The Great Olive Oil Hoax, Warrior vs. Worrier Gene, Maintaining Muscle During Endurance Exercise, The Ultimate Guide To Napping & More.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, the Great Olive Oil Hoax, Warrior Jeans versus Warrior Genes, Maintaining Muscle During Endurance Exercise, the Ultimate Guide to Napping, and much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Rachel, I feel free as a bird this morning.

Really? Why as a little bird?

Because I'm not wearing my pirate patch on my eye anymore.

Why on earth were you wearing a pirate patch?

I had a pirate patch on all day yesterday and the reason I had a pirate patch on was because something scratched me in the eye. At least I think this is what happened. My wife says I have seasonal allergies, but considering that I woke up this morning feeling fine and dandy, I don't think it's seasonal allergies. I think something scratched me in the eye while I was riding my dorky stand up elliptical bike around the neighborhood the other night. Because I woke up and my eye was swollen and it was watery and red and tearing and the only way I could function all day long was to put a. A pirate patch over the eye.

I love that you have a pirate patch just hanging around your house.

It's actually an eye patch. I just call it a pirate patch. It's not marketed as a pirate patch. It's just the eye patch from Walgreens Pharmacy. Anyways, though, I actually have a whole video of me wearing the eye patch because Hunter McIntyre and I recorded an episode of my other podcast, the one that's I guess, highly offensive or at least slightly offensive. It's called Obstacle Dominator and you can listen to and watch obstacle Dominator62. What you do is you go to ObstacularDominator.com, click on 62 and it's actually a very interesting episode. We spent an hour talking about how genetic testing influences supplement choice, fitness choice, what kind of workouts you're going to do, and kind of looked at Hunter because he's a freak of nature. He's the top ranked Spartan athlete on the planet. So we went over all his results, but I was wearing the pirate patch and drinking my usual Kombucha vodka Mix. And it's quite entertaining.

Were you feeling extra piratey?

Well, I do have a pirate joke for you. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

What did the pirate say on his 80th birthday?

What?

I'm matey.

That's a good one, man.

News flash issues.

Hear this noise, Rachel?

I can hear it. What is it?

I'm turning the hand crank on my desk because it's not the level I want. I have one of these hand crank desks that goes up and down. I opted to go for this instead of the push button because extra muscle. Yeah, I can get swole. I can get swole while I'm working. I also have this going right now. Listen. Do you hear that little beep?

Yes.

So I've got this peppermint oil diffuser and I can put it on intermittent mode where it will diffuse peppermint oil every 10 seconds, then turn off for 10 seconds.

I have so many questions about your diffuser. We need to put a link in the show notes to it.

We should. We'll put a link in the show notes or I'll do a story on it soon, perhaps. I've been giving away a lot of things on Snapchat, so maybe I'll give one away on Snapchat.

Brilliant.

Little bottle of essential oil. That's what I'll do. Okay, so if you're listening and go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat where in the past two days I've given away blue light blocking glasses, Aztec sea salt and a whole box of mushroom coffee. I'll give away an essential oil diffuser if you happen to be a Snapchat person. If not, you suck and you're missing out on an essential oil diffuser. But I've got the peppermint oil going on this one and I'm gonna put it on full on mode where it's gonna diffuse the whole time we're podcasting so that I basically have the cognitive power of someone really smart. I can't think of a superhero who has cognitive powers.

It hasn't kicked in yet then, has it?

No, it hasn't, apparently. We'll wait on that anyways, though. So speaking of cognitive powers, though, the portion of the show, of course, where we go over news flashes and the latest, greatest things that have come to light in the past week, and one thing a lot of people will swear by for cognitive performance because it can be used as a replacement for glucose in neural tissue, is this concept of ketones and ketosis. And there was a brand new study in cell metabolism that finally reported on the testing done by darpa, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research branch of the United States Army. So what happened here was, and this is something I talked briefly about in a podcast episode with Dr. Veach about ketone drinks. But we talked about this $10 million request that the United States army sent out to DARPA to have DARPA help develop an efficient food that soldiers could take into the battlefield. Dr. Veach, when I interviewed him, talked about how he was involved with this research and had developed what is called ketone esters, which are slightly different than what you typically find when it comes to like these ketone powders that you can buy on the market and mix into smoothies or a glass of water or whatever. These ketone esters are very expensive, very difficult and time consuming to make, but they have finally been able to test them and they did it in this new study. And I'll link to this study in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 357 ultimately, what they found was that when they took highly trained endurance athletes, it allowed them to clock up to an extra 400 meters distance to their workouts by switching their metabolism or their source of cellular energy from glucose to ketones. And it's very interesting because one of the other things that they found was that consuming the ketone esters caused a very, very low amount of lactic acid, which is a byproduct of glucose utilization by muscle cells, to be present in these athletes. And so not only were they able to exercise at a much higher intensity, but they were also able to be less sore post workout. So again, these things are very expensive, very hard to get your hands on right now compared to the more popular ketone salts that you can find in the market. But this is the first study.

So what are the differences really like the higher level differences between the esters and the salts?

We go into that a bit in the podcast if folks want to let's put a link in the show notes Rachel, because Dr. Veach and I geeked out on this a little bit. Ultimately, here's the story on this Ketone esters appear to be able to be utilized by the body a little bit more naturally than ketone salts. However, I do not agree with what Dr. Veach said in the podcast, which is that you would have to take copious amounts of salt at a very, very high level that could potentially damage the body to be able to get all the benefits that you could get out of, say, like a ketone ester. I think that these ketone salts that are out there that people can use and we'll talk about them actually a little bit later because I think we got a question from someone about hunting and hiking and how to maintain energy levels during long periods of time and also maintain muscle. We'll talk about that later on. But ultimately what this comes down to is if you want like the best of the best, you would have to get your hands on these ketone esters. They're not that available yet. But at the same time, they have finally tested them and they have been shown to be extremely efficacious when it comes to both altering fuel preference in the body and also enhancing, in this case, a 30 minute test. The cyclists in the study were able to cover an extra 400 meters, which is actually very, very significant. That is huge. That's like illegal performance enhancing drugs and then some.

It's exciting stuff.

Yes, we'll link to that in the show notes. And speaking of illegal performance enhancing drugs, let's talk about the Tour de France, shall.

Yes, let's talk about it.

So there was a very interesting article on Chris Froome, who won the Tour de France. And we've talked about Chris before. We've actually talked about him when we discussed nasal breathing. Chris is a guy who wears this thing called a turbine in his nose when he's competing. And it allows him to basically breathe through his nose and more heavily oxygenate the air. Because that's something that happens with deep nasal breathing. It's why using say like one of these breath. Right. I think it's called a breath. Right. Is that those nasal strips, Rachel, Am I right?

Breath, right? I'm not sure. Yeah, I've not heard of them.

They don't have those in Australia?

Not that I know of.

Just smear Vegemite all over the place.

They probably do. Someone's gonna comment, say, Rachel. Terrible.

Yeah. So he uses this thing called a turbine. But this particular article that I'll link to was more about his diet because, you know, speaking of ketos, I thought it was very interesting he commented. Or actually his wife, who they interviewed. I believe it was his wife. Yeah, his wife they interviewed. She says he's got such a sweet tooth. But he's found now that if he does cut back on the carbs, the weight does come down a lot easier than it does in the past. And cutting out foods like breakfast cereals and a lot of the wheat products and bread, but still eating the Right. Food. He is able to not feel hungry during the day. He's still lean, but his muscles look a lot more defined.

So he's not losing muscle.

