380: Caffeine's Effect on Testosterone, Meditation Hacks, Can Kids Eat More Sugar Than Adults &...

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Caffeine's effect on testosterone. Meditation hacks can kids eat more sugar than adults? How to fix plantar fasciitis, 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 physical and mental performance.

Ben Greenfield.

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You know, it's a good thing you can't see me right now because I've got those horrible goggle marks because I just got back from the pool like five minutes ago.

Well, you know, the only thing that's, that's like less attractive than horrible goggle marks all over your face when you like go out to dinner after you've been, say, swimming lapse. The.

You look so wide awake and not ghoulish at all.

Yeah, the only thing worse than that is the blue light blockers, AKA the birth control for your head. That's, that's also a pretty, a pretty bad look, but, but both are a better look than me right now. I've got a basically like chapped and peeling lips because who have you been kissing? Yeah, no, I got a mass. Okay, so here's why. I got a massage the other night. And you know how when you're face down on the massage table, you're all congested when flip over and they want to work on your thighs and your stomach or your neck or whatever, and you're laying there like, gosh, I wish I could actually breathe through my nose. Well, my massage therapist was diffusing this essential oil. It's like clove and it's basically like that thieves essential oil, right? Clove, cinnamon, rosemary, whatever. All these quote hot essential oils in terms of their effect on the body. And I thought, hey, that's a perfect decongestant. So I smeared some all over around kind of like my lips underneath my nose and started burning within like 10 minutes. And I kind of had that oh crap moment and woke up and my lips were, were burnt to a crisp. So first world problems. Burning your lips off during a massage therapy session, that's definitely first world.

News flash.

So the first thing that I wanted to mention today because I know that all of the Gentlemen listening in just want to get jacked. They want to increase testosterone. I'm pretty sure that we could just do every single show on boosting testosterone and we would still have listeners lined up.

We might even have more, actually.

Yeah. And then all of the women are sending their men to go listen to said testosterone episode.

It's not a bad business model, actually. Maybe we should consider that.

No. Testosterone is very sexy. Every guy doesn't want to lose testosterone. That's why it's an ancient ancest practice to have consumed the balls of living creatures. I'm pretty sure. And I know this because I've driven through Montana and I've seen the Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival. And I'm pretty sure that the logical way that ancestral man would have thought would have been, hey, my libido is failing. I should eat some balls. I'm pretty sure.

Well, you know, the more the traditional way of castrating bulls is to, like, just sort of pinch off the sack and then bite it. Like bite the sack and tear the. Tear the testes out with your teeth. So really, it's not that far off.

See, with our Nigerian dwarf goats, we just tied rubber bands around their testes. Yeah.

Apparently that's really not humane. Like, the best way to do it is, like really quick and just like rip it out with your teeth. I learned that from Mike Rowe, everybody.

We just. We just made a lot of people vegan anyways, though you're welcome, people. If you don't want to eat balls, you can also drink coffee. Because it turns out that in this latest study, there was a 70% increase in testosterone after the consumption of caffeinated gum versus a placebo gum. What they did was they measured the performance and the hormonal response. And this is important to exercise, meaning when you exercise after having had dumped copious amounts of gum into your system, your testosterone goes up significantly. And there are two things that I should point out about this study, which I'll link to, by the way. All these studies, everything we talk about, I'll link to over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 380. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com380. What I should mention is that a, they used a pretty copious amount of caffeine. This. This caffeinated gum was 400 milligrams in a. I don't know if it was a stick or a cube or a. I don't know, drop gum, drop. But ultimately that's like four cups of coffee in. Yeah, that's that's a lot.

Well, at least two.

That's a lot of caffeine. And furthermore, even though testosterone went up, they also measured blood lactate, they meas, you know, repeated sprints, they measured cognitive function. And it didn't appear that there was much of a significant effect on actual performance even though testosterone went up. Although I'm sure that there must have been some benefit somewhere, somewhere of the testosterone. I mean, even if it was the fact that one less animal had to lose its gonads because caffeinated gum was.

Available, that's pretty good benefit ultimately.

Interesting study. So try to chew caffeinated gum and I don't know, I don't know what brand they use, but I mean there's a bunch of different brands of caffeinated gum. But try some before workout and see what happens.

Now I'm wondering, does it have to be gum? Because I was taking some like caffeine and L theanine combo capsules for a while, like just as a way to sort of refocus myself in mid afternoon. Would that work?

Or does.

Is it the chewing action? Is that the, well, delivery?

Well, I've talked about this in some talks before about how chewing can increase blood flow to the brain and they've actually shown an improvement in cognitive function from chewing. And then we also all know that in the same way that ancient man ate the balls of living creatures that the Vikings used to chew on like leather straps, hence that advent of like people using like performance enhancing mouthpiece, mouth mouthpieces. So either way, it is possible that part of it is the clenching effect of chewing gum. Except they did have a placebo gum group in which that did not happen. So throw that hypothesis out the window. So there we go. Chew some caffeinated gum before your workout. And here's another interesting one, glutathione. You know, I'm personally kind of interested in glutathione because you can get these genetic tests, right, to find out which things that your body could or should be producing, maybe isn't producing or doesn't have the proper genetic SNPs to produce enough of. And for me, one of those is the gene responsible for the production of something called SOD or superoxide dismutase. What this means in a nutshell, and you can go get this tested at 23andMe or whatever, any of these genetic testing services, DNAFit, there's a bunch of them, but.

You can determine this. And then for me, this means that I need to pay close attention to My levels of glutathione. And I think four or five podcast episodes ago, we did a pretty extensive deep dive into glutathione and all the different ways that you could increase glutathione whey protein to liposomal glutathione to injectable glutathione. But what we didn't talk about was this study that just came out that investigated the antioxidant content of mushrooms. And this is the first time this has ever been studied. They found that mushrooms have very high amounts of something called ergothioneine, which is an important antioxidant and then also an even more important antioxidant. You guessed it, glutathione.

Glutathione, yeah.

So the mushrooms in this, they tested 13 different species, but the two mushroom types that had the highest amount of glutathione, if you wanted to start to kind of include these in your diet as a potent antioxidant. And again, I noted this for myself just because I personally need more glutathione. Were you got any guesses, Brock?

I would say those little guys, what the hell are they called?

Oh, porcini. Porcini. Porcini, yeah. Bing, bing, bing.

That's like the most common mushroom, right?

Porcini and yellow oysters. Very high in glutathione.

Oh, yeah, those are the ones that are all sort of flat and grody looking.

