Building Muscle With Body Weight Exercise, Why You Get Hungry, How To Detox Your Liver & More.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show, Building muscle with bodyweight exercises. Why you get hungry, how to detox your liver, does muscle scraping work? Regenechine, stem cell therapy, Are tattoos unhealthy? And much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Rachel, can I can I paint a visual for you of my podcasting setup today?

I would love to hear it.

I am in a lunging position on a couch cushion that I pulled off the little couch at my Doubletree Hilton hotel room here in Phoenix. I've got my portable mic setup, which I get asked about this all the time. What I use for a portable mic setup. So it's a shure mic that's spelled S H U R e with what's called a zoom recorder. And by the way, if today's audio completely goes to crap, forget everything that you just learned. But then I plug this into the computer and I record with you and we record via Skype. But this is the setup for being on the go is the good old couch cushion with the microphone and the Zoom H4 recorder. I can go anywhere and do anything with this interview. Presidents, world leaders, you name it.

How do you go? How long do you sit in that lunging position for?

My rule for positions is that the best position is the one that gets you uncomfortable in about 10 to 15 minutes. So you need to switch positions. So during today's podcast, I'll switch from right now, my left leg is forward and my right knee is down on the couch cushion. Then I'll switch to the left knee on the couch cushion and the right knee forward. Then I'll switch to kneeling. Perhaps I'll do some flutter kicks or some jumping jacks.

I can't wait to hear you do jumping jacks while we're podcasting.

Speaking of travel, a couple of things. First of all, last night on Snapchat, I Snapchatted over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat for those of you who like to follow stories that are trite and silly and typically expire within 24 hours, no actually, I try and put useful things out on Snapchat. So what I put out last night was I walked in my hotel room and I audited it. I showed what I do when I walk into a hotel room. Everything from not just turning things off, but unplugging things so you don't get the little light from the TV hitting the photoreceptors on your skin or the glow from the alarm clock doing the same. So I unplug everything. I find the router, which is typically behind the TV or whatever shelving the TV is in. You can find the WI FI router, and you can unplug that. Because the other thing that I do is when I check in at the front desk, I ask them for the Ethernet cable.

Oh, wow.

And most hotels will give you an ethernet cable so you can hardwire into the wall rather than plug in, which is why we're getting such clean, pristine audio today. What else? I close the curtains to block out light from coming out from the street. But you'll find that when you close the curtains, and I don't know if you've experienced this, Rachel, light still comes through curtains at most hotels when you close them, right? So you get a hanger from the hotel closet, and you use a hanger from the hotel closet, and you clip the little ends of each hanger onto the curtain to pull it shut. And it actually works very, very well in terms of limiting light from coming in the room.

You are a brilliantly innovative man.

What else do I do? I adjust the temperature to about 65 degrees. So between about 62 and 66 degrees is a perfect sleep temperature. What about sounds? I set out my coffee, my little mushroom coffee packets over by the coffee maker, because I don't really like to use the nasty hotel room coffee, which I may sound a little bit like my friend Dave Asprey complaining about mold and fungus and coffee, but I do get concerned sometimes about the coffee at a lot of hotel rooms. So I travel with my mushroom coffee, and then I throw in, finally, my standby travel workout when I'm extremely tired. And I finished an airplane travel bout where I've woken up in the morning at a hotel room and I just am in a little bit of a funk and not my usual workouty self. You want to hear my travel workout? My go to travel workout?

Love to. What is it?

Okay, good, because I just finished it about 15 minutes ago. All you do is you go for a walk, okay? In whatever area of the world that you're in, you go for A walk. And. And this is a way to trick your body. All you tell yourself is every time you get to a place where the street turns right, stop sign, yield sign, a new block, you name it, you get to choose. You either do five burpees, five bodyweight squats, or five pushups, and that's it. And you simply, how many turns do you do for as long as you can? What's that?

How many turns do you do?

A lot. Initially, it's a trick for your body. Cause you're walking for two or three minutes and you're like, ah, five burpees. That's not too bad. But then you go, and you go. So I walked this morning for an hour, and this involved a couple of phone calls, during which time I chose squats and pushups, not burpees, but walked for an hour and probably did. Gosh, a hundred burpees, 100 squats, 100 pushups during that walk came back. So great workout. But when you're traveling, something easy like that, that kind of eases you into the routine. I like things like that versus, say, waking up, going down to the hotel gym, and doing a CrossFit wad or something like that.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. That's so helpful, Ben. Thank you. That's brilliant information.

And for the rest of the podcast episode, you can simply refer to me as Mr. Helpy Helperton.

News flashes.

Well, Rachel, this is hot off the presses. How to build muscle without lifting crap. Tons of weight. Because I know that you specifically, you're very concerned about getting swole.

Are you not so concerned about getting swole? I can't wait to hear what you have to say. But actually, I'm really interested in this because I prefer super minimalist exercises.

Yeah, what is it? And your welcome to the gun show T shirt has been hanging in your closet for weeks. So we really, really need to get this sorted out with you.

I know.

So two brand new studies just got published. The first brand new study that was just published ahead of print. So we are really on top of things here on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. It shows that flexing your muscles throughout a full range of motion is just as effective as traditional, traditional weight training when it comes to building muscle. What? So what I'm talking about is literally the kind of flex thing that you'd see bodybuilders doing on stage, right? Flex your biceps, hold your biceps, put them into a contraction, or as hard as you can, move on. Flex your chest, flex your butt cheeks, flex your quads, flex your calves. They've shown that when folks do this, in this particular study, they did four sets of 20 repetitions with 30 seconds of rest. In between these big flex and hold type of sets, they built just as much muscle as another group that was using dumbbells at 70% of their one repetition maximum for four sets of eight to 12 reps with 90 seconds of rest.

I feel like that's unbelievable.

Flexing in front of the mirror can actually get you ripped.

Nobody ever needs to go to the gym again.

