May 13, 2015
Podcast #317 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2015/05/317-is-your-blood-pressure-too-low-wifi-kids-natural-surgery-preparation/
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Introduction: In this episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast: Is Your Blood Pressure Too Low, WiFi and Kids, What To Do Before And After Surgery To Recover Faster, Spreading Exercise Through The Day vs. Doing It All At Once and Are Raw Sweet Potatoes Healthy?
Welcome to the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain, and hormone optimization. So whether you’re an Ironman triathlete or you’re just wanna shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill, cutting edge content from bengreenfieldfitness.com.
Brock: Hey, Ben. I gotta say, you sounded a little lackluster this morning. What’s up?
Ben: I am – I am a little lackluster dude. I’m beat up. I gotta tell you. I’m full on beat up, I did those back to back Spartan races in the backwoods of Montana over the weekend.
Brock: I hear you had a little bit a tummy trouble.
Ben: A little bit a tummy trouble, and lot of people I’ve been talking to around here have been coming down with some kind of stomach bug, flu, whatever. And then starting at about midnight last night, I’ve been essentially peeing out my butt for the past 8 hours so.
Brock: Dude.
Ben: That’s been fun. Yeah, I actually – for the purposes of recording this podcast, and this just highlights my devotion to our listeners – I took about 2000 milligrams of activated charcoal to just try and soak up some of the liquids. I tried to appease the gods of my stomach with little inulin and green banana and potato extract. It’s basically a… have you heard of this Natural Stacks stuff?
Brock: I think I just heard your stomach make a crazy noise while you were saying that.
Ben: Yeah, actually. Yeah, my stomach literally just rumbled. It’s been rumbling all night.
Brock: Okay, so everybody has to pay attention. Listen for that. Yeah, I told I’d a lot of the Natural Stack stuff.
Ben: It can be a drinking game. Yes, so it’s a resistance starch but… and I’m really not, you know, this whole resistant starch-type thing but actually it’s a good way to soak up excess gas, some things like that in your tummy. And also I took some probiotics – that really helps to maximize the effects of probiotics when you put a prebiotic like inulin, or green potato starch, or something like that – so that was one reason that I had that for breakfast. The other reason is that normally if I were sick with something like the stomach bug and this is very weird for me. I’ve rarely ever get sick unless I’m off travelling some strange Asian continent. Anyways, normally I would do like the whole what’s it called? The bark thing? Bananas, apple sauce, rice and toast I think are the four. And we don’t really happen to have any of those items in our house, so I was digging through my pantry I’m like, “Okay, well this is pretty close: Green banana extract and potato starch with some inulin.” So, anyways if you hear an explosion or I spontaneously combust during this episode, you now know why.
News Flashes:
Brock: In between trips to the bathroom, Ben has been tweeting stuff out as normal at Twitter.com/BenGreenfield and this is the time when we will dissect these news.
Ben: That’s right. And this first news flash is about actually how you can avoid getting “the shitz”.
Brock: Hey. That’s what he said everybody. It’s not a curse when you say… what is that?
Ben: That’s right. S-h-i-t-z although we know how to either mark this episode as explicit or insert a cow bell, a horn, or just the standard bleep “shitz” whenever I say the word “shitz”. Okay, now…
Brock: It would do a lot of work for me, dude.
Ben: Out of the way.
Brock: Hilarious work.
Ben: Now that we have that out of the way, this actually is a friend of bicarbonate and since we’ve already talk about diarrhea and opened that can that worms on the show, we might as well start talking about it again. So bicarbonate is a known sports performance enhancing aide. So when you exercise, you get an increase concentration of protons or H plus ions especially when you’re fatigued. We’re talking about like hard exercise like, weight lifting, or sprints, or something along those lines.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: And when you put yourself in a temporary state of what’s called metabolic alkalosis, and this the state in which you are of course racing the PH and buffering those hydrogen ions. What can happen is you actually have an increased time to fatigue or better performance during short intense types of exercise. We’re talking about like glycolytic explosive type of exercise, potentially even something as long as like a good example would be like a fifteen hundred meter race, right?
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Where you’re definitely going for longer than 2 minutes.
Brock: Oh, okay. I was thinking like 90 seconds kinda effort…
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: But longer than that.
Ben: Yeah. And I even experimented what alkalinizing H and put things like sprint triathlons where you’re definitely far outside of the aerobic zone. But the problem is that you get diarrhea or stomach upset from this type of thing. I mean, I’ve even recommended the use of baking soda before to get your morning movement going on. However, this article and I’ll link to it in the show notes – the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/317. But what this article goes into is the fact that if you space your dosage of something like sodium bicarbonate, while we’re just talking about standard baking soda, and you ingest a small amount and the exact amount if you wanna do the math, is actually 0.1 grams per kilogram. So small amount in 90 minutes, and then 60 minutes, and then 30 minutes before the big workout or event or whatever it is that you’re preparing for. You can actually significantly reduce the risk of developing gastrointestinal symptoms and then if you at the same time have just a little bit of protein and carbohydrate – we’re talking about for example, let’s say 10 grams of weight protein with a little bit of like a potato starch, or rice starch, or something like that – that can still allow you to be by the time you finish all this and a pretty significant state of metabolic alkalosis without the stomach upsets, so it’s almost a way to biohack your baking soda if you will. And this would be something relevant if you know, let’s say you are a swimmer and you’re out of ______ [0:06:54.5] and you’ve got a 500 meter, you know, say you’re doing a 500 meter freestyle or 400 IM or something like that. This would be a case where you know, experimenting with this type of thing in practice first plus you just leave a floater in a pool.
Brock: Yeah. You’re not in the pool.
Ben: And then in your race, you know, this is kind of a perfect situation where to use something like this. So I’ll link to the article on show notes, but baking soda has always been proven sports performance enhancing aide up until I’ve seen this article, I’d never really seen a way to mitigate some of the potentially unpleasant side effects.
Brock: So would you choose something like this over one of the like actual – I don’t know, one of the pre-prepared pills like an extreme endurance or a one of those other ones: runners’ likes or somebody’s likes?
Ben: Well, a lot of those are designed to do the same thing but frankly, if you look at the dosage in most cases anything like that you know, sport legs, or extreme endurance or something like that, the doses aren’t very close when they’re using literature. They’re not even close and so it’s little bit of a head scratcher for me to you know, it’s kind of like creatine right? Like creatine monohydrate has been shown to be everything from a cognitive performance enhancer to you know, something that can increase strength and power significantly, and doses of about 5 grams per day, but you’ll purchase many creatine capsules or creatine powders on a serving is a gram. So you always have to pay attention to what’s actually in a supplement or compound versus what the research is showing is effective. So…
Brock: Cool. Yeah.
