The Ugly Truth About “Organic” Food, A Common Sleep Drug That Shrinks Your Brain, Do THIS To Kill Pain Without Meds & Much More! Solosode 479

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast. The ugly truth about organic food, a common sleep drug that shrinks your brain. Do this to kill pain without meds and a whole lot more fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this. Yo, what is up? It's been a little bit since I've come on for a solosode with you, you might notice I look different. Well, look, it's elk hunting season, all right? So I'm not allowed to shave my beer till I get an elk down. And I cut my own hair with clippers to save myself the 30 minutes of driving back and forth to the hairstylist and the $23 I pay for a cheap old men's haircut. Yeah, I'm that cheap.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:03]: But I did with clippers. Didn't do too bad. And then my wife attacked me with clippers on the back because she said it was uneven. So, anyways, yes, I used an instructables.com website to learn how to cut my own hair with clippers, and I don't think it looks half bad. Possibly like I just got out of prison, but not too bad besides that. All the show notes for today's show are gonna be at bengreenfieldlife.com/479. What else? Some of you have asked me about the intro music to this show and why I chose it. Well, that intro music is from a six song EP that I personally recorded in Nashville.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:40]: So if you go to Spotify, you can actually find that whole song. I'll link to it in the show notes, the whole album. But that was a bucket list item of mine. Shout out to Chad Carruthers, my producer down in Nashville, we went down there and just had a heck of a time writing, recording, producing. So if you want to hear my music, it's kind of like, I don't know, like an alternative rock me screaming into the microphone type of vibe with some more, like, inspirational, anthematic music, similar to the intro music to this podcast. So there's a shameless plug for that. Also, I always like to mention new things. I've been up to two new toys.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:18]: All right, those of you who are in, like, the biohacking, self discovery, personal improvement, and optimization space, check this out. This is incredible. So, I've talked in the past before about how I have this chair that vibrates. It's called a Shiftwave chair, and it alone is amazing. When I was at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine in Vegas last year, they were, like, the most popular booth. They had, like, 20 chairs lined up. The way it works is the chair vibrates in correspondence to special music that you're listening to through headphones with an eye mask on. And there are even full on breath work sessions in there where you're breathing as the chair vibrates and exhaling as it relaxes.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:01]: And we're talking, like, vibrates, vibrates. Like, it's full body shaking. And it was designed to increase HRV and shift your brainwave states using haptic sensations. Very, very cool idea. That one's called a shift wave. But what I've done, because I love to stack things, is I have taken that chair and put it underneath a lamp. That's called a roXiva lamp.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:26]: roXiva. The roXiva lamp was originally designed to allow you to simulate a journey with, let's say, ketamine or shrooms or LSD or something like that, drug free, using light and sound stimulation. And I must say, although I'm not that interested in journeying these days and self discovery, I get most of that during my. My prayer and Bible time with God each morning. The other effects of this roXiva light are incredible. There is one session, I've done it eight times so far, and I cry every single time. It's called Rebirth. It simulates the mother's heartbeat as you're in the womb, in the embryo using delta, or in the embryo, as an embryo using delta and theta brainwaves.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:14]: Very relaxing. Blackness, little flashes of light. And then towards the end of the episode, you go through an entire rebirth process. That's amazing. There is another one called No More Insomnia, which just caused you to just lights out almost right away. And you lay underneath this. Your eyes are closed, your eyelids are 1 mm thick, but the lights that this thing produces are able to slightly penetrate the eyelids and shift your brainwave state. So what I figured out how to do was feed the audio of it into the Shiftwave chair so you can vibrate your entire body and correspondence to the sounds and music while the light is going.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:49]: So you're getting light, sound, and vibration all at the same time. Not an inexpensive setup. If you were going to have all of that all complete in your living room, I think all in, you'd be up around $12,000 for basically the equivalent of the world's most amazing human optimization carnival in your living room. But I have been getting up at about 4 a.m. every morning and getting on that thing for about 45 minutes in the spirit of, and this is something that Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about as well, the idea that when you wake up, you're still kind of flushing some adenosine out of your system. Adenosine being the molecule that builds up sleep drive throughout the day. And when you wake up, you're still in a semi-sleep like state doing something like non sleep, deep rest, meditation, light, sound stimulation, etc. For those first, anywhere from 10 to, you know, an hour or 60 minutes of when you wake up can really give you a lot more energy and simulate like an additional full sleep cycle.