Science-Based Hacks to Defy Aging & Boost Longevity with Ben Greenfield

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, fitness hall of famer and four time New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives.

With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and.

Appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the.

Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King Live.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. Hey, it's jj. Welcome to this week's podcast. I'm bringing back one of our faves and that's my buddy Ben Greenfield. And just for the record, I was at an event with him recently where we went hiking with a whole group of people and I led the way and I was like so kind of chuffed about the whole thing that I was like leading the way. And Ben and I were yakking the whole way up the hill and all these people were kind of tailing, trailing behind us. And then afterwards I see this post in the the group's Facebook of like, oh yeah, I, I was on a hike with Ben Greenfield leading the way and I'm like, I led the way. What the heck is that? So anyway, not sure why you needed to know that, but I just feel feel it's important because we are talking longevity today and Ben's got like, I got 19 years on my buddy Ben. So I was like, okay, this stuff works. You're going to be thrilled to hear this stuff today because Ben is a massive research geek. In fact, we were talking offline. His next book coming out superhuman RX, like 600 pages plus of research. But you're going to hear that a lot of the things that you can do for longevity that Ben has put into place are really, I'm not going to say they're easy because some of them are like not so much fun, like, you know, getting into ice cold. But they are free and you can easily simply put them into place. How's that? Simply put them into place. Let me tell you about Ben. Ex bodybuilder, ironman, triathlete, obstacle course racer, human performance consultant, speaker and author of 13 books, including the New York Times bestseller Beyond Training. He's a Spartan SGX certified coach. He's been voted by NSCA as America's top personal trainer and by greatest is one of the top 100 most influential people in health and fitness. And he has a fabulous podcast as well. So you'll want to check that out. We will link to that in the show notes. We'll also link in the show notes to our last podcast as well. And you'll be able to grab all that at jjvirgin bgh so you'll be able to get that there. He also is the founder and owner of Kion. Not Kion as I've been calling it, Kion. And you know, everything that he really does is about how can you achieve peak performance, look amazing, defy aging, and live an adventurous, fulfilling, joyful and limitless life. So that is what we'll be diving in today. Really everything about like how do we de age. So I know that is something you're going to want to hear more about. And he gave us a little pearl today that's going to solve a challenge I've been facing. So I was super excited about that. You'll have to listen to know what I'm talking about. Before we dive into that, I just want to share this podcast review and it's by Concerned Mama J. Says it's love at first listen. Five stars. Says I've been Betty Rockin for a few months now after listening to Bri on Social. After following Bri on Social for years, I finally gotten serious. Two weeks ago she suggested listening to your podcast on one of her emails.

That's all it took.

I've been walking around for two weeks with headphones in trying to listen to as many as possible. Many as podcast as yours as possible. Not only that, I've been texting links to your show to everyone I know.

Oh my gosh.

Concern Mama J. Like you are the best. Then she says, I'm in love and I'm in love. Right back for you doing that. Thank you. She goes, your show is packed so full of amazing information. I absolutely love the show you did with Dr. Kringudis about understanding hormones. I also really enjoyed the show you did on maintaining healthy bones for life. All right, then she goes in here and asks for a question and let's see if I can give you some quick help on this, she says. Which leads me to my question. During the show you mentioned about having you start your career studying spinal biomechanics. My 14 year old daughter has been diagnosed with scoliosis. She has about 24% curve in her thoracic spine and 10% in her lumbar. She's very athletic, plays multiple sports year round. She's five, eight and according to the Shriner docs, almost done growing. They also advise us to watch to see how it progresses. So I just did a show with Nicole Saks and you will want to listen to that show, Concerned Mama J and hear what she has to say about this. She will be hugely helpful for you. So perfect timing. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. Hope that helps you and I super appreciate you leaving that review because that helps us a lot. So thank you so much for that. One of my favorite all time reviews. And now before we dive into the show, I want to share another one of my favorites with you.

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All right, Ben Greenfield, welcome back to the show. It's about time you got back here.

It's about time. Well, it's about time you had me back. Geez.

Well, you know, you keep hounding me. Sooner or later I gotta say yes, right?

Yeah, that's right.

All right. For everybody listening. No, I pursued you. All right. Are you. I don't know. How did it even happen? But we're here now and I'm so happy about it.

I don't know. I think. I think it comes down to people. Like, my people contacted your people, and somehow here we are.

