The "Monster Mash" Muscle-Building Tactic, Decoding Vitamin C, Melatonin, Iodine, Magnesium & More

My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, when we look at the historical literature on iodine, the discoverer of vitamin C, Albert Sene, of my heroes, he said, basically, when in doubt, prescribe the patient iodine. And it was incredibly common to use it therapeutically back in the day. And when you look at the number of things people have used iodine to treat, they'll treat acute illnesses with it, colds, flus, gastroenteritis. I mean, they'll treat all kinds of things with topically, topically, iodine's incredibly powerful.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

There's this device, this dude swung by my house like 3 years ago ago with this wristband ankle band thing that he put on me. And then he used an app to cause it to vibrate into social mode, which made me feel like I was on a blend of like having a cocktail and maybe a dark chocolate bar and being surrounded by amazing people.

And then later on I discovered it.

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Anyways, it's all on schedule.

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I can just wear this thing all.

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Well, folks, stress is a common factor that affects everybody. There's a lot of stuff you can do for stress, sleep, optimize relationships, time in nature, et cetera. But from a biochemical or a supplementation standpoint, magnesium is probably at the top of the totem pole when it comes to something that is depleted by stress, particularly because of high cortisol and some of these more stimulating neurotransmitters. And something that when consumed, can act like a sort of brake on your body's nervous system, helping to calm and soothe, improve sleep and allow for better quality of life. Magnesium can be confusing. There's lots of different versions of it, but. But this stuff called Magnesium Breakthrough gives you a full spectrum of all seven types of magnesium. Specially formulated to reach every tissue in the body for maximum health benefits. And addressing the deficiency in this key nutrient, magnesium can really address one of the root causes of stress. Magnesium and mineral deficiencies and also how to combat the effects of a high stress lifestyle. So the makers of magnesium breakthrough bioptimizers, they're giving you a big bonus gift. They're going to give you a free bottle of their powerful digestive enzyme, which is fantastic. Mast zymes wonderful before a big meal. And they're going to throw in their patented probiotic P3OM, also wonderful for digestive health and supporting the digestive system, along with the discount that you're going to get on magnesium. So to take advantage of that entire special offer, you go to magbreakthrough.com magbreakthrough.com magbreakthroath.com.

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So I've got a repeat guest on the show today. He's actually right here with me as I'm recording the intro.

Say hello, Leland.

Hey everyone.

So that's the voice of Dr. Leland Stillman, who you're about to hear a lot more from in today's podcast. So Leland is a doctor who first joined me for a show in which we talked about light as medicine, metabolic typing, some pretty controversial stuff regarding Covid, which we were hot in the middle of last time I hosted him. We talked about his polar bear fitness protocols and healing yourself with mindset and laughter and a whole lot more. And what I'm going to do is link to that original episode with Leland if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Leland2L E L A N D, the number two, which is where you'll find the show notes for this podcast. So if you want to really get to know Dr. Lehman and his Lee, Leland, Linda and his history, go back and listen to that first podcast. But basically we've been hanging out for the weekend. I've been feeding him raw liver smoothies and we've done breath and heat and cold. And these are all things that are kind of part of his personal and his medical protocol. He's been involved in natural and integrative medicine for a long time, since an early age. And he majored in environmental health at Connecticut College. He got his medical doctorate from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, got his training in internal medicine at the main medical center. So he's board certified in internal medicine, specializes in integrative medicine. But he really goes after the root cause of his patient's medical problems, does a lot of advanced lab testing and addresses a lot of imbalances not with pharmaceuticals, but with dietary and lifestyle interventions. Dr. Stillman has been a guy who I've also had time to spend with at the Runga event that we both speak at. That's the one that's put on by my friend Joseph Anu down in Austin, Texas. So he's also a well known personality down there. And again, he's into everything from photobiomodulation to nutrition to toxicology to the immune system. And I think that you're going to absolutely love this podcast recorded while Dr. Stillman and I take an icy cold walk outside in Spokane, Washington. So enjoy this one and keep your fingers crossed that the microphone doesn't freeze.

Or that we don't freeze to death. All right, here we go.

Oh, here we are. This cold, foggy, scary road.

Here, Leland, hold the microphone for a.

Second while I put my gloves.

Otherwise my hands are gonna freeze.

Oh, you guys. So for those of you listening in, this might be the coldest podcast episode we've done yet. I don't know.

We'll see.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So as a matter of fact, the last time that we did a podcast, Leland, I remember you were talking about the. What'd you call it?

The Polar Bear Diet or the Polar Bear Program.

Polar Bear Fitness was like the first fitness program that I ever launched.

What was that?

Oh, we talked about this on the last episode, but basically, remind me the.

Preview of it just in case people.

Like me are too lazy to go back and listen.

Fix your circadian rhythms, wear blue blockers, get red and infrared light, get your environment dark and quiet at night so you can sleep well. And then use cold and potentially ketogenic diets in order to lose weight, improve metabolism, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, I don't see a lot of polar bears wearing blue light blocking glasses, did.

Yeah, I know, man, that's true.

But the rest of it I get.

By the way, Florida boy, how you doing with this temperature? How'd you like that cold plunge last night that we did?

It was great, man, but I'm definitely not cold at it anymore. I was just in Nicaragua for the week and it was very tropical.

More importantly, how did you like the raw liver smoothie that I fed you yesterday after our workout?

It was delightful. I was shocked.

People always tell me, I tell you.

It tastes like ice cream.

I'm shocked that it doesn't taste like liver.

Yeah, no, it tastes like nice chocolatey ice cream, depending on what you put in it. I put the vanilla whey protein in it with a little bit of cacao yesterday and bone broth, frozen raw liver with cinnamon, a little bit of stevia. My audience is probably bored. They're like, ben, you talk about the.

Raw liver smoothie recipe on like at.

Least one podcast a month.

We know how to make it already, but it really does taste like ice cream. It does.

So yeah. There's a lot of things that you had mentioned that we could revisit where we have another discussion. So here we are walking down this farm road in the foggy cold, and one thing that kind of leapt out that you brought up as a topic of discussion was this concept of people who over exercise or overwork and over train. And yesterday we were talking and you said like, you were shocked at the number of people you run into now who are just like, pushing it way too hard with exercise. I commented that I heard an interview with the Liver King where he was describing how one of the things that got him on, like that controversial hormone and steroid protocol he's on now, was he got to the point where he felt like he had zero self worth unless he hit the gym and even got to the point where every time he had a meal, he felt like he had to earn it. So he had to go, like do a hard workout every time before he ate or when he was on vacation, he had to go find the gym and hit it like three times a day or he didn't feel whole or complete, or he was just a complete bear to be around. And it got me thinking that it kind of sounds like what you were describing to me in terms of patients or people you increasingly run into who are like, overdoing it, overworking over training. Get into that.

Yeah. So the way this happened was I hired my dear friend Jim Laird to work with me on my team, seeing my patients, because, you know, I realize that I bring a lot of knowledge with biochemistry and biohacking and light and all these other things, but I don't have enough time. And so I needed help anyway. And then I also don't have a very strong fitness and exercise background. I've been like a desk jockey my whole life. So I recruited Jim to do the exercise component and really like wellness and health coaching. And so he came in and one of the first cases we were on, within like five minutes of me telling him about the case. We'd been consulted because this girl had really terrible abdominal issues and pain, but she didn't really give me more than that.

Uh huh.

And I thought maybe this was a GI imbalance.

Right.

