How Many Carbs Make You Fat, How To Know If Fitness and Nutrition Research Is Good, How To Know If You Have Toxins and Much More!

Let me scroll down to those things.

Here, just a second. Good thing you're whispering. Don't want people to hear it.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, how to know if fitness and nutrition research is any good. Natural remedies for tinnitus, what to eat before an afternoon or evening race, abnormal heart rhythms during exercise, how to know if you have toxins, and much more.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast.

We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Testing, testing. Are you there?

I. I am here. You can hear me. This is.

Oh, thank goodness.

This is bad radio. We shouldn't be testing this thing in public.

No, probably not.

It's. It's kind of funny though. If anybody tuned into last week's podcast, and by the way, our itunes ranks have plummeted because we didn't record a podcast last week. Sucks. But, oh well, anyways, I have this fancy, fancy satellite Internet because I moved out into the middle of nowhere in the forest.

Literally the middle of nowhere.

Yeah. And it was like this like $600 set and they're like $180 a month for, for my upload and download gigs and all this jazz. And then Brock and I sat down to record the podcast last week and it was like the worst audio ever. So I am returning that for its full 30 day money back guarantee and we are actually recording this using my tiny little $40 at and T Wi Fi hotspot. So there you go. Although it's actually tarnished the reputation of this new little biohacked home I'm in because we've got like low volatile organic compound wood everywhere. The rooms are all hacked for like blue light in rooms of awareness like the gym and the office, and then no blue light, you know, like red light. Only in like the bedrooms and places where you sleep. We've got all organic, no spring mattresses, so there's no electromagnetic pollution or mold or toxin or anything while you're sleeping. I've got my, my stand up desk that, you know, this crank up stand up desk that I'm using now. And that by the way, is that.

The, the rebel desk.

I do. And later on in the podcast I have a chat. I have a discount code for folks on it too. Everything Is hardwired. Like the whole room, the whole house is hardwired. There was up until this at&t, wi fi hotspot. No WI fi anywhere. No Bluetooth. None of the appliances have Bluetooth. All the printers have the ability to disable WI fi. So the printers don't produce WI fi. There are kill switches next to your pillow in every bedroom. So once you lay your head down to sleep, you just push the kill switch and it turns off all electricity in the bedroom. The security system actually on the doors. I got a special security system that only emits this signal where it checks in with the. Whatever the system is that. That receives the signal from the security system and only checks in like once every three hours. So that's not emitting a signal.

I thought you'd just get like a bunch of bears to patrol the area. Your security system.

Yes, yes. Little, little tiger leashes. And then. And then there's. There's also a tricorder. We've got one of those Star Trek tricorders where you just walk into the kitchen and it scans you and tells you how you're. How you're doing that day.

Does it say it in fox voice?

Yeah. Fixes any, any heart disease, cancer, plantar fasciitis, you name it. It's just a little scan and boom.

Captain, I'm detecting plantar fasciitis in your left foot. This is not logical.

News flash shows.

Because we missed last week, does that mean that the news flashes are going to be extra bulky this week?

Yes, we're just gonna knock you out if you're listening in with news flashes galore. It's like, who's the news flash guy from Sesame Street? Guy Smiley. Is it Guy?

Guy Smiley?

Yeah. Guy Smiley. What's he say?

Well, I don't know what he says.

But he's got that awesome voice, that awesome Guy Smiley voice. We should play that for people. Why don't you play little Guy Smiley, bro? Say, sure. Aren't you America's most beloved game show host, Guy Smiley? That's right. I am America's most beloved game show host, Guy Smiley, and I'm here to take your picture. No, I just got. I just have a few things that I wanted to talk about. And of course, I know that all of our listeners have a lower than average iq. And so we'll just start off right off the bat with telling you if you're listening in, how to get smarter. And here's one. Here's one that I like. I've actually started in my Weekly routine for the winter because it gets cold here in Spokane in the winter. Now every Thursday I'm doing hot yoga, Bikram yoga, which I love. And there is a new study that shows that compared to just like stretching or toning exercises, yoga because of the emphasis on breath control and posture, actually makes you smarter and increases cognitive performance compared to just regular stretching. So yeah, it's really interesting. It was a study that they did in which they compared stretching and toning versus yoga and found a significant improvement in mental function post yoga. In this case, doing yoga three times a week and using cognitive tests to test performance. And in this study they used Hatha yoga, which is very similar to the type of yoga you do at most yoga classes.

Like the Hatha is nice and gentle and slow and relaxed.

Exactly. Unlike Bikram yoga, which I think I've heard Joe Rogan describe as group sex with your clothes on.

Exactly.

Which is not why I do it. But anyways though, there you go. If you want to get smarter, try a little bit of yoga maybe instead of stretching. And you can easily just memorize a five or ten minute yoga routine and do that when you would normally be stretching.

So yeah, I do the sun salutation. Just that over and over, like probably eight or ten times each morning, gets me going and gets the breath going too. I wonder if that's why I'm so darn clever these days.

Slow down. Actually, it gets the poop going too. Not to be vulgar, but because we don't believe in that on this podcast.

Yeah, we never talk about bathrooms.

Doing a few sun salutations, My gosh. If you want to get a bowel movement going in the morning, go for it. And by the way, another thing, and we might as well bring this up because I already talked about it earlier, that can make you smarter is standing like I'm standing right now while we're podcasting. If I weren't standing, we'd probably be talking about, I don't know, like clubbing a squirrel and roasting it over a fire or some other.

I'd just be batting at the microphone.

Yeah, but because we're standing, that's not the case. We're smarter and actually standing during the day. Multiple studies have shown an increase in brain derived neurotrophic factor and an increase in cognitive performance and blood flow to the brain, not to mention an increase in metabolic activity, fat burning, enzymes, a lot of other cool things. So the reason that I'm saying this is because the good folks over at Rebel Desk, which is the Same crank up desk that I have at my workstation. They're offering all of our listeners a discount. And the reason that I, that I chose this desk instead of one of like the ones that go up and down when you push a button is again, cause that EMF issue, like, I'm like I'm putting in a treadmill, which I'll talk about probably next week in my office. And it's a manual treadmill. It can go really fast, but it's a manual. So there's just like no electrical pollution generated. Same thing with this Rebel desk manual.

So it doesn't move on its own. It only moves because you're walking.

The treadmill. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's powered by. Yeah, they're really cool. And you actually, it's impossible to run with bad form on them. So I'll talk about that later on though, next week. But yeah, this crank up desk, it's a, it's just a crank up, goes up down. My kids love it. They make my desk go up and down all the time. And I like it because while you're working, I can get bigger guns while I'm working by cranking my desk up and down. Anyways, though, I know everybody's waiting for the discount code. So rebeldesk.com is their website, rebeldesk.com and here's what they're giving us. You can get 40 bucks off a desk which say, you know, that's a couple of steak dinners. So there you go. 40 bucks off a desk when you use code Ben B. I don't need to tell you how to spell Ben. That's dumb.

Okay, so rebel desk.com and, and code.

