Q&A 456: Holistic Cancer Management, Supplements To Combine With Sunlight, Constipation Hacking, Super Slow Training & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast, supplements you can combine with sunlight, constipation, hacking, holistic cancer management, super slow training, and much more. Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show. Hey. So I recently posted actually to Instagram. The idea of getting up in the morning, having a big glass of water, charging yourself up with all these things that allow the cells to take up more light like methylene blue or chlorella or shilajit, and then getting into red light or sunlight for 20 minutes. The reason for that is because all of those compounds I mentioned enhance the body's ability to uptake photons of light and produce. And I do this every day. When it comes to age reversal, feeling like a teenager producing massive amounts of energy in the absence of calories, this strategy just works. And the way I do it is I get up, I have the morning glass of water, I go down to my office and I flip on these panels. I'm sandwiched in between two big red light panels and the panels that I use treat my entire body in a very short period of time. The reason for that is I use these red lights from a company called Joovva. So Joovv sources only the highest quality materials, medical grade components. They've undergone third party testing, they've got safety marks from nationally recognized testing laboratories. It's a very safe, very reliable way to get red light, full body red light in a very convenient manner in a very short period of time based on the power and the dosage of these things. Incredibly safe, incredibly efficacious. They do have one called the Joovv Go that I travel with and that I'll use for bedtime reading at night, for treating sore joints, for putting between my legs, to get a little bit of an extra testosterone boost when I'm laying in bed. You can get access to all the Joovv stuff and get an exclusive discount on your first order from Joovv. Here's how. Go to j O-V-V.com ben and apply code Ben to get that instant exclusive discount on any order. So it's J-O-O-V-V.com BEN and use code Ben. Did you know that there is one part of sleep, one part of the night of sleep nearly everybody fails to get enough of. And it's the one part of sleep that's responsible for most of your body's rejuvenation and repair and hunger and weight loss, hormone production and energy and a lot More, you probably guessed it's deep sleep, the deep sleep cycle. If you don't get enough of this part, you probably get cravings. You have a lower than you should metabolism. You can get premature aging, like wearing of the skin, more bags under the eyes, wearing of the nails, thinning of the hair, or even worse conditions like onset of chronic disease. And one big thing that contributes to deep sleep cycles are your mineral status, primarily your magnesium status. See, magnesium increases something called GABA that encourages relaxation on a cellular level. It's critical for sleep. It's an inhibitory neurotransmitter, gamma aminobutyric acid. GABA magnesium jacks that up, meaning it also plays a key role in regulating your body's stress response system. So when you go to bed and you have lower anxiety and lower stress and higher gaba, because you have adequate magnesium, you can crush deep sleep. Now, before you go out and get any old magnesium supplement, you gotta understand, most mag products out there, they're synthetic. They are one to two forms of magnesium. And your body needs all seven forms of this essential mineral. That's where you use this stuff called magnesium Breakthrough. It's made by bioptimizers. It's got all seven forms in it. Taking it before bed helps me relax, helps me wake up feeling refreshed and energized, helps me restore my minerals, even assists with your morning bowel movement, which is a nice and noticeable beneficial bonus. And the deep sleep benefits are readily noticeable on my oura ring. So bioptimizers give special gifts with purchase on select orders. They give a 365 day money back guarantee on all their products and you get 10% off this stuff. The best aid I know of for helping out with those deep sleep levels in a natural, healthy and full body way. Go to megbreakthrough.com Ben use code BEN10. That's megbreakthrough.com Ben and use code BEN10. All right, so I've got a probiotic for you that is literally, as they say, the shiit. If you're looking for a pill to hack your bathroom habits so you can, let's say, get off to your morning workout or your other morning routines more quickly because stuff, namely your poops, just slip out of you smooth. Like creamy, creamy ice cream. It's kind of a gross analogy for anybody who eats ice cream. I'm sorry, I just destroyed your evening dessert experience for you anyways though, you get what I'm saying? Sometimes pooping is nice to have done in a quick and convenient manner and your biome influences your poop. Most probiotics that support the type of biome that goes on to support healthy pooping don't work. They'll make their way to your colon. Translation, that would mean easy poops for you if it did happen. Now, there is a company called Seed. They make what's called a DS01 daily symbiotic. I know it sounds like a Star Wars R3D 2C 3PO robot, but long story short is you don't need to know the name, okay? It's just seed. S E-E D. You can go to seed.com BenGreenfield to check this out. It's a capsule and capsule delivery technology that ensures precision entry through the small intestine to your colon. So day in, day out, like clockwork, you get the bacteria into your gut where it needs to go most. So you can perform on top of your game, or in this case, on top of the toilet. It's a patented delivery technology. Northern probiotics use this. Now. The other cool thing is that the prebiotics that they squeeze into this thing also help to do things like support your urolithin production, which is one of the new darlings of the anti aging and longevity industry. Their formulation has 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains of probiotics proven to support your digestive health and increase your intestinal transit time. All meaning you have less time squirming on the toilet, which is great. So if you want to start a new healthy habit today, you can visit seed.com BenGreenfeld that's S E-E-D.com, great URL, by the way. BenGreenfield. And use my code BEN for 25% off your first month's supply of seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic. That's seed.com BenGreenfield and use code BEN. Well, welcome to podcast episode 456. Q&A episode 456. My name is Ben Greenfield, if you hadn't guessed that already. And this is a little bit weird because I'll give you a little background. I've been podcasting for 16, maybe 17 years and when it first started, it was just me, solo, a very young personal trainer excited about this brand new world of podcasting. Hot in front of the mic. And it's kind of interesting because not only do I have my webcam, my old school webcam turned on. This was way back when you had to code your your own R feed and upload it to Apple and do a whole bunch of things behind the scenes and keep your fingers crossed that nothing broke and that Apple accepted your podcast and now it seems you can just push a button and have a podcast. But back then it was me video and just me solo going through things like relevant news flashes. Back then it was primarily from the realms of strength, conditioning research and exercise physiology. And then in addition to that, ask not asking but answering a few listener questions that would come in via email. Well, this month I've decided to do a little experiment. I would love to get your feedback on this as well. If you go to the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 456 you can let me know if this resonates with you. But I've decided to go back to doing more frequent such solo sodes for you. And this is going to be a couple of times a month that I come on that I give you some hot news flashes, some updates and answer a few listener questions as well. And by the way, if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com There's a handy button there where you can submit a question. You could also submit your questions on social media anywhere I'm found on social media and I take a look at those and also select a few of the doozies, so to speak, to reply to. So basically what this podcast is going to entail and there is a video version if you're one of those weird people who looks like to watch a talking head drone on for 60 to 90 minutes. Well, there is a video episode as well. It's on YouTube. It's also in the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 456 I even have this cool button I'm going to press. It allows me to change camera angles so you can look at a talking head from a different angle. I recommend walking in a forest or doing a workout or doing the laundry or cleaning the garage or mowing the lawn while listening to a podcast for the sake of movement. But if you do like to just watch the video version, you can do that too if there's nothing better to watch on Netflix. So anyways, I am going to begin to do these solo sodes like I mentioned a couple times a month. I would love your feedback if you like them. And I would love more of your compelling questions that are interesting and relevant and are things that you think you'd like to hear answered on the show. Not just in the realm of health and fitness, but spirituality, longevity, family and parenting, which has been a big focus, if you haven't noticed of the podcast lately. And I'm just going to riff for you for a while on these shows and hopefully give you some really interesting information, beginning with today, because I like to just jump right into the content. I read a lot of books, typically four to five books a week, and then often listen to one to two additional books on Audible. And I thought that these new solo sodes would also be a chance for me to share with you a couple of interesting books that I come across from episode to episode. So let's do that and then we're just going to jump right into the news flashes. So first of all, my friend Dr. William Lee, who wrote a book called Eat to Beat Disease that I did do a podcast episode with him with and was absolutely fantastic. Fascinating. The guy is super intelligent, steeped in research, and he just released a fantastic new title called Eat to Beat Diet. Eat to Beat Diet. And the book promised to be chock full of these little known tips about foods and ingredients that elevate metabolism and convert your white fat into more metabolically active brown fat, something that a lot of people will use methods such as cold thermogenesis or exercise to achieve. You can actually in a way eat your way into elevating these pathways as well. I almost didn't realize read the book because I thought it was going to be the same old same old, like put a little cayenne pepper in your coffee and work out before you eat and these type of strategies. But it actually turned out to be super interesting. For example, I always fold over the pages and underline with a pen. I'm very old school when it comes to reading. I do use the highlight feature on Kindle when I do occasionally read on Kindle, but mostly I love to read