How Warrior Breathing Works, The Best Way To Use DHEA, Should Kids Drink MCT Oil & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, how does warrior breathing work? The best way to use dhea? Should kids drink MCT oil, natural remedies for ingrown hairs, applied movement neurology, and much more.

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I'll try not to sound too gross for everybody, but I'm picking almond butter and spelt out of my teeth.

That's gross. I. If there's one thing that. That I cannot stand when I'm talking to someone, it's the smack of almond butter in their mouth.

I cannot abide.

Too many healthy friends who eat raw nut butters while I'm talking to them. Gross.

I thought you liked it. I. That I spread the word that people should do that around you.

It's like hacking hairballs when you're talking on the phone. Dude. Just. Yeah, not. That's just disgusting.

Sorry. Okay, I'm gonna. I'll stop all my disgusting noises, but.

Was that your. Was that your breakfast?

That was my lunch, actually. It's already 1220 here east.

That's right.

My breakfast was awesome, though. I had the. We talked about it a few. Few weeks ago on the. On the podcast. I fry up some green banana in some butter, and then I add two eggs, a little bit of coconut milk, and. And some flaxseed.

That actually does sound really good.

It's really good. And some cinnamon and some vanilla just to give it a little more excitement. Awesome.

My wife.

It makes my brain buzz too. I just feel super smart after I eat that.

That's the starch from the green bananas fermenting in your stomach and creating cytokines that activate, like, activation of brain neurons. It's actually true. Resistant starch can make you smarter by activating cytokines. It's really interesting. Well, there you go. Yeah.

That's a little recipe I got from a book called Paleo Girl for teenage girls that want to go Paleo.

That's. That's great that you're carrying around Paleo Girl in your purse. I. My wife made brownies last night, so I had a kale smoothie this morning with a brownie crumbled up in it. It was really good. That was my breakfast.

News flashes.

So I took a bath last night in. In red wine. Some really smart guy, like, tweeted about that the other day, and I thought, what the heck?

Oh, no, you did not, dude. I know that. I know that you're. That's ridiculous. Disposable income as an employee of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast.

Even, like Lonesome Charlie, the cheapest wine I could find was still a bathtub full.

Dude, bathtub full of two bucks. Chuck. Yeah, no, I tweeted this out. And of course, in all of our news flashes, they come out from twitter.com BenGreenfield Every week we talk about some interesting things. And this. This was on espn, that there's this guy named Amare Stoudemire, and he's actually a pretty good NBA player, and he actually takes a bath in red wine to create more circulation in his body. And he makes the red wine hot. So it's like a hot tub full of red wine. And he says that it just absolutely soothes the body. And then there's a quote in the article from the vinotherapy Spa in the Plaza Hotel in New York City, which is where you can get these wine hot tub treatments. They say grape polyphenols fight against free radicals, which cause 80% of skin aging. And by the way, 93% of statistics are made up on the spot. In addition to their exceptional antioxidant power, polyphenols reinforce microcirculation, protect elastic and collagen fibers, and prevent the destruction of the fundamental elements of the skin's support tissues. And what they say is that they do not recommend soaking in red wine, as the alcohol content will dehydrate the skin. So they instead actually use tracks of red vine leaf to soak in the bath rather than full on red wine. But this Stoudemire guy actually uses wine. He uses red wine baths.

Yeah, it seems like it would dry the hell out of you.

Yeah. And then he.

Rubbing alcohol over your body.

He says in the article, and I think this is pretty cool. Like, I'm all about, like, cold thermogenesis and Epsom salts baths and different ways to treat your body with water. So he says you have this ancient tub. So you have kind of like a salt tub and a hot tub and a cold plunge and then a pool, and then you just mix all of these things up. So this guy is jumping back and forth from like, cold tubs to red wine baths to hot tubs to Epsom salts baths. I would love to see his little recovery chamber that he's doing this all in.

It'd be quite amusing to watch kind of Keystone Cops version of taking a bath.

That's pretty nuts for a 31 year old NBA player that he's tapping on.

I guess he's got the dough, I guess.

Yeah. And speaking of anti aging tactics, there was another probably more feasible study that came up and more practically applicable study for our listeners who don't have giant tubs full of red wine to bathe in. And this was the concept of exercise and the minimal amount of exercise that would actually prolong your life. And I thought this was kind of interesting because when I'm out walking or when I'm out running, sometimes I wonder like how long would I need to run to be the equivalent of this walk? Or vice versa. Right. Like if I go on a run, it's like how long would I need to have walked to have equated that run, you know, from like a cardiovascular standpoint or an anti aging standpoint. And this particular exercise was entitled Minimal amount of exercise to prolong life. Do you walk, do you run? Or do you just mix it up and 1. The entire study is really interesting. It's available for. Well, it's not available for free, but you can go read the synopsis of it at least online.

That's all I can really understand anyway.

Yeah, the abstract. But I thought the interesting part of this study was that it comes out to about a 3 to 1 ratio. So you can get extension of life expectancy from both walking and running, but a 15 minute walk can be replicated with a 5 minute run, or a 5 minute run could be replicated with a 15 minute walk. When you're just talking about the anti aging and cardiovascular health benefits, you know, we're not talking about preparing for a marathon or the performance benefits, but. But it turns out that if you're short on time and you need to get rid of your 15 minute morning walk and instead go on a five minute run, that's okay. And also if you're maybe not feeling like running, but you still want to get all of the blood flow and anti aging benefits of movement, you can just go on a walk instead with the understanding that you'll need to walk approximately three times as long as you'd normally run in order to get the equivalent benefits. So there you go. You could do a 12 hour marathon instead of a 4 hour marathon.

