Q&A 453: Science-Based Trick For Morning Alertness, Hard vs. Easy Cardio Debate, How To Make A Vegan Diet Healthy, The Benefits Of Cigarettes & Much More

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, science based tricks for morning alertness, hard versus easy cardio debate, how to make a vegan diet healthy, the benefits of cigarettes and much more. Faith, family fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show. Nicotine is very interesting. I think nicotine is often vilified unfairly, but in terms of its effects on things like your vagal nerve function, its effects on focus, clarity and a host of other cognitive enhancing mechanisms. The fact that, you know, if you're not smoking a cigarette and stuff, it's not got like all the toxins and everything in it. And I really like to use nicotine, especially if I need to pick me up in the afternoon, but I don't want my sleep cycles disrupted later on. You can find nicotine obviously at the gas station, but most of that stuff full of crap. But if you want nicotine gum, lozenge and pouch options for adults who are looking for the best, most responsible way to consume nicotine, you gotta check out Lucy. So Lucy makes the best, the best tasting too nicotine products out there. Their pomegranate gum, by the way, is amazing. I love to chomp a little bit of that 2 milligram pomegranate. Grind it gum during the workday. Lucy Co and use promo code BEN20 at checkout. It's going to save you at Lucy Co and use code BEN20. Now warning, this product does contain nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical and so I'm supposed to tell you that. Anyways, go to Lucy Co and use code BEN20. All right, so joy mode. Joy mode. Just like it sounds. Powder. Yeah. To water, juice, coffee probably wouldn't taste so great, I think because to me it has like a little bit of a berry flavor. It tastes good, but I like to mix it in water. It's great pre workout, but it's amazing pre sex because they designed it as a natural sexual performance booster to support erection quality and firmness and sex drive. And it works for ladies too. My wife and I both take this a few hours before date night or before we know we're going to get it on. It's got clinically supported doses of L citrulline, arginine, yohimbine and vitamin C. And not to get too scientific on you, but the reason it's got the vitamin C in it is all those other things I mentioned, those directly promote nitric oxide production, which is like almost like a Viagra for your whole body, right? And then what the vitamin C does is it prevents the nitric oxide from getting broken down. So you can imagine you could use this stuff for blood flow pre workout, but oh my goodness, for a night in the bedroom or a couple hours in the bedroom, or if you're me, 15 minutes in the bedroom, it gives you an amazing, amazing experience. So it's a natural, it's science backed and it's called a sexual performance booster. It's made by Joy Mode. Very simple. Use powder and it works. So you go to use joymode.com greenfield and enter code GREENFIELD at checkout for 20% off your first order. No nasty prescription drugs involved, just natural powder. Use joymode.com greenfield or enter code greenfield at checkout for 20% off your first order. So enjoy Joy Mode. Bon Charge. Love to say that. Bon Charge holistic wellness brand with a huge range of evidence based products to optimize your life in every way. You've heard me talk about the importance of managing your environment, your air, your light, your water, your electricity with things like low blue lighting and blue blocks, full spectrum lighting that mimics sunlight. You've heard me talk about EMF protection, things like air tubes instead of regular earphones, laptop mats, harmonizing stickers, protection blankets, protection beanies. The kind of stuff I wear on airplanes. This company, Boncharge, they've even got cold and heat therapy, massage guns, ice roller massage balls, ice rollers. Like anything you need to make your environment or your body better. They just about have it. Fantastic, endless catalog of premium wellness products that allow you to adopt ancestral ways of living in our modern day world. And they're given all my listeners 15% off. You go to boncharge.com greenfield and use coupon code greenfield to save 15%. That's B O N C-H-A-R-G-E.com greenfield use code greenfield to save 15%. Have fun shopping at Pawn Charge, folks. Jay, this is an odd morning for me. I've got all sorts of cables and devices and random cameras and microphones and eight different pieces of software open on my computer. I suppose this is kind of a special announcement. I can see you, you can see me. And we are officially switching to this podcast, the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Being a video show, dude, look at us.

Welcome to 2023.

We joined the game, man. We haven't done a Q and A in quite some time. And just for those of you listening in, I keep all the show notes for every Q and A we take copious show notes. So BenGreenfieldLife.com 453 we'll link to all the news flashes. Anything else we talk about special announcements, since we haven't talked in just a little bit. Jay, is everything good?

Everything's good. Other than the fact, and this is a fun thing for us to open up with, apparently. I thought I was getting like, amazing deep sleep. Like, I was getting like three plus hours. Come to find out, maybe I wasn't. And I'm only getting like an hour. And I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, right, with this whole new change in some algorithms. I don't like to name companies because I own a biometric company, so I don't want to get sued by anybody. But there's been some changes in different algorithms that are looking at sleep staging.

Is it a ring company that rhymes with rorating?

Maybe. It's a great guess, Ben. They have a new sleep staging. It's in beta, but essentially what they're using, and I love this, they're using more or less like, high fidelity heart rate variability data to look at sleep staging. But those who have a quote, unquote, high heart rate variability, which is where I fall into the category, apparently, according to Aura, my deep sleep stages has been skewed. So, for instance, last night, it says on the old algorithm, keep talking.

I mean, I'm going to pull open my own data here while you're talking. Yeah, do it super nerdy, but keep going.

Okay, if you open it up and you go and just look at the sleep staging, it'll say, like, new sleep stage beta or the old one. Like, you just have to toggle it on. So last night, I'll show the camera too. I had three and a half hours last night in the old oura ring. I guess you could say algorithm new one 53 minutes. So I was off by like, almost three hours. Like, what's going on here?

Thank you for doing this, by the way. I never saw this setting. If people have an OURA ring and I open up my sleep stages, you're saying that it's more accurate if I toggle that new sleep staging beta thing to be on.

So apparently it is supposed to be. I mean, again, you know, Aura says it's in beta right now, but apparently it is supposed to be more closely associated with sleep staging on a polysomnography. So an actual, like, sleep study.

That's interesting. You know, I just got back from almost two weeks of being gone from my family and traveling. I was speaking at a longevity. Oh, I'm not supposed to say that. I learned at this conference, this anti aging and longevity conference that I spoke at. It's like a private membership only event. So I won't say the name of it because then people might feel left out or whatever. But you're supposed to say age reversal. Now, apparently you're not supposed to say longevity and anti aging. It's age reversal. That's the new moniker that all the cool kids are using. But I was traveling and during my trip I was like, geez, I just really want to experiment with some new things for getting a good night of sleep. And I recently posted this to Instagram some of the stuff that I tried. So first of all, I got those tape strips, hostage tape. They sent me these tape strips that they sent me back when I had a beard and a mustache because it's apparently good for keeping your mouth taped when you have hair on your face. So I did that and then the other thing, because we all know that the best way to assess whether something's working is to do a whole bunch of other things with it at the same time. That's just science.

