How To Explore Your Body & Your Body's Electrical Charge In Unprecedented Detail: The Future Of...

Ah, hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield, sipping a hot cup of morning brew here in Finland. I'm actually staying at a farm about four hours outside of Helsinki, Finland. I'm out at the personal farm of a guy who I interviewed a few weeks ago on the podcast episode. A guy named Vesey, or at least that's the nickname that he goes by. One of the fittest 65 year old dudes on the face of the planet. Tennis left and right handed. He invents special chairs that allow you to sit in a chair that I am sitting in right now that allows you to basically simulate the feeling of riding a horse. You need to see it to see what I mean. But go listen to the podcast episode.

I did with him.

It's@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Vessi V E S S I But that is actually not what this podcast is about. This podcast that you're about to listen to is quite interesting. It's a two parter. A two parter. So it's technically about MRIs, magnetic resonance imaging, and things that MRIs can tell you about your body that you might not otherwise have known. In other words, you don't just have to get an MRI to figure out if you've blown out your knee or you need some kind of a shoulder surgery, but you can use an MRI to look into things like the size of your brain and an extremely accurate measurement of your body fat percentage distribution. And even as my second guest in today's show gets into what's called a redox potential of your body. So my first guest is Marcus Foster, who actually hooks people up with the ability to do MRIs and to use MRIs for things that go way above and beyond just medical imaging. And then in the second part of the interview, I get Dr. Jack Cruz on and we talk about not just the health of MRIs, but also things that MRIs can tell you that go above and beyond what modern medicine even knows about, specifically this thing called the redox potential. Now, of course, while here in Finland I have had to deal with the effects of jet lag with the curve ball that your circadian biology gets thrown when you jet. Well, in this case, 10 hours outside of my normal time zone. And one thing that I've been taking advantage of while I've been here is the fact that white light, specifically blue enriched white light, can flow through the ear canals and target and actually hit light sensitive regions of your brain. And when you do that, the effect is that you send a big message to your body that it is morning or it is daytime, wherever you happen to be. And you can also do things like shut down seasonal affective disorder or the type of depression that people say in Seattle or Portland get. My apologies to everybody listening in Seattle or Portland, but you're so depressed you don't even know it. Anyways, though, what this device does is it actually targets your inner ear with bright light therapy. And the device that I use for this is called a human charger.

As a matter of fact, I was using it this morning right before I.

Perched in my horse saddle chair to record this for you. And it really reduces jet lag. And it feels like a cup of coffee for your brain. They call it the sun in your pocket. It is like you have the sun in your pocket, tiny little device. You stick it in your pocket and you put the little earbuds in your ears. And anybody listening in can get an enormous discount on this thing, 20% discount on this thing called the human charger. And the way that you get that is you go humancharger.com just like it sounds like humancharger.com and you use code B fitness, like Ben Fitness for 20% off. And actually the URL is humancharger.com Ben and use code bfitness humancharger.com Ben and Use code bfitness. This podcast is also brought to you by a beautiful timepiece that happens to be on my wrist right now. It's called a movement watch. A movement watch. What it is is it's a company that was started by two broke college kids, and they wanted to wear stylish watches, but they couldn't afford them. So they started their own watch company. And they cut out the middleman and they deliver to you these classically designed, quality, constructed, very minimalistly styled watches at a really, really good price.

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Would normally cost 400, 500 bucks for under $100. Mine's white with a leather strip on it, like a leather band. And it works amazingly. Imagine that it actually tells time. But more importantly than that, it actually looks good. And you get 15% off of any MVMT watch with free shipping and with free returns. And the way that you do that is you go to mvmtwatches.com ben but mvmtm is spelled mvmt mvmt watches.com ben. You can get a watch with a really clean design. And I've been getting lots of compliments on my watch. So if you want to step up your watch game like I did, go to mvm mtwatches.com Ben now let's jump into the first part of this interview, which is with Marcus Foster of Clarismo MRIs. And then we'll jump into the interview with Jack Cruz in this episode of.

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The most interesting thing we think is monitoring change, right? So developing and understanding how your body changes over time, you know, naturally through aging or through some kind of lifestyle intervention like training or diet, etc.

I need to explain to them how the photoelectric effect works without using any fancy terms. And the simplest thing to do is to tell them to go drink their coffee in the morning on the porch. And I tell them to do it with no glasses on. I tell them to look in the direction of the sun.

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 Green.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I guess it was about two months ago that I was laying in this long white tube in a London hospital, just staring at these blank white walls all around me while the whole room buzzed and hummed with this high tech analysis. It was actually a magnetic resonance imaging that I was getting, a procedure that's known as mri. You've probably heard of it before, but this was kind of a weird form of MRI because I wasn't injured and I wasn't sick. I kind of got recruited and immersed in this brand new form of cutting edge image analysis. Basically an ultra fast MRI that's designed to deliver really precise quantification of things like fat tissue and muscle tissue and even your brain. Within a few hours. It gives you a complete analysis of the entire structure of your body and your brain, from extremely accurate body fat percentages to body fat distribution of your visceral fat versus your subcutaneous fat, to the nitty gritty details of everything from your lean muscle to your brain and beyond. And if you don't know what any of that that I just went over means, don't worry because we're going to talk about it in today's podcast episode. We're actually going to take a deep dive into how you can do this type of advanced analysis on your body structure and also the future of MRI testing for things like performance and aesthetics and longevity and not just figuring out if your knee is messed up. My guest today is Marcus Foster. Marcus was actually overseeing my MRI there at the hospital in London. He sent me all my results. We're going to go over those today. We're also going to go over how it is that folks are using MRIs these days and how you can use these newer forms of MRIs to find out a whole bunch about your body that previously wasn't available when it comes to medical imaging. So Marcus has a really interesting story in terms of his career at Google and a whole bunch of accidents and issues that eventually led to him having a series of MRI scans and kind of delving into everything from CT scanning to MRI technology to all sorts of interesting things that ultimately led to him founding and starting this company called Clarissimo, which is the company that that went through and kind of did my mri. And I have a ton of data that I want to share with you guys, too, in addition to the show notes today. So as you sit back or if you're an active person, as you walk, hunch over your bicycle, swim, whatever it is you're doing right now, know that you can access the show notes for everything you're about to Hear over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI so, Marcus, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah. And if you're game, I'd like to start here. As long as this isn't too painful a point for you to begin with. I know that you kind of got started down this road while you were working at Google and you had a pretty bad cycling crash, Is that correct?

Yeah. So I was working at Google for many years, and around 2010, I started commuting to work in London by bike. Not every day, but occasionally sort of a 35 mile ride. And in November 2011, I was going down a road. You know, you can imagine November weather in England. You know, a bit gray, bit wet, and, you know, a car cut in in front of me and my rear wheel slid out and I hit the road pretty hard at high speed and I broke, you know, four ribs on my right side and my right collarbone and had a lot of very severe bruising on my right side. And as a result of that, you know, then I went to hospital and had a CT scan done of my thorax. So you know, my rib cage, you know, sort of from the neck down to, you know, the bottom end of my ribs. And, you know, that really was the thing that got this whole interest in medical imaging started.

What do you mean? You were just like, laying there in the CT scanner wondering how it worked, or were you as like a Google person? Because I know how. I know how you Google people think. Were you trying to figure out how you could use something like that technology for a greater good than just, like, seeing how messed up your body got after a cycling crash?

Well, you know, it was kind of a transformational experience because I was naturally being curious. I requested the raw imaging data and then spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to actually open these images, because it comes in this cryptic DICOM format, which is really, really bizarre. And once I managed to look at the imagery and then started playing around with some 3D visualizations of that data, so having kind of a 3D model of my body in this area, I was just blown away by how amazing this looked to some extent, how beautiful it was, but also how much there was to see that I didn't know about. How different bones hang together, what some of these organs are that are floating around there in my abdominal cavity that I've never heard of. This was just extremely fascinating to me.

Now, for people who don't know the difference, can you go into what would be a CT scan versus an MRI scan?

Right. So a CT scan basically is a series of X rays. So where.

Basically an X ray machine takes a lot of very close together through a plane, usually an axial plane, meaning through a cross section of your body, and then you can stitch that together and you get sort of a 3D representation. Now, X rays obviously produce ionizing radiation. So, you know, they are very. Well, it's very well established that there are a lot of health risks as a result of that radiation. And so CT scans are considered pretty bad. You know, you shouldn't have them for fun. You know, there needs to be a very serious medical issue that justifies, you know, exposing your body.

Right. Just because it's like. Well, I know with, with radiation is cumulative exposure over the course of a lifetime. It's like walking through the airport scanner isn't necessarily that big of an issue, but if you travel all the time, you know, doing it hundreds of times a year kind of adds up.

Right, exactly right. And so, you know, the CT scan is a really pretty massive dose of radiation.

Now, the MRI in contrast, how is that exactly producing an image of your body.

So the MRI basically uses a magnetic field and then modulates variations to that magnetic field, and then it measures how the protons in your body kind of respond to that. So in an mri, you create a very high static magnetic field that aligns all the polarity of all the protons in your water molecules in your body in a direction along that field. And then you send in radio frequency pulses that cause these protons to change their spin to oscillate, basically. And then you measure how fast they recover from that oscillation into their original position. And from that, you can infer certain things about the tissues that they're bound in, and that creates kind of contrast.

So from what I understand, an MRI in most cases would be used for something like really, really detailed evaluation of soft tissue, like fat tissue or musc tissue. Is that correct?