Ben spelled with A E. And then also they have this chair and I also have their chair. I don't use it that much, but it is nice. You know, occasionally when I want to write an article, for example, I like to sit down and I'm working on, on a book proposal right now for my next book, which is going to be about raising healthy kids. And I sit down when I'm working on that proposal and it's got this chair that will go up and down. So if my desk is already up, I can push the little thing on the chair and it goes up and then down and it's pretty cool.

The chair on the desk.

I have no clue why they gave us a different discount code for the chair. But you can go to their website, rebelled us.com you can get the chair for $20 off with code GREENFIELD. So code BEN to get 40 bucks off the desk, code GREENFIELD to get $20 off the chair that comes with the desk. So there you go. And by the way, speaking of standing and fat loss, here is another interesting way to burn fat. A hot bath. That's right. There is this really interesting article over on the biohacksblog.com website and it discussed a study in which they looked at what's called passive heat loading, which is the geek term for taking a bath.

And when they used getting hot without.

Doing anything, when they used passive heat loading or sitting in your bathtub and combine that with a cup of coffee, they found a significant improvement in leptin and in thermogenesis or calorie burn, which is really cool because we've talked, of course about cold showers before and we had Dr. Rhonda Patrick on the show and that was a fantastic episode where she talked about, about using saunas and spas to improve your metabolic rate and increase production of heat shock protein and all these other cool things. But it turns out that just like doing a post cup of coffee bath, or you could probably have a cup of coffee while you're in the bath if you wanted to do better.

Sounds thermogenic effect, doesn't it?

I always like a hot bath with a hot cup of coffee anyway.

Especially in the middle of summer.

Yeah, I mean, if you don't have access to a sauna or a spa and you just want to replicate this fat loss at home, you can try this out. The other cool thing you can do, a bath kind of relaxes you before bed. Even though I would imagine in that case you'd want to do hot tea instead of coffee. You can get out of the bath and you can just take a kind of a lukewarm or cold shower to cool down the body, cool down the core, and you'll sleep pretty well too. So really interesting though that a hot bath combined with a cup of coffee can actually help you to burn fat. Isn't that interesting?

That is. I've got two questions about that. Is there something about the coffee in particular that helps with it? Like if you did have say like a peppermint tea or something, would that negate some of the goodness?

Yeah. The caffeine does indeed enhance mobilization of fat stores if you are not in a fed state. So technically you'd want to do your hot bath, not like right after dinner, but maybe if it's been like two, three hours or more since your last meal and then you stack the coffee with the bath and remember and we've talked about this on a previous episode. If you're concerned about coffee keeping you up at night, you can combine it with something called L Theanine. And actually, green tea is a perfect example of a combination of caffeine and L Theanine, even though they didn't use it in the study. To me, that would make a little bit better sense if you were doing this closer to bedtime, to use green tea instead of gotcha instead.

Okay, so question number two. So cold thermogenesis, we know, activates the brown adipose tissue, and that's what sort of stimulates the fat loss. Is this actually working on your metabolism? Like, is it a whole different system?

Yep, exactly. So it's. It's basic thermogenesis. Your body is burning calories by trying to cool itself down because you're raising the metabolic rate. So there may be other things going on. Like, it's possible that heat shock protein or something like that somehow increases fat loss. I'll have to go sit in the bath and think about it, because maybe it makes you smarter, too. So a couple other quick news flashes. And by the way, if you go to twitter.com BenGreenfield Every day, sometimes twice a day, I'm tweeting the best and the coolest studies that I find, so reason to go. Follow me over there. But anyways, a couple of other things. The first is that you can eat a lot more carbs than you may have thought without getting fat. And even though this study was published several years ago, I came across it recently, and I just wanted to mention it because what they did was what's called massive carbohydrate overfeeding. This was in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And they gave a group of guys a ton of carbohydrates. They actually let me see how much they actually gave them. It looks like it was around 3,500 to 4,000 initially. And then they increased that up to almost 5,000 calories of carbohydrates per day. And what they found was that in the average human, you can take in approximately 500 grams of carbohydrate before what's called net lipid synthesis occurs, before carbohydrates begin to get turned into fat in the liver. So it's very, very interesting. And I'm not mentioning this study because I want to endorse a high carb diet, because I think that there are implications there for blood sugar, inflammation, insulin sensitivity, things that go above and beyond just that. Initial conversion of carbohydrates into fat. The reason I'm mentioning it is because I know a lot of athletes listen in and there's this concept of carbohydrate loading. And recently I've seen a lot of talk about carbohydrate loading potentially making you fat or having all those carbohydrates that you take in during like a race week before an ironman or a marathon or a spartan race or something like that making you fat. It turns out that you could probably get away with about 500 grams if you're the average sized guy. Probably a little bit less for girls, but about 500 grams of carbohydrates per day. That's 2,000 calories worth of carbs before net lipid synthesis occurs. Now again, I'm not endorsing this from a health standpoint, but it's interesting, I at least wanted to mention it, that from a performance standpoint, you know, this whole carbs get turned into fat, it's not quite as simple as that. And there has to be some pretty massive carbohydrate overfeeding before you begin to see carbohydrates get converted into fat. The only thing I should mention as a caveat here is that prior to doing this study on these guys, they did exhaust their carbohydrate stores. So they put them on like a low carb diet for a couple of days. So their glycogen stores were empty. If you're going around in a constantly fed state, then it's likely that it may take a little bit fewer carbohydrates than that for the carbs to get converted into fat. But ultimately what this comes down to is that the occasional, you know, corn, sourdough bread, wine, watermelon, beer, barbecue, you know, here we are just coming off of Labor Day, probably is going to do a little bit less damage from an acute fat gain standpoint than you've been led to believe. And so now I will sit back and wait for all of the. All the low carb, Jimmy Moore, Peter Attia, bulletproof diet, et cetera, et cetera, to come after me.

And, and I feel as if you just opened a large can of whoop ass on yourself.

I did open up a large can. No, but what I'm saying is, is like if you do want to try carbohydrate loading to see if it increases your performance somehow, go for it. You're not gonna get fat.

Yeah, well, and we're like you said, we're talking about like the real carb loading protocol, which Involves carb depleting first or glycogen depleting first and then loading up with carbs, not wandering around popping everything in your mouth constantly.

Yeah, I personally don't even really do much carb loading anymore though, because I spent two years getting myself through ketosis into a state of extreme fat burning efficiency. And if you've already done that, if you've followed a high fat, low carb diet for a while, you've kind of achieved that stage of efficiency. You're not one of those people that really even has to worry about carb loading.

But, well, even carb loading on people who do the protocol correctly, they say it only really increases about 2 or 3%. So if you're winning the race, that might be worthwhile, but if you're a middle of the packer, it's probably not worth it.

Yep, different strokes for different folks. And just to, to not vilify myself or to, I don't know if I'll make this up to reverse vilify myself. Here's one last interesting study in which they compared the intake of chia seeds versus the intake of Gatorade to see if chia seed loading could enhance sports performance compared to the intake of Gatorade. And in this study they used two different pre workout calorie loading techniques. And in one they used 100 calories of Gatorade and in the other they watered down the Gatorade so to speak, with about 50% chia seeds, omega 3 fatty acids from chia seeds. And they found that there was a.

Horrible thing to do to chia seeds. Why would they do that?

