Q&A 407: Top Air Pollution Tips, How To Get Started With Biohacking, Can Infrared & Red Light Be Bad For You & Much More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, top air pollution tips for you Australian listeners. How to get started with biohacking. Can infrared and red light be bad for you? And much more. Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, folks, you want the good news or you want the bad news? Maybe it's good news and good news for some of you if you absolutely detest my usual Q a podcast sidekick, J.T. wiles. Because I don't really have any Internet out in the forest at my house. I haven't for quite some time. I always gotta like drive to a library or an evil Starbucks to to record. And because of that, Jay and I were not able to connect for today's show. But I still wanted to get a podcast out to you. And so since we've had lots of questions and research studies bouncing around, I figured that it was high time I get you a Q and A. This is Q&A407. So everything I talk about today you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 407 if it sounds like I have a head cold, I don't actually. Quite the contrary, I have a laser light stuck up my nose. I use this thing called a Vielight. They're not like a sponsor of today's show, even though I've done a really interesting podcast with them. I'll put a link in the podcast to the news flashes section of today's show notes. But basically it's called a Gamma. Vielight has two different models. An Alpha for a 10 Hz brainwave signal and a Gamma for 40 Hz. And what the gamma does is it uses something called photo biomodulation, which we'll actually talk a little bit more about, or I guess I'll talk a little bit more about on the podcast today. To stimulate what's called the ventral and the cortical areas of your brain. And they're doing really interesting research on this thing for, you know, like dementia and Alzheimer's. But it's also fantastic as like a cup of coffee for your brain when you wake up, it actually activates something called cytochrome C oxidase in neural tissue using about 810 nanometers of near infrared light. And if that's a big for you and you don't quite understand what 810 nanometers of near infrared light is, then pay attention later on because I had somebody call in a question about light therapy and headaches and I'll get into that. But this thing I'm wearing right now is called a V Light Gamma. So if you hear a little beep, beep, boop bop or it sounds like my nose is plugged, it's because I got a laser light up my nose and a laser helmet on. So anyways though, today's show should be a doozy, should be a fun one for you. And at the time this is being recorded, just so you know, a quick special announcement. I'm going to be headed down to down over east to India. So for all of my listeners in India, I don't even know if my podcast is allowed in India because I heard podcasts that dropped the F bomb or have explicitity in them actually get banned from that Apple podcast store over there. I don't know if that's true. Maybe one of my Indian listeners could comment and let me know. But anyways, I'm headed to Bangalore or Bangalore, as you say, New Delhi, Mumbai. So you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com calendar to check out those details. And should my American listeners be feeling Lonely, the other two events I'll be at coming up here in the US are April 4th through 6th. I'll be at the Wild Health Summit at the Kentucky Castle, the wonderful Kentucky Castle destination hotspot in Lexington, teaching at a genomics based precision medicine conference there. And that is open to the general public. If you want to get in, I'll put a link to that one in the show. Notes, notes. And then of course I'll be at Paleo FX in Austin, Texas, if you want to join me in Austin. That is an amazing, fun, big, huge party in all things epigenetics, biohacking, keto, nootropics, strength, conditioning, sleep, stress, you name it. Everything is covered there. It's an amazing conference. So I'll link to that. And they're showing us too over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 407 so that being said, let's jump in, shall we? All right. This is the part of the show where I get into a lot of the things I release on my feed. I put out a research feed every week on Twitter and on Facebook. So if you go to twitter.com BenGreenfield or you go to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook page, you can all read about all these different research studies that I am poring through typically every single morning while I'm sipping my cup of coffee. And there were, there are a few interesting ones that came across my plate recently. So this first one appeared in the magazine Scientific American and actually reported on a study that was done in the journal Brain Imaging and behavior in the UK. They studied over 7,000, and what they wanted to look at specifically was the impact of moderate to vigorous physical activity on what's called hippocampal volume, which is basically directly linked to the growth of new neurons. And we already know that something called brain derived neurotrophic factor, or bdnf, is triggered by things like aerobic exercise or sauna or even psilocybin mushrooms, and that promotes neuronal growth and neuronal survival. But this specific paper reported on was this growing body of research that suggests that exercise that is cognitively stimulating benefits the brain more than exercise that doesn't make cognitive demands. What they found was that exercise is good for your HIPPoCampus and for BDNF, as we already know. But in this case, when exercise is combined with cognitively demanding activity in a stimulating environment, you get even more new neurons that are created and furthermore, it seems to trigger enhanced neuronal survival. Now, what does this mean? It means that if you're exercising right now and listening to this podcast, good on you. Because even something as simple as listening to a podcast or an audiobook, rather than mind numbing butt rock during an exercise session, can actually allow for the growth of new neurons. And I'll often do this. I'll do a challenging kettlebell workout or, or go out and do like an obstacle course style workout. And instead of listening to deep house or techno or something I might use when the going gets really tough to motivate myself, I'll instead listen to an audiobook or a podcast that's actually making me smarter while I train. And it turns out that based on this new research, even though it can be hard to focus on some of this stuff when you're exercising, that's one of the things that can cause the neuronal growth, having your brain and your body working hard at the same time. Now, of course, this goes to say that, you know, if you're engaged in a sport like table tennis or tennis or basketball or anything else, I mean, even golf, you could say that combines physical activity with something that's cognitively demanding. That's also a great strategy. I don't think anybody's