What Your Poop Can Tell You About Your Health, How To Heal Tendons & Ligaments Faster, Natural Ways To Decrease Cortisol & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, what your poop can tell you about your health, how to heal tendons and ligaments faster, float tanks versus salt baths, how to get your cycle back after being on the pill, and much more.

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

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

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

Rachel, I have it. I have a very, very important question for you because I have received, I think, five inquiries about this just in the past 24 hours alone. And by inquiries, I mean recommendations that I must check this thing out.

Go on, tell me. Ask.

This movie, Captain Fantastic. Have you heard of it?

I have heard of this film, yes, and I'm super psyched to see it as well. What have you heard?

Some guy who, like, has his kids, like, doing burpees and planks in the woods. They live off the grid he calls, like, soda, poison water. And basically he's raising his children to be little animals out in the forest. And for some reason, everybody is saying that I should watch it. You need to see it, because I.

Am model for your family.

Raising my family this way, which I'm not doing. My kids play tennis, and they go to a private school with a bunch of kids whose parents are primarily like, software programmers and bankers. And they don't live in incredibly sheltered life. Yet people seem to think that we're all running around barefoot, dirty and completely shirking anything closely resembling, say, like a vaccination or a Social Security number here at Greenfield's house.

Well, I feel like it's partly true, at least.

What part of that is true, aside from the fact that my kids do.

Burpees and they run around barefoot?

Well, I mean, you look at the.

River, and terran means earth and water.

They do have dirty hippie names, you know, my friend, the founder of Spartan, Joe Decenta, he moved his entire family, I believe, to Indonesia because life in the United States was not difficult enough. And if they want to watch television, they must do so in Mandarin Chinese.

White people are so funny, aren't they?

So that they apparently so they can learn the language that the next superpower of the world will be using. So I'm not that bad.

No, you're not. But that is also very smart of him, I think.

Yeah. I don't know. I guess so. There's an app on my phone, I think that. That I can hold up that will speak Mandarin Chinese for me should I actually need to ever order food from a Chinese restaurant when the Chinese take over the world? And I'm not saying that to be racist.

No, it's just factual.

It's factual. Speaking of facts, we have lots of facts in today's show, and it's been a while since we've had a Q and A. I've been traveling all over the globe, and you've. I think you've just been sitting on your hands over there in Portland.

I've just been hanging out, just, like, waiting for you to come back so we could do this Q and A.

Waiting with bated breath in front of your.

Yes.

So. Well, hopefully your bated breath is ready because we've got news flashes. We've got Q and A, we've got some really cool special announcements in today's.

Episode, and we've got your favorite subject, Ben. Poop.

And poop. So as they say. As I say, let's jump right in.

News flashes.

Well, Rachel, in celebration of today's podcast, I did probably the dumbest workout on the face of the planet.

Wow. What was your super dumb workout this morning?

I looked like an old man slash biohacker. I jumped up and down on my mini trampoline for 30 minutes with a training mask on.

That is a sight to be seen. Did you put that on Snapchat?

Okay, so no, I didn't because I couldn't hold my phone. While I was bouncing up and down in your mask, children and wife were indisposed to be able to film me. They get annoyed anyway, so they asked them to film me doing random things like this. Anyways, though, the training mask part of things. I'll save that till later. There is new research on the amount of carbon dioxide that you rebreathe when you're wearing it. The simulation of elevation, even though you're not actually at elevation. Inspiratory and expiratory muscle fatigue. There's some really interesting things kind of coming down the pipeline with the whole training mask thing. It's not a complete bunk, even though I think they should call it just training mask, not elevation training mask because you're not on a mountain. But the trampoline thing is really interesting. So NASA has studied trampolining for astronauts and there have been other studies just in random universities on trampolines, on things like VO2 max and cardiovascular fitness. But this most recent study was by the American Council on Exercise. And of course, as I do with everything I'm about to talk about, I'll link to stuff over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com360 so that I can prove to you. I'm not totally making this up, but what they found out was they had a whole bunch of people do 20 minutes of exercising on a trampoline. And by exercising on a trampoline, what I mean is you don't just jump up and down while you're staring at the wall. You like jump up and down. This is what I did this morning. And you do jumping jacks and then you sit on the trampoline and do planking exercises and then go from sitting to standing to sitting to standing. You can bounce side to side, front to back, single leg, double leg. So I mean, like you can do a lot of stuff on these little things they call mini trampolines or rebounders. But what they found is that when they had these jumpers do this for 20 minutes, their oxygen expenditure and their caloric burn, two pretty good indicators of metabolic effect and cardiovascular fitness effect, were just as high as cycling, playing football, ultimate Frisbee, running six miles an hour, and, and any of these other activities that are considered moderate to vigorous intensity exercise. And by the way, exercise science researchers call things either very intense, moderate intensity or light intensity for exercise. And this actually fell into the moderate to vigorous intensity category.

That just seems so crazy to me. How is that happening?

Well, you're bouncing up and down and it actually is, it is kind of hard. I mean, if you've ever tried to do like a 20 minute work, we've all bounced on a trampoline, at least most of us have, unless we were deprived and grew up in the woods doing burpees instead. But Captain Fantastic. But the, the idea is that your body is still having to absorb the load of your body going up and down. You're breathing, there's blood flow, there's even lymph flow there. There's some people that will claim, even though there's no research on this, that there's a detoxification effect because your, your lymph fluid is, is flowing around. The cool thing is you've got 40% less impact than running. So if you're overweight with joint pain or something like that, or you're, I don't know, I guess an astronaut with brittle bones returning from Mars, these kind of things can actually help you out quite a bit. So trampolining and a new study on trampolining shows. Oh, the other cool thing about the study was people enjoyed it far, far more than the running.

And I imagine that makes it seem a lot easier as well. Because it's fun.

Exactly. Lower, as we would say in exercise science, rating of perceived exertion. So there you have it.

Mini trampolining, not just for old people.

This podcast is brought to you by Mini Trampolines, the next thing Speaking of random things you can do to enhance health cold showers, here is a very interesting recent research study published a couple of weeks ago that I tweeted about over@twitter.com what is my Twitter account?

Ben Greenfield.

I forget if it's Ben Greenfield Fitness or Ben Greenfield. So anyways though, in this study what they looked at was 18 to 65 year old people who did hot cold contrast showers. Something that's actually really cool. I introduced my wife to hot cold contrast the other day, by the way, so remind me to tell you about this. But anyways, hot cold contrast shower, meaning that you go from a certain amount of time hot to a certain amount of time cold. And in this case they were doing what's called a 1111, meaning they were going from hot to cold to hot to cold to hot to cold for either 30 or 60 or 90 seconds for 30 days in a row. And what they found was that the people who did the cold to hot shower, this hot cold shower contrast, they had a 29% reduction in sickness absence from work, meaning that there was a significant effect on the strength of the immune system from doing a daily hot cold contrast shower.

And do you think that that would have increased if they had upped the time they were doing it for?

You mean like stayed in there all morning sitting in the shower?

Maybe not all morning, but like a little longer than 90 seconds?

I don't know the answer. Yeah, it looks like I'm looking at the actual results of the study and it looks like for the 92nd there was a pretty significant effect, but it wasn't that much greater than the 60 second shower. I do know that the NASA materials engineer who spoke at a conference where I watched some of the graphs that he put up or looked at some of the graphs that he put up of fat loss clients he'd worked with, they were doing a full five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening and getting significant meaning 10 plus pounds of fat loss per month with 20 seconds cold to 10 seconds hot 10 times through. So it's like five minutes. So, A, I think you need a really good underwater MP3 player to make time go by if you're doing something like that. But B, in addition to all the benefits that we've already discovered about cold showers and cold thermogenesis and hot cold contrast therapy, here's yet another one that we can add to that list of benefits. It makes you bulletproof to getting sick. So there you have it. Oh, and by the way, when we were in Kauai just a few days ago, my wife and I just returned from attending a wedding in Kauai. I brought my wife to a friend's house where said friend had a barrel sauna and a cold tub. And I had my wife do about two hours of getting into the barrel sauna for about 15 minutes, then to the cold tub. And we even wore the, you know, the funny little elven hats that one would wear traditionally in a sauna. And we did the cold soak back and forth and back and forth she developed.