Those little chia seeds drowning in Gatorade. They, they found that for a 10k, which is what they, they measured here, that the average 10k time with the chia seeds was about 37 minutes. So these are pretty fast runners. They were testing this in and with, with Gatorade it was about 37 minutes. So there you go, you, you can actually use things like, like chia seeds or you can water down your carbs, so to speak, with fats and still perform just as well. So and that incidentally, I, I just wrote, if you haven't been to BenGreenfieldFitness.com recently, I just wrote the entire story of my three, my three part article series on my experience at Seal Fit and Kind of like the Navy SEAL Hell week equivalent for civilians. And one of the things that I was using quite liberally, there was a chia seed mixture in a water bottle that I would just grab As I ran past, because we had very, very few feeding opportunities, but I just sucked down a bunch of chia seeds that I had mixed with honey, and that actually worked pretty well to maintain energy levels. And so, yeah, chia seeds and honey. Put a little lemon in there, some stevia. There you go.

Listener Q A. Hey, guys, I was listening to the Science Friday podcast the other day, and they were talking about how a scientific journal just retracted 60 papers after details of a peer review ring came to light. And also that the journal Nature recently retracted two papers involving stem cells. So I was just wondering, what are the important things to look for when you're reading a study or looking at research to figure out whether it's actually good research or whether you can trust the conclusions? Thanks.

Wow, skeptic. Sounds a little creepy. Honestly, want to go riding on his motorcycle, which I'm sure he drives like a Harley Davidson with the flames on it.

I'm thinking that that's right.

As he studies his two papers with stem cells.

Yeah, exactly.

You know what? There are definitely things that. So if you're listening in just to retract what I said earlier, you actually probably are a pretty smart cookie and you maybe are looking at studies or you're looking at research and trying to figure out if something a newspaper headline says is actually accurate and if you can actually trust the research. Well, what I would recommend is I have specific questions that I ask myself when I'm looking at research and.

Did you say you ax yourself?

Yes, because I was seven years old there for a second. So there's a few questions that I would recommend that you look into. The first is you want to question whether the research is what's called primary versus secondary research. So if it is primary research, what that means is that it's a collection of original primary data that's collected by the researcher. And typically it's undertaken after the research has kind of gained some insight into the issue by reviewing secondary research or by reviewing previously collected primary data. So that might be experiments, direct observations, et cetera. So it means that what you're reading was research that was actually done by the reviewer versus what's called secondary research. And what secondary research is is it's also known as desk research. So that involves someone summarizing or synthesizing a bunch of existing research together, such as you might see in, like, what's called a. Why am I blanking now on what do you call it? A collection of studies, a meta analysis. So what you want to look at is see, okay, is this an actual experiment or are they reporting on a bunch of other experiments and trying to draw a conclusion based on that? So you know, if, if it was a primary study, you can also look at was it was an observational study based on something like say food surveys or questionnaires, you know, that's pretty common. Or was it an actual experimental study? And so that's another really important thing to look into. And, and you know, of course you want like a.

Sorry, like a, like a self reported kind of thing versus an actual quantifiable thing.

Yeah. For example, in a lot of, you know, I took part in the University of Connecticut study in which we followed a high fat diet for a minimum of six months and most of us were on it for nine to 12 months leading up to that study. But we weren't in a lab at University of Connecticut eating butter and you know, MCT oil. We were off doing our own thing. When we came in, we reported our diet, you know, using the questionnaires we were provided. So that is an example of basically kind of observational versus us actually being in the lab there in some kind of a bomb calorimeter measuring exact calories in, calories out and food given. So those are a couple things to look at is was it primary or secondary research and if it was primary, what kind of study was it? Another thing that you can look at if it was secondary research or a meta analysis is how thorough they actually reviewed the topic. So a lot of times you'll find that research is actually cherry picked. And if you're looking at a secondary research study and it's all freaking evidence for and none against at all, sometimes that does mean that the evidence was cherry picked. Usually if I'm looking at a meta analysis, I want to see that they've looked at both the arguments for or against the particular point that they're trying to prove. So you can generally kind of tell if something is cherry picked if just like everything is for or if you're on a website for some product and they listed every single study in favor of that product, but not really questioned or addressed any studies that show that that product doesn't work. So that's another one to look into is whether or not the evidence was actually cherry picked.

Would you say that would make your spidey sense tingle?

That would make my spidey sense really, really tingle. Another one is animals versus humans. So of course there's a big, big difference in animals versus humans. And I recently tweeted out this really interesting. There's an algorithm or an equation that you can use. Like if animals are given of a supplement like say caffeine, you can figure out using this little calculation how much of a dose that would cross over to being in humans, which is kind of cool. But it doesn't mean that animals are little humans still. And it means that you still want to take into account whether or not whatever nutrition or training protocol imposed on the subjects in the study or imposed on subjects that are relevant to you. You know, were they, were they sedentary obese rats or were they, you know, 80 plus year old female nursing home residents or were they, you know, 20 to 40 year old athlete, for example?

So those all sound pretty similar to me.

Those all sound somewhat similar, yeah. So was the study short term versus long term? That's another one to look into. Because a lot of times a short term response, like a study that looks at the response of to the body of two weeks on a high fat diet, that's going to be a lot different than what you might see in a study that's long term or that looks at something like nine months on a high fat diet. So short term versus long term is another one to look into. So another one. And I know this is kind of propeller hat ish, but I think this is an important enough question for us to put on our propeller hats here. If there is statistical significance in research, was that statistical significance actually large enough to have practical significance? So what that means is that sometimes you get statistically significant differences that are practically kind of meaningless. So if we look at like dietary studies, sometimes you'll find studies that last months and months and months on, let's say green tea extract or raspberry ketones, and they find a significant amount of weight loss over the course of six months of using that supplement. But then when you look at it, it turns out that significant amount of weight loss was 1.5kg, or close to around 3lbs or something that you could have easily lost through two weeks of good exercise. So even though something is statistically significant doesn't mean that it carries a lot of practical significance, especially if you're going to spend whatever, 60 bucks a month on a supplement, you know what I'm saying? So you want to take into account how much significance there actually was and whether that's actually practical for you. So another one is whether whatever dosing or programming that was used in a study is actually relevant. So what I mean by that is you can look at a study that shows that, for example, eccentric weight training or negative super slow weight training. Training increases muscle hypertrophy by 20% compared to regular weight training. But then you find out that the eccentric training protocol used in the subject was two hours of eccentric weight training five days a week. And all of a sudden that becomes something that certainly has statistical significance, but that really is not relevant to you in terms of the programming or in terms of the dosing. So that's another one to look into when you're reading about any of these studies on any websites that are reporting on these fitness and nutrition research. And then the last one that I would look into is whether a study has actually been replicated. So if we look at, for example, creatine is a perfect example. Creatine literally has probably over a thousand different studies that have replicated that. Creatine actually works for strength, power, that type of thing. And there are other supplements out there, like ZMA is a really popular one that's recommended for improving muscular strength. And that has just a fraction of the convergence of evidence that something like creatine has. So when you look at replication, this is a reason I like. For example, there's this website called examine@examine.com and they review supplements and they look at a variety of studies and whether or not that supplement actually works based on a variety of different studies. And they'll give a supplement like an A, B, C or D ranking based off of how much actual data there is to back it up. And if it just has one study behind it, that's not enough to necessarily say that it's going to work. I talk a lot. Another one I talk about in that multivitamin that I use, the Thornifex multivitamin. Is that curcumin phytosis stuff? Like, there's a ton of studies behind this curcumin phytosome and how it beats out regular curcumin for fighting inflammation and for improving muscle recovery and stuff like that. But, you know, that's certainly something that to me is more important than one study, you know, for example, like by the curcumin phytosome manufacturer that shows that it works.

