UNLOCK Your Gut’s FULL Potential: Top Tests, Kid Probiotics & Poop Secrets!

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this. Welcome to the best of gut health. I have assembled in today's show the best of the best of my snippets from some of the coolest gut health podcasts that I've ever recorded. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com GutHealthPodcast you'll be able to access the show notes and take a deeper dive into any of these episodes, which you're gonna hear the best of the best from. We're gonna start off today with Pendulum's Colleen Cutcliffe. And she introduced me to alternatives to GLP1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic, but alternatives that are natural and safe and effective, including how you can stimulate GLP1 with specific forms of bacteria. This is a fascinating podcast. I've been experimenting with some of the peptides she sent me based on this GLP1 agonism, and it's incredible. So let's jump in and hear what Colleen Cutcliffe has to say. I've got this blood glucose monitor on. I can hold my phone up to it. It's a freestyle libre. It'll tell me my blood glucose in real time. And I was thinking about this, about the fact that, gosh, when I test this, this is measuring the sugar in my blood. But how the heck do you make the connection from a bacteria in my gut to the sugar in my blood? I think that it would be really helpful for me to wrap my head around this whole gut metabolism axis if you could describe how this actually works, how what I eat, specifically the bacterial content in my food or the biome in my gut actually influences something like blood sugar.

Yeah, I think at first it's sort of non obvious how your gut bacteria might be influencing your blood glucose spikes. And I actually also wore a continuous glucose monitor to understand what impact the products were having on my own blood glucose spikes. But fundamentally, everything we eat first goes into your stomach. You have all these stomach acids and they kind of break down your food to some extent. But more importantly, as your food parts go down the digestive tract, they hit the gut microbiome. And this is where the real metabolism of all of your food is happening. And one of the things that we all know is that a high fiber diet is really good for us. We're supposed to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. And one of the reasons why a high fiber diet is good for us is because when it gets to. When those fibers get to the gut microbiome, they get metabolized into small molecules called short chain fatty acids. One of the most important is called butyrate. And those small molecules that the microbiome creates after metabolizing our fibers actually stimulate GLP1 production. A lot of people don't know this. GLP1s are certainly starting to become more well known, but a lot of people don't know that GLP1 is actually triggered in the gut microbiome.

What's GLP1 stand for?

GLP1 stands for glucagon, like peptide. And essentially it is a small molecule that stimulates insulin response, and it actually does more than that. On the one hand, it stimulates insulin response to help clear out the sugar in your blood after you've eaten a meal. But it also appears to have a very strong tie to our brains and our cravings and our food cravings. And so people who take these GLP1 drugs, which are designed for people with type 2 diabetes, not only see that their sugars are metabolized in their blood more effectively by releasing insulin, but they also find that they have increased satiety. So they just really don't crave foods as much. And so that combination leads to kind of a really nice positive cycle in which you are metabolizing sugars better, and then you're also craving less of the foods that kind of cause these high sugar spikes. And so GLP1 drugs like Ozempic and things like that, that's how they function. And they're extremely effective in helping to lower blood glucose spikes and lower food cravings.

Would you ever take those? I think they call them semaglutide peptides.

Because now I know where I've heard.

That term GLP1 before, because everybody's dropping that as the way that these drugs like, or peptides, if you want to call them like ozempic, actually work. What do you think of those?

I personally would not take them. And the reason is because, you know, first of all, they were designed for people with type 2 diabetes who are people that are actually unable to produce the right amount of GLP1 in order to manage their blood glucose spikes. So you're talking about people that have a disease that a drug was designed for. And if you're a healthy person and you're able to make GLP one kind of adding a drug on top of that, in general, there's going to be side effects that you're going to experience. But maybe more importantly, is physiologically what GLP1 how it's supposed to work. So how it's supposed to work is that, you know, you eat food, your microbiome digests that food, and it tells your body, we just ate a bunch of food, we need to clear the blood, we need to clear the glucose out of the blood. So it stimulates GLP1. GLP1 gets released.

It.

It tells your body to release insulin. You clear the sugar out of your bloodstream. So actually, the levels of GLP1 in your blood go like this, kind of similar to blood glucose spikes. When your body eats food, GLP1 gets spiked in your bloodstream to tell your body to metabolize that sugar, and then it goes away. And then when you eat again, it does the same thing. And so you're supposed to have this cycle of GLP1. What the GLP1 drugs do is they increase GLP1 consistently, so you no longer have this cycle that your body is supposed to have. It's just high levels of GLP1 all the time. And while that can result in really nice, immediate results, it's not the way your body is supposed to physiologically work. And so when you disrupt cycles like that in your physiology and all kinds of other biochemical systems get disrupted. And so for me, since I don't have diabetes, I wouldn't personally take them.

So if you had the GLP1 constantly being stimulated by these semaglutide peptides, would you have constantly high insulin levels or low insulin levels?

You would be high. So basically you're. You're trying to. Your body is constantly trying to metabolize all the sugar in your bloodstream, even when they're. Even when you haven't eaten.

Huh.

So you could almost like induce kind of like chronic hyperinsulinemia with these.

And not only that, but these beta cells which are producing insulin, you're constantly stimulating them and having them going. And so eventually those betas. And this is actually quite well known for people with type 2 diabetes, when you keep stimulating those beta cells that produce insulin, over time the drugs become less effective because you're basically. It's like if someone were yelling in your ear all day long, in the beginning, you might have a reaction, but after a while you're going to start to tune it out. And our cells have a similar feedback loop, which is to say that under constant stimulation, eventually they become less responsive. And so that's what you're doing to your body. You're overstimulating a process all the time that's not supposed to Be turned on all the time, huh?

Well, I mean, even though like obviously being overweight or obese might have more risks than something like this peptide might present, sounds to me like we would.

Have to see like a lot better.

Long term safety data on something like pancreatic function or insulin sensitivity before saying that the average, I don't know, fitness enthusiast who wants to lose a few pounds or one of these anti aging enthusiasts who wants to keep blood sugar regulated effectively should use something like this 100%.

I mean, the long term effects and safety of long term use of the drugs in healthy people really hasn't been explored. They were developed for people with diabetes.

Yeah. And in contrast, it's my understanding that.

A lot of these so called blood.

