How To Recover From Lost Sleep, Is Your Smoothie Killing You, How Household Dust Makes You Fat & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, how to recover from lost sleep. Do bar workouts work? Can vitamin D supplements cause heart disease? Is your smoothie killing you? And much more. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movements get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. So, Rachel, in an effort to help our listeners get to know you, the new podcast sidekick, a little bit better, I thought maybe I'd ask you the quintessential question that all podcasters seem to ask each other these days. And that is, what'd you have for breakfast this morning?

Well, actually, my daily breakfast is just one big, massive mug of coffee.

I thought you're going to say Vegemite.

I actually do have Vegemite.

Really?

Yeah. My favorite thing is to have every American that comes over to our house try Vegemite on toast, and it's hilarious every time.

But for breakfast, you just have coffee.

I do, yeah. I love coffee. And for some reason, I don't, you know, need anything else in the mornings. It's perfect.

I would waste away by lunch.

Really?

Actually, there are. Sometimes if I have a big dinner party or if I overeat, I have a 1, 2 combo that I use to make sure that it doesn't all go to my waistline. I'll use this on Thanksgiving, Christmas, et cetera. I'm gonna sound very orthorexic here, but basically, I fast until lunch and I actually set my stopwatch. I'm very competitive with myself. So if I am eating at a big party by, like, let's say, whatever, 11pm at night, which would be pretty typical for a party, I'll then set my clock for 16 hours and I do a 16 hour fast from the bout of overeating until the next time that I will, quote, unquote, allow myself to eat. And then at some point during that fast, I do. Like a cold soak, right? Like cold pool, cold shower. Like a long cold shower, a cold water swimming. So that's really the only reason I'm not morbidly obese.

That's a good tip for everyone for this Thanksgiving. And now, Ben, you just got back From Helsinki.

Yeah, Just got back a couple of days ago from Helsinki, Finland. So for those of you who are at the big biohacking summit over there, hello. It was awesome to meet you. And if I remembered how to say hello in Finnish, I would say hello that way. I think it's just hey, as a matter of fact. But Finland's very cool. A lot of mushroom foraging, a lot of nude smoke sauna ing and a lot of dips into the Baltic Sea. So it was quite fun. And for any of our listeners who want to go over to Helsinki, Finland next year, we actually have the registration open for next year's biohacker Summit and we'll put it in the show notes. If you go to the show notes for this episode, you can get all the goodness that Rachel and I wind up talking about. And that's going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 332 so enjoy. News Flashes.

So what have you got for us this week, Ben?

News flashes this week? Well, as you know, Rachel, I try and keep people abreast of the most cutting edge health information on Twitter or Facebook or if you can dish out health information on Instagram, there too, even though it more often tends to be me in my boxers doing something crazy at my house. But we always are posting things and you're actually our social media. I don't know if we did. We mentioned that last week.

I don't think we did, no.

Yeah. For those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or wherever else, Rachel's kind of like the mastermind behind the social media. And yeah, there were some interesting things that we talked about this week. And this is the part of the show where I tell you about the most interesting ones. The journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. Here's an interesting one. They looked at the effects of three different energy drinks on oxygen consumption and perceived exertion during treadmill exercise. Now the reason I wanted to bring this up is because I can't even count on all my fingers and toes and would need more than that if I were going to count the number of people who I know who will like whip out a Red Bull during a Ironman triathlon or who rely on a monster energy drink as their pre workout go to. It just, it's all over the place and I don't. Do you drink energy drinks at all, Rachel?

Definitely not.

Really?

Not a fan. Terrible stuff.

You liar. You drink coffee.

That's true. I do drink. Yeah, I definitely drink coffee. No, but we definitely have a no energy drink policy in this little household.

Right. And when we say energy drinks, you know, the stuff that's either, you know, sucralose or sucrose or fructose or glucose mixed with copious amounts of caffeine and usually something else that kind of throws your ticker for a loop. Exactly. So in, in this particular study, what they did was they used four different commercial energy drinks. They used Red Bull, of course, they used Monster Energy, they used five Hour Energy, and then they used one with the unfortunate name Squirt, which I've actually never heard of. I don't even know what Squirt energy drink is. But they need a branding expert to rename that one.

I don't know if you want to know.

Yeah, so anyways, what they did was they had them ingest this energy drink and then rest in a seated position for one hour. Which I think in and of itself is just funny to have someone slam an energy drink and then just kind of sit for an hour. I would have liked to have it. I would have liked to have seen that part of the study. See, like how long it takes for their eyes to twitch a little bit and, you know, for maybe the pupil dilation to occur. Anyways, what they did was they then exercised for 15 minutes at 70% of VO2 max, so pretty hard on a treadmill. And they recorded their VO2, their rating of perceived exertion and their performance. The findings were that energy drinks and none of the four different energy drinks appeared to increase treadmill exercise performance or running economy or oxygen consumption whatsoever. And the conclusion of the research was that energy drinks do not improve exercise performance or time to exhaustion. So there you have it.

And they're full of sugar.

There you have it. The research gods have spoken. Now, granted, I would say that there's a big difference between like running 15 minutes on a treadmill and being six hours into like an Ironman triathlon and having an energy drink in your special needs bag to pick you up. And that's a little bit more difficult to gauge in research.

Right.

So anyways, if you were going to, to do like, like a big endurance event or something like that. Rachel, do you, do you use any type of sports performance enhancing compounds like mushrooms or adaptogens or superfoods or anything like that?

No. No.

Really? Really?

No.

Just coffee and veggie. You are so boring.

Just coffee and Vegemite?

