Ben Greenfield: The Unconventional Path to Becoming A Superhuman | TUH #083

Ben Greenfield discusses biohacking strategies including exosomes, gene therapy, and immune interventions. He describes receiving follistatin gene therapy in Cabo for rapid muscle gains and shares how a continuous glucose monitor showed a spike to 198 mg/dL during a Spartan race. Topics range from plasma exchange and hydrogen peroxide nebulization to circadian lighting and metabolic training.
Questions this video answers
July 30, 2024
About 198 mg/dL (just below 200 mg/dL).
Ben referenced a recent rodent study reporting ~16% increase in lifespan after exosome infusion (claimed mechanism: mitochondrial/PGC1α stimulation).
Use 3% hydrogen peroxide mixed 10:1 in saline (i.e., one part 3% H2O2 to 10 parts saline) and nebulize with a standard nebulizer device.
Ben reported receiving intramuscular follistatin gene therapy (clinic in Cabo). He said he weighed 175 lb before, topped out at 191 lb, and then was around 185 lb afterward.
Chapters
I think that vegetable oils are a much worse case than sugar.
There's plenty of people out there that would say that seed oil thing is fear mongering.
If I have corn dog that has been fried in vegetable oil, I can't just go burn that off. Right. Those lipids are used to comprise my cell membrane for sometimes months or years on end, accumulating in the body, creating inflammation.
I want to talk about some of the ways that we are enhancing the body's ability to heal and police itself. You start increasing red blood cells, hemoglobin, and all of a sudden they start these higher tier emotional states. I mean, it's motivating.
That's one of the reasons your superhuman protocol works, Right? My sons, they're 16 years old, they take supplements and they do that based on what I learned about their genes when they were 10 years old. And that's just like their supplement stack to give them a step up in life.
Where do you see the industry headed longevity and anti aging? Is it bio optimization? Where do you really see the innovations going?
I'll. I'll keep this quick.
Ultimate Human. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything, anti aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. And today I'm super pumped to have a very good friend of mine and co biohacker, an absolute icon in the fitness and wellness and biohacking industry, someone I consider a mentor and a friend. And. And what's really funny is we, we the podcast, before the podcast, we're like, let's just turn the cameras on because we're so intellectually curious that we started eating each other's face before the podcast. So welcome to the podcast, Ben Greenfield.
Thanks, man.
Dude, I'm pumped. And we're in London.
I know.
Right now. Yeah.
And which means we get to have crumpets after this.
Well, I, I don't think crumpets is on the biohacking list, is it?
I think if we put ghee on them, it counts. Yeah, I think that's how you fix everything with ghee. Or grass fed on my pizza, ghee on my burritos, my empanadas.
Taking defense to that right now, he's like, don't, don't, don't.
He'd be okay.
Don't dislike. As long as it wasn't. But we, you know, it was so funny was that Ben walked into the hotel room. We're in London, so we're here for the health optimization summit, which was amazing.
With an S. Yeah.
Like, they do. What? Summit?
Yeah, no, no, optimization. They spell with an S over here.
Oh, they do, yeah. There's a lot of funny things about the English, like, and their verbology.
Yeah.
Like health optimization.
Why couldn't they have a Z? Because they even have the word for Z is zed.
Well, they also. Things that are a scheme are actually legal. And it's like, it's like a positive thing. It's like, we should. We should form a scheme. We should develop a scheme. I'm like, no, we don't want to develop a scheme. That's a hair shy of a scam. But here, scheme is like a good thing. Like, it's like a. It's a healthy joint venture.
Oh, so if I tell someone I'm scheming.
Yeah, that's.
That's honorable.
It's honorable. Good. It's like we should develop a scheme for it to launch a new product. Like, we would never say that in the U.S. yeah, they got all kinds of other. All kinds of stuff over here.
That's.
That's a little different. Slow, funky, mate and bloke and.
Yeah, like.
Like, if you want to.
If you're like, Mike is Australian gay.
If you're in a bar, you actually want to challenge somebody to a fight outside, you say, would you like to have a go?
Yeah. Yeah.
Sound like, yeah, would you like to have a go? Yeah, sure, I'd love to.
You know what?
I've got a few minutes.
Take a piss and have a go. Yeah.
Which doesn't mean take a piss. It means have a drink. Right? Yeah.
I don't know how many people are we offending right now, all right. With our yay, literally bastardization of British culture, our audience in half.
But one of the fascinating things that we and I know that we're going to talk about so many things I want to go down the road of what you and I think are some of the most promising things coming out of the biohacking industry. One of the things that we were talking about before the fire alarm went off was the, the pace of innovation right now in the, in. In the biohacking, wellness, longevity space, whatever you want to call it, wellness and, and longevity has become the new luxury. And not only is there a lot of money chasing it, but the efficacy, the science has caught up to some of the stranger. More, you know, esoteric things. And, you know, we talked about that. The regulatory environment's not going to be able to keep up. Obviously, you can't keep pace with the pace of innovation. And so for the consumer, it's like.
Trying to keep up with the Tour de France cyclist who's doping.
Right.
They're just, there's just no doing that.
You know, theoretically, they could win seven back to back Tour de Frances.
Yeah, that's never happened, but. Yeah.
But so, you know, you've got the pace of, of this market and, and, you know, so what are, in your opinion, what are the most promising things? You're watching this podcast and you're like, man, there's so many roads I could go down. There's, oh my gosh, there's red light therapy.
Yeah.
And there's like, for example, you just introduced me to a group out of L. A and we did plasma exchange.
Therapeutic plasma exchange. Yeah.
Which was amazing. Where they actually took the plasma out of my body and, and replace it with alcohol.
It's like an oil change for your body.
Yeah. And I was tired the day that I did it, but the next day I felt amazing. Like, I felt like I was looking through a 4K screen, like I took a limitless pill. But where do you see the, the industry headed, you know, longevity and anti aging, Is it bio optimization? Is it, you know, learning to reduce the risk of pathology and disease? Like, where do you really see the innovations going?
I mean, where a lot of money is going as longevity and anti aging, age reversal, because that's what, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech billionaires are most interested in. So that's where a lot of the money's going. I think if you were to look at some of the things that are interesting right now and still fly under the radar and are still kind of like go to, go to Tijuana or Cabo or, you know, do a protocol that's unproven yet in my, in my opinion, is kind of like the wave of the future. You know, you could look at. For example, you and I both talked about exosomes before.
Yes.
