Science “Lightning Round” With Ben: Burn More Calories, Sleep Deprivation Hacks, Crazy Water Facts, Spiritual Not Religious & More: Solosode 475

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, a science lightning round, how to burn more calories, sleep deprivation, hacks, crazy water facts, spiritual but not religious, and a whole lot more fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Live show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this. Howdy. Howdy ho. Welcome to today's show, in which I am. You guys often ask me what I do during podcasts. Well, I'm standing on a grounding mat.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:48]: I'm wearing an infrared heating back belt. I like to wear some of these things that just kind of soothe my body while I'm podcasting. This one's the. What is it? The biomat bio belt. Infrared light, tourmaline crystals, and infrared heat makes the back feel pretty good, actually. I'm leaning, not sitting, but I'm leaning on my Mogo Upright Stool, which just makes my pelvis feel oh so gooey. And I'm drinking this thing. An Update.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:17]: Hold it up to the camera here. Updates Energy Drink pretty good. It's got like paraxanthine, which is kind of like Creatine's kissing cousin. That's better than, I'm sorry, caffeine's kissing cousin, which is upgrade on caffeine in my opinion. It's got Alpha GPC phosphatidylcholine in there, sweetened with stevia. It's a really great blend, even some L-Theanine, some vitamin B12 in there. So anyways, I enjoy these things.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:45]: I like them because you can drink them late in the day too, and they don't disrupt sleep. Update hold it up there. Update Energy Drink. Not a sponsor of this podcast, but I guess they are now. All the show notes are going to be a BenGreenfieldlife.com/475 and I am recording this the day before I'm about to head over to London. I would imagine this podcast is probably going to come out after I've already spoken in London. But hello to those of you who I'm going to see over at the Health Optimization Summit in London.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:14]: All sorts of crazy travel coming up and amazing adventures that I'll be hosting everywhere from Croatia to Costa Rica to Portugal to Ibiza. I don't know how to say it, it's like that. Approximately. Anyways, if you want to participate in any of the events that I host all over the world and you want to join me to party and have a good time and eat good food and work out and do breath work and all those good things, go to Bengreenfieldlife.com I believe it's BenGreenfieldlife.com/calendar, but it'll also be in the show notes. Just go to BenGreenfieldlife.com/475. And then finally, before we jump into the good stuff here, which is going to be basically like a science, news flashes lightning round. If you're interested in having me come out and speak at one of your events, I especially have been doing a lot of these corporate executive events where I come to your corporation and I give a talk about how to unlock better levels of productivity and energy and sleep management and overall health for better wealth, which is a very good corollary for a corporation to look into the idea behind making your employees and yourselves healthier using all the latest, greatest biohacks and tools and tricks and tips and tactics that I have, and unlocking more wealth for your company. So anyways, go to Ben Greenfield speaking dot com forward slash booking if you want to book me to come speak at one of your events.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:43]: BenGreenfieldspeaking.com/booking so check that out again. All the show notes are BenGreenfieldlife.com/475 all right, so let's jump right in. I figure we'll start with the low hanging fruit low, I suppose, being an appropriate title in this case, because this recent article slash paper that I read was all about push-ups. Now, let me say this. I'm a fan of push-ups. I do a lot of push-ups. Um, I like to keep myself in good enough shape to drop and do 100 unbroken, meaning knees not touching the ground. I do star push-ups when I'm out in a walk, meaning a push-up, and then rotate to one side and push-up and rotate to the other side.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:28]: I do squat push-ups, which is basically like a push-up with your hands elevated on a bench or a chair or whatever. You push-up and then you bring your knees down. You touch your knees to the ground, and then you come back up to a push-up position and you push-up again. That's a great one. Shout out to I think I learned that run from Elastaboy. I'll link to Elastaboy's programs. Great follow on Instagram. He's a big mobility, you know, active movement guy.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:51]: Great follow. Great programs. I've been going through his 30 day mobility course. I think I snagged those from his course fist push-ups where I'll bring my elbow to my rib. A lot of people ask me if I do a lot of fighting. I don't. I would get beat up in a fight, most likely. But I do a lot of fist push-ups, and so I got these big, meaty hands and high bone density in my.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:09]: In my hands from fist push-ups, I do hand elevated push-ups, foot elevated push-ups. I even have this crazy rule. All right, this is embarrassing, but if you ever go to a restaurant with me and I walk out of the bathroom a little bit red-faced, it's not because I'm constipated. It's because I've either done my token 20 air squats or, yes, I will occasionally drop and do 20 push-ups and then wash my hands very, very, very well afterward and get on the business. So, yeah, I probably get about 100 pushups in every day, a variety of different moves and angles. But the reason I'm highlighting all this to you and giving you a few tips on amping up your own push-up game sprinkled throughout the day is because they looked at active middle-aged men and the risk of cardiovascular disease. Pretty simple here. But what they found was that active, middle-aged men, and I think we could probably extrapolate this to women also.