Does A Vegetarian Diet Reduce Sperm Count, Cell Phones And Brain Cancer, What Is A Good "HRV" Number & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, Does a vegetarian diet reduce sperm count, cell phones and brain cancer? The best place to live for an active lifestyle? How to naturally increase HCl production? What is a good heart rate variability number meat broth versus bone broth and much more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, diabete digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfield Fitness.com.

Shalom, Ben.

Hey yo. Shalom.

Did I say that right? Shalom. Shalom.

I think that's one of those Hebrew words that is easy to say correctly because you don't have to sound like you're spitting up a hairball when you say it. Unlike say, which I, which I said plenty of times over the past week in Tel Aviv because I pretty much drank copious amounts of wine and cocktails every night over there. And it was amazing, by the way. Amazing. I'm sure that our listeners perhaps listened to the last two podcasts that have released from Israel if you didn't go back and listen to them. Because I took away a lot of really interesting, a lot of good tips as far as the whole health, wellness and nutrition scene over there. So check those out. Go back and listen to those two episodes. It's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Israel and BenGreenfieldFitness.com why cancer? Why cancer? And they kind of go over some of the stuff that I found over in Israel that I think you'll find helpful. But speaking of bringing things back from Israel, Brock, did you bring me a present? We had a little Ben Greenfield.

Did you bring me a camel?

We had a little Ben Greenfield fitness meeting.

Camel full of pumice.

I did not even see any camels over there, by the way. Lots of goats.

They do have real cities and not everybody rides a camel. And all the stuff we see in Disney films.

Yes, it's not the Middle east from Aladdin, Brock.

I know.

Anyways, though, olive oil, they do have lots of pretend lots of olive oil there, as you can imagine.

Oh, I bet it's delicious too.

It is delish. And I actually released a video of one of the olive oil farms that we went to and the shocking news that you actually really can cook olive oil at high temperatures. I'll put a link to that video. Yeah, extra virgin olive oil. You can Cook at high temperatures. Brand new research.

Crazy.

No, it doesn't. Brand new research that just came out of California showing the type of extra virgin olive oils that you can use if you use the really cloudy stuff with lots of polyphenols and flavonols and antioxidants that comes in like those glass non transparent bottles that actually has a really high smoke point and it does not get oxidized when you heat it. So this was brand new news to me. And I actually got, I caught on video the olive oil researcher going over all this and just uploaded it to YouTube. So I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's over at BenGreen2 9 9, but a funny story about that. We had a little Ben Greenfield fitness meetup in Tel Aviv the night before I came home. And one of our listeners brought me a bottle of olive oil as a gift. Like a nice glass bottle of olive oil. And as we were rushing through the airport, rushing through jfk, we just arrived back in the States where you recheck your bags when you're traveling internationally. You got to grab your bags and rec. Somehow that bottle of olive oil broke inside the bag. So I'm running through the airport, right? And I've got this olive oil bag like dripping behind me as I'm running through the airport. And we arrive to recheck our bags and we hear like all this commotion behind us and loud sounds of like vacuuming machines and like a HAZMAT type of cleanup crew. And they're following this kind of piss colored trail of olive over the linoleum. And I'm kind of, kind of nervously gulping because I can see that the trail of olive oil leads directly to my feet. And this entire cleanup crew at jfk, of course, thought that they were probably cleaning up some type of urine or human body fluid. So they're basically following all the way to me. And finally they get to me. And I was very straightforward with them. I said, well, I have a bottle of olive oil here in my bag that appears to have broken open. So I took it out, I threw it away. I actually stuck my hand in it and just like took a big old like handful of it and ate it right there in the airport just because I wanted to at least see what it tasted like. Yeah. And then I wiped the olive oil off my face and lovingly said goodbye to it and left the Hazmat crew to clean up the highly toxic olive oil from the JFK airport and all.

The people who had wiped out in the bottles of olive oil.

That's right. And I smelled like a giant pizza for the rest of the trip. Mmm.

Delicious news flashes. Now, even though you have been on several different continents in the last few weeks, you have been churning out all kinds of stuff over@twitter.com BenGreenfield and Facebook and so on. Want to highlight some of the cool ones that you've been talking about?

Some of the cool stuff? Yeah, actually, of course, I did just publish last week a podcast on cancer, why you get cancer and what you can do about it.

Yeah, that was very powerful. I enjoyed that one.

It was. And it was more focused on the emotional and stress components of cancer and how our 247 rush lifestyle can potentially suppress disease and cause tumor formation and the actual research that's behind that. But this particular tweet that I sent out was not focused on emotions and stress. It was focused on cell phones and brand new study that showed use of cell phones linked with brain cancer. This was a massive study out of Sweden. And what they found was that talking on cell phones can to brain cancer. They literally studied thousands of people and found that the longer a person uses a cell phone, the more likely that they are to get gliomas, which are a type of tumor found in the brain and the spinal cord. And the risk is three times higher after a couple decades of using a cell phone. And of course, we're now dealing with the first generation that's been using cell phones for a couple of decades. Right. So it's the first time they're actually able to come out with this. So, yeah, I mean, yet more evidence that it may be a good idea for you not only to mitigate your use of a cell phone, but also when you're gonna use one. Do what I do use an air tube headset, which means that it's this cable that plugs into your phone. Sound travels in tubes of air up to your head, and your cell phone never has to go near your head. So I'll link to this new study in the show notes.

