When Biohacking Goes Too Far, Hidden Carbs In Vegetables, How To Get Rid of Flat Feet & Is Miso Healthy & More?

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, Are inversion tables bad for blood pressure? How to get rid of flat feet? Is miso healthy? Hidden carbs and vegetables? When does biohacking go too far? And much more.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfield Fitness.com.

Brock I'm feeling pretty jacked this morning, I gotta tell you.

You're feeling jacked. Are you, Ben?

I am. I had a sore injured elbow for a few weeks there.

Oh yeah, you did some prolotherapy or prolozone on it?

I got a prolozone shot on it. I did a little bit of stretching on it. I'm back in the game. I did a hundred pull ups yesterday.

Nice. Without stopping.

No, it sounds impressive, doesn't it? I basically just do pull ups all day. So I did 10 sets of 10. So like every hour I would just wander into my gym and do 10 pull ups. So yeah, I'm feeling good. I can't, I can't type at all. But other than. And someone is holding up my microphone for me. Yeah, other than that, I'm good.

Your arms are like noodles. I've been doing a pull up challenge because I decided this year I wanted to actually get good at pull ups, not just be the wimpy guy who can sort of do like seven. So I've been doing this pull up challenge like every second day and I'm getting there.

Now. Are you swinging? Are you? Are you? I know that all the crossfitters out there are going to cringe, but are you kipping slash cheating when you do them?

Absolutely not. I'm keeping my body straight, like legs crossed behind me, like the ankles crossed behind me and just like nice and straight between the shoulders and the. And the knees.

Good. Well, we'll talk about inversion therapy later on. I know, because we have a question about inversion tables. But I mean, pull ups are pretty much like inversion tables in reverse. Like especially if you're hanging and getting full extension in between each pull up, you get an amazing decompression and what's called a traction effect on the shoulders, on the spine. I'm all about hanging, man. I do. I hang from my pull up bar. I've got like a little neck device. It's called a cervical traction Device. You can Google it, but. But I hang by my neck and it like, pops all my neck vertebrae. I hang from my inversion table and like, pops on my lumber vertebrae. I'm like a freaking gibbon, dude. I'm a gibbon.

Just worried that you're going to be showing signs of a stroke any day now. Twitter.com BenGreenfield is ripe with all kinds of awesome, right? Ripe. Rife. Is that the word I was looking for? It's rife or ripe, depending on who you're talking to or which study you're looking at.

Ripe, rotting, whatever. Speaking of ripe, though, and by the way, everything we talk about, I've tweeted out over@twitter.com BenGreenfield A brand new article that appeared up in your neck of the woods. Brock.

Meaning?

Meaning Canada.

Yeah.

I guess when I say you are neck of the woods, that's kind of similar to like New York being in the same neck of the woods as San Francisco. Yeah.

Honestly, Vancouver is a lot closer to you than it is to me.

You are in Toronto and this was in Vancouver. But it's an article that appeared about snorting chocolate. Snorting chocolate comes to Canada at a Vancouver candy shop. I love how the article starts out. It says, everybody loves snorting chocolate. It's for everybody. So here's the deal. This has actually been around Belgium for years and it's just now starting to appear in the mainstream. But the idea is you use this kind of mini catapult.

I love a catapult. It's hilarious.

Yeah. To shoot chocolate into your nose. And for two bucks a hit, anybody can try snorting this chocolate. And it's like this fine, high quality cocoa. You can do cocoa, raspberry or cocoa, ginger. And it's like about an eighth of a teaspoon that you're snorting. But the proprietor of this candy shop says that snorting chocolate can be a very satisfying experience. And you experience the chocolate for a couple of hours and it's very subtle and you're not going to get irritated by it. A lot of people have suggested it's cleared their sinuses. So to me it sounds a hell of a lot more fun than like a freaking, like neti pot full of sodium.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So the snorting chocolate. And if you want to see a demonstration of the snorting chocolate catapult and how that actually works, if you're having trouble visualizing that, then just go go over to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 306 and we have a little link to that article that has a video as. So another thing I tweeted was that there's something that professional athletes are doing a lot of now. It's not snorting chocolate. For those of you who are into the professional football league. And I don't know if you're watching the NFL playoffs. Over this past weekend, the Indianapolis Colts had a big vat of bone broth on the sidelines.

Nice.