paper. I'm very analogous when it comes to my reading, and for example, a few of the things that I that I folded over and underlined in this book included the fact that your metabolism actually decreases from the time that you're an early teenager until you're an adult. Your metabolism doesn't even increase during puberty, when you'd think it'd be rampantly increasing due to the need for better endocrine function. And this seems counterintuitive. But what happens is there are other mechanisms that allow you to be anabolic, so to speak. As you are aging and and especially in your younger years, your metabolism is not going up and up and up as we would think. Perhaps that's one reason why in an era of A high amount of access to hyper palatable foods. We are seeing an increase in things like teenage obesity or the onset of non alcoholic fatty liver disease, even in children, when that used to be only an issue with older adults or alcoholics. Well, your metabolism then levels out during adulthood, all the way out to 60 years old. Most people's metabolisms don't really start to decrease until after 60 years old. So based on this fact, Dr. Lee gets into ways that we can, often using methods that you may not have heard of, keep the metabolism elevated by what we eat. Now, he follows a very interesting diet. It's called a Mediterrasian diet. Mediterrasion, I think that's a much more catchy title than another friend of mine, bless his heart. But I think it's a. It's not the greatest title. Dr. Mark Hyman eats a combination of Paleo and vegan and calls it the Pagan Diet. I'm a bigger fan of the Mediterrasian moniker. It's basically the healthiest version of a Mediterranean diet, meets the healthiest version of an Asian diet and has a little oriental child from the Fertile Crescent. I suppose the book has some really good tips and recipes for that and it makes sense because we see a lot of longevity hotspots in places like Sardinia and in Greece, but also in places like Okinawa in Japan and some places like Boma county in China. So his diet is Mediterranean meets Asian and he gets into the details of that in the book. And I am recommending this book to you as a new read. It just came out. He talks about a pharmaceutical drug called Mybigron and he gets into how it jacks brown fat conversion rates way up super high, over and above most of the things you've ever heard of. The problem is it has rampant side effects like high blood pressure and swelling and headache and bloating. It's an off label high blood pressure drug, interestingly also used for kidney support. But Mybigran is not the best solution for increasing your metabolism for obvious side effect reasons. But foods that activate brown fat include one that I already mentioned, spicy foods which are great to consume, especially before you do cryotherapy or cold thermogenesis or even a workout if you want to shift into higher amounts of fatty acid oxidation. Caffeine acts similarly even superior to caffeine would be egcg, a component in green tea soy, particularly fermented soy like nito or natto, rather tempeh miso. These would all be examples of fermented soy products that can support fat metabolism. And then menthol. You know, I even am a fan these days of putting a few drops of peppermint essential oil, which you need to be careful with for oral consumption because it's highly concentrated and can cause esophageal burning. And almost like a paradoxical increase, even though it's often used for digestive support in things like heartburn, just if it's not diluted when you consume it. But peppermint would be another example, as would be anything from the menthol family, including mint leaf and oregano. So these are all foods that activate brown fat, and particularly if you're in a fasted state or you are about to do cold thermogenesis, can increase the efficacy of those type of practices if you're doing them for fat burning. There are also some little known foods that I've got a whole list of that I want to hunt down and try that fly under the radar when it comes to fat burning activation. Foods like horned melon, Shimiji mushrooms, that's S H I M E G I eji Shimiji Mushrooms and Slippery Lobster. I love that title. They all activate fat burning pathways. Slippery Lobster sounds like it'd be a very tough crustacean to catch, but nonetheless, if you can get your hands on it, it can activate fat burning pathways. So he has a whole list of foods like that in the book, and those are just a few examples of things that I highlighted. But the book is called Eat to Beat your Diet, Eat to Beat yout Diet. So that would be a good title for you to check out on Audible or Kindle or wherever you'd like. Or I suppose these days you can use ChatGPT and tell it to give you the summary. I don't know how many authors that's gonna put out of business, but I actually recommend you read the book. And another book that also intrigued me this month was written by another guy who's a former podcast guest of mine, Darren Olian. Darren is known as the Superfood Hunter. He's actually responsible for getting me addicted to what I consider to be the crack cocaine of nuts, Bruca's Nuts. They're like an addictively tasty blend of a peanut and a cashew. But they have incredibly high omega 3 fatty acid levels and also some of the omega 7s and the omega 9s, but very few of the digestive distressing or enzyme inhibiting or mineral inhibiting components that many nuts and legumes have. They're called Boruca's nuts. I talk about them all in the podcast episode that I did with Darren, which I'll link to in the show notes for this episode. Over at BenGreenfieldLife.com 456 he talks about some pretty cool things. It's basically all these common items we use every day that might be toxifying our bodies way more than we think. A few of my highlights from that book included because a lot of people are concerned about personal care products or they'll forget their all organic overpriced lotion from the health food store when they're traveling. He mentioned something called Waxeline. It's a multipurpose ointment you can find almost anywhere. It's 100% cruelty free. It has some some pretty cool skin protective and nourishing and anti inflammatory properties versus some spendier and harder to get options called Waxeline W A X E L E N E. So next time you're stuck looking for something you can use as an all purpose ointment or lotion or skin protectant, that's a good one to jot down as knowing that it satisfies all the criteria of being a safe food. That's not a fatal convenience, which is the title of Darren's book, Fatal Conveniences. He talks about avoiding mouthwash. I've talked about that on the show before. It not only can kind of nuke the microbiome in your mouth, but it particularly inhibits the growth of the bacteria responsible for converting nitrates in foods like say arugula or beets into activated nitric oxide in your body. So it's not that great for you. But he recommends just chewing on rosemary or spearmint or peppermint, or even putting a few drops of peppermint oil into coconut oil and doing something like oil olive oil pulling or oil swishing with that, which is also wonderful for cleaning the mouth and maintaining a good oral microbiome. He defines tampons as essentially, pardon the expression, pussy cigarettes. They're nasty things. Use organic only. He has a whole bunch of brands of menstrual cups or reusable pads from companies like Nixit and divacup and Tree Hugger and New Moon. He also recommends period underwear from places like Nyx or Tomboy X or Thinx. And I think that a lot of women particularly don't realize how much they are absorbing in terms of toxic ingredients, dozens of them from the average tampon. He also mentions also relevant, I suppose, more our female listeners lipstick, eye makeup and most anti aging creams as being pretty bad news bears. And he has a whole bunch of alternative options in the book for that. He describes a new study just came out in 2022. I hadn't heard of it before. It was in a Swedish scientific journal. It pretty demonstrably proves some of the deleterious effects of 5G on our cells. Now, 5G on your phone isn't as much of an issue. It's more of the panels proximity to the panel. So that's something to consider and it's concerning. It's not necessarily can do something about I suppose besides writing a letter to Elon Musk warning him about putting thousands of satellites into space that are going to bombard the planet consistently with 5G. But nonetheless, if you have the option to deactivate 5G on your phone, it's very simple in the settings. You may want to think about doing that. You may also want to think about your proximity to panels in your neighborhood if you're close to 5G and take into consideration how much time you're going to spend in front of those. Or go listen to my podcast with Brian Hoyer about things like Faraday shielding and and Faraday painting that you can do in certain rooms, such as the rooms you sleep in to protect you while your nervous system is repairing. But that was the first time I'd actually seen a study that actually concerns me quite a bit about 5G related to that. If you're interested in the microwave concept, he does get into the fact that microwaving doesn't radiate your food just fine for the food dehydrates it a little bit, but that's not an issue. That's technically how it cooks. It is by by rapidly moving the molecules and that can cause the water to decrease in the food. But microwaves, if plugged in constantly in the kitchen, especially when not in use, or if you're close to them when you are using them, can present some radiative concerns to the body. So something to think about if you're a microwave user. I'm not. I'm an air fryer user. I have a Cuisinart air fryer and use that for just about anything I'd normally use a microwave for. They're great and you can make crispy shrimp and donuts and air fried pickles and all sorts of things with them. And I think they're far superior to a microwave and far safer. He gets into clothing that's stain resistant, waterproof or wrinkle free. All of those tend to be loaded with a Lot of things that get absorbed through your skin that aren't that great for you. He recommends choosing organic cotton only. Or if you are going to use stain resistant, waterproof or wrinkle free clothing, you need to choose the stuff that's low in toxins. Typically they're going to advertise that. Typically it's going to empty your pocketbook a lot more quickly as well. But something to think about if you're wearing fancy clothing, it might not be that great for you. He also gets into, of course, something you're no doubt aware of or have heard of and that's tight bras and tight underwear and tight jeans and tight pants. I know they look great occasionally for fashion or for sexiness, you could don them, but I would not make those a staple in your fashion protocol. He also mentions air conditioning units. Air conditioning units in many cases create what's called sick building syndrome and churns out a lot of toxins. The one I have in my house is called an aller air. It seems to work pretty well. There are safer options out there. But he recommends as much as possible. You know, taking the good old cold shower, using minimal clothing at home, sleeping under the sheets only and just figuring out other ways to cool