The Secrets Of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine Diet, Does A Morning Cup Of Coffee "Break Your Fast", The Best Time Of Day To Exercise & Much More!

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan, Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride. As promised, this is the official podcast on Hugh Jackman's famous Wolverine diet, but I do not actually have the Wolverine himself on the show. I have the next best thing to The Wolverine though, Dr. Sachin Panda, and he has written this fantastic new book called the Circadian Code. This is like some of the gems that I come across, one of those books where I folded over lots of pages and developed many questions that I want to delve into with Dr. Pond and now get the book. Regardless, read the book, but we're going to unpack and explore some of the details of the things that I found most fascinating in the book. Particularly focused around time restricted eating. Dr. Panda has done some fantastic research around time restricted eating and if you're not familiar with him, he is actually one of the world's leading experts and researchers in focusing on how circadian clocks regulate behavior and physiology and metabolism. He was the guy who discovered how a blue light sensor in our eyes affects our sleep wake cycles and our depression and our alertness. And he himself also follows quite a bit of these, these time restricted eating protocols. So he's got a lot of practical knowledge as well. So this stuff extends to everything from acid reflux to heartburn to irritable bowel disease, to diabete to cancer to dementia to for those of you who maybe aren't sick but are trying to go from good to great weight loss, better sleep, better exercise, even better management of our technology and the way that we use them. So I'm really excited to talk to Dr. Ponda. Dr. Ponda, welcome to the show.

Hi Ben, I'm happy to be on your show.

Yeah, and you know, there's this term that you throw around in the book over and over again and it's trend tre. A large part of the book is of course about tre. So I Realize this might be kind of an involved question. I'm fine with you delving into the science, but what is TRE and what does it have to do with the circadian code?

Well, so TRE means time restricted eating. And that means that you don't have to mindfully restrict your calorie, no caloric restriction or cer, but be mindful about when you had your first calorie of the day and when is the last calorie of the day, and then try to have all those calories within somewhere between 8 to 10 or maximum 12 hours every single day.

I just want to interrupt you real quick. You just now said that it wasn't calorie restriction, but it was instead this compressed feeding window. Can you explain why that is?

Yeah. For a long period of time in nutrition science, we have studied how quality and quantity of calories affect our health. So that means we always pay attention to how many calories we're eating, or we pay attention to food levels and then try to do the math, how much protein, carbon, fat we have consumed. But for a lot of people, it's not very practical. It's very difficult to do that. And what we found was in very simple laboratory experiment that even without reducing calorie or changing quality of diet, if we give laboratory mice, lab mice, access to food for only 8 to 12 hours every day, they consume the same number of calories from the same identical food as mice that have ad libitum or 24 access to food. But surprisingly, these mice, which are on tre, they do not gain weight, they don't become diabetic, they have completely healthy heart, they have much more endurance and they have low inflammation. Many, many great health benefits. Not only that, if we take sick mice who are randomly eating around the clock and not mindful about the timing of eating, if we again time restrict them to only 8 to 10 hours every day, they don't reduce their calories, they eat the same identical food. And within 12 to 14 weeks, they also become healthier. In humans, there are now new studies, independent studies from labs we are not connected with. They have also shown that in very controlled studies, if these human volunteers reduce the time window, in this case very extreme time window, six hours every day, then these people also improve their health without reducing calorie. So in this way, what we are adding is very profound because nutrition and health science for last hundred years has been telling us to count calories and mind the nutrition content.

Yeah, be cold and hungry, live a long time, but be cold and hungry the whole time. You're doing it.

Yeah. And now if we do time restriction, then it becomes easier for all of us because if you think about it, our entire day is organized around time. We meet people at certain time, we go to, we drop our kids at certain time. Everything goes around time. And now if we think about food and compress it to certain time window, then in real life, for most of us, what happens is we also reduce a little bit of calorie. We may also improve our nutrition quality. And I'll get into detail why does that happen. But this is a nice segue into getting back your overall health and wellness.

All right, I have a lot of questions about how to logistically pull this off and what the compressed feeding window actually looks like. But before we get into that, I have to tackle the elephant in the room and that is this. What is the deal with Hugh Jackman and time restricted eating? Is it true that he did some version of this for the Wolverine diet for the. I guess it would have just, just been. It's not the X Men movie, but like the latest Wolverine series.

I think it started with a few years ago, and I saw that in newspaper, that he deliberately ate a lot of protein within a eight hour eating window, eight to nine hour eating window, and then put on a lot of muscle for this particular movie. And this is also becoming a new trend in Hollywood now. The new trend is to eat everything within eight to 10 hours and stop eating after 7pm and what we're finding is what he did is also a trend among many bodybuilders who want to build body but don't want to go through the trouble of eating, waking up in the middle of the night and trying to eat something to build muscle. And we know that that type of eating puts a lot of stress on your system because the gut is always busy. Many people who try to bodybuild that way also complain about their gut health and sleeping problem, etc. Whereas compressing everything into 8 to 10 hours helps in the way that during the fasting period when the muscle repairs itself, then it gets rid of the old and damaged protein from muscle. And then every day with the new source of amino acids coming from the food, it can repair and regenerate. So the bottom line with time restricted eating is during the fasting time, there is enough opportunity for the body, whether it's muscle, gut, liver, all these organs, they get enough time to repair, reset and rejuvenate every day. So just like you cannot repair a house or paint a house when people are still living or you cannot repair a highway when the traffic is still moving. It's really hard to repair, reset and rejuvenate every night. If we have food in our system and if we eat at the wrong time.

So this idea of being able to build muscle while you're on this compressed feeding window or this time restricted eating strategy, I think a big part of it comes down to when you are actually eating, to eat a pretty high number of calories. Now in terms of how that's done, have you guys looked at all whether that's best achieved via one meal or two meals or three meals? Like I know some people who will go all day without eating and then have one enormous meal towards the end of the day. Others will eat two or three meals. I know one popular diet now is people doing some pretty significant calorie restriction for like six days a week and then having one giant feeding day at the end of the week. Like is there one strategy that seems to work best when it comes to this?