Yeah. So typically, you know, in an MRI, MRIs, you know, very simplistically, MRIs are better for soft tissues because they can produce more contrast there, whereas the CT scan really just measures density of tissue in terms of how good it is at absorbing, you know, the X ray radiation. So, you know, it's very good at, you know, showing your bones because they're, you know, much denser than soft tissue, whereas an MRI is much better at showing you the differences between different kinds of soft tissues.

So you got the cycling accident, and you were interested in CT scanning technology. You were basically geeking out on all your CT data, and what is it that you were trying to figure out? Just what you could find out about your internal organs. Were you trying to just get a good picture of the human body? Why were you so intrigued with your CT scan results?

Well, you know, I had this imagery now of, you know, a part of my body. And, you know, my first thought was, wow, this is amazing. You know, how can I get a scan of my leg or, you know, other parts of my body that, you know, I didn't have imagery for so I could build, like, a whole representation of myself because I wanted to know what all these other parts of my body looked like. And of course, you know, came quickly to the realization that the only way to do that would be, you know, to break every bone in my body. So, you know, I would have a justification to get a scan. And this obviously, you know, seemed like a not very scalable way to do this. And so I got kind of intrigued by, you know, why was it that I couldn't use, you know, this amazing technology, you know, that we have in medical imaging. Just out of curiosity, to Explore my body to understand it better.

So from what I understand, you actually had, like, another cycling crash after that one.

Yeah, that's right. So pretty much a year later, I had another accident, you know, where a car sort of drove into me from behind and I broke my wrist in that context. So I had a CT scan of my wrist. So I now had Also, you know, 3D model of my wrist. I was very excited about that. And it was literally, it was quite funny. Like, I was. While I was lying there on the street holding my arm, immediately there was kind of this little thought in my head, you know, wow, now I can get a scan of my hand. That's going to be exciting. I wonder what that's going to look like. And, you know, that was a bit crazy, actually. That's the first thing that I thought about.

You're just out there trying to get hit by cars on your bike, so you can. You can get fancy medical imaging paid for by insurance.

Yeah.

So what happened after that? I mean, you've got a series of CT scans, you got MRI scans, but you were still just working for Google at this point, right?

Yeah, no, I was still working for Google. You know, I just got more and more interested in you. I was posting pictures that I generated of myself on social media and stuff like that, and it was just something that fascinated me. And then.

About another year afterwards, I was diagnosed with a tumor in my head and had a. As a result of that, had a number of MRI scans done off my head.

You were diagnosed with a tumor in your head?

Yeah. So it's a, you know, it's a benign tumor. It's called a prolactinoma. It's sort of a growth around your pituitary gland which controls a lot of your, you know, hormones. And so, you know, I mean, benign thing generally, and it's managed through medication, but it meant that I had to have these repeat MRI scans of my whole head, basically.

Interesting, that prolactinoma. I actually had a guy I interviewed a couple of years ago on the podcast. We were talking about levels of low testosterone and hidden causes of hypogonadism in guys, and apparently these benign tumors of the pituitary gland, These actually happen in guys, and a lot of times they think they get erectile dysfunction and low testosterone and all these things that make them wonder if they need to, whatever, eat more eggs or take some Viagra, and it turns out that they have this tumor. Is that something that you found via a CT scan?

This was through an MRI scan.

Okay. So you found this tumor through an MRI scan?

Well, I found it precisely for this reason that you described, that I was kind of saying to my doctor, don't feel right. And I've had very. You have, like, no facial hair, you know, lots of kind of odd things, you know, had throughout my life. And, yeah, I said, well, can you like, test my testosterone? And he was kind of, yeah, you know, that's kind of a waste of time, but, okay, let's do it. And, you know, literally, you know, 12 hours after they took the blood, the surgery called me and said, I need to come in straight away and, you know, drop everything, you know, come and see us. Because my, you know, the. My levels of prolactin, which is that hormone that gets, you know, secreted by the pituitary gland, was like, elevated by a thousand fold, its normal levels. And so it was, you know, pretty clear they had a very, very large prolactinoma.

So if people, you know, if guys were listening and they want to know if they had something like a prolactinoma, they could actually first, you know, before doing something like an mri, for example, of the head, they could just check their blood work to see if they have really, really high levels of prolactin.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

That's a very, very defining measurement.

Gotcha. Okay, interesting. So you found that you had this prolactinoma and then what happened?

Yeah. So, you know, again, you know, I was excited about getting more scans of different parts of my body and naturally, and in particular, you know, with. With these scans of my head, what was very obvious to me was that from a medical perspective, from a diagnostic perspective, the radiologist who analyzes the imagery is really only interested in this tiny little gray blob, which is this tumor. And it was like 2cm across. And that's the only piece of the image that's of any interest to them. And all the other stuff that's visible in those scans, my brain, all the different structures in the brain, your eyeballs and what they look like inside massive nasal cavity that you have, like all these other different things going on in your head, they were just mind blowing to me to look at. But of course, from a diagnostic perspective of no interest whatsoever. So there's this kind of discrepancy in the value that you can derive from the imagery between what's interesting for the medical profession and what might be interesting for you as a patient or a consumer. And so this is kind of how we started trying to figure out whether There are ways that we can use this imagery to create something of value to people that they will find interesting that is not diagnostic.

So that's when you actually left Google and started a company that was just designed to do MRI scans?

That's right, yeah.

Okay, gotcha. Now what exactly did you do when you started a company for MRI scanning? Did you have to develop a new form of MRI technology? Did you develop the actual hardware or a special form of software, or what exactly happened in the development of this company? Clarissimo.

Right. So, you know, we, we started the company really with the idea of, you know, we want to make the technology more accessible to people for, you know, non diagnostic purposes, to make it create sort of a more casual way to interact with this, you know, amazing technology. Because as I like to provocatively say, you know, it's one of the most amazing inventions that mankind has ever made, but, you know, it's wasted on detecting cancer because that's such a niche use case, really. So, you know, we use standard MRI machines that you can find in any, you know, medical imaging facility where they have an MRI scanner. And we, you know, we devised a, you know, proprietary protocol to acquire the images. So that's basically the way you program the scanner to run different kinds of sequences and magnetic pulses, etc. To produce a certain set of data. And so we developed this protocol to do whole body acquisition of data, specifically focused on differentiating fat and muscle tissue. And then we build a lot of software in the backend that then automatically reassembles all these pieces of the body and automatically segments and quantifies the different tissues that we're interested in. So muscle tissue and fat tissue mostly, but now increasingly also organs.

So a normal MRI wouldn't actually give you that type of soft tissue detail?

Well, it could if you run the right sequence. But the actual analysis, the segmentation, meaning saying this bit is muscle and this bit is fat and this bit is a piece of the liver. That's something that would normally be done manually, typically by a grad student sitting there painting slices manually.

Okay, so you can basically hack the software of an existing MRI machine with the actual programming that you've developed to be able to do a full body scan that differentiates between different types of fat, the amount of lean muscle, etc.

Well, it's more that we program the scanner with normal parameters, but then we build software afterwards that analyzes and automatically does this segmentation on the data we get from the scanner.

Okay, gotcha. One other quick thing I wanted to Ask you before we kind of delve into my own results and use that as a way to explain what it is that people can find out about their bodies when doing an MRI like this. We talked about radiation, how CT scans obviously have issues when it comes to radiation. One other thing I know people will ask about is this idea behind non native EMF or, you know, the amount of EMF exposure that you get, you know, similar to what you get from like a wi fi or, you know, having your cell phone next to your head or whatever. Are there concerns with MRIs when it comes to non native EMF or electrical, know, pollution, so to speak?

Yeah, so there is a, you know, a certain amount of research into that subject. The results or, you know, the general opinion at this point is that it is, you know, safe technology. There are, you know, there are basically three types of fields that you're exposed to. This is, you know, high static field that I talked about, which generally is considered, you know, not any significant risk. There is the gradient magnetic field, which is a different field that changes very fast to create certain changes in the tissues that it examines. And so there's maybe some concern around like these fast changes might be a little bit more dangerous than the static field. And then there is the radio frequency pulses that are being sent in. And again, there's no evidence whatsoever that this has any actual impact on changing the physical structure of any tissues.

Okay, got it. One of the reasons that I bring this up, by the way, to interrupt you, is one of my friends, Dr. Jack Cruz. He's a neurosurgeon who looks quite a bit into the magnetic potential of the human body and recommends the use of these magnetico sleep mats that you sleep on and also recommends you're very careful with EMFs. I know. He actually is a fan of MRIs for determining what he calls the, I believe he calls the resonance frequency of the body. And I have no clue what exactly it is that he's looking at. I didn't have a chance to talk with him prior to interviewing you. But he'll actually use MRIs to determine whether or not the body is, I guess, messed up more or less from a magnetic standpoint or whether or not the body is not carrying a specific chart charge. Are you familiar with any of these type of issues in terms of like using an MRI to go to like, delve into the actual electric potential of the human body?

No, I haven't really heard about any of that kind of research.

He has an article, it's called Biohacking Your mri. I'll put a link to that in the show. Notes for people who want to read this article by Jack Cruz about biohacking and mri. But it sounds like the biggest concern would be these radio frequency signals. Like, you just want to be careful. I would imagine you wouldn't want to get an MRI every day.

Well, so basically it is considered so safe that you, you know, you can get an MRI every day. Obviously, all the, you know, technicians who work, you know, in the imaging facility will be exposed, you know, for eight hours every day to, you know, parts of those fields. And, you know, there is a. There is some. Basically, people have agreed that we should do more research into the actual impact of this, but so far there's no real evidence that there are any negative outcomes from it.