Yeah, I think actually my people did. And I go, why are you contacting Ben? I can just text them, like, hello. Anyway, we digress. It would. Well, it's not like it hasn't happened before. So what we're going to talk about today, but before we go there, before we dive into, like, all the cool stuff going on now with. I call it de aging, by the way, because to me, I don't want to do anti aging because that means that I just died. So I think de aging. And we're going to be talking about that because my community is super duper interested because again, like, I just turned 56. I know. You're what, 12? I. I don't even understand why you're interested in aging. We're going to talk about that because you're. Are you 30 yet?

No, I'm 13 and a half, actually. I'm. I'm 37, actually.

We'll see. It's working. You look, you. You don't look a day over 30 now. And we have gone hiking together. And I totally kept up with you. In fact, I think I was ahead of you, even though everybody else said that you led the way, but you did.

You were a beast. I think you had a kettlebell in your backpack and you were wearing a training mask.

Right. And in altitude. So there. Like, let's. Before we talk about all that's cool now in the de aging longevity world, like, take us back to how you even got interested in all of this stuff.

Well, regarding aging specifically, or de aging.

Yeah.

Because you're not at the age where most people get interested in a. Like, usually it's like 45. They go, crap.

Yeah, yeah. And prior to that, I mean, if you pay attention to blood and biomarkers, typically the onset of aging occurs in the mid-30s. Like when you, when you really start to see some amount of hormonal imbalance, some amount of endocrine dysregulation, creeping rise in inflammation, typically a change in gut dysbiosis, sometimes a change in the ability of muscles to be able to recover, you know, due to lower amounts of mitochondrial biogenesis or, you know, less satellite cell proliferation or.

Now we are going to speak it for. We are going to make this so that the, the normal person out there knows what you're talking about.

Yeah, I can explain.

I can. So we're going to translate a couple of those things, but I would totally agree with you because I. It was. What I noticed is right around the age 35, life got fair in that the people who had crappy lifestyles, who. I was like, God, this is so unfair. I'm working my butt off, I eat correctly, I exercise, I get good sleep and they look great and they're trashing themselves. And right around 35, they looked like hell. And I'm like, yay. I mean, that might not sound nice, but I thought, well, you know, it just wasn't. Life got fair right around that time. Yeah.

All of a sudden, eating Big Macs and sleeping four hours a night doesn't work quite so well at a certain stage in your life and you can get away with it. I was the same way. You know, I, I played college tennis and I remember I would pull over at McDonald's every day on the way to practice and I would order a super sized Big Mac. And often I would skip the fries because I like the Burger King fries better. And Burger King was like, right up the road. So I go to McDonald's, get the big Mac thing, swinging to Burger King.

Wow.

I know I had it down. And hope you didn't have to go.

To a third place for a milkshake. Ben.

Wendy's Frosty. That was after practice.

Oh, there you go. Okay.

Well, it was 2020 First street in Lewiston, Idaho. I knew, I knew every, every hot spot for the best of the best. And anyways, typically a root beer or a Dr. Pepper along with the Big Mac and I would go and you know, just crush it on tennis courts for like three hours when I was 18 and feel great and sleep great and look great and you know, I continued down that path racing Ironman triathlon and you know, bodybuilding, sucking down like you know, five whey protein shakes a day and having six cans of tuna fish with ketchup for dinner and just, just abusing my body. But I was, I was like hella fit, you know, especially when I was racing Iron Man. I had an aerobic engine that could go for days and it looks good in spandex and I could ride a bike fast, I could run a marathon fast. And you know, I, I thought I was the bee's knees when it came to, to fitness. And I, I was still kind of like old school fitness. Like I synonymized that with, with health. And it wasn't really, until I kind of delved into the wonderful world of self quantification that I, I started to identify that I was, you know, pretty much healthy on the outside, but dying, so to speak, on the inside. Like my, my cortisol was all out of whack and my inflammation was through the roof. My blood glucose was indicative of like pre type 2 diabetes. My thyroid was out of whack. I had like, I was kind of creeping towards hypogonadism. Like my testosterone was, was plummeting and I had all this crap going wrong inside my body. And that, that was the point at which I was like 30, 31 at that point. And I, you know, the light bulb kind of went on for me that like performance is not synonymous with health nor is it synonymous with longevity. And increasingly since then, like in the past seven years, I've really started to look into, okay, well how can, how can we still perform pretty well, you know, because I, I love sports, I love athletics, I love competitions. I'm never going to argue that a lot of this stuff, like, you know, doing an Ironman triathlon is going to make you live a long time. It's probably going to take a few months off your life actually.