It goes into how unlike many cyclists, he's kind of like sworn off starchy carbohydrates and he's now basically eating primarily organic fruit, organic vegetables and meat. So he's adopted a little bit more of this kind of like ketotic approach. He stepped up his fat intake, he's doing more eggs. And it's interesting how professional athletes are beginning to kind of tap into this concept as well. The, the winner of the Tour de France. Although I'm sure at some point I would let. What, what, what do you think the prediction to be like in the next year we'll find out there's some crazy performance enhancing drug because let's talk inevitably discover about these guys. There's something getting injected into the right butt cheek that we didn't know about that, that they weren't able to hunt down until later after the fact. But let's keep our fingers crossed that he's clean and it just comes down to either he's sneaking in these ketone esters that we. Maybe it's that, as the article says, goodbye carbs. So it's nice to see some, some athletes are swearing off carbohydrates and at least in a high amount from the deleterious sources like breakfast cereals and things like that. So read that article if you're a cyclist, if you're interested in how athletes are limiting carbohydrates and still succeeding. So speaking of fats, let's continue down this road. My segues are awesome.

Yeah, that peppermint always kicking in, isn't it?

The olive oil. The olive oil in your kitchen cupboard may be an imposter. And the headline of this article is most of us are blissfully ignorant about how much rancid olive oil that we use. And what the article goes into is how Congress assigned a job to the FDA to begin sampling imported olive oil to see whether it's adulterated or fraudulently labeled. And the idea here is that there's this long history of scandal in the olive oil world in which in many cases low quality olive oil that is rancid has been masquerading and labeled as extra virgin olive oil, when in fact it is not. In many cases, it's mixed with other vegetable oils and doesn't contain any of the antioxidants or the flavanols or the polyphenols or many of the other things that we tend to find in good.

Olive oil, we've all become so used to eating the low quality stuff that we can't tell the difference anymore.

Well, if you eat a, if you eat or if you drink, you almost can really eat. You can almost chew on a good olive oil. You'll find that it's bitter, that you get a lot of like tannin, like flavors in it. Very similar to drinking like a very good herbaceous wine, like a Chianti. And, and it messes with your taste buds in very cool ways. It's like an explosion of flavor in your mouth. But those flavors include things like bitterness and sourness and things that we're not used to tasting in olive oil. I'm actually a member of an olive oil club in which every quarter, three bottles of olive oil get shipped to my house. And when I compare it to what I see at the grocery store, there's little green flakes floating around in it. It's like little bit. Well, it's definitely non transparent, but it's cloudy, it's greenish, it's yellow. You pour it into a shot glass and I do this, I'll pour. When the very first bottle comes, I'll pour it into a shot glass and pass it around the table for my wife and kids and me to taste. Very similar again to wine. And you can pick out all these really interesting flavors. And a big part of this is, for example, polyphenols. They're very, very bitter, but they're very, very good for you. Right. This is a big, big part of the antioxidants that you get in olive oil. You get all these tastes that you don't get in an olive oil that you get from the grocery store. And they're stored in these glass bottles that are non see through, you know, non transparent bottles. That's the way olive oil should be. But this article goes into how we have no idea, especially here in the US what olive oil should really taste like.

Yeah.

Or even look like. Yeah.

And I'm curious, what is this is probably a dumb question, but I'm going to ask it. What is so wrong about the olive oil going rancid and us eating it?

That's such a dumb question. Basically, oxidized fats. So when you oxidize a fat and consume that fat, whether the fat has been oxidized from light exposure or storage problems or anything else, that fat has peroxides formed in it. And those can cause the buildup of free radicals in your body, which can lead to, among other things, DNA damage to increased risk for cancer and essentially something that's supposed to be good for you being bad for you when you consume it.

Yeah.

Plus it just tastes like crap versus a good, good olive oil.

Unless you used to it tasting like crap, then it tastes.

I think everybody should have a good olive oil and a good sea salt on the counter. And it doesn't have to be the same brand. Right. Like I'll use olive oils from Chile Spain. You know, I'll put a link in the show notes to this olive oil club that I'm a member of in case anybody wants to join this little little club where I get the three bottles sent to me. But I'll also have, you know, Black Hawaiian lava salt and Himalayan pink salt and Aztec rock salt and different forms of salt, different forms of olive oil around. And geez, when you I mean I'm not a great cook, but I can make anything taste pretty damn good once I throw in a little bit of olive oil and some good stuff.

Yeah, I agree.

Yep. So one last little mention of an interesting article for those of you who are planning on having a baby or hang around with babies or get exposed to babies at any given point during.

I got lots of babies around me at the moment. I got a new nephew. I got a new nephew in law. It's all happening.

I don't even know what a nephew in law is.

Well, he's not technically my biological nephew.

I'll do the math. Later, this article appeared in the New York Times and it talks about how we can stem obesity and having overweight kids by not only starting before birth, but also taking advantage of some of the things that research has shown recently to act on obesity. There's 23 different genes that are known to increase the risk of a child becoming obese, and many of them are triggered during infancy, during the time that a baby is inside mom and also shortly after a baby is born. A lot of the article is not rocket science. For example, when a woman consumes a lot of food as she's pregnant and sugar goes up in her bloodstream, that increases the chance that a child might be born with insulin resistance or increased risk of type 2 diabetes or increased risk for being obese or overweight.

So don't eat a lot of food.

Yeah, but there are other things. Like for example, things I didn't realize in this article. The father's weight is important. Apparently being heavy alters DNA in the father's sperm and that changes gene expression and gets passed down to the next generation. Meaning that if you're a dad and you're not taking care of your body and you're shooting little sperm around here and there, it turns out that that sperm is equipped to make fat people more than lean people, which I guess unless you're a Samoan, is probably not advantageous for your child's future.

It makes sense though.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Yeah. So another interesting one is that a child's preference for highly nutrit foods or like their palate, the development of their palate, the sophistication of their palate is actually influenced by whether or not their mom, when they're getting breastfed, eats a large variety of nutritious foods. Because many of those slightly bitter compounds, speaking of olive oil or sour compounds, are some of the things that we tend to get exposed to when say we're eating like wild plants and vegetables and a wide variety of everything from, from fish to grass fed beef to eggs to all these highly nutrient dense foods. A child will tend to have a higher preference for these more nutritious foods if the mother is eating them while she is breastfeeding.

So she can't eat a lot of food, but she has to eat a lot of different types of food, can't.

Eat a lot of sugar spiking food. That's the one that tends to, especially when a child is still in the womb, that you'd want to be very careful with. So interesting article. Lots of things to think about and of course it goes in like antibiotics and gut health and all the usuals. But I thought it was interesting. So if you dig babies, especially lean babies and you want to have more lean, mean babies in the world, you.

Want to have a fit baby, check it out.

So we'll link to this as well as all the other news flashes. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 357.

Listener q&a.

Hey Ben, it's Grant. I saw a Snapchat story from you the other day and it pertained to napping and your daily schedule that I saw that you said naturally you wake up about 20, 20 to 40, usually 20, 30 minute naps almost daily. And it's part of your ritual and I was curious as to how your body naturally goes 20 minutes, 20 to 40 minutes and wakes up by itself without an alarm and what it would mean if you go longer, say like two hours or four hour naps, three hours, and what that means something's wrong with your body or what that pertains to. So thanks. Love the podcast, love following you on Social media and keep up all the great content.

Rachel, do you nap?

I haven't mastered the art of napping yet. I nap, I fall asleep for two hours and then I ruin my sleep for the next night. So tell me what I can do when you nap.

You nap for two hours?

Yes. Isn't that terrible? I just can't. I have to set an alarm to wake up. But then often I'll sleep through that alarm.

Interesting. Well, we'll get into why it is that when you nap, depending on the timing of the nap and your sleep the night before, that you would would fall asleep for two hours when you nap. And by the way, actually, that reminds me, yesterday I did take a two hour nap because my eye was bothering me so much in the middle of the day. I took cbd. I took cannabidiol. You know the nature CBD that our company makes?

Yeah, I love it.

I took six of those, six 16 milligrams of cannabidiol, which is blended. Oh my God.

Don't try this at home, kids.

