Testosterone Replacement Therapy, Hormone Testing 101, Spot-Reducing Fat Loss Cream, The Benjamin Button Longevity Cocktail & Much More With Adam Lamb of RenewLifeRX.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, our ideal person is the guy that's like, hey man, you're exercising regularly for the most part. You've taken care of yourself most of your life. Things you're paying attention, like, you know who Ben Greenfield is, like, they're paying attention, but they're still not getting the results. Those are the guys we hit home runs with. They know their body and it's just not adding up from a result standpoint. If you're eating pizza every day and drinking like two, two liters of Mountain Dew and sitting on the couch, you don't exercise. You're 50 pounds overweight, high blood pressure. You need Tony Robbins, not hormone thera.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and I am actually interviewing today's guest guest in a hotel room in Las Vegas. He's not in the hotel room. I am. He's on Skype. But I am here in Vegas because I was at the UFC fight 2:46 last night and got to bed, I think about 3:34am or so. And so I would imagine that my testosterone levels right now due to lack of sleep and having for me three, three cocktails, which is a lot for me because I'm like a one drink a night kind of guy. I probably have the testosterone levels of a nine year old girl at the time that Adam and I are actually chatting about of all things hormone optimization. So before I, before I let Adam pipe in, just real quick, I'll fill you in on who he is. So Adam is a guy who I ran into last year. I believe Carl Lenore from Superhuman Radio introduced us because he specializes in all things hormone optimization, particularly for males. But I believe that his company works a little bit with females as well. And he's just spent the last 10 years exploring the whole process of hormone optimization through things like stem cells, peptides, hormone replacement therapy, a whole lot more, and kind of systematized all of this in a hormone optimization clinic that works with people virtually called Renew liferx. He also has a book that we may get into today called Better Than the Binge, all about the social obligation of alcohol and how to get past that. And perhaps most importantly, he's a devoted husband of over 12 years. He has an 11 year old son, man after my heart, because I have a couple of those myself and a seven year old daughter. And so he's an entrepreneur, he's a family man, He Keeps himself in peak physical condition. And he's a real wealth of knowledge on hormone optimization. His name is Adam Lamb. And everything we talk about today, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com AdamLam you'll be able to access the show notes, learn more about his company, Renew Life rx, check out his book, et cetera. So, Adam, welcome to the show, man.

Hey, Ben, thanks for having me. Glad you had an exciting night there. Watching the fight.

Evan, it was a good fight, but actually, yeah, tell me, you know, something like that, like. Like one night of sleep deprivation or one night of more alcohol than one's used to consuming. Have you ever had a chance to do, like, pre and post tests or look at what actually happens to hormones after just a single incident like that?

Yeah. And so, you know, you know that our hormones kind of, kind of go up and down. There's like this system right, throughout the day, you know, with sleep and things like that activity. And, you know, you've covered it in a lot of youryour show. And actually, I think even your most recent podcast, you talked about natural testosterone, where, you know, when folks approach us and we. And they kind of ask about the natural things that they can do. And, you know, number one is being active, right? Good activity, especially using your legs. Number two is healthy nutrition, which would, you know, alcohol can lower testosterone, things like that, you know, and on the other side, good hydration and proper nutrients and sleep. Right? And also sexual activity, like, regular sexual activity is good. The one thing I'd be curious about in your situation is a part of me, like, I love fighting, and I used to be in the fighting space, actually. I work with a ton of retired UFC guys. But I also, you know, I don't like the violence and stuff like that. But there's. When you're watching that stuff, there's this, like, primal male part of you, like, instinct that's just fired up, you know what I mean? And I would be curious if testosterone levels would increase in those moments, right? Like, you're getting ready to get in a fight or you're, like, just being in that, like, environment. Whether it's adrenaline only or adrenaline testosterone. I'd be curious how that part of it.

Yeah. Well, aren't there some studies that show an increase in. I don't know if it's salivary testosterone or what, when guys are viewing pornography? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, for sure. It's actually, you know, blood pressure or heart rate increase and all that kind of stuff as well. Yeah, absolutely. That's why Sexual activity is good for because you're getting your body to practice the process of arousal, erection, and orgasm, basically, which also helps stimulate natural testosterone. So it's healthy.

Yeah, yeah. Except the whole neurotransmitter, not to mention the social implications of a regular pornographic habit. That's probably not the best way to get your testosterone levels up. And maybe responsible viewing of UFC fights could bump it up a little bit. But you're right, a lot of these things, like lifting with your legs, high intensity interval training, proper sleep, proper nutrient management, et cetera. A lot of the stuff I've covered on previous shows are, of course, the foundational principles. I just recently did a podcast that was 32 different ways to naturally increase testosterone. And, you know, folks can go listen to that. I'll put that in the show notes because I've kind of addressed thatthat side of things. But what I wanna get into with you is more of the science of hormone optimization from a laboratory standpoint, from a testosterone utilization standpoint, et cetera. So. Andand, by the way, before we jump into that, do you work with women as well as men with Renew Life?

Oh, yeah, we have hundreds of women that work.

I've got some questions for you about that too.

Yeah, no, I'm excited toto answer.

Okay, cool. Soso, first of all, in terms of quantifying, obviously, I would imagine step one is to actually figure out what's going on with your hormones if you were gonna test. And some of these questions, I realized will rabbit hole a little bit. But we have time. So what exactly besides just looking at testosterone, are you testing and tracking when someone comes in and they just want to know how their endocrine system is functioning, they're concerned about libido, energy levels, et cetera?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I'll dive into, like, specifically kind of our. We have like a phase one test really is like, you know, certain. We'll take what we do almost with everybody. We have a different one for male and female, obviously. And then if there's red flags or concern on something, then we have like this phase two where we dive deeper. Right. It's like, you don't have to go to the nth degree with every single person if they don't even have symptoms that potentially or in that space. So part of the process, before I go into the blood work, part of it is really having a story about, you know, what's going on in your life, what are your symptoms and things like that, because then we that that kind of goes into those notes for the physicians to review as the, you know, when the results come back as well. But we've kind of over the course of time, yeah, we've, we've replaced that. We've, you know, kicked certain panels out and added new things and we don't have like a 17 page every like just some of that stuff. The reason being is it's costly. Number one. Right. Like if you have like we still, we take care of some of these crazy unique folks that people just haven't been able to help. We're like their fourth place. And sometimes it's just because we have the experience. We've worked with thousands and thousands of people over the course of, you know, a decade that we have the data. So on one side too, I should say, you know, we're kind of a technology company as well. So a lot of the reason why we do stuff is because we can look at the data and see how it comes out. So going into like men, we check a CBC with differential platelet metabolic panel, lipid panel with cholesterol, obviously HDL, DHEA, total testosterone, TSH, IGF1, FSH, LH, PSA, estradiol and SHBG. So that's kind of the phase one check. Unless there's through conversation we notice that there might be a couple things we want to add. Whether we're diving into the thyroid a bit more or we're diving into other things.

Okay, give me a 30 second overview for each of those parameters on why you chose those specifically for a hormone panel. And also not, not to complexify this question too much, there were a couple things I didn't hear that I would have expected to like free testosterone. And I don't think you said estrogens, did you?

No. And when I said total testosterone, I thought he's gonna ask about free testosterone when I said estrogen.

