Cutting-Edge Regenerative Medicine, Budget-Friendly Biohacks, The *Truth* About Vegetable Oils, Optimizing Health Like a Battery?!, Ketogenic Diet Insights & More: The Most Listened-To Episodes of 2024

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: In this episode of the Boundless Life podcast. The Best of the Best of the best of 2024. Let's do this.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:08]: 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:29]: As is my annual tradition, I'm bringing to you today some of the best of the best of 2024, my favorite conversations, clips, and plenty more so you can access the show notes for everything you're about to hear at bengreenfieldlife.com/BestOf2024. It's BenGreenfieldLife.com/BestOf2024 and kicking things off from big things I've changed my mind about keto, carnivore, cryotherapy, statins, THC, sleep hygiene, minimal effective dose of exercise, and more. We're going to dig into ketosis.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:06]: You're going to learn.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:07]: While therapeutic, ketosis certainly has its place for treating a number of conditions and diseases, I no longer use ketosis in the same way I once did. I eat carbs. You're going to learn how many and I do not participate in a high saturated fat version of ketosis. All right, let's do this.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:24]: I started to experiment with the idea of eating a high fat, low carb diet, the availability and affordability of drinkable ketones like HVMN or Delta G or Ketone IQ. Those are three big companies that make this kind of stuff. It just wasn't really available around then. Ketone Aid would be another example of a company that now makes these drinkable ketones. Uh, and so you'd primarily get into ketosis with pretty extensive carbohydrate restriction and a high intake of fats. Now, because at the time I was racing all over the world as an Ironman triathlete, this really clicked for me because ketones can be a preferred fuel for the liver, for the heart, for the diaphragm, for a lot of these organs that would support long distance endurance. In addition, when you're trying to eat as much as you need to eat to support, say, Ironman level training. If all of that is coming from, say, the old school Gatorade Sports Science Institute recommendations for total carb intake, then you also tend to get things like gut fermentation and blood sugar dysregulation and other problematic issues that occur when you're living off of scones and biscottis and sugary energy drinks.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:42]: And gels. So I started to experiment with and even begin to use ketosis in my racing. I was then recruited by Dr. Jeff Volek for a big study he did at University of Connecticut where he had me and a group of other endurance athletes follow a strict ketogenic diet. I mean, we're talking like 90% fat, 10% whatever, carbs and protein and whatever was left over. But it was a massive amount of fat intake for this ketogenic protocol, which I followed for 12 months. I mean, to give you an idea of this, when I showed up at the lab to do the VO2 max test, the muscle biopsies, the three hour treadmill run and the like, I recall getting on the treadmill to start the three hour run and they gave me one strawberry mixed into a heavy cup of cream. That's the type of diet that we're talking about.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:32]: So anyways, the results of that study you can find, I'll link to them in the show notes. It's called the faster study. It kind of rewrote the textbook showing that people who followed a high fat diet could burn more than one and a half grams of fat per. I believe this would be per minute during exercise. And that was way larger than the 1 gram or so per minute that was the prevailing thought at the time. So you could turn yourself into kind of a fat burning machine by restricting carbohydrates and being in ketosis. The problem was that long term it seems to result in me and many of the other athletes that I talked to and a lot of the people I was working with, long term dysregulation of thyroid function or in guys, endocrine function in women, some markers of fertility like kisspeptin and FSH and LH. And so ultimately I got a little bit disillusioned with this idea of strict ketosis.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:32]: And it's interesting because if you look at the ketogenic diet, a lot of people talk about it for weight loss. But therapeutic ketosis has been around since the 1920s for the treatment of epilepsy. So the ketogenic diet is a carbohydrate restricted diet that has been used for a very long time to treat a number of different chronic diseases and conditions. Now you'll a lot of times hear people talk poorly about ketosis in the medical community because they're referring to what's called ketoacidosis that typically results in diabetic patients who have insulin insufficiency. And in that case the body gets starved of glucose because it doesn't have sufficient amounts of insulin to transport the glucose into the cells for fuel. And because of that, the body keeps it in circulation and the blood glucose levels get dangerously high. So then the body goes into a mode where it produces a ton of ketone bodies in response to the liver, sensing the really low levels of insulin. And when blood glucose levels are high and at the same time you have a lot of ketone bodies, that's a dangerous state of ketosis.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:36]: It's almost like hyperglycemia combined with hyper ketosis. But that form of ketoacidosis is different than the harmful effects of keto that I was referring to when I mentioned that. It seems to have an impact on endocrine function, even energy levels, sleep, thyroid function, et cetera. So anyways, the therapeutic ketogenic diet, if you look at it, is indeed very similar to what I was following when I did that Jeff Volek study. It was like 85 to 90% carbohydrate protein will typically make up anywhere from 10 to 15% of the diet. Very minimal percentage comes from carbohydrates, like 5, maximum 10%. And usually that's even from green leafy vegetables and other less starchy vegetables. Complete elimination of grains and legumes and roots and tubers and fruits and processed foods and just about any added sugars.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:30]: So if you look at that version of a therapeutic ketogenic diet, it has been shown to have therapeutic effects for a lot of things. Cancer. You know, it appears that cancer, if you look at the metabolic theory of cancer, seems to thrive in a glucose rich environment and thus shifting the cancer away from being able to feed on a high amount of sugar seems to be beneficial for cancer patients, especially for neurodegenerative disorders, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. Therapeutic ketogenic diet seems to have some really good disease modifying properties. It also, because of the impact that the ketogenic diet can have on lymphocyte function, can help out with autoimmune issues. Multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis. I sometimes wonder if part of that is just because a therapeutic ketogenic diet is also restricting some of those autoimmune triggers like legumes and grains, but nonetheless seems to have a good impact on that as well. Even cardiovascular disease, you know, nutritional levels of ketosis have been shown to improve blood lipids and triglyceride levels.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:34]: I don't think that's necessarily happening from the people who are just eating the, you know, fatty cuts of the pork chop and ribeye steak and putting a stick of butter in their coffee. But restriction of carbohydrates particularly seems to have an impact on the presence of cardiovascular disease. So, yes, there, there are some use cases for a therapeutic ketogenic diet. But what I've changed my mind on is that you should restrict carbohydrates intensively to turn yourself into a fat burning machine. I have since adopted more of a carb cycling approach. So my current diet, I actually don't eat a lot of carbohydrates until the evening. Then in the evening I'll have 200 to 300 grams of carbs, which is fantastic because those are precursors for serotonin, which are precursors for melatonin, so you sleep better. I typically will use some kind of a blood glucose disposal agent prior to dinner, like berberine or apple cider vinegar or bitter melon extract to allow my body to take up that glucose more efficiently.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:35]: And by doing that, I can actually be in this state of hyper focused ketosis the entire day and then in the evening, have carbs, make sure I'm sending the message to my thyroid and my endocrine system that it's not starved of sugars, and then wake up the next morning and rinse, wash and repeat. And that type of cyclic ketogenic approach seems to work very well. In addition to that, what I've changed my mind on is I've shifted pretty far away from a largely saturated fat based version of ketosis. And this is primarily related to the concept of nutrigenomics, meaning you can test your genes and you can see, for example, if you tend to have the genes that would predispose you to having an inflammatory response to saturated fats. And if that's the case, then if you were going to restrict carbohydrates, you would want to have a more Mediterranean approach, right? Like avocados, avocado oil, olives, extra virgin olive oil, you know fish, you know, sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies, et cetera, rather than big marbley rib eyes and pork chops and oodles of butter and coconut oil and a lot of these other saturated fats. So even the style of the type of ketosis that you choose or the type of fats you choose for a ketogenic diet play a role here. So, yes, I am careful with sugar, very careful with added sugars, particularly added sugars and seed oils are two things that I look for on ingredient labels if I happen to be eating out of a package. But I'm no longer like the strict ketogenic diet endurance guy.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:03]: Instead, I'm at about 200 to 300 grams of carbohydrates, which is a lot more than the paltry 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrates I used to have when I was, of all things, racing, Ironman, triathlon, feel a lot better, sleep a lot better, testosterone is better, thyroid is better. So ultimately, even though I think there are use cases for a strict therapeutic ketogenic diet, I don't think that it's everything that I had chalked it up to be at one time.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:33]: Next up, a recording from my conversation with Dr. Adeel Khan in Cabo, where we talked about gene therapy, stem cells, NK killer cells, advanced age reversal tactics, and a whole lot more.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:47]: Another question that I have about the follistatin. If you look at some data, if you're on massive doses of testosterone, there's.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:54]: Even studies that show that you can.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:55]: Gain greater amounts of muscle than you would with lifting and lower amounts of testosterone with follistatin. Let's say someone, though I wouldn't advise this, weren't subjecting the muscles to stress and lifting weights, would they still see.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:09]: Some type of muscle gain or muscle maintenance?

