, your receptors. You don't have enough adenosine to bind to those receptors and make you sleepy. So the fix for that is you just switch to decaf about once a month or so. Once every couple months takes about seven to 10 days of avoiding caffeine or just drinking much smaller amounts of it like decaf coffee to reset the adenosine receptors. That's my strategy is I just have certain times of the year where I'll switch to decaf. Usually I'll just wait until I'm about out of the coffee. The wonderful, tasty, antioxidant rich coffee in my, in my pantry. And then my mom owns a coffee shop and I just have her send me up some of her wonderful Decaf coffee and I just drink that for seven to 10 days and reset the receptors and switch back to regular. So that's the way that I do it is just not having any of the caffeinated stuff around the house every once in a while and switch to decaf or switch to a non caffeinated beverage or a beverage that's lower in caffeine. Another one that I like for that is drinking chocolate. I use this stuff made by a company called my Cacao. They do this really good cacao tea. It's not got any calories in it, it's just these organic cacao shells. You soak it in water and the end result is you get this stuff that tastes amazing like chocolate. I put a little bit of stevia and cinnamon in that. It's an amazing caffeine substitute. Has this really feel good effect from the theobromine in the chocolate. It kind of dopamine release. So that's, that's also a good, a good coffee alternative. Here's a good one. Thoughts on the assertions or claims made in the Game Changers documentary? Who saw the Game Changers documentary? I can't tell if that was the majority of you, but it's a very popular movie. But you know, basically outlined the fact that athletes can thrive on a plant based diet. And it didn't say outright but hinted at the fact that that meat might actually be bad for you. And you know, my take on that is that you can certainly build muscle and be athletic and have high performance on a plant based diet. But the risk that you take are the number of anti nutrients that come in those plants. Meaning that that quinoa has a soap like irritant that that is covered in called saponins that require the quinoa to be rinsed and soaked and rinsed and soaked repeatedly. And when they do this in South America, they'll use the water that they rinse the quinoa in to wash their clothing because it's so high in these soap like irritants. We already discussed gluten, right? How you have to ferment gluten in order to deactivate a lot of the gluten, pre digest a lot of the gluten and to deactivate a lot of the phytic acids that are in that gluten that can also do a number on your gut. Legumes, same thing. A lot of legumes need to be soaps. They need to be treated properly. There are some grains that need to be sprouted. There are many Plants that have a host of anti nutrients in them that can affect thyroid function, like large amounts of kale or spinach or broccoli or cauliflower, and smaller amounts of them aren't too bad. But when you get to the point where you're relying upon plants as your primary source of protein, you risk having to eat enough plants to where either A, you're getting gas and bloating from the massive amounts of fiber that you're having to digest and consume, or B, you create gut damage and you don't feel well because of all the plant anti nutrients that you're consuming. The exception to that would be if you're using a lot of old world methods like fermentation and soaking and sprouting. It's a huge chore and takes a ton of time versus just having a freaking piece of salmon or a couple of eggs or a little bit of grass fed steak, for example. So it's much easier to get the proteins that you need from meat. Technically, with the right mix of plants, grains, legumes, etc. You can match the amino acid profile of what you'd be getting. If you're eating meat, it's just far more work and there's a bigger risk of damage to your gut from the anti nutrients. In addition to that, it can be difficult on the environment to grow that many plants. Especially in an era where we're largely monocropping, we don't have proper soil treatment practices. If you're in it for the ethical game to save the animals, so many small animals die from all mono cropping, so that can be an issue. And you know, the same issue could be said for CAFO food for animals that are raised inhumanely or unethically. But if you can hunt your meat, or if you can get your meat from a good regenerative farm that's using proper ethical practices to raise its its livestock and raise its animals, pasture raised chickens, grass fed grass, finished beef, etc. Then I think that you can make an ethical argument for eating meat being okay. And you can certainly make a nutrient density argument for eating meat being okay. And when you look at a lot of the athletes in that movie, the bodybuilders, big muscular guys, what they leave out is how much powder and processed plant protein they're having to eat to sustain the amount of amino acids that they need. So again, you can do it. Even that comes with a host of, you know, if you ever stepped on an elevator with one of those dudes and they fart, you pass out it's pretty bad scenario. I've been to a lot of bodybuilding shows, I know what it's like, not just with the whey protein, with the plant protein powders too. So I just can't really endorse for athletes who are not willing to do all the work necessary to make plans to digestible a purely plant based diet. And even in that scenario, you're going to need to supplement with creatine, carnosine, L carnitine, taurine, vitamin B12, DHA, a host of nutrients that shove the supplement budget through the roof if you don't want to build up nutrient deficits over time. So I'm an omnivore. I eat good healthy plants, usually local, that are grown organically, that are sustainably harvested and that don't rely upon mono cropping like lots of grains and corns do. And then I hunt my meat or any meat that I eat that I haven't hunted. I make sure that I know the source of that meat. So I think that's, that's a much, much better way to treat food versus myopically eating say just a carnivore diet or just a vegan diet or plant based diet. So yeah, I had some issues with that documentary and I think some issues were not raising that documentary that should have been. So here we go. Any tips for improving posture? And I love this question. The entire chapter 18 of the book is all about posture and symmetry and I spent so much time on that chapter because it is such an under emphasized component of beauty and health and aesthetics. So a few very simple tips I'm going to give you. Just a few really read that chapter on beauty and symmetry though, because it delves in all the rest. Number one, breathe through your mouth as little as possible. When you breathe through your nose, not only do you fully oxygenate the air, you filter the air much better. You