Hello friends, welcome back to the show my guest today is dr. Rhonda Patrick. She's a biomedical scientist researcher and a podcaster determining the best actions to take for enhancing our health and extending Our Lives has grown more challenging. There are an unlimited number of Wellness approaches at our disposal. Thankfully, dr. Patrick has dedicated her entire professional life to identifying the most evidence-based strategies for improving our Health and Longevity expect to learn if low Omega-3s are worse for you than
Fucking cigarettes what Rhonda thoughts are on vaping in nicotine the best foods to boost your metabolism the once a week workout that candy age Your Heart by 20 years how to get the benefits of heat exposure. If you don't have a sauna the terrifying health risks of being too sedentary and much more. This was a lot of fun. I've been a massive fan of Rhonda's for a long time and it's nice to see someone who's focusing on the exercise side as well as the diet side the seems to be this obsession with diet as the only thing that you can manipulate
Meanwhile, all of the exercise protocols kind of get forgotten about and Rhonda is definitely in both camps. So I think there is tons and tons to take away from this plus. I've actually started incorporating some of the training protocols into my weekly routine, which is both painful Savage and hopefully going to make me die later. So I'll report back in 80 years, but now ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome. Dr. Rhonda Patrick.
Our low Omega-3s worse than smoking cigarettes.
I don't know that they're worse. So omega-3 fatty acids are in. You know, they're essential for many things.
And I think you're referring to one specific study that came out of dr. Bill Harris this group. He's the head of the fatty acid Research Institute. And he's actually the pioneer of the omega-3 index test which is how you should measure your omega-3 levels are measured in our red blood cells rather than what you'll 99% of the time find if you get a Mega three test its plasma levels, so red blood cells take about 120 days to turn over. So it's a long-term marker of your omega-3. Whereas if you go and
Get a Mega three plasma test. It's kind of like what did I eat for dinner? And the last week right? So you may have had a bunch of salmon, but maybe you don't usually eat salmon. So so anyways, the omega-3 index is a way to measure omega-3 levels and he had done a study looking at omega-3 levels and what's called all-cause mortality. So people dying from all sorts of non accidental causes cardiovascular disease disease is always at the top of the list because that's pretty much what everyone's dying of let's like the number one cause of death
Most developed countries and so he was looking at all cause mortality and correlating that with you Mega three index which essentially is measuring omega-3 low fatty acid levels and what he found was that so people that have a low omega-3 index so that would be four percent or less hat and then comparing it to people that had a high omega-3 index. So that would be eight percent or higher. So people that have the high omega-3 index had a five-year increased life expectancy compared.
Two people with the low now people in the United States on average have about a four to five percent omega-3 index. So it's pretty pretty standard pretty standard. I would say in terms of like what people in the US have in terms of their Mega three vs. Japan where they utilize Seafood their omega-3 index is like 10% so and they have a five year increased life expectancy by the way compared to people United States. So what he also did him and his colleagues looked at they stratified the the data and will tell you other factors physical activity, you know, yeah.
I smoked in and this is where it got super interesting because and I just the graph of this data. Does it like more Justice, you know because you can visually see it but he looked at all cause mortality and people that like live the longest were of course the high omega-3 and x with no smoking. Right? So like non-smokers they had the longest life expectancy and then people with a lowest life expectancy were smokers with Aloha Mega three index
But then when he looked at people that smoked but had a high omega-3 index either. They're getting a lot of fish or supplementing. They had the same life expectancy as people with low omega-3 but didn't smoke. So in other words having a low omega-3 index was like smoking with respect to all cause mortality and that's you know, and of course I get all the smokers out there going. Oh, so all I have to do is settlement with a mega three and I'm like, oh no, that's the wrong way to think about it. You know, I think I think most people now know,
Smoking is terrible for your health and it goes back to this idea this framework that I like to think about nutrition, which is what do we need right instead of like always focusing on what to avoid? Because if you focus on what to avoid, you still may not be getting what you need to run your metabolism to run, you know, neurotransmitter synthesis and all of that. So omega-3 fatty acids are hugely important for many things and we could talk hours for that. But with respect to smoking it's really quite
Right, you know it's kind of a stong astounding when you just look at that graph and they're like overlaid where you're like, oh wow. Non-smokers are with low make omega-3 or living as long as smokers with high omega-3.
Do you think that this is a direct cause of the Omega-3s or is there some healthy user bias that's Upstream from the kinds of people who are the kinds of people that are like people that will have omega threes in a
diet great question. So with this type of data, which is observational data, it's always a correlation so you can never you know,
Definitively say it's caused by a causation. So yes, there could be it could be a healthy user bias. There were other factors that were accounted for but I will say this.
Smoking everyone thinks about smoking and lung cancer or they cancer risk, right? Actually the biggest problem with smoking is heart disease. It is a huge it's so when you so here's the thing that I like to think about like with respect to smoking and disease risk smoking in a dose-dependent manner will increase your risk for lung cancer. So in other words the more cigarettes this you smoke the higher the risk of cancer, but it's not a linear increase with respect to cardiovascular.
disease and heart attack risk so you can just have a little bit of cigarettes and your heart disease risk skyrockets and omega-3 is one of the biggest things that it protects against is heart disease right doctors prescribe it so there's been randomized controlled trials where people are given high-dose omega-3 purified omega-3 in the form of either EPA which is one of the Marines horses or a combination of DHA and EPA and and a variety of Studies have
Own that like heart attack risk risk of dying from cardiovascular disease is dramatically lower in people that are given Omega 3s compared to a placebo. So, you know the fact that the the non-smokers with a Lo Mega 3 and X are probably affected. It's affecting their cardiovascular health inflammation is a big also a Big Driver of cardiovascular disease and Omega-3s are really good at lowering inflammation and many different ways. So yet sort of a long-winded
Did you know answer to your question is no you can't definitively say that healthy user bias isn't involved.
But there's a mechanism that we could see how it
would work there is and you know again there is a judgment for other health factors. So you would think that that would show
up. Let's say that someone goes I hadn't even thought about a mega threes. I should probably optimize those. What's the 80/20 of getting good Omega-3s in your diet. Someone might struggle with Seafoods kind of hard or expensive to cook at home. Where would you send them for getting it from diet getting it from supplementation?
What do they need to know?
So I think I talked about that. I make three index. And again you want to get 8% or higher. It's always good to measure things but there's been studies done where people with a low Mega 3 and X. So the standard American basically four percent if you give them about 2 grams a day of Omega-3, they can raise their omega-3 index from 4 percent to 8 percent. So that would be a supplemental form pretty 2 grams. So I'll just give you to give you some perspective, you know, Physicians prescribe. What's Lovaza, which is a DHA
EPA ethyl Ester form we can talk about different forms of Omega-3 of Omega-3 and they also prescribe the CPA which is a highly pure EPA form and they prescribe them at Grant in the gram dose of four grams per day. So that's twice as much as 2 grams a day, which so I'm what I'm getting at. It's a fairly safe dose and so two grams a day can raise people from 4% to 8% I think that's a really good sort of just starting point or the average person. I take experimentally higher doses, but but you know, I think generally speaking
It's pretty safe for most people to take two grams a day and you're going to get that high omega-3 index at 8%
Where are they going to go? How are they going to assess without getting some Norwegian farmer? That's squeezing fish into a barrel and and doing it holistically himself. What can you say about assessing the quality of Ivan? Remember cod liver oil tablets back in the day that all sorts of uproar before there was even a podcasting Universe to kind of scrutinize it what do people need to know if they're choosing their omega-3
supplement.
I think choosing omega-3 supplement is we actually have a lot of data nowadays. We have access to that data quite easy because there's a lot of third-party testing sites that go out and they just randomly get fish oil supplements off the grocery store shelves and they say I'm going to take this supplement. I'm going to measure important things. I'm going to measure the concentration of the Omega-3s EPA & DHA is the concentration in there. What is stated on the bottle? I'm going to measure you know, so fish it's being isolated for it's an oil it's in the fat right so
Fish also have contaminants they have pcbs. They have mercury among others. And so measuring those contaminants is important because fish oil is generally purified, but you want to make sure a good job was done. So those contaminants are measured and then oxidation. So Omega-3s are a polyunsaturated fatty acid prone to oxidation. And so you don't want to get something that has an oxidation of greater than 10. So anything greater than 10 of total oxidation you want to avoid because
it's like consuming rancid fat right rancid lipid like you don't want to do that. So so, you know, those things are all measured and their sources out there. So consumerlab is a you know, third party testing site that you know, they just there's a lot of affordable brands that you can find because some supplements are just very expensive. So I do like to kind of send people there because I have no affiliation with consumer by the way. I just like that. I like I use them. So I like that you can go and find a pretty decent quality fish oil supplement if you're a data Nerd Like Me.
You can take this up a level and you can go to the international fish oil standards site ifos. They just I mean it's like data party like they give you so much data, but like you have to like know what to do with it. So they measure all these things but like everything else right? And they also tell you the form its in so I mentioned ethyl Ester for the prescription form. There's also triglyceride form. Those are the two main forms that you can find fish oil supplements or Omega-3 supplements in
In and generally speaking triglyceride form is the most bioavailable triglyceride form is what is the form that you're eating fish? The Omega-3s are in triglyceride form when the Omega-3s are purified. They take it out of the triglyceride form and they purify it and it's in an ethyl Ester form some companies than Arias terrify it back into that form to make it Supreme and more
bioavailable pure and bioavailable
exactly, but not everyone does that and so if you get an ethyl Ester,
Worm, which is what is prescribed most people that are getting prescription form of Omega-3 to help prevent cardiovascular disease. They're taking ethyl Ester form. Then I've got the thing to know is you have to take it with a meal and preferably with a higher fat meal because it is absorb it you will absorb so little if you're taking it on empty stomach. It's very important and I didn't want to get into all the new ones but I mentioned two grams a day of Omega-3 will raise your omega-3 index from low to high right 4% to 8% Well if you really kind of
Look at the form people were taking triglyceride versus ethyl Ester, you know, they had to take you know, less of the triglyceride form to get there. But so I like to just average it out and say to but so if you can get triglyceride form, it's a great Forum to get
How much salmon or Cod or halibut do I need to eat per week? If I was going to try and get this through my
diet, right? I mean that's that's a question that I don't have empirical data to back up but I'll so so here's my sort of thoughts on that. I do think that wild Alaskan salmon is one of the best words of a mega three because that is a fish that has a very low level of contaminants like Mercury pcbs per gram or per ounce. I guess is usually measured per ounce of the fish, right? So
Salmon would be a great source. Now how much of that you have to eat? It's really, you know, depends on the cooking method like how how cooked was it? Because you can degrade some of the Omega-3s are somewhat heat-sensitive. So I don't know how much you'd have to do a test. Right? So you'd have to say okay. I typically eat salmon two nights a week or three nights a week and and then you want to wait 120 days, right? Because it takes that long for your red blood cells to turn over. OK I now here's the proton will
just just tell me how
How much Simon I need to eat? Come on,
I don't know I guess a week at least at least I would I would say you probably have to supplement on top of that. I don't know that twice a week is definitely not necessarily going to go from 4% to 8% But if you were to do, you know, I would imagine a lot of the people that care about this listening to this protocol will think right. I'm going to find a good quality low oxidation triglyceride version of Omega-3s that responsibly sourced. I like the look of I'm going to take two grams of that per day, and I'm probably going to try and have
Some sort of fish meal twice per week. Does that seem realistic? That's absolutely that's kind of that's what I do. I mean I did it and that's what I do. Did you up the dose a little bit more but like I said, you know, I like eat it. Like I take it throughout the day the Omega-3s you mentioned about smoking that did you see that the UK is thinking about introducing looks like it's going to introduce a disposable Vape ban Countrywide.
I literally came right band. Yeah, is there a non-disposable Vapes that we'll
just so you know the kind of liquid that people the E-liquid that people put into the these huge things that look like knuckle dusters. Yeah. So those will still be allowed actual people can still get the non-disposable Vape Liquid Plus the Contraptions you need to make it work but the elf bar the Escobar that
stuff what are teenagers getting their hands on what our Junior High star they getting money for the Disposable. See is that is that the Jets
just wait.
More it's way more arduous to be you gone by this thing and then you get the liquid and then you fill it with the liquid and all the rest of it and the flavors are a little bit more tough to balance. But yeah, it's the Disposable stuff. There's a couple of comments about Owen environmental impact because they do, you know the batteries are you basically throwing away a battery with some residual nicotine in it not good, but more not good is the fact that teachers in the UK have found that like a non in significant.
Of school children are dependent on disposable
Vapes. Okay, so I was going to say I don't there's like I could see arguments either way. I'm personally I as a parent and I have talked to teachers it mean it's insane huge problem in many schools were in the US. Yes in the u.s. We're taping vaping in class in the
bathrooms. Yeah, they've been sold in special 12 13 year-old Vape detectors in the bathrooms of British.
Cool. Yeah, I know. It's a problem here to especially in public schools. And so I personally like and bias and I'm like good like I don't want these like this. It's so easy and it's like bubble gum flavored. It's like, yeah, it's like geared towards true. I almost feel like it. Was there a push to like get them earlier. But you know, so in that regard, I'm I'm on I'm on board to be honest
have you looked into the dangers of vaping much at all? What do you think about that? I
had, you know, I've tweeted a couple studies. I haven't done a deep dive on it. I mean like I know there's
Some studies about so like lung issues, but like I don't know if it was like contaminants that are hitchhiking in with the baby, you know, so no, I haven't done a deep dive but I do plan on doing a deeper dive into like that world of like nicotine and and vaping and
Now's the Time with this UK band. So yeah, it's um, I've been thinking about it for a while has the introduction of fruity flavored Vapes like sparkle rainbow unicorn dust flavored.
Third Vapes and and stuff which are easily accessible pretty cheap 4,000 puffs or 2,000 purpose or whatever. So they last for quite a while has that been a net positive or negative because it's certainly allowed a lot of people who were previously smokers and cigarettes are no matter how bad you think the Vapes our cigarettes are so much worse like 20 times worse based on the stuff that I've seen as an educated reader of non scientific journals, but how many more people have been?
Thin end of the wedge into a nicotine dependency because it's more convenient because the smoking bans you can now do it inside tastes better. Okay. It's just a more enjoyable experience. The hit is very very high and fast. So I wonder whether the introduction of The Vape world has been a net positive or negative against cigarettes because to meet cigarettes seem Mark Norman's got this great joke were you says that smoking an actual cigarette now is so
Socially like push back against that if someone saw you in an Alleyway and you were secretly trying to smoke a cigarette. They asked what you were doing. You'd say that you were killing a hooker because like that's more socially
acceptable still like that and you're so I haven't been like the last time I went to I was in like Amsterdam 2015. I was shocked by how many people were just
smoking Mainland Europe is different. There are different breed Italians the Spanish the French, you know, they're eating croissants at 10 p.m. At night.
Just chain-smoking with a glass of red wine. They're going to live to 105. It doesn't matter right they're different. They're built different over there. I don't know what's going
on. But you know what? It's just kind of brings back to the your first point was the smoking and you'll make a 3 and don't Japanese men smoke pretty I'm pretty shy and they are living on average long and they eat a lot of fish right smokers High omega-3 index it go
cuz much as possible eat enough fish. But so here's another thing Max Luger beer, you know
Max. No, I don't
great guy. You should he's very much.
In your world genius Foods guy real cool dude. He introduced me to these things called knickknacks. So they are like very carefully sourced like nicotine mints, I guess and just nicotine has a nootropic nicotine has an improver for Focus attention seems to be like that's big at the moment, but then the pouches is ins and Snus and stuff like that.
There's a lot of questions about what's that doing to your gums? What's actually in that there's flavorings in them. Now where the flavorings coming from? So it's like does this permanent sort of cycle of something new comes in and oh that might be really great and then it comes out the bottom engineer like well, we don't know what's in it and it might actually be really dangerous for
everyone so someone someone that's in their 30s and in that world that like I'm not in is the is is who mentioned to me like have you looked into nicotine? Because I like I use these in is in. Yeah, and I'm just like what is this like this is like
like it's an entire universe like
emmalin. I have got to look into all this because like eventually my son will be you know of the age and so that's that's kind of what started my my interest in doing a deep dive on nicotine is like, okay. Well, is there a negative effect like maybe there's a trade of there's always a trade-off there's always a trade-off. So what is it? What is it right
very interesting. I'm fascinated by what's going to what's down.
I'm from new technologies, whether it be legitimate technology, like typical sort of screen social media virtual reality. Apple's new headset just came out recently or its Health technology. So it's deliver delivery mechanisms for things that we used to have but this is in a new way. And what does that actually mean? So yeah, we'll get back to talking to Ron dream one minute. But first I need to tell you about Ketone IQ 60% of Tour de France Riders use Ketone IQ to help them with their energy and mental Clarity and that's why I use it as my pre-workout. I don't have caffeine upon
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59 days and if you do not like it, they'll give you your money back right now. You can get a 30 percent discount off your first subscription order by going to the link in the description below or heading to hvm. And.com slash modern wisdom. That's hvm. N.com / modern wisdom talk to me about time restricted feeding because for a long time that was like the hot new girl in school and everyone loved it and it was really interesting but it seems like the trend is swaying.