Yeah, with lunch I did this ashwagandha and lemon balm and magnesium. Took it and just crashed for two hours. And of course, I always pay the price later on when I'm working late into the night because I slept for two hours in the afternoon. But cannabidiol, if you do need to knock yourself out with a nap, will do the trick. So anyways, napping, it's really interesting. And if you listen in for the next little bit, you're gonna know everything you need to know about how to take smart naps. And you should consider taking them. So they've actually done electroencephalography measurements of people's brains and their brain waves and their brain activity when they nap versus when they do not nap. And they have found that a midday siesta, a midday nap, when timed properly, and I'll tell you how to time that properly, briefly, actually results in significantly increased EEG and brain activity. Better than exercise, better than caffeine when you take that nap. So you almost get an extra day. It's like a smart drug in a way. Tony Robbins, and I'm seeing Tony Robbins advertisements all over the place for his new documentary.

I've heard it's brilliant.

Yeah, yeah. I need to see it at some point. But he says not to nap. He says resist the nap urge by doing. I believe it's push ups is the thing that he recommends. And you certainly do get an increase in blood circulation. You get an increased. Are called catecholamines. When you do, for example, exercise or slapping yourself in the face or caffeine or anything else as a replacement for a nap. But you don't get this increase in alpha brainwave activity and EEG activity compared to what you get with the true neural boost of a nap. So there's something to be said for napping. And when it comes to why that is, I think it's quite fascinating to kind of think about the reasons that we might nap. So for example, if you look at a lot of other animals, they have developed almost like a siesta habit in the mid afternoon and it's to get around the midday heat. Like people who hunt know that the worst time to be hunting, unless you're doing some spot and stock and trying to catch an animal sleeping, which is actually how I, how I shot my last deer was I was, I was out in the middle of the afternoon and caught it while, while it was, while it was resting. Is the.

Oh dear, I can't help it.

Yeah, I know what people are thinking. Ben shot a sleeping deer. No, it's more like this. You can see the antlers. This was an Axis deer. So I caught the antlers from 30 yards and then you just sit there waiting for the animal to move. If you try to sneak up on it, you'll wake it up. An animal will sense you and run. But if you simply wait, it'll eventually stir and then you can take your shot and try to take it down. So. So anyways, though we digress, digress. The idea here is that many animals have developed a siesta habit as a way of getting around the midday heat. And we may have, as humans have a little bit of this evolutionary or ancestral built in mechanism for that. There are also, when we look at a lot of newborn babies as well as a lot of animals, we see them sleep at many times during the day. And this appears to be somewhat advantageous for optimizing what are called memory circuits, meaning you can get enhanced short term and long term memory by engaging in some form of a sleep cycle at some point during the day. Obviously you get a huge amount of that at night, but you almost put a little bit of icing on the cake or a cherry on the cupcake or however you want, whatever dessert analogy you want to use to describe it. Dessert metaphor. But the idea is that you increase the supply of neurotransmitters and the size of networks that are responsible for increasing your short and long term memory when you can get a nap in during the day and We've talked about this on previous podcasts. Many animals do not get as deep a sleep as humans do when they sleep at night. So you'll see animals like dogs are a perfect example, right? Lounging around during the day, taking multiple what would be called polyphasic sleep cycles during the day, nap cycles put in at various points throughout the day. Humans don't need that much to increase our memory or to increase neuronal repair because we sleep so well during the night. But it appears that we do get a big memory boost and a big increase in that again that EEG brain activity by napping at some point during the day.

So when is the best time to nap? How long should we nap for?

All right, so I will get into that in just a second. I'm going to give you some rules for napping 101. But there are in case you're still on the fence about napping, there are a few cons and a few pros I would say to napping. Now, when we get into the first prose, this is simply the cool people analogy. You look at some very successful people. Winston Churchill, he would actually do a two to three hour nap in the afternoons. Bill Clinton was a napper. Napoleon was a napper. John F. Kennedy was a napper. Thomas Edison was a napper. Albert Einstein was a napper. You get many successful, especially like politicians and world changers, they seem to have this habit of locking themselves away at some some point in the afternoon to nap. I personally have the same habit around 1 to 2pm in the afternoon. And I'll explain why I choose that time. I simply disappear. And anybody who's in my house knows that they're not going to see me for anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes. And I go and I put in these binaural beats. I use an app called Sleep Stream and it plays binaural beats in each ear and I put it in what's called power nap mode and it lulls my body into sleep. And you can even put it into a mode where it will take you from stress. It's called a stress to power nap mode where it will take you from very stressful binaural beats and pull you from these beta stressful brain waves down into your alpha brainwaves and then into delta brainwaves as you engage in that nap. So first of all, cool people nap. That's number one reason.

Number one, a nap.

If that's not reason enough, you know that you get the significant increase in brainwave and alertness. And this is especially Useful if you have a creative profession in which you need to be creative in the afternoon or the early evening. Because I do a fair amount of writing in the evenings, I found that it helps tremendously when I need to write or when I need to play music such as work on my ukulele tunes in the evening. So, as I mentioned also, napping has been shown to increase what's called memory consolidation, especially when you nap. And that nap takes place in the second half of the day. Day. It's been shown to help combat sleep deprivation. So we know that sleep deprivation can do things like decrease insulin sensitivity. We know that it can increase the production of hunger hormones like ghrelin, while decreasing the production of appetite regulating hormones like leptin. Sleep deprivation can also vastly decrease your growth hormone production, which is essential for, you know, things like muscle gain and fat loss loss. And you actually see less of a deleterious hormonal effect in nappers, even when those nappers are sleep deprived. Right. Even if they're sleeping three to four hours a night. You can reverse a lot of the hormonal issues associated with sleep deprivation when you nap. And then they've also, in a couple of studies shown that napping can reduce blood pressure and can also increase cardiovascular health. So that's a few reasons.

Quite a list.

Yes. But if you don't time your nap properly, it can, as you've alluded to, Rachel, can cause insomnia. So proper timing mitigates this problem. But napping can cause insomnia. If you have a poorly timed nap, it can also result in what's called sleep inertia. What this means is that we have sleep drive built into our day where we get sleepier and sleepier as it gets closer to the evening. And that's part of our natural normal circadian rhythm. A poorly timed nap will shift that sleep inertia forward, which is why yesterday I wasn't tired until about 10:30 or 11:00pm I shifted my circadian rhythm forward. And if I'm not careful, a circadian rhythm that gets shifted forward can stick with you. Right. You can get to that point where you're one of those people who's just like, oh, I can't go get to sleep until midnight. That can, among a ton of other issues. You know, artificial light in the bedroom, not getting exposure to a lot of natural light in the morning, et cetera. Poorly timed natural naps can also cause that. So anyways, how do you properly time a nap?

Yes, tell us.

The very first thing is that you need to measure the optimum length of the period between when you naturally awake and your nap. To maximize the effectiveness of a nap. So here's the key. A nap should occur approximately seven to eight hours after you naturally wake.

So you say naturally wake, which means not waking up to an alarm.

I don't recommend people wake up to an alarm anyways. Recommend that people either use these phone apps that you set to say I want to wake at some point between 6 and 7am the phone app detects when you're in your lightest stage of sleep between 6 and 7am let's say that occurs at 6:19am and it wakes you gently at 6:19am an even better approach would be to pair that with natural light in the bedroom. I believe Withings and I will hunt this down and link to it in the show notes for you listening in. I believe it's the Withings aura, if I remember properly. It is a sleep sensor that produces light to wake you. And what that means is it doesn't wake you with like a blaring alarm clock or rock music or something like that. It's just basically a very, very therapeutic. Or therapeutic isn't the right word. It's a very gentle. Thank you, Rachel, for supplying me with your Australian vernacular, gentle way to wake up. So basically the Withing zora would be a perfect example of this. A sunrise alarm clock would be another example.

