June 14, 2017

Podcast From:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2017/06/368-building-muscle-testosterone-on-a-ketogenic-diet-food-combining-psychedelic-experimentation-natural-depression-remedies-more

[00:00] Introduction

[04:34] Welcoming Brock Back at the Show

[06:54] News Flashes/Interval Training

[11:40] Effects of Ketogenic Dieting

[16:41] Portland is Leading the Way in the New Golden Age of Psychedelics

[21:19] Magic Mushrooms are the Safest Drug a study says

[23:25] All About Sleep

[26:35] Special Announcements

[37:00] Listener Q and A: How To Build Massive Stamina & Recover Faster From An Endurance Event

[52:45] Everything You Need to Know About Food Combining

[1:09:32] Natural Fixes for Depression

[1:20:46] Does the Whole30 Diet Work?

[1:29:42] Podcast Review

[1:34:08] End of Podcast

Ben:  In this episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Show: Building Muscle And Testosterone on a Ketogenic Diet, Food Combining, Psychedelic Experimentation, Natural Depression Remedies, and much more.

Hey Rachel, I know you always have some kind of a special drinky drink that you drinky drink during the show.  Not that you're an alcheholic, but what are you diving into today?

Rachel:  Nah. I love a fancy drink.  I have tianchi this morning and it's probably my favorite. It's been my absolute substitute for coffee for like the past month and it's just doing the wonders.

Ben:  Tianchi.  I was actually with your husband at an entrepreneurial event last week. And as I'm getting on the airplane somebody taps me on the shoulder and I turn around and there's Jacob your husband standing there, and he has a packet of that tianchi stuff.  He's just like offering it to me out of the goodness of his heart. So I took it.

Rachel:  I love that he offered you tianchi when you introduced him to tianchi but he told me that you…

Ben:  When I probably have an entire duffle bag of the stuff.

Rachel:  Yeah exactly.  He told me that you ripped open the packet through your head back and dumped it straight into your mouth. (laughs)

Ben:  Yes. I hear that's how they do it.  That's how they do it in the Orient when they take adaptogenic herbs.

Rachel:  One way to do it.

Ben:  Last time I was with you, you're drinking the whiskey thing with a cherry in it. What was that called?

Rachel:  An old fashioned…

Ben:  Old fashioned. That's usually your drink of choice?

Rachel:  It is, though it's got so much sugar in it.  And I always wake up with sugary… it's not good but it tastes so good and I feel so fancy.

Ben:  It's that damn cherry.  Actually that reminds me.  My voice is going to fade because I'm in my little hotel room here in Monterey, California. I'm down here racing the Monterey Spartan Race so I've got my little… in case the audio sounds different by the way if you just listen to it 'cause I've got my little portable podcasting microphone set up. My slick little set up here on my desk. I'm kneeling on my pillow in my hotel room which is my equivalent of a stand up desk 'cause it's up in the kneeling desk but across the room tempting me as we talk about what was the whiskey drink? The old fashioned?

Rachel:  Old fashioned.

Ben:  And the tianchi… My refrigerator is calling my name. I always order a mini fridge to my room when I first get into a hotel ‘cause then I can go, like this morning my breakfast was a tomato, an avocado, a can of sardines, and a carrot with some almond butter on it. And that's because whenever I travel I swing by the grocery store, grab a bunch of stuff and throw it into the mini fridge, and almost every hotel, most people don't know that's even the crappiest of hotels, not that the Marriott in Monterey is that crappy, but they always have many fridges and they'll bring him to your hotel room and you can store things in there.  So if you learn nothing else from this podcast learn that.  But I'm going to go over there and grab my sippy sip of choice one second and you can guess what it is.  Be right back.  Stay there.  Stay there.

Rachel:  (laughs) I already know what it is.  There's only one thing that you have a drink.  (whispering) That's sparkling water, you guys. Sparkling water.

Ben:  And, oh, I mean that sounds really exhausting.  He's only five feet away.  Okay. Ready.  Here we go. (Opening a can) What do you think I have there Rachel?

Rachel:  It's sparkling water, Ben.  It's LaCroix isn't it?

Ben:  It's LaCroix coconut flavored sparkling water.  I usually will go for the glass bottled Pellegrino but I'm a sucker for this coconut flavored LaCroix stuff.  It's actually pretty good.

Rachel:  You're somewhat becoming predictable.  You and your LaCroix. (drinking sound) Oh my God, what was that?

Ben:  That's not me.  What are you drinking Rachel?

Brock:  (Singing) Brock Arms back alright!

Rachel:  Brock!  Is that you?

Brock:  Hello buddy!

Rachel:  Oh my God.

Brock:  I'm back!

Rachel:  Yey!

Ben:  Brock Jason Skywalker Armstrong, our former podcast sidekick. What are you doing here, dude?

Brock:  I don't know.  I thought I'd just drop by and say hi, or maybe I'll just come back and take over for Rachel.

Ben:  Dude, this is crazy.  First of all before I address that second thing you just said what are you drinking, dude?

Brock:  Coffee.  Just black coffee.

Ben:  Of course.  Some boring Canadian black coffee.  Black coffee and poutine. Hey, you guys listening in. Guess what? There is a reason Brock's back and that I faked surprise that he's back because I knew this is going to happen.  Brock is back.  Rachel has decided to move on to, I think run for the prime minister of Australia.

Rachel:  That's exactly what I'm gonna do.

Ben:  As well as a…

Rachel:  Vote one. Rachael Brown.

Ben:  That's right.  You're also working hand-in-hand with… who's the vagina queen lady? the girl who…

Rachel:  The vagina loving, vagina weightlifting, vagina powered woman. Her name is Kim Anami.

Ben:  Yes.  You're doing quite a bit with Kim Anami now.  I don't know if you're the person learning how to pick up kettlebells and coconuts with your vagina, but I know someone who is not.  And that is Brock because he doesn't have any coconuts around for his vagina.

Brock:  I've been hunting and lo, I can't find a single one here in Vancouver.

Ben:  Vaginas are coconut.

Rachel: (laughs)

Brock:  I'm not saying.

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  Anyways you guys, Brock is coming back onto the show as the Ben Greenfield fitness sidekick.  In addition, we're going to start launching back into listener Q and A.  You can expect here on the Ben Greenfield fitness show a couple listener Q and A's a month, a couple of interviews a month, possibly more but perhaps most notably Brock is back.  So let's all give Brock a rollicking round of applause. (applause)

Brock:  Thank you everybody.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

News Flashes:

Ben:  Alright.  This is the part of the show where I don't know who I even talk to now, I'm confused.  Do I talk to Rachel or do I talk to Brock?

Rachel:  You talk to us both.

Ben:  Which one of you guys wants to intro the news flashes?

Rachel:  Brock, you go on.

Brock:  Okay.

Rachel:  Take it away Brock.

Brock:  I'll give it a shot see if I remember all the locations of all your social media.

Ben:  Well, will just put them in the show notes.  Ben Greenfield fitness dot com slash 368.

Brock:  Nice.  Nice.

Ben:  Yeah.  I just did the job for him.

Rachel:  (laughs) And you're out.

Brock:  And I'm done. Now you can find all these news flashes over at Twitter.com/bengreenfield, Instagram.com/bengreenfieldfitness, Facebook.com/BGfitness, and of course, bengreenfieldfitness.com/snapchat.

Ben:  Yeah.  Just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/368.  If your memory is like mine.  Okay, so. Interval training, interval training.  Here's an interesting one you guys.  This was in the New York Times.  This is a gal that writes for The New York Times dot com called Gretchen Reynolds and she always got these pretty interesting articles. And she recently reported on this study that was published in cell metabolism that shows that certain kind of workouts can undo what years of living can do to your mitochondria.

You know, like recently I interviewed those chaps from Telo years where they went in and they measured the telomeres on all my white blood cells and determined how likely I am to die, right.  What my biological versus my chronological age was and I was actually kind of shocked like I found that my biological age is actually a year past my chronological age probably because I've done some pretty vigorous endurance exercise in the past and that's actually been shown to decrease or I'm sorry increase the rate at which your telomeres shortened or this…  Go ahead Rachel.

 Rachel:  Is one year bad though, Ben?  One year seems pretty legit the amount that you put yourself through.

Ben:  I don't know.  The doctor who interviewed me, he's like 45 years old and his age was 27.  So I got telomere jealousy.

Rachel:  (chuckles) Telomerousy?

Ben:  That’s right, telomerousy.  Anyways though, what they found out was when they biopsied the muscle cells of all these individuals who did all sorts of different kinds of exercise and they followed them for 12 weeks during this study, they had a group that did vigorous weight training several times a week, they had a group that did brief interval training three times a week on a bike. And what they did specifically was hard exercise for four minutes and then they rested for three minutes, and that they did that three times though.  So if you do the math which is really complex, that's 21 minutes of exercise.  And then they had a steady state exercise group that just rode the bike for 30 minutes without doing the intervals, and then they had a fourth group that didn't exercise.

Now, the group that did the interval training compared to the group that did the weightlifting and compared to the group that did the moderate exercising what they found was almost 400 genes were working differently in terms of advantageous anti-aging mechanisms compared with just 33 gene changes for the weightlifters and only 19 gene changes for the moderate exercisers.  And so, it turns out that because most of these affected genes are particularly involved with the mitochondria and how the mitochondria produce energy for the muscle cells, interval training and especially this four minutes on three minutes off three times through a deal seems to be an extremely potent short interval training workout that extends lifespan even more than weightlifting and even more than steady state exercise.  How cool is that.

Rachel:  That's very interesting and it also is interesting because of your telorjealousy, because you do a lot of high intensity interval training and yet it's age to you.

Ben:  Well there's a couple of things that come to mind for that. Number one, I do a lot of exercise generally like I have an article about this.  If you go to quickanddirtytips.com, it’s about how once you exceed about 60 minutes per day of intense exercise or 90 minutes per day of aerobic exercise, not only do you see a law of diminishing returns but you actually see increased mortality.

Rachel:  Wow.

Ben:  So this kind of seems to back that up that again like short and intense is best.

Brock:  Followed by a recovery.

Ben:  Followed by, yup, exactly.  Active recovery.  So I’ll link to this one over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/368 if you want to check out that study.  Now there's also been some recent investigations into the ketogenic diet because a lot of people say that you can't build muscle on a ketogenic diet, and furthermore that a ketogenic, high fat, low carb diet would decrease testosterone.

