The Best Way To Use Hydrogen For Health, Finding A Good Hormone Doctor, Why Alcohol ISN’T Always Bad For You (But Weed Might Be!) & More Solosode 496

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: In this episode of the Boundless Life podcast, the best way to use hydrogen for health Finding a good hormone doctor why alcohol isn't always bad for you, but weed might be. And a whole lot more. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist. And I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond. Welcome to another solo so where I get to do all the talking and don't have to interrupt anybody. It's Ben Greenfield. I'm here walking on my treadmill in my office.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:45]: Got some cool news flashes and some great questions today. If you have a question, you can write into BenGreenfieldLife.com if you want to access the shownotes you can go to BenGreenfieldLife.com 496496 Q&A episodes, almost 500. And there's actually a lot more than that. I started this podcast 19 years ago. Literally have lost track and started counting over multiple times because originally we had interviews and those got numbered and then they didn't and Q and A shows and those sometimes got numbered and sometimes didn't. I have average twice a week for 20 years. You can do the math, but that's thousands and thousands of episodes. I also have owned other podcasts.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:39]: A triathlon podcast called Rockstar Triathlete Academy, an endurance podcast called Endurance Planet, Business podcast called Train for Top Dollar. All in all, I have probably recorded, I would say, close to 7,000 podcast episodes. That's a lot of microphone spinning. Holy moly. Before we jump into today's news flashes and questions and answers, where have I been? I just got back from Austin, Texas. Me and my wife and a coaching client of mine did a little bit of medical tourism in Austin. We went to Austin Regenerative Therapy, shout out to the amazing team there and Dr. Win.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:24]: I had three liters of young human plasma infused into my body. That's just what it sounds like. Didn't bring my own blood boy, but 18 to 24 year old healthy male donor plasma infused into my body as a sort of human regenerative tactic. My wife got a. She's going to hate that I'm sharing this. She got a wing lift which is exactly what it sounds like for the downstairs department for women along with some other aesthetic protocols there and some facial stuff. And then she did a plasma exchange where they pull the plasma out as a sort of oil change for the body and replace that with albumin and some IV nutrients. I did also some sexual stuff, some Botox.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:11]: I had my blood pulled out stressed with a laser to activate so called V cells, very small embryonic cells and had those injected back into the body including the face which hurt like a mother but I gritted my way through it. Normally they can give you stuff for pain. I just, I didn't. And then while in Austin we visited Kooya. Shout out to Kooya. We did couples ketamine therapy there. We did a float tank, we did IVs, we did hot cold. We visited Alive and well.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:49]: Shout out to Alive and well. The best massagers in Austin got a massage there and did their hyperbaric chamber. Austin's just a cool place. If I could move to a big city it would be Austin. But I like my little 125 person community in North Idaho. But the name of the place where we did all the treatment and therapies, if any of you want to look into it, it's Austin Regenerative Therapy. I also got to hang out with my boy Brigham Buehler at Ways to well fantastic guy. He's doing some cool stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:21]: Stay tuned. Coming down the pipeline for a podcast with him because I will be back in Austin in March and we did some fun stuff in the evenings. Dai Dewey Restaurant. Must go to that one verdad Mexican. Saw our friends at Kiltoni. All sorts of stuff. All right. And Uchiko Sushi.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:41]: So good. I also did Bret Hurt's Love and Fear or Love Conquers Fear podcast. A few other podcasts. So what a journey. Okay, this is getting boring. I am sure hearing about my life. So let's jump into questions again. If you have a question you can ask [email protected] 496 Andrea says I would love to hear more about hydrogen therapies and what works best.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:09]: I've only heard snippets here and there. Trying to put it all together. All right. Hydrogen. I've talked about it a lot. I've called it a selective antioxidant because it can scavenge well are called hydroxyl radicals. It can clean up oxidation in the body which can cause cellular and mitochondrial damage. And hydrogen is very inexpensive and very good at doing that.