And then an article came out in Yahoo. Sports about Kobe Bryant and about how much fricking bone broth like he. He has this big giant thermos of bone broth that he uses at practice and as part of his daily nutrition routine. And the thing about bone broth, and this is a good note in that article, the Lakers head strength and conditioning coach says you could go into a store and on the shelf you can get vegetable stock or chicken stock, and that's probably been flavored with salt and chicken flavored bouillon cubes and maybe some msg. And it has very low vitamin and mineral nutrient value. But if you make your own bone broth and you actually don't skim all the jello like stuff off of it, a lot of people get all fat phobic, right? And they're like, oh, they could just picture all the fat globules on that bone broth somehow clogging up the arteries, which we know now is a myth. But that's the gelatin component of bone broth. And frankly, over@quickanddirtytips.com there's this podcast by this lady called the Nutrition Diva. Great podcast. And she talked about how the fact is, some parts of bone broth have actually been blown out of proportion in terms of how healthy bone broth is for you. Like the proline and the glycine and the vitamin and the mineral content, frankly, is not that much higher than a lot of other food sources such as other vegetables, meats, et cetera. But the gelatin, if you actually consume a gelatin, rich bone broth is where a lot of the research behind bone broth actually lies. So you gotta get the thick jello like stuff for it to actually make a difference when it comes to everything from, like, healing your gut to providing you with a lot of the building blocks for connective tissue. But if you do get that nice fatty globule of bone broth, it's good stuff. So. And apparently Kobe Bryant thinks so too. So if you too want to be able to dunk a basketball, then just drink some bone Broth.

You know why or you know who set Kobe up with that, don't you?

Probably our friend Dr. Kate Shanahan.

Exactly, buddy. Kate Shanahan, who was on the podcast, I think that was last summer.

Yep, exactly. That's a good podcast. If you go to bengreevillefitness.com, do search for Kate Shanahan. The last thing I wanted to mention was ginger and the fact that if you compare ginger to the popular diabetic blood glucose controlling drug metformin, metformin that's used for diabetes. It turns out that ginger, based on this most recent study that was done on ginger, actually has a better effect on fasting blood sugar than the most powerful diabetic drug that we have access to. And ginger supplementation in this study not only reduced fasting blood sugar, but also hemoglobin A1C, which is like a three month snapshot of blood sugar, apple lipoprotein B and A1, which are some of the more deleterious lipoproteins associated with cholesterol and a few other risk factors for chronic disease. So it's so easy. In this study they use ginger powder, but it's so easy to get the same effect by boiling ginger, by chewing on ginger, by going out and buying ginger candies from the grocery store. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, you might be counteracting the effects if you do it via the ginger candy. It's probably a wash at that point.

I'm sure they're dipped in vegetable oil and rolled in high fructose corn syrup.

They are pretty tasty though. But anyways, yeah, ginger, I mean, you can even take ginger. If you're too lazy to cook it. You can just drop it into like a smoothie, like a blender. But one good way to go, because it is going to stay bioactive. If you boil it and then you put it in the refrigerator. You can just boil a chunk, chop it into slices prior to boiling so you've got a more surface area of the ginger available for being heated. And then if you want to, you can just do that once. Like you can batch it and just keep some ginger root that's been boiled in your refrigerator. And you can toss that, like, if you're. I know a lot of our listeners are green smoothie people. Right. You could easily just put that in your green smoothie and it'll not only help with digestion and inflammation, but it will also help with any blood sugar response to that. That giant green smoothie that you might be sucking down in the morning.

So did they say what an efficacious dose is?

The gram dose of ginger powder was about 2 grams of ginger powder and from my understanding that's the equivalent of right around a half a finger's length worth of ginger root.

Okay, that's not bad.

Yeah, no, it's not like you're gnawing on like a wheelbarrow full of ginger root. So yeah, there you go. You can see all of those studies and more over@twitter.com BenGreenfield and get links if you just go to the show notes for this episode@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 306 that was.

The most delicious news flashes we've ever had.

Listener Q and A hi Ben, this is Kim. I have a question about inversion tables. I've heard you mention many times the benefits of inversion tables and I'm interested in buying one. Not because I have a bad back, but for brain biohack reasons. However, I have high blood pressure. My doctor says I have the gene. I have never practiced any of the bad habits for self induced high blood pressure. I've seen information on both sides one several information that suggests if you have high blood pressure you should stay away from inversion tables. And the other half of the information I've seen says if you have high blood pressure, inversion tables can be beneficial. Just wondering if you had any thoughts on this? Thanks. I enjoy the show.

I like how her doctor told her that she has the gene as if that's like the thing you can do about it. You have the gene. I'm sorry?

You have the gene for high blood pressure. It's called the heart gene. You have a heart.

You have a heart and you have blood.

