How To Do Kettlebell Yoga, Ben's Top Healthy Baby Tips, How To Measure Your Body Voltage & Much More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, using heart rate variability to measure your fat. Oops, nope, we're not doing that. Nope, nope. Okay, in this episode is aluminum foil healthy, how to measure your body voltage, how to do kettlebell yoga, how much dairy is in grass fed butter, my top healthy baby tips, and much more.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss recovery, dig sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Yo, yo, what's going on at the Greenfield house?

The Greenfield house is full of action. I've got a security guy upstairs who's installing like motion detectors and smoke alarms, all that jazz. So if in the midst of this recording you hear like, I don't know, the fire department pull up or it sounds like my house is getting broken into or burning down, that's probably, that's probably why.

Probably. I've got a delivery coming, so it's not quite as exciting as you, but we might hear a door knock and I might have to run off. So we're going to be good and focused today.

That's right. This podcast will be full of distractions. I hope everyone has taken their. Whatever. People who are listening to this are taking smart drugs, focus, nutrients, caffeine, ungodly amounts of green tea, whatever it is. That helps you keep out the distracting beeps, sounds, whistles, doorbells, dogs barking, et cetera. So let's roll.

Let's go. Twitter.com BenGreenfield has been ripping it up once again on the interwebs.

That's right. If you can actually rip something up on Twitter. Oh yeah, quite sure if that's possible.

You can rip Twitter a new one.

Versus just being a 140 character propeller hat geek. And I've got some things I threw out on Twitter this week that I think you'll find interesting if you're listening in. And of course, links to all of these and oh, so much more of the goodies that we talk about on the show are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com305 where you can also, of course, get transcripts. So the first thing that I thought was interesting because I'm always looking for ways to get better workouts when I'm traveling, right? Like in hotel rooms, airports and random public places.

This last time I did a hotel workout was what you had that one where you run up. You go in the stairwell and run up the stairs and then do some burpees and then rub another flight of stairs, and every flight of stairs had cigarette butts all over it.

That's a good workout, though, where. Where you. You run up to one landing, you drop and do push ups, you run to the next landing, you drop and do mountain climbers.

Oh, it's an awesome workout, except I like cigarette butts stuck to my hands.

Should have done squats, I guess. So anyway, this was in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research this month, and it compared the bench press, our traditional form of getting our pecs to look like Captain America, with the push up. And specifically, they looked at elastic band push ups. And just so you know, elastic band push ups are where you kind of put an elastic band over your back and then one end of the elastic band goes in each hand. Right.

So then you're standing up, you're not down in a plank position.

Yeah, exactly. So when you're doing your push up, you have the. No, you are down in a push up position. Oh, yeah. So when you're doing your push up, you have the force of the elastic band kind of pressing you down into the ground, which you have to resist. And then, of course, you're pressing against the form of the resistance band as you push out of the bottom of the push up. And they did what's called an EMG or an electromyographic analysis of muscle tiss, comparing what happened with the pecs in response to a bench press versus an elastic band push up. And what they found was that in terms of both muscle strength gains and also the amount of muscles activated in the chesticles, it was equal between the bench press, I think that's what they're called, the bench press in the band pushup, meaning that, yeah, you may not be able to, say, toss a barbell and a bench and some weight plates into your suitcase, but you could get like a nice sturdy resistance band or piece of elastic tubing, toss that into the bag, and you can get a pretty good workout. So, you know, I first kind of tapped into the power of resistance bands for travel when my wife and I were bicycling across Italy and I was biking all day. But I wanted to get an upper body workout when we'd get into our little beds and breakfast and agricolas and everywhere else we were staying. And so I just take out my elastic band and do like a 20 minute workout with like curls and elastic band push ups and Side raises. And you can get a pretty dang good workout with those things. And it turns out that now science has proven that you can actually prove.

What we've always known even as good.

A workout as you can get with fricking steel. So there you go. Elastic band push ups. Try them out the next time you're on vacation. The next thing that I wanted to mention was black seed oil. I actually just put a video up@YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness where I crawled out of bed in my bright red boxers and my wife shot a video of me making a smoothie and adding my new favorite smoothie ingredient, black seed oil. And I'm putting a link in the show notes to this really interesting oil article that came out looking into this stuff. It's called black cumin oil and it comes from a cumin seed. And the number of different benefits that this thing has or this stuff has is freaking amazing. I mean, and also the history behind it. Like Cleopatra used it as a beauty treatment and Hippocrates used it to cure digestive disorders. And you know, King Tut kept a bottle of black cumin seed oil in his tomb for use in the afterlife. So there must be something to. But get this dude. The prophet Muhammad calls it a remedy for every illness except death. I'm not quite sure what his remedy for death would be. But anyways, this stuff has a huge history as far as being used by practitioners of Ayurvedic and Chinese traditional medicine for thousands of years. And the amount of research is pretty staggering on black seed oil. And I was scratching my head about why I haven't heard of this stuff before because it can lower your blood glucose response to a meal when you take it and it's in a meal. It can like cure intestinal parasites and like candida and yeast and fungus and stuff like that in the digestive tract. It has pain killing properties so it acts as like an analgesic. It has anti anxiety properties so it kind of calms you down when you add it to a meal. I've been putting it over my salad like I mentioned in my smoothies. So it's black cumin oil.

Where the heck can you buy it?

Well, there's a lot of different places the one that I get and what you want, want to make sure when you use black seed oil, by the way, is you want it organic. You want you just, just like any oil, right? Like organic, you want it pure, pressed, cold processed. You preferably want it in like glass or in like a Non transparent bottle. I'm using this stuff the same place I get like this marine phytoplankton that I use like the little marine phytoplankton drops. It's, it's called Panaceta Black cumin oil. So I'll put a link in the show notes. People want to check it out over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 305 but pretty cool stuff. Black seed oil. That's my, my new fun thing. So fun. Other people get excited about new TV shows and video games and I get excited about black seed oil. So no worries.

That's fine. Here's why we like you.