Actually we haven't gone in detail into this particularly in human because it's really hard to bring human subjects, give them in lab, give them specific type of diet, control everything else. So it's really hard to say which one will work the best. But what we have seen is many endurance or even resistance trained athletes, when they try to do 8 to 10 hours eating mind like they have been trying everything else. So they are at the top of their game and what they're trying to figure out is if they eat for eight hours, are they going to lose any muscle mass? Because people always think that if you fast overnight then you'll break down your muscle to maintain your blood glucose level, which is partly true. But the muscle protein that you break down also helps to break down the damaged muscle proteins and reuse them for maintaining blood glucose. It also gives opportunity to build up muscle. So to come back to your question, we haven't tried to see whether one meal, two meals, three meals or a very short window of eating might help. What we have seen is particularly women who want to eat everything within a very short window, three to four hours or five hours, there may be some of them, very few of them may be slightly susceptible to getting adverse reactions. So for example they may increase their chance of gallstone and then some of them may become may see some problem with their menstrual cycle. But among we haven't gone deep into finding testing whether one, two or three meals work.

So would the window of eating then be different for men versus women? Like would mention do better with like an 8 hour compressed feeding window, whereas women might want to do something closer to a 10 or a 12.

So that again we haven't tested systematically. What we find is most people who follow this time restricted eating that try to do between 8 and 10. And then some people who are trying to lose weight but at the same time have other family obligation, they go between 10 and 12. So it's very hard to sustain eating under less than 8 hours and have a family life. So I won't say that men and women should have slightly different eating window. What boils down to is how many hours you are sleeping, how many hours you are eating and how it fits with your current lifestyle.

Yeah, you have a story of Dr. Rhonda Patrick in the book and how she experimented with this a little bit. And she's obviously a pretty rigorous, a self experimenter when it comes to a lot of these things. And I think what she wound up finding was that for her as an active female it was close to like a 12 hour time restricted window. And she, she didn't see quite as high levels of ketosis but apparently had better endurance performance and felt less tired during performance. But the. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, I mean Rhonda has tried 10 hours, 11, 12 and in fact for most part of the last couple of years she was also expecting a baby and then she has a baby now. So it becomes very difficult for pregnant women and also new moms to restrict their eating to less than to eight hours or less because of many obvious reasons. They're trying to actually eat for two people and it's a big stress. So you've got to kind of balance between what is stressful and what is good for you.

Yeah, I think pregnant women just need to stuff their face with really good nutrient dense food whenever they're hungry. I think that that's what I, that's what I would love for if I could go back and be a baby for my mom to be doing just eat, just eating liver and grass fed butter and bone broth all day long. The study that you did on resistance trained athletes was an 8 hour time restricted feeding window for 10 weeks where they lost fat and they did not see a decline in muscle mass and a lot of other health markers and metabolic markers improved. But then you also looked at how this affects endurance training. What did you find out when you combined time restricted eating with endurance sports?

So we haven't tried endurance sports in human athletes. What we have tried is in mice, because we always start with mice and we can control everything else. And this was kind of a very surprising effect for us because when we initially did this experiment, these mice were fed a very high fat, high fructose or high sucrose diet. They were getting 45 to 65% of their calories from fat and 20% calories from sucrose. And this diet makes everybody. This diet has been used in more than 11,500 peer reviewed scientific manuscripts to make mice sick. And then those mice are given either a drug or some gene manipulation to see the effect of drug or gene on health. So the bottom line was when we did time restricted eating on these mice, we wanted to see whether the mice lost endurance, endurance capacity. Because anybody would suspect that these mice are eating unhealthy food and fasting for 16 hours, 12 to 16 hours, and they must have lost some endurance. So when we put this mice on treadmill, we train them for a couple of days and then we put them on treadmill and we run them until time to exertion, when they cannot run anymore. And then we take them out and feed them. So when we did this, a regular mouse will run on a treadmill for say an hour, 60 minutes. That is unhealthy diet, eating randomly whenever he wants. And if a mouse eats this unhealthy high fat, high sucrose diet usually runs somewhere between 45 minutes to 50 minutes, slight reduction in endurance. Slight means almost 25% reduction in endurance. But surprisingly, when we had these mice eat the same unhealthy DIET for only eight hours, those mice run for 150 minutes. And that was really eye popping because I could not believe that these mice were running that long. So we have been experimenting and what we find is when mice eat between eight to 10 hours, they have this endurance benefit. When they eat between 10 to 12 hours, even though they have the same body weight, same muscle mass, they don't have that endurance benefit.

Hmm. So. So that would be something as significant as for endurance athletes. Like the difference between eating between 10:00am and 6:00pm versus between eating between 8:00am and 8:00pm yeah.

So that's why that was really amazing that we saw that. And then recently we have been hearing from many participants in our my circadian clock study. We'll talk about that later. Many people who try to do this between 8 to 10 hours versus 10 to 12 hours, they do see an improvement in endurance, or at least they're not as tired as they used to be after the same endurance exercise. Which brings up a lot of different interesting questions for us as Scientists why this happens? How can we mimic this? Is it due to ketogenesis, mild ketogenesis, that may be happening? Or is it due to the muscles getting repaired every day much better, or a combination of all? Or is it because the heart function improves? Because we know that time restricted in eating substantially improves cardiac function. So although we see the effect and we are very confident that it's happening both in mice and humans, of course, in humans we don't see doubling of endurance as we see in mice, but this is becoming more and more solid and we are more confident about it.

Yeah. The other one that you mentioned in the book was an improvement in motor coordination, which is also significant, of course, not just for endurance athletes and athletes of all varieties, but also important for things like, you know, motor skill acquisition or learning, for example, musical instruments or anything like that that would involve motor coordination. It seems that it's having a pretty significant effect on that too.

Yeah. So what we find is a lot of our daily activities, motor coordination, not even when we age. One thing that we slowly lose is motor coordination. So that's why elderly people are more at a higher risk for fall when they are taking the stairs. That's why we got interested in checking what happens to these mice when they are on time restricted eating. We think there is benefit both in the central nervous system or the neurons, and also in the muscle. So that the way the neurons connect to the muscle and coordinate that muscle movement and feedback to the brain and then again send that information to the opposite limb, hand or leg to coordinate this movement, that improves substantially when mice go through time restricted eating.

Now, the feeding window, you know, I just mentioned like 10am to 6pm as an example of an eight hour. But did you look at all at what time of day would be best to start eating and what time of day would be best to finish eating? Because obviously somebody could, you know, wait until lunch and then have their last meal at 8pm or eat from 2pm to 10pm or 6am to 2pm so what do you find?