Brock:  Which you I believe experienced exactly that when you're doing your great ketogenic experiment back in, when was that… 2000…

Ben:  Right.  Back in the 2000s. Back in the good old days. But yeah, I was training for Ironman.  I was following a ketogenic diet and my testosterone took a hit, my thyroid took a hit but it turns out you know, and if you go to a website there's a really good website called Keto Gains at ketogains.com.  They do a lot of talk there about how to and I'm not married to a ketogenic diet by the way.  I think we have a question later on in this episode about how to choose the perfect diet for you, and for some people who are doing like very long endurance exercise or who want to like hack cognitive performance a strict ketogenic diet can be useful.  But it also makes it as I've said in the past really difficult socially especially when you walk past an Italian restaurant like here in Monterey.  I went to a great Italian restaurant last night and they brought olive oil like extra virgin thick green olive oil to the table with their homemade bread, the homemade foccacia bread or like the day before, I was in Bulgaria.  And they brought out like the sausages, and the tomato sauce, and the vegetables, and the Ratatouille or whatever it was like the roasted vegetables.  And then they brought like this enormous loaf of like thick flaky bread to the table. I'm not gonna frickin’ like push my chair back and ask for some MCT oil. All right. I’m gonna stuff that bread in my face.

But this particular study looked into the effects of ketogenic diet on body composition, strength power, and hormonal profiles, and guys who were lifting weights.  And what they found was not only did they see a significant increase in total testosterone during 11 weeks of a ketogenic diet combined with the weight training, and they actually saw a slightly higher rate of testosterone increase compared to the group that wasn't fun of the ketogenic diet.  But they also noted a significant increase in lean muscle mass gain in these people who were eating the ketogenic diet because according to the study authors it appears that the ketogenic diet had a fat utilizing muscle sparing effect.

And the other interesting thing and this is what I want to note to folks who are listening and are thinking, well I'm going to try like the high fat low carb diet to gain muscle. They did protein match in the study. What that means is that both groups both the ketogenic group as well as the regular group were eating 20% of their dietary intake from protein.  Twenty percent of their dietary intake from protein.  And the actual breakdown here of the ketogenic that they use in this study is wasn't like 90% of fat, it was… let's see if I can get into the study.  I have the full study here in front of me and I can tell you exactly what the breakdown was here.  It was…  So the percentages were for the regular diet 20% from protein, 55% from carbs and 25% from fat.  But in the ketogenic group was 20% from protein, 5% from carbohydrate and that includes fiber and 75% from fat.  So obviously pretty significant differences here.  But what they did find was that testosterone really didn't decrease but increase and you can also gain muscle on a ketogenic diet assuming you're eating enough calories and assuming you're eating about 20% of your diet possibly a little bit more from protein.  So they have it.

Brock:  So is that amount of protein enough to actually kick you out of ketosis though? Like with what's that called when protein turned into…

Ben:  Yeah.  Gluconeogenesis.

Brock:  There you go.

Ben:  Now the idea is that if your nitrogen balance goes up too much from too much protein on some like a ketogenic diet what will happen is that that can cause some glucose conversion.  But if you're lifting weights that's pretty unlikely to happen.  So they have it.

Brock:  Gotcha.  So this needs to be combined with the heavy lifting otherwise it could be kicking you out of ketosis.

Ben:  That’s right.  So butter gives you biceps baby.

Brock:  Nah. (laughs)

Ben:  That's actually the next book I'm going to write.  Butter and biceps.  Also… oh go ahead.

Rachel:  So Ben, does this mean that the jury is out and we are 100% sure now that you can build muscle on a ketogenic diet?

Ben:  Provided that you lift heavy stuff and provided that you get enough protein.  Yeah. Yup.  There you have it.  And also there was a great follow up article that the study authors wrote that I’ll link to.  They wrote over at ketogenic.com.  So go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/368 if you're a nerd and you want to take a deep deep dive into that where you suck down coconut oil and butter in your LaCroix sparkling water.  Also, Rachel you live in Portland and I discovered a very interesting article about Portland.  And it's about how Portland is leading the way into a new golden age of psychedelics. Did you see this?

Rachel:  I did see it and I'm not surprised to be honest.

Ben:  Well…

Brock:  Portland.  My Portland.

Rachel:  There's a lot of medicine in general going on in this little town.

Ben:  Well, it begins with this fellow named Chris who makes a smoothie before he goes to work and he puts like his bananas, and kale, and berries, and everything and then he also throws in a couple of capsules of psilocybin mushrooms before he puts his cap on and whistles out the door and heads to work loaded up with psilocybin.  And he says that the afterglow lasts for a few days.  He does this on Mondays and Thursdays so he does a shroom based smoothie which is called micro dosing on a Monday and a Thursday.  And as the article says in New York they want to trip balls.  California is more burner culture hearts and flowers but Portland is different. People want to incorporate psychedelic experiences into their daily life, and for example this other guy that they highlight in the show who bought a Sonoran Desert toad that he keeps in his house to produce what's called the 5-MeO-DMT in toad's said venom sacs.

Rachel:  Wasn’t there a Simpson’s episode about that where they are all lick the toad?

Ben:  Oh, I don't know if he's licking the toad or what he's doing with the toad but venom filled sacs that produce 5-MeO-DMT would be another thing that you can keep her on the house in addition to psilocybin that you put into your smoothie.  And by the way I'm justing slightly but I do micro dose, like about every week or so I'll do a micro dose of LSD and you know, I've used shrooms as often as two or three times a week and like very small 0.5 to 0.7 milligram doses which is like a dose for me that's not what they call a trip dose but is instead just enough to cause an increasing cognitive performance.

The article has a lot of interesting anecdotes in it that I'd recommend you go check out if you wanna learn about how these “normal” folks in Portland are using psychedelics.  But yeah, like all sorts of people microdosing and one thing that's really funny is they say people report they form better sleeping habits, better eating, improves stress response. One man said he looked at the menu and said, “By God I wanted the salad!” They tend to drink less, smoke less that's both tobacco and pot.  And many report less coffee drinking as well.

Brock:  That sounds like some kind of hell.

Ben:  I know.  Less coffee drinking sounds horrible.  Less coffee drinking, more salads and mushrooms in your morning smoothie.

Brock:  This is the reason why you don't go to Portland on a Wednesday.

Ben:  Uhmm.

Rachel:  This is the reason why you do go to Portland on a Wednesday.  Everyone’s  walking around. (laughs) Microdosing.

Ben:   Now, the same guy who wrote that article also wrote the article which I linked to in the show notes entitled, “I Tried Microdosing With Four Different Psychedelic Drugs. Here's What Happened.” and this guy after writing the article about Portland took a pretty deep dive and what he did was he rated pleasantness and productivity from a variety of different experiences.  So he did cannabis as one of his drugs of choice and he rated productivity as a three on a scale of one to 10 but pleasantness as a 6.5.  He did LSD and what he rated for LSD for productivity was 8.3 and pleasantness was 7.1.  So he actually found microdosing with LSD to be quite more productive than doing it with cannabis.  No surprises there.

Brock:  And slightly more pleasant.

Ben:  Probably a lot fewer potato chips too. He did DMT which is an intense psychedelic experience. You know, that's one that you'd find for example in the venom sac of your pet toad as 5-MeO-DMT and he rated that pleasantness as 8.  And productivity is 8 so that one actually was higher even than LSD or cannabis in terms of its total rating.  And then of course there were shrooms and shrooms productivity rated 6.5 and pleasantness 7.2. So it turns out that the toads win over everything.

Rachel:  Wow. Keep your toads in your backyard.

Ben:  Uh –hmm.

Rachel:  I don't know. I don't know. I don't even know how you harvest the sacs of them to take.  Like how does that even…

Ben:  Very carefully.

Brock:  I don’t want to know.

Ben:  Very, very carefully with the help of a small child.

Brock:  Very careful.

Ben:  My kids have a dragon lizard.  So next up is they're going to get a toad.  But there was a recent study that came out that shows that most magic mushrooms are the safest drugs.  This came out just a couple of days ago compared to LSD, ecstasy, and cocaine apparently compared to all these other drugs where you'll have a relatively high percentage of people like alcohol, 1.3 percent of people who use it wind up having some kind of death-like experience or emergency medical treatment.  You know, cocaine is 1%, LSD is 1%, Amphetamine is 1.1%.  Ecstasy is 1.2%, Cannabis is the next safest with 0.6% claiming to have sought medical help after its use.  But when it comes to magic mushrooms only 0.2% of people reported seeking emergency medical treatment probably because they couldn't find the phone as it was a spinning…

Rachel: (laughs)

Brock:  As like they couldn't get off the couch.

Ben:  Their phone was a spinning pile of unicorn shooting rainbows.  Anyways though…

Brock:  I find that really interesting ‘cause during the 420 celebrations here in Vancouver, the emergency rooms saw a huge spike in visits just for that one day.  Maybe it's just because people have super got carried away on that one particular day but yeah, there were a lot of people going to the hospital.

Ben:  I would imagine that the difference between microdosing and hedonism would be pretty significant.  So yeah.  So that's interesting. So I’ll link to those articles in the show notes and I get a lot of questions from people actually at Paleo f(x) that somebody raised their hand and they were asking like how you can actually source said mushrooms and LSD and all these things that are technically illegal.  And there are websites out there that teach you to source it.  But one of the most common methods is you get a bitcoin account and a cloaked browser and then just go shop to your heart's content.  You can purchase mushrooms, AK 47, hitman, helicopters, you name it.

Rachel:  (laughs) You can also grow them legally in Portland.

Ben:  Yes. Or you could just get a horse that takes a dump in your backyard. That's right.  Oh, and then one other thing, speaking of psychedelics Let's talk about sleep.  I've been jet setting all over the globe recently.  I haven't been home in 20 days.  I missed my kids. But of course I have to pull out all these different jetlag and sleep biohacks.  Many of which I talked about in my Beyond Training book. But there was a really interesting study that went into something I hadn't thought about too much in the New York Times.

