22: Ben Greenfield - Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness
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Hello, you found the portal. I'm here today with my guest in studio, Ben Greenfield, down from Washington State. Ben, welcome to the program. Thank you. And hello. And hello, sir. So you are the first health guest, I think, that we've had on the program. We can talk about other things. But you've had healthy guests. We've had health-ish. Just not health guests. Health-ish. Okay. Yeah. And what I wanted to talk to you about is a little bit this issue of

how we sort through our bodies and our minds as mechanical systems. What do we do with integrating the tremendous amount of information? Some of the literature in the biomedical field is almost unreadable and it's extremely confusing. You have small studies, you don't have a lot of discipline across different fields to keep any kind of interoperability. And so,

I've always been afraid to enter this space, but you've been recommended as one of the countries or if not the world's top trainers, you've been an extreme athlete. You've been studying this from an academic perspective and you seem the ideal person to be our jungle guide into the wilds of what is known about us. Aside from the extreme athlete piece, I don't think masochism lends any great deal of credibility to one aside from a little bit of time spent testing things like, you know, ketones and carbohydrate mixes in the trenches and

finding out what might give you explosive diarrhea. But I do love to read. I love to study this stuff. I've always been a voracious and curious person.

consumer. I just figured if we can profit from your pain, that seems like a pretty good deal. Well, yeah, yeah, maybe a little bit. Uh, but yeah, you're, you're right. It is difficult with, you know, closed access to many of these journals and, you know, the ability to be able to review an abstract. And as we were discussing before we started recording, you know, an inability to, to determine whether or not a fasting study was done on a male or a female population, or, you

You know, whether or not a headline that might say vilify red meat is actually looking at the lifestyle practices of the people consuming said meat or the sourcing process versus unprocessed. There's just so many nuances to take into consideration.

And I think the saving grace though is that we live in an era now where the type of self-quantification that would have been prohibitively expensive 10 years ago is now readily affordable and available in the comfort of your own home in many cases. And so I think that –

And we can delve into this if you would like. The ability to be able to gather data about your own body and then decide what type of nutrition or exercise or supplementation protocol would be appropriate for you allows you to bypass a lot of this epidemiological data that paints with a very broad brush.

So these are all great topics. I mean, one of the great mysteries, since you've already brought up explosive diarrhea, we probably lost half our listeners with that one is why is my, you know, why is my toilet not a laboratory that is always taking data away from what I'm passing through me? Right. Or your, or your, your toilet paper, your toilet paper and a dongle on your iPhone. Yeah.

And yeah, that's one of the tests that's certainly very helpful. I think actually more helpful than these newer microbiome companies that are making a lot of predictions based on biome data collected from stool that don't have a lot of research behind them, such as, you know, we've tested your stool and determined that based on your biome data, you should be on XYZ probiotic that we are, by the way, manufacturing and selling.

But there are other tests that you can do that I think are very helpful and we could start with the bathroom since we're there already. Not literally. We're going to have to get back to like just introducing you but we're already – We're not actually sitting on porcelain. These chairs are more comfortable. There are tests like – I run once a year, a test from Genova Diagnostics. It's a three-day stool panel and a multi-day collection is important because –

Everything from parasitic activity to yeast, fungus, bacteria, all that changes on a day-to-day basis. And you can learn a great deal about your gut and inflammatory markers in your gut, bacterial balance, the presence or absence of parasites or yeast or something like candida, for example.

by simply on a yearly basis doing a panel like this. You literally, for three days in a row, just swab and it goes into a little tube. You keep that, much to the chagrin of my wife, typically in the refrigerator until all of your poop is ready to ship off to FedEx. Right. And you receive a beautiful PDF in two weeks that's got everything you would need to know about...

whether or not you might need to say supplement with a digestive enzyme because you have low pancreatic enzyme production or whether you actually do need to take that popular cleansing supplements because you have some kind of a parasitic overgrowth or something like that. I mean, I actually want to get back to this issue of your wife because I think the issue of whether or not your behavior is viewed as bizarre by your family is

has a lot to do with whether or not most people can stick to a regime. I mean, I am someone who believes that in general institutional wisdom is usually so polluted by the economic incentives of the institutions that I'm always open to the idea that the conventional wisdom is exactly what you would expect when institutions have perverse incentives. But if everyone in your family or your social environment doesn't

worry about these things the same way you might and isn't sort of willing to take responsibility for you know, you break it you bought it style approach can be very difficult to You know to get somebody to go along with putting your stool in the refrigerator as if that was normal and

Let's, let's get to that in a second. So I can at least sort of get some background from you. Can you just give us a very quick sketch of your academic and non-academic experience that brings you to being one of the most sought after fitness experts? Yes. Academically, I attended university of Idaho and,

not necessarily known for its its rigorous health and and medical program but i studied exercise physiology and biomechanics there because for for most of my younger years i was most interested in exploring the boundaries of human performance and how to maximize human performance which in retrospect is a far cry from enhancing health or longevity

And there are many people who are fit on the outside. But once you take a look at blood and biomarkers and may go exactly opposite. Yeah. Some of the self quantification we're talking about earlier, it actually can often fly in the face of longevity to to be operating at peak performance.

However, I studied that at University of Idaho and competed in tennis and in bodybuilding and water polo and volleyball, just played a lot of sports and progressed from there to almost 20 years of competing in professional endurance sports and doing things like Ironman triathlon and Spartan racing, obstacle course racing and adventure racing and just all sorts of kind of

masochistic multi-day type of events, which were interesting to me just from a pure physiological standpoint, because those are, those are really sports of attrition, right? Where you must have pretty robust management of everything from macronutrients to things that would affect fatigue more dramatically than say, you know, baseball, where you might be, you know, sitting in the dugout. And if you, if you stop moving, you know, many cases, you're still going to be okay.