And within five Minutes. Jim just said, leland, she's an exercise addict. And I was skeptical of that because you always have to be skeptical of things that people come up with in five minutes. Yeah, but we went through her labs, we went through her oura ring data, we went through her workout routines, and sure enough, she was over exercising.

How would you define that?

Over exercising for her very intense hiit workouts, up to an hour a day sometimes. And you know, you can do that for short periods of time, but you also have to really be careful maintaining your body. So, you know, I mean, you have to eat a huge amount of food to sustain that.

Right.

You have to get great sleep. And I don't see people pulling it off for long, long periods of time when they're also, you know, very successful.

Professionals or high level professionals, not professional.

Athletes with dedicated time for recovery, for luxuriously long meals that they can chew for long periods of time.

Right.

Red light therapy and compression boots and massages and all the things, like, unless you're a highfalutin executive CEO, and I do have, I guess I have like some clients and I've run into some.

People who are like this.

Like these guys do their business from the golf course, do like two workouts a day, and then still have four or five hours a day to devote to like recovery and napping. And that's what they do. They're almost like professional executives, athletes. But unless you're a professional athlete or someone with a very deep disposable income who has a lot of people doing things for you, what you're saying is it's hard to have a professional athlete training protocol and then also be a professional.

Yeah, that's exactly right. My practice has basically attracted a lot of these people over the years. So I've seen it more than once.

Now, let's talk about mechanism of action. A lot of people have gut issues. Do you suspect that it is the sympathetic nervous system stimulation drawing blood away from the gut? Is it inflammatory cytokines from exercise causing a shift in the biome? What's exactly going on in a case like that?

So I think it's all of it. You need a certain amount of energy. And whenever I think about the body, I always go back to Einstein's equation for relativity. E equals mc squares. So I always try and think about the energy and I always try and.

Think about the matter.

So you can create this picture of dysfunction with inadequate or the wrong types of matter. So micronutrient deficiencies, macronutrient deficiencies, the wrong number of calories per day.

Right.

And then you also have to worry about the energy side of the equation. So what's the light environment like? What's the light environment at night like, what kind of light therapy is available? All these things you have to really look into because people forget. But any energy that your body is subjected to can tax the system. It creates a cost.

Right.

So there's this great paper I love referencing. It shows that exposure to Sound greater than 100 decibels for four hours increases your magnesium losses in your urine by something like 100% for like two days.

Wait, so what you just said is basically sound pollution depletes minerals in your body.

Correct.

But I would extrapolate that and I would just say any excessive amount of any stimulus can do that. Right. And so the more stress someone's under, whether it's artificial light at night or sound pollution, and there's. Everyone's different. Right. So a lot of this may come down to genetics that we haven't yet quantified because some people it's easy to replete this or that, and other people, it's really hard.

Right.

I wonder about that, but I don't have the data, at least from what I've read, to really opine on it. But the point is just that all of it seems to come together to create the stress that then wastes the micronutrients, that then creates the state of deficiency.

Why can't I just keep working hard, crushing life and being a hard charging high achiever and do things like take minerals in the morning and make sure I get decent amounts of sleep, maybe less than the average person, Maybe throw in a nap and take a multivitamin to replace all those minerals and kind of like have my cake and eat it too?

Yeah, I think I would say you can, but it's a little bit like the faster you drive your car, the better you have to be as a driver and the more informed you need to be. And I just see people, you know, they're taking the curves like really well and they're sticking to the track and everything is great. And then at 90 miles an hour, they make a very small mistake and they spin out of control and they wind up wrapped around a tree. In this analogy, they're not wrapped around a tree. They're dealing with crippling IBS or depression or anxiety or insomnia or whatever. And then they're asking me like, what happened?

Yeah, I sometimes empathize. I don't know if that's the right word with people. Like that who have dug themselves into that kind of hole. Because I go through seasons in life, particularly when I'm working on book projects, which I'm doing right now. I mean I shared with you the other day, like I'm up some mornings, is really 3:45 now, just working on. Because I've got two book projects going right now, a cookbook and like a book of proverbs or precepts. And so I have to write a lot. But I'm also running my company and trying to stay in shape and trying to spend time with my sons. And my sons and I are working on a new game that we're designing and there's like. So now I'm having to research Kickstarter campaigns and there's so much going on right now at this season in life. And so I'm using like smart drugs and nootropics and caffeine and then high dose melatonin at night and kind of like on the up or down, a roller coaster ride. And this will be a season of life for me that lasts about six weeks. And then once April 1, both of those books are done and off to the publishers and the editorial team. I then shift into a season where I'm like sleeping nine hours a night and snuggling in bed with my wife in the morning until like 6:30 or 7 and giving myself luxurious recovery. It seems to me that sometimes if you have periods that you're working really hard, that happens. And rather than pushing yourself the entire year and hitting a wall and your body stopping you versus you stopping your body, what do you think about just like planning for different seasons and having seasons that include more luxurious rest? Almost the same way a farmer has like harvest where they're working 16 hours a day, but then other times of year when they're sleeping in.

I mean it's essential, right? And I love that you brought back seasonality because that goes back to that first like basically foray that I made into integrated medicine as my own, you know, as my, as a doctor, polar bear medicine, because the seasonality is really critical.

Right.

The pattern that I've seen is that emotionally healthy people understand that they need to have seasons of life, seasons where it's okay to work 80 hours, 90 hours, 100, 120 hours a week. But it becomes pathological when you don't build in the rest and recovery that you need, which may not be on a daily basis, it may be seasonal. And that's something that they really struggle to, to see.

I actually have this Metric heart rate variability. I don't know if you track that.

At all, all the time with your.

Patients, with your clients. That I track on my aura ring and during my hard seasons. My rule is that if it consistently drops below 80, then I will throw in like on a day I'll climb into the hyperbaric chamber for like two hours and just like do like a yoga nidra session followed by a long meditation or do like a super long brain tap session or something that on the day during the work period that I get to the point where, oh, my heart, my HIV is dropping so much, my body's gonna stop me in two or three days. I'll identify that and then throw in. The other thing I'll do sometimes is I'll call up a massage therapist and just do like a super long massage in the evenings. So I find I can get through these work stints if I keep my eye on the HRV and make sure that I step back and do something, something slightly more mindful and integrative and long for recovery on the days where it really starts to dip and then I get straight back into the work mode after.

Yeah, that's exactly what we'll tell patients to do. And we found that it's very, very effective. And we have people coming in whose HRV starting out is in the single digits.

Wow.

We really have to work hard to get them out of their own way.

Yeah.

Because there's always some reason, Right. Sometimes it's purely professional, but oftentimes they'll start to tell you they're deepest, darkest secrets. The things that have happened to them that they're running from, they're constantly trying to achieve in order to not sit with their feelings and really process them. Which has become, it's why mind body medicine is becoming more and more a part of what I do.

So you mentioned this Jim Laird guy. Is he the same guy who you told me you were working with who put like 16 pounds of muscle on your body in the past few months?

That is correct. Jim Laird did put 16, 18 pounds of muscle on me in the last three months with just like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, three or four times a week at the gym.

How many times was he injecting your right butt cheek? Not at all. With special juices.

You want to know what the juicy juice. The secret was the protein, really. I just didn't understand.

Just tell me the whole protocol. Go ahead.

Well, the protocol is basically we go to the gym three to four times a week. We do a combination of machines, we Do a combination of what he calls resets, which, if people want to see those, check out his Instagram, because he'll be sharing a lot of them. We'll use everything in the gym. Because he is a former powerlifter, he set records back in the day when he was at his peak, when he was injecting huge amounts of testosterone. So he's got a lot of experience with high performance and pushing yourself too hard.

