The 30 Year Old Scientist Phenom Who Runs a 2:30 Marathon, Deadlifts 420 Pounds & Drinks...

Oh, I'm breathing hard. I have this heavy bag outside my office. My I used to have a rule where I do jumping jacks. If I've been kind of sitting around for more than an hour, I get up and do 100 jumping jacks. Now I hit the heavy bag fast as I can, as far as I can 100 times and I come back in here into my office and I record podcasting magic for you. In this case, very magical. We're Talking to a 30 year old scientist phenom who runs a 2:30 marathon. He deadlifts £420 and he drinks of all things, hydrogen enriched water. You don't know what that is. You're about to learn. This podcast, speaking of cool things, is brought to you by this brand new incredible bicycle that I own. This is not a bicycle that I ride to the grocery store. This thing actually sits in my house and it allows me to get live streamed classes from a New York City studio, any type of classes that I want. Now bicycling, as you may or may not know, is a fantastic way to not just burn calories, but you generate a huge amount of mitochondria. You can do crazy high intensity interval workouts on it with this new program. I can do 20 minute burns, I can do hip hop, I can do rock and roll, low impact, high intensity. I've got over 8,000 on demand classes that I can do and I can ride live with other people. It's called Peloton. It's this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings these live studio classes right into your home. Or in my case behind me in my office. It's got a 22 inch HD touchscreen, this super silent belt drive. So it's really quiet so I can actually hear the workouts that I'm doing. Not like a super loud indoor trainer like a lot of these things are, and a tiny little compact 2 by 4 foot footprint so you can put anywhere, living room, basement, office, bedroom, behind your refrigerator, you name it. So they're giving all of you a limited time offer to get your own Peloton. Well worth it. Here's how you go to 1peloton.com let me spell that out for you. 1o n e peloton p e l o-t o n.com 1peloton.com and you get $100 off any accessories with your Peloton bike purchase and a great workout at home anytime you please. No driving to the gym. 1 peloton.com use the code GREENFIELD and yeah, you do this at home. But you aren't lonely on your spin bike because you can be with a whole bunch of other people. You just plug into other people, do the workout with them. It's amazing. Check it out. This podcast is also brought to you by MVMT Watches. And they've sold over a million watches now. And the reason for that is these things look, they look super stylish. They're minimalist. I've got four of them, actually. I can rotate between my white one. I've got this jet black one. My wife has this white one that I think looks super hot on her wrist. They've got fashion forward bracelets. They just added to their collection in classic, classic cuffs and trendy barbed wire designs. Finishes like gold and rose gold and matte black, and you name it. Those are just 40 bucks. And the watches themselves look like these super expensive Rolodexes, but you get them for pennies on the dollar. And they even have these custom new Valentine's Day boxes where you get a watch and a bracelet, and there's nothing better than opening up what you thought was just a bracelet and getting a watch too, or vice versa. So Valentine's Day is just around the corner. This is perfect for Valentine's Day. Perfect. And there's still time to get it 15% off. 15% off. These movement watches, you just go to MVMT.comBen that gives you free shipping and free returns. MVMT.comBen all right, let's go chat with Tyler.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

It's hydrogen gas. I mean, this is the jet fuel that you're talking about, or rocket fuel, really. Right. You have hydrogen, oxygen. They combust together. You make water. Hydrogen is three times more energy dense than gasoline. This is the molecular hydrogen we're talking about. Powers the sun, powers the cars, also powers the body. Right? Really? If we look at the metabolic pathways that hydrogen activates and exercise activates, and we do some parallels, we do some correlations. Here we see exercise can activate, say, SIRT3 expression, which is amazing for exercise. So can hydrogen.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, Ben Greenfield. And my guest on today's podcast is kind of a phenom. He was introduced to me by Dr. Joseph Mercola, who happens to be one of the more popular docs who I've ever had on this show. And Dr. Mercola filled me in on this guy and on the concept that we're going to talk about today, which is molecular hydrogen. Not as boring as you might think. It's actually really interesting stuff. And his name is Tyler LeBaron. Tyler, am I pronouncing your name right? Is it Le Baron or Le Baron or Le Baron?

Depends. I mean Paul Francais Le Baron.

All right. Yeah, Baron.

All right. Le Baron, which is French for the bear. I'm just going to make that up. Yeah, we'll roll with it, dude. So Tyler's 30 years old. He's run a 2:30 marathon. You can. What do you deadlift, dude? Like 450 pounds.

You know that? Yeah, I, that's, you know, 420 is my, is my max.

Dr. Mercola told me 450 ish. So we're in the ballpark, you know.

And I told him, don't, don't be just saying things that aren't true. He also said I was doing it too. No, that's what I would like to do.

Yeah, well, you're trying to qualify for the trials, right?

Well, I would, you know, I would like to see if I could make that qualifying time. That would be pretty sweet.

Yeah, it would be. And you're one smart cookie. So listen to this, folks. Tyler is the founder and executive director of the Molecular Hydrogen Foundation. He has a degree in biochemistry. He interned at Nagoya University in Japan in the department of neurogenetics to research the mechanisms of hydrogen gas on cell signaling pathways. He's the director of the International Hydrogen Standards Association. The International Molecular Hydrogen Association. Let's see how many times I can say hydrogen. He speaks around the world at different medical conferences, specifically on biomedical hydrogen and the use of hydrogen and hydrogen research. And he studied everything, physiology and exercise physiology and nutritional biochemistry, molecular cell biology, quantitative chemical analysis, biology analysis techniques. And he has researched just as many things, from vitamins and minerals and nutraceuticals to biological and chemical properties of creatine, therapeutic uses of exercise for disease prevention and treatment, to free radical biology and medicine, which we'll delve into today. Whole host of topics. But you know what's most interesting, Tyler?

What's that?

You studied at Nagoya University.

Well, yeah, for my internship. That's kind of the epicenter of a lot of the hygiene research. And so I had the opportunity to go down there and actually do the research, you know, in 2013 and really get involved in it. Yeah.

You know what's crazy about that is I used to go to Nagoya every year to race in the Ironman triathlon that they used to have over there in Nagoya.

Oh, Honda Desca.

Yeah. I'd fly into Central Airport. You know the airport?

Yep. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. And the triathlon's like, literally, like, right across the street. It was amazing. I'd go there and just, like, stuff my face with sushi and get amazing massages, visit some Japanese saunas, do the triathlon, take the bullet, train over to Kyoto, hang out in Kyoto, and then fly home is like, one of the. One of the funnest things I do every year. Amazing.

That's awesome. I just barely got back from Nagoya weeks ago.

Most people go to Tokyo or Kyoto, but I kind of like that area right now around Nagoya. A lot of people don't even realize they have this amazing airport you can fly into a lot of times, a lot lower cost than even Tokyo or Kyoto. So.

Yeah, interesting.

So before we even delve into molecular hydrogen, man, I'm curious about your training protocol, because not a lot of people can deadlift over 400 pounds and run a 230 marathon. I'm just curious how you. How you're able to lift heavy and run as fast as you do in an endurance sport.

Yeah, they are kind of a diametrically opposed, you know, training. But I think that's the first thing is most people don't train that way. And you can. Most people, if they're runners, they just. First off, most people who run don't lift any weights at all. And then those that do typically lift just very lightweight and lots and lots of reps. And conversely, those people who are lifting the heavy weights or something, they don't run a lot. And my goal has just been I want to be strong. I don't care about being huge and doing things for hypertrophy and have big muscles or things. I just wanted to be strong, so I would lift heavy weights. And that's the most important way to get stronger, to induce that stimuli for the central nervous system and everything, to actually lift more weights. Because the correlation between hypertrophy and strength is not as strong as most people think that it is. So I guess when it comes to my training for weightlifting, it really is focusing on lifting heavy. More like a power Lifter.