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:38]: However, put on your propeller hats. Its mechanism of action was not fully elucidated until last month. And brand new Redox biology paper that came out last month actually showed how hydrogen is working and it's pretty cool. Shout out to former podcast guest the guy who runs the Molecular hydrogen foundation Tyler LeBaron, also an incredible arm wrestler and marathoner and deadlifter who told me about this paper. So there's a target that molecular hydrogen, and we'll get to the delivery mechanisms for it, whether oral or transdermal or or breathed in, actually acts upon it is called brace yourself. The risky iron sulfur protein in the mitochondrial complex 3 pathway. So we're gonna abbreviate that RISP, R, I, S, P. Okay, so high level here, H2 or hydrogen targets this RISP, and that triggers degradation of RISP, degradation of the iron sulfur protein in the mitochondria.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:49]: That sounds like a bad thing. And if it happened long term, it would be because that suppresses the activity of the electron transport chain, which is responsible for creating energy, for creating ATP. Turn that off. Long term, not a good deal. Now that stress to the mitochondria actually initiates what's called a protein unfolding. And that protein unfolding turns out to long term increase electron transport chain efficiency. This is a classic hormetic style adaptation, meaning something that would kill you in large amounts or kill you if sustained for a long period of time, is good for you in small and moderate doses. And this is why frequent dosing with hydrogen in small amounts and I think of, and I talked with Tyler about this on the podcast that I did with him.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:47]: I'll link to that one in the show notes where we took a deep dive. Diurnal dosing, meaning taking some hydrogen in the morning when you get up and taking some hydrogen in the afternoon or the evening. Those tiny amounts repeated a couple of times a day give small stresses to the mitochondria, suppressing the electron transport chain activity. And the long term benefits are better ATP production. And the cool thing is because it's acting on protein folding mechanisms, the benefits persist after the hydrogen is out of your body. So that's pretty cool. Now we know how hydrogen is actually helping. So it would be like near the top of the totem pole, along with things like red light or PMF or oxygen to enhance your mitochondrial function.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:37]: Now, what's the best way to get it? Well, typically, if you're looking at hydrogen, the measurement in volume is called ppm. That's parts per million. We hear parts per million thrown around a lot in chemistry and in food science. So parts per million, that's basically the same thing as milligrams per liter. As milligrams per liter. So let's say I have ready for some math. 500 milliliters of a liquid, say water, and it's got 1.6 parts per million of hydrogen in it. Well, that means that that has 0.8 milligrams of actual hydrogen.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:17]: Hydrogen is 1 milligram per liter. And that's not something super important for you to know. But here's what is important. The amount of hydrogen that can be diffused in water at normal pressure tops out pretty early. Not much higher than 2 parts per million. So a lot of these hydrogen tablets that you use are great, but you're not going to max out the amount of ppm that you can get in the water. So the way these tablets work is you drop one or two, I often do three. You into a glass of water, they take about three to five minutes to dissolve or to react.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:56]: They're basically a magnesium based tablet. And then they produce hydrogen which off gases pretty fast. You want to drink it soon. And it is a quick, transportable, relatively inexpensive way to get hydrogen. Although it's not a huge ppm dosage and I won't lie, it's kind of a cash cow right now in the supplements industry. Meaning I've seen how much it costs to get a hydrogen tablet and how much these things are sold for. And I'm a capitalist. I have nothing against this, but people are making a lot of money selling hydrogen tablets.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:32]: Maybe I should have gotten into the hydrogen tablet game, but anyways, they are effective, they do work. You want to make sure that you've got access to good clean versions. I know my friend Gary Breca, he talks about his. It's called ah, gonna blank on the name. Just Google Gary Brecker Hydrogen. He's got a good brand. I think Organifi just launched a brand. Water and wellness has a brand.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:57]: Those are three that I know are good. So not the highest ppm, but I love it that I could like have that in my backpack on an airplane and put it in that, you know, the little bottle of water that I get in the airplane and get a little bit of hydrogen along with my microplastics. Okay. And then you have the, the actual bottles that make hydrogen. An example of this would be the company Echo. And you can get a higher ppm of hydrogen in those bottles and the lid stays on so it doesn't off gas as quickly. I like these, they don't have an unlimited shelf life. Like you could maybe run about 300 sessions on them before they start to create less hydrogen.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:37]: You're going to pay 150 to $300 or so for a hydrogen bottle. So technically the math makes better financial sense than just doing tablets. There has been some concern in the industry about the potential for these bottles to have some metal in the water that you drink, because the water does get exposed to a metal plate. I've seen no analyses the actual metal levels. I use these bottles frequently. I get my own metals tested, and I'm rock bottom low on metals. That's not to say that they're not making metals, because I also do saunas and coffee enemas and all these things that help to clear metals out from the body. But if you're concerned about that, it's just something to know about the brand that I've been using.