Bloodwork, Biomarkers, Biohacking Las Vegas, Optimizing Performance and Longevity & More With UFC Fighter Miesha Tate

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast. And this is really important because, like, these are the things that people need to know before they go out and look at something like testosterone replacement therapy. My wife, for example, she had so many women who were telling her that they felt incredible, you know, libido, performance, muscle maintenance, everything, because they had started taking small amounts of bioidentical testosterone. She got tested, and her testosterone levels naturally were through the roof. Right? So if she would have gotten. I want my wife to grow mustache, you know, she would have started testosterone. She would have been. She would have been on too much. Right. So it's always important to test.

Welcome to the Boundless Life with me.

Your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist. And I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond. I went to Vegas and chopped it up good on a podcast with the great Misha Tate. We recorded it for you. Misha Tate, world renowned UFC fighter, kind of a biohacking and fitness nerd. We span the gamut in this chat. It was super fun. If you want the show notes, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Tate podcast T A T E podcast BenGreenfieldLife.com Tatepodcast let's go talk with Misha Tate.

Man, I'm super excited to have you here. So thank you for making the time. And it was nice to run into you at a 4 m. And.

Yeah, the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine is, I think, what it stands for, a 4M. And to even go, you need to be a physician or somebody who's part of the expo, like exhibiting. And it's everything from just like roided up doctors and white lab coats. Who are. They look like freaking former bodybuilders to some really smart longevity medicine practitioners. So it's kind of a cool event. It's weird that they do it in Vegas. So it's like you do a longevity that. And no offense, because I know you live here, but the Strip is not conducive to anti aging.

I agree. People ask me, like, what is it like living in Vegas? I'm like, vegas is whatever you make it. It can be the craziest place on earth, or it can be super chill. Like you go out and hike the red rocks. Like when you're local. Like I was saying before we got on this, like, I try to steer clear of the Strip as much as possible.

They used to have, when I used to race triathlon. And they would have Half Ironman World Championships down here. They'd have the ITU World Championships would be down here for long distance racing. But those were all mostly out in Henderson.

Yeah.

Which is kind of. That's kind of the direction of like Red Rock and.

Yeah, yeah, it's more like the family area. Henderson. I just kind of call that like the family. And then you got Summerlin or my vibe. Yeah, exactly. So I think what I really wanted to dive into you with today is performance for athletes. Being an athlete myself and being in the latter chapter of my career. So I'm 38, I'll date myself right now. And I'm just right now outside the top 10. I just fell out because I've been inactive for about a year. But I'm looking to get back in there. And the longevity. Right. How do we stay on top of our game as we age? Right. So I wanted to talk to you about some of your favorite things. I've heard you talk about methylene blue. I've heard you talk about hyperbarics. I've heard you talk about a few things. All the things. But Lana, what do you feel like is some of the most important information? You would say that somebody is pushing their bodies and you'd have to be an athlete. Just somebody working out really hard. What are some of the best recovery tools?

Yeah, specific to. To longevity, which is important because my formal background is in exercise physiology and biomechanics. And I got a master's degree in that from University of Idaho. And then I operated a bunch of personal trainers, studios and gyms for years. At the same time, I was racing triathlon a lot. I played college tennis. I was bodybuilding after that, played water polo, played volleyball, eventually got an obstacle course racing. And that whole journey was based around performance, not necessarily longevity, which is often kind of paradoxical to performance. If we're talking about living a long time. Sometimes being super fit is not something that would allow you to live a long time because of the inflammation and the body damage and the endocrine issues and the sleep issues, et cetera. And then at the same time, when you say performance longevity, there's the side of the coin that's like, well, how. How long do I maintain my career as an athlete, not fool myself into thinking that I'm not doing damage to my body. Right. Cause every athlete and just about every sport, except I don't chest or ping pong probably is doing excess damage to their body. That if you just want to live as long as possible you wouldn't do. When I was maybe like 10 years, 10 plus years in the triathlon and Ironman, I started doing blood work and biomarker testing. When it finally started to become something that you could get in your house or you could get a little bit more easily or at least beyond what a standard doctor's panel would be. And that was when I had a light bulb moment that even though I was fit on the outside, I wasn't necessarily fit on the inside. Right. So in my case, I had high inflammatory markers, I had low testosterone, I had low thyroid, which is not uncommon amongst athletes. I have hypothyroidism to make aches, restrict carbs, restrict calories that will downregulate the thyroid production. I had low vitamin D, I had some weird looking lipids, like oxidized lipids, showing that my cholesterol was more atherosclerotic and a host factors. It means that cholesterol in and of itself is not really an issue. You could even make an argument that a lot of these markers that many people talk about, like APOB or lp, that people discuss now as really good proxies for heart disease and even those in the absence of like a real oxidized and inflamed scenario are not an issue. But if you have high cholesterol and you also have high blood glucose and you have insensitivity to insulin because of either really high amounts of stress or a lot of surges of carbohydrates or sugars or even seed oils for a really long period of time, or you have. Well, another example, be like a, like an imbalance between your omega 3 fatty acids and your omega 6 fatty acids. These are all a cluster of factors that could cause the cholesterol to actually be an issue, to actually cause like plaque formation in the heart, for example. But in the absence of all those problematic factors, high cholesterol isn't like a huge problem. But in my case, and in the case of a lot of athletes, it's like once I started digging and kind of put the detective hat on with biomarkers, I realize, oh my gosh, like I'm actually not training or recovering or both in such a way that I'm going to achieve performance, longevity. And now you can pair things like blood work and biomarker data with wearable data. Right. So you could like. Do you wear anything like a ring? Yeah. So oura ring is a perfect example. Right. So now you could look at your heart rate variability and see a daily stress marker that would allow you to make training adjustments or nutrition adjustments on the fly based on real time data. You can get continuous glucose monitor data which can kind of give you an idea of how glucose sensitive you are or how your diet and training is affecting how often your blood sugar goes up.

Do you wear one of those right now or how often?

I don't have one on right now because mine fell off. I was at the gym the other day and I rubbed up against the pole a little hard.

Oh, but you still use it on a regular burger.