No thank you. That sounds like some kind of hell yeah.

And then finally, and I'm kind of getting into farming lately because we're building well not farming, more gardening, I should say. We're building a bunch of extreme gardening. Extreme gardening. We're building a bunch of garden beds right now outside of my house. A bunch of raised garden beds. And then once those are in, we're starting into a barn that goes in behind the garden beds. And we'll put about a dozen or so chickens and one or two goats back behind in that barn. It'll be a few months before we add the chickens and the goats, but right now we're focused on the garden beds. And this was a really interesting article that caught my eye. That was about this Amish farmer that's using a pesticide sprayer on his crops. But rather than.

That's not allowed.

Well, rather than putting pesticides in the pesticide sprayer, he's putting like antioxidants, minerals, vitamins. He's got like this mix of extremely nourishing compounds that he's spraying his crops with. And I thought the article itself was actually really interesting. And it's certainly something that you can use this concept yourself. If you are like a backyard gardener, you don't have to get a full on sprayer and you don't have to go become an Amish dude.

You don't have to be Amish to.

Do this, even though I do recommend you go read the article. But there are a couple of things that you can put in a backyard garden that can really enhance the mineral absorption that you'd get from the fruits and the vegetables that you eat in that garden. Whether it's your back porch where you've got maybe some planters hanging because you have limited gardening space, or whether you have a full on backyard garden with raised gardening garden beds. Now what we use are minerals. Okay? So we use trace minerals that are actually mixed up. And you can buy these off of Amazon. You can get like organic trace minerals for your garden.

Oh, so you're not putting like Gatorade on your plants?

Purple Gatorade? Yeah. No, you can actually, you can go to Amazon. Most of the brands of organic trace minerals are actually really good there. And you just sprinkle it over your garden beds. Use it exactly according to package instructions. Basically, you're just sprinkling a few cupfuls of the stuff over your garden beds. I'll put a link in the show notes to some of the ones that we use. And then the other thing that's really interesting, if you live in a coastal area, like, you know, when I was in San Diego a few months ago, I was walking along the beach and there's just like seaweed everywhere washed up on the beach. And seaweed is incredibly mineral rich. And you can actually mulch seaweed. You can gather seaweed in just burlap sacks or garbage bags or whatever. And, and you can use that as a garden mulch on your garden soil. And it's a fantastic way to mineralize like a backyard garden, like a raised garden bed or a, you know, like a planter pot in your porch. So just basically seaweed. You can use fine broken up seaweed and you just basically sprinkle that and put it into your garden. And there's a great article, actually one of the blogs that I follow is called earth easy@eartheasy.com I really like it for just like kind of a mix of organic living and gardening. I read that and I subscribe to the magazine Mother Earth News. Like those are my two primary sources of gardening and kind of home study homesteading info. And anyways, I'll link to this article on Earthy about how you can go get seaweed off the beach and you can use that as a mulch and as a compost in garden beds. And it actually makes for really nutrient rich fruits and vegetables. So yet another use for seaweed aside from wrapping your lunchtime salads in nori.

Wraps, I don't, I don't think you can go down to the beach and get that kind of seaweed.

But actually something I should mention is, is while we're on the Twitter bandwagon, someone tweeted at me whether or not I think it was a. Well, maybe it was a blog comment on Ben Greenfield Fitness, but it was about Nori and whether we should choose organic sources of nori. And I actually linked to them an article on WH foods that goes into the fact that a lot of these, like seaweed wraps that you buy at the grocery store, they actually tend to have higher levels of metals, arsenic, and potentially radioactive materials just from like, you know, the whole Fukushima thing. So it turns out that it may actually be a good idea if you're one of those people like me that uses nori seaweed to use certified organic nori. And I haven't been eating certified organic nori just because I hadn't really been thinking about that too much. But it turns out that if you're, if you're eating things from the ocean, you do need to be a little bit careful. So I'm going to start using certified organic seaweed, you know, for like, you know, when I make like wraps and sushi. And stuff like that. So there you go. Not to scare people too much, but just one more thing to think about when it comes to optimizing your health.

Listener Q and A.

Hey, Ben. I recently attended a Level 1 Academy down at Sealfit, and my favorite evolution by far was when they brought in the Qigong Guide to do that warrior breathing. The experience was profound, to say the least. I experienced intense feelings of oneness with all humanity, saw crazy visions of flaming exploding zebras, and by the end of it, I was crying like a baby. However, when we walked out of the room, one of my teammates who was a pilot, killed my metaphysical buzz, telling me that what we just experienced was pretty much oxygen deprivation similar to altitude sickness. Basically, I just want to know your own thoughts and experiences with warrior breathing. Maybe what's going on at a physiological level that might trigger this type of psychedelic out of this world experience. Thanks, Ben. Big fan of the show, man.

Way to kill a buzz.