yourself, including, you know, keeping the windows curtains closed and keeping the windows open when you can and just being careful with excessive or frequent use of air conditioning. In the same way, you might want to reconsider how often you're using a microwave. Turns out to be a good idea. Last thing he mentioned that I underlined, even though there's plenty more in the book, is I actually have been guilty of using aluminum foil. I just happen to have it around. I'll sometimes wrap things in it like different meats or occasionally wrap food in it. Anodized aluminum is a form of aluminum foil that allows the aluminum aluminum to be far more stable and less likely to leach into the food. And so I'm personally going to be switching to anodized aluminum and of course stainless steel cookware or anodized aluminum cookware or cast iron cookware are all going to be safer than cookware that is non anodized aluminum. And then of course for non heat methods he recommends simply food wraps like earth harrow or cedar or lily beef. In our house we use Pyrex glass containers to store the food. But something to think about when it comes to food preparation and food storage as well. Plenty more in the book. I also recommend you try those crazy delicious nuts that he imports from somewhere in the Amazon. I forget where I think it's a Peru that they come from. They're called Barucha's Nuts. I will link to the book Fatal Conveniences, that other book Eat to beat your Diet and some of the other references that I go into in this podcast. If you, if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 456 and if you like me doing these type of book reviews, feel free to leave me a comment over there in the show notes and I'll keep churning them out because I got a lot of them that I like to share with you guys sometimes. All right, let's get into today's news flashes. Okay, Donnie Yance, physician, who's been on the show before to talk about herbal management of COVID and Long Covid, passed along to me last week week via email a new study that they came out with at his Mederi center, which is a holistic treatment center for a variety of health conditions, including most notably cancer. They actually did a study on perceived meaningful changes in whole person quality of life, well being and subjective symptoms following a whole person integrative health approach for breast cancer. This was very interesting because even though I'm not going to get into the entire study, it kind of reminds me of Dale Bredesen's approach to Alzheimer in which he successfully reversed many cases of dementia and Alzheimer's or at least slowed their progression pretty significantly. It's a multimodal approach, right? Like Dale Bredesen for Alzheimer's, he's using high dose fish oil and ketones and infrared light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, and a variety of other methods to manage Alzheimer's and other dementia like conditions. Well, this is very similar. There's an excellent table that I highlighted. I actually tweet out a lot of these studies over on my Twitter account. I tweeted out the image for this study. But what they did was they investigated breast cancer patients, many of whom were on chemotherapy, and they looked at their quality of life, the progression of the disease itself, how people actually had felt, their well being, their subjective symptoms. And they found that there was a protocol that they use at the Maduri center that helped out a ton with cancer patients, particularly cancer patients who were on chemo. They had a whole herb and nutraceutical formulation that they used everything from B propolis to whole plant extracts to nutraceuticals. They used a daily herb powder called a demulcent, which is a dosing of insoluble fiber along with a daily medicinal smoothie that had a lot of adaptogenic mushrooms and adaptogenic extracts in it. At night they were using slightly higher dose melatonin and then they also had daily apple cider vinegar drinks. They had some different suppository compounds that they were using primarily in the female patients vaginally for improving the microbiome. They included sinus support, immune support, hydrotherapy, breathing support, sleep support, enema instruction, of course, because we all know that's important. You got to know which hole to put things in. And they even included things like green tea, turmeric and bitters for digestion. Food that included seasonal variations, nuts, dairy, veggies is raw or cooked grain, seaweed, spices, a lot of short chain fatty acids from things like coconut oil. And the results were pretty fantastic. And the reason I'm sharing with this with you is twofold. First, I'm going to link to the paper should you be interested in holistic management of cancers, particularly in this case breast cancer. But I also wanted to mention it because it reminded me of something else. That is a document that I keep on hand and show share with people who approach me about holistic methods of managing cancer. And I'm not a doctor, I don't want this to be misconstrued as medical advice. You should always speak to your healthcare provider about any of these issues, particularly a serious disease such as cancer. But I wanted to share with you a few of the notable things that I recommend in that document because I think it would be helpful for you to understand what a more holistic approach actually looks looks like. So first of all, there are a couple of books. I'm going to throw some more books at you so you can use all your Amazon gift cards for this entire episode. One is called the Metabolic Approach to Cancer. It's written by someone who I consider to be one of the top smartest cancer physicians in the country and her name is Nasha Winters. Nasha Winters Metabolic Approach to Cancer contains an entire approach of exactly what I would do if I had cancer. It's got the recipes, the supplements, the diets, everything in there. And a fantastic addition to go along with it that even gets into some more advanced testing and early detection methods along with alternative drugs that offer an alternative approach to chemotherapy is a book called the Cancer Revolution. If you were to combine those two books alone and read them, the Metabolic Approach to Cancer and the Cancer Revolution, you would really have your head wrapped around what an alternative medical approach to cancer that has some research behind it actually looks like that other book, the cancer revolution, pages 177 through 197 I have folded over because it's step by step the exact daily meal plan. That would be a very good one to consider. It's obviously going to vary from cancer to cancer, but the book gets into all of that. Another resource is the Moss Reports website. It's a comprehensive date downloadable report on alternative remedies for each different cancer, prostate, breast, throats, et cetera. All broken down in a very accessible and easy to understand way. So I always recommend those three resources to people. The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, the Cancer Revolution, and the Moss Reports website. So a while ago I did a podcast with these folks that make oil. Now you've no doubt heard me talk about how seed oils are a huge problem. Vegetable oils are linked to widespread health and environmental issues, yet they're in like everything that we eat. They're cheap. They're found in most restaurants and packaged foods. Even fancy restaurants use them in their dressings and their sauces and their marinades and their cooking oils. But the problem is these seed oils are high in linoleic acid and omega 6 fatty acids. Two things your body needs. But not in the amounts you're getting them from seed oil. They're very high in inflammatory promoting compounds. If you're eating them in the amount that the average person, sometimes even the average healthy person is eating them. Now when I interviewed these folks from a farm called zero Acre, they described this super cool process where they are creating in a planet friendly way an oil that's like a vegetable oil but has more monounsaturated fat than even olive oil. And avocado oil, 10 times less omega 6 fatty acids than these seed oils. Incredibly high smoke point for cooking, 485 degrees Fahrenheit, clean, neutral taste. So it's perfect for cooking and baking and salad dressings and you just use it as a one to one replacement for any liquid oil. It's called zero acre. Zero acre and at zero acre farms they make this cultured oil has 10 times smaller environmental footprint as well. They use recyclable aluminum packaging. When they send the bottle of this stuff to your household that totally blocks the UV light which prevents oxidation of the oil. It's gluten free, vegan and glyphosate residue free, certified allergen friendly, Whole 30 approved. And when you get a bottle of this oil they are going to throw in an exclusive offer. What you do is you go to zeroacre.com greenfield that's Z-E-R-O-A-C-R-E.com greenfield exclusive offer and discount. You gotta try this oil. It's amazing to have on hand. And I still use some extra virgin olive oil and some avocado oil, a little butter, a little ghee. But this stuff is a staple for anything you want it for. And again, it's neutrally flavored, so it works for any recipe without kind of like altering the flavor of the recipe. Check them out. 0 Acre Farms@0acre.com GREENFIELD and you can use discount code GREENFIELD all right. You've been waiting for it. You've been asking for it. After hours upon hours of editing and recording and bringing in some of the most amazing parents on the planet, the Boundless Parenting Audiobook is now available wherever you get audiobooks. So this isn't any old audiobook. You've got me giving you my chapter with a lot of extra goodies that aren't even in the printed book. My wife doing the same thing. Nearly every parent featured within the book sat down and recorded their audio version of their chapter. So you can hear this stuff straight from their mouths. And the entire book just came together fantastically. If you want to learn how to build legacy if you want to learn education and disciplinary and wisdom building principles from some of the most amazing parents on the planet who have proven models of successful parenting and you want it in a highly entertaining, practical, easy to understand, easy to apply format, you got to get this book. So the printable book and the audiobook, you can get either version or both@boundlessparentingbook.com boundlessparentingbook.com and again, the audiobook is out now. So wherever fine, fine audiobooks are found, you can grab this thing. I've gotten so much great feedback. It's changed the lives already of parents, grandparents, educators, families. And again, this is consolidated wisdom from entrepreneurs, billionaires, moms, dads, pastors, education experts, legacy builders, wealth managers, and other just absolutely earth shaking parents. They've all come together to share their tips, their tactics and their tools with you. So it's the brand new Boundless Parenting Audiobook. Check it out@boundless parentingbook.com I'm often asked what is my Go to Desert island supplement? If I could take nothing else. Well, it's essential amino acids. I've been using them for almost a decade now. So you probably know that the human body is mostly water. What you probably