Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenefield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenefield Life Podcast.

Joel Greene [00:00:04]: There are dietary patterns in nature, and the refrigerator insulates us from those. And scarcity is the driver, and the product of scarcity is diversity. Scarcity forces you to eat things you probably wouldn't eat. You know, we're in this era where the meat guys vilify the plants, the plant guys vilify the meats. And it's really fascinating when you dig into this, what you see is that the exact category of food the other guys are vilifying is exactly what you need to offset the toxicities of your own hero food.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:32]: Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenefield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:53]: My podcast guests who I have on today, I think it was one of the few times that I almost broke the health podcasting Internet, or at least he did, because we recorded a doozy of a two-parter episode that just blew people's minds in terms of nutrition, myths and truths and super practical advice about your gut, your biome, the way you eat, etcetera. Well, I've invited them back. His name is Joel Greene, and Joel is a man of many talents. He just finished this book, which is basically dog-eared already. I have so many things folded over and highlighted in this thing, Joel, that we had a chance to talk about. Every time I hang out with Joel, I learned something new. I don't know how he stays so on the cutting edge of what he does.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:44]: Besides, maybe he lives in his mom's basement, reading books all day. I don't know. But, Joel, how do you describe yourself to people? Because I know you're not like a doctor or I don't know if you're an RD or, what do you say?

Joel Greene [00:01:58]: I would say an autistic, embittered consumer.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:03]: An autistic, embittered consumer. All right. You're AEC, Joel. Joel Greene, AEC. There you go. Well, you wrote that original book and the original book that we did that podcast episode about. Oh, and by the way, I should tell people, you got to go listen to other podcasts I did with Joel. And so all the show notes for this one are going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/immunitycode.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:28]: That's bengreenfieldlife.com/immunitycode. So, anyways, Joel, you wrote that original book, The Immunity Code, and then this thing shows up at my house, like, three months ago called the way, the way I interpreted the way is that it's kind of like boots on the streets, how you eat, based on everything you saw in The Immunity Code. But am I correct and that was kind of why you wrote it?

Joel Greene [00:02:51]: I think the main reason. The number one reason I wrote it was confusion. I just. You know, what had bubbled up, I think, in the interim time from publication of the first book was just completely polarized beliefs about everything, and more and more just people not knowing what to think. So what I wanted to do in this book, above all, was lay out kind of a framework that the average person could just rely on sense, more or less, to just kind of make sense of things, just return to sense without over complicating things. So that was kind of the number one reason. And then there was a lot of ground still left to cover, I think, in the first book, and I didn't have the room to do it. In fact, the original book was 800 pages when I first wrote it.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:33]: Yeah, but your books are fun. You don't do the cartoons and the illustrations in this thing, do you?

Joel Greene [00:03:39]: No. You know, so the funny thing that happened there was. I certainly wish I did.

Joel Greene [00:03:46]: Yeah, yeah. That would be fun to have that skill. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:50]: Well, the reason I bring that up is it actually does have really great illustrations and graphs, and I'm not just blowing smoke. I read a lot of nutrition books, and yours are very good. Before we started recording, we're talking about how I did a workout with my sons this morning, or we did some breath work, did some heat and some cold. We put up some weighted vests and did some calisthenic stuff around the house. And I said, well, I'm just fostering their pathway into becoming harder to kill. And maybe that was an accidental segue into what I actually wanted to ask you about as kind of a lead off, and that's this whole concept of dietary diversity. You're not really, like, a follow this exact diet type of guy, from the impression that I get. But you almost describe dietary diversity as, like, a protective mechanism.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:44]: I just want to hear, in your own words, why you would say that, how you would describe dietary diversity as nature's protective mechanism.

Joel Greene [00:04:52]: Yeah. Maybe the easy way to answer that is just a couple simple questions that kind of illustrated. Are blueberries healthy? Would you say blueberries are healthy?

Ben Greenfield [00:05:03]: Well, you know, Joel, they must be organic. And if not organic, taken home and rinsed in vinegar and water, and if eaten in the morning, thus breaking your 18-hour intermittent fast, could make you obese. But besides that, yeah, I would say, in general, I. And most people might say they're healthy.

Joel Greene [00:05:22]: What about blueberries at bedtime?

Ben Greenfield [00:05:27]: I think it would kind of depend on metabolic flexibility, on how much fructose you've consumed the rest of the day, or calories in general.

Joel Greene [00:05:38]: There you go. What about two pounds of blueberries at bedtime?

Ben Greenfield [00:05:44]: Can they be in ice cream?

Joel Greene [00:05:47]: It's whatever you want to do.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:50]: I think that might be a little much.

Joel Greene [00:05:52]: Okay.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:53]: All right.

Joel Greene [00:05:53]: So, yeah, so this kind of illustrates it right there. And I think we'll probably come back to this here and there. But what we just did was showed something really kind of, it's always been true and has been lost. And that's that the health of any food does not depend solely on the health properties within the food. It depends on other things equally. It depends on the dose, like how much, it depends on when you eat it and context. So a lot of different things actually play out into the health properties of a food. Right.

Joel Greene [00:06:27]: So that's interesting, kind of as a foundation, because we're in an era diet-wise. That, to me, is mind boggling, because I grew up in a world where everybody agreed what a healthy diet was, that it was nutritionally dense, balanced and diverse. That was. Everybody agreed that was what a healthy diet was. And so this kind of really was the motive behind the book, which is, that's gone. That doesn't exist anymore. And I've read science papers, literal science papers, talking about the problem that we don't have a definition anymore of what a healthy diet is. What's interesting is that we've kind of drifted into the notion or an age of exclusionism, or rather, cutting out entire categories of foods, is the way you get to health.

Joel Greene [00:07:21]: And the interesting thing is you have different tribes who fight over, well, no, your food's the bad category. Mine's the good one. You got it all wrong. So, that being said, it just brings up a really interesting question, which is, well, could you eat too much anything? I mean, is it possible that you could get. Doesn't matter what it is. Is it possible you get too much anything? And when you look at. I've spent quite a bit of time looking at ancestral diets, looking at the research on them, and pretty much seems to be like, the weight of the data supports this idea that they were quite varied, actually. And when you dig into it, the driver's scarcity.

Joel Greene [00:08:05]: So civilization is a bubble, and it insulates us from these patterns in nature. Light and dark, heat and cold, right? But there are dietary patterns in nature, and the refrigerator insulates us from those. And scarcity is the driver, and the product of scarcity is diversity. Scarcity forces you to eat things you probably wouldn't eat. And what's interesting about that is it seems to protect you from eating too much of anything. And when we get into this rabbit hole, what becomes readily evident, quite rapidly, is that there are synergies between foods, synergies between opposing food groups, such that we're in this era where the meat guys vilify the plants, the plant guys vilify the meats. And it's really fascinating when you dig into this, what you see is that the exact category of food the other guys are vilifying is exactly what you need to offset the toxicities of your own hero food.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:03]: Yeah, I want to get into that because you talk about that quite a bit in the book, about how everything, from the way that you combine foods to the nature of the microbiome, etcetera, might dictate whether, say, meat is good for you or meat is bad for you, or potatoes are good for you, or potatoes are bad for you. But back to the scarcity thing. As you were talking about that, I thought, well, there might be other things that could have, from an ancestral standpoint, influenced food choices. And the reason I want to bring this up is because I think it does impact a very small part of the exclusionary nature of many popular diets, you know, carnivore diet, paleo diet, vegan, etcetera. And that would be that I would still imagine that even many, many, many years ago, that if someone consumed a food group, and even author Fred Provenza has a book called, I believe it's called Nourish, about how even animals will self select a diet based on the impact on things like nausea, fertility, etcetera, that if someone were to eat a particular food group that did result in nausea, sickness, death, large amounts of that food appearing in the fecal matter afterwards, etcetera, they might, based on their, probably their individual gut tendencies, avoid that food for life or for a certain period of time. And based on that, I think that it's possible that some of the exclusionary nature of some of the diets that people choose, like, let's say, a carnivore diet due to autoimmune issues or low fodmaps diet due to SIBO issues, or an antihistamine diet due to sympathetic nervous system over stimulation, histaminergic issues might be appropriate in certain contexts. If that diet were harming someone from a health standpoint, and it wasn't just based on scarcity or availability.