So when you do that, are you doing like concurrent training? Meaning are you.

Oh yeah.

When you go to the, to the weight room, are you doing like running followed by powerlifting or weight training and then back to running? Are you completely separating your aerobic training and your strength training?

It doesn't matter. As long as I'm doing both, it's fine. And I'll just go, I'll just, for example, I'll have a focus. So let's say my focus is on strength training now. I want to get my bench press up, my deadlift up, you know, whatever, up as high as I can. That's my primary focus. That's what I do first, that's what I'll do, say in the morning or something. And then for running, I'm just doing high intensity intervals. I'm just staying in the best shape that I can. And then after I kind of start getting tired or plateauing a little bit of the heavy weights and things and I'm just looking for a little change and I want to get back into the running, I just switch them a little bit, just like a teeter totter, just kind of lopsided a little bit more. And I'll start focusing a lot more on the running, getting in more distance, getting in more intense training times and then kind of maintain the weights and I'll just keep on going back and forth, back and forth and then changing. If I'm going to go for a competition for weightlifting, focusing on that and then, oh, marathon's coming up, I want to focus on this. So that's kind of how I do it. So I try to train both of them every day, but as long as I'm doing them both at the same time, whether in the same day or in the same training session, it doesn't matter. I like to do it different times of the day because that way I can get some recovery in before I go do my next bout of exercise. I want to be as much recovered as I can so that I can get a good exercise session.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. So even though you're, you're specifically focusing on a certain, at a certain time of year, on strength or on endurance, you're still all year long training both strength and endurance in the same training cycle.

Yeah, one I'm trying to maintain. Not necessarily trying to improve, just trying to really maintain. I mean, we look at the studies in the VO2 Max. For example, going out and doing a few bouts of high intensity exercise a few times a week can really maintain your VO2 max pretty well as opposed to the enormous amount of time is required to improve your VO2 max.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Are you following any kind of special diet or do you use any special biohacks or anything like that? Any little secrets that you have up your sleeve as a scientist?

Maybe.

Sometimes I tell people what I do and they're like, wow, that's amazing. That's such a good idea. But I. But to me, I think, well, that's. What else would you do, right? For example, I do eat as healthy as I can. I really stay away from just refined sugars and carbohydrates. Not necessarily saying they're just bad, bad, but there is good, better and best. Right? And there's better choices, better options. And so I try to eat clean in those regards. And then the timing of nutrition I think is important. For example, when do you take your protein? Which protein do you take? Well, for me, I don't take that much protein at all. In fact, most of the time I don't take any protein because I just try to eat well. But if we look at the research, we know that 20 to 30 grams of protein is really all you really need. And Primarily it's the BCAAs that we need anyway, specifically leucine. So 20 to 30 grams of protein.

You'Re getting most of your benefits. But for me, like, if I'm hungry, then I'll take protein. Before I go workout and take a look at the research on protein supplementation before a workout. It's amazing. So if I'm hungry before I work out, I'll take protein. If I'm not hungry because I just ate a couple hours ago, then I'll go work out. And as soon as I'm done, then I'll take protein. But unless I'm really training, trying to get to that next level and kind of plateauing or something, I usually don't even take protein.

That's interesting. And that's also interesting what you said about BCIAs, because I actually don't really use BCAAs. There's some really interesting studies on depletion of some of the vitamin Bs with use of BCAAs and some pretty extreme glycemic variability with the high doses of leucine and then some neurotransmitter issues. I just wrote an article about this. I'm a way bigger fan of essential amino acids and I'll use those, you know, like for example, before or during and after training session for a very similar effect, but you kinda, kinda blunt some of the negative effects of BCAAs withwith like an essential amino acid. Are you familiar with any of that research on BCAAs?

Well, I am, I'm not familiar with that research you're talking about. I mean, leucine is essential for the stimulation of mtor and that is very anabolic. And some of the research I saw a while ago was suggesting that the primary benefit of taking whey protein or different BCAs in general was because of the benefits of leucine specifically. Now I do agree, and I understand just based on common biochemistry principles that taking levels of too much of one specific amino acid can certainly cause problems. And so for me, I actually will first take protein, then if I'm going to the next level.

Essential amino acids, and then if I'm looking to serious competition, I just really want extra push, then I'll look at supplementing in just pure BCAAs or maybe just focus on leucine. And that's for a very short time period. I'm not talking about chronic supplementation for months on end just for a short period to get me to that next level.

Right, you're looking for a pretty extreme anabolic effect. I guess I was more referring to some of the issues people experience with metabolic issues with bcaas. But the other thing is I personally like eaas just because a lot of times I'm competing in endurance sports, so I'm trying to avoid too much catabolism. So I'm trying to flood my bloodstream with as many amino acids as I need for repair post workout. But then also because central nervous system fatigue can be a big issue during endurance sports, the EAAs keep a lot of tryptophan from kind of flooding the blood brain barrier, which the BCAAs don't do quite as well a job of. So it kind of keeps me from bonking during the longer, longer endurance sessions.

So not to look into that.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I should send you, I'll get your address later. I'll send you a bottle of this stuff that I use for the amino acids. Like I. It's like fricking jet fuel. But we're here to talk about a different kind of jet fuel, man. This whole concept of molecular hydrogen. So I guess let's just start here. What is molecular hydrogen?

Yeah, so it's just, it's hydrogen gas. I mean, this is the jet fuel that you're talking about or rocket fuel really. Right. You have hydrogen, oxygen, they combust together, you make water but the combustion, it's amazing. Hydrogen is three times more energy dense than gasoline. So this is the molecular hydrogen we're talking about. Powers the sun, powers the cars, also powers the body, right?

Well, it's not an energy source to the body, but in the sense that it does have some really neat therapeutic and medical effects that we're really just recently finding out. One of the first publications on the hydrogen could give therapeutic effects was actually in 1975 by Texas a and M and Baylor University, and they published a report in the Journal of Science, one of the top journals out there, and they used a hyperbaric hydrogen chamber in an animal model of melanoma tumors. And they found that this treatment, at very high pressure of hydrogen, could basically reduce the melanoma tumors and was really remarkable in its therapeutic applications. But it's not, you know, if you think about the actual utilization or application of a hyperbaric chamber in normal life or in clinical practice, that would say it's not too easy to do. So I think that's why not much research was done until 2007, when there was an article published in the very prestigious journal Nature Medicine. And in that article, they found that hydrogen was very neuroprotective and prevented the toxic damage from ischemia, or perfusion injury that was induced via middle cerebral artery occlusion in a rat model. And basically, when this happens, when you have this hypoxia or this blood flow to the brain and different things, you cause lots of free radicals, lots of oxidative stress, and that ends up causing necrosis and cell death and all these different problems. And hydrogen gas was very effective at preventing that from happening. And it was done at a very low concentration, only 2 to 3%, which is below the flammability level, has to be higher than 4.6% to be explosive. And so now we can see that hydrogen gas could actually be utilized in a clinical setting because it's not flammable. And now, 10 years later, the Japanese government has now approved hydrogen inhalation as an official medical procedure for post cardiac arrest patients, because they're finding that it's actually more effective than conventional treatments like hypothermia, because, see, when the heart stops, it's not so difficult to get the heart started again. You get the heart started again, but then a lot of people die shortly after, because when that blood goes throughout the rest of the body and hits the brain, that blast of oxygen and oxygenated blood to everything starts causing this cascade of all this radical damage and oxidative so administration of hydrogen gas is able to help attenuate and mitigate those toxic effects. And there is a huge study going on right now. 60 patients with maybe 10 or so different hospitals and universities are evaluating the outcomes. And so far the preliminary results are quite promising.

