How Traditional Healing, Red Light Therapy, & Full-Body Stem Cells Can Radically Extend Your Healthspan (Even in Polluted, High-Stress Environments) With Sharad Baid

My name is Ben Greenfield and on.

This episode of the Boundless Life podcast, I work with a lot of celebrities. Most of them are devoting 3, 4 hours per day on their body and biohacking modalities and doing all the things that allow them to maintain that perfect physique, along with typically hormones, steroids, peptides, so called gear, as well as for the fat loss piece, things like ozempic and GLP1s which basically make you not want to eat is safe. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond. I was recently on an intensive health and biohacking tour of India and sat down for a fantastic conversation at a health and beauty clinic in which the conversation went way beyond health and beauty, but it was with Sharad Beid we had such an incredible conversation that I wanted to share it with you here. So it's wide ranging. We get into longevity, biohacking and much more. And for all the show notes you can visit the BenGreenfieldLife. Sharad that's s H A R A D, the name of my host on today's show. BenGreenfieldLife.com Sherrod enjoy today's show.

Are there ways by which you can hack into your biology and improve your fitness, your mental capacity, your body strength and overall live a longer life? Are there ways by which you can reduce your biological age then your chronological age? The answer is yes. Today we have a world leader in biohacking field, someone who's an expert into health, longevity and biohacking. Ben Greenfield. Welcome to Orissa.

Ben.

Jai Jai Nath.

Jai. Jai Nath. Hopefully I said that the right way.

Yes, you did, Jess.

You did. So.

So, Ben, billions of people have actually benefited from you and so many of them have learned various tools and techniques of biohacking and longevity.

I'm glad somebody other than my mom is listening.

So could you please tell me in your words, in simple way, what is biohacking and what is longevity? What you have been doing in the last several years in your field?

In the last several years in my field, I've kind of gone from focusing quite a bit on fitness and endurance sports and weightlifting and a lot of the things that I was a little bit misled when I was younger into thinking was always necessary for being healthy. And I've since progressed into a lot of things that go beyond that. We had A session last night here in town where I talked about everything from invisible variables like air quality, light quality, electrical environment and water quality to your spiritual health and your relationships, your family, your community, to detoxification. And a big part of this basically is, I think, influenced for, for me by the fact that I work with a lot of people and I'll look at their lab results or their health complaints, and they are exercising and they're eating a decent diet. Maybe not a perfect diet that's customized to them, but a decent diet. Yet there's a lot of things missing. I mean, everything from just their phones on WiFi and Bluetooth enabled in their pocket all day and same thing at night when they're sleeping and the WI fi routers blasting them because they put it in the bedroom and the air quality index in their home is poor and they're drinking out of plastic water bottles or the lighting. And the circadian rhythm is not supported by the light in the environment. And once you start to tweak a lot of those things, as I've done for myself, and what's the objective? What's the goal? 43. I feel fantastic.

Yeah, you know.

Yeah, you don't lose 43 at all. Well, thank you. Once you start to tweak a lot of those things, that's when you really see the dial start to move. As far as someone feeling the way they think they should feel from moving well and eating healthy. Don't get me wrong, those are foundational principles which are incredibly important to focus on, but there's a lot of other things that I've progressed over the years in developing. You asked me what biohacking is. It's a very loose term these days. It can mean everything from putting ghee in your coffee to getting NAD injections, to literally becoming a human cyborg with a neural implant. Right. Originally, biohackers back in the 60s and the 70s were real human cyborgs. I mean, they called their body wetware. And they would install things in their body, like hardware, like a compass that would vibrate, implanted in the chest when you face true north, or special chlorophyll pigments injected into the eyeballs for night vision or magnetic implants in the fingers to be able to interact with screenshots. I don't necessarily think that's a very relatable definition of biohacking now. I would simply say biohacking now is using smart tools and techniques and tactics to hack your biology. Not in love with that word, but it is the word people use to hack your biology in order to get better, faster, or in a more efficient way than you might have been able to in a native state. Right. If that makes sense. Right.

So what's the objective? The objective is to live longer. Live 100 years.

I don't have a number. I don't think it's realistic when people say they're going to live to 150 years or 160 or 200. You know, the longest living human, I think, on record, based on birth record data right now is around 117. I would be super pleased and proud if human science could advance to the point where we might be able to get that up to, say, 125 or something like that. To look at all the males in my family, most of them pass away between about 70 and 80 years old. And if that happens to be the case, and based on my own genetic programming, I'm close to that day. My goal is more to focus on being as healthy as possible as possible to the day that I die, to have that optimum combination of lifespan and health span. I also have that special trick up my sleeve that my own faith is that I am a. I'm a Christian, so I believe that my soul is immortal and I'll go on to live for eternity anyway. So I don't feel like when my body and brain finally passed, that that's the end of Ben Greenfield. And so I'm not necessarily ruthlessly obsessed with extending lifespan at all costs.

Right.

I'm a little bit more obsessed with extending health span so that me or anybody else who uses these tactics. Yes. Can live their best purpose. Right. Can be able to get out of Zed when they're. When they're 60 or 70 or 80 and feel great and be able to keep working and being with their kids and influencing the world in a positive way. Yeah, that's the way I.

Not many people are really aware of this new concept of biohacking. When do people start? How do they start? Is there a. Is there a. I mean, who is it actually meant for? Meant for everyone?