Alright, so fill me in on each of those and why you test them and why you don't test those two that I mentioned.

Yeah, for sure. And so going through the CBC piece is, you know, just standard health. Right. We want to make sure you're healthy. We want to, you know, going into a lot of folks we work with, I should say 50% are new people. Right. They're, they're not in the fitness space. They're like, man, I just want to feel better. I want to feel more confident. I want to have more, you know, excitement in my life. I want to be more playful with my wife. Those are our favorite kind of clients because they're not trying to achieve some kind of physical goal, which you and I both, you know, from the bodybuilding space, is something that's somewhat obnoxious and also fleeting. Right. You just, you never really get to happy. But so we overall want to make sure they're healthy. Going into the cbc, just giving baseline, like, where's our hemoglobin, hematocrit, red blood cell and those kind of things prior to treatment, and then with the metabolic panel as well, and then lipids, cholesterol, it's another thing, like healthier rule number one at our clinic is you got to be healthy first. Number two is we're going to get you feeling better. Because if, you know, we'll talk about that a little bit later with testosterone and cardiac disease, those kind of things that. But if you're responsible, that's just not really an issue. Going into DHEA too is something we've seen over time is a lot of our clients too are like high stress, high functioning, you know, guys like you that are bazillion miles an hour, planes every other day type thing. And we just noticed that depletion and DHEA and that when we restore that or actually put it in optimal ranges, they sleep better and they feel less stressed.

I want to interrupt you about DHEA real quick because I've actually, from what I understand, the DHEA is something that if you replace that alone, like in one of the podcasts that I did, the one at the A4M, I talked about missing nutrients that would be a good idea to address foundationally before you actually begin on something like testosterone replacement therapy. It's creatine, boron, vitamin D, magnesium, magnesium. And DHEA was one of those as well. But do you find in some folks that something as simple as restoring DHEA, like, you know, whatever, 25, 50 milligrams DHEA a day, is something that often reduces the need for actually using testosterone.

It's a good question. I'll say yes and no. And I'll say yes because I think of somebody who, I guarantee we know very famous popular marketing guy who had, he kind of reached out and was just like, something's off. And he's like 51, 52. So like in our head we're like testosterone. But he didn't want to go that route. And we just did some. We just recommended a good quality DHEA product to take prior a couple hours before bed. And it helped his kind of circadian rhythm. And his, his biggest concern is he wasn't like wanting to get out of bed this is like a motivational guy who, that, that's like what he lives and breathes and he found like he kind of lost it and that helped restore and it took a couple weeks, but that's all that we did. And he said he felt like he was back. Now we know popping him on some testosterone or something like that and doing, going through the full blood test, it was just like a recommendation, hey, try DHEA before bed, see if it self regulates. And that helped him. But if your testosterone is low and you have all the symptoms of low testosterone, we want to treat symptoms over just blood levels. And we'll talk about that a little bit too in this. But at the end of the day, if you're, you don't feel good. What's the, what's the whole purpose of.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so in addition to dhea, what were some of the other ones that you were talking about that you're looking at from a, from a lab test standpoint for your basic intake?

Yeah. So with total testosterone. So total testosterone has always given us a good vision of like the state of your body basically, like where your body's at from a testosterone standpoint. Free test. It's not as important when you're looking at shbg. And we'll talk about those, because what I want to do with you is I'll go through kind of these reference ranges that tell you kind of like where we think the priority is and what you should be testing. And then so the TSH is another one, the thyroid stimulating hormone, just to see like if it's buried or if it's higher than normal. We know there's an issue. We need to dive deeper if there's not. We're of the belief that thyroid medication is the number one kind of abused slash overly prescribed hormone medication in this country. Like, everybody's got a thyroid issue. The reality is not everybody has a thyroid issue. They just, you know, it fluctuates. They may just have some other issues that are, they think have to do with their thyroid. And so that's something that we, we test. But it may look deeper into like the T, you know, T3, T4 free and in some of those different ranges. But it's pretty rare that we have to do that. And a lot of times we actually have people end up coming off once their testosterone is optimized, they end up coming off their thyroid medication because the reason they took the thyroid is they wanted what the testosterone actually gives them. So it's an interesting thing. And it was Like I said, this is all morphed over time of experience and collecting data and all this kind of stuff based on how we do it to get that best outcome. Right. The next one I think super important, not a lot of people look at is IGF1. And so we, we look at that with everybody and that'll tell a lot about sleep, stress and then, you know, for folks that are into recovery and you know, things like that from muscle building or strength and those kind of things, or endurance and stuff like that, that helps because our IGF1 levels decrease significantly as we get older. But also a lot of lifestyle things have to do with it. The other part of checking the IGF one is it can throw a red flag up potentially for a pituitary issue that could be the cause of all of this stuff. Right.

Meaning if IGF1 is super low, it could indicate pituitary dysfunction that would affect overall testosterone production.

Or super high. Yeah, I mean, we've had a few folks that have come through and they're just, you know, they're up in the 300s, 400, and they shouldn't be because they're not. If they're taking, you know, a decent amount of growth hormone, they would be, but they're not. And so that's a kind of a concern. And we'll advise that they go see an endocrinologist and get a MRI of the brain. We've had, I don't know, maybe half a dozen folks come through it never thankfully ever had anyone that had like cancer. But we've had people that have had tumors that were non cancer on there that we discovered they never would have known of. Right.

I've been doing interviews with people about testosterone for a long time. And one of the first guys I interviewed that was actually his issue was he had a pituitary tumor, it turned out, which of course is typically not the cause of low testosterone, but it certainly can be something to look at. I didn't realize that IGF1 could be a measure for a correlate or that.

Yeah, just it's one of those things that you test something for multiple reasons and then. But if we see something like a 350, 400 or they're, you know, obviously we get people that are, they're doing stuff on their own that they're not telling us about. We're like, what's up with that? You know, and then we hope they come clean because we kind of. Or we scare them with the, hey, there could be a pituitary issue and we want you to go see an endocrinologist and locally and we'll find, you know, then they're like, well, I'm taking growth hormone that I get from my body.

Yeah.

And then it's like, okay, right. And so it's, it allows us to help just see the state of them because folks that don't sleep real well every single time, people that we can look and they're in the low one hundreds and even dipping below 100, they all have sleep issues. I mean, you take a sleep apnea person who's not and look at their IGF1 levels compared to someone who's like, oh yeah, I sleep great, man, eight hours solid, never wake up, those, those people are always higher. And so we see that from a data collection standpoint that IGF1, the IGF1 has a lot to do with recovery and things like that as well. So if you're always sore, you're not recovering, you're always tired and you're not getting good sleep and your IGF one's like, it' sit's just all kind of hurting you at the same time. And that's just. We get a lot of that data out of just IGF1.

Yeah. That's why I know a lot of these growth hormone releasing peptides or growth hormone precursors, they can often help people asleep as well when they use those prior to sleep. So it kind of goes both ways.