Joel Greene [00:11:02]: Yeah. So that brings us into what I think's a really fascinating point. And I agree. I think there are definitely times and situations and occasions where you need to have an exclusionary diet for different reasons, certainly not against that. That being said, I would venture to offer that there's really only one path that is going to give everybody the thing they want long term, which is lasting in real health, and that is a diet that's nutrient dense and diverse. I would just argue that's the only path. Now, what you just interjected was what I talked about quite a bit in the book, which is the variable of time and how time changes the equation of things. And this gets into something I think is missing, which is that when we look at food and diets and we assess them in our brain, we're not actually overlaying a template of what's going to happen over time, such that it's pretty easy to see there are real forces that change the equation over time. In the book I wrote about four.

Joel Greene [00:12:11]: Simplest one is just accumulation. You could accumulate things from a given diet and they can change the equation. An example would be like leafy greens and nickel. You're eating way too many leafy greens, and at first there's all these benefits from it, but then over time, you start to accumulate too much nickel, and then you get a nickel allergy from that. Now you have to avoid leafy greens. And there's tons of examples like that.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:35]: Well, organ meats and uric acid. That would probably be another one I could think of top of my head.

Joel Greene [00:12:40]: So that being said, there's also a way out of that, and it's well known in immunotherapy. It's just titration, which is that you can slow titrate your way back into diversity. The issue we run into most often is that there's no accounting for time. So we think that once is forever. So if I have something that's developed, that's it, I'm done. I can never eat this thing again. And then the second issue most often is that there's no accounting for microdosing in the thing that is troublesome and microdosing your way out of the problem.

Joel Greene [00:13:17]: But you've probably seen it, I've seen it dozens of hundreds of times, where you can have an allergy to something and you start with half a pee and work yourself up to a pee, and then after about a year.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:28]: So the whole nature of that new book, Blind Spots, I'm going to interview the author about the tragedy of advising mothers to avoid eating peanuts and advising mothers to avoid giving their baby peanuts ever. And the surge in peanut allergies that resulted because of that.

Joel Greene [00:13:44]: Yeah. And all this just speaks to is there's a variable that's been missing, and it's the impact of time, and it's the most important, it's reality that you're going to run into. And if diet as a paradigm just starts to factor time into the equation, it really changes how we look at things. So that's what I would offer.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:58]: Right, right. That makes sense. So boots on the streets when it comes to this whole concept of dietary diversity, I think it's chapter seven in the book where you start to lay out, well, this food is good for you. And by the way, this food is bad for you. And you do it with some popular items. You know, steak, I think, is one. Potatoes, I believe, to be another. Can you use a couple of those as illustrative examples for people to understand why it is that a food could be good or bad for you?

Joel Greene [00:14:25]: Yeah. So we've entered this era where you have polar opposite tribes, each talking about things that are true and scaring the daylights out of everybody. So that meat is good, meat is bad. I don't know what to think because this guy's really convincing, but that guy's just as convincing. And he says the opposite.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:42]: And he has a six pack, but he's rich and a billionaire and branded.

Joel Greene [00:14:48]: Doesn't live in the bubble that anybody else does. By the way, I love your blueberry answer. That was very nuanced to say. Yeah. So I just did it as an exercise, like, okay, let me argue both ways. We'll do anti-meat Joel, and then we'll do love meat Joel, either way. And just take one example so you can look at. You can look at the issue of non-human sugars.

Joel Greene [00:15:15]: You could look at. Remember we went to dinner, I don't know, a few years ago, and your friend Max was there, and he brought up Neu5GC, which is a non-human sugar. And glycolyl neuraminic acid. This is a sugar that is, it's not native to humans, but it's found in meat. And you can make a really good case that you should avoid meat because you can accrue this sugar over time. In fact, the World Health Organization actually puts recommendations on meat intake to prevent the excess of the sugar from lodging into human tissues. And what happens is we eat meat, the sugar gets incorporated into our cell membranes.

Joel Greene [00:15:51]: It's a foreign object, the immune system sees it, starts to attack it. And so you can make this case that if you're eating too much meat, you can develop an autoimmune issue. And there's some evidence to support this. When certain kinds of tumors are looked at, they're supersaturated with Neu5GC. Okay, so I could just scare the heck out of you based on that, right? And then I can go and look at. I can pull up a graph. In fact, I use the same graph to argue different ways in the book. So I start with trying to scare you about cattle meat, and I make the case that cattle.

Joel Greene [00:16:21]: Cattle organs are supersaturated with the Neu5GC. You know, you better, better avoid those. And then I just make the reverse case where, say, there's another sugar. It's closely related. It's called Neu5AC, and it's a cousin of that. And the thing about Neu5AC is it's essential for brain development. Like, if you don't get this sugar in the diet, principally, you get it from the mom's going to get it from animal sources, your brain never fully develops. That's kind of important if your brain doesn't develop.

Joel Greene [00:16:50]: And the cool thing about it is the best.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:53]: Basically, it just comes out. Did you want an autoimmune disease, or do you want to be stupid?

Joel Greene [00:16:58]: Isn't that always the choice in life?

Ben Greenfield [00:17:01]: It's always a choice. Do I want diarrhea or stupidity?

Joel Greene [00:17:05]: I think I'll take the autoimmune issue. We can hack our way out of that.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:09]: So with the meat thing, back to the Neu5GC versus the Neu5AC, how do you tackle that?

Joel Greene [00:17:15]: Yeah. So the issue with that just becomes a number one. Diversity in the diet prevents you from getting too much of anything. Okay. And then the issue with Neu5GC, what we find is that the very foods that are vilified by the other side of the equation. So some of these plant foods actually stimulate bacteria that help you break it down.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:38]: Yeah, I was hoping you would go there. Talk to me about that, about how microbiome diversity can actually solve a lot of these issues.

Joel Greene [00:17:48]: Yeah, very interesting. So there's a mistaken belief right now. It's widely prevalent, and it's that if you eat a food, then you absorb everything in the food. That's not the reality. The reality is that the microbiome acts sort of as a cloud, as a filter, and it's the makeup of the microbiome cloud that ultimately is going to determine things. So really good examples, oxalates. So we have this whole line of this whole school dedicated to anything with oxalates. Avoid it.