Oh, the warrior breath. Actually, I wrote about this and I'll link to the article in the show notes for this episod. So of course, everything we talk about, you can grab the show notes. They're extremely helpful. Brock and I spend a lot of time on the Show Notes creating resources for you guys. And today's show notes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 297. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com297. Anyways, though, I wrote an article when I got back from the SEAL Fit Academy because we did this same thing that Brian's talking about. The qigong guy came. I'm blanking on his name, but this really cool bearded guy who's like a martial arts expert and leads you through this intense warrior breathing protocol. And I had the same thing. I was crying like a baby. By the end of it, I was like hallucinating. I was having visions. I was having extreme moments of clarity and breakthrough in terms of my life's purpose, in terms of some of the ways that I want to raise my kids. And it was, it was about, I think it was about a 75 minute session or so that we were in there not just doing this crazy, intense breathing, but also the visualization, the meditation, pounding, pounding music that this guy has that, that brings you through the protocol. I've never done anything like it in my life. And I actually.

What do you mean by pounding music? Like what kind of music?

I mean, it's like. It's like the music is it. It's like a little bit of like Kind of underground technoish music with like some, some Indian type of flavor and kind of like, you know, yoga music on steroids almost. Let's just call it yoga music on steroids. All right, so I wrote about this and I'll link to my article that I wrote about my experience and some of the more specifics on the clarity that I had during that warrior breathing experience in the show. Notes for this episode. The type of breathing that you do while you're doing that is very similar to what Wim Hof and I talk about. Wim Hof is the Iceman. I interviewed him and he talked about fire breathing. And this is how he increases. And scientists have actually measured this. He's able to increase his core temperature by simply incorporating the same type of fire breathing protocol. A very long series of sharp and deep inhales followed by not very forceful and less deep exhales. Okay, so what you're doing, and it sounds like this, it's very, very sharp inhales, very brief exhales. You're. You're essentially kind of like an excited puppy. Yeah, like just like an excited puppy, except they decided to call it warrior breathing instead of excited puppy breathing for reasons.

If you came to my fitness class, it would be the excited puppy breathing.

The excited warrior puppy. Anyways, though, Brian says that his teammate killed his physical buzz by saying that it was just oxygen deprivation. In fact, it's not oxygen deprivation. It's just the opposite from a physiological standpoint. Okay, so first of all, just step back and think about this logically. Right? You're inhaling more than you're exhaling. So technically you're breathing in more oxygen then you are blowing off CO2. Right. Your oxygen to CO2 ratio is increasing. I'm sorry, decreasing. Right. Your body is going to be retaining extra CO2. Now this is very, very important to understand because oxygen doesn't transfer from hemoglobin. Oxygen is carried around in your blood and hemoglobin, but oxygen is not going to transfer into your tissues. It's not going to transfer into myoglobin or oxygenate your tissues unless there's something to drive oxygen from hemoglobin into tissues. Now, to a certain extent, just the partial pressure of oxygen in the air is going to help to drive some oxygen from hemoglobin into tissues. And when you're just breathing normally, just like your normal day to day breathing, as you're standing around, you're going to be anywhere from about 90, 70 to 99% O2 saturated. The average person is going to be about that level of saturation in the bloodstream. Like if you use a pulse oximeter and measure the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream, most folks 97 to 99% right around in there. Now, when you breathe more, you're going to increase that O2 saturation, but you're going to lose some of the CO2 if you're just focusing on just basically normal, hard breathing. Now, if the level of CO2 decreases in the body because you're exhaling too much with like deep, forceful breathing that focuses on the exhale rather than the inhale, then what happens is as CO2 disappears in your body, as your level of carbon dioxide decreases, hemoglobin actually doesn't release oxygen into tissues. The presence of CO2 or increased levels of CO2 is one of the primary mechanisms that will drive your body to release hemoglobin into muscle tissue. And so what you're doing when you're breathing in and you're forcing your body to retain more CO2 by breathing out less forcefully than you're breathing in, is you're driving oxygen out of the bloodstream and into muscle tissue more readily. You're actually hyper oxygenating muscle tissue or while decreasing blood saturation of oxygen. So if you were to wear a pulse oximeter, as you did warrior breathing, what you would find is that ideally you're going to see your oxygen saturation in your blood. What you would measure with the pulse oximeter, like a fingertip pulse oximeter. If you were to wear it during one of these sessions, it would drop from say like 98 down to 96 down to 95, possibly even lower than that as your body gets saturated with CO2 and oxygen is driven from hemoglobin in the blood into muscle tissue. And because you're doing this so forcefully, what happens is you are essentially hyper oxygenating your body. And that's of course, a term that gets thrown around almost too much these days. It's actually relatively difficult to hyper oxygenate your body by, say, breathing in pure oxygen, like at an oxygen bar, or, you know, taking these oxygen shots and like supplements that they sell now that are like these oxygen sprays that you spray into your mouth. The reason for that is that at the normal partial pressure of oxygen, you're generally mostly oxygen saturated in your blood. And once you're oxygen saturated, it's very, very hard to get more oxygen saturated in your blood by doing something like breathing pure oxygen. But as far as the muscles go, you can oxygenate the muscles more readily by Decreasing blood oxygen saturation and increasing the amount of oxygen that gets disassociated from hemoglobin and driven into muscle tissue. Now, CO2 is one thing that can do this. Interestingly, lactic acid is another thing that can do this, or more specifically, the presence of hydrogen ions. So as your body becomes acidic, what happens is blood saturation of oxygen begins to fall and your muscles can become more oxygenated. So that's just a, you know, again, it makes logical sense, right? When you're pushing hard, when lactic acid is getting produced and you're getting all these acidic hydrogen ions built up in your body as a result of hard exercise. Ideally, you want less oxygen in your blood, you want more in your muscles, right? So you can run from that lion or whatever it is that you're doing. So that and the presence of CO2 are two things that can, that can drive that curve more towards releasing oxygen into muscle tissue. The last thing that can do it is this substance called 2,3diphosphoglycerate, or 2.3dpg. And interestingly, when you train at high altitudes, your body produces more 2.3dpg, which drives again, oxygen from blood to muscle tissue. So that's one of the effects of altitude training, is your body more readily releases oxygen from hemoglobin and into muscle tissue. So there's a few different ways to hack it. But this warrior breathing, the reason that you feel like so awesome and psychedelic and lightheaded and different and almost rebirthed when you finish this thing is you actually are hyper oxygenated. And one of the reasons that I know that Mark Devine includes it at the Sealfit Academy, especially towards the end of it, is to help you with recovery, because as you drive more oxygen into muscle tissue, that helps your muscles to recover a little bit more readily. So that's basically what's happening, is blood oxygen is beginning to fall. Delivery of oxygen to muscle tissue is beginning to increase. And as delivery of oxygen to muscle tissue begins to increase, it's possible that your brain might be becoming a little bit more oxygen starved. I'm not quite sure of how the distribution of oxygen between muscle and brain is distributed when that curve shifts due to the presence of carbon dioxide. But ultimately you are not, you're not oxygen depriving yourself. If anything, you're oxygen depriving your blood, but increasing oxygen to your muscles. And either way, like the way I view it, is if you're having a total breakthrough and all these cool feelings and crazy visions and, you know, emotional feelings like that's great. That's good. And it's not just oxygen. Even if it was just oxygen deprivation. Great. If that's what it takes for you to have some kind of an emotional breakthrough, who cares? So, but that's what's going on in a physiological level with warrior breathing. That's how warrior breathing works.