I still worry. I mean, once you wear a blood glucose monitor for, I would say a couple of months, it's kind of tracking your calories for a couple months. You pretty much know it's like, oh, you'll have a banana, it's 70 calories and how much protein is in an egg. But for me, now I still wear one because what gets measured gets managed. Like, I actually do a better accountability thing. Eating, you know, whatever, not having, you know, a couple apples or a Snickers bar on an airplane or making sure that I get 10,000 steps in. I'm better at that. When I'm wearing something like a glucose monitor or an order.

Yeah, My aura ring too, keeps me accountable. If I haven't hit my activity calories for the day, it's like I've got to go go for a walk or do something to like get that last.

50 calories or bad at a better time. Because you just kind of want the streak of a good sleep score. And so you take all this data and then you can start adjusting your program towards a program that would be more conducive to longevity. And that's going to vary a lot from person to person. But if you're testing blood work and biomarkers and doing some form of self quantification, the data that you get from that is going to allow you to plug up the holes that would eventually accumulate to such a point where you'd have poor performance longevity or poor career longevity. And so what does that look like? In my opinion, a really good blood panel, at least on an annual basis. And I think an athlete who really wants to pay attention to that would be doing it on like a quarterly basis, like something that's pretty comprehensive. There's a lot of companies out there, ton of them, like Inside Tracker, Wellness fx, you know, what's his name? The more plates, more dates guy, he's, he's got a blood testing program. You can't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting, you know, Some kind of order to your home blood testing program. Another one called Cy Fox is good. And a lot of these you can order to your house. So you have a blood test that's going to allow you to see, hey, am I vitamin D depleted? Do I not need vitamin D? If my vitamin D is low, is it low because I'm actually needing more vitamin D? Or is it low because I also have high inflammatory markers? Right. So this is what I spend a lot of time doing. Each week is just like putting on the detective hat with people's biomarkers and blood work. But a basic blood panel would be one. Most basic blood panels don't look at some little things like fungal markers, amino acid balances, fatty acid balances, micronutrients, and some of the things that I think are also important to pay attention to. An example of a test that would do that is one called the metabolomics test. It will basically analyze a lot of the stuff that a basic blood test wouldn't look at. And even though that's not like, clutch 100% necessary, if you want to look at little things like, do I have enough of each different amino acid in my diet from a protein standpoint, right. For. For recovery and muscle repair or tendon repair, that would arguably be a good panel to get. Or do I want to see if I have, like, fungal markers in my blood or some kind of like an omega fatty imbalance, and I've got more omega 6 fatty acids than omega 3s. Like, it's a good test. It's a little bit more comprehensive. But if you're really serious about your career, like, that's another one that would be worth to spend. A really good stool test would be the third thing to look at. A stool test is just what it sounds like. Like you're going to, you know, usually you're pooping or you're wiping and there's tubes and it's messy, and you're keeping your poop in a prepaid, you know, labeled FedEx bag in the refrigerator for three days, because most of them do take three days, because that's basically more accurate. Because things change in your body over the course of days. And one poop isn't enough to show what's going on. But you can see yeast, you can see parasites, you can see fungus, you can see bacterial balances and imbalances. You can see whether or not you have a higher need for digestive enzymes. Whether or not poor performance might be related to this is kind of fringe. But like a parasite, right? Or some kind of a bacterial imbalance or low amounts of certain bacteria that could be conducive to performance. Like Akkermansia would be an example of that one. So stool tests would be the third thing to look at hormones. The basic blood test that I talked about first, that will, that will show up on a blood test, but it's like a snapshot of the hormones and you can get a more accurate review of how testosterone, cortisol, estrogens, even some things like melatonin for example, and some neurotransmitters even you can get a better look at that with urine. And so there's one test called the Dutch test that stands for dried urine, something, something. But that will show you a really good overview of like what's going on over a 24 hour period of time with hormones and show what the hormones are getting broken down into. And so if you're concerned about your hormone balance, that would be the fourth one to look into. Almost done. There's one that would be just once in a lifetime that would be a genetic test. So you could see a lot of important things related to performance. Like do I respond better to power versus endurance training based on genetic slow twitch, fast twitch muscle fiber composition. Am I a fast caffeine oxidizer or a slow caffeine oxidizer? Meaning is a cup of coffee like down a super fast caffeine oxidizer? It's like 4:30pm Right now I'm drinking a cup of coffee and I'll sleep fine tonight because I burned through it super quickly. And that's also verified by my genetics and other people. You know, this is something athletes and everybody should care about. They're going to have a really crappy sleep. Right. If they have a cup of coffee.

Yeah.

Or an energy drink or whatever in them in the afternoon or the early evening or sometimes even like in the midday in the mid morning. So the genetic test would also tell you things like do you have a high predisposition for lactose intolerance or do you need more methylated B vitamins or do you have low expression of your vitamin D receptors or are you a non responder to a fish oil form of omega 3 fatty acids? You need like an algae or a plant based form of omega 3 fatty acid. Like there's a lot of kind of cool things that you can find out from the genetic component that then feeds into how you're going to tweak your nutrition and your lifestyle and your training with all this data. And then the last One would be some kind of like a toxin test, and that's food allergies, environmental toxins, mold, all those little things that can honestly add up. It's like if you're whatever, straight up allergic to whey protein because you have a white blood cell reaction, whey protein, and that's in your smoothie every morning, that's going to affect your training and your career. Longevity and joint inflammation. You say the same thing for eggs or, or soy protein or, you know, pretty just by any of it has a protein in it. You know, fish, you know, sometimes you find with halibut, but you have a high white blood cell reaction to salmon. Two really good examples of food allergy tests, there's one called the Cyrex and one called the Zoomer. The Zoomer will test for gluten sensitivities, dairy sensitivities, everything else. It's a really good, accurate test. It won't give you an annoying list of 100 foods you're not supposed to eat that you place in a refrigerator, keep on your phone or whatever. The Cyrex company, they will not only test food allergies, but then they'll test for things like mold exposure, toxins, environmental exposure, things that now, as you know, back to living in Vegas as an example of a mold haven, a place where you are exposed to a lot of toxins and pollutants and mold. And that can certainly affect your longevity, your brain fog, your performance, your sleep, everything. So from a longevity for performance standpoint, the first thing I think about is what are we quantifying and then how are we going to customize training, nutrition and lifestyle based on what we've quantified? And if we're going to quantify an ideal gold standard scenario, you'd quantify blood, micronutrients, gut data and stool data. You'd have your genes, you'd have food allergy, some kind of urinary hormone analysis, and then you got your wearable data, right, like your sleep, your hrv, blood glucose, if you decide you're going to do that and then you're able to say, okay, so these are the tweaks that I need to make to actually stay in the game longer. It was a really long reply, but I can keep going if you want to see it.