Ben: Another interesting article was in Fast Company magazine, well not really the magazine but the website. And it was about an experiment on what happens to your body when everything you eat is organic. What they actually did – this was a Swedish grocery store chain called Coop that has been working for quite a while, a few decades, I believe – to educate consumers on the benefits of eating organic and switching to organic food and even increasing the amount of organic food production in Sweden. And what they did was they took a Swedish family: the Palmbergs – classic Swedish name of course, the Palmbergs.
Brock: I love those folks!
Ben: That’s right.
Brock: Good ‘ol people.
Ben: Good ‘ol Palmbergs. And they have them do a three-week experiment where they simply switch everything that they were eating and they were eating quite a bit of conventional food. They switched everything to organic and then they did urine samples each day. And the results were actually pretty shocking when you look at the chart and you can visit the article you know, I’ll put a link at bengreenfieldfitness.com/317. The urine samples in the beginning showed almost every single pesticide that you’d find growing on you know, typical non-organic produced meat, etc. in their urine and afterwards, it did all completely disappeared. All of these harmful pesticides was kind of interesting you know, there have been similar experiments with things like personal care products like phthalates and parabens and shampoos and how they show up in your urine as few as three hours after.
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But you know, I know that this is just an n = 1 but it’s actually quite interesting and you know, well for me, when I’m walking through grocery store and trying to prioritize organic versus non-organic ‘cause I know we posted this on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook page and some people were like, “It’s so expensive.” Generally, if you want to at least budget, just look at anything that you would eat the skin of, right? A carrot, a tomato, a peach, etc. For all of those you are definitely going to benefit from going organic but I mean you know, avocado – mmm – you know you’ve got a little bit of skin on there so you’re gonna get fewer pesticide and herbicide residues. Banana, same thing, so some of these things when you’re deal with the skin. I know probably some of our biohacking listeners didn’t do eat the banana peel and the avocado skin. But for those of you who consume your food normally, that’s one rule that I’ll follow when I’m at the grocery stores as far as the actual skin versus non-skin version.
Brock: You know the one part of that study that I found most intriguing was the 30% increase in the smugness of the individuals or the involved in it.
Ben: Yeah, yeah.
Brock: They were absolutely insufferable at cocktail parties.
Ben: Yes, and also just look constipated pushing their giant shopping carts full of organic kale through the aisles of whole foods. Yes, I agree. Okay, so last thing. Last one I wanted to mention. Moving on.
Brock: Moving on.
Ben: So this was an article that was in the Telegraph about whether or not WIFI is making your child ill. What is happened in France is they’ve actually banned WiFi in nursery schools and in primary schools and this article was primarily an interview with a British expert in children’s health and wireless radiation who has been giving up the use of wireless gadgets and trying to create a movement in schools to do things like you know, hard wired into router via the internet cables rather than having WiFi you know, bouncing around the school. And the article is chockfull of all these again, not pure of good research, but anecdotal evidence of these children with migraines and headaches and behavioral issues, all of which began to arise in conjunction with which is to WiFi or the use of the new library that had a lot of routers and WiFi signals going around in it and so it’s really interesting. A few other anecdotes that caught my eye was first of all, Lloyds of London – the major insure Lloyds of London – will no longer include liability coverage for injuries resulting from electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetism, radio waves or noise meaning that children who were exposed to any of these things that basically what the insurance company is realizing is that even though there may not be hard evidence, there’s no ______ [0:12:56.6] evidence out there to where they’re not even comfortable covering those type of injuries. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has now classified the electromagnetic radiation as a group to be carcinogen, and all that means is this is a possible cause of cancer so they can’t come out and say it’s a carcinogen, but we can say it’s possibly a carcinogen. Which I would certainly agree with based on just the evidence and in terms of things like blood brain barrier leakage and in rodents exposed to not just WiFi, but also Bluetooth. And the other interesting thing in this article was a quote from a scientist and he says, “We’re living in an environment estimated to contain more than ten billion times more electromagnetic radiation or radiofrequency wireless radiation – you know, from phones and routers, and things like that – than we did in the 60s.” And he says, “If this environment is safe, we’re talking about any order of 15,000 to 25,000 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals all being wrong.” Meaning that he is actually aware of you know, these thousands of papers that showed there are some issues with RF radiation. So it’s a… you know, it’s something I’m very careful with my kids and the kids have very thin schools, they have high water content, they can absorb a lot more radiation. Their neurons or cells are dividing more rapidly and I just think not only for adults but especially for kids, this is something that we should pay attention to.
Special Announcements:
Ben: You know, Brock. Some people will smear Nair on their body to remove hair. I actually used to do that.
Brock: I used to do that.
Ben: When I was a body builder.
Brock: When I was a ballet dancer.
Ben: Some people would bleach certain body parts to not only remove hair, but just to improve the acidic appearance.
Brock: Yeah, that’s always puzzled me.
Ben: Sad body part.
Brock: Weird.
Ben: But then some people will use Harry’s Shaving – the sponsor of today’s podcast.
Brock: Mmm-hmm.
Ben: If you go to…
Brock: Smart people.
Ben: harrys.com you don’t have to use Nair, you don’t have to bleach body parts, you can just get their – you get their Winston Set – I think that’s a good way to go.
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You get the razor which is made in this high quality German factory, you get three quality blades and you get a tube of their foaming shave gel which does not have any of those aforementioned, the parabens or phthalates that I was talking about. And also you can choose the other shaving cream if you don’t prefer the gel but those smell nice and tend to get me laid by my wife quite frequently so there’s that also.
Brock: (chuckles)
Ben: Anyways, it’s the aroma. It’s the – what do you call them? The hormones that you create that attracts the opposite sex…
Brock: The pheromones?
Ben: Yes. I’m convinced, they’ve injected pheromones into their Harry shaving gel and shaving foam.
Brock: It’s right up there with Axe body spray.
Ben: Mmm-hmm. Yeah, plus the Winston’s Set, it sounds very, very manly and cowboy-ish. Even though I’m sure that women can use it on their non-cowboy-ish body parts as well if they wanted too. Anyways…
Brock: You can just smoke Winstons back in the 80s.
Ben: Hmm, yeah. Might be a cigarette too, but in this case it’s not a cigarette – it’s a really good razor. So you can check it out at harrys.com – that’s h-a-r-r-y-s.com and they’ll give a five dollar’s off when you use promo code “ben” b-e-n.
Brock: How much more simple could it be?