going to be playing the ukulele or the guitar or the jazz flute while they're riding their bike down the highway. There are some things you cannot co combine. But I think that this idea of challenging your brain while you exercise is a good idea, and this latest research really backs that up. So I'll link to this article from Scientific American in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 407 Now, I also came across an interesting article that delved into this new Impossible Burger, which I get a lot of questions about. So Burger King now has their. Their Impossible Whopper, their Impossible Whopper. And that Whopper patty actually has 24 different ingredients in it versus the original Whopper Patty, which, aside from the oils that it's cooked in, I suppose has just one basic ingredient, and that's beef. The Impossible Whopper and the Regular Whopper have similar caloric count. The impossible Whopper has 630 calories, and those are from the added oils that they add to the Whopper to get the calorie count up. And the regular Whopper has about 660 calories of pure lovely beef, albeit from CAFO foodlots where they abuse the cows. So I'm not really a fan of either option. And there are some kind of cool things when it comes to the Impossible Whopper. So, for example, if you look at beef, the red color in beef comes from hemoglobin, which is the oxygen binding protein in blood, and myoglobin, the molecule in the blood that takes the oxygen away from the hemoglobin, or the molecule in muscle, rather, that takes the oxygen away from the hemoglobin. Now, they wanted to get the Impossible Whopper meat meat to get to that same red color. So in this case they use something called leg hemoglobin. Now, leg hemoglobin is made by bacteria, a specific bacteria called rhizobium. And what rhizobium does is it's an enzyme and it takes nitrogen from the air and turns it into fertilizer that plants can use. So it lives in the roots of plants. And the enzyme that binds to the nitrogen is damaged by the presence of oxygen. So this little bacterium, this rhizobium, it makes something called leghemoglobin to bind to oxygen to keep the oxygen out of the way so that the bacterial enzyme isn't damaged. Now, what scientists figured out how to do is they spliced the gene that makes this red leg hemoglobin into yeast so they could then grow yeast, separate the leg hemoglobin, and then add it into the Impossible Whopper. Now, that technically means the Impossible Whopper is a genetically modified organism. And in some cases, I'm not necessarily opposed to GMO proteins. I think the safety of Them still needs to be fleshed out. But I do like science and I think it is cool how they figured out how to make this beef red by growing hemoglobin on yeast, which is kind of cool. The problem is that when you look at the Impossible Whopper and the amount of soy that needs to be used to make the Impossible Whopper, here's the deal. The Impossible whopper has about 44 milligrams of estrogen. Now compare that to the Whopper. The whopper has about 2.5 nanograms of estrogen. Far, far smaller amounts of estrogen. Now, if you would like a little refresher on the metric system, there are 1 million nanograms in 1 milligram. So that means that an impossible whopper has about 18 million times as much estrogen as a Regular Whopper. Now, we know that excess soy consumption can cause things like gynecomastia or excess estrogen accumulation, especially in males, meaning basically causes the equivalent of man boobs. Now, six glasses of soy milk would be enough estrogen to actually cause gynecomastia. Now, when you are eating an Impossible Whopper, you're actually getting close to that. And so the problem is that you would have to eat about 880 pounds of beef from a steer that has been implanted with hormones to be able to get that amount of estrogen. And unfortunately, that's the amount of estrogen that we see in this Impossible Whopper. So I'm still going to steer clear of the Impossible Whopper, even though it has that cool little leg hemoglobin in it. It's simply something that I don't feel comfortable consuming. I don't know about you. How do you feel about the Impossible Whopper? Anybody out there mowing down on these things? If so, leave a comment in the show notes. Let me know why. All right, so what else aside from exercising for the brain and these scary new Impossible burgers? Let's talk about fructose while we're talking about food. Fructose. Vilified fructose. Fructose is poison, according to I believe it's Robert Lustig. And many people are very, very concerned about fructose. And I was actually having an interesting conversation the other day with somebody and said, well, technically, in what's called a hypocaloric state, besides the fact that it's not very nutrient dense and supports some companies that do some food lobbying, that I'm not a big fan of, the consumption of sweetened regular calorie soda really isn't that big of an issue metabolically. Again, if you're in a hypocaloric state. And that's because the fructose that's in that those sugars are primarily gonna be used to refill your liver glycogen stores. And to a lesser extent, because they don't really have the enzyme that takes fructose readily and turns it into glycogen, but they can do so to a certain extent, your skeletal muscle. And so the reason I say that is because when we look at fructose and we look at all the different studies on fructose out there, the only situation in which fructose has been shown to be an actual metabolic issue to contribute to things like excess triglycerides and non alcohol alcoholic fatty liver disease is if fructose is consumed with excess calories. Okay? And most people drinking soda are indeed consuming excess calories. But unfortunately, I know many health enthusiasts who steer clear of things like fructose and things like honey because they're afraid of some of the metabolic issues that they've heard about fructose and fruit, when in fact, you know, as I talked about in a podcast a long time ago where I was discussing why we include honey in the kion energy bar, fructose can be actually something that's good for blood glucose and stabilize insulin. And furthermore, this research study that I'm going to link to in the show notes, a pretty recent one that appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, summed it up pretty well. Basically, it points out that the highest level of evidence from systematic reviews and meta analyses on fructose does not support any causal relationship with cardiometabolic disease. What they found instead was that fructose containing sugars can lead to weight gain and increase in cardiometabolic risk factors and disease only if the fructose is consumed when one is in a state of hypercaloric intake of excess calorie intake. But if you're not eating more calories than you're burning, it is just fine to include fructose, especially for things like whole fresh fruit in your diet without risk of metabolic disease. And in fact, just a few months ago, a wonderful