KetoFasting: The Dark Side of Fasting & Ketosis (+How To Use Cyclic Ketosis To Fix The Issues)

Your hunger cravings are basically non existent. And because normally you're only eating twice a day anyway. Maybe some snacks in between if you're, if you're only eating for six hours. So it's like you're only skipping one meal. It's about the easiest. Sliding off a log, you know, it's just, it's just crazy simple. The solution for that is to eat some carbohydrates, like a fruit or something. You would think your blood sugar would rise, but it actually goes down because you raise your insulin levels.

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From sealfit, kokoro, Spartan agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver deliver you this podcast. Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Hey, if I sound like I'm talking funny, it's because I'm getting my teeth done. I got these porcelain veneers on my teeth right now and I feel like I'm talking like an overbite. I. I'm getting used to. I'm getting used to my new teeth, but sometimes I sound like I'm talking like this. I'm not a Washington redneck. Well, I am a Washington redneck. I'm just a bonafide Washington redneck with amazing teeth and an overbite now. Anyways, I'm working on that. This podcast today with my friend Dr. Joseph Mercola is brought to you by Kion, my company where I hunt down the most amazing formulations, design these efficacious shotgun formulas of supplements, functional foods. We got bars, we got. We have a wonderful fish oil. I pop 10 capsules of this fish oil every single morning. Except those nights when I plan on eating a nice big wild caught cut of salmon. But I use this stuff called Super Essentials. We have it at Kion. It is certified for sport, meaning it's independently tested and determined to be free of all athletic band substances, meaning you can take it if you're a professional athlete, but it contains significantly more dha. It's a one to one EPA to DHA ratio. They actually add extra DHA to this. Then they add in full spectrum of antioxidants including astaxanthin which is amazing. It's also really, really good for your skin. They add a protective gamma linoleic acid from borage seed oil and they blend all this together. Very sustainably sourced fish, low in metals. It's one of those guilt free fish oils that does not by the way give you fish burps. Just one of the many amazing products that we have at kion. You get 10% off this super essentials fish oil or anything else at Kion when you use COD. BGF10.com that's code BGF10.com get K-I-N.com another thing I should touch on here is that hydrogen rich water is something I drink a big glass mason jar of every morning. I have more in the evening. It's got over 1100 peer reviewed studies showing therapeutic potential for over 170 different disease models. It has selective antioxidant behavior meaning you can drink this stuff after workout the shutdown down inflammation without inhibiting your ability to build new muscle fibers or engage in mitochondrial biogenesis. It's hydrogen rich water and they're a sponsor of today's episode. The version I use the tablets and the water generator I use is called Trusy T R U S I I well you get 30% off of their tablets if you enter code BEN at checkout when you go to trusyh2.com Ben it's a mouthful. T R U S I I h2.com Ben that gives you 30% off of their hydrogen tablets. You can also over on that website@truchyh2.com Ben check out the actual water generator that I use. It allows you to drink water and even inhale hydrogen rich water. One of the healthier things that you can inhale as a matter of fact. So trucyh2.com Ben enter code Ben at checkout.

Hey folks, as promised, he's back. My friend. Multiple time podcast guest. A guy who thinks way outside the box who is constantly sending me these things that I never would have discovered on my own. Probably one of the guys who reads more research studies than anyone I know and always seems to be discovering some new cutting edge way to enhance human health and longevity. I like that he also kind of mixes as as I like to do a lot of newfangled technology and biohacks with a lot of kind of ancestor wisdom and many of these principles that Go far back in time, including what we're going to explore today, which is the principle of ketogenic eating, meal planning, timing meals for everything from managing chronic disease to promoting weight loss to optimizing health. His new book, Keto Fast, as usually happens when I get a book on the ketogenic diet, expected to possibly be just yet another book on how to put butter in your coffee, but this one was really good. It's not even that long of a book. It's only about 150 pages long, but man, I think I have over 30 pages. I tend to fold over pages and highlight and the book looks like it's been to hell and back because I think 30 pages are folded over. So. My guest today is Dr. Joseph Mercola. He's been on the show before talking about all sorts of different topics. But today we're going to take a deep dive into fasting. The dark side of fasting, ketosis, the dark side of ketosis, cyclical ketosis, and a whole lot more that I discovered within the pages of his brand new book, Keto Fast. Keto Fast, A step by step guide to timing your ketogenic meals. Joe, welcome back to the show, man.

Well, thanks for having me, Ben. And before we begin, I want to personally thank you for inspiring me, what, four or five years ago when you first interviewed me and I had no idea who you were, but I said, boy, you really knew some information and, you know, you're a real catalyst to help up my own game. And you know, you reading 300 books a year, I couldn't come close to it. I cannot compete with that level of book reading that you do. So what I can compete though is the studies. And you know, I've got a super RSS feed now that I'm able to read about 2,000 studies a year. Not just the abstracts but the full studies. And I like that better than books actually because it's just, you know, it helps me up my game and really get down into the science.

Yeah, you don't want to share that super secret tactic with anyone, do you? Your special website for research studies, well, you could use.

It's basically an RSS feed. So Google Reader, used to be, you probably do it with that, but now that's out of existence. So Feedly has taken over. So you can just search your terms. So I have a different one that's in beta right now so people can't get access to it and it allows me to. I've searched probably between 70 and 80 terms every day, seamlessly it just comes into this app and I get 10 to 15 studies a day. So it's really great.

What's the one that's in beta? Are you allowed to share?

It's called meta.org meta.org that's the one.

That you sent to me that you have to actually like apply to be able to get access to.

Yeah, I've had it for like the last three or four months and it's been. It was the best Christmas present I ever got. It was. It's absolutely amazing. It's changed my life.

Yeah, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. By the way, everything that I talk about, including a link to Joe's new book you can get over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com KetoFast Keto fast is where the shownotes are at. You begin early in the book and I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I think it is important for people to understand how important fasting is from a therapeutic standpoint and from a traditional and historical standpoint. I mean just about every religion on the face of the planet and many cultures have this history of fasting and you have some very interesting explanations in the book of everything from Judaism to Christianity to Islam. What were some of the biggest takeaways for you in terms of researching this book and the elements of fasting in traditional cultures?

Well, it was interesting because I initially started to or planned on writing this book as a way to optimize multiple day or five day water fasting and I certainly don't have the clinical experience in that. So I reached out to the clinician in the United in the North America they had the most, which is Alan Goldhammer who's the medical director of the True North Clinic. And they water fasted over 16,000 patients from anywhere to five to 40 days. So that's really his passion and I was going to co write the book with him and he was gracious enough to compile that history. So I didn't really go into the details on that as much, but it is pretty brilliantly displayed.

And it's of interest that historically most religions integrated as part of their regular practices. So I think that speaks to the value and the wisdom of that. How could a practice perpetuate if all these ancient religious cultures, historically and today didn't find value in it? It would have died out a long time ago.

Yeah, and there's a lot of ritualistic fasting, a lot of cleansing and a lot of use. Well, there's this term therapeutic fast, it comes up over and over again. And I was curious if you could define that. You know, there's that, that quote from Benjamin Franklin that you have in the book about how fasting is the greatest remedy, the physician within. I believe that that was either Paracelsus or actually Benjamin Franklin was the best of all medicines is resting and fasting. And it kind of gets to this point of therapeutic fasting. But can you get into, into this idea of therapeutic fasting and what exactly it is?