Well, my wife used to laugh at me because when we first got married, I was a bodybuilder, and I would practice my bodybuilding routine in front of the mirror at the foot of our bed. I would do the double chest pose, and I would do the double biceps pose, and I would do the butt squeeze pose and the open up your lats and make your wings look really big pose. And I would do it all playing soundtracks, like my dance soundtrack that I went out to stage on to do my special dance slash flex routine was the Scorpion's Symphony version, their German Philharmonic Orchestra version of Rock youk Like a Hurricane. So I would be in front of the mirror flexing to Here I am. Rock you like a hurricane.

And what did Jessa say?

Oh, she would lay on the bed and laugh and laugh and laugh. She'd sit there with her glass of wine, watching me, her big manly man, flex and flex in front of the mirror, then collapse into bed and actually not have sex, because, as I have talked about before on the show, before bodybuilding, you look great, but you are a chunk of muscle with zero testosterone levels, assuming you're doing it naturally and legally. So I looked great, but there was actually no payoff for her getting to sit and watch me shake my tushy in front of the mirror.

And the moral of the story is you were building muscle at the same time.

Very similar to, for example, the book Neuromass, which we talked about last week, which is a series of exercises that start with very, very super slow motion, move to an isometric hold, and also include a power type of body weight or kettlebell type of type of set. So the other thing, interestingly, is that at the same time that this study came out, the Journal of Applied Physiology published its latest study in which they compared not body weight, but light weight to heavy weight. And in this study, they had half of the subjects lift a heavy load that was 75 to 90% of one rep max, and then they had another half lift a light load at 30 to 35% and the heavy people were doing 8 to 12 reps. The light people were doing 20 to 25 reps. And they looked at everything from total and free testosterone to strength gains to DHEA to growth hormone. And, and what they found was that when it comes not only to building muscle, but also to getting stronger and experiencing the hormonal response to weight training, once again, it's not the weight that seems to matter as much as whether or not you've actually worked that muscle group to failure. And what they found was that the people who were doing lightweight, right, 30 to 50%, 20 to 25 reps, they still experienced a significant not just muscle building response, but strength building response.

Wow, that is absolutely fascinating. So basically, if you have less time, you should do higher weight. Is that some sort of rationale?

If. Well, no, basically the rationale is that I can, for example, work out here in my hotel room and I could crank out 100 push ups here in my hotel room to complete failure, or I could go downstairs to the hotel gym, pec deck. Right. And do you 10 reps. And frankly, my chest, from a fitness and a strength and a size standpoint, because I know we all care about our chesticles deeply, is going to experience just as much of a stimulus. So there's that. And we just saved everybody a lot of money.

And time.

Yeah, and time. Another interesting study, and this one, I suppose may have something to do with standing in front of the mirror and flexing is. It's not really a study as much as an article. It's a brand new beautiful mirror that is really an incredibly accurate scale. Have you seen this new high tech body scanning mirror, Rachel?

I checked it out. It's like something out of a sci fi movie.

It is amazing. It renders a topographical picture that captures all the ridges and valleys of your entire body. Your biceps, your waistline, your calf. It's produced by the founder of, fittingly enough, a company called Naked Labs, which is a Silicon Valley fitness firm that has developed what they call a naked 3D fitness tracker. It is sticker shock, gasp here, a $499 mirror combined with a scale. But when you step on it, what it does is the scale spins you in 360 degrees to capture a 3D scan of your body. And if you go to the show notes for today's episode, which you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 355, you'll want to click through to this study because it is mind blowing. Not only the accuracy of this thing when it comes to matching the gold standard accuracy of say, like hydrostatic weighing for measuring body fat. But also the photograph, the 3D photograph that you get from your body is very similar to what you get if you were to do like a full body mri. And this is just a scale that you can have in your own home.

Yeah, it's incredible. And it has a 2.5% error of margin.

Which is pretty good. You are not subjected to the same amount of radiation as you would be in a TSA scan manner. So not to worry. Especially because you're not living in this thing. You're just getting on it every once in a while to check out, say, your body composition. But I could see how something like this would be incredibly motivating if your goals were aesthetics or fat loss or muscle gain, this topographical scan of your whole body, or incredibly disappointing during the holidays, I suppose. But it's a very, very interesting mirror and I would recommend folks look into it. If anybody owns this mirror yet, please let us know in the comments. Your experience with it thus far.

BenGreenfieldFitness.com 355 Boom.

And then one other thing, speaking of mirrors, fat loss, muscle gain, et cetera. Really good article on why we get hungry. And this article appeared on Chris Kresser's website and gets into this idea behind how the microbes in your gut actually have different food preferences. What I mean by that is there are some microbes, for example, called bacteriodetes or bacteria dates or however you want to pronounce that, but they've been shown to have a preference for fats. There's another type of bacteria called Prevotella that grows best on carbohydrates. There's another one called Bifidobacteria that does best in the presence of dietary fiber. And the presence or absence of these different strains of bacteria can influence your cravings for specific foods. So how about this, Rachel? Have you ever, and I'm guessing the answer is no, but I'm going to throw this out there anyways. Have you ever had a chocolate craving?

Yes, definitely.

You tell the truth, I would have all the time. Anyways, though, people who are chocolate desiring actually have different microbial breakdown products in their urine than people who are chocolate indifferent. And I have yet to run into anyone, by the way, who is chocolate indifferent. But apparently they do exist. And apparently they these metabolites are influenced by what are called short chain fatty acid products in the gut. And what that means is that you may experience a higher amount of, say, chocolate cravings. If you've got low amounts of short chain fatty acids, which you would get from, say, vegetables or butter or coconut oil. There's a few different ways to get short chain fatty acids into your system. But it turns out that the bacteria, the presence or absence thereof in your system can influence cravings for specific foods. Not only that, but as I think we've talked about on the show before, microbes produce neurotransmitters, Right? The bacteria in your gut produce neurotransmitters. I was actually the reason that I'm here in Phoenix right now, podcasting from a hotel room as I was speaking at the natural grocer's store, a couple of them here in Phoenix. I'm their spokesperson now for natural grocers. During my talk, I was talking about fermented foods and how if you have a good, wide variety of fermented foods in your diet, you're not just giving your immune system an advantage, which many of us know about. Right. Like, good bacterial diversity in the gut allows for the barrier between your gut and your bloodstream to be less permeable, and it allows for better expression of a lot of immune factors that help with your immune system, but also it can help with things like, say, the ability of you to go to sleep or not go to sleep, the ability for you to get a dopamine or a serotonin response when you eat or when you exercise or when you have an orgasm or anything else that might be neurotransmitter dependent. And so going out of your way to eat a wide variety of fermented foods can actually be heavily involved in the regulation of eating and pleasure behavior. And it's because of how much dopamine, how much serotonin you produce in your gut, along with 30 other neurotransmitters. Yeah.

