Why You Should "Cheat" On Meals, When You Shouldn't Get A Blood Test, Which Massage Oil Is Healthiest & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Why you should cheat on meals when you shouldn't. Get a blood test. Which massage oil is healthiest? My bug out bag. How women can fix metabolic damage from overtraining 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 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 just finished an epic core workout.

Oh, you did?

Yeah.

What did it involve?

I did. Well, it was actually an obstacle course workout. Have you ever seen a log weave, also known as an over under?

Yes, yes. I'm familiar with the over under.

Yes. And if you are listening in and you don't know what a log weave is, Google it. I have a log weave. It's this new obstacle that I've got in my backyard. And what you do is you go over one log and under the other log there are a bunch of horizontally placed logs and you're kind of like gripping the logs between your thighs, holding them with your arms, then reaching to the next log. And what I did this morning for my big workout was I tried to stay there for 20 minutes, right? Just like weaving back and forth. And I feel as though I've been wrestling, slash, rolling with jiu jitsu, slash, making love to splintery logs. Feels good though.

Sounds like a great way to start the day.

It was a fantastic way to start the day.

Do we have some epic evidence for Instagram?

I do have a few little scars on my arm that I can perhaps post to Instagram for folks speaking of obstacles, also just this morning, at the same time that you and I are recording my friend Hunter McIntyre of TV fame and also the top ranked Spartan athlete on the face of the planet. He and I just recorded a podcast last night about a brand new obstacle course training event that we're going to host at my house.

Nice.

That's exciting. I didn't know about that.

Yeah, we partnered with Mark Divine, the guy who does like the seal fit stuff down in Encinitas, California. He runs like these kokoro challenges and these events called 20x's which is 12 hours of just like pain and suffering and becoming a stronger person. And he trains Navy seals and bud candidates and crossfitters and fitness freaks and anybody who just wants to really put themselves through the ringer. So we're going to do a 20x event at my house in Spokane. And then the next day, Hunter and I are going to teach an obstacle course racing event.

That is epic.

Yeah, there's a link. I'll link to it in the show notes if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 350 this is episode 350, but yeah, it's going to be pretty fun.

Sounds fun.

Yeah. Also, I wanted to mention that the other thing I've been supercharging myself with, aside from crawling around on logs, is insects. Insects, yeah. So I'm on this insect kick. I actually just, I just sent a post over to Instagram, but I've been ordering organic roasted crickets and I'm going to do a blog post about this and sprinkling them on salads as an alternative to like nuts and seeds.

Are they like the full size crickets or are they chopped up?

They're like young crickets and they're, they're whole and they're like, they're, they're chewy and they're nutty. And so I saute them in olive oil with, with typically I've been using. Have you seen seaweed noodles before? Like shirataki noodles or kelp noodles. So I like to use those because they, they give me a feeling like I'm eating pasta, but it's, they don't have calories, these, these noodles. And so I put those with crickets on my salads now at lunch. So I've been doing crickets and the other thing I've been doing is black ant powder. You heard of black ant powder before?

No.

You can actually, you can, you can order black ant powder.

And are they like the nasty ones that give you the really bad bites?

No, I think that's red ants or fire ants. Black ants just have incredible amounts of endurance. And I guess the idea behind this kind of, kind of similar to the idea of consuming like hornet extract. Because there's a company called Vespa that makes hornet extract and there's another one called Superman Herbs that makes ant powder. And supposedly it gives you amazing levels of endurance. So in the afternoon, I've been adding a little bit of ant powder to a frozen latte smoothie.

That sounds delicious. Admittedly though, half the world does eat insects. If you go to Asia, they're everywhere.

Yeah, they're very Sustainable. They don't produce a. A lot of greenhouse gases. Apparently crickets don't fart like cows do.

I'm not surprised.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, and one other thing, by the way, before we get into this week's news flashes. Speaking of eating tasty things, I just returned from a spearfishing trip in Florida. Cool. That's exciting for our listeners out there who have not yet tapped into spearfishing. And I was spearfishing on the boat with the guy who owns Spearing magazine, Jeremy Gamble, and also a guy who's been on this podcast before, who has trained some of the top free divers on the face of the planet, Ted Hardy. So Ted and Jeremy and I, we spearfish for two days down in the Gulf of Mexico. If any of you have not yet tapped into that sport or looked into it, and it was one of the reasons I got into freediving in the first place was it's basically like underwater bow hunting while holding your breath. And it's amazing, like, even if you don't get fish, and I actually spearfished several sheep's head fish. So very, very tasty. But even if you don't spear a fish, you're, like, down there swimming among the coral and holding your breath, and there's like little shipwrecks and tires and all sorts of things that you can swim around and look underneath and you'll pull yourself under ledges and look for big grouper. It's an amazing sport. I am now officially, I think, addicted to spearfishing. So stay tuned for more podcasts and blog posts about that, that wonderful sport.

News flashes.

Well, speaking of spearfishing, my first news flash today is actually about the amazing physiology of freedivers. And I'll link to this as I do with all the news flashes over in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 350 But Rachel, have you ever heard of the AMA in Japan?

These are the pearl divers.

Yeah, they're these female Japanese pearl divers. And what they do is they dive 100 to 150 times a day. They hold their breath for about two minutes at a time while they're swimming. And they are pearl divers, so they collect pearls and they collect food. And it's like this ancient profession that they've been doing for thousands of years in Japan. And they finally, at the University of Texas, in the American Journal of Physiology, they decided they wanted to study these women and see what their physiology actually looked like. And so they did a study on what happens when you're diving around in the ocean for long periods of time. Because as we know, I did a podcast on this on why water can be so therapeutic and also beneficial for like physiology and for physical performance. Because when your body detects a combination of a lack of breathing, like holding your breath, and then also cold water on your face, what happens is blood vessels constrict and your blood pressure goes up and your heart rate drops. Called the mammalian dive reflex. We talked about this on the podcast before. That actually trains your body to be more resilient to stress and it also activates what's called your parasympathetic nervous system, like your rest and digest nervous system. It's one of the same reasons that, that cold showers, once you get used to them, are so beneficial for your body because you get that constriction and you get that slight increase in blood pressure and then that's followed by a bunch of cardiovascular benefits. So what they, what they found in this study, I'll link to it. They found a lot of really interesting things, but they didn't, they didn't really discover that these women had like massive VO2 max or big maximum oxygen consumption. But what they did find was a huge decrease in what's called arterial stiffness. Arterial stiffness. And arterial stiffness is not a good thing. That's a hardening or a stiffening of the arteries. That's what arteriosclerosis means. That's when your arteries get hard. So the more stiff your arteries, the harder your heart has to work to pump blood through your body. And so what they found was that when you hold your breath and you spend lots of time underwater or in cold water, this arterial stiffness, and in particular these Japanese freedivers, the arterial stiffness plummets. And these women compared to normal age matched women who weren't divers, Right? So they compared them to women who weren't down doing all this like diving and breath holding in cold water. Their arterial stiffness was just like rock bottom in terms of cardiovascular health.

Wow.

So if I didn't already convince folks in that little anecdote on spearfishing to go find some water and do some diving, hopefully that inspires you to at least take a cold shower. If not, you know, do a little, do a little underwater swimming.

So I just think, I just think the concept of female Japanese pearl divers is pretty badass as well.

