Is He The Most Self-Quantified Man On The Planet? Tracking Telomeres, Heart Rate,...

Good morning manana. Ben Greenfield here. I actually have coffee. This is one of the rare occasions where I'm drinking coffee while I'm talking to you. Is this annoying?

I hate it when people eat on the radio, but this isn't the radio, it's a podcast. This coffee is kind of cold. By the way, if anybody has any fixes for cold coffee in the morning, please let me know because it's annoying to dump it back on the stovetop and drink it. I don't know. First world problem. Problems. Anyways, today I'm interviewing this guy named Quantified Bob. It sounds like a dumb name, but he's actually a really interesting guy and his website is super interesting too. I took the deep dive down the rabbit hole of his quantifiedbob.com website. It's amazing. So had to get him on the show. But speaking of coffee, before we actually interview Bob, I wanted to tell you about a recipe because in the last podcast episode we talked about altitude performance and there is this recipe for something called a high altitude smoothie. They call it a loaded smoothie. For a quick on the go breakfast. Here's how it goes. You take one and a half cups of coffee that you've brewed and then you add your milk, like your coconut milk or almond milk or camel milk. I actually have camel milk in my refrigerator right now. Perhaps more on that in a future podcast. They're wanting me to try it and see if I like it and see. See if my biceps explode out the skin of my arms from drinking camel milk Anyways though. So you take your coffee and your milk and then you basically blend that with protein powder, almond butter, coconut oil, cinnamon. And then this last ingredient is actually the one that I think makes the recipe raw organic cocoa butter, which you can probably find on Amazon or the folks at Bulletproof, I know have like an alkali free cacao butter. Alkali free, meaning that your brain isn't going to slowly die as you drink your cocoa. Anyways, you blend that, you put it over ice. That recipe comes straight to you from the coffee people who actually sponsor today's podcast episode Chimera Coffee, which is coffee that has nootropics mind and cognitive enhancing nootropics added to it. You get 10% off anything at camera coffee and you can make your high altitude smoothie with it. When you go to K I M E R A K O F F E E kameracoffee. You get 10% off with code BEN. So check out Khmer Coffee. This podcast is Also brought to you by eggplant shishoto and sama bean stir fry.

Actually, that's not who it's brought to you by. That's the recipe that they make. Blue Apron. Was that offensive, by the way, for me to make that accent and read it like that? You know what? I love Asian food. I love Asians. I love Asia Eggplant shishito and summer bean stir fry. That's. I'm gonna go eat Korean tonight anyways though. So that is a really good dish that basically arrives at your house. All the ingredients are there, right? Everything you need for the stir fry, that crisp summer beans and the blistered shishito peppers and the jasmine rife and the ginger shot sauteed cashews. And then you make it so it teaches you how to cook. But they send all the recipes to your house too. These are the folks at Blue Apron. So Blue Apron, all their beef is raised humanely. The chickens are free range. The pork is raised naturally. They've got vegan and vegetarian options, gluten free options. They source from artisanal suppliers, family run farms, fisheries ranchers. Really cool way to get your food, especially if you want affordable food for less than 10 bucks a meal. And you want convenient done for you recipes. So teach yourself how to cook and make life convenient the same way. You get three meals free with free shipping. Not one, not two, but count them three meals free. You go to blueapron.com Ben that's blueapron.com Ben. Blue Apron a better way to cook. So check them out. This podcast is also brought to you. Oh, and by the way, don't fast forward through the commercials because I have something to tell you at the end. This pod. Not that you fast forward through the commercials. Anyways, you're not like that. These people support the show. It's brought to you by Organifi. Organifi Green juice powder. Now what, what this stuff has in it, in addition to wheatgrass and spirulina and chlorella and green tea and horseradish powder which we talked about in the last podcast and ashwagandha and turmeric is they have. Excuse me, can't speak this morning. Maybe I should have waited until I finished my coffee. They have mint extract which I really like because when I put a scoop of this in my morning smoothie, mint is a digestif. But it's also got a little bit of like a pick me up wake factor and it's just this pleasant taste. It's the small things that matter. And I think the mint puts this stuff over the roof. In my personal opinion, if you're not a mint person, then screw you. Find some other gently dried super greens powder. I dare you. But in the meantime, try this stuff. You can get it 20% off. You go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com FitLife BenGreenfieldFitness.com fitlife and discount code Ben gets you 20% off. So check it out. Last thing I want to tell you was I get a lot of questions now about our premium channel. So we take hidden podcast episodes, interviews I haven't released other places, PDFs, videos from conferences I'm at, et cetera. And we jam pack all of those for $9.99 a year into what we call our premium channel. So there's like an app for this podcast, I don't know if you knew that, for Android and iPhone. And there's this huge collection, like 300 plus episodes that never make their way onto itunes or anywhere else. They're just hidden for again, 10 bucks here. So if you're bored and you run out of stuff to listen to or you want downloads, free stuff, etcetera, you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Premium. That is different than my inner circle. Okay, So I have the premium podcast in the inner circle. The inner circle. All that is is that that also is $9.99. Not per year, I'm sorry, but per month. And that is a monthly workshop and kind of like a living room chat with me and my wife, like a full on Q and A where we drink wine and answer your questions and talk about mildly offensive or controversial or other items we can't talk about on this podcast because this is for the general public and children. But also we have a forum, a very robust forum, which is a place where we do things like group coaching and answer your questions. And my wife puts out a monthly magazine. It's pretty much if you want to stock the Greenfield family, or I should say be a part of our family, that's the inner circle. So that's the difference between the inner circle and the premium offering. A lot of people do both, okay? A lot of people do both to get all of the goodness. Because I'd spend my life researching what works, what doesn't, getting out there in the trenches, figuring out stuff for you. Just like my guest quantified Bob today. So how do you get it? BenGreenfieldFitness.com premium is the premium channel. And then BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle is the inner circle. Goodness. So, all right, let's go talk with Bob, shall we? In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, they measure the length of your telomeres. The idea is, the longer those telomeres are, from a longevity standpoint, they can divide many more times before that fraying and death will occur. So you want to have as long telomeres as possible. I can pull biometric data off to see, like, do I act a certain way or breathe differently or sweat and things like that to kind of figure out, okay, and I'm aware of what. How do I fix that, you know, to improve my likelihood of winning? And I could see that my glucose readings tended to be higher on a Monday. Maybe that's like the stress of the work week, and it dropped down by the weekend.

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Hey, what's up, folks? It's Ben Greenfield. And I just realized that I did not yet open my. My morning Zevia soda. So let me get that open. I'm actually, I'm drinking a stevia flavored soda this morning because I've been fasting for quite some time now. I'm doing an experiment in which I'm gathering blood glucose and ketone values. And also, a phlebotomist just left my house. And that phlebotomist was doing a full wellness FX blood panel and then what's called a cytokine inflammatory panel. So I am bleeding out of many, many orifices this morning. I haven't eaten. And so this threatens to be a quite interesting podcast, especially when you consider that my guest today is himself a quantification nerd. That puts me to shame. His name at least when it comes to quantification, his name is Bob, and he goes by Quantified Bob. You can actually check out his website. It's very fascinating. It's@quantifiedbob.com Someone told me about Quantified Bob at a biohacking conference. So I went and checked out his website. And this dude tracks his entire life tirelessly. He has Reams of data and insight on everything from how the body responds to varying amounts of starch intake, to electrostimulation to artificial light, to different diets, to cognitive performance training and a whole lot more. He himself is a serial entrepreneur in digital technology and describes himself as a left and right brain thinker who is equal parts technical, creative and analytical. Anyways, though, Bob is big time into quantification and biohacking and I have a hunch that today's show will be quite interesting, not only because of Bob's past, but also because I'll be taking breaks as we go to poke myself with needles. So Bob, welcome to the show, man.