Yeah. Which is kind of cool because mushrooms are a pretty decent source of vitamin D as well, especially if they've been exposed to sunlight with their furry parts up. Yeah. Another reason to add mushrooms to your diet. Oh, and speaking of sunlight, did you see this? This thing about sunlight? And what these researchers at University of Alberta did was they observed that a lack of sunlight actually makes your cells store more fat. With the idea being that the fat cells just beneath your skin, your subcutaneous fat, can shrink when it gets exposed to the blue light emitted by the sun. And the way this is supposed to work is that when the sun's blue light wavelengths, which is the form of light that you can see with your eye, penetrates the skin and reaches the fat cells beneath, the lipid droplets underneath the skin, reduce in size and get released from the cells. So the cells don't store as much fat in people who have skin that gets exposed to the sun. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, I thought that was really cool. But they didn't explain where that fat went when it left the cell.

Well, typically, if a lipid droplet is reduced in size, that Typically means that. And this is probably why to a certain extent, like infrared saunas can work for detoxification is there's, there is a lysing of the actual fat cell and a release of fatty acids into the bloodstream where they could theoretically be burnt as energy.

Yeah.

What I think is even more interesting about this is people are walking around again wearing these blue light blockers at parties or in the evening watching movies or playing on their phone. And I think what's probably going to happen is a lot of people are going to get fat eyes. Yeah.

It's a terrible scourge of humankind, your eyes.

Yeah, we're going to have a whole generation of fat eyes, people who sleep really well, but they're going to have to super fat eyes. So. Yeah, well, it just looked like those.

Little aliens from all the, all the movies from the 80s.

Yeah. And then finally bacterial doping and poop doping could be the next big thing. According to this article that appeared in Outside magazine and this one was pretty interesting. They, they interviewed this guy named Embriet Hyde who manages the American Gut Project. And one of the things that they're doing over the American Gut Project, that.

Sounds like that's something totally different. American Gut Project.

What does it sound like?

Well, you know, the country's known for its obesity, Right?

Right. So.

Oh yeah, you're thinking like, I don't.

Get it, going around poking people on their fat bellies or something.

Yeah, you need to go to the Canadian Humor Project and work on your gut jokes. So.

Funny stuff.

Anyways, they're testing 150 samples of, of the microbiome of the poop from professional athletes and from amateur athletes. And they're finding some very interesting things. Like we already know that things like the firmicide bacteriode ratio can affect, let's say, your propensity for obesity and that there are certain bacteria that are responsible for certain personality characteristics or the propensity to gain or not to gain weight. And when we look at actual athletes in sports performance, it turns out that there are specific bacteria responsible for whether or not you're gonna be superhuman, shall we say? So one of the things they found was this type of bacteria. And they wouldn't name it in the article, they wouldn't name it publicly, probably because they want to turn it into some probiotic supplement that they can sell for copious amounts of money to the Chinese Olympians. But what happens is they tested marathoners and they saw this bacteria blooming in large numbers of marathoners shortly after they finished the race accumulates in the bloodstream and, and it accumulates after strenuous exercise. And it seems that it breaks down the metabolites associated with fatigue. Like it could be an actual lactic acid buffering bacteria. And if there was, let's say, a really good endurance athlete who had that, you could potentially either dope with their poop or if they were able to formulate this bacteria supplement with said bacteria, which seems like a more promising business model compared to trading athlete poop. But either way, you'd be surprised. Yeah, it's really interesting. So they're doing all this meticulous testing on the personal microbiomes of different athletes. Another one that they found especially prevalent in endurance athletes was something called Prevotella. Prevotella. And they don't know why, but apparently people who are endurance athletes have a higher than normal amount of this prevotella in their microbiome, especially in cyclists. And so this idea behind poop doping is that in the same way that someone with say, like C. Difficile or IBS or IBD or some other gut issue would. And people are doing this. There's clinics like the, like the Tame out clinic over in the uk they're finding a healthy donor, they're getting the poop from that donor injected into their backside or in some cases, taking a poop pill. And it's literally just like rebooting their entire microbiome. Well, it turns out you could say, for example, hey, I'm an okay high level collegiate endurance athlete. I've got a roster here of 12 of the top athletes who have whatever sold their poop to whatever we want to call it Fit Poop Clinic. And I can go and pay X amount of dollars to actually reboot my microbiome with their pooh. I don't see anything going wrong with that scenario at all.

I have a total new side business right now. I'm going to go to all the marathons, sneak into the porta potties that are in the elite little tent area.

Right.

Steal the poop, and then I'll just sell it out of the back of a van somewhere just nearby.

Yeah, I think that it also helps to concentrate a lot of that positive bacteria when they sit there and fester in the hot afternoon sun as the marathon is run by. Yeah, perfect. Perfect business model.

Million dollar idea.

News flashes.

All right, so Brock, you're, you're a bit of a trailblazing freelancer, aren't you? You do some freelancing, do you not?

I do so much freelancing and it's the, the worst part of it is getting people to pay the invoices, I gotta say.

Yeah, I don't know why I asked you that. Like I was Yoda anyways. I like that, don't you?

Grammatically interesting.

If you could reclaim up to 192 hours of your time each year, would you?

Brock, what kind of ridiculous question is that?

Of course I would say it's a leading question is what it is. Because our friends at FreshBooks, they make this ridiculously easy to use cloud accounting software for freelancers. And they do everything. They invoice, they track expenses, they allow you to get paid online, and they literally just finished rebuilding it like from the ground up. So what this is, is it's basically like everything you'd ever need. Like a one stop shop for freelancers. So they let you invoice, they let you track expenses, they let you get paid, and they work with like 5 million people to deal with their paperwork. How cool is that?

You know what's even cooler is I used to work just down the block from them in Toronto. They're a Toronto company.

Oh, well, I bet they're nice chaps.

They are so freaking polite.

I'm glad they're nice.

It's ridiculous.

Here's, here's how nice they are. They're offering a 30 day unrestricted free trial to all our listeners. You just go to freshbooks.com Ben and in the how did you hear about us? Section you enter code Ben Greenfield Fitness. Which seems redundant. You'd think if you'd go to freshbooks.com Ben they just know. But either way you're supposed to go to freshbooks.com Ben and enter code BenGreenfield Fitness. That gets you a 30 day unrestricted free trial. Unfettered access, as they say.

Unfettered.

So there you have it. This podcast is also brought to you by something I actually had in the afternoon yesterday, the organifi red juice. Have you tried this stuff?

No, I haven't. I'm waiting for somebody, a good friend of mine, to send me some.

I'm have to send you a little. Well, I'll make a little drink with it and then I'll put that in a bubble wrap, I'll freeze it and send it your way. I'm not going to send you my whole canister.

Sending liquid across the border is never a problem.

Nope, never that. Bullets, drugs, anything. But if you just want to get this for yourself, basically it's like cordyceps, beet, acai, pomegranate pretty much everything you'd ever want to build your blood or increase nitric oxide. It even has like this slight nootropic effect without the drugs. So, yeah, and it has a fresher. What a fresh. Fresh.