Joel Greene [00:18:18]: Well, what you find is that there are over 1,500 bacteria that can break down oxalates in the colon, and several of those are bifido and lactobacillus species. Something like it's in the dozens that do that. And so what you find is that an optimized microbiome that are rich in those species has the potential to break down oxalate, and then you get the benefits of those foods without the negatives. All right, this is a Greta Thunberg moment. I can hear it.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:52]: How dare you?

Joel Greene [00:18:54]: Benefits.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:55]: Yeah, exactly. And you know, by the way, I hope people don't miss the nuance of what you're saying, and that is that basically, and correct me if I get this wrong, Joel, many of these foods say spinach or kale that might contain oxalates that we're being told to avoid are the same fibrous foods that help the butyric acid production and bacterial balance in the colon that would then allow you to be able to digest those same oxalates.

Joel Greene [00:19:21]: Yeah. So it's this weird Catch-22. So a lot of these foods actually feed the bacteria that help break down oxalates. And there's another level to it, which is when you begin to look at the most serious problems you're going to have to solve. Like if you're interested in health, you're going to have to solve the aging in the cardiovascular system around that. I mean, I hate to break it to everybody, but the number one thing that's probably going to kill you is 30%, 31% likelihood death from some CBD related thing that's mostly dietary. So when you look at the cardiovascular issues you have to solve, guess which foods are foundational to solving those. It's leafy greens, it's nitrate-rich veggies, things that feed the nitrate-reducing bacteria in the mouth and stimulate the gut immune axis. And there's a lot of reasons why.

Joel Greene [00:20:05]: So you could look at these foods and say, oh, they're bad, they contain oxalates. You could also look at them and say, oh, they're good. They help solve the decline of the cardiovascular system. So what do I believe? And a more correct version is just to understand that an optimized microbiome helps you to negate and helps you to break down oxalates. Now, there's a dose issue here, because right away, I can already hear it out there. There's a conflation that happens, which is, yeah, but the average person's getting way too much, you know, and so. Oh, okay.

Joel Greene [00:20:37]: We just conflated the health properties with the dose. Now we're talking dose. We're not talking. Okay, so now that it's a dose issue. Yes, that's correct. But that's true of anything. So if you're overdosing anything, you're going to find issues. So, yes, it's, it's entirely possible to overwhelm an optimized microbiome by eating way too much, that's true. However, diversity in the diet, here's an example, protects you.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:00]: Yeah. And it's a little bit, again, kind of like a paradoxical, you said Catch-22 situation, because the longer period of time you go restricting certain food groups and limiting dietary diversity, the less diverse your microbiome becomes and the less and less likely you are able to handle dietary diversity.

Joel Greene [00:21:25]: Yeah, yeah. And so it's, so that's, you see this on a lot of different diets. You see it on carnivore diets, for example. So you can make a case that carnivore diets improve the gut. We see Akkermansia levels increase somewhat. Yeah. But the problem is you're reducing the diversity of bifido at the same time. And bifido is a controller on Akkermansia, keeping you from getting too much of it.

Joel Greene [00:21:49]: So you've taken away the control spigot and now over time, you reduce your diversity of bifido, which is the center of the gut immune axis, and you're increasing this thing that eats the gut lining. Okay. And you can have problems from that. So again, it's the same thing over and over and over, where as you begin to reduce diversity in the diet, you see these consequences long-term.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:11]: Yeah, and I was going to save this question, actually, I wanted to ask you this a little bit later on, but I think I might just throw this in there right now because I'm sure people are wondering, how would you therefore eat? Like in your book, you kind of lay out like a two day protocol of what a perfect scenario would look like. And obviously, as you know, this is a big question. You can probably spend the next 20 minutes kind of getting into the answer to this question, which I don't mind, but how are you suggesting that people then eat?

Joel Greene [00:22:41]: Yeah, well, what I lay out in the book is at its core, super simple. And here it is. Basically, you have a day that is foraging foods, and then the following day is a fast amplified by modern supplemental technology. And then you have feasting foods, and that's it. That's the gist of it. And then within that, there's tons of layers. And all this stuff we could get into complexity but, you know, it's designed.

Joel Greene [00:23:11]: The design of that is. Is designed to mimic the four dietary rhythms that you will see in nature. And what I mean by that is that, again, going back to biohacking, you know, we're. We're into, like, you know, we're into matching nature's rhythms of light and dark. Now it's night. You got to put these glasses on, okay? And then you got to do this thing to block these frequencies, you know, because nature has these and civilization has nerfed it. And old, you gotta get cold because not eat blueberries.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:40]: Leave out the blueberries.

Joel Greene [00:23:41]: Not a bit and not two pounds.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:43]: Yeah.

Joel Greene [00:23:45]: Nature has dietary rhythms. In fact, literally everything that lives is consumed during its waking hours with getting food. So nature has dietary rhythms, and they're actually quite easy to see. One is just going hungry. We call it fasting now. The other is foraging, which I call basically just looking for foods you prefer not to eat. The other is feasting, which is, you know, animal proteins.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:12]: You should throw out a caviar in there, by the way. Cause I don't like to eat Domino's Pizza. So within reason, food is that you don't like to eat.

Joel Greene [00:24:20]: You know what? If you come down here, we gotta go to truly. Did you see Dana White's view of Truly Pizza?

Ben Greenfield [00:24:25]: I don't even know what that is.

Joel Greene [00:24:26]: Oh, my gosh. You gotta come down here. Yeah. So Dana White did a review on, it's the best piece in the world. It's being a point. Feasting, feasting. So feasting is, you know, you got it.

Joel Greene [00:24:38]: You got a deer, you got a fish, and you eat the whole thing. All right? But then you go back to being hungry, and then there's a season of abundance where, you know, whatever, you got a whole herd, and you eat good for six months. But those are the dietary rhythms of nature, and that pattern is just designed to replicate that. So foraging foods are, again, foods of lesser preference. You know, things like roots. Roots are a food of last resort. They actually did a quiz with the hosta and asked them, hey, stack, rank it. And they were like, oh, honey, number one, roots, blast. Nobody wants to eat roots, but roots. Mushrooms, leafy greens, berries, all that stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:12]: Yeah.

Joel Greene [00:25:12]: And then the second day is feasting.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:14]: Okay. All right. By the way, the people who didn't like roots must not have discovered my recipe for carrot fries yet, but we can save that for another day. So we got foraging foods, then we have a fasting period, then we have feasting foods. Foods, feasting foods. I am a practical guy. Walk me through what these two days would actually look like. And you even talk a little bit about like the movement patterns that might be woven into that.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:38]: So give me the practical nitty gritty of what am I going to wake up and do on day one? What are we going to wake up and do on day two? Yeah.

Joel Greene [00:25:46]: So day one, either one of these days, first of all, either one of these days can be sub-caloric. I prefer typically the first day to be sub-caloric, but you can do it either day. So wake up, usually nuts and berries. That's what I'm doing, as of late. And my food of choice is walnuts and blueberries usually.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:08]: This is the foraging day.

Joel Greene [00:26:10]: Yeah, foraging day. So walnuts, blueberries typically. And there's a lot of reasons behind those two that we can get into. And then lunch is typically for me like purple sweet potato or like a greek salad or, you know, baked potato, like some kind of roots-resistant starch. Do it cold. And then there's a couple of preload meals before each meal. So we'll do, you know, something like an apple or maybe a little bit of nut butter.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:35]: What's the, what's the purpose of the preload meal?