And that was a great playground for me to explore a lot of the nutrition and the performance and the recovery concepts that I've been toying around with and still utilize. But I also am just a voracious consumer of content. You know, I pour through research every morning. I read a lot of journals. I read, try to read a book every day. You know, typically it's in the health or the performance or the nutrition realm.

And I podcast, uh, blog. Can we plug your podcast? Uh, it's just the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast, horribly narcissistic title that doesn't lend itself well to branding, but, uh, that's, that's, uh, that's my podcast. And, and I write books. I just finished, uh,

A 650-page book on all things anti-aging, longevity, gut, immune system, hormones, just kind of delved into every nook and cranny of human physiology. Heart rate variability. Quite a bit in there on heart rate variability. That's an interesting topic that you bring up. Is that something you're interested in? You must know June Yun.

Palo Alto partners who was a physician turned sort of hedge fund manager I do not ah so we were talking about how to make radical longevity a normal part of health and physiology and because it had this sort of bizarre patina of quixotic desire to find the fountain of youth and

Um, there was a period of time where it had to be de-risked by Silicon Valley. So it was sort of almost seen as being immoral to pursue radical longevity as a research program. And Aubrey de Grey and Peter Thiel and various people, uh, were instrumental in kind of

taking the slings and arrows from the outside world, said, oh, this is rich people trying to live forever on the backs of everyone else. But June was instrumental in trying to work through the system by giving some money for the Palo Alto Prize. He asked me to give the keynote. And it was a lot about talking, I mean, we were talking a lot about

if you strip off things like environmental insult or the burden of disease or self harm or all of these other things that one can die from, are you left in the end with trade offs between cancer aging? It's an essence. And do we understand the essence? And so June's perspective was that heart rate variability was the best concrete marker to target to proxy the

for improving longevity in a meaningful way because his theory was about homeostatic capacity. Can you get back to homeostasis? Absolutely. I would say...

pushing aside some of the more fringe markers out there that you can track for longevity. Let's say something like telomere length or, or a Horvath methylation clock or any of these things that are called as fringe. I would say that they're just bad proxies. Yeah. They're poor proxies. They're also less, um, they're less available and less scalable and less affordable for the general population compared to, yeah. Compared to what I would consider to be three very, uh,

useful markers to track overall health and longevity. And that would be glycemic variability and how often is the blood sugar fluctuating throughout the day and to what extent is the sugar remaining in the bloodstream versus transiently passing due to physical activity or good insulin sensitivity or good blood sugar management, something that can be measured via a $20 to $30 blood stick from CVS or Walgreens or

I wore the entire year last year and gleaned a great deal of actionable data from a Dexcom G6 continuous blood glucose monitor, which allowed me to see everything from blood glucose response to a cup of coffee, to plate of green beans, to exposure to heat versus cold. And I learned some very interesting things. For example-

The blood glucose rises dramatically in response to a cup of coffee, which is actually what you'd want. You know, it's mildly hyper cortisolic and, you know, it gives you a surge of energy and that sugar, assuming that the coffee is black and doesn't have a lot of calories in it.

That sugar is mostly glycogenolysis. It's released from the liver, and it's a short spike in blood glucose and doesn't contribute a great deal to glycemic variability. But I found it interesting how high the blood glucose rises after a simple cup of black coffee in the morning. So it was a narrow peak. Narrow peak. Okay, you still think of yourself as a book person, but you really haven't been reading as many nonfiction titles as you would like.

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I also found that my blood glucose responded quite dramatically to green beans, of all things, which were kind of a staple in my diet. And so because of that, I went out and got what I would consider to be one of the gold standard food allergy tests out there that doesn't give you a laundry list of false positives. It's called a Cyrex food allergy panel, C-Y-R-E-X.

And it turns out that one of the only foods that I produce a significant immunoglobulin reaction towards is green beans. And the blood glucose response that I saw after eating a vegetable was actually my body mounting an inflammatory autoimmune-based response to the vegetable. But it gave me a clue that I was able to dig more deeply into. I also found something very useful.

and quite useful for us since we're sitting in a cold room right now, the best thing I could do to lower glycemic variability and keep my blood glucose stable the entire day was a brief bout of cold in the morning. Just two to five minutes, cold shower, cold soak, jump in a cold river, dramatically controlled blood glucose the rest of the day. So glycemic variability would be one thing that I think is important to measure.

Inflammation would be a second. Inflammation is a little bit trickier because it does require a blood measurement that typically right now requires you to go to a lab to do a blood draw. But I'm talking about getting a measurement of something like HSCRP to see if your C-reactive protein is low. There are other inflammatory markers like fibrinogen or homocysteine or cytokines that you can measure.

But doing something like a quarterly measurement of just your HSCRP levels, that's a $30 to $40 lab test that you can run. That also is because inflammation is so tied to stress and a variety of other health conditions. You see that responded to something like dairy?

It can respond to food allergies. It can respond to stress. It can respond to, and this is something to be careful with in terms of the timing of when you run the test exercise can elevate it significantly, which is why sometimes if someone does a hard weight training session or run, they're

Then does their fasted lab test the next morning, the results come back, show elevated CRP and a doctor wants them to go in for a heart panel and spend a whole bunch of money when their CRP was just elevated due to exercise. The day prior continuous monitoring is that it has really shown us just how inadequate it is to pick some random moment.

And then decide that that is where your body is because your body may just be passing through that value of whatever it is. It needs to be precisely controlled. And when you look at hormones, it's even more important because if you look at the gold standard right now for hormone measurement, at least what's used predominantly, then we can get back to heart rate variability, which I would consider to be the third measurement to look at in addition to glycemic variability and inflammation. Yeah.

But when you look at hormones, for example, most tests are running a fasted blood draw in the morning of testosterone, estrogen, cholesterol.