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:11:11]: So I think that's it comes down to probably genetics. We don't fully understand it yet, but we did have some people, because we did DEXA scans on everyone in the trial, and we did have some patients who, for example, gained muscle and they weren't exercising. It wasn't like five, ten pounds of muscle. It was like one and a half to two pounds of muscle. But that's still pretty significant for someone who's not really exercising and eating a lot of protein.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:31]: I'm very curious to see what happens to my own body composition, because I already lift.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:11:35]: Yeah, exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:36]: Combining a strategy like this with lifting.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:11:37]: Oh, it definitely. And this is what it is. It's a body recomposition tool. It metabolically makes it easier to lose fat and it also makes it easier to put on muscle. So if you're in a calorie surplus or a deficit, it's probably going to shift one way or the other. Now, having said that, we have had patients who have had both. For example, they lost fat and they gained muscle at the same time. So it's that newbie game phase almost again when you first started working out.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:12:01]: So it's pretty cool what it can do, but obviously it plateaus, but then you. It's like. It's not like you lose that muscle afterwards, you know, as Long as you maintain it, then you've gained new muscle. And the gaining that new muscle is going to be so beneficial for your longevity and health. That's why I have, I have zero concern about follistatin as a, as a. And that's the reason why you also chose it as our first target. Because our gene therapy plasmid vector can be used for any peptide that's less than 10,000 base pairs.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:27]: Oh, wow.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:12:27]: So we're going to do, and like we talked about Klotho, but we're going to do Klotho. Yeah, Klotho GHK, which is copper peptide LH. There's a lot of other things in the pipeline too. We made CAR antigen. Now car the reason we're doing CAR plasmid is because we can transfect CAR into T cells and into NK cells and that makes it better for homing in on cancer cells. So we're going to do a clinical trial for that. So CAR T and CAR NK and CAR T and CAR NK are out there already, but the company's using it are using what's called Adeno Associated Viral Vectors, AAV. And the problem with AAV vectors is you sometimes have to go on immunosuppressants and there's risk of viral vectors.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:13:04]: Whereas with the plasmid vector, it's non immunogenic, there's no off site targets and it's very simple and it's scalable and it's a lot cheaper.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:13]: It's reversible.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:13:14]: It's reversible and has a kill switch. The bioelectrics don't have that. So this is really a really breakthrough technology and it's hard for people to understand unless you really have your pulse on the finger. In terms of cellular medicine, you mean.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:26]: If you ever wanted to undo all of the follistatin gene therapy, you would get just like an injection.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:13:29]: Or an oral antibiotic, Tetracycline.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:33]: Really? Oral tetracycline. You could just knock it out.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:13:35]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:36]: Now what if you get it and.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:37]: You get like an antibiotic in your.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:13:38]: Yeah, exactly. Let's say, let's say you got like.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:40]: probably something to tuck away and know.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:13:42]: Well, let's say if you, I mean most antibiotics you're taking amoxicillin or most common infections, so for most people it's probably not an issue. But let's say you have an allergy or something and you have to take that, then for sure you would have to repeat the therapy after that allergy.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:57]: What about Klotho? What's that?

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:13:58]: Yeah. Klotho is a really interesting. I think it has something like 3,000 studies now on it in PubMed. And it's a super fascinating peptide because it's this large peptide that has all these cellular benefits for not just reducing inflammation, but for enhancing cognition too. So it's kind of like the ultimate nootropic. But the issue with Klotho, as with many other peptides, is a short half life. Follistatin n also has a short half life.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:14:24]: So it's not really practical to inject yourself multiple times a day to sustain the levels. So that's why this delivery mechanism is so cool, because one injection can sustain your levels for 18 to 24 months.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:36]: Wow.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:14:37]: That's the beauty of it. It's a convenience factor. It's not like Klotho is new and.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:41]: This is like intramuscular injection.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:14:43]: Yeah, intramuscular, subcutaneous. Yeah, exactly. It's just like. And it takes literally two minutes and it lasts for 18 to 24 months.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:49]: Incredible.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:14:50]: So the convenience factor is just for me and for you too, I'm sure, because you're so busy. It's just like, okay, what can I get done in a short amount of time that's going to have a big benefit on my health and longevity? And that's my favorite thing about the technology and the delivery vector that we have.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:04]: How many fewer insulin syringes do I have to keep on?

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:15:06]: Exactly, exactly. Travel with it.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:08]: Now, what about this other component of the trifecta that you referred to, these NK cells? Why would someone do those?

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:15:14]: Yeah, so a lot of our patients are, you know, it's not like we're offering it as our anti aging package, but we may probably will soon because so many people are requesting to do NK cells. And the reason is because. And you can do blood work too, right? You do something like a lymphocyte map, and then you could figure out like, what are your NK cells? And a lot of people would be surprised how low they are. And the reason for it is because they start getting signs of immune dysfunction. They may not have full blown autoimmune disease, but they may be showing early signs of it.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:40]: And could that just be like thymus gland degeneration with age?

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:15:42]: Yeah. Or chronic inflammation in the gut and stuff like that. Right. And so chronic inflammation is always going to accelerate the degenerative processes. And a lot of people are walking around with chronic inflammation and hence why their immunotolerance decreases and as your immunotolence decreases. And that's probably the biggest risk factor as to why you develop all these chronic degenerative conditions as you age because aging is the biggest risk factor for dementia, for heart disease, for cancer. Right. It's osteoarthritis.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:16:06]: Aging is the biggest risk factor. So if we can target aging, we're targeting all these different diseases. And that's why it's hard for people to understand. Because in medicine we're always trot system based. But now it's coming. Now we're learning that maybe system based isn't the best for chronic illnesses. It's coming back to the root causes.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:22]: Right.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:23]: When you're halting a degenerative process or restoring compounds in the body that disappear with age. That's a kind of a true definition of regenerative medicine.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:16:30]: Exactly. Yeah. So the Klotho should hopefully increase, potentially increase IQ. We're going to measure IQ in the clinical trial.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:39]: Test me before and after.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:40]: Yeah, we will.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:16:40]: Exactly. The matrix progressive.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:44]: That test just stick away, stay away from calculus. It'd probably be the same before and after.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:49]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:50]: So.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:53]: This whole treatment that I'm doing, let's say someone is listening right now, even though there's some other things I want to talk with you about. And they were to call your clinic, what would they ask for? Just like give me what Ben got. Or is there a name to this?

