371: Why You Get Constipated & What To Do About It, The Truth About Metformin, Geeking Out On...

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, why you get constipated and what to do about it. The truth about metformin. Geeking out on green tea, how to get by on less sleep, how to use SARMs, and much more.

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

Power.

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

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

Hey, Brock, I'm reverse aging as we're talking.

Oh, you're doing some Benjamin Button action.

Yeah, got a little Benjamin Button action going on. Specifically, what I have going on is this giant mug of tea. It was when it was handed to me by chef David Boulay when I was in New York last week. He informed me it was called longevity tea. He got it in Okinawa. It's called longevity tea. It's apparently like a kind of like a cousin of Matcha tea. Matcha green tea. I believe it may also be related. Have you ever heard of gynostemma?

I have not.

Not to be confused with man boobs, which is gynecomastia.

It's awfully similar.

Yeah, Gynostemma, it's a green leafy herb consumed through Asia to promote health. And it's like this dark green tea, but it tastes like matcha. But I think it has some of the same bioactive components in it as this gynostemma, which may be one of these, you know, these fringe Okinawa longevity secrets that decreases the rate at which their telomeres shorten. Specifically, I think it's an adaptogen. I think is how it actually works. Regardless, this stuff tastes amazing. And I've been putting a little bit of butterscotch flavored stevia into it. And then I have this temperature, like the thing that you would stick into a turkey, and a measure how well your turkey is or is not done.

A thermometer?

Yes, a meat thermometer. I stick a meat thermometer into the little pot of water, and based on the instructions that I was very carefully given when I was handed this longevity tea, I do not pour the water into the tea until the water is about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. And so I Make this tea. And I've been drinking that instead of coffee in the morning just to see what happens if I drink green tea instead of coffee. And I've been doing that for about two weeks. I haven't had any coffee in two weeks.

Yikes.

Just been drinking green tea. Weird.

I've upped my green tea intake as well and my matcha intake, but unfortunately it's been in the form of ice cream.

Ah, yes, Matcha ice cream.

Have you had the. It's so good.

Is that. Is that a Ben and Jerry's?

No, I don't think so.

I'm pretty sure that Ben and Jerry's Chunky Okinawan Monkey is the. Is the new flavor that they've developed.

I'll go look for that.

Yeah, it's a longevity monkey. Anyways, though we digress. We've got plenty of research to go into, including research on green tea. We have a ton to talk about on this podcast episode. But before we jump into the news flashes, and I've got some good ones for you, I have to get something off of my mind and it has nothing to do with green tea.

Okay.

I have never in my life run a Kickstarter campaign, but we are in the throes, so to speak, of a Kickstarter campaign at the time that we're recording this podcast. So any of you listening in? And by the way, every pagan devil worshiper, anyone who's not into Christianity or God is going to run for the hills when I say this.

Yeah, including me. I'm an atheist, so I have trouble with this.

Yes, exactly. Brock's an atheist. Now hear me out here. The power of gratitude across all religions and all people cannot be denied. It is enormously helpful when it comes to decreasing blood pressure, improving longevity even without copious consumption of green tea, improving happiness, improving purpose, meaning everything. And I have designed a gratitude journal. We have a Kickstarter page going for it. It is a Christian gratitude journal. And what I mean by that is that there are Bible verses at the top of each page. Because I read the Bible a lot, I pick some of my most inspirational verses and I put them on each page. However, you don't have to be a Christ to use it. And you can support the Kickstarter if you go to Christian gratitude dot com. There, I got that off my back. And now we can. We can move forward. I'm grateful for any of you. No, seriously, not to be too woo woo. But I'm grateful or cheesy. I'm grateful to any of you who can go over there and contribute to the campaign and get on it. All right, let's do this.

News flash issues.

Head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 371 to find the links to all of these awesome things if you happen to miss them on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all those other wacky places. Are you still Snapchatting?

I Snapchat every day, dude. I Snapchat anything embarrassing every day. Primarily what I do. I read for about an hour every night. I lay in bed and I read. I have a very boring life, obviously, but anyways, I live life by the idea that not a whole lot of productive activity happens after about 9pm Aside from making love and writing in my gratitude journal. So I read.

And at the same time, at the.

Same time as I'm making love and writing in my gratitude journal, my wife absolutely adores me Anyways, though, so I generally use Snapchat to take photographs for people of the things that I'm reading, the things I'm highlighting, the things I'm underlining. And I use it quite a bit for that. And I also use it to take photographs of embarrassing or cute things that I know are going to disappear within 24 hours but that people might like. Anyways, like last week it was video of my of my goats giving birth to the five new little baby Nigerian dwarf goats that we have and everything from little baby goats jumping around to placentas hanging out of mommy goat's butt. So all sorts of cool things going on on snapchat.com are you sure that was her butt?

I don't think that was her butt.

The. The parts, the whole parts at the end of a goat, whatever those are called. Anyways, though. Anyway, I guess we can say goat vagina on this podcast and probably more appropriate anyways though. So yes, I do. Snapchat. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Snapchat if you like goat placentas. But speaking of placentas, News flash, the first news flash is based on this article that came out. A ton of people asked me about it. It was in Wired magazine. The title of the article is Forget the blood of Teens. This pill promises to extend life for a nickel a pop. Do you know what drug this article was talking about? What pill it was talking about?

I absolutely do. It's Metformin. And man, Wired magazine. You jumped the shark with that title. That is so click baity. I thought Wired was bey that I really Wired magazine.

And this is based on the advice given to me by the man who is considered to be the father of functional medicine in the United States and one of the most brilliant physicians I know, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. I was with him at a conference three months ago and I asked him if he could read one book, what book would that be? And he said, it wouldn't be a book. He said, I read a magazine every month. And I said, what magazine? And he said, wired magazine. He said, mark my words, just about everything you read in Wired magazine is something that is going to come to pass or that is extremely relevant or ahead of its time. So regardless of the clickbaity headlines.

I left that conversation. I went over to my phone, literally went over to the table I was sitting at, opened my phone and subscribed to Wired magazine based on his advice. And I get the magazine now. And this article is about this Metformin stuff, which I did not know. This comes from a plant known as French lilac and also goat's rue. And it's been around since the 1600s as a treatment for diabetes and as like this, you know, this sort of longevity tonic. And what this article goes into is this idea that all of these folks from over a dozen of the people in Tim Ferriss's book Tools of Titans, all the billionaires and icons and world class performance of that book, to Craig Venter, who heads up the Human Longevity Project and they're sequencing the entire human DNA. Ray Kurzweil, the guy of Singularity fame, and Ned David, who co founded a Silicon Valley startup called Unity Biotechnology, which is basically like an anti aging drug creation facility. They all take Metformin. And perhaps one of the reasons for that is based on something that Dr. Peter Attia has told me on this podcast before and also what he's written about on his show before. And that is that one of the keys to longevity is keeping your blood sugar levels low and reducing rapid fluctuations in blood sugar levels. But there's a whole lot more that metformin does in addition to lowering blood glucose.

And this article not necessarily good? Well, I'm guessing.

Well, what this article goes into is a lot of good and the reason that it's the darling of the anti aging industry right now and why so many people are either purchasing it online, which you can do pretty easily, you know, on online pharmacies or the dark web or whatever, or you can just simply get a prescription from a physician or a doctor friend or whatever. But I am working and I'm going to publish it this coming Monday. For those of you who are listening in on My own take on this because I've been taking an anti aging capsule that is very similar to Metformin in terms of reducing postprandial blood glucose for the past three years. I take two capsules of it prior to dinner. And I have not yet gotten on the metformin bandwagon. And I am outlining in extreme detail why in this article that I'm writing about the dark side of metformin. But you need to remember a few things. It works primarily on the liver. And so there is a pass through the liver and there is a potential for an elevation in liver enzymes. And you know, you only have one of those organs that I'm aware of, so I'd be careful in that respect. But there's also other downsides. You see reduced efficacy of it the older that you get. So the older you get, the more you have to take you. You see reduced efficacy with prolonged use. You see GI tract issues in many individuals. And perhaps most interestingly, it affects sleep spindles, and I'll explain what those are later on in the show. And also sleep cycles. It may also affect the ability of a part of your mitochondria called the Electron Transport Complex 1 to normally function. And that is actually something that also is extremely important for a good night's sleep. So when the article is suggesting the chronic intake of what is a more or less a synthetic drug that gums up a natural mitochondrial process of the body. Yes, it lowers insulin and it lowers insulin like growth factor, and it limits mtor, and it's a calorie restriction mimicking type of drug. And all of these things can indeed decrease the rate at which telomeres shorten and improve longevity. I think there's a lot of side effects to it that can be unpleasant and potentially life threatening long term that give me pause in terms of getting on this whole metformin bandwagon. And again, I'm writing a big article about this I'm gonna publish this week@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but ultimately I think that a lot of people are popping this pill without taking into consideration all the implications.

Well, that's not at all what it was developed for either. Wasn't the longevity thing sort of discovered as an afterthought? Or they just kind of like the heart medicine that then became the baldness medicine? That's sort of an idea, right?

Exactly. Yeah, it's like the heart medicine that became the baldness medicine.

I'm totally forgetting what that's called. Propecia.