The one from the New York Times that I linked to in the show notes, and you know, among a variety of things that you probably already know, right, circadian rhythm is F up by flying around on the airplane and you can be in a state of perpetual jetlag if you're waking and sleeping at random times, and you should try to keep your internal clock kind of cued with things like morning sunlight and trying to get rid of too much blue light in the evening. One Takeaway that I got from this article because I read just about every sleep article on sleep piece of research that comes out there is that you can actually use melatonin in the morning. And what that does is it advances your internal clock.  It tricks your brain into thinking that you slept longer. Let's say you're going from East to West.  So you are traveling from East to West and that means in the West when 10 PM rolls around technically your body thinks it's 1:00 AM, so you're going to get a lot more tired a lot earlier in the evening.  But you can fix that by that morning. Taking a small amount of melatonin to advance your circadian clock.

So the way that they phrase it in the actual article is travel east and you'll need to focus on morning light and evening melatonin.  But travel west and you'll need evening light and morning melatonin.  So isn't that kind of interesting? I never thought about taking melatonin in the morning but it makes sense.  And furthermore, they say that it does not cause drowsiness when you take melatonin in the morning.  I actually just took some this morning and (snoring sound).

Brock:  Ohh.

Rachel:  I was going to say, have you tried it ‘cause you’ve been traveling all over the place.

Ben:  I’m just kidding.  Yeah, actually I have not yet tried it.  I'm curious if any of our listeners you can leave a comment over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/368 if you're a morning melatoner.  But apparently it can actually work pretty well.

Brock:  How small of a dose are we talking here? Did it say?

Ben:  I'm not sure.  But typically a small dose of melatonin would be about 0.3 percent or so. And they actually talked about… or .03 milligrams, yeah.  They also talked about chronotherapy combined with psychotropic medication.  Speaking of psychotropics they talked about the use of ketamine as a way to fight after or fight off some of the depression that can occur with changes in circadian rhythm.  I thought that's one with lithium was another one that they talked about.  Lithium is something I discussed in my podcast with Kevin Rose where were we… and also the guys who invented the qualia supplement is another kind of nootropic that flies under the radar.  So extremely interesting article but I thought the most interesting part was just taking melatonin in the morning.

Brock:  Can you just drink a whole bunch of Sprite?

Ben:  Hmm, that’ll probably work as we know Sprite is chock full of melatonin. Thank you for your intelligent contribution.

Brock:  Yeah.  There actually was lithium in Sprite.

Ben:  Oh actually, no, it’s 7-Up.  It’s  7-Up.

Brock:  Oh, 7-Up, yeah.

Rachel:  7–Up.

Ben:  7-Up, dummy.  All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump into this week's special announcements.

Special Announcements:

Ben:  Well, like I mentioned, I’ve been jet setting all over the globe.  This weekend I'll be racing in the Spartan race here in Monterey and then also a few of the things coming up. Do you guys know about this guy named Chef David Bouley?  Ever heard of him?

Rachel:  I haven't.  No.

Ben:  Okay.  So he's like one of the top chefs on the face of the planet and he's actually… I don't coach that many people for health.  Like I'm kind of like the CEO of health for a select number of people who like send me their heart rate variability and their sleep, their exercise, their diet.  He's a guy who I've been helping recently and I'm actually going to go back to New York and speak at his July 11th Chef and the Doctor series where apparently…

Brock:  Which one are you?

Ben:  I will be posing as the doctor and it will be like a Q&A.  For that one they'll called it Chef and the…

Brock:  Yahoo?

Rachel:  Biohacker.

Ben:  Exerciser?  Chef and the Yahoo.  Anyways though, that's in Tribeca in New York on July 11th in the evening.  You can get tickets to that. There's also, I know this seems like a long ways off but if you want to buy your ticket you should get on it. Iceland.  I’ll be speaking at the cheesiest name ever but should be a good conference. Who Wants To Live Forever Conference in Iceland.

Brock:  I'm sure it's better in Icelandic. It's lost in translation.

Ben:  I think that is probably, yeah.  Yeah exactly, in Iceland it probably sounds like some bad ass phrase. But here in the US it's the Who Wants To Live Forever Conference.  So that's going to be in Iceland, September 8th through 11th followed up by the Biohacker Summit which is an amazing event in Helsinki, Finland in October.  So if you want to go to Iceland or Finland or both.  Check those out.  We'll put links to those in the show notes because you want to get your tickets early.

There's also a couple of other things going on that you would want to get your tickets early for.  Number one is the XPT Experience in Kauai where Laird Hamilton and me, and Brian McKenzie, and Kelly Starrett.  Whole bunch of people are going to be leading workouts like pool training, underwater workouts, breathwork instruction, a whole bunch of stuff and I'll link to that one in the show notes for those of you who want to get in on the XPT Experience in Kauai.  One of my favorite islands on Hawaii.

And then finally, I'll be headed down to the amazing Digital Detox Retreat in Panama called Runga.   It was in Costa Rica last year, this year it's in Panama.  It's an eight day conference that has everything from hiking volcanoes to white water rafting, to this intense 2-hour kundalini hot yoga sessions that we do.  Pretty amazing time.  So plenty going on on the calendar.  What’s the calendar URL, Rachel that people can go to?

Rachel:  bengreenfieldfitness.com/calendar.

Brock:  Hmm.  I didn’t know about that.

Ben:  Yeah!  It’s a new calendar.

Brock:  That’s awesome!

Rachel:  You can follow Ben in everywhere he’s gonna be and you can sign up to everything that he’s doing.  It’s lots of fun so go and check it out.

Ben:  Yeah, We should have called it bengreenfieldfitness.com/stalker.  No, I’m just kidding.  No, I actually love to hung out with folks when I’m at these places.  So yeah, the more the merrier.  And it just means we’re have less annoying people if Ben Greenfield fitness fans are at this thing ‘cause we all know that the listeners were all cool.  You guys get stuff like telomeres!  One of today’s sponsors.  Telomeres.  We talked about telomere measurement and the folks who measure telomeres, they wanted to give our listeners a special discount to get your own telomeres measured.

So this is the one were like I mentioned earlier mentioned the length of your telomeres and you figured out how old you really are and what kind of age related diseases you might have a pre-disposition too because the length of your telomeres tends to shorten with age and that’s affected by a whole bunch of different lifestyle factors.  So what they’ll do, there is somebody else doing this but they’ll take your telomeres, measure the length of your telomeres, you get your results back and you can track your telomere length overtime to see if anything that you’re doing or whatever it is, supplements, exercises, habits, whatever, psychedelics, how those are all influencing your aging.  And so, you can then basically take action.  If you find out that your morning kale smoothie is shortening your telomeres but your bacon and eggs for breakfast is lengthening your telomeres or keeping it from shortening, that’s a pretty dang valuable piece of advice in my opinion.

Brock:  It is!  I’m sure it is.

Ben:  Yeah!

Brock:  I’ve given up on a bunch of these but I really wanna do this one ‘cause mostly I wanna kick your butt.

Ben:  Here’s how: you to bengreenfieldfitness.com/teloyears and the code you wanna use to get 10% off is just Ben10.  So you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/teloyears and that code will last through August 31^st of 2017, so you have all summer left.  You can get 10% off at bengreenfieldfitness.com/teloyears.

Brock:  And then write in and tell us how old you are versus how old your telomeres are so we can all make Ben fell even more jealous.

Rachel:  All I know is I’m gonna be way better than the both of you ‘cause you both like 10 years older than me.

Ben:  No, we all know lifting a coconut with your vagina strips years of your life, so…

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic Foods and actually there’s one thing that I really like that they recently launch.  It’s called green coffee with chaga and maitake.  So green coffee is a lot higher in antioxidants and it has lots of similar compounds in it as green tea and the reason I like that is one of my potent one-two-three combos for morning fat loss is you get up and you drink either green tea or coffee, or in this case green coffee if you want a little bit of an extra boost, and then you do any form of easy conversational exercise.  And like your fat burning zone for about 20-30 minutes like walking in the sunshine, yoga, sauna, whatever, like easy conversational pace so the caffeine is mobilizing the fatty acids and the aerobic exercise is keeping you in that fatty acid mobilization mode and then you finish that up with a 2-5 minute cold shower.  That’s it.  Boom, boom, boom.  Caffeine; 20-30 minutes of exercising in aerobic zone, cold shower.  If you do that every day, you can literally as they say on TV, “Watch the fat melt off your waistline.”

Brock:  Eh!  That sounds gross.  I don’t wanna watch that.

Ben:  Yeah.  It does sound kinda gross like a candle melting.

Brock:  Yeah, it just paddles around your feet.

Ben:  Uh-hmm, yeah. (making sounds)

Brock:  Don’t do it.

Ben:  Anyways though, mushroom coffee mix.  There’s this company called Four Sigmatic, they do this green coffee and you go to foursigmatic.com/greenfield.  That’s FOURsigmatic.com/greenfield and coupon code Ben Greenfield gets you 15% off.  So now you can curse me in the cold shower as the taste of green coffee feels your mouth.

This podcast is also brought to you by something that my children are now using.  Every single Monday after they leave jiu-jitsu because I don’t want them to get ring worm and pedogo, MRSA, athlete’s foot, jock itch, lice, stand of acne or dry skin from the jiu-jitsu mat.

Brock:  You’re such a good dad.  You really care.

Ben:  I know.  I care about my kids’ dry skin.  Anyways though, what this company does is they developed a melaleuca based tea tree oil and eucalyptus leaf oil that they’ve infused into soap that doesn’t have a bunch of man-boob generating chemicals in it and you can just use a little bit everyday to knock out any of those things you’d picked out at the gym or you’d pick up under the jiu-jitsu mat and they make a whole bunch of cool things like MCT oil toothpaste, and Captain America weight plates.  And the soap is called is Defense Soap by the way.  The company is Onnit.  O-N-N-I-T.  Ton of cool stuff on that website.  You gonna spend a lot of time when you go there but one thing that I really dig that I travel with and that my kids use now is this Defense Soap.  Defense Soap.  You too can keep flesh-eating bacteria at bay.

Rachel:  Do you know where melaleuca’s from Ben?

Ben:  Drying melaleuca’s from?

Rachel:  Uh-hmm.

Ben:  From tea tree plant? They get it off of the skin of hippies.

Rachel:  From Australia and you’re welcome.

Ben:  Oh really? It’s from Australia.

Rachel:  Yeah.  Uh-hmm.

Ben:  I don’t know.  The tea tree in Australia?

Rachel:  Yes!

Ben:  Nice!

Brock:  That’s why it has such a sensible name.  ‘Cause Australians are so good at naming.