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:02]: Ladies who were able to complete more than 40 push-ups at a time had a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular disease outcomes, including diagnoses of coronary artery disease and major events like heart failure, during ten years of follow-up, compared to those who are able to do less than ten push-ups. So if you can do 40 plus push-ups, it appears to be a very good way to decrease all-cause risk of mortality related to cardiovascular disease outcomes. And this was a pretty big study on a lot of dudes, 1104 active male firefighters, on which they collected data from the year 2000 to the year 2010. So the takeaway point here is you can do push-ups anytime. They're beautiful because they are a pretty functional exercise that doesn't take a lot of equipment. The side bonus is if you're wearing big rubber, built-up shoe soles that keep it from being grounded during the day. Well, if you drop and do 20 push-ups, you're also getting that grounding and earthing effect from touching the beautiful surface of the planet. So do your push-ups, and hopefully that helps you out a little bit, and also do your squats.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:11]: So this is interesting. A lot of you are probably familiar with this idea of nonexercise activity thermogenesis, engaging in small movements throughout the day that have been shown to do things like keep blood sugar stabilized, keep lymph flow and blood flow circulating, allow you to have a slight bump up in metabolic rate, reduce a lot of the biomechanical issues such as low back pain associated with seated or standing positions for long periods of time. Well, here's it, here's what's interesting. Ten bodyweight squats every 45 minutes. That's pretty easy. Every 45 minutes you do ten bodyweight squats. That could be on a day of work, on a long airplane flight, you name it, during an eight-and-a-half-hour period of extended sitting time. So you gotta sit for eight to nine hours a day at work every 45 minutes.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:58]: Ten squats improve blood sugar regulation better than a 30-minute walk. It's crazy. So what they actually did was they took a bunch of overweight and obese men in this particular scenario. So you have to admit, like because they were overweight or obese, they were squatting a little bit more than the average normal-weight person might squat. But I still think we can take something out of this. And maybe you could do 20 squats instead of 10. But anyway, they compared the squatting every 45 minutes with 30 minutes of walking. And, and the 30 minutes of walking was basically in that same day that the other group did the squatting breaks.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:39]: And it turns out that the squat was way more effective. And I should clarify, by the way, the walking was broken into three-minute intervals throughout the day. So what's that come out to? Rough math? 15 three-minute walks throughout the day. Well, that's more time-consuming than ten squats every 45 minutes. Mostly takes you three minutes to do ten squats, which I doubt. So anyway, the idea here is that it is a shockingly low amount of physical activity that it takes to actually improve blood sugar regulation throughout a day of relatively sedentary activity. Now, related to this idea of brief spurts, brief bouts of exercise during the day, this has also been looked at when it comes to sleep deprivation. Came across another really interesting study that looked at the effects of sleep loss.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:28]: And they were trying to figure out what kind of exercise could allow for you to stave off the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation. So they looked at everything from like glucose management to mitochondrial respiratory function to tiredness and cognitive function. And what they found was that brief bouts of high-intensity exercise, we're talking like ten to 32nd all out powerful bouts of exercise throughout the day could mitigate the detrimental physiological effects of sleep loss. And again, this doesn't take much. This can literally be kind of similar to the squat concept. Every hour doing 30 burpees or just like going up a flight of stairs as fast as you can, or even though I got a green screen back behind me during this podcast, which hopefully they're using to make me look like I'm next to the Eiffel Tower or underwater with the bubbles. I've got a carrel bike, also not a sponsor of this podcast. But anyways, the Carol bike is cool because it is basically a quick sweat-free workout.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:31]: I get on it, I can do a quick ten to 1520 2nd max burst during the day. And it's really cool that if you're sleep-deprived, a brief burst of bursts of high-intensity exercise can stave off the effects of sleep deprivation. Let's face it, it's also good to know because it's kind of hard to want to go to the gym when you're sleep-deprived for a long, formal 40 to 60-minute workout. But just knowing that, if you just tell yourself, okay, I'm going to get through this day of sleep deprivation, I'm going to do whatever ten burpees every half hour that can have a really significant impact on glucose tolerance, respiratory function, what's called protein synthesis, because sleep deprivation can lower your ability to be able to build and maintain muscle. So these are all cool little hacks when it comes to sleep deprivation. Now what's interesting is you can stack on top of this the two compounds that I have found to be incredibly effective for allowing you to have good cognitive function in a state of sleep deprivation. So one we've got a clue about from a recent study that came out on February 28, 2024. One single dose of Creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in what's called cerebral high-energy phosphates, right.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:42]: These little energetic phosphate groups are available to your brain during sleep deprivation. And what they did in this was they gave subjects a high single dose of Creatine. I'll tell you exactly how much in a second. And what it did was it improved cognitive performance and processing speed, and the author said, partially reverses metabolic alterations and fatigue-related cognitive deterioration in a state of sleep deprivation. That's pretty cool that just Creatine can do that. Now here's the only problem. They were using 0.35 grams/kg well pound or a kilogram is 2.2 pounds, right? So if you do the math, you know, that means a guy like me has got to be taking north of 25 grams of Creatine to stave off the effects of sleep deprivation. And I don't know why they did this in the study, probably because it was just logistically easier, but they gave these people in this sleep deprivation study 21 hours of sleep deprivation.