Grow Muscles Faster, Pro Athlete Biohacks, Living Long With High Cholesterol & More.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, how to grow muscles faster, pro athlete biohacks. How much sun is too much? Does a sauna shrink your sperm? How to live long if your cholesterol levels are high, 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.

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

Well, Rachel, I feel like one big, giant piece of minty gum right now.

Oh, you do? Why is that? What's going on over there at the Greenfield house?

I'm. I'm cold air diffusing spearmint essential oil into my office because it's like a wakefulness oil. Vanilla is a good wakefulness oil, and sandalwood is another good one. Actually, I mix vanilla and sandalwood, and I make a homemade cologne. But mint is also a nice one to diffuse in the office.

Nice. And is it helping? Are you feeling all excited and ready to go for the massive podcast that we have today?

Oh, it's amazing. It's not quite as good as the 63 cups of coffee that we podcasted about over the weekend, but it's pretty good. And as you know, I'm a big fan of optimizing your water intake and your light and your electricity and then your air. And so, in addition to this little cold air diffuser and the new mint flavor I've been experimenting with, I also have this thing sitting on my desk called a plasma air purifier. Have you heard of these?

I have. Yeah, I have.

Yeah. It basically it neutralizes volatile organic compounds. Not that I'm sitting here in my office sniffing paint, but what it does is it cleans out viruses and bacteria and mold and dust and pollen and just basically cleans the air that you're breathing. It's called a breathe safe. So I've got the essential oil diffuser on one side of my desk and the breathe safe on the other. So basically, I'm simulating the equivalent of me being on a pristine Himalayan mountaintop right now, I swear.

News flashes.

Well, Rachel, I hope that you and all of our listeners are prepared for a monster news flashes, because with as much as I'VE been traveling lately, and as few Q and A episodes as we've been doing, I think that the news flashes, the research studies, and all the interesting things I like to fill people in on, they've kind of been piling up, haven't they?

They have been piling up and they. We have a massive pile to get through today.

Well, I'm actually, I'm kind of excited because there's a lot of interesting things. If any of you are listening in and you're into weirdo biohacks that professional athletes do or grounding or earthing or fat loss or anything else related to human body and brain performance, brace yourself, hold on tight, because we're about to generate some serious GS in today's news flashes. All right, first of all, blood testing. So I thought that this one company that was an up and rising company in the whole blood testing, self quantification realm was gonna be pretty dang sexy. It was called Theranos. Had you heard about this?

You posted this a little while ago, actually, so I'm really excited to hear what you have to say about it.

Yeah. One drop of blood on your fingertip and you walk into a Walgreens or a cvs, and it theoretically would allow you to have a host of variables, starting off with several dozen and leading up to hundreds. You know, everything from testosterone to all your cholesterol particles, red blood cells, white blood cells, everything. And all of a sudden, a few weeks ago, this company got completely shut down. This, this hyped up blood testing technology actually got shut down by the fda.

Wow. And why?

Well, the reason for this in a nutshell. And I'll link to this article along with everything else over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 3354 that's where the show notes are going to be for this episode. BenGreenfieldFitness.com 354 the idea is this. When you collect blood from a fingertip drop, you can get information about a few little things like blood glucose is probably the most common one. Right. And some people are now doing ketones quite a bit. Those, those are two things. But there's a lot of really other medically important molecules like proteins or like lipids. Right. Like your cholesterol particles and those not found in uniform concentrations throughout the body, they're going to vary quite a bit. And what this means is that the concentration of molecules taken from blood that's in a fingertip is going to be way, way different than the actual concentration of molecules. The accurate concentration of Molecules that you would get when you stick a needle into someone's vein and take it out of their vein. And so the idea here is it was very, very inaccurate data that they were generating.

And so do people know that to begin with because it was quite a big startup that got quite a lot of funding.

Well, that's the problem is that not only was it a little bit of kind of like jumping the gun, I guess, so to speak, when it comes to everybody getting excited about being able to self quantify everything with it with a single drop of blood, but there may have also been a bit of foul play in terms of, you know, this company's kerosene charismatic young female founder who everybody seemed to be infatuated with as some kind of a medical genius. It turned out that they may have been misleading some people. So I'd recommend that you read the article. And by the way, this is related to a company I, three years ago was very excited about, a company called Talking20, in which you put a drop of blood onto a little envelope and you mail it into this company called Talking20 and they'll theoretically give you back hundreds of variables. Well, it turns out this company got shut down too, so.

Wow.

The FDA is shutting down these, these blood companies right and left.

It's a brilliant idea if they could make it work.

Yeah. But it turns out that, that for any of these tests like cholesterol or, or thyroid hormones or anything else like that, you, you gotta wander into your local lab and, and actually have them stick a, stick a needle into your.

Feeling your arm. Doing it the old fashioned way.

Yep, exactly. So, and listening to this weekend's podcast, I geeked out on lab tests for about two hours with a couple. And we have a quite comprehensive interview on blood testing coming up in this weekend's podcast. If that little snippet wasn't enough for you. So next I wanted to delve into this new form of training. And this is relevant because I actually just posted a workout that I did this morning on the Snapchat. And this study is called a single set of exhaustive exercise before resistance training improves muscular performance in young men. And what this study looked at was if you do a very, very kind of easy, slow set prior to jumping into like a strength training set or a power training set, meaning you're going to do 10 repetitions of 10 seconds down and 10 seconds up prior to doing like a heavy deadlift or a powerful squat jump. The idea is that you build greater amounts of both strength as well as if this is something you're pursuing muscle size when you do, like this pre exhausting set. And the reason for this is that you pre exhaust all the slow twitch muscle fibers, and this causes you to recruit a bunch more of the fast twitch muscle fibers. And I have been experimenting a bunch with this approach using this book called Neuromass. And it's an excellent book. It's relatively short read. It's like $2.99 on Amazon, and I'm getting the guy who wrote it on a podcast. But it's a really cool way to train. So here's what you do. And I was actually doing this form of training just this morning. I posted it to Snapchat. Basically, what you do is something very, very slow. So let's say like a super duper squat. And it could be a body weight squat. The entire book is just body weight or kettlebell. So it could be body weight squat, or maybe you'd hoist one to two kettlebells up to shoulder height and do a very, very slow kettlebell squat. And then you would do something that recruits all that fast twitch muscle fiber after you've pre exhausted the slow twitch muscle fiber. So you would do like a squat jump with the kettlebells or a squat jump with body weight or a box jump or a set of lunge jumps or something like that. And, and then for this particular program in the book, what you do is you. You finish off the muscle with an isometric hold, meaning that you drop into like a squat position and you hold that while doing deep diaphragmatic breathing for like 10 seconds or 20 seconds. And then you move on. You do hamstrings, then you move on and you do chest and you do back. And I've been doing this workout in hotel rooms while I travel. I did it in my driveway this morning. I like it because all I needed was a yoga mat and a kettlebell. But it's a very, very cool way to train. And this most recent study shows that you actually get these pretty cool breakthroughs in both strength and size when you do it.

Yeah. And it sounds really accessible as well.

Extremely accessible.

You can do from anywhere with little amounts of things.

Yeah. And the other cool thing about it is there are instructions in the book on how you can use a towel, like a giant bath towel from, like your hotel room to do all of isometric training, like hangs and deadlifts and Romanian deadlifts and poles using just a common bath towel.

That is so cool.

Yeah. So check out the study. I'll link to that one in the show notes. It just came out in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, and I'll link to that book Neuromass as well. And like I mentioned, I'm getting this guy on the show to interview him. Another. Another interesting study that I tweeted was about barefoot running. So I don't know if you saw this one, Rachel, but it turns out that working memory is enhanced when you go for a barefoot run.

Isn't that fascinating?

It's really cool. Working memory is your ability to recall and process information. It's something that would be enhanced, say, with sleep, would probably be the most common thing up until this point that we know will enhance working memory. But in this case, what about caffeine? Caffeine, possibly. Yeah. Caffeine could potentially do it as well. And there's something else that could help out with it, too, that I'll mention in a second here. But the idea is that they enlisted a whole bunch of participants in this study, ages 18 to 44, and they had them run both barefoot as well as wearing shoes. They split them into groups and they tested working memory. And what they found was a significant increase, about 16% of an increase in working memory when folks were running the barefoot. And the hypothesis here by the researchers was that the extra tactile and proprioceptive demands associated with barefoot running may allow for an improvement in working memory.

What does that mean?

That means that for some reason, it seems to be stimulating more neurons or nerve endings in the bottom of the feet, which is a good reason to run barefoot anyways. It helps to enhance your foot strike and your feel for the ground.

Walk barefoot as well, or walk barefoot.