But it's like a stethoscope for your phone.

Yes. And if you're listening to this podcast through, like the Apple podcasting app and it's held up to your ear, you should probably put that down right away.

I'm going to start using my phone like the, like the old Spanish ladies I see in the neighborhood that hold it, like out in front of their face and shout into it.

That's what my wife does, because I don't think she's figured out how to use the headset yet. So she just kind of shouts into the speaker. So she can't really ever have a private conversation.

Who needs privacy?

I guess we might as well break the ice here and talk about the vegetarian diet. Did you hear about this one?

Well, I saw the extreme fisticuffs that ensued on the Facebook page when you posted this.

The new study that shows that the vegetarian diet does something terrible to men. I guess if men are interested in having children, and this was a.

In my opinion, that's not an issue.

Well, here's the deal. There's Loma Linda University, right? Loma Linda University is like a Seventh Day Adventist university. And so it's of course a vegan vegetarian institution. And they monitored meat eaters as well as vegetarians and vegans between 2009 and 2013 in hopes, of course, since it was research done by Loma Linda and under assumptions that the vegetarian sperm would be healthy. But what they found, and I quote from the study author, is this. We found that diet does significantly affect sperm quality. Vegetarian and vegan diets are associated with much lower sperm counts than omnivorous diets. Although these people are not infertile, it is likely to play a factor in conception, particularly for couples who are trying to conceive naturally the old fashioned way.

I love how it says with the turkey baster.

It's the old fashioned way. Yeah, with the turkey baster. So they found that vegetarians had 30% lower concentrations of sperm and that their sperm was weaker in terms of movement or motility. And so for vegetarians, only 30% of their sperm were active compared to 60% of the sperm being active in their meat eating counterparts. So there were a couple kind of explanations that they thought that may say why this would be the case. One was the possibility of like a shortage of vitamin B12. And vitamin B12 helps to break down estrogen, which can help to maintain a high sperm count. This is the same reason that women who have like estrogen dominance a lot of times can benefit from vitamin B12 or vitamin B12 injections. It turns out that, you know, in a vegetarian or vegan who's maybe not including, say like spirulina chlorella, some type of a B12 supplementation, that might be why their sperm count is lower. They found that pesticides might be a factor just because, you know, more fruits, more vegetables in a vegetarian or a vegan could cause increased consumption of pesticides if they're not being careful about where they're getting their fruits and vegetables. And then soy. It's possible that high consumption of soy in a vegan or vegetarian diet could impact sperm quality. I think that one of the important things to bear in mind here though is that just like anything, if you look at a vegan or vegetarian diet that's low in B12, that's high in non organic produce consumption, that's got a lot of pesticides on it, and then that also is high in soy. Well, yeah, that's a vegan or vegetarian diet done the wrong way. Right? So in contrast, yeah, in contrast, smart supplementation, use of vitamin B12, you know, consumption of organic, non herbicide, non pesticide laden fruits and vegetables. You know, only consumption of like fermented soy like miso and tempeh and natto. I still think, and I've always said this, that you could do a vegan diet, right. Or you could do a vegetarian diet. Right. And incidentally, like the whole time I was in Tel Aviv, I had meat twice. Like the entire trip was almost entirely vegan. You know, falafel and chickpeas and hummus and seeds and nuts and a fantastic array of foods. And I felt great. But, but that again was a vegan diet done the right way. So, so yeah, I think all our.

Listeners, all of our vegetarian and vegan listeners are doing it the right way, so they're probably not having this problem.

Yeah, in a similar way, I might.

Be sucking up to our listeners because I don't want to answer a whole bunch of angry emails.

I, I did my own sperm count a huge favor this morning actually, and it's why I was about a half hour late to our podcast recording this morning.

Were you out chopping wood?

I actually decided, I decided to get up early and go hunting this morning and I got about 180 pound buck at about 7:30am this morning. So I was out there field dressing it and it's actually the, it's, it's the, the biggest buck that I've gotten yet. So it took me quite a while to, to field dress and to. Then I got quite a workout in getting it back to my truck and then getting it into my truck. And so anyways, my, my sperm, that's the size of me. It was, it was a big, big animal. I mean, it wasn't like an elk or anything like that, but it was a big animal and it was.

How long do you think it would take you to field dress me?

To field dress you? I don't want to field dress you, Brock.

Okay.

I don't want to Feel dressing for a little while. I still, I still honestly stink a little bit. It's like, I don't know if you, when you feel dressed an animal, there's like this smell that just kind of like stays on you. It's. It permeates you. And. Yeah, anyways, I don't want, anyway, I don't want to gross people out, so I'll stop there.

Sorry. Vegetarians and vegans.

Yes.

Not only are your sperm low, but now you're sick to your stomach, but.

My sperm right now are quite happy. So. And I of course kept the, kept the horns for my kids. They call them horns. So I kept the horns for my kids. And then the last thing that I wanted to mention, a final tweet that I sent out was breathing. And there was a really interesting article over at the Sweat Science blog on runner's world. And again we'll link to all of these articles over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 299299 I guess we're almost episode 300.

Yeah, we gotta figure out what kind of party we're gonna have.