DHEA, what have you, but hormones fluctuate widely throughout the day. And because of this, I think that a urinary measurement for hormones, you know, there's another test that I think is great for self-quantification. It's called a Dutch panel. It's a dried urine test. You pee on a stick five times during the day and you get a running value of where your hormone levels are fluctuating throughout the entire day so that you can see if you're truly whatever high cortisol, low cortisol, high testosterone, low testosterone, et cetera.

And furthermore, urine test will show you the upstream and downstream metabolites of a hormone. And the reason that's important is because many people will, for example, get a blood measurement of their cortisol levels.

And see that they have very, let's say, very low cortisol. And some functional medicine doctor or naturopathic physician or something like that will tell them they have adrenal fatigue. You know, your adrenals are pooped out. You're not making cortisol. You need to stop exercising and go to a Vipassana retreat for 10 days or whatever. And it turns out that, for example, in a highly active exercising individual who is producing cortisol just fine, cortisol gets turned over very quickly.

And you aren't going to see this on a blood test, but on a urine test, you would see high levels of cortisol metabolites, meaning that cortisol is being produced just fine by the adrenal glands, but it's being cleared very quickly, right?

And so, so paying attention to the actual, the, the, the fluids being used to, to run the test is important as well. You know, so something like hormones should be tested via urine, but for the inflammation piece, you know, just running like a quarterly blood panel to see if your inflammation is staying under control, I think would be the second most useful measurement that is low hanging fruit for a lot of people in addition to the blood glucose.

And then the final would be heart rate variability. You can say more about that given that we started. Yes. Yes. Fully define it. So heart rate variability, you know, I wear, for example, a ring to track it. There are wristbands that track it. Bluetooth enabled heart rate strap is a little bit more of a gold standard, more accurate measurement. But it is simply a measurement of the delta between your heartbeats. You know, the interbeats.

from heartbeat to heartbeat, which should display mild variations from beat to beat, meaning that your vagus nerve, which innervates the sinoatrial node of the heart and monitors or, or, or,

controls to a certain extent, the electrical activity of the pacemaker cells of the heart by feeding into the sinoatrial node that should be giving good sympathetic fight and flight and parasympathetic rest and digest information to the heart. And if someone is able to control stress, well is in a relatively low state of inflammation and a high state of health, well rested, et cetera, and has good vagal nerve tone, the heart rate variability tends to be high.

And I originally became interested in heart rate variability because it is an excellent predictor of injury and illness in athletes, meaning that if you're training a team or an individual athlete and the heart rate variability begins to drop, typically you can predict injury or illness about two to three days later with surprising accuracy. And so that's a situation in which you would adjust the training program and give someone a rest day or a recovery day.

Well, in a person who's just tracking this for health, maintaining a high heart rate variability

maintaining good vagal nerve tone is one of the best things you can do for decreasing stress for controlling inflammation etc and the vagus nerve itself is just Fascinating. I mean it you know, we were briefly chatting about the gut-brain connection earlier and the vagus nerve is largely responsible for that I mean it snakes throughout the entire body it innervates that we should just say for the listeners that I

two very strange things about the gut. One is that it's a home to a large number of people who sort of are you, but aren't you? Yes, exactly. Uh, in your microbiome. And the other is, is that it has a very extensive nervous system, all its own, which has been called, it was Gershon's title, uh, the second brain, second brain, you know, the enteric nervous system and the, the

The efferent fibers of the vagus nerve will feed from the central nervous system to a wide variety of organs, you know, the pancreas,

to control insulin, the kidneys to control blood pressure, the liver and the gallbladder to control bile production and detoxification. And then the afferent fibers will travel from all of those organs, including the biome, back to the brain. And so there's this constant interplay occurring between the gut and the brain, which is why for anyone who wants to maximize cognitive performance, you know, care for the gut is actually very important. And

Vice versa for anyone who wants to limit things like gas, bloating, gut motility issues, etc. Paying attention to the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the amount of stress that you're placing on yourself. The HPA axis, the amount of stress that you're placing on your central nervous system affects digestion quite dramatically. That's why when we have family dinners at our house, we all take a deep breath in through our nose.

through our mouth three times and we prepare our parasympathetic system for digestion. We're activating the vagus nerve and settling down stress from the central nervous system, which would impact the enteric nervous system. And when you look at research done on vagal nerve tone, there are a variety of things that tone the vagus nerve that increase heart rate variability.

because a lot of the vagus nerve travels through some of the muscles around the throat and the neck chanting singing gargling so how much of our religious and cultural traditions are cryptic health programs that we throw over at our peril they they are indeed I mean that the fasting originally was was a religious practice not a not a weight loss or a ketogenic fad you know it's tied into

For example, the Mediterranean diet, that's the often neglected thing that people don't bring up when they talk about the health impact of the Mediterranean diet is if you look at the way that, say, the Orthodox Church practices the Mediterranean diet, there's a great deal of fasting. There are periods of time spent in protein restriction. You know, we know that catabolism and the cellular cleanup, what's called the autophagy that takes place during those periods of protein restriction, etc.

That's what has life extending properties and fasting is a big part of that diet as well. It's not just about, you know, unlimited breadsticks and goat cheese and, you know, oodles and oodles of extra virgin olive oil. I mean, there are other components of that diet tied into the religious aspect.

And ahming, you know, such as in meditation or the breath work in yoga, these things can tone the vagus nerve. Cold water, the mammalian dive reflex that, you know, when a baby is first born and many cultures would splash cold water in the baby's faces or for several months dunk a baby in cold water to tone the vagus nerve, to activate digestion, to activate the building of that biome we talked about.

All of these things are wonderful for the vagus nerve breath work. And so you can, you can train and control heart rate variability. And I really like that because it's so easy to track in real time. And I would say if you're tracking glycemic variability, inflammation and heart rate variability, those would be, those would be the three biggest things when it comes to health and longevity. Yeah.

