Does Marijuana Shrink Your Brain, Building Muscle With Vitamin D, Best Ways To Track Fat Loss & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Does marijuana shrink your brain? Building muscle with vitamin D? Why you should cry more. Curcumin versus turmeric, the best way to track fat loss 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 movements get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

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Rachel, I feel like we might need sad trombone music for today's show.

Oh, really? Why? What's going on?

Because I have not had caffeine this morning, nor did I have a glass of red wine last night, as is my usual habit.

That definitely deserves some sad music.

Sad trombone. Cue sad trombone here, Charlie Brown style. I'm actually, well, I'm doing a no alcohol, no caffeine experiment.

And you haven't tried this before?

I haven't tried this before, no. I mean, like, I've had times where there's like, you know, whatever weekends where I don't drink or, you know, I'll go like a week. I've talked about this before on the show where for every four weeks that I drink caffeinated coffee, I switch in one week of decaf to reset the receptors in the brain that can become desensitized to caffeine. And I decided to see if it would influence anything from my gut health to my weight to my overall feelings of energy. Not that anything's broken, but I'm, you know, I'm always wanting to try out these things and alcohol and caffeine are two staples in my diet, so.

And how are you feeling so far?

Well, in the evenings, I've been using CBD to, you know, because that token glass of wine at the end of the day kind of helps you relax.

Helps you relax, right?

Yeah. So I've been doing CBD occasionally, a little bit of THC here and there, but for the most part, you know, I've been doing fine, frankly. I've been sleeping extremely well. Interesting. Extremely well. I tend to wake at about two or three o'clock in the morning briefly, and. And then go back to sleep. And I don't, since I'm not doing alcohol in the evening right now, I don't wake at that point. Wow.

Wow.

But I gotta tell you, I'd rather have my glass of red wine and wake at 2 or 3am than not.

Have it at all.

But I'm just experimenting with it. And the caffeine thing, interestingly, there's a lot of evidence that caffeine, if you have food intolerances to things like gluten or corn or soy caffeine, particularly coffee, can cause a lot of cross reactivity with those compounds and, and aggravate even trace amounts of those type of things in your diet. So for me, I wanted to see if my gut would feel better. Not that I'm walking around with explosive diarrhea, but I basically just wanted to see how my gut feels if I cut out coffee and also if it affects things like sleep, energy levels in the afternoon, et cetera. So, still kind of feeling things out. I'll write a more comprehensive blog post, hopefully soon, but it's been a week and I have not yet spontaneously combusted.

Well, interesting. I can't wait to hear all about it.

Yeah, so stay tuned for that, all you podcast listeners who are obsessed with coffee and booze.

News flashes.

Rachel Dew. Or have you ever had a goal of getting swole?

No. Should I though?

70S, big ripped.

Should I? I mean, I'm open.

Do you own a welcome to the Gun Show T shirt?

I don't own a welcome to the Gun Show T shirt.

You're dead to me.

Seriously, you just lost all respect.

Everybody needs a welcome to the Gun Show T shirt in their closet. Well, the reason is that one of the things that I talked about this week was the fact that winter is quickly approaching. Father Winter. It's called Father Winter or Mother Winter.

Not sure.

I guess it's Father Christmas. Huh?

Father Christmas. Yeah.

Okay, close enough.

Either way, those are very different things, but we'll keep going.

Father Christmas approaches. And there was a recent study that came out this week in the American Journal of Physiology that investigated vitamin D and skeletal muscle repair and regeneration. And as we all know, we get less levels of vitamin D in the winter. I actually live on a north facing slope, which means that. And it's a treed north facing slope, meaning that if I don't get out before about 3 o' clock in the afternoon, my body doesn't see sunshine.

Wow.

I've got like this tiny patch of time. It's actually between about noon and 1:30 out on my front porch when there's some serious rays of sun floating through the tamaracks. And I will just go outside, go.

Out there, shirt off and just soak it in.

Soak it in. Yeah, exactly. So anyways, though, what this study looked into was supplementing with 4,000 international units of vitamin D a day, which, for those of you who want to quantify that, that's about 10 times as much vitamin D as most multivitamins use. So you really can't achieve this with a multivitamin without risking toxicity from all the other things in the multivitamin. So generally, you need to use supplemental vitamin D for something like this, but they did 4,000 international units of vitamin D a day, and a control group got a placebo, which was just basically like a capsule, but it didn't have anything in it. Usually they'll use like, cellulose or some other kind of fiber in the placebo capsule. And then they measured strength, muscle repair, muscle regeneration and hypertrophy, which is just basically muscle building. And what they found was a significant role for vitamin D in skeletal muscle regeneration and repair and also in hypertrophy or getting swole. So it turns out, and especially for those of us living in northern climates who don't get a lot of sun exposure and who are doing things like lifting weights, for example, or running, which tears down muscles or whatever, obstacle training or triathlon or marathoning or whatever else, that vitamin D supplementation is probably prudent, with the caveat that, as we've talked about on the show before, vitamin D can have toxicity. Usually it's 10,000 international units or more that typically causes bigger toxicity issues. And you generally want your vitamin D blood ranges to be between about 40 and 80, 40 and 80. So if you were to go and get a blood test and find out that your vitamin D is at 90, you probably don't need to take a vitamin D supplement. And if you did, you risk arterial calcification. Vitamin D can pull calcium into the bloodstream, and you can even risk that at lower levels of vitamin D unless you have adequate vitamin K and adequate magnesium. So if you are going to do something like using a strategy such as the one in this research study, and I don't think they use vitamin K or magnesium, they should have if they were looking at overall health, right, not just muscle repair, but use. If you're going to use vitamin D and you want to take the results from this study and run with them and go bench press and impress all your friends and take boatloads of vitamin D, use vitamin K and use magnesium as well. So.

All right, good to know.

And by the way, Rachel, before I keep going, because I've got some interesting stuff on marijuana today. Can you remind people where they can find all this? And, oh, so much more?

So all of this info plus more over at the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 337.

337. And if you follow any links there for Twitter, Instagram or Facebook or whatever you can, you can follow all the goodness. Do we have any Facebook giveaways going on right now, by the way?

We have an awesome Facebook giveaway, the Sleep Master sleep mask. We've got one going on Instagram, one going on Facebook, and one going on Twitter. So you got three chances to win. So all you need to do is go to the post and comment yes or no as to whether you wear a sleep mask. Simple stuff.

Yeah. Follow any of the links over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 337 for Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. But, yeah, the sleep mask or sleep mask, that's the one I use every night. Covers your ears, covers your eyes. It's the best sleep mask. I can sleep anywhere. Like an airport with that sleep mask on.