Well, it's using dietary or calorie restriction dietary intervention to activate very powerful metabolic processes to catalyze the healing process. Most of these processes in the molecular biology wasn't known, of course, when it was first started. And many of them just have been covered just in the last decade or so and really supports scientifically the value of this intervention. So it's just really a powerful strategy. And before I wrote the book, I was so Inspired. In over 30 years of clinical practice, I had never seen a more powerful intervention than multiple day water fasting. But then I began to realize that there are some practical complications of it because we live in the 21st century and we'll get into that a bit. But I was really surprised because I think we needed to move. We not needed to, we need to modify that. But getting back to some of those quotes, I mean, I know you're going to the Paracelsus Clinic in a few months actually in Switzerland.

Yeah, we've got two weeks there.

Yeah. He's a 15th century physician and his quote was fasting is the greatest remedy, the physician within. So that's a really powerful endorsement. And in the United States, it actually didn't become popular until like the 1800s with the natural hygiene movement. But then it became even more popular when Herbert Shelton popularized it about 1911. And.

There are many clinicians who use it, not large numbers, but Jason Fung would be the greatest example. I've got a quote from him in the book which is really intriguing, which is he describes fasting as the oldest dietary intervention in the world. It's not just the latest and greatest, but the tried and the true. And what I add to that is it's cheaper than free. So you save money when you do this and you also improve the quality of your life and you radically decrease your risk of chronic degenerative disease.

Yeah. In the book you talk about this guy you mentioned earlier, Alan Goldhammer, and how you learned a lot about the history of fasting from him. And he has this clinic in Northern California Is he still practicing at that clinic?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so that's called the True North Health Center.

True North Clinic. They have the largest experience, multi day water fasting of any clinic.

What kind of stuff do they do there other than water fasting?

That's it.

Oh, really?

Yeah, that's all they do.

That seems like something you could do on your own.

Well, they typically treat very sick individuals, so as a result, they have to be pretty carefully monitored to make sure that they don't have any complications. And interestingly, when you are doing this type of water fast, fast, it's wise not to exert yourself too much. And people like you and me would kind of ignore that, go on our daily business and think that's the wise strategy. But you're redirecting energy in your body away from detoxification systems and that can be problematic.

Okay, got it. So at that clinic, and I'll put a link to that clinic, True North Health center, in the show notes, they're not doing like enemas or exercise or any other treatments. You're just showing up and getting an overseen water fasting protocol.

Yes. Yeah. And they feed you, of course. So that's a. Well, they feed you when you come off of it, the refeed. Obviously they're giving you water and monitoring your progress and treating any symptoms that you may develop. But interestingly, one of the downsides of the water fasting is that you do have these symptoms. I think most of these symptoms are related to the fact of your inability to optimally detoxify, and it's largely a result of our exposure to toxins.

Yeah, we're going to get into the dir, kind of the dark side of water fasting later. But I think it's a very inspiring part of the book for those of you who read it, as you go through all these different religions and the deep history of fasting. You know, I've talked about on the podcast before how, you know, my dad will show up for our family Thanksgiving meal and then essentially he's doing. He's an Orthodox religion, Eastern Orthodox, and he's doing pretty much no meat, no dairy. I think he might have a limited amount of fish, very little protein, kind of an intense fasting protocol all the way up until Christmas. And it's almost like this seasonal detox. But I think it's also one of those things where when it's tied to religion and it's very almost liturgical, it becomes something completely different than say, kind of like the fitness movement these days and the health and Longevity movement. It's built around protocols like intermittent fasting or a weekly 24 hour fast, or an alternate day fast or something like that. But none of it or very little of it is tied to religion. And I think that's where it becomes very powerful. And I have all these books that I'm going through right now on the spiritual disciplines. Right. Silence and solitude and meditation, prayer, worship. And a big part of every single book is fasting. I mean, so many people do the nootropics and the neurofeedback for their brain and hoist the kettlebells and the hex bar for their body, but their spirit is kind of shriveled up inside them. And it sounds strange to Thai food to the soul, but it's one of the ways to actually care for your spirit. This idea of fasting, I mean, especially if you're. If you're combining it with things like meditation or solitude or like deep amounts of time spent studying, which you have time to do because you're not preparing meals. I mean, it's a very, very powerful remedy.

Yeah, it's something that I strongly believe everyone would benefit from integrating to their lifestyle. And in a monitored way. Not monitored, but in a metered way. So it's done carefully and you don't have any side effects.

Yeah. All right, let's delve into the science. I've talked about autophagy on the show before. I think people are familiar with the idea of clearing out dysfunctional or diseased cell components as being kind of like what autophagy is. But you go a step further and you actually define fasting as a free stem cell transplant. Stem cells are a big topic in the industry these days. So can you go into the science of stem cell regeneration and fasting and how those are tied?

Oh, absolutely. But before I do that, because I want to go into a little bit of autophagy because I've been studying it, because the extension of my reading these studies is not just writing this book, I'm writing the next one on emf. But really, again, you were an inspiration for this is to write my book on longevity. And it's probably going to be three or four books because it's hundreds of pages now with thousands of references.

As a result of that, autophagy is a big part of it. But both of our passions are to live as long and healthy as we can. And that's why I wrote the book Fat for Fuel. And then this book, which I think are foundational basics. You've got to activate these systems correctly. If you have any hope of living well beyond 120 because you've got to get the basics right. And the next basic is going to be on emf. But that's not for this discussion. But before we discuss autophagy, let's review what fasting is. Because there was different varieties, intermittent fasting is sort of the foundational basic of what you do, at least in my view as fasting, because that will get you your metabolic flexibility turned on and your ability to burn fat as a primary fuel. And typically.

You know that it's a minimum of 12 hours, we're probably closer to 14 if you're not eating less, if you're eating.

Not restricting it to at least 14 hours, it's probably not going to get you some of the benefits.

I think that depends not to derail you too much, but I think it depends on physical activity as well because.

That would be another issue.

Yeah. If you're up regulating amp K pathways and especially if you're an athlete or an exercise enthusiast, I've found that a lot of folks will do pretty well on a 12 hour fast, especially a very active person. And if they're exercising during that 12 hour intermittent fast, I think, and I haven't seen a lot of data on this, but you upregulate those amp K pathways, which I'd love for you to define.

Oh, I am definitely going to detail with that one.

Yeah, if you combine exercise with a shorter intermittent fast, like a 12 hour, I don't think you need to go on a guilt trip. If you're like an exercise enthusiast just doing a 12 hour fast, well, you're.

In an unusual category and you're a competitive athlete still. So that's a whole different ball game. And you're right, there isn't a lot of research on that. Most of the research of course is done in animals and they don't exercise in the same way. And the ones that have done in humans, there are really very few researchers who are examining competitive athletes. So there's not a lot of literature on that. But to finish the analogy. So Sachin Panda, who you know of, I think you've interviewed him before, just a magnificent researcher out of the Salk Institute. He did some surveys and found that less than 10% of the people restrict their food to less than 12 hours a day. Day. So 90% are not doing it. 90% are not even doing 12. And I think for a non competitive athlete, 14 to 16 hours is the sweet spot. So unless you're exercising like Ben like you, Ben, then you know, my recommendation is to strive for a 14 to 16 hour.

Or even 16 to 18 hour. 14 is the minimum in my view for a non competitive athlete. But 16 to 18 hour might be the sweet spot. And Jason Fung agrees with me.