Anyways, this one's about inspiratory muscle training and the fact that there are studies that show that when you warm up your inspiratory muscles, meaning you actually use like one of these resisted breathing devices, right? Like a power lung that they found that it can actually, in this case in swimmers, increase their performance by improving their hundred meter freestyle swim time. I thought this was really interesting and it's actually something that I do now when I am traveling to races like the last few Spartans that I've done, typically I'll fly into a race. Race. My hotel's anything from 15 to 30 minutes away from a race typically. So when I'm driving in my car to a race, I actually do a power lung warmup where I'll do a good 20 sets of three seconds in, three seconds out just to get the lung muscles warmed up. And I mean why not, right? Why not get your lungs all primed, get your inspiratory and expiratory muscles going. Even if you can't warm up your legs while you're driving, I think it's great. And even if you don't have a power lung, you can do some like the warrior breathing that I've talked about before. Like the, like the, like the 50 reps of like a sharp nasal inhale and exhale to hyper oxygenate you a little bit. I'm a fan and this, this study shows that there May actually be some benefit to inspiratory muscle exercising to warm you up prior to competition. So, I mean, you know, travel with a power lung. I've always got one in in my bag. Of course, all of our listeners get a discount on the power long. I think it's bgf. Like if you. If you buy a power lung from like the PowerLung website, it's BGF025, I think is what it still is. Well, I'll find it and put it in the show notes. But yeah, interesting that you can actually warm up your breathing muscles using these resisted breathing devices and get benefit from them.

And you can learn even more about some breathing stuff if you hang on for Saturday's podcast, which is super cool.

Yeah, Saturdays is pretty epic. Hey Ben, I have a question for you. Given your lifestyle, extensive travels, I was wondering why you live where you do.

And what do you think are the.

Best spots to live for? Swimming, biking, running, wellness, and just active lifestyle in general. Thanks.

It kind of sounds like Jeff isn't very fond of Spokane area.

I love living in Spokane and it's not just because I can hunt and podcast on the same morning. You know, Spokane in particular is. It's a very quiet city. It is jam packed with mountain biking, fishing, skiing, hunting, snowboarding, hiking, all four seasons, spring, summer, winter, and the other one fall. It's pretty much just got a little bit of everything and I love it. It actually just got ranked, I believe it was in Outside magazine, as one of the top waterfronts in the country as well, just because the Spokane river kind of passes through it all. The reason that I live here, honestly, is not originally because of all that. It's originally because when I graduated from University of Idaho, I got a job in Spokane, technically close to Coeur d', Alene, Idaho, which is across the border from Spokane in surgical sales. So I was selling knees and hips and standing around in surgical wards helping doctors to install knees and hips. Like that was my first job out of college. And I wound up living in Spokane for that and never leaving. But I fell in love with the city. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. And now I have my dream home out here in the middle of the forest. And it really is just a place where you can get out in nature and escape the hustle and bustle. The big city, there's enough to do because it's got about half a million people to where that you've still got a cultural scene, but there's zero traffic and there's tons of as we like to call it nature. It's also got really low pollution. This was interesting. When I was in Tel Aviv, I met with a startup over there and this is a startup that just launched a brand new app called the Breezometer. And the Breezometer maps real time air pollution and it gathers air pollution weather data from literally thousands of sources. And then it's got this built in algorithm that shows you the exact air quality and what's called an air quality heat map around you no matter where you're at. So you can, you know, anywhere in the city you can do something like map out like a running route or a cycling route and you can see exactly what the air quality is going to be like when you're in that route. And it literally circumnavigate the smog it will create. You can tell it how far you want to run, for example, and it will create the healthiest run for you based off of air quality. If air quality tends to affect you deleteriously like with asthma or you know, your, your lungs, the way you feel after the run, it will literally help to show you where to go for the best air quality for like a bike ride or a run or anything like that. I, I thought it was a pretty cool idea honestly. It's called Breezometer. I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but I believe it's, it's free or close to free and you just put it on your. It's available for, for Google and then also available soon. I think they're developing the iPhone version, but it's almost out. I think he said it was going to be a couple of weeks or something like that when I met with them. But yeah, super duper cool. Called the Breezometer. The reason I bring that up is not only is the air quality really good in Spokane, but there are also some other big cities for active families. And Outside magazine actually just came out with their 10 best big cities for active families. So shall we tell people what they are? Drum roll.

I think that deserves a drum roll.

Drum roll. And by the way, I'll put a link to this article if you want to really delve into the nitty gritty details of each of these cities. So here they are. Minneapolis, Minnesota, best for lovers of parks and lakes. Austin, Texas, best for urban recreation. And I actually do really like Austin. I used to do a, teach a triathlon camp down there and I grew Austin and Portland, two of the only other cities that I would consider living in aside from Spokane. They're Both on this list. So Portland is on there. And of course Portland because of the, the awesome cycling scene there is why it made the list. But there's a lot more to do in Portland, so don't you have to.

Ride a unicycle though? I had to do something like that.

Yeah. Salt Lake City, Utah is on there. Salt Lake City, Utah best for mountain sports, skiing, snowboarding, stuff like that. Boston, Massachusetts. This one surprised me, but Boston is best for runners and running fanatics, which I think is really interesting. I actually visited the, the author of the book the Evolution of the human body, Dr. Daniel Lieberman, who believes that running barefoot is, is the best thing since sliced bread. Or is it sliced cheese? I don't remember. What's the analogy?

Sliced pemmican?

Sliced. Yeah, whatever. Sliced liver. Anyways, I was in Boston a couple years ago and he and I did an eight mile run through Boston barefoot. Amazing.

Cool.