Yeah, so what we're finding is most American adults eat for more than 12 hours and 50% eat for more than 15 hours or longer. So then the question is, okay, so the first step should be just try to reduce your eating window to maybe initial target should be 10 hours. Because if you try for 10 hours, you may end up at 12, or maybe you find it easy and then you may shorten it to eight hours. So now the question is, how do you time that? So if we take almost consensus Agreement that we should be in bed for at least we should give ourselves opportunity to sleep for eight hours. And out of that maybe we'll we are sleeping for seven hours. Then you give yourself eight hours in bed. Then after waking up, we still have some melatonin that's going down, that's the sleep hormone. And then alertness hormone or cortisol begins to rise. It reaches its peak maybe 45 minutes to an hour and a half after we wake up. So that one hour after waking up, I call it the changing of the guards. When the sleep hormones are going down and wake up hormones are coming up, try to avoid eating within that hour. So that brings us to nine hours, eight plus one before going to bed. Again, two to three hours before going to bed, melatonin level begins to rise. And we'll get to why one should not eat during that time. And also not eating for two to three hours before going to bed helps you sleep better. So now you've got nine hours plus two to three. That's 11 to 12 hours that you have taken away from food. So now you have a window of 12 hours to play with. Now the question is whether that when to time your meal, should it be aligned to the local time or geological time or to your internal time. If someone is waking up at 6:00am, for example, for that person, he or she can start eating from 7 onwards. If someone is consistently waking up at 8am, then maybe 9 onwards is the right time. And then the question is, well, if someone is doing eight hours, whether early eight hours or late eight hours, which one is better? So this is where we are kind of trying to figure out. One has gone from getting zero benefit to getting maybe 70, 80% benefit. And then we have splitting the hair now whether one should get 80% benefit versus 90% benefit. This is where the common sense and your current lifestyle comes into play. If someone has to attend a lot of evening social dinners and unavoidable stuff at home, for example, one has to eat with children or your spouse is working late and every day you can only eat after 8 o', clock, then it's better to have a letter time restricted eating where the end of your eating happens relatively later in the evening if you don't have those obligations.

That's actually, by the way, what we do. I eat a late breakfast because our family has so many things going on in the evening. We have to have a late dinner if we want to have dinner together as a family. So it works best for me to just wait, have a late Breakfast or a very light mid morning breakfast and then I'll have a little bit larger lunch and then dinner with the family. But dinner is often, you know, as late as 8pm and I, I don't really necessarily endorse eating that late if your number one goal is circadian rhythmicity or even weight loss. But I think for, for our family we're pretty lean and healthy as it is, we all sleep well. And for me the importance of a family social time at the end of the day kind of trumps this concept of eating dinner slightly earlier.

Yeah. So that's why I think one should not think that okay, if I cannot eat until 8 o', clock, I should not do time restricted eating. You can still do, you can still see a lot of benefits. And we haven't seen any significant difference between early or late. Although there are quite a few papers now showing that people who eat late, they don't lose as much weight or they may gain weight, but in many of the studies they haven't specifically looked at when these people are going to bed. Because if you give yourself two to three hours between your last meal and going to bed, I think that will still be quite beneficial as opposed to just eating your last meal at 10pm and then going to bed at 10:30. That's not going to give too much benefit.

Yeah. And I guess my little hack for this is even though I go to bed about 10, like I mentioned, we eat dinner often around ate. I do use a lot of digestive enzymes and bitters and digestifs as part of that evening dinner. Just because as you note in the book, the body in terms of sleep and circadian rhythm and repair and rejuvenation should not necessarily be digesting food when your head hits the pillow. So I try and use some amount of supplementation to actually help that out a little bit in the evening. But that's actually something else I wanted to ask you. Was this idea of not just supplements but like coffee, tea, all these things that would be considered either negligible in terms of number of calories or something that wouldn't be considered a meal. You actually say in the book that that breaks a fast, that if you wake up in the morning and you have coffee, you know, at 8am but maybe you're waiting till 10am to eat breakfast, that that coffee breaks a fast. And I think a lot of people are confused by that. Can you explain why it is that you write that in the book?

For most Americans, people enjoy their coffee with cream and sugar. When I Stand outside, say Starbucks or Pete's Coffee early in the morning. I rarely see, maybe less than 10% of people actually drink a black coffee.

Cream or sugar or butter and MCT oil.

Yeah. So there is something going in addition to coffee. And then if you think about why we drink coffee, the number one cause is, well, we may not be well rested at night. We need that coffee to wake up and get going in the day. So this dependence on coffee, dependence on coffee to start your day is an indication that you are not getting enough sleep. So you got to work.

I don't know, it could just be that you like coffee. Like I sleep like a rock. And even if I'm not tired, I love to have a cup of coffee in the morning.

So I have. So I'm getting to the next point. The next point is, well, if someone is a night shift worker and works like a firefighter all night, has taken 10 calls and is sleep deprived and has to get home in the morning, of course we don't want this person to be sleep deprived and driving. So it's okay for this person to have coffee and stay awake and hit the road. And in that case, we don't even say whether there should be coffee or cream. This person has to be alert. The reason why I said coffee breaks, your first or breaks. When I say fasting, it's actually not the idea of putting calories, but it's the idea of keeping all your organs rest and rejuvenate. So just imagine when you're drinking coffee, your coffee is getting digested. It's absorbed by the intestine. So the epithelial cells are working on it to absorb it. They're sending it to your liver. Then the liver sends it to the rest of your body and brain and you're waking up. So in this process, just like I said, when you cannot repair a highway, when the traffic is still moving, of course coffee may not be the 18 wheelers running on the highway, might be a bicycle or a few people, but still it does in that literal sense wax up the system. The second thing that we also find is coffee can reset circadian clock. So that means if I take skin cells, culture it this, and monitor the circadian rhythm and add some caffeine to that cell culture medium, then that resets the clock. So in that way one can use this knowledge in a constructive way. So just like I said, in the morning, if you are sleep deprived, maybe it's okay to have some black coffee. Because a cup of coffee is similar to having your clock exposed to one hour of bright light. So in that way you can constructively use it in the first half of the day. But after noon, having a cup of coffee for most people, not all will disrupt their sleep, so they may not go to deep restful sleep. So that's why I think having coffee in the first half of the day is okay. And if someone is starting very early in the morning, maybe black coffee is fine. But adding cream and sugar will start this pancreas clock because that has to digest and absorb that extra glucose.