The other window from my understanding, that's not just, that's just a theory, that's not just what you think. But they've actually done research on autophagy mechanisms actually being activated far more significantly once you pass about the 16 hour mark.

Yes, but I still want to finish this now because so they get that 14 to 16 hours or 16 to 18 hours, but you're still not going to get maximal activation of autopsy, at least in my experience. I think you need to go more and that's I think where you get the benefits of the multi day water fasting or the fasting mimicking diet, which was developed by Valter Longo and probably is one of the most prolific researchers in this area.

But I don't think you have to go that extensively. I think you can do a hybrid of the two models and actually get most of the benefits, not have any, virtually none of the side effects and really maximize all these powerful metabolic processes.

Okay, so why do you call it a free stem cell transplant and how does this tie into AMPK pathways?

Okay, we'll get to the amp K, but what is autophagy? Let's do a simple review. So autophagy, there's three types. There's microautophagy, macroautophagy and chaperone mediateautophagy. And essentially it targets damaged and defective cellular parts, not whole cells. That whole cells would be apoptosis. But these defective cellular parts are targeted in some way. They're marked and then they're shuttled to lysosomes where the lysosomes have these digestive enzymes in there and they're able to and actually have NADPH oxidase which then creates superoxide. Superoxide combines with nitric oxide and forms peroxynitrite and just destroys these cellular parts and it breaks them down to their constituent elements which are then recycled for the repair and regeneration. So that's autophagy and that's what you activate when you do, I think this more extended fast, what I call the keto fast. But you know, there's other ways to do that. Longo's fasting mimicking diet, of course, the extended multiple day water fasting, which I don't recommend. So the free stem cell transplant is really an act sort of an artifact of what happens when you do these activities. And it doesn't occur during the autophagy phase, it occurs in the regeneration phase. And this is probably the best strategy to rebuild your health because you need to remove the damage and defective materials in your bodies. The proteins and the enzymes that just were the mitochondria that aren't even working anymore and just clogging at the systems and in many cases creating inflammatory cytokines that disrupt your physiology. So getting rid of them is one. But then the next step is the magical part is in the refeed when you activate these stem cells, and especially if you're combining it with a really good aggressive strength training program, then because one of the benefits that additional benefits that occurs during the fasting phase is that your growth hormone increases like 300%. And you're gonna say, whoa, that doesn't make sense. Because if growth hormone's up, then IGF is up, and that would, would actually inhibit autophagy. But what happens is the growth hormone receptors in your liver become relatively insensitive. So they actually, the IG IGF1 levels drop and you're able to get those benefits. And you get, it's just like you've taken a growth hormone injection though, you get the benefit, especially if you combine it right after. And you know, you'll see when I discuss it further. I recommend doing this twice a week so you can get these awesome benefits twice a week.

So you're sayingyou're saying how long twice a week?

Well, we'll go into the details later. But basically a 42 hour fast on anywhere from 3 to 500 calories. Calories based on your lean body mass.

So that would be almost like an alternate. Well, it's technically your keto fast protocol. Yeah, we'll get into that. Now, intestinal stem cell function, because I know a lot of people will fast to be able to heal the gut. You have some very interesting rodent studies you talk about in the book. Can you get into what happens especially to intestinal stem cell function?

Yeah, it improves that too. No surprise, because you have this thing called the leaky gut, which is a real symptom. And so when you do this type of fasting, I think the extended fasting, not just the intermittent fasting, it helps reduces the gut permeability by stimulating these brain gut pathways and enhancing the integrity of your gut lining, which is of course really important for improving your overall health.

Yeah, I think one of the major takeaways I have underlined in the book is that one single Fast improved intestinal stem cell function in mice who actually switch the stem cells in their gut switch from utilizing carbs to utilizing fat. And they actually saw this complete regeneration of the gut just from a fasting protocol. It's kind of funny because so many people will do like whatever glutamine, bone broth, colostrum, an autoimmune diet, and 18 different supplements to heal their gut. Gut, yet just not try, say, not eating food, as you've just alluded to several times per week.

Yeah, and it's interesting. I'll get into some of the supplements, but there are certain supplements thatand I didn't really highlight this in the book that much, but there are supplements, and I learned this from Bob Miller, who was at our Mastermind event in Park City last year.

So he helped me understand that there are certain supplements that will actually inhibit autophagy. So these are some of you do not want to take when you're doing some type of fasting protocol. And colostrum is one of them, as is methylfolate, as is B12. You know, these will actually slow down, slow down autophagy. So it's understanding when to cycle in and out of these, not only the foods, but the nutrients and the supplements that you might be using.

Yeah, and by the way, I don't think we yet defined amp K, the adenosine monophosphate protein kinase, but define amp K because it plays a pretty integral role when it comes to maintaining healthy autophagy. And I know that there are certain supplements you use to upregulate amp K and autophagy. So first define amp K and then get into the things that you did discover in writing this book that enhance kind of the fasting process. Because fasting increases amp K, but you can kind of put other things in your body at the same time to kind of upgrade the fast.

Yeah, it increases ampk and fasting also increases NAD by about 30%, which is another good benefit. But amp K is your friend, the higher the better. But just like when you just like inhibiting MTOR is your friend also, but you don't want to do it all the time. You do not want elevated amp K. That means you'd be in starvation mode. But it's a nutrient sensor and the amp is pretty similar to ATP. So that's, that's adenosine monophosphate is the core of it. And the K means it's a kinase. So it's actually an enzyme that attaches a phosphate to the amp to convert it to ATP. And it is low when ATP is low. So that's why it's a nutrient sensor. And it goes up. And it's a very good thing when it goes up because that means it's going to activate autophagy. So things that in inhibit or lower AMPK will inhibit autophagy because that's one of the primary signals. So it puts your body into a repair mode. And the primary issue.

Is that it catalyzes the inhibition of mtor, the mechanistic target of rapamycin, which is a powerful signaling pathway that is really used for anabolism or building your body. I mean, you need mtor, but if it's, but if it's activated all the time, you're going to have major problems. So it's just cycling in and out of AMPK and mtor and they're somewhat like a seesaw. So when AMPK is high, MTOR is low, and MTOR is high, MPK is low. So you want to cycle that seesaw in and out regularly throughout the week. At least that's my view of obtaining some of the highest benefits from this process.

Right. And when it comes to AMP K, kind of the beautiful scenario here for, for mitochondrial biogenesis, I think especially, you know, a lot of people listening in, they're trying to find that sweet spot for exercise and for fitness. But if you combine fasting with the other thing that can upregulate AMP K, which is brief spurts of high intensity interval training, you can mimic, you know, especially if you're an aerobic athlete. Because this is something I used to talk about a lot when I was doing triathlon and doing kind of like this minimalist Ironman triathlon protocol is I found that very short high intensity interval training sessions, especially in a slightly calorie depleted state, could give me the same aerobic benefits as the longer like 90 minute sufferfest pound the pavement run sessions or the very long bike rides. And I'm not saying you don't need to put in the hard work. I don't want to be one of those biohackers who stands on a vibration platform for five minutes to get a six pack abs. But what I am saying is that you can use fasting and high intensity interval training and as you've alluded to, especially after your feed, like a brief spurt of resistance training to get the growth hormone release and the AMP K and the mitochondrial biogenesis. So when you start to weave all of this stuff together, it creates a really beautiful scenario for fitness as well.

