Q&A 457: The Truth about Alcohol, Ice Cream, & Wearables Accuracy

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast, the truth about whether alcohol is really bad for you. The surprising health benefits of ice cream. Are wearables accurate? What is Brown's gas? And much, much more.

All right folks, here I am, another solo sod. If you listen to podcast 456, the one that came out before this one, if I'm done my math correctly, then you know that I'm gonna be doing a few more of these solo episodes. Mostly cause I have no friends and I like to sit around in my basement talking to you. And also I just have a lot that I sometimes wanna say in between these interviews that I do with really smart people. You know, I have a couple things I wanna contribute myself. Hey, look at me. Look at me. So anyways, I figured for today's episode, let's just jump right in. Everything I talk about, by the way, you're gonna find@bengreenfieldlife.com 4. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com 457. And we're gonna jump right into alcohol. Because there's a lot of hubbub around the Internet right now on the damaging effects of alcohol in any dose whatsoever. Not just heavy drinking on the weekend, but that nice glass of organic wine that you might have at the end of the day to relax and enjoy with friends, it's gonna kill you. It's gonna kill you. It's gonna increase your risk of all cause mortality, right or wrong. So what's the, what's the literature to date? To the date that I'm actually recording this in April 2023, actually say. Well, it is true that there's this J shaped association with alcohol consumption and health outcomes. And what that means is that at a low to moderate intake, alcohol is associated with a reduced risk of certain health outcomes. And that might be because of the cardioprotective effects of Alcoh. Like moderate drinkers have reduced risks for things like heart attacks and strokes. And what that J curve also mean is that it means is that as the intake gets higher, the risk increases. And usually around two to three drinks per day, a little bit higher end for men, a little bit lower end for women, we see an increase in the risk of alcohol. Now we also note that on this J curve, alcohol end abstinence, meaning not drinking at all, is associated with a greater risk, particularly when it comes to cardiovascular risk, than low to moderate alcohol consumption. Now here's the thing. There are some limitations to these type of observational studies. I'm going to link in the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 457 to a fantastic article by Brady Homer that outlines some of these limitations. So first of all, you can't imply causation, meaning drinking alcohol doesn't actually lead to better health, but is correlated with better health when we're looking at alcohol in low to moderate amounts. And that might also be due to the fact that we're socially satisfied, we're relaxed at the end of the day, or with people. People who engage in low to moderate alcohol consumption might be also hanging out with people in social situations. And we know that that is also something that is associated with better health. Low to moderate alcohol drinkers might also be it comes to other alcohol unrelated behaviors, things like their dental hygiene and their socioeconomic status or income or their weight or their exercise routines. And so their better health might not be because of the moderate drinking, but because of some of these other factors. Now, a lot of these studies also don't look at different age groups, the ages of recruitment. They don't necessarily separate out men and women. And so to date, there's been a lot of issues when it comes to the studies. But there was a brand new meta analysis that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It's pretty insightful. So what they looked at was 4.8 million participants and they looked at over 107 studies, or actually not over. They looked at exactly 107 studies. Now what they did was they, they controlled for all those confounding variables that I was just describing. Socioeconomic status, exercise, routine, income, weight, men versus women, age, etc. And what they found was that compared to not drinking at all, low volume drinking, occasional drinking and moderate drinking were actually not associated with an increased risk of all cause mortality. Okay. What that means, in other words, is that the risk of you dying from anything is similar if you drink low to moderate amounts of alcohol to people who don't drink at all. So when I say low to moderate, what I mean is about one drink per week up to three drinks per day, and then once you exceed that, all cause mortality absolutely increases. No surprises here. And the higher amounts, the higher increased risk of all cause mortality. Meaning that if you're drinking like five drinks per day, you got a 35% increase risk of all cause mortality. That's probably not a news flash for you. Now interestingly, when they looked at people who were recruited younger than 50 years old and followed up for at least 10 years until they were age 60 or older, all the drinking groups except for the very low amount of alcohol consumption actually showed higher risk of all cause mortality compared to people who didn't drink at all. In addition to that, female drinkers had a higher risk of all cause mortality compared to men and the women. When they compared women who were consuming two to five drinks per day to women who were lifetime abstainers, the women drinking two to five drinks per day had a 20 to 60% increased risk of all cause mortality. And for males, the all cause mortality was elevated for groups who had three to five drinks per day. So for males, slightly higher in terms of the amount of alcohol that they could get away with. So what this study shows is first of all, alcohol doesn't seem to have any type of lifespan extending effect, at least according to this study. So when we're talking about the cardioprotective effects of red wine or all these other mechanistic proposals for the health promoting effects of alcohol, we can't put any research behind that at all and stand up on those claims. Drinkers are not healthier than non drinkers, but at the same time, low to moderate amounts of alcohol does not make you any less healthy either. Okay, so basically what this big, big study, the biggest one to date that I'm aware of, shows is that if you're drinking in moderation, and I personally think even the parameters, these in the study are a little bit high, like you know, three to five drinks for men, two to five drinks for women on a near daily basis, even though that is not going to necessarily increase your risk for all cause mortality, painting with a broad brush here.

