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On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Anytime I suck at something, it just fuels me. Like I do not like to be bad at something that I want to try. And so they fly under the radar because I think they're super simple, they're not sexy, they don't have like frickin, you know, Chinese cistanche in them or whatever, but man, they frickin work. Once you do begin refeeding, and it can actually be used as a sports performance tactic in the same way that like, you know, avoiding caffeine for two weeks prior to a competition. Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Hey, how you guys all doing? Coach Mel here at Performance Challenge 2019 and we have Ben Greenfield. You guys, we are so lucky to get Ben with us. Ben is one of the most versatile athletes I've ever met. Is that fair to say, Ben?

Probably not, because I really cannot hit a home run, I can't kick a field goal, and I can't drive a golf ball more than about 200 yards without it going really funny directions.

Well, it's not bad. I mean, you could work on those things if you really wanted to. You know that he's a weightlifting champion, right?

Not that I'm aware of. That would probably due to my lanky limbs and body structure be a very bad idea.

Oh, no, I'm sorry, Bodybuilding. I'm sorry, you're.

I did do bodybuilding. I did do bodybuilding.

Yeah, sorry, not weightlifting. I'm totally throwing you under the bus here. I'm sorry. And a triathlon champion of all sorts, right?

Yeah, I did a lot of triathlons, a lot of bodybuilding, played college tennis in water polo, did a little competitive cycling, played for the volleyball team, and now I do obstacle course racing and bow hunting competitions, so.

And so forget about the bad place. He's a terrible athlete. He's not versatile at all.

Honestly. Honestly, I'm not, I'm not a gifted athlete. I, I gotta work my ass off for, for any sporting endeavor I do. And I think that's because, you know, I, I grew up, you know, homeschooled, playing freaking chess and was really good at like computer programming and writing fantasy fiction and doing all these kind of nerdy things. And I sucked at sports. And anytime I suck at something, it just fuels me. Like I, I do not like to be bad at something that I want to try. And so, you know, since, since like 13 years old, I've worked my ass off to be a decent athlete. But none of that shit comes naturally to me personally.

See? And that's exactly why we've got Ben here with us, you guys. I feel the exact same way about myself. He wrote a book called Beyond Training. New York Times best seller. You guys should all pick it up. Because the thing about training and the thing about being an athlete is there's so much more to it than getting out there and running the mile and lifting the weight. There's the food component, and then there's the mental component. And then, of course, there's teamwork, too, which we love here. And Ben's a master at all that stuff. And one of my favorite things about Ben is that he's so fun, and he experiments on himself consistently, all the time in all these different weird domains. I think we all need to do that. In fact, I'm not going to tell you how to do it, because who knows what could happen? But it's really cool. He's a really smart guy. He's got a master's in physiology and biomechanics. He's a biochemist. So his words. Not only he's tested on himself, but he's helped thousands and thousands of people, maybe millions. Huh, Ben? Through your books.

I mean, seriously, I think we got, I think, 42 million podcast downloads right now and counting.

So, yeah, amazing. That's fantastic. Well, I trust him. He puts out a product, too. After this, I'll be done talking about you. We're going to talk about some other things.

I was going to say let's talk about that.

I know the aminos, so I got to tell you, I started taking his aminos during events because I do these crazy endurance events as well. And I used to bonk all the time. And so I started, you know, experimenting with myself. And these aminos have been a game changer. We all did them during our world championship burpee endeavor.

That's right. Aminos work well. The problem is, like, branched chain amino acids are really popular. They have been in bodybuilding and sports for a long time. But that's just three amino acids. Leucine, isoleucine, and valine. And the problem with those is they don't repair muscles because there's only three of them. And you have nine essential amino acids that your body needs for staving off, like, muscle catabolism or, say, like, bonking during a workout. And the other problem is the leucine in that spikes your blood sugar really high. So BCAAs are cheap as heck and easy to find. But I'm a much bigger fan of essential amino acids. You know I started using those when I was racing Ironman and I've never looked back. I take at least 20 grams of those a day. They're, they're better than collagen, they're better than BCAAs. They're, I mean that they, they fly under the radar I think because I think they're super simple, they're not sexy, they don't have like frickin, you know, Chinese cistanche in them or whatever but, but man, they frickin work.