So I think that's exactly what the caller was talking about. Those, the studies that we retracted in the Journal of Nature, they were not able. They were not replicated by anybody else. So they ended up getting retracted. Because just one group of people doing it in one laboratory does not perfect study or conclusive evidence make.

Yep, exact. Wow, that was almost like a poem. It's like Robert. Robert Frickin Frost.

Nice, Robert Frost meets Carl Sagan.

Yeah. So one last resource that I will give you if you're listening in and I'll put a link to this@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 292. A guy who I've had on the podcast before named Alan Argon. He puts out a monthly review of a bunch of studies called Alan Argon's Research Review. And similar to websites like examine.com or sepversity.com or the biohacks blog website, it is comprised of information that not just looks at studies, but that questions whether or not those studies work, the methods used in the studies, and then gives recommendations on fitness or nutrition protocols based off of that. It's really good in an unbiased manner. So that's an Alan Argon's Research Review. I think it's a ARR.com something like that. But I'll, I'll link to it in the show notes so you can check in.

Confused with Alan Arkin.

I don't even.

The actor.

Is that like some Canadian hockey player?

No, no, he's a really famous actor. He's like super grumpy too. It would be really fun if the research review was done in a really grumpy voice.

Hi Ben, this is Teresa from Minnesota. Tell me, what do you know about tinnitus? What makes your ears ring incessantly throughout the day and the evening hours? Mine has gotten progressively worse as I've approached 50 years old and I'm just wondering if you have any suggestions how to quiet the inner noise that is happening in my ears. Thank you so much. I love your podcast. Well, Teresa, I don't know if you're going to be able to hear us over the high pitched sound that's ringing incessantly. Teresa, that wasn't your tinnitus, that was Brock.

Yeah, I think I just broke something.

Oh, gosh. Yeah. Ear ringing kind of, kind of stinks. And I actually have been dealing with that myself because my, my whole body, from my ears to my nose to my butt crack has been filled with sand since that Kokoro camp. Because you literally, I mean, go read my blog post about it@BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's actually BenGreenfieldFitness.com sealfit literally surf, swim, torture. For hours and hours at like 1am Just sitting in the sand on the beach with the waves crashing over our head over and over and over again. They had us make ourselves into sugar cookies, which is where you got to run into the ocean, then come back out Completely cover yourself in sand and then just like, like run down the beach with a 50 pound sack as the gritted sand digs into your shoulders and your neck. Not fun.

Anyways, though, if you guys tune in on Saturday for the, for the podcast that's coming out, then you'll hear how beat up. You can hear it in Ben's voice, actually how beat up and tired he is.

Yeah, I recorded that podcast like the day after Seal Fit, because we have a podcast coming out this weekend on. What is it on? I forget.

Sweet, sweet beats.

Oh yeah, that's right. So sweet.

Beef and with things.

Yeah. Heart rate variability. It's pretty cool. Their new episode, the new app. I am a little tired. Yeah. So you sound, you sound beat up tinnitus here. I'll tell you my number one thing. This doesn't involve like taking any supplements or anything like that, but it's a really cool thing you can do. It's called finger drumming. And this works anytime your ears are ringing, like after a concert or after you have water in your ears, when you get off a plane and your ears are ringing, or if you have tinnitus. So the way this works, you can do this while you're listening. Listening. It's pretty easy to figure out. Put your palms of your hands over your ears, but do so in a manner that has your fingers pointing towards the back of your head. So you put your palms over your ears. You should. And now that no one can hear the podcast, hopefully you're wearing earbuds. Put your palms over your ears and your fingers are going to be resting on the back of your head. You want your middle fingers pointing towards each other, right just above the base of your skull. And then you put your index fingers on top of your middle fingers and you like snap your index fingers into your skull. And if you do this right and your palms are covering your ears, you're gonna hear this like loud drumming noise every time your index fingers hit your skull. You just want to do that a few dozen times, like drum, drum, drum, drum, drum, drum, drum, drum, drum. So you're tapping with your index fingers and they're snapping of your middle fingers so they get some momentum. And if you do that every time your ears are ringing, see, don't they already feel better? Teresa, that's a really cool little remedy you can use for tinnitus. There's actually tapping and finger drumming is really cool. I don't know if you've read the book about tapping. There's a book called tapping. It's like Tapping emotional freedom or the tapping technique or something like that. But I've used that for like nervousness before I've gotten on stage. I've used it for insomnia. I've used it before. I've flown on airplanes. Like it's really cool. It's like this tapping technique where you tap the top of your forehead and then your eyebrows and outside your eyes.

I tap in between my eyebrows when I'm getting sleepy and I'm driving. That seems to perk me up a little bit or just annoy the hell out of me.

Yeah, yeah. So tapping. Check that out. A few other things that I would definitely look into for tinnitus as far as like supplements, natural herbal remedies, stuff like that. Anything that increases blood flow to your neck, your head or your brain. So that would include, for example, and this stuff works really well for headaches too. Topical magnesium. It's a vasodilator. You can smear it over your neck kind of by your ears on your lower shoulders. And it works really well for sleep and for headaches. But that can also help with ringing in your ears. It's a vasodilator. Just a basic topical magnesium. There's one if you go to greenfieldfitnesssystems.com there's one of the topical magnesiums that I use over there where I put just about anything I've ever recommended. And that one is topical magnesium with msm. So it helps with like bruising and tendinitis and stuff like that too. Another one that can actually help to increase blood flow to your head, your neck and your ears is caffeine. Just a cup of coffee. And if you do that while you're sitting in a hot bath, you will get a 6 pack abs. Anyways though, coffee can actually help. Anything with caffeine can help too. Basically improve blood flow depending on how you use it. Too much caffeine can actually restrict blood flow. So you want to be careful. But the other thing you can do with caffeine is they make topical caffeine lotions now which are really good for like wrinkle and anti aging, but they also help to increase blood flow. And so you could use that instead of a magnesium if you wanted to. Like a topical caffeine like any type of lotion that contains coffee extract. Another thing is ginkgo biloba. Ginkgo biloba is another thing that can increase blood flow to your head, your neck and your brain. It can reduce inflammation in blood vessels, can give you better circulation to your capillaries so that would actually be a supplement that wouldn't be a topical. So basically it's just like a capsule, like a ginkgo biloba capsule. There's a lot of different brands out there, and you can even get, like, ginkgo biloba in a tea. So that'd be another one to look at something else that can. That can really help. And they've actually done an interesting study on this that I found on the American Speech Language Hearing association website, that the gentle noise produced by a white noise generator or a fan during sleep can actually help provide relief for ringing in your ears. So if you're getting tinnitus while you're asleep, some kind of like a white noise generator on your phone or even like a fan, like one of those floors, floor fans, that makes a little bit of white noise, that can help out quite a bit as well. So I would say if I were to. If I were to choose, like, the number one kind of, like, little hack for this, I would personally do topical magnesium on your head, neck, and ears, and then combine that with that finger drumming technique, and that should help out quite a bit with the. With the tinnitus. So we've. We've also done previous podcasts on tinnitus and about how it develops in exposure to loud noise or ear infections or even some injuries to your nerve endings. And we talked a little bit more in that particular episode that we did about why it happens, and we talked about some supplements a little bit. But if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for tinnitus, then you'll find that previous episode that we did as well. So check that out. Hey, Ben. Hey, Brock. My question for you is about running the Rock and Roll Las Vegas Marathon at nighttime. So the question is, how do I eat leading up to the race? Most marathons are first thing in the morning, and I've got my fueling strategy down that way. It's the afternoon and that type of running and eating because you don't eat too much because then you feel like crud on the run. And if you eat too little, then. So I am seeking wise counsel from Ben and Brock. Thanks.