And that's something that, that monks have been doing for like hundreds of thousands of years. They do chanting, which is sort of restricting your oxygen and your breathing and then actually throwing in some self flagellation. So they're actually like beating themselves while they're doing these chants and kind of achieving the same sort of thing.

Yeah, but just because something's been doing something for thousands of years doesn't doesn't mean it's like they haven't been having sex for thousands of years and I just can't get on board.

You mean monks?

Yeah, monks. Yeah. So just because a monk does it, doesn't mean we should do it.

Hey, guys. Longtime listener, reader, buyer of books, I wanted to get your thoughts on dhea. Ben, I think you mentioned on Twitter a while back that if you weren't competitive, then you would consider it. So for non competitive, non athletes, what are your thoughts, concerns and precautions and where would be a safe place to start if someone had to move forward with a trusted brand? Thanks a lot. Bye.

Yeah, I did indeed remember saying a few times that if it wasn't banned by the World Anti Doping Association, I probably would use DHA because it has some cool effects. And by the way, just as a total, not a total segue, but as an aside here a lot of people ask me about the WADA banned supplements list and like, what's on it, what's not on it? It's so easy to search and go find out. I'll put a link in the show notes to the official WADA banned supplements list. And there you go. Now you have it. You can bookmark it if you compete, you know. Okay, so just go like anytime you start taking anything, go search their first first because that, that is important. And of course the WAD isn't, is the only authoritative body of sports leagues organizations on the planet. And maybe there is some other sporting league, you know, that, that you participate in that you may also want to check, but the WADA is the main one and DHEA is definitely on the WADA Banned Substance Substances list currently. As far as DHEA and what, what it can do? Well, first of all, what it, what.

Is, what the heck is it? Why would they ban it?

Your body makes dhea. It's a naturally occurring hormone that could convert into testosterone or estrogen in your body. And DHEA originally was marketed as like an anti aging supplement, but is now used, you know, as like a testosterone booster, as a hormone booster and for a few other reasons that we'll get into in a second. But it's an androsterone. Technically, DHEA stands for dehydroepiandrosterone, dehydryepi, androsterone. It's dhea. And you can supplement with it. Your body can actually make DHEA naturally. We'll talk about how you could do that. But like I mentioned, it's converted by your body into sex hormones, mostly testosterone and estrogen. And this may help with libido, it may help with sports performance, et cetera. As far as the studies that have looked into DHEA and the notable significance of studies, the number one thing that it's been shown to do in most studies is to increase testosterone. And the interesting thing that you should know is that the vast majority of literature finds that it increases testosterone in women, where it can help significantly with libido in women. I think a lot of girls, you know, who want increased sex drive or increased testosterone may not realize this. The DHEA actually of, of all demographics where it can have the greatest effect, it's in women. So. Nice. Yeah. So guys slip a, slip a DHEA pill over to your girlfriend or your, or your wife and there you go.

Do you not condone this behavior?

