Regenerating Your Thymus Gland, BPC-157, The Liver King Controversy & More

My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, the years you have highest levels of growth hormone and all hormones, to tell you the truth, are the years you look at a cancer map or cancer distribution studies. You have the least amount of cancer, but as your hormones all of them decline, you have more amount of cancers. Fasting also which won Nobel prize, right? Calorie restriction increases growth hormone levels. I personally take it myself. I give it to my parents, I give it to my wife. I think it's phenomenal.

Faith, family fitness, health performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show. Whole body wellness is obviously a big part of my life. I'm always looking for new ways to make my body feel great, make my brain feel great. One non negotiable for me is a daily dose of red light. I can use it to simulate sunlight. I can use it to simulate sunrise, sunset right in my office, bringing the sun into my own office. The infrared light spectrum is fantastic for boosting cellular energy for healing damaged cells that are under oxidative stress. There's a ton of clinically proven benefits to it. Better skin, higher testosterone, better blood flow to the whole body pre workout or post workout for recovery. Use them in your office at night when you don't want to flip on all the bright lights, but you want that giant dose of soothing red light therapy. And what I go to is Joovv for my red light. They source from the highest quality materials. 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Kind of like a biohacking wellness facility. He's a real expert in things like hormones and steroids and peptides and blood work and man, in this discussion, we open up the liver king controversy. We answer a bunch of questions on Instagram Live, and we really just had a fun time chopping it up, as they say. So anyways, the shownotes for everything that you're about to hear, you can find@BenGreenfieldLife.com DrDev that's BenGreenfieldLife.com DrD all right, enjoy the episode. And as usual, you can leave your questions, your comments, and your feedback for Dr. D or myself@BenGreenfieldLife.com Doctord all right, here we go. Hey, hey, hey. We're live. Magic of technology, me and Dr. D.

What's up, my brother?

Miami with my homie. And that's all the wrapping you guys get for the whole podcast. This is going to be interesting to set the stage for folks. I'm in Miami doing a string of meetings and talks with really cool people, and I decided to drop in and talk with a relatively new friend of mine, Dr. D. Dr. De Right. This place called Biohacks. That will fill you in on Biohacks. Biohax. And I will also, just so I get this out of the way and don't forget about it, I'll take show notes for you guys@bengreenfieldlife.com Dr. D. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. D E We've got Instagram live fueled up so we can take questions from our audience. But before we do any of the Q and A and everything, to be thinking about some cool questions that you guys want to ask. I thought maybe you guys could get to know a little bit more about Dr. D and what he does. We're also recording this for for his show, so he may have some questions for me. But dude, we did a brief Instagram live, like, maybe what, two months ago, something like that. And we talked a lot about, like, steroids and hormones and Peptides and all. All kind of like the, the biochemical things, which was interesting. So I wrote a scooter down here from, from the beach, which is great. I love riding a scooter through cities. I think I could have totally been a bike messenger in another life if I didn't value my head and my, and my, my mortality enough. But anyways, speaking of, like steroids and hormones and stuff, not that we want to kick this horse to death, but that whole Liver King thing. Okay, I haven't even talked about podcast yet, but tell me what you think about that.

Okay, that's funny, because I'm like, should I bring that up? Should I not bring it up? You know, because I. Number one, thanks for, for coming through and, and such an honor to have this guy here. Really admire your work, everything that you've done, man.

Oh, thanks.

And I can't wait to see you turn 150 years old. And I just said, I can't wait because that means I hope I'm right there with you.

I hope that doesn't happen because that means most of my friends are going to be dead. Except you, apparently.

Right. But no, you're definitely going to beat me. We're just talking about this guy's body composition, and he's super lean, which that already puts you, you know, helps a lot with longevity.

Well, kind of. Actually. We get back to the. We're going to rabbit hole. I can already tell. But. So the thing with the body fat is on part of my trip here, I just took a car from Naples into Miami after being up in Sarasota teaching at this event called elements with Dr. John Lawrence. We were covering, like, air and light and water and electricity and all the ways to optimize the body. But I stopped off at Naples because when I interviewed Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis on my podcast, they told me about this spanking new medical facility that they launched called Fountain Life.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know.

And so I went in, I did their whole battery of screenings. Cancer test for early detection of cancer called a grail test. And the genome evaluation.

Calcium score, blood work.

Yep. Coronary CT scan, calcium scan, and the full body mri. And then the DEXA scan was one of the protocols they did. Yeah, I've always struggled with this. I have an extremely high metabolism and very low body fat. And even after the DEXA scan and also at the mri, they're like, we don't know how good these results are going to be because your body fat is just so low. So what's up with the DEXA scan and low body fat, does it just not give you accurate results or.

To tell you the truth, that's the first I'm hearing this. And we're talking to you guys and we're looking at a hologic, last generation DEXA scan. Right there. It's in the other room.

You guys have one in this facility?

Literally right there. You can see that.

What's this place called? The Infinity.

Infinity Sports Institute. Okay. It's one of the few in Florida. And that's a hologic. Just so you guys know, we have to have a license from the state to have that machine in here.

It's called a whole logic hologic.

It's the brand. It's kind of like a Toyota.

Okay. Dexa's dual energy X ray absorptiometry.

Yeah.

Okay, so good job. I remember some of my stuff from college. And it's doing a scan of the body and it's supposed to be gold standard for body composition and body fat and lean body mass, Right?

Absolutely. And you use it actually for. To check for osteoporosis in older people, most namely after the age of 65. So if I kind of just explain it like in layman's, if it can see inside the bone, it can really get an idea of fat and muscle and. No, here we pick up really good numbers. Our record here, if I'm not mistaken, is 12 on.

For low body.

Low body fat on a. On a NFL football player.

Wait, what's your record for high?

Oh, there's. Unfortunately, there's so many does.

Does like the bioelectrical impedance. Does the body hydration matter when you do it?

To a certain extent, but variation small. But I, I've seen. I probably, I've seen like 39, 41 body fat.

Okay.

Which is like.

And this thing will tell you whether it's visceral or something. I was just gonna say, if the problematic visceral fat's high, it's. It'. Whereas if you look at like a cold water swimmer, Right. They've got sometimes higher fat, but it's all this metabolically active brown fat up around the collarbone and in areas that's not that big of an issue. So fat is not fat from a bad standpoint all the time.

The baby fat, the brown fat, Right?

Yeah. But this DEXA scan, you think like, if I was too lean, you're coming on my leanness, you think it wouldn't give accurate numbers or what do you think?

No, I think it should give accurate numbers. You know what? Let's do one after the show. You want to do that?

If we have time.

Okay. Roger, can you get Eric? Tell him not to leave because him walking out the door.

Well, we can do a video for people. We don't have to. I just did one.

We'll try. We'll try. It takes five minutes.

Okay.

But anyhow, so with. With. I mean, your readings and for regardless of whatever, but just for longevity. It's. It's amazing that you have so little body fat on you, and then tying it up with the whole Liver King thing.

Yes. Back to the Liver King. Enough about my not having enough fat on my body.

No, but tying it up to that. Here's the thing, brother. I get so frustrated, so freaking frustrated with the fitness community, talking about, hey, eating pizza and eating this and eating that, and they look chiseled. They look like they're sculpted. They look like Greek gods and not clear about what they're doing. And that is the only person that I've come and that I've called out on social media before. I'm like, hey, man, you know, because you're doing certain things right with your shirt off, like eating certain foods, et cetera, people are gonna think, hey, this is exactly how this guy looks. This way. Yeah, I'll do that. But I actually show people what I'm injecting at night. I'm very crystal clear. Hey, this is what I'm taking before I'm sleeping. You know, like, I take this, I take my vitamins, I take that, et cetera. And just to clarify, I follow a line of bioidentical substance I only put inside my body. What my body either needs. Needs what there's a receptor there for or what my body produces. So if my body produces it, I'm okay with it. It's, you know, it's a bioidentical substance. I'm okay with it. All the way from things like iodine. Right. Things that your body needs in order to operate, just like any system, any machine.