I don't know if you saw the study, like two weeks ago. It was something crazy. I believe it was over 16% increase in lifespan in rodent models with an exosome infusion based on stimulation of the mitochondrial pathways. The PGC1alpha pathway, which is something that you could trigger with. This is one of the reasons that high intensity interval training works so well. Right. You're triggering that PGC1 alpha pathway for mitochondrial proliferation, meaning better health, better ATP production. But in this study, it was an exosome infusion in mice. And the, the idea of Exosomes, these tiny little signaling molecules. It's actually kind of fun. Nanoparticles. I did my. My studies at University of Idaho. My master's degree was in exercise physiology and biomechanics. And when we were looking at cellular function and structure, one of the things that my professor, this was Dr. Dennis Daho, he's showing us these little vesicles that are coming out of the cells. He's like, yeah, this is basically cellular poop, Right? Just like the metabolic waste that cells put out. Well, it turns out fast forward 20 years, now that I'm aging myself. And exosomes are these same vesicles that we once thought were cellular waste products that it turns out are. They're considered to be paracrine molecules, things that cause cell signaling, draw stem cells into specific areas, increase blood flow, allow for intracellular commun. And it appears now they have a lifespan extension effect that could be equivalent or even superior to something like a stem cell infusion.
Wow.
And a lot of doctors now are combining them with stem cells because, you know, like, especially in the US where you're not allowed to expand a stem cell, that you're considered to be a pharmaceutical company if you're expanding a stem cell, which is why you got to go overseas. If you want to get, like, the high mesenchymal stem cell counts and you want to take whatever fat or bone marrow or expand it or umbilical tissue or neonatal product and expand it, in the US you can't do that. But in the US you can take non expanded stem cells and you can combine them with exosomes, and that vastly increases the. The efficacy and the signaling capability of the stem cell. So one thing that I look at in the biohacking industry is, gosh, like, with the studies I'm seeing on exosomes, that's one field I could see taking off even more than it is now.
And what is it? The growth factors, the high molecular weight, highly uronic acid. I think it's also important to point. Exosomes don't have DNA, so unlike stem cell.
Right.
They're not capable of really transmitting a signal to.
Exactly, exactly. I believe they have some micro RNA components, but they don't actually contain the DNA. Right. I mean, I've experimented with them. I've. You gotten an exosome infusion before?
Yeah, plenty of ex.
Have you ever done intranasal exosomes?
My wife did for. For as Nazna and Parosnia when she had. When she had Covid and what was crazy Ben Was she had. I still have the video. 18 months. She had no taste, no smell. And. And then. And then she got that. Remember everybody got that perverted taste, right? And smell where everything was like garbage.
Or trash and like, better than GLP1 for weight loss. Just don't smell anything. Okay?
It was awful.
I mean, my wife hated it, by the way, because she. She got Covid. Same thing. She felt fine, except she lost her sense of smell for two weeks. And she'd sit there at dinner and just be like, I don't even enjoy this.
Same. Same with mine. And my. My wife's thin to begin with, and she got real skinn. Very frail. The point where her family was like, pulling me aside like, hey, what's. What's going on? And I'm like, look.
Yes, it's the.
As nausea brought me out. There's nothing going on behind the scenes with us.
By the way. We're coming up with a new diary. The Clothespin Diet. Just close pin your nose.
She literally would clothes pin herself. But my. My whole point was that she. Somebody told her to take a nasal canulus. Now, this was an injection. This was just with the soft like sponge, that little cylindrical nasal cannulas, and fill her nasal cavity, lay at 45 degrees, fill it with the exosomes and let it naturally drain. Fill it again, let it naturally drain. She worked her way through 5mls in. In. In each nostril. And I kid you not, 40 minutes later, she's sitting at the breakfast counter and I had made eggs and avocado and. Which she never ate, and she took a bite of it and she just started sobbing, like, pouring tears.
And I was like, taste it.
Because she could taste it and it didn't taste like garbage. And she could smell it and it smelled like eggs and avocado and it tasted like eggs and avocado. And I actually, I still have a video to this day because I sent it to my buddies at Juvexo.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, first. First of all, that's, that's, that's interesting because, you know, joking aside.
Yeah.
One of the side effects of GLP1 agonist, the injectable GLP1 agonists that are super powerful is some people get depression. And part of that might be they've completely lost the dopaminergic stimuli from food, which is meant to be enjoyed. And when something that's meant to be enjoyed instead makes you nauseous, you know, it's like your wife cried over the eggs and avocado because we don't even realize the emotional sensation that we can experience or the happiness that we can derive from food until we lose taste or until we're taking some kind of a supplement that makes us nauseous in response to food. Later on, I can tell you an interesting story about the, about some of these GLP1 alternatives. But back to the exosomes. You know, your wife did, you know the equivalent of like the world's most expensive neti pot?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You can also what I did was I got one of the, the nasal sprays, one of the ones I had like one of those silver injection nasal sprays for, for immune function, like when I travel. But I emptied that out of there. I put the exosomes, a little saline solution.
It was like a vaporizer.
My head went clear as a belt for like two weeks. It was nuts really. One vial of exosomes that I went through over the course of two days. Just kind of huffing it pretty unsystematically. Just whenever I felt like, yeah, went through the whole bottle in a couple of days. It was incredible, the increase in mental clarity. And then I went to India. I did a. Have you been to India lately?
Not lately.
I did a three week tour of India and I mean really, the air hazard quality index was above 500, meaning that for me to go out on, you know, one of the walks that I enjoy, I love to walk outside. Two hour walk is the equivalent of smoking 20 cigarettes. That's. That's how poor the air quality hour walk is.
20 cigarettes.
Yeah. This is literally like if you were to have that in the US it would be warning, don't go outside. You know, stay indoors with your HEPA air filters turned on full blast.
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So anyways, I got back from India and you know, I do a lot of like underwater swimming and hypoxic holds and you and I did a bunch of breath work in my where we were just holding our breath. After the Wim Hof breath ups, I could not hold my breath even 3/4 of what I was used to. And I could tell I had a.
Just a lung degradation. That fast?
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, I was there for three weeks anyways though, so I, you know, I did, you know, there's a lot of things that you would see applied to COPD or to lung function. Hydration is the low hanging fruit, but then glutathione, vitamin C, you know, citrus containing fruits, an acetylcysteine, A lot of the things that would be considered popular antioxidants, those are, those are really good function. But I talked with a naturopathic doc over in India and what she uses with her patients, especially in Delhi, which is one of the worst areas, is nebulizing a mix of hydrogen peroxide. And you can do this if you're listening right now and you've been a former smoker or had COPD or you just want better lung function, or there's some kind of wildfire where you're at. You take a 3% hydrogen peroxide solution and you mix it 10 to 1 in saline and then you get one of these like 40, 50 nebulizers from Amazon. And a nebulizer is just basically turning all the little liquids that you have in the container into micro particles that you breathe in. And those saturate your lungs. And hydrogen peroxide actually helps out quite a bit with air pollution. But I talked with another doctor and they said, well, I've done this successfully with exosomes before.