We do not condone this behavior. So anyways, estrogen is the other thing, and this is also of note because if a woman is struggling with estrogen dominance or over aromatization of testosterone or something like that, DHEA is actually not the best idea of something to take. It would be for a highly active woman or to a lesser extent, for a man. DHEA would indeed be a performance enhancing supplement due to its ability to increase testosterone and increase blood. Dhea. A few of the things that it can help out with that studies have shown for it to help out with is bone mineral density. It can help with that. It can help to decrease sex hormone binding, globulin or shbg. SHBG is what can keep your total testosterone from getting converted into free and more bioactive testosterone. So DHEA is good for that. Tons of studies have shown that it does. It definitely increases libido. It's been shown to decrease fat mass. It's been shown to increase lean mass. It's been shown to increase what's called IGF1 or insulin like growth factor 1, which is a highly anabolic hormone and it's even been shown to increase subjective well being while decreasing cortisol. So yeah, so lots of cool effects of DHEA. And in most studies the dosage range is about 25-50mg per day. Although for the purpose of pure testosterone enhancement, especially in males it tends to be higher than that tends to be closer to 200 milligrams of DHEA that you'd use for something like that. So that's the deal with dhea. As far as supplementation goes. If you were, if you're going to look for a specific brand of DHEA and you wanted something that is not potentially going to be laced with other steroids or steroids and this is important to me, I would like. There's a variety of different brands out there because I don't personally use dhea, I can't speak personally about the effects of different brands. But I'd go with Thorne. Thorne Research is, is, it's incredibly well vetted. It is a physician's brand that's been used for a very long time as a, as you know, like a third party certified and extremely strictly regulated supplement company. So I'd go something like Thorne you can get off Amazon just basically like a thorn DHEA. They've got it in anything from like 25 up to up to 100 milligram capsules. So literally is just Thorne DHEA pretty. And it's not, that's not a, that's not Thorn fx. It's Thorne Research. Same company, they just own Thorne fx. But Thorne Research produces a lot of physicians lines and a lot of anti aging docs use Thorne as their preferred source of dhea. So I'd go with Thorne if I was going to supplement with it. But there are other ways that you can increase DHEA naturally. Even if you are competing and you're not wanting to take something that's on the WADA banned list, there are things that can definitely help with hormone production and with dhea one would be the consumption of oysters and any of these type of shellfish that are associated with increased libido that can help to increase dhea. So like going to an oyster feed or doing the whole, the whole shellfish, seafood, paella type of thing, that's one way you could do it. Exercise specifically lifting heavy stuff can increase dhea. So there's another good way to do it is just to basically lift heavy stuff. And sprinting is a close second for an Exercise that can increase dhea. Chronic stress can decrease dhea. I know that I'm not producing any groundbreaking news flashes here. These are all the things that can help out with all hormones, but decreasing stress can help out quite a bit. There are several medications that can really put a damper on DHEA and on libido in general. But birth control pills are one of the biggies when it comes to decreasing DHEA or decreasing testosterone. So that's another thing to think about. And those would be really the biggies. I mean lift heavy stuff, sprint de stress, be careful with pharmaceuticals that affect fertility and those are always that you could naturally increase dhea. So. So that's the skinny on dhea.

Hi Ben and Brock. I love the podcast. It's really brought out the inner nerd in me that I never even thought I had. So thank you for that. Question is I have a six week old baby boy and he is breastfeeding and he doesn't sleep very long. Two hours is really the most he sleeps even at night.

Night.

Wanted to start playing around with giving him a little bit of MCT oil in his bottle that I give him at night when his mom is sleeping. It is breast milk. I did try it two nights in a row. I gave him just 1 ML 1 cc of breast milk or of MCT oil in his breast milk in the bottle. I want to know your thoughts on, on that. It in my opinion it did seem like he slept a little longer and, and more comfortably. I'm just thinking those fatty acids will fill his belly and make the digestion a little slower. Wanted to know your thoughts and ideas on this. Thanks.

Now one cc is not very much MCT oil especially I guess for a, for an adult that would be a ridiculously small amount.

But yeah, you got to be careful with the baby. You could literally have a diaper moment. We joke about that with adults. And excessive of consumption of MCT oil with a baby. I can have a diaper mom, but I don't like. I don't know if you've ever like overdone MCT oil, Brock, but it doesn't just cause you to have the runs but it's like the burning anus runs. Like if you do too much MCT oil.

Done that.

Yeah, it's not a cool, cool feeling. It's like eating too much Thai food. It just doesn't really feel that great coming back out. Yeah, it's got a little bit of like a, an acidic burn and weird.

Seems like it would just make it.

Slippery yeah, so during exercise you can generally top out about like an adult can generally top out at about 1 to 2 tablespoons of MCT oil per hour. And trust me, I experimented with this a lot. I did the research on it, we did a whole podcast on it last year at some point after Ironman Canada when I was experimenting with MCT oil. And we found the research studies that showed the maximum human tolerance for MCT oil. And basically, if you're just going to use it over the course of a day, you top out right around 1 to 2 tablespoons per hour, depending on your size. So you don't need too much of the stuff in order to get that effect, that metabolic effect. And we delved into the physiology of MCT oil last week. So go back and listen to podcast number 296 if you want to know what's going on with MCT oil. But when it comes to kids, it's really interesting because if you look at breast milk, breast milk is naturally very high in fat. And that means that most newborns who are breastfed are actually getting a ton of ketones. And that's because breast milk's fat content is very much skewed towards medium chain triglycerides. And so babies are already keto adapted and generally stay keto adapted. And so you start feeding them Cheerios and Gerber sweet potato mash, mashed up prunes and yeah, and fruit roll ups and everything else. So anyways, it's really interesting though, if you look at the composition of breast milk, it's designed to help babies develop and help to build their brains and their central nervous system due to the amount of medium chain triglycerides and fat soluble vitamins that are found in it. So obviously if breast milk is chock full of MCT oil, then adding extra MCT oil to breast milk is just adding a little bit of something that's already in there. I personally think that in a mother who's eating a normal kind of ancestral diet, who's not starving herself, who's getting enough fats and fat soluble vitamins, I think breast milk is a pretty good composition for babies, period.