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:17:06]: Yeah, it's called Eterna Anti aging package.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:08]: The Eterna Anti Aging package.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:10]: Yeah.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:17:11]: Which is basically intravenous stem cells, exosomes, follistatin and gene therapy. And then natural killer cells can be added on too. And the reason we do natural killer cells too, as I think you and me talked about a little bit, is that they can help to clear senescent cells as well. And we know senolytics in general, which are oral medications to help clear senescent cells, are becoming popular because we know senescence is one of the issues.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:32]: The ants starts with an R. Rapamycin.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:17:34]: Yes, exactly. But rapamycin again is an old drug that has some off site targets which may not be the best. And so the reason I like these cellular therapies is they're generally very safe and they don't have any real downsides to them. They're just expensive, which is the biggest issue. But we're working on bringing the price down. Our price is even cheaper now than it was a year ago. So I think in another couple years it'll be even cheaper because the manufacturer.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:54]: Just fly into Cabo or Dubai or any of these other locations and stay there for a few days.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:17:59]: Exactly, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:00]: Probably plan on what, five days or so?

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:18:01]: Exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:02]: Yeah.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:18:02]: Just because we like to monitor you and do the whole thing. And then the NK cells and stem cells, we do on different days. The other component to it, which we're going to do, do for you too, is the placental implant, which is just a simple subcutaneous.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:14]: I've always wanted a placenta.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:18:15]: Yeah, exactly. Who doesn't? So it's a very simple subcutaneous injection. But what we do is in our manufacturing facility, we take the placental tissue and we lyophilize it and then we basically freeze dried. And what we can do is we can reconstitute it with saline and then we can inject it subcutaneously. And what that does is it raises intracellular NAD levels. And we all know about NAD, I'm sure because of NMN and all the popularity with IV NAD drips. But the problem with those things, NMN, I mean, there's a whole separate can of worms, but there may be some potential risk with NMN with kidney and whatnot. But.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:18:48]: And then it's also something you have to take every day. And IV NAD maybe works, maybe doesn't, because it doesn't really always raise intracellular NAD. I think you do the patches, right? Yeah, yeah. But the injection is just one injection and it can raise levels for up to three months.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:03]: And that's placental one.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:19:05]: Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. So it's this convenience factor.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:07]: I didn't know that.

Dr. Adeel Khan [00:19:07]: Yeah, it's a convenience factor and that's why you feel boost of energy as well right after the procedure. And then by then usually the stem cells and the follistatin has kicked in.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:15]: Coming up next, my conversation with Dave Pascoe, the 61 year old biohacker who does a pretty good job defying aging on an unbelievable budget. We get into his daily routine, how his low pace of aging is influenced by his lifestyle, his genetics, why I don't like eating my last meal of the day before 5pm and plenty more.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:34]: You know, similar to when I saw Julie Gibson's, Julie Gibson Clark's results. You know, I saw yours. I've met you a couple of times, you know, saw you down in Austin and I thought, well, gosh, like, you know, he's, he's definitely not getting young blood transfers, but. And you know, still doing endurance training and you know, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and you know, doing the things that you're doing. So I thought it was very interesting that your pace of aging is so low.

Dave Pascoe [00:19:58]: Yeah, that was very surprising. to me as well. I think even at my worst, my pace of aging, I think my highest test was maybe 0.8. I think it was.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:08]: Right. And what's your best result for your age?

Dave Pascoe [00:20:11]: Pacing, 0.66.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:13]: So for every year, like if you take 365 days of every year, you would only be aging for 0.66 of those days, which comes out to what, 250 in a rough math in my head. 250, 260 something days.

Dave Pascoe [00:20:28]: We get seven months. We age seven months for every calendar year, so we get the other months for free.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:35]: Yeah. How much of this do you think is contributed or how much of this is attributed to genetics? Like, what do your parents look like?

Dave Pascoe [00:20:44]: If you saw my family, and I don't want to throw my family under the bus.

Dave Pascoe [00:20:48]: Yeah.

Dave Pascoe [00:20:48]: I wouldn't say that any of us look particularly young. In fact, my family tends to be overweight on average. Although, you know, both of my parents have since passed and they both lived to the ripe old age of 89 despite not exercising, smoking, drinking, not eating well. So I don't deny that there's some good genetics there.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:14]: That sounds like my wife's side of the family. You know, Montana ranchers living up into their 90s and not really, you know, eating candy and, you know, drinking alcohol and not necessarily doing, you know, red light therapies and coffee enemas. So, yeah, I'm sure you've had a little bit of a good genetic hand dealt you, but I'm also curious, like I want to jump into your actual protocol and what, what it looks like on a day to day basis as far as the big wins for you beyond some of the general overview that you've given us so far. So if you don't mind, we've got time. I want to take a deep dive into what it, what a day in the life of Dave looks like.

Dave Pascoe [00:21:47]: Pretty much even before I get out of bed, I have a PEMF mat that I lay on. It's underneath my eight sleep and I crank that up and I do some stretching before I even get out of bed.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:00]: What kind of PEMF mat do you.

Dave Pascoe [00:22:01]: Use to Bemer, if you're familiar with them?

Ben Greenfield [00:22:04]: Yeah, that's a good one.

Dave Pascoe [00:22:06]: Yeah, they've got some good studies for blood flow. I'm sure they do many other things, but I think one of the only claims that they can make for the FDA's purposes is the benefit to blood flow.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:18]: And so when you crank that up, are you just laying there? Are you doing journaling or meditation or anything like that.

Dave Pascoe [00:22:23]: I'm, you know, I'm thinking about my day. Well, okay. So to be honest with you, and I can. I guess I can say her name because I think I've put it into do not disturb mode, but I have a Amazon Echo dot. And so I will call her Amelia right now so that she doesn't respond. But I have. I have a smart home, so I have everything programmed. And I basically will say good morning to her, and she will start telling me what's going on in my day.

Dave Pascoe [00:22:51]: She'll read to me what's happening on my calendar, tell me the weather, let me know a fun fact, and then she'll start giving me the latest news from CNN, from Fox News and ABC News. So at least I'm kind of fueling my brain while I'm laying there.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:08]: And by the way, have we established the fact, and we probably should have established this earlier on, you're not married and you don't have kids.

Dave Pascoe [00:23:15]: Correct.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:16]: Okay. All right. That makes a little bit better sense now with the morning chat with the bot.

Dave Pascoe [00:23:23]: Yeah. In fact, it's one of the comments I see most to things that get posted about me is they always say, he's single, no kids. That's it.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:33]: That's the secret to longevity. Hell, no. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, from a. If you want to really, you know, get a little bit esoteric and step back and look at this from an ancestral and evolutionary standpoint, it is true that if you have children, you have, in a way, fabricated some sense of immortality or life extension in the progeny that you've created to come after you that would theoretically give your body a biological message that it doesn't have to cling it so many years because, you know, you're living on through your children. And I think they've even, you know, shown everything from drop in testosterone with marriage and children and men, which might also be an unwandering mechanism to keep a man around the house, so to speak. But I think that there actually is something to the potential for, you know, even though I'm a happily married man with children, you know, if you don't have children, you might actually send your body a biological mechanism that.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:30]: Or biological message that it might want to extend lifespan a little bit.

Dave Pascoe [00:24:34]: Yeah. There's still hope going on up here, so.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:37]: Yeah.

Dave Pascoe [00:24:39]: So, yeah, so I'll do the stretching. I'll move from that. I'll. I'll probably do like five minutes bouncing on my little rebounder, which tends to get the bowels moving and then I'll do a little bit of incline on my incline table, which I just. In other podcasts it's been behind me, which I think is really obnoxious.

Dave Pascoe [00:25:03]: So I moved it just out of.