Yeah. With toast. Well, there, there was another interesting article that I talked about, and this one was about kids and, and what this was was an article that appeared on the BBC that showed that there is new study or a new, I guess you would call it a report out from what's called the Organization for Economic Cooperation. And what they looked at was school technology and whether or not school technology, in particular the use of like, computers and tablets and phones and accumulated daily minutes using Internet in school. They wanted to look at what actually happens to student performance in those situations. Now, what they found was that students who use computers very frequently at school get worse results. They found that students who use computers sparingly at school have better learning outcomes than the students who are regularly using computers. They showed no appreciable improvements in reading, math or science, even in the countries that heavily invested in information technology in schools. And some of the highest achieving school systems, particularly South Korea and Shanghai, which I thought was interesting, I would have expected them to have, like, computers attached to their shoulders. They had lower levels of computer use in school and higher levels of achievement. And it was really interesting to see that despite what you would think would be the case, right, like more computers, more phones, more technology, better performance, they found that that's not the case and that as a matter of fact, technology seems to inhibit performance to a certain extent in the classroom. And I like this because my kids I would consider to be learning deficient when it comes to finding their way around, like an iPad or an iPhone. They will use my Kindle occasionally or my phone. And they know the very first thing they do when I hand it to them is they put it in airplane mode. Because I've taught them about WI FI signals and what those can do to the body, but even those they very sparingly use. So it's good to know that technology is definitely not crucial. And we were talking about Finland, by the way. Did you know that over in Finland they don't even start school until 7? They barely do any standardized testing. They really don't focus on college too heavily. There's no school uniforms. There's no honor societies. There's no valedictorians. There's no, like, classes for the gifted. They rarely get more than a half hour of homework every night. But they rank among some of the smartest people in the world on standardized testing, right?

Yeah, yeah. And they're also quite happy because they're.

Out in the forest naked foraging for mushrooms.

So parents no longer have to feel guilty about minimizing screen time with their kids.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's that paradox, right? You want your kid to grow up and be enabled in a digital world to be able to survive. And I don't know, maybe your kid will be the next great Angry Birds creator. But the fact is that you don't need technology in the classroom in order for kids to learn. And it turns out that the more the technology, the actual, the lower the learning potential. So it's really interesting. And maybe it is because they're all playing, I don't know, Angry Bird or Minesweeper or. What's the candy one?

Candy Crush.

Candy Crush, baby. Yeah. So that was interesting. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was household dust. There's actually a new study showing how household dust can actually make you fat. And I thought I'd bring this up because there's been a lot of interest in household dust among our listeners recently because of the podcast that we did with Brett Bauer about the vacuum cleaners. Did you listen into that one?

I did, yeah.

Yeah. So he came to my home and did this whole audit of my house, like, fungus, mold, dust, everything. The dude knows a ton about household toxins, and I was shocked at what he showed with this vacuum he was getting out of, like, my furniture and my carpet and everything else. But what this latest research study shows is that there are materials in house dust that turn on a specific protein in your body. And the name of the protein. Brace yourself. Get ready for this. It's peroxisome proliferator activated nuclear receptor gamma.

Wow.

It's called PPAR gamma, we'll affectionately call it. So what it does in your body is that particular protein triggers fat cell growth and is involved in obesity. And what they found is that PPAR gamma is turned on after exposure to less than 1 milligram of household dust. And that houses that have a high amount of what are called semi volatile compounds commonly found in indoor dust, they're what are called ppar Gamma antagonists. This was a study published in the Environmental Science and Technology Journal. So that means that they can bind to and activate this PPAR Gamma, and that's involved in fat metabolism and also in fat cell proliferation. So they found that more than half of the dust samples that they collected from homes, offices, and gyms had a level of exposure that would allow for extremely significant PPAR gamma activation. So it turns out that the dust in your house can make you fat. Now, I'm a fan of, like. And I don't know if you do this, Rachel, like, leaving the doors and the windows and stuff kind of open during the day just to simulate your house being outside as much as possible.

So that's how people can mitigate their dust, making them fat.

That's one way to do it. The guy who I had in the podcast, by the way, I was actually surprised, I think, because usually we get anywhere from over the course of a year after these podcasts are released, like 80,000 to 90,000 people downloading an episode. I think only I talked to Brett. He had like 28 people, something like that, actually get on the phone with the free call that he offered them to go over all their household dust mitigating needs. So he has a lot more time in his schedule. So if you want to talk to Brett, we have a page for that. It's BenGreenfieldFitness.com rainbow that's BenGreenfieldFitness.Com rainbow and you can have a little chat with him about how to test household dust, how to get rid of it, everything like that. So you haven't yet done that. You should.

I tell you what, Ben. If he found dust in your already very detoxed home, I imagine he's going to find quite a bit in mine.

You're screwed.

I know.

Listener Q and A. Hey, Ben, Nate here. Question. I'm a paramedic firefighter, and as you know, our sleep schedule can vary quite a bit from no sleep to being asleep for one or two hours, being up for one or two hours. And it just really depends on what's going on that night. Do you have any tips to recover the next day or lessen the impact of the sleep schedule on our bodies and hormones? Thanks.

So that was Nate's question, and we need to help him out because he's a paramedic and a firefighter and he's doing good stuff for the world. So what have we got for him, Ben?

And we also don't want sleepy firefighters, and we don't want paramedics injecting substances into people while they're sleepy, while they're sleep deprived. It'd be bad. My brother is a paramedic and a firefighter. Really?

Yeah.