Hi Ben, thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of your show.

Oh, awesome. Well, it's good to know people besides my mom are listening because I know my wife doesn't listen. I say many things about her on this show and she never brings them up. So she's either extremely polite or she's not listening. Anyways, though we digress. Why do you call yourself Quantified Bob? I'm just curious about how that title arose. Sure.

Well, I've always been interested in finding ways to better understand and optimize different areas of my life. And it was for a long time it was something I really just kept to myself because I thought maybe other people would view it as weird. But over the years I started running into other people who shared this passion and this sort of evolved into what's now known as the Quantified Self or biohacking movements. And I was actually surprised people had any interest in what I was up to or doing or learning. So I got pretty inspired after the first ever Quantified Self conference and I said, you know what, I should start publicly sharing some of this information about what I'm up to. I need a domain name for the website and really Quantified Bob was just the first thing that popped up. So people refer to me as Quantified Bob, but really it came out of the name for the blog Gotcha.

Normally I would probably save this question for the end, but I want to ask you this right now because I know you quantify a ton of things and we're going to have a lot of fun today and get into those. But when you're quantifying yourself and you are testing yourself. For example, I'm in a fasted state right now so that the impact of food doesn't affect the blood and the glucose and the ketone values I'm collecting specifically. And I do that because Obviously for me to have whatever, anything from coffee to food, etc. Is going to introduce confounding variables. How do you account for all of the different potentially confounding variables when you're testing and tracking your data?

Yeah, it's a big challenge because if the goal of self tracking at the end of the day, well, for me at least, is to optimize my life and free up time at some degree for certain parts of my life. But if it becomes burden and time consuming, really, then what's the point? So that's on one hand, but on the other hand there's a saying that goes, you can't manage what you don't measure. So like you said, you're doing an experiment right now where you're trying to reduce the number of variables. You don't want to affect your experiment by other things that are happening. So maybe we just take a step back and we look at the types of data we gather. There are things like passively collected data that you don't have to really think about. It could be if you have a wearable, just pulling biometric data off of you. You may have something that helps track your sleep. We can use our phone or other devices to track our location. You can track your time and working or doing other things. So those are things that you don't have to invest a whole lot of time into and they kind of be independently collected. Then you've got manually captured data like you mentioned, glucose ketones. You step on a scale, body composition, measuring your mood, tracking workouts, diet and supplements. That's like another layer of data. And then we've got data that's a layer above that, which is less frequently collected, more periodically. So blood work, lab tests, things like that. And then if you want to go another degree outside of that, you can overlay external data. Maybe you want to look at things like the weather or the stock market and overlay that to see is that having any kind of impact on you. So in terms of the confounding variables and how do you limit things.

I think there's that sort of set it and forget it standpoint of you really want to make as much of it passive as possible and have it automated. But if I'm doing an experiment, you definitely need to, you can't be running, let's say eight experiments at once because you'll inherently affect the results of one experiment with the other. So for me, I've got sort of a baseline of things I'm just collecting. It's very passive and if I'm going into a certain type of experiment or I'm testing a theory, I'll make sure to, like, for example, if you're doing a fasting type experiment, I'll make sure that I limit things like exercise. If I'm, you know, if I'm doing something that's gonna measure inflammatory markers, well, what if I overexert myself working out or I roll my ankle? That's going to, that's going to create an acute inflammatory response which may affect the data. So you have to kind of figure out ways to balance all of that.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So basically, if you're, for example, testing blood glucose, you would want to eliminate as many variables as you can that will affect glucose. Exercise and food would obviously be big ones. But you know, sometimes I think about things like lighting and sun and the air that we breathe and, you know, exposure to Wi Fi or Bluetooth, you know, and all these little things that affect our bodies. And I'm always wondering, you know, when we're quantifying how many variables are affecting us on a day to day basis that are kind of like throwing a wrench into some of that data. But ultimately, I think, I think the takeaway for folks listening in is as you delve into perhaps some of the experiments that we're going to talk about on today's show, make sure that you do account for some of that stuff because otherwise you just don't know or at least track, you know. So for example, every single time that I'm taking a glucose or a ketone measurement, right now I'm tracking what I've been doing for the last 60 minutes. I'm tracking how I've felt, if I've, if I have, you know, how the bowel movements have been, if I've been thinking more clearly, less clearly, sleepy or less sleepy, you know, that type of thing. So writing things down can help out quite a bit too as you're tracking. And often I'll just use like, you know, the notes function on my, on my phone, for example, or a simple Excel spreadsheet. I don't get too, too down and dirty with my quantification in terms of having it take over my life. But it does help to keep track of some of these things. Now, one of the first things I wanted to ask you about, Bob, was you did a glucose tracking experiment in which you say you hacked and tracked your glucose. I'm curious. Obviously a lot of people understand glucose and that it's blood sugar, et cetera, but what Kind of unique things did you do, or unique things did you find when you were messing around with your blood glucose?

Yeah. So what inspired this experiment was really I was looking over my 23andMe data. I was one of the early users. So it's a genetic testing service. You spit into a tube and saliva, and then they'll sequence and give you. They used to give you these health reports. They don't do it as much anymore. I was grandfathered into the old reports, but it showed I had an elevated risk of type 2 diabetes. Now, granted, like, the average American, I think, is about 26%, and I was probably about 10 points higher.

Interesting. I share that characteristic, by the way.

Yeah. And so. And it's in my family. On one side, I've had a few relative extended relatives that have, you know, developed type 2 diabetes. So I started digging into that a little bit more. I saw that the American Diabetes association had some guidelines. It said you're like, okay, glucose is between like 70 and 130 milligrams per deciliter. Which is why I think people get surprised when a doctor says to them, hey, you have type 2 diabetes. Because it shouldn't be something that sneaks up on you. Like, the problem is if you're at 129, they're gonna tell you you're in the okay range until you go over that 130.

Right. Now, a quick question before jumping in. When you did your genetic testing, were you already kind of like geeked out on quantification at that point, or was this like your first foray into testing things?

No, I was collecting a lot of different data. I think when. At the time, I think beyond blood work, this was the first sort of add on type of tests when they first came online, because genetic testing had been prohibitively expensive. And I think when 23andMe came out, it was maybe $200 or so to do the test. So it was another area. The same way I've done gut biome testing and things like that. It was another set of data that I could look at and start correlating it with other.

Information I had. So in terms of the reason for the experiment, there's anti aging groups like Life Extension foundation that said, really, you need to be below 80 milligrams per deciliter. That's a good baseline, actually even below 80. So what I did was I just started taking a baseline of fasting glucose readings. So every morning.

First thing after I wake up, pull a drop of blood with a glucose meter and just Note the values every day. So I got a 30 day baseline, then I came across a supplement called oxaloacetate, which I know you've discussed depth. So I was intrigued by some of the experiments that had been run with it. Now, granted, it was done on a lot of lab animals, but it showed how it had benefits to mimic caloric restriction and had some longevity benefits. So what I did was I did the 30 day baseline, I just started supplementing with oxaloacetate for another 30 days and took again morning fasting readings every morning. And it was really interesting to see the effects. It actually knocked my morning fasting glucose readings down pretty considerably. You saw it just spike down. There's about a one week loading phase and then it started going down. And then once I got off of it, my levels came back up, but not to the levels they were at previously.