Glucose disposal agents that a lot of people talk about, like berberine or bitter melon extract or apple cider vinegar, or I suppose like a pharmaceutical like metformin, those are acting differently, right? Those are triggering the, from what I understand, the cell surface receptor, the glute transporter that would allow for glucose to be taken up into something like muscle rather than hanging around the bloodstream. It's a different mechanism of action, isn't it?

Well, to be honest with you, even though metformin has been out for a long time, I think there's still things being uncovered about it. And actually there's a pretty strong set of hypotheses around metformin impacting the gut microbiome and that being one of its mechanisms of action too. And actually a lot of people theorize about apple cider vinegar as having kind of a similar thing. So you're introducing something more acidic into the microbiome. You're potentially changing the composition of the microbes that are there. But, but ultimately the microbiome is your natural way to metabolize these fibers and to help your body metabolize sugars and carbs by stimulating GLP1. That's kind of the natural system. And so that's where the microbiome becomes really interesting because what people found is that people with obesity and type 2 diabetes are low or entirely missing these microbes that stimulate GLP1. And so that's where you start to have really interesting intervention opportunities.

So rather than taking GLP1, you're actually allowing the bacteria in your gut to naturally produce GLP1 all on its own. What kind of bacteria would actually do that?

Well, there's actually only one strain so far that's been known to do that. As I mentioned, there are these short chain fatty acids like butyrate that get produced by the microbiome. And there's been evidence suggests that butyrate can stimulate GLP1 production. There's actually only one bacterial strain that's ever been shown to directly be able to stimulate GLP1. And, and it's a strain called Akkermansia mucinophila. This is a strain that you're really not going to see on labels, and certainly probably most people haven't heard of it, but it is emerging as a keystone strain in the gut because it is the only strain that we know of right now that literally lives in your gut lining. Its job all day and all night is to keep that gut lining regulated. It also is the only strain that is known to be able to stimulate GLP1. And so it really is becoming clear that this strain is super important. And maybe I'd say, moreover, the way Akkermansia started to make its way into this keystone strain status is because there are a wide variety of diseases in which people are low in Akkermansia. So there's obesity, type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes, actually bipolar disorder, inflammatory diseases, immune diseases. So you start to say, like, well, gee, all these diseases that people have and they're also low, they're, you know, correlatively low in Akkermansia. You know, why would that be? And, and really what's starting to emerge is that Akkermancy is just playing a really core role in the gut lining as well as the production of GLP1. And that's how it's having all these outside outsized effects when you don't have enough of it.

All right, I hope you enjoyed that snippet from Colleen. Next up, I've got Dr. Hanaway. Dr. Hanaway is responsible at Genova Diagnostics as the expert behind their GIFx three day stool panel. So we get into microbiome testing, what a test result will reveal, what steps to take from a functional medicine standpoint. When you test your gut, we even go into psychobiotics and the manipulation of bacteria, gut brain signals. So if you want to learn how your bacteria and your intestinal inflammation affect your mood, your health, your longevity, and a whole lot more, tune in to this episode with Dr. Hanaway. Again, all the shownotes are@BenGreenfieldLife.com Gut Health Podcast. I used to always recommend folks, and this is right up your alley, use something like a Genova Diagnostics GIFX stool profile. Usually like a three day profile where you're getting a sampling over several days, which I understand to be A little bit more accurate than the, than the single day panel. And that is a panel that advertises itself as being able to detect, you know, most of the common parasites and then yeast and bacteria and I believe inflammatory markers as well, like calprotectin, for example. And I think some people might be confused about whether or not getting a test like that would be redundant with getting something like a longevity gut biome test that's looking at the actual microbiome of the gut. Do people need to get both or can you get just about everything that you would get out of a GIFX panel from something like a gut bio?

Well, that's a great question and I think the answer on that is still to be determined. So I have, you know, I worked as the medical director, chief medical officer at DigeNova for 10 years. Markers like calprotectin and pancreatic elastase were tools that I actually was the one involved in getting FDA approval and getting CBT code status for them. So I'm very familiar with them and have published on each of them, their great individual biomarkers looking at inflammation and looking at digestion. They also, the GIFX has different ways of being able to look at the gut microbiome. It uses culture methodology that's been around for 50 plus years. It's been using the 16s probes that we talked about that are going to help us get an idea of diversity and what's going on, but they aren't going to give us all the details and they're not as sensitive. And they also have some markers of directly measuring the metabolomics, the metabolic byproducts of the bacteria. Now, what the gut biotest does is it's able to give us kind of everything that's going on there. So I can look at and say, wow, I have 198 species. Here are the species, and here, here is how much is there. And that is exactly what's in me. And I can get an understanding of what's going on virtually because they're looking at the genes of what's happening with the bacteria in my gut. Metabolically, those are very useful pieces of information that are not available on a test like the GI effects, but the individual biomarkers looking at inflammation or digestion, like calprotectin, which is a validated tool, or pancreatic elastase, which is a validated tool. Those would need to be done separately. You can get some inference on the gut biotest about an inflammation score based upon the machine learning that Joel Dudley has helped put together. You can get an understanding of what's happening with digestion based upon who's living in the hood that are helpful with digestion, but you don't get an exact answer.

Interesting. So at this point, if you wanted the best of both worlds, you'd have to get both tests. It sounds like that would be appropriate if you wanted to see everything that was going on in the gut. You'd have to get a GIFX panel and, and a gut biopanel.

Or you can get some of the individual biomarkers like pancreatic elastase and calprotectin from just about any laboratory in the country and then look at the gut bio test to really get an understanding of the gut microbiome. There's no better test for the gut microbiome than what Longevity Health has put together.

Oh, that's a powerful statement. Okay, the GI effects panel, then, like you mentioned, you probably could save some money by just getting like calprotectin and pancreatic elastase and a few of the things you wouldn't be getting with something like a gut bio. Do you think that in the future some of these microbiome tests like the gut bio would also be able to offer those type of markers on the panel?

I'm hoping we can get there.

Yeah, that would be cool. To only have to fiddle around with one.

Yeah. And part of it, Ben, is they're going to be working on doing the comparisons to see can you actually predict exactly what the calprotectin level is going to be. That's what the beauty of what Joel Dudley's work is and the machine learning is to be able to make those comparisons. We don't know that yet. For example, there is a low level inflammation that we have. A pretty good idea is happening for a lot of people that's based in the microbiome. And we don't see changes in inflammatory markers of the gut yet and we don't see changes in crp. But we know that there's something that's going on with inflammation. We look at these millions of people with autoimmune diseases and, you know, we're not actually able to pick up where's the inflammation. We know there's something going on with the immune system and it's our hope that we're going to be able to characterize that with the, with the gut bio test and metagenomic sequencing and machine learning and virtual metabolomics. So that's, that's to me, where the, where the puck is going, okay, got it.