At least a little bit away from time restricted feeding, especially on a morning. So what's your how do you conceptualize all of this now?
So time restricted feeding or temperature did eating, you know, it's a form of intermittent fasting right? And I think that many people when they think about intermittent fasting they think okay. Well, I just need to skip a meal I need to like have a period of I need to extend my period of time where I'm not eating in the easiest way to do. That is skip skip a meal and that's kind of
What happened? So, you know, dr. Sachin Panda good friend of mine big, you know, circadian biologists researcher does a lot of research on time ship to feeding and you know, we talked about this like almost ten years ago. Essentially. There's a circadian reason to eat your food within a certain time window and then have a period of rest and fasting right. So everything on our body runs on a clock and including our metabolism.
And you know, so we're most insulin sensitive in the morning least sensitive insulin sensitive in the evening, right? So, you know, your blood glucose levels are go much higher with the same carbohydrate intake in the evening versus the morning. Even you know, just calories are same everything is the same. There's also some argument to be made by you just need a period of rest like your gut digestion all that like energy is being diverted to do that when you're digesting food, like that's that's a big thing and there's also a lot of responsibility.
A happen after you eat a meal causing inflammation and things like that that divert energy there. So it's taking energy away from other things like repair. So repairing processes are usually happen when you're in a fasted state. So just like when you're sleeping your brain shuts down right like your brain, if you didn't sleep your brains not going to repair it's not going to stop like you need that rest period Well the same goes for like other organs like a neat they need a rest period and and so it's really important to have that rest period right so
The longer the respite there longer the rest period is the better in terms of like having enough energy to like do those repair processes things like that require energy. And there's also you know other reasons as well, but generally speaking there's an argument why it's good to have a rest period of fasting period right and is that doesn't need to be 16 hours. Does it need to be 20 does it need to be 12? Like I don't I don't really know that we know the exact time to that but what we do know is that
Talking about this to the public was translated to I need to skip breakfast. That was like the take-home was okay. I need to do a 16-hour I need to do ate my food within eight hours into a 16 hour fast and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to skip breakfast and keep extend
my first lunch 12:00 have didn't hate Gray's between then
and and that was hands exactly and that was that was kind of the the take home the Practical implication there that everyone started doing the problem with that is that
That you know, so our muscle is the biggest reservoir for amino acids. Just like, you know, we store glucose as glycogen in our liver or muscle we store triglyceride as you know, you know, we fat as triglycerides in our adipose tissue. We don't really storm us. I mean, we don't really store amino acids, but you can kind of think of the muscle as a reservoir for it because when we have a period of basically we're not getting an intake of amino acids. We need it. We need amino acids to survive like we need them.
And so our body pulls from our muscle. So in the morning if you think about it, what's the longest period you go without having amino acids? Well, it's when you're sleeping. So breakfast is actually really important. It's in it's important to get protein amino acids and that first meal because if you extend that me if you extend that fasting period by skipping breakfast, your body is going to be like I need protein. I need I got to make a bunch of proteins to like have my heartbeat and my kidneys function, right? So it's going to pull Amino.
Acids out of your muscle and so that can cause muscle atrophy particularly. If you're not doing resistance training. So amino acid is one way to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. The other way to do it would be resistance training. So there have been studies done. Like for example women that are doing time restricted feeding. They will not lose muscle mass if they're doing resistance training. So
does it make Seagate the gains of resistance training?
By doing that it mitigates the the atrophy. So it's
mitigating. Sorry does time restricted feeding I skipping breakfast limit the gains made from resistance training. If both of those things are done
together, not not if you're getting enough protein, I mean, it would not in that study. At least I think I think if you're not getting enough protein within 24 hour period yes, but like if you're getting so so to get your gains in and I'm sure you've had people on talking about this but like the RDA for protein.
Is 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight and that was like determined like forever ago when we were using older techniques, we as in scientist, not me because I haven't personally done this experiment but the scientific Community was using techniques that underestimated amino acid losses. So these committees were set up to determine. Okay how many how much amino acids? Do you know what quantity of amino acids? Do we lose every day? And how much do we make sure we have to get each day to replenish?
That right. And so those losses were underestimated. In other words. We're losing more than they thought and so what does that mean? That means? Oh, maybe you weren't the RDA for protein is too low. So people like dr. Stuart Phillips and others have now redone these experiments with like newer more sensitive Technologies because that's what happens with time. Right? We get better Technologies more sensitivity and they have now determined that it's actually one point two grams per kilogram to just bare minimum prevent losses and it gives
you 50% on top.
Of what was
originally founded originally and if you're actually doing because if you're physically active if you're doing resistance training that goes up to 1.6 grams worth nothing to me and while 120 was the minimum but like to like build muscle to get the gains are talking about and there's actually been studies done in older adults is a big problem older adults are there not as sensitive to amino acids. It's called anabolic resistance. So with the same protein intake, they won't build as much muscle it fair 65 versus when there were
34. So Grand dad needs to
be cooking twice as many
states. He needs twice as many steaks and there's been studies looking at the actual RDA of older adults get 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight. And then the other group gets 1 Point 2 grams per kilogram body weight the group that got 1.2 has much higher muscle mass gains. Yep, and just press it actually prevents the atrophy that is happening just with age. Okay, so getting back to the time restricted. Yeah eating thing.
How should someone incorporate this into their lifestyle what it sounds like you're saying is have a high-protein meal at some point early in the day. But if you're also saying that it's important for us to have a period of rest and digest so that it's digest rest and repair can actually happen. How should people think about about doing that especially given the fact that sorry later in the day instant sensitivity is
skewed anyone that did Carbonite a carb backloading 15 years ago because they read a bodybuilding.com Forum like me knows that so you've kind of got this always good to eat some things later in the day. There's this skew down that way but there's also we can't miss breakfast. So it's like that just sounds like eating all day to me. When do we when do we stop
right? Yeah. Sorry. I went off on a tangent there. But yeah, so the the timer started eating. Okay. There's a there's a couple good ways to think about about it. You want to stop eating about three hours before you go to bed.
Possible. Okay, that's last bit of food in mouth
Yes. Yes, because it's still you're going to add another five so last fit a bit of food in mouth doesn't mean I'm now in a fasted State you got to calculate 5 hours after that takes about five hours to digest. Okay. So after the five hours after your last bit of food in your mouth now, you're in a fasted state, right? So that's going to be when you're sleeping. Most likely you don't have to skip a meal you can eat your food with in an eight-hour period
and vast for 16 hours without having to skip a meal most of the time unless I guess unless you're an Entertainer and your meals do come later then but still you can still like everything's just shifted over and yes, you'll be you know, less incidents that insulin sensitive later in the day, but you can like do some air squats for two minutes like you could there there there are things you can do to improve insulin sensitivity and also to improve glucose blood glucose levels like later in the evening if you're having a meal on we can talk more.
Later, but anyway, so there are things you can do. I think the way to think about it is the easy way is to stop eating about three hours before bed. That's a really easy and also your sleep improves because you're when you're digesting if you eat like right before you go to bed your body's like a wake. It's like a wake right? It's like digesting and using energy. It's
not even Beyond what's happening physiologically just the sense of being full. So I was a club promoter for 15 years, which meant that we would work from we'd set the club up at 9 p.m. And we'd finish it too.
In the morning, and I'd get back into food that I prepped that morning the day before his morning would be there waiting for me. Well, you know haven't eaten in six hours seven hours something like that. Okay, so I'll get in they'll eat but just the discomfort of having a lot of food in you like even that sucks, right? You know, the other thing is with with the thinking about it. I think a lot of people got all like, you know in a tizzy over over the fact that like if you looked at the time after defeating and the way
Los a lot of the weight loss was due to calorie restriction because people were just actually eating less they're skipping meals and it's like yeah, so a lot of weight loss. I mean when it comes to weight loss like calories in calories out matter like energy balance, right? So that's important. I think that's where a lot of people were like up time restricting doesn't matter because it's all about caloric restriction and it's like well, yeah if you're looking at what endpoint are you looking at? Are you trying to lose weight? Then you calorie restriction like you should be not eating as a however you want right and most people that are like
peace even overweight they can actually they can actually fast and not lose as much muscle like some people will go on a fast or do you know limit there they'll skip meals basically and they can lose like up to 30 percent of their weight will come from muscle so I know crazy is crazy unless you do resistance training a resistance training
some children to get that what you want me to get him a bully only if you're having sufficient protein outside of that intermittent fasting
window, not necessarily that will help you gain more but like
Mitigating the atrophy because of the stimulus you got the stimulus.
Okay, what would you suggest as a good selection of breakfasts that people could have that kind of meet the criteria that you're talking about here. What would be some
things right eggs would be like like for depending on your body weight, you know some if you're if you're dude, you're probably have like five eggs scrambled eggs are great. You've got I mean, it's got the protein and eggs are really high and they have like lutein and choline in them. I mean
Colin's important for brain function lutein, it's much higher and greens like kale, but there's some in at least pasture-raised eggs Farm the farm, you know, the non-conventional eggs or whatever they're called. Those are terrible.
But what is that too just to interject that what is the to know about eggs? How do you select your
eggs pasture-raised? Because you want them to eat like grass and stuff the chickens because they're get there getting like lutein from the greens and lutein is really important for brain function.
Shannon I function I would love to talk about that more when we talk about cognitive function because it actually there's a there's not enough lutein and an egg to substitute What's Done in clinical studies, but there is in kale. So but still it's good to get a source of it. So I think I think eggs is a really good source of protein for breakfast because it's you know, it's just it's very nutrient dense with the colon as well. Colin's really high in egg.
Yolk. They can an egg steak and eggs.
Yeah. I mean like whatever your jam is like for the for the protein bacon and eggs, too.
Steak and eggs, you know, I like to also have some smoked salmon and eggs. So my Omega 3s.
What about the people who are training first thing in the morning? Let's say that they've got to get to work their part of the you know, that the 6 a.m. CrossFit cryo crowds. They're not going to be up at 4:30 doing the scrambled egg so that they can digest it in time to go do
Fran they're going to probably do a protein shake like whey
protein so you would still even for the people that are up early and then go to go and train. It's such a high priority that you would still suggest consuming some protein it prior to
working hard to get 1.6 and then you and then like, you know,
Stuart Phillips likes to use this analogy. I'll give him credit for a league where you're squeezing the last drops out of the cloth. Like for people that are like really trying to gain muscle mass. I get sick really their thing. You can go like up to like to you getting like 2 grams per kilogram body weight. And so I mean there are some people that like, so if you really trying to like gain that muscle you do much one gram per pound you do. Yeah, you do need unless you know, unless you're just going to eat like, you know, a lunch and dinner and lots and lots of protein but it's really not that it's hard to get that much protein we had
This like rule at Uni which was no one flukes one gram per pound of body weight. No one accidentally goes through their day and looks back at the macros that eating and goes I hit 180 grams of protein without thinking like it has to be conscious. Yeah, there's no casual die unless you went to an all-you-can-eat buffet and even if you do that, it seems like the upper Bound for protein absorption within one meal is kind of like 50 grams in any case our last yeah. So the 40/40. Yeah, so you like, okay. Well well done you managed to get through.
For steaks there, but how much of that is actually going to be used by your body. So yeah, that's an interesting one. It's I've found it fascinating kind of observing this it intermittent fasting to we still need to do this, but we need to integrate it. But we need to front-load the protein earlier in the day and also to just alleviate the protein dead that your 1.6 per kilo of body weight needs to hit by the end of the day.
Yeah. I think that it's it makes sense when you just think about it, like if you're if you're
Skipping a meal you're going to be losing muscle mass like especially if you're not doing any resistance training and that's like, okay. Well, then I probably shouldn't be skipping a meal but I think I can still do term restricted eating, you know by just stopping my meals before three hours before bed. And then you know, you're going to get a period of fasting really you just want that repair mode, you know, you want that prepare mode and there's been clinical studies that have looked at other endpoints besides weight loss and it does make a difference it at there's improvements and things like blood pressure. For example
All things like that, but I don't know that you're going to get the repair like there's animal studies mechanistically looking at that you're not I don't know that we're going to get that and human data on that. It's going to be hard to do not impossible, but it's definitely going to cost money to get a clinical trial doing that sort of work
talk to me about the rest of your framework for approaching nutrition and making decisions about food.
I'd like I said, I really like to make decisions about you know, so I did my postdoctoral research with dr. Bruce Ames and
and he's sort of a legend and he's 96 now and that but you know, we he specialized for some towards the end mid to end of his career on micronutrients, right? These are important minerals and vitamins and amino acids and fatty acids that you need to get from your diet to run your metabolism. And when I say your metabolism, I don't just mean fat burning. I mean, do you know a repair? I mean, you know making energy, I mean making dopamine and serotonin and everything, right? So
MIT a lot of minerals are cofactors for the enzymes that are doing that in other words. If you don't get those minerals, then the enzymes aren't going to be working optimally and so, you know things aren't going to be working optimally and if you're talking about things like repair what happens is you get this Insidious damage and magnesium is a perfect example half the country doesn't get enough magnesium, which is about three hundred twenty milligrams for women and 424 men. And so what happens when you're not getting enough magnesium, well nothing as far as you know, you look in the mirror and you're fine, right?
Not like 0 damage is happening. You know, you can't see it on a daily basis. If you could it would be so much more apparent to us, but it's Insidious. It's just it's occurring a little bit each day and as decades build up, you're not going to be repairing damage to your DNA and DNA damage is a major major cause of oncogenic mutations. These are mutations that lead to cancer. So then you get into your fifth sixth seventh decade of life and you got pancreatic cancer or you got fill-in-the-blank cancer and there are of course studies dissociating magnesium in
With cancer and you know studies looking at DNA repair as well. So the way I like to think about nutrition is what do I need to get for my diet that is essential for me to be functioning optimally for me to prevent the damage that can lead to neurodegenerative disease to cancer. That's that's kind of the way and then also what do I need to get in terms of like my macro nutrients like proteins are really important when I need to I need to think about like how much protein you get right because
Atrophy happens you start to you know, and you Peak muscle mass 3522 30s, I guess and then as you get into your 40s, you start to lose a lot more like 8 percent per decade and then you get into your 70s it goes up to so sad. Yeah, so that's how I like to think about it where it's like, okay, I need to get magnesium. I need to get omega-3. I need to get vitamin K. I need to get so what foods are rich in those and a lot of minerals and some vitamins that it's spread out.
Amongst different food groups so vegetables particularly grew leafy greens are really high in magnesium. They're high in calcium. They're high in vitamin K. They're high in folate. Like we need full late. This is like amazing to talk about this experiment that my mentor did back in like there was like the 80s but essentially like he took he took animals and gave him a folder full light deficient diet in one group and then the other group he irradiated the mice like
Ionizing radiation like the stuff they give you cancer OK and and he looked at double-stranded breaks to your DNA and that's like the start of DNA damage that can lead to cancer and ionizing radiation causes double-stranded breaks in your DNA and he compared the two groups and they were identical. So not having folate in your diet was like being ionized getting ionizing radiation.
Oh, you can get yourself ionized as much as you want as long as you eat spinach.
I mean no because it's going to do the same thing as not eating spinach, but the
Is that people know to avoid going in a machine that's going to be I know right, but they don't think about do I need folate. Do you know so it's like that again. It's that what do I need to avoid mentality which isn't it's not that you shouldn't think about like you do need to think about things to avoid but we need I think the priority and the focus first is what do I need to get for my diet? That's so interesting the tend toward demonization of certain food groups and awareness and concern about this is poisoning you this is bad for you. This is
Something that you need to avoid absolutely. But if you just avoided a ton of stuff, you still haven't got what you actually need. Exactly and if you focus on what you actually need guess what you avoid kind of stuff. And so and I also think it a sort of has to do with this like it's this learned helplessness mentality where it's like someone else's fault. They're poisoning me. It's like, you know what I mean rather than what am I not? What am I not taking initiative to like know that I need to get into my body. Yep, right worse has
Poisoning me it's the pesticides. It's the this it's that it's and they are kind of to some degree.
But how worried are you about oxalates in leafy
greens? Yeah, so oxalates mostly high in spinach not kale and you know, if you're juicing spinach every day and you have like kidney problems, that's probably a bad idea. So oxalates, you know, if you're if you're cooking the spinach that basically, you know causes enzymes to degrade, you know,
these oxalates and it's not as much of a problem. But you know, I think there's been again a demonization of it. It's like it's like this anti-nutrient. It's like oh this is a reason I shouldn't eat leafy greens because they're oxalates and it's making me kidney stone and the reality is is that you know oxalates her that you don't you only absorb so much particularly, like if there's magnesium present and there's so much magnesium in these greens. That's mostly not the problem and the problem with oxalates again, you'll get like that one case study with the
With failed kidney syndrome that was juicing every day for like years and it's like don't give me that example like that. You know,
unless you're a power user of
spinach. It's really spinach and some people have been saying K little good though. Spinach is good. I lips finish to spinach salads are not going out. Like don't it's not you're getting good stuff from spinach. It's really high in magnesium. It's really high folate was first isolated from my mentors Mentor Peter Mitchell from spinach. That's he discovered that vitamin. He discovered it.
