Q&A 426: Does Being Overweight Help You Live Longer? The Dark Side Of Fasting, The Latest On Caffeine & Exercise Performance, Ben's Pre-Workout Formula & Much More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, does being overweight help you live longer? The dark side of fasting. The latest on caffeine and exercise performance. More Clubhouse, live Q and A and much, much more. Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the. Jay. I'm feeling kind of guilty right now.

Ooh. This always begs the question as to why, so go for it.

I'm feeling kind of guilty because I did high intensity exercise this morning. I did the good old school, quick and dirty Pavo Zatzolin style Russian kettlebell workout where you do 10 intense kettlebell swings and then 10 pushups, 10 rounds of that with some nasal breathing on the Airdyne bicycle in between each. But the New York Times, hence my guiltiness, just released an article saying too much high intensity exercise may be bad for your health. And now a whole bunch of people have been asking me about that study and asking me if they should stop their high intensity exercise. In the subtitle of that article says that hiit, hiit, High intensity interval training may harm your mitochondria, the energy generators found in every cell of your body. And so, so that's the news on the streets. And I thought just because we have a lot of people who listen in, who are kind of in the hit, we should probably address this issue.

That's worth. It's worth discussing, man. I got, I got sent this article by like three different people and then I sent it over to you, and I was like, let me get Ben's take on this because, you know, it was, you know, I'm sure we're going to get into it, but it was one of those things, I think, that people, if they just see the initial title, they just. And that's what a bulk majority of read the title. They read one sentence in it and they're like, okay, hits out, not doing it anymore. But you still did it for some reason.

Mm. Yeah. So a few, a few things to think about. They had, they had 11 men and women, so this was a massive study. And they were tracking things like their blood sugar level, their metabolic health. And what they did was four weeks of a pretty ambitious exercise program, meaning that during the first week they did a hit session that involved four four minute long intervals, five times on a stationary bike with three minutes of rest in between those four minute long intervals. Okay, so. So we're talking about a duration of intensity that is well in excess of much of the gold standard research on HIIT, which is like 10 to 30 seconds in duration. Okay, right. These are four minute long efforts, five times through with three minutes of rest in between each. Now during week two they, they added an extra session and they added in more workouts and then also 8 minute spurts of all out pedaling. Now they've doubled the exercise times. Now they're exercising for eight minutes in addition to exercising for four minutes. And I'm not saying their total exercise duration was eight minutes. I'm saying that was how long the intervals were that they were doing. And they continued this for four weeks with very little recovery and not any so called periodization to give people a chance to kind of step back. But let's say that they had had adequate recovery and let's assume that these people were recovered. Either way, what they did was then they measured things like blood sugar stabilization, they measured things like the health of the mitochondria using muscle biopsies. And they were showing that the mitochondria were only producing about 60% as much energy as they had during previous weeks throughout the course of the and also they saw a high amount of glycemic variability, like a lot of see sawing spikes and dips during the day in terms of blood glucose. And so here's what you need to understand in order to understand why what happened, happened to the people who were in this study. When you're doing high intensity interval training, essentially you're breaking down ATP, okay? And you're breaking down ATP pretty rapidly. Now ATP when it's broken down is converted into ADP and energy or this phosphate molecule, right? You cleave one phosphate molecule off of adenosine triphosphate and then what you're left with is adenosine diphosphate plus a phosphogenic energy molecule that can be burnt, you know, and you know, that's why when people take creatine they say they have more energy. We talked about that in the last podcast episode. That was podcast, what was that? 425. So today is 426. So all the shownotes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 426 and anyway, so that's why creatine phosphate can give you some extra phosphogenic pools to use to replenish ATP more readily. But regardless of whether or not you have creatine on board, the ATP when you're doing high intensity exercise gets broken out into ADP plus a phosphate molecule that gets burned and then you're left over with amp adenosine monophosphate and another phosphate molecule. Now, the thing is that there is evidence that once you completely exhaust the amp, the AMP stores, you can actually limit the mitochondrial response, potentially even decrease the ability of the mitochondria to produce energy. And that occurs in one of two scenarios. High intensity interval training duration, that is too long or inadequate recovery period of time in between the efforts. Arguably, you could also say that another thing that could cause that to happen would be just not having enough calories or enough ATP on board, meaning doing a bunch of HIIT and say, like a fasted state. But ultimately, the lion's share of the research on HIIT shows that once you exceed about 30 seconds, you're actually getting to that point where you're exhausting your AMP levels to the extent to where your AMP ATP to ATP ratio is going up and up and up. And so what happens in that scenario is a whole bunch of lactic acid accumulation and a dip in the ability of the mitochondria to produce energy. The potential for overtraining and a lot of the issues that have dictated, in my opinion, the smartest approach to high intensity interval training being very short efforts with long recovery periods. Okay, so that's why for me, like kettlebell swings, for me to do 10 kettlebell swings takes me about 10 to 15 seconds, and then I'm recovering for a good 60 seconds afterwards before I return back around to the next effort. Now I like to recover via like some nasal breathing on the bicycle, bouncing around, walking around the backyard. But ultimately, this study was a very poorly conducted example of what high intensity interval training should look like. And furthermore, when we see a lot of the complaints out there about heart attacks, right? Heart attacks being associated with too much intense training, One of the reasons for that and one of the reasons that some of the biggest damage from a heart attack comes after oxygen returns to the heart is because the heart uses up all the phosphate. The mitochondria start producing free radicals. And essentially when all the adenosine has been broken down, there's not enough, what are called adenosine ribose frames, this protein framework to accept the phosphate molecules fuels. And then you start producing ammonia in the heart and you create this acidic environment where the heart, which would normally ideally operate on ketones, is kind of forced into this like glycolytic state, very similar to what you'd see in say, like an out of control cellular clump that's developing cancer due to excess glycolysis. And so you're doing damage to the heart, you're doing damage to the mitochondria. And the reason for that is efforts that are too long with inadequate recovery periods, sometimes in a state of a caloric deficit such as fasted exercise. And so once you put all those variables together, all this study tells us is how you should be doing hiit the right way and what the wrong way to do it would be. Does that make sense?

When I first read this article, I was kind of struck with something you and I had discussed. It was probably about a year or so ago when you first introduced me. It was an article that we posted. You first introduced me to the concept of high intensity repeat training, or hurt training, which is basically just exercising all out, like close to 100%, which is what hit should be or what hurt should be for about 10 seconds and then giving like a pretty gracious rest period. So for me, that's normally about 50 seconds. So like, let's say if I go high intensity almost 100% for 10 seconds on my, like concept rower, then for, you know, 50 seconds, I'm just going to do a light, kind of easy, breezy type row with nasal breathing exercises. And then after that hit another 10 seconds as hard as I can. And then I'll generally do like anywhere from about seven to ten sets max. I mean, ten's really pushing it. And I've just found that especially if I look at like data metrics, if I look at my aura, if I look at my whoop, if I do exercises like that, more hurt instead of hiit, then I tend to have better biometric outcomes. I tend not to be overreaching or over training nearly as often. Whereas before when I was doing hiit, I was just kind of like muscling through it. Like, no pun intended. Like, I was just saying, well, I don't care really what my biometrics say. Like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing, doing. And I was overreaching, I was over training, I was getting hurt. And so for me it's just been a much better option. And also too, from a psychological perspective, 10 seconds is a hell of a lot easier than thinking about, what'd you say, eight minutes of high intensity. You can't go eight minutes high intensity. Like maybe if you're doing like 60, 75%, but not 85 to 100%.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. So, so I'll, I'll link to a great article that appeared on the Breaking Muscle website a couple of years ago on how to do what's this so called hurt, which is essentially what We've just described H I R T high intensity repeat training versus HIIT high intensity interval training. And for most people, aside from the elite athlete who's trying to increase VO2 max, who's willing to put up with some of the potential damage that might occur to their heart or to their mitochondria or their oral metabolism from excess training, which is just kind of like a trade off you make if you want to compete on the pointy, pointy edge of sports that I think hurt is a far better way to train. Extremely short exercise sessions or interval training periods of 10 to 30 seconds in duration with very long recovery periods, one minute, like I explained I was doing this morning, is actually considered pretty dang short for a recovery period if you're truly going all out. And gold standard is closer to three to four minutes. So hopefully that's helpful for people who saw that study and were a little bit confused about whether or not they should be doing high intensity interval training. We actually kind of like jumped into the news flashes without actually even introducing the news flashes. And when we do, open it up for questions. Just so all of you who are on Clubhouse know for people who want to ask questions live, you can, you can definitely ask questions about some of these things that we discuss in the, in the news flashes, but we're not going to open up the floodgates for questions right now. So there was one other thing I wanted to mention and then we'll move into the news flashes. I'm also super excited, Jay, because up on the Traeger grill on my patio right now, I've got a little kitchen experiment going on.

