00:00:00
Why do people not know that vitamin D deficiency can increase dementia risk by 80%. Why do people not know that having
00:00:06
a lack of this mineral is affecting their long-term risk of cancer? Why do people not know that having a low
00:00:11
omega-3 index is as bad for you in terms of mortality as smoking? And as a scientist, I've seen firsthand that 70%
00:00:19
of the way you're aging is actually due to your lifestyle. And all these things are so easy to do. So for example, as we
00:00:24
age, certain areas of the brain which is involved in learning and memory starts to shrink by about 1 to 2% per year. The
00:00:31
good news is studies show that people being part of an exercise protocol, not only did they not have their hippocampus
00:00:37
shrink, it actually grew by 1 to 2%. And there's more. There are other things that don't even require as much effort
00:00:43
as exercise, like supplements. And it's been shown study after study that if you take someone and you sleep deprive them
00:00:49
for 21 hours and give them 25 to 30 grams of creatine, not only does it negate the cognitive deficits of sleep
00:00:56
deprivation, it makes people function better than if they were well rested. And then there's magnesium. There have
00:01:01
been studies showing that people with the highest magnesium levels have a 40% lower all-c cause mortality. And over
00:01:07
300 different enzymes in your body need it to help with short-term survival. And yet 50% of the population in the United
00:01:13
States does not have adequate levels of magnesium. And there's still more. There's saunas, red light therapy,
00:01:19
ketogenic diets, blueberries, electrolytes. We can talk about all of them. Please. Okay. So, I found when you go into this
00:01:26
sauna, something happens. That's incredible. So, I see messages all the time in the
00:01:32
comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel,
00:01:39
that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to
00:01:45
keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do double check if you've subscribed and uh
00:01:51
thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I
00:01:56
appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you.
00:02:02
Dr. Ronda Patrick, you strike me as a fairly obsessed person.
00:02:09
What is it you're obsessed about and why are you obsessed about it? Because I can see from speaking to you previously how
00:02:15
passionate you are about the subjects we're going to talk to about today. And so I was I was um I was wondering what
00:02:22
it is about these subjects that is driving you and what what you're trying to accomplish.
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I've learned through my experience. So I have a PhD in biomedical science. I've done research on aging, on cancer, on
00:02:35
metabolism, nutrition, neuroscience, a lot of different fields, very cross-disciplinary.
00:02:40
And I've realized over, you know, the decades of doing research that there are many different small changes that can be
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made that have a really big impact on our health, what's called our health span. So, this is essentially being
00:02:53
disease-free uh throughout our life, being healthy, feeling good. And I'm
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sort of obsessed with trying to optimize that and find a protocol to optimize it
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and then share that information with the world. And it's funny because, you know, we live in a time now where we've got
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access to so much information, overwhelming amount of information. But the reality is is that simple important
00:03:20
tools that people can do in their life right now to drastically improve the way
00:03:26
they age are still not known to the general population. And so my mission is to get that knowledge to people so that
00:03:33
they can make these simple changes and live healthier and feel better. And what will be the impact on their
00:03:38
lives if they understand that information and start to implement their that information on a real sort of
00:03:43
specific practical in a real specific practical sense. Well, there are things that people are
00:03:50
deficient in, for example, that they could simply take a supplement. Vitamin D is a is a good example that could
00:03:57
affect their disease risk, their dementia risk. I mean, so you're talking
00:04:02
about quality of life improvement right now and also later. So, it affects
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mood, it affects depression, and it affects your neurodeenerative disease risk risk like dementia and Alzheimer's
00:04:13
disease. So there are lowhanging fruits, things that are simple that you can just basically fill these gaps. I mean there
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are things that are also a little more effortful and this is where exercise comes in where you put in this effort
00:04:25
and it just if you could pill up what exercise does in a pill, I mean it would
00:04:31
be be the biggest blockbuster miracle drug out there. I mean it blow ozic out of the water. It'd be I mean just no
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comparison. So, um I think I think that you know again that it's it's these
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little things that you can do that is going to help with depression, help with mood right now, make you feel better
00:04:48
right now, give you more energy, help you be more focused, help you be more motivated, but also affect your
00:04:55
long-term disease risk so that you know when you're older in life, you're not demented. And that affects you, it
00:05:01
affects your family. So I think I think it's it's just an important it's so important because there are easy things
00:05:07
that can be done that people just don't know about. Is there a psychological element to this where we kind of see aging as an
00:05:14
inevitability so we don't fight it because we only seem to interfere with and fight and are motivated by things in
00:05:20
life there where we feel like we've got an element of control and we see we see everybody get old and we see everybody
00:05:26
start to you know lean over a little bit and struggle to walk and get a little bit more frail. So I think because we've
00:05:33
observed that so much over the last couple of decades. I'm 30 years just over 30 years old. I assume that will
00:05:38
happen to me. So I've seen my dad, you know, get older, get a little bit more
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large, lose his lean muscle. So I think, well, I'm like my dad. I've got the some
00:05:49
of the same genetics. That's inevitable for me. So genetics does play a role in the way
00:05:54
you age, but it's a small role. In fact, 70% or more of the way you're aging is
00:06:01
actually due to your lifestyle. Let's just imagine two 70ish year old men,
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okay? John and Rob. And John, you know, he's razor sharp. He can carry groceries
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to his car. He doesn't get out of breath. You know, I mean, he's he's feeling healthy. He's be able to he can
00:06:21
walk efficiently, right? And then there's Rob. And Rob is
00:06:28
forgetting his words. You know, he's not cognitively sharp. He's out of breath just from walking to his car. He has a
00:06:34
really hard time carrying groceries. Genetics only plays a small role in in
00:06:39
those two different outcomes for those two men. The biggest, I would say, thing
00:06:44
that's dictating the way these two men age is their lifestyle, with a huge part of that actually being exercise. Mhm.
00:06:51
And you know, I know we've all heard it from our mother or grandmother, great-grandmother. You know, exercise is
00:06:57
is good for you. If you eat healthy and you exercise, you're going to you're going to be healthier. And that's like a
00:07:02
general statement, but the reality is it is so true that exercise affects
00:07:08
everything, you know, down to the molecular level in terms of like the way you're aging. So, um, no, it's not just
00:07:16
dictated by genetics and it's not inevitable and there are things that you can do to dramatically age better.
00:07:23
So, let's play a little a little game here. So, imagine that I listened to
00:07:28
your advice and the things that you know about health, longevity, aging, um, and I followed all of them, which is very
00:07:34
hard to do because, you know, implementation is is not the same thing as knowledge. So, imagine that's person A, that's Steve A, and then there's
00:07:41
Steve B. I do the exact opposite. Based on what you know about the science and about outcomes and expected outcomes,
00:07:49
how would Steve A that followed your advice live his uh live his life as he ages?
00:07:55
And how would Steve's B, how would his outcomes be as he ages? Like what would
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you if you had to obviously this is like super you're forecasting here and it's hypothetical, but what do you think the
00:08:05
variance in these two people's lives would be? Well, if you're talking about the extreme ends, like if Steve B was
00:08:12
like eating sugar and smoking and drinking and just obese and sedentary, everything that you don't want to,
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which is like a lot of the population. I mean, then you're talking like a 14-year difference in life expectancy,
00:08:25
which is pretty big. But not just life expectancy, the way your your independence, right,
00:08:33
your your mind, so you'd be forgetful. I mean, it would just be it would it would
00:08:38
be a terrible quality of life, right? So, it's not only are you going to die earlier, you're not you're just not
00:08:44
going to live a good quality of life. So, so Steve A might be into his 90s and out surfing, you know, because you're
00:08:53
you've exercised, you've you've given your body like the right nutrients that it needs, you've gotten good sleep,
00:09:00
you're not overweight, you're not eating a lot of refined sugar, all these things that sort of accelerate the aging
00:09:05
process. And we can talk about different components of this and how they do affect the way we age and our disease
00:09:11
risk, but I mean there's there's studies that show even like a 14-year difference
00:09:16
in life expectancy for like someone who's morbidly obese versus lean. So Steve A could be out surfing at 90
00:09:23
and Steve B would be potentially dying at 75, but also his quality of life
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would his health span would diminish probably in his 40s and 50s, right?
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So it's really it's a 14year reduction in lifespan but potentially a 30 40 year
00:09:41
reduction in health span in quality of life and health span being able to be functionally independent
00:09:47
being able to be cognitively sharp feel good right and your mood I mean all these things are affected
00:09:53
you must be sitting on some some crazy ideas because as a biomedical science you can kind of see as a biomedical
00:09:59
scientist you can see some of the research and technology that's coming down the pipe so I'm wondering Before we
00:10:05
get into the the conversation, are there any big ideas about the future of aging
00:10:10
and longevity that are in your mind that you think about that are actually really important to know because as Brian
00:10:18
Johnson has often said to me, you want to live to to see these
00:10:23
breakthroughs. Yes. Yes. I am excited about some gene therapies and being able to sort of
00:10:32
reprogram our our cells to be more youthful. So, you know, this is this is
00:10:37
something that was pioneered back in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka from Japan and
00:10:44
he actually won the Nobel Prize. Why his research was so important for the field of aging wasn't really known at that
00:10:50
time. What he had shown is that you could take a cell that's old and it
00:10:55
could be a any cell. It could be from an 85year-old person with Parkinson's disease, for example, and you get it.
00:11:02
You know, we're constantly getting skin cells and sloing them off every day. You can take one of those cells and add four
00:11:09
different proteins to them. They're called transcription factors. Essentially, all that means is they're kind of like master orchestrators of
00:11:17
many different genes in your body and how genes are activated and turned on and doing what they're supposed to or
00:11:22
they're turned off and quiet for the time that they're supposed to be quiet. And it's you you add those four proteins
00:11:30
and you can take that 85year-old cell skin cell from a person with Parkinson disease and you can make it into what's
00:11:36
called an embryionic stem cell. And it does that by sort of wiping out the
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what's called epiggenome. So people are familiar with their DNA, right? Well,
00:11:47
the epiggenome is something that sort of sits on top of your DNA and it
00:11:53
regulates, you know, how your genes are being expressed or turned on and off, right? And it sort of brings it back,
00:11:58
reprograms it to this youthful state where it becomes an embryionic stem cell. And then that embryionic stem cell
00:12:04
can then form any type of cell in the body. you can form a heart cell or a liver cell or a brain cell or a cell
00:12:10
from your eye and so this is called induced pur potent stem cells and this was a breakthrough at the time because
00:12:17
it's it was so import it's important for cell regenerative therapies okay let's say someone does have Parkinson's
00:12:22
disease and you want you know Parkinson's disease people are losing dopamineergic neurons and their
00:12:29
substantia so these are dopamine producing neurons and dopamine is important for motivation and it plays a
00:12:36
role in our, you know, cognitive function, but it's also important for movement, right? So, um, people with
00:12:42
Parkinson's disease are losing those at a rapid rate and they lose control of their motor capabilities. And so, you
00:12:48
want to be able to take an old skin cell from someone, reprogram it to become a
00:12:53
dopamine neuron and then inject it into that person, right? It's their own cell, so they're not going to reject it,
00:12:58
right? So, that was like the big thought at the time. Fast forward, you know, a decade or so and a a whole handful of
00:13:08
brilliant aging scientists have discovered that instead of taking these
00:13:13
old cells and putting these four proteins on it to become this sort of stem cell, they can pulse it. Just a
00:13:20
quick little pulse. What is a pulse? Like an electronic shock? No, what I mean is it's just not
00:13:25
incubated for as long of a time period. So, it's a shorter time interval that
00:13:30
you're putting these four different transcription factors on top of the cell that reprogram it, right? And the reason
00:13:37
for the shorter time is that you don't want it to lose its cellular identity. So, let's say it was a skin cell. You
00:13:44
want it to stay a skin cell, not become an embryionic stem cell, but you want it to be a skin cell from a one-year-old,
00:13:51
not an 85y old. So, the way to do that is what's called partial reprogramming. And so they
00:13:58
basically researchers have found that you can just sort of what I call pulse.
00:14:03
It's partial reprogramming. You're kind of putting it on for like a shorter period of time and then that cell keeps
00:14:09
its identity but it's youthful. It wipes out all the damage, everything that's accumulated over those those 85 years.
00:14:16
And this has been shown in animal studies in rodents that if you if you add these four different transcription
00:14:23
factors and you give them to mice, you can rejuvenate many of the different organs. So essentially turning back the
00:14:29
aging clock in different organs in these mice. Now this obviously has to be translated to humans, but I think it's
00:14:36
super exciting and I do think it's the future in terms of solving aging and
00:14:43
rejuvenation, rejuvenating our organs. And so it's something that I'm pretty excited about and following closely.
00:14:50
And are they then living longer? Some of these studies were done in animals that are what's called
00:14:56
accelerated aging. So yes, they were living longer in that background of
00:15:01
accelerated aging. Um the question is, you know, can they live longer if it's
00:15:07
just a normal mouse that's not like an accelerated aging model? And and these are things that are all being done right now. These sorts of studies are in
00:15:13
progress. Where do you think is the most important place for us to start this conversation
00:15:19
based on everything you know and maybe some of the presumably there's some like foundational stuff, right?
00:15:24
I do. I think the important place to start would be we're talking about we
00:15:31
were talking about aging as a disease and I think being sedentary is a disease
00:15:37
and I think that's a good place to start. What I mean by being sedentary is not physically active. someone who
00:15:44
doesn't engage in any type of physical activity. And what is the spectrum there of, you
00:15:50
know, someone who doesn't move at all for, you know, 24 hours a day versus you've got obviously someone that's
00:15:55
constantly running marathons and doing crazy stuff, but where is where are most of us on that scale? And are we moving
00:16:00
enough? Most of us are not moving on that enough. And most of us are, if you're
00:16:06
talking about globally, we're on that sedentary scale where we're just not physically active. we sit at our
00:16:12
computer or our desk or our cubicle, you know, all day and we're not we're not
00:16:17
actually moving around a lot. Um, and I say I say sedentaryism
00:16:22
is a disease because it's actually been shown to
00:16:27
increase the risk of early mortality even more than diseases that we know of
00:16:32
like type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or even terrible habits like smoking. So being sedentary actually
00:16:40
could predict early mortality even more than those diseases. But it it it's
00:16:46
let's take a step back. It's even bigger than that. There there's this amazing study. It's called the Dallas bed rest
00:16:52
study. And the study started back in the 1960s. And this is done by probably the
00:16:58
world's most talented cardiovascular exercise physiologists.
00:17:04
And so Ben Saltine, uh, Jerry Mitchell were involved in this early study in the 1960s. And what they did was they took
00:17:11
five men, they were college students and they put them on bed rest. And this is
00:17:16
like 3 weeks of legitimate bed rest. We're talking they couldn't get up to go to the bathroom, so they had catheter in
00:17:22
them. They did not move for three week. The researchers wanted to find out what happens to your cardiovascular system if
00:17:29
you are not moving around for three weeks. And now if you think about it, you know, there's a lot of people that
00:17:34
are undergoing surgery or they have some sort of bad illness, influenza or
00:17:40
something that keeps them bedridden for it's not unusual to be 3 weeks to be
00:17:46
honest. So it's not completely irrelevant. And what was found is after that 3
00:17:51
weeks, you know, their cardiovascular system was just tanked. And one of the major they they were probably the some
00:17:57
of the most wellstied men at the time. And um one of the biggest factors that was measured was their cardiorespiratory
00:18:04
fitness. This is often called V2 max. And essentially it's the maximum amount of oxygen that you can breathe in and
00:18:11
your lungs then breathe that oxygen to your muscles. And it's measured during maximal exercise. You're putting in a
00:18:18
maximum effort and that's called your cardiorespiratory fitness. And we can talk a little bit more about that. But
00:18:23
their cardiorespir respiratory fitness tank. And now I mentioned this was in the 1960s. About 30 years later, and
00:18:31
this is where uh Ben Lavine came into the study. He's at the UT Southwestern in Dallas. He's also very one of the
00:18:37
most famous, you know, cardiovascular exercise physiologists out there right now. They found these five men from 30
00:18:45
years earlier and they measured their cardiorespiratory fitness and a variety of other parameters that they had
00:18:51
measured at the time. And what they found was that three weeks of bed rest
00:18:57
was worse on their cardiorespiratory fitness than 30 years of aging. So
00:19:02
essentially their cardiorespiratory fitness was no worse 30 years later than
00:19:08
it was after their 3 weeks of bed rest which is kind of amazing because you
00:19:14
would think that the 30 years of aging would be worse on your cardiorespiratory fitness than the three weeks of bed
00:19:19
rest. And it's the same the same individuals, the same individuals, the same five men.
00:19:24
Um, now after the three weeks of bed rest, you know, back back in the 1960s, they were able to get their
00:19:30
cardiorespiratory fitness back up again once they started exercising and moving around and it took a while. But when you
00:19:36
look at their baseline levels, their baseline cardiorespiratory fitness and you compare it to their
00:19:41
cardiorespiratory fitness baseline 30 years later, it wasn't worse than what
00:19:46
happened when they they compared it to the 3 weeks of bed rest. And you might go, well,
00:19:52
why is that so significant? The cardiorespiratory fitness dropping. We know that cardiorespiratory fitness is
00:19:58
one of the best predictors of longevity. So there are studies that have shown that people with a high
00:20:04
cardiorespiratory fitness live five years longer than people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness. That's,
00:20:12
you know, pretty big difference. They're they're basically 80% less likely to die of many different causes of of death. So
00:20:19
cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory disease, things like that than people with a low cardiorespiratory
00:20:26
fitness. So you're really getting, you know, a five-year increased life expectancy. You're sort of pushing and
00:20:32
delaying those age related diseases like cardiovascular disease, you know, like
00:20:37
cancer, for example, you're pushing them down later in life. So you're not you're not dying from them sooner. And we do
00:20:43
know that really just going getting anywhere out of that low cardiorespiratory fitness. So people
00:20:50
with the low cardiorespiratory fitness are people that are sedentary. And if you just move anywhere above that, even
00:20:56
if you're going low from low bad to like low normal, you're gaining about two years increase in life expectancy. And
00:21:04
that's not really that hard to do. But if you think about cardiorespiratory
00:21:09
fitness, like right here, just having this conversation, actually even just sitting quietly, it takes about three
00:21:16
milliliters of oxygen per minute per kilogram body weight to do that. to
00:21:22
carry groceries to your car, it takes about 11 milliliters of oxygen per
00:21:27
minute per body weight, per kilogram body weight. And so as you're aging, you're kind of heading towards this cliff, right?
00:21:34
Because your cardiorespiratory fitness goes down with age. It does. That's what happens naturally. If you're at the
00:21:40
point where you don't work on your cardiorespiratory fitness, if you're not being physically active, and there are
00:21:45
certain exercises that are better at improving cardiorespiratory fitness than other others, if you're not trying to
00:21:51
improve it, you're going to be heading towards that cliff faster. And then everything becomes a maximal effort.
00:21:56
You're out of breath just talking. You're out of breath carrying groceries to your car. Everything is a maximal
00:22:02
effort. And you don't want to be there. You don't that that quality of life is not good. It's not good. Right. And then
00:22:09
on top of that, you're also going to die sooner. So you're talking about two things here. You're talking about decreased health span and decreased
00:22:16
lifespan. So yeah, we should be moving more, right? And the question is, well, how do you improve your cardior fitness? Right.
00:22:23
Yeah. I mean, do you lift weights? Do you go for runs?
00:22:28
Do you bike? What is it that is really good at improving cardior fitness? And
00:22:34
that's the question that a lot of exercise physiologists have answered over the last couple of decades. You
00:22:40
want to do and engage in what's called vigorous intensity exercise. So this is the kind of exercise where you're not
00:22:48
able to have a conversation when you're engaged in it. Right? So so your heart rate is going up to about 80% your max
00:22:55
heart rate. You're not able to really talk. And it's I would say you know it's something that can be done in intervals.