Or is it by drinking a fantastic smoothie like this? I don't know what's in this thing, but this is great. What's the name of the clinic that we're at?

It's called ubiu.

You view.

Yeah.

You view. And I keep butchering the name of the city. What's the name of the city?

Bhuvaneshwar.

Bhuvaneshwar? Yes. Okay. You view and Bhuvaneswar.

You view is you Be authentic. You be gold. Aurum is gold. So you'll be authentic. You'll be gold.

Yeah. Okay, I like that. So. So where do you get started?

Yeah, where do people get started?

Yeah, I think it really depends on the person, right? Because I'd love to give you some beautiful answer about, oh, start by getting a. Whatever HEPA air filter and going outside barefoot and getting sunshine and, you know, adding some NAD and minerals and creatine and omega 3 fatty acids in your supplementation protocol. You know, there's all sorts of places you can start. But I think what's more important is that you, you look at what someone's objective is, right? If somebody comes to me and their number one objective is that they got a DEXA scan or some kind of in body scan and they have a high amount of visceral fat, they want to lose weight and they want to improve aesthetics, right? That person is going to focus on everything from a diet adjusted to reduce inflammation to some sort of fasting protocol to typically some kind of a cold thermogenesis to lifting weights. If someone comes to me and their goal is to put on muscle, right, Like I'll train some Hollywood celebrity or executive who literally just wants to pack on 10 pounds of muscle. That person would be doing greater amounts of protein intake and some kind of a sauna protocol because that produces heat shock proteins that help with muscle. They might be increasing their protein and their amino acid intake. They might be supplementing with collagen, creatine. Someone else, an executive who wants memory enhancement, right? So for them, it might be some super fancy peptide protocol in which they're using things like peptides, these small aminoes. Yeah, Sea max and sea length and cerebralysin, and all these neural peptides along with natural products. You talk about memory. Ginkgo, biloba, bacopa, monieri, these herbs that can help with memory. And I might have them playing brain games or doing a musical instrument or doing some form of memorization or doing things that grow the brain. I personally do all of these things, right? Like, I focus on muscle gain, I focus on fat loss, I focus on hormone optimization, on gun vanish, I'll do all of this. But, and this isn't, you know, I'm busy. You know, I got a family, I got a farm, I got goats, I got chickens, I got three companies. I'm working 60 hours a week or more, right? I don't have the time to be doing this for six or seven or eight hours a day. So for much of me, these kind of Things are just woven in throughout the day. Like if I have a bunch of journals and research articles to catch up on, I'll go into the sauna and do a sauna session simultaneous to that. Or if I want to do red light therapy, I've got red light panels in my office and I'm flipping those on for the first 20 minutes of work. If I'm preparing for an interview with a podcast guest, I'm literally downloading their audiobook or other interviews that folks have done with them and listening to that while I'm doing my morning.

While you multitask? Basically, yeah.

So you're basically multitasking. Not in the, you know, multitasking of course, has a bad rap because of the cognitive task of switching repeatedly between tasks. That's different than what I would instead almost call multi stacking. Right. Just doing different modalities at once, none of which detract from the others. That's amazing. Wow.

I'm 40 something and it's so fascinating to hear that you can do all this and biohack and you can have a larger healthspan and live a quality life. You know, I, I also been doing certain things in biohacking. I've been doing intermittent fasting very regularly. I've been doing cryotherapy, full body cryotherapy, I have rallite therapy, I take IV drifts like NAD plus lymphatic massages, etc, etc, I've been doing that. But there are various ways of doing bi biohacking. So let's start with food. Now that you're in India, and as you know that we love our food, food is a love language. We love to feed, we love to eat.

And I've caught on to that.

And interestingly, you know, every time I.

Turn around, there's a chance to eat.

Yes. And if you come to India, people will offer you mithai, which is basically a sweet Indian sweet, which is pretty much a lot of sugar.

So I know I had a layer at the airport and there we offer.

Mithai in every festival and we festivals are all over. So we basically as a country consume a lot of sugar. What do you think? Where are we going wrong? Because as you know that India is also deemed as the diabetes capital of the world. So what would you suggest? Indians because they consume a lot of sugar.

Yeah. I don't think that it's any secret that sugar can contribute to insulin resistance and contribute to diabetes. Right. So I would probably be leaving a lot on the table to just say eat less sugar. No, I Eat sugar, but it's from natural sources. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, purple potatoes, my wife's addictive sourdough bread, sometimes a little bit of dark chocolate and yogurt and blueberries for desserts and parsnips, carrots and beets and yams. And the natural, nutrient dense sugars that you find a lot of healthy foods. When it comes to the isolated sugars, everything from the high fructose corn syrup to the added sugars in processed and ultra processed foods, those are obviously a little bit more of an issue when it comes to.

So why don't you be in sugar?

But even those if you're exercising, you're metabolically active. Sugar is not that big of a deal, or as big of a deal as I think a lot of people will think that it is. I mean, technically, if you wanted to lose weight, I could give you 2000 calories of coca Cola a day. And if you're burning 2100 calories a day in exercise and movement, you're still going to lose weight. It's not like the most nutrient dense diet. You're going to build up amino acid deficiencies and fatty acid deficiencies and vitamin mineral deficiencies over time, but that's not enough to cause weight loss. And I'm not endorsing that. Do not say that Ben Greenfield started the Coca Cola diet. But I think there are other things to think about. Let's look at a couple of them. For example, if you and I looked into this last year when I was in India, if you look at the rise in sugar consumption and the rise in diabetes, they're not correlated. There hasn't been a steep rise in sugar intake. However, there has been a rise in the substitution of natural oils like ghee, extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, et cetera, with seed oils that are more processed. When you consume a processed seed oil, this means an oil that has been heated once or heated multiple times, a high intake of fried foods. These oils that have a low smoke point, you tend to see an inflammatory response in the body.

