Plant Based vs Animal Based: Whats the True Optimal Diet?

Gentlemen, what's going on? We are here with Bryce Hannah. Bryce is a member of the Twitter health space sphere. He's been doing a lot of really good research and work recently around some unique topics like fiber, probably first and foremost, you know, talking about iron and low iron diets, a lot of stuff with collagen recently, and he has a lot of very interesting takes. Bryce, welcome. Thank you so much for hopping on.

Thanks for having me.

You have a very unique approach to health, very outside of the current move and the current wave of, you know, carnivore and peptides and all of the niches that are in the zeitgeist right now. Why did you come across the conclusion that you have now as opposed to, you know, Liver King stuff? Yeah. Yeah.

So I think I sort of entered the space backward, like relative to a lot of other people. I think a lot of people, they sort of start with like weight loss or athletic performance or things like that. And in those communities, it's very common to run into kind of keto or low-carb approaches as like a kind of dominant, dominant kind of protocol or paradigm in the space. And I actually, when I first started learning about health, this was probably 8 years ago now, maybe a little bit more. The first 2 things that I started learning about were I was just like looking up these health lectures on YouTube and it was basically Sugar's bad and you should be a vegan for like the two big takeaways I got. So that's kind of what I started with was actually like plant-based and vegan diets. And I learned a lot about nutrition from that perspective, but it also led to me developing kind of some malnutrition as a result of just not having the nutrient-dense kind of animal products in my diet and lacking B vitamins and minerals and things like that. And so I realized pretty quickly that that's not working and that I needed to kind of improve it and build on it from there. And so then a friend of mine had actually reposted something that, um, Daniel or Grimhood had written and I'd started following him and we started talking and things like that. And I came across this entire kind of space that I wasn't familiar with and I just was obsessed, you know, I devoured it over the course of maybe a year or so and quickly began building on it from there. Daniel's mentor had this dietary kind of protocol that I learned a lot about through Daniel and through direct contact with his mentor. And it was really outside the paradigm. And it was a little bit kind of a mix of like a plant-based and an animal-based. And I think I've really done a lot of kind of thinking and writing about this to kind of expand on it and clarify it because a lot of his writing was very skeletal and sort of just basic frameworks, but some of the interesting aspects of it were like avoiding fatty industrial beef, eating more fiber, eating non-grain, non-nut, non-bean seeds like flax, chia, hemp seeds have been one that I've kind of been pushing as well. And really just kind of the focus of like a clean diet that's going to be supportive to the gut and it's going to avoid some of the toxicities that come from both plant and animal foods. And a lot of people, I think it's easier to focus on the plant foods and they sort of ignore that some animal foods could be problematic as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, and I think this is something that we can really focus on is the nutrition component because, you know, nutrition is not like fitness wherein fitness, there is the good enough threshold, right? You go in, it doesn't really matter what you do as long as you just go to the gym and you exercise whenever, like with food, that's not the case. It is interesting you bring up like this third path, which is looking at, you know, okay, maybe there are bad things in vegetables and maybe there are bad things in meats. Let's find ways to, you know, have our cake and eat it too for both of those. One thing that you mentioned was, you know, non-grain, non-nut fiber sources. You were mentioning some specific seeds coming in from the more animal-based space. These things have anti-nutrients, right? These things have phytoestrogens, these things have oxalates. What is like the grading heuristic that you're using when looking at these fibers? Why is it these seeds instead?

So there's a few different components. I'll address the, the phytoestrogen kind of thing first, because I think this is honestly one of the most misunderstood things in nutrition. Names have a lot of power. When you, when you give something a name like phytoestrogens, it implies a certain function in biology that then goes on to basically imprint on the kind of culture and how people interact with it. And I think in the case of things like flax, I think the, the name phytoestrogen itself is sort of doing more harm than good because when you compare the impact that these kind of plant-based interact with the hormone systems in this way, it's very different than what you'd expect. You know, if you, if you see something like BPA, which is an estrogen mimetic, it increases risk of breast cancer and other tissue cancers when it's given to animals, and I think to some extent we have similar research on humans. In comparison, if you look at flaxseed and consumption of flaxseed, it actually lowers breast cancer risk. So how are those two things both working with the estrogen receptor if they're having opposite effects? And so the interesting thing here is that you can have kind of a whole spectrum of interactions when it comes to different receptors. There's agonists, which are activating the receptor. There's antagonists, which are inhibiting the receptor. And then there's this sort of middle ground concept, which is what's called a partial agonist, which is basically a compound that activates the receptor in some conditions when say that receptor is kind of low activation or you're deficient in its normal kind of activator. But then in conditions where the receptor is overactivated, it behaves like an antagonist. And this seems to be more of an approximation of what the compounds in flax do is they only really have any estrogenic effect in the absence of estrogen. And even this, the only reason I say this is because there's a little bit of research in postmenopausal women showing that it reduces certain symptoms. That might not even be an estrogenic effect, but bare minimum, it seems like that's the, that's the case where maybe you could argue that that's happening. But in the average person, it actually has several effects on estrogen independent of the receptors. That are kind of protective here. So this might be other reasons it lowers breast cancer risk. Among other things, it shifts the byproducts, the waste products of estrogen that are created to a less active form called 2-OH-E1. And this basically is like a weak estrogen byproduct. The other byproducts are much stronger and actually in some cases can bind estrogen receptors for longer than estrogen itself. So when you shift to these kind of weak byproducts, even though your total estrogen level in theory could stay the same, the byproducts can significantly alter its effect. And this isn't solely unique to flaxseeds. There are other compounds that can do this, but it does seem to be somewhat a property of so-called phytoestrogens is that they can shift these ratios. The other thing that's interesting is that because flax lignans, which are the active kind of compounds, they can actually displace estrogen itself, but they have a much weaker ability to actually activate the receptors. So there's some estimates that suggest it's something like 1/400th of the potency of estrogen, like milligram per milligram. And when you think about it that way, you know, that's sort of an insane like difference in potency and might be that the amount of these compounds you need to actually significantly reach any kind of comparable effect to estrogen is massive. And meanwhile, if they're kicking it off its receptors, you're actually turning over more estrogen in the process. So there's some really interesting aspects of it there that these things could be hormone balancing and protective in that way. But as far as like the antinutrient content goes, so there's a few different kind of compounds. You mentioned several of them. One that people worry about is phytates. The main issue with these is that they bind the minerals in seeds, grains, and beans, and it renders them insoluble. So they won't be able to be absorbed by the body. This is really a significant reduction in how well minerals are absorbed. And because of this, a lot of the time people are eating grains and nuts and things like that, and they're looking at the nutrition label and they see a certain content of magnesium and calcium. And the reality is that that could be 60 or 80% lower if you factor in how much is absorbed. So that, that can be a significant detriment. And with a lot of these things, that's a big reason to avoid them, or at the very least not to rely on them as your primary source of those nutrients. When it comes to these seeds, the interesting thing is they, they do have a lower content of many anti-nutrients, but the other kind of aspect of this that is really helpful is sprouting. So one of my kind of advocacies is whenever possible, if you can consume sprouted seeds, that's, that's sort of the best of both worlds. My view is sort of that when it comes to flax and chia, the benefit of fiber and these other active compounds is significant enough that I think the, some degree of loss of mineral absorption that you see is enough that it doesn't outweigh it. It's still beneficial. The content of other kind of digestive irritants, digestion inhibitors is lower with these as well, even when they're not sprouted compared to things like beans or nuts. And they don't have the same degree of like mold contamination and things like that that you see in some nuts. So that is all kind of an argument in favor of them. But the biggest thing is if you can get them sprouted, sprouting reduces the content of these antinutrients by roughly 60 to 80%. So you can see the mineral absorption goes up almost to 100%. And then the content of other things like oxalates, which are these, these compounds that form crystals with calcium and are implicated in kidney stones and things like that, the oxalate content also goes down. And you see interestingly with sprouting even an increase in B vitamin content because as the plant sort of comes alive and begins to grow, it actually will synthesize more nutrient cofactors that it needs. So you even see an increase in vitamins and minerals.