Okay, so let me ask you this. People are saying that one of the issues with the Liver King, besides him lying and that lie potentially fueling a lot of business for him based on his deception about how it is he truly got his body, and him selling supplements that he claims got him that body when there were some other things involved as well. The other issue is people say, well, what he was doing is problematic because it's dangerous. Dangerous for the liver, dangerous for the lipids, dangerous for cancer risk. Now, from what I understand and you can correct me if I'm wrong here. If someone's on appropriate amounts of testosterone replacement therapy and someone is perhaps not doing like a bunch of steroids and SARMs and some of the things that might be a little bit murky in terms of the potential impact on health, and maybe they're doing like a little bit of testosterone and peptides, let's say. Do you think that's damaging to the body? Do some like a testosterone and peptides protocol.

Okay, so you just really. This is like my favorite topic. And number one, let me just clarify with people like what are my credentials? So I went to traditional medical school. I have a doctorate in medicine. I stopped my residency. I didn't really agree with what. After medical school I did a postdoc in metabolic research at the Cleveland Clinic here in Florida.

Okay.

So I actually worked with 1000 pound patients. I've seen those in. I was in. I always loved metabolic stuff. So I've seen patients like that. And to working with some of the top athletes in the world now. So I have a pretty big.

But do you have your spinning certification? That's the most important thing in the fitness industry?

Not yet.

Okay, well you're, you're mildly credible.

Go ahead and, but just, just so everybody, I'm not a licensed traditional doctor, but I am board certified in alternative medicine and I combine my MD and that's where we are today. And I run Biohacks, which has a bunch of licensed professionals.

Okay.

So anyways, point is, I will die for what I'm going to say right now with what your body produces, which is the testosterone and peptides, like great peptides like ghk, copper, which is found in the saliva, urine and blood, in the plasma, in the blood.

Your body already makes it.

Your body makes it and needs it. And for example, you start to see an increase in cancer because of the down regulation, the production of ghk. And the GHK is not even a fitness peptide. It's for skin and hair and nails.

And so yeah, it's even used topically in a lot of like hair growth and skin care.

And it's basically the 911 for injury. So you get a cut and your genes all of a sudden upregulate GHK for it to come. But as you age, the production declines and therefore you even see an increase in cancerous activity. Oh wait. Holy smokes. Well, did you just say the lack of peptide can promote cancer? Absolutely. There's a meta analysis on growth hormone, brother. It's wonderful. It's 11,191 participants. They did a retroactive study. So they looked at past studies. They didn't do a new study. So they looked at PubMed Web of China and I can't remember two more large databases and they collected all these growth hormone studies and they showed that in adults, this is actually the title, what I'm going to say right now, maybe not verbatim, but in adults with adult growth hormone deficiency, which many of us have, the replacement of growth hormone helps in preventing cancer. And I'll wrap it up if you.

Have a growth hormone deficiency deficiency.

But now there's another study called the TRIM trial which is stands for thymic regeneration, immunorestoration and insulin mitigation. And even for social proof, not scientific proof. Forbes already done article on this Nature. It was originally published in the Aging Cell. And they use dhea, recombinant growth growth hormone and metformin which is a drug. I personally, I don't, I don't like metformin. They use this and they actually show that they can slow down the aging process, which is amazing significantly.

And by the way, I still want to get back to what it was the liver king could have been doing that you feel could have been actually dangerous or harmful. But I remember because I like to look and you know this Dr. D through natural lens as much as possible, I say okay, well they use the synthetic or pharmaceutical. Not that those are all bad, but would there be a natural way to achieve this? And I remember when the TRIM trial came out and I stepped back and thought okay, well let's say somebody doesn't want to use growth hormone. Maybe they don't have a deficiency, maybe they have downregulated growth hormone receptors because of their diet or there's some issue related to them not necessarily needing to take growth hormone. Well, what about things like natural raw fermented dairy or colostrum or even some of the growth hormone based peptides like cjc, ipamorelin. And then I looked at the dhea. I don't have much of an issue with like even my wife, she takes very small amounts of, of dhea. I think it's fantastic. Especially for perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. Guys go back and forth on that. I see some guys seem to do well on it. Some double women seem to do really well in like 10 to 20 mgs of DHEA. Yeah, so that one I, I didn't have a huge issue with. And then the, the metformin was the Other component, I thought, well, gosh, I mean, between low level physical activity, cold baths, lifting weights and blood glucose disposal agents. Right. Like berberine or dihydroberine or bitter mill or apple cider vinegar or whatever you could probably. I would have liked to see like a sidearm. Not that they, they would have done this would have been too complex where instead of growth hormone and metformin and dhea, maybe they try like colostrum and a blood glucose disposal agent and physical activity and maybe some DHA or something like that. But I remember when that study came out, I thought there might be a way to do this naturally too. So.

But here's the thing. The growth hormone, I don't think they used it in the study per se because of the direction benefits of the growth hormone, but they use it. I, it's funny, with somebody that was here earlier today, I actually went over the study, so it's kind of fresh in my head. They use it for the, the ability to regenerate the thymus gland. So that's when you can come in. Yeah, it's, it's. I mean, forgive the colloquialism here, but screw the growth hormone. You don't have to use growth hormone. You can use thymosin, alpha, thymus and beta, for example.

Peptides.

Peptides.

Those are great. A lot of people use those during COVID and long haul vaccine and saw great results.

Right. Or even like organic meats and so forth. Things that you can.

Like thymus extract. Yes. Or sweet breads. Yes. Right.

So, so, and here's. And guys, just to be very clear, my life philosophy, like honest to God, like I'd rather it's not feasible, but move to the Amazon and live in the middle of nature and get true sun. Decrease my chemical burden, which is something we here, I'm like super passionate about. Like before taking a bunch of stuff, I'm like, how much chemicals, how much excitotoxins are you exposed to? You know, like where do you live? Do you live next to these crazy towers, glyphosate land, all that kind of stuff. But so that, that, that's my real inclination. But we live in the middle of a cement jungle which he just wrote a scooter through. And, and it's like, okay, these things are impossible. You know, we're talking to attorneys and busy moms and so forth that it's like, okay, ma', am, your vitamin D is abysmally low. You're getting osteomalacia because you're like under 15. Vitamin D so it's like, okay, go out in the sun from this time, and this time. Oh, I'm not going to do it. Okay, fine.

Supplement.

So just so so we're clear, I, I, I, if I can one day actually get this all naturally. And that's why I admire you, brother, because you, you're, you're more isolated. You're, you're, you're doing this in a way more natural way. And I, you know, frill. Not because you're here, but hats off. But for those that can't, like the. The art of regeneration of the, of the thymus gland, which I actually just did. The CTA and the calcium score not too long ago.

Yeah.

And they actually wrote embryological remnants still visible of the thymus gland on my case. I was so happy because I'm like.

Oh, crap, is that abnormal to have embryological remnants of the thymus gland at this age? Would it normally degrade by your age?

Yeah, so. So yeah, in medical school, they trick us. So first year medical school, and there's doctors listening out there. See if you remember this. They'll usually, in anatomy first, first semester, second semester, they'll give you an X ray of a baby's, you know, chest, and they'll put an arrow and say, what structure is this? And you're like the professor stupid. And it's like, it's the heart, man. And you put heart and go to the next question. Then everybody gets that.

Almost everybody gets it wrong because it's the thymus.

It's the freaking thymus.

Wow. Hey, what about the idea of red light on glands for glandular activation? I have a red light. I have a few. And two different companies have told me that I should use the red light on the thymus to strengthen the immune system and increase thymus gland activity. So it's pure anecdote because I've never seen any studies on photobiomodulation for glandular activation of the thymus. But I do it. And just because I got the red lights out anyways, in the morning, I just put it right kind of over the lower part of the collarbone in the center.

I think it makes perfect sense. I'm a big blue, firm believer. Photobiomodulation, you'll see, like I told you, our new facility, it's going to be red like galore. Yeah, but that makes a lot of sense. And I mean, and the thymus gland, I mean, now I'm going to go off on a whim here a little bit, but it seems it even has, like, Some like extra, let's say, sensitivities to the environment, even like spiritual. There's a lot of like, if you, if you Google, like thymic tapping, like people that used to tap their thymus in the past, you know, to release fear or release emotions.

One of the tapping points in the tapping solution book.

Oh, I didn't.