But Boston is a good place for running for Knocks. Colorado Springs, Colorado best for endurance sports such as triathlon. Madison, Wisconsin. Madison, Wisconsin is best for cycling, especially road cycling. Of course they have the world famous Ironman Wisconsin there. Albuquerque, New Mexico made the list. Albuquerque, New Mexico, which they say is best for year round adventure. Things like rock climbing, trail running, mountain biking, even skiing. So Albuquerque, New Mexico and meth of course. Washington D.C. and it says that Washington D.C. is best for weekend warriors, whatever the hell that means. But it's got a hiking trails, a road biking route, whitewater for kayakers. So Washington D.C. that one kind of surprised me that Washington D.C. made the list. Boys.

Kind of gross and hot and sticky there.

Yeah, I'm not, I don't run there.

Once and almost barfed.

I don't know how much I'd like to recreate there. Boise, Idaho, which I would agree with, made the list. I've actually got a, I've got a five day elk hunting trip down, down near Boise next year.

I thought this list was supposed to be big cities. Isn't Boise like 300 people?

650,000. So yeah. And Boise is pretty cool. So go watch Napoleon Dynamite if you want to know what Boise is like. Because that's pretty much what it's like.

That's an accurate dictation.

Is it? It actually is. Lots of people wearing wolf T shirts. So those are some other big cities. You know, I told you why I live in Spokane. But if you're looking for another good city to live in, that's another one to look into. Would be this article the 10 best big cities for active families from Outside magazine. So check it out.

Hello, Ben and Brock, this is Kathy from Portland, Oregon. As always, thank you guys for an awesome show. I love the podcast. Don't ever miss it. So today I have a question about hydrochloric acid, betaine HCL specifically, and I hear you mention it a lot, and I know that it's a great supplement to take for many reasons for gut health, to sterilize your food so that you aren't prone to parasites, bacteria, etc. My question is, I have tried to supplement with betaine HCL before and I noticed that it gives me major insomnia, a little bit of anxiety, and I also get a little bit of joint pain with it. So I'm having a hard time finding anything about why this may happen. I did see that it could be related to suppressing like your potassium and magnesium, so I don't know if that has anything to do with.

It.

Could make sense to me. If I supplement with magnesium, for example, I get heart palpitations. So maybe it's all pointing to a mineral imbalance. Not sure. Anyway, would love your thoughts on betaine hcl. And again, thank you guys for all of your awesome work. It is truly appreciated. All right, bye.

So I've never taken HCL myself, but I do use bitters a lot and I know that kind of goes hand in hand.

Yep, bitters. Bitters are digestive, so you can buy bitters in pill or liquid form. And bitters help to. They help your body to produce its own hcl. So bitters aren't acidic, they don't contain hydrochloric acid themselves, but kind of like starting off your day or proceeding a meal with lemon wedges or lemon in water. Bitters work the same way. And that's one way that you can JumpStart your own HCL production if you struggle with the use of an HCL supplement. So yeah, bitters are really good. I personally use a digestive enzyme that has HCL in it. I use the thorn digestive enzyme and I take two of those. And actually the best timing for a digestive enzyme is about 20 to 30 minutes before a meal or 20 to 30 minutes minutes after a meal.

Interesting. So why is that? Why is it just before or just after?

Because that's the amount of time that it takes for the enzyme to actually be waiting and ready in your gut to enzymatically act upon whatever you want it to act upon. So 20, 30 minutes before, 20, 30 minutes after. If you take it right with at the exact same time As a meal, it's actually not quite as effective. So 20, 30 minutes before or after. But the reasoning is kind of interesting. So here's the deal with hcl and some of the deleterious effects of that that Kathy has experienced. It actually is true that when you're taking something acidic, you can pull alkalinic ions like magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium from the blood to buffer the extra acidity that would be in an hcl containing supplement. So that could be the issue that's happening here. Of course, that one would be easily fixed by either a not taking hcl and using some of the other natural alternatives that I'll talk about in addition to bitters here in a second, or just using mineral supplementation, like using things like sea salt, you can get trace liquid minerals that you can add to water. To mineralize water, you can take a multivitamin that has minerals like the thorn multivitamin that I've talked about before. That's actually technically called a multivitamin mineral complex because it's got minerals in it. But basically adding extra minerals into your diet if you're on a high amount of hcl can be helpful if that HCL is pulling alkalinic minerals from your body to help balance out that acidity. So that could be one of the reasons. The other interesting reason, though, that hcl can sometimes cause side effects that are unpleasant, can be because of what's called die off when yeast cells are rapidly killed. Like if you have a fungal infection or candida or something like that, candida in your gut, which can actually be killed by hydrochloric acid that actually releases dozens and dozens of different types of toxins when it dies off. And that can include toxins. I know toxins is kind of a woo woo word, but some of the things I'm referring to, for example, would be ethanol and acetaldehyde. So if you look at acetaldehyde, we've talked about that one on the podcast before. It's something that Asians get big amounts of relationships. If they try to drink and then take one of these Asian drinking pills that people sell now, it can actually create a bunch of acetaldehyde and create even more issues that go way above and beyond the Asian flush that folks get when they drink and they aren't producing alcohol dehydrogenase. But acetaldehyde can be produced when yeast dies off as well. And that can impair your brain function, it can kill brain cells, it can affect your endocrine system, your hormonal balance, your immune system. Your respiratory system. High levels of acetaldehyde can damage the membrane of your red blood cells and reduce their ability to carry oxygen around the body. Now you know why drinking a lot might not be a good idea as well. Like drink a lot of alcohol, but so acetaldehyde, generally you'll get like brain fog and fatigue and sometimes you'll even be more allergic than you would normally be to foods and eventually that die off goes away. But it's what a lot of people feel, just really horrible once they start onto antifungals. Reduce carbohydrate, try and kill off yeast, candida fungus, stuff like that in the digestive tract. And one of the things that can happen is when you take HCl and digestive enzymes and especially a lot of HCl, you can kill off some of that fungus and you can get some of these candida die off type of symptoms. In that case, some of the best things you can do if you're experiencing die off symptoms is one, you just drink a bunch of water to flush those toxins out. And that can help a lot is to just increase your water intake.