It is pretty bad. And they're actually, I discovered these women for the first time in a book on free diving. I forget the name of the book. I interviewed the Guy on the podcast. It was one of the first things that got me interested in going freediving. I'll remember it eventually. But yeah, these Japanese women are called the ama. AMA should Google them. Or check out the article that we have in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 350 Another thing for those of you who are extremely concerned about your children being at birthday parties eating gluten filled cupcakes, really good article on Mark's Daily Apple about cheating on meals and how sometimes you actually should cheat and like go out of your way to cheat. And it was based on this study last week that found a new way to prevent food allergies in kids. And this new way is to actually feed them some of these bad foods when they're infants or these, you know, quote unquote bad foods. Um, like peanuts are one, for example. Like if you give, give your child microdoses of peanuts as they grow up, they're, they're less likely to develop a peanut allergy. And as a matter of fact, one of my kids had severe peanut allergies when he was born. And I remember freaking out one day because I had eaten peanut butter and my hands still had a little bit of that peanut oil on them. And I picked him up, you know, like you pick up your child and your hands wrap around their little torso and he was in his diaper and within 10 minutes he had these enormous red rashes right where my fingers had both touched him and put this peanut oil on him. And so we found out that he was severely allergic to peanuts. And rather than keeping him from peanuts, I started microdosing him. I would grind up like half a peanut each day. And I eventually got up to about five peanuts that would give him each day, and he completely resolved his allergies. I could touch them with the peanut oil and everything and smear them in peanuts, let the dog lick him off. No, I didn't do that. I didn't do that. But it's a fun thing. This same concept has been shown to work for commonly allergenic foods like eggs and wheat and dairy, like yogurt, things like that. What they found in this study was that infants who are regularly exposed to allergenic foods in their first year of life were less likely to be allergic to those foods later on in life. And the article goes on to talk about some really interesting things like milk and egg allergies. For example, kids who were found to have allergies to eggs and milk if they were given smaller doses of these, over time, they actually develop the ability to be able to tolerate eggs and milk just fine. Another thing that they found, for example, was that occasionally consuming oils that have had oxidative damage and inflammation, like occasionally eating, say, flaxseeds, like ground heated flaxseeds, or occasionally eating, like, even french fries that have been cooked in oil or heated in oil. What happens is you actually have this pathway in the body that metabolizes the toxic byproduct of oxidized heated oils. And this particular toxic byproduct is called 4HNE. And what happens is that when you get low microdosed concentrations of 4HNE, you actually develop a big increase in your ability to produce what's called glutathione, like, your endogenous production of this antioxidant glutathione. And so if you occasionally have, like, a cheat meal where you're eating, like, you know, rancid oxidized oils, or, you know, maybe like a burger from your favorite burger joint, it turns out that that can actually make your body a little less susceptible to that, causing you a bunch of damage.

So I feel like the obvious next question is how often is occasionally?

Well, that's the issue is, you know, research doesn't really tell us how often occasionally is. But here's the. Like, I'll often go on, I'll travel to different countries where I might have, you know, like in Japan, concentrated sources of gluten and some kind of a glutenous, you know, sweet rice cake. Or I might be over in Thailand where I'm consuming pad Thai that's been cooked in heated vegetable oil. And some people who are, like, orthorexic and completely, you know, eat a 100% healthy diet, like, don't follow the 8020 rule, but instead, just like, never touch, never go near gluten, never go near an oxidized oil. It turns out that that may make you a little more susceptible to this stuff, really causing, like, gut issues to you, not being able to fight off a lot of the oxidation from damaged foods when you do encounter them. You know, another. Another case in point would be like, you know, when I've gone off and done things like the Spartan agoji or the. Or the kokoro camp, sometimes you're eating MREs, right? Like, the most oxidized, nasty, nasty stuff on the face of the. And if you eat 100% clean all the time, sometimes that stuff can really flip your stomach more than if you give yourself occasional microdoses of gluten or vegetable oil or dairy. So it's a really compelling article. I've only scratched the surface of it, but I'd recommend that you go read it. The last thing I wanted to mention is that a lot of people avoid grains because of the phytates in grains and the phytic acid in grains that can not only the gluten, but also some of these other things. But it turns out that your gut flora, your gut bacteria can be trained. If you give it exposure occasionally to these phytates that you'd find in grains, it can actually be trained to turn that phytic acid into something called inositol. And inositol is this nutrient that's involved in mood regulation and insulin sensitivity. And the more phytate rich foods you eat, the better your gut bacteria get at breaking down the phytates and converting them into beneficial compounds. So truly interesting.

So basically, you don't need to feel guilty all the time about cheating on.

No. And you may even want to go out of the way occasionally to cheat. So yeah, really, really interesting perspective. I'll link to that article in the show notes and I have more because it's been a little while since we've had a Q and A. I'm actually going to, I'm going to throw in a few extra little articles. There was an interesting research study that came out and I kind of liked it because I start off every day with a giant ass cup of coffee. And also when I first wake up, even before I get to that coffee, I have a big glass of warm water and I add a little bit of lemon juice and I add a little bit of baking soda to it. And what they found in this most recent study was that even though it's already well known that caffeine is an ergogenic aid and can assist with performance like climbing around on logs in the morning. And it's also known that sodium bicarbonate is a really good lactic acid buffer. Baking soda is actually one of the best lactic acid buffers on the face of the planet. If, as we've talked about in a previous podcast, you, you don't eat too much of it because it'll. It'll blow out your backside. Yeah, you will paint the toilet brown if you have too much baking soda. But if you microdose it. And the way they figured out how to do it in studies is, is you take just a little bit, right? Like teaspoon of baking soda every 20 minutes for two hours leading up to some type of a big workout or event in which you're going to produce a ton of lactic acid, like a big CrossFit workout or a sprint triathlon or spartan race or something like that. You can actually get the benefits of baking soda without blowing out your backside. And what they found is that the lactic acid buffering effects of baking soda are enhanced by when you combine it with caffeine. And I'll link to this research article in the show notes. But what this means is that you could, for example, leading up to a really tough workout or any event in which you're going to produce a bunch of lactic acid, what you could do is you could have, it's typically about 100/mg of coffee or caffeine that have been shown to actually allow you to get a lot of the ergogenic performance enhancing benefits of caffeine. But you could combine that caffeine with microdosing of baking soda for the couple of hours leading up to this event where you're going to produce a bunch of lactic acid and the caffeine vastly enhances the effectiveness of the baking soda.

There you go.

Yeah.

Question, question is bicarb soda, is it good if you don't have any issues going to the bathroom and also are not.

And in an athlete it's alkalinizing. And granted, if you don't lead a really acidic lifestyle, right? If you're not, just if you're not consuming copious amounts of red meat and caffeine and alcohol and dairy and all of these foods that aren't necessarily villainous but are indeed acidic compared to a lot of vegetables and fruits, baking soda can help to alkalinize the diet a little bit. So let's say that whatever I travel with baking soda, I travel with a little Ziploc bag of it. But you know, if I'm in Las Vegas, right, and I go out to, to a big steak dinner and I have two glasses of red wine and a big, you know, chunk of steak and it's got, you know, dairy, butter and stuff like that. That's a frigging tasty meal, but it's also an acidic meal. And so that would be a situation in which you could, you could mitigate some of the acidity with a little bit of baking soda for alkalinity.

And that would be the next morning.

Yeah, the next morning. Or you know, that morning. You know, I just do it as a daily tonic. The, the other one that works similarly for, for alkaline, for alkalinity, but that doesn't buffer lactic acid. It's not a sports performance aid, but it's still very alkaline. Is apple cider vinegar. That's another tonic that some folks will start their day with. So either one. Either one. Or you could just be boring and have, I don't know, chamomile tea or something.

Just plain water or water.

Who wants just plain water? A couple other things. There was a really interesting study done just this month on light. And as we all know, when you get exposed to light exposure at night, and even Apple has realized this with their new addition of the nighttime setting on the new iOS system for iPhones, they've got a nighttime setting now where it'll diminish all the blue light from your iPhone when sunset arrives in whatever location of the world you happen to be in. The reason they do that is because we know that television and iPads and, and Kindles phones, et cetera, can decrease your ability to produce melatonin while you sleep and disrupt your sleep quality. Well, what they found in this study was that if you get exposed to natural sunlight or blue light during the day, right, like, let's say you get out in the sunshine multiple times or perhaps it's gray where you live, like Seattle or something like that. So you use maybe like any of the little biohacks we've talked about in other podcasts, like blue light producing glasses or a blue light box or even these like in ear blue light producing devices. When you get exposed to blue light during the day, it makes any screen time that you get exposed to at night less likely to disrupt melatonin production. And so while I don't think you should do this as a crutch to, you know, blast your eyes with a, with a, you know, movie every night before you go to bed or to spend copious amounts of time lying in bed, you know, before sleep on your iPhone. It does turn out that if you're going to get screen time in the evening, and let's face it, that's just kind of part of life for a lot of us, right? Like you get phone calls in the evening. Sometimes you want to watch something to unwind at the end of the day. If you get sunlight or some form of blue light during the day, all that stuff is going to be less deleterious to sleep quality.

There you go.

Yeah, it's kind of cool. So there you go. Yet another excuse to get out in the sunshine.

Yet another excuse to move to a different country or state.