Ben: How much more simple? A few other things: first of all, the Ben Greenfield Fitness Quarterly Box has launched and this is where I similar to the una-bomber but in a much safer way. Put a bunch of random items and objects: bio hacking equipment, nutrition – what’s the sexy title now for nutrition? How do they call it? Functional foods, yes, functional foods, supplements, gear – all sorts of things that I discover on a monthly basis as I’m doing strange things to my body. And I put it on the box and I share it with you along with a letter written by yours truly that tells you how to use all these things.
Brock: Hand written?
Ben: Ah, well it’s…
Brock: I hope not ‘cause your handwriting is atrocious.
Ben: It is quite atrocious. As a matter of fact, I am – gosh, I hope he’s not listening into this podcast episode but if he is, my apologies – I actually… it was wanted to sent a letter to my friends to congratulate them on their birthday. And my handwriting is so bad that I actually had the woman who cleans my house write the note for me and so it looks like this flowy, girly, effeminate writing. And if that individual…
Brock: Is that eligible?
Ben: If that individual ever sees my writing, they’ll know – that game is up, they’ll know that I outsource that one. Anyways though, the Ben Greenfield Fitness Quarterly Box bengreenfieldfitness.com/quarterly and you’ll get a box every single quarter. It’s like Christmas coming every quarter and of course in the winter quarter…
Brock: Every three months.
Ben: You’ll get two Christmases: the regular Christmas and the much, much better Ben Greenfield Fitness Quarterly Christmas. A couple other things: if you live near Vermont or you would like to fly to Burlington, Vermont – beautiful area of the world, by the way – forests, mountains, steep hills, they have the Spartan World Championships there last year and a cool place. And they have this enormous farm. One of the biggest farms I’ve ever been at in my life. And out of this farm called Shelburne Farms is something put on by the Weston A. Price Foundation it’s called the Traditional Foods and Health Gathering. And last year, myself and Nora Gedguadas and Jeff Leach and some like local cooks and food prep specialists and like ancestral living type of folks, we did a conference running this year. I actually enjoyed that one so much you know, some conferences I leave and they suck and I never want to go back. But this one…
Brock: (chuckles)
Ben: this one was just like this nice conference out in a barn, on a farm, full of fantastic food – we ate oysters and kale and grass-fed beef and just a really cool, cool event.
Brock: What kind of oysters?
Ben: I don’t know what kind of oysters there are. Probably oysters like rocky mountain oysters in those testicles thing.
Brock: Testicles?
Ben: Yeah. Now we didn’t ate the testicles that I’m aware of. I’m aware of. Although those chocolate coated balls may have – now that I think about it, in retrospect – I was feeling pretty manly after eating those so it’s possible.
Brock: There you go.
Ben: Anyways though…
Brock: Maybe this is probably been referred to as the Beavis and Butthead of fitness.
Ben: (strange laugh)
Brock: So sick of that.
Ben: Ah, June 3rd thru the 6th. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Small pause there to sip my tea.
Brock: Gotta stay hydrated.
Ben: It gotta stay off the diarrhea somehow. I wish we took out the Q and A after this. So, the last thing is that if you happen to live in my neck of the woods, Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, my wife and I are teaching a Fermentation Class on how to preserve fruits, vegetables, make yogurt, nato, kefir, kimchi, kombucha – stuff like that and I will be – we’ll be doing that at the Argonne Library.
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The Argonne Library in Spokane. So fantastic library – it is actually whenever my home, and not one of my current home but the home I used to live in. Whenever it used to run out of WiFi or the power went out, I always go the library to work, so it’s my old hunting grounds. But I’ll be there with my wife, that’s Tuesday, May 19th in the evening – 6:30 to 7:30pm and the good news is we’ll have our handy-dandy recorder there, and so we’ll record it for any of you who are on the bengreenfieldfitness premium channel, and we’ll release that as an hour-long episode for you listening to if you are part of the bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium or you’re gonna access to like 300 extra episodes and pdfs and videos and audio, chapters.
Brock: Your audio books.
Ben: Yeah. The…
Brock: These chapters are coming out this Saturday, in fact.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. Been recording a lot. So there you have it and I believe those are all the special announcements.
Listener Q & A:
Carl: Hey Ben. Just recently started listening to your podcast. I’m really enjoying the information you give. I have a question about little blood pressure. My blood pressure generally runs below 90/60, I’ve always been told how great that was. I ran across the comment from a nutritionist indicated that low blood pressure are reflection of an electrolyte deficiency in the blood. He claims that this can reach a mere of health-related issues including depression and insomnia, those of which I’ve struggled with. I was wondering what are your thoughts on this, and if you have any idea on how to raise blood pressure other than adding salt to your diet and mineral drops of water. Look forward to hearing your response. Thank you.
Brock: It’s funny. There’s seems to be a lot of people lately have been talking about having low blood pressure. I feel like eighties was the decade of high blood pressure and now the 2010s are low blood pressure era.
Ben: Yeah or the 90s.
Brock: Ah, I think everybody forgot about blood pressure and just got focused on grunge.
Ben: Mmm. Tuc, tuc and grunge. Um, blood – sure. If your blood pressure is low, all you got to do is – tell you what Carl, you can come check my email inbox and just come check it every day. I guarantee your blood pressure will dramatically rise. Every morning, without fail it works like a charm. No, seriously a blood pressure being well below 90/60 – 90 for systolic and 60 for diastolic – that can definitely be a potential issue that’s known as hypotension. And your blood pressure can become so low that it causes things like dizziness and fainting and fatigue and nausea and gosh, I guess about everything I’ve been experiencing the past few hours.
Brock: Hmmm. I think we just figured it out.