And I don't have to mess with.

It, I don't necessarily endorse messing with it. If you add MCT oil to a bottle and it seems like it helps your baby sleep better, I would suspect it's more due to the extra calories than it is due to the fact that that's how shoving your baby even more deeply into ketosis. Even though technically if they are burning those MCTs, those medium chain triglycerides, and churning out ketones as a byproduct of MCT metabolism. That's possible. And we see MCT when you look at kids and MCT oil, it's a well known therapeutic remedy for kids with epilepsy or seizures to put them on a ketogenic diet or to use mc2io quite liberally in their diet. And it's well accepted in medical literature that is just fine and just safe for kids in that type of situation. Again, in moderation. And, you know, in terms of the actual dosage, you know, it's one of those things where you do have to pay attention to symptoms. Gas, bloating, diarrhea, et cetera. But most kids can get away with anything from about 5 to 10 tablespoons of it during the course of a day, maximum for, you know, for most young kids. Ultimately though, because breast milk is so high in ketones and in mcts, it's really not going to be a big deal to give it to a baby. It's just exactly what they're getting anyways. And it's one of the reasons that giving a child soy milk or soy formulas or baby formulas that are lower in fats, that don't have as much medium chain triglycerides in them really shorts them, not just from a central nervous system development standpoint, but also a gut healing standpoint. Right. Because breast milk has lots of colostrum and probiotics and other things in it that helps with the lining of their gut. So I would say probably, Chris, what I would do in addition to adding MCT oil to the breast milk in the bottle to help your baby sleep better, is maybe give them a nice piping hot cup of bulletproof coffee in the mornings.

Just to get them going.

Yeah, just to get them going. You know, give them a little, little, little blended coffee.

I was thinking about should rub the MCT oil all over them and then like chase them around and trying to grab them.

Yeah, put a little ice cube in their bulletproof coffee so you don't burn their little mouths. But no, seriously though, McTool in Babies bottles for breast milk. It's not going to hurt them. But understand that they're already getting a ton of it in mom's breast milk.

So, Mr. Greenfield and Mr. Skywalker, question about ingrow hair. I've ingrow hair on my face and of course got worst once I got to my adult life and also every time I shave. So I guess my question is if there is anything that you may recommend for me to do? Since antibiotics on my face as a cream and I also ingested antibiotics didn't work. I'm looking to see if there is anything else that I can try. Thank you. Appreciate it, guys.

I still to get terrible ingrown hairs in my neck, like just right at the bottom of my beard.

I've never had a problem with ingrown hairs until I started manscaping and because.

Oh, so not on your face or neck, but down there.

Well, that's why like, like, you know, African Americans are one population that tend to get more ingrown hair is just because their hair is more curly. And as most people know, the hair down there tends to be curly hair.

And.

And so what? Ingrown hairs are also known as razor bumps. They're hairs that have curled around and grown back into your skin instead of rising up out of your skin. And I never really had to deal with them until again, I started manscaping a little bit and started getting all these little raised red bumps that looked like little pimples and discovered the magical experience that is an ingrown hair. So, yeah, and it tends to happen like in the beard area, legs, armpits, bikini area. And it can create inflammation, it can create redness, it can be a little bit embarrassing when you get these little spots forming. And there are certainly things that you can do about it though. So let's talk about some of the ways that you can get rid of ingrown hairs, aside from putting antibiotics on your face, which I don't necessarily recommend.

Remember, I've never even heard of that before.

Yeah, I mean, it would be a way to clear up any type of bacterial inflammation that results from the, from the wounds that are created by an ingrown hair, but it's not going to get rid of the ingrown hair, period.

So when you get like a slight infection in the. In the ingrown hair.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Gotcha. So one of the best ways to do this is to use an exfoliator. And I mean, you can easily make your own exfoliators. My, my wife in, in the Ben Greenfield inner circle, she's always creating these videos and she's got a bunch of handouts in there on how she creates all her own natural personal care products. And one of the things that she does is just a skin exfoliator. And you can just use basic sugar. If you just want a basic skin exfoliator, you can mix sugar with some extra virgin olive oil or some coconut oil or Your preferred oil of choice. And you can stir in some essential oils into that. We had a whole podcast on essential oils, but some really good topical essential oils. Oils are like tea tree oil. That's a good one. Lavender is another really good one. And that's it. It's just sugar, usually about 2 part sugar to 1 part oil. And you put in a few drops of essential oil. And that's a very simple three ingredient homemade scrub. And you just scrub that into your skin and then you rinse it off with water. And you can do that every day. You can do it a couple times a week. But that's just a basic skin scrub.

So watch out because the dog will try and lick it off.