You are at risk for high blood pressure. You also have arteries and veins and that increases that risk even more. Well, we've certainly done episodes on natural remedies for high blood pressure. And really the thought on this is very simple. Pretty much anything that, that trained your body how to vasodilate and vasoconstrict better is good for blood pressure. And so that would include things that are red because nature gives us clues. Beets are a perfect example. Watermelon is in fact another good example of something that increases nitric oxide. It can open up blood vessels. There are, there are products out there that do like grip strength training where you grip and release and grip and release. And those are actually fantastic for high blood pressure based on the same reason that like yoga and Tai chi are good for high blood pressure because you learn how to move and relax, then move and relax. So any of those type of exercise modalities are fantastic for high blood pressure. The other thing, and we've interviewed this gentleman on the podcast before, what's his name? He's so prolific that I've forgotten his name. He wrote the book Body by science, Doug McGuff and his strength training protocol, which is basically a super, super slow strength training protocol, right? Like 10 to 30 seconds up, 10 to 30 seconds down to complete muscular failure before moving on to the next exercise and doing five different exercises. The idea, and I've written an article about this over@quickanddirtytips.com, but the idea is that when you're moving that slowly, you get a huge amount of peripheral blood pressure increase, like in the little capillaries around your muscle. And that serves to drive blood back to the heart, thereby decreasing what's called central blood pressure. And so you get a blood pressure lowering effect in terms of the type of blood pressure that would be considered to put you at risk for cardiovascular disease while still getting all of the strength training risks or strength training benefits, depending on how you look at them. So, yeah, really interesting. But any of those strategies can be used for blood pressure. And of course, I'll link to the previous podcast that we did, it was 140something, I think, a while back on blood pressure or 184podcast184. Anyways, though, when it comes to inversion tables, there is some talk out there about inversion tables and blood pressure. And the reason for that is because there was this fellow named Dr. Goldman back in the 80s, and he published this medical study that suggested that inversion therapy could increase blood pressure and internal eye pressure. And for anyone who's hung from an inversion table before, that part about internal eye pressure probably does not surprise you. And the first few times you hang from an inversion table, it is uncomfortable. Your head gets a lot of pressure in it, and that's first of all just because your body has to learn how to shuttle blood efficiently as you're hanging upside down. The other reason is that inversion actually increases the amount of capillaries that feed your head. And so you increase blood flow to your head and blood flow to your brain through the use of an inversion table. But the first few times, when you don't have that buildup of capillaries and you're not accustomed to shuttling that blood around, it is uncomfortable and you do actually feel like your eyes are gonna pop out of your head. So anyways, though, after that study, there's been a series of studies that have shown that inversion tables and inversion therapy is not responsible for strokes, is not responsible for popped blood vessels. And research shows that you're at no more of a stroke risk hanging upside down than if you're exercising or moving right side up. So further research has found that the body has these mechanisms that get put into place to prevent any damage from being upside down. Your body learns how to shuttle blood quite efficiently in the same way that when you're lifting weights, as long as you're doing so in a slow and controlled fashion, that peripheral blood pressure offsets the central blood pressure. It's very, very similar with hanging from an inversion table. And actually some of the research has shown that with inversion, especially inversion with oscillation, meaning as you're hanging from inversion table, you sway from side to side and you sway.

I thought you were going to say rotating like a spinning inversion table, like a gyroscope.

Some of the patients blood pressures in those studies actually dropped. So inversion table may actually be beneficial for blood pressure. Ultimately the trick is to kind of move as you're doing it right to kind of like twist around stuff as you hang. So I'm a fan, like I mentioned earlier, of inversion and of hanging. If you want to get a good inversion table. I would say if I could recommend one brand, it would be the brand Teeter. That's T E E T E R and they have this brand called Hang Ups. Teeter Hang Ups. They've been around since like the early 80s. That's the type of inversion table that I have. It's much easier than like getting gravity boots and a pull up bar and hanging from the door. Even though I think Teeter does indeed make that type of system too. If you want to do who's a James Bond that hangs upside down and does the setups?

I don't know, I don't remember. I know Rocky did it, but he was hanging in like in a barn.

Yeah. Anyways, those, those particular tables are tested really well for endurance and rotation control and ease of assembly and they, they meet the most stringent inversion table safety standards. Did you know that there are indeed inversion table safety standards?

I didn't, but I'm glad to know that there is.

And they even if you go to Teeter, I'll put a link in Amazon. But the Teeter hangups even has really cool chart that shows you a bunch of exercises that you can do from your inversion table. 29 different stretches and movements that go above and beyond Just sit ups and swaying side to side, so.

Oh, and they've got a vibration.

Cushion stretches. Yeah, I mean like you could pretty much like go full on, like high class first.

I'm never standing on my feet again.

Yeah, so. So check it out. Teeter hangups. We'll put out the Amazon link to to Teeter's stuff in the show. Notes for you at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 306 and best of luck not popping blood vessels in your head.

Hi Ben and Brock. Great podcasts and love all the wonderful information. This is Mike from Northern Indiana. I experienced an injury this last summer during a triathlon. On the run portion. I felt tinge in the bottom of my foot and after consulting with a podiatrist, the diagnosis was posterior tibial tendon dysfunction or pttd. And wondering if there's anything I can do for that tendon and just for the overall general health of my tendons and ligaments on what you would recommend. Thanks for the information and the awesome podcast.

You guys do a great job.