Ben: There we go. So that’s considered a hypotension and it can even cause inadequate flow of blood to important organs like your brain, and your kidneys, and your heart, and so if you have low blood pressure and 90/60 is definitely low, you should not necessarily worry that something is broken with you but you should at least look into a few things. And the first really, the glaring thing here and your nutritionist it sounds like are already mentioned this to you, is a potential electrolyte imbalance or deficiency. And I find that in most cases this happens in conjunction at least in like the exercise enthusiast population, in conjunction with adrenal fatigue. So the that this works is in many cases you’ll find people who have adrenal fatigue, who’ve over-trained, who are over-stressed from exercise or you know, relationships, lifestyle, lack of sleep or whatever – they’ll crave salt or they’ll crave salty foods. And in addition, one of the tests for adrenal fatigue is the blood pressure test where you lay down and you take your blood pressure and then you stand up and you take your blood pressure. And if your blood pressure drops when you stand up, that can be a sign of what’s called low aldosterone which tends to go hand in hand with cortisol dysregulation that occurs during adrenal fatigue. You can also and if you don’t wanna use the blood pressure cuff – if you go from lying to standing, and you get dizzy or you’re exercising and you go from say, like doing some type kind of a floor exercise, like planks then you get up and you’re doing say, like whenever to the treadmill and you’re getting dizzy – well, that can also be a sign, assuming that you haven’t been you know, drinking alcohol before you rush into your workout routine that you’ve got one of these low blood pressure, over-training, or adrenal fatigue type of issues. So the way that this works is aldosterone is a steroid hormone as made by your adrenal glands, it regulates blood pressures. So, basically what happens is…
[0:25:03.1]
when your brain produces cortisol’s stimulating hormone also known as ACTH, that’s sent from the brain and the brain is monitoring the amount of circulating cortisol that is occurring. And so, high cortisol is gonna tend to lower the brain’s ACTH production, okay? So being stressed out will cause the brain to lower its ACTH production and when that happens, you get decreased aldosterone secretion, and that leads to lower blood pressure and when you get that lower blood pressure, a lot of times what happens, is one of the ways that aldosterone lowers blood pressure is by creating an electrolyte imbalance – basically imbalance with sodium, potassium, magnesium, etc. And this is also why in many cases, if you have insomnia and you hear your heart beating in your head, if you’re over-trained, you’re stressed out and you try to fall asleep at night. Getting up and drinking a glass of water with a little bit of sea salt or a salt with a good mineral spectrum in it like you know, I used this Aztec salt stuff – that can be very helpful in helping you to fall asleep and helping to address some of those electrolyte imbalances. So, that’s one thing that I would look into. Now how would you know if you have some kind of adrenal fatigue issue? The main test that you can get is called an Adrenal Stress Index. Adrenal Stress Index or ASI test – it’s a salivary panel, you can get that from the company like Direct Labs, we’ll put a link in the show notes for that one. But that would be one thing that could cause this, however there are other ways that you can raise blood pressure, if you just tend to be one of those people who walk around with slightly low blood pressure. So, some of the major things in addition to getting a little bit of extra salt in your diet, extra electrolytes in your diet, one is caffeinated beverages. Those can temporarily increase blood pressure and people with a hypotension by using caffeine from the coffees and teas throughout the day can mitigate some of the dizziness effects of hypotension. However, I’m not too enchanted with that as a healthy approach, right or just like drinking coffee all day long to get your blood pressure up, just something seems wrong with that somehow. So yeah, there are few other things though, in Ayurvedic medicine, raisins are traditional remedy used for treating hypotension naturally. You just soak…
Brock: Yeah!
Ben: Thirty to forty raisins in a cup of water overnight and you eat them in the morning on an empty stomach and you can even drink the water in which the raisins were soaked…
Brock: Weird.
Ben: …and that can help to increase your blood pressure. Possibly because it’s just so frustrating standing there eating these raisins, one raisin at a time as you wake up in the morning. It doesn’t seem super-efficient but hey, that’s just me. Holy basil – it’s an herb that’s beneficial for low blood pressure, it’s got a lot of vitamin C and magnesium and potassium in it so, that’s one of those things it’s good to have, if you’re also like in a state of adrenal fatigue or stress, holy basil is actually very good. Licorice is another – licorice can – well, if you have high blood pressure already, you should actually stay away from licorice-based remedies. But licorice actually blocks the enzymes that breaks down cortisol and supports healthy adrenal function and especially in someone who has like chronic fatigue syndrome or like full blown adrenal fatigue where they simply aren’t producing enough cortisol, licorice can not only help to normalize low blood pressure but also help to increase or at least keep cortisol levels a little bit more elevated. So licorice is another one. Beetroot juice and (chuckles) okay, this is kind of funny – beetroot juice can help with both hypotension and hypertension. Beetroot juice is just you know, it’s dark red color, it’s great for your blood – nature gives us clues like that and you know like, beetroot juice being all dark and red is actually something very supportive for blood issues. But I’ve been drinking because Beet Performer, this company sells it like this: “dense, dense extractive beet juice in a can.” They are our sponsor of Teen Timex – the triathlon team that I’m on.
Brock: Oh, cool.
Ben: And so they just sent cases and cases of this Beet Performer to my house. And so I’ve just been up – I’ve been drinking it. Can of beet juice usually in the afternoon simply before my workout while of course, yesterday I had a can of beet juice and then last night when all hell broke loose, it really look like someone got murdered in the toilet.
Brock: Ohhh.
Ben: It was not, not, not a good look.
Brock: That’s a bad combo.
Ben: Yeah, really bad combo: beet juice plus any type of stomach flu or stomach bug that involves stuff coming out your backside – not, not really a good combo but beet juice can also help with low blood pressure. Rosemary and other, rosemary can help to improve circulation, it’s a good central nervous system stimulant, you can use a rosemary tincture, a rosemary essential oil or even just cook quite a bit with rosemary type of herbs – that would be another kind of common home remedy for low blood pressure.
[0:30:14.6]
And the last is lemon juice. Lemon juice especially if you have low blood pressure related to dehydration or not drinking enough water, lemon juice can actually help you retain a little bit of water, it’s kind of a great little morning tonic. Anyways, I’m a big fan of lemon juice. I’ve talked about it before – lemon juice and lemon essential oil but that would be another. So, I know that’s a lot of different things to try or whatever, but if you did wanna raise your blood pressure especially if you’re experiencing dizziness and nausea and some of these things related to blood pressure, those are a few things that I would try. You know, stand there in the morning, eating your 30-40 raisins, one raisin at a time, follow-up with some beet juice, and uhm, okay – one of this adrenal stress index test and you’ll be off to the races.
Lucy: Hi Ben and Brock, Lucy here from Australia. A huge fan of your podcast, thank you so much for all the information, and entertainment. Absolutely love listening to you guys. My question is regarding my 7-year-old daughter, who has to have an operation this year for removal of adenoids, tonsils, and a bent septum as she struggles to breathe and her doctor says this really is the only way forward for her. I’m wondering what I can do to repair her gut for this operation and what I’m might need to do post-operation so she recovers quickly from the anesthetic and antibiotics. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and keep up the good work. Thank you.
Brock: Do you still have your tonsils?
Ben: Ah, I do, I do. What do call it? Tonsillectomy – that was not on my list of childhood procedures. As a matter of fact, I’ve never really broken a bone aside from little potential like stress fractures in my toes or fingers that I suspect are stress fractures but went away. I’ve never had any major surgeries. I have never had my tonsils or my appendix or anything like that removed. So, I’ve gotten lucky in that regard.
Brock: Yeah. I’d say so.