Scientific way.

Yeah. So I did that and then I did my usual like, you know, keep the room cold, you know, use a red light headlamp to get around at night. I had one of those little joov gos that I was using to light up my room in the morning and in the evening to simulate sunrise and sunset. The two. Actually, no, I'd say three main things that I did. And my sleep scores were an average of 94% during my two weeks of travel with eight hours of sleep a night, which is amazing. That's like better sleep than I get at home. So I was mouth taping and then I was running light sound stimulation or breathwork session on myself every night for like 20 or 30 minutes, which I don't do at home. Cause frankly, I like sex, I like talking with my wife, I like our evening prayers, I like my kids a little bit and I like to read them stories and stuff. And frankly I. I don't have the time at home to do like some 30 minute light sound stimulation thing. But when I'm traveling, I don't have a life. So, you know, by like 9:15pm I could get in bed. And so I was using either the Braintap or the other Ship app to do like breath work for relaxation or one of the light sound stimulation sessions for relaxation to kind of turn my brain off in the evening. So I was doing that every night. I was doing the mouth tape every night. And then as I usually do when I travel, I was using a melatonin suppository. But I did another thing. The guy, Dr. John Laurence, I recently talked about this on a podcast, who makes those melatonin suppositories. He has another one called Solace and he designed it for pain. And it's got this Chinese herb in it that's been studied for insomnia and sleep support. And John told me he's like, the. The people I've given it to for pain have been crushing sleep. Also, I think it's called Cordialis is the name of this stuff. They get a little bit of organic cbd. They put that in there. And so I was putting two things in my booty. Melatonin suppository and a Solace suppository using hostage tape. And then that light sound stimulation, which sounds like a lot of stuff, but honestly, it takes like two minutes to put all this stuff on. And dude, my sleep was so good. Like it was one of those deals where I got back from two weeks of travel and felt like I had been on vacation or something. As far, you know, when you walk in the door, you just don't feel exhausted and jet lagged and sleep deprived. It felt like that. So I think that might be kind of. Kind of, sort of maybe my new travel protocol. I don't know.

That could be a good go to. Dude, I don't know. For me, my sleep is really bad and inconsistent when I travel. Especially like that first night. That first night, it's just like a weird atmosphere. I don't know if it's an evolutionary thing. Like you're not in your environment, you're not at home. And so I never sleep well. And then it's like the day that I. The night before I go home, it's like maybe the anxiety of like, oh man, gotta get everything wrapped up, get to the airport, like do all those things. So sleep just generally isn't great for me when I travel. But some great tips to end up trying. I love breath work or any type of, you know, biofeedback or anything before bed. That's a really great way to downregulate the nervous system.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be long. I said 20 to 30 minutes. But I mean like the other ship app has yoga, nidra and breath sessions that are like eight minutes long. The Braintap I think has one as short as 10 minutes. But I think like 20 to 30 minutes is kind of my Sweet spot. Let's jump into today's News flashes. Let's go. All right, everybody. Welcome to the News Flashes. So this is the part of the show where I discuss some of the more compelling posts that I've made of late regarding the news specifically. Typically, it's scientific nutrition, exercise, age reversal, as we know we're supposed to say now news that we've posted of late to primarily Twitter, although I kind of post these all over the place. So our first news flash was very interesting. New study or paper really on morning alertness. Morning alertness. This was pretty interesting, I think, especially because a lot of people struggle to figure out why some mornings they wake up groggy and some mornings they wake up bright and bushy tailed metaphor I've never quite understood. And they're wondering, oh gosh, was it, you know, a supplement I took, was it the temperature, was it light, whatever. But what this prospective longitudinal study did was they had over 800 twins and then also genetically unrelated adults. So they were able to study genetics in this, which is really interesting when you have a twin population. So they're able to see, well, our genetics playing a role here. Turns out, long story short, even though I'll link to the full paper if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 453 is that your morning alertness is not affected by your genetics, but it is affected by four independent variables that they found in this study. Number one was no surprise, sleep quantity and quality the night before. That's a big duh. If it's poor, you're gonna have poor morning alertness. The second was physical activity the day prior. And they found regarding physical activity that a greater amount of physical activity the day prior resulted in increased amounts of morning alertness, which again, I don't think that is much of a shocker either. Although in this case, these were people that were not athletes or heavy trainers or people who would have been at risk of overtraining. They were engaged in just a modest amount of physical activity. I didn't see a table in there that actually showed on the study the actual amount of physical activity. I don't know if you had a chance to take a look at it, Jay, but I mean, in a nutshell, what it comes down to is if you exercise the day prior, you are going to have higher amounts of morning alertness on the following day. Meaning technically, if you want to hack cognitive performance the next morning, do an exercise session the previous day. It doesn't say what time would be ideal either, although we know that the best times for exercise are typically within two to three hours of waking to take advantage of that cortisol awakening response or else sometime in the later afternoon to early evening when body temperature and grip strength and reaction time peaks. So regardless, we know that some type of physical activity, prior physical activity the day before the next thing was super interesting. It was what they ate in the morning. So these measurements of morning alertness were obviously not occurring right when these people got up, but later on in the day. And they found that what they ate in the morning affected morning alertness. And interestingly, this is kind of hard to wrap your head around initially when you hear it, but I'll explain. Higher amounts of carbohydrates in the morning seems to increase morning alertness significantly. However, high amounts of blood glucose, meaning large amounts of glycemic variability due to the hypoglycemic drop that occurred afterwards, and also the release of serotonin, which causes a tryptophan post turkey dinner like sluggishness in the brain occurred or was present in people with decreased morning alertness, which sounds paradoxical like carbohydrates with breakfast or for your first morning meal increases morning alertness. Yet an increase in blood glucose decreases morning alertness or at least a significant increase in blood glucose decreases morning alertness to the extent to where they even tested like a glucose drip to raise blood glucose and found yeah, this actually does decrease morning alertness. But what they explained in the paper was that a well composed meal that also includes proteins and fats, and even though they didn't list it, I would also say fibers causes a slowed release of those carbohydrates to the extent to where the carbohydrates with the morning meal allow for energy, you know, glucose for the brain, et cetera, that keeps morning alertness high without the blood glucose spike that could cause morning alertness to be low. So what I'm saying here, the takeaway from this is if you were going to have carbohydrates for breakfast, which appears to be a hack to increase morning alertness, then they should be paired with proteins and fats. It shouldn't just be toast with jam or oatmeal with brown sugar or a bowl of cereal. I doubt a lot of our listeners are consuming those type of things anyways. But the thing to understand here is that it appears that the reason that the carbohydrates with the morning meal increased alertness for the rest of the morning and was because of that long, slow, stable release in energy with A slight increase in blood glucose. That wouldn't happen in response to skipping breakfast or having like just a high fat, high protein breakfast. So I think that based on this, it would be prudent if you are struggling with morning alertness and want your morning alertness to be higher, to consume some type of low glycemic index carbohydrates in moderation with breakfast. Now this does not need to be a pasta feed, right? Or a couple bottles of Gatorade. This can literally be, I'm going to dump a handful of blueberries into my morning smoothie or like I'm going to have a little serving of fruit or say like some sweet potato with my eggs or something like that. Now I know that this is coming from me, the guy who says, well, try to eat the lion's share of your carbohydrates in the evening to support sleep and to allow yourself to be able to burn more fats and proteins during the day. But this study got me thinking. I'm like, well, gosh, if people are seeing an energy dip that's related to low blood glucose, then maybe they should include just a little bit of a low glycemic index carbohydrate with breakfast. And I think that based on what this study is showing, that that could actually be prudent. And for most people who are exercising or being physically active in the morning anyways, I don't think you're going to any worry about getting fat or something by having a handful of blueberries with breakfast. So that was interesting.