Gotcha. Well, over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI for those of you listening in, I'll link over to Dr. Jack's article on biohacking your MRI so you can delve into that. But in the meantime, since we've put this off long enough, Marcus, let's go over my results. So you have this website, Clarissimo, it's spelled, called K L A R I S M O. And within a few days after you had done that scan on me at the hospital in London, you sent over my results. And I've actually got them pulled up in front of me. I also have them uploaded to the show notes for anybody who just wants to see basically what I look like completely naked in an MRI scanner. Don't worry, it is a cartoon rendering. It is not actually me naked. And there's a bunch of data there. So let's go over this stuff. And bearing in mind a lot of people are listening to this, not necessarily watching it, what kind of stuff can you glean from this data that you've sent over to me?

Right. So our overall goal was always to make it both informative but also interesting and visually engaging for people to look at. But the stuff that always fascinated me at the beginning was really seeing my body from this completely new perspective. And as I said, for me, that was kind of a transformational experience. The analogy I always like to use is with going to space. Most people, if you ask them if they wanted to go to space and you could guarantee their safety, they would say, sure, of course I want to go to space. Even though there's no real utility. You know, it's not like you have some business up there and need to pick something up or there's a meeting. You need to go to in space. You know, you just go. Because, you know, you know that it will be a very exciting experience.

That moon rock that you promised your kid.

Exactly. And so, you know, so a lot of what we deliver was really around, you know, visualizing your body in a way that you haven't seen it before. Now with your results and, you know, a couple of other people that we've scanned there is, you know, they're special, as I mentioned earlier, in that you, you are not like most of the other people that we've scanned, as you probably know. You know, you're pretty fit and lean. In fact, you are by far and away the leanest person that we've scanned ever.

Really.

And, you know, that actually caused a few problems for our algorithms, you know, in terms of the segmentation. And so, you know, with some of your results, you know, they, they don't look quite as exciting as, you know, they might look for somebody who's more, let's say, normal in terms of their body composition. And that's why I sent you.

So I'm the freak of nature that broke the machine?

Pretty much.

Well, let's start there. So body fat percentage, obviously you can get. There are gold standard methods out there for body fat percentage. Like a DEXA scan I know is one that a lot of folks will do, or an underwater hydrostatic weighing, or even these BOD pods that you see at gyms. How does an MRI compare to some of those in terms of accuracy of fat measurement?

Yeah, so all of these things call themselves the gold standard. The truth is they are not compared to an MRI scan. You know, all of them rely on a lot of maths to infer things from measure, measuring secondary values or observations. Right. So, you know, a DEXA scan, for example, you know, basically guesses what your 3D shape looks like by essentially looking at a 2D slice through your body. So obviously there's a lot of assumptions being made, so especially in terms of separating different types of fat tissues, so visceral from subcutaneous fat. And just for an explanation, so subcutaneous fat is the fat tissue that's underneath your skin. So between your skin and your muscles. And from a health perspective, it's actually not that bad. It's more aesthetically relevant than necessarily from a medical perspective. And visceral fat is the fat that's inside your abdominal cavity, so underneath your stomach and torso muscles and surrounding your organs. And that's the stuff that's actually more relevant from a health perspective. It is luckily also metabolically More active. So you will lose it faster than the subcutaneous fat.

So I'm looking over my results here. It says that my. My fat percentage. Am I correct here? It says 2%.

Yeah.

Okay.

So.

So total fat percentage would be like, my visceral fat plus my subcutaneous fat.

That's right.

Okay. And visceral fat here, it shows as relatively low, which would be so. So if someone has high body fat percentage, it's not just a matter of the body fat percentage itself being unhealthy. It would be how much of that is visceral fat, which would be unhealthy, versus how much is actual subcutaneous fat, which would be less of an issue.

That's right.

Aside from it perhaps being an aesthetic issue, like, if you want to look ripped and you're welcome to the gun show T shirt, you might want to have lower levels of subcutaneous fat in your arms. But ultimately it's the visceral fat. Now, this says, I have 0.08 liters of visceral fat. It's kind of funny. It says that's the equivalent to 0.2 cans of soda.

It's basically nothing. You know, like I said, it's by far and away the least we've ever measured in anybody. You see. So the reason we give people this body fat percentage is so they have some kind of reference versus these other methodologies like DEXA and BOT POD and all of these. And so you can kind of compare it to what you might get on another reading. But really, the thing we're trying to push is for people to understand it. Really, Visceral fat is the thing that they should be most interested in, because that's the stuff that actually matters.

Gotcha. Okay, so next, you also scanned my head and my brain, and I see there's actually some data here on my results. Like, it says my brain is 5% smaller than Einstein's and 49% smaller than an average male Clarissimo user. What does that mean? Like, is there a correlation between brain volume and intelligence? Is this something I should be worried about? That my brain is small?

No, you shouldn't be worried about that. There is no established correlation at all between brain volume and intelligence. It's obvious from the fact, for example, that women's brains are smaller on average by quite a lot than men's brains. Really? Yeah.

Quite significant, interestingly. But women are obviously not less intelligent than men. We're not suggesting that. So in terms of the actual data, when I find out this data about my brain, and I look at these images that you have here of my brain. It's kind of funny. You have like my hat size on here along with all my clothing sizes. I guess that's one side benefit of an MRI scan is, you know, your exact clothing and hat sizes. But what else can I find here? I mean, there's a lot of cool cross sections here of my brain. There's a lot of images of my brain. But is there anything, I guess, like playing devil's advocates here? This all looks like interesting facts, but, like, where's the utility in terms of the brain scanning data?

I think definitely, you know, the brain scans are mostly, you know, novelty. You know, there's no real utility in this. So one area that where we, you know, I've been thinking about developing this is there's been a lot of research around how, you know, you can grow your gray matter, for example, by using sort of mindful practices like meditation, etc. So that could be something that people might want to monitor. That could be something that people might want in engaging in that kind of behavior.

So related to what you're talking about with the gray matter, I'm looking over my brain data here. So when I'm looking at the picture of my brain that you have on this MRI scan, can you actually look directly at the gray matter and see whether or not that's like they say, for example, that you can grow the gray matter of your brain through specific brain training exercises, or that you could potentially shrink it through the overuse of something like marijuana, for example, where here on my data can actually see gray matter itself.

That isn't. So we have that, but that isn't actually exposed yet. We haven't put that on your profile.

So this is something that you're constantly. This actually looks a lot different than it did when I logged in like a month ago. But you're kind of like adding, I guess, features to this online software that shows the MRIs as you build. Yeah, okay, gotcha. So brain volume, Pretty much all we can figure out is how our head looks, what size hat we should get, and whether or not our brain is bigger or smaller than the average population. We can't actually look at gray matter quite yet.

Not quite yet. I mean, we have the data, we just haven't created sort of visualizations for it yet.

When do you think you're gonna be able to do that?

Probably soon.

Okay.

Been modelling it for quite a while.

Okay, gotcha. Now, muscle. You also have muscle. I'm looking at all the pictures, it's so freaky to just see my whole body laid bare like this and chopped up section by section. What can you derive from muscle? So fat shows you the difference between visceral and subcutaneous fat. What kind of differentiations can we see here with regards to muscle or muscle imbalances or anything like that?

That. Yeah. So, you know, muscle, we, we do volumetric measurement of a few different groups. So basically your torso muscles, which is, you know, everything we get from shoulders down to, you know, your abdomen, then your thigh muscles, where we at the moment group together your glutes and quads and hamstrings all into one chunk. Lower leg muscles and then the iliopsoas, which is, you know, sort of a muscle that runs along your, your spine. And these are mostly for measuring and tracking changes because people like to grow muscles by doing squats or whatever. And this is something that we can track here very nicely. And of course we can also expose imbalances to a certain degree for people who have maybe recovering from injury or other things like that.

So what about fast twitch versus slow twitch muscle? Can you see that?

We can't see that at the moment we have started. There's been some research into using MRI to do that and we have been experimenting with ways to basically analyze that. There is a. I can't remember exactly how it's worked, but there is a certain particle that you can look for and it indicates, you know, the balance between fast and slow twitch muscles, type one and type two, too.

Okay, got it.

So this is something again we're working on.

I see here, for example, like my, my left thigh and my left calf actually are more muscular that contain a higher amount of, I guess you guys quantify in liters. I have a total of 31.92 liters of muscle in my body. But like my left calf is 1.8 liters and my right calf is 1.76 liters. Have you come across any research or any data that shows that that would be related to like, you know, some type of, of muscular imbalance? I mean, is there anything that you, that one can glean from this liter of muscle data?

Well, I mean, that's quite a small difference. Right. And so if you're right handed, are you?

I am, yeah.

So then, you know, you will most likely jump more with your left leg. So you would expect your left leg to be a little bit more developed on your right leg. Tiny little bit, but these are very, very small differences.

Gotcha. Okay, got it. Now what else can you get from this data? Walk me through anything else interesting that would perhaps make people want to rush out and get an MRI or find some utility in this type of data.

Yeah, so like I said earlier, your scan is a bit different, and the experience, I think, for you is a bit different than for many other people. One thing that we can do, and that's for most people, extremely exciting, is strip back the subcutaneous fat layer and reveal.