Yeah, exactly. This is the sugar medicine that is becoming the anti aging medicine that is in my opinion a bit overhyped and potentially dangerous. So either way though, for those of you who want to read the article, I will link to it@BenGreenfieldFitness.com371 I will also link to what I use instead and I'll tell you what that is in a second. And then I will also be publishing an article Monday that really gets into the dark side of Metformin. For those of you who want the scientific nitty gritty on this. Now what I use instead is the same stuff that actually the guy who gave me this bag of longevity tea also gave me a bag of this other stuff and said this is the other thing that the Okinawans use copious amounts of. Do you know what that was?

Is it berberine?

Berberine is close. And berberine is something that I send my kids out into the forest to harvest every week. So every Friday my kids go up and they dig up what's called organ grape root, which is a plant that grows out here on the property and they take their little pocket knives and they cut it into 1 inch chunks and then they come back inside and they make it into tea.

Awesome.

And I now put that into my little bark tea that I make and that I put into my smoothies because it actually itself has a lot of really cool potent blood sugar regulating effects. Plus when you harvest something from the local land, it's just nice to be able to use a a local plant rather than like going to whatever Amazon and paying 60 bucks for a capsule bottle of it. But no, this stuff is actually not bear brain. Even though I like bear brain. It is bitter melon. Bitter melon extract.

Oh yeah.

And I have tested my postprandial blood glucose after using this stuff because I do eat carbohydrates in the evening and I drink red wine and eat dark chocolate and it shoves my blood glucose, it causes it to plummet after a meal. And I've compared it with and without this bitter melon extract. There's a huge host of longevity benefits to this this bitter melon extract stuff. And I'll also talk about this when I write this article about the dark side to Metformin. But I'm a fan of a natural plant based herb like that rather than a synthetic drug that gets passed and processed by the liver. So anyways, that's what I use instead is bitter melon extract.

Sounds delicious too.

Well, I guess since we're talking about bitter melon extract and teas and longevities. We should get into a fantastic article that I read recently on green tea that actually influenced my decision to add a big cup of green tea into my morning routine and actually at this point replace my coffee with green tea.

This seems wrong.

I should get right out there and say that I really miss coffee. I love coffee. I love the taste of coffee. I love the antioxidant effects of coffee. I love the comfort food aspect of coffee. I do consider it to be a comfort food, but the ritual of coffee. The ritual of coffee. But at the same time, green tea has its own rituals. Tea in general has its own rituals. I was actually, when I was in New York City last week, where I actually discovered a lot more about green tea, simply because this chef, who I've already mentioned once on the show, this famous chef in New York named David Boulay, he's very into Japanese cuisine and he's very into tea. And he taught me a lot about tea when I was there. And he sent me home with all these tea varieties, including this longevity tea and this bitter melon tea. But he influenced me to really get me and also my boys who've been doing this in the morning to get on the bandwagon of preparing tea correctly, the correct temperature. And you got the little Japanese pot and, you know, you boil the water and you let the water cool and then you put it in the pot. I forget what the name of this little pot is, but it's actually kind of cool. It's a different way to start the morning versus the French press of coffee or whatever your method of coffee preparation is. Either way, though, this article that I'll link to over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com371 goes into some very cool effects of green tea that are based on recent research. For example, it can improve blood lipids very similarly to taking a statin drug, but without the side effects of a statin. Meaning like a statin can, for example, strip a very important mitochondrial component called coenzyme Q10 from your tissue. And what you see with consumption of green tea, and specifically what are called the epigallocatechin gallates, the EGCGs in green tea is a drop in oxidized cholesterol due to what appears to be what are called the glycosides in green tea without the change in the coenzyme Q10. So in terms of, you know, I do not think in any way that LDL is bad. I try to keep my own cholesterol elevated above 200. My LDL cholesterol very high. But at the same time, when it comes to small particles or oxidized cholesterol, that's what I'm careful with. And it appears that green tea does a very good job decreasing some of those deleterious blood lipids. So that's one interesting thing about it. Another thing is that it appears to assist with post exercise glycogen resynthesis, meaning that after a workout, or let's say I'm working out in the morning and I want to to store up my carbohydrate levels after that workout more quickly from whatever I might eat for breakfast. And I also want to oxidize fat more efficiently because it mobilizes fatty acid. There appears to be a beneficial effect from that as well. And I'm not eating a lot of carbohydrates in the morning along with my green tea for that glycogen synthesis. But remember, your body can synthesize glycogen from the glycerol backbone of fats, and it can also, via a process called gluconeogenesis, synthesize glycogen from the glucose derived from proteins. And it appears that green tea might actually help with all of these type of mechanisms for giving your liver and your muscle extra glycogen to burn, say, later on for a hard workout. So there's that.

That's really interesting. So it just sort of stuffs it all into the muscles instead of letting it turn into fluffy fat.

It up regulates a certain transporter that makes you less reliant upon insulin and more able toto push, for example, glucose from the bloodstream into muscle to store it away as glycogen. That transport is called the GLUT4 protein.

Interesting.

That is interesting, isn't it? Another thing that it does is it can prevent visceral adiposity, with visceral body fat being one of the more deleterious forms of body fat compared to say, like subcutaneous body fat. Visceral body fat is the type of body fat that would build up around the organs. Another study, and these are all recent 2017 studies, show that in response to a hypercaloric diet, like an unhealthy hypercaloric diet, green tea actually alleviates visceral body fat accumulation. So this means that you can go out and you can have Chicago deep dish pizza, and as long as you drink a little bit of Japanese green tea on the side, you're gonna be just fine. So all sorts of cool things going on with green tea Now I have a request for our listeners, however, and I didn't even get into all of the. Actually, let me mention one other thing here, just while we're geeking out on green tea. It increases what is called endothelial independent nitro mediated dilation. And I realize that's a mouthful, but what that basically means in layman's terms is it's almost like Viagra for your whole body in terms of what it can do to vascular flow. And so what, full body erections from green teeth? No, what I mean by that is.

That they're having trouble staying erect.

It's excellent for vasodilation of vascular tissue of vessels. So, yeah, very similar to a nitric oxide type effect, which is also why it's something that works quite well and it actually pairs quite well with bitter melon, by the way, for a sauna. Because when you get in the sauna you want more blood flow, right? A lot of people take like, like nitric oxide type of supplements or like a nitrate or something like that prior to doing a sauna. Or niacin, right. For detoxification and for blood flow, a big old cup of green tea could be just as good. So there you have it.

There you have it. And these studies were all brought to you by Ben and Jerry's Longevity Green Tea.

Yeah, the Chunky Longevity Monkey. Anyways, though my request from listeners would be was I'm still looking for like the ultimate green tea experience, like start to finish, because I've got it, kind of got it hacked together right with my turkey thermometer and my boiling pot of water and.

My relative gumshoe approach to creating green tea in the morning. So if you're listening in and you're a green tea aficionado and you have the best tools and tips and toys or perhaps a blog post or an article or something like that on how to replicate like a true Okinawan or Japanese green tea experience in the average American home. I would love to hear your feedback on that. So if you could go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com 371 because again, both my children and I are kind of enjoying this morning tea experience, but I feel like we're bastardizing it a little bit just by kind of using whatever random kitchen tools we happen to have around the house. So if you have suggestions or ideas on how to really make tea, the ultimate daytime or morning or evening experience, leave comments over there@bengreedfulfitness.com 371 because I'd love to hear.

How folks who really know tea are getting the most out of tea. Because this is kind of like a new thing for me. Me.

Well, if I've learned anything from the Japanese restaurant in my neighborhood, it's that you should take a whole bunch of the cheapest green tea bags you can find, put them in a plastic jug in lukewarm water and leave them there for hours. So you might want to, might want to try that.

That comes out with the general. What's his name? Chicken, Right?

Yes. Yeah. On the side.

Exactly.

For free.

Exactly. All right, we aren't done yet. Speaking of viagraphy or whole body, here's the latest on whether running hardens your arteries. Did you see this study, Brock?

I did, yeah. I mean, Alex Hutchinson does such a great job of writing the synopsises of these kinds of studies. I follow him. So I see all this good stuff through him, really.

Alex Hutchinson, being one of the excellent bloggers over at Runner's World and one of the guys who has been following this kind of controversy. It's been going back and forth for several years about the relationship between exercise and heart health and specifically the relationship with, between running and heart health. And the idea that for almost seven years now there's been data pouring in that shows that runners, and especially long endurance runners, ultra endurance runners, marathoners, et cetera, seem to have a surprisingly large amount of plaque, a higher what is called coronary artery calcium score than matched groups of controls who do not run quite as much.

Have you had a calcium score done?

I have not had. I've had an ultrasound echocardiogram to see if I have athlete's heart. Right. Like an enlarged ventricle. And I've had of course, like a stress EKG for two reasons. Number one, to see if I'm able to exercise at a hard intensity without getting what are called paraventricular contractions or abnormal heart arrhythmias. And also because I'm going to do an IBOGA retreat or like a seven day plant based medicine retreat and they, they had me do one to make sure that I wasn't going to die of a heart attack during the, during the IBOGA ceremony. That's, that's perhaps a discussion for another day. But ultimately I have not yet gotten a coronary artery calcium score. Have you?

I have, yeah. I've had the other two that you mentioned as well, that I had a calcium score done. And before I was sent in the, the cardiologist said if it's, if your score is like 100, we won't worry about it. But if it's 1000, we're putting you on statins and stuff. And basically my number came back as 85 and I never heard from him again, which was good news.

So you would not fall into that category of a runner that has this coronary artery calcification, then?

I guess not.