author and researcher, a guy who's been on my show before, Stephan Guillen DNA, he published a systematic review of whole fresh fruit consumption and looked at what it did to overall energy intake, meaning stabilization of appetite and also adiposity or propensity to weight gain. And what he found was that consistent intake of whole fresh fruits not only decreases the amount of calories that people eat during the day, but it also is not associated with weight gain and may indeed be associated with aches. Modest protection against weight gain. And that impact goes up the more you get towards whole fresh fruit and the less you get towards isolated fruit sugars in something like a fruit juice. So this points out the fact that not only again in an isocaloric or hypocaloric state is fruit and fructose not fattening or contributory towards metabolic issues, but it may in fact have a protective effect. So everybody out there who's fruit fructose phobic or fruit phobic continue to be that way. If you're talking about a state of someone who's eating enough calories and then the fructose and the fruit, or perhaps the fructose or the, or the sugars from a wine or alcohol is causing spillover. But if you're already controlling calories, including fruit and fructose in your diet is no big deal at all. So quit being afraid of fructose and fruit, my friends. It's not that big of a problem. So finally I wanted to get into, you know, speaking of fruit and fructose, this whole idea of fasting and ketosis specifically related to something that I'm very intrigued with and that would be breath control. Well, my friend, Dr. Peter Attia recently published an article on his website that was inspired by another friend of mine, Justin Lee, the guy who typically guides me when I'm on my hunts down in Hawaii. He's a world class free diver, he's a spear fisherman, he's a, a bow hunter. He competes in these free diving and spearfishing championships. And what he decided to do for his championship was to engage in intermittent fasting to elevate ketone bodies to see if he could increase his breath hold time. Well, I personally, when I trained with freediving instructor Ted Hardy down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who does a fantastic course. For anybody who wants to get a free diving or spearfishing, you need to check out Ted's course. It's called immersion freediving down in Fort Lauderdale. So he took me from about a 2 minute and 30 second static breath hold up to a 4 minute and 45 second static breath hold in the pool over the course of seven days. But when I took exogenous ketones, in this case in the form of ketone esters, prior to the breath hold practice, I was able to tack an extra 23 seconds onto my own personal breath hold. So I was in like the 420s without ketones. Once I added the ketones in, I got up into the 440s. And there are other strategies that you can use to increase your breath hold time, like say, not being too cold, not consuming caffeine or anything that's going to increase metabolic rate, being careful with dairy, which thickens the mucus. But these ketones seem to make a profound impact on breath hold time. Well, what Peter talks about in the article is how how one of the things that is the trigger for you to take a breath would be high levels of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide accumulation in your bloodstream, which sends your brain this early warning sign that you're not gas exchanging and causes you to take a breath. But you can also hack this. So if you have less internal CO2 levels, you would have a lower involuntary muscle contraction of your diaphragm and less of that involuntary urge to breathe when you're trying to hold your breath. Well, some people to achieve this effect will do things like hyperventilate prior to a breath hold. The problem with that is that it can be dangerous because you can breathe off so much CO2 that you don't get the signal early enough to take a breath. And you can get things like shallow water blackout. And people have even died from doing things like WIM HOF style breathwork protocols prior to breath holds in the pool or breath holds underwater. But you can naturally and to a slightly lesser extent decrease your carbon dioxide production if you're in a state of ketosis or if you're engaged in intermittent fasting, there's lower metabolic cost of processing food. So not only do you have more blood flow to go around to deliver oxygen to your heart and to your brain to allow you to hold your breath longer, but then you also have this decrease in CO2 production because you're burning more ketones as a fuel rather than burning more glucose as a fuel. So you have decreased oxygen consumption and increased CO2 tolerance. And what Peter gets into in this article is how both intermittent fasting or being in a fasted state, as well as having high levels of the ketone beta hydroxybutyrate in the bloodstream that actually results in this drop in metabolic rate and metabolic efficiency that would actually drive up an increase in the ability to be able to hold your breath. Now there's also kind of a dark side to this for people who are concerned about potentially like suppressing their metabolic rate. And that would be that excess intermittent fasting restrict ketosis may actually have the potential to reset your metabolic rate to be lower, which is great as a longevity hack, but may also result in some issues with your overall calorie burn during the day. And some people who will say, oh, I feel like my metabolism has dropped or I gain weight more easily, many of those people are excessively fasting or excessively restricting calories or focusing a little bit too myopically on strict long term ketosis, which I really think is only a great strategy if you're dealing with something like, like epilepsy or cancer or some other issue that's been shown to be medically assisted by ketosis. But if you're into breath holding, free diving, spearfishing, maybe just a breath holding contest with your friends in the pool, doing it in a fasted state appears to actually cause a drop in the CO2 levels and increased tolerance to a deprivation of oxygen. So Peter's always an interesting guy and I thought this article on his website was, was quite interesting. And for those of you who are yawning because you have no interest at all in breath holding or fasting or ketosis, my apologies, I'm done now. But I will link to all those studies and many more if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 407 hi Ben, I was.

Wondering if you could chat quickly about air purifiers and dehumidifiers in the home to create a more healthy environment. So especially for those who are living in cities, for example, like London, which is where I'm based, and you can basically come home at the end of the day and wipe the city off of your face. That's how much particular matter can be found in the air. Any comments that you have or recommendations for products you might use would be very much appreciated. Thank you so much.

