Spotting Hidden Heart Disease With Ultrasound, Artery Plaque Reversal From Natto, Why CIMT Beats Most Hospital Scans, & More With Joseph Ence

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

Joseph Ence [00:00:05]: The layers of the artery are very important. When the walls get thick, that's usually metabolic issues. Too much sugar, too much insulin causes this lining to get thicker. But also plaques will form when you have nefarious molecules. LP, LD-A, dense LDL. Those come bombing up the pipe, and you would think the blood flows evenly, but there's eddies in the stream, there's Bernoulli effects.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:28]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:00:28]: And it causes damage to the walls. It gets worn out, and then those little dense molecules get pushed in. The body sends in a white blood cell. They gobble it up, but it turns into a fatty streak or a plaque.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:39]: Is that called like, a foam?

Joseph Ence [00:00:40]: Foam cells, yeah. They aggregate, and they're pussy and nasty and pimply.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:44]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:00:45]: And over time, the body will calcify it. That's the. That's the traditional knowledge right now is that you'll get these calcified plaques at the end of your life, and those are measured with the coronary calcium score, which is a great test, but it's not a tracking test. Your score is only going to go up as your body calcifies more. So looking at this with ultrasound, you can map it. I can tell you where every plaque is, I can tell you how much plaque is there, and then I can compare you to the American population.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:09]: 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. Joe, we've hung out at conferences before, and I know you as the guy who does scans on people's necks to figure out what's going on with their hearts. And. And by the way, if you're listening to this episode, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/ CIMT for all the show notes, because this one's gonna be pretty video rich. But, Joe, how do you describe yourself to people in terms of, like, what you do?

Joseph Ence [00:01:54]: I like playing with technology, and there's a lot of tools that the FDA's use that aren't brought into regular practice.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:01]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:02:02]: Most people don't.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:03]: Do you stuff the FDA's use?

Joseph Ence [00:02:04]: The FDA uses this to track the efficacy of all the statins. There is a rich history of research comparing this test to every lipid profile, okay. Blood pressure, every metric related to vascular disease.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:18]: How'd you get into playing with FDA computers?

Joseph Ence [00:02:22]: When I was a teenager, I broke into a hospital and fired up the ultrasound machine. I thought, this is fun. Well, my sister broke her leg and they said, don't touch that.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:30]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:02:31]: So I of course fired it. And I was like, you can see live images in real time and this is not taught to every kid. There's no. It's used on pregnancies. It's pretty safe.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:40]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:02:40]: So after that, after college, I got my degrees and stuff and I'm like, I want to do something fun. And I couldn't make money with the degrees I got. So I worked with a guy who did ultrasound and he showed me the ropes. How to be of service to some clinics because they want tests that may not be cash paid. And this is one of them.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:57]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:57]: So you didn't even get a degree in medical imaging or anything like that? You just picked all this stuff up along the way?

Joseph Ence [00:03:03]: Correct.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:04]: You're like the rogue diagnostic technician.

Joseph Ence [00:03:07]: Yeah, I have no medical credentials, but I am the best in the world at this.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:10]: Okay, so by this stuff, what exactly is this machine that's in front of us right now?

Joseph Ence [00:03:17]: So this is a standard hospital ultrasound machine. You'll see this in any highest quality you could hope for. Just the name brand, everything. I wanted to bring the best. But Also these smaller $5,000 probes are just as compelling on the images. You can see fatty streaks in the arteries. You can see the vessels, you can track them all the way. You can see clots.

Joseph Ence [00:03:38]: And what's special about this is it does every body part. I need a different ultrasound probe for this, for your heart, your liver, whatever. This will emulate all of them.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:46]: What is that?

Joseph Ence [00:03:47]: It's a digital ultrasound chip.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:49]: Digital ultrasound chip plugs into a tabletop. This is different than what somebody would use if they want to like look at a baby.

Joseph Ence [00:03:54]: No, you could do that with this too. Now really, you can do hearts, you can do valves. The imaging is incredible. Eyes, MSK, muscular injection, and joints. Get that stuff. Exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:06]: Is this what you want? New technology?

Joseph Ence [00:04:07]: This is out about three years and only in the last year has the quality gotten so good that my long term techs are dumping the big machines.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:14]: For the smaller ones. Okay, I know you're gonna show me how all this stuff works, but for you in your day to day, are you like traveling to doctor's offices to teach them how to use this stuff or are you more kind of. Because I've only run into you at conferences and expos before we decided to meet up at my house here.

Joseph Ence [00:04:29]: Yeah, so at the conferences I do this. We do this for the wealthy. The powerful. The people who don't want to be famous, they want to live a good, long life. They want to look and see and make sure their arteries are clean. There's no plaque, there's no buildup. But about 80% of the people I scan, they'll have some plaque that I can show them, and that's compelling.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:46]: Okay. All right.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:47]: I wanna show you something I've got. You can stay there. I'm just gonna grab this from the shelf. I have this book. I've been wanting to do a podcast about this book. I don't know if you've heard about this one before by Ford Brewer and Todd Eldredge called Prevention Myths.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:00]: Oh, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:00]: Why stress tests can't predict your heart attack and which tests actually do. And I still haven't nailed them down to get them on the podcast. But this talks about all the problems with just relying on lipid panels for knowing what your cardiovascular risk potential is and potentially some of the radiation issues with doing repeat CT angiographies like this clearly scan that everybody's kind of into, and they talk about CIMT in here. Carotid Intima Media Thickness score. And I immediately thought of you because I learned a ton in here. But see, here's the page. Carotid Intima Media Thickness testing. So this book obviously was fantastic.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:39]: But for people who are just watching this podcast and aren't going to read the book, how do you describe this whole CIMT thing to people?

Joseph Ence [00:05:46]: Well, the layers of the artery are very important. When the walls get thick, that's usually metabolic issues. Too much sugar, too much insulin causes this lining to get thicker. But also plaques will form when you have nefarious molecules, LP, LDA, dense, LDL, those come bombing up the pipe. And you would think the blood flows evenly, but there's eddies in the stream, there's Bernoulli effects, and it causes damage to the walls. It gets worn out, and then those little dense molecules get pushed in. The body sends in a white blood cell. They gobble it up, but it turns into a fatty streak or a plaque.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:23]: Is that called like a foam?