Wow.
So I nebulized exosomes for a couple of days after I got back from India and my lungs felt great within half a week. And so, so there. I think that, you know, back to the root of your question. I think that's one field that we'll see continue to explode and then another one.
You mean the, the field of exosomes and their applications?
Another one is.
And they're very, they're relatively safe. Not relatively, they're very safe.
They're pretty safe. Yeah. Yeah. They're literally just a signaling molecule. You can think of them as like upgrading whatever your body's normal cellular function would be.
They're about an 800th the size of a normal cell though. Right. So they, they actually don't ask permission. They go right through very small, so.
Exactly. Just about anywhere in the body.
And I think that's part of their, you know, that's part of their efficacy because the, you know, they can go into areas of inflammation or they don't have to ask permission to cross the fossil.
Yeah, like a ghost.
Right.
That we'll just walk right through. Yeah, exactly.
So I think that's, I think that bodes well for inflammatory conditions or just like you're talking about the neural inflammation, pulmonary inflammation, you know, areas where larger molecular size compounds are just not going to make it in.
Yeah. I had no clue that the direct impact on lifespan though, until I saw that. That road.
That's pretty interesting. I gotta look, I gotta look that up.
Yeah, it's crazy. It just came. I think it was nature.
Nature. Okay, I'm gonna.
The. The other one and you and I talk about this a little bit this week is gene therapy. You know, like, like the old school CRISPR gene editing that everybody was afraid of and you know, rumbles about the Chinese super soldiers and you know, crazy, you know, growing a third eye. It, you know, the idea of precision gene editing, reversible precision gene editing is very interesting.
This is something we talked about at dinner the other night.
Yeah.
With Dr. Cook. Matt Cook.
Yeah. And, and one leading company in the field, they're called Mini Circle, they've developed a reversible technology. It's, it's a, it's a plasmid based gene therapy that is targeted to specific tissues. It's also reversible, it's reversible. Technically, it's like, it's like a tetracycline based antibiotic that you would get injected if you ever did want to reverse it. I suppose if you actually did start to grow a third eye or some giant research study came out showing that it was. Because this is some of the stuff we're talking about. This is still. Again, back to the root of your question. These are still the fringes of medicine and things that haven't yet been approved. But that could be the wave of the biohacking and human science sector.
Right.
So gene therapy, as of right now, there's only one that's effective that I know of and approved in certain places. To have done you, you would still need like, if you're a US listener, you would still have to travel internationally to have something like this done.
Right.
Like Tijuana, Cabo, Dubai. Those are a few places where I know you can get it done. And it's an intramuscular injection. The one that I got is called Follistatin. And if you've ever googled or if you're, if you're listening right now, you could google, you could google myostatin knockout bowl or Myostatin knockout mouse or myostatin knockout dog. And you see these massive, just like absolutely Swole bodybuilding esque animals who unfortunately because that myostatin therapy actually results in such steep amounts of muscle growth that it can be so anabolic that the animal just dies an early death.
Wow.
Because same similar as bodybuilding. It's like you and I know that. That being a bodybuilder isn't the healthiest thing. Right. Because.
Right.
Not long term cardiomegaly. Enlarged heart. You know, it's a lot of stress. It takes a lot more antioxidants for the body to produce to carry the muscle, to cool the muscle. There's a lot of diminishing returns.
Right.
When it comes to muscle. So with follistatin gene therapy, it's a little bit more of a gentler form of that. Meaning all it is is it's an injection that slows down the degradation of muscle tissue. Basically.
How does this slow down the degradation stop the body from.
There are.
There are things that inhibit muscle growth.
Right.
Myostatin.
Right, Right, right.
So does it inhibit myostatin?
Follistatin is similar to myostatin in that if you were to. If you were to trigger follistatin, you would see an increase in muscle protein synthesis. If I believe the mechanism of action is an increase in mps. So it's not that you're in inhibiting follistatin. You're. You're stimulating follow statin. So again, a lot of this is just purely anecdotal, but I'm. I'm part of a WhatsApp group of a whole bunch of other people who have had this done. I think there's only a few hundred folks who've actually had it done and everyone is experiencing the same thing that I've experienced. I weighed 175 pounds in early March when I was in Cabo and had a nurse walk into the clinic and she literally goes, hey, do you want to be superhuman? I'm like, okay. So. And she quick intramuscular left shoulder. Yeah. In Cabo. In the right shoulder. And that was. It took five minutes. I walked out of there. And since that day, the gym has been easier. Recovery has been profound. I topped out at 191lbs, started training for a Spartan race with my sons, which involved a lot of running and endurance. Went back down to £185, which I'm at right now. I've never put on muscle that fast in my life.
Wow.
And that. That was gene therapy. And so now the next two that are in the process of approval are Clotho gene therapy, which would have a Significant impact on cognitive performance specifically. And apparently you see a stimulation of NAD pathways as well. So if you were supplementing with nad, theoretically you wouldn't need to even take NAD if you had the Clotho gene therapy.
Right.
And then the other one is LH therapy, luteinizing hormone therapy, which would increase testosterone very similar to taking testosterone replacement therapy. And the effects of these gene therapy injections are about one to two years. Oh, wow.
So you get this injection and it lasts for one to two years.
Right.
Now when you say it's reversible, is it reversible because it's. It ends or is it reversible because you can actually.
Because if you were to actually get. I actually asked the doctor, the doctor that did My procedure is Dr. Kahn. And I asked him, like, what if, like I got sick and a doctor puts me on.
Terrible last thing.
Puts me on an antibiotic.
Yeah.
And he said, well, if it's a tetracycline based antibiotic, technically you could reverse the gene therapy if you were on tetracycline based antibiotics. So that. That is the mechanism via which it's reversed tetracycle. Yeah. Yeah.
So, so these gene therapies are basically targeting, shutting on or shutting off.
Exactly.
A certain gene. So you got the outcome. So if you.
Precision gene therapy.
Yeah.
So if you stop crispr, which has a whole bunch of downstream implications.
Yeah. You stop the inhibition and it would be permanent. You know, if you take it out, I mean, maybe you can get it back.
I don't think CRISPR gene editing is reversible, as far as I know.
Yeah, No, I don't think it's reversible either.
Yeah.