A lot of times it seems a little too easy.

Well, there are other things you should do too. You shouldn't be exercising much if you've got die off going off just because stress can weaken your adrenals. And it can be too much stress to be detoxing and be exercising a lot at the same time. Vitamin C helps out quite a bit. It helps to restore adrenal balance and immune system balance. Like taking anywhere from about 2 to 4 grams of vitamin C a day can help if you're experiencing some type of a die off reaction. And then you can also take supplements that help to neutralize acetaldehyde into acetic acid. One of the more common ones is milk thistle. You could literally go out to your yard and find dandelions. If you live in this area of the world. Dandelion works very similarly to milk thistle. You can put dandelion greens in salad, for example, or you can just buy like a dandelion extract or a milk thistle extract. And that can help a lot with converting acetaldehyde into acetic acid. And acetic acid is really easily expelled by your body. Interestingly, if you're using milk thistle extract, it can help to convert that acetaldehyde into acetic acid. And the acetic acid gets converted into digestive enzymes. So there's a pretty cool little circular helpful effect there. So I don't know if this is a candida die off. I don't know if it is a stripping of minerals from the body, but either way, those are some of the things that you could consider doing. Now, if you just wanted to stop taking an HDL supplement altogether. You know, you talked about bitters, Brock, as one thing that can work pretty well to stimulate your body's own HCL production. And that's. That's one really good idea. And actually delicious. They're delicious. They're all right, I guess. They're bitter.

I love them. I have like six or seven different. Different variety of them. And I just take some. Like my SodaStream makes some soda water and just a few drops of bitters. Yeah. And they're awesome.

It's a great idea. It really is a good idea. If you. Sean Croxton right now has his digestion sessions going on. Fantastic online summit. Like, if you have constipation, diarrhea, gas bloating, any digestive issues, this. I think it's like 70 to 80 bucks to download the audios, the transcripts, the videos, everything. That's a really, really good one. He's got an interview in there. One of the things he's gotten there was an interview with a guy named Dr. Ruscio. And they go into how to stimulate your body's own HCL production if you don't want to be on an HCL supplement the rest of your life. One of the things that they talk about is bitters, but another thing they talk about is the fact that if you have H. Pylori, which is an infection that a lot of people have, that can decrease your ability to produce hydrochloric acid as well. And I've tested myself for H. Pylori. It's very, very similar, simple to test for with a gut test or a stool test. And one of the best ways to get rid of HCL is with something called mastic gum. So I got rid of mine by taking two capsules of mastic gum a day for a month, and that was it. And then I retested and the H. Pylori was gone. And my digestive symptoms improved massively. So that's another thing that can affect hydrochloric acid is H. Pylori. And then the last one is, is what can happen if you are not producing enough HCl is symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency. And there was this really interesting study. And again, this is talked about in that digestive sessions summit. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes or you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com FixMyGut that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com fixmygut to download all these sessions. But vitamin B12 injections. They did a really interesting study in Japan where they found that doing vitamin B12 injections, not taking it orally, but doing a once a month vitamin B12 injection, shot in the hip could make the body produce its own hydrochloric acid. Really interesting link between vitamin B12 deficiencies and an inability to produce hydrochloric acid. And this is where they just take a little pinch of like abdominal fat typically or sometimes the fat in your butt. It's a little subcutaneous needle. They ingest vitamin B12 and that's it. Super. It's, it's safe, it's legal. It's something that a lot of naturopathic medical physicians will do. And it's in the, in the Japanese study they were using what's called a cyanocobalamin injection. You can also get a methylcobalamin injection. Injection. But these are just vitamin B12 injections and they improve the production of HCL. So yeah, bitters, knockout H. Pylori, vitamin B12 injections. Look into whether or not this might be a candida die off. If it's not and it's just stripping of alkalinity, you can use minerals. So those are some of the things I'd recommend. And again, I would also I do like this digestion sessions thing. So I would go over to the BenGrudleFitness.com FixMyGut link and grab those as well.

Hi Ben. I want to start using HRV to avoid overtraining. I understand that my LF and HF should be balanced with high power and also that my HRV and RMSSD should be high. But I'm not exactly sure what numbers I'm looking for to see what number is I and what numbers are so out of whack that I just shouldn't be training. I'm female and 25. I have to assume that that also makes a difference. If you have any like quantitative numbers to go by, that would be great help.

Thank you.

Did you check your HRV this morning?

I actually didn't do my HRV measurement this morning because I got up a little while I wanted to hunt. I got up a little late. You got to get out there before you know it's light to get hidden before the deer come out. So I was in a rush, so I did not.

I was going to do a compare our numbers thing, whip it out and see if this was higher.

