387: How Much Alcohol Makes You Fat, The Best Exercises For Getting Smarter, Good Vs. Bad MSG & Mor

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. How much alcohol makes you fat, the best exercises for getting smarter, good versus bad msg, 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. 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.

Brock, do I sound medieval to you? Medieval?

You're very, very medieval.

Well, I've been living for the past two weeks, supposedly.

I guess.

I guess my medieval accent's like a uppity English accent. I don't know if that's actually how they spoke back then.

Probably not.

I've been living in Estonia. It's like the medievalist of the medieval cities. The city Estonia. Have you been there?

I have not. Why is it medieval? What's. What's medieval about it?

Well, the whole thing is just like this old medieval town with castles, and people walk around there, like, clad in their medieval garb. I mean, it's like a Renaissance fair on steroids. Honestly.

Are you sure you weren't at a Renaissance fair? They just told you it was Estonia?

It's possible. The first restaurant we went to, they had a sword fight, literally during dinner. You show up and you're eating this big leg of pork.

I see what happened.

Mustard with. With. And. And it. It's full on medieval. Like, they actually tweak the menu.

So you were at Medieval Times.

Really is kind of every restaurant there is Medieval times. Crazy, but. But done right. Like, there's no, for example, tomatoes or potatoes, because apparently they didn't eat nightshades back then, and so they don't have them on the menu because that's not something that. That they ate.

Well, the potatoes came from the new World, so they maybe just plain up, straight up, didn't have them yet.

The new world doth hath no potatoes.

Sir Walter Raleigh, I believe, who brought potatoes back to England from. Well, from the islands.

Your level of medieval knowledge trumps mine. But I can tell you this. I had beer. I was drinking, like, honey beer and mead brought. Brought to me foamy and frothy by my own personal beer wench.

I just as. As I offend bartenderses everywhere. I don't actually Call them beer wenches. Unless I'm at a medieval restaurant. I had, yeah, they have like a strong dark beer with herbs added in, just like they drank back in the medieval days. So they told me I had a spice wine, but they didn't call it spice wine. You know what they called it?

I don't know, I can't even guess.

Spiced wine because they pronounce everything differently.

Bummer.

Yeah. But actually there were some really, really good foods. And, and by the way, in the news flashes today, I have another interesting article that came out about medieval times, medieval days, and something we can glean from them for bacteria, for our immune system. But one of my favorite dishes, one of my favorite foods that I had there in Estonia, if anybody goes to Estonia, by the way, you got to go to this, this place. It was called Old Hanza. Old Hanza. And they bring you out all these, these royal duck liver pates and something they call Neptune's platter, which is like salmon eggs served over this wild salmon, which apparently they did have back in the medieval days. A game sausage made of bear, wild boar and elk. Bear, wild boar and elk. Two of those animals are animals that I have hunted unsuccessfully. One I have hunted successfully, wild boar. I've come back empty handed from my elk hunt and my bear hunt. And so it just brought a big smile to my face to be able to walk into a medieval restaurant and eat game sausages made of animals I've unsuccessfully hunted.

I do love me some sausages. And bear is a delightfully tasty meat. It's hard to find, but it really is tasty.

It's hard to find good bear. You got to fly to Estonia. Anyways, I was there for Mind Valley University where I was speaking on longevity and beauty to medieval people. So it was actually, it was, it.

Was, it was cool.

It was a good event. They actually put this event together where they bring entrepreneurs and their children together from all over the globe to go to school during the summer and learn things you don't learn in school. Like, my children were learning emotional intelligence, body language. They were going out to like parks and forests and I suppose they were doing foraging or something, I don't know. I just sent them off with the teacher and kept my fingers crossed they weren't going to get killed by archers. But it was quite the event. Mind Valley University. You should check it out if you haven't been to one of these events. I really like what they're doing, though. They're taking education and reinventing education to make it to more of an international community experience where kids learn important life skills they might not otherwise have learned in life.

So I got to wrap my head around this. So Estonia is just north of Latvia and your kids were able to go to school there. Do they speak English there?

Yes, they speaking well, Mind Valley brings in all these teachers like, you know, my children were being taught by special instructors that they brought in. For example, you know, I finished up one day of my own day of teaching and lecturing and listening into other experts come in and talk. And then my kids came to me, I said, well, who's your teacher today? And it was Jim Quick, the brain learning expert. So Jim Quick was their guest lecturer and he came in and he taught him his memory palace techniques and how to memorize things and how to use your brain as a cutting edge weapon to develop enhanced memory and not shoot lasers. Not to shoot lasers out your eyes because he apparently worked with the squad from the Avengers movie and the X Men. Some of these techniques. Yes, yes. So if anything, I came back with elk sausage shards in my teeth and children who can memorize copious amounts of.

Objects now and a serious amount of beer bloat. I'm guessing as well.

It was a very productive trip, baby.

News flashes.

So, Brock, I am always on the lookout these days for things that primarily enhance cognition and longevity. Those are like my two darlings of late. I've got the fitness and the body composition piece worked out pretty well in my own head, I think. And so now I've really been bent. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I've been bent towards cognitive enhancement and longevity. And so whenever a study comes across my plate that combines not only exercise and fitness, but also cognitive enhancement, my eyebrow goes up my right or my left one.

You totally beat me to the old comment, by the way. Say it's. It's purely because you're getting old. Your interest has shifted and that's fine. Probably wrong with that. Yeah, I'm older than you, so that's.

I'm.

I'm happy that your interest has shifted to that because I can. I can benefit from it too.

You can piggyback on that. This, this one made my inner brain go.

As it does my inner caveman medieval brain. So this was a study on neurological health and what kind of exercise actually enhances neurolog health. And I'll link to this as I will do with all the articles and the research studies that we talk about. If you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 3 8, 7. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com 387 I say it twice. Just like they do on the, on the 800 commercials on the Internet.

Five, five, five.

Yeah. What do they call those? Infomercials. Infomercials. I haven't had anybody watch those anymore these days.

I don't even know if they still have them. I haven't had cable in so long I have no idea.

I don't know what cable is. Anyways, so this research study looked at what kind of exercise would do things like enhance neural stem cells to produce new neurons and cause neurogenesis in the same way that, you know, there's lots of chatter out there on the interwebs right now and also in books in popular culture about psilocybin and DMT and drug like experiences that enhance neurogenesis. And lion's mane extract is a popular one. There's a lot of even just coffee, even coffee.

Aerobic exercise, you don't have to drop acid to get it.

Better yet, drop acid and have a.

Cup of coffee with lime and then go for, go for a bike ride.