Joseph Ence [00:06:24]: Foam cells, yeah. They aggregate and they're pussy and nasty and pimply.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:28]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:06:29]: And over time, the body will calcify it. That's the traditional knowledge right now, is that you'll get these calcified plaques at the end of your life. And those are measured with the coronary calcium score, which is a great test, but it's not a tracking test. Your score is only going to go up as your body calcifies. More.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:44]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:06:45]: So looking at this with ultrasound, you can map it, I can tell you where every plaque is, I can tell you how much plaque's there. And then I can compare you to the American population.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:53]: You can do this in the heart.

Joseph Ence [00:06:55]: I look right here as a window to the heart.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:57]: I was gonna say, because that's what I call the carotid. Right. So this test, the carotid Intima Media thickness score, from what I understand, what I read in this book, it correlates decently to like one of these fancy clearly scans that people are doing for plaque analysis. What are your thoughts as far as correlative power to going into the hospital for one of the fancier angiographies?

Joseph Ence [00:07:23]: Clearly makes beautiful reports. And they will tell you what's going on in your vessels. They straighten it out all beautiful. And you feel like you got a thorough. But those scores traditionally go up. Plaques don't traditionally disappear according to peer reviewed science that you and I get. We'll talk a little bit later about some other substances from the Blue Zones in China or, sorry, Japan and Italy. But yeah, they correlate pretty tight.

Joseph Ence [00:07:45]: But the technicians and I talk, we're like, when I see a bunch of plaque in the neck, I would expect the coronary calcium score to also be high. It doesn't correlate when we gossip amongst ourselves. But the research is out there.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:56]: Okay, so then if you're just looking at the carotid, if somebody has like plaque break loose, it's usually not breaking loose in the carotid, right?

Joseph Ence [00:08:05]: It's breaking loose for a stroke.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:07]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:07]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:08:08]: For a stroke, it's a. Correct. It's a good indicator. And this six inch is good of your 100,000 miles. It's supposed to be correlative.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:14]: Okay.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:14]: It's supposed to be correlative, meaning. And this is kind of like what I'm wondering, like if I were to get a test like this, which is ultrasound, so it's not super invasive and we'll demonstrate what it looks like. And there's not a lot of radiation. Could I use this instead of like an angiography for long term predictive power on how much calcium or plaque I might have?

Joseph Ence [00:08:36]: Yeah. This is the preferred tracking tool of the FDA for vascular health, cardiovascular health. Are the walls thin and limber? Are they getting thick and stressed? Is the plaque forming? You can see the process ongoing in a six inches of artery, but the rest of the body correlates highly compared to all the other reference ranges. But yeah, this is one of the best, most Effective, no side effects. You can use it in your office. It's getting cheaper and better all the time.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:06]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:06]: I mean, obviously you'd still need somebody who knows what they're doing, because I think I even read this in this book, Prevention Myths, that it can be good as a predictive tool, but the skill of the person doing it and the ability of the person doing it to be able to actually interpret the data is pretty important.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:26]: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:09:27]: Having a technician that knows what they're looking for. But we're getting doctors doing this with 20 hours of training, four hours of training, and then they upload their scan every day, and you build into it. But there's two parts that are important. The tracking of the lining is important because that's your tracking tool. How thick is this? What's your vascular age? But the plaques, those could be anywhere. And if they're soft and gooey and dangerous, or if they become a little more secure, the body will fibrous them up. And then at the end of the cycle, they're calcified. They snap like chalk on cadavers.

Joseph Ence [00:10:00]: When they take it out, it snaps like chalkboard chalk. It's visceral.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:04]: So when you talk about calcium, a lot of times I see it described, or plaque, I guess I see it described as stable versus unstable. And for example, you'll see a lot of athletes who have high calcium scan scores, but it's supposedly more stable, tightly packed calcium. And then in people who are less healthy, it is unstable. As far as differentiating between stable versus unstable, does it test like this?

Joseph Ence [00:10:30]: Yeah, you can see the difference. When they're calcified, they're bright. There's a shadow underneath them you can't ultrasound, can't see through. Calcium. When they're soft and gooey and fresh and gelatinous, that's when they're nasty and most dangerous because that rips open or pops the cap comes off the plaque, and you get this thrombus or clot that goes up to your brain or heart, and that's. That's the problem.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:50]: How many people have you done this on?

Joseph Ence [00:10:52]: Personally? 4,000. But my database has a quarter million, 300,000 in it.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:56]: I've seen at conferences where there's, like, you know, biohackers and athletes, and some people are probably not healthy. Like, have you found any correlative patterns? Like, have you seen, like, athletes have more stable plaque? Or have you found, like, people who are supposed to be really healthy aren't? Like, what have you found?

Joseph Ence [00:11:13]: Yeah, I've had a couple surprises. I was in Dallas scanning and some 60 year old testosterone replacement dudes came up. And I've scanned enough that they always have a 20% ring around their arteries. Pretty cons, really.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:25]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:26]: Now, are you talking like therapeutic TRT or are we talking like guys who are obviously juicing and are like way.

Joseph Ence [00:11:33]: More buffs than they should be at 60?

Ben Greenfield [00:11:35]: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:36]: Because I mean, like I'm on TRT, my levels are at like 800.

Joseph Ence [00:11:39]: I'm not knocking it. I take it too.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:41]: Yeah, yeah, but you're talking about guys who are maybe abusing.