Is it fresh and fruity?

A flesh and fruity flavor? Fresh and fruity flavor, thanks to the monk fruit that they put in it. So it's a red juice. They do green juice. They do a really good one called a gold powder. It's like turmeric. It's like. What do they call it? Coffee shops? Golden milk. Yes, they make that. So you go to. And the golden milk has Rishi in it, so helps you sleep if you have like a nice piping hot cup of golden milk at night. I make it in my nutribullet. It's amazing. You go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Organifi with an I and use discount code Red Ben. Red Ben to get your discount on organifi. And I should mention, by the way, for people listening in, we've got a pretty robust calendar now developing over at Ben Greenfield Fitness. My next stop is I'm going to be in Florida, near Fort Lauderdale, speaking at the Academy Regenerative Practices Conference. Bunch of physicians who are going to learn how to further the field of regenerative medicine from yours truly. Actually, I'm just going to talk about fringe stem cell injections, but it'll actually be really interesting. It's put on by the U.S. stem Cell Clinic down there, but it has.

Nothing to do with spring break.

Yes, and I should mention too, the Woodstock of America's ancestral healthy living movement is coming up. Paleo fx.

I was wondering where you're going with that.

All the goodies, all the links are in the show notes. So all this stuff, your freshbooks, your organifi, everywhere I'm going to be over the course of March and April. You just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 380. BenGreenfieldFitness.com380. And it's all there. Hoorah.

Listener.

Q and A.

Hi. I'm wanting to.

Stop my brain thinking, actually surrender my thoughts during meditation. I find my thoughts just impact me just way too much. And I'm wondering what music you would recommend for me to.

Listen to Twist to attain a higher. A high state of consciousness.

This is likely the biggest hurdle that most people, when they start meditation, need to get over. It's keeping that quiet.

Let's just listen to this podcast because I'm injecting Sublingual. Is that what it's called? Sublingual?

Sublingual. We're slipping things under people's tongues.

No, like what's, what's the word? Subliminal. Subliminal. I was close with sublingual. Yeah, I just invented a new word.

Sneaking it under your tongue while you're sleeping.

No. Subliminal messages are woven throughout this pod. You will focus. You will not lose focus or you will die.

We will place blue light blockers upon your head.

The thing is that I'm pretty sure this is a natural state, this brain wandering thing, because about every week I take my little boys, my twin nine year old boys, into our sauna, into our big infrared sauna. They should sponsor this podcast because I said that. Our big clearlight sanctuary infrared sauna.

Get it now with four easy payments of the 2999. What we'll do though is I'll set up a candle that they stare at, right, that's sitting there on the floor, that's flickering. I also have an hourglass that is a 15 minute hourglass, right, so you can watch the sand fall. And it's a quarter hour glass. What we practice on doing. Yes, it's a quarter hourglass. What we practice doing is simply observing the flicker of the candle flame or observing the sandfall. And they'll generally go about one or two minutes before you start to see a fidget here, glancing out the window there, you know, kind of like elbowing brother to see what he does. And it, it's a very natural state. It's not like we, we, we popped out of our mothers, you know, just ready to go sit on the Himalayan mountaintop or go to a vinpassana, you know, ten day silent meditation retreat. And so, yeah, we need some help. And for me, I guess maybe this is the way that I'm wired. Like I'm always looking like there's a lot of articles about let thoughts go through your mind like a cloud. Or do you like my voice, by the way?

You're so soothing.

So soothing.

I just drifted off.

Except the deep emotions persist. Seek out the deep place from which they can. Like a lot of that stuff is like, yeah, kind of sort of works. And I've taken a transcendental meditation course, right, where we talk a lot about that. And I interviewed the guy who, who taught me all my, all my tm, Philip Land. And we discuss a lot of this in that show. There's this idea behind transcendental meditation and kind of like how to focus as you have this mantra going through your head. But, you know, I like to get down to brass tacks and kind of dwell upon a few of the things that we can do from a. From a biohacking standpoint, so to speak. So one thing that I would recommend is that you want to set up your environment in terms of the senses that are around you to be able to focus better. And for me that's sound and aroma are two biggies, sound and aroma. So for sound, what I mean by that, and I'll link to some of the interviews and some of the resources that I have on this in the show notes, is certain hertz frequencies that are played can induce a sense of concentration and a sense of focus because they induce alpha brainwave production and decrease beta brainwave production. And they can also, some of them, depending on the hertz frequency of the music or the way that the instruments are tuned, also induce a theta brainwave frequency. This is why certain songs can make you feel really stressed out. If you listen to Slayer, you're probably going to get a little bit more beta brainwave induction and if you listen to Enya, maybe a little bit more alpha beta. Or I just want to go punch my fist through the wall because this song is driving me crazy.

Anyways though, so two of the track that I really like, there's a company called Love Tuner. I get flack for this sometimes, but I actually have this little teeny tiny flute, like teeny tiny flute, like the size of like the, like the cap of a pen and you blow into it and.

Blows at a frequency of 528Hz.

It blows.

All right, which among all of us, woo woo hippies is considered to be the hertz frequency that opens up your fourth chakra, like your heart, right? It makes you feel these intense emotions of love and they have a whole 60 minute track that just plays like these nice tunes at 528 hertz. There's another guy named Michael Tyrell who has two different albums and I've interviewed him twice, once each about each of these albums. One's called Whole Tones and one's called Life, Love and Lullabies. What I do is I have Those on my MP3 player and I can also hook them up via the auxiliary cable in the sauna and play them on the surround sound speakers in the sauna, which you can get for four easy payments of 29.99. And anyways, though, I. I will play those tunes inside the sauna and as soon as they come on you get this deep sense of Focus and calm and well being.

And you wet your pants.

And you wet your pants. No, that's only at 666 hertz.

Oh, that's the brown note.

I think that's the evil. That's the mark of the beast. If you played at 666 hertz, horrible things happen. You get chapped lips anyways, though, so I would recommend that you pay attention to sound. And there are even apps such as, say, the Sleep Stream app. That's one that I really like. I actually will sleep with that app. My wife gets really jealous, but I sleep with that app quite frequently.

She's a very understanding woman.