Interesting. So you were using oxaloacetate, and for those of you who don't know what oxaloacetate is, it's actually part of the Krebs cycle, which is what we feed glucose into, for example, to generate ATP. And I know that oxaloacetate, if I am correct, I believe it's kind of like a rate limiter in terms of your ability to utilize fatty acids as a fuel. Meaning that the more oxaloacetate you can kind of pump into your system, the more quickly you might be able to engage in fatty acid synthesis and then ATP production through the breakdown of fats. Is that kind of the idea behind oxaloacetate from a metabolic standpoint?

Yeah, and for me specifically, it was on the sort of the short term benefits of it, where again, I experimented with things like intermittent fasting and I wanted to see if I could get some of those same benefits by supplementing with it. Because that was one of the claims of what it can do is almost mimic some of those caloric restriction type of benefits.

Right. Kind of what they say about, for example, the use of MCT oil or ketones to mimic like being in ketosis, but instead you're like taking exogenous forms, you know, like dumping a bunch of, you know, MCT oil on your, on your pasta or C8 oil on your sushi or something like that, to, to put yourself in a quote unquote, fasted state, even though you're eating.

Exactly. And, and you know, and to go back to like collecting data and being overwhelmed with it. When I first started this experiment, I structured it where I was going to be taking glucose readings, like many, many times a day over the course of the week. And it just became way too burdensome. And I realized that really the only important metric was that fasting morning reading. I was doing postprandial readings like an hour after a meal and things like that. But I said, you know what, let me just focus on the morning fasting reading. So I saw the benefits of it. And so then I waited a few months. Well, actually, no. At first I looked at the data in addition to just dropping my baseline readings, I was looking at it by day of week, and I could see my glucose readings tended to be higher on a Monday. Maybe that's the stress of the work week, things like that, and dropped down by the weekend. But there were a few days where I think it was a Thursday and Saturday where the values were much lower and I couldn't figure out why. Then I started looking at my schedule, my calendar, and I realized I play soccer a few nights a week in some leagues, and Wednesday nights and Friday nights I was playing in leagues. So it dropped. So my fasting glucose the following morning would plummet even more, even though I was doing other training the rest of the week. So my theory was the kind of soccer, it's high intensity. You're sprinting, you're jogging, you're stopped, so you're kind of doing that type of interval training for a bit. That coupled with the oxaloacetate seemed to have a nice synergy.

Interesting.

I then tried to like correlate things like just steps and activity with the readings. And there's a program online, tool called Statwing. I just imported the raw data into it, tries to find correlations in the data, and I couldn't find any correlations. So I had step data from both my phone. I have an app on my phone that just kind of passively tracks my movement. And I was wearing a basis tracker, so intel owns them. And so I looked at the data like a.

My basis watch.

Exactly, yes. And there was no correlation with doing things like playing soccer or running around. My phone's not on me, so it's not tracking those steps. And they won't let me play with that device on my wrist, so I had to take it off when I was playing. So I was kind of losing that data.

Right. You wouldn't want to hurt anyone with your giant self quantification watch.

Exactly. So that was kind of where I got to looking just at the general activity of that activity of playing soccer, lowering the glucose values. And then a few months later, I tried to replicate the experiment exactly the same way. 30 day baseline oxaloacetate, and it failed. It did not work. And then what I realized there was. I was doing this over the winter, so we had gotten some pretty bad snow in New York, so my activity levels pretty much dropped down. I was much more sedentary. And even from a work perspective, I went at that point from going into commuting into an office every day to working from home. So to me, it showed that that synergy really only works. You have to have this sort of activity with the oxaloacetate to get really at that benefit.

Right. And how much oxaloacetate were you actually taking for people who may want to try to utilize this to control their own blood glucose?

Yeah, I was taking. Was it 100 milligrams? The pills are 100 milligrams, I think I was taking one in the morning and one with dinner.

Were you using the bulletproof anti aging formula? That one?

Yeah. Correct. It goes by some other names as well.

Yeah, that's the one that I've used in the past. And the primary ingredient in that is oxaloacetate. And they call it the anti aging formula because it's actually very good for the mitochondria as well. But I hadn't thought of it for actually reducing glucose in the past. What I've used for that is, well, a few things. Bitter melon extract, cinnamon, and apple cider vinegar are the three that I found to have kind of the biggest effect on, especially your post brandy blood glucose, by using two teaspoons of cinnamon, Ceylon cinnamon, or a couple shots of apple cider vinegar or a couple capsules of a bitter melon extract supplement. Those are a few of the things I've used to control blood glucose. But that oxaloacetate piece is interesting. As well as the influence of the amount of exercise you did the night before. That's also really interesting. So as far as the way that you monitor something like glucose, do you just use like a finger prick test? Actually, you know what? One. One moment. We'll add a sound effect to this one. Get ready for the. For the sound of the spring. Ouch. All right. I am myself bleeding. Was that the test that you did? The finger prick test?

Exactly. Yeah. So I did some research on the different. There's a few different meters out there that they've done some testing on. The accuracy, like none of them are going to be. I think the best accuracy is maybe within 5% and those readings. And I was willing to live with that.

I think for this experiment I used the.

Which one was it? It was the Abbott one.

Yeah. There's a precision extra is the one that I've used in the past for like, ketone and glucose if I'm going to do blood measurements. And there's also a good one for the breath that is a. Have you heard of this one? It's called a ketonics that you can actually breathe into to measure ketone values. Yeah.

So with the glucose measurement, I've actually switched to the precision extra from. I think it was a freestyle light, mainly because it does ketones and glucose, the ketonics. I have one of those devices. The challenge with it is, and I could talk about this further, I've done experiments, ketosis experiments, where I've taken the blood readings with the breath and they don't correlate and they claim it shouldn't because they're actually measuring two different things.

The breath is measuring the acetate and the blood is measuring the beta hydroxybutyrate for ketones.

Yeah. And I've also run into. I think it's one of those things where you also have to be very consistent with how you breathe into it. It takes a lot of practice, otherwise you can mess the results up. So I have it. I just haven't been able to incorporate it into experiments where I actually got, you know, the data that I was looking for.

Now, what about the use of one of these implantable glucose monitors? I don't know if you've heard about these, but actually it was Dr. Mercola of Mercola.com, who actually filled me in on this Dexcom G5 blood glucose monitoring thing. Have you experimented much with those or looked into those at all?

Yeah, actually, this experiment I just mentioned, the original idea was to do continuous glucose monitoring. So the device you're talking about is really meant to for diabetics. So they're relatively expensive because they're sold.

Through medical and you need a doctor to write your prescription for one also.

Yeah. But you can find them. They're available. So I was going to piece the system together because there's actually different components. You have a transmitter, a receiver, and then the little patches that are disposable, that have the needle that kind of goes under your skin and what it does, it'll collect. Yeah, it's collecting data continuously. So you could just have 24 hours. You could actually see kind of like your. If you have this glucose or rhythm of it rising and sticking throughout, or what happens overnight while you're sleeping. So, personally, yes, I'm still very interested in getting into More of the continuous monitoring. Because I think the challenges with a lot of measurements are when we're taking one value, it's a point in time.

Just like cortisol, for example, how doing a 24 hour salivary or urinary test is far more valuable in terms of the data you get compared to like the blood measurement that you get when you do like a fasted cortisol as part of a blood draw.