Because I would think that once you. Yeah. If you took like a cytosine glycine. Glycine sequence out and you took it out, it's gone. Yeah. So you can't just sort of.
Yeah.
Scoot the DNA and make room for it again. But, so, so, you know, these gene therapies, either turning on or turning off or inhibiting. More enhancing I guess would be the right term. So you, if you inhibit the breakdown of muscle or you inhibit the building. The, the inhibition on building muscle, then all of a sudden you get these outcomes. Like what you're talking about 14 pounds of muscle in what, two months.
Same reason you and I would use like protein or amino acids post workout to increase muscle protein synthesis. You're doing something very similar with that gene therapy.
That's amazing. Yeah. And, and so. But you don't feel you've had any other side Effects from this, positive or negative?
Just none at all. Besides a little bit of extra wasted time in the gym. Because, because you, like I was telling you, I was at the gym, like that week I was visiting the gym in Cabo and I would be there like an hour and a half and look at my clock thinking like 20 or 30 minutes had gone by. Just because you're enjoying it and you're crushing. A lot of people who get on testosterone replacement therapy. One of the side effects of that is a stimulation towards forward progress, towards wanting to achieve things both mentally from a business standpoint, physically, biologically. And so that's one of the reasons that people who are on testosterone like to go hit the gym. This had a very similar effect to something like that. Like you just feel like going out and lifting. So even the motivation is higher. And of course, since you're recovering faster and you're building muscle faster, you know, it's actually, it was, it was incredible.
I call it that old school positive aggression towards working out.
Yeah.
You know, you see people have that all the time. And I think a lot of that comes too from, I mean, I'm sure there's a hormonal component to it, but the, the alpha, alpha male side of things. But you know, you start increasing red blood cells, hemoglobin, the capacity for the blood to transport oxygen, you start raising that oxidative state. People have more energy, they've got more oxygen and energy available for elevated emotional states. So it's easier for them to be passionate or elated or joyful or aroused. And all of a sudden they start existing in these higher tier emotional states. I mean, it's motivating. Right, right.
That's one of the reasons your superhuman protocol works, right? It's, it's PMF to, to open up the cell membranes and then you hyper oxy and then produce more ATP with red light. Yeah, yeah.
And so I want, I want to transfer now and talk about some of the ways that we are enhancing the body's ability to, to heal and police itself. You know, I was talking yesterday at the health optimization summit and we started stumbling upon ways to, you know, everybody's talking about cancer, preventative measures and you know, reducing the toxic load in the body. But what about strengthening the immune system actually is the best at catching metabolically healthy cells that are switching their metabolism to being metabolically unhealthy cells and doing things to really greatly enhance the immune system. So, and, and giving it support. Things like plasma exchange.
Exactly.
And you know, you're actually the one that turned me on to that, I had it done in la. I haven't done my post labs yet, but I did have some mycotoxins. I had a little bit of LP which, which was a concern to me because the rest of my panel looks right.
And Apple B. Yeah. Are the two to look at.
Yeah, yeah. Lp, little A and. And Apob. But you know, multiple mycotoxin wise I had some minor ones, but I'm really going to be interested to see if after taking out that plasma and exchanging it with albumin and then retesting, you know, how much I dropped some of those little toxic loads. Because I live in the, I live in the mold capital of.
Yeah, the world.
I found out told me that Miami is the mold capital of the world. It's like all the places. So I did see some, I did have some, you know, mold spores, some little. Right. Michael types. And so I'm going to look at those. And I had some minor heavy metals that were just starting to get into the yellow.
Yeah.
So have you done the plasma exchange? Do you see this becoming something that's mainstream? I mean, right.
Plasma change. I mean it is expensive and a lot of times it requires a series of treatments and apparently there's a newer form of it. You and I were talking with a gentleman at the symposium this week who developed a different protocol, Lumadi, which is more of a heparin based therapy that is still like a filtration type of protocol.
Basically. Like a dialysis.
Yeah, like different than therapeutic plasma exchange where you're not removing albumin and a bunch of good stuff, but you're filtering the blood very similarly to how you just described. I, I think that there's definitely efficacy to that when it comes to immune system regulation. The problem is it's expensive and it's hard to get and it's still one of those things that, you know, especially for, for the alternative to therapeutic plasma exchange you still have to go overseas to do.
Right.
I think another thing that you have to think about though is the actual cellular damage, the cellular membrane damage that can occur if you've got had mold, mycotoxin, any type of stealth co infection like that. And that's another thing you have to target in, in addition to just getting the bad stuff out. So this is where I think is.
What is the damage that it caused.
What do you mean?
Like endothelial damage or what kind of.
Like, like cell membrane damage. And so this would be where things like phospholipid therapy or some Type of a phosphatidylserine or phosphatidylcholine protocol comes in because I, I look at it from two different perspectives. You want to, you want to heal the, in the cell membranes and you also want to heal the blood brain barrier issues that have arisen as a part of that. So there are many doctors now that will put someone on a mold and mycotoxin eradication protocol. Many are not using therapeutic plasma exchange just because it's so fringe and hard to get. They're using a lot of the traditional approaches of upregulating the liver detoxification pathways. Sometimes ozone, but usually something like glutathione and N acetylcysteine spread throughout the day, which is not that difficult for people who even have a low budget for this stuff to be able do. Combined with a binder, you know, like activated charcoal or kitosil chlorella or clay or something like that, that binds what you're detoxifying. And then you combine that with the two primary detoxification pathways that you're doing. A lot of sauna, infrared sauna, particularly just because of the penetration of the light more deeply into the body. And then something like a, you know, like an enema protocol, like a, like a coffee enema protocol to actually get stuff out. But then you also have a lot of doctors now using phosphatidylserine IV protocols which help to repair the cell membranes. And then there's, now there's, there's one company I found the other day, they're called NT Factor and they actually have a small oral phospholipid based product that you can consume orally to help to supply the body what it needs to heal cell membranes. So the idea is you don't just have to eradicate, you also want to heal. And the eradication protocol could be how are you healing? Therapeutic plasma exchange.
What heals the phospholipid bilayer? Like what, what actually repairs cellular.
It's actual, you know, from, from these supplements like the phosphatidylserine or phosphatidylcholine or even these, these absorbable oral phospholipids, it would be actually consuming the lipids themselves that are used to comprise the cell membrane. Like the whole idea of why, you know, seed oils would be a prudent thing to avoid based on the fact that they can accumulate in the cardiolipin layer in the mitochondrial membrane, they can accumulate in cell membranes. That's, that's why it's Kind of like the you are what you eat type of concept. So in the same way that you want to consume healthy fats, you can also consume lipids that help to make that cell membrane even healthier.