00:23:01
So you can do highintensity interval training. So you have these intervals where you're getting your heart rate up,
00:23:06
you're doing vigorous exercise, and then you have recovery periods where you're kind of resting. You're you're lowering
00:23:11
your heart rate. You're not doing that max that maximal sort of exercise. And I say this because
00:23:18
there have been studies, multiple studies that have shown people that engage in moderate intensity exercise.
00:23:25
So this is the kind of exercise when you can you're breathy, but you can still kind of have somewhat of a conversation
00:23:30
while you're doing it. Like the stair master. like the stairmaster. Yeah, exactly. Um, even
00:23:36
people that are engaging in that type of exercise for two and a half hours a week, so this is following the physical
00:23:41
activity guidelines, 40% of those people can't improve their cardiorespiratory
00:23:46
fitness. And it's like, well, I don't know about you, but like I don't want it to be a
00:23:51
coin toss in terms of like if I'm doing that kind of exercise, well, if I have a 50% chance of not improving my
00:23:57
cardiorespiratory fitness if I'm doing this. I want the sure thing. And the short thing is you take those people and
00:24:03
then you have them engage in highintensity interval training and they're able to improve their cardiorespiratory fitness. And that's
00:24:10
because you you're putting a stronger stress on your cardiovascular system. And so the
00:24:16
adaptations are greater. And part of the adaptations are you're able to bring in more oxygen, carry it to your muscles,
00:24:22
carry it to your your you know other other tissues better. And so that's your cardiorespiratory fitness. Uh and so and
00:24:29
so that's that's really I would say um the bottom line here is engaging in even just once or twice a week. And I would I
00:24:37
would say the the most wellressearched protocol for that would be something called the Norwegian 4x4.
00:24:44
And that is where you're doing a longer interval. It's a 4-minute interval and
00:24:50
it's best done on either a stationary bike or maybe a rowing machine. And
00:24:55
you're going as hard as you can and maintain that intensity for four minutes. And then you're going to go
00:25:02
down to light exercise and recover for four minutes and let your heart rate go down. And you do that four times. So
00:25:08
it's a four by four. And that is probably one of the most robust ways to
00:25:13
improve cardiorespiratory fitness. But there are other ways even doing you know one minute on one minute off. So you do
00:25:20
one minute as hard as you can go again for that entire minute. not going all out, but as hard as you can and maintain
00:25:25
that for the entire minute. And then you rest a minute and you do that, you know, 10 times. So, it's a 20-minute workout.
00:25:32
So, for the several million people that are listening right now, if you had to prescribe them all something to do and
00:25:39
it was the minimum they had to do. Tell me what exactly the workout would look like and how frequent it would be
00:25:46
on a weekly basis. I would say the minimum effective dose would be once a week. Okay.
00:25:53
And it would probably be the one minute on, one minute off. If
00:26:00
you want like the upper end robust effects of improving cardiorespiratory fitness, you can still improve it with
00:26:07
something like a Tabata. What's a Tabata? Where you're doing a 20 second interval and you're going more all out because
00:26:12
it's shorter time and then you're recovering for 10 seconds. So, it's a 20 second on, 10 second off.
00:26:18
You do that eight times. And um if you repeat that twice, so it's essentially a 10-minute workout, that's also something
00:26:25
that can improve cardiorespiratory fitness. But I would say, and I'll tell you I'll tell you why. There's the
00:26:32
minimum, right? So the one minute on, one minute off. But I would say the Norwegian 4x4 is the gold standard. And
00:26:39
that's because it's not only improving cardiorespiratory fitness. This is probably one of the most
00:26:45
exciting pieces of evidence I've seen with respect to, you know, exercise and
00:26:51
aging. And that is that being part of an exercise protocol was shown to reverse
00:26:57
the structural changes that occur with age in the heart by 20 years.
00:27:05
So what do I mean by that? I mean, people that were 50 years old that were
00:27:13
sedentary, so they weren't really going to the gym, they weren't engaging in any sort of physical activity, but they
00:27:20
weren't, you know, they didn't have diseases. They didn't have type two diabetes, they didn't have cardiovascular disease. I would argue
00:27:26
sedentary, being sedentary is a disease, but putting that aside, they didn't have any diseases, right? And they're 50, so
00:27:32
they're midlife. And um this was again this was done by Ben Lavine out of UT uh Southwest at in
00:27:39
Dallas. He took these you know 50-year-olds and put them on a pretty intense exercise routine for two years
00:27:47
or a stretching routine. This was like the the control. And this type of exercise routine was
00:27:53
progressive. So they started out lighter and sort of worked their way up, right? Like you don't want to just start with a Norwegian 4x4 people that never never
00:28:00
exercise. I mean that's going to be tough. So it was a progressive sort of building up to that. But um towards the
00:28:07
ends of about the first six months, these people were exercising about 5 to six hours a week and that included one
00:28:13
to two sessions of the Norwegian 4x4. And it also included a lot of, you know,
00:28:19
they're they're doing moderate to vigorous intensity cycling or running
00:28:25
and some some strength training as well. And they did this for two years.
00:28:31
their hearts were looked at and so as we age our hearts shrink and they get
00:28:36
stiffer and that plays a role in causing cardiovascular disease. I mean that's the number one killer in the United States. It also affects
00:28:43
cardiorespiratory fitness right why does the the heart you know stiffen with time
00:28:49
has a lot to do with actually being exposed to a lot of glucose when you're
00:28:55
eating a lot of refined sugar and refined carbohydrates you're having a lot of glucose around in your system.
00:29:00
This causes a chemical reaction called glycation. So you get these advanced glycation end products that sort of
00:29:07
react with your collagen that's lining your heart and your mocardium and it
00:29:12
causes it to stiffen and so now the heart can't really respond to stress well. It's stiff and that plays a role
00:29:19
in like heart attacks for example. So exercise is one of the best things you can do to
00:29:26
move glucose out of your vascular system and get it to your muscles. And so that's that's one of the things that it
00:29:32
does and helps with not causing that stiffening of the heart. And so essentially these 50-year-olds had
00:29:40
their their heart the structure so it was bigger and less stiff after two
00:29:45
years of this you know exercise protocol. It essentially made their hearts look like 30 year olds. And I
00:29:51
mentioned they were 50 year olds. I mean, that's amazing. That's incredible that you can take someone midlife, put
00:29:57
them on a two-year training protocol, and reverse the aging of their heart by 20 years. So, on this Norwegian 4x4,
00:30:05
you've convinced me to give it a shot. But specifically, how I how I do that.
00:30:10
So, it's it's I do my warmup and then I do four minutes of hard exercise. I take
00:30:16
a break and the exercise I'm doing in those four minutes can be any number of things but I just have to get up to 85
00:30:23
80% of my exertion levels 80% difficulty. So the way it works is as they mentioned
00:30:30
it's it's best if you're doing a cardiovascular type of exercise. So like the assault bike you could do assault bike. Yep. Assault
00:30:36
bike. You can do a rowing machine. You could do uh stationary cycling machine as well.
00:30:42
Could I run? You can, but that is is it's definitely
00:30:47
um it's I think it's better on on doing like maybe a bike or a salt bike or something. Um but you can run like what
00:30:55
whatever it is that you like to do and you are going as hard as you can for that four minutes and maintain within
00:31:00
that four minutes. So it's not an allout or it's far from all out, right? But you're not really having a conversation while you're doing it. And then the four
00:31:07
minutes of recovery, you're if you're running, you kind of go down to walking. If you're on the rowing machine or the
00:31:13
assault bike, you're just going very slow. You're just really going slow and you're letting your heart rate come
00:31:19
down. You're letting your muscles kind of recover, your cardiorespiratory fitness, you know, kind your your
00:31:25
cardiorespiratory fitness system recover somewhat. And then after that 4-minute recovery, you go back to the four
00:31:31
minutes of like intense again. And you're doing that four times. It's not
00:31:36
easy, but you know, people can start out, they don't I mean, even if you start out with not going super super
00:31:44
hard in those four minutes where you just maybe you can have a conversation, but you're still going hard harder than
00:31:50
you're used to pushing yourself. And I think for people that haven't really engaged in any type of high-intensity
00:31:56
training before, that's a good idea where you kind of you got you can't just start doing it
00:32:01
right out the gate. You want to kind of work your way up that. So doing the four minutes do just try to put in as much
00:32:06
effort as you can right during those four minutes and then you do your recovery and you repeat that four times
00:32:13
but then work your way up as you as you do it one week, two weeks, you know, a month later, two months later and really
00:32:19
try then to get to that point where during those four minutes you're getting, you know, you're pushing
00:32:24
yourself hard where you're not really able to have that conversation and physiologically what is going on in
00:32:30
my body when I get to that 85 90% effort range and I and I stay there for a
00:32:35
couple of minutes. That doesn't occur when I'm doing my stair master.
00:32:40
I mean, so many things are are happening. I mean, there's a lot of different, I would say, physiological
00:32:46
responses that are You've got a big smile on your face when I ask. Yes, I do because it's, you know, one of
00:32:51
my favorite things to talk about and it has to do with when you're when you're pushing yourself really hard, you need
00:32:59
you need to make energy, right? And the way that most of our cells make energy, like our muscles, is by using our
00:33:07
mitochondria, these are tiny organels inside of our cells that produce energy, but they need oxygen to do it. So that's
00:33:13
where the oxygen comes into play. When you start to push yourself really hard, you can't get the oxygen to your muscles
00:33:19
quick enough, but you need to make the energy. And so your body decides to make
00:33:24
energy in the form of ATP without the mitochondria, and it uses glucose to do that.
00:33:30
and you're not making as many of those ATP energy molecules, but you're still
00:33:36
making them and you're making them quick. And that's what your your body wants to do. And and so it's using
00:33:42
glucose to do that without the mitochondria, but as a byproduct, it's making
00:33:47
something called lactate. And this is what gets me so excited because, you know, for the longest time, lactate was
00:33:54
thought to be this just metabolic byproduct of glucose metabolism. you
00:34:00
know where you're when you're pushing yourself really hard anorobic it's called anorobic by the way you're not
00:34:05
you're not only anorobic you're just some somewhat anorobic you're still use producing energy with your mitochondria
00:34:12
it's just you're also producing without the mitochondria it's not like a a sort of black black and white sort of thing
00:34:17
right it's a little bit gray but the reality is you're producing something called lactate and for the longest time it was thought this lactate
00:34:24
oh it's just it's bad because you know it can form lactic acid and that burns forms that burn in your muscles. And you
00:34:31
know, this was, you know, decades ago. And we now know from the work of George Brooks out of UC Berkeley that lactate
00:34:38
itself isn't causing the burn. And not only is it not causing the burn, it's
00:34:43
like a miracle molecule that's being made. This metabolite lactate gets into
00:34:49
your circulation and it gets consumed by your heart, by your brain, by your
00:34:55
liver, and it's used for energy. It's very it's it's very much similar to beta
00:35:01
hydroxybutyrate that ketone body that you always hear about people talk about when they're fasting or doing a
00:35:07
ketogenic diet. It's actually very similar to that. It gets used it gets transported through the same transporter
00:35:13
and it's used like energy. Very similar to that. Um but what's more exciting is
00:35:19
that lactate is a way for your muscles to communicate with other organs like the brain. And it's called a signaling
00:35:26
molecule. So, it's your muscles are going, I'm working really hard. This is really hard. We have to respond to this
00:35:32
work. We have to adapt. And so, your body goes, okay, I got to like turn on all this awesome stuff that I have
00:35:38
because I'm working so hard. I need to respond to that so that like I'm I'm good, right? And so, what happens is the
00:35:45
lactate, this has been shown, it gets consumed a lot by the brain. And in the brain, it it activates something called
00:35:52
brain drive neurotrphic factor, BDNF. And this is kind of like a miracle grow
00:35:58
for your brain. So essentially, it's able to increase the growth of new
00:36:03
neurons, which is amazing. It's called neurogenesis. It increases the
00:36:09
connections between neurons. So it improves memory, cognition, and then um
00:36:14
it's involved in what's called neuroplasticity. So the ability of your brain to adapt to a changing
00:36:20
environment. This is all from lactate. Um, and it also increases neurotransmitters like norepinephrine,
00:36:26
so focus and attention, serotonin, your your mood, you're feeling better, you're, you know, motivated. All these
00:36:33
things are happening because of lactate. And there's been studies in humans showing that people that are compared
00:36:38
working hard, working out hard, vigorous exercise versus sort of moderate to light exercise, they make more lactate.
00:36:45
And that lactate, you know, it's been shown that high levels of lactate are correlated with improved cognition
00:36:51
scores, uh, improved impulse control. So serotonin plays a role in impulse control. So you're able to not just go
00:36:58
on your impulse, right? You're you're able to kind of like, which is great if you want more focus and attention, right? So this is this is all really
00:37:06
exciting stuff because it all comes down to just it's it's like your muscles are these little chemical pharmaceutical
00:37:11
factories and the way to make them make these pharmaceuticals is to work them to challenge them and that can be done with
00:37:18
an easy highintensity interval training protocol. A variety of them Norwegian 4x4 can increase brain drive neurotrphic
00:37:25
factor that's been shown. The one minute on one minute off protocol also has been shown to increase that again through the
00:37:31
lactate. So that's one of the big sort of I would say differences between vigorous intensity exercise and more of
00:37:39
that moderate intensity or like low intensity exercise. And I honestly think, you know, I think the guidelines,
00:37:46
you know, everyone's sort of obsessed with steps. I need to get my 10,000 steps in, my 10,000 steps. And they have
00:37:51
wear wearable devices, and I think that's great, but I think we need to change the 10,000 steps to at least 10
00:37:58
minutes of vigorous intensity exercise. like you could do 10 minutes of, you
00:38:03
know, any type of exercise that's really going to get your heart rate up and it's going to be so much better. So, this is
00:38:10
a really dumb question, but it's the question that I had in my mind, which is if lactate is such a miracle
00:38:16
drug, why can't I just drink it? Why can't I just get get a shot of lactate versus
00:38:22
having to go through vigorous interval training? It's a great question, Stephen, because um there have been
00:38:29
studies that have been done looking at, for example, traumatic brain injury
00:38:34
patients. So, people that have undergone some sort of head trauma and they've
00:38:39
infused sodium lactate through like an IV into their, you know, system and the
00:38:45
lactate immediately gets consumed by the brain and it's been shown to improve their recovery. So, it's called the
00:38:51
Glasgow score. You may have heard of it, but it's kind of essentially this battery of tests that's done to sort of
00:38:56
assess how someone's recovering from traumatic brain injury. And the sodium lactate does improve that. So there are
00:39:03
you can find out there, you know, different types of lactate that you can consume.
00:39:08
And theoretically, it should help, but what happens is when you consume the lactate,
00:39:14
lactate actually gets used by the gut. So a lot of it's going into the gut cells before it gets into your
00:39:20
circulation. There's always a trade-off with these bloody things whenever you try and trick the system or shortcut the
00:39:26
system by like drinking something. I feel like there's a trade-off which people don't talk about a lot. Well, the thing is is that I it is good
00:39:32
for the gut. In fact, a former colleague of mine, Mark Chanaga, has shown that
00:39:37
lactate is really beneficial for for uh the gut epithelial cells. In fact, if you think about it, all these sort of
00:39:43
beneficial probiotic bacteria like bifido bacterium for example, they're producing lactic acid and that lactic
00:39:51
acid does get converted into lactate. It's sort of like this physiological
00:39:56
homeostasis where you have uh the difference of just a hydrogen atom. So you're having lactic acid and lactate
00:40:02
sort of in this equilibrium so to speak. But um those those bacteria in your gut
00:40:08
are making lactate essentially. And the reason it's so good is because it is an
00:40:14
very e easily utilizable source of energy for the gut cells. So, not to
00:40:19
like go off on a tangent here, yes, there is always a tradeoff, especially for doing something orally, but when it
00:40:24
comes to exercise, there's so like I mentioned when we first started talking about exercise, if you could pill up what exercise does,
00:40:32
I mean, it's so many things, right? It's not just the lactate. Yeah. So many different things, so many different adaptations that occur. I mean
00:40:39
it would be a miracle drug. So there's you're not just getting the lactate, you're getting the, you know, the improvement in cardiorespiratory
00:40:45
fitness. You're getting the muscular response, right? The adaptations to your muscle. Um you're you're increasing
00:40:50
stress response genes like heat shock proteins that are important for preventing neurodeenerative disease.
00:40:56
You're making antioxidants because the inflammation that you're generating while you're exercising. There's hundreds and hundreds of things that are
00:41:02
happening all in concert from exercise and you just can't you can't pill it up.
00:41:09
I have another really silly question which is if lactate and these other things even like creatine and you know
00:41:14
all these other things are so good for me why doesn't my body just make more of it?
00:41:19
I mean your body does make it. The the problem is is that you know as we're
00:41:24
aging everything becomes less efficient. everything doesn't do what it used to do
00:41:30
as well as it did when it was younger. Um, and it and also in the in the case of creatine, which we can talk about,
00:41:36
you know, later if you're interested, then um, you know, your body only makes so much of it. And
00:41:42
why doesn't it make more? I don't, you know, maybe I'm not giving it the the minerals
00:41:47
or the environment it needs naturally to make more. I don't know. You you get it from your food, too.
00:41:52
Creatine is found in meat, in poultry, and fish. So, probably that's why your
00:41:59
body doesn't make more of it because it knows you're going to be getting it from your diet as well.
00:42:04
And so, that is another way to get creatine. Okay. Of course, the vegans and the vegetarians, that's a whole other
00:42:11
ballgame because they aren't eating meat and so they're really essentially only relying on what their body can make.
00:42:17
We'll definitely talk about that later. Um on this point of the brain then if if I I don't want to be an older person who
00:42:26
can't remember things and stutters over my words and falls into cognitive decline. And I'm I'm 32 now. So I'm I
00:42:33
feel like I'm at a moment in time where I can really make decisions now that have a really big impact on my
00:42:39
90-year-old brain and my ability to think straight and clearly and remember things. Are there things that I can be
00:42:44
doing now that will have a profound impact on my cognitive performance at 90? Yes. And what are those things? Absolutely. Well, first of all, just to
00:42:51
kind of wrap up the exercise story because I think this study is so profound and in fact it wasn't done in
00:42:58
32 year olds. It was done in older adults. So, we're talking 60 year olds or a little bit older. And these
00:43:04
individuals were put on a aerobic exercise training program for one year
00:43:10
that was more of like a 70 to 75% max heart rate. It wasn't so vigorous, but
00:43:16
it was pretty pretty vigorous for them, right? And um the the basis of this study was to look at brain aging. As we
00:43:24
age, I mentioned our heart aging, right? It gets stiffer and shrinks with age. Our brain also shrinks with age. It's
00:43:30
called atrophy. And as we age, especially starting in midlife, so around the age of 50, your your brain
00:43:37
and certain areas of the brain like the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory, starts to shrink by
00:43:43
about 1 to 2% per year. I don't want that to happen. Same. Same. The good news is um in this
00:43:50
study, after a year of this sort of aerobic exercise training program, they were doing three times a week about 30
00:43:57
minutes a day. Really not even that intense. these individuals and then there was a control group that was kind
00:44:03
of the stretching they like to use the stretching as the control group. So that let's talk about the the control group,
00:44:10
the stretching group. They did lose about 1 to 2% in terms of the size of their hippocampus, it shrunk one to 2%
00:44:17
after that year, which is what you would expect normally. However, the group that
00:44:22
was training, not only did they not have their hippocampus shrink by 1 to 2%, it
00:44:29
actually grew by 1 to 2%. which comes down to that neurogenesis, that growth
00:44:35
of new neurons, the brain drive neurotrphic factor that's able to do that. You're actually able to grow new
00:44:41
neurons even when you're in the age of 50, which is amazing. It's incredible.
