Tyler LeBaron: Hydrogen Water, Mitochondrial Health, Selective Antioxidants, & Longevity | TUH #265

Alkaline water alone is not going to provide benefits. Even if you subscribe to the benefits that we need to maintain an alkaline body, you can't do it with alkaline water.

Everyone thinks that it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit. So many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4 pH water.

Molecular hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits to alkaline ionized water.

The mechanism that hydrogen uses to leave the body's production of necessary free radicals alone, reduce the harmful free radicals that we don't need, and allow this cellular homeostasis to return.

Hydrogen acts as a therapeutic selective antioxidant. It doesn't change anything with the water, it's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances.

So for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, what's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water?

First, I would just consume it daily. When you drink hydrogen water, you, you'll Ultimate Human.

If you've ever spent money on alkaline water, I need you to hear this episode because Dr. Tyler LeBaron, the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist, author of over 50 peer-reviewed publications, is about to blow up everything you thought you knew. Here's the truth. Alkaline water's benefits have nothing to do with pH. Nothing. The clinical research shows that when you remove the dissolved hydrogen gas from alkaline water, every single benefit disappears. It was never the alkalinity. It was always the hydrogen. And what Tyler reveals in this conversation is stunning. In a Japanese clinical trial, adding hydrogen gas to standard treatment improved cardiac arrest survival from 61% to 85%. We're talking about 24 additional lives saved per 100 patients. Tyler explains how hydrogen works as a selective antioxidant, a redox adaptogen that targets only the harmful free radicals while preserving the beneficial oxidative signals that your mitochondria need. This is the science everyone is sleeping on. Don't skip this episode. Hey guys, welcome back to The Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.

And every time I have a guest on, on the show, I get excited to talk to them about their subject area of expertise. And today's guest is someone I have been really dying to have on the podcast. He is probably solely responsible for my foray into hydrogen water, hydrogen bathing, hydrogen inhalation, all things hydrogen. I have the deepest level of respect for this guest. He is probably the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist. Um, I would, I would argue that He has published numerous papers in quality peer-reviewed journals. He holds a PhD in this area of science, and we are absolutely blessed to have Dr. Tyler LeBaron on the podcast today. And I will say he's also become a good friend, and he was teaching me how to arm wrestle this morning. Fully random sidebar, but we had a great workout this morning, and he was giving out— he's a professional arm wrestler, which is, you know, that's banging a 90-degree turn from hydrogen studies. And so he was teaching Zac Efron and my son and I and all the guys how to arm wrestle this morning.

So maybe before the podcast is over, we'll throw in some arm wrestling tips.

It's all in the wrist.

That's right.

I've just heard that. I don't know if that's true or not. So that's all I've just given you, all my arm wrestling knowledge in one sentence. But Tyler, I'm, I'm so excited to have you on because I think people, when it comes to hydrogen water, hydrogen tablets, bathing in hydrogen, inhalation hydrogen, I think they fall into one of two camps. In my opinion, there are the hardcore skeptics and then there are the people that have actually gotten familiar with the science. And so I would love for you to just give my audience some background, you know, your, your personal story about how you got into this space, because it is kind of random, right? I mean, you have a PhD and spend your time researching this smallest, lightest element in the universe. And going so deep into that science, but you've done it, you know? And so I'd love to hear the backstory of what got you interested.

Well, again, thank you for having me on your show. I really appreciate the opportunity to educate. And it is something I'm very passionate about. I'm honored that you think so much of me.

I do, I really do, man.

I really stand on the heads of shoulders of giants. I mean, there's a lot of other researchers that are much more, expert in their field than I am. I've just been at this for 16 years, and I am really grateful for my mentors who— and these— I go to these conferences in Asia and Europe and meet with the other researchers, and I'm just really grateful for them. And, um, you know, and I have a lot of interests, like arm wrestling. I'm, I'm a wannabe professional. I compete competitively, but there's again a lot of people who are a lot better than me, and I'm just grateful that I can be on this journey. And with that journey though, Yeah, you know, I came across this whole hydrogen concept back in 2009, and I learned about it because you probably heard about alkaline ionized water.

Yes, everybody's drinking alkaline water. Yeah, yeah.

And which is unfortunate. We'll get to that. Yeah. But see, I learned about this, and this is— I was always interested in science and just health, but this is before I had, you know, any real science training or knowledge. And but, but there was some papers on this alkaline ionized water, and I was like, this is interesting. but I want to understand. I was asking the different people, like, how does this work? And all the answers were kind of contradicting each other. And then I went to the university and asked my professors, well, how does alkaline water work? Why would this help? And they explained to me that it's not going to help. And it wasn't just making fun of me per se, but explaining logically the reasons why alkaline water alone is not gonna provide benefits. And that raised the question then, how is it possible that this water could have any benefits? Which also raises the question first, before we try to figure out how something works, we first need to figure out if it works.

Right.

And so that was my very first forte or foray into research is I did a little study, just a pilot study, and I found that drinking alkaline ionized water that was fresh could provide some, some exercise benefits. Basically, I had during lactate threshold running and the late onset muscle soreness, yeah, that, that area, lactate threshold, they could exercise a little bit longer. And anyways, this gave me, um, some, I guess, some push that I should want to research this more and try to understand why. But it was in this investigations and reading more of the literature that I came across this article published in Nature Medicine on hydrogen gas being therapeutic. Now, I didn't understand the significance of that at the time, but when I was talking to one of my professors, a biochemistry professor, he had printed that article off and he handed it, and I went to his office. I went to his office all the time. We're always talking about different things. And he had printed that off and he, 'cause he said, "I was really thinking about this whole alkaline ionized water thing and in your write-up, you cited this paper." pulled it off and handed it to me. And he says, "You know, Tyler, I think there's something here." And when he said that, I just, I felt something inside of me saying, "This is really interesting. This is something I want to research. I want to understand this." Because hydrogen gas is so easy to get. It's all over the place.

It's the most prevalent element, literally, right? It is, exactly. And it's the smallest, the lightest. It's highest on the periodic table, right? It's 10% of our body weight is hydrogen.

Yeah, a different form of hydrogen. Yes, that's actually a good point 'cause we wanna talk about and separate between hydrogen gas and the different types of hydrogen.

Like hydrogen ion versus H2.

Yes, or the hydrogen that's in compounds. And, but let me—

Yeah, let me unpack this.

Yeah, why don't we unpack that first? And then I wanna talk about this Nature Medicine paper so we can understand why this is so significant, right?

Yeah.

And throughout this podcast, I just wanna say through the outset, I am really happy to be here to educate 'cause it's something I'm passionate about with my research. And it's exciting to see this field emerging, but often some of the marketing or excitement outpaces the actual evidence. And, but if I don't come and educate, well then who's going to do the education? They might be talking about things that aren't necessarily true, or the hydrogen is gonna alkalize your cells or something. And that's not how it works, right? So I'm really gonna try to do my best to stick to the science and help us understand how it's supposed to work. What does the research actually say? And just people can kind of get ground a little bit more, right? Because I think that the preliminary evidence is interesting enough that it should give us pause to really think about it, right?

Yeah, and so this Nature article, I don't mean to cut you off, what was the subject of the Nature article?

Okay, yeah.

Because that is a very serious— for those of you that are not familiar with that journal, that is a very significant, highly regarded peer-reviewed journal.

Yes.

They don't just throw papers into Nature.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so basically it was with ischemia-reperfusion injury. This was specifically in a stroke model. So what they did is they took these rats and they induced a stroke model. It's called a middle cerebral arterial occlusion. So they cut the blood supply to the brain and that's going to cause damage. Because you have no oxygen-rich blood going to the brain. And then when you let the blood go back to the brain, well, now that blood is oxygen-rich and that oxygen-rich blood goes to the brain and it causes what's known as a reperfusion injury. So you have ischemia and reperfusion, or an IR injury. And this is a major problem with strokes or anytime you're cutting the blood supply like that. Well, they used, hydrogen gas, and they only used 2% hydrogen gas, which is important because above 4% hydrogen gas is explosive. But if you keep it below that, then it's not explosive, and it still had these therapeutic effects. Now, you could probably add this in the show notes, and you can look at the figure, and you can see this white portion of the brain, the rat brain, and that the white area is the dead area of the brain, and that's when no hydrogen gas was given. Or helium gas was also administered and there was no effect. But when only 2% hydrogen gas was given, it dramatically prevented the brain damage from this stroke model. I mean, it's just mind-blowing. You don't have to be a scientist to look and see, you can see the difference right there. And then they, what they did then is they figured out a mechanism is they dissolved the hydrogen gas into cell culture media. Okay, so remember it's just a gas, it's dissolved in the cell culture media, and then they added some mitochondrial toxins and things that would create a lot of free radicals, because that's what happens during ischemia-reperfusion injury is free radical damage. So they added some toxins in there, create more free radicals, and they found that hydrogen gas also was able to reduce the oxidative stress that was going on, right? So the, the article, the name of this paper was entitled that hydrogen acts as a therapeutic selective antioxidant, and it was able to help prevent this brain damage from the stroke study. So, going back to my story, when my professor handed this paper to me and he felt, hey, there's really something here, that was very exciting to me. And seeing how this study basically ignited the interest in hydrogen research, I went and I looked at all the studies and everything I could find at the time, and there were only 50 or so publications on hydrogen.

1,500 now.

Yeah, exactly, around 1,500 studies, maybe over 3,000 publications in total. I mean, I have authored over 50 publications on hydrogen now, compared to back in 2009. But maybe we should just break down again the different forms of hydrogen, just so we can make sure everyone's on the same page.

Right.

Would that be helpful?

That'd be very helpful.

I think when we think about water, for example, we already know water is, H2O. So water already has hydrogen in it.

And that's the biggest blowback that I get when I tell people that, you know, I drink hydrogen-rich water every day, and they're like, that doesn't make any sense, water's— hydrogen's already in water. But those, those molecules are spoken for, right? I mean, they're already bound. Yeah, this is like H2O plus H2, H2, H2, H2, H2, right?