Sometimes while I'm in bed with her, I actually have an app wife threesome. Kinky man. We're going to the gutter on this podcast. I am at least totally, totally did. I'm sorry about that, folks. Anyways, though, the thing with the Sleep Stream app is like a dj. So you can choose like pink noise, white noise, brown noise, purple noise, and I made that one up. Pianos, binaural beats that induce focus, that induce concentration, that induce creativity. So that's one that I really like. And then there is another one called Brain fm. So these are like tunes that you can put into your ear. Brain FM is more sound based on artificial intelligence algorithms designed to induce creativity, focus, or sleep. And then the Sleep Stream app is just like a whole, whole bunch of different things. And you can actually layer. They're not like an app that you can't play both at the same time. You can play both at the same time. So you can even mess around and layer them if you wanted to. So I'll put some of my favorite sound resources in the show notes. But then the other thing that I mentioned was, do you remember, Brock, that you mentioned aroma, smell?

Oh, yeah.

So some of.

Just don't rub it on your lips.

Yeah, Some of. Some of the smells that have been shown to increase focus and concentration. One would be rosemary. So rosemary is a very good one. I like that. Vanilla, cinnamon and peppermint. And you can get an essential oil diffuser or you can just like carry around one of these little bottles and just like snort it, sniff it. Or if you go to. If you go to my Instagram page, I actually have a little Instagram tutorial on how I make these aromatherapy diffusers for, like, pennies on the. No, not diffusers. They're inhalers. Right? You get on Amazon, you go to Amazon, you get these little inhalers, and they have a little cotton wick and you dip the cotton wick in the essential oil and then you put the cotton wick in a little, little glass container that the inhaler comes along with and you can sniff your essential oils. So anyways though, any of these things like vanilla, peppermint, rosemary, cinnamon, those would be like the big four. I recommend those for assisting with focus with not getting too distracted. You'd be surprised that like when you get the right music and you get the right smells, how much that can improve concentration. So a couple other things I would recommend. First of all, if you do want to get into the woo woo, there's one pretty decent article online about three ways to increase focus. And it talks, it kind of talks about things I haven't seen people talk about before. Like to silently ask yourself a really big question before you meditate. So you actually have a goal that you're, that you're trying to get out of that meditation. It's like for me, one of the first things that I write in my journal when I get up is what truth did I discover in this morning's reading, right? And this Christian gratitude journal that I use every morning because it allows me to read with some amount of, some amount of cognizance or at least more cognizance about what I'm reading versus just like picking eye boogers out of my eyes and trying to squint and figure out what it is that I'm staring at as I try to wake up. So same thing. Before you meditate, right? You'd want to silently ask yourself what you're actually trying to achieve. And then a couple other recommendations they have in that one is consider the idea that you're connected to the divine, which I think is interesting. And they, they kind of get into that in the article about how you're, you know, how you're like part of the vastness of the universe. And I'm not, I'm not totally like a daoist oneness of everything type of person. But at the same time, this idea that you really are doing something extremely divine and spiritual is a cool way to go into a meditation session and then marinate in the ideas. So.

Basically figuring out what big ideas you're kind of pursuing, so to speak, during that meditation and marinating in those ideas.

Just, just basically instead of letting the thoughts come and go like clouds, actually embracing the thoughts and kind of like, you know, not analyzing them, but letting them kind of fill your head, like welcoming them rather than feeling like you have to banish them. So, you know, we're getting kind of woo woo. But those are, those are a few things that I'd recommend when it comes to.

Well, when we're talking about meditation to begin with, I think getting a little woo woo is kind of a given.

Sorry people. I know a lot of people don't like it when we use that word, so we'll try to use it that much anymore.

What meditation?

And then honestly, like when you look at books like Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Will, where they talk about how, you know, things like microdosing with shrooms enhance the spirituality and the spiritual experience, there's something to a lot of that. And one of my go tos for a day where I need more focus and more concentration is not mushrooms, even though I will use those on occasion.

Lsd.

Microdosing with LSD can also work, but let's say you don't want to go spend cryptocurrency and do illegal things. There's one supplement and full disclosure, I support this supplement. I'm like an affiliate for them, but it's called Qualia. I also call it the God Pill. And it's got some things in there that I've found really, really help me with, with concentration and with focus and specifically with not having like the monkey mind that jumps around from task to task. Like I can just like hone in and focus and just like write for two hours without getting distracted or focus on accomplishing one like what I would call deep work or deep concentration. And some of the things in there make sense when it comes to inducing this effect. Like lithium orotate. Right. Lithium orotate is a neurochemical and it crosses the blood brain barrier and can have a pretty profound effect on your ability to be able to control like ADD and ADHD like symptoms. It's got choline in it, which acts basically on both the peripheral and the central nervous system as a choline donor to allow for a little bit more of a stable thought pattern. There are nootropics in there like Huperzine and vimpocetine and theobromine and kind of a variety of things that, that play a variety of roles, you know, in terms of cerebral perfusion and neuroendocrine regulation, but also just the ability to be able to concentrate and focus. So I wrote a big article on this, on this qualia stuff. This stuff I call the God Pill stuff. So you know, if you wanted it to supplement, we all know that you can just pop a pill and become a better meditator. So of course, so there's that too. I'm looking at investing in either a Biomat or the Normatec. I usually run three to four days a week and I'm prepping for a 15 mile race. Didn't know how much anti inflammatory effects the Biomat would have versus the Normatec. I've used the Normatec before. I've never been exposed to a biomet. Thoughts from you, please. It was kind of funny because.

Are you familiar with with Men's Health films, Brock?

I'm not.

They do like short films where they'll go and do like A Day in the Life of of Rich Froning or Day in the Life of Laird Hamilton. And they decided yesterday to do A Day in the Life of Ben Greenfield. So they had their film crew show up at my house and wait, did.

You know they were coming or did.

I did. No, no. Surprise, surprise. Singing telegram. No. We're gonna follow you around the house all day with a video camera. Trust me, it'll be fun. Anyways though. So the thing that they thought was quite interesting was my napping habit because after I finish lunch I'll usually have like a big cup of something like Reishi tea during lunch to kind of, kind of relax me a little bit. And then I'll go upstairs and I will. Well, I actually go upstairs before lunch and I turn on my Biomat and then by the time I go up there after lunch, it's all warm. Like a giant, warm, sleepy, cuddly bear. And I will. That doesn't actually eat people or claw your face off. Bears aren't actually cuddly kids. Just so you know. Anyways though. So I'll heat up this biomat and then I have these boots next to it. So they're following me upstairs. I'm like. So I'm going to go take a nap now and I roll out the biomat first. And for those of you who aren't familiar with the biomat, basically you plug it into the wall, but it has what's called an EMF protector in it. So. So you're not getting exposed to a lot of like electricity from the wall if you're concerned about like sleeping next to an EMF source, if you're one of those Faraday cage people. Anyways, though, what it also has on it is a, it generates infrared light. So it's really great for relieving muscle spasms or relaxing muscles or reducing inflammation or improving tissue oxygenation. It's like a heating mat without the emf. But the heat comes from far infrared rays. Cool. Which we don't even need to get into all the research behind infrared. And it's very potent anti inflammatory. I mean, we can. If we want to get into infrared.