Interesting. Wow. Well, we have something in common. There we go. The very, very first thing that you and I have in common. Both of our brothers are saving the planet. They are anyways. And my dad also was a paramedic and a firefighter growing up. And they do have weird, erratic schedules. And it is one of those things that can be a little bit of an uphill battle, almost like night shift work. But there are some things that you can do. I mean, even if you're not a paramedic. Or a firefighter, and you're just, I don't know, maybe you've stayed up all night drinking or you're at a conference or you're a college student and you've got a bunch of work to do for finals or a test. Lessening the impact of erratic sleep basically comes down to a combination of decreasing neural inflammation, which my friend Nora Gedgaudas likes to describe as a bunch of the glial cells in your brain go off like a bunch of Chihuahuas holding machine guns is the way that she describes it, and essentially begin firing in ways that almost make you feel out of control, out of control of your appetite, your self control, your wakefulness, and basically you feel a little bit less in control of your body, even your speech patterns, et cetera. So you want to decrease your neural inflammation while also putting things into your body that are going to help to regulate your circadian rhythm or assist you with wakefulness, even when you've had erratic sleep schedules. So I would say that there are kind of like three different categories that I would focus on when it comes to lessening the impact of erratic sleep. One category would be light, one would be supplementation, and one would be food. So the reason that I'm not going to recommend the glaring, well, maybe it's not super, super glaringly obvious choice. The reason I'm not going to talk a lot about cold water, which I actually use quite a bit for everything from like, you know, jet lag to, like I mentioned, when I eat copious amounts of food, is that when you are very, very low on sleep, that can actually be quite stressful to your sympathetic nervous system. And jacking yourself up with cold water or cold showers or cold immersion is sometimes not the best choice when you're already stressed. So I'm gonna leave that one out. I'm also gonna leave exercise sessions out because the same thing holds true. It can be difficult, especially on your cardiovascular system when you exercise in an exhausted or sleep deprived state. So whereas I am a fan of things like cold water to maintain wakefulness when you have had enough sleep or, or exercise sessions to jumpstart your circadian rhythm when you're traveling or when you wake up in the morning if you've just had a night of crappy sleep, sometimes those are not the best choices for you compared to the stuff I'm about to talk about. Okay, so first of all, light. Light is your friend. Whether that be sunlight, whether that be in ear LED lights or intranasal light therapy or blue light boxes or Any of these devices that expose you to large blasts of light. So you can use these at multiple points throughout the day when you are low on sleep, when you need a pick me up, when you don't want to be dumping any more caffeine than, say, like, let me put it this way, once you exceed about 500 milligrams of caffeine, you are. You're really risking quite a bit of adrenal stress. And so milking your way through the day after a night of erratic sleep with copious amounts of caffeine is not the best strategy. Yeah, but light is actually quite handy. So there are a few ways you can do this. For example, I wrote an article about this device called the Human Charger. Made in Finland, incidentally, so I was able to see those folks when I was over there. They make a device that is a 12 minute, extremely bright light cycle that it looks like little headphones, little earbuds. You put one in each ear and it blasts your ear's photoreceptors with bright light for 12 minutes. And when you would use that would be in the morning when you need to really wake yourself up after a night of erratic sleep. And even throughout the day. I wouldn't use it anytime after when the sun goes down. Unless you plan on being out late. Right. And then it's a little bit of a hack that you could use prior to say, like a night of partying or something like that as a surge of wakefulness without consuming again, something like coffee. Go ahead.

Yeah, no, that makes absolute sense. Keep going.

Okay, so the other thing that you can do, and we're going to release a podcast on this in a couple weeks, is they make devices also that were originally used for Alzheimer's patients, but that can also be used in a very similar fashion. They look slightly. Well, here's the deal. When you're using the Human Charger in Ear photoreceptor, it can look like you're just listening to an MP3 player. This other device, though, is intranasal light therapy, which is just what it sounds like. You are actually shoving something up your nose. It's a little clip of light.

Kind of uncomfortable.

Yeah. And it's kind of hard to make it look like you're listening to music when you're doing that one. It's hard to look like anything except someone walking around with an implant in your nose. So even though it's a little less conspicuous, it also can be a very effective way to use light to regulate your circadian rhythm in A creative, portable way. If you don't have exposure to sunshine. I mean, don't get me wrong, sunshine is probably the most important and effective and natural way to combat the effects of erratic sleep with light. But sometimes you just can't get out in the sun, whether due to work limitations or the geographical location that you're in. Like all you folks in Seattle or Portland, et cetera, you just don't get any sun. No, Right. Exactly. Well, you're over in Seattle, right?

I am, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think we mentioned that in the last show. But for those of you who are curious where Rachel's from, or those of you who are trying to stalk Rachel. She's in Seattle.

Please don't.

So intranasal light therapy in ear photo therapy, and then also the exposure to sunlight, they also make these blue light boxes, like I mentioned, that you can place on a desk or a countertop. And. And those also emit blue light that can be used very, very similarly. So that is one strategy is light. Another strategy is something that we've talked about quite a bit before on the show, and that would be the strategy of limiting blood sugar fluctuations through the use of ketones. Now, ketosis is a diet that is very helpful for neurodegenerative diseases, can be helpful for things like Alzheimer's, helpful for things like ms, et cetera, because it shuts down a lot of excitotoxicity in neural cells. And it turns out that ketones are an energy that can be used very effectively by the brain. One ketone that's called beta hydroxybutyrate, which is generated when you burn fats as a fuel, that is a more efficient source of energy for your brain per unit of oxygen than glucose is. And what this means is that you're able to avoid frequent fluctuations in blood sugar, which can actually cause increased nerve cell inflammation and vascular inflammation, and can also contribute to kind of like a roller coaster level of fatigue throughout the day, while also supplying your brain with a very potent source of fuel that actually fights off cognitive impairment when you use ketones as a source of fuel. The other very interesting thing is that when you are low on sleep, you generally have a high expression of pro inflammatory, what are called cytokines. This is one of the reasons that you feel so crappy after a night of partying or after a night of erratic sleep. It's the reason a lot of night shift workers have chronic diseases related to inflammation. And so because it shuts down what are called, I'm going to use Another big word here. Peroxisome proliferator activated receptors or ppars. Okay. The same thing that dust can cause, what it can do is it can shut down expression of those pro inflammatory factors. And the way to get yourself into ketosis is something that kind of sort of goes above and beyond the scope of my answer to Nate, but ultimately it involves limiting your amount of consumption of glucose, processed sugar and starches, while putting a lot of healthy fats like triglycerides, coconut oil, moderate amounts of things like butter, some olive oil, seeds, nuts, cheeses, things like that into the body. So basically a higher fat, very low sugar, low carbohydrate diet, the day after a night of lost sleep or erratic sleep can really assist with neural inflammation and also giving your brain a very potent source of fuel. And they actually make nowadays what are called BHB salts or ketone salts, and that's literally beta hydroxybutyrate that you consume in a supplement form. So there's kind of a couple different ways that you can get yourself into ketosis, but it's a very potent strategy when you're low on sleep, is the use of ketosis as a fueling strategy.

And you've written a ton of information on it already. I have, yes, I have.