I've kind of always wanted to do the Las Vegas Half Marathon just because it's run at night and it goes down the Strip.

I was gonna say it doesn't go down the strip. Yeah, yeah.

So that's. Apparently it gets kind of dangerous, though, because it's like the road is closed off. It's kind of Dark and there's potential for like bottles and stuff.

Dance around the superhero and the people handing out flyers of naked women.

Totally.

Yeah. Cool.

All the showgirls with their big feathery hats.

I actually, it's been a while since I've done an afternoon or an evening race and it really is kind of an interesting scenario because you can't just eat breakfast for example, and head off to the race. I think the last time I did this was the Boise Half Ironman. It was like a two or a three o' clock in the afternoon race.

And I did a sprint or sprint triathlon last summer that had started at 2 in the afternoon.

Yeah. And. And I also sometimes Wednesdays we have a, we have a Wednesday night 5k race series I go to sometimes here. The trick is that you avoid things that are going to take a lot of energy or a long time to digest and you avoid things that are high in fiber. And sometimes you just repeat what you'd normally have for breakfast prior to a big event like a half marathon or a marathon or an Ironman or something like that. So an example of, of let's say if we were going to take the traditional route, not like a high fat ketogenic type of route, but if we were to just do like a, a simple, easy to digest carbohydrate based meal, one example would be you do for breakfast a sweet potato or yam or if they're small, a couple of sweet potatoes or yams with some sea salt, a little bit of honey, a little bit of nut butter, you know, like an almond butter or something like that, some water to wash it down. I even like a digestive enzyme supplement because it reduces the energy cost of digesting food. And when you're in a race that helps you quite a bit to break down your food. But you do something like that at 9 or whenever you normally eat breakfast and then you just do it again at noon and you just eat throughout the day. It sounds boring, but you basically just play it safe and repeat the same thing that you'd normally eat for breakfast before a high priority event. Another thing that you could do, for example, if you're doing more of the high fat approach is something like, you know, I've talked about this, how I did this before Ironman. All the Ironman races that I did last year, I just drank bulletproof coffee. I had a cup of coffee, about a quarter stick of butter, a couple tablespoons of MCT oil. I blended that up. I put a little bit of coconut milk in There a little bit of cinnamon, some stevia and, and I believe I even put about a tablespoon or so of nut butter before the Ironman events just for a little bit of extra calories, but that works fine as well. The only thing is how much of a diaper pants issue you're gonna have if you're doing three cups of that throughout the day.

If you haven't tried that before, do not try it before the half marathon.

Jeff. Yeah, I mean honestly one thing you could do is you could just get up for breakfast, you could do the whole sweet potato yam thing and, and then for lunch have your cup of bulletproof coffee and then I don't know what time that half marathon starts, but there may even be a dinner too as well, in which case you'd again have something simple. Avoid the steak and eggs. I would even avoid in this case fatty fish and spinach and things that might work well the night before but that won't work that well the day of. So keep it very simple, keep it very clean and none of the high fiber things like none of these like high fiber energy bars, no big salads, no huge portions of like fruit smoothies, stuff like that. Keep it really simple, clean, easy to digest. If it's something that is, that's liquid based, that's fine as well. Another thing that, that I've done a couple of times lately when I've been traveling is I use meal replacement blends and I don't have a link link handy to put in the show notes but you could probably find it if you went to the Thorne website. Not Thorn FX but Thorne, the company that owns Thorn fx. It's like this big.

Oh, I didn't know they were affiliated. Funny.

Yeah, that's who owns Thorn FX is Thorne and they make something called, it's like Medipro. I believe it's Medipro. Anyways, it's like everything that you need in a meal but it's really, really easy on the stomach.

I've been using the Super Berry stuff.

Yeah. What am I thinking? Yeah, I mean like if you go to Greenfield Fitness Systems like the Super Berry or the Super Green, same thing. That's very, very similar. The reason I've been using Super Berries, yeah that Medit Pro stuff from they sent me some to try and so I've just been like, I just have a big canister, I've been going through it. But yeah, Living Fuel Superberry or Living Fuel Super Greens. These meal replacement blends can work really well because it's just like dark done for you. Right. You know, it's going to be easy to digest. You know, there's not going to be a lot of fiber. You know, there's not going to be a lot of hard digest fats or proteins. You just eat it as a meal replacement. It sounds boring and frankly it does get boring. But at least you're playing it safe. At least you know that you're not going to have any stomach issues. And you can just mix something like that up with some water or some almond milk or some coconut milk or something like that. And you could do that for breakfast, lunch, and then your pre race dinner or you know, either living.

It looks like the race starts at 4:30, so you're probably good if you have sort of a slightly late lunch.

Yep, exactly. So those are, those are some of the things that I would do, Jeff. And if, if you're listening into the podcast and you've got your own tips for Jeff, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 292 and let Jeff know what, what you would do. I guess another option is you go to like Hard Rock Cafe, have a burger. Oh yeah, I heard that you eat.

A whole bunch of pancakes and, and eggs and stuff and then go do a bunch of burpees and then eat more eggs and pancakes and.

Exactly.

If anybody wants to know what I'm talking about, listen to the Obstacle Dominator podcast that came out yesterday.

Did I talk about it in that one? About what they did to us at Seal Fit?

I think so. I think that was the one. Or maybe it was Endurance Planet. I can't.

Okay, quit real quickly and we'll move on to the next question. Yeah, this was about 48 hours in to the, to the, the sleep deprived butt kicking and they suddenly stop and they're like, let's have breakfast. We're like. And you know, everybody perks up because we've been barely eating anything up to that point. They took us out for this. All you can eat pancake, eggs, bacon and hash browns breakfast. And they ordered tons and tons of food. And then they forced us. There were 17 of us left at that point. They forced us to eat everything. And we're talking about like pancakes coming out your eyeballs. These pancakes were literally, literally like the size of basketballs. I mean, huge pancakes.

And these aren't gluten free.