Right, yeah, exactly. And even things like if you wake up and look at your, let's just say resting heart rate, you might have all this data that you've collected and you say, oh, it was up, it was higher this day or lower this day. But then if you plot it just based a scatter plot, just based on the time you took it, you might realize that like, well, no, all of my 7am readings are the same. All my 7:30 readings are the same. So I think sometimes we look at the data and it's showing us one thing, but we have to be looking at it another way. It's a point in time.

Right. And then the other thing about these continuous blood glucose monitors, I'm always kind of considering this is they actually produce a decent kind of like electrical signal. So I know that there's one that's lower in terms of like EMF production. It's the Dexcom G5. And that's one that I'm personally kind of looking into. I had a physician actually write me a prescription for one. I just haven't filled it yet. But yeah, because I think similar to you because I had that higher than normal risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Glucose is definitely something that I try to stay on the cutting edge of in terms of everything from like slipping into the bathroom to do air squats when I'm at a big dinner where I want to kind of keep myself a little bit insulin sensitive to using these things like cinnamon or apple cider vinegar. I'm going to have to look back into this oxaloacetate as well because I was actually using that quite a bit when I was racing Ironman triathlon to assist with ketosis and mitochondrial function. But there's other things you've tracked too, not to kick the glucose horse to death too much. For example, water quality. I think you did a quantification test on water quality, is that correct?

Yeah. So I think when you think of quantified self and self tracking and all of this, we focus a lot on our bodies and kind of what we're putting into it and everything like that. But we don't spend a lot of time paying attention to the environment around us. So over the past few years I've gotten very interested in just figuring out ways to optimize my living space so things like water quality, air quality, non native emf, light, et cetera. But a water quality experiment was pretty straightforward. I just wanted to see.

Just do my own testing of water quality in my home. So water coming out of the faucet versus I had tested out a number of different filtration, mostly pictures. I'm in New York City, I'm in an apartment, so I can't really be ripping out walls and installing things. People have a whole home system in place.

With New York City it's known to have some of the, I guess what they consider the best tap water in the country, but they still put a lot of chemicals in it. Even if you go on their the Department of Environmental Protection from New York City they list all the things they put in the water to help everything, to help prevent corrosion of pipes, to prevent lead from leaching in to things like fluoride, etc. So the test was relatively straightforward. I just did an A B test. I bought a few water testing kits and I ran a series of tests on the tap water just as it comes out of the faucet and did that abed it with the filtered water. And I used a, it was called zero water filter. I don't know if you've ever used that.

Is that like a reverse osmosis?

No, it's just a pitcher that has a five stage filter within it and they claim to remove almost all dissolved solids. It even comes with a little digital TDS meter. So the idea is like they tell you stick this in the water, pour water out of our pitcher, put this device in it, it should come up to zero. So like total dissolved solids in water is one of the things that you need to look out for.

I see it here on Amazon, the only pour through filter certified by the NSF to reduce lead. Interesting. And it's pretty too so you get that. Cool. It looks interesting. The zero water. I'll put a link by the way you guys as we talk about these things like monitors and oxaloacetate and stuff, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com that's BenGreenoldFitness.com Bob and I'll link to this stuff in the show notes. So you compared your zero water to your regular water. One quick question for you. How did you test your regular water? Did you have a test kit that you ordered from somewhere?

Yeah, there are these water quality test kits you can, I mean, again, if you want to do like a really deep analysis of your water, you know, bring in experts, there's environmental specialists that can do it. But I think if you just want to get a good, just high level view of what's going on, you can order these. I think the test kit I use was just a, what was it called? First alert. Makes these for, I don't know, like 10 to $15.

Okay.

And it's got a battery of, you know, they sell different versions of it that have more or fewer tests.

So those are similar to like the, like the digital test meters you can get off. Like Amazon, for example.

Well, no, it has a combination of, there's different vials and little sticks. You put, you, you take a water sample and you put it in some things you're testing for bacteria and you have to pour some water into this little vial.

Yeah, no, we're, we're definitely thinking of the same thing. I've seen, I've seen these before. They're very similar. Like the pool test kits.

Exactly.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. So you tested your, your zero water and you tested your regular water. And what did you find?

Well, surprisingly well. I was actually, I was surprised that the overall quality of the tap water wasn't too bad. Like the total dissolved solids were well below the sort of recommended guidelines. The filtered water. Actually, for me, I'm not trying to promote any product here, but it actually did what it said in terms of removing all the total dissolved solids. They can't make claims with like fluoride, but fluoride in itself would show up in a tds like it's a total, it is a solid. So if you have, if you test out a zero, that's, that's showing that it's pulling that out if there was anything in there. Now there are specialized meters for things like fluoride, if you really want to get geeky about it. Like, there's digital meters that just look for that at a very minute level. So maybe, you know, I'm seeing zero, but it could be like 0.0001. It's not totally conclusive. Things like lead and bacteria were negative. An interesting observation was. So the tap water itself coming out of the faucet is neutral to slightly acidic, just a little bit like between 6.5 and maybe 7. But when I filtered the water, it made it more acidic.

Interesting.

So that was kind of an interesting observation about if you're Trying to, you know, it's.

Well, it makes sense because you're filtering out minerals which can contain some amount of alkalinity, which is why it's, it's beneficial, you know, if you're using like reverse osmosis filtration or something like that to remineralize your water or to like buy, you know, trace liquid minerals and add them back to the water. Because I think that's actually a common issue is increased acidity in filtered water. And you know, you have a lot of these obviously, like countertop home water makers now that are like alkalinizers or that, you know, pass water over metal plates to decrease the ph, et cetera. But I think a big part of that you can just get from adding minerals back into your water. Yeah.

And so I was doing a little bit of that where I, you know, there's things like coral calcium and you pull these in some types of baking soda that don't have aluminum in them. And I was like, at one point I just said, what am I doing? Like, why don't I just drink spring water?

We're putting all this crap and trying to fix something to get it. And I'm like, I can just get. But if you have access to regular, natural, high quality water, just drink that. And at least, you know, the stuff in your home. I'm not drinking gallons of that a day. So the filtered water is fine. If I'm doing something very. I just need a little bit of it. But day to day, if I'm just drinking water, I'm gonna go for something more high quality.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm very much a fan of having your water tested. Even me, I have well water and I've tested it and found that it has higher than normal levels of bacterial based iron and manganese. Manganese. And interestingly, and I actually would like to ask you if you quantified anything going on in your own body in response to your water filtration. But I did a test when I moved into my home that I live in now, about two months in, after drinking the well water, I did a test and my iron levels had risen and my manganese levels were off the charts in terms of my body's level of manganese. Tested my well water, and sure enough, the two main minerals in there that were in very high amounts were iron and manganese, which actually both. Manganese can inhibit some function of copper in your body and iron can cause things like hemochromatosis, basically rusty blood vessels. So I added an iron filter and A manganese filter. But it's interesting how you can actually track your body to see how your body is responding to water at the same time that you're testing your water. Did you do any type of testing of anything from heart rate variability to the amount of metals in your body to anything like that?

Definitely. Heavy metal testing. And that was part of the inspiration for this experiment was I had some through the roof readings on mercury and lead when I was doing some heavy metal testing, which kind of came out of some other testing I was doing. And I was trying to figure out was there an ongoing exposure, where was it coming from? And I wanted to just make sure, like, okay, is it coming from the water in my home? Because even if you put filters on your drinking water, unless you've got shower filters as well, you're going to be breathing all the same stuff in every morning. If you take a shower, it's coming through the same pipes. So this experiment, at least for me, showed that things like lead exposure and the heavy metal side weren't really from. This wasn't from my water.