But I actually love that you say that right there because I think you said a couple of things that are super important to underscore. Number one, performance does not equal health. They could, but it doesn't necessarily. And in a lot of these things, like doing like ultra, you know, ultra sports like ultra endur sports can actually be worse for you, not better.

Yeah, I mean, there's even A, you know, Dr. James O' Keefe has done some studies on arterial stiffness and, and risk of cardiovascular incidence and just overall mortality in response to exercise. And there's, there's a definite law of diminishing returns. You know, it's, it's basically once you exceed about 60 minutes of anything intense, you know, like let's say a CrossFit workout or high intensity interval training session or something like that. And once you exceed about 90 minutes of something aerobic like marathon training or ironman training, and I know 90 minutes seems like a lot to a lot of folks, but there's actually a surprising number of people who are in the gym twice a day or training for a triathlon or whatever the case may be who are well in excess of either 60 of intense or 90 minutes of something kind of aerobic. And that's the point at which you actually see increased risk of mortality and an increased risk of death because of all the rampant inflammation and, and oxidation and, and hormonal deficits that can occur in response to kind of like going to battle every day. And you know, so I, I've said that before to a few people and they've been like, well, what about, you know, hunter gatherer tribes and farmers and.

People who are just like marathon training every day? The gatherers would walk and, and the hunters would hunt and then they'd go recover and rest and you know, it's crazy. One of my favorite lines that I used to teach when I was teaching that weight loss resistance seminar was exercise can be therapeutic or destructive. It's, it depends on the dose. And same with food. Like too much healthy food is not healthy. So yeah, name a people group who said every day like I'm going to go out and steady state run for hours. Like, they wouldn't have done that. They walked or they sprinted to get an animal and they walked.

You know, exactly. And, and you can walk a ton. Like, walking is amazing. And I hunt. Like I bow hunt. And I have some, you know, some weeks where I'll disappear to bow hunt up in Colorado high country or in Hawaii or whatever, and I'll traverse like, you know, 60 miles over five days. And I'll be active from 4am until 5pm you know, bear crawling and walking and lunging and stepping and carrying. But even at the end of one of those days, I don't feel half as beat up as if I'd gone for like a 60 to 90 minute marathon training run. Because once you reach a certain level, there's actually, you can actually quantify this. In exercise physiology, they call it the aerobic threshold. Right. Once you pass the threshold where you kind of out of your, like, easy conversational fat burning zone and you're kind of jumping into the realm where you're slowly beginning to burn more carbohydrates, it's getting to the point where it's kind of hard, the muscles are burning a little bit. That is kind of the definition of the point at which you do start to create an appreciable amount of inflammation. And so, you know, when somebody says, oh, what about all the people who are out there doing way more than 90 minutes of aerobic exercise? Well, it depends on how you define aerobic exercise. And you know, hunters, gatherers, you know, foragers, gardeners, people who are working construction or painting or whatever. Like, it's a different scenario than pounding the pavement while you're training or, you know, far different scenario than like a, you know, two a day CrossFit training session or something like that. Like the, it can be a little confusing to folks, but ultimately, you know, it's kind of like low level aerobic activity versus high level aerobic activity and beyond.

Right. And we're meant to do that. We're meant to move more. Like we need to actually park the car farther away and take the stairs and, you know, all get. I always say, just get a dog with like big eyes. They'll just look at you like, take me out, take me out. Like right now we're living in this condo temporarily in Tampa. And like, we gotta go out multiple times a day because guess what?

Yep.

Yeah.

Fabulous for that. Far better than cats in many ways, in my opinion.

Sorry, everybody, I'm with you. Yeah, we, we like cats. We love dogs. So anyway, okay, so back over to this. So you, you went and you started to test. You found out that while you could perform at a very high level, it wasn't necessarily the healthiest. And this led you on this path, right?

And it's a, you know, it's a pretty, pretty convoluted path really, because when you look at all the pathways of aging, I mean, there's the immune system, there's the cardiovascular system, there's the joints and collagen and elastin, and there's the hormonal system and the white blood cells, red blood cells. So, you know, when you, when you step back and look at aging and how we could, we could de. Age so to speak. It's kind of multimodal. Like, you really need to treat your body via a variety of. Of. Of different strategies. And so, you know, as I started to kind of look into. Into longevity and. And aging and how to kind of marry performance to health and longevity, you know, it just. Just got deeper and deeper. Like, you know, looking into concepts like, say, hormesis, right? Like, how could we use brief exposures to cold or sunlight, radiation or heat from saunas or, you know, wild plant extracts or, you know, things that would do damage to the body in large amounts and expose the body repeatedly to those in small amounts and kind of get what exercise would give you without beating up the body all the time. And even fasting would fall into that category. You know, these, these hormetic stressors that induce resilience that seem to enhance longevity. And then as long as they're the right.

