Is Your Blood Pressure Too Low?, WiFi & Kids, Natural Surgery Preparation & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, is your blood pressure too low? Wi fi and kids what to do before and after surgery to recover faster. Spreading exercise through the day versus doing it all at once and are raw sweet potatoes healthy.

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

Hey Ben, I gotta say, you're sounding a little lackluster this morning. What's up?

I am a little lackluster. Dude. I'm beat up. I gotta tell you. I am. I am full on beat up. I did those back to back spartan races in the backwoods of Montana over the weekend.

I hear you had a little bit of tummy trouble.

Little bit of tummy trouble. A lot of people I've been talking to around here have been coming down with some kind of a stomach bug, a flu, whatever. And then starting at about midnight last night, I've been, I've been essentially peeing out my butt for the past eight hours. So. Dude, that's been fun. Yeah, I actually, for, for the, for the purposes of recording this podcast, and this just highlights my devotion to our listeners. I took about 2,000 milligrams of activated charcoal to just try and, and soak up some of the, some of the liquids. I tried to appease the gods of my stomach with little inulin and green banana and potato extract. It's basically a. Have you heard of this natural stacks stuff?

I think I just heard your stomach make a crazy noise, actually.

Yeah, my stomach literally just rumbled. It's been rumbling all night.

Okay. So everybody has to pay attention, listen for that. Yeah, I totally can be. A lot of the natural stack stuff.

Can be a drinking game. Yeah. So it's a resistant starch, but. And I'm really not into this whole resistant starch diet thing, but it actually is a good way to soak up excess gas and things like that in your tummy. And also I, I took some probiotics and that really helps to maximize the effects of probiotics when you put a prebiotic like inulin or green potato starch or something like that. So that was one reason that I had that for breakfast. The other reason is that normally if I were sick with something like this stomach bug, and this is very weird for me, I rarely, if Ever get sick? Unless I'm off traveling in some strange Asian continent. Anyways, normally I would do, like, the whole. What's it called? The Bart thing. Bananas, applesauce, rice, and toast, I think are the four. And we don't really happen to have any of those items in our house. So I was digging through my pantry. I'm like, okay, well, this is pretty close. Green banana extract and potato starch with some inulin. So anyways, if you hear an explosion or I spontaneously combust during this episode, you now know why.

In between trips to the bathroom, Ben has been tweeting stuff out as normal@twitter.com BenGreenfield and this is the time when we will dissect. That's right, Snoozes.

And. And this first news flash is about actually how you can avoid getting the sh. Ts.

Hey, and that's with a Z, everybody. With a curse when you say it with a Z.

That's right. S H, I, T, Z. Although we now have to either mark this episode as explicit or insert a cowbell, a horn, or just the standard bleep whenever I say the word. Okay, now that we did a lot.

Of work for me.

Dude, out of the way.

Hilarious work.

Now that we have that out of the way, this actually is referring to bicarbonate. And since we've already talked about diarrhea and opened that can of worms on the show, we might as well start thinking talking about it again. So bicarbonate is a known sports performance enhancing aid. So when you exercise, you get an increased concentration of protons or H plus ions, especially when you're fatigued. We're talking about hard exercise like weightlifting or sprints or something along those lines. And when you put yourself in a temporary state of what's called metabolic alkalosis, and this is a state in which you are, of course, raising the pH and buffering those hydrogen ions, what can happen is you actually have an increased time to fatigue or better performance during short, intense types of exercise. We're talking about, like, glycolytic, explosive type of exercise, potentially even something as long as, like a, um. A good example would be like a 1500 meter race, right? Where you're definitely going for longer than two minutes.

Oh, okay. I was thinking like 90 seconds kind of effort, but yeah, longer than that.

Yeah. And I even experimented with. With alkalinizing agents for things like sprint triathlons, where you're. You're definitely far outside of the aerobic zone. But the. The problem is that you get diarrhea or stomach upset from this type of thing. I mean, I've even recommended the use of baking soda before to get your, your morning movement going on. However, this article and I'll link to it in the show notes in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 317 but what this article goes into is the fact that if you space your dosage of something like sodium bicarbonate and we're just talking about standard baking soda and you ingest a small amount and the exact amount, if you want to do the math, is actually 0.1 grams per kilogram. So small amount 90 minutes and then 60 minutes and then 30 minutes before the big workout or event or whatever it is that you're preparing for, you can actually significantly reduce the risk of developing gastrointestinal symptoms. And then if you at the same time have just a little bit of protein and carbohydrate, we're talking about, for example, let's say 10 grams of whey protein with a little bit of a potato starch or rice starch or something like that, that can still allow you to be, by the time you finished all this in a pretty significant state of metabolic alkalosis without the stomach upset. So it's almost a way to biohack your baking soda, if you will. And this would be something relevant if you, let's say you are a swimmer and you're at a meet and you've got a 500 meter, let's say you're doing a 500 meter freestyle or 400 IM or something like that. This would be a case where experimenting with this type of thing in practice first, last thing you want to do is leave a floater in the pool.

Yeah, not in the pool.

And then in your race this is kind of a perfect situation where to use something like this. So I'll link to the article in the show notes. But baking soda has always been a proven sports performance enhancing aid. But up until I'd seen this article, I'd never really seen a way to mitigate some of the potentially unpleasant side effects.