On the point of estrogen being a scary word, it is a scary word. You know, you hear phytoestrogens and that's concerning. But I think a good example is like same with like, you know, SARMS and SERMs, given the way that it, it modulates the estrogen receptor. So I personally used to be really afraid of it, you know, cuz I was very concerned about my, my endocrine system. And once I kind of was like, all right, I'm gonna stop looking at like in vitro studies of lycopene and just these very like far off inconclusive mechanisms. The benefits, I think if someone is, is very gastrointestinally compromised, that's a different story. But looking at these things in general, I do think it's important to look at any intervention as like for the benefit of X at the expense of Y., right? So with a lot of these, as you've mentioned, maybe it's not best to get your primary mineral nutrient content from these foods, but for the benefit of, you know, this type of fiber, whether soluble or insoluble, it is worth the expense of a small amount of antinutrients if you're mitigating it. You mentioned sprouting, you know, soaking, steaming, boiling. These are all ways to break down some of these, these antinutrients. Everyone's like, oh, like plants have antinutrients, so they shouldn't be eaten. And they do, right? Like they have defense mechanisms to stop themselves from going extinct, animals do too, right? That's why they can bite and claw and run away. You just have to neutralize it. And like, you can neutralize an animal's defense mechanism with a bullet. You can neutralize a plant's defense mechanism with soaking, steaming, you know, your choice. So going into these specific ones, we can talk about a few of these fibers that are really coming to the forefront as being powerful compounds and interesting compounds. PHGG, partially hydrolyzed guar gum, modified citrus pectin. We've got obviously hemp seeds, chia, flax, and then another, another one that we see a lot too is, is inulin and then acacia fiber. Out of all of these, which ones do you find is the most interesting? How would you classify these against one another? And what use cases do you see these tools having for the average person?

So something that's been kind of interesting to me to observe recently is there's been kind of a resurgence in these posts that are not anti-fiber, but basically saying like it is harmful to recommend fiber broadly to people. And they cite these examples of like, if you've got IBS or ulcerative colitis or something like that, then above a certain amount of fiber can cause issues for you. Or, or you might have, basically bloating and discomfort and things like that from fiber. So we shouldn't kind of recommend these things broadly. And I think there is always nuance needed for individuals, just in the sense of, you know, if your gut has dysbiosis, you have upper intestinal overgrowth, there might be a lot of foods that you don't tolerate well, you know, that can lead to sensitivity to lactose that can lead to sensitivity to certain types of fiber. And I think an interesting kind of way to look at this is the FODMAPs approach. They categorize fiber into groups based on the structure of the fiber that it contains. So a lot of people have this very vague idea of what fiber actually is. So they kind of think of it as like, we've got protein, fat, carbs, and then fiber is like this fourth thing that's somehow different in structure. But the reality is that it's actually not, it's really almost always just long-chain complex carbohydrates. So even things like cellulose are actually just carbohydrates that our bodies simply can't digest. For another animal, they would be treated closer to just carbs. A lot of herbivores have bacterial digestion and things like that that can break these down just like any other carbohydrate, and they don't distinguish them in the way that our bodies do. But the benefit of that is that if we're looking at the microbiome, it's located in the colon, in the large intestine at the end of our digestive system. So if you're eating easily digestible, simple carbohydrates, protein, and fats, your body's absorbing all of that in the small intestine and it's not reaching the colon. It's not feeding the microbiome. And there's a number of negative kind of effects that can occur with that. So there's, there's this idea really that humans need some fiber, whatever that might be. Otherwise you see a significant drop in the diversity of strains. In some cases, if you have dysbiosis in the short term, kind of restricting fiber can be helpful because you see that shrinkage of strain diversity. And if you had overgrowth of some of these strains, then that can give you time to rebalance. There's always this sort of importance of reintroducing fiber for these different benefits. And another kind of benefit is that fiber is a binder of different compounds. The broad term would be biotoxins, but this can be bacterial toxins in the gut, like endotoxin. This can be mycotoxins that are produced by mold that are in the food supply and in our living environments. And this can also be waste products like those estrogenic and other hormone wastes that we were talking about that are excreted by the liver into the small intestine and then passed into the colon. So, Fiber has all of these kind of structural binding sites that can allow it to bind things like the bile acids, things like the mold toxins and hormone waste. And this helps our bodies to clear them. So it sort of serves this protective role, but the caveat that I always give is just that it's fiber that you digest well. And for different individuals that, that can vary. If we look at FODMAPs as like an example of this, they have some different kind of groups of fiber. That you can look at that are found in certain foods. So one example is there's a class of fiber called fructans, which are the carbohydrate chains contain fructose. And so as your microbiome or your gut bacteria break those down, if they're not kind of strains that are used to metabolizing fructose-containing fiber, they might rely more on anaerobic metabolism and you have more gas like hydrogen sulfide and methane being created. And that can cause the bloating and either constipation or diarrhea, depending on the person. So you can have these problems arise when you eat fiber that your body's not matched to. Beans are another kind of good example. They contain a type of fiber called galactans that are really unique to beans. Like this isn't found in a lot of other common dietary foods. And these are fibers that contain the sugar galactose as part of their chain. And it's the same thing. This is why a lot of people get gas and bloating and things like that uniquely from beans is that the strains that specialize in that type of fiber are much less common in the general population, unless you're someone who's either eating them all the time. Like you can acclimate to most types of fiber just from eating them regularly for months. Or if you have a family history and like you grew up eating a lot of beans and legumes, then maybe you can tolerate them better. But for the average person, it can feel a bit like a minefield because you're you're navigating this world where first we have every kind of food you can think of available at all times. You can go have Indian on Tuesday and Mexican on Wednesday and sushi on Thursday. And that's, that's like your week is just bouncing from one thing to the next. And your gut can't necessarily catch up. If it's not used to something that you're eating, you just have poor digestion and you don't even realize how much that's affecting the rest of your life. So when it comes to the fibers you mentioned, These are some of my go-tos, you know, particularly I'm a big fan of the flax chia, but also the SunFiber, the modified citrus pectin, these different things. The reason that I like these is because they are tolerated by people who don't often tolerate fiber well. So with the flax and chia, for example, they can contain a lot of fiber just relative to what most people are consuming. So if you're not used to that, it can be good to sort of introduce these things slowly. But the good thing with them is that they're very low FODMAP fibers. They don't contain any of the major groups that are kind of difficult to digest for many people. So even on a low FODMAP diet, you can incorporate ground up flax and chia seeds. If you tolerate lactose, kefir is great to mix it with. And that might be a great gut hack for the majority of people because it's gonna provide these easily digestible fibers. When it comes to more extreme situations, sometimes it can be helpful to just introduce any fiber that's tolerable. And this is where I really feel that the PHGG or SunFiber and the modified citrus pectin is most useful because these are sort of like the end-all be-all. Like if you don't tolerate hardly anything else, there's a good chance you'll still tolerate this fibers. And the interesting thing is that Fiber can actually improve its own tolerability, but you sort of have to get a foot in the door somehow. You have to get some kind of well-digested fiber in, whether that be just eating a little bit of certain fruits like berries or things like that, that are low FODMAP, or whether that be a fiber supplement like pectin. The kind of effects that you get, a lot of them are related to the gut barrier, its integrity being improved. You see more mucus secretion beyond the gut barrier. There's a layer of mucus that's secreted that sort of acts as a like a protective lubricant, like oil in the engine for digestion. And basically you see a reduction in both of these. The gut barrier becomes leaky and you see a shrink in the amount of mucus. And both of those can be improved by the right fiber for the right individual. So these are options that are really well tolerated. And even a few grams can be enough to see some of those benefits start to occur. And with time you can introduce more and more diversity of fiber. Depending on kind of what the person tolerates.