And it's. I mean, well, have you ever, have you ever tried to get yourself into ketosis or done a high fat diet?

I kind of naturally am drawn towards high fat diet, so I don't do it like religiously, but I definitely am sort of halfway there, I think.

As a, as a vegetarian. What are your primary sources of fat?

Butter, MCT oil, coconut oil.

Okay, got it. What about like seeds and nuts and stuff like that?

Definitely huge amounts of chickpeas. They're super high fat, aren't they? Yeah. Eat a lot of seeds and nuts. Definitely avocados, huge amounts actually. Probably too much avocado.

Okay, got it. Yeah. So. So plant based diet is something that you can achieve ketosis while following because honestly a lot of the, whatever you want to call paleo or carnivorous sources of ketones, they also spike blood glucose or cause gluconeogenesis as proteins get turned into glucose. Like fatty fish meat, stuff like that, bacon, whatever. A lot of those are so protein rich that they can make ketosis difficult versus a lot of these healthier vegetable based oils and fats and seeds and nuts and things of that nature. But ultimately, if you are low on sleep, ketosis is another good strategy. Okay, the next thing that I would recommend, and I'm going to Turn to some Nutraceuticals. Now one is called Acetyl l Carnitine. Acetyl l Carnitine. So this is something you would typically get in its supplement form. For example, Now Foods is a supplement company that you can easily go to on Amazon to get acetyl l Carnitine. And that crosses the blood brain barrier pretty easily. And when it does, it's a very powerful antioxidant in neural tissue. So it acts on acetylcholine function and it acts on dopamine function. Two different neurotransmitters that are going to affect the way that you feel and the way that you function when you're low on sleep. It's very neuroprotective, a lot of like smart drugs. And we're gonna. Did we agree to pronounce it nootropic?

Yeah, let's agree.

Smart drugs and nootropic compounds, they contain acetyl l Coline or acetyl l Carnitine rather, due to its cognitive enhancing properties. But it also does a very, very good job at fueling mitochondria in the brain and also acting as an antioxidant in the brain. So when we talk about brain inflammation, neural inflammation from lack of sleep, that's one supplement that would be prudent to include. Another that I would include. When you're low on sleep, even if you already take it, you can double dose on. It would be either a fish oil or a krill oil for a lot of similar reasons. It's considered to be very neuroprotective. So what you're trying to choose when you're low on sleep are any of these supplements that are neuroprotective. So it is important to know that not all fish oils are created equal. I recommend if you're going to get a fish oil, you use one that is in what's called, it's a triglyceride based form. A lot of fish oils, they don't reconvert the fish oil out of its unnatural and unhealthy ethyl ester form back into the triglyceride based form because it's expensive. So with fish oil you get what you pay for. But if you use a good form of fish oil that can also be very neuroprotective. So there are a few different brands out there, like Nordic Naturals. Carlson's Exos makes a fish oil. I take the one, I take the fish oil that is made by the company Living Fuel because it also has vitamin D, vitamin A astaxanthin a bunch of other kind of cool little neuroprotective compounds in it. But a fish oil in addition to acetyl L carnitine would be another one to use. So the next thing to look into, and you're gonna love this one, Rachel, is coffee good? But the deal with coffee is coffee has specific compounds in it that I've talked about on the show before. Very potent brain anti inflammatory agents. One is called cafestrol and one is called cowajol. We don't really see those talked about too much when people talk about coffee. But those are the two different agents in coffee that actually affect cognitive performance separately from caffeine. Now the interesting thing is that when you use a paper filter or any type of filtration mechanism when you make your coffee, particularly a fine pour on the filtration, both of those compounds, the cafetrol and the cowboy, those don't wind up in the coffee.

Interesting.

So you would want to use French press or you'd want to use what's called Turkish coffee, which I also affectionately call cowboy coffee, where you're just pouring hot water over the grounds and then kind of like pouring the hot water with the coffee into a cup while trying not to pour the grounds into the cup, which is effectively what Turkish coffee is. But coffee has especially those particular compounds in coffee. Those have very, very good neuroprotective and neural anti inflammatory components. The other thing, interestingly, that is a very powerful neural anti inflammatory compound. It's kind of like the king of of anti inflammatory compounds when it comes to everything from decreasing a lot of like the amyloid plaque that builds up in Alzheimer's disease, decreasing a lot of this neural excitotoxicity, which are the little Chihuahua cells in your brain going wild and firing off their machine guns. It's called microglial overactivity for those of you who want the technical mumbo jumbo for that, to a lot of the inflammation that occurs via lack of sleep. Curcumin is actually one of the best neural anti inflammatory compounds that you can consume. And lately I have been experimenting with taking curcumin, like curcumin powder. And what I've been using are the exos, curcumin capsules, and I'm actually breaking them open and putting two capsules into my coffee. So the way that you do this is you make a French press coffee and you put curcumin into the French press coffee and it tastes like someone kind of dumped a bucket of curry into your coffee. So I can't say the flavor is out of this world, but in terms of the way that the coffee makes you feel from a neural standpoint and also the amount of neural inflammation that occurs, particularly if you've been traveling, you're jet lagged, you're low on sleep, et cetera. Curcumin combined with like a French press coffee is amazing as a 1, 2 combo for shutting down neural inflammation.

And is that also going to help with clarity for feeling cloudy after not getting enough sleep?

You basically feel like someone washed your brain after you have coffee with curcumin. So if you haven't tried coffee with curcumin before, try it. I can't speak to the greatness of the flavor, but it is very, very good for fighting off a neural inflammation. So a few other things that I would do. One would be if you're going to use any type of smart drug or any type of nootropic in addition to just caffeine, the one that you would want to choose particularly for erratic sleep would be aniracetam. Aniracetam is something we talked about last week. It's in for example, the new supplement called Nexus made by Axon Labs. And I'll link to all this stuff in the show notes for you over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 332. I'm just going to put out a giant list for you of the cocktail for low sleep. But if you're going to use a smart drug, andiracetam helps out quite a bit. Aniracetam is, is my choice. Nootropic. When I have landed in a new city and I'm jet lagged or I have, you know, whatever. I've only slept from let's say 10pm to 4am Because I had to get up early to work or to do something else. So that would be, you know, if you were to choose anything, you know, there's all sorts of things out there like alpha brain and you know, modafinil and all these things. Aniracetam works quite well in that situation. So. But I'm not done yet. There are other things for those of you druggies out there who just want the full on stack and wanna pull out all of the frigging stops. Couple of other things. First of all, creatine. Creatine is most known for its effects on strength and power. But it turns out that your brain uses creatine to create synapses. And studies have shown, many studies have shown that creatine improves brain function. Especially this will be interesting for you, Rachel. It improves neural function most dramatically in vegetarians because vegetarians a lot of times are creatine deficient. And simply using 5 grams of creatine a day has been shown to significantly improve brain function in vegetarians.