We could, but I think it's been done and I don't think it's even at question anymore.

No, no. There's multiple studies that show that infrared sauna devices and infrared light wave radiation producing devices are safe and effective for healing a variety of different inflammatory disorders. That has been studied extensively. So we know that infrared can be very effective for, for inflammation, for a host of other factors as well. But inflammation is really one of the biggies that, that it's been shown in clinical studies to actually reduce. So I lay down on my biomat and then. Oh, and also not to get too out there, it's, it's lined. I got to make sure I say this with the right voice, okay? Lined with tourmaline and amethyst crystals embedded in the actual mat. And again, might sound a little crazy, but when you look, when you look at trees, when you look at rocks, when you look at like sand on the seashore as you're walking barefoot on the beach, when you look at like all these like, Himalayan salt lamps that hippies have hanging around their homes, when you have these like negative ion generators that are now built into HEPA air filters for homes. All of this is based on the concept of negative ions, meaning that the air that you breathe is actually, to a certain extent, electrified. You're actually breathing in ionically charged air. And one of the things that causes negative ions to be produced is minerals. That's why Himalayan salt lamps produce negative ions. That's why rocks produce negative ions. That's why sand produces negative ions. When you breathe these in, they have a very beneficial effect on the cell membrane, on the electrochemical potential of the actual cell membrane. And so when you're sleeping on this, it's very similar, like grounding or earthing, right? Same, same type of concept. It's like getting more in touch with our natural earth because it's just, it's lined with a whole bunch of relatively expensive tourmaline and amethyst crystals, which is why, like, my kids have a biomat. I think it was like 800 bucks. And I've got like the big full one. And it's like, you know, I think it's like 1400 bucks, something like that. So it's not cheap, but it's, it's pretty cool also. And I've got a video online about this. You can turn it into a sauna you can actually. This sounds really silly, but if you have some of those like space agey silver like Mylar thermal heating blankets, you can just lay down on your Biomat and wrap a couple of those around you and you break into a full on sweat within like 10 minutes. So if you wanted to use it as a sauna, you totally could.

Anyways though, so I lay down on my biomat and these guys are filming me and I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet because then I reach down, reach down beside the bed.

Leslie is pull out. Leslie's getting old as this question gets answered.

And I pull out these boots. These boots that are designed by a bioengineer who I've interviewed on the show, but they're called Normatex, right? And like normally if you wear compression, let's say tights, like your tight pants, you get your tight pants on, skinny jeans, tight pants on.

Anyways though, that helps to transport some fluid out of your limbs. But these things actually plug into a device that pumps air in and out of the boots. It's called sequential pulse technology. So it starts at the bottom of your feet and squeezes all your veins and your lymphatic vessels up towards your heart using this pressure. And then after it's pulsed pressure up towards your heart, it returns back down to the feet and then does it again. So. So it's just like a massage, right, for, for your both legs. They also have an attachment you can use in your hips. They got attachment for your arms that makes you look like a silly. Who's. Who's the big, the guy on the, the COVID Like the big puffy white guy on the COVID of like bread and stuff like that. Is that a good enough Michelin man? Not the Michelin man. There's another, there's another guy. He's like, like the Michelin Mansbury Doughboy. Yes, you look like the Pillsbury Doughboy when you put on. Thank you, Brock. I need my pop. I need my pop culture help on this podcast anyways though, and a lot of studies have been done on that. An improvement in arterial resistance and upregulation of what are called PG1 or PGC1 Alpha and Enos, which produce nitric oxide and enhanced flexibility and decreased soreness. So I figure, what the heck? If I'm gonna go up and lay on my bed for 20 to 45 minutes after lunch and take a nap, I want my body to just be getting as good as possible during that nap. So I lay down on my biomat And I pull my Normatec boots on and then I pull a sleep mask over my face. And I don't know how long they filmed me just laying there because when I took off my sleep mask and opened my eyes, everybody was gone and I was dead to the world. But to answer Leslie's question, first of all, if you really want the full meal deal, the Cadillac of recovery, do what I do and use both the same and I, oh, I also do this, don't laugh naked because infrared doesn't penetrate clothing very well. That's why if you're doing like joov lights or you know, infrared sun or anything, you want to wear as little as possible if that's at all possible. So I did keep my shorts on for the men's health. But ultimately you want when you lay down, like when you lay down to take the nap, like try to take off your clothes. So anyways Leslie, when it comes to anti inflammatory, if you had to choose one, the biomat, just because the Normatec boots don't, those don't really decrease inflammation, they kind of pump it out of the legs. But as far as like a really good anti inflammatory boost, I would say the Biomat. But if you're a true, true real biohacker both.

Hey Ben and Brock, it's Tim Hoover. I've been a long time listener to show about three years now. I thoroughly enjoy everything you guys put out. You help me live a better life through obviously the things you recommend. So I have a question for you. I have three kids, ages 10, 12 and 14 that are very active. But a few years ago whenever I switched over to whole clean eating I switched everybody in my house and so my kids have. They don't eat processed foods or sugar. And I'm just curious, does the sugar really matter how much sugar is okay for kids and should I be letting them eat some processed food or some snacks? As high energy as they are, would they burn it off or am I doing things right or wrong? Because my kids are seem to be shorter than the other kids and it could be genetics, I don't know. I'm just wanting to make sure that I'm feeding my kids properly and helping them grow to be the best little superhumans they can be. Thanks guys.

Brock, how much sugar do your children eat?

Not very much because I don't have.

They don't exist children. They don't exist. Yeah, that's the way to do it then. You just don't need to worry about these things at all. Well the fact is that in Our day and age. You know, normally I would say. Well, normally I would say what I kind of get into in my book beyond training, that kids are not just little adults and kids, and especially growing kids who might also be strenuously exercising or at least relatively physically active, which is what I would assume the majority of the children who belong to listeners of this podcast would be. They're not little adults. They've got a lot of different defining physiological characteristics that make them different than the older population. And I get into this in my book about how, for example, we see higher fat oxidation rates in exercising children. Exercising children actually are better fat burning machines, possibly because they've just had less a period of time of their lives to be eating cereal and scones, biscotti and sugar. So they haven't switched out of that fat utilization. But it turns out that they actually oxidize 10 to 40% more fat during exercise compared to adults. Now, does that mean they need less carbohydrate? Not necessarily, but it does mean that because of their high fat oxidation rates, we should be taking into account the fact that they do need a decent amount of fat in their diet, possibly even more than many adults. Now, they also burn lower amounts of storage carbohydrates, meaning children don't yet have the level of enzymes that are necessary to break down muscle or liver carbohydrate, what we call glycogen, to fuel as fast as an adult can. And so what this means is that giving a child during very intense glycolytic efforts, some exogenous source of carbohydrate, right? Like actually giving them sweets to fuel intense efforts could be something even more beneficial for a kid than for an adult. So actually having, you know, whatever a healthy energy bar at. And when I say healthy energy bar, I mean paleo, gluten free, lactose free, dairy free, raw, what did I miss? Soy free, whatever all those little labels are that everybody has on every energy bar nowadays. Those ones, give one of those to your child during their next soccer game. It actually turns out that the kids actually need that type of exogenous carbohydrate intake during longer exercise sessions. Now they have.