Yeah.

So go to the gym. It really isn't that hard. Lifting. I mean, I'm not that sore. I'm not, like, struggling to get out of bed.

It's challenging.

I feel it. But I want people to understand, like, we're not driving people into the ground with this. And that's what makes Jim so good. He knows how to get great results without beating people up.

So, by the way, are you doing, like, multiple sets for muscle group, or are you kind of doing, like, the single set to failure type of approach, or does it vary?

We don't do single set to failure. It's just a really. A hodgepodge of different things. I mean, it might be the trap bar one minute, it might be, you know, free weights the next. It might be a machine the next. It all depends on what's available.

Okay, and then you said protein. Tell me about that.

Well, Jim has this recipe where he calls monster mash.

And let's just say it's true to its name. So the basic recipe is you take a couple of pounds of ground beef. This is what you want. If you got, like, two people right.

Oh, boy.

Because we'll often have meals after the workout together. You cook that up with onions, garlic, herbs, spices. You throw in some kind of starch. I'm a big fan of potatoes, sweet potatoes, and then rice. And you might add tomatoes, you might add other vegetables. And I think it's really important to add the vegetables, the greens, the peppers, the mushrooms, the. I already said onions and garlic. So you're getting all that. Those micronutrients. I actually like to add, you know, some nuts and seeds, obviously whole, obviously organic for the high quality stuff. So I'm getting some arginine from that. And then you add bone broth. And that's kind of the secret because if you put all that together, you can make a really palatable.

Like in a blender?

No, no, no. In a big, big pot.

Like a big.

I was imagining a smoothie, like my.

Friend Mark Bell has, literally, like a.

Steak smoothie that's like a powder. And he shipped the canister to My house.

And it's literally like a bunch of.

Like ground up bones and meat and liver and all sorts of stuff. And it's like a protein powder. You make a smoothie out of it.

So when you said monster mash, I.

Was thinking like a nutribullet or Vitamix.

No.

And you eat two pounds of ground beef post workout.

Between the two of us.

Yeah.

Oh, between the two of you.

But Jim will. Will vary it. Right, so we might throw in chicken sausages with beef. We might throw in shrimp. Usually it's actually two proteins. Eggs are another really common ingredient.

No organ meats.

You know, we will add in organ meats. Now that you mentioned it, I need to actually go buy. I got to figure out how I'm going to incorporate that.

Yeah. Oh, so good. Heart, liver, kidney.

Yeah.

Bone marrow. Now I'm sounding like that liver king guy.

And you'll get to like a 90 gram serving of protein from that.

Yeah.

Which is insane.

Yeah.

I never thought I'd be able to do that. But because of the way it's prepared, it works.

And so before you weren't putting on much muscle, it sounds like one thing you weren't doing is adequate amounts of protein. So how much protein would you say you're getting? Like, have you looked at like grams per pound, body weight or total grams per day?

It's about a gram per pound of. Of body weight.

A gram per pound. So pretty much I, I usually tell people 0.6 to 0.8 grams per pound.

Yeah.

Is a general range. And then the only population I've seen who needs to eat more than that are like high school football players putting on mass bodybuilders, et cetera. So you're kind of like hitting that protein range that I would argue based on MTOR stimulation for long term longevity is not something that pairs well with an anti aging protocol, but is pretty much unparalleled when it comes to muscle mass and hypertrophy.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that's what's interesting about what I do with patients. I'm often counseling them. They'll say, well, look, I want to be, you know, ripped and I want to be shredded and I want to be lean and I want to be able to bench this.

Right.

And I say, look, I get that, but you also want to live a long time.

Right.

And I'll use this example. There's this old study from back in the days when we had psychiatric hospitals, and this is in Russell Ryder's book on melatonin, where they took Some of the inmates who were really violent and they thought, okay, well these male patients are really violent, really dangerous. Maybe for the safety of the staff, if we castrate them so they don't have any testosterone, they'll be safer, right?

Yeah.

Let's just say this was in a different.

This was in the good old days. You could do things like castrate your human subjects.

Yeah.

So they did it before we discovered fruit flies.

That's right.

Little castrateable fruit flies.

So they did it. And lo and behold, the castrated male patients didn't just live longer than the non castrated male patients, they lived longer than the women.

I don't like the direction the moral of the story is going, but keep going.

Well, what I ask men is I say, look, let's just say for a moment that I find definitive proof that castration will increase your lifespan. Are you gonna ask me for a referral to a surgeon for castration? And so far I've had no takers.

No. Instead I'm going to physiologically castrate myself by sitting in an ice tub over exercising under sleeping and not having enough protein.

I mean, whatever floats your bucket.

I get it though. I get what you're saying. By the way, you mentioned Russell Ryder and you had told me that there are times when you use that whole high dose melatonin sledgehammer approach that I talked to Dr. John Lieurance about. And Russell Ryder is a guy Dr. John Lieurance has talked about before in my interviews with him. And he developed the high dose melatonin suppositories that I'll use when I travel or when I want to do kind of like a melatonin sledgehammer for circadian reset. What are your thoughts on melatonin?

So I initially was very bearish on it because I was reading all this literature about how we can disrupt systems with things that we use exogenously. And there's a lot of truth to that.

Right.

But then I really doubled down on researching the melatonin literature and asking myself, okay, like, can I harm people with this? Because it's all well and good to say. Well, there's this possible problem. Right. But the other thing is, can you actually document that it happens? And it's not like melatonin hasn't been around as a supplement for long enough. And it's not like it's not available in doses that are big enough. So I looked and I couldn't find anyone anywhere documenting that anyone had really lasting negative effects of melatonin. And you know, that really Got my attention. And then I had a patient who, I don't think I told her to do this, but she did it anyway. She wound up on 60 milligrams of melatonin twice a day and it.

60 milligrams twice a day? Yeah.

That's a lot. It's a ton. And it's also got nothing to do with her circadian rhythms.

Well, a lot of people have told me that melatonin, because of its anti inflammatory and antioxidant potential, if you've got enough light hitting the retina, can be used daytime for anti inflammatory without making you drowsy.

Yeah.

And that's the thing about melatonin, Right. Is that it's secreted and produced in cells in responses to different stimuli at different times of day. And that's why I've looked at taking exogenous melatonin as a little bit like being trying to wash your dishes from your sidewalk.

Okay.

You know, it's better to turn the faucet on in the kitchen rather than try and squirt the water in through the window.

Okay.

As in you want to rely on and optimize your endogenous production first. And of course, I do that with patients with red light and infrared light and sauna and circadian rhythms and blue blockers and adequate tryptophan in the diet, not to mention B6, magnesium and all the other stuff. Right. But then I still would have these cases where we were having trouble getting symptoms under control. And as I was saying, this patient put herself on 60 milligrams of melatonin twice a day. And lo and behold, her night sweats got better, her fatigue got better, her headaches got better. I mean, I'd helped her make an enormous amount of progress already. But then when I asked her about it, she said, Look, Dr. Stillman, I feel so much better. I really don't want to stop my melatonin, so I'm just going to continue it indefinitely. And she's still on it.

Wow.

And then I started to use it in more cases where women were complaining of.

Only in America.

Right.

Because this would be a prescription in Europe. Like, you can't even buy melatonin over the counter.

I did not know that.

Yeah. It's considered to be like a hormone that you have to have prescribed.

Wow.

Yeah.

We're one of the only countries you can actually buy melatonin over the counter.