I love it.

Please, I'm listening. So then the second part, aside from that, and this is kind of like more of what you hinted at when you asked me this question, would be all this biohacking stuff, because it's my opinion that when you look at the world of biohacking, there's kind of like two categories, roughly speaking, that a lot of biohacks would fall into. The first category would be the shortcut category. It's like, hey, we invented this machine and it's going to give you the equivalent of a three hour run in 20 minutes. Or you only have to work out twice a week for 10 minutes because this machine will shock your abs while you lay on the couch or whatever. You're going to get in a cryotherapy chamber for three minutes four times a week and you're going to lose way more fat than if you ever dieted. And most of that stuff is hooey. Don't get me wrong, if you're a super busy, hard charging executive and you have 20 minutes a day, sure, go buy a $70,000 machine that's going to hook you up to all this electricity and cold and compression everything and do it. But I think that in most cases, especially from a functional athletic standpoint, there's not a lot of shortcuts when it comes to performance. I mean, you need to train where biohacking I think lends itself more usefully to the realm of performance is the recovery piece. There's a lot of things you can do when it comes to biohacking technologies that would speed up or enhance recovery. Now I think this is interesting because I've heard some people describe biohacking as almost like mimicking the type of stuff that we would have gotten in nature, living a more ancestral, primal, hunter gatherer lifestyle, pre industrial, where we weren't indoors in temperature controlled environments, not being outside, not getting out in the sunlight, not moving our bodies during the day. And I think there's something to that. So, for example, we know that the Earth itself, like the surface of the earth, the ground, can not only produce negative ions that help to restore the proper electrical potential to your cells when your bare skin gets in touch with the surface of the planet. But it also produces mild electrical frequencies ranging from 0 to 100 hertz that also have an anti inflammatory effect. So then you take biohacking technologies, particularly things like grounding sheets that you put on your bed, or like a PEMF mat, or that you lay on, or a PEMF coil that you put around a joint, and you're taking what you'd find in nature and concentrating that in a training environment, or an environment where you're not able to be outside barefoot, but you can actually sleep or stun the ground, assuming you live in a cave. And you're not sleeping on a rock. And so that would be one example of a biohacking technology that is simulating what you get in nature and has really good anti inflammatory effects. And arguably also, if you're looking at pemf, which stands for pulsed electromagnetic field technology, it kind of amplifies the signal even more and it has a really, really good effect on blood flow and on opening and closing channels in the cell membrane. So you're able to actually recover a little more quickly from that standpoint. So that would be one thing, another would be certain spectrums of light, like, you know, if you look at it, ranges. But it's like the best forms of light are around 650 nanometers to around 810 nanometer wavelengths of light.

So you're talking about near and far.

Like infrared red light, near mid far and red light. You get that from sun.

Right?

But if you're not able to get out in the sun or if you want to concentrate those frequencies in like packets that are able to give you what you get from hours out in the sun, then you could use like a red light panel or a wraparound red light device for a joint or a red light bed.

Do you feel like, because there are a lot of red light if like you go on Amazon or something like that, I mean, there's all kinds. Do you feel like different brands of that? Actually, yes. And it's like, so people always ask me like, oh, you know, what do you recommend? And I, you know, I have some brands, you know, a brand that I've worked with, but. And other brands that I've recommended based on what other people have told me that I haven't. I'm open that I don't have personal experience, but I've always wondered if there is that much difference between, you know, a less expensive brand and a high end brand. I mean, can there really be.

Yeah, yeah. It's the milliwatts per centimeter squared. That's like the units that they measure the power of the light with. The lower the power of the light, the less expensive it is, but the more time you need using it to get the effects.

And you need it really close to your skin usually. Right. I mean, some people also think that if they like hang this thing from this, their ceiling or have it up.

In a fancy chandelier, like usually we're talking like six inches from the skin or more. If you're wearing a red light that is like right up against your skin, or if you're wearing like A wraparound device like a. I have one called a kineon that you could wrap around an elbow or a knee. Same thing like that's super tied up against the skin. But you're looking at stimulation of collagen and elastin production. You're looking at increased blood flow. You're looking at a direct downregulation of pain, which then can affect post red light movement patterns and performance due to the blood flow. There are effects on your circadian rhythm in your sleep. And yeah, you can get a lot of that from sunlight. But again, most of us are not going to be able to just like walk around in the sun with our shirt off for a couple hours a day getting all these red light frequencies. So that would be another example of where biohacking lends itself well to longevity. So you've got some form of like earthing technology, some form of electrical technology. Another example would be oxygen, right? Like breath work is certainly one way to get a little bit more oxygen into tissue, you know, to either blow off CO2 levels or increase CO2 levels, increase nitric oxide levels, increase oxygen levels. But then you could take it to the next degree and actually use something like hyperbaric oxygen, right? Which is something that can hyper saturate the tissues with oxygen and speed up both wound recovery and training recovery.

I love hyperbaric.

It's amazing. Even like the soft shell, like 1.2 to 1.5 atmosphere units, they still have a pretty good effect. Another example would be intermittent hypoxic training where you're just sitting reading a magazine or in your recovery booths or whatever, and you're breathing from a device that alternates between really high oxygen levels and really low oxygen levels. With the idea being that the only real way to increase oxygen saturation in tissue if you're not doing intensive breath work would be to deliver oxygen to your body when certain tissues are deprived of oxygen. Like if you're in a hypoxic state or when you're under pressure. So the hyperbaric chamber does under pressure. An example of intermittent hypoxic training would be like there's one company called Celgem, they make a unit that you just breathe via mass from as you're sitting. Another example would be exercise with oxygen training where you're actually exercising wearing an oxygen mask and delivering oxygen more readily to tissues because you're breathing high oxygen level, like sometimes 90 to 95% oxygen.