Okay. So it does jumpstart the circadian clock, which would mean that, like coffee, afternoon would probably not be a good idea in most cases, unless you actually are trying to shift your circadian clock forward. But in the same way that you would want, for example, lots of exposure to blue light or preferably natural sunlight in the morning, and in the same way that you would want to use other circadian cues like movement, for example, to jumpstart the circadian rhythm, you could use coffee as a way to regulate your circadian rhythm by drinking a non calorie based source of coffee at some point in the morning.

Yeah, it's a great way for shift workers to reset their clock and also stay a lot because, you know, for many shift workers, we don't want them to be sleep deprived on the job and make bad decisions. But any, in those cases, yeah, any.

Type of coffee that has calories added to it, or you could even argue sweeteners added to it, would cause a flux of digestive enzymes and incretin hormones and gastrointestinal effects that would indeed cause something very similar to a breaking of the fast that would disrupt some of the metabolic benefits you're trying to get out of a time restricted eating window. And that, I guess that makes sense. Even if you say, put some cream in your coffee and go exercise like you're burning the calories with exercise, but that still doesn't really negate any of the effects it might have on circadian rhythm. Now, one question I wanted to ask you about regarding this was there are a lot of folks who recommend for jet lag, and I've said this myself before, that you use a lot of these, what do they call them? Zeitgebers? Zeitgeists, Things that can jumpstart the circadian rhythm. Do you know what I'm referring to?

Yeah.

Is it, is it zeitgeist? Is that the word?

Zeitgeber?

Yeah, zeitgeber. So zeitgeber. Yeah. So zeitgebers would be things like Exposure to light movements. And you know, even one could say things that might cause a slight cortisol release like a cup of coffee. But a commonly discussed zeitgeist guyber is food, like having a meal at the normal time where you'd normally be eating when you get to where you're going. So even though I skip breakfast a lot or eat a late breakfast when I'm at home, sometimes when I'm traveling, like if I go all the way over to Japan and I wake up at the hotel, I'll go down and have breakfast at like 8 or 9am to kind of get my circadian rhythm aligned to that new time zone. Do you think that that is a myth? Do you think it's a good idea? Do you think it's a bad idea? What about using food as a way to kind of jump start your circadian rhythm after you've traveled heavily?

Yeah. So for a very long time we thought that light is the only zeitgever or time giver for our circadian clock. And in fact I have spent half of my research carrier working on the effect of light on clock. And yes, it is true that light does reset our brain clock. But the brain clock, in addition to brain clock, we also have clocks throughout the body. And only in the last few years we're finding that the rest of the body clocks, they actually track when we eat, they don't track that much when we see light. So in that sense, resetting your clock by changing your food time seems to be more powerful. And recently there are some studies done in rats showing that when rats are jet lagged and then given food breakfast at the new light dark cycle or new time zone, you can say then their circadian clock reset much faster than if they're just given light alone and with no control over food. So in that way, food works in many different ways. Just like you said, in the morning you go get a breakfast. And of course when you are having a big breakfast in the morning, you may not feel that hungry for lunch. So maybe your lunch is little bit smaller than what you usually eat. And that helps in a different way because if you think about jet lag, most of the daytime sleepiness that we experience in jet lag happens right after lunch, which is a postprandial dip in your alertness. And if you reduce your lunch, not even have your lunch, then that reduces the chance that you'll be sleepy in the afternoon. So in this way, when someone is traveling, giving yourself at least 12 hours of break from food, from the New breakfast time and then having a good breakfast, having a very small lunch, or even skipping lunch. Most of the time I skip lunch because if I skip lunch, then I stay alert and listen to people in the afternoon. And then after dinner means if you have a good dinner, then you'll naturally feel sleepy after dinner.

Hmm. Yeah. And the only thing I run into when I skip lunch is, of course, as an athlete, and you talk about this in the book, actually, and perhaps we can talk about this a little bit more. The best time of day to exercise is, I think, as you note in the book, like your body temperature peaks and your post workout protein synthesis, your reaction time, even some hormones tend to peak in the later afternoon or early evening, making that a good time of day to do more intense exercise. The only thing I've noted is that when I skip lunch, sometimes that late afternoon hard exercise session kind of becomes increasingly difficult. And so I guess mymy current protocol is I actually eat a pretty good lunch and then I take a quick nap. And when I get up from that nap, you know, I will sometimes have just a touch of caffeine or some green tea or something that kind of picks me up. I'll even like chomp on some nicotine gum or something to wake myself up and then kind of get back into the day. And I feel pretty good with that type of scenario. So I think, you know, sometimes for athletes skipping lunch, if they are going to exercise late in the day, it can kind of backfire to a certain extent.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. My life is very sedentary. When I travel, I'm attending conferences where I have to sit in the conference after lunch and then listen to a few other talks and I barely get a chance to go for a run. Most of my runs are in the morning. And I absolutely agree, if you are active and you're an athlete exercising in the afternoon, it's a bad idea to skip lunch.

Yeah. Now getting to that though, the time of day to exercise. You talk about that a little bit more in the book. Is there anything else that you wanted to explore when it comes to the best time of day to exercise and some of the things that you found in your research?

We always see that in both animals and controlled laboratory conditions in humans, that seems to be best time to exercise. And as you mentioned, it's late in the afternoon. And evolutionarily that also makes sense because our ancestors, hunter gatherers or farmers, they had to get back to home in the evening and they had to run back because evening or darkness was really unsafe. So in that way, evolutionarily, we have adapted to have better exercise in late afternoon. And that means cardiac function is much better. Motor coordination is at its peak, Muscle performance, muscle tone is great. And in that way, we have less risk for injury. And that's why, if you even look at. So in the book, I mentioned how people have gone back and looked at 25 years of NFL or NBA records when the athletes traveled from west coast to east coast and when they played after the jet travel. And that has been replicated in many other studies. And people are finding that, yes, if the west coast team travels to east coast and then plays Monday Night Football, for example, then the west coast team has a slightly better advantage of winning against the home team. So that's a indirect, what you can say, epidemiological support for this idea that evening, evening exercise is good for you.