Yes, exactly. To move from Seattle. Oh, and then One other thing that I wanted to mention. They have done a study in which they found that the lower your home temperature is, the lower your waist measurement is. And whereas we've known for a while that cold exposure will activate thermogenesis in what's called brown fat. And remember, brown fat is the fat that takes calories and converts those calories into heat. It's very, very metabolically active fat compared to boring old white adipose tissue on your waistline. But what they found is that there's a direct correlation between how cold you keep your home and the actual waist circumference, like your waist measurement. And they found that people who had homes with an indoor temperature of right around between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which is kind of cold. Right. That's not comfortable. But if maybe you wear a hoodie and you teach your body how to put up and deal with the cold, it's not that bad. When they compare that with people whose homes were at 68 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, the people whose homes were colder had lower waist circumference.

That is the strangest study, but really fascinating.

I keep my home cold all the time, even right now, while I'm talking to you, just so I don't get distracted by being too cold. So I'm wearing a hoodie, but my office is at about 54 degrees, and it's just something you learn to deal with. And frankly, I think that sometimes we spend too much time not allowing our bodies to adjust to extremes of heat or extremes of cold, and this study shows that it may be a good idea. Plus, if you keep your home cold, you can eat more. So there's that.

There you go.

Listener q and a.

Hi, Ben. My wife is 54 years old and has a long list of health issues, many of which develop later in life, from food allergies and asthma to aching knees and swollen fingers in the morning, which she describes as Mickey Mouse hands. All of her doctors just want to treat her symptoms, but I want to help her get to the root causes. Would you recommend a functional health test like Wellness fx? And if so, which test should she choose? Or something else? Thanks. I love the podcast, and I think you're absolutely brilliant. Great job. Keep it up.

You know, I. I can only imagine what Mickey Mouse hands are.

I know it sounds kind of cute, but it also sounds horrible.

It does sound good. Doesn't Mickey Mouse have giant white hands?

Yeah, but they're like stumpy fingers, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Probably not a good look. We should probably help Phil out with the Mickey Mouse thing.

Phil, we're gonna help you out.

Yeah. So here's the deal. When. When you're looking at something like this and trying to consider whether you should get a blood test or something else, you need to understand why some of these things happen to people, especially as they get older later on in life. And you need to be familiar with this concept of autoimmune. Are you kind of familiar with autoimmune, Rachel?

Kind of, but not everyone would be. So, go on.

It's kind of a coverall term, but it's one of the top 10 leading causes of death, especially in women who are under the age of 65. And it's something that affects literally millions and millions and millions of Americans. Autoimmune diseases would include things like rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes and thyroid disease and lupus and weird patches on your skin and eczema and food allergies and multiple sclerosis. All of these are forms of an autoimmune disease. And all that means is just like, it sounds like self immune autoimmune. So it's an immune response in which your body creates systemic inflammation. Your body is attacking itself. So your immune system has this sophisticated system for keeping you safe that works by identifying any foreign substance that enters your body or that you come into contact with, like something you might smear on your skin, or something you might eat or something you might rub in your hair. And if your immune system deems that to be dangerous, it produces antibodies. And autoimmune diseases occur and can even happen even if you weren't born with them. When your body is working really hard to defend itself against something that it deems potentially dangerous, like an allergen or a toxin or an infection or a food or even a metal, there's all sorts of things that could cause this. And it fails to differentiate between the intruder that it's fighting off and other parts of your body. Okay. So it will mistake other types of tissues for harmful substances. An example of this would be, like, gluten. Very, very high amounts of gluten are something that your body can mount an inflammatory reaction against. But gluten proteins closely resemble the same type of proteins that you find in, for example, thyroid tissue. And that's why you'll sometimes find people who have, like, full blown gluten allergies also have the autoimmune disease hypothyroidism, because they've wreaked havoc on their thyroid gland by mounting an inflammatory reaction against their own thyroid tissue, along with the gluten.

On that in particular. Would you. There would be other symptoms prior to it actually turning into a hypothyroidism.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, sure. So. So a lot of the things that Phil is saying that his wife gets, you see with autoimmune. So. So classic, classic things. Is there something on your skin? Right? You got some kind of recurrent rash or hive or redness. A lot of times you have joint pain or muscle pain, and sometimes it can be in just one part of your body, right? Like just your knees or just your elbow. And, you know, it's not from, like, running or changing up, like, the type of squats that you were doing or something like that, but it's just like this mysterious joint pain that seems to have arisen at some point in your life. Feeling tired or fatigued is a biggie. Cold intolerance, heat intolerance, weight gain, excessive weight loss. A lot of times you'll see hair loss. An interesting one that you'll also see is, like, if you look at your fingernails, you'll see a lot of little white patches on your fingernails. And sometimes on other areas of your skin, you'll see white patches. Sometimes you'll get numbness or tingling in your hands or your feet because the autoimmune disease is affecting your nerves. So there's a lot of little symptoms very similar to what Phil is describing that lead up to or that are present during an autoimmune disease. And typically, what modern medicine will do is they'll give you an immunosuppressant drug or a steroid, right? So you'll see, like, hydrocortisone or there's any number of different immunosuppressant drugs that they'll give you. But the problem is that if you simply shut down the immune system without addressing what is causing the issue in the first place, you get rid of the autoimmune issues, but you increase the risk of two things. A severe infection, right? Like, you're gonna be way more susceptible to stuff like MRSA and staph and influenza when you shut down the immune system because you're taking an immunosuppressant. And then the other thing is cancer. Immunosuppressant drugs can cause cancer or increase your susceptibility to tumor growth. So there are other things that you should consider doing if you have an autoimmune disease. And this is where Phil's question about testing fits in. Because you can't just say, I'm going to cut out dairy and I'm going to cut out gluten, and I'm going to cut out soy, and I'm going to cut out eggs, and I'm going to go move to a Himalayan mountaintop and live inside of a giant bubble. Just because that's, I mean, that would theoretically work. But in the era that we live in where we can test this stuff, it's a better idea to test. And blood testing is useful for some stuff, right? Like identifying, say, like cholesterol, you know, HDL versus LDL versus, you know, LDL particles, or identifying, like your, your thyroid hormone production or your vitamin D. But it's not that great if you suspect that you might have an autoimmune disease. And instead, there are some other things that I'd recommend that you have tested. Now, the very, very first thing that I should say is insert disclaimer here. I'm not a doctor, and this is not to be misconstrued as medical advice. If I suspected that I had an autoimmune disease and I couldn't figure it out, the number one place that I would go would be to find a functional medicine practitioner. These are physicians who are well versed actually identifying the root cause rather than, say, covering things up with an immunosuppressant drug. So you go to functionalmedicine.org, i'll put a link to that in the show notes. But there's a practitioner search page on there, and that would be something prudent to do if you didn't want to just take it all into your own hands. And one of the lab tests I'm about to tell you about, actually, the first lab test I'm going to tell you about, you have to have a doctor order for you anyways, so you're going to have to hook up with a good functional medicine practitioner anyways. So, that being said, the very first thing I would do is I would test for potential dietary or other environmental triggers that would be causing you to produce a bunch of antibodies. Now, the very best way to do that is via a specific lab called Cyrex C Y R E X. And the reason is because if you go out and you get food allergy or food intolerance testing and you just do a standard, like blood spot tests, there's one called an ELISA or an ALCAT that a lot of physicians will run. The problem is that, for example, they will take your blood sample and they will subject that to a variety of different food proteins to see if you're allergic to those specific food proteins. But they'll take like, they'll expose the sample to say, like, raw egg or raw chicken. And then they'll look at the white blood cell under a microscope and see what happens to it. And the problem is that just about all of us will have kind of a deleterious response to say, you know, fricking raw chicken, right? So they're not taking like the cooked and the raw form. They're just taking the raw form. They also don't do a lot of, like, repeat tests to double check and make sure that there's no false positives. And so what typically happens is you'll do one of these tests and you'll come back with like 300 foods you should never eat again. And they're like every food that's in.

Your pantry, it's a new level of depression, extremely frustrating.