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:39]: By the way, that whole dose at one time. I don't recommend that. That's a fast track to disaster. Pants. And for anybody who's used Creatine, you know what I'm talking about. So in order to do this effectively, you'd have to take your standard five-gram dose of Creatine. And by effectively, I mean not spending the day on the toilet and pulse that throughout the day. Like you, you wake up, you've only had 2 hours of sleep, you take 5 grams of Creatine.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:02]: A couple of hours later, you take 5 grams of Creatine. And you keep going until you get up to around rough math. 0.35 grams/kg don't worry, I'll put that number in the show notes. Just go to bengreenfieldlife.com 475 and it'll be over there. But anyway, so Creatine pairs very, very well with another compound that I think, because it simulates the type of DNA repair and cellular repair mechanisms that would normally happen during a night of sleep, can be a really, really good thing to stack with Creatine, and that is NAD. Any day that I'm sleep deprived, I take extra NAD and I take extra Creatine. Try it the next time that you haven't gotten as many z's as you want, and I guarantee you're gonna some big difference. Um, so NAD's a pretty easy supplement to find these days.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:46]: So is Creatine you could use. The ones I use are the, the bio stack labs NAD and I use, of course, because I'm affiliated with the company, the Kion Creatine. And that's, that's the stack. So 5 grams of Creatine, but you got a pulse set throughout the day. Do the rough math. 0.35 grams of Creatine per kilogram of body weight. Now, of course, a lot of people in a sleep-deprived state are also curious about the effects of napping. And this was another kind of cool paper that came out recently.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:17]: They looked at the association between daytime napping and the cognitive and physical performance, performance detriments, and fatigue that occur after sleep deprivation. Now, the conclusion here was pretty straightforward. After a night of normal sleep or partial sleep deprivation, a daytime nap between 30 and 60 minutes long has a moderate to high effect on the improvement of cognitive performance and physical performance and the reduction of perceived fatigue, meaning that a nap is a huge weapon in your weapon box, tool in your toolbox for combating the effects of sleep deprivation. Now, I know many of you because I've talked with many people about this. You have trouble taking a nap. It's hard to take your brain off in the middle of the day and it's difficult to just shut down or you're groggy and fatigued when you wake back up from the nap and it's hard to start the day again. Now, here's the deal. I take a nap almost every day.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:10]: As a matter of fact, I have instructed my team not to schedule phone calls, consults, work, etcetera for me, between the hours of two and 04:00 p.m. That's not because I'm taking a two-hour nap. It's because after lunch, I tuck away, and by the time I get up from 40 to 60 minutes of napping or some of the alternatives to napping that I'll describe to you in a second, I need some time to jump in a cold bath, do some stretching, get back up, go through some more work before I really, like, turn on the phone and jump back into a formal, scheduled consult or something like that because I don't like to jump right into a phone call with somebody when I'm still, you know, digging the nap goo out of my eyes. So anyways, what I do is with lunch, I will consume an adaptogen. I like adaptogens because unlike, let's say, you know, weed or marijuana or CBD or melatonin or something like that, they allow your body to turn down the dial a little bit without leaving you fatigued afterward. Some of my favorites are Reishi extract. I'll stir a little bit of Reishi extract into the cup of bone broth or water that I have with lunch. Uh, there are other adaptogenic blends by a company called Four Sigmatic Mushrooms.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:16]: I like some of their stuff. Um, there are adaptogens like Shilajit, which actually a lot of people use for energy, but I like it after lunch. It seems like it helps me tone things down a little bit. The cool thing about adaptogens is they'll kind of turn up the dial if you need the dial turned up. Turn it down if you need the dial turned down. So anyways, Reishi is good. Ashwagandha is another really, really good one. Tulsi Astragalus.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:39]: Any of these common adaptogenic herbal blends are really good and ill. I'll put a few of my favorites in the show notes, but basically, I have that with lunch. And then sometimes I can't sleep because I've got like 800 emails and the four phone calls from that morning and a podcast coming up, and I can't turn my brain off. But what I do is I have a few little tools that I've sprinkled around that I use to be able to shut my brain down in the afternoon. One is New Calm. It is a sound app that can stimulate, in a short 20 to 30 minutes, almost a full sleep cycle. Even if you're not sleeping. I don't really believe it.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:10]: I interviewed the guy on my podcast. I look at some of their sleep spindle data, and some of the research that they presented on the show, and I feel incredibly refreshed. Even with a 20 to 40-minute New Calm session, even if I don't fall asleep. Another one would be this gal I follow on YouTube, Allie Boothroyd. She has fantastic yoga Nidra tracks, which I think doctor Andrew Huberman has made popular by calling them non-sleep deep rest protocols. And very similar to something like the New Calm kind of simulates sleep without actually sleeping, even though sometimes I do fall asleep. I've even downloaded Ali's eight-hour yoga Nidra track and used that on an airplane for a long airplane flight. So anyway, yoga Nidra would be another one that I like.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:50]: And then the last one that I use quite a bit for my afternoon nap is this device called the Sensate. It's think of this like a vibrating, purring cat sitting on your chest. It ties to your app, the Sensei app on your phone. You select an audio track and they're all very soothing. They range anywhere from ten to 30 minutes. And then you put it on and the thing vibrates in conjunction with the audio track. It's incredible. It'll lull you back to sleep if you wake up at 02:00 a.m.