So would you choose something like this over one of the actual, I don't know, one of the pre prepared pills like an extreme endurance or one of those other ones, runner's legs or somebody's legs.

Well, a lot of those are designed to do the same thing. But frankly if you look at the dosage in most cases, anything like that, you know, sport legs or extreme endurance or something like that, the doses aren't very close to what they're using in Literature, they're not even close. And so it's a little bit of a head scratcher for me to, you know, it's kind of like creatine, right? Like creatine monohydrate has been shown to be everything from a cognitive performance enhancer to, you know, something that can increase strength and power significantly at doses of about 5 grams per day. But you'll purchase many creatine capsules or creatine powders, and a serving is a gram. So you always have to pay attention to what's actually in a supplement or compound versus what the research is showing is effective. So cool. Yeah. Another interesting article was in Fast Company magazine, well, not really the magazine, but the website. And it was about an experiment on what happens to your body when everything you eat is organic. What they actually did, this was a Swedish grocery store chain called Co Op that has been working for quite a while, a few decades, I believe, to educate consumers on the benefits of eating organic and switching to organic food and even increasing the amount of organic food production in Sweden. And, and what they did was they took a Swedish family, the Palmbergs, classic Swedish name, of course, the Palmers.

I love those folks.

Delightful people, Good old Palmbergs. And they had them do a three week experiment where they simply switched everything that they were eating and they were eating quite a bit of conventional food. They switched everything to organic. And then they did urine samples each day. And the results are actually pretty shocking when you look at the chart and you can visit the article again, we'll put a link@bengreenfieldfitness.com 317 the urine samples in the beginning showed almost every single pesticide that you'd find growing on typical non organic produce and meat, et cetera, in their urine. And afterwards it had all completely disappeared, all of these harmful pesticides. So it was kind of interesting. They've done similar experiments with things like personal care products like phthalates and parabens and shampoos and how they show up in your urine as few as three hours after. But I know that this is just an n equals 1, but it's actually quite interesting. And for me, when I'm walking through the grocery store and trying to prioritize organic versus non organic, because I know we posted this on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook page and some people were like, it's so expensive. Generally, if you want to at least budget, just look at anything that you would eat the skin of, right? A carrot, a tomato, a peach, et cetera. For all of those, you are Definitely going to benefit from going organic. But I mean, you know, avocado, you know, you've got a little bit of skin on there, so you're gonna get fewer pesticide and herbicide residues. Banana, same thing. So some of these things where you don't eat the skin. I know, Po, probably some of our biohacky listeners do indeed eat the banana pill and the avocado skin. But for those of you who consume your food normally, that's one rule that I'll, that I'll follow when I'm at the grocery store. As far as the actual skin vs non skin version, you know, the one.

Part of that study that I found most intriguing was the 30% increase in the smugness of the individuals that were in the. Involved in it.

Yeah, yeah.

They were absolutely insufferable at cocktail parties.

Yes. And also just looked constipated pushing their giant shopping carts full of organic kale through the aisles of whole foods. Yes, I agree. Okay, so last thing, last one I wanted to mention. Moving on, moving on. So this was an article that was in the Telegraph about whether or not wifi is making your child ill. What has happened in France is they've actually banned WI fi in nursery schools and in primary schools. And this article was primarily an interview with a British expert in children's health and wireless radiation who has been giving up the use of wireless gadgets and trying to create a movement in schools to do things like hardwire into the router via the ethernet cables rather than having wifi bouncing around the school. And the article is chock full of all these. Again, not peer reviewed research, but anecdotal evidence of these children with migraines and headaches and behavioral issues, all of which began to arise in conjunction with switches to WI fi or the use of a new library that had a lot of routers and WI fi signals going around in it. And so it's really interesting. And a few other anecdotes that caught my eye were, first of all, Lloyd's of London. The major insurer, Lloyds of London will no longer include liability coverage for injuries resulting from electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetism, radio waves or noise, meaning that children who are exposed to any of these things, basically what the insurance company is realizing is that even though there may not be hard evidence, there's enough anecdotal evidence out there to where they're not even comfortable covering those type of injuries. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has now classified the electromagnetic radiation as a group 2B carcinogenic. And all that means is, is a possible cause of cancer. So we can't come out and say it's a carcinogen, but we can say it's possibly a carcinogen, which I would, I would certainly agree with based just on the evidence in terms of things like blood, brain barrier leakage, and in rodents exposed to not just WI fi, but also Bluetooth. And then the other interesting thing in this article was a quote from, from a scientist and he says we're living in an environment estimated to contain more than 10 billion times more electromagnetic radiation or radio frequency wireless radiation, you know, from, from phones and routers and things like that than we did in the 60s. And he says if this environment is safe, we're talking about in the order of 15,000 to 25,000 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals, all being wrong, meaning that he is actually aware of, you know, these thousands of papers that show that there are some issues with RF radiation. So it's, you know, it's something I'm very careful with with my kids. The kids have very thin skulls, they have high water content, they can absorb a lot more radiation, their neurons or cells are dividing more rapidly. And I just think, not only for adults, but especially for kids, this is something that we should, we should pay attention to.

Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, just recently started listening to your podcast and really enjoying the information you give. I have a question about low blood pressure. My blood pressure generally runs below 90 over 60. I've always been told how great that was, but ran across a comment from a nutritionist who indicated that low blood pressure is a reflection of an electrolyte deficiency in the blood. He claims that this can lead to a myriad of health related issues including depression and insomnia, both of which I have struggled with. I was wondering about your thoughts on this and if you had any ideas of how to raise blood pressure other than adding salt to your diet and mineral drops to water. Look forward to hearing your response. Thank you.

It's funny, it seems to be a lot of people lately have been talking about having low blood pressure. I feel like the 80s was the decade of high blood pressure and now the 2010s are. Or the low blood pressure era. Yeah, over the 90s I think everybody forgot about blood pressure and just got focused on grunge tech.

Tech and grunge, sure. If your blood pressure is low, all you gotta do is. Tell you what, Carl, you can come check my email inbox and just come check it every day. I guarantee your blood pressure will dramatically rise. Every morning without fail. It works like a charm. No, seriously, blood pressure being well below 90 over 60, 90 for systolic and 60 for diastolic, that can definitely be a potential issue. That's known as hypotension. And your blood pressure can become so low that it causes things like dizziness and fainting and fatigue and nausea and, gosh, I guess about everything I've been experiencing the past eight hours.

I think we just figured it out.

There we go. So that's considered hypotension. And it can even cause inadequate flow of blood to important organs like your brain and your kidneys and your heart. And so if you have low blood pressure and 90 over 60 is definitely low, you should not necessarily worry that something is broken with you, but you should at least look into a few things. And the first, really, the glaring thing here, and your nutritionist, it sounds like already mentioned this to you, is a potential for an electrolyte imbalance or deficiency. And I find that in most cases this happens in conjunction, at least in the exercise enthusiast population, in conjunction with adrenal fatigue. So the way that this works is in many cases, you'll find people who have adrenal fatigue, who have overtrained or who are overstressed from exercise or, you know, relationships, lifestyle, lack of sleep, whatever, they'll crave salt or they'll crave salty foods. And in addition, one of the tests for adrenal fatigue is the blood pressure test where you, you lay down and you take your blood pressure, then you stand up and you take your blood pressure. And if your blood pressure drops when you stand up, that can be a sign of what's called low aldosterone, which tends to go hand in hand with cortisol dysregulation that occurs during adrenal fatigue. You can also, if you don't want to, use a blood pressure cuff, if you go from lying to standing and you get dizzy or you're exercising and you go from, say, like doing some kind of a floor exercise, like planks, and you get up and you're doing, say, like running over to the treadmill and you're getting dizzy, well, that can also be a sign, assuming that you haven't been, you know, chugging alcohol before you launched into your workout routine, that you've got one of these low blood pressure over training or adrenal fatigue type of issues. So the way that this works is aldosterone is a steroid hormone and it's made by your adrenal glands. It regulates blood pressure. So Basically what happens is when your brain produces cortisol stimulating hormone, also known as acth, that's sent from the brain, and the brain is monitoring the amount of circulating cortisol that is occurring. And so high cortisol is going to tend to lower the brain's ACTH production. Okay, so being stressed out will cause the brain to lower its ACTH production. When that happens, you get decreased aldosterone secretion and that leads to lower blood pressure. And when you get that lower blood pressure, a lot of times what happens? One of the ways that aldosterone lowers blood pressure is by creating an electrolyte imbalance, basically imbalance of sodium, potassium, magnesium, et cetera. And this is also why in many cases, if you have insomnia and you hear your heart beating in your head, if you're over trained or stressed out, as you're trying to fall asleep at night, getting up and drinking a glass of water with a little bit of sea salt or like a salt with a good mineral spectrum in it, like I use this Aztec and salt stuff that can be very helpful in helping you to fall asleep and helping to address some of those electrolyte imbalances. So that's one thing that I would look into. Now, how would you know if you had some kind of an adrenal fatigue issue? The main test that you can get is called an adrenal stress index. Adrenal stress index or an ASI test. It's a salivary panel. You could get that from a company like Direct Labs. We'll put a link in the show notes to that one. But that would be one thing that could cause this. However, there are other ways that you can raise blood pressure if you just tend to be one of those people who walks around with slightly low blood pressure. So some of the major things, in addition to getting a little bit of extra salt in your diet, extra electrolytes in your diet. One is caffeinated beverages. Those can temporarily increase blood pressure. And people with hypotension by using caffeine from like coffees and teas throughout the day, can mitigate some of the dizziness effects of hypotension. However, I'm not too enchanted with that as a healthy approach. Right. Just like drinking coffee all day long to get your blood pressure up. Just something seems wrong with that somehow. So there are a few other things though. In ayurvedic medicine, raisins are a traditional remedy used for treating hypotension naturally. And you just soak 30 to 40 raisins in a cup of water overnight, and then you eat them in the morning on an empty stomach. And you can even drink the water in which the raisins were soaked. And that can help to increase your blood pressure, possibly because it's just so frustrating standing there eating these raisins one raisin at a time as you wake up in the morning. It doesn't seem super efficient, but hey, that's just me. Holy basil. It's an herb that's beneficial for low blood pressure. It's got a lot of vitamin C and magnesium and potassium in it. So that's one of those things that's good to have if you're also like in a state of adrenal fatigue or stress. Holy basil is actually very good. Licorice is another licorice can. Well, if you have high blood pressure already, you should actually stay away from licorice based remedies. But licorice actually blocks the enzyme that breaks down cortisol and supports healthy adrenal function. And especially in someone who has like chronic fatigue syndrome or like full blown adrenal fatigue, where they simply aren't producing enough cortisol, licorice can not only help to normalize low blood pressure, but it can also help to increase or at least keep cortisol levels a little bit more elevated. So licorice is another one. Beetroot juice. And okay, so this is kind of funny. Beetroot juice can help with both hypotension and hypertension. Beetroot juice is just this dark red color. It's great for your blood. Nature gives us clues like that and, you know, like beetroot juice being all dark and red, it's actually something very supportive for, for blood issues. But I've been drinking because beet performer, this company that sells like this dense, dense extract of beet juice in a can, they are a sponsor of team Timex, the triathlon team that I'm on.