So you want something that's a little bit more precise and a little bit more accurate. Now there are these things called arrays, A, R, R, A Y. And that's just a fancy name for all the different tests that Cyrex offers. So, for example, they've got a chemical immune reactivity screen which will look at specific chemicals in your environment. These would typically be things from like, personal care products or household toxins, fungus, mold, stuff like that that could be affecting your immune system. That's their array 11. They've got another one that looks at, for example, what's called your gluten cross reactivity. That's array four. That's a very common one. And that identifies any dietary proteins, including things like coffees and teas and eggs and everything that would cause your body to become hypersensitive to gluten.

Gluten.

They've got the best, most gold standard wheat and gluten autoimmunity test on the face of the planet to find out if you're, if you're gluten insensitive. They've got one called an intestinal antigenic permeability screen, which measures whether or not you have leaky gut, what's called intestinal permeability to large molecules that can inflame the immune system. So there are a variety of different arrays that they do. And for example, some of them you could just look at your symptoms and choose the right test like they want. They have one called a joint autoimmune reactivity screen, which actually looks for the specific things that would cause what are called connective tissue disorders. So if your main issue is joint pain, you would want to get that one. That's a Ray 8. If you just want to take your, I don't know if you have a health savings account or a flexible spending account or good health insurance. When you meet with this functional medicine doc, they would be able to advise you which to get. But I mean you could test all these, you could test chemical immune reactivity, diet, bacteria, viruses, stress, all the different challenges to your immune system. It'd cost you a few thousand dollars if you were going to do every array on there. But if it were me and I had a bunch of stuff going on, I would frankly just say, hey, we're not going to go on vacation this year and dude, run the arrays.

Definitely.

And frankly that's just reality. But Cyrex Labs, I'll put a link in the show notes to Cyrex and also to the functional medic practitioner's website because you'll need a doc to order these for you. I wish that I, as a, as a, you know, I'm a, I'm a nutritionist and a personal trainer, but that does not qualify me, that does not certify me to be able to order these for people. Or else I'd have them available@greenfieldfitnesssystems.com but either way you can go to the Cyrex website and get those done. So that would be number one. The second thing that I would test for would be metals. Like I mentioned, metals can be associated specifically things like mercury. If you've had mercury fillings, if you've done like a lot of like dental work, if you have worked in any type of industrial setting or you live in a city, a lot of times you can have some very specific autoimmune reactions to mercury. And so in that case what you'd want to do is heavy metal testing. I will link to a podcast that I did. It's about an hour long about kind of like the crucial do's and don'ts of heavy metal testing and metal detoxification. But if you have a bunch of symptoms like this that are just complete head scratchers for you, metal testing would be one to do as well. The Cyrex lab testing doesn't do a bunch for metals. They're a little bit more food and kind of like mold and fungi related. So you'll probably want to do a metal test as well. And then the last thing would be a poop test. So this one's pretty straightforward, looks at like enzymatic production, bacteria, yeast, fungus, et cetera. I'll put a link to this one too in the show notes. But all it does is it tests to see if there is gut inflammation going on or if maybe you have bacterial dysbiosis, right? Like an overgrowth of bad bacteria. It'll test for the presence of like H. Pylori, parasites, amoebas, all sorts of fun stuff.

Where does that one come from?

Without testing? You can do that through direct labs in the comfort of your own home. You can poop in a tray.

So you poop in a tray and then you send it back to them in the mail.

Oh no.

Oh my God.

You poop in the tray. Then you take a little fork and you fork the poo from the tray into the tube and then that goes in the refrigerator and you Repeat that for three days. And then you take the little prepaid meat FedEx bag that they send, you send that off and just like magic, within a couple of weeks you have a PDF that tells you everything that's going on inside your poo. It's actually, it's an interesting test. I do that test once a year on myself and my personal protocol is I tell everybody, even if you don't have an autoimmune issue, test your saliva once a year. I'm sorry, once in a lifetime. So you have a DNA analysis, right? So you just know your DNA, test your gut once a year. And then I personally test my blood four times a year. But that's because I'm constantly self experimenting. But I think once a year is reasonable, right, to test your blood. So that's kinda like the protocol. But if you're concerned about the autoimmune stuff, look into the Cyrex labs, look into heavy metal testing, look into gut testing. And then finally as you're going through all this testing, if you just frickin wanna like get rid of at least some of the symptoms, try something like the autoimmune diet. There's a full on book, the one that I like is called the autoimmune Paleo diet. And it's like an eight week long protocol that just cuts out a lot of the major offenders and still gives you a food list that doesn't make you feel like you gotta eat cardboard and sparkling water. Yeah, and it's pretty decent. There's stuff like bone broth and pear sauces and fish and all sorts of stuff that you could still eat in there. So that one I'll link to in the show notes, it was written by a friend of mine who's really really cool and smart when it comes to immune diseases. Her name is Mickey and she wrote this book called the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol. So check that one out. Even though I wouldn't, you know, you shouldn't just switch that diet and say I'm going to be on that diet for the rest of my life. Instead, figure out what's going on, do some of those tests that I talked about. Best of luck. Keep us posted if you have more questions. And of course, as with anything we've talked about, if you have questions, comments, feedback, you can leave them in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey Ben. Hi guys. First of all, love your show. I've been listening to it now for the last six months. Extremely informative. And I am, Ben, hooked going to a bunch of the conferences you're speaking at this year in 2016. So I'm very excited. I'm a personal trainer, group instructor and a massage therapist. So the question that I had for you, Ben, was when you are using the massage oils with clients, do you have any idea on the absorption level of these oils into your body? And could you tell me about the pros and cons for this? I'm a little bit concerned about massaging five or six hours a day and absorbing all of this oil in my skin. Would love some information on that. Love you guys. You're doing an awesome job and can't wait to hear the next podcast. Bye bye.

Well, your skin is a mouth. And since your hands have skin, your hands are a mouth, right?

That is so weird.

Your hands are a mouth. Yeah, skin absorption. It's called dermal absorption. I wrote about this. I wrote a big article and I'll link to it in the show notes about this skin serum that I developed. And by the way, I don't recommend it for massage therapy. A, because you're going to go through it pretty quickly if you use it for massage and B it's not I've gotten a lot of questions about the skin serum from a moisturizing standpoint. It's not a moisturizer like let's say avocado oil or coconut oil. Frankly, both of those. Those are decent natural moisturizers. The skin serum is more something that is designed to remove wrinkles, to remove oxidative damage on the skin, to improve glow, to feed the skin's microbiome, but it's not a moisturizer per se. I personally, because I don't have to deal with dry skin that much, I just use the skin serum after I shave and that's It, But a lot of people have asked me, well, should I use a moisturizer too? I tell them, yeah, rub in the skin serum. And then on top of that, just use a little avocado oil or olive oil or coconut oil as a moisturizer.

Yeah.

And the idea behind this is that chemicals, so a lot of people kind of like they over magnify the issue with skin absorption. It's not as though you're walking around as one bag of bones and blood and organs covered in this tiny single cell layer of skin. Your skin's pretty thick. To get absorbed through your skin, a chemical has to go through a few layers. Your epidermis and then your glands and your hair follicles. And there are several different layers of skin. I mean, your skin's like a seven layer dip, really. You've got, you know, like I said, it's not just like a, you as some weak defenseless blob of goo and bones covered by this tiny little layer of cellophane like material. Like there's, there's the epidermis and the dermis and the epidermis. You've got the stratum and the corneum and the granular layer and the spinous layer and the basal layer and the basal lamina and, and so there's all these different layers that a chemical has to go through in order for it to get absorbed. Now what happens is if a particular chemical is actually fat soluble, it can pass through your outer skin layer pretty easily. And an oil, well, it's an oil, it's a fat. And fats are fat soluble. Fats mix with fats really well. And so what that means is that when you look at a lot of beauty products or skin cosmetics or massage oils, those are the kind of things you have to be concerned about because they have oils in them. And anything that has a fat soluble chemical, that's the stuff that you have to worry about. And that's why when you look at like nicotine or birth control patches like thethe epidermal delivery of these is far more efficacious and speedy than the oral delivery. And that, you know, that's why they'll do medications through the skin a lot of times. And it's also why, you know, they've done tests where they've screened like newborn babies and they found literally hundreds of toxins in the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies. And then when they identified these toxins, half of them were the things that the women were using in their makeup or their lotion or their moisturizer. And I'll link to an article that I wrote about this. But the Environmental Working Group did a really interesting article on on studies in which they found a ton of these different birth defects and carcinogenic type of compounds in the umbilical cord blood of infants. And it was all related to the personal care products used by the mom.