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:18]: it's great for an afternoon nap. I love to use it on airplanes. It's pretty affordable. And what's cool about it is that about every month they add a couple of new tracks to the app. So you can constantly be kind of changing things up so your brain doesn't get used to a certain audio sequence and start to engage in what would be called, like, the anticipation of the actual audio, which can keep you awake because you know what's coming up next in the song versus your brain being a little bit of. A little bit of a confused state about what part of the audio is coming up next. So you relax a little bit more. So those are a few things that I'll use the New Calm, the yoga Nidra, or the sense eight device.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:52]: And what I like about any of those tools is they're also fully portable for when traveling because I also nap when I travel. So, anyways, head nod to napping, and it's a. It's a fantastic way to combat the effects of sleep deprivation. Now, if we're going to be talking about sleep, and a few other interesting things. So, eating at night. Eating at night. This was a prospective cohort study that found that eating during the night is associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, especially among people who eat the majority of their day's calories in the evening. Now, this is one of those things where even though this study had 41,744 participants in which they looked at all-cause mortality, cancer mortality, and diabetes mortality, you always have to dig into the study just a little bit.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:41]: And the reason for that is also related to the alcohol study that I'll bring up with you next. The reason being is that if you actually look at the study, some people think nighttime eating is having a big dinner. In this case, nighttime eating was defined as eating, and often, or in many cases, eating, the majority of the day's calories between 10:00 p.m. and 04:00 a.m. meaning this is most relevant to those of you who are doing midnight snacking, maybe not intermittent fasting after dinner and waiting until breakfast to eat, having half a pound of ice cream, you know, at 10:00 p.m. right before you hit the sack. That is what is classified as nighttime eating in the literature. Do not use this newsflash as a reason to, like, skip dinner per se, but instead to question any late-night snacking habits that you have, because a lot of people can handle not eating between 10:00 p.m.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:35]: and 04:00 a.m. but it does turn out that if you are eating between 10:00 p.m. and 04:00 a.m., especially an appreciable amount of calories, there is definitely an increased risk of all-cause mortality. So, a, it's good to know, but also b, it's good to know that if you see this headline saying eating at night is going to kill you, make sure that you understand that it's between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 04:00 a.m. that it appears to be the most detrimental related to that. At the same time, another study recently came out showing altered sleep architecture following pre-sleep alcohol intake.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:08]: And again, a few people sent this to me. They're like, bro, you're going to keep having that, you know, an organic glass of wine with dinner or, you know, a little mezcal tequila with some citrus salt, electrolytes on some soda water, and a squeeze of lime. After reviewing the study, I think that I am comfortable continuing my habit of a little bit of a hormesis-inducing microdose of alcohol with dinner. Not only do I enjoy the taste, and the palate-cleansing aspects of it, but I think that the endogenous antioxidant production of antioxidants like glutathione and superoxide dismutase, along with epidemiological data indicating small amounts of alcohol without binging on a relatively frequent basis, is good for you and could decrease risk of all-cause mortality. I'm comfortable continuing to do that, but what this study actually did was they gave people the equivalent of three drinks of Everclear, aka vodka, immediately prior to them hitting the sack. So the only real takeaway here for me is don't drink a bunch of pure-spirited alcohol right before you go to bed. And possibly a bigger takeaway is if you see a study saying that alcohol will disrupt sleep, look into the dosing, look into the timing, right? Because we do know alcohol causes big flood of gamma amino butyric acid inhibitory neurotransmitter that when that flood wears off can cause you to wake up and have poor sleep architecture after about one or 02:00 a.m. a glass of wine with dinner at 08:00 p.m.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:36]: is highly unlikely to do that unless you're very alcohol sensitive and you rarely drink, right? So my rule is one drink a night. Occasionally, if I take my wife out to dinner on a hot date or I'm at a big function, I might have a pre-dinner cocktail and a small glass of wine with dinner. Even that's pretty few and far between. And I have to admit, even with that, I notice an impairment in sleep. One last thing is that I want to give a shout-out to my friends at Mind Pump. Not one last thing to this podcast. Don't worry, I got a few more takeaways from the podcast, but my friends at Mind Pump had a fantastic podcast on sleep with another friend of mine, Doctor Kirk Parsley. The Sleep Doctor.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:15]: I will link to it in the show notes called How Navy Seals and High Performers Stay on Top of Their Sleep. Early on when I was first learning about sleep, Doc Parsley taught me a ton in podcast interviews with him and side discussions with him. And I highly, highly recommend it's Mind Pump episode 2245. Mind pump guys are super cool friends of mine, but yeah, if you want to top off a little bit of your understanding of sleep, sleep deprivation, and sleep hacks, check out that episode. So, moving on from sleep, why don't we dive into the woo-woo a little bit? Dive into the woo-woo. How about EMF for your head? I was recently in Austin, Texas. Did the spartan decor race down there with my sons. Fantastic.