Really Cool, cool article at Supversity. So of you know, we're all big fans of lights and I'm right now bathed in blue light because it's morning here in the Greenfield house. And so in addition to like, you know, sirens and motion detectors going off all over the place, I've got these blue lights. They're called awaken alert bulbs. And you know, I'm constantly looking at the effect of light on the human body because it has such a profound effect on your circadian rhythm, your recovery and brain inflammation. And the website Supversity did a really cool roundup of 10 new studies that go into the health effects of light exposure on your health and your physique. I'll put a link to this article in the show notes. But some of the studies were really, really interesting. For example, let me find a good one for you here. Bright lights at work. They did a recent study that showed that bright lights at people's workplace kept them sane, happy and alert. So if you're feeling a little bit down, you know, maybe, maybe it's not disrupted sleep that you're dealing with. Maybe you just maybe have a really annoying co worker who's looking for their stapler or something like that. Office space reference for anybody who's an office space fan.

I got that one.

Have you seen my stapler? But bright light, like blue light boxes or using some kind of a bright light exposure can help quite a bit with your mood. Now. It's been studied insanity apparently as well. Once again, science has proven staying away from nightly night exposure has been shown now to help keep arteries clean in old age. So this one study found that even after adjustment for confounding variables like age and gender and smoking status and diabetes and sleep medication and all this other stuff, exposure to light at night was associated with what's called carotid intima, media thickness or basically hardening of the arteries. So the more blue light that you get exposed to at night, the harder your arteries become. Crazy.

That's crazy.

Another one.

The iPad is really killing you.

Yeah. Another one showed that if you dabble around with your smartphone the evening before an important sport event and you're looking at light for as little as 30 minutes, it influences your exercise performance, specifically under hot conditions. They studied cyclists in these temperature controlled rooms with high humidity and high temperature and found that they were less able to maintain their body temperature when they'd been looking at light from their iPhones the night before.

That's interesting. I've been waiting for them to do a study where they talked about the duration of exposure being a factor. So it was 30 minutes?

Yeah, this was 30 minutes. Let me tell you one more here that they found back pain. They found that three sessions in front of a 5000 Lux lamp, which is very similar to these blue light boxes that you can get off of Amazon. It reduced pain intensity in people who struggle with chronic back pain during the day. And I'm not saying that you got to go out and buy like a light box, but I mean, fricking try and get out in the sunshine for, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes and pretty big effect there. So really cool article that just kind of scratches the surface of some of the stuff that went into. But I thought that was pretty cool. And then the last thing is that as I mentioned, about a month or two ago, my wife and I were in Israel shooting videos, recording podcasts, and writing about the burgeoning health and wellness and nutrition scene in Israel.

Eating and eating and eating. From what I could tell, yes.

Even though I'm not a Jew, I have a Jewish name, Benjamin Greenfield. And so of course I love Israel. So of course we're now releasing all the videos that we shot over there. And the first video is up right now over@YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness My wife went to a healthy chocolate making class and learned how to make chocolate at home. And she shot a video where she basically, in the kitchen, shows you exactly how to do this. And in this case did it as a project with the kids. So if you want to know how to make your own healthy chocolate at home and you're tired of paying $5.99 for your organic dark chocolate bar at.

The grocery store, I wish mine was only 5.99.

You can bulk make it yourself. Check out the video. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. So make your Own healthy chocolate while you're staring at your blue light, doing your elastic band push ups and drinking black seed oil. And you'll be all set with this week's news flashes.

Listener Q and A.

Ben hi, this is Joan. Question. I know I'm finally going off the deep end with all of this information. Do you ever wrap food in foil, like baked potatoes? I've always cooked them by wrapping them in foil. And also if I reheat things, oftentimes I'll wrap them in foil and put them in the oven. Aluminum foil, would you use it or not?

Aluminum.

As they say in weird places? Yeah, I use aluminum foil, but I'm pretty careful about using it around heat. The reason for this is they've done research on this and they found pretty high levels of aluminum in foods that that have been cooked and then reheated with the aluminum foil. Like, for example, if you reheat your leftovers in the oven on the broiler with the aluminum foil on them, the problem is that the aluminum can accumulate in your body and that can cause things. I mean, it's been shown it causes things like osteoporosis and Alzheimer's. And the higher the temperature, the more the leaching that occurs from the foil. So I'm pretty careful with that. It's safe for cold foods. It's safe to wrap cold foods. They've never observed any leaching in studies to be happening unless you actually get heating. And it doesn't matter which side. Like if you put the shiny side against the food or the dull side against the food, both can increase the amount of aluminum that leeches off of aluminum foil. So you do have to be kind of careful with this stuff. I mean, like I've talked about before on the show, you know, we primarily use glass containers. Sometimes stainless steel usually will reheat and just like a good cast iron skillet on the stove. And I know that this is probably annoying to folks to hear about, yet one additional thing that they shouldn't put use aluminum foil. But I mean, like, we use aluminum foil, for example. You know, my boys, I took my boys skiing on Saturday and made everybody sandwiches and wrapped the sandwiches in aluminum foil and put them in our, in our ski backpacks. And honestly, aluminum foil at cold temperatures is better than plastic because plastic actually can leech even at room temperature or cold temperature. Aluminum is not going to leach from aluminum foil unless it gets heated up. So you do want to be kind of careful with it. I mean, high aluminum levels in the body can alter things like bone mineralization, they can affect your. Your thyroid activity. And you get really high calcium levels in your blood when you get aluminum accumulation. And just for the same reason, you wouldn't want to just take a high dose calcium supplement without getting extra vitamin K, for example, to increase the calcium absorption. High levels of calcium can cause calcium deposition in your arteries, so you want to be careful with that. And of course, you want to be careful with any type of metals because of the neurotoxic effect, because of the association between things like aluminum and Alzheimer's, for example. So I'd be careful with it for that reason. The other interesting thing that they found with aluminum foil is they did a study on potatoes and aluminum foil, and what they found with the potatoes was that there was potential for botulism. They found that baked potatoes wrapped in foil were linked to cases of botulism. And this is because the spores that cause botulism, they can survive the baking process. If you bake a potato in aluminum foil, and then the foil wrap seals the potato, and that prevents oxygen from being present. And in that environment, spores on the potato can germinate and grow. And so, like, I know I sound like I'm just being like one of the ironically tin foil wearing hats.