You had something going on last time with the whole wrapped meat thing and now you got something new going.

Yeah, the Lomo El Tropo wrapped meat that turned out amazing. Go see my Instagram feed to take a look at that idea of wrapping a giant piece of tenderloin in a towel, soaking it in wine, adding a whole bunch of salt, and then tossing it on top of a giant fire. That worked really well. And I posted that to Instagram. It was a hit. That was. It's oh my gosh, it's so good. You cut it and it's like filet mignon tenderloins. But what I'm doing now, and by the way, Shameless Plug, my cookbook just went on pre order@boundlesscookbook.com if anybody wants to try out some of these crazy ass recipes I come up with. But here is my, here's my reasoning on this latest recipe. I'm trying this morning and this is super easy for any of you who want to try it. But I won't be able to tell you until tonight how it turned out. I'm taking my twin boys and my wife out to play tennis at about 6pm around 7, I'll come back and finish cooking this thing and let people know how it actually turned out and I'll put it on Instagram. But, Jay, have you ever been to a restaurant and had duck confit?

I have no clue what that is. I just know what the word duck is. And he said something that sounded French, maybe.

Okay, confit, C O N F I T. I'm going to educate you. That's the kind of like the ultra slow transformation of meat into just like rich, crispy, skinned succulents. All it really means, if you see that on the menu, is they're taking the duck and cooking it in its own fat. Or sometimes they'll use a different fat like lard or olive oil or something like that. But it's typically cooked, immersed, submerged in its own fat, at a low temperature, not a frying temperature, but a very low temperature, 200 to 220 degrees or so for a good six to eight hours. And when you do that and the meat is immersed in the fat, you get a tenderness on the level of like a deep fried Thanksgiving turkey without a lot of the oxidative byproducts that you're going to get from frying at a very high temperature. But then when you take that meat and you finish it by taking all that fat that it's been slow cooking in all day and give it a quick sear to get it crispy at the very end, you wind up with one of the most flavorful, wonderful, enjoyable pieces of, in most cases, poultry that you'll ever wrap your teeth around. And so duck confit is one of my favorite things to order at this local French restaurant named Florida Sells that I go to. And so I was. These are the kind of things I think about while I'm laying in bed at night. I thought, well, why can't I take just, you know, any of these, you know, whole organic pastured chickens that I've had in my freezer, right? A lot easier to get my hands on than duck. And why couldn't I take that and basically cover it with a whole bunch of suet, which is like the fat that you'll typically find around the kidneys. I got a whole freezer full of suet from Belcampo and so I just drenched the chicken in a mix of suet and coconut oil because I almost didn't have enough suet to cover the chicken in a Dutch oven pot and then put it on the Traeger at 220 for about eight hours along with a host of different spices and herbs. In this case I use like dill, salt, pepper, cayenne, paprika, rosemary, thyme, etc. With a little bit of bay leaf. And so it's about, I put it on at about 4:30am this morning because I've been getting up kind of early. So by about around noon or so, I'll check it, I'll pull it from the grill, I'll stick it in the fridge to sit in that fat for a while. Then tonight for dinner I'll take it out and fry it up for the family. What do you think? Huh?

Man, it sounds really good. I love your adventurous spirit when it comes to cooking because I would have not thought of that because I mean, it didn't even know what the hell it was. But sounds amazing.

Yeah. So if any of you are listening, you got some extra coconut oil or any other form of fat or even like lard or whatever laying around and some chicken. Try it Dutch pot, cover it in fat, put it in the oven or the grill for about eight hours and that's it. And it's really kind of like a low maintenance recipe too with whatever herbs you desire. So I'll put that one on Instagram later on. So that's@instagram.com BenGreenfield Fitness the new cookbook is it BoundlessCookbook.com and I suppose we should jump into the news flashes.

Yeah, let's get going.

All right, so. So a few rapid fire news flashes before we jump into to some discounts we want to give you guys. And then our live Q and A. A lot of people were pretty heartbroken when the news came out last year, or it may have been almost two years ago now about our beloved Topo Chica water, which many, many people are huge fans of, especially if you live in Texas, being shown to contain a variety of contaminants including polyfluoralkyl, which is, which is abbreviated pfas, which is a chemical substance that's linked to things like cancer and learning delays children. And Tapo Chico failed the test. They had extremely high amounts of PFAS's. So tapo chico last month basically announced that it had upgraded its filtration system to ensure the continued safety and quality of Tapo Chico into the future. And so those of you who decided to forego your tapo chico habit based on that study that came out a couple of years ago, the good news that I have for you is Tapachico is now once again thumbs up low in PFAs. They've amped up their filtration capacity and you can now drink Tapachico again guilt free. So there you have it.

Yes. No, that's really. You don't know how depressed I was when that study came out. And I had to put it away because, you know, really, I had always drink Pellegrino, and I really love Pellegrino, but there was something about Topo Chico that just had that, like, bite to it. It's got that, like, really crisp carbonation. I guess the mineral content just gives it a bit of a bite. And I missed it so much. And so when I this. When I was reviewing for today and I saw this article up, I was so excited and so happy. So I may head to Sprouts after our. After our talk today. Grab a. Grab a 12 pack.

And of course, Pellegrino and Gerald Steiner are also up there. And one thing I should note, for those of you who have seen me on the gram doing this, I take my Pellegrino now and I pour it through what's called, like a water vortexer. It's this fancy copper water vortexer that basically it structures the water. It causes the formation of these H3O2 molecules as it pours through this vorticine device. And so you essentially return it to a similar flavor and electrochemical potential as you would get if the water were straight from the spring. So you can take your carbonated bottled water and restructure it by pouring it through this device. Now I'll open my Pellegrino or my Topo Chico or my Gerald Steiner, pour it through this vortexer. And I'll link to that one in the show notes if you guys want to see what I'm using. This copper vortexer. And then so I pour it into a glass mason jar and then drink out of that. And the cool thing about this vortexer is I use it on wine like I drink the dry farm wines. Amplifies the flavor of wine. You can use it for scotch, for whiskey, for vodka, any of your hard alcohols. You can use it for kombucha. It not only aerates whatever liquid that you use it with, but it also structures it. And so, I mean, playing around with liquids, the other thing is that that infopathy device that I did that I did a podcast on. You know the one that'll. That'll impart frequencies into water. I had a. Yeah, I had a dinner party at my house the other day and I, I have a bunch of like local biohackers who I, who I had over and one guy, he actually. Matt Blackburn. Shout out to my friend Matt Blackburn who's got a. I think it's the Mito Life podcast. He said he was experimenting with the sildenafil frequency that that thing has to basically impart the frequency of Viagra into the water that you're drinking. So after that dinner party a few nights ago, I started doing in the afternoon sildenafil and I am totally not kidding you, a near insty boner after I drank the water. And I don't, I don't know how much of that is placebo effect. Right. Admittedly, you know, I should have done some time double blinded trial where I had my kids do it and then they don't tell me which water it is and I drink that. But I have successfully repeated that experiment three times since and every time I get swole really down down under. So have you used it before the.