Yeah, it looks awesome.

Yeah. Anyways, though, we digress because I want to talk about weed. I want to talk about what it can do and what it can't do. And there was a study that came out that shows that marijuana can. We may have to use the sad trombone again. Shrink your brain, particularly the area in the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making, emotion, and controlling reward and punishment related behavior, can shrink slightly with frequent marijuana use, in this case toking up about three times a day, which is more. That's more than most people use. But I do know as marijuana becomes legalized, there's a lot of people using a lot of chc, using edibles and cigs and all this stuff. And that effect is even more pronounced in terms of shrinking of the gray matter in that region of the brain. And they use MRIs to study this. And this was at the University of Texas that they did this study. It's even more pronounced in younger individuals, people whose gray matter may not have completely formed, people who are still growing from a neural standpoint is why you should rip that bag of weed out of your teenager's hands right away. But ultimately, marijuana can cause damage to the brain. And particularly it's the interaction with the CB1 and the CB2 receptors that can cause these issues.

So when you say use it a lot, so that's three times a day for how long? What kind of period of time.

Yeah. The study says chronic marijuana use is about six to eight years. It would appear that six to eight years of chronic use of marijuana, which, you know, a lot of people like, eh, don't use marijuana six to eight times a year. But ultimately whenever I see studies like this, I'm careful. Right. Because it's like, what if they would have studied people who used it for a year, once a day. Right. So this study gives me pause. And this is why, like I mentioned earlier in the show when I was talking about relaxing at night, this is why I'm trying to progress even more towards using CBD than thc. Just because cbd, which is cannabidiol, that's the legal form, it's derived from organic hemp. It's legal in almost every country, all 50 states. And it interacts with your endocannabinoid system, which is the same system that THC from marijuana interacts with. But it doesn't interact with these CB1 and CB2 receptors, which can, long term, it appears, cause some damage to gray matter in the brain. But it can do everything from like, decrease symptoms of colitis and irritable bowel syndrome to causing a release of adenosine very similar to what you'd want if you were to like, go to sleep. If you take it in higher amounts, it acts like a smart drug in lower amounts. And it even counteracts a lot of the effects of thc. It somehow blocks the ability of THC to cause some of the psychoactive effects that indicate interaction with some of these receptors in the brain. And so if you use CBD even at the same time as you use thc, you might be able to reverse some of this damage. Yeah. And the, the interesting thing I think about this is that there was a post on the Huffington Post and this, this appeared several weeks ago, but the director for the National Institute on Drug Abuse wrote an article in the Huffington Post called the Potential Promise of Cannabidiol Researching Marijuana for Therapeutic Purposes. Cannabidiol is cbd. And I thought that this article was interesting. I don't know if you know this, but the government holds a patent on the use of CBD to Manage medical conditions.

Interesting.

Did not know that the US Government holds a patent on it. And what this study goes into and what I think I'm being a little conspiracy theorist now, but the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, so someone who's basically on payroll for the government pens this big article in the Huffington Post about the beneficial effects of cbd. On a variety of different medical conditions, particularly neural conditions like seizure and epilepsy, and also for kids who have untreatable conditions. And the article itself, which I'll link to in the show, notes, it goes over how GW Pharmaceuticals is now developing a pharmaceutical drug that is basically cbd. They're going to patent it and they're going to sell it at ungodly prices, which is dumb because you can get it from just organic hemp plants for not as much as you or insurance is going to pay for the CBD from this pharmaceutical company. But I think it's quite interesting that this stuff seems to be taking the world by storm in terms of people recognizing its effects and its ability to not just combat some of the issues of thc, but its ability to recreate some of the effects that marijuana has without destroying the gray matter in your brain, making you a thumb sucking, stupid, short term memory loss stricken individual. But, and I know you'll like this, Rachel, because this is the last thing that I wanted to get into.

But wait, there's more.

There's something else that can rebuild the gray matter in your brain within eight weeks.

Meditation.

Boom. Meditation. You got it. Yes, Mindfulness meditation. So the Harvard University did a study in which they investigated, using MRIs, this very same MRIs that they used to study the effects of marijuana shrinking gray matter in the brain. They investigated meditation and the effects of meditation, eight weeks of meditation on gray matter in the brain. In this case, participants spent an average of 27 minutes a day doing mindfulness based meditation. They experienced a major increase in gray matter density in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that's associated with self awareness and compassion and introspection. And interestingly, they also saw a slight decrease in gray matter in the amygdala, which is the area of the brain responsible for creating anxiety and stress. Yeah. So although they could have changed this headline, they could have said eight weeks of meditation shrinks your brain because technically they lost gray matter in their amygdala and they gained gray matter in the hippocampus.

And meditation is free. It does the same similar things as cbd. And it's free.

Yes. Yes. So although I like to combine the two personally, because CBD has other effects on your gut and inflammation, stuff like that. But ultimately, what you've learned so far in today's podcast, and we aren't even to the Q and A yet, is don't drink alcohol, don't drink caffeine, decrease. All the Mormons listening in are Going to be really happy. Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, et cetera. We're going to gain a lot of listeners. Don't do drugs, take CBD and meditate.

That was a really good om, Ben.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Listener q and a.

Hey, Ben. My name is Matthew. You know, after a good cry, I.

Always feel really good.

Are there any physiological benefits to crying?

So that is a really fascinating question, Ben, because I must admit, after a good cry, I feel a lot more resilient and, like, ready to go. And I wonder, what have you got to say about this?

Do you cry a lot?

I love crying, for sure. Yeah. It's weird. It's a weird relationship I have with it, but it always makes me feel better.

Do you know how much people cry? Because I looked into this. Ooh.

How much?

10 ounces of tears per day. Like, a lot of times we don't even know. Like, it doesn't have to be crying. Like, you can just produce tears. They're called, like, reflex tears and basal tears, and your body just produces them to keep your eyes wet and moist. But we produce about 30 gallons a year.

That's crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. So what's the deal?

So crying does a lot of cool things that you probably would not expect. So when you produce tears, they help the body to get rid of specific adrenal compounds called one's called prolactin. Another one is the adrenocorticotropic hormones, like adrenaline, for example, and then also another endorphin that's called leucine, enkephalin. When you cry, you find all those substances in your tears.

Oh, my gosh.

And when that happens, you actually get a decrease in cortisol and an opioid, like, painkilling effect. So crying actually helps to kill pain. And in addition to that, you can actually, in a similar way, that you lose some toxins, right? Like some metals, some phytoestrogen, and stuff like that through your skin and then through your urine, and then a big part of it is through your stool. You actually lose some of these same toxins through your tears. Wow. We should write a book called the Tear Detox.