So I used a sunrise alarm clock. So you can set it to sunrise and then the sun goes to level 10 at its fullest, but then the alarm eventually goes off if you don't wake up. And I found that I never actually woke up to the sunrise part and always only woke up to the alarm.

Yeah. So were you wearing a sleep mask or anything like that?

No, it's just the light didn't seem bright enough to wake me up.

You know, I would be interested to see your sleep cycle, see how much deep sleep you're getting. I don't know if you've ever tracked your sleep, but you may, you may have some, some issues that are occurring during the night of sleep that are causing you to have what's called oversleeping syndrome or need for more sleep. I actually just wrote an article on this. It hasn't been published yet. It's going to appear over@quickanddirtytips.com but it is about how one of the number one causes of a need to sleep, no matter how much you sleep, is sleep apnea.

Interesting.

Yeah. Which can be fixed very, very simply. We have a Few podcasts on it, but can be fixed with a mouth device that adjusts your jaw while you sleep. I would consider if I were you though, looking into whether or not you have sleep apnea, because if you have it, it can make you want to sleep more. Sleep through alarms, feel groggy, even if you're getting nine hours of sleep, et cetera. So sleep apnea is something to look into.

So seven to eight hours after waking up naturally is the great time for a nap.

Exactly. That's a perfect time for a nap. So if you're a 6am Wake time person, a perfect nap time for you would be 6am plus seven hours to eight hours, which would be you settled on for a nap between 1:00pm and 2:00pm okay, so once you exceed eight hours, that's where you start to shift your circadian rhythm forward, get more deleterious effects, etcetera, etcetera. The next thing is that a well scheduled nap, contrary to popular belief, will not cause drowsiness later on in the day. Even if that nap is long. Right? You can take a 60 to 90 minute nap. It's not going to disrupt your circadian rhythm. It's not going to cause extreme grogginess the rest of the day, unless it's a poorly timed nap. So as long as you're napping seven to eight hours from the time that you wake up, then you'll be fine in terms of that nap, no matter how long it is, not messing up your sleep inertia.

So 60 to 90 minutes.

Now, some people will go through sleep cycles. So a sleep cycle would be like going from your phase one sleep down to your phase four sleep and back out. So the recommendation is that you get in any given week about 35 of those sleep cycles. Let's say that you're sleeping seven hours a night. Many people will go through four sleep cycles during the night. Some people go through five. If you're going through four, it would definitely behoove you to get your fit by taking a slightly longer nap in the afternoon. If you're getting five, just fine during the night, five sleep cycles during the night, then for you, you might just need a, you know, a 10 to 20 minute power nap. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does. Yeah.

Okay, cool. So the next thing is you need to preferably time your least stressful activities to occur in that last hour before the nap. Which is why you shouldn't work hard during lunch. I actually like to do lighter activities during lunch. You know, maybe my Facebooking or, you know, reading Some Snapchat messages or, you know, thumbing through a magazine that has come in the mail. Something that doesn't involve heavy and hard stressful activities for the hour before the nap. You will have a better nap if you can do that. And so if you can program your day so that lunch is not stressful and lunch doesn't involve a lot of heavy business meetings, that's best.

What about what we eat at lunch.

For the best nap in terms of what you eat? That's gonna be dependent on genetics. It's gonna be dependent on food tolerances, et cetera. I've found that extremely heavy meals cause me to become very groggy and almost as though I almost. A nap becomes a requirement more than an option. I eat pretty light lunches, right? I do things like miracle noodles, which are a form of pasta, but they're made from shirataki, so it's zero calories and zero gluten. So it's just insoluble fiber. And I'll, for example, put those in a cast iron skillet with some tomato and some fennel seed and a handful of olives and maybe about half of an avocado, some sea salt, some pepper, and I'll just basically grill all that up very quickly and dump that into a bowl and eat it with a fork. Or I'll have just a bed of vegetables and sometimes I'll put some sardines or some seeds or some nuts on there. But I don't do big sandwiches or heavy sweet soups or giant smoothies and things like that for lunch. Lunch is pretty light for me.

And so if you were to eat a heavy meal and that was to make you require a nap, if you wanted to nap every day, would that be a bad thing? Basically. Can food help you nap?

The only thing I'd bear in mind is that if lunch is going to be a very calorically dense meal, especially if staying lean is a priority for you, that you realize you may need to go for a lighter breakfast. Breakfast and. Or lighter dinner. If you've decided lunch is going to be the big.

The meal.

Yeah, exactly. And a meal before a nap is recommended. It can help a little bit. I just don't like that meal to be super heavy. I also don't like to wake up burping up my meal because I feel like digestion shuts down a little bit when one sleeps, which is true once you lie down. So I'm careful. I'm not super duper heavy. Tiniest amounts of caffeine in your System can interfere with the quality of that. So you do want to be careful. Remember, caffeine has a half life of depending on the person, whether you're a fast caffeine oxidizer versus a slow caffeine oxidizer, which you can determine via genetic testing. Coffee can stick in your bloodstream for three to six hours, which means that if you're planning to take a nap around one or two, you may need to have that morning cup of coffee all kind of done and dusted between 8 and 9am at the latest. So. So if you really want a good nap, especially if you are a slow caffeine metabolizer, not a fast caffeine metabolizer, which again you can test with genetics, consider not drinking like mid morning caffeinated beverages or late morning caffeinated beverages or iced tea with lunch or things along those lines. Yeah, yeah. So those are the main recommendations as far as napping goes with the biggest one. Probably the biggest tip I can give folks is get that nap in about seven to eight hours after you've woken. And what I'll do is I'll also, I'm writing a note to myself. I'll link in the show notes to that sleep stream app that has the power nap function that I mentioned. And you know, I do a few other little things when I settle down for a nap in the afternoon. Like I will, you know, I'll use a little bit of a lavender, for example, lavender essential oil on the upper lip to help with relaxation. And I do nap with a sleep mask as well.

I'm also curious how devices like the SR1 impact napping. Does that sort of have any effect?

That's a good question.

The night before or something.

For people who are listening in, the SR1 is a sleep device that emits what's called a pulsed electromagnetic field. I actually put it on my body. You're supposed to wear it on your collarbone because that's close to what's called your bracelet, brachial plexus, which sends a signal to your brain to produce more delta brain waves. It induces a very, very deep sleep. Some people find that they do wake groggy when they use that for a nap. Some people find that if they can't nap though, that actually allows them to nap quite well. So I don't use it for a couple of reasons. First, I find that I can nap just fine without it. Second, I use it all night long and part of me wants to not become dependent on it for napping. And so I just don't If I'm on a plane, for example, I don't want to take a nap on a plane. I'll use it on a plane just because it's small and portable. And frankly, anything I can do to get to sleep faster on a plane, I'll do. Aside from Valium and copious amounts of alcohol, which will cause you to, by the way, because I've tried this, go to sleep in San Francisco and wake up in Hong Kong pretty easily. Valium and red wine is a very potent combo.

You aren't like time travel.

It can feel like a million bucks afterwards, but it can work. It's like time travel. So anyways, coming full circle, Grant basically says that I say I naturally wake after a 20 to 30 minute daily nap and it's part of my ritual. And he's curious how my body naturally goes 20 to 40 minutes and wakes up by itself without an alarm and what it means if I nap longer, like two to four hours. Basically. I answered a lot of Grant's questions in my explanation there. But ultimately the body will wake naturally when it is ready, when it has consolidated the memories, when the brain has gotten the neural rest that it needs for the day. And if I have slept seven to eight hours the night before, for me, that magic spot is 20 to 40 minutes. That magic time frame is 20 to 40 minutes. If you nap longer, it can indicate, like I mentioned to Rachel, that you have an underlying sleep condition, like sleep apnea, for example, that is keeping you from getting enough high quality rest the night before. If you nap longer, it could mean that you're having too heavy of a lunch. If you nap longer, it could mean you have an extremely cognitively stressful morning. And finally, it could just mean that you popped way too many cannabidiol capsules and, and knocked yourself out into a coma. So it could be multifactorial. But ultimately, yeah, that is the skinny on napping.