Yeah. And it doesn't change the chemistry of the water. So if we, if we can actually We can actually say there's several different species or forms that hydrogen exists. Now let's just go through them briefly. If you go to the periodic table of elements, you'll see that hydrogen is number 1, right? That's elementary school, hydrogen is number 1. That hydrogen has 1 proton and 1 electron, and it's all by itself. That's atomic hydrogen. But if it's just a single electron, it doesn't wanna stay by itself. That hydrogen atom is gonna wanna react with pretty much anything. If it reacts with nitrogen, you can form things like amino acids or like ammonia, right? And hydrogen-nitrogen compounds. It can react with carbon to form hydrocarbons like carbohydrates, gasoline, right? All of these types of— these are hydrocarbons. It could react with oxygen to form things like water, H2O. And like what you talked— you used to mention how these other atoms are spoken for. So you look at the water molecule, there's the oxygen, and then hydrogen is a tet— hydrogen attached to the oxygen, so it looks like Mickey Mouse. There's oxygen, and then 2 hydrogens are attached to that oxygen molecule, so they're kind of tied up, right? So again, hydrogen can react with, you know, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, or it could react with another hydrogen atom. And if it did, it would make a hydrogen atom here and a hydrogen atom here, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. So instead of a water molecule, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. We call that molecular hydrogen. Great. And this is the diatomic gas. This is what we're talking about, this odorless, It's tasteless, it's flammable above 4%. This is the gas, and when you take this gas and you dissolve it into water, you don't change the pH. You don't change the structure of the water or anything. So pH, people get confused because when they hear pH, it stands for, in their mind, potential hydrogen. But what form of hydrogen? That hydrogen in pH is the hydrogen ion. It's the H+ ion. So if you look at that periodic table of elements again, and you have the hydrogen, atom has a proton and electron. If you take away that electron, you just have a proton, right? That is the hydrogen ion. Ah, that's what makes acid-base.

Okay, and everyone thinks that it's the— it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit, but it sounds like you're going to make the argument that it's the hydrogen driving the benefit.

Yes, it's a hydrogen gas. Yeah, hydrogen gas is totally different than alkaline pH. They're totally different concepts. There's— there's there's no similarity other than we're using the word hydrogen, but the hydrogen ion is just a proton. The hydrogen gas we're talking about is 2 protons, 2 electrons bound together in a covalent bond. That is a strong covalent bond. So if you dissolve hydrogen gas into water, it's not going to dissociate into protons and electrons. It stays always hydrogen gas. It also doesn't, you know, like structure the water or do any changes to the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas. So if you take, I see you have like, supplements here like Perfect Aminos or electrolyte powder, let's say. If you were to dissolve those as you do into water, it doesn't change anything with the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances. In the same way, you can take the hydrogen gas, you dissolve it into the water, you drink the water, the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas into the body.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So this article initially got you interested. And then you went on this foray overseas and you started looking at different research institutions, reading about different peer-reviewed papers. You eventually decided to affiliate with one of those and start doing some of your own research. And I've read most of what you've published. I've also read other publications on traumatic brain injuries and post-concussive injuries. Comparing hydrogen, soaking limbs in hydrogen immediately after a traumatic event versus the current protocol, which is like the RICE protocol, rest, ice, compress, and elevate. And some of these were very small trials. Some of them were even N of 1. But what seems fascinating to me is the number of applications across so many different categories, athletic performance, you know, brain health, inflammation, selective antioxidants, PCOS, hormone balance, cardiovascular conditions. I mean, and I want to get into some of those, but so you then affiliate with some of these research institutions overseas.

This is because, so I was majoring in biochemistry, and for one of the degree requirements, we had to complete an internship. And so I thought, where do I want to do my internship? I want to do it in hydrogen gas. That'd be amazing. There were a couple of places in the USA doing things. There was some place in Pittsburgh, also a little Linda University, but most of the research was out of Japan. And I got some favorable place— actually NASA was also interested in hydrogen therapy because of radioprotective effects, so I actually had some email correspondence with all these groups and they were all willing to work something out, but they weren't doing a lot of active research. So I realized I really need to go to Japan. And I chose Nagoya University where Professor Ohno, who I consider a great mentor of mine, was there and I researched it at Nagoya University in neurogenetics. And we took hydrogen gas and dissolved it into cell culture media and looked at the effects of hydrogen gas on various cell signaling pathways. And that's when I was able to meet a lot of other researchers. I mean, top experts in the field, like Dr. Ohta, for example, is a mitochondrial expert.

And that is the foundation of human optimization. Human performance, longevity, anti-aging, wellness, whatever you want to call it. I mean, most of the really, I would say, sound research that I think is going to move the needle is already inside the mitochondria. Yeah, 110 trillion of these in our body, another 10% of our body weight is mitochondria. It's— I, I think, uh, few people really understand the significance of mitochondrial metabolism and its links to all forms of disease and pathology, at some point, I can't think of a disease etiological pathway that does not operate by either directly or indirectly interrupting mitochondrial metabolism.

Yeah, there's, there's, there's— the mitochondria is very important. And, and we know when we make our energy, for example, we, we make ATP, the adenosine triphosphate, right? That's the energy currency of the cell. And the mitochondria make up like 90% of all that ATP. And you need about as much ATP as you weigh per day. So if you're 150 pounds, need 150 pounds of ATP turnover cycling. So, mitochondria has to turn this out, just recycling very, very quickly. And so, it's a core organelle that's not just for energy production, but sensing so many different areas of redox homeostasis, and that involves an inflammatory response. And that helps to understand actually a lot of the reasons why molecular hydrogen has any biological effect or therapeutic effects that we're seeing in some of these studies.

So you go over to Japan, um, and because I know that you actually authored the paper on looking at alkaline water, um, benefits versus the benefits of—

yes, hydrogen. That's, that's a key—

that's the one that blew my mind.

This one is a very important one because it's not, um, just a study, but it was— it's actually a comprehensive review article of all the studies that published at the time on alkaline ionized water, including a paper that I was involved in. And so many groups demonstrated that when you simply remove the hydrogen gas from alkaline ionized water, the benefits are eliminated.

Wow.

And, and, and that blows a hole in some of the claims that the benefits are alkaline pH.

I hope you guys are listening to this. Alkaline water is garbage. Um, and I, and I think so many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4 You know, pH water.

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No, no, and I think there's correlations. There's no benefit to an alkaline pH itself, but it depends on why it's alkaline. Because if you were to get certain minerals water, for example, a lot of times mineral water is alkaline because it has minerals in them and are balanced with, say, bicarbonate ions. But it ends up being those minerals, like some more magnesium, some calcium, some, you know, manganese, another trace mineral. I add mineral salts to my water all the time. That's good for you, right? But it's not, again, to your point, it's not because of the pH. And our body already buffers the pH very well. And in fact, when you—

And the range is very narrow.

Yes, 7.35, 7.45 is kind of what we say. And you know that when you just hold your breath, for example, that urge to breathe, it actually comes because you start to build up acidity. You start to build hydrogen ions, and so you wanna exhale out because People can try this. Take, take a straw, for example, and blow into water with pH drops. And you can see that the pH starts to go down because CO2 dissolves in the blood to create carbonic acid, and that makes hydrogen ions. So in the same way, like when you exercise, you break down your carbohydrates and fats into CO2. The CO2 dissolves into your blood and lowers the pH. So by you exhaling, you remove that CO2 and the pH is able to help to maintain. That's also why Sometimes when you're in shock, for example, people will start to hyperventilate and you exhale so much CO2, the blood pH starts to go up a little bit too high and now people can start actually like tweaking their arms or going like contortions. You start to raise the pH so high that you start to ionize various proteins and now the cell membrane potential reaches threshold easier. For example, you start to make muscle contractions, your alpha motor neurons activate your skeletal muscles, so you get these contractions, for example. Just those small changes—

That's why they have you breathe into a bag?

Yeah, exactly, 'cause you breathe in the bag, then you're reabsorbing the CO2, you're keeping that CO2 level so you don't raise that up higher. So, point is, even if you subscribe to the benefits of we need to maintain an alkaline body or something, you can't do with alkaline water. Breathing is much more effective, right? And even when you look at like say pH of 10, a pH of 10 is, although it's alkaline, it's not really a buffer. That's why just a drop or two of lemon juice brings the pH right down. In contrast to say, baking soda, which is a pH of 8.1, that can neutralize thousands of liters of alkaline, of acidic water, but it would take thousands of liters of alkaline water to neutralize the same amount of acid because of the buffering effect.

Right, okay, so then you, the first paper that you were involved in, was this the paper that was looking at alkaline water?

Yeah, that's one of the early ones. We actually looked at, It was an animal study in NALD, and we found that we first did an experiment where we're using alkaline ionized water. This is a collaboration that I was doing with a group out of Israel, and there was no benefit, and they were surprised. And I was like, well, what's the hydrogen gas concentration? And they're like, we gotta figure out how to do that. So they measured the concentration and it was pretty low. It was like 0.3 milligrams per liter or so. and it's like, I think the concentration needs to be higher because the other studies were using higher concentration. So, because now they can measure hydrogen— it took a long time to do this, this is like several-year experiment that we were involved in— increase the concentration of hydrogen using different methods, and then we're able to do two different groups where we could do a higher and a lower concentration. The low concentration, again, no benefits at all, even though it had like a negative ORP, it was an alkaline pH, all the same properties, no benefits. The higher concentration did have obvious benefits. So that was published back in 2018, 2019 or so, but we worked on it since like 2014, for quite a while, actually earlier than that. But the main article is this comprehensive review article. You can look it up, it's called Electrolyzed Reduced Water Review 1, and there's 2 reviews. There's Review 1 and Review 2, and there's this comprehensive review to go through any question or any thought you've ever had about, this area, goes through the water microclustering claims, alkaline pH, negative ORP aspects. It just systematically goes through every one of them and conclusively demonstrates that molecular hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits, if there are any, to alkaline ionized water.

Right. So you also authored a paper, I think, which may be, in my opinion, the most impactful, um, paper that you've ever authored or co-authored, and that was understanding the exact mechanism by which hydrogen acts inside the mitochondria. And, and I think it's, it's— I don't think most people absorb what it means to be a selective antioxidant, um, versus an antioxidant. So maybe we could talk about what makes something an antioxidant, um, you know, what is oxidative stress, and, and why do you not want to over-suppress it? Um, you know, and why could that be dangerous? And what's unique about hydrogen that it restores this redox homeostasis, um, versus just over-suppressing, you know, oxidative free radicals?

So let's do this, let's go through some history, okay?

Okay.

We're gonna go start with that Nature Medicine publication, and then we're going to talk about the benefits and problems with antioxidants in general, and that'll lead us to this target of hydrogen that we recently published, okay, and that explains everything. So I can tell you're so proud of it.

You smile when you say it, dude. You're proud of that one. I read it too. It was very, very well authored.

