Dr. Scott Sherr Reveals the Biohacking Power of Methylene Blue

This episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights, and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google account, Google Health app, internet, and Google Health premium subscription. Features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy.

Expedia and VisitScotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland. The sweep of wild coastlines, quiet lochs, and untamed landscapes. Fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land. Come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave. Plan your Scottish escape today at expedia.com/visitscotland.

So good, so good, so good.

New markdowns up to 70% off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Stock up and save big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories, and more must-haves for summer. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favourite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.

Not everything synthetic is bad for us. You take insulin, that's synthetic. You go to the ER because you have a tracking infection up your leg and you don't get antibiotics, you could die. So we need synthetic things sometimes. And not everything natural is good for us. You're more stressed every day because your mitochondria are under significant duress. You may need to take methylene blue on a regular basis. What methylene blue can do is it can compensate both on the metabolic side of the challenges making energy and also on the side of detoxification. Is it works on both sides. And the other big thing about it is just quality.

With all supplements, quality. Make sure they're testing, testing, and testing.

Do not buy your supplements on Amazon, please, because you don't know what's in that warehouse. You get an ingredient, say it's methylene blue in this case, from a manufacturer. If it says it's from the US, they're lying.

It's just really frustrating as a supplement producer to deal with this where you're competing against these garbage brands.

Most people that I see don't realize that they need to be more relaxed. They just think they need better sleep. I know people love their morning routines, but I'm gonna tell you, your evening routine is so much more important than your morning routine.

Even when you're doing all the right things, your strength training, staying active, prioritizing protein, keeping the muscle you built over a lifetime gets harder with age. Now, our parents were told to accept that it's just getting older. I don't buy that. And that's why I use Timeline powered by MagnaPure. Here's the real story. Muscle isn't just about strength or looking good. Muscle runs your metabolism, protects your balance, preserves your independence, and determines how powerfully you age. And what most people don't realize is that muscle loss isn't only about hormones or workouts. It's about cellular energy. As we age, our mitochondria, those energy engines inside our muscle cells, become less efficient. Now, when your muscles can't produce energy well, it's harder to maintain strength, function, and resilience.

That's where Mitopure comes in.

It's the only clinically studied form of urolithin A, a postbiotic shown in human clinical trials to support muscle strength and function by helping renew mitochondrial health at the cellular level. I love this because it works with your training, not instead of it. Now, strength training is the signal, protein is the building block, and Mitopure supports the cellular energy that allows your muscles to actually respond and adapt. Mitopure gummies make it simple. 2 a day, sugar-free, vegan, non-GMO, and independently certified for quality. And let's not forget, absolutely delicious. So if staying strong is part of your longevity strategy, and I sure hope it is, visit timeline.com/JJVirgin and get 20% off your order. Building muscle, stabilizing blood sugar, and supporting your metabolism Those have been my core messages to millions of women over the years. But you know, there's something we don't talk about enough, and that's when you travel. What happens? Quite often you experience constipation, stomachaches, bloating, and not just during your trip, but also when you get back. This happens because your microbiome gets exposed to lots of different stuff, different foods, different water, different microbes, or it could just be the stress from all that travel. Now, I recently traveled through the Amazon rainforest And even though I'm used to traveling, I made sure I had these two supplements with me to avoid any kind of craziness. ParaGardian and Herbal Power Flush from Bioptimizers. ParaGardian is a botanical formula designed to support gut balance. Think of it as your reset tool when your system has been a little challenged. And Herbal Power Flush supports regularity gently and effectively, especially when your routine has been disrupted with different schedules, different hydration, and different food timing. And if elimination slows down, everything feels off. You feel bloated, inflamed, sluggish. So here's the bottom line. Your gut is not separate from your metabolism. If your digestion and elimination are off even a little bit, more than likely everything else will be off too. So whether you're traveling or just feel like your system needs support, Head to bioptimizers.com/jjvirgin and use code JJ Virgin to make sure you have these two supplements on hand for whenever you're feeling a little off. Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, Mom— turned four-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part: when you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right, my team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally to connect with you.

Here's how you do it.

Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. My virtual JJ Virgin will reply directly, and trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe to JJ.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together.

When you downregulate somebody's nervous system to a place where it's calmer, reactive anxiety is also a possibility because they were used to being at such a high level and you're bringing them down. You have to make sure that they're in a safe place to be able to do that because you can have reactive anxiety to coming down too.

Explain that.

Reactive anxiety is this. You've been working at a high level for a long time, and all of a sudden I bring you down a little bit, but you really want to be up there because that's where you've been for such a long time. You're like, why don't I feel this? Why can't I get up there? Why can't my mind do the things that I used to be doing? Like, and all of a sudden that's, that actually causes anxiety, but that goes away. It takes about 5 or 10 minutes usually. Hang out. It's gonna be okay. I've had people, you know, some women, you know, women and men cry and then, and like, or tears come down their face. So the detox kinds of reactions feeling, but as soon as you can get them down there, then that's, gold, because then they're like, okay, I get it. How do I do this more?

And so if you master this, would it be that you can get yourself into sympathetic where you need to be, but then you know how to move yourself back out of it?