That's one good.

You could use aluminum foil, though, to make your, your little tin foil make your beanie as you sit and preach to your neighbors about why they shouldn't be using aluminum foil. But no, it's got its uses. And by the way, one cool thing that you can use aluminum foil for, and this is probably a good segue into our next question, is that it can be used to ground your body. Meaning that if you want to increase the amount of electrons that you get, like when you're gonna go, like, stand on the ground and try to get all the antioxidant effect of electrons coming off the ground or the floor, you can stand on aluminum foil if you can't afford one of those expensive grounding mats or earthing mats. And it actually works pretty well.

Interesting.

There you go.

My favorite thing to do with aluminum.

What's that?

Chew on it.

Mmm. Yeah, that's pleasant.

Have you ever done that?

Yes, once. Never again.

I dare everybody out there to try it.

Send in your videos.

Hey, Ben and Brock, this is Mike from Seattle. Though right now I'm living in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I just have a quick question about grounding or earthing and how to measure the quote unquote, need for it, or if nothing else, just the hypothetical Way to quantify it. So to throw out a couple hypotheticals, if somebody had a long airplane ride, let's say to Africa or Asia, and then they were inside all day using their cell phone, iPad and watching tv, could they feel good about going outside barefoot just for a couple minutes and getting sufficient electrons to counteract their plane ride and all that electronic activity? Or conversely, let's say somebody were to go outside, play outside barefoot all day, come inside, sit at their computer for a couple minutes, and then want to go to bed. But if they wanted to reset themselves and kind of get to an optimal level of electrons from the Earth, could they just go back outside again for a couple seconds?

Mike? Sorry, dude, you went on and on and on. I had to cut you a little bit, but I'm sure we got the gist.

Yeah, this is a really interesting topic. So I think that probably we should explain what's going on here first and then I'll talk about how you could measure your body voltage or whether or not this stuff's actually working. So most of us have noticed that we feel better when we're walking barefoot on the Earth or on sand or on ground. And research has shown why this happens. Your immune system actually functions a lot better when your body has an adequate supply of electrons. And you get a ton of those when you're in barefoot contact with Earth. Research has also shown that when you get exposed to electrons from Earth by literally having your skin touching the ground, there's a really significant antioxidant effect and that can help protect your body from inflammation and a lot of the other health consequences that tend to happen when we get exposed to a lot of electrical pollution from computers and cell phones and stuff like that. When you look at substances like asphalt and wood and rugs and plastic and like built up shoes, you know that, that have, you know, thick surfaces and don't allow you to ground, we get separated from that contact. So Earth, the, you know, the planet, ground, rocks, etc. They maintain a negative electrical potential on their surface. And when you're in direct contact with that surface, whether you're walking or sitting or laying down or standing, those electrons get conducted to your body and essentially bring your body to the same electric potential as the surface that you're standing on the Earth. So if you live in direct contact with the Earth, you're consistently grounded. And there's a lot of really good physiological and electrochemical changes that occur in your body that promote really, really good health. And there's all sorts of really interesting studies Coming out all over the place now that show improvements in everything from heart rate variability to decreased inflammation, to better stabilization of cortisol levels, to better sleep to reduce stress. When you get this grounding or this earthing effect. So grounding or earthing traditionally just defined as putting your bare feet on the ground. So that can be like dirt, grass, sand. Concrete actually works as well, you know, assuming it's not like concrete at the top of some kind of like a skyscraper. So the earth is the best natural source of electrons. There are other ways to get them, like grounding mats and earthing mats and even shoes. There are some shoes now that they make with carbon plugs in them that help you to get more grounded when you are walking around in shoes. Like, I've got these sandals. They're called earth runners, and they look kind of hippie. They look like Jesus sandals, But they've got these carbon plugs in them. And I'll toss those in my suitcase when I'm traveling anywhere where I know I can wear sandals. I know snow isn't covering the ground. And they have this really significant grounding effect when you're walking around, even if you can't walk around barefoot. So they're called. They're called earth runners. And the other cool thing about those is that you look like you came out of the Last of the Mohicans movie or the Bible. Yeah, that's.

I was more biblical.

Yeah.

But Old Testament.

Anyways, they are. They are pretty cool shoes. They're made out of leather and like these little carbon plugs. So modern running shoes, like things like plastic and rubber and stuff like that. They're really good insulators. Right. They're used to cover electrical wires, for example, those same materials to keep the conductors from touching each other and from touching your skin so you don't get shocked. But the bad part is when you're walking around on the surface of the planet Earth, you don't get a lot of those free electrons getting transferred into your body when you're. When your feet are covered with, like, plastic and rubber.

But if you get hit by lightning, you'll be okay.