Rachel:  It does. (laughs)

Ben:  That’s right.  I thought they harvested it from hippie armpits just like puchelli but now I know.  Good to know.  Oh 10% off though.  Just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/onnit, that’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/ONNIT.

And then finally, this podcast is brought to you by something I have not one, but two of in my house.

Brock:  Show off.

Ben:  Right next to my soap.  It has over 20,000 reviews that’s based off of Amazon and Google reviews with an average of 4.8 stars out of 5.

Rachel:  Wow!

Ben:  It is something that you can get with completely free shipping and free returns to US and Canada.  You can try it for a hundred nights.

Brock:  Enough already.  Tell us for god sakes, man!

Ben:  No! I’m enjoying the suspense.

Brock:  No!

Ben:  A hundred nights, risk-free in your own home.  It was designed in Merica and it will, speaking of sleep, it will enhance your sleep even more than psychedelics, even more than soap, than flesh-eating bacteria protection soap.  This is called a Casper Mattress.

Brock:  Ohh, my god!

Ben:  A Casper Mattress.  That’s right, and you not only can get this obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price but you’re getting better price because if you go to casper.com/ben and you use promo code Ben, then you’ll save 50 bucks off everything or anything from Casper.  Their adaptive pillows, their soft and breathable sheets or of course their mattress that comes in a tiny little “how did they do it” size box.  So check it out casper.com/ben and use promo code Ben.

Brock:  Wewww! Ohhh.

Ben:  On we go to this week’s Q and A.

Listener Q & A:

Kory:  Hey Ben, this is Kory.  I am currently training for the Hurricane Heat 12 hour event for Spartan race.  I did this event last year and I got time hacked at the 10^th hour and so I have learned from the event and I’ve started to do a lot more rucking, weighted calisthenics and more military PT, style workouts, but I know this style of training can do a lot of damage on your body’s joints.  And I’m wondering if you have any tips on how to train for a weight bearing endurance event like this without doing too much damage to yourself.  Also, if you have any special gear like any rucks you can recommend and things like that.  That would be great as well.  Thank you so much.  I love the podcast.  Keep it up.

Brock:  So what the heck is a Hurricane Heat to start with? I’ve never done a Spartan.  I’ve only done Tough Mudders.  Is this something completely different?

Ben:  Yeah.  They put a giant fan in front of a wall to simulate a hurricane then you run at the fan as your hair blows back, and you sprint like Tom Cruise sprinting away from an explosion except you’re you sprinting towards the hurricane fan.

Brock:  Hmm.  That doesn’t sound that it hurt.

Ben:  That’s what it is.  No actually what it was back on Hurricane Irene was going to knockout the East Coast and force the folks who put on the Spartan race back there to shut down the race, instead, this seems really intelligent, they decided to just go to the course anyways during the hurricane.  And they showed up and Joe De Sena who’s like the CEO of Spartan, he just basically force ‘em to toil through the race with the whole bunch of pouring rain and sand bags and obstacles and tons of burpees and they just did that for like 12 hours instead of doing the actual race.  So, it sounds super pleasant but now they’ve turned it like this crucible.  So you can do like a 3-4 hour version, you can do a 12 hour version, and…

Brock:  Wait a second.  Were you serious?

Ben:  Yeah, I’m serious. (chuckles)  That’s actually…

Brock:  Really? I was waiting for you to do like for the butt of ‘em… uhm, there.

Ben:  No, no, no punchline.  That’s actually how they did.  The folks at Spartan can get pretty crazy.  So yeah, now you do this, you can sign up for any Spartan like if I wanted to tonight instead of going to race the Spartan in the morning, I could show up at 7 PM tonight and just do the Hurricane Heat until 7 AM the next day as a way to grow a little bit hair in my chest.

Brock:  Actually, you probably lose some of the hair.  I’m guessing.

Ben:  Well, I’ve done many Hurricane Heats.

Rachel:  You’d also lose some teloyears.

Ben:  I am actually one of the few people who have ever completed the Spartan Delta which was designed to produce some of the strongest and most mentally tough citizens on earth by doing things like the Hurricane Heat and the Spartan Agoge, and the Spartan like the deal where you do all the Spartan races on one weekend, yeah, I did that.

Rachel:  I remember.

Ben:  That’s why I’m so…

Rachel:  I remember that Ben.

Ben:  So my telomeres are so old.

Rachel:  I remember Agoge and I remember you’re telling me that a girl lose some toes to frost bite.

Brock:  Ehhhhh!

Rachel:  I was like, I’m not really sure about this anymore. (chuckles)

Ben:  Yeah, she lose toes like the first hour.  Yeah.

Rachel:  Yeah.

Ben:  Yeah, and that was cool.  You couldn’t pull on your pants and take a crap without your ass checks getting frost bite ‘cause it was 38 degrees below zero.  That was a cold race.

Brock:  Welcome to my world.

Ben:  Yeah.  So how do you actually train for one of these things?  I know Kory is wondering how he can do it without damaging his joints specifically ‘cause that’s the big thing.  There’s some definite strategies that you can use.  So, my recommendations that I’m gonna give to Kory.  I would say that there are probably 5 and then I’ll throw in a bonus 6 little tip for you Kory that would be the reason most people fail stuff like this, most people fail Ironman, most people fail, I don’t wanna say fail just like I have a really miserable time to cross the finish line, the Navy SEALfit Kokoro, etc.  So I’ll throw a little tip for you at the end.  But the first thing I recommend is a freaking really good incline treadmill.  Like I have a Nordic track treadmill that goes at the 40% incline in my garage.  I got it for a great deal off at eBay.  You’d be surprised at how many rich folks buy fancy incline treadmills and just basically sit on ‘em and practically pay you to come pick ‘em up.  Craigslist is not a good source for this.

Do a search for a Nordic Track incline treadmill.  You want the kind that goes to a really steep incline so that you can get your heart rate really high and you can simulate the kind of hills that you’re gonna be climbing which are usually gonna be more than 20%. Like one Hurricane Heat I had two 40 pound sand bags and I carry them for almost 4 hours and part of it was just like up and down a muddy slopes, and they were a lot steeper than 20%.  And probably more than 40%.  But the idea is that you use that treadmill so that you can get all of the metabolic and physiologic benefits of uphill climbing with none of the joint pounding of downhill running, right? ‘cause you could go on run repeats but going down you really tear up your knees and your calves and ankles and that can lead to joint pain overtime.  But if you just have a basic incline treadmill, and even if you don’t have one, go to the gym and get the treadmill that at least go up to 15% and do really long brisk weighted walks up that thing without any type of downhill running.

So it’s sounds boring but it does save your joints and there are some professional Spartan racers like one guy I’ll have dinner with tonight.  He is here in town for the race, Matt Novakovich and also goes by the name “The Bear”, and he’s like one of the fittest older Spartan.  I think he’s like 41.  So he’s not super old but he also really keeps himself put together in one piece and he spends copious amounts of time just on the inclined treadmill and the dude can run a blasting fast 5K but most of his training is just walking a very steep inclines.  So, there’s that.  Inclined treadmill.  That’s one way to build up stamina.

Number 2, and this is something that I’m typically on when I’m at home for 45 miles a day, low level physical intensity that keeps your core muscles activated that trains all the tiny little muscles in the bottom of your feet, but that allows you to still be productive at the same time.  That would be just a basic treadmill workstation or a standing workstation or both.  They’re all training through throughout the day.  It sounds dumb, it sound simple, it sounds silly but that freaking works even when I was training for Ironman.  I would be in my feet for 5-6 hours a day, and then I’d finished the day with one really brief high intensity run, or high intensity bike ride or high intensity swim, so I had low level physical activity all day long and then kinda like the icing on the cake or the cherry on the poutine or how do you say it in Canada.  (laughs) It was that brief high intensity exercise at the end of the day.  So the basic standing workstation or a treadmill workstation.  That would be tip number 2.

Brock:  But would you put it on on a 15% incline?

Ben:  You could! Yeah! You could kill 2 birds at one… now, I don’t use the mechanical treadmill in my office ‘cause these things churn out a ton of what’s called dirty electricity.  So that’s one out in the garage but my treadmill in my office is called the True Form treadmill which I like because a True Form, you can only run or walk on it if you’re on a proper biomechanical position.  Meaning, if you’re using like a mid to front forefoot strike, so it’s a good type of treadmill.  They’re expensive but they’re manual, they don’t produce a lot of dirty electricity and your posture stays really really good when you’re on it.

Brock:  So you can’t lean way over and put your elbows on the thing and read a magazine while running on it?

Ben:  Right, or he’ll strike, exactly.  Yup, yup.  Sounds like the voice of experience there.

Brock:  Yeah!

Ben:  Next up would be a really good weighted vest that allows the vest not to bounce around but very form fitting on you and allow you to do a lot of the rucking, and the weighted calisthenics and the military PT style workouts but with extra weight on your body.  But again weight that’s not bouncing around and so it’s just again like greasing the groove that you’re working against one of these weighted vest that you could start at 10 lbs. and tweak it to get up to 40 lbs. by adding extra weights to it.  One that I like for that is made by this company called Hyperwear.  I’ve tried a lot of the weighted vest and this one is like the most form fitting weighted vest.

Brock:  Yeah.  It’s almost like a compression vest.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.  Exactly.  Actually I did on a dare, I did a Spartan race wearing this vest once and that was pretty horrible and uncomfortable because this kinda tight and compressy.

Brock:  Were you surprised that it was horrible?  Was that really a surprise to you?

Ben:  No.  But climbing the rope was really hard.  Like climbing a rope with a weighted vest is hard especially with the vest.

Brock:  Yeah.  So you cannot be surprise.

Ben:  So, get it like a good weighted vest that fits tight like a Hyperwear Weighted Vest.  That’s the brand I like, and I’ll put our Amazon link if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/368.  Anytime I mention something like that and you buy it at Amazon, you put a few coins in our podcasting hat.

Brock:  Cha-ching!