Yeah, that's interesting. So Monday Night Football, basically, the west coast team traveling to the east coast is going to have a performance advantage because the east coast are. They're kind of like on the tail end of their performance rhythm based on circadian cycle, whereas the west coast is in kind of like the perfect performance window.

Yeah. So now, of course, very carefully, they watch when people are traveling and then they're scheduling their game accordingly. Even for Olympics, they make sure that the athletes arrive few days before the event so that no one has that circadian advantage. But you can see that this is true. We have seen this in many, many different studies. So coming back to how to use it, of course, not everybody has that luxury of only exercising in the afternoon. So that's why I say, well, for an average person, exercising anytime is good. In the morning, it has a different advantage because you are exercising with low glycogen. And moderate, mild to moderate exercise with low glycogen helps to replace repair mitochondria and build mitochondria, which is always good. So now the idea, the new emerging idea is one should once in a while train in low glycogen state. And then of course, in the afternoon you are in your prime state, so you can do both resistance and endurance training in the afternoon.

Yeah. I should note, by the way, to folks who are really fretting about this, that of course, the best time of day to exercise is the time when you're going to actually do it. So I often break that rule, like when I'm at a conference and I'm busy and I'm traveling, sometimes I get up in the morning and just crush it at the Gym because I know that's the only time I'm going to get to exercise. So I just, I get up early in the morning and do it. But if I have the option to wait, you know, I'll go on an easy walk in the sunshine in the morning. This is the ideal day for me. You know, I'll do an easy walk in the sunshine or some yoga or sauna or go for an easy swim. And then later on in that day that's when I'll do any performance enhancing workouts or hit the weights or do like high intensity interval training or something like that. So sometimes it changes based on the situation you're in. I'd like to shift course here a little bit and talk about another, I guess what you think could be a myth. But I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit more about this. And this is this idea of biphasic sleep. A lot of people will say our ancestors didn't actually sleep through the night, they would go to bed and then they'd wake up at a certain point and start a fire and dance and make love and sit around, tell stories and go back to bed. What's your take on that?

Well, I mean, people have been looking at it even in the modern days. So for example, there are three or four different studies that came out showing that people who still live a hunter gatherer lifestyle in South America or in Africa, they don't have this kind of biphysic sleep. They do actually sleep continuously and they don't wake up and spend couple of hours. Because imagine these people who are hunter gatherers, light is not a luxury. They cannot just wake up and switch and flip a switch and will have light and will have all this luxury. All of this came from only one historian who went around and looked at how people had described some of the sleep pattern. And most of it came from rich royalties and noble people in different part of the world. And a lot of it is actually from older people. And we know as we get older, our sleep slowly deteriorates and we tend to wake up for many different reasons. And then when we wake up, of course in those days people didn't have anything else to do. And even we, if we wake up, we are not just tossing and turning, we wake up and maybe check our emails and do something else and then go back to sleep. So then the question is, if something is commonly described in history, was it normal? So for example, if I go back and gather a lot of historical evidence saying that yes, in every culture having acid Reflux. There is description of acid reflux in almost every culture. Nighttime acid reflux. So then if it was common, is it normal to have acid reflux? No. So then same thing happens to this. If in many different historical documents, if somebody finds that people were waking up in the middle of the night, staying awake for an hour, was it healthy? No, because in those days people used to live up to 45 years or 40 years max. And so I don't think there is any evidence that says that anything that's common is normal. In fact, in these days it's much more important because we don't have the luxury of having 12 to 12 hours of darkness. Because remember in those historical time, people had the luxury of sleeping, of being in bedroom for nine, 10 or 11 hours. So even if they slept for four to six hours, woke up, did something else, went back to sleep for two to three hours, it was okay for them. But if we wake up in the middle of the night, we have a very compressed window. A lot of us are lucky enough to get seven hours of sleep and within that seven hours, if we wake up for two hours, then we are losing our sleep. So what we're finding with time restricted eating was really interesting, that with time restricted eating, people's core body temperature falls slightly more and the arousal threshold goes up. So they actually get into deeper sleep and they don't wake up. A lot of them, they don't wake up at 3 o' clock or 4 o' clock in the morning. So that tells us that maybe there is a biological reason or there is a biological mechanism why we deteriorate our sleep as we get older because our arousal threshold goes down and then by reinforcing our circadian rhythm, we can get back that continuous sleep.

Yeah, you talk in the book about how they would actually put sleep trackers on some of these populations like the Hasda in Tanzania or the Toba in Argentina. And they actually did not find any signs of two phase sleep. These people just go to bed around 9 or 10 and then wake up around dawn. And you know, this two faced sleep in our modern society of course is when you wake up and you've been asleep for four hours. You dig into your cell phone, you open up Facebook and then you on YouTube and then you're into the mail. And yeah, I think perhaps some people fabricated that as an excuse to lay in their phones and dink around on their phones at night. But I thought it was interesting how you kind of dispelled that myth of two faced sleep in the Book. Another thing I wanted to talk about a little bit that you explore is jet lag and airplane travel and how we can kind of manage some of these things that go around jet lag. And one thing that you talk about, particularly that I haven't heard discussed very much before, was this idea of figuring out ways that you can enhance your oxygen availability when you're flying. Can you explain?

Yeah. So when we are flying, the jet lag actually relates to many things. One is we stay awake, watch a lot of TVs, and then we think we should get our tickets worth of food so we eat more. But the one thing that we often forget is we are flying in a plane where the air pressure is set to, say, 15,000ft or 10,000ft or even in some cases, worse than that. And there are many nice studies, very well controlled studies over a long period of time. People have shown that, in fact, the oxygen, low oxygen in a transatlantic flight or a long haul jet is so low that it can reduce your dissolved oxygen level in your blood and it can even sometimes come down to as low as 90%. So then the question is, how do you breathe more? And what I have been doing is I put a sleep right or breathe right, one of the sleeping aids that goes on the nose or inside the nose that keeps the nostril open. And in that way I can breathe more air because the airplane air is less in oxygen. And if I can breathe more, then I can breathe more oxygen.

That's interesting. So this is just like one of those same type of things you'd see like football players wearing or a lot of Tour de France cyclists will use these. They actually use one called a turbine. It's a nasal dilator to increase airflow. But you also wear one of these on an airplane.

Yeah, I use. So my. Yeah, my travel companion is always a neck pillow, earplugs, eye mask, and then a breathing aid.