I like that it's nicknamed Adult Acquired Flat foot.

Exactly. Adult acquired.

Are you supposed to get it as a child? And that's weird that you get it as an adult. I don't understand why it's called that.

Well, it was back in the 1900s that there was this guy named Philip Hoffman. He was an orthopedist. He did this study and the study was called Comparative Study of Barefooted and Shoe Wearing Peoples, which is a fantastic title.

That's the title of my next album.

I am a shoe Wearing People. Are you a shoe wearing people?

I am not.

No. I am barefooted. Anyways, though, he published some really interesting results in the American Journal of Orthopedic Surgery with a bunch of photos. And they were in particular photos and studies of people who grew up wearing shoes versus people whose feet were primarily spent inside of shoes or people who grew up barefoot versus people whose feet were inside of shoes. And when you look at the photos, they're absolutely amazing. The difference in terms of like the cramped toes and the flat feet and the collapsed arches and the people who are accustomed to shoes versus the people who grew up, like, walking on the beach and walking barefoot. And even if you look at kids, like one of the photos shows a kid who's worn shoes for three months and then compares that to an adult who went barefoot their whole life. Three months was all that it took to shape a child's foot and to start to cause their toe, like their big toe to turn Inward. And the amazing thing is that in this study in which this Dr. Hoffman looked at over 186 pairs of primitive feet, which would be like hunter gatherers and tribal populations who just don't wear shoes and walk around barefoot, he didn't find one single foot that had this flat foot syndrome or any of the other symptoms of weakness that you find in normal shoe wearing populations. So foot development turned out to be really similar in all populations up until the introduction of these built up overprotective shoes. So shoes are the primary culprit when it comes to altering your natural foot structure. But they've found some other interesting things too. Like there was a study in India that found that flat feet were far more prevalent in people who wore footwear before the age of six. And that might be because six are kind of like, or six years old is when a lot of bone structure development has actually taken place by that point. But kids who were barefoot for most of their first six years had way better developed arches and less flat feet. So, you know, you're probably getting the idea here that one of the number one things that you could do to strengthen your feet and to even restore arches. And there's been another. This wasn't a study. It was more like an N equals one kind of case study. But they've shown that you can redevelop arches in flat feet just by beginning to use barefoot or minimalist shoe type of approaches. So you definitely want to stay away from built up, overprotected orthotics and shoes with lots of arch support. The only exception to that would be like, if you're listening in and you get a lot of heel pain and you have like heel spurs, that type of thing. Sometimes orthotics can remove the pressure from the heel. Granted, you're still going to weaken your arches, but if you're just trying to like heal a heel spur, then the arches can come in handy for like, heel spurs, plantar fasciitis issues where you need to take some pressure off of your heels. But unless that's the case, going barefoot and getting into minimalist footwear is one of the most important things that you can do. And you can do it all the time. Even if you got to wear shoes at the office. You can walk your dog in your bare feet and you can go get the mail on your bare feet and the newspaper and you can walk around the living room with your bare feet. I mean, there are so many opportunities. You should be able to spend several hours per day unshod Now a few of the other things that are going to help accelerate the process of restoring normal arches and restrengthening the feet from flat feet. One would include spreading your toes. If your toes have spent a lot time, a lot of time in like a compressed toe box. Not only can it be helpful to do exercises where you're fanning out your toes as widely as you can and you can actually do this as an actual exercise, right? Like relax the toes and fan them out. Then relax them and fan them out. I'm all about getting more bang for your buck from a time standpoint. I mean, you could do something like that when you are bench pressing or you know, in between sets of deadlifts. Like you can, you know, you don't have to just sit there and have like that be the only thing that you're doing. You could do it while you're watching reruns of Modern Family or Family Guy, whatever.

Some show that involves a family or a family.

Yeah. Why is that? Why do the funny shows have families?

I've never watched Modern Family. Is it funny?