Wow, that's interesting. So if I am craving fat, it's not actually me craving fat, but a little microbe in my belly?

Well, it could be the absence of a specific microbe. They found, interestingly, that obese individuals tend to have lower microbial diversity than individuals of healthy weight. Right. So going out of your way to not just get probiotics or probiotic capsules, but a wide variety, Right? Like switch up probiotic brands every once in a while, eat a different variety of fermented foods, like, you know, on a good day, two to four different kinds, like kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, natto, fermented milk products, et cetera, and Then also, and they touch on this in the article, don't just eat fermented foods, but also eat the beneficial food that those ferments are going to feed upon. Specifically prebiotics. Right. These would be things like plantains, onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, inulin resistant starch, things that these good bacteria are actually going to feed on. But that one, two combo, if you're someone who deals with cravings, being hungry all the time, having chocolate cravings, sweet cravings, there are a variety of microbes that can tend to be responsible for that. And one of the best things that you can do is to increase microbial diversity. That's the biggest problem with cravings, is not necessarily a presence of way too much of one bacteria as much as an absence of many of the bacteria.

And if you want all of these fascinating news flashes and more, make sure you're following Ben on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Listener q and a.

Hey Ben.

Hey Rachel.

So I've been seeing a personal trainer for the last month or so dealing with my it band and my hamstring. They're very tight and I've never been able to touch my toes throughout my entire life. I'm 28 now and I'm just getting towards my ankles when I'm bending straight down. So now that I've been seeing his personal trainer for about a month, he's been doing lots of the most ridiculous stretches I've ever felt in my entire life on my back, pushing my leg up and down this way and that way. He's beginning now to use gua sha, the Chinese medicine or the Chinese practice where they get inside your ligaments and scrape out whatever is built up to get new flesh moving, to get new blood moving.

Flesh moving. But you get the idea.

So is muscle scraping good or is.

It all wu wah, as you would say? Let's know your thoughts. Thanks. Have you ever been muscle scraped, Rachel?

I haven't. It sounds painful though.

It. It can be. I've. I've done graston, which is one form of muscle scraping. And I'll talk about that momentarily. I've used hawk grips, which are a special medieval torture chamber looking device that you use to massage muscle. And I've even used, based on the recommendations from my massage therapist, river rocks, meaning literally, like smooth river rocks that you can use to scrape a muscle area. So the idea behind this whole concept of graston therapy or scraping the outside of a muscle, like the skin around a muscle that hurts or a muscle that needs to be freed up, so to speak, There's a few things that happen physiologically. First of all, when you scrape a muscle area that separates and it breaks down, collagen cross linking, it stretches the connective tissue and it stretches the muscle fibers. And it does so in a much more precise and targeted and admittedly painful manner than say, just like a big foam roller. Right. Just imagine a butter knife versus a foam roller, butter knife versus foam roller death match on your muscles. The butter knife is actually going to be able to get in and scrape some of that connective tissue in smaller spots of your body compared to, say, a big old foam roller. Another thing that happens is you get what are called reflex changes in muscle holding patterns. What that means is you inhibit a lot of the. So when a muscle is cramped or spasmed, that's what's called an alpha motor neuron reflex. Your alpha motor neuron is causing that muscle to be in a constant state of stimulation. Okay. This is why, for example, when you're out exercising, just the taste of something salty, pickle juice, mustard juice, an electrolyte capsule broken up into your mouth, you name it, it actually causes the spasm or the cramp to go away very quickly because it inhibits that alpha motor neuron reflex. And when a muscle is in a chronic holding pattern, tight and cramped up and spasmed because it's been injured, this actually allows that particular reflex to get inhibited. When you scrape or you work something in a manner that you would with one of these graston tools or any of the other tools that are now popping up out there. And I'll talk about the tools in a second here. Yeah, A few other things. First of all, you get increased angiogenesis, which is a local increase in blood flow, and a buildup of new capillaries into the tissue that has been scraped. You get increased cellular activity from that. So you get a migration of things like fibroblasts and mast cells and some of the things necessary for a natural, normal healing inflammatory response into the area. And you also get, secondary to that, an increased histamine response. You get a release of histamine, which can also influence the natural inflammatory process in a positive manner. Meaning you upregulate the inflammatory process, or say, in an area of scar tissue, you reinitiate an inflammatory process that was shut down and needs to be reinitiated so that you can get rid of the scar tissue and build up normal new tissue in that area. Does that make sense?

That does make sense. Yep.

Okay, cool. So some people wonder, like, how does this actually work. Is it an actual butter knife? And I will admit I have used a butter knife to scrape specific muscle groups. The thing is though, when you look at these Graston tools, so if you were to go to the Graston website, that's G R A S T o N, I believe it's grastontechnique.com they actually trademarked six different stainless steel tools that are of different shapes and sizes that are designed to rub muscles and to scrape joints in specific areas of your body. Right. So like the one that's designed for your traps and the back of your neck is shaped in a different way than the one that's designed, say for the outside of your knee or the inside of your elbow. And these are expensive, like these little scraping tools, these stainless steel scraping tools, because they're trademarked or patented or whatever, they cost hundreds of dollars to get. I mean, like if you hook up with a practitioner who has a good set of grass and technique tools, they invested heavily in both those tools as well as in the, the method of using those tools. So you cannot just grab a butter knife out of the drawer and hack it necessarily. I suppose if you really know your way around your anatomy, you could probably do a little bit, but you may hurt yourself. Might be best to save that for the butter. Rachel.

So question the types of injuries that something like this would be best for sure.