I've got to get me some creatine also.

You're going to get you some creatine? Yeah. There's a lot of different forms out there, powdered forms, capsule forms. We do have Creatine over@GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com I have a form called creapure over there. But there's a lot of different ways to get your creatine. You don't need to load with it, you don't need to take the boatloads that the bodybuilding websites and magazines tell you to take just five grams a day. And creatine can help out quite a bit, too. And then the final thing that I'm going to recommend to you is this. It's called an alkaloid. A lot of plants have these compounds called alkaloids in them. And there is a mossy plant called Huperzine that's used in Chinese herbal medicine for headaches, for fever and for a lot of things related to neural inflammation. And the particular alkaloid that's found in this Huperzene plant moss has been shown in studies to increase nerve cell growth so very similarly to creatine, to protect against Alzheimer's, similar to curcumin, and to enhance memory as well as to increase a rapid eye movement sleep. If you take it prior to sleep, and it's called Huperzine A, Huperzine A. And you can actually get this, you can find it in supplemental form, just like the acetyl l carnitine or the creatine. The source that I use is called Tianxi. It's like a Chinese adaptogenic herb complex and that has the equivalent of something like £40 of this club moss extract in it called Huperzine. The first person I ever heard or saw talking about this was Tim Ferriss, who talks about it quite a bit in his Four Hour Body book as one of his neural anti inflammatories of choice. But Huperzine would be another one to throw in there. One thing you should know is that when you use something like Huperzine, it rapidly increases what are called your acetylcholine levels. And so you do need to make sure that if you take acetylcholine or, I'm sorry, if you take a Huperzine and you Find that you tend to clench your jaw or get a lot of tightness in your head, neck and jaw, which is very much indicative that you are someone who's like a choline hyper responder who doesn't do well with things that rapidly increase acetylcholine. You can use this little hack of combining it, and I know I sound like a complete druggie here, you can combine it with aniracetam, which actually rapidly turns over acetylcholine levels. And that's a way to combat the effects of the high amount of acetylcholine in Huperzine. So I know that was quite a bit of things that you can use. And to review light ketosis, acetyl l, carnitine, fish oil, coffee, preferably with curcumin, preferably French pressed, aniracetam, Huperzine and creatine. Those are the exact compounds that I would use, for example, during a finals week, during a week of lost sleep, during a day where I've had erratic sleep, et cetera, if I wanted to pull out all the stops. So there you have it.

And so one question, at what point does erratic sleep turn into sleep deprivation?

It's a good question. Sleep deprivation is something that, it's cumulative and I know that kind of sounds head slappingly obvious to a lot of people, but what that means is that, and we talked about this a little bit with Nick Littlehales, is that if you are supposed to get, let's say 3590 minute sleep cycles in a week, which is appropriate, that's about what you should be shooting for. That comes out to five 90 minute sleep cycles per day. And you don't hit that over a seven day cycle, then you would be considered to be, based on Nick's opinion and what we talked about in that podcast, you would be considered to be sleep deprived at that point and capable of making less than ideal decisions or perhaps eating one too many Snickers bars. But I don't know about you, Rachel, but I feel sleep deprived or feel as though it's affecting me cognitively with as little as one night of a lost 90 minute sleep cycle.

Right.

Whereas physiologically it's apparently closer to one week. I would say one day seems to be the case for a lot of folks who I talk to.

Right. So light supplements and food.

There you go.

Hi, I'm calling because I'm wondering about the effectiveness of barre exercises. I've been seeing many barre studios and barre classes popping up all over the place, but I haven't been able to Find any research about its effectiveness or impact on the body.

So if you could please let me.

Know what you know about this, I would love it.

Thank you. Have you ever done a barre workout, Rachel?

I have, yeah. Pure barre. It's taken over America.

Mmm. Yeah. Well, I personally like to sculpt myself a ballerina's body. So I have a. I have a bar here in my office where I do my. My purettes. Is that how you pronounce it? My plies, yeah. So it's interesting, the barre workouts, they were, of course, no surprises here. They were developed by a ballerina. So there was this German dancer living in London who came up with this idea to combine her dance conditioning routine with rehabilitative therapy. And this was way back in like the 50s, and her name was Lottie Burke. And she started this method that's kind of branched into and wound up being this bar method that is now taking over the world by storm. So it's not just in dance studios now. It seems to be like showing up in like, you know, gyms and personal training studios and just like run of the mill fitness routines as far as, like a way to work out.

Right. And ballerinas are strong people.

Ballerinas, they are strong.

There's gotta be something to it.

That's right. Even the men, even though they do wear pants that look very tight. Painfully tight. Painfully tight.

It's like gymnasts.

That's right. So barre obviously has its origins in dance, but you don't have to be a dancer to do barre. And basically. And you could probably describe the workout even better than I could, Rachel, because it sounds like you've done it more than I have. But it's mostly body weight. Sometimes they'll use light hand weights, like two or three pound hand weights, or sometimes resistance bands. Sometimes they'll use exercise balls. And typically you're either wearing your socks or you're barefoot and you're doing a bunch of. Rather than doing squats and shoulder presses and big compound movements you would do in a strength training class, they're tiny 1 inch increments, more like isometric moves where you'll go like down an inch, up an inch, and you move very, very slowly using isometric contractions, which.

Yeah, tiny, tiny, tiny movements.