Now, my own personal hypothesis is that this might be related to the earthing or the grounding effect that you get when your skin is in contact with the planet. And in this case, for example, even if I'm not walking around barefoot, I'll often wear these geeky. I call them my high tech Jesus sandals. They're called Earth runners. Have you seen these?

I've got a pair. I love them.

Yeah, they're sandals that have a copper plug in the sole, and then the lacing is lined with copper. And so even if you're not barefoot, it allows the electricity generated by the surface of the earth to basically get absorbed into your body, you know, through the sole of your shoe. A little bit better than what you'd get if you were, say, wearing a normal rubber pair of running shoes. So ultimately, it turns out that barefoot may enhance working memory, and I suspect it might have something to do with the grounding or the earthing effects just as much as perhaps the tactile or the proprioceptive demands. But either way, if you want to become a smart cookie, one thing that you should consider doing is getting out and walking or running barefoot more often.

Love it.

Yes. And this is definitely related to another really cool study that went into living in a very ancestral way, and in this case, spending 10 days in the wilderness. What they found was that these folks who spent 10 days in the wilderness were able to strip over 7 inches of fat off their waist and boost their insulin sensitivity by over 53%. This one was pretty fascinating. What they did was they had this group, and this was in Spain, they had them spend 10 days in the wilderness, basically walking. They were walking about seven to nine miles a day. They were walking from what they called water hole to waterhole, which makes the participants sound like a group of bison or buffalo, but they were, in fact, humans. They were wearing backpacks. So each of them had about 16 pounds or so in their backpack. They were sleeping in just a camping situation. Right. So going to bed close to sunset, rising close to sunup, the temperatures actually were dipping at night down to about 50 to 60 degrees. Right. So it got a little bit chilly during the night, and they actually got, you know, exposed to decent temperatures during the day. It varied between about 75 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. These water holes that they're arriving to drink at, it was just like clean, non chlorinated water. And they were eating twice a day, almost like this intermittent fasting type of approach. And what I mean by that is that they were feeding them a diet very similar to what's called the Hasda diet, which was seeds and nuts and berries and some citrus fruits. And then they'd bring them animals like ducks and chickens and turkeys and rabbits and fish. And they would prepare these at the about halfway through their walk during the day, and then again when they arrived to their destination. Right. So we've got a combination of 100% exposure to the elements, which the researchers hypothesize would kind of resynchronize the circadian rhythm, or the internal clock. You know, everything from sleeping outside to being exposed to extremes of cold and heat. Cyclic water intake, meaning that they were drinking really good, clean water, but they were actually going for long periods of time during the day without water and then drinking a bunch when they would get to these water holes. And they've actually shown that experiencing thirst during Movement can cause a release of an anti inflammatory hormone called oxytocin. The same type of hormone that gets released during hugging or sex for some strange reason also gets released when you're thirsty. So they observed that. They also, of course, they were intermittent fasting, right? They. And eating only two meals a day can increase your mitochondrial density, it can increase your ability to tap into your own body's fatty acids or adipose tissue. And it can also, as you would suspect, increase your insulin sensitivity. So they saw that. And then of course there was just the, you know, rather than doing like a CrossFit workout, right, or a triathlon training session or, you know, bodybuilding or something like that, at the beginning or the end of the day, these folks are just walking with a little bit of weight all day long, right? And apparently as part of their deal with the Spanish government, they were doing a little bit of like repairing of the roads as they were walking. And then the last thing I should mention is that they were not allowed to have their mobile phones or their electronic devices.

So the cool thing about this as well is that this could also be applied to just everyday life. Well, that's from walking waterhole to waterhole, right?

That's, that's the thing. You don't have to go, go out in the wilderness and walk from water hole to water hole to get these benefits. Think about it. Don't snack in grace frequently, right? Allow yourself, perhaps when you are exercising or working out, to get a little bit thirsty. So don't necessarily go out with your giant Nalgene water bottle and maybe try doing your workout with no water and just drink at the end. Go to bed when it gets dark and wake up when it gets light and let your room be a little bit cold and maybe get a little bit hot during the day and then don't snack or graze all day long like I mentioned, and engage in low level physical activity all day long. A little bit of walking, a little bit of light weight bearing. And the results in the study were just astounding. I'll link to it in the show notes. But quite interesting what happens when you implement these simple things that our ancestors might have done.

Right? Yeah, this is my favorite study so far, I think.

10 days of Paleo life in the wilderness. So sounds fun.

Yeah, Maybe we can organize a retreat.

That sounds kind of fun. Let's, let's go clean up the roads in Spain and walk waterhole to waterhole. This, this next one I thought was really interesting. It looked at the best way to build Mitochondria, which. Which, of course, you know, I just mentioned, and which are our cells powerhouses, if. Did you happen to listen to the podcast with Dr. David Minkoff last week, Rachel?

I haven't yet.

Okay. It was on why we get cancer and how the concept of getting cancer is far different than what modern medicine seems to think, which is that it's simply DNA mutations causing undifferentiated cell growth. And that, in fact, cancer begins when mitochondria become defunct, when the cell's mitochondria are no longer able to take oxygen and produce ATP and produce water as a byproduct, and instead produce a bunch of energy in the absence of oxygen and create a bunch of toxic lactic acid in the process. So that podcast is, in my opinion, a must listen for anyone who wants to stay healthy because we delve into how to take care of your mitochondria, et cetera. But this particular article that I'll link to delves into what's the best way to trigger the formation of new mitochondria or to allow the mitochondria to become more powerful. Like, how efficient can you make each unit of mitochondria to create as much energy as possible?

And it's specifically for training.

Yep, specifically related to training. So they found that when it comes to making the mitochondria more powerful. Right. To boosting the output of the mitochondria, that you must do sprint workouts as part of your training routine. In this case, sprint workouts comprise about 30 seconds. And this is something that I've talked about a lot. This is something that's worked into this. You know, this look good Naked and Longevity program that I created. It's a very popular PDF that we sell for about. I think it's about $27 over at greenfieldfitnessystems.com and in that program, I tried to grab all the different research studies on all the different things you could. You could stim with exercise, right, like fat loss and VO2 max and mitochondrial density. And one of the things that I do in there is I try to stimulate the phosphogenic energy system, the energy system of the body that splits creatine to create energy. And that means that you're doing very short bursts of 10 to 30 seconds. And it turns out that that does the best job, boosting the overall mitochondrial output, but it does not actually increase the mitochondrial density quite as efficiently as doing exercise sessions that are at a slightly longer, more medium pace. Right. And in this case, what they found Was that to actually increase mitochondrial density, they were doing, for example, four sets of five minutes of cardiovascular exercise with about a two to one work to rest ratio, right? So you go five minutes hard, two and a half minutes easy. And sure, it's not quite as hard as you'd be going during a 10 to 30 second effort, but this kind of like lower level, high intensity interval training with a 2 to 1 work to rest ratio when paired with short, very, very hard efforts with full recovery, gave you this one, two combo of both increasing the density of your mitochondria as well as how much energy your mitochondria could actually produce. So takeaway message here is, you know, if you were to do like, let's say two cardiovascular training sessions per week, you do one that's like a, you know, four by five minute efforts with, with a two to one work to rest ratio, right? So like two and a half minute long recovery periods. And then you'd also have a session where you do just like 10, 22nd very hard efforts, like a Tabata protocol or something like that. So ultimately, really interesting in terms of actual research that shows how we can maximize our mitochondria, you know, whether it's better to go farther or faster or both. And it turns out it's both.

And we still want to maximize our mitochondria. Just to stay healthy.

Exactly. Just to stay healthy. And of course, Dr. David Minkoff and I in that podcast episode talk about how just having dense mitochondria or efficient mitochondria doesn't solve all your problems. You need to, for example, limit the amount of radiation that you're exposed to. You need to limit the amount of electrical pollution that you're exposed to. You need to get exposed to lots of really good oxygen by potentially using things like ozonated water or hyperbaric oxygen chambers. We kind of geeked out on all the things you could do to reduce your risk of cancer, especially if you're genetically predisposed to it. But of course, you know, you could start by simply making sure that you're including these two different types of interval training sessions in your routine.

So love it.