It'S, it's also not going to make you live any shorter. And you know, when you look at cultures around the world like the Blue Zones, who many of them use alcohol as a daily part of life, and that seems sustainable, it seems enjoyable, there's a socially enriching effect. I don't think this is surprising. But basically if you are someone who is avoiding alcohol because you think it's going to make you live longer to avoid alcohol, well that's not necessarily true. And at the same time, if you're drinking alcohol because you've heard it's healthy and it's going to help you to live longer, that's also not true. So the big takeaway message here is that you can, if you're a woman, probably drinking up to two drinks per day, possibly a little bit more, for men, up to three drinks per day, possibly a little bit more, and not necessarily experience a risk of all cause mortality. Now I Still think we should proceed with caution. I suspect that something like a glass of organic wine and for men, maybe two or a very, very clean version of alcohol, like, I don't know, a little Mezcal or something like that on the rocks or maybe an old Fashioned without a lot of sugar in it or. Well, that's probably gonna be just fine. Like I mentioned, I personally will have anywhere from two to a maximum four maybe drinks per week. And everything else for me in the evening is like sparkling water with different essential oils and electrolytes or some of these ketone alcohol alternatives. And so that's basically what's going on right now with alcohol. Now if you want to read the full article or the full paper, I'll link to it if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 4:57 but I actually thought it was, it was, it was pretty interesting to kind of see what the actual, what the, what the actual latest research is showing. So related to that, I figured while we're being all hedonistic and stuff, we might as well talk about ice cream because this is pretty interesting. So there, there was a Harvard doctoral student who back in 2018 was looking at the link between dairy foods and chronic disease. He actually found a pretty unusual conclusion in one of these studies. In diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day seemed to be associated with a lower risk of heart problems. So this is obviously surprising because it's kind of like a mega bomb of dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar. And that should certainly raise some eyebrows. But they actually, in this article that appeared in the New York Times originally that I'll link to in the show notes, they present a few plausible biological explanations for why ice cream, even in diabetics, could potentially be something that is healthy for you. So we know that dairy foods pretty much across the board, low fat dairy, high fat dairy, milk, cheese, they appear to help prevent overweight people from developing insulin resistant syndrome, which is a precursor to diabetes. But when we look at dairy based desserts, in this study that was done at Harvard, there was actually specifically for ice cream, an effect over two and a half times the size of milk for reducing the odds of developing insulin resistance. And so they started to dig into why this might actually be the case. Because again, we know this dairy intake for the most part, unless you have lactose intolerance and you're gonna go decommission a bathroom is pretty good for you, especially high intake of yogurt, for example. But why the heck would that be for Ice cream. Well, first of all, there might be an effect here when it comes to modulation of your microbiome. There's a possibility that some of the probiotic enhancing foods in ice cream combined with some of the prebiotic sugars in ice cream might be affecting the microbiome such a way that it could potentially reduce your insulin resistance risk. There's also potential that the calcium, the magnesium, and the mineral bioavailability in ice cream might also allow it to be somehow a little bit better for the microbiome. Now, there's also, of course, real world evidence. There was a YouTuber who launched what Men's Health called a diet that would make the American Dietetic association bricks. That's literally what what Men's Health said. So this YouTuber was having 2,000 calories a day of ice cream, plus 500 calories a day of protein supplements, plus, speak of the devil, alcohol. He was literally pounding Irish whiskey milkshakes. And after 100 days on the ice cream diet with nothing else, right, just protein, whiskey and alcohol, he lost 32 pounds. It's kind of like that Twinkie diet that I've heard about. And you see this occasionally, just like basically having pure simplicity and eating the same thing over and over again can result if the calories are actually controlled for in weight loss. I'm not necessarily endorsing an ice cream based diet, but it actually is pretty interesting, this whole ice cream saga, how ice cream might actually modulate the microbiome and also your mineral intake to such an extent that it could decrease your risk for insulin resistance. Now, I approach this the same way that I approach the alcohol study, meaning that if you're having a reasonably sized scoop of ice cream at the end of the day and it's not contributing to excess calorie intake, then it's probably not gonna kill ya. I mean, we even know this for things like high fructose corn syrup and fructose sweetened foods. They really only seem to present a high risk for things like non alcoholic fatty liver disease or obesity or insulin resistance when they're consumed in the context of a diet in which calorie int exceeds calorie burn. Meaning if you're eating 2,000 calories a day of ice cream, of alcohol and of Twinkies, then it's actually not as bad for you as some of the orthorexic health population might have you to believe. Now, of course, as you probably also know, it is incredibly difficult to consume things like ice cream and alcohol and Twinkies and not exceed your total calorie allotment for the day, especially because many of these foods trigger what's called a incretin response, a digestive hormone response that makes you want to eat more foods. And I think long term you're going to wind up with a deficiency in micronutrients and minerals and some of the other things that you'd be getting from eating a more widely varied diet. I suspect that long term your microbiome might also take a hit. However, what I'm getting at here is I would love for my podcast listeners to be okay with having a glass of wine with dinner and maybe delving into some ice cream with dinner. Or after dinner, you know, have a cup of ice cream with the kids, sprinkle some cacao nibs or bee pollen or coconut flakes on it if you're like me, maybe a little bit of stevia, chocolate syrup if you're trying not to exceed your calorie intake. And maybe you've also had a glass of organic biodynamic red wine or maybe a low sugar old Fashioned with dinner. This stuff's not going to kill you. What it actually comes down to Most importantly, even though I'm not a pure calories in, calories out proponent, I think that there are some other metabolism effects of foods that we need to take into account, like the thermic effect of food, the bioavailability of nutrients, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it's just looking more and more, at least to me, as though a little bit of hedonism here and there. As long as you're not exceeding your total calorie allotment, the day might not be that big of a deal after all. So you heard it here first. Have your alcohol, have your ice cream, enjoy it. Enjoy it with people, enjoy it with your family. Throw a little bit of hedonism into the mix. It's not going to kill you folks. All right, so this, this next paper that I want you into, speaking of calorie