don't know is that everything else in your body is 50% amino acids. They're the building blocks of life, essential for health fitness. They naturally boost energy, they build lean muscle, they enhance athletic recovery. They stay stave off the appetite even if you're eating a low calorie diet or you're fasting. They're fantastic for pre workout, for during the workout, for post workout. And the essential amino acids that I use are backed by over 20 years of clinical research. They're in perfect ratios. They essentially match what your body needs and what the muscle composition of amino acids actually is, which a lot of other amino acids do not do, especially branch chain amino acids, but many other essential amino acids as well. So this is the stuff by Kion. Kion aminos have the highest quality ingredients. No fillers, no junk, rigorous quality testing and they taste amazing with flavors like lime, berry, watermelon, probably my favorite mango. They're amazing. You just put a little bit in water, you can add them to smoothies. They are one of the top supplements that my wife and I take each day. And again, it's been a staple of my diet for years and years and I swear by this stuff. I've had friends start to take these and literally report that they feel like they're on some kind of a steroid. Now there's no steroids in the kion aminos of course, but it is amazing how you feel when you step up your intake of essential amino acids. And I'm shocked that more people don't know this secret. So Kion aminos, you can get 20% off monthly deliveries, 10% on one time purchases. And it's very simple. You go to getkeion, get K-I-O-N G-E-T-K-I-O-N.com Ben to get my fundamental supplement for fitness, recovery, appetite and much much more Kion aminos, check them out. You got to get on the essential amino acids bandwagon. You will be absolutely shocked at how you feel on these things. So getkion.com Ben in addition, after talking with so many physicians on my podcast and privately about cancer, I I've found that a few things pop up over and over again. And these are all things that similar to Donnie Yance's approach that I mentioned as a multimodal approach to management of quality for life for breast cancer are things that kind of stack. So first of all, water daily frequent consumption of hydrogen rich water like water that has hydrogen tablets added to it or water from a hydrogen machine combined with deuterium depleted water. I have a of whole bunch podcast on that. But deuterium is a heavier isotope of hydrogen that seems to gum up some of the metabolic machinery and it's something that seems to be indicated for use of mitochondrial support, particularly in situations of chronic diseases like cancer. And you can buy deuterium depleted water, mix it with other water that you drink during the day and deplete the levels of that heavy isotope deuterium from the water. And then finally a very high mineral solution solution like plasma minerals. There's one called Quinton that's very good. There's also a newer one called Mana M A N N A And these are very, very mineral rich compounds that you would add to the water that you drink. So with water you not only want it filtered and pure, you go beyond that hydrogen rich water, deuterium depleted water, and then the addition of electrolytes like Quinton or Mana. Another one is a lot of specific medicinal plants and mushrooms. I talked with Dr. Thomas Cowan about this. He also has a great, great book called Cancer and the New Biology of Water that would be a third read, I suppose in the whole cancer realm. But he actually harvests a lot of these plants, dehydrates them, powders them and sends them out in these, these miron glass jars that are protective against things like sunlight oxidation and heat oxidation. Those would include most notably the ones that seem to have very anti carcinogenic offense. Chaga Ashitaba, that's as H I T A B a turmeric, burdock, mistletoe and melatonin. There are also a couple of what are called glycoside extracts that he recommends from the digitalis and the strophanthus plants. Strophanthus plant. And so those are typically something that Dr. Thomas Cowan recommends you just mix with anywhere from two to six cups of organic bone broth each day, cycling these specific medicinal plans, plants and mushrooms along. Now a lot of the things I'm recommending interestingly translate directly into a little bit of an anti aging, longevity and overall health promoting effect. And so these are things you could do on a daily basis if you're just trying to eat a healthy diet. So these are all specific medicinal plants and mushrooms that are mixed with bone broth. And I will include of course a list to everything I'm talking about in the show notes should you want to kind of read this stuff. And if you're not taking furious notes because you're taking my advice earlier to be working out or walking or you're listening to the podcast. Daily use of some form of niacin support, particularly a nicotinamide riboside or NR nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide or NAD or nmn, which I got to remember that one, I believe that's one that's a nicotinamide mononucleotide, if I recall, or, or these NAD patches, which are electrophoresis patches that you can apply to the skin that give you a slow bleed of NAD into your system. I actually use those on plane flights and I use them on any day for which I'm sleep deprived because NAD as an aside seems to help a ton if you supplement with that. And creatine would be a close second if you're dealing with sleep deprivation. They seem to help a lot with sleep deprivation. So the only exception to that would be recent study indicated that for breast cancer, if there is a pre existing state of breast cancer, the use of in that study's case, nicotinamide riboside or NR seem to accelerate tumor growth. So there is at least one form of cancer for which this would be contraindicated. But in most other cases, some form of mitochondrial support and DNA repair support via nr, NAD or NMN seems like a good idea. And that could be oral supplementation. That could also be NAD patches or NAD IVs. For oral supplementation, my current choice, I use one called Biostacked Biostacked Labs. It's not just nad, it's a whole range of different NAD supportive and DNA supportive compounds. But they use NAD3 in that particular formula, which if you listened to my podcast with Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis seems to be one of the newer, more bioavailable forms of nad. And then like I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of these NAD patches. I get them from a company called Ion Layer and they're very simple. I just keep them in the refrigerator. If I'm sleep deprived or I'm off on a long haul plane flight, I'll slap one onto my inner thigh or my buttocks and it just gives me a slow release of NAD into the system over about 12 hours. Additional strategies include frequent high dose vitamin C therapies and also OZONE OZONE therapies like OZONE IV therapies. Those are of course something you'd have to hunt down at a medical clinic. And I'll share with you one medical clinic that seems to be, it seems to really leap out as a very good medical clinic for cancer management. In addition to that Mederi center that I mentioned earlier in the podcast M E D E R I, I'll just tell you right now, the other one is Hope for Cancer. Hope for Cancer. I've had Hope. Several people visit that and found great Support, either through chemotherapy or even in the absence of chemotherapy, with cancer remission. So electrical medicine is something that I think flies under the radar. But there's some evidence that cancer cells particularly may respond to some forms of electrical medicine. This would include rife therapy, pemf, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. And it wouldn't really be an electrical medical modality per se. It's more of a heat treatment modality. But hyperthermia, hyperthermia is. And I've done this a couple of times, it's incredibly uncomfortable. I only did it so I would know what I was talking about. But you get a rectal probe inserted so you can track that. Your temperature actually gets up to about 107 degrees Fahrenheit, and you lay inside this incredibly hot chamber with just your head sticking out, because your brain would fry normally in this thing if your head were inside it, like a normal sauna or cryotherapy chamber, in my case. I did it in Sweden at a biological medicine facility in Sweden. And they literally had a nurse, like, dosing my head with ice water and cold water during the entire treatment. It was very uncomfortable. I nearly passed out. I remember finishing the protocol and sighing with relief and telling the nurse that I was going to go jump in the lake, which was near the facility. And she said, no, your body temperature is supposed to stay elevated for as long as possible. So instead, I crawled into my bedroom and Collapsed for about 5 hours, just covered in sweat while hydrating furiously. So anyways, hyperthermia, though, does seem to have a great degree of cytotoxicity against cancer cells when it comes to these electrical modalities that I mentioned. You may want to listen to my podcast episode with Dr. Jeremy Stitch, in which we mentioned the Bioelectrical Institute in Lexington, Kentucky, where he has a machine called the Catalyst, which delivers a full body electrical sweep that many of his patients will use on a daily basis for about 20 minutes. There's also the Biocharger, which acts very similarly. There is the. The Pulse Center's PEMF system, which is a pulsed electromagnetic field system, which is incredibly powerful. It's the most powerful PEMF system I've ever used. It came out of the horse racing industry, and it's one of the only ones where you get on it and it just kind of wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. You can feel it over the entire body while you're doing the treatment. And then even the Biomat, which combines infrared, infrared therapy with electrical therapy, that's another one that's a little bit easier. To afford and useful to have around anyways. It's great for relaxation, for massages, etc. So those are a few electrical modalities. Hyperbaric oxygen seems to have a little bit of evidence behind it. I've had several physicians recommend that one to me. Just a hyperbaric chamber, even though the hospital grade chambers that go up to about 2.4 2.5 atmospheres seem to have better effect than the home units. I have a home unit, it only goes up to one and a half atmospheres or so, but it still allows for a great deal more oxygen uptake because the oxygen is pressurized and you're breathing pure oxygen while you're inside that chamber. So the main thing I notice I can hold my breath almost like I've got three lungs when I get out of that thing. And you notice you recover faster too. But it seems to be something that might be a good idea to have around for cancer management as well. This is more of something you may have discovered if you've looked into what's called the Garrison therapy for cancer. But as uncomfortable as it looks might sound, regular use of coffee enemas is a pretty good idea. I have quit doing as many of these. I used to do a coffee enema on a weekly basis. I've stopped because I found a much more travel friendly, quick, less messy