Well, and again, I'm just one of the authors. I was happy to be involved with that paper, but really the harder research belongs to the other authors. And I was just grateful to be part of it. 'Cause when I was in Japan, back in 2013 is when I proposed this concept and we stayed in communication, talking about it and working on it for a long time. That's why I'm happy because it's like, It's over 10 years of work. A lot of effort went into this. But let's talk about some background information to understand why this is so important. If you remember with that Nature Medicine publication, it talked about how hydrogen acts as a selective antioxidant. And that's a key word about that selectivity, because we don't want just more antioxidants, because antioxidants aren't necessarily a good thing. And the research has shown that over and over again. And that's because it turns out we actually need free radicals. All right. So let's just break this down, maybe a step back. We know that if you— too much oxidation is bad. So if you take like an apple and you cut it in half, it's going to turn brown, right? An avocado turns brown. You have rusting. All that is literally oxidation, right? We are breathing right now. And that oxygen going into our bodies is oxidizing. It's oxidizing our cells. It's also what's driving life. That's how our metabolism works. Oxygen works at the complex 4 of the electron transport chain, literally consuming the electrons from our foods, making metabolic water. That process is oxidation. But see, sometimes during that process in electron transport chain, that oxygen gets consumed prematurely by electrons. It gets electrons prematurely, and that creates free radicals. Okay, this is going to be really important. So I just want to set this up a little bit more in the mitochondria. This is where we're at. We're going deep into the cell, into the mitochondria. And you have what's called the electron transport chain, right? And there's 4 main complexes, complex 1, 2, 3, and 4. And basically you get electrons that are passed from complex 1, and then those get passed to CoQ10, actually ubiquinol, and then they go to complex 3. Electrons from complex 2 also go there, they go to complex 3. So complex 3 is very important. They're receiving all these electrons, okay? We're gonna come back to this, it's gonna be important. So remember, complex 3 is very important important.

Yeah.

Then the electrons go from complex 3, one electron at a time— a little bit dangerous— one electron at a time through cytochrome c, go to complex 4. At complex 4, those electrons typically will combine with oxygen and 2 hydrogen ions, and you make water, right? Okay, so you make water—

intracellular water.

Exactly right. During this process, you make what's known as the proton gradient, hydrogen ion gradient. So in the inner in the inner membrane space of the mitochondria, you put a whole bunch of protons there, pumping against its concentration gradient, and then those hydrogen ions have to go through the ATP synthase enzyme, sometimes called complex V, but it goes through this enzyme and it makes ATP, turns out lots of ATP. Now, as I said, oxygen is a strong oxidizer. So, you inhale, the oxygen is going to bind onto your hemoglobin, it has some of the iron on your hemoglobin, so it can bind there, And that's important because you want to kind of sequester oxygen as much as you can in the blood. You don't want to have a whole bunch of oxygen floating freely all over the, all over the place all the time. The hemoglobin goes down, goes into lysine muscle cells, and the pH is lower, which is actually going to cause the hemoglobin to slightly shift its conformation. It's going to allow oxygen to leave the hemoglobin easier. As soon as that oxygen diffuses out, it immediately gets sucked up by the mitochondria. Mitochondria and at complex 4 and converts it to water. That way there's like hardly any oxygen at any time in the cells because that oxygen, if it goes in the cell membranes, it's going to cause oxidation. It's going to cut in the cytosol, oxidation, free radicals, damage, right? As it goes in mitochondria, those electrons in the electron transport chain get— right, are being transported. But so that oxygen could actually consume those electrons, say, at complex 1 or sometimes at complex 3 or through this semiquinone radical that was created with CoQ10, uh, that, that enzyme ubiquinol, um, it can be a ubiquinone radical, for example. And you can— oxygen can get reduced, receive an electron. When oxygen gets a 1-electron reduction, it's called a superoxide anion radical. Now, that radical, it turns out, it's beneficial and harmful.

So beneficial to a certain level, harmful at a certain level. Yes, like a lot of species. Hydrogen peroxide, yes, another one, you know, very necessary, but it can also be very damaging.

What happens, because hydrogen peroxide comes next, what happens is actually a certain signaling effect that superoxide can do, and then this enzyme superoxide dismutase can convert superoxide to, um, hydrogen peroxide, let's say, or, or, or to water. And then hydrogen peroxide also has certain signaling effects it can do, and then there's even a specific aquaporin or protein channel for aquaporin to transverse to do further signaling, and then say like catalase, glutathione peroxidase, can get rid of that. So these free radicals are literally produced for specific signaling effects that our bodies literally need in order to have normal mitochondrial function. So the mitochondria regulates our entire like redox homeostasis. That's the, that's the main area. There's other enzymes like the NADPH oxidase or these NOX enzymes number of the enzymes that make free radicals, but the mitochondria is very crucial and plays the largest role in making free radicals. But see, our body has developed in ways to create a small amount of free radicals when needed and to do specific signaling. So when we exercise, we're breathing more oxygen, we're using more oxygen. So what happens to the free radicals? They increase. That increase in free radicals in turn signals our body to make more mitochondria, to make our muscles work better, to do a whole bunch of signaling effects.

That hormetic stress.

It's a hormetic stress, exactly.

You have a positive response. So is it fair to say that we actually don't want to over-suppress our oxidation?

That's the point. That's exactly right.

You've used this term redox homeostasis. I want to pause on that for a second because redox homeostasis is this balance between oxidation and reduction, right? And ideally, we want it to be in balance. We don't want to over-suppress oxidation. We also don't want to over— we don't have too much inflammation or oxidation either. And with antioxidants, you really don't know if you're over-suppressing it or if you— maybe you just inadvertently hit the target. But, you know, if you're piling a bunch of vitamin C or beta-carotene or something like that into the body, yes, it's an antioxidant. But I think there's a prevailing thought that, well, oxidation is bad, more antioxidants must be good.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. And the only technicality is technically we don't really want to balance, we want homeostasis. And the difference is that balance would mean they're equal, and that's dead, right? So we can't say that oxidation is just bad in the same way we can't say reduction is just bad. You need to have both of them. And that's why I like the term redox, because redox means oxidation and reduction. And you want to have that homeostasis. So our body— I was going through the whole, that whole transport chain because we want to see that we are designed to make free radicals to do certain signaling effects. And then they get— our body naturally gets rid of them through our body's natural antioxidants. Right now, what happens though with aging, with environmental toxins and whatever, what have you, or just exercise. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you're not exercising, inactivity. Then your natural body's ability to produce antioxidants goes down, your mitochondria become dysfunctional as well, you start to increase more free radicals, you increase free radicals to the point you are now suffering from oxidative stress, right? That's a bad thing, you don't want the stress, you want a hormetic type of effect, but not an excessive amount. And so maintaining, again, maintaining a redox homeostasis is why it's so important. Our body contains our own antioxidants, right? Glutathione, we mentioned these, right? There's a whole bunch of them. And all plants do the same thing. That's why if you have like your apples, for example, if they're on the tree, they're not turning brown because they also have antioxidants in them. And that's why when we eat, say, the apples or the carrots or what have you, we get those antioxidants inside of us, these polyphenols that can scavenge some of these antioxidants or some of the oxidants, right? Now, it turns out though that when you basically isolate these potent antioxidants all in the cells, or you have synthetic forms and you just ingest high amounts of them, well, that's going to be problematic, kind of what you pointed out, because now we're potentially blunting those free radicals that our body specifically produced so that we could have improved mitochondrial function and mitochondrial biogenesis. So, when we look at these studies, we can clearly see that if you're eating a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables and so on, then you have your antioxidant homeostasis, your redox homeostasis, everything is good, it's healthy. But when you start to perturb that, either by doing things that are very oxidatively harmful, like say smoking or just environmental toxins, or you have low physical activity, because low physical activity will result in lower levels of your body's natural antioxidants. Then you have oxidative stress. Also, if you start taking high doses of, say, synthetic antioxidants, then you start to cause a disequilibrium or—

Blunting, yeah.

Yeah, you blunt those benefits. So you can actually see a number of— especially in animal studies, but clinical studies as well, a number of them have actually shown that antioxidants might actually blunt exercise training adaptations. So you don't get mitochondrial biogenesis. You don't get improved, say, insulin sensitivity, or if you're blunting the inflammatory response, right? We need these things. We need to maintain the homeostasis. And so that's why we don't want to just take a bunch of antioxidants. And that's why hydrogen is so different than any other antioxidant. And I want to talk about this for just a second. This is just basic chemistry, actually. But the reason why it's selective is because hydrogen gas does not react with the beneficial free radicals. It only reacts with the harmful ones.

That is so incredible that it's— that word selective means it's reacting with the harmful free radicals like the hydroxyl free radicals and not interacting with the beneficial free radicals and allowing the body to just perform that function on its own. Because I mean, there's nothing more intelligent than our own innate, you know, system. You know, that, that electron transport chain was designed for a reason. It innately knows what it's doing.

And it's right there in that same Nature Medicine publication. Again, that's why it's such a landmark paper. They took, say, nitric oxide, superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radical formation through the Fenton reaction, and they added vitamin C or hydrogen gas. And you can see that vitamin C neutralized everything, the good, the bad, everything. So vitamin C is great. It's gonna get rid of the bad, but high amounts could also get rid of the good.

Right.

Okay, hydrogen gas, when you put that with, um, say superoxide or these other free radicals, there was no reaction. It is thermodynamically possible, but it's kinetically infeasible based upon the— these rate constants. See, the hydroxyl radical is so reactive that it will react with anything. Yeah, anything that's in the vicinity.

And that's really the only free radical that I'm aware of that has no known benefit in the body.

Pretty much, right?

I mean, it's—

I mean, maybe by accident.

Okay, because ostensibly we'd want to take that as close to zero as possible.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's just because it reacts so quickly with, with anything, and that's going to cause, you know, DNA damage and all sorts of problems. All the other ones can kind of be regulated, and your body have a natural detoxification systems for that, like the superoxide dismutase enzyme, right? And all the other ones. So in And so we're going through some of this history. We first see that hydrogen is selective because it can only react with the most oxidative or strongest radicals, the most harmful ones, right? And it's small enough it can actually get into the mitochondria, whereas again, these other larger antioxidants, maybe like vitamin E, which is more— it's larger, but it's also more lipophilic, so maybe it can't easily transfuse into the cytosol and then go into the mitochondria or different areas. Hydrogen gas can do that, where vitamin C is more water-soluble, so it's gonna have a harder time going through the cell membrane. It has to go through a transporter protein. Hydrogen gas, again, there's no problem. It can diffuse very easily into the mitochondria, and there it can help with these free radicals and acts as selective antioxidation. There are 3 ways that hydrogen is helping with this antioxidative process. And that's one of them, is it's only going to react with the most toxic hydroxyl radicals if it reacts with them at all.

Yeah, I hope people are picking up on the fact that, that, you know, how profound that is, because it is the only selective antioxidant that I've ever been able to find in any kind of research. You know, um, you know, anti— antioxidants are, you know, abundant, but selective antioxidants, the mechanism that hydrogen uses to leave the body's production of free radicals, necessary free radicals, alone, reduce the harmful free radicals that we don't need, um, and allow this, this cellular homeostasis to return. I mean, you just can't overemphasize how unique hydrogen is in that, in that way.

Yeah, and that's actually— as cool as that is, that's a minor mechanism by which it exerts these antioxidant effects.

Really?

The other big one is because it's able to regulate your body's innate or natural antioxidant defense mechanisms.

Wow. Because it can even bring redox up.