Interesting. So when you're talking about the use of hydrogen in these situations, are you breathing it in or is it a different delivery mechanism? And one of the reasons I ask is I've seen, I've been at medical conferences and health conferences before where folks have walked up and been and had these little tablets that dissolve in water and make little bubbles and they'll drop them in my water and say, hey, I'm hydrogenating your water. This is gonna make it, you know, amazing for you know, as like an antioxidant or to get some of the other benefits that you were just talking about. Likelike. Is that howhow the delivery is occurring in these studies?

Well, yeah, so that's a great question. There's several ways to deliver hydrogen. I mean there's a hyperbaric chamber and actually just as a side note, there are actually hyperbaric chambers that are have been developed now. It's like 2% hydrogen and you just get in the chamber and go through the therapy. But then there's inhalation and that's like with a K cannula, right. Or a gas mask for example. And you just, you know, in China, I was at one on one of the medical clinics there and you go in and you sit on in their chair in their clinic and you inhale hydrogen gas. And they're doing, there's probably 60 or so clinical studies that are currently in progress right now onon the use of the hydrogen gas inhalation. And then there is just simply drinking hydrogen rich water. So when you, you can take hydrogen gas, just like CO2 gas or oxygen gas and you can dissolve it in water and now you have water that has hydrogen gas in it. And this, the solubility is about 0.8 millimolar or 1.6 milligrams per liter. And by simply drinking the water, that also gives remarkable therapeutic effects. And this is the interesting part too is you know, you're going to get a lot more hydrogen gas from inhalation, but that does not necessarily mean greater benefits. And in fact, in one of the studies done actually at Nagoya University in 2012 with a Parkinson's disease model, they found that administration, continuous administration of hydrogen gas in the air. So 24, 7 they were inhaling hydrogen gas all the time. Was not effective in preventing the development of Parkinson's disease. In the animal model, however, the drinking of hydrogen rich water was very effective. So in some cases it appears that drinking hydrogen rich water is actually more effective than inhalation. Now there's been more studies and things been done. There's different pharmacokinetics alter pharmacodynamics, so there's many methods of administration. But what we do know from the clinical human studies and the animal studies is that yes, drinking hydrogen rich water is also very effective and maybe in some cases more effective and maybe in other cases not as effective. But we do need more research.

So how wouldhow would you actually make like a hydrogen rich water? Like what's actually occurring? Because water already has hydrogen in it, right?

Dr. Okay, yeah, that's something good to bring up. So yeah, water is H2O, right? Looks like Mickey Mouse have the oxygen and then the hydrogen's attached to it. But that's, that's the issue. They're attached to the oxygen, they're already bound up. I mean, look at glucose. The chemical formula for glucose is C6, H12O6. So six carbons, H12 hydrogens and six oxygens. Well, just because glucose has hydrogen in it doesn't make it the same as water or doesn't make it therapeutic for you, right? Those hydrogens are all tied up or bound to the oxygen or to the other molecule. Pretty much every organic molecule out there has hydrogen in it. But we're talking about hydrogen gas. It's just two atoms, two hydrogen atoms that are chemically bonded together and that's the hydrogen gas. And that gas can be dissolved in the water. So it doesn't, when you dissolve it in the water, it doesn't alter the structure of the water. Doesn't make like H4O or it doesn't. So technically hydrogenation of water is not true because hydrogenation suggests that it's going to attach to the water molecule and that's not happening at all. It's just dissolved in the water. So to your question was how do you make hydrogen water? Well, you can simply dissolve it. Just take like a tank of hydrogen gas and bubble it into the water. You mentioned that about these tablets. For example, the way the tablets work, the tablets themselves don't contain hydrogen. It's not like that's impossible. Hydrogen is a gas. The tablet is a solid. But they're hydrogen producing tablets. So if you took the tablet and there's other things out there too, you drop it in the water and it reacts with the water to produce hydrogen gas. Because like you said, water already has hydrogen. So the tablet, the ingredients in the tablet is able to basically liberate that hydrogen and it bonds together. Now you have hydrogen gas. So that's why if you've seen the tablets, when you put it in, you'll see tons of gas bubbles being produced off of the tablet and you could even light them on fire. You can see this is, this is hydrogen gas. So that's one of the ways that it can be done.

Now, hydrogen is like an inert gas. Like, how does it even have any therapeutic effects? Like, how's it, how's it actually working once it gets into your body?

Yeah, that's why I got interested. Because, like, what, the hydrogen gas? Yeah, it's kind of biologically inert. It's not inert like helium or other the noble gases or something. But yeah, it's, you know, when you look at other gaseous signaling molecules in the body, such as nitric oxide or hydrogen sulfide or carbon monoxide, these gases all have specific chemical properties that allow it to interact with certain receptors. I mean, nitric oxide is a free radical, so it's very reactive. Carbon monoxide is very polar. It's able to bind very strongly to the iron and part of the heme1 oxygenate system or different areas. So these all have specific capabilities to bind. But hydrogen gas doesn't really have this. It's this very small molecule. It's nonpolar, it's neutral. So the mechanism of how it's actually causing these effects, the actual primary targets are actually still elusive. We actually are not sure how it's happening. But what we do see in the in vitro studies is that hydrogen gas acts as a cell signal modulator. For example, it's able to activate the NRF2 pathway. So maybe we should talk about that just a little bit. So the NRF2 pathway is, or the NRF2 is a transcription factor and that when it is activated, it binds to the DNA to a specific portion, the are antioxidant response element portion, and it causes basically the transcription of your body's own antioxidants like glutathione, superoxide, dismutase, catalase, and several other cytoprotective enzymes and proteins. And this is critical. So this NRF2 pathway is very protective and it's one of the benefits of exercise or many supplements out there, because NRF2 pathway can be activated and in turn upregulate the body's endogenous antioxidants so hydrogen somehow can activate that pathway. And we've seen it so many times in studies using genetic knockout models, mirna interference or pharmacologically blocking the NRF2 pathway. We see for sure hydrogen as a gaseous signal modulator is activated in this pathway, leading to these effects.

So this signaling pathway that it's deactivating, it's the NRF2 that's. You pronounce it.

Yeah.

Okay, well.

Or NRF2. Yeah.

Okay, yeah. Then the NRF2. That's right. So in terms of affecting that pathway, would that pathway be something that is associated with the actual response to exercise? Meaning exercise or something like that would cause inflammation or oxidation and then the body would upregulate things like, you know, mitochondrial enzymes and have, you know, basically like a fitness response. So technically, wouldn't hydrogenated water blunt. I mean, wouldn't it be the same as the antioxidant or anti inflammatory in terms of you needing to be careful with excessive exposure to it?

I see what you mean. Yeah. So you're saying because when we exercise we activate these pathways and by taking normal antioxidants, we actually negate or abolish those effects. The benefits of exercise.

Right.

Let's review for our audience. Let's just review some of that and then we can answer the question very clearly. It is essential when we consider free radicals and reactive oxygen species. It is true, as we all know, that they're linked to pretty much every disease and the pathogenesis of them and their progression in pretty much everything. I mean, when you cut an apple in half and it starts to turn brown, that's oxidation. And that happens every time we breathe oxygen. It, it causes an oxidation to our body.