Did she love it?

She did. She loved the way that she felt. But she had splotchy skins and skin burns for a couple of days. So maybe.

Wow, what's that from?

Maybe the sauna was too hot. I don't know. I kind of go extreme. I jack it up a little bit. So aside from burning the skin off my wife's thighs, it was a lovely experience.

Great experience.

Yeah. So there you have it. We'll link to that study in the show notes. Now, here is something that's quite relevant to what we've already talked about. Natural kindergarten in Finland. Now, I bring this up for a couple reasons. First, I'm headed to Finland. Did I tell you this?

Very soon you are?

Yes.

The Biohacker Summit. It's happening and you're speaking at it.

I'm speaking at the Biohacker Summit in Helsinki. Helsinki. And people can still get in on this? Actually, there's a 40% discount. To be able to get into the conference, you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Biohacker 2016 or just go to the show notes for this episode and you can get in. And this is really cool. We don't just implant chips in the backs of our hands or inject chlorophyll into our eyes to enhance night vision. Two things that people are doing, by the way, these days. But we do things like molecular gastronomy, wild plant foraging, ancestral cooking preparation, and then we also do the talks themselves are extremely Good, refined speakers. Meaning that there's like, you know, smoke comes out on stage before you get up to speak. And there's really good AV. And yeah, it's a fantastic conference. Anyways, though, it's November 17th and 18th in Helsinki and there'll be, like, a few extras. I think we're doing a getaway out to a private farm in Finland for a few days after the event. All sorts of cool things going on at that event. So go to it. But they've. And we've talked about this on the podcast before, discover that kins in Finland are very, very smart. Not only do they not have standardized testing, but there are a handful of these things that this article in particular is talking about, which is a forest kindergarten, a forest kindergarten. Kids are going to school in the forest instead of in an actual classroom.

I feel like that's like a dream come true for me.

Oh, how cool is that? Well, get this in the article. And this article appeared in the Atlantic. A typical day in this school, they will do things like make fairy houses or use sticks to create, like, little, little drum sets. The math lesson will include things like forming letters out of sticks or measuring distances between trees or learning how to do, like, pay softs. And they learn to prepare meals over fire, like stew and pancakes and what they call stick bread, which is basically like baked dough wrapped around a piece of wood. So if there's. There's anything that you could learn from nature school, it's how to wrap dough around wood and make bread over a spit. I have always envisioned using it like, you know, putting a squirrel on a stick and putting that over a spit or a rabbit, which I've actually done before out in the woods, but I've never tried it with dough.

So it sounds good. And everyone should know how to do that sort of stuff.

Yeah. So these kids just go out in the woods all day, and that's their school. And they're actually. They're testing really well. They're getting very smart. They're creating, like, gardens, doing scavenger hunts, learning how to track animals. And, you know, I agree with. Have you heard of Seth Godin before?

I have, yeah.

Yeah. So Seth Godin has this philosophy that your job as a parent, if you have children. So if you're listening and you have children, your job as a parent begins when your kids walk in the door. That's when you start homeschooling them. And that's what I do with my kids. So when they get home, we go out and we do wild plant Foraging. And we look for mushrooms, and we. And we shoot the bow and we learn how to use Craigslist to sell things and how to, you know, how to use Airbnb and, you know, things about entrepreneur and business and wild plant forging and foraging. All the things that they don't really get in school. Not that their school sucks. It's just that schools don't teach certain things these days. So I think you can have the best of both worlds and not be like this. This purported Captain Fantastic character. Again, I haven't seen the movie, but apparently, as. As we would. As we would say here in the States, bad stuff goes down.

So what do you think the likelihood is that you would ever have natural kindergartens in America?

I don't know. Well, you know what? I take that back. I do know Katie Bowman, who we've had on the show a couple of times. Her kids over in Seattle go to some kind of a forest kindergarten.

Oh, wow.

They exist. They're not all over the place, and they're obviously not orthodox, but they exist.

Awesome.

There you go. We can leap over brooks and run through trees. And you know what? You don't have to go to nature kindergarten to do this or forest kindergartens to do this. You can take your kids out in the forest and teach them, even if they go to a regular school. Okay, so a couple other things that I wanted to talk about. I know there's a lot of news flashes today, but it's been a little while since we've had a podcast, so I'm taking advantage of this in every way possible. You're gonna be here for a while, Rachel.

I love it. I hope you have your smoothie.

Did you have your smoothie this morning?

I haven't had a smoothie, but I am on my second cup of coffee.

I had a copious amount of smoothie this morning because I blended my smoothie and it was too thin. And the way that you get it to be thick is you add extra protein powder or extra, say, collagen powder or extra gelatin or extra coconut flakes or extra chia seeds. So I just kept adding stuff until it got thick enough, and I think I got huge. I think I doubled the calorie count of my smoothie.

That's a smoothie fail or a smoothie win.

Yeah, I'm a little bit insulinogenic right now anyways, though, so there is this fantastic paper about the effect of diet components on the level of cortisol, which sounds stupid and nerdy and boring, but it's Actually, one of the best articles and most digestible articles, really. It's not that difficult to get through, even though it's scientific. It's a paper on all of the research behind things that can naturally lower the levels of cortisol. Because we know that while cortisol is good, raised levels of cortisol for long periods of time can cause things like a catabolic effect, breakdown of muscle tissue, breakdown of gut tissue, inhibition of, say, like the conversion of inactive to active thyroid hormone. There's lots of downstream effects, and this is near and dear to my heart because I have never in my entire life not tested either blood or urine or saliva with extremely high cortisol levels. Now I also have high DHEA levels and my testosterone is good. And, you know, I just kind of have high everything but my cortisol.

You just didn't overachiever then.

Apparently my adrenals are overachieving.

They're overextending.

So this article shows the effect of nutrients and food products on cortisol. And there were some very surprising things that came out of it. For example, fermented milk products such as, well, yogurt, right? Kefir, things like this, they can actually cause an increase in something called gamma aminobutyric acid, which can get converted into something called corticolibrin, which decreases cortisol. And interestingly, taurine has a similar effect. Taurine, such as we would find in Red Bull. Isn't it sad that the first thing that comes to mind is Red Bull when it comes to Red Bull? Or the Khmer coffee, I believe, has taurine in it?

I think it does, yeah. And you can just buy taurine in tablets, can't you?

You can buy it in tablet. You can also find it in lots of meats, you can find it in eggs. It's also found in seaweed, it's found in krill. It's even found in brewer's yeast, which you can, like buy and sprinkle on salads, is like a really nutrient dense source. So taurine was one. Fermented milk products was another that, you know, and there were a few in there that kind of fly under the radar, I think, sprouts. So I don't know if you've done much sprouting, Rachel, but you can take any number of different things and put them in glass mason jars. My wife does a lot of this. And you can sprout brown rice, you can sprout quinoa, you can sprout barley, you can sprout beans, and apparently sprouts very similar to fermented milk products and very similar to taurine. They actually have a cortisol lowering effect. And what I like about this is the article wasn't just jam packed full of supplements that you can take. Bioactive vitamin C and rhodiola and ginseng, the things that we find often advertised as being able to raise or lower cortisol. But it gets into, you know, dietary components and food strategies that can lower cortisol as well. So I. Oh, and one really interesting thing, by the way, this is what I, what I found fascinating. Have you ever had green coffee or like unroasted coffee at a coffee shop?

No.

It's really interesting. It's got like this peanut buttery, nutty flavor and it's got a little less caffeine than regular coffee. Different terpene profile, different antioxidant profile. When I grew up, my dad was a gourmet coffee roaster. So we'd have these bags from all over the world and they would get delivered to our house. And my dad had this fancy coffee roaster. It was like a $30,000 coffee roaster out in the shed. And us boys would go out and watch dad roast coffee and dump these green beans into the roaster and they're very flavorful. But he also had a very fancy espresso machine and he showed us how to make coffee out of the green coffee be rather than the roasted coffee beans.