burn, was excellent. I think it's one of the best articles that I've read when it comes to getting stronger. So it appeared in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research called Maximizing Strength, the Stimuli and Mediators of Strength Gains and Their Application of Training and Rehabilitation. So basically what this looked at was all of the different ways that people could get stronger. So what they showed was that your strength gains can be stimulated via both non traditional and traditional methods. Let's go over some of the more traditional methods, things that you should think about if you're just trying to get strong like bull. Because like, for me, I follow a lot of these principles and I only weigh 170 pounds. You know, there was a time in my life when I was 215lbs and weightlifting at a very low body fat percentage when I was bodybuilding. Well now, pound for pound, I'm way stronger and I use a lot of these principles to maintain this, this long lived wiry power and strength that isn't necessarily associated with an increase in bulk and mass because muscle actually does take some amount of energy to carry and to cool. And you know, bodybuilders don't necessari live longer. In many cases they die early due to that added stress and due to, due to, you know, cardiac hypertrophy, you know, enlarged athlete's heart. But at the same time, strength is not necessarily synonymous with getting big and bulky. And we know based on grip strength, overall strength, you know, deadlift weight, et cetera, that there are some, some definite longevity enhancing properties of strength as well. So a few things to think about when it comes to strength. First of all, maximal mental effort. And my friend Ben Pakulski actually talks about this quite a bit, the mind muscle connection, meaning that a greater mental effort during strength training produces greater strength gain. Specifically focusing on the muscle that you're attempting to recruit. And there are even some people, including a guy I'm going to be interviewing soon on the show, if the interview didn't already come out yet, Andrew Triana or Andy Triana of Superbrain, who will incorporate things like visualization or meditation in between sets to increase neural drive for motor unit recruitment. And there are of course some different biohacking modalities. Probably most notably, there's a unit called the halo. It's a trans direct cranial stimulation unit that enhances your motor neuron recruitment when you play it for 20 minutes before weight training. Or you could use visualization or meditation, or you could read a book like the Inner Game of Golf or the Inner Game of Tennis and learn about this idea of priming the muscles mentally. Motor imagery training is what it's called, that can increase strength. Now the next would be maximum neural activation of muscle. So this would be an increase in the neuromuscular recruitment. Now there was a recent study on electrical muscle stimulation and muscle strength gains. And this would be using something like the Catalyst full body electrical muscle stimulation suit or some other method of using electrodes either with your weights or using body weight training. And that study that also appeared in the Journal of Strength Conditioning research showed significant strength gain across 10 different studies on electrical muscle stimulation when it was used to enhance strength. And that probably is due to the maximal neural activation, an electrically evoked contraction. Imagined muscle contractions can do the same thing. And of course, no surprises here. Training with increasingly heavier loads, meaning adding weight to the bar or the kettlebell or the dumbbells every time you go to the gym, all produces an increase in maximal mental effort under external load. So the first two strategies that are highlighted in this paper involve using the mind. The next is involving lifting and lowering movements, what's called concentric eccentric muscle actions. So essentially focusing not just on the lifting portion of a lift, but also on the resisting or the lengthening of the muscle during the lift has a significant increase in the force of the muscle contraction. In episode 456 in which I talked about super slow training, I talked about that gradual switch from fast twitch to slow twitch muscle fiber recruitment and the increase in motor unit recruitment when you're moving, especially in the down phase or the eccentric phase of a workout in a little bit more slow fashion. But ideally you are doing both. You're not just doing eccentric training like negatives, you're not just doing concentric training, but you're incorporating both. I think that's kind of a pretty obvious takeaway, but it's also mentioned in this paper. Next, training through full range of motion. Now painting with a pretty broad brush. If you're moving through a full range of motion, you're generally going to produce more strength. There are some joints that benefit even more from a full range of motion, like if you're training your glutes or you're training your hamstrings or your quads, for example. Those are all muscle groups in which moving the muscle through the greatest range of motion possible can elicit both strength and hypertrophy gains. If it is, for example, the biceps or the triceps, then that doesn't appear to be as important. As a matter of fact, I have an article and I'll link to it in the show Notes, in which I also talk about a newer range of motion study that has a table in it that shows you all of the muscles that do best moving through full range of motion. But if you don't have time to look at that table and you're, you're not quite as anal and type A when you go to the gym, just know that moving through full range of motion for the most part is a good idea. And then the, the last kind of big one that they Talk about here is inducing muscular metabolic stress. What that means is the accumulation of metabolic byproducts, including lactic acid in the muscle tissue during training creates a significant strength enhancement effects effect and and blood flow restriction. Or cats who training using pneumatic cuffs or bands to allow more of those metabolites to stay localized to the muscle during training seems like the best way to cause this to happen. This idea of muscular metabolic stress. So in summary, maximum mental effort using something like visualization, maximal neural activation using something like electrical muscle stimulation and or meditation or visualization, going through the full range of motion and focusing on both the concentric and the eccentric muscle action and then finally inducing as much muscular metabolic stress as possible, all seem to be really good mediators for increasing strength gain. Now they also talked about a few other strategies they mentioned. If you begin each set of resistance exercise in a minimally fatigued state, that helps to maximize long term strength gains. So if you look at CrossFit or you look at like a boot camp style workout, or if you look at many of these workouts that are kind of like doing cardio in between the strength sets, that's actually not very good for increasing strength. If you're in a metabolically fatigued state, that is going to especially over time, diminish strength gain. So if your goal is to just get as strong as possible, have at least a couple of dedicated sessions per week where you're not bouncing back and forth between cardio and strength or you're not training with say like minimal recovery periods. As a matter of fact, longer rest intervals, specifically rest intervals two minutes or longer, are best for increasing strength. That doesn't mean you're sitting there, you know, reading a magazine or just dinking around in your phone, which super annoys me when people are doing