Yeah. Okay, let's talk NBA. The NBA Finals just ended and there's been a few articles on the Internet that have gone into the professional athletes in the NBA and all the weird little biohacks that they're now getting into, and the first article that I'll link to in the show, notes, and again, everything we're talking about, if you guys really like to read or if you're like me and you use the Send to Kindle button on your browser like crazy, I hit that thing like it's cocaine. All day long, send a Kindle. And then at the end of the day I just read everything that I sent to my Kindle with the sleep mode activated in my Kindle, of course. So I don't get iPad insomnia, but this. Speaking of insomnia, this first study was on or this first article is on NBA players and how much they're geeking out on improving their sleep habits. So they've gone way above and beyond just, you know, all of the players on most of the teams wearing Fitbits and things like that to self quantify their sleep. But now they're actually hiring sleep specialists who are working with the players to really dial in their sleep, especially when they're traveling. And I thought it was fascinating in the article some of the things that they're doing. For example, many of them are now using a sleep tracker called whoop, which is a wristband that has five sensors on it that's W H O O P and it samples the player's biorhythms 100 times per second. And then it gives them a recovery score every morning based on their heart rate variability. So they get like the green is go, yellow is be careful this day and red is make this a completely easy day. You know, very, very similar to, you know, what I personally recommend folks do with, for example, the nature beat heart rate variability measurement in the morning or the use of this oura ring that I've been using to track sleep. But they also get into some of the things that they've been doing in terms of the players actually taking things with them to allow them to sleep better. So, for example, if you look at this one team, they're doing a lot of chamomile and lavender teas and lavender oils before bed. Sound familiar? They're doing tart cherry juice and microdosing with melatonin. You've got others that are now traveling with blackout curtains as well as special, special devices that they fit over the air vents in hotel rooms to filter out dust. You know, very similar to this BreatheSafe device that's on my desk or similar to some of the, some of the air cleaning protocols that we've talked about on previous podcasts. They're even traveling with like wooden boards to firm up mattresses for different players. Right. So they can sleep on a more firm surface if the bed is too soft. They're customizing Pillows for players, like custom fit pillows. And by the way, we had a whole podcast on this with this guy named Dr. Nick Littlehales who works with European soccer players on this. But you know, and I've always said this, European soccer players seem to. And Tour de France cyclists, those, those two athletes or, or sports are way ahead of the curve when it comes to everything from heart rate variability to optimizing sleep to self quantification. And now it seems that the NBA is finally catching on as far as implementing a lot of these geeked out sleep strategies with their players.

Yeah, that's awesome. And it said that, I mean, one player being injured can cost them $100 million. So that was the bottom line that really sparked them to start looking into recovery and sleep.

That's why it has always shocked me when a team will focus on movement and they'll focus on diet for players. And even those are sometimes not all that great. A lot of times, like the NFL, for example, it's still a good boys network, right? Like, players are still bench pressing and drinking Gatorade because that is where the, where the money at, or that is where tradition is at. But it always baffles me when players or teams will spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on an athlete and then shorten their career by 6 years by not optimizing things like air and water and light, electricity and sleep. And so this other article actually goes, I think it delves even more deeply into the realm of nerdiness when it comes to what some of these players are doing. And this was the Golden State warriors who were playing in this most recent NBA Finals. They lost in Game 7. They did, but they were using a device made by Halo Neuroscience. And what this company makes are headphones with these little soft plastic spikes that go above each ear that press into your skull and deliver these pulses of electric current to your brain. And the idea here is that these Halo headsets are using a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tdcs. So what TDCS does is it's based off a couple of electrodes that are attached to a battery, and you're typically attaching a headphone looking device to your head, and it's actually sending this little mild current, like 500 to 1,000 times smaller than the current you'd use during electroshock therapy through your brain. And the idea is that current changes the excitability of different neurons, making those neurons a little bit more or less likely to fire. They call it neuropriming. And the idea Here is that when you wear them, for example, 20 minutes prior to a warm up for a game or a practice, that your brain is able to deliver stronger, more synchronous signals to your body. So they were actually using this strategy to prime their players prior to performance. And there's some really interesting studies. I mean, They've been studying TDCS in athletes since about 20077 when a group of Italian researchers showed that when you stimulate the motor cortex with tdcs. Actually talk about this in my book Beyond Training. This was a study done in cyclists. Those cyclists experienced significantly lower levels of neuromuscular fatigue and increased endurance during their performance when they were essentially shocked prior to performing. And it turns out that when used prior to something like basketball or let's say before tennis or baseball or something like that, that TDCS could improve focus and subsequently performance when you use it prior to going out to do what it is you want to do.

Yeah, and something that I really liked about it as well was that it can or they're looking at how it can help addiction and depression and it's going to be a potentially really powerful thing for that too.

Well, wrap your head around this. Pun intended. We posted a few photo to Instagram. You can see it over@instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness in that photo, I'm wearing a $25,000 Qeeg cap. This cap measures the frequency and the speed of your brain waves and looks at each of the different lobes of your brain and the activation in each of those lobes. Now, I recorded an hour and a half long podcast with Dr. Andrew Hill and that podcast is going to get released in a couple of weeks. While wearing this cap, as it measured my brain, we actually discovered some different areas of my brain that are hyper excitable or hyper focused.

Oh wow. What are the hyper excitable ones?

Well, basically I have a tendency towards hyper attentiveness. And the idea here is that when you are hardwired like that, you can have difficulty relaxing, slowing down, in some cases sleeping, or falling back asleep after you wake up. And I certainly have been able to overcome many of those things through strategies such as transcendental meditation, the use of lavender oil, the use of pulsed electromagnetic field frequency in microdoses while sleeping, etc. But what we're actually going to do this summer is I'm going to be traveling to LA for three days and we're going to spend three days retraining my brain and then I'll travel back to Spokane with these same electrodes that you attach to your head and spend several months actually building myself a new brain using neurofeedback.

Oh my God. That is crazy.

It's going to actually cost a pretty penny, but I think it's going to be worth the the information I'll be able to give our listeners in terms of how we can use modern science to reprogram our brains that are either affected by, in my case, things like multiple concussions while playing sports because we did find damaged areas of my brain to just basically having to fight an uphill battle against living in a modern post industrial era. So anyways, fascinating stuff. So stay tuned for more as I retrain my brain. And stay tuned for that podcast too. Okay, I realize the news flashes are going on and on, but I've got a few more things that, that I wanted to share because there's, there's so much that's come down the pipeline this week. My friend Dr. Jack Cruz wrote a very interesting article. As is the case with all of his blog posts, it will make your head hurt. This one is called did. This one is called. The title of this one is called Time Subtraction. And the article goes into everything from cancer to mitochondria to activation of your myelin sheaths to enhance your nerve function, et cetera. Jack Cruz is a great guy, but I always like to scroll to the end of his blog post because there he tends to give some really good practical suggestions. And in this case, when it comes to enhancing the health of your vagus nerve, which we've talked about on the show before as being the most important nerve when it comes to stabilizing your nervous system, recovering, sleeping better, thinking better, et cetera. He has some great tips. So you want to hear some of my favorite tips from this one I love?

Yep.

Okay. So first of all, one of the things that he talks about is that you must reconnect with natural light. And he is a huge fan of not just going out of your way to look directly into natural sunlight in the morning, or in my case, if it's gray or cloudy. I'll even hack that with something like greenish blue light producing glasses. Like I talked about this Retimer set of glasses I've been using. But he also highly recommends that at night you see some form of red light, such as the sunset. Or in our case, what Jessa did was she's taken a bunch of wine bottles and she's made fire torches out of those wine bottles so we can actually look at natural firelight at night. Without necessarily going in our house and starting up a fire in the fireplace. So looking into sun in the morning and then seeing some form of torchlight or sunset at night. He's also a huge fan of using water daily to generate negative ions and to also activate the vagus nerve. Just the sound of falling water and the sight and smell of falling water can activate the vagus nerve. I actually do not have a waterfall in my home, but it is high up on the list of things that I want to add. Some form of moving water, right? So if you live in a place where you're not getting exposed to ocean waves, to waterfalls, to moving rivers, go out of your way to figure out a way. Even if you buy like one of those little. I mean, even those. Those cheesy little, like, you know, the waterfalls I'm talking about, you can like.

Yeah, you like desk, they're on your desktop. Water, pretty LED lights, and they change color and just usually spurt water everywhere as well, by the way.