If you have a good moisturizer or even like a little bit of sesame oil or almond oil or olive oil. The other thing, and I think this was a tip given to me, actually. You know what? I read this in the book Change youe Schedule, Change youe Life, a book written by an Ayurvedic physician. You'd probably like that book. It actually explores some of the concepts we're talking about today, but more from an Ayurvedic medicine standpoint. He gets into the concept of the air on the planes being very dry and how you can actually smear the inside of your nostrils with some sort of like a good toxin free oil and that that can enhance your ability to be able to, to get more oxygen and battle jet lag a little bit as well. So I would imagine that the two in combination could work quite well.

Yeah, I mean the aeroplane air is very low humidity, so that's a no brainer to have some moisturizer.

Well, I have a, I have a flight coming up tomorrow morning, so I may have to try this. I have a bunch of these nasal dilators and I definitely have olive oil, so I may give it a go. Okay, so how about the concept of melatonin? Because obviously a lot of people will travel with melatonin for what we were just talking about for jet lag. Some people just use a little bit every night before they go to bed. But can you get into the idea of melatonin and meal timing? I think a lot of people don't understand the interplay between melatonin and insulin and blood glucose.

Yeah. So this story actually started in 2002, 2003, when this modern human genetics study started looking at which gene mutations are linked to obesity, diabetes. Surprisingly, people are expecting that genes linked to, say, glucose metabolism would be on the top of the list. But surprisingly, they found two or three genes that are that shocked them. One was melatonin receptor gene, and then the other one is a clock component called cryptochrome. I'll not go into cryptochrome, but the melatonin story took around 10 to 15 years to really pan out because, you know, it was obesity diabetes research and people are not familiar with what, what's the link between melatonin and obesity. And slowly the story is this. For melatonin or any hormone to act, these hormones are like, like keys. And they have to go and bind to their target, which is a lot, and then they unlock and then cause the effect. So similarly, melatonin binds to its receptor. You can say the lock is melatonin receptor 1B and that's how melatonin puts down your brain to sleep. But surprisingly, the same receptor is also found in the pancreas. And then people got curious. What is melatonin doing to the pancreas? To make a long story short, it actually makes pancreas to sleep. So that means even if your blood sugar level is increasing, pancreas would sense that blood sugar level and produce a little bit more insulin to help your muscle and liver to absorb that blood sugar. When it is sleeping under the influence of melatonin, then it doesn't do that, so it produces Less insulin and blood sugar can remain high for a little bit longer time. And nearly half of our population have this mutation in melatonin receptor that makes this effect of melatonin on pancreas much more potent. So that means nearly half of the people have this mutation. They cannot reduce their blood glucose for up to two hours after having an evening meal if the melatonin is already high, whereas the other half may bring down melatonin, bring down blood sugar relatively okay. And this fits with a very old idea that was prevalent in 1970s and 80s that used to be called evening diabetes. And we also see that even in these days when we monitor people's blood glucose continuously. That is, if I check into a hospital and then get my blood glucose tested in the morning in response to a test meal where I drink a glass of juice or something, and then the physician tests my blood sugar level for up to two hours, I may come out okay. I'm not diabetic. But in the evening, say at 8 o', clock, even if I have fasted for eight hours or nine hours in the daytime, I go check into the hospital and then do the same test, my blood sugar will remain high for a longer time. And that happens with almost everybody. And now we have, now we have an explanation, because in the evening, our melatonin begins to rise. Maybe it's making our pancreas go to sleep, and that's why our blood sugar remains high. And for those people who already are at a high risk for diabetes, those who have pre diabetes, and on top of that, if they even have this gene mutation in melatonin receptor 1B, they're at a very high risk for this postprandial blood glucose, or if they have extra melatonin right after or right before the evening dinner.

This is interesting to me, not only because it means that you should be careful with taking a melatonin supplement right after you've had dinner, but also if you think about when you wake up, I know that some melatonin, of course, when you wake up is still gonna be in your system. Like if you wake at, let's say, 6:30, you know, around 7:30 or 8. So to me, this seems like yet another reason to perhaps not have breakfast right when you wake up. Because if melatonin is shutting down the pancreatic production of insulin, you actually would have higher postprandial blood glucose with morning breakfast, if you eat breakfast too early.

Yeah. So that's why I said that in the morning, give yourself at least an hour before you have Your fast calor, that's when the melatonin level is slowly going down. Most of us actually wake up with an alarm clock or with some deadline. So that means we are forcing our brain to wake up and then our melatonin will take another hour or even sometimes two hours if we're waking up with insufficient sleep.

Interesting. So perhaps if you were traveling and you wanted to use food as one of these zeitgebers. Like to go back to my analogy with Japan and I was going to have breakfast to jumpstart my circadian rhythm, I may want to consider using one of these alarm clocks that gently wakes you like some phone apps now. And there's even a new sleep headband. I think it's called the dream that will gradually wake you during the time when you're in your lightest phase of sleep. It seems to me like that would be a pretty good idea as an alarm clock to use, especially if you're going to have an early breakfast.

Well, so those things help you to wake up in your light sleep. But still, you know, as you know, we go through quite a few sleep cycles, so we have different time window of those light sleep. But even during those light sleep, we still have high melatonin that's helping us to go to the next sleep cycle. So yes, one idea would be to wake up gently and also maybe with a alarm clock or timer to your light that will slowly brighten up your room. Another simple thing you can do is you can just wake up and take a walk outside or go for a mild run, or like you do, go for a swim outside. And that 15, 20 minutes of bright light exposure, even at twilight time, we have thousand to ten thousand lux of light that'll be enough to suppress melatonin. And then you can get back to a hotel, get a good healthy breakfast and start your day.

Now, related to this is the idea of resetting the gut clock when you travel. I know you've got some studies that you've done on mice who have traveled across different time zones, or at least you've changed the light dark schedule in these rodent housings so that it appears that they've traveled across a bunch of time zones. Like a human who has flown from one country to another. Can you go into what you actually did with these rodents to reset their gut clocks and why you'd want to do that?