Right. So you're saying they're more.

These fats can comprise your cell membranes and be a part of your body for depending on the research, you look at three months and up to two years after you consume them. So you literally are. What you eat, ate more in the case of oil than in sugar, because sugar can have a pretty short transient time in the body.

Right.

I could have a candy bar and go burn it off at the gym. So with the oils, when you Create inflammation. You also induce a resistance of fat cells to mobilize fatty acids to be burnt as energy.

Right.

So you also create a state of insulin resistance because you get more resistant to insulin in a state of inflammation, which is what rancid processed seed oils can cause.

That's very interesting because in India, I mean, vegetable oils and seed oils are very, very popular.

Yeah.

It's ironic.

I mean, we were eating a healthy meal last night and there was millet and quinoa and amaranth and all these lovely vegetables. They were cooking them in sunflower oil. Right. Which is one of the rancid seeds. And it's not as though you can't say, hey, could you prepare this in ghee's? Come this morning I had a dosa and I asked for them to prepare it in ghee. Yesterday I had a piece of chicken and I asked to cook it in ghee or olive oil. Most of the time they have those fats and oils around. It's simply a matter of asking for them and then at home stocking your pantry with those same options. Let's look at another factor in addition to seed oils. Air quality index. Yeah, I want to talk to you.

About air quality index. Since you've been in India for days, how has it been?

So is the topic of definitely something that needs to be addressed not only in India, but anywhere where there's a high population? I think in India it's a little bit worse because of vehicle emission standards and rapidly growing population and crowded streets. But when you look at what's going on when, let's say even if you're staying in a nice hotel and it's 500 meters from a busy highway, you've got carbon monoxide, which binds to oxygen or binds to the cells that would normally carry oxygen. So you're using oxygen delivered cells. That's affecting cellular metabolism. You've got nitrogen D, which is also toxic. You've got volatile organic compounds which can build up in the body and reduce metabolism and cause the same type of inflammation that induces resistance to fat loss and insulin resistance. You've got, what do you say, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, volatile organic compounds, metals and microplastics, both of which are now associated with insulin resistance, inflammation. And so there's this cluster of factors. And of course the more important question becomes, what do you do about it?

Yeah, what do we do about it? We don't. We can't leave the city. We have to stay.

Exactly. What do we move? If you still got to feed, you know, Feed your family.

Right. And is there anything that government can do?

So the big obvious ones that I think some people are aware of but that we should, we should at least give a head nod to.

Right?

One would be good. HEPA air filtration. Looking for a HEPA air filter that will actually filter PM2.5. So particulate matter 2.5.

So keep it in air filters.

That's the size of the particle that's going to be most well absorbed and cause the most systemic damage. PM of like 10, that's going to irritate the lungs a little bit, but it's not going to cause as much system wide issues. But you want a HEPA air filter that has really, really good carbon filtration that's going to get rid of PM 2.5. In the US there's brands like Jasper Air. Dr. Origin is the one that they have at the hotel that I'm staying at here. That's also a good one.

Right.

Origin by the way is also the company that did research on genetically modifying plants to make them better air scrubbers. So if you look at the NASA Clean Air study, they actually sound available in multiple plants like Peace Lily and English Ivy that you can plant around your house. They're not as powerful as a HEPA air filter.

What plant did you say?

They're prettier. There's like eight or nine of them. A couple I said was English Ivy and Peace Lily. There's several others. I don't have them all.

Is that enough for a person in the house? If you keep a plant does that?

No. You still need HEPA air filtration particularly let's say you still live in a clean area. You create a lot of air pollution when you cook. I'm shocked because I measured in my kitchen the PM 2.5 because the air filter I have called the Jasper, it'll also measure the air quality. And in most kitchens the fan above the stove is too far above the stove to be able to catch a lot of the particulate matter that gets released when you clean. So my PM level goes from 4 up to above 500 when we're cooking in the kitchen. So now I have a standalone HEPA air filtration unit in the kitchen. So air filtration via both plants and HEPA air filters that would be one. Another would be using a good mask when you are outdoors in areas where you need it. You know, classic example would be the N95 which obviously got here from the.

Airport where you're wearing the mask.

I wear that I wear that mask a lot. Yeah, I don't like it. I feels hot and sweaty. And breathing into a mask, you're breathing in your own carbon dioxide. So you get a little bit lightheaded and it's not comfortable, but it does do a good job filtering.

But talking about the carbon dioxide that you breathe in, is that good? Because when you have the mask on, you kind of breathe these stains.