But at the same time, when we exercise, we are breathing a lot more oxygen. And between 0.1 to up to 2% of the oxygen that we inhale turns into free radicals into reactive oxygen species. But these, just as you mentioned, these reactive oxygen species are critical in mediating the therapeutic benefits of exercise. And they activate transcription factors, they activate mitochondrial biogenesis via upregulation of PGC 1 Alpha and a number of other areas. Nitric oxide we just talked about, nitric oxide is critical for the vasodilation and a number of other extremely important benefits. But it's a free radical by definition. And several studies have shown that supplementation or ingestion of high levels of antioxidants chronically can actually negate exercise training, prevent the increased insulin sensitivity, or even hamper the increases in mitochondrial biogenesis.

I mean, Right, like high dose vitamin C or high dose vitamin E, for example.

Exactly. I mean, I mean, you know, it's sad, but you can imagine people, I'm going to be healthy, I'm going to get my vitamins, I'm going to start exercising. They do this for 10, 12 weeks and they're like, man, I'm not in any better shape than I was when I started.

Maybe because we're neutralizing these essential reactive oxygen species. But at the same time.

At the same time, there are those free radicals that are toxic, that are damaging and such as the hydroxyl radical or another oxidant, peroxynitrite. Peroxynitrite is extremely damaging as well. Very powerful oxidant. And it's formed when you have excessive high levels of nitric oxide and superoxide and they react together to form peroxynitrite. But if we look at superoxide for a little bit. Superoxide is critical in the production of mitochondrial biogenesis, and it's specifically produced and specifically regulated under a tight homeostatic range. And when it kind of gets too high, then our body's enzyme superoxide dismutase will basically convert that into hydrogen peroxide. And then hydrogen peroxide as an oxidant, if there's actually specific aquaporin or a protein channel, the hydrogen peroxide can actually transverse through and activate specific transcription factors to induce further cytoprotective benefits. And those levels are very tightly regulated as well. And it can be quickly neutralized by glutathione, peroxidase, catalase, and a number of other antioxidants. So everything is very tightly regulated. But what happens is when we age or various environmental toxins, or maybe going out as an untrained person, and you're a weekend warrior, right? You're not trained, you don't have the buildup, the cellular adaptations, and you push yourself really hard for a few hours, or maybe you go run an ironman or a marathon, you're not really trained for it. Or if you are an elite athlete and you're doing your best to really train, and you're chronically training high intensity for prolonged periods of times, you're creating a lot of these very damaging free radicals that are above the level that our body can normally handle. And so our levels of, say, glutathione and superoxide dismutase and different things, they start to decrease. And then we start getting oxidative stress. And now we were at risk for infection, at risk for injury, we have more inflammation, we have all These problems. Okay, so now let's consider molecular hydrogen.

Okay.

Hydrogen gas does not scavenge or neutralize with these free radicals if it reacts with any radical. The only possible radical that it can react with and neutralize would be the hydroxyl radical. That's the only one that is reactive enough. So it's like a selective antioxidant. And in fact, that Nature Medicine publication, the title was Hydrogen Acts as a Selective Antioxidant by Reducing Cytotoxic Oxygen Radicals.

Okay, got it. And I'm going to interrupt you real quick. I'm going to hunt that down and link to it over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com hydrogen if you guys want to delve into any of these research studies that Tyler's talking about.

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So this study was in Science magazine. It was looking into the anti inflammatory effect. What'd you say? Nature magazine.

Yeah, yeah, Nature medicine.

Okay, Nature Medicine. So it was showing it has selective antioxidant properties. Is that how you described it?

Exactly, yeah, yeah. It selectively reduces just the cytotoxic radicals, not the beneficial radicals. Right.

I've never heard of something that could actually do that before. Is that common?

Not really. Because typically if you have something that's a reductant, it can going to react or can neutralize pretty much anything. Vitamin C for example, great antioxidant. But maybe it's too great, maybe it's too powerful type thing. So it can neutralize, just like the studies you mentioned earlier, neutralize those beneficial signaling molecules. And so now we're, now we're not getting those benefits mediated by the, by the reactive oxygen species. But yeah, hydrogen gas, it is selective and it's not going toit really just helps to maintain redox homeostasis. That's the way That I term it.

We have to. Like I said, everything is tightly regulated. Even hydrogen peroxide, superoxide, nitric oxide, those are all tightly regulated. And if those get too high, damage ensues. And hydrogen gas can help via cell signal modulating effects, help reduce those levels. For example, hydrogen can help down regulate the overactivity or hyperactivation of NADPH oxidase system which produces superoxide. So by downregulating or decreasing its activity, we have less superoxide production and when the levels are so excessive that it's damaging to the cells. You follow?

Yeah, yeah. This is super interesting. So what about the ability of it to affect other antioxidant enzymes like say like glutathione or superoxide disputase or a lot of these other pathways? Like for example, you know, a lot of folks will do genetic testing, right? Like I've done, done my 23andMe analysis and I show that I've got some SNPs that might downregulate that superoxide dismutase pathway. What would be the effect of hydrogenated water on some of these other antioxidant pathways?

Yeah, well, and just a clarification, we don't want to call it hydrogenated water, but maybe just HRW or for hydrogen rich water. Just because hydrogenated. Yeah, yeah, probably better because hydrogenated. Yeah. Means it's like chemically bonded. But. Okay, you know, exactly. What we do see, what we do know is hydrogen gas can activate this NRF2 pathway and leading to higher expressions of glutathione, superoxide dismutase and catalase, and induction of other cytoprotective proteins and enzymes like hemo and oxygenase.

But the important thing about this is it only does it if it needs to be. This is a really big point and it makes it very difficult to study hydrogen too. But if you were to take a normal healthy cell, for example, that.

Has a certain level of glutathione or superoxide dismutase, et cetera, and you give or administer molecular hydrogen to that cell or that tissue or that animal, you will actually see that the level of glutathione does not change. It doesn't increase or it doesn't decrease. And that's because it's already at normal homeostasis. That's where it needs to be. But as soon as you add some sort of a toxin or an assault to that cell or that tissue or that animal, then the glutathione levels may decrease a lot. But the administration of hydrogen gas helps to maintain it where it's supposed to be in that homeostatic range.

Okay, got it. Interesting. So it has a positive effect on the activation or the upregulation of additional antioxidant enzymes in addition to it being able to affect that NRF2 pathway itself without actually blunting the natural hormetic response.

Exactly. Maybe we can categorize this. Hydrogen can help reduce the oxidative stress by one its cell modulated effects in terms of decreasing excessive levels of radical production, such as the NADPH oxidase system or maybe inducible nitric oxide synthase, which is very problematic. If that gets too activated, hydrogen can decrease that. In other cases though, it can increase like Enos indothelial nitric oxide synthase. So we get higher levels of nitric oxide production. And so we have one, it's decreasing the ROS production because it's down regulating its production, preventing it from occurring. And then another is via this activation of the NRF2 pathway and leading to higher levels of the glutathione and superoxide dismutase and things, but only to maintain this at the homeostatic level and not blunting the hormesis effect. And if we actually look at the clinical studies with hydrogen for athletes, for example, there was one with elite soccer players, a double blinded, placebo controlled crossover study and drinking hydrogen rich water. And they found that hydrogen was effective at preventing the early fatigue, decreasing the lactate production as well as just improving their overall performance. But it did not decrease the markers of oxidation, which suggests that it's not going to blunt those therapeutic effects or those hormetic effects of exercise.