That's right. That's right. One use for sugar that's actually okay. Baking soda can also work pretty well. You can do the similar thing with baking soda. You know, in a pinch, you could use toothpaste. But, you know, the basic idea with baking soda is you just make like a, like a paste with baking soda and you dip a cotton ball in that paste and you dab it on the skin. You let that sit for a while, and then you wash it off with water. And that's, that's very, very similar to the type of thing that you can do for like acne and zits and spider bites and things like that to just draw some of the inflammation out. So, and that can also exfoliate a little bit. Tea tree oil, again, that essential oil that I just mentioned, that's great as, as a topical that you can literally just put some on your fingers and rub it into the area where you're getting the ingrown hairs. And that can help a ton. So that's another one. Black tea bags can get rid of ingrown hairs because they have tannic acid, and that reduces redness and inflammation. The way you do this is you just get the tea bag wet. Like you moisten it in warm water and then you just rub it over the affected area for a few minutes and that's it. And then you make your friends some tea, your enemies, after you cleaned your bikini line with the black tea bag. So, yeah, but black tea bags are another one that you can use. Honey actually has some really cool antibacterial properties, especially Manuka honey. Manuka honey is great for everything from, like, road rash to scrapes to cuts to burns. And it's very, very simple. You just put a layer of honey right on the skin. You let that air dry for 10, 15 minutes, and then you rinse it off. Or if you prefer to walk around with a sticky face, you can keep it on there. But yeah, honey works really, really well. And probably the last thing I'd recommend. Another thing that most folks should have around their house is anyways, because it has some great kind of like internal yeast and bacterial cleansing properties. And it's very alkalinic. It's apple cider vinegar. And that's also great topically for these type of things. And very similar to the way that you use baking soda or you'd use tea tree oil. You can use a cotton ball. You put some apple cider vinegar on the cotton ball and you just dab that all over the affected area and you let the skin absorb it. You leave it there for 10, 15 minutes and then you wash it off. And that's another way that you could do it. So you could use apple cider vinegar. You could use an exfoliator. You could use like the tea bag method. You could use manuka honey, and you could use essential oils. All things that, you know, we. We have certain things that are just like staples in our house anyway. And probably everything that I've just described except sugar are things that I recommend kind of having around anyways in your natural care medicine cabinet. So try out some of those things. And that's what I would do.

So how does exfoliating make the hair not grow back in on itself?

Well, it helps the ingrown hair actually come out of the skin. It removes dead skin cells, and it actually will pull the ingrown hair out of the skin. As you're rubbing that exfoliator into your skin, because it's an exfoliator, it creates a friction. So as you're. As you're rubbing and creating that friction, the ingrown hair is coming out.

Okay, so the. So the dry skin or the dead skin or whatever was holding it in, and then once it's gone, then it can rise.

It can, it can rise like a phoenix from the ashes out of your.

Skin, display itself in all its curly.

Glorious in your beard or your pubes. So gotcha. Yes, there you go. Help that little ingrown hair become the ingrown hair that it was always meant to be.

I'm glad you said pubes.

Hi Ben, my name is am Henry and I'm calling because I'm curious if you've ever heard of Applied Movement Neurology. It's a program certification application where you learn about the nervous system as a pertains to movement blending, functional neurology, biomechanics gymnastics, hand balancing and martial arts. It's supposed to increase strength, improve mobility, and enhance athleticism. I'm curious if, again, if you've heard of Applied Movement Neurology, if you know anything about this program and if it's worthy of looking into further as. As someone in health and wellness, I'm a personal trainer and I am really big into progressive calisthenics. I feel like it's very holistic, as a holistic approach to strength building. And this Applied Movement Neurology seems like something that could pair up really well with that.

And.

Yeah, I'm just curious what your opinion is. Okay, thank you.

I had a sneaking suspicion when I first heard this question that we talked about this before, but after I did a bunch of searching around on the website, I don't think we have.

We haven't. We've talked about something that's basically the same before and that's Z Health. And both Z Health and Applied Movement Neurology are based off of, of the same type of theory of activation of the brain and the nervous system and optimizing activation of the brain and the nervous system by training the brain and the nervous system and kind of getting the ultimate combination of balance and eye movement and joint motion and coordination and the activation of proprioceptors or the cells in our joint that can sense movement and kind of using movement patterns, using training to actually get all of the complexities of the nervous system to work together. So that's kind of the idea behind Applied Movement Neurology or behind Z Health, is that your brain and your body will basically get better and work better together when they practice or get exposed to certain movement patterns. And this can also help with everything from like corrective exercise to pain relief. So, for example, one of the things that Z Health has is they've got this thing called the Vision Gym that allows you to actually not have to wear glasses anymore. It retrains your eyes. And I own the system. And it's just a series of eye charts that you use to train your eyes. It's a series of exercises that you do with a pencil, like divergence and convergence. Convergence exercises as you hold a pencil close to your face and then farther away from your face, you do the same thing with your hands. You practice tracing giant circles with your eyes. You do palming exercises and cupping exercises over your eyes. You've got balancing exercises where you're balancing and looking at an object close to you while you're standing on one foot, and then an object farther away from you while you're standing on one foot. And it's just a way in which you're training your nervous system to communicate with your joints. And this feedback tells your body where it's at in space. It tells your eyes where they're at in space. It tells your body how fast your appendages are moving. It helps to retrain movement patterns, it helps to train your nerves. I mean, your nervous system is the fastest system of the body, and your nerves communicate with lightning speed. And what you're trying to do is train all that to work in coordination. And when you look at faulty movement patterns or you look at bad eyesight, or you look at muscles that someone has a hard time turning on or coordinating during performance, a lot of times it's not musculoskeletal, it's nervous system related. And a system like Z Health or Applied Movement Neurology is basically one of those things where you're training your nerves. And you know, if you look at this from a simplistic standpoint, you can do everything from making sure that you're not neglecting balance exercises in the gym, to doing plyometrics, to training your eyes, to even like training your ears, to training your joints. And that's the basics behind it. And I've never really done much with Applied Movement neurology, but I do own some of the Z Health stuff. I plan on going to one of the Z Health certs sometime in early 2015. I plan on going to one of those and I'll put a link in the show notes over at@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 297 to the podcast that we do with Eric from Z Health because it actually is a really cool program and you can just get books and CDs and this vision gym that I mentioned, for example, from them to fix your eyes and make it so you don't have to wear glasses. And it's really amazing stuff that not a lot of people are tapping into.