They do work. They work. I've never been a better athlete and it's not only because of the aminos, there's other factors. But man, when it comes to competing I would never, never looked back. So you know, if you feel like you're bonking and you're having some energetic problems and you're building mass, really important to get some of those into your protocol. Check him out. So Ben, I got the million dollar question for you. You're going to love this. Other than horse meat, turkey meat, goat meat, if you had to survive for one day and thrive survive, if you had to thrive and compete on a vegetarian diet, what would you do? We have a lot of vegetarians out there that are following us and you know it's a struggle to try to macro balance your protein. So give us an example of how you recommend to your clients you do that.

I can't let it fly under the radar that you said horse meat because I actually hunted horse last month in an undisclosed location where it's legal to hunt horses. And it actually is really, really amazing, super iron rich meat. But that probably just grossed out all the vegetarians. So for carnivore you cannot beat liver. Liver is the most nutrient dense food on the face of the planet and there's not a lot that approximates that from a vegetable standpoint. But there are certain nutrient deficits that we know build up on a plant based diet that can, you know, those gaps or holes so to speak, can be filled in. So the first thing is that if you're eating a grain or a plant rich diet, you must learn the art of proper fermentation, soaking, sprouting and a lot of ancestral food preparation techniques that render plants nutrient dense and digestible. Don't just buy quinoa from Costco. Soak your quinoa overnight, then rinse it to remove the digestive irritants and make it more absorbable. But then also consider leaving it in that jar and sprouting it. Take all your almonds, your, your nuts, your seeds, learn how to soak those, learn how to sprout those, which will decrease the phytic acid content in them, make them more digestible, allow you to absorb more nutrients and kind of unlock and open up the nutrient power within seeds and nuts. Learn how to, instead of eating regular bread, which has a lot of the larger gluten proteins and the again, more of the phytic acids in them which inhibit nutrient absorption, learn how to either make sourdough bread or hunt down really good old world style slow fermented sourdough bread. And of course you need to, as we see many of the blue zones that do have a high amount of wild plant intake, you need to do two things. Number one, you need to eat a wide variety of plant matter. So don't just do kale, spinach, cucumber, blueberry, right? You need to include things like wild nettle and mint and thyme and rosemary. And the strange things you find at the farmer's market or perhaps a CSA that you join where you're getting these things that you don't quite know how to cook or prepare, like maybe it's some kind of an heirloom vegetable, or maybe it's a different form of kale, like a dinosaur kale. Or maybe you're getting jicama or butternut squash or purple potato, or, you know, we literally see over 100 different species of wild plants and vegetables that our ancestors consumed and we tend to get kind of myopic sometimes in our food choices and buy the same thing year round. So if you're, if you're vegetarian, it really pays off to eat seasonally, eat locally and tap into the bounty that you might find at a farmer's market, for example. And then when it comes to, to nutrients that tend to be notoriously void in a vegetarian diet, some of the big ones that you need to fill in the gaps with vitamin B12, very difficult to get unless you're eating meat. However, you can supplement with a good vitamin B complex multivitamin, or you can include a lot of algae in your diet like chlorella and spirulina and marine phytoplankton. Another one is taurine. Taurine, of course, you could just drink a bunch of Red Bull, but I don't think that's the healthiest way to get it. You can supplement with taurine, another one that's very similar, another amino acid that's notoriously deficient in a vegan or vegetarian diet because you mostly only find it in animal products is creatine. And taking about 5 grams of creatine can also plug in a lot of the gaps. A few others that are important in addition to your vitamin B complex, taurine and creatine would be the fact that the DHA that's so important for your nerves and your membranes. Sure, you get small, small amounts of it, like you get about a 2% conversion of it from the oils that you get from seeds and nuts, and especially things like chia seeds and flax seeds for example. But that still doesn't hold a candle to what your body actually needs. So in a case like that, like, like some kind of a vegan DHA complex, they make some of those. Again, including things like algae and spirulina in your diet can give you some of that dha. But getting good bioabsorbable DHA is also very important. The amino acids we already discussed, like the essential amino acids, you know, a lot of vegan and vegetarian diets, in addition to fatty acid deficits, build up a lot of amino acid deficits. So soaking, sprouting, fermenting in the manner I described earlier, can unlock a lot of the amino acids from seeds, nuts, grains, plants, etc. But supplementing with some form of amino acids can also be very, very helpful. And then there's one other thing I'd really focus on. It would be vitamin D and vitamin K, two other nutrients that are difficult to get from plant matter. And again, you can use those as a supplement. You can take like a liquid vitamin D, vitamin K. You can also include a lot of fungal matter in your diet, like mushrooms, especially mushrooms that you've dried in sunlight or that have been exposed to sunlight. That will give you some amount of absorbable vitamin D as well. And there is an article, if you go to my website@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I have an article that lists those and a few others. If you just search there for like Ben, Vegan diet modifications, just use a search term like that, you'd probably stumble across that article or Melanie could hunt it down and make it available to you guys. It's also, I have a whole chapter, whole chapter in my book Beyond Training that covers how to fill in the missing gaps in a plant based diet. But it can be done. I mean, there are folks like Rich Roll for example, a good athlete who thrives on that type of diet. But I know him and you know, he bends over backwards to do a lot of the proper food preparation tactics and you know, Hunts down a lot of the superfood. Some of the more complete plant proteins, like, you know, like, instead of just like rice protein, you know, he'll use things like, like a sacha enchi protein, come out with hemp protein combined with like digestive enzymes that unlock and make more absorbable a lot of the amino acids in those proteins. So you can do it. It's a, it's a pain in the ass compared to having a rib, eye and some liver, but you can do it.