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:48]: And I just find it's an incredible way. I put on my little red light headlamp and my red light or my blue light blocking glasses, I wander downstairs and I put this thing on. It's amazing. It is really cool. So the chair is called a Shiftwave and the light is called a roXiva. I think I'm going to be doing a podcast with both of those folks, by the way. But anyways, I'll link those little tips in the show notes, go to bengreenfieldlife.com/479 and I'll link to my album, as well. So what have I found for you this week? Well, I got a lot of cool news flashes.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:18]: The first is pretty interesting. So a lot of you might be familiar with the corruption rampant in the organic food industry. This corruption, I guess you could understand it as a breakdown in the trust between consumers and the companies that are claiming to provide clean, chemical-free products. It happens when companies or farmers cut corners to increase profits while still labeling their products as organic. Yet a lot of times those organic products that you're purchasing, you know, slapping yourself on the back that you're doing a good job for you and your family, staying healthy are not exactly healthy. I think my mom listens to some of my podcast episodes, and I think she knows that it's one of my pet peeves. When people put the label organic on something and say that it's healthy, like, hey, I got this chicken, it's organic. This water is organic.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:09]: This apple pie is organic. These Cheetos are organic. Just because it's organic, especially if it's labeled certified organic, does not mean that it's healthy. So here's how it plays out. False organic claims. So some producers will slap the organic label on foods that don't fully meet organic standards. So that might mean using prohibited chemicals or fertilizers, but still marketing those products as 100% organic and they're able to actually get away with that. There's an entire website I'm going to tell you about here briefly called OrganicEye, like e-y-e, organiceye.org that I found that really, really helps you wade through the clutter and the confusion of what's truly organic and what's not.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:47]: Next, there's very weak regulation. Organic certification is meant to ensure that your food meets pretty strict standards. But many regulatory bodies are underfunded or inconsistent in their inspections. Kind of like the people who were trying to regulate Tour de France cyclists to be drug free. What's the organization that regulates cycling? WADA. And they just couldn't keep up with the cyclists because they were underfunded and understaffed. And this is how the whole Lance Armstrong and a few dozen other folks wound up getting away for years and years with illegal performance enhancing drug use and professional cycling. And I'm sure it still happens.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:27]: WADA hasn't necessarily expanded their funding or their staffing. It also happens in the organic food industry. And that allows some bad actors to get away with using synthetic pesticides or GMO's in their so called organic crops. Next, there are imported organics. There's corruption in imported organics, meaning organics that are coming in from other countries. Because some countries that export organic products to the US don't follow the same stringent rules as the US. Yet their food can still get labeled as organic once it hits US shelves. And many companies do this as a way to cut corners, get cheap food imported that's technically organic, but doesn't meet US organic standards.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:06]: But through this loophole, it's still allowed to be labeled organic on the grocery store shelf. And then there's also corporate influence. I mean, as the organic industry has grown, it's no surprise that a lot of large food corporations have gotten involved. And many of these big companies have been lobbying to loosen the rules around what qualifies as organic. It decreases their cost of goods sold, improves their margins, and also waters down the meaning of the organic label. So enter this website that I found called OrganicEye, organiceye.org. I forget who alerted this place to me as a good industry watchdog, but if I could just tell you a few of the headlines from their action alert website.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:49]: For example, diseased animals allowed in organic pet food. Meaning that they actually will use diseased, broken down animals in organic pet food. Just like it sounds like the phony baloney animal welfare rule, organic factories are milking conventional dairy cows. Just tons of action alerts on this website and the FAQ section is pretty interesting as well. So for example, I learned when it comes to using the word organic on a label, you can only use the word organic on your label if you're inspected annually and certified by a third party organization accredited by the USDA's national organic program. But it's actually surprisingly easy to actually get away with doing that. Now, organic I defines organics as something far different. They look at elimination of synthetic chemicals.