Yeah, fitness and optimal Health. I really think it's a recipe for massively and radically accelerating your ability to achieve optimal health.

Now, what are the different nutrients and supplements? Because, I mean, you even, you even sent me, and I know this is part of your next book, so I don't necessarily want to. Want to force you to reveal all the secrets in your next book on longevity, but you sent me. Yeah, you sent me, like, the recipe for an autophagy tea that you were drinking that I've even mentioned on other shows, and I think that's a perfect example of how.

Have you tried it yet?

Yes, I bought all the ingredients. It's in a glass mason jar up in my pantry, and I've been using it every day. I actually quit using nicotinamide riboside, which I was taking as a supplement, and began to use that tea instead because it has a lot of these NAD precursors in it that you talked about. But can you get into that as kind of an example of the different things you found to upregulate amp K?

Sure. Before we do that, let me mention one of the things that that decreases amp K, and that is present in 80% of the population. What do you think that is?

Well, I. 80%, I would say excess calories, but that seems too obvious.

Insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance. And normally.

Natural Medicine acknowledges that 30% of the population has diabetes, which of course is maximal insulin resistance. But. But type 2 diabetes. But if you do a more sensitive test, that was described by Joseph Kraft and he wrote a book about this, where you do oral glucose tolerance tests and you sequentially measure your glucose and insulin levels after the glucose challenge, and then you graph that and you look at the graphs, the tables in his book, you can figure it out. But if you do that more sensitive test, 80% of the population has insulin resistance. And when you are insulin resistant resistant, your AMPK is inhibited, it goes down. So you've got to do the basics first. You've got to get rid of insulin resistance. No magic autophagy tea or supplement is going to counteract that. It's the fundamental foundational basics that you need.

Okay, got it. And by the way, and most of.

Your listeners are doing that already. But I just, you know, I just want to reinforce the obvious.

Yeah. And just a quick rabbit hole, I think, a lot of people, because there's a lot of talk going on out there before we return to these nutrients for autophagy in your teeth. There's a lot of talk going on out there about insulin resistance induced by ketogenesis. Due to the fact that on an oral glucose tolerance test after one has limited carbohydrates, they appear to have insulin insensitivity in response to a bolus of glucose. It's my understanding that that's related to ketosis or fasting, causing a downregulation of GLUT4 and GLUT5 transporters receptors. So that it appears that because your GLUT4 and GLUT5 are down, regulated glucose isn't getting into muscles or liver quite as well. But what you would see after a few days of, say, carbohydrate refeeding would be an amplification of those receptors. So it's not true. Insulin insensitivity that's occurring as a result of fasting or ketosis, even though it might appear so if you're just doing a glucose tolerance test.

Yeah. And glucagon is a hormone that also interacts with that, as does the insulin resistance again, or actually maximum insulin sensitivity. Because when you restrict your carbohydrates and especially in a fasting mode, your insulin levels can get so low that your glycogen levels that actually it's too low to stimulate the liver to make glucose. So you actually get a. It doesn't inhibit it or that doesn't stimulate it. So you actually, you need. So your glucose levels start to rise and you get gluconeogenesis just because your insulin level, insulin levels are so darn low. And interestingly, if you. The solution for that is to eat some carbohydrates like a fruit or something, and it just look almost pure healthy carbs and you would think your blood sugar would rise, but it actually goes down because you raise your insulin levels.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so nutrients for autophagy. What kind of things have you discovered?

There's a lot of them.

Most of them.

That's okay.

We got time. Yeah. Like berberine. Berberine is a good one. You don't want to take berberine every day, but berberine is good. ECGC from green tea is another good one. But what I think is even better, I found these apples from Europe, wild crafted apples with no. That are organic and they're. They're picked green. And these ancient apples are full of these EGCGC like compounds. And they probably have higher concentration. They do have higher concentrations than green tea. So it's the whole apple and these wild apples.

Anyway, that's another one because I know you have a little bit of a fruit orchard. Are you growing these? Are you purchasing them?

No, no, I import them from Europe. It's not available commercially. And, you know, some of the, most of the polyphenols are, are really bitter. Berberine would be a classic example. I would challenge virtually anyone to have a teaspoon of berberine and not just maybe not a quart, 16th of a teaspoon. It's so darn bitter. Equally bitter is pomegranate peel. Not pomegranate, but pomegranate peel polyphenols, sometimes referred into literature as ppe, pomegranate peel extracts. But you can get the pomegranate peel powder and there's no, there's no capsules like that, but they do sell the powder and you can put them in capsules yourself. And that is loaded with ellagic acid and these ellagitannins, which may be, which most likely are even more powerful. And the active form of that is actually created when you swallow them. And they're metabolizing your gut to these other chemical compounds called urolithins.

Yeah, urolithin A, that's actually an anti aging compound. I don't know if I've ever told you this, but the probiotic that I use, the probiotic made by seed, that's a few different probiotic strains mixed with pomegranate extracts so that you get that urolithin A release upon consumption of the pomegranate extract. So I take it as part of my probiotic.

Yeah, yeah. It's a magnificent thing. And I want to thank you tooi was excited when I first found out about this. And then you referred me to a podcast of these guys from New Zealand, I believe, believe they're naturopaths and they really had it now. Or.

Yeah, those are, those are the guys from, from ATP Science. They did a great, a great podcast specifically on pomegranates and all of the cool elements of the entire pomegranate fruit eaten whole, meaning literally, like peeling it, dehydrating the peel and powdering that, eating the seeds, eating the juice. Like not just buying the palm pomegranate juice from, from the store, but thethe magic of eating the whole pomegranate. I'll hunt down that podcast and yeah.

It was a good one. I listen to those guys regularly now. They're pretty good.

Yeah, yeah. So this tea that you make, fill me in on the ingredients of that.

Well, one of the ways that you activate autophagy is you make sure that you don't have a lot of acetyl coenzyme A, because when you increase acetyl Coenzyme A, you inhibit autopsy. That's just fact. And interestingly, counterintuitively, when you're fasting and you want to activate autophagy, it's not a time. Even though your body makes ketones, this is not a time where you want to take external ketones. Exogenous ketones, not a good idea, because it breaks down to butyrate, and butyrate actually increases coenzyme A, which will inhibit autophagy. So there's a time and a place for everything. But taking ketone esters or salts is not a good idea when you're fast.

Really? Because a lot of people will use exogenous ketones as a way to stave off appetite cravings while they're in a fasted state. But you're saying even though that that might save off appetite cravings, it reduces autophagy.

What would you rather do? And the appetite cravings will. We'll talk about that in a bit. But they typically disappear on almost everyone if you're doing this thing right. But why would you want to inhibit autophagy? To me, that's probably one of the primary benefits of doing this fast is activating autopsy, because virtually hardly anyone's doing it. 90% of the people are eating more than 12 hours a day. That's 90%. And, you know, it's just a small fraction of people who understand this and are applying it.

Got it. Okay. So the autophagy tea.

Autophagy tea. Another one I use is chamomile tea, organic. Why? Because it's really high in apigenin, which is a flavone, and that will inhibit.

It inhibits.

What was the pathway on that one? I think it's NAD. No.

That'S Polyarcos NQO1. I've actually forgotten what it inhibits. No, it inhibits CD38, which is an ectoenzyme that consumes NAD.

Okay, okay. So it's consuming NAD. So would that be a way to actually increase NADH? It is the consumption of chamomile powder.