Before doing a workout?

Have I used it before workout the sildenafil frequency as like a vasodilator for the workout.

You know how bodybuilders will use sildenafil for workouts and get the crazy pump.

I've used it before mattress workout, I can tell you that. But yeah, actually sildenafil is banned by WADA for that reason because it's such a potent nitric oxide precursor and performance enhancing aid. I haven't really experimented with it much pre workout, but that's a good idea especially if you're doing any of these oxygen enhanced workouts just because you get even more blood flow. So for any of you who are using exercise with oxygen training or even using hyperbaric oxygen chamber, anything you use prior to a session like that, that will increase nitric oxide is actually going to improve the effects of that practice. And so yeah, this would be something to try for that as well. But isn't that cool that I can actually make my own drinkable water Viagra without actually going to any say like fringe international online websites to purchase off label generic Viagra.

Right. It sounds crazy and you are right. It could, could potentially be placebo. But who cares?

It's.

It's working for you.

Yeah. Keep it up. And for those of you who want to listen. Yeah. That, that podcast that I did about that whole water Device is at BenGreenfieldFitness.com infopathy info pH and it's not even that expensive. Infopy. It's like a 200, I think. 200 bucks. Oh wow. That's not bad at all. Which considering you've got access to thousands of chemicals and supplement and supplements and meds that you can infuse into your water, it's actually pretty cool. It almost feels like cheating, but sure.

Does it reduce the amount of carbonation in your drink though? Because I feel like that would irritate me a little bit.

Like if you were to use Pellegrino, for example.

Yeah, yeah. Like when you put Pellegrino or Topo Chico through it does. Because I kind of like my bones.

Oh no. We're talking about two different things. So. So sorry to confuse. But the, but the water, the water vortexing device is. Is the first thing I was talking about. And then that Infopathy water charger is a second thing. Hopefully it's not too. And I honestly use both. Like I pour it through the Vortessor and then put it on the Infopathy device. But neither seem to influence the carbonation that dramatically. And I'll link to all of these news flashes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 426 but there was also an interesting study kind of similar that hit study a little bit of fear mongering almost that came out that showed that belly fat becomes resistant to fasting and that a new study showed that fasting essentially makes you fat. This also is one that I received a lot of emails and texts about. And so I thought I should clear up the air on this as well. This was a study that was published in the Cell Reports journal. And what they found was that in fasted rodent models there was a change in both forms of fat in their bodies. Both the visceral fat, like the visceral belly fat, the fat tissue surrounding your organs, like your stomach, and then the subcutaneous fat. Right. The fat that's just underneath your skin. And they found that in particular the visceral fat most significantly actually became resistant to the release of fatty acids in these fasted rodent models. Meaning that over time, as these rodents fasted, the visceral fat became less and less capable of releasing its own fatty acids to produce energy. And of course, this makes sense from an evolutionary or an ancestral standpoint because when you are sending your body a signal that there are not enough calories to go around, so to speak, that triggers like A preservation signaling pathway in visceral fat and, and causes it long term to become resistant to releasing fatty acids, to breaking down fatty acids for energy, because it wants to store them. Right. And so they used a pretty cool, what's called proteomics form of measurement, where they measured more than 85 different proteins and enzymes located in fat deposits to show that there were cellular changes occurring that made the belly fat almost like, resistant to fat loss. And so I went ahead and dug into this study a little bit more because the news flashes didn't really tell the whole story. So first of all, what they did note across the board was an improvement in many actions that would be associated with improved metabolic health. Like metabolic health, like, they found a consistent increase in mitochondrial protein content and an increase in fatty acid synthesis pathways that were associated with decreased inflammation and improved insulin sensitivity. Which does make sense because as these fat cells become more insulin sensitive, they're able to take up energy more quickly, sop up energy from the bloodstream and store it. And they also saw an improvement in mitochondrial and metabolic health because the body became better equipped at being able to produce that ATP that we were talking about earlier. So it was good for the mitochondria, it was good for metabolic health. And despite that, they did note that the visceral fat was not able to break down quite as readily in these rodent models that were fasted. And so when I think about this, there's two things that you should understand. A, this was long term fasting without refeeds, long term calorie restriction in the absence of refeeds. Now, once you introduce refeeds into the equation, like, let's say you do some, some form of calorie restriction for, let's say four weeks in a row, but that calorie restriction is accompanied by like, like every Saturday or every Sunday, you're actually eating to slight caloric excess, or you're refilling your energy stores with a few meals that are actually giving you as much energy as you'd want. Like, you're eating ad libitum, completely satisfying your appetite. That appears to stave off any issues with like thyroid downregulation, resistance to fat loss, etc. So there's a difference between long term calorie restriction restriction and long term calorie restriction with refeeds. Okay, so I'm a bigger fan of including refeeds. If you're trying to lose weight and you're using a diet approach to do so, you know, restricting calories to do so. So that's one thing, the other thing is that it appears that, and I'll get into this when it comes to aging momentarily and the anti aging effects of fasting. But it appears that many of the benefits of fasting don't necessarily come from the caloric restriction, but from the so called compressed feeding window, meaning it's not so much about restricting calories as it is about restricting the hours during the day in which you're consuming those calories. Which is another feather in the cap for the intermittent fasting approach where you might eat your normal. For me, I typically eat 3,000 to 3,500 calories a day, but that's over the course of about 8 to 10 hours. And then I've got another anywhere from 10 to 16 hours during the day where I'm simply not eating. And so you'll get a lot of the benefits of fasting from that approach alone and also be able to harness a lot of what they did show in this study. The improvements in mitochondrial efficiency, the improvements in the decreased inflammation in fat cells, the improvements in insulin sensitivity. So ultimately the big takeaway from this study is don't get concerned that fasting is going to make you fat. Instead just don't fast long term without including refeeds and consider adopting more of an intermittent fasting approach than a strict caloric restriction approach. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. Makes, makes plenty of sense. Yeah, I think it's, it's like you said, kind of similar to that article we talked about in Hit. You see the headlines here and you think okay there, therefore we need to throw away fasting because I'm just gonna, you know, keep, keep belly fat and it's gonna just continue to grow and not go anywhere. It's not gonna budge. No pun intended. Done a lot of puns today. But you know, I think that it's, it's true that like it's, it's not that fasting in and of itself is going to be detrimental, it's just how you fast, just like anything we do in life. So I think that those clarifications are extremely important.