00:44:46
So, that study I love because a couple of reasons. one, it shows that it's
00:44:52
possible to not only stave off, you know, some of the components of brain
00:44:58
aging, but to reverse it and increase it, right, through exercise. And number
00:45:04
two, I love it because it's never too late. Like, you can start this, you
00:45:10
know, in your 60s and still have a benefit, right? you're you're talking about being in your 30s, but you know,
00:45:16
some people watching this show, listening to the show, may already be in their 50s or 60s, right? So, it's never
00:45:22
too late. Um, likewise, you know, we're talking about being cognitively sharp and not
00:45:27
getting dementia. There's also studies showing that people like women that were
00:45:32
brought into the lab, they had their cardiorespiratory fitness measured, those women with the highest
00:45:38
cardiorespiratory fitness were 80% less likely to come down with dementia over the follow-up period of time. So it
00:45:45
again, I think exercise is one of the big ones when it comes to brain aging. But you asked an important question. and
00:45:51
you say, "What can I be doing now that's going to affect the way my brain ages, you know, for the subsequent decades of
00:45:58
my life?" And there are other things that can also be done that don't even require as much effort as exercise.
00:46:05
Exercise is the gold standard because I mean, being able to not only, you know,
00:46:10
stave off atrophy of the of the brain, but to like regrow some of it is
00:46:16
incredible, right? I mean, that's just mind-blowing. Have they ever taken people with dementia, Alzheimer's, and
00:46:22
put them on an exercise program and monitored the decline of their cognitive
00:46:27
abilities on an exercise program? Yes. I mean, it's it's much harder when you already have someone who
00:46:35
is in that pathological state because things just really snowball and accelerate. And there are some benefits.
00:46:42
I mean, but it's not it's not prevention is always the best. Prevention is always
00:46:47
the best. And so, you know, I I think that if there's any sort of take-home
00:46:52
here, it's that like let's let's try to do what we can now so that we don't get to that point
00:46:58
before we get into the the the easier ways of staving off cognitive decline.
00:47:05
Do do we know what causes dementia and Alzheimer's yet? Do do we have any ideas? Because we can when they do the
00:47:10
brain imaging, they can kind of see these plaques on the brain, they say. that I mean there's a lot of different it's
00:47:16
multiffactorial which means there's a lot of different causes of dementia and Alzheimer's disease so I would say you
00:47:22
mentioned plaques amaloid beta plaques what happens is you know that's the aggregation of a protein in our brain
00:47:29
called amalloid that typically is cleared from our brain and um what
00:47:35
happens is this abnormal you know thing happens where you're not clearing the amaloid and so it starts to
00:47:41
kind of form these clumps and aggregates with the amaloid proteins that are not being cleared. And that essentially is
00:47:49
happening outside of your neurons, but it's happening where the synapses are formed between neurons. And so what
00:47:55
happens is it kind of disrupts the synaptic connection between neurons, which is essentially forming a memory.
00:48:01
And so when you start to disrupt that connection, you lose not only the the
00:48:06
memories start to go away, but the whole purpose of the neuron is to kind of I
00:48:11
mean one of the purposes is to to form a memory. And so you start to like neurons start to die, right? When they start to
00:48:18
lose their purpose. Amaloid aggregation is linked to a lot of things. So, for
00:48:23
example, I mentioned it being cleared when we sleep, particularly when we're in our deep sleep stage, slowwave sleep.
00:48:30
That is um something happens that's kind of incredible. It's called activation of
00:48:35
the glimpmphatic system. So, you've heard of the lymphatic system. Well, the glimpmphatic system is essentially this
00:48:41
series of like networks and like almost like these like highways and essentially
00:48:48
roads and stuff all like throughout the brain where you're squirting this cerebral spinal fluid throughout the
00:48:54
brain and it's clearing away all the garbage things like proteins that didn't
00:49:00
get cleared and it's sort of squirting them out and clearing them out through this lymphatic system. that lymphatic
00:49:05
system is activated during sleep and it's one of the reasons why people that don't get good sleep over the course of
00:49:12
decades have a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease is because they're getting these amaloid plaques built up
00:49:18
in their brains but there's other causes as well so for example glucose metabolism is disrupted in the brains of
00:49:25
Alzheimer's disease you need glucose your neurons need glucose and so you
00:49:30
know the essentially um your your brain isn't able to make energy correctly without the glucose getting into your
00:49:36
brain. And so that's another sort of metabolic underlying cause of
00:49:41
Alzheimer's disease where you're essentially I mean it's thought to be where you're eating a lot of refined
00:49:47
carbohydrates, refined sugars and you're not exercising and essentially you're
00:49:52
you're disrupting the glucose metabolism in the brain as well as the whole body.
00:49:58
Right? So the brain and body are connected but um there's also genetic
00:50:03
causes as well and you know some people have genes that can increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease because they're not
00:50:10
able to clear amaloid as well because they're not able to repair damage as
00:50:15
well. So the the bloodb brain barrier which is really important for filtering out toxic things from getting into the
00:50:21
brain it starts to break down and that's one of the I would say early early signs of
00:50:27
Alzheimer's disease is that breakdown of the bloodb brain barrier and that happens in people that have a genetic risk factor called APOE4. You may have
00:50:34
heard of this but this is probably one of the biggest genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's
00:50:39
disease. About 25% of the population has one copy of this gene. That increases
00:50:45
the risk of Alzheimer's disease by twofold. If you have two copies of it, it increases the risk of Alzheimer's
00:50:51
disease by tenfold. So twofold being 200%. Twofold being twice twice as much. Yeah.
00:50:58
200%. And 10fold being a,000%. Right. You're you're you're basically I mean
00:51:04
it's it's pretty bad. And it's not like a it's not your destiny to get the
00:51:10
Alzheimer's disease if you have those genes. You can do things in your lifestyle that can sort of turn the
00:51:15
table. So you're not you're not necessarily going to be getting that that Alzheimer's disease and a lot of
00:51:20
different lifestyle factors like getting good sleep, like exercising, avoiding alcohol, avoiding smoking, not being overweight and obese. Like those affect
00:51:27
your Alzheimer's disease risk. More importantly, if you have one of those genes, then you really have to be
00:51:33
cognizant of those things because if you have one of those, you know, ApoE4 genes, then then essentially your
00:51:41
lifestyle matters even more than people that don't. And you can do a test to figure out if you have those genes.
00:51:46
Yes. Yes. There's a a variety of genetic testing services that can be done. pretty much all the ones that are out
00:51:52
there on on the market, you know, ancestry DNA. I mean, depending on where you live and what there's so many out
00:51:57
there right now that that will test for that. Mortified if I found out I had two of those genes.
00:52:03
Two of them is less common. When I mentioned the 25% of the population having it, it's usually one alil.
00:52:08
Alcohol essentially can really increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease if you
00:52:14
have one of those genes. And I think that there's really no safe amount of alcohol that can be consumed for people
00:52:19
that have APOE4. if you're concerned about dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The other thing is contact sports and
00:52:24
traumatic brain injury. people that have any of the, you know, any one or two of the APOE4 genes, if they have that, then
00:52:33
if they get a TBI, like if they're playing American football or they're playing soccer or MMA or boxing,
00:52:40
whatever, then you talk about like going up to a 10-fold risk for Alzheimer's disease when you get like an injury because
00:52:47
people with those genes don't repair damage as well. So, it affects their their brain's
00:52:52
ability to repair damage. And so that's also really important to consider. So moving back then to this the simple
00:52:58
things that we can do to improve our cognitive performance as we age, the things that are simpler than doing the vigorous hit training.
00:53:04
There's actually quite a few. And first and foremost, the one I love the most is a simple multivitamin.
00:53:11
And the reason I love this is because I don't know it was about 10 years ago
00:53:17
there was a a huge study that was published and it was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and it was
00:53:23
called Enough is Enough. Multivitamins are not only useless, they're harmful and it was essentially looking at a
00:53:30
variety of studies and arguing that multivitamins are expensive urine.
00:53:35
You're just not really doing anything. And in fact, if you take a multivitamin, you might even be increasing the risk of
00:53:42
disease. That study was terrible. And I 10 years
00:53:48
ago went and just broke it down and, you know, pulled it apart piece by piece.
00:53:53
But here we are 10 years later. Three large clinical trials have been done. And these are randomized control trials
00:54:00
where older adults were given either a multivitamin and this was just your standard run-of-the-mill multivitamin
00:54:06
Centrum silver or they were given a placebo and they were given this for a couple of years.
00:54:12
And what three different studies showed was that a multivitamin improved cognition, improved processing speed, it
00:54:20
improved what's called episodic memory. So the kind of memory where you're remembering experiences and you can
00:54:27
recall events, things like that. And not only did it improve it, it improved it so much that it was equivalent to
00:54:34
reducing the aging of the episodic memory by 5 years. So a simple
00:54:41
multivitamin and why is that important? Because you know multivitamins have a variety of these vitamins and minerals
00:54:47
that we're not getting from our diet that are important for everything. for
00:54:53
metabolism, for the way our neurotransmitters are firing, for reducing damage that's causing, you
00:54:59
know, oxidative stress, right? So, a simple multivitamin, how much easier can
00:55:04
it be than taking a simple multivitamin? And the fact of the matter is that we're talking about a randomized control
00:55:10
trial. This is showing cause, right? This isn't just an association. This is showing that you took a multivitamin for
00:55:17
a couple of years and improved your cognition more than a placebo. So, I
00:55:22
think that's pretty incredible and it's one of the examples that I like. But, um, diving deeper into some of the
00:55:30
the nutrients, this is this is an area, you know, I started out as a scientist.
00:55:37
I started out as a chemist actually. But when I first got into biology, I was working in an aging lab and
00:55:44
studying aging. It was very interesting to me because I essentially with my own
00:55:50
experiments with my own two hands could could manipulate these like tiny little worms. They're called sea elegance and
00:55:57
their whole genome was sequenced at the time and this was like in the early 2000s and um they have a lot of genes
00:56:02
that are similar to humans. It's called homology and one of the genes is the insulin signaling pathway and the IGF-1
00:56:10
pathway. So insulin signaling would be something that's activated with glucose. You're eating a lot of sugar, right? And
00:56:17
I could take these worms and I could genetically decrease their insulin signaling. So it kind of, if you think
00:56:24
about a parallel to that, that would be, okay, we're not going to be eating as much sugar, right? We're not going to be activating that pathway so much. Mhm.
00:56:32
And I could do that in this worm that has a life expectancy of about 15 days
00:56:37
and I could extend its life expectancy to 30 days, right? So you're increasing its life expectancy by pretty much, you
00:56:45
know, 100%. Right? Well, not only did they, you know, live longer, they were
00:56:51
healthier and youthful, and you could see that visually, they're moving around and they were just youthful worms. And so I was very excited about this, you
00:56:58
know, in my 20s because I was like, "Wow, this is very relevant. We have this gene and we know lifestyle factors
00:57:06
that affect it, right? Sugar." So the takehome for me was
00:57:11
lifestyle matters, you know? Yeah, genetics, maybe that'll be something one day where we're decreasing the insulin signal. But I was looking for the now,
00:57:17
not the future technology. And so the now to me was wow, like I don't want to be constantly activating my, you know,
00:57:24
insulin signaling pathway. like look what happens to these worms if you reduce it. I mean it's amazing. They're youthful and they live longer. And so I
00:57:32
started to kind of get into diet and lifestyle sort of just out of curiosity
00:57:38
and sort of reading in the literature and I came across some studies from my
00:57:43
mentor Dr. Bruce Ames where he was showing that not getting enough
00:57:48
nutrients like for example folate. Folate is found in dark leafy greens like kale. You know, folate if you if
00:57:55
you if you decrease folate and make someone deficient in it, it essentially
00:58:00
causes doublestranded breaks in your DNA that essentially is like being under
00:58:08
ionizing radiation. And that experiment was done like you could take a mouse make it like put low folate in the in
00:58:14
you know the mouse's food and then take another mouse and put it under an ionizing radiation machine and the
00:58:21
amount of double stranded breaks in their DNA which cause cancer which accelerate aging which affect every
00:58:27
every you know how how your your cells are functioning it was the same. So, it
00:58:33
was like, wow. Not having a certain nutrient in your diet was like standing under a radiating
00:58:39
machine, ionizing radiation. No one's going to want to stand under an ionizing radiation machine, but no one's thinking about how your diet can do the same
00:58:46
thing. Um, and that was kind of I got into a lot of Bruce's Bruce's research
00:58:52
at the time. So, Bruce, he anyone in the in the science field knows Dr. Bruce Ames. actually came up
00:58:57
with the Ames carcinogen test and that essentially was a way of cheaply looking
00:59:03
at and identifying whether something's a carcinogen and he got into sort of nutrition as he started to figure things
00:59:08
like folate basically being lack of folate being a carcinogen essentially right like ionizing radiation is a
00:59:14
carcinogen and then he started to go on to other nutrients as well like magnesium and B
00:59:21
vitamins but I think for me the aha moment was micronutrients and these vitamins and
00:59:26
minerals are affecting the way we age, are affecting our health on a similar
00:59:33
level as these toxic things that we're worried about like ionizing radiation. And nobody's thinking about it like
00:59:39
that. So, I'll give you an example. Vitamin D, you talked about dementia, what's going
00:59:45
to help prevent dementia. Vitamin D is, it's actually more than a vitamin. Vitamin D gets converted into a steroid
00:59:52
hormone. So, a steroid hormone essentially what it does is it goes into
00:59:58
the nucleus of a cell where all your DNA is and it it's activating genes and
01:00:04
deactivating them. It's affecting your genome and it's actually over 5% of your
01:00:10
your your genome is being affected by vitamin D. Why is that important?
01:00:15
Because 70% of the US population has insufficient levels of vitamin D. The
01:00:22
reason for that is because vitamin D3 is actually made in the skin from UVB
01:00:28
radiation from the sun. And so if you're not outside, then you're not really
01:00:33
making a lot of vitamin D3 in your skin. And vitamin D3 then gets converted into
01:00:38
this steroid hormone that regulates everything, right? And so um you know modern day society, you know, we're
01:00:45
inside all the time. We're working. We're not outside. And even if you were outside, there's so many other factors
01:00:52
that affect it. So, anything that blocks out UVB radiation blocks out the availability of your body to make
01:00:57
vitamin D3. So, sunscreen, right? That's a big one. Melanin, the the darker
01:01:03
pigmentation that acts as a natural sunscreen. And then latitude, depending on where you live, also. So, you know, a
01:01:10
good number of months out of the year, if you're in a more northern latitude like England, like Wales, like Chicago
01:01:18
or Sweden, you're not UVB radiation is not even hitting the atmosphere, you
01:01:23
know, for several months out of the year. Combine that with sunscreen or
01:01:28
melanin, and you got like this disaster, right? In fact, there was a study out of the University of Chicago that looked at
01:01:37
African-Americans and Caucasians and their ability white people.
01:01:42
Yeah, exactly. Their ability to make vitamin D3 from UVB radiation
01:01:47
from the sun. Yeah. And as I mentioned, you know, melanin is a natural sunscreen. And you know,
01:01:53
people that are, you know, either, you know, from African origin or South
01:01:58
American or Southeast Asian, right? People that are closer to the equator usually have more melanin. It's an it's
01:02:03
an adaptation to prevent you from burning from the UV rays of the sun. Well, um, this University of Chicago
01:02:10
study found that, um, you know, people that are African-American had to stay in the sun six to 10 times longer than
01:02:17
people with fair skin, the Caucasians, to make the same amount of vitamin D3. And so, as a consequence, if you take
01:02:23
someone who like yourself, well, you're you're you got a little bit more mel melanin mixed a little bit. Yeah, you've got a little
01:02:29
bit more melanin. But let's say you take someone who, you know, has a like my mom, she's Nigerian.
01:02:34
Okay. Your mom from Yeah. Nigerian. And let's say your mom moves to Chicago, right? Well, she's moved to bloody England.
01:02:40
Or she moved to England, right? Exactly. Then you're talking about a recipe for disaster in terms of vitamin D because
01:02:48
you're not only not making it several months out of the year, I forgot how many months out of the year, maybe four
01:02:54
or five or something like that where the UVB radiation is not even hitting the atmosphere, but you have this natural sunscreen. What's the consequences of
01:03:00
that in terms of symptoms? Well, it's it's kind it's not like an acute thing where you kind of just look
01:03:06
in the mirror and you're like, what is the causation then in terms of Right. Right. Yeah. So, the reason I say
01:03:11
this is because people always think of like, well, I'm not getting enough vitamin C and I have scurvy and you can
01:03:16
look in the mirror and your gums are falling apart. Right. It's easy to identify this. Vitamin D deficiency or
01:03:22
insufficiency is more insidious. It's kind of this damage that accumulates over time. it's something that isn't,
01:03:29
you know, quite noticeable or maybe maybe you're feeling, you know, m maybe
01:03:34
you're feeling like lethargic or you don't have enough energy, things like that, but you don't really really know quite why. So, vitamin D insufficiency
01:03:41
and deficiency, there are acute effects where like if it's severe, it can cause ricketetts and like bone mal forations
01:03:47
and stuff, especially if it's happening early in life. But um what we now know is that being
01:03:54
deficient or insufficient in vitamin D can increase dementia risk by 80%. And
01:03:59
that's been shown in multiple studies. The converse is also true. So people
01:04:05
that supplement with vitamin D3, and this is where a simple solution comes in, right? So you're not making it from
01:04:10
your skin, but you can take a supplement. People that supplement with vitamin D3 have a 40% reduced risk of
01:04:16
dementia. So in other words, they're avoiding deficiency, which is very common, and avoiding that deficiency
01:04:22
then is reducing their dementia risk. And there's actually even been studies in people with dementia, in people with
01:04:28
Alzheimer's disease that were giving a vitamin D supplement or a placebo control. And those individuals given the
01:04:35
vitamin D supplement had improved cognition. They had um lower markers of amaloid plaques. So those were this will
01:04:42
those were also measured as well. So vitamin D is doing a lot of things. It's it's regulating 5% of your protein
01:04:49
encoding human genome. If I want to increase my probability of getting dementia, then I've got to stay out of the sun. I've got to avoid um
01:04:57
vitamin D. I've got to drink alcohol, smoke, be sedentary, and I've got to sleep really badly.
01:05:03
Yes. And eat a lot of refined sugar. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Okay.