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:26]: I got these from the company 10X. I think Echo is who 10X partnered with on the hydrogen bottles. And then we pull out the big guns. And I won't lie when I'm at home now. This is the primary. The next two things I'm about to tell you. The last two things are the primary ways that I get hydrogen. One is, I would say, the highest throughput delivery method of hydrogen that you can get.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:51]: That's getting more and more research behind it, and that's actual hydrogen inhalation. These are machines that use diluted water and like a balloon inside the unit to concentrate hydrogen inside that balloon. You then breathe it. I have a big podcast about the science behind these and how they work with Alex Tarnava and good old Tyler Lebaron, who I mentioned earlier. And you get super high concentrations because you're breathing, like, 4% hydrogen. So if you're laying there for a half hour and I just do this when I'm taking a nap, I lay back, middle of the day. I usually take a siesta around 2pm, pull this mask on. And so I'm breathing for 30 to 45 minutes.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:32]: I'm literally getting the equivalent of hundreds of bottles of hydrogen water. Big blast all at once. So I'm getting a ton of that mild hormetic stress and increased electron transport, chain activity. And I think it's the best way to get hydrogen. Now, you got to be careful. Some of these machines have a high risk. Don't run away, scared of exploding. Some of them are very poorly made.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:58]: The one that I like, that I use, I don't think it's the only good one out there, but is H2Inhale. H2Inhale, that's in my lounge. I'm, like, addicted to it. I feel so good after I use it. Lower soreness, better recovery, better sleep. Just fighting inflammation on a lot of fronts. Increasing ATP production and then the other way. That's pretty cool.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:20]: That also allows for a ton of hydrogen to get absorbed a little bit more. Logistically inconvenient, but super relaxing is a hydrogen bath. So some companies make, I think Water and Wellness has these hydrogen bath tablets that you can dissolve into just a normal bathtub full of hot water or if you really want to, ballsy with it, cold water. And they also have hydrogen diffusion units that diffuse hydrogen into the water as you fill up the tub. I have the ladder. I got it from a company based out of San Diego called Lumati. Literally have a. We built this brand new house in Idaho and I realized after the fact, this sounds super dumb, but I turned to my wife a few weeks after living in the house and I'm like, do you realize we don't have a bathtub? She's like, yeah, yeah, I didn't think we needed one.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:15]: And she did a lot of the house design. So I'm like, screw that. I'm not going to live till I'm 90 years old in a house without a bathtub. So I had a bathtub put in the garage with a curtain around it. I got a red light over it. Super relaxing. And you fill it up with this hydrogen diffusion unit from Lumati. So.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:35]: So it's transdermal hydrogen absorption and you can get a lot delivered with about 20 to 40 minutes of immersion. Now, don't laugh. The only issue is that when you have a bath in a garage, the water starts to get cold after like 15, 20 minutes, especially when it's winter in Idaho. So I have a sous vide wand that I set at 105 degrees and I put it in the bathtub and that maintains a pretty good temperature while I'm laying there soaking in hydrogen. And. And then I also use the ancient minerals, magnesium flakes, and I dissolve those in the water. So it's just this relaxing bath. I do that about once a week, sit there for 45 minutes, read a good book.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:17]: I have one of those bath pillows. Yeah. So I'm pretty pampered. But that's the deal with hydrogen. Hopefully that helps you out a little bit. Andrea, great question. If you want to start simple, just go with the tablets. If you want the best of the best, I would say the inhalation is the best way to go.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:36]: Question from Kristen. I'm a 52 year old female. My hair is falling out. And I would like to know where I can go online or in person for hormone replacement therapy. I need to go Somewhere where they know what they are talking about. Well, first of all, as you may know, the black box warning on hormone replacement therapy is no longer there and it's turning out that this is a pretty safe and effective solution for women's energy levels, muscle, bone density, vitality, libido and battling all the issues that come with perimenopause and menopause. My wife is on hormone replacement therapy. She's worked with a couple people during that journey.