Q&A 429: The Best Anti-Aging Measurement, A Pre-Big-Meal Weight Loss Hack, Banana Peel Tea For Sleep, The Long Term Health Effects Of "The Pill" & Much More!

In 3, 2, 1. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, the best anti aging measurement that we know of. A pre big meal, weight loss hack, banana peel, tea for sleep, and a whole lot more. Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Welcome to today's podcast. Which is kind of weird because we, we do These Q&As on clubhouse and for some reason we, we had a technical snafu and I couldn't get the questions to like come through on the audio. I don't know, I'm not a tech wizard, but I had my, my audio assistant who you'll. You'll hear is basically an exotic Persian queen, record the questions for me so you can still hear what is asked. Although my apologies if you asked the question and you were so excited about being featured on the podcast and your voice ain't there. Sorry, I don't know what to tell you. We kind of, kind of lost it. I'm not quite sure what went on, but anyways, it's a great episode nonetheless, if I don't say so myself. Jay, welcome back, man. You missed the last Clubhouse Q and A, but we had fun without you nonetheless. It was basically just me talking to myself and some other people.

I didn't miss the last one, but my guess is, is that the consumers wrote back and they said, you cannot do this again without that good old J Wiles.

That's kind of sorta what happened if you want to tell yourself that. Not quite pump up your already inflated ego, but ultimately I just decided I wanted to have somebody to talk to because I get lonely talking to myself. As we were saying before we started recording, I was homeschooled, but thus dictating that I'm okay with talking to myself a lot since I had to dance with myself at the prom. And my high school reunion was a little lonely also sitting by myself at a table reading a book. But I do like people sometimes.

That's the only reason my wife married me too. She's one of six. They were all homeschooled and she was telling me about their prom and I put that in huge air quotes, even though nobody can see me do was like a Pride and Prejudice prom type thing. So they kind of did that style of D. But I was like so homeschool, which I grew up in like such a conventional suburban, like high school. I went to high school with like 550, 600 people. So it's a bit of a. Bit of a different world for me.

Well, your wife, having only six children in her family and being homeschooled was part of a very small family, as homeschooling goes. My own family was me and two brothers and two sisters. And often at homeschooling conventions and get togethers, folks did comment on how small a family we had, which seemed odd at the time. Anyways, though, yes, speaking of loneliness, this is kind of a big week for our family because tonight my twin boys head off into the wilderness for their rite of passage. They're. They're 13 years old and this is officially. Yeah, well, they've been preparing, you know, they've been wilderness survival classes since they were six and training particularly with this organization called Twin Eagles Wilderness School, which puts on fantastic father son wilderness survival camps and kids camps and nature school. And they also have a rite of passage offering for adolescents and young men. And so my sons are actually, you know, admittedly a little nervous. It's a very big ceremonial week for them. But they have a, you know, their bags packed, they got a knife, a wool blanket, a little bit of grit and training and they're ready to shove off tonight. Mom and I take them off to the backwoods of North Idaho tonight and they get dropped off in the wilderness. So if I don't have any children by next week and social workers are knocking at my door asking about, you know, whether or not my children were eaten by bears. That's what happened.

So yeah, just give them the bear excuse. They're going to be there for a week. Is that what you said?

Several days. It won't be quite a week. It'll be around five days. They don't know though. All they know is they're getting dropped off and they know nothing aside from that. They don't know when they will be extricated. They don't know what to expect. They don't know where they will be. All they know is they have their bags packed by the front door and we leave our house at 4pm today.

So that's hardcore. So for all intents and purposes, they have no idea that this is like their rite of passage. And they'll know at the end.

Oh, they, they know it's a rite of passage. They just don't know what to expect, which is part, you know, ego, dissolution, fear of the unknown. You know, speaking of loneliness, you know, being with oneself, slash with God in an isolated scenario for quite some time. You know, it's, it's a big step for them. So yeah, last night I told them, you know when we had dinner and I kissed them to bed good night. That I was for the last time celebrating an evening with Bo. And the next time that I saw them and had an evening with them, I would be celebrating with them as adolescents. So you have it. Yeah. And then I had an interesting morning. I'm sorry, dude, I am already sore, which bodes ill for tomorrow. I don't know if we chatted about this, but this company called Catalyst Catalyst, they developed. And I'll slap a link in for people@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 429 if you want to check this thing out. You know, I've been a fan of electrical muscle stimulation for a while and have used it for retraining injured muscles or waking up old muscles that my body has forgotten how to use, like, say the gluteus medius for external rotation or the vastus medialis of the quad for knee pain. A lot of these notoriously untrained muscles or muscles that tend to get detrained or not used as much as people age and thus contribute to injuries and poor movement patterns, poor functioning, et cetera. So electrical muscle stimulation has always been good for that. The problem with it is that there's all these wires and electrodes and you got to get the electrodes precisely placed on the right muscle or they contract in the wrong way and you can injure yourself. So this company, Catalyst, I swear this is going to be a game changer in the fitness industry. They make this suit that you pull on that stims you. You just pull the suit on. It connects to an iPad where a trainer walks you through the whole workout. So this morning I did it like their full body strength tr workout, which was just 20 minutes. And then I slapped on the 10 minute cardio workout after that. And oh my goodness, it is just next level. Holy cow. Like, and, and interesting. It's not like a suit.

Are you talking like a full body suit?

Yeah, it's like a spacesuit or not spacesuit. It was like, it was like a. I'll. I'll put a picture on Instagram eventually. Or people just Google it. But yeah, you, you pull on the suit ties to your iPad. You do the workout. There's a trainer there that increases or decreases intensity as you go. And it is, it is hard. This is not one of those as seen on T, like stimulate your abs while you eat Twinkies on the couch type of things. Like, it's, it's full on a workout. Like, I'm drenched in sweat by the end of 20 minutes.

I'm gonna try this thing.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

That's cool.