So, for example, let's say you have Achilles tendonitis, right? And the Achilles tendonitis has been inflamed for a while. It's gotten stiff, it's a little bit crunchy. Now you need to scrape it. You would actually do a series of scraping sessions, a series of Graston sessions on that specific area. And like I mentioned, like, I, for example, have two river rocks, smooth river rocks in my freezer, cold, like ice. I can use those to simultaneously ice and massage scrape. An area. I won't claim because I know there's a bunch of Graston technique practitioners cringing right now. I won't claim I'm getting all the benefits that I would by using the fancy multi thousand dollar briefcase full of Graston tools. And if you follow the link that I'll put in the show notes or you go to grastontechnique.com you can see what these muscle scrapers actually look like. But I'm getting some benefit. Furthermore, if you go to Amazon, you will find that similar to what Preston mentioned, this Gua sha, this Chinese method of scraping mussels, they actually have for as little as under $30. These medical grade Gua Sha massage tools that can be used very similarly if you know your way around the human body, right. And you know your anatomy and you're able to use them very similar to these Graston tools. There's another company called Zuca that makes them. There's another company called Hot Grips. I was speaking with one of my friends, Joe DiStefano, who has actually been on the show. He was on the show a little while ago. He was telling me that Graston recently lost their patent or whatever expired in terms of what they hold on these tools. So there are companies now popping up and making these self body scraping tools far more affordably than what you may be able to get if you were to just order, say Graston tool. That was the way that I understand it. And he had one of these Hot Grips devices at his house when I was speaking with him and I grabbed one. I did some, some hot grip work on my arm and granted it left some, some gnarly like chafing and abrasions on the skin of the outside of the arm as I was working on it. But the muscles underneath felt as though I'd done like deep targeted trigger point therapy work just from using these specific tools. And the cool thing is a company like Hot Grips, they send you a training or a DVD manual. They let you use a locate a provider function. On their website, they sell different types of what they call handlebars and curving devices. Some that are designed for the wrist, some that are designed for the hands and the toe and the feet. Some that are designed for, for example, larger body parts like the spine or the back or the neck. But I think that anybody who say exercises or has muscle pain would benefit from looking into at least this concept of scraping a muscle group rather than just like massaging it or foam rolling it.

Is there a difference between Graston and Guasha and the rest of the sort of frameworks for it, or are they all.

Yeah, the shape of the tools differ, the training differs. I'm kind of a hack, so I'm into just like grabbing a few tools and working my way around the body and figuring out what works and what doesn't. That's just the way I operate. So I mean, I'll link to the Amazon page where you could just grab a couple of scrapers. Rachel.

I'm doing it.

I'm really pleased to know that they have one shaped like a boomerang.

Yay.

That might be the first one for you. To get because I know every Australian loves to kill things with boomerangs. But either way, it's a good question. And yes, I am a fan of muscle scraping. And oh, one last thing, the evidence behind things like Graston technique in terms of actual clinical research that have been done on these things, there actually are no high quality clinical trials that validate the efficacy of muscle scraping that I have ever seen. However, from my own personal experience, as well as from speaking with a lot of athletes who use these things, as well as with Graston practitioners and even the folks over at Hot Grips a little bit, I am a fan and I think that it's worth it. If anything, you're at least going to have a big briefcase full of interesting devices that spark conversation that you can keep on your coffee table, your collection of boomerangs and funny shaped butter knives. So there you go.

Hi Ben, this is Michelle from upstate New York. I'm wondering about liver cleanses. I've seen quite a bit on YouTube where folks are putting together a concoction of olive oil and lemon juice and drinking it and then having a bowel movement where these stones come out of your body that are supposed to be from your liver. And it sounds like a kind of cool way to purge a lot of toxins from your liver. But I wanted to get your thoughts on it and see what if this is safe or not. So appreciate your thoughts and keep up the good work.

Not sure about the idea of drinking olive oil, but I'm open.

Ben, I actually had when I was at the grocery store last night. Have you come across this company, Kavita, that makes cayenne lemon juice cleanses that are made from fermented coconut water?

Yes, I have.

I love them. I don't know if they're doing a thing to my body when it comes to a liver flush, but they at least taste good, especially the ones that don't add a bunch of residual sugar to there is something scientifically to the concept of some of the components of something like this flush. So we can get a little bit sciency here and put on our thinking caps. But if you think about gallstones, for example, technically a large dose of oil, such as you might get from olive oil, that's going to stimulate a pretty strong gallop bladder contraction. That if you have small gallstones or a whole crop of small gallstones, which they actually call, I'm going to use the highly medical term here, sludge. If you have a lot of that, sometimes an oily meal can stimulate a gallbladder contraction. This is also why some people who switch to a high fat diet, they'll get indigestion pretty quickly, even if it's from healthy fats. Right? Not a chicken wing based high fat diet, but, but like, let's say olive oil, avocado, coconut milk, stuff like that. Because their gallbladder doesn't contract or produce bile quite as well. And in many cases, those type of people need to be on a digestive enzyme complex that includes bile extract and ideally also includes something like hydrochloric acid. Right. So a digestive enzyme that just has digestive enzymes in it for a high fat diet is inferior to a digestive enzyme complex that has, say, HCL and bile extract in it. So just something to note there. But at the same time, yes, there's theoretically something to the idea that when you have the olive oil component of a flush for the gallbladder or the liver, you are going to stimulate a gallbladder contraction. Now, when you look at another component that you'll see in some of these cleanses, many of them, although the one that Michelle described doesn't talk about this, many of them include some kind of a salt or like you're adding a sea salt or a magnesium or an Epsom salt, magnesium sulfate, specifically, like what you'd find in Epsom salts, that also stimulates a gallbladder contraction. And it relaxes a lot of the muscles that control the release of bile into the intestines in a very, very similar way as fat would or oil would. It also causes a release of something called cholecystokinin or CCK from the upper small intestine. Okay? So you would, for example, now know that there are two things that you could put into, say, a flush. You could put some olive oil and you could either use magnesium or some kind of a salt based extract or a trace mineral extract or something like that. Now, next we get to the juicing component, right? Lemon juice or something that is the equivalent of lemon juice. You'll find apple juice is another one that gets recommended quite a bit. And the argument here is that these are somehow stone solvents, that they break down the gallstones, that the chemical contact between, between the juice, the acidic juice and the gallstone will break it down. The problem with this is there's actually no way for the apple juice or any other agent that you take by mouth to come into contact with stones in the gallbladder or in the bile duct. You actually have a pretty effective sphincter muscle built in that prevents your intestinal contents from leaking back into your bile duct or your gallbladder. So when you drink, like, fruit juices, lemon juice, flushes, stuff like that, those are not actually going into your gallbladder or into your bile duct. And so it's unlikely that there's much happening from the lemon juice component, aside from it being a slight digestif that may, similar to the olive oil, cause you to produce a little bit of extra bile. By the way, I'm just going to see how many times I can say the word bile in today's show. Such a pleasant word. It's one of those words that actually is as gross as it actually sounds.