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:25]: The two primary people that she has worked with are Karen Martell, former podcast guest, and I will link to her stuff in the show notes and also Dr. Rosensweet who uses more of these plant based low toxin progesterone estrogen creams and testosterone creams. There's also a clinic called Game Day that has specialized in men's health for a while and now they are also moving into women's health. I think it's called something like Her Day She Day Game. Her Game She. I don't know, something like that. But gameday, if you just go to their website and I'll link to it in the show notes, they're also rolling stuff out and they're pretty good. They're not one of those fly by night pill mills.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:06]: So what do you want to look for when it comes to a high quality trustworthy hormone replacement doctor? Well, first of all, they should have an md, they should have a do, they should have an ND or some kind of advanced functional or integrative training. I mean you can go to someone like a chiropractic doc who has a physician on staff. However, what I look for is someone who either is or has someone on staff who has credentials from the Institute for functional medicine or A4M the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine, or ACAM, which is the American College for Advancement in Medicine, and preferably some kind of fellowship or, or hefty continuing education in women's hormone and women's metabolism and preferably women's thyroid because that often goes hand in hand with hormones. So they need to understand endocrinology metabolism, inflammatory pathways, detox pathways, gut health and genetics as one integrated system. This should not be, hey, we're going to run like a dried urine test on you look at estrogen, progesterone and testosterone and replenish accordingly. They need more than that. It can't just be pellet clinic, testosterone shots, progesterone cream, which is sometimes what you run into. People who are just like, hey, we're testing and we're getting you on the standard cookie Cutter treatment everybody else gets.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:33]: You want to work with someone who is testing you on a regular basis, preferably quarterly. I mean, my wife, right now she's working with bright Clinic and Dr. Rosensweet. Every day she logs in and fills out this super quick questionnaire about her symptoms and everything. And the doctor actually sees that on the other end and can make on the fly recommendations. I'll hunt down their information and Karen Martell's information because those are the two people my wife has worked with who I trust and I've been impressed with them. But this Dr. Rosensweet from the Bright Clinic and then Karen Martel, they also need to initiate with a really good consult.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:11]: I mean, when my wife started working with Rosensweet, they talked to the phone for like 90 minutes, right? Full health history, cycle history, pregnancy history, miscarriage history, trauma history, stress, sleep, gut, thyroid, autoimmune, family history, genetics, detailed symptom mapping, not just like, hey, do you get hot flashes or not? So you need someone who's really getting the full picture, not some 15 minute appointment. Red flags, they say we don't need labs, we go by symptoms. You have to work with someone who's quantifying data. Symptoms matter. But hormones without data is basically just guessing. They only test estrogen and progesterone. That's like late 90s medicine. They need to test everything.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:56]: Thyroid, gut, blood work, lipids, all hormones, upstream and downstream metabolites, everything. They don't test thyroid thoroughly, meaning they just test for say T3, T4, TSH, you need thyroid or TSH, you need free T3, total T3, free T4, total T4, thyroid antibodies. You want a really good picture of thyroids, Someone who pushes pellets. I don't like those because they can't be adjusted. So a lot of times I think that's lazy medicine or the doctor just can't explain what they're doing. They can't explain the mechanism, the risk, the benefit, the alternatives. So obviously you want someone who's got a really thorough approach. Now, I know I named Some people like Dr.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:45]: Rosensweet and Karen Martel, and I also named a clinic Gameday. If you have my book Boundless, there is a section in my book Boundless. I realize I'm upselling you here on my book that really takes a deep dive into how to find a good doctor, how to find a good dentist. Full list and directory of all of the different clinics, dentists, doctors, et cetera, who I recommend. Another example that would be on there would be the Wild Health Network, which is a network of precision medicine docs scattered around the U.S. they also tend to practice pretty good medicine. So those are some of the things that you think about. Those are some of the things to vet.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:25]: I think that years before perimenopause starts to set in, that's the time to begin working on stuff like this. So good question and hopefully that gets you on the right path. That was for Kristen. Okay, so now I want to turn to some research articles and some thought provoking things to think about. I think I just overused the word think. So the first and I'll link to all these BenGreenfieldLife.com496 the first is an article by my friend OG in the Health industry, founder of Primal Kitchen, which makes the best mayonnaise and ketchup and mustard and salad dressing on the planet. Mark Sisson, who I've always respected for having a very level headed approach to health, fitness, nutrition supplementation. Not a lot of baby talk, not a lot of yes, no black, white, but gives very nuanced answers and he recently wrote a pretty comprehensive article about alcohol.