The muscle structure underneath. Now, for somebody like you, who has basically no subcutaneous fat to speak of, this is not that different, what we can show you, because it's kind of the same thing that you see when you look in the mirror. But if somebody who has an extra 10, 15, 20 pounds on their body for them, suddenly they will look very, very different in this image. And that's why I sent you a comparison earlier, so you can kind of see how different the experience might be for somebody who is maybe not quite as lean as you are. So for that kind of scenario, we can basically show you what you could look like if you lost some of that fat. There's this hidden superman underneath your fat layer waiting to jump out. And that's been.

Everybody has a six pack ab. Somewhere underneath the subcutaneous.

Exactly. Somewhere underneath you have a six pack. It's just a question of setting it free.

Interesting. Okay, so as far as the data that will show the difference between visceral and subcutaneous fat, that sounds to me like it. It's one of the more valuable pieces of data, as is like tracking your muscle as your muscle grows, as your muscle changes, and then potentially seeing how your brain is responding in terms of not just the growth of the brain itself, but also the change in the amount of gray matter.

What else. What else is interesting about this type of MRI testing? Or what will we be able, do you think, to be able to find in the future using this. This special type of MRI testing?

So definitely the most interesting thing, we think, is monitoring change, right? So developing and understanding how your body changes over time, you know, naturally through aging or through some kind of lifestyle intervention like training or a diet, et cetera. And, you know, what we want to be able to do and sort of start trying to work on is being able to then also predict how your body will change if certain things happen. So imagine you have two scans over a year apart, and you've gained five pounds of weight in certain areas, mostly fat, for example. Then we would love to be able to tell you, hey, if you keep going like this, in three years, this is what your body's going to look like and give you a very real representation of that. Or alternatively, if you wanted to lose 20 pounds through endurance exercise, then this is what your body would look like at the end of that. This is a realistic goal of how you are going to develop over a certain period of time. Or if you started cycling, £100.

Oh, really? So you can forecast data that would show, for example, if I lose my fat at X rate of percentage, that I would look like this six months from now.

That's the thing that we want to get to.

Yes, interesting. So you could actually see what you'd look like skinny if you were fat, or what you'd look like more lean if you were, say, wanting to compete in a bodybuilding show. You could see what your body is going to look like down the road, like how it's going to develop.

Exactly right. Because we basically create a full 3D model of your body and then we can analyze these vectors of change, how your body changes as a result to a certain kind of stimulus, and then predict where they will go if you keep at it for a certain period of time. And we get that from collecting a bunch of data from other people about how their bodies are changing.

And it looks like. So I have access to all my raw data I actually uploaded. It's like 300 megabytes worth of raw data. Now, returning to what I was mentioning regarding, for example, Dr. Jackson Cruise. He says that MRIs have a ton of atomic data in them and that if you know what to look for, you could actually be able to see the 3D atomic structure of different molecules in your body and know what, for example, your redox potential is like. Your actual ability to be able to have a certain amount of negative ions or a certain amount of positive ions, et cetera. In terms of the actual raw data, could I download this raw data and pretty much send it to anybody who's an expert at looking at an mri and they can delve anything they want out of this data. Like, is there more than just like, the fat and the muscle and the brain visualization that one could theoretically glean from this stuff?

Sure.

I mean, the raw data basically is. So just to backtrack, when you talk about raw data in MRI scanning, that's usually the physicists at least refer to it as the. The actual data readouts before the bunch of Fourier transforms and things have been done to it, and before it's been reconstructed in the imagery that you normally look at. The data that you can download is the data that as it has been reconstructed by the console software on the scanner itself already. So it's not the raw complex data that you read out, but it is also before we have reassembled it. So the data that if you download it and it's not going to be one scan of your body, it's going to be a bunch of different chunks that overlap in some places. And so, yes, you could look at them and look for other things, but it's pretty messy if you just look at it like this.

But I would be able to find the positive and the negative charge within specific sections of tissue.

You should be able to. I think the thing caution is our. The resolution of the whole body scan is only about 3 by 3 by 3 millimeters. So, you know, it's not really. They're relatively coarse tissue samples.

Gotcha. So is this stuff covered by insurance or is this just a huge chunk of change? I know with me, we did it as kind of like a guinea pig analysis of Ben, so we could talk about it on the podcast. But how much can people be expected to spend on something like this?

Yeah, so we have been offering it sort of depending, you know, in the range from like 99 to 199, maybe 249 US dollars.

That's less than what I expected for an MRI test.

Yeah. So, you know, we try to do it for, you know, as cheaply as possible. You know, the fixed cost of an MRI machine obviously are pretty high. You know, they cost sort of 2 to around $2 million maybe with all the extras. And so, you know, it's kind of a big asset for people to buy. And, you know, so it is relatively expensive still at the moment to rent time on a machine, even though, you know, the incremental costs of doing additional scans are very, very low.

And where can people actually get this done? Is it just in London right now?

So at the moment we can scan people in London and Los Angeles and we're looking to restart getting people in the Bay Area as well.

Okay, cool. Interesting. Well, for those of you listening in, I am definitely uploading my results here to BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI for you to check out because it actually is a very, very cool way to visualize the body, goes into way more detail than say, like a DEXA scan does. And I may in a future podcast also, if I can get a guy like Jack Cruz to look at the results of this, delve more into how you can tell the redox potential of the human body using something like an MRI as well. Because I think if you're listening in and you're one of those people who does things like uses like earthing and grounding, or if you drink reverse osmosis water, or you're very careful in terms of your mineral intake, or you're into cold thermogenesis for increasing your, your positive negative ion balance or limiting the amount of wifi you get exposed to all that stuff, this might be a very cool way to actually see how that stuff is impacting your health as well and your cellular potential. So all sorts of cool stuff. I think when it comes to the future of the use of something like an MRI for delving into fat, muscle, brain and a lot more. One last question for you, Marcus. As you build out the ability to be able to utilize this data even more completely, you know, to find out things like gray matter, do I have to go in and get scanned again or does do my online results, you know, kind of like 23andMe, for example, just change as the technology gets updated?

Yeah, I mean, as much as possible, we will, you know, anything new that we do, we will try to make available to all the existing users who've had scans. You know, of course there may be new acquisitions that we want to develop. So we're looking at like liver fat, for example, you know, where you would need to have another scan.

Oh yeah, that's kind of cool. And it looks like you guys have a, you guys have a pretty huge team of physicians and investors on board. I'm just looking at your website and the about us section. So it looks like you've got quite a few folks working on this. And I'm going to stay tuned to see where this stuff goes in the future because I think being able to visualize your body for everything from longevity to anti aging to weight loss to muscle gain to everything else else we've.

Talked about, I think it's pretty cool.

And I'd encourage folks just for sheer entertainment value to go and download my raw data and I'll put in the show notes for this over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI all the little pieces of software you can use on a Mac or Window or Linux to actually view the raw data.

So you can check all that out.

And much more along with the Clarissima website. So, Marcus, thanks so much for coming on the call today and sharing this stuff with us, man.

Yeah, sure, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Cool. All right. Well, folks, well, this is Ben Greenfield And Marcus Foster from Clarissimo, that's K L A R I S M O signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com be sure to leave your questions, your comments, your feedback, anything else you want to add in over in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com MRI and have a healthy week.

Hey, Ben Greenfield here.

I hope you're waiting with bated breath, whatever that means for part two of this podcast interview. Now, before we jump into part two, I wanted to alert you to the existence of this special company that takes any fit people and hooks you up with extremely good rates on life insurance that are rates based on the fact that you're a fit and healthy person living a health conscious lifestyle. So what this company, they're called HealthIQ, does, is they use science and data to get you lower rates on life insurance. So if you cycle or weightlift or swim or run or do anything else active, basically what they do is they, they figure out a way to get you a better rate on life insurance. And the way that you get that is you go to healthiq.com Ben whether you're a professional bowler or an exercise enthusiast or a weekend warrior or a recreational worker outer anybody who's physically active can learn more about life insurance and get slamming deals on life insurance by going to healthiq.com help. That's healthiq.com Ben and also speaking of being active, this podcast is also brought to you by something that allows you to decompress your spine, to drain and get lymph fluid flowing through your body to increase the amount of oxygen, literally train the capillaries that feed your head and make them more capable of bringing oxygen to your brain. And, and this is, you may have guessed it, inversion. And specifically this table called a teeter T E E T R a teeter inversion table. So they're like the Cadillac of inversion tables. They allow you to hang and do 29 different stretches and movements in this digital guide that comes along with your inversion table. Way beyond just gravity boot setups and swaying side to side. A lot of really cool moves you.

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Hey guys, it's Ben Greenfield. And you've already learned a little bit about MRIs, how they work and what you can use them for when it comes to 3D volume renderings of the human body. Looking at how much fat is in the the body or how much muscle is in the body, or looking at specific areas where there might be anatomical issues. But what we haven't talked about is how an MRI can be used for something most people frankly don't know in terms of this way to measure something else in the human body, something called the redox potential of the body. And if you haven't heard of the word redox or you aren't familiar with the term redox potential, then you are going to be enlightened today. You're also going to be enlightened about how exactly MRIs can tell you a little bit more about what's going on in your body from more of a quantum mechanics standpoint. And my guest today is really one of the world's leading experts when it comes to enhancing not just your neurological function, but your body's entire electric potential using everything from, from biohacks to self quantification tools like an MRI. His name is Dr. Jack Cruz. He's been on the show before to talk about, for example, things like cold thermogenesis and things like enhancing neural function and vagal nerve tone and the autonomic nervous system. But today we're going to delve into something that he also happens to know quite a bit about, which is how to use an MRI to actually get information about the body that you can't get from other places. He's a neurosurgeon, he's the CEO of Optimized Life. You can check out his website@jackcruise.com, one of the best blogs that exists. As long as you don't mind your head hurting when you read stuff. So, Jack, welcome to the show, man.