Yeah, it actually is. It's pretty, it's pretty funny. It's legitimately funny anyways though. The other thing is you can actually spread your toes while you're sleeping and I'll put a link in the show notes, but you can get these special things called toe spreaders and they actually keep your toes spread when you're sleeping. Those can help with plantar fasciitis, they can help with heel spurs. They can also help with flat feet. Walking in different directions can be extremely helpful. And what I mean by this is you can do like monster walks with an elastic band. Attach your feet, your ankles together and you can do forward monster walks backwards monster walks side to side monster walks where you're down in like a corner quarter squat position, walking with the resistance of that elastic band. But do this in your bare feet or your socks and your feet are going to have to work in all sorts of different directions. And then one last tip I would give you would be uneven surfaces and of course sand is one. A lot of us though don't have access to sand. There are now like anti fatigue mats popping up all over the place for people who work at standing workstations. I know there's one that's called Topo, I believe it's called. It's on like a Kickstarter right now. I am right now, as we were recording, standing on one called a KAI Bounder. It's a KY Bounder. I'M going to work on an article on all these different like anti fatigue mats here at some point for BenGreenfieldFitness.com but when I'm standing on this thing in my bare feet, I'm constantly having like it is very similar to standing in sand. It's like an extremely dense sand foam. And so your body's constantly having to kind of move and adapt and it stretches your feet and it helps to shape your foot as you're standing. It relieves pressure from your joints that you normally get if you were standing on just like carpet or wood or concrete or something like that. So standing on uneven surfaces, walking on uneven surfaces, I don't know, go jump on your bed. Anything that involves walking around on an uneven surface. And I just kind of. But if you've ever stood up and just like walked across your bed, especially if you've got one of these new like springless mattresses, it works quite well for something like that. It's actually very therapeutic for your feet. In previous episodes I've talked about like the Essentia mattress and I've also talked about the Casper mattress. And in one of the rooms in my house I actually have one of these mattresses on the floor. It's in my kids playroom. But when I go in there and I walk around sometimes I'll just walk around on that mattress and. And you feel your feet just stretching all over the place. So that's another option. Just like spend a bunch of money on a king size mattress and just throw it on the floor somewhere for walking around on if you have some change to spare. So there's that. If you don't have a beach, just get a mattress. So those are some of my recommendations for getting rid of flat feet. Hey Ben, Ellie again.

So I eat a lot of miso. Like I spread it pretty thickly on my sandwiches. Is there any problem to this other than I'm probably getting a lot of excess sodium. Thanks. Love the podcast.

I think the first thing we need to address is. Ellie, why are you eating sandwiches?

I don't know, man. I eat sandwiches.

Do you?

Yeah, I have a sandwich about once or twice a week I'll have a sandwich. My wife makes this sourdough bread and I'll put like some, some hummus on there. I don't think I've ever put miso on there but usually like some, I'll do like some kind of vegetable and some meat and like you know, just an old school sandwich.

Dude, it's your fault that I don't eat sandwiches like three years ago when I started working with you, you were like giving me the smackdown anytime I'd have any bread. So it's been out of my house for about two years now.

Well, yeah, but that you don't make your own bread.

No.

Which is actually very. If you would freaking learn how to make your own bread, which is not hard to do.

It's easier just not to eat bread.

Yeah. I have a recipe in in beyond training for making your own bread that is literally like it takes five minutes to put the ingredients into a bowl and you pour them into a pan and you put in the oven. It's more of like a flatbread cracker, but it works fine for sandwiches. Totally fermented, gluten free, whatever. Anyways, though, miso, I guess the primary concern that a lot of people have about miso is it's considered to be a high sodium food. Like 1 teaspoon of miso gives you like 200 to 300 milligrams of sodium. But the really interesting thing is that they've done research on miso and found that despite its high sodium content, it doesn't appear to have that effect on the cardiovascular system. Particularly speaking of blood pressure, blood pressure that a lot of other high sodium foods can. And they've even compared in animal studies identical concentrations of salt like table salt, sodium chloride. And they've compared that to equal versions of miso and found that the miso did not raise the blood pressure like the salt actually did. So reasons for this aren't quite clear, but the speculation is that miso has this protein composition derived from the soy protein component, which is where miso comes from, is soybeans. And that the building blocks of protein that get formed from these soy proteins when the beans are fermented helps to counteract any of the issues with the sodium in the miso. So it's one of those deals where it's a whole food and all the components are working together to help you out a little bit. So the blood pressure isn't much of an issue with miso. Now there are some other interesting things that you should know about miso. First of all, it's got some benefits when it comes to vitamin K if you get the right kind of miso. So there's a bunch of different kinds of miso. And the way that miso is made is you'll typically add a bacteria to ferment the soybeans that are used. And in a traditional, like Chinese miso, they'll use a bacillus bacteria. And what happens is when you ferment soybeans using this bacillus bacteria is you create a bunch of the form of vitamin K called MK7, which is the form that's really important for like bone health and decreased risk of osteoporosis and proper absorption and utilization of vitamin D, balancing of calcium, all these cool things that happen when you get adequate vitamin K. You know, the same type of vitamin K you get from say like natto or grass fed butter. So that's what you get in Chinese miso. Now Japanese miso typically uses a different strain to ferment the soybeans. This is called Aspergillus. Aspergillus, Aspergillus, Asperagolus, Asparagus, Aspergillus. Anyways, though, the idea with that type of fungi or bacteria is that that can actually affect the isoflavones that are in soybeans. And what happens is when that particular microorganism is used to ferment miso, it's capable of turning some of these isoflavones. In particular, they're called genistein. There's another one called diadesen and it ferments this into something called equal. And while you don't have to necessarily be super duper familiar with all these terms and weird names, what you should know is that equol, once it is present in the body, has some really good anti cancer benefits and also cardiovascular benefits. And so whereas a Japanese miso is going to be better for cardiovascular health and for anti cancer benefits, you're going to get more digestive benefits and vitamin K2 producing benefits from a Chinese miso. So the takeaway message here is that if you're going to include miso as a staple in your diet, especially in thick quantities. Yeah. Experiment with different forms. You could use like a dark red miso, you could use a yellow miso. There's a variety of different miso pastes out there that you could get from like the Asian section of, well technically the Asian section of most stores. It's like the GMO non organic miso that is notoriously high in like the gen, the genetically modified soy. But if you get like the nice dark reddish brown misos or the, like the, the orange slash yellow misos from like the actual Asian market or the Asian grocery store, you're going to get a lot of these really, really good compounds. And you can, you can see almost automatically whether it's a Chinese miso or whether it's a Japanese miso. I say mix it up use a few different kinds. So you're getting both benefits of the fermentation of these soybeans using different strains of bacteria. It's the same reason that I recommend a wide variety of fermented foods. Don't just eat yogurt, have kimchi, have some sauerkraut, have some kefir, have some kombucha. You want to expose your body to a variety of different strains because each of those strains result in the production of different types of vitamins, minerals and beneficial effects. So I guess like the one concern with miso is of course the soy. Because it's a fermented form of soy, it's going to be, you know, a lot of the digestive inhibitors, a lot of the things that can wreak havoc. From an autoimmune standpoint, you don't have as many of those risks like a fermented soybean versus say an unfermented soybean like Edamame for example, which I'm not a huge fan of of. But if you do have, if you've tested your blood and you've got a lot of like thyroid antibodies or you've done one of the better allergy tests out there, it's called a Cyrex labs test and you test for really big sensitivity to soy based proteins, you may want to consider eliminating these altogether. But if that's not the case, you know, miso, like real miso, real fermented, non gmo, like certified organic miso is really good for a lot of stuff. And you can use it as a marinade. You can combine it with olive oil and ginger and garlic to make some really nice dressings. You can heat it. And I like to just make a soup on the countertop. You do some water, you do some miso and then just throw in your choice of vegetables like some shiitake mushrooms or some carrots or radishes and you just heat all that up and make a nice miso soup. Or of course, Brock, you could put it on a sandwich with a little bit of avocado and some fish and have yourself a little miso. Avocado seafood sandwich. Hi, Ben.