You know, also there's a lot of research showing that plant based isolate protein powder is way more absorbable than, you know, just, you know, taking a bunch of chia seeds and your beans.

It is, and eating it. If you mix it with digestive enzymes or use a digestive enzyme complex at the same time, it makes a plant based protein just about as bioabsorbable as whey protein.

Right. Whey is awesome too. And if you have. Do you do whey, Ben?

Whey doesn't really agree with my stomach. I actually, if I do a protein powder these days, about the only one I use is really, really settling to my gut. It was a formula designed for like cancer patients and people in hospitals who needed really, really good absorbable forms of protein and also for people with IBS and ibd. And it's, it's called Thorne Mediclear. It's a little bit more expensive. You know, it's like, I think it cost me about 60, 60 to $70 for a big canister of it. But I always have one canister of vanilla and one canister of chocolate in my pantry. And if I'm going to do a protein powder these days, I'll use that one. So it's like a plant based protein powder, but it's got like glutathione and curcumin and sulforaphane and all these gut healing compounds in it and enzymes and probiotics. So yeah, a little bit more expensive. But that's the one I like is the Thorn Mediclear. And the one that I get is the Thorne Mediclear sgs, which has extra glutathione in it to help to kind of heal up inflammation even faster.

Do you have gut problems? How's your gut, Ben? How's your gut doing?

My gut is good. It's probably of all the areas of my body, it's probably the weakest. Probably because I grew up on like pizza and ice cream and would drink like a gallon of 2% commercial milk every day. And you know, I I had a pretty. And when you combine that with all the endurance sports I do, which we know creates rampant gut inflammation, I got to be careful with my gut. I'm very careful with things like gluten and dairy, especially if they're from commercial sources. I do a lot of probiotics. I drink a lot of bone broth. I eat colostrum. I'm constantly doing things that care for my gut because if I don't, I can. I can decommission bathrooms pretty easily.