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:33]: So he gets into the idea that the bulk of evidence out there kind of is based around the idea that there's no safe amount of alcohol. And he also mentions that the bulk amount of that evidence is based on observational data. That means they take large swaths of the population, they see how much they drink, they track their health, then they come up with a single number that shows the so called risk of drinking various levels of alcohol for diseases like say cancer or heart disease or early mortality. And then they plug in thousands of people's individual experiences with alcohol into a single number that they then claim represents the effect of alcohol on every human being on the planet. That's a little bit of a limitation in terms of how we conduct studies and how we try to encompass experiences of tens of thousands of people into a single data point. And it just doesn't tell the whole picture. Let's dig into a few examples. Brain Atrophy probably one of the most cited objections to alcohol intake is that it reduces brain volume.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:40]: That's what you hear from Rhonda Patrick. That's what you hear from Andrew Huberman. Both great people who are doing a great job with public science and public health education. And the crux of their argument rests on the results of a big UK Biobank study. Over 36,000 adults. They measured brain matter volume, gray matter, white matter. They found that any amount of alcohol, even just one or two drinks a day was linked to lower brain volumes. And it's a little bit more nuanced than that.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:08]: Other studies have shown different results. There was a paper that looked at a population of adults in New York that found that light to moderate drinking, one to two drinks per day, was associated with greater brain volume, with wine having the strongest relationship. Another study on Danish men found that those who drank small amounts of wine, in this case, what I would consider to be more than small, I have maybe three to a maximum of five drinks a week. These guys were having eight to 14 drinks a week that had lower cognitive decline. Those men had lower cognitive decline than the men who completely abstained. The only alcohol that didn't provide protection in that case was beer. That's great. I don't like beer, so let's just say beer makes you stupid.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:50]: And the other thing about this UK Biobank study is the effect was very small. If you control for all the variables they identified, alcohol explains about 0.4% of global brain volume changes and 0.1% of white matter changes. That's exceedingly small. We're not frying a very big fish here. And there are things that are way more correlated to brain volume than alcohol. Blows it out of the water. Aerobic training, strength training being two huge examples. Loneliness, social isolation, the amount of relationships in your life.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:27]: Sleep probably is the biggest lever for brain volume. So what I'm saying here is that if you're doing aerobic exercise and you're strength training and you have good relationships in your life and you're sleeping well, the very, very tiny, I would say, unconvincing evidence on a few glasses of wine a week, shrinking your brain is a totally moot point. Another thing to think about, a lot of the links between moderate drinking and brain health are established through something called rate yourself Mendelian randomization that looks at genes that appear to predict behaviors related to alcohol intake. They're not actually looking at intake, though. They're looking at whether a person who carries certain alcohol related genes has a higher risk of dementia. So what that means is they're not studying actual drinking, they're studying genes that predict drinking and then they infer the rest. So that means being genetically predisposed to drink more alcohol is linked to Alzheimer's. It does not mean drinking a glass of red wine with your family at the end of a long day while you're playing games and laughing and hanging out causes Alzheimer's.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:42]: So huge difference there. Another problem is that, and this is all some of Mark's observations, you Got to look at who's telling you not to drink. A lot of health influencers and longevity experts who say alcohol is a poison are the same people who might be eating once a day, taking a handful of supplements, working out a ton, and perhaps deep into ketosis. This is interesting. Ketosis, or ketogenesis, operates on the same pathways that we use to metabolize and detox alcohol. So if you are a strict ketotic person, alcohol might be a bigger issue for you than people who have a little bit more flexibility in their diet. Some of these issues can be skirted by supplementing with nad, because ketosis combined with alcohol actually really strips one of the enzymes necessary for making NAD in the body. And I'm not telling you like, go get drunk and then consume nad, but it's really interesting that ketosis or carbohydrate restriction could make alcohol less healthy for you.