that at the gym or watching TV in between your sets instead means that you might be doing some foam rolling, maybe a little bit of extra core work or balance work or something that's still making your body better in between sets, but you aren't actually working in between sets. They also bring up recovery in between sessions for the so called super compensation effect. That makes sense. Just don't train if you can't meet or exceed. As a previous podcast guest of mine, Dan John has said, if you can't find, meet or exceed your previous training sessions performance and you're trying to increase strength, you probably shouldn't go to the gym that day and you should instead do a more recovery based modality. Now, a few of the things that they Talk about is what's called supra maximal training intensity. Supra maximal training intensity. This means that including things that allow the muscle to be loaded even more than what you would be able to produce yourself can be helpful. And there are machines like the tonal, the wall mounted exercise machine with pretty small footprint. I like that machine. Or the X3 bands by Dr. John Jacquesh, or even the expensive but highly effective ARX machine. All of these are training modalities that basically introduce a lot more force into the muscle than you'd be able to generate yourself, especially through the eccentric or negative component. It's very similar to going to the gym with a spotter and having someone actually push the bar down or support you when you're lifting more supramaximally than you'd normally be able to lift on your own. That's incredible for increasing strength. So they've also looked at the use of things like neuromuscular electrical stimulation, whole body electromyostimulation stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation, some of these, you know, more hacky modalities. And all of these actually seem to be pretty good for increasing the neural excitability and motor neuron recruitment that can increase strength. And so these are not just silly as seen on TV biohacks. These things can actually work as well. Same thing could be said for the BFR bands, you know, or the, or the Katsu bands. So in a nutshell, if you want to increase your strength, then you should focus on things like meditation, visualization, potentially some electrical muscle stimulation, or other ways that you can increase motor neuron recruitment, including things like a tdcs like a halo device that you can wear before workout, meditation, visualization, the use of BFR bands when appropriate, long rest periods and figuring out ways to subject your muscles to a higher amount of force than you'd be able to do if it was just your little old self training. So I think a lot of that stuff is common sense. And if you want to dig into the paper to get the full science behind many of these methods, then I'll link to it in the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 457 but I just thought it was a great reminder of the different ways that we can increase strength. Now the next thing that I wanted to bring up kind of, kind of taking a little turn of direction here was neurons. This was a fascinating article that appeared in the neural regeneration research. And what it looked into was the idea that neurons can actually communicate using light, what's called ultra Weak photon emission. So neurons actually use biophotons of light to communicate with each other, not just say, electrical activity or the release of neurotransmitters across the synaptic, the synaptic cleft. The way that this work is that, the way that this works is that biophotons get absorbed by what are called chromophores within a cell. And when the chromophores absorb these photons that are actually produced anywhere from the ultraviolet to the red to the near infrared wave range, that's 200-950nm, you see an increase in, in neural communication. In addition, neurons actually generate these same wavelengths of light to be able to communicate with each other. And you know, if you look at the brain, for example, it's the most energy intensive organ of the body at rest. You can actually burn a significant amount of calories just by thinking and doing amount of a high amount of cognitive work. Well, the brain uses glucose, it uses ketones, it uses oxygen to fuel that energy production. And all of your tissues generate heat when they're metabolically active. And the blood that brings their nutrients spreads that heat throughout the body. And so when we look at the brain particularly, we actually see a high amount of this biophoton emission in cells of the brain. And so if they're using a way to actually visualize light production in the body, you see that neuron specifically, specifically in neural tissue such as the central nervous system, seem to produce a high amount of these biophotons of light. So there's a growing body of evidence that neurons self generate light, ultraviolet, red, near infrared light. And this light, referred to as biophotons, helps the neurons to communicate with each other. Now the reason I'm bringing this up is I think it's interesting that as I've talked about in the past, humans can, can photosynthesize almost like plants, when we're exposed to sunlight and we have the right type of nutrients in our body, like the dark greens and blues of the plant kingdom. Black things like shilajit, or blue things like methylene blue. And now we know that neurons actually use light to communicate. When people talk about us being a light being, it's both literally and figuratively true. And I think this is yet a another reason that ample sunlight exposure or the use of red light therapy, or ideally both, is probably something that's going to be supportive. Not just for things like the skin health or, you know, shining it on the gonads for hormones or something like that, but actually for nervous system communication in general. I also think this lays out a pretty good case for things like that that Violight or Vielight device that I talked about, Vie Light with Dr. Lou Lim, where we discuss all of the different ways that light can be beneficial for the body using something like intracranial or transcranial light exposure. And this is like a headset that you can wear on your head to stimulate neural tissue with light. But it's also interesting to think about the fact that neurons create light themselves. And I'll link to that podcast with Dr. Liu Lim about how you can use light to stimulate neurons a little bit more effectively in the show notes if you want to check it out. Okay, I get asked a lot about the accuracy of wearables like the Apple, the Garmin, the Aura, the Whoop. Well they recently on on a website revealed the results of a study that looked at the accuracy of wearable technology and smartwatches and wearables in general. So I'll give you an overview of what they found and then we'll delve into a few of the specific products, namely the Apple, the Oura Ring, the Whoop, the Garmin, the Fitbit, and the Samsung when it comes to their accuracy. So the highlights are as follows. Wearable devices have as much as a 20% error when measuring heart rate and calorie expenditure and can be off by as much as 100%. Most of them overestimate total sleep time and underestimate wakefulness after sleep onset on average. Exercise intensity, the motion of your extremities during exercise, the wrist position, and any interference like sweat or dirt on the skin, along with skin pigmentation, have all been shown to decrease the accuracy of wearable devices, and they actually tend to underestimate step count by 9%. So let's look at specifically how this is relevant to each of the different devices that you may or may not be using. Apple Watches I'm not a huge fan of those because I think it's like a giant radiating