The field of therapy behind carbon dioxide therapy. I actually have a carbon dioxide generating unit called a carbohaler next to my desk in my office. And I do breathe pure carbon dioxide for about 5. Not pure carbon dioxide, I shouldn't say that. It's about 7% carbon dioxide for around 5 to 7 minutes during the day. It seems to build up stress resilience, increase your heart rate variability, which is a measurement of your nervous system readiness. And it has some interesting effects on the lungs as well. However, constantly breathing carbon dioxide, I mean, for more than like five to seven minutes, you're inducing a mild state of physiological stress and psychological stress. If you're walking around with a mask the whole time because you're at a mild state of self suffocation, the carbon dioxide inhalation. So we've got HEPA air filtration and masking. And then there are certain things that you can do beyond that as far as what you consume. So pure, clean, filtered water. I hydrate a ton here. I've actually recorded a few podcasts here and I've literally had to go use the washroom during the podcast because I have to pee so much here. But I'm doing that on purpose. Like I'm saying, very well hydrated. So being adamant about hydration from good, clean, pure sources. Right, right. So plastic is of course the.

You get the water in the plastic bottle mostly. Is that not an issue?

Well, the problem with the plastic and a lot of people like, well, it hasn't been heated. I don't know if the plastic water bottles in the gym mini cooler back at my hotel also spent 10 hours in the hot backseat of a car before they put them in the gym. So you need like the really hard heat resistant plastic or I just travel with the glass or stainless steel water bottle. I fill that up at the airport from the drink. It saves me whatever $7.99 on a Fiji or a Pellegrino. And that's what I do 99% of the time. Then at home I just have a water filtration unit. So drinking a lot of water, that's one. There are certain Antioxidants from foods that are most studied for reducing the effects of air pollution. One would be sulforaphanes. You get those from broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts. You can buy sulforaphane as a supplement. That's one that's very powerful. Another one would be anthocyanins. You find those in things like blueberries and purple cabbage, like the blues and purples of the plant kingdom. Powerful antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E are pretty well known for pollution. And by the way, I've tripled my antioxidant intake since I got to India just by traveling with some of these little antioxidant packets. Vitamin B flies under the radar. The research on vitamin B to reduce the effects of air pollution damage on DNA, on the immune system and on the lungs is not something a lot of people talk about. But you can get a good vitamin B complex multivitamin just about anywhere. And vitamin B has really good effects.

It was all that you do to counter the air pollution that.

Yep. And then glutathione. Glutathione is incredible. Few things to know about glutathione. You can take it as an oral supplement, right? I use it as a. As a transdermal. I use a brand called Glutaril, which is very well absorbed. So I use transdermal glutathione spray. I'm doing eight sprays in the morning and eight sprays in the evening here. Normally at home, I just do four sprays in the morning.

What's that?

So I've got four times the amount of glutathione going into my body, which is an antioxidant that's also going research for its effects on mitigating air pollution damage. N acetylcysteine supports your body's own glutathione production. It's also a supplement that you can get in India. That one has also been studied for air pollution. Right. Cordyceps. There's a lot of, like Sherpas we'll use when guiding people up Everest because it helps with lung function. Well, no surprises there. It can also help to reduce the effects of air pollution or help your lungs to deal with that a little bit more. Cordyceps, mushroom extract, cordyceps, teas, et cetera. So we've got nac, we've got glutathione, we've got cordyceps. And then beyond those kind of things, from a dietary or supplementation standpoint, I'm a huge fan of nebulizing I bought a nebulizer when I got here. It cost $20. I got a little bottle of hydrogen peroxide. You mix the hydrogen peroxide. Typically you'd use a saline solution. I don't travel with the saline solution. So I just get good, clean, pure water and put a few pinches of salt in it.

Right.

You typically want about 0.15% solution. So I'm basically doing into the nebulizer. The canister for the nebulizer is about that big, so I'm filling it up mostly with water. And then I don't have a volume measurement in my hotel room, but I'm just splashing that with a little bit of 3% hydrogen peroxide. Easy to find at any pharmacy. A nebulizer and hydrogen peroxide might put you back like 25 USD. Now what I do is when I'm checking my emails in the morning or in the evening, I pull on the mask and I'm simply doing deep breathing through the nebulizer with hydrogen peroxide while I'm working on my laptop. Now, at home, I have liquid glutathione. And you can actually nebulize. And I'll do this when I get home. You can nebulize liquid glutathione, and that's an even more powerful antioxidant than hydrogen peroxide. So I use a brand called Glutastat. It's made by a company in Florida called Mitozen. So nebulizing is incredible for the air pollution piece as well. Wow. And then if we want to get deep into biohacking, we're at a beauty clinic right now. Aesthetic exosomes have become very popular. I was talking with Dr. Sam earlier. They use Korean exosomes here for injectables in the face. You can also use exosomes because they're so concentrated in growth factors as injectables for joint issues. You can use them as an IV for longevity. The last big study, it was on rodent models, yet they showed a massive. It was like a 17% increase in lifespan just from IV exosome infusion. But because they're so concentrated in growth factors, they can also heal tissue very quickly. So I have a source in Lithuania for exosomes because I don't know if I can say this on the podcast. I might get in trouble. I don't know if it's legal, but I'm doing it anyways. She ships them to my house, and so I have four bottles of exosomes waiting at my house. When I get home. And I will also nebulize those. They're little vials. You put a little bit of typically like sterile water into them and then you can inject them, you can nebulize them. You can use them as a nasal spray. Those are more expensive. Exosomes are not inexpensive.

Amazing. Amazing.