That is just so scary.

Yeah. So you do need to take into consideration even what your massage therapist is putting on your body. Now fortunately, most massage therapists are pretty woo woo folks and they're already kind of tapped into this. There's not a lot of massage therapists using stuff like parabens and phthalates and nasty carcinogens on your skin. But there are some specific massage oils that I would personally choose as some of the better ones to look into. And so here are some of my top ones. Almond oil. Almond oil is really, really good. It's good for the skin. It's a little bit oily, so it lets a massage therapist's hands glide pretty easily over the skin. And it's reasonably priced. So you're going to go through a lot of it if you're doing a lot of oil based massage, but it doesn't irritate the skin. The only people who shouldn't use that is people who have a nut allergy. But I'm a big fan of sweet almond oil. That's one that you could talk to your massage therapist about or if you're a massage therapist listening in, that would be one that would be acceptable. I would endorse it. So apricot kernel oil is another. Now it works very similarly in terms of texture and its usefulness for a massage compared to olive oil or I'm sorry, almond oil, but it costs a little bit more. It's got more vitamin E in it, it's got a longer shelf life. But it also is one of those oils that's really good for massage but doesn't leave you feeling greasy afterwards. And it smells really nice too. I don't know if you've ever smelled apricot kernel oil.

I haven't.

That's another good one. Interestingly, and not to get too explicit, I know we got got some complaints on itunes recently for our explicitness in episodes. We got a little, perhaps we did go a little crazy in the past few episodes from a sexual standpoint. But any of these oils, any of these oils I'm talking about, they're great for the bedroom too. So there's that Yoba oil. Yoba Oil and my wife always gives me a hard time because I often pronounce it jejoba because I think jojoba just sounds better.

Sounds way cooler.

Or yehoba, some people will say. But that's a wax that's extracted from the seed of the yajoba jojoba plant and it has really good antibacterial properties. And it's got what are called long chain wax esters in them. And these long chain wax esters are very similar to your skin's sebum. So it gets very well absorbed. It's a good carrier oil. It's actually one of the things that we have in the anti aging skin serum. It's not irritating to the skin and it's very kind of silky. It's one of the more pricey oils. So a lot of times you'll mix it with other oils. But that's another really good one. A couple more coconut oil. Do you use coconut oil much?

I do, yeah. That's kind of what I use to moisturize my face actually. But it's so thick.

Yeah. It can leave a little bit of a shimmery appearance. That's why I'm a little bit bigger fan of some of these other oils if it's being used on the face. But, but coconut oil is specifically something for massage therapy that you'd want to get in a form called fractionated coconut oil because it only contains a fraction of the whole oil and it's less pricey than like sweet almond oil or the jojoba oil. But the idea is that fractionated coconut oil isn't quite as greasy and it also doesn't stain sheets.

That's helpful.

Again, helpful for both the bedroom as well as massage therapy.

I put it on my face before I go to bed and then I lay on my pillow and then suddenly my pillowcases are ruined. How's that for a first world problem?

Don't get the thick white solid oil. Fractionated coconut oil is like a light non greasy more of like a liquid. And then the last one I'd look into is sunflower oil that's also like a light non greasy oil that won't leave the skin feeling oily. It's extracted from sunflower seeds. It's got a lot of essential fatty acids in it like linoleic acid and palmitic acid and stearic acid and a lot of things that are actually components of healthy skin. And the only issue with sunflower oil is even though it is pretty good for massage in terms of its, its Texture, it does go rancid pretty easily. So you want to keep it in like a dark, cool area. That's why you have to be careful with, with using it from a dietary standpoint is just because of the potential for rancidity. So if you get that, you know, just like, like fish oil, for example, keep it cool, keep it dark because it is prone to rancidity. But it's another decent option for massage. So those would be my top choices. And the cool thing about any of those, especially the Yoba oil, is you can add essential oils to them like ginger or stinging nettle oil or cinnamon oil or peppermint or any other things that you want to add aroma for. Lavender, rose oil, there's all sorts of different oils. I personally keep lavender essential oil and rose essential oil at the bedside for just basically sleeping a little bit better because those are both relaxants and I'll dab a little bit on my upper lip. I keep coconut oil and also THC infused oil called Bond that I get from this company in Seattle. And those are for sexy time. And then I keep the skin serum and I actually keep that on my bedside. I've been dabbing it on my face before I go to bed at night and then also a little bit in the morning. And those are all the different oils. You'll find all sorts of fun things on my bed stand. Sometimes I should do, or sometime I should do a blog just about all the things on my toilet, my bed. There's all sorts of fun little things in there.

Are there any downsides to as a masseuse absorbing that much oil if you're massaging like over a hundred day.

No, not if you're using anything I just talked about.

Okay, good.

It's only if you're using the bad stuff. So yeah, that's the skinny. And we'll put links to some of the stuff in the show notes for you. So hopefully that's helpful, Sherry. And now you owe me a massage.

Ben Greenfield, this is Ryan Walker reaching out to you from Mobile, Alabama. First and foremost, I freaking love your show, man. It has changed my life. So thank you so much for all that you do. And I've got a fun question for you. I'm one of those wacko conspiracy theorist type people who believes that the sustainability of our financial system will not remain for much longer. So with that being said, I was hoping maybe you could put together A list of 10 items or more or less of not necessarily items, but, but foods, remedies, things like that that we can keep. We can start storing that will help us optimize or at least maintain our health in times of hardship. Looking mostly for maybe the best essential oils to have. If you could pick like the top five or really anything, anything that you. If you had to put together your own bug out bag kind of scenario, what would it consist of? So, again, thank you so much for everything, Ben. Love the show, Keep up the great work and thank you, Rachel. You've been awesome as well. Hope to hear back from you soon. Bye.

Bye.

Well, this is a topic near and dear to my heart right now, Rachel, because I've been having to put together a bag of my own.

Oh, you have? What for the zombie apocalypse?

Well, no, I always. So for the past two years, since I took a wilderness survival course, I've had what's called a bug out bag. And it's the bag that you grab if. If crap hits the fan and you gotta run for the woods. It just has everything in it that you'd need to survive for a while. You know, like, I've got my, my compass and my magnifying glass and my fire starter and my knife and my, like, water filter and, you know, pretty much anything I'd need to survive in the wilderness.

I am, I am definitely curious about when you say hits the fan, what exactly you're talking about that would require into the woods.

It would be. Okay. So I am or have been accused of being a prepper. Right. I've got gold, silver guns, a. Well, I'm adding solar and wind power to my home so I can get off the local power supply. Yes, I have a Social Security number. Yes, I live legally and lawfully. But I also, let's put it this way, if the million man Chinese army were to attack or the Iranians were to send a bunch of nuclear bombs over our way and just like, you know, stuff got really, really bad or Donald Trump pissed off, you know, Putin.

Or whatever, that's probably the most likely one I've heard so far.

Probably. So I would be able to survive for a while here on my homestead.

How long is a while?

I think that at this point in my life, based off of the food we have stockpiled, gold, silver, camo farm, I think I could probably get by for years.

And what does. How does Jessa feel about the prepping?

She's probably a bigger fan of it than I am. I mean, she is responsible for the chickens and the goats in the garden and she's a total ranch girl. And you know, granted, is that, is.

That Prepping for an apocalypse or.

Some of my stuff is more setting. Some of, some of my stuff is more based around like, you know, the stuff that you'd expect guys to be more into, right? Like weapons and, you know, ammo and gold and silver and that kind of stuff. But, you know, ultimately I'm into this whole, this whole idea of survival. I subscribe to a magazine called American Survival Magazine and it's just like every issue is chock full of here's what to do if there's a solar flare that knocks out all the wi fi on the face of the planet.

I feel like here's, here's really coming out right now. Like, I feel like this is actually coming out to the world.

You're.

You're a legitimate prepper.

I'm a legitimate prepper, I think. And that's why I like this question.

I'm a legitimate profile.

But I actually I, I rabbit holed there a little bit because I was gonna say I'm putting together a bag right now for the hurricane heat in Seattle next week. So I'm headed to, to the SEATT Spartan and that and I'm going to do the hurricane heat. That means I show up at 10pm and they just like put you through the ringer until 10am and then I'm going to do the race too.