These are like full on buttermilk pancakes, eggs, peanut butter, you know, salsa, bacon, hash browns. And then they commenced by literally taking us out and we started sprinting down the alley and went straight into a two hour workout of broad jumps, burpees, backwards runs, bear crawls, pretty much everything that would either make you want to crap your pants or taste breakfast twice. And people were literally doing that. There were guys, like pulling over, puking their guts out on the side of the road. People were literally crapping their pants and. Which really sucked because they took us in for this, like, hot yoga session afterwards. Nobody got a shower or anything. It was just nasty, nasty. Go, go. Read my story about this@bengreenfieldfitness.com sealfit if you want. But it was not a pleasant all you can eat pancake breakfast.

Hi, Ben and Brock. My Name's Fred. I'm 66 years old and always prided myself on my low heart rate. But recently my doctor has told me that I have an atrial fibrillation. Now my question is, can I actually train a heart that has. That's in. That has a fib. Now when I run out of breath, I don't know if it's the afib or my age or if I'm just not in shape. Thanks for any thoughts that you might have on this.

Well, Brock, you have a little bit of history with this, don't you?

Yeah, I do have an atrial fibrillation as well.

Yeah. Yeah.

I've got what's called a wankeback syndrome.

Yeah. A wanky back. That's actually illegal in my state to, to do the wanky back thing, but maybe careful who I tell. All good up in Canada, so. So tell us a little bit about that.

Well, wanky back is just my. The space between my heartbeats gets farther and farther apart until I finally just drop a beat. And luckily, like most people, it picks back up again. And I don't even really notice when that happens, but it's. It's one of those weird things. Sort of a remnant from my, my episode with pericarditis and myocarditis a few years ago.

Yeah. Where you got like the. The infection of the lining of your heart and you literally almost. Almost died from that. Right.

I did actually flatline several times.

Yeah, I remember I was technically dead.

But not for long enough to actually cause any brain damage, I think.

Yeah. If you. If, as a matter of fact, if you go like Endurance Planet did a pretty good story on you. If you go to Endurance Planet, you do a search for Brock. They did a good story. And Brock actually did a podcast on anxiety and gave his history of the pericarditis and the heart issues. Really interesting so go take a listen to that at Endurance Planet. But yeah, the afib, you can still exercise with afib, which again is just, it's an abnormal heartbeat. And there are certainly some things that you want to do to pay attention to what's going on as you exercise. With afab, it's a really common abnormal heart rhythm, though it doesn't have to start with pericarditis like Brock was talking about. You can literally just have a little bit of a shorting of that electrical impulse that's normally generated by what's called the sinoatrial node in your heart. And a disorganized or a dysfunctional electrical impulse is actually quite common, especially as you get up to higher exercise speeds or intensities. I personally get what are called PVCs, paraventricular contractions, or which is kind of like a little blip in the electrical activity in my heart because I've gone in for cardiac stress tests. And when I get to about minute 17, 18 of an all out VO2 max test and I'm chugging away on that treadmill pretty well, I actually have, have these PVCs and it's not full on afib, but it's, it's again an abnormal heartbeat and it's pretty common. So you don't necessarily need to stop exercising, but what's important is that you pay attention to what's going on in your body during exercise. One of my clients, I feel that.

We should throw in the I'm not a doctor clause here.

Let's do it, let's play it, let's find it, let's find a good one. What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle conductor?

Look, I'm a doctor, not an escalator.

I'm a doctor, not an engineer. I'm not a scientist or a physicist. Mr. Spock, one of my clients that I trained for a long time, he, he had a lot of AFIB during exercise. And what we found for him was one of the triggers was steady state exercise for longer periods of time, like five to ten minute intervals where he'd be pushing for a long time. He'd go into AFIB and get really uncomfortable. And what we found for him was that we could get his cardiovascular fitness up and give him a good workout with shorter intervals and longer recovery. So what we would do is we would do rather than like long cardio sessions, we'd do some really quick, like 30 to 60 second cardiovascular bursts. And then we go and do some weight training and kind of use that as like the recovery for the burst and then we come back and do another cardio burst and then back to some weight training and back to another cardio burst. And what that allowed him to do was still get the cardio, you know, with that interval type exercising without experiencing the discomfort that can occur when you're in AFIB during steady state exercise. So that's one thing to bear in mind is that you may do a little bit, bit better with interval based training rather than steady state aerobic training, which, you know, obviously can be kind of difficult if you're training for like an Ironman or a marathon or something like that. But it's certainly something to use as your, as your basic day to day training protocol. Now, if you are doing steady state exercise or any other form of exercise, there are of course things that can make you more susceptible to skipping a beat. The caffeine that you're going to find in everything from coffee to tea to soda to anything else is definitely something that you want to be careful with. High caffeine intake can cause AFIB episodes. I want to give a caveat that that's not clinically proven, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. A lot of people say that they find they have more issues with their heart rhythms or with AFIB or skipping a heartbeat when they've had a cup of coffee or an energy drink prior to a workout. So just something to know about. Another thing that can make AFIB worse is high blood pressure. I find that the number one cause of high blood pressure in most of the folks whose diets I look at. If it's not stress, emotional stress, work stress, relationship stress, it's high sodium from processed foods, whether it's from whole foods or the health food store, whether it's from the grocery store, just high levels of sodium in the absence of other good electrolytes. So that along with potassium deficiencies is really, really common. So you'll find potassium in things like squash, avocados, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, things like that. And if you don't have many of those foods in your diet, and you also have a high level of processed food intake or a high level of sodium from table salt or sodium from packaged foods, that can be a pretty big issue when it comes to afib. So pay attention to sodium potassium ratios as well. Another thing to look into is you need to think about blood thinners that help to prevent blood clots, which are a common complication of atrial fibrillation. And so a lot of times you'll get put on a blood thinner like warfarin, if you've talked to your doctor about afib. But the issue is that if you're also using things like fish oil and, and curcumin and other supplements that can help with clotting factors that can make your blood too thin and create some other issues during exercise, lightheadedness, things of that nature. So I would recommend that, if possible, come at things from a clotting perspective. Come at things naturally with things like fish oil and curcumin. And don't do the blood thinners or if you're gonna do the blood thinners, don't use those particular supplements. Be careful with those.

And definitely don't do epo.

Yes. Do not do erythropoietin that makes your.

Blood nice and sticky and thick.

Yes, exactly. Or ride in the Tour de France and join any of those teams like Team Radio Shack. If they tell you to lie down on the bus, be careful. That means that, that the, the blood dopes are coming.

So here it comes, Here it comes.

And then just be careful with overheating. AFIB is something that you take, tend to get really susceptible with when overheating. So if you're going to use that hot bath coffee trick that we recommended, I wouldn't be doing burpees in the bathtub if I were you. Just be something to avoid, just explain. Dangerous. Yeah. Interestingly though, as far as arrhythmias in your heart, this is going to come up on the podcast that you'll hear this weekend. Really, really good podcast with the folks from Sweet Beat. But their new Sweet Beat life monitor comes with this health patch that you can wear while you are exercising and it will identify PVCs. You can go look at your heart rate rhythm data from your workout and you can see the situations while you were exercising that sent you into a PVC or an abnormal heart rhythm. So that's really cool because then you could just wear this for your workouts for one or two weeks, kind of looking at your staple workouts. And you could see, okay, when I did a five minute treadmill interval, it happened. And when I was maybe be, whatever lying on my back bench pressing with a barbell to happen. And so you can start to identify the certain exercise or movements that can aggravate afib. So that's another thing to look into would be this Sweet Beat app. And again, we've got a podcast coming out this weekend about it. But I'll also put a link to the information on that particular monitoring system over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 292Hi Ben, this is Joris from Maryland.