That would probably be okay. Just go out in a storm. So. Good idea, Brock. Thank you for your contribution, your valuable contribution. So the other thing that you have to understand here is how your home and your living environment is going to affect your electrical potential. And that requires you to understand kind of like the three different forms of electricity that. That there are. So one form is direct current, what we know as DC electricity. So if you think about like a flashlight that's got two type D batteries in it. And when you turn the light on on the flashlight, you get this current that's created by the chemical reactions in the batteries that causes the electrons to go to the bulb, that converts the electrical energy into light. And all those electrons are kind of, kind of moving. And that's a perfect example of a direct current. Now an alternating current or AC is what's in your home more often and that's produced by electrical generators. And then it's distributed throughout, say like a neighborhood or out to your home via wires that are either overhead on the power lines or wires that are buried underneath the ground. Now like I mentioned, in direct current electricity, where you got electrons traveling like the battery up to the bulb with alternating current or ac, the flow of electrons in that circuit, in an AC circuit is not very significant because mostly the electrons are just going back and forth without actually progressing along a wire. They're just vibrating back and forth by, you know, like a hundred thousandths of an inch. So they're, they're barely moving at all. They're not actually flowing. And it's really interesting because this means that like the electrons that are in your household wiring are, they can be the same ones that were present like five years ago when your house was built or whenever you, you moved in. Because in contrast to DC or direct current, the electrons aren't like flowing all over the place. They can just stay in that same circuit, vibrating back and forth and creating energy like power computers or TVs or whatever. So you know, sometimes when you hear about like lots of, of power traveling back to the substation, like through the ground, you know, it's, it's not quite as significant as what we've been led to believe. And even, you know, I've talked about these big power surges, they're not quite as big. You know, once you start to understand that it's really more of an AC current that's in the home and you're not getting these huge surges all the time. Now I've certainly, I've used these, these dirty electricity filters in different outlets in my house. And I have found when I walk around with one of these little EMF meters that measures the amount of electromagnetic fields in any room, that the field is a little bit lower when I use these, these, you know, anti electrical pollution devices. But you do need to understand that this idea that power companies use the planet Earth as part of the alternating current circuit to like save on the expenses of Overhead wire or something like that, that's not quite accurate. Just because most of the time you've got alternating current or AC and electrons aren't having to travel all over the place, they're just kind of sitting there in your home vibrating back and forth. So either way though, you can still get affected by electrons, whether they are in your home, whether it's a DC current or an AC current or the electrons that are just naturally present on the plan Planet Earth. So, for example, when you look at things that can cause spikes in the number of electrons that are in the air circulating around you, or like wireless signals, everything from electric heaters to refrigerators to vacuum cleaners to WI FI routers to high efficiency lighting, specifically like fluorescent bulbs, all of those can cause some pretty significant electrical spikes that just get radiated into the atmosphere. Because, you know, any wiring around your house can act like an antenna. And you can act like an antenna because you are an electrical machine. And this is why you can get affected by a lot of the electrical signals that are taking place around you. Electrons can travel through the air just the same ways they can travel through the ground or, you know, in and out through a current and that type of thing. So you can measure the actual voltage in your body and you can do this via what's called a body voltage meter. And specifically what that measures is how much electricity is being induced on you, where, wherever you are. And you can also measure how much that charge is changed by things that you do in your environment. So I'm going to put some links in the show notes for you because you can either buy a body voltage meter off of like, you know, Amazon, for example, has several. You can also make your own. And I'll link to a website that shows you how to make your own body voltage meter. But the way that you use these things is you'll. So a meter comes with a pair of standard test leads is what they're called, and you'll plug alligator clips. Yeah, exactly. So you plug them into the meter and then to read your body voltage, you're holding the tip of one of the test leads between your finger and your thumb. And what you'll find is that your proximity from electrical wiring and appliances really affects that reading and the general level of EMF in your environment, like WI FI signals being on and off, etc. That affects that reading as well. Well, and the idea is that you'll see, you know, 150, 200 volts, whatever showing up on the screen as you're measuring your Body voltage meter. And ideally, when you ground your body, right, like when you're. When you're standing on top of a grounding sheet or, yes, even aluminum foil, or you're. You're standing on the planet Earth or you're using like one. Like I use a biomat, for example. You're laying on a biomat, you should see the reading drop, drop to very near zero. And that indicates that what you're doing is actually affecting you. You'll be able to measure not only how the EMF in your environment is affecting you or how much EMF there is in your environment, but you can also measure the effect that it's having on your body and whether or not something you know, like grounding really, truly does work. And it does. Like, you can. You can measure yourself with a body voltage meter and see that it actually does work work.

So if it drops that much, does that mean that that voltage is actually gone or that it's just being pulled out of your body the same way a grounding plug would make it?

What it means specifically is that when you're grounding your earthing, negatively charged electrons are passing into your body from the grounding surface and bringing your electrical chemical, electrical, electro. Chemical, your electrochemical status back into balance. Oh, okay. So it's not resetting the circus, the circus, the circuit, basically, it is kind.

Of electrical circus going on in your body.

Some of us are a circus. So, yeah, that's the idea. So you can test that as far as quantifiably measuring the need for grounding, like Mike says, like seeing where you're at or if you need to be grounded, that's technically how you would do it, is just get a body voltage meter and test. Now, what I do, and I've. I've got one sitting on the edge of my desk right now, is I use this little device, and we had these people on the podcast before called the lapka, and that allows me. It does all sorts of cool things. Like it measures the amount of radiation and the nitrites and fruits and vegetables with this little probe. But it also allows me to walk around my house and measure emf. And so I do that just to measure the amount of EMF in a room. And it's kind of like one of those. Those correlative activities, right? Like you. If you know that there's a high amount of EMF in the room, you can test yourself using a body voltage meter to see if it affects you. I can just tell you right now it does. Like, you don't have to go out and get a body voltage meter, which tends to be more expensive than an EMF meter. If you just want to use an EMF meter and measure the amount of EMF in your environment, if it's high, you do two things. Number one, you mitigate the emf, right? Like, you figure out ways that you could, like, unplug the WI FI router and do any of these other things that I've talked about multiple times on the podcast. Or if that's not an option, if you're at your office and you've got 12 colleagues using the wifi router who would all get pissed if you walked over there and unplugged it. Figure out ways to ground yourself. I mean, figure out ways to wander outside every hour and reset your electrical circuit by getting in contact with the ground. Mitigate some of that damage, at least if you can, sort of. So, you know, ultimately you don't have to test your body voltage, but it is kind of cool to see, you know, how it changes when you ground and how your body actually is an electrical machine and things that you do. You know, just like taking your shoes off, you'll notice that body voltage meter drop. So, yeah, that's. That's kind of the. Kind of the. I guess that's not the short answer, that's the long answer. So there you go.

That's a very long answer. And I don't know if you actually told Mike exactly. If he was playing outside all day and then he jumped on his computer before bed, is that gonna screw him up?