Total rabbit hole. But that's actually a very potent stack. You take a microdose of psilocybin about depending on your body size, 0.2 to 0.5 grams. And then you stack on top of that lion's mane and niacin. That's a, that's an extremely mind spinning and actually character developing stack. It allows for you to have a great deal of introspection. It's good for like if you're going to do a, you know, a typical microdosing protocol would be 10 weeks. You microdose every three days or so. And for enhanced neurogenesis and also for basically dissolving the ego just a little bit and being open to new ideas, setting aside some of your preconceived beliefs about the world, et cetera. I know I'm kind of getting a little woo woo and esoteric here, but you take lion's mane niacin and psilocybin every three days and you try to combine that with like a long walk in the forest. It's a very, very cool way to do a little bit of introspection, self development and also get all the benefits of neurogenesis as well. So all right, there's that. But you could also, you could also do this also do squats. You could squat. It turns out that exercise, particularly exercise that uses the large leg muscles, enhances neurological health in a way that's different than like high intensity interval training in a way that's different than steady state endurance TR in a way that's different than working your bis and your tris on a Tuesday and your shoulders and your triangular deltoids on a Wednesday. It's actually essential for your brain and your nervous system to grow to actually have to move the legs. This study highlights why, but it really brings squats just another notch up the totem pole. Squats and probably hex bar deadlifts. And I say hex bar just because people of any age can lift a pretty heavy hex bar without throwing a out their back. And a hex bar almost forces you into decent form. A little bit more glute and hamstring utilization, a little bit less strain on the upper back. My go to exercises if I had to do nothing else would be back squats and hex bar deadlifts. And this study talks about how it's critical to brain and nervous system health. So not only should you be including squats in your program, I would say for me, I'm going to publish on this week's weekly roundup, which comes out Friday if you subscribe to my newsletter, my entire training program right now, How I train well, twice a week I lift heavy and both those lifting days include back squats or goblet squats with a kettlebell. The other interesting thing about squats for you biohackers and self quantification nerds out there is that I have attached a heart rate variability monitor to myself to see the effects on my sympathetic nervous system and my parasympathetic nervous system when I squat. There is no exercise compared to the squat that actually dumps my nervous system into a hole, meaning lowers my HRV more than a back squat. And that might sound bad, but when we're talking about the hormetic response to exercise and choosing exercises that specifically stress your body so that your musculoskeletal system and your neuromuscular system bounce back more fit, you actually want to choose exercises that suppress your HRV temporarily. And you can try this for yourself. You know, if you have a nature beat or if you have an aura ring or if you have anything that can kind of track your HRV apple watch time. Yeah, most people use these to say box breathe or do alternate nostril breathing or meditation and they want to breathe themselves or meditate themselves or think themselves into a state of low stress. But you can use these in in the opposite manner. You can actually go and figure out the Things that stress you out quite a bit to determine if you rest and recover afterwards, what's going to move the dial most for, say, fitness. So a lot to be said for squats. I think the back squat thing is because you have like this heavy object on your back, death is imminent. You know, it's as though a saber toothed tiger has tackled on your back and it's about to sink its jaws into your vertebra and your cervical spine and you have to, you have to squat it away, you have to scream and squat. So I suspect using the little, the little pad on the bar probably reduces the effectiveness of it a little bit. I just like to think that I was always proud of myself that I don't use that pad. And I instead have this nice little scar on my upper neck.

I've got one of those too. It's like a sort of a rough piece of skin with some. With a permanently inflamed lump.

Yeah. So leg exercise is critical to brain health, but here's another thing that, that's critical to brain health and actually enhances learning. There's this concept way back from the Grecian days, from the Greek days. Now we're going to jump. I guess it would be behind the medieval days just a bit. I'm kind of an idiot when it comes to history, but I'm pretty sure the Greeks came before the medievals. Anyways. So in Greece, this concept of a walking university, this concept of walking lectures, moving lectures to learn as one moved, was something that philosophers would do. I believe if we look at, you know, some of these Stoic philosophers, I think Epictetus was one what was another Stoic philosopher.

Oh man, I don't, I don't know.

Yeah. Anyways, they, they would walk while teaching. And so they actually did a study where they compared children who were physically active during their academic lessons. So six weeks of active math and English lessons, and they compared this to children who were in a traditional sedentary environment in school, sitting. Well, they learned. Well, it turns out that the children who move, the children who engaged in light to vigorous physical activity throughout the day, including during their actual learning sessions, had much higher educational performance on the tests that followed those lessons when they were active, as they were learning. And this is actually something that, for example, Finland incorporates in some of their schools. And they're close to Estonia. Speak of the devil. But they're known for having one of the most robust and effective education systems on the face of the planet. And they move as they learn. So the way that this would translate to, say, adults, because I know not everyone listening is a fifth grader or a breeder. Yeah. If you have something to learn or something to teach, try it while walking. And this is actually a strategy that I'll use. Let's say there is a TED Talk that's pretty dense that I want to listen into because some of my favorite podcasts are the TED Talks podcast and the TED Radio Hour. I listen to a lot of TED Talks. I'll also listen to some podcasts that can tend to be kind of dense. Like Knowledge Project is another one. There's a few others. I like my podcast to teach me a lot. If I'm going to listen in, I don't want to listen in to like, you know, three hours of chatting about, say, someone's. I don't know what's an example, you know, just like banter. Yeah, I hate banter. Don't you hate banter, bro?

I don't know. I listened to your entire interview with Joe Rogan and somehow I managed to get through that.

Well, we weren't bantering that much. I caught a lot of flack for interrupting him a lot just because I had a lot to say. I mean, you know, when somebody asked me a question, my brain just starts spinning and I say a lot. But anyways, we digress. This idea is that I will go for a walk when I have my most dense listening to do. Or I have an audiobook that I'm going through that has a lot of new concepts in it. You could of course, stack said, supplement. Stack I talked about earlier something that's going to enhance neurogenesis, like lion's mane, for example, or that lion's mane. Psilocybin, niacin, Stack. But anyways, when you want to learn something dense, choose a day or stack up all your most dense educational podcasts or audiobooks and choose a day and go for a walk. And movement enhances your ability to learn. Isn't that cool?

It does. I'm reading the, the research here though, and they were, they were actually disappointed in the effectiveness of this though. It was their self reported engagement level. So the kids didn't feel like they were learning more, but they were. They were.

They.

I guess that's a good thing. Why are they disappointed? Yeah, that seems they felt, I know.

They felt less engaged somehow when they, when they asked the pupils, they call them pupils, pupils if they were engaged and they felt like their engagement levels were lower but they were learning more effectively, which I think is a good thing because it almost means like you're activating the default mode network in your brain. Right. You're almost learning subconsciously when you move as you learn versus when you're sedentary as you learn.

Yeah, I guess. I don't know why they called that disappointing. That actually, like, I was misled by the word disappointment. That totally seems like exactly what you want to do. You want the kids to just almost accidentally be learning more, because that's going to stick with you a lot more and make it a lot more intriguing and hate to use the word engaging, but it's going to make them want to do it more often if it doesn't seem like it's a chore.

So, yeah, sneaky way to get kids to learn without making them think they're learning. You take them on a walk. So there you have it.

Stupid kids. They don't even know they're learning.

Something to be said for traveling universities. Someone should start a school in which kids just learn the whole time that they're moving. I think that was a. My former podcast guest, Katie Bowman. Her kids go to, like a forest school, but it's only for. I think it's only for preschoolers and kindergartners. And then as they get older, they have to go into the normal school.

In Germany, they've got schools, I think all the way through the. At least the elementary school levels, where you can do it in the forest, but Germans are. There's so much ahead of us in some things.

So. Speaking of moving, someone sent me an amazing infographic. At least I thought it was very interesting. The arguments for. For why Homo sapiens are some of the best endurance animals on the face of the planet. Meaning we can hunt down just about any animal that exists, provided that you give us some water and some food. And even in the absence of water and food, we can go for a pretty long period of time. And this, this infographic, if you're listening in, you gotta go. You gotta go look at this infographic because it's got a picture of somebody running and then it's one of those graphics that has the person's nude. Yeah, it's a nude hunter gatherer. So anyways, they detail everything that goes into making humans perform well at moving for long periods of time. Moving for long periods of time. Like, for example, just the fact that we are upright allows for better body cooling. But then it goes into a lot more than that. Like loose, low and wide shoulders with a head that's decoupled, meaning the way that our upper cervical Spine is oriented, allows for swinging of the upper body and movement of the head that counteracts the leg movements. And a lot of animals don't. Upright animals don't have this same mechanism we have, for example, compared to some of our ape cousins, shorter arms. And that reduces the effort in the actual arm swinging while still allowing us to counterbalance with the legs. We have extremely well developed Achilles tendons. Much to the chagrin of anyone who's had a, an Achilles rupture. Have you ever had that happen, Brock?