Okay, so what the latest data is showing, and this is going to keep all you runners from hanging up your running hats and switching to golf or ping pong, is that the pattern of plaques that form in these runners tends to be a different form of a plaque, a plaque that's less likely to cause serious problems like a heart attack. So not all plaque is created equal. The deal is that there are hard, calcium rich plaques and then there are softer calcium deficient plaques. And the hard plaques can narrow the arteries and.

They can cause these blockages that can trigger a heart attack. It appears that the soft plaques are a little bit less of an issue. And so there's all sorts of different theories out there as to why endurance exercise would cause any form of plaque buildup at all, like the turbulent high pressure blood flow through arteries during exercise, contributing to plaque formation or the hormones associated with exercise as playing a role. But ultimately, it appears that it's not like it's a different form of plaque, and it's not something you have to be quite as concerned about. Although, and this is certainly. I'm glad you brought this up, Brock, because I plan on doing this later on this year. I do want to go get a coronary artery calcium score myself just to see where I'm at, because I'm curious.

Yeah, it is interesting.

Yeah. But in terms of the type of plaque, it appears the type of plaque matters, and so there's more to it than meets the eye. So if you're seeing the headlines that say runners get plaques or running is bad for your heart, please realize that whoever wrote that article in the media might not realize that there's a difference between the type of plaques and what I'll do is I'll link to the in depth article by Alex Hutchinson that kind of, kind of delves into this in detail about whether you know, the blockage is harmful versus not harmful or whether a plaque is harmful versus not harmful. But ultimately, the takeaway point here is that running is not necessarily going to accelerate coronary atherosclerosis.

And we still have yet to see a lot of diminishing returns. Now, I have written an article about this, and it does appear that once you exceed about 60 minutes of high intensity exercise per day or about 90 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per day. There is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to mortality. Meaning that you're not going to make yourself live longer by going out and doing more than an hour of intense exercise per day or more than 90 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per day. But ultimately it also appears that running is not going to kill your heart in moderation.

I thought one of the most interesting points that Alex made in his article about this was that sort of playing into that idea that you can't outrun a bad diet and that like, because there isn't really a, there's a, there isn't a conclusion for whether it was causality or, or just the, the result of, of actually running, that it may just be that all these runners are going out and eating way too much pizza after they go for their long runs.

Yeah, I talk all about that in my book Beyond Training, about how when, when you, when you look at the, the diets of many athletes. Yeah, you have to take that into consideration too, that, that whole, whole eat to train, train to eat vicious cycle and how we can actually break that cycle. So yeah, absolutely, it's a good consideration as well. And then finally we are going to get to. And by the way, as we are talking right now, I am blasting the entire back of my body with what is called near infrared radiation. Okay. Near infrared radiation. The reason I'm telling you that is because there was an excellent article published by our friends who produce the ball light that I use. The joov light. Yes. This is the light that is based on this concept of photobiomodulation. This idea that certain wavelengths of light can activate Leydig cells in one's testes and cause increased testosterone and sperm cell production and also improve skin health and assist with detoxification, all these other cool effects. But the article that I will link to in the show notes is about the difference between saunas and infrared because a lot of people kind of get confused about that. And the few little takeaways that I wanted to get into from this article was the impact of light energy at the cellular level. Meaning that specific wavelengths of light have some really interesting effects on the mitochondria in our cells. And when you look at some of these narrow band wavelengths of light, about 600 to 950 nanometers or so, they're able to penetrate human tissue very effectively. And when they penetrate human tissue, what happens involves something called cytochrome C oxidase and that's the last enzyme in the respiratory electron chain transport of the mitochondria. And during cellular respiration, or what's also called oxidative phosphorylation. Specific wavelengths of light, and we're talking about near infrared light specifically, can break the bond between this gaseous molecule, nitric oxide, and this cytochrome C oxidase enzyme. And that allows oxygen to actually bind to something called nadh. When that happens, hydrogen ions can allow for your body to produce cellular energy or ATP. So when you look at something like near infrared, you're essentially charging your cellular batteries in terms of activating your mitochondria and allowing it to produce more ATP. Now, there's a host of benefits to like a dry sauna, for example, when it comes to the production of heat shock protein and detoxification of some metals through sweat. Improved ability to be able to produce erythropoietin, like red blood cell precursors. But ultimately, if there's not light in there, you're actually missing out on a lot of these positive mitochondrial boosting effects of light. So what I do personally in terms of my own use of light is in my office here I have these lights, they're made by Joovva, and it's a near infrared light that I can shine on my body while I'm in my office. And then I also have a sauna. It's made by this company called clearlight, and that delivers far infrared light, which penetrates a little bit more deeply into the tissue, which heats the tissue. But I am a huge fan of this concept of using photo biomodulation to improve everything from skin health to hormones to mitochondria. And this article does a pretty good job breaking down why you need to go out of your way to not just get heat from, say, like a dry sauna or a far infrared sauna, but also get exposed to light from some of these near infrared wavelength ranges. So I think it does a really good job breaking it down. And I think that anybody who's kind of into like biohacking or better, living through science or has a little bit of extra money to throw around, should definitely consider adding something like near infrared into your protocol. Because these lights I have in my office, they make every day shinier and better and make my office look like a tanning salon.

Totally. I was at the A4M conference last year in Las Vegas, and I was surprised at how many booths around the entire expo floor had some sort of panel of red lights, like something you can Wrap around your face or you could put under your back or you could stand on or you could lay on or something. So it's, it's really, this is a, a big movement these days.

Yeah. What's the A4M?

It's the longevity. I can't remember what A4M actually.

Oh, the, the American Academy of. Of Anti Aging Medicine.

There you go. That's something.

Yeah. You know what, I think I might be speaking at that next year. I believe it was pretty, it was.

Pretty fun conference actually. Yeah, it's very interesting.

Yeah. I'm actually headed down to Florida next month to do a, a bone marrow like a stem cell extraction and then a stem cell treatment. And I think that they've connected me to this American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine organization and I'll be speaking there the following year. So anyways, yeah, this whole podcast seems to be taking a twist towards longevity. So there you have it.

It does nothing wrong with that.

Special announcements.

Speaking of longevity. Yes.

Did you hear the, the, the podcast last week with Dr. Dick Gaines?

I. No, I haven't listened to it yet but God, seriously, his parents need a smack.

Well, he's the guy who I went to Florida to see where we got, where we got it wasn't we, it was me. I got acoustic sound wave therapy. And what that does is it breaks open old blood vessels in both men and in women crotch region and stimulates the formation of new vessels. Right. So you get better erections and you get better blood flow and you get better orgasm quality and it actually is very cool and it works. I'm actually going back there next month to do another treatment and to combine it with. And this is not to be confused with the stem cell injections I just mentioned earlier. Yes, I'm doing all sorts of weird things this year. They're going to inject me with platelet rich plasma directly into my genitals. I don't know how that's going to feel, but apparently it has a profound effect on penile health. So anyways, going down to do that.

Are you experiencing some unhealthy penileness?

No, but I consider myself to be a guinea pig for the masses. A relentless self experimenter who will put my body and my dick on the line to make other people's lives better. So yeah, very unselfish.

I'm making a very unpleasant face right now anyways though.

So the idea here is that I interviewed Dr. Gaines last week and we talked about way more than that. Growth hormone and testosterone and anti aging medicine and all sorts of other interesting things that this guy knows about. But this company that he owns called Gains Wave, what they do is they do this treatment for men and for women, and they're offering everybody who listens to this show a discount. And what you do, it's very, very simple. You text the word greenfield to 3131. 31. And what that gives you is 150 bucks off of any GainsWave treatment at any of their 60 different clinics around the nation. So it's just you text GREENFIELD to 313131. They also have this website, gainswave.com and you can click on it, you can find a doctor. And it is an office friendly website. It's just mostly like Creative Commons photos of nurses and physicians and stethoscopes so you don't have to worry about strange things popping up on your computer if you visit gainswave.com where you're at your office. Or you could just text using your phone. That might be even more Safe. Text word, Greenfield. The 3131. 31. So you have it. Are you doing it, Brock?

I'm actually trying to see if there's one in my neighborhood, but there isn't. There's only one in Canada. Oh, no, there's one in Ottawa as well. Okay.

So sorry, Canadians. The Americans are going to be far ahead of you when it comes to our sex game. This podcast is also brought to you by something I haven't been able to drink.

In a couple weeks because it's coffee and I've been drinking green tea. This coffee, though, is the. It's. It's the vitamin coffee. The vitamin coffee that has brain vitamins added to their coffee. Alpha, gpc, Taurine, L Theanine, dmae. You know what's crazy is a lot of those things are the same type of things that you would find when it comes to neural enhancing properties and cognitive enhancing properties in something like fish, like wild caught fish, except they've somehow managed to add them to coffee without the coffee tasting like a seafood restaurant. So it's actually really good. And it helps to prolong coffee's dopamine effect and it reduces any anxiety or jitteriness from the coffee. So it is called. You probably know what it's called, Brock, don't you?

I've had it.

Yeah. Chimera.

It's delicious.

K I M e r a K-O-F-F-E-E.com. see what they did there? Chimera coffee. Because it will turn you into A frickin chimera. Not a longevity chunky monkey, but an actual chimera. Use code Ben to get 10% off. And do you want to know my dirty little secret?

Always.

All right, I have a couple of times. Because my wife always has a piping hot pot of coffee upstairs until about 2pm in the afternoon. I have snuck in a little bit of coffee after lunch in a couple days, I'll admit and.

You son of a bitch.