Eyebrows and the side. Nick Ortner's book, I interviewed him a long time ago. But one of the areas that you tap is thymus cloud. My family and I, we all do tapping every morning. We don't do this whole sequence, but what we do is we do a gratitude practice, meditation, breath work, and memorization of a passage of scripture. And then at the very end when we're all settled down, I have everybody choose a spot for me. It's over the heart. And we tap for about 30 seconds because based on the concepts of neuro linguistic programming, which is kind of what the whole tapping solution is based around, along with activation of some of those certain points. If later on in the day when you're stressed or you feel as though you need to settle down or return back to that meditative state without doing like 10 or 15 minutes of breath work and Bible reading and prayer to get there, you tap on that same area and it allows you to set this haptic cue that brings you back into that feeling of relaxation. So right now I guarantee if we, we were doing active tracking of my heart rate variability, like using a ring or a metric or whatever, when I tap right over that area, because I've been tapping for three years, every morning right after meditation, my body goes, oh, hey, it's time to settle down. So there's something to it, to, to the whole tapping component.

No way, dude. That's super cool. I'm gonna incorporate that.

That book, the tapping solution. A lot of people like it for stress and I thought it was silly at first. Honestly, I'm like just tap areas. But there's another book that's very similar called the Healing Code.

Oh, I know that.

Just this idea, I think that has some, some tapping in it as well. Okay, so anyways, this is all fantastic information, but back to. To the liver king to close that loop. What do you think he was doing that would have been dangerous that you think, oh, like regardless of what kind of body it gets you, this is stuff you shouldn't really f around with in most cases.

So I actually saw an email circulating. I don't know if it was true. Let's assume it was true so I can use it as Examples.

Okay.

I saw testosterone, assuming it's bioidentical. Okay.

Which is not problematic.

No, no. Your body's producing it, your body requires it. Your hormones need to decline for you to age. Right. That's really how it works. It's not the other way around. You age and then your hormones decline. Right. It's the other way around.

So aging is a result of hormone declination.

If we're going to make that word up. Exactly. There you put it together better than I could. So yeah, you need that. Then I saw, I think I saw cjc, which is a very popular peptide, et cetera, growth form.

Is that growth woman releasing or growth hormone secreting peptide?

Well, it was CJC with diaper morel.

And so, so, so which is great. Pre bed for. I'm comfortable with people using that like cycling through that. Yeah, I know a lot of people that do.

Yeah. And if just a little side note, I, my personal favorite of those, of that family is Tessem.

Yeah, I did that for a couple of years. I don't even do a lot of peptides now. Just because I, I simplified. I just decided, you know what, I could spend all my day with the needles and stuff. Extra five minutes with needles in the morning, five minutes hugging my kids. You know, I cut out a lot. But for a while and I got some, some decent muscle mass doing this without too much training. I did Tessamorelin in the morning, pre faced workout and then ipamorelin and CJC 1295 in the evening to support sleep and growth hormone release. Five days on, two days off. I did two 10 week cycles for two years in a row. So a total of 40 weeks on that stuff. Stamp of approval for me, you feel unstoppable. And again, the only reason I stopped because I was like, gosh, all these minutes of doing this and filling the needles and doing that, this is all kind of adding up. And I, I'm not like a professional bodybuilder or something.

Yeah, no, that's true. And yeah, sometimes it does get annoying to prep all that stuff but you know, so that, that's okay. And then I saw the growth hormone and assuming it's you know, proper 193amino acid sequence and you know, bioidentical, that's okay. I'm a big fan of it. And this isn't medical advice, but I personally take it myself. I give it to my parents, I give it to my wife. I think it's phenomenal.

You do. Total side question. Do you think if I start Taking growth hormone, I would put on muscle 100% really consistently. I've thought before, but then I'm like, I don't, I don't know if I, if I want to or I need to. But it's not like testosterone where if you start on it, you're not on it for life type of thing.

Right. So I care a lot about blood work and then the numbers that you see there, like I personally think somebody, a man's testosterone, you know, somewhere between 750 to 1100. You're great.

750 to 1100?

Yeah. You don't need to be. What is good to is better? No.

Assuming you're free testosterone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I think the best metric I've seen is free testosterone. If you multiply that by about like 14 to 16 and you're falling in like that, that 750 to 1100 range, that's pretty good. Yes. For free testosterone. So that would be index hormone binding. Globulin is relatively low. Free T is high, testosterone is elevated and it's not getting converted into estrogens. Now, while we're talking numbers back to growth hormone, let's say that someone has something they want to track to indicate to them that they might be taking too much growth hormone or they need growth hormone. Is that IGF that you would look at?

So IGF BP3.

Especially IGF BP3, yeah.

IGF BP3 will be a really good indicator. And then if you're following proper. So in the U.S. you know, to, to be able to prescribe growth hormone, there's a few guidelines you need to follow. So number one, you know, you can prescribe for like the, you know, the growth deficiency, serious growth like Turner syndrome, et cetera, achondroplasia, dwarfism, etc, or wasting states or cachexia when a person has HIV cancers and so forth with the doctor deems it's necessary. And that's truly what oxandrolone or Anavar is supposed to be used for, for those kind of states as well.

Okay, and then which Oxandrolone and Anavar. That's above growth hormone though. That's, that's bigger guns.

So we're going to talk about that in a second because I saw those things, those are of the nature in liver King's list.

Okay.

Supposedly, I'm not saying it is the list. It was circulating. So then, then you have adult growth hormone failure, which is another modality that.

Would be a reason, a medically indicated reason to take growth.

Right. So and truthfully, you should do MRI studies, etc. It's not just, oh, here's, I think you have this failure and you can go ahead. So you look at IGF1, but that's still not sufficient IGF1, BP3, which is blood work. And then you would actually get into imaging and so forth. So they're pretty picky on how you guys do it.

I'm not derailing you as I ask you these questions as we go through this, am I?

No.

Okay, so another question regarding growth hormone. Then we can get back to the liver king and some of the other stuff that you saw. I believe it was Mark Gordon who does a lot of like talking in the endocrine world, who I heard mentioned the fact that the issue sometimes with the carcinogenic potential of growth hormone, and I briefly mentioned this earlier, is a lack of the density of proper growth hormone receptors. And he indicated that a lot of these flavanol related compounds, particularly things like quercetin and fisetin, which are often used in the anti aging industry as supplements, upregulate growth hormone receptors throughout the body to the point where it becomes more fully saturated through the body and you actually reduce carcinogenic potential. If you're taking like whether keracitin supplement or fisetin supplement, you find kerosene like red onions and apples and fisetin in strawberries, but kind of like resveratrol in wine, you have to take a lot of it. So I thought that was interesting that there was indication that growth hormone could be less problematic if you have adequate flavanol intake from things like kerasotin and fisetin in diet.

So, and this is like me being 100 genuine, I can't see where growth hormone has a carcinogenic potential.

Okay.

But I do agree with the receptor theory and using some of these flavonoids, et cetera to upregulate receptors. And that's the infinite argument of for those that are pro growth hormone, some people say, hey, take it in the morning. And then those people, the people against it say hey, but the receptors aren't upregulated. You'll see them more at night. Kind of like some of the, you know, take your iodine for your thyroid at night because the, the receptors are also upregulated and et cetera.

It helps a lot of people sleep too, right?

Absolutely. I love iodine. Lugolz iodine.

Well, I was talking about growth hormone, but iodine also helps you sleep. Huh?

Lugolz iodine. I'm a huge fan of that. Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting.

I didn't know that well, because it regulates metabolism, right? So if the person has. And in the quick trick, right, you wake up in the morning, don't even get out of bed, take a thermometer, put it under your armpit, and then check your, your temperature during the day. If there's variations there, you know, it could be an indicator of your adrenals being off, thyroid being off.

That one called the, the Dr. Broda Barnes test. I think that temperature valve for, for iodine, that might be what it is.

I don't know the exact number, but yeah, it's been around. It's kind of, it's an old functional medicine, I think. Yeah, but, but yeah, if, if the per. It's not like iodine's gonna help everybody, but if the person's a little metabolically unregulated, that the little iodine drops at night could work. I don't miss it. I don't miss it. But going back to the growth hormone, so I can't see huge carcinogenic potential in, in, in it. And I'll give you a few examples. The years you have highest levels of growth hormone and all hormones, to tell you the truth, are the years you look at a cancer map or cancer distribution studies. You have the least amount of cancer, but as your hormones, all of them decline, you're, you have more, more amount of cancers in your life, right? You have more diabetes, you have more heart disease, you have more, etc. Etc. And then fasting also, which won Nobel Prize, right? Calorie restriction. One of the things that it does when you're. It increases growth hormone levels. So it's like, wait a minute, I thought we didn't like growth hormone. But your body's producing it. I can't understand how, if your body produces something, how is it going to cause cancer to you? I did just. It doesn't get through my skull. You know, I went to school. I have a degree in biology. You went to the doctor.