Bile. It is.

Bile.

Keep going.

Bile. Okay, so anyways, the flushes like this are safe, right? Obviously, olive oil, lemon juice, stuff like that's not going to do that much to you. But the question is, is it giving you the most bang for your buck when it comes to passing things like stones through your body or flushing your liver? When we look at studies, there's not a whole lot in terms of literature that can inform us as to whether this stuff worked. So we know, for example, that there have been studies that have been done on lemon juice, lemon extracts, and they've been shown to lower liver cholesterol levels. And there's also another study that suggests that lemon peel consumption could be beneficial if you have something like fatty liver disease. So we do know that lemons are doing something to the liver, something beneficial to the liver. We've also seen in research. There was a study back in 2010 that showed that olive oil can actually cause a similar reduction in the occurrence of fatty liver and may protect against some toxins that could potentially damage the liver. Okay, so there's a little bit of mild research out there that shows that some of this stuff might actually work. I like to get a little bit more specific, though, and look into what would actually be causing a liver to become, you know, toxic in the first place. What is. What is a toxin, for example? And when we. When we look at toxins, you know, we can look at everything from, like, volatile organic compounds that you'd find in paints and air fresheners and cleaning products, to, you know, perichlorate that you'll find in, like, fuel, you know, like car fuel and airplane fuel. There are phenols, there's arsenic, there's acrylamide, which we find in, like, you know, cigarette smoke or foods that have been cooked at a high temperature. There is, of course, what we find in our personal care products in our household. Cleaning chemicals. And your liver, in many cases, has a two phase process to break down chemicals and toxins. Have you heard of a phase one detox versus a phase two detox, Rachel?

I have, yes.

Okay, so in the liver, during phase one, you get toxins that get neutralized and broken down into smaller fragments. And then in phase two, in the liver, these toxins are bound to other molecules and then excreted in the bile or in the urine or in the stool. And so as long as you have what you need for phase one and phase two detox, your liver does a pretty good job in both of these pathways.

So what do we need for phase one and phase two detox?

Yeah, phase one would be. Well, I'll tell you. B vitamins, right? So B2, B3, B6, B12, folic acid, even the type of NAD. I don't know if you heard the weekend podcast episode on nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. But in addition to a whole host of really powerful antioxidant mechanisms, it would be beneficial for the liver as well for the reasons that we talked about in that episode. So your B complex, any foods that are rich in antioxidants or flavonoids. Right? So dark fruits, vegetables, carrots, oranges, almonds, which are rich in vitamins A, C and E. Those are important. Glutathione is especially important as a phase one detoxificant. And you can use like, a glutathione supplement. You could use like, a whey protein, which actually has a lot of glutathione precursors in it. But you'll also find glutathione in stinky sulfurous foods. Right, like garlic and onions and sulfur based foods and, you know, asparagus and things that would make your breath stink or that would bewhat my kids would call farty foods. Right? So glutathione amino acids are another one. And then phospholipids, right? Phospholipids you're gonna find in eggs, fatty cuts of meat, organ meats. Believe it or not, eating liver is good for your liver. Big clue there. And fermented soy products like natto or tempeh or miso. A lot of those are pretty high in phospholipids as well. So that would be your phase one precursors. You'd want to include a lot of those type of things in your diet. And then the phase two, where we remove a lot of these toxins from the liver. Again, stinky vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, brussels Sprouts, those are high in something called Indole 3 Carbinol, which is really, really important for phase two detox. Limonene, which you're going to find in addition to lemon. You'll find that in oranges, tangerines, caraway seeds, dill seeds. So there's something to the lemon component for the phase two portion of a liver detox. Glutathione, once again is also important for phase two. Not just phase one, but also phase two, fish oil and amino acids. And there are multiple studies that have shown the efficacy of all the nutrients that I just described for supporting proper liver detox pathways. For those of you who raise an eyebrow whether or not the science exists, I will link in the show notes to an article that I wrote about how to detox your liver in which I link to a lot of these published peer reviewed studies that have been done on some of the components that I just described for detoxing the liver. But you would want to include a lot of those in the diet. And I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I have a question as far as detoxification. Yeah, go ahead.

Around the liver and functionality, is there anything in our genes that stop our livers like any mutations in our genes that stop our livers from functioning?

Sure. If you were to, for example, get like a fitness analysis through a company called DNAFit, for example, will take your salivary genetic analysis and spit out specific recommendations such as you're a person who should exercise every day consistently versus spend a long period of time between bigger exercise sessions. One of the reasons for that, that you might be able to get away with smaller frequent exercise sessions would be you have a high amount of endogenous glutathione or endogenous antioxidant production. And in that case you might be someone who would not necessarily need to take a lot of exogenous glutathione. Right. So that would be an example of how your genes could influence this.

And would it then be damaging to take extra glutathione?

Not necessarily damaging anything except your pocketbook.

Yeah, yeah.