And again, kind of boots on the ground. Can you give me an example of something that you might see or perhaps even as you just alluded to with the case of inflammation, something you see repeatedly on something like a gut bio in many people? And what steps from a functional medicine standpoint you would then take to address something like that?

Well, with the gut biotest, where I'm going is I'm looking at some of the scores that are put together, where we're going to look at a microbiome based inflammation score. And that's going to tell me, okay, so here's an inflammation that's going on. Now I need to work with some specific agents and they may be, they may be fish oils and omega 3 fats. They may be using turmeric and various formulations of turmeric at therapeutic doses, 500 to 1,000 milligrams twice a day. They may be using boswellia. I've got a whole series of kinds of things and tools that I work with that I'm able to apply. When I know that there is an inflammatory issue that's going on or if I see that there's a permeability issue that's going on, then you know that I can tell from, from the gut bio test. So with each of these factors I'm getting deeper into an understanding now where, where they're going is being able to take that not only look at the immune system and, and, but to more deeply look at digestion, to understand, you know, where your fiber needs are, but also being able to look at the enteric nervous system and the whole brain, gut microbiome connection, which is fascinating. We see this whole idea of psychobiotics and prebiotics that are going to help the bacteria that will have an effect on your mood, on depression and anxiety. And this to me is really a whole fascinating new field that we're going to be looking at the gut to treat patients who have, you know, depression and anxiety and mental health and neurological disorders. That's really fascinating.

That's interesting. And not many people have used the term psychobiotics on the show before, but I know it's been several years now since, you know, articles have been appearing on PubMed about this idea that probiotics, when ingested, can confer beneficial effects to the central nervous system and regulate the HPA axis and the glucocorticoid stress response. It's very interesting that these things in a way are almost like mini psychedelics.

Well, you can think of them that way or you can think of them. I'm actually more interested in what are the foods and what are the prebiotics that help your bacteria to grow, to be able to bring balance back to the system overall. And so here's. Let me give you an example of how sort of the, if you will, the oddness of my thinking, but how these pieces fit together is that we know that through the gut it produces cytokines that may be pro or anti inflammatory. It produces metabolites. There are more metabolites that come from our gut than there are circulating from our own cells. There's information that is stimulated from the vagal nerve going back up to the brain. There are neurotransmitters like serotonin. 95% of the serotonin in the body is in the gut. All that information is going up into the brain. Ten times more information going in that direction than in the other direction. Now where it goes is it goes first to the amygdala, which is involved in our emotional relationship to the world and gathers information from our memory. And it goes to another place called the insular cortex. And our insular cortex is a small little area that helps to define our own sense of self. So from there that information then goes to the HPA axis and determines what's going to happen hormonally. It goes to our whole reactivity, it connects to our emotions. So to me, like, okay, so what I'm taking in from the environment, the dog that I'm touching, the water that I'm drinking or bathing in, the food that I'm eating, every environmental input is being related to or filtered through my gut microbiome. And it's sending signals to my brain that help me to understand who I am and how do I relate to the world and what is the emotional connection. Well, that to me is super fascinating because it now puts us in direct relationship where the microcosm of what's happening in our gut is related to the macrocosm of what's happening in our world and the diversity of the microbiome. And it connects to our own sense of self and relationship to the world. Well, that's a pretty big view. And that's a view that systems like Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine have talked about for a long time, of how those elements fit together. That's what I'm interested in.

Next up, I had a fascinating discussion with seed probiotics Raja Deer. We talked about how he cares for his young five month old with bifidobacterium Infantis and the right way to support a young growing child's microbiome. We talk about food sources for reinventing your own gut bacteria, how your microbiome is made, how it informs your lifelong health. If it's true that babies born via C section have inadequate gut bacteria, you'll be surprised at his reply and a whole lot more so if you want to learn how to help your body make its own natural antidepressants using specific gut health strategies. And you're really going to enjoy this conversation with seeds. Raja Dir.

If you are not born vaginally or if you're born via C section, I should say there's a lot of people who say that your gut is not really adequately populated with beneficial bacteria, the right amount of bacteria for years later on in life, like until you're. I've seen figures like 7 or 8 or 9 years old. Is there anything to that? Is that true or is that just kind of like a myth floating around the Internet?

Yeah, that's not entirely true. So a better way to think about it is that the mode of birth, vaginal versus C section, the mode of feeding, breastfeeding versus non breastfeeding and the presence of antibiotics are kind of three equally and varyingly powerful lever, you know, cares of the, of the stool. So try to get as many of those right as you can and if you're able to do so, you'll have a very good chance at what is considered an optimal infant microbiome, which is dominated by a few different strains of Bifidobacterium infantis, making way for other Bifidobacterium to slowly start to build with diversification and acidify the gut as the rest builds on top. So you'll, you'll have that if you follow those three. There are studies where people are born non vaginally, but there's no antibiotics and there's breastfeeding and a little bit of luck that the right strains found their way there and they ended up with all known markers with a totally fine microbiome at six months and on.

Okay, what are the three strategies again?

Did you say vaginal birth, breastfeeding and no antibiotics.

Okay, so if you aren't born vaginally but you're not exposed to a lot of antibiotics and you breastfeed, arguably you're still going to have a decent biome as an infant or your child is.

Going, I mean if there's, if there really is no Bifidobacterium that finds its way there, you could kick start the process by making sure that that infant has exposure to a few different strains of Bifidobacterium infantis. But it could be there, it could not be. The data's inconsistent on how. How B. Infantis actually gets to infant guts in the first place.

Okay.

Yeah. I was just curious the extent to which the vaginal flora makes a significant impact or I guess even like the fecal matter that they say that the child is exposed to going through the birth canal. If that really is as significant as a lot of people say.