Yep, fully agreed. And then kind of related to this, a pretty good blogger in the anti aging and longevity realm, a guy named Josh Mitteldorf. He writes some pretty compelling articles based on research in the field of aging. And he's written a series recently called Weight and Aging Paradox, two part series. And it's very interesting because there is this kind of hypothesis going around and it has been going around for several years that to a certain extent being Overweight may have a metabolically protective effect, meaning slight amounts of cushion, so to speak, may actually lower your risk of mortality rather than, as you expect, increasing your risk of mortality. And it sounds paradoxical, like you're saying, like being fat is going to help me to live a longer time. But there was a study that came out of Ohio State University a couple of months ago, and it was based on the Framingham database, which has medical and demographic information, in this case on about 5,000 people that they tracked over 74 years. And they found that the people who lived the longest were not only average weight when young, but they also gained weight, especially during their middle years. And the folks who were gaining weight as they aged actually showed a 40%, basically, I'm sorry, the people who maintain what would be called a low to normal weight all through their lives, they had a 40% higher risk of death, higher all cause mortality risk than those that actually gained slight amounts of weight as they aged. And so that seems a little bit paradoxical because we've always been told, as I alluded to a little while ago, that caloric restriction is associated with improved life expectancy in largely mammalian models and also in yeast, fruit flies, et cetera. And when you step back and look at things, though, this might suggest that calorie restriction doesn't necessarily extend human life capacity. Now, there's a few things to bear in mind here. A, when they're looking at the actual association between weight and longevity, they're looking at bmi. And BMI doesn't necessarily differentiate body mass index, that ratio between your height and your weight doesn't necessarily account for muscle. Meaning that maintaining or even increasing muscle as one ages may be what's going on here. And it's not necessarily increasing weight. You know, ignorant or agnostic of what's going on in terms of, of whether that weight is fat weight versus muscle weight. But instead it's this idea that maintaining muscle as you age could have a protective effect on mortality. And so that, I think, is something that isn't going to shock a lot of people. And there still is good evidence for caloric restriction in humans. Like they found that food shortages during World War II in some European countries are associated with a pretty sharp decrease in coronary heart disease mortality, which then increased again after the war ended. They've shown that when folks lose weight, it seems to, based on methylation measurements, kind of turn back the aging clock a little bit. We find that when BMI increases again, even though they're not differentiated between fat versus muscle you seem to see an increase in C reactive protein, a measurement of inflammation that might also be associated with an increase in aging or at least an increased risk of mortality. We know that a loss in insulin sensitivity, which is sometimes associated with weight gain, may drive some different age related diseases and that there's a strong correlation between BMI and obesity. But it still is interesting that in this Framingham study, weight gain didn't show up as a risk factor for faster aging. Now, now, in his comments on this, Josh had some interesting ideas as to why this might be the case. So first of all, there is that part about higher bmi, possibly indicating more muscle mass, not necessarily more fat mass. I think that definitely plays a factor. There's also the emotional hypothesis, and this is interesting. But when they look at profile of mood state scores and they look at so called happiness factors, people who are slightly overweight tend to be a little bit happier, have higher levels of life satisfaction. So it's kind of interesting that by enjoying food and not necessarily being cold and libido less your entire life, you may actually have a level of emotional enjoyment that might actually increase your lifespan a little bit. I'm not saying that by adopting an epicurean philosophy of eating fried chicken in bed with lard dripping from your cheeks like Fat Bastard in the old Austin Powers movie is going to make you live longer. But big glorious family dinners and celebrations and outings and going to some parties and having big meals that may actually allow for a decreased rate of aging, even though you might have a little bit more cushion, so to speak, compared to people who are calorie restricting their entire lives or maintaining weight their entire lives. Another thing that may happen here is they're not differentiating that much between brown fat, right? Like metabolically active brown fat that you get from things like cold thermogenesis and cold training, for example, is playing a factor here, right? So part of it might be, well, you don't necessarily have more fat overall, but you have more brown fat. And I think a lot of these polar bear swimmers in the Bay Area have shown that you can live longer and be fat if that fat is really good metabolically active brown fat because you have a robust cold thermogenesis practice. So that might be part of it as well. Then there's also this idea that I alluded to earlier that calorie restriction and being lean is not necessarily what would cause you to age more slowly or increase lifespan, but rather it's simply time restricted eating. And so you could, for example, be normal weight or slightly higher than average weight or higher than average bmi. But if you're still intermittent fasting and having these compressed feeding windows, you're basically reducing your risk of that slightly higher weight being problematic or the slightly higher calorie intake being problematic. And so there's a variety of factors to think about here. But ultimately the big takeaway is that if you are constantly calorie restricting, maintaining very low body fat percentage, exercising intensively, and as we've already established, doing too much, say high intensity exercise in a calorically deprived state, et cetera, don't fool yourself into thinking that that is actually going to help you live longer. It may actually decrease lifespan versus a strategy of intermittent fasting, eating really good, nutrient dense and even sometimes calorie dense amounts of food, exercising in a way that doesn't totally deplete you every time that you exercise. That appears to, based on some of the data that we're seeing, be a better strategy for longevity versus just strict calorie restriction and excessive exercise. So I don't know if that's going to be a huge news flash for folks. I think that it's kind of intuitive for a lot of people, but especially in the fitness world, I think we still have this approach of beating ourselves up, calorie restricting, excessively exercising, having very long training sessions in terms of the time of the intervals that we're doing high intensity interval training. And I don't think any of that is actually doing a good job helping us to live longer versus maintaining just a little bit of extra weight.

Yeah. When you first started talking about this study, my first, first thing, especially when you mentioned BMI was my mind immediately ran to the whole subject of muscle mass and kind of how that factors into bmi. And I thought about myself. I mean, I'm actually considered overweight. However, right now my body fat percentage is around 11 to 12%. I'm just really tall, I'm broad, I'm muscular. And so those things make me in a higher BMI category. But I would could believe that the things that I'm doing, especially from a fitness exercise regimen, are kind of adding to my overall sense of wellness, but also too to longevity. So yeah, I think that that's a huge variable in here. And then another thing you said, Ben, that was really interesting was the emotional component. I think a lot of times people think that when you become depressed or anxious, but especially depressed, that people tend to just kind of gorge themselves with food. And that's actually quite the opposite. That's that's a bit more of kind of the other extreme that doesn't nearly as frequently as people who lose their appetite and don't eat nearly as much and they lose a ton of weight. And so we have to remember there's so many variables in here. And so I don't think the study is just saying like, hey, the fatter you are, the happier you are. You have to kind of, kind of look at the asterisk beside that and see that there, there are different things that you have to parse out.

For sure. You can be depressed emotionally eating fat and you can be, I am loving life and having amazing dinners with my family, you know, normal to slightly high weight. And then the other thing to bear in mind here is that the way that BMI is calculated dictates that people who are shorter are always going to, based on that calculation have a higher bmi. And short people tend to live significantly longer than tall people. And you know, we even know about, about Loron dwarfism where they've shown that these, these dwarfs have very low levels of insulin like growth factor one. And Dr. Rhonda Patrick, I believe is probably the person who's talked about this the most. And there's this idea that slightly lower levels of growth hormones, slightly lower levels of IGF1 may allow for longer life. And so short people would technically tend to live slightly longer anyways and that might kind of skew this as well. So ultimately though, I think it's interesting to think about and I just want to put a warning out there to people who are just like, you know, living this extremely stoic lifestyle. You might be missing out on quite a bit of enjoyment and not even inducing the longevity benefits that you think you might be inducing versus sane amounts of caloric restriction or intermittent fasting combined with things like cold exposure, high intensity repeat training and some of those things that we do know could extend lifespan without excessively beating up the body.

Indeed.