Oh, cool.

And so they just sent cases and cases of this beat performer to my house. And so I've just been. I've been drinking a can of beet juice usually in the afternoons at some point before my workout. Well, of course, yesterday I had a can of beet juice. And then last night, when all hell broke loose, it really looked like someone got murdered in the toilet. It was, it was not, not a good look.

It's a bad combo.

Yeah, really bad combo. Beet juice plus any type of stomach flu or stomach bug that involves stuff coming out your backside. Not. Not really a good combo. But beet juice can also help with, with low blood pressure. Rosemary is another. Rosemary can help to improve circulation. It's a good central nervous system stimulant. You can use a rosemary tincture, rosemary essential oil, or even just cook quite a bit with rosemary type of herbs. And that would be another kind of common home remedy for low blood pressure. And then the last is lemon juice. Lemon juice, especially if you have low blood pressure related to dehydration or not drinking enough water. Lemon juice can actually help you retain a little bit of water. It's kind of a great little morning tonic. Anyways, I'm a big fan of lemon juice. I've talked about it before, lemon juice and lemon essential oil, but that would be another. So I know that's a lot of different things to try or whatever, but if you did want to raise your blood pressure, especially if you're experiencing dizziness and nausea and some of these things related to blood pressure, those are a few things that I would try. Stand there in the morning eating your 30 to 40 raisins, one raisin at a time. Follow up with some beet juice and get one of these adrenal stress index tests and you'll be off to the races.

Hey, Ben and Brock, Lucy here from Australia, huge fan of your podcast. Thank you so much for all the information and entertainment. Absolutely love listening to you guys. My question is regarding my 7 year old daughter who has to have an operation this year for removal of adenoids, tonsils and a bent septum. She struggles to breathe and her doctor says this really is the only way forward for her. I'm wondering what I can do to prepare her gut for this operation and what I might need to do post operation so she recovers quickly from the anesthetic and antibiotics. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and keep up the good work. Thank you.

Do you still have your tonsils?

I do, I do. What do you call it? Tonsillectomy. Tonsillectomy. That was not on my list of childhood procedures. As a matter of fact, I've. I've never, I've never really broken a bone. Aside from little, you know, little potential like stress fractures in my toes or fingers that I suspect were stress fractures but went away. I've never had any major surgeries. I have never had my tonsils or my appendix or anything like that removed. So I've gotten lucky in that regard.

Yeah, I'd say so.

Anyways, though I have to be careful when I respond to a question like this that involves a kid in surgery just because I'M not a doctor. This podcast is not medical advice and is not meant to be misconstrued as such. And so all I can tell you are the type of things that I would do myself if I were going in for surgery. And I'm gonna have to leave it at that. And I will certainly let you know if anything I mentioned is definitely inappropriate for a child. But I can jump into some of the things that I would do if, if it were me. So as far as surgery goes, there there are a few things that can help to do things like reduce wound healing time and reduce wound size and help boost your immune function to help ward off infection. One is zinc. And a lot of people these days are they have zinc deficiencies. And in most cases for an adult, if you're looking at like, like a zinc supplement, it's around like the 10-30mg type of range. But using zinc orally for anywhere from four to six weeks prior to a surgery, because that's about how long it takes to actually address a zinc deficiency, can help out quite a bit to heal wounds. The same thing if you've gotten very sick or you've gotten injured or you have some kind of a, specifically a wound, like a skin wound or some kind of bacterial growth, Zinc can be one of the things to look into. Vitamin C has been used for a very long time, Since World War II surgeons were using it to assist with surgery recovery in their patients. Now, vitamin C, you can only have about 1500 milligrams or 1.5 grams of vitamin C, kind of able to be absorbed in a typical adult at any given time. And so even though taking as much as 5 to 6 grams of vitamin C in a day can help quite a bit with everything from collagen production to strengthening your immune system to strengthening scar tissue to reducing tissue death, you want to split it up into three to five daily or three to five per day doses of vitamin C. There are a variety of ways to get vitamin C. The one that's been recommended to me and the one that I've used when I need to increase my vitamin C intake is made by a company called American Nutraceuticals. It's a vitamin C powder, and I can link to that one in the show notes for you, but it's called American Nutraceuticals. It's a vitamin C powder. And that one I've found to be okay to consume in terms of high amounts without getting a lot of, of stomach distress. So we'll put that one in the show notes for you. And then there's a few other things that can help out. One that I would look into would be proteolytic enzymes. And these are things like bromelain that you'd find in the stems of pineapples, papain, which comes from papayas, trypsin and chymotrypsin, which a lot of times you'll find in meat. Not only can taking high amounts of proteolytic enzymes when you're injured, when you've had a sprain or a strain, help quite a bit with inflammation and with breaking down the fibrinogen, that can cause things like soreness and inflammation, but it can also be something to use to help heal more quickly from surgery. So that would be another one. And it's just basically an enzyme. So bromelain, papain, trypsin and chymotrypsin, those are all in the Nature Flex. So there's this joint and bone and muscle support compound called Nature Flex that I actually have over at Greenfield Fitness Systems. And it's, it's all these things, you know, tart cherry extract and vitamin C and proteolytic enzymes and glucosamine and chondroitin. It's like a shotgun approach to supporting your joints and ligaments and muscle and bone. So that one is okay for kids to take. You know, for my kids, I'd only give them about one capsule or so because you don't need that much. But I mean, I've used as many as 12 a day when I've been injured. And that stuff is called Nature Flex. So it has those, those proteolytic enzymes and stuff like that in there. A couple others that I'd mention, one would be chlorella. There's a lot of Japanese studies that have found chlorella to be very effective in speeding up cell growth and to help naturally repair wounds. So chlorella is one that you could look into for a kid, you know, if they don't want to swallow capsules. There are chewable chlorella tablets called recovery bits. They're called recovery bits, and I actually have some in my refrigerator and I'll use them just as, like a snack. They're very filling as well, but they have a good detox effect and they may help with wound healing as well. So that's another one kids will enjoy.