It's pretty astounding the rate at which your body can accumulate the. Well, they're basically positive electrons, right? Not negative electrons. So yeah, if you were playing outside all day and then you went in and exposed yourself to a bunch of emf, it is going to affect your body's voltage. And so the answer to this would of course be like get a grounding mat or an earthing mat or a biomat or something like that and just lay on that for a few minutes, pour back bed, and you'll at least be able to mitigate any of those last minute things you did before bed that affects your body's electrical potential.

So bummer.

Hiya, Ben. I just finished listening to episode 302 and you mentioned kettlebell yoga. I had a search and I can't find much on it. So if you could leave some references for where you found the routines especially interesting in doing like a ketobo sun salutation routine and any others you might Recommend. Thanks, Ben.

Bye.

Yeah, I kind of want to give this a go, too. You did talk about it a couple episodes ago.

The reason you can't find it anywhere is it's completely my invention. Well, there you go. It doesn't exist except in the world of Ben Greenfield. So I just finished writing an article that hasn't been released yet yet for quickanddirtytips.com and it's about how you could technically stay fit doing nothing but yoga, like yoga fitness workouts. And I'm kind of on this kick right now where for 20 to 30 minutes every morning I've been doing yoga, but hard yoga. So, for example, one of the routines that I talk about in that article and I'll link to the website for quick and dirty tips, because if you sign up for the free newsletter over there, you just get it in your inbox every time I release an article. Or you can subscribe to to it in itunes too, because there's audio versions of each article that I release. But, you know, one of the sample workouts is you'll start off with sun salutations, except instead of doing your sun salutations, traditionally you do them with dive bomber push ups instead of just like going through your, you know, your, your plank to your cobra type of thing. So dive bomber push ups, which are a lot harder version of, of the, the push up part of the sun salutation. And then you'll jump up into a standing position after you've gone through your sun salutation. And you'll do like five super slow overhead squats. Holding a kettlebell overhead. Right? Like super slow, controlled, deep nasal breathing. It's tough. You're working on mobility. You're really activating a lot of your muscles more than if you weren't loaded. And then from those super slow overhead squats, you'll transition onto the ground round and you'll hoist the kettlebell overhead with one arm and you'll do five Turkish get ups on that side and then you'll switch and you'll do five Turkish get ups on the other side. And the breathing is really important here, right? Like it's all with deep nasal breathing where with every move you're either going through a full inhale or an exhale cycle. Okay, so we've got, we've got the warm up with the sun salutations. And then you're doing the super slow overhead squats with the kettlebell held overhead head. And then around five Turkish get ups on each side with the kettlebell hoisted above your Head. If you don't know what a Turkish get up is, use the Google machine. And then you'll stand up from those Turkish get ups and you'll do 30 kettlebell swings. Except you'll do them. You know, my favorite way to do these is where you actually let go of the kettlebell in between each swing and you let it float in the air right in front of you for a split second and then you catch it with your other hand and you do the swing. You let it float in the air in front of you. So it puts you into trance, like meditative state that's flowing these swings, but your heart rate is up there too. Yeah, you're just like flowing with the kettlebell. And then I'll like pull the kettlebell into my chest and then drop down into a squat. Hold that for five deep breaths and then set the kettlebell down, stand up, reach for the sky, go through another sun salutation series and then pick the kettlebell back up and go into that first move like the super slow overhead squats. And you'll go through that for, for like three to four or five rounds. You know, it can take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. And by the time you're done, you feel really grounded and you're hyper oxygenated the way that you normally are after yoga. But you've also got this really good conditioning workout too because your heart rate gets pretty jacked, you're loading your muscles and that's kettlebell yoga tm patent pending.

Hi Ben and Brock. Hey. Love the podcast podcast guys. It's pretty much been life altering for me over the past couple years. I got a question about a topic you've talked about a lot. I went full vegan, then vegetarian, now I eat fish. Feel like I'm definitely missing out by not eating meat. So that may be something I go back to. But my big question is, what's your take right now on grass fed butter? Thanks.

Thanks.

Appreciate it.

How do you feel about grass fed butter, Ben?

I feel great about grass fed butter. Me too.

Next question.

Do you got. Do you guys have Kerrygold up in. Up in Ca?

Probably. I actually don't know. We've got some really good organic grass fed butters like that are made nearby that I buy. So.

Okay.

I don't really worry about getting it from Ireland.

Yeah. So grass fed butter. Why would you do grass fed butter? Well, first of all, when we step back and look at butter as far as who should be eating it versus not butter is dairy. But it's only got minor Traces of the dairy proteins and the sugars remaining in it, like the lactose sugars and the dairy proteins that people who are allergic to dairy might normally not be able to tolerate. I've found that most people who are allergic to dairy can tolerate grass fed butterfly butter pretty well. Some people have some pretty significant autoimmune issues, can't even do butter. Some people who really struggle with dairy. Now those people can sometimes do okay with ghee, which is basically pure butter fat that's been rendered down like ultra clarified butter because you heat up at this temperature that's high enough to cook off the water and it browns the milk solids and it gets rid of a lot more of the lactose than the dairy protein. So it's got even less of the quote unquote dairy in it than butter does. And a lot of people who can't do butter at all do just fine with ghee. So if you just, if you just can't do butter, try ghee. And you know you can get really good organic ghee off of Amazon. Like pure Indian foods is a good brand. Ancient Organics is a really good brand. You can get that stuff just straight off of Amazon. I'll put a link in the show notes for you if you want that. We get Kerrygold butter. That's generally what we use. It's just like an unsalted organic Kerrygold butter. Sometimes I'll get it from the grocery store, sometimes we order it from US Wellness meat. That's a really good source. But why would you want to do butter? Why would you want to do grass fed butter? Well, first of all, a few of the things that you look at in butter, butter has conjugated linoleic acid in it. It's abbreviated as cla. Now CLA is actually a trans fat and we often shove trans fatty acids under the bus. But this is a naturally occurring trans fat that is actually, actually good for you. It's been linked to like tumor suppression and reduced belly fat and superior cardiovascular health and even fat loss because it enhances your ability to burn fats.