My numbers are generally anywhere between about 85 and 95 for HRV numbers. And that's a great question about what, what is the right HRV balance? So first of all, I've got a really, really helpful PDF that I'm going to put a link to in the show notes. Because recently in the Superhuman Coach Network, which is the global network of personal trainers and nutritionists that I advise, we had the folks from Sweet Beat come on and do a seminar on some of the really nitty gritty geeked out aspects of hrv. And they actually went into to not just your low frequency and your high frequency numbers which measure the strength of your fight and flight nervous system and your rest and digest nervous system respectively. But also we went into the RSMSSD and I know that that's a mouthful, but basically that's the standard deviation in the amount of time spent between heartbeats, right? So like a high RSMSSD is correlated with a high HS or a high hrv. All that means is that there are tiny beat to beat fluctuations in the amount of time that your body spends between heartbeats. And that's a good thing. It shows good interplay between both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of your nervous system and a good healthy, robust nervous system. But they've also done some studies where they they found the approximate HRVs and the low frequencies and the high frequencies that are generally considered to be average for males and females in different age ranges. And there's a really helpful PowerPoint online that I'll link to if you want to take a look at. I'll link to it in the show notes. But what it comes down to is for younger males up to about 29 years old, the average HRV is about 72 and for females it's about 67. And then as you get older it drops. The average for 30 to 49 years old is 62 for males and 60 for females. For 50 to 69 year old males it's 52 and for 50 to 69 year old females it's 55. And then for the 70 to the 99 year old age range it drops down to about 52 for both males and females. Now what you'll find is that a lot of times in athletes and in very healthy people, especially people who are physically healthy, the HRV is much higher than that. I find that for the majority of the very successful healthy athletes who I work with, who are not injured, who are not getting sick, they tend to consistently stay between 80 and 90. And after our weekly rest day or a weekly easy day, we get up into the 90s. And that's a combination of rest. It includes a low emotional stress, low relationship stress, good nutrient intake. But as far as the actual research on the averages, you know, we're generally looking at anywhere from like the, the mid-70s to upper-60s, when the younger age ranges to like the mid-60s for the, for the higher age ranges. Now, as far as low frequency and high frequency scores, these are also something that you'll find in the Sweet Beat app, for example, which is the app that I use to measure my heart rate variability. For males in their 20s, you're generally going to find low frequency to be right around the mid-1000s, like around 1500. And for females, right around 800. And then for the high frequency score or your parasympathetic nervous system score, close to 1000 for males and right around 500 to 600 for females. And then as you get older, that tends to drop. You know, for males, for example, once you're getting up into your 40s, low frequency is around 200 to 300, same for females. And then high frequency is between 100 and 200. But again, in athletes, like for myself, I tend to make measure between 6,000 and 8,000 for both low frequency and high frequency. So again, these averages are not necessarily for a very healthy, robust population. These are for the non BenGreenfieldFitness.com listeners.

Sucking up again.

Yeah, so basically, if you're listening in and you have no clue what I'm talking about, you need to go back and listen to some of the other HRV episodes, episodes that we've done because we've spent hours explaining what exactly HRV is. But I can tell you those are the numbers based off of studies that have been done. And then I can tell you from my own experience with the athletes that I've worked with, I generally like to see low frequency and high frequency numbers that are about 1500 or higher. And I like to see HRVs that are 80 plus and then on really good days, 90 plus. And if you're 25 years old, you should definitely be in that 80 to 90 range. And in the thousands as far as your, as far as your low frequency and your high frequency goes. And again, in the actual show notes for this episode, I am uploading a PDF that's going to be super helpful for you. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 299, I've got an HRV measurement PDF. And it's the same PDF that we kind of went through in that. That superhuman Code Network workshop that I did. It's not the. The audio or anything like that, but at least gives you some of the information that we went through in the actual PDF itself.

Hi, Ben and Brock. My name is Robin and I have a question about bone broth. Everyone talks about how healthy and nourishing it is to your body. However, I've also read that it has high levels of glutamate. I recently did a Nutri Val test by Genova and it showed that I already had elevated glutamic acid levels. So I'm really concerned about taking anything that might increase my glutamate levels even more. Would love your thoughts about that. I'm really confused about what to do and whether I should be taking it. I mean, drinking it, actually. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

Glutamate.

Glutamate.

Monosodium glutamate.

Monosodium glutamate.

I guess that's just one type of glutamate.

Chinese food. That's right. I like me some good msg. That's a sign of a good Chinese restaurant is if you walk out with brain fog.

Yeah, I listen to a Science Friday podcast all about the MSG conundrum, and the studies are so all over the place. There's no, no real scientific link between MSG and brain fog and all the headaches and all that kind of stuff people report, it's crazy.

It can depend. I mean, when you're looking at MSG or the umami flavoring that's added to Asian food, sometimes it can depend on how much and sometimes it can depend on you. So, for example, glutamate clearance is affected by the amount of mercury that you have in your body. And so if you have like, dental fillings or if you have a lot of heavy metals just because of exposure to heavy metals, or you've never done a metal detox that will lower your ability to clear glutamate or to clear msg. And when that happens, you're going to be more susceptible to brain fog than, say, your neighbor sitting across from you who doesn't have mercury fillings. So, I mean, there are little things that can affect this pretty dramatically. You know, in a case like that, you'd want to say, for example, go visit. Probably the best doctor in the USA for getting your mercury fillings removed is a guy named Stuart Nunneley who lives in Texas. You can look him up or you can look in your area for what's called a holistic dentist. And we've done podcasts before on holistic dentistry. But you can look at getting your mercury fillings removed, or you can do a detox. Like, once a year. I do a heavy metal detox. I use this stuff called metal free, and it literally binds metals in what's an amino acid cage. Like, it's a spray that you put underneath your tongue. It chelates metals, but it doesn't allow them to become active and circulate in the bloodstream. As they're chelated, they're basically passed out in. In your stool. So you get a nice shiny metal stool. Not really. Really? No, not really.