From any isolated from spinach. It's really high in spinach. Okay, so leafy greens. Yeah important. Yes. Okay, then you want to get B vitamins again pull it is a B vitamin but getting getting B vitamins zinc. Also, you want to get iron these are also important micronutrients, you know minerals. That's where you get the meat, right? So red meat for the iron and protein B vitamins. It's got zinc as well poultry is another
Shane right. So these are good sources of protein and other micronutrients that you're not going to get as much from Plants.
What do you thinking about when it comes to sourcing and choosing your
Meats? Yeah. So there's been some studies that have compared like grass-fed cows versus like meat from grass-fed cows versus like conventionally raised cows and I would say the biggest difference is at least from the data that's been published is you know for one day.
Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid profile. So which makes sense if you're if you're feeding a cow bunch of corn and I think they also have like it's like corn oil like pellets didn't you know, it's like they're going to have a higher omega-6 profile right? They're going to have more omega-6 because that's corn versus if you're going to give them like plants. They're going to eat plants. They're going to have a better omega-3 to omega-6 profile. And so and that's exactly what you'll find. So like even though me
Isn't like the best source of Omega-3 if you get if you're if you're eating, you know ground beef or a steak from a cow that was you know, pasture-raised is going to have a higher omega-3 profile then then the conventional meat and there's you know, there's some there's some argument to be made for that. It's like well and then there's also things like well, you know what you have to think about like, what food is there is it like are they given food? That's that's doused in glyphosate. Like I don't know like what's you know how the crook the corn crop is like that?
How they're growing lots of corn, right? So, you know, there's you can sort of obsess over everything you have to like. I think you have to sort of choose your battles. Otherwise, you can just go insane. So, you know, they do you have to eat pasture-raised to meet. I don't know that you do if you can it's better like not everyone can afford like food is so expensive now too, right? So at the end of the day like our bodies can handle a lot of damage they really can but like
That is only if you give them the things they need to repair that damage and be able to like be, you know more more optimally functional. So that's kind of my my take on the you know, pasture-raised versus conventional. I personally do get pasture-raised. I prefer it also the hormones if they're not I think generally speaking they go hand in hand. They like will give hormones and antibiotics to cows and stuff and it's like, oh do I don't want a bunch of antibiotics in my meat that I'm eating right? Like that's another thing to consider
what do people mean when they talk about
Out prioritizing energy balance. I hear this. Yeah. I have no idea what the
trailer I mean, I think ultimately their their calories in calories out kind of thing. Like, you know, if you're if you're consuming like a ton of calories and you're not physically active like that's you're going to start storing more fat like it's, you know, just simple math. So that's I would say the easiest way to think about it is really just calories in
Is that really does matter? Like it really does like you're going to you know, so you don't want to just eat to eat tons and tons of food like you do want to eat a bag of potato chips. Like after you do your
Peloton. Yeah, and I guess going back to one of the reasons why intermittent fasting was so popular was that it's you don't really need to be as obsessive with your MyFitnessPal. If you only have a 6-hour eating window because for lots of people it's tough to get over Surplus during just six hours as long as you're eating Whole Foods mostly blah blah.
Blah blah blah
and that's what it comes down to I think exactly that is that if like the people there kalakaar restricting naturally when they're doing intermittent fasting, right? And so that's why it was it all comes down to calories in calories out. That's what caloric restriction is you're restricting. You're not eating as many calories and you end up, you know losing weight. But if you eat Whole Foods and I really do think like the Paleo movement back in when I mean, it was like 15 20 years. I don't even know how long ago was but they were onto something.
I think that's a really good way to eat because you're not just only eating me. You're not just only in Plants you're getting the broad spectrum of micronutrients and there's other things in plants that are like phytochemicals that are beneficial as well. Right? So it's not just getting the micronutrients. It's also getting these other, you know, chemicals that are like doing beneficial things in us that we know for sure from randomized controlled trials are doing beneficial things. So, you know, that's another added reason to kind of have more.
Diverse Whole Foods type of diet will get back
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Give em ome and tou s.com modern wisdom. What are the most important things to consider when it comes to improving cognitive function? A lot of people want better focus. They want to be more productive. They want to improve their mood they want to do all of those things. Like what are the big movers when we think cognitive function. So there's what I like to think of as there's definitely big movers. There's things that require effort and there's like lower hanging fruit.
Right. So this is things that like you could take a supplement perhaps and I would say the big movers are the ones that of course are going to require more effort. Like that's always how it is. Right and it's pretty clear now. I don't think I think it's pretty scientific consensus that exercise and particularly vigorous exercise is one of the best ways that you can get a cognitive enhancement, you know memory executive function processing speed. So there have been studies that have been done in older adults in
aged adults in children like across the lifespan and it's just undeniable that getting your heart rate up, you know getting getting your heart rate up and blood flow up and sweating is going to make you smarter and feel better. It's going to make you both. So like there was there was even one study that was done in older adults. And this was like a classic study that I just remember I talked about it for years, but other cities have like repeated it since then, but it was like 2011 or 20 2012 published in pnas.
And this this researchers talk these older adults and they put them on a year-long intervention exercise program and there was a lot of more vigorous intensity. So they're getting up to about 80 percent max heart rate 75 80 percent max heart rate, and I'm for one year. They did this intervention and after that year, they had a 2% increase in their hippocampal volume. So hippocampus is a part of your brain that's highly involved in learning and memory and they increased it.
By like 2% So people that it in that age group lose between one to two percent of their hippocampal volume per year. So they essentially countered that loss that attribute that they're there age-related, you know experiencing each year. And so part of the reason that happens is when you're doing a vigorous type of exercise you are increasing brain derived neurotrophic factor bdnf and that is responsible for growing new neurons in the hippocampus is responsible for neuroplasticity. So, that's the
Of your brain to like adapt and change to the changing environment, which is what older adults don't do very well write your brains much more plastic when it's younger like you can adapt to things. That's why you that's saying you can use hard to teach an old dog new tricks, right? I mean that's kind of where it comes from so bdnf plays a role in that. So you want more bdnf like you and exercise and particularly vigorous exercise if you're working your muscles so hard that they can't get oxygen to them fast enough and that's why I say vigorous then they're forced to basically make energy without oxygen.
Engine and that happens by just using glucose and then you make lactate as a by-product and lactate is what is signaling and increasing that bdnf and lactates. Really? I mean, you can measure it there's you know things out there that you can buy and measure it but I don't think you need to I think you can just measure your heart rate and if you're getting if you're doing a vigorous intensity exercise 10 minutes, that's all it took was 10 minutes to have improvements and cognition executive function processing speed. So even just a 10-minute workout and like I did one before I was came here like that's like
That's my thing. I do, you know, it's like I want to be on top of my game. So you just can do a 10-minute, you know workout. I could be high intensity interval training where you're shifting between periods of vigorous exercise and then kind of resting a little bit and then you do these intervals or it could just be like, I'm gonna do a 20-minute like and run and then I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to do it. So exercise exercise is the number one I would say big mover as you said, it's also the most requires the most effort the other things and this is where I
Kind of like I'm smiling because there was very recently a new study one out of three very large randomized placebo-controlled trials where they're giving one group a placebo and another group a multivitamin. Okay. This is a multivitamin which is the micronutrients. I've been talking about magnesium B vitamins folate Vitamin K is just stuff people aren't getting enough of they're not getting enough from their diets and they gave older adults. So these were people that were 65 and older.
And there was three different Trials of this study. It was called the cosmo trial and there's about 5,000 participants in total and the evidence was clear that just giving them a multivitamin improved cognition and its load braid aging which was it was estimated to slow brain aging by about two years and I this is like it's so it's funny because 10 years ago. I was like doing I was out there podcast talking, you know talking on podcast about huge studies that
are coming out saying enough is enough multivitamins are a waste of money. Don't buy them and they were saying the exact opposite and they were terrible studies and I like tore them apart. But here we are Ten Years Later
complete maybe full
circle. What's the easiest thing you can do? Like does that mean a young person can take a multivitamin? It's going to immediately make them. You know, I probably not a 20 I came surance. Yeah, it's something that you can start now and certainly older adults. It made a difference so that that's one another.
Is again I mentioned that there's other these phytochemicals in plants that are beneficial there in vegetables and they're in fruits so blueberries and blueberry extract or even the equivalent of one cup of blueberries. This has been done like the equivalent of one cup of blueberries improves cognition executive function. It include improves memory also processing speed. So that is something like if you're like, you know fast reaction time. I guess it's more relevant for like, maybe someone who's athletic
Attic, but you know fine motor coordination things like that multiple studies showing this. I mean, there's been meta-analyses showing it. This is across the lifespan. There's been studies in kids there but there's been studies and middle-aged adult and there's been studies in older adults and it's clear blueberries make you smarter and they make you feel better least to make me feel better.
So Libras are the king of fruits. I think I mean, it's between blueberries raspberries and pineapple I think for like the top spot in my world.
First blueberries. Yeah, no blueberries are so they have something in them called anthocyanins and it's what gives the blueberries they're like pigmentation raspberries have them to blueberries are very concentrated them in them. They also have so anthocyanins are a type of polyphenol. They're actually a flavonoid there have a polyphenol polyphenols are sort of wide class of phytochemicals and phytonutrients Michaels. There's a lot of them a lot to different types of them and they really are beneficial in humans. And like I said, there's randomize
Controlled trials comparing giving this to a placebo and it was bad for you. Then. It would be clear right? It's good for you. So blueberries are at the top of the list for that for improving cognitive function low-hanging fruit. How easy is it to eat a cup of blueberries today? I
it's literally hard to not you a cup of blueberries.
It's hard not to yeah, so that would be another one. I think another one on my list would be similar to that would be Coco polyphenol. So like from from like dark chocolate they
Have another type of polyphenol called catechins and the best one so there have been studies lots of studies on this and it's mixed on this. So some Studies have shown benefits. They increase blood flow to the brain. They include some you know vascular flow so you can get an immediate effect where you know, if you increase blood flow to the brain, which is what exercise does right we're talking low hanging fruits easy to do take a pill that would be something to do. It is it's improved cognition executive function and there's a type called Coco via and I
Have no affiliation with them but they've published their they have studies published with their proprietary blend which is again, one of the highest concentrated. I would say cocoa flavanols out there the catechins consumer Labs tested them and I've seen I've seen the data and it's very clear. They're very high in they just out-compete all the other brands out there and they also have the lowest contaminants. So they're really a good but expensive way to get those cocoa flavanols, which are really good.
And then the other one would be for a cognition would be lutein, which I mentioned earlier.
It's in egg. Yolks not very concentrated. It's in kale very highly concentrated in Kill almost 24 milligrams in 3K leaves and I say 3K leaves because that's what I put in my smoothie. So I've calculated it. But so there's 24 mg of lutein. So lutein is a type of carotenoid like beta carotene like lycopene in tomatoes, you've heard of those things before will lutein is in that same category. It is a carotenoid it accumulates in the rods and the cones of your eye it protects against
Get oxygen from Blue Light like this like looking at and also the sunshine when you go outside that damages our eyes, it causes macular degeneration and so lutein and zeaxanthin is another carotenoid there in Greens and they protect against that but they also accumulate in the brain and there have been a variety of study. So there's been observational studies correlating plasma levels of lutein and zeaxanthin with certain cognitive scores. So like Krista crystallized intelligence.
They're adults that have lutein and zeaxanthin higher levels have more crystallized intelligence. So that's the ability to use all the information you learned over a lifetime and like use it. There's been randomized controlled trials looking at giving 8 mg of lutein. I said 24 is in 3kl so they give 8 mg of lutein and something like 23 mg of zeaxanthin to older adults and it improves neural neural efficiency. So this is the ability to basically
Your neurons can function with less energy, which is nice So that obviously improves cognitive function because it's very energy demanding process. So so lutein
is another one lie. Yeah. I know. It's an egg choline. Yeah, you know cholinergic 6 generally very important for brain
function it is yeah. It's an important. It's important for brain and there's been studies actually with pregnant women if you give pregnant women about 500 mg of choline,
Dean per day their children score better on until intelligence tests. Yes. So so I learned about this of course when I was pregnant and I was like, well, I was actually before I was pregnant. I was like figuring out like what I'm going to do like, what do I need? Yeah, and that's why I so many eggs during pregnancy because they also supplemented by.
Oh, you've got like Mastermind babies. I
do. Wow, but so Colleen's also important. Yeah for sure brain function, but that again comes down to again getting
to get everything you need from your food and then Omega threes. There's been so many randomized controlled trials on Omega-3s improving cognition, especially when they're it's it has to be two grams or more. That's what you'll get the the mixed data if it's like, oh we gave him 500 mg wasn't enough the studies that were consistently showing improvements in cognitive function or at least two grams a day of the omega-3. So that's my that's my sort of I think low-hanging fruit for cognitive function things you can do.
Is that the same strategy for battling neurodegeneration over time as well? The things that improve cognitive function now, it's just the same. It's one in the
same. It's very similar because I mentioned brain-derived neurotrophic factor bdnf that plays a huge role in battling neurodegenerative disease risk, a lot of the the anthocyanins the catechins that are in things like blueberries and chocolate dark chocolate, especially when you concentrate the patter down those are they have anti inflammatory process like
Properties they have antioxidant properties and their increasing blood flow to the brain as well. So they're getting more oxygen to the brain. They're getting more nutrients to the brain all those things play a role in Bush both short-term Health, but also long-term brain health as well. So it's both for sure. They're they're very much connected what happens when people get brain fog like what is what is brain fog? I know what it feels like but like what's going on? Yeah, so brain fog or as I like to call it a reduction in mental.
Clarity and I
think dr. Way of regime
like I just heard too many like people say they like brain fog brain fought like and it's I got like this like I was telling you I got this knee-jerk reaction to like you've got what I fog like I did when people like say brain fog up, I don't know, you know, but yes it is thing. So it's you know, when you have a reduction in a mental Clarity, it feels like this brain fog and you know there I personally think it all comes down to food. I think it really comes down to food and I mean
I mean when you're sick, you have brain fog but we can talk about how it overlaps with that. So I think there's really two big it all has to do with meals and eating. So the first thing I think that's highly involved in this reduction and mental Clarity or brain fog as people like to call it is what's called the postprandial glucose response. So that means blood glucose levels going up after a meal. And what happens is this if you have a really high
Postprandial glucose response you're eating a high glycemic index food something that's definitely like a refined carbohydrate. For example, that'll really smash you you're going to get this really sharp peak in glucose and then like a drop and or a sugar crash as people like to call it and so it's really hard for your brain to be functioning properly with that postprandial glucose response. And that's partly why you'll hear a lot of anecdotes and myself included people that have tried.
Ride a ketogenic diet or I used to always like to do podcasts on a fat in a fasted State because you're not getting that postprandial glucose response is one thing it really sort of it. It's evens it evens it out. Not everyone responds well to be kidding diet and I certainly don't think it's easy to continue on forever. So there are other things obviously we're avoiding refined carbohydrates is is an easy no-brainer, right? There's nothing in there any
You need from there. Nothing no micronutrients, you know protein great like you're not getting any from that so that would be one thing to avoid because that'll make sure you're not going super super high, but you can still have it from from from a meal and some of the things that you can do to mitigate. That one would be exercised snacks. So this is like doing a really short bursts of intense like vigorous exercise 80% max heart rate for like 1 2 3 minutes and you do it 30 minutes or 30 minutes up to
An hour either before or after a meal so you kind of do it within this hour before or after a meal and what happens is that vigorous intensity exercise while you're shooting your heart rate up, you know, and it's hard to do your you're increasing lactate and it doesn't take much it gets soaked up by the muscle and this is then causing Transporters glucose Transporters to come up to the muscle and opening the gates basically so that when you eat that meal the glucose goes into your muscle is more anabolic you wanted to go there.
And it's not you're not getting that like huge rise and then drop in the post with the postprandial glucose response. So that would be the one thing exercise snacks. Lots of studies out there, especially with people with type 2 diabetes have a problem. Do you know maintain their blood glucose levels? The second thing would be food order like the order you eat your macronutrients on the plate kind of so, so I would say about 10 minutes. It can be on the plate depending on how slow you
I eat so if Seafood order there's been studies again largely in people with type 2 diabetes who have issues regulating their blood glucose if you eat protein or fat
10 to 30 minutes before carbohydrates, it can very much blunt and slow the postprandial glucose response. So if you have like let's say you eat a can of sardines before you're going to go to a restaurant. You're going to eat out your presumably going to eat more terribly than you would if you're cooking at home, right or you do a little protein shake 20 minutes before you're going to go to a restaurant or whatever and that'll or or before like even just if you're going to do a podcast.
Mundt mental Clarity you want to make sure that let's say just eat the protein and not have the carbohydrates. Right? So what that does is it's I mean it's doing essentially like increasing insulin so that when you do have that glucose, it's
it's not wrapped its by me if you were if you were going out for dinner presumably something else you could do is try and have the starter be a steak tartare. Tuna tartare oysters, something like that and just be like, can we just wait an extra 10 minutes on me?