01:05:08
Exactly. Now, you might go, "Well, how much vitamin D?" Right? I'm talking about deficiency and insufficiency and you really want to get a blood test to
01:05:16
know what your levels are. There have been I don't know 30 plus studies that have looked at vitamin D levels and all
01:05:24
cause mortality. So that would be again you know how you know dying from a variety of different diseases
01:05:30
cardiovascular disease respiratory disease cancer and people that have blood levels of vitamin D between 40 60
01:05:37
maybe 80 nanogs per milliliter have the lowest all-c cause mortality so these people are not deficient not
01:05:43
insufficient insufficiency happens at about 30 nanogs per milliliter below
01:05:48
that deficiency is 20 nanogs per mill milliliter and below and so um there
01:05:55
have been a variety of studies that have looked at for example the brain and the aging brain and vitamin D levels and
01:06:00
it's been shown that for every you know 10 nanimal per liter decrease in vitamin
01:06:06
D blood levels there's an increase in brain damage it's called white matter
01:06:11
hyperintensities it's basically damage to the white matter in your brain and the white matter in your brain is myelin
01:06:18
that's how your brain's communicating and and like how you know it electrical impulses are being you know moved so
01:06:24
that you can think and talk and all that. Exactly. Yeah. I hadn't had one today, so I feel
01:06:29
like you you've persuaded me. Most people that are deficient can increase their blood levels to a normal
01:06:35
sufficient level by about 4,000 IUs of vitamin D per day. So, not and that's
01:06:41
been done that's been shown in multiple studies. Not it's not it's not that hard to take. In fact, vitamin D supplements are probably the cheapest supplement out
01:06:47
there. It's like 10 cents per pill. When you talked about these, I was really surprised to hear that they
01:06:52
have cancer preventing chemicals in them. And then um I was looking at some of the research and it does say exactly
01:06:59
as you said, things like kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts linked to a reduction in breast cancerous prostate, lung, and
01:07:05
colarctyl cancers. According to the World Cancer Research Fund and PubMed,
01:07:11
most of us don't eat enough of this stuff cuz it's not the tastiest stuff. And you talked about sugar as well. It
01:07:18
it makes me think about the diet that I'm currently on, which is the ketogenic diet, and whether that is an optimal
01:07:24
diet in terms of all of the things we've discussed earlier, dementia, longevity, aging. What is your views on the
01:07:30
ketogenic diet? I think there's there's the extreme ketogenic diet, like the
01:07:36
classical ketogenic diet, and then there's modified sort of low carb ketogenic diets that do allow for I
01:07:43
mean, there's yes, these are leafy greens that are carbohydrate, but they're high in fiber and they're low
01:07:49
glycemic index. And so, you can actually eat leafy greens on a ketogenic diet and
01:07:54
still be in ketosis. So I the ketogenic diet is very I'm very interested in it
01:08:00
because I do think that beta hydroxybutyrate which is the ke major
01:08:06
circulating ketone body that's produced when you're in ketosis is highly beneficial much like lactate it can
01:08:13
actually do a lot of what lactate can do. It gets into the brain and it's an e
01:08:18
easily utilizable source of energy by neurons. These are ketones, which is what your body makes when you
01:08:25
abstain from carbohydrates and sugars. Yes. It eventually shifts into ketosis where you're running on keto.
01:08:31
You're in ketosis and you're running on ketones. Yes. It's what you're measuring when you're doing your when you're measuring
01:08:36
your finger prick that it's beta hydroxybutyrate. That's the major circulating one that you're measuring. And that's
01:08:42
actually a signaling molecule. It's activating brain drive neurotrphic factor in the brain. And so it's very
01:08:49
interesting because it's it's almost like having lactate in your body but having it constantly. So I'm super
01:08:56
interested in a ketogenic diet particularly for people that respond well. I mean some people their
01:09:02
triglycerides go really high, their cholesterol goes really high and there's sort of an I would say individual
01:09:07
variation in terms of how you respond. And so it's good to always measure everything right to make sure that
01:09:13
you're responding well to ketogenic diet or to maybe cycle it. I've been very interested in cycling it for brain
01:09:18
benefits as well because of the beta hydroxybutyrate where it's it's just so
01:09:24
beneficial for the brain. You know, it's been shown that you know beta hydroxybutyrate. So what happens is when
01:09:31
you have this ketone like beta hydroxybutyrate get into the brain, it's
01:09:36
able to be used as energy instead of glucose. I feel like we should take a step back and explain what keto is for
01:09:43
for the for the listener who maybe has never really heard or understood it before. And I know that there's a large
01:09:49
proportion of people that don't know what it what it is because I spend a lot of time at dinner parties trying to talk
01:09:54
about it. And it's super surprising to me that the average person actually doesn't really know what what keto or
01:10:00
ketosis is. So, I think that's great. Yeah, we can talk about ketosis. Um, essentially if
01:10:07
we if we kind of take a a thousand mile high view of it without getting so technical,
01:10:12
yeah, I would say the best way to think about being in ketosis is your body is using
01:10:19
fatty acids as energy and not much glucose. You'll still use a little bit
01:10:25
of glucose. You need to use glucose because your red blood cells, for example, don't have any mitochondria.
01:10:31
They need glucose, but you're mostly using fatty acids as energy that are being produced from they're being
01:10:38
released from fat stored in atapost tissue, which is like my belly, which is like your belly, visceral fat,
01:10:45
um, subcutaneous fat. So, this sounds great. My body's going to use burn the fat instead of burn, you
01:10:51
know, burning glucose, which I've got from eating bread or something. So, I'm going to get skinny. People do lose weight on a ketogenic
01:10:57
diet. My dad has lost so much weight, it's ridiculous. It's like shocking. on a ketogenic diet. Yeah, it's crazy. He was quite a big man
01:11:04
if I say so myself. Very big belly. And he sent me this screenshot the other day after a couple of months on the
01:11:09
ketogenic diet. And he's like 13. He's just for the first time ever been 13 stone since
01:11:15
since he was in his teens. He's now 13 stone. So he's lost what the equivalent of about four four or five stone in
01:11:22
weight in a couple of months. And he just looks completely different. Now, I'm not, you know, I'm not necessarily
01:11:27
saying to stay on that diet forever, but the the speed in which one can lose weight on a ketogenic diet is
01:11:34
remarkable, right? And so, you're you're basically the food that you're eating is predominantly
01:11:40
fat, right? So, you're you're basically not only using the fat that your body already has stored, but you're also
01:11:45
fueling yourself. You're feeding yourself more fat, right? So, you're basically using the fat as energy and
01:11:51
through a whole bunch of biochemical reactions, you produce ketone bodies as
01:11:56
a byproduct of of that. It doesn't necessarily have to be just ketogenic diet. Like, you can when you're fasting,
01:12:04
you go into ketosis, right? Because if you think about it, you're you're not
01:12:09
giving yourself food. Instead, you're relying on what your body already has as a source of energy. And you only have so
01:12:15
much glucose stored as glycogen right in your liver. And that I would say after
01:12:21
there's individual variation, but after about 12 hours of not giving your body food, you sort of deplete all your
01:12:28
glycogen stores and then so you start to shift to lipolysis, which means the breakdown of fat. So fasting is another
01:12:34
way to go to get into ketosis. Another way would be intense exercise. So, like, you know, these endurance athletes that
01:12:41
are doing long duration types of exercise also can go into ketosis,
01:12:46
right? Because they're depleting their glycogen stores much quicker and they're also using all this energy that they've
01:12:52
they've fueled themselves with because it's it's so intense, right? Long duration type of exercise. And so, and
01:12:58
you can combine these things as well, right? You can do endurance exercise with the ketogenic diet and you really
01:13:03
kind of can get into ketosis quicker. Is it like a switch? So there is something called metabolic
01:13:11
flexibility which essentially means that your body is able to
01:13:17
switch between burning glucose and using glucose as energy but also using fatty acids as making you know as energy and
01:13:24
then producing ketones as well. And the more I would say the more um if you've
01:13:30
done ketosis or if you exercise a lot like frequently or you do any form of
01:13:36
fasting or what's called timerestricted eating. So let's say you eat all your food within an eight hour window and
01:13:42
then for 16 hours you're not eating food. Your body is used to switching to fatty acid metabolism to to using fatty
01:13:48
acids as energy. So you're really metabolically flexible. And um not everyone's able to do that because most
01:13:56
people actually they think they eat within a 12-h hour period, but they there's been studies that have been done
01:14:01
that have shown that actually they eat more like within a 15 to 16 hour period, not not even a 12-h hour period.
01:14:07
Certainly not a 10 or eight hour period. So there's, as I mentioned, it takes about 12 hours on average to deplete all
01:14:14
your glycogen levels. Now, you can accelerate that, if you're doing a lot of physical activity, but once you
01:14:19
deplete that liver glycogen, that is when you shift into burning fatty acids and then eventually ketosis, right?
01:14:26
In terms of longevity, have they ever done any studies where they've put someone on the ketogenic diet or like a
01:14:31
mouse or a rat on a ketogenic diet versus the the average diet and then monitored how long they live?
01:14:38
There have been studies by uh Dr. Eric Verden out of the uh Buck Institute for
01:14:43
Aging in Novado, California. And I mean this was several years ago. He's done these studies probably almost 10 years
01:14:49
ago, maybe about 2018 or 2017 these studies were published. But um he he did
01:14:54
do some of these studies with a ketogenic diet in rodents and it did seem to extend life expectancy but more
01:15:02
importantly the health span. So particularly in the brain. So it's like their brain had aged much much better.
01:15:09
they had less of the all of the pathological features of Alzheimer's
01:15:14
disease. And again, I do think like I mentioned, I I'm I'm super interested in
01:15:20
beta hydroxybutyrate in particular. I mean, there's it's multiffactorial because on the one hand,
01:15:25
you're not eating as much glucose, right? And that in in and of itself is important because glucose can be so
01:15:32
damaging particularly if you're not physically active because it's not if you if you're physically active and
01:15:38
you're eating some amount of glucose that's going into your muscle. It's not damaging the vascular system. The vas the cardio the vascular system
01:15:44
is very much related to the brain, right? So when you start to stiffen your blood vessels and stiffen everything, I
01:15:49
mean that's that's affecting blood flow to the brain. It's you know it's causing hypertension. That all affects brain
01:15:55
aging as well. So, I think just, you know, and then the the the damage that the glucose does in and of itself, like
01:16:02
I mean there's studies, it's really interesting. There's studies showing that people even on the high end of
01:16:08
normal in terms of their blood glucose levels. So, they're normal, but they're kind of on the high end of normal. They
01:16:14
had more brain atrophy than people on the low end of normal.
01:16:20
By brain atrophy, you mean their brain was shrinking. Shrinking. Shrinking. And it was the hippocampus,
01:16:25
by the way. again that that part of the brain that's involved in learning and memory. So the glucose itself has this effect on you causing
01:16:34
damage and accelerating the aging process. But then there's this other very interesting effect of these
01:16:40
chemicals that are made as a byproduct of being in ketosis and that is the beta hydroxybutyrate that ketone body gets
01:16:47
into the brain. It's transported across the brain through an MCT transporter. And when it gets into the brain, it can
01:16:54
be used as energy. And you your neurons don't need to use glucose. And it can do that. So your your neurons can use
01:17:01
glucose as energy, but it takes energy to use that glucose to make energy. When
01:17:06
you use the ketone, the beta hydroxybutyrate, it takes less energy to you to make that energy. So it's
01:17:12
energetically favorable to actually use that ketone, that beta hydroxybutyrate.
01:17:17
On top of that, this is what's so interesting, it frees up glucose. So, the neurons aren't using the glucose.
01:17:22
Where does the glucose go? Right? Because it's there. It's it it sort of shunts it into this other pathway that's
01:17:29
called the pentos phosphate pathway. I don't want to, you know, burden people with all the technical details, but let's get to the important part of that
01:17:35
is that it shunts glucose into this pathway that makes essentially its precursors that make what's called
01:17:41
glutathione, the major antioxidant in the brain. And so you're making more
01:17:47
glutathione day after day after day. That is huge because oxidation in the
01:17:54
brain, inflammation, this is a huge cause of brain aging and Alzheimer's disease, dementia. We now know
01:17:59
neuroinflammation is one of the major causes of it. And so if you have more glutathione in your brain, you are going
01:18:06
to basically sequester that damage that's causing, you know, that's that's
01:18:12
aging the brain essentially. And so the glucose now is not being used for energy. It's being used to make an
01:18:18
antioxidant in the brain. Okay, that's also really cool. And there's more. There's
01:18:24
more. Okay, so then the beta hydroxybutyrate itself is a signaling molecule like lactate. The ketone,
01:18:29
the ketone itself is a signaling molecule where it's basically, you know, it's a little bit of a stressed state,
01:18:35
right? So when you're in ketosis, it's you're stressing the body. It's either exercise or you're fasting or you're on
01:18:41
this ketogenic diet. And so your body again is responding to that stress by
01:18:46
making like a bunch of awesome resilient stress response things that are
01:18:51
basically gonna improve the way you age. And so the ketone beta hydroxybutyrate then activates brain drive neurotrphic
01:18:58
factor. This miracle growth for your brain, right? It's involved in growing new neurons. It's involved in increasing the connection between neurons. It's
01:19:04
involved in neuroplasticity. All those things. And so you get this multi-level benefit not getting not having the glue
01:19:11
glucose causing the damage. You have um basically the glucose now being used.
01:19:16
Not only is it not going causing damage, it's being used to make an antioxidant. And then you have the whole ketone, you
01:19:22
know, aspect where you're you're essentially um making and activating all these beneficial pathways in the brain
01:19:28
that reduces aging. And what's going on when we take exogenous ketones, external ketones via
01:19:36
a drink or something like that? Yeah. So, what's happening is you're essentially giving your body the beta
01:19:44
hydroxybutyrate ketone that it would make normally if you were undergoing ketosis and using fatty acids only as
01:19:51
energy. You're giving your body a big boost of it. So, you're kind of bypassing the the way that your body
01:19:57
would make it itself and giving it to your body. And it's great for people that have a hard time with doing a ketogenic
01:20:05
diet, for example. Maybe they just can't stick with it or maybe they don't respond very well to it in terms of
01:20:10
other biomarkers. They're going to get a lot of the benefit, but it's only going to last, you know, one to three hours,
01:20:16
right? Yeah. Until it flushes out, right? Until until you use it up. Yeah. And so it's in addition to just people that
01:20:21
want to get that focus and attention, which is what both you and I have experienced when we've taken these, you
01:20:27
know, supplements, this exogenous ketone. There's also some potential therapeutic
01:20:33
effects. So people that have mild cognitive decline, maybe like the first
01:20:39
stages of dementia or Alzheimer's disease can kind of perk up and um
01:20:45
perform better when they have when they're given an exogenous ketone, this supplemental ketone beta
01:20:51
hydroxybutyrate. There's not a lot of studies on it, but there's like a few case studies where
01:20:57
case studies being like a single person is given it and they're followed and looked at, you know,
01:21:03
and it's very interesting. I actually know that they're doing studies on exactly that at the moment.
01:21:08
Um because I've spoken to a few of these companies and a few scientists that are in this field over the last couple of
01:21:14
over the last couple of weeks in fact and they were saying that we're currently in the process of doing studies to see that if exogenous ketones
01:21:20
which are these ketone drinks or ketone shots can repair your cognitive faculty faculties and is that via the process
01:21:27
that you describe where glucose is pushed into this other pathway? Yes. So, um, I think I'm aware of the
01:21:35
same study because I've I've looked it up in the clinical trial and what's what's being looked at after giving this
01:21:42
exogenous beta hydroxybutyrate, this supplemental ketone in people with Alzheimer's disease, you can repair
01:21:50
damage because again you are activating brain drive neurotrphic factor which can
01:21:56
it can repair damage. It can grow new neurons. It can help with brain atrophy. it can strengthen connection between
01:22:02
neurons and then the glucose now is being shunted into that repair pathway that glutathione is being activated and
01:22:09
and that's able to you know repair damage as well. So I I'm excited to see
01:22:15
the public like that that study published. I would hypothesize that there's going to be beneficial effects and it's going
01:22:21
to be pretty exciting particularly because it is hard for older adults some
01:22:27
older adults to do a ketogenic diet. It's not the easiest thing to follow. I mean, you do have to be pretty
01:22:32
disciplined. So, this alternative to being able to supplement with something that can sort
01:22:39
of at least for the course of a couple of hours do what being on a ketogenic
01:22:44
diet can do is very exciting. Right. When you took the keto shot that you had
01:22:49
at home, what did you experience? You said it was potent. It was powerful. Yeah. It was like a neutropic effect
01:22:57
where when I mean neutropic effect, it's it's the kind of effect where you you
01:23:02
feel focused, your attention, your alertness is enhanced, you're sort of filtering
01:23:09
out all the background noise in your brain that sort of those little thoughts that pop in and distract you. And so,
01:23:15
uh, you're more productive. And, um, that was very noticeable. In fact, there was a time when I was like before any
01:23:21
podcast, I would take a shot of it. I would do it and um it's kind kind of
01:23:28
expensive, but it is I there's a lot of people that are that are using it now. And I think it's I think it's a better
01:23:34
alternative to some other neutropics that are common right now, like nicotine, for example, which can really
01:23:40
have a negative trade-off, but can do something similar. Whereas this is like
01:23:45
not only gives you that sort of cognitive enhancement, that brain pump, it also has like benefits for brain
01:23:52
aging. Right. What are your superfoods? There must be foods of yours. Um olive oil has become
01:23:59
one of my superfoods. Just a food that I love to just put on as many things as I can because everybody tells me about these polyphenols which are apparently
01:24:05
amazing for you. But what are some of the your sort of favorite superfoods that you try and consume that most
01:24:10
people might not think of? So we talked about leafy greens. I guess that's one of them. It is leafy greens. Um they have they're
01:24:16
high in magnesium and you know magnesium is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule. Chlorophyll give plants their
01:24:22
green color. Magnesium is very important for preventing damage to DNA DNA and
01:24:28
cancer. And you know half half the US population doesn't get enough of it. They're high in a lot of different
01:24:34
compounds. I mean they're folate, vitamin K one. So you're getting a lot of these micronutrients that are important. So I do like re dark leafy
01:24:42
greens. I particularly like kale and broccoli because of something called sulfurophane
01:24:47
which is sulurophane itself is not in them but a precursor when you break the
01:24:53
plant or you chew it um it makes sulfurophane. So there's an enzyme that gets activated that converts a precursor
01:24:59
in these plants called glucaraphin into sulurophane. Sulfurophane is also increases glutathione in the brain. It
01:25:06
helps detoxify pollutants like benzene, um, bisphenol A, BPA as well. So, I do
01:25:13
like dark leafy greens of the cruciferous family of vegetables. Again, that would be kale, broccoli. Um, those
01:25:19
are those are the cruciferous family. I also like blueberries. Blueberries are a source of polyphenols. You mentioned
01:25:25
olive oil as a polyphenol. If you're on a ketogenic diet, olive oil is like the great, right? Because you need fat. And
01:25:31
olive oil is so great because it also has those polyphenols that are beneficial. has been shown even in studies to improve cognition and memory
01:25:39
and uh lower even marker markers of um bad cardiovascular disease like Apo B
01:25:45
for example lower that. So blueberries I like because blueberries have also been shown even a cup of blueberries a day
01:25:52
has been shown to improve cognition. So I like the polyphenols. It increases blood flow to the brain. I also like
01:26:00
salmon and I think that would be something that most people would think is healthy. I like it because it's high
01:26:06
in the omega-3 fatty acids which I'm very very it's I think it's very very
01:26:12
important to get enough omega-3 fatty acids. I also supplement with them because there's a lot of research out
01:26:18
there and if you want to get into that we can but um the superfood would be the the salmon because it is a fatty source
01:26:25
of fish that is high in omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA which are found in
01:26:30
marine sources not plant sources of omega-3. I found it really interesting when I was looking at omega-3 that it has an impact
01:26:36
on mental health and depression and things like that. Yeah, it does. It's it's it resolves
01:26:41
inflammation. It's sort of an anti-inflammatory and inflammation plays a role in
01:26:46
depression. A big role. In fact, we we know that um people that are injected with inflammatory molecules like
01:26:54
something that's made in our gut from the bacteria in our gut called lipopolysaccharide. If you inject them with that it or a
01:27:01
placebo control, which is saline, it causes depression. But if you give them an omega-3 fatty acid supplement, EPA,
01:27:07
it blunts the depressive symptoms. So, in other words, if you're causing the inflammation by injecting something that
01:27:14
causes inflammation in people, it causes depression. But if you give those same people something that blunts that
01:27:19
inflammation, omega-3 fatty acids, it doesn't cause the depression, which is kind of amazing. And there's a ton of
01:27:25
other evidence out there. But, um, omega-3 fatty acids are
01:27:30
they're so important. And what's interesting was there's a study out of Harvard that identified the marine
01:27:36
source. So, I talked about salmon, EPA, DHA, and then there's the plant source,
01:27:42
ALA. And I say marine source because it's really those are the important ones that you really want
01:27:47
from the ocean, from fish, seafood. So, this Harvard
01:27:53
study identified not eating enough seafood as one of the top six
01:27:58
preventable causes of death up there with not having hypertension, not
01:28:04
smoking. So essentially not getting enough omega-3 from seafood was so
01:28:11
important for preventing early death that it was comparable to people having high blood pressure, having
01:28:17
cardiovascular disease, for example. And again, it's one of those things where people just don't think about what they're not eating, what they're not
01:28:24
getting. And um you there's so much research that have been done even since that that study that was published in
01:28:30
like 2009 looking at omega-3 fatty acid levels in our blood cells, red blood
01:28:36
cells. This is called the omega-3 index. O it's really an important marker of our
01:28:42
long-term omega-3 because our our red blood cells stay around in our system
01:28:47
for like 120 days. So it's a long-term marker of your omega-3 intake. And
01:28:54
there's been a variety of studies um done from Dr. Bill Harris out of the fatty acid research institute. So I'm an
01:29:00
associate a scientist there showing that people with what's called a high omega-3
01:29:06
index which is a lot of omega-3 a lot of omega-3 their omega-3 index would be 8% or higher that's considered
01:29:13
high compared to a low omega-3 index. That would be 4% or lower. The average
01:29:19
omega-3 index in the United States is about 5%. So, it's on the low low range.