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:55]: Fantastic race. It's inside a conference center or an event center or an arena, and you do ten, 500-meter runs pretty all out with a fitness station between each. Kicked my butt, ate me up, and spit me out. Super sore afterward, but, man, it was a blast. Highly recommend. If you need a goal to get fit, check out the Spartan Decafit series. But anyway, afterward, we're walking through Austin. We walked past the sunglasses store, and I looked inside, and I saw these new Ray Ban stories, and I was walking along with my sons.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:22]: I'm like, hey, check out these glasses. So we went in, we put them on, and we could take a picture with the glasses that then sent the picture to our phone and listen to music and do videos and use Siri. So these new Ray ban stories are kind of like the old, what they call the Google glasses that didn't really take off and had the huge $1,500 price tag. Well, Facebook collaborated with Ray Ban on a similar concept, these so-called smart glasses. And they don't actually come with a big price tag on them. These are smart glasses that contain Bluetooth and Wi-Fi functionality. Now, I've expressed in the past my concern about, you know, despite some of the cool socializing and communication aspects of VR, and perhaps even some of the skill acquisition or fear-defeating ways in which they can be used, they have to emit a pretty large amount of EMF radiation to communicate with the source of the Wi-Fi or the Bluetooth. Now, Bluetooth devices emit the same kind of EMF that your cell phone, your microwave, your smart meter, and your Wi-Fi router.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:21]: Admit it's at a little bit lower intensity. But yet wearing glasses like this all day long could potentially be a problem, even if the Wifi, which is a significant problem, is turned off. To understand why you may want to avoid some of these VR headsets and smart glasses, you need to understand something called the SAR. SAR-specific absorption rate. The specific absorption rate is a unit of testing that tests how much EMF your body will absorb while using an electronic device. And all the governments worldwide, not all of them. I suppose there are probably some fringe governments that don't really care that much about SAR guidelines, but governments that regulate sales in their country including the US, have SAR guidelines that electronics manufacturers have to comply with in order to sell their products. So I think that's important.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:07]: A lot of people would like to know how much EMF they're getting from their gadgets and the health risks of going above, say, the government-set limits. But the problem is that the SAR doesn't measure how much EMF you get from your gadget. It takes instead a mannequin and tests how much EMF the mannequin receives from the gadget. This mannequin actually has a name in EMF research. It's called a Specific Anthropomorphic Mannequin. SAM, Specifically Anthropomorphic Mannequin. Special mannequin. They design it to be the equivalent of a six-foot-two-inch tall, 220-pound man.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:43]: That's important to know because that's bigger than about 97% of the population, and especially bigger than children who are wearing, say, glasses and VR headsets. Now, that means that 97% of the population is going to absorb more EMF than the Sam man. But if you dig into the specific absorption rate that they found when testing the Ray Ban story, you can see that the Ray Ban actually hits a SAR of 1.11.11. Now, the SAR limit set by the FCC in America is 1.6. It's measured in watts per kilogram over a gram of actual tissue. So that means that our limit for the Ray Bans at 1.1 is below the danger limit set by the government at 1.6. But you have to remember that the danger limit is on a six-foot, 2220-pound man and not necessarily a little kid or a small woman wearing this EMF headset around their face. So I think that, first of all, there are a lot of issues with even just having 1.1 SAR blasting your face all day long.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:55]: Even though it might be cool to occasionally wear these, I don't know, during a tennis match or something like that. So you could listen to music and take photos of the tennis ball as you're playing. Could get a little distracting. But that's the first use case I think of. But you can also go to a pretty decent website. It's called shieldyourbody.com/fx. That's shieldyourbody.com slash the letter f, the letter x.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:19]: And it is an app that actually lets you see what you're absorbing in terms of EMF when certain things are being used by your body. And we can see with the Ray Ban what actually happens when you're connected to 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi on the Ray Ban. And again, it's 1.11 SAR. What I like about this app, and again, I'll link to it in the show notes also is you can look up different devices and see what you're absorbing with both Wi-Fi turned on and Bluetooth turned on. The SAR when the Bluetooth is turned on but the Wi-Fi is off on the ray ban stories is 0.76. The only problem is that the app also pulls up research that shows you what that specific absorption rate correlates to in research. And even with Bluetooth at 0.76 around your face during the day, there's 153 separate studies showing neurological and physiological health problems. So I'd be concerned about that.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:16]: Now, there are hundreds of research studies showing the health effects at or below 1.11, which is what you'd get if you had the Wi-Fi on, on your smart glasses. So I would exercise extreme caution with any of these so-called smart glasses. And the main reason for that is nonionizing EMF radiation that can cause DNA damage. I use the term DNA damage. I used it earlier, and I was talking about sleep deprivation. NAD, is simply defined as an alteration in DNA structure capable of causing cellular injury and reducing viability or reproductive fitness of an organism. Okay? That's what DNA damage is. Now, experiments have looked into non-ionizing EMF radiation and DNA damage, and it is an actual issue.