Now there's one other thing that I wanted to mention that I think was super duper interesting and that was the latest research that came out on, on coffee. And this was, well, not coffee really. It was caffeine. The International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand on caffeine and exercise performance recently came out and some of the takeaways from that, if I could go through some of the bullet points kind of rapid fire with you, I think were, were super duper interesting, especially for people who like to have their coffee. So a few of the things in this study which was titled the International Site of Sports Nutrition position stand on caffeine and exercise performance. First of all, they did of course, no surprises here, found that caffeine improves physical performance dramatically in both trained and untrained individuals. And that if you abstain from caffeine for a certain period of time, such as 10 to 14 days prior to an exercise session, then consume caffeine, that the magnitude of those effects is pretty significantly increased, particularly for aerobic exercise and aerobic endurance. And so the other thing though that they found that was interesting was that some of the things that seem to be better in terms of a delivery mechanism for caffeine, specifically, if you're consuming caffeine to enhance your workout or to enhance sports performance, is anything where the caffeine stays in your mouth. Okay, so caffeinated chewing gum, mouth rinses, meaning literally just like taking one of those caffeinated gels and swishing around in your mouth, then spitting it out or some type of caffeinated mint or gum or any caffeinated substance or even like a no dose tablet or whatever. And just like keeping that in the mouth, mouth energy gels, energy chews, those type of things specifically or more significantly for aerobic exercise have a really dramatic effect versus just like chewing and swallowing or having a cup of coffee prior to your workout. So actually having it in your mouth seems to help out quite a bit. So those were a couple of things. But then there were a few other interesting takeaways as well from this caffeine exercise performance paper. There's a big individual response, big individual response. If you are a fast caffeine metabolizer with something as simple as your 23andMe results would show significant improvements in exercise performance via the use of caffeine. If you were slow metabolizer, sometimes not only less performance improvements, but worsened performance in response to caffeine. So if you take your genetic results and it shows that based on your CYP genes, your slow caffeine metabolizer, you may actually want to avoid caffeine prior to exercise. So that's something to think about. Another one is that if you are not going to chew or suck on a caffeinated mint or piece of gum during exercise, which appears to be the best way to take in caffeine during exercise, the best timing strategy appears to be 60 minutes prior to exercise. So if you are going to have that cup of coffee or pre workout drink that has caffeine in it, it some people suck that down and then go work out, but appears an hour before is when the the best effects will kick in. And so you know, if you're getting ready to work out and you're thinking about your pre workout, you may actually want to time your pre workout, if it's a caffeinated pre workout, up to an hour prior to your exercise session rather than right before your exercise session. And so that, that's another good to know, interesting takeaway. Caffeine did not seem to affect hydration status, exacerbate dehydration, or alter thermoregulation. Even in high heat exercise environments, you don't have to worry about using caffeine during exercise, even exercise in the heat. Furthermore, caffeine also seemed to benefit athletes who are performing at altitude. It offset the negative effects of hypoxia. And so if you're competing at altitude, it turns out that caffeine may actually be pretty helpful for that as well. And I'm trying to think if there were any other big takeaways. I guess the last thing to consider is that if you consume caffeine post workout with your post workout meal, if you're one of those people who wants to consume a post workout meal, which as I've talked about in previous podcasts, is something that's really only that necessary if you're going to be exercising again within the next eight hours, like if you're a two a day type of person, if you have your post workout meal with some caffeine, caffeine, you replenish your glycogen much more quickly. And so you can actually, you know, if you're not gonna take a, take a nap or something like that, you, you can actually take caffeine with a post workout meal. Especially if you're an athlete. Again, that, that would be, you know, the person who's maybe in a tournament or competition where they gotta compete again and they're refueling right after they've competed once, or you're somebody who likes to work out in the morning and then again the evening having coffee or caffeine post workout along with your post workout meal. If that post workout meal has carbs in it, it will help you to assimilate those carbs more quickly and you'll replenish your muscle glycogen more quickly if you include caffeine with your post workout meal. So yeah, I really appreciated the ISSN digging in. This is in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. Just laying everything out. Really nice bullet point format on all the different ways to use caffeine during exercise. And I'll link to the full paper in the show notes notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 426 and I do realize we're getting a little bit long in the tooth with our intro and I do want to allow time for some clubhouse Q and A's. Here we go.

Hey Ben, how you doing? Thanks for Sophia calling me up. I'd love listening to the podcast. I knew you were talking about maximizing your workout. I know you mentioned that you don't use Tadala flow or any of those type of, of do you use? First of all, big question is a, what do you do in terms of boost? What is your go to for boosting nitric oxide if you're doing some type of like Kaatsu or some type of blood flow restrictions that change what you're doing to increase blood flow? Are you using any type of like a BPC157 with your workout? What is your best pre workout regimen that you use with your clients? I know, I kind of, I, I, my patients are very aggressive in what they want to use in terms of their pre workout. I know you are as well, so I'm really curious to hear what you have to say.

Yeah, you know, this kind of popped up a little bit during the last podcast, podcast425. This idea about ways that you could increase nitric oxide naturally without the use of things like say, you know, Viagra or even arguably supplements like, you know, arginine or citrulline, et cetera. And so we had a big podcast where we talked about all these different ways that one could increase nitric oxide naturally. Obviously there are some of these foods that work really well, like beets or, you know, arugula or any of these nitrate rich foods. But the interesting thing is that, and I think I'm trying to remember which podcast this was. I think it was podcast. Do you remember, Jay, the one where we did the big, the big nitric oxide show?

I remember doing it. I want to say it was probably about five or six podcasts ago. So maybe around like the 4 18, 419 area.

Okay. All right. Gotcha. Soso. One thing that we brought up during that show was it's really interesting, if you have a good oral microbiome, you actually convert the nitrates from those food sources into nitric oxide more readily. And so what that means is if you are using mouthwash frequently or using any fluoridated mouth product more frequently, like fluoridated toothpaste, for example, or drinking high amounts of fluoridated water from your municipal water supply, you actually decrease that conversion. So maintaining a really good oral microbiome is one thing that's important for naturally increasing your nitric oxide levels. In addition to that, photonic light, specifically from the red light spectrum, infrared, and even to a lesser extent, recent research has showed that even UVA and UVB can introduce this effect as well, can increase nitric oxide. Which is why I think they've come out with several studies now showing that infrared sauna can decrease cardiovascular mortality risk. And probably a big part of that is due to the management of blood pressure and other cardiovascular parameters via the increase in nitric oxide. Furthermore, they've shown that even if vitamin D levels do not increase appreciably, you actually see a lot of these cardiovascular benefits in response to UVA and UVB radiation. And the hypothesis from that is that UVA and UVB radiation from the sunlight may also do a good job increasing nitric oxide. So sunlight, infrared saunas, in addition to a good oral microbiome, combined with nitrate rich fruits or vegetables like, like beet or arugula, that's also a really good strategy. There is one product, and I guess this would count as a supplement, but it's probably the most impressive one that's, that's not Viagra that exists out there. It's made by my friend Dr. Nathan Bryan, who's probably one of the better nitric oxide researchers out there. And that's called Neo 40. Neo 40. And you can actually get these, these test strips, these mouth test strips to test nitric oxide in your mouth. And kind of the more red they turn when you put them in your mouth, the higher the levels of your nitric oxide are. And it turns out that for me, when I tested my nitric oxide levels using these strips and combined it with Neo40 like they, they would get bright, bright red using this Neo 40. And so a lot of people swear by that stuff. So that's another really, really good way to do it. What else Jay, you got anything on your end for ways that you could naturally increase nitric oxide?

I think you hit on the ones that, that, that I would, I would mention. You know, I know he was, I don't know if the question was fully natural because he was asking about things like, you know, peptides and whatnot. And so I can, so I can, you know, discuss kind of my utilization or of, of different supplements. I put that in air quotes which nobody can see me in. But that is actually something I was referring to earlier and I wasn't supposed to be referring to it, which was nicotine. So like I think you hit on all the natural ones, but for me a big one is just like a piece of Lucy gum before I work out. That's been probably the most.