I mean, I think it is. I think it is important for other reasons. A perfect infant microbiome, like, let's say two weeks or three weeks out from being born, should be dominated by Bifidobacterium infantis, one bacteria. And you know why? Because it takes HMOs, it takes the sugar, the. The prebiotic fibers, and breast milk. It engulfs them entirely, and it leaves no, nothing else for any other pathogen to grow. There's nothing left over internally entirely metabolizes HMOs internally. So when B. Infantis is there, it's not allowing any potential pathogens in that early period of life to take hold. Secondarily, it trains the immune system to promote tolerance. And so it's a very big driver of minimizing what's called that atopic march, those conditions of allergy, asthma sensitivity, inflammation, excessive inflammation.

That.

That tolerance, we believe, is taught from that bacteria. And so for infants that are getting that bacteria initially from fecal content or very rarely a reservoir vaginally, that contact is very important. For others, maybe it finds its way in a different way. But you. If you want an optimal microbiome out of the gates, that's what you should. That's. Those are the conditions you need.

So are you saying that the. What do you call Bifidum infantis?

Bifidobacterium. That's the genus.

Okay.

It's a very interesting genus, even in our research for many different stages of life. That's a good. That's a very good one. And the species is called Infantis. I think it's a subspecies of Longum, but it's Bifidobacterium infantis. That's the Latin name of the. Of the bacteria.

Okay, so are you saying that Bifidobacterium infantis is like, the only important strain in a young human being up to a certain age?

I mean, at least one strain. There are other different strains that have different benefits. But as a baseline, Bifidobacterium infantis is, in fact the healthiest infants in the world are dominated by almost exclusively Bifidobacterium infantis until diversification.

And what age does diversification usually occur?

That depends on when you bring, when you bring foods into the mix. So as long as you're exclusively breastfeeding, you're pretty much going to be dominated by Bifidobacterium infantis in an optimal state.

Okay, I got it. And these HMOs, that's human. Human milk oligosaturates.

Yeah, that's coming from mom's milk.

Is there a benefit to consuming HMOs after you've finished breastfeeding? Let's say for me, for an adult who wants a healthy gut. Is consumption of human milk oligosaccharides something that's beneficial?

I mean, that's an interesting question. I think that it could be, but I think that if you have certain diet, if you have the right diet, it's not necessary because you'll still give plenty of oligosaccharide like structures that you find in the food matrix. So it's preferential. So it can in periods of distress, probably tip certain communities in a more favorable way. But my perspective is that a rich and varied oligosaccharide composition in your diet should overpower any additional effect that HMOs would have in adulthood.

What are some other ways that you get non human milk oligosaccharides? These other oligosaccharides that you mentioned. From food.

From food. I mean, in virtually all plant rough plant matter, you're going to find some version of them. I mean, they're in many, many different fruits, they're in many different vegetables, they're concentrated very highly in tubers. You're getting them if you're eating carbohydrates from plants, most generally come in the form of, if they're not, if they're not sweet, generally come in the form of variably digested oligosaccharides, varying chain length prebiotics. That's what you're getting these types of fibers from your diet. Now there's some that are better, again easier to get. There's some that are more useful in different periods of time versus others. But an optimal healthy microbiome at the adult stage should be able to tolerate and actually demands an extremely diverse portfolio of plant fibers.

Okay, so you've got your monosaccharides, which are like the single very simple sugars. Then things like polysaccharides are oligosaccharides, longer chains of carbohydrates that you'd find in fiber, or are they just varying lengths like you said? I don't even remember what the word oligo means.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, like, the number of polymers, the number of the degree of polymerization isn't 1. It's closer to like 6 or 7 or 8. Like, and then above 10, I believe, is like a fiber. Like, like characterizes a fiber.

Okay. All right. What do you think about the carnivore diet, though? Are they getting oligosaccharides from meat in some way?

Certainly. Certainly not.

Really?

Certainly, yeah, certainly not.

Is that a problem, do you think?

I think. I think people could survive on a carnivore diet, But I think that every 100 out of 100 academic microbiome scientists would answer that question by saying that you're introducing a massive deficit to the host microbiota. A massive deficit. And first and second, that you probably dramatically shift it from a sacralytic state, which means breaking down carbohydrates, to a proteolytic state, which is very adversely associated with metabolic and cardiovascular health outcomes. Just from the microbiome standpoint, I'm not.

Talking about in the blood, knowing what, you know, if you were to kind of have the gold standard feeding or probiotic or, you know, breast milk consumption or human oligosaccharide consumption, human milk oligosaccharide consumption for a young human being coming into this world to give them as many advantages as possible from a microbiome standpoint, what would it generally look like in terms of what you'd feed a young human being to optimize that?

I mean, I think about this all the time now, so I've. As detailed and intricate of an answer as you want to that question. I think I'm very, very interested in the development of the gut and the brain, and they're kind of related. There's a lot of compounds that drive. That either comprise the structure of it or drive the development of it. I think for the first few months, as much as possible, one should exclusively breastfeed at least through four months. Try to get to six if you can, but at least through the first four months, if there's no Bifidobacterium infantis. So I didn't do a test per se, but I gave him early inoculation of Bifidobacterium infantis around week three or week four.

Wait, wait, what do you mean early inoculation?

I mean, I. I did it Myself, I work with and grow a lot of different strains. So I took two or three strains from our library of Bifidobacterium infantis and I put it on, on his, on the tip of his tongue. And then he breastfed right after.

By the way, look at you. You got your library of probiotics, you got your gas stimulators. Geez, everybody's gonna be gonna be envying your setup at home. So you inoculated your son with those strains. What else do you do?

Yeah, well, that's first going to get to breastfeeding. When you get to diversification, you want to get carotenoids and N3 fatty acids as early as possible. You want to make sure that mom is taking very, very high dose, at least dha, but ideally DHA and epa, that that's going to directly pass through the breast milk. And even during the breastfeeding phase, you want to make sure mom's eating an incredibly diversified diet in carotenoids. Carotenoids are very unique in that they actually are stored in, are broken down in the gut alongside like polyphenols and flavonoids and some other plant based compounds. But they also make their way directly into the eye and into the brain. And that's very interesting to me, right, that there's this very precious class of compounds that crosses the placenta, it crosses the blood brain barrier, it's allowed to aggregate in the brain of your offspring. And so I'm very, very interested in some of these types of plant based compounds.

Gonna sell a lot of mini carrots to pregnant and breastfeeding women with this. What other food sources are rich in carotene, by the way, that you like?