And is the purpose of working out while you're doing that because then your body's kind of Sending the signaling that it's also ready to see the oxygen.

You're inducing mild hypoxia with exercise. Yeah. And I think gold standard would be if you're able to do intermittent hypoxic training while exercising. Right. So like I have one unit at home called, called a liveo2 and I can go hyperoxic and then go hypoxic and go back and forth between those two while I'm on an Airdyne, for example. Example. So oxygen, lights, electricity, those are three examples of ways that biohacking modalities could be used for recovery. And then there's other things, like compression boots, like graded compression boots. That's a biohack, but it's certainly something that does much faster. What just like laying with your feet up against the wall would do for you, which was the old school way of kind of getting that draining effect of blood. Another example would be thermal regulation. Right. Like you could certainly go put a sweatsuit on and you know, ride on a bike in a sauna or whatever and get a sweat on. But I think the idea of hot cold contrast therapy, especially when we live in very climate controlled environments that are very comfortable, can have a really good effect for erythropoietin production, for better red blood cell production.

Erythropoietin, can you explain that to us?

Erythropoietin is a precursor, a precursor signaling mechanism to allow for better red blood cell production, which is why it would also be used as an illegal performance enhancing.

I know it's banned in the U.S.

Yeah, well, you can induce your own natural release with sauna, particularly sauna post exercise when you're already in a heated state. So that would be one example. You also get a lot of other cool things in a sauna or with heat, like, like production of heat shock protein.

Can you get EPO from doing the sort of hypoxia? So I've used, what was it? Alto lab. I've used an alto lab before, which is kind of simulation of going up and you know, and if you're not careful, you can just pass out because you're just sitting down at rest and you're breathing through this long tube that's got all these foam pieces, you know, just people who haven't used this before. It's kind of what it's like and you're just breathing through it and then all of a sudden you can get lightheaded and anyway there's time that you're supposed to stop, you know, doing airsoft Supposed to do it for a long period of time, but sometimes easier said than done when you're a hard headed athlete, you know.

Yeah, totally. But yeah, that can do it. Being in a hypoxic state, sauna, free diving, the compression of the water. And I haven't seen data on this for a hyperbaric chamber, even though a hyperbaric chamber does simulate being underwater. But freedivers who are getting pretty deep, you see compression of the spleen and subsequent increase in epo, which is why I don't know if this is still as popular, but there was a guy named James Nestor who wrote a very popular book called Breathe several years ago and talked about how many Olympic athletes who weren't necessarily free diving Olympic athletes, but were athletes from other sports were getting into freediving due to the cardiovascular performance enhancing effects of pressure under depth in the water.

So why, why wouldn't that be the same with an oxygen tank? I mean, I understand the oxygen.

You mean in the hyperbaric.

No, I'm sorry, I'm saying it's like if you're scuba diving. Yeah. Because I mean, you'll still be under pressure, but you're breathing oxygen that's under pressure mixed with nitrogen.

I don't know if the use of a mask while scuba diving would result in some kind of a downregulation of red blood cell production, because technically, if you look at this from like a mechanism standpoint, and I'm just hypothesizing here, if you have readily available oxygen combined with compression and you have not readily available oxygen, such as would be the case with free diving and compression, I would theorize that there would be an increased propensity for the body to increase red blood cell production or erythropoietin production in the oxygen deprived environment rather than the oxygen saturated environment. But I'm not sure. I don't know if hyperbaric therapy or scuba diving would increase it, but I do know freediving does.

I think you get more nitrogen when you're diving too, right?

Yeah.

Because the concentration is different.

Bends thing.

Yeah.

Careful with.

Yeah. So maybe something to do with that too. The concentration or mixture.

Yeah.

Anyways. Okay. Did you have more.

I guess the last piece with like thermal regulation as an example of a biohack for recovery would just be cold, you know, and there's so many people that you've probably heard about saying that you're not supposed to get cold after a workout, that it blunts your hormetic response to exercise and. Oh yes, kind of taking Too many antioxidants. And by the way, you'd have to take a ton of antioxidants to do this. So like a ton of vitamin C and vitamin E. Mega doses. Same thing with cold. It will blunt things like satellite cell production, post exercise, muscle building capacity, post exercise, mitochondrial building capacity. But if you look at the studies that demonstrate that to be the case, it's like 15 to 20 minutes in the cold. We're not talking about just like jumping in a cold plunge for two minutes, right? So it depends on how cold you get. Like if you're getting to the point of shivering, you can make a case that you're probably inducing such a drop in core temperature that you would be better served by separating that like two hours out from the workout. The same you should separate like high, high dose antioxidants out from the workout so your body is able to make its own inflammation and get its own training response. But cold, to be another exact cryotherapy chambers, cold plunges, I think those fall into the category now of biohacks and those would be other examples. So if I could like, you know, snap my fingers and make a little recovery studio for somebody, they'd have some form of heat, some form of cold, some form of hyperbaric and or, you know, intermittent hypoxic training. They would have some kind of grounding or earthing or PMF technology, they would have some kind of red light technology and maybe some compression boots, right? And so then you're kind of using a lot of the modalities that can enhance recovery a lot more than whatever the old school rest, ice, compression, elevation, eat a burger type of thing, right?

So if you're training and you're trying to optimize your use of cold alongside with working out, would you do it before you work out or would you space those or do you not care if you do it right after you work? I mean, how do you.

Perspective. This is all anecdotal. There's a guy named Dr. Thomas Seger who has made a lot of this theory popular. But the idea is pre exercise cooling can cause an adrenaline response and an endocrine response, particularly in terms of testosterone and cortisol. That gives you an incredible workout. And I've tried this. And again, this is all just anecdotal. And you do feel amazing when you work out after the coldplay. I've also experienced that you have to avoid anything that's relatively biomechanically intensive or complex. Like I wouldn't go do like, you know, snatch or clean and jerk when you're cold. But if you're talking about like a metabolic conditioning workout or something where you just need to like push hard, getting cold beforehand I think has more benefits than getting cold after. Like, ideal scenario, you like get cold and then do your workout. And then for that erythropoietin piece, like go get in the sauna after your workout.