Ben:  So Normatec, these Normatec recovery boots.  I swear by this and what I figured out a couple of months ago, was I can stand at my standing workstation with these boots on it.  It’s called graduated compression meaning unlike compression socks, what it does is pulses the actual fluid out of your limbs starting at the bottom, if you’re using the legs once, the bottom of your feet, not your bottom, the bottom of your feet, and then it pulses all the way up to your hips and then goes back down to your feet.  So you go through these different compression cycles, not only does it make your legs feel light as a feather but it gets rid of inflammation, soreness a lot more quickly and allows you to do something like stand at the standing workstation for a few hours without getting that super heavy feeling in your legs.  And they can also be used to recover really quickly from a lot of the longer rucks and the longer uphill walks that you’ll gonna do.  And the cool thing like I mentioned is that I just realized that you can wear them while you’re standing at your desk all day and it gets rid of all of that heavy feeling, that you can have bricks on your feet after you’ve been standing for like 7 hours while you’re working.  It doesn’t happen.  They’re called Normatec Pulsing Recovery Boots, and again those are kind of expensive but in my opinion, like if you’re gonna be an exercise enthusiast for life, well worth owning those.

Brock:  The best part is it makes it sound like you sprung a leak.

Ben:  Exactly.

Brock:  Sssssssssssss… beep, beep. Ssssssss

Ben:  I’ve worn them during podcast actually.

Brock:  Yes, I’ve heard it.  It sounds like you’ve sprung a leak.

Ben:  Uh-hmm.  The next one that I recommend that is very kinda similar to the Normatec but that is probably one of my other favorite recovery tools.  I don’t talk it a lot in the podcast but it works really well from everything from like releasing your jaw, if you have a tight head, neck, and jaw.  It works really well for increasing blood flow to the head if you move this thing around in your head but then it also works really really well for joints.  Like moving synovial fluid in and out of joints, reducing inflammation in joints, helping the joints to recover more quickly from exercise when you do some passes with it around the knee, around the ankles, around the hips.  I like it for even around the elbows after you’ve been typing or doing a lot of pull-ups.  And it’s called a Myobuddy, a Myobuddy.  It’s almost like a glorified car buffering device, car buffing I guess you’d say.  Car buffing device.  Buffering is what the internets does.

Brock:  You’re buffing your car.

Ben:  That’s right.  And it looks just like a car buffer but you use it on your body.  They should had called it a body buffer but instead they decided to call it a Myobuddy which I think refers to myofascial and then of course, body.  It’s a body through your myofascia.

Brock:  Now it totally looks like a car buffer.  I just went to their website.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah, and it works really well.  There’s another one called the TheraGun which is more of a pointed, like a breeeeeee, like a jackhammer for different areas but this Myobuddy is a little bit more of softer approach that works really well for your joints.  You just like move it and counter clockwise or a clockwise motion around the joints.  That’s another one that I really like for just like a quick go-to recovery tool when you don’t have time to put a massage therapist in your pocket.  So, that’s one called the Myobuddy.  The Myobuddy.  So those are a few of the sources that I would use to train for an event like this while minimizing some of the damage.  Those would be some of the tools in your training tool box.  Aside from just like hunting down hurricanes and training during hurricanes.  That would be very very sport specific for this particular event.  Really? No laughs at all? (laughs) Nobody thought that was funny? I thought it was a little bit funny.

Brock:  I still think you made that up.

Ben:  No, I didn’t.  You haven’t heard Hurricane Irene.  Like Google, like Hurricane Heat Spartan.

Brock:  Oh, I will.

Ben:  Story.  ‘Cause Google’s always right.  Or Wikipedia.  The other thing that I find whether it’s the hurricane heat as people get more and more pale and tired, and the best athletes in the world that would normally just like kick my butt or other people’s butt, they fall to pieces like 7 or 8 hours.  You see this happened in Ironman, in Kokoro, I had this guy who was like he was training for the Navy SEALs and he fell asleep standing up while we were doing murf.  I mean, like you see these people just crumble and fall to pieces and it doesn’t have to do with lack of fitness, it doesn’t have to do with lack of recovery, what it has to do with and this is again a simple stupid rule that you need to follow during these events.  Just pure hypoglycemia and glycogen exhaustion by the time you get 8, 9,10 hours in.  And the reason for that is based on your gastric emptying rate and based on your ability to absorb from the bloodstream X amount of carbohydrates or other forms of fuel per hour.  You can’t wait until the meal time that they have at this events where they have to break it a 3 hour mark or the 4 hour mark, or whatever, and use that as your time to eat.  Neither can you eat when you’re doing an Ironman like once every hour or during like the Navy SEAL Kokoro event stop to eat just when they have you break for the breakfast, the lunch, and the dinner occasionally.  Instead, all I do is I eat early and I eat often, so I’m literally taking little bites of really good clean energy bars or little bites of nut butter packets or little bites of pemmican or algae and spirulina bits.

Anything I can sneak in whether it’s in my backpack or in my shorts or whatever.  You’ll find me constantly anytime I can get just a slight boost of energy, I do it.  So I follow this rule of eat early, eat often.  When you eat early and you often during a very very long event like this, what you’ll find is you have a lot less gastric distress but you’re energy levels stay far more elevated then if you follow the rule that I think works pretty well for longevity and for staying in fat burning mode the rest of your life, for I like I only eat 2 or 3 times a day most of my life but when I get on to these events, I’m taking little nibbles like every single hour and often every 15-20 minutes for that slow bleed of energy.  It helps tremendously especially when you get 8, 9, 10 hours in and then for some of these events your 35, 40, 45 hours in, 60 hours in, that adds up when you’re just doing those little bites throughout.  So eat early and eat often and I’ll put a link to some of my best articles I’ve written on how to tackle Kokoro, how to tackle Hurricane Heat, how to tackle some of these big stamina requiring events in the show notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/368 so you can go kinda dive into those if you want.

Zach:  Ben! I just stumbled across the concept of food combining.  I’ve always thought of combining foods to get a balanced meals – so getting some proteins, adds some carbs, add some fats in each meal.  I’m somewhat new to the nutrition side of things.  What’s the low down on food mixing? How do you do it properly and how do you avoid having undigested proteins and other things in your system? Thanks Ben, hopefully I look forward to an answer from you.

Ben:  I’m pretty sure I’ve broke every food combining rule in the world this morning because I had a carrot with almond butter, a can of sardines, an avocado, a tomato, and a can of liqueur.

Brock:  Hmm.

Rachel:  Yeah, that meal does not make a lot of sense to me.

Brock:  Did you melt cheese on top?

Ben:  Really good though.  Took a picture of it and put it on Instagram.

Rachel:  On top of a can of sardines?

Ben:  You go to instagram.com/bengreenfieldfitness, you could see it.  You could comment on it.  It was actually really tasty.  A little bit of black pepper, a little bit of sea salt, standing in the hotel lobby, amazing! It was almost as good as the four season’s breakfast buffet.

Brock:  Almost…

Ben:  But we digress, food combining.  So, have any of you experience with the food combining diet?

Brock:  No.

Rachel:  Nope.

Ben:  Okay.  Or experimented I should say.

Rachel:  I just like to eat all food, all the time.

Brock:  Yeah.  Food goes in here.

Rachel:  Uh-ha.  And it’s good food but like it’s all food all the time.  It’s all good food.

Ben:  Yeah.  It’s down like gaping mo.  So the basic principles of food combining: a) you don’t combine meat and starches in the same meal.

Brock:  I’m out.

Ben:  Okay? So, pizza, like meat lovers…

Brock:  No.

Rachel:  I’m out as well ‘cause I don’t eat meat.

Ben:  Meat lovers combo is out.  Combine vegetables with meat or starches.  So whenever you have meat or whenever you have starches, you combine vegetables with them.  So you must always place kale lovingly on your bread.  You only eat fruit except lemons and limes of course, away from other food groups because fruit is highly fermentable apparently.  And then you avoid dairy or you eat dairy all by it lonesome.  So if you’re gonna have brie cheese resist the urge to put it on a cracker and definitely resist the urge to put it on a watermelon, and avoid dairy or eat it alone.

Rachel:  It doesn’t sound very fun. (laughs)

Brock:  This is just makin’ crap up now.  It’s like…

Ben:  No. It’s this old ayurvedic practice and the problem with it is you pretty much find the most zero traditional society in the face of the planet aside from this rare ayurvedic situations or people who just listen to too many podcasts about dieting.  You see like, whatever, like in Switzerland it’s all like milk products with rye bread that Swiss villagers would have eaten or like the gaelic people of Northern Europe where they subsisted on fish and oats, right? They would have got their hands slapped by the food combining dieticians.

In the Caribbean, you find seafood with tubers like purple potatoes and things like that.  The Polynesian you see starchy tubers and fruit, and seafood.  You see very few primitive people, you see very few of our ancestors from either traditional standpoint or just like a basically freakin’ like eating.  You see very few of them doing things like putting restrictions on combining starches with protein or fruit with proteins, and there’s a reason for that.  And it’s because when you consume food, your body can digest any food combination, right? So you’ve got saliva in your mouth that has the enzyme amylase which starts to breakdown carbohydrates and then your stomach has like the pH of 2 which can dissolve just about anything and so when all the contents wind up in the stomach, that turn steak into soup in a couple of minutes.  I mean, the stomach is extremely powerful in terms of its ability to be able to handle from an acidity standpoint any combination of foods.  And then once it gets into your small intestine from your stomach, the acidity from the stomach causes the pancreas to release all these alkalinic enzymes like bicarbonate and digestive enzymes and that allows you to breakdown and absorb things like fats.  And so, if you’re producing adequate stomach acid especially everything necessary happens downstream to allow you to be able to digest foods just fine.

Now, as the same time you sifts from food combining diets do actually works because a) you’ve got this whole like a ritual approach to meal time where you’re gonna be restricting certain foods and restricting certain calories just because there’s so many ways that you can’t eat.  And honestly, like sitting down and being mindful about a meal and choosing what it is that you’re gonna eat versus just like doing as many of us do which is just like go, go.  Apenuts, grab everything, eat it.  Stuff into our mouth and push our chair away from the table.  Like you’re going to be less stressed and again it digest your food a little bit better.  You obviously gonna reduced the intake of a ton of different problematic foods because [57:55] ______, right? ‘Cause that’s starches and fats and potato chips I guess would starches and oil.  There’s so many things that you can’t really eat when you do it, and then of course when you restricting fruit, you might restrict some amount of fermentation like there’s also things that could point to the reason that food combining might actually work.  But I think there are better ways to allow yourself to digest food the right way.

Rachel:  Is it intended to be like a lifestyle diet or a lifestyle choice probably something that they do to combat something that’s going on digestively?