Hey, what's up, Ben? How are you?

I am well. I'm well. And you're down in Mississippi right now, right?

Correct. And the heat pretty warm here for early November.

Nice. Yeah, everything's frosted over here and the snow is actually beginning to fall up in the mountains. So we've got a little, little bit different scenario up here in the Northwest. But yeah, this, this whole deal with MRIs, man. Before we delve into, into MRIs in general, can you explain what. What the redox potential actually is? What. What redox means?

Yeah, well, I. I think we probably should give a little background kind of where this all came from. I wrote a blog post about two years ago, but why I wrote it was probably more important because it gets to this issue about redox potential. I was giving a talk at a Biohacker event that actually Ben was at, and we had a Q and A afterwards, and I had actually a radiologist in the group around me make a comment while I was talking to a medical student that he did not believe that I could tell the redox potential from reading MRIs. And, you know, Ben, when you're talking to people at a Q and A, especially at an event, you don't have time to sit down and discuss, you know, quantum physics and actually how it's possible. But I made a promise to the medical student who was there that I would, when I got home from Pasadena, that I would do that. So that's what I did. I wrote how to biohack your mri, and it was a read. I think it was the Redox 2 blog, because I had already written a Redox 1 blog. And the redox potential, simply stated, is the amount of voltage that's present within or within certain parts of the cell. The easiest way to understand it, the more electrons you have, the better or higher your redox potential will be. The more protons you have, the lower your redox potential will be. And we can decipher not only amongst labs, if you look in the first Redox RX blog that I wrote, I think I gave 30 different ways to, you know, give an insight to your redox. But I didn't really talk too much about the MRI. And then in the Redox2 blog, all I talked about was actually the redox and how it relates to MRI pictures that radiologists and neurosurgeons get. You know, me as a neurosurgeon, just about every day I'm in practice, I probably look between 30 and 50 MRIs per day.

Wow.

So for me, it's. I would actually say I'm one of the unusual people. I find the redox potential readings of films are more accurate for me than they really are. Looking at people's labs now, obviously you get even better when you have the ability to take the labs and the MRI together. And with people that are in my clinic who I see for a variety of different issues, I'm able to do that. Several of people who are members at my site, I have a lot of physicians who are members at my site. I've actually invited them down here to my clinic down in New Orleans and Mississippi to actually learn how to understand how to read the redox potential off films. And several of those guys have made comments about that, that it's not as hard as you think if you know what to look for. And Ben went, I guess, the extra step about three months ago, he had somebody do a full body MRI on him. And next thing you know, I got an email and Ben said, please, and tell me kind of what you think about me, you know, and it's been, probably been two or three months before we could connect to get on to do this. And.

I remember I actually sitting here in front of me, I have the original paper from when your people connected to me, the three things that I wrote down, you know, looking at your, your mri, and to be quite honest to you, I thought when you did this, I thought it was going to be a complete waste of time because, you know, when you and I spoke together in London, I made the comment that you're one of those guys that I think redox potential is really good because you do a lot of things to protect yourself that are correctly. I think eventually, as the decades go up and the heteroplasmic rate increases, you may have a problem. But I was surprised to see there was three things on your mri. And I didn't know really the reasons why these things existed. But. But the funny part, even Ben doesn't know what I'm getting ready to say. I figured out what Ben's problem was literally about two or three weeks ago when I was looking at his Facebook page. Interesting.

What the cause of the problem was on the mri.

Okay, well.

Let'S let people wait with bated breath on that for just a second because I wanted to back up, up real quick, Jack, just to make sure that we put this in the, in the correct light for people. Redox potential. You're saying that low redox potential is not a good thing or. And you said low redox potential was due to excess proteins, right? Or excess protons.

Yeah, it's too many protons. Remember, protons are another way we call ph. And ph links directly to, you know, General Pollock's work, which I know you're familiar with, which is the exclusion zone inside a cell. And the exclusion zone directly is one of those other redox potential measures. And that directly ties to other effects in the cell that I probably haven't talked to you with, but we may get into it later.

Okay, Gotcha. So if someone has a low redox potential, what kind of things are they going to notice? Like. Like, why is that a bad thing from a. From a physical standpoint?

Well, I mean, the real big issue. Let's make it really simple. Think about aaa. Like where Ben is now. He said it's cold. So if he goes and tries to start his snowmobile up that he hasn't, you know, used since last year, it may not start. Well, the reason it may not start is because the battery in the snowmobile has a low redox because it has no water in it. So in a human being, dehydration would be one of those signs. What's another sign? Loss of libido, loss of erectile function, loss of lubrication. Small ejaculate size changes in your skin, your hair, your nails. The big one that I always look for, and I know you do too, is poor sleep. Since I see much older people than Ben normally does because he's dealing with generally fit athletes. So he's looking for certain things I see. Cataracts are a huge clue. Reflux. GI reflux is another big one that I see. In terms of sleep, I ask about dreaming and how people dream. If they dream, it's usually a sign that they have a good redox. When they come to see me as a physician, one of the first things I look at is their potassium level. And I look at their BUN and creatinine for the reasons I already mentioned, the un. And creatinine level is a measurement basically, of how hydrated or dehydrated somebody is. So it also gives us an insight into how much ATP they're able to generate in their mitochondria. In fact, potassium is probably one of the most important labs that I use with an mri. And that's part of the reason why you'd probably be interested in that, because for every 0.3.

Milli equivalents that we drop on a potassium level below 4, we're losing about 100 milli equivalents. Inside the cell. And this doesn't sound like a big deal to you guys now, but you have to realize we're dealing with atomic sizes in cells. And potassium has this ability to glue water together. And as it glues water together, it basically allows it to become, for want of a better term, a polarized layer of water cell. And the real key thing with that is most people don't know that sunlight, unlike all the man made light that we're around, is unpolarized. So that means that our cells are designed to polarize sunlight in order to break it up and do some interesting things with the frequencies. But the main thing that may be new for you and your listeners is that polarized light in a cell gets utilized by a non linear aspect of light called the Faraday effect. And the Faraday effect is an optical magnetic effect inside cells. And really all you need to know about it probably right now is that it is the wireless system, the wireless power grid inside a cell that allows you to turn sunlight into voltage, that powers the redox potential in cells. And one of the proxies that we use as physicians and, and now scientists are beginning to use, like Gerald Pollock is looking at the size of the exclusion zone of water.

Right.

And that's the key. And you know, Pollock is up your neck of the woods, Ben, and you know, he's told you many times that the key thing with the exclusion zone is the net negative charge in it. Well, that goes back to the first two sentences you asked me in this podcast. We're back to net negative charges was electrons. Again, so these are all semantics. And once you put them all together, they begin to make a lot more sense for people.

Yeah. And if you're listening in and if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI I have a link to an excellent article that Jim Jack has written called the RedoxRx, which kind of delves into what you would feel if your redox potential were low. Some of the things that Jack just talked about, like the quality of your hair, skin and nails, and loss of libido, loss of lubrication and poor sleep, and a lot of these things that can be caused by a low redox potential. And in that article, Jack gets into, you know, things that, that can be clues, right? Like low heart rate variability or low, low levels of pulse or low levels of levels of blood oxygenation. Right. Like low pulse oximetry and a lot of these other things. But the, the mri, of course, comes up there as, as I guess, you know, Kind of like a more advanced or targeted way to look at what one's redox potential is. So, with that being said, Jack, let's go ahead and jump into to what you noted on my mri. What. What was it that you found that. That leapt out at you?

There was. There was three things that I wrote down on the piece of paper after I reviewed it. The first one was I noticed an abnormality in the maxillary sinus. And the funny thing was.

I wasn't sure which sinus was truly abnormal because it looked like there was an injury that occurred to one of them. The second thing that I noticed, between T1 and T4, your facet joints definitely had a change. I wouldn't call it a pathologic change, but a change that I didn't see in the facets in the cervical spine or down in the rest of the thoracic spine or in the lumbar spine. And that surprised me because I know how fit you are and all the things you do. And I was like, why would he have four vertebrae where he's got facet disease and not anywhere else? Then the only other thing I saw, and I thought this initially was an artifact, was your right rotator cuff. I saw some abnormalities in the ligaments and the water content in the joint, especially one of the tendons in there, called the supraspinatus. And I noticed that your right deltoid was a little bit smaller, at least on the mri. And I think it was because there was less water in it. And I wasn't sure because, you know, I mean, Ben, you have to fess up here a little bit, too, until some of the. Your listeners. Ben didn't tell me about nothing.

I just sent him my mri, right?

He just sent it to me. And I. I don't know Ben's medical history. I don't know anything about it. And I really thought when he sent it to me, that he was looking to figure out was there something on there, you know, related to his, you know, endurance training and. And all the things that he does. But those were the things that stood out for me. And, you know, that, like I said, that was about two or three months ago. Then I completely put it to bed. Ben and I haven't actually talked in a while. And then he contacted me this week and said, hey, man, let's do this podcast. And it was so ironic. I was looking through Facebook one day, and I saw you doing some kind of freaking yoga pose where you're putting your hands up like this and that, and I looked at it, and I said, so that's the reason why. Turns out Ben's got this big, huge red tattoo between T1 and T4 on his back, and he's got a tattoo over his right deltoid, which I didn't know until I saw that picture.

Interesting.

And then one of my. One of my members, actually, Ben, clued me in on the third thing when I kept mentioning your maxillary sinus, that you apparently had some kind of eye fracture.