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:43]: They look at promotion of superior environmental stewardship, caring for the planet, humane animal husbandry, and economic justice for the farmers, who a lot of times have a more difficult time making money while producing organic food. The website is chock full of amazing resources for finding organic food, too. That's really organic. Like the Weston A. Price Foundation. Localharvest.org, which is incredible. Eatwild.com. That's a really fun one. Eatwild.com.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:09]: You should check that one out. And there's a bunch of other organizations that they list on there as well. So basically what you can do, if you want to stay on top of this yourself, is you could go to the OrganicEye.org website and read the very helpful tips that they have there. I'm just alerting you to the website. I'm not going to give you all the tips right here. Besides, I want to make you aware of the fact that if you're buying organic food, there might be a little bit more to it than you've actually been led to believe. So again, the website is organiceye.org. They take donations, they're fighting the corrupt system, and they're trying to shine a flashlight on the corrupt conspiracy between corporate lobbyists and the USDA, which is basically allowing livestock factories and the industrial scale operations for food to provide substandard and produce substandard organic food.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:04]: And I don't think that's acceptable. I don't think you should either. So go to organiceye.org, bring yourself up to speed on this, and think twice about whether or not just because something says organic on the label, it's actually organic. Next up, you probably heard this in the podcast announcements, but a brain shrinkage alert now. Benzodiazepines. My best friend on a 12-hour airplane flight. If I got to go to Asia, I do often have diazepam, aka valium, in my travel bag. Xanax would be another example.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:37]: Ativan, aka lorazepam would be another example. All these medications are believed to work by enhancing the effects of something called gamma aminobutyric acid, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that promotes relaxation and reduces brain activity. But that can be a limited view, and the website GreenMedInfo did a really great exposé on these benzodiazepines, which are often effective for short term relief of anxiety and insomnia. But the complexity of their neurobiology and many of the unknown drug interactions within the brain is a little bit concerning. Now, there was a brand new, pretty groundbreaking study in BMC Medicine Journal, and that shed new light on the long term effects of benzodiazepine use on brain health. Now, what that study was trying to do is clarify conflicting evidence from previous research regarding the impact of benzodiazepines on cognitive function and brain structure. Now, what they actually found, and this actually was in stark contrast to what a lot of other studies found, was that benzodiazepine use was not significantly associated with increased risk of developing dementia, although a bunch of earlier studies had suggested a higher risk. Now, the problem is, a lot of the headlines now are saying there's no risk of benzodiazepine use and early onset Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:04]: But there are a lot of other studies that say otherwise. Now, the study's neuroimaging data also revealed some pretty interesting things. A reduction in the volume of two critical brain regions. The hippocampus, which is crucial for memory formation and spatial navigation, finding your way around, and the amygdala, which is key in processing emotions like fear and anxiety. And these brain regions naturally shrink as you age. But it appears that shrinkage is accelerated with the chronic use of benzodiazepines. I'm not talking about popping a valium before you fly to Tokyo. I'm talking about using these things to get to sleep at night.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:45]: You know, as my friend doctor Kirk Parsley says, you know, if somebody hit you over the head with a sledgehammer, would you call that sleep? Well, the answer is no. But if you look at the sleep architecture of someone who's not concussive, and someone who takes a benzodiazepine for sleep, it's actually very similar. You actually don't get very good deep and rapid eye movement sleep. There are a lot of other, of course, long-term concerns of chronic benzodiazepine use. Increased suicide risk, increased all-cause risk of mortality, hypertension, and increased blood pressure in children. Delirium. So when you look at all of the other ways that you could fall asleep at night, if you have insomnia, you could look at cognitive behavioral therapy, probably one of the most well-researched therapies that can be used for anxiety, stress, and insomnia, exercise, mindfulness, stress reduction, the non-sleep deep breast protocol or yoga nidra that I talked about earlier, many herbal supplements, chamomile, passion flower, valerian, other supplements such as melatonin. I use that quite a bit when I travel.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:49]: Also, it's fantastic as an anti inflammatory as well. So if you're on the valium bandwagon, you may want to think twice about using it, if you're using it chronically or any other benzodiazepine, because of the concerns about brain shrinkage and the impact on sleep architecture. Not to mention they make you constipated as heck. So if that's an issue for you, it's probably caused by use of benzodiazepines. So some people say, well, why not just take a little bit of psyllium husk extract or do a coffee enema? Well, then you're shrinking your brain and addicted to enemas at the same time. Not something I recommend. So anyways, I'll link to that study at bengreenfieldlife.com/479.