I'm going to stop you for a second. You said beneficial. It might be beneficial to give them one of these gluten free, fat free, soy free treats. Do you mean beneficial to their performance or beneficial to their health?

And. Well, you asked. Well, if a kid's running around, kids are pretty insulin sensitive. There's not going to be a big spike in like Whatever, you know, pancreatic cell destruction from excessive insulin production in response to eating an energy bar while they're running around in the soccer field. Right? Like, that's, that's not something that you need to worry about. Now, we'll get to what, you know, happens at rest here in a second. But interestingly, it also turns out that during exercise sessions that aren't that long, about 75 minutes or less, they've actually found eating carbohydrates does not appear to give extra performance advantages for kids. And specifically this would be kids under the age of 16. Now, I know that all this is starting to sound kind of confusing, and ultimately what that means is that for longer exercise sessions, like let's say a basketball game or a soccer game or a tennis match that you know is gonna last longer than 75 minutes, your child, and especially because they can't break down muscle glycogen quite as well, or liver glycogen quite as well, they're definitely gonna benefit from exogenous carbohydrate sources. And you probably don't want a kid to be doing like the whole ketosis, low carb thing during an event like that. If, if a child is competing in a Sport that is 75 minutes or less, something pretty brief, something, you know, maybe it's just like a 500 meter swim at their swim meet or something like that. Doesn't appear that giving them a bunch of exogenous carbohydrates gives them much benefit. And in fact, because they oxidize more fat, you would probably be better served by sticking to seeds and nuts and nut butters and olives and avocados and a lot of these more kind of like Mediterranean fat. So a big part of it depends upon the length of the sporting session. So ultimately, big picture to bring this full circle is that if you got a kid who's in a sport, and it's especially like a sport that's lasting longer than 75 minutes, make sure that you have some form of carbohydrate based fuel to give them. If it's under 75 minutes, then a kid can actually do pretty well eating fat. You don't have to worry as much as the Gatorade Sports Science Institute would have us to believe about kind of, you know, making sure that they're just like constantly fueled with some form of carbohydrate. Now, that all being said, how much sugar is okay for kids when they're just like hanging out the house? Right? Because technically, whatever, kids have a higher metabolism so maybe their, their blood sugar is not going to, you know, get as high because they're running around, you know, a lot more. And ultimately, in both children and adults, huge amount of variability. I mean, we know this from my interview with Rob Wolf and his book Wired to Eat, about this research that they did in Israel, where people, based on their microbiome, their microbiome vastly different responses in blood sugar in response to, say, like a banana versus a cookie.

And they've also looked at other genes, not just the microbiome, but genes like there's one gene called G6PC2, and that decreases the pancreas ability to detect sugar in the blood. And that would have a significant effect. And actually people who would have a different form of G6PC2 due to that change in their DNA, that again, you could look for on a, like a 23andMe test that would predispose you to slightly higher levels of blood glucose so you could actually have your child genetically tested. And I personally don't have any.

Problems ethically with that. I think for me personally, the pros outweigh the cons. And you could find out, hey, does my child possess some of the genes responsible for higher than normal blood glucose or pancreatic cell destruction or higher than normal risk for type 2 diabetes? You could also just basically, you know, I know this sounds like biohacking your kid, but you could get a blood glucose monitor and just for like a week on your kid's typical diet, monitor their blood glucose and scar them for life because daddy is chasing them around with a needle to the end of their fingertip. You know, ultimately we're, we're now coming out with some pretty cool infrared technology that could give you a decent idea of blood sugar levels. But ultimately, what I'm saying is we live in an era where you could quantify DNA and you can quantify microbiome and you can do like a blood glucose analysis and see what's going on with your kids blood sugar levels. Do kids have higher metabolisms than adults? In most cases, yes. Are they running around a lot more? In many cases, yes as well. And so it's, It's. Am I asking myself a lot of questions on this podcast so that I can respond? What kind of questions are those called?

Not a leading question. Why am I blanking on this? When you ask a question but you know the answer, it's not a leading question. You know, rhetorical. Yes, a rhetorical question. I think it's a rhetorical.

No, rhetorical requires no answer at all. It's just to make a point.

Yeah. And that's what I'm doing. Right. I'm asking these questions in order to create a dramatic effect on this podcast. So what do I do with my kids? My kids.

They get carbohydrates, they get sugar. And here's the way that I do it with my children. First of all, my kids understand that the main time that the body can have not a very deleterious response to the intake of carbohydrate is pre exercise, post exercise, or during exercise, when the insulin response is going to be blunted and your body's going to be pretty insulin sensitive and glucose transporters are going to be upregulated, etc. I've actually taught my children that concept. And so they will. A lot of times when they get a sucker from Wells Fargo, when we go to the bank, or when they get, when they go to, like, Awana's on Tuesday nights and they get new candy, like, they'll actually save that. Like, they'll, they'll bring it to school sometimes and down it before P.E. they'll take it before or after Jiu Jitsu. When I say take it, I make it sound like medicine. They'll consume it like Cookie Monster in the backseat of the car on the way home from Jiu Jitsu. But they realize there's a time and a place when carbohydrates can be less damaging. In addition to that, I don't do with them as I do with myself when it comes to restricting carbohydrates completely until the end of the day. And that is because of children's rapidly growing bodies, the need for extra glucans for, you know, for joints, the need for a little bit of extra glucose to go around from their rapidly elevated metabolisms. I mean, typical day for my kids, you know, out the door to school, running around at school, you know, pe, recess, coming home, piano, Jiu jitsu, you know, running around chasing each other with nerf guns, you know, eating dinner, running around more, hanging from the yoga trapeze. I mean, they're honestly more active than I am in many situations. And so, for example, they'll come home from school and they'll grab like a brown rice cake and they'll put some raw honey and almond butter on that. Or they'll blackstrap Molasses is another very nutrient rich sweetener that we use organic maple syrup. Right. They're making themselves. So now they're cutting their pancakes and their waffles that they make in the morning. With a scoop of protein, which is a great strategy. But they're also using an organic maple syrup, right. A little bit more nutrient dense than just, you know, say something, something more sugary, less nutrient dense corn syrup than artificial maple syrup. Date dates and figs, they do a lot of cooking with those. So ultimately. And when I say cooking with those, I mean they actually have a cooking podcast and they actually make like cakes and sweets and things like that. And they'll use dates, figs, blackstrap molasses, raw honey, organic maple syrup, like a lot of these nutrient dense sweeteners. So I don't, I don't ban them from doing that, but I encourage them to do it when they're more physically active. They don't really have that kind of stuff when we're on like a long car ride. Right. Like, it's more like avocados and carrot sticks and things that aren't going to spike their blood glucose. So full circle. I know I just went through a lot, but here's the idea.