Speaking of. So my big sort of argument with the ketogenic diet is it's not the ketogenic diet. It's actually how people implement that. And, you know, when it gets down to your colon, you've got a bunch of fat and protein, you know, mostly fat, and your biome gets really screwed up from that. How do you deal? We have a lot of people on the keto diet in this challenge as well. How do you with deal compensate? I know you eat a ton of like, phos and goss and all that, so.

I don't eat a ketogenic diet per se. I did for a while. You know, I was part of the initial ketogenic experiments in Dr. Jeff Volek's laboratory. You know, way back in. In 2012, I began on a ketogenic diet when I would race Ironman. And, you know, a few of the issues are that some people genetically have very poor genes when it comes to bile production, fat metabolism, and even increased risk of cardiovascular disease from very high cholesterol, like familial hypercholesteremia, or very high particle count or inflammation, or all three in response to high fat intake and. Or high saturated fat intake. So some people with a gene like the, the APOE34 gene, which I have, or the APOE4.4 gene, which is even worse. Like, they should only have about 5 to 10% of their total fat intake coming from saturated fat. And so for those people, if they were going to follow a largely ketogenic diet, they need to do lots of Mediterranean fats, olive oils, fish oils, avocado oil, macadamia nut oil, anything that's not kind of solid at room temperature versus coconut oil and butter and lard, heavy cream. And a lot of these things we see people on a ketogenic diet following and other people who have poor gallbladder function or poor pancreatic enzyme production, they need to use things like ox bile extract and lipase and all these different enzymes. And you would know this if you are on a high fat diet and Your fat or your stool has a lot of fat stories, streaks in it, or it's kind of oily, or the toilet bowl kind of has the fat droplets in it after you've had your poo. And so the ketogenic diet is not some myopically appropriate diet for the general population. It works for some people and especially for athletes. Another issue is the hormonal deficits and thyroid issues that can build up with long term glycogen depletion when you're trying to combine carbohydrate depletion with a high fat, relatively low carbohydrate diet. So most of the athletes who I coach who want to follow or for whom a ketogenic diet would be appropriate, you know, to manage blood sugar or, you know, for weight loss or for cognitive performance or some of the other benefits of a ketogenic diet, I'll have many of them do carbohydrate refeeds in the evening from about 100 to 200 grams of things like sweet potatoes or taro or rice, or like a, you know, slow fermented sourdough bread or appropriately prepared quinoa or amaranth or millet. And then even for the people who I coach who aren't athletes, I'll still have typically like a Saturday or Sunday where they'll have a meal or a day that brings them closer to like 40 to 50% carbohydrate intake for the day, you know, whereas they'll be at sometimes 10 to 20% on the other days of the week. And those kind of refeeds can kind of hold back some of the hormonal issues that can occur with long term ketosis. Because there's very few populations we see from an ancestral standpoint, except save say like the Inuit, for example, who have some pretty robust genetic adaptations to be able to handle a high fat diet, who don't include something like whatever raw honey or tubers or white rice or something like that as a staple in their diet. In the same way, we don't see a lot of data epidemiologically that there are large populations that thrived on a strict plant based or a strict ketogenic or a strict carnivore diet. We, we simply, again, don't see that complete exclusion of carbohydrates as something that really many populations ever have had much success with.

And I heard some research, I read some research around it. There's some possibilities that it even ruins your glycogen pathway. You start to use that pathway of burning Glycogen less. And so that starts to diminish that.