I've been commuting by bicycle nine miles each way from one dense suburb to another alongside pretty heavy traffic. On the plus side, the rides are often the best part of my day and I take the twice daily workouts to counteract the effects of an otherwise pretty sedentary lifestyle. And hey, how more functional can fitness get if it helps you do your job? So I'm not afraid of riding in traffic. What I am worried about is exposure that I might be getting to environmental toxins that I breathe in or even absorb through my skin during my daily rides. Do you know of any studies that cover this topic? And if I want to get myself checked out for exposure to road toxins, what kind of lab tests would you recommend? I appreciate the work that you do and I hope to hear from. Hope to hear your answer on one of my rides since your podcasts are preferred listening on my commute. So don't worry, I use bone conducting earphones, not earbuds.

I know we've definitely talked about this before, so Lawrence, do a, do a search. But yeah, I think we can add some more info to that.

Environmental toxins, toxins, toxins, toxins while you're riding your bike on the road. Road banana peels are a biggie. Banana peels and dirty diapers definitely do not run over those. Swerve to avoid really big dog doo doo.

That can be dangerous.

Hopefully he can understand us through his bone conducting earphones. Yeah, yeah. I mean like there are so many different environmental toxins that you can get exposed to and they can go above and beyond. Of course, just the road. And I don't want to use scare tactics here, but I mean if, if you just go down the list of things that we get exposed to every day, it's pretty big. Somebody recently tweeted me on Twitter, which is where you tend to tweet people, and they said, ben, you're too into supplements. Just live life. And my response was said the person who lives in a bubble or something like that and doesn't exercise. Because frankly we are surrounded by so many different things that sometimes we need a little bit of extra help from supplementation or we need to test and see if there are certain things that, that we've been overloaded with that we need to detox.

So I picked up some of that. That glutathione, the stuff from Bulletproof Executive. Man, that stuff tastes bad.

It tastes like liquid dog farts.

I really hope it's doing something good for me because I feel like I do a lot of swimming. I swim in the lake here in Toronto and run outside and stuff. And yeah, I just thought I need to do something about my toxicity. So I started taking that and, and. Good lord, that tastes awful. It better be worth it.

It's really, really good for that particular liver detox pathway though. And interestingly, you know, I have a naturopathic physician. I kind of like him because he like guinea pigs on me. He's always running these different tests on me and I like it because it keeps me on the, on the pointy edge and he knows that I'm into it. So the other day, this is about two weeks ago, he recommended I get an organic acids test done. Done. And I actually hadn't done one of these before and I'll be talking about the results on a podcast soon. But it identifies certain things that some blood tests don't get into, like individual amino acids that you are deficient in and certain, certain elements such as amino acids that support certain parts of your liver detox pathways that you are deficient in. And it turned out that I'm actually deficient just from a genetic standpoint and probably a, you know, an exercise standpoint as well because I exercise quite a bit. I'm deficient in some of those glutathione pathways. And he's like, well, you should probably. He's like, I know you're taking the Thorn multivitamin and all that jazz, but he said you should step things up, especially on your heavier exercise days with a little bit of extra glutathione support. So that's certainly one detox supplement that I'm starting to use now too is the under the tongue liquid glutathione. So.

So anyway, I just, I gotta know, is guinea pigging kind of like gerbiling?

No, far different than gerbiling. Okay, good. And totally legal in the state of Washington.

Okay.

Anyway, some of the things that you're going to get exposed to that are, that are probably some of the more common toxins you will experience in our environment, whether you are riding a bike besides the side of the road or whether you're in the typical modern working office environment. One, one is PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls. And that's an industrial chemical that is a pretty persistent organic pollutant that increases things like risk for cancer and impaired neural growth and development. And its major source is farm raised salmon. Okay. So that would be one thing to avoid would be farm raised salmon. If you're in the U.S. especially, that's the number one source of PCBs in our environment. So if you're at that fancy restaurant that's serving the wonderful cut of cedar plank salmon, ask if it's farm raised or wild. Pesticides are another big one. Fungicides and herbicides, all that stuff. And you can certainly get exposed to those while you're on the side of the road, while you're, you know, walking in the grassy park. That type of thing. Mold and mycotoxins and fungal toxins and things that you'll find in foods like peanut, wheat, corn, even coffee. A lot of alcoholic beverages. Most modern cheapo beers have a lot of mycotoxins in them. A lot of buildings are contaminated with mycotoxins, especially like older apartments, residences, office buildings, stuff like that. That's another pretty major source. Another one is phthalates. Phthalates are used to lengthen the life of fragrances and they're used to soften plastics. And you're going to find those in plastic wraps, plastic bottles, plastic food storage containers. All of those can leach phthalates into your food. Earlier in this podcast I talk about VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, which you'll find like off gassing in a lot of household things like carpets and cabinets and paints. You also find them in deodorants, cosmetics, air fresheners, things of that nature. That's another one to be careful with. You've also got dioxins. Dioxins are something that you find when you burn stuff like wood or coal or oil. Or like if you live near the dump or your local municipal waste area where they incinerate waste, you'll get a lot of dioxins in the air. And you'll also find a lot of dioxins in animal fats, commercial animal fats, like non organically raised cattle, pork, poultry, things of that nature. They're a pretty major source of dioxins as well. A few other things would be heavy metals, of course, which, you know, arsenic, mercery, mercury, mercury, mercery, well, mercer lead, aluminum, cadmium, those, you know, you'll find everything from, from dental work to building materials to deodorants, that type of thing. Chloroform is another one. And that one's really common to find in municipal drinking water, which is a good reason to have a good water filter in your home. And then finally chlorine, which is again drinking water. If you live near like a factory or a paper Plant or something like that, they use a lot of chlorine and the industrial processes for those. And most like household cleaners that you're not making yourself or like the non organic household cleaners, those are pretty high in chlorine as well. So I know I just went over a ton of things and I'm totally not saying that to scare tactic you. The reason I'm saying this is so that you hopefully at some point, as I was just talking, became aware of possibly a few things in your environment or in your living space that might be affecting you. So the goal here is for you to become aware and then kind of the next thing that you can do, and this kind of goes after the meat of Lawrence's question, is how to find out what you actually maybe have already built up in your body. So you can decide if you're going to go do a, a heavy metal detox or if you're going to, you know, go through like a, you know, like, like a month long liver detox, that type of thing. And what I'll tell you now are some of the top tests that you can do. So, so most of these you can find via the wholesale laboratory website, Direct Labs. Many of these you can also go, you know, go to our show notes, print them off, bring them in your doctor, ask them if they can run any of these tests for you. So one of the ones is called a US Biotech test. It's called an environmental pollutants test and that's a urine analysis. It's about 200 bucks. And it assesses your exposure to most of the chemicals that I just went over. Okay. They have another one, the same company, US Biotech, they have one that's slightly more expensive and, and it's called Environmental Pollutants plus a Urinary metabolic profile. And in that one they assess organic acids, phthalates in your urine, parabens in your urine, and then all the other environmental and occupational chemicals that they test in that other one. That one's a little bit more expensive. It's like 350 bucks. And the thing is, US biotech can be purchased through Direct Labs. You can purchase these tests yourself and have them sent to your home, but they aren't listed on the Direct Labs website. You have to call Direct Labs. US Biotech for some reason doesn't want those kits listed on the website. But I've spoken with Direct Labs about this and you can just call Direct Labs and ask them, tell them you want to get the US Biotech kit for environmental pollutants or the urinary metabolic profile. And they can do either of those. Now, those won't test for, like, mold or toxins. And for that stuff, there's a. Probably the best one is a company called Real Time Labs. Real Time Labs. That one you can find at Direct Labs at the Direct Labs website. And I'll link over to these panels in the show notes as well. There's one called a mycotoxin panel, which tests for the toxins produced by fungi. There's another one called an aflatoxin panel, which tests for aflatoxin levels. And most of these are right around the 200 to $300 range. And then there's one called an aquratoxin group, which tests for a lot of mold and toxins and some of the things that you won't get on the aflatoxin or the mycotoxin panel. So if you want to just test for all those toxins to decide if you need to go on, basically like a detox protocol, which we aren't going to get into in this particular episode because we're dragging on, but that's the test that you would get. And then the last one that I'd recommend is there's a test called. Actually, there's two of those I'd recommend. One is a test made by a company called Biohealth, and it's a clostridium test because Clostridium is another toxin that you run into a lot from food and drink and things of that nature. That's a pretty quick $100 kit. It's made by a company called Biohealth. And if you have gut issues and you've done all the other gut tests and nothing showing up, that Clostridium one can be a helpful one to look into. And then finally, for everything else that I haven't talked about, so I just talked about mycotoxins, mold, fungi, clostridium, environmental pollutants like phthalates and parabens. The final one would be, like toxic heavy metals, things of that nature. If you go to Direct Labs and you just do a search for doctor's data, there's a company called Doctors Data that tests for all of these different things like toxic metals, elements, etc. So that'd be one to look into as well. So I know this stuff sounds like nerdy and like, you know, you're being a worry wart or whatever, but it actually is pretty important to at least once a year look into this stuff. And, you know, then if, if you want to know how to detox, how to clean up your home. I'll link to this in the show notes, but I've got a really comprehensive article on how to detox your home, your personal care products, your, your household cleaning, cleaning chemicals, all that stuff. And also in the inner circle, my wife and I have a ton of webinars and instructional quote unquote recipes for detoxing your home, that type of thing. So you could look into that as well. But that is how you would test, I guess the other method, if you just. There is a free method. Did I tell you about the free method, Brock?