Damn.

That'd be pretty cool, though.

That would be cool.

Grabbing bullets anyways, though. So that's one thing you can look at is mercury and metal. But there's also a difference between bone broth and meat broth. So meat broth is when you cook the bones and the meat into the stock, and that's what's called meat broth or meat stock. It's got a bunch of gelatin, it's got a lot of free amino acids in it, and it's not as high in glutamate as a bone broth, which is when you're actually simmering the bones for a long period of time. So there's a difference between, like, a meat broth and a bone broth. And when you're using a bone broth and you're getting a lot of those glutamates drawn out of the actual bone itself, cooking the bone broth can actually produce a little bit more of those free glutamates in people who are sensitive to those can react to them in the same way that they do with msg. So because of this, what can be a good idea is to start with meat broth and to just use meat broth only. And if you're doing this for health reasons, a lot of times, as you're beginning to get healthier, I talked about Candida die off, for example. And one of the things that they'll use a lot of times in people who have a candida infection or need to heal their gut is bone broth will be one of the recommendations for that. But in reality, to help to ease some of the toxicity that can occur from that Candida die off, I was talking about earlier, you can start off with a meat broth and then gradually progress to a bone broth as you become healthier. But a lot of people just need to stick to meat broth, rather than bone broth. Or cook the bone broth at a really low simmer, which will help to minimize a lot of the freezing glutamate production that occurs when you're making a bone broth. But as far as the glutamate thing goes, you may want to consider doing a metal detox. The other thing you may want to consider is switching to a meat broth instead of a bone broth. I don't know if you're buying these broths or making them yourself, but I would consider kind of go in the meat root rather than the bone root for your broth.

What about doing something like the gelatins.

Like buying the powdered gelatin or the collagen? That might be higher in free glutamates? Okay. I'm actually not 100% sure, but I would imagine based off the way that those are made, that that would be higher in glutamic acid and glutamates than like a meat broth. I just highly suspect just because of the way that those are made and the amount of collagen that's in them and the fact that collagen is hydrolysated or broken down, it's pretty likely that would be higher in glutamates. I'm not 100% sure, but what I typically recommend to people is that they use this website called the Brothory to just get organic bone broth shipped to them if they're not making it themselves. But if you're trying to lower your glutamate intake, you would want to do just a basic meat broth. And there are plenty of meat broth recipes that are out there, but you're just basically putting meaty bones into a pot and covering them with water. And typically, you add some herbs, you add some salt, and you turn up the heat in the pot, you bring it to a boil, and then you let that simmer until the meat is well done and kind of falling off the bone, and then that's it, and your meat broth is done. A bone broth, you'd be going for a lot longer period of time. I mean, you're cooking it for a good day. You're getting a lot of the, you know, the marrow and the minerals and stuff out of there, but it's also going to be higher in glutamate. So I would just go with like a meat broth, and you're still going to get plenty of gelatin, plenty of good stuff out of that, but less glutamate.

And then, of course, serve it with a nice mushu pork MM moo shoe.

Hi, Ben, this is Amelie, and I have a question about breath ketone meters. I recently purchased over at Ben Greenfield Fitness Systems the breath ketone meter called the ketonics. And I am curious how the measurements in the ketonics relate to blood millimolar measurements using the Abbott Precision Extra. I'm trying to avoid purchasing a blood ketone meter because I really don't want to poke myself or buy the expensive sticks in order to test blood ketones. But I'd like to see if I'm truly achieving a ketogenic state or not. It looks like the ketonics has some sort of a measurement above 5pm and I don't know what that really relates to. And I'm wondering if you have blood ketones down as low as 1 part per millimolar, if the ketonics will even measure that or how sensitive that is. Can you please give us a sense of what the comparison is between the blood ketone meters and the breath ketone meters? Just for those of us trying to stick to ketogenic diet and using the ketone meter as a way of kind of gauging where we're at in the process, I'm somebody who has used the urine ketone sticks before and they don't work real well. So again, thanks so much. Bye.

Now, remember when Jimmy Moore was on the podcast, he was talking about using a blood ketone meter and he was doing it like several times a day for like three or six months or something ridiculous like his fingers were basically pincushions.