Interesting. So you're probably getting it from other sources, like brake dust or something you were getting from walking around the city or the gym or something like that.

Exactly. Well, well, lead's a little different than mercury. Mercury, you can kind of. I was able to knock those levels down pretty considerably. But lead, because it's more in your bones, you could have had that in your bones for 20 years. And as you start like trying to chelate or get it out of your system.

It just takes time. And it's not something that to prove that. It's whether it's an acute exposure, ongoing exposure, versus something that's. That happened a long time ago. It's, you know, that that's. It takes time to figure out because you have to have enough testing, enough, enough data points.

Yeah, that's true. Many of these, these toxins and metals and things like that, they, they could have been in the body for quite a period of time. So another thing I wanted to ask you about, in terms of environment, are there other things you've tracked in addition to water as far as, like environmental variables that affect your body, like air? You, you mentioned, for example, like non native EMF things along those lines. What else have you tracked in the environment?

Oh, well, definitely air quality. Again, I live in New York City, and even the fact that the EPA says that indoor air in general is something like two to five times worse than outdoor air. And if the outdoor air I know where I Live is already bad. I can only imagine what it might be. In my home.

I basically was experimenting with a number of different air quality monitors and sensors. I even built one of my own because initially, some of the data points I wanted. None of the products you could buy that were more consumer focused really could give you all the detail that I wanted.

Now, what is an air quality monitor actually testing for?

So an air quality monitor just has a number of sensors built into it. So a simple example would be every home has a carbon monoxide detector, like a smoke alarm, right? So it's looking for elevated levels of specific carbon monoxide, and it will go off. So an air quality monitor will do everything from measuring temperature, humidity, air particles like particulate matter, then things like carbon monoxide, which is from incomplete combustion of fuel. So if you have a gas stove or a dryer, and those be leaking carbon monoxide out, things like nitrogen dioxide. So especially, again, if you live in a city and you've got traffic and cars going by all day, it tends to come from a vehicle exhaust or kerosene, natural gas, carbon dioxide, which is really, for me, it was because I was setting a lot of this up in my bedroom. So I was looking for, if you're sleeping with the doors and window, everything's shut at night, is that going to elevate carbon dioxide? Because that and then maybe affect sleep, you know, is that going to have less oxygen in the room? The area I was really interested in was what are known as volatile organic compounds, VOCs. Because VOCs are these chemicals that can come from anything from acetone and benzene. If you've got cleaning supplies in your home, your dishwasher can give off some of these as well. And the challenge is they've got limits, environmental limits, for in commercial, like in factories and things like that. Like, workers there will wear these little patch. They're not digital. There's little patches they'll just put onto their shirt, and then they send it into a lab to make sure that the levels of certain VOCs don't go over their designated amount. But there's no limits set for homes.

So I was kind of getting a little. I'm sure if you ever bought a new piece of furniture or something, and it tends to have that smell like it's gassing off chemicals. So all of that can have these effects. So. So an air quality monitor, can different ones measure different aspects of all of this. So when I first started, I found this open source. I'm a technical guy, and I can build stuff whether it's hardware, software, things like that. So there was a product called the thing called an AirPi. AirPi A I, R, P I. Basically, it's built off of this little computer called the Raspberry PI. It's like a $20 computer that's like the size of a deck of cards and that's just really just used to power it. And then there's a circuit board you attach to it that you solder in a bunch of these inexpensive sensors for things like temperature, humidity, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, some general air quality value, and then even things like sound and light levels. And so what I did was I set this up and I put it in my bedroom and I just started collecting data for like a month. And I could see trends of.

For me, I was most interested in, for example, in things like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. I live right across the street from a grocery store that has delivery trucks coming all day. And I could look at my meter and I could see when I plotted all the data that in the morning when they come to do deliveries, a lot of this was getting into my home. It was coming through the window because the windows aren't necessarily totally sealed. You actually don't want to have your windows totally still. You want to let things go out and some things come in. So I was looking at things like that. I was looking at from a sleep perspective because it was in my bedroom. I could see that throughout the evening because it'd be like myself, my girlfriend and my dog all sleeping in this small bedroom. And the carbon dioxide levels were going up. And if you ever wake up in the middle of the night, I think it's for us, at least I think it was because the level of oxygen was going down, carbon dioxide was rising. And if you just open the door in the morning, all the fresh air comes in, you see the readings go right back to where they should be. So when we talk about a lot of these variables, even though I was measuring air quality and indoor environment, you could take this data now, I could overlay it with sleep data if I wanted to. I could do other things with it right now.

What would you say for people listening in who want to do continuous air quality monitoring would be the best, affordable or user friendly way to do so if someone didn't want to don their giant welding mask and say, start soldering things together? Yeah.

So I explored some of the products that were out there. I, I found this one product. It's called a Foobot F O O B O T and it has A number of sensors. It just, it looks like one of those Amazon Echo devices. It's really small and vertical, and you just, it's. You just set it up anywhere in your home and it will basically collect continuous data. And you can look at the data real time off your phone. There's like an app, but if you're more geeky and you want the raw data, they provide as to all the raw data, so you can take it and do whatever you want with it.

Interesting. So that one's called a Foobot.

A foobot? Yeah, I think it goes for around $200, $150.

Okay. Yeah, I see here that they actually have it on Amazon for. For $199. Indoor air quality monitor. And so you can sync this to your phone and you can see how your. How your air quality is. And then you could potentially test things like, you know, maybe does my blood glucose response go up if the air is crappy or do I have more deep sleep if the air is good? Those type of things. Yeah.

And because it's so small and portable, like, I, you know, I started off by putting it in my bedroom to kind of capture, you know, a certain amount of data. And once I was able to optimize kind of what's going on there, I can move it into another room and say, let's look at my living area, etc. But what's cool is you can start taking these and you can use the device itself to trigger other things. So I have like a HEPA filter, that's a portable HEPA filter. So I can just clear out a room pretty quickly. So you could set it up now where if certain levels of particulate matter or overall air quality, if they go below a certain threshold, you can say, kick on. If you have the HEPA filter plugged into one of these sort of smart home outlets type of things, you can have it, trigger it, say turn on the HEPA filter for 30 minutes and shut it back off. You can automate some of the ways to keep the environment optimized.

Interesting. Okay, so in terms of the water and the air, did you find that. Well, obviously with the air you just use one of these HEPA air filters, and with the water, you use the zero filter. During the experiment, have you settled upon like your gold standard method of filtering water or filtering the air, or is it just the HEPA air filter and the zero water for now, for air.

Quality within my home, yeah, I would say for air quality, it was. The HEPA filter has been doing a Pretty good job. I've also tested to make sure there aren't things like mold, other contaminants. I've taken all the cleaning supplies and chemicals that, like, are in your kitchen. I put them in, secured them so that, like, they're not gassing off into my living area. You know, there's just a lot of, like, proactive things you can do. I had a. I had a carpet in my bedroom that I. Once I removed it from the room, it actually had an impact. I think it was still. Even if it's like a year old, it could still be gassing off a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. And. And what I use in. In my home is the Aller Air. Have you heard of this before? It's like a central home HEPA air filter that has. It's got basically like a carbon filter in it, but then they. They add. It's almost like an irradiation device that, you know, radiates like mold and fungus and things like that. It's more of a. I don't know if they sell one. It's like a standalone HEPA air filter. Do you have one of these ones that like, sits in the corner of your room, like the, The HEPA air filter that's like a standalone unit?