Joseph Ence [00:11:44]: 65, 70, just. Okay, good for you.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:47]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:11:48]: But I scanned him and he had. I scan enough of them that I know that that plaque's there. His was almost gone. And he's telling me he's on this natto diet. Nattokinase.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:56]: Nattokinase. I take that.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:58]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:12:00]: And he told me that he takes it with several peptase, which is the enzyme the silkworm uses to gobble too. Yeah, that's the stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:06]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:07]: Apparently, like I. Because I looked into the things that could potentially regress plaque.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:10]: That's it.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:11]: Or decrease plaque progression. Nattokinase was in there. Vitamin K is another one. Serrapeptase is another. I have a lot of sources of those in my diet. Like, not to sound like the fox guarding the hen house, but like Kion and one of the supplement companies I own, we have a joint product that has a ton of serrapeptase and turmerosaccharides in it. And I take that more for recovery, but I know it has an impact on the heart. And then this company, Novos, they have these gummies that they say target the seven key pathways of aging.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:42]: So they got like lutein and zeaxanthin. I think ginseng is in there, but those have nattokinase in there.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:47]: And.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:47]: And then Dr. Darshan Shah, who's a super cool physician down in LA, he and I partnered up with a company he has called Vitaboom. And I basically took everything I could find for plaque regression and had him put it all in one packet. It's called the Ben Greenfield Heart Health Pack or something like that, but it's got nattokinase in it as well. I haven't done a lot of CIMTs to actually test in real time how I'm doing. It'll be interesting to test me later on and see where at. But yeah, like I'm super cognizant of this stuff due to high genetic risk for cardiovascular disease and I already have, like. I had, like, 8% plaque in my LVA when I tested three years ago.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:29]: CT angiography.

Joseph Ence [00:13:30]: So endurance athletes do pound their arteries pretty good.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:33]: Yeah, like 20 years of Ironman triathlon and Spartan. And I'm sure that's. That's what a lot of that's from.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:38]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:13:38]: I've scanned the Denver Broncos, and they, they, they. I don't know if it's the. The blood pressure spikes or the. I don't know, but it's tough on the arteries. Those guys that do more than 100 miles a week.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:48]: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:49]: What's gold standard for tracking? Like, if somebody were to. I don't want to ask you this too. Like. Like how somebody could actually get this, but if someone were to get. This is every month, is every six months.

Joseph Ence [00:14:00]: It doesn't move very quickly. Six months is aggressive. A year was about right. Five years. If you're pretty clean and you just want to do tracking. Tracking.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:07]: That's pretty similar to an end geography, then, because they say like, once every two to five years.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:10]: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:11]: Okay. So I think when you and I talked last, you said you have, like, a directory of practitioners who could do this.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:20]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:21]: Is that the Vasolabs?

Joseph Ence [00:14:22]: The Vasolabs website will tell you all the locations where we have contractors and you can get it done. But if you're an office or clinic, we'll fly a tech out to you or we'll find a local tech, so you can do it monthly or quarterly. That's the bulk of my businesses. The conferences we go to, the. The people we help, the people we educate. That's all fun and bonus.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:40]: Okay, all right, cool. What else?

Ben Greenfield [00:14:42]: What were you talking about with Japan besides Nattokinase? It's the same thing. The Blue Zones, man.

Joseph Ence [00:14:46]: Do you remember where everybody is tracking down the Blue Zones? People that live over 100 years old. And what do they have in common? And there's a couple pockets in the world. And so I got into that Natto because some doctors were emailing me price and potency of the supplies they get. And I'm like, all right, natto. I pull the research studies, and on a thousand patients over a year, it opened the arteries 30%.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:06]: That's impressive.

Joseph Ence [00:15:07]: That's incredible. Because what the traditional science is, you'll calcify the plaque and then just go into the night with a bunch more calcium in your body. But in these Blue Zones, they had these diets. The antipasti, the vinegary foods. The fungus is in their diet. They're eating close to the earth. They give service and receive service from others. They live in a community.

Joseph Ence [00:15:28]: I'm trying to pattern my life a little tighter to that because if you have any of those things, you're not going to make it.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:36]: Isn't actual natto like the fermented, slimy soybeans?

Joseph Ence [00:15:39]: It tastes so horrible.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:40]: Yeah, I wasn't getting. I used to race triathlons in Japan. I'd had that for breakfast, like mustard and a seaweed wrap. I didn't mind it that much. This was years ago. My wife and I even figured out how to make it and it was too laborious and barely anybody we knew even liked it came over. But I'm pretty sure that's the natural source of nattokinase is actual fermented. I think it's a soybean.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:03]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:16:03]: Fermented soybeans. They taste horrible. It's like if you've been on a farm, a bucket of wheat that's been left out too long. That's the smell. I was getting better potency from the live stuff than the pilled stuff. I have two little plaques that I'm tracking myself. And so I was taking the natto pills after meeting those muscle heads. God bless them, they're great guys.

Joseph Ence [00:16:23]: And I was tracking the plaque. It wasn't shrinking until I went about six months on the natto, the earthy stuff, and that was a lot more effective.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:32]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:32]: I wonder if there's a place because. Not that I want to encourage people to not have an intimate connection to their food, but a place you could buy it that's a decent source natto, I'll tell you, so you wouldn't have to make it yourself.

Joseph Ence [00:16:45]: Japanese food stores. Not Korean, not Asian, not Chinese. The Japanese eat it for breakfast. There's hardcore about. It comes in these little Styrofoam packets. They're like a buck each. They're crazy cheap. And try a bunch of different ones.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:57]: Styrofoam can't be that great for the microplastic forever chemicals piece. But there's got to be. There's got to be a decent, healthy source of it, too, because I'm sure other people have looked into this. I'll do some digging myself and put it in the show notes for people who are watching. What about, like, modern tactics from the pharmaceutical industry? And the reason I ask this is that the first people ever did my scan were the folks from Fountain Life. I was out in Florida and they did an angiography on me and they told me they literally had hundreds of patients that they'd seen some successful plaque regression in via the use of a PCSK9 inhibitor. Like the twice a month or the twice a month injection that supposedly upregulates LDL receptors. So LDL has more to bind to and you get less plaque accumulation.

Joseph Ence [00:17:46]: Yeah, that's only for the hyper rich as of right now. But the people I've scanned their IMT, the wall thickness dropped in half. They showed me reports of what it was before. I didn't believe them because I've never seen a drop that much. It was impressive.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:00]: From What? From that PCSK9?

Ben Greenfield [00:18:03]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:03]: Okay, so like a repatha.

Joseph Ence [00:18:05]: Repatha, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:07]: Yeah, it is.

Joseph Ence [00:18:08]: It scares me.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:09]: It's so efficient, it's expensive. I started taking it and took it for a year and a half after they told me that and my insurance covered it. I think my co pay was like 250 bucks a month. So I mean it's still not cheap but considering the effects it's supposed to have. The problem I noticed was my LDL started to get very low. Like I dropped in like the 60s on that, from the 200s down into the 60s. And of course considering cholesterol as a precursor for hormones, cell membranes, et cetera, I started to get concerned that it was too effective.