I know. So when I say I've switched to green tea, I actually, I've sipped on the coffee. I've cheated on my green tea just a little bit here and there. I'll admit it, because I just can't.

You call yourself a Christian.

I know, I know. But I'm very grateful for the coffee. So there's that. I read it in my gratitude journal. So anyways, camera coffee.com use code BEN to get 10 off 10 discount@chimera coffee.com this podcast is also brought to you by the company that makes this, this green juice powder, the gently dried superfood green juice powder we've talked about oh so many times. But they have a new one. They have a red powder now they're confusing everybody. They have red angry now and the.

Red that's super confusing for us colorblind people.

Well they took all their, they took all their, all their same processes, their same technology that they used to make the green stuff. Now they do a red stuff that's got acai, beet, pomegranate, cranberry, raspberry, blueberry, strawberry. And then they put a bunch of adaptogens in there like cordyceps and Siberian ginseng and rishi mushroom and rhodiola. It's called organifi. Brace yourself. You know what it's called? Mm.

Mm.

Red juice powder instead of green juice powder. Yeah, they're very creative over there.

That's a bummer.

Super creative. It's acai and cordyceps infused though gently dried superfood powder.

That's not a bummer.

And anyways though, so it actually is pretty cool stuff. And everybody who wants to see what this stuff is like and it's actually really, really great. Like as a pre workout or add it into your morning smoothie, you get 20%. 20%. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Organifi with an I BenGreenfieldFitness.com organifi and we'll put links and all these codes in the show notes too. For all these goodies. Go to BenGreenfulFitness.com371 I got one more for you, Brock. This podcast is brought to you by Orchestra One.

That's it. Commercial over. I think that's pretty much all they wanted us to say.

Yeah, they just wanted us to sing.

Should we say what it actually does? It's the it's an all in one platform for healthcare practices and providers that does like everything. Scheduling and payments, communications, document sharing. It's all secure, it's all encrypted, it's all HIPAA compliant. So if you're a doctor or you're a nutritionist, or you're a personal trainer or a gym owner or a chiropractor, chiropractic or a naturopath or a health coach or anybody, it lets you in one mighty, mighty piece of software. Keep track of everything from payments to appointment reminders to calendars. It's pretty slick. I ran gyms for eight years back in the day and I really wish this would have existed back when I ran gyms because I would have pulled out a lot less hair. And it's called Orchestra Orchestra one. And it's one of those things that you would normally like pay a monthly fee to access and instead they're just giving every single one of our listeners six months of it totally free. So you could just like use it for six months and see if you like it. And the way you do it is you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com orchestra.

And use code.

My kazoo was better. Use code BEN for six months of orchestra one. Absolutely friggin free. That's a value of $120. So there you go. Just saved you on a bunch of money. So now you can go buy a steak dinner. And if steak dinners make you constipated, keep listening because in today's show we're going to fill you in on the ultimate fix for constipation. But before we jump into that, Brock, a few quick special announcements. In terms of the calendar pack, there are a ton of places that I am going to be where you can come and hang out with me and we can have a great time for in terms of meetups, et cetera. Next week, I'll be in Asheville, North Carolina July 29th. That's a Spartan race. If you're near North Carolina, come on out to the Spartan Race. Hang out at 10am that Saturday we're going to have a Ben Greenfield fitness meetup right outside the Spartan pro team tent. You don't have to be a Spartan athlete but come on over with your fitness, your nutrition questions, anything that you want to talk about. And you can do that. I can't guarantee I will not hand you a giant sandbag to carry up and down a hill since you are at a spartan race. But either way seems fair. Same thing. We're gonna do the same thing in West Virginia the next month, August 26th. So two different Spartan races you can come and hang out at. In addition to that, I will be speaking in Iceland. You can still get in, you can still get tickets. And Iceland, I, in my opinion, is a pretty frigging cool place. It's called the who Wants to Live Forever conference, brought to you by Ben and Jerry's chunky longevity monkey. September 8th through 11th. And we've got discounted tickets over at BenGreenfulFitness.com 371 who doesn't love Iceland? And then also in Brock. We gotta talk, dude, because I need to get you to this event. Helsinki, Finland.

Yes. Oh, I want to go to that.

It's the same weekend as the Bulletproof Conference. I actually, I got a couple of tickets. I'm sending a couple people from my team to the Bulletproof Conference because it is pretty cool.

Yeah, I've been there a couple times. It's fun.

I'm probably gonna wind up in Finland. Not over in Pasadena where my friend Dave Asprey's event is, but it's the Biohacker Summit in Helsinki, Finland. Helsinki, Finland. I like to go to Finland. We have like this upgraded dinner and we do wild plant foraging and molecular gastronomy cooking. And then we have this three day after event where we go out into the sticks and like camp and do smoke saunas and jump in the Baltic Sea. It's just like. It's a pretty amazing time in my opinion. As much as I like to attach electrodes to my nose and stuff up my butt, like, the Finland Conference is pretty cool too.

So it's not a competition.

Yeah, yeah. Anyways though, the reason I'm saying this is I've gotten a lot of people who are like, why do they have to be on the same weekend? Well. Well, you know what? You've got many years in your life. You can try both. Anyways, though. October 13th through the 15th, the Biohacker Summit in Helsinki, Finland. That's a good one. Check that one out. And then there's one other that I'll bring up. Two others I want to bring up. The XPT experience in Kauai is December 7th through 9th. That's me Brian McKenzie, Kelly Starrett, Julia Starrett, Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reese. We're going to be teaching like underwater workouts, breathwork, construction, recovery, biohacking, a whole lot more and then straight from there, if you feel like it, you can come on over with me to Panama for a full eight day digital detox called Runga. And we've got off site adventures like hiking, volcanoes and whitewater rafting, zip lining, world class spa treatments, amazing food. So that's going to be a good time as well. From what I hear, we're also going to be throwing in a crap ton of spearfishing. So. So lots of adventures for you to go on. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 371. The show notes and the calendar are all right there. Which one are you going to go to? Brock?

Oh, do I have to choose? I want to go to all of them.

Do them all. Panama, Hawaii, Iceland, Finland.

Is Van Halen going to be there?

Where? Panama. Panama. Panama.

Listener q and a.

Hi Ben, My question is I've been taking probiotics for about six months now and I still continue to have major stomach issues. It almost seems like every vegetable that I'm eating is like fermenting in my stomach and that it just is not digesting the food through and stuff is just sitting in there and it won't come out. So I'm not exactly sure what to take. I've taken some laxatives to try and push it through but it doesn't seem like it's working right. It's like what probiotics work the best and am I putting too much in there? Thank you.

So constipated Kelly, as we like to call her around the homesteads, constipated Kelly.