Yeah, but, but, but, but Nic, nicotine, you should know that that's a vasoconstrictive. A lot of people even develop erectile dysfunction with long term use of nicotine. So you know, theoretically nicotine would actually act in, in like, like to, to counteract what you'd be looking for when it comes to nitric oxide. Dictating that if you were using nitric oxide or if you're using nicotine for its exercise performance benefits, which it does have, you would actually want to be even more adamant about finding ways to increase your nitric oxide or taking some kind of blood flow precursor prior to workout because nicotine may actually shut down some of that effect.

So yeah, I was actually thinking, well I guess I know as far as like dilating cerebral arteries, I know that it was effective, but I guess I didn't realize from a muscular tissue perspective the opposite.

Yeah. And especially for something like erectile dysfunction, it's also something that can exacerbate that nicotine use. So you do need to be careful to really pay attention to nitric oxide levels if that's the case. But for me, I like to think that I'm getting a huge nitric oxide boost every single morning because I get up, I do breath work, including nasal breathing, which is a really good way to increase nitric oxide and something that I do during exercise. But then every morning while I'm drinking my coffee or my cacao or whatever I happen to be drinking in the morning and kind of working on emails and articles, et cetera, I do 20 minutes of these Joovv red lights, like the red light therapy. So every morning I'm getting this big boost of nitric oxide. And admittedly now that I'm drinking magical sildelafil water again in the afternoon, there's another boost right there. And so that combined with, with you know, we always have like roasted beets and arugula and stuff like that in the refrigerator. We eat a lot of those. I don't use a lot of, a lot of mouthwash or anything else that keeps my mouth super duper clean. I don't have halitosis, don't worry. But I'm pretty careful to not like nuke all the bacteria in my mouth. You know, those are a few kind of the low hanging fruits when it comes to nitric oxide. But I'd say, you know, sunlight, nasal breathing exercise and nitrate rich vegetables along with a good oral biome is the best way to just naturally keep your nitric oxide levels elevated. And then finally, as far as pre workout stacks, go listen to my podcast with Milo Sakev, the bodybuilder, because we get into some pretty potent pre workout stacks. Probably just to tell you exactly what I and this is going to get kind of weird for you guys, but I'll tell you exactly what I do pre workout these days, whether it's if I'm doing my hard workout in the morning, which I'll do on a day where I just know this afternoon we have family tennis, I'm not going to do my afternoon workout because I'll be out playing tennis tennis with the kids. So I did that kettlebell workout this morning instead. But what I do these days is like Jay, pre workout I often will pop a little nicotine lozenge or piece of nicotine gum. And then as I have reported in the past, I get this Zen spray which is like an oxytocin, peppermint rosemary, Amazonian herb hoppe nasal spray from my friend Dr. John Laurence. I do about three huffs of that per nostril, so it feels for a moment like someone's punched me in the back of the skull and it just amps up my sympathetic nervous system, my body temperature, everything. And I also do about three drops of the Sananga eye drops that we talked about in the last podcast, which make me go blind for about two minutes. So this sounds like a pretty painful way to go into a workout, but by the time I start the workout, I've got that nasal spray, the nicotine, the Sananga eye drops, and I just crush it for like a half hour. And what I also like about that is because I often do my hard workouts, like later afternoon to early evening. I'm not putting anything into my system such as caffeine that's going to interfere with my sleep later on because of the relatively short half life of nicotine and the fact that even like that Hoppe and those eye drops don't interfere with sleep patterns. And if anything, I found the eye drops actually give you really cool lucid dreams dreams or more intense vivid dreams. So that's kind of my pre workout right now. So great question. Let's take another one.

Hey Ben, it's me, Joey. I wanted to know as far as like the leg workouts, you know, because I'm trying to stay pretty thin and try to stay lean and you know, I really listen to your pockets. I get so much from what you offer the community. But like as far as like building muscle mass in my legs, can you do that every day? Is that something you know, like I know the abs you can work out every day is like, you know, building muscle mass in your legs. Is that something you would suggest to do on a daily basis?

There are some exercise protocols out there that anecdotally, not a lot of human clinical research, but anecdotally show that, that, that strategies such as like a daily barbell squat workout or daily stimulus of the leg muscle fibers even on a daily basis. Without that 48 to 72 hours of recovery that you would expect to be recommended for idealizing hypertrophy can actually allow for appreciable gains in muscle mass tissue in the legs. And so doing a leg leg workout every day, if it were a formal leg workout, meaning you know, you got whatever squats, lunges, leg extensions, reverse hypers, glute, ham raises, you know, whatever the case may be, that's probably a significant enough workout to where you're, you're, you're not going to get adequate recovery if you're doing that every day. And you should have a good 48 to 72 hours of recovery between those workouts. But if you're doing more of what would be called like, like a, like a stem workout where you're just stimulating those muscle fibers for a brief period of time and not causing an amount of calcium influx, inflammation, muscle fiber tearing, eccentric muscle tissue damage, et cetera, that would occur with a longer, more appreciable workout. You could theoretically hit it every day. And what I mean by that is for example, one single squat set to failure per day, or having a set course of walking, loaded lunges or farmer's walks that you're doing on a daily basis. I mean there's a reason that Tour de France cyclists have thunder thighs and they're definitely not doing a cycling workout and then taking three days off then doing another one. They're literally hitting their legs every day. And I understand that that's non weight bearing, it's less eccentric, it's more of almost like an endurance based form of exercise with a significant amount of fast switch muscle fiber activation because of the level of power those people are putting out during those interval training workouts workouts. But I, I would say it kind of depends. If you're talking about leg workout, it's like cycling, running, rucking, hiking, etc, you could actually do something like that every day and Provided you have ample calories on board, you're not catabolizing muscle, especially ample protein on board. You could see some leg growth and then the other strategy would be shorter, kind of like triggering or stimulus workouts for the legs, like a single squat set the failure on a daily basis that you, you might throw down before dinner, for example, to also upregulate glucose transporters and allow you to be more metabolically sensitive to dinner. You could do things like that. I wouldn't do a formal hefty leg training workout every day though. You're just not going to see enough recovery for growth in a scenario like that. So that's kind of the skinny on the leg piece. And by the way, the guy who asked that question, that was Joe. From a Shout out to Joey's Hot Sauces. That's the only hot sauce I use now. Joey introduced me to it a few months ago. It's like all these organic red peppers and habaneros and I've got like 12 bottles of Joey's Hot Sauce in my pantry. I'll give it out to people when we have dinner parties. I sell everybody Joey's hot Sauce because it's amazing and you don't get all the toxic ingredients you do in a lot of these condiments. It's kind of like Primal Kitchen has their mayos and their ketchups and their mustards. I've got a whole pantry full of that. And then I have a whole pantry full of Joey's Hot Sauce. And I think Joey gave us a discount link somewhere. So I'll hunt that down and put it in the show notes for you guys who want to try Joey's Hot Sauce blend. I guess that's a benefit of these clubhouses is kind of like that dude got on last week and was pimping his mattress company. When people get on and ask questions, it's a little back end way to highlight their business as well.