Absolutely. Oh, for sure they do. And then the next thing we look at this is for men is FSH and lh. So follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone. And part of the reason is it also kind of tells the story of like the function are those function because usually if they're functioning healthy and properly, your natural testosterone's good. And that communication from the brain and testes is happening how it's supposed to, but sometimes it's way low and sometimes it's way high. And either way it's not a good thing. If the communication is like, if I give you directions and you still show up at the wrong place, or you just don't ask my son to do something like five times. That's the, I'm doing my job by telling him, but the message isn't working right and I'll probably use a lot of analogies. I apologize. My goal is always to dumb it down for a lot of folks to understand. But so with the LH and fsh, it gives us a good baseline too, because those levels just about always drop depending on the path of Testosterone therapy, you go on, but usually on there. So we know kind of where they were at because we also like to help people. Throughout the course of a year, we'll usually have folks come off and do kind of like a reset to show them that, hey, we can get you back to where you were prior to therapy. Because that's what people wonder. Do I have to be on this forever?

Right.

And the answer is typically no. But a guy that's 35 is gonna bounce back easier than the guy that's 65.

So. So you'll put someone on testosterone to get their levels up and then gradually take them back off the testosterone.

Not necessarily gradually. And we're just at the belief and just with anything like that just shouldn't be done always. We want to, we want to see what the body does. So just, I'll use me personally. So like October, I come off testosterone completely and do like a reset similar to post cycle therapy type thing. And we don't like to use that term. It's usually associated with like steroids abuse and bodybuilding, but it's very similar structure. And then after that doing labs about a week post, you know, reset and showing like that's, that's really where your natural levels are going to stay as opposed to somebody who might go on testosterone come off, whether it's financially or some other health issue happens and they have to come off and then they're kind of like in this low, you know, because the natural function is not shut down, but can. And it can be shut down but significantly hurt based on the exogenous testosterone that you're putting into your body. And so we just pay attention to the LH and FSH baseline for us to see where you were, you know, and because sometimes they come in and it's. They're at 0.4 LH and a 0.8 FSH that's low and that's. That we might be able to get your testosterone back up just by increasing LH and fsh. Maybe like a HCG or Clomid protocol or something like that.

Gotcha. Or of course for LH and fsh, a big part of that from a, almost a very similar, like an HPA axis standpoint would be things like stress, sleep, nutrient management, et cetera. Because the issue there would be the actual message from the brain getting delivered to the testes to produce testosterone not happening properly. And that's usually more of like a stress issue if it actually is impacting LH and FSH that dramatically. Right.

100% and what's funny is you would think in any client of ours you talk to would tell you that we talk and ask a lot about their life that they don't typically get when they go into their standard family practitioner. And because we understand that stress is massive, especially when it comes like, erectorial dysfunction, that things like that where they're like, you know, the medication doesn't work, or like all these other, my estrogen's too high or my estrogen is too low, or I'm not enough to stop. They want to blame the drug. But through conversation and lifestyle, like, man, they're stressed out. And, you know, it's like, if I put a gun to your head, I don't care how attracted you are to the opposite sex, you're not thinking about sex. Right. And internally, we have these fight or flight things going on. Sometimes we just. Just. It's part of our life and we don't realize it. And stress is so massive. I mean, to your point, with a lot of the symptoms that could be related to low testosterone, that's, you know, case in point. Why FSH and LH is another thing to look at through these testing.

And then what. What else after LH and FSH are you looking at?

Yeah, so PSA is one that's important. We want a good baseline. I don't. I can't recall, and obviously I don't see everybody's stuff or hear everybody from a patient standpoint. But we, we try to keep everybody under one. But we also want to know, you know, there's a guy came across recently. It was like a friend of a friend of mine. So I want his PSA came back really high, and had he not come through our process, he would have never discovered it. He had to go in and he had to get prostate exam and get things checked out and. And thank God he didn't have cancer or anything, but it was something to look into, right? Like if there was a situation, you know, maybe it would have been caught early instead of something later. And so. But anyway, it just gives us a good baseline because too much testosterone a lot of times can increase prostate to a bad spot, but also too much too high. LH and FSH we've seen convert over to higher folks with that just kind of come with really higher than normal. LH and FSH have higher prostate levels as well. So again, PSH for a baseline, we want to make sure testosterone therapy is not causing a negative impact in. In most cases, it actually lowers their psa.

Okay, got it. So Anything else in addition to the psa.

So next would be the estradiol. Estradiol. There's a good, again, a good baseline piece of where we want to be to, to just find out how their body may react from like an aromatization to testosterone and where they start. Because some guys come over, they're at 20, some guys come over, they're at 43. And finding out through lifestyle, diet, things like that, we stop doing total estrogens. And part of it is there's so much stuff that can affect your estrogen level that's not as important. I mean if you eat soy regularly, if you have. There's a guy, just quick story for listeners. A guy had almonds, was like his snack on his desk every day and his estrogen was like 300, which is super high for a guy. And we couldn't figure out why. And we just talked. And while he's talking to me, he's eating, I'm like, what are you eating? He's like, almonds. And I said, well, that's probably converting because legumes and things like that have been shown to convert to estrogen. He came off, he stopped eating almonds and he was eating a lot of almonds, for the record. And his estrogen went down under 100. That was the only thing changed.

Interesting. Well, I know estrogen is related to inflammation as well. And if the almonds were from a trail mixed, in many cases those things are coated with vegetable oils as well. So sometimes there's things coming in along with the nuts that may make an impact as well.

Yeah, for sure. And so it's just in everybody's body, you know, there's one thing too with this whole space that any absolute, the only absolute is that any absolute for anybody is wrong. Right. Like what works for you and works for me and works for the guy down the street can be different. Right. So everybody's body kind of, I think, utilizes certain things differently, absorbs things differently and can respond to things differently. And so we just really try to, we measure that throughout the process with our clients. Every two weeks we have follow up specific questions related on where we think they might be in the journey to get data to see if, you know, the physicians want to change dosing, increase something, take away something, add something, something like that. And most of the time, I think about 86% of the time we have it dialed in initially, which is good. And then the last thing, which is potentially the most important thing is sex. Hormone binding globin, shbg. That's something we've been super focused on, like hyper focused on for like the last, let's say four years. We started really looking into it. Two years we've kind of like been hyper focused on that because we've seen that there's for like the quote unquote happy like feeling of somebody on testosterone or not on testosterone. Really is this correlation of a ratio for SHBG to testosterone and with guys that have high shbg, low SHBG either or can have this low testosterone symptom, and it just has to do with the ratio of the total testosterone and shbg, We've just found that whether it's high and they may require a higher dose of testosterone to get that down as opposed to trying to press it down, or if it's low, trying to bring it up first before we put them on therapy, it just works.

Well in many cases, from what I've seen in folks that I've tested and worked with, high sex hormone binding globulin is also something that seems to pop up over and over again on a high fat, low carb diet. And I've seen some evidence that it may be because sex hormone binding globulin also somehow is involved with the transportation of fats through the bloodstream or the interaction with fatty acid metabolism. And sometimes you might see artificially elevated values of SHBG in a state of a high fat, low carb diet. Have you run across anything like that?