Well, I decided that although I love everybody in London, and I'm gonna be over in London in July, I'll be visiting your great city. I thought this would be a good question to reply to. Also because so many people in Oz are dealing with air pollution based on the fires over in Australia. So it's, it's relevant on multiple fronts. And you know, it's something that when I'm traveling and I'm in cities, you know, like, like Bangkok or Cairo or some of these other places I've been recently, you know, I have to deal with the same thing, this issue with air pollution in even when you're outdoors, of course, you can still experience a lot of this. And it is an issue. I mean, every day you inhale about 15,000 liters of air and any toxins that are in that air, they're gonna pass through your lungs. And they don't just end up in your lungs, they get circulated to your heart, your liver, your kidneys, your brain. And the World Health Organization has actually reported that long term exposure to air pollution can lead to a marked reduction life expectancy, particularly due to increased lung cancer and cardiopulmonary related mortality. The link between cognitive decline and air pollution is pretty profound too. CNN recently reported on this major study that shows that cognitive decline in air pollution now affects 95% of humans worldwide. And this can be everything from pollen to dust to pet dander, to mold spores and smoke that you would find indoors. Invisible gases and volatile organic compounds, you know, from furniture or carpeting or paint. And then once you're outdoors, it's mostly combustion from motor vehicles or the fuel burning industry and factory. And then of course we have the outdoor pollution sources from smoke, you know, from brush fires and also herbicides, pesticides, windblown dust, etc. Now this air pollution primarily is going to cause damage via an inflammatory effect. So it can sabotage cellular methylation processes, it can impair immune system T cell function, and it can also cause hardening of the arteries or almost like this athletic atherosclerotic effect due to the free radical production. That's particularly an issue after being exposed to gasoline or diesel that you get from say, walking alongside a busy road. And then also jet fuel particles. Now, ironically, one of the bigger areas, and I talk about this in my new book Boundless, one of the bigger areas where you find a lot of this formaldehyde, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, mold, etc. Are gyms. Because a lot of times gyms only have carpets, they're in a warehouse style facilities. But there's a lot going on in gyms as far as everybody walking around with all their different perfumes and colognes on, all the different off gassings from the furnitures and the exercise equipment at the gym, the cleaning supplies that are used at night after everybody's left the gym, that are all just there in the morning when you show back up, along with the spray bottle bottles that people are walking around with cleaning equipment when they finish, you combine that with the carbon dioxide from everybody huffing and puffing inside the gym. And it turns out that a gym is actually not that great of a place if you're concerned about air pollution. And then of course the indoor mold that you'll find a lot of these gyms and locker rooms and swimming pool Areas and saunas and you know, the, the walk water you're breathing in the steam room, if that hasn't been filtered. I'm not trying to scaremonger here, but it definitely is something to think about if a gym does not have a good. And you should be asking this before you join a gym, HEPA air filtration system. Attention paid to the cleaning chemicals that they're used, filtering of the water that's used in the steam rooms. I would think twice about making that gym a staple in your exercise routine. Now. Now the thing that I want to get into though is of course the root of the question, and that is what can you do about some of this damage and how can you fix some of it? So I've got a few tips that I'm going to get into here that should help you quite a bit with reversing some of the damage of air pollution and protecting your body a little bit more. The first one is something that's just good for you in general, especially, especially for your endocrine system and your symmetry. And that would be nasal breathing. So your nasal passages are filled with these tiny hairs called cilia and those filter and humidify and warm or cool the air before it enters your lungs. They protect you from about 20 billion particles of foreign matter every day. Now we know breathing in through the nose helps you to take fuller and deeper breaths, which can stimulate your lower lungs to distribute greater amounts of oxygen through the body. We also know the lower lung, which is where you're going to hit more of when you're doing nasal breathing, that has more parasympathetic nerve receptors that can calm the body. Whereas the upper lungs, which are used more in your chest breathing and mouth breathing, those trigger sympathetic nerve receptors, these special baroreceptors that can result in a cortisolic response. But the filtration aspect of breathing through the nose in relation to air pollution is particularly relevant. We also know that when you breathe air through your nose, your sinuses produce nitric oxide, which can open blood vessels and help to combat some of that constriction of the arteries that can occur in response to high levels of pollution. So that's one thing to think about is nasal breathing. Now, next would be inside your home, as we've done in our home. You want both plants that naturally filter the air as well as high efficiency particulate air filters. So if you look up the NASA Clean Air study, you'll find plants like peace lily and Boston fern and English ivy and areca palm and we know that these can remove things like benzene and formaldehyde and trichloroethylene in the air. But if smoke is getting, getting into your home or, you know, off gassing from vehicles or furniture, etc. Plants can actually help to clean that. And of course, they look nice too. The other thing that I mentioned, these high efficiency particulate filters, that's a HEPA filter. So a good HEPA filter can remove almost 100% of particles from the outdoors or indoor pollution from the air. And if you want to take that one step further, there's also a different kind of air filter filter that operates on something called photoelectrochemical oxidation or pico. An example of that would be another one that I have in our house. And I'll put it in any room if somebody's painting or someone's vacuuming. It's called a molecule, it's spelled with a K. A molecule. So these HEPA filters or molecules can work really well. For me, I've got a HEPA filter in my office called an air doctor. An air doctor. I have a central HEPA air filter in the home called an alar. And then I have these molecules that are in different regions of the house that can filter out all the other air. So we've got really clean air in our home, especially because we have like four different plants from the NASA clean air study. So our home is like a pristine Himalayan mountaintop when it comes to the house being naturally, naturally cleaned as far as the air is concerned. So a few other things that I wanted to recommend, these would be more nutritional based because there are certain dietary factors that we know based on their antioxidant content that can help you fight the fumes from the inside out. So one is vitamin C. So vitamin C works to recycle vitamin E. And one of the reasons this is important is because you're going to turn