Yeah, I highly recommend microdosing and tapering up cuz you can get some pretty nasty reactions, especially with some of these more like, you know, fibers. For me, if I don't take it for a while and then I retake it, I get pretty nasty flares. You mentioned PSGG or SunFiber that I've seen that, I mean, that is FODMAP friendly, extremely well tolerable. A lot of people swear by it too. It's especially in the niche the niche corners of the internet. And you know, you mentioned fruits, fruits and vegetables, also great source of fiber. But something that I, I also recommend people is just find the fruits and vegetables that you tolerate well and just have those as your foundation. And also, you know, look at it retroactively, go back and see what did you eat in those first 1,000 days of your life because that's most likely what you're, you're biome acclimated to. And we know that, you know, epigenetics change your capacity to tolerate certain foods over generations. That's why I personally go out and pursue fiber. Obviously you have the prebiotic component, which is important. And I, and I try to, you know, compound that with like an active probiotic strain that I'm focusing on, on colonizing. But I, I think the, the binding component is something that we're missing. For context, Imran was just having steak and eggs on a cutting board. So I was having like this, this AGE, acrylamide-rich charred steak every single day. No fiber. And I looked, I looked crusty and dusty like a lot of carnivores do. Yeah. And I'm like, why, why is this? A lot of it is because one, you're, you're, you're pushing dysbiosis just from, you know, having no fuel for the, for the, the right bacteria. And then additionally, you're not binding up toxins that you're getting from your diet or from your environment. But as you mentioned, we have the endotoxin component as well. We have just like the natural metabolic and, and hormonal byproducts and metabolites that are being produced that need to be excreted. And fiber, you know, seems to be one of the best ways to do that. And then you have those bad bacteria shedding those lipopolysaccharides as well, which in conjunction, you mentioned fiber being an necessary component to strengthening that mucus membrane and keeping those, those junctions tight, subnutrients. It, it really is kind of a nasty storm to feel and look like crap. And now speaking of meat, another thing that you've been talking about a lot recently is the therapeutic benefits of lowering free iron, lowering homocysteine, and lowering some of these long-chain saturated fatty acids. This is a point of contention because everybody, or a lot of people, do believe that red meat is the best food. It's the one true superfood. And I think there's a lot of merit to it, but I also think there's a lot of nuance. You mentioned, you know, grocery store fatty meat as being a culprit, but what is this nuance here? What is this idea of, you know, potentially having benefit of lowering red meat and acids?