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:34]: But if you or someone you know is on long term benzodiazepine use, please know that it is linked to reduced brain volume. All right. On a brighter side, a new meta analysis on tea. Now, I like tea. I've been drinking this stuff called Ashitaba tea. It's incredible. A lot of people ask me, you know, I own a coffee company. It's called keon.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:53]: Uh, we make an incredible organic coffee. Single estate farms, roasted in the USA. We got decaf, we got regular, we got medium, we got dark roast, we got light roast. But I drink coffee, like, maybe three days a week when I'm at home. When I travel, I average one to two cups a day because I'm just, like, outside of my normal sleep habits and circadian rhythms when I travel. But at home, I mix it up. I do coffee tea some days. I do mushroom tea some days.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:18]: I do herbal tea some days. I've really been getting into this Ashitaba tea. Ashitaba is a source of natural ketones called calcones. It also supports metabolic function and detoxification, has anti inflammatory activities. It acts to reverse excessive cell growth. So it's got a little bit of zombie cell deactivating type of compound in it. You might be familiar with the idea of the senolytics. Well, Ashitaba is a natural senolytic, and it's a liver cleanse.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:51]: And the Thomas Cowan's vegetable powders, where I get a lot of my vegetable powders, they have this Ashitaba tea. Ashitaba is arguably one of the most nutritionally dense superfoods on the planet. I would put it right up there with Tulsi tea as another one. That's really, really fantastic. And Cowan's grows this stuff and it's incredible. I had a cup this morning, I blended up with a little bit of salt and vanilla stevia. But anyways, this recent meta analysis of 38 data sets, almost 2 million people were included in this meta analysis. And they found tea consumption to reduce all-cause mortality, specifically from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:33]: But the people who were drinking 1.5 to 2 cups a day of tea, that's probably because of all the polyphenols and the theoflavins and the flavonoids and phytochemicals in tea, all of them had lower, well, not all of them, but there was a significant number of people at a lower all-cause risk of mortality compared to those who drink no tea. So what do I drink? Well, I use that Thomas Cowen's Ashitaba tea. There's three different teas in my pantry. Another company I've had on the podcast before, Kauai Pharmacy. They make a Tulsi tea that I love.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:07]: They have a whole bunch of different herbal teas. But Tulsi is specifically good as an adaptogen. Helps to quell adrenal stress without putting you to sleep. So when you jump into your email inbox in the morning and you're sipping a cup of Tulsi tea versus a cortisol activating, potentially jitteriness producing cup of coffee, the Tulsi tea wins out, in my opinion. And I have a whole podcast with the good folks at Kauai Pharmacy about all the other benefits of Tulsi. I've been to the pharmacy. It's a two acre farm. They grow amazing teas, potions, tinctures, powders.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:37]: But Tulsi tea is one that I've really been getting into as well. So that'll be another option. The last tea that I have is called Pique tea. Pique tea. So Pique tea is like a powdered tea. It's very, very useful when you travel. They use a cold extraction technology to extract and preserve a lot of the phytonutrients and tea, and to make them arguably even more bioavailable. Then they triple toxin screen everything for purity and bioavailability, and they use what's called full spectrum isolate synthesis in their teas I realize this sounds very scientific, like the tea that went to Mars, but they synthesize the most bioactive isolates with payloads of essential nutrients to get into your cells.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:20]: That's called Pique. P-i-q-u-e. And they have a bunch of fantastic samples. But they specifically started off their teas to support fasting. I'm not big into fasting. I like to eat after I have my tea. But anyways, the Pique tea would be noted by. So three teas that I have in my pantry, the Pique tea, the Kauai tea and the Collins tea. So the idea behind tea is that it's healthy in general and you do not have to do a tea ceremony. I don't know if anybody's into this whole tea ceremony thing where it's a mindful, ritualistic method of drinking tea, where you choose a tea and you sip slowly while, I don't know, reflecting on the present moment or mindfully gazing off into a pastoral field, and you sip slowly and take time between each sips to appreciate the taste and the feel and the warmth of the tea.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:09]: And that's great, but I usually have work to do when I'm drinking my tea. So yes, there are benefits to a tea ceremony, but more importantly, if you're not yet on the tea bandwagon, and don't worry, you can have a cup of coffee in the morning if that's your thing, and your head's going to explode. If you don't have your coffee, then have a cup of tea in the afternoon. Or based on this study, one and a half to two cups and a cup is not much. We're talking like 6oz. So anyways, new meta analysis on tea, there's a lot of people in that meta analysis. I would say that I am going to stay on the t bandwagon. It's a great way to mainline a lot of these nutrients into your body.