That's right. Yeah. Wow. So, so you have like your natural antioxidants, right? Glutathione, superoxide mutase. These are all regulated by this transcription factor, the NRF2 pathway, the NRF2-KEAP1 pathway. What happens, this is a protein that's in the cytosol. And when you get oxidative stress that's happening, then you get oxidation of this, like, keep one factor basically, and then the NRF2 can diffuse into the nucleus. There it binds to the DNA, and then you get this basically just transcription of your body's natural antioxidants.

So it's trying to protect itself.

Exactly.

Catalase, glutathione.

They all start to increase. Yeah. NRF2 regulates over 200 different cytoprotective proteins and enzymes.

Wow.

This is the other cool thing. Hydrogen is only going to upregulate NRF2 when the cell needs it. So if you have a cell— we've published studies on this demonstrating that hydrogen can regulate and upregulate NRF2, but only if there was a stress.

Wow.

So if the cell is— if you take hydrogen gas, you put in a cell culture, and you measure NRF2 levels from a healthy cell you don't see any NRF2 protein changes. You might see some changes in mRNA, but just because you see mRNA doesn't mean it's actually at the protein level. But in general, you don't see any real changes at the protein level. But if you were to add, say, environmental toxin, some stressor or something that would normally cause oxidative damage in the cell, and then you administer hydrogen gas, that's when you see the rescuing effect of hydrogen. Wow. So hydrogen is able to go to the individual cells, knock on the door and say, "Okay, how are you doing? How is your redox homeostasis? What do you need? Do you need the Nrf2 upregulated or not?" And so it's only going to basically upregulate the Nrf2 pathway in the cells that are suffering from not having enough Nrf2 where you want to bring those, say, your glutathione levels up higher. So this is a key mechanism because again, yes, superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, these are all good, but again, only if you have it at the right concentration in the right location for the right duration. If you start making too many of these because you have a hyperactivated, say, NOX enzyme system or certain complex of the mitochondria, that's when it becomes problematic. Hydrogen is able to regulate our body's natural antioxidants so our body can naturally detoxify these oxidants before they get too high and to help clear them.

It's actually using the innate intelligence of the DNA way to regulate that system instead of circumventing the DNA and just suppressing it on its own.

Yeah, exactly. It's, it's regulating everything.

Yeah.

And, and, and then there's a—

fascinating.

And then there's a third way. I said there's three ways. We've talked about two so far. The third way is that hydrogen, because it's signaling effects, it can actually help to suppress excess oxidation that's occurring. In fact, it's more of a modulator Because in some cases, hydrogen is able to— if there's an excess amount of free radicals that are being produced, like say a complex one of the mitochondria or NADPH oxidase enzymes, these NOX enzymes, or neuronal nitric oxide synthase, where you're getting too much nitric oxide in the brain, it's causing oxidative stress.

It happens in Alzheimer's patients, it happens in autistic patients. Ostensibly because of gut dysbiosis, but you see very high levels of nitric oxide, which most people think is, you know, just has a vasodilation effect, which it does, but it can also be a toxic gas.

Yes, it is a free radical. It can be very toxic when you have dysregulation. And that's another key area that hydrogen helps to regulate. See, hydrogen gas is a—

So, Gary, take hydrogen water every day, dude. If you're not convinced like halfway through this podcast, like I'm gonna take some right now.

Well, I mean, the mechanisms are very interesting, but we're still looking at the clinical evidence on this. And it's very— the preliminary evidence looks very exciting. But the nitric oxide one is very interesting because again nitric oxide and hydrogen gas don't react, but hydrogen gas can regulate its production. And so these different enzymes, if they get too high, like for example you have superoxide that's produced from the NOX enzyme and you have high levels of nitric oxide, if those levels get high, they immediately react. I mean the only thing that slows the reaction is the rate of diffusion, and when they do react, you form peroxynitrite, which is a strong oxidative molecule. So hydrogen is essentially preventing that formation because it's able to decrease the amount of free radicals that were produced in the first place. So you have prevention, but it's not more than just prevention because as I said earlier, our bodies need free radicals. So sometimes the cells need a little boost. And so in a number of studies, including our own that we'll talk about here in just a second, We can see that hydrogen gas can transiently increase small levels of free radicals. So it can increase, say, superoxide production for just a little bit. It's a small transient level. That's kind of a hormetic stressor. My point is, is think about hydrogen is going to do— go to this cell, and this is not really accurate, but I'm just trying to explain this kind of a layman idea because we can look at these cell culture studies on this. So Hydrogen gas goes to this cell, "Oh, you're not producing enough free radicals to have the hormetic stress, right? So we increase your superoxide production." Now that could in turn activate NRF2, and now you can have higher levels of endogenous antioxidant self-defense system. It goes to this—

To the biome, catalyze all these others.

So that's that cell. The same body, we're talking about the same human. Now we go to the other cell, different organ or an adjacent cell, who knows, And this one says, oh, you know what? You are suffering from oxidative stress. I'm going to decrease the amount of oxidation that's occurring. I'm going to help suppress or downregulate NADPH oxidase system. I'm going to help decrease the amount of free radicals that are being produced. All right. And then it can go to another cell and it can say, oh, you know, I'm going to modulate your entire free radical production so you have a better homeostasis, right? Or maybe it's going to go into another cell and it's just going crazy. Ischemia, perfusion— you have hydroxyl radicals being produced just like crazy. And hydrogen gases, if it's there, it can react with the hydroxyl radicals and form water.

Yeah, so, so you have completely neutralizing the worst free radical in the body. Wow. I mean, it's— I hope mechanistically people are really grasping how incredibly unique that is. It's almost like an intelligent molecule, right? I mean, it sort of arrives and then assesses and can shift its impact based on really what that redox homeostatic environment needs— an improvement in, in redox, a reduction in oxidation. And, and that's just so fascinating because I think very often we just have the, you know, take these blanket approaches. Um, and I did for, for years too. I just thought, man, more more vitamin C IVs, more, you know, more antioxidants, less free radicals. That's a good thing. Um, but really, years ago when I started stumbling upon a lot of your research, talking to you, getting to know you, really going down the rabbit hole of how unique hydrogen is, it's not only a part of my routine every day— I mean, I take it either immediately before or, or right after I do every hyperbaric session because, you know, I realized in, in hyperbarics, uh, you know, that excess oxygen, that oxygen singlet, could be, uh, creating oxidative stress.

Yeah, and it does. And that, that's how HBOT tends to work. Yeah, you, you literally create a hormetic stressor just like exercise, and you, you want to get the benefits and negate some of the negative effects. So taking hydrogen therapy, there's some research on this, at least in cell culture studies, some very interesting research helping prevent oxygen toxicity. so you're able to get some of these benefits. Oxygen is a much stronger molecule, you know, like ozone therapy that people do, or hydroperoxide. There's a number of things out there that are pretty strong and have serious side effects potentially, like HBOT, you know, going too high, going for too long. Oxygen toxicity is a very well-known thing. Hydrogen seems to help negate— or negate is probably a strong word— but help to reduce some of those excess the side effects, so you can still get those benefits. Because to your point, you need to have this— I want to say balance clinically, but really this homeostasis of oxidation and reduction. And so that's really where the research is, I would say, converging in terms of aging and disease conditions and so on. It's not about oxidative stress or the free radical theory of aging, it's all about redox dysregulation. And as you get older, as you age, as you have environmental toxins and so on, you get a redox dysregulation. And the problem is that redox dysregulation can happen not only in the same individual, but even in the same— in the same organ, even in the same cell.

Right.

So you can have like one portion of yourself, say the cytosol, that is suffering from oxidative stress, or say in the mitochondria, oxidative stress that's going on. There's too many free radicals are being produced. But yet another area you're actually lacking reductive potential. Where, say, like in the endoplasmic reticulum or something, you're not able to fold your proteins correctly. If you can't do that, then you can't— protein structure dictates function, right? You need to have the correct redox homeostasis. And so you can imagine if the cell itself is suffering from a redox dysregulation, How would it be possible that taking a conventional antioxidant that only is unidirectional, it's just an electron donor basically, is going to help that?

Well, there have actually been cancer studies with like beta-carotene, I think, where they showed that it went the opposite direction.

Yeah, unfortunately that's exactly right. Then they found people who smoked a lot, when they ate carrots, they tended to— there's a correlation, they tended to maybe live longer and be better. And it just makes sense. Well, yeah, 'cause smoking causes a lot of free radicals carrots, a lot of beta-carotene, that's an antioxidant, so it's going to neutralize those. But when they decided to do the study, hey, let's really determine this, they found that those taking the beta-carotene started dying faster and getting cancer faster than those on the placebo group.

Wow.

And maybe we could talk about the mechanism quite a bit, but maybe it's because, again, you're not able to directly address the redox homeostasis, the dysregulation, right? Because you're just providing a bunch of antioxidants, but you could still be suffering from a reductive stress in different areas. Whereas hydrogen is totally different. You don't have that same concern. But that study actually, it's another maybe critical thing for us to think about just logically as well, because on the surface it can make total sense mechanistically, like, hey, carrots are rich in beta-carotene, antioxidant, smoking, oxidative stress, we should take it. And that's why we have to be careful when we focus too much on mechanisms like, "Oh, this is the mechanism of this, this is the mechanism of that," because just because we can find a mechanism to support something doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be the clinical outcome, because the clinical outcome is going to be a summation of a whole bunch of the mechanisms all living together.

I think some of the worst research we do is when we study things in isolation. We look how something behaves in a laboratory and we assume when we put it back into the human body, it's gonna behave the same way. And very often nothing could be further from the truth.

That's exactly right. And that's also some of my skepticism, even with this area of hydrogen research. I'm talking about this 'cause I'm passionate about this area, and the mechanisms are, I love biochemistry. I love this area.

Clearly you love biochemistry. Yeah, I'm gonna pull us out of the weeds here in a second. 'Cause I wanna get into some of the more practical applications, right?

Which I know is what people want to hear, and we'll do our best to do that, but it goes to my saying, I also have to be cautious because I don't wanna be the hypocrite, like, oh, this is all the things happening in the cell, but we really wanna know, okay, what's the endpoint? What do the clinical studies actually show? That's really what matters.

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Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Because, you know, um, anecdotally and observationally, um, what I have seen from bathing clients of mine in hydrogen gas, um, by using hydrogen gas myself during, during intense exercise— look what we did this morning, um, trying to keep up with my son, his performance in distance racing. You know, he just, just did 100-mile, uh, race. I truly believe if he wasn't powered by hydrogen water, uh, he wouldn't have completed the 7 marathons, 7 continents in 7 days, um, because he had never run a marathon.

Yeah.

Um, you know, I've read some of the, uh, published research on delayed onset muscle soreness, on lactate thresholds, and again, mechanistically it makes sense, but also So practically, in the host, it's also, it's also making sense. So maybe we eventually— I want to get to how should people take it, how much should they take, um, is it safe for everybody to take, you know, hydrogen tablets, say, uh, first thing in the morning, um, maybe another one in the afternoon, or take, take additional hydrogen if you're, if you're exercising intensely, uh, certainly if you're using hyperbarics, um, but where are the broad applications. Does hydrogen water help with hormones and women's health specifically? And how does hydrogen water impact athletic performance?