Not specifically. You know, there was a lot of talk too that like obesity was tied to high shbg. And you know, and some of the guys that we've seen with actually the total contrary to with high SHBG are like super fit guys. And what we've seen is that a lot of the guys that we'll see, let's say they're 40 and their testosterone's 700. Right. So anyone else usually on the planet would say, oh man, you're fine, 700, that's great. But their SHBGs did 130. And what we found is that usually through conversation that those guys have always been muscular, athletic. When you think of 18 year old LeBron James, that dude didn't have 900 testosterone, it was like 1800. And so we've been doing a lot of testing and this is something we can talk about too with younger folks, like athletes to kind of show them like, hey man, when you were 22, beast, your testosterone's at 17. Because you know, you and I can look at different athletes and people talk about oh, he's got good genes. Well, yeah, it's his. His testosterone function and recovery and growth hormone, all those things. Those are the. Those are what we're talking about when it comes to, like, just absolute beast athletes. You know, I think when I was younger, some of these guys I knew that would, like, these dudes ate pizza and drink beer, and they looked like bodybuilders, like, two weeks out, and they just had good genetics. But a lot of it was, we're not testing testosterone in 18, 19, 20. My son. I'll definitely do that because I understand that difference and something. Actually, you mentioned Carl Lenore earlier, that Carl and I have talked about a lot. So we're working with some young athletes to do their blood work with their healthy. No symptoms, feel amazing. Right. Crushing goals and things like that, to see what that looked like then. So 10 years from now, if they don't feel like that, they can compare, right. And have an understanding of what might have happened. Whether it's just natural testosterone, you know, going lower, or, you know, with fighters, for example, like UFC fighters, these guys, after you get so many concussions, you know, TBIs, things like that, you're gonna. It's gonna affect your endocrine system, which can ultimately lower your testosterone. So you used to be a fighter at 1500 testosterone. Now you're at 355 years later because you've been pounded in the head so many times. And so stuff like that, we're looking into and testing because it's interesting for us, and we like the data.

Okay, got it. Now, are you running all these with blood measurements, or are you using anything like saliva or urine?

That's a great question. We've always. And this is. I hate saying this, but we've always done it with the. The blood work. And it's like a trust thing. Like, we just. We trust that data. I think that we would be open to doing some different urine stuff or different saliva stuff, but we would probably contract that to somebody who's really experienced in there. Like, we stay in our lane. If there's something that we're not real good at, we're not going to, like, try to be good at it with Dr. Google or something like that. And so everybody has the confidence that, like, I have no problem saying, I don't know. And so we've just. Our history in past, what we've done with folks has always been through blood work, and we trust that outcome because it's been very successful. And so there's some great stuff, I think with saliva and urine and doing different kind of testing to dive deeper, especially in certain things.

Yeah, I'm certainly a fan of the Dutch complete panel just because it can give you a patterning throughout the entire day of how the endocrine system is fluctuating, you know, between cortisol, testosterone, et cetera, versus that single snapshot from blood, which is, you know, I think one of the issues with blood testing is you're only seeing one measurement during the day versus the natural variations that should be occurring during the day. So is that something that you ever consider, like if you test someone and let's say they're, you know, whatever their morning blood levels of cortisol are elevated, which is the case naturally in many people, but perhaps cortisol is extremely low the rest of the day after that morning rise. I mean, how is it that you wouldn't want to look at some of those variations throughout the day?

Yeah, and I think it's. You're totally right. A lot of the. We work with a lot of trainers that refer clients over, and one in particular has everybody do the Dutch test first and then ultimately they come over to us because it's likely a testosterone deficiency. But when, you know, like I said, these are our surface kind of tests. And then if we have to go deeper, we refer out, you know, like I said, we kind of. We're not experts at certain parts of certain areas, or not experts, I should say, in everything we think we're really good at some of the stuff that we do. But the biggest concern with that is, you know, we have these baselines, we have everybody do fasted testing, they do it in the morning, and that's the items that we look at. And then if we need to, throughout treatment to test other things, we definitely send them out. You know, there's folks we get blood work on every 30 days, every 90 days, and just about everybody goes every six months.

Every six months would be like gold standard for the minimum amount of time between tests or the maximum amount of time between tests.

Yeah. And even, you know, there's folks who've worked with us for five, six, seven years and like they're, they're self experts, you know, which we've empowered them to like, really understand their health, what works in. We still have them go every, you know, six months to make sure, because something else can occur in your life. And if I think of it like, if I can get folks to check their blood work regularly, think of how much, you know, disease or other issues that we could potentially identify early for them, that may have nothing to do with hormone therapy, but for me it's like doing the right thing and doing a good thing by making them get their blood work done regularly.

Yeah. And are you testing anything different in women versus men? Like everything you just described is that typical male panel. And would that look different if you were testing a female?

Yeah. So with women, we'll look at things like pregnenolone, progesterone. We do look at total estrogens with women, not estradiol as much as. But other than those that I just listed, it's pretty similar as far as that. What our experience is, and I know a lot of people won't like this statement, is we just seen that women are typically taking everything under the sun except for testosterone. We've just seen testosterone be the. I couldn't tell you, Ben, how many times we have women that are taking 5, 9, 12 things in, they still feel like crap, they still have all the symptoms we take them off at, usually have them do like a 30 day, just like clean the body out, detox, and just do like a low dose testosterone cream. And they're like, oh, this is what I've wanted for nine years.

Really? So you have women do a low dose testosterone cream.

That's usually the first place we go.

Even more than progesterone, huh?

Oh, yeah, without a doubt.

Interesting.

Yeah. And one of the things we've actually seen too, which is very unique with women, because here's the deal. If you're, if you're like guys, we don't work with guys under 30. You know, maybe some unique rare cases we've had, guys have had certain issues that testosterone is just gonna, it's gonna help them. Most of the guys under 30 are usually like, want to be bodybuilders and their goals don't line up with like our ideal kind of client goals, right. Of people just want to feel great, be healthier, feel inspired. But with women, I mean, women after having a baby can have just a total wreck of their hormones, right? And so we've seen where we've had younger women come aboard. Testosterone's in the tank, estrogens in the tank, progesterone's in the tank, all these things. And their body's still in like baby making years, right? Baby making, maybe not baby making mode, but baby making years. And so we found that instead of giving them different patches and creams and pills and all this other stuff that just doing testosterone, it's kind of like this authoritative hormone that once it's elevated to optimal levels, the estrogen falls back into place, the progesterone falls back into place. Their cycle is now normal again. And then if they're younger, the great thing is we can bring them off testosterone and, and their body just that it's like the clock, the timepiece keeps ticking. And you know, obviously if we, if we had them at a 50, testosterone now they're down at a 40, but before they're at a 4. But they're doing it naturally. And that we've seen that happen with women like come back quote unquote. With guys, it's tough unless it's an LHFSH situation. But a lot of times women too. One of the biggest things with menopause is just optimizing their testosterone eliminates the symptoms of the hot flashes, the night sweats, the irritability, the vaginal dryness, all that kind of stuff, just testosterone cream. And if you put someone on five things, especially women like men, there's certain things that we know what needs to be there. Kind of like you can't just have a one legged stool. But with women we always just start with one thing. Usually testosterone, or maybe it's thyroid, but typically it's testosterone. And then as you know, depending on the feedback, sometimes they're great and it's problem solved. Why put them on more drugs, right? But other times, you know, we may add some things as we go so that we have those reference points of like, oh, hey, I'm having trouble sleeping now, or hey, these hot flashes came back. All right, well let's pull out whether it's DHEA or whatever it might be and just really measure that stuff as we go. But yeah, testosterone's like the main number one thing that we do with women. Low dose.