And that's so key. It's the right amount. It's that right. You know, the exercise and then rest and recovery. It's the intense heat and then rest and recover. So any of these things that you can stress the body and then it can come back and rebuild and come stronger.

Exactly. And the same could be said for, say, you know, immune pathways and immune system degradation is associated with, you know, a host of different chronic disease and, you know, even cancer to a certain extent. And so, you know, then I started to delve into, okay, how. How could we. How could we improve the health of the immune system? Could you. And some of this stuff get kind of fringe, right? Like, could you go out and get thymus injections or begin to eat more organ meats or even look into, you know, this is an increasingly interesting world of medicine. Look at the peptides. Like, could you use certain peptide injections or oral peptides to enhance the health of the immune system? You know, and you could look at skin and collagen and elastin, you know, what type of topicals could help with that. Or, you know, you could look into things like red light therapy and, you know, and so, you know, I just start to explore a lot of these elements that you could introduce into your life to kind of defy aging to a certain extent and still be able to perform pretty well, too. And then a big, big part of it comes down to minimal effective dose of exercise, right? Like, how could you stay pretty fit without.

Yes, we all want that one. It's like. And here's what's interesting. Here I am at 56, leaner and fitter than I was in my 20s, when I was a fiend, like a fiend, with the amount of exercise like that I would do every day, like hours of cardio and weight training, I didn't have as much muscle mass because of all the damn cardio I was doing, you know, and my body fat was higher. And it's like, it's like night and day difference in terms of my health and this. And I'm 30 years older and I'm doing a quarter of the exercise. So it's an important message to get across here is more is not more.

Yeah. And you could even look at the certain fitness parameters that are associated with living longer. Like let's say something, something associated with aerobic exercise, your VO2 max. Right. Like what's, what's the maximum amount of oxygen you can utilize? And that's based on a few different elements, like how, how much blood your heart can pump with each beat and how well your tissues are equipped to grab oxygen as it rushes past in the bloodstream. And how, how, how big is your lungs capacity? Like how much air can you breathe in? That's actually associated with living longer. And the interesting thing is studies have shown that you can increase and maintain your VO2 max by training once every two weeks with a targeted VO2 max training session. And that's not that, that means twice a month. And, and you know, the, they've even studied the best way to do it. And it comes down to pushing yourself kind of hard for about four to six minutes, recovering for about four to six minutes and doing that for multiple rounds, about four to six minutes. So you want to maintain your VO2 max. Well every couple of weeks, you know, get, get on a bike or, or go find a hill or you know, choose your mode, whatever makes you happy rowing or, or whatever. And you do four to six rounds of four to six minutes with four to six minutes of rest, and that's it. And that, that targets your VO2 max. You know, another element that's been shown to be associated with longevity is not just walking, but your walking speed. Right. Like your actual leg turnover when you walk. So you could go on a walk, but perhaps you put a metronome on your phone or you listen to beats that are like 80 to 90 bpm plus, which for a lot of people, you know, that many steps per minute kind of challenges them. There's even this very cool device. I found this a few months ago. It's called a counterpulse. It's a little heart rate monitor that you wear and it monitors your heart rate as you're walking. And as it monitors your heart rate, it sends a signal to your phone so you can listen to music or beats or whatever while you're out on a walk, and it will time your steps per minute to the beats per minute of your heart. And this is very cool because in cardiovascular medicine, one of the ways that they rehab patients is they use something called enhanced external counter pulsation. And all that is is it's like this pair of like boots that you pull over your legs. And every time your, your heartbeat is in its refilling phase, you know, it's called your diastolic phase, it will pump, you use your muscles to pump the blood back up to the heart, and it really does a good job increasing the health specifically of the coronary arteries around your heart. Well, it turns out that if you can somehow contract your legs during the diastolic phase of your heart, you can achieve the same effect in terms of building new and bigger coronary arteries. And so what you do is you simply put on this heart rate strap, you go for a walk, and the, the app kind of trains you to time your heart rate to your steps per minute that you're basically doing your own counter pulsation therapy while you walk. So that's another perfect example of a very simple way that you could de age your heart by simply walking and timing your walking speed to your heart rate.