Not NADH. NAD. Plus it would increase. Yeah, apigenin in chamomile.

Pow. Yeah, because it inhibits the ectoenzymes, the CD38 ectoenzymes that would inhibit NAD, not inhibit, use or use.

Yeah, it's probably the second largest consumer of NAD in your body. Maybe. Hopefully it's the first, because the largest consumer in most people is parp, poly adp ribose polymerase, because it's a DNA repair matrix enzyme that's essential to repair DNA breaks, and it's activated when you're exposed to even a frequency. So if you've got that under control, then you're not activating PARP too much and then probably CD38 becomes more of an issue.

Yeah. And you also told me you put this hydroxycitrate and garcinia compound in there, like a colonizer.

Garcinia lowers coenzyme A, or actually it's the hca, the hydroxycitric acid, that lowers the coenzyme A, both of which would upregulate autophagy. Yes. Yeah. It's just like. It's a hidden pearl that virtually no one knows. I discovered it reading one of these journals. Yeah, this is what it does. I mean, it's been commercially used extensively for weight loss, but to me, it's an autophagy activator, a pretty profoundly effective one if you're doing it the right way. Now, it doesn't work if you take just swallow some and you're eating a regular meal. You've got to integrate it into the proper fasting protocol.

Now, you actually make this stuff. So you blend Paul D arco bark tea, hydroxy citrate and carcinia powder, quercetin powder, glycine, quercetin and chamomile. Sorry, quercetin.

I get slapped on the wrist for my pronunciation of that a lot. And then. So all of these are upregulating autophagy or increasing nad, or both. But then you're also sweetening it. You turn to me onto this fabulous sweetener that you use.

Did you like it? Did you like it?

Yeah. Tell the listeners about it.

Oh, this is the best sweetener I've ever encountered. It blows everything out of the water. It's made by Lakanto, I believe, L A K A N T O. And it's called Monk Fruit Sweetener.

Or Lohan. And the unfortunate problem, it's really hard to find because it's on this obscure website called Amazon. But you got to be careful because they go out of stock a lot. So I usually have two or three bottles all the time in case they go out of stock. But the flavor, it just is a magnificent flavoring agent. It just always makes anything taste good. But that's the tea. In addition to the tea, I use the tea to swallow all these other supplements like the berberine curcumin, the pomegranate peel polyphenols, the apple peel polyphenols, or the apple whole wild apple polyphenols, the Resveratrol CoQ10 interesting. Tocotrienols are another ones that do it it. So I take those at night rather than in the morning.

Do you drink this tea hot?

Oh, no, no, no. I drink it cold, actually, because I live in Florida.

Yeah. Yeah. But most of this stuff dissolves pretty well. Or do you put it into the smoothie or into the blender?

Yeah, I put in a blender because in fact, I just had some this morning and I didn't put in a blender because I was in a rush. And if you don't dissolve the power, you can kind of choke on it. So the blender works really well.

Yeah, I mixed it all in a mason glass jar. And actually what I did a few days ago was I made ice cream out of it. I just took all the powder. Really?

Yeah.

I put it in with cacao and six egg yolks, can of coconut milk, a little bit of collagen for the joints, add a little extra sweetener in that, and then let me think of what else I had in there. Those were the biggies. And then I blended that and then put it in the freezer in a stainless steel bowl. So I've got it as almost like this ketogenic ice cream I can have after dinner at night. But it's got all the powders in it. So I've.

It turned.

Turned your tea into ice cream. But it tastes pretty good.

Leave it to Ben to improve it. So you are really healthy and I don't think you have many symptoms of any disease, but have you noticed any difference from doing this recently?

No, but I haven't gone in for any labs recently either. And I haven't retested my telomeres, so I can't say I haven't quantified lately. I've been too busy. Well, hello. During this episode, you might hear my good friend Dr. Joseph Mercola and I talking about infrared and saunas. Well, the sauna I use is made by Clearlight. They're a sponsor of today's show. What I like about them is they're a. They're a low EMF sauna. They use EMF and ELF shielding. They have a lifetime warranty. I have their big sanctuary model in my basement, so I can go in there and do yoga and all my woo woo crap. I can also read magazines, read books in there, keep my cell phone out of there. I don't want to microwave myself in my sauna. But saunas have been shown to do a lot of the things you discover in today's podcast episode. Wonderful for the detoxification aspect you're going to get while you're trying something out like ketosis or the Keto Fast protocol that we discuss. Better yet, you get $500 off the regular price of any sauna from Clearlight Saunas and a free gift with your purchase. You just go to healwithheat.com and you use code Ben Greenfield. That's healwithheat.com use code BenGreenfield. It'll save you 500 bucks. That's a chunk of change off of one of these high quality, beautiful infrared saunas from Clearlight. This podcast is also brought to you by Alky Hall. It's actually brought to you by Fitvine Wines. All of their wines have less than 0.09 grams of sugar. That's 90% less sugar than the average wine. Only 118 calories in a glass, only 3.9 grams of carbohydrates, and they offer these rich flavor profiles with about 13 and a half to 14% alcohol or so. They've got a cab, they've got a peanut, they got a Syrah, they have a Pinot Grigio Sauvignon Blanc. A wonderful. I like their Prosecco. I'm not a big white wine guy, but their bubbly Prosecco is kind of fun and great for parties. It's all guilt free, though. It's all guilt free because it's organic, it's biodynamic, it's micro filtered, it doesn't have all the toxins and preservatives in it. And better yet, you get 10% off of anything from Fitvine wine. You just go to fitvinewine.com and you use greenfield10 to save 10% off. When you go to fitvinewine.Com that's fitvinewine.com use code greenfield10 for 10% off.

Before we get into some of the dark side of fasting, you talk about the dark side of water fasting and the dark side of fasting in general in the book. One other thing that I wanted to comment on that I thought was interesting and that I know you know a little bit about is this idea of hydrogen peroxide in the body, why that should be something we should care about, and how ketones could potentially protect the brain from excess peroxides produced by hydrogen peroxide.

All right, well, not everyone listening to this had the opportunity to attend some biochemistry courses, so let me condense biochemistry into a few paragraphs for you. So ultimately, the food you eat, especially actually the fats and the carbs are used as fuel Sources and the protein maybe can use for fuel, but typically it's broken down to its constituent amino acids. So you can remake that in the proteins and enzymes that your body needs. But after you eat fats and carbs, which are the primary fuels, they're broken down by enzymes in your stomach to their basic parts, which is pyruvate for carbs and free fatty acids for fats. And these parts are then shuttled to your cells. And then your mitochondria uses the them for energy with oxygen. It burns them, and ultimately these fats and carbs are converted to electrons. That's what the whole electron transport chain does in the mitochondria. And these electrons are passed through molecules called cytochromes, and they result in ultimately generation of ATP. Now, what's not obvious, that these electrons broken down from the food require a final resting place or acceptor, and that is the role that oxygen serves. So ultimately, ideally, it receives these electrons from the food that you're digesting in the form of hydrogen, which is ideally converted to water. Now, the carbon in the foods you have consumed is converted to carbon dioxide, which is the waste that you breathe when you breathe out, obviously. Now, the key point here is that the conversion of the food you eat that your body uses to make ATP is not 100% efficient. If you're metabolically healthy, like most of the people listening to this, and you certainly are, it's probably somewhere between between 95 to 97%. But if you're metabolically inflexible, like over 85% of people in the country are, then you cannot burn much fat for fuel. When you do that, you're 30, you're going to generate 30 to 40% more reactive oxygen species of which hydrogen peroxide and superoxide are the two primary ones with inside the mitochondria. And then they leak out, you know, so they leak out and they cause these and that, that's the pollution that you get from these electrons leaking out and not converting into the ultimate beneficial one, which is water. Now, when you're healthy, the superoxide and peroxide are not necessarily bad. Yes, they're free radicals, but they're biologically important free radicals that actually regulate your biology. As long as they're in the right concentration, you're golden. It's only when they become high that they become problematic. And the answer certainly is not to take antioxidants to lower these. The answer is toto address the fundamental problems that's causing the aberration in the levels.