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Well, that's very helpful that you're narrowing it down to three things that many people will never have heard of or thought about. But the thing that I want to get at, and maybe this is a good place to break, most of us don't know how to think about these things. I can't tell you the number of times I've been walking down the street and somebody says, wow, would you look at the nerve tone on that? I mean, nobody talks these days. I got the vaguest nerve on that, babe. I know. We don't know how to think about

about all of the messaging chemicals, all of the, if you ask people to break down the body into three layers, how many people would come up with cytology, histology, physiology, and anatomy? We don't remember all the cranial nerves. We can't quite keep straight with the pancreas, the gallbladder, and the liver are up to. Cranial nerves, yeah. I remember the pneumatic system

On old the pneumatic on old Olympus, powering tops of Finan, German view, some hops. Hey, I never get it. Just don't ask me to name them all. Yeah. That's funny. I hadn't thought about that all the time. Um, we don't know how to think about our bodies and prioritize these things. In other words, if somebody says, look, I don't want to get this deep into what it is that you're talking about. Here's my time budget. Here's my mental budget. What can I afford to think about without, uh,

feeling lost. Because I think one of the things that I find very off-putting is that there seems to be kind of a Rubicon. Either you go in for this health thing and it becomes a large part of what you discuss every day with your health friends, or you're sort of frozen out on the other side of this thing, not quite sure of yourself. You know, in some ways people feel the same way about this as they feel about mathematics. They're lost. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I don't necessarily think that you need to be immersed in the data of self-quantification. I think that there is a great deal of value if you do want to learn about your body and do something like a yearly comprehensive blood panel, a yearly gut panel, heart rate variability tracking, measurement of inflammation. I've done some of these things. I get it back.

I scratch my head. Somebody tells me what the something means. I start doing that thing to rectify the situation. Somebody else says, well, that's not what that means. Right. And so my question, I mean, here's my ideal. I'd like to get the 10 sharpest minds in the field into a room and then ask questions and watch them duke it out intellectually and

So somebody could say, well, you know, that's true in general, but if you condition on this variable, then that's no longer true because that's just part of this natural response.

And it's a, you know, fair or not fair. Well, that study, you know, really only looked at a very small sample. That's the tricky part is the biochemical individuality. And Roger William, I believe, was back in the 60s, wrote a wrote a book that dictated the 12 different shapes of a liver and a stomach and a pancreas. And the fact that some people have extremely robust stomachs.

vitamin D excretion rates and should therefore get plenty of sunshine and perhaps even supplement with vitamin D, whereas other people would get arterial calcification from supplementing with vitamin D.

Some people have very high rates of oxalic acid and uric acid excretion and can eat nuts until the cows come home. And other people will get gout and pain in their big toes from having a few handful of almonds each day. So it varies widely from person to person. I mean, that's the variability of the person under study.

I'm saying that's part of the whole quantified self thing, which is understanding which particular machine you've inherited and what you can do with it and what you can't. But then there's the other issue, which is sort of sensitivity analysis for information. That is, if there is a slight change in our understanding of something, does the prescription flip wildly or does it move a small amount?

And then just to get really into where I think a lot of these problems go wrong, I want to hear many more of these things talked about in terms of trade-offs where, well, this is good for you in this regard, but probably bad for you in that regard. Whereas a lot of the advice is phrased differently.

in terms of that's a great thing for you. And I just don't even believe in general. - The ketogenic diet is a perfect example of that. - Say more. - Many of the studies on it myopically focus upon weight loss, or sometimes upon lipids, your cholesterol values.

When you look at the ketogenic diet that may have helped your neighbor to lose 20 pounds, putting coconut oil and butter in their coffee every morning and having some kind of ketogenic fat bomb after dinner every night, some people have, for example, an FTO gene that would predispose you to very high levels of inflammation, which we talked about earlier, in response to high amounts of saturated fat, particularly levels of saturated fat that exceed 10% of

of total daily intake of fat, which on a standard modern ketogenic diet, it's common to eat 30, 40, 50% of your total fat intake from saturated fat. Others have familial hypercholesterolemia, which would dictate your cholesterol values. And this would be, I don't necessarily think LDL cholesterol is...

is indicative of cardiovascular risk, but in people with FH, it actually is. So very rampantly high levels of cholesterol in response to a ketogenic diet. Uh,

Other people have poor liver and gallbladder function, which would dictate that they're going to have horrible bowel movements and a great deal of digestive distress in response to that diet. But if you look at a meta-analysis of ketogenic diets that say that this is favorable for the general population, in many cases they're looking at weight loss, not inflammation, not bowel function, not lipid panels. And so the problem could sometimes be the value being measured.

Right. What I'm trying to get at is I don't see a solution for muggles, for civilians, for the average person who's not a high net worth individual, not a fitness geek. They want to avail themselves perhaps of whatever the best thinking is, but they don't know what happens when people conflict. I mean, like if I listened to physicists,

or mathematicians, you can very quickly usually tell who's talking sensibly.

You know, they're willing to give up. Well, you know, that's absolutely, that's technically true. But in this case, blah, blah, blah. When I listened to health people, the conversations are usually dyadic. It's usually two health people talking to each other. Yeah. And often with a great deal of conflict of interest because there's a, there's a diet book or a supplement company involved. Right. So conflict of interest is terrible within the health institutions. It's terrible within the anti-institutional context.

experts as well because of the fact that there are products on the other side of this thing. And then there's this question that every single biological system I've ever studied is incredibly complicated. If you look at the cascades, you know, just from one homologous system to the next, they're totally different. It's very hard to,

to figure out what we're talking about in trade-off space. You can measure a bunch of stuff, but even there, if it doesn't lend itself to continuous monitoring through a cheap device, relatively cheap device, you can be

unclear as to whether or not those values even really represent you. Right. And from one standpoint, it's a frustrating conversation because it is such a soft science and because there is so much biochemical individuality.