Joel Greene [00:26:39]: A lot of different reasons. You can use them for different purposes. Mainly it's a GLP-1 activator. So you just hit GLP-1 20 minutes before your meal. And the really weird thing on this, you know, like through the first half of the day is I'm not hungry at all. It's really weird. And it's. You're not eating much either.

Joel Greene [00:26:53]: You know, there's not a lot of protein, not a lot of things in there. Um, but you're mimicking foraging. And then dinner typically is usually a leafy greens with some kind of white meat, you know, chicken, fish. That's the first day. And then the second day would be wake up.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:10]: Wait, wait, wait. Just backpedal. Just saying on that first day, are you exercising at all because you're not eating a lot of calories? What's the actual workout look like?

Joel Greene [00:27:17]: Yeah, mostly it's cardio stuff. Mostly it's cardio stuff. So it's either, I like to do stairs of late, so I'm either running stairs or, you know, some time on the bike or it's anything to keep the heart rate and push VO2 max.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:31]: Okay. VO2 max. So when you say cardio, like, you're relatively high intensity cardio.

Joel Greene [00:27:36]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:37]: Okay.

Joel Greene [00:27:38]: I think we've both been on this VO2 max kick for a while.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:41]: Yeah. Okay. All right. Got it. So day one's forging, you're still exercising, you're doing cardio, pushing yourself in that respect. You get to the evening, you fasted overnight, then what comes next?

Joel Greene [00:27:52]: So then this is the, what I call the amplified fast. So the thing to understand here, what sets this up is that we have entered this age of fasting where you just think fasting is this thing you do. But if you, if you do fasting in nature, you never do fasting alone. You always do fasting with foraging. Always. You never, never in nature are going to sit around and just be hungry. You're not going to do that. You're like, going to be looking for stuff. And so typically, when you're looking for stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:14]: It'S some intentional religious fast or self-denial, you know, like a monk who might crawl to a cave and fast for 100 days or something like that.

Joel Greene [00:28:23]: Or something you might do on a Ben Greenefield retreat.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:25]: Right, exactly. Yeah.

Joel Greene [00:28:26]: There you go.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:27]: Yeah. Yeah.

Joel Greene [00:28:31]: By the way, you're. You're one. Where's the one next year?

Ben Greenfield [00:28:34]: I have many, but the one coming up is in Ibiza, Spain, and then Portugal.

Joel Greene [00:28:40]: Oh, my gosh, that looks cool.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:41]: Yeah, absolutely cool.

Joel Greene [00:28:44]: Yeah. So going to wake up and then the main thing here, the thing to understand, and this is fascinating, to break down the bacteria, the keystone bacteria that are spun up by those foods on day one that go with foraging. When you look at the benefits of fasting, they nearly one-to-one mimic them. They almost exactly mimic them. You can look at, like, for example, species of bifidobacteria. You're gonna see AMPK activation, you're gonna see HDAC inhibition. You're gonna see all this stuff resulting from that. Same with Akkermansia.

Joel Greene [00:29:14]: And so nature has kind of provided this way when you're in a starved state to optimize the renewal of the body through going hungry and foraging foods at the same time. And so what that whole first day exists for is to spin those bacteria up that mimic fasting. So the following day, in a fast, all those pathways are already lit and then we just add all the modern stuff. So typically, like, for me, that would be get up cold, plunge, supplement, different stacks for different purposes of supplements, usually longevity-based. So I do my own stuff, which is young body, which is NAC, glycine, AKG, white willow bark, and then I'll stack other things around that, and then it's usually something intense. So, like, either sprints or go to the gym. And what I find that's really cool is I don't have to warm up if I get cold first. Like, I just get out of the cold and slap my muscles and I can go right to it.

Joel Greene [00:30:10]: I don't have to warm up.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:13]: Yeah. That's actually what I love about a pre-exercise cold plunge. It. It works wonders. Yeah. Right now I'm on this kick where I do a cold plunge, than 20 minutes of waking every day, which is also a slap in the face. But yeah, doing it whenever you work out doing a cold plunge pre-workout, there's even a guy named Thomas Seager. Makes a pretty strong case that the surge in endorphins and the endocrine response, including testosterone from that approach, paired with the potential for a high amount of anti-inflammatory activity and a drop in those same compounds, if you do it post exercise, we dictate that anytime you can choose to do so, do your cold plunge pre-exercise.

Joel Greene [00:30:53]: Yeah, I mean, I've been doing that for years. I think it's kept my hormones. I'm not on TRT. I'm going to be 60 this year. I think it's, the thing is you in a cold state, you're doing things like sprints, and then you're augmenting that with supplements, and it's all that window of time three times a week. So I'll do that, and then I'll just fast until noon, and then I'll feast. So, like, feast typically could be, you know, a giant omelette with giant egg white omelette with cheese and a couple of burgers. You know, big, big caloric meal, huge amount of protein, a huge amount of animal protein.

Joel Greene [00:31:32]: And then I'll fast, and then I'll go 6 hours, and then I'll have a really big dinner, typically.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:36]: Yeah. So the general mentality here, if I could sum it up the way I'm thinking about it, Joel, is day one, the foraging day, might be a day very similar to how you'd act if you were truly out foraging or like what we might consider to be mostly aerobic activity, nuts, seeds, berries, greens, etcetera. Go to bed, wake up the next morning, and now you're jumping in a cold plunge, maybe mimicking the ancestral activity of swimming across an icy cold river, and you're charging up a mountain with a spear, and you're killing a deer or you're harvesting the twelve eggs your chicken laid or whatever, and then you're going into feast mode, choosing foods that would be foods that, from an ancestral standpoint would be less available in a foraging environment.

Joel Greene [00:32:23]: Pretty much, yep.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:24]: Interesting. So there's a lot of subtle nuances in terms of the science behind it, which you lay out in the book, but I have specific questions about some of the specific subtle nuances I think would be most interesting for my audience. One that you already mentioned, GLP-1. And you say that we can trigger GLP-1 from addressing the gut and the biome. Can you get into that a little bit more?

Joel Greene [00:32:52]: Yeah. So when you look at first of all, let's just take a high level insulin. What GLP-1s have brought to the forefront is this notion that efficient insulin function is not just about insulin, its actually about other hormones as well. And so I lay it out in the book, which is the complete family. And so if we start talking about insulin, we've got to talk about insulin. Glucagon, GLP-1, GIP, adiponectin, and then that all rests on a layer of the microbiome and it all works together as one thing. So if were going to look at, hey, what would be the perfect diet to stimulate insulin? Weve got to take all that into account. So with respect to the microbiome, what's interesting is that the keystone bacteria that get fed by that pattern, for example, ackermansia, make proteins that stimulate GLP-1.

Joel Greene [00:33:45]: And they also together work to modulate insulin function. So for example, the fetal bacteria modulates the composition of bile acids. It helps to make insulin more sensitive. And so these bacteria are actually very much involved in the family of insulin function, making insulin efficient and specifically making peptides and proteins that stimulate GLP-1.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:13]: When you look at a lot of these fibrous foods, foraging foods, etcetera, I'm assuming that those would have more likelihood to increase GLP-1 than some of the feasting foods. Is that the idea behind a lot of these companies now that are producing supplements that are supposed to increase GLP-1 via the microbiome, like pendulum has their Akkermansia. There's another one called calocurb that's making the one that's super bitter to trigger the bitter receptors in the intestine. These seem to have a lot of the same compounds of vegetables, herbs, spices, seeds, nuts, etcetera might have.