Ben: Anyways though, I have to be careful when I respond to a question like this that involves a kid in surgery just because I’m not a doctor. This podcast is not medical advice and it’s not meant to be misconstrued as such. And so, all I can tell you are the type of things that I would do myself if I were going in for surgery. I’m gonna have to leave it at that. I will certainly let you know if anything I mention is definitely inappropriate for a child, but I can jump in to some of the things that I would do if it were me. So, as far as surgery goes, there are few things that can help to do things like reduce wound healing time and reduce wound size, and help boost your immune function to help ward off infection. One is zinc, and a lot of people these days are – they have zinc deficiencies and in most cases for an adult if we’re looking at like a zinc supplement, it’s around like the 10-30 mg type of range but using zinc orally from anywhere from 4-6 weeks prior to a surgery ‘cause that’s about how long it takes to actually address zinc deficiency, can help out quite a bit to heal one. The same thing if you’ve gotten very sick or you’ve gotten injured, or you have some kind of a – specifically a wound, like a skin wound or some kind of bacterial growth, zinc can be one of the things to look into. Vitamin C has been used for very long time since World War II surgeons are using it to assist with surgery recovery in their patients. Now, vitamin C – you can only have about 1500 mg or 1.5 grams of vitamin C, kinda be able to be absorbed in a typical adult in any given time, and so even though taking as much as 5-6 grams of vitamin C in a day, can help quite a bit with everything from collagen production, to strengthen your immune system, to strengthening scar tissue to reducing tissue death, you wanna split it up into 3-5 daily or 3-5 per day doses of vitamin C. There are variety of ways to get vitamin C. The one that’s been recommended to me, and the one that I’ve used when I need to increase my vitamin C intake is made by a company called American Nutriceuticals. It’s a vitamin C powder and I can link to that one in the show notes for you but it’s called American Nutriceuticals – it’s a vitamin C powder and that one I’ve found to be okay to consume in terms of high amounts I getting a lot of stomach distress. So, we put that one in the show notes for you. And there’s a few other things that can help out – one that I would look into would be proteolytic enzymes. These are things like bromelain, that you’d find in the stems of pineapples, papain which comes from papayas, trypsin and chymotrypsin which a lot of times you’ll find in meat.
[0:35:06.9]
Not only can taking high amounts of proteolytic enzymes when you’re injured, when you’ve had a sprain or a strain help quite a bit with inflammation and with the breaking down of the fibrinogen that can cause things like soreness and inflammation but it can also be something to use to help heal more quickly from surgery. So, that would be another one and it’s just basically enzymes so – bromelain, papain, trypsin and chymotrypsin. Those are all in the NatureFlex. So there’s this joint and bone and muscle support compound called NatureFlex that I actually have over at greenfieldfitnesssystems and it’s all these things, you know, tart cherry extract, and vitamin C, and proteolytic enzymes, and glucosamine and chondroitin. It’s like a shotgun approach to supporting your joints and ligaments, and muscle, and bone. So, that one is okay for kids to take. You know, for my kids I’d only give them about 1 capsule or so because they don’t need that much. I mean, I’ve used mine 12 a day when I’ve been injured and that stuff is called NatureFlex. So it has those proteolytic enzymes and stuff like that in there. A couple of others that I’ve mentioned: one would be chlorella. There’s a lot of Japanese studies that have found chlorella to be very effective in speeding up cell growth, and to help naturally repair wounds. So chlorella is one that you could look into. For kids, if they don’t wanna swallow capsules, there are chewable chlorella tablets called Recovery Bits. They’re called Recovery Bits and I actually have some in my refrigerator and I’ll use them just like a snack. They’re very filling as well but they have a good detox effect, and they may help with wound healing as well. So, that’s another one.
Brock: So kids will enjoy how it turns their mouth crazy color.
Ben: That’s right. It will turn your mouth full on green so. You know now how to turn your poop red, and your mouth green. And then the last thing that I’ve mentioned, if you do need to get on antibiotics would be of course, to get on a good probiotic and you can easily take a probiotic capsule and open that into like a glass of cold water. You don’t need to put like some lemon juice and stevia in there for a kid, do something like that or you can – you can put a smoothie, you can put an apple sauce, etc. So, I’m using a probiotic especially if the child has to be on antibiotics or an adult has to be on antibiotics. That’ll be useful. Dr. Jack Kruse, a friend of mine who is a neurosurgeon – he has all sorts of kinda radical ideas when it comes to surgery. A very good article that he has written called Peri-operative optimal surgical considerations, some mouths, fantastic title by the way.
Brock: Say it again.
Ben: Really makes you wanna click on it. Peri-operative optimal surgical considerations.
Brock: Uhmm.
Ben: I’ll link to this in the show notes for this episode but basically what he goes into are not only some of the same type of nutrients that I’ve mentioned. He’s got on the same page as me with a lot of that stuff, but he’ll use for example cold thermogenesis. He’ll have his patients do a series of cold thermogenesis sessions to increase nitric oxide production, and increase stress resilience going into surgery, and that’s like cold showers, cold baths, even like cold tacs placed over the areas that are going to be operated on in the case of tonsillectomy, I don’t really see you necessarily holding a bag of ice against your neck but for other surgeries, that’s something that may come in handy. That’ll be something probably more pleasant for adults and kids if you necessarily subject your child to an ice bath a day up until surgery. That’s something that he’ll use. Another thing he does is – during sleep, pre-opt and post of sleep, he’ll make sure that there’s not a lot of LED or artificial lights present and even use things like eye mask during sleep, just because this can help with neuro-repair and recovery so much when you’re able to get into those deep sleep stages that can be interrupted by LED and artificial lights. So, that’s another thing that he’ll do. He’s also a big fan of at least speaking with your surgeon about things that help to thin the blood just a little bit that act as natural anti-platelets. So like resveratrol is one, fish oil is another. Of course those are things that you’d definitely want a surgeon to know about if you’re on any type of blood thinner going into surgery but those can help in terms of like anti-platelet and anti-clotting factors. So, he’s got some interesting ideas like that in an article that I’ll link to on the show notes. I think this is especially interesting, his thoughts about sleeping in a very black room and like using clod thermogenesis going in and out of the surgery.
Brock: Unlike Ben, he is a doctor. So…
Ben: He is a doctor. And then, you know, kind of the same lines, there’s some evidence that acupuncture can help speed wound recovery if you’ve gotten in surgery and you actually have a wound like a knee surgery, or hip surgery, and you want to eliminate scar tissue.