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:42]: So I'll link to that study in the show notes as well. Next up, a recent study looked at the physiological mechanisms between resistance training and pain relief. In this case, they were looking at pain relief in people with cancer. So they looked at breast cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer, and they examined a bunch of controlled trials that were done on resistance training. They found that strength training, you know, it's a little bit paradoxical. You think, well, you lift weights, it's going to increase your amount of pain and soreness. But what strength training does is it actually modulates pain pathways, not just tendon and ligament and muscle associated pain, but in general, full body pain, something that you might get from cancer because you upregulate the release of pain relieving substances like beta endorphins and anti-inflammatory cytokines and even endocannabinoids that, you know, you get high from strength training. Not really.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:41]: You produce endocannabinoids though, that are stress and pain modulating chemicals when you strength train. And so the interesting thing about this was its linked to a book that I just read. Its called Pain Sense. It was written by a former podcast guest named Stephen Hussey. Wrote a fantastic book on the heart called Understanding the Heart. And I do plan on having him back on the show to do a whole podcast about pain. But I took a lot of important notes that were major takeaways for me that were associated with pain. And a big part of pain relief is based on how water interacts with cells in your body.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:16]: And Stephen and I will go deep into the science of this when we do the actual podcast. But he had a lot of really great practical tips that often are not talked about when it comes to pain. And it's not just popping ibuprofen or a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. For example, grounding, earthing and PEMF paired with red light therapy, infrared light and oxygen, because all of these help to structure water in the joints and in the cells. So going outside barefoot using PEMF, using red light or infrared light therapy to actually increase ATP production, after you've improved the integrity of the cell membranes with grounding, earthing or PMF, and then oxygen therapy combined with that, this would be the so called well known Gary Brecken made it popular, the 10X Superhuman type of approach where youre doing PEMF and then oxygen therapy and then red light, not only fantastic for the mitochondria, but also fantastic for pain, you could do a poor person's at home version of this by going outside barefoot, doing some breath work, and getting into the sunshine light sound therapy. Also speaking of that, roXiva lamp that can help to modulate pain as well. There's even a device called the BrainTap. It's a wearable, portable visor that has an entire series on it designed to turn your body into its own pain killing pharmacy based on brainwave modulation in a way that decreases subconscious pain activations.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:43]: He goes into structured water, he goes into endotoxins and metals that can accumulate in the body, specifically from poor dental work or root canals. And it's really fantastic. But he also talks about strength training in that book and loading of tissue as being something that can cause a remodeling that can decrease pain. Perhaps this is why. For example, it's well known that if you have Achilles tendinitis, you should actually strength train to help to heal the tendinopathy. Because when you lay down a load on a tendon, then what you get is better vascularization and a remodeling of the injured tissue in such a fashion that it realigns. We're not talking about heavy strength training, but light strength training. Stretching and loading an injured body part, especially if it's a pain free form of movement, can be fantastic for decreasing pain, not just due to that loading effect, but also back to this study that I was citing earlier because of the release of pain relieving substances like beta-endorphins, anti-inflammatory cytokines and endocannabinoids.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:48]: So if you're injured, let's have a knee injury, get into the gym or start to work out, but do things that don't aggravate the knee. Right? Push ups, overhead press, pull ups, pull downs, etcetera. That alone can help with the pain from the knee and then do mild to light loading of the knee. It's a big part of like Ben Patrick's Knees Over Toes program, right? Paradoxically, you're loading the joint in such a manner that increases the collagenous and tendon stiffness within the joint and allows for better mobility, better strength, better support, and less pain over time. I actually keep Ben Patrick's book ever since I interviewed him, I keep his book ATG for Life out in my gym, and I still try and sprinkle in movements from that program on a regular basis. And I think my knees have really thanked me for it. So anyways, it is interesting, the strength training can be used as pain relief. Next up, I want to address, and this is again based on a study that I recently came across, the idea that people are saying not to take vitamin C after you work out because it will blunt your gains or inhibit the so called hormetic response to exercise.