And when you say low dose, how much is that?

So when you think of like a average male testosterone is like a 200 milligram. A female is maybe 2.5 to be 4 milligrams. I can think of off the top of my head, a client who is like retired bodybuilder. Like she's abused her body with tons of drugs. But she's like in her 50s now and so she needs a little bit of a higher dose. She might be like a 5 milligram, right? Or maybe even as high as like a 7.5 or something like that. So it varies but like, you know, Susie down the road, 125 pounds, just kind of going through menopause, like Maybe even a 2.5 milligram cream. Will do it.

Okay, now that kind of leads me to a question I wanted to ask you about. And that would be, let's say you ultimately determine that testosterone, testosterone does need to be replaced in a man or woman who you test. You mentioned the cream and I'm curious because there are a lot of different methods out there from injections to pellets to gels to creams. What are your guys go to's as far as the actual method of delivery? If you find that testosterone is low, you've already addressed foundational principles like nutrition, sleep, stress, the type of exercise someone is doing, et cetera, is still low. So at that point, what would be the form of delivery that you would use?

Yeah, so I would say about 80%. And I'll just say men, women. There might be two women that do very small dose injection. It has to do with some, they're having transdermal absorption issues. Like two of hundreds of women that we work with, we like the cream, But I'd say 80% of the of our male patients, for example, do cream. Testosterone cream. Two reasons. A, we believe it's the healthiest, safest, most effective way. B, a lot of our guys are just, they're not put, they're like, I'm not putting a needle in. You know, like they're not comfortable. You know, guys like you and I who are experimental and we've been in this space a long time, like it's not scary to have a needle, but most people are like, they shake, you know what I mean? The thought of that, you know, and that's a lot of the reason why they don't pursue testosterone, because they think they have to give, go to the doctor, get injections every week or they have to take like Androgel something. Like a lot of the gels just aren't very great. And so we use compounded testosterone cream. And the cool part too is you can adjust the dosing, right? We have guys that are doing three in the morning, three at night, or two in the morning, three at night. Two and two is probably the average. Maybe it's one and one. And a lot of it has to do with like, where do they feel the best? Because like, for me, I feel like in the 800s is probably my number, like 850. If I were to just pick one where I feel the best. Higher than that, I'm a little like libido distracted. I'm probably a little bit more intense, you know, and under that I'm kind of a little more, ugh, right but some guys, they need to be at a thousand or eleven hundred or twelve. What in the world. Some guys, if they get up to 800, they feel anxious and you know that they're. They're finding themselves distracted or something like that. So finding that the cream allows us to help adjust dosing just based on that feedback loop that we get from them. And then injections will do, you know, usually do like a split dose during the week of injections. The once a week is not ideal.

But you're not, you're not combining injections with a cream. You're doing one or the other.

Yeah, we've done a couple hybrid where you'll do like, let's say a half CC of testosterone, for example, and do like a one pump at night type thing. We've had some folks do that or a lot of folks that travel and they're not comfortable taking, you know, they're going overseas regularly or they don't want to travel with the injection. So we'll have like a travel cream type thing that we'll have them do that helps keep those levels optimized. But we really, like, the cream, really gets that natural testosterone pulse. And that's where we see that being most effective.

You mean the natural testosterone pulse in. That testosterone is pulsing a couple of times a day, for example, in the morning and in the evening. So when someone's using a cream, they're using a cream like applied to the, I would imagine the testicles or an area of high blood flow in the morning and then also in the evening. Evening, yeah.

And so we'll talk about the scrotal application in a second. But the. You're exactly right. So that night and morning mimicking to the point where if you do it and you know, when you think about when you're breaking down this dose as opposed to like 100 milligram injection. Right. Like twice a week, and you're breaking this dose to like a 14 milligram injection. Right. Like twice a week or twice a day or whatever. The, the, you're almost sneaking it into the body and it's a bioidentical cream. So the body, there's just less, less disruption, less change, as opposed to, you know, you take a guy that's doing a 1cc injection every two weeks, the side effects are not even worth being on testosterone. Right. And so.

And it in no way matches the natural fluctuations of testosterone, like doing a huge bolus at 1 point versus doing smaller doses morning and evening on a more frequent basis.

So bad. And what we'll see too, is that guy might feel like Superman for five days and then a little bit normal and then feels like crap again. But his hemoglobin, hematocrit, they're all shooting up. Red blood cell count. LH and FSH are shutting down because you know that there's so much testosterone coming at one time. So they're getting all the negative piece and, like, kind of some of the positive. But with the. With we have guys that do testosterone cream that their LH and FSH don't even go down. They stay there because it's the proper dose. That's kind of with that natural testosterone pulse. And so they don't need more drugs, they need less drug.

And so that would also be a situation which you would be less likely to blunt the body's natural production of testosterone when you're using testosterone therapy if you're using something like a cream. Okay. And you said that the best place to apply the cream would be scrotally. No.

And so what's what. I know that that's been super popular. We actually have folks do the back of the knee or forearm or I personally do shoulders. The absorption good, but everybody's skin's different body weight. You know, like, if you're. If you have a higher fat content, the absorption can be a little bit different. So we never. I know that there's guys that do it. We just. That's not our path. Because I know that it works well. Putting it on the back of my knee or on my forearm or on my shoulder or something like that. So I just think of it like the last place in my body I want there to be a problem is down there, because everything works really great. And I know that putting the cream on my shoulders, for example, works really great, too. And so we don't necessarily advise that, but I know that we have guys that do do it. But I'll tell you, recently I had a guy who's been a client for a couple years. He's always been a forearm guy, and he started doing it scrotally, and then he actually. His estradiol went up strangely, after he'd been doing that for about 90 days. Ish. Because I remember his time for his refill, and he mentioned that. And through trying to figure out what's going on, why this sudden change. I mean, we're going. Like we talked about earlier, we're going through diet, sleep pattern, nutrition. Like, are you eating something different? And then I don't know why it took to the end of the conversation but he's like, oh, I switched to scrotal. And so we switched them back and the symptoms went away. Not that that's going to happen to everybody, right. But we just kind of mentioned that whether it's an absorption, he's absorbing more and it's peaking higher. Those kind of things we wouldn't know without doing significant testing into it. We just know from our patients we've been working with for so many years doing it this way. It's worked well. So we usually just say forearm, shoulder, back of the knee. But it's each their own. I personally like guy to guy. I've never done it, and I don't know that I would, but I guess I try it.

And for women, is it still vaginally?

No, same thing, back a knee, forearm. With women, our biggest challenge sometimes is that just making sure that their bodies, they all use lotion and things like that. You want to, you know, make sure absorption is good or the area's clean and dry for doing it. But, yeah, I've never ever, any of our physicians ever had them put it on vaginally. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying we've never done it because we've never really had to. Right. We get the results without doing that.

One concern that people might have because this recently. Two different research articles recently came out. One in the Journal of the American Medical association, and I think the other one was the Annals of Internal Medicine, where they were addressing testosterone replacement therapy and talking about an increase in cardiovascular events or an increase in inflammation or some other concerns from a medical standpoint. Did you see either of those papers?