But you know what? Just like cold air diffusers that diffuse essential oils, just like, you know, Himalayan rock salt lamps that produce negative ions, these little forms of moving water, if you can figure out a way to have that in your house or in your garden or in your yard, big benefit for your vagus nerve. Another one that he recommends is sound, the use of sound for your vagus nerve. Now, he recommends using something like a quartz sounding bowl or even doing chanting, using the sound like a monk might do to train the vagus nerve. And I've personally talked about chanting, gargling, singing, all of those as being excellent for the vagus nerve. But sound and sound frequencies, I'm glad to see that he recommends it. He recommends the quartz sounding bowl. If you're into technology, I would also Recommend. There are CDs that I'm now using. They're called whole tones. W, H, O, L, E tones. And these tones are set at a specific frequency that activate your vagus nerve. And you put the CD in and you just sit there in front of your speakers. And you can do it while you're doing yoga or while you're reading, but they actually create the specific sound frequencies that activate this vagus nerve. It's basically sound therapy. Yeah. So basically, sound and sound frequencies are also important. He goes into cold water face immersion, which we've also talked about before on the show. But this idea of splashing cold water in your face or jumping into cold water or immersing yourself in cold water. I made a very good point to someone who was asking me about the difference between cryotherapy and cold water when it comes to cold thermogenesis. And one thing that I mentioned is with cryotherapy, these chambers that you go and stand inside to decrease the body temperature and decrease inflammation, et cetera, the one thing that you miss out on with a cryotherapy chamber is activation of your vagus nerve. Because your face isn't getting wet, you aren't activating that mammalian dive reflex. So Jack, in this article, he says you should consider to learn free diving. You should consider, consider filling your mouth with ice cold water or putting your face underwater, figuring out ways to expose your body to cold water. So that was another really, really good, good tip that he goes into in here. You know, the article goes on and on, but a couple of other important ones that I like that he goes into. One is to avoid sunglasses. And I've talked before about avoiding sunglasses because they shut down the melanin on the skin. When you wear sunglasses, you're actually blocking photoreceptors in your eye that are sensitive to light. This down regulates melanin production in your skin and makes you more likely to burn in response to sunlight.

Interesting.

Yeah. Ironically, when you wear sunglasses outdoors in the bright sun, you're more likely to burn. But also, and Jack makes this point in the article, when you block sunlight from actually coming in direct contact with the rods and the cones in your eyes, it desensitizes your vagus nerve. And he talks about how you can resensitize your vagus nerve with like, stimulating your eyes by rubbing your eyes, like vigorous rubbing of your eyes, making a fist and rubbing both eyes. But it turns out that wearing sunglasses is actually doing yourself quite a disservice when it comes to stimulation of the vagus nerve.

That's good to know.

That was another one. And then finally, the sound of water. Just the sound of the ocean or waves crashing or water or for me, when I sleep, I actually use the sound of raindrops. I use this app called Sleep Stream and it lets you make ocean wave sounds or raindrop sounds that also can activate the vagus nerve via the tiny little hairs in your ears. So it turns out that there's a lot of different ways to stimulate your nervous system. And I would recommend that folks read this article. But a lot of these things are not that difficult to kind of work into your daily routine, right? Like getting exposed to moving water and getting a little cold water on your face each day and not wearing sunglasses out in the sun, trying to get a little natural sunlight in the morning, seeing a little bit of torchlight at night, doing some chanting or humming or singing. I like practical tips like this that improve the performance of your body and brain.

Totally love it. I'm going to do all of those.

Yep. Okay.

Super easy.

Cool. Now moving on. Perhaps this is a little bit more paparazzi esque, but have you seen skinny little Ryan hall lately? The marathoner. The very good marathoner that quit marathoning due to complete andropause or hypogonadism. His testosterone levels dropped extremely low. And if you see pictures of him, he was small and weak and skinny and all these photos of him out running. But have you seen him lately?

I haven't. What does he look like? He is jacked, Wolverine.

He is jacked. Now granted, I'm guessing he's probably on testosterone replacement therapy and I'm not necessarily a fan of that as much as I am a fan of things like peptides or sarms or other things that aren't going to shut down your own endogenous testosterone production. But I will put a link in the show notes to an article in Runner's World that shows Ryan Hall. The dude looks amazing. I mean it is profound. The difference between what he looks like as a professional marathoner, like skinny, massy, ated, sunken cheeks, just like nothing. And he is actually one muscle bound dude now. And I mean we're talking like it's less than a year. I mean he's put on 40 pounds of muscle since he quit marathoning. Just solid muscle.

Wow.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. So go, go check out the photos. I'll link to them again if you go to BenGreenFitness.com 354. Check out what happened to Ryan hall and they have his workout that he's been doing in there as well. I think probably his workout is less significant than the fact that he's no longer marathoning but quite interesting and you should go check him out. Ladies and guys, interesting case study related to that. There was an article in Science and Health that compared the 5k to the marathon and asked the question which would you expect to be more healthy? And Rachel, I would hazard a guess that you as a non marathoner would likely have your own answer to this question.

Am I that obvious?

Yeah, I'm pretty obvious.

I like running, but I just can't see how doing that sort of distance is good for your body.

Well, what they found was that compared to running marathons, when you run a 5k you actually achieve greater benefits for just about every reason that you would want to run, aside from adding 26.2 miles, you know, as a feather in your cap. What they found was that when you look at reductions in body mass index, improved cholesterol, reduced cancer risk, decreased gallbladder disease, decreased cataracts, decreased cardiovascular disease disease, decreased Alzheimer's, decreased risk of mortality, decreased respiratory disease, adding additional mileage has a law of diminishing returns. And once you get above, right around the training for a 5k type of mileage, and especially training for a 5k using high intensity interval training, you actually begin to see diminishing returns like decreased libido, decreased hormones, increased risk of injury, and a drop in many of these health benefits that we go after when we're doing something like that.

The reason we exercise is to be healthy. Yeah.

So it turns out, and I'll link to this article, but compare, you know, when you compare a 5k and a marathon across almost all categories, a 5k comes out winning. Now, I know that we have many marathoners and ultra runners that listen in. I'm not trying to throw that sport under the bus. Right. Like, I've done marathons, I've done marathons and beyond. When it comes to the amount of time that I've spent out running. And there's people doing 50 and 100 and 200 mile races. And when it comes to mental fortitude, when it comes to showing that you're able to go out and climb a very serious personal Mount Everest and you're able to suffer and you're able to display enormous amounts of human stamina, et cetera. Good on you, but totally mad respect. I'm not gonna say that. That it's. That it's healthy. And I don't think a lot of marathoners or trail runners will claim that it's necessarily healthy. It may be healthier than being sedentary. Right. But if we want ultimate health, you know, it comes down to things like, you know, a 5K. So.

Yeah. And I imagine those people aren't actually running those races to be healthy.

They're doing it to Exactly.

Climb their Mount Everest.

Exactly. All right, I've got one more for you.

Last one, Ben. Gotta make it a good one.

How to boost your performance gains by more than 600%.

That is awesome.

Okay. This study, this study looked at DNA. Now here, here's the background on this. There are a host of genes that different people have different copies of that are responsible for the way that you respond to resistance training. There's A bunch of known genetic variants that influence your adaptation to resistance training, meaning the frequency of resistance training. Right? Like whether you're, you're a person who genetically produces more endogenous antioxidants. Meaning that you would be a person who would respond best to daily consistent training versus say like two monster training sessions per week with longer recovery times. There are enzymes responsible for, for the expression of fast twitch muscle fibers versus slow twitch muscle fibers. Meaning that if you express more fast twitch muscle fibers, you know, like I personally do, I am what is called a power responder, Meaning that my body responds very well to strength and power based sets, to short, heavy sets with high weights rather than longer sets, you know, of 12 to 20, 25 repetitions with lighter weights. So I'm a power responder, not an endurance responder. There are genes responsible for determining how well you would respond to say, high intensity cardio training versus low intensity longer endurance training. What they did in this study, and this was through an organization called DNAFit, and that's a DNA testing organization, I've personally gone through them and, and had both my exercise and my nutrition assessed in terms of enhancing my genetic response to training. And this was entitled, this study was entitled A genetic Based algorithm for personalized resistance training. And it was very simple. All they did was they took two different groups, they tested their genes, and they had one group just do a basic standard exercise protocol. They had the other group do an exercise protocol that was having them train according to their genotype, meaning doing power versus endurance training, training frequently versus infrequently, et cetera. So for example, if you have a power genotype, you would train with high intensity. If you have an endurance genotype, you train with low intensity. And they found that the group that trained according to their genotype experienced performance gains of more than 600% and performance gains that dwarfed the folks who were not training according to what their genes were actually dictating. They should be training like that. Is that mind blowing?

That is almost unbelievable. Holy moly.

I mean, if that does not influence you to shell over the hundred to two hundred bucks to drip saliva into a tube, right? To smell a jar of peanut butter, to make yourself salivate and drip saliva into a tube to get your DNA tested. If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what does. And granted, there is this technology called crispr, this, this new gene splicing tweaking technology coming down the pipeline in which you may actually be able to change your genes. But until CRISPR is well proven and has a long safety record behind it. In more than just, say, fruit flies. I plan on training according to my genes, not changing my genes, and taking advantage of the things that studies like this have actually shown. So check this one out. Check all the everything that we just talked about. I've got a link to every single thing that we talked about from this book neuromass that I've been using, to these articles on the NBA, to this article on DNA fit, to the pictures of Ryan hall doing selfies with his shirt off, and much more over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 354. What do you think, Rachel? Did we spend enough time on the news flashes?