Oh, my gosh. Kenny, please.

The Crying Diet.

I'll be the case study, because I cry so much.

Yeah, you just. You eat a meal and then you cry. Just, like, watch a sad movie or pluck some nose hairs or something and. Oh, my gosh. Okay, this is our next idea. Well, stay tuned.

Another question would be, do you get the same benefits from crying. That's like not an emotional crying versus crying from, like, plucking a nose hair. Is it the same thing?

I doubt it, because I would imagine that if you're crying when you're stressed, you're going to release those chemicals more readily than if you're crying just to. Whatever, to keep your eyes moist.

Right, right, right.

Yeah. That's a great question, but I'm honestly not sure. There was a study. The study was done. I forget where this one was done, but basically it was a psychiatry study. It was at the St Paul Ramsey Medical Center. And this was the one that found that you could detox through the tears, and then you could also get rid of these chemicals that raise cortisol when you cry. So there's that. That's one thing. Crying can also kill bacteria. Tears contain lysozyme. Lysozyme. You also find lysozyme in. In breast milk. You find it in semen, you find it in mucus, you find it in saliva. And it can kill 90 to 95% of any bacterial strain in about five to 10 minutes. They did a study on this in the journal Food Microbiology, which they studied tears. And they found that tears actually have enough antimicrobial effect that they can even protect against contamination from anthrax.

Oh, my God. That's insane.

Tears can kill anthrax. So the way that lysozymes work is they destroy bacterial cell walls. And I guess what this would mean, like, if you were to drink tears, maybe you would kill off some of the good bacteria in your gut. So I wouldn't recommend harvesting and drinking your tears or maybe licking the tears off of someone's face as they cry. So you try to condole them just because. I know so many of our listeners are face lickers. But basically the idea behind tears, I don't know why. I don't know why that would come in useful. I could see why having antibacterial properties in, like, milk or even for reasons we won't get into on the show, semen would be beneficial to some extent. But I'm not quite sure why tears would have antibacterial powers. It's kind of interesting, but if you're concerned about food poisoning, you could, for example, cry on your food before you eat it. So there's that. Okay, so like we mentioned, tears can moisten the eyes, but tears are produced by something called the lacrimal gland, among other glands. And when they're made by that gland, they can clear up your vision by lubricating your eyeballs and your eyelids. And when your membranes in your eyes get dehydrated, that can make eyesight a little bit blurry. But when you cry, it's almost like a detox for your eyes, right? It keeps them moist, but then it washes away dust, it washes away debris. That's why sometimes you'll get a little teary eyed. If I go on a bike ride and I'm not wearing glasses, I'm flying down a hill, I'll have to cry afterwards. But crying prevents the dehydration of those surfaces. But then it also prevents dehydration of some of the mucus membranes in the eyes. So basically, if you finish up a hard day of working on the computer or riding your bike without sunglasses on, just have a good cry. And it makes a lot of that stuff go away. I would suspect that that effect of tears is part of the effect made by those natural subconscious tears that we just release during the day. You know those, those 10 ounces or so that everybody releases during the day? Yeah, I'm guessing.

And so is, is that all you have on tears?

No.

Oh gosh, there's more.

Okay, go. There's more. So tears can actually. They've done a study on antidepressants in tears, and this was a study at the University of South Florida. They found that crying elevates mood better than any antidepressant that they tested. And what they found was that 90% of criers actually felt better than any antidepressant they'd ever been on after a cry. I'm not totally sure how they conducted this study, if it was actually questionnaires or like profile of mood state scores or something, but there's some effect of crying against depression, so there's that as well. And then there's a couple other things. Crying is actually a way that we show emotions and that we communicate. So it can, you know, now we're going to get totally woo woo, right? But when you are communicating with someone and you show emotions like anger or tears, punching a wall or sitting quietly with your hands folded, all of these things send messages. And crying sends a very powerful, almost like an evolutionary or an ancestral based message when you're communicating with someone else. If you are emotionally distressed, it not only shows that you're in touch with your emotions, but it's a very, very good way to send an extremely clear signal to someone that they need to pay attention to you. And humans are hardwired to pay attention to people who are legitimately crying. So there's that too. It's just. It's a. It's a way to get what you want.

That's horrible.

So, yes, that's the deal with crying. What were you gonna say?

I was gonna say, did you find a lot of research on it?

A lot of research on crying? I did. I found that. That study in the. In the Food Microbiology Journal. And then the National Eye Institute is. Who had the study on the. The moistness and how much we actually cry. And there was a study from the University of South Florida that looked into the antidepressant effects. And then finally for the detoxification. That study by the psychiatry research Laboratories at the St. Paul Ramsey Medical center, that was the one that looked into the detoxification effects. So. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess it's interesting because we don't hear too much about it, but I guess the takeaway is you should cry more.

That's right, Matthew, start crying.

Mm, good.

Pluck some nose hairs. Watch a sad movie. What is the. Before we move on to the next question, what would you say, like, if. If you were to cry right away? What. What movie would make you cry?

Oh, I hate to be this person because I'm not a super lovey dovey person, but the Notebook. Yeah. Brings me to tears for sure. What about you?

Is that with Ryan Gosling? Yes.

And it's a love story. I hate myself a little bit for.

It, but I think I've seen that one.

Yeah. What about you?

I can't tell you the last movie I cried during. I really. I really can't even remember a single movie that I cried during. Not moved by movies, probably, like back when I was a little kid and I was a little bit more moved by movies or even watched more movies because I watch like one movie every couple of months now. Like, I'm just not a movie guy. Don't have time for it. Maybe like Hoosers where they win the.

Basketball game Again, before my time. Yeah, all your jokes are lost on me. I'm sorry.

Nothing to make me feel old. Laughing at my. Make it making. Making disgusting noises when I talk about sex, offending my old school basketball. What was the last one?

What do your boys cry about? Tell me that. Do they cry?

Yeah, actually, one of my boys was crying the other day. And then. And then I promised to our listeners we'll stop droning on. He was crying because I'm having my kids do. Oh, gosh. I'm gonna get nasty letters and comments from listeners now. I'm having my kids get really cold at least a few times a week now. And it's like winter, almost winter here, and it's getting colder. So I'm having them go out to the cold pool before school and jump in the cold pool and stay in there. And I refilled the cold pool and they didn't know it, so it was really cold, like from deep in the well, like just barely above freezing, like low 40s, probably. And one of them. And they were used to, like, upper 50s, and one of them just like jumps in there and his head pops up from the pool and he's just like. Yeah, he had. He had some tears for a while, but I taught him how to do, like, the. The Wim Hof style breathing. Got him to inhale and then don't exhale quite as much and inhale. And then I accept quite as much and I call him. I wouldn't let him get out. I got in with him, you know, and I wouldn't let him get out until I'd, like, calmed him down. It was pretty. It was pretty cold, though. I'll admit there was some shrinkage going on.