Joel Greene [00:34:46]: Well, I wouldn't say that fiber or compounds from the microbiome have a greater potential to trigger GLP-1. I would argue probably the feasting foods have a greater potential to trigger GLP-1. Like things like. Yeah, like when you really look at it and you look at what triggers it. Dairy, eggs, you know, all these. All these things work together, but they work together with the foraging foods. They actually work together. So you'll find, like, for example, something you'd never think of, like apples.

Joel Greene [00:35:11]: Apples really trigger satiety. So I guess it gets to the approach in the way you want to do it. I would me personally never, ever do it through trying to supplement things like Akkermansia, because it needs to exist in a balance with bifido, and you can throw that balance off and get more problems than it's worth.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:31]: By the way, in their defense, I think this one company, it is Akkermansia, bifido, and butyricum that they use, I believe.

Joel Greene [00:35:38]: Yeah. Well, that being said, I just think the optimal way to get it is through diet and through food. I think you can do it through food where you're not only stimulating GLP-1, but you're also accounting for adiponectin and you're accounting for glucagon and all these other things that are part of the equation that only food can address.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:56]: So dietary diversity is directly linked to satiety via these GLP-1 mechanisms in a potentially much more complete way than, say, just supplementing your way into it?

Joel Greene [00:36:07]: I would say at the highest level, it's linked to efficient insulin function. And it's quite fascinating when you look at. I've looked at this, there's not a diet that's ever been, that exists right now, that has purposely set out to hit everything, to hit all the insulin hormones and the microbiome. Not one, like, they don't even think about it. But when you look at how insulin works.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:32]: I know, Joel, I need to send you my cookbooks and your diet, by the way, it seems like your diet does that. The immunity tomorrow. Yeah, of course. Okay, so we'll quit tuning yours, but do progress.

Joel Greene [00:36:44]: Yeah. Excluding said company. How dare you? Excluding said company, you're going to get optimal GLP-1 activation when insulin works efficiently. And so it's kind of this thing of like, you're not going to get real health, lasting health, unless insulin works efficiently. And if you want that, you're going to need a this whole family of things being hit. And dietary diversity not just doesn't address just GLP-1 and GIP, it also addresses atiponactin and also addresses glucagon in fact, this is really interesting. The fingerprints of dietary diversity are everywhere once you start looking for them.

Joel Greene [00:37:24]: So if you look at, like, let's take insulin and let's just accept the premise that you're not going to have lasting health without efficient insulin production. Okay, so simple layer. Okay? That means you need minimally insulin and glucagon to be very, very efficient. So those two are mutually exclusive. Like, you cannot. They both need to be stimulated, but you can't stimulate them at the same time. Right. So what that speaks to is that these distinct mechanisms, you can have insulin resistance, you can have glucagon resistance, they both need to be stimulated, but not too much.

Joel Greene [00:37:59]: And it's different elements, different mechanisms that optimally stimulate both at different times, which itself just points to diversity, goes right at all of the mechanisms of insulin, not just GLP-1. And, yeah, that is a function of. That is a fingerprint.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:15]: Okay, got it. Is it true that you actually have a shake before dinner? And if so, is it based on some of the mechanisms that you just described as far as the ingredients in that shake?

Joel Greene [00:38:24]: Sometimes. Sometimes. I mean, everything's context. So if I'm hungrier, like, I'm feeling a lot of hunger, and I'm just whatever, feeling it that day, then there's a shake. In the book I call the GLP-1 shake. And it's just a combination of things that hit GLP-1.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:40]: GLP-1 shake. I guess I have to find this. Actually, I do remember one part I was asked about. You said honey and stevia connect together to stimulate GLP-1. I remember that part in the pre-dinner shake.

Joel Greene [00:38:50]: Yeah. So whey protein stimulates GLP-1. It's just stacking everything that we believe stimulates GLP-1. So whey protein definitely stimulates GLP-1. Honey stimulates GLP-1. Stevia. So there's some good research. 200 milligrams of stevia will stimulate GLP-1.

Joel Greene [00:39:07]: Really?

Ben Greenfield [00:39:08]: Does the stevia need to be combined with honey? Is there something going on there?

Joel Greene [00:39:12]: It's just synergistic.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:14]: Okay.

Joel Greene [00:39:14]: Yeah. What's been shown is that stevia works better with sugar. So stevia on its own stimulates GLP-1 to one degree. But then when you add sugar to it, it stimulates GLP-1 even better. And so honey is kind of your perfect sugar.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:28]: Okay, that makes sense. Okay. Yeah. I was wondering about the reasoning behind that. So the pre-dinner shakes, theoretically, this might be something that you could do before you go to a party, social event, maybe you've been invited out to a restaurant that doesn't have the greatest things on the menu from a health standpoint. You could flip to the pre-dinner shake page, have that. You know, how to eat the stevia, the whey protein, etcetera, and have a pretty satiated appetite going to dinner.

Joel Greene [00:39:51]: Yeah. So, like, let's take that in its simplest form, just super simple. The idea would be like, have an egg, hard boiled egg, 20 minutes prior to going to your, whatever, your dinner party. So that egg is going to hit the gut. It's going to trigger GLP-1, GIP. And so as you start eating, you're just going to get fuller, much quicker. It's just simply timing things.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:10]: Please tell me I can put salt and hot sauce on the boiled eggs.

Joel Greene [00:40:13]: Absolutely.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:14]: Okay, good, good.

Joel Greene [00:40:15]: Yes.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:16]: All right.

Joel Greene [00:40:16]: Of course, those mandatory.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:17]: Those don't kill those little GLP-1 babies. All right, good to know.

Joel Greene [00:40:22]: We love our GLP-1 babies.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:23]: All right, so we're on the GLP-1 topic. Obviously, that's a hot topic related to weight loss right now. But you also talk about something called neurotensin. I haven't seen that written about too much. What is neurotensin? How does that relate to weight loss?

Joel Greene [00:40:36]: Well, it's a hormone. It's a neurotransmitter. And it's involved in the hunger response or the food response in an interesting way. Basically, GLP-1, the GIP. GLP-1 access kind of acts like a enough, not enough kind of thing. It's like, okay, I've had enough. Where neurotensin does that, but it also sort of throttles the reward from different foods. So it's like, first slice of pizza.

Joel Greene [00:41:05]: Mind boggling. Fifth slice of pizza, eh, didn't taste, you know, and so there's a hormone in our brain at work that's throttling down or throttling up the reward from food. And neurotensin does that. So what's interesting about it is. Got some interesting research. One is, in mice, it's really depressed after fat loss. And what's very interesting is bariatric surgery. It doesn't lower after bariatric surgery.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:36]: So neurotension does not get lower after bariatric surgery. Yeah.