What it can do is it can induce short term insulin resistance. Meaning if you get a glucose tolerance test after you've followed a high fat diet, you'll note that your blood glucose responds as though you were pre diabetic and you'll see a very high amount of blood glucose once you begin feeding on carbohydrates. If you followed a high fat diet, that's because you down regulate some of these transporters, such as GLUT4transporters that will transport glucose in into muscle, for example, to be stored away as glycogen when you're following a high fat diet, because your body simply doesn't need those transporters to be active. So once you begin feeding on carbohydrates again, your body doesn't really have a good disposal source for the glucose, but that's pretty short term. Within about two to three days of carbohydrate refeeding, your glucose sensitivity returns and is sometimes even enhanced. So that's kind of a short term issue. I think one of the other things you were referring to is a downregulation of the enzyme that it's like a glycogen synthase enzyme. It's responsible for allowing you to store carbohydrates. But that's actually almost like a tactic you can use to your favor that a lot of athletes will use. And this has been fleshed out in research. And it's something I used to do when I'd race Iron man, for example, is I even did this when I was bodybuilding to store up a bunch of carbohydrate in those last few days leading up to a competition so that the muscles look really full because they're full of carbohydrate and the water and the minerals that the carbohydrates draw in. And what that involves is it's like a carb loading protocol, right? You follow a low carb diet for a certain period of time, a week, a month, whatever. And then once you begin to load with carbs again, even though glycogen synthase was downregulated, it becomes very active once you do begin refeeding. And it can actually be used as a sports performance tactic in the same way that like, you know, avoiding caffeine for two weeks prior to a competition and then drinking a couple cups of coffee before you race can make it a very potent ergogenic aid. So you can use some of these down regulated mechanisms to your feedback favor Interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. I see how that would work. You know, there's so much research around all this stuff right now. It's pretty incredible. You know, it changes every, every day. And that's why, you know, like, we're back to the keto. We just have to, you know, everyone who's doing that should. Should really be seeing a doctor or a specialist to help you. Sure. You know, your body's okay and functioning all right with that.

Yeah. Or at least get, like, get a genetic test to see if you fall into that great idea, that genetic variant of hypercholesteremia or the APOE 3,4 or 4,4 gene. Or also get a gut test to see what your bile production and your enzyme production looks like so that you know whether or not you need to modify something like a high fat or a ketogenic diet. And then also just if you're following that type of diet long term, I do recommend something like a quarterly blood panel of your therapy, thyroid and your hormones to make sure that there's not any kind of hormonal deficits that are accumulating in response to that diet.

So my next question for you, we're going to get a little bit into this. I know you don't have much time, so I wanted to talk about. We sort of talked about your fueling, and now we want to talk about training and we're going to go back to biochemical structure again with their mitochondrial building. So for everyone who's starting to train, I know your sore. I know this may be new for you. A lot of things are happening in your body and at the core of your energy center that's allowing your body to grow and do what it's doing is your mitochondria. So I just was hoping you could give us a quickie on the method at which the mitochondria multiply and build and what that does to your endurance.