Hi, Ben.

Love the show. Just have a quick question on gallstones. Recently got diagnosed with them. Looks like the natural remedies don't really work. I wanted to get your input, see if there's anything that I should do other than surgery or if that's my only option.

Thanks.

So I have never had gallstones, but I hear they're pretty painful.

Yeah, a lot of people do have to get surgery for them. So they're like these tiny little. They're literally like stones. They're. They're mineral deposits. You can get one really big one, or you can get hundreds of small ones, or you can get some big ones and some small ones, but they're just like hardened petal pebble like deposits in your gallbladder. And there's. There are certain things that put you at higher risk for them. Like if you're female, you're at higher risk. If you're overweight, you're at higher risk. Family history or being over 50, being on birth control pills can increase your risk of them being on hormone replacement therapy. A lot of those things can increase your risk for gallstones. There's some dietary factors as well, and I'll talk about those in a second. But basically they're just formed from cholesterol and then something called bilirubin. And bilirubin is just a waste product which you'll find in bile. Bile is a liquid that Helps your body to digest fats. So bile is made in your liver and then it gets stored in your gallbladder. And what happens is that when you get excess cholesterol and excess bilirubin, you get it hardening into these gallstones. It's just basically hardened cholesterol with a little bit of bilirubin. And then it'll eventually block the duct that carries bile from your liver to your small intestine. And when that happens, it gets really painful. It's just like having a blockage in a tube inside your body. Anytime you get a blockage in a tube, your body usually doesn't like that, gets painful, gets inflamed. You can get your pancreas inflamed. Sometimes stone fragments will just pass through the bile duct of the gallbladder, but that's pretty rare. And so the good news is you don't necessarily have to get surgery when you have gallbladder issues. So when we talk about just basic big picture preventative issues when it comes to gallbladder, a lot of people will say that a high fat diet because of all the cholesterol causes gallstones. That is a false perception. Let's bust that myth. All right, let's. That's actually not true. So the idea here is fats aren't soluble in water. And so before you can digest dietary fat, you have to do what's called emulsification. You have to emulsify the fat. And that's what bile does. Bile emulsifies fat, so you can actually digest it. So the liver makes the bile. Like I mentioned, it'll store it in the gallbladder until that bile is needed. But if you don't eat much fat, your liver is still going to create bile, but that bile will remain in the gallbladder. And gallstones can get formed when you aren't emptying bile from your gallbladder on a regular basis. So if you're eating a very, very low fat diet, or you have a family history of gallstones and you decide you're going to switch to a low fat diet, that's actually not a good idea. They did a trial at a few different American university hospitals, and they found that the lower the fat intake, and in this case, it was after about eight weeks of low fat dieting. What they found was that subjects who had gallbladder disease, a quarter of them developed gallstones after eight weeks of this low fat dieting. And when they were fed a high fat diet, they did not develop that.

Wow.

Yeah. So the idea is you need to somehow stimulate biorelease. So cutting out fat completely from your diet is not a good idea when it comes to pre existing gallbladder disease or when it comes to getting rid of gallstones. So switching to a low fat diet, you'll hear a lot of people say that that's not necessarily the best thing. The other interesting thing from a lifestyle standpoint is skipping breakfast. Skipping breakfast may also increase your risk of gallstones. This was a study in France and they found that French women, and particularly French women with gallstones, if they fasted on average for two hours longer overnight, they wound up having increased risk of gallstones versus the people who didn't skip breakfast and instead ate when they got up in the morning. There's something about the bile release that happens when you have a well timed morning meal that helps with gallstone prevention.

Interesting. And so what's he talking about? The natural remedies don't work.

Okay, so the idea here is that there are some things that may help a little bit with reducing gallstone formation, but a lot of them aren't particularly efficacious. So for example, curcumin is one. Curcumin actually something that is good to take with a meal, whether it's sprinkling a bunch of turmeric on your salad or even using a curcumin capsule. And what they found is that about 300 milligrams or so of curcumin increases what's called the solubility of your bile. We'll talk later on in this podcast about forms of curcumin and how most curcumin really doesn't get absorbed at all. And so kind of depends on the source of that. 300 milligrams. But curcumin may help out in this case.

Interesting.

Another study that they did was with vitamin C. Not high, high dose vitamin c, but about 200 milligrams a day. So nothing super out of the ordinary. And they found that in women who took vitamin C, they found that they were half as likely to develop gallstones as those with lower intake of vitamin C. So that's another one is vitamin C. In addition to curcumin, there's also something called bile extract. You can actually take a bile supplement. And a bile supplement may actually jumpstart the production of your own bile formation. And a lot of these bile acid pills are typically something that comes along with a digestive enzyme. So for example, Exos makes a digestive enzyme that has. And this is the one that I Use. It's got ox bile extract in it, which sounds just nasty. Yeah, well, I don't know how many baby oxes died to make ox bile extract.

Don't. You'll make me cry.

I don't think they actually kill.

I'll detox tears.

I don't think they kill baby oxes. I'm pretty sure it's. They're adults for sure. Yeah. Anyways, though, taking bile acids may not only help to prevent the onset of gallstones, but it might help to dissolve and break down gallstones. So bile acid supplementation may be an alternative to surgery.

So when you say they don't work that well, what kind of, like, percentage are you talking here? Like, is it worth looking into, worth trying?

Curcumin and vitamin C are more preventive measures that are just good overall lifestyle practices, whether it's using turmeric and eating lots of vegetables and moderate amounts of fruit. You know, I never like to say fruits and vegetables because I'm a fan of eating about 10 times as many vegetables as fruits.

As fruits. Right.

Getting good natural sources of vitamin C. Or there's like, there's a one company that makes a very absorbable form of vitamin C that doesn't cause stomach distress, even in high doses. The company is called American Nutraceuticals. You should be able to find it on Amazon. We'll put a link in the show Notes. But that one, you can take vitamin C in even higher amounts without creating a lot of digestive distress. But those are more preventive, but with bile treatments. What they found is that about two thirds of people who take bile acid pills, and that's found in a form called ursodeoxylcholic acid or ursodiol. And this would be very similar, like ox bile extract, that you can be symptom free within two to three months. But they found that even in those studies, it may take several years for the stones to completely disappear.

That's symptom free. In two to three months. It's still pretty good, right?