also don't activate the baroreceptors in your chest that are responsible for triggering the release of cortisol. So you're in a more parasympathetically driven state and your actual facial structure changes in terms of your jaw formation and the position of your tongue when you train yourself to breathe through your nose. This includes. There's a wonderful book about this called the Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McCown. This includes during exercise you need to train yourself to the point where you can get to a tough gym workout. And only when you're digging to the deepest of wells would you breathe through your mouth. The rest of the time you breathe through your nose. It's actually a wonderful way to train. They usually take the little spartan kids and set them off on runs where they had to hold gravel or water in their mouth and just breathe through the nose the entire time. And that was a form of mental training, but it's actually breathing through your nose, especially while you sleep. Some people are even mouth ticking when they sleep. It's wonderful for posture. Number two would be your shoes. The actual heel rise of your shoes. You can see right now I'm wearing my Vibram monkey shoes. These are Vibram KSO treks that I'm wearing. I wear these Earth Runner sandals. It's like earthing or grounding sandals. My kids right now wear Nike Freeze. Right. So any minimalist low drop shoe girls, I know that you like the way that you look in heels. Guys like the way you look in heels. Guys who own cowboy boots. The ladies like how you look in cowboy boots and tight jeans. But if you want to F yourself biomechanically, that is one of the fastest ways to do it because you completely turn off your glutes and activate your hip flexors, and you create a lot of postural issues that result in low back pain that can stick with you for a really long time. So pay attention to the shoes, pay attention to nasal breathing. And then there's a lot of different forms of structural therapy that can really help to realign your body that you can use for movement snaps throughout the day. Two of those that I've taken courses in that I think are good tools to have in your back pocket if you have a chance to take a movement or a symmetry course. One is called Eldoa E L D O A. I have a podcast about it on my website. It's a form of self myofascial stretching. I'm a fan of any type of stretching or body work that you can do yourself so you don't have to rely upon a practitioner to go and see. You have to get massage twice a week to put your body back into place. But Eldoa works very well. And the other one is called foundation training. Those two forms of training, Aldoa, is self myofascial training. And foundation training is a form of training teaches you how to kind of reactivate your glutes, glutes turn on your butt, decompress your spine, get rid of back pain, alleviate some of the pain related to things like herniated discs. It's a very, very good way to train. It's foundation training. It's just a series of eight to 10 different moves that you can do in the morning when you wake up, or maybe if you're in sauna or sometime when you have a quick break during work. Cut your lunchtime short, leave 20 minutes early, go to your foundation training. But that's a very, very good way for symmetry as well. There's a whole bunch more stuff in the book because those are, those are three things I pay attention to. Nasal breathing, your shoes, either Eldo or foundation training. What's one thing you have changed your mind on over the past year or two, which you previously felt strongly about? I would say something even more important that I've changed my mind on in the past year or two is just in riding Boundless, getting to the Anti Aging longevity chapter that go through what all the blue zones are doing. There are freaking 110, 112 year old cigarette smoking, gin chugging, great grandmothers who are living these long, wonderful, relatively healthy, happy lives. There are dudes in Sardinia and Nicoya and Okinawa who would not know a biohack if it slapped him in the face. There's never been a Vasper or an ARX machine or used a photo biomodulation panel or taken metformin or rapamycin. And in many cases that's not even because they're, they're doing the equivalent of that. You know, they're getting some sunlight maybe and controlling glycemic variability. But also, you know, some of these guys are eating potato chips, right, and driving dachshunds around a polluted city. But one element that you see over and over and over again in the lives of these people and in the habits of these people is that they have a good circle of friends. They have healthy, thriving relationships. They're the people whose homes you go to for lunch and there's like three uncles and two cousins arguing at the kitchen table like some, some TV sitcom. And we're used to hunching over a computer, shoving a salad in our faces, all alone in the office, right? People who at first glance, we would say are defying everything that we've learned in westernized culture about lifestyle and about longevity. And yet they're still living these long, healthy lives. And it's because in many cases, emotions and relationships, characteristics, all of these can trump biology, right? If you have love in your life, if you have positive relationships, heck, a belief in a higher power of meditation practice, prayer practice, low amounts of stress, people in your life who love you and who you love, then in many cases all this other part of the expression that we're doing in our quest to live the longest time or be as healthy as possible, or get the best sleep score. It's actually pretty meaningless because why do it if you're not happy? Why do it if. If you have a bunch of spats with your brother and your sister and your mom and your dad and your friends and you don't know your neighbor's name and you've lost contact with all your buddies and girlfriends from high school and college, I mean, like, that's the stuff that really counts. That's the stuff that really matters. And I went for a really long time in my life thinking I could be like the lone wolf biohacker who didn't need friends, who didn't prioritize things, family dinners, who didn't have a deep spiritual relationship with my wife, who wasn't talking to God every day, and I could just push through with all my fancy biological firepower and know how. And it's simply not true. And I've vastly changed my mind on that. I would rather be in here till 1am eating chocolate and getting drunk with you guys and having an amazing time. Laugh. We're not going to do that. Don't worry. But I would much rather that than go back to my condo and shine laser lights on my balls and fall asleep on the walls. So that's the one thing that I've changed my mind on most dramatically. Thank you guys for coming.

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 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. Sa.