At the same time, to me, it's an exciting and promising conversation because I believe we're on the cusp of everything from microneedling patches that can be slapped on and you forego the trip to a laboratory. You put an envelope, you mail it off, and you have all the data right there, hundreds of blood biomarkers from the comfort of your own home to iPhone dongles or anything else that can be used to collect this data.

If we were to combine that with AI or algorithms that can actually feed through that data and produce digestible information that's understandable to the general public and people can take their health into their own hands using easy self-quantification combined with essentially using AI and algorithms, which I have a hunch you know a great deal more about than I do.

I think that that is, that's the promising future of healthcare and self-management. So that we're in an intermediate state right now.

curating and collecting all the laboratory measurements that are going to give the most useful and actionable data. Cause it can't just be, you know, I said like a microneedling, you know, a patch that you could, you could put on your arm, but we already talked about the urine. We talked about the stool, right? You have to collect more, more fluid from the body than just blood. Um, and I feel like that should be done passively. What do you mean?

my toilet should be a laboratory. That'd be amazing. It'd be absolutely amazing. I mean, if it can have a, I mean, I'm confused as to why it's going to have a hot, cold, warm bidet and vibration and, and wipe your ass for you. It should be able to collect. I mean, it feels to me like the Japanese have thought about all sorts of aspects of my comfort and luxury. And what I really want to know is my markers. Yeah. And, and it shocks me that that doesn't yet exist. The ability to be able to more easily and precisely quantify this and then have it fed into an algorithm that will spit out

actionable data that's easy to understand. But the fact is, I should say, to my knowledge, it doesn't yet exist. And I'm pretty plugged into this sector when it comes to all the different ways out there that one can test and the different companies that are doing the testing and the information they're putting out. And there's no platform yet that's doing blood, gut, urine,

saliva, heart rate variability, and some of the other metrics you'd get from a wearable device, then taking that, putting it through an algorithm, and then pushing out the exact lifestyle, dietary, and supplementation or medication steps that someone could take to affect the biomarkers they tested. Well, another thing that I would love to see this coupled to is some sort of a software product that has...

the 15 leading health and performance experts talking about the same data. So just the way you have market analysts and you want to see whether the market analysts are all talking to each other or whether they're disagreeing. And then you want to listen in on the disagreements. I mean, one thing I'd love to do is to have you back with three or four other people in your field who, if you all respect each other,

and say, well, you know, I think that that could easily be misinterpreted or you're taking us too far into the weeds. Or I think that that study has been given with far too much weight. And yeah. And, and, and, you know, people have toyed around with that. I think, uh, you know, Joe, for example, has hosted a meet, uh,

plant debate. Yeah. You know, and, and there's some chatter like that going on. I, I personally don't really use my own podcast as a platform for, for argumentation or debate as much as exploration of ideas. But you're right. It would be interesting. I think it might just lend more confusion to the matter. I don't think so. I think this is a big, a big miss. I think that one of the things that I'm finding is that,

the public wants to listen in on conversations between people who are talking almost in tongues. And then because they have the ability to slow it down and annotate, um, like right now there is a, a, a discord server that, uh,

And the audio is searchable now too. Well, I know Google is searching audio. I use an app called cast box. It's fantastic. I use it for all my podcasts, not just for the podcast.

Only because you can, you know, it's got good smoothing algorithms to where you can play one, two, three, and four times speed. And it still sounds good, but I can use the search function on that and it will search the audio. Let's say I want to learn about some random health concept, like small intestine bacterial overgrowth. I can search, it'll scrape, not just the show notes and the title and the description, but the actual audio itself. And I can go directly to the timestamp where that discussion begins and jump right

- Right in on whatever we're studying on. - If the fidelity is high enough, depends what the nature of-- - I don't know how the fidelity feeds into it, but it's, I mean-- - No, sorry, it's the fidelity of the transcription. - Right, right. No, it's not searching the transcription. It's searching the actual audio. It's an audio search engine. - So if you say something that's technical, I mean,

I guess I'm just confused as to how, how you're saying it. No, what I'm saying is that let's say someone is searching for glycemic variability, a term that I've already used two or three times.

And whoever's producing the show notes for your show or the title or the description isn't actually typing glycemic variability. It's not scrapable by a search engine in terms of the text that the audio is now being searched as well. And that phrase will be picked up on the audio and display in search results.

Okay, but it has to have a, so if you put in the search as a sound and then it's looking for some comparable sound. But it may miss, in a highly technical speech, I don't know that we're there that it's 100%. Yeah, I don't know the level of accuracy, but I've found it to be a great utility. So leaving that aside, I mean, the point that I was trying to get at more was just that if you had like health UFC where experts go at it with each other.

What's the old MTV, the death battle? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The death battle. Those claymation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like that. Well, but I think that's what people want. And they believe in some sense that once they can hear a group of experts sort of handle their concerns, they don't have to be the one filtering what's durable, what's ephemeral, what's a fad, what is fairly solid information.

I think that's the great appeal of listening in on an expert conversation when you have a community that's actually dissecting it and is able to do more with it. Yeah. I think as long as people are aware of any pre-existing bias, because there's everything from...

the investments that that expert might be involved in to the supplement companies they might own to the dietary books that they wrote five years ago that they're still married to even though research has changed because those diet books have served them quite well from a monetization standpoint. I mean, there's a lot of kind of back-end issues you got to pay attention to, but...

But yeah, I mean, it would be interesting at least. Let me do something dangerous for my own podcast. I have a few products that have health implications that some of which I've come to really like. Are you familiar with any of these cooling systems for mattress pads so that you don't wake up in a pool of your own sweat? Yes. The bed jet.