Ben:  Right.  In many cases they’ll be that argument that you do it when you wanna fix your gut or you’ll do it when you wanna lose weight.  But some people try, I mean, it was on the Dr. Oz Show, it was on Oprah, I mean, you’ll see this diet champion in many cases and I think the biggest thing and one of the reasons that works for most people is stomach acid, right? People who are on proton-pump inhibitors or on acid blocking medication.  When you have low stomach acid, protein and carbs and fats simply don’t digest as well because the fats and proteins aren’t getting digested by the enzymes from the pancreas that are supposed to get release in response to the acidity coming in from the stomach to the small intestine and you also get a lot less breakdown in the stomach itself and that can also result in leaky gut and autoimmune issues, et cetera.  So, one thing would be stomach acid production, and actually not only not being stressed out but also using things like enzymes and bitters, and perhaps lemons and limes before you eat.  Things that will cause the body to produce not just more stomach acid but also to produce more digestive enzymes.

So, the other reason that people have problems digesting fat is a lot of people have followed a low fat or poor fat diet for a long time.  So your gallbladder doesn’t release bile as much and in many cases once you start to introduce more fats, you need to consume some digestive enzymes like digestive enzymes of bitters, or digestive enzymes of what’s called ox bile is another common one but things that will jumpstart your body’s own production of bile so you can handle some of the fats that you’re eating along with these other foods.  So doing things like increasing your stomach acid availability, increasing your availability of digestive enzymes, gradually getting yourself into eating more fats with foods.  Even limiting like the amount of liquid that you… it is true that if you gulp down a big glass of water with a meal, that can actually dampen the acidity in the stomach to a certain extent.  So I personally don’t drink a lot of water when I’m eating a meal like these are all things that you can do to support digestion but the idea is your body is actually equipped to digest many of these foods all at the same time.  So, it’s really not necessary to do a food combining diet.  Although I do have some recommendations here of food combinations you definitely wanna avoid and food combinations that work really well if you guys wanna hear what those are.

Rachel:  Yes, I’d love to hear them.

Ben:  Okay.  So first of all, the number 1 worst food combination on the face of the planet that you’ll gonna find in pizza, donut, French fries would be any type of processed fat combined with carbohydrates.  And there’s a reason for that.  So when you look at insulin, insulin is a storage hormone that increases one of the major fat storage in the body called lipoprotein lipase.  So basically, the other thing that insulin does is it decreases the availability of something called hormone sensitive lipase and it slows fat oxidation by suppressing something called CPT1 which is the rate limiting step in fat burning.

And so, if you actually increase insulin at the same time that you’re taking a high amount of calories you’re essentially shoving those calories into fat tissue and simultaneously suppressing fat oxidation.  And one of the best ways to increase insulin in the presence of fat would be to consume starches along with those fats.  Now, there would be a situation in which case this would be okay and I’ll get to that in a second, but that would be one thing.  Anytime you’re at caloric excess with the combination of fats and carbohydrates, you’re vastly increasing the propensity to shove calories into adipose tissue.  Now there are other things that would happen when insulin gets induced by carbohydrate consumption and when you’re eating fats at the same time.  For example, there’s something called Acylation Stimulating Protein also known as ASP, now ASP gets induced by fat intake and it’s also a fat storing feedback mechanism.  Meaning that when ASP goes up, insulin goes up, and when insulin goes up ASP goes up.  So it’s a one-two combo to store fat.  You’ve also got this gut produced signaling molecule called glucose dependent insulinotropic peptide known as GIP, okay? You can say that 10 times fast.  Glucose dependent insulinotropic peptide.

Anyways, GIP is also induced by both carbs and fat and it also can cause fat storage, storage of energy.  And then finally ghrelin, the hormone that gets released that actually induces hunger and cravings for things like sugary foods and salty foods, it actually increases in response to this lipoprotein lipase.  So you also get this kinda like yoyo weight gain response.  Now, when you look at all of these different molecules from the Acylation Stimulating Protein, the GIP, the ghrelin, the insulin, the lipoprotein lipase, and the other hormone responsible for fat storing, they’re all going up significantly when fat is consumed along with carbohydrates, okay? especially when processed fats are consumed with a very fast release carbohydrate like a starch or a sugar.

Now, the situation in which this would not likely be the case and where you can actually slow this down would be a) if the carbs have a lot of fiber.  So a low starch carb like having celery with almond butter or having some kind of like a healthier fiber rich bread with avocado.  Let’s say, a sprouted hemp bread with avocado, things like mixed nuts which already have fiber and the most type of things that actually can decrease the insulin release and release of these other issues that can cause fat stores.  That would be one thing if it’s a higher fiber carbohydrate, probably less of an issue.  This is how I do it in other situation.  I don’t combine fat with carbohydrates for the reasons that I just mentioned and also because it can increase oxidation of the cholesterols in the bloodstream that the fat produces.  I don’t consume fats with carbohydrates unless I’m in a post workout scenario because when you’re in a post workout scenario you’re blood sugar barely goes up at all because you have the ability to be able to shove glucose into muscle cells and liver cells really readily, but you also have upregulation of glucose transporters after you’ve exercise and that means that you have less of a need for an insulin release.

So the one time that I will do, you know, whatever, a nice roasted chicken with oils and sweet potatoes or avocados with a quinoa salad and red wine and a dark chocolate, it’s dinner in a post workout state.  So I’ll exercise in late afternoon or early evening and then with dinner, I’ll only have carbs along with fats to my heart’s content but unless I’m in that post workout insulin sensitive state in which glucose isn’t gonna stay very elevated, I’m very very careful.  And if I haven’t workout, such as like for thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner, where God knows, like cranberries and turkey and mashed potatoes and every other combination of fats and carbohydrates, I’ll go for a walk afterwards which lowers postprandial blood glucose and increases insulin sensitivity.  So, the worst food combination for overall health and for weight loss would be fats with carbohydrates but there are some exceptions to that.  Does that make sense?

Rachel:  It does, yeah.

Brock:  I think the lesson here is to always be in a post-workout state.

Rachel:  (laughs) Unless your Rachel. (laughs) In which cases, just don’t eat versus fats and carbs.

Ben:  Yeah.  And by the way, they have studied what I just said and they haven’t found it to be true in a hypocaloric state.  Meaning, everything that I just said if you’re dieting and restricting calories has a far, far less pronounced effect.  So that’s one thing that you should note.

Rachel:  Yup.

Ben:  The other thing that’s interesting is certain food combinations can be really really good together.  Like take a plant-food with meat.  Like when you consume leafy greens or berries or any polyphenol containing food that can inhibit the formation of the carcinogens that get produced when you eat meat especially meat that has been cooked or seared over high heat.  So that’s why salad is really good with steak or that’s why it’s kinda funny, but when I’m at a breakfast buffet and if I’m doing bacon and eggs, I’ll put raspberries or blueberries or blackberries over top of the eggs and actually have polyphenols along with the potential carcinogens from the meat or the cooked products.  So that’s one thing that works really well.

Another one would be anything vinegar-ey with the carbohydrate-rich meal ‘cause it can blunt the glycemic response to a meal, right? So for example, if you’re havin’ sweet potatoes and steak, you could have balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing on your salad or if you’re havin’ sausage and potatoes, right? ‘Cause I just got back from Bulgaria where there’s lot of that.  If you have pickles or sauerkraut or any like fermented vinegar-ey food that can lower the blood glucose response.  If even doing something like a shot of apple cider vinegar before a higher carb intensive meal lowers insulin and lowers postprandial blood glucose.  So vinegar-ey foods along with carbohydrate-rich foods, that’s another one that works really well.  And interestingly, close second to vinegar cinnamon specifically Ceylon cinnamon.  So sprinkling cinnamon on sweet potatoes or putting cinnamon on an oatmeal or having cinnamon on bread.  Those are all ways that you can lower the glycemic rise and improve your insulin sensitivity in response to one of these more insulin producing foods.  So, that’s a really good mix as well is a lot of these different herbs and spices like cinnamon, vinegar, and then also having plant foods along with meat as things that you should do from a food combining sampling.

Rachel:  And would a glass of kombucha suffice for the vinaigrette?

Ben:  Only with a shot of vodka instead.

Rachel:  (laughs) Got to intend to drink vodka for lunch but…

Ben:  Yes, that’s one final food combination I leave you guys with is if I’m at Whole Foods and like when I go to a city and I wanna have cocktails back to my hotel room or whatever, and I got that many fridge, I always buy a bottle of sake and a bottle of kombucha from Whole Foods, and sake/kombucha mixed 50-50 is freaking amazing.  If you’ve never tried that, you’re missing out on a cocktail from the heavens.

Hannah:  Hi Ben, my name is Hannah and I just broke up with my boyfriend of 2 years and having trouble coping with the mental and physical ramifications of heartbreak.  I take a lion’s mane mushroom supplement, I take D3, I exercise regularly, I take cordyceps, and a good B vitamin, and I think all those things are helping but I am exhausted.  I’m having trouble sleeping, I can’t think clearly, I am breaking down all the time and I’m having really hard time coping.  So I was wondering do you have any suggestions for how to deal with a heartbreak and the physical aspects that entails.

Ben:  Wow! Love hurts, hi guys.

Rachel:  Love hurts.

Brock:  Yes.  Speaking as probably the only one here who’s divorced.  Yeah, it can suck.

Rachel:  Yup.  Thanks for calling in the question Hannah.  It’s super gracious of you.  This is not usually something we cover on the podcast but I think it’s a really important one.

Ben:  No, it’s not.  This would normally be what? The Dr. Juro Show or with The Sex With Emily Show?

Rachel:  But I feel like Ben Greenfield got some really good insight into this so…

Ben:  Well, I mean yeah, I look at this very similar to how I’d look at how would you naturally approach something like depression which was kind of an issue with neurotransmitters and obviously anti-depressants are a huge issue not in US alone but worldwide.  I mean, it’s like a billion dollar industry, right? The anti-depressant industry and it’s especially interesting when you look at this industry and you find that not only do anti-depressants not work but if anything they make things worse.  They’ve been shown to increase the symptoms of depression and increase the risk for suicide and basically cause the withdrawal symptoms of things like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that can mess up your neurotransmitters for a really long time and cause you to do more and more anti-depressant drugs to actually get the same effect like if you go and you look at, you know, like one of my friends, Dr. Chris Kresser, he’s done some really interesting writings on anti-depressants and the vast number of shortcomings over on his website, and yeah, I mean, you should definitely look into other things.