Some of them can be a thousand to fifty. So many of them for a bottle. But if you were to stack all those things, that would be. Yeah, that would help out with the pollution piece. But back to how we got on this topic. You talked about sugar as being something that would contribute to diabetic risk in India. I would say that seed oils and air pollution are just. It was big of an issue to think about.

I'm glad that you do so many things and not walking out of the podcast the way Brian Johnson did for the aqi.

Brian Johnson was here a few days ago. He's a great guy. He's super dedicated. He's, you know, one of the most well researched human guinea pigs in the world right now.

Yes.

I don't know that a lot of what he does is super relatable or doable for the general population, but he's sacrificing his body, you know, and testing these things out. And not everybody has the same genetics as Brian Johnson. So obviously what he's doing might not work for you. Yeah. But he certainly brought a lot of, I think, positive interest into the idea of extending human lifespan or health span, if that's also what you care about. But yeah, I saw that podcast where he was wearing a mask during the podcast and eventually he just left. If I really, truly wanted to live as long as Brian Johnson wants to, and I was as dedicated as he is, I probably would leave also and just go curl up in my hotel room with the HEPA air filter. I think it's difficult to live life in a bubble, though, so you do what you can to minimize the damage. And I don't travel with you guys. Pick me up from the airport. I don't even check a bag when I travel. Now I'm now checking a bag because you guys are so generous. Every time I give a talk, it seems like I get a gift or I've got plates and cups and I literally had to buy an extra bag. So, yes, now I'm checking a bag when I travel. I travel very light. But I also have a few key things. I even brought a few of them for show Patel, if you want that I consider to be like biohacks. Biohacker travels.

So.

After I go through security. Because if I do this, when I go through security, they freak out. And I learned that lesson the hard way. Literally the last time I was in India, having to get stripped down completely naked in the women's changing tent because I was a complete ghost passing through security. And the soldier flipped out and literally almost went to the point of shoving the wand up my butt to see what I had on. So this is an EMF blocking blanket. Right. So I pull this over my body when I'm on the airplane, and it helps to block radio frequencies, WI FI radiation from causing a little bit of a draining of my body's battery. You know, last night when I was giving my talk, I discussed how your, you know, your body is a battery. And each of the cells operate at a specific electrochemical gradient, like negative charge on the inside, slight positive charge on the outside, hefty exposure to EMFs in the environment from WI FI routers, from cell phones, from X ray scanners and the like. All of this can cause a calcium influx into the cell, which positively polarize or positively charge that cell a little bit. And it can reduce cellular metabolism to a certain extent and cause you brain fog. Use it when you sleep. So I just pull this over? Yeah. This is like a blanket. Not even when I sleep. Just I'm sitting there and then this is really cool. This is a full pull on hoodie that I can wear that also blocks emf. And again, like, if I were to go through an X ray scanner, I would look like a ghost wearing this. And even though the hoodie, every time.

You walk into the scanner, you wear this.

Yep. Pants and then even a little beanie. Right. So I can wear this on the airplane. And if I'm in a hotel room that has a lot of WI FI signals bouncing around and I flip on the phone and there's like more than, you know, it was like 20 wifi signals. I'll usually use this blanket during sleep as well. It's not the most comfortable blanket, but it works for blocking emf. It's like a silver line fabric. So I travel with this. For the EMF piece, I also have a set of headphones. Of course, noise blocking headphones are great for sleep, especially on airplanes. But these headphones are interesting because there's a cranial nerve that snakes through your whole body. It's called the vagus nerve. It stimulates the pacemaker cells of your heart. It innervates your organs. If you're in a stressed out state, you typically have poor Feedback from your vagus nerve to the rest of your nervous system, including your heart. Now many people now are measuring their heart rate variability, their readiness score, their stress score. And a big thing that feeds into that score is your heart rate variability. The number of times in between each heartbeat. It should be variable. It should beat and, you know, 98 milliseconds, another beat in 102 milliseconds. It shouldn't be like a beat at 100 milliseconds and a beat at 100 milliseconds. There should be some variation. There's all sorts of ways that you can increase your vagal nerve tone. De stressing practices like yoga and meditation and breath work, cold plunging and cold therapy, particularly if your head gets under the water, chanting, singing, humming, gargling, all sorts of ways that you can do it. But there are also electrical vagal nerve stimulators. Literally they're electrodes that are placed near the typically the auricular nerve underneath the ear. And that triggers the vagus nerve in a way that actually tones it and increases your heart rate variability. So check this out. These headphones basically look like normal noise blocking headphones. These are made by a company called Hulist. However, they also have these little pieces that I can put on either side of the headphone. And then I take the covers off of these pieces. And so when I feel stressed, when I want to relax, if I wake up at night and have a difficult time falling back asleep, what I can do is put these headphones on. And they only because I just stuffed them into my bag hurriedly on the way coming in here, but basically I put them on and these little pieces go directly over the ear or under the ear, right where it stimulates the vagus nerve. And they deliver a mild electrical sensation that helps to tone the vagus nerve. So I can decrease stress while I'm on the go. And obviously since I like to travel with over the ear headphones anyways for the airplane, it's not like I have to travel with a bunch of extra stuff besides those two extra little vagal nerve stimulators. They go over the headphones and then in addition to that in this bag. I'm a huge fan of red light therapy, but I'm not going to travel with a red light therapy bed or panels and sometimes hard to hunt down these things when you're on the go. So what I've got in this bag are a few things. First of all, this is a wraparound red light therapy device. It's even waterproof. This one's made by a company called Lumiflex. And I can flip this on. And what I do is when I'm laying in bed at night or when I get up in the morning, I put one on my back and one on my stomach. If I ever get any aches or strains or pains, I can wrap it around a joint. So I travel with two of them because they easily fit in here. So my favorite way to do it is I put one in front of me and one behind me when I get up in the morning. And because the muscle pain. What's that?