wristwatch, but Apple watches have been shown to underestimate your heart rate by an average of 1.3 beats per minute. Now their accuracy improves, interestingly as heart rate increases. The Apple Watch seems to make miscalculate calorie expenditure by overestimating calorie expenditure by as much as 115%. It tends to have a 0.9 to 3.4% error when measuring your total step count. Now it does correctly identify 97% of the time if you're sleeping when monitoring sleep and it correctly identifies if you wake up during sleep only 26% of the time. It underestimates your heart rate variability by almost a factor or almost by 10 milliseconds. Meaning that if you're tracking your heart rate variability and it's constantly low and using the Apple Watch to do that, that might not actually be accurate. So then we have the Oura Ring. The Oura Ring accurately measures your resting heart rate. It's more accurate than the Apple when it comes to measuring your resting heart rate, only a 3% error. Now it also has a 13% error when measuring caloric expenditure. Okay, so it's not super accurate for caloric expansion, but it's not bad as far as wearables go. It correctly identifies when you're sleeping 94% of the time, so pretty close to the Apple, and calculates total sleep time with 96% accuracy. That's why I actually like the Aura specifically for sleep. It seems to do a pretty good job identifying time spent in light, deep wake and REM sleep and correctly identifying when you wake up during sleep. But like the Apple Watch, it also seems to underestimate heart rate variability by about 10 milliseconds. And it has about a 4.8% error when it comes to step count. Then we have the whoop. The Whoop. On average, heart rate measurements are 99.7% accurate. And it's 99 point or 99% accurate when measuring heart rate variability. So it's one of the better ones, especially when it comes to heart rate variability. It has a pretty high degree of accuracy when measuring sleep, but slightly lower sleep parameters than something like the Oura Ring. At the same time, their product does not count steps because they say that step count ignores intensity and other movements, so we can't really comment. But they do measure something called strain, which takes into account heart rate, physical activity, activities of daily living, etc. So for for heart rate measurements, the Whoop seems pretty good for sleep measurements, the Aura seems pretty good, and the Apple a little bit of both. Now the Garmin is another one that's commonly used that underestimates heart rate variability by 22. So not accurate at all when it comes to heart rate variability. Worse than the Aura, worse than the Apple. It has pretty good sleep monitoring, but its error for step count is way off. Like 23 and a half percent error with your step count and up to a 42.9% error when measuring caloric expenditure. A little bit of an error for measuring heart rate, but only about 1 to 2%. So that's not too bad. But, but the Garmin, I don't think it performs as well as the Aura or the Whoop based on what I've seen from from this particular paper. Now, the Fitbit that underestimates heart rate by an average of 9.3 beats per minute during exercise, that's pretty significant. It's got a 14.8% error when measuring caloric expenditure and it miscalculates step counts by about 9.1 to 21.9% and overestimates total sleep time by 7 up to 67 minutes. And combined with the fact that it doesn't really do sleep, at least to my knowledge, and some of these other variables that things like the Whoop or the Aura or the Apple are doing dictates that I don't think it's the best wearable out there. Might work for exercise, but even for exercise it's underestimating your heart rate by 9.3 beats per minute. And then we have Samsung. Samsung isn't as inaccurate as the Fitbit. It underestimates heart rate by only about 7.1 beats per minute during exercise, a little bit lower error in the step count and a little bit lower error in the energy or the caloric expenditure. It also under reports heart rate variability if you're using the Samsung for heart rate variability by 18.24ms, which is pretty significant. So I know it was a lot of numbers. What's the takeaway? If you're going simple, you don't want to break the bank and you need an inexpensive and affordable way to track your fitness, the Fitbit is going to rank a little bit higher than the Samsung. If you are looking for something that is going to do a good job measuring sleep, measuring exercise, measuring heart rate variability, it's et cetera. There's a wide degree of pros and cons between the Garmin, the Whoop, the Aura and the Apple. But in an ideal scenario, if you didn't want to be weighed down with too much, it appears that doing something like using the Whoop to measure a lot of your exercise parameters and your total daily strain, and then using something like the Aura to measure things like sleep and heart rate variability would actually be a pretty good one two combo if you're one of those crazy transhumanistic biohackers who likes to have a million devices on your body. I personally am pretty comfortable with just using the Aura and the cheapo Timex watch that I wear. But I do know now based on this that I'm getting an underestimation of my heart rate variability by about 10. So if it's saying my heart rate variability is low, it could be a little bit higher than what the aura is actually telling me. And it's not going to be that accurate for calorie expenditure. And also it doesn't do a great job telling someone if they are or are not waking up during sleep. But ultimately, you know, for me it's almost like a toss up between the aura and the whoop. Just depends whether you want something on your wrist or whether you want something on your finger. And if you want the most accurate data possible, you could actually do both. Both the ring and the whoop. I'll link to the full article in the shownotes@bengreenfieldlife.com 4:57 if you want to check this out. My voice is cracking a little bit. I realize it's probably because I've been up since the butt crack of Dong. So I went turkey hunting this morning. So at the time I'm recording this, it's about noon and I've been up since about 3:00am so sorry about the voice, but nonetheless I'm going to proceed so the last one that I wanted to mention was a really, really great article called Thomas Jefferson's Ten Rules for Life. This appeared on a fantastic website called called the Art of Manliness. And there was an 1825 letter to his friend John Spear Smith that highlighted Jefferson's refined list of what he called his Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical life. Because over years Thomas Jefferson took a list of 10 life rules and he shared these with his children, his grandchildren, and his friends who were looking for guidance on parenting their kids. It's kind of interesting because I've actually been doing the same. I have a book coming out next year called Precepts. It's a hundred different rules for life. So I'm overachieving by Thomas Jefferson 10x But I'll probably still never be the President. Nor do I have a deep desire to be the President. But nonetheless, Thomas Jefferson has 10 and they're pretty good. I'll go over them with you. You can read the details in the article, but here you go. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. In other words, procrastination, despite being difficult to overcome, is something that's going to hold you back in life. So never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Or as the ancient Chinese proverb goes, the best time to plant a tree 20 years ago or today. Just get it done. Number two never trouble another for what you can do yourself. Thomas Jefferson was a big fan of a self reliant spirit and while I am a fan of delegation, outsourcing and having a little bit of a Tim Ferriss four hour workweek type of approach to business and life, if you can do something yourself, you should at least learn how to do it and then decide if it's something that you want to continue to do for yourself so that you can build your self reliance. I don't know if I agree with full self reliance. Sometimes I think that can be tied to ego, but nonetheless general self reliance I think is a pretty good idea and you're going to survive in the zombie apocalypse also. So there's a bonus. Number three Never spend your money before you have it. Of course not all debt is bad. It could make things like home ownership possible, for example, but too much of the wrong sort can be enslaving. The more you reduce your debt, the more your peace of mind, security and freedom to pursue opportunities is going to grow. And there's too many people leaving paycheck to paycheck. So I I like Thomas Edison's idea there. Even though I'm a fan of smart debt, I'm not a Dave Ramsey cash is king type of guy. I think putting your cash to work for you in a prudent way is a good idea. But ultimately, never spend your money before you have it. Next Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap and this will be dear to you, meaning it will cost you dearly if you're buying what you do not want because it is cheap. Shopping bargains, Shopping bargain websites, going shopping on Black Friday and just seeing what's on sale. Thomas Jefferson would not have been a fan of that because it builds up clutter. Items that are poor quality that need to be replaced or expensively fixed that robs you both. Money and time is something that often occurs from budget shopping for deals. Know what you want, know truly what you want. Find a good deal on it. But don't just go shopping and see what's on sale. Anybody practicing Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day or Cyber Monday may want to think twice about that if they want to follow follow Thomas Jefferson's rules for life. Next. Number five Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold. It says pride elevates your sense of superiority so that you arrive at the irrational belief that the world revolves around you. And the antidote to pride is humility, the recognition that you aren't the center of the universe, and that even if you've already achieved considerable success, you still have plenty of room for learning and and growth. I would tend to agree on that. I mean, religious and spiritual thinkers from St. Augustine to C.S. lewis have all taught that pride is the root of many sins and many moral failures. Check out Ryan Holiday's book Ego is the Enemy if you want to learn more about that Next. He says, I like this one. We never repent of having eaten too little.

This is so true, right? Like most of us have a common regret in overindulging rather than under indulging. As a matter of fact, the only time I really beat myself up for having eaten too little would be like if I'm in the middle of a workout and going hypoglycemic. Or I wake up at like 2am Because I didn't have enough calories or carbohydrates with dinner. But ultimately, if you forward think, when you are engaged in any hedonistic effort, including alcohol, ice cream and Twinkies, you should think about moderation. The Japanese, I forget the word. It's hara bocchi hari, something like that. Like push yourself away from the table when you're 80% full. But Thomas Jefferson has a good observation there. I like that we never repent of having eaten too little. Your appetite could be your ally rather than your enemy if it's properly harnessed, as Plato argues. Number seven. Nothing is troublesome that you do willingly. Nothing is troublesome that you do willingly. Some people have a tendency to go through life acting like they're constantly put upon. Like, I have to go to work, I have to volunteer, I have to call my parents. But when they're putting that obligation amongst themselves, they act resentfully and with a high dose of annoyance. So instead think in terms of getting to do something, carrying out what you do because you know that it's something that you're doing willingly of your own volition. And if you find yourself living a life in which you're constantly, constantly engaged in troublesome activities that you aren't doing willingly or of your own volition, but because the world has asked you to, or the world expects you to, then you may want to step back and do a little bit of life reinvention so that you're living your day doing the things that even if they're hard work, you're willingly doing of your own volition. So next, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened? Meaning worry. When we worry about Things that won't necessarily happen but that are outside our control, we experience needless anxiety. So of course this ties into stoicism. Right? Don't worry about the things that you cannot control. And thankfully the reverse is also true. You can reduce life's pain by only worrying about the things that actually happen and not those that only may occur. Yes. Plan for the future. Yes. Create worst case scenario. Outcome comes just so you are prepared. But don't spend your life worrying about things that won't necessarily happen. Whether it's the next zombie apocalypse or world war or anything like that. Be prepared, but don't spend your life in worry and anxiety about it. Number nine, take things always by their smooth handle. That's another stoic inspired life rule. It comes from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who thought that there would be an easier and a harder way to do just about anything. And a lot of people do go through life in hard mode. They think if something isn't difficult, they aren't doing it correctly. And while many good things are hard, the fact that something is hard doesn't necessarily make it good. There's a great book called essentialism by Greg McCown in which he asked the question, and I've seen Tim Ferriss also ask this, what if this could be easy? And then you outline the easiest way to tackle a problem. Now sometimes I think some, you know, for example, the minimal exercise, you know, biohacking community who want to get by on, you know, one one minute hard effort per week, tend to take this to its finest extent and actually try to make things too easy. Okay. Things still need to produce outcomes. And sometimes you do need hard work. Blood, sweat, tears, chopping wood and carrying water. But you should also seek the easy outcome if it or seek the easy process, the easiest road to the top of the mountain if it does exist. And I would say the one exception to that would be in the realm of exercise and body physical improvement. It's usually the harder path that actually pays off the most, assuming you're not over training. And then number 10 when angry, count to 10 before you speak. And if you are very angry, count to 100. I love this. The deep breath before you speak, managing anger, the hot emotion with something as simple as counting. And Jefferson was a wise guy. Count to 10 when you're angry or 100 if you're very angry. That's a great tool to prevent your temper from getting the better of you. Now, I'm not naturally a very angry guy, but I do make sure when I'm replying to an email that irks me or I'm about to jump into a difficult conversation. I breathe. I do breath work. I count. I go out in nature and take a quick walk or do something that ensures that I'm keeping my emotions at bay. Now, the article Thomas Jefferson's 10 Rules for Life that I appeared on, the Art of Manliness, does go into a lot more details, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight into Thomas Jefferson's 10 Rules and Ways that you can implement them. And I'll link to the Full article at BenGreenfieldLife.com 457.