I was just going to say I had one thing to say about that too because Joey made a comment that I just like to address because I think you're right. Like if you're, if you're kind of doing an all out, full formal leg workout, like you're just gonna end up over training. You're not gonna give adequate time for recovery. And Joey had mentioned something like you can, you can work out abs every day. And this is actually kind of. And I'm not calling maybe what Joey is saying necessarily a fallacy, but what I will say is that there are some individuals who they do believe that they can go in the gym, you know, hit a hard workout on whatever they're doing and then kind of finish off with abs and then just every day just pound abs and they end up locking up their stomach. They don't see any gains, they're just kind of always sore. And so I think it's one of those things that you listen to your body and don't, and don't over train these things because that is going to just lead to a detriment in your, in your progress. So I just wanted to kind of clarify that like you said, you can do workouts on certain muscle groups each day, but I wouldn't make them formal all out just like to exhaustion with repeated sets. I think kind of that single set to failure is probably a little bit, you know, better, better suited for people.

Yep, yep, noted. Good question. All right, let's, let's take another one.

So this is Arian from Amsterdam. Thanks Ben for sharing all your knowledge.

Really appreciate it.

So my question is I'm, I'm kind.

Of a fasting enthusiast and I've done.

Quite some fasts for over 72 hours. But are there any benefits for fasting over 72 hours and is there, is there a maximum until it's still healthy?

Oh, well, there's absolutely data that shows that once you exceed the 16 hour mark of fasting, you see a market improvement in autophagy and then in terms of like mucosal cell turnover in the gut, gut healing of the gut lining, et cetera, these longer fasts even in excess of 24 hours. And these three to five day water fasts for people who do have appreciable amounts of gut inflammation, sibo, et cetera, that sometimes if they can get past the discomfort of that extended caloric restriction, it can produce profound improvements, sometimes a complete reversal of a lot of gut issues. You also see improvements in insulin sensitivity. You see increased cellular autophagy. You can see especially when combined with things like, like sauna or the use of binders like charcoal, a decrease in metal accumulation and a release of toxins from the body. I mean there's a lot that happens once you exceed the kind of the classic intermittent fasting type of window of 12 to 16 hours. But of course there are all of the potential metabolic downsides of doing that frequently that we've already highlighted earlier in this show on the paradoxical relationship between caloric restriction and aging. So based on that, my general recommendations to folks from a fasting standpoint is as follows. For pre menopausal women, fasts of longer than 12 hours done frequently appear to be not so good from an endocrine function standpoint, hormones, fertility, et cetera. So most women I recommend a 10 to 12 hour intermittent fast on as many days of the year as possible without exceeding that 12 hour mark very often, if at all. For men, it appears to be closer to 12 to 16 hours to harness a lot of say, like the longevity or the metabolic benefits of intermittent fasting or restricted feeding window. So pre menopausal women, 10 to 12 hours, men and postmenopausal women, 12 to 16 hours, you know, 365 days a year if you want to. And then to tap into some of these benefits of longer fasting periods, a couple of things I like to encourage people one up to four times a month to do a 24 hour fast, such as dinner time to dinner time, Saturday dinner, put down your fork, don't eat again until Sunday at dinner, or you know, Friday dinner to Saturday dinner fast. And that, that just seems to be something a lot of people can kind of wrap their heads around and do one to four times a month, such as just identify one day of the week where you're going to do a 24 hour dinner to dinner fast, so called omad approach, one meal a day and then finally some type of a quarterly cleanup where you're engaging in more significant levels of autophagy. Once in the spring, once in the summer, once in the winter, and once in the fall. You do something like a juice fast like the one I recently wrote about, or a Kitchari cleanse, or an ayurvedic cleanse, a so called Panchakarma type of cleanse, or a Valter Longo fasting mimicking diet approach where you're eating 30 to 40% of the number of calories that you would normally consume over a four to five day span. Or for those of you masochists out there, even something as significant as a water fast for three to five days. And I personally, because I'm just supremely curious and like to immerse myself in all different forms of fasting, I'll just kind of pick and choose when my quarterly cleanup rolls around, what I want to do. If there's some new fasting protocol out there, sometimes I'll experiment with it it. But every quarter I try to do something that's a little bit more intensive when it comes to cellular autophagy. And so I've got the daily intermittent fast, the weekly, up to one time a month, 24 hour dinner to dinner fast, and then the quarterly so called cleanup fast. And that's what I do for myself, that's what I encourage for a lot of the clients who I'm working with. And it just works. It seems to be something people can wrap their heads around and, and it works. And so yeah, you get benefits once you exceed 16 hours. And the benefits from an autophagy standpoint seem to improve and increase the longer that you go. But again, you just have to understand that there are some metabolic trade offs when it comes to thyroid down regulation, endocrine down regulation, energy levels, enough glycoprotein to go around for healthy joints, etc. So you just wouldn't want to overdo that level of fasting. And of course this is also dependent on things like body type, how much storage fat you have available, your metabolic efficiency, and how long you might have been experimenting with things like low carb or keto or caloric restriction or fasting, dictating your ability to be able to mentally or physically be able to handle longer fasts. But ultimately, yeah, there's benefits to longer fasts, but that doesn't mean you do it all the time. In the same way that there's benefits to long like hard and heavy weight training workouts or sauna sessions or cold sessions, but you wouldn't want to want to exceed them. Just like anything, fasting should be treated as a hormetic stressor. And especially for the longer, bigger hormetic stressors, if you're doing those, you do them more infrequently and typically follow them up with a pretty significant form of self care. What I mean by that is if you've done a five day fast, you want to spend the next week or so eating some pretty nutritionally dense, dense, even arguably calorie dense foods so that you're kind of reigniting the body's metabolism and endocrine status, so to speak. So it's kind of like that feast fast, feast fast type of approach cycled throughout the year. Great question. Let's take one more, one more question.

Hi, I'm Anna Pacino and nice to talk to you, Ben and Sophia and Jay and thank you for having me. And, and Ben, you've been in my garage when Vinnie Tordrich and I were recording and we filmed a video with your shirt off. I think he was painting something on your shirt, I can't remember. But I'm going to have Vinnie find that video from one back in the vault. It was very, I don't know why he never put it up. But I didn't come up here to say that. I just wanted to say hi. I wanted to know because you're talking about fasting. So Param. Menopausal women, of which I am a member. Member of this group. I did a 28 day carnivore challenge and because of my celiac, I don't eat eggs or dairy, so I can't tolerate them. So it was very much a strict muscle meat and the occasional organ meat challenge. And I really, really struggled with it. In fact, I dropped about 17 pounds and I wondered if it was mostly because I was fasting because I just, I couldn't choke it down. To use a less graphic phrase. I can't think of one. And then re. Adding back in. So kind of getting to almost like a keto, I guess what they would call keto carnivore. Adding back in vegetables and a few nuts. Not too many. I don't want to tempt fate. I immediately gained back 12 of the 17 pounds. Not immediately. Like it took about four or five weeks. But I was wondering if that's. Is that normal? Am I doing the wrong thing? I didn't enjoy the Carnivore. I don't see that that's something place that I would go for the long term. But is that something that you would recommend like maybe for two weeks instead of 28 days? Or am I doing something wrong? What can I do better? Thank you.

Hey, and I. Great question. Yeah. I remember doing that podcast in the garage with Vinnie. That was fun. I was down in la, the Vinnie Torrid show. And I think you guys. And then I'll answer your question. Didn't. Didn't Vinnie just come up with some kind of like fat documentary? Like eating fat documentary?

He has two documentaries out now since, since we've seen each other. He has two documentaries demystifying fat, fat and fat too. I have two low carb slash keto cookbooks, Eat Happy and Eat Happy too. We're not very creative with our naming, our nomenclature, but we'll get there. But hi, nice to see you.