There's plenty of people out there that would say that, you know, the whole seed oil thing is fear mongering. I get it all the time, every time that I talk about seed oils. And I, I disagree too.
I, I, it's, where do you fall? It's interesting because what people say is if you look at, you know, some epidemiological data that, you know, consumption of some of these polyunsaturated fats rich in omega 66 fatty acids seems to be correlated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. I am not convinced that they're actually looking at rancid, oxidized forms of those oils, which the lion's share of people are consuming when they're eating fried food at restaurants or cooking with vegetable oil from plastic that's been stored on grocery store shelves.
Right.
I mean, you've talked extensively.
Yes.
On your podcast about hydroxy, noninol and some of the ways that these oils are actually extracted affected. Yes. And the inflammation that it can produce in the body and how long these fats stick around. I mean, there was a time when they would say two or three months. And now I think there's, there's data of up to a few years that many of these lipids remain in the human body. Again, coming back to you are what you eat.
That's right.
And this is why, you know, I have just a very, very simple illustration for people. I tell them, well, look, if you were, if you were at the fair, if you walked up to me at the county fair.
Right.
I don't know about you, Gary, but I spent a lot of time at the county fair.
I do, too. I pretty much live there.
Zipper and Gravitron and. Yeah. Petting the pigs.
You can't turn on Instagram without watching somebody getting flung off of one of those teacup rides. It's like, I don't think I would ever get on one of those.
No, thank you.
And you see the dude that's running it, too, and he looks like he just fresh out of a, you know, a big old fat bag of weed. Yeah, he's got a couple tats on his face.
God bless the carnies. Yeah. So anyways, though, if I, I tell people, if you were to walk up to me at the county fair and offer me like a stick of cotton candy or a corn dog, I'll take the cotton candy 10 times out of 10 because that's just sugar. Right? You can eat sugar and you can walk around, you can burn it off and go ride the teacup and get thrown out of that and burn off some more sugar. But basically you can get thrown, burn through glucose. I mean, yeah. And maybe we can talk about this later about how my blood glucose hit 200 in the last Spartan.
I definitely want to talk about that.
Last week so we can come back to that and why that may or may not be an issue. But, but your body can do a pretty good job if you're a physically active person metabolizing sugar. And you can even make a case for sugar being a sometimes drug. Like if you're going to go throw down a hard workout or do a Spartan or do some highly glycolytic CrossFit workout or something like that, sugar can actually be pretty helpful for enhancing that glycolytic process. It's not necessary, but it can be helpful. And in some cases, for example in endurance sports, even in bodybuilding, you see this, you do glycogen or carbohydrate or sugar deprivation to upregulate the body's ability to be able to pull it all into muscle. And then when competition day rolls around, you eat a whole bunch of sugar, carbohydrates, et cetera. Your body has up regulated the processes responsible for pulling the sugar into the muscle and you just soak it all up. And that's how you know a bodybuilder will sometimes gain ten pounds between the morning flex off show and the actual evening competition because now that they've weighed in, they go eat a bunch of carbohydrates. And because they've been carbohydrate depleted for so long, long, your body just soaks all up.
Yeah.
Ironman Triathlon. If you train low carb and there's been studies on this training low carb allows you to more effectively use carbohydrates when you get to race day because your body just burns it up so readily, just, just absorbs it and uses it way more effectively if it hasn't had it for a certain period of time.
Right.
Because it's upregulated all of the transporters necessary because it's been such a, such a, an unavailable commodity that your body wants to use it as effectively as possible when get it right.
So you're saying occasionally it's actually not a bad idea to do that?
I think it's actually, it's actually a cool little hack to go low sugar, go low carb. And then when it's time to do the big workout or when it's time to like, whatever, go to the beach and you want to look swole or, or whatever the case that you might want carbohydrates for, then you do a carbohydrate feed and your body just soaks it all up. Boom. Yeah, but the, the, the deal with the, the cotton candy is, yeah, I'll take the cotton candy 10 times out of 10, because again, I can walk around, I can burn it off, I, I can bench press, push up, you know, walk, sprint, whatever. But then if I have that corn dog that has been fried in vegetable oil, I can't just go burn that off. Right. Those lipids are used to comprise my cell membrane for sometimes, you know, months or years on end, accumulating in the body, creating inflammation. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that vegetable oils are, are a much worse case than sugar.
Yeah, I think I, I think that's, that's true too. I mean, one of the things we talked about before the, the podcast was not just what happened to you and your race, but, but, you know, I have clients that would start using a constant glucose monitor, like what you're wearing, and the first thing that, that would shock them is that their blood sugar starts rising in the morning upon waking when they haven't eaten.
Right. Freak out time.
Yeah, yeah. And people are freaking out.
They're like, I'm pre diabetic. What's going on?
How is my blood sugar rising? And I haven't eaten since, you know, 8 o' clock last night. And, you know, we talked about this gluconeogenic response, you know, where the liver is creating new glucose. I think obviously everybody knows that. But you said you were recently in an intense race.
Yeah, I did. I did the Spartan decafend I was wearing. My blood sugar hit, it was just below 200, about 198.
That's incredible.
During the race, you know, and, and so stepping back and looking at the reason for this and the reason that people might wear a blood glucose monitor or take their blood glucose because they're trying to pay attention to their health, which is a good idea. Idea. I mean, I, I mostly wear this thing now not because I don't know what a certain food is going to do to my body, because I've worn it long enough to know how green beans versus steak versus, you know, a Twinkie are going to affect me. Right. Not that you lot of Twinkies or crumpets or cotton candy. But I wear it because what gets measured gets managed. This is the same reason I wear a ring to track my my steps. Because if I wear it and I check it at the end of the day day, I'm going to be a lot more likely to say like take a postprandial stroll after dinner to hit my 10,000 step allotment. Or if I wear it when I'm sleeping, I'll do a better job getting lights out early, taking care of my sleep hygiene just because I like to have a cool score. And when you measure it, you manage it.
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But anyways, the, the idea is your body has mechanisms to mobilize glucose when your body needs a hit of energy. Even if you don't have exogenous sources of glucose, like a morning stack of pancakes or bowl of cereal, you'll see that blood glucose rise due to the cortisol awakening response. Right. You wake up, light hits your eyes. You'll notice if you want to experiment with this and you're wearing a blood glucose monitor. If you have like one of those seasonal affective disorder light boxes, for example, that blast your body with light, right?
Yeah.