No. Thank you.

Achilles tendon rupture. Yeah, I haven't had it either. Apparently it feels as though like a horse has kicked you on the back of your lower leg and it just feels like it's, it's been shot with a, with a, with a shotgun. Anyways, though that well developed Achilles tendon acts as a spring so it stores and releases elastic energy. Thyroid and adrenal glands. They're larger than a lot of other species. The humans have larger thyroid and larger adrenal glands. And this allows us to more efficiently utilize the limited energy stores that we do have. Particularly carbohydrates and fat even down in the detail of our toes. Like our big toe is inward and projected and then our mid foot is compact relative to other species. And that restricts excessive rotation of the feet as you run or as you walk, as you move for long distances. So a ton. I mean the, the, the article goes into the ears, the eyes or the infographic goes into the ears, the eyes, the brain. Really fascinating though how well equipped a human is to move for long periods of time.

I find it really interesting the, the whole thing about the adrenal glands and the thymus and, and stuff being larger. Can you imagine how delicious sweet breads would be from humans?

Sweet breads? You mean like the. What's a sweet bread? Isn't that the, the, is that the adrenals, the kidneys?

No, yeah, it's the adrenals and thalamus and stuff.

Yeah, you cut up the kidneys, you like thin slice them and you bread them and you fry them. That's a sweetbread, right?

No, it's thought it was brain and I'm going to Google it. This is a part of the show called Brock Google's things.

Look it up. I'm pretty sure I had these in Spain. I raced the triathlon world championships for ITU a few years ago in Victoria, Spain where all these bars have pinchos which are appetizers. And I believe one of the things I was served with Sweetbreads.

Yeah, it's. It's the culinary name for thymus, which is the throat, gullet and neck or pancreas.

Especially from a calf or a lamb.

There you have it.

There you go. So I was just thinking, like, you take the thalamus, thymus, out of a. Out of a human, probably. Very tasty. Yeah. Based on this infographic, I'm saying similarly.

The last time I went for a hunt in Kona, I harvested from the wild sheep that I shot the testicles based on the recommendations of the guide I was down there with. And I thin sliced them, I dredged them in coconut flour, and then I fried them in. Or I dredged them in coconut flour in an egg and fried them in macadamia nut oil. And they were tender and juicy and amazing. And I'm pretty sure my balls got bigger after I ate them. I think. Just saying, maybe it was a placebo.

Effect, but either way, maybe you were just aroused.

I don't know how it went from endurance running adaptation to eating balls, but.

That was my fault. I started talking about cannibalism.

Yeah. All right, so I got a couple other interesting studies for you. All right, so this next one was very interesting, and I couldn't let this podcast go by without mentioning it. It was a study at MIT and it was entitled 24 Hour Fasting Regenerates Stem Cells and doubles Metabolism. Doubles metabolism regenerates stem cells. So we know that the magic mark for fasting kicks in at about the 16 hour, but at 24 hours, we actually see regeneration of stem cells and it kind of flips this metabolic switch, specifically in the gut. It enhances intestinal stem cells particularly, which is really good news for people who have gut issues. Just this simple concept of incorporating, say, a weekly 24 hour fast for cellular cleansing and also the doubling of the metabolism that occurs afterwards is intriguing. You know, there's this guy, Valter Longo, who endorses eating normally, but then incorporating a few longer extended fasts. His recommendation is up to five days of fasting, during which you actually see a slight lowering of the metabolic rate and a slight loss of lean tissue, but then the body bounces back afterwards, increases the metabolic rate. You get all the detoxification and cellular turnover. They call it cellular autophagy benefits and longevity benefits and stem cell benefits. And then the body bounces back after the fast. Now, five days is a long time. But returning back to how I mentioned in this week's weekly roundup that I'm going to publish from the site I publish this every Friday. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Sign up for the newsletter there or just visit on a Friday, visit the site on a Friday, and this Friday I'll be publishing my training routine. And not only does it incorporate Monday and Friday squats, not only does it incorporate these daily walks that I talked about, which are my opportunities to learn language or to listen to a more involved and cognitively demanding podcast or audio, but I also implement a weekly 24 hour fast. So I fast every day for 12 to 16 hours, meaning I'll skip breakfast or I'll eat a late breakfast or occasionally an early dinner. But either way, I always give my body that 12 to 16 hour cleanup window. 24 hours, though, something a little bit more magical happens. And so I fast from Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner, which is pretty easy and by the way, does not necessarily require caloric restriction. I can eat a big ass celebratory Saturday dinner, fast all day, fast through the night, you know, skip Sunday breakfast, skip Sunday lunch, and then have another huge Sunday dinner at which I'll often eat 2,500 calories. So I'm not necessarily engaged in calorie restriction. But just this idea of not eating for 24 hours appears.

To give some profound benefits to your biology, including this stem cell production and doubling of the metabolic rate. Isn't that cool?

It is cool. And this study in particular, the one that was done at MIT that this article is about, was done, done in mice, of course, but that doesn't mean that they haven't done similar things with humans. And there's certainly like, it's been years of, of people trying these different types of fasts out and. Well, not even years, like hundreds of years of people incorporating fasts into their, into their lifestyles, whether it's a religious thing or a social thing or whatever it happens to be. We've been doing this for a really long time. So I think sometimes people see these studies and go, oh, well, it was done in mice. Mice. But this study was done in mice. But there's certainly a lot of evidence to show that there's a lot of benefits. And maybe it's not exactly 24 hours like it was in mice, but certainly probably close.

Yeah, that's, that's also, as I get old, in the tooth, something I really focus on these days. Yeah. Are the, the spiritual disciplines, right? Fasting is considered a spiritual discipline. Silence and solitude is considered a spiritual discipline. Meditation and prayer and then self reflection, like asking yourself at the end of the day, what good have I done this day? And that actually pairs very well with gratitude in the morning. So self reflection and gratitude, meditation, silence and solitude, prayer and fasting kind of falls into that category as well. So that's something that.

I really focus on now, structuring into my daily routine. Did I do my morning gratitude journaling? Did I self reflect at the end of the day on what good I accomplished that day or how I actually went about my day? In addition to that, I incorporate the 12 to 16 hour fast, the 24 hour fast, and then these periods of time where I can be engaged in silence or solitude, which for me right now is just like sitting in my sauna at the end of the day, kind of quietly. I'll light a candle in there, burn a little incense sometimes and just, just sit and be with myself. So the spiritual discipline is just as important as squatting.

I think I do the same sort of thing, but I go and sit on the roof with a pint of ice cream and reflect on my life.