I want to know about green leafy vegetables. Can I get too many carbs from green leafy vegetables? I heard some people limit them and other people say any amount of green leafy vegetables is fine.

I love the green leafy vegetables. That's basically what when you gave me the smackdown about the sandwiches, I just basically replaced it with leafy greens.

You're going to die. Of carb disease now.

Ah, crap.

Everybody knows leafy greens are full of carbs. They're going to knock you out of, out of ketosis again. And when you get knocked out of ketosis, your world will begin a spiral downwards into early death, onset of cardiovascular. No, I'm just kidding. Most people worry way too much about the carb content in vegetables. So here's the deal. Most of that is fiber. Most of the carb content in most of these vegetables, even like freaking carrots, is fiber. And calorie for calorie, especially dark leafy green vegetables, they're one of the most concentrated sources of nutrients in any food. And the carbs, like I mentioned, they're packed in layers of fiber that makes them very, very slow to digest. They have very little impact on blood glucose. I don't know if you've ever taken out a blood glucose monitor and eaten a bunch of a kale salad with some olive oil and pine nuts on it, maybe some vinaigrette, and tested your blood glucose afterwards, you're going to notice pretty much a mood response. And of course they're rich in everything. Vitamin K, vitamin C, vitamin E, all your B vitamins, your beta carotene, and for your eyes, like the lutein and the zeaxanthin. And a lot of the dark leafy greens have a little bit of omega 3 fatty acids in them. And I can't say enough positive things about them. Some people, and I will acknowledge this, they can for thyroid conditions, like non heated, when they haven't been steamed, like spinach and kale. And some of these things that have what are called goitrogens in them, those can have an impact on thyroid function function. If you're eating a bunch of them. The other thing you should know is if you're following a low fodmap diet, if you have constipation, gas, bloating, small intestine bacterial overgrowth, those type of things, some of these vegetables and spinaches among them, tend to ferment and they tend to have a high potential for fermentation. If you do a lot of them with spinach, for example, more than 15 leaves of spinach, that's considered enough to cause some significant fermentation. If you're somebody who struggles with constipation or small intestine bacterial overgrowth, that's not.

Very much, 15 years, you could go.