Which I use. Like I've got the little. I have this pair of Retimer glasses back in my hotel room here in London right now, which blasts my eyes with bluish green light when I wake up in the morning. They're called retail lights. Yeah, they're called Retimers. There's another brand called IO A Yo. Both of these glasses are designed to simulate the bluish green spectrum of sunlight in your eyes. When you wake up, they stay on for about 20 minutes. And if you are traveling, if you're or whatever in Vegas and can't get out in the sunshine because the buildings are blocking all of that, or you're in your hotel room and you gotta get some work done, you can't necessarily, you know, put on your hotel bathrobe and wander outside in the sunshine when.
You first get up, kind of resets your circadian.
Yeah. And then I, I double up. I've got another one called the human charger that goes in your ears and it blasts the photoreceptors in your ears with light. So I'm getting full sunlight on my eyes and in my ears. And since we're all tidy little biohacking schemers here, the, the other thing I do is. Well, when you look at the light spectrum during the day, you've got a certain amount of blue light, somewhere between 40 and 60%. I forget the exact value of blue light from sunlight. You've got about, it's, it's around 40 to 50% red light, right? Near infrared red light, far infrared light. And then you've got, got, it's around 5, I believe it's even below 5% UVA and UVB light, right? So you've got the, the UVA and UVB, which helps you with the vitamin D3 and the nitric oxide production. Then you have the red light spectrum. Then you have the bluish green light spectrum. So in an ideal scenario, you should be trying to match those spectrums as closely as possible in your indoor living environment and waking environment. Which is why, if you really wanted to geek out.
Can you do that though? With, with. Well, they have lights that emit those wavelengths.
You, you can do it. So first of all, when I wake up in the morning, especially if I'm traveling, I, I get adjusted to my new time zone way better. When I do this, I use the little glasses that make a bluish green spectrum. I put in the, the ones for the ears.
As you're telling your brain it's morning.
You'Re telling your brain it's morning. What are you missing out on if you're using bluish green spectrum and bright like LED in the ears. The red light. Yeah, the red light. So then I also have these red light devices, the same ones as you would use for like joints. I have a couple of wraparound red light joint devices and I just put those on as well.
Okay.
So I basically, I'm blasting my body in the morning with red light, with bluish green light, and with light in the ears. Right. And if you wanted to do this at home, you would technically. I mean, if you really want to be as, as. As scientifically accurate as possible with daylight. Yeah, I know, I know. Some people like to geek out on this. In all of the waking, daylighty, working, exercising areas of the house during the daytime, you want about 75 blue light and 25 incandescent light. If you want to match outdoor daytime as much as possible. And there's two ways to do that. You can either literally go through the cans of the house and have three quarters of them be overhead LED light. And you want to use good LED light. So if you look for led, you want what's called oled. OLED is low in flicker, it's low in emf. And there are companies like Bon Charge or Block Blue Light that actually make healthy OLED lights. And then in the other 25 of the cans, you would put it incandescent light. So you're basically matching as closely as possible sunlight. And then in your more relaxing areas of the house, say like the dining room where you're gonna have dinner.
Yeah.
Or a master.
Even the lower levels of light not.
So overhead, leading up to the master bedroom, whatever would be the complete opposite. 75 incandescent, 25 OLED.
Right.
And this obviously sounds really laborious or you're going to be telling a lot of how many insert XYZ here, people does it take to change a light bulb? And so both Bon Charge and Block Blue light. Now this is super cool. This is what I'm outfitting my entire new house with in Idaho.
Yeah.
One light bulb. You put it in and you turn on the light switch once and it does daylight. Right. The perfect combination of blue and incandescent for daylight.
Right.
You turn off the light switch, you turn it on again, and it does twilight. The perfect combination of 25 LED, 75% incandescent for Twilight, like after 6pm or whatever, and then you flip it on again and it goes full red light. So you could literally have your whole house. And all you do is flip a switch and it goes to change whatever you want for whatever time of day. So that's what I'm going to have in, in my new house is just every can will have those bulbs.
That's so cool.
But if you were to just use the. You know how they'll have, like, seasonal effective disorder Boxes that produce a bunch of blue light that really, like, wake you up. And these are like high flicker, high blue light. This is like the kind of light that you should avoid most of the day, but if you blast yourself with it in the morning, it can really help wake you up. And I have one of these on my desk. The one I have is called a beacon 40. And it's literally like looking at a strobe light. And really, I mean, it wakes you up. Wow. But if you were to test your blood glucose, back to the blood glucose piece, along with that amount of light, you would see a steep rise in blood glucose in the morning. And back to what you were saying is the frustration. A lot of people, like, why is my blood glucose going up in the morning? I haven't eaten anything. I've been.
Yeah. I want to talk about how it.
Hits cheesecake for dinner last night.
Because you would think conventional. The opposite. I'm burning glucose.
So glycogenolysis, it's.
Yeah.
The idea that your liver and your muscles, to a certain extent, will release glucose into your bloodstream anytime that it sees a need for energy, for wakefulness, for combating stress, for fighting whatever the case may be. And this is why when you wake up, you see that normal cortisol awakening response causing a surge in blood glucose. Yes. And if you have a cup of coffee and you look at a bunch of blue lights.
Right.
Or especially if you like jumping an ice bath with some people, do like, you'll see that go up even more because you're amplifying that cortisol awakening response. Right. This is even why, you know, some people, probably Dr. Huberman being the foremost amongst them, who I've heard say this.
Yes.
Is that if you don't want to get tired earlier in the day, if you don't want to accelerate sleep, drive too early.
Yeah.
Try to stave off that cortisol awakening response. Try to wait a little bit to jump in the cold bath, to have a cup of coffee, to blast yourself with blue light. And this is actually what I do do, is when I get up in the morning, when I'm at home, because unlike when I travel, I don't have to, like, be on a stage speaking or, you know, be in a podcast with fire alarms going off in a hotel room.
And.
And so when I'm traveling, I just blast myself right away because I. I gotta get the f up when I'm traveling.
Right.
But at home, for the first hour, when I wake up, my whole home is the way that A lot of people should have their home at night. It's all red light. I keep my phone with the, with the blue light turned off. My screen monitor still has the, like the, the dimmed light. I don't turn on that blue light box on my desk until about an hour after I've been awake. Because if I just shove too much at my body right when I wake up, I'll get really tired like 2 or 3pm in the afternoon because you're accelerating my sleep drive too quickly. So it's this concept of easing yourself into the day. Right. You would also see a lower blood sugar response if you do that, which would result in less of a hypoglycemic drop, which would result in you being a little less hangry.
Right.
When breakfast roll or hypoglycemic. When you go to the gym at like 8:30 to do your workout and you've already had that blood glucose spike and so you've kind of like, you know, you've kind of like blown your load for, for the workout later on, meaning you'd have to.