solution. It's called Neuroperg. It's almost like a coffee enema suppository. You put one up your butt delivers high dose glutathione and some other liver detoxification support and gallbladder bile producing support compounds into your body as it sits in your bum hole. I find that if I put that thing in in the morning, about 45 minutes later I have a glorious bowel movement. I'll warn you, it seems to burn a little bit, but man oh man it has saved my butt, literally and figuratively when it comes to the time and hassle put into coffee enemas. It's called no Neuropurge. It's made by a former podcast guest of mine, Dr. John Laurence. He has a company based out of Sarasota, Florida called Mitozen. Links to it in the show notes. But that neuroperg is just amazing for a butt based detox. So that or a coffee enema. Next related to electrical medicine would be complete elimination of non native EMF wherever you can, WI fi routers, Bluetooth, any significant smartphone usage, et cetera, et cetera. That is something that's very recommended just for general health. But Especially for cancer management, I think living in an electrical soup or an EMF heavy soup is a very bad idea indeed. If you're dealing with cancer, emotional detoxification, that should be a no brainer. Yet a lot of people fail to take into consideration the benefits of gratitude, of prayer, of meditation, of relationships, of a low stress level lifestyle. And all of these stack really, really well. You know, Dr. Bruce Lipton, his book Biology of Belief gets into this quite a bit. The idea of emotional detoxification and the link between your emotional state and the onset of disease, including cancer. I think it's even a verse in the Bible that says something about how anger and bitterness can cause disease to settle in the bones, which is very interesting because if you look at Chinese traditional medicine bones, bone cancer is associated with an emotion. In Chinese traditional medicine, many emotions are directly correlated to certain diseases. In the case of cancer, anger and bitterness, or in the case of bone cancer, anger and bitterness seem to be something that they correlate with bone cancer in Chinese traditional medicine. So of course your spiritual disciplinary practices are important. And again, I'll say it again, everything I'm talking about has great application just for general health, not just cancer management. There are certain practitioners who have high dose T cell therapy, killer cell therapy overseas or in Mexico. Dr. Matthew Cook is one of my friends. He runs Bioreset Medical in San Jose. He does great regenerative medicine and stem cell protocols there, but has a separate clinic in Mexico. And you can go to a place like that and get high dose T cell therapy and, and many people will successfully turn to something like that for increasing T cell count in the face of cancer. And then the last thing I'll mention related to cancer would be, or the second to last thing would be mixed tocopherol and tocotrienol. I discussed these forms of full spectrum forms of vitamin E. It's called tocopherol and tocotrienol and this plant called annatto, which has very high natural levels of these forms of vitamin E. When I did a podcast with Dr. Barry Tan, that would be a good one for you to listen to. I actually use that for myself for heart health and for what I would consider in myself to be a relatively high plaque score. It seems to have some good evidence for reduction of plaque. They make it at a company called Designs for Health, but it's called a natto A N N A TTO and it's a full spectrum plaque form of vitamin E. The last thing I'll mention again, I'll link to all these forms of managing cancer in the show notes but it would be a form of immunotherapy. I mentioned that T cell therapy. But there's also a form of immunotherapy that uses four different off label pharmaceutical drugs for cancer management based on pulsing of different nutrients and then depletion of different nutrients into the cells. Dr. Thomas Seyfried has developed this protocol and they utilize it at a company called care oncology. Careoncology.com care oncology and they're a US and a Canada based company that as the name implies have some oncological treatments that also I think fly under the radar. So those are a few things to think about when it comes to cancer and a few things I'll often tend to share with people who ask people me what I've learned about cancer from the various physicians, many of them functional medicine physicians who just study this stuff day in and day out and aren't necessarily steeped in allopathic medical management of cancer per se, but who seem to have a lot of really good ideas that do happen to have science behind them. But I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist here. I think don't get as widely disseminated due to pharmaceutical interest in the profit, the massive profit generated from chemotherapy drugs and traditional oncology management. So I hope that's helpful for you. And again I'll put all the notes over@BenGreenfieldLife.com 456So this, this next thing that I that I read up on is really interesting. I've talked in the past about how there are certain things that you can consume that increase the uptake of photons of light into the cell to help to activate higher amounts of ATP production via the elevation of cytochrome C oxidase on the cell surface or in the mitochondria more specifically. And those would be things like the blacks of the plant kingdom like Shilajit would be most notable amongst that which is basically a supplement that you can take that's a bunch of fermented old plant matter that's super rich in minerals but also seems to increase the uptake of particularly infrared light in about the 600 to 820 nanometer spectrum by the skin and pairs quite well with things like red light therapy or infrared saunas or even sunlight exposure. Another one you may have heard of would be methylene blue. Some people will get huge amounts of energy by combining methylene blue with infrared light. Another would be any of the photocyanins chlorella or Spirulina, for example. These dark greenish blue substances of the plant kingdom also seem to pair really well with energy production in response to light. Almost as though your body is photosynthesizing something like a plant. Well, there's another compound that I came across recently that seems to, based on its interaction with the cell membrane, facilitate photon absorption in the cell. And I came across this when I was reading a paper written by a guy named Lance Shutler. S C H U T T L E R He recommends something he calls the DHA regimen. DHA is the docosylhexaenoic acid that you'll find in high amounts in say fish oil. It's a guideline to take in about 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams of DHA per day. You'd probably have to take about two to three amounts of the average fish oil in order to get that amount. But, but that increases the peak omega 3 levels and also the building of DHA in the body, particularly relevant to your cell membrane to a level that seems to very significantly increase brain derived neurotrophic factor and nerve growth factor, which are fantastic for the nervous system, but also seems to increase the body's ability to be able to produce ATP in response to sunlight. In addition, this amount of DHA consumption seems to increase the levels of what's called synaptomide, synaptomide, which also helps to promote the process of neurogenesis. Now, after reading this article by Lance, not only did I begin, in addition to taking something like shilajit or methylene blue or a dark greenish blue blue pigment of the plant kingdom, prior to something like infrared light or large amounts of time in the sunlight, or the use of like a, like a joov red light or one of these red light therapy devices that I use. But I also began to throw about four fish oil capsules into the mix. I've just been using the kion fish oil. Obviously I, I own the company so I know a guy and I get a good deal. There are other forms of fish oil that are good out there. I think another really good form because it's flash frozen as soon as it's harvested off the Alaskan coast and made from fish guts instead of the traditional components of the fish, which is typically the fish flesh or the fish skin. That company is big Bold health and they make a really, really good fish oil as well. That's made from salmon. The one we have at Kion is made from really clean anchovies. But either way, either way you get your DHA it seems like playing around with mixing it with light exposure seems to be a good idea because it is a core component of the development of the photoreceptors and the conversion of photons into electricity by the nervous system and by the brain. So DHA supplementation, along with any of these other things that assist with light absorption, can kind of in a way turn your body into a bit of a plant. It allows you to photosynthesize. So it's just fascinating. The other thing I did after reading this research on DHA is I took a couple of bottles of fish oil. I have one section in my refrigerator that is one of the lower vegetable crisper sections. And in that I have a few supplements that I recommend my children to take. There's not a lot of supplements that I recommend to my children, nor do I want a kid to think that they got to pop pills all day to be healthy. But I have done genetic testing with my sons. They do make a lower than normal amount of this brain derived neurotrophic factor genetically. So I recommend and leave out for them something to support bdnf, particularly lion's mane extract and now this dha. They take glutathione because they have poor glutathione pathways. Both of them are heterozygous for the MTHFR gene, meaning they have slightly lower methylation. So they both take a little bit of liver extract, like a desiccated liver capsule. And those would be the biggies. They take dha, they take glutathione, they take lion's mane and they take liver. And the DHA is the new addition. I'm having them take fish oil now. I actually looked into some of the other research on fish oil and it's just fantastic for an adolescent or teenager's growing brain and growing nervous system. So on any day for which a child isn't eating a large amount of say, safe cold water fish, like salmon, anchovy, herring, sardines, mackerel, et cetera, I know some kids just don't want to choke that stuff down. I think that fish oil supplementation, particularly fish oil rich in dha, is a pretty good idea because fish basically eat algae and that incorporates the DHA fatty acids into our cellular membranes when we eat those fish. Because nature's original source of DHA comes from algae. Most people don't have a refrigerator full of algae, but we can certainly get fish oil or good clean fish to eat to get that. So interesting on dha. And I suppose while we're on the topic of skin and the sun, another new study came out that investigated the effects of tomato and lycopene on molecular markers of UV induced skin deterioration. What they found was that supplementation with tomatoes in the diet or the supplement lycopene or both, significantly prevented light induced skin photo damage and skin photo aging. Now this is pretty interesting because I've talked about astaxanthin, which you also get from fish or