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:03]: So, for example, uh, one study by Lie and Singh found exposure to a 60 Hz magnetic field can initiate an iron-mediated process that increases free radical formation in brain cells, leading to DNA strand breaks and cell death after about 2 hours of exposure. Okay, so again, you could use glasses like this for short periods of time, just in the same way you can stand by a Wi-Fi router or use your phone for short periods of time. But once you get past about 2 hours, there are some significant health effects. They've also looked at EMF effects on blood blood-brain barrier and found that constant EMF exposure. And I talk about this a lot in my book Boundless, especially the updated version coming out in January. We went through a lot more of the EMF and even the 5G research. Cellphones, laptops, tablets, Wi-Fi routers, smart meters, they loosen the blood-brain barrier integrity. Now, that's a wall that keeps unnecessary fluids away from your brain.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:57]: So that means fluids like, say, albumin protein can easily enter your brain, and that can lead to issues like risk for epilepsy or multiple sclerosis, MS. So EMF exposure, we know, can cause things like headaches, migraines, changes in sleep habits, depressive symptoms, loss of concentration, loss of memory, especially in people who are a little bit more sensitive to it. So ultimately, I'm not comfortable with the EMF levels that you find in some of these smart glasses, and I would be pretty careful with them. And a lot of these headsets, from the echo frames to the Apple AR headset, to the Nreal AR glasses, to these Facebook Ray Ban stories that we're going to see increasingly rolled out, I am not confident that they're safe. And so if you've been thinking about them for yourself or for your children, I would say if you get them, use them infrequently and definitely don't use them for more than 2 hours at a time. And I'll put some of this research and even an article that kind of goes into some of these measurements and what they mean a little bit more if you go to BenGreenfieldlife.com/475 all right, well, I told you that we were talking about the woo woo, so I also want to bring up this really great Twitter Spacess. Not that I listen to a lot of Twitter Spacess, but this is interesting. It was about the mystery of water.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:16]: Much of my family is in the water business, which is why I find this interesting. My father, may he rest in peace, he passed several months ago, but he was so into water that he went from being a coffee roaster and espresso machine repairman and a coffee shop owner who found that the most valuable aspect of affecting a coffee's flavor, besides the bean quality, was the water in which the coffee was extracted. Well, he went on to start a water filtration company that still exists that my brother and my sister now run called Greenfield Water. But they do a lot of structured water filtration as a part of their device systems. Whole house, pour-overs, under sinks, you name it. And this Twitter Spaces has got into some really interesting information about about water. For example, the structure of the water, how the molecules are organized, is much more important than the chemical composition, because water molecules can join together in groups called clusters. And what scientists now believe is that these clusters can work as a sort of memory cell in which water can record the history of what it's been exposed to.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:23]: I warned you, this is gonna be a little bit woo-woo. But it is very interesting when you look at how water might respond to, say, like loud rock music versus classical music, or prayers versus negative emotions, or how even in something like homeopathy, very, very, very weak dilution of something that is placed into the water can actually cause you to have some of the same effects as a stronger treatment of that compound itself. I probably just totally bastardized the entire field of homeopathy, but that's roughly what I'm getting at. I haven't interviewed a guy who has a device called the InfoPath device, which blasts water with the frequencies and lights associated with certain molecules like stem cells or testosterone or bitters and digestive enzymes and passes those along to the water, resulting in the water being a weak dilution of some of those compounds based on the memory of water. They even cite in this particular Twitter Spaces, experiments that have shown DNA transduction is possible, meaning that water can retain and transmit DNA signals. And this could be important, this water memory theory, in the detection and treatment of diseases like autism, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and different cancers. So keep your eye on the field of water therapy. We know that using structured water, and this has been shown in research.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:43]: I've seen lots of data just from the farms that my dad and now my brother have worked with. It makes vegetables ripen faster. It increases the amount of useful microelements and vegetable proteins. So animals on farms grow better when they are consuming produce grown in structured water and drinking structured water themselves. This is the reason I have a whole-house structured water filtration system in my home. And, the whole idea behind water being able to carry information and being able to carry energy is probably one of the reasons that structure structured water seems so beneficial. And even with irrigation, they found 20% less water is needed when structured water is used, versus ordinary water to actually grow a crop. So this is kind of concerning, because if you look at nature and rivers and streams, they flow along a curving course, piling over rocks, etcetera.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:36]: And it's very structured. The water is when it's in that environment, but the water that's in a closed loop system, such as in many cities, water that flows in a floor panel heating system that basically creates an unstructured water that's stored in municipal water supplies. This essentially pollutes the information of the water. I realize, again, this sounds kind of woo, but the idea is that water loses the ability to carry packets of energy and may become less hydrating. In those scenarios, the podcast also goes into Deuterium. Deuterium water and what radioactive radiation does to water. Basically, what you see is a destruction of the water and an increase in the Deuterium concentration of the water when water is exposed to radiation, herbicides, and pesticides. In addition, the Deuterium that your own body is able to deplete that, or the low Deuterium water that your body is able to produce when you're not eating a lot of starches and sugars, allows you to battle some of those effects of Deuterium coming in in the water.