Dave Pascoe [00:25:05]: The frame here, thankfully. But I have these things set up so that I have to trip on them on the way to the bathroom. So it's nothing I have to go out of my way to do. It's just on the path.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:15]: Right? So it's a reverse psychology, keeping the, the, the bowl of M&M's off the kitchen counter so you don't eat it every time you walk by. It's like me, I got a kettlebell on the floor in my office and a Carol bike and an elastic band and a couple of 10 pound dumbbells. So every time I'm wandering in and out of my office, I'm always stopping to exercise on something. So you do the rebounder in the morning and that, you're right, that is great to get the bowels moving. As a matter of fact, it's kind of funny. I. I have a bio charger, which is this fancy device that does like, you know, red light therapy and negative ions and PEMF and all this stuff all at once. It's kind of like a stack of a bunch of biohacks.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:52]: And it comes with all these different recipes for inflammation, for lymph, whatever. But there's a recipe on there called Raisin Brand. Every time I do it, every time I do it with one of my friends, the first response is like, we gotta go poop like crazy. As a matter of fact, I avoid using it a lot of mornings because we always have family meditation at 7am, which is like typically right after I finish my biocharger session. And I don't like to have to literally like take a crap during family meditation. But yes, jumping up and down on the trampoline can elicit a similar effect. You're right.

Dave Pascoe [00:26:22]: So I do that and then eventually I move down to the basement, do my Carrol bike. I do that about every other day.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:29]: And explain that one to people who aren't familiar with it.

Dave Pascoe [00:26:32]: Okay, so it's, it's an AI driven bike that it's, it's high intensity interval training. And the way I do it, I do it the, the two 20 second sprints, right.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:46]: Which can be exhausting, by the way, if you actually go as hard as you're supposed to go. I just got back from the Health Optimization Summit in London and I raced the guy who was running the Carol bike booth on it. We did the two by 20 second protocol. He maxed out at like 1300 watts, which is through the roof. I think I only hit like 850. And you're just, you know, two. Two 20 second intervals doesn't sound like much. But if you don't have much time to exercise, it will definitely improve mitochondrial proliferation, lactic acid tolerance, give you a huge aerobic boost, metabolic increase, with a pretty shockingly short period of time spent exercising.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:28]: So you got your Carol bike. What comes next?

Dave Pascoe [00:27:32]: So then I'm mixing up a concoction of a bunch of different protein powders and leucine and L citrulline and yeah, the whole list is on my website. But I'll mix that up, I'll drink it, then I'll start the P90X workout.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:49]: Okay, so quick question before we jump into your P90X, that pre workout protein and everything that you do, are you doing any type of intermittent fasting, like how long is it after you've had your last meal, the night before that you're jumping into like a feeding protocol, breaking the fast, so to speak?

Dave Pascoe [00:28:04]: Yeah, good question. I try to eat dinner like between maybe 3 and 5pm.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:12]: Oh gosh, you're killing me. All the longevity enthusiasts I talk to, you guys all eat so early. And that's the part about having a family, man, is we have these big glorious family dinners, but I'm still burping up steak when I get into bed at night. And I know, I know that I would have better autophagy if I didn't. But yeah, I'm definitely aware of the fact that eating earlier is better, but that's pretty early. What'd you say? Between three and five?

Dave Pascoe [00:28:35]: Between three and five. I like to be finished eating before six. So if I could finish eating by five o'clock, that's terrific.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:42]: And what time do you go to bed?

Dave Pascoe [00:28:43]: Usually I try to get to bed about between maybe 8:30 and 9:30.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:49]: And you don't struggle with having finished dinner, let's say at 5 and you got social events, et cetera. Afterwards, you don't struggle with thinking about eating and throwing a little extra food here and there?

Dave Pascoe [00:29:00]: It happens. Yeah. I mean life gets in the way all the time.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:03]: But generally like your last major meal of the day is like late afternoon, very early evening.

Dave Pascoe [00:29:09]: Yeah, like I said, I find my sleep scores are much better when I'm not digesting.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:14]: Yeah, yeah, me, me too. But kind of like your, kind of like your endurance training and you know, climbing the mountain, you knowing that that might not be the best thing for longevity. It's kind of like me with family, happiness, togetherness, relationship, community. It's just like eating late is one of those things that's still in my protocol, despite that not being ideal.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:36]: Next up, if you dug that conversation, you'll like this one too. Another anti aging enthusiast who is doing it without a lot of the fancy tech that the rich biohackers and tech billionaires use. Julie Gibson Clark. You're going to learn about her supplements, what she does for sleep support, her fitness routine, and a whole lot more. And remember, all the show notes are at BenGreenfeldLife.com/BestOf2024.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:00]: Besides the Novos supplement, some of these greens powders, do you do anything else like digestive enzymes or probiotics or anything along those lines?

Julie Gibson Clark [00:30:10]: Yeah. So, you know, as part of my work when I had the heavy metals and things, so I had learned I'm pretty much chronically deficient in magnesium. And I don't know, maybe that's in my genetics. I have no idea. Or maybe that's just what everybody is. But. So I have been taking magnesium for years. I mean, something like trying to think it must be like 4 to 600 milligrams a day, you know, throughout the day.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:30:32]: Fish oil I've always been taking ever since my 40s. And vitamin D3K2 as well. Those and a B complex. Like, I've been taking that for, you know, over a decade, 15 years now, so long before I started Novo. So I, maybe that's where the, you know, 75, the score of 75% came from. I don't know. You know.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:53]: Yeah, we got a bust. Fortune magazine, maybe it's a little bit more than 79 bucks a month on supplements, but you're not swallowing like 100 capsules a morning.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:31:01]: Right. Like, I would be doing those whether, like, I'm not doing that for longevity. I'm doing that so I literally just can, you know, function. If I don't have the magnesium, I just start crashing.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:11]: And those, those really are some of the fundamentals, right? Creatine, vitamin D, magnesium, good greens powder and some fish oil. Right. Like, those are kind of like, I almost consider those to be base, foundational parts of the diet. Not, I mean, they are supplements, but they're really just like the natural stuff that works, that isn't that expensive in the long run.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:31:30]: Yeah, yeah, I don't take, I, I experimented with creatine and had like half my hair fall out So I know people say it doesn't do that, but it definitely, like, it was not, it was not a good experience for me, hair wise.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:41]: Yeah, you can look that up. Like if you upload your data to Self Decode or Genetic Genie, you can see if you have the genetics that cause hair loss. And I think it's about 20% of people can experience that.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:31:52]: Yeah, yeah. So I just thought, just went off of that and let's see what else. I think I wrote them all down. So let me make sure I'm accurate about. Yeah, so that's, you know, it's magnesium, vitamin D3, fish oil, B complex. That's what I've been taking for, you know, pretty much decades. Then I added the Novos and their, you know, their Core and their Boost. So the Novos Core is.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:32:14]: People can look up what's in there, but. And then the Boost is NMN. Before, at one, at some point before Novos, I was experimenting with NR and I just, I did it for a little bit and I felt pretty good. But then I quickly switched to Novos and started taking their NMN. And then, But I've kind of pulled the NM out and I'm experimenting with NR again. And I hate to because I know there's a big debate about this, but I think I feel better on NR than I do NMN.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:47]: Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit of a silly debate. I think largely driven by commercialization.NAD, NR, NMN, oral consumption, you're still going to get some cellular delivery. You know, NMN might make it into the hypothalamus in the brain a little bit easier. It's still a good idea to do occasional IVs or transdermal patches or even suppositories for a higher dose. You know, if you're sleep deprived, if you're inflamed, if you want to top off your levels as you age a little bit. But in the long run, you know, all you're doing is elevating levels of niacinamide in some way to increase NAD availability. And I mean, if you had to, you could even go with dirt cheap niacinamide.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:27]: But I think what you just alluded to is a pretty good idea, like try NAD, try NR, try NMN, see which one you feel best on or see which one results in the lowest levels of inflammation or the best results on an aging test. And you know, some of it is pretty subjective.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:33:43]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me it was like, it's not like I want people to know this like it's not like you are like woo. I have a ton of energy. Like I just drank like 10 cups of coffee or anything like that. It's just that it like almost raises the floor. So say like the first six months of that, the Novos test, I was in a yet again a very, very stressful period. I mean I hate to say it but almost the parents worst nightmare. And so the only thing I was doing, and I think that's what people should know is this magnesium D3 fish oil.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:34:11]: B complex always. And the Novos. My workouts were haphazard. I was barely meditating. I was definitely not sleeping. I mean I would go three days without sleep. But that's when I noticed like I wasn't, I wasn't so tired, you know like before I would like lose one night of sleep and I couldn't function the next day. You know, here I'm going three days because of stress and everything.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:34:36]: It's like that floor was raised. And I just notice with NR it's like raises that floor a little bit higher than NMN. Again that's cut somewhat subjective but that's how it feels.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:47]: How's sleep now, particularly as you age? Because obviously as melatonin decreases a lot of people they sleep less as they age. I'm curious what that looks like for you. And if you do anything in particular to prioritize sleep, you obviously understand it's important. So I'm curious what you do.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:35:01]: Yeah, and I've been like that my whole life. I mean again being a swimmer you got to be in the pool for practice at 5am so even like in high school it's like, you know, nobody had told me to go to bed. I was in bed and asleep by 9. 9pm every night. Not that I didn't go out on the weekends, but you know, so. And I've just always been pretty careful about eight hours of sleep. I think I learned that from my dad. And I just kind of have safeguarded it pretty much my whole life.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:35:27]: I mean I go out and have fun and everything, but it was like gotta get your eight. So now I, you know, I wear like a mask. I can't seem to, I can't black out my room enough just given our house. But I wear a sleep mask, I do the mouth tape. I make sure I'm for the most part in bed by nine. Again having a teenager, that makes it kind of hard. But in bed by 9 and then I'm probably lights out by 9:15, 9:30. And my alarm is set for 5, 5:15, depending on the day.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:55]: Yeah, that's good. By the way, I do the sleep mask, even though I have blackout curtains. It's interesting. They actually did a study on this. It was. It was pretty recent, like last year. The pressure of the sleep mask against the face, regardless of how much light it blocks, can help with relaxation. The same without a gravity blanket or kind of like a heavy pillow on your chest.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:16]: For a lot of people, that's very comfortable. It's very soothing. And a sleep mask kind of does the same thing for the face. They even have, like, weighted sleep masks now. You know, they're kind of like gravity sleep masks. And so it's not just about blocking the light. It's actually the pressure against the face. Isn't that interesting?