01:29:24
People that had the high omega-3 index, in other words, they were either eating a lot of fish like salmon and or
01:29:31
supplementing with fish oil or microalgae oil, which is another a
01:29:37
marine source of these omega-3 fatty acids. They had a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people with
01:29:44
a low omega-3 index. Pretty big difference there. All all you have to do
01:29:49
is essentially either eat enough seafood and or supplement with a fish oil
01:29:54
supplement. But what was so fascinating about this study was that Bill and his
01:30:00
colleagues not only looked at the omega-3 index, they looked at people that also smoked and they said, "Okay,
01:30:07
we know smoking is terrible for your heart. We know it's causes early mortality, cancer, and all that, right?
01:30:14
What about people that smoke and their omega-3 index? So, there was four groups
01:30:20
that were looked at. Smokers that have either a high omega-3 index, so these smokers were either supplementing or
01:30:26
they were eating a lot of seafood. And then there were smokers with a low omega-3 index. And they compared them to
01:30:33
non-smokers with a high omega-3 index versus a low omega-3 index. And what was
01:30:38
so fascinating about this study was that smoking was like as bad for you in terms
01:30:45
of mortality as having a low omega-3 index. So the smokers with a high
01:30:50
omega-3 index had the same mortality risk as non-smokers with a low omega-3
01:30:56
index, which is fascinating because everybody knows to avoid smoking. Smoking, if you want to take years off
01:31:02
your life, if you want to decrease the quality of your life, start smoking right now.
01:31:08
But the same mortality risk was found in non-smokers who did not have a high
01:31:14
omega-3 index. Right now, I say this, I'll talk about this and smokers will
01:31:20
say, "Oh, great. Now all I have to do is take fish oil and I'll have the same life expectancy as a non-smoker with,
01:31:26
you know, a low omega-3 index." But of course, the the take-home here is that for those of us that are not smoking,
01:31:32
but we're not getting enough omega-3 from our diet, that's like smoking in
01:31:38
terms of mortality risk. So, super important, and I like talking about this
01:31:43
because it really makes it again really clear that not getting these essential nutrients can be very detrimental to our
01:31:50
health. And it's easy to fix. You can take a fish oil supplement. You can increase the amount of salmon that you're eating. And there have been
01:31:56
studies from Bill's group that have shown people that supplement with between 1 to two grams of fish oil per
01:32:02
day can go from a low omega-3 index to a high omega-3 index, which is not hard to
01:32:07
do. So, I guess two questions, which is, is having these little omega capsules the
01:32:13
same as eating the salmon in terms of the omega3 that I'm getting? And how
01:32:19
long do I have to take these little omega capsules for to move from having a low index to a high omega-3 index?
01:32:26
Well, these are great questions, Stephen. So, essentially, this little capsule here is not the same as eating
01:32:34
salmon. And there's a few reasons why. So, for one, when you're eating a fish
01:32:39
that's high in omega-3, like salmon, you have this omega-3 in what's called
01:32:45
triglyceride form. So the omega-3 is is is bound to a glycerol backbone and
01:32:50
that's really important for the way you absorb it. Some fish oil supplements don't have that. They're they're aster
01:32:56
they're basically they're molecular distilled and then they're put they have an ethanol back backbone. So it's not
01:33:02
quite as bioavailable. But I think more importantly is that these fish oil
01:33:07
supplements are purified. So you're not getting mercury
01:33:14
or microplastics or things that are also found in the whole fish. So these are better.
01:33:21
Unfortunately, I think so. I do. Um, as much as I think it's it's better, you
01:33:26
know, for the longest time I always I was always a whole foods first approach. Um, but we do have this environmental
01:33:33
pollution problem and fish have been contaminated with heavy metals. They've been contaminated with microplastics.
01:33:40
I would say that salmon is one of the lowest fish that has the lowest amount of mercury compared to other fish. So it
01:33:47
on a on a per gram basis, you're getting less mercury per gram with salmon than
01:33:53
you would be with, you know, something like swordfish, for example. But but you
01:33:59
also have microplastics unfortunately that are now in fish. And it is something that enters our body when we
01:34:06
eat the fish. And so I do think the fish oil supplements are a good alternative because you're getting those omega-3
01:34:11
fatty acids and you're not you're you're not getting some of the other bad things that are in the fish. That's fascinating. I didn't really I
01:34:18
didn't really think of omega-3 as being that important, especially as it relates to longevity. I always thought about it as being something that would help my
01:34:23
brain work better today. You know, cognitive performance now. Well, it does that and it also helps
01:34:29
prevent the cognitive decline later. And also cardiovascular disease, that's a big one. So there have been some really large randomized control trials that
01:34:36
have actually given people with cardiovascular disease that are on, you know, some sort of standard of care
01:34:42
treatment like a statin and they've given them four grams a day of a purified form of omega-3 called EPA
01:34:49
versus a placebo. And the people given the omega-3 had 25% less cardiovascular related
01:34:56
death or events like heart attacks and strokes. So, it's not only like preventing, you know, we talked about
01:35:03
all cause mortality and this association where you live longer. It's also helping people that already have cardiovascular
01:35:09
disease and reducing their risk of dying from it. Right guys, going to go get Steve. The guest is here. Ready?
01:35:15
Come in. Oh my god. Steve, what are you doing? This is uh the Bontage face mask. It's
01:35:22
good for blemishes, wrinkles, uh clears up the skin. It's red light. Have you not used it before?
01:35:28
No. I tried this before. It's um it's really really good. It's shines red light on your face which helps increase
01:35:34
and boost collagen production. Actually found it out cuz the misses seen her wearing it. She terrified me a couple of nights in a row. Um I thought it was to
01:35:41
scare people with but actually it's really really good for your skin. So they are a sponsor of the podcast and uh I've been using it every day for about a
01:35:48
year and a half now. Wow. Well, Steve is great. Yes. And Bon Charge ships worldwide with
01:35:54
easy returns and a year-long warranty on all of their products. So, visit bondcharge.com/diary for 25% off on any product sitewide. But
01:36:02
you have to order through that link. That's boncharge.com/diary with code diary.
01:36:09
When I asked you before this conversation started rolling, what you're really excited about at the moment, your response to me was there
01:36:15
was a few things, but one of them which lit up your face was creatine. Yes. And it's funny because
01:36:22
it lit up your face again. Yeah. It's it's funny because creatine has been around for I mean ever for
01:36:28
decades and it's always been in my mind it was like one of those Jim bro things. I'm like I don't need to be swole.
01:36:35
Yeah. I don't need creatine get get swole. And you know this is this was the thought for for many many years. And then over
01:36:42
the last five years or so the effects of creatine on the brain
01:36:49
started to really get my interest. anything that affects the brain I really become interested in. And so that's kind
01:36:55
of what did get me the most excited about about creatine, but also I started
01:37:00
doing a lot of resistance training. And so I was like, "Okay, here I am now. I'm like one of those gym guys. I'm doing
01:37:07
I'm doing the barbells. I'm doing the, you know, the squats and the deadlifts and all that." And so so why not give
01:37:13
myself some of the creatine? Well, what is creatine, right? Why is it important? You talked about earlier, you know, why
01:37:21
doesn't our body just make more of these things that are so beneficial? We do make creatine. We make about, I don't
01:37:27
know, our liver makes about 1 to three grams a day of creatine and our brain
01:37:33
also makes creatine and those are the two organs that make it. Creatine gets
01:37:38
consumed by other tissues like the muscle is probably the one that's the greediest because creatine is stored as
01:37:45
phosphocreatine but it's used to make energy essentially. So it can increase muscle mass, it can increase muscle
01:37:52
strength in combination with resistance training because you're able to regenerate and make energy faster. So,
01:38:00
for example, I became interested in it after reading studies where people that supplemented with creatine that were
01:38:07
engaged in resistance training were able to gain more lean body mass. They were
01:38:12
able to gain more strength. It was increasing their training volume. So, you can do one to two more reps, right,
01:38:19
of of whatever exercise you're doing. And it seems to decrease the recovery time between those those sets as well.
01:38:26
So, you're able to increase your training volume. Well, anything that's going to in increase your training volume is going to then have the
01:38:33
downstream effect of, you know, increasing the adaptations like increased muscle mass or increased
01:38:38
muscle strength. I started supplementing with creatine about a year ago and I
01:38:43
started supplementing with it for that reason, for the my training and I was doing about five grams a day because
01:38:49
that was really what was shown to to be beneficial for muscle health in
01:38:54
combination with resistance training. And it's important for people to realize that supplementing with creatine by
01:39:00
itself, without any type of resistance training, isn't going to grow your muscle. It's not going to make you stronger. You have to put in the effort
01:39:08
because what creatine is doing, it's helping you make the energy quicker, right? And that and then being able to
01:39:15
make that energy quicker means that you're able to then do that exercise better, um, harder, more of it, right?
01:39:21
So, um, it's sort of sup supercharging your exercise routine. and five grams a day was like, "Okay,
01:39:28
perfect. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing five grams a day." And definitely noticed an effect on my training volume
01:39:34
where I was, you know, doing more more reps. So that was like, okay, a year ago, I had already been aware of the
01:39:42
effects on the brain. I thought maybe the five grams a day would do that. So what are the effects on the brain? Well, your brain also consumes a lot of
01:39:48
energy, you know, needs a lot of energy. So it does make its own creatine. But it
01:39:54
turns out if you can if you can give your brain more of that creatine
01:40:00
particularly under a period of anything that's causing stress. So let's say lack
01:40:06
of sleep or let's say emotional psychological stress or in my case high
01:40:15
cognitive load where you're just every day learning concepts, complex things.
01:40:21
you're trying to remember them. You're putting ideas together and coming up with new hypotheses and you know, you're
01:40:28
just you're just you're studying a lot and it's very cognitively demanding and it's it's a type of stress on your
01:40:34
brain. That's like my life, right? Um under this condition of stress, depression is another one. That's a
01:40:40
stress on your brain or neurodeenerative disease. That's a stress on your brain. So any kind of stressful condition,
01:40:48
that's where creatine shines in the brain. I would argue that I mean all of
01:40:53
us who who has the perfect amount of sleep never has stress nobody right there's always some sort of stress in
01:40:59
the background. So um that's when I was like okay so if you're the perfect
01:41:05
person you have no stress you get the perfect amount of sleep every night your brain makes enough creatine to kind of
01:41:11
do what it needs to do. I know that I'm constantly under stress. So um I'm like
01:41:16
okay well I think I need a boost. And this is where a lot of very interesting studies have come out of many different
01:41:22
labs. Um, some out of Germany that looked at the dose of creatine and how
01:41:27
it increases creatine levels in the brain. And this is why I now supplement with 10 grams a day. So the study out of
01:41:34
Germany found that five grams a day of creatine, if you're supplementing with five grams
01:41:39
a day, your muscles are greedily consuming it. Particularly if you're working out, they want it. They want it.
01:41:45
after about five grams a day, especially over a few months, like you're you're saturating your muscle and that's
01:41:50
enough, right? Anything above that kind of spills over to the brain. And so they
01:41:56
what this German study found was that 10 grams of creatine increased creatine levels in several different regions of
01:42:02
the brain. And that was probably the most exciting, you know, I would say evidence that supplementing higher than five grams a day was actually doing
01:42:09
something in terms of getting creatine into the brain. There have now been a variety of studies
01:42:14
that have looked at different outcomes, right? So, if you supplement with 10
01:42:20
grams of creatine or even go higher than that, like 20 grams of creatine, how does that affect cognitive function,
01:42:25
right? And so, um some of these studies have been been done by uh Dr. Darren Kandow. He's um at the University of
01:42:31
Regina in Canada and it's looked they've looked at things like sleep deprivation
01:42:37
and it's been found that if you take someone and you sleep deprive them for 21 hours and give them about 25 to 30
01:42:47
grams of creatine, it completely negates the cognitive deficits of sleep
01:42:53
deprivation. Actually, not only does it negate the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation, it makes people function
01:43:00
better than if they were well-rested. That's where I was like, wait a minute,
01:43:07
there's many times when I'm traveling, I'm jet-lagged. Uh lots of times when I'm sleep deprived and I have to be
01:43:13
doing a podcast or a presentation, whatever. And in those situations, I go
01:43:19
up from my 10 grams to more like 20 grams. Like today for example, I wasn't
01:43:24
really sleepdeprived, but you know, there was a lot of high cognitive demand. This is a long podcast. There's
01:43:31
all that stuff. And so I went up to 20 grams today on my creatine. And I Well, I will say even at the 10 grams for me,
01:43:39
we were talking about this with respect to being in ketosis. I don't feel that mid-afternoon crash
01:43:46
when I have the creatine. Not being on a ketogenic diet, not being in ketosis. It's very clear for me and I've done
01:43:53
this where sometimes I only do five grams and then if I do that I'll notice I'm like why am I tired right now? So
01:44:00
there's something interesting and maybe it's placebo. I'm going to throw that out there. Very possible. But I don't
01:44:05
know maybe the creatine is again it's able to regenerate that energy quicker
01:44:10
and so that's also beneficial for the brain. And now I I would say all these creatine researchers a lot of them are
01:44:16
shifting to the brain. And it used to be all muscle focused and now people are super interested in what creatine is
01:44:23
doing to the brain, especially if you're supplementing with more of it. And you know, this is important for people that
01:44:29
are under a stressful situation, but also for vegans because creatine is
01:44:34
found in food, mostly in animal products like meat and poultry and fish, dairy. A lot of vegans don't eat that. And I've
01:44:40
had so many of my vegan friends, I've got them on the creatine, and it's
01:44:45
changed their lives. I mean, they're like, "This is like incredible." You know, can you imagine someone who's not
01:44:51
getting any creatine from their diet because they eat no meat and all of a sudden they start supplementing with 5,
01:44:56
10 grams of creatine and it's like they have energy. Some people say they they require less sleep, which is kind of
01:45:02
interesting. That's kind of a comment I've heard many, many times from people is that it's like their brain doesn't
01:45:08
need as much sleep. They have more energy. So, um, I've been a big fan of the creatine, um, not only for the
01:45:14
muscle, especially because, you know, working out is something that's very important, but for the brain as well.
01:45:21
I always thought of creatine as something that you you took and you kind of had to load up on, and then over a couple of weeks or months, the effects
01:45:27
would kick in. But you're telling me that if I had creatine in the morning, that same day, I would experience
01:45:33
potentially improved cognition if I have a big enough dose. Yes. So, um, great question. A lot of
01:45:40
studies that have been done that you're referring to have been done in the context of exercise and muscular
01:45:46
performance. And the reason why people have to load up on like they do a
01:45:52
loading phase, let's say 20 grams and then they go down to this sort of maintenance phase of five grams is
01:45:58
because it takes I don't know I think it's about a month or so before you can saturate your muscular stores of
01:46:06
creatine. And then what does that mean? It means that um the creatine which is actually stored in
01:46:11
your muscle as phosphocreatine is there and ready to be used to make energy. So
01:46:17
so it takes again it takes about a month or so to do that unless you are really
01:46:24
giving your muscles a high dose right. So the five grams a day it only it can only do it for so many days and then
01:46:30
finally you get saturated. When you do this loading phase you kind of just accelerate that whole process. And so
01:46:36
that's why when people are doing these experiments where they want to test the effects of creatine, they want they want the participants to have really high
01:46:42
levels of creatine in their muscles quick because they don't want to do a month-long experiment, right? They want the experiment to be like a couple of
01:46:48
weeks or a week. So that was kind of the whole concept behind this loading phase. If you're not someone who's going to
01:46:55
some kind of competition, you know, like your CrossFit games or something, you don't really need to do that loading
01:47:01
phase if you've already been supplementing with five grams a day for like a month. When it comes to the brain, what's happening if you get above
01:47:08
that five grams, that's pretty much all consumed by the muscle. You're having some leftover in circulation and the
01:47:16
brain takes it up and it takes it up, right? When it re what it really shines is under that stressful condition, which
01:47:22
again for me, I feel like every day is this is is like cognitively demanding for me because I'm constantly, you know,
01:47:29
learning new material or learning new information or working on things, right? And so there's a lot of cognitive stress
01:47:35
on my brain. And so I feel like I'm constantly under that stress. And that's where getting the creatine in your brain
01:47:40
helps you make that energy quicker. And so that's why like I've done I've had, you know, been jetlagged and have have
01:47:46
to give a talk at you, you know, like 5:00 a.m. in the morning, my my biological time after not getting sleep.
01:47:52
And I've done like 25 grams of creatine. And it it's insane how much it helps me.
01:47:57
Again, it could be placebo because I'm anticipating that effect, which is fine. Placebo is a real thing. It's great. I'm
01:48:03
all about it. But there's some evidence also that this works, right? That the
01:48:08
creatine is helping with under that sleep deprivation and that stressful condition. I was reading about a study in 2025
01:48:15
where they gave creatine to people that had depressive symptoms alongside CBT
01:48:21
training. And the people that had creatine and the cognitive behavioral therapy training experienced a greater
01:48:27
improvement in their depression symptoms than those who just received the cognitive behavioral therapy, which is
01:48:33
which is incredible. It's fascinating. I mean, depression is a type of brain stress, right? I mean,
01:48:40
we know inflammation plays a role in in depression. We know oxidative stress plays a role in depression. And there
01:48:47
have now been some animal studies that have shown creatine is somehow having an anti-inflammatory effect. I that hasn't
01:48:54
all been worked out. So I don't know if it's all just the energy component of
01:48:59
it. It could also be this other sort of newly identified role that creatine's playing in sort of having an
01:49:05
anti-inflammatory effect. And I don't know much enough about that. I don't know that there's enough even known about that, but I do know that it
01:49:11
exists. And it's fascinating because again I think where creatine really
01:49:16
shines in the brain and it's been shown study after study is under some kind of stressful condition depression or sleep
01:49:23
deprivation or there's a new study that came out it was published I don't know a month ago or so showing that it was a
01:49:30
very small pilot study and I want to caveat this there was no placebo control
01:49:35
but it did show that giving people with Alzheimer's disease creatine I believe
01:49:41
it was 20 grams a day did improve their cognition. And so again, this is a whole
01:49:47
new field where now we're looking at creatine in the brain, not just the gym bros and not just the muscular effects,
01:49:54
but in the brain and how it's affecting the brain and being beneficial for cognition, for brain aging, for
01:50:02
depression. Is there a link or an association with cancer outcomes in creatine? Wondering
01:50:08
because I was there was there was a study that I was looking at earlier. Yeah, this one it says a a 2025 study of
01:50:14
25,000 people each found that for each additional 0.09 grams of creatine over a
01:50:19
two-day average was linked to a 14% reduction in cancer risk. Right. Which was in the Frontiers Journal and
01:50:25
reported by the BBC. Yeah. That it's it's like a new unexplored, you know, association here
01:50:31
where it's like I I don't know why creatine is doing it. Is it the anti-inflammatory effect? Is it who
01:50:38
knows? But again, I mean that I I was aware of that study and it's like a whole new area that needs to be explored
01:50:44
where you know some people were worried about creatine actually causing cancer. I've actually had people ask me that
01:50:49
question and it's actually the opposite where it seems to be reducing cancer risk. The some of the other sort of
01:50:55
misconceptions around creatine are that it's going to I mean there was this stereotype that people take it they get
01:51:01
massive muscles and they become bloated. So I think that put a lot of women off in particular according to some research that we actually did just to understand
01:51:07
perceptions of creatine in my investment fund. But the other one was hair loss. People think there's some sort of
01:51:13
association with hair loss. I.e. if you take creatine you're more likely to lose your hair. Right. So there was this one study that
01:51:19
was published I don't even know how many decades ago. Maybe you can pull it up but it was in rugby players I believe
01:51:27
and these rugby players that were given I I believe it was a high dose. Maybe it was 20 grams. I can't remember the exact
01:51:32
dose but um they had increased levels of dihydrotestosterone
01:51:37
DHT which is something that is linked to androgenic alipcia. So this would be you
01:51:45
know basically your the the DHT can affect the hair follicle and keep it in
01:51:50
this like stunted phase where it's not growing and so that can cause hair loss. And that one study didn't measure hair
01:51:57
loss. It just again looked at the the DHT, the dihydrotestosterone levels.