over vitamin, vitamin E more readily, especially in response to air pollution. So foods that would be high in vitamin C would of course be your berries, your citrus fruits, some dark leafy greens, et cetera. But you can also supplement with vitamin C. There's one wonderful kind of whole foods form of vitamin C that I like called American Nutraceuticals. And they do a, they do a really nice vitamin C that's pretty, pretty bioabsorbable. You can only absorb about one and a half to two grams at a time. And if you want to take a hefty dose of vitamin C, if you're in an area of a High air pollution. You might need 5 to 6 grams per day, but the American nutraceuticals vitamin C is pretty good. I think that's about one and a half to two grams a serving. Vitamin E, like I mentioned, is also really good. And the problem with vitamin E, as I discussed in my podcast with Barry Tan from Designs for Health, is that most of it is the tocopherols and not the taco trienols. And there's technically four different forms of tocopherols and four different forms of tocotrienols that you'd want to be able to get the benefits of vitamin E without some of the risks of isolated tocopherols. So you can find vitamin E naturally in these type of forms, like extra virgin olive oil or avocados or avocado oil or cod liver oil. But you can also use a really good fish oil. I use one called Super Essentials Fish Oil. Super Essentials Fish Oil. Another good one is Green Pastures Fermented Cod Liver oil, because that one has a lot of beta carotene in it. And we know beta carotene is also really important for yourfor your immune function and for protecting you from some of these effects of air pollution. So that's like the orangish reddish yellow one you'd find in red and yellow and orange pepper and sweet potatoes and yams and carrots, etc. But you can also get high amounts in this cod liver oil. Now, whether you're doing cod liver oil or the super essentials fish oil, you're going to get omega 3 fatty acids. And we know that those are really good. And studies have shown omega 3 fatty acids can lead to a reduction of the inflammation and oxidative stress caused by air pollution. So, you know, I love the idea, idea of a smash diet. Sardines, mackerel, herring, anchovies and salmon. But also stepping that up, along with 8 to 10 grams of a really good fish oil on a daily basis, this would be kind of like your stack for air pollution. Be forms of vitamin C, forms of vitamin E, forms of vitamin A, AKA beta carotene, and then also some kind of really good omega 3 fatty acid acid fish oil type of source. So that's what I would be doing. And I guess the last thing that comes to mind would be you could use a really good essential air diffuser in the home as well with some kind of a component in it that will help to clean the air. So you could take like an essential oil diffuser and you could diffuse thieves or good citrus Oil like a lemon oil in there. Another one that I really like is an uplifting scent like peppermint or rosemary or cinnamon. And so using an essential oil diffuser can saturate your house with a lot of different scents that also help to clean the air. So you may want to consider some kind of an essential oil diffuser as well. And then, I mean, there's nothing against, you know, wearing a mask when you go outside. There's actually one interesting study that showed that if you live in a polluted area, you're still going to get more benefits from exercising compared to not exercising. So you're still going to be at higher risk of getting exposed to a lot of these harmful particles from the air if you're exercising outdoors. But it's better than not exercising at all. I would just make sure to breathe through your nose, potentially wear one of these filtration masks, and then work in some of these strategies I just talked about to at least ensure that when you're at home you're not getting exposed to a lot of these issues. It's kind of of like WI Fi or non native emf. It's like a lot of times you don't have a say when you're in an airplane or a train or at your office or wherever else, your exposure to WI Fi and emf. But you can at least make sure that your home, the place where I would imagine you're spending at least a third of your life, hopefully a little more, you're not getting exposed to a lot of that and you're able to undo a lot of the damage and then just be cognizant. Again, like I mentioned of your gym, you know, no matter where you're at in the world, I'll start Australia or London or anywhere and start to think about that place where you might be spending. You know, a lot of people are in the gym for 45 minutes to an hour and a half, sometimes five to seven days a week. And you need to be cognizant of what you're getting exposed to when you're at the gym as well and think a little bit about that. So hopefully that has been helpful for you.

Hi Ben, my name is Ava. So I have a question about just all the information that you are sharing, which is pretty awesome, but for a novice or someone who's just starting off, it seems a little bit overwhelming. So I'm wondering just where would you start? You know, a lot of the information is very, very intriguing and sounds awesome, but like I said, it sounds A little bit overwhelming. So where would you start?

Well, Avis. Do you own a car rental company, by the way? Because I think I've seen that before, Avis. So it can be dizzying. I agree. This whole world of biohacking and all the information and I've gotten this question before and for me it comes down to foundational principles. Foundational principles. And there's a few things to think about before I get into kind of this idea of treating the body as a human battery. I would like to point out something that one of my friends, Ben Pakolsky, really great bodybuilder, former bodybuilder, who now trains a lot of people. The very first thing he has all his clients do for a month, for a solid month, is to breathe, meditate and walk. Meaning every single day long walk in the sunshine or outdoors, daily meditation session, daily breath, work practice, boom, that's it. And that's all they do for a month. You know, they're not lifting heavy weights, they're not biohacking, they're not doing some crazy pre sleep protocols, nothing. Just breathe, meditate and walk. I think that that is a wonderful kind of foundational principle for anybody. No matter how many other, you know, biohacks or fancy protocols are stacking on top of that, I think everybody should be breathing, meditating and walking every single day. And the cool thing is, no matter where you're at in the world, those three are technically, last I checked, free. Unless you have to use your fancy head worn electrostimulation device and tie it to your self quantified phone app while you're meditating. Aside from that though, those things are free. Now in addition to that, I think that from a dietary standpoint, the two. There's a lot of things you can do from a dietary standpoint, but I would say the two. Actually, I'm giving you three the three most important things you can do from a dietary standpoint. A is some element of intermittent fasting or compressed feeding windows, period of the week or period of the month when you're engaged in protein restriction. Occasional 24 hour fast. Occasional fasting, mimicking diet where you're eating 40% of your calories you'd normally eat for five days in a row once a quarter. I have a whole section in Boundless where I walk through all the different fasting protocols. But mine is quite simple. I fast 12 to 16 hours a day. Women should be closer to 12, men closer to 12 to 16. I do a 24 hour fast one to two times a month. Dinner