So why is that not a thing? Why are we not drinking green coffee?

Well, some coffee shops do it. I've been in, for example, you're in Portland, which is like a mecca of coffee shops. And I've been to a couple coffee shops there that will serve you green coffee.

Interesting. I feel like I've been drinking coffee non stop for like 15 years and I've never come across green coffee.

Try it. Just. I mean you can order like organic unroasted coffee off of Amazon and try making yourself. You just prepare it the way that you would prepare normal coffee in any ways, though. The reason that I jumped down this rabbit hole is that green coffee lowers cortisol. Well, black coffee increases cortisol. Isn't that interesting?

Wow, that is fascinating.

Yeah. So black coffee stimulates the secretion of something called hydrocortisone which gets converted into cortisol. Decaf coffee doesn't do that quite as much, but green coffee can actually lower cortisol, significant decrease. Very similar to another compound, oolong tea. You had oolong tea before?

Yeah, yeah. And is green coffee the same sort of level of caffeine as, like, decaf?

No, there is, I think, slightly more in green coffee. But you have, you've asked me a question that I don't know that I fully know the answer to. So if someone's listening in and you know the answer, green coffee versus decaffeinated coffee, which has more caffeine, and you answer that question over the comment section, you get nothing except feeling good about yourself and good karma for everybody listening in with high cortisol.

But anyways, and you can go to the comments section@bengreenfieldfitness.com 360.

That's right. And then the last thing that I wanted to mention in today's news flashes is oxytocin. Oxytocin is likely something that you've experienced before, Rachel.

It's true, Ben. This article was one of those moments where I finally realized I had a language for something think about myself that I didn't know before. But there was so many phrases in here that I thought, oh, my God, I actually might be overdosing on oxytocin.

That's right. It is the love hormone. It is.

And I love. I just love it.

Promotes social bonding, altruism. They actually have done studies where they found that, like, if you're high in oxytocin or if you have increased levels of oxytocin, in this case, they'll. They'll use like, nasal or oxytocin injections. You tend to be a poorer negotiator because you just trust. You trust people more. So it could screw you in some situations, like, I don't know if you're working on Wall street or if you're a lawyer, if you're in another situation.

Yeah, you just imagine humanity are all good. We're all good people.

Right.

That might not always be true.

Well, in this study, they looked at spirituality and meditation, and they found that people who were given oxytocin in this study, they actually had enhanced amount of spirituality, meaning that basically they participated in a guided meditation. And the people who received the oxytocin during the meditation reported more awe, more gratitude, more hope, more inspiration, more love, more serenity. And it didn't affect everybody equally. There's actually this gene, and I wasn't aware of this gene. It's called CD38, and it regulates the release of oxytocin from the hypothalamus neurons in your brain. And they found that there are certain people that are able to produce more and respond to it much better. So What I did was I ordered oxytocin from an online pharmacy. I spent a couple of weeks lurking on forums and trying to figure out which pharmacy wasn't going to, like, kill me if I ordered this Oxytocin and some syringes, just insulin syringes and alcohol swabs. And I injected myself for a week with oxytocin to see what effect that it would have. I did this a couple of weeks ago just to see, like, how it would feel during the day. I tried varying amounts. Too much makes you sleepy, I think. You just get. You get almost like, too. Too lovey. Like you just want to go curl up in bed and kind of just like. Just like, rub your skin, cuddle yourself.

Yeah.

If you took, like, sass or MDA or E, for those of you who are out there, who are. Who are ravers. But the interesting thing is that it also has some very cool effects, like if you take it in smaller doses. I found in the morning when I'd inject smaller doses. And to avoid giving medical advice on this show, I'm not going to give you exact dosages. Oh, what the heck. Let me pull up my little. Because I kept track of this in Evernote.

But the disclaimer is, Ben is not a doctor. He says should be taken as medical advice.

Yeah. So there's a thousand international units in about a bottle of oxytocin. It's very hard to get the nasal stuff without a prescription. But what I did was I reconstituted that with what's called bacteriostatic water, which is very typical. You order something in powder form, then you have to reconstitute it with water. And I used approximately, for most situations, about 10 to 20, what's called international units, which, if you're looking at a half cc insulin syringe, you're drawing back to the 7 to 15 tick mark. Ish. And I would simply inject that. And I use my inner thigh, which is an area of decent blood flow. So I found that too much made you sleepy. So once I got up to about 30 international units, which would be three times what I tried in the morning to have a decent effect of just feeling positive. It made me very sleepy. But the other cool thing is that oxytocin is released during breastfeeding and during sex, and it can enhance the closeness to a partner during sex. And so I injected, in a few cases, about 30 to 60 minutes prior to sex, and I used 20 international units. I found that to be the sweet spot. And it actually Made a sex. Not, not like some. Some wild raving sex party, but more like the type of sex that's like cuddly sex where you just want more.

Like the female version of sex that it is all the time for women. That's a generalization.

You know, guys, a lot of times, guys, you notice when you finish, you just want to like roll over and go to bed. It's like you've got your thing and women want to cuddle. And it made me want to cuddle.

Like I didn't have that capacity until.

Yeah, so it's really interesting. Don't kill yourself, folks. If you listen into this with the whole like syringes and injections thing. I do not endorse online pharmacy, but I thought I'd give it a try anyways because I like to guinea pig this stuff in myself. So there you go.

And are there any other downsides to potentially overdosing on it than getting sleepy?

Oh, I suppose you could probably shut down your hypothalamic production of oxytocin and screw yourself from being trusting or loving or cuddling for the rest of your life. But I went through some of it and that's why I just experimented with it for a couple of weeks and stopped. If the results would have been jaw dropping and amazing and life changing, I probably would have continued to experiment with it. But it was more subtle but quite interesting to mess around. So if you want to experience what higher amounts of oxytocin feel like, then try, try injecting yourself with the love hormone. Shall we respond to some questions?

Let's do it.

Listener Q and A.

Hey guys, I have a question about poop. I've noticed that some foods come out the same way they look going in. Corn, quinoa, nuts, raw carrots and beans are some of the perpetrators. I recently made a big batch of kanaiwa, if that's how you pronounce it. It's kind of like similar to quinoa. And after a couple days I had to throw the remainder of it away since just looking at it made me lose my appetite. So I was wondering what it means when I can see pieces of food in my poop. Specifically, are these foods being digested and am I even absorbing their nutrients? If not, is it even worth it to eat these foods? Or is there anything I can do to make the nutrients more available? Like for instance, eating nut butters rather than whole nuts. Thanks guys. I appreciate the research you do and the information you provide on so many unique topics. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Rachel, this is crazy, but did you know that some people actually have Instagram accounts where all they do is track their poop?

I didn't know that. And suddenly I'm really interested.

Yeah, they take photos of their poop.

Oh, my God.

You can actually find these. There's one called the Daily Duty on Instagram. It's like a daily poop report and just do like a search for poop. Instagram or poop photos Instagram. And there are people that just like, take photos of their poop. I guess it's like this self quantification thing where you're using the world as accountability. So that should you ever decide not to track your poop, your friends will call you out on it.

But I just can't help it that I'm Australian and I love dumb humor.

Yeah.

But that is hilarious to me, because.

Poop, I mean, if. If you look at your poop, one. Do you ever do that? Do you ever just, like, turn around?

I'm not sure how much I want to go into detail, but I do.

What is in there? Yeah, what's.

What's in there?

Why does it look different?

Oh, hey there, little fella. You're a little different. And sometimes you see things. You're like, is that a. Is that a worm? Is that.

Because they would freak?