Yeah, so this was actually done in one of my collaborators lab in Mexico. So what she did was very simple experiment. As we now know, almost every organ in our body Has a clock. So when we reset or when we do a jet lag experiment, then say three days after giving the jet lag, we can go back to these animals and then take out a little bit of that tissue from different parts of the body and say, has the clock reset to the new time zone? And when these mice are not given any food cue, they are allowed to eat whenever they want. The only thing that has changed is light. Then we see that after three days, the mice might have reset their clock halfway. So if they went through an eight hour jet lag, then they might have reset by four hours to the new time zone, not the eight hours. But if in this experiment, if the food is also restricted and they start eating only in the evening because mice are knocked on now, then after four days, if we check their clock, then they would have reset by six to eight hours. So that means giving this timing cue by food was much more effective. That's one aspect. And the other aspect is if we think of the new thought about how our gut affects our brain, a lot of the hormones that we use that our body uses in the gut to sense food or to digest food, etc. Those hormones are partly broken down. And these hormones also affect our mood. So for example, one of the gut hormone, when it's partially broken down, can act on the brain and make us more anxious or give us panic attack. So by eating within say 8 to 10 hours or restricting when we eat in the new time zone, etc. Will actually help us to control this gut brain axis, gut brain communication, so that our mood remains much better during jet lag or even after we come back to our new time zone or home zone. Home time zone, then that also helps us to reduce this anxiety or depression, those kind of symptoms.

Okay, so basically this just comes down to what we were talking about earlier, like eating at the appropriate time in whatever the new time zone is that you've arrived in. Which of course logistically can be difficult. Like I've arrived in some Cities at like 10pm and if I've been fasting on the flight, which I do often, I'll either fast or eat very minimum calories. I'm hungry when I get to the time zone. And I will sometimes, you know, take a bunch of melatonin or some other sleep aid and get into bed and get away from any restaurants or, you know, steer clear of the hotel bar and the hotel minibar or anything like that, because I'm so hungry and just wait until the morning to eat. And very similarly, you Know, if I arrive at like 3pm, I'll wait until dinner to eat, or if I arrive at 10am, I'll wait until 1pm to eat. But what you're saying is that that is actually considered to be resetting the gut clock when it comes to restoring normal circadian rhythms when you travel.

Yeah. So what you're doing is resetting your gut clock and that helps you to reset the rest of your clock. And I think in most of your examples, when you say you reach the new time zone in the evening, what I have noticed is most of the flights from US to Japan or China, they reach Japan or China in the afternoon or evening. Whereas most of the flights from US to Europe, they usually reach Europe in the morning. So my rule of thumb has been, well, first, like you do do sufficient fasting in flight, 10 to 12 hours pre flight before reaching your new time zone. And maybe in Japan or China you can have a early dinner when you're going to Europe, you can have your breakfast after landing and that will help you reset the clock.

Interesting. Now, in terms of things that go beyond food, specifically medications and supplements, can we actually time those to our circadian rhythm as well?

Yeah. So this is a very new area of circadian rhythm research because only recently we and others have found that nearly every gene in our genome turns on and off at different time of the day. So that means if you think of every medication, the medication, every drug goes and finds its target gene and then turns it on or off. That's the fundamental idea about any drug. And now imagine if the target is on at certain time and off at certain time, then you can imagine that, well, depending on the drug and what it does, that should be an optimal time for every drug. And since the field is very new, we can just predict which drug might have what optimal time. But we have to go back and do the right experiment or look at historically some of the clinical trials to see which drug acts at what time in this context. Historically, people have found very rich literature on chemotherapy for cancer and particularly breast cancer. Chemotherapies have a very nice literature on what time which chemotherapeutic agent works best. And this is not a one time that works best for all the drugs. So individual drug has its own optimal time. And beyond chemotherapy, the other areas are arthritis pain medications. So some of the pain medications, some of the pain actually happens much more in the morning. We know that arthritis pain is more severe in the morning, but surprisingly, the medication actually works much better if it is taken on the night before going to bed because the optimal time for the drug to act is very early in the morning. And this drug should be in your system before you wake up to act then. Some of the new drugs in diabetes, for example, the newest drugs are SGLT2 inhibitor. This is an enzyme in our kidney where you can pee the extra blood sugar. And in some of the studies there is indication that the drug is given in small dose in the evening, that's as effective as a medium dose in the morning. So I think this is an area in the next four to five years we'll see more and more drugs and their optimal timing will be determined and that will help people to reduce their dose or have more effective treatment of their drug. And this is also a very urgent area because if you look at the top 20 best selling drugs in the US then they benefit only 1 out of 3 to 1 out of 21 who take the drug. So the best drug actually benefits only 30% of the population who take it. So if we can increase that efficacy by even 10 to 15%, that's going to benefit millions of new people. That's why we're very excited about this aspect of circadian rhythms.

Yeah, that's very similar to a compound a lot of people are using now to manage autoimmune and that would be low dose naltrexone. I know that that's best taken around 9pm or so to match to the natural endorphin cycles based on circadian rhythm in the body. So a lot of these things that control autoimmune issues or gut, some of them are best taken at night as well. So that was a very interesting section of your. And by the way, I've got a couple more questions for Dr. Ponda, but I'm going to link to the book. For those of you listening in, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com the code. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.comthe code. And I'll link to Dr. Ponda's book and a few other good books on this topic as well as anything else we discuss on the show. Next question I have for you is regarding these blue light blocking glasses and I've noticed increased use of those, particularly when I go to a lot of these biohacking or health conferences. Everybody's walking around, going to lunch in their blue light blocking glasses, walking around the expo in their blue light blocking glasses. What's your take on this idea of just like constantly wearing your blue light blocking glasses and how that could Affect the circadian rhythm.

Well, that's the thing about circadian rhythm, that anything that you think is good for your health, you got to, you got to think twice. Because just like timing makes a healthy food junk, similarly timing can make a healthy light junk light. So during the daytime, we need bright light or blue light to suppress our melatonin and also increase alertness and increase happiness, reduce depression. And that's the whole reason why people are in wintertime or in northern latitude, feel depressed during half of the year. So we need that blue light during daytime and only in the evening or nighttime. Not having enough blue light helps us to build up our melatonin and help us going to bed. So in that way, having those blue blocking glasses in the evening is good for overall health. So coming back to people who wear them all the time, one thing is, if they're actually exercising a lot, being outdoor for an hour or so, even with those blue blockers, because those blue blockers are actually not blocking all the blue light, they do block to some extent, somewhere between 10 to 50. Sometimes the extreme ones can go up to 70% with those red light. So even people who are wearing them and outdoor a lot of time during daytime getting a lot of bright sunlight, it's not too harmful. But what we are seeing is a lot of people, particularly students, college students and high school students, a lot of people who work in it whole day they're sitting indoor, they barely have access to bright light. And if they are depriving themselves of this blue light that we need during daytime, then maybe slowly, they might feel they may be a little depressed, they may be a little low. They may not connect these dots, but that's something they have to be careful about. Some people use it to reduce glare, reduce screen brightness issues. So for those kind of issues, you can always adjust your screen brightness or even change the screen color. You can even put night shift during daytime, manually override it. But depriving yourself actively of blue light during daytime may not be doing too much good.