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:57]: Now, there's a few things you need to know about this. First of all, it's not entirely true, okay? It's not entirely true that you're not supposed to take vitamin C after workout because it will blunt your ability to be able to respond to that workout. First of all, almost all the studies that have shown this to be true have used megadoses of vitamin C in excess of 6 grams of vitamin C. That's a lot. That's a lot. More than you're getting from blueberries or the average vitamin C supplement and or combined it with massive amounts of vitamin E. And so if you're just taking a sane dose of vitamin C post workout or it's in your, I don't know, your athletic greens or antioxidant or whatever it is you're taking vitamin C with, then it's really not a big deal unless it's megadosed or combined with a bunch of vitamin E. Now it's interesting because vitamin E is a little bit different than vitamin C.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:50]: Vitamin E can actually act as a pro-oxidant or an antioxidant, meaning vitamin E can scavenge free radicals and inhibit the formation of something called protein kinase C. And that's how it acts as an antioxidant. But it can also act as a pro-oxidant, particularly if a person is under mild oxidative stress, which you would be after exercise. So the idea of taking vitamin C and vitamin E at the same time, again, even that's not an issue if it's immediately post exercise when you're already under a lot of oxidative stress, as long as you're not using megadoses of it. So when you look at a lot of these studies that have shown that taking antioxidants after a workout will blunt the hormetic responses to a workout, you have to look at the methodology of the actual studies. Almost all of them employed, untrained, or recreationally trained individuals. Okay, so that's important because most of the people taking antioxidant supplements are actually, in the studies at least, they're not well trained or professional athletes. Now, extremely strenuous bouts of exercise do not result in the same amount of oxidative stress in very trained individuals.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:12]: And this is probably because participation in a regular exercise program is associated with a chronic upregulation in your own antioxidant defenses, which allows you to be protected against a lot of the exercise induced increase in free radicals. So this means that it's possible that the negative effects of antioxidant supplementation on performance of well-trained individuals is going to be pretty minuscule because you've already got a lot of your own endogenous antioxidants that you're producing. And in addition, none of the pertinent studies on antioxidant supplements even looked at females. And that's an important limitation considering that there is a lower amount of exercise induced lipid peroxidation produced in females in response to exercise as a result of their elevated estrogen levels. So not only do females respond differently to antioxidants post exercise, but so do trained individuals. So I realize that's a lot. What's the big takeaway story here? So, first of all, let's say you have antioxidants in your smoothie. Your favorite smoothie bar has vitamin C or even vitamin E in the compound or in the smoothie.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:21]: You don't have to worry unless there are megadoses of vitamin C in there, like six plus grams and huge doses of vitamin E. Furthermore, if you're female or a very trained individual, you have to worry even less when it comes to the so-called blunting response of taking an antioxidant. So I would say if you're an untrained individual using a whole bunch of antioxidants post workout, that would be a situation in which you may be limiting your response to the workout just a little bit. But, you know, in the past, I've said, well, don't take antioxidants after workout. Turns out you're not supposed to take a whole bunch of antioxidants after workout. And then finally, I mean, I came across another study while I was looking into this research showing that when you take vitamin C after workout, it can prevent excess lipid peroxidation and muscle damage, but has no effect on inflammatory markers. Therefore, it's not going to blunt the beneficial inflammatory response to exercise. So ultimately, the whole, like, don't take antioxidants after workout thing, you don't have to worry about it as much as a lot of people are actually worrying about it.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:30]: You have to be inspecting the label of everything, making sure that you're not taking antioxidants. Just don't megadose with them is basically the idea. And if you're combining vitamin C and vitamin e, take a little bit less of both. You know, don't, don't take a whole bunch and at least give yourself two to 4 hours post workout for you to be able to mount that inflammatory response. All right, next up, as you notice, I've been growing a mustache, growing a beard, watching the video version on YouTube or at bengreenfieldlife.com/479. It's made my nightly mouth-taping protocol a little bit more difficult. Had to use this stuff called hostage tape. It's incredible.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:06]: It actually allows you to keep tape on, on a hairy face. But what's interesting is ever since I started mouth-taping, I wake up less at night to pee. And many people report the same thing. They're like, I put mouth tape on. I fell asleep at 10 p.m. and I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and I hadn't gotten up to pee. Well, here's why this actually works.