That's what I was gonna say. Like when the workout, when are you positioning your workout in that? And then, so what do you do? You journaling? Are you looking at emails?
Are you. I get up, I pray, I read my Bible, I stretch, I do some foam rolling and then I start to turn the lights on and stuff. And usually about an hour after I'm awake, I'm in front of my computer making sure there's no email fires to put out. I'm running that, that blue light kind of waking my body up while I'm drinking a cup of coffee. And then I gather the whole family for meditation. With meditation as a family, every morning at 7am we have a big team huddle. We gather, we read the Bible together, we pray, we talk about what's going on. You know, when the boys have jiu jitsu and tennis and you know, what, what time's dinner and who's making what for dinner. And we just, it's almost like a team huddle and one big giant hug and then I go work out after that. So, so I'm usually working out like two hours after I get up.
Right?
But you see this good.
I mean you find that you're, you're, you're well energized and like easing into your day rather than get it. Because a lot of people just get.
Up and get after the cortisol awakening response obviously, you know, so there are ways to manage that and There are reasons that you may want to manage that, but you should also not freak out that you're pre diabetic if you wake up and your blood glucose is more, much higher than what you'd want to see for a normal daytime value. Because that's your biology, doing what it's supposed to do, waking you up. You see the same thing though in the sauna, right? People go hyperglycemic in the sauna.
That's right.
Which throws a lot of people for a loop because they're like, well, I heard the sauna was good for my blood glucose and may lower risk of diabetes.
Good for insulin sensitivity.
Yeah, yeah. For insulin sensitivity. You may see the same thing with cold, which again, people think that's paradoxical because you're supposed to see good metabolic stability, you know, as a response to cold thermogenesis. And it is indeed one of the best things to do for lowering blood glucose. Matter of fact, if I'm going to go out to a, to a restaurant, I know I'm going to have what you might consider to be a cheat meal. If I do a cold shower, cold soak beforehand, that's one of the best ways, even stronger than weightlifting, to stabilize my blood glucose. And then people go to the gym and their blood glucose will go, you know, way up in the gym or this Spartan race that I did, it hit almost 200.
That's incredible.
But it's this idea of an extra acute response to an activity that increases blood sugar. In many cases return results in long term stabilization of blood sugar in the same way that an acute rise in heart rate from exercise, an acute rise in blood pressure from exercise results in a long term decrease in heart rate and decrease in blood pressure.
Right.
So in many cases, if you're doing things that cause your liver to dump a bunch of a bunch of, or to break down a bunch of glycogen and dump a bunch of glucose into the body. That doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. If you're tracking those blood and how long it's a normal response.
How long can the liver sustain this kind of gluconeogenic response, let's say during intense exercise?
If you do the math, you've got. So we all have tens of thousands of calories of storage fat, many of us much more than others. But this is why, why human beings can go for a very long time at the proper pace without even eating. And you can train yourself into that state. Yeah, you're going to break down a little bit of muscle Tissue. But if you were burning at a low to moderate pace, at a fat burning intensity, let's say even like 300 calories an hour, and you got 20,000 calories of fat to burn, I mean, you're, you're looking at like, you know, 60 plus hours, hours that you can just go without actually running out of fuel. Well, in comparison, your storage of carbohydrates in a steady state, much lower steady state. And then it's kind of funny because a lot of people were like, well, you're saying I could race an Iron man triathlon without eating. No, you could, but it would be a 17 hour iron man. Exactly, because, because like I used to race Iron man. And it kind of looks good on paper to say, well, I'm just going to ride my bike at an aerobic page pace. But in an actual Iron man triathlon, if you're trying to go fast, there are certain things like a 20 second window to be able to pass another cyclist, which means that you might be pushing 200 watts and you have to do a 600 watt surge to make a pass within 20 seconds. You can do a 600 watt surge on a bike burning purely fat.
Right.
So even an Iron man is like aerobic, aerobic, aerobic and then boom, anaerobic and then aerobic and anaerobic aerobics. So, right. You, it's even very difficult to stay aerobic for, you know, for especially race, that includes cycling or, you know, swimming where you're trying to stay on somebody's feet or something running for that matter. Yeah, but in comparison to the tens of thousands of calories of storage fat that you have, you have around 400 calories in your liver and you have around 2,000 in your muscle. Depends on how much muscle you have. If you look at a bodybuilder, they could probably push closer like 3,500Calories of actual storage carbohydrate in the muscle. So if you look at 2, 000 calories for most people working out hard, you're gonna bonk or hit a wall after around 90 minutes. That, that's about how long you could really go without eating. Which is why for about anything longer, you know, for, for the average person, something like a half marathon or a 90 minute gym workout, you're gonna feel like crap within 90 minutes. And in some people it's even shorter than that. Especially if you're like a low carb person because you're going in there with already lower levels of muscle. Glycemic glycogen Usually your liver glycogen levels are store or are full, but it's a pretty short period of time. And this is why even for someone who's well trained, fit a fat burning machine, whatever. Even if you're doing like a long race or a workout, you're still going to need like a slow bleed of carbohydrates to be able to replenish that muscle glycogen or liver glycogen.
Right.
That you're burning through. And this comes back full circle to what I was talking about earlier, how you can actually go, go low carb to allow yourself to be able to use those carbohydrates more efficiently when they are released and then go higher carb when it's time for the, for the hard workout or the hard race and.
Really fill your muscles to get that, you know.
Right.
Right. I think the visual benefit anyway.
Yeah, yeah. It's like the sweet spot for me when, when I got to my last few years of Iron man racing, I had kind of for the longest time swallowed hook, line and sinker. The whole Gatorade Sports Science Institute have, you know, 400 to 500 cal of carbohydrates per hour from the sugary, sweet fructose maltodextrin mixes during the race. And I instead switched to about a quarter of that and then combined it with ketones, essential amino acids and electrolytes and had the best three years of racing of my life. Eating less carbohydrates, just enough to stave off the liver and the muscle glycogen stores from being emptied and everything else I was getting from the glycogen and carbohydrate sparing nutrients of ketones, amino acids. Wow. And electrolytes. And that worked perfectly as a race fuel.
Is that what they meant when they said, I remember Lance Armstrong's coach saying I switched him from a sugar source to a fat source and he was actually a fat fueled athlete.
Yeah. And when people say a fat fueled athlete, you still need a slow bleed of carbohydrates coming in. As a matter of fact, beta oxidation, the process of burning fat, still relies upon trace amounts of glucose. So you still need glucose, but you need less than what you would think of glucose. As a matter of fact, before we started recording that the, the, we were talking about the low carb ultra endurance athlete, Zach Bitter.