Symptom free. But that means you may still have some of the gallstones. Like, it may come back rather than taking that or whatever. Now, cholecystectomy is what you'd normally do. That's a surgery that removes the gallbladder. And it's one of the most commonly performed surgeries in the US I am not a fan of removing the gallbladder because once you remove it and you don't produce bile, you can get loose stools, gas, bloating, fat Malabsorption. Really, really rough day if you have a big steak or something like that or too much nut butter. So I'm not a fan of that type of surgery.

So what do you recommend?

Well, there's another treatment called extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy, we're gonna emphasize.

That sounds interesting.

Eswl, so there's not that many places that offer this, but it uses shock waves to break gallstones into smaller fr, which then get dissolved if you take an oral bile acid pill. So you combine this ESWL therapy with the use of bile acid supplementation. And apparently I haven't personally gotten it, but from what I've read up on eswl, it's uncomfortable, it's a somewhat painful procedure. You'll usually take a sedative to remove some of the discomfort. And you may get some biliary pain as those broken stone fragments pass through the bile duct. Biliary pain meaning up around like that right upper quadrant where your liver. Whereas you may get some pain in there as you pass the stones. But they've done some studies on it and they've shown everything from successful treatment with 90 to 100% of people with one stone, and for people with multiple stones, up to 67% of people. And so, I mean, like, if it were me, I would do that before taking out an organ of my body, definitely.

Right.

That's what I would look into doing. So, yeah, it's called eswl. So that's one that I would look into. You're gonna have to probably. I mean, the way that I would start with a procedure like that is I would google ESWL plus the name of your city and start to look into who's doing it, particularly with procedures like that, who's doing a lot of them.

Right.

But that's where I would start. I mean, you could use curcumin, you could use vitamin C, you could use like a good digestive enzyme with bile acids. If that's not working, you try this eswl. Last ditch would be getting your gallbladder removed. Oh, and then don't skip breakfast and don't eat a low fat diet.

Is it performed by a doctor, the eswl?

Yes, yes. You would get this at like a, like a health center. Or I would guess that it'd be like a gastric disease type of facility, so. Or a gastroenterologist. So you just have to find someone who could do it. If you are a listener and you're listening in and you have a friend who does ESWL out of their basement or preferably a hospital. Please leave a comment and direct our dear listener Seth to someone who can who can do ESWL in Seth's area. I don't know where Seth lives, but either way leave a comment if you have experience with ESWL and we'll help Seth out.

Hey Ben, it's Zach here. I've heard about turmeric and curcumin from you and the community and would like a definitive lowdown on it. I'm an ultra endurance runner and general health minded guy who wants to recover faster and up regulate my fat conversion. Should I buy bulk turmeric powder or turmeric extract supplements or curcumin extract supplements? And of those with or without pepperin or black pepper? And does the 95% curcuminoid label also play a large factor into that decision? Further, what should the dosage be for me as a hard charging athlete and when should it be taken as I usually subscribe to a fasted morning workout. Thanks a lot for all you do. Bye.

I would like a definitive lowdown on this as well.

Yeah, because curcumin. I use curcumin almost every. I also use turmeric almost every day.

Like for my and this is a question we get all the time.

For my salad I use turmeric and black pepper. I take curcumin in supplement form. I take turmeric too in supplement form. I mean like I'm a huge fan. I'm a turmeric junkie. So here's the idea. Turmeric. So turmeric is well known as a culinary spice and it's been used traditionally in like ayurvedic medicine and in India as a disinfectant, as a treatment for things like bronchitis and laryngitis. And it comes from the underground stems, they're called rhizomes of a plant called curcuma longa, which is actually a member of the ginger family. So it's interesting, ginger is very anti inflammatory and has a lot of really good antioxidant properties. And of course so does turmeric. So it gives like the yellow color to Indian curry and you know, mustard and you know, anything that's yellow, a lot of times it's been flavored with turmeric. Don't spill it on the couch. My wife got really pissed at me one night when I ate curry on the couch and we never did get those turmeric stains removed.

Right.

So careful with it. It does stain. Now in terms of turmeric and curcumin Both have quite a bit of really good research behind them. So turmeric has been shown to work just as well as a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug like ibuprofen for knee arthritis and knee pain. That was a study that they did back in 2009. They've shown that curcumin acts to have. It acts very similar to like a weak phytoestrogen. And what that means is that it can have some very good cancer productive effects. It can induce programmed cell death of colon cancer cells. Which is very interesting because we talked about last week about how red meat can cause cancer and colonic inflammation, potentially especially processed red meat. And we talked about marinades and spices and curcumin. It turns out if you are eating a lot of bacon, maybe something that you should include as a staple in your diet. Curcumin has also been shown to suppress micro inflammation in the GI tract that's associated with inflammatory bowel disease. And there are a host of other studies that have been done on curcumin. But its most promising research looks like decrease in triglycerides, decrease in inflammation, decrease in pain related to joint pain and arthritis. It's got very strong antioxidant activity, can decrease hscrp, which is an inflammatory compound, can increase HDL in addition to decreasing triglycerides. And those are the biggies. Then there's some lessons, less well conducted studies or studies that show minor effects in terms of for example, a staving off cognitive decline, decreasing damage to DNA, increasing insulin sensitivity, increasing intestinal motility, which is your ability to kind of move things through the digestive tract, decreasing blood glucose and increasing vascular function. So there's a lot of really interesting studies on curcumin.

So why is it not like a superfood?

Curcumin?

Yeah.

You mean why isn't it in Time magazine listed in your superfood article?

Why hasn't it been marketed as a superfood?

It's all relative, honestly. Because knowing western palates, it doesn't taste as good as blueberries.

Right?

That might be a big reason. Doesn't taste as good as blueberries and kale smoothies. So anyways, the idea behind turmeric or the difference between turmeric and curcumin is pretty significant. So I'll get into some of the differences here. The idea is that turmeric is relatively well absorbed if you take it in food form, but only in very, very small amounts. You have to take a lot of turmeric to get all of the curcuminoids that you'd get in the isolated curcumin that they extract from turmeric, how much is a lot? You'd have to take about 400 to 600 milligrams of turmeric about three times a day to get adequate absorption. That's a lot of turmeric. And even then, it's not very well absorbed unless you mix it with something called bioperine or black pepper extract. Now, granted, I put turmeric and black pepper on my lunchtime salad, but I'm well aware that I would have to dump nearly the entire spice bottle of turmeric on my salad to get what I'd get from far less levels of curcumin. Okay, so curcumin is like a very, very concentrated form of turmeric. When it comes to curcumin, though, curcumin is also not very well absorbed at all unless it's paired again with black pepper or piperine. When I say black pepper, I don't mean you're going to like, like swallow a bunch of curcumin capsules and then like, grind a pepper grinder into your mouth. They sell, they sell bioperine supplements. Okay? You can go to, like, Amazon. You can buy bioperine or black pepper and some curcumin supplements. There's one, for example, I know there's one called, what's it called? Extreme Endurance. I think they make like a recovery capsule that's. That's got some curcumin and some black pepper in it.