Yeah. So anyways though, we gotta, we have a ton of news flashes today, so we should probably just, just jump right in. So let's do this. Well, for those of you joining us on Clubhouse, if you're listening to this or, or participating live, don't worry, you don't have to sit on your hands the whole time just listening to Jay and I. Ch after we go through the news flashes. If you are joining us for the Clubhouse Q and A, we open up our questions live on this podcast for any of you to ask your questions about anything we talk about or anything else. And if you are not on Clubhouse or listening live, if you just go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 429We'll put a link there where you can pop into Clubhouse. I don't know if it's still one of those scarcity closed membership type of apps or if it's just open to anybody yet, but either way, yeah, we'll put a link@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 429 and then for those of you on Clubhouse, be thinking of some good questions to ask as we rock and roll here. So inflammation, inflammation is something that has popped up repeatedly in my own news flashes this week. And you know, probably the best way to kick this off is a fantastic article that basically delved into tracking aging parameters. Tracking aging parameters, like there are all these things that you could test to look at your rate of aging with one of the gold standard measurements, but one of the ones that's really more expensive and not that accessible to a lot of people, being what's called a methylation clock or a Horvath clock of aging or a variant of this so called Horvath clock of aging. But when it comes to things that you can measure a little bit more readily and a little bit more affordably, even in the comfort of your own home or with it with a quick blood draw at a lab or at a doctor's office, you know, there are other parameters like say a telomere measurements. You know, telomere measurements are certainly something that I've talked about in the past. And that's one way that you could track aging, just tracking the rate at which your telomeres are shortening. Another qualitative set of variables would be things like grip strength or walking speed or the amount of weight you can deadlift. Like, like there's a lot of Little parameters that you could for aging that have been studied as markers of increased aging or resistance to a lot of the diseases that set in as one ages. But this latest study looked at some different parameters for aging. And so they looked everything from white blood cells to red blood cells, hemoglobin, platelets, interleukin and TNF alpha, these markers of inflammation. They looked at telomere length, they looked at white blood cell counts. And what they found was that if there was one thing, if there's one thing that you were going to measure to track how quickly you're aging or how successful any longevity or anti aging measurements that you might be implementing are, inflammation topped the list. Inflammation topped the list. And this was even a more powerful predictor of aging than your telomere length. And of course that's important for a couple of reasons, namely that when you look at inflammation, we're talking about a very affordable and quick measurement. In most cases, a basic blood panel is to measure your C reactive protein, which is a pretty good mark, assuming you haven't worked out a day or two prior. Running or weightlifting is going to artificially increase that value. So you want to be rested when you track it. But then this study also took into account a couple other inflammatory measurements, particularly interleukin 6 and TNF alpha, which a good inflammatory panel. I know Wellness fx, they have an inflammation panel that takes three or four different inflammatory markers like crp, interleukin and tnf and just, just test them all at once. And that's something also you could just go ask your doctor for. If you have a doctor who's going to run that test for you, or a company like Direct Labs, you could just order these type of tests to your own house. And so it's important because that's a pretty easy test to measure. But it's also important because of course, this then tells you that anything you do in life that will make a dent in chronic inflammation, particularly not like the acute inflammation you might get from exercise or say a hefty sauna bath. The type of chronic inflammation brought on by stress, poor sleep, high vegetable oil consumption, high amounts of sugar constantly in the bloodstream. These are all things that are pretty controllable factors for aging. Relatively low hanging fruit for aging, and it turns out probably the best things to track and manage for aging. And of course, secondarily, this also points out the fact, and this is something I've talked about in the past, telomere testing can give you some clues. But as the authors of this paper Kind of point out in the paper, still just looking. When you measure telomeres at the leukocyte telomere length. Right. The white blood cell telomere length, which is just one part type of cell in your body, it's not looking at the entire body. And there's some other issues with telomere length also, particularly the fact that it doesn't seem to be that accurate as you get older, particularly after the age of 75. And so they did this test in a lot of centenarians and supercentenarians in which telomere length really isn't even that accurate as a predictor of longevity. So that's another thing to bear in mind is that the older you get, the less accurate telomere measurements seem to be, especially after the age of 70, 75 or so, depending on the research you look at. But pretty, pretty good information, you know, if you just want to keep your, your finger on the pulse of one thing, you know, inflammation is a pretty good one to track. Yeah.

I think to your point as well, is that when you look at kind of the available telomere testing right now, there are some that are better than others. And more than often, people typically will go for the cheaper one. And sometimes the cheaper ones aren't necessarily the better ones. Sometimes you do get what you pay for, and they are still more expensive than running like CRP or looking at Interleukin 6 or TNF. And so I like this because again, this is pretty much even conventional doctors. I mean, a lot of the people are listening here. I probably don't even go to many conventional doctors anymore, but a conventional doctor could write a script for you to have this blood draw easily. And normally a lot of these individuals won't question while you're kind of running these tests, why? The why? So I like this idea of running these and kind of looking at inflammation level and that being much more of a predictor for successful aging. And again, yeah, just because I've done the telomere testing and that can change, like within a month. It can have significant changes depending on kind of, you know, how you were tested and where you were tested and what you were tested for. So I like this.