How it turns your mouth crazy.

That's right. It will turn your mouth full on green. So you now know how to turn your poop red and your mouth green. And then the last thing that I'd mention if you do need to get on antibiotics would be, of course, to get on a good probiotic. And you can easily take a probiotic capsule and open that into like a glass of cold water. You know, you could put like, you know, some lemon juice and stevia in there for a kid, do something like that. Or you can, you know, you can put in a smoothie, you can put in applesauce, et cetera. So using a probiotic, especially if the child has to be on antibiotics or an adult has to be on antibiotics, that would be useful. Now, Dr. Jack Cruz, a friend of mine who's a neurosurgeon, he has all sorts of kind of, you know, radical ideas when it comes to surgery. A very good article that he's written called Perioperative Optimal Surgical Considerations. It's a fantastic title, by the way.

Just say it again.

Really makes you want to click on it. Perioperative Optimal Surgical Considerations. I'll link to this in the show notes for this episode. But basically what he goes into are not only some of the same type of nutrients that I've just mentioned. He's kind of on the same page as me with a lot of that stuff. But he'll use, for example, cold thermogenesis. He'll have his patients do a series of cold thermogenesis sessions to increase nitric oxide production and increase stress resilience going into surgery. And that's like cold showers, cold baths, even like cold packs placed over the areas that are going to be operated on. And in the case of a tonsillectomy, you know, I don't really see you necessarily holding a bag of ice against your neck. But for other surgeries, that's something that may come in handy. That would be something probably a little more pleasant for adults than kids. I don't know if you necessarily want to subject your child to an ice bath a day up until surgery, but that's something that he'll use. Another thing he does is during sleep, pre op and post op sleep, he'll make sure that there's not a lot of LED or artificial lights present and even use things like eye masks during sleep, just because this can help with neural repair and recovery so much when you're able to get into those deep sleep stages that can be interrupted by LED and artificial light. So that's another thing that he'll do. He's also a big fan of at least speaking with your surgeon about things that help to thin the blood just a little bit that act as natural anti platelets. So like resveratrol is one, fish oil is another. Of course, those are things that you definitely want a surgeon to know about if you're on any type of blood thinner going into surgery. But those can help in terms of like anti platelet and anti clotting factors. So he's got some interesting ideas like that in an article that I'll link to in the show notes. I think it's especially interesting his thoughts about sleeping in a very black room and using cold thermogenesis, going in and out of a surgery.

Unlike Ben, he is a doctor.

So he is a doctor. And then kind of along the same lines, there's some evidence that acupuncture can help speed wound recovery. If you've gotten surgery and you actually have a, a wound, you know, like a knee surgery or hip surgery, and you want to, you want, you want to help eliminate scar tissue, that's one thing. And sunlight can also accelerate wound healing quite dramatically. You've probably noticed this if you've had like a cut or a scrape or a bruise, when it gets exposed to sunlight, it actually heals a little bit more quickly. So that'd be another one to look into. Would be just a good amount of sunlight exposure, which is good for you anyways. So those are some of the things that I would do if I were going in for surgery. I'd definitely use some vitamin C and zinc. I'd definitely work in proteolytic enzymes or some of this nature flex stuff. I'd do some chlorella. I'd do some cold thermogenesis and make sure the sleep was really solid and then get lots of phototherapy. Sunlight exposure, possibly if I wanted to reduce scar tissue formation, acupuncture. But at the same time, I also think scars are pretty badass. May skip the acupuncture.