Just money extra spent. But the other thing that is important to realize is that in that phase two detox pathway, there are specific components that have been studied that can bioaccumulate or reduce toxicity in tissue, including liver tissue. Spirulina and chlorella have been heavily studied for this and there's a large body of evidence to support their detoxification activity. And there are other compounds. Dandelion extract is a Big one. Another really big one is milk thistle extract that they have shown can actually protect and promote the growth of liver cells and fight oxidation, particularly in the liver. And that's due to a component that they have in them called silymarin. Silymarin can actually enhance that phase two liver detoxification pathway. And so there are other things in addition to dandelion and spirulina and chlorella, there's ginseng and zinc and all sorts of things. And again, full disclosure, I actually make a supplement that is designed with all of these compounds in it to detox and cleanse not just the liver, but also the gut, the gallbladder, a lot of these other organs, using things that have actually been proven in studies and not trendy, like, you know, maple syrup, lemon cayenne type of cleanses. That one's called nature cleanse. Nature cleanse. And it's just basically got a colon blended it and that has turkey, rhubarb root, slippery elm bark, marshmallow root, fennel seed and fenugreek. So it's really good for digestif. It's also really good for your colon. There's an activated fiber blend in there that has things like apple fiber and some of those prebiotics that we talked about that are really good for fiber feeding the good bacteria in the gut. Inulin is another one that's in there. There's a mineral blend in there that also has some certified organic beet juice concentrate to assist with blood flow to the gut. And then there is a botanical blend that has things like hyssop in it, which is really nourishing to the gut, and ginger, yucca, rosemary, turmeric. So you can give yourself not just a healthy liver, but a silky smooth bowel movement every morning.

It sounds a lot better than drinking a cup of olive oil.

Yeah. And one recommendation, some people will use that you need to take it with a big glass of water. My preferred method is I'll take four of those capsules with a big glass of water in the evening. I don't do that all the time, but typically one or two times a week. And especially like if I've had, you know, more than one glass of alcohol, situations like that, I will, I will include that nature cleanse stuff as well. So I'll link to that along with some of these other studies over in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 355 and now, Michelle, your liver can be as clean as a whistle.

Hi, Ben, this is Ross in New Hampshire. Thanks very much for the podcast and all your information. Wondering what you think about stem cell therapies and treatments for injuries instead of surgeries. Traditional doctors seem to only be interested in surgeries and don't place much stock at all in the stem cell therapies. And the stem cell guys think that the stem cells are the are the way of the future. Regenexx is the particular procedure I'm looking at and it's for to repair articular cartilage damage in a knee. And anyway, just wondering what you think about that. Thanks, Rachel.

My left knee is going numb.

Oh, time to change. I think it's been longer than 10.

To 15 minutes here. Two knees over to one knee. There we go. All right, good as new.

We're ready.

Or maybe I just need stem cell therapy. So a stem cell therapy for the treatment of injury. So there actually is this new form of therapy that a lot of people are talking about. It's called regenokine. That's actually what it's known as in the United States. Technically, the name for it is orthokine and it is an experimental medical procedure where you get your own blood extracted and then reintroduced as a way to reinitiate the growth. Very similar like that graston technique of new cells to reduce pain, to reduce comfort, to re induce inflammation in an area where maybe inflammation has shut down. It needs to be reinitiated so that healing factors can migrate into an area. And this particular treatment, this orthokine treatment, it was developed by a couple of molecular biologists in Germany and they've studied it on osteoarthritis of the knee and they've actually found it to produce some really good positive results. It's different than, for example, platelet rich plasma or prp. Prp. Basically you extract the blood and you spin the blood in a centrifuge and then you re inject just the platelet part of the blood. It's basically just a bunch of white blood cells that you're injecting back into tissue to reinitiate a healing process. Whereas with orthokine or regenokine, when you extract the blood, you're specifically heating the blood and then centrifuging it until you get some of the parts separated. When you centrifuge it and then incubate it at a slightly higher temperature, you get more of the components that stop what's called interleukin. You get a production of what are called interleukin antagonists. And these are anti inflammatory Properties that using this orthokine process get concentrated as much as a hundred times higher than what you'd get in like a PRP or a platelet rich plasma type of treatment. And there are a lot of professional athletes who swear by this. You know, this is the one that Kobe Bryant did and Grant Hill did. And who are some other people I know, Joe Rogan and Dana White, right? A couple guys involved with the ufc, they swear by this stuff. Brandon Roy, who is also a retired NBA professional, he does it. You get some celebrities like Willie Nelson has done it, bass root and another like MMA UFC guy has done it. There's a lot of footballers, volleyball players, all sorts of folks who swear by this orthokine procedure. But it's not stem cells. It's really not stem cells as much as your own tissue or your own blood specifically that you are extracting and then re injecting specifically for osteoarthritis and joint pain. And in many cases, folks are actually flying to Europe to get this done because it hasn't yet received FDA approval in the US because there's some kind of requirement in the US that body tissues have to be manipulated or something like that prior to a blood extraction. I'm not quite sure how it works, but basically it's easier to get in Europe than it is to get in the States. But you can still get stem cell in the States specifically. For example, I'm aware of one place in Las Vegas, and there's a physician in Las Vegas, his name is Dr. McGee, and he uses amniotic fluid, which you would get from a mom who's had a C section. You can get stem cells from her amniotic fluid and also from what's called the chorionic fluid and from umbilical cord cells that you can then inject into muscle tissue using a series of injections to get something very similar to what you'd get from like, you know, embryonic stem cells, without a lot of the ethical issues that you run into with embryonic stem cells. And that one a lot of people swear by as well. And his website is totalsportsmedicine.com he's based out of Las Vegas. But that's a little bit different than Regenekene or Orthokine. It's actual stem cell injections. But that's another one that not only seems to be pretty efficacious, and this is just based on anecdotal evidence, but also one that would be a procedure very similar to something else. I'll tell you about here in just a second in which you can actually inject or put the stem cells into one area of the body and they will go to and act upon whatever area of the body that needs healing. And so stem cells are very interesting in that respect in that they don't necessarily have to be injected straight into the injury site.

And is there any downsides or side effects to either of those two?