Yeah, I think that's how I usually try to do it too, just to maximize. Okay. Something else you said earlier was that when you got tested, remember how long ago you said it was, but that you had low testosterone. And I find that becoming more of a common theme for men and I think for women too, obviously I don't get as much testosterone as you, and I love testosterone, so I don't wanna blunt that ever. But what was it for you that was causing for testosterone to be low? And how old were you when you got that tested? You were an athlete, presumably you wouldn't think, I'm sure, that, you know, I.

Was in the low three hundreds, which is not that great. It's not like, like, that's not even low enough to be diagnosed by most doctors with like full blown hypogonadism, but it's low enough to feel kind of crappy.

I was gonna say, I still feel like it's pretty low for where, where I would picture someone live. You know, you're athletic.

You know, that's not, that's not the whole picture. I mean, you want to test your free testosterone because some people will be like in the 300s, 400s, and they have so much bioavailable free testosterone, usually because they have like low levels of sex hormone binding globulin that there are just fine. And then other people can be a 300 to 400 and feel really crappy because they have high sex hormone binding globulin, which is usually induced by carbohydrate deprivation, calorie deprivation, or stress. And so they don't have as much bioavailable testosterone. Right. Because nature just wants to down regulate fertility in a time of famine or stress.

So explain that really quick. When you have high, would you say immunoglobulin binding sex hormone binding sex hormone. Okay, so when you have a high amount of that, then it is. Is it kind of taking more of the testosterone and not. Or how does that actually work in the body?

Like the name kind of gives it away, like sex hormone binding globulin. So if that's high, then you have more of your sex hormones bound and that would often happen if you're doing something that would make your body not want to have as much freely available testosterone, which is usually stress or not enough calories. And your body's, you know, from a primal standpoint, it's like, yo, we don't want to make babies in a time of stress or famines. Let's keep this down. Regulated for me and for a lot of people, I was restricting carbohydrates excessively. I was engaged in really high amounts of chronic repetitive motion endurance training, which is also not fantastic for, for any hormones for the most part, besides a little bit of an increase in cortisol. Generally just calorie deprived just from training a lot. And then if you step back and look at. And this is really important because like, these are the things that people need to know before they go out and look at something like testosterone replacement therapy, which obviously an athlete in a regulated sport is not going to do. But I know a lot of people in the general population are just like, yo, my testosterone levels are low, so I'm gonna get on testosterone. Why not? There are certain compounds that can help your body to make more testosterone without you getting on testosterone replacement therapy. The biggies would be. And you can of course test for these like we were talking about earlier, actually see if many of them are low. But the biggies would be vitamin D, zinc, boron, creatine, omega 3 fatty acids and magnesium. Right. So those are like kind of like some of the base things to look at if testosterone is low and to make sure that you're getting. From a dietary standpoint, the largest density of androgen receptors is in the legs. And so doing more strength and power training with the legs compared to endurance training with the legs can also have a really good impact. Sleep and low stress, those are like no brainers, but still, still a big deal. Interestingly, we're talking about the red light thing. And for guys who shine red light on their testicles, there seems to be a response via the leydig cells of the testes that increases testosterone production from something like that. The same thing if the testicles get really cold, which is probably why some people think they have such a great workout after they do like a cold plunge pre workout. So you kind of step back and you look at a lot of those bases first. And then there are certain things. There's not a whole lot of NSF certified for sport compounds out there that are like herbal blends, but some seem to have an impact. Tribulus terrestis would be one Fenugreek fadogia is another one. So there's some herbs that seem to, in a lot of people, cause a little bit of a bump up in testosterone as well. But the very, very, very first thing is, of course, the tests. Because like my wife, for example, she had so many women who were telling her that they felt, you know, like they're perimenopausal women, and they said they felt incredible, you know, libido, performance, muscle maintenance, everything, because they had started taking small amounts of bioidentical testosterone. And my wife thought maybe she should start using some form of bioidentical testosterone because she had a lot of friends who said it was great.

Right.

And then she got tested and her testosterone levels naturally were through the roof. Right? So if she would have gotten, I want my wife to grow a mustache, you know, she would have started testosterone. She would have been. She would have been on too much. Right. So it's always important to test, but in athletes, usually, yes. Low calories, low carbs, stress, sleep, too much endurance training, not enough strength and power training, not enough recovery, and then some of those basic nutrients and minerals that aren't being covered from a dietary or supplement standpoint.

I have two questions for you. Why were you restricting carbohydrates with the kind of athletic, you know, output you were having? And also, how do you eat? Now, I understand you're not like competitive other than pickleball we were mentioning. But other than that, what is the healthy diet kind of look like for you?

I was restricted carbohydrates based on a surge of interest in the idea of ketones, the byproduct of fat burning. And now something you just buy and drink straight up, which was available back when I was racing, or else I would have done this, I would have taken ketones. But ketones are a great endurance fuel. They're a preferred fuel for the heart, for the liver, for the diaphragm. Arguably, if you're in an observed sport, which I was in, you aren't in as high a state of glycolysis or carbohydrate burning at higher intensities, you're instead more in a state of beta oxidation, fat burning and ketone utilization. So for somebody like an ironman triathlete, or a marathoner, or a long distance swimmer or long distance cyclist or something like that. A lower carbohydrate intake is something that could theoretically allow you to have more favorable metabolics, meaning fewer blood sugar spikes, fewer of the issues with bloating and gas and Fermentation that a lot of distance athletes get with high carbohydrate intake during exercise. And also the ability to be able to have a readily available source of fuel that you can burn for long periods of time, your own fat. And the idea here, the theory at least at one point, was that by eating a higher fat diet and a lower carb diet, you could shift the body into a where it just like burn more fats preferentially. That was a theory for a while. And then this guy named Jeff Volek did a study at the University of Connecticut, and I was in that study where he had one group of athletes follow a normal carb diet for 12 months, which is like 50 to 75%, and then another group follow a pretty strict ketogenic diet for 12 months. And we're talking like, you know, like, don't walk past an Italian restaurant or don't eat your olive carb. Like don't smell a carb. It was like one strawberry a day, like super, like 40 grams of carbs.