No, but there's all these stories, you know, because I. I go to all these health and fitness conferences and people are like, I went on detox regimen 22A, and I found that a worm three inches long materialized itself from my anal cr. Oh, my. Three simultaneous days. And I'm like, is it possible it was just like a little bit of mucus or maybe, I don't know, an undigested piece of very strung together bean sprouts. Yeah. Or kale from all those copious amounts of kale smoothies you're drinking right after you do your detox yoga and your detox enema. And typically they swear it's a worm. I'm not sure about that. Anyways, though. Yeah, corn, quinoa, nuts, carrots, beans, as Annie says, are some of the perpetrators.

What she finds in her poop.

Yeah, there's a giant piece of corn in the crap anyways, though. Yes. Most people have seen these type of things in their poo. And we take. Let's take quinoa, for example. Quinoa, of course, is super trendy right now. It's a seed. It's not a grain. And because it's a seed, the seed of a plant has the plant's embryo. We know this, right? And a plant's mission, just like anything living from an evolutionary standpoint, wants to pass on its genes. So around the outer coating that protects the embryo is. Or around the part of the seed where the embryo is contained is this outer coating. And the outer coating would protect a plant from microbes and from insects and from predators, and would help it to withstand passage through the digestive tract of any animal. So it could be, wow, safely pooped out and planted. So in the case of, like, quinoa, what coats the outer lining of quinoa are little antinutrients known as saponins. And saponins cause little holes in the lining of your intestine. They can cause what's called leaky gut, and they can cause gastric distress, and they can, of course, cause that quinoa to get passed through pretty quickly, undigested. And not only quinoa, but other things you eat along with the quinoa, because, frankly, if you have leaky gut, the cells that line your gut are so permeable that the tight junctions between the cells start to break apart, and you actually lose a lot of your nutrient production, you lose a lot of your enzyme production, you lose a lot of the ability to be able to digest other foods, not just the quinoa. So there's one giant nasty party going on in your gut, unless you actually render that quinoa digestible, which is not hard to do. You know, we mentioned soaking and sprouting. I will link to, because I have this over at greenfieldfitnesssystems.com I have a complete soak time chart that I send to my clients. It's just free there on the website. For very common seeds and nuts and beans and grains, I tell you how to soak everything from almonds to how to sprout almonds to how to soak and sprout cashews, for example, for almonds. A proper soak time to render almonds digestible, if you happen to have almonds in your crap is 8 to 12 hours. You soak your almonds in a glass mason jar and then rinse them, and that would render them digestible. If you want to sprout them, you can actually leave them in there for up to three days, about 24 hours. Up to three days. You know, those little sprouts coming out of the almonds are like, you know, less than a quarter of an inch. But, you know, that's what you do with almonds with. With quinoa. It's a bit different with quinoa, you'd want a three to four hour soak time, which is not that long. And then very similar to almonds for sprouting. You could leave it in that jar, you could rinse it in the mornings to enhance the process. But you leave it in the jar for two or three days, you'll start to get these little quinoa sprouts, which, by the way, like I mentioned earlier, have now been shown to do cool things like decrease cortisol, but that also keeps quinoa out of your poo. Am I making sense?

You are making sense. So basically anything that's a seed to a plant needs to be sprouted before it can be digested.

Yeah, if it's got the embryo in it. If it's something that would be used to propagate a plant, and this would include a nut, you can soak it, you can sprout it. You can sprout lots of things. You can sprout pumpkin seeds and you can sprout rye and spelt and walnuts and wild rice. A lot of people don't think about soaking and spreading wild rice, but any of these things that would normally wind up in your crap, usually they are seeds, nuts, beans and grains. And corn is up there too. Now, that does not mean, for example, I could soak an almond and I could eat it, but I could eat it really fast and stressed out while I'm hunched over Facebook and emails and talking on the phone, and it would still wind up in my crap. So another important thing here is actually chewing your food. And this is stupid, but so many people do not just chew their food enough. And so if you're chewing your food and you're eating in a stressful situation, that can also affect your poo and what appears in the toilet. So that's another very important thing is chewing. And just for a little bit of time, it's kind of like breathing, right? So I wake up in the morning and I do two things. I do my gratitude journaling and I take my heart rate variability and do all my, you know, my stupid morning self quantification things. But the whole time I'm doing that, I focus on deep nasal breathing, deep nasal breathing. And then when I go downstairs every morning, I do a series of exercises called core foundation exercises. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Morning, I have my whole morning routine, kind of like itemized anyway, but there are no pictures of my poop, by the way. Anyway, so I do these core foundation exercises while I've got the water boiling for coffee, and they include decompression breathing for the spine, very big breaths from the rib cage. Right. Expanding your rib cage. So I set the precedent the rest of the day to breathe deeply. And the same can be said for food. Right? So if you chew each bite of breakfast 25 times.

Very intentionally.

Yeah, very intentionally. And this way, even smoothies, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I like them so thick that I have to chew them, which came back to bite me in the butt this morning because I just wound up eating 1500 calories. Yeah. Pun intended. But there will, I guarantee, be no unsweetened coconut flakes which were in my smoothie this morning because I'm chewing that smoothie so damn much that.

That.

That stuff is much more easily digested. So chewing is another big one. Now another one. And you would have to get a gut test for this. And what a gut test is is. Have you ever done one, Rachel?

I haven't.

Okay. Typically you get a kit in the mail, and there's one that I. Look, it's a three day kit. And doing more than one test per day is important because your gut, Your gut will change from day to day. So if you get a poop panel or a poop test and you're only pooping once, rather than like for three days in a row, you're not going to get the whole picture of the poop. But it has these little trays, the same as you would order a hot dog at a ballpark in. And you poop in the tray, which is actually really hard to do, believe it or not, to aim at the tray and poop in it. I've found that the best thing to do is just put the poop tray on the floor of your bathroom on a paper towel, and then just pretend you're taking a dump in the woods. And try not to overflow the poop tray. Try to somehow, like, wiggle your way from the tray over to the toilet if you can't cut the flow of poop before the tray is completely filled.

This is such an informative podcast problem for you anyways.

And then you. You take just a very little bit of that poop. It goes into a little tube with special chemicals in it, and you shake up the tube. You put it in a prepaid FedEx bag in the refrigerator, and you be sure to tell your loved ones that they shouldn't. They shouldn't eat the tubes. That is not chocolate pudding. And then after three days, you send it off. You give it to the FedEx guy, he opens the door, tell him it's a gift for your Aunt Mary in Minnesota, and wink. And off he goes with your biohazard based poop bag. Anyways, though. So this gut panel will tell you, among other things, your enzyme production and the health of the bacteria and the number of the bacteria in your gut. Because dysbiosis, an imbalance of good bacteria in your gut or insufficient enzyme production or both, can drastically decrease your ability to be able to digest foods. And there are all sorts of digestive enzymes that you can take with food. You can take not just an enzyme, but there are other things that many good enzymes will have in them. For example, HCL or ox bile extract is another that you'll find. You'll find some with like herbal additives. For example, fennel or licorice to assist with digestion. Lemon juice can assist with digestif. There's a lot of digestifs out there. I mean, freaking alcohol is a digestif. That's why sometimes if you eat in Italy, sometimes before, after your meal, they'll bring you grappa or vin santo, which are these herbal infused alcohol derivatives that do indeed help with digestion. So the use of digestifs in addition to chewing properly, in addition to proper food prep like soaking and sprouting, can all decrease the ability of you to get very high Instagram clicks and traffic on your poop photos. But they also make your poop more healthy and more importantly, they actually allow you to absorb what it is that you were eating.

Nutrients. And so other just to go into more detail on this subject, are there any other signs of unhealthy poop that isn't food in your poop?

Oh, that's. That. That could be a whole other podcast. But yes, there's. There is this thing called a Bristol stool chart. Have you seen this?

I haven't.