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:36]: Now, Deuterium is a very, very heavy isotope that's similar to hydrogen. So it can kind of, in a sense, gum up the metabolic machinery, the mitochondrial machinery, if it is Deuterium instead of hydrogen. And it turns out that if you're not careful about your water sources or the amount of sugar that you're consuming, your body can become overloaded with Deuterium. And I have another podcast I'll link to in the show. Notes all about DDW water, Deuterium-depleted water, and its health effects. So this particular Twitter Spaces even goes into water and prayer, meaning that the frequency of vibration in prayers in any religion, in any language they claim, is about 8 Hz. That corresponds close to the frequency of the Earth's magnetic field, which is around 7.8 Hz and so this is the reason that they think that praying over food that contains water or praying over water may actually alter the vibrational frequency of the water.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:34]: And this is why we have the concepts of things like holy water or healing waters, and actually look at some of these waters under a microscope. The crystals look different. The crystals of tap water look kind of chaotic, and the crystals of this so-called holy water have a very, like, symmetrical form, almost like a six-pointed star. It's really interesting. There are so many things that I think we have yet, to learn about water. But basically, I learned a ton from this Twitter Spaces. I'll link to it in the show notes, but it's called The Mystery of Water Special. So if you're into water and you want to shock some of your friends at a cocktail party or have them ask you where you left your tinfoil hat that you should have been wearing that evening, tell them about this water episode.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:15]: All right? And then finally, before I fill you in on a recent anecdote from a lipid panel, I recently had done a great article about spirituality and health. Now, I am both spiritual and religious, right? I am, you know, I pray, I meditate, I journal, I sing, I read scriptures. But I also am religious, right? I go to church. I'm technically a reformed Protestant and grew up in a Christian protestant denomination. And there's a long list of social determinants that we know matter for health outcomes, right? Employment, income, social support, race discrimination, education, the community or neighborhood that you live in, but you don't see in the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health. Yes, that's a thing, religion, and spirituality. However, some people think that's because there's not a lot of research around the impact of spirituality on health, and that's not the case. There was a recent 2022 systematic review in the Journal of the American Medical Association that I recently came across.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:20]: It documented 215 studies. Each of those studies with a sample size over 1000 people, use longitudinal data to evaluate the relationship between religion and health. And then there are also meta-analyses, large longitudinal studies, including Harvard's nurses' health study, and other documentation suggesting that being spiritual and religious may be superior to just being spiritual on your own and walking through the forest and talking to God. As a matter of fact, weekly religious service attendance is longitudinally associated with this means like going to church every week, lower mortality risk, lower depression, less suicide, better cardiovascular disease survival, better health behaviors, greater marital stability, happiness, and even purpose in life. Now, a lot of people question whether religion is a cause or a correlate for these improvements, right? But if you look at studies that control for baseline health and adjust for a ton of other socio-economic and behavioral compounding variables, it provides strong evidence for attendance at a religious service not being correlated with all these things like lower depression, less suicide, and better cardiovascular disease survival. Meaning like whatever, if you're richer and more healthy and have greater marital stability, you go to church. Rather, it's a cause. Seems that religion is a social determinant of health that has been fleshed out in multiple large research studies.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:47]: So I think that failing to consider religious community and thinking about public health can really impede our understanding of the health of populations. Like, if you extrapolate the nurses' health study data, that suggests about 40% of the increasing suicide rate in the United States from 1999 to 2014 could be attributed to declines in attendance at religious services during that period. There is another study that suggested that declining attendance at church from 1991 to 2019 accounted for approximately 28% of the increase in depression seen amongst adolescents. And we can't ignore those trends. So there was another recent major review in the annual Review of Public Health that looked at suicide, and it completely omitted the questions about religion and spirituality. Even though I do think that based on what I've seen, the neglect of religion in public health conversations needs to change. Now I'm going to put a resource for you in the show notes. I printed this off and I spent about a week reading it with my family it's from a website that I like called The Art of Manliness and it's titled Why You Should Go to Church Even If You're Not Sure of Your Beliefs.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:58]: Why You Should Go to Church Even If You're Not Sure of Your Beliefs. And it goes into all these benefits of church attendance, a greater social support, a chance to remember and reorient and reflect and recenter at the beginning of the week, building of discipline, creating a rhythm of ritual and routine, resulting in stronger marriages and man. The studies on that are probably some of the strongest when it comes to church attendance and stronger marriages and stronger relationships. Development of successful and well rounded children, the chance for communal singing that even impacts the vagus nerve. For all you nerds out there, it's fantastic for the nervous system, connects you with people from all different walks of life who you might not normally otherwise have socialized with, contributes to greater free thinking and diversity of ideas. You wouldn't think that people who go to church have greater diversity of ideas, but it turns out that because religion is a voice in the marketplace of ideas, and if you're truly dedicated to hearing and understanding all of them, then engaging with religion actually contributes to, again, greater free thinking and diversity of ideas, we see a lessening of bitter partisanship in people who have church attendance, ample opportunities for a greater amount of service, and again, these are causation, not correlation based studies when we look at this stuff. So anyways, I will link to the full article. I recommend you print it and read it yourself, or read it with your family.