Yeah, well, I mean, you can think of it as. It's essentially an electron exchange pathway as electrons move through a gradient within the mitochondria. You know, your mitochondria is a membrane, and as the electrons cross back and forth across that membrane, it essentially produces a charge. And that charge ultimately results in the production of ATP, your body's energy currency. So anything you can do to enhance that pathway, particularly by treating your body like a human battery that you're charging, the better you're able to get either mitochondrial biogenesis, the formation of new mitochondria, mitochondrial density, or simply enhanced production of ATP. I think the best ways to do that are just to list a few. Number one would be very, very good intake of water that happens to have an electrical charge to it. I'm a big fan of water that is either enhanced with hydrogen so you can get hydrogen rich water generators these days, or hydrogen tablets that you drop into your water and or structured water so you can drink structured water, you can buy structured water, you can even install a structured water generator in your gym or in your home. And that tends to be enhanced even more if you and or that water is exposed to near and far infrared light. So either get yourself like one of these photobiomodulation panels or you spend time in the infrared sauna on a daily basis after you've had pad. I drink a great big mason glass jar full of structured hydrogen rich water at the beginning and the end of the day. Then I get out in the sunlight every single day or I hit the infrared sauna every single day or while I'm working I stand in front of one of these light panels. I own one called a joov every single day. So you've got light and water combined and that does a very good job for the mitochondria. If you can add minerals into the mix, and I actually do that, I'll add sea salt or like trace liquid minerals to my water and continue to use minerals throughout the day or sea salt throughout the day, that can enhance the effect even more because the minerals, of course, like properly prepared water, contain a charge. And what happens is photonic energy from infrared light can enhance that charge and increase mitochondrial activity. The other things I like, you know, other than just exercise and a certain smart diet, which are both helpful for the mitochondria, are getting outside barefoot and or using one of these grounding or earthing or pulsed electromagnetic field mats or beds that can also charge up the body's battery and ensure that the millivolt potential across the cell membrane remains close to about negative 60 to negative 80 millivolts, which is where it should be. So going outside barefoot, doing yoga outside, laying on your back in your backyard outside to read a book, buying a PEMF mat or laying on one, or you know, I get a massage on one every week that can be very helpful as well. This concept of grounding or earthing or even kind of biohacking, so to speak, grounding or earthing with the use of a PEMF device. And then finally the mitochondria respond very well to heat and cold. So again, hitting the sauna on a regular basis, you know, I Get in the sauna four to five times a week for about 20 to 30 minutes. That's very good for the mitochondria, as is doing something like a cold plunge or a cold soak either after your sauna or like a cold shower before bed at night, which can also help with deep sleep cycles. That's really good too. So I would say that your biggies are water, minerals, light, heat, cold and then grounding or earthing as the top strategies aside from exercise and a smart diet to enhance the health of your mitochondria.

See, I'm so glad I asked you that. I've never asked you that before in any of our interviews. And that is a wealth of knowledge. And of course that's why we have Ben on because he knows all of these sort of alternative sources and experiments with this stuff his self. So you guys just got a whole lot of information from Ben that's so valuable. Definitely watch this again and again and write it down, make your notes. Wow, thank you, Ben. That's really incredible. So last but not least, what's on the frontier for you? What are you going to do next? What's your big next challenge? Do you have any competitions?

Yeah, I'll jump back into the Spartan pro race circuit in August and I'm just, just doing a lot of time with the kids and also a few bow hunting competitions over the next few months. And then I also just finished a new book. It's a big one, it's about 600 pages long. It will be published in January. It's 30 different chapters on mind and cognition from smart drugs and nootropics to Lyme disease and mold and other things that affect cognition and mental function. So you know, 10 chapters on the nervous system and the mind and the brain, 10 chapters on the body, fat loss, performance, you know, mitochondria, you know, everything you would need to enhance musculature and kind of like the flesh and the blood and then 10 chapters on the spirit. Right. So things like gratitude, sound, healing, sex, love, relationships and even a lot of the longevity and anti aging tactics from you know, basic stuff like, you know, how to actually eat more wild plants to very advanced stuff like peptides and sarms and stem cells. So yeah, it's 30 chapters, pretty big. It's called Superhuman Rx, as in like superhuman.

Great title too.

Yeah, so that'll the. Right now the, you know, the basic information is that superhumanrxbook.com and then that'll get released in January.

Oh, I'm so stoked for you, Ben. Of course you wrote that superhuman Rx book. Of course. Because that's. That's what you do. That's what you thrive to be. And of course, you're achieving that. Say hi to the family and the kids. And August, say, Ben's been through our kokoro camp. Of course, like I said, he does everything, and kokoro is a little bit of everything. So that's how he came here. 34 Hoo yah. Well, thank you so much again, Ben, and all of you, if you have any questions, send them to me. I'll try to get over to Ben. Or you know what, Hit up Ben yourself, go to his website, go to his podcast, and enjoy everything that Ben is. Thank you again, Ben.

Thanks, Mel.

You're amazing.

All right, later.