Google a fodmap chart and I recommend anybody who struggles with constipation, gas, bloating, digestive distress, et cetera. You pay attention to a fodmap chart, Just slap it on your fridge and you could see, for example, collard greens don't really ferment. Kale doesn't really ferment, ginger doesn't really ferment. These are all things you could put in a smoothie. Whereas cabbage has pretty good fermentation potential, spinach has a lot of fermentation potential. Tomatoes ferment onions and garlic, big time. So there's some of these things that you just want to pay attention to. But ultimately, when it comes to the sugar content, it is pretty low in all these dark, leafy greens. Now, when you look at carbs in general, if you want to consider this, like on. On a carb matrix, leafy vegetables are going to have the least amount of carbs in them, right? So lettuce, herbs, Swiss chard, spinach, kale, all that stuff. Next up would be stems and flower vegetables in terms of carbohydrate contents, like broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, asparagus. Still not a lot of carbs when we're comparing this to, like, fruits and potatoes, but those have a slightly higher carb content than some of the lettuces and the dark leafy greens. Next you have fruits and fruits that would not necessarily traditional fruits like melons and apples, but just a fruit is the part of a plant that contains the seeds. So squashes would fall into this category. Peppers, eggplant, green beans, tomatoes, all of these are fruits. Avocados are kind of considered a fruit as well in this case, even though they have considerably less carbohydrate in them than like, squashes, peppers, eggplants, green beans, et cetera. But anytime you're starting to deal with seeds in a vegetable fruit, then you're going to have a little bit higher carb content. And then, as you probably would have guessed, roots are a vegetable, and those have the highest carbohydrate content at all, the highest starch content. And I would say those would be the one thing to really go out of your way if you're really trying to go low carb or control surges in blood glucose. You could just be careful with these, eat them after a workout or whatever. Parsnips, sweet potatoes, yams, jicama, and carrots and radishes would also be considered roots, but they have way less carbohydrates than sweet potatoes and yams and white potatoes. And some of the things that you would intuitively, when you eat them, you can tell, like, they're just, you know, a little bit more More starchy.

I like your demonstrations.

They make that sound. So anyways, that's kind of the deal with low carb vegetables versus high carb vegetables. But ultimately vegetables in general are low carb when we're talking about comparing them to like vegetables versus, you know, a Jamba juice or vegetables versus, you know, a bag of chips or a yes sandwich. So ultimately I wouldn't worry about this too much at all. I would keep your dark leafy greens up and don't worry about the whole like ketosis slash kale conundrum. Oh, that's what we should call this, the ketosis Kale conundrum podcast.

Yeah, I thought for sure you were going to bring up the net carb ratio like the calculation or you figure out offset the carbs by the fiber content.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's where you look at the label and it has X amount of carbs in it. But then when you look at it, you can see how many of those carbs are derived from fiber versus how many are actually derived from like true, like, you know, starch based carbohydrate. But the problem with that is that, you know, sometimes I forget about this stuff because I don't look at labels barely at all anymore because I just eat food that doesn't have freaking labels on it. So, you know, that's part of this too is the more real food. And you know, we've just got like, you know, dried foods and glass mason jars and vegetables and produce and some meat. It's like, you know, the whole label thing becomes far less of an issue when you're eating that way, which I would encourage you to do if you're listening in.

Speaking of glass jars filled with real foods, we've had a couple of people over the last little while that have had the same sort of complaint I would would call it. And a couple of them, well, pretty much everybody who's written in have asked to be anonymous. But basically the problem boils down to a boyfriend and. Or a husband and. Or a wife have gotten a little too deep into this podcast to the point where their significant other have actually been kind of filled with resentment towards you, Ben, because they listen to you more than they listen to their significant other and basically like keep the house too cold, keep the lights too dim, do things yoga poses while they're supposed to be chit chatting, rolling out on a rolling foam roller the entire time they're watching TV and stuff like that, to the point where they're kind of destroying their relationships by the sounds of things. And they. I feel like they're going too far, but I. Maybe we should give some people some advice here.

Yeah, I think that that's a misconception that a lot of people have about me. And, you know, the people who are on the cutting edge of health is that we're all like connected to a Fitbit 24. Seven, walking around with the, you know, aluminum foil tucked in our underwear to protect us from emf. A little handheld meter to measure how much electricity is in each room that we walk into. And then just like a lacrosse ball in the pocket at all times to roll out any tiny little element of, you know, tissue adhesion and maybe what else? A heart rate monitor. Of course, you have to wear blue.

Glasses for the morning and orange glasses in the evening.