So there's a few different reasons why we might want to avoid red meat. And the important caveat here is that I'm not somebody who is like, you should never eat red meat. You know, if you cut it out of your diet completely, you'll be better off. I think that there's balance to be had here. And really the biggest thing is that the type of red meat that's available to us, which is this industrially farmed grain-fed beef, is so much worse than what we would've naturally consumed in the past as far as like hunting or even just traditional farming practices several hundred years ago would've been radically different than what we're doing today. So there's several reasons for this. One of the biggest things is that the, the way that these kind of mass-farmed ruminants are fed and raised is completely the opposite of their natural diet. So they're adapted to eat a diet that's high in fiber so that their gut bacteria can ferment those fibers and release them as short-chain fats, which then they can use for energy. So when you look at it from that perspective, the standard ruminant diet is closer to a low-carb or ketogenic diet than it is to a high-carb diet. And what this means is that they're relying on these gut bacteria to process fiber, and they're basically eating a low-carb diet because the bacteria are metabolizing the carbohydrates before they reach the animal circulation. So what we do essentially in these industrial farming operations is we invert that. We give them antibiotics in theory. I think they're kind of being pushed away from doing this, but if they can, they will. We give them antibiotics in order to sterilize their gut bacteria so that they don't have this ability to burn up extra calories and that 100% of what they eat can then be absorbed. We also give them carbohydrate-heavy diets. So even with the gut bacteria that are present, they can't metabolize all the carbohydrates and you get these simple carbs still entering the body. And what this leads to is basically the ruminant equivalent of obesity. And this is what they want. You know, they want more pounds of animal that they can then ship off and have butchered because they get paid by the pound. So if, you know, 20% of the animal by weight is fat, then that's great to the massive kind of farming operations because that gives them the ability to make 20% more profit overall. And so they do everything that they can to promote what's basically obesity in these animals. Another thing is that when you buy meat at the store, it's actually injected with water. I think it's also, it's like around 20%. It's allowed to be added water by weight. You throw a steak in the pan and you cook it and there's all this juice that comes out. That's not juice. It's like the added water that's injected into the steak as it's processed at a factory. And it's, it's the same thing with the fat. These are just because they sort of activate that ancestral memory of like, oh yes, this is like, this is what we're meant to be eating. This is something that we've eaten forever. Doesn't mean it's the same. This is like a Frankenstein version of that. And on so many levels, like we're, we're disconnected from the process to such a degree that it's sort of kept behind a curtain and we don't realize how different this is from the true kind of reality that we've been living for hundreds of years before this. And so the iron is another thing. This basically comes down to iron. Iron's implication in aging is massive. This isn't something that I've, I've come up with. This is basically a consensus within the scientific community. There's a really interesting paper, for example, that's, it's called the Role of Iron in Brain Aging and Neurodegeneration. And basically the way that this works is the iron has sort of two main reactions that it contributes to. One is called a Fenton reaction, which is in a scenario where you have unbound iron. Like let's say hemoglobin or another iron-containing protein gets broken down due to cellular damage, whatever that might be, that iron is then released into the water and fluid within the cell. And if that iron encounters oxygen, it basically generates this Fenton reaction where you have a cascade of electron transfers that result in free radicals being created in the process. So some people compare this to the reaction of rusting. It's sort of similar in the sense that it's also an iron-oxygen reaction, but it can honestly be even worse because with rust you get this sort of stable byproduct. In this case, it's like the, the free radicals that are generated, they can almost cycle in a way unless that iron is bound or, or removed in some way. And the damage that can occur is very significant. The other thing is that iron is involved in the creation of basically these, these like waste products that kind of accumulate in cells with aging. The biggest example is one called lipofuscin. And this is basically, it's very similar to something like what we think of as like amyloid plaque in, in Alzheimer's disease. It's basically like an aggregate of protein and fat and other components in the cell that get oxidized and damaged and then react together to form almost like a polymer, like a big clump or chain. And iron is the catalyst for that. Similarly, iron is also involved in the formation of these brain plaques, like tau tangles and amyloid fibrils and things like that. These are also centered around iron because it triggers these kinds of reactions where chemical bonds break and new bonds can form in the wrong ways that cause things to kind of clump together. And the iron that gets embedded into these kinds of clumps and plaques actually makes them reactive with oxygen. So there's a little bit of kind of this discussion of blue light causing free radicals and aging of the skin and things like that. And the fact that we're living under artificial light creates these sort of damaging effects. The reason that blue light is damaging is because there's lipofuscin in ourselves. It's that lipofuscin absorbs different frequencies of light, especially blue light, and generates free radicals in the response to that. And iron allows that to happen. It's what's kind of reacting with oxygen specifically. So you've got this accumulation of iron that occurs in different tissues as they age, and it accumulates in these sort of plaques and waste products. And there's a whole slew of other issues that these things cause. A lot of it has to do as well with blood flow. You get less oxygen delivery to tissues that have a lot of this kind of plaque and other things that restrict circulation. But then you also have this sort of issue where iron is accumulating and it's causing these, this free radical damage to form. So it's a vicious cycle. And the issue is that a lot of people are eating too much iron and they don't realize it. So there's two sides to the coin here. Some of it has to do with how the iron is channeled, right? So if you don't have, if you don't have B vitamins and copper and vitamin A and vitamin C, these cofactors for iron, then it's not going to be properly used and it's going to end up being kind of released freely because in the context of it being bound to hemoglobin, it's not causing these same problems. It's sort of in its right place at the right time. So if you, if you look at it from that standpoint, to some degree, meat has many of these cofactors. Now I would argue that that's only the case if you're eating nose to tail or if you're eating a good diverse kind of Variety of like meat and seafood because for example, with copper, you don't have a lot of copper present in red meat. It's honestly, if you just eat steak, you're just gonna be iron overloaded and copper deficient. And that's exactly what's gonna cause some of these issues. If you're eating steak and liver occasionally, or oysters, you're gonna have the copper that's going to balance this out, but you still can get up to a point of excess iron accumulation. And the clearest way to see this is really your, your ferritin level. There's a lot of research associating elevated ferritin with different diseases. Some of this comes from inflammation because inflammation can also elevate ferritin, but some of it is independent of that where you have basically iron kind of reacting in these different ways. And here's something kind of very interesting and surprising to circle back to, to some of the effects of iron and aging. Pretty much every anti-aging compound that we talk about commonly is either an iron binding agent or reduces iron through some other mechanism. And one of the most kind of shocking and surprising things I've come across recently is actually that antibiotics reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. And the, there's a couple reasons why this is probably the case. One of them is that they all bind iron. They're all basically iron binding cases. There's one that was specifically being research that like they believe the mechanism is more so iron binding than, than its antibiotic effect. It's called Cleoquinol. And it, it was basically being studied for Alzheimer's disease because it was such a potent iron binder in the brain that it was basically theorized to be effective for this. I don't remember if it passed clinical trials. It's either still in clinical trials or it didn't make it through for one reason or another. But Big Pharma is basically pursuing this avenue of research where they're looking for iron binding agents that are also effective with this. The other thing is that iron feeds infections in the body. A lot of bacteria and viruses rely on iron to kind of carry out their inflammatory or modulating effects on cells. And antibiotics also kill off these infections. So they reduce the amount of iron by binding it. And they're also reducing the infection rate. And even when we talk about things like Alzheimer's, some of the kind of common things that we associate with that, like amyloid plaques, amyloid plaques actually are an immune defense system. They encase bacteria and kill them off in the process. And they produce these like free radicals and things like that to kill off the bacteria that they're encasing. And that's protective in the short term, but they, if they don't go away and they're not broken down after this happens, you get this accumulation. So to some extent, there's a lot of connections between iron accumulation and these sort of infections and things like that, that develop and stick with you throughout life, even infections in the brain. And then you get this sort of long-term degeneration that occurs and it all comes full circle to dietary iron, dysbiosis, poor immune system function. These, these basic principles that we're talking about. Yeah.

I think you, you mentioned it in the beginning. It's, the, the negative effects that iron overload has is not controversial, nor is it niche. I think this has been big since, you know, I got into the space and was very naive. And, you know, the first thing that you're kind of told to do when getting into that space is to avoid enriched grains because you just have unbound iron. You have literal iron shavings that aren't being absorbed and they're just feeding these pathogenic bacteria. And, you know, we see it a lot too. When women in particular are given iron supplementation for iron anemia and they start getting major dysbiosis and it makes a lot of their symptoms worse. 'Cause as you mentioned, you know, a lot of it has less to do with how much iron you're consuming, but where is that iron being transported and is it doing so effectively? One of the things too with meat, you mentioned the fat component of it. I, I do not want a lot of fat from my red meat. Primarily because of what you're saying, where they're getting it from, the, the context in which these animals are being raised and bred. And also the fact that, you know, a lot of, like, toxins are fat soluble, you know, so they are gonna be more likely to be deposited in the fat, the muscle fibers. When it comes to a proper way of eating meat, I'm, I'm really big on, on cycling your meats. I think you mentioned it, making sure you're getting that variety because it's not just the nutrients that you're getting variety from, it's also the like avoidance of too much of one nutrient. Right. When it, when it comes to looking at protein in your diet and a sensible way to approach eating animal protein in particular, how do you look at it?