Wow.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which kind of speaks a little bit to its power. So what about you? Do you do you use high dose melatonin at all? Like when you try. Because you're here in Idaho, you live in Florida.

Right.

Like when you travel down here, did you take melatonin?

So the other thing that happened in this case that got me really curious was that when she was taking this high dose melatonin, we took a hair tissue mineral analysis of her.

Okay.

And she broke the level for, I mean, her aluminum level was off the charts. Oh, on the little piece of paper they give you, it goes up to four.

Yeah.

Her level was 119.

Why?

I don't know. But my theory is that maybe the melatonin is inducing a detox.

Oh, like pulling metal out of tissues.

Right. So I'm trying to confirm or whatever.

Supplement she was taking aluminum.

So I'm trying to just confirm or disconfirm this by putting different people on melatonin and then checking htma because I'm just really curious if this could work.

HTML being the hair tissue neuroanalysis testing.

Yeah.

Wow.

Because I really would like to know if it works for that or if it's a fluke. Because, you know, if you look up aluminum detox, you're going to get some pretty bread and butter stuff. You're going to hear about things like silica and you're going to hear about things like vitamin C and you know, you could do things like penicillamine protocols and you can get really crazy with all that stuff. But if it was as simple as just putting someone who had aluminum toxicity on a little bit of melatonin and they would just naturally get rid of it.

So the fact that it's high on the HTMA can mean that the body is getting rid of it. It doesn't necessarily mean it's super bad and your tissues are accumulating it.

Right. It's more a marker. The HTMA is more a marker in many ways of excretion than it is of total body accumulation. But it depends on the mineral and it depends on the conditions.

Okay, so do you take melatonin?

Occasionally?

Yeah.

Because with jet lag it's just so rock solid.

I agree.

And you know, particularly if you have someone who's having trouble sleeping at night, there's a lot of simple bread and butter over the counter stuff. Like your Kion sleep protocol product is great.

Yeah.

And I'll use that and other things to get people to sleep. And then there's herbs. Right. And then there's things like progesterone and there's. I mean, there's so much you can do for sleep. But then at the end of the day, you'll still have some people who are just like, I can't sleep.

Yeah.

And I say, look, let's sort all this stuff out one day at a time. For now, I want you to get some restful restorative sleep. So start 20 milligrams of melatonin and go up by one capsule a night until you get a really solid, rock solid sleep. And so Jim, my strength trainer, who I mentioned earlier, he had a really terrible TBI last year and he basically couldn't function. He was like, you know, barely able to talk, had this terrible stutter. He's had a bunch of concussions in the past because he did security work and he fought MMA and he's had a lot of head injuries and he wasn't able to sleep for like four or five months. His oura ring data was terrible. His HRV was terrible. Finally I just said, look, Jim, try some melatonin. He tries it. He's like, leland, didn't work. It's like, all right, man, we'll go up on the dose. He goes up to 80.

80 milligrams.

Yeah, yeah.

He says, leland, it still doesn't work. Like, look, man, just go up by 20 milligrams a night until you sleep. And he got up to 300 milligrams of melatonin and he slept like a baby. And it effectively reset his ability to sleep. And since then, his sleep has progressively recovered. Yeah, and we did a bunch of other testing to figure out what other things he needed. But the melatonin was really instrumental in getting Jim back to really being well and able to get restorative sleep.

About 300 milligrams is what's in that super Sandman suppository that I'll use when I travel or like, when I get home from travel and need to do a little bit of a reset. And that seems like kind of the sweet spot. I have in the past, even used, like a couple just to see. Well, 300 is good. Is 600 better? And you actually don't see much of a difference. There's kind of like a saturation threshold or something like that.

Well, what's funny about that, right, is that I talked to John Laurence about this because I thanked him, I said, hey, listen, I really helped Jim with this piece of advice you basically gave me at Runga. And I told him I'm using high dose melatonin for some of my patients now. And he's like, well, what does that mean? Like, are you using like a gram? And I was like, no, John, I'm just using like dozens or hundreds of milligrams. I'm not using like 1000 milligram dose like he's using.

Well, you probably know that maintaining muscle health is critically important to longevity and enduring good health in general. And postbiotics, which are the active nutrients your body makes during digestion, are also an emerging research driver of good health. Now, this compound called urolithin A is one of the only postbiotics shown to have major health benefits and be bioavailable. If you're able to get it into your system orally, it can also help to maintain your overall muscle health, which is of course very important for longevity and overall good health. That's one of the reasons why exercise and weight training in particular is so good as an age reversal strategy. But getting high levels of urolithin A puts the icing on the cake. It upgrades your body's cellular power grid. 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Might notice a little change up in the audio here because Leland and I continue to have a fascinating discussion on that walk a few weeks ago now.

And it wound up we had about.

Gosh, almost a half hour of pure gold to share with you. Towards the end, I think it really sucked until we lost the recording.

Right, Leland?

That's right, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now people are in for a real treat now that we've had a chance to warm up. Anyways, though, the last part of our discussion was so fascinating, I of course didn't want to leave you all hanging. So Leland and I reconnected and we're rerecording this bit that we lost because there's a few other key areas that I really wanted to make sure that you guys knew and that Leland has some really, really great insights on. Now, in the spirit of us being out on that trail walking, Leland, I'm actually walking on my treadmill right now. I figured I might as well just keep it up.

Yeah, I just had a really, really good workout at the gym with Laird. Of course I mentioned before and now I'm sitting in front of my photon from Ryan Richards.

Are you eating that meat bowl that we talked about?

I just had the monster mash.

Yeah. Stan Efferding's monster mash I got to try that sometime. I just got done making a mashup in the kitchen. I'm interviewing some guy who invented an overnight oatmeal company on my podcast tomorrow.

So I just got done putting oatmeal.

In the refrigerator for overnight oatmeal. But I got to admit, the monster mash sounds pretty palatable right now.

I mean, listen, if you want to gain a lot of weight fast, there's nothing better.

Yep, that and bench pressing, baby. Old school.

Okay, so speaking of bench pressing, one.

Of the things we were talking about during our recording and also before when you're at my house, was this idea of how often you're running into people who don't necessarily fall into that category that a lot of doctors have to deal with, which is people needing to get off their butts and move, but instead people moving too much paired with people working too much. Can you tell me what you're running into in your practice with that?

Yeah, I mean, it's just the fact that the vast majority of Americans are very sedentary, dare I say lazy, at risk of offending or being unkind to them, but they don't do a lot of work. They aren't very ambitious in their careers. They're not very ambitious in the gym. Sometimes it's hard to find what they're ambitious about. But then there is another segment of the population, and you recorded a great podcast with a guy named Doug Brackman on this.

Oh, yeah, Driven. That's a fantastic book. Great podcast too.

Yeah.

It's really important for people who are.

Driven to understand that they're just wired differently. They look at it and they're like, that's the big source of my success. That's why I'm a CEO. It's why I'm a vp. It's why I'm a, you know, super mom, super wife, super, you know, PTA member or whatever. But it's also their. Their downfall and their Achilles heel because they'll get overextended and they want to be excellent at everything and they spread themselves too thin and they just. Sometimes we need to be their wake up call of saying, hey, listen, you cannot do as much as you're doing in a sustainable way. Look at your hrv, look at your labs, look at your performance, look at these different things. It's time for you to get realistic about, you know, your expectations of yourself and maybe dial it back. Because the tendency for those people is to come to us looking for enablement, basically. Okay, I'm not making My gains or keeping my gains in the gym. I'm not able to keep up the times I was hitting on the bike or the treadmill or whatever. I need you guys to give me some peptides or some hormones or whatever in order to enable me to keep doing that. But that's not a great long term strategy. There's real consequences for that. And it's not like those things aren't good useful, whatever. It's funny. Jim just ordered some peptides for us to use.