Which group were you in?

I was in low carb. Okay. And so the low carb group, upon going to the lab and getting tested, they went through the same tests as the regular carb group. And the testing was a VO2 Max test, which is a pretty intense running test on a treadmill, a three hour run on the treadmill, which super sucks because I was just staring at a white wall in the lab without like a TV or anything with like a IV attached to your arm and a mask on. Not pleasant. And then some stool testing, some muscle biopsies, et cetera. The long story short is what they found was that the athletes that followed the low carb high fat diet experienced an increase in fat burning that was at about 1.5 to 1.8 grams of fat per minute, which was way above what most the physiology textbook said at the time, which was like 1.0 grams of fat per minute. So it almost rewrote the textbooks and showed that if you restrict carbohydrates, your body will burn more fat during exercise. Now that's not the whole story because there's a few things to consider. Yes, you burn more fat during exercise, which can have a carbohydrate sparing effect and be advantageous if you need to go for long periods of time and you want to be a so called fat burning machine. It didn't improve performance at all. It just didn't like decrease it. Well, theoretically, for somebody who's going to be out racing 10, 12, 15 hours, that could be an advantage, which is why a lot of endurance athletes still eat a low carb diet or a ketogenic diet. But then the other piece, and this is back to me, a lot of the people who are following a low carb diet had thyroid issues, testosterone issues, a lot of the issues that tend to pop up when the body just doesn't have enough sugar to go around. And so I changed my diet once I started testing a lot of these things. And what I feel really good on and what I do is I have really stable energy levels if I don't eat a lot of carbohydrates the whole day. I also seem to get more bloating and gas when I consume carbohydrates. I just have a gut biome that burns up carbohydrates in such a way that they're methanogenic, you know, produce a lot of gases, and a lot of people experience the same thing. Like they'll have wheat, apples, you know, carbs, fruit, et cetera. And they're just, you know, more bloated and gassy from that. So my energy levels are better, my digestive system is better, Everything feels really good. If I don't have a lot of carbs during the day, and then at dinner, I have a lot more carbohydrates. And by having more carbs with dinner, the carbs serve as a precursor to serotonin, which helps you have more melatonin, which helps you sleep better at night. The carbs that you're getting at night help to top off your muscle glycogen levels, your muscle storage carbohydrate levels, so you can have a good workout the next morning. And you also get enough carbohydrates to where your thyroid is not getting the signal that there's not enough carbs, or your testosterone is suppressed from low carb intake. So it's kind of like you have your cake and eat it too, because stable energy levels all day long, a lot of fatty acid utilization all day long, and then a carb refeed in the evening, and then you sleep really well, and then you wake up and do the same thing. Some people have tried to poke holes in this by saying, well, you know, this is less of an issue for athletes anyways, because most athletes are pretty insulin sensitive because they train, which induces insulin sensitivity. But some people will say, like, for the general population, studies have shown that you're more insulin sensitive in the morning, so you should have more of your carbs in the morning and less in the evening. But the issue is not only do the carbs in the evening seem to help with sleep a lot more, but you can induce a state of insulin sensitivity using a lot of things. Like you could go on a walk before dinner, you could take a cold shower before dinner. You could have apple cider vinegar or berberine or one of these supplements that helps to lower blood glucose before dinner and make it so that dinner isn't causing some huge issue with glucose fluctuations or something like that. So what's that look like for me in the morning? Usually I'll have you know, it was like post training, pre training, I usually do like a shot of ketones and some amino acids. I really like ketones and essential amino acids fasted but with, with ketones and essential amino acids to kind of help me get through workout because I still work out pretty hard in the mornings. Okay for like an hour. And then post workout I usually have a smoothie. I'm a total smoothie guy. So it's like ice, whey protein, bone broth or coconut milk. Usually like some nut butter. I'll top it with like cacao nibs or coconut flakes or bee pollen. Like a really good smoothie. Lunch is a big salad with, you know, leftover meat or fish from the night before. Olive oil, you have seeds, nuts. Just a basic like really good, almost like a low carb, Mediterranean style lunch. I rarely snack at all throughout the entire day. I just have the ketones of the amino acids. Smoothie lunch and then dinner is super varied. It's like sweet potato fries, you know, beets, yams, purple potatoes, white rice, fish meat. You know, my wife makes amazing sourdough bread, so I like that with butter and honey. And so dinner, it's nice too because if you save your carbs for dinner, it's socially one of the more widely varied meals of the day. Anyways, if you're going out, you can be a little bit more freewheeling if you've like, if you're still like fill your carb allotment at night because you haven't filled it out earlier in the day. And this helps for a lot of people I find with weight loss too because they're again burning a lot of fats during the day and then having their carbs at night. And it seems to keep people on a little bit less of a road to just like throwing in a bunch of cheat meals because they're super carb deprived. And I just want to, you know, cheat all the time. So it's kind of like the Way I approach alcohol, like I've been drunk in probably 20 years, but I literally have like a glass of wine almost every night with dinner and with consistency. Like I don't ever feel like I just need to go like drink, because I haven't had a drink in, you know, 70 days or a year or whatever. So.

Yeah, yeah, no, this is great information. You said something about the lowering of blood sugar after having carbohydrates. So for me I try to eat around six or seven and I'm usually asleep by 10. But if I was doing this where I had more carbohydrates later at night, something with honey, these things, would you say that going for a 10 minute walk is going to make a good impact on blood sugar? And you also mentioned something, did you say berberine? What did you say?