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:49]: And then of course, you have to take into consideration the nocebo effect, right? It's been drilled into your head that alcohol is bad for you. It might actually cause issues. Lots of research shows benefits to alcohol. For example, red wine, when consumed with a meal, improves the inflammatory response to that meal, reduces cholesterol oxidation products in the gut, and reduces postprandial high blood glucose. Red wine makes LDL cholesterol more resistant to the type of oxidation that could result in plaque deposition. Moderate drinking, and this is as high as up to three drinks per day. I'm not endorsing that, but it actually improves endothelial function in heart disease patients, enhancing the ability of the endothelium to repair and respond to sheer stress and injury. I think three is pushing it because there might be effects on the liver or on sleep parameters if you have up to three drinks or three plus drinks.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:48]: But it's interesting that can actually improve endothelial function. Low doses of alcohol are correlated to more cognitive fluency and, and a little bit better learning. That might be because of less self judgment, a little bit of social lubrication, a little bit of relaxation. And I would say the big thing that I just mentioned is that yes, alcohol disrupts sleep. It throws off sleep cycles, it inhibits melatonin secretion. But all of the studies that look at that are looking at late evening alcohol consumption between 8pm at and midnight drinking like European style during the afternoon or early evening glass of wine with dinner and the dinner's finishing two hours or three hours before bedtime. Not a big idea or not a big. It is a big idea.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:38]: Not a big problem. Melatonin secretion actually starts around 9pm so if you're having wine with some roast chicken and carrots at 6pm you are not going to have any issues. I mean assuming you got a normal liver and glutathione production, it should not be an issue. So I could go on and on and I'll link to Mark's article, but here's my take on alcohol. I have not been inebriated or drunk in a very long time. I've rarely had more than two servings of alcohol. Years and years and years since I've ever had more than 2 servings. Date Night with my wife, which might be twice a month.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:15]: I will have a cocktail before dinner and then my wife and I share a glass of wine during dinner. Split pour. I probably drink about three to five times per week. Small glass of wine with dinner, small splash of a good alcohol like a mezcal tequila or I like this one called Kreos or yeah K R E O s. It's made from the mastic gum. Super good, great for the gut. And, and when people come over and I make them a cocktail, they're often like shocked that I really truly am just splashing alcohol in there. Microdosing the alcohol in.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:53]: So don't beat yourself up you guys. If you like to have a glass of wine every now and again, yes. If you have non alcoholic fatty liver disease or history of really deleterious drinking habits, addiction, et cetera, avoid it entirely. But and again, I'll link to the full article [email protected] 496. I don't think that alcohol is as big a deal as we've kind of been led to believe. Okay, but how about another one here? Let me pull up this study. This one I recently just came across. The effects of cannabis use disorder on cognitive function.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:31]: This one was a little concerning. It was a meta analysis show that cannabis use disorders associated with moderate deficits in verbal learning, memory, speed of processing and working memory. A lot of you right now are saying yeah, duh, we know that the gummies make you stupid and we know that smoking a joint makes you lose track of that joke you were halfway through telling and give the wrong punchline. I think that what's important to know about this study is that it was discussing cannabis use disorder. That's a little bit different than occasionally using weed. What this study was more specifically is they pooled data from a whole bunch of studies that compared people diagnosed with cannabis use disorder versus healthy controls on cognitive tests in which they were scored across 13 different domains and they found measurable deficits, especially in memory and information processing. Now, these people were not high at the time that they were being tested. These people were simply engaged in chronic cannabis use for a long period of time.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:39]: Now, what would chronic cannabis use actually be like for someone to even report that on a questionnaire? Well, it's difficult to say for sure, but typically we are looking at THC, not CBD based products, usually used multiple times per week, like 5 plus times per week at a dosing of anywhere from 5 up to really 50 milligrams in some people. So obviously that's a hefty dose. But this is only concerning for people who I would say are daytime smokers, people who, and this is probably a bigger issue, people have to take a gummy every single night before they go to bed. Not only because of the impact on cognitive function the next day, but there is mild. I have a whole section about this in my book. Boundless, mild free radical leakage that occurs in the mitochondria in neural tissue in response to thc. Cbd, especially like the gummies and the tinctures that you can get with less than 0.3% THC. Not too bad.