Yeah, that's the thing is, I think we have to strike a balance. And I like that a lot of these companies now, for example, Raw Optics or Felix Gray or Amber, they're developing glasses that can be worn in the daytime to reduce screen glare and some of the flicker damage from overhead fluorescent and LED lighting without necessarily blocking blue light and blocking the actual circadian cue from the blue light. So I think it's worth it if you're kind of on this blue light blocking glasses bandwagon to have a Set of clear glare blocking lenses that you could use by day and then your orange or yellowish lenses for night. I think that that's kind of a good way to address that issue. Now, a couple of times during this show you've mentioned my circadian clock and I know you've got a research project going on over there. Can you get into what you're doing over at my circadian clock?

Yeah. So a few years ago, when we discovered that this time restricted eating or timing of eating is so important for health, two issues came up. One was my scientific peers always asked, well, how do you know that people actually eat outside, say 10 or 12 hours window and what proportion of people actually eat and who can benefit? And to test that, we realized that we have to do some, what we call epidemiological study where we can ask people from all over the world to share what time they habitually eat. And then next question was, how are people going to, how are you going to figure out whether it's a modifiable behavior? Can people change their eating habit and when they change that, what do they prefer? Do they prefer, say, just like you said, 6:00am to 6:00pm or 8:00am to 6:00pm what is most desirable and what benefits you'll ultimately see? We realize that most of the clinical studies in this country or anywhere in the world is actually done on a very small number of people who are willing to participate and have time to participate in these clinical studies. They live usually within 20 to 30 miles of a big clinical center. And in that way, most of our knowledge about drugs or any procedure is truly limited to a few people living within medical, within easy access of medical centers. So then I thought, well, when people are so familiar with sharing data over phone, then why don't we develop an app called my circadian clock? And since it's a research app, we make sure that people give us their consent that they participate. We also tell them that we are anonymizing their data and we are not going to sell their data to anybody. So all of these have to be in what we call informed consent. So people go to this website, read about this study, give the informed consent, and they can download this app, my circadian clock, either it's working now both in iOS and Android, and then they share their habitual eating pattern, what they're doing right now for a week. Because we know people change their eating pattern between weekday and weekend. We usually give them two weeks because hopefully within those two weeks they can give us one week of data. And then through this App. We also give them some tips about how to sleep better, how to eat better, how to eat within say X number of hours, and then they can do a self directed 10 to 12 weeks of time restricted eating. Then during this time we also have a few very short surveys to see what improvements they're seeing. So when we do these studies, we are doing two things. One is we are collecting epidemiological data on how people are having their lifestyle. Second is what they can modify. Those are most important. And then, and finally, even if this is self reported, sometimes those self reported data help us to come up with better controlled studies in the lab. For example, few years ago, one of the immediate benefit of time restricted eating, many people said, was they were sleeping better and we wanted to test whether it's true or not. So we went back to lab and then we put animals under time restricted eating and we measure their sleep and we realize that is the arousal threshold that goes up. So when they eat time restricted eating, then they get into a slightly deeper sleep so they are not woken up by mild disturbances and noise. And that's what is happening. So similarly, we have gone back and now we hear people saying that at times eating reduces their overall inflammation, so some of the inflammatory diseases become less severe or their medication dose reduces. And then we're going back to the animal models to see whether it's true. Another example was some people said, well, they're falling sick less and less. For example, everybody, some people may catch a cold or have a runny nose three, four times a year. And after doing time restricted eating for a few months, they're noticing that they're not that sick that often. So we went back and actually one of our esteemed colleagues, he did an independent study, he took mice and then put them under time restricted eating and gave them a very high dose of bacterial toxin. And usually this level of toxin can be lethal for experimental animals. But the animals who were on time restricted eating could tolerate that and survived. So this idea that time restricted eating can improve your immune system, we had no idea that that was happening. We could not ask our mice whether their immune system is getting better. But when people self reported, that helped us, that is helping the community to go back and do more control studies and find whether it's true or not and how it can benefit people.

Wow. So ultimately for this immune system function, boost for the sleep, boost the exercise performance, the motor coordination, the re regulation of circadian rhythm and jet lag. Ultimately it appears that the magic comes down to trying as much as possible to eat in an eight hour compressed feeding window if you're a female, especially an active female, possibly even pushing that as far as a 12 hour compressed feeding window and attempting to not eat too many of those calories within two or three hours prior to bedtime, not break your fast in the morning with your pumpkin spice latte. And that's basically the ins and outs of starting on this whole Tre thing and looking like Wolverine. Yeah, that simple. Well, the book is just chock full of even more science so again I'm gonna link to it in the show notes. For those of you listening in over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com the code and if you go there I'd be curious to hear your comments about what you found with the eight hours and how you've timed those eight hours. Again, you know, for me personally usually my feeding starts or my eating starts at about 10am and you know, frankly I'm closer to a 10 hour because like I mentioned I'm usually kind of doing dinner around 8pm but ultimately I think that the research that Dr. Ponda outlines in this book cannot be denied when it comes to the benefits of having long periods of time every single 24 hour cycle where you go without stuffing your face. And the book just has tons of other little tips in there that we didn't get into. But fantastic read. And Dr. Ponda, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us man.

Thank you Ben.

Alright folks, well I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Sachin Panda, the author of the Circadian Code, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Want more? Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can subscribe to my information packed and entertaining newsletter and click the link up on the right hand side of that webpage that says Ben Recommends where you'll see a full list of everything I've ever recommended to enhance your body and your brain. Finally, to get your hands on all of the unique supplement formulations that I personally develop, you can visit the website of my company kion@getkion.com that's getkion.com.