I thought we had the excuse though to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I was going to go with it. Man, sugary cereal.

It's got to be one of those new paleo keto low carb cereals. I was telling somebody the other day, and again, they're not a sponsor of this show or anything, but Magic Spoon, they actually did a pretty good job replicating all of our favorite morning Frosted Flakes and Fruity Loops and Cocoa Puffs flavors without the crap. I'll occasionally have a bowl of Magic spoon, like with some yogurt or like some coconut milk and it's pretty good.

I need to give it a try. I saw it at Sprouts, it was like 12 bucks a box and I was like, is this shit worth it?

You gotta eat rice and beans for all your other meals because of the dent in your pocketbook, but you know you're at least gonna have a guilt free breakfast. Oh, and I did mention there were four independent factors that they looked at One was the sleep quality and quantity night before, one was physical activity. The day prior, one was a breakfast rich in carbohydrate. But the fourth was the paradox, lower blood glucose after breakfast. That's why I wanted to explain that. So you have higher morning alertness if you have carbs for breakfast, but it has to be paired with a low blood glucose response. I guess the other hack could be maybe to take like a blood glucose disposal agent, you know, like berberine or bitter melon or something like that, before you have breakfast if you include carbs with it.

So I feel like for the physical activity component, I was just thinking about this as we, as you read through these results, is that there has to be that threshold. But I feel like the primary, like mediating variable here is still sleep. Because I've found that even if I train really hard, as long as I get a good quality and quantity of sleep, then my recovery and then alertness tends to be better than if I paired like a high level of physical activity or the same high level of physical activity with poor sleep. And maybe that's just me anecdotally, but I think it makes sense that if again, if you're an athlete or you're training hard, like, yes, that is a huge priority for you, but prioritizing sleep as well is key for morning alertness. So I would put that. I know it wasn't necessarily talked about distinctively in the study, but it seems to make intuitive sense.

Yeah, and there's a lot of other kind of like subtle variables. I got into it. It's actually a great read, the whole paper just in terms of understanding circadian rhythmicity and glucose monitoring, breakfast and physical activities. And they use some accelerometers to detect sleep and wake cycles. So I thought it was kind of a cool paper. So we'll link to that. BenGreenfieldLife.com 453 now speaking of exercise, I also came across three different articles that got me thinking about what's better for specifically fat loss and weight management and metabolic response to exercise. High intensity interval training, or like low steady state cardio, because that's this constant debate. The reason it got me thinking about that was because the journal Kinesiology Review recently released a paper that was titled extraordinary claims in the literature on high intensity interval training. Are the extraordinary claims supported by extraordinary evidence? And what they said was that there are four claims people often make about high intensity interval training. One, that it lowers the risk of mortality more than moderate intensity continuous exercise. Two, that it doubles endurance performance after only 15 minutes of training over two weeks. Three, that one minute of HIIT is equivalent to 45 minutes of moderate intensity continuous exercise. I've always had my eyebrow raised at that anyways, because it seems a little bit ludicrous. And then four, HIIT is more pleasant and enjoyable than moderate intensity continuous exercise. No, it's not.

Whoever made that claim has never done it before.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's going to get me into what I wanted to talk about when it comes to this, because when they looked into this, basically they found that most of those claims are pretty darn questionable. And what they also found was that the majority of people who do high intensity interval training, this is important for you, if you're listening right now, to understand, do not reach the same level of intensity as the actual studies that are done on high intensity interval training. People hear about, like, let's say a tabata set, right? 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy. Barely anybody actually goes as hard as they demonstrate is beneficial in the actual research studies in labs. And barely anybody goes as easy as they're supposed to during the rest periods. Most people are like 20 seconds push. 10 seconds, okay, keep moving and kind of push a little less harder than 20 seconds push. I'm guilty of that sometimes too, because let's face it, it actually is hard to truly get up to like 90 to 100% intensity or even exceed VO2 max. There are two ways, and I talk about this both in Boundless and then my previous endurance training manual called Beyond Training. There's two different ways to stimulate, like, mitochondrial proliferation and endurance and muscular endurance. One is via what's called the PGC1 Alpha pathway. Do you know what that stands for, by the way? Jay, you want to sound really smart.

That is well beyond my pay grade, brother.

It's the master switch that increases mitochondrial density and the activity of what are called oxidative enzymes, both of which are highly favorable for not only just overall decrease in mortality, but increase in fat burning, increase in endurance, et cetera. And the PGC1 Alpha pathway is the master switch that responds to this moderate intensity, continuous steady state exercise. It's the peroxisome proliferator activated receptor G coactivator 1 alpha pathway. That's actually what it stands for.

Exactly what I was thinking.