I think we did.

All right, let's move on.

Listener Q and A.

Hey, Ben, First, I'd like to thank you for all the amazing information you're providing on your podcast and through your website. Second, I'd like to ask you a question. It's in relation to dermatology. It being summer, I've started to spend a lot of time in the sun to make sure my vitamin D levels are on point. I rarely use sunscreen, instead opting to titrate up my sun exposure as the season goes on. Lately, I've been noticing that I'm not getting burned. I'm getting a nice coloring when I spend one to two hours out in the sun. But I am seeing some freckle and mole growth. I'm curious if you could speak to how this happens and the mechanisms that drive the growth of moles and freckles and that sort of thing on the skin would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

You, Rachel, did you listen to my podcast with with Deepak Chopra's brother that came out last weekend?

I haven't yet. I'm sounding terrible.

You gotta catch up. You gotta listen to podcast. You gotta listen to that one. That one was about coffee.

Well, 63 cups of coffee. Of course I'm gonna listen to that.

Oh, yeah, it was about coffee, vitamin D, eating more nuts, meditating, et cetera. One of the things we talked about in that particular episode and that he highlights in his book, is that you can get just with about 20 minutes of sun exposure to the major areas of your skin, kind of towards the middle of the day, you can get 25,000 units or up to 25,000 international units of vitamin D. That would assume that you're a white person and that you don't have quite as much of the melanin on the skin, which is going to inhibit a little bit of that vitamin D absorption. But basically it's shockingly effective for vitamin D to spend time in the sun.

And when you say sun exposure, what does that mean for a cloudy day?

You're still going to get some UVA and UVB when you're getting the sun through the clouds. But typically you want direct exposure to the actual sunlight. But if anything, you go out at about noon. So noon is when UVB and vitamin D production are at the highest. So you know when all of the articles like Prevention magazine tell you that sun exposure should be avoided for three to five hours around noon and postponed to the afternoon, as they'll tell you, that's actually wrong. You want to go out at about noon. That's to enhance UVB and vitamin D production. Or technically, between about 10am and 2pm that's the best time. I actually like to go outside and have my lunch out in the sun when I can. So that's a perfect time to do it.

Right. Exactly.

Now I want to get into a few more little tips about the sun and shatter some myths about the sun. But first, the issue with the freckles and the moles. And this is certainly relevant because skin cancer is the most common cancer in the US and it's certainly something that if you play your cards right, you can decrease your risk of. And it doesn't come down necessarily to staying out of the sun. We'll get into that in a second. But the idea here is that there's a definite difference between moles and freckles. So basically, when you're looking at freckles, those are the small light brown patches. Those are just going to develop from ultraviolet exposure in anybody who has fair skin. So if you have freckles, it simply means that you're getting a combination of UVA and UVB exposure. It does not mean that you're getting too much UVA and UVB exposure. It's simply a natural melanin expression, these little light brown patches. And you'll see many recommendations out there to slather a bunch of sunscreen on your kids if they start to get freckles. On your babies, if they start to get freckles, that's not necessarily the case. Okay. That's really not something that you necessarily need to worry about. Now, when you get to moles, moles are a little bit different. And of course, I'm not a. What do you call a skin doctor?

Dermatologist.

Yes, a dermatologist. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you. Sometimes I'm at a loss for words, but Melanomas typically appear as new spots about well over 60% of the time. But the rest of the time they'll appear within birthmarks or moles. And if you are aware of the number of moles that you have and the size of those moles, and you start to see a new mole that looks different than the rest of the moles, that's when you want to pay attention. And you can actually, it's interesting. People who don't have many moles are at a lower risk for developing skin cancer. So if you've got somewhere in the range of like less than 20 moles, you've got a really low risk. But if you've got a mole count greater than 50, you have an extremely high risk of melanoma. And, you know, that's a pretty large mole count. I actually haven't seen a lot of people who have like 50 moles.

I have a question. How do you distinguish a freckle from a mole? Because some of my freckles look a lot like moles.

Large dark spots. And again, we're gonna have dermatologists, like leaping through screaming right now. Go, go.

Comment.

Yeah, go leave a comment. That's what the, what the comments are for. But yeah, moles, typically the ones that you want to worry about is they're asymmetric. Okay? So you'd want to worry if a mole is not like a perfect circle. If you can't draw a line down the middle and match up both sides, right? An asymmetric mole, that's something you want to worry about. Moles with fuzzy or ill defined borders, that's also something you would want to worry about. That's potentially a melanoma. Moles with different irregular colors throughout. Or two toned moles, right? Like moles that aren't the same color throughout. That's another thing you'd want to worry about. Say, okay, so they'll stick up on the skin a little bit, they'll be a little fuzzy, they'll be asymmetric. Definitely moles that are big, anything bigger than about 6 millimeters in terms of a mole, that's when you'd want to start to worry. And then moles that are changing, right? Like moles shouldn't change. They should just be there and stay the same. But if you're noticing a mole change in size or color or diameter or shape or anything like that, that's something to worry about. So that's kind of the idea with moles. And so the answer is it depends. Like a low number of symmetric Moles that aren't changing color, that aren't changing size, that aren't changing borders. You really don't need to worry that much at all. And you also don't need to worry about the little light brown patch freckles that can develop just from normal UVA and UVB exposure. What you need to worry about is what I just talked about. Does that make sense?

It does make sense.

Okay, so the idea here though, if we get into radiation, because I can't talk about sun without mentioning this. The interesting thing is that first of all, we know that living in areas that get more UV radiation, that seems to be protective against a host of different cancers, prostate, lung, colorectal leukemia, cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, lymphoid cancer, et cetera. We know that in areas where people get more UV radiation, it's actually protective against those kinds of cancers. Now, this may have something to do with what I mentioned about mitochondria and how taking care of your mitochondria and especially good exposure to light and the outdoors and frequencies of light may actually help with mitochondria. But when you look at skin cancers and at melanomas, typically there's a lot of little facts that kind of muddy this neat, tidy relationship between the sun and skin cancer. So for example, vitamin D that you get produced in response to UVB exposure, that kills melanoma cells. And if you have vitamin D levels between about 40 to 80 nanomoles per liter, if you test your blood, vitamin D is between 4 and 80, that's actually optimal for protection against melanomas. There are also studies that show that smart sun exposure has really good beneficial anti cancer effects and anti cancer effects at the skin level. And the idea behind this is that you've got RNAs in your skin cells and some of those RNAs are non coding RNA. They don't synthesize proteins. RNA would normally synthesize proteins. Some of it is non coding, some of it does not synthesize proteins. And when DNA is produced in skin cells, it triggers these non coding RNA to go into protective mode. And that actually reduces their potential for cancer. And it induces what's called tumor suppression. And so the idea is that when we get exposed to a good combination of UVA and UVB from the sun, it can actually decrease cancer risk by increasing vitamin D and by also causing these non coding RNA to go into protective mode. So go ahead.

One question I have is, I mean, I grew up on the sunshine coast where the sun shines strong 365 days a year. And most people, it's not an office job kind of lifestyle. There's no kind of corporate. It's. It's just straight coast. People work on the beach. People are lifeguards, tradesmen. And so they're getting kind of intense sun exposure for, you know, eight to ten hours a day for 365 days a year.

Yeah.

So is there such thing as overexposure? And how does that impact skin cancer?

Well, actually, occupational sun exposure, lifetime sun exposure is actually associated with a lower risk of melanoma. And outdoor workers are people who spend lots of time in the sun on a regular, consistent basis. That's actually associated with a lower rate of melanoma. The type of sun exposure associated with a higher risk of melanoma is recreational sun exposure, meaning you don't go out in the sun and then you go out on a Saturday and you get burnt. That's actually associated with the greater melanoma risk, even though that person might be spending literally 40 fewer hours in the sun that week than the occupational worker who's outdoors. So that's a biggie. So in terms of how this plays out on a practical level, first of all, you need to get a combination of UVA and UVB standing in front of your window or having an office or a car that has sun coming through that blocks uvb, you're only getting uva. That actually increases your risk of skin cancer and burning. So you need a combination of UVA and uvb, meaning you actually need actual sunlight. Even many of these tanning booths, they'll produce excessive amounts of UVA and not a lot of uvb. And so you need to get natural exposure to radiation, not artificial exposure to radiation or not radiation that's filtered through a window. You need a base tan. People who carry a base tan a lot during the year have a lower risk of melanoma. Melanoma because they're less likely to burn. Burning is bad. I think most people know that if you get a skin burn, that does indeed increase your risk of melanoma. But if you, like I mentioned with occupational workers, spend lots of time in the sun consistently and never get pasty white, so you never have to go burn. That's actually good when it comes to decreasing risk for melanoma. Like I mentioned, go out between 10am and 2pm to maximize the amount of benefit that you get from the sun from a vitamin D stamp standpoint. Another thing is that they found that if a single body part is exposed to the sun, that one single body part, if it's exposed more than others, has a greater risk of melanoma. So I'll even do this. This sounds stupid, but when I'm eating, I'll face one direction for half my salad, and then I'll turn and face the other direction for half my salad. Because during the summers I eat out on my patio. I'm actually conscious to get. It's not just aesthetic wanting to look good on Snapchat with my nice, completely even, symmetric, non farmers tan. It's actually that I don't want one specific body part to get more sun than the others, because that's one of the things that increases risk.