And there’s even a randomized control trial recently in which they looked at adults with major depression.  It’s called The Smiles Trial, and this one just came out.  The great great title for a study.  I believe it’s a 12-week randomized control trial of dietary interventions to treat severe depression and in this case all they was they clean up the diet, right? In this case they switch people to like a Mediterranean-based diet and they saw a vast reduction in depression symptoms just from a simple dietary fix.  Meaning, that they we’re introducing more vegetables, more fresh produce, more fish, and a lot of healthier whole grains which I know can have issues depending how you prepare them but ultimately, you know, and they’re doing like seeds, and nuts, and fermented foods and things along those lines.  Significant increase in the ability to be able to get rid of some of these depression symptoms.  But there are other things that you can do as well that I think fly under the radar when it comes to depression.

Depression or sadness in general, for example, one thing that you see over and over and over again is just straight up physical movement.  Physical movement knowing from the dopamine release, the brain derived neurotropic release, the assistance with sleep but there are so many studies on exercise and depression.  And specifically they did one experiment that looked at aerobics and looked at weight training and looked at circuit training and despite seeing from my earlier note that interval training is best for anti-aging.  It turns out that weight training is the best for reducing for reducing depressive symptoms perhaps that’s because of all of the catharsis that occurs when you’re, I don’t know, pushing the bench press, you’re doing a heavy squat…

Rachel:  Put heavy things… yeah.

Ben:  Ughhh.  Get rid of all these negative energy but anyways, so it turns that non-aerobic exercise, weight training or anything that’s non-aerobic like less than 2 minutes long in terms of length appears to be the best for reducing depressive symptoms.  So basically lift heavy stuff if you’re coming at this from an exercise standpoint.  The other thing that they found and they found quite a few things to be efficacious but I wanna highlight a few.  Light therapy.  Now, normally what light therapy involves is sitting and staring at about 10,000 lux units of light from what’s called a light box, but unfortunately that can cause retina damage when you do that and I’m a bigger fan of greenish-blue light and I use this things called the Retimer Glasses.

I also use called the Human Charger which in-ear light therapy but light therapy is actually been shown to be quite efficacious when it comes to lifting mood, and when it comes to getting rid of things like seasonal affective disorder and it sounds dumb that if you have your heart broken you’d go put on a dorky pair of green and blue light producing glasses, but it turns out there’s actually not only benefits the light therapy but when combined with some of these things like exercise and adequate sleep and some of the supplements I’ll talk about, it can be quite useful.  So that would be another one would be light therapy.

There’s an herb that grows like wildfire on my property and my kids call it the happy plant.  It’s yellow.  They go out there and actually eat it sometimes like my son, I remember last year he was like, “Dad, I’m not feeling well.  So I’m gonna go out and actually harvest.”  He was harvesting this happy plant and he was actually tearing a little buds off the end of this yellow flowers and eating them, and it is a plant that has shown to be far more effective than anti-depressants with 10 times less the adverse effects of an anti-depressant.  Do you know what it is?

Rachel:  Is this St. John’s Wort?

Ben:  Well, it has the St. John’s Wort in Australia or Saints John’s Wort as we say in America, Rachel.  Yes! St. John’s Wort.  The little yellow flower and the extract from this flower has been shown to be quite useful for depressive symptoms.  That’s kinda funny ‘cause it is beautiful like yellow uplifting flower.  Like nature has its clues that they give us.

Rachel:  Make sense, yeah.  Exactly.

Ben:  So St. John’s Wort would be another one that you can look into.  You can get that as a capsule, you can get it as a tincture.  So, that’s another one that I think flies under the radar sometimes.  Now, a few other things to look into.  They’ve actually shown that your omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids ratio.  Too many omega 6’s from seed and nut oils and rancid vegetable oils and things like this and not enough omega 3s from things like wild caught fish, or eggs, or even some vegetables like pumpkin seeds and hemp seeds, that omega 6 to omega 3 imbalance can be a risk factor for depression.  So you can actually use things as silly as it sound like fish oil for depression.  Wild caught fish like I mentioned, grass-fed beef, a lot of these compounds that are higher in omega 6s and just as importantly lower in omega 3s that seems to have a pretty significant effects too.

Another one would be vitamin D and they’ve shown that about 5,000 international units of vitamin D per day preferably combined with vitamin A and K2, so you avoid any type of vitamin D toxicity, that’s actually been shown to have a significant impact on depression.  So, higher intake of vitamin D that would be another one that I would recommend.

A few others that I would look into and again, this is kinda fly under the radar.  One would be hydrotherapy.  So there was one study that was done in 2010 that found that hydropherapy and this would be the use of hot water baths.  And you can even do something as simple as you know like a mineral bath with some magnesium and some lavender.  They’ve shown that that can actually reduce depressive symptoms for a significant period of time.  Just basically taking a freaking bath with bath salts and with something like lavender oil.

Rachel:  I feel like I’m swim in our well and truly I’m aware of this.  (laughs) We feel like we’ve been doing this for probably a century, also trying to get you guys on board but no… yeah now, it’s proven.

Ben:  Yeah.  Exactly, exactly.  And by the way, they found out that cold water immersion and cold water face splashing can help out a little bit with your vagus nerve health as well, and may have a little bit of an anti-depression effect too.  That would be another one to look into would a hot therapy or cold therapy or even both, right? So go take a cold shower the next time that you get your heart broken.  So there you go.

And then just a few other, they’ve shown that curcumin, consuming turmeric and curcuminoid can have a significant impact on depressive symptoms especially compare to a placebo.  So cooking a lot with turmeric or using supplements that have something like curcumin in them.  There is another thing called eye movement desensitization and re-processing, EMDR that appears to have a pretty significant impact on depression.  That’s when you gonna have to google and look up.  I don’t have much experience with EMDR but that one also pops up.

And finally, something that I do every single day and I actually designing a journal for my own practice for this that I do every day without fail.  It’s just basically gratitude.  So every single morning I wake and I answer 3 questions in my gratitude journal: what truth that I’ve discovering in today’s reading ‘cause I always read in the morning and I find that I read with more intention and purpose when I know I’m going to answer a question about what I just read.  I mean, gets to answer question that I was just read.

Rachel: (laughs)

Ben:  What am I grateful for, right? So I write down one thing that I am grateful there and then instead of like the affirmations like me, me, me, I, I, I, what can I accomplish today, what can I make improvement for me, how can I make myself better, how am I gonna make money, and all that type of thing.  It’s instead others facing.  So the third question I answer in addition to what truth that I discover today and what am I grateful for is who can I pray for, or help, or serve today.  And I write that one person.  And those are my 3 questions that I start off with and I think a daily gratitude practice can be profound for depression or sadness and for just like thinking about others instead of thinking about yourself if you do it the right way.  So, those are some of my recommendations.

Rachel:  What about tianchi, Ben?

Ben:  Then you could also just dump Tianchi into your mouth, yes.

Rachel:  Done. (laughs)

Ben:  Actually that does have a lot of adaptogenic herbs that covers some of the basis that I just talked about.  So, yeah! Yeah, that’ll also be good.  So, dumps so tianchi in your mouth and write down what you’re grateful for and go take a cold shower.  Anyways, best of luck Hannah and if any of the rest of you have tips that you wanna put into the show notes, just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/368 and leave your tips for Hannah there.

Anonymous:  What are your thoughts on the Whole 30 Book, lifestyle change and their recipes?  Do you think it’s beneficial or are there other ways to figure out what maybe causing certain reactions in your body?

Ben:  Wow! This is a loaded question.  (chuckles) Diet.  First of all, let me put it this way.  The Whole 30 Diet is super clean.  I mean, if you don’t know rules basically it’s not this silly food combining rukes.  It’s basically don’t have any sugar, don’t have any alcohol, don’t eat any grains, don’t eat any legumes, don’t eat any dairy, don’t eat any additives, and don’t eat junk foods for 30 days.

Brock:  It sounds like Paleo.

Ben:  That’s it.  It sounds like the air diet.  (laughs)  No, but you can actually have grass-fed meat, wild caught fish and produce, and vegetables.  Yeah, it’s very very similar to the Paleo diet actually.

Brock:  Yeah.  That was the first thing when I read the first book version of this book that came out.  I’m like, “oh, this is just paleo. It’s free packaging.”

Ben:  Yeah.  It’s basically like the paleo diet.  Getting rid of even some of the additives from something like that.  I was looking the label of a paleo energy bar today.  It was a paleo donut glazed energy bar made from egg white protein.

Brock: (laughs)

Ben:  It’s just like paleo-man would have had.

Brock:  Exactly.

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  Anyways, paleo diet with a grain of salt.  So any diet like this were you eliminating that many things, I mean, let’s not beat around the bush.  It’s gonna be a freakin’ work, right? And I know everybody listening in, you’re intelligent you know when you restrict that many foods, you’re gonna see some things work from a dietary standpoint.  I don’t think it’s working ‘cause there’s something magic about taking legumes out of a diet, like I’m a big fan of lentils.  Sprouted lentils for example.  I don’t think it works because you’re removing wheat from the diet. Freakin’ when I’m in Europe, and then I’ll spraying their crops of glyphosate, I eat bread to my heart content.  I think it works ‘cause they’re taking dairy out of the diet, I’ve got 2 little goats at home that we can milk for raw milk like honestly it’s the combination of getting rid of all the junk food that makes this actually work, but rather than looking at a specific diet book and saying that this is the diet that’s gonna work for me.  I like the second part of this question which is, are there other ways to figure what you should be eating and what foods rather than just eliminating all foods, say why don’t I just eliminate the foods that aren’t working for me?

Now, most food intolerance tests like Elisa is one or Alcat is one, like those are 2 common blood test for food intolerances and they basically look at how your blood response when exposed to specific food.  Like the Elisa test measure something called the IGG anti-body reaction and the Alcat test measures white blood cell reactions.  And that seems like a plausible theory because antibodies and white blood cells are part of the immune system.  If your immune system reacts to a food that would signify an intolerance but the problem is that for example, your IGG response to a food in many cases can indicate that your body needs that and it’s not intolerance.  Many of the white blood cells are tested on this test of raw protein like raw chicken or raw eggs or raw beef and not the cooked protein.  So it’s not a surprise that you get these tests and then you walk away with the frustrating long list of foods you’re not supposed to eat because the cooked form of that food was not even tested.  So you get this huge list of like false positives.  The only food allergy test that I actually like is made by this company called Cyrex, C-Y-R-E-X.  Not only do they test every single protein twice to ensure you and they call it their double assurance method but they test both the cooked and the raw form of the protein. They have one called an Array 10.  The Cyrex Array 10.  I’ll link to it in the show notes but that’s the one that I and most of my clients get to identify true food allergies.  I get it from this company called True Health Labs.  So, Cyrex food allergy test, that’s the test that I like but then you can also if you didn’t wanna buy ‘cause it’s kinda expensive, I think it’s like 600 bucks, something like that.  I mean, granted you have your list of foods for life but it’s still expensive.  Even more expensive than not eating legumes for 30 days believe it or not.