Joel Greene [00:41:42]: And it kind of explains the success of bariatric surgery in a way, because so one of the key hormones related to food intake is not perturbed post-fat loss. And all of this is under an umbrella, which is the post-fat loss rebound. I wrote about quite a bit in my first book, and it's only made a better case since then. There's just a boatload of research that is now showing that this is quantifiable, it's measurable, there are clear mechanisms at work and they're multiple, redundant. There's tons of science papers on this now showing that, basically, over many thousands of years, our bodies are rigged to defend against going hungry, defend against starvation, defend against fat loss to keep us alive. Neurotensin is one of a number of ways we can measure the rebound effect post-fat loss. So this thing, post-fat loss drops, and it is the number one predictor of weight regain so far that we have.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:43]: Do you mean because if neurotensin drops, the food reward is going to go up or the desired food is going to go up?

Joel Greene [00:42:50]: Both. So food reward, you're going to be more rewarded for food and you're going to want to eat more. And that's just neurotensin. That's not even counting leptin or any of the gut hormones. And all those are dysregulated too, post-fat loss.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:04]: So if I was going to lose weight, but based on what you just explained, I wanted to keep neurotensin somewhat elevated so that I didn't have as much of a risk for weight rebound. Is there a way to do that?

Joel Greene [00:43:17]: Yeah, yeah, I built a whole course on it called Beat The Rebound. But essentially the first thing we have to do is we need to recognize weight is like top of sleep, sleep and weight. I mean, those are top two problems most people struggle with. Sleep, weight and gut. So this is a huge problem. It's only getting worse. And one of the reasons it's just getting worse and worse and worse, despite every diet under the sun, is there's no acknowledgement of an entire set of mechanisms and processes that kick in in the post-fat loss period that are nature's way of regaining all the weight you lost. So the first thing is we have to recognize, hey, there's a whole bunch of mechanisms that are going to start now that you've taken your post-fat loss selfie and you got about six to twelve months where you need to counter these. Okay? And some of it gets pretty esoteric, but the simple, simple thing that we're trying to do, post-fat loss, we have to get energy expenditure up and we have to get all of the signaling for food intake down.

Joel Greene [00:44:21]: That's the thrust of it. So we have to reverse those two things. So typically, post-fat loss, energy expenditure is lower and the drive for food intake is higher. And so we have to put our hands and reverse those two things.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:32]: Right. Metabolism has gone down. Desire for food has gone up.

Joel Greene [00:44:36]: Yeah, yeah, that's. That's. There's. There's other things going on. A lot of other things. But that's, like, to make it simple, that's. That's the gist of it. So let's start with, you know, kind of like a foundational element, which is, in order to get our metabolism up, we need a higher caloric load in the morning, and it needs to be very strategic.

Joel Greene [00:44:57]: So there needs to be a bunch of protein in there, and there needs to be fermentable carbohydrates in there, things that ferment. And the reason is both of those things. So we got three things going on. We got the meal size, we have protein, and then we have fermentation in the gut. All three of those hit GLP-1. All three of them do. So when you combine things that ferment in the gut, you tend to produce the bacteria that trigger GLP-1. So potatoes, for example.

Joel Greene [00:45:25]: And when you combine that with protein, then protein also hits GLP-1. So in other words, like steak and eggs at breakfast, for example, or, excuse me, a baked potato and steak at breakfast with eggs. It's a natural response. Everybody kind of, you intuitively know what I'm saying is true. It's when we're doing it. So we're in the post-fat loss phase, we're increasing caloric load, and then we're skewing the macros at breakfast to just lay the hammer down on all of the satiety hormones, all of the. Everything that signals satiety and fullness. And we're trying to get your calories up.

Joel Greene [00:46:00]: We're trying to get your metabolic expenditure up as high as possible.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:03]: And you're not eating like that the whole day because, obviously. But you're starting off the day in a way that many people, I think, is paradoxical to fat loss. And I should mention, by the way, subtle nuance, when Joel says fermentable carbohydrates, that's different than fermented carbohydrates. So this wouldn't mean, like, prioritizing, even though it might have some benefits here and there could be some crossover yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, etcetera. You're more talking like resistant starch, potatoes, inulin, things like that.

Joel Greene [00:46:32]: Yeah, but those things can work, too. We're looking to create those bacteria we spoke of that hit GLP-1 in the gut, and we're looking to do that in conjunction with GLP-1 stimulating food like protein, like, you know, small pulses of fat, everything together, and the caloric load, you know, is very high. So that's when the body has the greatest ability to take all those calories and turn them into heat energy in the morning.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:57]: Got it.

Joel Greene [00:46:57]: Which goes against a lot of schools of thought. So there's. There's the don't eat breakfast school of thought, you know, like, nah, never eat breakfast, blah, blah, blah, all that. And the thing I think that's worth mentioning is that this is a strategy, and it is done at a specific period in time, which is the post-fat loss period. And personally, I don't think this whole weight thing is ever going to get anywhere until there is complete acknowledgement of the post-fat loss mechanisms that kick in. They are real. They're quantifiable. I talked about one in the book, another one, and I talked about, and this is a brand new study.

Joel Greene [00:47:32]: You can measure it. This group out of Harvard, they were able to measure post-fat loss tripling of the synaptic neurons that drive food reward. So they looked at the agouti-related complex and they measured pre and post-fat loss, and they saw a tripling of neural traffic that drives increased food intake post-fat loss. So it's quantifiable.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:58]: Yeah, yeah. And so it's obviously an uphill battle, and I would raise your. It's not going to go away until we do something about the reward mechanisms and say it's also probably not going to be until we get better padlocks for the refrigerators and app locks for Uber Eats, just because of the rampant access as well. I think that's an elephant in the room. Of course, back to the ancestral hypothesis here of constant 24/7 access to hyper palatable foods, and paired that with low dietary diversity to a certain extent.

Joel Greene [00:48:28]: Your stand up's getting way better. Are you working on it?

Ben Greenfield [00:48:31]: I'm actually walking that standing, Joel. Okay, so a couple other questions. I know we still got time for a few more. So, saturated fats. You know, you talked about the time factor and how things will build up over time, but this is kind of like the opposite of that. It seems to me the argument for saturated fat, certain things will decrease over time in the body and affect our ability to be able to deal with certain compounds. And you say that we might have more difficulty being able to handle. I think what you mean by that is we might have increased cardiovascular complications to saturated fat as we age. Can you explain how that works.

Joel Greene [00:49:10]: So this gets to the aging of the cardiovascular system. And I would offer it's poorly understood, rather not poorly understood in science circles, but certainly poorly understood within the biohacking community, and even more so, the public at large. And basically, it's this. There is a one-to-one correspondence. If you graph this out between the decline in the cardiovascular system and the inability to lose weight, one-to-one. Like, it's amazing.

Joel Greene [00:49:42]: Yeah. And when you begin to break it down, it makes perfect sense. So there's three major things happening with the cardiovascular system as we get older. So the first thing, there's this class of enzymes called the NOX enzymes. And they have a big word, it's NADPH oxidases. They're the only oxidative enzymes that we know of in the entire body, the only enzymes whose purpose is to produce free radicals. And we find them in immune cells, but they also line the entire vasculature. And what they do is they take superoxide and they dismutate that down into hydrogen peroxide.