Time to dinner time. And then once a quarter, I do like a spring cleanup for my body where I'll fast for five days, eating about 40 to 50% of the amount of calories that I would normally consume. Okay, so that's what my own personal fasting protocol looks like. And I find for me, I can sustain that year after year without any fancy 10 day water fasts. Now, in addition to breathing, meditating, walking and having fasting is one component of the diet. The other two components of the diet that I think are very important are a eating in a parasympathetic state. Lots of chewing, lots of gratitude, settling the body prior to eating, eating while sitting, not driving or rushing around, and being very cognizant of the state of your nervous system when you're consuming food, because that's going to help with satiety, a normal blood sugar response, the production of digestive enzymes, less bloating and gas after the meal. And so that's a very component or important component in addition to some element of fasting. And then finally, even though there are a wide variety of diets out there, and based on your ancestry, your genetics, your biochemical individuality, your enzyme production, your activity levels, your medical history, a whole host of reasons, diets are going to widely vary from person to person. But it seems like increasingly these days, once I've gone through someone's lab, their blood work, etc. One of the most common diets I find recommending to people and, and this is also based on the robust literature that I've seen on it for cardiovascular disease, for metabolic risk factors, for weight control, etc. Is just basically a low carb version of a whole foods based Mediterranean diet. A low carb version of a whole foods based Mediterranean diet with extra virgin olive oil and ancient, fermented, soaked and sprouted forms of grain and red wine and sirtuin enhancing foods like blueberries and here and there, a little bit of dark chocolate. Wonderful. Back to that smash diet forms of cold water fish like sardines and mackerel and herring and anchovies and salmon. This idea of a low carb Mediterranean diet, I would say if the diet world is all confusing for you, you don't have the money to self quantify at least that. So all this stuff is free, right? Breathe, meditate, walk fast, eat in a parasympathetic state and look into some form of something close to some semblance of a low carb Mediterranean style diet. Okay, so those would be like the foundational principles from a movement And a nutrition and a mindset standpoint. Now then moving on from there. Once somebody's nutrition and their movement is set up in the way that it should be, I then turn around and I look at the body as a battery. And if you really want to wrap your head around this, the best book that you could read is called the Body Electromagnetism and the foundation of Life by Robert Becker. And in the book the Body Electric, it's fascinating. What Becker was studying was regeneration of limbs, primarily in salamanders and frogs. And he hypothesized that electrical field would play an important role in controlling the regeneration process. So what he went through in these salamanders and frogs was he mapped the electric potential at different body parts during the regeneration process. And he found that when the limb of a salamander or a frog was amputated, the voltage in that cut area would change from about negative 10 millivolts, right? So a negative potential to positive 20 millivolts volts or more. He called this the current of injury. So the voltage would change into a more positive voltage and then as the limb would regenerate, you'd see a drop back down in voltage into a more negative voltage potential. Well, it turns out that one of the reasons for this is the human body uses electricity. Your cells are specialized to conduct electrical currents. And the elements in your bodies that allow for these charges to be conducted are minerals like sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium. I mean there's 80 plus trace additional minerals and also things like hydrogens, positive charge, oxygens, negative charge. So almost all your cells are going to use charge elements along with hydrogen and oxygen, primarily comprised from, from water, to generate electricity. And then finally, the last component that generates electricity is melanin. In response to photons of light. Melanin pigments knock off about four electrons for each melanin pigment. Right? So you got minerals, you have melanin, and you have hydrogen and oxygen from water that all help you to generate and carry electricity. Now each of your cells has a cell membrane. That's what protects it from the outside environment. The cell membrane is made up of lipids. These lipids create a barrier that allow only certain substances to reach your cell interior. Now the cell membrane functions as a barrier, but it also acts as a way for the cell to generate electrical currents. Alright, so resting cells are normally negatively charged on the inside, and the outside environment tends to be more positively charged. That's due to a slight imbalance between the positive ions out outside and the negative ions inside the cell. And cells achieve this charge separation by allowing charged ions to flow in and out through the cell membranes, that flow of charges across the cell membrane that helps to generate an electrical current. And then as I spoke about with Dr. Thomas Cowan when I interviewed him about cancer, the interior part of the cell, the cytosol of the cell, is chock full of of water that is in a structured form, a gel like form, that allows for continuation of that current throughout the cytosolic fluid within the cell. Right. So you have elements outside the cell and inside the cell you have structured water. Inside the cell you have a cell membrane and you have the propagation of this action potential which triggers these electrical currents. Or really the electrical currents are action potential. But the inside of the cell, when positive charges come in, that triggers an electrical current that turns into an electrical pulse called an action potential. And that can actually allow for the normal function of the cell. This is also why things that disrupt that charge can have a deleterious impact. You take something like the influx of calcium. Well, we know that people with electro hypersensitivity, people who have brain fog or poor energy when they're around like WI fi router or large appliances, or non native EMF like cell phones, they actually feel pretty good if you put them on a calcium channel blocker because they get less calcium influx into the cell. Now if you are exposed to a lot of these non native EMF sources and you are on a calcium channel blocker, you could for example, just use magnesium, which will limit the amount of calcium that influxes into the cell. And so once you start, start to think of your body as a battery, there's all sorts of things that you can do to actually enhance health and energy levels. Now, based on all this, what would be the lowest hanging fruit? Right. So already you're fasting, eating some semblance of a low carb Mediterranean diet, eating in a parasympathetically driven state. You're breathing, you're meditating, you're walking. Well, first of all, I talked about photons of light and how those can interact, interact with melanin in the body to help to generate electrons. And so because of that, I think one of the first things everybody should do is adequate daily exposure to sunlight, along with the use of some of these infrared devices. I talked about how I was using that violite gamma earlier to charge my mitochondria