Yeah. And these small, small movements can really help you to isolate specific muscles. But when you look at it from a physiological standpoint, what you're doing is you're building up lactic acid tolerance and you're also strengthening muscles with less impact. So without as much straining of tendons and ligaments, et cetera. And that's one of the strategies that I'll use a lot of times with athletes who I'm training, who are in an off season or who are injured are isometric moves where we will, for example, do a workout that involves a two to five minute squat hold, a two to five minute push up hold, a two to five minute pull up or hang hold, a two to five minute lunge hold for each leg, and then a two to five minute plank, for example. But bar workouts, you are also doing what is very close to isometric or very close to working very, very small, small patterns, like one inch at a time. So you target a lot of muscle groups at once during a class. And people who have done it have told me that their body kind of shakes like a bowl of jello when they're doing it because of all that lactic acid muscle buildup and the fact that you are having to hold anytime that you try. And even if you just try and get up on your toes and hold yourself up on your toes, you get a lot of shaking, you get a lot of fatigue, and you also improve your mind body connection. So you strengthen the neuromuscular system quite a bit when you are consciously holding a move rather than just kind of like flailing like you do in a lot of strength training classes. Would you say that you feel that when you do a bar class, Rachel?

Yeah, you're definitely kind of engaging muscles that you might not have even known existed. And they're the tiny ones that kind of hold a lot of things together. So that, that side of it is definitely really, really good.

Did you know that Brock, who. Who was the podcast sidekick before you moved in and forced him out, he used to be ballerina. Did he? Wow. Yeah. So if we. If we had him here, I'm sure he could. He could. He could speak to this, to this bar workout. Now, there are some issues with bar workouts. You're not building a lot of strength when it comes to things like bone density. You're not doing a lot of compound movements like squats, lunges, bent over rows, clean presses, a lot of things that would be considered to be functional. So I would say that if you're going to do barre workouts, you should have at least one. One devoted workout a week where you are lifting weights and actually doing compound movements with barbells or dumbbells or kettlebells or other moves that actually challenge your ligaments, your tendons, and your joints a little bit more than Body weight and isometrics will.

It's interesting as well, because would you consider ballerinas, professional ballerinas, to have highly functional strength? I mean, they're jumping in.

I would consider them to have highly functional movement and mobility. But I would also say that many of them, they have a little bit of a frail appearance when it comes to overall strength. And so if strength and bone density and staving off muscle loss and things like that are important to you, I would say that you should, if you want to train every muscle system, right, if you want to be like what I call Batman, right, Like have power and strength and endurance and flexibility, et cetera, I would say that the strength component is probably slightly missing from something like a bar workout.

And what about heart rate?

Yeah, from a cardiovascular standpoint, it depends. So from the evidence I've seen, it looks like most bar workouts are done at about 40 to 60% of max heart rate. So if you want to, for example, increase VO2 max, you want to do a marathon triathlon, be able to climb a flight of stairs or rescue a baby from a burning building, if you want to increase VO2 max, you may need to include high intensity cardiovascular intervals on the side and throw in some VO2 max type of sets. And then the last thing is that when you are using body weight workouts, whether it's a bar workout or whether it's a workout where you're doing the push ups, squats, pull ups type of thing, you plateau far more quickly than you do when you are lifting weights and you have the ability to say, like, add more weights to the bar. And so because of that, you may find that you have to constantly overload and challenge your body with more moves or more bar, or like I mentioned, just add one or two strength training sessions into the mix, one or two high intensity interval training sessions for cardiovascular exercise and the mix, and then you've got a nice balanced routine. And this is what, whenever I look at a single method of working out, whether it's yoga or barre or strength training, I always look for balance. And there's a lot of bodybuilders who have no mobility, who need to be doing things like foam rolling and yoga. And there's a lot of crossfitters who have poor cardiovascular endurance, who need to throw in a few longer runs during the week, and there's a lot of, say, yogis who have poor bone density because there's not enough strength loading going on. So you always want to step back and look at any given workout routine and Fill in the gaps.

Yeah. There's not necessarily one workout that's going to cover off on absolutely everything.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. So that being said, I. I don't think you're gonna see me wearing the tidy tight pants anytime soon and. And venturing into a bar. A bar class. Although, you know, not to be crass, but what, what brand of pants do you get so that your package looks as huge as it does on these ballerinas? These, these dudes that you see dancing?

I don't know the brand of pants that makes them look like that.

I think it's the brand of pants. They can't all be hung like that.

Have you got pants envy?

I have pants envy. So if anybody knows the brand of pants that. What do you call the male ballerinas?

I don't know.

Yeah, that the male ballerinas use. Brock would know. Let me know because I may have to get myself one of those for the next big date night with my wife. Impress her. Hi, Ben, this is Bill Montgomery again with another question. I just recently read an article on Yahoo. That said that in taking anything more than 4000ius of vitamin D3 was bad for you and could cause heart disease and all sorts of nasty stuff. And I thought it was just the opposite. So was curious what you thought about the vitamin D, if that's a good study they did or if it's something that's a bunch of crap. Appreciate it. Bye. Do you take vitamin D, Rachel?

I do. And this one's a little scary.