I'm familiar with that one, which uses air to cool. And then I personally use one called the Uler. Uh, my wife has one as well. I don't think it's ever been flipped on, you know, returning to your, your, uh, allusion to, uh, to the, to the bizarre health practices that spouses sometimes don't adopt. But, uh, I think about the Uler system because you and your wife don't have to have the same set. Yes. Yeah. And, and I, I find it useful. Yeah. I can set it at 55 degrees. Uh,

Um, you know, I would say just when you look at a lot of the wearables out there, one of the sleep metrics that people struggle with the most is deep sleep. Right. During which a lot of the nervous system repair and recovery is going to take place. I mean, memory consolidation and learning short term to long term things like that would occur during dreaming during the during the lighter REM sleep stages. But deep sleep is particularly important for recovery.

and seems to be the one that people struggle with the most. And the two things I have found to impact deep sleep, the highest are sleeping in a cool room, sleeping on a cool surface. If I've done anything to heat the body, such as a heavy meal or a heavy exercise session within three hours prior to bedtime, some kind of cold walk or cold shower, something to cool the body back down and wearing wool socks to bed. And the, that we're, when you wear socks to bed, it actually cools the rest of the body.

So that and higher dose CBD have been the two things that have increased my deep sleep the most. So yeah, I sleep on one of those pads. So that's, by the way, that's the spot. The one that you sleep on is my sponsor, which I didn't, which I didn't mention. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still confused about whether they're calling it the chili pad or the ruler, but it's, I think they have two different products, but that was my favorite find of 2019. Yeah.

Because I didn't know. And I, again, I liked the pad really cool, but I liked the comforter to be really warm. So I don't even know what it is that I'm interested in. It's interesting because there's actually a couple of interesting things. A, I think it is at Stanford that they have researched now that cooling the forehead is particularly helpful for sleep latency issues.

Meaning shortening the time that takes you to fall asleep. So they've just developed this company called, I think it's Ebb. I'm not financially affiliated with them at all, but it's a headband that cools the head as you're falling asleep. And it's similar to the chili pad, except you wear it on your head. And then the...

The other piece. Tell me, are wives into this? What's that? Do wives think this is attractive looking? Please say yes. No, not in the least. The chili pad can be set to switch to a warm setting at whatever time you want to wake up. So it'll slowly warm the bed as you wake. I haven't messed around with that function at all. I just set it at 55 degrees and pass out.

But it's useful. So I would say, yes, there's something to the idea of sleeping on a cool surface. Absolutely. I remember the other thing I was going to say is, you know, people talk about sleep hygiene, absence of light, presence of cold.

A silent room. Red versus blue light. Right. My entire bedroom is red incandescent light bulbs because you don't have any suppression of melatonin levels when you flip off the lights at night to pee or when you're getting ready for bed at night. But I think one thing that folks neglect in sleep hygiene is safety.

This comes all the way back to the vagus nerve and activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. The same reason that you would take three deep breaths and chew each bite of food with pretty high frequency. If you are sleeping and your brain is convinced you're in a safe environment, you sleep much better. This is why so many people struggle with sleep when they're traveling.

I've found one of the best things aside from never having my laptop in the bed, because if my brain associates the bed with work, you get sympathetic nervous system activation and lack of safety. One of our biggest battles. I can't stand work.

bumping into the metal of a laptop. Even if I'm in a small hotel room, the laptop, I just don't allow it near the bed. It's always somewhere else in the room. If I want to lay on my stomach and work on my laptop, it's on the floor. But the other thing is a gravity blanket. I don't know if you've ever used like high compression, 20 to 25 pound, like breathable cooling gravity blankets. But what I do is I have the chili pad underneath me. I pull this gravity blanket over top of me and it feels like you're just blanketed in safety. It's amazing.

I totally believe in this madness. It's one of the best sleep hacks I've adopted over the past year. Okay. Another one of my sponsors. I'm curious. I hate mushrooms, like with a vengeance and a passion that you can scarcely believe. The one way in which I can get mushrooms is. Was this a psilocybin experience in college? No, no, no, no, no. This is a experience with my parents growing up, putting things in my spaghetti. I don't think it was psychoactive spaghetti.

I actually love this company that puts mushrooms in coffee and tea because I'm able to get it in. I think it has some kind of psychological impact. I can't prove it, but I believe that mushroom chemistry is incredibly powerful. Are you a devotee of any of these particular? I am. Like chaga, lion's mane, and other mushrooms? The cognitive piece I find particularly intriguing is

Because if you look at this idea of the doctrine of signatures, it's this idea that the way that things look in nature indicate the biological impact they might have on the body. So we know that walnuts have high amounts of choline and DHA in them, and they're good for your brain. We know that pomegranates are good for cardiovascular function. So are tomatoes. And when you cut them open, they almost look like the ventricles and the atria of the heart.

This is a serious Marin County thing.

which is actually wonderful for neurogenesis and neuroplasticity and cognition. And so, yeah, there's something to be said for lions, mainly for cognition. Some of the beta-glucans in, say, turkey tail have been demonstrated to be anti-carcinogenic and anti-angiogenic to tumor growth. So that's another useful one.

Um, I use reishi mushroom for relaxation. You know, cordyceps is good for, these are all the ones pre-workout. Yeah. Yeah. There's all sorts of interesting blends out there. Uh, so, so yeah, I'm a fan of, I'm a fan of mushrooms. I think, I think they have a lot of utility. Are you, are you a fan of psychedelics? And I'm happy to unask the question if I should. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, psilocybin, particularly when, when combined with lion's mane, um,

In small doses, I'm a fan of that as a nootropic blend. My concern with psychedelics is that they have become, it seems of late, so culturally acceptable and also...

culturally acceptable and more and more accessible that I think there's some rampant abuse going on that is now justifiable. Whereas whatever, dropping into a K-hole or doing ecstasy on the weekends, you can now say you're using ketamine to manage some mild depression issues and using MDMA for some self-therapy work that you're doing for PTSD.