And another place that this could show up is what we call in Australia, trucker's arm. Where if you drive a lot and you have your kind of right arm on the door and the sun is beating down on it for. And all of a sudden that gets a ton of sun exposure and nothing else in your body does. We call it a tracker's arm. And that could be kind of dangerous.

Yep, exactly. And then just take care of your skin. Probably some of the best things that you can do to take care of your skin. Lycopene. That's really, really good for the skin. Interestingly, nature gives us clues, right? Like egg yolks are good for your eyes, and they look like an eye. And walnuts are good for your brain, and they look like a little brain. And celery is actually good for erection. Avocados are good for libido, and they look like little testicles. Raw tomato, the skin of tomatoes, it looks kind of like a sunburn a little bit, right? So a little bit of lycopene. That's a good one. So cooked tomatoes is really good, especially during the summer. Astaxanthin. So the fish oil that I use is called super Essentials. And it's not a clear fish oil. It's like blackish red because there's a bunch of astaxanthin in it. And when I used to go race Ironman Hawaii, I would load with 10 to 15 grams of astaxanthin per day leading up to that race. Because they've actually shown that that works almost like an internal sunscreen. So that's another one that you definitely want to go out of your way to use if you're concerned about excess sun exposure or melanoma. Maybe you're one of those people who has more than 50 moles, for example, and then any fats, saturated fats, monounsaturated, fats, et cetera, fats that are a little bit skewed towards omega 3s. They actually did a study in Australia, Rachel, that found the people who had the highest concentrations of DHA and EPA had the lowest levels of what is called cutaneous p53 expression. And cutaneous p53 expression is something that your skin upregulates in response to damage from the sun and it can lead to melanoma. And the idea here is that good levels of omega 3 fatty acids actually drops that cutaneous P53 expression. So spirulina, chlorella, fish oil, cold water, fish, stuff like that. And then the last thing would be, of course, antioxidants. And I'm getting a guy on a show who's talking about vegetables and how especially perennial vegetables tend to be really, really high in a lot of the type of antioxidants that can protect us from radiation damage. And so we're talking about things that have rhizomes and roots, things like, like ginger for example, or collard greens, things along those lines that would be considered perennial type of vegetables or herbs. Those are really, really good to include in your diet. And if you want to get a jump start on that podcast, there's a book called how to Eat More Vegetables by A doctor named Dr. Thomas Cowan, C O W A N and he delves into some of the cool things about vegetables. I folded over a lot of pages in that book and I contacted him afterwards. He's going to come on the show and share this stuff with us. But in the meantime, eat your vegetables, get your omega 3s, get your fish oil, get your astaxanthin, eat some tomatoes and some celeries and avocados of course too. Now we know why. And that's what I would say to you. David. Hi, this is Claire from Bangor in Northern Ireland. Myself, my husband enjoy using the sauna and steam room for hyperthermic conditioning. After a generation gym workout, would this be detrimental to our chances of conceiving a child? Also, any BioHacks for helping two 40 plus year olds to conceive? Many thanks and love the podcast. Well, I can tell you one thing that does shrink your sperm, Rachel.

Wearing super tight underwear, not your sperm.

I don't think you have sperm.

I don't have sperm, no.

Super tight underwear can do it actually. But Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss shrinks your sperm?

Yes, he shrinks your sperm. Tim Ferriss shrinks your sperm. Heard on the, on the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast.

Tweet him that I dare you in.

The four hour body. He actually goes into a little self experiment that he did in which he carried around a cell phone in his pocket and compared his sperm count to when he didn't carry around a cell phone in his pocket and found that just having a cell phone in your pocket significantly reduces sperm production.

How did he eliminate all of the other variables in that?

I don't know. But there are other studies that seem to back up what he says in terms of a link between cell phones and infertility. So more on that in a second. In terms of other things that can either increase or decrease your sperm count. But one of the things when we talk about saunas for example, is that there is a definite effect. So they actually did one study over in Finland, of all places to do a sauna study. Imagine that.

Did you know the word sauna comes. It's actually a Finnish word.

I spent my fair time in Finnish saunas. I'll be going back over to Helsinki for the biohacker summit for anyone who would like to join me. I remember probably one of the highlights of that was there were about, I believe at one time nearly 20 of us men and women, all naked had shoved into a sauna. Out in. It was the royal, it was called the king sauna or something like that. And we were basically going into the sauna and then running down the dock buck naked, jumping into the Baltic Sea and then running back and getting in the sauna. It's the most.

Sounds incredible.

The most skin and bounce and boobage and balls.

Just a lot of bouncing skin, bounce.

Boobage and balls in the Baltic Sea. Anyways though, the idea is that they did this study and participants did a three month sauna regimen. They did 15 minute sauna sessions, so not that long. They did them twice a week. They provided blood and semen samples at each point in the study. They had their scrotal temperature recorded before and after each session. And that of course makes a sauna session very relaxing when you know that your scrotal temperature is being measured before and after each of your sessions. They showed that participants sperm counts and sperm concentration were significantly lower at the end of the three month sauna regimen. And they remained low for three months after these gentlemen had finished their twice a week sauna experiment. And after those six months total sperm production went back up to normal levels. So it wasn't permanent damage. But the higher temperatures definitely interfered with sperm production. And regular exposure to sauna in this and other studies has been shown to lead to Reduced sperm count.

And I'd imagine. Is that the same for cold? For really cold temperatures, no, it's not.

The same for cold. So your testicles hang down from your body in order to stay cool.

They do.

They do. They hang down from your. What do you mean they? I'll show you a picture of a naked man sometime.

Rachel, are we gonna do the birds and the bees?

We are. The testicles hang down from the body to cool the testicles. And so a cool testicle is actually able to produce sperm more efficiently. And once they get heated by just a few degrees, less than 5 degrees, sperm production will decline. That's why sperm production can also get reduced when you wear tight pants. Right, because it keeps the testicles from hanging down when you use hot tubs frequently, even when you keep a laptop in your lap for a prolonged period or a cell phone in your pocket. All of this can increase the temperature of the sperm. That's why studies have shown that sperm production is highest in the winter. Like, if you want to conceive, the best time to go about doing your business is in the winter. Plus, it helps keep both you and your partner warm. So there's that benefit as well. But the idea is that the shape and the speed of the sperm itself, the motility of the sperm, may also be affected by the heat. So it's not just the production, but it's actually the quality of the sperm itself. So. So definitely you want to keep your testicles away from saunas and other heated environments for several months prior to whenever it is that you plan on conceiving. But there are quite a few other things that you can do. And I'll put a link in the show notes to 50 Ways to Boost your sperm count. There's actually an article that goes into 50 ways to boost your sperm count. You want to hear some of the more interesting ones, Rachel?

I would love to.

All right, men and women who want to conceive, listen carefully. You want to avoid plastics and canned foods, BPA and phthalates that you find in plastic foods and canned foods, like the non BPA free ones. Those have been shown for many, many years, like since the 60s, to decrease sperm count. Even plastic receipts that you get, like at a gas station or a grocery store, those have BPA levels, or they've shown that people who handle those have BPA levels 10 times higher when they're simply handling unused. They actually did a study where they got a bunch of people to handle unused receipts and then eat a basket of french fries. And they showed that after that test, they had BPA levels that were 10 times higher than when they started. So that's something to be careful with. And what are a few other ones that you'd want to be careful with? Marijuana studies have shown that marijuana smokers have less seminal fluid and a decreased sperm counter. So you would want to, if you were trying to conceive, to be careful with smoking marijuana or using any form of marijuana, really. In general, wifi. I mentioned laptops, but they've actually shown that WI fi exposure can cause one quarter of sperm to stop swimming and cause a significant decrease in sperm count. So WI fi, not just laptops, but WI fi itself, can be significantly damaging. Unfortunately, for all you triathletes and cyclists out there, they have indeed shown that there is an inverse relationship between the shape of the sperm head, the tail, and the body of what are called the spermatozoids and the hours that one spends cycling per week. So that would be another one to be careful with, would be long periods of time. Now, they do make bike saddles that have a little hole in the middle. So that would be.