That's what you were thinking. I know. In addition to that, however, a second pathway, the shortcut pathway, the HACK pathway, it's the adenosine monophosphate kinase, the AMP K pathway, which some people might also be familiar with. So you Got two different ways to get fit. One is the slow way, the PGC1 Alpha pathway. One is the AMP K pathway. The lion's share of professional endurance athletes walking the face of this planet trigger the PGC1 Alpha pathway. 80% of the time. They've actually studied this. Like cross country skiers, marathoners, triathletes, et cetera. The best of the best, even just naturally, without even knowing about it, tend to do about 80% of activity that is at aerobic threshold, low intensity, triggering the PGC1 Alpha pathway. And then this is important. The other 20% they do at extremely high intensities, triggering the AMP K pathway and very little in between. Now, my recommendation in the past to folks who want to hack time, get fit, increase lifespan and health span, and burn fat and increase the level of mitochondria is to mostly work on that AMP K pathway if you have limited time, right? If you're actual real person in the real world, not a professional athlete, what I've said in the past is, yes, use high intensity interval training because you're going to trigger that AMP K pathway. And then what you do is you hit the PGC1 Alpha pathway by just making sure you're engaged in low level physical activity during the day. Walk when you take phone calls, take the stairs, go on some hikes here and there, ride your bike to work or to the grocery store if you can. Just basically try to simulate, you know, like a hunter, gatherer, ancestral lifestyle. And that way you're not spending two to three hours in the gym, on a treadmill or an elliptical trainer triggering that pathway. You're instead just triggering it through your activities of daily living. And then when it is time to work out, you trigger that AMP K pathway through high intensity interval training. Because it's the bee's knees, baby. Now, here's what these papers that I'll link to in the show notes get into is, yeah, it's the bee's knees, but most people, they don't actually reach the required intensity to do it. So the takeaway message here is I'm still a big fan of hiit, but I was pretty shocked to realize, like barely anybody actually does HIIT properly. So this might require you doing a few sessions with the trainer or using like some kind of a computer or, you know, like a wearable or some other modality to make sure your heart rate's getting high enough. But the long story short, the big takeaway message here is if you're exercising with high intensity interval training and you're not seeing results. It's probably because your intervals aren't hard enough or your exercise intervals aren't hard enough and your recovery intervals aren't easy enough. Yeah, right. So if, if you're doing a, you know, I'd recommend in the path, like to trigger mitochondria, do 30 seconds hard, use a one to four work to rest ratio and do like five rounds of that. So we're talking about like 30 seconds hard, two minutes easy. 30 seconds hard, two minutes easy, five times through. Pretty doable to wrap your head around. Those 30 seconds need to be smoke coming out your ears. Somebody's needing to hold a gun to my head, Sorry for the violent analogy to get me to do this. 25 seconds and I don't know if I can hold on for dear life. And those two minutes are like something you'd pay a million dollars to be able to have available at the end of that 32nd effort.

So Ben, you and I have talked about in the past even smaller segments for workout or even smaller working set, like 10 to 15 seconds to where you're literally doing. It's not 90%, it's like a hundred percent, all out, everything you can give. Because a lot of people can do like a hundred percent in ten to fifteen seconds. Do you still, do you think that's too small of a window now? Because I'm thinking like there are some people who I've worked with in the past who like, even 30 seconds like to go 100% like is still pretty challenging. But like 10 to 15 seconds with like, you know, a two to three minute break, like is doable for them. And they still relish the two to three minute break.

Hey. So whether you run, ride, hike, swim, lift, whatever, you understand what it means to push harder, to reach farther, to go the extra mile. That relentless drive runs in your blood, literally. There's a company called InsideTracker. They actually let you track your blood and they give you a personalized plan to build endurance, boost energy and optimize your health for the long haul. They created this with leading scientists in aging and genetics and Biometrics that analyzes your blood, your DNA and your fitness tracking data to identify where you're optimized and where you're not. And then it gives you a daily action plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition and supplementation for your body. And when you connect it with your Fitbit or your Garmin, you unlock real time recovery pro tips even after you complete your workout. So it's like having a personal Trainer and a nutritionist right in your pocket, takes all the guesswork out of your blood work and you get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to InsideTracker.com Ben that's InsideTracker.com Ben all right, let's talk about the one supplement that I think is one of the most powerful supplements. It flies under the radar, that is good for building lean muscle, enhancing athletic recovery, naturally boosting energy. Backed by over 20 years of clinical research. And this stuff is something I discovered when I was racing Ironman triathlon. And it just turns out that it is basically the building blocks of life. And I'm not kidding, it's actually essential amino acids, all the ones your body needs because your body is 50% amino acids. And the building blocks that amino acids give you, they're absolutely fundamental not only for fitness but for recovery, for satiating your appetite. Helps me to sleep better. It allows me to go for really long periods of time without eating oodles of calories. It's like the Swiss army knife of supplementation. It's called Aminos Kion Aminos K I O N. You go to getkion.com ben to get this stuff at 20% off of monthly delivery and 10% off of a one time purchase. Fantastic flavors. I personally like the berry, the watermelon and the mango flavor. Those would be the top three to try in my opinion. And you just put it in water. I mean I dump the powder straight into my mouth pre workout and it's like a shot in the butt to go out and crush a workout. But it's great for a whole lot of stuff besides just a shot in the butt. So check them out. Getkion.com Ben getk I-O-N.com Ben to get my fundamental supplement for fitness, Kion Aminos. All right, this is cool. You can join team Ben Greenfield Life. We're currently hiring. You can check out our careers page at BenGreenfieldLife.com careers we got editorial position available. It's the editorial assistant for Ben Greenfield Life. You get to assist with and execute the full editorial strategy. That means things like blog, email, social media, copywriting, collaborate across different departments on all the written content. Ensure that we have timely and appropriate development and delivery of digital content that can conforms to editorial style. Because I can't do that on my own. Lord knows all I can do is write. I'm horrible at managing the rest of it. I need an editorial assistance. We're hiring one BenGreenfieldLife.com Careers is where you can apply. We have a very creative and inspirational network and team. We live to empower people to live their bold, purpose filled and adventurous life with help, hope, happiness and love. And our team is amazing and so super fun, super fun to work with. So check it out. Go to BenGreenfieldLife.comCareers if you think you got the chops for this new editorial assistant position. That's just basic exercise physiology. You have your creatine phosphogenic pathway where you're splitting creatine to create ATP. That pathway poops out somewhere around the 15 second mark. So theoretically you can go balls out for 10 to 15 seconds. The anaerobic glycolysis is going to last. In a highly fit individual, you might be able to go as long as two minutes, but for most people it's like 30 seconds to 60 seconds maximum. So you could go at 90 to 95% for up to perhaps two minutes, depending on how fit you are. And then you really start to shift into burning more fats, fewer carbohydrates, more aerobic, less anaerobic once you start to cross that two minute threshold. So the main thing then would be that the majority of high intensity interval training should be in that 10 second, up to a maximum of two minutes in length for the exercise intervals. The only exception to that would be that they have shown that if you want to increase your VO2 max, your maximum oxygen consumption, which is heavily correlated with longevity and also performance, that doing maximum sustainable pace efforts for four to five minutes works really well. And that's with like a one to one work to rest ratio. And so with some of the people who I work with, I will have them do and that's not very frequent, that's once every week to once every two weeks. So I'll just put a workout when I'm programming a workout for one of my clients, where it's like a VO2 max triggering workout. And they might do it every other Saturday, like twice a month where they're doing four to five minutes as hard as they can sustain for four to five minutes. So what I mean by that, if you're doing on a bicycle, if you started off at 90 bpm, you finish at 90 bpm in terms of your cycling cadence, but you maintain that the entire time. And that entire time you're basically going as hard as you possibly can, but without a drop off in power output and or in cadence. Then you recover for four to five minutes and you do that four to five times through. That's a solid like 30 minutes of exercise with half of that being pretty difficult. But that would be a rare example of a high intensity interval training session that's effective for desired fitness goal that is a little bit longer than that two minute range. But that's because it's VO2 max. And VO2 max does have an aerobic component. Does that make sense?