Not just carotene. So I should clarify that the class are carotenoids and there are a wide variety of compounds. There's about 40 or 50 in the human diet that are found across the spectrum of color. Basically, they comprise color in, in certain vegetables by having an absorbing effect on the light spectrum and reflecting out others. So that's their relationship. They function alongside chlorophyll as a relevant molecule in plant biology. That just turns out to be very interesting for, for humans too. I mean, we benefit a lot from that.

So just colorful vegetables.

Yeah, as, as, as rich and deep. Most pigments in vegetables are driven by something in the carotenoid family or also in the marine environment, things like astaxanthin or zeaxanthin. There' the sea as well.

Got it.

Anything you go out of your way specifically for your son or that you recommend folks avoid.

I mean, I'm pushing for him to get onto, onto polyphenols as quickly as possible as well. So blueberries, bilberries, you know, just most of your bright, relatively lower sugar berries, I think, are you, you're just going to get so much of it, so much good stuff from that.

Fantastic. You've just described the diet that my sons grew up on, so I feel very good about that and I'll still probably forward them this podcast in a few years. So I've got healthy grandchildren, but yeah, okay, that's great.

I see them also probably drinking the oil of the fish straight out of.

The pan in addition, so they're not that extreme. Although I have to admit they probably get their fair share of chicken fecal matter from doing an inadequate job washing the eggs. They go down and harvest every day from our chickens. So they are getting an adequate microbiome. That and licking the goats.

That's. That's it. You see, you see, in the first two years of life, you'll see introduction of all kinds of things that kids eat. You know, you'll see everything that they eat show up. But it doesn't last very long. It just passes through and signals to the host to teach it tolerance. That's the hypothesis behind early, early rich microbial exposure. And its effect on the immune system is that you're born inflamed microbes and certain ones are better at teaching your immune system tolerance. Over time, that benefits you, that benefits your immune system. It makes it more calibrated.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying today's episode again. All the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com GutHealthPodcast this next conversation was Lauren Lacks, who wrote a fantastic book on supporting your gut specifically. A lot to do with the mind and the brain. But we get into a lot of practical stuff here too, like what you.

Can learn from your poop.

Because who doesn't love to stare at their dump in the toilet? What's coffee withdrawal? Constipation? Do eating disorders create gut disorders? And if so, what you can do about that. She has a great book and this conversation was just incredible. I got a lot out of it. Again, all the shown is going to be@BenGreenfieldLife.com gut healthpodcast so enjoy this conversation with Lauren.

Do you think that eating disorders damage the gut? Because it seems kind of counterintuitive to me and maybe some other people because you think, well, anorexia, you're just not Eating very much. Like, wouldn't that be easy on the gut? Obviously, maybe it's hard on the joints and the hormones, et cetera. But does that make sense? Just playing devil's advocate, it seems to me like sometimes eating less could help the gut. I even know some people with gut issues who get really skinny and almost look like they have anorexia just because they're afraid to eat anything at all. But it seems to help their gut. And so do you think there's a mechanism of action where anorexia or some other eating disorder could actually harm the gut?

Oh, 100%. I mean, I think just in research alone, we see 98% of those that have had eating disorders will develop a functional gut disorder. And so, and I think it's super unaddressed, both going through treatment and eating disorder life. And you're right, like that which is once productive can become counterproductive. So I think it begins on first, where the gut begins, when you are beginning. So say I feel a little bit better when I'm adopting, say a diet of not eating, fasting. But it really depends on the variables as well. If you're living on artificial sweeteners, as I was, like crystal light, and all these diet foods that are super processed, that's not going to make your gut feel good. And then just like all the dysbiosis we would call insufficiency dysbiosis, that's created with anorexia, so you are basically starving out both the healthy and the non healthy gut bugs. So you really just don't have that life force in there. And one in four women that have gone through anorexia, or I just say women, but men are experiencing this as well, will develop an autoimmune disorder as well. So we just know how related that is to leaky gut and dysbiosis on the back end. And then those that maybe are struggling with overeating, binge eating, I mean, likewise, there's dysbiosis being created, dysbiosis being just gut imbalance because of just the certain things that you're feeding, the microbes versus and certain things you're not and how you're forcing digestion to happen. There's a lot of stress created, I would think. And that too being the number one driver would be stress, the perceived stress, the inflammation that's going through that gut brain axis. So great question. And yes, gut issues are very common in those that have struggled with disordered eating. And I think again, that threshold, if one goes on, say a long term fasting or just eating less diet, they feel better because perhaps they were starting at a threshold of a very dysbiotic gut to start. And so they are starving out some gut bugs that aren't serving them. But I do see this in diet culture too. You don't have to have an eating disorder to fall into the pigeonhole or the rabbit hole of a disrupted gut microbiome. And I think any diet, it can be productive. So we say carnivore, keto, vegan, vegetarian, whatever people are adopting. The reason why they see that productivity is because it's modifying the gut. And then the reason why 95% of diets fail, say after the 30 days or three months or hit that plateau, it's not just because they failed the diet or their willpower's down or the diet's not working. It's because of what's happened in the gut microbiome. And in my patient population, I see a lot of patients that don't have overeating disorders, but they have a fear of food that is developed because of like they've pigeonholed themselves so much into a certain diet where they're eating maybe five to 10 foods because it's all their body can handle, they've developed histamine issues or they continue to linger in that state because even things like a carnivore diet, which I think can be very beneficial and therapeutic. But I've had a lot of patients that have fallen into what, like, that's all they can eat now, because if they do introduce something back in, it was kind of like a band aid, it was cover up because they took out certain foods that were making them unwell. But if they didn't mind to heal the gut as well, didn't just rely on the food and grow some healthy gut bacteria that could digest other foods, they may run into a wall. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. It's interesting because I was telling you before we started recording, I'm supposed to interview Steven Gundry tomorrow and his whole book is about, he calls them gut critters. But the idea of the microbiome and its importance in the gut brain axis and the gut metabolism axis. Sure, if you overeat and spill over a bunch of, say, inflammatory lipopolysaccharides from the gut into the bloodstream or develop leaky gut or pockets of inflammation, diverticulitis or the like, then that kind of makes sense because you're just eating too much. You're eating too much of the wrong thing. But it Sounds to me like what you're saying is that even if you're not eating enough, you're throwing off your microbiome, not feeding your gut bacteria, not populating your gut and creating a host of other issues. What I'm talking about is particularly relevant to not eating enough or excess dieting or anorexia nervosa or not eating a wide enough variety of foods. I think it's pretty intuitive for most people, something like bulimia would cause issues just because you've got so much acid imbalances and that results in poor digestive enzyme production and damage to the esophagus, et cetera. But I was just thinking about that as you were talking that it is kind of interesting because you'd think, well, just don't eat and everything will heal up. But you just don't eat. And as you just noted, you throw the bacterial balance off in a pretty remarkable fashion. It seems like this question I want to ask you is on the extremities of the paradoxical because it involves hyper analyzing a component of your diet in a manner that might actually stress a lot of people out. But you have this poop chart in the book on page 64. I think I wrote to you and asked if we could put it in the show notes too so people could see what the golden poo chart is like. So shownotes are going to be@BenGreenfieldLife.com lax but I was over at my buddy's house last week and he showed me this black box. He's like, dude, this is the most powerful one day cleanse ever. So I actually, because I like to guinea pig this stuff, I ordered it and it comes with this guide on how to interpret the color and the length and the activity of your mucoid plaque, right? These things people mistake for parasites that wind up in the toilet bowl. And while I'm not going to put you on the spot to interpret mucoid plaque, it did get me thinking as I was reviewing it just this morning over breakfast over my green smoothie, looking at pictures of mucoid plaque, I thought I should ask Lauren if she looks at her poop and if so, what she or somebody listening in could learn from that.