Cool. So you're going to actually become a certified Zed health practitioner.

I don't know if I'm going to be a certified practitioner, but I mean, basically like the people that run and own Z Health, I've met them at a few conferences and every time I meet them, they try and convince me to come to one of their certs. And I really want to because like, again, like I mentioned, like, even just this vision gym thing that I own is amazing. Like I've got 2020 vision anyways, but I've done it a few times, stuck in the DVD DVDs and use some of the little eye chart patterns and like the 3D vision charts that come with the program just to train my eyes and keep them activated. And just as some kind of fun to do as nervous system training. And those type of things are great on a recovery day, right? On a day where you're not going to go beat yourself up with a weight training session or a swim or a bike or a run, you can just train your vision or you can train your nerves and you can do this kind of stuff without really beating up your muscles and your joints. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of the system and you should check them out. And I'll just put a link to the podcast that we do with the folks at Z Health, but I suspect it's very, very similar. Even though I haven't seen any of this stuff from Applied Movement Neurology, I suspect they're probably pretty similar.

Very cool.

Yes sir. And speaking of a very, very cool.

That's what I was going to say.

We got a very, very cool review that someone left us. And as usual, if you go to itunes and you leave the show a review and we read your review on the show, then you get a sexy Ben Greenfield fitness gear package sent straight to you. And if you want to see what you get, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness dot com gear you'll see the sweet type T shirt, you'll see the water bottle, see the beanie hats, all that fun stuff. So check it out. And if you hear your review read on the show, just email Ben greenfield fitness.com and we'll send you, we'll sell you, we'll send you free straight to your doorstep. Something cool. Before we read today's review though, just real quick, I did mention last week that we are looking for a main sponsor for BenGreenfieldFitness.com this means that you get a featured sidebar ad that's going to get exposed to the 350,000 unique visitors that we get each month to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and what we are looking for specifically I can tell you the exact dollar amount is we're looking for an $8,000 sponsor for the year, which is actually compared to most advertising fees, that's actually a pretty slamming good deal for a year long. Sidebar ad@bengreenfieldfitness.com do not apply. If you happen to be a Business that specializes in something that we do not support. For example, if you know the CEO of Little Debbie Snapcakes, we probably will not feature their sidebar ad on the show. But if you or someone you know happens to come to mind as being someone who would fit as like, a cool corporate sponsor or personal sponsor of the Ben Greenville Fitness podcast, just email BenGreenfieldFitness.com and again, it's 8K for the year. Featured Sidebar Ad, 350,000 unique views a month. And specifically, what we would be using your sponsor money for is for the actual Internet fees to support this show. So there you go. That being said, Brock, what do you think? You want to read the review?

I just want to. I want to be one of the sponsors and just, like, have my picture.

Just your picture.

Like, not sell anything. Just be, like, just me.

Just your beard with a few random ingrown hairs. Yes, yes.

Some really good infected ones. That'll teach the people who go to the website. Okay. Anyway, yeah, the review is from. Hey, it's from kl. Isn't that Superman's name?

I have no idea.

Yeah, I think that's his real name. Damn. Superman reviewed the show. Nice. It goes like this. Ben delivers great content in a way that credits the listener with some intelligence, but also demands that his guests know and can back up what they are saying. Ben is a respectful devil's advocate who helps his guests get their main points across clearly and convincingly. Do you think of yourself as a devil's advocate?

Absolutely.

You advocate for the devil?

I advocate for the devil.

I appreciate. I appreciate Ben's healthy skepticism when no science substantiates claims and his support of an idea when the science is there. If you want to follow a hacker extraordinaire, then get in the Ben Greenfield pit. Pitness Podcast. The Ben Greenfield Podcast Train. I'm feel I'm sleeping, eating, and exercising better after about 10 episodes, you will, too.

My healthy skepticism.

Yeah.

Yes. Well, cool.

It's better than an unhealthy skepticism, which is what I have.

It's very polite and kind review, and I cannot think of anything bad to say to KL or anything I could say that would give him a hard time. Usually I give our reviewers a pretty hard time, but that was actually pretty good. Aside from the fact that he says he's sleeping, eating, and exercising better after about 10 episodes, when, in fact, we have hundreds and hundreds of episodes. So, kl, you need to get busy neglecting your family, your friends, your career and your hobbies and just start listening into to all those back episodes.

So I think he has to start neglecting his sleeping, eating and exercising.

That's right. So that being said, you probably want to, after listening to this episode, rush out and make yourself a kale smoothie with brownies in it. So make sure that you're doing so wearing your brand new training mask from trainingmask.com use your 20% discount code BEN2014 check out everything from today's show over on the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 297 don't forget to hyperoxygenate while you're making your kale smoothie with brownies wearing your training mask. And until next time and have a Great week.

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

You.