No, but I heard about them, actually. Some from mutual friends of you and I. But there's, you know, with some of those studies we look into, I think there's got to be a lot of responsibility in testosterone therapy. It's like handling a gun, right? You need to understand guns aren't bad, but you have to understand the gun before you handle it. It's like driving, right? You can't just get behind a car because you like cars. You need to understand how the car works. And the same thing with testosterone therapy, anything. You can drown in water, but you also need water to survive, right? And so we really do a good job, in my opinion, of making sure, like I said earlier when we first got this, that you have to be healthy first before testosterone therapy. Because if you're eating pizza every day and drinking like 2, 2 liters of mountain Dew and sitting on the couch, you don't exercise. You're 50 pounds overweight, high blood pressure, cholesterol's through the roof. You need Tony Robbins, not hormone therapy. You got to get some things together first. To your point, the natural health aspects of getting active, getting your body, getting the right nutrients in your body, and doing that first. And I think what the problem is, a lot of times, like the situation of those studies, they're not those folks that are getting testosterone. They're folks that don't have the best health situation or regular healthy lifestyle.

These are people that maybe have not adjusted their lifestyle, but that are using testosterone replacement therapy as a band aid. And what we'd have to see, actually, is a comparison between people who use testosterone replacement therapy and also have set up all those foundational principles from nutrition, low stress, sleep, et cetera, and those who simply are slapping it on and continue to sleep five hours a night and, you know, fly all over the world and eat a crappy diet, and they're just basically using testosterone to cover up some of those issues, that it's probably gonna be a different impact on heart health and PSA and, you knowand all the other things, you know, like inflammation that some folks will say testosterone replacement therapy will cause. It would be interesting to actually see what happens with healthy people who use something like this.

Yeah, and that's the first part. The second part, and like our panel of docs is of an agreement that, like, 90% of testosterone therapy is not done properly. And I mean, there's. And we see it because we have these guys that are on therapy, and they kind of find our clinic through one of our clients or something like that. I was thinking of a guy recently. He's getting 300 milligrams of testosterone every three weeks. If you do that, you're going to end up with some cardiovascular issues. And his blood work was a mess, and the guy's like, 36 years old. It shouldn't be because he's athletic, he's pretty health conscious. Our ideal person is the guy that's like, hey, man, you're exercising regularly for the most part. You've taken care of yourself most of your life. And athletic, you're eating the right things, you're paying attention. Like, you know who Ben Greenfield is? You know what a keto diet is, you know what intermittent fasting. Like, they're paying attention, but they're still not getting the results. Those are the guys we hit home runs with because they know their body, they know their health, they know the things that they're doing. And it's just not adding up from a result standpoint. Almost every time that case is, you know, it's a, it's a hormone issue. Right. But sometimes, you know, like these cardiovascular studies, like it could be somebody who's just not healthy and then adding testosterone to it isn't gonna make you healthier. Right. It's like buying books and not reading them. It's not gonna really do anything good for you except for take up space.

Now, now, could any of this have something to do with the actual form in which the testosterone is delivered or what's co administered with it? Because I know a lot of doctors are administering everything from like HCG to DHEA to other compounds that are delivered along with the testosterone. Do you think that's part of this at all as well? Like administering testosterone by itself versus things that you would normally have accompanied with the testosterone?

Yeah, for sure. There's so many variables in those studies and that's why we don't, you know, there's a big thing recently or probably in the last year about anti estrogen and things like that being the worst thing for you and stuff like that. And we're not of that belief. We also don't believe everybody should be on something. It's just a matter of what does your blood work tell us, what's your past health history tell us, what's your follow up lab work tell us based on where do we need to adjust, where do we need to add? Is there something we need to do? Is it HCG for six weeks every six months? Or maybe you need one anestrozole every 10 days, maybe you need two a week. I personally take a half milligram twice a week and I, you know, when I did my blood work.

You mean as an aromatase inhibitor to keep from excess estrogen?

Correct? Yeah. Taking it? Yep. And so if, if I went two weeks without it, I just don't, I'm moodier, I don't feel as good my overall, just my body. And that's some people, some people don't. And you know, then they'll, people bring up studies where well, hey, it showed, you know, bone density went down. Actually a scientist friend of mine, we were talking about that and he actually did the DEXA scan and his bone density didn't. But also in that study, were those people all on testosterone? No. Right. Which we know can help with bone density. And so like some of these studies, you know what I mean, like they're good, I think for referencing and paying attention to and sparking kind of like that research rabbit trail for yourself. But I think that just being going into hormone therapy, not aggressively, but monitored healthy people that know what they're doing. I think that's the best way to do it to avoid being one of those potential statistics.

Got it. Now, Renew Life Rx, are you guys using things other than hormone replacement? Like have you delved into peptides or stem cells or any of these other things that often are used kind of in that same type of anti aging cocktail?

Yeah, so we, we do do a lot with different like growth hormone releasing peptides at, you know, BPC 157, things like that for healing. We have a sister company here where I live in the Houston area called Regenerative Revival and we do regenerative medicine. So we do, you know, tissue derived allograph, stem cell treatment, you know, amniotic fluid, prp, those kind of things. They're separate entities but kind of all under the same philosophy of care type thing. But as far as in the, in the Renew Life Rx, the hormone optimization. Yeah, absolutely. I mean some of these peptides are just game changer, amazing. You know, that can help folks, but also making sure there's the right resource, the right supervision with them to get the best out of them and stay healthy too.

But to give an example of that, I would love for you to delve into because I know you guys have like these different stacks, like peptide stacks. There was one I saw on your website, like a fat loss peptide stack. What would be in something like that?

So I think, and I'll have to, I'm going off memory, but something like, you know, Tesamorelin with a, you know, there's a, the fat loss cream. And that cream really helps with localized fat and cellulite loss.

Okay.

So there's different stuff based on different goals. The, the usual focus is for us is like fat loss, lean muscle gain, recovery. You know, you work with guys that train like animals like you that their body's just not keeping up with it. Maybe there's IGF1 deficiencies, things of that nature. And so you know, those are all things that we look at when it comes into the peptide realm and recovery.

And I just pulled up this fat loss peptide stack on the Renew liferx website and it says that that's three things. An anti obesity drug injection that says it helps to immobilize fat cells, A CJC ipamorelin injection to stimulate growth hormone secretion to cause fat loss, and then this transdermal fat loss cream it says it's glycerrhetinic acid and aminophylline. Transdermal fat loss cream. What's an anti obesity drug? Because there is a peptide called AOD that I've heard of before is like an anti obesity peptide, but I've never really delved into it or ask anybody about it on a podcast.

Yeah. And so no, that, that is actually what it is. And, and that's where I apologize for. I'm more of the, the business structure guide. I let the smart science guys do their stuff as well. Right. But yeah, no, it is, it's the AOD injections or doing the AOD injections with the CJC 1295 ipamorelin and the fat cream, which we had a lot of really good results.

Yeah. I'd be curious to see if someone could lose weight on that. Like doingyou know, waking up in the morning, doing something like a fasted morning workout. So you're mobilizing fatty acids using something like this transdermal fat loss cream that apparently can almost like spot reduce fat in target areas and then doing like the growth hormone secretors at night like cjc, ipamorelin. Have you noted that with something like that people actually can accelerate fat loss significantly or are you guys just still kind of experimenting with it right now?