Okay, you might want to look it up in Bristol stool chart. And it classifies poop according to seven different types. From type one being very separate hard lumps like nuts, like almost like rabbit poop, all the way down to like type 4, which would be smooth and soft poop, like a sausage or a snake, which is like good healthy poop all the way down to just like watery poop that explodes and hits the back of the toilet and you know, you gotta clean it off with a, with a wet wipe. There's all sorts of different types of poop, but the Bristol stool chart allows you to kind of determine, you know, what things like mean. Like, like for Example, if you have. If you have very, very narrow pencil like. Or ribbon like stools, that could indicate you have what's called a bowel obstruction or colon cancer or a tumor, you know, or like polyps in your colon, right? So that could tell you something. White stool or pale stool or gray stool can indicate that you have liver or pancreas disorder. So it can be a sign of, like, you know, of organ issues. If you have a lot of floaters, right. A lot of splashers that can indicate that you have a lot of mucus in your stool. And in many cases, people have inflammatory bowel disease, right? Like colitis or Crohn's disease, they tend to have more floaters because there's more mucus in their stool. So it really depends. And also, by the way, very, very odorous stool is an issue. So I used to have. Used to. I want to emphasize.

Go on, let's do it.

I used to have really bad and frequent gas, and I used to have very stinky crap. And I used to eat Big Macs and a lot of fermentable carbohydrates, fructose from things like Coca Cola. And I used to eat a traditional. When I was doing Ironman triathlete for a couple of years, Iron man triathlon for a couple of years, I ate very traditional pasta, bread, whole grains. And there was constant fermentation in my gut. I'd wake up in the morning and be almost embarrassed because the bedroom didn't smell very good. And I'd be like, oh, my gosh, is this normal? And it was from copious amounts of food and training. And training anyways makes you less likely to be able to digest food. And now that I've fixed my diet, and I eat a diet comprised of raw dairy and fermented grains and low amounts of fruits, but high amounts of vegetables and wild meats and forage plants and things like that. I still poo. And poo is still kind of nasty, but it doesn't actually stink the way. I'm not gonna lie. Right. Poop has sulfur in it, and gas has sulfur in it. And so you get a sulfur smell, but it's not nasty. Like, what died? Type of smell. Right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, even if your stool has a really bad odor, stinky stool can be a sign that you have celiac or Crohn's disease or some kind of malabsorption or typically a pancreas issue. And so, yeah, there are definite things that your poop or even the absence of your poop, right? Like constipation can tell you about your gut. So, yes, that might be a discussion for another day if someone wants to call that one in. But the last thing that I should mention to wrap up this poop discussion, or should we say wipe up this poop discussion, is that I just got a bidet.

Seen these, the things that you wash your bum with afterwards, and super proud.

Because I installed it myself on my toilet just like a plumber. I even wore like loose fitting jeans with no underwear so I could get like little plumbers crap going on. Yeah, big old. Big old wrench. And no, I didn't, but I did purchase a bidet and I installed it all by myself on my toilet in my bedroom. And now after I take my morning dump, I flip the on button on this little water thing and I get this glorious flow of water spraying my little. So, yeah, it's really interesting. I just finished my morning dump and this luscious flow of actually cold, because I didn't spring for the hot water version, but cold water hits my butthole, makes me squeaky clean, and it's almost like a tiny little anal massage to start my day. It's wonderful.

Interesting anal massage. Didn't know that was a thing. But cool.

Analog oxytocin injections.

It washes and then you wipe. And it's supposed to just enhance cleanliness and hygiene.

Well, that and let's face it, it just feels good.

So there you have it, Annie. That's what you need.

Hi, Ben, this is Jodi. At the end of the month, due to a congenital hand problem, I will be undergoing major ligament and tissue surgery in order to reposition the carpal tunnels in my right wrist. Now, the recovery. Recovery period is substantial. As a brief overview, two to three weeks for Skin to Heal, four to six weeks for Ligament and Tissue to Heal, six weeks of wearing a splint, and 10 weeks of physio. So it's safe to say that I want to be able to give my body the best chance of recovery. Now, a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, you sent me an article which discussed maximizing recovery from injury, but there seemed to be a slant towards recovery of joints. Now, my question to you is, in your opinion, for someone who's in my position, what would you do in order to maximize recovery and healing of tissue and ligaments? Thank you.

All right, news flash for you, Rachel. Did you know tendons and ligaments are not like muscle? They're not the same as muscle?

I did not know that, no.

Yeah, they're just so Tendons and ligaments are these little bundles of filaments that lie in almost like a parallel arrangement. And if you. I used to dissect cadavers, human cadavers, because I was a TA for the anatomy class at University of Idaho. And they actually are embedded in this really interesting, almost like this sticky, jelly like substance. And these fibers, these threads, they're collagen. And then everything else around them, it's mostly what's called proteoglycans, which are big molecules that have absorbent capacity. It's actually why people who eat a very, very low carbohydrate diet and exercise a lot, they get joint pain because they don't have enough of these proteoglycans because they are derived out of a glucose molecule. Kind of just an interesting side fact for those of you obsessed with ketosis, but perhaps with joint pain, maybe you should step up the carb intake just slightly. Anyways, though, these collagen fibers are really long. They could almost stretch along the whole length of the tendon. And this is. They're much different. They're a little bit more dense in the way that they're laid out. In a tendon or in a ligament is a little bit different than that of a muscle. And the main function of a tendon, for example, is to pull. A tendon connects muscle to bone, a ligament connects bone to bone. And what happens is as the tendon gets tensile stress on it, these elastin fibers get stretched. They get stretched and stretched and stressed. And then the tendon acts like a spring and it can spring back. Like when your foot hits the ground, the tendons stretch and then contract and you spring off the ground. That's the way something like, say, like an Achilles tendon works. And if the tendon gets pulled too far, and typically that would mean a stretch that's greater than somewhere between about 5 to 10% of the stretch capacity of a tendon. The tendon can rupture. We tend to see little dents appear because individual fibers more or less snap. The tendon gets frayed like a broken rope. And that's what we would call a strain or a sprain would be something similar, but it'd be something similar happening to a ligament, not to a tendon. That's basically what's going on when tendons get injured, when we have sprains and strains. And I know you had a question, but I wanted to throw something in real quick. When a tendon ruptures like that, when there's been an injury, there Are also damage, or there is also damage that occurs to blood vessels. And so it's typically the blood vessel response and platelets in your blood that get activated when they come into contact with these proteins that wouldn't normally be found in the bloodstream. Right. Like actual proteins from muscle fibers. And when that happens, these growth factors get released and that triggers all sorts of things in your muscles. It triggers a basic inflammatory response, the attraction of inflammatory molecules, molecules to a site. And then when that happens, the inflammation causes the influx of what are called endothelial cells and you get new blood vessels. Getting formed causes an influx of stem cells. You can start forming more collagen because stem cells can be precursors for collagen. And you get this new collagen material. It's like this little watery, like gel. And gradually, as things heal, as you get more stem cells and more blood vessels built, the tendon will repair. And there are certain things that we know can actually assist with this lay down of new tissue with the alignment of fibers so that scar tissue isn't formed from fibers kind of like all willy nilly aligned in there in a scar tissue type of way. And also a way that we can kind of increase the assistance of the blood vessel and the fiber repair. So before we get into that though, what were you gonna say?

I was gonna say, does scar tissue feel like baby bumps under the skin?