Hi, Ben and Brock, it's John here from London. I'm a big fan of the podcast. Please keep it up.

So I had a question.

Ben mentioned he sometimes does pull ups when walking by his pull up bar during the day. I work from home and also do the same thing at times. So, you know, occasionally I'll do maybe five sets of 15 pull ups throughout the course of a day. I'd read about people following the Charles Atlas type bodyweight routines who do this sort of training. So lots of press ups, pull ups anywhere between 20 and 40 reps per set throughout the day. So you can end up doing quite large numbers of press ups and pull ups. And I Just wondered how this compared to another type of training regime where you work out a specific time of day. But obviously you wouldn't be able to do as many reps in that space of time. So for example, something like 30 to 40 minutes of German volumetric training or superset training. Also doing press ups, dips, pull ups.

That sort of thing.

Hope this makes sense. And yeah, likewise, like I said, enjoy the podcast and yeah, keep up the good work. All the best.

Bye Bye.

John's kind of making me feel like a wimp right now. I'm doing, I'm, I'm only doing five pull ups. Every time I pass my bar, cop.

Out 15, 15 pull ups. And I actually, I don't, I have no clue what this German biometric training is that he's referring to.

So I'm assuming, you know, I don't.

I don't know what German. I thought German biometric training sounds like something you, some kind of a class you take before you go learn how to make a Volvo. I don't know German biometric training. No clue. But anyways, this is actually a good question, you know, whether you can get the same amount of benefit out of doing a high amount of reps throughout the day versus like a one a day really focused targeted workout. And it does kind of depend what we're talking about. So you can certainly, if you're just talking about fat loss and metabolism, the former approach, the approach that might be called greasing the groove by some, that's just like frequent low level physical activity throughout the day that has definitely been shown to keep metabolism more elevated and to burn more fat than like sitting in a chair all day and doing some monster exercise session at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. And there's actually a really good video about this. I don't know if you've seen this video, Brock. It's called the Truth About Exercise. No, I'll put a link to it. You can watch it for free on Vimeo. But they took three people and they put sensors on them to monitor their activity level. And one was a waitress and one was this business guy who just like sat around all day but then went to the gym every day. I don't remember, I don't remember now what the third one was anyways though. It was, it was the, the woman.

It was a German biometric.

Yeah. And then the person doing German biometric training. But the, the woman who wasn't exercising wasn't going to the gym. The waitress, she was actually the One with the highest overall activity level. And, you know, it's kind of similar to my wife, for example. She spends all day, like, you know, tooling around in the kitchen and gardening and pushing wheelbarrows around and carrying rocks and, you know, occasionally chopping wood. And she actually doesn't do formal exercise very much.

Your wife is an old timey pioneer woman.

She's an old timey pioneer. She wears a calico dress. She'll typically ride a horse.

And a bonnet.

She rides a horse, yeah. Wearing a bonnet to the grocery store to pick up things like bags of rice and sugar cubes. Bless her heart. Yeah. Straight out of A Little House on the Prairie.

Exactly.

Jessa Ingalls Wilder. Anyways, though, the takeaway point here is if we're just talking about fat loss and increasing the metabolism, the approach of staying engaged in low level physical activity throughout the day is superior. Now, if we're talking about muscle gain or actual physical performance, then things change a little bit. So what I mean by that is, first of all, when you are exercising and you're doing multiple sets all at a, all at a time, you know, like a, like a traditional exercise session where you might do three, four, five, six sets for, say, like, your arms, as you're training to failure, near the end of those ladder sets, all of your smaller muscle fibers are becoming fatigued. And what happens is your nervous system is forced to use a lot of the body's larger fast twitch muscle fibers. And when that happens, you create more activity in what are called the satellite cells that are responsible for growing new muscle and increasing the, you know, kind of like the anabolic muscle building type of response. So you don't get that same fatigue effect by spreading out smaller sets throughout the day simply because you're not getting to the point or you've exhausted your smaller muscle fibers and are moving on to the larger fast twitch muscle fibers. The other thing that happens when you are doing multiple exercise sets in a row or doing a, you know, a more formal exercise session is you get a lot more localized lactic acid in the, in the area around the muscle. And when that happens, when you get that localized lactic acid, not only do you trigger an increase in the enzymes that are responsible for buffering lactic acid, which can come in quite handy, you know, if you're, if you're competing in sports in which you need to kind of push past the burn, but when you increase intramuscular lactic acid, you also get an increase in intramuscular growth factors, including growth hormone. You Know, you get a big dump in growth hormone, you get a big dump in nitric oxide as blood rushes in to remove a lot of the protons that build up during exercise. You get a shuttling of lactic acid into glucose formation in your liver to help feedback and fuel the exercise even more. So there's a little bit of a metabolic efficiency response. So all those things happen and they only happen when you're actually training the muscle, typically in a more formal exercise session that you wouldn't experience by spreading exercise throughout the day. So it's kind of the difference between health and longevity versus performance. If you want to get all the performance and muscle building factors you do need to do a more traditional exercise session, then the other thing would just be mental focus fortitude, especially for athletes out there. I mean it is difficult to charge through a 60 or a 90 minute exercise session. You know, like my workout yesterday for example, you know, I, I could have walked all day and stopped occasionally throughout the day to do burpees. But my actual exercise session yesterday was 54100 yard sprints with 5 burpees after each sprint. So I used, actually I used pennies to keep track. So I took out 27 pennies. So every time I'd go down and back, I'd take one penny out of the cup and put it on the ground. And extremely difficult exercise in terms of not just lactic acid, but also just mental tolerance. Right. Like that's one of those exercise sessions that I'll rely on in a race when the going gets tough and I just need to buckle down and focus. And so again, I could have done for the 12 hours of the day, every half hour I could have stopped and done five burpees and then maybe gone out into the yard and done a hundred yard sprint. And by the end of the day I would have done the same amount of work. But the latter approach of spreading things out throughout the day wouldn't have given me quite the performance and the mental benefits and the lactic acid and the growth hormone benefits. So that's kind of where I'm at as far as that goes. I guess the other thing is if you're concerned about basically over training or draining energy, the former approach of spreading things out throughout the day can actually be better. And the reason for that is that training to failure, doing multiple sets all in a row, that increases levels of something called nucleotide adenosine monophosphate, which is also abbreviated amp, very dramatically compared to doing like non failure based exercise and elevated amp is a sign that your cell is drained of energy. And when that happens, you can actually get a decrease in protein synthesis. So ironically, digging into the well, too much can actually hold you back from an anabolic and a growth hormone perspective. So it's about finding balance and perhaps not doing a formal exercise set to failure every single day of the week, but at least having a couple of times a week where you do push your muscles to failure more than what you do if you were, say, spreading things out throughout the day. So there you go.