Yeah, I have like a Honeywell that. It's got two filters. It's got a helper filter and a secondary filter. And what I like about it, again, living in an apartment, is I can just move it if I need to move it from room to room. It's pretty easy to do.

Right.

But there's also another, like, there's other devices coming on the market, like you mentioned one. There's another one, I think it's called, like, molecule with a K. And they're making some claims as well about they irradiate the air as they bring it through. So it's killing. It's not just filtering, but it's also killing any pathogens and things that are in the air.

That one's called a molecule.

Yeah, I think it's one of those. It was being funded through Indiegogo or something, but they actually have the product out. It's actually released.

I'll look it up.

I can't vouch for it because I haven't used it, but I've read about it and it seems promising right now.

What about one of the things that we hear people quantifying all the time now is, of course, sleep. Have you done anything interesting or intriguing or different when it comes to the sleep quality or sleep tracking Well, I.

Guess I'm fortunate in some ways in that I'm a pretty solid sleeper. So I've never had sleep issues. For me it was more about I sleep seven, eight hours a night. But if there's 24 hours in the day, if there's a way for me to get one hour less of sleep and still get the same benefit out of it, I would love to do that because that frees up another hour of my life.

Life.

So I've had conversations with a number of sleep experts. I've reached out to some sleep clinics to find out like for example, what are the optimal percentages of different sleep stages you should be getting? And while they can provide like the average percentages for you know, different age groups, they're they like, they themselves are like we don't know what's optimal, like in terms of sleep phases, like do you need more REM sleep? Does, let's say the average person gets, let's say 25%.

Well, they're pretty big ranges.

Yeah, but in terms of like I've looked back at data, I've done things where I, for example, took a year of my sleep data and just kind of went through it to see if there are any trends. And for me, I guess again I'm fortunate where my day to day sleep was pretty consistent hours per day, I don't suffer. A lot of people have what's called sleep debt where you get very little sleep all week and then you make up for it all on the weekends. So I think for me the benefit of trying to get to bed consistently every night, getting enough sleep every night for me has worked a lot. Now what's interesting is I've always had issues recalling dreams and there could be a number of issues at play. Some of it could be related this neurological or heavy metal based things like that. I was doing a lot of things around non native emf and what I noticed was when I was able to knock down some of the non native EMF in my bedroom down to like pulling my bed away from the wall afoot because there was an outlet behind my bed that was giving off a lot of, a lot of electromagnetic radiation off it. Like a coaxial cable.

Gotcha. So you're talking about everything from WI fi signals to power surges from the local power supply.

Exactly, yeah. Literally there was, behind my bed was a outlet and a cable jack because my television was on the other side of the room. So I ran like one of those coaxial cables all the way to the other side of the room, but that wasn't really that it wasn't shielded. So it was actually creating, it was amplifying a signal. So I two things. One is you can move the bed away from the wall because it's, it reduces the signal pretty drastically, just even moving things afoot. But just unplugging that cable knocked it down as well. But once I started sleeping farther away, I noticed that things like dream recall improved. So even though I was getting the same amount of sleep every night, it doesn't mean that.

Everyone in terms of quality, it's just a sign of the recall for me is that you're getting into certain stages of sleep.

That's really interesting. I've personally found that especially when it comes to tracking my morning heart rate variability, which is the strength of my nervous system in the simple 5 minute measurement I do every morning when I'm at home, it's always much, much higher. And granted, when I'm at home I'm more relaxed. I might be engaged in a whole bunch of things that help the nervous system. I'm getting outside, I'm getting more fresh air, more sunshine, more sex, all sorts of things. But one thing is that I have kill switches in my bedroom where when I go to sleep I hit that kill switch and there is no electricity at, at all in the bedroom. Even my phone is plugged into one of these portable phone chargers that doesn't create as much electrical pollution.

As would be plugging your phone into the wall. And I think that that plays a huge role in terms of my nervous system health and robustness. When I wake up in the morning and I literally, it's the same as if I'd been camping. So I think there is something to that, that elimination of what you call non native emf, especially with regard to sleep. That's really interesting.

Yeah.

So in terms of aging, I know that you've tracked something to do with aging or telomeres. Can you go into that? Because that sounds like something pretty unique.

Yeah. So I think with coming up with a way to quantify or measure your rate of aging, I don't think there's going to be a single answer because we can look at things from a mental capacity to physical, et cetera on the telomere side. So, so basically I can give a quick explanation of what telomeres are. You have your chromosomes and at the end of every chromosome is like this little tip that's kind of like the plastic tip of a shoelace that allows for the chromosomes to divide and over time they will start to fray. And it gets to a point where those tips break off or fray too much and the cell can no longer divide and the cells die. So as people age, there's a natural progression of that happening. So.

There was a startup that had come out, basically it was out of a lab in Europe where they can measure, they measure the length of your telomeres. The idea is the longer those telomeres are.

From a longevity standpoint, they can divide many more times before that fraying and death will occur. So you want to have as long of telomeres as possible. It's done through a saliva sample, sent it in. They send me back the results and they kind of say, okay, this is the average length we saw. Here's where you compare to the, you know, your, your biological age compared to the population, whatever. And so I write them back and.

For people who might be interested in getting this test for themselves. Do you know the name of this lab?

Well, here's the problem. The FDA has stepped in, shut them down. They were called Tello Me. So you can no longer do Creative Name Consumer. Yeah, and it was, the parent company that's based in Europe is still in operation, but the U.S. there's no, you can't do telomere. Like I've, I see a couple startups that are trying to do the same thing, but they know like the fda, like they're pretty stringent on things like that.

And so that's, that's in the U.S. but in Europe you could have your telomere length measured.

Exactly. And there may be ways to do it here, but not consumer facing. Like you'd have to do it through a lab, like a research lab or something like that. But, but the problem there is they sent me back my data and the results and they said, okay, here's where you are in comparison to the population or people your age. So when I write them back and I'm like, well, that's interesting. Well, how big was the sample size that you're comparing me to? And they were like, it was something like 12 people. And I was like, okay, so basically you're not telling me anything because your sample size is so small that you gave me some raw value. So they didn't have a large enough sample size to really be able to make those comparisons. I think there's a lot of other stuff going on out there where they're trying to look at different blood markers and things to come up with like a quantifier to basically quantify your biological age. I know there's a, there's an online testing company, I guess you've mentioned Wellness fx. There's another one called Inside Tracker that has a thing called, they call it Inner Age. And what they're doing is they're just looking at, I think they've dug into a bunch of data and they've written some algorithms that say based on your glucose, like vitamin D, testosterone, HSCRP and I think some liver enzyme function, they can say, okay, your biological age is this. And so they're trying to make it into a simple number. But the telomere, I thought that it's a very promising area. It's just that I think for a self quantifier or people in the public, it's not accessible. It just isn't something that's easily accessible. So I look at things though like what I've really become interested in the last year is just my omega 6, omega 3 ratio.

Okay.

So I don't know if you've done any testing with that, but it's basically you're looking at these are things that your body doesn't produce, you've got to get from food, right?

Yeah, I certainly, I've personally tested these before. But I'm curious what it is that you were looking for by testing the omega 3 and omega 6 fats.

So based on research I've read.