Yeah. Wow, that's huge.

Oh yeah. I've got a full list here. I'll give you the quick list and then I'll, and then I'll jump into my healthy bug out bag. But the full list of stuff I have to bring to the Seattle event is ruck, headlamp chem lights, high visibility safety vest, compass, duct tape, black Sharpie, 100ft of paracord, a multi tool, MREs, 3 liters of hydration, 25 pound weight in my ruck pack, a sandbag. And then for some reason they said I need to bring a kickball. I have no clue why. But what I have heard about these spartan hurricane heats is if you don't bring to the tee everything that they tell you, you tend to get punished with copious amounts of burpees. So I'm just gonna bring all that stuff. So I'm putting together that bag right now. But I like Ryan's question. So Ryan, let's go ahead and just forget all the stuff that we would expect to be crucial. The stuff I just went over, right, like your water filter and your compass and your magnifying glass and like a knife and some fire starter. I like your question because what are some of the healthy things that will help you during times of hardship. So, so here we go. First of all, my little favorite that I tend to wear when I'm traveling or when I'm in the forest, when I'm out on a long hike. And this probably doesn't fall under the category of like something healthy or biohacky, but it's my survival bracelet. Have you ever seen a survival bracelet?

What's a survival bracelet?

So I'll link to my survival bracelet in the show notes because you can get it off Amazon.

That looks awesome.

Okay, so basically it's a bracelet made out of paracord. So you can, you can undo the paracord and have 12ft of paracord that you could like suspend yourself off the edge of a cliff with. But then it's got a kale hook for fishing with leader line. It's got little foam bobbers that are like roll up foam bobbers along with some egg sinkers. So you could just basically catch fish. Fire starter, rod, fire striker, dried grass, tinder bundle, safety pins, compass. And those are the biggies. But it's, but it's all built into this tiny little bracelet. And you would never know looking at it that it has all this stuff in it. It just looks like a normal little bracelet. But you can literally, if you find yourself in the wilderness, catch fish, find direction, hang off cliff, start fire, etc.

And it's only $20.

I know.

Oh my God. That's probably the best thing.

I know, I know. I don't wear it all the time because it's kind of a weird looking bracelet. But if I'm out just like trucking around, I like my little survival bracelet. So have that. The next thing that I would recommend is a good essential oil that's going to kill off anything like staph, mrsa. I don't want to tell you how many times I've used this stuff in the wilderness or when I am like in a hotel room where I have second thoughts about the cleanliness of that hotel room or Airbnb and I have like an open wound I've gotten from a triathlon or a race or something like that. I always travel with a little bottle of thieves Essential oil and thieves is a blend of clove, lemon, eucalyptus, rosemary and cinnamon. So it was inspired by these old school French thieves who used to travel all over the world and they would like, the legend is they never got sick. And this stuff works like that. Like you can put a few drops in water if you feel that you've been exposed to something, you can put it on wounds. I have a really gnarly, like, open wound on my shin right now from sliding down a rope while doing rope climbing. And I put some thieves on that this morning. But I would have a bottle of thieves.

Oregano. Why do you use thieves instead of oregano?

Oregano is good, but thieves is. It covers even more bacteria than oregano does. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of oregano. Thieves is expensive too, right? So that's another issue. Oregano is a little less expensive, but, you know, bottle of thieves is like 50 bucks. But I but have one on hand, so that'd be number two. Number three would be cinnamon. And the reason I like cinnamon is because it has been proven to be more effective than DEET in warding off mosquitoes and insects. And you can just get a little bit of cinnamon essential oil. Two or three drops will literally cover your arms and legs. And if you find yourself in a mosquito infested situation, mosquitoes just do not like cinnamon at all. So those are the two oils that I've had that I'd have would be thieves and cinnamon. So you can smell like a giant Cinnabon roll. The next thing that I would have, and this is another one that flies on the radar, is sprouting seeds. So the idea behind this is that sprouting seeds are. They're basically these little seeds. You can get them off like Amazon and you can store them in your bag along with like a paper towel. And when you're ready to sprout the seeds, you get a little bit of water on the towel and you wrap up a handful of these seeds and you wait just a couple of days and they sprout into these extremely nutrient dense snack. They're very, very portable. And again, all you need to do and you can use these just for like your general cooking. And they're great to add to smoothies or sp. Sprinkle on salads, but they're sprouting seeds. The ones that I get, you can find on Amazon. There's a company called the Sprout House that sells them. And they're clover, lentil, daikon, radish, and fenugreek. And you literally just add water. And they take a couple of days to sprout. And they're incredibly nutritious. Really, really good blend. And that's a great addition rather than having a bunch of nasty MREs for a bug out bag. Now, I would also, of course, have another thing that I really, really like as a nutrient dense, calorie, calorie rich source of fuel that gets rid of cravings and that gives you a little hit of energy and that would be like a really, really good dark chocolate.

So I think a lot of people are happy to hear that.

Yeah, there's a lot of different dark chocolates out there. I, I tend to go between a bunch of them. Like I've used the Eating Evolution chocolate. We have a, we did a whole podcast. Brock and I did. I think this was before you were doing the podcast with me, Rachel, but we did a whole podcast on which of the chocolates out there are the healthiest. The one I've been doing a lot of lately is the bulletproof chocolate. So. Bulletproof. The company came out with this chocolate, they call it their chocolate fuel bar. And it's about 80% chocolate, but then they sweeten it with xylitol instead of sugar. And I believe they add some MCT oil or something like that to it that, that gives it kind of this unique energy blend. It's XCT oil. XCT oil. So that's the stuff that gets readily burnt by your liver for fuel. So it's like a chocolate bar that doesn't spike your blood sugar levels, basically.

Yum.

Which is a sugar free chocolate bar, but it's still got a lot of fuel in it. So I like that one. I like the one that they've got a little bit of coffee infused into because you get that coffee chocolate combo. So I'd have that in there as well. Dark chocolate. The next thing that I would add would be something that I use for, and I know this might be offensive to some of our Hispanic listeners, Mexican showers, which from what I understand is just this idea that you use a baby wipe to shower rather than taking an actual shower.

That I'm sure is kind of offensive.

Yeah, it's kind of offensive. But I have, have these in my bugout bag and what they are is they're called action wipes. I'll use them like after a triathlon I'll use them to wipe my arse when I'm taking a dump in the woods, you name it. But they're basically a wipe that is infused with frankincense, eucalyptus and tea tree oil. So they smell really good, but they also kill bacteria if you happen, you know, kind of like thieves. So you can even use them as like a wrap around wounds. But you can also use them to just like, like, you know, whatever, clean, funky armpits. These ones are called Action wipes. I've actually been using action wipes for almost a decade. I discovered them at a triathlon down in California and yeah, just fell in love with them. So I'm always ordering myself a pack full of action wipes. They're just, they work perfectly. The only thing I can tell you is they're not a flushable wipe. So don't wipe them down the toilet because they're really strong and they're durable and designed to be used multiple times. Times. But they work really well. They were originally. Interesting story. I have a podcast that I did with the owner. They originally developed for sexy time activities in the bedroom and then she realized that they worked well for sports.

We just keep going back there, don't we? We just can't get away from it.

Only twice. But no, I mean, I don't mind talking about that stuff. That's life.

Me either.

But anyways, the action wise, I would have those in there. So a few other things because I wanted to give Ryan 10 things. Ambronite. I would forego any MREs, any nasty oxidized, military based ready to eat pouches. Basically Ambernite. I just did a podcast with them. You can listen to it at BenGreenfieldFitness.com AmbronitePodcast I discovered it in Finland. It was developed by a bunch of adventurers and mountaineers. It's this little green pouch. 500 calories a pouch. It's got like 20 different superfoods in it. You can literally, you don't even need a cup. You can just open up the pouch and add a little bit of water to the pouch. Eat it right out of there. It's probably the most satiating meal replacement powder that I've ever used. And I would definitely have that in your bug out bag as well. Would be some pouches of ambernite. Yeah. So amber night would be the. You know, and you could even break up the chunks of dark chocolate and put them into ambernite night.

Yummy.

Not that I've ever been known to do that. That's like liquid ambrosia. Seriously, you have to try it. Have you tried that stuff yet, by the way?

I haven't, no. Actually Jake had it last night for dinner though.