It's the fat that burns fat.

It's the fat that burns fat. That's what CLA is. And grass fed butter has about three to five times more cla in it than butter from grain fed cattle. So the CLA content is definitely higher. When we look at vitamin content, that's another benefit of butter, right? Like vitamin K2 and all these fat soluble vitamins. And you a nice yellow butter is yellow, assuming it hasn't been dyed which some companies do. I can't believe it's not butter. Vitamin A content is that carotene is what's going to make it yellow. So you get a lot of vitamin A, you get a lot of vitamin K2 and both of those have fantastic benefits for everything from hormone and steroid precursors to helping your body. Like I mentioned, vitamin K2 helps your body use calcium correctly and affects effectively. And vitamin K2 and vitamin A are both found in significantly higher amounts in grass fed versus grain fed butter. And again they've done studies on this and it has been shown fatty acid composition when you look at like the omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid ratio. Omega 3 of course being the more heart healthy fat that is higher in anti inflammatory potential. Omega 3 fatty acid potential is much, much higher in grass fed butter versus grain fed butter. Few other things as far as grass fed goes, in my opinion, it tastes a lot better. It's like creamier, it's smoother, it's richer. So ultimately you're getting way more out of grass fed butter than grain fed butter. I mean grain fed butter is still going to be better than like canola oil or margarine or I can't believe it's not butter butter. But ultimately grass fed butter is going to be better. So it's a better butter, better butter, buddy.

Hey Ben, my name is Tyler from Southern California. Question for you. If you were to get Jessup pregnant again, what would be your top adjustments in your life for healthy family and babies? Thanks, Bren. Love the podcast.

It made me slightly uncomfortable the way Tyler said if you got Jessup pregnant again, like I, hopefully it was consensual.

To my knowledge it was.

Okay, good.

Actually, I, I, I can tell you exactly how we conceived. I had just done, I believe it was my first Iron man, maybe my, my second Iron Man. And so I'd had like, you know, stressful past couple of weeks going in. I raced and like a few days after I raced Ironman, we conceived. And it was literally one of those things where since I share my entire life on this podcast anyways, I might as well delve into this. My wife doesn't use the pill, we don't really use any chemical contraceptives and we generally just have protected sex.

The sheep intestine.

Yeah, exactly. With a sheep intestine. Exactly. You've got it Brock. A sheepskin. Such a hippie. And yeah, when we want to have babies, we have unprotected sex. Easy. Bada boom, bada bing. So anyways, yeah, we we decided we wanted to have a baby and we had sex and we conceived that night. So there you go. Go race an Ironman triathlon and you will induce enough genetic mutations in your body to where you'll not only conceive, but like me, you'll get a double whammy. Make two.

You know, I tried to have sex after my first 70.3 and I gave up after like the first two minutes. I like, I'm just too tired. I'm sorry.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the problem with, with racing. You know, this. This is a few days after, right? But racing in Ironman or doing anything really hard like that, you're so jacked up from an adrenaline standpoint. Cortisol, caffeine, everything. You'd think that you just pass out after an event like that, but you don't. And I think I've said this before on the podcast, but like, the one time that I'll use something like Valium or a benzodiazepine or Diazepam, I will take that. After a really, really tough race when I know that I'm so much in pain and just like thrashed and I can't sleep and you lay there staying weak at this, you know, I just take Valium in a glass of wine, honestly, you know, it's like the. My big Valium time of the year.

So I know you don't do this anymore, but I think both of us used to do the Goo Roctanes and. Oh yeah, after my first 70.3, I think I had like 25 Goo Rock teens or something during the day. So I'm just like vibrating with sugar and caffeine.

I used to go through 40 gels an hour during a race. Nuts. So anyways, though, if I did get Jessup pregnant again, the top adjustments I would make in my life. Well, I can tell you. I can tell you that def. I'll give you five. I'll tell you five of the top adjustments that I would make that the things that I would change. But before I do, let me give you my best resources as far as babies and children. Like, if, like the resources that I all. I guess this would be a six, right? Like the things that I would have gone through completely given enough time. First of all, there's a guy named Chris Kresser. Really intelligent, like holistic medical practitioner. You know, he's like an integrative medicine guy. He has this thing called the healthy baby code. And it's just like this step by step walkthrough of everything. From, like, fertility to gestation to breastfeeding. And it's all just like this, this online series of modules that you go through. And he covers, like, micronutrients and food toxins and, you know, putting it all together and kind of like, it's a really, really good course. I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but that's one thing that I would have gone through rather than just, like, trying to piece it all together myself from the 18 different quarters of the Internet. I think his is, like, 200 bucks, right? Which seems kind of spendy, but honestly, like, it's like, it's the same mistake on, like, a college course on raising a healthy baby. So that's one thing that I would have gone through next. I don't think it was out when I had my kids. I wish it would have been. But Dave Asprey's Better Baby book, that's another really, really good resource. Dave and his wife Elena wrote that book. Kind of flew under the radar. Not a lot of people know that Dave Aspie wrote a book about having better babies. Sometimes Dave catches some flack about, like, you know, for example, his new bulletproof diet book. I know he's caught a lot of flack for that, about just, like, being a big, huge advertisement, right, for, like, supplements and his upgraded supplement company. Whether or not you think that that's the case, I can tell you right now that the Better Baby book really doesn't push nearly anything at all. It's just, like, about raising a healthy baby. And so if it concerns you that it might have you feeding your baby charcoal and glutathione, don't worry.

Coffee?