Oh yeah, definitely. It's your daily report card. And it's just like people are tracking their blood sugar nowadays or their oura ring score or whatever that monitors their use. It is something that ideally and hopefully we're doing daily now I have a lot of conversations like how's your poo? Or Tell me your habits. It's normal. Define normal, please. Because everyone's level of normal is a bit different. But the ideal normal poo would be daily, if not twice a day, as well as a well formed, complete src shaped, easy to pass, and one or two passes kind of poo that would sense, like, signify a golden poo. And if it's anything other than that, then we just get a little bit, like, questionable. There's multiple factors that can contribute to different types of poo, and mostly being our eating habits and stress levels. But that said, I do use this golden poo chart to kind of help people really assess where they're at and get a better understanding of poo.

Yeah, ribbons, pebbles, rocks. I get the big dump. I mean, like, I fill a toilet bowl every morning. Not to gross people out. But then you write in there, big dump could indicate chronic constipation, which I get sometimes, by the way. Low stomach acid enzymes, dysbiosis from stress, irregular eating habits, low vagal nerve tone. And then the last one was a little bit of a head scratcher for me. Megacolon. What's megacolon?

Megacolon would be like a toxic colon, or for some people, toxic colon. Some people, it's just like a very enlarged colon. So they just like are holding a lot of poo at once compared to those that are not. Like just a smaller container, kind of like a person that has a larger stomach versus those that don't. And so like, if it's like your motility is a little bit slower, sluggish, then that could be a piece of the puzzle from a megacolon. And that's, I mean, I was diagnosed with that as a kid. Like, they looked at an X ray. It's like you have a very large colon, Lauren.

Oh.

And so I was having a lot at that time.

Thank you.

And just managing that is just like, I mean, diet was way different than it is now. But there's also certain supplements and digestive supports that helped me, like, with kind of in the stage of coming out of a constipated state. Sometimes when people are like, say they've been on a train of like not eating for a certain time of day and then eating more later in the day. Like, I mean, there's just more bulk of in the stool that could be creating like a big dump scenario. Or if again, they are taking maybe a supplement such as like a digestive, like a gallbladder support, that's going to like release more bile at once or like help with Stimulating that release right there. And so I like my rule of thumb number one is like, better off than in. And so like any type of poo being better than no poo, because at least we're clearing. And then that I think is probably more indicative. I don't know if you do intermittent fasting right now or like what your fasting, what your eating time frames are.

A little bit. I'm just. Yeah. By the way, I'm so lean. I don't worry about it that much. But I generally have like 12 to 16 hours. I go overnight until breakfast that I don't eat. And part of that is just because I don't like to do sauna and cold pool and workouts and stuff after I've had same a smoothie or eggs or breakfast. So I just wait until I'm done with all my things and I have breakfast. And by the time that rolls around, it's been, you know, 12 to 16 hours. Yeah.

Well, then, I mean, I. I teeter between that and just like straight up golden poo is what I would call it. But. And one thing, another thing I have found that's kind of a trigger and a positive, like it's helping my body at least with the motility in bulk is I tend to eat more of like starch at night. If I do do starch, I don't really do much starch during the day from a blood sugar perspective. But I am like obsessed lately with like kombucha squash in particular. And I find when I have like something that is that like soluble fiber and bulky, like it is gel, like in nature. So it is, it is showing up as bulk in the stool in that way.

Yeah. With some almond butter and honey and sea salt. And the squash, it counts as dessert too.

It's amazing nature's candy.

You can pray to God for more almond butter if you have a few extra squashes around. So the constipation thing is interesting because you talk about a form of constipation in the book that I'm guessing a lot of people have dealt with as they take advice to cut down on stimulants and energy compounds and coffee. You talk about coffee withdrawal constipation. I've never seen that in a book before. What's coffee withdrawal constipation?

Well, since coffee is a natural digestive bitter. So it's like a bitter is gonna poke the gallbladder and the gallbladder, why that's important. That's the most underrated organ, I think, in the body. But it's what's not only stimulating enzyme production and the breakdown of fats is what people most correlate it to. And also just like the release of bile, like bile is being released when that gallbladder is stimulated. So if you can imagine a organ or like closing your fist, ideally when a digestive bitter like coffee or a fat touches that fist, like you get a nice pump, like get that pump, that muscle up and going, squeezes out the bile to then stimulate a bowel movement. Well, if people are stripping the coffee out and they're not doing, like, maybe they're even drinking two to three cups, like the average would be. Or maybe it is just that morning cup. It's just that extra little nudge, nudge that helps with that release and so that constipation can happen. And that way coffee also, as we know, is a stimulant, like some. So there is some like caffeine release or like adrenaline release that is helping with some motility for some people as well. But the agent I find or the mechanism I find most prevalent for people is that gallbladder. And so when we support the gallbladder, say with some digestive bitters or like even bile salts with meals for a time, not always and forever, even like apple cider vinegar, which can also have some of that gallbladder stimulating effect there, cholagog effect, then we can help with regulating some poo. We also know that coffee is a natural dehydrator. So it's also kind of zapping up the hydration being one of the number one supports for healthy motility. And a lot of folks are just under hydrated in our modern day.