01:52:02
It's never been replicated. There's after so many decades, it's never had any animal evidence showing that this
01:52:09
actually causes hair loss. Nothing has really come up showing that this is something to be concerned about. So, I
01:52:17
take it as, okay, it's like a one-off thing. Who knows what was going on here? But like, you would think if it was
01:52:23
real, it would be replicated after when was it published? 2009 2009.
01:52:29
Yeah. So, it was a group of rugby players. They were given 25 grams a day of of creatine. Um, but there was
01:52:34
actually a study, a randomized control trial done in 2025, this year with 45
01:52:40
resistant trained men all given five grams a day of creatine over 12 weeks. And there was no significant difference
01:52:46
found in their hair outcomes or DHT versus placebo. There we go. When was that published?
01:52:52
2025. Oh, this year. randomized control of med. Well, I mean to get to get also to
01:52:58
your your other point about the water weight gain. I know this is a real thing because also several of my my
01:53:04
girlfriends were concerned about this as well. And it's funny, you know, creatine does bring water into the cell and but
01:53:13
that's actually a it's not a bad thing, right? And it you're really not going to get a big gain in weight. I mean, I
01:53:19
can't imagine. There's nothing more than like two pounds, you know, if if if anything at all. So,
01:53:26
I do think that is sort of uh something that's I don't it's a it's a it's a fear
01:53:32
that's not justified in my opinion. I mean, you lose you you gain, you know, four pounds of water weight when you're
01:53:38
on your menstrual cycle. Yeah. You mentioned fasting. Yeah. There's been lots of conversation
01:53:43
around fasting, around whether it's good, bad, how long to fast, or whether just restricting your calories is the
01:53:50
same as fasting. A lot of people talk about autophagy. My girlfriend talks about water fasting. What is your
01:53:57
perspective on the role of fasting, how we should do it, if we should do it, when we should do it, who should do it?
01:54:02
I think it depends on what your goal is. So you mentioned people talk about
01:54:09
calorie restriction and really you know is the fasting just about the calorie restriction and I think when it comes to
01:54:17
weight loss losing losing weight predominantly hopefully fat not muscle
01:54:24
then calorie restriction is the main thing to do here and intermittent fasting is sort of a tool to get you
01:54:31
there. In other words, people that are doing intermittent fasting tend to eat fewer calories. And that's been shown in
01:54:36
several studies, even if they aren't counting their calories because they are limited in the amount of time they're
01:54:42
eating and then they're fasting for a longer period of time. They end up just consuming naturally fewer calories.
01:54:48
Being in a calorie deficit, is that going to put you into the ketogenic state that you get from not fasting?
01:54:56
No. Not if not necessarily. No, it's not. So you can be in a calorie deficit,
01:55:02
but it it depends, right? So when you're when you're in the fasted state, what's
01:55:08
important here is you're activating a bunch of pathways that don't become
01:55:14
active when you're in a fed state. And there's a lot of biochemical reactions that sort of dictate all that. But you
01:55:20
mentioned autophagy, right? And and that's the big one, and that's happening only when you're really in a fasted
01:55:25
state. What is it? There's different types of it. So generally speaking, it's the clearing
01:55:31
out of damaged stuff within your cell. So what is damaged stuff? It can be
01:55:37
protein aggregates. For example, if we think about in neurons, amaloid beta protein aggregates. So autophagy could
01:55:44
play a role in clearing that out. The plaques and stuff you get in your brain. Exactly. But you also get plaques in
01:55:49
your cardiovascular system. So autophagy can play a role in clearing that out. Um but it also can be fragments of DNA. It
01:55:56
can be, you know, all all sorts of gunk and stuff that just can accumulate inside of your cell. And so you're kind
01:56:02
of getting rid of that. Also, it can be even on the level of, let's say,
01:56:09
it's the organal level. So you can actually have your mitochondria. We talked about mitochondria being the major source of energy inside of our
01:56:15
cells. Mitochondria are very important for the health of all of our cells, our neurons, our muscle, because they
01:56:21
produce energy. But mitochondria also accumulate a lot of damage quite easily because they produce energy and they use
01:56:28
oxygen to do that. They make a lot of what's called reactive oxygen species. So these are things that can really react with our DNA with proteins inside
01:56:36
of our our cells with with um lipids. So the cell membranes. So your mitochondria
01:56:43
don't really have a repair system like our DNA does. So we have DNA repair enzymes that can repair damage to our
01:56:48
DNA, right? That's where magnesium comes in. magnesium is required for these enzymes to be activated to repair damage
01:56:55
to our DNA to prevent cancer. Our mitochondria don't have that kind of repair system. They have another repair
01:57:01
system and one of it is what's called mphagy which is kind of a subp part of
01:57:06
autophagy and it's where the mitochondria they accumulate damage. you can essentially
01:57:14
take that mitochondria and get rid of it, right? Or a piece of that mitochondria that damage and get rid of it through this sort of autoagy type of
01:57:21
thing, but it's called mopagy. And that happens with other types of what are called organels within our cells. So
01:57:28
this autophagy process, this autophagy is sort of a general term, but it's essentially the cleaning out of damage.
01:57:34
It's the repair process for damage. And it's something that happens most the time when we're in a fasted state, which
01:57:40
typically happens when we're sleeping. How long do do I have to be in a fasted state for? I mean, it depends. I would say
01:57:47
that we haven't really worked that out great in humans because people aren't measure measuring biomarkers of
01:57:54
autophagy in humans. There have been some studies that have looked at being
01:58:00
in a fasted state for like 16 hours. And essentially once you get once you break
01:58:05
through that part of depleting all your liver glycogen that's an important you know precursor for activating autophagy.
01:58:12
So I mentioned earlier that happens after about 12 hours right so as you get to 12 13 14 15 16 hours then you're
01:58:20
probably getting to that state of autophagy. Um however there's such
01:58:25
limited evidence evidence on that in humans. A lot of it comes from animal studies. With that caveat, I will say
01:58:33
that you can get a lot of benefits. So, some of the metabolic benefits from fasting include improved glucose levels,
01:58:40
improved um blood pressure regulation, metabolic effects, improved for example,
01:58:46
weight loss. Right? Now, can you get all of that from just doing caloric restriction versus doing t like this
01:58:53
intermittent fasting? Right? You can get a lot of it, but there have been studies showing that doing doing this sort of
01:59:00
intermittent fasting is beneficial uh for some of these metabolic parameters
01:59:05
outside of the caloric being in a caloric deficit. What does that mean? Metabolic parameters again glucose regulation, blood
01:59:12
pressure, your blood pressure control as well. So these things have been shown in in people that are doing timerestricted
01:59:18
eating. So they're basically doing a type of intermittent fasting where especially if they're doing a really
01:59:24
compressed window. So they're eating all their food within six hours and then fasting for like 18 hours.
01:59:30
That's really beneficial, right? Because and even if they have the same amount of calories as people that are calorically
01:59:36
restricted, they've compared those head-to-head. people that are doing the fasting have better improvements in
01:59:41
their glucose regulation, better improvements in in um their blood pressure than people that are even still
01:59:48
eating fewer calories but not doing the fasting component. So, what would you recommend for the average person? I asked you earlier on
01:59:54
to give me a a sort of a perfect uh a perfect prescription of what I should do in terms of fasting
02:00:01
on a daily basis. Do you think I should have eating uh sort of fasted windows of, you know, 12 to 20 hours?
02:00:10
You know, I think it really depends on what you're looking for. And personally, if you are wanting to have this more
02:00:16
autophagy kind of potentially autophagy activation where you're you're clearing
02:00:22
away stuff within your cells. Again, we don't really know the hard number yet,
02:00:28
but I would say yeah, you probably want to be around a 16
02:00:33
hour window of not eating. What do you do? I mean, it depends on the day, you know,
02:00:38
on an optimal day. Most of the time, I'm I'm probably eating all of my food within a 10-hour window. And so, I'm fasted for 14 hours,
02:00:46
but optimally, like it all depends on my family and like eating dinner with my family and what's going on.
02:00:52
Do you ever do longer fasts? I don't do I mean I would say a a day is like the
02:00:57
longest that I do but I do a lot of exercise on top of that and so you can kind of kick yourself into that
02:01:03
autophagy state a little bit more because it's kind of like we talked about this it's a way of sort of supercharging your ketosis and so if
02:01:11
you're exercising and fasting um that kind of supercharges that whole
02:01:17
autophagy system as well but um it I do think it's a kind of an interesting idea
02:01:23
uh to do some longer fasts maybe once a year, once a quarter depending
02:01:28
why because you are activating that repair process. Now you have to do resistance
02:01:33
training because you don't want to lose muscle mass. Protein is important. It's one of the signals for you know muscle
02:01:40
protein synthesis which is essential for you know gaining muscle mass and maintaining muscle mass. Right.
02:01:46
So after a fast you want to break the fast with something protein richch. Absolutely. Definitely protein rich for
02:01:51
sure. Um, but I think also during a fast if you can do some kind of you want to
02:01:57
you want to stimulate your muscles with mechanical force because that's the other signal to stimulate muscle protein
02:02:03
synthesis. And so I I think one of the biggest concerns people had with fasting
02:02:08
and this was over the last 5 years or so is that studies have shown people that
02:02:13
undergo intermittent fasting tend to lose muscle mass because they're eating
02:02:19
fewer meals. they're not getting as much protein and perhaps they're not doing resistance training. Now, there have
02:02:25
been other studies that have looked at people doing intermittent fasting and resistance training and they don't lose
02:02:30
muscle mass because they are doing they're getting that mechanical stimulation of their of their muscles
02:02:36
which is preventing the loss of muscle mass. And so, I think the take-home here is if you are doing intermittent
02:02:41
fasting, you want to make sure you're getting all your protein, 1.6 1.2 to 1.6 six grams of protein per kilogram body
02:02:48
weight per day depending on how much you're resistance training. And you also
02:02:54
you want to make sure you're getting your protein in that small window that you're eating. And you want to make sure that you're doing resistance training as
02:02:59
well. Those are two really important things if you are going to do intermittent fasting. There was a study I read which is linked
02:03:04
to that which said linked to that but sort of adjacent that says uh in in nine human trials they found that 23% of
02:03:12
people enjoyed better sleep after intermittent fasting. which I thought was interesting. Yeah, cause causation is obviously hard
02:03:18
to establish there, but Right. I I think and that brings us to this other sort of aspect of
02:03:23
intermittent fasting, which is timerestricted eating. Essentially, what
02:03:29
what's the best thing to do is really you want to you want to eat within an
02:03:34
earlier time window. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of them is that
02:03:40
when you eat later in the day, let's say 8 o'clock at night, nine o'clock at
02:03:45
night, your body is starting starting to naturally make melatonin. That's a hormone that's involved in
02:03:51
helping you get sleepy. Well, melatonin also inhibits the production of insulin.
02:03:58
And so you basically will have elevated blood glucose levels when you're eating later in the day
02:04:04
because you're you're less you're you're basically less gluc your your glucose
02:04:10
regulation is impaired somewhat, right? So it's better to try to eat your food
02:04:15
earlier in the day, but then there's also this this area of you want to probably stop eating like 3 hours before
02:04:22
your natural bedtime. And that does affect sleep. So, if you think about it, when you're sleeping, you don't want to
02:04:27
be digesting. Like, there's all these things that are activated during digestion, and that's going to affect
02:04:33
the way you sleep. And so, there are some interesting studies that have found that people sleep better if they stop
02:04:40
eating at least three hours before bed. That is something that I do try to do almost daily. And um it's also something
02:04:48
that was very interesting. I think a friend of mine, Dr. Dr. Sachin Panda at the Sulkq Institute was one of the first people to observe that. He's got this
02:04:55
this app that he um has called my circadian clock and he used he's used this app over the years for clinical
02:05:01
trials where people will take a picture of their food and it timestamps the foods that he knows what time they're
02:05:07
eating and when they stop eating. And and people that are part of this trial started to send him comments
02:05:12
going, "Oh, I stopped eating earlier and all of a sudden my sleep is better." And after you start to get about 10, 20, 30
02:05:20
people making the same comment, you start to go, wait a minute, there's something here, right? And so I think he was one of the first people to actually
02:05:27
um observe that that correlation between stop eating earlier and sleeping better.
02:05:34
Well, you talked about protein earlier when we're talking about resistance training and fasting.
02:05:39
When should I Someone told me that you're supposed to take protein straight after you did the a resistance training workout. Straight after you lift the
02:05:45
weights like 30 minutes after. Does it matter? Well, we that's what was thought I think previously for I don't know how many
02:05:52
years it was thought this was there was an anabolic window, right? Where you want to take in this protein within 30
02:05:58
minutes to an hour of doing your resistance training. And that way the
02:06:03
amino acids that are anabolic like leucine are going into the muscle and building muscle essentially, right? We
02:06:11
now know that it's not really an anabolic window. It's about your daily
02:06:17
protein intake because what exercise is doing, what the resistance training is doing is it's sensitizing all your
02:06:23
transporters and your muscle to amino acids. And that's that's happening over the course of 24 hours. So you can take
02:06:29
that protein in within that day and it it really still do the same thing. So I
02:06:35
don't think you have to slam your protein shake within 30 minutes to an hour. Maybe maybe if you're like a
02:06:43
bodybuilder and you're really trying to get that little tiny tiny tiny percentage, maybe you'll have a little
02:06:48
bit of a benefit. But generally speaking, most people what you want to look at is your daily protein intake
02:06:55
because that's essentially um the most important thing. And the exercise itself is sensitizing all these, you know,
02:07:03
transporters on your muscle that are allowing the amino acids to come in and build protein, increase muscle protein
02:07:09
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There's a term that you've used a few times which I'm I'm not super well educated on, which is insulin
02:09:19
resistance. What is insulin resistance? Is that something associated with diabetes? And
02:09:26
therefore, does someone like me need to care? I don't have diabetes. Okay, let's take a step back. when you
02:09:31
are eating something that is going to raise your blood glucose levels, right?
02:09:37
You so like a piece of bread or some sugar or whatever, right? So essentially, if you're increasing that glucose spike in your in
02:09:44
your bloodstream, you want to have that glucose go somewhere. You want it to go to your muscle and or sometimes it goes
02:09:51
to your atapost tissue. But in order to do that, you have to activate insulin. And insulin then causes these
02:09:58
transporters that usually aren't active to kind of come up and take in the glucose. So insulin resistance is when
02:10:06
you're basically constantly constantly activating that pathway um such that
02:10:13
your cells don't respond to the insulin like they used to. And so the insulin
02:10:18
isn't doing its job as well. And so essentially your blood glucose levels stay elevated and that causes all sorts
02:10:26
of damage the glycation and things like that we've talked about. So it's really insulin failure.
02:10:31
Insulin's failing to do its job. Well, it depends because you're still making the insulin but it's essentially
02:10:38
not the insulin receptor isn't responding to that insulin and so it's
02:10:43
it's not doing its job. Yes, it's not doing its job. But it's different from type 1 diabetes in in the sense where
02:10:48
you're type 1 diabetes, you're actually not even making the insulin, right? So that's very different. So yeah, insulin
02:10:54
is not able to do its job. But insulin resistance and I mean there's there's so
02:10:59
many different diseases that it's been linked to. But everything I think everything is so complicated. So I don't
02:11:05
know that everything's due to insulin resistance, but it's like one component of, you know, something that's
02:11:11
accelerating the way you age. I had a a light doctor in here the other day, a sunlight doctor the other day and we
02:11:16
spent a lot of time talking to talking about light and sunlight and one of the things that I've been really fascinated
02:11:22
by is red light therapy over the last couple of months. Do you do have a sort of red light therapy routine?
02:11:29
It's interesting that you ask. So red light therapy in the scientific literature called photobiomodulation.
02:11:34
Um, I know that's a complicated word, but you know, there's essentially a variety of different wavelengths that
02:11:41
can be used to stimulate physiological processes like mitochondria inside of
02:11:47
your your cells to to do stuff, right? I now am convinced that red light therapy
02:11:53
plays a role in helping with skin aging. So, I do have a mask. It helps with with
02:11:59
skin aging and wrinkles. There have been enough studies now that is pretty convincing that it does seem to improve
02:12:05
the way skin ages. I do think the important thing here is the parameters that are done. It's not just wavelength,
02:12:12
but it's also like the energy, so irradiance. And so you have to kind of look at all those parameters and make sure you can replicate that with
02:12:19
whatever product that you're using. What about infrared saunas? Infrared saunas or traditional saunas?
02:12:25
The infrared ones. Infrared. So infrared saunas are a type
02:12:30
of sauna that is using it's using you know essentially infrared
02:12:37
radiation right infr infrared wavelengths to heat up the body. And so they're not very hot. So if you look at
02:12:44
like the ambient temperature in an infrared sauna it goes up to like 140 degrees Fahrenheit
02:12:50
which is very different from a traditional sauna. So, infrared saunas don't have all the same benefits as a
02:12:57
traditional hot sauna, something that maybe goes up to 175, 180 degrees Fahrenheit,
02:13:02
unless you are staying in that infrared sauna for like a very long time, perhaps even twice as long as you would or more
02:13:09
in a traditional sauna. The interesting thing about infrared saunas, I would say, um, so a colleague of mine, a
02:13:16
collaborator of mine, Dr. Ashley Mason, she's at UCSF and she's been doing what's called the heat bed study and
02:13:22
it's an infrared sauna that is essentially a head out heat bed. So your whole body is in this infrared sort of
02:13:31
bed, but your head is out of it. So your head's not in it. And people um she's
02:13:36
done she's now done a couple of studies and the most recent study has been done in people with major depressive
02:13:42
disorder. So they have depression and these people are are doing an infrared
02:13:47
sauna to a pretty extreme degree. So she's elevating their core body temperature by around 2°. So they're
02:13:56
essentially getting in a somewhat feverish state. And in order to do that, I mean, these people are in this
02:14:02
infrared sauna for well over an hour. So not like most people that are doing
02:14:07
infrared saunas. You're probably staying there for like 20, 30 minutes, right? So people are getting very very hot to the
02:14:13
po to the point where their core body temperature is going up to you know increasing to um like one one and a half
02:14:19
to two degrees right and she's looking at the effects on depression and so what
02:14:25
she has found is kind of amazing is that people that are doing this infrared
02:14:31
sauna this heatbed and doing cognitive behavioral therapy CBT
02:14:37
they are experiencing massive anti-depressant effect. So, there's something called the Hamilton scale,
02:14:42
which is like a battery of tests that are done to assess depression. And just to give you like um some some
02:14:50
sort of basis of like if you if there's something considered clinically significant, then you have like a
02:14:56
three-point change on that scale. Well, essentially this infrared sauna plus the cognitive behavioral therapy improved
02:15:03
the Hamilton scale, you know, assessment by 16 points. And these are people that
02:15:08
did four or eight rounds of it. So it was over the course of either one month
02:15:13
or two months. Some people just couldn't finish it because it is pretty intense. Like you're you're heating your body up
02:15:19
quite a lot and you're sitting in this, you know, infrared sauna for over an hour and it's it's a it's a pretty intense. But the magnitude of effect on
02:15:26
the antid-depressant effect was it's it's stunning. And this kind of all stems back from her mentor Dr. Dr.