Exactly. Yeah. So you always wanna have the capacity. The more reserve you have, the more you're gonna be able to show up and do the things that you want. And the best example of this is the gym. If you're already in that sympathetic dominance before you get to the gym, there's very little reserve you have to, to lift more weight, to create tension on your muscles, and you have a much higher risk of getting hurt actually, because there's very little reserve that you have. Whereas if you come in relaxed, you have much more tension, much more capacity on your system, and that's that reserve that you have. But after you finish working out, should you go in your cold plunge? Should you go right to meetings? Should you do it? No, no. You need to take some time. Take even just 10 minutes and do what? And relax. The best way to do it. Is to lie on, on the ground.

Mm-hmm.

With your feet up against the wall.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Because you're bringing back blood flow to, from your legs and you're bringing it back to the center of your body to help with, you know, with circulation. Or if you can't do that, try to sit down and just do a meditation for 10 minutes or just do some breathwork where you just prolong your exhales, cuz that's gonna get you in parasympathetic mode because the faster you can get yourself down, down in parasympathetic. The more benefit you're gonna have from exercise. So we call it the parasympathetic edge for a reason, right?

And that's cuz your body can then recover.

Yes. When you recover, your cortisol level comes down and your, your insulin level goes up. Um, that's why eating after exercise or even during, but especially afterwards can be good because eating after exercise is gonna increase your insulin. It's gonna decrease your cortisol. It's gonna increase your capacity to shift over into parasympathetic. And so in some people that are really having a hard time. What I'll do is like, okay, you're not gonna stop exercising. You think you need more stimulation. Let's get you to exercise, but at least after exercise, let's get you to sit down and eat something. I don't care. Just don't stand and eat if you can, because that doesn't help. Not a good idea. We should be sitting while we eat. But even sitting while you eat is gonna get them a little bit more parasympathetic. Some period of time, 10 to 15 minutes after you exercise to drop down your nervous system. Mm-hmm. Because that is a superpower. Like that's what I try to emphasize. Like a superpower for all of us is to be able to get that reserve up and use it, but then flip back down as fast as possible.

Or you could go in the sauna.

Yeah.

Put your legs up on the wall.

That works.

Do a double whammy.

I do the sauna.

That's a big one. Yeah.

Yeah.

I actually just did the sauna and literally put my legs up and I was like, this is fantastic. Why'd I never think of this before?

You were already ahead of the game for today's conversation, it sounds like.

Right?

There you go. Yeah. Because you can use, I use sauna like that too, you know, as a way of, so exercise, then sauna. Is a nice combination. It's going to calm down.

But after working out. Yeah. If I could be one of those influencers on Instagram who just spent their whole day doing things. Sure. Everything's perfect on Instagram. I go, let's just call them out. They're really not doing those things.

No, no.

I was like, I don't know how you have 7 hours a day for your morning routine.

Give me a break. And it's their morning routine, not yours. You don't have to emulate theirs, please. I promise you that what they're doing is not what you need to do most of the time.

Well, one of the things I do want to get into, because I had some, like, biohacking questions. Tell me about methylene blue. Is this worth the hype?

The thing about methylene blue is that it's been around for such a long time, but only over the last couple years has really kind of hit the zeitgeist.

What is it, first of all?

So it's a compound that was developed in a lab in 1870, or 1870s, 1870, so a long time ago, developed as a textile dye to dye things blue. Like your shirt, for example, in the 1870s would have been dyed with Methylene blue, or blue jeans from Levi Strauss that would've been dyed with, with methylene blue. But what was interesting about this class of dyes is that there was a couple researchers at the time trying to figure out ways to treat infection. We didn't have anything back then. There was no antibiotics, no antimicrobials, and they figured out that high doses of methylene blue would kill pathogens but wouldn't harm the host, the human host. And that was like an amazing feat of engineering because we didn't have anything at the time. So methylene blue was the first fully synthetic drug that was registered with the FDA in 1897. Wow. So it doesn't come from the earth, it comes from, uh, ingredients that were made in labs. And sometimes people don't like that even in our natural space, but understanding that not everything synthetic is bad for us. You take insulin, that's synthetic for diabetes. If you have type 1 diabetes, if you go to the ER because you have a tracking infection up your leg and you don't get antibiotics, you you could die. This happened to my son a couple, couple years ago. I was like watching the thing go up his leg. I'm like, ah, crap, you know, but I, I got to give him antibiotics, right? So we need synthetic things sometimes, and not everything natural is good for us, right? You can eat the wrong mushrooms and die of liver failure. So just be aware. And I've seen this in, in ICUs when I was in training. So methylene blue was developed as an antimicrobial, and by 1897 until about 1950, it was the premier antimicrobial. Antiviral, antifungal, antiparasitic, antibacterial.

And was it only prescription then, or was it over the counter?

So that's a good question. I don't know if it was prescription. I don't think it was.

God, so there was no Big Pharma?

There was no Big Pharma. Beautiful world. Big Pharma was involved in, like, making your 7-Up with cocaine, you know. They were doing things like that. But there really was no pharma companies until Bayer, actually, until 1950 or so. Bayer was also involved in German things that aren't great. But that was like one of the first pharmaceutical companies making aspirin, right? I don't think it was prescribed per se, but doctors did use it a lot for urinary tract infections, et cetera. And if you were in World War II, you were shipped over to Japan or that in the Pacific, you were taking it prophylactically to prevent infection. They called it going blue in the loo, because if you take methylene blue, your urine will be blue.

Yes, I know that. I know that to be true.