Yeah, my hack for that is I just drink more coffee because I figure the excess liquid helps to overtake the dehydration effect. That's my logic. I'm sticking to it. Your section on constipation was crazy. I mean, just to give you guys a little bit of a preview of Lauren's book. I mean, the part on constipation alone is use magnesium or buffered vitamin C, chew your food until fully liquefied and slow down sea moss one to two spoonfuls daily. I've used that before. It's a really good source of fiber. I forget, is that the soluble fiber that the CMOS is?

Yeah, yeah, it's gel. Like, okay, Gel, like.

Yeah, gel, like, exactly. Probiotics like Lactobacilli plantarum, Squatty potty. I love that. Except when I travel and I don't have it sit up Straight during the day. Take a prokinetic in the morning and evening. Eat food with breakfast instead of like a liquid. Sip, smooth, move, tea. That sounds fantastic. What else? Water and minerals, of course. Avoid drinking out of plastic water bottles because it causes gut inflammation. No laying down or intense exercise directly after eating. Avoid raw veggies and raw salads. And by the way, Lauren, that was transformative for me when I quit filling the blender bowl and my plate with giant piles of kale and spinach and the like. Avoid high fodmap flight foods, digestive bitters, like you noted, coffee enemas. I actually still do those once a week. Chlorella tablets, jumping up and down in place or rebounding tabletop position, stretch, squeeze your colon, acupuncture point, right hand, the inner web of the right hand. Abdominal massage and hypnosis for digestion and meditation. That is a pretty comprehensive list. When it comes to all of these different things that somebody can do to get stuff moving along, it makes me think, well, there's got to be some things that cause that in the first place that pop up over and over again. What would you say are the primary leading causes of constipation besides not just drinking enough water?

Yeah, I mean, I think overtly stress. So like, I mean, and stress, such a broad term, but you can imagine just like clenching your fist. Like even a little kid that's like just so frustrated they gotta go poo. Like, it's just like when you're clenching your gut or like you are shortening your breath. A great telltale sign for people to do. Or like a check in would just be pause for a minute and count the number of breaths you take in a minute. And just to get some feedback for yourself. And ideally, like, we're at rest or like you're moving a little bit here, so your breath rate would be a little bit different at a minute. But if you're just chilling out, do this exercise, and ideally you want to have a four to seven breaths per minute rate if you're in that rest and digest parasympathetic sympathetic mode that the vagus nerve loves for motility. So the average I found is 12 to 20 breaths per minute for most people. If you think like, again, rest and digest meditative state in a way, like, it's like pausing to pray and breathe before a meal. Like, the reason why I think prayer is also helpful for digestion is just because it's like that natural art of pause that was created for humans prior to eating food and just jumping in and plowing in for that rest and digest. But 12 to 20 breaths is what I would say. I find the average breath rate if we're on the higher end of that, like say if you're in the 15, 20. I've had a woman that was, she was at 47 breaths a minute. She had no idea she was hyperventilating and she could not figure out for the life of her why she had this chronic sibo, methane based and she couldn't lose the last like 10 pounds. And that exercise alone was so impactful for her. The body doesn't know the difference in running from a bear versus I just pulled up my Instagram feed and I'm comparing myself to my business rabbits that I'm chasing or to the girl that I want her body. The way that the heart is changing and the breath rate is changing. And so that is I think just to show kind of how stress just residual. We don't think we're under stress. Exercise is a stressor, like you said to the body. It's a healthy, can be a hermetic stressor, but kind of that yin and that yang. Other other causes of constipation. I think just going back to that gallbladder, it is so inundated. It kind of is the net that catches all these toxins and gets congested over time. And so especially with females that I work with that have had birth control pills is a huge stressor, the gallbladder. But then we just like plastics by and large for humans as well. Long term use of like drugs like SSRIs or Tylenols, Advils, NSAIDs, obviously toxins in the food, seed oils, et cetera. Like if your gallbladder is just inundated, your cup gets full over time, that's going to cause some digestive backup from a gut perspective. And it's also, I think one of the leading causes of things like that are downstream. So say like a sibo or just chronic bloating and then the constipation.

Yeah, that's super helpful. Probably one of the most underrated tactics that you have on there is the abdominal massage. I even have a miniature massage gun. It's made by power plate. It's one of the really small ones that TSA doesn't freak out about. And I travel with it. And also times if I get traveler constipation, I'll lie on my back on the bathroom floor and just follow the path of the colon, right ascending, transverse, descending over and then kind of over the ileocecal. Sphincter and just do about like two or three minutes of that. Transformative for travelers constipation. I mean, they work at home too, obviously, but abdominal massage with like a percussive gun set on a really light frequency, that's a game changer.

Next up is some information from probably one of the most popular two part episodes I've ever recorded on nutrition with the great Joel Green. You should listen to the entire two part podcast series. But in this section we get into whether or not cold thermogenesis is an effective weight loss strategy and how to amplify and hack cold thermogenesis. Using a few tricks that Joel has up his sleeve, we get into how to shrink fat cells to keep yourself from regaining fat after you've lost weight, as well as what happens to Akkermansia when you do cold thermogenesis. A lot of surprising stuff in this episode, so I think you're really going to dig it.

So here we go.

Let's go talk to Joel. This is a strategy that I began implementing after noticing the profound impact it had on blood glucose control when experimenting with this and a continuous blood glucose monitor. And that's cold. Why not just like take a cold shower or you know, go for a brisk walk in the, in the cold weather rather than eating all these random things before and after the meal. Do you incorporate cold thermogenesis much at all in as part of the strategy?