I don't think so.

You just pee and then you get really close to the toilet and you look for pieces of plastic in your pee.

Yeah, that's reliable.

It is, it is. You could just smell for plastic. That's another good one to look into. Banana peels, things of that nature. But yeah, Lawrence, I mean, it's certainly something to, to look into. And then, I mean, just, you know, stay far away from the road when you can. But commuting in heavy traffic can certainly expose you to some stuff. And I definitely recommend prior to your commute, you load up with some, some antioxidants and a little bit of extra, extra antitoxin help before you go on that ride. My favorite would be antioxidants, you know, like take a, take a shot of Life shots, for example. That's one that my doctor actually made that one. It's called life shots, like this powder. And you can just like slam it before you go swim in a chlorinated pool or go ride beside a heavily polluted road. And that's a, that's actually a pretty good one, but.

And tastes like Kool Aid, but it's good for you.

It tastes like Kool Aid. That's good for you. That's right. There's not even any sugar. It's flavored with stevia. So there you go. So, yeah, that about wraps it up. That was our last question. Even though we do have an itunes.

Review, we do have an itunes review. Fantastic one from BamFhacker.

Bam F. Hacker. And by the way, if you hear us read your review on the show, if you go to itunes and you leave a review, subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review Review. If you hear us read your review on the show, just email ben greenfieldfitness.com and we will send you a pack full of the sweet new Ben Greenfield fitness gear, a beanie, PCB free water bottle or bpa Free water bottle. Let's hope it's both. I've talked about so many chemicals in the past five minutes. I don't know. Just doesn't happen.

That was an accurate statement. It doesn't have any pcb.

Yeah, that's right. And then a sweet tech T shirt. That's awesome. That doesn't look like one of those giant dorky cotton tents that a lot.

Of I wear mine belted around the waist as a tunic.

That's right, because we all love tunics. Yeah. Let's. Let's read Bam Fakr's report. What does he have to say? Maybe I think because he says he's reading this one on the toilet, we should play some good toilet music as we we read his review. How about some toilet. How about some toilet music? Something that was toilet music. Some nice piano tune that lulls you into pooping.

Oh, I see.

I thought you meant something. Never mind.

All right, it starts with As I sit here using my Squatty Potty, I was reminded that I wanted to leave a review. I started listening to your other podcast and found this one after looking you up online. I'm very happy I did. You provided provide great information in an easy to understand way and do it in a fun manner.

That's a very well constructed sentence for someone who is pooping.

It's actually a really long post. Considering he was on the toilet, I'm hoping he wasn't straining at all. Yeah, don't strain. Bama Hacker.

Yes.

Anyway, I was a big fat guy 3 years ago and have since found a new love for fitness and to date have lost 70 pounds and I'm down to 10% body fat. Nice. Nice work.

Nice. Perhaps even fewer pounds after you finish writing this review.

The information I get from your podcast helps me continue to progress in my fitness goals. I've learned about many products that I use regularly, including my favorite the Squatty Potty.

Squatty Potty.

I have heard or Sorry, I have a hard time pooping without it. Hopefully not a hard poop timing without it. Thank you. And my kids thank you because they enjoy telling everyone about how I poop. Nice.

Oh, wow, that's nice. I'm sure.

Keep up the great work and I'll continue to listen and learn. P.S. brock, you are a okay too.

No, Maybe, maybe, maybe after he finishes pooping, he'll think you're even better because he'll be in an even better mood.

Oh, I was thinking that was probably when he added the P.S. it was kind of like ah. And Brock, you're okay.

Yes, by the way. Brock, you're okay. You should have read that in his because it was probably really more like this. As I sit here using my squam body I was reminded that I wanted to leave.

Don't strain. I said don't strain.

Well anyways, that that was a great review that you that you plunked down for us there. Send you a little little something if you ride into the show. Maybe some toilet paper too. And you can get a squatty potty at the link that we'll put underneath the review over in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 292 so you too can have a beautiful bamboo squatty potty in your home. That along with everything else that we've talked about you can check out in the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 292 thanks for listening. Be sure to tune in this weekend for the this sweet beat heart rate interview which is freaking awesome. And yeah, I think that's about it. Brock. Anything else?

No. Thank goodness. Let's wrap this up.

Enjoy your week. Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.