It's really good. I've had it for dinner. Yeah, it's really, really good. Especially when I got to work during dinner and I just need to eat something with a spoon out of a cup.

It's just functional eating. Exactly.

Okay. So kind of along those lines as far as a cleanse We've all heard about activated charcoal before and how that can get rid of toxins in your gut if you've gotten food poisoning. And that's certainly something that's in my bugout bag. But because I want to be super unique with these ideas for Ryan, I would say that something that acts similarly to activated charcoal, but also supplies you with amino acids, fatty acids, brain building, dha, appetite satiation, et cetera, would be chlorella. So chlorella will bind and remove toxins. That's why it's one of the reasons why sushi is such a perfect food, because it's seaweed that's mixed with fish. And so the seaweed will bind a lot of the toxins in the fish, like the metals and stuff like that, and help remove them from the fish. And chlorella acts similarly in your body. Body. So it helps when your liver has used your liver's antioxidants to help to metabolize toxins and stuff like that. Chlorella is one of the things that can help to remove those. It's basically what would be called a binder or a phase two detoxificant for the liver. So you can put a bunch of little chlorella tabs in there. I'll link to a whole article that I wrote about how to use chlorella tablets, but that would be another thing to add in. Almost there.

Sure.

Two more things to get us up to 10. Next would be again along the lines of something more supplement ish that helps to decrease inflammation, decrease joint pain, decrease nerve pain. And that would be curcumin. So curcumin is a really potent antioxidant. You can have a Ziploc bag full of curcumin capsules in there. And basically curcumin is not very well absorbed. There are only really two forms of curcumin that tend to get absorbed very well. Number one would be if it's in what's called nanoparticle form, there's this whole emerging field of nanomedicine in which they take certain compounds and they blend them into tiny, tiny little nanoparticles, and those get absorbed much, much better than the bigger particles that you'll tend to see in most supplements and medications. And then the other way to make curcumin bioavailable is to blend it with, with a fat. This is why adding turmeric, my wife did this last night. Turmeric juice, juiced turmeric with coconut oil, because the fats act with the curcuminoids in the turmeric and they get them really well absorbed. But you can also just take curcumin in what's called a phytosome form. You want to look for curcumin phytosome, so either nanoparticle curcumin or curcumin phytosome. But either of those are extremely well absorbed forms of something that works very similarly to ibuprofen or Advil without the gut damage. Right. So if you happen to get injured, this would be a good one. And then finally, because we've already been woo woo talking about the earthing sandals, the other thing that I would look into is something that will help to make your water healthy, healthier after you filtered it. So there's this idea that of course, when you filter water, you can get rid of chlorine and fluoride and you know, amoebas and you know, E. Coli and stuff like that. But the problem is water that's been filtered is dead water. So when you filter water, it loses all of its, all of its vibratory frequencies. It's just like if you put vegetables in the refrigerator for four weeks, they're not as nutritious for you as if, say you just, just picked them out of the garden and ripped them up and made a fresh salad. Because they lose a lot of the vibrational energy that they get from like, sunlight. Water is the same way. Once water isn't passing over rocks and underground streams and, you know, through pipes and stuff like that, and it's just kind of stopped and sat stagnant for a while. It is no longer. It's, it's no longer what's called resonating with the same frequencies. There's, there's a scientist named Dr. Gerald Pollock at University of Washington who studies this idea that water that's not vibrating at these frequencies doesn't hydrate cells quite as well. So you can get. So I have a whole house structured water filter in my home that structures all the water because I get my water from a well, but then it passes through an iron filter because there's iron in my well water. And it also passes through a manganese filter because there's a manganese issue with my well water. But then it's dead water because it's been through all these filters. So I've. So the final thing I do is I pass it through what's called a structured water filter. And typically a structured water filter is. It's like a vortex. It's a series of Glass beads that the water travels through that restores that same frequency that would have had if it were like traveling through an underground spring. And you can get portable structured water filters that you can put in a bug out bag bag and that you can take water that you filtered and drink it through. Like there's one called, for example, Nanowell is a kind of cool one. It's a little, little portable water bottle. You can take it with you when you travel. You can take it in a, in a, in a bug out bag. And it's just a little mini structured water maker. And there's, there's a bunch of others I'll link to them on Amazon, but they're also known as, like, ionizers, water ionizers. But they make water bottles that will just do all this for you. They even make, like, little sticks that you can add to a bottle of water and then shake it up with the water. And it helps to restore some of the vibration into the water. So those are all the things that I would add to a healthy meal. I'll put a full list in the show notes. And of course, a lot of this stuff is just good stuff to have, even if you're not a prepper like me, even if you don't subscribe to Survival magazine, even though I think everybody should subscribe just because it's just like it's prepper porn, basically. It's fun stuff to read. So check all that out, Ryan, and everybody else who's listening in. Who wants to survive when Donald Trump pisses off our overseas neighbors?

Hi, Ben, this is Jennifer from Oceanside, California. I have a question about increasing thyroid function once damage has been done from a low carb diet. I had been playing around with nutrition and trying to get leaner and ended up depleting my thyroid function fairly significantly. I have a doctor in nutrition who's a homeopath that will be helping me as well as a new nutrition coach. But in the interim, if you have any advice on how to use carbs to help reset my metabolism and get me better back on track and what types of carbs to use, I would really appreciate it. I've been feeling really slow and not so good. It's not a fun feeling. I know I can fix it in a month or two with help, but if there's anything you can kind of guide me on between now and then, I would really appreciate it. Thank you and Rachel for all of your excellent advice and products and wonderful things. I can't tell you how much I benefit from It. I'm a physician myself and often pass a lot of your information to my patients, other physicians and friends. Keep it up. Thanks.

Well, this is a topic near and dear to my heart because my wife Jessa, is a former cross country runner and she and a lot of her teammates dealt with like stress fractures and amenorrhea and all these issues related to, to training, getting really lean with like, endurance training.

Yeah.

And you'll often see this to be not just an issue with endurance athletes, but also with active females in general. And so there is this, this concept of the female athlete triad, which is a combination of disordered eating. And also a lot of people don't realize this. It can be either disordered eating, like anorexia, or just low energy availability, like not eating enough damn food. And then that's typically combined with amenorrhea and low bone density, like osteoporosis. That's kind of like the, the cluster that you tend to see. And a lot of times it goes hand in hand with some of the hormonal issues like the, the thyroid issues that Jennifer is talking about. Now, it can be pretty prevalent, especially among athletes and in studies that they've done, generally in the active female population. It's about somewhere between 12 and 18% of the total amount of the active female population, meaning like exercise enthusiasts, triathletes, crossfitters, et cetera, have hypothyroidism, hypogonadism, growth hormone deficits, or any of these other functions of the female athlete triad. So it's a pretty prevalent issue. And when you think about 12 to 18% is huge, it's a lot of women that deal with this. And there are some issues that tend to crop up over and over again when it comes to the long term effects, effects of stuff like this. So not only do you, of course, lose fertility when your menses starts to disappear and you begin to increase your risk for fractures as your bone health begins to diminish. But they've also looked at women who are showing a lot of these overtraining signs, and they found decreased left ventricular mass and diminished thickness of cardiac walls. And basically, as nasty as this is to think about your heart tissue, but you begins to almost eat itself because you begin to break down your own cardiac tissue to rely upon for energy. So not just your muscle tissue and bone demineralization, but also the heart.

That's crazy.

Yeah. And the culprit is not necessarily, as many people have been led to believe, carbohydrate restriction as much as it is overall energy deprivation. And as a matter of fact, what they found is that the hormonal imbalances that are caused by over training in females especially can be reversed with high amounts of energy availability. And so what I mean by that is they've studied the ability to produce things like luteinizing hormone, which allows for the restoration of fertility. They've looked at bone density, they've looked at the ability to produce things like progesterone. You know, one of the things that women tend to lose that affects like sex drive during, during periods of caloric restriction or overtraining. And they found that almost all of this can be reversed by increasing energy availability.

So what does that mean, increasing energy availability?