And so that was the first way that methylene blue was used as an antimicrobial. And even until the 1960s, if you lived in a Soviet bloc country, you had like a throat infection as a kid, your mom, most likely not your father, would be painting the back of your throat with methylene blue because it works as an antiviral, then putting people out in the sunlight because they knew inherently that the combination was actually profoundly anti-infective. The other major way we think about methylene blue, not only as an anti-infective, is as a, a profound mitochondrial support. It— we were talking about ourselves being gasoline-powered cars. We make waste. What methylene blue can do is it can compensate both on the metabolic side of the challenges making energy and also on the side of detoxification, because it works on both sides. Helps with energy and detoxification.

Wow.

There's very few compounds out there that are like that. The key with the methylene blue though is that it has to be low dose for this, like usually around 4 milligrams to 25 milligrams. The stuff that you had is way too high of a dose, and so that 4 to 25 milligram dosing is that redox support that we all, many of us, 94% of us can benefit from. The biggest example of this is if you like to go on airplanes or you have to go on airplanes. So most planes are pressurized to about 8,000 feet above sea level, which means that you're low oxygen on an airplane. So you go from where you live, which is mostly at sea level, to an airplane that you're at 8,000 feet. All of a sudden they close the cabin door, you start feeling like tired and a little, uh, little groggy. That's because your oxygen level went from about 21% in the air that you're breathing at sea level to about 17 or 18% on the airplane.

They should have like Peloton bikes or something there, and then you could get some hypoxic training in.

You could, right? You can definitely do that. Intermittent hypoxic training.

There we go.

I do have a couple guys that I know that have G7s with hypoxic training on their bikes. But, um, in any respect, what methylene blue can do is it can compensate for that low oxygen level. Wow. It can prevent you from having a deterioration of energy production because you have methylene blue around. It can work just like oxygen. Most cases, and clean up the mitochondria, prevent you from having more inflammation, everything that happens additionally from being on a plane.

And altitude, I would assume.

Yes, altitude is huge. So even if you're on a G7, you know, which is nice, maybe one day I'll be one, even you're still getting more of the radiation stress of being closer off the Earth's surface. And so you're getting more stress even being on the G7, but it's not as much as being on an 8,000.

Is this something you could take every single day or not necessary or what?

Depending on how healthy you are. In general, and more resilient you are already, well, how much methylene blue do you actually need? So my people that have chronic complex illness, that have chronic brain fog, chronic fatigue, mental health issues, they might need methylene blue on a regular basis for a period of time. It's gonna take you 6 months or a year to get better, but we can give you things along the way. Methylene blue is one of those things that I give oftentimes, and it's that mitochondrial support that so many of us need to be able to downregulate our nervous system that we were talking about too. Whereas if I just downregulate somebody's nervous system without giving them enough mitochondrial support, they're gonna feel like crap when we downregulate them, and it's not gonna get better until we do. Low dose is around 4 to about 25 milligrams is my dosing range for most people. And I don't like people to start off at, at a higher dose, even at the higher range. I like to start, start off at 4, 8, maybe 12.5 milligrams, then see how they feel.

Time of day matter?

Mornings are usually better because methylamine boot can be activating. It doesn't give you like a stimulant kind of feel, but it does increase serotonin and norepinephrine a little bit as well. So you have to be aware of that. When you're taking methylene blue and you're relatively well optimized, what it should feel like is just that you're elevated and you're up and you're good.

And you feel like— I might wanna run downstairs and take some of the stuff you brought right now. Yeah.

Yeah. I take it on days where I have more stress, more travel, bad sleep, or something big that's going on that day from an endurance perspective. If I'm doing some extra working out, mm-hmm. Because in those cases, your mitochondria are more stressed. And so you wanna give it additional support so you can do more. Now, if you're somebody that's coming from a place where you're more stressed every day because your mitochondria are under significant duress, you may need to take Methylene Blue on a regular basis for a period of time. And some of my patients, it's been months or sometimes even years, but, but I'm slowly decreasing their dose over time. But I always start off the same for everybody. I have start everybody like 4, 8 milligrams typically increase the dose every 3 to 5 days. So take it daily. For 3 to 5 days. It's not one of those things that builds up in your body over 30 days, over a year. It's like, no, if it doesn't work after 3 or 5 days, increase the dose. If it doesn't work after another 3 to 5 days, increase the dose. Now, the reason why you want to go slow and not go so high of a dose like the other stuff that you had is that you get to about a milligram per kilogram, which is around 50 milligrams to 70 milligrams for most people. It still can be mitochondrially supportive, but at the same time, it starts increasing the production of hydrogen peroxide in the system. Mm-hmm. So hydrogen peroxide, you know, you can buy it at the store, but your cells make it. They make it as an anti-infective. They make it as an anti-cancer. They make it as a way to kill off cells that shouldn't be there. So that's good, except if your body can't tolerate that, which many people can't if they're already under significant stress and antioxidant deficiencies. Because when you have more hydrogen peroxide around, you make more glutathione. At least you try to. Hmm. If you can make enough glutathione, you should feel okay, but if you can't, you're not gonna feel very good. People telling me like, hey doc, I, I started taking Methylene Blue and I felt like crap. I'm like, well, how much did you take? Like, I took a lot. I was like, well, this is why. And then, and, and you need a lot of good detox support. So I have patients of mine with chronic infections that I use the higher doses, but I'm always giving them antioxidant support. I'm always giving them, you know, binder support as well. So they're making sure they're pooping every day. They're going in the sauna, they're doing all the other things because it's going to cause some stress on the system. I can even give higher doses for acute infection, acute trauma. I give up to 150mg, about 2mg per kilogram, for 3 to 5 days as an antiviral, as an anti-infective in general. Um, my mom was bitten by a tick in New York where she, where she lives, and we gave her Doxy, which is for Lyme, because I'm not stupid and I don't want her to get Lyme.