Julie Gibson Clark [00:36:30]: That is interesting because it makes sense. Because last night I was, like, going to sleep and I realized I'm like, I couldn't really, like, you know, just turn on. I realized, oh, I didn't put my mask on. I put it on right to sleep. So, yeah, there's gotta be something to that, for sure.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:43]: You gotta try this old device called a Sensate. It vibrates on your chest. That thing knocks me out on a plane. It's like a. You know, it turns the vagus nerve through the collarbone in your chest. It vibrates. Kind of like that Apollo vibrating device. But unlike the Apollo, it syncs to music.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:59]: That's on the Sensate app. I swear by that. All my friends who I have try mine when they come over to my house, they're like, I gotta get one of these things. Cause they're inexpensive and they just. They're a game changer for sleep on an airplane. Do you use any of these other kind of, I guess, technologies, you know, PEMF and Hyperbaric and red light. Do you ever implement any of those?

Julie Gibson Clark [00:37:19]: So I had. I don't want to say I experimented with HBOT, but my son, when he was kind of going through things, we. We learned he had a. Like a TBI when he was a baby. So we were working on that with him. So we had, you know, giving him HBOT sessions. And I thought, oh, let me try that. But I've done a few sessions.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:37:38]: It was cool. I mean, I'd love to, like, have one in my house and just do my daily meditation on that. But. So, yeah, I don't. I don't do any of the light or any of that kind of stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:49]: And by the way, that's surprising. Like, you would. You would be an anomaly in kind of like the biohacking longevity industry, just based on the fact that you don't have, you know, an elaborate morning routine that involves eight different devices?

Julie Gibson Clark [00:38:01]: No, no, I do not. It's called get out of bed and get your happy butt over to the gym.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:05]: Okay, well, I do want to. I do want to talk about that. I want to talk about the gym. Do you. Do you still swim or. What's the. What's the exercise routine look like?

Julie Gibson Clark [00:38:12]: Some. Some days I swim, but I don't know, I just like. Swimming is so boring. I mean, I like. I'm convinced I'm good at math because of swimming. Because I'd sit there and go, oh, God, I've got 20 laps. I gotta do 40. Okay, that's half.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:38:23]: You know what? I'm just gonna, like, sit there and do all the math in my head as I'm swimming anyway. So. No, I don't do that anymore. I just. I like going to the gym, but I really don't love working out. I just. I like going for the sauna. So I joined the gym for the sauna.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:38:38]: And I usually wake up in the morning thinking, ah, I'm not gonna do my workout. I'm just gonna go. I'm gonna have a sauna. And that'll be kind of my cardiovascular for the day. But as soon as I walk in, I'm like, okay, you gotta do like one set of something. So. So my routine is usually Mondays. I kind of switched it up since the Fortune article.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:38:57]: And I'm always kind of experimenting. Try, like, I kind of switch it up either between 6 months or 12 months. So now I'm doing a full body workout. Let's see, Monday is actually VO2 max, because I figure I kind of got a lot of back to my dad, like, glycogen and my muscles from eating, you know, extra stuff over the weekend. So Monday, first thing, I do the VO2 max, and I do a Norwegian 4x4.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:19]: That's. That's. That's the classic. Yeah. Four minutes, four minutes hard, four minutes easy, four times through.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:39:24]: Yeah, I actually do three. I do three minutes easy, four minutes hard. I do that four times through, and then just two minutes really easy. And then I'll see Monday. And Monday is usually like, abs as well. So I'll do those two. Then I jump in the sauna, then I take a cold shower.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:39:41]: And people have asked me this, so I'll mention it. My cold shower is as cold as I can get it in Arizona, which in the winter is actually cold. And it's about four to five solid minutes. And I wash my hair. I do. I do everything I'm supposed to do in the shower, you know, but just in the cold. And most days I don't want to do it, but it feels really good once you know, it's like a natural antidepressant for sure that. I don't know, it's like a dopamine curve.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:40:06]: Apparently that lasts pretty long. So. So yeah, so that's Monday. Tuesday is a full body workout.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:13]: Okay. I was going to ask you how long you average at the gym each day with these workouts.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:40:19]: Yeah, it varies. So like that Norwegian 4x4. I mean, I'm. That's 35 minutes. 30 minutes for that, 5 minutes for abs. And my. I stretch too. Some days I forget, but stretch.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:40:31]: And then the sauna is 30 minutes and showers five minutes.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:37]: So maybe like in and out, all done. Like a little over an hour or something like that.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:40:41]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. On Monday. So Tuesday I do a full body weight workout and I do Tuesdays with free weights and I do it at a different gym that doesn't have a sauna. So we've got like a gym in my neighborhood and it's just a little less crowded. It's easier to kind of get everything done. They've got all the equipment. So I do a full body that. And that probably takes me a solid hour.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:41:03]: But I'm doing, you know, step ups and all kinds of other things just so I don't have to do cardio on top of the weights. And I'm just messing around with all kinds of different stuff every day. You know, I don't really have any routine except for to just, you know, get the upper body really well, get the lower body. And I try to just kind of mix it up. So. And that's. So that's Tuesday. And then Wednesday is just like abs and I do just like a zone two cardio.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:41:34]: And it just depends on when my first meeting is that day. So sometimes it's a 20 minutes, sometimes it's 30, sometimes it's 45. And I'm always working out on either a step mill or I sometimes use an elliptical trainer.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:47]: And is that, is that fasted or is this after your green?