Is that in your free ebook you're giving everybody the link to that? You know what I'm getting? I'll get it.

Embarrassingly, I don't recall which free ebook we were giving, but. But either way, we're going to give.

Your longevity hacks free.

Your guidebook, the Longevity Hacks book. You know what, I don't think it's in there, but it'd be very simple. It's called a counter pulse device. You could Google it.

We will put this into the show notes because here's what I love the most about all of this is I know we'll talk about a couple things that are great discoveries that do cost money or do take other time. But what we're saying is that normal walk you're doing right now, you get a nap, you know, you wear a heart rate monitor, you get a nap and bam, you can get more out of that walk. I love that. That is super cool. And you don't have to buy one of these, you know, because I know that you can go in for that therapy. I used to have a buddy who did it in Beverly Hills. But you can also. They're expensive, but you can buy one. But here's how you can create it yourself.

Yeah, here's another. Here's another quick hack for you, too. Two things that happen when you age, your grip strength decreases, and that's another one that's correlated with increased risk of mortality, meaning as your grip strength decreases, your risk of dying goes up. Another thing a lot of people deal with as they age is either incontinence or prolapse or both. It's an issue not only for people who. Who exercise, but just the general population can experience issues with pelvic muscle weakening and incontinence or prolapse as they age. And so very, very simple trick you can use. Everybody has periods of time where they're sitting in their car, sitting on the airplane, on the bus, on the subway, whatever is. You can get yourself a hand grip strengthening device. I like the ones made by Captains of Crush because they can go from. Not only they have a badass name, but they can go from, like, you know, 90 pounds of pressure all the way up to, you know, if you're some powerlifting Olympian, you could do like 400 pounds of pressure on one of these Captains of Crush hand strengthening devices. And you just squeeze your hand and you hold, then you release, and you squeeze, then you hold. And you can actually time this to Kegels. So as you're sitting in your car or on the airplane or whatever, you do 10 squeezes with the right hand, and at the same time, you squeeze your butt and you squeeze all your pelvic muscles, and then you release, and you do that to failure on the right hand, then you switch to the left hand. You can do this when you're in traffic or whenever. And so again, you're tackling two elements of aging. Right.

I'd love to see this explanation. When you, like, rear end somebody, and.

They go, what were you doing, ma'? Am?

Yeah, proceed with caution. But I mean, if the car is not moving, you're sitting in traffic. I mean, there's no reason you can't have a little hand grip strengthening device. And you're, you know, you're squeezing, contracting, squeezing, contracting. But that's another one. That's just a very simple thing that you can. You can weave into your life. And I have a lot of my older clients do that just when, when, you know, when. When they're passive, when they're sitting down anyways, you know, it's a way that you can train your body very easily. And again, grip strength is Another thing they've studied to be correlated with longevity. And then probably one of the biggest ones, I'll throw one more out at you. It would be your mitochondria. You know, I mentioned those earlier and you know, those little organelles in the cells that are responsible for, for taking things like oxygen and nutrients and, and producing ATP, using essentially electricity to do so. Every single mitochondria is a tiny little battery and it relies upon a property amount of minerals and a proper electrical gradient across the membrane inside the mitochondria to be able to operate properly. And that's why when you exercise and you exercise the right way, you can increase the number of mitochondria. That's called your mitochondrial density. And when you increase the number of your mitochondria, to clear up a definition I threw out earlier, it's called biogenesis. So you've got increased mitochondrial biogenesis so you can produce more ATP. Well, sure you could, you could exercise and increase the health of your mitochondria, but there's so many other things that can increase the health of your mitochondria once you realize that your entire body is just basically a battery. So for example, when you're outside and you're barefoot, or you're laying down in your backyard and you're, you've got your shirt off, or you're, you're, you're camping and you're sleeping on the ground, you're constantly exposed to an electrical frequency that's emitted by the planet Earth. And that's one way to charge up your mitochondria. It's called grounding or earthing. Just basically doing some of those walks barefoot or going outside and laying down in your backyard to read a book. And that's useful because another thing that can charge up the mitochondria and charge the human battery is infrared light, which you can get from sunlight, which you can get from some of these fancy new, you know, devices called photo bio modulation devices, you know, these big red light panels that people are using now and they'll, you know, stand in front of those, you know, as, as they're working or you know, as they're laying on the couch or whatever, you know, light, infrared light, in addition to earthing or grounding, is another way to charge up the mitochondria. Cold and heat, which I mentioned earlier, not only give you a lot of the same kind of de aging cellular resilience benefits as exercise does without forcing you to beat up your body as much, but those also help to maintain the electrical Gradient as well. So you could take a cold shower every morning. Or better yet, if you want to increase your deep sleep percentages, you could take a cold shower at some point in the few hours before you go to bed at night, and you could try to hit the sauna a few times a day.