That makes sense, yeah.

And then one other thing, and I'll link to this part of this tweet that I sent out, referenced a paper called Slow and Steady or Hard and Fast. And Brad Schoenfeld, a fantastic researcher, was a part of that paper, along with James Steele and Daniel Plotkin and a few other good folks in exercise physiology and exercise science literature. This came out last year and basically one of the big takeaways from that, it was actually written in the conclusion, in the abstract. They said that their findings provided compelling evidence that the pattern of intensity of effort or volume during exercise had minimal influence on longitudinal changes in fat mass or fat free mass. And basically the best exercise program that you can adhere to when it comes to training your aerobic or endurance system is the one that you're going to do regularly and consistently. Like that's the most important thing, which I think applies to just about anything. Diet, exercise, you name it.

Right. That makes sense.

Okay, so another one. We're going to totally just like shift topics here and talk about sperm. The reason I want to bring this up, you hear a lot these days. I think Paul Saladino, the Carnivore, Maryland guy, has said this. I've heard other people, primarily like paleo or carnivore diet enthusiasts say this. When you are on a plant based diet, your fertility suffers and sperm quality decreases all the way down to people referencing Kellogg. Part of that was based on, I think, Seventh Day Adventism. I'm nothing. I don't want to insult a bunch of Seventh Day Adventists, but the idea here was that if you feed a diet high in grains and low in protein and fat and relatively high in processed carbohydrates to males, that their propensity to want to go out and have a whole bunch of sex and even like make a lot of babies and have a high amount of libido and sexual drive decreases. Therefore, a hack for, you know, keeping guys straight laced and, you know, all churchy would be to just have cornflakes for breakfast every morning instead of eggs and bacon and liver. And there is kind of sort of something to that. Like you actually see in a lot of vegan and plant Based diet studies a drop in sperm quality and a drop in fertility. So there is some truth to that. However, there was a recent cross sectional study in men with infertility and they looked at eating animal based foods and eating plant based foods. But what they looked at with the plant based foods was whether the plant based diet index they called it was either what they called a healthy plant based index diet or an unhealthy plant based index diet. So essentially they were looking at, okay, so let's see, you are going to go vegan or vegetarian or whatever. What if you're doing like soaking, sprouting, fermenting whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes. And what happens if you're going like fruit juices, sugar, sweetened beverages, ultra processed foods, refined grains versus whole grains, potatoes and sweet foods. And the results were not that surprising. Greater adherence to a healthy plant based diet was associated with higher sperm density and better sperm motility versus the unhealthy plant based index diet which is unfortunately all too common.

Right.

The stereotypical like Trader Joe's grocery store, soy milk, tofu. Right. You know, fructose laden refined grains, eating everything out of packages. Plant based diet versus what we might call a more, I don't know, Garden of Eden esque type of diet rich in natural fruits and vegetables and produce and natural compounds and unprocessed grains and things of that nature. Well, it turns out that you can't paint with a broad brush and say that a plant based diet renders all males infertile. An unhealthy plant based diet, steeped in refined grains and sugar, sweetened foods and ultra processed foods appears to be horrific for fertility and sperm quality. But a healthy plant based diet is not going to castrate you, which I think it seems that a lot of carnivore diet enthusiasts might be claiming. So this was interesting to actually see it fleshed out in the literature.

It is super interesting. I mean I would guess that the carnivore advocates would argue, well then let's still compare that to let's say a fully animal based diet and see if that improves sperm quality even more so. But yeah, I think you're right. They tend, there tends to be a lot of broad brush painting here in terms of just like all plant based diets will lead towards kind of this pathway. But we know that there are indeed healthier options out there. It's not just that everybody's eating a bunch of fruit juice, sugar, sweetened beverages and refined stuff all the time.

You're right. Let's face it the ultimate study would be healthy plant based diet, unhealthy plant based diet, healthy nose to tail, regeneratively raised, grass fed, grass finished carnivore diet versus meat and ribeye steaks and greasy burgers. Carnivore and animal based diet. And what's going to win out? I suspect, and this would probably come as no surprise to people, a healthy omnivorous natural diet would probably be top of the totem pole. A healthy plant based diet would probably be second, an unhealthy omnivorous diet would probably be third. And an unhealthy plant based diet would probably be last place for fertility. That's what I'm guessing.

That's what I would think too.

I'm no scientist. So anyways, it's interesting. Speaking of me not being a scientist, I also wanted to mention here, as we get towards the end of the news flashes, a couple interesting takeaways. First of all, I actually thought this was interesting. There was a paper that evaluated the credibility of the top 100 best selling nutrition books. In this case they did it in Canada. And the takeaways were a little bit concerning because I think that we as human beings naturally have this unhealthy cognitive bias that if something is written down and if a book happens to have gotten published, it must be God's truth, it has to be fact. Otherwise how could it be printed? How could it have found its way to a library and been bound between two beautiful hardcovers with an author's name on it? Maybe a New York Times bestseller stamp like this must be true what I'm reading. We just think that. I think a part of it's just our educational process and we grow up getting books handed to us and hey, this is the truth. Well, we know, especially me being in the publishing industry and seeing how technically easy it is to actually get someone to publish a book for you. Later on, just a second, you'll figure out how actually easy it is to get a research paper published too, which is kind of shocking.