I think the concern that people have is taking supra. Optimal amounts that go above with the.

Body, that's a different story. So let's talk about what you asked me a few minutes ago. Looking at, let's say IGF levels, you know, one of our labs, the level, it's. I think it goes from 17 to 536. I think you're nuts if you're going over 400. Me particularly, I'm around 270, 280.

And that's great for IGF? Yeah. The doctor once told me that when he looks at the sweet spot, he likes somewhere in the range of like 80 to 200 for IGF. Like above 200, gets concerned. Below 80, he gets concerned. I don't know.

I think that's a little bit more conservative, but, but, but. Okay, that's fine. You know, like, I, I honestly believe that those IGF levels need to be optimized. Which, by the way, what does IGF stand for? Insulin. Like growth factor Insulin. Like. Well, what does it do? Well, it helps also supplementation of with IGF as well, which I think that was on Liver King's email to IGF1.

You mean that Deliver King was supporting his IGF1 results or supplementing with.

Yeah, because it was this whole email or something like that, that. And he's writing to somebody and then he wrote down everything I was taking.

Okay.

You know, and, you know, the igf, I mean, and we see really cool stuff. Somebody. I. I'm a big fan of. I don't know him, but for. He does a sport. Well, right now he's the king of the sport that I do, Jiu jitsu. And he was having some gut issues and he published on his Instagram this. So I think it'll be okay for me to mention this. Ryan Gordon does the guy's amazing Jiu jitsu and he has gut issues and took a bunch of peptides. IGF I saw was in his cocktail. It's really regenerative. These things really, really help. So going back to Liver King's list, you know, the, the, the peptides I think are great. The testosterone is great, the growth hormone is great. But now you get into the not so nice things.

Okay.

You get into what I believe I saw there was Stazolol, which is Winstraw.

Okay.

I believe there was oxandrolone in the anovar, too. I'm not sure, but whatever. That whole family, when you start getting into things.

Yeah, what is that family?

So, because people are going to be like steroids. Okay. What's a steroid? Vitamin D is a steroid.

Guys, that's a good point.

Right? So your pregnenolone, androsten, dione, aldosterone, which regulates blood pressure in your kidneys. They're all steroids.

Progesterone. Progesterone, which is actually great as an anxiolytic. I have a little bottle of transdermal progesterone on my bedside, and if I'm very anxious, I put a little that in the inner arm, rub it in I get it from. From Chris Shade at Quicksilver Scientific. And then I. And I mostly just use it because my wife ordered it and she had some leftover sh. She didn't like it, but.

And it increases a little sex drive.

Anxious. A little bit of that and a little bit of cbd.

You don't feel the sex drive too? It helps sex drive. And it never noticed that.

No.

You probably have ice.

But my sex drive. But yeah, I don't know if I can get higher. Okay, so that's a pretty good noise. Okay, so the. The steroids. It's not the problem. It's a steroids. What is the problem?

So here is the issue and the person and all these fitness guys, etc. Okay? And honestly, take the. I. I think this is really good advice. You know, when you're using something that your body does not produce. Here's a little principle I live by for my own health and that of my family. Your body will attack whatever. It does not know what it is. And we do a lot of inflammation studies here. I love this laboratory called Cyrex.

Cyrex.com I use that with a lot of my clients. For instance, environmental exposure of toxins and molds and also for like gold standard food allergy. Absolutely amazing.

You know, they're the first ones in the market to do in the United States to do the leaky gut test. They were the first ones.

Oh, wow.

I have a podcast with a medical director and he's telling me about it.

Yeah, they're a great company.

Oh, yeah. So when you're doing that, like leaky gut, all these things, I mean, except Tylenol, ibuprofen, these things, your body doesn't know what it is. It can attack it. Now, when you come in with a molecule that looks like testosterone, but it's not testosterone. Right. Or women, for postmenopausal women were like primarin, which stands for pregnant mare urine. So it's estrogen replacement, but it's. No, it's estrogen from horses. Yeah, Right. So the principle from steroids to, you know, legally or illegally prescribed or whatever, whatever. When you're putting these things into your body, your body then can attack it. And that's what causes the cancers and autoimmunity and yada, yada, yada, and the leaky guts and all that stuff. And I'm really not for that. And that, that. And also, you age a lot quicker with that stuff.

All right? Families or people with kids or people with friends who have kids who like to hang out with you or people who want to have a family but don't want to work out with their family. I'm getting a little long of the tooth here. Here's what I'm getting at. I'm launching a family challenge. It's called the Boundless Family Challenge. So basically, as you might know, I just launched my book, Boundless Parenting. And it's knowledge and years of experience from not only me and my wife, but over a dozen other rockstar families and parents and educators. And as part of the launch of the book, we're going to have a Boundless Family Challenge. It's a four week challenge and you're going to get all the workouts, all the instructions, all the accountability that you need to actually get fit together as a family. Instead of everybody just doing their own separate thing at the gym. I'll actually be sharing with you my actual tactics for how I did everything from fitness walks to group exercise sessions to breath work to spirituality, a whole lot more with my own family. And it's going to be fun. So the challenge starts on January 30th. You can go to BenGreenfieldLife.com BoundlessFamilyChallenge to claim your seat at the family table today. So it's BenGreenfieldLife.com Boundless Family Challenge. Hope to see you there along with your fam. I've worked to achieve many things in life, but my greatest yet most humbling work, I think, has been with my role as a father. Parenting is blissful. It's brutal. It's far beyond anything I ever could have anticipated. My sons are now teenagers, and the people around us who engage with them often ask if I could write a book on raising children and education and legacy and discipline and all this stuff that goes into raising a good child, a good human. Now, I didn't feel that qualified to write a parenting guide, so I gathered a team of parenting superstars, dozens of my friends, entrepreneurs, authors, neurologists, psychologists, family coaches, a whole lot more. I got all their best tools, techniques, perspectives, habits, on again, everything from education to discipline to travel to rites of passage and beyond. And I put it all in one massive book that's like the guide to parenting. So it's now available. It's@boundlessparentingbook.com and that's where you can pre order your copy today. So BoundlessParentingBook.com it has been an absolute adventure putting this thing together. I think you're going to love it. Okay, quick question. If there's a doctor watching, would they be laughing if you said if it's foreign, your body will attack it because they think that's like woo woo science or is there an actual like, are we talking about like a distinct white blood cell reaction and inflammatory response to a steroid the body may not recognize or make on its own?

No. Well, first of all, I think there's a, there is going to be a doctor laughing at one point or another.

Because a lot of people still obviously leaky gut and obviously that's been proven now. But sometimes when you say something like attack the body, that's murky. What's that mean?

So, okay, I'll put it in terms that I learned in medical school when we discussed these topics. They said they would say, oh, don't worry, there's immune tolerance. It's so your body can actually tolerate a certain amount of toxin or foreign chemical, etc. And then there's always the, the whole premise of toxicology. You know, it's in the dose and you know, not too much of it. You know, now after my years of studying and being exposed to this and you know, mix of traditional with alternative, so forth, the, the hoots with that. No, your body's designed in, in a way where it should consume things that it understands what it is. And I'll give you an example. Gatorade, red Gatorade. Well, that red 40 inside the Gatorade. We know now today that it's connected with anxiety, it's connected with depression, it's connected with cancers as well. They're all in the family of excitotoxins. So if you start looking at different families, non bioidentical steroids. So not vitamin D, not progesterone, but stanazoleone and, and all these other guys, right. And the primobolins and all these things. You start looking at those families of things. You shouldn't be taking those. You shouldn't be. You should decrease the amount of chemical burden and foreign molecules in your body, period. I mean, that's the philosophy even in our veggies.

And it's part of that because it's difficult on the liver to push all of the synthetic compounds from a steroid protocol like that through the detoxification pathways.