Yeah, yeah. And a few other notes regarding inflammation. Another kind of cool study that came out looked at exercise and calorie restriction relative to inflammation. And this is interesting because they've kind of in the past studied what would be better, right. Like exercising or restricting calories when it comes to, well, particularly losing weight, but also metabolic factors like Insulin sensitivity or, you know, your lipid panel or blood pressure. And there, there was one study that they did, I think this was like back in 2009, 2010, something like that, where they compared two different groups. One, one group was a control group and it didn't change anything at all. Another group cut their calorie intake by about 25% and then another group also cut their calories, but only cut their calories by like 12.5% and then increase the calories they burnt through physical activity by 12 and a half percent. Right. So does that make sense? So one group was just burning calories through cutting out the amount of food they were stuffing into their gaping maw, while other people actually didn't reduce their food intake quite so much, but at the same time began to exercise a little bit more. And it turns out that both groups lost the same amount of weight. They Both lost about 10% of their weight over the course of, I think this was like a six month study. And you know, they both shed a decent amount of total fat and visceral fat, the problematic fat that you kind of want to lose in a case like this. But only the exercise group actually showed improvements in things like insulin sensitivity and a lipid panel and diastolic blood pressure, whereas the group that restricted calories, they just lost weight. Right. So if you exercise plus calorically restrict, we know that you can both lose weight and also improve metabolic parameters. And this of course, is under the assumption that you're not over training and that this isn't some type of, you know, hefty, you know, liquid 400 calorie diet combined with a CrossFit workout every day, which, which we know leads to overtraining and, you know, calcium buildup in the arteries and the heart. You know, a lot of other issues. But, but sane attention paid to calorie intake plus sane amounts of exercise is better than just say, dieting alone. So the, and, and other studies have looked at exercise training compared to calorie restriction. You know, there was another study, I think this one was in two, where they looked at restricting calories and exercise training on insulin resistance and on liver markers and on what's called visceral adipose tissue, again, the more problematic form of fat. And in that study, what they found again was that exercise versus calorie restriction was far more powerful for reduction in adipose tissue and also reduction in insulin resistance. Right. Whereas the calorie restriction just was useful in losing weight. Weight. Okay, so there's something happening when you exercise that goes way above and beyond what you get from calorie restriction. And then leading up to this latest study there was another one in 2010 where they looked at calorie restriction and endurance exercise. And both the endurance exercise and the calorie restriction were shown to have. Now to the subject of the matter, a potent anti inflammatory effect, particularly in fat tissue issue with exercise winning out as having a slightly more impactful effect on pro inflammatory cytokine gene expression. So basically the production of inflammation. And once again I'll keep emphasizing this is not like Ironman triathlon training or some crazy just beat you up and spit you out CrossFit daily workout routine. This was just sane amounts of exercise with a little bit of calorie restriction. And so this, this latest study, what they looked at was exercise training versus calorie restriction on inflammatory markers. And it was really interesting because what, what they did was they compared all these different studies that had been done, you know, like some of the ones I've just mentioned and many others, like 30 plus different studies on exercise and calorie restriction. And basically the, the long story short is that combining exercise with some form of calorie restriction is more effective than calorie restriction alone at reducing inflammation, particularly cytokines and crp. So once again we see that if you want to control inflammation, yeah, there's a lot of things that you can do like stress less, sleep more potentially weave in some of these anti inflammatory herbs and spices like turmeric and ginger and some of the different curries and you know, curcuminoids and all these things that can decrease inflammation. But it turns out that exercise, especially when done in, in a sane manner, can decrease inflammation and is more powerful than caloric restriction at decreasing inflammation. And the last reason I think this is interesting is because we know that exercise acutely increases inflammation, like short term, but then long term decreases inflammation the same way that like when you do a sauna, it acutely increases your blood sugar. Like anybody who's tracked their blood sugar goes through the roof when you're doing a sauna treatment. But then long term, if you do a regular sauna treatment, it improves your ability to be able to control your blood glucose. So you're trading off short term inflammation or say short term spikes in blood glucose with the ability long term to be able to control those parameters for better health or better longevity. Now I think most of our audience already is aware of calories, how much they're eating and also exercising. But it turns out that, that exercising is even more Powerful at controlling inflammation, which I think is kind of cool.

Yeah, it is pretty cool. But I think too what I hear you saying is that there's obvious benefits to exercise, there's obvious benefits to caloric restriction, but also too, the combination of the two are quite effective as well. So kind of the good rule of thumb is exercise and you know, states of caloric restriction can be quite helpful in reducing some of these inflammatory cytokines and biomorph markers. So yeah, that's. Yeah, and I think like you said, most of our audience is gonna know that, but studies that continue to demonstrate that are going to condition us to want to do it more. So it's always good to review.

And we just spent like five minutes basically telling people long term chronic inflammation is bad, move more, eat less. That's basically what it is in a nutshell.

The simple answer is the right answer.

Yeah. And then also related to inflammation. Then I want to move on to a few other kind of interesting things that I think folks are really going to like. There was also a study that they did on something that is associated with a significant increase in high sensitivity C reactive protein, which is like the gold standard marker I mentioned earlier of low grade chronic inflammation. And this was a study in women, you'll know why momentarily. But basically what they looked at was oxidative stress and low grade inflammation in healthy young women. The type of inflammation that would predispose these healthy young women to future disease. And they measured oxidative markers. One that they really looked at was called hydroperoxides. And then also that cspr, if I can spit out the alphabets, HSCRP that I talked about. Now there was a very, very interesting finding and that was that women who were on the pill, oral contraceptive users, had a significantly higher level of high sens reactive protein. And I've talked about the pill and some of the issues with artificially shutting down fertility and the endocrine system via the pill in the past. But this kind of yet throws another wrench into that birth control equation when it comes to the trade off between birth control and amping up inflammation in your body. So you know that that's yet another reason I'm a much bigger fan of the timing method or condoms or something that doesn't mess with your physiology as much when it comes to birth control. Because man, it seems like every other study I see on the pill basically shows that, yeah, it's like a convenient short term hack if you're, I guess, trying to plan your family or you know, Although I do not endorse this whatsoever because I think it cheapens an act that should be highly sacred, but basically, you know, allows women to sleep around more without getting pregnant or to have sex without getting pregnant. The problem is there that the pill is not the way to do it. And there are. There are better methods than that if you don't want to be, I suppose, popping out babies right and left. But I think if inflammation is something you want to control, you shouldn't be on the pill.

Well, you're just making so many intensive changes to your inherent physiology. I know that even in my world and mental health and in psychology, there are women who are prescribed oral contraceptives for mood stabilization and sometimes when we might see some improvement in overall mood, but then all these other physiological aspects change. And because all of these other physiological aspects change, they might have kind of this. This brief bout of enhanced mood, and then it just kind of falls off the shelf. And again, I'm not trying to speak down to contraceptive use and trying to persuade somebody to get off them or to get on them, but I think that as we kind of scour the research and the data and we start to see research like this and we kind of hear some of these anecdotal reports from physic and clinicians, it's just something that you have to be so incredibly careful of. And just like nutrition or anything else that we're putting into our body that's gonna make inherent physiological changes, it always warrants us just taking the time to do a little bit of studying, not just kind of take something because it's prescribed or handed over. And that's all I'm gonna say. I'm gonna off my soapbox now. Thank you, doctor.

Yeah, well, I'd recommend the 2019 book is probably the most updated treatise of this matter. And that would be Jolene Brighton's book, Beyond the Pill. And it's like a hormone balancing book, but also gets into a lot of better methods for birth control. And it's really, really well written by a physician. And I think that's a wonderful handbook for women who want to kind of understand the pill and also understand contraception in general. So that one's called beyond the Pill. I'll find that one and link to it in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 429If folks want to dig into that one. Now, speaking of having baby babies, there was also, and this totally has nothing to do with inflammation, but there was a study that looked at all of the different herbs out there and the effects of them on testosterone, on sperm and on male prostate health. And this was a pretty cool scientific review of mucuna and ashwagandha and maca and tribulus. Actually, the name of the paper was beyond tribulus. And so what they looked at was hypogonadism or infertility fertility in men. They looked at hormone balance in men. They, they looked at prostate health in men. And then they looked at what the actual clinical literature says about a lot of these herbs that were, you know, whatever, buying at the 711 as our, our giant rocket erection pill over the counter supplement, or, you know, the super expensive tribulus that you're importing from the far reaches of the Himalayas or wherever the heck they get tribulus from. And so, so what they found found was that tribulus caused no changes in free or total testosterone.