I think it's the scariest.

Yeah, it was interesting because what they did was they looked at author credentials, they looked at financial incentives, right? Like who's paying the bills, you know, whose pocket, who's in your pocket? And also scientific citations of the top 100 bestselling books in nutrition related categories from Amazon Canada. And what they looked at was financial incentives, right? Products, services, endorsements, social media pages. They looked at author credentials like degrees, background, educational history and then the number of scientific citations in text citations and a reference section and the number of scientific journals cited in said books. So what they found was that there was a huge amount, possibly not a surprise here to people, of, I guess, questionable information in these nutrition books. Half of the authors lacked academic training or clinical experience in the category in which they were writing about when it came to nutrition. Most of them, the lion's share of them were financially incentivized by, by a supplement company or by someone else who was like sponsoring the book that had been written. And then one third of the books had no scientific evidence, zero scientific citations whatsoever. And these are books that people are reading the top 100 books teaching them about what they should eat. This is concerning because, I mean, I don't even know if I need to say why it's concerning, but, but look, I've said this about personal trainers. Like if you're assessing your personal trainer based on their Instagram followers, based on their body, which is probably supported by science, that goes, as we found out with the Liver King, way beyond what they might tell you that they're doing and into the category of the price of a small car worth of supplements and steroids and injections each month, that person might be giving you an exercise program that actually does not have science behind it. The same goes for nutrition, right? If you are having a nutrition plan written for you or you're reading a nutrition book and you look at the education of that author and you look at the number of scientific claims or scientific citations in their book and you look at whether or not they're, I don't know, giant tome on the damaging effects of, of lectins and my lectins come from the devil. And that chapter happens to finish with a little discount for the supplement that they made that digests lectins for you, you should at least raise an eyebrow. Okay, now I understand, like I wrote a few nutrition books and my nutrition books have supplements that I'm affiliated with that I sell in them. They have occasional claims in them that come more from like eastern lore and thousands of years of ancestral wisdom and not actual peer reviewed, double blinded clinical research. However, I have a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics with an emphasis in human nutrition and spent years and years studying this and a certified strength conditioning coach certification from the nsca, highly credible company and a CISSN which is a pretty respected nutrition certification. And There are over 800 scientific references in Boundless alone and almost that many in a book like Beyond Training. And I tell you, all of the companies that I might be affiliated with or financially profit from if you happen to go out and buy said supplement. So this isn't the pot calling the kettle black. This is just me pointing out the fact that if you're out there reading books, like, at least look at the author's education, at least look at the number of references or the presence of scientific evidence, and at least take into consideration financial incentives. And again, like, that doesn't mean that if someone's profiting from a book that doesn't have truth in it. Like, my most popular interview last year was Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis talking about age reversal strategies. Well, technically, every chapter in that book, what's it called, Lifespan, is a pitch fest for companies that they've invested in. Now, technically, they don't say in each chapter, hey, I invested or I'm profiting from this company. I think they do. Somewhere in the end of the book, if someone were reading that without understanding that they might swallow everything that book says, hook, line and sinker, and they may or may not be led down the wrong path, I don't know. I think the book was amazing. I think that the fact that Peter and Tony probably profited quite a bit based on the growth of companies they talk about in that book and the sale of products that they talk about in that book, yeah, they profit. But I don't think that that makes the information in the book bad. I thought it was a great book and there were a lot of scientific references in it. So the presence of the author profiting, I mean, I'm total capitalist. I don't mind people making a buck, but I think people just need to understand that just because a book is published and this study really pointed out quite glaringly, that does not mean that that book is something that you should take as God's truth for what you need to be eating the rest of your life.

Yeah, for sure. We're in the age of the influencer, right, man? So anybody can put up their shingle and get on Instagram or TikTok and develop a lot of followers and the next thing we know, people are running after them for in different type of royalty deals to do their own book. Tell us how you got there, what was your journey would look like. And then again, there's nothing inherently wrong wrong with that. Like, I don't want to, you know, dispel this idea that people can't go out there and like really make something for themselves. But it shouldn't be that we just blindly follow the advice of everybody. We have to do a little Bit of our own digging, which means that we have to do a little bit of our own work. And sometimes we're a little bit lazy, and it's difficult to do that. But I think it's just a little bit of extra time and effort. And then also just kind of questioning. Like, I don't mind people being cynical. Like, as a scientist, as a clinician myself, like, I have to be a bit cynical and kind of dig into things on my own, not just kind of take it for its face value. And I think everybody has the responsibility to be a little bit of a cynic or at least a scientist, which are kind of one in the same, in my opinion, sometimes. But we all have that responsibility. That's kind of my take. The other thing I take from this, Ben, is that we should just not trust Canadians, like those who are north of the border. Man, they should be playing hockey and eating their poutine.

They're very polite, but highly suspect when it comes to credibility. I think that that's the main thing this paper pointed out. No, I'm kidding. I love Canadians.

Yeah, me too.