Wait, I gotta ask. Do you inject the peptides and sprinkle them into the monster mash or you take those separately?

Oh, man, that cracks me up. Actually, Jim just ordered some intranasal ones. I may or may not have a raging case of adhd and his team.

Wants me to focus a little bit more.

We'll see.

And yeah, it's sort of like the secret to people's success is being really, really driven. Right. And I certainly fall into this category myself and I just can't stop. I'm just constantly on the move doing things. I have to know myself and be realistic with myself and know when to dial it back. And a lot of things I've learned along the way have really helped me. So blue blockers put me to sleep like a double dose of Benadryl. And that helps me not overwork at night. Getting wiped out at the gym helps me sleep as long as I'm not doing two plus to to bedtime. Getting plenty of sun helps me relax so that I don't get too worked up and too dialed in for work. And I know it happens to me, you know, when I get too focused and fixated on work and I'm not taking enough time for me and doing those things that help me really restore. I see my HRV tank, my labs don't do well. It's just not good. And so a lot of people coming to us, they're actually doing too much. They're either and it's never the same, right? I mean, some of them, they're doing too much at the gym. More and more, I appreciate that people are also not just doing sometimes too much in the gym. They're just doing things in a way that's really bad for them. People just don't realize that their ribcage and pelvis position governs which muscle groups are going to be worked in an exercise. And it can create dysfunction in their shoulders, their hips, their knees, all their joints. And they don't realize it's just because they're form and Like I said, talking about lifting with Jim, I've just learned more and more of that from him. And going to the gym with him is really fun because he points out that's an outside hitter in volleyball, or that person over there played basketball, or that's a lefty pitcher. It's really funny. You can just tell how people moves.

Yeah, people move.

And also some of the athletes have good body awareness. But I agree, you see a lot of folks kind of moving like Muppets at the gym from a biomechanical standpoint, kind of flailing all over the place or stooping in poor posture. I think part of that leads back to what you were talking about earlier, that need to simply use exercise as something, another thing to simply check off the list and just get through and do without a whole lot of attention to excellence, presence or form, or the mere goal of exercise to burn stress or burn calories, both of which can lead to simply just push, push, pushing versus using the gym as a way to make yourself, pardon the expression, harder to kill, stronger for life, better prepared for life's activities, and very focused with a goal in mind that goes beyond catharsis or calorie burning. And when you're talking about this idea of enablement, folks going to their dock looking for the doc to be able to allow them to continue to push at a pace that perhaps they shouldn't have been pushing at in the first place. That recently blew up in the news. And I wouldn't throw him under the bus unless he'd already admitted this on other podcast interviews. The liver king Brian Johnson recently busted for. Even though it wasn't illegal activity that he was up to, but it was revealed that he was using a lot of steroids, a lot of hormones, a lot of stuff that went above and beyond just liver and, say, the monster mash. And he said that a big part of that was he simply had to figure out a way to keep pushing at the level that he was pushing. And food and supplements weren't quite enough.

And he had to add in a.

Bit more of what many call better living through science to be able to scratch that itch of what I think he's referred to as a combination of kind of like body dysmorphia, exercise addiction, and a drive to exercise at a level that if he didn't do it, he wouldn't even feel sane or normal or confident during the day. And so he dug himself into that hole. And you see that sometimes people get on one upper, then another smart drug, then a Nootropic, then a cough, cough, intranasal peptide.

I'm just kidding.

And try and just get themselves up, up, up to the point throughout the day. And then of course, I'm sure you experienced this also, Leland. Then turning to the downers at night because a lot of that stuff, the half life of it dictates it's still in your bloodstream when it's time to hit the sac. And so you get this vicious cycle. I've found that for me, a lot of times I'm not tired in the afternoon and I want to push and I want to keep working like an animal. I'll even admit that perhaps some of the caffeinated compounds or energy compounds I've consumed in the morning are probably still kind of pushing me through the day. But just through self discovery, I've found that if I don't almost force myself to do a yoga nidra session or a meditation session or a more relaxing, not a wim hofi but a more relaxing breath work session or a siesta, if I don't do that by the time I get to dinner with the family in the evening, I'm toast, I'm grumpy and I feel like I have been gas pedaling it the entire day. So even when I don't feel like it, I lay down and sometimes within about 10 minutes my body begins to downregulate and my brain recognizes that it can rest and it can check back for a little while. And that's just a gift that I give myself for 20 to 45 minutes on as many days of the week as possible. So yeah, I think there's a lot of things that people need to consider when it comes to this idea of over exercising and overworking.

I understand the appeal of the mindset. When I first got into functional and integrative medicine, I worked at a very intensive, very intense wellness center. And we did a lot of IV stuff and it was really fun. You can really push the limits with that and you can get some amazing results. But as I may have mentioned earlier, I just saw people who would fail. And then as I worked and worked and learned more, I realized, okay, the people who failed are the people who don't get the fundamentals. And one of the things they didn't do a good job of explaining in medical school is that in medical school and in residency you get kind of indoctrinated into this idea of okay, you put the orders in the computer, the electronic medical record, you give the orders to the nurse, the team, whoever Right. And their orders, they get done, and that falls apart when the patient leaves the hospital. I mean, even if it even gets done in the hospital, you do have to double check and make sure everything's actually happening. Right. I sometimes used to joke in the hospital that the orders were really just suggestions. And sometimes that's a good thing, right? Sometimes people don't follow stupid orders, and that's good. But when patients go home, what they do on their own time is sometimes they don't do anything that you tell them to do. And again, sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad. But when you're practicing integrative and wellness medicine, you're looking at this case and you're like, wow, we have them on all the stuff, and they're on this and that, and they're eating this way and that way. And we did this test and that test, and we treated this, and it's not. And then you get into, okay, well, what's going on? That's like, it's not working. It works for everybody else. Why isn't working for them? And it'll be, oh, wow, you know, like they're going through divorce or, you know, their business partner just dropped dead, and suddenly they're picking up twice as much work, or they're going through a, you know, a divorce in their business or something like that. And there's some kind of big psychosocial stress that's wrecking them. And sometimes it's chickens coming home to roost after, I mean, years. Right? So like with the. With the Liver King, I look at patients who get into trouble with the law, trouble with their wives, trouble with their husbands, trouble with their whoever, right? They get caught. They're almost like looking for someone to catch them. When you look at how they're doing, what they're doing, they're almost like, desperate for somebody to talk to them about, hey, what's really bothering you? That you're actually engaging in these behaviors. And that all comes out in their physical training with guys like Jim and in their medical treatment with guys like me. Because it takes a long time, I think, to get really comfortable with having those conversations with people. Most clinicians, I think, are not even aware that those problems are going on. And it took me a long time.

To realize that sometimes I'm the only.

Person that someone has, like, a positive interaction with in their week. Right? They have nagging, you know, mean or unpleasant or just negative family. They may have a toxic work environment. They may not have any close, intimate relationships at the moment and being able to talk to people about that is sometimes the most cathartic and therapeutic thing that I do. And.

I would never realize that coming out of residency because it's something they didn't teach us. I've realized it's so powerful what you can do just with your words and your presence to help patients heal.

Yeah, I think that you're right.