It is, yeah. And it is true that there has been research recently conducted on vitamin D. And I don't remember where this particular research study first appeared, but it was one of those studies that looked at blood tests of a bunch of different people over a long period of time. It was like a 10 year period of time. And what they found was that there were some people who had a very high level of vitamin D who had been supplementing with vitamin D. And I believe it was almost a quarter million people that they looked at in this particular study. And what they found was that there's this law of diminishing returns with vitamin D where once you get up to a blood level of about 4:40, that that is considered to be ideal. And then once you go above 40 and you get over 80 and then especially once you exceed 100, there is a diminishing return with vitamin D and you actually get a few different things that happen. One is a hypercalcemia or high blood calcium levels that correlate to High vitamin D levels and hypercalcemia or high levels of calcium is something that can contribute to plaque formation in coronary arteries. So that's one thing that can happen is just basically calcium deposition in arteries and that is associated with excessive vitamin D. So that's one thing that can occur. Now vitamin D can be insane amounts, right? Like if you fall into that 40 to 80 level, it can inhibit a lot of atherogenic processes, it can inhibit calcification and, and it can inhibit release of a lot of the pro inflammatory cytokines and a lot of these molecules that tend to adhere to smooth muscle cells in vascular walls and contribute to coronary heart disease. So it's one of those things where you can't paint with a broad brush and say that vitamin D in general is going to cause disease. However, there are a lot of people taking vitamin D who have not tested their blood levels. If you are taking vitamin D as a supplement and your blood levels are above 80, then you could indeed be risking hypercalcemia. And a lot of people are taking vitamin D supplements and engaging in that risk for two reasons. First of all, they're already getting enough vitamin D from food sources and sunshine to where supplementation is not necessary. Or they're getting vitamin D from multiple supplements that they're taking and not realizing it because the vitamin D is in a lot of stuff these days. They'll add it to fish oil, they'll add it to multivitamins, they'll add it to immune system supporting compounds. So you might think you're getting whatever 2,000 international units per day from your multivitamin, but once you add in all your other sources, you might be getting closer to 5,000 units a day.

Right? And it's also just a given in places that don't have a lot of sunshine that you just take vitamin D. You don't even kind of think about it.

The other issue is that vitamin D can cause calcium calcification if taken in the absence of vitamin K2. Now you get vitamin K2 from, well, sources would include for example, grass fed butter or natto, which are like fermented soybeans. You can also get vitamin K2 in supplements and if you have good bacteria and eat a lot of good fermented foods, you can get vitamin K from your gut. The bacteria in your gut can make it, but a lot of people don't have those factors present. So they're taking high amounts of vitamin D unopposed with vitamin K and also unopposed with magnesium. Another co factor that's necessary for vitamin D absorption and to avoid over calcification. So what this comes down to is a, if you're taking vitamin D, you have no business taking it unless you wander into a doctor's office and slap down 40 bucks and get a blood 25 hydroxy vitamin D test to see if you fall between that 40 to 80 range. Number two, if you do find that you need to be taking vitamin D, you need to take it with vitamin K, you need to take it with magnesium. And it's pretty rare that I see folks who need to be taking anything more than a couple thousand international units of vitamin D per day. And the thing is, a lot of people are taking like 4,000, 6,000, 8,000, 10,000 units of vitamin D because, because they heard it was just like this magic multivitamin when in fact you don't need that much. And there is a law of diminishing returns. So I recommend for vitamin D, what I do is I use the shotgun approach. I take the Exos multivitamin, which has vitamin K, magnesium and vitamin D in it. So my bases are covered. The other thing that you can do, let's say you're taking that multivitamin or a multivitamin like that and your vitamin D levels are low and you still need to get them high. Maybe you live in a very, very gray area or something like that, or you've just got a chronically low vitamin D levels from years of low vitamin D intake. You can add extra vitamin D on top of that. But if you do, you want to choose a vitamin D source that also has vitamin K in it. Exos, the same company that makes that multi, they also have a liquid vitamin D. Vitamin K blend is just basically vitamin D, vitamin K and MCT oil. If you look on the label of a lot of vitamin D supplements that are out there these days, supplement manufacturers are getting a little bit more savvy about the need for K2 included along with vitamin D. And so you'll see that on the label. But look for it, make sure that whatever source of vitamin D that you're using also has vitamin K and also has minerals or magnesium in it. And so that's how you can avoid vitamin D harming your ticker. Hey Ben, I have a quick question. My holistic doctor told me that if I made my smoothies and not put every color vegetable in it, that I could actually be creating more oxidation in the cellular level than if I used every color period. May I have your thoughts on that? You know, I don't know about You, Rachel. But putting every different colored vegetable on the face of the planet into my smoothie sounds exhausting.

It does sound exhausting. But I actually really love eating lots of different colors. So I'm interested to hear your answers to this question.

Yeah, I mean like that's the advice that you see on the COVID of Cosmos, Shape, Men's Fitness and Men's Health and Women's Health and the newspaper.

People believe everything we read.

Eat the rainbow, eat a variety. It's one of those head slappingly obvious things that most people know about. A lot of people don't realize the reasoning behind that though. So the reason for that, when you look at different colored foods, they have different properties. So for example, red foods, interestingly because they're red, they actually help out with most things related to blood. So red foods are red because they have what are called lycopene and also anthocyanins in them. And both of those help to increase heart and circulatory health. So examples would be like cherries, cranberries, red bell peppers, tomatoes, tomatoes. Beets would be another biggie. Beets. Beets are very red.

I thought beets were purple.

No, beets are red, like well purplish red. I think that we could probably say that. I don't know. I would consider a purple food to be like a blueberry, plum, eggplant type of thing. Beets would fall into the blood supporting category for sure. So we've got the red foods and then we have orange foods. So orange foods, A lot of people have heard of carotenoids or beta carotenoids, also bioflavonoids, also vitamin C. Orange foods are very high in all of those compounds. Compounds and orange foods. Interesting because skin you could argue is kind of sort of orangish. Mostly the benefits for those are skin and eyes. So we're talking about like carrots, oranges, sweet potatoes, slash yams, peaches, what else? Like butternut squash, pumpkin, stuff like that. Orange foods would be more like skin. So we've got red foods, blood orange food, skin, and then you've got yellow. So yellow foods. This is going to sound really, really gross, but I used to dissect cadavers when I taught the anatomy lab at University of Idaho. I didn't teach it, I was a ta. Right. So my job was to, was to dissect cadavers. And one of the things that you find is there's a lot of yellow in brain tissue and in digestive tissue like gut.

That is really gross.