I did. I got my eye broken kickboxing a few months ago. Leading up to that mri. I got what's called an orbital fracture, where it's pretty common. You get hit in the eye, and it essentially breaks that little sinus passage between the eye and the sinus or the nasal cavity.

Right. And I didn't know that. Although I say I didn't know that. But I kind of did know that, because apparently how I got reminded of this was you posted about this. You posted that a picture of your eye, and you had a subconjunctival hemorrhage. And you asked what it was. And I actually said on your Facebook feed, I said, dude, that's a blowout fracture. And I had forgotten all about that. And one of my members actually brought it to my attention. I said, that's the reason why it's MRI look the way it was. So, you know, from that standpoint, that's really all I picked up on it, but I thought it was kind of cool.

It's very interesting that you picked up on that without knowing about it. But even more intriguing to me is what you just said about tattoos. Why the heck would tattoos affect one's redox potential or affect the health of, say, like, joints or the hydration of joints?

Well, that's. That's pretty easy. Remember what we just talked about earlier? That the way our body gets filled with light, most commonly that people understand through the eye, but the other way is through the skin. And, you know, we go back to, you know, Chinese medicine. They always talk about meridians and things like that for acupuncture. Well, it turns out, if you read some of the latest research on biophotons, is that it's now become pretty clear that the other way that the human body focuses a lot of its light injuries through the meridian system. And that basically is another synonym for the collagen system in the body. Most physicians know, and hopefully most of your elite readers know, that collagen is piezoelectric. What does that mean? It means when you rub it it releases a DC electric current. So where does that DC electric current come from? It comes from sunlight. And that gets to the gist of what I mentioned earlier in this podcast about how the Faraday effect works to polarize sunlight, to turn it in to different forms of energy that we use. Faraday effect is not actually how we turn sunlight into a DC electric card. I've actually covered that with you before. But that's a big part of why DHA is really important within the eukaryotic cell membrane, which is also one of the ways that we increase that redox potential. The key thing is, is that sunlight, when you get a tattoo on your skin, it's in your epidermis, it's loaded with transition metals. Transition metals are a part of the periodic table. And I think the one. The one that you know the most is iron, because people get iron. You know, Mars is rusty. Your tattoo is red. And I didn't realize that. Well, red ink uses high levels of iron oxide.

So.

So that means that the amount of sunlight that you can assimilate over that part of your body is much reduced. So if it's reduced, that means the cells deep to that surface will not. Their mitochondria will not be able to generate the normal voltages that you see. You know, and for example, in humans, that voltage is about minus 400 millivolts, you know, at cytochrome one. Then it goes all the way up distally. So the end result in a guy like you, where you have this tattoo, is that you'll see some evidence of early onset bone disease. And the reason why it was stark for in your case is because, you know, when I see a regular Joe in my clinic, they're going to have the same type of disease up and down their spine. Yours was focal, and I was like, the thing I thought of. I remember when I originally looked at the picture, I said, well, maybe Ben got hurt in one of his tough mudder races or, you know, you know, doing something that you, you know, you do.

Right.

And I. The shoulder thing didn't even dawn on me because I just assumed, considering I know what you do, you probably jacked your shoulder up somewhere along the, you know, the path. And then when I saw it, I was like. And I saw the picture, when I realized you were using red, I was like, hmm, that's interesting. And, you know, the thing about tattooing that people don't know, and I see this a lot. You'd be very surprised because, you know, in your generation, especially with women, they get these Tramp stamps. And believe it or not, we see pictures. They're mri, where you can see a lot of the metal artifacts in the skin, and immediately below that, you'll see changes in the bone, the ligament. And degenerative disc disease is one of the most common things that we see. In fact, in the quantum Facebook group that you and I are both a member of, there's two huge threads in there, and I actually put pictures in that thread of the MRIs where you'll actually see the degenerative disease adjacent to the tattoo. So it's not an uncommon thing for me to see. But the thing is, I didn't know that you had that, because when you and I I've ever been around, I don't think I've ever seen you without your shirt on.

Yeah, we don't get naked together a lot, so. Yeah, that's really interesting.

That was. That's the reason why I didn't put two and two together when you sent me the MRI probably three months ago. But, you know, seeing it now, it makes sense. And what people need to realize is that our skin is a giant solar panel. It actually, I call it an accessory solar panel for the brain and the heart. And the heart. Because that's where we bury our mitochondria. And as you know, the redox potential really is associated with our mitochondrial voltage. And for those of you who don't know, mitochondria have tremendous voltages in them. In fact, if you were to do the mathematics and measure it out, because we're talking about small little areas, since the cell membrane, the outer and inner mitochondrial membrane, are only about 4-6nm thickness, that means the charge that's normally on a healthy mitochondria is 30 million volts. So just for those of you who don't know what 30 million volts is, that's the same type of voltage that you find in a bolt of lightning, and that's in one mitochondria. Realize that different cells have different amounts of mitochondria, but brain cells and heart cells have the most. But on average, and I'm giving you averages here, because there's differences. 30% of the dry weight of a cell is mitochondria. So that tells you that our body is designed to harness huge amounts of photoelectric power in a cell, and we hide it in different areas. You know, we've already talked about cell membranes. DHA is important in turning, you know, that electric current into a DC electric current during the day, goes away at night. The Faraday effect has different effects. But the key thing is, where do we bury most of our charge? We bury it in cell water, we bury it in cell membranes. And then the big one is actually in the mitochondrial matrix, which is where all the hydrogen protons are. And that's kind of where, you know, when you listen to solution based ancestral and paleobiochemists, they focus their attention on that. And I don't focus my attention on that because to me that's. It completely takes the solid state part of biochemistry away. And that's really the biggest part.

Really allows you to understand kind of what's going on inside a cell.

Gotcha. Well, Jack, I've heard you talk a lot and write a lot about ways to improve the redox potential. And there are many things that I do that I've taken straight to heart and implement in my life. Life, from what you've written, such as frequent exposure to sunlight and limitation of artificial blue lights, you know, the use of infrared therapy, the use of cold thermogenesis, drinking good, clean, structured water, you know, that's filtered as well, you know, and has minerals added to it. You know, I'll even use things like pulsed electromagnetic field therapy and, you know, grounding and earthing and things like that along with ketosis. You know, I've heard you talk about a lot of these things, but, you know, as far as when you look over an mri, you know, like mine, and you see issues that have come up like the ones that you've highlighted, are there other things that you recommend for me or for folks listening in to improve redox potential, things that you think fly under the radar, things that you think people should know about?

Well, I mean, you have to realize for your guys listening to this, you know what I would tell a performance athlete group, I would probably focus in on things radically different than I would do with my patients. And that's the difference, because you have to remember, I have a little bit more context with them when they're in front of me. I've got, you know, their demographics, their history. I know what they do, I know if they spend their lives predominantly indoors. And I have to tell you, most people I see, the number one issue is that they live in indoor existence. They're covered with clothes, they never see a sunrise, and they never see a sunset. So really the story for them is I need to explain to them how the photoelectric effect works without using any fancy terms. And the simplest thing to do is to tell them to go drink their coffee in the morning on the porch and I tell them to do it with no glasses on. I tell them to look in the direction of the sun, just like the sphinx. And why am I telling them about the sphinx? It's something that most people know. They also know that sphinx is pointed to the east. Often four of the sphinx's extremities are on the ground. So I always tell them, when you go outside, try to do it with no shoes on. If you can do it with as least clothes on as possible. Big benefit. And the morning is really, really important.

The water issue is probably the easiest one, at least for me down here. I just tell them I want them to move from a municipal water system that's forded. It's one that's either spring water or we'll talk to them about springs around here because we have quite a few, but they'll just go to the store and buy the water. That's commonplace down here. We're fortunate here. We have a ton of water, so that's not an issue. The bigger one. And I usually don't talk about this with my patients when I see their mri, because I have to tell you, Ben, the thing that really makes the biggest impact on my patients is when you're sitting down with me and I have these discussions like you guys hear me on podcast, but you're not with me in a clinical situation when I'm showing you your MRI and I'm pointing out that, hey, look, you're 26 years old. And the reason I'm channeling this, because it happened Yesterday with a 26 year old, you got fat replacement in your bone marrow, you got fat replacement in your muscles. You're supposed to be skeletally mature at this time, meaning your bones and your ligaments, your discs, everything's supposed to be optimized. Why is this screwed up in you? The reason why the MRI is extremely important for patients is I can give them a visual and auditory sense while I'm talking to them and explain to them that these represent proton shadow casts. And I don't use that term, but they're proton shadow casts that tell me what the magnetic fields that they exist in are really all about. And I explained to him, for example, the kid yesterday, I told him how cigarette smoking and dip actually could have led to this. I also explained to him how using his cell phone and one of the interesting things in his case, he put the cell phone right in his back pocket and it was one of these new 5G phones. So I explained to him how that works. Worked, and he was totally freaked out. It also didn't help that he also worked for the power company. So he had a lot of reasons to come see me for degenerative disc disease at 26 years old, but none of them he realized. And the interesting thing is the first question that I asked him, because his mom and his wife and new baby were in there, and it just killed me when I saw it, because the baby had the iPhone in front of them. And I was more freaked out about the baby watching the damn phone. But I said to him, I said, just tell me, how well do you sleep? And this was literally every time I go in to see a patient, I make sure that my nurse puts the MRI up on the computer screen. And I always tell her to tell them, let them look at it. It was funny, when I walked in the room, his mom was actually really studying the mri. So I said to her, tell me, what do you see? She goes, I don't know. She goes, but I'm hoping you're going to be able to tell us. And I did. And I spent, literally, because they were the last patient of the day. Yesterday, I spent almost 45 minutes. I went over the Uvex glasses, I went over the stuff we talked about with his skin. But the number one thing that I focused in on Ben was his demographics. I wanted to know where he lived. I wanted to know a little bit about his grandma, a little bit about his mother. And I was lucky in his case, because mom was there so I could ask her. And when I explained her that I wanted to know about the mitochondria she gave her son to explain why he's got diseases of aging at 26 years old, I was able to completely come up with a coherent plan that I physically wrote out on a piece of paper and said, these are the things I want you to do and your listeners, and you may be really interested in this. You know, you come to see a nurse, or automatically you assume, okay, is he going to operate on us? He's going to put us in conservative therapy. We're going to use pt. We're going to do this, we're going to do that. Ben, nothing that I gave this guy.