Kelly the constipated. Sorry Kelly. So, yeah, sorry Kelly. So Kelly, you're taking probiotics. You're still having major stomach issues. Foods fermenting in your stomach. This is classic what I would consider to be. I'm not a doctor. Don't misconstrue this as medical advice. Please go see a licensed medical practitioner. But in most cases, this is an overgrowth of bacteria in your small bowel. So what does that mean? Well, it means that the small bowel usually digests food and absorbs nutrients and it's a pretty impressive little organ and it connects your stomach to your large bowel. You may also know your small bowel as your small intestine, but for the purposes of this description, I'm calling it the small bowel because it really is just part of your bowel and it has a bunch of bacteria in it, just like your large intestine does. And what can happen is that small bowel can get overgrowth in it from the type of bacteria that would normally be found in the large bowel in the colon. And what happens is that when colonic bacteria begins to occupy the small bowel, the small intestine, a lot of those bacteria can produce gas. They can damage the cells lining the small bowel, also what's called the mucosa. And that can lead to what is called leaky gut. It can overrun a lot of the normal bacteria that you would otherwise find in the small intestine. And there's some other interesting things that can happen. For example, the wrong type of bacteria in your small bowel that might be just fine for your large intestine, but be considered pathogenic. In your small intestine can take up certain B vitamins, like vitamin B12, vitamin D, before your own cells have a chance to absorb those nutrients. So you can see vitamin B12 deficiency and sluggishness from that, like mental sluggishness and physical sluggishness or chronic fatigue. It can also, those same bacteria can consume many amino acids or proteins that you've digested. And that can lead to protein deficiencies, inadequate recovery, and even an increase in ammonia production by those bacteria. And so you get a little bit of a burden detoxification, calcification system from an overgrowth of ammonia related to that overgrowth of bacteria. In addition, if you're taking fat soluble vitamins or doing a good job, eating your liver and your milk and your butter and all these things, those same bacteria can decrease fat absorption because they have an effect on your bile acid. They restrict some of your bile acid production. I have worked with a lot of people, especially athletes, who eat a higher than normal amount of calories, believe it or not, who get this issue. Especially because a high calorie intake can cause this type of bacterial overgrowth to occur, especially high carbohydrate intake. But high calorie intake in general, and your body would normally have several different ways of preventing this bacterial overgrowth from happening. Like gastric acid secretion, which would be maintaining an acidic environment. And in many cases, when you're eating a lot of calories or you're not producing enough hydrochloric acid because of stress, that acidic environment goes away. In many cases, a normal peristalsis would cause food to move through the way that it's supposed to. But again, if you're exercising a lot. If you are stressed out when you're eating, in many cases that does not occur. You even have a valve that normally allows the flow of contents into your large intestine and prevents things from refluxing back into the small intestine. It's called the ileocecal valve. And in many cases, people who have like low back issues or musculoskeletal tightness or fascial tightness in the abdominals or in the kind of like the area above the bones that are right above your hip, because a lot of people don't get those areas massaged or do deep tissue work in those areas, they'll get ileocecal valve issues that cause again, this small intestinal buildup, this, this growth of large intestine bacteria in the small intestine, which is really interesting because some of this responds not just to chemical measures and food adjustments, but also to doing things like abdominal massage and even like every morning. Now, what I do is I actually have one of these vibration devices. It's called a myobuddy. And I actually, I massage my ileocecal valve in the morning and it helps a ton with bowel movement, but it helps keep something like SIBO at bay because it keeps stuff kind of moving through you if you do something like this heavy alcohol use, right? Like doing those two glasses of wine per night. Dear men and women. Not that any of you ever do that. I'm just saying that can feed the specific type of bacteria that can contribute to overgrowth. Oral contraceptive pills, believe it or not, can also contribute pretty significantly to this, what's called small intestine bacterial overgrowth or, or bacterial overgrowth in the intestine. And it can be very difficult to treat because in many cases this overgrowth would respond to antibiotic treatment. But then it grows back pretty quickly if you're not able to address some of the underlying factors that are actually causing it. So in many cases, if you go to a doctor and you have this, it's called sibo, they will put you on like low dose naltrexone, or they'll put you on some type of antibiotic protocol, sometimes on a prokinetic agent. And all that means is it's something that would increase the muscular contractions of the small intestine. But in my opinion, there are some other things that you need to do if you truly want to knock out the type of constipation that tends to be caused by something like this. And many of these same things, even if your constipation is not associated with small intestine bacterial overgrowth, but it's related to other things. A lot of these things I'm about to describe to you will still work. By the way, I should mention that if you take a whole bunch of probiotics and you do have this issue, it can aggravate the issue. And so in many cases, you don't want to be taking a lot of probiotics at the same time that you're doing some of the things that I'm going to recommend. So either way, the first thing that I would recommend to get rid of the gas producing bacteria in the upper GI tract that can cause bloating and abdominal discomfort and constipation and a whole bunch of methane production. And by the way, that gas can get trapped and as it moves down into the colon, it acts as what's called a paralytic agent, cause constipation. There is a relatively new blend of botanicals that can get rid of this issue. So it's peppermint leaf, which calms the small intestine and that gives time for the other two components I'm about to describe to you. It gives these other two components time to work effectively. The next would be flavonoids from this. It's a South American hardwood tree called quebracho and that soaks up the hydrogen and creates a very unfriendly environment for the type of bacteria that would weaken the cell walls in your small intestine to be able to grow. And then the third component is a natural antibacterial that's extracted from horse chestnut, also known as conquer tree, and that shuts down the actual methane production by the bacteria that causes the gas buildup that causes the constipation. And so there is a supplement called Atrantil. You can find it on Amazon. And it's very simple to use. Use it for about 30 days. And I've had many clients utilize this extremely successfully for bloating, for abdominal discomfort, and for constipation, especially related to sibo. And you just take two to three of these before each meal that you eat. And it works like gangbusters. So that's one. It's called Atrantil A T R A N T I L. Okay, so that would be one that I would recommend that you put into a protocol for something like constipation.

A few other things that I would highly recommend that you do. And what I am going to do for you is I am going to put a link to a secret document that I usually only reserve for the clients who I coach who have constipation issues. I'm going to give it to everyone lucky enough to be listening into the podcast right now. Secret Constipation because it tells you the exact morning protocol, exact movement protocol, and exact dietary protocol to follow if you want to get rid of constipation for good. And I'm going to give you the brief overview and then I will put a link to the entire hidden document. It's a Google Doc you can download for absolutely free. Thank you very much. Go to BenGreenfulFitness.com371. You'll be pooping like a baby.

You mean without any control and into something that needs to be thrown into the trash? Mm, yeah, okay, fair enough.

While weeping uncontrollably and occasionally laughing at silly things like rubber birds. Anyways though, so you wake up in the morning and you do a glass of salt water. And when I say salt water, I specifically am referring to this form of electrolyte enriched water called Soleil water. Very easy to make. You take a glass mason jar, you put the little salts from the Soleil water into the bottom of the jar and you drink your normal glass of water. But you put about a tablespoon of this very salty water in there and that helps to move things through you. It kind of kind of keeps.

The stool just a little bit loose. Loose enough for you to hop on your squatty potty and take a poo. That would be Number two is in addition to drinking a big glass of this electrolyte infused water in the morning, number two is you use a squatty potty. Just buy one. Buy a squatty potty. They sell travel squatty potties. They sell them for your toilet at home, but it puts you in a position where you're not kinked in that puborectalis angle. I would recommend that you not bring a phone or a Kindle into the bathroom because as soon as you hunch over to read that thing or play on your phone, you kink that angle again instead. If you need to spend a little bit of time in the bathroom waiting for things to come out, then do something like Listen to an MP3. Listen to the Ben Greenfield Fitness show as you lean back and avoid any type of hunched over position. You just sit in the squatty potty and you can squirm, you can wiggle, you can move, you can twist, you can cross and uncross your legs, etc. Give yourself a little bit of time. But don't take anything in the bathroom that makes you hunch over. That's a mistake a lot of people make. I know it sounds dumb, but it pinches that angle and it keeps you constipated. Okay, so use a squatty potty, but use it properly. Don't squat on it, and then hunch over forwards on your phone or with a book. The next thing would be spend about five minutes each morning, if you can, either doing qigong shaking and just Google qigong shaking, or go to my little link there on that Google Doc, or use a mini trampoline. Anything that bounces you up and down for about five minutes will help tremendously in getting stuff moving, especially if you do it after that salt water and before that little squatty potty technique that I just gave you. And then finally, there's a series of yoga poses that work very, very well, especially for constipation. And I will put a link to each of those yoga poses. They're the 10 best yoga poses for constipation. And if you just switch to those for your morning routine, you don't have to do it for life. But until you train your body to get to the point where it's loosened up some of those ligaments and tight tendons that can cause constipation, because, again, it can be very anatomical, you'll get to the point where you're limber enough, so to speak, to move things through. But there's 10 different yoga poses that I really like. So you wake up in the morning, you have your glass of water, you do your yoga poses, you jump on the trampoline, or you do the qigong shaking for about five minutes, then you get in your squatty potty, and you do your squatty potty thing. Now, if you get traveler's constipation or if stuff just doesn't come out of you, and you. You really need to get to the point where you've trained your body to just get rid of stuff, especially until you knock out this small bowel or small intestine. You can get a rubber enema bulb, and you can use that rubber enema bulb and do either a coffee enema, or what works just as well is an enema of baking soda and sea salt. You mix a little baking soda, you mix a little sea salt, you put that in warm water, and you retain the enema for about five minutes, and then you poo. And that will work like gangbusters if these other things do not. So that's my recommendation. For like a morning routine for constipation, especially if you're going through a period of time where you're trying to get rid of the small bowel overgrowth. Now, a few other things that I would recommend. Number one would be sometimes, especially if you're cleaning up the diet and you're switching to the type of diet I'm about to describe to you, you aren't going to be able to do a lot of hard exercise. So a perfect example of an exercise protocol that you could do that isn't going to be quite as hard is, for example, a couple of times a week you do a super slow protocol. For example, Doug McGuff's book Body by Science is a very, very good example of just a couple of times a week, 15 to 20 minutes of heavy, super slow lifting. In addition, you would do something like very, very simple two to three times a week swimming laps or underwater hypoxic work or aqua jogging or anything kind of like non weight bearing that's not going to tear the body up too much just as you're repairing the body, taking in less food, but still trying to move and keep blood flowing. And then also Bikram yoga or any form of hot yoga. Big fan of that two to three times a week for detoxification and for again cardiovascular blood flow, getting things moving through the body. And I'll put a link to all these things in the notes for this constipation fix that I send to you. And then I'm also a big fan of, of qigong because qigong has a specific part of it where they focus on what is called your Lower Dantian. You know what the lower Dantian is, Brock?

I have no idea.

It's all like they're right down there underneath your belly button, all your sex organs and your large intestine and that entire area that tends to be just weak and turned off in a lot of people. And when I went back east last week and I interviewed this guy who's a qigong master, Robert Peng, he talked a lot about the Lower Dantian during our interview in his office and how that in his opinion is the most important part to focus on. So I own all of his videos and what my kids and I have been doing is going through his entire video series to teach ourselves qigong. But what you would want to do if you're constipated is go through a qigong video series like that and pay very, very close attention to any of the parts that get into a focus on the lower Dan Tian so you're learning how to breathe energy into that and become aware of it. And essentially you're consciously teaching yourself to be able to flow energy, qi, prana, chakra, whatever you want to call it, in and out of that bowel area. And that sounds cheesy and it sounds woo woo, but that mind body connection is actually pretty important when it comes to this stuff. So from a workout and a movement protocol, that's kind of an overview of what you would be doing. And then finally, in addition to that atrantil that I mentioned that you can take with each meal for about 30 days in a row, you'll want to heal up leaky gut. And so I'm a big fan of using colostrum and L glutamine and bone broth on a daily basis for that as three things to help to heal up any small intestinal damage that has been done. But in addition to that, I would highly recommend something like what's called an upgrade elemental diet for 30 days. And I like my version of this diet because it's basically like having chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So all it involves is one to two scoops of this stuff called Thorne mediclear sgs, one of the best meal replacement blends on the face of the planet for healing up a leaky gut and fixing your stomach. And you blend that with water or bone broth in a big blender. You can throw a little bit of stevia in there for some sweetener if you want. And then you add a few things that I feel that that particular meal replacement blend is deficient in particularly essential amino acids. About a teaspoon or so of a really good salt, and then about two teaspoons or so of a really good fat, like an extra virgin olive oil or some krill oil or some coconut oil. And you blend all that up. And for 30 days that's what you have for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner. And I've had quite a few discussions with the docs over at Thorn about the way that this particular meal is made up. This Thorne mediclear stuff, it's perfect. Combined with these other strategies, like using some colostrum, using some glutamine, taking the atrantil at getting rid of all these issues. It's like pushing the reboot button on your body, reboot button in your gut, your small bowel specifically. I know that's a lot of things, but if you put all that together and you stick to what I just described to you, for about a month. You will find that constipation is not something that you ever have to worry about again. Mark my words, 30 day money back guarantee. And since you didn't pay anything for this podcast, that's pretty easy for me to do anyways though I'll put a link in the show notes. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com371. You can download my hidden document, the ultimate fix for Constipation, where I'll walk you through each of those things. And that's what I would do. Constipated Kelly or anybody else listening in. If you want to push the reboot button on your gut, if you're constipated, if you are traveling and you got to push stuff out, whatever, I'll put everything in there that you need to know.