So I take a hot bath before bed. And it's funny, I've been tracking my deep sleep, which is needs to improve, and I was like, how, how the heck am I going to improve this? Like, I've done everything and now you just gave me that and I really don't want to do that.

Well, here's, here's the thing, Ben, come on. You're taking a hot bath and you're keeping your bedroom cool because the blood gets shunted to the extremities during that hot bath. You can actually get a little bit of a cooling of the core as that blood kind of returns to the core. But you need to make sure if you take a hot bath that you still do keep your room cool. Or we do.

We had a big argument over this at the beginning when Tim and I first got together because he was a five to six hour night sleeper, so we had to correct that. And then he liked the room warm. And I'm like, no, honey, like, we gotta like crank this, crank this one down. Now here's the boy. Yeah.

The perfect sleeping temperature, in my opinion, is the one that really makes you not want to take your clothes off before you crawl into bed because it's kind of sort of cold. But by the time you get into bed and you got the covers pulled up, it's okay. But there should be mild resistance, mild cognitive resistance to taking your clothes off before you get into bed at night. And usually for most people that's like 64 or 65 degrees in the bedroom. But yeah, the cooler you can be when you go to sleep, the higher your deep sleep percentages are going to be. We know from these, these Finnish studies that they did on Finnish men that hit in the sauna a few times a week, and they saw a drastic increase in lifespan, even, even, you know, eliminating a lot of the confounding variables with 20 to 30 minutes of sauna exposure a few times a week. And that's another thing that can also affect the mitochondria. And so you've got grounding, earthing, you've got infrared light, heat, cold. And probably the final two that you could throw into the mix would be drinking really good water and putting minerals in your water because minerals carry an electrical charge. So there are trace liquid minerals, there are really good salts, like, you know, Celtic salt, for example. You can put pinches of that into your water. You can consume, you know, produce, if you have access to produce that's grown in really mineral rich soil, you know, by an organic gardener or something from the farmer's market. That's another way to get really high amounts of minerals into your body. But mitochondria are not that hard to take care of once you've kind of cracked the code of treating your body as a battery and using a lot of those little strategies I just mentioned to kind of charge up the human battery.

So here's the question of mitochondria and I, I just want to hear it again because the biggest question, what would be super awesome is if there was some way that we could test the change. Because I love. And you started out the whole thing by saying, you know, I started doing tests and that's where I realized that what I was doing for performance wasn't necessarily making me healthy. Like anywhere where we can actually test improvement is awesome. And, you know, I know the way to really look at mitochondria is do a muscle biopsy. But like, no, you know, that's not that. Yeah, no, thank you. Nope, I'll pass. But is there beyond just kind of going, well, what, how are my energy levels and all that? Is there any other way that we could say, hey, this like this, this light therapy is working, this hot and cold therapy is working, this grounding is doing something. Is there any other way that you know, to assess to go, yeah, my mitochondria are kicking.

Yeah. Either an oxidative stress profile or what's called a urinary organic acids test can give you a pretty good idea of a lot of the metabolites that are reflective of proper mitochondrial function.

So, so like cysticanatane and citrate and all those types of things.

Yep, exactly. So the urinary amino acids test is pretty good. You know, Genova Diagnostics does one. A lot of times it's combined with blood. So it's a small amount of blood plus urine. And if you do the one that has the blood, you'll get more values. But it also means you need to go to the doctor to do it. You can't necessarily order this test to your own home through direct labs or something like that. Oxidative stress profile, same thing. You need a blood measurement for that. But you can quantify some of this stuff. You can test for some of these more Fringe parameters and it gives you a pretty good reflection of mitochondrial health. And if you don't really have the cash or the insurance to get one of these more kind of extra expensive fringe test, like a urinary amino acids test or an oxidative stress profile. If you just do a basic blood test, but you specifically look at inflammatory markers and most doctors can run this test specifically hscrp, fibrinogen, homocysteine, what you'll get is a reflection of your inflammation. A lot of times rampant inflammation is reflective of have some kind of mitochondrial deficits. And what would be some clues as well.