So I think for most people, there's probably exceptions to this, but for most people, I think the diet that will feel the, let's say the lightest, like where you, you just have energy, your digestion is smooth, you don't have a lot of kind of negative side effects like bloating or feeling heavy after meals, a lot of it basically stems from a diet that's higher in carbohydrates, kind of moderate in protein, and lower in fat. I think, I think eating a lot of fat and a lot of carbs together, not due to some like competition, but more so due to the digestive effects of the kind of competition with different macronutrients slowing things down. And a lot of people not digesting fat well. That feels very, very heavy to people. And a lot of the time when they reduce their intake of animal fat, their digestion improves for these different reasons. So I've always found that interesting when it comes to protein. There's another kind of aspect of this, which is that to some degree, we see research showing that higher protein intake is associated with certain diseases in aging. And the really big caveat here is that above all else, you need to maintain physical fitness. So this should never be misconstrued as like advice to restrict protein to the point of like not being physically fit. And this also means that protein intake should be very dependent on your physical activity level. But that said, I really don't think there's many scenarios where people need more than 120 or maybe 150 grams of protein per day. To maintain and reach their fitness goals. Maybe if you're an extreme athlete, but for the average person that's sort of casually working out and doing things like that, I think this idea that you need to consume even more than like 1 gram per pound of body weight, which is kind of like a standard recommendation that's thrown around, when you get up to like 200, 300 grams of protein per day, almost certainly that's causing problems. And there's a few different reasons for that. It does put some load on the kidneys, I think. Some of what we see with diseases of aging is any amount of kidney disease that's present is significantly worsened by high protein. And that can be some of the reason that there's association with heart disease and things like that as well. But the other thing that's really interesting is that some amino acids break down into these sort of toxic byproducts. The biggest example is definitely homocysteine, which is produced from methionine. And this is basically a waste product of what's called the methylation cycle. So these different methyl groups are given up and in the process it fuels these different reactions and homocysteine is produced as a byproduct. And homocysteine is really a nasty, nasty compound. I mean, it, it mimics the excitatory transmitter glutamate, so it can be inducing anxiety and depression for some people. There's even research that shows that Schizophrenia, one of the kind of rarer causes of schizophrenic symptoms is just extreme elevation of homocysteine. You can have like maybe 1% or less of schizophrenia cases where it's hyperhomocysteine states that are produced that actually cause psychosis. And it's pretty beyond that. It increases risk of heart disease. And this isn't just, oh, if it's high, it increases heart disease risk. It's even within the normal range, you see an increase in risk. It's something like as it goes up 5 points on the kind of within the normal range, you see like a 20% increase. And once you get outside of the normal range, it's just exponentially worse from there. And this partially has to do with the way it interacts with proteins. Homocysteine can bind to different proteins and it can basically form this like addict where it, where it attaches itself to proteins and it disrupts their normal function. And one of the, the biggest things is these connective tissue proteins like collagen and elastin. So you see aging of different tissues, you see aging of the skin and things like that. But more importantly, these connective tissue proteins maintain the circulation. They're found in blood vessels and arteries. And so homocysteine being elevated is sort of the catalyst for things like plaque depositing in the arteries because it actually opens up these points of damage in the lining of the artery that can then allow different debris and things to accumulate. So homocysteine has this disruptive effect on proteins and it's directly stimulating the nervous system. And there's basically two reasons why it's elevated. And one of them is high protein consumption, excess protein consumption. And the other one is deficiency in B vitamins. So there's always, with these kind of risk factors, we're always talking about synergistic risk. So it's, it's not just that if you have a perfect diet and you're not deficient in any nutrients and you eat red meat occasionally, you're going to have this problem. That's rarely the case. People that are unhealthy are eating red meat on top of that. And the iron and the homocysteine and the excess fat is just fuel to the fire of the other health issues and negative practices they're kind of doing. And so The, the best way to, to do it in my opinion is to look at things like homocysteine and ferritin on your blood work, make sure that they're in the lower bottom quartile of the range if you can. And if you find that they're elevated, kind of one of the troubleshooting things is, are you consuming a pound or more of red meat per day consistently, or are you just kind of consuming it occasionally? And other animal proteins can provide the methionine as well. So this isn't unique to red meat, at least with the protein aspect, but a lot of other protein sources beyond red meat have either more diverse nutrients or they have kind of other beneficial components like omega-3 fats in seafood, which kind of add to the benefit and make them in some ways preferable to red meat. So I don't think red meat is the end-all be-all of nutrition. I think it has some vitamins and minerals. It's very high in, for example, iron and zinc. But if you're adequately getting those nutrients otherwise, it doesn't provide copper, it doesn't provide selenium, it doesn't provide a lot of these other things that you can get in significantly higher quantity from something like seafood. And so exactly what you said, the kind of rotating different meat and animal product sources can be really beneficial for this reason.

Right. Something that comes in the conversation with methionine and homocysteine is the importance of balancing amino acids. You mentioned, you know, methionine in excess is, is quite inflammatory. It's quite pro-aging. A lot of people, you know, say the key is to balance it with the collagenous amino acids, the glycine, the proline, and the hydroxyproline. Now, does that mitigate the negatives of methionine? Is it a ratio component or is it a sheer volume component of methionine? How far does having some more of those, you know, connective tissue rich cuts and slow cooked, you know, bone broth or stews and whatnot offset this methionine issue?

So we don't have a definitive answer on whether it can completely offset it. There is some promising animal research suggesting that adequate glycine can pretty much completely mitigate the effect of methionine on its own. This doesn't discount other things like iron, but it is sort of an encouraging result. The reason that this occurs is glycine also interacts with the methylation cycle. So it actually, in its metabolism, it also binds methyl groups and it sort of reduces the amount of methionine in tissue because it sort of burns it up. Now, in the process, it does create homocysteine as a byproduct of that. It's not going to fix it on its own. You do still require adequate levels of the B vitamins, particularly B6 is a cofactor for homocysteine being broken down. So it doesn't work in isolation, but glycine in general is an extremely beneficial amino acid. It has a lot of positive effects. It's necessary to build collagen in the first place. So if there ever is damage to this connective tissue, having adequate glycine can help your body repair that. And then it also has kind of counteracting effects against homocysteine in the nervous system where homocysteine is excitatory and stimulates firing of neurons.

Mm-hmm.

Whereas glycine is actually inhibitory. Glycine is actually a neurotransmitter. Not a lot of people kind of know that or think of it that way, but it has its own receptor called the glycine receptor. And then it also kind of interacts with some of these other receptors like the GABA and glutamate systems. In the brain. And so it can have a calming effect on anxiety and things like that, that cancels out many of the negative effects of elevated homocysteine.