Hey Ben, what's up? This is Bruno da Gama here. Brazilian health and nuts. Usually I get eight hours of sleep and I feel amazing throughout the day. I have all the energy that I need to do whatever I want to do. My question is, is there a way to decrease the amount of sleep, let's say get around six hours and still be as productive as I am when I have eight hours? Meaning is there any special protocol, special foods, special supplements or anything like that that could give me here this advantage of just sleeping less but still kick ass during the day? That's my question. Thank you so much and I appreciate all that.

I do.

Bye.

I totally understand why Bruno is asking this, but you know, I'm not with you, Bruno. If I could sleep 10 hours a night, I would be so happy. Well, I love sleeping.

I love sleeping too. But, but admittedly, and I've found this to be the case for me, of late, I have been sleeping anywhere from five to seven hours a night. And this has been a topic hot on my mind because I've had to mitigate some of the damage from that, some of the effects of it. And so I've been researching myself something that we talked about on the show sometime back, but that we haven't visited in quite some time. And that's the wonderful, wonderful world of polyphasic sleep. Because frankly, Bruno, you ask about supplements or foods or protocols. Yeah. You know, Modafinil and Adderall, people talk about that. I've talked about the God pill Qualia. And I'll put a link in the show notes to my article on the God pill, which I like. You know, and just in short, what that is, is it's a blend of neural anti Inflammatories and what are called choline donors, nootropics, amino acids that specifically assist with neurotransmitter formation and then some things that help out with the blood brain barrier. And it's called qualia. I have found that in terms of allowing you to get your polyphasic sleep cycle in later on in the afternoon as being one of the best things, it's not gonna keep you up for like 24 hours in a row. Okay, so qualia is one that I would look into. The other one, surprisingly enough, that works very well in allowing you to cope with sleep deprivation, still be lucid, still have verbal fluency and memory recall, but also still be able to nap and engage in the polyphasic sleep that I'm about to describe to you. It's a little bit more fringe, but it would be microdosing with LSD, very small amounts. We're talking about anywhere from 5 to 15 micrograms of LSD. There's a specific way that you can do it. Probably the best way to figure out how to do that. Bruno, if that's something you want to delve into, it's obviously not legal, but there's a website called, I think it's Third Wave Psychedelics. They have a PDF that you can download there that will teach you how to microdose and also teach you how to source something like LSD or Shrooms or anything like that. And I'll put a link to their website in the show notes, but it's called Third Wave Psychedelics. So if you wanted to do something like lsd, it's certainly an option. But again, all of these are kind of like covering up an issue. And what you don't want to do is get the long term neural damage and the long term memory deficit damage that can occur by using pills to cover up a lack of sleep. Instead, what I would recommend is like I mentioned the wonderful world of polyphasic sleep.

Oh, I thought you were going to say cocaine.

Cocaine, that's right. Coca Cola, baby. Did you know Coca Cola still has like a. Some kind of like a patent on cocaine? Meaning that they. Yeah, no, like, like Google Coca Cola cocaine, Federal government. And there is a ton of really interesting information. I was talking. Who was I? Oh, Kyle Kingsbury, who came up here to podcast. We went paddleboarding and he told me this story about Coca Cola and cocaine that just blew my mind about how basically.

It'S kind of complex, but Coca Cola, the company somehow still imports coca leaves, still imports coca leaves from the Andes because they were using those as a flavor originally. Everybody knows this, right? Coca Cola originally had cocaine in it. And they still obtain Coca and they import it each year under special permission from the dea. And they extract cocaine from the coca leaves, but they don't use the cocaine because there's no cocaine in Coca Cola today. And it turns out that all this white powder cocaine that Coca Cola is no longer using goes to this company in St. Louis. It's called Mallinckrodt Company. And then they wind up turning that over to the DEA and federal regulators and then it all just kind of disappears. So somehow the US government, through Coca Cola company is getting over 300 kilos of cocaine each year and nobody really knows where it's going. I'm telling you, you can look this up. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but you can look it up.

That the federal government, they can import and process the coca plant which they obtain mainly from Peru and Bolivia.

God bless capitalism, baby.

Anyways, though we digress.

Anyways, that's totally.

Thank you Brock for derailing US Polyphasic sleep. So here's the deal.

There's evidence that light sleep, this non recovering sleep stage can allow you to get to the point where you can get by on lower amounts of these longer blocks of eight hour sleep. So to understand what I'm about to describe, just understand that the very, very basics of sleep stages. So you got your rapid eye movement rem, rapid eye movement sleep. And this would be the stage of sleep where you get a restoration of mental clarity and it reduces a lot of the symptoms of sleep deprivation. That's also the stage of sleep where you have your most vivid dreams and where your brain wave frequencies are very wavy wavelength or wave like, okay, that's like your REM sleep.

It'S not your slow wave sleep, but you get this very wave like function during that sleep. Then you have your slow wave sleep, your SWS slow wave sleep, that's non rev sleep or non REM sleep. So that's where you get your immune functions, that's where you get your hormone functions. That's where you're completely unwakeable, very slow delta brainwave frequencies. This is known as deep sleep. Okay? It's also known as stage three or stage four sleep. So you have your rapid eye movement sleep which isn't quite as deep but where you still get a restoration of mental clarity. And then you have your non REM sleep which is where a lot of the repair and the recovery takes place. You also have a stage of Sleep called non rapid eye movement sleep. And technically both light sleep and slow wave sleep are a type of non rapid eye movement sleep. And so we see non rapid eye movement sleep occurring during both of these different phases of sleep. And then you also have light non rapid eye movement sleep. And this is actually one of the things that you're getting into when you incorporate some of the polyphasic sleep strategies that I'm about to describe to you. So the idea here is that everybody has to go through certain sleep cycles during the night. I talked a lot about this during my podcast interview with Dr. Nick Littlehales. And we go into sleep rhythms and how you need to, for example, for any given seven day period, get like 30 to 35 of these different sleep cycles where you alternate between your REM sleep and your non REM sleep during the night. Well, the idea is that there's a concept called sleep repartitioning. And this is when your body will divert from a typical one and a half hour sleep stage where you're moving through all these different sleep cycles and you do this multiple times during the night. Most people need to go through anywhere from four to five of these one and a half hour long sleep stages during the night that consist of those different stage one, stage two, stage three, and then finally rapid eye movement or deep sleep and back. And so what happens is you're supposed to go through all those. But sleep repartitioning, what that happens is that if you start to throw in 20 minute naps at 31st, and they've shown this in sleep labs at first, those naps are only going to be comprised of stage one and stage two sleep. Which is why when you wake up from one of those 20 minute naps, you'll have some amount of mental clarity. But what happens with sleep repartitioning is that over time the body adapts and you begin to pass through your entire sleep phase during like a short 20 to 30 minute nap. Meaning you can cross from stage one to stage two to stage three, and even reach deep sleep phases. Once your body has adapted and began to engage in sleep repartitioning, you simply have to train your body to be able to do this. And so there's all sorts of different polyphasic sleep cycles that are out there. But one very, very simple one, and this is the one that I do, is you'll sleep anywhere from six to seven and a half hours during the night and you're getting, you know, three, perhaps four of your one and a half hour ish sleep cycles. During that night. But then later on in the afternoon, you're doing a 20 to 30 minute nap. And with that 20 to 30 minute nap, what happens is you're eventually training your body. If you do this nap over and over and over again to get to the point where you're engaged in sleep repartitioning and you're able to go through an entire sleep cycle during that short nap, you're training your body how to get very efficient polyphasic sleep.

You're sort of letting your body train itself. Really.

You're not doing the training. Exactly, exactly.

It just figures it out.