It can. It can feel like little bumps under the skin. Although that can also be calcification. It can be lay down of little bits of bone. It does kind of depend on where the injury has occurred. But yeah, I mean, in many cases, if you feel a lot of those little bumps, this will happen in athletes a bit little a lot. Because we get a lot of calcium released post exercise that contributes to muscle soreness far more than say like lactic acid, which is typically gone a few minutes after exercise. But calcium deposits can cause that. And when you combine that with the fact that a lot of athletes are deficient in magnesium, the calcification combined with magnesium deficiencies can cause a lot of calcium deposits that cause limited range of motion and a scar tissue like appearance in certain areas of tissue, like calcified knots, almost. Anyways, though, there are a lot of things that we know can help with tendons healing, movement. And we've talked about things like electrostimulation to increase blood flow. And we've even talked about injecting with things like peptides, for example. I've got a couple of articles that I'll link to. There are these things called peptides that you heard me mention, how we can cause inflammation in tissue and we can cause the migration of growth factors subsequent to inflammation. But when you inject a peptide, it's simply concentrating growth factors around that tissue. So if you sprain or strain your ankle, say you can get your hands on something like BPC157, don't confuse it with your oxytocin and you can inject that and that can help. But there are other things that I think are perhaps even less fringe than that. I'll link to the articles that I wrote on peptide injections by the way, in the show notes. But there are some other things. So for example, we know that what are called cyclooxygenation inhibitors, which are also known as non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs, which are also known as ibuprofen, Advil, Diclofenac, there's a lot of them, those have been shown clinically to have a clear inhibitory effect on tendon healing. They shut down inflammation. I would love for them to do similar studies on very very high dose vitamin C, very high dose vitamin E, very high dose turmeric. Because there are some things that I see people who pride themselves upon being non ibuprofen users when they get injured will take too much of and shut down that natural inflammatory process. I've seen in the case of ibuprofen, an amount of anti inflammation that limits tendon healing and can cause the formation of scar tissue. They've done studies in rats, they've shown that the effect is similar in both rats and humans with any of these non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs. So yes, they give pain relief, but they result in a partially healed tendon that ultimately will be a less healthy tendon in the future with more scar tissue and less collagen and less of this like fatty proteoglycan type of coating around it. That's one thing. So avoid excessive use of anti inflammatories, whether natural or chemical pharmaceutical. The next would be mechanical loading. We would think that let's say in the case of something like an Achilles tendon rupture, Achilles tendon strain would be a more appropriate description, that if we load it that it is going to basically keep it from healing because it is under stress. But what they found is that when you load an injured tendon it triggers this really interesting cellular machinery and causes a lot of genes to become activated that have to do with inflammation. For example, when we load an injured joint, we find that we stimulate the synthesis pathway of something called PGE2. And PGE2 is actually what most non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs are trying to keep from occurring. It is actually something that can enhance the growth factor and the healing response. It is also associated with pain. So it's kind of this catch 22. You load an injured area, you'll experience a little bit of extra pain in it. But you Also from this PGA2 response, get increased triggering of the formation of new fibers, new tissues and new blood vessels. And this is why if you have strained your elbow, or if you have strained your Achilles tendon or any other tendon by doing very slow, what's called eccentric contractions that lengthen those fibers and that put stress on those fibers and you can actually accelerate the healing time and accelerate the help of that tendon post exercise. So what that means is as soon as a little bit of the swelling has subsided, as soon as you've got a little bit of a reduction of what's called the edema, you can begin to do things like stand on the edge of stairs and slowly lower yourself. Then use the railing on the stairs to pull yourself back up and slowly lower yourself again. Try with two legs, Try with one leg. That would be an example of loading that is of an eccentric form. Because you're slowing the body down. You'd have to be careful to keep it under control. I wouldn't necessarily go out and start trampolining right away, say. But in addition to avoiding nonsteroidal anti inflammatory drugs, loading of a tendon, mobilization of a tendon can help out quite a bit. And in general, even though most physicians recommend that we allow injuries to rest during the inflammatory phase and to begin to mobilize when the inflammation has subsided, we actually know that very close to immediately. I mean like once you've got a little bit of ice on there, a little bit of the swelling has gone down within a day after hurting a tendon, you should begin to load it if you want to accelerate that. What's called the regenerative phase. There's a very favorable effect of loading on the regenerative phase. So you load it, you avoid non steroidal anti inflammatories. You can experiment with things like peptides to enhance the migration of growth factors into an area.

And this is just the tendons, Ben. Or is this tendons and ligaments?

This would be tendons and ligaments.

Okay.

Yeah, both. Even though with ligaments typically in many cases that's a more serious issue because if people have really damaged their ligaments, the ligaments torn and it has to get surgically repaired. You cannot magically connect a ligament back to a bone without surgery. So, yeah, it kind of depends. I'm not a doctor. Please. If you freaking like fallen off your bike and torn your shoulder to pieces, go talk to a sports medicine doc or an orthopedic doc. Don't just start doing handstands and throwing out your ibuprofen bottles because Ben said so. But you can enhance the healing. And if you go, I'm gonna throw this out here as a shameless plug. In my book Beyond Training, if you go to BeyondTrainingBook.com, there's a chapter in there on 25 additional ways that you can help your body to recover. I would read that because I get into electrostimulation, I get into ice, I get into which topical creams and lotions work, which ones don't. So read that@BeyondTrainingBook.com and then the other thing is, and I'll link to this in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Listen to my episode with Shawn Stevenson where we talk about all the things that can assist with the formation of new stem cells, which you've just learned are important for healing. We talk about aloe vera, we talk about colostrum, we talk about what else is in that one. I think we mentioned bone broth. There's a lot of things that you can use as like foods and supplements to assist with repair as well.

So final question.

Yes. Do.

Does all of this apply for old injuries? Like long term injuries?

Yeah. So long term injuries, the problem is that you've got a bunch of scar tissue laid down and you typically have to reinitiate the inflammatory process, basically go and hurt yourself. Go and hurt yourself or inject like, that's what a lot of like platelet rich plasma injections and peptide injections and, and a lot of these injections, they're designed to reinitiate a little bit of that inflammatory process. That's one way to do it. And then like really deep tissue massage where you're using like, you know, scraping tools like graston tools, and there's this new one called hawk tools and you know, your own thumbs or river rocks, whatever, to like just scrape all over in that tissue to reinitiate the inflammatory process and to begin to lay down those fibers in the proper direction. Sometimes that's what it takes. And yeah, it feels like you're re injuring yourself. And I guess in a way you kind of are. But yeah, for an old injury, A lot of times you just have to kind of injure it again. Creatively.

Cool.

Hey, guys, my name is Miguel. I'm from Texas. And I was wondering what your opinions are on float tanks. Float therapy. I love taking magnesium baths, and I'm curious if there's much difference between homemade magnesium baths, flow therapy, and finally, in general, what are pros and cons in regards to increased brain chemicals, stress relief, or recovery, both muscular and neural? In short, where does flow therapy stack up compared to other relaxation modalities? Can't wait to hear back. Thanks, guys.

So, Rachel, how do you pronounce. How do you pronounce this guy's name?

Miguel. Miguel.

Miguel. That's how you say it. I believe that it is Miguel.

Miguel.

Miguel. But I. But I like Miguel. That could be the name of my third child should I decide to produce another. Another burpee child in the forest would be Miguel. Anyways, though. Float tanks. Float therapy. Have you done it?

I have. Yes, I have.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I personally get a little bit bored. Maybe it's because I'm a swimmer and when I get in water, I kind of want to move around and swim versus just lay there in the dark in a singing pool floating on my back.

Yeah, I find it to be really uncomfortable, actually. I'm not sure I dig trying to relax in such a seemingly unnatural environment where my skin is stinging.

And, you know, this is why most people will use recreational drugs such as, you know, whatever, anything from marijuana to mescaline before they'll use a float tank. Not only to enhance the creativity and the thought dump. That kind of happens when you're all by yourself and sensory deprived, but also kind of to keep some of that. That. That restlessness at bay, I guess. But yeah, these float tanks, they're. They're also known as isolation tanks or like I mentioned, sensory deprivation tanks. And there's float tank facilities popping up all over the place, as there's one very close to my house that. That just opened. And they were developed in the 1950s by this guy named John Lilly. And they have been used for everything from stress and anxiety to migraines to chronic pain to mental disorders and even recovery for athletes. Because when you're floating in a bunch of water that has minerals in it, a lot of those minerals. I mentioned, magnesium, for example, to offset calcium. You're getting these absorbed straight through your skin, and you get a great deal of relaxation. There's a little bit of a detoxification effect just based on osmosis you know, things moving from an area of high concentration of or low concentration of salts to high concentration of salts. Right? So you get some movement of metabolic byproducts out of your body through your skin, same as you would in, say, like a, you know, a spa or an infrared sauna. And you float, because in float tanks, they'll add hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds of Epsom salts. And these get to the point where the water makes you so buoyant that you just like if you've ever been to the Dead Sea in Israel, you just go in and you float, and it's soundless and it's dark. And they have done studies and they found that you get an activation of theta brainwaves very similar to what you'd produce during REM sleep or deep, deep meditation. These actually happen in a float tank. And there are some other very interesting hormones that get produced that cause things like a lowering of heart rate, lowering of blood pressure. And they found that in studies that when you float, you can not only reduce pain and decrease anxiety, but you can increase optimism and you can even fall asleep faster later on at night. So, yeah, a lot of interesting things happen. And plus, you get out and your skin is all exfoliated and it's all soft.