You're not stupid.

I try not to be. I try not to be most of the time. But I also gave her the methylene blue and she got 150mg for 5 days. She felt amazing.

Number one, where were you when I got bit by that bug in the Amazon?

Yeah, you need to have your methylene blue with you, right? That's what I, with all my patients, I have, you have to have it in the medicine cabinet or whatever.

Yeah.

Just in case at the higher doses. But on a regular basis, it could be transformative to people. It's a bridge for so many people because it gets you from like point A maybe to like H, I, or J. So you've skipped a whole bunch of steps so that you have more support that all of a sudden you feel like you can do more. And that bridge has allowed you to change your diet, get out of a bad relationship, get a sleep divorce. Whatever it might be that you need to do that you couldn't get there if you hadn't had that support. And that's why it can be so great for so many people. And the other big thing about it is just quality.

With all supplements, quality. Yes. Peptide supplements, hormones, quality, quality. Because make sure they're testing, testing, and testing.

Right. And that's not just trusting the testing from their manufacturer of the ingredient. And, you know, we're talking about— well, there's layers of testing, layers of testing, right? So you get an ingredient, say it's methylene blue in this case, from a manufacturer. If it says it's from the US, they're lying. I had somebody a couple of weeks ago that said to me, hey, Doc, I bought this methylene blue online from Amazon. It said it was made in the US, but it took 3 weeks to get through customs.

That's so interesting.

So interesting, right?

That's so weird.

And this is what happens, right? And so methylene blue in this case comes into the United States from us. We get it from Japan and Korea. Actually, it comes to a trusted manufacturer here with a certificate of analysis that says it meets all of our specifications.

Right. But then they have to quarantine it and then they test again. Right.

That's what we do. But many companies do not do this. They just trust their manufacturers and say, oh, it came with a C of A.

No, we don't do it. And you have to quarantine it and you have to test. It was— it's so interesting when we get something that we end up having to backorder because it came in and they quarantine it and we test it and you're like, kind of like, ugh, but you want that.

You have to. Yeah.

So it is, it is the downfall of all of this is when you do these things correctly, not everything passes.

Right. And we've had to throw out thousands of dollars worth. It took took us a year longer to launch the company. So we were the first company to come out with a commercial product with methyl blue back in 2020, one month before the pandemic. Wow. First company to do it. So before that, you had to go to like a chemistry lab or someplace online and buy it from there, which is not something you'd want to do. And so it took us a year longer to launch. And, and still, even with the same trusted manufacturers over the years, we've had to throw out thousands of dollars because it can contaminate— all supplements can be contaminated, but Methylene blue specifically could be contaminated with lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. And even if it says USP methylene blue, we've tested a lot of that stuff.

Mm-hmm.

It doesn't meet the criteria unfortunately because of its potency. So it doesn't meet label claim for the milligram dosage or its purity with the heavy metal concentrations. And so liquids are the biggest culprits here because liquids, they're just, they, they lose potency very quickly. And you, you know, somebody in their garage could just go on Amazon and say, hey, here's my methylene blue. And I saw this. A number of times, like even from people like—

I was like, I feel like Amazon should really— there should be some kind of scrutiny here on these things. It's just really frustrating as a supplement producer to deal with this where you're competing against these garbage brands and great marketing and cheap prices.

Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC, and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds.

Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs PCs.

Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com/studentoffer. While supplies last. Ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms/collegepc.

You have one new message.

Ring, ring, ring.

Translating. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney+.

You could say that again.

Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Lizard potato. It's certified fresh and verified hot.

Now we party.

This is incredible!

Wow, I am clearing the rest of the day.

Disney and Pixar's Hoppers, now available on Disney+. Rated PG.

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents. They help you find the coverage that fits your needs so you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Yeah, I always tell my patients, and I say it online all the time, do not buy your supplements on Amazon, please. The only exception, the caveat, is if you're going to buy them, buy them directly from the company that you trust. Do not get them from an Amazon warehouse because you don't know what's in that warehouse. There's been millions of dollars of counterfeit stuff that we've seen from, you know, reputable companies by name with their labels on there, but it's not their stuff. You know, Metagenics is famous for this, actually, like millions of dollars of their stuff that was all just rank, not theirs. It was just with their label. So awful. So I always say, look, go with companies that you trust that will go the extra mile. That's everything, you know, from methylene blue for sure, but any other, like, and I know with your, with your company, it's the same thing.

That's the way I grew up in the supplement industry, so I knew about like how these things all had to be tested long before GMP was a thing.

Sure, sure.

That's nothing compared to what we've done with all our testing. So with the methylene blue, you'd mentioned before the sunlight.

Yeah.

What I've always heard is get yourself in front of some red lights for activation. So is that a thing?

Yeah, it is a thing. Yeah, because sunlight of course has red light in it.

Right, so the red light would probably be, is that the better way to go?