Yeah. Better Baby Book, though, that's another really good resource. And then a couple other resources that yours truly, truly created. After I've had my kids, I have an entire course. It's literally about 20 hours worth of content on Udemy. And Ari Meisel, who is like a productivity expert who runs the less doing website, and myself taught an entire course on Udemy that you can download to your phone or watch on your computer. It's just like, Udemy is a place where. Where you get courses for learning things. And we did an entire course on raising healthy kids, and we specifically targeted it towards dads raising twins. But to be honest with you, every single element of that course are things that I've learned since I've had kids. We go into everything from, like, you know, light and electricity to sleep enhancements, to increasing their level of intelligence naturally to. To supplements that babies can take to just everything that you'd want to know about the way that he and I raised our twin kids. It's called the double dads course. So you can check that out at Udemy Double Dads course. And then the last resource that I have is my 10 ways to grow tiny superhumans book, which is based off of a talk that I gave up in Toronto that I eventually turned into an electronic book that's just like, 10 really, really good ways to increase the health of your children or increase their beauty, their bone density, their immune system strength, everything. So it's called 10 Ways to Grow tiny superhumans. I'll put links to all of those resources@bengreenfieldfitness.com 305 but now, as far as the things that I would change. First of all, my wife had a C section. And the thing about this is that we planned for about seven months to have a natural birth at home. She had a doula, she had a few midwives. We had like the full on freaking, like, water, like, tub in the bedroom. Like a big turtle tub with the slide and everything. I thought it'd be a special, you know, birthing tub, but it was just like the big turtle tub with the slide that kids play in.

It's the Mr. Turtle Pool. Yeah, Mr.

Turtle Pool. So we were gonna have the Mr. Turtle Pool baby and did the whole home birth thing. But ultimately my wife is the person who would have died like in the old west movies having babies. Cause her hips are so small, and she's got these two big old boys, you know, big old twin boys inside her, and she couldn't get him out. I mean, like, we had good doulas and good midwives, and every half hour we were taking the heart rates on the kids to make sure that they were okay. We only lived 10 minutes from the hospital, so we knew that was there if we needed it. We went through classes, courses, everything you need to know about natural birth. But when it came down to it, it was either my wife or the babies, right? Like, that's. It was just like, you know, either she was gonna. She was. They were not gonna come out of her, and they were gonna just like go through this extreme, extremely traumatic time and then not make it out. Or else my wife was gonna, like, crack open her hips and, you know, break her vagina and whatever else happens, you know, trying to get the babies out. So we went to the hospital and she got a C section. So as far as what I would have changed there, as far as the c section goes. I really didn't have a choice choice at that point. But the problem is it was just a complete rush job, right? Like rush to the hospital, get rushed in and basically I paid for two births, right? Like I paid the midwives and the doula and everybody for the natural birth, which was not cheap. But then I also paid the hospital for the C sections, which was also not cheap. So what this comes down to is probably going back and looking at it all over again. I would shock have probably just gone straight for the C section just, just because that's, that's the reality of the situation frankly is, you know, if we look at things from an ancestral standpoint, without the, without modern medicine, my wife would have probably died or the kids would have died if we would have just stuck with the natural birth in that situation. I'm not saying natural births are wrong, but I'm saying for a tiny woman with tiny hips trying to have twin boys at home without any help from modern medicine, and it's just like, you know, she would have been the person who died in the, in the Wild west movies. So there's that. So do your research. Especially if you got twins and a small wife. The next thing is, and I know this is a really controversial topic, but I would have gotten even more educated on vaccinations and specifically on vaccination schedules than I did did. There's a really good book out there called the Vaccine Book, written by an MD named Bob Sears. And the book goes into a comprehensive discussion of every disease that a child can get vaccinated for, how common or rare that disease is, the ingredients of each vaccine, the possible side effects from each vaccine, and then goes into what would be considered like kind of the. A vaccination schedule that not only minimizes some of the specific vaccinations that tend to have more of the harmful ingredients in them, but also how you can spread out a vaccination schedule from the time a child is born until they're about six years old, rather than assaulting a newborn baby fragile immune system with a huge overload of some of the ingredients that are in some of the vaccines. I'm not saying I'm anti vaccine, but I think that there is a better way to vaccinate and to get some of the benefits of herd immunity without necessarily doing every single immunization under the face of the planet compressed into a very short time frame for a child. Now for us, us with our kids, we ended up getting, we did, we did the, the mmr, we did polio and trying to think. We didn't do chickenpox, we didn't do tetanus, we didn't do diphtheria, we did not do the, the pertussis one, we didn't do hep B. Some of these ones that tend to be higher in some of the nasty ingredients and the heavy metals and the things, things that might deleteriously affect a child's immune system. The reason that we got the vaccinations that we did was because we did a lot of international travel with our kids when they were little babies. We went to Thailand and Chile and these places where we weren't really comfortable not immunizing them completely. But if I could go back and do it all over again, I'd do two things. I'd read this book, the vaccine book, and I'd spread out the vaccinations over a much longer period of time. And I would also reconsider traveling internationally with my kids. And I'll get into some other reasons why that would, why I would do that in a second, but alternative vaccination schedule. So basically I'm not saying no vaccines, but I'm saying at least consider spreading them out over a longer period of time than what most countries actually recommend as far as vaccination schedules are concerned.

I have a feeling in the last few years the, the changes in some of the vaccines have been quite dramatic too. Like the nasal delivery of a lot of the, the like flu shots and stuff like that are so much better than, than what we had especially well, that I had in the 70s as a kid too. Like it is, it is getting better and better.

Yeah, exactly. And you can, you can make you, I mean you can follow a few guidelines like you don't want combinations of vaccination because it's easier for a baby's body to handle just one thing at a time. And you can insist on single dose vaccines which aren't preserved with mercury or anything like that, versus a multiple dose vaccine. So like Brock says, it's not like all vaccinations are created equal. So you can educate yourself on that topic.

And if there's one thing that's come out of all this hysteria around vaccines, it's actually, actually like it kind of kicked the medical community into actually looking at how they could make it better and make it a little bit more streamlined. So that's one good thing.