So the bulls can hang down.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. And then there are things that can increase sperm count. Right. So lycopene, like I just mentioned, that you're gonna find in. In red fruits like tomatoes, and also strawberries and cherries and peppers. Those all increase the mobility and the morphology and the volume of sperm, as does cold showers, which we're all a fan of here at Ben Greenfield Fitness.

Just had one.

Yeah, just had one. So your sperm count is quite high, I'm sure.

Really high.

Yeah.

Anyone want to make babies?

Said Rachel. There's lots of quotables on today's show. Eat garlic. So garlic is a natural aphrodisiac, a sexual superfood, but it's got selenium and allicin and a lot of different antioxidants in it that assist with. With sperm count. Dark chocolate is another. Oysters is another. Asparagus is another. Bananas are another. Walnuts are another. Pumpkin seeds are another. Soy is not. Soy actually decreases sperm count, specifically unfermented soy. So that would be like tofu, soy milk, things along those lines. Now, I will link to this full article in the show notes because it even delves into supplements like ginseng and maca as different herbal supplements to increase sperm count. But I would imagine if you did everything in this article, take your cell phone out of your pocket, stay out of the hot tub, take cold showers, eat tomatoes and walnuts, take ginseng blah, blah, blah. You will probably have oodles and oodles of children, triplets, quadruplets, the list goes on. But I'll link to that in the show notes for you and then perhaps you can send me one of your children for a trade because you're going to have a lot of them on your hands.

Hey Ben, this is Rick. Just want to say I absolutely love listening to the podcast as I work on our family farm and just also wanted to tell you thanks for causing me to reevaluate how I use fatty coffees in my diet since I know that I have high cholesterol and been testing it and just trying to see where it's at as far as particle size and, and all the ins and outs of the cholesterol. And was just told today that I do have a real high count of the small particle size, the ones that need to worry about sticking to my arteries and causing problems. And I have my 9 year old son, he was just in for his yearly checkup and they tested his cholesterol and their doctors all bent out of shape about his cholesterol being elevated and high and telling us that if we don't get a handle on it in the next six months that they want to put him on statin drugs. And statin drugs is something that, that I went on, oh, 10 years ago, 10 years ago and didn't take him very long because of the side effects. And that's something my wife and I would, we refused to put him on just because of the side effects and you know, just the complications that can come from that. And so just trying to just figure out, just if you had any recommendations on like how we can stack the deck in my favor and my son's favor just as we navigate just the health care system and just, yeah, just how to live a long and healthy life as we, as we fight this, this elevated cholesterol levels that, that has not fared too well for, for my uncles and great uncles and just looking to just try and figure out how to just live a long, healthy life and avoid those nasty statin drugs.

Well, Rachel, I'm afraid we're back to jeans.

Oh, here we are again. Oh, comes back to jeans.

Not the tight jeans, not the tight genes that reduce your sperm count, the genes with a G. You beat me to it and I'm not a doctor. This is not to be misconstrued as medical advice, blah, blah, blah. But Rick and his son, you know, it is likely that they may have, have the gene responsible for causing you to have what's called familial hypercholesteremia. So there is a specific gene in the body called the APOE gene. Apoe. The APOE gene. An APOE is a protein. It's a component of lipoproteins. Lipoproteins are the particles that transport fats like cholesterol and triglycerides around the body. And not everybody has the same type of APOE or the same type of APOE gene. There's a bunch of different versions of the gene, and the three most common versions are E2, E3 and E4. And depending on which of those genes you have, you're going to have really small differences in the APOE protein. But those differences are going to significantly alter the activity of that protein and the lipoproteins and the fats that are transferred that it is transporting around the body. So, for example, there is a form of that gene that is called the E4E4 genotype. Okay? The APOE E4E4 genotype. And that particular genotype combination has been shown to give one an extremely increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. A three to five, a five fold increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. And it's also been shown that that particular gene causes one to carry a lot of cholesterol in the bloodstream. And you'll find in modern medicine, you know, many folks who have this APOE 4E4 genotype, they're prescribed cholesterol lowering statin drugs because their cholesterol, cholesterol skyrockets. And these people's cholesterol, they'll go, it'll be elevated even in the absence of, say, a high fat diet, but it'll go even higher in response to a high fat diet. And this may be the portion of the population that might need to be careful eating a lot of fats in general, not just saturated fats, but also monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturations saturated fat. So, you know, this is a case where, you know, we talked about genetic prescription for exercise. This may be a case where there's also a genetic prescription for nutrition. And these people have this, this APOE4E4 gene, which is possible in Rick's case, might need to make some pretty significant, significant dietary modifications. Now, when it comes to dietary management of familial hypercholesteremia, one of the things that I think that we should look at is Papua New guinea, the island of Papua New guinea, the reason for that is that most of the Folks over there have this E4E4 gene. But the crazy thing is cardiac death, stroke, exertion related chest pain, incidence of Alzheimer's, the list goes on and on. They don't actually occur in the Catava people in Papua New Guinea. And so when we take these folks who have this gene that in, you know, the typical Western or the typical American would actually cause some really significant issues. Alzheimer's and cholesterol related cardiovascular issues, plaque formation, et cetera. We don't see that in the same population. Well, we should probably take a look at what it is that they're eating.

Yeah. What are they eating? Tell me.

When we take a look at their diet. It is not a high fat, low carb diet. It is a low fat, low cholesterol, high carbohydrate diet. The fats that they are consuming are mostly saturated because they're coming from coconut. Some of it is from fish. The carbohydrate comes from primarily starchy tubers, right? Carrots, sweet potatoes, yams, things like that. And a little bit of the carbohydrates come from fruit. It's what's called the Kitavan diet. K I T A V A N diet. And they use dietary staples like I mentioned, like tubers, yam, sweet potato and taro. They use fruit, they use fish, they use coconut. What do they not use? They do not use dairy products. They really don't use much alcohol or coffee or tea at all. I don't necessarily think that the absence of coffee and tea is doing them any favors. The absence of alcohol, especially like sweetened alcohol beverages, is probably doing them some favors. The absence of dairy products may indeed be doing them some favors as far as controlling insulin levels. But they've actually noted that in response to this diet, these folks do not have this deleterious response to a gene that would probably normally not be doing them any favors. Now, one of the other things, and I'm to going, going to link to a fascinating, very geeked out podcast by a guy who I've had on the show before, Chris Masterjohn. In his podcast, episode number 16, he talks about the best way to get to the root of the problem in familial hypercholesteremia. And he said that what you're really trying to do is you're trying to upregulate the expression of what are called the LDL receptors, right? So you're able to clear cholesterol from the bloodstream more quickly. And he talks about how in addition to eating a low fat High carbohydrate diet comprised of plenty of natural vegetables and plant based matter with limited amounts of things like coconut and fish. The other things that you should do is, the other thing really that's very important to do is to maximize the biological activity of thyroid hormone. Because there is a direct correlation between taking care of your thyroid, taking care of and a decreased risk of having high cholesterol be damaging to you. So we're talking about making sure you get things like selenium and iodine, making sure you avoid things that might potentially damage the thyroid, like, say, gluten. Right. Which is why you see the Kitavans perhaps getting more of their starches from tubers and fruits and not necessarily breads and gluten containing grains. And so ultimately it would appear that for Rick, doing something like a ketosis diet might not be the best thing. Doing something more like the type of diet these folks in Papua New guinea are doing that might be a little bit smarter move in addition to keeping a finger on the pulse of your thyroid and taking care of your thyroid. And I will link to that podcast called the Daily Lipid. I'll link to that particular episode as well so that Rick can take a listen to that, to really delve into, into the details of how to manage this, what's called heterozygous familial hypercholesteremia, or this APOE4.4 gene.

Do you think he should get tested for the gene first?

Oh, absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I would imagine he already has been tested, but if not, yeah, I'd test for it anyways because I would hazard a guess, actually. Bet you money, Rick. Let's make a bet right here on the show. 100 bucks on your firstborn child and maybe this nine year old you speak of that you probably have that gene. And again, I'm not a doctor. This is not to be misconstrued as medical advice. I'm just saying. So that's my recommendation and I'm sticking to it.

Hi, Ben, my name is Gina, longtime listener and actually you read a couple questions of mine on your podcast. So thank you very much for the work that you do. My new question is that I've been recently diagnosed with the fact that I grind my teeth at night. And as you might know, the Western medicine's only solution to that is to design a plastic thing that I put in my mouth at night. So I'm still grinding my teeth, I'm just not grinding my enamel. I'm grinding on that plastic thing. And if you Google online The recommendations they give you is to reduce your use of caffeine, reduce your use of alcohol, and reduce your level of stress. I'm working on all those three things. I actually recently quit coffee, so I'm drinking very little caffeine. My alcohol consumption is also limited to a couple glasses of wine on the weekend. And, well, with stress, you know, you can do all the meditation you want, but I don't think I have a zero stress life. Anyway, I'm just curious if there's anything else you've heard of or anything else I can do to help me solve this. Thank you so much.