Red light's gonna be more intense because it's more intensity red light. And so red light about, 680 nanometers or so. It combines with methylene blue at a very specific part of the mitochondria called complex 4, um, and they both donate electrons to complex 4, synergizing together to help you make more energy.

The other one besides the methylene blue, the other one that you are deep into is hyperbaric. Yeah. So one of the selfish questions I want to ask is, I know that hard shell's better, but I also know that it's really easy to go downstairs into my hyperbaric. It's like crawling into a womb, that thing. You like it, huh? But I wish— I want the seated one, but, you know, I can just go in there for 90 minutes. So I know the pressure's not as high, but let's talk benefits of hyperbaric, who should be doing it, and soft versus hard, all of that.

I became very much involved in hyperbaric medicine. I still am for the last almost 15 years. So I have a very significant appreciation for what it can do. It can help heal wounds from the inside out and can do this very holistically by really rebuilding your cellular architecture. But very quickly also, I realized that there were different pressures, of course, and there's also the right time for people. Oftentimes, especially for the deeper pressures, I often like to say it's not if hyperbaric therapy will be helpful, it's when and at what pressure. Because milder pressures in the chamber can be very supportive, can be very helpful from a neurocognitive perspective. They don't cause a lot of stress on the system. When you go to deeper hyperbaric pressures, you bring more stress into the system. And that's not necessarily bad as long as your system can tolerate that stress. And what I mean by here is the reactive oxygen stress we were talking about before. Our cells, if you're flooding the body with more oxygen, is what you're doing in a chamber. You're combining increased inspired oxygen with increased atmospheric pressure. You're simulating the pressure you feel under a certain amount of seawater. You're driving a huge amount more oxygen in circulation. We typically carry oxygen on red blood cells. Most of us are doing pretty well already with that. If you put a pulse ox on your finger, 98, 200% for most of us, that's the number of sites that are bound by oxygen already. So what is a hyperbaric chamber gonna do? Well, if you just breathe a mask of oxygen, only 2% of those sites are really available for you to carry oxygen. But in a chamber, you're pressurizing it, so you're actually driving oxygen not only on the red blood cells, but also in the plasma or the liquid of your bloodstream. The liquid of your bloodstream has very little oxygen in it at sea level, but you can flood up to 100 to 1,200% more, 12 times more oxygen in. Sounds like a great idea, and it is, especially if you have an acute issue, like if you have acute trauma, acute heart attack, stroke, traumatic brain injury, concussion, same thing. Um, or, you know, spinal cord injury. Like if you get more oxygen in circulation very, very quickly, you are going to save tissue hands down. And there have been studies on all of those things, even in traumatic brain injury, which is like 50%.

Couldn't get my son into, like when he was in the hospital for 4 and a half months.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's hard enough getting fish oil, much less forget the hyperbaric.

Yeah. You should see what some people are doing with methylene blue and like serpentine is giving them.

I wish I'd known about that. I would've done it too. I did everything.

I know. I'm sure you did as much as you could at the time. Yeah. Right. So what's happening in a chamber is you're flooding the body with all this oxygen. That could be a great thing, but it, it's also in context because when you're flooding the body with all this oxygen, now what happens? So some of that oxygen's gonna go to your, your mitochondria to help you make energy. Sure. Can you make energy effectively? I don't know. I, do you have optimized capacity both to make energy?

And then the other side of it is, it sounds like methylene blue plus hyperbarics would be the ticket.

This is the ticket, right? And then it, but it's for me, it's like, okay, let's, wait typically 3 or 6 months unless it's an acute issue to optimize mitochondrial function, add in some methylene blue, potentially add in some red light, do some foundational testing, and then that's when you benefit. So I think you'll like this story. I was disinvited from speaking at a conference when I submitted my lecture. My lecture title was, please do not put them in the chamber. It was a hyperbaric conference, by the way.

Oh, that's great. Yeah.

They're like, no, no, you can't come speak at our—

I was like, yeah, that makes sense.

And so I love hyperbaric therapy. If you, if you sequence it correctly, you can see people reverse things like cognitive impairment, strokes, concussions, chronic infections.

I had a facelift with a, um, I did a whole thing on YouTube about this, but with a, I got a hematoma because I threw up. Ah. And I had to speak at A4M to like, like I literally had the surgery and I knew I had 14 days.

Yeah.

And then I get this hematoma. And throw up. And so for days, like, she's suturing, like, 3 days of this, and I'm like, black in my mouth, black in my ears, like, and I'm like, okay, now I have 12 days. And I was literally in the hyperbaric every single day.

That's great. Yeah, for plastic surgery, for any kind of surgery, I always recommend hyperbaric therapy because if you do it— the best actually scenario for the future for you, if you have any more, hopefully you don't need them, but 2 or 3 sessions before And then you do 5 to 10 afterwards. Deeper pressures are typically better for this. Yeah. Because you're getting more—

I just didn't wanna go out and see any. I was like, and I'm not going anywhere.