Maine's like however long you think that we need just give us another 10 and then you've encapsulated it within the the entire meal, I guess as long as everybody else is on board with that. Otherwise someone's had a bunch of bread and they're just they want the whatever main course to come out but
that they should that's like the worst thing is having the bread on the table first, right? But should be good. It is good. But like the pro eat the steak tartare first and then go for the bride, right? You'll slow the glucose
response. Is it place in Austin called Dean's Italian? It's just down the street from you.
You should go you should go is
Italian. Yeah, I'm looking for restaurant recommendations,
please I'll send you some me some more. Yeah, Dean's Three Forks and the somewhere else. I want the other evening that was phenomenal but Dean's Dean's in Three Forks and to steak restaurants. I go to the most but Dean's do this they call it a bread Crown. So it's like a literally looks like a little crown that comes out kind of about that sighs. There's a part of whipped butter in the middle of this thing and it's glazed on top. It's got like a salt.
Lay's this thing is like crack. It's so good. And it's just there you arrived you sit down. You've got the drinks or whatever and then this thing arrives and you just can't it's impossible to not eat. Yeah. So yeah almost getting is this something that we can do with this like pre appetizer appetizer to come after the appetizers around about 15 minutes if that's okay because dr. Rhonda said, so yeah. So food
order, you know is is something legitimately that's been studied empirical data showing it does
Blunt, the glucose postprandial glucose response. And so that is another thing that can really I think affect mental Clarity or brain fog. So just like I said like the protein or fat like an avocado sometimes I'll have a nautical avocado and that kind of just delays the emptying of your stomach into your intestines and it kind of slows it even Keel rather than real high Spike and then
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Prioritizing that and skewing that toward protein is just going to cause you to eat less of the carbs. If there is dessert at the end you're going to think look I'm not as bothered because I've just put more in me that's been skewed and discriminated in the direction of what you should be prioritizing.
Anyway, absolutely. So you get more your it's a tidy plays a role. I mean, I think you're eating something before like protein you're talking to he's Macho, you know, you're not going to eat as much but that kind of leads into the second. That's not the only part of the meal or food or eating that I think plays a role in this reduction of mental clarity.
And brain fog the other thing is the postprandial inflammatory response. So eating a meal causes inflammation. It happens in every one every meal. It's no there's no avoiding it like to some degree it happens and but you can minimize like how much of an inflammatory response you're having. So people eating a very high sugar and high fat meal it really that's the real. Those are the two real big movers of it. But even if you're just doing a ton of
fat without like fiber or protein fat is Harsh on the gut and so what ends up happening is your gut epithelial cells. There's like things holding them together tight junctions, they open up and they let little pieces of bacteria. So our microbiome. I mean we
got truly kike
is exactly what it is. It's intestinal permeability and it allows pieces of bacteria
little thing every for every like bro signs term. I've got you've got the specific term that comes out of medicine. Is it brain for it's a reduction in mental clarity.
Is it leaky gut? It's a the the wall lining of the intestine as opened up to him.
Yeah, intestinal permeability or leaky gut as it's called. That's what you're doing. So emile's cause that to happen transiently. Some people have like a very big problem with leaky gut, but so transiently you're letting bacteria get into your bloodstream. And this is what happens. Is it species of bacteria the called endotoxin or lipopolysaccharide the same thing but they're getting into your circulation because they're opening up right getting from a jet engine not supposed to be there right and your immune.
In system gets activated. So your immune systems like it knows those pieces of the bacterial membrane it recognizes that that's how it you know, recognizes a bacterial and pathogen and so it gets activated and what ends up happening there's one your immune systems activated. Okay that requires a ton of energy. So energy is shunted away from your brain and it goes to the immune system because your body goes triage is a goes I need to survive. There's a bacteria. There's a bacterial and Bader in my system right now. I'm going to take all my energy and I'm going to make sure that I get
Of this Invader, so I don't die. Right so that's that's the first thing that's happening in terms of like energy is being diverted from the brain from neurotransmission from thinking everything and it's going to immune system to activate it. Okay, it doesn't you know happen for that long of a period but it's happening after a meal the second thing that's happening is that your immune system itself is creating cytokines that are activating other immune cells. That's how they like talk to each other and these things are there essentially
We can be saamana genic so they can make you sleepy. So when you're sick what happens when you're sick, you're you have no energy, right because all the energy is going on your immune system and your sleepy so that's exactly what's happening after meal. What's happening when you're sick to a smaller degree is happening after a meal the post and frame postprandial inflammatory response. And then the other thing that's happening is those cytokines also a Crossing into your brain and disrupting neurotransmission disrupting connections. Like we now know that it's the blood-brain barrier does not keep immune molecules.
Out get some they get in there and they're wreaking havoc. So it's another reason why you don't want to have you know inflammatory a lot of inflammation. But so then the question is, okay. What do I do? Right. So that's the question. How do I not get such a big postprandial inflammatory response and it also again why a lot of people myself included always feel like more mentally clear when I'm fasted right? But I'm like, I don't lose a protein. I mean the muscle mass I need to get ya some cake. The question is what do you do one obviously avoid the sugar high sugar high fat
Okay, that's clear to smaller meals have less of a postprandial inflammatory response of the bigger the meal the bigger the response bike and then bike and then down. Yeah, but it's like we now we're talking you're getting both you're getting the glucose and you're getting the inflammatory response. Yep. That's another thing. So actually like smaller meals does help that so like if you need mental Clarity and stuff like don't have a big meal and the other thing that actually makes an effect on that is believe it or not. We're going full circle a mega three.
Omega-3 has been shown in clinical studies to blunt the post and post prandial inflammatory response
with the meal or at any point throughout the day.
So that's why I take my Omega-3s throughout the day with meals and it's doing it to some degree both some degree
but something systemic but there's also something you
can't exactly there's something systemic the inflammation process but there's something acute in the gut that it's also playing a role in preventing the lipopolysaccharide from getting the
circulation. Is that a is this dose-dependent if I have one?
G with each meal you say two grams of triglyceride responsibly sourced blah blah blah from a Norwegian guy that's doing it like this with fish.
Can I have one gram with each meal? Would that be sufficient?
I think the studies and I can't remember. I think it was like they were lower dose like 500 mg. I think it wasn't even that high. So I typically do the one g with each meal. I think that's a
safe. It's a nice way to remember to do
it. But yeah, it's a nice way and and that's so so I like to do the reason I like to have a mega threes rather days for one that reason blunting the postprandial inflammatory response to I want these like specialized resolving like these specialized resolving molecules in
They produce like when your metabolism in my blood constant resolving inflammation that's
working trusting gets it through throughout my 20s. I said I was a club promoter and I thought I had depression or like acute depression that would come on every so often like intermittently throughout the year. I think looking back. It was just low mood and burnout. I think that's what was going on. But the way that it would manifest for me is I wouldn't get out of bed. I wouldn't want to go to work and see people and I was them I was in charge of this company so I could do whatever I wanted and I'm could tell me otherwise but one of the
things that I would do is I would order pizza or like high sugar foods and sweets and stuff like that and it would company right like a company. No be something I do but I'd notice especially if you have you know, a big Domino's in front of you and you've got some sweet stuff to have after that the sense that you get in your body, especially if you haven't been outside if you basically not moved because you feeling a little bit miserable and you the curtains are drawn and you just laid in bed and Uber driver or whatever's coming. You've taken the food off him.
Information like the throbbing that you feel in your body it almost like a heartbeat feels like or your blood pressure feels like it's gone up and then almost all of the time after that. I think this is very common for people to deal with the low mood if they do Comfort eat like that. They'll them fall asleep. So shortly after that and then that dysregulation of your sleep pattern also makes you feel even more like shit and then you come out of this sleep your emotions are all over the place. You've still got tons of like either blood sugar rushing around your you do know, you've got digestive discomfort.
- just eating all of this food. And yeah, just seeing that as like a little petri dish microcosm for what happens if the least amount of movement possible like you've gone from bed to door back to bed. And that's it. Nothing in terms of any kind of stimulation already in the low mood and then you go to sleep the most sedentary of all of the positions. Yeah, it's you can feel that inflammation that cytokine response and your thoughts again, super super muddy.
More so feedback into that low mood.
It's a vicious cycle, right? Exactly. No and you mentioned it's funny how you mentioned people get see when you get sleepy after a meal. It's like that's the cytokines that are some energetic. It's supposed inflammatory inflam inflammatory response. And again how it happens. But the bigger meal to you'll notice that the bigger the meal if you overeat the Sleepy you are right and so it's more of an inflammatory response. So now you can think about it as oh, I'm not sleepy it. So I'm I've got some inflammation going on after that.
Neil
be interesting what about improving mood? What do people get wrong when thinking about that?
I mean to improving mood is, you know, we were talking about exercise and at that would be the most effortful way that you can improve mood and there's studies that have compared it to like running to essentially two standard SSRI treatments, which are pretty classic antidepressant that are used and it's performed as good as an SSRI with a
Health benefits, of course, right? So but you met you said something interesting when you were talking about when you were feeling depressed in that was that you couldn't even got a bet right, you know, so there it's clear that exercise will help mitigate depression. It'll improve your mood very clear but not everyone is going to go for a run. Not everyone that is depressed will get on Peloton or fill-in-the-blank type of exercise right? There are some people that like, it's hard to get out of bed.
So what could be a non-pharmacological treatment to help improve mood? Right and I think that this is what is super exciting and this comes into to heat deliberate heat exposure and and sauna and it's something I personally experienced firsthand when I was in graduate school. I was extremely stressed out which can manifest with depression anxiety. Right like you those are all come connected and this was like 2009 I started using the sauna every day.
Before I go into the lab and I all of a sudden was, you know handling my failed experiments better. I was like handling the stress for my advisor and just all the things they had to do so much better. I mean it was so noticeable that I initially went. Oh my gosh, there's something going on here. Like I need to figure this out. And so that's what initially even got me interested in the sauna was the effect on my mood and at the time I had like I've published on this sense I published on this.
And 2022 but I had come up with some theories about there's lots of reasons why I had come up with a with a theory on it affecting the opioid system or natural endogenous opioid system. So when you get in the sauna or when you're under you know, deliberate heat exposure say a hot bath something similar you release endorphins and that's the feel-good opioid that when you're running, you know, same thing, but you also release something that's the opposite of that. It's called diner.
And that is the opioid that's responsible for that discomfort feeling that dysphoric feeling like it's hot
miserable. I hate it. Why am I doing what? Yes.
Oh, yeah. Exactly. And that's when you're running what it happens during physical activity as well. And and so what it does it actually cools down your core body temperature somewhat and that's why it's like a natural response and but when you release that discomfort feeling there's a feedback loop it actually tell it actually you actually make more receptors and you make them more sensitive to the feel good.
The endorphins so that you feel better later. And so now there's been some scientific research for from Charles raised on back in I think it was like 2016. He had done a study where people were they basically like it was a type of sauna more like an infrared sauna. It was elevating their core body temperature to about feverish date like a 101.3 and there was a sham control which was the placebo they were getting hot enough to think they were getting the treatment but it wasn't raising them. It wasn't
Them a fever and so that was done just one time and this was in people with major depressive disorder like this like legit depression in the people that got the act of you know, sauna treatment had an antidepressant effect that lasted six weeks after one time right? No way. Yeah one time so now dr. Ashley Mason at UCSF, she's running the osher center, which is they do a lot of non-pharmacological treatments for a lot of stuff and I've been
lucky enough to collaborate with her on some of these studies where she now right now has a paper in press which I don't impress right in peer review, but she basically trained with Chuck raised on and carried on the torch and now has done either for treatments or eight treatments and some people and looked and these are people again with depression and did a battery of scores. You know, that these people do when they're measuring depression and it's just
Off the charts unreal like so damn exciting like I can't tell you how exciting it is that people that got this sauna treatment. I mean they I think it's something like the Hamilton score where you need like a three or four point change for it to be significant. I mean, these people are changing like 16 points
and ssris I think are only two two or
three. I don't know what they are but it's not loads. All I can say is she's doing an infrared sauna on hers has its ahead out infrared sauna. So it's like it's like a dome and
Those people look so
funny and yes, but they're but they're in there for a very long time.
Have you considered that? It's just them overcoming the discomfort of looking so stupid while being in one of those tents that has your head sticking out the
top either. She's probably so many mechanisms at play, you know, but but you know, there's there's some argument to be made for head out, you know, we could get into that but like I think I do think that inflammation so sauna does what exercise is doing and to some degree with respect to you know,
Causing both acute inflammation but having a strong anti inflammatories month, but then I think the opioids could be in there's so many things like it's not known what's happening
exercise get hot if you can get hot while you exercise probably also you can do both but getting hot like some people like again getting into a sauna is like getting into a spa. It's a lot easier to go from your bed into this other little chamber where you're just like no Island rise. No, there's no effort. It's discomfort doing it for you. The he's doing it for you will get back to talking to Ron during 1 minute. But first I need to tell you about element.
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I think I really want to kind of elevate the way that I feel throughout the day. I don't I just don't feel that sort of excited or fired up about the obviously there's like what are your relationships? Like? What's the job that you do? Do you have meaning and purpose in your life and said all of those sort of things but are there any interventions from a physiological perspective where you think this is something that you should
prioritize right? So I think that it comes down to obviously like doing an exercise snap. We talked about exercise just doing like a two minute, you know high knees or squat.
Or something. It makes a difference. It really does you're getting you're getting that oxygen to your brain. You're getting more nutrients and bdnf plays a role in depression. So that stuff I think immediately improves mood but there's also you know, so so what neurotransmitters are involved in mood or you know mood and what is mood when we talk about it? Well, I mean, it's complicated like I don't even know that we can Define it exactly right. I mean there's there's you get you have things like serotonin. It's evolved in mood and motivation.
And you have to be in a good mood to be motivated right there really hand-in-hand same with dopamine. Norepinephrine is another one that's involved focused attention mood, you know things like that. They're all sort of, you know involved in the in the mood motivation that sort of Pathways. So there's like a there are behaviors that you can engage in to sort of optimize for those neurotransmitters or neurotransmitter optimization is is sort of like trying to engage in behaviors that can optimize for those neurotransmitters. So one
One high intensity exercise does it it's been shown serotonin goes up it goes up because again, your lactate is increasing the serotonin but it also goes up because branched chain amino acids, which are getting when you're eating protein. They compete with tryptophan tryptophan is a precursor. It has to get into the brain and they compete for transport into the brain with those branch chain amino acids and tryptophan is a precursor for serotonin. So if you're eating a bunch of protein,
Which have branched chain amino acids leucine isoleucine things that are building muscle basically and you're not exercising then your tryptophan can be out competed and there's been studies doing this. They've given they've given people a big like shake like a protein shake essentially that does not have any trip. It has no tryptophan in it. So they're essentially just dosing them with branched chain amino acids and their tryptophan levels Fall by like 90% in the brain and and subsequently their serotonin levels.
Vomit and people get in a terrible mood their long-term planning shuts down. So serotonin plays a role in impulse control like being able to like control your impulses and not engage in behaviors that are just very impulsive. And so that that goes down and this is just normal people that you know are drinking this shake of Branch chain amino acids. So what makes the branch genome acid amino acids going to muscle exercise. So if you want to do that, then you're going to get more tryptophan in the brain to make
serotonin. What?
Is the Adaptive justification of the Adaptive mechanism for this is it that if human was doing relatively high intensity extended exercise that would often be some sort of pursuit hunting type thing. Therefore you need a natural painkiller to encourage said human to keep chasing said wildebeest because if they feel better, they will keep chasing it which means they're more likely to catch it which means they won't starve and die.
That sounds like a great explanation. Yeah. I mean we used to move around.
Like you said, it doesn't necessarily have to be high intensity. It could be just lifting weights to it causes branched-chain amino acids be taking up to muscle, but you're you're moving. Yeah. So there there's a you know, I think there's could be an evolutionary pressure. You know reason why
there is forever in my world. There's an evolutionary reason for absolutely everything not because it's the only thing I've got any expertise and but yeah, that's that's interesting to think about how I wrote this like 10 years ago when I was still suffering with low mood and stuff like that that
If you gave me the choice between a good night's sleep of 9 hours or a hard training session of one hour my mood reset before and after training is greater than before and after sleep. I found more bleed from pre to post sleep then pre to post training and it's so ruthless that if you are suffering with low mood or if you're on your period of high stress or whatever it is. One of the things that you go to First is sleep, even though in my experience. The higher Roi thing is the thing that
Hardest to do when your mood to the lowest because your motivation to do difficult things is also at its
lowest totally absolutely. It's funny that you mentioned the sleep thing too. Because like, you know, I do think sleep is important, but nowadays I'm like, you know, it's exercise like like I don't know that anything matters is much if you are putting in that effort to exercise and you know, that could be shown in data. If you look at you know studies that have looked at all cause mortality and people that don't you know, sleep is much like they're getting
Six hours or less they have a higher all-cause mortality than people that are not see but only in people that are not physically active. So people that are physically active and sleep terribly had the same all-cause mortality as people that weren't, you know, slept fine without so in other words all interest exercise can negate the bad effects of lack of sleep on all-cause mortality, and I also glucose response goes up with lack of sleep. Like you're you're you're you're basically going to have a higher postprandial glucose for
Monster food. You're going to have a higher fasting blood glucose level when you don't get enough sleep.