Joseph Ence [00:18:42]: How do you reconcile that research study where everybody over 100 has cholesterol over 200?

Ben Greenfield [00:18:47]: 250, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:48]: I suspect that centenarians probably have robust endogenous antioxidant mechanisms and low amounts of inflammation that will cause that cholesterol to not become atherosclerotic. Because you look at cholesterol, what's going to cause it to become atherosclerotic? Racing ironman triathlons, stress, smoking, poor sleep, high blood glucose, high seed oil intake for high amount of reactive oxygen species, high amounts of sugar. So I think if you look at a centenarian, in many cases their lifestyle, high amounts of physical activity, sunshine, grounding, earthing, low inflammation, happiness, being with other people, high amount of endogenous antioxidant production even from mild amounts of hormetic stressors like low dose alcohol, you get all these factors present that I think would render the cholesterol that they do have to have far less potential for being atherosclerotic. Yeah, that's what I suspect at least.

Joseph Ence [00:19:49]: Yeah, I think you're spot on there.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:51]: Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:52]: Let's do a little show and tell. Let's show people how this actually play.

Joseph Ence [00:19:56]: With the toys works.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:57]: Yeah. And again if you're listening, this might be kind of boring. Check out the video. BenGreenfieldLife.com/ CIMT.

Joseph Ence [00:20:04]: Alright, this is my Favorite model of the artery. There's one on these on each side of the neck. We're going to measure the thickness of the walls. That's the metric. Depending how thick or thin the artery flexes, more or less based on that number. And then if there's plaques, and on most Americans, 80% of them, I'll find a plaque that I can show you. This is the same ultrasound used in.

Joseph Ence [00:20:24]: The hospital, I think 7 to 11 megahertz.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:29]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:20:30]: And we'll just put it right on his neck.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:32]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:33]: Make sure we get some of the screen on the camera, too. Now, should I not talk?

Joseph Ence [00:20:36]: You can talk.

Joseph Ence [00:20:37]: Okay. I'll tell you if you need to shut up.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:39]: Show my upper.

Joseph Ence [00:20:40]: Yeah, Let me put in my protocols. And so everything I'm going to take is already annotated. Now, just for reference, here's your trachea voice box. If you swallow, you'll see that move.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:51]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:20:52]: Your thyroid gland kind of wraps around your trachea and off to the side there.

Joseph Ence [00:20:56]: We're looking down the tube of that artery.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:58]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:20:59]: As I move up towards your brain, it's going to get a little bit.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:01]: Bigger.

Joseph Ence [00:21:03]: And split into two right there. Big one feeds the brain. Little one feeds your nose and cheeks with blood. So I gotta lay it out here. And that lining is the intima in media.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:18]: That's exactly what you show on that model.

Joseph Ence [00:21:20]: It's alive, breathe it. Exchanges nitric oxide with the blood, has tons of functions we're still learning about.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:27]: What's that mean? Where it goes red and orange.

Joseph Ence [00:21:29]: Red is going up to the brain, and blue is going backwards. And I'll show you where there's some retrograde flow where it goes backwards in a couple spots, and everybody's got it.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:40]: Here.

Joseph Ence [00:21:41]: I measure the speed of the blood going through, make sure we're in the right range. We are. And here we can see both channels. This one feeds the brain. If I move it, that one feeds the nose and face. So I'm following the walls, making sure they look even and thin and limber. And up here, you got a little bit of a. Doesn't look calcified yet.

Joseph Ence [00:22:08]: A little bit of a what? Build up a little bit of plaque.

Joseph Ence [00:22:13]: Kind of sticking on the wall.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:15]: And you can just tell that from, like, looking at it? It's not calcified by how dense it is or.

Joseph Ence [00:22:20]: Yeah. So the blood is.

Joseph Ence [00:22:22]: Is dark and liquid. And so if I look in the center of that. There's a little bit of a pool. It's a little dark pocket, but it's.

Joseph Ence [00:22:29]: Got a nice cap on it.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:30]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:22:30]: Holding it in.

Joseph Ence [00:22:31]: So I wouldn't worry about that guy.

Joseph Ence [00:22:35]: But you can see here, let me show you from some other angles. So right there, a little bit of thickening there. Let me see if I can get him straight to the top.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:55]: Here.

Joseph Ence [00:22:55]: We can do it. So there's a side view of that.

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

Joseph Ence [00:23:04]: Point it out. Little calcified nugget on top.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:07]: Those little kind of like nodule looking things.

Joseph Ence [00:23:09]: Yes, sir. I gotta get a color picture showing the blood going through. So this is my favorite.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:20]: That's the blood coming back. The blue blood coming back.

Joseph Ence [00:23:22]: Hold on. I think it switched.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:26]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:23:26]: So blue is going up right now. And you'll see little pockets of red where the.

Joseph Ence [00:23:33]: You get this retrograde and everybody has it. So if your cholesterol is not perfect, well, how does this plaque deposit? You've got this irritation.

Joseph Ence [00:23:40]: And if your blood's too sugary or too insulin, if that's a word, causes irritation and eventually it'll wear away and cause that lining to become more easily penetrated.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:54]: Kind of like when you're swimming in a river and you get towards the edges and there's a few places where the water is like reverse direction.

Joseph Ence [00:23:59]: Exactly. The eddies in the stream.

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

Ben Greenfield [00:24:03]: Interesting.

Joseph Ence [00:24:03]: All right, so now we're going up to the ICA. A little bit thick there. I'll show you a top down of that..

Joseph Ence [00:24:22]: And then show you the blood flow going through it. I think there's all kinds of turbulence, right?

Ben Greenfield [00:24:32]: Yeah. Wow.

Joseph Ence [00:24:34]: You would think you would sense that or feel it, but.

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

Joseph Ence [00:24:39]: Now without these tools, you'd never know.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:46]: And so the Intima Media part of carotid Intima Media, that's just basically that inner lining of the vasculature.

Joseph Ence [00:24:53]: Correct. So in research, they would just measure.

Joseph Ence [00:24:55]: How thick that is. But what I'm trying to prove to everybody and just showing everybody. Let's take a tour.