[0:40:02.6]
That’s one thing. And sunlight can also accelerate wound healing quite dramatically. You probably notice this if you had a cut or a scrape or a bruise, when it gets expose to sunlight, it actually heals a little bit more quickly. So that’d be another one to look into would be just a good amount of sunlight exposure which is good for you anyways. So, those are some of the things that I would do if I were going in for surgery. I’ll definitely use vitamin C and zinc, I’ll definitely work in proteolytic enzymes or some of this NatureFlex stuff, I do some chlorella, I do some cold thermogenesis, and make sure that sleep is really solid, and then get lots of like phototherapy, sunlight exposure, possibly if I wanted to reduce scar tissue formation, acupuncture, but at the same time I’ll also think scars are pretty badass, so I may skip the acupuncture.
Jon: Hi Ben and Brock! It’s Jon here from London. I’m a big fan of the podcast. They use to keep me up! ‘Cause I have a question. Ben mention this sometimes those pull-ups would walk you by as pull-up bar during the day. I work at home and also do the same thing, so occasionally I’ll do maybe 5 sets of 15 pull-ups throughout the course of the day. I’ve read about people following the “Charles Atlas” type of body weight routines they do a sort of training say lots of press – press ups, pull-ups. You know, anywhere between 20 and 40 reps per set throughout the day saying you can end up doing quite large numbers of press up and pull-ups. I just want to have this compared to another type of training where you workout a specific time of day. Perhaps you would bear to do as many reps in that space of time. So, for example something like 30-40 minutes of German Biometric Training or Superset Training also doing press up, pull-ups, those sort of things. I hope this makes sense and yeah, like what I said, enjoyed the podcast and yeah! Keep up the good work! All the best! Babye!
Brock: Jon’s gonna making me feel like a wimp, right doing – I’m only doing 5 pull-ups every time I pass my bar. Not 15.
Ben: Fifteen pull-ups and I have no clue with this German Biometric Training is that he’s referring to.
Brock: I certainly you don’t, I don’t.
Ben: I don’t know what German Biometric Training sounds like. Something you – some kind of a class you take before how you go on how to make a Volvo. I don’t know. German Biometric Training, no clue. But anyways, this is actually a good question. You know, whether you can get the same amount of benefit out of doing a high amount of reps throughout the day vs. like a one a day really focused, hard workout. And it does kind of depend what we’re talking about. So, you can certainly – if you’re just talking about fat loss, some metabolism, the former approach – the approach that you know might be called greasingly grooved by some, that’s just like frequent low level physical activity throughout the day that has definitely been shown to keep metabolism more elevated and to burn more fat like sitting in a chair all day and doing some monster exercise session at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. There’s actually a really good video about this. I don’t know if you’ve seen this video, Brock, it’s called “The Truth About Exercise”?
Brock: No. I didn’t see that.
Ben: I’ll put a link to it. You can watch it for free on Vimeo but they took 3 people and they put sensors on them to monitor their activity level and one was a waitress and one was this business guy who just like sat around all day but then went to the gym everyday. Uhm, I don’t remember. I don’t remember now what the third one was. Anyways though, it was the woman…
Brock: It is a German Biometric…
Ben: Yeah, and the person doing German Biometric Training. But the woman who wasn’t exercising, who wasn’t going to the gym, the waitress – she was actually the one with the highest overall activity level. And you know, it’s kinda similar to my wife for example, she spends all day like to and around in the kitchen, and gardening, and pushing wheelbarrows around, and carrying rocks, and occasionally chopping wood, and she actually doesn’t do formal exercise very much.
Brock: Your wife is an old tiny pioneer woman.
Ben: She’s an old tiny pioneer. She wears a Kaliko dress, she’ll typically ride a horse.
Brock: And a bonnet.
Ben: She rides a horse, yeah, wearing a bonnet to the grocery store to pick up things like bags of rice and sugar cubes, plus her hair straight out of the little house on the prairie.
Brock: That’s so – Exactly.
Ben: Jessa Engles Wilder. Anyways though, the take away point here is if we’re just talking about fat loss and increase in the metabolism, the approach thing engaged in low level physical activity throughout the day is superior. Now, for talking about muscle gain or actual physical performance, then things change a little bit. So, what I mean by that is first of all, when you’re exercising and you’re doing multiple sets all at a time, you know, like a traditional exercise such as you may do 3,4,5,6 sets for say like your arms.
[0:45:10.7]
As you’re training to failure, near the end of those latter sets, all of your smaller muscle fibers are becoming fatigue, and what happens is your nervous system is forced to use a lot of the bodies larger fast twitch muscle fibers. And when that happens, you create more activity in what are called the satellite cells that are responsible for growing new muscle, and increasing the kinda like the anabolic muscle building type of response. So, you don’t get that same fatigue effect by spreading out smaller sets throughout the day simply because you’re not getting to the point where you’ve exhaust your smaller muscle fibers and are moving on to the larger fast twitch muscle fibers. The other thing that happens when you’re doing multiple exercise sets in a row or doing more formal exercise session, you get a lot more localized lactic acid in the area around the muscle, and when that happens, when you get that localized lactic acid, not only you do trigger an increase in the enzymes that are responsible for buffering lactic acid which can come in quite handy, you know, if you’re competing in sports in which you need to kinda push part the burn. But when you increase intra-muscular lactic acid, you also get an increase in intra-muscular growth factors including growth hormone. You know, you get a big dump in growth hormone, you get a big dump in nitric oxide as blood rushes in to move a lot of the protons that build up during exercise. You get a shuttling of lactic acid and the glucose formation in your liver to help feedback and fuel the exercise even more so there’s a little bit of a metabolic efficiency response. So, all those things happen and they only happen when you’re actually training the muscle typically in a more formal exercise session that you wouldn’t experience by spreading exercise throughout the day. So, it’s kinda the difference between your health and longevity vs. performance. If you wanna get all the performance and muscle building factors, you do need to do like a more traditional exercise session. And the other thing would just be mental fortitude especially for athletes out there, I mean, it is difficult to charge through a 60 or a 90-minute exercise session. You know like my workout yesterday for example, I could have walked all day and stop occasionally throughout the day to do burpees, but my actual exercise session yesterday was 5400 yard sprints with 5 burpees after each sprint. So I use actual – I use pennies to keep track. So I took out 27 pennies, so every time I’d go down and back I take 1 penny out of the cup and put it on the ground, and extremely difficult exercise in terms of not just lactic acid but also just mental tolerance, right? Like that’s one of those exercise sessions that I’ll rely on in a race when the going gets tough and I just need to buckle down and focus. And so, you know again I could have done for the 12 hours of the day every half hour stop and then 5 burpees and then maybe going into the yard and then a hundred sprint. By the end of the day I would have done the same amount of work but the latter approach was spreading things out for the day wouldn’t have given me quite the performance and the mental benefits, and the lactic acid, and the growth hormone benefits. So, that’s kind of where I’m at as far as that goes. I guess the other thing is, you know, if you’re concerned about basically overtraining or draining energy, the formal approach is giving things out throughout the day can actually be better, and the reason for that is that training to failure during multiple sets on a row – that increases levels of something called nucleotide adenosine monophosphate which is also abbreviated AMP. Very dramatically compared to doing like non-failure base exercise and elevated AMP is a sign that your cell is drained of energy, and when that happens you can actually get a decrease in protein synthesis. So, ironically digging into the well too much can actually hold you back from an anabolic and in growth hormone perspective. So it’s about finding balance and not doing a formal exercise set to failure every single day of the week but at least having a couple times a week where you do push your muscles to failure more than what you do if you were say, spreading things out throughout the day. So, there you go.