Bodybuilders would have told you that a long time ago, man.

Yep, yep. But in contrast, in contrast, maca, tongkat ali, which some people might be familiar with, is T O n G K a T Tongkat Ali A L I tongkat ali, maca, velvet bean, which is also known as makuna or dopamucuna, ashwagandha and fenugreek. All of those actually did noticeably increase testosterone, with the best increases in testosterone being reported for velvet bean extract and ashwagandha. And free testosterone responded pretty well to fenugreek and tongkat ali. So, you know, if you're looking at, at herbal parameters for increasing testosterone, you may want to look into ashwagandha, you may look into velvet bean, you may want to look into, to tongkat Ali and then fenugreek. And of course, in the past, you know, I have a whole podcast I did for the. What's that big anti aging symposium In Vegas, the A4M American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine. Yeah, I spoke to a bunch of physicians down there about. Okay, well, before you put men on testosterone, here are the basic parameters that you want to make sure that you cover first. First. And, and down there, you know, and these are not herbs, but it's basically creatine, dhea, vitamin D, magnesium, boron, zinc. I think those were the, were the biggies. I'll have to hunt down that podcast and make sure I covered them all. But so, so those are obviously not herbs. But then arguably you could say, well, perhaps consider also, you know, velvet bean, ashwagandha, fenugreek and tongcat elie as part of that, you know, so Called stack for for testosterone. And you're probably going to make a dent in low testosterone levels, assuming you're also doing things like sleeping, avoiding chronic cardio, lifting heavy stuff with your legs, even having sex, all those type of lifestyle parameters that increase testosterone. Now, interestingly, they also looked at the libido, not just testosterone, but libido, which is kind of separate from testosterone and so forth. For libido, what they found was the most effective. It was actually in men, Tonkata lee increased libido. Maca root also had a significant increase in libido. And this is great because these crossover into testosterone as well. And then they looked at women, and in women who wanted higher libido, tribulus actually did turn out to be useful, as did fenugreek. Yeah. So in men, tribulus didn't really increase testosterone or libido, but in women it did increase libido. And in women, women, fenugreek also increased libido. So that was really interesting. And by the way, if you don't want to explain this to the kids, if you're driving around in the minivan with the kids right now, you may want to put earmuffs on them real quick. But fenugreek also reportedly makes your sperm, or I guess your semen, I should say, taste like sweet licorice. So there's that control group for this. I don't know if that was a study. I think that's more anecdotal reports. Yeah, apparently it makes you taste a little better. And then finally, they also looked at, of course, like I mentioned, prostate health and other aspects of men's sexual health. You know, looking at things like peak urine flow, nighttime nocturnal erections, BPH symptom scores, which is related to your prostate health. And so for that, what they found was that one of the very popular things used for prostate health, saw palmetto, didn't really seem to make much of an impact at all. But they also looked at things like bee pollen extract and nettle and Korean angelica root and moringa leaf extract. And so what they found, particularly from men who are concerned about their prostate health, was as follows. The ones that I just listed were consistent with decreasing bph, and that was pygium. P Y G E U M. That's an herb. Bee pollen extract check. Yes. Nettle also. And then a couple that appeared promising and the research went back and forth, was Korean angelica and moringa. So if you're trying to get more fertile, you could kind of stack a lot of those herbs and don't worry if you're not writing all this down. I'll link to the study in the show notes. Oats, you could stack those herbs for prostate health. They also found, and this is no surprise because we know all the bioavailable lycopene in these two things. Cooked tomato, because if you cook tomato, you're going to increase the lycopene bioavailability. And pomegranate also appeared to have a lot of effects at reducing the risk of prostate cancer. Bulb onion and garlic also appeared to have some benefits. But the problem with those two is that, that if you're doing this for sexual health or, you know, a better sex life, you, you aren't going to smell that great. And it might be possible that most members of the opposite sex may actually want to stay away from you. Indeed, you smell like a giant oniony garlic pizza. Anyway, so I thought that was useful. I love studies that are useful that actually do a good job digging into the actual science behind the stuff that we sometimes, sometimes pay a lot of money for but aren't sure will work.

Well, especially like Tribulus and then Saw Palmetto, which I was actually more surprised by. I feel like tribulus has been debunked for so long. I mean, you've asked anybody in the bodybuilding community, most people who have been in it for a while know that like tribulus is absolute garbage for increasing testosterone and building muscle. Andand that's kinda been debunked, even though it's a huge seller still inin supplement shops. Saw Palmetto is one of those interesting ones because that's the, the one I still hear like thrown around all the time as being helpful for overall prostate health. And so kind of seeing this article that demonstrates that maybe it's not as useful as what we thought. That to me, is very interesting because it's such a big seller.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, the only research I've seen that shows tribulus to actually have a little bit of research behind it for really anything at all, is it might affect heart health and blood blood sugar, meaning that women who have taken tribulus, and we know by the way that now we established that in women it may help with libido, but in women who took tribulus, it helped to manage blood sugar levels and maybe prevent increases in blood cholesterol and even the blood cholesterol was an animal study, so I wouldn't waste too much money on tribulus, personally.

Yeah, there's other better things. More research Things.