Well, that's one of them. So your body detoxifies, I believe, 60% through the liver and then 20 through the kidney and then another 20% through different pathways. Right. And then the conjugation pathways, et cetera, like the, the first pathways of the liver. They're highly dependent on zinc and glutathione. And B complex and so forth. So many times we're already deficient in that stuff. Right. You throw some leaky gut in there, and then you can't absorb those vitamins and minerals and so forth. And then you don't have the glutathione that I believe your body produce about like 12 or 14,000 milligrams a day in average. Right. You don't have that stuff. And then all of a sudden, that chemical burden starts to increase and starts to increase and starts to increase. And then. And there you go. And then there's some leaky gut, and then there's. And then. And you can start to have neurotransmitter imbalances, too, and so on, so forth. And then all of a sudden, you have a human that's starting to get unbalanced, and then to ultimately forms. Dis. Ease. It's out of ease.

So it sounds like this is multimodal.

Yes.

In terms of the liver king, Brian Johnson, he would have things like potential for neurotransmitter deficiencies, potential for impaired liver detoxification pathways, potential for an autoimmune reaction, and basically the type of things that you would experience if the body was frequently bombarded with the foreign compound that it had to metabolize.

Yeah, I mean. And, I mean, I don't know the guy, but to be that size and today be that level of leanness, et cetera. Here's the thing. Then I ask, what are the doses? Because the doses, I heard something like 11,000 bucks in growth hormone a month, man. That's like, I don't care how expensive you're getting that stuff. You really got to consume a lot of that. That's all.

I thought Colostrum was expensive. Here I am, and I own a company that sells cholesterol, Colostrum, and I'm still, like, taking a. I take a scoop in the morning and scoop in the evenings, because at the back of my mind, I'm like, stuff's expensive. Gotta be careful. Don't want to drag my company down. So.

So Colostrum is awesome, by the way.

Oh. Oh, my goodness. People have IgA deficiencies and nutty Umami. Your gut feels great. I don't want to turn a commercial for Colostrum, but I like Colostrum. Okay. So. And by the way, you don't know Brian Johnson. I. I do. He. He's a friend of mine. He's featured in my parenting. He's an amazing father and husband and businessman who definitely effed up in Terms of his honesty, I don't think at his heart he's a bad person. No, no. He got stuck in a lie that was very difficult for him to wiggle out of. And so it is what it is. And now he's suffering the consequences. Anything beyond the steroids that you think were problematic or that people should be aware of to avoid, that might pop up in this industry as being recommended to them if they want to get swole bro or lose body fat or like that, or the steroids.

The main thing, I mean, I, I don't care too much for these things. You know, I wouldn't even be talking about this if it wasn't important to a lot of people that live in that social media. Like, oh my God, these people look in a certain way. And it's like, I really want to help these people because I was once a chubby kid too, you know, years ago. But it's like, okay, how do I get like that? And so I, I, I did literally, I scroll this, like 30 seconds scroll and then going off the top of my, in my head, what I can remember. But I think, you know, just moving away from the liver king, but overall, people that look a certain way and then promote products that they're not, they're not the main variables getting you there, Right?

Sure.

Maybe a supplement's got them 10% there, if that, or 5%, I don't know. But, you know, when there's stronger substances there, you got to be careful. And then even for your personal health, and I understand, I think, talk to a lot of people, you know, that are in different kinds of, you know, even bodybuilding and so forth, and it's like, hey, man, you don't really understand the harm this stuff does to you, Right?

Yeah.

You know, and then there's a confusion. Testosterone and a synthetic, a methylated testosterone. Does the methylated one cause cancer? Absolutely. That's really, really, really bad. But if you go to Google Scholar, I think there's around over 3,000 articles showing how bioidentical hormones, not only they do not cause cancer, but they can actually help with many disease states.

Yeah.

You know, and that's the whole difference. But it's such a fine line because you say, is testosterone a steroid? Is vitamin D? Is there, like we just said, yes, but how about the others? These are the distinguishing factor. And people say, oh, it's because they're synthetic. No, synthetic just means it's made in a laboratory. What we're talking about is, is it bioidentical or Is it non bio?

Okay.

That's really the distinguishing factor.

Okay, so it's not the synthetic nature, it's, it's, it's the biocompatibility with the body. Exactly. Nature of it.

Exactly.

It's an interesting comment that you make about the social media because I've certainly been involved in social media and have a public facing Persona for many years, ever since I was in bodybuilding and then try and I got called out. When I was a bodybuilder, I could not afford anything. I, I was tuna fish, I was protein. My farts could knock out an elephant and I would live. I had no money. I would get home from my classes at the end of the day, I would open up like fortuna fish cans. I would put relish or ketchup on them. I would eat those. I would go to the gym. I eventually got a sponsorship from ABB Bodybuilding who would send me a little canned protein shakes which is just like chemical cocktail. And then I would eat like I would go to the grocery store and buy as much of the meat that was on sale as I could.

I hate to interrupt. You're not a big fan of the, the protein shakes either?