Interesting. Okay, so ketones are gonna protect your brain cells that are exposed to these oxidative stressors like hydrogen peroxide, which you're gonna find quite common in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, for example. Okay, gotcha.

You know why? And they do it because they're HDAC inhibitors is one. So they radically lower inflammation and they also increase a molecule that you're well familiar with, but many people are not. It's called nadph.

It's the coenzyme cousin of nad, and probably just every bit as important. And if you increase your NAD levels, you'll get this because there's another kinase enzyme, nadk, which adds a phosphate to NAD to turn nadp. And, and then you reduce it to nadph. But why is it so important? You need it for just about everything in your body, man, but primarily not only to make your cholesterol, your fatty acids and your steroids. I mean, it's the rate limiting factor for fatty acid synthesis, but also it is this reservoir of electrons. It's what your body uses to recharge your antioxidants, the ultimate internal antioxidant. So ketones increase nadph.

So this would be something that folks could use as a strategy in addition to doing something like consuming this autophagy tea, or an alternative to doing something like NAD injections, for example.

Well, I wouldn't combine it with fasting. It has its purpose in place and it's one that you and I could use and many listening to this can use all the time. And that's when you're flying, flying. That's when you, that's when you're gonna benefit from these things as the ketones. That's when I would use exogenous ketones big time.

That's right. I remember you giving me thisthis tip andand I started to travel with a little shot glass of it of the, it was thethe HVMN ketones was the ones that I was using because they travel pretty well and you can carry them on.

Dr. Yeah, I use ketone aids, but they're the same.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Soso water fasting, I want to start there because, because you mention in the book, and this kind of intrigued me, that before writing the book, you thought water fasting was the most powerful metabolic intervention you'd ever encountered in four decades of clinical practice. Then you changed your mind. Why?

That's a great question. Because.

It was initially advised by.

Walter Longo and Brian Walsh that that probably wasn't the best idea for two different reasons long ago, primarily for compliance. But I think that might be related to his very thick Italian accent and his inability to communicate effectively with his patients. But Brian Walsh, for another reason, not only compliance, but also it metabolically is not optimal and it largely is a result of the fact that we live in the 21st century and we have massively increased exposure to the people who were fasting for thousands of years that, that they didn't have, and that is to these toxins that are produced chemically and industrially. And most all of these toxins, certainly not all of them, but the vast majority of them, are fat soluble. And because of that, they're stored in your fat. And when you are water fasting for a long time, you will release and liberate these toxins. And most people have impaired detox systems and as a result of that, they're going to cause the side effects and the symptoms that most people have when they do extended multiple day water fasting.

Okay, got it.

So, and let me break that down a little bit now. There's, there's three phases, right? Phase one is when you convert your body, converts that fat soluble to water soluble. And that's not a problem. You don't need to improve that because your body does that automatically. What most people have a problem with is phase two. And that's where you attach these molecules to the toxin like a methyl group, sulfur, acetyl group, amino acid, glycine or glutathione.

And that allows you to, that makes them much less reactive and easier to excrete so that you can eliminate them effectively from your body. But you also need some food, specifically amino acids and proteins to fuel this process. And if you don't have any, you're going to have side effects, which is what the primary. So there's two primary reasons I don't recommend it. One is because of the compliance, which I think is a real issue for most people. People, you know, the vast majority of people will not do it. But then secondarily, I think it's going to hurt you potentially more than help you.

Okay? So essentially, even in as little as five days, you can overwhelm your detoxification pathways. Because we're living in this post industrial era where we kind of have this unnatural environment, we're exposed to a lot of toxins. You could, you could perhaps theoretically argue that if you live on a pristine Himalayan mountaintop and never travel, you could probably get, get away with water fast and not have to worry about some of the Detoxification reactions.

Absolutely. I'm sure there's people in the world who don't have heavy burdens of that and that wouldn't be an issue.

But otherwise you'd need frequent refeeds to make sure that you have what you need to enhance these detox pathways.

Yes, well, and here's the other massive thing too. If you're going to do a multi day water fast or even a fasting mimicking diet according to Longo's instructions, which is pretty expensive, it's $300 for five days. So you're going to probably even he does if you're sick people doesn't recommend it more than once a, once a month, but probably once a quarter for most people. So you're only going to be getting the benefits of this activity for, you know, 20, 30 times a year. Whereas if you do the keto fasting like I described, and we'll discuss in more detail in a moment, you can get it more than 100 times a year. So collectively you're going to get far more benefit by doing it more frequently. So you may not get as much detoxification autophagy benefits, but because you're doing it more frequently, collectively it will be more effective.

Okay. Now you also talk about the dark side of the of fasting in general. As a matter of fact, you have an entire chapter devoted to the dark side of fasting. Why did you devote an entire chapter to the dark side of fasting even beyond just water fasting?

Well, for the reasons I just mentioned, primarily because of the detoxification impairment, because your body needs some fuel, primarily protein. I've noticed personally that I've been able to increase my lean muscle mass mass by having protein during the partial fasting days. And we'll discuss what that means in a bit. But the other primary one is compliance. People just won't do it. I mean, I mean they might have been on their deathbed. Even then they still won't consider it.

Yeah, I mean, on a lot of my fasting days and I get lots of questions about this, I use amino acids and even though those are, you know, they're mildly anabolic, that's what I use as my protein source if I'm doing an extended fast.

Well, let me discuss that here because I think that's a great strategy, but I think you could even improve it further because the last thing you want to do when you're seeking to activate autophagy is to give yourself branched chain amino acids which will stimulate MTOR.

Well, yeah, that's because the BCAAs have leucine in them. But if you balance that out with the other amino acids, that's why, why I use essential aminos, not branched chains.

Yeah, but there's still some, so you have to look at the total. So I think that's great. So what does that mean? That means you can eat vegetarian proteins which have very low branched chains, but you wouldn't eat meat. Clearly you don't want to eat meat protein when you're in a partial fast because you're going to activate autophagy and I don't know thisI mean I've got your enzymes, your protein powder. I haven't looked at the concentration of the branched chains in there but. But you want to make sure they're low is the key.

Yeah, it's low in branched chains and then it's all vegan based.

Yeah. Then you're fine. And the other one you can use is bone broth or collagen protein which has virtually no branch chain amino acids. And even though you might have 20, 30 grams of it, you are not going to activate MTOR at all.

Yeah. So you could essentially do a fast, let's say like an extended, extended fast for multiple days or 40 plus hours or something like that and not have to risk a lot of these detoxification side effects by using something like bone broth, vegan based proteins or aminos. Interesting.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. And then.