02:15:34
Charles Raison his research that um was essentially like an infrared sauna. So
02:15:40
he did something this was you know back in 2016 he did this study where he put
02:15:45
people in this sort of infrared sauna like thing and it it elevated their core body temperature again by about two two
02:15:51
degrees. There are people with major depressive disorder or he gave them a sham control. So it was kind of hot and
02:15:57
people were thinking they were getting the treatment but it was actually a placebo. Okay. It was enough for them to think they were getting the treatment,
02:16:03
but it wasn't ele elevating their core body temperature enough. And they did one treatment of this, okay? And he
02:16:08
showed that the people that did one treatment of this had an anti-depressant effect that lasted six weeks later after
02:16:15
one treatment. Sham control didn't get this beautiful study. Um, you know,
02:16:20
Ashley kind of followed on that study and showed multiple sessions of it
02:16:25
really had an even more robust effect. But I say this because I don't want to like I don't want to like say infrared
02:16:32
saunas aren't great. However, there's a lot of benefits that have been related
02:16:38
to more hot traditional types of saunas, finished saunas, for example, traditional saunas that are that are
02:16:44
hotter, right? And so you're staying in these 175 180°ree sauna for like 20
02:16:50
minutes. And it's associated with, you know, lower cardiovascular rated
02:16:55
mortality. So if you you're doing it four to seven times a week um that's associated with a 60 sorry 50% lower
02:17:02
cardiovascular related mortality versus doing it one time a week or all cause
02:17:07
mortality it's associated with 40% lower all cause mortality versus doing it one time a week. So
02:17:14
what's going on there? Right. Exactly what's going on there? And so the the the really fascinating thing to me about this deliberate heat
02:17:22
exposure from a sauna is that it is sort of mimicking moderate intensity aerobic
02:17:29
exercise. And this has actually been shown, it's been compared head-to-head to moderate intensity like cycling on a
02:17:35
stationary bike. A lot of the physiological responses, so your core body temperature goes up, your heart
02:17:40
rate goes up, right? When you're exercising, your heart rate goes up. Same thing happens when you're in a hot sauna. your heart rate goes up, your
02:17:48
cardiac output is increased, right? Your blood flow is increasing. All these things are happening and they're very similar. Exercise, heat stress, you're
02:17:55
sweating, right? To cool down your your body. So, it's a way of sort of mimicking this moderate intensity
02:18:02
exercise that doesn't really happen in an infrared sauna if you do the same amount of time as you're doing in a hot
02:18:07
sauna. Now perhaps if you increase that time it would happen but there's all these benefits that are happening with
02:18:14
just doing a deliberate heat exposure from a sauna that seem to not only sort of mimic
02:18:22
cardiovascular exercise but they add on to it. So, we were talking about cardiorespiratory fitness and how
02:18:28
important that is for longevity, right? Where there have been studies that have looked at people that exercise on a
02:18:34
stationary bike or they exercise on a stationary bike and then follow that up with a 15-minute sauna. And it's been
02:18:41
shown that those people that do the 15-minute sauna on top of the exercise have a more a higher improvement in
02:18:47
their cardiorespiratory fitness. They have more improved um levels of their their cholesterol and lipids. their
02:18:53
blood pressure improvements were greater. So there's this additive effect of adding on the deliberate heat exposure with the exercise that isn't
02:19:01
happening with exercise alone. So again, that's sort of just more evidence of
02:19:07
why, you know, doing a deliberate heat exposure like a sauna. In fact, hot tubs, that's something that's also been
02:19:13
shown to improve blood pressure. In fact, a study just came out a couple of weeks ago showing that a hot tub is very
02:19:19
beneficial for improving blood pressure, for doing all the same things that a sauna does, which is kind of exciting because not everyone has a sauna.
02:19:26
I heard that you sometimes rehearse important talks and studies in saunas.
02:19:31
Yeah. I mean, this started back when I was in graduate school. Um, I used to go to this I lived across the street from a
02:19:38
YMCA and I used to go to this sauna and use the sauna before I would go into my lab and do experiments.
02:19:44
And there's a couple things I noticed. One, I was able to handle stress better.
02:19:50
My stress of, you know, failed experiments, mentors putting all this pressure on me, all
02:19:56
that stuff, right? If I went to the sauna beforehand, I was very much, it's like I was more resilient to the stress.
02:20:03
And that was when I started to look into the effects on the brain. And that's where I also am very interested in
02:20:09
depression research as well, right? Because you're you're causing like brain resilience. But um once I started to
02:20:15
realize like this is affecting my mood, this is affecting my ability to handle stress. I was using the sauna like every
02:20:21
day. I mean I was like religious about it. It was crazy. I mean it was like six to seven days a week I was going in that sauna.
02:20:27
And because it was like using it every day, you have to multitask. you only have so much time in the day, right? And
02:20:33
so I'd start rehearsing my presentations, like going through them in my mind while I'm sitting in the sauna with these other people from the
02:20:39
YMCA who probably think I'm crazy because I'm sitting here like saying things, but I noticed that I was able to
02:20:46
remember things better if I had gone through them in my head with the heat.
02:20:52
And it wasn't until many, many years later, I mean, I kept doing that. Like even sometimes when I travel and I'm giving a presentation or a talk, I'll
02:20:59
get in the hot bath in my hotel room and I'll just lay in the hot bath and I just go through my talk in my head or I'll
02:21:05
like look at my notes and like if I forget something I'll go through it in my head. And it wasn't until several years later that I started looking into
02:21:12
the science behind that. Like there's something going on here. What is going on? And I found that actually when you
02:21:19
go into the sauna, so there's a lot of physiological changes that happen. Growth hormone goes up. Um, in fact, it
02:21:24
depending on the the temperature and duration, growth hormone can go up anywhere between two-fold to like
02:21:30
16fold, like insane levels of of growth hormone. But there's something else that goes up called IGF-2,
02:21:37
and that is associated with improving memory and learning. And so, there have
02:21:42
been animal studies that have done this. And so, I've kind of connected the dots here and go, maybe that's why. I don't
02:21:47
really know why. I mean, sometimes just like a very strong emotional response can sort of help you remember something
02:21:54
and you are at the end of the day causing a very strong stress response when you're getting in the heat.
02:21:59
So, I like to use the sauna for a lot of things. I do I do it depends on the day. Sometimes I do it I like to do it before
02:22:05
bed. So, I'll do like the hot tub or the sauna. It improves sleep. It improves my sleep. And that has to do with the
02:22:11
growth hormone. It has to do with what are called somnogenic cytoines. These are inflam inflammatory molecules that
02:22:17
are made that are that cause sleepiness. So if you think about when you're when you're sick and you have, you know,
02:22:23
inflammation going on when you're when you have an illness, you're very tired, you're sleepy, you're producing a lot of what are called somnogenic cytoines.
02:22:30
These are cytoines that are invol inflammation molecules that are involved in making you sleepy. Those are also
02:22:35
produced when you are undergoing deliberate heat exposure like a hot tub or and that's been shown uh as well as a
02:22:41
sauna. So sometimes I like to do the sauna at night like to relax and help help my sleep. Sometimes I like to do it
02:22:46
after a workout um to extend my, you know, my workout like the study I talked about where you're improving your cardiory fitness as well.
02:22:53
Would you like some tea? My team can make you some tea if you'd like some tea. I would love some loose leaf tea in a
02:22:59
metal cup. Why Why don't you want this this tea? what you're doing here is is tapping into my sometimes my friends don't want
02:23:06
to talk to me because I'm like the bearer of bad news, you know, where it's like what am I what is Rhonda going to
02:23:12
tell me now that I shouldn't be doing that I love doing, right? Another obsession of mine of late has been
02:23:18
microlastic exposure. And I know you've talked about this on the podcast before and it's it's in it's in the news now. A
02:23:24
lot of people are sort of familiar with microplastics, right? breakdown of plastic particles that are tiny uh
02:23:32
depending on the size and getting into our circulation. Right. And when you think of microplastics, you
02:23:38
think of plastic. When you think of plastic, you think, "Oh, that plastic water bottle." Yeah. Well, I'll just avoid that plastic water bottle, right?
02:23:45
What you don't realize is that everything everything has plastic. So,
02:23:52
you have here this to-go coffee cup, which I don't know how many coffees I
02:23:57
and teas I've had in a to-go coffee cup, but it's hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds. And the thing that's so
02:24:04
disturbing is I learned that, you know, these many most all of these plastic I
02:24:10
mean, sorry, these um paper looking coffee cups are actually lined with plastic. They're lined with a plastic
02:24:17
liner to prevent like the liquid to, you know, leeching into the paper, right? And that plastic lining when you add
02:24:24
heat to it, i.e. boiling water for tea or hot coffee, it accelerates the
02:24:30
breakdown of the plastic lining. So, you're drinking microlastic beverages
02:24:36
and also the chemicals associated with them. So there was this plastic study that was done that showed heating up
02:24:42
plastic essentially causes these these toxic you know plastic associated
02:24:48
chemicals like BPA bisphenol A which is an endocrine disruptor. It disrupts hormones. It sort of mimic mimics
02:24:55
estrogen. So you know it's it's sometimes like called an estrogen mimemetic. It causes that to leech into
02:25:02
your beverage 55 times more. 55 times 55fold. Yes.
02:25:08
Which is 5,500%. A whole lot. Yes. And so you're talking about drinking, you know, plastic
02:25:15
chemicals and microplastics. So that was like, okay, well, fine. I'm
02:25:20
going to bring my mug in anytime I'm traveling and ask them to put my coffee in that. So I I see so many people with
02:25:27
these to- go, you know, paper cups and and and they're drinking coffee in it. And it's like it's so hard for me because I realize it's like this plastic
02:25:34
soup that you're drinking. Now you have a tea bag on top of that and that is
02:25:39
something that there have been over the course of the last seven or eight years
02:25:44
there have been studies that have come out that these these tea bags are composed of made of you know there's
02:25:51
plastic polymers in them and so there's thousands of microplastics that are
02:25:56
released in every milliliter of tea from these tea bags and there's a variety of different tea bags essentially all of
02:26:03
them release microplastics the ones that's that that look like they won't release them. So now, while I used to
02:26:10
drink a lot of tea when I'm on the go, I I bring my own with me. I bring my own looseleaf tea with a little, you know,
02:26:16
one of those little steepers that can steep the tea. And I use that because
02:26:22
mostly because the heat, you know, it's just it's accelerating that breakdown. Yes, I'll drink plast I mean, I'll drink
02:26:28
water out of a plastic bottle sometimes when I'm traveling because there's no other options. And actually, there was a
02:26:33
study that just came out. I'm sure you saw it. Did you see the study that showed glass had higher levels? So,
02:26:40
water that was in glass had higher levels of microlastic than water that was in plastic containers. This was a
02:26:45
study that came out of France. Oh, come on. You didn't see this study? No. Oh my gosh. This is like everywhere.
02:26:51
Everywhere. I mean, it came out, I don't know, in the last two weeks or so. Um, the study came out of France and it was
02:26:58
essentially showing that glass bottles had more microplastics in the liquid
02:27:04
that they contained than plastic bottles which contain liquid. And you might go,
02:27:10
"What? That makes no sense, right? I mean, why would the glass have plastic
02:27:15
particles at a higher level than a plastic bottle?" Well, it turns out that the paint on top
02:27:20
of the lid of the glass bottle has is it has plastic polymers in it.
02:27:26
And so the paint is flaking off and getting into the water that is contained
02:27:33
in the glass bottle. There is I think a silver lining here and that is well okay
02:27:38
there might be more microplastics in the beverages that are in the glass bottle compared to the plastic bottle but the
02:27:44
size matters. So it was shown that the size is larger in the glass bottles
02:27:50
compared to the plastic bottles and the size of the plastic the the size of the microplastic. And there's a reason why this is important
02:27:56
because microlastics and nanoplastics as you get smaller in size they get
02:28:02
smaller. They're called nanoplastics. Those are the most dangerous because it can be more easily absorbed in the gut
02:28:09
and get into the circulation. If it gets into circulation, it can more easily bypass the bloodb brain barrier and get
02:28:15
into the brain. Size matters and so the larger size flaking off from the paint
02:28:22
is less likely to be absorbed by the gut and to get into circulation. Now, this has to be shown. I'm sure that's going
02:28:29
to this study is going to be done next. Like, this is going to be the next study. It hasn't been shown yet. I've heard you talk about fiber as well
02:28:35
playing a role in getting microplastics out of our body. Okay. So, yes. So, fiber is interesting.
02:28:40
This all comes from animal studies. And fiber seems to play a role in the absorption of microplastics and
02:28:46
nanoplastics in your gut cells. And that's really important because if you don't absorb them, it's excreted through
02:28:52
feces, right? And it's been shown we only absorb about 1 to 2% of these microplastics that we're ingesting.
02:28:59
Fiber, what it does is two things. One, it moves the microplastics through the
02:29:05
intestines quicker, right? Which is what fiber does. But I think the more important thing is the type of fiber. So
02:29:11
you want this fermentable type of fiber, soluble fiber. That's the kind of fiber
02:29:16
that's really good for your gut microbiome. And what that does is it's essentially creating this viscous
02:29:22
gel-like sort of gel-like, you know, mucousy stuff inside of your gut that
02:29:28
encapsulates the microplastic so that it can't be absorbed by the gut, you know, what are called the gut epithelial
02:29:34
cells. And so if you're essentially not able to absorb those microplastics, then
02:29:40
they're not getting into circulation. And that's like the biggest thing that you can do, right? Is is not get them
02:29:45
into circulation. Now, this is all based on animal evidence. I did speak with with a microplastics researcher at a
02:29:52
Harvard, Dr. um Carrie Nadal, and she wasn't even aware of this, and now she's like on it. So, I'm hoping that there'll
02:30:00
be some human human evidence coming soon looking at whether or not microplastics, if you're eating fiber, if that can
02:30:06
basically blunt the absorption of the microplastics into the system. I think
02:30:11
people that are eating more fiber in their diet probably are getting less of that microplastics into their into their
02:30:17
system, but that hasn't been shown in humans. It's only been shown in animals. I'm guessing you don't eat canned soup
02:30:22
either. Yes. Yeah. So the canned soup is interesting. You know, again,
02:30:30
aluminum cans are lined with this plastic, you know, lining and that
02:30:35
prevents the the sort of breakdown of the of the the aluminum, right, the metal.
02:30:42
Uh unfortunately it also causes these chemicals like BPA that are in the
02:30:47
plastic lining to leech into the in this case the soup or the beverage or the
02:30:54
liquid that they're contained in. Right? There was this study that showed I think
02:30:59
it was was it a th00and% increase of BPA after drinking a soup out of a can
02:31:05
versus a soup out of a glass. A thousand% increase in bisphenol A
02:31:10
levels. I mean that is bisphenol A levels being BPA which is the bad thing in microplastics.
02:31:16
It's the it's one of the bad chemicals in plastics that is an endocrine
02:31:21
disruptor. So it's disrupting hormones and you know that can play a role in a
02:31:28
lot of different things um depending on what we're looking at. So it's hugely
02:31:35
important for obviously like neurodedevelopment in children. So like pregnant women but even like you know
02:31:42
disrupting disrupting hormones in general like mimicking estrogen I mean that's not something that guys want to
02:31:48
do either right so it does it is something to be aware of but the thing
02:31:53
is is that you know BPA it was this beautiful marketing strategy that came out I don't know how many years ago but
02:32:00
all this BPA was replaced with something else that wasn't BPA it was BPS and so
02:32:06
now everything is marketed as BPA free And people think that is like, oh, oh,
02:32:11
it's not dangerous. It's BPA free. However, what it's replaced with is doing the same thing as BPA, if not
02:32:17
worse. And that's been now shown in multiple studies. So, it's also an endocrine disruptor. It's doing the same thing. And yet, people think, you know,
02:32:24
that it's it's safe because it's BPA free. Did you hear about this study of people
02:32:30
that live close to a golf course? Yes. Yeah. There's a study that came out, I
02:32:36
don't know how, it was very recent, maybe a month 2025. Yeah. So maybe I think it was a couple months ago, and the study showed that
02:32:42
people that lived near within a mile or so of golf courses had a much higher
02:32:48
incidence of Parkinson's disease. Right. It says 126% higher risk,
02:32:54
right? Okay. So then why is that? Right. Okay. And this is where I want to get into the the pesticides issue because
02:33:02
it's it's known like any scientist that's done research in neurogenerative
02:33:07
disease. It's one of the ways that you induce Parkinson's disease in animals is
02:33:13
you give them insect. You give them essentially a pesticide. So rotinone
02:33:19
being one, paraquat. And what that does is a mitochondrial toxin. So it's it's basically causing the mitochondria to
02:33:27
die and then essentially when the mitochondrias are are dying or apoptosing you know the cell under goes
02:33:33
apoptosis and dying. So you're essentially you can induce Parkinson's disease in mice by giving them these
02:33:40
types of essentially you know these types of insecttoides and herbicides. So
02:33:46
it's well known that that can cause you know Parkinson's disease. It's important to know that it's mostly the ingestion
02:33:53
of it and not the inhalation of it. And that was a big concern because it gets into the water source and that's what's
02:34:00
thought to be the underlying cause. People that are living close to a golf course, it's getting into it's
02:34:05
contaminating the water source essentially. And so people are are drinking these these you know this
02:34:13
basically these pesticides, insecticides and herbicides, right? So, um, a water
02:34:19
filter like a reverse osmosis, you know, water filter, something like that that can filter out some of these molecules,
02:34:25
hugely important. And I think that's the solution to people that are living near a golf course or people that are living
02:34:30
near any to sort of agricultural place where they're using a high volume of these types of, you know, herbicides.
02:34:37
What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about? run. I think we talked a little bit about
02:34:44
magnesium, but I don't know that we talked enough about magnesium and it is
02:34:50
important because it's something that is required for
02:34:56
gosh over 300 different enzymes in your body need it to function properly. So,
02:35:01
it's what's called a co-actor and I mentioned DNA repair enzymes. So,
02:35:06
there's it's also used to make energy. So, you need magnesium to make energy and to use energy. You need magnesium to
02:35:14
repair damage that's happening all the time. And close to 50% of the population in the United States does not have
02:35:21
adequate levels of magnesium because they're not eating the foods that they need to to get the magnesium. Dark leafy
02:35:28
greens. I mentioned it's at the center of a chlorophyll molecule. There have been studies that have shown that for
02:35:34
every 100 millgram decrease in magnesium
02:35:40
intake, there's a 24% increase in pancreatic cancer incidents and that's
02:35:45
in a dose dependent manner. So you keep going up and up. I think that people
02:35:50
don't realize that they're not getting enough magnesium. Magnesium is required to make to turn vitamin D3 into the
02:35:56
steroid hormone. So some people have a magnesium, you know, insufficient amount of magnesium they're taking in and
02:36:02
they're actually not able to make enough vitamin D into that steroid hormone. Again, magnesium is controlling 300
02:36:08
enzymes. Some of those enzymes are actually the ones that are converting vitamin D3 into the steroid hormone. So
02:36:15
magnesium is hugely important. It's something that can be easily corrected.