Julie Gibson Clark [00:41:51]: No, fasted. Yeah, fasted. Yeah, fasted. I cannot work out on a full stomach at all or anything.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:59]: Yeah, I did one the other afternoon because I had a house guest and he wanted to work out and. Yeah, you know, two hours after lunch and I'm burping stuff up. I have my best workouts fasted in the morning, sometimes some ketones or some aminos if it's going to be a hard one, but that's about it.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:42:12]: Yeah, I haven't tried the ketones yet. It sounds really interesting. I. I do. I am experimenting with pre workout. My son kind of got me into this, so I've been using this, of course, like, he wanted to get the kind of unhealthy pre workout. I'm like, no, no, no. We're getting the healthy stuff, you know, so.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:42:28]: Ordered something from, like, a nutraceutical company. I don't know. Anyway, we didn't really talk about it, but, like, my morning routine, I do get up in the morning and drink green tea and pray. That's kind of my, you know, quiet time. But I don't drink coffee. I don't. I just cannot have a lot of caffeine. So when I do pre workout, I'm like, Whoa.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:42:49]: So the VO2 max day, I'll take a pre workout and then Monday and Tuesday, basically pre workout and then sometimes on Saturday. So, okay, so let's go back. So Monday, VO2 max. Tuesday, full body workout. Wednesday, just kind of zone two cardio. Thursday is zone two cardio. Somewhere between Thursday, Friday or Saturday, I'll do another full body workout. But I'm in the gym and I'm using, like, all the machines, you know, just things that kind of, I don't know, honestly limit your range of motion, you know, different.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:43:19]: So. And that's not as intense. But I definitely, like, enjoy the leg presses and various things that they have there. So I'm doing another full body workout either Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. Lately, it's been Saturday because my son likes to go with me and he works out. So. And I'll do pre workout with that one as well, but the others. So Thursday, Friday, I'll do, like, zone two cardio and then nothing on.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:43:47]: On Sunday.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:48]: Like, nothing, nothing. You don't go, like, on a walk or anything like that or.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:43:52]: I've been getting into ruck. I've been getting into this rucking. I was like. And I don't really have, like, the ruck sack or anything like that, but I did. I just grabbed my backpack and I have this old cookbook from, like, 1977, which is like, you know, old gourmet. It's like, basically a year's worth of magazines in one book. So I put that in there. I think it weighs, like, seven pounds.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:44:10]: And then last weekend I put in, like, another. But so yeah, I'll just go for a walk or. The weather is beautiful here and the hiking is gorgeous. So I go out hiking. It just depends on how much time I have and what's going on.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:21]: Next up, Dr. Kate Shanahan and I had a great conversation about vegetable oils and what you actually need to know about toxic compounds and seed oils and whether or not the harm is underestimated or overestimated. She wrote a great book called Dark Calories. She's got another one called Deep Nutrition. Enjoy our conversation.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:41]: You say in the book that even the people, which it seems like a lot of them now, including me, who are warning that seed oils are harmful, are underestimating the extent of the problem. So what do you mean when you say that?

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:44:57]: Yeah, so. Well, you're familiar with my work, and at the very beginning of my dive into nutrition, I realized that vegetable oils were really bad for us. And I also was talking about sugar and its role in harming our health and disrupting normal growth and all the harms that it does. But I wasn't clear in the beginning which of the two was worse. And as time has gone by and more folks have come to understand that, yes, vegetable oils do promote oxidation. I've continued my research and discoveries, and I've discovered that oxidation truly is the root cause of literally everything that ages us. Like, accelerates our aging. It kills us.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:45:50]: Even if under the best of circumstances, it's oxidation and oxidative stress that ultimately lead to our demise and determine our lifespan. Right, which is supposed to be, you know, around 100 years, give or take, and not the other. Not what sugar does. So the vegetable oils drive oxidation and oxidative stress, but sugar mostly is about glycation. And when you compare these two chemical processes, which I've done, glycation is not anywhere near as bad. It's like one, one thousandth or a billionth in some cases, the speed of the reactions. And it's not as ubiquitous. Sugar is regulated, so you can't have it just go out of control.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:46:39]: But oxidation can.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:40]: Now, what I know about oxidation, it's been a long time since I took chemistry, but I did take chemistry in high school and in college is that when you donate an electron to something, that's called reduction. And when something is missing an electron or you take an electron away from something, it's called oxidation. Right? Normal chemical reaction. Why would that be a bad thing?

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:47:06]: It's necessary for life. It's how we generate energy. But oxygen is the main molecule of oxidation in the body. That's why, in fact, we call the reaction oxidation, because, you know, it's oxygen molecules that are responsible for stealing these electrons. And oxygen is how we generate energy. But oxygen is also itself a dangerous molecule. So it's what kills us, too. We have to keep it in control.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:47:41]: We have to keep these reactions in control. And biology has been battling oxidation reactions for, like, billions of years. And normally our biology can keep oxidation under control. And when I say normal, I mean normally on a normal human diet, which we are no longer consuming, and on a diet that's high in vegetable oils and processed foods, we simply cannot control oxidation reactions. And this accelerates the demise of every cell, and it accelerates the inflammatory process. What you get when oxidation reactions go out of control is something called oxidative stress. Oxidative stress drives the two most common disease processes in the world, and that is inflammatory diseases like asthma and allergies. And that drives autoimmune diseases, too, and degenerative diseases.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:40]: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people might be scratching their heads because, you know, you said that, you know, this. This oxygen is related to oxidation. And then, of course, we brought up vegetable oils as one of the primary causes of oxidation. Put those pieces together for me, because it's not like somebody picks up a bottle of canola oil and says, oh, this is full of oxygen. That's going to oxidate my body. So can you clarify a little bit how these pieces actually work together?

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:49:09]: Yeah. So oxidative stress is definitely not caused by, you know, too much oxygen in the air or, you know, you don't have to worry about how fast you breathe or anything like that. Oxidative stress is in modern times. Now, our problem with oxidative stress is coming from the fact that these vegetable oils contain toxins that eventually deplete our body's ability to control oxidation reactions. They deplete our antioxidant systems. So I'm talking about the antioxidants themselves, like vitamin E and vitamin C. I'm talking about the enzymes that control oxidation. Maybe you've talked about these before, like superoxide dismutase and catalase and so on.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:49:59]: And they also deplete the intermediate products. Our bodies spend a lot of energy controlling oxygen. And antioxidant enzymes are the most prevalent types of enzymes in our mitochondria and around our mitochondria and our mitochondria, where we use oxygen, our mitochondria generate energy for us, and they do that with oxygen. So our bodies are designed to be able to handle oxygen and oxidative stress. But what vegetable oils do is deplete that antioxidant arsenal, and they make it impossible for our cells to generate energy without experiencing undue amounts of oxidative stress. And there's other effects that they have in our bloodstream have nothing to do with energy generation either. But it all comes down to the fact, the way that vegetable oils are processed and their fatty acid composition. Because the vegetable oils that I identified as the problematic ones, I call them the hateful eight.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:51:05]: Like, there's eight of them. I'm just going to like corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grapeseed. Just so you know what we're talking about here, we're not talking about olive oil, we're not talking about coconut oil, certainly not talking about butter. So those. The way they are processed is unique. And that's really the problem, because the processing strips the antioxidants and generates the toxicity that causes oxidative stress in our bodies. The toxins promote oxidative stress. Most toxins actually harm us through oxidative stress.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:51:42]: Glyphosate does. Heavy metals do. So these toxins are similar in that regard. It's just that they came from not the seeds themselves, but the reactions that occur during the processing of the oil. So that is only the oils that we need to worry about. It's not the seeds.