So I want to finish the mitochondria story briefly because I'm gonna refer back to that as I address all of these things. And the summation of everything is back to the mitochondria, the mechanism, and to that paper that you mentioned. We published a paper in Redox Biology with my collaborators in Japan. Again, they're the real researchers behind this. I'm just happy that I was involved since 2013 actually on this project. But this Redox Biology is a top journal. But what we found was that hydrogen specifically targets a specific protein in complex III of the mitochondria. So remember we went through electron transport chain? In complex III, there's a specific protein called the RISC-A iron-sulfur protein or the RISP protein, and it transfers gives an electron, one electron at a time. Ubiquinol comes in, gives an electron, and then the RISC-A— one goes to the RISC-A iron-sulfur protein pathway. When hydrogen gas targets this protein, it actually stops it from working, basically. It causes a change in this protein, it stops it from working. This is a stress. This is because you're not able to transfer the proteins. The mitochondria quickly recognizes this stress, and you start to see increases in some superoxide levels. Levels, so a slight transit increase in superoxide production, you have an initial drop in ATP levels that quickly causes the mitochondria to respond, to regenerate and rejuvenate. It's, it's the mitochondrial function. And then the RISP, or the iron, the risk iron sulfur protein levels, they come back up even higher than they were. ATP levels go back. You follow that with exercise, as soon as you start exercising, what's the first thing that happens, you start producing free radicals, right? Your ATP levels drop immediately, just very quick. That's why creatine phosphate kicks in very quickly, right? All these similar things start happening, and then later you start having an increase in everything. So you get the mitochondria biogenesis, right? So one of the main targets of hydrogen gas seems to be this RISC8 iron sulfur protein in complex 3 of the mitochondria. So mitochondria is a prime target of hydrogen. And based upon that, we can understand why hydrogen is able to regulate redox homeostasis, produce some free radicals when needed, suppress free radicals in other cases, activate the NRF2 pathway, increase mitochondrial regeneration, rejuvenation, ATP production, all the cellular things that are needed right there in the mitochondria. And now we have one of the mechanisms of how hydrogen specifically does this.

Wow. Wow.

So now let's go to these practical applications, 'cause I wanna refer back to this, that target, and we can understand how hydrogen gas would be doing some of this based upon understanding of the mechanism.

Yeah, so maybe we start with athletic performance.

Sure.

Right, because, you know, vast majority of my audience is exercising on a regular basis, and they're either taking hydrogen water or they're not.

I take hydrogen for all my exercise.

So do I. And I absolutely unequivocally notice a benefit. So does my son. And so does every athlete that I work with.

So there's a couple of points. The first one I want to point out is when it comes to athletic performance, we call it an ergogenic effect, okay? We first, whatever we do, we first don't want to make things worse. And that is a major concern that a lot of new emerging technologies, supplements, fad concepts, concepts come in where they could potentially negate some of the exercise benefits. We talked about earlier how, uh, some— and some studies show that taking antioxidants can actually blunt exercise performance because you're— maybe you're blunting those free radicals that you need. Taking, uh, NSAIDs and anti-inflammatories, same thing, that could potentially blunt exercise benefits.

Cold water immersion immediately after— yeah, strength training, another good one.

Yep, exactly. Yeah. So, when it comes to hydrogen therapy, we can very confidently say actually that hydrogen at least does not negate exercise benefits, it doesn't impair exercise performance. So, that's number one. If there's a question, maybe you should really be cautious before you try to do any intervention. Hydrogen doesn't do that and we can think about the mechanisms. It doesn't react with other free radicals at all, it can't do it, it's only going to regulate the NR2 pathway when there's a serious problem going on. It actually can increase superoxide production similar to exercise. And then we look at the studies, we look at the animal studies, for example, with exercise, so combinational studies, we actually see that during the control, of course, there's no increase in mitochondrial biogenesis. We look at a marker, PGC-1-alpha, this is peroxisome proliferator active receptor coactivator 1-alpha. It's—

it's a mouthful. There's gonna be a test on this later, so I hope that everybody got that.

Well, but this, this is the master target we want to activate. Things like AMPK can activate this, um, which AMPK gets activated when you break ATP down to get some AMP levels. The AMP can activate AMPK. Um, calcium is another one that can activate this, but you want to activate PGC-1α, and exercise does that really well. PGC-1α in turn can increase things like mitochondrial biogenesis and vascular endothelial growth factor and a number of things. So hydrogen— when you do exercise and you combine it with hydrogen, you see PGC-1α levels increase. Mm, actually they increase even more than exercise alone.

Wow.

When you do the same exercise with vitamin C, you see PGC-1α levels decrease.

Yeah, it's not—

so this is critical to understand. This means that hydrogen is not impairing exercise performance And if anything, it might act as an exercise mimetic to help to improve exercise performance, especially over the long run, because you see increases in PGC-1α. Wow. So this is animal studies, and it makes mechanistic sense based upon the mechanisms I just talked about in these in vitro studies, cell culture. Now we look at the clinical studies. There's a breadth of studies on exercise performance, and—

I've read them in swimmers, elite swimmers, I want to say another one in elite soccer players.

That's right. Yeah.

So I've read some of this research and more discussed like delayed onset muscle soreness, but it also discussed performance recovery. I don't remember if we went into specific mechanisms, but I mean, I don't, I don't know that I have read a negative research publication on hydrogen. I'll just put it that way.

Yeah, it depends on definition of negative. There are a number of papers that show there are no benefit. We published an article one of my first articles actually when I was doing my master's— is there's a lot of people who are saying that their VO2 max was increasing when they take in hydrogen water. And it was a simple study because we know exactly how to measure VO2 max. It's a little more complicated. We'll say VO2 peak for those who are exercise physiologists. But we looked at this and we found that there was no increase in the VO2 peak following acute supplementation with hydrogen. Mechanistically, that wouldn't be expected. But in that case, it would be a ICANega study. However, we did a sub-analysis of some of the— like, look at the exercise and heart rate at lower exercise intensities, we could see that the heart rate was a little bit lower. And there's changes like in the respiratory quotient or the respiratory exchange ratio and a number of other changes. Changes, and other people have reported on this too, showing that actually hydrogen, even an acute dose of hydrogen water, might be able to help with some of the athletic performance, whether hydrogen water or hydrogen inhalation.

Well, it did in swimmers and it did in soccer players.

Yes, exactly. And some of the soccer players, they took it for like a week, but they was not at a VO2 max, wasn't a max effort. So, we're probably not going to see a change if you just take one dose of hydrogen and you go for for peak performance. But you might see even just one dose of hydrogen and you can see at like a lactate threshold, a pretty high intensity, you can maybe exercise for a longer period of time, maybe do more bouts of exercise, and probably those benefits are going to be more significant when you do a longer dosing protocol because again, just like exercise, it takes time to activate mitochondrial biogenesis. So by taking hydrogen water, water, you want to recover quickly because that's like the number one thing that comes to athletes is you want to recover fast. Why? So you can train again, right? It's a vol— it's volume dependent, right? And the volume is limited by how quickly you can recover. And so by taking hydrogen water, if we can improve the inflammatory response, we actually can see that an acute dose of hydrogen often will increase superoxide production and inflammatory markers like interleukin-6, for example. and then it goes back to baseline faster and lowers that chronic low-grade inflammation, lowers that chronic oxidative stress.

Which is why it has a positive effect on delayed onset muscle soreness.

Yeah, there's a lot of potential mechanisms that could be going on with that, and more research needs to be done because a lot of those studies are still pretty small, right? But we can see though in the studies that have been done where hydrogen does seem to exert like an anti-fatigue effect, right? right, but able to exercise, uh, let's say, yeah, there was a scale where they rated the, the Borg effect or the RPE.

Yeah, yeah, where they rated the actual, um, level of intensity, level of perceived effort. Yeah, the perceived exertion, perceived exertion. Yeah, the level of perceived exertion. And in, in nearly all of those cases, their, their level of perceived exertion for the same amount of exercise was lower. Yes. I mean, that's clearly something that would, in my opinion, improve performance.

Yeah, you can do it again. And but those are also correlated with changes in, say, lactate levels. Those, those levels were also lower, right? Which, you know, the reason you make lactate in the first place is because there's a mismatch between how fast you need ATP and how quickly your mitochondria can make ATP. So if you need ATP fast enough, or faster than what your mitochondria can provide, you have to go through glycolysis.

You start producing carbon dioxide instead of using oxygen, right?

Yeah, well, it's not carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is only produced during the TCA cycle, the citric acid cycle. Glycolysis doesn't use oxygen or anything. It just breaks down your glucose molecule, and in order to continue driving— the end product of glycolysis is this molecule called pyruvate, and then pyruvate normally enters into goes to the citric acid cycle and then gets converted to acetyl-CoA and then citrate, you do the whole citric acid cycle, then you make NADH molecules, then you go through the electron transport chain, complex 1, 2, there's 3, complex 3, right? There's a whole process, takes quite a bit, makes a lot of ATP. One glucose molecule can make 30 or 32 ATP molecules. You even use oxidative phosphorylation. But glycolysis only makes like 2 net ATP, but it's a lot faster. I won't give you numbers, but it's a lot faster. So if you can't oxidize pyruvate fast enough, then you convert pyruvate to lactate. And that's important because lactate production allows glycolysis to continue going. So lactate production actually delays fatigue, it allows you to continue exercising, it prevents or delays acidosis, for example, because the whole purpose of lactate production is you're actually regenerating a molecule that you're familiar with NAD+. Yeah, NAD+ drives glycolysis, and if you convert all your NAD+ to NADH, you can't do glycolysis anymore. So by converting pyruvate to lactate, you convert NADH to NAD+, and then any NAD+ can drive from glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate, that can cause that oxidation to 2,3-bisphosphoglycerate. So you get any NAD+ being produced. So in these studies where lactate levels are lower, there's a couple of potential things that are going on. Number 1, maybe because you did this exercise intensity, you need X amount of ATP, and so maybe what's happening is the hydrogen helps your mitochondria function better so you can provide the amount of ATP you need via oxidative phosphorylation through your mitochondria as opposed to anaerobic glycolysis.

So in other words, it's just to, again, to pull us out of the weeds, it's allowing you to exercise at the same intensity for a longer period of time.

Yeah, exactly. Either because of—

Because that's anecdotally what I notice.

That's right.

In my son and every athlete that I put it on. I mean, I bathe them in hydrogen water. I have them consume hydrogen-rich water. And I have hundreds of clients that by bathing and consuming it have both reduced their their pain, improve their recovery, and increase the duration that they can exercise at a high level of intensity. And, and this has been in a number of UFC fighters and a number of professional athletes that most people watching this podcast would know, um, that perform at a very high level, and now they would swear by it.

Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. And, and the research is still ongoing with that, and I think we'll start to see some of the differences in the mechanism, because when you drink hydrogen water, actually a lot of the hydrogen gas is expelled out of your lungs lungs, so a lot of that doesn't actually reach the muscles, yet we still see these direct benefits versus, say, inhalation of hydrogen gas. That's going to have some different, different effects as well, but they both have very, you know, uh, obviously benefits that we see when you look at the clinical studies.

So let's go through some, uh, again, I want to pull this out of the weeds. So now you know the mechanism, um, I want to pull this out of the weeds, but, um, you know, I, I want to talk about, uh, women's hormones and women's health of, um, PCOS, uh, and, and, and hydrogen-rich water. Um, we, we touched on, uh, athletic performance. There was also a really interesting article published in, um, the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. And in this article was— I think it was a 6-month study, uh, they broke these, uh, gerontology patients into two, two categories. One drank hydrogen-rich water, one did not. They used, uh, um, tattoo markers for methylation. They used, uh, they measured like sit-stand ratios. Uh, they also measured, you know, different cognitive scoring, um, short-term recall, uh, learned memory. There were different, uh, a number of different, um, measurements for cognitive function, and it seemed to universally improve the hydrogen-rich water side significantly across all of these markers. Um, it was— that was another one that really piqued my interest in hydrogen water because, you know, a lot of studies are in young athletes, you know, like 22-year-old soccer players, you know, 25-year-old, um, you know, competitive swimmers. But here you have a population that's deconditioned, um, you know, they're not out there sprinting, and part of their protocol wasn't to change their exercise regimen, yet they had exercise benefits.

Yeah.

They actually— I'm calling it sit-stand ratio. There's another term for it. But— and that was another study that really drew my interest to hydrogen-rich water because that was the only intervention that they made for that 6-month period of time. Yeah.

And I'm familiar with that study. It wasn't one of the ones that I participated in, but I know the authors, the researchers. And yeah, it was a very powerful study because to your point, this was number one, it was a longer study. They're using the hydrogen-producing tablets. And so you get a pretty high dose of hydrogen, which is important because sometimes some of these studies, they use hydrogen water, but the concentration, they may have found more effective benefits if it was a higher dose. This is one of the potential trends. We found this in metabolic syndrome study, for example, when we can talk about later. But that study showed some of these potential benefits that you already mentioned. And it was like 6 months, it was a pretty good duration. And that makes sense when you think about the mechanisms. Hydrogen is not a super powerful molecule, and that's what makes it largely safe as well. And so it's going to go in and it has these effects in the mitochondria and in the cell, and it's these long-term benefits that we start to see. So that's why going longer, like for 6 months, you might still see more of these benefits. And also this is what gets me excited because yes, I am very interested on the mechanism of biochemistry just because I like to see how things work.

Clearly you are.

But we want to know that those clinical endpoints, and here we're showing that it's translation, it's being translated, right? It's translatable between the cell culture to animal studies, and then finally to the human studies, right? And like, I know you mentioned with the women, at PMS and PCOS as well. More research needs to be done on this. I was involved, I helped author one of those studies, but it was more of a subjective type thing that we looked at and it does show favorable effects. So I wouldn't say hydrogen is like a hormone or necessarily mimics those things, but again, by helping to improve the terrain, the cellular terrain and how the inflammatory process and oxidative stress, you can start to help maybe regulate things that are really outside of homeostasis. So really think about hydrogen as a homeostatic adaptogenic regulator.

Yeah, yeah. You know, you also are in the 24 Week, uh, Metabolic Syndrome.

Yeah, that was the one.

That's— this, this I find fascinating because, um, the vast majority of Americans with chronic disease have metabolic syndrome. Um, and the vast majority of my deconditioned clients have metabolic syndrome. Um, 41% of children have metabolic syndrome. Um, you know, 52% of adults. I mean, you know, we become the sickest, fattest, most diseased nation in the world despite the fact that we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare, largely because of metabolic syndrome. And, you know, metabolic syndrome is a combination of things, you know, hypertension, high triglycerides, poor insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance, obesity. And that was another one that was very fascinating to me. Can you, can you talk about what happened to those patients? What changed? And what, if anything, surprised you? And what does this mean to hundreds of millions of Americans that are suffering from metabolic syndrome?

Yeah, this was a 6-month study. It was conducted in India with some of my colleagues there, and it it was a pretty big undertaking. We use the hydrogen-producing tablets in the study because we could provide a high consistent dose of hydrogen.

Which by the way is why I'm not a proponent of the hydrogen bottles any longer. I used to be a big proponent of the hydrogen bottles. I'm not a believer in those anymore. I noticed that the proton exchange membranes will break down over time. The seals would break down over time. A lot of these would, if you did clean it regularly, you would get almost like mold in, in the bottom. And then because there were so, so many Chinese fakes on, on the market, you know, I had, uh, I had clients that actually had these things explode on them. And, and to get a relatively low dose of hydrogen versus getting like 12 parts per million to 13 parts per million, um, from an elemental magnesium tablet, I mean, it's, it's apples and oranges, even cost-wise. And I hadn't seen any studies using hydrogen bottles. I'd seen them with hydrogen inhalation, hydrogen tablets. Maybe there were some with hydrogen water bottles that I'm unaware of, but I haven't seen it.

Yeah, I mean, the bottles can work, but there are a number of caveats. I think you mentioned all of those, right? There's some bottles that are okay, but then the longevity of those. The nice thing about the tablets, just for research purposes, is it's a lot easier to give a client a bottle of tablets and teach them exactly how to use it. And we know they're getting at least a minimum —same dose. Even if it's not exactly the same, we know they're at least getting a certain amount of hydrogen in order for it to be clinically relevant. A minimum threshold, okay.

Yeah, hitting that threshold. So can you talk a little bit about the metabolic syndrome paper?

Yeah, so this paper, it was actually— it was both surprising but also expected because there were a number of other studies already on the metabolic syndrome area, but we were using a higher concentration of hydrogen and a longer duration. And what we found was we found improvements in triglycerides, in cholesterol levels, in the ratio, for example. We found decreases in some of the inflammatory markers and oxidative stress. Maybe something that was surprising was there was— the BMI was lower, which specifically because of weight loss, those seem to be more just fat loss in the hydrogen water group.

And you just converted half my audience, right? But that one— really? Better fat loss?

Well, it wasn't a primary endpoint, but it's something that was observed. And this has actually been shown in a number of studies where there seems to just be some modest weight loss, specifically from fat mass, and potentially an increase in lean body mass. And And it's interesting, you'll probably like this, this is really interesting, but there was an animal study, it was published in Journal of Obesity, I believe, it's a Nature publishing group also, or it used to be, but in this study they used leptin-deficient mice, so leptin-deficient, leptin is a hormone that makes you feel full, and so if you don't feel full, you want to keep on eating, and so these mice would overeat and they were fed a high-fat diet.

But they would blunt leptin so they wouldn't have a satiation response.

Exactly, so just keep on eating. Yeah, well, those given the hydrogen water, they, they like were so much thinner than the other, other rodents were. It was just— I mean, those pictures in the article, you can just visibly tell the difference. In fact, the drinking of hydrogen-rich water in this case was equivalent to like a 20% caloric restriction. Wow. And mechanistically, they found that hydrogen increased FGF21, or fibroblast growth factor 21, which increases energy expenditure which is again, something that happens in the mitochondria.

So it's metabolism, improves metabolism. And wasn't there recently a paper, you might've been involved in it, comparing it to GLP-1s?

Oh yeah, there was a study on that. I wasn't involved with that paper, but that was interesting because hydrogen seemed to have some benefits in terms of basically helping restore some of the losses that can happen with like obesity or whatever. So you can have basically the right levels that you would otherwise— you're supposed to have, and maybe that's helping to regulate somebody's weight or their satiety or just their perception, their desire. There's a lot of— hydrogen is very multifactorial because of what it's doing to the brain, what it's doing to the gut, and what that in turn is going to do to the brain. And then if that's going to change, then you're going to have your dietary habits will change. That's further going to change your gut microbiome. And then you might feel like exercising, you have more energy 'cause you're improving the mitochondria. And now if you start to exercise, and we see this in some of these studies where people, where they're taking hydrogen water, and like, write down in the journal, "I feel like exercising more, I walked more," which is kind of a confound, but it's also, that's very interesting that people are wanting to just move more and do things more. And that's very important for overall health.

Well, you know, there's also, a link between the reduction of fiber in our diets over time and the reduction of this production of hydrogen gas.

Oh, that's a very interesting correlation. And yes, basically, if you have a healthy diet, if you have a healthy microbiome—

Healthy microbiome.

Yeah, if you have all these are healthy and good, you naturally produce a lot of hydrogen gas. Actually, you can produce up to, you know, I don't know, over 10, even 13 liters of hydrogen gas a day, just by having a microbiome with a lot of fiber. Now, a lot of that hydrogen gas is not, is gonna be consumed by other bacteria, it's gonna be lost in flatulence. So, you don't actually get a lot of—

Lost in flatulence? I love the scientific term for it. And it's explosive. Just bust an ass. Yeah, it's explosive. Because it's above 4%.

Yeah, yeah. But you know, it is interesting when you look at some of these studies, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, a lot of neurological conditions, they tend to have lower hydrogen gas in their air, in their exhaled air, their breath hydrogen gas is lower. And when you look at my collaborators at Nagoya University, they looked at Parkinson's patients and the bacteria in their fecal matter actually had less hydrogen-producing bacteria than those who don't have those diseases. So again, a very strong correlation. Again, correlation does not equal causation, of course, but these are important correlations that you would expect to exist, that would exist if there were a causative factor going on, right? Same thing with the Japanese centenarians, right? Those who become centenarians, they have higher exhaled hydrogen gas levels, goals than, than, you know, younger people who, you know, don't, don't end up living as long, basically.

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So, so for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, water, um, what is their entry point? What's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water if they're— if they've never consumed it before?

Well, it's— I guess it's pretty simple.

One hydrogen tablet a day, uh, start it in the morning, take it with food, take it without food, take it before exercise. How would you— how would you tell somebody who's, um, compelled maybe after listening to this podcast?