Yeah. So for me personally, I haven't done the aod. We've had everybody that's used that to my knowledge, and I'll have to pull up the data to look into that, apologize. I didn't have it prepared to give you that specific feedback. But for me, for example, I use, I'll use the fat cream in the morning. I get up, I put it on, I go grab the coffee, I turn on my infrared sauna and then I go sit in the sauna. You know, it's probably 15 minutes or so after I put the cream on and I notice for sure in my midsection personally. And then usually at night before bed, I do, I rotate between the CJC epamorelin before I go to bed and Tesla Marellin first thing in the morning. And, and I'll do fasted workouts. I do intermittent fasting, so I don't eat till noon. So like me personally, I know that journey as far as the results. But you know, and then the blood work and the kind of the, the lifestyle story that we get from the clients. But I know that it became kind of like you said, it's on our website, it became something that we talked about because we had a lot of results Good results with folks doing it.

Yeah. Thethe tessemorelin's interesting because that's a pretty potent fat loss, muscle gain type of peptide. And from what I understandand I've never done something like this myself, so I'd be curious to ask you, would you. If you were gonna do something like that, could you. Could you use Tessamorelin as a peptide in the morning for, like, a morning workout, for muscle gain and fat loss and then for the growth hormone secretion do during bed and the better sleep, then use cjc, ipamorelin in the evening and stack those three together.

Yeah. And we've had folks who actually, I think one of our physicians did that. And the IGF levels, IGF1 levels get kind of higher than necessary.

So you may be in too anabolic a state or have risk for, like, too much MTOR activation.

Yeah, for, like, our goals. Right. Like, for the goals of what we want to function as a clinic. That can. That can happen. Yeah. And so, you know, I always take everything back to me personally, like, I wouldn't do that. I could, you know, but I just. I don't. I just think a little bit less is more. We can, you know, we want to, like, get the best results with the least amount of, you know, drugs possible.

Okay, got it. Another one I saw on your website was the Benjamin Button longevity cocktail. What is that one?

Yeah. So we kind of hopped on the. That was more of, like an attention catcher, because I think you probably. There was, like. It was like, mainstream news, and that's why we hopped in on it. There was the conversation about growth hormone metformin and DHEA being this, like, you know, showing signs of reversing aging. But the study was only done in, like, nine people. But we kind of had that as a. We want to have that conversation. It's like, it's like, as a parent, you want to be the dad that has a conversation about sex with your kid, not the neighbor kid having the conversation, like what he learned from his older brother. And it was the same thing. Like, we kind of did that internally, and then obviously we put that article out externally because we want to have that conversation so people aren't going and making assumptions or poor health decisions or going down the wrong track of something that maybe wasn't studied as well as it could be.

And what was in that cocktail? The Benjamin Button cocktail?

Yeah, it was growth hormone, DHEA and metformin.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, I knowi know the study that you're talking about right now, II talked about that one on a podcast and mentioned that, you know, what I would like to see is perhaps using some more natural substances, like, you know, for example, colostrum instead of growth hormone. And, you know, maybe see something like some bitters or herbs or spices, like bear brine or vinegar or cinnamon. And then the third component was dha. You know, maybe leave that in there. But, you know, replace a couple of the more hefty pharmaceuticals or growth hormone with something a little more natural and see if you get similar results. But yeah, it is interesting that they pretty significantly reversed the epigenetic clock in that study by something like two and a half or three years, right?

Yeah, it's interesting and we'd like to see where that goes. And it's stuff that, you know, we're always looking into that. And I think actually how you and I first met was through Hector Lopez, who's a guy we work closely, and it's like we're. We're constantly looking in. You know, that's the backside conversations that are had with our team. And looking at, like, is this real? Is it? There wasn't a big enough study. How can we look into it? How can we quantify it? How could we figure out a safe, better way to look at that? We're always looking at those things. But nonetheless, it's a conversation that makes ABC and Fox News and whatever. So we have to be prepared to have that conversation so people aren't out there trying to misinterpret information that they saw on the news.

Yeah, yeah, Hector's an interesting guy. I actually had him on the podcast. We did a show about kind of like the dirty back end of nutrition supplement companies and how supplements are manufactured and the difference between CGMP and non CGMP and crazy ingredients you can find in supplements that aren't supposed to be in there. Like, we actually had a pretty interesting podcast a couple years ago, so I'll remember to put that one in the show notes for this episode again, which are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Adamlam I also wanted to ask you, Adam, about this idea of alcohol and why you wrote a whole book about overcoming the social obligation of alcohol. Obviously. Also, since I'm in Vegas, something that's top of mind because I think half the city is walking around with a giant cocktail cup with a curly straw sticking out of it.

Right. And. And so I think that, like, where you and I are kind of similar is, is I've been like a lifetime, you know, body hacker, biohacker, whatever you want to call it. And so I'm constantly like, where can I be better, right? And I'll try different things. And, you know, some stuff. I've tried the Carnivore diet. It doesn't work for me. I've tried the keto diet. It doesn't work for me. Like, clean eating works for me. And intermittent fasting. I don't eat till noon every day, and I stop at eight. Like, that just. I've done it for, like, five, four years now, and it. And it just works for me. And so the alcohol thing was. Alcohol was always a part of my life. My younger years. I used to bartend. The negative side. I had an alcoholic father, so it always kind of was, like, in the back of my mind, I saw, like, dad left. Dad wasn't around always about. Dad chose alcohol over me type thing. And so being a father myself, like, the most important thing in the world is my involvement in the lives of my kids. And so it was just always there. It's like that elephant in the room. And I'm a guy of, you know, gets up early in the morning, fasted, training, and I'm preaching and teaching about this stuff since, like, I was in high school. And so it didn't make sense that I drank regularly. And I drink too much in my 20s. Like, you know, like I said, bartending and nightclubs and, like, partying, doing that kind of stuff. I'd probably been to Vegas, like, where you're at now, and not seen Dave for a couple days. You know, like, just. Just living that lifestyle. But, you know, when I came to the time of when I quit drinking, it was. It was coming off of a summer. We lived in Michigan, lived in the lake where you just kind of get out in the boat and you're just kind of drinking because that's what everybody's doing. And I was like, man, I am so sick. I don't remember last day. I didn't have a drink. And so I. I was like, I'm gonna go 30 days. So I stopped drinking for 30 days. And I went to Vegas during that 30 days, actually, for the Olympia and some other stuff. And I was like, wow, I went through that and didn't drink. I'm gonna try another 30 days. So I went 60 and then 90, and I got to 90 days, and I was like, man, I'll never drink again. And that decision, like, I don't know, man, I was like, the weight was lifted off my back to just like, I don't need it. And it doesn't add up. And I had people telling me, like, I looked younger, and my mind was so much more clear. I was coming to. I was solving problems faster, and I was like, holy cow, I might be onto something. And then I reached out to. I don't know if you know what Tucker Max is. He's. He wrote. He has a book Fisher in hell. So he's a buddy of mine. I reached out, I was like, man, I want to write a book. Can you help me? He's like, well, I have a company that does it. At the time was called Book in the box. And I. Sorry, I don't remember what it's called. I just referred to someone over there too. But if you want to write a book, it's an incredible process. And so Tucker's team helped me write the book. Better than the binge overcoming. Because I didn't want to be the guy that's, like, sitting down with my friend that wants to have a beer and discussing. I was like, I want to just create a comfort area to have this conversation. If you think you have a bad relationship with alcohol, here's what I did to stop drinking. It just walks everybody through the process of removing it to kind of get around that social obligation. Because I had a lot of folks are like, man, I did good until I hang out, you know, get out with co workers and things like that. Everybody's got a drink, and I feel obligated, and then I don't feel as good, and I'm disappointed in myself for drinking, whatever it might be. And so I figured out a way, and I've coached a few hundred people through quitting alcohol, which has been kind of neat. I'm not anti alcohol. I actually buy wine for my wife because she doesn't know.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I've seen some evidence that, you know, small doses may actually, well, partially be a hormetic effect, be healing for the blood brain barrier. And of course, we see, you know, moderate or low to moderate alcohol consumption, a lot of the blue zones and, you know, protection against longevity and dementia and glutathatic drainage during sleep. Like, there' sthere's a lot of benefits. I think toto low to moderate consumption of alcohol. But I do think that, yeah, if it's becoming a fallback for you to decrease stress at the end of the day or getting to the point where you're at two to three drinks a night, you know, it is something that I think should be stepped back. But I personally drink just about 365 days a year, one serving of alcohol, and probably about once a month or so, you know, kind of like I did last night, I'll have two or three drinks, but it's pretty few and far between. And I think that concept of microdosing with alcohol, Alcohol is beneficial not only because some of the polyphenols and anthocyanins and flavanols that you could arguably also get from berries or something like that, but also because of that mild hormetic effect. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Just a little bit of radiation, a little bit of uva and uvb, a little bit of extreme cold and extreme heat.