Smoke a joint, eat some Ben and Jerry's, set up there, gaze off into the Canadian wilderness. The other thing is this finding that I alluded to earlier about the medieval stuff, the medieval medicine. And this article was actually pretty fascinating. I was talking about this at dinner the other night while I was eating at a medieval restaurant with someone. We were talking about, you know, wisdom that we could derive from medieval medicine and medieval drugs particularly. And what they've found is that many of these medieval antibiotics that they've unearthed in medieval literature and lore actually work on modern bacteria that is even antibiotic resistant. And these contain things that you would kind of assume through logical analysis, would in fact be effective against bacteria like the bald's eye salve. They call it Bald's eye salve. It's also found in Bald's Leech Book, which was discovered in the British Library. It's an ancient Anglo Saxon recipe, and the ingredients are garlic and alliums that you mix with wine and ox gall. And then they would put this in a brass vessel and let it stand for nine nights. And for eye infections, this stuff was and still is effective. And this was something we brought up a couple years ago in a podcast when there was this news article about a medieval potion that killed MRSA better than the antibiotic drug vancomycin. And it was very, very similar. It was like garlic and leeks, some kind of bile from a cow's stomach. But they basically mixed all this stuff together and it worked extremely effectively against mrsa. So People who are out rolling in jiu jitsu gyms or playing turf on a football turf that's rife with Mrs. All it really comes down to is harvesting some bile from a cow's stomach, little garlic, getting yourself some allium from your local grocery store, and then hunting down a brass vessel, maybe from ebay, mixing it all together and letting it sit. The more I think about it, the more laborious this sounds.

Have you ever heard of the. The Roman Pliny the Elder? Yes, that sounds totally like something he'd do. So if anybody hasn't looked him up, look him up. It's, it's amazing the concoctions, anything you can think of, any ailment can think of. He's got some crazy ass thing of like putting blood in an egg and tricking a dog into sitting on it for a week and then feeding it to your neighbor to rid yourself of syphilis and stuff. It's, it's quite amusing.

Pliny the Elder. All right, so this begs the question, did, did Pliny the Elder actually write any books that one could buy and read?

He sure did. It's a huge encyclopedia of all kinds of maladies and remedies for them called Naturalis Historia or Natural History.

Natural historia meaning natural. How do you know that means natural history?

I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for Italian.

Yeah, I totally. He was Italian. He. Yeah, he was Italian. Como. Italy, baby. So check out Pliny the Elder and also everything else that we mentioned in today's news flashes. It's over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 387 I also every single day publish about two or three interesting news flashes and pieces of research on Twitter. So you can check that out@twitter.com BenGreenfield.

Special announcements.

All right, Brock, I got something better for you than medieval antibiotics. What do you think happens when you combine cherry juice with ginger, turmeric, white willow bark, which comes from salicin, salicylic acid, the same stuff you find in aspirin, hyaluronic acid, boswellia, also known as frankincense, which is one of the most potent natural anti inflammatories you can get your hands on. And then something called myristoliate, which is a fatty acid that supports joints, particularly some interesting studies on it in restoring knee function in arthritic conditions. You take all of that, you throw in some proteolytic enzymes to break down the fibrin that makes you sore after a workout. You throw in 20 different bio organic minerals and electrolytes including potassium and magnesium and then some collagen, type 2 chicken collagen, along with some glucosamine and some chondroitin. What do you think you have?

You got yourself a stew there, baby.

And you got yourself one of the most potent soreness killing and workout recovery stews that exist. I've got clients who have gone into surgery and loaded up with this stuff. I have myself used it both morning and evening to knock out injuries really quickly. It's really good if you're sore. It's a very potent anti inflammatory. It's called Kion Flex. Kion Flex. And you can get this along with all the other supplements that I formulate over on the kion website. It's getkion.com right now they're running 10% off of Kion Flex getkeon, that's K-I-O-N.com so you get Kion Flex for mobility and flexibility and recovery and everything else good. That happens when you consume every anti inflammatory nutrient known to man.

So it's like shooting yourself with a healing gun.

Yeah. Another, another good one that's, that's floating around out there is this concept of nicotinamide riboside. Nicotinamide riboside. I've talked before about how I personally do every month at least an NAD injection. It's an incredibly uncomfortable injection. It feels like your whole body is on fire. But NAD is one of the most potent ways to enhance your mitochondrial health. It's also fantastic for everything from addiction to anti aging. Decreasing the rate at which stem cells shorten, enhancing your stem cell availability. Well, the idea is that NR nicotinamide riboside is like a precursor to nad and if you consume it, it can actually increase your own NAD levels. So the cool thing is that it's the key ingredient in one of today's sponsors that has these NR capsules. And I actually use them in between my NAD injections to keep my NAD levels elevated. So this stuff's called Truniage True Niagen and they have this stuff that's created by a California based nutraceutical company called Chromadex that has developed this extremely effective and absorbable form of NR nicotinamide riboside. It's got zero negative side effects and you can just take about two capsules a day to keep your NAD levels elevated. You don't have to inject nad, but even if you are injecting nad, it works really well to keep NAD levels up in between injections. And everybody listening in can get this stuff@truniagen.com it's T R U Niagen and Niagen is N I A g e n truniagen.com Very cool, unique new supplement out there for mitochondrial health, for energy levels, for stem cell production, for kind of that longevity effect. So true. Niage. Another interesting one. I've got a little supplements here, but these are very. Not fringe, but lesser known supplements, I guess I would say.

Yeah, I'd never heard of this next one. This is kind of cool.

Yeah. There's research from Dr. Alessio Fasana, Harvard that shows that pretty much all gluten is inflammatory and triggers an autoimmune response whether or not you have celiac disease. Like everybody has a slight inflammatory response to gluten. Gluten. And in addition to that, many people just want to go to an Italian restaurant every once in a while, but have to fight that uphill battle against glyphosate and copious amounts of gluten, especially in some of these wheat crops that are grown for higher commercial yield. And we're surrounded by gluten. Sometimes you want to pound a couple slices of pizza or have a burger and not have it brought out on kale and romaine lettuce. And in a case like that, you can actually consume something called dipeptidyl peptidase. Dipeptidylpeptidase. And it's a form of a special protease that breaks down the coating of the gluten protein. So it basically causes you to be able to digest gluten when you would not normally be able to. This stuff is called Gluten Guardian. Gluten Guardian.

I love the name. Good name.

Yeah. And you can save 10% off with the code Greenfield if you just go to. To Gluten Guardian just like it sounds. Glutenguardian.com greenfield that's glutenguardian.com greenfield so you can partake in all those rare gluten filled delicacies that your grandma serves you when you visit.

And I believe the Gluten Guardian is joining the Avengers in the next. The next series as well.

Yeah, Gluten Guardian will be the new guy. He throws loaves of bread, people.

He's going to come back and save everybody from Thanos.

Yeah. Sourdough bread. So the, the final sponsor for today's episode is Gains Wave. Have you done a Gains Wave treatment, Brock?

No. No. And it, it scares me a little bit if it's. If I didn't have to go all the way to Florida for it. I'd probably feel a lot more inclined.

Don't they have providers all over the U.S. yeah, you threw me a softball there, baby.

Nobody in Canada, though. Sure.

I don't know about Canada, actually. That's a great question. But they use this, this safe non invas treatment protocol that basically involves blasting your crotch with acoustic sound waves. It's this patented frequency of sound waves. Breaks open old blood vessels. It builds new blood vessels. I've done it four times. I'm actually going down to Florida at the end of this month. My wife is going to do it. They do it for women. It's called Femiwave for women. So when my wife and I go down to Florida, we're going to be in Miami and Fort Lauderdale the first week of August. We're going to go and do a couple's session of Gainswave.

That doesn't sound romantic at all, really.

Well, it is once the numbing cream wears off, baby.