Yeah, it really does. And, and you're right. I mean, I think that's the most fascinating thing about glycine is a non-essential amino acid having those glycine receptors. Right. One thing with glycine real quick, which is somewhat of a conundrum. Some people have a paradoxical stimulating response to glycine because of the way that it impacts the NMDA receptor. The consensus is if you're feeling overstimulated from glycine, taking with other GABAergic compounds like magnesium or taurine will help push that NMDA activity towards the more inhibitory GABAergic range. Why, why is it that it's, it's kind of a crapshoot whether or not you're gonna have stimulating or inhibitory effects from glycine?

So there's a few different aspects of this. Part of it has to do with individual GABA glutamate balance. I like to call it the yin and yang of the nervous system where basically glutamate is the brain and the body's dominant excitatory neurotransmitter. So pretty much universally every neuron in the brain is stimulated to fire when glutamate is present. And it does that through a couple different mechanisms, but the, the receptor you mentioned, the NMDA receptor is sort of considered the main or one of the main glutamate receptors. And when this receptor is activated, it causes calcium to flow into neurons and calcium triggers that, that signal, that activation to fire. And there's a few different factors that inhibit this, this process. So interestingly, the glycine acts as what's called a coactivator. So there's a site for glycine to bind to the NMDA receptor where you can have both glutamate and glycine present. And glycine is actually required. For the NMDA receptor to be activated. In the short term, this can occur because let's say eating a very small amount of glycine, you're not deficient strictly, but let's say lower in glycine than would be optimal. Then you might have higher glutamate than you really are feeling because the coactivator isn't present. So not all those receptors are activated with the amount of glutamate you have. Now let's say you, you bring that glycine back up to like a more normal level. And now all that glutamate is going to be active and you're going to feel that for the first time. And it can be quite stimulating. The glycine receptor itself can have some effects like this. So it, it's not just the glutamate receptor, but this can be why a lot of people find it stimulating. And in the long term, you know, you're actually going to see the opposite effect with glycine where it's, it's protective over time as you kind of replenish it, you can bring the level of glutamate down through different mechanisms, but in the short term it can be very stimulating. So there's different factors that mitigate that. One of the biggest ones is actually magnesium. Magnesium is the body's sort of natural counterbalance to glutamate because it fits into that calcium channel that is in the NMDA receptor and it blocks calcium from flowing into neurons. So you don't get that firing of neurons that occurs because you don't have the calcium entering that sends the signal. And so if you're magnesium deficient, you're going to be more prone to this. If you have excess glutamate, you're going to be more prone to this. And Another interesting one is actually zinc. Zinc also has a similar binding site to magnesium and also inhibits the excess firing of these NMDA receptors. So magnesium and zinc deficiency both play some role here in why you might be more sensitive to that. Definitely using other kind of compounds that act on the GABA system, which is the brain's dominant inhibitory system, kind of the inverse of glutamate where any neuron that is activated, I get activated by GABA is suppressed from firing instead of firing. So things like taurine, taurine is one of my favorite amino acids. It mimics GABA by binding to the GABA receptors. And this kind of acts as like a blanket over these neurons that kind of inhibits any excess firing. And so that can kind of balance out the effects of glycine so you can get the benefit without the drawbacks. Adequate magnesium can have a similar effect. And then L-theanine is another one of my favorites. L-theanine, rather than working on the GABA receptors, it actually works on the NMDA receptor itself, but it binds sort of similar to what we were talking about with the phytoestrogens. It's a weak activator and it binds to the receptor displacing glutamate and then kind of acting as a suppressant of its activity through displacement and a weaker activation itself. So these things can really help balance it out. The last thing I've found is actually that if you eat like a, like an insulin-promoting meal, you can get more of like a systemic effect from the glycine. So if you have like a late dinner or something like that, and then you take glycine before bed, more of it's gonna reach the brain rather than having systemic kind of body effects. And that can create more of a stimulating effect for some people. So not pairing it directly with food can also play some role in making it less stimulating.

You know, you mentioned magnesium as being like that primary cofactor. I'm curious if you've seen this as well, but I've seen people who are deficient in magnesium but aren't able to actually tolerate the like neurological or the, the nervous system load that comes with magnesium. So they'll start getting like weird heart, like heart almost palpitations. They'll start to have a cortisol blunting effect that makes them pretty much a zombie. And a lot of people push away from magnesium from that. I did at a certain point, but I realized that was actually something that I had to push through. And the way that I changed the approach, similar to what you're referencing with glycine, is instead of looking at it as something that you take for response, it's something that should be a daily threshold requirement. It should be a daily tapering that you can actually spread throughout the day. So I'll take a bunch of magnesium glycine, I'll put it in like a liter of water, and I'll have that liter of water throughout the day to have that, that saturation effect with minimal side effects.

So there's two terms that I really liked to help kind of describe it. One of them is magnesium saturation, and then the other is magnesium burn rate. So basically these terms, they refer to whether your body has storage of magnesium that's been built up over time that it can pull from in acute situations. For example, the your skeletal system and your bone can store about 10 grams of magnesium. And that can be released in deficient states where that might be depleted. So you, you see these kind of risks for osteoporosis and things like that with magnesium deficiency that, that can take more than just one dose to resolve. And the other thing, the magnesium burn rate, there's an interesting study, for example, on soldiers in active military duty. They found that they had 20% higher average magnesium excretion in their urine versus just a random person in the general population. So the more stressful and intense your life is, the more you're exercising, the more intense and stressful your job is. If you've got some bad situation going on, like a divorce, that can all play into basically how much magnesium your body needs. And if you have had a lot of bad situations, if you've dealt with trauma or extreme stress in the past, then that can predispose you to magnesium deficiency because in the short term you use up a ton and then you're not replenishing it properly with the different kind of sources of magnesium that you're getting. So spreading it out throughout the day, the reason that this works the best is because the, the gut has sort of a bottleneck. For magnesium absorption. You can only really absorb so much through the active absorption channels. It does have its own unique absorption channels, so it doesn't compete the way some other minerals do, thankfully. But it is something where those absorption channels can be saturated if you take too much at once. The reason that people get a laxative effect or that certain forms of magnesium are used as laxatives is because they're not absorbed and they, they hold water in the bowel when there's excess magnesium leftover. So I really have come to view the bowel flush as, as like an unnecessary effect. The situation where it might be beneficial is if someone's constipated. So like, let's say you overshoot, there's a good chance that you've been kind of constipated or had this buildup in your digestive system that wasn't properly cleared. That can be a good reset, but you don't need to push that every day. And over time, this sort of watery stool can actually contribute to things like dysbiosis. So the goal shouldn't be to kind of flush yourself out. It should be to only give your body small enough doses of magnesium at a time that it can absorb it fully. What you're talking about with like spreading it out throughout the day, just kind of a little bit at a time in water or like a capsule here and there, that's, that's the optimal way to consume it. And that's what I really focus on with, with people I talk to and work with as well is just the optimizing magnesium absorption by by kind of only giving your body what it can handle at a time. And that doesn't mean you can't build up from there. You know, you might start with a 100mg tablet 3 times a day, and then you can bump it up to 200mg 3 times a day. And as long as you tolerate that, then that is gonna work well. But if you are taking a dose of magnesium and you're feeling negative effects, you need to split that dose in 2 and try it in the morning and in the evening. And if that's still too much, you need to basically break it up further. Another thing that's kind of interesting is people tend to tolerate food sources of nutrients better than supplements, just in general. If you're sensitive to supplements, oftentimes you can get some similar benefits from food if you find a food that's high enough in that nutrient. And so we talked about flax and chia earlier as fiber sources. Hemp seeds, the reason I'm so big on those is that they are the highest food source of magnesium by weight. So yeah, 1 ounce, about 3 tablespoons of hemp seeds gives you about 50% of your daily value of magnesium. And that's, that's insane. You know, the, the other source that's really high is pumpkin seeds. So occasionally I'll work in like sprouted pumpkin seeds to my diet. They do have to be sprouted. Hemp seeds, I haven't found a source for, for sprouted hemp seeds, but the fact that they're usually sold shelled where it's just the, the fatty core of the seed, that helps a lot because the anti-nutrients are generally found in the outer part of the seed. So the magnesium content of the inner part is much more well-absorbed relative to other kind of seeds and things that are whole grains. But between those two sprouted pumpkin seeds and hemp seeds, you can get a lot of magnesium from your diet. So if someone doesn't tolerate magnesium supplements, I would at bare minimum still include a few tablespoons of hemp seeds per day to try to kind of bring that in from another source.