One quick last question. If I was to sleep track, would you recommend I use the aura.

The aura ring for sleep tracking?

Thor ring.

That's good for looking at your sleep cycles. But if you want to specifically see if you have sleep apnea and you don't want to order professional sleep monitoring equipment that you stick up your nose and all over your head while you're asleep, best bet for you would just be a pulse oximeter. You can get a pulse oximeter that will monitor whether or not your oxygen is falling at different times during the night. So you can buy a pulse oximeter and I will put a Link in the show notes to the brands that will actually monitor your, what's called your blood oxygenation levels all through the night. And what you'd want is to wake up in the morning and see if there are specific periods during the night, night where your pulse ox starts to go from 98 and all of a sudden it's down to 95 and 93 and 90. And if you see that that's the case, it's highly likely that you have sleep apnea and highly likely that you should consider going to a sleep professional to actually get a dental fitting for a mouth device that reduces the obstructive apnea while you're asleep. Okay.

Thank you.

Yes. And they're quite attractive at parties too.

I was going to say.

Yeah.

Hi, Ben, Dallas here from Australia. Love your podcast. After your recent podcast with Dr. Chopra, I have a question about coffee when breastfeeding. The study showed that coffee consumption had little impact on the child when pregnant. Is this still the case when breastfeeding? I have a four and a half month old daughter and want to know if I can safely drink caffeinated coffee when breastfeeding without affecting her. We only drink good quality mold free coffee. Thank you, Dallas.

Well, I was really excited to listen to that podcast with Dr. Chopra because I love the idea of drinking 65 cups of coffee a day. It was so validating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think one small intestines would probably wear away and just drop out your butt if you did actually drink 65 cups of actual coffee per day. I'm guessing that this Voltaire guy that we talked about in that podcast episode was perhaps sipping a half a shot of espresso or something like that. But when it comes to pregnancy, we do know that caffeine can cross the placenta from the maternal to the fetal bloodstream and that the fetus only has a very slow ability to be able to metabolize or break down caffeine. The interesting thing is that when you're pregnant, maternal metabolism of caffeine also slows down during pregnancy. So that means caffeine lingers in mom's bloodstream for a longer period of time. So we know that when you consume caffeine during pregnancy that it enters fetal circulation. The problem is that there's almost like a myth out there that this will cause, for example, birth defects or miscarriages. And I think that we need to look into the research on both this and breastfeeding to really decide whether a mom can get away with drinking coffee.

So what does the research say?

Well, there was one big review of caffeine safety in pregnancy that they did in 2013, and this was like a big cohort study. And what they found was that when we look at miscarriages, there's really not a big link. Assuming that you're under 200 milligrams of caffeine per day and a cup of coffee, average cup of coffee is 100 milligrams per day, that there's really not a big risk for or incident of miscarriage when you are drinking coffee moderately. Okay, so one to two cups a day of just a basic black coffee, not Red Bull, not monster energy drinks, not no dose pills, but just a cup of coffee. Now, you tend to see a few confounding variables, though. For example, studies have shown that women who consume more caffeine while they're pregnant also tend to be more likely to be smokers. They tend to drink alcohol in pregnancy, they tend to be older. And so all of those factors could increase miscarriage risks. So you need to make sure that you pay attention to some of these studies and see whether or not they're actually taking into account the lifestyle of the type of mom who tends to drink caffeine and coffee and, you know, snort crack and hang out with hookers all, you know, the whole time she's pregnant. So that's, that's one thing.

So what about the risk of having just a caffeine jacked up baby instead of miscarrying?

So to answer your question about the effects of caffeine on the actual child, there have been some studies that have looked at the baby's behavior under the influence of caffeine. So there was one study where they looked at heart rate and sleep times and found that even though the infants absorbed caffeine, just like I just described, and in this case, the moms were drinking up to five cups of coffee per day while breastfeeding, they didn't notice any difference in the baby's heart rate or in the baby's sleep times. In another study that they did, and this was in 2012 in the Journal of Pediatrics, they also compared maternal caffeine consumption in breastfeeding moms to moms that didn't breastfeed with caffeine in their systems and found no significant differences in the sleep patterns of the babies.

So is it just that caffeine is not affecting the baby?

It doesn't appear to be affecting them when it comes to increased heart rate or trouble feeding or slower ability to gain weight because of some big bump up in metabolism or anything like that. That although there was one study in which they looked at babies that were dosed with caffeine to treat, speak of the devil. Apnea. Because some babies, especially premature babies, get sleep apnea and that's again that complete drop in breath pattern while asleep that causes a big drop of oxygen levels while asleep. And what they found was that when the breastfed baby is absorbing a high amount of caffeine because mom is drinking a lot of coffee, and in this case we're talking about 10 to 20 times the amount of caffeine that we would see in these other studies, they actually did show an increased heart rate in the babies. They did show a little bit of trouble feeding, they did show slower weight gain, it did reduce apnea as well in these kids. But this was with copious amounts of caffeine. I mean we're talking about like that Voltaire esque, this would be like 10 plus cups of coffee a day in most cases. When we look at all these different studies on caffeine and breastfeeding, in the case of pregnancy, staying under 200 milligrams per day appears to have no deleterious effect on birth weight miscarriages, et cetera. And for breastfeeding, staying under 300 milligrams per day appears to be just fine. And once your child is five to six months old, it appears to be a non issue period. So ultimately babies are resilient. Babies are resilient. And we've been completely lied to by I don't know who would have lied to us about caffeine, who would have profited from lying to us about coffee and caffeine? Who's the scapegoat?

Somebody who doesn't sell coffee or caffeine, but the baby food industry.

Gerber's trying to get us to feed our babies pea mash and sweet potato.

When all they need is a cup of coffee.

All they need is a good frappuccino baby.

Hello Ben, this is Alekse. I love the podcast and have been listening for many years now. My question regards hiking. I'm going to Norway for a hiking trip and I was thinking how would I keep myself healthy without losing too much muscle during the trip with the least amount of weight to carry? And would that change if I were to hike, for example, a 2000 mile Appalachian Trail instead of a week long hike? Thank you.

So Alexei wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to go on these big long hiking trips but stay completely swole.

Yeah, I guess that's having his cake and eating it too, isn't it?

Well, everybody wants to finish their hiking trip and be able to flex off. Right. Fit into their welcome to the gun show shirt.

Right? Yes. I'm assuming that's what's happening.

Yeah. So maintaining. So what this comes down to for me, like when I think about this is for anybody. Let's say you're not a, a week long hiker. Let's say you're, you're not necessarily, you know, completing the Appalachian Trail, but you are an endurance exerciser. Or let's just say you have a high calorie burn in general due to your lifestyle. I don't know, maybe you're, you're a roofer or a construction worker or. Who else burns a lot of calories during the day?

A nurse, Personal trainer.

Surgeon. Personal trainer.

Ooh, a surgeon.

Yeah. But you don't want to necessarily eat copious amounts of calories, carry copious amounts of calories, calories carry heavy amounts of food. As you know, as Alexi noted, when you hike, you want to stay relatively lightweight. And I suppose rib eye steaks are probably not the best fit for putting into a lightweight backpacking for seven days. Yeah. Or man in a can, giant canisters of protein powder. So there are some, shall we say, I don't know if clandestine would be the right word, but small, portable, little known things that can give you a step up when it comes to essentially anabolism and especially anabolism while you are extremely physically active. Some a little bit fringe, some not so fringe. So for example, there's one in particular. Why don't we start with the fringe right away? There's one that I am writing an article on right now and it's called a selective androgen receptor modulator. Also a sarms. Rachel, I know you're a complete nerd when it comes to SARMs.