Your hunger cravings are basically non existent and because normally you're only eating twice a day anyway, maybe some snacks in between if you're, if you're only eating for six hours. So it's like you're only skipping one meal. It's about the easiest sliding off a log. You know, it's just, it's just crazy simple and there's like no hardship, mental hardship.

One other kind of, I guess, dark side you talk about is just ketosis in general or the drawbacks of long term ketosis. What are the drawbacks to long term ketosis?

Well.

It'S like anything in life, if you overdo it, you're going to have a problem. So long term ketcosis means that you're really doing very significant calorie restriction to get there. So the problems with that, especially if you're a woman, is that you can impair or develop some resistance to your thyroid hormones receptors. So you have a thyroid impairment, which is probably one of the biggest ones, but it just stops working as well. You weren't designed to do that. I mean you could be basically going to start switch from fasting to starvation mode, which I mean typically, at least classically, is defined as something longer than a few weeks. But I think you're still going to.

Really not optimize your rejuvenation strategies with that method.

Yeah, a lot of people will. Folks like the ketogains website are of course making popular the notion that a ketogenic diet could support muscle growth or muscle gains in the presence of heavy lifting. But that's still not long term ketosis. And from what I understand, long term ketosis is actually associated with excess catabolism if there are no refeeds present. In addition to the thyroid issues that you mentioned and what I personally experienced because I combined 12 months of strict ketosis because I did Jeff volek study at UConn and had to follow 80 to 90% fat based diet, going into that, I experienced some pretty severe endocrine disruption as well. I got nearly hypogonadal combining long term ketosis with no cyclic refeeds with high amounts of physical activity.

Yeah, that's because fasting primes your body for improvement and it does this by removing the damaged parts through autophagy. But as you just mentioned, and it's the refeeds that are the. It's really the magic of the fasting is the refeed and that's where the opportunity to rebuild your cells and tissues, it's largely as a result of the stem cell activation, but giving yourself the nutrients and the metabolic activation through like strength training exercises to cause that repair and regeneration or regeneration and basically anabolic growth.

So define for me keto fasting and how this concept of cyclical ketosis works and addresses the issues we just talked about.

Okay, the first, as I mentioned earlier, is that you want to be metabolically flexible. You cannot do keto fasting or partial fasting, at least in my belief, unless you're metabolically flexible. So if you do four weeks of eating between only six and eight hours a day. I personally do six hours all the time. I mean, it's very rare I ever violate that window six hours. And if you do it for four weeks, you will invariably. I mean, there are probably some people who won't be, but probably not anyone listening to your podcast. So if you do that for four weeks, you will be metabolically flexible and then you can start a keto fast. So what does. You're only going to have one. So basically you would not eat for 18 hours. So say that window is from 9 to 3. So you haven't eaten for 18 hours, you know, at 3 o' clock in the afternoon and then 9 o' clock the next morning. What are you going to do that day? You're going to have one meal. That one meal is somewhere between 3 and 500 calories. And the way you figure out the number of calories is based on your lean body mass. And you multiply that by 3.5. It's not a rigid science. You just want to have enough calories. What are those calories? I learned this by trial and error. It's most of the calories are protein. You want to definitely restrict your carbohydrates to under 10 grams, ideally certainly under 20. But if you can get under 10 and the fat under 10 or 20 grams and the rest of it are these proteins that the sources we just mentioned earlier, you don't want to have any branch chains or at least minimally minimal branch chains. I mean if you have a few grams it's not going to be a big deal, but you really want to keep them minimized. And you can have things like bone broth, collagen, vegan proteins and also.

Your essential aminos if they're low in branched chains.

And for people who are looking at labels of supplements and things like that, the branch chains would be leucine, that's the particular villain in very high amounts. Yeah. And then isoleucine and valine are the other two.

Or valine is some of the biochemistry people would say. So yeah, those three are the branch chain. So they are, are beneficial. So when do you have those you have on the refeed? The next day. That's when you go wild with the branched chains. It's not that branched chains are evil. There's a time and place for all of them and they certainly shouldn't be taken when you're in keto fast. And that's the key. So then you also want to be careful that you're not taking some of the supplements mentioned earlier, like your colostrum ketone supplements, B12 or methylfolate, because that's going to activate MTOR and that's the last thing thing you want to do well activate MTOR.

When you're trying to activate autophagy because you remember seep, there's a balance because you're going to increase, you're going to decrease ampk, which will activate mtor.

Okay, got it. So essentially the steps here would be incorporate time restricted feeding.

In your book. And I know we mentioned if you're exercising this may decrease a little bit, but it's about 16 to 18 hours per day. And then you recommend to stop eating three hours prior to bedtime. At least you're kind of enhancing autophagy.

I personally do mine, but six hours before. But you know, I'm not married and I, you know, I have no social life, so it's hard for me to do that.

Yeah, I was gonna say we usually have our family dinner like 8:30pm so that's tough. But then you also have, in addition to the intermittent fasting, not eating for three hours hours before bedtime, you simply incorporate the cyclic approach where you're going ketogenic for how many days in a row before you do a refeed.

The restricted six to eight hour eating window is, it depends. Twice a week I'll do the partial fast or the keto fast. So I'll do a keto fast and I'll eat for two days and then I'll do another keto fast and then I'll eat for three days. So you can put two in and a week.

And the keto fast days you're defining as the 16 hour, 18 hour fast days.

No, no, a keto fast day is when you only have that 300 to 500 calorie meal. One meal.

Okay, okay, got it. So every single day you're doing the intermittent fast and then on a couple days of the week you're doing the 300 to 500 calorie, where you're limiting the amount of animal proteins, colostrum, et cetera.

Now this is different than the fasting mimicking diet which does them consecutively. And I think there's benefit to break it up. And then so you're fasting and actually in Longo's approach, He gives you 1,000 calories on day one and then 750 calories on day two, three and four and five. So I'm saying go lower after an 18 hour fast. And when I do this, every time I do this, I will not lose any weight. When I'm doing a 16 to 18 hour or 18 hour intermittent fast. Just don't lose weight. Assuming I'm eating my regular calories. But the moment I go do the keto fast, I'll lose four or five pounds. I'm actually losing less now that I've integrated the protein, increase the protein back up to make that the primary constituent of the calories.

Okay, so if you're getting hungry during this, do you have specific strategies that you use or supplements that you use to manage any type of hunger or appetite cravings?

That's A great question, but.

Most people who are metabolically flexible, if they're engaging in this strategy, will not, not be hungry. I would say the vast, vast majority, probably 90, 95%, if you're not metabolically flexible and you're making the transition, then it's going to be a problem for sure. No question about it. But so traditionally, in that window where you're trying to become metabolically flexible, you can use things like coconut oil or MCT oil or even better, caprylic acid, C8 or even ketone supplements, because that will convert to energy real quickly and give you energy. But I don't recommend that direct during this time, largely because you're not going to be hungry. But if you want something in your mouth, what I do, I've got. I have over a thousand, maybe two thousand aloe plants and it's one of the plant foods I like to eat. So I usually go through about two or three leaves a day and I'll just suck out some aloe gel and that's more than enough to satisfy any mouth cravings or feel, really.

You use aloe gel?

Well, but from. Fresh from the plants. I grow them.

But you can buy aloe gel as well, like on Amazon. Is that anything comparable?

Because there's a lot of ingredients to preservatives and the way they're raised, it's just really careful. There's just so much. I mean, you almost have to live in a subtropical place to grow aloe outside like I do, but it's ideally, it's best fresh.