All right, want to cover a few questions here? We have a question from Madison Jewell from Instagram. If you want to ask a question by the way, you can do so@bengreenfieldlife.com or any of my social media channels. You can find me typically under Ben Greenfield, Ben Greenfield Life or Ben Greenfield Fitness. Ask your questions. We look at them every week and I pick a few that I want to reply to on the podcast. So I got two today. An NAD supplement that isn't intravenous. Now this is interesting. So many of you are aware of nad. As you age, NAD concentrations in your blood decrease and low NAD concentrations due to NAD's mitochondrial and cellular protective properties are associated indeed with cell aging. All your living cells need NAD to function. All 30 trillion cells in your body need NAD to function, and a dip in NAD concentration can negatively affect cell function, DNA repair and an acceleration of cell aging. Because of this, many people will supplement with, for example oral nicotinamide riboside or nr, or oral NMN or oral nad. And that can certainly be a good strategy. But then some people will really get their levels up by doing NAD IVs. And this is interesting because NAD can help to control the production of a protein in the brain called PGC1 Alpha. Helps keep your brain cells protected against oxidative stress. It may lower the risk of heart disease, specifically age related dysfunction in the arteries. It may lower cancer risk, except in the case of breast cancer that's pre existing, in which case it seems to accelerate tumor growth. So just something to think about there. As far as a caveat, it could support muscle function as you age, meaning lower NAD levels can negatively impact muscle strength, muscle endurance and overall function. It helps to maintain a healthy circadian rhythm. Which is why if you're sleep deprived, dosing with nad either orally or with an IV or via this other method I'll mention can be be fantastic for a day of sleep deprivation. For example, today I'm using a lot of NAD and creatine because I'm going off three hours of sleep just is what it is. But I certainly will use things like NAD in a scenario like that. However, what Madison is asking is, is there an NAD supplement out there that is not intravenous? Well, there is. And if we are not talking about oral consumption, it would be patches. Okay, so for example, up in my refrigerator I have patches. I get mine. There's a few different vendors I get mine from called Ion Layer. I'll link to it in the show notes. But Ion Layer or any of these transdermal patches deliver nicotine, adenine, dinucleotide, NAD plus through your skin. Now, they've actually looked into these and they've shown pretty good promise in pre clinical studies and clinical trials. One one study that was published in the Journal of Nature in 2019 found that NAD patches increase NAD levels in humans by up to 50% and improved markers of cardiovascular health. There was another study in the journal aging cell in 2020 that found that NAD patches improved mitochondrial function in mice and increased lifespan. There was another clinical trial in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry that found the NAD patches reduced cravings and withdrawal symptoms in people with opioid use disorder. So, you know, my only beef with NAD patches is if you use them frequently on the same area of skin, they can result in some itching and some skin irritation. So even though I use them, especially on sleep deprived days and for long haul plane flights, specifically for the cellular protective properties, I vary where I place them. Typically for me, it is the inner thigh or the outside of the buttocks, two relatively hairless areas where they seem to stick pretty well. So I think that patches are a fantastic way to get your nad. And the way these patches work is they come with two different vials of solution, saline solution. You mix the NAD powder up in one solution and you put that on one side of the patch and then the regular saline solution goes on the other side of the patch that then starts to push NAD into your system once applied to your skin via the process of electrophoresis. Now the other thing, or rather technically it's called iontophoresis. It's a medical technology. It delivers components through to your body through the skin using voltage, a voltage gradient. So it basically has a small electrical field on a small area of your skin. And that electrical field, like a battery, is produced via the different salinities of the solution on both sides of the patch. The patches I use ion layer also come with some handy tape to really keep it nailed down because you leave it on for 14 to 16 hours and it'll get like anywhere from 500 to 1000 milligrams of NAD into your system during the day that you wear it. And I think six come in a pack. It's like this monthly subscription. I think that's a fantastic way to get NAD in. There's another guy named Dr. John Laurence who's been on the podcast before, before and his company Mitozen makes an NAD suppository literally right up the bum. And this would be a way to get NAD into your system during a night of sleep. Some people find that NAD makes them excitable and don't like that solution. And then if they try to do it daytime, well, you try walking around clinching a suppository in your butt cheeks. It doesn't work out so well. But if you are able to sleep with NAD in your system and I'll use these sometimes, and this is another option that I use for a long haul plane flight if I don't have the patches around. I think a suppository or a patch is better than oral intake in terms of increasing bioavailability of nad, but not quite as expensive or as much of a hassle as an iv. Now, all that being said, I do take oral NAD as well. Right now I use a form called NAD3. It's a, it's a different compound of NAD, seems to be very bioavailable and I get that from a, from a supplement called Bio Stacked. It's kind of part of my morning age reversal stack. So that's the skinny on how to get NAD into your system without necessarily getting an iv. It'd be the patch or the suppository. The patch is made by ion layer, the suppository by Mitozen. I'll link to both in the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com 457 and then Brian asked, what do you think about a filtration water filtration system that incorporates brown gas? Brown gas. So what is brown gas? Well, I've been seeing a lot more talk about