02:36:21
The deficiency can be easily corrected by taking a supplement but also eating more leafy greens which is the best
02:36:27
source of magnesium. The question is what do supplements do? What kind of supplement do you take? How much should
02:36:33
you take? All these things are I think questions that people are interested in. So I've got some magnesium here. Is um
02:36:40
is taking magnesium going to have a positive role then on my my speed of
02:36:45
aging? I do think so. I think so. Yes. We talked about cancer incidents, right?
02:36:51
Magnesium. So, I think magnesium is one of those sort of minerals that is c when
02:36:58
you when you don't have enough of it, it's causing that insidious damage over time that accumulates and then rears its
02:37:05
ugly head, you know, in the fifth, sixth, seventh decade of life. And that ugly head happens to be cancer. So I do
02:37:11
think that if you are able to avoid magnesium deficiency and insufficiency,
02:37:17
then you are going to be able to basically make sure there's enough magnesium around for everything in your
02:37:23
body to use it with with what it needs it for. So um and I've heard you say that 50% of
02:37:29
people are deficient in the United States in magnesium, right? Close to 50%. And not to mention, you just talked about, you know,
02:37:34
electrolytes. athletes, they actually require between 10 to 20% more magnesium
02:37:40
than the general population because of their magnes their magnesium losses are so great and so they can be even more
02:37:46
deficient. Magnesium is needed for red blood cells and so you know people can have lower energy as well. So,
02:37:52
magnesium, magnesium is so important for so many different things. And you know, like I said, I think there I do think
02:37:57
there's a trade-off here where whatever magnesium you are getting from your diet, if you're not getting enough of
02:38:03
it, it's probably going to make energy instead of being used to repair damage because you need to make energy every
02:38:10
day, right? That's the most important thing. If you don't make energy, you die. Like, you can't survive. So
02:38:16
whatever magnesium your body is getting, it's not going to that process of
02:38:22
repairing DNA, which doesn't really matter until you're in your, you know, fifth, sixth, seventh decade of life and
02:38:28
cancer, you know, risk increases, right? And so there's this idea, this put out
02:38:34
by my mentor Dr. Bruce Ames, called triage theory. And he's shown some evidence of it. Magnesium is one of them
02:38:40
where magnesium seems to be triaged to energy production at the expense of
02:38:45
repairing your DNA. What does that mean? It means that if you're not getting enough magnesium
02:38:51
through your dietary intake and you're not supplementing with it, whatever magnesium that you're getting, there's 300 different enzymes that need it to do
02:38:59
their function that your body is finding a way to triage it to the most essential
02:39:05
functions that are going to basically help with short-term survival. Triage means it's basically allocating
02:39:11
Yes. It's allocating it to the the processes inside your body that are essential for short-term survival right
02:39:18
now. Long-term health, diseases of aging, like cancer, that doesn't matter as
02:39:25
much, right? If you're deficient, yeah, your body your body basically says, "No, I don't I'm not going to give
02:39:30
whatever precious magnesium I have right now to prevent cancer because I need to live long enough to reproduce and pass
02:39:37
on my genes." And cancer doesn't happen until I'm well well past that. Right? So
02:39:42
this idea, it's called the triage theory and he's he it's been shown for um several different micronutrients. Another one is vitamin K. So vitamin K
02:39:49
is really high in dark leafy greens. Well, what Bruce Bruce um has shown is
02:39:56
that vitamin K is important for a couple of things. One, it's important for blood coagulation, blood clotting, and that
02:40:03
all happens in the liver. You activate proteins in the liver for blood clotting. If you don't have vitamin K,
02:40:09
you can't do that, right? It's it's one of the reasons why when a baby's first born, they give it a vitamin K shot so
02:40:15
that they have blood coagulation. On your YouTube channel, you made a video about magnesium, which I recommend
02:40:20
everybody goes and watches if you are interested in going deeper on this subject. And um on your YouTube, I found
02:40:25
a stat that said for every 100 milligram drop in magnesium intake is linked to a
02:40:31
24% higher risk of pancreatic cancer. Yes. Which is shocking. It is. And again, it
02:40:39
comes down to the DNA repair enzymes that are that require magnesium to be
02:40:46
activated. And if over a lifetime, you're part of that 50% of the population in the United States that
02:40:51
doesn't get enough magnesium, then you're talking about not being able to repair damage to your DNA over decades.
02:40:58
And essentially what that means is, you know, at some point damage happens to your DNA in the right part of a gene
02:41:04
that is what's called encogenic. it's cancer-causing and so eventually it's going to cause cancer if you're not able
02:41:11
to repair that damage, right? And so getting enough magnesium is important to make sure you're repairing that damage.
02:41:18
And um it's not only important for cancer, but also all cause mortality. So there's also studies showing that people
02:41:24
with the highest magnesium levels have a 40% lower all-c cause mortality than
02:41:30
people with the lowest magnesium levels. and they have a 50% lower cancer related
02:41:36
mortality compared to people with the lowest levels. So again, cancer is still in there and we're seeing that magnesium
02:41:42
intake is very important with respect to cancer. And that is something that, you
02:41:47
know, people don't realize when they're not getting enough of magnesium in their diet, they're not eating their leafy greens or they're not taking a
02:41:54
supplement that they're sort of affecting their long-term risk of cancer. So people with high magnesium
02:42:00
levels have a 50% lower risk of cancer death than those with low levels,
02:42:06
right? H and is that you you obviously can't do
02:42:12
like a double blind placebo control test on that. So they're they're really establishing causation. So it could be
02:42:18
other things like it could be the other dietary factors that go into go into
02:42:23
that. Maybe if we think about causation, people that eat a lot of hamburgers don't have a lot of like leafy greens.
02:42:30
Exactly. You nailed it. Um, essentially, magnesium is packaged in these foods that are beneficial like dark leafy
02:42:37
greens. And there's so many other benefits along with them that you can't establish causation and say, "Aha, it's
02:42:43
just the magnesium." I would argue it's probably not just the magnesium, but magnesium does play an important role.
02:42:50
It's just you can't of course pinpoint it to just magnesium because you're right there are many other important
02:42:57
healthy things in these micronutri in these plants that are beneficial for health as well.
02:43:02
There was a really random thing that I think parents might appreciate us talking about which was when I was
02:43:07
looking at your work you mentioned this chemical that if parents take while their baby is inside them mothers take
02:43:15
the baby is smarter. Yes. Choline. Choline. Choline. Yeah, choline is an essential
02:43:22
nutrient that is it's really concentrated in egg yolk. That's a
02:43:28
really good source of choline, but it's important for
02:43:33
it's a precursor for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. It's also important for producing all
02:43:39
these epigenetic changes called methylation that regulates the way our genes are expressed. And it's also um
02:43:47
very important for our cells like the membranes of our cells and it it makes
02:43:53
something called phosphotidyl choline. It's doing so many things is the point I'm getting to. I don't want to get into all this nitty-gritty because people can
02:43:59
get lost in that. But the point is that peg women that were given like the RDA
02:44:04
close to the RDA it was like 500. What's the RDA? the recommended daily allowance. Actually, I think in this
02:44:11
case it was the DRRI, the the dietary recommended intake. So, pregnant women
02:44:16
were were given close to what is the dietary recommended intake. So, they were given 480 milligrams a day of
02:44:22
choline or they were given almost double that. So, they were given 930 milligrams a day. And I don't remember
02:44:31
what trimester uh they started in but they were given this you know throughout a certain time frame and during
02:44:38
pregnancy and then a variety of cognitive tests were done after the child was born. And the children that
02:44:44
were given the mothers that had children that were given the really high choline intake the 930 milligrams scored better
02:44:50
on all these IQ tests. And so essentially their children were smarter
02:44:55
if they if they if their mother had taken choline throughout pregnancy. And I think this is really interesting because it's the one easy thing that
02:45:02
people can do. They can supplement with choline andor they can eat a lot of eggs with egg yolk which is something I I did
02:45:09
both during pregnancy. I was eating probably like six eggs a day and
02:45:14
supplementing with choline. So I was doing both. And um every mo every mother
02:45:19
wants to think or every parent wants to think that their child is smart. But I bet your child is smart. He's a smart cookie. Yeah.
02:45:25
How old is he now? Almost 10. Seven. Seven. Okay. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest
02:45:30
leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you.
02:45:37
Interesting. If you could go back and change one
02:45:42
thing about your life, what would it be? And you cannot say nothing. That's what
02:45:48
it says. I would say the one thing that I would change, I'm 47 years old, just turned 47
02:45:58
last month. I have one child. And I think if I could go back in time,
02:46:05
I would change my decision to only have one child and I would have another
02:46:10
child. Why?
02:46:16
Because I love being a mother. I love the joy
02:46:23
that children bring to your life is it's unexplainable until
02:46:29
you experience it. Everything about it, helping shape them, learning with them,
02:46:36
going through hard times and experiences, but also experiencing the joys.
02:46:43
I regret sort of you know I had children later in life because I was really
02:46:49
pursuing my career and it is definitely challenging being an
02:46:55
entrepreneur that's a mother. I made a decision that I was going to have one
02:47:00
child because I wouldn't be able to do as much of what I love doing outside of
02:47:06
being a mother if I had more than one child. And now I realize that say that
02:47:11
when I'm older and closer to dying, I know now that
02:47:18
I'm not going to think about doing one more podcast when I'm on my deathbed. I'm going to think about all the
02:47:24
experiences I've had with my family. And I do I do have a pretty balanced I would
02:47:29
say balanced personal life and family life with my career.
02:47:34
I don't know that it was the easiest decision to make where I had to sort of give up some of my intellectual pursuit,
02:47:42
some of my entrepreneurial my productivity essentially. I had to give some of that up to to to
02:47:49
be the best mother that I wanted to be to be present with my husband and my my son and enjoy everything that I enjoy
02:47:56
because that takes time. and that time that I'm with them, I am not doing my
02:48:01
podcasting or my research or any of that, right? And I'm happy with that decision. And in fact, I would even give
02:48:08
up more of it for another child. Um, and that's a very personal thing that I'm
02:48:14
discussing. So hopefully I'll be okay with it.
02:48:20
It's not the first time I've heard this. Really? Yeah. No. Yeah, it's not the first time. I I hear this a lot which is fascinating
02:48:27
to me from from high performance women. It is it's you know
02:48:34
I say that it's very hard to be a very
02:48:39
high performing female and mother at the same time. Uh you either have to
02:48:45
sacrifice being present with your family or your health because you don't sleep
02:48:51
as much. uate, you know, you're you're basically not going to be getting as much sleep because you're going to be working
02:48:57
rather than sleeping during some of the those hours, right? So, I do I do think that it is very challenging and I'm not
02:49:05
saying that um there aren't really high performing mothers out there, but it is
02:49:10
it is a very difficult thing to do. When you say you you made the choice to
02:49:15
have one, was that an intentional choice? I you and your partner did family planning and said we want one or
02:49:21
was it because you said your child is seven you said you're 47 so at 40 obviously it's it's becomes a little bit
02:49:27
more tricky than it than it does when your 30s to conceive right so I think what in in my case um I
02:49:34
I got pregnant when I was 38 for the first time and I gave birth when I was 39
02:49:40
so I was pretty late already and at that point
02:49:46
I didn't you know as I It was I was so overwhelmed and my productivity had gone down so much just from that event
02:49:54
that I was worried that I wouldn't be able to keep it up if I did another one right away, which I had to do because I
02:50:01
had waited so long. Now, why did I wait so long? I was pursuing my career, you know? I mean, and I would argue now that
02:50:08
I could have had a kid in graduate school. I could have had a child as a post-doal fellow, but again, it's one of
02:50:16
those things where you just you keep you want to like get through this milestone and then this milestone and then you want everything to be perfect and you
02:50:21
start to like this perfectionism can sometimes be a double-edged sword, right? Yeah. Where your perfectionism then is like,
02:50:28
okay, well, you're you're going to have a trade-off here. Yeah. And that trade-off for me was my reproductive lifespan. You know, I'm I
02:50:34
was older when I started having children. know there's a lot of technologies out there now that can help with that but at you know 47 it's I
02:50:41
would say not looking good. Uh I think I ask about this and I'm curious about this because me and my
02:50:47
partner I'm 32. She's turned 33 last week. We don't have any kids. We've been together for almost seven years now I
02:50:53
think. And so you can imagine in my life how easy it would be to make excuses
02:50:59
that I need to get through this year because this big thing's happening or I'm moving to LA so now's not the right
02:51:05
time. And then she's got her business going on so now is not the right time for her and she's traveling and doing these retreats around the world so
02:51:10
that's not perfect timing. And then because of this podcast, I've played the scenario forward because I get to meet
02:51:16
people who are a little bit further down the line than me. And I get to ask them about their regrets and the decisions they wish they'd made and were they
02:51:22
intentional about fat family planning, did they wish they'd done it earlier? And the thing it's changed in me is it's made me realize that to start the
02:51:29
process, if it's something I want to do well before I'm ready because there is a
02:51:35
there whether we like it or not, there is a biological clock. And the thing that I've observed in the guests,
02:51:41
specifically high performance women, whether you Ronda Rousey, the UFC champion, who I sat and interviewed and
02:51:48
who was in tears talking about her failed IVF for the I don't know the fifth, sixth, seventh time, or other
02:51:54
women that have sat here and interviewed and looked in their faces is the regret of having that decision taken taken away
02:52:01
from you is going to be much much worse than the inconvenience
02:52:08
of the choosing an imperfect time to have the kid. So, funnily enough, I w I
02:52:13
don't people don't really know this cuz I don't talk about this, but I walked away from this podcast a couple just after hearing this story over and over again and I went to the women in my
02:52:20
lives and I was like, it's like super annoying being that guy cuz especially as a guy saying it, I'm like, by the
02:52:25
way, family planning as early as possible is probably a good idea. and
02:52:30
whether that means freezing your eggs or freezing your embryos or just giving yourself the option in the future um is
02:52:37
probably a good idea. And it was so interesting to actually see the reaction to me saying that to some of the women in my life that I care about like my,
02:52:43
you know, my siblings or my partner because upon saying it, it wasn't
02:52:51
incredibly wellreceived because I think it's a confronting thing to say to somebody
02:52:58
because there's a bit of a stigma associated with like freezing your eggs and IVF and freezing your MBOS's. And
02:53:03
even with my partner, the first time I said it to her, it was it was almost as if I was like insulting a little bit,
02:53:11
insulting her. That's almost the the how I thought she took it for the first three or four minutes. But then when I
02:53:16
explained what I was saying by like give let's give ourselves the option when we're older, you know, if you know,
02:53:23
let's just give ourselves the option. And also, if you go through these procedures when you're younger, you have higher quality yield from the eggs you
02:53:29
freeze or the embryos you freeze. Let's just give ourselves the option. And then she kind of turned 5 minutes into the conversation and then she got super
02:53:35
excited about it like 15 minutes in and now we're like super excited. So like we're we're trying to conceive but also
02:53:41
we're going to be freezing our eggs and freezing embryos in this year in September because and I've just tried to
02:53:48
be a really big influence to the women in my life to like give yourself the option. And I say this because I've seen the regret on this podcast and that's
02:53:55
what I'm saying. And I think all I think all people that can and I know it's expensive as early as you can should
02:54:00
consider the fact that we live in a world that is driving productivity that is making us work later and later in
02:54:06
life that is making us more obsessed with our careers and without us really knowing it there is a clock and it's
02:54:12
robbing us of the option to make family planning decisions. 100% agree. I I can't I can't agree
02:54:20
more. Exclamation exclamation everything you just said. I mean, if I had frozen my eggs or we had done, you know, IVF
02:54:27
and frozen embryos that were viable and healthy, then we'd have the option, right? I mean, it's it's it's it's so
02:54:34
true. And I don't know. I think I think I was just really blinded by and
02:54:41
overwhelmed by, you know, how much work I have to do and thinking, "Oh, there's no way I could do more than one."
02:54:47
Because, again, I when I'm a mother, I go all in. Yeah. When I'm a podcaster, I go all in.
02:54:53
That's exactly, you know, it's not just, you know, when I have a guest on, like I really like I need to like be really interested in
02:54:59
them and, you know, so there's it's all in, but not giving myself that option is a big regret, you know, where at least
02:55:06
if I had frozen my eggs down, then I would be at a point now this if I had done this, you know, when I was 39 or 40
02:55:13
or even if I had done it the first time, you know, when I was earlier in my 30s, I should have done that, you know, but
02:55:19
um I just didn't have the foresight enough to to do that and I and I do regret it. So, it's great. It's great
02:55:26
that you talk about it to the the women you that are in your life and even on the podcast. We're really bad at forecasting the fact
02:55:34
that we will change this. And I think this is like really at the heart of it. Like we're really bad
02:55:40
at forecasting the fact that our current state of mind might not be our future state of mind. But you've only got to look backwards in your life and realize
02:55:46
how different you are and how you think and what your priorities were. I was in nightclubs at 18 and 19. I there's
02:55:51
nothing for me going to a nightclub now be like a form of like it'd be like waterboarding me. It'd be like torture.
02:55:56
I changed and so at like 35 at 40 45 there's a high probability that I'm
02:56:02
going to have a different perspective than the one I have now. So give myself the option at 45 to like you
02:56:07
know so that's kind of how I think about it and I say this out publicly because I just think I don't like I don't like
02:56:13
seeing that regret in people. It's hard. Yeah, it it's definitely hard. Thankfully, I do have this joy in
02:56:19
my life and I'm so glad I have that. But, and I have to acknowledge the fact that
02:56:25
many people even if they did want the option for fertility reasons can't have children. So, um it's not still not an
02:56:32
option for everybody because there are, you know, people have certain health complications and um other issues which
02:56:38
prevent them from having kids even if they wanted to and even if they're young and I've got friends in my life that unfortunately are in that situation. But
02:56:45
yeah, thank you so much for the work that you do. It's um it's really really important work in part because you're so
02:56:51
unbelievably engaging, but you're so because of your obsession, you're so unbelievably rigorous and in the detail
02:56:57
of the things you talk about. And as you said, there's so many people around the world, and I know because we we meet them wherever we go in the world that
02:57:03
don't have access to this information like they're not going to be on PubMed reading through the journals and trying to distill these big words. And I think
02:57:09
you do a brilliant job of educating many many millions of people in every corner of the world through your YouTube channel and your Instagram etc. and um
02:57:17
making these like complicated things accessible and if if if you're successful in that which you very much are you're you're tilting the trajectory
02:57:23
of their life but also therefore their future and their kids' lives and their kids' kids' lives and um and that's a
02:57:29
really wonderful thing and we need more public educators like you that have the talent of articulation and engagement
02:57:34
that you do. There's they're very very rare and hard to come by. I do a podcast where I look at all these people and you're like the very very best at it and
02:57:41
you've done it for so unbelievably long and that's why. So, thank you so much for educating us and allowing us to live the future that uh that'll be most
02:57:47
conducive with our health and happiness. Well, thank you so much Stephen for the really engaging conversation and for asking the hard questions.
02:57:54
Thank you. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show
02:58:01
regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what
02:58:06
we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do
02:58:12
that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single
02:58:18
week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
02:58:27
[Music] Heat. Heat. N. [Music]
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