Yeah, so the idea is that you have the ability to up regulate glucose transporters that help to take glucose out of the blood and into the muscle. And so there are certain things that can increase their activity or increase the sensitivity of the cells to insulin. And a few of those would be physical activity. Right. So pre or post meal walk, or pre and post meal walk that can stabilize blood glucose. Being cold can stabilize blood glucose. Matter of fact, even if you do a cold plunge in the morning, it can help to stabilize blood glucose the rest of the day. And that is anecdotal, not science, but I've worn a blood glucose monitor and that's the number one thing that keeps blood glucose stable for me the rest of the day is if I've been cold in the morning. And I've had so many clients and athletes I coach and multiple people experience the same thing. It's just like super stable, really. Even keel blood sugar levels. If somebody does a cold plunge or cold practice early in the day, there are certain nutrients that can act as so called. Technically the name for them is glucose disposal agents, GDAs. One would be Berberine or more powerful form of berberine called dihydro berberine some people will call like nature's metformin. Metformin is like the diabetic drug that a lot of people use to stabilize blood sugar.

You have to be careful a little bit with that though because you can drop your blood sugar too. I mean some people get excited about that. Right.

And dihydroberine is super powerful. Yeah, yeah. You can go hypoglycemic then bitter melon extract would be another one that's pretty good. There is one called grains of paradise pepper extract which is actually in my Pepper grinder. It's like what I use instead of regular pepper, which can lower your blood sugar and keep your metabolism elevated too. Apple cider vinegar, if you just don't want to supplement at all. Shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal. Ceylon cinnamon is another one. If you're out at a bar or a restaurant, you can literally just order bitters over soda water with a squeeze of lemon. And just the mere taste of something bitter can help to lower blood glucose. And anything bitter is also something that increases your GLP1 production. So a lot of people will, you know, inject GLP1 now to feel satiated. But very bitter things also increase GLP1 and help you to feel satiated. So it's kind of a double whammy effect of those. So there's so much that you could do to make yourself more sensitive to carbohydrates. Frankly, if you're an athlete, like, it's kind of a moot point anyways because most athletes, especially those who might be doing two A's, like a training session, a practice session or whatever, like you're so glucose sensitive and, and your muscles just waiting as a metabolic sink anyways to where having carbs at night is really not going to be that much of an issue. And if you thought it was or suspect it was, you could just put on a blood glucose monitor for a couple of weeks and make sure that you weren't getting this huge spike before dinner.

If you were somebody who had to really worry about fat loss, like for athletes that need to diet and cut weight, you know, it's not just about our athletic performance, but we have to actually get on a scale. Do you think at that point that would be something to more consider then? Since it's not just about performance the next day, but it's like we have to make sure we stay in that fat burning state a lot of the time.

So if you're looking at the technical term for this from a physiological standpoint, would be your respiratory quotient, your rq. The lower your rq, the greater amount of fat and the less sugars that you're burning at rest. So by lowering your rq, you're going to increase fat burning by restricting carbohydrates, for example, until the evening, you'd have a lower RQ during the day. Now, being in a higher state of fat burning is not synonymous with weight loss because there are a lot of other factors at play. I think that being in a higher state of fat burning can be metabolically favorable for more stable energy levels. Or for some people, like I was talking about for myself, for gut, or for an endurance athlete, for example, who wanted to train their bodies to have a little bit more of a carb sparing effect. But for, for fat loss specifically, I think there's a few things to consider. First of all, like, SECO trumps everything. Calories in, calories out. Like you do have to burn more calories than you're consuming. And of course, the problem with that is, well, how can you do that and still maintain energy levels? Thyroid, you know, testosterone, all these other things. That usually comes down to refeeding, right? So usually you do like, you know, three days low calorie refeed day or six days low calorie, one refeed day to where you're burning more calories than you're consuming. But you're also giving yourself certain days where you're giving your thyroid and your endocrine system what it actually needs. So SECO is kind of like the biggest one for fat loss. Like, move a lot, don't overeat. However, there, there are elements that go beyond just seco. One example would be inflammation. Inflammation will restrict the ability of. It'll restrict fat cell autophagy, right? The ability of fat cells to basically die, shrink, and your ability to beta oxidize in general, to burn fats.

Why is that? Why does it do that?

Inflammation will affect cell membranes in such a way that you're unable to actually engage in beta oxidation or fat burning. And it can also cause fat cells, particularly visceral fat tissue, to be the.

Fat around your organs.

Autophagy. Yeah. Okay, so inflammation, I mean, that's. There's a lot of factors. There is the environmental factor, right? Environmental toxins, mold, personal care products, household cleaning chemicals. This is like the stuff a lot of people think about when they're trying to lose weight. But this stuff adds up. Like these are little things that matter.

So yeah, fragrances, Endocrine disruptors is what you would categorize.

Endocrine disruptors, exactly. Plastics, microplastics, like just having a super clean environment can be conducive to losing weight. Another one would be the idea of cell membranes and inflammation related to what are called oxidized linoleic acid metabolites. Ox lambs. These are factors that generally are introduced into the body when you're consuming fats and oils that have been exposed to high amounts of oxygen, heat and light. So a diet that's rich in fried foods, no matter how low the calorie intake, a diet that's rich in like oils that you're cooking with that aren't necessarily at a high smoke point or having a high smoke point like canola oil would be one example of an oil to be careful with. High amounts of sunflower oil, safflower oil, most processed, ultra processed and packaged foods you just need to be careful with because of the oil factor and also fried foods because of the inflammation that those can conduce via oxidation. So that would be another way to pay attention to inflammation. You can also experience inflammation from other environmental factors like excessive exposure to EMF and WI fi. You know, we talked about air pollution from a toxin standpoint that's also going to affect you from an inflammatory standpoint. Low intake of antioxidants. Right. Not eating a diet that's rich in a rainbow of colors or low in certain fruits and vegetables or low in anti inflammatory spices like turmeric and ginger and garlic. And a lot of these things that you'd see in more of a Mediterranean approach, all that would be important as well. So the main thing would be don't necessarily look at it in terms of like fat carb ratios because honestly that is going to vary a lot based on your training load, even based on your genetics. Like I mentioned, like when you do genetic testing, you actually determine if you're more predisposed towards fat burning or carb burning. But also look at inflammation at environmental toxins, at how much you're, you're moving, the amount of EMF exposure, the amount of air pollution. So a lot of little factors that you keep track of. And then the last thing you should know is that there is data showing that micronutrient depletion or micronutrient imbalances can also restrict fat loss. So that comes back to the blood testing piece. Like what are your vitamin D levels look at, what are your magnesium levels look like, what are your micronutrient levels look like, what are your fatty acid ratios? She was at. So I think testing can give you a lot of clues as well.