Joel Greene [00:50:22]: And then from there, hydrogen peroxide is used in insulin signaling as a throttle, as a feedback mechanism. So when you bring glucose into cells, hydrogen, the NOX enzymes activate. Hydrogen peroxide is produced, and it helps with vasodilation, and it helps control just how much glucose do we need in the cell? So what happens as we get older is they break. They tend to just hyperactivate, and they begin producing more and more and more hydrogen peroxide. And so when that happens, free radical stress tends to take place in the vasculature in the endothelium. Well, that breaks the whole body. That breaks the entire body because it breaks insulin function, it breaks glucose signaling, but a lot of other things, too. So what happens is, when the NOX enzymes hyperactivate with age, a number of things happen.

Joel Greene [00:51:20]: One of those things is that they are able to oxidize saturated fats into a particular compound called an oxysterol.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:31]: I see where you're at.

Joel Greene [00:51:32]: An oxysterol is an oxidized form of a cholesterol. And they're not bad. They're actually essential. They serve as critical signaling molecules. But the issue is, when you make too much, it's like anything else, you make too much. So what happens with age is that the NOX enzymes go, and then when the NOX enzymes go, another mechanism goes that's called the glycocalyx. Glycocalyx lines the vasculature. It's a tension mechanism.

Joel Greene [00:51:56]: It's hair, it's fur. And what it does is it uses mechanical tension to tell the tight junctions of the vasculature, kind of where they should be at. It's very similar to leaky gut, so you can get leaky vessels. So when this happens now, your percent likelihood of cardiovascular disease shoots through the roof, you just have a much higher percentage. And the reason has to do with a number of different things. But particular and unique to saturated fats is that over time the body can accrue, accumulate oxysterols in the body. Now the body's super good at getting rid of cholesterol and that's why you can measure cholesterol intake and it doesn't seem to do anything, you know, you can measure someone, give them tons and tons of cholesterol, it doesn't seem to do much. Body's really good at getting rid of it.

Joel Greene [00:52:44]: It also doesn't stiffen the arteries. Not so with oxysterols. The body is terrible, terrible at getting rid of oxysterols. And there's different forms of them. And the different forms can be incredibly pathological. For example, there's one called 27OH. So 27OH is the primary oxysterol. Like when you take, when you look at Alzheimer's disease and then they do samples of the spinal tissue of people with dementia, it's supersaturated with 27OH.

Joel Greene [00:53:19]: And it's the primary oxysterol going into the brain when you look at it breaks chico, it breaks the calories in calories out paradigm. So what you see with mice, there have been tests done on mice where you give them 27OH, they gain weight without changing calories, without more fat absorption. In other words, they just gain weight without assimilating more, without absorbing more fat.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:47]: And is that because of an effect on the HPA axis or down regulation of metabolic rate or I impact on thyroid function or something?

Joel Greene [00:53:56]: I don't think it's known, I don't think we understand it yet. It seems to break the paradigm of calories and calories out. But what you can see in humans is that when 27OH is elevated, it's very difficult, you have a very hard time losing body fat. So to answer this question, there are these key problems happening in the vasculature as we get older. It's the increase of the NOX activation, it's the decline of the glycocalyx and then the aggregation of oxysterols. All these things are happening all at once. And the net of these things is one big thing. All metabolic, all cardiovascular disease is characterized by a loss in nitric oxide production.

Joel Greene [00:54:39]: So what happens is two things. One, we're producing less nitric oxide, and nitric oxide is becoming less bioavailable at the same time. So nitric oxide is going down. And then what is now happening is you can be, you can have saturated fats in the diet that had caused no issue whatsoever when you were young. And now, because of the decline of the vasculature, you can be creating oxysterols and damaging the endothelium just due to the decline of the vasculatures.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:11]: The idea here then would be, we want to figure out how to keep nitric oxide elevated, keep the NOX hyperactivation down regulated, and protect the glycocalyx. And I actually have talked about protecting the glycocalyx on shows before about heart health, you know, sulfur based compounds, for example, being one of the compounds that can help out with that. But when it comes to the whole NOX issue, how do you tackle that?

Joel Greene [00:55:37]: Diet wise, which is what we're talking about, foundationally, there's two things. So the job is we have to increase nitric oxide production. We have to increase nitric oxide availability. We have to spin down NOX hyperactivation. And so the foundation for that are two food categories, which is nitrate-rich leafy greens, nitrate-rich vegetables, and then berries. Those two things cover the ground we need to cover. So nitrate reducing bacteria in the mouth, essential. Essential.

Joel Greene [00:56:08]: You must have them. Number one source. Leafy greens, nitrate-rich veggies. Number one source. And humans lack nitrate reductase. So this is the enzyme that reduces nitrate to nitrite. We lack it. And so the bacteria in the mouth are essential because they help increase nitric oxide production.

Joel Greene [00:56:28]: And there have been a lot of guys talking about this. We were just at an event together where one of the guys talks about the nitrate bacteria in the mouth and mouthwash and all that stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:42]: I shouldn't use mouthwash and floridated toothpaste, because it'll decrease the activity of those. That's Nathan Bryan. He talked about that on my show. Yeah.

Joel Greene [00:56:49]: Oh, okay. Yeah. So you had them on. Yeah, Nathan. So, yeah, I wrote about it in the new book as well, which is just that there's this bacteria in the mouth. They're essential. You have to have them and you have to feed them. And the way you feed them, principally is through nitrate-rich veggies, principally.

Joel Greene [00:57:03]: So the net of that, number one, is you're going to increase nitric oxide. Now, when you add berries into the picture. So berries have two effects. One is they tend to, across the board, favorably impact the NOX enzymes in different ways. Different berries will impact the NOX enzymes in different ways, but generally speaking, they tend to turn down the rheostat on the NOX hyperactivation. So that's one thing. The other thing is they make nitric oxide more bioavailable. So, dietarily speaking, these things, these foraging foods seem to have a synergy that impacts the cardiovascular system in beneficial ways, particularly as we age.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:41]: Interesting. Okay. So that seemed like a pretty easy way to do things versus just taking Viagra, I guess, for the nitric oxide piece. And then for the saturated fats, what you're saying is one could continue to eat saturated fats as they age, but the key would be including nitrate-rich veggies and berries as a staple in the diet.

Joel Greene [00:58:03]: I would call that the simple thing. Yeah. I would also add to that, again with our blueberry example. We started the whole show off with. We just quickly showed that you can get too much anything, even a good thing. That didn't take much brain power to figure out. The funny thing, you'd never know it. We've entered this age where there are groups of people out there right now that would vitriolically say, no, dude, there's no amount of saturated fat that could be detrimental.

Joel Greene [00:58:34]: None. We've vindicated that. We know that now. There's no amount of cholesterol that could be bad. I mean, there's really people that think there's no amount like. Like this is immune from homeostasis. You know, it's true of everything else. True of water, it's true of air, it's true of fiber, but not this stuff.

Joel Greene [00:58:50]: No, you can't get to. So when, when you take that argument, the first thing is when you look at it, when you look at all the studies, ancestrally that have been done, there's kind of a range. There's a true north in ancestral diets. It seems to be roughly 7 to 11% of the diet with saturated fat. And that seems pretty consistent. I mean, you're a hunter. It's tough. Game animals are not the same as hybridized Holstein cows.

Joel Greene [00:59:17]: They're very different in terms of the fat content. So I would just say that there's a true north that nature provides for saturated fats, and it's not an unlimited amount. It's kind of in this range.