Brock: I got to know why 54 times?
Ben: Uhm, I’ll talk about this on a future podcast once I’m ready to make the announcement, so to speak. But I have hired a coach specifically a coach who specializes in training obstacle course athletes because I’ve realized that even though I’m getting much better at climbing walls and climbing ropes, and throwing spears, my running, you know, I’ve only been doing this whole obstacle racing Spartan thing for the past year. But my running really isn’t getting any faster. I think one reason for that is, I’m doing all my own workout as my own stand-by workouts, I’m not really super motivated to push myself in my workouts.
[0:50:02.4]
I’m not going outside my comfort zone when I’m doing, you know – I won’t let – I’m a good coach, right, like I coach a lot of high level athletes but if you wanna have a bad coach then coach yourself or you know, this phrase goes something like that, so ultimately I needed a source of intrinsic motivation and a touch of uniqueness to my workouts that I wouldn’t be doin’ myself. So as far as why 54? Only the reason is that all of these sprints were done at just a little touch of a 5k speed, and if you look at that workout it’s pretty close to running a 5k but just all split up in a multiple little hundred yards sprints so.
Allie: Hey Ben and Brock, quick question about your opinion of raw sweet potatoes. In the evening, I’ve developed the habit of having a few slices of raw sweet potato after dinner to sort of cure of after dinner munches, few thin slices of raw organic sweet potato. Pretty tasty, don’t knock it until you try it. Doesn’t cause many stomach issues or anything like that but I just wondering what your opinion of eating raw sweet potatoes was. Thanks for great show.
Brock: I believe that’s how you get worms, isn’t it?
Ben: Uhmm.
Brock: This was what my mom told me when I was a kid and I’d start sneaking the potatoes off the counter.
Ben: I’m sure that’s pork actually, Brock. Well, a little bit of a difference.
Brock: That’s straight up treakin’ noses.
Ben: Yeah. You know, we did – remember when we did that whole sweet potato yam episode ‘cause a lot of people think like sweet potatoes are yams. So when you go to the grocery store, you’ve got like the nicey, yellowish-orange potato that they call a yam, and then you have the white-ish potato that they call this sweet potato. Remember that episode we did?
Brock: I don’t. I’m a little worried about myself now.
Ben: I feel that the Saturday night live episode now where Chris wants his face as he’s interviewing celebrities and he’s like – remember that? And that time when the move…
Brock: That is awesome!
Ben: …when he interviewed guests.
Brock: That was awesome!
Ben: Remember that movie? Remember that time… that time – that was awesome! Remember that podcast, Brock? Remember that?
Brock: That was awesome! Awesome!
Ben: So, sweet potato and a yam at least in most grocery stores and like the US and Canada, and most civilized countries, they are the same thing. They’re both potatoes. So, yams are potatoes, sweet potatoes are potatoes. Really a true yam is like that…
Brock: I believe that one is a potato actually.
Ben: …that puple-ish thing. It’s like the purple-ish tubers root vegetable. That’s a real yam and yams are a lot of times huge. Some grow as big as 5 feet long and they’ve got this blackish brown bark-like skin and typically the flesh is purple or red, far different than the type of sweet potatoes and yams that we find at the typical supermarket or in the US or Canada or where else but kind of off the topic – slightly off the topic. I guess the…
Brock: Five feet long?
Ben: Yeah! Yams can get huge – huge. Yeah, I’ve seen some very big yams in Hawaii actually. So, when we look at potatoes – I’m gonna link in the show notes, it’s at bengreenfieldfitness.com/317 to a very interesting study that they’ve done on the toxicity of a variety of root vegetables, tubers, cassava, things of that nature. And the interesting thing is that a lot of these underground tubers, and these type of things that are growing in the ground, they do have quite a high level of toxicity particularly toxicity to neural tissue and toxicity to gut cells based on the fact that they naturally kinda protect themselves. When we look at the sweet potato, one of the things that you’ll have in a sweet potato is something called a trypsin inhibitor and a trypsin inhibitor basically it inhibits part of your ability to be able to digest some of the proteins that are in that actual sweet potato and it can also do a little bit of damage to your gut same as eating like unfermented soy can cause some issues. Now, particularly even more concerning to me, I guess at this point in my days that sweet potatoes contain raffinose and raffinose is a sugar that’s responsible for extreme flatulence, and when you are cooking a sweet potato and you’re heating it up, you know, boiling, baking it, whatever, you inhibit that ability of raffinose to ferment, and so you basically by eating raw sweet potato, you may not be someone that your friends want to be around so… they’d be another reason to be careful. Sometimes the sweet potato can have some fungal contamination and baking will generally destroy a lot of those type of toxins as can peeling the potato. When you peel it, you remove a lot of the alkaloids that a lot of people are sensitive to in terms of like the same type of joint pain they’d get after eating nightshades like tomatoes and eggplants, you can get that from potatoes and sweet potatoes as well.
[0:55:02.8]
So, the article itself goes into everything from cyanide toxicity to some of the other alkaloids, like that alpha solanine and the alpha chaconine that you’re gonna find in potatoes to calcium oxalate crystals, to a lot of issues that you’ll find in many of these tubers and these underground roots that generally point out the fact that we would be pretty smart to in most cases cook them, and in many cases especially if we find that they don’t make us feel that well to peel them as well. So, I am going to not hack on the eating raw sweet potatoes bandwagon. At this point in my life, I will stick by my tried and true recipe which is… drumroll please… (drums playing) Soak them in oil like a nice avocado or coconut or extra virgin olive oil. Put some paprika, some sea salt, some black pepper, and just a touch of cayenne in there, and then mix them all together. So, at this point before doing all these sweet potatoes, you cut them into like stick fries-style strips, laying just – lay all those out on a baking sheet, you bake them about 350, 400 ‘til they’re nice and crispy, ahhh! It’s heaven on a baking sheet.