Is it for the muscle pain?

For muscle pain, for innervating the. For kind of like warming and radiating the gut blood, so. Which is going to basically cause photonic activation of all the cells in the body as the blood rushes past. So I'm getting this. This almost like the equivalent of red light therapy, but it's on the go wrapped around any joint. So I travel with these. And speaking of red light, I also travel with these. I was wearing these last night. So of course, these are pretty blue light. You put these on at night. So if you're in a hotel room that's got a bunch of bright lights, or I'm speaking at night under LED fluorescent lights. Yeah, I can wear these? Yeah. And they keep your melatonin from being disrupted. Yeah, I saw you wearing them last night. Great on you. And then you can also, in the same way that you can block red light at night, you can get more natural. Bluish green light is the light spectrum that kind of causes the waking response. So if I'm not able to get outside in the sunlight when I'm traveling, maybe it's a cloudy day, maybe it's a time of day when the sun hasn't yet come up. But I want to get my body awake. Maybe I'm in Las Vegas where there's a bunch of tall buildings and you can't find the sun if your life depended on it. I'll pull on these glasses. And These are called iOS. Wow. And they go over my eyes just like that. Matter of fact, I may have misspoken these ones. There's two different brands I travel with, one called iOS and one called Retimers. These might be the Retimers. Anyways, those are the two brands, Ayo and Retimer. And they produce this spectrum that I can use while I'm checking my morning emails or walking around the hotel room. And what is the morning? Making coffee. It causes an awakening response to occur very similar to what you get if you were looking at sunlight. So it's a way you can kind of hack your circadian rhythm by getting exposed to more blue light. So you'd want to avoid the blue light at night. You can wear glasses like that in the morning. Yeah, it helps with circadian rhythm. Yeah, exactly. So then these two. These are interesting. This one's called the Apollo. And this can go around my wrist or my ankle. And then I can use an app on my phone to select whether I want it to be set in sleep mode, relaxation mode, meditation mode, focus, energy, social. And it delivers a mild vibratory sensation around typically your ankle or your wrist, and it shifts you into that desired state. I love this. For sleepy on airplanes, for giving a talk, I can put, I had it on last night in energy mode. So I'd stay energetic at night when I was giving my talk. And it's a very subtle sensation. And obviously it's highly portable. And I can travel with this anywhere in the world. So that one helps with sleep or energy. And then this one, this is one of my favorites. So when I wake up in the morning, sometimes I want like that extra 20 minutes in bed or sometimes very similar to what happens to a lot of people. I wake up at like 3am with racing thoughts or something like that. This is called a sensate. And you wear it around your neck. It goes right over the collarbone. So it stimulates the area of the collarbone responsible for triggering the vagus nerve, similar to the vagal nerve stimulators on the back of the net.

Right.

And then you put it on and it plays music through your headphones that correlate to the vibrating sensation that the sensate is making.

Incredible.

And it just pulls you into this peaceful, meditative, like state. You just forget all your worries. You lay back. It feels like a cat purring on your chest almost. But this thing, I mean, is. It's super simple and easy, and I'm addicted to it. Like, it's amazing. I do one almost every single morning for about 20 minutes when I travel. And so those are just a few of the little things, you know, that don't require me to, you know, to check a bag, per se. But those are examples of what I suppose back to your original question, would be considered like biohacks, but they're relatable. And a lot of those things, those are affordable for the general population as well.

Now that you're in India. And a study says that, you know, 60% of the Indians chooses to be vegetarian. Right. They have A vegetarian diet and a majority of them do not stay away from meat for religious reasons as well. Yeah, I'm a vegetarian myself. Yeah. How do you supplement the vegetarian food? Like how do we get our protein intake?

Yeah.

What, what's your advice to the people who have. Can't eat meat for that matter?

Yep. So I look at the blood work of a lot of plant based eaters and I tend to see the same deficiencies pop up over and over. Just be it's creatine, vitamin B12, it's not tested as much, but taurine tends to be low in these individuals, Omega fatty acids. Overall, protein intake tends to be low. And iron. Those are some of the biggies right now. What's interesting is you don't see those abnormalities pop up as much in the people who are using more ancestral preparation methods for the plants that they're consuming. What do you mean ancestral soak? When you sprout, when you do slow cooking methods, you unlock a lot more of the nutrients from the amaranth and the quinoa and the millet and the lentils and the legumes and all these foods that tend to be some of the protein sources on a plant, those.

Are second diet, second class protein.