Joseph Ence [00:25:00]: Let's map it out. And now this is your tracking tool. So kind of like the clearly for arteries.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:06]: Right.

Joseph Ence [00:25:08]: All right, I'm getting five more pictures.

Joseph Ence [00:25:09]: Of this lining just so I can get a really good average of what we're measuring.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:13]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:25:14]: And I'll switch to your left side.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:16]: Okay.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:17]: You tend to often see differences in one side versus the other.

Joseph Ence [00:25:20]: Yeah, I've seen as much as 70% blocked on one side and 30 on another.

Joseph Ence [00:25:24]: But most people are smaller versions of that. Like 2510.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:31]: Did you say 70.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:33]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:33]: So when you see something like that, like you were showing me those little nodules I had, would that mean, like, that would take up 70% of that space that we're seeing?

Joseph Ence [00:25:40]: Correct. Like 70% of that.

Joseph Ence [00:25:42]: And you find a lot of mine.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:43]: Wasn't anywhere near that?

Ben Greenfield [00:25:44]: No, no.

Joseph Ence [00:25:45]: 5%.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:45]: Okay.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:46]: I was gonna say.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:47]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:47]: It seemed like the blood could get through pretty well. You ever test somebody super young and they have deposits?

Joseph Ence [00:25:56]: I've never tested these.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:57]: I mean, like teenagers or.

Joseph Ence [00:25:59]: Yeah, their dad died at 30 and they had me scan them.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:01]: It was genetic.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:02]: Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Joseph Ence [00:26:04]: These Latino girls, super cute. They're like teenagers.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:07]: Oh, they're females.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:08]: Yeah. Wow.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:09]: Because that's less common for females to have the way less high risk of cardiovascular disease from plaque, Right?

Ben Greenfield [00:26:14]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:26:15]: There's a curse with testosterone.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:17]: Yeah. Really?

Ben Greenfield [00:26:18]: Direct correlation with testosterone, huh.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:20]: That's interesting. Well, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:26:24]: Or the cardio protective of estrogen, whatever.

Joseph Ence [00:26:26]: You want to call it.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:27]: Nature makes you strong and virile and really good at making babies. And takes you out by attacking your ticker.

Joseph Ence [00:26:32]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:32]: Lion dies young bastards.

Joseph Ence [00:26:38]: Great blood flow.

Joseph Ence [00:26:41]: But these bigger machines have better blood flow. Like, that's for sure.

Joseph Ence [00:26:45]: I won't deny that the color is more detailed.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:55]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:26:55]: Like, this side I'm not finding nearly.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:57]: As the left side has less than the right.

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

Ben Greenfield [00:27:01]: Interesting.

Joseph Ence [00:27:01]: It's common enough, but I don't have a reason for it.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:04]: Yeah. Huh.

Joseph Ence [00:27:05]: The best hypothesis is like, what side.

Joseph Ence [00:27:07]: Do you sleep on?

Ben Greenfield [00:27:08]: Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:09]: By the way, when you were talking about testosterone, do you ever see any data that shows, like, the actual levels of total or free T and correlation.

Joseph Ence [00:27:16]: With not at that granular level?

Joseph Ence [00:27:18]: I would like to see that, though. That would be a good study.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:20]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:20]: I don't know if it exists. I mean, it might.

Joseph Ence [00:27:22]: It probably does.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:23]: I have to dig into it.

Joseph Ence [00:27:24]: There are so many research studies that I have not yet gotten into. Yeah, that's super mild. Just that little bump may just be a keloid.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:34]: Found any with as many as tests as you've done? Like, any difference between, like, Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:40]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:27:40]: African American Indians.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:42]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:27:42]: They're genetically. Got a tough road to hoe.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:47]: Indians or Native Americans?

Joseph Ence [00:27:48]: India Indians.

Joseph Ence [00:27:49]: India Indians, Mexicans. If they're on a high glucose diet, they get screwed up real fast.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:56]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:27:58]: I read a whole book about that.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:59]: Called The Jungle Effect. How like Hispanics who eat a traditional low glycemic index corn, maize, bean legume type of diet, as they might in Mexico, they don't really manifest a lot of the insulin, glucose and diabetic issues. And then as soon as they get into more of like a Tex Mex high glucose westernized diet, automatically it manifests.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:20]: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:28:21]: Blankets and fry bread were not the best things to give.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:24]: Something like Cameroon, Africa, high genetic risk of colon cancer. It doesn't manifest because of the high fiber diet. And then an African American and like, I don't know, like the Southeast, you know, eating fried foods automatically you see the increase in colon cancer.

Joseph Ence [00:28:37]: So the IMT measurement, 0.7, 0.746.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:40]: So now we're looking at the actual data for those of you watching the video.

Joseph Ence [00:28:42]: And I'll generate a complete report. That's colorful. That has all the images.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:46]: So. So walk me through this.

Joseph Ence [00:28:48]: So just the right common right side artery walls were 0.7. The left were 0.741746. So those are gonna be reasonable. I'll graph it out to exactly what it means in the report, but they're not bad.

Joseph Ence [00:29:01]: Okay, they're done.

Joseph Ence [00:29:04]: Now we'll scan you on the new machine.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:06]: Oh, it's different one.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:07]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:29:08]: This one is.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:09]: Oh, I see you were using this. And this is the nice one you just talked about.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:13]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:14]: You just want to like show people the difference between the two, huh?

Joseph Ence [00:29:16]: I do, I do. Because the best part about this test is not the tracking tool. It's not that you have plaque. It's that when you show someone the plaque, the light bulb goes off and they say, what do I do now?

Ben Greenfield [00:29:28]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:29:29]: Like it's the way to immediately emotionally invest them.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:31]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:29:32]: With a, with a path.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:33]: Right.

Joseph Ence [00:29:36]: So here, I'm going to let you hold it.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:38]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:29:38]: I'm going to just go see. I'm going to start on your right side.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:42]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:29:43]: And we'll fully take a video. When I say hit the red 30, please hit the red 30.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:46]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:29:48]: But I'll go up and down. There it is. Trach, thyroid, carotid going up.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:58]: Do you like this one better?

Joseph Ence [00:29:59]: It travels so much easier.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:01]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:30:03]: All right, hit that button. So I'm just going to go up the artery slow and even.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:09]: So when I hit that button, it just records it.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:11]: Yep.