fish oil in the past as almost being like a form of edible sunscreen. Well, you can now add tomato and lycopene supplementation to that. Interestingly, a lot of these things that, that help out with skin photo damage are great for the hair, the skin and the nails as well due to their, their antioxidant activity in the body. And then there's, there's one other. I actually have a bottle. I haven't tried it yet. It's not the summer right now. While I'm recording this, I was kind of waiting to break it out for the summer, but there's this newer supplement called Summer Ready. Summer Ready. It's an antioxidant, but it has another component that's been studied up to help protect the the skin. It's a fern from South America. Sometimes I sound silly when I'm talking about these random furry mammals from the depths of South Africa or something like that, but anyways, it's called Polypodium leucotamus. Polypodam Leucotamus. Somebody's got to make a meme of me basically bringing up all these fringe things from the four corners of the planet that protect you from various diseases. But I suppose it's my job to keep you informed, right? Okay, so Polypodium lecotamus. I'll take a sip of my soda there. It's a, it's a fern from Central and South America and actually has some pretty good study behind it for being a very strong and powerful antioxidant for the skin. It's a great title, Summer Ready. And again, I haven't tried it yet. The only thing I've really used is edible sunscreen was back when I was racing Ironman triathlon in Hawaii. I used to take massive amounts of athaxanthin, 10 up to 40 milligrams of astaxanthin. And 10 is the minimal dose required, by the way, to protect your skin from the sun. And compared to when I didn't do that, I would have far less burning, far less skin discomfort, far less skin peeling. After finishing 10 to 12 hours of racing out in the hot, hot sun in Kona. And I attribute that to partially to that high amount of astaxanthin supplementation. And if I could go back and do it again, I probably would consider throwing a little lycopene into the mix and throwing a little bit of this polypodium from this supplement called Summer Ready into the mix. And I plan on for any days this summer where I'm doing a lot of boating or if I hit the golf course for several hours or I'm out playing pickleball and spending more amount of time in the sun than I know would be prudent if I'm not protecting my skin to begin to, in addition to using natural sunscreen, consume some of these compounds. Interestingly, many of them can help out with radiation exposure as well. So, you know, people don't talk about this as much, but you are exposed to a great deal of solar radiation while you're flying, you know, especially if you're flying for long times in an airplane. So there could be an argument to be made for using these type of things in response to radiation exposure while flying as well. I suppose the last thing I should mention, since I brought it up and since I was also talking about that book Fatal Conveniences, people often ask me which brand of sunscreen I use. I vary. There's a lot of clean brands out there. But right now my pantry is full of this stuff that's made by. It's a company owned by a Navy SEAL and a waterman. Two friends of mine, Nick Norris and Mark Healy, they came out with a sunscreen company and they've got like face sticks and lip balm and really, really good, clean, kind of guilt free sunscreen. That company is called Protect P R O Te KT Protect. They also make really good electrolyte. So that's what I use for sunscreen right now. But anyways, interesting to know, I suppose with the onset of summer. Useful information. All right, well, since we're jumping all over the place and since we already talked about your butthole, let's talk about constipation. This was a newer paper that came out in the Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Journal. It's entitled Abdominal Massage and Functional Chronic Constipation. A randomized Placebo controlled trial. This was a trial on 74 patients diagnosed with functional constipation, which I don't know if there's a difference between that and just not being able to poop very well, but functional constipation, functional chronic constipation sounds like a horrific thing to have. And so what they went into in this paper was how freaking efficacious abdominal massage can be for constipation. Now, I think I brought up on the podcast before that there is a form of fascia release, like deep fascial release and deep fascial therapy called Clear Passages that works on what is actually gut issues that flies on the radar for a lot of people who have gut issues. They don't realize how much of a muscular component there can be. And this Clear Passages involves five to seven days of daily kind of deep tissue and fascia work all around the abdomen and the pelvis and the pelvic floor muscles done by a certified therapist. As I do when I'm curious about a lot of these things. I went and did it and tried it and didn't realize how adhes and how stuck up I was in many of those muscles in the pelvic floor and the abdominals. But this is not that. This is not Clear Passages, although you could look up that company if you want to kind of get a glance at whether or not you have fascial effects, adhesions that are impairing your digestive function or causing constipation. But this is simple abdominal massage. Abdominal massage. So I'm going to link to a run through of the type of techniques that they used in the paper. If you go to the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 456 but they would use stroking, effleurage, kneading, even vibration therapy with the hands. Traditionally the type of things that you would get usually, usually following the path of the colon, right, which would be up your right side, across in a leftwards direction. If you're looking down at your stomach, down the left side and then back across over to the right side and then slightly down. That's the path of your large intestine. You can use sweeping strokes and moderate pressure. Whether you're a massage therapist doing this on someone or you can do it yourself, it's actually a little bit more specific in terms of the the protocol. Usually you want to be lying down flat on the floor. Typically you're doing that square like motion I just described five to seven times. And then you finish with a whole bunch of strokes right around the lower right side of the abdomen where there's a sphincter that once you've moved everything through, you can kind of get stuff to move through. When you do that little stroking three to five times in the lower right side after you've done that Square stroking. And sometimes you got to do. Do that for a few rounds to really get something to pass. So that it's. It's fantastic to know how efficacious massage has proven to be, even for people who are clinically diagnosed with acute or not acute, but chronic functional constipation. The other interesting thing is you can, of course, do this yourself. Like, I have one of those miniature power plate vibration guns in my bag, my travel bag. And a lot of times I'll get a little gummed up when I travel, particularly after a day of flight flying. And I will do massage using a vibrating percussive gun. You want to be careful not to apply too much pressure. You don't want to cause organ damage. And if there's any pain, definitely back off. But a vibrating massage gun can be very useful for this. A vibrating massage ball or even a normal massage ball that you lie face down on and do yourself, keeping your stomach over that ball and moving it in the pattern I've just described. That can be very efficacious. Sometimes you'll do that for like three or four minutes when constipated. And all of a sudden you got to find the nearest toilet fast. And another method would be particularly for the psoas, There's a very small device called the so Rite psorite. It's a small plastic piece, probably overpriced. It looks like they could probably make that on a mold in China for a couple of bucks. But I think it sells for, I don't know, 40, 50, $60, something like that. Nonetheless, the. They make not just a PSOAS device now, they make a whole range of devices, and they just kind of fit the body very, very well. They line up with most human beings psoas in a very effective way. And I'll sometimes just do that in the morning while I'm reading my Bible or praying or reading some literature. I'll just lay on top of that PSO rice and kind of so. Right. And kind of do some of my own manual therapy around there on the psoas. And that's not the exact protocol that they used in this paper. But the psoas particularly, and the tightness of it is linked to constipation. So something else to think about, but massage for constipation. Not a lot of people talk about that before they turn to the psyllium fiber and the cleansing supplements and the magnesium oxide and, I don't know, the coffee enemas or whatever else. But constipation can be treated with something as simple as a massage. Now I want to mention something else that's related to digestive health before I answer a few questions here, and that would be the wonderful peppermint that I mentioned earlier. So I have been getting more and more into peppermint oil. I'm not brand specific. I think what I have right now is a young living peppermint oil. I've been putting it in water, I've been putting a little bit of my upper lip pre workout. I've been putting just one or two drops in my mouth along with that coconut oil that I mentioned for coconut oil pulling. And it increases your alertness, your energy, your performance. If you massage a little bit into your abdominals, it seems to help with good gas and bloating. It's just a cool little hack to have around. And this recent paper looked at proprietary peppermint oil and caraway oil combination. Even though I personally think you don't need a proprietary peppermint oil and caraway oil combination, I think just peppermint oil will do. But they looked at 580 people and found that this peppermint oil was a very effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome syndrome. And then a follow up study looked at the skin application of menthol, meaning literally applying menthol to the legs or to the body parts that you're working in the gym. And they found a significant increase in sports performance, in this case isometric weightlifting performance when the muscles had a little bit of menthol sprayed on them prior to the workout. Now again, the concentrated peppermint oil, be careful, that stuff can burn. I don't know if you've ever used like 100% burn oregano oil, which is also in the mint family, but my mom actually did that once and she had like what looked like a third degree burn on her lips for weeks. So you only use diluted oregano oil. You only use if you can diluted peppermint oil, but you could dilute it in a little bit of a carrier oil like let's say an almond oil. Or you could even just take a spray bottle with water and put peppermint oil in the water. Keep that in the gym. You spray it on the muscles pre workout and like I mentioned, not only does it get give you this nice clean mental energy. Pick me up. Not only does the same application to the stomach or a little bit taken orally seem to help a lot with gut health, but it helps with your