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:42]: They have an anxiolytic effect. I would still say you don't want to abuse them because they can produce what's called a taphylactic response, meaning you need more and more to actually feel it. But I think my main takeaway from this study is if you're using THC containing cannabis every night to sleep or you are using 5/mg of THC cannabis multiple times per week, you are likely inducing a decent amount of stupidity. Again, from a practical standpoint, some people ask me about my own cannabis use. I like to take anywhere from 100 to 300 milligrams of CBD for airplanes. It really helps me sleep on airplanes. I use a shout out to Adam Wengauer, former podcast guest. I use his brand called Element Health, his maximum strength cbd, I think earmuffs kids.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:39]: Cannabis is a great sex drug. My wife and I probably average of about once a month. So like 12 times a year will get high after date night for sex. These are great for sex. Increases sensitivity. It's a little bit of a disinhibiting compound. And that would be about the only time I use THC unless I have an injury or pain and it helps me to sleep. And I don't think produces as much issues as like Valium or you know, the Diazepams.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:12]: So that's the skinny on cannabis. Be careful with it, be careful with alcohol use responsibly. But hopefully that kind of gives you a little bit of a perspective on this stuff. All right, two more for you, two more. I just love talking about this stuff. I mean, from the very first podcast, it was just me filling you guys in on interesting things that have come up in research lately, and a lot of people got scared. Speaking of sleep, which has come up a couple times on the show of melatonin, due to the headlines from a news release issued by the American Heart association newsroom entitled long term use of melatonin supplements to support sleep may have negative health effects. And what this was was a review of health records from a global database of patient data.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:57]: Over 130,000 adults who had insomnia and they were using melatonin that had been prescribed to them. And they found an association with heart failure, hospitalization for heart failure, and all cause mortality due to heart issues in the people that had used melatonin. So then they issued potential safety concerns here. And I ran this by Deanna Minick, who I did a big podcast with, all about melatonin and its multitude of benefits that go way beyond sleep. And so she had some good notes. First of all, this was a research abstract, not a publication, meaning we got no information on the dose of melatonin being used, concurrent medication use which often occurs in people with insomnia, the timing of the use, the delivery mechanism, or even the general health status of the population, which again, might have been pretty unhealthy to start with due to the fact that they had long term chronic insomnia. The population also matters. The release mentioned the researchers categorized people with chronic insomnia who use melatonin supplements long term by a year or more, and those who had never had melatonin use recorded anywhere in their medical records.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:15]: So there's some important points here. They included people in countries that require prescription for melatonin and countries that do not need a prescription. And the people seeking a prescription for melatonin likely had health conditions that warranted medical assistance for relieving insomnia, which can have a lot of underlying root causes like depression, anxiety and cardiovascular issues. The prescription use most likely implies that they were using a high dose of melatonin, 3 to 6 milligrams or higher. And it's still unknown as to whether the non melatonin group had ever actually used melatonin before because they didn't document that use. So really, all this study told us was that basically people who probably have a lot of pre existing health issues and chronic insomnia who have been prescribed or have used a pretty high physiological dose of melatonin may have potential impacts on heart health, but we don't know for sure. A lot of melatonin supplements are 0.3 up to 3 milligrams. You could use a smaller dose.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:24]: You could of course monitor your heart health with both lipid measurements and things like a calcium scan or CT angiography and you could avoid high doses of melatonin. And if you do have insomnia, use the top two things that I think exist cognitive behavioral therapy or yoga nidra non sleep deep rest protocols, both of which I've covered on this podcast a few times and I will link to in the show notes. I do not use melatonin unless I'm traveling and I've crossed more than three time zones in which case I take and there is no research on the safety of this. So proceed at your own risk. I take 300 to 900 milligrams of melatonin the first one to two nights I've traveled somewhere that's very far away from home and it has transformed my jet lag. You're a little groggy the next morning once light hits your eyes, it causes melatonin to detach from receptors and you wake up again. That is full on biohacking. Proceed at your own risk.