Yep, exactly. Now, there are some risks there, like when you don't get a lot of sleep, you get to reduce what's called a sleep spindle. Remember I said I'd talk about that later on. And reduce what's called a K complex. Now, sleep spindles are where the brain learns where nerves control what specific muscles are being used, where you form memories, where the nerve nervous system repairs and recovers. And you may miss out on a little bit of that with long term polyphasic sleep. You may miss out on some nervous system repair and recovery and you may miss out on some memory formation. The other risk here is that as you age, you become less efficient in sleep repartitioning. And so the older that you get, the less you might be served by polyphasic sleep. So if you're like 20 to 40 years old, this is probably a pretty good strategy. As you get older, you might have to prioritize these longer sleep cycles at night, where you are trying to sleep through the night, or at least getting many of your sleep cycles done during the night, rather than purposefully shorting yourself on sleep so you can engage in a polyphasic sleep cycle. But the biggest takeaway here, and this is what I've found, and it's helped my life tremendously, is that you can do these shorter cycles. Get your three to four, one and a half hour sleep cycles during the night, but then train your body how to get an extra full sleep cycle during the day by simply training yourself. And an ideal time is anywhere from five to seven hours after you've woken. So if you wake at 6am, the ideal time for a nap would be starting your nap sometime between 11am and 1pm and you do your 20 to 30 minute nap. And that trains your body to eventually get to the point where it repartitions and it engages in an entire full sleep cycle during that nap. There's all sorts of things you can do to master the nap. Right. And I have an article@BenGreenfieldFitness.com called how to Master the Nap. You do binaural beats with headphones. You do a sleep mask, a little bit of lavender, you make sure it's at the same time. You could do a little bit of a reishi mushroom extract or something like that prior to lunch. All sorts of things that you can do to enhance.

The efficacy of the nap. But ultimately it all comes down to polyphasic sleep. And what I'm going to do for you, Bruno, is I'll put a link to a polyphasic sleep, kind of like a how to document that you can read. I'll put that in the show notes over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com371 and it gets into all sorts of different polyphasic sleep patterns because I remember Brock and I did a big podcast on this sometime back where we get into like biphasic sleep and everyman's sleep and Uberman sleep and all these different methods. But for me personally, it's just as simple as a slightly shorter nightly sleep cycle and then that 20 to maximum 40 to 45 minute nap in the afternoon around 1pm have you read the.

Book the Power of When? I have Michael Bruce.

Yeah. Michael's one of my friends.

Yeah, that's something. I can't help but think about that when I think about Bruno's question in that book. Dr. Bruce, he's a doctor, isn't he? Michael Bruce? Yeah, I think he's a PhD of some sort. But he writes about a thing called chronotypes and basically breaks it down to four different chronotypes. And each one of the chronotypes has a very specific sleep cycle or sleep time or wakeful cycle or something. And I think that'd be an interesting thing for Bruno to take a look at too. I think you can take a quiz online if you go to the Power of When website.

I interviewed Michael Bruce and that interview is called the Best Time of Day to Exercise. But we get into a whole lot more, including the best time of day to take a nap, how to nap, et cetera. So I'll put a link to that one in the show notes. Thanks for bringing that one up, Brock. But yeah, he's smart. He's a clinical psychologist, he's a diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine. He consults with NASA, he's been on the clinical advisory board of Dr. Oz for quite some time and has been on the Dr. Oz Show. I want to say like over 30 times. And yeah, he's pretty interesting, dude.

The first things you listed were a lot more impressive than that.

But yeah, well, we all know that the best way to verify your scientific firepower is whether or not you've been on the Dr. Oz Show.

Exactly.

Anyways, I'll link to my podcast episode with Michael Bruce and his book Power of Wind for you as well, Bruno. So hopefully that gets you started. And remember, Fallouts Fails LSD baby.

Hi.

I wanted to know if this both products, the MK677 and the RAD 140 that can be used for my father. He's 82. I feel that it would benefit him. But I like your opinion on it. Also, could women use both products?

Thanks.

Mmm.

Sarms.

Sarms.

They have names that sound like they're Star wars robots like MK677 and RAD140 and GW5.091. Actually, one of the when we talked about exercise in a pill in episode number 370, that's technically a SARMS, the one that they gave the mouse that improved aerobic endurance by like 70% without the mouse doing any extra exercise, that was the sarms. And it stands for Selective Androgen Receptor Modulator. It's what's technically called an androgen receptor ligand. I have written a few different articles on BenGreenfieldFitness.com about how exactly to use SARMs and what they actually do, like their actual mechanism of action. But they're very, very interesting because different SARMs have of different effects. So I really don't want to go into the mechanism of action here because I've written about it so much. I'd rather just get into the practical nitty gritty of like how to use SARMs, if that's cool. And for those of you who want to geek out on SARMs, I'll put a link to my article. It's called A New and Potent SARM Stack for Muscle Building, Fat Loss and Anti Aging. How to use MK677 and RAD140. And then I also have another article on, on some of these other SARMs, selective androgen receptor Modulators. Let me mention, by the way, that they are banned by USADA and wada. And so if you're listening and you're competing in like, you know, triathlons or marathons or cycling or spartan racing or anything like that, you can't legally use these. And they're also something that don't have a great deal of long term safety research behind them. They're usually sold by like veterinary medicine websites not meant for human consumption. So just an FYI, we're delving into kind of like the. Well, heck, we already talked about LSD, so what the heck.

So for example, like LGD4033 pretty popular SARMs, and it's one of those that is extremely effective for lean mass gains. So if you're trying to put on muscle, it's an incredible SARMs. Like some of the other SARMs, you cycle it because it can drop testosterone when used chronically over long periods of time. It decreases what's called FSH and LH in both men and women and for example in both sexes that can be assigned to your gonads to produce testosterone. And so you need to be careful with it and you need to cycle something like this, which I'll get into in a second. But that's one example of a SARMS. Another one would be like MK2866. That one's better for healing injuries very, very quickly. Unlike something like the lgd, it doesn't increase what's called aromatization, so it doesn't increase your risk for like estrogen formation and, and man boobs. And so it's, it's different. That would be like a SARMS that you would use, for example, for recovery. There's another one called RAD140 and RAD140 is another one that's good for like lean muscle gains. It's, it's a, a little less of an issue when it comes to decreasing your ability to produce testosterone. So it'd be like a less testosterone reducing alternative to LGD4033. And then there's that one we talked about last week, which is excellent for exercise and for endurance. GW5015, that's the one that they call exercise in a pill. It's technically exercise in a dropper. But that one doesn't really have much of a deleterious effect on testosterone or on estrogen levels or anything else like that. Some people have suggested that it may cause cancer to develop rapidly in several organs. And I know that those studies were done.

In rodent models that already had cancer, caused the tumor to grow more quickly. But something to bear in mind if that's something you're interested in using, There may be a downside to exercise in a pill, primarily being lots of tumors.

That's a pretty big downside.

That's a pretty big downside. There's MK677 that's another very popular one. And that's one that's actually been studied in older mammals. And it's been shown to cause a relatively large increase in cortisol and a slight increase in insulin resistance, but also a huge improvement in things like lean muscle gain and fat loss. And so, as with anything, there are some downsides, there are some side effects, and that's why in most cases, most cases, you would cycle a SARMS to get rid of many of these issues. So when I say cycle, you take it for a certain period of time and then you stop and then you.

Jump on a bike.

Yeah. Then you hop on a bike and you ride a bicycle. No, you cycle. So you get on and off it, and when you're off it, you take things like aromatase inhibitors to shut down estrogen formation or certain things that will increase the formation of luteinizing hormone. Like bulbein is a perfect example. And so for like an LGD, SARMS, you'd go eight weeks on and then you'd go eight weeks off. And for the eight weeks on, for example, you'd take like 2 to 4 milligrams of that every day. And then during the eight weeks off, you would use, for example, things that help with testosterone. We're talking about like tribulus, bulbine, zinc, magnesium, creatine. Some people use things like Clomid or HCG along with aromatase inhibitors, things that would decrease the formation of estrogen. You know, we're talking about components like diindolmethane is one common one. Curcumin or turmeric is another one. There's one called Brassopsis, another one called Prunella. You know, things that help to control estrogen so that you're not getting the estrogen side effects of being on SARMs long term. Most SARMs are like 8 weeks on, 8 weeks off. Some are 8 weeks on, 4 weeks off, some are 12 weeks on, 4 weeks off. My recommendation to most folks who want to be conservative with SARMs is to do eight weeks on, four weeks off. That's a cycle that tends to be pretty proven with most SARMs. And for the four weeks off, and you could even do eight weeks off if you wanted to be very careful. You would take something that increases your testosterone, specifically your luteinizing hormone or your follicle stimulating hormone, your LH or your fsh, and also take something that reduces estrogen for that. Right now, my two favorite supplements would be one called Aggressive Strength and another one called Estrogen Control. And so what you do, let's say you're gonna take LGD. Are you going to stack one of these SARMs? Like a very common stack would be MK677 and RAD140. That's an extremely potent stack for fat loss, for muscle gain. And then you could even do a separate cycle of something like gw if you were an athlete and you wanted to improve your endurance, but you would do eight weeks on and then four to eight weeks of taking morning and evening aggressive strength and morning and evening estrogen control, and then you'd go back onto the sarms and you'd cycle through that multiple times throughout the year. And I get called out on this all the time because I know that sometimes I talk about things on the show that have not been proven in long term safety studies to be completely bulletproof when it comes to safety. And I realize that all of this stuff is kind of like a proceed at your own risk type of discussion. At the same time though, it's, in my opinion, worth looking into. If you wanted to accelerate your gains, I would just say cycle and do a conservative cycle. Right, like eight on, eight off or eight on, four off. And again, like I mentioned, another kind of more aggressive cycle would be like a 12 on 4 off. But anyways, I would definitely include something like aggressive strength and estrogen control. Aggressive strength being the one that will improve fsh, lh, testosterone when you're off this arm. So you don't get a long term deficit in terms of the testes job of creating testosterone, estrogen control. And that one has like the Brassopsis. It's got bulbine, it's got turmeric, it's got all the things that will decrease estrogen and you do those as you when you're in your off cycle from the sarms. Does that make sense? It does.