Cool. And, and what would be just some basic things that beyond just, you know, your energy level, what would be clues that your mitochondria are operating better and that you've increased your number? Like what? How would you be able to tell?

Yeah, one very simple one is breath hold time.

Right.

So there's a, there's a guy named Patrick McCown, I forget the name of Patrick's book, but he has a very simple test in that book in which you passively exhale. And that's not a forceful exhale, right? It's just breathing out and then kind of stopping before you get to the point where you got to really contract the diaphragm and push everything out. And you don't do it like a big suck of air in before. So you're just standing there breathing normally and you exhale normally and then you hold. And he calls this a CP test. And I totally forget what CP stands for, but anyways, you want to be able to, in an ideal scenario, hold for longer than 25 seconds. And you know you're doing really well if you can hold it for longer than 40 seconds. And that can be reflective of ATP production and proper utilization of oxygen by the mitochondria. It's also a good way to test your nervous system. Like if you don't have like a heart rate variability test device or something like that, it can give you an indication of the health of your parasympathetic nervous system. And it's a, it's obviously a very qualitative test, but it's, it's, it's pretty simple to do. It's just a passive exhale you hold. And your goal, ideally, if you want to be really good, is you go for longer than 40 seconds.

I was just holding my breath. Now I'm back. You said that I blew all my air out. Very unpleasant feeling though. That's another one like you want to give me unpleasant Feelings, like, make me, like, put me in a really cold place. And when I have to go to the bathroom, I'm hungry and I have to hold my breath. And that's like, I'm over the top. So what would you say? I know you have a cool book coming out, which we'll have to have you on back on when this is is getting ready to come out. Superhuman Rx, what do you think? Like, one thing that you're super excited about that's like kind of coming out next. What are you seeing?

Oh, it's coming out next.

Horizon. What's new? Like, what's new that's getting you excited out here in the whole longevity world?

Yeah. Well, you know what? I. I mentioned them briefly, but I would say peptides. Peptides are really interesting. You know, these are small change of amino acids that can be used with laser precision to target certain effects in the body. So, for example, and they've all got funny names, but there are a couple called TB500, that stands for Thymosin Beta 500. Another one called BPC157, that stands for Body Protection Compound 157. And these chains of amino acids, typically they're injected via an insulin syringe, like very similar to a diabetic would do. And those two can vastly enhance joint healing, collagen degradation, inflammation in specific areas of the body, including the gut. And that would be something like if you have a lot of aches and pains as you're getting older, either doing every once in a while, kind of like large boluses of those, or using them in smaller amounts every day, that can be really good for joints and for recovery. Another one that's used for the immune system that has some really interesting studies behind it for aging even in humans, is called epitalon EPI t H a L o n. And they've done some human subject studies where they'll do an injection for about 20 days twice a year with that peptide. And it reverses a lot of mechanisms associated with aging clocks. So that's another one that's interesting. There are two that seem to have a profound effect. These are like exercise in a bottle when it comes to simulating what exercise does for the mitochondrial biogenesis I was talking about earlier. Those two are called humanin H u m A N I n and Mott's C M O T S dash C and then a couple of others that are very interesting that have got some decent research behind them. One can stave off some of the neurodegeneration that occurs with aging. And this one you could use intranasally. It's also available as an injection. It's called C Max S E M A X.

Don't worry everybody, we'll have it in the show notes. It's like I'm sure Booba jjvirging somebody out. Which yes, we will have this in the show notes. We'll have it in the show notes. Okay, so go ahead.

And I'd say if I could name one other, a lot of people we touched briefly on sleep and how cold can enhance deep sleep cycles. Another thing I've found to really improve deep sleep cycles is CBD at higher doses. Not THC but cbd. And then in the realm of peptides, there's a new peptide called deep sleep inducing peptide. And it doesn't cause you to fall asleep, but once you are asleep it increases your deep sleep cycles significantly. And this would be another, you know, it's uncomfortable for a lot of people. But I, I find most people to, you know, if diabetics do injections with insulin syringes all the time, you know, anybody can wrap their head around this. But you can speak to any anti aging or longevity or functional or integrative medical practitioner who can kind of work with you on peptides. There are, there are many that specialize in peptides there. You don't want to just go online and buy fringe peptides from some cheap website because usually they're, they're really cheap stuff that's manufactured in China and a lot of times kind of other fillers in them. But if you work with a physician for peptide therapy, honestly I think that's, that's one of the frontiers of, of de aging as you call it.