Yeah. You can't feel anything for like four to six hours. And then all of a sudden you're like. It's like you were in high school again for the next month. It's crazy. So everybody listening in gets 30% off of gainswave. You go to gainswave.com Ben. Men or women. The female version, by the way, is called femiwave. So you go to femiwave.com ben or you go to gainswave.com ben so if you have not yet experienced the magic, magic wand of Gainswave, you are missing out on an important part of life. A little bit of better living through science, baby. So that all being said, just a couple of quick things coming up before we jump into this week's Q and A. I will be traveling to Bozeman, Montana. For any of you who live in or near Bozeman, Montana, or want to fly in, the ancestral health symposium is coming up quick. It's July 19th. That's in just, gosh, about a week or so. And that's a very cool, more kind of scientific conference that goes into everything from diet to movement to sleep to stress to epigenetics. I'll be speaking there on. On biohacking, of all things. And it's. It's actually quite a good time. Great food, wonderful people, good little parties in the evening and extremely didactic. Very didactic. They should have a walking university there because it's pretty dense information. Honestly.

It's one of those ones you walk out and your brain's gonna explode.

You learn a ton, which I love. By so that's the ancestral health symposium July 19th. I'll put a link over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 387 and in addition to that, there's a, there's a few other events coming up. There's a great speaking of biohacking Biohacking conference coming up in Toronto, Ontario. I'll be speaking there October 15th through the 17th, 15th through the 17th.

So I think it's the 14th through.

The 16th, something like that. I don't know. Mid October, the Spark Biohacking Conference in Toronto, Ontario. So check that out. And then finally I should mention that the Switzerland retreat, two weeks, myself, my wife and a team of health professionals over in Switzerland are going to lead you on a journey to the Swiss Alps where you get to taste the most cutting edge forms of European medicine, particularly like anti aging and detoxification medicine. While eating amazing food and going on amazing hikes in the Swiss Alps. You really cannot be beat that. This is going to be one of my highlights of 2019. It's going to be in the summer in July of 2019. I'll put a link to all the details in the show notes. It is about 2/3 full right now, so I believe that means there's five rooms left at this resort up in the Swiss Alps. So if you want to go.

Go to the show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com 387 and I will have all the links right there in the show notes.

Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, this is Margie from New Hope, Pennsylvania, longtime listener, second time caller. So I have three questions on alcohol and I listened to the alcohol podcast twice and I'm hoping that maybe you can clarify a few things. Number one, does alcohol really slow or halt your body's ability to metabolize fat enough to cause weight gain? This has been a big argument I've had with a friend of mine. She says no, that it's all about calories. I say yes, it's about this slowing of the metabolism. Number two, so if this is because of the sedative effect of the alcohol.

Would that mean that any substance that calms the nervous system causes slowing or halting of metabolism? And then number three, is a daily dose of alcohol safe for the liver to detoxify every day? Thanks so much. I appreciate all your interviews and all that. You do have a great day. Bye bye.

I really like this question because like the guidelines are all over the place and they really actually depend on where you live, like in North America. I think it's two drinks per night for a man, one for a woman. In France it's like three and two. And in like Sweden it's one and none or something. Or no, it's five a week. I think they break down.

Form of alcohol differs too. Like in, in Poland, where vodka is your blood. Yeah. Literally is in your bloodstream. From an early age, you could probably just take shots all day long. Italy, same thing. Bottle of wine with dinner. For me personally, I haven't been drunk in about seven years, but I drink every day. I have, I have one drink a day. But honestly, based on the size of the Greenfield drinking vessels.

Yes.

Fish boil size, wine glasses and the giant Moscow mule.

More like a drink and a half. But I drink close to 365 days a year. I have a drink and I rarely eat, if ever exceed two drinks because I am well aware of the spillover of acetaldehyde, the ability of alcohol to be tapped into as the primary source of energy, trumping carbohydrates and proteins and fats and anything else that might be in your body at the time. And so, yeah, there can be some trade offs when it comes to weight gain, but it's actually fascinating and I want to take a little bit deeper, dive into alcohol, because in some cases it's actually been shown to speed up, up metabolic rate and cause weight loss. So the thing is, as far as actual research goes, when we look at actual literature and not anecdotes from different populations around the world, light to moderate alcohol intake is not a risk factor or is very often not a risk factor for obesity or being overweight. Whereas heavy drinking and binge drinking are pretty consistently linked not only with adiposity, but with inflammatory adiposity. Meaning you're not just increasing your levels of subcutaneous fat underneath the skin and your arms and your legs, you're creating more inflammatory fat in the waistline, the quintessential beer belly, for example.

The dead body.

Yeah. First of all, what happens is when you consume alcohol, we know that it is relied upon as the primary metabolic source of fuel over and above anything else that you consume at the time. And simultaneously it inhibits fat oxidation. So alcohol is around seven, seven and a half, I think it's 7.2 calories per gram is what alcohol comes out to as far as the actual calories. But it inhibits fat oxidation when you consume it and causes actual fat sparing and thus higher body fat long term. And that is assuming that this whole physics equation of calories in versus Calories out is not being weighed in light of the actual alcohol consumed. If you're at a caloric deficit and alcohol is being consumed as a primary source of your calories, you should be more concerned about the liver, the inflammation and the amount of acetaldehyde, the toxic byproduct of alcohol metabolism, more than you should be concerned about weight gain gain. But once you're eating to caloric excess, if alcohol is part of that eating to caloric excess because of the suppression of fat oxidation and the ability of alcohol to be able to encourage the formation of higher body fat levels, particularly, you know, deleterious inflammatory fat, you should be pretty dang careful with this stuff. Like I don't eat to caloric deficiencies, but I am very aware of not only my timing of alcohol but also how much I drink. So to give you an example, your muscles lack the actual enzyme necessary for taking the fructose from alcohol and converting that into muscle glycogen to be able to store that alcohol to be used for say, the next day's workout. Now, your liver can take fructose and your liver does have the enzyme that's capable of taking fructose and storing it away as liver glycogen levels. But you can only store 350, 400 calories in your liver. And when you have a drink, unless you are in a fasted state, like let's say you're going to have a, I don't know, mimosa in the morning after you've done a 16 hour fast, in most cases, you've got already 200, 250 calories of storage glycogen in your liver. So once you've had maybe one drink with enough fructose, 100 to 150 calories worth to replenish your liver glycogen, anything else is going to spill over into the bloodstream and cause more triglycerides and increased amounts of storage body fat. So for that reason I always have my alcohol, unless I am having a really nice steak, in which case I want a little glass of wine as almost like a palate cleanser in between bites of steak. I always have my alcohol on an empty stomach before dinner. And the added advantage of that is that alcohol, if you're drinking alcohol, that's more of like a bitter or a digestif, you know, such as Moscow Mule is one of my, my weapons of choice in the alcohol department. It's got ginger in it, often mint, some lime. These digestifs that can actually enhance your ability to be Able to digest a meal and even enhance your insulin response to a meal, causing the meal to spike your blood glucose less significantly. So the timing of alcohol is important, as is the amount, meaning that the timing in an ideal scenario would be on an empty stomach before a meal and then. And the cool part about that too is if you're drinking for the de stressing effect or you're drinking to kind of feel it, to get that nice little happiness inducing buzz, that happens a lot easier when you're drinking on an empty stomach with a slightly empty level of liver glycogen levels compared to if you're drinking after or during dinner. Does that make sense?

Yeah, definitely.