This is super interesting. Now one of the things that I noticed when I was over at your Molecular Hydrogen foundation website, where by the way, for those of you wondering, Tyler doesn't sell anything on that website. He just studies molecular hydrogen, which is fascinating. You're such a geek, dude. You talk about the anti apoptotic effect, the anti cell death effects of hydrogenated water. And that makes me wonder when it comes to things like cancer, for example, if there's an anti cell death effect, would this for example, be something risky to drink, eating too much dairy or taking too much, like, you know, like growth hormone, for example, that it might be potentially too anabolic or keep natural cell death from occurring.

I mean, I guess the best answer is we don't really know. What we can say is what we have seen in the research.

That because hygiene is selective like it is, it doesn't, it may not have such a. That Effect on the cancer cells in all cases, especially.

In a living person. And when we look at the anti apoptotic effects, well, that's because we're preventing the caspase activation earlier on in the signal transduction and preventing the protein phosphorylation cascades earlier on. And that's resulting in anti apoptotic or the prevention of cytochrome C release or different things that cause the cell death. Now if you're on the website, if you go to studies, then you'll see cancer is listed there. And there's a number of studies where it's actually has shown that hydrogen could have a suppressive or inhibitory effect on various cancer cell lines, such as colon cancer. There was pretty good inhibition inhibitory effect on the growth of colon cancer. And they've also done another study, a human study is open labeled and kind of small, but it's still very good with showing that hydrogen was able to help negate some of the cytotoxicity or some of the damage that occurs with taking normal chemotherapy drugs. And that's, that's a really important thing there because chemotherapy is so harmful and damaging to the body. So hygiene being able to mitigate those toxic effects but not alter the anti tumor effects of the drug is very critical.

Why would something that's anti apoptotic, that's anti cell death be a good thing? Because I thought like natural cell death was something we're going after. When we say fast, for example.

Sure. But at the same time, when you okay, fasting for example, has anti apoptotic effects for normal healthy cells. It up regulates DNA repair mechanisms, it enacts gastric grillin secretion, which is very neuroprotective. There's a lot of benefits from fasting, but fasting, as you know, is also can be beneficial for cancer inhibition because you're not getting the growth hormone signals or substrates that are promoting cancer growth. So we can't look at it just because it's anti apoptotic. Well, we have to look at under which conditions is it anti apoptotic because in some of these studies it promotes apoptosis, it promotes cell death. And when we look at specific things like cancer studies, for example, cancer shuts down the mitochondria from working and does most of its metabolism through glycolysis. And the reason why is because the mitochondria actually works fine. It just shuts it down. And the reason why is because mitochondria are very smart. And if they realize the cell Is cancerous, they will send out cytochrome C and that's a signal for apoptosis. So cancer shuts that down. And some of the chemotherapy drugs, what they try to do is actually inhibit glycolysis, Forcing the cancer to activate the mitochondria again and use the mitochondria to get its ATP, its energy needs. And as soon as it does that, then the mitochondria says, hey man, the game's over, and induces apoptosis, a cell suicide. Well, hydrogen is very efficient at inducing mitochondrial biogenesis and up regulating the activation of the mitochondria, Maintaining mitochondrial membrane potential. A lot of benefits to the mitochondria. So it's also possible that hydrogen gas administration to the cancer activates their mitochondria and then in turn, the mitochondria realizes it's cancerous, the cell is cancerous and thus induces apoptosis. And therefore hydrogen is very suppressive against cancer. So it's all how it's. Under which conditions are we looking at it? You follow?

Yeah, exactly. It sounds like it has kind of like a cell signaling effect too.

Exactly. And that's. Oh, and so that's brilliant. So cell signaling and this hormetic effect. So there was a study done. It's funny because I knew this was the effect in 2013, but it was just published in 2017. And what they found is hydrogen does induce a hormetic effect in the initial stage. So they took and administer hydrogen gas to the cells. And you actually see very mild to small transient increases in superoxide production. And so hydrogen administration, just like exercise, slightly increases superoxide production and other free radicals.

Kinda like thatthat sarms that they talk about the exercise and a pill that they give to mice. It sounds like this is kind of having a similar effect, except it's just water with extra hydrogen in it.

Yeah, with hydrogen gas in it. It is kind of like a exercise mimetic. If we look at the metabolic pathway.

Yeah, a memetic. Exactly. An exercise memetic.

Yeah. And it really. If we look at the metabolic pathways that hydrogen activates and exercise activates and we do some parasite, we do some correlations. Here we see exercise can activate, say SIRT3 expression, which is amazing for exercise. So can hydrogen. Hydrogen. Exercise increases the nad to nadh ratio. That's your electron energy carrier system. Very important for anti aging and for exercise, Hydrogen can also do that. Exercise activates PGC1 Alpha, which leads to mitochondrial biogenesis and a number of other benefits regulated through the PPARS. Peroxidone proliferator activated receptor. Hydrogen also increases PGC1 alpha. And we can keep going down the list of various transcription factors and pathways that are activated by exercise. And then we look and see, hey, Hydrogen also activates these pathways and likely does it through its hormetic mechanism.

That's really interesting. Okay, so when it comes to hydrogenated water, there's this concept, you know, hydrogen rich water. Sorry, I got, I keep saying that hydrogen rich water. Gotta be careful, man. You can deadlift more than me. So hydrogen rich water, there's this concept of alkalinity. Right. A lot of people buy these countertop alkaline water makers.

Oh, sure.

What, what's the, what's the properties of hydrogen rich water when it comes toto alkaline versus acidity? And is there any advantage to it from that standpoint?

Sure. So first off, hydrogen gas has no effect on ph. It's a completely separate property.

Okay.

There's no correlation, no relation. If we look at ph, PH stands for potential of hydrogen. So you. So it does. It is kind of confusing. You're like, what?

Yeah, that's why I was curious, like how it would affect hydrogen level. Yeah.

So the higher the hydrogen, the more the higher the ph. But it's actually very different. We can walk through this briefly. The potential.

Really means like powers and the exponent like the power of 10 and in this case is the inverse of an exponent, which is a logarithm. And the hydrogen in H of ph is a hydrogen ion or the H. So again, hydrogen gas is H2 neutral molecule, two electrons, H plus no electrons, just a bare naked proton. Basically that's H. So ph literally means the negative logarithm of the hydrogen ion concentration, which is completely different than this hydrogen gas that we're inhaling or we're talking about for therapeutic use. So you can take hydrogen gas and you can dissolve it into acidic water, alkaline water or whatever. It'll have no effect on the ph directly. It does not convert into protons and electrons. It's just hydrogen gas and it stays that way. And then that's interesting history because if we do look at the history of the alkaline ionized water or electrolyzed reduced water, what it's called in literature.

What's alkaline water called in literature?

Alkaline ionized water in the literature is called electrolyzed reduced water.

Electrolyzed reduced water is the same as alkaline water?

No, no, it's the same as alkaline ionized water.

Okay.

Because there's two ways to make alkaline water. You can make alkaline water just by adding some baking soda or some sodium hydroxide, or you can make alkaline water through an electrolysis machine, and the properties will be different. Not the alkaline properties, but the properties of the water will be different. Because when you do electrolysis of water, you make hydrogen gas. I mean, that is how, how you mass produce hydrogen gas is from electrolysis of water. That's your high school chemistry experiment right there, right? You put the battery in the water, and all of a sudden you start seeing bubbles, one off the cathode, the other off the anode, which is hydrogen and oxygen, respectively. So when these alkaline ionized water or these electrolysis units were making alkaline water, a lot of people were getting benefits thinking incorrectly, but thinking it was the alkaline properties of the water that was making them feel healthy. But really, it was the hydrogen gas that was produced from the alkalizer from the electrolysis machine. And now many studies, many studies have shown that when you take the hydrogen gas and remove it from alkaline ionized water or just water, all the benefits are eliminated.