Yeah. But if you're simply just like cooking them quickly, you're not unlocking a lot of those nutrients. Right. So the first thing I encourage people to do is soak, sprout. Right. Ferment, you know, you can even eat sprouts like seeds that have been sprouted, obviously eating a wide variety of foods. This is like, you know, vegetarianism 101. Rotate your grains and your beans and your rices and eat a variety. And don't just have one type of grain or bean or rice or grass, that you're getting a multitude of different amino acids from those sources. But again, they're not going to be unlocked. Right. Let me put it this way. Consuming like a bowl of quinoa for breakfast that you've soaked at night and rinsed off and then let soak again in a little bit of water and vinegar and then rinse that again in the morning and then prepare it almost similar to how you might do overnight oatmeal, you're going to get more protein and less digestive distress from that quinoa that's been slowly prepared. So rotating and also using ancestral preparation methods is important. Nowadays you can get rice protein powder, pea protein powder, hemp protein powder. A research study came out several years ago showing that if you consume digestive enzymes, when you Have a plant based protein, you increase the amino acid bioavailability of that protein. So you can kind of like hack a plant based protein powder by adding enzymes to it. And it's still not as good as whey protein or egg protein for example. But you are.

But whey protein is still okay because it comes from dairy. So we consume a lot of whey protein as well.

Yeah. So whey protein would be okay. I actually didn't know that. I thought that you also stayed away from whey protein. No, no, no. We do consume wheat comes from cows.

But it's a dairy product, so yes, it's fine.

Yeah. So whey protein's got great amino acid bioavailability. One of the top selling products for one of my companies called Kion, a nutrition supplements company, are vegan essential amino acids. These are the building blocks of protein that are pre digested, that amplify your body's own blood levels of amino acids for muscle building, for repair, for recovery. But they're a non animal based source. So essential amino acids are all nine amino acids. Branch chain amino acids aren't so good. They're almost like inexpensive flavored water and they spike blood glucose a little bit. And I'm not a huge fan of those. But if you get all nine essential amino acids by essential, they're the ones that your body can't make on its own. Right. You can actually increase your protein availability. Collagen and gelatin are a little bit similar to that. For many vegetarians those aren't an option unless it depends. There are. There are not many good sources of like collagen and gelatin that you're going to find in the plant based world. But essential amino acids, that's another really, really good way to manage your levels up. You should be shooting for about 0.7 to 0.8 grams per pound of body weight you can use.

So we supplement through whey protein and through the amino acids?

Yeah, yeah. And digestive enzymes at the same time that I have the supplements. And then the other things I talked about, you know, iron, if you're eating a wide variety of legumes, et cetera, you can usually get enough iron. But some people need to supplement with iron. An example of a form that doesn't irritate the gut would be like iron bisglycinate. Right. Taurine, you can supplement with. Creatine's fantastic. Just pure plain old creatine monohydrate, around 5 grams a day for both men and women. For the neural brain enhancing effects. You can Even get up to 10 to 20 grams. The higher amounts are also fantastic for deprivation. Some kind of a vitamin B complex in many cases, like a fat soluble vitamin complex as well, like your vitamin D, A, E and K. That's something that tends to be a little bit lower in plant based eaters. And then the last one would be omega fatty acids. If you're doing a lot of chia seeds, flax seeds, nuts, you'll get a decent amount of omega fatty acids, but the conversion is pretty poor. And you can, I mean of those fats into DHA and EPA in your body. So you can use a plant based source of omega fatty acids as well. And one of the best ways to do that is via algae like chlorella, spirulina, et cetera. A lot of algae has decent omegas in it. So those are some of the things. Very nice, very nice.

So I was told that when you turn 30, you lose 1% of the muscle mass every year. It's called sarcopenia or something.

Yeah. Depending on how much protein you eat and whether or not you're lifting weights. Yeah.

Right. So what are the biohack techniques to improve or you know, boost your muscle mass and improve your recovery? Because as you know, muscle is the organ of longevity. Yeah, yeah, Exercise, I understand, but how important is muscle building?

Lifting weights and lifting weights, particularly at a rep range that doesn't allow you to get more than about 12 reps in. So a lot of people just lift too light. Right. So there's the whole concept of what's called reps in reserve. And you would want to. My rule is 3. Like if you can get to 12 and do 3 more, then your weight's too light, you need to increase your weight. So getting the muscle close to a high amount of time under tension, that induces as close to fatigue as possible without injury. That's one is most heavy enough weights. Right. So like I, I went for a swim this morning and I did some squats in the gym. Right, right. And I did 10 sets of six squats. Right. And in between the squats I was doing some planks and some core work and some recovery. But I, with the weight I was using, I wouldn't have been able to do nine squats. Right. So. So I was within that rule of three parameter. So lifting heavy weights, eating adequate protein. Right. You touched on that 0.7 to 0.8 grams of protein, a pound of body weight, some form of thermal stress. I briefly alluded to this earlier. Like the heat shock proteins that you get from the thermal stress in a sauna that helps to be able to maintain muscle. It's very interesting research. It doesn't seem like you be able to just build muscle by getting hot. It's more about maintaining muscle than building muscle. But having some kind of a robust sauna practice that can be helpful. Hormones especially as you age, women will see decreases in hormones like progesterone and testosterone. Men in particular see decrease in testosterone. There are herbal agents like Tongcat ale or Turkesterone that can help with testosterone. I'm not opposed to testosterone replacement therapy for people who are doing a lot of things that you'd want to do to maintain elevated testosterone levels but still seeing deficits. So paying attention to hormones is important. And I mean don't get on testosterone replacement therapy until you're at least lifting heavy weights, getting adequate sleep, de stressing and consuming. The building blocks for testosterone should be creatine, minerals, zinc, magnesium, boron and vitamin D. You should have all those present in your diet. Omega 3 fatty acids would kind of fit into that as well. Just addressing all the basic building blocks I see a lot of times especially it's popular in the U.S. people just get on testosterone replacement therapy when they haven't addressed the base foundational needs. I would say the biggies would be eat adequate protein, lift weights, pay attention to your hormones, get hot on a frequent basis and that'll help. Right? Right. Amazing.