I also have never had poutine in my life. I need to add that to the bucket list. All right, let's keep going. I promised that I would talk about nicotine. Let's talk about that before we talk about cigarettes. Nicotine is pretty interesting stuff. So tobacco in itself, obviously being highly concentrated in nicotine, is this favored compound in a lot of ancestral cultures. It was used by a lot of native tribes and early physicians for, you know, things like. Like ulcers, for example, even, like, energy hunting, you name it. But they also recognize that a large dose of tobacco could cause a toxic effect. Now, in the 1800s, I think it was, they discovered nicotine, and they discovered that there was this pharmacological property of the tobacco plant based on nicotine. And even though tobacco itself was carcinogenic, meaning it had a lot of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in it, the nicotine, the main alkaloid in tobacco, had a lot of positive properties and a lot of highly addictive properties. So nicotine acts on these receptors in the brain called nicotinic cholinergic receptors. And those receptors can get flooded with dopamine and require more and more nicotine over time to actually get the wakefulness or focus enhancing effects of nicotine. Now, interestingly, though, when you trigger those cholinergic pathways, you get better reaction time, you get better cognitive performance, you get increased arousal. It combats glutamate, rather, it increased glutamate it would combat gaba, which is the inhibitory neurotransmitter that causes sleep drive. Even though the nicotine is in and out of the system pretty quick, and you could usually do a little bit at night, and it doesn't impair sleep the worst the way caffeine would, it still is going to a little bit. And then the other thing that happens with nicotine, this is really interesting, is there are certain diseases, like Parkinson's disease, for example, that because of the dopaminergic and the choline stimulating effect of nicotine, those diseases seem to be helped by nicotine. And so there's a lot going on when it comes to tobacco. Despite it being often high in heavy metals, you know, high in carcinogens, there is support, especially for neurological conditions and for the nootropic effect of nicotine that dictates that we can't completely shove that plant under the bus. Now, cigarettes are, of course, probably one of the more vilified delivery mechanisms for nicotine. However, there is a paper that a lot of people might not be familiar with. It's called cigarette smoking, an underused tool in high performance endurance training. This paper is a staple of medical literature and it is a summary of all of the good things that cigarettes do for you when it comes to endurance training. So, for example, if we look at cigarette smoking, it has an impact on three different things that are favorable for endurance. Serum hemoglobin, lung volume, and weight loss, or power to weight ratio. Okay, so blood hemoglobin concentrations, the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, is something that a lot of athletes will try to increase with altitude training or blood doping or use of hormones like epo. Well, it turns out that cigarette smoking has been associated via research with persistent long term increases in hemoglobin. As a matter of fact, smoking 10 or more cigarettes a day gives you an average hemoglobin increase of 3, 3.5%, which is pretty significant. And that's maybe half of what you get through the use of the illegal performance enhancing drug erythropoietin. But long term use of cigarettes increases serum hemoglobin. It increases lung volume. Cigarette smoking, especially related to the onset of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, seems to cause some type of an increase in lung capacity, which seems paradoxical, but it might just be that, I don't know, diaphragmatic, you know, inspirational expirational muscle endurance effect of smoking a cigarette, I don't know. But we see an increase in total lung capacity when someone is a regular cigarette smoker. And then finally, we know cigarettes stimulate weight loss through increased metabolic demand, through appetite suppression, and through the action of nicotine, that magical molecule that I just mentioned. And these effects appear to be dose dependent. The more cigarettes you smoke and the longer period of time for your life that you've smoked cigarettes, the more of a benefit of hemoglobin and total lung capacity and weight loss you seem to experience. So what this paper was trying to point out. And by the way, Jay, are you going to go out and start chain smoking now?

I mean, you sound like a walking, talking ad for smoking. So. Yeah, I feel like I should follow you up on this. Yeah, let's go.

Yeah. So the reason that they published this paper was. It was almost a joke, right? What they wanted to point out with this was that when an expert in a field provides a summary of literature, which is what I just gave to you, that generates useful recommendations and new conceptualizations of a topic, and the research results are selectively chosen, which is the case. Okay. A lot of what I told you was selectively chosen. It was hand picked, it was cherry picked to make cigarettes look good. There is a great potential for research to create a convincing argument for a faulty hypothesis. Despite everything I just told you, we know there are reams of other data that show that cigarette smoking is basically going to kill you and it's horrific for your cardiovascular system. However, it is possible to twist science to make a case for just about anything. Right? And so, yeah, we could say, okay, well, I don't want to do altitude training because I can actually find a lot of papers that show that altitude training is associated with several severe and life threatening risks like pulmonary edema and cerebral edema and even severe flatulence. Yes, there's an altitude training study that shows that altitude training is associated with severe flatulence or flatus expulsion. So flat out. Yeah. And so I could therefore say, well, cigarettes will also have the same effect with fewer of those side effects and definitely not flatulence. So go for cigarettes instead. So the reason I'm pairing this with what I just said about the Canadian book is never swallow something hook, client and sinker. Always question, always dig, always seek the advice of folks who you actually trust, who, you know might not be financially incentivized or otherwise incentivized to make a point for you. Because as we can see now via things like the nutrition books in Canada or this article that shows that you can use research to show that something that we know is bad for you is Actually, good for you. You just need to proceed with caution. That all being said, I'm going to go smoke a cigar.

Right. I was wondering where you were going with that study. I was like, I wonder what Ben's going to pull from this. He's going to say all of these great things about cigarette smoking and then be like, well, but it's offset by all the really crappy things that go along with smoking. But no, it's true, man. It's true. The one thing that I will tell people as well, because this one comes up a lot. I've seen a lot of people post stuff on social media or they'll send me via email a study and I'll look at it and it's some obscure like research study out of like nowhere with like non credible, like peer, it's not peer reviewed. Like it hasn't gone through the rigorous scientific process of being approved by peers in the field. And I'll kind of basically send them over, send it over to them, be like, listen, there was like five participants in this study over the course of like a week and this wasn't even reviewed well. Like the, the, the methodology was pretty poor. But again, the, the layperson may not understand that. Right. They just see it looks like it comes from the journal of such and such published by these people at this university and therefore let me accept it for what it is. And unfortunately, you can't blame people. Right. A lot of times people just don't know any better. But I think again, it's our responsibility to kind of learn those things and understand what we're looking at when we're looking at it.

Yeah, well, hopefully we've scared enough people to death to where they're just going to climb under a rock and eat fruits and berries.

Mission accomplished.

Speaking of other people, we have alluded to the fact that we have a whole bunch of people live on Twitter spaces right now. And even though we went kind of long in the tooth with our introduction and our news flashes, I think we have time for at least a couple of questions from the folks on Twitter. So we have a question from Twitter from Irfan. He says, does sprinting count as lower body workout for strength and endurance, not hypertrophy? Does sprinting, I'm assuming running might mean sprinting on a bicycle count as a lower body workout for strength and endurance, not hypertrophy. So when I used to do triathlon, I would go out and do like hill climbs and stuff like that on the bicycle. And I was always under the impression that if I was going to be doing like hill climbs on my bicycle, uphill runs on the treadmill, cycling at a low cadence and a high resistance, that I was getting the type of strength training and strength stimulus that I would be getting if I were doing strength training at the gym. Well, if you think about it, let's say you take the average 30 minute spin class, which was technically short for a spin class. How many repetitions are you doing, Jay, with your legs during a class like that?

A lot more than a normal squat set.