Well, it depends. Nowadays there's lots of great options. I mean, heck, I, the same company I own that does colostrum does an amazing like whey protein powdered smoothie. But it depends. Like if you look at like insure, the number one doctor recommended brand for people to have a nutrient replenishment in the hospital and you actually look at the label, it's back to like the red number 40 type of Gatorade stuff you're talking about. So the protein, it depends. There's some clean brands out there, but it depends. Back in the day, whatever I had was not clean. And then I eventually was able to afford creatine, right? Just pure creatine monohydrate. And then energy drinks because I got free energy drinks from my gym and that was it. And people were like, oh, you're on the gear, you're on this, you're on that. I'm like, you should see my checkbook. Like I can barely pay rent. But it came down to hard work and putting in the blood, sweat and tears. Same thing when I got into triathlon. I'll give one more example and maybe we should take some questions from folks in triathlon. The, the way that I retired from being in the gym industry and operating all my own brick and mortar personal training studios was I was obsessed at that point. I'd gotten out of bodybuilding. I was very into Ironman triathlon. I didn't have much time. I was working literally like 14 hours a day as a personal trainer. But I understood metabolism because I had a master's degree in exercise physiology and I understood that there were two different pathways to increase strength. Your mitochondria, right, you have the CGMP pathway and the more aerobically driven pathway. It slips my mind at this point. So anyways, there's two different ways to train for endurance. Either a polarized training approach with long slow training, like long slow aerobic training, tons and tons of hours, building the aerobic engine, the so called Maffetone approach. And then there's the other approach, Phil Maffetone, he's like one of the godfathers of, of aerobic training. And you take your heart rate and you find out where the lactic acid begins to accumulate. You subtract 20 beats from that and that's like your aerobic training heart rate. And it's like 80% of your training is done with the long slow aerobic approach. But that requires a ton of time. Like you gotta like train for 18, 20, 25 hours a week and you're staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool and hunched over on a bike all the time. I didn't have the time for that. I literally did not have enough hours in the day. But I really wanted to do Ironman so I did the majority of my training indoors in highly controlled environments. I did almost everything as high intensity interval training to trigger the pathway that I knew could be triggered if you went hard with long recovery periods. And so a sample swim for me would be I get in the pool quick, warm up ten hundred meter repeats as hard as I could freaking go, blood coming out my eyeballs. And then my bike ride would be, for example, I'd be on a computrainer and there was this guy named Troy Jacobs who had these workouts called Spinnerville's workouts where like you had to amp yourself up for this and get yourself mentally ready because you were soul crushing workout. But then it's over in like 45 minutes. Same thing. I bought Troy Jacobson's Runnerville's workouts which were 20 to 30 minute treadmill routines. And I would do a couple of the 20, 30 minute treadmill routines, couple of the hard bike rides, about three swims. Then on the weekends I would find out my exact race pace and I would just go at that race pace thinking that okay, I'm going to get my my body into that race pace zone and I would do about a two to three hour ride, I would do about a one to two hour run and I would do around a 3K swim. And so once you added it all up, I was training about 10 to 12 hours a week for Ironman and I was qualifying for Ironman Hawaii World Championships every year. And I was like top in my age group and I wasn't a pro, right, But I, I was like one of the top of the top age grouper guys. And what I did was over the course of a year I thought, well, my sons are about to be born, I want to move into the house and be homeschooling my kids and be a stay at home dad. And there's no way with my current scenario of training at the gym all day and then coming home and collapsing on the couch exhausted that I'm going to be able to raise a family and these twin boys my wife is pregnant with. So at that point I was successful enough in the gym industry because I was doing all these biohacking tech. I was like an early adopter of all the technology. I was geeked out. I love this stuff. We had high speed video cameras and platelet rich plasma injections and indirect calorimetry and all my partners were physicians. So we had a really good outreach into the medical community and we had all like the triathletes and the executives and people like that coming in for training. So I was already making six plus figures a year as a personal trainer running two gyms. So I was getting hired to go around the country and speak to trainers at fitness conventions about how to make money with a gym. And I was telling them about all the different tactics that I used and partnering with the medical community. And this is the equipment that has a really, really good ROI once you invest in it. And so I was carving a name for myself as a trainer. Who you go to when nothing else works. It was like 2008, I got voted as America's top personal trainer and I was in the limelight. But at these conferences I was hearing things about, oh, online businesses forming affiliate relationships with other people in the community. JO I thought JV was like when you aren't good enough to make the big basketball team, but it's actually the joint ventures and and so I spent nine months, I get home from the gym, you ask my wife, I'd stay awake till like 3am building my own website, learning how to program, learning how to code. I got into how to buy ads on Facebook And Google. I hired my first VA after listening to Tim Ferriss's four hour work week when I was driving to a triathlon one day. I thought, oh, I can outsource, I can hire people. I pulled out a Craigslist ad in the Manila, Philippines and hired my first VA, Marge, who's still working for me after all, all these years. And then what happened was during Ironman Triathlon race week in October, by that point, after nine months of sleeping like three hours a night, I had created an online training program with all the digital downloads for here's how to eat, here's how to train, here's how to use all my methods to allow you to cross the finish line of an Ironman triathlon with a big smile on your face, but without having neglected your friends and your family and your careers and your hobbies and everything. Everything else. And then I figured out how to create an affiliate link for that using an old program, I don't even know if it still exists, called clickbank. And people could sign up to be an affiliate for my program. So all these triathlon websites and triathlon authors would basically help promote my program for me. I spent those nine months going to every big triathlon forum that I could. And in my signature, I had a link to the website and where my email list collecting thing was. And I would post, I would spend. This was my whole Friday, eight hours on a Friday, just in forums. This was like old school. Like back in the day it was kind of like Reddit, right? Those are like forums. And you'd post in the forums and you'd have your bio that people could click on after you posted. So I would spend my whole day almost doing like AMAs to really make a name for myself in the industry. And then what happened was I was racing Ironman Hawaii. I even went so far as to pre schedule all my tweets. Cause I was kind of early adopter of Twitter and this was like 14 years ago. And I pre scheduled my tweets to tweet out and be like, hey, I'm at mile 112 with a bike ride. I used the triathlon Dominator plan to. So I was kind of going to get shot in the foot if I had a flat tire or anything went wrong. So I threw all my eggs into the basket. And what happened was during that, during that week, through all of that was available, I even had a company in Texas who would like drop ship and fulfill and print the physical book and the physical DVDs and the digital everything. For me, I made $50,000 over the course of the week of the Ironman Triathlon after I crossed the finish line. And it was at that point that I was like, oh, I can take information up inside my head. I can put it out there for people and I can sell it and I can do this from home in my underwear. And all I got to do is study and learn cool things that I like anyways and then tell people about how to do it. And so I had the podcast and the blog. I had the newsletter. And so that was when I, like, like, quit all my training studios and gyms and started doing a lot more of what I do now, which is like consulting and advising and. And media and the podcast and everything. But back to the social media thing. Like, I realized that, oh, hey, if you're going to promote a certain program, like, there's no way I could have done that and lived with myself and been training 30 hours a week and told people, Just train 10 to 12 hours a week. Right. To do Iron man for bodybuilding. Right. Do all the steroids instead of just like creatine and tuna fish. But coming full circle, I hadn't planned on telling that story, but I started to tell it and then I got caught. It was a great story. So anyways, if you can figure out how to look at a social media influencer's labs, their wearable data, like, if. If they're not willing to share some of that stuff, then raise an eyebrow. And. And I think that was the issue with Deliver King, was he should have been fully transparent up front and been like, hey, I'm on all this stuff. I'm also following these nine ancestral tenets, you know, Liverpool, which sunshine. Oh, they're wonderful. I do all that stuff. Yeah, they're not, not like, I don't do those crazy barbarian workouts and stuff, but.

Yeah, no, and he seems like a great guy, man. Yeah, just a wonderful guy. I mean, but, you know, just using as an example for.

You ought to read the. The chapter in my parenting book that was written by him because I have like 30 different parents in his. What he, what he does with his sons, like, liver and bone marrow every meal. And, like, they'll fast all day and then do a hard workout at the end of the day. Day. And his kids will eat steak. And he's. It's very, very odd. He's kind of like another guy in the book named Joe the Senna, the CEO of Spartan. These are. These cats are cut from a different cloth.

So here's the thing people chase performance. Now I honestly believe if we lived with the Spartans, you know, you know the movie 300 for those of you that I honestly believe those guys probably look that way and, and, and they were probably freaking 50 years old and tough as nails and so forth because their bot they were eating different food foods. They were living in a different environment, not exposed to all this stuff. You know, so nowadays I think we as humanity we were saying something's not right. Yeah, it's, you know, that it's not that the fish is sick, it's the aquarium is sick. You know, the. Yeah, the environments.

There's this nostalgia for the good old hunter gatherer days. I have no desire to go back and live in spartan. It'd be horrific to be disease and.

I'd like to go to war.

You know, guys coming at you with swords in the streets. Like we live in a very magical privileged era. And that's kind of like a lot of people say is about biohacking. Like the idea is we're trying to figure out how to marry ancestral tenants using technology and other tools with a modern industrial lifestyle. So we reduce the evolutionary mismatch and damage from all the EMF and the lack of sunlight and everything while at the same time taking advantage of the fact that we can go to a grocery store and buy 700 calories and a little pint of ice cream and that's at our fingertips. And all we got to do the next day is go to the gym and turn in the morning muscle. And that's like ancient. Man would have killed for that. Right? Like what? Not only are you giving me a free hour in the morning to go to the gym, but I can eat a protein dairy pack growth hormone inducing ice cream at night. Like we live in a cool era.

Absolutely.

We just got a few little uphill battles to fight from a health standpoint.

Absolutely, man, I agree with you. You know, but you know, I think us personally, you know, looking for that performance and clean performance and you know, and like I said in the beginning, I really believe that if I could, I'd isolate myself and just get it as pure as possible. Just raw health. But you know, I live in a cement jungle.

Let's take some questions from Instagram. Let's do it. By the way, all the shownotes will put@BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. D. Somebody says share a bit about BPC157.

Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah, you probably know more about it than me, Dr. D. Because you. You fuss around with peptides, I think probably more than I do. But BPC157, body protection compound, like the other peptide you mentioned, GHK, copper peptide. The body makes it. Yeah, absolutely. It's secreted in gastric juices. It's amazing both orally and injected for inflammation and particularly orally. Seems to work really well in the gut. And my favorite way to use it right now, besides, if I get a joint issue and I want to inject subcutaneously with an insulin syringe around that issue with BPC 157, which I do keep in my freezer and will reconstitute if I get injured, is there's a new company, they're called LevelUp LVLUP out of Australia. They developed this thing called gastric healing formula. It's like BPC157 and a whole bunch of other natural anti inflammatory and gut healing peptides compounds. So I've actually been starting to use that and it feels like super gut nourishing. I think they just launched the company because I just got a bottle recently. But what do you think of BPC157?

I. I'm actually taking a pretty darn high dose of injectable BPC right now because in jiu jitsu, I, man, I got like somebody went for my knee and they did. And like, you know when you're like, you hear the crepitus in the meniscus, like you're going upstairs.

I get that my knee sometimes.

Oh my God. No, but it was. I'm like, oh my God, I hope I didn't Jim my meniscus. Anyways, BPC is great. Found in the gut, really good for musculoskeletal and. And gastric issues, you know, all the way from Crohn's to. Which is really good, by the way, with KPV too. KPV and BPC do really, really, really well.