and neural tissue to activate something called cytochrome C oxidase so I can produce more ATP in neural tissue. Another example example of that would be like these joovv lights that I've talked about before where you can stand unclothed in front of one of these red light panels and it can result in the delivery of these photons of light that help to do things like charge the cells, but that can also activate mitochondria in skin tissue, in the testicles for increased testosterone production for men and increase sperm quality. And so this is a way to almost, almost bring sunlight indoors, at least the infrared and red aspects of sunlight, far infrared sauna or full spectrum sauna, similar thing. So I would say some element of light would be number one. Next. You already learned about negative ions. Well, it turns out the earth, every time lightning strikes, it collects these negative ions and then your body soaks them up whenever you're in contact with the planet Earth. So going outside barefoot, foot walking on the beach, swimming in the ocean is especially helpful. Wearing grounding shoes or earthing shoes or buying like these straps like the earthies off of Amazon that allow you to just wrap a grounding strap around any existing shoe and turn it into a shoe that unlike a big built up rubber sole, conducts a charge. Even concrete will conduct a charge. Is why I like the, you know, in addition to the to the air pollution issue I talked about about with gyms, I'd rather work out in my danky little garage gym with a concrete floor in my bare feet because I'm getting grounded or earth the whole time. Or go outside and do a barefoot walk in the sunshine or wear some earth runners and go for a walk in the sunshine. I even interviewed a guy named Clint Ober who develops mats and pads that you can place underneath your sheet and your bed or you can stand on while you're at work that can also deliver these same influx of negative ions. You can even buy a negative ion generator off a website like Amazon that you plug into a wall that generates these negative ions into your office air that you're breathing. So it's just like a beach inside your home. So negative ions from the earth from grounding or go read the book Earthing or grounding in addition to the body electric. If you want to wrap your head around this even more. Well, it turns out two other things that can help out quite a bit with electron flow through the body are temperature fluctuations. Right? So I'm a huge fan of a regular cold practice cold shower every day, or hot cold contrast shower, ice bath, jumping in a icy cold river or lake or pool, the use of cold and cold thermogenesis and cryotherapy, or even some of these wearable cooling devices, like, there's one called the Cool Fat burner that you can wear that keeps you cool without you getting wet even while you're at the office. These fancy cryotherapy chambers can work. Even though I'm a bigger fan of cold water immersion, I think that's top of the totem pole for cryotherapy. Any of these cryotherapy chambers can also be very effective. So the utilization of cold on a regular basis and then also the utilization of heat on a regular basis. Right. Sauna practice that has you sweating for 20 to 30 minutes, four to five times a week, that can also be very effective for a variety of health reasons. You know, the increase in heat shock proteins and cardiovascular blood flow and nitric oxide production, but also for electron flow. Okay, so so far you've got, in addition to the nutrition and the movement protocols I talked about, you've got light, you've got earthing or grounding, you have cold, you have heat. And then the, the last couple I wanted to mention was I talked about how minerals and water actually help to carry that charge as well. So if you get really good, clean, pure structured water or spring water, which is naturally structured, or you take any water and you place it on a device that would charge it like a somavedic would be one way to do this. Placing a mason glass jar out in the sunlight would be another way to do it. You can basically create your own structured water. And drinking water that's been structured can really help with this charge. And in addition, drinking water that has minerals added to it or consuming minerals and mineral rich foods on a regular basis can also help with that charge. So you've got things like the company Aqua Tru, which makes wonderful trace minerals, and also has this countertop reverse osmosis filtration system that cleans the water. You have companies like Quinton, which make this wonderful hypertonic mineral solution, which is fantastic for giving you 80 plus different minerals. Even some salts that you can find at any grocery store have a very high mineral count, like Celtic salt. Celtic salt, if you look at a mass spec analysis of all the different salts out there, it's one of the lowest in Microsoft microplastics and metals, but it's very high in minerals. And you can find that at Safeway or Albertsons or Rose Rs or, you know, any grocery store has Celtic salt. You can put pinches of that in your water on your food. And then finally paying attention to the filtration of the water is important as well. I'm a huge fan of something like the carbon block water filters that green filled naturals. My dad's company makes these wonderful water filters that use carbon block filtration and then structure the water afterwards. Or if you don't have the ability to have a whole house or a whole office filtration system, you can use something like the Countertop Aqua True Reverse Osmosis water filter, one of the few water filters that are reverse osmosis based that don't build up bacteria in the tank. With a good water filtration system, you're still going to have to pay even more attention to adding minerals back into the water because a lot of those can get filtered out too. But filtered water, preferably structured water, adding minerals back to it also a wonderful way to carry a charge in the body. And so when you step back and you look at this, you've got light grounding and earthing heat, cold water minerals, and those are six foundational ways that you can really get started on the journey to self optimization, especially when you combine it with eating in a parasympathetic, sympathetic state, fasting, some semblance of a low carb Mediterranean diet, breathing, meditating and walking. So that's where I would start before you begin thumbing through the pages of Men's Health or Women's Health magazine and doing all the fanciest workouts that you can find in there. The workouts are the icing on the cake, my friends. The workouts are the icing on the cake. If you want to look good with your shirt off on the beach or go to a triathlon or two, join a CrossFit gym. But they're not necessary for optimized health. Instead, everything I just talked about is necessary for optimized health. You do all that stuff and you're hitting on a longevity and a health standpoint. Throw a little bit of exercise in there for a performance and an aesthetic standpoint and you've got the best of all worlds. And I geek out on a lot of this stuff in far greater detail in my book Boundless, which is out now@boundlessbook.com but that is where I would start.

Hi Ben. My name is Ryan and I recently bought a Joovv. My husband loves it, but I've been having weekly migraines since starting it. I use it for about two or three minutes at a time, was doing it every day, but I've quit. I get normally one migraine a month with my cycle, but these are once or twice weekly now. And I was just hoping for some advice on how I could continue to use this without this happening.