Nice. Okay, cool. We'll. We'll link to those documentaries in the show notes. I, I actually haven't seen them yet, but somebody's telling about them the other day, so I still have to check them out. I'm, I, I tend to convert documentaries to audio and listen to them while I'm doing things like hiking or riding my bike. So I miss out on probably like half of the cinematic imagery in a documentary, but I just don't spend a lot of time sitting in front of a tv. However, I will either watch it and or listen to it to get your question. Yes, that's quite common to see some gastric distress, some blah feeling, et cetera. If you are, are shifting into, let's say like a carnivore diet type of protocol, there's a few reasons that can happen. One is that there's a pretty significant change in the gut biome when you dramatically change your diet from like high carb to low carb, from high fiber to low fiber, from vegetables to meat, the makeup of your bacteria shifts dramatically. And for example, as you cut out carbohydrates, which is quite common on a carnivore type of diet, the carbohydrate loving bacteria tend to fight back. In many cases you will get diarrhea as your biome shifts in a very similar manner as you might get diarrhea or some kind of Herxheimer reaction when you adopt a new probiotic or quit a certain probiotic. And so there are some microbiome shifts that are pretty dramatic that seem to in most people diminish after about two weeks on something like a carnivore diet. But that, that kind of like liquid poo, paint the back of the toilet seat type of phenomenon is not uncommon in people who adopt a carnivore diet. And a big reason for that is the shift in the microbiome. And I'm unaware of any special magical probiotic that you could take to reduce that effect. The only thing that I found amongst people to kind of adjust it would be to start into a carnivore diet, but include things that help to bulk up the stool, such as a chia seed slurry or a sea moss gel. Of course that would be considered cheating on a carnivore diet, but at least kind of staves off some of the, some of the diarrhea issues. Yeah, go ahead.

I, I did take hcl betaine. I anticipated this because when I asked around everybody who was doing carnivore, what's your biggest advice? And the biggest advice was don't trust a fart. And so I was like, oh well that's very telling. And so I did take HCl betaine, stomach enzymes every time time I ate. And I think that that helped because I managed to avoid what you're talking about. But yes, I just wanted to throw that out there.

Yeah, HCL will help. However, in most people what helps even more is bile, such as ox bile extract. Because when you when you consume fats, your gut releases this hormone called cck, which is cholecystokinin, that makes your gallbladder contract and release bile that's stored there. Then that emulsifies the fat and allows for the fat to be absorbed, absorbed from other enzymes. And the gallbladder is kind of like a muscle. If you're all of a sudden asking to produce more bile, it takes some time for it to do that. And so some people will supplement with any digestive enzyme that not only includes hcl but also some type of an ox bile extract for example. And believe it or not, liver supplement or liver intake or organ meat intake seems to help out with the bile production as well. And so the one I like for this is Thorne's Biogest, that's a pretty good digestive enzyme supplement that helps with bile acid production and also includes ox bile extract in it. So bile is another one that can be very helpful and that's one that you may want to consider in addition to hcl. So another thing that can cause kind of a blah feeling on something like a, like a carnivore approach would be too much protein relative to fat. That's a very common cause of diarrhea is switching to a carnivore diet but doing kind of like more of the, you know, the Costco ribeye steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner type of approach versus the kind of like the classic nose to tail approach that Dr. Paul Saladino is championing, which would be, you know, a lot more of like the, the suet, the bone marrow, the bone broth, the organ meats, the fattier cuts of meat and taking in more of the fat and then including bile and even HCL to a certain extent and avoiding just the lean proteins is another thing that seems to help out quite a bit when it comes to being able to digest better a carnivore based diet and also avoid some of the hyper ammonia that might be associated or the hyper amino acidemia that might be associated with excess protein intake in the absence of natural amount, ounce of fat. That's why nearly everybody, even way back to the Arctic explorers like what's his name, Viljamore Stefansson, he was an early champion of the carnivore diet and he really suggested adding in additional fat based on this concept of what would be called rabbit starvation or too much protein in the absence of enough fat. And then the last thing is some people don't respond well to a carnivore diet if, if it is associated with a high Amount of potentially inflammatory products like processed fat, products like processed tallow for some people who are including dairy, high amounts of dairy which inflames many people. Egg whites versus whole eggs. Non ruminant foods and especially non ruminant foods that have been fed grains like chicken and pork, higher in omega 6 fatty acids. Those would be two such examples, especially pork that isn't pastured pork or pork. Pork that's been bred to be the other white meat lower in fat. And so paying attention to the actual sources and eliminating any potentially inflammatory sources of meat on a carnivore diet is also something that seems to help out quite a bit. But in a nutshell, if you're experiencing gastric distress, switching to a carnivore diet, understand some of that's normal due to the shifts in your microbiome. Understand that a lot of it can be mitigated by including a good digestive enzyme with something like bile. Understand that a lot of it can be mitigated by eating more of a nose to tail higher fat approach. And then understand that a lot of it can be mitigated by decreasing any of the potentially inflammatory foods that might be associated with like dirty carnivore, right, like dairy and processed fats and egg whites or you know, or non natural chicken and pork, etc. So those are a few of my tips and I hope that's helpful. And I'm kind of to the point now on this podcast, by the way, where because I have another important phone call coming up in about 10 minutes that I have to be on, we will need to start to wrap things up. But, but, but, but before we wrap things up, first of all, I hope you guys are enjoying it when we do these live on clubhouse. We'll continue to try to hurdle some of the technical issues that we run into. But if you guys, if you guys really enjoy these clubhouses, we will definitely keep doing them because it seems like we've got a decent number of people in the room and, and people are listening and asking questions. So I'm totally game to keep doing this. Second of all, yeah, I think, I think it's fun. What do you think, Jay?

Oh man, I love it. Yeah, it's really fun just to be able to interact. I mean, it's not that I don't enjoy the, the, the one on one calls that we have been, but having other people in the room to listen to us. Yeah, it's fun.

Yeah. A few, few hundred flies on the wall and they, they can hear all of our embarrassing Live editing mistakes. And then also I'll put all the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com426 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com4:26 if you, if you like what we're doing, honestly, you guys, those of you live, those you listening to the recording after it comes out, one of the best, best things you can do to support this show is not only to, to visit the show notes and, and check out all the goodies that we have over there, support our sponsors, et cetera. But leave, leave this show a rating, whether it's Spotify or whether it's like Samsung or Apple podcasts, wherever you listen in, I realize it's a pain in the ass and an extra step. But if you go and just like write one sentence and leave a review based on all these podcast algorithms, it's one of the best things you can do to support this show and to support our labor of love, so to speak. And so if you're able to drop in, leave a review, it's tremendously helpful. Sometimes, even though it seems this is occurring with increasing rapidity and frequency, we don't have time to do special giveaways and goodies for people who leave reviews. We do occasionally do some cool giveaways to the reviews that we read on the show. So we'll get back to doing that pretty soon. And then grab my new cookbook. Grab my new cookbook. I'll let you know on instagram@instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness how that chicken confit recipe turns out. I'll show you guys some cool photos and give you the whole recipe on Instagram probably later tonight or tomorrow, assuming that it doesn't poison and kill my entire family. And then the cookbook is@boundlesscookbook.com available for pre order. It's big, it's beautiful. Tons of cool photos, tons of amazing, unique recipes, biohacked smoothies and, and cocktails and everything from wild game meat to plant pestos to just everything I tend to make on a regular basis is jam packed into that cookbook, along with plenty of science and fun anecdotes. So you want to check that out. And gosh, I think that's about all the time that we have. So once again, Jay, it has been an absolute pleasure geeking out with you for the past hour and a half, along with all of you on Clubhouse.

Indeed, man. Enjoy it. Can't wait for the next one.

Awesome. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben along with Jay signing out. Notes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com426 have an amazing, 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 everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week. Sa.