I think a lot of times people get stuck into this cycle of overworking and over exercising because that's not only their identity, but that's how they feel they need to show up to the world. I think one of the best ways to return to your true, authentic self and being your true, authentic self, rather than who you think the world wants you to be, is to have people you can talk to and people you can be your true self around. Because it's pretty easy to just carry this image. I've had years of my life where I've done this before. I had close friends I could confide in besides my wife, for example. Close friends who had challenged me about what I am or I'm not doing or how I am, or I'm not showing up. When it comes to displaying a fake me versus a real me, it's been a long journey. But I've realized that solid relationships, people you can confide in, people you can talk to. And you're right. I think for some people that could be their GP or a doctor like.

You, I think that's super healthy to.

Be able to do that. Because I think once you talk about it, you realize sometimes by expressing it to someone else how silly it is how many hours you spend in the gym each day, or how many hours you're working on any given week, or how many supplements you're using to stay awake or to fall asleep at the beginning or the end of the day. So, yeah, I think that's a really good point.

I mean, they're just strategies, right? It's a strategy of I feel incredible anxiety when I sit still. So my strategy is study all the time or be at the gym all the time, or be cooking all the time, be busy all the time, or I feel bad about myself when I don't have a, I don't know, 28 inch neck, so I just have to go to the gym and do unbelievable number of neck exercises, whatever. And that's what it is. It's a strategy to try and cope with their feelings. It's pretty remarkable when you think about the fact that people really, they think they do things because of how they think, but the truth is they do things because of how they feel and they'll find a way to rationalize what feels good. And then they have to figure out through sort of trial and error and really the sometimes the ugly feelings that people get when they do things they're not proud of. Right. Oh, wait a minute. You know, there's a reason why I'm using this coping strategy. Instead of hitting the bottle every night, I need to go back and forgive some people or improve my relationships or find something to do socially out and about so that I'm not just sitting here alone at night. We have a lot of those conversations in our practice and it's some of the most life changing work that we do because we help people understand why they're doing the things that sometimes they didn't even realize were destructive. And it may not be destructive. I'm not saying going to the gym is bad, but. But there's a big difference between doing an hour of really high intensity interval training every day for six months and doing high intensity interval training for 20 minutes two times a week.

Yeah, that's something a lot of people are talking about now. Guys like probably Dr. Peter Attia most notably and I talked about this a lot in my endurance training book beyond training. You don't need that much high intensity interval training to move the dial on VO2 max or mitochondrial density. It's typically one workout a week that's short 10 to 30 second bursts, typically five to 10 of them with long luxurious rest periods. Another workout once a week that's anywhere in the 4 to 6 minute range of maximum sustainable pace with a 1 to 1 work to rest ratio where you're going hard recovering, going hard recovering, that's typically around four to six times. And that would be classified as a zone four up to zone five cardio intensity. And the rest can literally be slightly above conversational pace walking or something like that. What would be referred to as zone two cardio. I think people sometimes get the impression that because hiit is good, you must do a lot of it to stay fit. And it's good, but it's so darn good and so darn effective you don't even need to do that much of it. And so yeah, I think sometimes people just get sucked into some of these exercise myths. Weight training, if you go heavy and you go hard and you go to failure a couple times a week and you're going to be strong like bull mitochondrial density, those short bursts once a week and you're going to have good density, VO2 max. Those little maximum sustainable pace efforts once a week and you'll be good. And then cardio is just keep moving. Walk on a treadmill while you're recording a podcast.

And by the way, I agree with the neck thing.

You're going to be seen and heard and loved, even if you have a pencil neck. Despite what Hollywood or Men's Health or Women's Health magazine would have you to believe, most of the time, the person that cares the most about your neck is pretty much you, and usually only you. Unless you're getting a paycheck to be a supermodel or on the COVID of fitness magazines. Right? There was another thing you mentioned to.

Me at my house.

This might seem like a little bit of a non segue and unrelated, but I was fascinated about it and I got to ask you about it. You said something like, and I remember you mentioning this on the walk and the recording that we lost that you have found a ton of benefit from iodine. That's not something a lot of people talk about. Tell me about that.

It's funny, it goes back to this statement that Dr. Jack Cruz made a long time ago that just resonated with me so much, I never forgot it. And I don't even think I heard him say it more than like once or twice.

He.

And it's just this. It's biohacking the periodic table of elements. When he said that, I thought, oh my gosh, that's exactly where we should start with medicine, at least on the matter side of the equation, right? E equals MC squared, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That's Einstein's general relativity. And in medicine, basically, the way I look at it, we have energy and we have matter. And if anything you're doing in the physical biochemical world, you're dealing with both sides of that equation at all times because they're inseparable. But with the matter part, you have it very conveniently laid out for you in the periodic table of elements. And when he said that, it really made me realize that for a long time I'd been so curious about what does this element do or that element do and what we do with big things like testosterone or other hormones or peptides. And when I say big, I mean many different elements and atoms put together in a very small specific arrangement, right? That's very different from the fundamental elements of matter that compose our physical bodies and that then our bodies really rely upon in order to have normal and optimal function. So iodine is kind of at the end of the periodic table. And it took me a long time to get around to really learning about it. And it's a really funny element because it's part of the halogens on the far side of the periodic table, which include fluoride, chloride, bromide, and there's different forms.

Right.

Fluorine, fluoride, chlorine, chloride. I won't get into all that fundamental chemistry because, to be honest with you, it bores me and isn't really clinically relevant.

Although you are one of the few people who refers to the humor and funniness of where a certain compound is located on the periodic table of the elements. Leland. I think that's the first time someone has commented on the funniness of it.

I know, right? But it's just true.

The niceties of these little things, they escape my brain because I can just look them up. But anyway, iodine is really important. People think of it as just one of the precursors to thyroid hormone, but that's such a gross understatement of what it does, particularly in our modern world. So I got two great books on this recently. One of them is iodine. I think it's why you need it, why you can't live without it. That's by Dr. David Brownstein. And then a premium substack subscriber of mine actually sent me a book, which I was so impressed by. This book is called Hidden Cause of Acne. And it blew my mind. This girl, her name is Melissa Gallico, and she's a former military intelligence officer, Fulbright scholar, really smart. And she put together this incredible book on how fluoride. She believes fluoride is behind the acne epidemic. And I don't think it's just that, for the record, but she makes a really compelling argument.

By the way, her argument doesn't have to do with nitric oxide, does it? Because I know people use fluoridated toothpaste also. Mouthwash is another. They tend to have low levels of nitric oxide production because it kind of nukes the. I believe it's the bacteria in the mouth responsible for the nitrate conversion.

That's very interesting. I didn't know that. It's probably connected, but she doesn't bring that up in the book.

Okay.

But she really geeks out on fluoride and all the different places where you can get it. And I have to admit, even though I've heard a lot about fluoride, there were some areas where I just didn't realize we were potentially getting it. It's a really common ingredient in certain pesticides in certain wines from certain areas. I think it's the San Joaquin Valley of California. Apparently it's higher in processed fortified dairy products because it's concentrated. She's got all these great, great little pearls in there about where fluoride is. The tie in with iodine is that iodine is not only responsible for producing thyroid hormone, Iodine is responsible for interacting with different components in your cell and creating what are called iodolactones and various other constructs that include iodine. From the epidemiological data, it would seem that the higher the iodine content of the diet of the populace, the healthier they are and the less degenerative disease they suffer from, as well as the less thyroid disease they suffer from. Melissa, in her book, goes into really amazing detail about how various cultures that people think of as not eating a high iodine diet probably did eat a high iodine diet, despite what people have previously taught. Again, the tie in with fluoride and iodine is that iodine can replace and push out fluoride and bromide and the other halogens in the body. But because iodine is such a trace element, it's found in very small quantities in all but very few foods. Seaweed's the major, major source because it's present in trace quantities. When you use it at really high doses and things like Lugol's iodine, you can push way more iodine into the body than you usually do. And you can get some really powerful healing reactions from this.