Joseph Ence [00:30:11]: And then right there at the 3 o'clock, you'll see that little plaque, a little bit of thickening.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:16]: Does the same one we show on the other one.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:17]: Uh huh.

Joseph Ence [00:30:19]: And then I come back down and then I got people that will snip out the images and mark the locations.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:27]: Boop.

Joseph Ence [00:30:29]: And here I lay it on its side. You can see that lining all the way through.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:33]: That looks pretty good.

Joseph Ence [00:30:34]: Yeah, it Does So it's even.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:39]: Nattokinase is working.

Joseph Ence [00:30:40]: I think it is. Come back here. I had the best shot of that plaque right there. Left.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:51]: That's the trick.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:51]: Just gotta.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:52]: Just gotta get your ass to sticks with North Idaho.

Joseph Ence [00:30:55]: I'm digging it here.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:57]: Yeah, cool.

Joseph Ence [00:30:58]: Coming back down.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:59]: Cool part of the world.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:00]: All right.

Joseph Ence [00:31:01]: Red 30.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:01]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:31:06]: I mean, seeing the anatomy in real.

Joseph Ence [00:31:09]: Time was just always so cool to me.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:11]: Interesting.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:12]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:31:13]: I don't know why this isn't in every high school letting kids play with it.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:16]: Oh, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:19]: How long do you think it'll be before you could just, like, get one of these for your house and AI will interpret it for you and you can just scan yourself?

Joseph Ence [00:31:24]: I'm working on that. But I think in five years, this should be in your cell phone.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:28]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:31:28]: And you rub it on your skin.

Joseph Ence [00:31:29]: And then you get a CGI, like rendered artery or something.

Joseph Ence [00:31:33]: Yeah, I know.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:34]: I did a home EKG the other day. It was stupid. Easy via cardio with a K. It took me like two minutes and I got a. Almost like a clinical grade EKG right there in my own home.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:43]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:31:43]: We're drowning in data, though.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:45]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:31:49]: What does it mean?

Ben Greenfield [00:31:51]: Yeah, well, the software on the app, like, does the analysis and everything for you.

Joseph Ence [00:31:55]: It's incredible.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:56]: That's super cool.

Joseph Ence [00:31:58]: People are still having insurance pay 1,500 bucks for that.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:01]: I know I won't have a job soon because you don't know how many calls I have a week of people just asking me to go through their labs with them and be like, yeah, just upload them into your phone.

Joseph Ence [00:32:11]: All right, that's that.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:12]: Let Grok and sexy mode fill you in.

Joseph Ence [00:32:14]: Save study, and then I'll text you.

Joseph Ence [00:32:16]: These images, the videos. Like, I can text you right away. Patiently.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:20]: Love that.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:21]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:21]: And if you email them to me too, I will, because all my information is out there in the post anyways. I'll put them in the shownotes.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:27]: People want to see some of the images. Have you noticed anything that flies under the radar or isn't part of the public discourse currently, like certain diets or patterns? We talked about testosterone as potentially being correlative, but have you come across anything else that surprised you in terms of the people who you've tested, who you found to have or not have plaque?

Ben Greenfield [00:32:55]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:32:56]: Yeah, people. Hard living adds up on them. They've had a divorce.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:02]: Really?

Joseph Ence [00:33:02]: Yeah, I've scanned doctors and stuff. And, you know, you do this enough, you kind of get a sense. And I saw this plaque, but it was an older plaque it wasn't still developing. Her body's addressing it. It was. I said, oh, I imagine with this kind of damage. She had a divorce, like 10 years ago, five years ago. She got all panicky and froze.

Joseph Ence [00:33:20]: But stress is huge.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:22]: Yeah, Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:23]: I mean, you've even heard probably the idea that you can actually die of broken heart syndrome. You came across that before. Like, people who suffer severe loss, particularly with a relationship or a family member or a loved one, they actually experience an inflammatory reaction in cardiovascular tissue.

Joseph Ence [00:33:43]: I bet there's a whole cascade.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:44]: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:33:46]: No, I've. I've seen it, but nobody ever thinks of it like that. Like, you know those guys that retire and they die week later? Like, that was the important part of their life.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:54]: Right.

Joseph Ence [00:33:54]: And that's super common. So when we talk about the Blue Zones, to be of purpose and to be of receive service from others is super important.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:01]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:34:02]: Because if your main thing dies, you know, you got enough extra in your life that you're not just going to fall apart.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:07]: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:34:08]: That's a big one.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:09]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:34:10]: Niacin. All right, so I started like 20 years ago. Niacin had a whole sales force. Coast Pharmaceuticals, they had an extended release version. Great. Best education I've ever seen. It was like pharma reps done. Right.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:24]: Right.

Joseph Ence [00:34:24]: That ended 20, 2010, 2013, they went off patent. No more pharma reps pushing the message. Within three years, all the other pharma companies vilified niacin, took it out of the equation, said it's so it's too hard on the blood sugars.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:39]: Wait, was this.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:40]: Was this post it not being patentable?

Joseph Ence [00:34:42]: Correct.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:42]: That's interesting.

Joseph Ence [00:34:44]: Seeing how the industry works, it's kind of like.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:46]: All right, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but that's interesting.

Joseph Ence [00:34:48]: It's just the natural way the business works. So doctors who get their pharma rep in twice a week get the latest info, they think. But niacin is so powerful. It's such a. Something that's been around so long, it has such a good track record. But that flush is uncomfortable. The red. And you can get rid of that flush with pectin.

Joseph Ence [00:35:05]: Eating applesauce in a baby. Aspirin, you can get that through. But niacin is known to increase your good cholesterol, what, seven points a year? No upper limit, if you're consistent with it. Niacin is known to take care of the LP. That's the one that I. When I'm scanning patients and I see plaque on both sides, bilateral, I tell.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:25]: The doctor LP is difficult to lower. Repatha we were talking about earlier. That can have an impact. Niacin. You're right. That's another one that I've come across. I think fish oil could factor in a little bit or like an omega 3 fatty acid. But yeah, there's not a whole lot out there that puts a big dent in LP.