I know everything about SARMs. I just learned what the acronym meant all the time.

Yeah. So these selective androgen receptor modulators actually contain what are called androgens. And androgens are a special kind of hormone that act as a ligand. So I'm going to add this to your vernacular. What a ligand is, is all that is is a molecule that's linked to another molecule, a ligand. L, I G A, N D. And in this case, androgens connect to cellular androgen receptors. Now what that can do is it can replicate the effects of androgens, which in the human body would cause things like muscle growth and anabolism, etc. But selective androgen receptor modulators are able to, able to do this without causing a lot of the side effects that say steroids can cause. So they can be taken orally, so you don't need to inject them. You don't get a lot of the, again, the deleterious side effects of taking steroids. And the idea here is that they're non toxic, they don't cause liver damage. A lot of times when you're taking testosterone or you're taking steroids, you can get some bone loss. And they've looked into sarms and bone loss and they don't cause that. A lot of times in men who are using testosterone replacement therapy or who are using steroids, they get prostate problems, they get, I'll use the highly scientific term, ball shrinkage. And you don't get that when you use a selective androgen receptor modulator. It doesn't interfere with what's called your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal, apparently axis. This means that when you take testosterone, injectable testosterone, testosterone creams you via a negative feedback loop, shut down your body's own endogenous production of testosterone. And should you ever stop that steroid or that testosterone replacement, you feel like crap for months afterwards. You can't get it up. You have no libido, you have low motivation, low ability to put on muscle, low endogenous testosterone production. You don't get that when you use one of these selective androgen receptor modulators. You also don't get conversion of testosterone into estrogens or into something that can make you go bald, which is dihydrotestosterone or dht. And you'll see a lot of folks in the athletic or the bodybuilding industry using SARMS to prevent muscle loss and to assist with lean muscle development. And you'll even see these used for things like, you know, faster injury recovery and increased power and better joint healing abilities, etc.

So are there any cons to these cons to SARMs?

You can, if you overdo it in women, you can get a little bit of a development of male characteristics.

Wow, that's kind of a big deal, Ben.

Big eyebrows, big chin. So you'd want to be careful. In men who overdo SARMs, there is some risk for some of the same things we would get with a huge production DHT, which would be like acne and baldness and even a little bit of gynecomastia. But this would be high doses taken for a long period. Okay, so a typical SARMS cycle would be running it for just four weeks, for example, like taking. Taking a SARMS orally. An example dosage would be like 10 milliliters for about four weeks, probably. And the one that I'm writing an article about right now that I've really been doing a lot of research on on is one called LGD4033. That's the one that's most used for things like building muscle and increasing libido and simultaneously reducing body fat percentage without taking hormones or without taking steroids. For all of you listening in, especially those of you who don't want to risk extreme public embarrassment because you compete in a sport that involves urine test testing, you can't use these if you compete in a World Anti Doping association sanctioned sport, even though about a tenth of the world's athletic population uses SARMs, they've approximated. So a ton of pro athletes use SARMs even though they're not supposed to. However, if you're just hiking the Appalachian Trail and you want to maintain skeletal muscle mass without deterioration of, for example, type 2 muscle fibers, would be the big one that this is going to assist with development of SARMs. Taking something like LGD4033, little bottle of it out there on the trail, and taking one dropper full, which is about 10 milliliters under the tongue, on a daily basis, could help out quite a bit with maintenance of lean muscle during endurance exercise or long exercise sessions.

So that's number one.

So that's one LGD4033 SARM. Another one might as well just stay fringe. BPC157, that is an injectable peptide. This one is legal based on World Anti Doping association and USADA regulations. And it's simply a sequence of amino acids. So you've heard of perhaps branch chain amino acids or essential amino acids. This is like that on steroids. They've done a huge number of studies and shown everything from enhanced repair of tendons and muscle and intestines and teeth and bone. I've got a big article on BPC157. And I mean, you can take an insulin syringe and just spray it orally into your mouth to enhance repair of gut damage. You can take any specific muscle group that is injured and poke it into the little bit of skin near to that injury site and inject it it and rub it in or massage it in and get extremely enhanced muscle repair. I'm talking about, like 10 times faster. I've done it with a hamstring injury for example, and completely banished it within a few days. The other thing that you can do is you can use it to maintain muscle by either using it, it's systemic. Right. So you can use it orally, you can inject it anywhere, and it's going to have full body systemic effects.

Wow.

And so you, you can literally use this while out on a trail and just inject it anywhere or take it orally and it will help to maintain muscle mass or even to build muscle mass. So it's somewhat fragile. You'd have to be careful with it getting jarred around after you have to reconstitute it. So it comes as a powder and you mix water. And I've got all the instructions on a. I'll link if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 357 I'll put a link to the article that I wrote about it in the show. Notes, Notes. But basically it's, it's similar to like a sarms, you know, an extremely small bottle that is extremely potent or as, as they'd say in Aladdin, phenomenal cosmic power.

One question. If I took it orally for an injury in my wrist, it would still have the same impact as injecting it into my wrist or.

No, not the same. Less. Less. But still an impact.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah. If you just don't like to shove needles into body parts.

Right. So we have SOMS and BPC157. What's next?

So another one that I'd recommend would be something that we touched on earlier, and that would be the use of exogenous ketones. Because by utilizing ketones rather than your own muscle glycogen or rather than glucose, you can spare muscle glucose or spare blood glucose, spare muscle glycogen and keep yourself from having to break down your own storage fuel as energy. And the cool thing about ketones is that they're very potent and can be carried in light amounts, because that's what we're talking about. Things that are light, portable, easy to carry, but that can maintain muscle mass, similar to a rib eye steak or a protein shake. So there are a lot of different types of ketones out there, but because the consumption of what are called medium chain triglycerides or antibiotics, MCTs actually enhance the production of ketone bodies by the liver. I am a fan of a specific form of exogenous ketones. Again, if you don't want to spend the $3,000 on that ketone ester developed by DARPA that I mentioned earlier. But you Want something a little bit more palatable for the pocketbook. A pretty good one would be, for example, there's a company called Keto Os and that is ketone mineral salts that have been blended with a high fiber medium chain triglyceride formation. So you get the benefits of both exogenous ketones along with medium chain triglycerides. The small packet, relatively light, you would reconstitute it in water and the ingredients are just MCT powder, beta hydroxybutyrate which is the ketone, and then stevia. And you can choose. They've got one that's caffeine free and one that they call charge that has caffeine in it, but that's it. And the other thing that you should know is that, that ketones act as a natural diuretic. So you may need to make sure that you increase your electrolyte and your water intake when you start using something like this. But that would certainly be something that if I were on a long trail hike, I would definitely throw into the mix would be this, this keto os blend of powdered MCTs with exogenous ketones in the form of beta hydroxybutyrate.

Yes. Good fuel.

Yes. And we're increasing everybody's vocabulary with all sorts of big words like LGD4033 and SARMS and beta hydroxybutyrate. Next we would go for something very nutrient dense. So I Talked about how BPC157 is an anabolic amino acid. Well, another thing that has a lot of anabolic amino acids in it, including 18 of the 20amino acids and all eight of the essential amino acids that your body can't produce. Making it a complete protein is spirulina. Spirulina has, you know, it's got more beta carotene than carrots, it's got more iron than spinach, it's got more, more antioxidants than blueberries, it's got more chlorophyll than, than any dark leafy green shake. And it has a nutritional profile that's very, very similar to breast milk, which is close to a perfect food. You can get spirulina in like chewable tablet form, you can get it in powder form, but considering the dense amount of amino acids in it. And this is especially useful for vegans or vegetarians who can't use it. And an animal based amino acid or a steak or chicken or things like that that are very anabolic. This is lightweight, it's easy to carry and it acts like an oral Full spectrum amino acid with the vegan twist. And plus it turns your mouth green. So definite added benefit, you can be that person on the Appalachian Trail with green stains all around your mouth as though you just eaten. I don't know what green animal would be out in the forest. That one would be chasing through the forest and eating like a zombie.