If they want— and that's kind of my first thought is first, what does the research say? Like, what is your situation and circumstance at, right? Because, you know, hydrogen is not proven. That's kind of anti-science also. Like, we don't prove anything. In science, we try to prove things are false. And if we can't prove they're false, then it increases the probability that they're probably true. But we never really know if it's true, right? And so I guess first I'm just saying, I don't want to misrepresent like the Emergen-Study It's like, yeah, 200 human studies, but they're kind of all over the place from universities all over the world, not like just a focused look at this specific primary endpoint so we can make this specific claim or whatever, right? So, there needs to be more research to really categorically say, "Yes, if you do hydrogen, you will have this benefit. This is what it is." Instead, I think that people should have an informed consent. They should understand, "Hey, this is an emerging area. The safety is very high. The research looks promising, especially animal research, but the number of clinical studies look good." And if you have that, funds, the discretionary means to try, then by all means, you can try it because I believe the safety is high enough that you can do that, right? And so if that's you and you do want to try, then I guess if you're going to try the hydrogen tablets, for example, then yeah, you actually only need one. In fact, most of the research, just one tablet will provide you more hydrogen than the majority of all the clinical publications Wow, because most, most of them did not use hydrogen tablets. But that's starting to change because the hydrogen tablets have been now used in clinical research. Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, because they're just— they're convenient and you provide very high dose. And now there's looking at some of these studies that potentially dose-dependent effect. And if you also look at the translational effects, so animals, they drink a lot more water compared to us. I mean, like, an ant— like, we'd have to be drinking like over a gallon of water water a day, you know, and to drink the equivalent to what an animal would, a rodent. So they're getting a lot more hydrogen. And so maybe one of the reasons that they are more responsive to the benefits of hydrogen is they're also getting a higher dose. There's a lot of other metabolic factors as well, but there's some trending in some cases when they have the higher doses is beneficial, which is why a lot of researchers are choosing to use hydrogen tablets, you know, but, but, and there are some studies that, that there are some studies that show that a high concentration is not more effective than a low concentration in that specific area. Yeah, but there are other studies showing that a higher concentration is more effective in those specific areas. But there are no studies for hydrogen water— there are no studies where a higher concentration is less effective than a lower concentration. Okay, now that's not true for inhalation. So you're gonna guess—

so if you're gonna do it, yeah, that's 2 to 4%, but, um, so if you're going to do it, you, you taking a tablet that's 12 parts per million, um, and when would you consume it? First thing in the morning?

Yeah, first I would just consume it daily. Yeah, like we just think about what's the easiest thing, just consume it daily. And then if you want to be, um, okay, figure out some regimen, whatever, we don't have enough research to really say this is going to be the most effective, right? Um, for example, you can take it fasted. There's ideas if you take it fasted, well then maybe you don't have any noise in your blood or whatever, and then hydrogen gas can directly cause the signaling and you can get those benefits. Take it before you exercise. But you could also argue before I exercise every time. Yes. And, and that's— and that makes total sense.

Is that when you take it, or in, in general?

I feel like I do hydrogen water before exercise and I do like inhalation of hydrogen gas like after like a post-exercise. Okay. But, but you can do there's arguments both ways and we just need more clinical research to see if there's really any difference. So you're just saying, just take it down. Just take it because it's not like caffeine. If you want the benefits of caffeine to help you exercise, you actually take it before you exercise, right? That's not true with hydrogen. Hydrogen is going to provide a benefit that kind of stacks on top of itself over time. And because we start to change gene expression, we start to change the function of mitochondria. So we start seeing changes over time and they become more and more consistent. Consistency is the most important. And now if you're really thinking about something important to you, then yeah, take the hydrogen before you exercise. But for that matter, take the hydrogen after you exercise also. So you can, you can safely take, you know, a number of these, say, tablets. There's, there's no safety concern when it comes to hydrogen gas itself, just pure hydrogen, right? There's really no safety concerns. They've been using hydrogen gas to prevent, say, decompression sickness since the 1940s at orders of magnitude higher than what you would ever talk about therapeutically, dissolving a gas in water and then drinking that. So, there's not a concern there. You just start running up against how much magnesium can one tolerate, for example. So, you can probably take—

'Cause there is a trace amount of elemental magnesium that remains after it effervesces. It's not a therapeutic dose of magnesium either, but it's—

Well, not necessarily because most people, see, most people, are only getting around 300-400 milligrams of magnesium. Most people are deficient in magnesium. So simply by taking 1 to 2 tablets a day, you're literally no longer being deficient. And that can literally move the needle, just not being deficient in magnesium. And I would suggest that the research indicates, at least my interpretation, that taking closer to around 700 milligrams of magnesium is probably better for you. So taking several tablets a day, you, yes, you get the benefits of hydrogen, but I'm just saying you also are getting some of that magnesium as well. And that can help move that needle a little bit more, 'cause magnesium we know is, has a lot of benefits to it.

Now, what is like really exciting you about the research in the hydrogen? Because as I've poked around the research, you know, I've seen it in, concussive injuries, you know, comparing it to the standard protocol for concussive recovery and being magnitudes better than the standard protocol. I've seen it used, you know, to soak limbs immediately after injury compared to the RICE protocol, rest, ice, compress, and elevate. There seems to be significant indications in cognitive studies that the Journal of Experimental Medicine Experimental Gerontology, there seems to be significant impact for delayed onset muscle soreness and maybe, um, blunting the lactate threshold for athletic performance. Um, you know, I, I, I certainly think that making it a part of your daily routine, definitely not going to have any negative side effects. And there's this whole host of selective antioxidant benefits that you're not getting from your regular other, you know, ingestion of antioxidants. I will say that, again, anecdotally, I have seen the greatest impacts from people that are bathing in it in terms of like immediate benefits. Like, my, you know, Sage, my wife, has an L5-S1 fusion. And so when her back acts up, it travels right up her spine and she literally just cannot sleep. It locks up. When I rub her back, it's like as hard as a— it's hard as rock. Um, but if she gets in a 25-minute hydrogen bath right before bed, she'll sleep 7 hours. Um, and I put Navy SEALs in there. I put Sean Ryan in there. He called me the next day and was like, dude, this is the first time I got 8 hours sleep in 15 years. The first time I woke up with no pain in 15 years. And it, you know, maybe lasted 48 hours. Um, I put arthritic patients in, in these tubs, bathe them in hydrogen 25, 35 minutes. Um, no one's ever gotten out of there and said, I feel the same or feel worse. Almost without exception, related to inflammatory conditions— knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back— there seems to be an immediate benefit for people and pain, inflammation, like, yeah, you know, range of motion. And I have seen this so many times and so consistently that I'm absolutely convinced. And so what are your thoughts on that? Well, that's exciting.

I mean, you know, it's interesting because— That's exciting. Well, it's interesting though, because what you're talking about is your experience.

Yes, I wanna be cautious to say exactly that.

Yeah, and these, I guess we could term it anecdotal evidence, which is not something we just throw away, but it's anecdotal, but it's still a form of evidence.

By the way, eczema and psoriasis, Yeah. So in front of my eyes, I've seen it.

And there are actually some case studies on those areas also, right? So, so there can be some mechanistic sense to some of these things. And so, but, but bathing doesn't have as much research as say drinking hydrogen water or inhalation. So I have to be a little bit more cautious on what I can say, what we see clinically. Mechanistically, I could see how some of these examples make sense. Makes sense. You get in the water and immediately hydrogen gas, the smallest molecule, it can penetrate the skin and it can actually get into those areas. Almost like it's not there, right?

I mean, it's transdermal.

Yeah, it goes transdermally. I mean, it's still— we don't want to go into some of the Brownian diffusion aspects, but—

No, please don't. I'm just kidding.

But it can get to those areas And we can see effects, like in our research, we found that hydrogen influenced the mitochondria within as little as 2 minutes, right? So we can see effects immediately. And when you drink hydrogen water, you're influencing the microbiome and you see excelled hydrogen gas within just a couple of minutes also. So hydrogen gas is going to the body, but again, the concentration is probably not very high, if at all, in say, your knee or something after you drink hydrogen water. So the benefits to the knee come through other mechanisms, other second messengers, other things that are happening versus if you were to bathe directly there or if you were to inhale hydrogen gas. Now that hydrogen gas is getting feared into the blood and getting into those joints specifically. So those are different mechanisms and they can be supported by mechanisms actually. I mean, I've seen it so consistently. Which is why I think you can't necessarily say what's better, bathing or drinking or inhalation. Really, if you can, you should do all of them. I would say most of the research is on hydrogen water inhalation, and bathing is starting to emerge, and that's becoming maybe more popular, but mechanistically, we understand how hydrogen gas works on the mitochondria level, its effects on signaling, calcium signaling, for example. So some of these can start to make sense.

Probably why some of the exercise benefits. So let's talk about inhalation because hydrogen is amazingly effective at very low doses. I mean, concentrations, 2 to 4%. Yes, yes.

And we don't want to get confused because the concentrations in water is very different than inhalation, right? Because we want to reach at a certain micromolar level, a few, several micromolars in the bloodstream. When you drink hydrogen water, you only have, you know, let's say you're going to drink this, you're going to get around 3 to 4 milligrams of hydrogen gas dissolved in the water. You drink that, it's going to be diluted by your body, right? By the time it gets into those areas in your, in your, like, a portal vein and your liver, you're going to be around, you know, 5 to 30 micromolar concentration, right? When you inhale hydrogen gas, based on Henry's Law, between 1 to 4% you also get around 5 to 30 micromolar concentration, right? And that's, and that's what we see in, in, in, in the research, in the animal study. So that Nature Medicine publication, again, that was 2% hydrogen gas. Now, this is probably some of the most, most powerful and interesting area of research. I'm going to get to some research going on in Japan right now with, with, with hydrogen gas. That Nature Medicine publication was 2% hydrogen gas. Then they looked at stroke, so an actual clinical— so that was an animal study of stroke. They used actual human studies, and 10 years later in 2017, and they did a safety study and a comparison to see how effective hydrogen gas was. Again, about 2% hydrogen gas. Okay. And in this study, they found that inhalation of hydrogen gas compared to standard treatment, a standard drug, Hydrogen gas was more effective at improving the National Institutes of Radiance scores of the stroke and a number of other parameters. I have to go back and look at the study, but it was essentially more effective in all those parameters. So again, this ischemia-reperfusion injury, free radicals, oxidative damage, inflammation—

And lungs are an excellent delivery mechanism directly into the blood too.

Exactly, and that's an important clarification too, because hydrogen gas, unlike oxygen, does not bind onto the hemoglobin. Hemoglobin. It doesn't get carried through a specific protein, it just dissolves into the—

it dissolves into the blood. Yeah.

And then it is— then, then as it's dissolved at that, you know, 5 to 20 micromolar concentration, it reaches the target organs, has its effect. When you stop inhalation or stop administration, then it goes back to baseline within an hour. So like when you drink hydrogen water, all the hydrogen gas is gone after an hour, right? The benefits remain for like 24 hours or potentially longer if you were constantly doing hydrogen water. So same with inhalation, it's gone after an hour or so, but those benefits remain. So they also looked at in animal studies in post-cardiac arrest syndrome in animal studies, and they found that the 24-hour survival— in 24 hours in the control group, about 43% survived. When you do the normal therapy, which is targeted temperature management, so basically cool the body down like a therapeutic hypothermia, then you have 77% survived. Wow. That's, that's why that's a normal treatment. Mm-hmm. When you did hydrogen gas, 92% survival. Wow. When you combine the two, 100% survival at 24 hours. You're kidding. That's huge.