Okay, so just a couple other quick things that I wanted to mention. And this is related to kind of like how in the intro I gave you the preview of a pre big meal weight loss hack. Well, here's the deal. There was a study that came out that looked at how much you can decrease your muscle glycogen, right? These carbohydrate sinks in your muscle with lifting weights. So in the past, we've known that you can get a pretty big reduction in muscle glycogen content following resistance training. And studies show anything from like 25 to 40% or so in terms of how much carbohydrate you can suck out of your muscles in response to resistance training. It's important to understand that when your muscles are storing glycogen, that glycogen is kind of divided up into different parts of muscle fibers. If you really want to get nitty gritty. You know, technically, muscle glycogen is divided up into what's called intramyofibrillar glycogen, glycogen, and then inter myofibril glycogen, which is which an intra would be kind of like within the myofibrils, your muscle fibers. Inter myofibril or glycogen would be between the myofibrils and then what's called sub sarcolemmal glycogen, which is just beneath the sarcolemma of the muscles. And that's probably way too geeked out for most folks. But understand that when they're assessing glycogen depletion in most studies, they don't do a very good job looking, looking at, or I guess differentiating where the glycogen is actually coming from. Now, this latest study, they actually studied not only how much glycogen was getting depleted, but where it was all coming from. And so it was a really good study. And they used some pretty decent methods with this to really dig in to how much glycogen was actually being sucked out of the muscle. So the inter myofibrillar glycogen, like all the storage carbohydrate that you have in between all your muscle fibers, fibers that accounts for like 80% of your total muscle glycogen. So it's a pretty significant amount. And what they found was that total muscle glycogen decreased by about 35 to 40% after resistance training. Right? So towards the high end of what we've seen in literature in the past, and a lot of it came from that Inter myofibrillar glycogen. Okay. And I know that a lot of people are wondering why the heck they should even care about that. This. Well, it's important because if, if you know that a bout of resistance training, and in this case, you know, most of the studies were that, that have looked at this in the past and this current study, it, it wasn't just like messing around in the gym for a little while. We're talking about like a 60 to 90 minute weight training session with compound lifts like squats and deadlifts and split squats, et cetera. What the idea here is though, when you deplete glycogen like this, that if you're going to go say eat a meal afterwards, your body is going to take that meal that you've eaten that may have some carbohydrates in it and use those carbohydrates to replenish this 25 to 40% of muscle glycogen that you've exhausted. And furthermore, we know that resistance training upregulates something called GLUT4 transporters which accelerate the absorption of glucose into muscle and the formation of, of this glycogen is enhanced by increased enzymatic activity of the enzymes responsible for storing this carbohydrate away. And so you know, and I've worn a continuous blood glucose monitor before and have found that you know, compared to like whatever bitter melon extract and berberine and apple cider vinegar and Ceylon cinnamon and you know, all these, even, Even like a 10 minute postprandial walk, all these things that are pretty decent at maintaining normalized blood glucose response, especially in response to, to a big meal and especially a higher carbohydrate meal. The two most effective things for my own continuous blood glucose monitoring if you're going to have a big meal are weight training at some point in the two to three hours leading up to that meal and or cold thermogenesis in the like a cold shower or a cold soak in the two to three hours leading up to that meal. And this, this study just backs it up that, that resistance training just depletes muscle glycogen levels levels dramatically. And it's also important of course, for anyone who is I guess training for say like professional sports or has back to back workouts or anything like that. Like understand, and I've said this before, that if you're going to work out and then work out again within eight hours, it actually is important to include carbohydrates with your post workout meal so that you're adequately replenishing those storage carbohydrate levels. If you are not working out again, it appears that just eating ad libitum according to appetite, you're gonna replenish your glycogen levels within about 24 hours anyways. So if you're just working out, say like you have a one hour workout every morning, you don't have to go eat a bunch of carbohydrates after that workout. Even the carbohydrates you might have with dinner that night are going to give you what you need for the next morning's workout session. And I actually think that's a good idea anyways because then you're gonna go all day burning fats and, and restricting carbohydrates, refeed at night so you get that bump up in serotonin and melatonin levels. You sleep well, you wake up the next morning, you rinse, wash and repeat. But if you're like a professional athlete and you've got a weight training session in the morning and scrimmage or practice in the afternoon, have carbs with breakfast and then have carbs again after that evening or later afternoon workout. But ultimately the big takeaway is we knew resistance training depletes carbohydrate levels, but this latest study shows that it really, really makes a difference. Dent in muscle glycogen levels particularly.

Yeah, that's super interesting. Even though all of our low carbers, they heard you say eat carbs and they immediately turn this podcast off.

All the low carbers walking around with low testosterone and hypothyroid, not knowing why. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, if you look at my diet, you would consider me to be low carb, but you know, I still have probably the equivalent with dinner. I probably have about any, depending on the day's physical activities, 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrates. Plus, you know, we do know that the body can form some carbs from gluconeogenesis, from protein, and also from the glycerol backbone of fats. So you know it basically by the nature of eating food, period. You're not low carb because your body's gonna, your body's gonna make some glucose.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good distinction.

Yeah. And then finally, speaking of carbs, here's a fun one and, and I figured we'd finish with something fun. Fun. I discovered this hack that I haven't yet tried, but I wanted to throw it out there just to find out if anybody had. And you can leave a comment@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 429 if you have anything to add into this equation. But you know those banana peels that you typically just throw away if you're eating bananas as part of your diet?

If I was eating carbs, I would. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah. Well, it turns out that there's something called banana peel tea. Tea. Banana peel tea as a sleep hack. So banana peels have potassium and magnesium, natural muscle relaxants. And they also have the amino acid L tryptophan, which gets converted to HTP, you know, 5 HTP, which gets converted into serotonin and melatonin, your sleep hormones. And it turns out that many people have discovered that by consuming banana peel tea prior to sleep, they sleep better. And it's actually not the sugar in the banana. Right. It's just the banana peel. So rather than eating a banana or say like eating a kiwi or some cherries, which do the same thing, if you are not wanting to eat a ton of fructose right before you go to bed at night, or maybe you've already had all your carbs from those wonderful, say, sweet potato fries or sourdough bread at dinner and you don't want even more carbs, but you want to make yourself a little sleepy. Time to tea. What you do is you cut off the ends of the banana and then you peel it. I don't think I'm going to even worry about explaining to people how to peel a banana. Why am I even doing that? Figure it out. Scratch your head and figure out how to peel a banana.

Eats me bed.

Yeah, go for organic bananas. Conventionally grown bananas. They tend to be heavily sprayed with pesticides. And then what the recommendation is to actually dehydrate them. You could just batch this all at once. Just do a whole bunch for the week. You could get all your banana peels, peels, toss them into the, into the oven at like 155 or into a food dehydrator 155 for around 6 to 8 hours if you want to. You could dehydrate the actual banana flesh too, because dried bananas are actually pretty dang good, especially with a little bit of dark chocolate and dried bananas. Oh my gosh. Oh yeah, that's pretty tasty. So anyways, and then you've got your dehydrated peels. What you do with your dehydrated peels is you can then just basically grind them and use Them like tea. Like, put them in a French press or a strainer or whatever, and just have yourself some wonderful, wonderful banana peel tea as a nighttime sleepy time tea. So there you go. What do you think, Jay? You gonna try? No, I haven't tried it yet. Cause literally, it was something that just came on my radar a couple of days ago. And I'm like, oh, I should mention this on the podcast. I just don't have any bananas for around the house right now. But once I do, this is definitely something I'm gonna try just to see. See how it works.