weightlifting performance. Now this reminds me also because you can smell it you can sniff it especially before breath work. Sniffing peppermint is amazing. Or diluting a little bit of peppermint oil and sprinkling in the sauna or wherever else you might be happening to do breath work. There was this one guy I interviewed, his name was David, I'm blanking on his last name. David Morin. And he made a spray bottle spray that's got a bunch of oils in addition to peppermint oil that open up your body's natural respiratory pathways. It's kind of funny because last week after reading this study I thought gosh, I wonder if I have any Davis flow tutor. I went to my gym, I had three bottles he'd sent me that I had to even opened and I've been now spraying that in my hands, rubbing my hands together, taking a big whiff and then spraying a little bit on the legs and the arms before a workout. And I mean man, I mean especially if you don't want the central nervous stimulation that some people struggle with when it comes to like pre workout supplements. Something as simple as a minty oil helps. That stuff he has is called a flow to Flo2. Obviously you could just take some peppermint oil and some other menthol based oils and and drop them into water and get the same effect. But sometimes it's convenient to get the done for you thing. Just like you could also use a kettlebell handle to work your psoas or you could get a so right. I mean there's more than one way to skin the cat. But either way this flow o2 stuff is. They call it the world's first respiratory enhancement oxygen saturation supplement. Basically just sprayable peppermint oil. And it turns out there is something to this stuff stuff. So something to think about and I hope that those news flashes have been helpful and informative for you. And I guess now we've got time for a few questions to finish things up here. So let's turn to the questions. I remember if you have a question you can ask it by going to BenGreenfieldLife.com we have a little box there where you can ask a question you can also ask on social media, any of my social media channels, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you leave a question, I'll check it out or I do have some social media managers who help me out because I just can't keep up with it all. And we'll see the question and see if it makes the cut, so to speak. So let's jump into this week's questions. All right, so the first question, it's interesting. Why should you do super slow training? Why do extremely slow reps? This is a question from Ben Wenick. He asked it on Instagram. I'm working on a on an article right now that gets into a lot of my current exercise strategies and exercise protocols. And it is true that super slow training is a core part of my protocol. I just did a super slow training set this morning. Chest press, pull down, squat, deadlift, overhead press, seated, row one, single set to failure. Which if you're Moving very slowly, 20 to 30 seconds up and 20 to 30 seconds down is not only incredibly difficult, but takes about two to three minutes per set. And trust me, if you're doing it properly, you don't want to do another set. It's usually around six to eight repetitions per exercise and it's incredibly efficacious. So there's a variety of things that happen and these have been studied when you're doing super slow training before I describe them to you, understand that you're not going to be a super athlete or become a super athlete with this form of training. It's not functional, it's not explosive, it's not going to turn you into the next LeBron James or Serena Williams or anything like that, or really help out with something like crossfitting. But if you just want to maintain or build muscle in a very safe, predictable manner with a low risk of injury and you want to keep coming back over and over again, you know, in my case, two to three times a week of weightlifting and just feel the rest of the week like you don't have a bum knee or a bum shoulder. You threw something out again doing a snatch or a cleaning jerk. You know, this is a great way to train. I don't think I would have trained this way until I was maybe 35 years old or a little later. Because I don't do as many hardcore athletic events for which I need to do functional explosive training anymore. Yes, I still throw the kettlebell around a little bit. Yes, I'll still do some body weight calisthenics or plyometrics, but the core of my strength maintenance and strength building routine is indeed super slow training with either machines or free weights. I'm lucky enough to own an arx, which is kind of a more expensive exercise device that kind of makes guide your body through these movements. Other examples of done for you methods that are less expensive than the ARX would be the X3 bar setup, which is an elastic band setup designed for super slow training and single set the failure. Another one would be the tonal, which is a wall exercise device with a very small footprint that you can use for traditional strength training. But that also, because it kind of pulls you back in eccentric, what's called an eccentric motion, just as hard as you pull against it, can also be very useful for this form of super slow training. So those would be a few examples, the arx, the x3 bar, or the tonal, or just a good old nautilus machine or you can do with free weights. I mean, it's a little bit more focused, necessary to do this with free weights, because you got to control the weight and the weight range of motion a little bit better. But ultimately, the reason I like it is basically based on the science of muscle tension. The amount of force, force or tension a muscle can develop during a muscle action is based on the rate of muscle shortening, what's called the concentric phase, or like I mentioned earlier, the rate of lengthening the eccentric phase. So the amount of tension that's generated in a muscle during any given set that you do is related to the number of fibers that are contracting. Okay. Your muscle fiber, or your muscle cell, as it's also called, it has several thousand what are called, called myofibrils, which are these thin and thick protein filaments, the thin ones being called actin and the thick ones being myosin. And these units of thick and thin filaments comprise the basic contractile unit of the myofibrils. It's called the sarcomere. Okay, you don't necessarily need to know all this science, but it could be important for you to understand what's going on who are super slow training. So in a muscle fiber, the slower the rate at which which these actin and myosin filaments slide past each other, the greatest number of cross bridges or links that get formed between the filaments. The more cross bridges there are, the more tension you create. Okay, so the more tension you create, the more motor units are firing. And physiologically, what can occur is a very large stimulus in muscle strength development when these fibers are moving more slowly against each other. It's very synonymous to how a muscle hypertrophy occurs in an environment in which there's a large amount of lactic acid in the muscle that's a trigger for muscle hypertrophy. So that's why something like higher reps, higher sets with a moderate workload, or even blood flow restriction training that accumulates lactic acid in the muscle can assist with muscle hypertrophy. While moving the muscle at a point, certain slow rate can assist with muscle strength. Conversely, moving the muscle at a fast rate can assist with power production, but not necessarily strength. This is why a lot of power lifters you look at might be small and wiry. A lot of strength trainers are kind of like bigger and thicker, but not necessarily ripped, so to speak. And then a lot of people who train with hypertrophy or even a mix of training tend to have a large amount of muscle, such as a bodybuilder. So when we move the muscles slowly, that's what's going on. The other interesting thing, and in his book body by science, Dr. Doug McGuff gets into this, I interviewed him long ago. He was the guy that first introduced me to super slow training, is there is an increase in what's called peripheral blood pressure that causes a high heart rate and a large amount of cardiovascular strain. But without an increase in central pressure, which means that there's a lower risk of something like passing out or God forbid, some kind of a heart attack. When you doing heavy weight training, when doing this form of training. So it almost kind of counts as cardio, so to speak, and seems to also help out quite a bit with blood flow and a lowering of blood pressure. When you do it properly, and by properly I mean you do have to move slow. It is hard if you do it. It's kind of like high intensity interval training. Most of the studies on high intensity interval training involve intensities that nobody's actually reaching in the average gym. When doing high intensity interval training, like nobody should be able to do like four back to back to bata sets or like, you know, do their 30 second mitochondrial triggering high intensity round on the exercise bike, then mosey on over to the bench press. I mean these things are exhausting, but when done properly, they actually work. In other words, you do have to put in the work and feel the burn, so to speak. So with super slow training, there are multiple studies behind it, not only for for strength gain, but also for a little bit of hypertrophy. Interestingly, and I'm not going to get into the studies, there are plenty of them and I'll link to several in the show notes. But the idea behind a classic super slow training protocol is you use big five to big six exercises. Like I mentioned, I do the deadlift, the chest press, the pull down or the pull up, the squat, the overhead press and the seated row. Another example that Doug McGust discusses in his book with free weights would be a bent over barbell row, a standing overhead press, a deadlift, a bench press and a squat. Now the interesting thing is that when you're moving slowly, you're activating first the fast twitch fibers. And as they fatigue, because they do fatigue more quickly, your body gradually moves into slow twitch muscle fiber activation. So you actually wind up loading a whole range of motor units very effectively when doing super slow training. Conversely, because there is a large eccentric load, because you're moving the weight very slowly when lowering it, you do need to recover a while. You aren't going to hit the gym again the next day when you do this. This is why I only weightlift three times a week. But I do full body. I don't do a body split part routine. I used to do that when I was bodybuilding a little bit, but now it's simply full body exercise routine three times a week, week. Using primarily super slow training. Like I mentioned, I'll sometimes throw a few kettlebell swings, a few, you know, clap push ups, or a little bit of work on the vibration platform or you know, some Airdyne sets or something like that into the mix to stay a little bit functional because, you know, I gotta be able to run around the pickleball court these days. But ultimately that's what the super slow training looks like and that's how and why it works. And it can be combined effectively with other modalities like, like blood flow restriction training. It's very