Yes. But when it comes to that oxygen stress, that's how the whole system works. That's how hyperbaric therapy works, by the way, so that you're flooding the body with more oxygen. You're creating reactive oxygen species. That's how you change your epigenetics. That's how you change how your DNA is expressing itself. So you get new blood vessels, you get decreased inflammation, you get stem cell release., and those stem cells get to mature in the various tissues that you need them. But what are you doing with all that reactive oxygen stress? Do you have the capacity to neutralize that with antioxidant capacity? And that's where something like methylene blue can come in. But also, like, are you taking enough antioxidants on a regular basis that you need? Are you taking your glutathione? Are you taking your alpha lipoic acid? Are you taking your vitamin C? Like, these are all very important. So the way I think about this is like, okay, you want to get better in a hyperbaric chamber. Where are you now? The first and primary example was I would work with somebody. She was a nurse at the clinic that I was the medical director, and she used, had Lyme for many years, chronic Lyme. And she, I saw her do hyperbaric therapy, just be ripped apart, like so tired, so weak. Mm-hmm. And eventually by the end of it, she was feeling better, but then she would relapse again and then again. And she was like, there's something different that needs to happen here, right? This is because her system was not well supported enough to be able to tolerate the benefits of using hyperbaric therapy. And then what she had to do was really optimize that on a foundational level with my other friend that does chronic complex medical illness and ketamine in his clinic that I was telling you earlier. So she was working with him, then she was able to see the benefits long term.

I have never heard anyone talk about this. This is actually like, they should have had you at this conference because this could change everything for hyperbaric in terms of people's results.

I wish they would care more, but the problem is that people don't care about what happens after somebody leaves their clinic.

But they'll come back if they feel better, so they should.

Yes. I mean, I went back. So in Israel, they were like the primary place that a lot of the research has been done. I have a lot of respect for them, a lot of respect. And they'd done— they did a lot of the studies that looked at anti-aging and reversing telomere length, or increasing telomere length and reversing senescent cells and all these things. I go there and they show me a picture of a penis before and after hyperbaric therapy. They say, oh, this is, this is how we get all the guys to show up because they all get better erections after hyperbaric therapy. I'm like, cool. Yeah. How long does it last? They're like, oh, we don't know. You know, I'm like, well, does it matter? Like, well, they'll have to come back at some point to get more. I'm like, okay, well what if we did some other things like optimize their diet and their health and their mitochondrial function and blah, blah, blah. Like, oh, that's, and they're right.

It's too difficult.

It's too difficult to study actually. Right. You can't study that. I, I totally understand that. So I think what they've done is great.. But what I've seen in clinical practice, right, is I work with people that have chambers on their G7s, on their, in their mansions, and also people that have chronic complex medical illness in their home, is that if we can optimize their system, they don't need as much over time and they will see benefits more long-term, just hands down. And so my clinical practice changed about 5 or 7 years ago when I realized I was missing something dramatic, which is that putting the brakes on. And saying, you know what, maybe hyper— hyperbaric therapy isn't for everybody right now. You know, I know you're coming to a clinic, a clinic needs the money on some level to stay awake, stay alive, you know. But when you throw this context in there, people care about this. They're like, wow, you said you, you didn't think I needed hyperbaric therapy now. Wow, that's a big deal, right? You know, it's like the classic, if you go to a cardiologist, you're gonna get an EKG and echocardiogram. If you go to a hyperbaric, you know, person, you're gonna go in a hyperbaric chamber.

I've never heard once, like, in any of the times I've gone to hyperbaric, that about this piece of it. I mean, at the very least, you would think you would do hyperbaric followed by like a Myers and a glutathione push or something.

Yeah, so the thing about the mild chambers is you can get away with a lot more.

So is there value, like the chamber we have downstairs, is there value to these things for, you know, health optimization?

I think so. Yeah, I think so. But what's nice about the chamber, like the milder chambers, is they don't cause a lot of stress on the system. They give you more oxygen, maybe up to like 300 or 400% more oxygen depending on your system and your setup.. And that's good because you get a little more oxygen, a little more energy. It typically doesn't make people crash. You know, it doesn't make you feel like you're down for like 3 or 4 days afterwards. And that's also a pretty good sign for me is that, and that's also diagnostic. If you go into a chamber, you feel like shit, that's often a sign that there's more detoxing and increased capacity work that you need. And, and my framework, the way I think about this, JJ, is like that health optimization medicine framework that I was mentioning earlier. That's what I use with my patients is I, I work on that. Foundational framework that optimizes, you know, from that ground level. It's called the metabolomic level. And then we change the diet, lifestyle, things like that. And then we say, okay, now, now it's time for to think about hyperbaric therapy. Think about, you know, some of your cool other contraptions you want to get for your house. Great. But let's get to the foundation in order.

Most of the stuff we have just kind of showed up at our house.

I'm sure.

Yeah. Um, the reality is, although I'm really hooked on my PEMF mat, I will tell you this is a new a new toy that got sent and it kind of sat there for a while. And I'm like, I'm just going to lie down on it. The minute I went to lie down on this thing, the dogs were all over it. The dogs are like right there. And I'm like on chat going, do dogs notice? Because they are like right in it. And I discovered the perfect thing for me is to get on that PEMF mat with my red light mask, with my Dr. Joe meditation. I'm like, triple hack right here. But that's what I'm, I've always been insistent upon is I see people whole, you know, with these biohacking conferences with all this ridiculous stuff. And I'm like, so did you exercise today?

Yeah.

And they're like, what?

You know, how much have you drank? How much water have you drank?

Did you sleep? You know, it's like, it's like when you look at the basics of, of moving and sleeping and good relationships and eating, the stuff that really isn't, you don't need to go spend $50,000 on some thang. Those are the biggest needle movers. They always have been. Always, right? So that's where I always like to people have them focused, and then we can take the step up.