I believe like 50. 50. You need of each.

I don't know what the ratios are. I could look into it. I don't know the ratios, though, off the top of my head, in terms of how much curcumin and how much black pepper. I would imagine there's a really good website called examine@examine.com I've talked about how I subscribe to various research journals, and Examine is one of the ones that I subscribe to. And they probably have a little bit of information on that website. So if you go to examine.com, you could probably find out about how much much black pepper you need to take to make curcumin or turmeric absorbable. But generally these black peppers capsules come in a capsule form that you take so you don't chew on black pepper.

I hate taking tablets. I gotta try to do the black pepper.

There's another workaround here, and this is what I do. Phytosomes. So phytosomes are plant extracts like turmeric, that are bound to what's called phosphatidylcholine. Now, your bodies can make phosphatidylcholine and you can also get it from food or you can get it from supplements. And phosphatidylcholine is extremely well absorbed, very well absorbed. And so what they've figured out how to do, and this is actually made in India, I believe, this form of curcumin called Meriva M E R I V A. When you attach a curcumin to phosphatidylcholine, what happens is you get almost instant absorption and bioavailability versus most curcumin that you take without it being attached to this. Unless you accompany it with black pepper, the curcumin is not going to be absorbed at all. Now, what they've demonstrated in human studies is 29 to 30 times greater bioavailability when you combine curcumin, when you attach it to one of these phosphatidylcholine molecules and the resulting compound is called a curcumin phytosome. Curcumin phytosome. Now, what this company, Meriva does is this is the type of company that sells its curcumin to other, like vitamin and supplement companies. So if your vitamin or your multi or your supplement or anything that you're taking for curcumin, if you look at the label and it says Moriva on it, or you look at the label and it says curcumin phytosome on it, that means that it's that that absorbable form of curcumin and you don't have to take anything else along with it to get all of the benefits of curcumin. So the one that I take is made by Exos E X O S and that is just curcumin phytosome. It's about 1,000 milligrams and a serving of that, and I'll take one to two servings on any day where I've had like hard and heavy exercise. I've also taken those capsules and broken them into morning tea or morning coffee because of the neuroprotective effect that you can get from curcumin as well. So I'm a much bigger fan of curcumin than I am of turmeric. Although the one exception to this is that turmeric in most studies has shown greater efficacy for arthritis than curcumin. And I'm not quite sure why, but apparently there are some pain fighting components of turmeric that aren't in curcumin. So if you have something like let's say knee osteoarthritis or elbow arthritis, you may benefit more from using turmeric. And the source of turmeric that I use when I am injured is this stuff called Nature Flex which is turmeric mixed with tart, cherry, ginger, a bunch of other anti inflammatory compounds, glucosamine, chondroitin. It's like a joint support formula. I only take it if I'm injured, but it's because turmeric may have greater efficacy for arthritis or like injury issues. Whereas curcumin is probably better as like a daily tonic if that makes sense.

And Zach says is the 95% Curcuminoid label, does that play a factor in making the decision? Does it?

Something could have 100% curcumin and unless black pepper is present or unless it's bound to phosphatidylcholine, it's going to be almost completely non absorbable. So you really wouldn't want to take it unless you actually have it in that form. So the percentages don't matter. What matters is the actual form that it comes in.

Right?

Yeah. So we'll put some links in the show notes to some other resources. But the last thing I should mention is that when you're using curcumin it appears to go quite well not only with black pepper and or phosphatidylcholine but also you can get a little bit of a synergistic effect if you also use ginger and fish oil. So if like joint soreness, pain, stuff like that is an issue for you, that's a really good stack is to use a curcumin or a good absorbable turmeric along with black pepper along with fish oil along with ginger. Great stack for like joint pain for example.

So there you have it, a definitive lowdown on turmeric versus now you can.

Go get your curry on.

Hey Ben, this is Jamal from Texas and I own my own group personal training facility where we mostly focus on fat loss and I wanted to know or start incorporating some tracking measurement during or before and after and wanted to know what you would recommend. I know a lot of people are doing the heart rate thing like Orange Theory and a couple other people, but what would you personally do if you owned your own personal training facility and you were looking to maximize fat loss and using analytics for your clients to track their performance and maybe also use it to use as a leaderboard measure. Thank you. I always enjoy the podcast.

Rachel, do you, do you track your own body fat?

I don't, but we talked about it in the last podcast and I, by looking at those photos, kind of determined what percentage body fat I am exactly.

Yeah, we, we geeked out on body fat in episode 336. If you get a chance to listen to that, listen in. But we didn't talk much about like, how to measure it. There's a little bit about it. But as far as like tracking fat loss and measuring fat loss sustainably, I believe what we talked about was skin calipers. We did last episode. Yeah. And how I used to do a lot of skin caliper messages. That's called the pinch method, where you'll pinch the body fat in three to seven different areas of the body to approximate the body density, which you then feed into a calculation and you get body fat. And there's a lot of other things in addition to skin calipers that folks will use to calculate body fat, like underwater weighing. This is one that we used to do a lot back in the exercise physiology lab when I went to University of Idaho. You'd strip out of as much of your clothing as possible. You get in a giant pool of water, you let out all the air of your lungs. So it's a really uncomfortable test. And then you get dunked underwater and your body density is calculated from your underwater weight and then that's used to calculate your actual body fat percentage. Wow. It's like medieval torture combined with body fat measurement.

And that sounds kind of intense to do for like a normal person.

Yeah, it's called hydro densitometry and you can find it at a lot of exercise phys labs and like research clinics. They'll still use this as a method of measuring body fat, but yeah, it doesn't work that well for the average person. Most people's bathtubs aren't deep enough.

Right.

There's also dexa, the full body scan. And these are pretty cool. I got this done. When I did. I was part of a study at University of Connecticut where they brought us in and they had me follow a high fat diet for a year and then running a treadmill for three hours. And they measured fat utilization and everything else, but they also did body composition and they used a DEXA scan for this. So that's a full body scan. That stands for dual energy X ray absorptiometry. And it's a more Costly form of measurement. And it's probably not an option if you like to avoid X ray radiation. However, it will show you your body fat. Any different area on your body, which is kind of cool. So you could see like, oh, I've got fat thighs, but I got skinny chest or whatever.

And are they all kind of equally as reliable?