When you say healing reactions, do you mean like detoxification? Almost like a Herxheimer's diarrhea release in the stool type of reaction?

Yes. And I have to be gentle with.

People because I always like to have the diarrhea warning on the podcast, you know?

Well, you know what's funny about it? Yeah, I mean, I could do that. I mean. But the problem is, it's so interesting. It's not as. And people get this idea like, oh, if you use iodine, you may screw up your thyroid. That's actually probably total nonsense. I'm not saying it's not possible. I think anything is possible. But when we look at the historical literature on iodine, which Melissa goes into a nice detail in her book, the discoverer of vitamin C, Albert Sangurui, one of my heroes, he said, basically, when in doubt, prescribe the patient iodine. And it was incredibly common to use it therapeutically back in the day. And when you look at the number of things people have used Iodine to treat. They'll treat acute illnesses with it. Colds, flus, gastroenteritis. I mean, they'll treat all kinds of things with. Topically. Topically, iodine's incredibly powerful.

Yeah, it's very well absorbed. A little bit like transdermal magnesium gets pretty decent absorption, too. I know some of it depends on the Dalton size. The same would go for some of the transdermal peptides, but. But yeah, I mean, isn't that like a test? If you put iodine. I don't know how accurate this test is. If you apply iodine topically, the rate at which it disappears can be indicative of your level of iodine deficiency.

To my knowledge, no one's ever substantiated that that's actually a real thing. But, yeah, I mean, what I do in my clinic is at a certain point with somebody, once I think their fundamentals are dialed in, I'll just say, look. And I tend to recommend that my patients eat seaweed. Seaweed is safe. Seaweed's a food. If seaweed was really going to hurt a lot of people, I think we would have found out about it. The FDA and the USDA are just like, they love banning things.

Yeah. By the way, it's also a great spice. Kombu, dulce, kelp. You can buy these as amazing spices. Like Dr. Thomas Cowan. He has an heirloom vegetable company where he packages up, amongst other things, super flavorful seaweed powder and ships it in these really stable miron glass jars to your house. And because it pairs really well, as you, I think, noted, or alluded to, with the balances out, the selenium in fish, for example, out of those iodine sources go really well with the fish meal. So I'll often. What I used to do is I would sprinkle it all over fish before I'd broil or bake fish. I've since learned that cooking with some of those more potent herbs is best done by only using salt as your primary spice and then using your other spices once you've removed it from the heat, because you get better stability of the extra, say, sea vegetables, in this case, that you're adding to it. So now I'll bake fish with salt and olive oil and sometimes a little lemon juice, pull it out, and then just do a generous helping of that sea vegetable powder all over it. And I think that's a wonderful way to get iodine, especially if you don't want a slimy nori sheet or something.

That's really funny. Yeah, I know.

Those are good options.

I just ordered a couple pounds of seaweed. I like to get a variety. I think I just ordered from Maine Coast Sea Vegetables.

Oh yeah, the Maine Coast Sea Vegetables. Fantastic.

Yeah. And so I cook with it in soups, stews, I throw it in the monster mash. And then I've been experimenting on myself with high dose Lugol's iodine for weeks now. I haven't had any problems. I figure if I'm going to tell people to do this for long periods of time, I should at least say that I've done it and I've gotten up to 50 milligrams and I do that pretty much every day.

That's a lot of iodine. 50 milligrams a day.

50 milligrams is as much as I've heard anyone use in clinical practice for prolonged periods of time. But it's clear from whoever people I've read, Brownstein and Los Galico, probably the foremost among them, that there's people who are taking 50 milligrams of iodine for months and months and months and months with no adverse effects and in fact reporting remarkable improvements in performance and their health. And I have to say in the last couple months there's two things I've changed that were significant. I got a new sauna space and a photon from Brian Richards. And I mean, I can't stop.

They're so good because of the heat or because of the infrared light. Like were you doing sauna before and you switched to red light therapy based sauna?

I didn't have a sauna set up before.

Okay.

I'd had a sauna space previously and then I just moved a bunch and downsized and I bought a new one. And it's sort of like I kept telling myself, well, I live in Florida, do I really need a sauna? It's like a sauna outside. Seven months of the year today it was 65 here. And of course Jim is £250 and five' ten. And I joke that he's a furnace and I'm a radiator because he's built like a fire hydrant and I'm built like a bean pole. But he's helping that in the gym, obviously. But I'll cool off so fast. And so I love having a sauna even when it's only a little bit cold outside. But I mean the energy I feel, the productivity I see in myself between that and I'm convinced the iodine has a lot to do with it. But either way, I mean, I'VE never been more productive. I've never been more physically powerful, fit, better sleep, better mood. And I really. The more I read about iodine, I mean, it has all these important effects on the brain to the point that if you look in the literature. Right, if you look in the literature, it's pretty clear that the more fluoride you take in, the lower your IQ is going to be. They've tested that in kids a lot. And it's one of the big problems the fluoride lobby has right now in terms of overcoming.

All my teeth could rot out of my head and I wouldn't bat an eye. But you tell me that I'm going to lose a couple of points of iq. I'm going to freak out.

It's just a simple matter of what's it worth to me. My brain's worth a lot more to me than my teeth. Fortunately, I don't have to make the choice between the two. You see where I'm going with this. Fluoride might be good for your teeth. Let's just suspend our disbelief there. But if it's coming at the cost of iq, and this is where the iodine is important, if iodine can push fluoride out of cells, that the fluoride's poisoning. Right. It could be basically the antidote for fluoride toxicity. And I've been struck by the number of patients I've seen over the years. And it's so funny, I'm thinking of one right now who I noticed that they had what looked like dental fluorosis and they had terrible acne. And I wish I'd known about iodine back then because I would have been really curious to see what happened because we tried a lot of things on their acne and not a lot of things really moved the needle on it.

I'm gonna have to check out that book. And by the way, the shownotes@bengreenfieldlife.com Leland2 Leland, the number two. I'll hunt down those books and put them in the show notes. That's fascinating. I mean, I would. And you'd probably agree with me, Leland. I would proceed with caution by saying that nearly everything could be cured with iodine. That's probably a fast track to be called a medical kook.

I know, right? But listen, you're just parroting Albert Szent Giorgi.

Yeah.

Don't do this. I was reading and this has happened multiple times to me over the years. I was reading a book two nights ago on what this doctor claimed was the root cause of many cancers and chronic diseases. It was a certain carbohydrate binding protein, I believe, called galactin. And fascinating book. He makes a pretty good case, but he another guy, I mean, I love him, but he does this. Another guy who does this is Dr. Steven Gundry, who's great. But these are two examples of guys who will paint a villain. In the former case, galactin, in the latter case, lectin, as being the main thing you need to worry about for just about every disease and health risk factor on the face of the planet. And then somewhere around chapter, usually it's between chapter eight and ten of the book, the latter three quarters, there is the chapter that details why you got to be careful of your source of some type of anti galactin enzyme or lectin digesting enzyme. And here's the one that I'm inventing and am now selling to you. And here's your discount code on the website. And it's kind of like the fox guarding the henhouse. And again, it's super good information. But what I wish a lot of these docs would do would say, just come right out in the very beginning of the book and just be like, hey, I sell a product that's going to help you with the issues that you're about to read about. Because sometimes you get towards the end of the book and you almost feel like as the reader, you've been a little bit deceived. Like you've gotten your hope way up about fixing everything and then found out the person who is telling you all this information kind of profits from telling.