Yeah. That's why, I mean, like, you can get pretty good measurement of ketosis, like how many ketone bodies that you're producing from a blood measurement. And a blood measurement is pretty accurate, but it's also invasive, it's inconvenient, it is expensive. And they've done studies, the most recent study was in spring and of 2014, in which they've tested the accuracy of breath ketone measurements using some of these new breath monitors that are out there versus blood ketone measurements. And what they found is that when you're looking at ketone bodies that you can measure in your breath or your blood or your urine, that when you're measuring via the breath, you get a pretty significant correlation between what you're going to find in a blood test and specifically what's measured when you look at the breath is acetone. And when you're measuring acetone in the breath, what that's correlating to is the amount of what's called beta hydroxybutyrate in your blood. And those two values tend to track together really, really well. So a blood ketone measure measures beta hydroxybutyrate in the blood. It doesn't measure acetoacetate or acetone, which are two other forms of ketones that you're going to find if you measure in the breath. But those blood ketone measurements are expensive. They sometimes fail. So that means they'll cost you twice, they're inconvenient, and they of course mean that you need to bleed. And the fact is that acetone measurements in the breath correlate just perfectly to beta hydroxybutyrate measurements in the blood. And both of those are better than the urine. So all the urine shows you is what's called acetoacetate or excess concentration of acetoacetate in your urine. And the problem is that that's eventually going to decrease as you get better and better at utilizing those ketone bodies for fuel, basically. And so if you're just using, using urine, eventually you're going to think you're not in ketosis when you actually are. But you've got lower levels of acetoacetate in your urine simply because you're using it more efficiently. So I do like, like what I own is one of these ketonics breath monitors. It's got a USB cable that comes out of it that you can plug into your computer. It gives you like a different series of lights to show you what level of ketosis that you're actually in. They work really well. It's a one time cost, so you just buy the thing. I honestly forget how much it costs. So we'll put an Amazon link in the show notes to be able to buy it. But I think it's somewhere between like a hundred and one hundred fifty dollars somewhere around in there. But it's called a ketonics and you just breathe into it and it'll tell you whether or not you're in ketosis. And it is sensitive. And there are studies that show that it actually is, is sensitive enough to be very, very accurate in terms of the way that it tracks with blood beta hydroxybutyrate measurements. And if you want to really delve into this, listen to the interview that I did with Jimmy Moore, the ketone clarity interview. I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to take a listen. But it's really good if you want to really learn more about ketosis.

Does that ketonics meter does it actually give you the 1 millimolar per whatever deciliter measurements?

Yeah, it has colors that correspond to each of those different variables, so.

Oh, so it doesn't actually spit out a number. It just gives you like a range.

Yeah, exactly. It gives you a color. Yeah, that'll show you the range that you're in. Exactly.

And that's enough information there. Like, you don't need the exact number.

No, you don't need these. I mean, if, if you know that, for example, your ketones are between like three and let's, let's say three, three and seven, you're well into ketosis. Whereas if you know if it's between 1 and 3, you're kind of like in mid range ketosis. If it's below one, generally you're not really in ketosis. If it's like above seven, you might be getting close into ketoacidosis, which might be kind of dangerous. But, yeah, all you need are ranges. You don't need an exact number. Cool. Yeah.

All right then.

Yeah.

Well, that. That is our last question for the day. So maybe we should give away some gear.

Let's give away some gear. And by the way, the way that this works is you can get Ben Greenfield fitness gear over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear and when you do that, it goes into the coffers to support the show. So we've got like a cool tech workout T shirt, we've got a Ben Greenfield fitness beanie, we've got a sweet BPA free water bottle. But you can also go leave a review in itunes. And if we choose your itunes review and we read it on the show, then you get a pack sent straight to your front door, lovingly packaged by yours truly. So it looks like this review comes from TIB012 and it's called the End of the Rainbow. What do you think, Brock? You want to read it?

The end of the Rainbow? Yeah. It's so tiny, my old man eyes are having trouble reading it. I'll do my best.

Use your beard.

Yes, the power of the beard. Power me through. I have listened to dozens of health, wellness, nutrition and performance podcasts during my grueling two hour commute to and from work and have finally found the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. The Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast is a wealth of information that someone with even half a brain, only half, can digest and use to improve his or her life.

Life.

Personally, I've downloaded the Ben Greenfield fitness app, which I highly recommend to my iPhone paid the whopping 10 bucks for a full year's worth of premium content and am now in the process of listening to every single episode. Wait, did. Did you write this? This reads like a commercial.

Yeah, it's great.

I often find myself replaying episodes because there is just so much information that Ben selflessly gives away. It can be hard to keep track of it all. After listening to this podcast for over a month, it is clear that Ben puts his heart and soul into each and every episode.

My soul.

Every episode. Ben's podcast sidekick, Brock also gets five stars from me.

That's good.

You guys truly brighten my days and keep my road rage at manageable levels. That's good. That's. That's our goal. Thanks. Ben and Brock keep the great content coming.

I wonder if they're Irish, like a leprechaun. Maybe you should have read that in an Irish accent. Or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I see.

Yeah, the pot of gold. Yeah.

I was wondering where you're going with that. You just wanted to do a crazy accent and make everybody mad again.

Yeah. No. Well, that was a great review. Thank you so much. And. And of course, I mean, since they brought it up, we didn't. Honestly, we did not pay for this review or anything like that.

And it's not even our.

You can pay 10 bucks and you can get all of our premium content, as well as our secret insider stuff that we've got available inside the Ben Greenfield fitness phone app and also in the premium content. So you can check this thing actually.

Right now being the audiobook version of Beyond Training.

That's right. I am chapter by chapter releasing my book, so. So you can check all that out over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Premium. You can grab all the show notes for this episode, everything from the olive oil video to the study on cell phones and cancer, to the HRV measurement PDF, to everything that you need to make yourself a pretty dang smart cookie. Along with the free book from audible over@bengreenfulfitness.com what's it called again?

You have to effing eat.

You have to effing eat, go the f to sleep. And, folks, have a great effing week. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice. Sam.