All right. Well, migraines do suck. My wife gets them occasionally, usually in conjunction with her periods. The use of progesterone seems to have helped out tremendously with that, which makes me suspect that in her case, it's an endocrine issue. Sometimes it can be a magnesium deficiency, sometimes it can be blood flow to the head and, and that can even be anatomical, such as the need for neck deep tissue work. The use of transdermal magnesium on the neck and the temporal lobes can help out quite a bit with that. Sometimes it's stress based. I found many people do well with vagal nerve stimulators, like the Circadia Fisher Wallace device for things like migraine headaches. But sometimes it can be light based. It can be based on retinal stimulation and eye issues in response to light. And that can even be near and near infrared and red light, particularly red light, really, because it's more visible than near infrared light. But let's step back for a second and talk about this idea behind infrared. And I was talking earlier about photons of light and how melanin in the body can respond to photons of light light, how it can activate mitochondria in tissue, etc. When these, these photons, particularly infrared and red photons of light, are shown on the skin. Now, near infrared light, that's like 700 to 800ish nanometers. And then you have infrared light, which is 800 up to around 3,000 nanometers. And far infrared is kind of 3,000 plus. So there's a few different spectrums of light that a lot of of these lighting companies use. And the idea is that infrared radiation, which is technically what this light is, is it increases the temperature in tissue. And these photons of light also interact with components of mitochondria like the cytochrome C oxidase, to cause more production of ATP. There's a lot of really interesting research behind this. For example, infrared light, infrared light, like near infrared light or far infrared light, you know, not the visible red light that you can see. It's been shown to be useful for skin issues like psoriasis, for diabetic complications, in terms of reducing insulin resistance or lowering blood glucose. It's been shown to lower blood pressure and cause a direct influence positively for heart health. They've shown a decrease in inflammatory cytokines in response to response to infrared light, an acceleration in exercise recovery due to the reduction of the Production of a couple inflammatory enzymes called COX1 and COX2, very similar to how like a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug would work. We see an increase in the L, arginine and nitric oxide pathways, something I mentioned earlier. So you're actually getting better blood flow. Some studies show a reduction in anxiety and depression, better mood. We see better wound healing, skin health, elastin and collagen production. And that's all in response to infrared light. To infrared light. Now you also have red light. Now red light is below that 800 nanometer range, that's like 620 to 750ish nanometers. And red light, it's actually a little bit better at cytochrome C oxidase because the mitochondria will absorb more red light, which is, which causes it to release nitric oxide and increase ATP production and decrease oxidative stress. And red light in particular has also, like infrared, been shown to be very useful for skin quality, but may also be useful for physical performance. They've shown an increase in endurance, improved recovery after high intensity exercise in response to red light. You also see it used for some of the same things as infrared for wound healing, for inflammation, for pain. Red light is particularly helpful for cognitive function, which is why that V light that I mentioned earlier that I was using on my head when I was recording this podcast earlier, it's something that they're now using for Alzheimer's and dementia and depression and cognitive enhancement, even in healthy subjects. And also for people who have head injuries like TBI or concussion. This red light treatment has been shown to balance inflammatory markers in response to head injury, prevent cell damage, death in response to head injury, and improve brain function four weeks after a head injury like a TBI or a concussion. And if you read airplane magazines, you may have also seen the hats now that have the red light built in. Well, it turns out that red light can also induce hair regrowth. So there's a lot of benefits to these type of lights. But the problem is that for you, particularly with the migraines, it's less likely the visible red light that you're seeing on these devices that is triggering the migraines. Because many people's migraines are sensitive to sunlight, to viewing light. It's basically related to the way that the muscles contract in the eyes that can cause tension in the rest of the muscles of the head and cause this migraine like effect in response to light. And a lot of people will say, well, why don't I just put on my blue light blocking glasses and fix that. Well, the problem with that, you know, like one of my favorite blue light blocking glasses is RAW optics. That's the one that I use most often because they block all light wavelengths up to about 550nm, up to about 550nm, which is where you're going to find all the different forms of blue and green spectrums that have the biggest effect at lowering melatonin levels and disrupting sleep, particularly at night. Well, RAW also makes a day lens that reduces the blue light emission from LED lighting and fluorescent lighting and backlit screen devices. But those are still all down, down, down around that 550 nanometer wavelength of light. And like I just mentioned to you, red light is going to be closer to 620 to 750 nanometers. So you're not going to block that red light if you're wearing a pair of blue light black blocking glasses or daytime anti glare glasses. However, here's the good news. Any polarized sunglasses, any polarized sunglasses such as you could find, you know, on Amazon, for example, those are going to block a lot of that red light and some of those higher wavelengths of light. So if you're using red light therapy and it's bugging you, first of all, the red light isn't damaging to the retina, neither is the infra. It's not going hurt to hurt your eyes, but if you get migraines and it's triggering the migraines, just wear polarized sunglasses. And polarized sunglasses will block that red light that you're seeing in a manner that's different than the, than the blue light blocking glasses. And so that is the approach that I would use would just be to get a good pair of polarized sunglasses, but then also go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and search for migraines because I've got a couple of other podcasts I've done done where I've discussed in great detail lots of really good natural remedies for migraines, natural remedies for migraines. So check that out. Now I'll link to as many of these resources as possible. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 407 now a couple of other things. First of all, my new book is out. Go to BoundlessBook.com if you already got it. Please, please, please leave a review. Last I checked last night, night it was number one in longevity, number one in exercise and fitness, number one in alternative health, and number eight overall of over 8 million books on Amazon in new releases and number 48 of all books worldwide that exist, period. So people are liking it. So if you haven't gotten Boundless yet, check it out boundlessbooks.com and you can also leave a review. Please, please please. Barnes and Noble, Amazon, We're Wherever you can leave a review, please do it because this book is taking the world by storm and I want to keep it steamrolling along so that we can all work together to get this message out of Boundless energy your beck and call all day long, even if you're not wearing laser lights on your head. In addition, if you can leave this show a review, it is amazing. Amazing for publicity for the show. So if wherever you listen to this castbox or Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever, leave the show review, it helps tremendously. I often choose reviews and I send cool little prizes and goody packs to people who leave a review. So leave your review and if you hear it right on the show, we'll send you a wonderful, wonderful goodie prize pack of goodies from BenGreenfieldFitness.com so check all that out. Check out our amazing sponsors. All the show notes are at BenGreenfield Fitness.com 407. Thanks for listening. I love you guys and have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. 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