You all that information.

I'm one to talk because I have sponsors on the podcast and things like that. But it's interesting.

What I'm getting at here, Leland, is don't write a book about all the health issues of iodine and come out with Stillman's iodine 3.0. That's my business advice to you.

You know, it's really funny you mentioned that, because Jim's got a friend named Charles Mayfield who makes lard skincare products. Do you know Charles?

What's his last name again?

Mayfield.

Yeah, I used to hang out with him. I think it was at the Paleo Effects conferences they'd have down in Austin, Texas, if we're thinking of the same Charles. Yeah, nice guy.

Yeah, right. And so I told Jim for some cracks in his feet, I was like, hey, listen, man, throw some iodine in that. And he's like, yeah, that's a good idea. And so then I was like, listen, pitch Dr. Stillman's iodine infused smart lard. Charles actually likes the idea, so maybe we'll do it.

That's funny.

No, I agree with you. And there's a lot of perverse incentives. That's the technical word for it, perverse incentives. But the reality is you have to make a living and particularly if you're providing all your content for free. I don't think you have a paywall up anywhere, do you?

If there is one, I'm unaware of it.

Yeah, right. So, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I decided to go behind a paywall with a lot of my content. If I write a blog post where I explain you how to save, and I looked at the imaging cost recently. Like a brain MRI is like $8,400 in about five minutes. I can explain to you how to get it for like 350. So if I charge $20 for a substack premium subscription for a month, I think that's a pretty good deal if you're going to save eight grand on your brain MRI if you really need it, which a lot of people don't. And that's the simple reality of it. Right. Is when I see guys like that doing the thing with their books. So funny. A medical marketer that I know who markets for a lot of integrative docs and clinics, he said, don't hate the player, hate the game. And he's right, because that's all there is to it. Human nature's got a lot of problems and we just have to live with it.

Yeah, I agree. By the way, Total aside, I think with the sauna thing, you're onto something.

Even though you live in Florida, that.

Sauna is a good idea because I think the amount of that 600 to 810ish nanometer wavelength of red light that you feel really good on getting exposed to, and that has a host of the benefits that get reported. And a lot of the red light literature would dictate you'd have to spend a lot of time in the sun and get a lot of UVA and UVB exposure to get that amount of light. And I think you can concentrate it without risking the potential for, you know, the grandma from something about Mary skin effect from, you know, three, four hours in the sunlight each day, especially down in Florida. And so I think even if you're in a hot environment, having some form of red light therapy is a good idea. It just allows you to concentrate without a ton of time in the sun. I'm totally not sun phobic, as you know Leland, but I think it's a good idea. And secondarily I think that the fact that you feel so good with the red light, I think it is a little bit different than what you get from sunlight and even from sauna. I've done dry sauna for a series of years and eventually switched to infrared and I feel better after the infrared, deeper sweat, more endorphins, feel a little less drained because the heat is lower but the sweat is equivalent. So yeah, I agree. I mean for me personally, the sauna is a game changer. I haven't done the iodine yet, but I can tell you related to the sea vegetable concept, I think that two things that also go very, very well with red light would be any of these melanin rich compounds that assist with the cytochrome conversion to ATP in response to photons of light. Like a lot of the. I think they're called phyocyanins or something along those lines. Like the blues and greens that you find in chlorella, marine phytoplankton, et cetera. Or the blacks that you find in shilajit or the blues that you'd find in like methylene blue. Fantastic. To pair with red light therapy then the other one. And I recently came across some very interesting research on this and its effect on the cell membranes and also the activation of cytochrome for ATP production. Higher dose DHA on any days that you do red light therapy appears to be a pretty good idea also. So I think some type of bluish green compound, some type of DHA source and then hit the sauna and it just stacks a few modalities that I think make the sauna even better.

Yeah, you're making me remember. One of my favorite stacks is methylene blue, hydrociodine and fulvic acid. Minerals not mixed together. There's something that happens between those three with the methylene blue doesn't mix in. But I'll stack them in the same glass like one after another after another. Now I'm going to stack those and go use my sauna space and see what happens. I'll let you know. Yeah, I'll be really curious to hear. I would love to know what you see. If you try high dose iodine. I start people on a real simple taper up and I start them on one drop of blue galls and I'm very clear with them. Look, if you have palpitations, if you start losing weight, it's the iodine and you have to eat a lot because it will upregulate your basal metabolic rate just as a matter of pushing that iodine dependent thyroid pathway. And it also, I mean, to be fair, I suspect that it acts to actually change cellular metabolism through other pathways as well. There's a ton of literature on iodine consumption and cancer rates showing that iodine consumption seems to drop your risk of cancer. That's one of the reasons why I'm using it more clinically and in myself as well. In a world that's full of halogens from, I mean, they put bromine in like energy drinks, breads, fluorides, just everywhere. And so no wonder, I mean, I think, no wonder I feel better right on this high dose of iodine. And that's one of the reasons why I'm using it clinically and I really suspect why it helps protect the cell from cancerous changes. And it's something that I'm talking to my patients more about who've got a history of cancer. I'm like, look, maybe for all we know, you're going to do way, way, way better on higher doses of iodine, even if you don't want to use it as Lugols, which is like, it's like the F16 compared to the AR15 of like, of iodine. Yeah, it's a really powerful, powerful supplement. But I'll start people on one drop, taper them up to 20 over 20 days, one drop increase a day, and then maintain them and just watch what happens because they'll start sleeping better. We had a guy's blood pressure in our program. Optimal male vitality dropped by about 30 points. He did that and he did some blood donation, a couple of other things. But the improvement people see with high doc iodine is really, really remarkable.

Yeah, I'll have to try it and compare it to how I feel with the sea vegetable, which I would say I might be getting maximum 5 milligrams a day with. So that upper range of 20 to 40, I'll mess around with it a little bit and let you know. The only other people I've seen talking about iodine would be some of these more fringe longevity enthusiasts, I believe. Brian Johnson, another guy I'm going to get on my podcast who does a lot of age reversal tactics. He both tracks iodine pretty intensively because he does a lot of self quantification, but I believe also uses iodine. And I've heard him note somewhere that he notices a drastic effect in energy as well. So thank you so much, Dr. Sillen for giving all of us yet another thing to add to our giant plastic bag full of supplements.

I mean, I know you guys were looking for more stuff to put in.

Your cupboards, all those uppers to support our narcissistic overworking tendencies. But no, seriously, I will try it out. And if anybody has questions, comments or feedback about that, the Show Notes where you can leave your comments and everything. BenGreenfieldLife.com Leland2 that's BenGreenfieldLife.com Loland the number two where you can also listen to the other fantastic podcast that Leland and I had a couple of years ago. And I suspect that you're going to hear more from Leland in the future on this show because he and I have have gotten to know each other and you're a good man, Leland. I really appreciate you giving the time too, for the show.

Thanks, man. Thanks for having me on. It's good to be here.

Yeah, for sure. All right, folks, well enjoy your iodine, your melatonin and much more. And go to the Show Notes for links to Dr. Stillman's stuff, his substack and everything else. And thank you so much for listening. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Leland Stillman signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week.

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