Absolutely. Yeah. And also, you know, growlsteiner, some, some of those mineral oil.

Yeah.

Crazy. I mean, crazy amounts of magnesium, like 20% of your RDB. In a liter, right? Obviously that's, that's not, has nothing on those hemp hearts. Obviously, right. The form matters a lot. I find that the fully chelated magnesium glycinate works like a charm, doesn't cause drowsiness. And then also topical magnesium. Talk about like a totally different absorption pathway to help with that saturation. And you mentioned stress and magnesium people. Why is it that we find GABAergics to be more perfect than ever? Obviously a lot of it comes down to everyone being constantly overstimulation, but why is it that so many people are finding benefits? From the L-theanine, from the inositol, from the taurine, from the magnesium. And, and what is the risk? What is the risk of constantly nudging our system? Or, you know, you know, in some cases directly binding these GABAergic receptors?

So I think almost everything in our modern environment predisposes us toward higher glutamate and lower GABA levels. To give a few big examples, certain nutrient deficiencies, magnesium deficiency, enhances your sensitivity to glutamates. Even normal glutamate levels will feel worse with magnesium deficiency. The first thing they notice when they take magnesium is it's like a weight has been lifted as far as like their anxiety and just general tension goes. And then beyond that, vitamin B is needed. Actually glutamate and GABA convert back and forth into each other. So vitamin B6 is involved in the one step conversion of glutamate into GABA. And you'd think this would mean that they're always balanced, but actually you get glutamate from your diet. And if you're B6 deficient, it just stays glutamate. You don't properly convert it into GABA in the right amount. And this can cause a lot of really severe anxiety disorders where you just have a B6 deficiency and you get panic attacks and things like that. And you don't realize that that's what it is. It's in some cases it could be quite severe, but quite simple to correct. And even within a week of B6 repletion, you can see just a dramatic change in how people feel. Zinc deficiency is another one I mentioned earlier. That's also kind of related to this. And then there's these sort of stimulating factors in our environment that really drive glutamate activation as well. So the biggest one is our light environment. Actually, the artificial light is very centered around the blue part of the spectrum. And in nature, when you go outside in the sun in the morning and in the evening, only the longest wavelengths of light are getting through because they have to pass through more air in the atmosphere as the sun is near the horizon. The short wavelengths like UV, like purple light, like blue light, they get largely filtered out. And so you don't get a lot of blue light in the morning and in the evening around sunset, but in the middle of the day, when the sun is straight up and down, you have the shortest distance of atmosphere that the light is passing through. What that translates to is more blue light, purple light, and this is why you get UV light in the middle of the day. So when UV light is present, you also have high blue light. And because of this, our bodies are wired to read this as a signal for awakeness and alertness. So we go outside in the middle of the day and it wakes us up. It gets our circadian rhythm on track. And part of that is by simulating glutamate. Now, when we work indoors, when we turn the lights on, as soon as the sun sets, all this sort of changes in our indoor light environment, that blue light is highly stimulating toward glutamate. It's gonna promote glutamate release. And this is actually why you see a connection between light and seizures in epilepsy. So epilepsy is the textbook example of a high glutamate state in the extreme. So activation of the nervous system that's so widespread and severe that every neuron in the brain practically is firing at once and you have uncontrolled muscle activation and things like that. That is extremely high glutamate state and bright light, flashing light, blue light are all stimulating of glutamate to such a degree that they can act as triggers for epileptic seizures. Now, you know, you and I, we don't get it to the same degree. We're not in that extreme state where every little thing just sets us over the edge., but we're at like a chronic low level of activation when we're in this blue light environment, when, when we're looking at screens, when we're working indoors under these like fluorescent lights, and these all kind of contribute to elevated glutamate. Another thing that's kind of unfortunate that's less in people's control is the EMF kind of environment. There's a, a researcher named Martin Pall, P-A-L-L, who's written a number of papers on some of the kind of biological mechanisms of EMF and these electromagnetic kind of radiation in our environment, like from Wi-Fi and cell signals and things like that. And he's shown that some of the frequencies of these EMF kind of sources that we have in our environment actually activate calcium channels in much the same way that glutamate does. So this might be one of the mechanisms why some people experience kind of bizarre significant sensitivity to EMF is that it's activating glutamate and that it's sort of a glutamate mimic that can stimulate the nervous system. I don't know if you've ever had like a time in your life where you've been like somewhere with no cell service, just like really isolated in nature for years. Right. So it is like a night and day difference. It's like when you return to civilization, the amount of just resting tension that you have is so much more noticeable that It's like, you don't even realize how tense you are. And this is true for a lot of health things. You know, people eat fast food every day. They drink alcohol and wake up feeling just a little bit hungover without really noticing it. They are in blue light rich environments. They aren't sleeping well, you know, they're, they're in an EMF rich environment and all of this pushes you toward discomfort and high glutamate and other health issues. And you just read it as, oh, I have anxiety. Oh, I have depression. Oh, I'm just a tense person. And if you don't ever kind of approach it from the standpoint of what if this is in my control, even just to some degree, what if I can improve this? Then you're never going to realize how bad your resting state is. And it's sort of like you can get sucked into that entropy of just not realizing that these things are happening to you. And as a result of that, something like magnesium, it can be like waking up from a bad dream where you're like, wow, I didn't realize that I felt this bad until I felt better. And now I know that that wasn't normal.