Joseph Ence [00:35:42]: Now there's some stuff coming, allegedly, but that's a big lifestyle one as well.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:47]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:35:47]: Stress may actually elevate it. Genetics being screwed that way.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:53]: But you see any differences between endurance athletes and weightlifters?

Ben Greenfield [00:35:58]: No.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:00]: Anything else leap out as far as things you've seen?

Joseph Ence [00:36:04]: Smoking's bad.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:05]: Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:06]: No shit.

Joseph Ence [00:36:09]: That's the obvious one.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:10]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:36:10]: And wait, like smoking.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:12]: But what about. You know, nicotine is very popular now and some people even say it might have a protective.

Joseph Ence [00:36:16]: The science on that's so interesting. It's getting pitched to me with. It cures Covid, spike protein, whatever.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:22]: It's. Yeah. That data about people who had. Who were cigarette smokers seem to suffer less of the impact from COVID than non cigarette smokers. Not to make a case for cigarette smoking, but the theory was that the nicotine seems to have some type of a protective effect.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:39]: Yeah. Yep.

Joseph Ence [00:36:41]: Bergamot is another one that nobody talks about. That fruit.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:44]: Citrus bergamot.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:45]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:45]: Interesting.

Joseph Ence [00:36:46]: Super good with the cholesterol. It's as natural as you get.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:49]: I've been trying bergamot tea in there.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:51]: Right.

Joseph Ence [00:36:52]: But you can get it candied at the Asian food stores and try to change your diet a little bit. But most people don't try to eat like their grandfathers or their grandparents ate.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:01]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:37:02]: Everything's so preserved and trisodium phosphate and all the chemicals in it. But as closest to the earth as you can get is probably the way to go.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:10]: Yeah. I don't know.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:11]: My grandpa smoked cigars and ate bagels and cream cheese, so it might depend on your grandparents. But, but, but, yeah, absolutely. The Blue Zones style.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:21]: Grand.

Joseph Ence [00:37:22]: Yeah, yeah. Italian antipasti, Vinegary foods, fungusy foods.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:26]: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:37:26]: Apple cider vinegar.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:27]: That's interesting that you keep bringing up like the. Like the vinegar, the fungus. Some people might be confused when they hear you saying fungus because obviously people get concerned about candida. Yeast infection, fungal overgrowth. All gets a bad rap. When you say fungus. What do you mean?

Joseph Ence [00:37:43]: I'm talking mushrooms in your diet.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:44]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:37:45]: The cool mushrooms. Like Lions Mane. Trying to work those things into your diet, not just in pills, but as close to the earth as you can get is What I'm saying, Fungus.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:54]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:37:55]: There's a lot of different magical mushrooms out there.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:58]: Yeah, yeah, there are.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:59]: I actually have. I've been messing around a little bit with, with amanita for. For sleep. It's like a gabaergic. It's actually the Mario mushroom.

Joseph Ence [00:38:06]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:07]: Which in high doses is highly psychedelic, but in low doses it has some interesting effects.

Joseph Ence [00:38:10]: That's the red cap Christmas one, right?

Ben Greenfield [00:38:13]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:38:15]: I just brought on an industrial mushroom.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:16]: Lab to my office out in my mini fridge in the garage right now. Just, just kind of experimenting with it.

Joseph Ence [00:38:21]: You're gonna knock.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:21]: I'm not one of those guys who trips out on anything, you know, I'm. I like to keep myself pretty sober and aware. But yeah, microdosing, it seems to have some, some cool effects.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:30]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:38:31]: A lot of guys out there mixing their own mushrooms. They're growing them and then putting them in pills for their study aids. Yeah, I tried some and they were dynamite. Like, I was zoned in, like on Ritalin.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:39]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:38:40]: It was excellent.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:40]: Yeah. I've microdosed with psilocybin for years and I think that that's a very, very good, responsible, non dangerous use. Sensory perception, creativity, spirituality.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:53]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:38:54]: Do you feel closer when you're microdosing?

Ben Greenfield [00:38:59]: I think I would say. You know what? Honestly, it's difficult to say. The reason I say that is that I usually get up, I pray, I meditate, I read the Bible, and if I'm going to take a microdose, it's usually like an hour after that. And it's been such a long time since I've actually like gone to a spiritual place after microdosing. I can tell you that when I used to kind of like trip out on drugs and stuff, which was a kind of former chapter of my life. Absolutely. You feel deeply connected to the spiritual universe. But I don't know about microdosing.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:36]: Yeah, right.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:37]: I would hazard a guess that with what macrodoses do, microdosing would probably do something like that.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:42]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:39:42]: I'm glad you gave us the drink. You did. Like, people who are drinking monsters all the time. How do you stay in tune with your body when you're blasting it?

Ben Greenfield [00:39:50]: Good minerals, good for the heart. Not sponsored by LMNT, but they're on the show now. What else you got in your little book there?

Joseph Ence [00:39:57]: Be useful. Niacin, bergamot, FDA, CBD, Telemed. There are tons of passionate doctors out there that have prevention programs designed for you. Like if you go to the cardiologist, you're going to let's say there's a dozen guys in that office. They're going to see you and test you and make sure you're taking the medicine and whatever. But there's no preventative strategies. They're not going to give you exercises to do, foods to stay if you're lucky. There's a nurse practitioner that will run that program, if there is a program.

Joseph Ence [00:40:30]: So most people don't get any prevention in their insurance. They don't get any prevention. The only things that prevention pays for are mammography, colonoscopy, AAAs, and cholesterol tests.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:42]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:40:43]: The insurance system does not pay for prevention. So it's up to you. You're gonna have to pay cash. There are doctors out there that are passionate. They have heart attack and stroke prevention programs that are dedicated for people like you. I recommend you use these guys for six months, nine months. Figure out what their, their, their playbook is, what drugs they use, if they use drugs. You can do a lot of this naturally with natto and other things like that.

Joseph Ence [00:41:06]: Cutting out sugar, seed oils. We don't have to talk about sugar and seed oils in this one.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:11]: Yeah, we've.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:12]: We've kicked that horse to death. News flash. I mean, well, sugar. I mean, like added sugars. Yeah. And we're not talking like sweet potatoes, yams, and maybe healthy whole grains. That type of approach.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:19]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:41:19]: If you can get it naturally, then all for you. Yeah, but Fruit Loops are not a. Yeah. This world.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:24]: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:25]: It's not a food group. At least barely a food group. So with the telemed thing, you mean that you endorse working with a practitioner who's using telemedicine? Is there a group that you.