Well, you're also going to select for foods that are more salty more sweet. I mean I found this as well that I for the first time in my entire life when I had a stable sleep and wake pattern was covid. That was the first time that ever gone to bed as an adult the same time most nights out of two weeks because I was always running our events, you know, which would mean I'd be up until two three.
5:00 in the morning catching up a till driving back from one of the club nights in a different city doing something like that. And I remember thinking I always thought that I had low mood and was a bad sleeper and I just realized I was doing shift work. The shift work is considered. I think the World Health Organization literally considered shift work a health risk. So this is firefighters. This is Nurses. This is anybody that's got an irregular pattern and I thought that was me. I was like, oh this is
It was so.
Formative and such a foundation to the way the my lifestyle and the texture of my mind existed that I didn't I couldn't imagine what life would be like different and then covid comes in and obviously nightclubs were immediately or get shut down and I guess guess I'll try this going to bed at 11 o'clock every night thing and then mood started to just like linearly get better throughout all of 2020. And yeah that was wild to see that that
a study of someone who basically had no theory of mind for what it would be like to not be like that to then actually get stable sleep and wake was it was crazy. It was a really big change.
Yeah. That's it really is like you said the shift work. I mean, I'm so respectful for people that are doing it and Sachin pandas actually done research work with like firefighters and stuff and shown that if the shift workers do time restricted feeding and eating like the if they're doing that while they're doing their shift work. They actually do have better at least like metabolic outcomes and
Off like or Not by outcomes but biomarkers, so there is somewhat so so it helps because you know, they're obviously their bodies completely out of cycle and whack but if they can at least keep that food intake clock on the right, you know path and right clock it does make a difference. So they're not eating All Around the Clock
basically presumably if they were also doing training if they're exercising that would help to mitigate medical grade
ago. I think the exercise would be the most important thing that they could do.
Do and firefighters. I mean they are they do have to be physically fit right? I mean that's part of like the requirements. So
if I fight is basically like being a halfway house into the Armed Forces like a lot of my friends that are there that you know, they have PT they have yard time. They have kid inspections. They have all this sort of stuff. I don't know whether it's the same. I don't think it's the same for people that are accident and emergency nurses and doctors and stuff like that. I
Know if it's the same for the police. I guess if you're part of the SWAT team and stuff that would that would be very heavily prioritized by don't know if the the classic Bobby on the beat with a big gut and a SAM thinking British here and like one of the silly hat that are British police officers were I don't know whether they're put through the same kind of Fitness. I suppose that job, sometimes it's less physically demanding than a firefighters, but then if you're chasing some Scali down an Alleyway and chasing after some person that just committed a crime you need to be pretty fit for that.
We are super super interesting are when were talking about cold and heat exposure to something that you've spent an awful lot of time thinking about.
What's the best way to utilize cold and heat routine throughout a week? Like what's just the the simplest way to do an evidence-based cold and heat protocol? I think one of the best ways would be if you so most people should be training right? They should be doing some sort of resistance training or endurance training vigorous exercise doing the heat after that. I think would be one of the best because you're
You're extending your work out to some degree. So there's been there's been studies looking at the on the endurance. I'd like if your intervention studies that have taken people that have done Exercise on a stationary bike or they've done the same exercise in the stationary bike and then done 15 minutes of hot sauna, like right after that
and basically no break
with no break. They just go into this on after and then VO2 max was measures have VO2 max is like your best way to measure cardiorespiratory Fitness, right? So the maximum amount of oxygen you're taking in
In maximal, you know exercise. So the their VO2 max was better and people that did that exercise the the stationary bike plus the sauna versus just the stationary bike. Right and that is a lot because sauna to some degrees mimicking moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise, you know, it's doing a lot of the same things a lot of the same physiological responses happening. So I would say doing the sauna right after the workout, but also there's a new say that came out showing people that did resistance training and
Got into a sauna had like better muscle gains
and it just makes your workout more of whatever you
did it, make sure you know, but I think some of that has to do with the heat shock proteins to and also yeah, there's been studies showing that if you increase blood flow like like if you do resistance training it used to be like this thing was like, oh don't do any endurance training like like at this on the same day that you're doing resistance training cause you're going to want your games or something. I don't remember what exactly was called, but that's kind of
Been put to rest. It's not true. So so too. Well, I guess there's always extreme. There's always outlier. Okay, I should say ways you could do it but generally speaking like getting some blood flow to your muscles after you've done training actually improves hypertrophy, right? Because you're getting some growth factors and things there and immune cells things that are like playing a role in the hypertrophy
right there a window post training that you need to get into the heat within
not necessarily know
within the same day.
No, I think you should do it. If you okay you're acting you asked me about the optimal protocol. I would say optimally it would be after training. It doesn't have to be because also he plays a role in sleep. So peep some people choose to do their heat at night like a couple hours before they're going to go to bed. You can go actually have been kind of obsessive about this of late and I do both so I do I get in a sauna after I work out and then I do the jacuzzi at night with my husband, which is
Other form of heat stress you're in you know, 104 °F water. You can be in there for 20 minutes and get it similar responses in terms of biomarkers as a Sano. So I do think if you're only going to do one you can kind of choose like do you have a hard time sleeping do you want to or do you want to kind of extend your workout? And now I don't know that you have to do it. Like I think there's also been observational data by the way the study with the cyclists and the sauna that was an untrained people. So you might go or what about train people ins. Yeah, but
And there's observational data showing that people that do exercise or people that exercise and sauna. So this is all sorts of people. This is these are people that are exercising. These are newbies, right the people that do exercise in sauna have a higher vo2max compared to people that only exercise. So there's evidence. I think that that kind of makes it a little stronger that it's not just a newbie gain right like that. It's probably something going and I think it's because it's it's mimicking cardiovascular exercise.
So do you have to do it after work out? No, you don't have to but I do think it's I personally like to do it after a workout. It's like I've already got my heart rate up, you know, it's it's so it's really just like extending extending my
workouts. I'm just two windows that seem to be at least interesting to use would be 2 hours ish finishing two hours before
bed. I say that yeah because some people take longer to cool down. Yeah, and I do exactly so yeah two hours like to get out before, you know, like because
You don't want to be like trying to go to sleep. Then you'll have the opposite effect, right? You're too hot. You can't fall asleep
and then post woke up to post workout and a couple of hours before sleep. What temperature how long per week what else?
Yeah. So temperature duration frequency, like how many times you know, so there's all sorts of studies coming out of Finland where saunas are ubiquitous and everyone's using one looking at, you know, sauna use and all-cause mortality cardiovascular.
The rate of mortality dementia Alzheimer's disease all those things, right and what's clear is that there is a dose-dependent effect with frequency and duration in the sauna. So in other words, the more frequent the Saudi use the more robust of the effect, so I'll give you an example all-cause mortality is 40 percent lower in people that use this on a four to seven times a week. So four times would be minimum right versus people that use it two to three times a week. They have a 24 percent lower all-cause mortality, right?
The bare minimum would be too if you want something. This is compared to people use it one time a week. But if you want the most robust affects, the bare minimum would be for up to seven write every day. So that would be frequency. Now temperature and duration most of those studies in Finland. The average temperature in the publication's is about 174 175 degree Fahrenheit and the duration in that sauna is also important. So if people only stayed in for 11 minutes, they weren't getting
In a very robust effect, they had to stay in for at least 20 minutes. So 20 minutes at 170 for °F. Four times a week is the recipe for I would say that the best, you know effects for cardiovascular brain all-cause mortality.
What about if you increase temperature and reduce
duration? Yeah. So this question usually I get at the opposite because people are interested in infrared saunas.
Infrared saunas go only to like 145 degrees Fahrenheit the kind of heat you up a little differently. They're not the ambient air is not as high. It's like, you know electrons that are like moving your molecules in your body up. But so in that case you would want to stay in much longer duration and that's what's used in like Ashley Mason study, but the opposite so like if you're going to you know, what 180 or how hot are we
talking as 2:30
today? Okay. So heat is so he
Has a stress response. It's a stress on the body. Right and you have this stress response to the heat, right? So your body makes heat shock proteins. For example, you got doc thoughts you have you get dark thoughts. Yeah, exactly and then and then you get out and you feel great, but you also get chatty in there. So it's important to keep in mind that you don't want to go to extreme on heat because it is a stress like just like you don't want to like
exercise like all day like you need recovery, right? You don't want to fast like forever like you need food. These things are stressed their stressors on the body and our body has a stress response to them. So this is kind of like hormesis. We talked about hormesis a lot. Right? He does the same thing heat can permeable eyes the blood-brain barrier when you start to go to extreme temperatures melting my brain.
I'm concerned that that 230 is too high. Yeah, there's so there was one study that came that was published. So 2022 it was kind of recent ish and it wasn't from dr. Your allow cannons group who is the main researcher who does a lot of studies out of Finland looking at you know, sauna use and dementia, for example, he found Sony uses associated with like a 66 percent reduction in Alzheimer's disease and dementia, if you're they're using it for 27 times a week. Well another
He came out and this was in gosh. It was a quite a few. I don't know members to or 5,000 adult. It was a log or maybe it was more actually. Well. Anyways, they looked at temperature and they looked at duration and they looked at Alzheimer's disease risk and you know is clear that you know, if you use the sauna you had a lower degree lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, but there was a subset of group where people were using it at 200 degrees Fahrenheit or more that
Have the opposite effect.
Wow, so U-shaped curve to temperature.
I think so, I don't talk about I don't want people to get freaked out because it's like but not everyone's doing 200. I think there's the extreme there's always this extreme push where I'm going to go hard. And if you're that personality type you're going to be that person that goes all the way because that's what you do on everything you do, but I love ya so I do think with sanne though. It's important to keep in mind that it is a pretty strong stress on the body particularly if you're not head out, right, but if you're getting your head in there and warming it up to
130
degrees Yep. This plunge thing is really really intense. I mean, there's a couple of things when you think about like, where's the thermometer actually located is it is it is point. It's at the top unless you're stood on your tiptoes on the bench. You're not actually going to get your head to that point and the difference between this one that I've got is two benches and the lower bench
is way
cooler half as hard as sitting on the upper bench and the upper bench isn't at the all the way at the top and if you're at the other side to where the rock heater.
As if you're over there then it's easier and if you're at the front and it's a bit hard so you can kind of mitigate within that I suppose one consideration like four times a week can be quite intrusive for somebody to get that heat exposure especially if they don't even if you do have a sauna at home, it's still pretty intrusive like okay. I'm going to go and back and forth to the thing and preheated and all the rest of the stuff. Is that a if you were to do 20 minutes in 180 190, something like that.
To make sure that it's 174 and then take a little break and then go back in. Is that a way that you can maybe get away with doing three times a week or two times a week and still try and capture some of those really good gains.
I don't know that that data is there to make that statement but I do know that there have been studies looking at going repeatedly and taking a few minutes break and going back into the sauna. And what is clear is that you do get big major boost and growth
hormone. Is this the thing that 16? Yes Tina increase. Yes, so tell us
that yeah.
So what they were doing is they were going so they're going I don't remember how many times but it was
quite full times 30 minutes
break. Yeah with break something like that. Yeah, so it's been years since I've talked about that study. But yeah, so and that could give 16 fold increase in growth hormone, which you know, it does it's transient. It doesn't like last forever. But you know also growth hormones involved with sleep and in deep sleep and so it's another reason why doing that like timing your sauna around around bedtime could be highly beneficial for a lot.
Lot of people like a lot of people really do benefit. So I personally like I said, I do I kind of do both I did like the I do the hot tub, which is 104 degrees and I'm in there for like 30 minutes and with the difference being that it's 104 degrees of liquid touching your skin exactly now and there's been studies that have looked at so there's heat shock proteins that are activated in the sauna and they're also activated in the hot tub and brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is from exercise also is activated when you get in a hot tub, so and
The sauna so it's like when you start to see the biomarkers that are similar between the different heat modalities. You kind of go what the end of the day is your heart rate going up in the hot tub. Yes. It's like I've been I've done the sauna for likes usually years and years and years. I like I know how I feel I feel the exact same way in this on I like the sauna better because I'm less likely to cheat like I will cheat in a hot tip. I will give my arms out like you have to have your shoulders down for 20 minutes. So you have to really like you I saw you on Twitter get into a
You got in trouble with big steam like the steam room versus Sauna versus jacuzzi thing. I think there's a lot of people that are
like evangelists for the sauna being the only way to get hot and I think that you'd mentioned there's quite a lot of different ways that you can go. There's
a lot of different ways you can get hot and I think I mean I've done a lot of steam showers again, you're getting your heart rate up your you're getting you're increasing your cardiac output. You're getting blood flow increases you're sweating like all these things are happening. It's the heat shock response your you know, there's a lot of ways. What is it that a lot of rooms to a lot of roads to Rome right? I mean, it's not
not
would if somebody doesn't have access to easy access to a sauna or doesn't have one in the house. What about just running hot bath and then continuing to like, I mean, how much is a thermometer that you put in the bathroom? Probably $5, maybe ten dollars or something throw that in get it at what temperature and stay in for 20
minutes exactly. I do this a lot when I'm traveling by the way, like I get I do that the portable sauna I do I do it but so what I what I like to recommend
Man is like so go and get one of those pool thermometers. Right? I mean, they're like you said they're like anywhere between five to Fifteen dollars loti one's a little floaty ones you put that in your bathtub and you get it up to 104 set your timer for 20 minutes make yours. Make sure your shoulders are down like submerged below and if the the the temperature starts to go down just add some more hot water and that's that's it. Most most people have a bathtub. And so I like that it can be accessible because that's another thing I get a lot of oh I do.
Have a sauna at each position. Yeah, you know and yeah, there's a lot of gyms, but this isn't Finland like we're you know, everyone has a sauna so so I do realize that there's a limitation on the saunas and you might grow old and why do I need to like do I need it? You know, like I said, so there's the vo2max, you know that you're getting you're getting even better than just exercise. Now, there's people out there that are endurance athletes like there. I don't know do they need it like for vo2max probably not but it also helps with disuse atrophy muscle atrophy.
And those Studies have been done. So they've done studies where they do like this. They immobilize a limb people for like a period of weeks and they did local heating in one study, but there's been a lot of animal studies doing sort of whole body Heating and it'll prevent disuse atrophy by like 40% I snapped my achilles three years ago full Detachment playing cricket and it was
Thirteen Days from when the happened until when I got my surgery, so I'm waiting for I wanted a very particular surgeon in the UK to come and do it. One of the guys had been highly recommended to me which meant I had to wait a little bit longer 13 days of not stepping on my right leg and it was gone. It was so alarming to look down and see especially because you've got the other leg too fucking compare it to
so you laid in the bath or whatever looking down and thinking this is wild it's so crazy and you obviously you see people that are in wheelchairs who maybe don't use the lower limbs all that much and they've got very thin legs. And yeah, it was what it was crazy to see that in 13
days when you were young when you this happened and so you can recover you can bounce back quite quickly, but people that are older like they go and they get influenza and they're like convalescing for like weeks, right? They're not moving. They're not using
Their muscles they can't recover like they'll never get back to whip that pre so scary. And and this is where I think the heat comes in and also a mega threes so I know it's like omega-3. Like I can't like there's like there's a good few low hanging fruit
rice episode is brought to you by
Omega-3s, but it's been shown to cut disuse atrophy but like 50% so and this but this is something that's not going to happen. Like you have to preload it. So you have to it the omega-3 is
late in the muscle membranes and it takes about four weeks for that to happen. So you have to plan ahead or just be the person that's already taking him. That way it's already there. Right? And so then you're ready
to talk to me about cold. We got hot. Yeah cold exposure.
Yeah. So deliberate cold exposure is another type of home attic stress and there's some overlap but there's different like you can increase heat shock proteins from cold exposure. He charged these stress response Pathways. There's a lot of
Lap where you can like because it's just it's a it's an adaptation right? We were meant to move. We were meant to be hot. We are meant to be cold. We're going to get plant phytochemicals where they're you know, our bodies respond and we activate all these really beneficial genetic Pathways. So they all kind of overlap some do it better than others like heat shock proteins are more robustly activated by heat, but cold also activates them. Just an interesting thing to think about so cold Exposure One of the most robust physiological
Responses to colder cold exposure would be norepinephrine release and we were talking earlier about mood and like neurotransmitter optimization things to do like behaviors. You can engage in and timing of those behaviors around things that are you know, perhaps going to require a better mood or motivation or something like that. Right? So cold norepinephrine does play a role in motivation and mood and those things and like I got in the cold shower before I came here and I usually do that before like a talk or
You know something like that as well, but some norepinephrine release is one of the most consistent physiological responses. You can get that from 20 seconds at like 40 °F water or to Excuse Me 2 minutes at 49 or 50 °F water will release norepinephrine or epinephrine to fold over baseline or you can be crazy and staying Like 50-degree Water for an hour. Who does that and you'll get a five-fold increase.