Thousands. And we know that when you look at hypertrophy and strength training adaptations in the gym, they tend to drop off after like 12 reps. Right. So, and I wrote about this in a book that I wrote some time ago, I think you can still find on Amazon on strength training for endurance sports, because it's a fallacy that by doing like uphill bike rides and uphill sprints and resisted strength work for the legs from an endurance standpoint, that you're going to develop the type of strength that's actually going to result in, say, an increase in injury prevention or, or stimulation of new muscle fiber growth or anything like that. It doesn't count as a lower body, traditional strength training workout. You actually have to, if you want to be a well rounded athlete, pair even resisted endurance training with things like, you know, six to eight reps for sets of squats or weighted lunges or deadlifts or Nordic curls or back extensions or the type of things that would trigger a strength training response in the leg. So long story short is, don't fool yourself into thinking that just because some Tour de France cyclist has thunder thighs that you're going to get that type of leg toning by doing a few resistance train bike rides per week. The fact is that if you're an anomaly and you're a highly trained, specifically cyclist who does a ton of cycling, and even some bodybuilders who use this approach, they'll do a lot of cycling to stimulate their legs and their quads. And when I was a bodybuilder in college, I did teach a lot of spin classes. I played water polo, and I have to admit, I did minimal leg work. I had a couple of times a week that I would do like squats and deadlifts and things like that. And I had pretty good leg tone. But most people are not going to get the type of leg tone, full glutes, muscle activation, hypertrophy in the legs, et cetera, that they desire from just like steep uphill hiking and cycling at a Low cadence with a high resistance or anything like that. Long story short is if you truly want to maximize strength, power and hypertrophy adaptations, you need to be in the gym and you need to be doing far fewer than thousands of repetitions. You might be doing in a spin class or an uphill treadmill or outdoor hill running workout. So the long answer to Rafaan's question, but no, sprinting doesn't count as a lower body workout for strength and in endurance, you have to resistance train in order to trigger those parameters. I would say the only exception that would possibly be slightly higher rep lower resistance with something like blood flow restriction bands, which seem to be that one thing when you cut off blood flow to a muscle that can result in a little bit of a hypertrophic response.

Yeah, because you would expect that if it were the case that sprinting, if it led to strength, I'm assuming then they would have studies demonstrating that outside of any resistance training or weight training work for that individual, that increasing kind of their sprint workouts would then lead to them being able to have higher, like, let's say one rep maxes in those types of workouts. And that research is not there because that does not happen. Is that basically it?

Yep, that's basically it. That's basically it. So I hope that that clarifies. So, so do strength training and do endurance training. And as we learned earlier, if you are using hiit training, do it hard enough in the couple of minutes that we have left. Jay, do you have any last tips, any last new discoveries, any last cool new things that you're excited about that you want to share with people?

Yeah, I do. So I would say one of the things that I have been working on that I have found to be really fascinating because this whole deep sleep thing has kind of bothered me because I tend to be a bit of a data nerd. I mean, I own a data and biometric company, so data is just kind of naturally a part of my everyday, like waking hour and sleeping hour. And so I've been playing around with some different protocols, like for sleep and deep sleep, just seeing if they worked. And I did not do it last night. And I had a suppression of this deep sleep. And I'm like, oh, maybe there's something to it. So I have been like, I know you and I both use the chilipad. And I mean, I swear by that thing. I love that thing. Just because for me, I always have been a hot sleeper. And I have been doing this thing where I would just kind of keep it Cold all night long until the last hour or or so. I would have it kind of crank up a little bit higher and get a little bit warmer. But actually what I've been doing and I just forgot to set it last night because I keep it on like airplane mode underneath the bed. I have been doing it to where I progressively warm up throughout the night. So I set it at like, let's say 54 when I get in the bed and then like progressively throughout the night starting at around 12am to about 4 or 5am when I wake up. Like it goes up by basically like 5 degree increments, like every single hour. And I have found that for me, I actually stay asleep a lot longer when it's not just like one set cold temperature throughout the night.

When are you increasing the heat? At what point during the night?

So I normally go to bed about 9 o' clock and then around 12. So three hours after I fall asleep is when I'm starting to increase the heat by about 5 degrees. And I've noticed that shift and increase my overall deep sleep because I was getting about three hours of deep sleep kind of around that time. And then the back end of my sleep is where I was not seeing much. It was more, you know, rim and light, but a lot more light than anything. And so I was like, well, maybe I can play around with some temperature. And me increasing kind of the temperature in just small little bits throughout the night actually helped me to get more deep and REM sleep, which I found fascinating.

Yeah, so if someone does have like a chili pad or something like that, they could program that using the app and you could actually set it so it gets a little bit warmer towards the middle of the evening and then gets cool again or maybe warm again. I know it does have a setting that shows that if you make it slightly warm as you, you're getting close to your desired awakening time, it can ease the transition to awakening, which to me, even though I'm too lazy to do anything except just set mine on cold and fall asleep, seems like a pretty decent idea to experiment with. Well, that's interesting. It reminds me of something I was thinking about the other day, and this might be something interesting to end on, is I have like this Faraday bed canopy. I'm gonna do a video of it. It says push a remote button and the canopy goes down, which is pretty cool. And it blocks all emf. And I've got like this pulsed electromagnetic field mat under my body as I sleep. And then I got a chili pad. You Know, this cool like neck supporting pillow that I sleep with and all this stuff on my side of the bed. I get all this stuff all set up and turned on and everything. And then I roll over to my wife's side of the bed and pretty much spend the entire evening snuggled up next to my wife, completely away from all the things that I just turned on for the whole night. And so it's a little bit paradoxical, but it makes me feel good that it's all over there turned on should I ever decide to forsake my wife and go back over to my actual biohacked side of the bed. So sometimes folks, all you need is a good snuggle.

That's it. Does your wife now does she not like, like the cool bed and stuff?

I mean, it's not that she doesn't like it. She's, she, she, she couldn't care less if I were to set all up for it and turn it on force. Not like she's knocked gonna like it. But yeah, she couldn't care less. She's not gonna take the time. So think about the most biohacking she does is she takes some supplements, you know, that some doctor recommended to her for, you know, just like aging well and managing hormones. I think she has a little bit of dhea, a little bit of progesterone, she takes some magnesium before bed. I think she takes a little bit of like maca when she gets up in the morning. And she'll sometimes use the four sigmatic mushrooms in her coffee. She does a little bit of hot yoga, she plays some tennis. And I think that's the extent of her, that's it, entire age reversal strategy. I like getting to the dinner table and not having to talk about health and fitness and biohacking because nobody at the dinner table cares about it. All right, well, that being said, we should probably end this thing. I'm glad it went well. And by the way, if you want to watch the video, my face standing there talking to Jay's face, if that's your thing, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com453 that's BenGreenfieldLife.com 453. We'll put the show notes, put the video. Everything you need will be over there. Jay, thanks for joining me and showing your lovely face and possibly or possibly not putting on pants.

You'll never know my secrets.

All right, folks. Never know later. More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach. To discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.

Sam.