And sometimes I would just say that it's sometimes hard for people to do those simple things when they feel like crap, when they feel like shit, right? And so I tell people, you know, calm down, that's not going to work. I tell them sleep better, right? Or why don't you just move a little bit more? Like, that just doesn't work for a lot of people. So giving them a little bit of energy, a little bit of runway, on-ramping, whatever you want to call it, that's been the key to learning how to be a clinician over the years. It's like you got to find where that lever is going to be, that small little inflection point. I met, you know, Dr. Ted, uh, the founder of, of our nonprofit and, and Transcriptions. I asked him like, why are you doing this? Like, he's like the really brilliant smart guy. And he is like, well, if we can move the needle on health just a little bit, think about how much good we can do. He's not talking about like moving 180 degrees. He's talking about like a percentage, 2 percentages. Like what you can see even population-wise, but even individually too, right? If you can just move things just a little bit in people, that's where things start changing. And you gotta find those levers. And that's what, you know, clinical practice is all around, all about. And, and that's what drives me crazy sometimes, looking on the socials and looking at influencers. Well, you could get driven crazy looking at socials anyway, but just with people out there telling people what to do that they have no clue what it is to treat patients or see people and, and understand how that works. It, it's really difficult because then I have to get— I mean, my small practice, I get a lot of like, well, doc, should I be doing these 17 peptides? I'm like, well, how about we start with getting you outside and getting some sun or something, you know? Yeah. Like, and so it's, it's hard to navigate that.

I know, until you've actually worked with people. Yeah. I was always like, well, that sounds great, but they're not going to do it.

Right.

So, you know, that's a great protocol.

Sounds fantastic on paper.

Yeah. I was at one event and they said, yeah, what— here's what you do. You tell the patient to go drink this shake every day and give them this meal plan, have them come back in a month. And I go, that's what you do? Like, none of them will follow this. Like, are you kidding?

It was like the average compliance, it's like so low.

Like they didn't— it didn't dawn on them that that wouldn't work. Yeah. Could you ask them if they actually did it? Cause they won't do it. I can promise you. I paid my way through graduate school and doctoral school working out in the world instead of being a grad research student, cuz they got paid nothing. Yeah. I was like, I can make more. But it was the best thing ever cuz I could try and go, this stuff you're teaching does not work. Yeah. It does not work. This is ridiculous.

Yeah. Most people that I see don't realize that they need to be more relaxed. They just think they need better sleep. They just, they sleep is trash for so many people. So if you can work on optimizing their sleep. Then everything else seems to get a little bit easier. Like, oh, my nervous system feels a little bit better. Then we can work on other things. Yeah. When we develop things, we are looking to help support all those stages of sleep. But the biggest thing about sleep is it doesn't start when you just hit the pillow. It's like 3 hours before you go to bed. And so I, I know people love their morning routines, but I'm gonna tell you, I think they're overrated compared to evening routines. Yes. I think your evening routine is so much more important than your morning routine.

So we are gonna do a little speed round. Yep. Most underrated tool for calming the nervous system.

Most underrated tool would be to go outside.

Biggest mistake people make when they are trying to fix their metabolic health?

Do more instead of less.

Supplement that actually lives up to the hype?

Methylene blue, man. We were talking about it.

Yeah. Biohacker trend that's overrated?

Well, there used to be the, uh, the not eating thing, the intermittent fasting thing. I think people got to a point where they were getting caloric deficits and losing muscle mass. And I saw this over and over again. So getting enough caloric intake is important.

So that's one that I'm glad is not as popular as it used to be, the OMAD. Well, I love the intermittent fasting. That's like, you know, I'm eating within a 10-hour window. I go, you mean you're eating normally?

Yes.

We had to call it a diet now because we eat from— like, what is it, Satchin Panda says, or Ponda says, we're eating 16 hours a day?

Yeah.

Okay, the biohacker trend that is underrated, it's calming down your nervous system.

Nobody wants to have a nervous system that's relaxed because that means they're relaxed and they're not doing something. It's the do, do, do versus chill, chill, chill, right? So, um, that's happening now. There are more devices out there. There are more people talking about it. I know there's a, there's a book coming out. I think it's called like The God Shot, which is, uh, injecting you in your neck.

Oh, and that, yeah.

Say that again.

Ben was talking about that. I was like, that sounds awful to me.

Yeah. I mean, it can work for people that are super, super stressed. It's not gonna work long-term if you don't do the other stuff. Right? But it can help drop you. And I've seen it, like, with, with veterans and PTSD and trauma. It can be very, very helpful.

One daily habit that dramatically improves nervous system resilience.

I love meditation.

Do you meditate?

I do, yeah.

What type do you do?

Usually just a guided meditation. Sometimes I'll just do a focus practice with breath. It doesn't have to be crazy. And I tell my patients this all the time. If you can just take 2 to 5 minutes to just observe your mind, that's all you need to do to start off with. You can go more, but just micro levels of that is what I try. I'm not, for me, like more than 10 minutes is likely not going to happen. But if I can get a 10-minute block, I'm good. Couple times a day, 3 times a day if I try. And then micro meditations throughout the day, just taking a second going, oh, I'm here. That's it. You know, just trying to bring yourself back to the moment. Like, so very basic things. And I, I'm, I'm a big fan of Sam Harris and his app called the Waking Up app, if you've heard of it. He has a lot of great ways and, and a lot of great, great teachers on there. That talk about just bringing you back to that present moment, like the proverbial, like proverbial be here now, Ram Dass kind of thing. But like, where are you? Here. What time is it? Now. Oh, okay.