Well, anytime that we are healing a muscle rapidly, whether we are using a steroidal precursor, whether we're using a hormone replacement therapy, whether we're using colostrum, right. Whether we're using stem cell injections, peptides, et cetera, there is potential for a lot of extra tissue growth. There is no long term study on this in humans, but I suspect that there may be some potential for there to be like a carcinogenic effect. Right. If you overdo this stuff. So, yeah, you may get cancer growing out your head if you're not careful. Anyways, though. So there's a few other things, though, like bpc. I wrote a big article on this totally legal stuff that you can order from like, veterinary or human chemical research websites. It's not cleared by the FDA for human consumption, but it is legal. It's a peptide. Many peptides are banned by the World Anti Doping association or banned by USADA, but BPC157 is a little powder that you can order. You can do what's called a reconstitution, meaning that you inject what's called bacteriostatic water into it, and then you inject that either into a joint or you can literally just spray it straight into your mouth very slowly because it's pretty fragile stuff, but you spray it into your mouth quite slowly with like an insulin syringe. Case in point. I woke up the other day and my neck was hurting because I was doing handstands the day before in yoga. And this was right before we just hosted the seal fit event at our house. And one part of that event was we sent everybody out the door to just basically walk 15 miles with a 50 pound pack on. Right? It was just a ruck in the middle of the day and I was supposed to lead it, and my neck was not feeling up to the task. I just basically got an insulin syringe, extracted a bunch of BPC157, jammed it into my neck intramuscularly. So not the. And of course I cleaned with an alcohol swab first, but just jammed, cringed, injected, and then I rubbed the tissue for about Two or three minutes to work the peptides into the tissue. Within a couple of hours, my neck was completely pain free. I mean, this stuff can work super duper fast. Should probably be illegal. It might be soon. Again, no long term human studies on it, but it's just basically a peptide. I recently wrote two different articles at Ben Greenfield Fitness, one on this BPC157. Another article that I wrote was on a different peptide called TB500. There is even what's called a SARMS, which is an androgen receptor module. There are a bunch of different SARMs out there as well, and I'm working on an article about that. Again, that's something that would not be conducive if you're an athlete, like competing in UFC or tennis or basketball or Spartan racing or triathlons or anything else that is monitored by USADA or wada. But when it comes to just healing up muscle tissue more quickly, things like peptides and things like sarms you can do in the comfort of your own home versus say, stem cell injections or orthokine or regenechine where you need to travel to a facility to get it done. So I'm all about things like, you know, scraping yourself with a butter knife and jamming insulin syringes into your neck that you can do in the, in the comfort of your own kitchen on Snapchat versus traveling to a dock. But to answer Ross's question, this stuff can work.

Hey, Ben, this is Karen from New Mexico. I am an ultra purist for what I put in and on my body, as I know you are. So I trust your opinion with this question. But I have never heard anyone address tattoos and injecting ink inside their bodies. Is it harmful? Is it not? Do you think we'll find out in 20 years? That it is, and I would love to hear you respond.

Thanks. Bye.

Rachel, do you have any tattoos?

I knew.

Do you have actually more specifically. Great pickup line for a bar. Do you have butterflies and barbed wire coming up your butt?

No. Do you have barbed wire and tattooed sons from the 90s?

I have a tribal son tattoo that you could say is slightly dated. It is mildly a frat boy tattoo. I have a tattoo on my shoulder. I get asked about my tattoos. The tattoo on my shoulder is the Japanese kanji symbol for chi or life force. The tattoo on my back is the Iron man logo immersed in water and fire to signify my six completions of the Hawaii Iron man in Kona. And then I have the Greek Hellenic symbols for water and Earth tattooed on my hip to signify my boys river and Terran. And that one's designed to look like a birthmark. I have my wife's initial tattooed on my finger, so I do not wear wedding ring. I have that tattoo instead. And I believe, according to my calculations, that those are all the tattoos that I have.

So they can't. They can't be that unhealthy.

Well, we'll get into that. Did you say you have any?

I do, yeah. I have a. The word autonomy tattooed in my foot. When I was 18, I got it tattooed in my foot before I went traveling, and then I had.

What's. What's the word?

Autonomy.

Why did you tattoo that on your foot?

I wanted to. Well, I appreciate and strive to be a self governing individual, and I kind of think it was a bit of a way of telling the whole world to kind of f off as well.

Yes.

And then I have a wolf tattooed on my wrist, which is from the book Women who Run with the Wolves, which was written by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and it's about a woman who sings life into the dead.

Interesting. Well, if anyone ever sees Rachel, the tattoo on her foot is assigned to you to go f off. Just so you know, it sounds quite smart. Autonomy. Yeah, it is interesting because our tribal ancestors, they used a lot of dyes made from the natural environment that I'll get into in a second. But many of today's tattoos have kind of an unknown conglomeration of metallic salts, right? Like oxides and sulfides and selenides and things that you'd find in, like vaccines, for example, that, you know, we won't get into that debate right now. But vaccines aren't necessarily the healthiest thing to be injecting into your body. You'll find organic dyes, you'll find plastic suspended in the carrier solutions that they use for a lot of these tattoos. The European Commission did a report on the health risks of tattooing, and they found about 40% of the organic colorants used in tattoos in Europe aren't even approved for use on the skin as a cosmetic ingredient. And nearly 20% of them contained a carcinogenic aromatic compound called an amine. And many of the chemicals that they found in the tattoos were originally intended for use in writing inks and paper inks and automobile paints, and not necessarily in tattoo inks. So that is one issue is the components of the inks themselves. And the FDA here in the US they don't require ingredient disclosure on the inks. And so tattoo inks can technically contain any chemical. They can contain mutagenic chemicals that can cause mutations. They can cause teratogenic chemicals which are capable of causing birth defects, and carcinogenic chemicals which are of course capable of developing cancer. And when we look at the actual components themselves, first of all, the carrier solution of an ink that typically contains things like denatured alcohols, methanol, rubbing alcohol, antifreeze, detergents, formaldehyde, and other aldehydes that can can indeed be pretty toxic and carcinogenic. And there is a huge variety of dyes and pigments that are used in tattoos like quinoline and dyes made from ash and from inorganic materials like titanium dioxide and a lot of things that people are either allergic to or that aren't doing the body any favors. And they have some newer tattoos now. Like they have plastic based inks that are like glow in the dark inks and those polymerize under the skin and create literally one big solid piece of of plastic under the skin that slowly leeches plastic into your system. There are others that will just glow in response to black or ultraviolet light. And that's another plastic based pigment that can actually cause a phototoxic reaction when sun interacts with it. When you look at like the red ink in tattoo, typically they'll put mercury in a lot of the red inks. They put a cobalt in some of the blues. Cadmium sulfite is one that you'll find in the yellows. And many of these contain things like lithium and copper and essentially metals. You know, I've personally tested high for metals before and have wondered how much of that is due to the tattoos that I've gotten. You know, obviously you can get it from brake dust and car keys and Chinese toys and stuff like that as well, but you can certainly find quite a bit of these components in tattoo inks.