brown gas in the supplement world or the, or the health optimization world. It's also known as hho gas. It's a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. You make it by electrolyzing water. So they've used it in the past for welding, for cutting, for energy generation. But now it's something that seems to be taking off when it comes to its, its health applications. So, you know, I've learned a little bit about Brown's gas recently and what happens is typically some kind of a machine, what's called an electrolysis machine, splits water, just regular old H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. Usually that happens by putting two different electrodes into a, a solution that has a catalyst and then water and then running a direct current through the solution. Now what happens when you do that is a great amount of hydrogen builds up in the water. So you're getting a lot of the benefits of hydrogenated water. But it appears that Brown's gas seems to have some other beneficial effects in the body, possibly because the hydrogen bioavailability or some other properties of it that seem to allow it to cause some pretty significant health effects in people. You may have heard about Dr. Gerald Pollack, who did the study on water up at the University of Washington and produced what he calls exclusion zone water. Well, technically that form of water and its gel like state is very similar to the hydrogen rich water that you get by using some type of electrolyzing tool to actually make Brown's gas. So the question is, what kind of tools do you use for this? Well, when I first started looking at Brown's gas, even though I don't really have like a Brown's gas filter or anything like that in my house right now, the biggest name that kept coming up was this guy named George Wiseman. He has a website called Aquacure and they create a bunch of Brown's gas generators that produce this HHO rich water. And there's another company that does a very similar machine. It's called hydrogen4health. Hydrogen, the number four health. It's a competitor to Aquacure, but they also make a Brown's gas producing solution. Now apparently some electrolyzers are more efficient than others at making the water, but these two are apparently the best that are out there on the market. From the research that I've done. There is also a way that you can, can breathe Brown's gas. And there's a company called Hue Light out of South Korea that makes incredibly high hydrogen flow. They use what's called a proton exchange membrane to generate hydrogen that is very, very similar to Brown's gas in terms of you actually breathing in that, that HHO enriched gas. Now I'm no expert on Brown's gas, but what I did look into was whether or not you could use this stuff to even like treat a really large body of water like let's say a pool or an ice tub or Something like that. So you could literally just be bathing in this hydrogen oxygen mixture for the health benefits. And.

The two that appeared to come up are made By Eagle Research, eagle-research.com they make what's called a water torch that literally can treat an entire body of water if you want to like take Brown's gas and you know, put it in your pre existing cold tub or swimming pool or something like that. Now as far as the health effects of Brown's gas, it appears to be pretty similar to the type of health effects that you would get from the use of hydrogen. And in many cases you're actually inhaling this gas like the tools I've just described, sort of like a mask that you wear and you're inhaling it. This isn't necessarily drinkable like hydrogen water would be, but you're getting the same effects of drinking hydrogen water from drinking this, this Brown's gas. And it appears to have an anti inflammatory effect, a little bit of almost like an anti allergenic effect, seem to modulate the immune system a little bit. Like it's really, really interesting and you know, I don't know all the different mechanisms of action, but based on the selective antioxidant capability of something like supplementing with hydrogen. And it's something I'm looking into and I just thought I'd open the discussion on this podcast because it appears to be something that's increasingly common. I might get my hands on a Brown's gas generator at some point so that I can produce this so called electrically expanded water and assess the results for myself. But in the meantime, I'd be curious if any of my podcast listeners have experimented with this much this not just the use of like hydrogen tablets or hydrogen water generating machine, but an actual Brown's gas machine because it seems like it's something that could help with a variety of health issues. I mean if you go to a molecular hydrogen institute, they have a lot of medical studies on the use of hydrogen. And based on what I've seen as far as the mechanism of action, a lot of that stuff would cross directly over into concepts related to the use of Brown's gas. So that's basically what it does and what it's all about. And I'll link to some of those resources that I talked about in the show notes if you go to Ben Graham, greenfieldlife.com 457 so I actually am going to be going over to London here in a couple of weeks for the health optimization summit. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com calendar. You can see that and a few of the other side events that I'll be doing over there in London. But because of that, I actually have a reporter from the UK calling me on the phone in about five minutes. I'm gonna have to end this podcast pretty soon. Soon. But what I'll do is I'll put all the show notes for you@BenGreenfieldLife.com 457. If you're listening to the show and you get a chance, please leave it a review. Wherever you're listening in, go to the website, ask your questions. I always have some fantastic links to resources. If an article's out of date or can't be found or has a paywall a lot of times provide the archived link of it so you can read it pretty easily. If you want to take a deeper dive into anything that I talked about, you can also ask your question questions over there@bengreenfieldlife.com 457 and I'll read them and try and provide you some direction based on your questions. And that all being said. Yeah, leave the podcast a ranking. Ask your questions. Thanks for listening. I hope this has been insightful and informative for you. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield. Have an amazing week.