Ben Greenfield [00:32:29]: So nighttime or nocturnal urination is called, appropriately enough, nocturia. Nocturnal urination, the regular urge to get up and urinate at night, it can be caused by a lot of things, but sleep apnea is specifically one of the things that is associated with that. Now, the reason for this is that sleep apnea affects a hormone in your body known as atrial natriuretic peptide, ANP, and that causes your body to produce more urine when you're asleep. So, basically, if you're a mouth breather, if you have poor airway flow, you haven't trained yourself to breathe through your nose during sleep, you're not mouth-taping, etc. You are going to get up at night to pee more, and it's, of course, going to affect your sleep quality every time you do that. Many of us who get up at night to pee knows how hard it can be sometimes to get back to sleep afterwards, no matter how tired you are. So it turns out that this link between sleep apnea and nocturia is something that could be addressed through the process of mouth-taping.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:35]: This is not based on any studies. This is just something that I wanted to report, you know, kind of like mixing the light sound machine with vibration as something that's pretty cool that I've discovered lately that seems to work. And I just now draw drew the corollary between that, because I realize, well, hey, I'm getting better airway flow, so I am producing less ANP, the atrial natriuretic peptide, and therefore, I'm getting up less to pee more because I'm breathing through my nose, and I'm breathing through my nose because I'm mouth-taping. So, anyways, if you haven't yet gotten on the mouth-taping bandwagon, it's very simple. I just keep a strip of tape next to the bed. The stuff I use is hostage tape. There's another brand called somnifix that's really good. It feels kind of weird, right? At first, you want to do, of course, when you're done talking, especially if you have a significant other in bed, because you're going to sound like Kenny from South park.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:23]: And then you just fall asleep, and you very gently take it off in the morning. Trust me, very gently. Especially if you're using that hostage tape stuff, because it is aptly named it sticks to your face really well. I kind of smooth it down for about 15 seconds on each side and just fall asleep. And it works amazingly for improving sleep quality. So check it out. A mouth-taping, especially if you've been getting up at night to pee, and it might actually fix that. So, so I realized that was, that was a whirlwind of somewhat shorter podcast episode today.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:55]: I know I got through everything. I want to tell you pretty quickly there, but all the show notes are going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/479 including the calendar of the different events I'll be at across the globe. Links to everything I talked about, from OrganicEye.org to the roXiva and the Shiftwave lamps to some of these studies that I've discussed, to the mouth tape. I'll put it all in there. Bengreenfieldlife.com/479. Leave your questions, comments and feedbacks. I read them all. You can even let me know if you like these quick and dirty shows that just get you through a whole bunch of interesting practical tips in a short period of time. And I talk really fast at times. It's just all that mouth-taping at night makes me really blabber as soon as I rip that tape off in the morning. But anyways, thanks for listening. I'm Ben Greenfield. Have an incredible week.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:42]: 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.

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