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:24]: I get super high dose melatonin suppositories and lozenges from Dr. John Laurence at Mitozen and that's how I do it. But besides that, I don't use melatonin on a regular basis at all. It's a very much a sometimes drug for me. Okay then the last piece that I thought was interesting, I came across a tweet by Simon Mockling. I have no idea if I'm pronouncing his name properly. He says you've been told microplastics are everywhere. But what if a lot of that was junk science? Well, that caught my eye.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:01]: So I looked into this. The EU Food Safety Authority recently reviewed 122 major studies on microplastics and nanoplastics in food packaging. Their verdict was that most of these studies were were deficient, unreliable or corrupted. That's what EU's top food scientists said. They found methodological flaws, they found widespread misidentification and they found rampant background contamination. Meaning a lot of these labs were finding particles that weren't even in the packages that they were testing. Now in about half the studies, scientists found exactly what they were looking for. In 11% of the studies, they found plastics that weren't even present.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:44]: In over 50%, the methods couldn't detect anything even meaningful. So they were basically kind of guessing about the amount of microplastics and plastics in the food that we're consuming. So then how do we go from sketchy lab data to headlines that are screaming that you have a credit card worth of plastics in your brain? Well, part of it has been lawsuits, part of it has been lobbying, part of it has been clickbait journalism. Because as Simon notes, fear sells. And there's a potential here for a pretty big fake enemy created while ignoring real risks. So basically, in this report, they issued several urgent recommendations to fix the mess, namely standardized tests for microplastics, better methods of detection, contextualizing risks, and not confusing background noise with real exposure. And they also reminded researchers to compare microplastic risks to real world risks, like, say, what's in the food itself or air pollution, for example, or for example, our PFAS exposure and pesticide exposure and exposure to other compounds that have actually been tested in supply supply that could be an issue. So basically, long story short is EU food science authorities condemned bad microplastic studies.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:07]: Now, I'm not saying there are not microplastics in the food supply. What I'm saying is that some of this has been blown out of proportion. And when it comes to microplastic and nanoplastic exposure, you may not need to be living in a constant state of fear. Yes, you should certainly do things like avoid drinking hot beverages out of plastic lined containers or heating your food in plastic containers. You should avoid licking your fingers after handling receipts. You should, and your children should avoid chewing on cheap plastic Chinese toys. There are a lot of places where you can reduce plastic exposure. But I think that a lot of the studies on actual microplastic and nanoplastic content in foods is a little bit blown out of proportion.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:55]: You can get. Remember that company I mentioned called Lumati that I got my hydrogen generator from? They are also who make the red bed light that I have the red light bed that I have the LG10. And they also have a super simple at home salivary microplastic test. So you just test and see what your levels are at. And of course you can sauna on a regular basis, have healthy bowel movements. That's not going to remove all the plastic out of your body, but it can make a little bit of a dent and then the most important thing is avoid hefty exposure, especially the combination of heat and plastics, but do not lay awake at night with insomnia that you have a credit card's worth of microplastics in your brain. And if you do, don't take too much melatonin. All right, I'm going to wrap up there, so BenGreenfieldLife.com what did I say? 496.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:52]: 496 for the show notes thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Leave your questions, leave your comments, leave your feedback. I love to read them and subscribe to the podcast and leave it a ranking or review if you would be so kind because that helps motivate me to keep on digging into interesting things things, sharing them with you to hopefully make your life better and help you be a little bit more boundless. All right, over now to discover even.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:18]: More tips, tricks, hacks and content to.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:21]: Become the most complete boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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