So the question sounds terrible.

Is there anything non toxic when it comes to tattoos? Well, there are some safe carriers that are basically just like purified water and glycerine and ethanol that do not contain a lot of these more damaging ingredients. And specifically, there are some relatively non toxic ink colors, like black, for example, if you don't have hemochromatosis and you get like a traditional ink made out of black, that black ink is typically comprised primarily of iron. Sometimes they'll use carbon, sometimes they'll use logwood. But that would be an example of a relatively non toxic tattoo. White pigments, a lot of times they'll just use titanium dioxide. Non toxic yellow tattoos can be made from turmeric. For greens, they've got a carbon based pigment called monoazo, which you can get blue. A lot of times they'll use non toxics like sodium, for example. Small traces of copper are used in the blue dye and copper can be a little bit iffy in higher amounts, but pretty small amounts in like the blue dye red. Red you can use. For example, there's something called naphthol, naphthol, which is a hypoallergenic form of red ink. For purple and violet, there's one called dioxazine and carbazole, which sound bad, but those are actually relatively non toxic harmless inks. So it would depend on the tattoo ink manufacturer. And there are some tattoo ink manufacturers that make safe or safer non toxic tattoo inks. Few of the ones you'd want to look for. National Tattoo Supply, the company Eternal, the company Skin Candy Dynamic. There's one called Kurosumi that's K U R O S U M I. And all those companies make pretty significant efforts to produce safer, non toxic tattoo inks. I will link to the names of some of those in the show. Notes to today's episode over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com355 but ultimately the answer is A, it depends. B, if you really like the tattoo and you love the badass look that it gives to your butt crack or the f off message that your foot can send to the world in the case of Rachel, then perhaps it's worth, you know, stripping a couple weeks off your life with some kind of a strange foot cancer. So it all depends on what your priorities are. But that is the skinny on tattoos and toxicity. What do you think, Rachel?

I love it. I have a final question though. Is there anything you can think of real quick that we can do if we have tattoos to sort of mitigate the risk?

Easiest thing that I would do is just a very basic metal detox. There's actually two different things you can do. One that removes a lot of toxins in addition to metal, one that focuses on metal. There's one called Cyto detox. You put about 10 drops of it in the morning and 10 drops in the evening just under your tongue and you hold for about 90 seconds. That one does a really, really good job at detoxifying. You know, it's not really a liver detox as much as like a blood detox. So that would be one that you'd get either very close to the time that you got a tattoo or if you're still concerned about things circulating in the body from the tattoo, it would be one to look into. There's another one called metal free, and this is just basically a spray that you spray and hold in your mouth again like sublingually for about 60 to 90 seconds. And it specifically acts on metals. It's called a heavy metal detox spray. Both of those would be prudent to include if you've just recently gotten a tattoo or if you've been exposed to these type of tattoo inks in the past and you want to kind of clean up your body. So try those out.

Awesome. Thank you.

You're welcome. So that being said, which I always tend to say at least once on a podcast, what do you think? Shall we give away some cool stuff today?

Yes, definitely.

So this is the time of the show when we give away goodies. We're going to give away a water bottle, cool tech T shirt, a beanie. And the way that you get these is you leave a review over on itunes. And if you leave us a five star review in itunes and say something nice, we will send straight to your front door a goody pack. If you hear your review read on the show, just email geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's geereenfieldfitnesssystems.com with your T shirt size and we'll get a pack off to you. So that being said, we've got a review. I said it twice. We've got a review read by or left by Iplesco. What do you think, Rachel? You want to take this one away?

Yes. The review is called listening to Ben can cost you money in a good way. Since starting to listen to Ben Greenfield last year, I now own an Oura ring, an SR1 sleep device, leg squeezes, compression boots, various supplements, etc. Without his podcast, I would never have been exposed to these products and or the information. As a chiropractor, I can use much of Ben's information for my practice to help patients. Good stuff. And I want that true to form treadmill.

The true form trade. You know what he's talking about? The true form treadmill.

No, which one's that?

That is the special curved treadmill that I use as a standing workstation. It is a treadmill that's designed to teach you how to walk and run with proper foot and body biomechanics. And so I can do an all out sprinter or run on it. And I do it because it's manual, right. So it doesn't have a motor, doesn't produce a lot of dirty electricity in my office. A treadmill is one of the biggest producers of EMF that you can have hanging around your house. So it's a manual treadmill, but it is pretty fancy. I think it's a few thousand bucks. It's like the Cadillac of treadmills. It's the one they use, the CrossFit games. But yeah, there is yet another thing for those of you out there who are slowly becoming more and more poor from listening to the podcast. However, with heavily enriched lives from a health and fitness standpoint, there's yet another purchase for you. So we will put a link to that review as well as a link to everything from the wrist shocking device to the 3D naked mirror that we talked about, the Graston muscle scrapers, the Liver Detox supplements that I make, the BPC157 that you can jam into your neck with a needle, and oh so much more if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 3:55 Rachel I'm going to go plug everything in my hotel room back in so I don't piss off the housekeepers.

Okay. And I'm gonna go to Amazon and buy some funky looking metal scrapers.

Awesome. All right folks, well, thanks for listening in. Stay tuned this weekend for a podcast with the Great Juji Mufu, aka John. Call and have a healthy week. 3, 2, 1.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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