Joseph Ence [00:41:37]: I like out of Springfield?

Ben Greenfield [00:41:39]: Cure Coach.

Joseph Ence [00:41:40]: Cure Coach.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:41]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:41:42]: It's an online group. These guys, they've got a great intake. They ask you so many questions that it kind of percolates into your head like, ah, okay. Oral health has an effect. Gut biome has an effect. And so after doing their intake, you're aware of more things. And then going through your life the next few months, you're going to notice sugar's in that, seed oil's in that. Cutting this out, cutting that out.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:02]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:42:03]: I mean, once you're aware, you start. It takes a while to figure out how to cut it all out.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:07]: I'm glad you brought up not only the gut microbiome, the gut heart axis isn't talked about as much as the gut brain axis, but it is important and there is a link. The other piece and this actually surprised me. I did an oral microbiome test with my doctor, with my dentist, Dr. Loud down in Phoenix. And I was lit up like a Christmas tree the first time that I did it. And she was showing me the data between your oral bacteria and risk of dementia, Alzheimer's, risk of cardiovascular disease. And you know what I did? I started doing the oil pulling in the morning. I used this stuff called simply O3.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:47]: It's like an ozone oil, oil pulling oil. I did that for like six months, came back in, did a repeat. And I was also paying better attention to flossing and oral care in general. I started tongue scraping, doing some of the ayurvedic stuff, and my biome improved dramatically. Went from being all reds to mostly greens and some yellows, as far as the risk potential being favorable. So, yeah, it's interesting, the link between oral biome and heart health.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:13]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:43:14]: A couple of things about that that interest me is husbands, wives have very similar gut oral biome profiles. And we know those help in digestion.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:23]: There's some other studies that's because. Like salivary exchange from kissing and.

Joseph Ence [00:43:26]: Correct.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:27]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:43:28]: Gut biome as well. The kissing, it goes all the way through. And I do know that in a lot of studies, your gut biome tunes up to the foods that you eat most. So if you're always eating Chinese food, you're going to get more nutrition out of that science, Chinese food. But having a diet that's so varied, your body's always kind of guessing and it can't tune up to what you're looking for.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:48]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:43:48]: So there's a lot of great research on people getting rid of their chronic issues by changing their gut biome. You've talked about that. It's just fascinating. And nobody pays attention to it, knowing that the food that's in a lot of the processed foods, the tri sodium phosphate, the so many of them, they will interrupt and you won't get the digestion. You'll get skips and lags and leaky gut syndrome, and all those things seem to happen. So paying attention to your food, your food supply, but also cultivating your whole biome, like this is yours, all of you together. Are you?

Ben Greenfield [00:44:18]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:19]: I'm glad you brought up that part too, about the biome being reflective of the foods that you eat. Because I think a lot of these microbiome tests that people are getting that are like a shotgun analysis of the genes in your gut, they'll give you, like this list of foods that you should or should not eat. And in many cases, you tend to be predisposed to do better with the foods that are a staple in your diet anyways because your gut has been trained to properly digest those and those are the bacteria that you've built up. And some people will show that they're not supposed to, let's say like vegan, they'll get a biome analysis that says they're not supposed to eat red meat. And yet part of that might be simply because they haven't been eating red meat. So it's a little paradoxical, self fulfilling problem. I'm a little suspect, yeah, I'm a little suspect of some of these gut microbiome tests that tell you what you should and should not eat. I'd much rather see a true iga, ige, IGG food allergy test to tell you something like that, just because again, I think the gut can be trained to a certain extent via biome diversity to deal with a pretty wide variety of foods.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:22]: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:45:22]: Those tests seem to be more of a snapshot of where you're at and not your potential and not what you can do.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:28]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:29]: And there might be big data that comes out eventually or that that is currently being released that proves me wrong. But that's just, I don't, I don't typically get a lot out of those tests. Especially when I'm talking with somebody on the phone looking over their test and correlating that to what they eat and I'm like, oh, you seem predisposed to do well with all the foods you're already eating. That's kind of interesting.

Joseph Ence [00:45:48]: Yeah, yeah, funny. Yeah, funny. If you're selling tests, you wouldn't, you wouldn't pitch that necessarily. You'd pitch.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:55]: Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:45:56]: Marketing has a big effect in healthcare, doesn't it?

Ben Greenfield [00:45:58]: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:59]: So what's the future of all this? I mean, in terms of how somebody listening in right now can test or expect to see this kind of stuff becoming a little bit more mainstream? You mentioned earlier that there might be some AI application in the future or ability to do it on your iPhone. You mentioned Vasolabs. What's the best thing for somebody to do right now if they're concerned about plaque and they want to get it.

Joseph Ence [00:46:27]: Looked at right now? If you want to get it looked at, go to our website. We got dozens of locations. We also have cities that we travel to. Chicago, Boston, Vasolabs.com like V A S O. V A S O Labs events.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:40]: Okay.

Joseph Ence [00:46:40]: And we travel a lot. We do events a lot. And yeah, we love Working with people and Coaching them up on whatever we can help. Everybody's got a different story, different pieces missing, or a different piece is added.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:53]: Cool, cool.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:54]: And I will. I'll put links for everybody in the show notes too, if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/ CIMT all of this book. Also, this will be an interesting one for you to look into, Joe. Yeah, Prevention Myths. Yeah, I need to do a podcast with these guys, too. There's a good book too. You can see all the.

Joseph Ence [00:47:10]: Yeah, I found Ford Brewer. I found his plaque.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:12]: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:13]: Oh, you did?

Joseph Ence [00:47:13]: I was the guy. Yeah, he showed up in an event.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:16]: Yeah.

Joseph Ence [00:47:17]: He'll tell people he's a good dude.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:19]: Cool.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:19]: Yeah, I think he's got like a YouTube channel as well. All right, cool. Thanks for tuning in, folks. And that's everything you need to know about CIMT. Again, the show notes [email protected]/ CIMT thanks so much for doing this, Joe.

Joseph Ence [00:47:32]: Thank you, man. Excellent.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:33]: To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks and content to become a the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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