Okay, so what I tell my, my female clients who I've worked with and kind of walked through, you know, anywhere from 6 to 12 week programs for kind of getting their periods back or getting rid of thyroid issues or like the high TSH that Jennifer is talking about. Or you know, the other issues that you see are like again, low luteinizing hormone levels. So low estrogen, low testosterone, low progesterone, usually whacked out circadian rhythms because there's an absence of a cortisol spike in the morning. And then also really, really low insulin like growth factor, which is one of the things that allows you to recover more quickly from exercise. And then of course the decline of heart mass, organ mass, bone mass, muscle mass, even brain mass. Oddly enough, they've even found that to be an issue. What I tell them is basically it's a process of allowing yourself to get fat and you put on some weight and you decrease training. Because what's going on is your body will tap into its energy stores in the form of body fat, muscle and organ mass as well as the insulating fat around nerves and neural tissue. It will decrease metabolic activity, specifically by down regulating thyroid activity. And then it will shut down non vital, very energy intense, intensive parts of your system. And the two most energy intensive systems that women have that get shut down are the immune system and the reproductive system. So you get sick more and you lose fertility, okay? The thyroid activity decreases and then you start to see shrinkage of brain, heart muscle, organ, et cetera. And women who ignore this and continue to just drive and train and not jump into a properly programmed training program, program, they, they eventually just waste away. And you tend to see, I see this sometimes when you look at like you know, 50 year old female ultra runners and they look like Yoda basically. It's like that's not the way that you know that a woman is, is kind of supposed to look. And granted, if you're happy running up mountains and you know, and that's what you want to do and you're okay with the fact that you might, when you're 80, step off of a curb and get a fracture and you know you're not going to have a sex drive ever, you know, that type of thing, you know, that's, that's fine if that floats your boat. But for a lot of women it's, that's not the way they want to live.

So can you, can all of these things happen from under eating and not over training?

It's very, very typical for these to be a combination of over training and under eating eating, not both. So you get over training and undereating. And what you get from that is basically low luteinizing hormone. There are low levels of what is called leptin, which can help with appetite regulation. Everything else that I just got done talking about, well, what you do, even if it's only temporary, and a lot of times this can be as few as eight to 12 weeks that you'd see this, this is you overeat and you under train. That is essentially how you reverse this. As simple and as stupid as that is, this is the thing that I have found to, and that research has shown to reduce this issue in females and to get rid of this vicious cycle. So it's basically four different things. You provide adequate and continuous energy supply to your body. So this means breaking all the rules of ketosis and intermittent fasting, etc. And essentially what, what you're doing is you're controlling what are called your ghrelin levels, which help to mitigate a lot of the loss of leptin hormone, which is an appetite regulating hormone that occurs when you're overtraining and undereating. And it helps to stabilize blood sugar and so that will help to stabilize cortisol levels, get the cortisol spike occurring again in the morning and restore proper appetite hormone expression. And the way that, that you do that is by eating three square meals a day and then multiple snacks too. Okay, so that's number one. Number two is you need to make sure that glucose levels are normalized and that will increase insulin levels and insulin like growth factor levels. And that can help out with the thyroid dysregulation. And the way that you do that is you ensure that each of the meals that you eat throughout the day includes some type of low glass glycemic index. Carbohydrate that's gonna allow for a low bleed of energy. So you do a lot of like grains and legumes and seeds and nuts and things like that. So not a lot of like super duper sugary foods, but instead foods that are gonna give you a slow release of carbohydrate. And again, this is not for everybody, right? This is for women who are specifically finding themselves in this issue. Number three is a really balanced intake of every type of natural fat you can get your hands on. And again, I'm basing this all off of studies that have looked into reversal of overtraining symptoms in women. I'm not just pulling this stuff out my butt and I'll put links in the show notes, but what you want to look at when I say balanced intake of all types of natural fats is you would be going after things like fish oil, algae sources, avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil. So you want to get a combination of polyunsaturated fatty acids, acids, saturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acids. Because you have to rebuild things like cell membranes and hormones and steroidal precursors. And that takes a balanced intake of a good mix of natural fats. And then finally, you need a profound reduction in training volume to lower things like energy requirements, catecholamine requirements, cortisol requirements, minutes, vitamin D, turnover into cortisol, et cetera. And that typically means doing a lot of like kind of, you know, yoga, easy swims, foam rolling and mobility work, programming in far more recovery days, allowing for adequate rest between sets, lowering the number of sets or repetitions that you do, lowering total training volume, etc. And there's actually a fantastic three part article series on a website called Supversity that I'll link to that really goes into all of the different studies that investigate reversal of the female athlete triad. But ultimately what it comes down to is not just eating more carbohydrates or getting off a low carb diet. It comes down to everything that I just talked about. Snacking, frequency, avoidance of intermittent fasting, lowering of training, volume, increase of all sorts of different types of natural fats. And then those are some of the biggies. But I'll link to that full article for you in the show notes. But that is where I would start and that is something that a lot of times you'll see not just women, but also men need to do because this can be an issue in men who, who over train as well. So, so yeah, that is where I would start Jennifer, I hope that helps. Again, I should throw in a disclaimer here. I'm not a doctor. This is not to be misconstrued as medical advice.

Well, it's funny because she is a doctor.

Oh, oh, I thought. Okay, so, so she, I thought she was saying she has a doctor. She is a doctor.

No, she's also a physician herself.

Yeah, well, there you go. I'm just saying if I wasn't getting my period, that's what I was would do. I know she didn't talk a whole lot about amenorrhea, but you'll tend to see this, you know, hand in hand with thyroid dysfunction is this whole female athlete triad. So anyways, there you have it. So that being said, we covered a lot in today's show.

Huge podcast.

So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 350 because we have tons of goodies in there for you. Everything from the the earth runners to all the studies that we talked about, to all the links to everything that I would put in my bugout bag to the new anti aging serum to all the different events from the paleo effects to the biohacker summit. On and on. You can get all the goodies@bengreenfieldfitness.com 350 and the last thing we're going to do is we're going to give something away. We have gotten a plethora of one star reviews lately in itunes. Considering we work our ass off to produce this podcast and to try and get you valuable information that just irks me when I log. And I know part of it is like there have been a few episodes where we've gotten, yeah, maybe a little bit too explicit for the kids in your minivan or you know, maybe I've talked about something that seems woo woo, like transcendental meditation. Shocker. But ultimately, if you're listening in and you do dig this podcast and you want to give us a little good karma, here's what you do. Go to itunes. Itunes is the place to do it. Leave a five star review. Say something nice, say something cool. And if we pick your review to read on the show and then you email, just email your T shirt size to geergreenfieldfitnesssystems.com if you hear your review read on the show, we'll send you a cool Ben Greenfield fitness gear pack with a water bottle and a T shirt. Not just any T shirt. A tech T shirt for exercising and a beanie. A really cool Ben Grindel fitness beanie. So we have a review. Five star Review called Great Frickin Podcast. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark Left by Joel D. 82 and Rachel, you want to take this one away?

Yeah, let's do it. All right, so Joel D. 82 says this is a terrific podcast. If you like health and fitness based on science instead of outdated info from the 50s, this is the best podcast. It's always a good listen. Thanks to Ben's humor, his cute sounding Australian co host livens things up as well. Oh, isn't that sweet? What a nice pat on the head.

I like to think that I too am cute sounding.

I thought you were the cute one, Ben.

Yeah. Although I think that you probably got a lot of new followers from you posting bikini shots of you doing the cold water shower challenge that we just.

Got done doing and then let like come on now. Probably Rachel's not an athlete. She doesn't have an athletic body. It's like not a big deal saying.

I think folks dug that. But anyways, the 50s, the 1950s. Outdated info from the 1950s. I don't know what was going on in the 1950s, but I'm thinking like, wasn't that when you would do like roller skating, drive through fast food, milkshakes and what else, like old school Fords? I think television just came around in the 1950s. And music, of course, from the 1950s we had Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. Right. Those are big in the 50s. So there were all sorts of good stuff going on in the 50s. Dude, don't slam the 50s. I'm just saying. But we're still gonna send you a gear pack, so just email us. Thanks for the awesome review and again, you can leave your review. We'll put a link in the show notes. Just go to itunes, do search for the Ben Greenfield Fitness show. And in the meantime, we have plenty of fantastic episodes planned for the future. I've been record recording my butt off with podcasts about everything from staying fit when you're injured to the healthiest kinds of wine to I'm doing one later on today about algae. All sorts of really cool podcasts coming down the pipeline, so stay tuned. In the meantime, check out the show notes for everything@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 350Rachel Ben later.

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

Sa.