It's gross. Disgusting. But anyways, yellow foods actually help to promote digestion and they help with brain function. It's really, really interesting how nature gives us clues like this. So examples of yellow foods and yellow foods are high in what are called alpha carotenes, whereas orange foods a lot of times have more of the beta carotenes in it. We would be talking about things like yellow peppers, of course. Pineapple would be another one. Lemons would of course course be considered yellow. There are a lot of apples that are kind of yellow. Some beets are yellow, as a matter of fact. Yellow watermelon, which I love. Yellow tomatoes. Any of these yellow foods are going to help with digestion and brain function. And then there are the greens, of course. Green foods are generally going to be very, very high in what's called lutein, and also indoles. And both of these are particularly improved or are particularly helpful for things like bone, teeth, muscles. Green foods cover a lot of bases, actually, because greens tend to be some of the more powerful in terms of their nutrient density. So everybody, that's why you gotta eat your greens. Eat your greens. Everybody knows about these, right? Like broccoli, spinach, kale, brussels sprouts, you name it. By the way, what color is vegemite?

Like a dark brown, because it's got everything.

It's got so many good things in it, it's just almost brownish black. Now, vegemite, I don't think is an actual vegetable.

It's not a vegetable.

It's not even close to a vegetable, despite its name. So I'm gonna see how many vegemite jokes I can get away with, by the way, until they get really old. So anyways, green foods would be the next category. And then there are two other categories. One would be bluish purple foods, which get their hue from what are called the anthocyanins in them. And those are associated with ant anti aging or antioxidation. So we're talking about just basically fighting off the effects of life, of breathing, of living, of exercising. So blueberries, blackberries, like I mentioned, plums or eggplants would kind of fall into that purple cabbage. There are some potatoes that are purple. Elderberries would be another big one, purple grapes, raisins, stuff like that. So those are going to be more like anti aging, antioxidation. And then finally there's white. And I'm not talking necessarily about white foods like white bread and white rice, but there are some other things you could probably think of, right? Like onions, cauliflower. Yep. Some white potatoes, ginger would be considered white jicama, a lot of turnips, there are like garlic, white peaches, white nectarines. Mushrooms would be considered kind of a whitish food. Now, white, interestingly, they help to enhance the immune system. So think white blood cells. Right. White foods like this can really, really help with immunity. So once we put all these, these colors together, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, slash purple and white, you can cover a lot of bases once you are eating the rainbow. And as you can see, by eliminating one food, like say not eating ever, like the whitish foods, you're gonna miss out on the immune benefits. Or by not eating the yellow foods, you might miss out on some of the digestion benefits. But for a doctor to tell you that you must put every different colored vegetable into your smoothie and otherwise you could be creating more oxidation than if you used every color. I'm gonna call BS on that one.

Okay.

Because kind of like protein, it doesn't matter how much you get in any one single meal. What matters is what you get at the end of the day. By the end of the day. Yeah. Granted, you can only really absorb and digest 20 to 30 grams of protein max, anyways in any given meal. But ultimately it comes down to what you've gotten into your body by the end of the day, or in some cases with fat soluble vitamins, for example, by the end of the week. And not necessarily necessarily what you've got in any one given meal. Now, granted, there is an article that I have written over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com about how to biohack your smoothie. And in it I talk about the fact that when you blend at high speeds, having the yellows, right, like having vitamin C and a little bit of cold water in there prior to doing all of your blending, helps to prevent a lot of the antioxidant or the oxidation and the nutrient damage that can occur with blending. But that is a specific vitamin C plus cold water mix that you're using. And it is for the reasons of preventing oxidation of the nutrients that you then add in. It's not because you need to eat every color within that one meal.

So don't stress. Your smoothie is not killing you, your.

Smoothie is not killing you.

But still try and eat the rainbow.

Fire your doctor and eat the rainbow. Yes. So that being said, we somehow managed Rachel, in our first ever podcast voyage together, to get through all the questions we did.

And the training wheels are off.

The training wheels are off. But we still have to get to the itunes review.

Oh, yeah.

But before we do. By the way, everything that we've talked about that you've just listened into, from the Beyond Training audiobook to the unbearable Meditable Mind retreat to all of our sponsors to the news flashes, everything to my massive list of things you can do to avoid the deleterious effects of poor sleep. Those are all in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 332. And of course, we never delete comments unless they are extremely offensive. So if you want to pipe in with any of your own thoughts, go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 332 and start a conversation or join a conversation over there. But you can also leave the show a review. And if you leave the show a review, it helps us out tremendously. And you can do so by going to itunes, doing a search for the Ben Greenfield show and leaving preferably five stars versus one to four. And also, I mean, if you're going to leave four, just leave five. Honestly, people, I mean, come on. You know you've got it in your.

Heart and you know you love it.

That's right. And then you can also say something. And if we read your review on the show and you hear it, just email geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.Com and we'll send you a surprise pack with a bunch of cool stuff in it. So, that being said, Rachel, what do you think? Do you want to read this week's review? Sure.

So the review is from Certified Wellness Geeks, and it's five stars. Great content and info. If sometimes we hear too much about our host wandering his property buck naked and picking vegetables after his cold water training, I do that. You do? I love that these guys and girls can burst out some serious science. But don't get too nuts with it so us laymans don't glaze over. Also, these guys care about their fans and they're willing to interact with us via social media. Truth, this is evidenced by my tweets with Ben back and forth regarding the Spartan race, ultra beast and cramping issues. If Brock wasn't leaving. Oh, I would say he needs to do more SNL Sean Connery voicings. Speaking of voices, I think the switch from the porn star narrator to the wannabe James Earl Jones is perhaps an improvement. Seriously, these guys will help you 10 times your wellness, fitness training, food, knowledge. Wonderful.

Did he just ask for Sean Connery in persons?

Yeah, Saturday Night Live Sean Connery voicings.

You know you like it, Trebek. I'll take eShwage for 400.

That was really good.

You better believe it. And your mother liked it. All right, well, on that note, I guess I'll just take us out with Sean Connery. Thanks for listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. You can visit the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 332 to access all the goodness that is the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. And how am I doing, by the way?

Incredible. Keep it up. Keep it up.

Okay. All right. Tune in this weekend for a fantastic special interview. And I'm beginning to sound like an old man. I'm beginning to sound like an old man losing.

Yeah, you're losing us. Then you're losing us.

So I'm going to stop there. Thanks for listening in. BenGreenFulfitness.com 332 is where you can access the show notes. Myself and my Australian friend are going to go eat some Vegemite now. Later, you've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice. Sa.