Yeah, I had no idea you were going to like this question so much. You're totally lighting up on this one.

I've. I want to write a book about kids someday. Just about kids and how they work, how to make them, how to raise them, how to. Because I'm so wise, I have twin nine year olds. Obviously I've cracked the code on successful children. Obviously because they're nine and they're not dead anyways though. So full circle, full circle. Long workouts exceeding 75 minutes. Make sure that your child has good, healthy carbohydrates on hand. Under 75 minutes. Don't worry about it as much as all the other parents seem to be doing at rest. Long car rides, long plane rides, et cetera, do to your kids the same as you should do with yourself. Higher fat intake, moderate protein, low carbohydrate, normal day. When your kids are running around being super active, don't shun carbohydrates, don't shun sugar. Make sure that they know the best time for them to be taking it in during the day is when they are being pretty physically active. Not when they're sitting around reading or watching tv. But use nutrient dense sugar sources, have them around. Teach your kids the concept of nutrient density. And then if you really want to get into things hardcore using blood glucose monitoring and DNA testing, figure out the actual genetic propensity to something like type 2 diabetes. And like, like if you've got a child with, let's say a 40% higher than normal risk of type 2 diabetes. You may want to make a different choice in terms of the afternoon snack that you feed that child, AKA rice cake with raw honey versus avocado with olive oil and sea salt, because of that kid's unique genetic predispositions. And the two best books to figure this out, in my opinion, excellent new book called Dirty Genes by Ben lynch. And also the book that I already mentioned, Rob Wolf's book Wired to Eat. Oh, and by the way, because my kids are twins and they were born at 4 and a half pounds each, and twins are just technically a little bit smaller than other kids, they're also freaking like their mom, like super skinny, high metabolism, run around all the time. I don't think the fact that they're small is going to make that big of a difference. You know, aside from in terms of macronutrients, just, you know, overall calories, you know, maybe a little bit less. But all the rules I just outlined apply. It's just that, you know, big old whatever Bruce down the street who's kicking the pants off of the child growth chart may have a whole avocado, whereas your paltry, small, feeble little child only gets three quarters of an avocado.

Poor kid.

Hey Ben, it's Glenn here from Saskatchewan, Canada. I have a question for you today about plantar fasciitis. I used to be pretty avid long distance runner. I run about a half marathon, five or six days a week. Never had any problems with my feet or anything like that. Then what happened was about 4 years ago I switched from a very active career to a desk job. And when I did that, I gained about 20 pounds. And as soon as that happened, I got plantar fasciitis almost within the first month. Month. And since then I have not been able to get rid of it. I pretty much. I've completely stopped running at this point. I haven't run for ages, for years.

I'm able to go to the gym still and I wear these padded shoes that have a ton of padding in them just to try to protect my feet. But even that, you know, the plantar fascia gets super inflamed and tight every single time I do anything. Even if I just go for a walk around the block, I'll get, you know, pretty extreme pain in my heel and even up into my ankle. Just wondering if you have any advice for how to get rid of, you know, a case of plantar fascia fasciitis like this that's been sticking around for quite some time.

Cheers. Brock. You've been. You've been dealing with this a little bit.

Yeah, I have, but I actually, I was under the impression that it wasn't fasciitis anymore. They didn't call it that. It was a fasciopathy.

Oh, fasciopathy. Oh my God.

That's the new way to refer to this injury.

Yeah. Interesting. I actually did not know because it's.

Not an inflammation fasciopathy.

So it's. So it's a pathological fasciopathy. What's supposed to be the difference between fasciopathy and fasciitis?

Semantics.

Yeah, because, I mean, no, it.

It's apparently because it's not a true inflammation. Like itis refers to something being inflamed. But it's not necessarily that your plantar fascia is inflamed, it's that it's aggravated. Yeah.

I was under the impression that like apathy. Right. Like a pathological condition was something that like is manifesting itself in some kind of like a. Like a. Like a pathy describes the actual pain. Like I have, you know, plantar fasciopathy, which means that not only do you have inflammation, like it covers that, but also you have pain, you have limited range of motion. Like it's a. It's a pathological condition versus just say like plantar fasciitis, which might be inflammation of the plantar fascia that's, you know, non symptomatic or asymptomatic. I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I actually tried to ask my. I have a really smart chiropractor that I go to see quite often and I tried to ask him the difference and he. When I said it, it was plantar fasciopathy. He actually sort of waved his hand dismissively in my face and shook his head. And he didn't.

Impossible.

He did not want to discuss that. So apparent. It's not a big deal.

He probably just wanted to adjust T5 and T6. That's the answer to everything in a chiropractor's office. That's your thoracic. But my upper neck. Not your thoracic. But my lower. Not your thoracic. Just kidding. I actually love chiropractic docs. Most of them.

Me too.

There's a few weirdos out there, but most of them are actually pretty cool. I have a lot of friends who are kairos.

Some of them are fuller.

Yeah. Anyways, so we digress.

We totally went off track.

First of all, I'm not going to go over all the stuff that you've tried, Glenn, because you tried a lot. Like, I could tell you how to like, buy the frozen juice cans at the grocery store and roll those under your feet. And how to like, you know, get a night support brace, which in my opinion works really well. And how to do the little exercise where you pick up the marbles with your big toes and drop them into the cup or scrunch up the towel and then extend it with your toes. Sounds like you've kind of done all of that, bro. I'm not going to insult your intelligence. I'll fill you in on a few of the things that you may want to try that you haven't yet. First of all, one of the things that you could do is just break up the tissue. And there's some pretty interesting studies on the ability of something called pulsed electromagnetic field therapy to kind of act similar to almost ultrasound in terms of not just increasing the uptake of oxygen into pathological. See what I did there? Tissue areas that are inflamed, but also to do things like induce heat shock proteins to reduce some tissue damage, to increase ATP production, stimulates what's called myosin phosphorylation and the actual hertz frequency. There's one device that I like because it's small and would fit almost perfectly underneath your heel. It's called a flex pulse. And that one has a setting where it goes back and forth between 10 hertz and 100 hertz. That would be a pretty good one to consider using on the foot. So if you haven't used PMF yet, definitely look into PEMF. Another one. And I had this done on my SOAs. And Gabby Reese down in Kauai.