Okay, so in addition to that, there's some really interesting mechanism via which alcohol could cause you to become overweight, in addition to its ability to be able to burn preferentially as a fuel and its ability to be able to decrease fat oxidation. So for example, we know that it influences a bunch of different hormones that are linked to satiety. Leptin would be one for example. Glucagon like peptide, would be another. So what seems to occur is that alcohol can increase appetite and influence hunger by acting on the opioid and the serotonin pathways in the brain, both of which can increase your appetite. Now the cool thing is another area of the brain that alcohol acts upon is the gaba, the gamma aminobutyric acid pathway. And that's an inhibitory neurotransmitter, which is why a glass of wine or some kind of alcohol towards the end of the day can assist with sleep a little bit. The problem is you drink a whole bunch of alcohol, you get a huge amount of GABA released. And when that begins to wear off, you can actually get this excitatory response, which is a reason that you would wake up after a few too many drinks around 2 or 3am as all that wears off. It's kind of a combination of that having to pee. And if you look at the Chinese medicine clock, the potential for that being the period of time when if you have liver issues, you would wake up a little bit. So a whole host of reasons that you would wake up in the wee hours by drinking to excess. But it appears that some of the same mechanisms can also spike hunger. And so that's another reason that alcohol might be associated with obesity. Especially heavier alcohol consumption would be the suppression of some of your appetite regulating hormones and an increase in some of the hormones responsible for increasing appetite.

That's interesting because you couple that with the sort of decreased Being sensible, and you get a little bit hungry, and all of a sudden you're, you're, you're making a fourth meal instead of just having a little munch in the evening, you get that little bit of hunger boost. And then. And you're also lowered your inhibition. So it's like ordering pizza instead of just having a, a carrot or something.

Right, exactly. And, and the problem is that, you know, you look at someone could say, well, marijuana does the same thing. Marijuana makes you hungry. It's true. But marijuana doesn't have calories, right? So you're not piling calories on top of calories. And marijuana also does not support, suppress fat oxidation. So, I mean, if, let's say a couple of drinks make you hungry and smoking a joint makes you hungry, technically smoking the joint would be healthier. I mean, it actually, alcohol is responsible for way more deaths and metabolic issues than marijuana ever will be. But at the same time, the big picture is that we know that alcohol can also make you more hungry, especially in excess. So the interesting thing, though, and something that I alluded to, is that we do see a certain population, heavy alcohol consumers in particular, who not only don't gain weight, but actually have higher metabolic rates. They have higher metabolic rates, and this is fascinating. So there is this metabolic pathway. It's kind of similar to the brown fat pathway. You know how when you take a cold bath, you get some of your white adipose tissue converted to brown fat, and brown fat takes calories and burns them to generate heat. It's very metabolically active tissue. Well, there's another similar metabolic pathway called the. It's a mouthful. It's called the microsomal ethanol oxidizing system, the meos. And you find this system in the liver. Now, when you burn ethanol, when you burn alcohol using this pathway, it's actually taking the alcohol and burning it to generate more heat than it is to generate ATP. And so the idea is that people who drink a lot, what they get is an upregulation of this MEOS pathway. And so they see an increase in their metabolic rate, they see an increase in the amount of the alcohol that's actually burnt to generate heat to maintain the body's thermoregulatory mechanisms. And this might be why, for example, there's one fascinating study where they increased alcohol consumption to 2,000 calories per day derived from alcohol. So that's a good four or five drinks at least. Now, the weight gain that occurred in response to that, this was in a human study, was only 6 grams per day, barely anything. And then they did the same thing with chocolate. And chocolate caused a weight gain of 198 grams per day, meaning chocolate blew alcohol out of the water. Heavy alcohol consumption out of the water in terms of the ability of chocolate to cause you to gain weight compared to alcohol. And the idea is that this MEOS pathway, as soon as you start to drink a whole bunch of begins to get activated, increases the metabolic rate and causes you to be able to metabolize alcohol more efficiently. The problem is that only takes into account whether or not you're going to gain weight and does not take into account your liver health. Alcohol is well known as one of the best ways to kill stem cells. I talked about this, I believe, in my podcast with Dr. Dan Pompa a couple of weeks ago. Alcohol, of course, has effects on, on acetaldehyde, not just the liver, but the kidneys. So this MEOS pathway can get activated. But it turns out that that's probably not a very good excuse for you to be drinking a lot of alcohol. But there is something to be said for like, these skinny fat people who drink a lot. One of the reasons is that they, they maintain higher body heat by activating this MEOS pathway.

That's really interesting when you were talking about the sleep portion of, like, if you drink too much before bed. Bed, like when I have drank too much before bed, it's usually at 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning, you wake up and you have to pee, but you're also like super hot, like just, just radiating heat. So that's this effect then.

Yeah, yep. And that, that is why actually insufficient sleep has been heavily associated with great alcohol consumption and excess body weight. Like, sleeping less than six hours per night goes hand in hand with alcohol consumption in many studies. So that's probably one of the mechanisms, because one of the best ways to sleep well is to decrease your core temperature. And one of the best ways to sleep poorly is to eat a heavy meal and drink a bunch of alcohol before bed. So.

And that's increasing your core temperature, so. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, exactly. So then there's also, of course, the genetic determinants, like, you know, alcohol dehydrogenase. We know that, that some people rapidly eliminate ethanol because they have more active alcohol dehydrogenase pathways. Kind of like there's fast coffee metabolizers and slow coffee metabolizers. The same could be said for alcohol consumption. And because of those detox pathways, not only do we see some people gain weight in response to alcohol, and some People don't gain weight as much. As a matter of fact, I know a very lean guy. Well, Todd White, the guy who owns dry farm wines, he fasts all day, which I'm sure has a pretty significant strict keto. He's pretty strict here. But he also has a whole bottle of wine with dinner most nights. An entire bottle. And he, he's actually, he maintains a very good metabolic profile and he is in very good health. And part of that is because he's drinking like this biodynamic filtered wine. It's organic, you know, it doesn't have a lot of additives and preservatives in it. It's lower in alcohol. But it's likely also because he may have the genetic capability in terms of alcohol dehydrogenase mechanism and the ability to even produce some enzymes that are liver protective enzymes, based on his genetics, to be able to handle alcohol a little bit more easily. Another person who I know who drinks a copious amount of alcohol is Wim Hof, the iceman. Wim Hof, Yeah. He drinks a lot of beer. Yeah. Again, granted, the ice probably confers some protection. You know, he does have a big red nose, which I think might be because of that alcohol consumption. But at the same time, yeah, he's in relatively good metabolic health. And part of that is likely due to the genetic variations he possesses. With his history, I think he's Danish, and you look at some populations that have a history of more alcohol consumption, and he's able to function pretty well in higher amounts of alcohol as well. So there are certain genes that not only code for your alcohol dehydrogenase, but also for liver detox genes, things like glutathione, for example, or the metabolism of acetaldehyde, which we defined as a byproduct of ethanol metabolism. And if you possess these genes, then you're also going to do a better job metabolizing alcohol. When I interviewed Dr. Ben Lynch. Dr. Ben lynch, who wrote the book Dirty Genes, and he runs this genetic analysis pathway called Strategene he outlined. And if you go listen to that interview, I'll put a link to it in the show. Notes, notes. Basically, I don't produce the endogenous antioxidants responsible for assisting me with the metabolism of ethanol. And so he actually, he sent me a few supplements that I now take as almost like a stack. If I do anticipate that I'm going to be at a party and I might be, you know, having, you know, for me partying, I'll be Honest with you, it's, it's two to three drinks rather than one to one and a half, right? Like that's a, that's a, that's a, a good time for me. And that's a Saturday night. Plenty of dials in my brain, right? But if I'm going to do something like that, you know, he sent me molybdenum and a couple others, something called Homocystex, which is a homocysteine based supplement. And there's one other. But anyways, I will link to my interview with Ben Lynch. You can hear a little bit more about some of the genetic factors that would be responsible for allowing you or disallowing you to be able to metabolize alcohol. And then finally, a couple of other things. Margie asked, would anything else that has a sedative effect, because I mentioned how alcohol increases your GABA production, anything else that has a sedative effect do the same thing? Well, it turns out that there are a host of medications that have a sedative effect, particularly by acting on your serotonin pathways that are directly associated with weight gain. And these would also be things that you would want to be careful with. Probably.