Yeah, we do have some bananas around the house because my. My boys, they like that as a snack. And so I will tell my wife to hold on to some of the banana peels, and she's gonna look at me like I'm crazy, but I'm gonna say that Ben Greenfield said it, so she'll just say, all right, we'll do it, and then I'll give it a go. You know, my. My go to before bed is. Is drinking some Reishi, and I love doing that. That. However, I'm out of Reishi right now, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna try this. I need to dehydrate some banana peel, but it doesn't sound very difficult to make, which is nice. And, I mean, I like being resourceful, too, and kind of using the things that I wasn't planning on using. So I really like this idea. I'll let you know if I try it.

Yeah. And honestly, where my mind goes is why not make your Reishi tea with banana peel hot water? Right? So you could have banana peel Reishi tea. That's. That's the next big thing in health. Banana peel Reishi tea. Now we actually can go answer some questions.

It's that time.

I've noticed that whenever I'm exposed to a high amount of sun or heat, I see an elevation on my continuous blood glucose monitor. I'm also wondering what effect a berberine supplement may have on my blood glucose levels.

So, first of all, regarding the use of a continuous blood glucose monitor in the sauna, when I interviewed Josh from Levels Health, he did indicate that sometimes during exposure to the heat, that continuous blood glucose monitors may have a slight decrease in accuracy. And so it is actually possible, possible that that excess heat might influence the accuracy of that. And so I, you know, I don't know how much faith you could put into the data you're getting from a continuous glucose monitor in the heat. But, you know, I. I think the. The dexcom Blood glucose monitor seems to work pretty well. I've also had decent, decent measurements with the Libre. So I don't know that that's a, that's a tricky one one. But yeah, I do know some of these sensors don't seem to work too well in the heat. But I wish I had a better answer for you on that one. Regarding the berberine, you know that for some people berberine can have some issues in terms of efficacy and absorption. There might be some genetic issues as well with the actual ability to be able to respond to the, the blood glucose stabilizing effects of berberine. But you know, in the past we've talked about this new form of berberine called dihydroberine. Dihydroberine. So dihydroberine is a form of berberine that's better absorbed and that appears to have a much bigger impact on blood glucose levels. So it increases adiponectin, which is the protein secreted by your fat cells that helps out with your insulin sensitivity. It seems to increase glucose, glucose uptake into fat cells, kind of similar to that, that weight training that I talked about. But basically that will help to lower your blood sugar. And that happens even if your liver cells and your muscle cells are already full of glycogen. It'll still help increase glucose uptake into fat cells. It's really easily absorbed into the intestine, whereas berberine is not. So that might be another issue with Ishmael is intestinal absorption of bear brain might just be too low. Whereas DHB dihydroberine can get absorbed like 5 times higher than regular berberine. And again when it comes to actual impact on blood glucose, it seems to have a much better effect. So what you may want to do is actually try a different form of berberine called dihydroberine rather than regular berberine. And that might be something to experiment with. And so I'd suggest you try that out and if it doesn't work for you, just go with another blood glucose disposal agent like bitter melon extract or Ceylon cinnamon or apple cider vinegar. There's a variety of them out there, you know, these so called glucose disposal agents, GDAs. But that's, that's actually where I, where I'd start. I don't know. Do you have anything to throw in there? Jay?

So the only thing that I was thinking is that it is a sauna effect from the sun. So basically it is having maybe some sweating or excessive sweating, having some dehydration, maybe a decrease in blood volume and Therefore glucose goes up and that's what he's seeing. That's the only thing that I can think of. Because if it's just like basic sunlight and it's the same temperature as you were previously when you were indoors, I can't think of anything like cortisol modulation that may impact it.

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not quite sure. I don't know. But we do know that that sunlight can also assist with blood glucose management as well. You know, that's kind of a little known effect of sunlight. And I think I talked about that when we were discussing vitamin D. You know, the impact of photonic energy, of light like infrared light, you know, that near infrared, far infrared, red spectrum may also assist with blood glucose stabilization. They've actually shown for diabetes that sunlight can actually assist with management of type 2 diabetes. And so you can actually find research on sunlight and management of diabetes. And you know, of course I think anybody for a wide variety of health reasons should be getting out in the sunlight. And I think it goes beyond the vitamin D. I think it gets onto the photonic energy and sunlight as well. But yeah, that's a head scratcher. But anyways though, let's go ahead and, let's go ahead and take another.

You spoke a little about the inflammatory effect of the pill. I'm wondering, were there any other long term effects from taking oral contraceptives?

That is a great question. And like I mentioned, Jolene Brighton's book Beyond the Pill gets into this a little bit, but there's some definite long term effects, you know, in terms of hormone regulation and kind of like, you know what being on long term hormonal contraceptive can do. I mean, we know that if you look at the physician information pamphlets on oral contraceptive pills, I mean the list goes on and on. There's dozens of, and dozens of issues from insulin sensitivity to high blood pressure to anaphylaxis to even heart attacks and cancer. It's crazy. Even fatal blood clotting. But really long term, the main thing is hormone regulation. And I think the Journal of Sexual Medicine is the journal that initially did some of the research on this and found abnormally low levels of testosterone that occurred long after women cease using the pill, which of course is going to be responsible for energy libido, a wide variety of beneficial effects. And progesterone similarly seems to experience kind of like this long term drop long term. There also appears to be, especially in teenagers, increased vulnerability to breast cancer. There was another study that found a loss in overall well, being like 40% of women who started the pillow, even after they were off it had a decrease in sexual desire and an overall drop in well being. And that may even contribute to this roller coaster ride of being on the pill, getting your mood and libido screwed up, and then winding up on something, an ssri like Prozac, for example. This might sound kind of weird, but if you think about it long, long term, when it comes to your marriage and your family. Family, there's this idea, and this is something that we've known for a while, is that women, based on the pheromone production when they're on the pill, tend to be attracted to genetically dissimilar men before going on the pill. And then after going on the pill, they're attracted to men who are genetically similar to themselves. And what that means is that a woman who's on the pill before marriage, who later stops taking the pill in order to have children, children, could stop being attracted to her husband or be attracted to her husband less intensively. And that's just based on. Yeah, evolutionary psychology or ancestral psychology would argue that genetic similarity in couples could lead to fertility problems or lead to genetic issues with the offspring. So you want a genetically diverse set of partners. It's kind of like, don't marry your cousin or your brother or your sister. Like, there's actually some biological wisdom to that. And it could actually lead to long term breakdown in relationships because odor perception actually plays a significant role in maintaining your attraction to a partner. And so the negative effects of the pill are kind of like not just physical, they're also social. And it's interesting too, because marriages between genetically similar people are also more likely to produce children with genetic problems. So it kind of like has this multi generational effect. And then of course, we have to consider the effect on the environment too, right? Like we hear people talking about like frogs turning into females, but there's actually a greater number of intersex animals being found in aquatic environments. And they're actually attributing some of that to the female hormones in the pill being excreted in the urine, winding up in our world's liver, like our water supplies, like our rivers and our lakes. And it affects egg production, it causes male fish to have female characteristics. It appears to affect frogs. And this isn't just birth control pills. I think it's pharmaceuticals in general. But it's affecting the environment too. And I guess, long story short, as you guys are getting the impression of, I'm not a huge fan of hormonal contraceptives, and there's some long term effects that, you know, I think working with a good functional medicine doc who's using something like a Dutch panel, which is a urine panel, to monitor hormones and get those realigned properly would be the first step. If you've been on the pill, you get off and you want to kind of like, like mop up some of the damage. I would do some, some data driven testing, like a Dutch urine test to see what's going on and then take appropriate steps from there. But yeah, it's, it's certainly a concerning issue in my opinion.