No, dex is very reliable. Underwater weighing is very reliable. Skin calipers, if the person doing them has done a lot of them, that's also very reliable. There's also near infrared interactants. That's called nir. That's where they use a fiber optic probe. They hold it against your skin, and you can get one of these for yourself at home. But there's another thing that's better than that that I'll talk about in a second, but that just uses light that gets reflected off your tissues and off your bones back into the detector. And it approximates your body fat based off of how fast the light comes back in.

Interesting.

Yeah, they usually do that on like, your biceps. Bod pod is another one that's very similar to like the underwater weighing, except you sit inside a small chamber rather than going underwater. And a lot of like gyms and health clubs have that. It's. It's relatively accurate.

Yeah.

And then they have bioelectric impedance. That's the cheesy device that you see at health expos and at the gym. Like the handles that they have, you hold. And it's not super accurate. However, if you measure at the same state of hydration at the same time of day each time that you measure, even though the body fat percentage that it gives you may be off by 1 to 5%, it'll still give you a consistent reading. So if you're just using it for tracking purposes and you're using it consistently at the same time of day in the same state of hydration, it can be pretty accurate, at least for your own personal tracking methods.

So what do you recommend?

Here's what I recommend. Here's what I recommend for Jamal or anybody else listening in. There's two different things that I like. One, and I've used both. I own both. One is the Withings Smart Body Analyzer. So this is a scale that you stand on. It's similar to what I just talked about. It uses impedance to measure your body fat percentage. But the cool thing is that when you step on the scale, it measures your heart rate, it measures your body fat, and it even measures the quality of the indoor air like it does, like CO2 analysis. And measures the quality of the air that you're breathing. And so it's kind of cool because you can not just know what your body fat percentage is, but also some other things in your environment. So it does continuous checks of carbon dioxide levels in your environment. It calculates your resting heart rate. Let's say you get on every morning, you can see what your heart rate is every morning. Syncs to your phone so you can keep track of your percentages. And the phone app that comes along with it has a lot of little like weight loss goal tools and little like coaching tips and stuff like that. So that's the one that I like. It's called the Withings Smart Body Analyzer.

Do you use that at home?

I don't use it anymore. It's in my closet somewhere because I quit tracking my body fat just because I found that. But. But for people because. Because my goal, Rachel, right now is not fat loss.

Right.

So I have no reason to be tracking my body fat that intensively. So.

Right.

The other one though is called the Body Metrics. This one's pretty cool too. It uses ultrasound. And what you do is you get this little handheld body metrics device. I'll put links to both of these in the show. Notes. The within scale is not super expensive. It's 100 to 150 depending on where you get it. So it's expensive for a scale, but it's not that expensive for a body fat measuring device. This other one is closer to 500 bucks. But what it is is it's an ultrasound device that you hold up against different areas of your body according to the instructions that come with it. And again, it's called the body metrics and it gives you your body composition across your entire body. Very similar like these, you know, multi, multi thousand dollar DEXA scan units, except it measures hydration, it measures body fat measures a bunch of different things. It's the same one, I think Tim Ferriss talks about it in the Four Hour Body book, for example, as like a kind of cool little cutting edge method that a lot of biohackers like to use to find out the true fat thickness at every single measurement point. So if you're trying to reduce body fat, you could even see which areas of the body would be best to really spot target. And a lot of people think body fat spot reduction doesn't work. But I've written articles before, particularly over@quickanddirtytips.com, i've got an article about research showing that when you hit a certain part of your body over and over and over again. With targeted training to muscle fatigue, you actually experience lipolysis and decreased fat deposition in that area of the body. So if you find out that your weakness is, like, fat thighs, you can really step up, for example, how many squats and lunges that you're doing and decrease body fat in that specific area. So you could combine something like body metrics, ultrasound, body composition measurements with targeted body fat reduction, spot reduction.

Awesome.

Yeah. So the withings. Withings or the body metrics are the two ways that I would go, Jamal. And best of luck, man. Have. Have fun geeking out with those.

Hey, guys, I had a question regarding a pretty new area of science and research that's going on out there, but seems to be growing pretty quickly in the last few years called NRF2. I know that a lot of the research that's coming out right now is really looking at preventative health approaches, but also I wanted your feedback on this as a strategy for recovery. I know as a fireman and a father of three, I'm always looking for an edge, so any feedback on this would be great. Thanks.

Strap on your propeller hat, baby. Yeah.

I have no idea what he's talking about.

My eldium Q46 explosive space modulator. Do you ever watch? You're gonna make me feel old again. Did you ever watch Marvin the Martian?

Oh, I did watch Marvin the Martian.

Marvin the Martian. He was pretty cool.

There you go.

Yeah, he was a villain, but he was a cool villain. He was the villain you could laugh at because he's always, always hurting himself like Wile E. Coyote.

Do you feel way less old now?

I feel. I feel young again. Thank you. Appreciate that.

All right, NRF2. Let's do it.

Redemption. NRF2. So NRF2, it stands for nuclear factor, like two, and that's. It's what's called a transcription factor. It gets encoded by a certain gene in your body. And basically what it does is it regulates the expression of certain proteins that protect you against antioxidants or against oxidative damage, inflammation, things like that, oxidative stress, whether it's from the environment or whether it's from radiation or not eating enough turmeric, whatever, like NRF2 can prevent some of this inflammation. And activating NRF2 has been shown in some studies to even potentially promote the development of cancerous tumors as well as the development of atherosclerosis. So it's very interesting how this particular gene interacts with different regions in the body. And basically what you would want to do is activate it, but not activate it too much, because it appears that by constantly activating it, you can get cancer, you can get atherosclerosis, but you still want to activate it to a certain extent. And the reason that I say that is, for example, you look at ketosis. Let's say ketosis activates the NRF2 pathway and it decreases oxidation, it decreases inflammation. And the way that it does that though, is it initially. This is going to sound kind of confusing. It initially increases oxidative stress. And when you increase your oxidative stress, what happens is your body starts to churn out more of its own endogenous antioxidants and its own natural anti inflammatories and painkillers. This is what's called a hormetic effect. It's the same reason that mild doses of radiation and adequate amounts of exercise and some cold exposure, and some heat exposure, and some fasting, and even some exposure to things that are slightly aggravating to your gut. But like wild plant extracts, for example, all of these things have a hormetic effect where they're a little bit stressful on your body, but only a little bit. And for the most part, what they do is they cause your body to turn up its ability to withstand higher levels of stress.

Right?