Ben Greenfield [00:52:03]: Okay. So the processing is going to reduce the natural antioxidant contents of the oil. Because if you think about extra virgin olive oil, it's got this chock full of these flavonols and polyphenols and antioxidants that would theoretically cause that oil to be stable and less prone to oxidation. But what's going on with vegetable oils in terms of the way they're processed, that would either increase the amount of toxins in them or decrease their antioxidant content.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:52:34]: So what's happening is, during the factory refining of these oils, the reason these oils are problematic is because the refining of the creation, the generation of these oils requires heat. And the polyunsaturated fatty acids in these seeds are exposed to extreme heat and pressure and oxygen in the factory. And the crude oil that you get from like, just creating, you know, converting soybeans into soy oil requires lots of heat and it damages the polyunsaturates so that the crude soy oil, for example, is disgusting. It's literally crude and rude. Right. Deserves the term crude. That's different from olive oil, which you just squeeze some olives with a stone press. You could have done that a thousand years ago and they did.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:53:27]: And that oil is edible. That's called virgin olive oil. It is edible and it's good for you. But the soy oil and the corn, the canola, et cetera, the virgin oil is inedible. It's just like burnt basically. And the proteins and the carbohydrates and the fatty acids have all combined in a disgusting gloppy mess. It's just burnt seeds really. And that there's all kinds of stuff in there that is foul smelling and acrid like has an acrid quality.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:54:01]: So it kind of can burn your eyes. And if you were to swallow it, it would burn your esophagus in your stomach and you probably just throw it back off. That's your body's way of protecting itself from these toxins. And it also has toxic compounds in it. And the refining, it requires refining to make it edible. Right. So there's nothing else in the food supply that is literally inedible and toxic as part of its manufacturing. Nothing else.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:54:28]: That's why vegetable oils are oxidative stress in a bottle. And oxidative stress is death. Early death.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:34]: Is one of those toxins. I've heard people talk about this one HNE. I think it's hydroxy nonenol or something like that.

Julie Gibson Clark [00:54:44]: Do you know this one?

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:54:45]: It's 4HNE, and that's just the name of the molecule. And it belongs to a family of very top toxic compounds called alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes. Acrylan or acrolein is another one. Crotonaldehyde from cigarette smoking is another one. And in fact, when you use these things to cook with in a restaurant situation, in a deep fryer, scientists have tested the amount of toxin that develops. So they can tell you how much you're getting when you eat fries from a place like McDonald's or Burger King. And they found that the amount of these alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes is equivalent to the amount in a cigarette. Like on a one to one basis, one french fry equals the toxicity of smoking an entire cigarette.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:55:39]: So if you give these to your children, it's like giving them cigarettes. And you know, it's really. I'm not saying this to like blame parents or put shame on any parents. It's shame on the folks who've been claiming that these oils are heart healthy and promoting them without any regard to the reality of their chemistry. And what the toxicologists have been trying to warn for decades.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:06]: What if you just took a bunch of antioxidants.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:56:08]: Yeah, that's a great question. It doesn't work. So, like, most of the antioxidants that we can eat are designed by plants for plants. They help plants and they help protect plants from UV radiation and, you know, problems that plants face. Oxidative stress from being dehydrated, for example, and pathogens for plant pathogens. So it has nothing to do with human body's needs. And the antioxidants that we get from plants, the once they get absorbed into our body, they have almost no function, and our liver and kidneys basically need to eliminate them. So while they are useful in terms of cooking, like olive oil, the polyphenols and olive oil, it helps to protect the oil while you're cooking it.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:56:52]: It also helps to protect the food that you're cooking in your olive oil. But so it helps to prevent oxidation reactions in your food. It also probably help helps to prevent them in your gut, helps keep your microbiome from experiencing too much oxidative stress. But in terms of protecting your cells, they're worthless.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:12]: Have you ever heard of this guy, Dr. James D. Nicolantonio, who's written a few food and science books, who says that there are certain things and two that he names that I know are spirulina and glycine, and that those can somehow help to protect the cell membranes against some of the damage from oxidized oils? This is something I came across in his book, and I believe this was in rodent model studies, that there was less oxidative stress in response to consumption of vegetable oils with around 5 to 6 grams of spirulina or glycine consumption. I just wasn't sure if you'd come across that at all.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:57:54]: I've seen so much about how this or that little thing that it can be turned into a supplement helps. And sure it can, but you have to look at the details to understand what are they comparing it to. Are they comparing it to the standard rat chow, which is basically pure processed food? I mean, rat chow, a standard lab animal chow, is basically like feeding people vegetable oil, sugar, refined carbohydrates and protein powders, and then some added vitamins. So this is why it's important to think about these studies. You can't just take them as like, oh, therefore, this means that, right, you have to. You have to approach any question from multiple angles. You can't just take one single study and say it showed it. It must be true.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:58:40]: And that's what I've spent my entire career doing so. I always fact check everything and I also like probe the question from different angles. Like, for example, what are they comparing it to? What are these rats eating? What is the baseline diet? And so if you add a whole food, spirulina is just, it's a, it's a seaweed. So I consider that a whole food. So if you add a whole food into a diet that is purely processed junk, it's going to have benefits, but that's all there is to it. So. So it's not like you need that. Right.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [00:59:13]: It's not like you need. Spirulina has any special properties. Any whole food has some antioxidants that, like I say, can be helpful during the cooking process, during the digestive process, but then that's where their utility ends. They do not magically help us recover from a lifetime of vegetable oil consumption and processed food consumption that has promoted metabolic disease.

Ben Greenfield [00:59:41]: You talked about how olive oil is processed with less heat. A company like Whole Foods says that they use something like Cold Expeller pressed canola oil in like their salad bar or some of their ingredients. Is there a way to somehow have that oil extracted from. I think it's called the grapeseed and have it not have as much oxidation, kind of like Whole Foods is claiming to do?

Dr. Cate Shanahan [01:00:07]: Yeah. So they're kind of misleading you there in a very important way. And they're kind. They're mixing up expeller pressed with cold pressed. There is no industry standard term in canola as there is in olive oil. Cold pressed does refer to a specific temperature in the olive oil world, but to my knowledge it doesn't. And what they do use, I know what they use is just your standard expeller pressed. And as I explained actually in the introductory chapter of Dark Calories, that is a big lie that expeller pressed organic is just means they didn't use hexane.

Dr. Cate Shanahan [01:00:46]: But all the, everything I said about how the crude oil is toxic and needs to be refined in order to become like something that you don't immediately throw up to become edible still applies. So of course they would mislead us. They want us to think that they're doing something great, but it's not great.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:04]: How do I work out when I travel? How do my friends work out when they travel? Well, I get into a conversation with former bodybuilder and a friend of mine, Chris Gethin. You're going to learn how to energize your mitochondria. And the full ranging discussion with Chris, the full version of any of the podcasts that you've heard snips of during today's show, you can access at bengreenfieldlife.com/bestof2024.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:28]: The idea here is that one of the first books that I took them through in the self improvement sector was a tiny little ebook that's still available called IKIGAI 2.0. IKIGAI is the Japanese term for life purpose, similar to how the Italians have the Plan de vita. And it goes into the idea of what is it that you're naturally good at? What makes time go by quickly for you, as Mark Manson, the author, says, what makes you forget to eat and poop. And as you go through that book, you hone down your life skills, the things that come easy to you, the things that you're called to, and in some cases, even the potential for commercialization or monetization of that skill to the world all down into one single succinct purpose for life. And that can change from season to season. Like my purpose in life right now is to be a wise teacher, or, I'm sorry, a wise human, a gracious teacher, and a humble leader. Because I am in a season of life where I want to do a better job listening to my gut and having a certain amount of discernment and wisdom. So, wise human, I want to learn how to teach concepts without trying to make myself sound too smart and use big words, because that's a weakness of mine.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:48]: I almost slip into this scenario where I think the way to impress people as a teacher is to say a bunch of things that make me sound impressive. But at the end of the day, that sometimes just makes people's heads spin. So gracious teacher and then humble leader, I want to do a much better job leading my family and leading my team with humility and empathy and being able to relate to people and being able to say when I'm wrong and say sorry when I'm not. So if you have a single succinct purpose statement for your life and you wake up in the morning, that, in my opinion, beats everything for ripping you out of bed. When motivation is low, you have to know why you're getting up in the first place. You know, physical parameters aside, so that's the biggest variable. But then you get into, of course, the biological component, which we can't deny the body and the brain. There's, you know, the catch all term in medicine, kind of similar to the catch all term for fibromyalgia, right? My body hurts.