Okay. There you go.

That's it. That's all I needed. And so this kind of coming out of like the future orientation to the past orientation. So I'm not somebody that thinks you need to meditate for 3 hours a day. I think that there's reasons to try that sometimes. I have an inclination, like, especially if you learn how to concentrate again, which I think everybody needs to do, like having some concentration practice, something that I've been trying to work into my days. Short little bursts, micro meditations. That's what I have. That's what I love people to try to do if they can.

What's next for you and where can people find you?

So I have a company called Troscriptions. Uh, the company has been developed, we, we launched just before the pandemic. As I mentioned, we were the first company to come out with a commercial product with methylene blue. And our goal with this company from the beginning was find ways to help people now while they're on that longer path of optimizing their health, which as we talked about, can take a while, 6 months, a year, or longer. So we've created products for energy, focus, sleep, stress, immune system function to help people right now along that path. But I always educate in the way we've been talking about today, which is these are great. I know they can help you now, but you still gotta do the work. I'm gonna try to make it easy for you. And then over long term, I hope you need these things less. So that you don't need Tro Calm to calm you down. You can just go outside or do some breathwork or use your vagal nerve stimulator if that's what you have, right? But the goal with the company as we grow and as we continue is that we want to be— we are one of the premier brands of methylene blue out there with a practitioner's choice. The practitioners go to us because I'm a clinician, I see patients, right? Dr. Ted, who was on our team, he sees patients. We've been seeing patients for a long time and we care about quality, we care about dosing, we care about education, right? And that's with everything that we do. And so we're— I'm hoping as we create new products, we'll create more education around them and give people these solutions now along that path. And then we have our nonprofit organization called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, HomeHope for short. That's at homehope.org. And that is— that, that ecosystem is training practitioners, licensed and non-licensed, to learn how to optimize people's health. Rather than focus on disease. And then we're growing that. So we have more clinicians, we have more practitioners coming through. We have a 7-module certification for practitioners and it's foundationally associated with the idea of not just looking for root causes of illness. I have lots of functional medicine docs that I've—

we've already got that covered. Yes.

But there's no other specialty out there that's creating a standard of care for health, not disease.

Isn't that bizarre? I mean, as you start to talk about at the beginning, I go, wow, we don't really study what it means to be healthy.

We don't. We don't. And then we're the first specialty to really focus on that. And we, we do that by optimizing you, not just for your age, not to be normal for your age. You wanna be optimized, right?

But I don't wanna be normal for my age.

Hell no. Right. None of us do. And then, well, except if you're between 21 and 30, which is when you're most optimal for everything you'd wanna do. And so that's what we do. We shift your bio, shift your nutrient networks, your hormone networks, everything to that level, to back to when you were 21 to 30. Go.

And then you have a podcast too, right?

Yeah, we have our own podcast. We just rebranded it. Um, you're gonna be coming on too. It's called the Health Optimization Medicine. Podcast, and what we're really trying to bring on is experts that are working in these, in these places, which you have been doing for, you know, longer than a lot of people.

Well, cuz I didn't have any like medical tools. I was a lowly— now it's very cool to be an exercise physiologist, but back then it was not.

You had to be scrappy about it. You had to figure it out along the way. And the evolution for me also is another company called OneBase Health. OneBase Health is a company that we developed, that I developed a number of years ago. Initially it was on hyperbarics specifically and helping optimize, but What I realized over the years is that we need to learn how to integrate these tools together. Like how to use your hyperbaric therapy, how to use your lights, how to use your sauna, how can you get good data? And so we're creating an ecosystem of software that's connected to hardware to be able to figure all this out.

This is great. It reminds me early on, I actually went and switched grad schools to study pharmacology to learn how to put drugs and supplements together.

Oh, nice.

She was like, don't do that. I'm like, well, the clients are coming in with them. Yeah. You know, and I feel like it's the same way here with these, like trying to figure these things out. And you don't see clinicians doing it. So then you have just people with podcasts talking about it. I'm like, well, that, yeah.

But now the cool thing is we can use wearable technology and we can use sensors that are on machines to get a sense of what's actually happening with the machines, with you, and how it's all doing.

And so we'll see how the PEMF plus red plus dog plus Dr. Joe works, cuz I think I've got a winner there.

That sounds awesome. I don't think you need any, any bio— you don't need any metrics to know for sure. I think you're good.

Well, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me, JJ. This has been fun.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode.

Hey, JJ here.

And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 Podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

The most memorable gifts aren't found, they're made. Zazzle is a custom marketplace where you pick any product: a mug, a card, a tote, a phone case, and make it personal. A photo, a name, an inside joke. The kind of gift that actually fits the person. That's what 30 million customers have been coming back to Zazzle for over 20 years to find. Right now, save 25% on your first order at Zazzle.com. That's Zazzle.com. Make it Z-amazing.

Athletic Brewing Company crafts award-winning non-alcoholic beers for those who want to be part of every round. With over 185 flavor awards, they're exceptional NA beers that fit your lifestyle and any social occasion. Summer's full of good times, and Athletic fits right in. Go to athleticbrewing.com to have brews delivered to your door, or find them at a bar, restaurant, or store near you.

Near beer.

Athletic Brewing Company.

Fit for all times.