Why isn't everybody talking about that?

Well, it was an animal study. Ah, it was an animal study. Okay, but this was enough. That was enough to get the Japanese government to approve, um, hydrogen as a Class 2B medicine for the study of hydrogen in post-cardiac arrest syndrome patients in hospitals.

Wow, when do you think that study will be done?

That's already been done. I'm gonna tell you the results. Okay, good. That's exciting, dude.

We waited the whole podcast for this. We should have talked about this minute one.

Messing around with the free radical, you know, stage 4 of that, you know, electron transport.

This is the meat. Yeah, this is— but understanding those mechanisms helps us understand these observations, right? So the Japanese approved this so they could do a study. And it's not approval like now they're gonna use it in the hospitals or whatever, it's just so they can actually do a study, 'cause you have to make sure this is safe. You're talking about people who are coming in comatose, who are already on the verge of death, and then you're going to do some other radical therapy. You've gotta get approval for that. All right, so they gave this approval. There's a major study undertaking, 15 different hospitals that were involved. But then COVID happened. Oh my gosh. So unfortunately the study got truncated, and so it wasn't—

they all died because they were vaccinated.

But they didn't go as long as they wanted to. But, but we do have some of those results. Wow. And basically the, the, the, um, the couple of the endpoints— so they use 2% hydrogen gas, all right? Again, this was not with a nasal cannula where like, you know, so many milliliters of flow rate. This like with a face mask, a tank of exact precise concentration of hydrogen, because remember, 2% seemed to be more effective than 4%, so you really need to control everything, and you can't have it be flammable. It has to be below 4%, or else you can't do the study. Okay, so in the study though, they looked at a couple of things, but I'm just gonna give you two main results. The 90-day survival, because typically after post-cardiac arrest syndrome, you're able to resuscitate the person, medicine, but then the survival is not very high because it has so much damage. They end up dying, you know, several days, weeks later, right? They looked at the 90-day survival, and in the, um, hydrogen— no, in the control group, the control group, I think this— I think there were about 77 patients. It was gonna be like 380 or something patients, but it got truncated. But there was like, in the— in this study, there there was a 61% survival in the standard treatment group. And in the hydrogen group, it was an 85% survival. Wow. So if you had 100 subjects, 61% survived with standard treatment, 85 lived. It's like, what, 24, you know? I mean, that's a pretty significant— Significant, yeah. This is people's lives. This is an actual study. So these people are alive because of hydrogen gas. Wow. And then the primary endpoint was improvements in neurological scores that they were looking at. And in the standard treatment, it was a 39% improved neurological scores. And in the hydrogen treatment, it went up to 56%. So still a pretty big difference. Now, because the sample size is a little bit smaller, this statistically did not reach statistical significance, but still 39% improvement versus 56% improvement was a pretty big— That's a massive improvement. Especially when you consider that there was the survival increase from 61% to 85% was more. So more people who are maybe on the verge who would have died anyways, they also survived. And yet you still saw, an increase in the neurological improvements. Wow. So this really has grabbed a lot of people's attention. And so there's a lot more research that's been going on in this area. And then that's, these are comatose patients. I mean, they're inhaling hydrogen gas, right? Wow. Now more research of course is going on in this area. But it's trending because I believe that there's a lot of corruption and problems with like the FDA and like all this kind of stuff and everything, but that corruption is everywhere. It's not just with these organizations, right? But I do believe, and maybe I'm just too optimistic, but I believe that if we had true, good, concrete evidence with clear primary endpoints, then hydrogen therapy could be a standard care. Like, but, but in order to get that approval, we have to have that evidence, right? And how do we have that evidence unless we do the clinical studies? Why are the clinical studies going to happen unless we educate people about it, right? And that's really what I'm here today for, right? I want to educate people about what's going on, allow people to have their informed consent. We can raise the awareness about this. This is going to allow for more research to happen. And if Hygen really can radically revolutionize healthcare, wouldn't you want to know? Wouldn't you want to use it? Again, something so safe, so simple, that's affordable to anybody. And that's precisely why we're working on this education, right? And that's ultimately why, as you know, I helped to invent that Inhale H2 unit. The entire purpose is not because we know this is gonna cure every disease known to man, it's because we wanna do clinical research. We care, like I care about you, working on educating everyone about it. Well, we want to do clinical research, and now we can do that without tanks of this, this gas and everything, explosive. And we can monitor the concentration, make sure it's therapeutic. And so that's the whole idea behind, you know, Inhale H2 is initially it was for clinical research, and then with Alex is like, people actually want the unit. There are people right now today who would want to use this.

100%. And, and so everyone listening to this podcast probably wants to—

yeah, you get hydrogen water, which we see those benefits, and we have inhalation. So really nice combination. And I— but I believe people should understand the limitations and the preliminary evidence. That, that's how you overcome skepticism, because being skeptic is so important. Yeah, that's how you prevent falling, falling victim to a scam, right? Being a skeptic means that you are open-minded, not so open that your brain falls out, I think that's Oberg's dictum or something. But that means specifically that you do not reject the information without first evaluating the evidence. And you don't accept the information without first evaluating the evidence. You do both. And so I want people to know what the evidence is. And we're not claiming that it's gonna cure a disease. We have all this evidence that's proven to do this. That's the antithesis of science. No, we're just saying, Hey, this is what's shown in the animal studies, the emerging clinical studies. If it makes sense to you, if you have the desire and the monetary means, well then you can give it a try. And now you have options available. You know, when I was doing my research and doing my PhD, I remember seeing some of the results.

And you were like, damn, I wish I had one of these.

I wanna get into this study. We had to take a medical grade hydrogen gas with the exact percentage. And I'm thinking, why not? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I inhaled that stuff, you know, and I want this. Same thing with making hydrogen water. I would make hydrogen water in the laboratory. And so I read these papers, I look at the research, I'm like, we know this is safe. Maybe, maybe it can, it can help me. And so I want to try it. And so I would use it. And so now they're like these tablets or this Inhale H2 machine. Hydrogen, people can use it and they can get clinically relevant doses that we use in the clinical studies if, if you want to do that, right? But I would not say that— I would not say the evidence is so compelling that you should do hydrogen therapy instead of, say, go to the gym. Like, if you have a choice to go to the gym or just drink hydrogen water, yeah, dude, come on, go to the gym, right? But if you're not able to exercise at all all, for whatever reason, you're so busy and you have the discretionary funds, why not try hydrogen water, which acts as an exercise mimetic according to some of these animal and early studies, right? If you, again, if you have the choice— or do both.

If you're going to— that's what I do. I don't have a single client that I don't recommend take hydrogen water. And that's why I'm so glad that you're here to sort of return, you know, the noise to the balance of, you know, what are, the claims that we could make based on the research today, and then where does the research look like it's heading? And I think the nicest thing is that the research indicates that it's extraordinarily safe and offers a plethora of benefits, even though there's additional research that needs to be done.

It doesn't impair performance. It doesn't make things worse. The emerging evidence in animal studies is very promising. The emerging evidence in clinical studies is very promising. It makes mechanistic sense, but, but of course I would not say that you should— that hydrogen therapy is more important or there's more evidence than getting your sleep right or exercising or, or maybe sauna.

Sleep, whole food diet, and exercise. Those are the foundations.

But if you can do both of them, if you can do all of them and you have the discretionary means to do so, I believe that people should have— should be able to make their own choice to do that. And luckily there are good products on the market now. Where people can make that informed choice, right?

I agree. Tyler, this has been amazing, dude. Uh, you know, I know it was very granular for a lot of folks. For my, for my super nerds, which is probably half of my audience, they're gonna love this. Um, for the Andrew Hubermans out there that really want to know the mechanism, they're, they're gonna really enjoy this. Um, I've been a huge proponent of your research. I've been a huge proponent of, of hydrogen water. My family drinks it. My parents drink it. After that experimental gerontology clinical study, I put both of my parents on it. They've been on it, you know, that entire time since I read that study. I think that was published in 2018, November 2018. But I, I'm really deeply appreciative of this because even though, uh, we went very granular on the science, I think people understand now why this is such a unique molecule. Maybe they understand what the difference is between an antioxidant and a selective antioxidant, which makes hydrogen so unique. It's almost like this miracle molecule, um, with how it reacts in, in the body. So, um, if my audience wants to find you, like, where, where can they find out more about you? Are you on Instagram?

Yeah, yeah, you can find me on Tyler W. LeBaron on all channels. Okay. Okay, so Tyler W. DeBaron. Yeah.

And I'll link your research to, you know, in the show notes. I'll link your hydrogen inhalation machine in the show notes. But I always wind down all my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. So you probably know that this question's coming.

Oh no, I'm worried. Oh yeah, yeah.

No, everybody gets the same question. There's no right or wrong answer to it, so.

But before you do, I wanna end with this. Okay. Hydrogen, think of it as a read-only memory. Redox adaptogen that benefits the mitochondria. I want to change the narrative that hydrogen is not just this antioxidant. There's a buttload of antioxidants out there. Yeah, think of it as a redox adaptogen that benefits the mitochondria. Yeah, that's a great way to frame it.

So what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

That's a great question. I think a lot of that comes from within, uh, something divine aspect about that. Um, to be the ultimate human means you are reaching your full potential. Has nothing to do with being better than anybody. It's just, are you making changes? Are you being better today than you were yesterday? And that is in all aspects of your life. How do you treat your neighbors? How do you, are you making the world a better place? Are you improving this gift that we have of our body? Are we, you know, we say if knowledge is our power, then learning is our superpower. Are we learning? Are we doing these things? I think to be the ultimate human, we have a balanced life where we're trying to, become the ultimate, to reach that potential and all those things. And it's not necessarily that we reach our potential, but we're striving for that. We're just making these small changes, just like hydrogen, a small molecule, but it's constantly there and just slowly getting better and better and better. It's not trying to brag or anything. It's just always there. And that's really kind of what we should do. I think, I think, I think if I were to sum it up, it's just, being incrementally better in all the aspects that we can on a daily basis.

Man, phenomenal. We're going to head over into my VIP group now. The VIPs are the only ones I tell who's coming on the podcast before they come on the podcast. And so I let them know you were coming. They were super excited. There's a whole host of questions for you. If you guys are interested in becoming an Ultimate Human VIP, just go over to theultimatehuman.com/vip. Would love to see you in there. Private podcasts, one-on-ones with me, ask Gary anything. There is a 10-month course on becoming the ultimate human version of yourself. It's entirely free. It's all inside of the VIP community. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We're going to have Tyler back again for sure. As you continue your journey on hydrogen, I want to keep people up to date on your research and, and the emerging research and some of the new findings. Would love to see if this study in Japan ever gets completed. That one is completed. Yeah, I mean, oh, the one before COVID Yeah, no, it's done.

Yeah, published in E Clinical Medicine. I'll publish that one, so we will link that one.

Yeah. And until next time, guys, that's just science.