So why we why would you want norepinephrine will it is a neurotransmitter. It does play a role in Focus attention regulates mood it helps with like anxiety. All those things are really important. So it's kind of I personally like the time it around things like cold exposure also sort of benefits with respect to mitochondrial biogenesis. You can get in cold plunge and stay in there for 15 minutes and increase mitochondrial biogenesis markers and muscle tissue. So that's the growth of new mitochondria.
Andrea in your muscle tissue, that's great. Mitochondria are producing more energy. So it's associated with less muscle atrophy to search but you can get that from a high-intensity workout too. So you don't have to necessarily do cold. When should you do the cold so I can tell you what not to do it. When not to do it would be after sort of a strength training or resistance training workout.
How long is the window?
It's about so that's a good question. So I've come up with my own sort of window on this and I can tell you the rationale behind that.
But so here's the thing. There's been a couple of studies and it's actually not all consistent. The first study that came out that was like the big made the big deal. It was like, I don't know 2015 or so when it came out or something like that and the study did it was a cold ice bath and it was five minutes after a strength training workout where people the like the men went in and like put their leg or something like that in the in the ice bath for 15 minutes. And this was right after the workout. Okay, or did a passive recovery where they were
She'll eat on a stationary bike. So the control group wasn't just sitting around they were actually in my opinion increasing hypertrophy by movement. Okay, just that's clear. I think that's a flaw of the study. And so the people that did the ice bath right after there were there was a centurion work at had still had hypertrophy, but they had less than the control group. And so that was like, oh it's blunting gains. And so I was like died back then I would dive into I was trying to dive in Downers leg or legs. I don't
remember
Right. I was just wondering because it would be interesting if they compared the
leatherneck other leg Yeah, I don't I don't remember. It's been so long since I've read that study. But so when you are when you're doing exercise when you're doing resistance training, you're obviously causing an inflammatory response, right? That's part of the stress and there's a counter to that there's a very potent anti-inflammatory response and with the with the resistance training, you're actually damaging muscle, right? You're damaging the muscle. It's like a mechanical force.
Doing all sorts of Pathways Well turns out that immune cells have to get to that muscle and that plays a role in in the hypertrophy but like this whole response if you look at like some of the cytokines and igf-1 that's involved in signaling and all that. It happens. Like it Peaks like an hour after resistance training and then after that it kind of goes back down and so the question is when you're getting in the cold you're causing basil restrict richer constriction. So norepinephrine I mentioned is a neurotransmitter. It's also a whore
Mon it's made in the periphery as well and it's evolved in Basel constriction, which is the opposite of what he does beso dilation. So when your basil constricting your cutting off the roads to get to your muscle, right you like the growth factors the immune cells all those things can't get there. Right? You're stopping that I think this is what's happening. And so, you know, it's like well what if I just wait like an hour or two would I be safe possibly or maybe just, you know, do it a few hours like five hours.
The rule you use five. So I
personally don't do as much cold exposure as I should do because I talk about it. I do it a lot more in the summer when it's hot and but when I do do it most of the time it's before something I know it's like it's ridiculous, but it's the truth or I'll do it in the morning like so I personally don't like to time it right after my heat exposure mostly because blood pressure.
Changes for me that are just freaky that I don't play Wild. Do you contrast that are p is very very weird it is. Yeah. I mean some people like that right? I enjoy it but it's like a dizzy feeling it's a dizzy and I've had like even more extreme where it was like vertigo and I had like it was said on the side and just yeah exactly stare at the floor and hope that it goes away. Yeah, so I'm not to like fond of that feeling so I like to separate them, you know a little bit although I think
If I wait like five to ten minutes after I get out of the sauna like and just kind of a room temperature just chill out for a minute. Let my heart rate come down. Then I get in the cold. I don't have that response. So like waiting a little bit. So I think the rule of thumb for cold exposure is I think that neurotransmitter optimization optimization. Like when do you want to use it to get that norepinephrine hit because it does help with Focus intention it helps with mood anxiety. And so like, you know if you want to like if you wake up in the morning first thing and do it, that's a great way to start the day.
I like to wake up and get on the Peloton or do my workout but also just timing it around things. Like I said, I did a culture before I came here. Yeah from at home. I'll get into the cold plunge before something that you know is going to cause me more anxiety or just I need more focus and
attention. So you mentioned 20 seconds of 40 degrees is enough for the norepinephrine. But what about if we're looking for the full Cascade we're going to capture as much as we can most that is realistic for people to do how
How frequently how cold per week
so we talked about norepinephrine and we talked a little bit about mitochondrial biogenesis the growth of new mitochondria in skeletal muscle and that was 15 minutes at 50 degrees, which if you can get to the three-minute three and a half minute Mark at 50 degrees, you can get 250 rest of it's fine. Yeah, but there's another benefit we didn't talk about which is actually making more mitochondria in your adipose tissue. And that's an adaptation that is a response to cold exposure because
Cuz when you have more mitochondria in you're fat, you're you're basically making it's basically you're making more energy burn more energy. But you also release heat as a by-product. And so it's an adaptation the more you use the cold the it's called Browning of fat. And the reason for that is because when you look at a fat droplet under a microscope and there's more mitochondria in it, it looks Brown compared to White. So so that's also something that happens and most of the studies looking at Browning of fat and humans have not been done in getting into a
Water they've been done in like humans walking around at 50 °F or putting on a cold suit. That's 50 °F II know it's like one of those things you like walk around with the air. Yeah, and and so again for those I mean, it's it's anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour. You start to you start to get that so 15 minutes I think is a good marker
for session
for a session for you the whole shebang. Yep, right leg. Not just the norepinephrine.
But the mitochondrial benefits if you're also looking for Browning of the fat and you know the muscle what temperature and so that would be like 50 degrees 49 degrees Fahrenheit if they're if you can and which is its I mean, that's cold some people go that's pretty miserable. I
mean we used to again, it's so funny like the Bro version of me and my friends that do this in Austin if we go to kuya where I've said that you should go if you're coming through it's 2:20 in the sauna. It's
Seven degrees in the ice bath and we're doing 20 and 33 times like but it seems like dialing that back in terms of intensity and increasing it in terms of frequency and duration is where we're actually going to maybe not even capture more games but reduce some of the negative effects of us going hell for leather on
yeah. I mean you got to think about like, you know, the the fact that this you are stressing your body, right?
If you want you want the stress to be good and great enough and will be robust enough, but you don't like there's a window right like you don't want to go outside that window where it's like damage. Yeah,
but we're all one rep max spilled on everything so are all of the rows that go into it will look like when I went into the gym going to failure or doing Drop sets or you know pushing myself until I want to throw up that worked that has to be the universal rule for all modalities of stimulus. Therefore, I'll just
Do the sonnet till I like want to pass out and they'll crawl out and that's got to be the
best. How long are you do you stay in the 2:30? And you get down do you keep going down
each step up and down. It depends on whether my housemates that and we also watch stuff. So we'll put a speaker in there and like watch a little bit of like an interview or YouTube or whatever usually about 15 to 20 minutes is like my real upper Bound for that 231. That's
a lot for that
hot. It was it was rough. It burns the inside of your nose like if you try and breathe in through your
I knows it hurts hurts my nostrils to do that. Anyway, 15 minutes 50 degrees not done within five hours of hypertrophy training. Let's just say it to be safe. Right also, probably not done within a couple of hours of going to sleep because that's maybe going to cause some complications when it comes to getting your body core temperature,
right you talked about called? Yes. I don't know. I think I think it's a like so like it can help with sleep to actually getting
cold hot and cold can do.
Hot and cold can help with sleep as if you go hot then it's going to bounce back and pull you into
coal. It it your body does go like if you notice when you get out of the sauna like doesn't take it. I don't know how it berries on each person. But after a little bit of time all of a sudden, you're really cold, right? You're like gasps. Oh, I don't know that it, you know, I think people even do like hot and I've done this hot and cold and it does really help with seem doing both as well. Okay, but it's also kind of a exhausting thing with your with your body, which makes sense right when I
went to this place.
In Toronto called other ship you heard of this.
It sounds yes. Yeah, I have yeah
so that cool. It's similar to kuya in Austin other ship do classes for heat and cold. So they've got this 90 persons sauna, which is like a Coliseum and it's this raked sort of seating and benches and it's huge this sauna thing at the front looks like a massive barbecue grill for the biggest party that you've ever seen and then they have coaches that guide you through the cold exposure as well. So there's kind of like
He's stood at the end of each of the cold tubs and they say what do you want you to get out of the session today? And they'll take you through different modalities. One of the ones that they did with us, which are really loved was 30 seconds in 30 seconds out three rounds of the cold and while you were in there you were moving both arms and legs and doing a little bit of toning like vocal like toning stuff. And that was wild I'd never done that before we tend to just get in sit in for two.
Three minutes get out go back in the sauna, but that was really interesting the effect of doing that was pretty
cool. Yeah doing a workout in there because again your your it's like making your workout harder, right? It's like because they're both sort of to some degree doing like do at least physiological responses kind of similar with respect to cardiovascular and there's also something about if you don't have an agitator in the cold tub, everyone's everyone's done this everyone knows that you get in and you sit and you like just going to wait for the film of warm water to kind of get around me and
If I really really don't move, it'll be less painful but doing this is just it's so miserably so much. All right, frequency 15 minutes 50 degrees. How
often I don't know that there's an established frequency like there is with the sauna, right? This isn't like there's not a large observational studies looking at people that are col plenty, but I will tell you so I talked to dr. Lachman about this in a while what percentage of people in Finland because the saunas are dishonest ladies are coming
around finland's Ground
Zero.
Do ya like are doing our because they a lot of people will just they'll do they have like these public soun has as its called and Community will get in there and then they go and like in the winter time to just go into the Baltic and jump in and it's cold and I've been there I've experienced it. I've seen it so he was saying about 10% of people. I was actually thought it was gonna be more than that, but it's not about 10% of people are doing are going doing contrast therapy. So they're going from hot to cold. So then you got your go. Oh well because I wanted to know
Are some of these benefits like from the contrast and there's not a lot of research on it, you know, so the question is like I don't I don't think that you can give a frequency like with absolute
confidence all 27 times per
week. Exactly. Yeah, so it's more of a okay. Well are you looking for these Browning of fat? Is that because it'll go away when you stop doing it. So you have to keep it up in the more you do it is kind of dose-dependent. So do you try and do I told you that I don't do enough cold exposure and
it's the summer would you try and do yeah, I mean so I look I feel great. I feel great this morning when I was doing my cold shower, right? Like I like to use it for that like mood
booster cute. So it's so it's an acute
performance enhancer that neurotransmitter optimization think that's why I that's why I like to use it and every time I do it, I'm like, why don't you do this more? I know why because I'm doing the hit and the muscles and then I'm the mom and like a podcast and that you know, so it's like that's it's almost like I think it's almost
You're to just at least if it's winter to just get into the cold shower because it's like less of like something about the cold plunge. You got to like lift the lid up the Led You Gotta think about you got to think about it like, oh it's cold plunge, and I got to get past that three three and a half minute Mark where you know you burning and then you're not burning. So I think I think that I just let would like to start using it on a more of a daily basis for the way. It makes me feel and that's why I like it. Mostly it seems to me.
Based on what you're saying here. That although there is definitely a place for cold exposure and deliberate cold exposure has some effect that you don't capture with the sauna. If you were to make a pie chart of what's happening with heat and cold a lot of it is coming from heat and only a little bit of it is coming from cold. Yeah, when we're talking about a lot of these Health outcomes with respect to cardiovascular disease and dementia and all-cause mortality. All it is it's all but you know again the hot is mimicking moderate intensity exercise. So yeah, that makes sense the cold. I really just
They come all comes back again to that that makes you feel so good. You're getting that norepinephrine. It does brown your fat and like look Browning a fat is a therapeutic Target for many researchers that have been researching this now and for you know over a decade where there it's being looked at to help as a treatment for type 2 diabetes because you do improve metabolic Health like from browning effect, but compare that to like exercise diet what you're eating. I don't know that it matters. I don't know that the cold even
there's like don't I don't even know that we should have been talking about the metabolic benefits of it when you're when there's like so much more bang for your buck from
wrinkling on the top of the icing on the top of the yeah, exactly and it's like, okay I'm making more mitochondria on my muscles, but I want to be doing hit and vigorous exercise for all the other benefits and guess what I get mitochondrial biogenesis from that like pretty robustly is out with the brown browning of the fat is that wrists in and clavicle in is that one of the cues that I've heard about?
But this have you seen this stuff now, I don't interesting. So they'll be people screaming Us in the comments. But I'm when I was at other ship when I've been to Korea when I've been with huberman. There's something to do with the wrist area kind of up to the bottom of the palm and something about the clavicle as well being an area which is particularly susceptible to
Benefiting from cold exposure for this brown adipose tissue thing. I heard this story that sounded true, which was during World War Two. The Germans are trying to work out why their fighter pilots were dying so quickly when they were rejecting over the British Channel, let's say that they'd run out of fuel or they'd been shot down or that the engine had failed to some reason or another and the pilots were rejecting and they were finding them dying very shortly.
After the plane had gone down so they had a lot of prisoners in one form or another they were able to do these tests on and what they found was that if the life jackets lifted the clavicle up out of the water the survival time went through the roof. So there's something very important about this area of the body being under the water and that is the converse reason apparently which is why your clavicle should be under when you're doing glib deliberate cold exposure.
That's interesting.
I know there's a you know, when you're when you get into cold water particularly, if you're not adapted, like you're not deliberately doing it. There's a cold shock response. Right? And so I wonder you know, and some of that plays a role in like people actually having you know dying from from getting in really cold water. I don't I wonder if there's a connection there between the cold shock
response. Yes, very interesting. Yeah. Yeah because less of them is under the water when it comes to exercise. What is your framework for designing an exercise
routine?
Well, so for me, I personally get very motivated when I understand how things work and and look at data and see outcomes and I think okay. Well, I need to you know, get my routine around this whatever, you know is is the data and so I have been pretty convinced that I've always been like a runner. I always been endurance more of an endurance Chucky. I'm not an athlete like I've done like one marathon in my entire life, you know, I'm not out there.
Clock in those kinds of miles, but I do enjoy going for runs and I enjoy that sort of endurance exercise. So for me, that was always what I might go to less focusing on resistance training as we've talked about hugely important for muscle mass. But the question is well, how hard do I need to go on the you know on the endurance? So it does it need to be more of a vigorous exercise workout or moderate intensity lower intensity. Is anything better than
Nothing. Yes, I think at the end of the day like the most important thing is habit. Like what are you going to consistently do? Right like you're going to consistently do some sort of physical activity and it needs to be that like whatever it is that you will do otherwise like you can talk about what's the best but if you won't do it, it doesn't matter right? So I tried to get a lot of vigorous intensity exercise. And so that would be eighty percent max heart rate. And the reason for that is because
I've been pretty convinced that if you are not an athlete doing more than 10 hours a week or 10 or more right of you know endurance training. So if you're not that person, I think that it's more beneficial the data suggests is more beneficial to gauge majority of the time in more vigorous intensity exercise versus what's Zone to training, right? So like a lower intensity or I guess it's more moderate intensity the talk test kind.
Of exercise right where your breath easy, but you can still have a conversation which I do like doing those as well particular. I'm having a conversation with someone on a run. It's nice. I enjoy it. But I do also go harder. I do a lot of high intensity interval training and I think that the there's evidence for that. If you are going harder and you're getting that heart rate up to eighty percent max heart rate your increasing that lactate and we've talked about this that you know, that in itself is beneficial.
It's beneficial for the brain and I think that's one reason I'm particularly motivated because I'm very interested in brain health. And so lactates been shown black tea is consumed by the brain during physical activity. This has been shown in humans and it fuels basically normal function while you're exercising is your brain is working harder while you're exercising just like your heart and your muscles your brain is working harder to and lactate is feeling that and you're basically increasing norepinephrine and serotonin from that lactate Soul a
Jade itself is actually it can be used as an energy source. I very utilizable energy source much like beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is a ketone body that you make when you're either fasting or on a ketogenic diet. It's very similar. And so lactate increases those neurotransmitters. It also increases that brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is beneficial for growing new neurons. It's beneficial for neuroplasticity for basically making you feel better making you smarter staving off neurodegenerative disease like there's you
Want bdnf like that's what you want. And so and again this is all evidence-based studies that have been shown in human showing that the higher intensity the more intense the workout the more vigorous the more lactate and lactate is signaling to increase that and your it's the way that your muscles communicate with other organs. Like it's increasing lactate and lactate is going to other it's being shuttled to other organs and is signaling to them to do these beneficial things. It's called the lactate shuttle. It's also being shuttled back into your muscle and doing things like increasing glucose uptake.