The ideal ratio that I don't think it's really possible to get to without mass supplementation is one to one. So you do an omega 6, omega 3 test and the ratio is one to one. The Western diet, because we eat so many omega 6 fats, the average person, they say in the western diet is somewhere around 15 to 16 to 1, which is, and the thing is you need both of those omega 6, omega 3s, but omega 6 is pro inflammatory and omega 3 is anti inflammatory. So I think people who tend to eat more of like a paleo diet or they get more seafood, things like that, they'll bring it down for me, I think without any intervention. I just did the test the first time. I think I was around 4 to 1, which is considered pretty good. And that's with very minimal supplementation of fish oil, things like that.

Now for that test or for the other test that we were discussing, the telomere test, were there actually interventions that you used? Did you mess around with changing things like anything from fish oil intake to kale intake to anything like that that would affect something like telomere length or affect something like this omega 3, omega 6 fatty acid index you brought up.

Well on the telomere side. Unfortunately again they shut that service down. I didn't have enough time to get more data points. I think I was only able to capture maybe two points in time that were relatively close to each other. So I didn't notice there weren't really any interventions there because to me it was something I would just want to check every year. On the telomere side on the Omega 6, Omega 3. I'm actually working on this right now. So at the end of the summer the interventions I've made is increasing my basically I'm trying to get as much from real food as possible and minimizing supplementation. So I mean I am taking some high quality fish oil but not super mega doses of it just a little bit to supplement but I'm trying to eat as much wild caught salmon, sardines, things like that to see if I can bring that number down. I would love to be more three to one or even below that. So at the end of the summer I'm going to test again but I'm already kind of in a very high percentile of kind of like based on their population studies.

Yeah, I've run into a lot of people who follow you mentioned the Paleo diet who have DHA and omega 3 fatty acid levels that are actually off the charts that actually you know, if you look at wellness fx for example flag is red if something is high risk and their omega 3s are so high that it flags as red even though it's not actually high risk. But you know I found that people who tend to not eat very western diet, especially a few things like vegetable oils and canola oils and, and fried foods and things like that, they tend to have really, really nice looking omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acid ratio values.

Yeah, likewise. I mean I've spoken to a number of friends, I've done similar tests and they tend to have the same ranges. There are those people who though they're like to a one to one and so they're going to. They're basically mega dosing on some of the fish oils and there's some debate over how much is enough or too much. So. So I'm just trying to strike a fine balance. I'm taking a little bit but I'm trying to really minimize. I'm doing the same thing actually with vitamin D this summer. I've gone off any vitamin D supplementation. I'm trying to get it all from the sun. So I basically stopped it in April or May and I'VE just been going through the entire summer, just getting lots of sun every day. And I'm actually using this app that helps you track. Basically knows what based on where your GPS coordinates are and it knows the angle of the sun throughout the day and you can tell it like things like cloud cover and all that.

What's the name of that app? I think I've heard of that before.

It's like dminder.

So the letter D Minder.

Yeah, D Minder.

And it's like a app, like reminder.

Yeah. And it's cool. And it tries to predict your current vitamin D level. So. Based on what the data you feed into it. So what I'm going to do at the end of the summer is I'll retest for my vitamin D level and see was it close or not.

Now you've also, and a lot of people will test for exercise related metrics, steps taken, et cetera. But when it comes to exercise and movement, you've done one interesting thing and that is actual electrostimulation. Can you talk about how you've used electrostimulation for fitness and anything you found by quantifying that?

Yeah. So there are lots of different modalities and tools out there. I know you've used things like the Markpro and Compex that give you those concentric contractions or use it for strengthening and recovery.

For the past few years I've been using a neuromuscular stimulation modality. I know you've had Jay Schroeder on before who comes from the Russian training science and technology and you hook electrodes up to you and. And couple that with training. So I've been working with that for a while and I've seen some pretty extensive benefits in that. What it's really doing is it's overriding your nervous system with information to sort of get you out of these bad compensation patterns. You've had to kind of retrain. It's almost like you're retraining the communication between your brain and your muscles. So like if you lift weights in a gym and that's like the hardware. This is. I'm sorry, if the. That's the software. This is like helping with the hardware piece of it.

So are you using this device called the ARP wave that delivers this relatively intense electrical stimulus and then moving a muscle through a range of motion while being shocked? More or less. Is that the technique that you're using?

Exactly, yeah. So the ARPWave device, there's two devices, one is more for therapeutic. So if you have disconnects. It's more for like therapy. So you would start with that to kind of resolve like, like if you've got shoulder pain or something like that, or your knee hurts or you've got some injury, they have another device that's called the pov. It looks very similar except it's more targeted towards the training side of it. So. Yeah, so you're basically coupling the stimulation with those isometric type exercises or super slow exercises or rebound exercises.

And sometimes you've got the electrodes on you while you're doing it and they're not, they're not making your muscles like it's not trying to make your muscles strong. What it's actually doing is it's allowing that eccentric. You can lengthen your muscles so that you can get into those positions. And it kind of reinforces the proper communication channels between your brain and muscle.

Yeah, it's not comfortable either in terms of the amount of the stimulation. For those of you who've used a Mark Pro or.

A computer electrostimulation unit, we're talking about something that's like 10 times the magnitude of that. Right. This is the one that can simulate, I believe like a 600 pound squat for example. And I know I've had it attached to my abdominals and just been dripping with sweat after about 10 minutes or so, but I've never actually quantified anything. Right. I've never actually done it and then quantified say heart rate variability or the nervous system or sleep or anything like that. Have you quantified much in response to that, that level of electrostimulation?

Mostly. Well, I would say mainly it's with regards to.

Trying to like testing my reaction time reflexes. I. There's definitely wasn't, has been an improvement in those areas. So like there's. Have you ever done like a tap test? Like a central nervous?

Sure. Like the CNS tap test on your phone where you just tap as quickly as possible?

Yeah. There's apps for it. Or you can use a stopwatch. And the idea is because it's an indicator of your kind of neurological how function, how well or how port's working. So I've done tap tests over time to kind of see was there a change there in terms of general? I mean you can do strength assessments just to see are you getting stronger.

The idea of being more neurologically efficient allows for what they call displays. So. So maybe I go snowboarding or surfing and I'm just like, I just get right up and I'm like Doing awesome. You just feel like you can pick, your body can adapt to those neurological challenges faster. Something like juggling. I was able to just pick up some balls and start juggling after practicing for just a brief amount of time. And it was something I couldn't really do before. But it's a display, right? It's not making you a better juggler. Just saying you're prepared to take on if something is thrown at you. You can, you can take it on.

Right. And I know that ARP Wave is actually leased as a medical device or as a device that personal trainers or gyms or health professionals can use. So I think if someone doesn't own one, they can actually find a practitioner in their area that might have one they could try. Right?

Exactly. There are people around the country that have some are more on the therapeutic side, but there are some training facilities that are, that have opened.

I'll put a link in the show notes because if you're listening and you haven't tried this ARP electrostimulation yet, it's actually one of the best ways to stop chronic pain. If you have chronic pain or if you need to retrain a muscle, it's just, it's not exactly comfortable, but it works. So one other question that I have for you, Bob, is in terms of self quantification and what you would consider to be the craziest or the most unique or entertaining form of self quantification that you've done as you've gone through creating this quantifiedbob.com site.

Well, I don't think anything's necessarily crazy because I do want to make one thing clear, is that when I do an experiment or I try something out, I research the hell out of things.