Bye.

You know, I have a story about tossing and turning in one's bed that doesn't necessarily involve teeth grinding. But for the first time that I think I can ever remember, my kid came into my bedroom in the wee hours of the morning. I'm a very lucky guy. My kids never wake me up in the morning. But river showed up in the bed this morning and he walked in at like 5am I think it's because he had soccer camp today and he was really excited. He said he couldn't sleep. And of course he collapses in bed next to me and falls asleep, but he thrashes in his sleep. He kicked me. And I'm not saying this to be crass and to keep the balls discussion going on, but he kicked me in the balls full on three times. Finally I got out of bed. So that's why I was out in the driveway doing a kettlebell workout in the wee hours. But he does not grind his teeth. He obviously has some other ball kicking issues, but a lot of people do grind their teeth. And I'm not gonna insult Gina's intelligence by telling her to decrease stress. Cause she's obviously aware of that. She's quit coffee, she's limited alcohol consumption, she's doing everything she can about stress. And stress is indeed. Typically, stress and anxiety are the number one things that cause teeth grinding during the night. And everything from, oh, we've talked about stress so much, right? Like diffusing lavender essential oil or using CBD extract or doing yoga before bed. Things like, anything that's going to decrease stress and anxiety. Of course that's going to be important because you don't want chipped enamel and grooved, worn down teeth.

The other thing is it can just be clenching your jaw, not necessarily grinding your teeth. So even if you're not a teeth grinder in your sleep, because no one's ever heard you do it, you could still be sort of clenching your jaw Pretty solidly.

Yep. And that leads me to my first recommendation. And this would be for anyone, really. I sleep like a baby after I do this. And I'll link to the YouTube video that I just uploaded to YouTube last week on how to do this. But this is jaw realignment. Self. Jaw realignment or actually, Tracy, my massage therapist, is coming over tonight. She comes over in the evenings, like 8, 8:30 at night. So my massage finishes up, like right before I go to bed. It's amazing. I put on my biomat, I put it on top of her massage table and I lay on, on the biomat. I get infrared therapy from my biomat. While she does, like, the jaw therapy and I have her do specific. There are things I can do myself. I can foam roll my calves and I can get adhesions out of my IT band. But she does little areas, right. Like, she'll do like my abdominals, right. Like it's. That's really hard for me to do detailed work on my abdominals. And she'll do, for example, like right underneath in the meat of my armpits, in that teeth grittingly tender area. But it makes your shoulders feel so wide and open. And then she does the jaw and a lot of cranial sacral work. And what you'll find is that all that moving around, when you get cranial sacral work, that actually causes the plates in the skull to shift and adjust. And this can help to treat teeth grinding because you release a lot of the tension that occurs in the cranium. And so this, this cranial sacral therapy and jaw realignment. I highly recommend that for any, not just teeth grinders, but anybody who wants better sleep, even if you get it just like once a week, well worth it, in my opinion. So. And it also, speaking of the vagus nerve. Stimulates the vagus nerve.

Yeah.

So there's that.

And so you, you do that on yourself. You do some sort of.

Yeah, you can, you can find tight areas in your jaw and pin those with your fingers and then open your jaw until your fingers kind of slip off that pinned area and then close your jaw. And you can do that over and over again in different areas of your mouth, preferably on both sides. But watch that video that I'll link to over in the show notes. The other things that I would recommend, first of all, mineral deficiencies. Teeth grinding is associated with mineral deficiencies, not just calcium, but a lot of different minerals. And you might need to add things like calcium and magnesium and zinc. But I'd also recommend the extensive use of things like Himalayan rock salt or Aztec salt or any of these forms of salt that are really, really high in a wide variety of minerals. You can also use trace liquid minerals, for example, one of the ones that I have now. And once you hear this weekend's podcast, you'll know why. I've recently doubled my intake of minerals. But I use these natural vitality plant sourced trace liquid minerals. So they've got lots of what's called humic acid and fulvic acids in them and those support your body's natural detox processes. But they've also got basically a natural purified water extraction of plant based minerals in a really, really high concentration. They're sourced from this prehistoric plant deposit called Senonian Vegetate. It's this mineral rich organic soil derived from plants and plant breakdown. And they bottle this stuff and it's called plant sourced minerals made by this company called Natural Vitality. I'll link to that in the show notes. But you can get out a shot glass, right? The same one that you take your vodka in in the evenings. And you can do a shot of trace liquid minerals a few times during the day. You can dump that into a glass of water along with liberal salting of the foods and of course consumption of mineral rich foods. And some of the more mineral rich foods would be things like sesame seeds and chia seeds, almonds. Bok choy is really good. Broccoli and turnip greens are really good. A lot of different forms of fish are really good. So I would definitely include those in the diet as well. And then the last thing I would mention is get a gut panel. This is going to sound really nasty, but once I came back from Thailand from racing triathlons in Thailand with parasites and I didn't know at the time, I got tested and I worked with a Chinese herbologist to they get rid of the parasites. But every two weeks I would wake like clockwork. And I later found out that when you have parasites they actually they hatch according to the cycle of the moon. And this is really nasty. But you wake up when they're like hatching inside you. Like you'll have like insomnia, but it can cause teeth grinding, it can cause mood swings and it's weird. It's like you have these creatures living on a cycle inside you. And in this case I started on this nasty, nasty tasting like Chinese herbal protocol, most of them taste nasty and got rid of them and had like these nasty, weird like mucus filled poops for several weeks and Then they were just gone. So whacked. So look into that. You can get a gut panel. I'll put a link to a gut panel. You want to do a gut panel that's more than just like one poop. There's a three day gut panel. And that will ensure that you aren't just getting a snapshot at which time the parasites might get missed in the poop. You want to poop lots. You want to poop for three days in a row and then send it all in these little tubes off to the lab and find out if you got any critters in your gut. Because interestingly, that can affect youryour sleep and your teeth grinding. And the cool thing is everything I just mentioned, even if you don't grind your teeth, it can help you sleep. Addressing mineral deficiencies can help you sleep. Fixing your jaw can help you sleep. And definitely destroying the little wormies in your gut can help you sleep. So I think that is a perfect place. Parasites to end today's massive podcast, or at least to get close to ending it. What do you think?

Couple more things.

Couple more things. We want to do a giveaway, don't we?

Of course. It's the best part.

Okay, so here's the best part of the podcast. So if you leave us a review in itunes, if you dig this show, the effort we put into it, the massive attempts we go through to either grocery you out and or educate you, leave us a positive review in iTunes. 5 stars. If you have it in the goodness of your heart along with saying something nice. And if you hear your review read on the show, all you need to do is email gearreenfieldfitness systems.com that's gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com include your T shirt size and we'll send you a cool T shirt. Ben Greenfield fitness water bottle, a beanie, all sorts of cool stuff. So check that out in itunes and we have a review left today by Super Moo Doo.

Super Moo Doo.

Do you take this one away, Rachel?

Yeah, the title is Masterclass in life and it's five stars. Thanks, Supermooju. This is the perfect combo of informative, unbiased life hacking genius I regret not finding in my teens. At a month from 40 years old, I can silently hunt any personal midlife crisis, put it down with my recurve takedown bow and harvest its organs for all that vitamin and bio available goodness with a self grown organic kale salad, of course. Purely life changing.

Wow, he kind of kissed up to both of us with that yeah, he did everything to you with the organic kale salad, to me with the sting of the organs. I don't shoot a recurve bow. I shoot a compound. But I. But I do appreciate the gesture.

I love it.

Yeah. That's awesome. Awesome review. Awesome. For a guy being at a month from 40 years old, I don't know if you could suddenly hunt down any personal midlife crisis. This podcast may not, contrary to popular belief, keep you from purchasing a Ferrari in midlife, or from going nuts on hookers and cocaine or. Or from finding a new religion.

Hopefully it does help at least prevent all of those things.

Well, at least teach you not how to not shrink your sperm and how to biohack yourself like a professional athlete.

Why your balls hang.

That's right. All that and much more. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 354 for the epic show notes to today's episode. And Rachel, thanks for putting up with all my pepperminty goodness this morning.

I loved it. Thanks for having me.

You're welcome. I'm going to go breathe my plasma air, purified air here, and recover a bit more from my massive kettlebell workout. So enjoy the rest of your day.

You too.

All right, folks, thanks for listening in. Have a healthy week.

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

It.