Is going to cost him more than 100 bucks. He doesn't have to do PT. He's got to do things that I want him to do for the next two weeks. The other thing that I made a prediction off the MRI and I can share with you guys, because it's actually germane to. To what we're talking about when I saw the fat replacement in his bone and his muscle at his age, I knew immediately his vitamin D level sucked. And immediately his wife and his mom said, there's no way. Because he works outside. He's a. He's a lineman for the power station. And I'm like. And I stopped them both right there. I said, let me ask you a question. When he came out of your vagina, did he have these clothes on? She looked at me like, huh? I never thought about that. I said, that's the point. And then I said to her, since we live in a pretty rural area down here, I said, do you know any other wild animal that comes out of its mother's vagina with that T shirt and thing on? And she didn't. She says, no. And I said. And then I pointed out the window of the clinic, and I said, see that tree there? If me and you went to Home Depot right now and we bought a tree and put it in your backyard and we put a tarp over it, would it grow? She goes, no. And I said, see, you got that immediately. But what you didn't get is that even though your son has an outdoor job, he's not getting any sun. And this is when the kid stepped up to the plate and said something very interesting to me. He said, doc, you know, this is really funny because when I first started listening to you, I thought this was all a bunch of horse. He goes, but, you know, when I feel best, he goes, when I'm riding my motorcycle and take my shirt off. And I just went. And. And these are the things, Ben, that when you're a clinician, especially when you're a quantum clinician, that that's why seeing patients for me is I love it. I absolutely love it. The crazy thing is, I didn't make any money off this guy at all. Do I know that I'm going to be able to change his life? Because we're going to be able to do things that are simple for him. So for him, one of the things that I did, based on his MRIs, I made sure that I got him a Home Tens unit, one of these real small ones. Because one of the things I'm really.

Concerned about, Home TENS unit, like the transcutaneous nerve stimulation, right?

And the reason why is because if you understand degenerative disc disease from an mri.

You know, your brain up here, and I know you probably can see this picture, but people at home won't, because I'm touching my head, this is where most of your DC Electric Current comes from. From the sun. It's based in your brain because that's where most of our DHA is. We have two ligaments on the front and back of our spine that Ben can look at on his MRI after he gets done with me here. They're called the anterior and posterior longitudinal ligament. I want you to think about them kind of like wires. Well, in between those two wires where your discs are. So when you lose that DC electric current, when you lose that redox power, you start to lose water in the disc, and the disc starts to shrink. So the analogy that I use with my patients, it's kind of like a gas shock in your pickup truck. If you take the gas out, you don't want to drive that car over a country road because it's going to be bumpy. Well, the same thing is true with your back. And I explained to them the only way you can recapture the water in there without me doing a fusion operation is to improve the redox potential in that ligament. The best way to do that is to use the meridians on your back. And I don't tell them about meridians. I just say, get a TENS unit, because what a TENS unit does delivers negative charge. So the analogy that I use as I use aaa. So look, when you have a dead battery, can you jump it with aaa? And the answer is, no, you can't, because the battery's dead. I'm like, right, So I need you to start drinking more water. When you start drinking water, you're gonna start peeing more. Then I want you to put the tens on. I want you to keep doing it. What's gonna happen? You're jumping the distal part of those two ligaments so that you can start retaining the water in it and the disc can rehydrate. Kind of like when you take a sponge and you put it in the water in your house to let it reflow. And since this kid was 26, his disease was completely reversible. But he needed to understand how to biohack. That's what we call it, but that's not what he calls it. How to biohack, how to rehydrate his discs. So, Basically, in that 45 minutes, all the things I wrote out for him that I want him to do, he's gonna do a biohack himself, and he's gonna come back and see me in two weeks, and we're gonna see how it goes. He left with his family. They were kind of shocked. They were like, all of this stuff we can do, none of this is gonna require surgery. You didn't even send us to pt. I said, no, I want you to do this first. There's things I may do based on how you do from there, but one of the big things with him is he had a big time blue light exposure through the eyes. And the funny thing, he's 26, and both him and his wife, remember I told you about their daughter, was on the cell phone. They both had myopia. And I explained to all three of them why they got myopia. Because I told them, unlike when I was 26, I was always outside riding my bike. These guys are always on the phone constantly. And even his mom said he goes, you can't get him off the TV at night when he comes home from work. And I was like, we didn't talk about the UVEX glasses.

And when I told him this, he says, let me get this straight. Blocking the blue light at night can actually improve my mri, improve my back pain? And I'm like, absolutely. We see this all the time. It's probably the most common thing that I see in the clinic. And if it lasts long enough, it'll affect other parts of your body.

I didn't bring up the terms mitochondria and the stuff that you and I talk about here, but. But you don't have to make this really difficult for a patient when you have an MRI film in front of them and you can actually show them and then tell them that the choices that they're making are actually what's causing this, and then give them a real little plan over two weeks so they get small clinical wins. So when they come back, they're like, okay, doc, I did it. I'm definitely better. What's the next step? And you know this guy, since he was the first time I saw him, I actually gave him a little bit more than I normally would because he was very interested. And that's when I explained to him I wanted him to go to his primary care doctor and get his vitamin D level. Because I explained to him, how do I look at a vitamin D versus just about anybody else that you probably ever interviewed. I looks at a dead battery, I want to know based on where the latitude is here. The latitude is 28. Well, this time of the year, November, I want my patients between 50 and 60 nanograms per deciliter. I told him, I said, if your vitamin D level is 30 or below, I'm probably gonna have to use this tens unit on you. And I may even have to use some Other things on you, like red light therapy to improve your situation. And also tell me how long you're gonna have to stay in PT. I said, if you're below 15, then we got a real problem. Then the tension, it's not going to work at all. I goes back to what we said before about triple A. You can't jump a dead battery. And that's when I would probably start ordering some of the labs we talked about earlier. I'd want to know what his potassium is, his BUN and creatinine. And the reason I'm concerned about that with him is because he works for a power company and that kids around humongous electromagnetic fields and he doesn't know about it. And he kind of does, because when he works on these lines, they make them wear. What do you. The best way I could describe it, it's kind of like armor. And he says, doctors, a lot of times when I'm around the 740 kilowatt power lines, he goes, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck stick up. And I'm like. I said, dude, the hair on the back of your neck is like 2 or 3 centimeters away from where that posterior longitudinal ligament is. So that kind of explained to me the whole picture that I was seeing. Because when you look at the picture and you look at the kid's age, you go, there's. There's something clearly, most spine surgeons would never ask the questions that I ask because they don't look at MRIs the way I look at them. You know, they look at MRIs kind of the way people look at pictures when they go to the museum. I don't look at it like that. I look at those pictures really as a map of electrons and protons. And I'm looking to see why there's more protons in a certain area. And then I try to fit it together with the puzzle that the patient brings to me, you know, and that's why Ben's biohack for me was kind of interesting, because he sent me the MRI and didn't give me any background story. But I guess the point for this podcast, that's probably good because you can confirm or deny.

What we saw in your mri, I think was pretty accurate, having no information.

Yeah, yeah, it certainly was. And you know, not only it's, it's very interesting. You know, I know that sometimes when you go and you see whatever, like a tarot card reader, a lot of times they'll tell you things that, that are like self fulfilling, proper prophecies like, oh, you had a what, whatever. You, you had a, a harsh experience with love in your life and you're like, well, yeah, I, I did. How'd you know that? And you know, in many cases it's, it's just because who hasn't? But in a situation such as this. Yeah, not only have I had my eye broken, but I've had a huge amount of rotator cuff issues on that right side.

And.

Thoracic spine mobility has also been a big issue for me. And you know, when I look over, for example, and again, I'll link to this if those of you listening in, you got to go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com I'll link to Jack's articles on this. But when you look Jack at.

Are you going to put your MRIs up on this blog?

Because I think, yeah, they're going to be there for people to download and see as well. But I mean, like your shopping list, for example, Jack, for fixing one's redox potential is, you know, the type of things that I think a lot of people who have listened to this podcast for a while will know about. For example, you know, not only like a handheld held electronic pulse massager units like you just talked about, but like reverse osmosis water or structured water, water with a, with a higher ph. Grounding shoes or earthing shoes. You know the, the book the Body Electric by Robert Becker? You even have something I use every day now that I've been using for the past few months. The, the 810 nanometer infrared intranasal light therapy device. I mean, I, I swear by that thing.

I'm glad you brought this up because now, now we can get to a Ben Greenfieldism that you need to know. This is going to be a biohack for you, Ben, and this ties directly to your result. I don't know if I'd want you to use that. How do you like that?

And why is that?