One of the things that I've seen as, as kind of the more robust literature is the potential risk factor for increased risk of cardiovascular disease. And after kind of the studies that we've been talking about today, I think that, I mean, we probably would conceptualize this regardless of whether or not we saw this study. But I think the study provides some ample evidence to inflammation being the mediator there. So I think that kind of taking those things into consideration, I mean, again, this goes back to my statement I made earlier. It's like, you know, I'm. Who am I to convince someone to be on it or off it right now? I don't, I don't kind of see that as my place, but I think that you need to listen to the evidence, kind of open up some eyes and ears and hear kind of of the potential risk factors. I think a lot of young women are put on these things and they have no idea kind of what they're getting themselves into from a physiological perspective and state, and they have no idea of the potential ramifications. And I hate that decisions that are made for girls when they're younger or even when they're made for themselves when they're still young and maybe not full matured can have long lasting impact.

I just started training Jiu jitsu at age 28, and I know you've got Kion Flex, but I'm curious, what are some other low hanging fruits for joint mobility, flexibility and that kind of stuff?

All right, so for joint health, I mean, we've obviously talked about a lot of things before, but. But I'll share a couple of my biggies and things that go beyond perhaps what we've talked about before. And then, Jay, perhaps you can share some of yours. Sound good?

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay. So I would say the things that people don't do enough of that they should know about because, you know, we hear about turmeric and Curcumin. And you know, Sam brought up Kion Flex, which is more of the turmerosaccharide, some of the AMLA root, you know, some, some cool little herbs that we did. We looked into all the human clinical research on joint support and put together a good formula there. There are also these proteolytic enzymes known as wobenzymes, often as a brand name, but those are really, really good at breaking down fibrinogen and some of the byproducts of muscle soreness. But I can tell you probably some of my top things that don't fall into like the supplement category just because I think most people know, know about the kind of things you can pop, you know, as pills to help out with inflammation recovery. Again, not to sound like a fox guarding the hen house, but I think, you know, Keon Flex is top of the totem pole for me on that infrared light. So, man, after a tough workout, like especially the day after from sore, using the joov light or using an infrared sauna is amazing for blood flow, for decreasing inflammation, for reducing delayed onset muscle soreness. And especially, especially when combined with cold, like hot, cold contrast going back and forth between the heat and the cold. That's way, way high up there for me. The next would be transdermal magnesium. I just put some on this morning after that electrical muscle stimulation workout. I find transdermal magnesium just because it's better absorbed than oral and you can localize it to the specific muscle that's sore. I'll use topical CBD and Traumeel and Arnica, but. But I find nothing beats transdermal magnesium. I use one from a company called Ancient Minerals that's compounded with something called msm and so you get a lot of bioavailable sulfates and that thing's just fantastic for delayed onset muscle soreness. So I'd say hot cold therapy, infrared transdermal magnesium, and then a few others that might fly under the radar. They're increasingly not banned by, but being kind of given a watchful eye and slowly removed from the market by the fda. But if you can get your hands on them and stock up on some peptides, particularly the peptides BPC157 and TB500 and to a lesser extent the peptide GHK, copper peptide. Those are all injectable peptides that can be wonderful for injuries and for soreness as well. Well, again, the injectable form seems more efficacious than the oral form of peptide. But that's another one that I would consider if you want to really jump into kind of like the better living through science type of category. And the last one that I use that's super effective is pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. I have one of these units by a company called Pulse Centers. It was developed for the horse racing industry. So it's super hefty, high power. You know, the, the, the, the thing comes with like a massage table and a chair and all these coils. I use that thing almost every day just on, you know, little injuries, aches, pains, you know, during massages. But I'm a huge fan of PEMF too. So I'd say for technologies, PEMF and infrared, for kind of like supplementee type of things, transdermal magnesium and peptides and then for like an oral, oral supplement, Kion Flex. And those would be, those would be some of the things that I think I use most regularly for, for soreness, you know, on, on a pretty regular basis. That's not an exhaustive list, but those are the ones that I think come to mind as things I use like almost every day. What would you throw in there, Jay?

Yeah, so I'm going to take a bit of a different approach to this, but I like everything that you said because I think that those are kind of just the good low hanging fruit. Not too cost prohibitive for most people. The next one that I'm going to present is certainly not cost prohibitive whatsoever. But if you're thinking about sports like martial arts or Brazilian jiu jitsu, we know that a lot of individuals are prone to injury because of overuse or because certain areas of the body, especially the legs, knees and ankles, just are not strong enough enough to withstand a lot of the momentum shifts that you have in doing jiu jitsu. So I actually started following an individual. I heard him on Ben Pakolski's podcast. This guy, his name is Ben Patrick. He's the knees over toes guy. This guy Ben.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually, I exchanged some emails with his mom who I guess runs his company, because I was looking at some of his videos and I'm exploring maybe getting him on the podcast. But yeah, it's a. Go ahead, Jay.