I'm just wondering, in terms of cycling, would there be any advantage to doing say like one week on, one week off? No, just alternating like that.

Now the body responds to multiple weeks. That's why you generally would see the shortest cycle of SARMs you would do would be an eight week. And generally you're looking at eight, 10 or 12 weeks for your on cycle and then four to eight weeks for your off cycle.

All right, that makes sense.

Yeah, it's one of those things kind of like taking beetroot extract for.

Endurance. It's better to do it like two weeks in a row leading up to a race, for example, to load with it than taking it like one day. Same thing with SARMs. You're gonna get better results by doing a certain number of periods of weeks every day and then you take a certain period of weeks off. So gotcha. Yeah. That's the ultimate guide to SARMs. And that's not the ultimate guide to SARMs. That's basically my overview of SARMs. I'll put a link to my articles on it in the show notes and then grisel, once your 87 year old father is walking around in a unitard towing boats with his teeth through San Francisco Bay, you can attribute all of that to him having listened to episode 371.

Can I ask you one thing though?

Yeah.

Why does everyone talk about chasing their sarms with oj, like with orange juice? What's up with that?

Ascorbic acid improves deliverability. You could also, if you want to avoid the fructose you could use, you could take like a lipophilic vitamin C capsule and you could dump that open inside your mouth or take your sarms then chase it with a glass of like lemon juice and water.

All right. I thought it was just to cover up the gasoline flavor, but.

Love that gasoline flavor.

Hi Ben, could you give us your opinion on the Wim Hof breathing method versus the Buteyko breathing method? As per Patrick McEwen's oxygen advantage, which one would you say gives the best long term gains for health and life? Thanks a lot. Love the podcast.

All right, so.

Oh, I'm totally dizzy now.

Yeah, High on life and breath. So I get this question a lot about the Wim HOF breathing versus the Buteco very low and slow breathing. In the show notes I will put my interview with the Butecho Method Enthusiast Patrick McCone who wrote the excellent book Oxygen Advantage. I will also put a link to my podcast with the equally entertaining Wim hof. Wim hof. Man, have another beer, man. Anyways though, so have you heard him sing?

That guy can really. He can play the guitar and sing like nobody's business.

Yes, he's a good. He's a good musician. He played guitar on my podcast. Go listen to the episode. Did he?

Oh crap.

Sorry. So the Buteyko breathing method is a breathing method that is designed to make permanent or lasting changes in your unconscious breathing patterns. It's very good at activating the parasympathetic nervous system. It's very good at keeping you from over breathing. And we get into this in the book Oxygen Advantage. But the idea is that excessive intake of oxygen can create a lot of reactive oxygen species. An increased respiration rate and from a longevity and a stress standpoint, learning to control your breath and not engage in a lot of hyperventilation can be a very healthy practice, especially when it comes to decreasing stress and improving heart rate variability. When you look at the WIM HOF breathing technique, that's brief controlled periods of hyperventilation like 30 rapid inhalations and exhalations followed by breath holding, usually followed by some kind of immersion into cold water or hiking up a mountain barefoot in the snow in your underwear or folding.

Over a face first because you passed out.

Right. The WIM HOF method has a goal to prolong breath holding and usually to prolong breath holding in cold conditions or to allow yourself to be able to handle some type of a cold stress better. It also seems to have this fascinating effect of working to activate areas of brown fat cells and working to assist with immune function. And even as Wim has shown in clinical studies, to decrease the formation of inflammatory cytokines, he's even injected himself with E. Coli and shown that his breath patterns combined with cold work can render the body non susceptible to the deleterious effects of E. Coli.

That was nutty. That was the craziest thing I've seen somebody do.

So the problem with the WIM HOF method from my standpoint is that you're hyperventilating and that means you're blowing off carbon dioxide and that hampers aerobic metabolism. What I mean by that is that when you breathe off carbon dioxide, a high amount of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream is the signal for oxygen to get delivered to the cells of the body. Okay, so basic physiology is that carbon dioxide will decrease the affinity of the hemoglobin for oxygen and cause the oxygen, oxygen to become dumped off into muscle tissue more readily so that your muscle tissue becomes more oxygenated. If you're over breathing, you're looking at breathing off more carbon dioxide. And a lot of people think, oh, that means I'm not going to be acidotic. That means I'm going to alkalize my body. When in fact it doesn't really mean that your kidneys do a pretty good job of maintaining your body's pH. Instead it just means you're depriving your tissues of some oxygen. Can that be useful when you blow off a bunch of CO2 for say, getting a dump of nitric oxide and vasodilation to be able to withstand a cold water immersion? Absolutely. Can it be useful for activating the immune system in like a temporary fashion? Absolutely. Can it be useful for holding your Breath for a really long time underwater, since carbon dioxide is your body's signal to take a breath. Dangerous, but yes. So there are applications for the WIM HOF method, but they would be acute applications in my opinion that you would use in certain situations. Like I dropped my chunky longevity monkey pint of ice cream into this freezing cold pool of water and now I have to dive down and get it. I'm going to do 30 Wim Hof breaths and I'm going to dive down there and get it and be able to do that because I did his special breathing pattern.

Whereas the Buteyko breathing would be something that you do just like during the day. Nice, easy, relaxed, light breathing to keep yourself from hyperoxygenating your body and breathing in too much and also to keep yourself from blowing off too much carbon dioxide so that you're getting yourself into a state where you have more oxygen available to your tissues.

But with decreased metabolism, meaning that you're not creating a lot of reactive oxygen species. So the idea is that they both have their time and they both have their place. And I use both. I love the WIM HOF method. When I'm gonna go do like cold water immersion or I'm getting ready for like a, a race and I gotta activate my body and blow off a bunch of CO2 or I, I for example want to like do like yogic fire breathing to, you know, and I'll do that sometimes just to like get a lot of blood flow going through the body to increase nitric oxide production. There's a time and a place for it. But you don't do WIM HOF breathing. You don't do this all day long. Right. Certain periods of time, just like exercise, just like heat, just like cold, just like any hormetic stressor, you can overdo it. So that's the idea is you don't have to be.

A zealous disciple of any one breath method that you stick to all the time. The best for long term gains for health and life is to breathe nice and easy through your nose, not to breathe too much. And then when it comes time to breathe hard and heavy and do something like a WIM HOF breathing technique, that's when you do that. And so yeah, that's the idea behind the difference between the WIM HOF and the Buteco. And I'll put a link to both my interviews that we're take a deep dive into this stuff in the show notes. We're@BenGreenfieldFitness.com371 along with my ultimate fix for constipation. Hidden Document all the green tea stuff. And remember, if you're a green tea expert, hop into the comment section and fill me in on everything you know about making the green tea experience the ultimate green tea experience. I'll put a link to the article on sauna versus infrared light, the metformin stuff. And stay tuned for my Monday blog post on the metformin stuff and a whole bunch more including like the polyphasic sleep how to and.

The psychedelic sourcing document Top secret, the aggressive strength and the estrogen control stuff I talked about when it comes to sarms. A lot more. But also, let's give something away, shall we? Sure. So this is the part of the show where we read a review. Yeah. Typically if you leave a five star review on itunes and say something nice and we read your review on the show, all you need to do is write to geergeareenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gearreenfieldfitnesssystems.com and when you write to us, what we will do is we'll turn right back around, we'll send you a handy dandy gear pack full of like a tech T shirt and a cool water bottle and a beanie and all sorts of cool stuff. However, every so often we'll just read a review that we found entertaining. And so in today's show, we're going to read a review that happens to be. Well, Brock's going to read it. Actually, it's too painful for me to read, so. One star review.

One star review.

First of all, first of all, if you hear this one star review read and you got anything out of this show, good karma people. Go leave a quick five star review in iTunes. It'll take you two frigging minutes. Not itunes, Apple podcasts, whatever they're calling it now anyways though. So here's A review from Arab 2713 or AROB 2713. A R O B 2713 says would not recommend one star. You want to take this one away, Brock?

Yeah, I'm going to do a voice just warning you.

Okay.

Way too technical and random. Ben jumps from one topic to the next. He has a monotone voice that puts you to sleep.

Yep.

Did not find this podcast helpful.

Oh, you know, his reviews up to the very end, it was really accurate. It is technical. That's random. Well, it's random. We jump from one topic to the next.

We do.

Right? Constipation to sarms and beyond. I do have a monotone voice that puts many people to sleep, but it sounds like some people, based on the question that we got today, could use better sleep. And so there's that. However, we try to make the podcast helpful. So I'm sorry about that. A Rob but a Rob, if you still are listening and you're not asleep.

And I haven't pissed you off with my imitation of your voice, write in.

To the show and we'll send you a T shirt. Because technically 75% of your review is correct. 3 out of 4 things that you mentioned was correct. So with that being said, thank you all for listening to this technical random topic jumping monotone sleep inducing show. All of the show notes are over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com371 Remember to support the Kickstarter going on right now@christiangratitude.com remember to check in on my forthcoming article on the dark side of Metformin. And you can do that by ensuring that you subscribe to the free newsletter@bengreenfieldfitness.com and that is it. Goodbye, Brock.

And next week I'm putting some really tight underwear on Ben so he's not so monotone.

Boom.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.