It is salty.

Similar if you were to take a bath, but without the sensory deprivation. Now, Miguel was asking in terms of the difference between magnesium baths and float therapy, really the main thing is the lack of sensory deprivation. I don't know about you, but if I'm in a bath, I'm freaking reading my Kindle, drinking a glass of wine, sometimes shouting downstairs to the kids if they're doing their homework or playing their piano. You know, it's very different than just like being shut off in the dark in a float tank. And, yeah, you don't get the same production of theta brain waves. You don't get the same sensory depth. You don't get the same sparking of creativity. Yes, you can still get high in your bathtub and dump a bunch of Epsom salts in there.

You could turn the lights off and make sure you only did it when no one was home.

Exactly. And also, you're not going to dump hundreds of pounds of Epsom salts into your bath to the point where you float. Unless you're very bored and have a very high disposable income, and in which case maybe you are going down to your local garden store and getting all that magnesium chloride they sell to melt ice on the streets when it snows. You could Technically, bring that back and have a giant tub in your backyard and kind of create your own float tank. Technically.

There you go.

Float tank hack by Ben yeah, and I actually use magnesium salts when I do an Epsom salts bath. Magnesium chloride salts salts rather than Epsom salts because you actually have higher levels of magnesium. They're a little bit more expensive, but they're healthier in terms of the mineral content than just pure Epsom salts are. But either one works and both of them have that really cool effect. It's just that, I mean, really the main difference is that a float tank has more salt and more sensory deprivation. And so if that's what you're looking for, that extreme relaxation or really, really large intake of salt. And it's worth what you're going to pay, right? Because in many cases you're paying. The last one I did, it was about 70 bucks for run an hour of a float tank. So you're paying a little bit of money to actually go in and use them. But you can also buy them for your house. I have thought about that. I'm not sure where I would put it, but it's on my list of things to look into. Maybe I'll put it next to the sauna, I don't know. But I think a float tank would be interesting to get, just to be able to slip into every now and again, say when the family reunions are occurring at the house or gets too busy or let's just say, not that I endorse this, I want to try some creative strain of plant based medicine and go in there with maybe like an audio recorder to record my thoughts and notes. And I guess that leads me to the last thing I would want to say. If you run a float tank facility, here's a business idea for you. Put little audio recording tools inside the float tank. So when people are floating, if they have ideas that come to mind, they're not laying there for like 45 minutes trying to remember that idea that came to mind 45 minutes ago. Because they aren't gonna have a notepad and a waterproof pencil in there. So what you do is inside the float tank. I'm serious. I'm telling this.

Any float tank, this is a brilliant idea.

You record the. The. You have like a recorder inside the float tank. And then you upsell that person after they floated an MP3 recording of their entire float session, should they want to actually listen to anything that they said as thoughts came to their mind, or if they wanted to listen to the sounds of their own uncomfortable screams as they attempt to scrape their nails on the wall and climb out of the float tank due to extreme sensory depth. Because that happens.

I feel like that's a brilliant idea, Ben.

Boom. There you go. Just pay me. I don't know, royalty or whatever.

Hi Ben and Rachel. I'm a 25 year old endurance runner and longtime fan of the show. I have a question about preparing for pregnancy as my husband and I are hoping to start a family soon. After about 10 years of being on birth control, I am finally ready to get off the pill. Do you have any recommendations for how to get my cycle to restart naturally? I am also wondering what prenatal vitamins you would recommend that won't break the bank. Also, should I scale back and exercise at all while I am trying to conceive? I listened to your past podcast with tips for how men can increase their fertility, but what about for women? Do you have any other suggestions for how I can best increase my chances of getting pregnant? I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thank you.

Wow, she's got a lot of questions in there.

She has got a lot of questions. Becca's not messing around.

I don't know if I'll get to all these, but I can definitely talk about getting your period back. Lord knows I've lost my cycle many times to the pill. Had to fight an uphill battle to get it back.

Your menses. I just learned that was a thing the other day. The menses? Wait, no, the menses.

The period. The manses. Really?

Yeah, the menses. When men get their menses, it's called a manses.

Wait, men get menses?

Well, apparently someone commented on my Instagram and told me we should hang out when he has his menses and I have my menses and we can. I'll get emotional and he'll. I don't know what he does, but something happens, apparently.

Well, I do know that my mood will change based on moon cycles. I do know that the best time to say, like, hunt a big buck is after a full moon. Because they get all all horny after a full moon and they're out there looking for does. So yeah, I mean, the moon does affect men and of course the moon. We know this affects women's cycles because if you put a bunch of women together like in the same area of the world with the same moon cycles and leave them together for a few months, they all wind up having their cycle at the same time of the month. It's really weird.

That must just be mind blowing to me. Like, what are you? You're like barely human.

Crazy barely human creature has this weird thing that happens to each month that I had to explain to my kids last week, by the way, how did they take it? Actually thought it was really.

She bleeds for five days and doesn't die.

Yeah, because mom, we had to go and this is when we were in Canada, we had to go and buy tampons. And the kids want to know what those are for. And so, I mean, I like, my kids know anything they want to know about, I educate them on. Because I'm of the opinion that a kid who is well educated will make better decisions in life and will be less likely to say, like, have the forbidden fruit syndrome. Right. Like, I didn't get alcohol when I was a kid. My first experience with alcohol was when I stole a bottle of whiskey from my dad's office and drank that and got drunk in my bedroom because I hadn't really ever learned anything about like, what alcohol is, what fermentation is. Never like had wine at the dinner table, you know, so my, my kids know about like, you know, any of this stuff, you know, wine and, and, and mushrooms and weed and periods and like, you know, any of those things.

That Nothing is taboo. Off topic.

Yeah, nothing is taboo. We talk about the meaning of every curse word on the face of the planet. They know how to use it. They know the appropriate situation which to use it, you know, so they won't be that high schooler who's dropping the F bomb in ill fitting situations just to say it. Because they know that, you know, they might use the F word like maybe a dozen times in their life, you.

Know, appropriately, when they really mean it.

A dozen times in a year or whatever. Because they know when to use it, you know, when it would be used appropriately. So. So yeah, anyways, we digress. So you've been on the pill. We've done podcasts about the pill and all the damage that it can cause. I'm not going to get into that because if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you do a search for the pill, you can find out what it does. And as I discuss what you can do to get your cycle back, I will mention a few of those little things and I guess I'll start here. There is a ton of evidence and there's one pretty comprehensive article actually from 2013 that goes into oral contraceptives and changes in nutritional requirements while you're on them, that key nutrient depletions occur when you're on the pill, it just happens. It strips your body of nutrients. The specific nutrients are folic acid, all your vitamin B complex, vitamin C, vitamin E, and then the minerals magnesium and selenium and zinc. And most research has found that the levels of these vitamins and minerals in the blood of women who take oral contraceptives is significantly lower than women who use, say, like natural contraceptive strategies or who don't use contraceptives.

Do you mean when you say oral contraceptives, all forms of birth control?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm not talking like a cervical device or something like that per se, unless it's actually pumping some similar hormones or chemicals in your system, but.

Yeah, which they are.

Yeah, exactly. So. So it kind of depends. And. Oh, and by the way, one more little rabbit hole. My wife and I are totally into A, timing and B, like really good condoms, like lambskin condoms. Like that's. We do that instead of the. The pill, but. And there's a really good book about timing called the Woman Code, I believe it's called.

Yeah, no, there's one called Code Red. I think it might be.

Yeah, Code Red, Code Red.

Brilliant book on periods, ladies.