The biggest ones would be any drug that would be an antidepressant. So Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, those are some of the biggest weight gain offenders because they block the reabsorption of serotonin and that makes more of it available to send messages between nerve cells and it can increase appetite significantly. So it's not lowering the metabolic rate as much as it's just making you more likely to, to grab a Snickers bar or a carton of Ben and Jerry's. But ultimately that sedative effect of some of these things, like antidepressants can do the same thing, but it's not because they lower your metabolic rate. So ultimately, the big picture here is coming full circle. Moderate level of drinking, light to moderate level of drinking seems to confer some longevity benefits, especially if you're drinking a nutrient, nutrient dense form of alcohol, such as, say, red wine. In addition, drinking on an empty stomach when the liver's glycogen stores are empty is probably going to help you out with some of the potential weight gain from alcohol. Analyzing your genetics to see if you should be taking certain supplement stacks or certain endogenous antioxidants or non endogenous antioxidants, being like an oral antioxidant or an antioxidant, like a weekly glutathione injection or something like that, if you're going to drink, is probably a prudent thing to do. And then finally, I do have a podcast that I did in which I took a deep dive into alcohol damage mitigation, like what to do if you are going to go out and party. And we cover everything from turmeric to activated charcoal to different things you can put into your body to protect it. That was a podcast with Thomas DeLauer and it was just a couple of months ago I recorded that. So it's, it's fresh off the presses and everything's updated and relevant. So I will put a link to that as well if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 387 and that being said, Nos.

Dravia, Wait, can I add one thing to the end of here? Just I think one of the biggest things that people sort of miss in the studies, like they talk about green zones and how people in the green zones that live a really long time tend to have a more moderate intake of alcohol. I think something that's missing or that a lot of people miss when they look at that information is that it's not alcohol. Sitting in your basement by yourself, sort of medicating yourself. It's very social in general. Like it's going out in the evening with friends, playing checkers in the square, having, having some wine there. It's, I think context has as much to do with it as, as just the amount that you're having. And we should, we, you have to be careful when you just started saying like two drinks or three drinks a day or five drinks a week or whatever it is, the situation and the, the surroundings has a lot of effect on whether it's going to confer a health benefit or just going to numb you to your, the sadness around you. Which is, I'm sad to say, but.

In other words, it's, it's okay to have a flask full of whiskey that you, you toke on regularly as long as you're doing so while playing checkers in the square, sitting across from your other alcoholic friend.

Yes?

Hey, Ben, it's Meg from Park City, Utah. I'm wondering if you could take a slightly deeper dive into msg. My son and I have a disagreement about whether or not it's okay to partake. I've heard for so long that it should be avoided. And he says that recent studies show that it's safe and it's a naturally occurring compound in vegetables. And he sprinkles extra MSG on his food. But I still avoid it like the plague. What gives? Is it much ado about nothing? Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

Bye. This question makes me want Chinese food. Food.

I hear you.

With an MSG salt shaker.

Yeah. Somebody bring me a little pile of MSG that I can just liberally sprinkle. Who does that?

I don't know, but you. But you know what's interesting is that that stuff is not any different than the MSG you get. You know, people say, oh, MSG from food is different than the MSG that you get from, from Chinese food. It's not like you can get a bunch of MSG in food. Like kelp and seaweed are really high in that umami flavored msg. So is fish sauce. So is soy sauce. You buy like a good hard cheese, like a parmesan cheese soup. Parmesan cheese is incredibly high in msg. Shiitake mushrooms, a lot of mushrooms are high in msg. A lot of shellfish, which is a super ancestral food. You know, humans who originated living primarily on coastlines ate copious amounts of shellfish. And that has a lot of MSG in it as well. Might be why we retain kind of a taste for that, that, that pleasant umami flavor of msg. Well, the fact is, when you, when you look at natural versus manufactured, what they call umami or msg, what happens is.

It all winds up going through the same metabolic pathway in your body. So in the stomach, monosodium glutamate, or msg, dissolves into basically sodium cations and glutamate anions. It's a very simple chemical equation. And essentially all that winds up in your body is l, glutamic acid or glutamate. So whatever form the MSG is in, it's going to wind up doing the same thing in your body metabolically, whether for better or for worse. And we can, we can talk about that in a second. But ultimately there's not a difference between the MSG that you're going to find in the little umami salt shaker that they've got got sitting on the kitchen counter at the Chinese restaurant that you go to and the umami you're going to get from parmesan cheese or mushrooms or anything else like that. Now, glutamate, or glutamic acid, it's an amino acid, totally naturally occurring, like I just mentioned. I just listed off a bunch of foods that have it in there, and a lot of those contain pretty appreciable amounts of glutamate. There are A lot of benefits to glutamate. It can improve your digestion. They've even found in chronic gastritis patients that glutamate actually helped to heal the gut. You know, it's a close cousin to L glutamine, a known supplement that we take to heal leaky gut. Glutamate can help to enhance the flavor of foods. Obviously, you know, you take some.

Vegetables and you splash some fish sauce on there, or you do a saute and you do some parmesan cheese and a handful of shellfish or mussels on there, and you're adding glutamate, uma, umami rich flavors. At the same time, there are certain populations that do not do well with glutamate based on imbalances in their brain levels of glutamate and some other neurotransmitters. For example, they've noted that children who have autism get beneficial changes that occur when they remove concentrated sources of glutamate from their diet. Concentrated sources being things like Chinese food, MSG seasoning, or fish sauce. Another one would be migraines. A lot of people get triggered by high amounts of glutamate and that can cause migraines. If you get migraines, that'd be another reason to cut glutamate or MSG rich foods from your diet. So Kung Pao's chicken would be out if you get headaches. Obesity, there seem to be some appetite stimulating effects of MSG and glutamate, and it's probably because it is kind of one of those hedonistic flavors that triggers the, this ancestral mechanism in humans to like food. And so probably one of the worst things that you can do for your waistline, as you've already learned from this podcast, is to booze it up and eat Chinese food. So that would probably be one of the worst one, two combos, maybe, maybe smoking a joint afterwards, because pretty much all you're going to want to do at that point is eat copious amounts of food. So we know that alcohol and glutamate are both both known appetite stimulants, but they're known calorie containing appetite stimulants, which is kind of the worst 12 combo that you can get. So anyways, that's skinny on glutamate. So if you have a child with autism or you yourself have autism, you get migraines, you're trying to control appetite. Glutamate's probably not going to do you any favors if you just love cool flavors and you want to improve digestion. There's zero evidence that MSG is going to be an issue, just as with anything in moderation. But in my opinion, probably the deleterious reaction that a lot of people have to glutamate containing foods is because they're notoriously used in situations in which there are other food colorings and histamine rich compounds which we'll talk about in a second, and vegetable oils and other things that cause bigger issues than the msg. So I would say that Chinese takeout food in the cute little paper box, as far as the MSG in that is going to be something just fine. Go to town. Hey Ben, love your show. Longtime listener. Question I have is about smoked salmon. Obviously we all know about the dangers of smoked meats classified as a strong carcinogenic, but very difficult to find information on smoked salmon. Obviously salmon itself is touted as a superfood. But keen on your thoughts on whether smoked salmon has the same benefits as regular salmon or if it should be more akin to smoked meats, which we should definitely be avoiding. Thanks again, Ben.