Okay, so this gets to a what, when and how questions and order of operations and structure function kind of question. And it's just super, super fascinating. So here's the thing with cold. Cold is a, is a foundational tool set to do a lot of things. So what I want to do is move us from listening into the cold is good thing and move us into cold works here, cold works here, cold works here, and here's when you do it. Okay, so the first thing about cold to understand is that it seems to potentially differentiate macrophages, which are. I built my book around two concepts. An immune cell called a macrophage and then a protein called hypoxia inducible factor. Okay. And they're both related. What cold seems to do is particularly in adipose mass is it flips macrophages from the inflammatory state, I call them the red team, to the non inflammatory state, the blue team, not the halo. Okay. And so when we apply cold to adipose mass, there's a bunch of things that happen. Okay, so we can use cold very strategically timed to periods of fat loss for very specific effects. Okay, a couple things to know before you start. One is that cold induction is one to one related to proliferation or inverse proliferation of achromansia. So the reason Eskimos are fat is that cold induction drives down achromansia. And it makes sense, okay, from a survival perspective, if you're enduring a lot of cold, like if you look at people who live in northern climates, okay, northern latitudes, you need to make more energy. So the body has a mechanism built in that makes you make energy, and that is cold inductions spins up, eating spins down. Achiermansia increases the surface area of the gut. Okay, so achromansia goes down. But the other thing that cold induction does, particularly in adipose mass, is it induces uncoupling. Okay? And the really interesting thing that it does is it induces FGF21. So FGF21 is fibroblast growth factor 21. It's a starvation enzyme made by the liver. And FGF21 is neither good nor bad. It's useful. It's extremely useful in certain places. What FGF 21 does is it seems to adapt the body to starvation, adapt the body to fasting, and it can induce what's called a futile cycle in adipose mass, meaning that it can potentiate both the release and the storage of fat mass. And so if you map it out over time, in the short term it's fantastic, in the long term, it's bad. But where this gets great is at the end of a period of fat loss, which we'll get into later. I'm sure one of the problems that you're up against is that I call this in the book the fat loss paradox. The act of shrinking fat cells potentiates long term weight gain through a number of mechanisms. So we have to hack those mechanisms. One of the ways we hack those mechanisms is to hack FGF21 at the end of a fat loss period. And the way that we do that is through timing cold induction to the end of a fat loss period for a certain period of time and timing that to the production of agremansia. So at the end of a fat loss period, you want to induce cold in adipose mass specifically. And what this is going to do.

And by the way, to jump in, when you say at the end of a fat loss period, let's say someone has done like a cleanse or a fast, or gone through a period of calorie deprivation or something like that, that.

Or just reduce their body fat substantially.

Like you got cut or exercise.

Yeah, right. Yeah. If you don't want it to come back, there's a series of steps you have to do.

Okay.

That's gonna be super important for people because we know that. And you get into this in your book, the shrinking of fat cells can trigger change, changes that cause a regain of that fat pretty readily unless you do what you're about to explain.

Right. So one of the emerging ideas in preventing weight regain after a period of fat loss is to induce FGF 21 and also at the same time to flip types of immune cells from the red team, the inflaming guys, the killers, to the healers, the blue team. Okay. So cold induction kind of checks all the boxes. So post fat loss you've kind of got where you want. You need a week of cold induction targeted specifically to fat mass. Okay. And what it's going to do is it's going to flip macrophages in your fat mass to the anti inflammatory kind. So it's going to, it's going to help resolve the injury that fat loss induces, which we'll get into at the same time. It's going to, it's going to drive FG right when you need it. Now what you don't want to do is continue this like for, you know, the research seems to suggest right around between 7 to 10, 12 days. You don't want to keep doing it like for 30, 40 days because what happens is you're going to spin down achromansia, you're going to increase surface area of the gut, you're going to increase energy intake, you're going to, you're going to aid the weight regain. Okay, but this is a specific example of kicking cold induction as an idea and, and then applying it in an extremely targeted, extremely efficacious way for a specific functional outcome.

So the cold then would be something that you do for a brief period of time after you've lost weight, but then you're not a fan of continuing the cold on a regular basis.

I think it's very good strategically. I don't think that it's something you should do all the time. What I have tend, what I have seen is that people who do cold induction all the time is they get kind of this barrel chest look going on, they get kind of this kind.

Of weight concentration, the polar bear swimmer, high amounts of, of brown fat deposition on the collarbone, shoulders, et cetera, type of look. Yeah, but, but, but we should, we should clarify too. Like, like that's some pretty hefty cold thermogenesis. Those are like 10 to 20 minute doses on a daily basis. You know, like, like my own strategy is, is quick, you know, jump in a cold pool before I start my day or quick cold shower. And I found that to be fabulous for maintaining, you know, a lean body. But I have found not only endocrine disruption and some kind of significant sympathetic activation and even like mild, you know, what you might call some adrenal exhaustion or you know, some symptoms of adrenal fatigue from people who over overdo the cold thermogenesis. But these longer bouts of cold thermogenesis or cryotherapy chambers or something like that would be appropriate for a short period of time following something like a weight loss protocol, after which you'd want to dial it back.

Yeah, I think you really hit it on the head. So what you brought up is you brought up the duration, you brought up the timing, you brought up very important things that it's neither good nor bad, it's the order of operation. The way you do it the other way that I find it just incredibly powerful is really very similar to what you're doing. And in my own sort of lexicon of how I do things, it's on day two of the two day pattern in my program where you're amplifying fasting signals, then cold induction before the workout on the day, you're doing sprints on the day. The more you can replicate the ancestral dawn hunt, the better. And I think I talked about this one in the book. It's the hardest one to do. People are game for everything else. Until it comes to the cold induction at dawn. I'm not doing that.

Yeah, you get used to it.

You actually have a hack to amplify the effect of the cold thermogenesis. And it's like a menthol type of topical cream or lotion.

Yeah.

What you find is that you'll get a similar effect. You'll get uncoupling by topical application of menthol, where adipose mass is, which is really one of the places you really want it. And so by adding the two, adding all three, actually adding fasting, adding early morning time of day, cold induction and menthol all in one spot. It's kind of. There's this new word in the science called combination therapy. Okay. And it's just like kind of the smart word for just throwing everything at it but the kitchen sink. And it's kind of that.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. Again. All the shownotes are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com GutHealthPodcast you can go there. You can leave your comments, your questions, your reviews, and a whole lot more. I read them all, so thanks so much for listening in. And again, it's BenGreenfieldLife.com gut healthpodcast. Hope this podcast helps you to poop better, feel better, get more out of your food, and understand your digestive system just a little bit more. Thanks so much for listening. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, My weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life, and a whole lot more. Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. Ben BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings, and the bigger the Ben Greenfield Live show gets, the bigger and better the guest get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so much. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small, small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I post personally, use, support, and with full authenticity and transparency, recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.