Or you're using LSD with great frequency. Many people are using that as a microdose every day. And the problem is you look at something like ketamine or MDMA, which people are using a lot of, that's neurotoxic. And if you look at something like-

The neurotoxicity? How neurotoxic MDMA is. It is in a trip dose. It's definitely neurotoxic. I would say a microdose of ketamine for something like managing mild depression or anxiety is relatively safe, but there are people using a lot more than that. I mean, I know people who are addicted to their ketamine nasal sprays and their ketamine trochies now and using those every single day.

was so preposterous given the twin criteria that are supposed to define what goes on schedule one, that a high propensity for abuse when, you know, LSD is weirdly self-limiting, for example, and that the high degree of harm. And in fact,

I was shocked to find out that I had been propagandized and that the harm had been exaggerated. The lethal dose of LSD is through the roof. Well, nobody's ever found it, I think. Yeah, I think the one elephant that they were able to kill and find a lethal dose of LSD for, it turned out that it was actually the drug they were co-administering with the LSD. It was some kind of a tranquilizer or something like that. I didn't want to think about this. Keep the elephant from berserking. Yeah.

But my concern is potential for neurotransmitter depletion and imbalances due to overuse of psychedelics as well as potential for neurotoxicity. Let me just clarify the question. My guess is that we've gone through, there was an initial lie. The lie was found out to be a lie.

Then there was a new lie that was told by those using the psychedelics that effectively these are not that dangerous, that the load is quite modest. And there are ways in which that might be true and there are ways in which that's not true, even for something where the physical load is modest. I mean, I don't think we know how we're reordering the mind today.

even if you don't find a strong physiological impact of something like LSD. Yeah, that's my concern is serotonin imbalance, dopamine imbalance, dependency. There is a biological impact that I think a lot of people do not take into account. But to reply to your initial question, yeah, I'll microdose occasionally with psilocybin.

I wrote a fiction book last year and I'd write every Friday on a microdose of LSD.

I will. What's a micro dose for you? Uh, for LSD, about 20 micrograms. It's a fairly large micro dose. I tend to have high tolerance. Yeah. And on a quarterly basis, I will, I will journey, uh, with my wife. Actually, we, we do couples therapy every quarter and our facilitator uses a variety of different Amazonian medicines. There's always a great deal of preparation going in a great deal of integration going out. And even then, um,

This is actually fresh on my mind because I have a journey coming up in six days. I take vitamin C. I take 5-HTP. I take methionine donors or methyl donors like SAMe.

I use NAD, IVs, and injections. I completely prepare my cells for the toxic overload they're going to experience. And then I supplement going out with everything I know my neurotransmitters need to replete themselves. You know, dopamacuna and more 5-HTP,

more vitamin c for the toxicity so there's a great deal that i do to reduce the biological impact that i know even a single journey can produce is this a dmt based journey or is this more of a mescaline this this would be similar to something like uh mdma ayahuasca and psilocybin over the course of you know anywhere from 10 to 20 hours and

The ayahuasca would be isolating though, wouldn't it? Well, it's a similar feeling. It's not ayahuasca that's being used. It's actually...

the person who facilitates this for me, they're using a series of injections and pills that because of legal reasons, they actually won't tell me what they're using, but I can tell you it's, it's similar to the same type of feeling as you'd get from something like a five MEO combined with ayahuasca or MDMA or suicide. Five MEO is the extract isolated from the Sonoran desert. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

but what concerns me are the people doing their 38th ayahuasca treat and some New York city loft with their personal shaman and just completely abusing, you know, in terms of frequency of these things and not taking them as seriously as they should. What do we do about explaining quickly to the government that it's in everybody's interest to stop bullshitting about schedule one designation and to start talking about really coming up with some regulation that is beneficial, that recognizes the health benefits of,

It seems to me that we've got sort of a wrong new culture in place around the abuse of these things to compensate for the wrong culture that we have at a legal level.

I think Johns Hopkins and the maps foundation, they're beginning to roll out good research that that's actually being paid attention to. I think academic institutions are doing good service for that. I think that the implementation of physician or shadow NYU at the same time, right? NYU physician assisted PTSD and trauma clinics that are using ketamine or, or,

What I would imagine pretty soon will be psilocybin under physician supervised protocols with proper integration and proper medical management going in and going out. I think that that will be something that we see with increasing frequency, actual physician overseeing clinics. You think that there's an aspect where we're expecting the physician to –

step into the role that a shaman previously inhabited and that maybe physicians aren't really, they may be more medically skilled, but that a lot of the impact is not at the level of. There's, there's, there's a need for physician education programs. Absolutely. I know that, uh,

you know field trip which i think is rolling out in toronto la and new york over the next year they're combining like physician education programs with physician clinics for things like ptsd and trauma using plant medicines or using ketamine

But yeah, I think we're going to see this strange kind of like hybrid physician shaman type of model where folks are actually educated in clinical management, medically educated, but also have a working knowledge of things like Amazonian medicines and, you know, integration and you're able to facilitate as well. I think the music is huge. And I think that when you look at

You know, I was even toying around with some apps because I love to play handpan and guitar and ukulele and there are somatics apps that you can download that will translate the music into recognizable geometric patterns.

And I think that the use of music in conjunction with some of these therapies can elicit almost like a vibratory response within the cell that's based on a response to these sound frequencies that can enhance a journey or take you to a certain state. I don't know about within the cell. You really think there's like a cellular level for music? I think there's a cellular level. And I'm not speaking...

based on science or research or anything like that. But I suspect that we are actually impacting ourselves with sound frequencies and that these geometric patterns are that, that we're seeing that you can visualize that music is producing and, you know, like an app are actually occurring within our bodies as well.