Yeah, amazing. So let's do a quick fire round. I'll ask you questions.

Okay.

To give me short answers.

I'll be brief. I'm bad at that, but I'll do it.

You know, nowadays you see a lot of celebrities with you know, perfect body, toned body, perfect physique. Are they fooling us with their perfect routine of food and diet and exercise or is there something that they are going on? Is what's your take on Ozempic?

I work with a lot of celebrities. Most of them are devoting 3, 4 hours per day on their body and biohacking modalities and doing all the things that allow them to maintain that perfect physique. Along with typically hormones, steroids, peptides, so called gear, as well as for the fat loss piece, things like ozempic and GLP1s which basically make you not want to eat.

Is Ozempic safe?

Not in the dosages that are being used. It's a pretty impressive drug with really good safety records for things like diabetes. But you can control your appetite with it by using like 1/10 or less of the amount that's Currently being dosed at the high dosages. You get things like muscle loss, gut inflammation, depression, anxiety. So I like those drugs, but not in the amount or the dosage that they're being used, which I think is in excess. Right.

So Ben, I'm very curious to know what is the most craziest thing that you've done in the field of biohacking and health and fitness? What's the craziest thing that comes to your mind?

I've had every single one of my joints, toe to head, hair, skin, nails, donads, everything injected with stem cells during a four to five hour surgery in Park City, Utah. And I've done that twice.

Injected stem cells in your joints?

Yeah. Ok. Every joint, all at once.

And what is it doing?

Session longevity and basically restoring your body's lost stem cell pool that occurs as you age. I've done gene therapy in Mexico where you literally get an intramuscular injection. In this case, I did follistatin gene therapy, which caused 11 pounds of muscle gain in about three months, which would be unheard of via natural means, but it literally turns on the gene responsible for building muscle. That's interesting. And I've done also in Mexico, full body blood filtration five hours a day for two days in a row in a hospital bed in Tijuana, having all the blood pulled out of my body, pass through a filter to pull out pathogens, spike proteins, everything, and then back into completely clean up the body. Similar to a dialysis. Yeah. God, yeah. Well, those would be, I would say three things. Full body stem cell procedures, gene therapy and blood filtration. Wow.

Very interesting. If you could delete one mainstream myth about health and longevity, which is being very pushed by the experts in capitalism, what would it be?

One myth that you need to eat a lean, low fat diet in order to be healthy. Because fats serve as the building block for cholesterol, for hormones, and they're so necessary for so many metabolic functions that I think we're too fat phobic. And I wish people would quit throwing around words like or phrases like lean protein as much.

Yeah. So can we really cheat genetics? I mean, some people are born with good genes, some are with bad genes. Can we, can we hack that? Can we cheat our genetics?

Yeah, you can test your genes. You can find out you have a high risk for, I don't know, like colon cancer and limit your red meat or alcohol consumption. You could find out you have a high risk for type 2 diabetes and wear a continuous glucose monitor like this and pay attention to your sugar and your carbohydrate and your seed oil and your air pollution and things that we were talking about earlier, you could find out you have a high risk for blood pressure and take things like nitric oxide supporting foods like beets or cordyceps or extra virgin olive oil or some of these things that help out with nitric oxide production, you can find out they have a predisposition to certain diseases and adjust your lifestyle according to your diet, your exercise, et cetera, so that the epigenetic factors responsible for manifesting that disease don't actually take place. And technically you could actually get nowadays like gene therapy and actually, if you want to, you know, delve deep into biohacking, actually get injectable gene therapy for some of these things. But yeah, you can certainly address genetic risk factors pretty adequately if you know what those genetic risk factors are.

That's amazing. Wow.

Yeah.

So the last question, Ben, what's the best money hack that you could advise to the followers in India? Something which comes cheap. I mean, you've said a lot of things. I know. What is something which is the cheapest and the most effective and efficient biohacking technique?

The planet Earth. Every time lightning strikes the surface of the planet or solar radiation bombards the surface of the planet, it collects negative ions. When your skin comes in touch with the surface of the planet, you absorb those negative ions and it helps to recharge the body's battery. That's why the sandals I took off when I came in the door here have copper plugs in the bottom of them and copper laces. They're called Earth runners. There's other brands out there that keep me grounded. And in connection with the planet Earth versus wearing big built up rubber soled shoes, I go outside barefoot. I'll do push ups with my hands on the concrete. I try and get in touch with the surface of the planet for at least 20 minutes a day. But if you look at PubMed, there is a growing body of research on the effects of so called earthing or grounding. Cheap, easy. Last time I checked, touching the ground was free. Yeah, most cities and countries and states, I'm sorry if you live in a place where it's not. But yeah, just earthing. Grounding.

Fantastic. Such a lovely conversation that we had, Ben. I really had a lot of fun and there's so much of information that you've given us. I mean, I really have to sit and decode each one of it and try to see what works for me.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for being on this podcast. I totally loved it.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you. Thank you.

Very smoothie too.

To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks.

And content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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