Yeah, no, people don't realize how much of an impact all of these stressors have just over and over again, 24/7. You know, the brain and body is good at adapting, but it doesn't make it where these things are non-problematic. It just makes it where that's your new normal. And that was the environment that allowed me to heal and to recover and to become normal again. And then coming back to a city, some people are more sensitive than others, most certainly, but you just notice all these infractions over and over again, and it wears away at you. It totally destroys you. If you're sensitive to it, that doesn't make you weak. That makes you attuned to your environment. Like you have spidey senses and some people's spidey senses are more sensitive. So It is crazy. The thing you mentioned too with the epileptic component, think about like, you think about like flickering lights are enough to cause full-blown seizures in epileptics. Think about what it's doing to the average person and think about how many like sub-noticeable flickering lights there are everywhere on screens. When you go into any grocery store, I mean, you, you put your phone on slow motion and you notice it. So once you become attuned to it, you realize like this, this is a problem. And then once as you mentioned, you can actually map it to what's happening mechanistically. You can remove that doubt and, you know, the, the classic triage of people saying you're being neurotic, you're being crazy. It's not neuroticism if the mechanisms are stated and it's not neuroticism if you do something proactively about it. You know, it's my opinion. Don't be afraid to be called neurotic. The, the thing you mentioned that you're looking into right now with stretching lowering cancer risk. This kind of ties in a number of things we've been talking about with the collagen matrix and how a lot of these, these problems that we're seeing with, you know, homocysteine among other things are the impact that it has on the collagen matrix. What, what is this all about? This stretching, probably lowering cancer risk, right?

So this is something I, I came across basically a number of different kind of threads recently. I was looking at these effects of stretching and massage and I came across a study showing that stretching reduces cancer risk by something like 50%. And this is really significant. And it, they included all these caveats, like this isn't like a treatment for cancer. This isn't like a replacement for chemotherapy and that sort of thing, but it's something that really seems like out of left field, but it aligned with a lot of other things I've been looking at. These seem like things that people do that are like kind of just relaxing or comforting, but that, you know, probably modern medicine or the average person would just dismiss that as saying, well, it's just a stress reliever. It's just something that is making somebody feel less stressed. And that's, that's all that the effect is about. But I believe it's more than that. I think that it sort of ties together some interesting things I've been looking at related to blood flow and collagen and how they interact with different things. So if we look at how cancer develops, pretty much everyone over the age of 50 has some amount of cancer, and these are called microtumors. They're basically like patches or small amounts of cells that have the qualities of cancer cells, but in a perfect world will literally never develop into anything. So pretty much everyone has these little scenarios arise where there's sort of like a small cancer-like growth that is then destroyed by the immune system. But for some reasons, different people will have one of these growths turn into something real and long-lasting, and this is where you have tumor development. And the part of the reason this occurs is it all comes down to the collagen matrix around cells. So one of the defining qualities of cancer is that it has an unusual collagen structure around it that's more dense. And difficult to penetrate. And this actually is increased as the cancer grows, but even before the cancer develops, it's sort of a precursor for cancer development. So the hypoxic condition that occurs in that patch of tissue where you have lack of blood flow, you can't get enough oxygen, triggers all of these adaptive responses. Like you see an increase in VEGF, which is the vascular endothelial growth factor that promotes the creation of new blood vessels trying to reach that tissue. You see an increase in another factor called hypoxia inducible factor, which also promotes some of these changes. And basically you get this inflammatory kind of process that tries to drive almost like a healing and an increase in circulation. And up to a certain point, this is a protective adaptation where if that sort of cancer tissue can get plugged back into the body as a whole in the right period of time, then it can be protective. But once it's sort of on a roll and once it's developing, then that increased circulation can actually be problematic. And so the best sort of treatment is prevention in some sense, because you need to maintain the collagen matrix in your body in such a way that it doesn't restrict blood flow to these different parts of the body. And this is This is really what stood out to me most with these two particular pieces of evidence, the benefits of massage and the benefits of stretching, having these like extremely beneficial effects that seem paradoxical at first. What does stretching do? It restructures that collagen matrix. It causes the collagen matrix to be pulled and strained and then to reform with fresh new kind of connective proteins. And when that occurs, you're breaking up that, that dense kind of buildup of disorganized collagen and you're laying down new organized collagen. And so you see that effect. You also see improvement in blood flow and things like that with exercise in general. Exercise also reduces cancer risk for that reason. And when it comes to massage, you're seeing a similar thing where if there's any kind of stagnant tissue where you, you aren't getting the proper oxygenation, the proper flow of water, when your lymph isn't moving in that tissue, then massage can allow blood flow to reach that tissue that wasn't before. And in the case of fat and things like that, it can improve metabolism in that tissue because it's now getting the oxygen it needed. A lot of the time when you have somebody that is overweight or things like that, their extremities and the, the fatty tissues are very cold because they aren't properly circulated.. And so they become, they become sort of stagnant in the sense that you can have these stress responses to lack of oxygen occur that then predispose to cancer development. And the other area that I've been really interested in with this is calcification, which is kind of going hand in hand with this really when, when you have calcium crystals and things that are deposited in that tissue, the body kind of treats it as like a foreign body and will actually lay down more collagen around that kind of buildup of these calcium crystals. And that can lead to basically what's called fibrosis, which is excess collagen and almost like an internal scarring of different organ systems. And it can also lead to basically this, this increased risk of cancer where the blood flow and circulation are cut off. And it ties back into the same mechanisms we were talking about with Alzheimer's disease. The amyloid plaques in the brain work very similar to this sort of fibrosis and calcification where they build up in certain regions and they restrict blood flow and oxygen delivery to those tissues, leading to the effects of aging. This is something I'm, I'm working on kind of a more expanded fleshed out thread on the topic. And I really, I'm interested to see kind of what other connections I can dig up with this, because I think that the biggest thing that ties a lot of what we've been talking about and some things we haven't talked about, like the benefits of grounding and other types of movement and things like that, is that they improve the ability of water and electric signals and oxygen to travel through connective tissue. And that's essential for life to function. And the sort of derangement of that is one of the biggest things you see in aging. You actually see an increase in collagen tissue content in aging, but it's not organized collagen. It's disorganized collagen that impairs blood flow.

Yeah. It is interesting trying to find the thread because you'll see these totally different and isolated or seemingly isolated functioning and, you know, symptomology in the body and seeing more. Bryce, I really appreciate you coming on. You have some really good work on Twitter, among other places. I'm looking forward to this work that you're going to have on the stretching and the collagen. Where can people find you? What are you working on?

So I got a few places I'm posting and writing. My account on Twitter, X, is Photobiogenesis, all one word, no underscores or anything. And then I have a Patreon that I post articles and things to that's under the same name. I also have a website where I have some free blogs and I offer kind of educational consulting where we talk about a lot of these same topics and things related to health. And my website is multiflora-herbs.com. So if anybody wants to check that out, it's also linked on my X profile. So I'd start there and then if you find it interesting, there's more kind of long-form stuff I've written over the years to dig into as well.