Do you think PPC would work? Because, you know, a lot of people get into the whole like rectal delivery mechanisms, like if you had colitis or an issue like that. I think bpc, like if somebody developed into a suppository would be effective.

Absolutely. And you see, you see.

I mean, I wonder if anybody's doing.

That right, right now.

Talk to Dr. John Lawrence up there in Sarasota. He's into putting everything in suppositories. BPC157 suppository. You heard it first here, folks.

So I, I think it's wonderful for any gastric GI repair and also for musculoskeletal repair. And it goes really well with some stuff. And even I'm going to drop one here. I'm going to touch it based on something really controversial right now.

Okay.

Semaglutide. A lot of people talk about semaglutide.

Oh, gosh. My friend took semaglutide. He's my friend up in Spokane. He took it and we went out to eat at this amazing restaurant, and.

He didn't eat anything, of course.

He's like, dude, are you okay? He's like, I'm nauseous. I don't want any of this stuff. And I saw him the next day, and we're at a coffee shop with all these amazing baked goods and chocolates. Didn't eat anything. He went for like a week and barely anything at all. Lost a bunch of weight. And like, after I saw that peptide in action is a peptide, right? Semaglutide.

I don't know if it is. I think, yeah, it's less than 40amino acids, but it's not a natural peptide that is not produced in the body. So that's one that, you know, just real quick on that. It's not a natural. PPC is ghp.

Yeah.

What ghk.

Having witnessed firsthand what semaglutide does, though, like, I think if you're. If you're lean and active, I would be darn careful with that stuff. But if you're obese, I mean, to me it's like, dude, compared to, like, getting gastric bypass surgery, I. I think that stuff seems. I think it may be associated with a little bit of gastric distress. Possibly.

Absolutely.

Like metformin. A lot of blood glucose disposal agents. Yeah, man.

But, but semaglutide. But number one, I, I, instead of semaglutide, consider perhaps tirizepatide, which is the newer one. They're both GLP one.

Say that one again.

I don't know if I can pronounce it right. Tir, zepatite or terazepatide.

Okay.

It's also called mounjaro, as semaglutide is called ozempique. The. Okay, but regardless, if you get it compounded with bpc, that's the way to go.

And is that oral or injectable?

Injectable, yeah. And the nausea is way less, especially if you put BPC into it.

I'll hunt down the name of some of these things we're talking about. I'll put them in the show notes for you guys@bengreenfieldlife.com Dr. D. Because I know some of them sound like Star wars characters. C3PO and R2D2. All right, what else we got? You got a question?

Yeah.

Nad. Does increasing or injecting NAD daily decrease your body's natural production of nad, similar to a testosterone injection? I don't think that I've seen there's a negative feedback loop for nad.

Me neither. I don't think there's many studies on it.

First of all, there's the recent study on NR that showed that in a pre existing cancer model that supplementing with NR in not super hefty doses could actually accelerate the tumor growth. Now, a lot of people took that in the headlines.

Oh yeah.

NAD causes cancer. NR causes cancer. No, it's kind of like the old China study where this guy wrote a book about how excess protein causes cancer, but neglected to inform folks of the fact that the rodent models used in the study were injected with a toxin that could causes cancer than given high amounts of proteins. And any of these studies that show something, you could probably say something similar about growth hormone. Right. In a pre existing cancer model where a tumor is already present, certain things can accelerate the growth of that tumor that in otherwise normal healthy individuals would not be an issue.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

By the way, talking about cancer, one of the main pathways that really promotes the growth of cancer is mtor. Mtor, which when you. That's why fasting's so good, because excessive mtor. Yes.

A lot of people flip out and they're like, I don't eat steak, it's going to give me cancer. And that diet, that's an issue we're talking about like face feeding all the time with excess amounts of protein. Yeah, that's, that's where you got to be.

And by the way, that was the best explanation I've, I've heard on the NR study, by the way. So on the nad, I don't know of any negative feedback on that one.

Yeah.

Oh, I got another question here.

Okay.

What dosage and type of testosterone do you recommend for a male over 40 years old? I mean the general answer for that, and our docs here are the ones that do the dosing for that. But I would say it has to go off of your blood work. And I mean there's a general rule of thumb, what I mentioned before, you having optimized levels of somewhere between 700 to tap it out. Let me ask you this.

Let's say someone wanted to take the bare minimum dose of Testosterone, whether via like a scrotal cream or injection or whatever to feel good. But they weren't even concerned about getting up to 750. They're just like, I want to see what testosterone feels like and I may want to try this out for a few weeks and I want to take the bare minimum dose to see what it feels like. Is there like a certain milligram dosage that you think someone could try in a scenario like that for males specifically?

That's dicey because I've seen here from what our docs do and so forth. Like, I mean some, some guys, you know, friggin 75 milligrams a week and it's like it shoots up.

75 milligrams a week is far less than most people would take.

Standard, I mean, let's say standard American dose for male Testosterone is like 200 milligrams a week for.

Yeah, okay.

Right. You see, you see that a lot. Which I think that, you know, many cases is pretty high. You know, I, I personally, I do like around 125 a week. I don't need much. I, I'll. And then I've seen guys consume a lot of it. It's also, it's all going to depend on that blood work, you know.

Yeah.

But again I, I, you know, keeping your free testosterone and your, which is the most important thing, optimize because lots of times people are taking a lot and then their SHBG is super high. They're not controlling that.

Yeah.

So go off the blood work and, and you know, don't, don't go too crazy.

I keep a little bottle of testosterone cream in my fridge and the dosage says take three squirts and do three in the morning and three in the evening. I do, I do half a squirt in the morning and half a squirt in the evening, approximately. I think what it comes out TO is around 5 milligrams per day, which I would consider to be almost like a testosterone microdose. So I take about 35 to 40 milligrams of testosterone a week and then I feel great on that. I think my levels are like 700, something like that. So it's just, it's like a little baby dose and I feel pretty good on that. That and I, I also like multiple times I've been traveling and haven't had it with me or whatever and stopped it and I've noticed anything as far as like a big comedown effect.

Yeah.

So I kind of like the idea of like Teeny tiny micro doses which is cool compared to an injection or a pellet. Like if you have the scrotal cream, just a tiny, tiny little dab.

It's like the guy's doing them once a week. Injection of 200 milligrams of star. I think that's ludicrous. It's too much.

It's like boom. Yeah.

And then you, that's when you feel.

A come down and I feel like you can match the natural diurnal variety variation of testosterone which is a tiny little bit in the morning and maybe as I get older I'll increase it a little bit. But I feel great just doing a teeny tiny bit. So.

Absolutely.

All right, let's, let's go with a couple more questions and then we, we've got a sushi date here you guys. So go. Do you have a good site or brand for peptides compounded through a doctor? That's, that's, that's what I vote. Now some people will say Peptide Sciences has decent peptides. I think you'd be careful with anything you're injecting into your body. I usually send people to, I used to sell them tailor made pharmacy but they're out of business now. Can labs up in Canada. That's John Francois Tremblay. I know he does good stuff. My friend Dr. Matthew Cook in San Jose and my friend Dr. Craig Conover in at Conover Wellness. The cool thing about Craig is he'll like do a 30 day pack. He pre fills all the syringes and just sends it out so you don't have to worry about mixing or dosing.

Oh really?

Yeah. And obviously you got to do a telemedicine consultation with them and get established as a patient. But Craig's got some cool stuff. I have a lot of clients who work with Craig.

Yeah. I mean if you're going to do peptides, here's my bottom line answer. Go work with a doc.

Yeah.

And get it from credible pharmacy. I could tell you guys some pharmacies I like. I like Wells Pharmacy, I create pharmacy. They have really good stuff. But yeah, you go work with the doc and be careful. Again goes back to that premise. Not to put anything your body doesn't know inside of it. If you're going to put bpc, that's not exactly that string of, it's a, it's a pentadecapeptide.

Right.

Okay, 15amino acids then that's a problem.

What about tessofensine peptide? Somebody asked about that one.

Tesofensine I'm not a big fan of that because it's actually. So tesofensine is a snr I type medication. You know, I'm not just thinking it upregulates. It's for weight loss, right? So.

Well, yeah, it suppresses appetite and theoretically I've heard that it has a little bit of a thermic effect like isolated from like El Baba. I didn't know it's isolated from King. So here's my test offensing story.

I don't like stimulants.