Have you looked at these hands from the perspective of frequency analysis? No, but I can tell you that I feel amazing. I have a hand pan that I'm learning to play right now. I place it in my lap each night and they're impossible to sound poorly on because they're all tuned to a specific scale. Like mine is in a B scale. Well, I can, I can strike it anywhere and it sounds great. And it's very calming. I tried to look at this and I,

My understanding is that if you think about steel drums, steel drums have that very muddy kind of sound. And that with the hang, which was sort of the great innovation in this area coming out of Switzerland, the problem is that a two-dimensional metallophone

doesn't have good harmonic discipline relative to a one-dimensional media. So that if you think about a flute, or if you think about a vibrating string that you would have, let's say on a violin or a guitar, the harmonics have to sort of line up in some well-defined fashion because of the one-dimensional nature of the medium that's vibrating. When you have a two-dimensional medium, everything is off. And what the Swiss did was to figure out how to get enough precision

to get the two dimensional medium to sound at least for the first few harmonics as if it was a one dimensional medium. I don't know if I exactly have that right, but that's why it's impossible to sound bad because you're hearing something

that effectively would never be found in nature by just taking a metal plate and banging on it. Yeah, that makes sense. I was always under the impression that it was simply the tuning of the instrument itself in that each place where you strike, where each of the different locations, for anyone listening who hasn't seen a hand pen, usually there's eight or nine different locations that you strike. It's basically all tuned to the same scale. Yeah.

And so you may have a pentatonic scale or something like that where it's hard to find a wrong note. Right. You know, tuned to the same route, I guess I should say, you know, in this case B. Well, I think you can tune it to any. Yeah. Oh yeah. You can, you can do it to see, you can do it to D, but when, once you buy a pan, it's you're buying your hand that's tuned to a specific frequency and you can't play and sound good. A pan that's tuned in B, you know, with someone who's got a pan tuned to tune to C for example. Um,

What can you leave my audience with the best way for somebody who's not familiar with a lot of the words that you've used or concepts we've discussed, but they're realizing that the processed food that they're eating might not be good for their lipid layers. They know that their sleep is off or stress is too high. They don't know enough about physiology, anatomy, genetics,

to understand everything that's being said, what is the best way of handing off from the show to somebody who wants to enter a kind of more mindful and intentional space and feels unsure that they have what it takes to digest the information and confusing signals that are coming out of this? I have two thoughts. The first is be patient and wait when it comes to the self quantification piece, because

As we discussed, I think we're in an intermediate phase and I think it's moving quickly. And I don't think that the frustration and confusion is going to be around much longer as we roll out tools that allow for easier self-quantification and interpretation of that data. For now, I would pay attention to eight things. The first would be, regardless of the exercise program, just regular low-level physical activity throughout the day. We know this concept of NEAT,

uh, non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, regardless of whether you go to the gym, just moving throughout the day as much as possible. Uh, that that's the first thing.

The second would be of all the diets that I've seen out there in terms of good research, I think one of the best ways to eat would be some semblance of a relatively low-carb Mediterranean diet. I think that that's the one that seems to be the best for most people because it controls glycemic variability, introduces you to some elements of fasting, has lots of herbs, spices, supportive oils, etc.,

I would be out in sunlight frequently because we know that photons of light are very healing to the body. And there's this amazing new concept of human photosynthesis and our ability to create electrons and ATP in response to photons of light. I'm immersed in a few books right now on that, and it's absolutely fascinating.

In the same way, I would be outside barefoot or touching the ground every day. This is great. This is four or this is still three? This is four. Okay. So we have low-level physical activity. We have some kind of a low-carb Mediterranean type of eating approach. Exposure to sunlight, BMI.

being outside barefoot or in touch with the planet, which allows for, if you look into the research on earthing or grounding, a great decrease in inflammation and improvement in a, in a wide variety of health parameters. These are just finger fingered vibram type. These are not grounding shoes, but, but going outside barefoot without big rubber sold shoes on. Um,

introduce heat and cold. We know from Finnish longevity studies, for example, that sweating or being hot on a frequent basis is very good for the body. And we know that cold thermogenesis, cryotherapy, cold showers, things like that are wonderful for things like weight stability, nitric oxide production, blood flow, etc.

Low-level physical activity, some kind of a low-carb Mediterranean diet, sunlight, grounding earthing, heat, cold, and then finally good clean water and minerals like a good salt, good trace liquid mineral, anything like that. I would say that if you address those eight parameters, the movement, energy,

and the relatively clean diet. Let me see if I got it. Okay. All right. So low-level physical activity. Regardless of the exercise program. Regardless of the exercise program. A low-carb Mediterranean diet. Yes. Then there's going to be sunlight. Then being barefoot. An alternating hot and cold regime. Heat and cold would be five and six. Oh, five and six. Okay, I didn't realize I had two there. Yep. And then minerals and...

Minerals and water. Minerals and water are seven and eight? Yeah. Okay, now I got it. And largely, and I know we're running a little short on time, but largely the idea behind those latter six, photons of light, negative ions from the surface of the earth, the movement of electrons via heat and cold, and the carrying of electrons with water and minerals essentially treats the human body as a battery.

And because each of the cells operate on electrochemical gradient of a negative charge inside and a positive charge outside, one of the best things you can do to charge your human battery is light, earthen, grounding, heat, cold, water, and minerals. So that's where I'd start. All right. This is pretty intense. Ben, we would love to have you come back and potentially we'll pair you with somebody.

who is more up to your level of knowledge of the human body as the amazing machine. - What we decided to call it, the death match. - Yes. - The portal death match. - Well, health UFC for the moment. Do you have anything that you'd like to tell people so that they can come find you and get some more wisdom if they're hungry for more? Other than the Ben Greenfield podcast? - I would take a dive into my new book. It's called "Boundless" and you can get it anywhere.

Fantastic. All right. You've been through the portal with Ben Greenfield. Thanks for tuning in. Remember to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, CastBox, wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, meander over to our YouTube channel and remember to both subscribe and click that bizarre bell icon so that you're notified whenever we get around to dropping the next video episode. Thanks for being with us and be well.

Thank you.