Ben Greenfield [00:59:28]: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for reminding me. I've got my elk hunt in two weeks. Okay, so we've got a little bit of time left, Joel, and these are going to be more like rapid fires. Obviously, I'm holding up your book right now. Go to bengreenefieldlife.com/immunitycode if you want to get into the nitty gritty details of all this stuff, but we have throw a few at you, Joel. Some of these, you actually call them food hacks in the book.

Ben Greenfield [00:59:53]: And you give me, like, the 20, 30 second lightning flash as to why you think these are cool. Trypsin. Go.

Joel Greene [01:00:03]: Cheese enzyme. Helps break down cheese. Helps release, helps release a peptide in cheese. Alpha-caso something.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:12]: Alpha-casozepine. Yeah.

Joel Greene [01:00:16]: Yeah. Age. I would have gotten that 20 years ago.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:20]: Yeah.

Joel Greene [01:00:20]: It helps you sleep.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:21]: Yeah. Okay. All right, so. And you said you could break it open and add it to mozzarella. So you combine trypsin with cheese, and it helps you to sleep.

Joel Greene [01:00:28]: Who knew?

Ben Greenfield [01:00:29]: Okay, citrus peels. I know you're a big fan of those.

Joel Greene [01:00:33]: Yeah. So quick, useful hack. If there's a nuclear war, you combine chlorella with citrus peels, and it's been shown to protect against radiation. But the big thing there is polymethoxyflavone. So polymethoxyflavone is a, it's found in citrus peels. Tangeretin is a really good example of that.

Joel Greene [01:00:55]: Mind boggling stuff, really is. Works on a number of different levels. Very synergistic with apple peels, actually. So those two together in the diet a few times a week, do a number of really good things, possibly may help to burn brown fat, do all kinds of good things.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:11]: Right. So a lot of people who might be, like, peeling their apples or, I don't know, like a peach or whatever, like, you should actually be eating the peels of those. I assume you're not talking about, like, lemons and limes.

Joel Greene [01:01:22]: Uh, yeah, no, no, not so much that, but, like, orange. Orange peels. Um, as long as you can get. You know, the issue we're up against is getting unadulterated food. So that's the big challenge.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:30]: Yeah. Yeah. And the bitterness. Geez. Okay, so that's pretty cool, actually, about chlorella and peels. I didn't know that. How about trehalose? It appears there's a sugar and a few of the shakes in the book. What is it about trehalose that you like?

Joel Greene [01:01:42]: Trehalose? It's an autophagy. Autophagy-inducing sugar. It seems to block mTOR. Seems to work on a number of levels to induce autophagy. I first started writing about that one, I think, in 2021 on my Instagram. And I use it during the amplified fast, every now and then, periodically. So it's really good to combine with fasting, it initiates autophagy and it does a bunch of good stuff. So there was, there was for a while, some chatter about, well, you're going to spin up a certain bacteria that's toxic if you eat that, but it's true of all sugars.

Joel Greene [01:02:17]: And anyways, it's something I've devised.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:19]: Is it sweet like sugar? Like, could you use as a sugar substitute?

Joel Greene [01:02:22]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:22]: Okay. Just like Amazon, for example. I assume you can find this stuff.

Joel Greene [01:02:27]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:27]: Okay.

Joel Greene [01:02:27]: It's as easy to find.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:28]: I've never used it much. Okay. This is a fun one. It has to do with a dietary diversity feast, I think. Casein phosphopeptides in dairy.

Joel Greene [01:02:36]: Yeah, that just. Yeah, that just gets to. That just gets to all the cool stuff that's in dairy. I mean, dairy is like this treasure trove of peptides. And so this is one, this is a peptide that's found in dairy that makes a case for dietary diversity. What it does is helps bind heme iron. So, like, if you have meat in the diet and you're worried about iron overload, then, you know, dairy is a good way to neutralize that. And this is a peptide that helps to bind iron.

Ben Greenfield [01:03:00]: That's amazing. It reminds me of that. What's the tribe that, the Maasai tribe that does the blood and the milk together as like a dietary staple. So they probably didn't know about the casein phosphopeptides. Just stumbled upon it ancestrally. There we go. The dairy with the meat and the dairy with the blood. Okay.

Ben Greenfield [01:03:18]: Nopales. Nopales.

Joel Greene [01:03:20]: Nopales. Yeah, man. Maybe. Maybe. I've spent a lot of time over the years trying to either debunk or confirm this, but working theory may be the most powerful natural glucose disposal agent in the universe of foods.

Ben Greenfield [01:03:36]: Geez. That's from cactus.

Joel Greene [01:03:40]: It's cactus leaves. It's cactus leaves. Yeah. Back in 2012, when I was doing my nutrition software, we had a bowl called the Napolito bowl. And I think I put that in the new book. But it's a very powerful glucose disposal agent. In fact, the way you know that's true is that there are cautions with diabetics about eating nopales because it can drop your blood sugar.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:00]: Interesting. Is that something that people, like, put into blood sugar control supplements now, are there companies doing that.

Joel Greene [01:04:07]: I think there might be nopales.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:10]: There isn't. They might want to think about it. I don't know. Yeah, it looks super interesting. Turns on AMPK as well and increases glucose by increasing the number. So. Yeah, so it's a GLUT4 or glute transporter agonist. Okay. How about palatinose? This is the last one, I promise, Joel. Palatinose.

Joel Greene [01:04:28]: Yeah. I first wrote about this back in 2006. It's a weight loss sugar, essentially. It's a sugar. It has most of the sweetness of sugar, but it seems to have a glycemic yield very similar to raw oats. So, like, if you're eating, you know, the rate at which sugar hits the blood is very, very slow. So there's, there's a company called the brand name is Beneo, and they've got research on it showing this stuff actually helps you drop weight. In fact, when I first wrote about it back in 2006, like, the headline was A Weight Loss Sugar?

Joel Greene [01:05:02]: So. Wow.

Ben Greenfield [01:05:02]: So, so what I've learned is, like, for the sweetener section of my pantry, I could look into adding the trehalose and the palatinose. And then we talked about the honey and the stevia, and those would all be good ways to be sweetening my, you know, my pre-dinner shakes and my midnight blueberry ice cream.

Joel Greene [01:05:20]: Two pounds.

Ben Greenfield [01:05:21]: Two pounds of it. That's right. Yeah.

Joel Greene [01:05:23]: Yes.

Ben Greenfield [01:05:23]: Yeah. Joel, you are a wealth of knowledge, as usual. And again, folks, like, if you like this episode, we cover so much more in the other two that we did, which are also highly relevant. This new book, The Way - The Immunity Code Diet, I'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. Highly recommend you read it. Don't worry. It's not like one of those things. You got to be a nutritionist or physician to be able to understand.

Ben Greenfield [01:05:45]: There's even cartoons and QR codes and all sorts of helpful stuff in there. So I'll link to that at bengreenfieldlife.com/immunitycode. Joel, thanks once again for crushing it, man.

Joel Greene [01:05:58]: Thank you so much for having me on. It's always an honor.

Ben Greenfield [01:06:00]: All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenefield, along with the great Joel Greene, signing out from bengreenefieldlife.com/immunitycode. Have an incredible week.

Ben Greenfield [01:06:10]: Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more, check out bengreenfieldlife.com. It's all there. Bengreenfieldlife.com. See you over there.

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