Ben Greenfield [00:43:18]: Again, it's from The Art of Manliness. Great website, and it's called Why You Should Go to Church Even If You're Not Sure of Your Beliefs. So that all being said, I want to finish with this. And I know I've been doing a lot about heart health and a lot about how even up to a year ago my lipid numbers were lit up like a frickin Christmas tree. My Apple B, my LP, elevated plaque, high triglycerides, low HDL, just a ton of issues on my lipid panel. And I've highlighted on several podcasts what I've done to go about addressing that taking niacinamide and NAD, taking nitric oxide, support for vasodilation, using something called Arteracil for the support of my endothelial glycocalyx, the lining of my vessels, taking a couple of grams of fish oil each day taking vitamin K recently had a fantastic podcast on vitamin K. I didn't realize how important vitamin K is for heart health, but it's way up there all the more so if you're taking vitamin D because excess vitamin D can pull calcium into the arteries, cause arterial calcification, vitamin K and secondarily magnesium can help to stave that off from occurring. Taking proteolytic enzymes, very similar to nattokinase, and taking magnesium before I go to bed at night.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:36]: Speaking of magnesium, these are all part of the heart health stack that I've been using, and I'm going to publish in the show notes what my results which would have been about four weeks ago, actually look like. My lipid panel is pristine. The only thing that's still slightly elevated is my triglycerides, and that's actually very common in what are called lean mass hyperresponders, which I am. Because I eat a low carbohydrate diet, my body mobilizes a little bit more triglycerides to use as a fuel, but my HDL is high, my Apple B has dropped, and my total LDL has dropped. Well, the HDL has gone up. My lipid panel looks really, really good. And I actually think that this stack that I've developed is fantastic for anyone concerned about heart health. Now, if you have plaque and significant plaque, which you can measure with something called a Cleerly CT Angiography, or something that if you don't want the radiation, the hassle of a CT angiography, there's also something, something called a CIMT Carotid Intima-Media Thickness score.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:34]: It's a non-invasive ultrasound scan of the neck, which can correlate pretty well to telling if you have plaque accumulation in your heart. Well, if you do a test and you have high levels of calcium or plaque, you may still need to either take a low-dose statin. If you are a genetic statin responder, I'm a non-responder, so I'm taking statin. Genetically, you can look at your statin status, or you can use a twice-monthly injection called a PCSK9. So what a PCSK9 does is it causes degradation of some of the LDL receptors, so you basically get more of the cholesterol-rich LDL particles out of the plasma. So basically that can be a really, really good way. And I've talked with a few different doctors who use it successfully in their patients to reverse plaque accumulation or slow plaque accumulation. That's the only other thing that I'm doing in addition to the stack I just told you is twice a month I do a quick injection in my thigh of a PCSK9 Inhibitor, and I'll be going in for a repeat plaque evaluation quite soon, but my last CIMT that I did looks really good.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:39]: Uh, there's a great book, by the way. I'll link to it in the show notes. If you want to read about some of these heart tests and how to interpret them, it's called Prevention Myths. Prevention Myths. But anyways, I partnered up with this company called Vitaboom, Vitaboom Vita Boom. And what we did was we took all of the different things that I'm using for heart health and put them into one box, one stack that you can just take all at once. So not wanting this to turn into a giant commercial, but I get asked about this so much that I just wanted to put them all into one stack. So I can tell you the exact stack contents.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:14]: It is Nattokinase antioxidant, something called a Nerf Two Inducer, which is for the endothelial, glycocalyx, nitric oxide support, vitamin K two vitamin K one red ginseng root, niacin, vitamin D three vitamin K two omega-three krill oil and magnesium glycinate. So basically all of that is in one packet for everything you need for heart health. So if you want that literally just came out, you go to vitaboom.com/ben V-I-T-A boom.com/Ben I bring this up because it's important. I'm often asked about this and got to send people to the four corners of the planet to get what they need for heart healthy. And this kind of solves that problem. So again, it's vitaboom.com/Ben anyways, check out BenGreenfieldspeaking.com/booking if you want to book me for an event, check out the show notes for the calendar of everywhere. I'll be at the world, in the world, at the world, around the world, on the world. BenGreenfieldlife.com/475 leave your comments, leave your questions, leave your feedback wherever you're listening to this podcast, leave it a rating or review if you enjoyed it, made your life better somehow if you learned something new.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:21]: Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldlife.com signing out. Have an amazing week. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes? My weekly roundup newsletter, cutting-edge research, and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life, and a whole lot more, check out BenGreenfieldlife.com. it's all there. BenGreenfieldlife.com see you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like, or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do then, huge thank you.

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