Right.
Zach and I and about a dozen other athletes were part of a study at University of Connecticut. I think it was about six years ago. It was called the Faster Study. And it literally rewrote exercise physiology textbook textbooks. Because what they did was they had a high fat ultra ketogenic group. Like we're talking like 10 carb intake, like very, like almost like therapeutic ketogenic. Yeah, I was in that group. And then they had another group that was eating the, the standard stereotypical, around 55 to 65% carbohydrate intake diet. Right. And then they had us all go into a lab at University of Connecticut. They did muscle biopsies, they did bloods during the entire protocol. And so we, I arrived the night before, checked into my hotel, went over to the lab. They punch holes in both the thighs and so they do the muscle biopsy. Have you had a muscle biopsy?
No, but I've had an 18 gauge to the thigh. And that's, it's like, it's about an 18, right? Or is it 6?
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's a big needle. Yeah, it might, it might even be bigger than that because they literally have to pull the muscle like a guillotine out of the thigh. And then they did the back of the leg as well. And then they did a fat biopsy to look at that, the composition of the muscle and the fat. And then.
And you first volunteered for this?
I was getting $1,000, which for me at the time was a lot of money. That was a lot of money. Plus I was training anyway, so we don't do this.
Times were tough around that training session.
And get paid a thousand dollars, get a free plane ride to University of Connecticut. Sounds great. So anyways, I, I show up, they do the muscle biopsies that night. They have you do a VO2 max test going as, as hard as humanly possible to see your maximum oxygen utilization. Then the next day you wake up, you've collected overnight urine, you do a stool test, and then we got our pre race meal, which was run strawberry in a six ounce cup of heavy cream. So that, that was, that was what they gave the, the ketogenic people before putting us on a treadmill. And this is the worst part. No TV, blank white wall. Run on the treadmill for three hours as hard as you can.
Three hours.
Three hours. Hours. Yeah. Yeah. So I did 23 miles on the treadmill just staring at the wall and oh my God. And you've got the mask on for the indirect calorimetry the whole time to see how much fat and how much carbohydrate you're burning, along with the cannula attached to your arm for collecting the blood while you're running for three hours. So anyways, leading up to that point, if you were to read the textbook, it says the maximum amount of fat that a human body can actually burn during exercise is 1, 1 gram per. I'm gonna have to, have to remember what it is. So one gram. So it would be one gram per minute. One, one gram of fat per minute. And we were on average, and some people were as high as 1.8, but on average as the ketogenic group, we were burning 1.5. So what we showed in that study was that by switching to fat as a fuel, you're actually able to burn more fat, fat during exercise. So it was, it was very interesting, you know, showing that you can have.
More fat during exercise.
Right. You're able to actually increase your body's fat oxidation ceiling during exercise. Which would mean if you're, and I'm not like a full on like keto enthusiast, you know, I, my typical diet.
Is you could be more efficient at.
Burning fat if you can train your body to be a fat burning machine. That's undeniable. Now like there's, there's no question about it. Science has shown that that study has shown that. That doesn't mean that a strict ketogenic diet is great. As a matter of fact.
Right.
You should have seen what happened to my testosterone and my thyroid during those 12 months. Thyroid plummeted because my body, you know, carbohydrates are necessary to a certain extent for proper thyroid function. So my body was getting this starvation signal for a year. So my thyroid stimulating hormone went through the roof and my free T4 plummeted. My testosterone also got down into the three hundreds because again my, you know, the human body is smart. We're in a time of starvation and famine. It's not a good time to make a baby. So we're going to reduce testosterone production. And it took me a year and a half to get my values back up by doing what I do now, which is I don't eat that many carbohydrates the entire day, keeping my body in a relative state of fat burning, keeping energy levels stabilized. So I'm not, besides that cortisol awakening response and my workout and sauna session, getting a glucose spike. And then at the end of the day, I eat as many carbohydrates as I want to a certain extent. Usually it's about 200 to 300 grams of carbohydrate. The advantage of that is that carbohydrates assist with serotonin production, which can help you to produce melatonin so you get a better night of sleep if you have more carbohydrates in the evening.
And when you said more carbohydrate, what's the typical meal look like? You like, what have you eaten so far?
Today I'm having like, like today I had a bottle of ketones and a protein powder that I mixed up. And you know, normally if I was at home it'd be more like a, like a high fat, high protein, post workout smoothie. It was coconut milk, clean whey. This was something I got at the, at the conference. It was like a, like a bone broth protein, like a minced chocolate bone broth protein. So when I'm at home it's like, it's like a, like a high fat, high protein smoothie. Lunch is typically like some roasted vegetables, some leftover meat from the night before, maybe some seeds and nuts, maybe a can of sardines. And then dinner, that's when I'll have sweet potato fries, carrot fries, beets, parsnips. We do a lot of like, you know, so called USOs, underground storage organs. I just think they're metabolized a lot better. I don't do as well with grains and bread. My wife makes like a slow fermented sourdough bread. That's pretty good. Good. I had a little bit of wine. My dessert is usually like a homemade yogurt with some dark chocolate and some blueberries. And so I have all that in the evening. And some people will say correctly, why have your carbohydrates in the evening?
Right.
Because your body is more insulin sensitive in the morning partially due to that cortisol awakening response and that and you, you can, that is true, your body is more insulin sensitive earlier in the day. However, you can induce a state of artificial insulin sensitivity later on in the day. Prior to that, carbohydrate refeed and have your cake and eat it too. And so this would include like a cold bath in the later afternoon or the early evening or a cold shower or cold soak. It can be saving your weight training or whatever your harder workout for the day would be. It can even be as simple as like a 5 to 10 minute pre meal stroll.
Right.
And you can also use glucose disposal and agents. This would be like bear brain bitter melon extract. Even if you had a restaurant, like a little bitters and lemon juice and some soda water. But all of these glucose disposal agents will reduce your postprandial glucose spike. So yes, you're more insulin sensitive in the morning. But humans are smart. We can figure out ways to make us more insulin sensitive in the evening.
Right.
Have stable energy levels during the day, then have the carbohydrates at the end of the day and kind of like, have our cake. And.
And when you. And you carbohydrate load, do you load? You're not really carbohydrate loading, per se.
You're just having your carb. If you were to look at my diet, it's still low. I mean, like 30% carbs. Okay, so I'm still pretty low carb, but not like the 5 to 10%, like, therapeutic ketogenic low carb.
Right. And is that just because you feel better?
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