Yeah, really, really smart individual who had multiple knee constructive surgeries. Never thought he'd play basketball again, multiple injuries to, to both knees. And he thought that he, you know, should have had surgery, never did and probably injured it even more. And so he started kind of going against conventional wisdom, which, you know, with kind of the whole idea of knees over toes is that most, a lot of Bodybuilders kind of in this day and age don't think that when you square squat or do any movements that your knees should ever cross your toes. And he thought that was just kind of insane. And so he developed this program to create more bulletproof knees. And again, I'm going with this because there's so many knee injuries that take place in jiu jitsu and martial arts. But I really like this guy. So if you haven't followed him on Instagram, he's knees over toes guy. Ben Patrick, he created this entire formula on creating bulletproof knees. And a lot of it is just reaction, retraining different muscles around the legs and the ankles, the tibialis, and then also doing stretches to kind of put more load onto the knees and progressively put more load onto the knees. But I think that is such a low hanging fruit that not a lot of people really think about is just appropriate stretching and appropriate strength training of some of these muscles that we may not use that are going to strengthen different areas of the body that are more prone to injury, injury especially strengthening like the tibialis. So I think that's one of the things that I actually have been doing because if anybody recalls on hearing me on the podcast, I tore my meniscus playing tennis last January, and I still was having some difficulty in the gym with things like deadlifts, things like squats, leg press. And so I started kind of integrating some of Ben's work into my own routine. And I feel like my knees are getting back to bulletproof, which I, I had to have. Like, I wasn't gonna allow anything to keep me back from, you know, playing tennis or getting out there and, you know, doing high impact sports. So that's one. I think that if I were you, Sam, I'd. I'd give a look in.

Yeah, I, I dig that. And to follow up on that or piggyback on it, as folks say. There's one book I have on my Kindle that anytime my knee hurts, I flip to this book and just open up the section that hurts. And it's all based on trigger points, areas that are painful, that typically the pain is caused by an area related to that area, but not right in it that's in a state of cramp that needs a trigger point, like a good 30 to 60 seconds of a deep tissue press with a slow release of the breath to kind of release some of the tension in that trigger point. And it's called the knee pain Bible. And so if I get pain on the outside of My knee, it's intermedius, it's gluteus medius, and of course, vastus lateralis. But it shows you, like in a really good diagram with links to YouTube videos as well, the area to mash or to roll with a softball or foam roll or whatever. That book, like nine times out of ten when I recommend to somebody or use it on myself for an area of knee pain. Shockingly effective at reducing knee pain, but even more shockingly, reducing knee pain by working on an area that isn't even a part of the area that hurts. You know, similar to tennis elbow, you could, you could Google, like, trigger points for tennis elbow. Tennis elbow. There's trigger points for tennis elbow way down in the thumb where the thumb attachment is for one of the extensor radialis muscles of the thumb. So if you don't know about trigger points, there's another one under the armpit for front of the shoulder pain. It's crazy how sometimes we think the pain is coming from one area and it's actually totally unrelated and the pain is in a different area. That one's called the Knee Pain Bible. And of course, probably Kelly Sarette's Becoming a Supple Leopard is one of the best guides to just no trigger points for every muscle that's out there and. And hit those. Hit those trigger points effectively. So, anyways, I hope that's so interesting. I hope that's helpful, Sam. And we. We gotta begin to wrap things up. I've actually got a podcast. I'm boogieing off to here pretty soon. Danica Patrick, apparently the. The race car driver, has a podcast. She wanted to interview me today, so I'm gonna go. Go be on her show. But that thing starts pretty soon. Soon. So I got a boogie momentarily. But first of all, my apologies for the audio snafus on today's show. We'll get those sorted and fix them for next time. So don't worry, you guys, forgive us and we're back next time. Even better. Assuming Clubhouse is still around, doesn't get replaced by whatever Zuckerberg's doing is his. His. I don't know. Apparently he's coming out with his own version. And do we have. Do we have a review? Can we give away a goodie on today's show? Jay, do we have any reviews picked up? So Jay's going to read a review. And the best way to support this show is if you got to Apple Podcasts or to Spotify or Samsung or wherever you listen to the show. If you leave a review it's one of the best things you can do to help this show out. So even if right now you jot a quick note to yourself, take 20 seconds, leave Ben and Jay a review, it will be tremendously helpful for the show. Furthermore, we go read the reviews each week we pick one out of the hat and. Well, we don't pick it out of the hat, we pick good one and then we send you a gear pack, a cool tech T shirt, a BPA free water bottle and a sweet Ben Greenfield fitness beanie straight to your house and all you do is if you hear us read your review, email gearngreenfieldfitness.com gearngreenfieldfitness.Com with your T shirt size will get a gear pack sent out to you as our ethical bribe to force you to leave a review. So anyways, Jay, you want to take this one one away?

Yeah, no, I was looking in the room. I always like to see if the person who wrote the review is in the room and I'd like to try to see if I could find someone in the room and then find their review real quickly. But I couldn't do so.

That's especially tricky when in Clubhouse. I want to reward that in Clubhouse people have names like, you know, Bob and Kate and then, you know, their reviews are like, exactly. Pretty Kitten 111 217X Kaleman 206.

Yeah, yeah, all right. But this, this one is Be Feral 7 Be Feral 7 Best Health Podcast around and they said this is a science backed biohacking and lifestyle tip podcast. Ben goes the nth degree when it comes to fringe ways to be healthier, more fit, et cetera. But you can pick and choose depending on what is most important to you. Just start listening and you'll understand. Even though I'd argue that it's not just French, there's also a lot of things that are science backed and still French.

You'll understand. Just listen. You'll get it then you just won't know until you listen. The light turn on. Yeah, well, that's a great review. So Farrell, whatever your name is, email gear bengreenfieldfitness.com with a T shirt size, we get a handy dandy gear pack out to you for those of you who join us on Clubhouse. Those of you who join us on Clubhouse, thanks for joining in. It's always fun to have people along for the ride. The show notes are@BenGreenfield Fitness.com 429 for this show where you can go leave your comments, jump into the discussion in the comments section there. That's always fun. And of course, let us know if any of you tried banana plt and wind up roofing yourself. Sorry for that unsensitive politically incorrect joke. And so that being said, until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. J.T. watt signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com 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 everything that I've ever watched. 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 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.