Did you say your sore ass?

Yeah, my sore ass. Gabby Reese down in Kauai hooked me up with this girl named Angie down there. Who? Angie Mueller. I forget her website's name. You could probably look her up in. In Kauai and she did dry needling on me. And dry needling is something that actually has been looked at for inflammation of the plantar fascia. And if you don't know what this is, it's an actual. Just like it sounds like, it's like a long ass needle that's so small that it doesn't really hit the nerves too much, but you definitely feel like a slightly uncomfortable amount of pressure from it. But they kind of put it into specific areas to reduce inflammation and to reduce pain. Like a treatment on your plantar fascia would take like maybe 15 minutes and they've shown that this can actually, I mean it's essentially just repeated puncturing of your tissue with an empty hypodermic needle. That, that can have a really effective.

Effect, a really effective effect on the plantar fascia. And actually they combine that with a, they combine that in one study with ultrasound guided steroid injections which I actually, this is like similar to I did with stem cells where they went into my hip and they use ultrasound digital thermography to identify the areas and then they put the needle ex. Exactly where the area is. They can do that same thing with your plantar fascia. They could do that within this study. They use steroids, but you could probably try it with prolotherapy, with prp, with stem cells, any of those. But you'd want an ultrasound guided injection. So you put it exactly where it needs to go. But this is another thing that you could look into would be dry needling, preferably with some kind of a thermography to image it.

Similar to pemf. There's also this thing called extracorporeal shockwave therapy. Same thing I did to my down at Gainswave. You could probably have them do your, in your foot at the same time if you wanted to.

You probably don't want to though.

And this is, it's, it's high intensity acoustic sound wave therapy that breaks open old blood vessels and builds new blood vessels and you can use that on plantar fascia. And this is another one that they've studied and that they've used and they found efficacy for a little bit more expensive. I mean you're looking at 500 up to $3,000 for shockwave therapy and sometimes two or three treatments of that. But you know, if it's just like a bane in your side and you can't walk, I mean it's something you could, you could look into.

It's not that expensive here anyway. In Canada, like I, I paid 65 for my physiotherapy appointment and they just like did it, just did that because they thought that was what I needed.

But you've also been paying taxes out the ass since you were 18 years old. And sorry, I wasn't trying to compare.

Our medical system to the American medical system. I'm just saying it's not, I don't think you have to pay the.

You've paid for it. Someone is paying for it. You don't have this debate right now. We could throw it down right now.

That's not what I meant to start.

Says nobody wants to Hear Ben, who basically wants to privatize healthcare completely. Anyways, that's just me. I digress. So I've not only lost several podcast listeners, but also created vegans out of the ones who don't want to think about tying rubber bands around animals testicles. We're on a roll. Okay. Two of the things I would look into. First of all, you can order these peptides to your house for like pennies on the $2. And very few studies behind these. This is more of like a go to the Bro Science bodybuilding forums. And a lot of people have used it for this and I've written articles on this. They're called peptides. And they can repair tendon, they can repair muscle. Actually. It's like a poor man's prolotherapy or a poor man's PRP or a poor man's stem cell. BPC157 and TB500. Those sound like robots out of Star wars, but they're actual peptides that you can inject into a joint. So those two I would consider too. And the problem is there's not a lot of loose skin to inject those subcutaneously around the plantar fascia. But if, if you get them even close to the area of pain and you've got some skin to pinch, you can get them subcutaneously up around in there and.

And hopefully you've got a fat heel.

Yes, well, as long as your heel isn't getting exposed to the sunshine, it probably is fat. We know that. Today's news flash. And then finally there is this study about high load strength training improving outcome in patients with plantar fasciitis. And in this study they actually had these people doing heel raises with the towel underneath the toes. It's essentially almost like a eccentric. Same thing that they did with Achilles tendonitis back in the day. You know, ironically enough, it appears that loading the Achilles and doing like eccentric light muscle tearing on it actually helped to realign a lot of those fibers. The same thing. In this study they actually did high load strength training. And high load, essentially it's like an eccentric. It would be eccentric plantar flexion in these patients with plantar fasciitis. And they did this every other day. Right. So about 48 hours for recovery and actually found that to have a pretty decent effect as well.

So that's actually what's working the best for me on my plantar fasciitis. As soon as I introduced that, I did a series of about three weeks of doing it every single day. And it just pissed off my. My plantar fascia, like, made it worse. But now I've backed off to every second day and it's almost like magic. Like I barely have a slight ache in there now.

Well, if that doesn't wind up working, you could. You could diffuse essential oils down by your foot like vanilla peppermint. And you can. You could play them heart chakra lullabies and it would probably heal up the pain. Oh, yeah, and they probably have a double blind spin of gratitude about that. I practice gratitude too. That's really good.

I'm so grateful to my heel.

All right, before we offend people, let's give some. Let's give something away, shall we? All right, so this is the part of the show where if you email gear greenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gear G-E A R@greenfieldfitnesssystems.com and you let us know your T shirt size and we read your review. There's a lot of hoops to jump through. We read your reviews, but you go leave a review, we read it here on the show, and if you hear it red and you email us your T shirt size, we send you free. Okay, that's what I'm trying to say.

Beep.

So this one's called Getting reacquainted with biology. Five star review by Scooter Jones. Scooter Jones.

I love that.

I own.

I hope his name really is Scooter.

His name. Scooter. All right, take it away, Brock.

All right, it goes like this. Ben presents information as a trained expert. Although he's a total a hole. Oh, no, wait, that's not what it says. Sorry. Ben presents information.

You woke up on the funny side of bed this morning as trained expert.

But with the open mind.

Of a perpetual student. It's actually a really nice compliment there. You're a perpetual student.

Ben didn't graduate ever.

You just. Yeah, there's no graduation ceremony for you. His education and background provide a solid backbone to measure different health, fitness, and wellness trends and tactics. Tactics against. While his curiosity encourage to try fringe techniques and report back on their results. Benefits the greater good. Oh, nice. You benefit the greater good. I've enjoyed the ride so far, as well as getting reacquainted with words I thought I had left in my last biology class I took. That's awesome. Thanks, Ben. Totally like reinvigorating that bio 20.

Yeah, I want to know. I want to know one of the new words that he learned. How about. How about one of those doozies that I threw around today, like sublingual or subliminal or. What's another good one from today's show? Brock, there was that last one. Hypothetical. As in a hypothetical question. Hey, Brock, is this podcast over? Yeah. Should we probably go? Yeah. Did I enjoy talking to you? Yeah, probably.

That's just call and response now.

That's not even later.

Dude, are we done?

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

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