What about any of these resistant starches, acacia fiber, psyllium husk, anything like that.

You could do them. You have to be careful because there's so many people have sibo, or small intestinal bollocks, overgrowth, and those will actually feed that. If you don't have. If you're confident you don't have that, you've been tested for it, or especially if you've looked at it metabolically with urine organic acid test, then I think you're probably fine. But I wouldn't use them liberally for everyone because there's so many people who have sibo, they don't know it.

Yeah, my old standby is I just chomp on a piece of nicotine gum and have some sparkling water. That. That just works for me.

Yeah, you can drink as much water as you want. Sparkling water to is going great.

Yeah, you can't chew as much nicotine gum as you want. That stuff can be highly addictive. But man, if you're. If you're craving a meal, you pop a piece of that. And I've got this Lucy stuff that's pretty low in artificial compounds and it just, it works like gangbusters for that. So you are also a fan of sauna and supporting the fasting protocol with sauna. I, I love to hear you geek out on your sauna setup. So can you, can you inform me what your sauna setup looks like and also some of your do's and don'ts of using the sauna because you have a whole section of the book devoted to this as well.

I think it's really important and I think one of the experts in this and I first met him at the last Bulletproof event in 2017, I believe Brian Richards, who has the SaunaSpace company, he's the founder of that. And I fully believe that the near infrared sauna that he was promoting was not that good. And I was going to respectfully dialogue with him at that event and in it. And he wound up changing my mind because he's really knowledgeable. In fact, I did an interview with him on my site. It's really the best concise pieces of information about the whole topic because it does get deep into the science. But essentially I believe near infrared is the best, like Brian's promoting. And you can make them inexpensively yourself. The one he sells, at least the one that's EMF free, is like $8,000 or so. And you don't have to go to that level. And it's certainly inconvenient. It's like a small tent. It's not like the sauna you have. But the beautiful thing about there's no EMFs and it is truly indeed full spectrum. Now there's some far infrared saunas that claim they have full spectrum saunas, but they don't. You just cannot do it with a ceramic panel. It's not possible. So you need like a bulb, a light bulb, these incandescent light bulbs. There are heat lamps essentially that produce the full spectrum of infrared. And a lot of people don't realize that 40% of the energy that comes from the sun is infrared. 40%. So it's probably a good likelihood that there's some benefit to regular infrared exposure. And the other beautiful thing about near infrared on Lake Far is that it heats you up pretty instantly. So when I had a farm for a sauna I was using, you'd have to preheat the sauna for like 30 minutes before you get in. Otherwise you're just going to sit there and be Cold, but near infrared, you turn the thing on and you're like warm with within a minute and you're sweating like within five. It's pretty crazy because, you know, a lot of the far from sound is claimed that the rays penetrate your body deeply, but they don't. Far infrared only penetrates a few millimeters. The near infrared does go into like 5, 6 centimeters or even more.

Yeah, they also. The near infrared is a. Is a unique wavelength in that that stimulates the mitochondria to release nitric oxide. So you're getting stimulation of ATP production.

Yeah, 660 is one that does it and then the other one is around 850. I mean, there's probably 10 to 30 on each side of that. That does it. But that's the normal range that's quoted.

But you could also, I think as you talk about in the book, you could just use like a teflon free heat lamp to kind of build your own near IR sauna.

You draw because. Yeah, and there's a Lawrence Wilson who wrote the book. Some. I forget the specific name of it, but it's sauna. But it just type sauna therapy for.

Detoxification and healing is what he wrote.

So he goes through instructions on how to make your own. Now, it's not going to be ideal, but you can definitely do it for a few hundred bucks because you got to be careful of materials because when you're heating them up, if they're going to outgass some toxic chemicals or plasticizers, it's not a good idea. So you got, you know, if you're diligent though, you can, you know, and wise and do your research. You can probably construct something that's a little better and still safe to use. So. But that's something I do every day personally, that I'm home.

Yeah. Do you use any type of. Any type of compounds prior to a sauna?

I know one popular one, I think Lawrence Wilson made this one popular is niacin, for example, to increase blood flow and sweat.

Yeah, There's a number of protocols that use that. The primary one that stimulated that, I think was Wilson. I think he copied that from Hubbard. This Church of Scientology is a Scientologist.

I think he is. Yeah.

So Hubbard promoted that. Large doses up to 5 grams. And I think that's. I did that for a while when I didn't understand things. And, you know, I hooked up with Bob Miller and he helped me understand that niacin has some downsides too. High doses, particularly in that it's A methyl consumer. So it'll suck up your methyl groups, which is one of the reasons why you get the flush. Because it's a histamine release.

Interesting. So especially if you're a poor methylator, you have methylation issues. From a genetic standpoint, you'd actually want to be very careful with niacin.

Yeah. In fact, the people who flush like at 50mg of niacin are probably the ones who have MTHR defects.

So the biggest takeaway here, if you're gonna do some type of keto fasting protocol and want to enhance the detoxification process and you want to get the most bang for the buck out of a sauna protocol, you should ideally try choose low EMF and as much near infrared as you can get.

Yeah, that's the key. And I do about 30 minutes and then you want to combine it with a little cold thermogenesis. I'm not as brave as you are and have a 30 degree or 35 degree ice tub out in my backyard, but I've got a pool that typically, at least in the winter, is down somewhere between the high 50s to the 60s, which I find comfortable.

Sounds bomb.

Much below. Below high. Yeah, below 50s. That just. I'm not going to do it. It's just, I just, you know, life's too short. I might have a little. And I think you get the benefits. Ray Kronos did a lot of research on cold thermogenesis, and he told me personally that 67 was probably a sweet spot if you do it like for 15 or 20 minutes.

Oh, really? He told me 55. That bastard. I've been going all these years.

Yeah, I think he told me that he didn't like you. This is why he said 55.

He was punking me. Interesting. Okay, so the book is called Keto Fast. I think about time that this podcast goes live. You should be able to grab this off Amazon and certainly pre ordered if it's not live. Yeah, and I'm gonna put a link to everything we talked about too, even the ingredients to Joe's autophagy tea. I'll put a link also to even like the clinics we talked about, like Paracelsus or the True North Cell Center. His. His little trick website for research studies. I took a lot of notes, so I'll link to all of this in the show notes for you.

There's.

There's no reason not to get. Get this book. It's. It's short, but. But chock full of. I mean, there's stuff we didn't even get to. And I think folks are really going to get a lot out of this one. And I'm actually looking forward to your book on longevity, too, Joe, so I may have to have you.

Well, that's not going to come up for a few years, but okay.

Sounds like a. Sounds like a piece of deep work.

But anyways, your book will be mine on that one for sure.

Yeah. Yeah, my book, well, my book isn't just on longevity, but there's a. There's several pretty hefty chapters on it. And that book, I think that comes out in January. So if you subscribe to my newsletter, you'll find out when that one comes out. The show notes for this episode you just heard are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com KetoFast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.comKetoFast and grab the book, too. Give it a read. As usual, Joe, you're chock full of information and I appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing all this with us.

Yeah, likewise. Thanks for the opportunity to share this and hope it really provides. Provides magnificent benefits because it's such a simple strategy and really you don't have to spend virtually anything for it. You're actually saving money because you're eating less food.

Yeah. All right, cool. All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Dr. Joseph Mercola signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.