I have a bottle of it in my fridge. I have another person who's close to me who is somewhat sensitive to these compounds. They took one capsule of what is the equivalent of the bottle in my fridge and they were up to for three days without sleeping. But not like good energy, like super jittery nervous energy. I took one and felt fantastic. Except I didn't want breakfast, which I don't like because my smoothies taste amazing. I was like, oh man, I don't even like my smoothie. And so I still have that bottle in my fridge. Been there for like six months. I take a capsule about once a week when I want to just like crush through a morning and not think about food and have a good workout. And it seems to work as advertised, but it's very powerful and I think it probably like modafinil works on some of the dopamine and serotonergic pathways and I think, gosh, if you want to trigger some of those pathways or have like that feeling of being unstoppable for a few hours. The one that I like now is called Paraxanthine. P A R A X A N T H I N E. It's a brand new. Sean Wells, my friend who's a formulator, he developed it. It's in this brand new energy drink called Update. And Sean sent me a few capsules of Paraxanthine. It's like Modafinil or Provigil or the drug that the Limitless movie was based off of. But rather than keeping up for 24, 48 hours, it wears off after about four to six hours with no crash. And it's really interesting. It increases swagger and confidence and energy. It's very cool. So as a matter of fact, I like it so much this Update energy drink company, once I found out they were putting parazantine in their compound, I had a chance to try it, drank it, you even sleep well on it. You could take it like 10pm and still go to sleep if you wanted to. And have really good sleep cycles. I invested in their. In this Update Energy Drink, like four weeks ago. I gave them. Sometimes I'll do that when I really like a company and I. I try something, I'm like, oh, this is gonna be a game changer. So I tried that. It's called Update Energy Drink. So really shameless plug. We have parazantine. It's pretty cool stuff.

But the tesofensine, it's a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It's a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, and it's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. So it's. That's that it. I was thinking about that for a second. It was super strong, so. And it's a stimulant. I'm not a big fan of stimulants. Especially if you have a metabolic issue where you need to.

I have cocaine in my fridge and break open the capsule and just snort it. Yeah, there you go.

Almost the same thing.

Okay, let's see. Let's. Let's do maybe. Okay, we're getting kind of long in the two, so let's go with one more, but let's pick a good one.

Somebody asked where we're getting our glasses.

We're getting our glasses. Raw optics is where I get mine. Where do you get yours?

These don't come from a very biohacky place. Prada.

Prada. At least you're styling. That's what I did with my first set of blue light blockers. I got a set of frames that I really liked and then had the lenses cut. This is back before the blue eye. Okay. Somebody says, okay. Electrolytes are electrolyte powders, safe to ingest if it's synthetic. Synthetic like potassium chloride, citrate, or other salts of macro minerals as opposed to bioavailable electrolytes. What I look for in electrolytes is a. Not the Gatoradey stuff. So I look at. I like it as clean as possible, just the minerals in it. I use three brands of electrolytes that I like. One is called Protect, which is made by this guy I like to support, Nick Norris. He's a Navy SEAL. He helps out a lot of other Navy SEALs. Got a whole foundation. I interviewed him on my podcast when I was in San Diego. And it's like a liquid electrolyte in really good flavors, like lemon and watermelon. That one's good. I like this company. It's all over the place right now called element, which is good. Element tea. But my favorite. And they've even used this. I interviewed a guy, didn't release the interview about this. They've used this electrolyte complex and done full blood trans or plasma transfusions in dogs and the dogs have functioned just fine by replacing all their plasma with this electrolyte solution.

No way.

It's harvested from phytoplankton bloom in the ocean and filters called Quinton. I don't know if you've heard of this stuff. Q U I N T O N. There's a hypertonic formula you take in the morning and isotonic in the evening. I think of all the electrolyte formulas, it's damn expensive. But like, if you want the best of the best minerals and electrolytes, that Quinton stuff is amazing. You can buy it in bulk. Comes in a big glass bottle. I think Water and Wellness sells it. But so, so if you, if you go to my pantry right now, I got Protect, I got Element and I got Quinton and for me, those are the top three electrolytes besides just Celtic salt or Kalima salt or whatever salt I happen to travel with.

Yeah, I mean, I, I'll, you know, I defer that question to you because you're, you're just, you're a wealth of knowledge with everything that's out there in these products and so forth. But I personally, I did that now I fell off the bandwagon a little bit with it and I feel it. Which is a Soleil 1 water. Big fan of solar. I mean, huge fan of that. Yeah, a little lime.

And I used to do the Soleil salt chunks where you take it, you put in a glass bottle, you put it in the sunlight and you make like infrared light infused Soleil water.

Yeah, that's the best. And then some super, super, super high quality coconut water. And I, I'm, I, I don't go too crazy on, on that stuff, but as long as it's, it's clean company doing it the right way. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

You, you need, you need the electrolytes. Guys, like there's a. Yeah. Athletes, for example, like, we're super picky with our athletes. I mean, we're looking at their electrolytes and minerals. It's such a big mistake that, you know, especially you, you can see it in your workout. Sometimes your workout is like, man, I'm dying through this workout. Sometimes you'd be surprised. Or for example, for preventing lactic acid, some sodium bicarb, you know, so take some capsule sodium bicarb right before you work out and go in some, some brand new.

Brand new like, like baking soda pre workout taken in small doses, tapered over time leading up to. Which is a pain in the ass. But if you remember to do it, you just put a bunch of baking soda and water and kind of sip it leading up to your workout. The lactic acid buffering properties of that or sodium citrate are amazing. And the study just came out today was in tennis players showing awesome performance improvements with just cheap ass baking soda like arm and hammer aluminum free baking soda.

The study came out today.

Well, I mean it was released in the, in the journal strength conditioning research. Oh wow. Yeah, I mean I just saw it today. But it was, it was a November study. Yeah, the November study.

Wow, that's awesome.

So anyway, so. So it's not an electrolyte per se, but sodium citrate or sodium bicarbonate. What do you think, man? Should we bring this thing in for a. In for a landing?

I'm in the mood for some food, bro. We spoke a lot about food too.

I got, I got a scooter across Miami to go up. Sushi. Hey look you guys, we're going to put push this one out on the podcast so you can go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Dr. D. Dr. D R D E. So BenGreenfieldLife.com D R D E over there I'll put shownotes. We use a lot of big names and big titles, but I have a great team. They hunt all this stuff down. They put it in the show notes for you. So this will come out in a couple weeks. You guys can check it out. Dr. D, where's the best place for you to find you?

Biohacks B I O H A X and you could go to our Website, same thing, biohacks.com all right, cool.

Sweet. All right, here we go folks. Sushi time. Thanks for watching. Boom. We love you. Just imagine a hotel surrounded by nature, vineyards and gardens. This forest classified as a historical garden in a very special country. At a hotel located in the oldest demarcated wine region in the world. Imagine this place has a state of the art spot. 2,200 square meters, 10 treatment rooms, an indoor pool with underwater sound and chromotherapy. Imagine a kitchen team that brings to the table not just delicious food at this place, but values. Environmental sustainability and wellness and local sensitivity and global sensibility. Imagine being able to be bathed in luxury and being able to be local, to buy local and to eat local, not caged off as some fancy tourists. But as a part of the community and part of the terrar of the region. Well, that's exactly what you experience in Portugal at their Six Senses Luxury Retreat. And I'm going to be there for a special event that you can read up on@BenGreenfieldLife.com SixSenses it's called the Boundless Retreat and at BenGreenfieldLife.com SixSensenses you can see everything we're doing every day starts with a healthy farmhouse breakfast, morning movement session with me. You get access to three different 60 minute spa treatments that you can choose from throughout the day, indoor pool and vitality suites, meditation, sound healing, an alchemy bar with kokedama and yogurts and pickles and sprouts, workshops, retreat meals, all made from locally sourced organic produce, Q&As and sing along sessions with me. This is going to be an amazing, remarkable, once in a lifetime experience. You have four nights, full board accommodation in a deluxe room. They're at the facility and this thing, as you can imagine, is going to fill up fast. It's in Portugal at the Six Senses Retreat in Portugal. Again, all the details are@BenGreenfieldLife.com SixSenses and the dates are February 27th through March 3rd, 2023. February 27th through March 3rdrd, 2023. I hope to see you there. 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.