I gotta know why 54 times.

I'll talk about this on a future podcast once I'm ready to make the announcement, so to speak. But I have hired a coach, specifically a coach who specializes in training obstacle course athletes, because I've realized that even though I'm getting much better at climbing walls and climbing ropes and throwing spears, my running, you know, I've only really been doing this whole obstacle racing spartan thing for the past year, but my running really isn't getting any faster. And I think one reason for that is I'm doing all my own workouts, my own standby workouts. I'm not really super motivated to push myself in my workouts. I'm not going outside my comfort zone when I'm doing, you know, I, I won't lie, I'm a good coach, right? Like I coach a lot of high level athletes. But you know, if you, if you want to have a bad coach, then coach yourself. Or, you know, the phrase goes something like that. So ultimately I, I needed a source of extrinsic motivation and a touch of, a touch of uniqueness to my workouts that I wouldn't be doing myself. So as far as why 54, probably the reason is that all of the sprints were done at just a little touch over 5k speed. And if you look at that workout, it's pretty close to running a 5k, but just all split up into multiple little 100 yard sprints.

Hey Ben and Brock, quick question about your opinion of raw sweet potatoes in the evening. I've developed a habit of having a few slices of raw sweet potatoes after dinner to sort of cure the after dinner munchies. A few thin slices of raw organic sweet potato. Pretty tasty. Don't knock it until you try. It doesn't cause me any stomach issues or anything like that, but I was just wondering what your opinion of eating raw sweet potatoes was. Thanks for a great show.

I believe that's how you get worms, isn't it? At least that's what My mom told me when I was a kid and I'd start like sneaking the potatoes off the counter.

I'm pretty sure that's pork, actually, Brock. A little bit of a difference.

Straight up trichinosis.

Yeah, yeah. You know, we did. Remember when we did that whole sweet potato yam episode? Because a lot of people think like sweet potatoes are yams. When you go to the grocery store, you've got like the. The nice yellowish orange potato that they call a yam. And then you have the white ish potato that they call the sweet potato. Remember that episode we did?

I don't. I'm a little worried about myself now.

I feel like the Saturday Night Live episode now where Chris what's his face is interviewing celebrities and he's like, remember that? Remember that time in the movie? That's how awesome interview goes.

That was awesome.

Remember that movie? Remember that time? Remember that time? That was. That was awesome. Remember that podcast, Brock? Remember that?

Remember that was awesome.

It was awesome. So sweet potato and a yam, at least in most grocery stores in like the US and Canada and most civilized countries, they're the same thing. They're both potatoes. So yams are potatoes and sweet potatoes are potatoes. Really a true yam is like that.

I believe one is a potato, actually purplish thing.

It's like the purplish tuberous root vegetable that's a real yam. And yams a lot of times are huge. Some grow as big as five feet long and they've got like this blackish brown bark like skin. And typically the flesh is like purple or red. Far different than the type of sweet potatoes or yams that we find at the typical supermarket here in the US or Canada or anywhere else. But kind of a. Kind of off the topic. Slightly off the topic, I guess.

Five feet long.