I love me some smoked salmon.

Great for the breath too. It's perfect. Like pre date food. Yes.

There's nothing like you want to make out with somebody.

Yeah. Put a little fish sauce on there. So I mean, smoked meat does kind of get kicked under the bus nowadays as a, as a carcinogen, but smoking is actually. Yeah.

Is it true that it's actually classified as a strong carcinogen? That's what Alex said. I've never heard that before.

Not necessarily. I mean, it really depends on the food. But smoking is one of the world's oldest food preservation techniques. I mean, our ancestors used to strip pieces from animals and smoke them on wood fires until they were basically cooked. And smoking depending on the food is really not an issue. Like salmon particularly stays very stable when smoked. They've studied this, they've looked at whether the fragile fish fats are oxidatively stable in response to smoking. Not only did smoking in one study done on, on smoked salmon at a relatively high heat protect omega 3s from oxidizing, it actually concentrated the stability of the omega 3 fatty acids. So it was almost like the smoked salmon became more stable and less susceptible to oxidation. Furthermore, if you take that salmon, you can make it even more stable and less prone to oxidation. If you want to keep, keep it for a long period of time by fermenting it after you smoke it or by buying smoked salmon and fermenting it. And that's actually, that's very simple. To do. Fermenting is. It's something that scares a lot of people, but it's super duper easy. You literally just take smoked salmon that you smoked yourself or that you've purchased, and you put it into a big glass mason jar with some lemons, like lemon juice. Or whey works, too. Whey is the clear liquid that you could, like, strain off the top of the yolk container that that clear liquid. And then you can add any number of different herbs you want. Like, fennel is really good. Dill goes really well with fish. Bay leaves typically like peppercorns. That's another thing that you'd put into a big jar for fermentation. And then you put some salt in there and you put the lid on, and then you just basically keep that at room temp for about a day or so. That initiates the fermentation process. Then you just stick it in the freezer.

Freezer.

And that's how you ferment fish. And it'll keep for several weeks. Did I say the freezer? I meant the refrigerator.

Yes.

Yeah, you stick it in the refrigerator. Yeah, freezer. You got some smoked salmon popsicles. The refrigerator. Just stick it in there might be good. And that's a very, very simple fermentation method. I love. For example, what's Sally Fallon's cookbook? Nourishing Traditions. My wife and I use that all the time to learn how to preserve foods, how to ferment foods. It's a great, great book to have on hand. But, yeah. So smoking salmon and even fermenting that smoked salmon is a known food preservation technique. The problem is that any smoked food gets concentrated levels of histamine. Concentrated levels of histamine. And histamine can be an issue. The problem with histamine in people who are sensitive to it is it can cause a host of reactions, from gut issues to headaches to low energy levels to poor sleep. And you typically will find a lot of histamines in any fish that's been smoked or dried, in any canned fish, like canned tuna or canned sardines, any marinated fish. Most seafood is relatively high in histamines, as are most crustaceans. So if you are sensitive to histamines, I'll tell you in a second how you can figure that out. You actually would want to avoid smoked salmon. There are a lot of different ways to test whether or not you are sensitive to histamines. Like, there's a stool histamine test, there's a blood histamine test. Most of them are very inaccurate. And don't work if someone's telling you they're going to test your histamines in your stool blood. None of that seems to correlate with histamine or histamine intolerance. Intestinal bacteria can produce a lot of of histamine. And so a stool histamine test is a lot of times more reflective to what your bacteria is doing rather than your own sensitivity. Blood does not appear to be very reliable as well. Really, the best way to see whether or not you are what's called dao deficient, DAO deficient, or whether or not you have a genetic issue with being able to handle histamine, would just be too to feed something like 23andMe data through that guy's protocol I talked about earlier, Dr. Ben Lynch's strategene analysis. That's in my opinion, a bulletproof way to test for histamine intolerance. It tells you exactly if you possess the gene that does not allow you to digest histamine properly. And yeah, you can supplement with certain things that will shut down the histamine reaction. There are certain natural antihistamines that you can take. We're getting a little long in the tooth, so I don't want to jump into the mechanism of action for those. But there are supplements like histamine blocks. There's another one called histamine X. There are some forms of glutamine that help. There are some forms of creatine that help. There's a lot of different ways to go after histamine sensitivity. And you would just consume these at the same time that you take the histamine. And I should mention, by the way, a lot of probiotics are also very high in histamine. So what I would do is go Togo order a 23amine genetic test if you don't have one. If you already have one, take those results, run the raw data through strategene, and then that will show the genes associated with histamine breakdown and also show you exactly what you can do if you have issues with histamine. But ultimately, for smoked salmon and many smoked foods in general that don't become oxidized in response to smoking, the smoking is not the issue. Sometimes if you're using, like, wood chips and pellets that have a lot of preservatives and artificial compounds added to them, that can be an issue. But ultimately, I'm a fan of smoked salmon, and the health benefits far outweigh any deleterious issues. Unless you're super duper histamine, sensitive.

Nice. And the only thing I was thinking of too is the, some of that smoked meat and some of the cured stuff that you find in regular grocery stores will have that, that smoke flavoring in them. And maybe that's what Alex was talking about that we definitely should be avoiding.

Yeah, that's different. You want a good.

But if it's, if it's really smoked, then it's okay.

Yeah, you want a good, healthy smoking process. The other thing is that as we get into this week's review, I'm going to grab myself a little sesame seed bagel, tomato, some cream cheese, some capers, some smoked salmon, sit back, back and listen to this week's reveal.

Oh, I see what you're doing. You're gonna have a little snack while I read. All right. Well, this one comes from Sweet Cincy. I don't know if that was supposed to be Sciency or Cincy, but anyway, it's a five star review and it goes like this. I learned a Ben Greenfield and the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast from the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. After one episode, I was hooked. Ben and Brock cover all sorts of exercise, nutrition and supplementation strategies, strategies and so much more. They provide recommendations backed by science, they debunk myths and bro science and overall provide a great listen for anyone trying to live optimally. Thanks to everyone involved in providing such a great resource.

That's nice. I like how you read resource. It's not a resource. It's a resource. Kind of like it's not spiced wine. It's spiced wine. Spice and wine.

Spice of wine. That's because I'm learned.

You know, we started, we started medieval. Now I saw New Jersey. Let me see if I can revert to my medieval accent. So first of all, if you read your review on the show, email gear@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that's gear G A R BenGreenfieldFitness.com we'll send you a T shirt, a tunic, a helmet, a bow, an arrow and a vial full of magical potion that kills dragons. Dragons, dragoons, dracons.

You simply need to include your tunic size or your T shirt size when you email gear@BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you enjoy this show, leave your own review. If our medieval voices annoy you, leave us a one star. If you learned anything interesting, leave us a five star. It helps out the show. All of the show notes you can find, find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 387 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com 387 Brock, you got any other voices? You got. Do you have a medieval voice?

Well, I think they probably talked more like this. Really?

All right.

Well, thank you for listening. BenGuefieldFitness.com is where you can get all the goodies. Ah.

Sound like a drunk smoked salmon consuming medieval wench. I'm a beer wench. I'm a beer wench. Thanks for listening.

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Sam.