The glasses all the time. And the different spectrums for the different times of day. Here's the deal. I think probably the best way to frame this would be a really good book that I'm personally reading right now. The book is called Just Enough. And in sum, this book is about success. And it's basically saying that success is not about spending all of your time in the pursuit of one object, objective, right? So much that you miss out on the pleasure and the richness that you can find in other dimensions, but instead to have a good balance of just enough in each category and in the book. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes for folks they want to get it. I've got on my Kindle right now, but the book talks about how there's four categories that are going to keep you satisfied in life. And. And successful. And those four categories are happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. Happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. And when these four factors are imbalanced, your success will feel satisfying and worthwhile. And I certainly think that you can get out of balance when it comes to, for example, the achievement component, right? Like trying to have it all, trying to do every workout, trying to use every biohack. And all of a sudden, like, your focus on your family, which should fall into, like that legacy category, falls out of place. Your focus on significance, like what kind of contribution that you're making to the world would fall out of place. Your focus on happiness, like eating a giant tub of gelato or having hot, crazy, wild sex instead of going to bed at 9:30pm Maybe when the sun has set at the same time. So you can certainly get out of balance. And I personally, I know that this is a little bit airy fairy in terms of putting an Exact amount up. But I follow about an 8020 approach, right. Like I'm always publishing these articles about how alcohol can be detrimental and might cause hormonal disruption. It's not like I have a little meter that I measure out exactly 6 ounces of wine with each night. I pour a glass of wine every single night. And every once in a while when I'm out and about, I'll have like three or four drinks and one of those might be a shocker. A beer that's not gluten free and all these things that frankly, I don't really care about because my focus at that point is on happiness and relaxation and not counting calories or paying attention to being in a consistent biohacking mode. I will go to, you know, see a movie sometimes or watch a movie at home. And I don't have my, my blue light blockers on or like my, you know, my compression boots. I don't have like a foam roller there. I'm just like sitting there, you know, like snuggling up to my wife and, you know, making. I don't want to like get carried away here, but like, you're, you know, I know I'm not going to get like laid, you know, three quarters of the way through that movie. Which is, let's face it, that's one of the fun things about hanging out and watching a movie or something like that is what it ends up with. And so that's another case where I'm just like, yeah, screw it. I don't need to do all this biohacking. I'm just here to have fun. The same thing with food every single night, just about all throughout the day. I eat the same thing almost every day. I have a smoothie for breakfast and I have a salad for lunch. At night I eat whatever happens to be there. Like tonight is pad thai night at our house. We'll have pad thai. The kids are making pineapple ginger ice cream. And yeah, that will totally knock me out of ketosis. And as a totally high carb meal, my blood glucose gonna be through the roof when I go to bed. I don't freaking care because I've had a great night with my family, eating wonderful food and just hanging out. And so what this comes down to is, yeah, sometimes you're going to potentially create a little bit of a dent, a little bit of a deficit in the health that you're constantly pursuing. Sometimes you're going to miss out on a chance to work out a muscle tissue adhesion or miss out on a chance to recover properly because you got back from a workout and decided that rather than taking a magnesium salts bath and spending 15 minutes on the foam roller, you're going to, you know, whatever, crack open a beer and stand around chatting to a friend on the telephone, you know, so it's just like you have to have this balance. And I would encourage you to read this book just enough. Because so many of us focus on like the all or nothing principle rather than thinking about, hey, what's the minimum amount of this stuff that I could do to achieve some happiness? You know, achieve, achieve some health, but then focus on other things like significance and legacy and contribution and achievement rather than just focusing on our own freaking bodies. I think I just broke a record for how many times I said freaking.

That's because you mean it.

Just because I can't say the other word. Passionate anyways, though. So, yeah, that's my take on this is do not, do not be under the impression that I endorse this constant 100%, 247 biohacking mentality, because I don't. And I am all about getting the most you can for the minimum amount of input, the minimal effective dose, and just enjoying life. And if you were to come to my house and hang out, you'd find that there's far less of this focus on biohacking than you may be under the impression that there actually is.

I was working on a video the other day again with Dr. Doug McGowan. It's funny that he came up twice in this podcast, but he was specifically talking about exercise when he said it. But I think it, it rings true for this as well. He said if it, if you actually get stressed out or angry because you can't make it to your workout or you have to skip going to the gym or something like that, then you've probably gone too far.

And you also probably have the wrong outlook on what exercise is anyways, because for me, if I get to the end of the day and I can't make it to the gym, it doesn't matter because I've been like walking around and on my feet and taking pull up breaks and all this stuff all day anyways. And so exercise for me is an option, not a need at the end or the beginning of the day. So. Yeah, but I completely agree. That's a great check. If you miss your foam roller and you're in a pissy mood, then, yeah, there's probably a little bit of a change in priorities that needs to take place.

All right, well, there we go.

All right. Well, I guess that replaced this week's review, I suppose. But of course, if you do want to leave a review, we do send out some super duper cool Ben Greenfield fitness gear packages straight to your front door. And if you go to itunes and you leave a review, not only do we appreciate it, not only is it good karma, but we also send you free crap. So not literal crap. Go to itunes, Leave review. Check out our resources for this episode@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 306 where you can learn to hang from an inversion table, fix flat feet, and sleep with toe spreaders on. Assuming those don't annoy your significant other. Yes. All right. Well, have a healthy week, folks. Thanks for tuning in.

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