We should link to that in the show notes. I'll make a note to myself. It's a great name too. So anyways, you need to replenish those minerals. That's number one. So very good. Multivitamin, multi mineral complex. I like the Thorne prenatal vitamin. Thorn makes good stuff. They've got a good prenatal. If it were me, I would actually add a good mineral complex to it, like trace liquid minerals. I would definitely add zinc to it because zinc is the one that in terms of your plasma levels gets most depleted by the pill. And you can eat lots of shellfish, right? Like oysters and clams and pumpkin seeds have zinc. And so does red meat and so does poultry. But zinc, you typically. We're talking about like 15 to 30 milligrams a day if you've been on the pill. And most multivitamins don't have that much zinc, so you got to add in extra zinc in addition to a really good multivitamin that has minerals in it. So the other ones that tend to get depleted, like I mentioned magnesium, right. So usually around the range of a few hundred milligrams of magnesium, basically up until you get to the point where you have loose stool, your entire vitamin B complex. And vitamin B6 is the biggie. Vitamin B6 is extremely low in people who have been on the pill. And you're Going to find that in a lot of different meats, for example, have pretty high amounts of vitamin B6 and some fermented foods. But you may want to actually get a vitamin B6 supplement in addition to doing something like that Thorn prenatal vitamin. So you've got your zinc, your magnesium, your vitamin B6, and then just like a really good multivitamin. So that would be number one. Number two would be your sleep. So we know that your circadian rhythms get affected by a whole bunch of different hormones, but luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone and prolactin are three of them. And all of those get thrown off by being on the pill. And I know some scientists are screaming through the mics right now, wanting me to get into the details of how they're thrown off, but we've been going for a while, so I'm just going to kind of skim over that. But basically, prolactin, FSH and lh, luteinizing hormone, those can be reregulated to a certain extent by ensuring that you restore natural circadian rhythm. And really go listen to that interview I did on the Power of when with Dr. Michael Bruce, where we talked all about chronobiology and about how to figure out what your circadian rhythm should be. And then use every strategy you can. Blue light in the morning, red light at night, avoiding screen time at night, blah, blah, blah. To get adequate sleep, but specifically not just adequate sleep. Like adequate sleep could just be like knocking yourself out by drinking a whole bunch of chamomile tea in the evening while you check Facebook. Right. But adequate circadian rhythm is primarily driven by three cues. Three. What are called zeitgeist? I think they're called circadian rhythm cues. Exercise, light and food. Right. So normal breakfast time and a normal dinner time.

Wow.

Blue light in the morning, absence of blue light at night, exercise at a certain time of day, regular time of day, preferably light movement in the morning, more intensity in the afternoon or early evening, finishing up three hours before bed. Those are the three ways that you really train your circadian rhythm. So get that dialed in. Number three would be basically this idea that you want to increase your calorie and increase your, shockingly enough, carbohydrate intake so that you can put a little fat on your body. You need to increase your storage fat to be able to become fertile. And looking like someone on the COVID of Shape or Prevention or Women's Health magazine, looking like the airbrushed salt and water depleted model who got ready for that one single photo shoot on that one day. Plus got photoshopped is not a good way to be fertile. And fertility and fashion magazines do not go hand in hand. You can quote me on that.

So exercise while she's trying to to conceive, is that something that she should.

Scale back, shouldn't be doing that, or.

She should just eat more or no exercise?

If you want to have a healthy, robust baby, you can get pregnant, do an Ironman, right? But if you want to have a really healthy, robust baby who's got adequate amounts of fat soluble vitamins, not a lot of stress and cortisol, et cetera, I would be doing things like super slow training, yoga, swimming. There are all sorts of ways that you can stay fit without pounding yourself into the pavement, getting ready for or, you know, ironman wherever, just because you paid your 900 bucks for it or whatever they're charging for Ironman these days. So yeah, be careful and put on some weight, eat adequate calories, not a lot of fasting. The next one would be stress. I talked about cortisol a little bit. Chronic stress can cause what's called HPA axis dysregulation and that can result in a host of issues including D decreased fertility. So focus on stress. Probably the best podcast I've done on stress to date, if I could think of one, would be my interview with Eudean Harry, the author of Anxiety 101, Where We Go into a whole bunch of different ways to control stress, but it's not an impossible nut to crack. Breathing, heart rate variability, measuring time in nature, avoiding stressful relationships, things like that, gratitude, journaling, lots of stuff you can do for that. And then finally, the last thing I'd look into is taking a lot of oral contraceptives for a long period of time can cause a buildup and a storage of estrogen, specifically in fat cells. And these estrogen hormones can stay in your body for a really long time. And the way that they get cleared is via the liver's natural detoxification process. And probably the two biggest things you could do. There's a lot of stuff you can do to enhance your liver detox, but two big ones are to a get lots of really good sulfur based cruciferous vegetables in your diet like sauerkraut and broccoli and cauliflower, especially fermented cruciferous foods. Sauerkraut is actually really, really good. So eat sauerkraut to get pregnant, basically, that's what I'm saying. And then the other one would be I just saved a lot of people a lot of money. Folks are rushing out all over the place to buy sauerkraut and pop out babies.

Yup.

The other one would be glutathione, which you can purchase in a supplement form like a liposomal glutathione. And I would definitely recommend a few of those. I've got an entire podcast. You could go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for estrogen dominance because I have a whole podcast on how to clear estrogen out of the body more quickly. But glutathione and fermented cruciferous vegetables are a couple of them. And so I know I just gave you a bunch of little podcasts to go hunt down and listen to. I'll try and have some links for you over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 360 and the only thing that I would ask you is that you give me, just give me your firstborn child. I don't need all of them, but just in exchange, good karma, all the.

Hard work is done.

All the hard work that I put into responding to your question. Becca, just. Yeah, firstborn child doesn't have to be a rush. Like a USPS large priority box would be fine. And they can come out here and do burpees in the forest and walk barefoot and count mushrooms in Mandarin Chinese with my children. So. So yeah, those are all the questions for today. But wait, we still have more. There's more. We have a giveaway. We want to give away a gear pack, a Ben Greenfield Fitness Tech T shirt, a sweet beanie, and a BPA free water bottle. That's not going to give you cancer that fast unless you're drinking really crappy water out of it with birth control pills, which are in the municipal water supply, by the way. Anyways, we're going to give that to our top review in itunes for the week. So if you want to support the show, good karma and win stuff, go leave a review on itunes, say something nice and if we read your review on the show and you hear it read, hop onto your computer and email quick gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com and include your t shirt size. That's gearreenfieldfitnesssystems dot com we'll send you some cool stuff. So that being said, we've got a review. It looks like this week from NFC called Backed by Science. It's a five star review. Rachel, you want to take this one away?

Yeah. All right. Ben is one of the few people in the fitness podcast realm that can actually speak to the science he brings up. It's one thing to have popular guests and new fitness trends to talk about, but Ben actually experiments, comprehends, and explains in an educated manner. This is not a bro talking about bro science. This is a professional talking about actual science, which he is capable of explaining. Explaining.

Boom.

Kind of.

If you can explain it to me, you're doing pretty well.

I don't know how much actual science is involved with pooping in a hot dog tray or injecting love hormone into your body.

I feel like there's a ton of science involved in poisoning.

Playing with sticks in the forest instead of going to school.

There you go.

However, I do appreciate the gesture. And yeah, we try and at least throw a little bit of science in there, in here, because we're not, we're not. We're just a little bit. Woo woo. We're, I think we're like 20%. Woo woo. 70% science.

50. And I just want to put that out there. I'm about 50%. I don't believe in it, but I leave space that really strange things could be true.

She's lying. Her entire closet is full of white lab coats and rats. All right, well, we should probably bring this thing to a close since it's been a while. And Again, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 360 for all the goodies, from your own custom fit suit and your Reishi mushroom extracts and your camel milk to mini trampoline research and estrogen dominance, clearing float tanks and oh, so much more. And Rachel, Ben, I don't really know where to go from there, so I guess we just say goodbye.

Bye.

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

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