I'm not just going to like stick electrodes on my head just because, hey, it sounds great. I want to research and understand it, understand all the risks, understand the potential benefits. So for me, a lot of the things that I have planned or I'm working on, they're not all just about being physical or about your body. I'm trying to really understand how to take data and use it to make decisions. So, for example, how do I value my time? What's the value of my time?

In order to do that, I need to understand what is my day like or my week like. And whenever I make a decision, what's the opportunity cost there? Like, could I outsource it to someone else? What's the benefit versus me doing it myself? Maybe. Yeah, I can hire someone to walk my dog but maybe there's pleasure I get in spending time with my dog, things like that. On the financial side, like true cost of ownership of things like you own a car, let's say you pay a lease payment on it, but you only use it on the weekends. So what does that ride you just took really cost? $50 because you only use the car three days a week? Or cable television, how much am I paying to watch each channel? And then I'm taking that a step further again. Being a software guy, technology guy with an interest in artificial intelligence, I'm playing around with using AI to figure out ways to optimize my schedule. So basically figure out, I know I'm most creative at this time of day. I work better at this time. I like to train at this time and figure out how to take my calendar and all the things I need to accomplish in 24 hours and say, you know, this is okay, Bob, today, this is what you should do, right? And not have to think, you know, kind of like, let, let that tell me how my day was best optimized. But in terms of like, using some of the measurement data. I have an interest in playing poker and I'm not a great poker player, Benny. I'm like a casual player. But I've become interested in figuring out how to, like, could I use some of these techniques and tools and to kind of make myself a good poker player. So for example, you need to work on increasing your working memory to do everything from calculating odds, things like space repetition. There's techniques to memorize positions of cards and likelihoods of hands and stuff like that. And so you can adapt. Take a lot of these techniques I've used elsewhere to kind of apply it to, let's say, becoming a good poker player. And if you're playing, let's say, in person against other opponents versus online, then you're dealing with things like tells and like, do I, you know, using where like I can pull biometric data off to see, like, do I act a certain way or breathe differently or sweat and things like that to kind of figure out, okay, and I'm aware of what I do. How do I fix that to, you know, to improve my likelihood of winning? You know, there's, there's, there's those areas I'm doing some things right now with. Sounds like you might be doing something similar with more fasting. There's a thing called fasting mimicking diet. I don't know if you've heard of that. So I did one cycle of it, which was very interesting. So the fasting mimicking diet is. I hadn't really done much with pure fasting. I've done intermittent fasting and that type of thing, but I didn't want to just do a cold turkey, a five day water fast. I came across some research, I guess.

The National Institute of Aging had done some research they had funded where they took these, they took a group of people and they basically cut their calories down to about, let's say half of what the requirements were for five days to see if you can get almost the same amount of benefit as a pure fast.

Right.

And long story short is there's a whole set of macronutrients, there's a composition of calories and micronutrients, and it's actually been patented. But I found the patent filing so I tried to reverse engineer it and I basically did the fast myself and measured ketones and my glucose readings and all sorts of other things over the course of the five days. Because you're supposed to like do a, you eat normally for 25 days and you do the fast for five days. And I took a bunch of blood work before I started and then at the end of the fast, right as I did a refeed, another set of blood work. And it was really interesting to see the effects of how my glucose values just went like plummeted down, ketones shot way up. It took about two and a half days to see any result though, because I think even though you're always in a nutritional ketosis for it to start really spiking. It was right after day two. I saw this increase. But what's interesting too is because you're eating a little bit, I'm talking maybe 500 calories a day. There weren't really. You didn't lose much in the way of body composition, like losing muscle mass because it was just for five days. But once I did the. Once I ended the fast and did the rebound, I thought there would be, based on the research I read, there should also be a boost in your immune system, things kicking back in. But for me the biggest observation was testosterone. There was a huge. I think I went from like 475 to over 800 just once I refed.

Wow. And that's basically the fasting mimicking diet, if I'm correct. Based on the initial research that was done in it. I know they studied mice and they found a big increase in things like pro longevity genes and neurogenesis and things like that. But they were just basically fasting for four days, right?

Yeah, it's basically. Yeah, it's a five day. It's a five day fast or a five day fast.

Yeah. Okay.

But it was five days.

Five days, nothing except water or. Is there anything else that you were taking in?

No. So my total caloric intake was around 500 calories a day.

When I reverse engineered it, I think the way that they did the study was they gave people a lot of broths and chamomile tea and nuts. It was. But there were no meats actually in the fast. So they basically gave them minimal animal derived products.

So like a protein restricted fast.

Yeah, so I think it was something like the percentages were maybe like you had 9% protein, 44% fat and 47% carbs. But on a 500 calorie diet, none of that significant. It's very little of everything. But what I did was I wanted to simplify it. So I was basically eating avocados. I need some chamomile tea, some raw sweet potato and greens powder.

Wow.

So you get the micronutrient and you're eating very little. My meal plan was I have a little bit of sea salt.

Like an avocado, some of the greens powder, maybe some either cauliflower and, or sweet potato and some coconut oil and that was it. And you did it for five days. And actually I was surprised. I felt pretty good throughout it.

Yeah, it sounds pretty sustainable, especially when you add in those other things. And I think that that's a missing component of a lot of our modern lifestyle is the ability to go for longer periods of time on these type of water restricted or very, very much lower calorie diets. Especially for people who listen to this show who are out doing many of them, everything from adventure races to spartan races to triathlons. It's like trying to find that time of year where you're not going to eat can be tough. But I've been programming at least one time in per month when I'm getting in a 24 hour fast. I do the 12 to 16 hour daily fast. And this year I actually plan on doing a longer five to seven day fast kind of similar to this one that you've experimented with. That's quite interesting though. On the hormonal response you'd expect some of the, some of the sexual and fertility based hormones to decrease in response to calorie restriction. But in your case they, they went up, huh? Yeah.

And the panel I ran didn't do igf. But you should be seeing us, but that should be affected as well.

Interesting.

Yeah. But again, what's interesting about this experiment was going back to, you know, collecting too many data points or things affecting other experiments. I had to find five days where I was like, I will not. I'm not. I didn't exercise. Like, I basically was like, I didn't want to have anything affect it. So.

Right.

Yeah. So it was tricky to find those five days because really, with this diet, where you see the benefit is when you do repeat cycles. So you might get some benefit off the first one, but then you eat normally for 25 days, then you do another five day fast.

Oh, really?

You'll actually see the effects magnified. You probably get into ketosis faster.

Probably some of the hormonal responses will be even bigger. Yeah. So that's where I'm excited. That's what I'm working on now is I'm getting ready to repeat these cycles and then see, you know, here was the first cycle. Now what happens on the second or third, et cetera.

Wow. Well, I will link in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Bob this particular research study, this mimicked fast diet because it actually is kind of fascinating how they set it up in the rodent models. And I know a lot of people have kind of experimented with this one. There's some good articles out there. So I'll put resources in the show notes for those of you listening in. And I'll also link over to quantifiedbob.com, the air purifiers and ketone testers and everything else that we talked about in today's episode. My finger's bleeding right now because I just did another ketone value test. I'm not that high, about 0.6 for ketones right now, which is actually surprising considering I haven't eaten in quite some time. But anyways, I digress. I will put links to all these things in the show notes again. BenGreenfulFitness.com Bob and Bob, I want to thank you for coming on the show today and sharing some of this stuff with us and sacrificing your body for science as much as you do.

Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure being on.

All right, folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfield and Quantified Bob signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

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