Okay, what about seed oils? I feel like this is a hot topic lately and we're finding that there's a lot of seed oils in our foods. And I've heard things like it can be worse for you than sugar because at least sugar has a shorter life of metabolism. Burn sugar off.

Yeah, oils can have a depends on your definition of a half life, but they can spend anywhere from three months up to a few years in the body and they can be incorporated into cell membranes and mitochondrial membranes and tissue. So I think you could make a case that they could be worse for you than sugar. Especially like if you're an active person, sugar is less of an issue. Oils, you can't necessarily burn them off. At least those that are. That are used in your membranes. I think that, you know, some people will say that seed oils are unfairly vilified because if you look at some populations, like in Mediterranean or in Japan, they're eating a high intake of some of these polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids that come from seeds that were vilifying in the West. But the preparation factor is huge. How many times are you repeatedly frying a food in that oil and work at McDonald's? I'm like frying it, whatever. Like a chicken and peanut oil once. Like that's not as big of an issue as. Yeah, like fries, McDonald's, which you probably know better than me. How many times a lot. Potato gets dunked in the. Or the fries get dunked in the middle.

That's how long that oil is staying that hot for.

Exactly. Or how long has even like olive oil been on the shelf at Costco or whatever in plastic?

You know, it gets oxidized more by the light. Right.

Yeah. He like, so it's not the, it's not the oils that are. The big issue is, I mean, because even if you look like, you know, some people say, well, I shouldn't eat a whole foods because the salad bar has canola oil and it's like cold expeller pressed canola oil. Yeah. It's under lights. And you could argue like if you're going to Costco and like a hot food bar, like 8pm at night when it's been sitting there all day, like, probably not the best idea, but it is the way the oils are stored, how much they're heated, how much light they'd expose to. So you should just consider oils to be fragile, even like fish oils like that. Right. Like if you get fish oil and it's outdated or it's been stored improperly or again, it's been like sitting on a store shelf for months on end and you don't know how it's been transported, or it arrives to your house in the middle of the summer and you bought a great fish oil on Amazon or whatever, and then you were traveling for three days and it was sitting in your mailbox, don't have it because it's worse for you than not taking fish oil at all. I think some people, like, you can almost get orthorexic with it. I have some friends who like carry a seed oil card to a restaurant and tell people they're allergic to seed oils and everything must be prepared in butter and olive oil and unicorn tears or whatever. Like I'm, you need to have balance and moderation and everything. I'm kind of like an 80, 20 guy when it comes to that. And so when I go out to a restaurant, you know, let's say like a fancy steakhouse where they're going to probably use vegetable oils and you're going to have oils that have been heated multiple times and there's going to be salads and sauces and dresses, things that have oils in them that might not be the perfect oil that you choose at home. There are things that you can do. Like there are ways to protect your cell membranes from the damaging effects of seed oils. One example would be spirulina. Like 5 grams of spirulina can help with cell membrane damage from seed oil intake. Glycine would be another 1, 5, 6 grams of glycine can help with this as well. Higher intake of omega 3 fatty acids or any anti inflammatory herbs or spices that can also help. So, you know, it's kind of like, I think of it similarly as some people will say that grilling meat can be carcinogenic because of the charring on the outside of the meat. But then if I make a steak and there's a slight char on the outside, which sometimes can be really flavorful, but then I'm also having like rosemary and thyme and garlic, a lot of these anti inflammatory and antioxidant foods, they can help to protect you against the carcinogens. So I think a big part of it also comes down to just dietary diversity. And yeah, there's certain enemies in the diet, if you want to call them that. But the more diverse your diet and especially the higher the intake of like a wide variety of herbs and spices and produce, the better you're going to be able to protect yourself against some of the other stuff that just kind of sneaks in.

I think that's a really great point. And I also think that stress can be one of the worst, you know, things to the stress response that you get. If you get super fixated on don't touch receipts and don't drink out of a plastic water bottle. If it becomes where it's more stressful than it's worth, then I think what you're saying, your approach is so logical because like, okay, maybe you like having a charred piece of meat and you don't want to feel stressed out about it. So maybe having the rosemary and having these other things, knowledge is power. But I think that 8020 role and also remembering that stress is also something that's very damaging to the body. And you don't need to make this where it's all consuming super stressful. I've got to do it 100% perfect or I'm going to die tomorrow. We don't have to have that kind of attitude. And realistically, even if we were striving for that, we won't achieve that. We just don't have a cohesive environment to go along with that.

Or you can placebo yourself too. Trying to remember how this study went, where they gave people. I forget if they gave them a high calorie milkshake or a low calorie milkshake, but basically they told them that it had a different number of calories than it had in it. I think the way that they did it was they gave people. They gave one group a high calorie milkshake and told them it was a high calorie milkshake and they gave the other group a high calorie milkshake and lied to them and told them it was a low calorie milkshake. And the group that thought they had the low calorie milkshake actually had a lower blood glucose and blood lipid response to what they thought was a low calorie milkshake or what they thought was a high calorie milkshake week.

That's the best thing you told me on this whole podcast. I'm gonna placebo the hell out of myself.

Yeah. Tell her.

This is like 10 calories.

Grass fed butter and then you're in your part.

Yeah, I love it. This was awesome. Ben, thank you so much. He has so much great knowledge. It took a lot of mental notes, but it. As soon as this comes out, I'm going to be re listening to it and probably taking a notebook to it. So thank you for.

That was a fun shot. And you only want to dumb the teddy bear in a gig on the table.

I'll tell you the story about this, actually. It's kind of funny and it's cute, but so built for growth. Was inspired by my coach who passed away, unfortunately to suicide. And he always would say that change is inevitable, but growth is not right. We have to choose growth. We don't get to do that. So this teddy bear is actually made out of one of his flannels.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So it's got some significance. I know it's a little cute and cuddly, but it's actually just a very important piece of why I'm doing this. Because, yeah, he was such a great, such a great man and he gave so much. So I kind of look at this as a way to kind of have his remembrance and pay it forward for all the great things that he did. So thanks.

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