A frog. A frog.

A frog. Yes. You're like a frog eating Appalachian Trail hiker. So spirulina would be another one and of course along with spirulina for the similar amino acid effect, just essential amino acids. So they've done a host of studies on stopping muscle breakdown with the use of branched chain amino acids. The problem with branched chain amino acids is that while they can keep muscular catabolism from occurring during long term endurance exercise, they do not result in the same anabolic effect as essential amino acids because there's only three of them in branched chain amino acids. Whereas an essential amino acid blend is going to have eight to nine different amino acids in it. And branched chain amino acids can also spike blood sugar levels levels and cause some other issues that I'm not a fan of. And finally, they don't lead to the staving off of central nervous system fatigue the same as essential amino acids do. Because essential amino acids will compete for tryptophan in the brain and keep tryptophan, our sleepy turkey Thanksgiving molecule from crossing the blood brain barrier from interacting with the cellular receptors for tryptophan. And so ultimately an essential amino acids blend. And I'll put a link in the show notes to the one that I like called nature aminos would be another one to include. So where are we at so far with what we have listed?

So we got spirulina, nature aminos. There's one more that I think you want to talk about.

SARMs, BPC, colostrum. Yes, colostrum. Yeah, Colostrum is huge. I'm a big fan of that. It's such a potent. So what it is is what you'd find in breast milk in the fluid that comes out right before the breast milk comes out in like a goat, cow, mom, whatever. I'm a big fan of a goat based colostrum because a goat based colostrum, unless you have a pregnant women producing breast milk who you can carry out there with you on the Appalachian Trail, it's very biocompatible with the human body, meaning that it's a small protein that gets absorbed very well compared to like a cow based colostrum and colostrum. Has a huge number of growth factors in it that can do everything from heal the lining of a leaky gut, which is what it does in an infant, to cause actual growth of muscle tissue in adult humans. And you can simply take this, for example, in the morning when you get up, you know four to six capsules of colostrum. And it has some very potent immune boosting effects. The only caution I'd give you if you're hiking with it is it can't be heated. You need to be careful when you heat it. It's enhanced with pairing with probiotics. So if you take it at the same time that you take probiotics, all the better. But know that whether you're using that or probiotics, you just need to be careful that it doesn't get heated up too much. However, not only is it a big performance enhancing aid, but colostrum has. Has a very, very potent anabolic effect. So if you're just trying to get swole as muscular as possible, you would be on colostrum, spirulina, aminos, some kind of exogenous ketone, some BPC157. And then if you aren't competing in a World Anti doping Association or USADA sanctioned sport, something like SARMS, like LGD4033, and you will get big. As a matter of fact, Rachel, I don't think I've mentioned this on the show before, but aside from the SARMS agent, I'm actually using everything that I just talked about while lifting heavy.

Well, there you go.

Because I got cast on a TV show that I got to put on muscle for.

What TV show?

The Broken Skull Challenge.

Oh, wow.

It's on CMT on country Music Television. But it involves heavy. Go watch it if you're listening and just do a search for Broken Skull Challenge. Or actually, we'll put a link in the show notes. The defending champion right now, speak of the devil, we talked about him earlier, is Hunter McIntyre, my partner in crime over at Obstacle Dominator. But you have to fight. You have to lift heavy objects.

You have to, basically, you're gonna fight Hunter.

Go. I don't know if Hunter will be on the show when I'm on it, but you have to be a meathead. So I am trying to put on some muscle to become a meathead so that in a few weeks I'll be able to compete when I head down to film the Broken Skull Challenge in la.

So that's gonna be funny. I can't wait to see that. So, oh, yeah. That is basically how Alexi can have his cake and eat it too.

Boom.

Is it like, is it out there in the world that people should drink breast milk? People like, we like, why do we drink and eat colostrum and we don't drink and eat like our own breast milk?

So my personal hypothesis on that, because I don't know the exact answer, is that a, we don't drink the breast milk of our own species because we have access to things like goats and cows and camels and I don't know, whatever else can be milked as the lining or as the line goes from the movie with Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro. I'm a cat. Could you milk me Falker? You can milk it if it has nipples. Right. So we've got access to the breast milk of other animals and we're smart enough to access that because. Because, let's face it, mothers and mother's breast milk, that is something that would best be reserved for the growing baby population of our species. And if all of us adults start drinking breast milk of our own species, we would probably risk babies not having enough.

Right. I see. My personal hypothesis, if there was a way for babies to have enough, though, it would be better obviously to drink our own because it's made for humans, not for us.

Yeah. And if you look at things that have nutrient dense profiles similar to breast milk, right. Like spirulina or liver or eggs or any of these things high in fat soluble vitamins, we certainly have access to things that will be a little bit of a parallel to breast milk in nature that we can take in. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone at some point comes up with a way to do like, breast milk from a lab where it's all the things that breast milk colostrum and growth factors and, and probiotics and everything else, and maybe it comes in a breast shaped bottle that you buy from the grocery store.

And then Freud is like rolling over in his grave.

And Freud is freaking rolling over in his grave. Yep.

Hey, Rachel and Ben, thanks so much for an awesome podcast. I'm learning so much. It's so awesome. Please keep it up. Today I have a question about comt genetic mutation, of which I have, and I know that that means that you can have a hard time breaking down catecholamines. And I definitely have major insomnia issues. If I'm out late at night, I just cannot wind down. And I just feel like I have all this adrenaline and cortisol going on and it's really difficult for me to ever fall asleep if I'm out too late or if I'm just too amped up in the evening. So I was just wondering if you had any advice on this for those of us with the COMT mutation and if there's anything that we can do to help break down those catecholamines that would help us, you know, get more into our parasympathetic nervous system. So thanks so much. Look forward to your answer.

So, Rachel, just to f with you, what's this question about? This.

This question is about the warrior versus the warrior gene.

The what versus the what?

The warrior. I got to say it like an American warrior versus. No, they still sound the same.

I love how an Australian cannot say warrior versus warrior. It's just not. You're not able to do it. Your tongue doesn't move that way.

Doesn't. No.