Brock: You know, I do almost exactly the same thing except I wrap them in bacon.
Ben: Uhmm, uhmm… bacon wrapped sweet potato fries. Sound laborious but delicious.
Brock: That’s worth it. Solely worth it!
Ben: Yeah! So, speaking of a completely untouchable recipe, we actually have a review that someone left us for the show.
Brock: What?
Ben: So, yeah, here’s the deal – here’s the deal. Don’t hit stop yet. I know you wanna hit stop ‘cause it’s like the things are over, blah blah blah but you wanna hear this review. It’s pretty good…
Brock: If you’d hit stop last week, you would have missed out on the Sean Connery impressions.
Ben: So anyways, if you leave a review on iTunes, first of all it’s good karma for all of the laborious, deliciousness we put into the show even when we have diarrhea, but it also helps to…
Brock: We do not have diarrhea…
Ben: I – well, yes. I’m speaking for myself, dude. You don’t yet, Brock.
Brock: And my shorts are perfectly clean.
Ben: Yes. Anyways though, if you leave an iTunes review, we not only send you some cool gear – t-shirt, water bottle, really cool beanie, if your review gets read on the show, but you also help to increase the rankings, you get more eyeballs on the show. If you go to it right now, just go to iTunes and you leave a review or you go to the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/317 and you leave a review, you’ll get to see the new podcast artwork which basically is me, half-naked looking like I stole something and I’m jumping out from a wall…
Brock: You’re jumping a wall ‘cause you robbed the liquor store.
Ben: Yeah. Looks like I robbed a liquor store or I’ve got like a pack of cigarette I grabbed out of the 711 and I’m runnin’ like hell. So anyways though, leave a review. It helps. And today we have a review from Robearius called “Untouchable”. Brock, you wanna take it away?
Brock: “I had a Major League soccer player recommends Ben’s book Beyond Training to me. Soon after I discovered his podcast and haven’t looked back. Ben is an information machine and his podcasts are like going to class where you walk away learning something – be it small or large.” I’m glad he differentiates between the classes where you walk out having learned nothing. Yeah.
Ben: Versus having learned all about liquid explosion poo.
Brock: Yeah, and how to make it crazy colors. “You cannot go wrong with this podcast. This is the most informative and exciting source of information on health and fitness that I have found.”
Ben: Well, that might be an over exaggeration. I wouldn’t say we are the most exciting. I would say there’s probably some kind of an ESPN football podcast out there somewhere that’s just riveting but we’ll take second place.
Brock: Okay. I’m okay with that.
Ben: Okay.
Brock: I am proud to be a follower of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. If you are not a follower, you are missing out!
Ben: Yeah!
Brock: “Thanks for all your hard work, Ben.”
Ben: An information machine – I like that!
Brock: Uhmm.
Ben: Maybe I should begin to speak my robotic line…
Brock: There’s actually a crank on the back of Ben’s head, needs septic crank above it, the information flows.
Ben: That’s right. It’s called the propeller hat.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Keeps the ladies away. So, anyways though, that wraps up today’s show. We do have a fantastic show coming this weekend and I don’t know if you’re a listener, you need to go back and listen to the show we did last weekend on how to get ripped with yoga – which was actually a pretty interesting episode. This week, I’m trying to remember what our weekend episode is.
Brock: I guess the Apnea.
Ben: Oh! The sleep! Yeah, this is a good one. This is really a good one. Y’all wanna listen this week sleep apnea episode for sure if you care at all.
Brock: (snoring sound) Alright, that was my sleep apnea impression.
[1:00:02.6]
Ben: Alright folks, have a healthy week!
Visit bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and performance advice.
[1:00:47.3] END
May 13, 2015 Podcast: Is Your Blood Pressure Too Low, What To Do Before And After Surgery To Recover Faster, Spreading Exercise Through The Day vs. Doing It All At Once, and Is Raw Sweet Potato Healthy?
Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right (or go to SpeakPipe), use the Contact button on the app, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, Skype “pacificfit” or use the “Ask Ben” form at the bottom of this page.
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- YES, you can temporarily change pH of your body to help exercise. Here’s how. And here’s how to ensure you don’t get “the shitz”.
- Here’s what happens to your body when everything you eat is organic.
- Lloyd’s of London will no longer insure you or your kid against WiFi.
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June 3-6, 2015: Nourish Vermont: Traditional Foods and Health Gathering. Come learn the core principles of traditional diets, inspired by the teachings of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and explore how embracing this lifestyle can contribute to one’s health, wellness and longevity. Hear Ben and Jessa speak on ancestral food preparation methods, and enjoy nutrient-dense, locally and organically grown vegetables, pastured and grass–fed meat, raw dairy products, and fermented vegetables. Click here for all details and to register.
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Listener Q&A:
As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Brock Skywalker Armstrong, the Podcast Sidekick and Audio Ninja.
Is Your Blood Pressure Too Low?
Carl says: His blood pressure is always well below 90/60 and has always been told how great that is. He just came across a comment from a nutritionist on how low blood pressure could be an indication of an electrolyte imbalance/deficiency. The nutritionist also said that this can lead to depression and insomnia. Carl is wondering what you think of this and if you have an suggestions on how he can raise his blood pressure – aside from adding salt to the diet or mineral drops to water.
In my response, I recommend:
–Adrenal Stress Index test
What To Do Before And After Surgery To Recover Faster
Lucy says: Her 7-year-old daughter has to go in for an operation to remove her adenoids, tonsils and bent septum. The doctor says that is the only way she will be able to breath properly. What can she do prior to the surgery and after to prepare and repair her gut from the surgery and the antibiotics?
In my response, I recommend:
–NatureFlex
–EnergyBits (use discount code “BEN” for 10% off your next order of Energy Bits)
–Restore Curcumin
–Probiotics
-American Nutraceuticals Vitamin C
–This article by Jack Kruse
Spreading Exercise Through The Day vs. Doing It All At Once
Jon says: He is also a fan, like you, of doing things like 15 pull-ups every time he passes his pull-up bar or doing 40 press-ups occasionally throughout the day. This “Charles Atlas” type workout can result in some high amounts of reps through out a day but could you explain how this compares to doing a more targeted workout at one time in the day? Like 30-40 minutes of Superset training or German Biometric Training.
In my response, I recommend:
-Truth About Exercise video
Is Raw Sweet Potato Healthy?
Allie says: She is wondering what you think of eating raw sweet potato? She likes to have a few thin slices of raw organic raw sweet potato after dinner to cure the after dinner munchies. She thinks it is pretty tasty and it doesn’t hurt her stomach at all. Is this an ok thing to do? Any benefits?
In my response, I recommend:
–This article on raw potatoes.