Cool. What's really exciting about all this is that it's, I mean the difference now versus 20. It's a great time to be in my 50s, like 30 years ago. You know, I'm thinking back to my mom and where she was at and there really wasn't a whole lot that we knew about at the time. Like now we can put some intermittent fasting and fasting and light therapy and ground and exercise and then start to do some of this other stuff. But a lot of the stuff that you talked about today doesn't even cost anything. And that's really exciting. And I know we just chunked a whole bunch of information a short amount of time. You are going to be able to get access to a bunch of this in Ben's Guide to Longevity ebook, which is going to be@jjvirgin.com BGH obviously we are having you come back much sooner, especially with your new book coming out, because I want to do a little bit of a intro to that book and what they are going to be able to expect.

You aren't going to be able to carry on an airplane. It's like 600 pages long. So it's more of like a coffee table book. It's like an encyclopedia, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Well, it's. You know what? Actually, I think you'll probably sell even more copies because that's what we really need books for nowadays is reference manuals. So that's what's super cool. It sounds like you've gone and researched the heck out of stuff, which is what I know you love to do. And I always love hanging out with people who do tons of research because I just like to get the cliff notes of it. So I'm gonna go give a couple.

Action steps from today's podcast interview because.

I know there was a lot of information here. So stay with me. So lot to deconstruct from today's episode. This is one where you should be super happy. We have show notes. I will be linking to a lot of stuff in there. Again, JJVirgin.com forward/B G Age for Ben Greenfield Age and here's what the deal is. I'm going to give you a couple things that are easy enough to put into place right now. And the big thing I said on the interview, I'm like, more is not more. Well, more is more. What I really meant is more is not better. And with exercise it really comes down to yes, we want to move more. And we talked about this in the fat fitness program. Yeah, you want to move more all throughout the day. Now what I love is the fact that you can get an app that can help you get more out of just regular moving. And then you want to be very specific as to the dose that you do some high intensity interval training and resistance training for because you want to make sure that's benefiting your heart, your immune system and your brain and that you and you're helping your body handle stress better. But you're not over taxing. So it's push and recover. So exercise is super important and what you monitor and measure you can improve. So first thing we're going to start doing is just monitoring that and looking at again how you can get more out of what you're doing there. Especially with the heart rate monitoring app you talked about for walking. That's going to help you create that pulsatile effect, which was so cool. Next one was doing grip strength and full transparency. Like, I cannot open jars like I used to. And it's like, the one thing that I'm like, going, oh, my gosh, I'm getting older. Like, I can't do that. And I think back to my mom going, can you open this? And all of a sudden, I'm handing the jars to my husband or my sons going, can you open this? I'm like, oh, man. So I love this idea. And I thought it was so funny, this. I was getting the visual of the Kegel grip strength combo in the car, you know? But this is a great one. And grip strength trainers are so inexpensive, so that is definitely a cool one. And what I remember, what we learned way back when in grad school was that, you know, as you strengthen one area, other areas get strong along with it. So grip strength, super important. Next one, get yourself cold for some deep sleep. It's why you want to get your room colder. It's. I'm looking at now going, okay, take that hot bath. I get into a cold room. I'm just debating whether I could get into a little cold shower right after that. I. I'll try it tonight. We'll see. I'm just not. Not totally sure. And then the breathing exercise, I mean, come on, that's free. That's so cool. So breathing exercise, grounding, getting out into the ground. By the way, my son with the traumatic brain injury, this is the stuff that he did after the traumatic brain injury. He started gardening. He started getting out into the ground. He started laying down on the ground like he knew mitochondria needed that. That is so super cool. So these are all easy things right now that you can put into place immediately. That will start to de age you. All right, so I want to see. When we run into each other, we'll both look at each other and go, are you 25? Are you 25? That's what I'm looking for. All right, another awesome podcast cast episode. Love to get your review. If you haven't left one yet, I'd love to hear it. So jump on over to itunes or whichever platform you listen to and let us know what you think, and I hopefully will be able to give you a shout out on the next show. See ya. That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another.

Step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe.

To the show, and we'll talk to you next week.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I check all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website what Should I read next podcast.com to find out more.