Yeah. This is really, really, really interesting. It's. It's this. This idea. I won't. I won't geek out too much on the C O M. But what it comes down to is that we have this specific gene called the COMT it stands for catechol O methyltransferase C O M T. And all that is put in simple terms, it's an enzyme, and it degrades things like dopamine and epinephrine and norepinephrine. And depending on which version of that gene that you carry, you're either going to break down things like dopamine and epinephrine and norepinephrine quickly, or they're going to hang around for a long period of time in your system, and that's going to influence your behavior and your personality. So we have this worrier profile. The worrier has lower amounts of comt what does that mean? It means they break down their dopamine less quickly and they have higher amounts of dopamine. When you have higher amounts of dopamine, you get more pleasure out of life. But you also get, interestingly, a lot of people don't realize that's more misery out of life. You have bigger highs and also bigger lows when you're a worrier. So what are the positives of that? Well, you get more pleasure out of life, like I mentioned. And they've done studies where they've shown that people who have what's called the double A gene for COMT have twice the amount of positive emotions towards a pleasant event than the people who have the double G version of that gene. You tend to be More creative because dopamine in the prefrontal cortex of your brain promotes cognitive stability and makes you more resistant to distractions. So worriers tend to be able to focus on and be more creative. You tend to have a higher IQ with the higher dopamine levels. You tend to have better working memory. And they've actually done tests, they've done one test called an N back test where people with this, with this high amount of, or I'm sorry, low amount of cot comt. High amount of dopamine. These worrier genes, they have better reading comprehension and better working memory and even more plasticity of the brain going into old age. A worrier also when they're not under stress, and this is important, a warrior does better with attention and processing of information under stress, but a worrier has better cognitive function when they're not under stress. So in a stress free scenario, a worrier does quite well, AKA computer programming versus you know, operating a radio in a battlefield. So a few other things, you tend to have better fine motor skills. And these are all things that they've test, that they've tested. And you tend to be able to focus more when you realize that you've made an error. And people who have the warrior gene, they even have a better ability to be able to aim a weapon, interestingly, like a gun or a bow. What are the bad things? Well, you don't handle stress as well as a warrior does because of that high, high amount of dopamine. So it can work for you and against you. You tend to be more impulsive, you tend to have a higher risk for depression and anxiety and you tend to be more neurotic. They've even shown that there are some other issues in terms of like increased cocaine dependence and nicotine dependence and things that you would expect when you have a higher dopaminergic response to certain chemicals. And then they've also found that there are certain medical conditions associated with having this warrior gene, primarily high amounts of ADHD and add high amounts of fibromyalgia, which is ghost muscle pains and sensitivity to heat and pressure and things like that. So if you have this particular low cmt, high dopamine, there are some things that you can do if you have this worrier gene, which would be what Cathy has this hard time breaking down, catecholamines, insomnia issues, etc. Some of the things that you can do, first of all, you can ensure that you have adequate amounts of B vitamins like B6 and B12 and folate and what's called betaine. And the reason for that is because, because high amounts of these B vitamins support formation of something called adenosylmethionine and that prevents or at least partially inhibits this comt activity and can assist with the dopamine breakdown a little bit more readily. So that's one thing is getting a really good vitamin B complex, even just a multivitamin. I like the Thorn multivitamin because it has a lot of of what's called methyltetrahydrofolate in it, which is like a very bioabsorbable form of vitamin B. Another one that seems to help with this is magnesium. High amounts of magnesium citrate, which is another co factor for some of the enzymes that can help to break down dopamine when dopamine is high. That would be another one to make sure that you include in your diet would be adequate magnesium.

Is that also in the Thorn multi?

No, that would be something you could take like a natural calm magnesium or you could even use topical magnesium and rub it on your tummy. That's a perfect place to absorb topical magnesium. Interestingly is the stomach high amount of blood vessels and that's where I'll put topical magnesium a lot of the time. Be very careful with alcohol consumption because alcohol can cause a rapid release of dopamine, especially in limbic areas of the brain. Brain. That can not only increase your vulnerability to alcohol dependence, but can also increase the instance of things like insomnia, et cetera. You would want to avoid stimulants. Any type of stimulants, including caffeine, honestly can cause a high, high amount of this dopaminergic activity. And so you may want to consider using non caffeinated beverages, white teas, things like that, as opposed to, opposed to coffee.

What if you have the comps mutation and you're a fast caffeine metabolizer? Does that even itself out?

No, I'd still be careful. You're still going to have, I like the way you're thinking, but antioxidants. So antioxidants are going to be important because those prevent the oxidation of all this dopamine that you have hanging around and that can be pro carcinogenic in high amounts, oxidized dopamine. So what you would want to do, for example, like I mentioned that that Thorn multivitamin, that's got actually some really good antioxidants in it like vitamin C and vitamin E and some of the things that can help out with this high amount of dopamine and prevent the actual oxidation of that dopamine. What are a few other little things? There's something called diindolmethane. You're gonna find that in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, etc. You can also purchase it as a supplement called dindal. And the reason for that is because if you have high estrogens, estrogens can actually inhibit comt and cause more of this dopamine to be hanging around in the bloodstream. So preventing excess estrogens, both from, like, you know, your personal care products, you know, phytoestrogens from plastics, things like that. But also considering use of this dim or this diindolmethane or things, things like broccoli and cauliflower and things high in diindylmethane can also help out quite a bit. And I'll list some of these recommendations in the shownotes for you. There's also, of course, the warrior gene, which is everything that I just said, the opposite of that, right? Like, really good under high stress scenarios, Low amounts of dopamine, lower amounts of pleasure out of life when you have this warrior gene, in many cases, better performance under pressure, better performance under stress, but worse executive function, sometimes worse fine motor skills. This is the classic meathead fighter, no offense, Navy seal type of approach. And these people just don't produce as much dopamine. And so there are issues that you can or things that you can take into consideration for this. The biggest would be you'd want to get dopamine into your system. There's a lot of different ways to do that. But if you happen to test and you can just use 23andMe testing to get this test done figured out for the warrior genes, probably the best thing you can do is there's a supplement called brain Food. And this is just a dopamine precursor. It's made by Axon Labs. I've had the folks from them or from Axon Labs on the podcast before, and I'll link to it in the show notes. But it's just dopamine precursor that can help you. It's kind of cool if you take dopamine precursors prior to any pleasurable activity, like sex or eating or anything. It just kind of like, like psilocybin mushrooms, for example. It just makes everything a little brighter, more colorful.

What about if you have tastier mutation and you take a dopamine precursor? How then is that like quadruple pleasurable?

Your head will explode? I don't think that would help out with Kathy's insomnia.

But don't do that, Kathy. It's a bad idea.

Try. So. And I'll put a link to the 23andMe genetic testing if you want to test this out, as well as some of the other recommendations that I went into, all of those over in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 357. So hopefully that helps you out. And you can also grab everything over there from the olive oil that I recommend to some of those things, from maintaining muscle during exercise to this new ketone drink article from the Deployment Department of Defense, the Casper mattresses, the, the calendar, and much more. But of course we would be doing everyone a great disservice if we didn't give something away. Right, Rachel?

Correct.

Yes. So. So do it.

Yeah.

So this is the part of the show where we take the top iTunes review of the week and we give you something cool. We're going to send you a BPA free water bottle. We're going to send you a a tech T shirt that makes your muscles look great whether or not you're breastfeeding. And we're going to send you that made no sense, but I just said it anyways. We're also going to send you a hat, a toque, a beanie, a Ben Greenfield fitness beanie. And all you need to do is this. If you hear your review read on the show, just email gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gearedreenfieldfitnesssystems.Com and if you're a five star, you can unique review gets read. You'll get that back. Just be sure that when you email said address, you include your T shirt size and your mailing address. So that being said, we've got a review left by BobRvl and Bob RVL says you want to take this one away. Rachel.

Yes, it's called Great podcasts and it's five stars. I am a big fan of Dave Asprey and when I was introduced to Ben's podcast, the first thing I thought was was this is the athletic Dave Asprey. I can relate to Ben because I'm a CrossFit coach and competitor. I'm always looking for ways to hack my performance and nutrition. Thanks for the great info and entertainment. I like the woo woo stuff you air.

Dave Asprey, for those of you who don't know, he's the bulletproof guy. He's the guy who invented bulletproof coffee. The bulletproof exec not necessarily known for being an uber athlete. Per se, but I would in no way want this to indicate that Dave is a spaz because I have seen him do headstands on vibration platforms before at conferences and he's not an athletic.

Tard but he's not gonna run a Spartan and then a Hurricane. He this weekend is he never know.

Maybe he could be there so maybe.

We'Ll meet him in pullback.

Anyways though, I like Dave Asprey. He's a friend of mine. I didn't want you to read read this review because I don't like Dave, but I think it's a good review and I will take it. I will now go by the title the Athletic Dave Asprey who is Woo Woo Stuff. Yes, who likes Woo Woo stuff. So that being said, you can access all the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 357. You can watch Rachel and I doing a Finnish sauna or whatever else we decide to do this weekend by going to Ben greenfield fitness.com Snapchat and you can also win stuff over there. Plenty more coming down the pipeline. A fantastic interview this weekend, I believe, with the speaking of Woo Woo man himself, Dennis McKenna, about LSD and psilocybin and Ayahuasca and all sorts of interesting things. So that should be interesting. And in the meantime, thank you for listening. And Rachel.

Yes, Ben.

Enjoy the rest of your day. Pirate patch or not.

You'Ve been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.