Well, here's the thing that people don't know. You know that cytochrome 4 and 5. Cytochrome 4 is called cytochrome C oxidase. It's a heme protein, meaning that it absorbs red light. The atpase also is a red light chromophore. So those two proteins, the way I think about things, those are red light antennas. So you're putting this red light up your nose and I just told you that one of your paranasal sinuses is abnormal. Here's what a lot of people don't know about nasal sinuses. And nasal mucos, they make nitric oxide. And guess what? When you put too much red light in the nose, you actually can cause problems with the bone and the teeth around that area. Here's the thing, Ben, and this is one that I hope you do do. In biohack. There's a new device, it's not that new. It's been out for about two or three years that we use an asthma for kids that have asthma. It's a fractional, no nitric oxide device called Neox Mino and I believe you spell it M I, N O and you can buy it anywhere. I think it's built somewhere out close to you in the west coast, in Arizona. Basically what they have the kids do is they have them breathe into it. And if you have abnormal levels of nitric oxide, this thing is so accurate, it picks up five parts per billion. So when someone gets an injury in their aerodigestive system in their paranasal sinuses, we look for that. And one of these really cool effects that people I think know about, but I've never heard anybody talk about it publicly, but we're going to talk about it now. You know, when you go out in the sun and you see really bright sunlight that has UV in it, people start to sneeze, right? You know what happens? Because the pulse of UV light stimulates the ciliary beat in all your perinatals and sinuses, because there's a huge pulse of nitric oxide that's built. And the reason why I'm telling you this is if you put red light in there, you may stimulate too much bone healing. See, one of the interesting things about nitric oxide with bone, and since I am a spine surgeon, I happen to know a ton about bone. Nitric oxide makes bone much stronger, much faster. So that's one of the ways that we can biohack our own patients when we have to do surgery on them. And you have to realize then where you had your orbital blowout fracture, you may not want a ton of bone, because remember, the sinuses are designed to be filled with air because you want to reduce the amount of the facial skeleton so that if it does get trauma collapses normally. So if you get too much bone formation, that you could actually cause a big time rhinitis and some nasal polyps and things like that. So I would tell you, and I actually mentioned this, I think in another podcast I did with Luke's story, that anybody who's had a previous deviated septum or nasal surgery or your kind of injury I don't think, at least initially, I would use the red light until I knew that my nitric oxide levels and my expired air was okay.

And that's. That's where you'd use something like this Niox Mino device.

Exactly. And I know that you're doing a lot of hypoxic training and stuff, so this is kind of like a little toy that I think you would really like. And I know your injury was from a long time ago, so it's probably not an issue now. But it would be kind of interesting if you went back to the same mri, say a year from now, will the bones healed? And see is there a thickness where the blowout fracture was or not? Because if you kept using the red light, I would tell you my prediction would be that you'd see much more bone formation right in that area.

Interesting. Well, I'll link to that. I see that it appears to be something that would need to be.

Prescribed by a physician, this Niox Mino medical device for measuring fractional exhaled nitric oxide. But it looks very interesting. I'll link to that over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI if any of you want to check that out. Now, we're running a little bit short on available time. And really, when it comes, for those of you listening in to fixing your redox potential, not just biohacking your mri, but fixing redox potential in general, Jack does have a really comprehensive article about this that I'm also going to link to if you go to, to BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI But Jack, in closing, are there any big messages that you would like to get out to people when it comes to their electric potential, things that you think fly under the radar, things that you've been looking into lately that you think people should know about, that maybe you haven't had a chance to talk about?

Well, I talk about sunlight a lot, but I will tell you, I still think it's the easiest, simplest, cheapest way to improve your redox potential. And people, Ben, they're just not down on what they're not up on. And sunlight happens to be one of those things. And I'm just going to tell you, it's not just about the spectral density. It's actually about how sunlight changes from the time it rises to the time it sets. There's three variables, and you need to learn about those three variables because I think they're very important. And the other thing that I think you brought up really well is that you need to realize that the surfaces, one of the things that I teach my members about, that I made a prediction a long time ago that's really starting to come true, especially with the Nobel Prizes which were just given, you know, in October, that with time it will be shown that our surfaces in our body are far more important than the biochemistry that happens below. And the reason why what happens at the surface dictates the biochemistry of below. I think you need to begin to understand that for those of people who are listening to this, who don't know anything about.

The two Nobel Prizes that I'm speaking of, Ben knows probably one of them pretty well, and not so much on the other one. But the Nobel Prize for Medicine was given for autophagy and apoptosis just recently. And I think most people listening to this know about that. But what people don't know is the one that was given for physics was given for topology, something called topologic insulators. And what people don't realize is that topologic insulators in biology are actually what determines apoptosis and autophagy efficiency. And to me that's the most interesting part of these two Nobel Prizes being given in the same year, because even the Nobel committee doesn't realize this. And I've been talking about this a lot with my members and I have a current blog post. You don't have to worry about reading it. But there's one thing, Ben, I would tell you. Take the GIF off the blog post and put it in the show notes and let your people see it. It basically is a GIF of a picture that shows you all you need to know about a topologic insulator. Basically it's a two dimensional thin sheet that has three dimensional waveforms in it. And when you see the picture, it's in my Time25 blog post, and you look at it, you'll begin to understand really how your skin works and why tattoos can affect it, why sunscreen can bother you, why sunglasses and contacts and things, you know, that we use, you may want to start thinking maybe this isn't such a great idea. And I think then down the road when this science becomes mature, because right now it's really only talked about in.

Physics and also in biophysics. But it's very clear that topologic insulators and understanding how we can improve our own, like for example, melanin and eumelanin in our skin is the number one topologic insulator that talks to our mitochondria. And you know, this blog post was Or I should say that podcast was about the redox potential. Well, how do you recharge your mitochondria? Well, one of the main things that you use is you use melanin and eumelanin to take sunlight and charge yourself up. It's just like, you know, the have an electric car and go into Whole Foods and plug in. That's how I want people to start understanding. Because when you begin to see how these connections go, the story is very simple. Reconnect with nature. It doesn't have the physics, doesn't have to be, you know, at the tip of your tongue. I want people to know. I want you to go back and do the things that we're designed to do, because too many of us have gotten too far away from that, and we've become too beholden to gadgets and things like that that we use to biohack. And I know it's cool and things like that, but the longer I've been in this business, the more I'm starting to realize that there's downsides to it. And, you know, maybe to end this with. Ben told me he wanted to ask me a question about did I feel that MRIs were safe? This will probably open people's eyes. If you would have talked to me probably three, four years ago, my answer would have been unequivocally, yes. But some biohacks that I've done on myself have now caused me to question that. And the reason for that is, if you understand how MRI is generated, we use a uniform magnetic field, but we send pulse radio frequency to offset the tilt of the protons to measure what we call relaxation phases. And it turns out there's now data in the literature that show even those small little pulses of radio frequency can actually liberate metals in our body.

And do different things. And believe it or not, when I did some MRIs on myself a couple years ago, I found that I had spikes for a couple of days of certain metals in my body. And why am I concerned about that? Well, not only do I have amalgams in my mouth that I refuse to take out, but that's for a totally different podcast. But I also do spine surgery on people where I use, you know, different types of implants. So it turns out that one of the metals that we use is called titanium, and it's the reason we use it. It's a transition metal. It's MRI compatible. It does cause some scatter, but not too bad. Believe it or not, there's now data in the dental and the medical literature that show that we're starting to see free titanium in people's blood. And the crazy thing is, if we image people too much, it seems like the amount of these transition metals show up in the blood. And for those of you who think this is total bull, I'll just remind you that the contrast media that radiologists use for MRIs is called gadolinium. Gadolinium is a rare earth metal, and gadolinium is paramagnetic. But gadolinium also has another key effect that Ben asked me about my beard before we came on. This is the effect that I'm biohacking right now. It's called a magneto caloric effect. And gadolinium happens to be the one metal on the periodic table that has the biggest magnetocaloric effect. So the question is an open one for me right now. Are MRIs completely safe? I think they're way safer than CT scans and some of the other things we do. But I can't give a definitive answer yet because I follow the data. And it pains me almost to say this, but I. For the last four years, I have really limited how much and how many times I will order MRIs, especially in people who I know have implantable metals in their body. So that means, you know, knee replacements, hip replacements, even tattoos. And that's part of the reason I bring this up, because people don't think about tattoos as, you know, metal implants, but that's effectively what they are. And I just figured we end on that because I think it'd be interesting for people to think about and, you know, they can start looking into these things yourself.

But that.

That brings you straight forward to what I'm kind of doing and thinking about now.

Interesting. Very interesting. So maybe I just need to go get these tattoos lasered off and call it good.

Or.

Or avoid getting additional.

If you do do that, you need to hack it, because I've always wanted to, when someone does that, to see what the effect would be on their plasma. My prediction is you would see a pretty big change in your redox for a short period of time, because I think you would liberate tons of transition metals.

Yeah, interesting, interesting. Well, this has certainly given me, and I'm sure a lot of other folks, quite a bit of pause for thought when it comes to everything from electric potential to sunlight exposure to tattoos and beyond. It makes me want to actually get outside and get in the sun right now, which is what I'm probably going to do as I eat lunch. So, Jack, thanks for coming on the show. And I'm going to link to all the excellent articles that you've written on this stuff over@jackson jackcruise.com so folks can go explore that. And if you want access to the links in the show notes, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com MRI where you can even download my MRI if you're really bored and just want to look at it. So, Jack, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man. I appreciate it.

All right. Take care.

All right, folks, so this is Ben Greenfield and Jack Cruz signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

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