Even the president of the Korean Water Society, which is also one of our MHF advisors, he's one of the pioneers in alkaline ionized water research. He himself has done many studies showing that, yes, alkaline ionized water exerted these anti diabetic and anti cancer effects and a number of different things, but when the hydrogen gas was removed from the water, the benefits were eliminated. And, and this is also a critical finding because.

The medical community knew that the alkaline claim never made sense. And the scientists who did the research, they never claimed the benefits were from alkaline, the alkaline property of the water, because it doesn't make any sense to put it in comparison. Even if we subscribe to the concept that we need to alkalize our bodies and eat alkalizing foods or this kind of stuff, even if we subscribe to that, you cannot do with alkaline water, because alkaline water is not a buffer. In fact, a comparison is if we look at baking soda, which is our body's natural buffer, sodium bicarbonate, that's our natural buffer. In our body, we have about 10 millimolars of that. Well, if we do a comparison, about 1 teaspoon of baking soda can neutralize as much acid as over 700 or 800 liters of alkaline water at a pH of 10.

So these alkaline countertop water makers, or even adding sodium bicarbonate to water could alkalinize the water. But what you're saying is that the benefits of alkaline water would not persist unless somehow that water was also hydrogen enriched. And in the case of both sodium bicarbonate water and countertop alkaline water makers, those still aren't hydrogen enriched?

Well, baking soda, adding baking soda to water or other things that of course will never have any hydrogen gas in it. But the alkaline water countertop makers or the ionized water, they can have hydrogen gas in it, at least initially, if you have the right source water and some people who have very low tds. For example, we measured this. You can measure the concentration of hydrogen gas with redox.

The total dissolved solutes.

Yes, the tds. Yeah, Total dissolved solids. And then I'm just saying we've measured the concentration of hydrogen gas produced via very various of these products out there. It's very easy to do now. And what we see is depending on the source water and depending on the ionizer, the electrolysis machine, you can have very good levels of hydrogen or very poor levels of hydrogen. And if you talk to the industry, if you talk to those who've been selling alkaline ionized waters for a long time, every single one of them will tell you this fact. It's best to drink the water fresh. And if for whatever reason, if they don't know, whatever reason, if you're not cleaning your machine.

Or if you leave the water out for weeks or so many days, it seems like the benefits are not there anymore. Well, now we know the reason why is because the hydrogen gas has just dissipated out. It's out of the water because it's just a gas, it's going to dissipate out. And the reason why is because it had hydrogen gas initially, but now you let it sit on the counter so long and now it doesn't.

So if you drink it right away, is it hydrogen enriched water like if I had like a Kangen countertop water maker or something like that?

Exactly, yeah. If you drink it fresh from the faucet, you know, it's gonna last for a little bit. It's not gonna, you know, vanish within the blink of an eye type thing, but you can't leave it sitting out for weeks or something. But yeah, that' sthe hydrogen gas will be there and then you can get some benefits. But the other thing though is if you live in like aand that's only if you live in A place that has good TDS. If you have, you have to have like 100 ppm TDS or something in order to get the dissolved hydrogen.

So you could what, what if you add, add like extra minerals and stuff to it before you put it through, like a countertop water ionizer.

That may work, but if you consider the filters, I'm not an, I'm not an expert in this area, but, but if you consider that if your TDS of your source water is say 20 ppm and you're going to try to increase that to 100 ppm, you know, adding, you know, 80 more milligrams per liter of minerals, that's. I don't think you can do that so easily. You might, it might be better off to move to a different source water with higher TDS levels.

Would you drink ionized water from one of those countertop machines or do you?

I have in the past. Yeah. I actually it's one of the ways I know so much about this because I actually first got introduced to ionized water in 2009 and I started looking at the literature. I was like, man, maybe there's something to this because it doesn't, you know, what the claims people are making about the alkaline benefits, you know, of course, doesn't, doesn't make sense, but there was research on it and so I started evaluating that and that's when I came across this hydrogen gas. So, you know, now, now that we know the benefit is from hydrogen gas, well, for me then why don't I just focus on what the benefit is? Because all those units, they were all manufactured and designed and optimized specifically for alkaline water, not hydrogen gas.

Yeah, I'm kind of careful with them anyways. I don't use them. And my dad, he's big into water filtration techniques and he informed me about some issues with metallic ions. I guess they pass some of that water over a metal plate and metallic ions can be present in the water that you're drinking. And so you might get a buildup of things like mercury or lead or aluminum or copper, apparently by drinking too much from these countertop water ionizers. So I, I personally don't really use them. I just drink my well water and I have a couple filters that, that goes through. But yeah, I guess youyou could always do it and just test your, test your blood metals or your hair metals and see what happens.

Well, it may not be so easily. And I mean, they try to make them, they do them right, you know, try to make them good because they use, you know, good platinum. Platinum is a very inert electrode but you could have alloy issues and you could have degradation of the electrodes and actually get platinum particles into the water. There's an ongoing, it's an unknown thing. So.

It needs to be done in that area.

Yeah, I hear it. I want to ask you a little bit about where you could find other sources or figure out a way to make hydrogen enriched water. But I had a couple other questions for you first. We have a lot of people who exercise who listen in like you. Is there any effect aside from the antioxidant or the anti inflammatory effect that this would have on exercise performance? Have any studies been done on that?

Yeah, so there's the one that I mentioned earlier and that was with the elite soccer players and they found that hydrogen was able to decrease the fatigue level and as well as decrease lactate lactic acid production. And that's critical because that suggests that hydrogen is able to improve the efficiency of the mitochondria. Because when we exercise we primarily, well that's aerobic primarily relying on the mitochondria for ATP production. And then as we start to exercise more intensely or we start to get tired, we have to start relying on glycolysis and then we can start getting high levels of lactate or people call lactic acid production, not lactic acid. But anyways this because the study showed that the lactate levels were reduced even though the exercise intensity was the same. That suggests that the mitochondria was functioning better. There's other studies showing that hydrogen was able to help improve soft tissue injury like the recovery from sports soft tissue injuries by taking hydrogen water. And there's also another study that was done out of Japan. Bathing in hydrogen rich water and helped prevent the damage of inflammation and oxidative stress. Too much oxidative stress. It was very interesting. The trend was a slight decrease in oxidative stress but again not enough to abolish the training benefits of that stress. But specifically the article found that it decreased the delayed onset muscle soreness so people could go and exercise again and continue getting the benefits of exercise. I actually am involved in another study out of Japan where we're doing hydrogen rich water for.

The performance in VO2 max increases in this study increases in their exercise capacity. And then I'm just finishing up another study that I'm doing here and find I was looking for, I was actually using the hydrogen rich tablets and found that there's a decrease in the sub maximum exercise at Least a trend in the submaximal exercise heart rate. So it's able to exercise.

That should be a good thing. Yeah. Improvement in exercise efficiency and economy.

Exactly, yeah.

Interesting.

There needs to be more studies done. I mean, there' sit's still a very new area of research, but the safety of hygiene is very high. And the preliminary results from animal and hema studies is very, very encouraging. And there's some pretty neat studies that are coming out. They're really showing that I think it is a great thing for exercise, either a, to help prevent that excessive inflammation and oxidative damage that that will hamper exercise performance.