So NRF2 is one of those things that's activated via this hormetic response. And then once you begin to overdo radiation, you begin to overdo heat exposure, you begin to overdo cold, overdue the intake of toxins from plants, for example, or pesticides, you know, overdue exposure to sunlight and sun damage, et cetera. That's when you get so much expression of nrf2 that you can potentially increase your risk of cancer and increase your risk of atherosclerosis. And that's why you may, for example, see people who are overdoing exercise out in the sun, flying in airplanes all the time and beating their bodies up. They start to lose out on a lot of these health effects. And instead, you know, in addition to hormone depletion and thyroid depletion, whatever, they get over activation of NRF2. So it's one of those balanced things, kind of like activation of mtor, your muscle building protein. Right? Like when you activate that pathway, you can activate it so much that it becomes carcinogenic. So the trick is to eat enough food to keep yourself somewhat anabolic, lift weights enough to where you're strong and you got tight, powerful muscle, but not to get to the point where you're eating 6,000 calories a day and, you know, walking around with it with a barbell attached to your shoulders all the time, because that eventually can become too pro growth, too much MTOR activation and potentially pro carcinogenic. So it's one of those things where it's always a balancing act.

And so what do you think of it as a strategy for recovery?

Well, I'm not aware of, like supplements and stuff like that that increase NRF production, although I would imagine that you could take like wild plant extracts and probably get some of that effect. So when it comes to recovery, I would say that if you use something like mild amounts of cold, mild amounts of heat, a little bit of intermittent fasting, by the way, turmeric and curcumin have been shown to increase NRF2 as well. Interestingly enough.

Interesting.

Then what happens is if you're getting a little bit of that systemic oxidative stress, you're going to increase your body's own ability to activate NRF2 and to recover more quickly. The even more interesting thing is that if you get genetic testing done, like a salivary genetic test, you can find, and there's one company called DNAFit that will spit out these results for you. I'll put a link to that, by the way, in the show notes. But basically what you can find out is how much of your own endogenous antioxidants you naturally produce based off of your genes. Some people produce more, some people produce less. So some people need to take less of a substance to activate their NRF2 gene, and some people need more. And you can actually get that tested via genetic test and find out whether or not you are actually someone who needs more cold heat, wild plants, curcumin, vitamin C, like a lot of these natural things that would increase the production of NRF2 versus you may be somebody who just recovers really well with, with minimal amounts of these type of things. So not everyone is created equal when it comes to this stuff.

And considering that it's about striking a balance, you probably want to start there to make sure that you don't overdo.

It with genetic testing. Yeah, genetic testing is so cheap now. Yeah, I mean, it's like, what, 97 bucks, something like that, to get your 23andMe done? I recommend it. And then I recommend getting the results and exporting them to a company like this DNAFit, which will tell you like, like your salt and your alcohol and your caffeine sensitivity and whether you have predisposition to celiac disease, whether you have the genes for lactose intolerance, what your fast twitch, slow twitch muscle fiber capacity is, whether you respond better to power training versus endurance training. I mean there's so many cool things that you can derive from DNA based data. So yeah, check out the show notes. We'll put links to all the goodies that we talk about. Not just that but but also body fat analyzers, forms of curcumin, all the studies we talked about with marijuana making you stupid, all that stuff.

Meditation making you smart, meditation, killing off.

Your amygdala, which is a good thing. So. BenGreenfieldFitness.com 337 check it out. And speaking of the show notes, if you leave a review and you hear your review read on the show, and the way that you leave reviews, you just go to itunes, you leave some stars, you say something nice, then we will send you a gift pack and we actually have a review to read. Yay. And if you hear your review read on the show, email gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gearreenfieldfitnesssystems dot com and we'll send you a Sweet Tech T shirt, BPA free water bottle. Guilt free. You won't get water bottle cancer or water bottle man boobs. And then a what's the other thing? A toque, a beanie to keep your keep your head warm. So check all that out. And Rachel, what do you think? You want to take it away with this week's review?

Yes, it's called It's not all about Ben. 5 stars by daa021 I'll warn those.

Of you listening in, it's kind of long, but it's actually kind of entertaining.

So good. Yeah, I've listened to the show for over a year now. My wife started listening to it about six months ago. The information we've taken from this podcast has changed our lives. We eat and live differently than we did a year ago. No, we don't do everything Ben recommends, but we do what we can and take the information and incorporate what works best for us. It's not all about Ben because he's also introduced us to some other great podcasters like Jordan at TheArt of Charm, Tai Lopez, Tawny Luco at EndurancePlanet Lucho.

But they're also both good people at.

Endurance Planet as well as others. I disagree with some of the recent reviews about dishonesty. Ben is very open and forthcoming when he produces, when what he produces or is sponsored by a specific supplement. And if you Think otherwise. You must not be paying attention.

Well, some people said on their itunes reviews that I am dishonest because when I recommend, I don't know what like digestive enzymes or curcumin or something like that, that I make money off of them. Yes. If you click on links in the show notes, you help to support the show. That's not dishonesty.

Yeah. Ben, you're a very honest person.

That's capitalism.

All right.

Okay, go ahead.

Yes, Ben does talk about a lot of tests and equipment that is not cheap, but he does offer alternatives of cheaper options when they exist. But that is not what this show is about. It's about pushing the boundaries of our bodies and learning about our bodies as at a finite scale with micronutrients, etc. That cannot be accurately tracked and tested over the counter. Overall, it's a very informative show and Ben does his best to research everything he brings to us and explains when articles are based on bad science and why pseudoscience.

Woo. Woo.

Last but not least, I really enjoy the new co host, Rachel. Oh, that's very sweet. Thank you.

Except they spelled your name Rachel.

That's okay. I don't care. Ben, thank you for not picking a doctor or someone as technical as yourself. I think Rachel and formerly Brock do a great job asking questions and bringing some of the topics out of the clouds for us. Less technical folks. Right. Keep up the good work. Thank you.

You know what this. This whole thing comes down to though?

What does it come down to?

So during this podcast, you. You made me feel really old. Old. And our reviewer made you look really stupid.

So are even.

Is that thinking glass half empty? No, actually, that was a great review. I love it. And I'm gonna start calling you Rachel now.

No, that's not what I love.

And they spelled Brock's name Broch. Broch, which is also a cool name.

They're obviously great people, so we don't care.

Yeah, well, anyways, if you're listening in, you can go leave a review in itunes and we can read your fantastic, highly entertaining reviews on the show. So again, head over to BenGreenFitness.com 337 to check out everything from the link to our interview with the vaginal weightlifting coach to weed, to fat loss devices and fat tracking devices. Curcumin, turmeric, DNA tracking, NRF2, you name it.

So much stuff.

Yeah, thanks for listening in and stay tuned this weekend for a very cool episode. I'm going to keep it a surprise, but you're going to love it. In the meantime, Rachel, ciao.

Bye.

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

Sam.