Yep, exactly. And again, this book goes into which vaccines are most dangerous, which ones have the nastiest ingredients in them, and it kind of comes down to Some of the tougher ones to get really clean versions of are like the hpv, the one for meningococcal diseases, the MMR and then the chickenpox. So anyways, though I didn't do as much research as I probably could have on vaccines, that's the second thing I do. And I'll put a link to that vaccine book in the show notes. A couple other things. Like I mentioned, I would have reconsidered international travel not just because it would have decreased the need for compressed fascination schedule, but because a child growing skull is thin. They get exposed to radiation more intensively than adults. And because of their rapidly dividing and growing cells and nervous system, they're more susceptible to a lot of the potential mutagenic effects of radiation. So I would have done a little less airline travel with my kids when they were babies. I, I really think the less you can, you can toss your kid on an airplane, the better. And I know that that might mean that they get exposed to less, I don't know, like, you know, Chinese street food and, you know, being able to visit mosques when they're two years old and whatnot. But you know what? They're going to get plenty of opportunities to travel internationally as they age. I just think that throwing a baby on a, on a metal tube exposed to solar radiation and, and all the other electrochemical effects of hurtling through Earth's atmosphere 30,000ft high in a metal tube, I just don't think that's the best thing for a baby.

So would you have waited until they were like five maybe?

Yeah, I'd wait until a lot of the, specifically the neurological development had taken place, which is generally around like 4 to 6 years old. A couple other things, I wasn't really on board quite as much with artificial lighting. I would have used just blue light. So this lighting science company that I've talked about before on the show, they have what's called a sleepy baby bulb now, which I think is great. So if you go to the lighting science website, it's called the sleepy baby bulb. And this is basically just a bulb. You know, the same company that makes the awaken alert bulbs that I use in my office and they, the nighttime bulbs that I use in my bedroom, but they've got one now for baby's rooms. And in my baby's rooms I just would turn on the lights. I didn't know at that time as much about how lights affect a baby's circadian rhythm and their sleep cycles. And so I would have made more conscious Decisions specifically about the lighting in my kid's bedroom. That's a low hanging fruit that's easy for anybody to do is just unscrew the light bulb and screw a different light bulb in. And be careful with the type of light that you expose your baby to at night. And frankly, if you're getting up and down, taking care of your baby at night, it's better for you too when you aren't as exposed to as much blue light. Like you'll be able to get back to sleep faster. And you know, God knows we all need more sleep when we've got little babies around. And then the last thing that I would have done again related to the airplane radiation, the airline travel is I had a wifi router going in my home and the office was next to the baby's bedroom. And I wasn't really aware, aware the really enormous negative health effect that a WI fi router can have on neurons and electromagnetic fields. And some of the things we talked about earlier in this podcast, I would have, even though all I had in my home was wireless, I would have completely moved that WiFi router to a different area of the house, like the kitchen, and just gotten really, really far away from the baby. Specifically, like as far, like the farthest spot in the house that I could get it from them and me while I was sleeping. And that's something else I didn't do that I'd probably go back and do. So, you know, those are some of the things that come to mind right off the bat would be like the natural birth versus the C section, the vaccination, the airline travel, the lighting and then the WI fi. But you know, for the most part, I did a lot of stuff right. You know, we made all our own baby food and you know, we'd rub like fish oil into our baby's feet at night and we use like this liquid multivitamin that had like magnesium and all these really high dose nutrients in it. And so we did, we did a lot of things right, which is why my kids are freaking awesome. But yeah, there are some pretty awesome. There's some things I go back and do differently because, you know, frankly, the third arm that's grown out of one of their backs and one of them has like a bright glowing green eye.

You know, that's what makes them awesome. Why would you want to change that?

That's what makes them special.

That's what makes them X Men.

You're special. So, yeah, that's how you can avoid having little X Men mutated babies. So.

All right, let's wrap this sucker up.

Let's do it, dude. So as we usually do on this show, we always end with a nice review. And if you hear us read your review that you leave in itunes on the show and you email Ben greenfieldfitness.com with your T shirt size, I will put in the mail to you a sweet BenGreenfield Fitness beanie, a BPA free water bottle, and an awesome tech T shirt that makes your chesticles look freaking awesome even if you don't do elastic band push ups. So. So, looks like this week's review is called the Car Talk of Fitness and nutrition podcast by Whole dudes. You ever listen to car Talk, Brock?

I haven't, but I looked them up because I wanted to see who this click and clack people were.

They're pretty cool. My favorite Car Talk episode is where the guy calls in about how to wash a car. This kid calls in about how to wash. Wash a car properly because his parents want him to start washing the car and, like, their response was, do it with, like, one of those steel wool pads and your parents will never again ask you to wash a car and your problems will be out the window. So do it anyways. Take it away, Brock.

All right. Ben and Brock are like the click and clack of health and fitness. But instead of teaching you how to fix their rusty old automobiles, they teach listeners how to rev the human machine and get the most out of their bodies. Since I've started listening to the podcast, I've started doing my grocery shopping wearing a weighted vest. Stopped wearing deodorant. Oh, dear.

And I've recently grocery shopping.

Yeah, with a weighted vest. I've recently started wearing those stupid looking orange glasses everywhere, which seem to completely cancel out any success with the ladies that would have recently resulted from my vastly improved physique and fitness level. So thanks for nothing, guys, but really, the podcast deserves to be at the top of the charts.

Wow. So we've kind of. Kind of destroyed his life, but, well, it's. It evened out at the same time. Even things out. Yeah, I think he's pretty much started. We should probably sign things out by talking like click and clack. I think they've got. Got like New Jersey accents. I believe they have New Jersey accents.

So maybe I don't have any.

Maybe it's New York. I don't know.

But I haven't seen the show. But I'm expecting the guy with the beard sounds like this.

It's probably a fuel injector.

It's always the fuel injector. I hate those things.

It's gonna make a sound like this.

Why don't we just have carburetors like the old days?

Right away if you're gonna wear a weight at the grocery store, make sure that you push a shopping cart over to the baking soda section and get some baking soda in your armpits, but.

Just don't get it in your catalytic converter.

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

Sam.