tough to do a super slow training session with blood flow restriction bands on. But if you're looking for the hypertrophy effect particularly, that could be very effective. Another little hack that I'll sometimes throw in is at the very end of the set, I'll finish off with just a few final reps through partial range of motion because there's no way you'll be able to go through full range of motion after doing a full super slow set. But partial range of motion typically close to lockout of the joint. And I'll do a few just like quick explosive pulses or surges that build up a little bit of extra lactic acid in the tissue and fully exhaust those leftover fast twitch muscle fibers, if any are kind of left over after that routine to describe it in layperson's terms. So that's the skinny behind super slow training. That's why I do it. That's the benefits of, of it. So great question, Ben. Another question related to exercise and something I just mentioned. I think maybe I didn't, I said that I meant to Say that in addition to blood flow restriction training, you can wear an electrical muscle stimulation suit, which sounds super biohacky, but holy hell, it actually works. Electrical muscle stimulation is kind of like the new thing in strength training, particularly low impact strength training. And it's, you know, it's a little bit more sciency. I think it's scoffed at by the average hardcore gym rat or, you know, garage gym type of bodybuilder who only works with the steel. But I did an interview with these folks who make a full body electrical muscle stimulation suit that's wireless. It's called a catalyst. And when I interviewed them, I was shocked at the research behind this thing. So not only is it indicated for a variety of health conditions, they've studied electrical muscle stimulation training and found it to be a viable alternative to exercise in people with myopathy, like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or chronic heart failure. They found it to be good for bone density, which really surprised me because I didn't realize that despite there not being an axial load on the joints, that there was still a triggering of the tendons pulling against the bone and thus an increase in bone dents for you get a huge increase in blood flow, your heart rate goes through the roof. So there's a cardiovascular training effect. And this catalyst, what I like about it is it comes with a little iPad. There's a trainer and you got like 20 different strength training sessions to choose that use a variety of different frequencies and walk you through like an overhead press or a squat or a lunge with no weight, just the electrical muscle stimulation. They also have a cardio mode that operates at a certain slightly higher frequency that you can run, well, say like rowing or riding the air, dying or even just walking. And it is, it's a pretty cool little exercise hack. I like to throw my catalyst suit in my bag when I travel. So if I'm going to be on the road for a while and I'm like, well, I want a wide variety of things I can do. And I just don't want to hassle with hitting the gym or finding a gym or paying for a gym. I will go with like electrical muscle stimulation on a Monday. Blood flow restriction training, which you can do even if you're still a little sore because it's low weight on a Tuesday and then go on a long walk on Wednesday, do electrical muscle stimulation on Thursday and blood flow restriction on a Friday. And that's just an example of how you can weave this in these days. If I'm at home, I Only use my EMS suit, gosh, two maximum four times a month because it recruits all these muscle fibers you wouldn't normally recruit because basically the controller of the electrical muscle stimulation is like overriding your brain and causing to recruit all these muscles you'd normally not recruit. But it also just causes you or allows you, if you really turn the thing up because you're in charge of how high you want to go. I push myself pretty hard on that thing so I get the closest I would ever get, I suppose to what you might define as rhabdo. It's not true rhabdo, which would be such a serious condition that my kidneys are having to make metabolize all the broken down metabolites of very hard excessive training. But I'm definitely extremely high on the, on the DOM scale, on the delayed onset muscle soreness scale. So this electrical muscle stimulation is interesting. Christian says, avid fan here for many years. I've got a long standing shoulder injury. I've been considering an EMS suit to work my upper body without exposing myself to weights before purchasing this fairly expensive catalyst suit. Would value your thoughts as to whether you see it as a game changer. Well, you know, prior to using the catalyst, I was using this super expensive electrical muscle stimulation device. All these wires coming out of it with electrodes that you had to attach to stuff. And it's, it's amazing for physical therapists and people who really know their way around where to place the electrodes properly as a training tool for emf. It's called the Newbie. And I said emf ems. It's the Newbie. N E U B I E. And that thing is a, is really, really intense. It goes all the way back to a, a podcast I did with Jay Schroeder who I met at. I went to Dave Asprey's very first. What did he call it? The, the Bulletproof conference or the, the Biohacking conference. And the main speaker there was Jay Schroeder and it was just me and a small handful of guys. I think Aubrey Marcus was there as well. And we were going to head to head with these isometric lunges that Jay was having us do with the EMS system. It was a Russian ARP system attached to us and, and it was incredible for crushing pain in different joints that needed recovery and activating a whole variety of muscles you'd normally not use. And Jay had been working with a wide variety of NFL and NHL athletes using this thing. And I was blown away by the research and the efficacy of EMS at that time. But until the Catalyst suit came out it seemed kind of clunky for the average person to be able to do risk free, meaning you don't have to worry about where you're putting the electrodes. The EMS suit, the way it works is you spray it down a little spray bottle it comes with to wet the the suit and allow for better electrical conductivity. You pull it on, flip open the iPad. The workout takes 20 minutes. I like to throw in a little 10 minute cardio finisher with the suit still on at the end. And yeah, I mean I'm, I'm a fan of it. I think Catalyst has some massive wait list to get one right now that might have changed but either way it's called the Catalyst K K A T A L Y S T. I'll link to it in the show notes. But like super slow training, I don't think EMS training is pure bunk or just, you know, something sexy to do on a as seen on TV commercial. As a matter of fact I'll the the Catalyst website has a list of dozens of studies that have been done on everything from jump height for volleyball and basketball players to sprint time to aerobic exercise performance to strength performance to hypertrophy to even pelvic floor muscle issues. It triggers and contracts the pelvic floor. So if you struggle with incontinence or prolapse or something like that, this suit can be used to strengthen those muscles as well. Also seems to be extremely efficacious for low back pain and people who can't throw around heavy weights at the gym but want to strengthen their body without low back pain or low back injury risk. So highly recommend it didn't intend for this to sound like a giant commercial for the Catalyst but yeah long story short is is I'm a big fan of the Catalyst electrical muscle stimulation suit, particularly for travel so. Well folks, we're running up against time. I think that's probably all of the questions that I'm going to have time to reply to all the news flashes I'm going to have time to get into on today's show. But ultimately I hope this has been helpful for you and you know it's interesting for me to back to the old solo sewed method but but if you enjoyed it let me know. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 456 you can leave your comments, your questions, your feedback over there. I'll link to all the studies I mentioned, all the resources that I mentioned and I guess that is probably about it besides me encouraging you to if possible. If you don't subscribe to the show, do so. It's the lifeblood of a podcaster, subscriptions to the podcast and reviews, kind reviews reviews or sucky reviews. If you just want to give me sucky feedback, you can. I read them. Although I'd rather you just, you know, let me know in the show notes. Don't leave me a bad review if if you want to be kind anyways though, leave a review, subscribe wherever you listen, as that helps out quite a bit. And you'll be of course the first in line when a new episode comes out. And one more time if I don't sound like a broken record already. The show Notes are at BenGreenfieldLife.comFort 456 I will await all the memes and TikTok videos making fun of coffee enemas and the 18 different supplements you can take before you venture out into the dangerous sunlight. I'm self aware that some of these things sound kind of fringe, but it's interesting. I love this stuff. I just love to study super cool ways to enhance the human machine and learn how to optimize the way that you look, the way that you feel, and the way that you perform. So thanks for listening in. I'm Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldLife.com have a fantastic week. All right folks, it's coming up. It's right around the corner. It's a health optimization summit. Me and my entire family are headed to London for this thing and it is crazy amazing. It's this massive expo full of the best biohacks. You get to be ahead of the curve and see this stuff before it even hits the streets. You get entrance and access to all stages and breakout talks by an amazing, amazing variety of speakers. They've got 35 world class forward thinking speakers from the biohacking, nutrition, longevity, fitness, functional and preventive medicine fields. They've got next level exhibitors and workshops, amazing VIP experiences with parties, with gadgets, with refreshments, with priority seating, with upgraded goodie bags and the list of speakers at this event is crazy. So it's happening June 17th and 18th this year. So it's coming up. Quick Jim Quick, Vishen Lakhani, Mimi Icon, my friend and dentist and former podcast guest Dr. Dominique, Dr. Jolene Brighton, Dr. Mark Atkinson, Chris Gethin, Dr. Christopher Shade. The list goes on and on. Some of the best of the best speakers, the coolest crowd and the exhibition floor is absolutely mind blowingly amazing. Plus London is fun great restaurants, cool people, and it's a party. So. So if you want to go to this year's Health Optimization Summit, here's how to get in with a discount that's going to give you 10% off of all the regular and the VIP tickets. So again, it's June 17th and 18th. It's at the Business Design center in London. And here's your code. BenGreenfieldLife.comHOS23 that's BenGreenfieldLife.comHos23 for this year's Health Optimization Summit. Enjoy. 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, podcast listening channel, wherever that might be. And just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.