And or maybe actually act ergogenically to mimic exercise and its benefits in inducing those transcription factors.

Interesting. What about the effects of. Well, now that we know the effects on lactic acid, the fact that it can almost act as an exercise mimetic as well improve exercise economy and efficiency.

I found some websites that sell hydrogen enriched water and they talk about improvement in aerobic output in swimmers. And then also a halting of atrophy of muscle during detraining. And then also what you alluded to, muscle fatigue and lactic acid recovery. So I've seen some of these studies. What about another issue that a lot of people deal with and that would be the gut. From what I understand, like thethe bacteria in your gut, your colon, I believe, actually produce some hydrogen rich gas. Some people more than others, if you know what I mean.

But what's the deal with the effects of this stuff on our gut? Like if our gut already produces hydrogen gas, would there be more health effects for the gut by actually drinking it?

Yeah, that's a great question. I meanand that is a number of things. First, the fact that the gut, the intestinal bacteria, are already producing hydrogen gas further illustrates the safety of hydrogen gas. We're always exposed to hydrogen gas in our cells and our breath and our blood all the time. So the administration of small amounts of more hydrogen gas is very safe for you. But then the question is why is it still effective? Why are we seeing these animal and these human studies that it's still effective even though we're getting so much more hydrogen gas from intestinal bacteria? Well, there's a couple reasons why. One of them is because the intermittent type exposure, just like most cell signal modulators, a pulsing type effect is going to be more effective. And we get that that way. And we also see that the route of administration by inhalation or drinking is just a different method of administration. And because these pharmacokinetics dictate pharmacodynamics, that's also going to alter the effects. And then as far as the micro, the microbiome, there may be some benefits. Also could be one of the targets of hydrogen to actually improve the microbiota and the normal microflora, improving the optimal homeostasis. And maybe there were some studies in early studies out of Russia for example. I don't know how credible they are or things, but there is some interesting correlations from some good human studies and some Parkinson's disease and different things going on. Looking at hydrogen producing bacteria is lower in say people with various neurodegenerative problems. And by taking hydrogen we can maybe help improve the population of certain bacteria or improve the homeostasis of the microflora to cause an inhibition of the pathogenic bacteria and an increase in the beneficial bacteria.

That's interesting. So that's why a diet that's rich in fiber, which would feed bacteria and assist with production of hydrogen gas, could also have a little bit of an anti inflammatory effect.

Sure. And it does. And we've seen this. In fact, the University of Florida and the Forsyth Institute of Boston, Massachusetts with Harvard Medical School did a study a few Years ago in 2009, an animal study, and they took an animal.

A rat, and they, or maybe it was a mouse, but they administered lactulose and they found that the lactulose administration produced a lot of hydrogen gas. Lactulose is a fiber, non digestible carbohydrate, but it produced lots of hydrogen gas and it provided a protective effect to the liver when a toxin was administered. But then they took the bacteria and they removed their ability genetically modified genetic knockout study and removed their ability to produce hydrogen gas and put it back into the animals. And the benefits of the fiber in this case were eliminated, suggesting that the benefits are a lot of the benefits in this case again were mediated by hydrogen gas. And by administering the bacteria back in that could metabolize the lactulose and produce hydrogen gas that reinstated all the benefits.

That's fascinating. I have one other question for you about the health effects. I noticed on your website that you talk about the fact that there may be some kind of like an anti allergenic effect. How would that even work?

Yeah, that was done. Actually one of my friends, Dr. Ito there in Japan in 2009, he's one of the first studies to really show that hydrogen really acts as a cell signal modulator. And when we have this cascade of inflammation, we're getting an Allergy, for example, allergic type reaction. We're getting high levels of pro inflammatory mediators such as the various interleukin cytokines and myokine activity. And when they get really high, hydrogen can help to decrease them back to normal. And it appears that happens early on in the signal transduction process near the receptor interface and thus prevents this excessive upregulation of the allergy response. And so these studies where they give like LPS lipopolysaccharide to induce the neuroinflammation or other types of inflammatory diseases, hygiene is very effective at preventing that allergic type reaction or that inflammation. But again, like free radicals, we need inflammation as well to help mediate a lot of the benefits. The myokines or the, the cytokines that are produced from exercise, like interleukin 6, very pro inflammatory and very damaging and diabetes and all sorts of things, but also very important for meeting the benefits of exercise. Well, hydrogen again, only mediates or attenuates these inflammatory markers back into that homeostatic range and not so much that it's negating the benefits of, of the exercise or whatever we're talking about.

Do you know anybody who has like hay fever or any other type of allergies who have tried hydrogen enriched water for something like that?

I have heard and I'm, you know, I'm always very skeptical when I hear the testimonials, but I hear quite a few of them. People who have allergies, for example, people who have asthma or like exercise induced asthma when they start taking the hydrogen. There's some really, there's some really good effects. There's, there's a report from that company in Texas, they're selling their hydrogen products.

But there was somebody there, I guess, who have documented.

With their doctors, really, it's a really neat little study that they have showing that the hygiene has really improved their asthma, their exercise induced asthma significantly. So.

I think it's a great area to look at.

Why haven't more, why don't doctors talk about this? I mean, I'm pretty steeped in the supplement, the fitness and the nutrition industry. And I haven't really heard much about it before until Dr. Mercola mentioned it to me. Like, why isn't this more mainstream?

Well, I just think it's a timing issue. I mean, if you look at nitric oxide, it was known there was something amazing like this back in the 70s and then, you know.

Finally won the Nobel Prize in 1995 or 98 or something, something. But still nitric oxide is Just now really receiving the press and the discussions and everything and the awareness that it merits, well, hydrogen gas, I mean it's still in its infancy. We have so much more research and exciting things to discover and learn of how it's working. And there's only a thousand scientific publications or so which, yeah, maybe it's impressive for just some therapeutic molecule or something. We have a thousand scientific publications and it has been shown to be effective in about 170 different human and animal disease models and essentially every organ of the human body. But we do need more studies and the awareness is really growing exponentially and the research is growing exponentially. So I just think because there's 7 billion people in the world and it's quite a new area of research, it's going to take some time. And I predicted that a few Years ago in 2013, 14, I predicted that 2017 would mark the year of the awakening, if you will, in terms of people with the influencers, people like you, Dr. Mercola, some of the big players, celebrity figures and professional sports teams which they would learn about hydrogen and then slowly start promoting that. And that's exactly what has happened. There's a number of celebrities and professional sports teams and players and people out there that are using hydrogen now and talking about it. But it's just going to grow. It's going to slowly take some time. And so 2027, another 10 years, I think it will be everywhere. I think doctors will talk about it all the time. I think it'll be a mainstream thing because it does not, it doesn't negate the benefits of some other therapy. There's no contraindications. And it is the molecule of life. I mean it's what started the universe and life, the evolution of life. It's involved in everything. And now the biomedical research is really showing us how essential it really is.