We talked about that as well. So the lactate itself is only going to come when you're cranking up the intensity when you're working hard enough that you can't get enough oxygen to your muscles, you know to basically produce energy. So that's sort of the the I'm actually trying to make more lactate and the lactate increase doesn't last long. It's pretty transient like 20 minutes or so. You'll be back to your Baseline after a pretty intense workout. So there's data not only show
That it's beneficial for the brain and be drained brain derived neurotrophic factor in these neurotransmitters is talking about but also lactate itself is used by neurons. So the lactate is going into your brain. It's transported across the blood-brain barrier. It's used by neurons as an energy source, and in fact our neurons prefer lactate so our astrocytes which is a supporting cells in our brain. They make a lot of black tape because they actually are what's called glycolytic they use glucose without their mitochondria as energy and they shuttle the
lactate out and neurons take it up and so neurons like to use lactate because they use they they can use lactate as an energy source without using as much energy as they do with glucose. So it takes more energy to use glucose to make energy than it does lactate that makes sense. It's so funny, you know, even when you were in school people would learn about the lactate threshold and they know that that was the reason that your muscles burn when you're doing cross-country running and you're 13 years old or whatever and it's almost like the enemy
Some ways it's the thing that hurts. I don't want it. I don't like that and now you're telling me that it may actually be super useful
super. It's definitely the thing that you want. It's it's just it's hugely beneficial for the brain. You know, again, it's also beneficial for the blood-brain barrier. It's increasing vegf, which is a growth factor that helps you grow new blood vessels and like repair blood vessels at your blood brain barrier. So it doesn't break down which happens with age. So it is and I was talking about the neurons using it.
There's there's evidence that when so when your neurons use lactate they spare glucose, they don't need glucose because they're using it lactate for energy. Right and what happens is called the glucose sparing effect and what that means is glucose can be used for other things and what it's used for is producing. It's a pre it makes a precursor for glutathione, which is the major antioxidant in the brain. And so there's actually a there's there's research out there looking at giving
People lactate infusions that have TB. I feel like well, it's like sodium lactate so it feels like you know saline but okay. Yeah. So so people that have a TBI traumatic brain injury, they have massive like injury in their brain, right and they need glutathione. It's a very potent antioxidant but their glucose is being used up to make energy. I mean, it's not there's nothing there to make the glutathione. And so there's these studies that have shown that the sodium lactate infusions.
Is it has a beneficial effect with TBI? Because it again I think this is the mechanism that's happening. One of many is it's helping with the glucose pairing. So glucose is used to make more antioxidant your brain so that on top of it's also making
bdnf brain growth factor. Okay. So I think that will be a lot of people listening who fall into one of two camps almost everyone listening will be training in some way or another right? This is an audience of Jack people, but one will skew towards the body building style training.
It'll probably be a 3 to 5 days split I can push my legs or maybe a body part split or something like that. And those people will likely be trying to hit, you know, the six to 10,000 steps per day. So they'll be focused very much on the resistance training will be another Camp of people who are like heavy on Zone to they'll be the runners. They'll be the cyclists. Maybe they'll be some hybrid training people that are in there. But even the hybrid training guys are going to just be doing like either camp on a camp to what you're saying. Is that there
His third Camp, which is this high-intensity vigorous exercise and that that may be the most important one of all
so I think that if we're talking about the the camp with a Zone 2 and if we're if we're talking about athletes more, I mean, these are people that are clocking a lot of miles right just normal people. Okay. So these are like committed exercisers doing maybe you know for the two to four hours a week of exercise. They'll
do a POC run and they'll like, you know, they'll keep on top of that runs throughout the week or whatever.
Yeah.
I think that if that's so again it going back to like if that's what they're going to do. Everything running is beneficial like you're also going to get a lot of benefits from just doing Zoom to right like if but you know, there's I think that if you can step it up to being a little bit more vigorous if you can still do that and habitually do it incorporate some high intensity interval training in there as well. I do think it's very beneficial and you know, it's also beneficial for the vo2max improvements like there's been studies that have been done looking at people that are
Are actually meeting the requirements for aerobic exercise per week. So it's like two and a half hours a week. And even if they're Meeting those like doing moderate-intensity exercise, there's like 40 percent of those people will not improve their VO2 max. Like they're called non-responders. It's not really know why they don't respond, but it's thought because you know improvements in your cardiorespiratory Fitness as measured by vo2max. It's an adaptation.
Mission and in order to have that adaptation like a stronger stressor will produce a little bit more of a robust adaptation. And so there are studies that have identified like people that don't respond. If they then engage in more high intensity training they can get those vo2max in prison.
That's 40% of people that would be doing your Zone 2 plus resistance training style stuff. That doesn't pick up. I mean Peter it's here told me that VO2 max is the single most important metric.
When looking at someone's longevity how much truth do you think's in
that? I think that absolutely he's right. I think VO2 max is one of the single and and the thing I love about it is that it's something that you can measure its a biomarker. I think it's one of the most important things absolutely and there's you know, there's there's some evidence that like doing doing this vigorous exercise is important, but it has to be like a longer interval type of exercise. So, you know, at least one minute that would be sort of the minimum but like better if you can get to four minutes, so there's
Called the Norwegian 4x4 protocol and that's four minutes at the highest intensity that you can maintain for the entire four minutes followed by three men at recovery of like light light exercise. I mean, you want your heart rate to come down so that you could do it again 4 times, right? So the
Norwegian people. Yes, absolutely miserable
the Norwegian 4x4 and you know, there's there was a study and I like I like this is one of the studies that inspired me and
This is this was a study out of UT Southwest and Dallas and the study took 50 year olds that were healthy, but they were not physically active so they didn't have like type 2 diabetes and all that but they weren't active there was a detrained exactly their detrained and they put them on a pretty intensive training protocol for two years. Okay two years. It was a two-year intervention and it was a progressive protocol. So obviously when you have an untrained person
You don't just write out the bat Norwegian 4x4 day one. No, that's not gonna happen. So it took them six months to kind of work up there there their training right there endurance and by the time they got to their 6-month Mark they were doing about you know, four hours a week of what's called maximal intensity exercise. So, this is vigorous. This is
this is where I was a week of maximal intensity. Yeah.
Wow, so they were doing so they
Were basically doing it was like is its high as you can maintain, you know vigorous intensity workout for 30 minutes basically, so they're doing these 30 minute workouts where you're doing like 75 80 percent max heart rate for 30 minutes. Okay. So anyway, that's about eight times a week. Yeah. I mean, so there's also doing they're doing other things as well. So they're doing it's not when I say four hours a week, they're exercising for us. We
are also doing when they were doing four hours of this re jono by for
Nana.
No, there were doing exercise four hours a week. Okay, but they were doing a majority of that was maximal intensity exercise. So a lot of that was doing like 30 minute sessions of this and I think there are probably doing like one and a half to two hours of that. Yep. And then they were also doing some strength training and then there were doing the Norwegian 4 by 4. So there was kind of a nice sort of balanced and then the control group was doing this sort of I say strength training, but it was more I guess body weight, you know kind of stuff that control group.
Is doing that so it was a type of sort of body weight training, but it wasn't high intensity. Like it wasn't like the the CrossFit kind of stuff that you could do. It was he was more like lower stretching kind of stuff maybe yoga ish kind of thing. And so so after two years these people like the cardiac structure, so as we age our heart gets smaller and it gets stiffer and this happens. It's like part of aging that results in a lot of things so cardiovascular.
Risk goes up at also like your exercise performance and capacity goes down. So after that two years of you know doing this pretty vigorous intensity exercise protocol. They're the people the 50 year olds. They reversed their cardiac structure aging by Twenty Years. So there are Hearts were looking more like 30 year old Hearts versus 50 year old hearts and this is after two years of doing this and to me it was so motivating to go. Wow, this 50 year olds can do this like these were untrained people who?
Don't usually work out and by the end of this two years. I mean they were like getting at it. And so I've you know kind of stepped up my my game a bit also, like I've got a coach coming and I'm working with two days a week and to do I'm doing a lot of it's like a resistance training but like kind of interval as well. So I'm getting the high heart rate and and that intervals so funny to see Peter tear and yourself kind of converge on this new it's not it's not as if it's new, but it was definitely
And I wasn't hearing about four years ago. I wasn't hearing people talk about this. Everything was own to it was you know, like go slow to go fast or whatever. The tagline is and one of the problems with his own two is that you need quite a high duration like by Design because you know, 45 minutes or an hour multiple times per week. She's actually difficult. So lots of benefits of improving VO2 max. What are take us through the Norwegian 4x4 again, and then
What else is in there? If there was a protocol or a number of protocols you were going to design here's a program that you can take away today into your gym and do that will help to improve your VO2 max. What would you tell
people I would say the Norwegian 4x4 is by far the best and you're going to get the for the people that are really determined and committed that would be it that would be the four minutes of the exercise intensity as hard as you can go and maintain it for the entire four minutes. So
obviously didn't to the what do you mean it's hard as you can go.
And maintain it. What does that mean?
It means you don't want to go like all out like like 95% of your max heart rate because then you can only last for like a minute, you know, and so so then you're going to go down you're going to you're going to slow down right? So what it means is like you want to go, you know, it might for some people it might be like 75 percent max heart rate, right? So some people might be 80% but you want to go as hard as you can for the four minutes without
Out like really slowing down. So you kind of have to pace yourself a little bit, but you don't want to go too slow. Right? Like you definitely can't be talking like you should not be able to talk for sure when you're doing it. So it's hard enough that you just absolutely can't talk, but it's not all about so minutes four minutes and then three minutes of totally light like you're going all the way. This is like, you know, you're you're like back to like Zone 1 if you want to call it something
if you're hot can come come down if your heart rate come
down. Yeah you doing that for three minutes because you want to give your you want to
Covers that you can do it again and it and you repeat it. It's affordable for time protocol. So you do it once and then repeat it three times or you just call the 4x4. I think that's probably one of the best protocols to improve vo2max now. Dr. Martin Kabbalah. I've had them on my podcast. He's a real expert on these high intensity interval training protocols. He does a lot of research on it at McMaster University in Ontario Canada. And he also says you there, you know there there's evidence that a one-minute protocol. So like just even
I'm doing like an interval like one minute interval and then doing that like, you know, a few times also can improve VO2 max. So that's a little easier and also it's easier like I like I do one minute intervals. I'm trying to now incorporate the 4 by 4 into my routine, which is coaches help with that. So but it imagine
it's a motivation thing, which is probably one of the biggest hurdles to get over that just if you've got any program in front of you that isn't the norm
In 4x4 for the day you go. Maybe it's back and biceps on. Maybe I'll just go for a little jog it take mañana mañana
mañana. Yeah it is it but again, like I said, you do have to do you try to make it consistent. So
frequency per
week while the Norwegian 4x4 would be like one time a week.
Okay, unless that's
it. That's the hard day. That's less that's
less per day it is. Okay. Yeah. Is there any benefit to going twice per week? Probably?
Yeah.
But I've been so much but I did
say that these people be wrong. Yeah, this 50 year olds. Did it one time a week for two years and they reverse their cardiac structure aging by 20 years a course. They were they were also doing other vigorous intensity exercise. It wasn't the torturous Norwegian 4x4, you know, like so if
know we Jim 4x4 is gold standard at the moment for improving VO2 max. What would be some examples of other vigorous exercise?
Workouts, what else is in that
bucket? Well, people can do what they enjoy doing. So you can go for a run like I often go for a run. And you know, I'm doing 75 80 percent my max heart rate. Usually it's like a 20 minute run that I do that, you know, so like is intense as you can maintain for 20 minutes, like that's what you want to do. You want to kind of get that you get a feeling for that. So if you like runs because there's a lot of benefits to running you're out in nature. Well, I guess some people do on a treadmill. I'm not so big on.
Eels like I'll do them like when I go to a gym or something traveling but I like running out in nature. I think there's just it's there's lots of benefits to doing that some people like to get on their bike and cycle. So like you can just go on your bike and do a 20 to 30 minute 7580 percent max heart rate cycle, right? So what we're aiming
for here is 75 to 80 percent max heart rate for around about 20 minutes
exposure. You can or you can do you could do like a high-intensity interval training so so high intensity
Will training would be you're going to you're going to go more than eighty five eighty percent, right? You might go you're going to do like more of like a submaximal perhaps perhaps even a maximal interval so you can go up to 90 95 percent max heart rate. So that would be I mean, you're obviously you can only maintain that for like so long right? Some people might be 32nd pushes
it to bottom and I'll think
about I do a lot about us as well often times. I like to do something every day most days of the week and it's funny. I kind of
Of adopted this this routine when I was I was kind of trying to do a little bit like Joe Rogan sober October, but it was like every day October. I was trying to work out every day and I noticed as like I could do this. I'm doing it for like one month and I don't I wasn't going as hard as like the this guy isn't doing the sober October weather like competition. It was like they were just back in the so like if you do something every time I do something every day, so sometimes I'll do like a 10-minute Tabata where I get on there and I just go hard for 10 minutes. It's when you know, it's
Time I'll do a 45 second on 15-second officers a three to one ratio. I really like that one. But sometimes I'll do 22nd on 1010 take it off. So it's like I'd like both but like even just 10 minutes again, I time it around like like I got I'm going to go to work on and I want to feel motivated. I want to feel better. I want to be more focused and on my game and I just get on there for the bike for ten minutes and do it. You know, there's there's studies out there these sort of exercise snacks now 10 minutes is longer than an exercise snack, but their studies out there.
Where people are wearing these like wearable devices, right? And so you can track their their heart rate. You can track how far the heart rates going up. And so there's a large large studies. They're called the vigorous-intensity lifestyle activity and most people are taking advantage of everyday life like there. They have stairs every day to work. They Sprint up him. They don't walk up them. They Sprint they get their heart rate up to like 75 percent max heart rate 80 percent max are whether they're getting intense and people that do this anywhere between one.
Three minutes a day. I mean these guys have like a 50% lower cancer related mortality cardiovascular related mortality. And this was even true for people that identified themselves as non exercisers. So they aren't these are people that are not going to the gym or doing other like tennis or whatever. They don't have Leisure Time physical activity. So the benefits were also in people that identified as non exercisers. So my point is that the vigorous-intensity these like even short
Bursts of it just consistently like every day a little bit like they do add up there's additive effects and they make a difference. So that's also I think really something that's very encouraging because some people I got to go and work out for 30 minutes like it you need that motivation, right? Like some people don't have that motivation. And so it's a lot easier to just get up and do something for two minutes. It's hard, but you can do it and you can do it at your house what
apart from running up and down the stairs what?
Other ways that people can incorporate exercise snacks to take advantage of this
body weight squats are a great one. So you just you just you know, doing your squats and you do it for a minute and then rest for whatever 15 seconds and then do another minute. I mean those are hard and they get your heart rate up so you can do that for like three minutes. That's a really good one and then you're going to be really sore if you're not used to it, but and then there's the high knees so you do high knees. I mean you could do chair squats you could do playing the
planks the upper peas those burpees. So you do like the plank thing and then you come up and jump and like those are all I think really great examples of just like easy ways to do exercise snacks, like even at your desk and just even breaking up we're talking about improving cognition improving mood breaking up your work day with those like it makes a difference on your mood on your cognition. Like it helps you're getting blood flow immediately to your brain. So
yeah, you were talking you were telling me about the need for people to break up the set.
Entry time that there's some very specific risks that people can encounter if they're too sedentary for too long too frequently. What's happening
there? Yeah. It's interesting. So I never identified myself as sedentary because I've always done something like running or jumping rope or something like going to the gym something. I'm where I'm physically active so it's like, oh I'm in the Physically Active group. I'm not sedentary. Well, it turns out being sedentary is like what we've been for the past couple of hours.
Hours, we've been sitting here that is sedentary. So even when you're even if you you know, go to the gym or you go for runs, when you are sitting at your desk for a period of hours, you are sedentary and sedentary being sedentary itself is an independent risk factor for disease like cancer. So now do I think the marathon runner that you know also has a, you know desk job where they sit at their desk for eight hours is going to come down with cancer. Probably not because there
They're really putting a lot of effort and and they're Physically Active, but I certainly am not the athlete and I am a committed exerciser. Right? So I'm putting in anywhere between, you know to 25 hours of you know, exercise in a week depending on the week, right? So for me, like I spent a lot of time sitting I spent a lot of time sitting and so that to me was like a big thing where it's like, oh that's an independent risk factor for breast cancer.
Which you know a woman's breast cancer risk and just lifetime risk is one and eight. It's incredibly High and the of course there are of course, there's lifestyle factors that can sort of increase or decrease that and just said sedentary ism is a independent risk factor for that. So again, it's really and so easy. So I have started incorporating exercise snacks. I'll get up and I'll start doing some body weight squats. I think that's my go-to. I also like doing burpees. I've been doing some burpees and high knees. I'll do every hour.
I think every couple of hours. I've also been starting to time them around my meals so that's that's another thing I think being aware of the postprandial glucose response and how it affects my cognitive function my mood and also just knowing that it's healthier and it's so easy to do like just do like 2 or 3 minutes of free food. You can do it pre or post food both trying to do burpees post food might be difficult. You can do it up to like an hour after right? Yeah, so
One of the things that dr. Stu Miguel number one back pain specialist on the planet taught me about forever ago. And then Mark Bell also popularized this 10 minute walk 50 minute walk post eating because insulin sensitivity because of helping to re-adjust glucose levels within the blood also the muscles of the hips and the arms cross across the stomach's actually helps with digestion of food a little bit as well. Like if you had a really big meal and all
Do is lie down actually probably one of the best things that you can do to make yourself feel better is to maybe go for a walk. What would you say here? We've got the post-meal walking crowd in the post-meal burpees crowd. Like is there something that they're you're missing from one of those are you happy with either?