Ben Greenfield [01:03:45]: I don't know why. It could be collagen and elastin degradation. It could be rheumatoid arthritis. It could be sensitivity to the nightshades that I'm eating. Who knows? And a lot of physicians will say you have fibromyalgia, which doesn't really solve your problems. Similar scenario for chronic fatigue syndrome, right? Chronic fatigue syndrome is just feeling tired and sluggish and demotivated during the day. But it could be a sluggish thyroid hormone because maybe you're not eating enough calories or enough carbohydrates, or you've got too much exposure to fluoride and chlorine and the type of things that are keeping your thyroid from operating properly. It could be a neurotransmitter deficit because you might not be consuming enough amino acids or vitamin D.

Ben Greenfield [01:04:31]: It could be an issue with the actual lining of the nerves, the myelin sheaves, where nerve signals propagate. Which typically means that you need two different fats for that to work properly, because these two different fats actually make up the myelin sheath. And those two fats are DHA and oleic acid. DHA from things like fish oil and Mediterranean fats, and oleic acid from olive oil, as the name kind of implies, avocado oil, etc. You could go on and on. Mold sensitivity, Epstein Barr, Lyme. So you have to dig a little bit when it comes to some of the biological reasons that one would feel demotivated or fatigued or so sluggish that they can't accomplish their purpose in life even if they have it. You know, they're just.

Ben Greenfield [01:05:19]: They're dead by 2pm or they have a difficult time getting out of bed. Obviously, part of this involves testing, you know, lab testing, quantification, actually figuring out what are your thyroid parameters. Do you have mycotoxins in your urine if you do a urinary mycotoxin test? Do you have hormone deficits if you do a urinary test like the Dutch hormone test. So obviously a lot of digging, which might sound a little bit intimidating to folks, but that's why guys like you and me exist, to actually help walk people through this type of stuff. I would say, though, that that the number one thing to think about, and this relates to you bringing up last night, is the concept that our bodies are a battery, right? Your body actually operates with a very precise electrochemical gradient within the cell membrane. It should have a slightly negative charge on the inside and a slightly positive charge on the outside. And there are certain things that can charge the body's battery. And there are certain things that can drain the body's battery.

Ben Greenfield [01:06:20]: We live in an era, as you just alluded to, that I will call an ancestral mismatch, or other people might refer to it as an evolutionary mismatch, this idea that human beings for thousands of years had access to sunlight and the planet Earth and moving and gardening and hunting and building fences and hauling rocks. And now we are living in boxes, sitting in boxes, working in boxes, traveling in boxes, flying in boxes. We have access to a host of highly palatable foods, and we don't move as much as we're really meant to move. All of these parameters tend to drain the body's battery, with probably the most significant being the electrical soup that we live in. I flipped on my wifi in the office over there, and I had to ask how to get on the wi fi and which one it was, because there was at least 30 different signals within the room that I had to choose from from the wi fi. Most people live in that soup. Many people have and almost pride themselves upon owning smart appliances. You know, anything from your air filter to your refrigerator, to your washer, to your dryer, to your lighting system.

Ben Greenfield [01:07:28]: Many of these things come with wi fi, often that can't be disabled. We're plugged in. We have our phones often, you know, just blasting us with radio frequencies during the day. All of these result in an influx of calcium into the cell, which is positive, if you remember back to high school chemistry. And that's one of the reasons that they gradually make you feel sluggish during the day, is you're simply de charging the body's battery. So the idea is you want to recharge the body's battery. You don't have to be a luddite and completely avoid electricity, but you need to do things that allow the body to recharge. So a few simple examples.

Ben Greenfield [01:08:06]: Photons of sunlight, right? We know that the red and infrared and near infrared spectrum of sunlight penetrates the cells and results in the electron transport chain within the cell being able to produce more ATP. ATP being the body's energy currency that gives you more energy, that allows you to feel less sluggish. We know that the earth, every time it's struck by lightning, or every time solar radiation bombards the surface of the planet, it collects and stores negative ions. And when you touch the Earth, when you walk on the beach, when you swim in the ocean, when you get in a body of water, you recharge the body by absorbing those negative ions. We even know that despite poor farming practices and agricultural practices and poor access to good food, that a lot of the foods that we eat are relatively stripped of electrolytes and minerals. But, you know, I handed you some really good salt when we had our smoothie bowls over there in the other room. Because I salt profusely, I use electrolytes all the time. You know, not crappy sodium chloride like you find in table salt at a restaurant, but good rich, mineral rich salts and electrolytes because those also help to keep carry a charge through the body.

Ben Greenfield [01:09:20]: So the idea I think, is that even though there are all these different tests that you can get for chronic fatigue and some of the things that I talked about earlier, the number one thing to think about is how can I somehow address an evolutionary mismatch or an ancestral mismatch while living in a post industrial environment. That doesn't mean that you gotta quit your job and go outside in the sunshine half naked every day and you know, go move to the beach where you can walk in the sand or, you know, you know, buy expensive electrolyte supplements or something like that. It can be as simple as using grounding mats or earthing mats indoors, which are special mats that you can stand on and sleep on that allow you to be in touch with the surface of the planet even if you can't be outside. You can use, and this is getting into biohacking now or like infrared lighting technologies, an infrared sauna or a red light panel. Or when we were driving in the car to the workout, I even pulled out of my bag this wraparound light device that we put on your neck like a necklace that charged your blood up with infrared light. In addition to that, you can just get a basic salt. For example, in the US you can find one of the most mineral rich, low toxin, low microplastic, low, low metal salts at just about any grocery store, you know, Rosar's, Silverton, Safeway, whatever. It's Celtic salt, that little blue bag of salt that's super rich in minerals and you can just put sprinkles of that into water on food, makes food taste better as well, which is fantastic.

Ben Greenfield [01:10:49]: And so the basic idea here is that you need to think of your body as a battery and keep the body's battery charged. Finally, the number one time in your life when you can give your body a chance to recharge the battery and be away from that electrical soup is when you're sleeping at night. That's when your cells can repair and recover from all the electrical draining that occurs during the day. This is why I think it's important to go through your bedroom. Do you need a TV in there? If not, get rid of it. Do you need your phone off of airplane mode while you sleep? If, if not, put it in airplane mode. Do you need certain devices in the bedroom running and turned on, including something like a wifi router during the night while you're asleep? If not, turn it off. I think you should go through steps to make your bedroom like a dark ancestral cave, because that's when your body is going to repair before you step out at 7am in the morning to go to work with those 30 Wi Fi signals.

Ben Greenfield [01:11:48]: So if you're going to start anywhere, start in the bedroom. And there's actually a whole field of science around this called building biology. And you can. I mean, I realize this might sound, you know, fancy or expensive, but it's actually, it's not that expensive to go through the bedroom with an electrical meter or have a building biologist do that. You can test your bedroom and get rid of things that produce a lot of electricity, and it's a fantastic way to optimize your sleep as well. Most people who do that just begin to sleep like a baby.

Ben Greenfield [01:12:19]: Hey, thanks so much for listening. Leave the podcast a rating wherever you happen to be listening and check out the show notes BenGreenfieldLife.com/BestOf2024 where you can leave your comments, your questions, your feedback.

Ben Greenfield [01:12:32]: I read them all.

Ben Greenfield [01:12:33]: Thanks so much for listening.

Ben Greenfield [01:12:34]: To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks and content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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