I was talking about that at dinner last night. I was saying that when I used to drink regularly, I never got sick. I get sick more, you know, maybe once a year, something like that, since I quit drinking. But I also moved to a different. I went from Michigan to Texas. And there's just different allergies and stuff like that. But I think that, you know what I tell folks that are curious in that, like you just mentioned, like, having a drink 365 days a year, no problem. Like, your relationship with alcohol isn't bad, but some people, their relationship with alcohol is bad, but because socially, they have five other buddies that drink more than they do. They justify their three to five drinks because that guy's, you know, that guy's drunk, get divorced, get a dui. It's not me, so I don't have a problem, but maybe they do. Kind of the temperature gauge I always give folks is like, if you drink to intoxication, often you have a drinking problem. If you drink to intoxication, once in a blue moon, like, you know, you let things go, so, you know, no big deal. And if you never drink the intoxication, you definitely don't have a bad relationship with alcohol.

Yeah, yeah. I'm keeping my eyes quite a bit on some of these potential alcohol replacement cocktails. Like at the Boundless book launch party in New York City, for example, we had. We had 12 drinks on the cocktail menu. None had alcohol. They were all adaptogens, botanicals, nootropics, and. And, you know, everybody was drinking and felt absolutely amazing. You saw that feel of being at a cocktail party, but there was no alcohol in these things. And then there's. There's companies like, I think Kin is one popular one that's out there right now that's making these. These products, these drinks that are meant to simulate kind of like what alcohol would do. But they've got different effects like you know, one for nightlife, one for sleep, one for. Or like being at a cocktail party, whatever. But that one's called kin. And then I'm right now in the midst of looking into this new molecule called D13 butanediol. It's a ketone. It's a ketone ester that's bonded to beta hydroxybutyrate. But apparently, and I actually have some waiting for me at home when I get home, it gives you a buzz very similar to alcohol, but it's a ketone induced buzz that does not result in the toxin acetaldehyde formation. And so that, that's one that could be very interesting as well. Almost like a ketogenic non alcoholic drink. Thatthat I think they actually call it keto buzz. And I haven't tried it yet. But some of these alternatives to cocktails are pretty interesting too.

Yeah. And I'm not super familiar with them. I've become like a sparkling water snob oflike. I have a fridge in my garage. People just bring over weird, different, random. I got a bunch of different, you know, sparkling water with caffeine and it's naturally flavored with apple. Just all these wild different things. It's kind of been like a fun thing that friends will come over at our house or something and just bring some unique thing. But I was at a dinner last night. No, I didn't really know. I only knew one couple at the dinner. It was a friend of mine's birthday and I didn't know the rest of their friends, but they didn't know I didn't drink. We're about halfway through and just somehow through conversation he mentioned that at the book and we kind of talked about it. But the point was like they didn't realize I wasn't drinking with them and it wasn't intentionally. But you know, usually what I do is I have coffee which kind of just is a little bit uplifting, especially in the evening and with a meal. And like I have a Perrier and it's the guy poured it in a wine glass. I'm not trying to fit in intentionally. I've kind of passed that. But for people that are looking into it, they're fine. And I just have fun and have conversation and I'm outgoing guy anyway. So like I don't need the alcohol to open me up and you know, so I just, that's what led me to remove it and I write a book just to kind of create a safe place for someone to ask questions or you know, if it's something they're thinking about. Right?

Yeah, yeah. And I'm even careful if I'm having alcohol like, like here in Vegas. Last night I was drinking Mezcal with a little bit of soda water, lemon and a splash of bitters. Mezcal is like micro filtered soup. Super low in sugar and it's almost like a keto friendly alcohol. And so there's, you know, there's certain things I'll look for when it comes to what I choose when I am drinking to ensure I stay as healthy as possible and nonetheless still always pop the activated coconut charcoal once I, once I get back to the hotel room. So yeah, alcohol is going to be different for everybody. But I'm still a fan of microdosing responsibly. However, I do want to check out your book. I notice it's I think it's like free with unlimited Kindle subscription on Amazon right now. Well, cool. We've been going for a while, so there's so much more that I could delve into with you about growth hormone and peptides and some of those things that we could just rabbit hole on forever. But for now what I'm gonna do is a, I'm gonna put all the shownotes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Adam Lamb that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com AdamLam and then B, I know that you're offering everybody a 50% discount off the initial labs and initial consultation with Renew liferx and if folks want to do that, I'll put a link in the show notes or if you wind up on the Renew Life RX website, I'll just give you the code and it's Ben 50. Ben 50 that gets you 50% off all the labs that Adam and I were talking about in the beginning of this podcast and then an initial consultation with somebody from Renew Life Rx to go over your labs with you, make recommendations, et cetera. So it's actually a pretty good deal. So the code is BEN50 on that and anything else you want to throw in there?

Adam no, that's it. I hope that if there's anyone of your listeners that are just curious to pursue or have questions or they're not thrilled or with their current situation that you know, that just we could, we'd love to talk to them and just see if we can offer a better, safer treatment for them and if they have any questions, you know that we didn't do too much into the regenerative medicine side of stem cell treatment and things like that. We have a lot of folks, five, two people flying in tomorrow to get treated. That's why I'm here in the office today. And so we, yeah, anything, anything. Longevity and that kind of stuff. We'd love to have a conversation. They can reach out to me and I'd love make sure they let us know that they heard about us on your show.

All right, man. Well, thanks for coming on. And again, folks, shownotes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com AdamLam and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Adam Lamb signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.