Well, I don't know about the whole arms movement aiding in digestion thing all that. I do know that the more vigorous intensity when you're actually going to start that feeling that burn right when you start to when you start to get up to that. Okay, I'm making
Some lactate that's what's actually increasing the the Transporters glucose Transporters glue. They're called glute for their in your muscle and they have to like move their way up to the top and lactate is what signals them to do that. So when I'm just thinking about the glucose and improving blood glucose levels vigorous is better and we got chasing that burn chasing the burn and there's been studies that have that have compared Walker's to interval Walker's so these are people that are just walking
versus walk pick up the pace while they're walking walk slower pick up the pace while they're walking now, they're not running but they're just your interval walking and it's been shown that interval walking improves a variety of metabolic parameters more than just walking and again, it makes sense because when you're picking up the pace, you're you're working harder you're making lactate and that's one of the big signals for these glucose Transporters to come up to the top of the muscle and we'll let the glucose in
so I do think from mechanistic understanding that I also data showing walking versus interval walking interval walking is better when you can when you can pick up the pace when you can go a little bit more intense, it's better. All right, what about
becoming muscled for
longevity?
So that's why I'm working on you. Probably don't I'm not all jacked up, but I'm that's that's my that's been my new goal particularly of late but for like the past year, I've become more aware of it. I would spend more time focusing on it. I now have a coach who's great and coming to work with me to focus on that because I feel you know, I'll tell you when it really hit me I had I had someone on the podcasts Mark dr. Mark Madsen and he I have admired his work for years. He's a he's like the
In fasting King, like he's I've known of his research since I was in my 20s, right like he's also done a lot of work on hormesis. And I you know, I've just I followed his work for so much of my scientific career. So it was very cool to have him on the podcast and talked to him and we were talking all about everything under the sun with respective fasting and hormesis and and we started talking about training and he has been a you know track
You know Runner forever big big endurance athlete might not you know mountain biking everything and he told me he said, you know, the one thing that I really regret regret in my life is that I didn't spend more time building muscle mass because he had an accident he had a mountain biking accident and you know basically couldn't walk around and use his muscles for quite a period of time and he said it really hit him hard. And so that was my first kind of like, oh wow like
Like I'm and I've always focused on endurance. I never thought I really needed to focus much on muscle. I'm not a bro. Like I didn't have that incentive to like, you know build the muscle and I knew it was important but I didn't really I didn't dive in deep enough and convince myself that it was as important. So that was the first sort of eye-opener for me. And then I had Stuart Phillips on who does a lot of research on resistance training. He's the one that like I helped, you know identify that.
The RDA for protein intake is likely to low and he has a really good way of explaining, you know muscle mass and this what's called a disability threshold, which is what I think everyone that has an older parent or grandparent has seen in action where you're they get older and they experience that you know take where they're out for whatever a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden, of course, they can't gain their muscle back and then it happens again.
Then again and then all of a sudden H is downhill and they can't walk they you know, and the trajectory just plummets and you know, it's just not good. So in order to sort of you know, not let that disability threshold be so devastating you really have to build up your muscle mass earlier in life. It actually it's never too late. But if you can do it earlier in life, it's better. So training wise like I now am I'm I used to just do I mean really it was like 30 minutes a week.
Or so of like resistance training, you know where I'm just doing dumbbells or something and now I'm doing two hours a week maybe a little bit more. So that is a new focus and I'm working with the coach because I've noticed I do much more likely to injure myself when I'm just like doing it myself and I don't really know what I'm doing and I'm following like a Peloton class or something. So now I'm working with the coach who's really great and I just I'm I was so sore just after the first training session.
It was like I thought I was fit, you know and here I am like just little tendons and muscles. I just didn't even know we're there. So now I'm really trying to get I think minimum like two hours a week of some sort of resistance training where I'm working a lot of my muscles not just you know, my biceps are my
triceps. So if investing in muscle mass is like contributing to a retirement fund that you can then withdraw from Brighton like the life. What is the age where it starts to become more difficult?
Occult and then after what age is it basically impossible to gain muscle
mass. So there's muscle mass and there's muscle strength and I've everything that I know I've learned from the experts like dr. Stuart Phillips, like, dr. Brad schoenfeld and reading their work and their Publications. So, you know muscle mass Peak around 20 to 30 and then after that you start to lose about eight percent per decade until you get to 70. It's 12 percent per decade but strength decreases.
These are even greater than that. So, you know, we talk a lot about muscle mass and that's important but but strength is important, right like you want to be able to get up and out of a chair. Like it makes a difference on your quality of life like being able to be independent and function independently. And so that's where there's hope especially because so we're talking about muscle mass gains. Well, it's like so what happens when you reach reach the age of 50, it's you know, you're not your anabolic resistance is starting to kick in right?
You're not being a sensitive to the protein intake really have to rely more on on the mechanical force, you know of stimulating muscle protein synthesis as the form of increasing muscle mass and hypertrophy. So is there a time when you won't gain any Mouse I think you'll continue to gain a just won't be as much right you really battling atrophy at that point to so, you know, the more you can contribute earlier the more you'll have to pull from but I do think the strengths the gains in strength or what is
Good because at least they're study showing an older adults you can ones that haven't really worked out much if they start a resistance training program. They can counter the atrophy losses and they can gain and they can like regain strength like years that they've lost so you can really gain your strength gains can be really good even in old age. And I
think that's an awesome. One of the things that people might be thinking. I'm 42 like it does that mean that it's too late basically from it.
Me to start gaining muscle or gaining strength, or is it I'm a lost cause at this
age now, not at all. No, not 42. I mean it's going to get more challenging when you're 72, but even then you're going to gain strength. I mean, there's studies showing that for sure, you know, it muscle mass gains won't be as good but you will you will be countering that that atrophy, you know, it's not like it's not beneficial
to people need to lift heavy.
Well, that's that's the
That's the the golden question that first two Phillips. He showed that years ago that people he didn't untrained people first. So he showed that untrained men could gain just as much muscle mass and strength lifting lighter weights as people as the men gain lifting heavy weights as long as they put in the effort. So the volume and effort has to be high. So you have to like you'll probably do a longer duration.
It'll be more you'll be doing you know more effort, but you can gain as much muscle mass and strength if you're doing lighter weights as long as you're putting in that effort and then Brad schoenfeld came in after because he was like us do that was that was untrained man. Come on, and he then did it in trained men and lo and behold guess what same data same results. So the train men also could gain as much muscle mass and strength by lifting lower doing lower weights. As long as the effort is that's the key effort, right?
You have to put in enough. You have to be fatigued if you know who dr. Mike is ratelle is no I don't profess a of exercise science at Lehman College. Probably I think the best guy for evidence-based hypertrophy training on the internet at all at the moment Adam on the show last week and
He's just so far. I would you really really need to connect with him. Cause the guys so phenomenal is also jacked out of his mind. Right? So you like walks the talk, but he came on and he was explaining about the typical sort of Bro Science rep range, which was 8 to 14 any more than 14 and it's completely pointless his rule or at least what the evidence seems to show is that anything over six and below 30 as long as when you finish you are looking at one.
2 2 1 2 3 RI our reps in reserve. So that's what you're talking about here. He's Brad schoenfeld is one of the guys that he respects the most in the industry as well. And the point is that you can get yourself to 28. And if you like I could do three more. Maybe that's good. Now one of the disadvantages that you have of doing that is obviously your session length is going to be longer but one of the advantages that you have is that your injury risk is going to be lower. So I think I mean that was
Fascinating to me as someone who's spent his entire life like allergic to going over 16 reps. I do know that's just cardio. Like that's just you know, that's just lame that was really interesting a couple of the other things that he taught me that I thought was fascinating. He's a huge proponent of tempo. So it seems like the tempo of the movement is super crucial the entire duration of the rep should not be less than two seconds. So you could get away with one second up and one second down, but it's very important to
Control The Eccentric portion of the movement most of the muscle growth comes in East central portion of the movement the long stretch that you get at the very end range of movement as well seems to be particularly where muscle growth is discriminated toward. So what you want to try and do is do exercises which incorporate that stretch for instance. If you see people that do wide grip lat pull-downs you get to this position and you're like what my laptop actually all that stretched whereas if you go a little bit more narrow you go over hand.
Pull-ups or one of his favorites, which is this like a single arm wrap around a lat pull across. So if you can imagine that you've got a cable machine over there and you actually getting into this really super stretch position in you're pulling right background and you're feeling that that but yeah for him the key things that I took away from that was one two three reps in reserve Tempo seems to be just a great way again to reduce down the load because you can still get 23 reps.
And reserve on 10 reps, but because you've been doing Tempo. It's so much harder. So again, you have all of these different things that you can use to manipulate the difficulty in the amount of reps that you need to go through and just a little pause at extension in whatever it is the bottom of the squat. It's going to mean again that you don't need to use quite so much weight. It's going to put you into that the muscles stretch position, which is where most of the hypertrophy occurs and just I think a to count down on whatever it is that you're doing just seems to be the smartest way to do it can reduce injury risk.
Going to mean you don't need to use as much weight. It's going to maximize that time under tension that were talking about and it's going to mean if you do a little pause at the bottom and then get it back up. It's fine. So that's now for me all of my training. My entire training protocol is built around that type of tempo rep range and loading with the stretch at the bottom. So there's a he was so simple is great to hear really really good.
That's a really great. I mean easy-to-follow kind of protocol. I mean for sure and I do remember dr. Bradshaw Layfield talking
About the some of the same things with the eccentric movement and the stretching of and all that like being really important for hypertrophy. And of course my new coach who knows everything. She's like on top of all of it.
So pointing at you telling me what about training when your towed a lot of the time people don't get as much sleep as they want or they're a little bit more stressed or whatever. They think I'm tired. Should I train? Yes, if I train I make myself more tired that might be dangerous or whatever. What what do you
think? Well, yeah, absolutely. That's the best. That's the time when you should train
It's time and we were kind of talking about this, right so, you know, there are studies showing that if you don't get enough sleep you can have a higher all-cause mortality than someone who gets enough sleep unless you're physically active physical activity blunts some of those negative effects of not getting enough sleep. So you're tired. You should you should go get at it. And also guess what happens you don't feel more tired you feel like especially if you're going to go do like a hit workout you feel invigorated you feel better.
You're increasing blood flow to the brain. That's what you need. Right? You're lowering inflammation inflammation is what's making you tired inflammations? What's giving you that that tired feeling? And so exercise is the the counter to that right exercise is one of the most robust ways. You can have an anti inflammatory response because your body is naturally, you know, there's one thing. I mean we talked about taking Omega 3s. I mean, there's ways to reduce inflammation by by taking certain phytochemicals or Omega-3s, but exercise is
Forcing your body to use all of its genetic Pathways to counter that inflammation and it does it for a long time. It's not just a quick as you metabolize it. How long is it in your what's the half-life of the compound deal? This is like days after right. So the little bit of stress that you're putting on your body that anti-inflammatory effect is so much greater that it counters the stresses of Life of everything. I metabolism of just, you know, thinking and breathing so I think that
At exercising when you're tired. You should be motivated and know that you're actually you're going to feel better. It's going to you're going to you're going to be less tired after like you really are especially if you don't go for like a five-hour run. I mean, like let's like, you know enough about and yeah my supposed as well, you know, one of the things when you're tired, your injury risk does go up your ability to do fine control motor movement and stuff like that. So if you're going to go and get that session, but you've only had five hours sleep because the kids woke up at 4:00 a.m. This morning and it's been a nightmare.
You just got back from a flight or whatever. Like don't try max out. Yeah, right. It's not it's not 3rm deadlift day. It's I go in and I try and work hard but not kill myself
day, right you either I mean if it's you know, it's always easier to like, like I said, if you could just do like a hit session, that's great, or just do you know do a high-intensity sort of bodyweight exercise workout, right? You do some push-ups you do some pull, you know, some pull-ups and then some squats or whatever, you know or lift light.
Sir, like you were saying where you're not you're not going to the other thing is like the story that you tell yourself about being the sort of person that maybe didn't have an ideal night sleep but still went and got after it. And this is totally separate to the physiological effect. Yeah. I suppose the endorphins of the actual session will help with this but like I overcame a difficult thing today like that story that you tell yourself is so powerful and it helps to kind of reinforce this positive self-image of being someone who happens to life as
Life happens to
them. Yeah, I mean this is like this is something that I think about a lot as a parent like the little winds are such confidence boosters, you know, like it doesn't have to be like the big thing that you're going for but like just a little wind like I went and I did 10 minute workout, you know, it's like a little wind like good. Fuck you. Well, yeah, I mean you it makes a difference and I think you said it like beautifully like it's a confidence booster and and those things do
do sort of I think they add up and make a big difference
for what else haven't we said about exercise. Is there anything else looking in that people need to be aware of
I think you know, the big thing was was covered with respect to vigorous intensity really focusing on getting that vigorous intensity every week focusing on the vo2max training knowing the brain benefits and then any kind of resistance training obviously is important. This is a really I think big main things
what would be if someone isn't going to go and get that lactate?
Tested or do a VO2 max test with the mask on and all of this stuff? What is a rough Benchmark that people can use to check I am making progress this awful Norwegian 4x4 torture device is that I've been doing every Sunday for the last six months has helped like what right? Well, how can people do the like home version of
the test? Yeah. So obviously a lot of people use their Apple watch which does measure VO2 max.
But I would say if you want an evidence-based way to measure vo2max. And the reason why the Apple watch isn't necessarily accurate is because so so the thing that's really been shown to be a good way of estimating VO2 max is What's called the 12-minute run test or 12 minute walk test depending on your Fitness level, right? But you need to have access to like a flat either track or something some sort of you know thing. That's that's that's flat right you could also
I mean it's got to be distance. So if you can somehow get a clock that in on your watch as well as you're on a bike. I think the best thing would be a track field or something like that. And what you do is you you in 12 minutes you run as fast as you can to maintain that pace for 12 minutes and then you have to have that distance measured, right? So that distance is measured and then that there's this calculation that is done considering you know, the
Is that your whatever you've run and everything and that turns out your VO2 max and that's kind of what the Apple watch uses. But the Apple watch doesn't know when your leg running hills and stuff. So it's kind of because that the takes it into account. So if you're running hills and stuff, it's more challenging. You're not going to go as far right and so that's kind of where I go. Oh, well Apple watches only so good. So
I wonder whether I'd be interested to know if there's people who can cheat this test in some way. Let's say that
one person builds a vo2max what I'm thinking with this Norwegian four by four
I probably do need to start doing it a bike to me seems to be the best thing that I could think of. It's the easiest machine for me to get my heart rate very high on its both arms and legs its stationary. There's no picking it up putting it down resetting it and it also means that during those three minutes you can kind of just push away like this, but I would imagine that the person who does running intervals for the Norwegian 4x4 will develop a number of efficiencies that are
Disproportionately advantageous for this 12-minute run tests, right? My someone does it in the pool, right? Someone just swimming intervals for minutes three minutes, whatever how much that will cross over. So there's definitely going to be ways a like high rocks hybrid training this whole thing at the moment is a huge huge burgeoning. It's basically filled the hole that CrossFit used to have I think and I think a lot of people are going to have that by wonder how many people have disproportionately good
Run tests that may actually overclock the vo2max because of their efficiency that they've developed from using running as their modality for building that vo2max
right now. I mean, it's a good point. I think for sure most of the Norwegian 4x4 Protocols are done on a stationary bike most the time. That's the king. Yeah.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick ladies and gentlemen under it's been really great to meet you. I love your work. I love the fact that you just got this broad evidence base that you can tap into and teach us mere mortals about what's going on in the
the world of fitness and search you've got this bdnf protocols.com thing, which is a free guide that people can take in order to maximize different ways to get bdnf. What's in that
it's a bunch of protocols that that have been evidence based that are you know, how to increase bdnf exercise protocols on a protocols polyphenols. So we're talking about blueberries things like that. And then I kind of have my protocol in their interweaved. It's like well, this is what I do.
But yeah, so it's a I think some people want to know how much you know, how hard do I go to get my bdnf from a run or a workout or what do I need to do? So there's there's it's like kind of evident evidence-based protocols on different things different lifestyle factors and behaviors. You can engage in to improve
it. Oh, yeah, where else should people go. They want to keep up to date with your
work YouTube channel. It's called found my fitness have podcasts. I interview experts sometimes I do stand a little videos where I talk about the science of something diving into magnesium next we also
Have one on vigorous exercise and then imma podcast Apple podcast Spotify. Then my website found my fitness.com. That's where you can find me sign up for my newsletter, but I would go to the bdnf protocols to get all the the good protocols on improving brain health, basically. Oh, yeah. Thank you Rhonda. Thank you so much. It's been fun.