Yeah. Yams can get huge, huge. Yeah, I've seen some really big yams in Hawaii, actually. So when we look at potatoes, I'm going to link in the shownotes over@bengreenfieldfitness.com 317 to a very interesting study that they've done on the toxicity of a variety of root vegetables, tubers, cassava, things of that nature. And the interesting thing is that a lot of these underground tubers and these type of things that we eat that are growing in the ground, they do have quite a high level of toxicity, particularly toxicity to neural tissue and toxicity to gut cells based on the fact that they naturally kind of protect themselves. When we look at the sweet potato, one of the things that you'll have in a sweet potato is something called a trypsin inhibitor. And a trypsin inhibitor basically inhibits part of your ability to be able to digest some of the proteins that are in that actual sweet potato. And it can also do a little bit of damage to your gut the same way that eating like unfermented soy can cause some issues. Now, particularly even more concerning to me, I guess, at this point in my day, is that sweet potatoes contain raffinose. And raffinose is a sugar that's responsible for extreme flatulence. And when you are cooking a sweet potato and you're heating it up, you know, boiling it, baking it, whatever, you inhibit that ability of raffinose to ferment. And so basically, by eating raw sweet potato, you may not be someone that your friends want to be around. So that'd be another. Another reason to be careful. Sometimes a sweet potato can have some fungal contamination, and baking will generally destroy a lot of those type of toxins. Excuse me, toxins. As, as can. Peeling the potato, when you peel it, you. You remove a lot of the alkaloids that a lot of people are sensitive to in terms of like, the, the same type of joint pain they'd get after eating nightshades like, like tomatoes and eggplants. You can get that from potatoes and sweet potatoes as well. So the article itself actually goes into everything from cyanide toxicity to some of the other alkaloids, like the alpha solanine and the alpha cacanine that you're going to find in potatoes, to calcium oxalate crystals, to a lot of issues that you'll find in many of these tubers and these underground roots that generally point out the fact that we would be pretty smart to, in most cases cook them. And in many cases, especially if we find that they don't make us feel all that well to peel them as well. So I am going to not hop on the eating raw sweet potatoes bandwagon at this point in my life. I will stick by my tried and true recipe, which is. Drumroll, please. Soak them in oil like a nice avocado or coconut or extra virgin olive oil. Put some paprika, some sea salt, some black pepper, and just a touch of cayenne in there and then mix them all together. So at this point, before doing all this to the potatoes, you've cut them into like steak fry style strips. Then you just lay all those out on a baking sheet and you bake them at about 350, 400, until they're nice and Crispy. Ah, it's heaven on a baking sheet.

You know what? I do almost exactly the same thing, except I wrap them in bacon.

Mmm. Bacon wraps. Bacon wrapped. Sweet potato fry. Sounds laborious. But delicious. Delicious.

Totally worth it.

Yeah. So speaking of a completely untouchable recipe, we actually have a review that someone left us for the show, so. Yeah. So here's the deal. Here's the deal. If you're listening and don't hit stop yet, I know you want to hit stop because it's like, the thing's over, blah, blah, blah, but you'll want to hear this review. It's pretty good.

If you'd hit stop last week, you would have missed out on the Sean Connery impression.

That's right. So anyways, if you leave a review on itunes, first of all, it's good karma for all of the laborious deliciousness we put into the show, even when we have diarrhea. But it also helps.

We do not have diarrhea.

Well, yes, I. Speaking for myself, do you. Don't yet, Brock.

My shorts are perfectly clean.

Yes. Anyways, though, if you leave an itunes review, we not only send you some cool gear, T shirt, water bottle, really cool beanie if your review gets read on the show, but you also help to increase the rankings. You get more eyeballs on the show. And if you go to it right now, you just go to itunes and you leave a review or you go to the show notes over@BenGreenFitness.com 317 and you leave a review, you'll get to see the new podcast artwork, which basically is me half naked looking like I stole something, and I'm jumping over a wall.

It looks like you're jumping a wall. Cause you robbed a liquor store.

Yeah, looks like I robbed a liquor store. Or I've got, like, a pack of cigarettes I grabbed out of the 7 11, and I'm. I'm running like hell. So anyways, though, leave a review. It helps. And today we have a review from Robarius called Untouchable. Brock, you want to take it away?

I had a Major League soccer player recommend Ben's book Beyond Training to me soon after I discovered his podcast and haven't looked back. Ben is an information machine, and his podcasts are like going to class where you walk away learning something, be it small or large. It's. I'm glad he differentiated between the classes where you walk out having learned nothing. Yeah.

Versus having learned all about liquid explosion poo.

Yeah. And how to make it crazy colors. You cannot go wrong with this podcast. This is the most informative and exciting source of information on health and fitness that I have found.

Well, that. That might be an over exaggeration. I. I wouldn't say we are the most exciting. I would say there's probably some kind of an ESPN football podcast out there somewhere that's just riveting, but we'll take second place. Okay.

I'm okay with that.

Okay.

I am proud to be a follower of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. If you are not a follower, you are missing out.

Yeah.

Thanks for all your hard work, Ben.

An information machine. I like that. Maybe I should begin to put a quarter in his ear. Information, beach juice, blood pressure.

There's actually a crank on the back of Ben's head and you just have to crank them up and the information flows.

That's right. It's called a propeller hat.

Yeah.

Keeps the ladies away. So anyways, though, that wraps up today's show. We do have a fantastic show coming this weekend. I don't know if you're a listener, you need to go back and listen to the show we did last weekend on how to get ripped with yoga, which was actually a pretty interesting episode this week. I'm trying to remember what our weekend episode is.

I think it's the apnea.

Oh, the sleep. Yeah, this is a good one. This is a really good one. You'll want to listen to this weekend's sleep apnea episode for sure. If you care at all.

What?

What?

All right, that was my sleep apnea impression.

All right, folks, have a healthy week.

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