Yeah, it's interesting because you have like oxygen as being one of the main elements that we find super important for life. And hydrogen is on the other end. Right. Like that's the balance between oxidation and reduction. So you almost have like this yin and yang type of effect where, where everybody's talking about breathing and hyperbaric oxygen chambers and wim hof breathwork and it's all about oxygen, oxygen, oxygen. But a lot of us aren't thinking about hydrogen. So this is really, really fascinating. The other thing that I noticed was in some of the research they've looked at a lot of these. I know this is kind of woo woo, but like these healing waters, right like these springs or these curative waters you find around the world. I know there's some sites in Japan and Mexico and, and Germany and we hear about sulfur a lot of the time. But correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of these type of waters that people have turned to traditionally as healing waters have pretty copious amounts of this hydrogen in them.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that a lot of them do. I know that some of them do. And it is very interesting when you go to the places that are really actually documented to have some beneficial effects. You know, it could be as simple as people are drinking this water and it has some iodine in it and they're getting better. But there are other things in there. Like some of these spring waters, they actually do have hydrogen gas in them. And they're produced either from bacteria or from basalt catalyzed reactions. There's a number of mechanisms for how hydrogen gas can be in these waters. And you can, people have gone and measured them and you can get small amounts of hydrogen gas. And if you consider that when you're, if you're bathing in the water, then the concentration does not need to be so high because hydrogen gas is the smallest molecule in the universe. It's smaller than oxygen. So you're bathing in the water. That hydrogen gas from the water can diffuse through the cells of your skin and into your blood. And actually studies with bathing of hydrogen water have actually shown increases in blood levels of hydrogen as well as the breath exhalation. There's increased levels of breath hydrogen showing the hydrogen gas really is diffusing into the body and exerting these benefits. So it is very interesting when you consider this whole romantic relationship between hydrogen and oxygen, Hydrogen, this premortal first element in existence. And this balances the oxidation and reduction. And then when the two hydrogen and oxygen react together, you form the life giving solvent water, which is the perfect balanced molecule. And now we're learning about the benefits of hydrogen, that it. Hydrogen oxygen is essential for life, but it's slowly killing you, slowly oxidizing you, just like that apple that turns brown.

I interviewed Patrick McKeown who wrote the Oxygen Advantage. And a big part of that is you actually focus on breathing less. Like a lot of light nasal breathing and controlling respiratory frequency for the reasons that you've just described. Excess oxygen. It's why, you know, too much exercise equals too much too much oxidation. Right. Too much inflammation. And one of the reasons for that is muscle damage and inflammation, of course. And another reason is just excessive oxygen Intake. So yeah, it's really interesting and I wanted to ask you because I know we're getting a little long and I want to make sure I have a chance to talk about where you might be able to find like sources of hydrogen enriched water or make it. And I'm curious, like how much you actually have to drink. Like in these studies, are we talking about like gallons a day? Is there a dose response effect? I mean, how much do you actually need to use?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the research, we need to have more research to really answer that specific question. How much do we need to use? Because the amount, the dose different based on age, the weight of the person, the ethnicity, the genetics, whether their diet, their microbiota, which disease it is. In some diseases maybe they need a lot more. I mean if we look at rheumatoid arthritis, for example, with those studies they used a higher concentration of hydrogen, like 5 milligrams per liter. But in other studies something closer to 1 milligram per liter of concentration.

Is enough. And so the IHSA International Hydrogen Standards association, which I'm director of as well, we just had some more meetings and we released our official proceedings on what we're setting as the initial standard simply based upon the current human studies, what had been shown in the current team of studies to be effective. And it's looking like at a minimum level you need about 0.5 milligrams of hydrogen a day. And likely taking more specifically for different diseases is better. And because a higher concentration is not ever less effective than a lower concentration, then often it's a good idea to just get a good dose of hydrogen and that should be good, that should be where things are at now.

A lot of these websites they sell. So we talked about the hydrogenated, the hydrogen tablets on like Amazon, for example, is hydrogen tablets. And you said you've used those before, but did you say that those tend, because hydrogen is so inert, those tend to come off the water very quickly. I mean, are those an effective source of hydrogen enriched water versus I know there are other companies that will sell like bottles of hydrogen enriched water that are, they're already bottled already hydrogen enriched. Like do you use these pills at all that you can just buy off of Amazon, the tablets?

Yeah, I mean it depends. You know, it all depends because there's a lot of maybe scam products out there and different things. I mean there's tablets that work, there's tablets that don't, there's ready to drink product pouches and other even plastic bottles that work and some don't. Of course, if it's in a plastic bottle, it's not gonna work at all because hydrogen gas will diffuse right out of there.

So it needs to be like a can or a glass.

Yeah, I mean, something like.

Container of some sort is known to help keep the hydrogen gas in the water. The physical chemical properties are such that it doesn't diffuse right out, such as it would with plastic containers.

Okay. One of the brands that I've come across is this. It's H2.

I believe it's called H2 rejuvenation. They're like these effervescent tablets that you dissolve in water. Have you used these before?

Yeah, I know of those ones as well. So, yeah, you can test, you know, you can easily test the concentration of hydrogen. What do you mean?

How do you test?

Well, there's a. There's a Redox titration reagent called H2 Blue from H2 Sciences, Inc.

And you can use that and you can actually measure the concentration of hydrogen in various products. Because there's a lot that say, oh, we make, you know, 1 ppm or 1.6 ppm or something, but. But actually they don't. It makes a lot less or even none.

So you'd want to get these strips, these reagent strips, and you could actually measure it to see if it really does have hydrogen in it.

They're drops, they're reagent. It's a liquid.

Okay, got it. Now, another company that I found sells these things by the can.

This one is called H2BEV. H2BEV, molecular hydrogen drink. Have you used that one?

Yeah. So I've also tested that one. I mean, I'm trying to be very vague because I, you know, you have to.

You have to stay as the scientist. Right. The unbiased scientist.

Yeah. There's so many products out there and things. Some of them work well, some of them don't. We're just, you know, we don't make. We don't sell things. We don't make recommendations or endorsements for the products. You know, that one isn't a can. And, you know, I guess I did mention earlier that that's one of that. The antecedental report that I saw with the asthma. And so there we have. They have a good product and you can measure the concentration that comes in the can. And they have different beverages, like a nitric oxide beet or something product. It's really great for performance. And some of the different Flavors. So it's not, it's not just water. It's a good refreshing drink, if you will. But there's other, there's other products out there and other cans and other pouches and things as well. You can always measure the concentration with that H2 Blue reagent and see where it's at.

Interesting. Okay, well, what I'll do for people listening in, I'll hunt down some of these tablets, some of these cans, some of these testing drops and the other resources that Tyler and I have brought up, including his website for the Molecular Hydrogen foundation, if you want to delve into this even more. I'm personally fascinated by this. Absolutely intrigued. And Dr. Mercola is one of my friends and I certainly put a lot of trust in much of what he has to say as well. And so that sounds bad the way I say it. I put a lot of trust in what he has to say, let's put it that way. So I'm, I'm gonna experiment with this a little bit myself and I'll kinda let you guys know what I get as far as results. Whether I self quantify or throw down some hydrogenated workout before I swing or somesome hydrogen enriched water, I should say, before I go swing the counter.

Doctor. There you go.

So, Tyler, in the meantime, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man. This is absolutely fascinating.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you're, you know, everyone's welcome to check out the website molecularhydrogenfoundation.org I'm not much of a social media person, but if you look me up on Facebook, I every once in a while do post some of the new studies that we've done and some of the different conferences and symposia that I've been at. But please, if you have your questions with products and different things, you know, talk to Ben or things that we just, we don't, you know, really make those recommendations or things. We just try to focus on the research on what's out there.

All right. Awesome, man. Well, you're a wealth of knowledge and one smart cookie. So I'll put links to all this stuff over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com hydrogen and Tyler, thanks so much for coming on the show, man.

Yeah, thank you. Awesome.

All right, folks, well, until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Tyler Lebaron signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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