Brock:  Believe it or not.

Ben:  Robb Wolf has a new book called “Wired To Eat”, where you’re simply measuring your blood glucose after certain meals to figure out which meals spike your blood glucose and which don’t.  And a meal or food that doesn’t spike your blood glucose significantly will be something that you could eat.  So, I would recommend you review that book.  You could do like a Cyrex test and then also review that book to check and make sure you’re not just getting an allergy reaction or not but you’d make sure you’re not getting a deleterious blood sugar to a food just from the cheapo blood glucose monitor from freakin’ Walgreens.

Then another one that I look into would definitely be a DNA test so you cannot only see whether or not you produce certain indigenous antioxidant yourself versus if do you need to supplement glutathione or do you need to supplement with vitamin C or something like that.  But then you can also see what your ancestors ate, you can see what type of intolerances you’re predispose to like lactose or gluten or something like that.  And the very coolest thing is I think if you see that you came from sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia or Mexico, you can go and look away your ancestors would have eaten and there is a fantastic book.  I just got done reading the book and I’m gonna get the author on the podcast but it goes into exactly how to choose your diet and the foods that you eat based on what your ancestors ate.

So this lady named Daphne Miller, and I met her at an event that was in Malibu a couple of months ago, she traveled all over the world and she would take like Mexican people with diabetes and she would actually put them on kinda like a slow carb – bean, and rice, pork-rich diet with homemade corn tortillas, and all these things you wouldn’t expect that they should be eating but instead of it being Tex-mixed or American-mixed, traditional low glycemic index or traditionally prepared Mexican diet with non-GMO corn and all these healthy meats and these people did just fine.  Or she’d put like these Greek people doing with heart disease on this traditional Cretan diet, like rosemary and tea, and wine, and wild caught fish and copious amounts of extra virgin olive oil and they’d get thin and their heart diseases usually go away.

So it’s really interesting.  She would actually just see what their ancestors have eaten and not put them on the Americanized version of that ancestral diet and put on a version that diet that really truly was like their ancestors have eaten and she saw amazing improvements in these people from a chronic disease standpoint.  And so, the name of that book is called “The Jungle Effect”.  It’s called “The Jungle Effect: The Healthiest Diet From Around The world – why They Work And How To Make Them Work For You.  That’s a really fantastic book.

Brock:  I love the songs from that book too.

Rachel:  (laughs)

Brock:  (singing)

Ben:  No.  It’s not that one, Brock.

Rachel:  It makes a lot of sense though you know, it shouldn’t really be that crazy.  It makes a lot of sense.

Ben:  Uh-hm.  Yeah, it does.  So she went to like Mexico and Greece, Iceland, Cameroon – West Africa where she found that nobody has bowel trouble over there based on the foods that they eat over there.  Okinanawa, Japan, and then she even has this chapter called forging foreign indigenous foods in a modern world.  How to find some of these indigenous foods in modern grocery stores, and it was pretty shocking where she’s able to find like freaking Walmart.  So, really good book and it’s called “The Jungle Effect”.  Check that one out and I’m actually gonna go down to her house in Berkley.  So I’m gonna down and race the Spartan in San Francisco and then swing at her place and interview her in Berkley later on this year.  So we’ll have a good little interview then about this stuff but yeah, that’s where I would start as far as customizing your diet is concerned.

And yeah, I guess that means that now that we’ve introduced Brock, that let you known about the news flashes from magic mushrooms to interval training to melatonin and beyond, we have answered a whole bunch of questions, we’ve filled you on in the calendar at bengreenfieldfitness.com/calendar.  Now, all we need to do is give some crap away.  What do you guys think?

Brock:  Can I do it?  Can I do it?

Rachel:  Yes.  You can do it, Brock.

Brock:  Yey!

Ben:  Go for it, Brock!  Why do you give some stuff away, dude!

Brock:  I haven’t done this in so long.  It’ll feel so good.

Ben:  Simple pleasures in life.

Rachel:  (Chuckles)

Brock:  You have no idea for 2 years I had an empty hole in my heart because I haven’t been able to give stuff away every week.  Okay, so the rules are you leave a review on iTunes and if you hear it read on this show, then you get stuff sent to you.  You just have to send an email to… what’s the email address?

Rachel:  [email protected]

Brock:  Okay.  So this is the review and it’s by Saver3 and the title is What Would Ben Say.  It’s a 5-star review.  Uhmm, nice.  And it goes like this: “I knew I’d become a BGF junkie when my wife said ‘What would Ben say?’ as I explained to her my recent loss of energy during my workouts.  I’ve been an avid listener for over 3 years now, piping Ben, Rachel and their guest into my earbuds while I sweat out my morning fitness sessions, and I’ve sent podcast links to friends, clients on multiple occasions.  So, have a listen, and you’ll start asking yourself, ‘What would Ben say?’

Ben:  You know the funniest part about this review is? If we’ve got bracelets made up like “What would Jesus do?”

Rachel:  Like “What would Jesus do?” Yeah.

Ben:  WWJD, would be WWBS.

Brock and Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  So…

Brock:  Perfect!

Ben:  If you want to design your own personal WWBS bracelet and take a picture of you wearing it, now what we will send Saver a gear package.  Just email gear@greenfieldfitnesssystems with your t-shirt size.  I’ll send anybody a freakin’ gear package if you upload a photo that says WWBS on it.  Just that little tongue and check bit of evidence that you listen in to today’s show and made it all the way through.  So, there you have it.  Saver, write us and let us know your address, your t-shirt size, and if you wanna leave a review, just go to iTunes and leave a review.  It’s good karma.  Make sure you say something nice if you know anything nice to say as my mother said, don’t say anything at all.

Brock and Rachel, I guess we should say that for those of you listening in, this might be the last that you hear of the beautiful, rollicking Australian voice of Rachel on the show.  Rachel, it’s been a wild ride the past 2 years.  Any last words for the audience?

Rachel:  Thanks!  Well, thank you so much for having me.  It’s been so much fun.  I’ve loved getting to know you guys at the social media elsewhere, so keep tunin’, keep listenin’, keep asking questions, keep engaging, and I’ll be around.

Ben:  And we love you, Rachel.  Brock, you got any last words for our listeners? Anything as profound as what Rachel just said?

Brock:  I don’t.  I don’t have anything as profound as Rachel said but I’m gonna missed Rachel and it’s really an honor to have passed the job off to Rachel 2 years ago, and it’s even more of an honor to accept the job back from Rachel.  So, thank you, Rachel.

Rachel:  You’re welcome, Brock.

Brock:  For both covering for me and for giving it back.

Rachel:  You are so welcome.

Brock:  Hugs.

Ben:  Alright.

Brock:  Hugs.

Rachel:  (laughs)

Ben:  All around.

Rachel:  Virtual hugs.  Radio wave hugs.  I’m not really sure.

Ben:  And shall we finish with the joke about Canada just to shove Brock under the bus?

Brock:  You got one?

Rachel:  I don’t have one.

Ben:  You don’t have one?

Rachel:  (laughs) I love Canadians!

Ben:  Okay.  How about this? What Dr. Seuss book do they read every morning in Canada?

Rachel:  What?

Ben:  Tim Hortons Hears A Who.

Brock: (laughs)

Ben:  And that’s funny.  Alright you guys, well, for those of you listening in, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/368.  Leave a comment.  Leave a question.  Let me know if I made a huge mistake bringing Brock on the show because…

Rachel:  Don’t.  Brock’s brilliant.

Ben:  You never know what fireworks might implode at this point.  But anyways though, Rachel, Brock…

Rachel:  Ben, thank you.

Ben:  Thanks for joining me here in my hotel room in Monterey.

Rachel:  You’re welcome.

Ben:  I may now back to the many fridge and grab another liqueur, baby.

Brock:  Maybe cleanup that pile of underwear too before the maid comes in.

Ben:  Possibly.  They don’t call the maids here.  Alright, later you guys.

 

 

June 14, 2017 Podcast: 368 – Building Muscle & Testosterone On A Ketogenic Diet, Food Combining, Psychedelic Experimentation, Natural Depression Remedies & More!

NEW! Click here for the official BenGreenfieldFitness calendar of events.

Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right (or go to SpeakPipe), use the Contact button on the app, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, or use the “Ask Ben” form at the bottom of this page.

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News Flashes:

• Interval training is one of the best anti-aging forms of exercise out there: – 4 min on, 3 min off x 3.
• So you *can* build muscle and testosterone on a ketogenic diet (says the latest research). And here's a great follow-up article by the study authors.
• We're Entering A New Golden Age of Psychedelics, and Portland is Leading the Way – and a related review of four different psychedelics by the author.
• Oh yeah, and magic mushrooms are ‘safest drugs’ compared to LSD, ecstasy & cocaine – says study.
• Travel east and you’ll need morning light and evening melatonin; go west and you’ll need evening light and morning melatonin.

You can receive these News Flashes (and more) every single day, if you follow Ben on Twitter.com/BenGreenfield, Instagram.com/BenGreenfieldFitness, Facebook.com/BGFitness, BenGreenfieldFitness.com/Snapchat, and Google+.

Special Announcements:

This podcast is brought to you by:

TeloYears – Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/TeloYears and use my special gift card code BEN10 to get 10% off your TeloYears kit (and listen to my podcast about it here).

Four Sigmatic – Check out their awesome mushroom extracts at FourSigmatic.com/GREENFIELD and use code BENGREENFIELD for 15% off

Onnit – Get 10% off ANYTHING, from functional foods to supplements and beyond, at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/ONNIT (no code required)

Casper Mattresses: Get $50 toward any mattress purchase by visiting Casper.com/BENand using promo code BEN

–Click here to follow Ben on Snapchat, and get ready for some epic stories on his morning, daily and evening routine! What did you miss this week? A clay mask, a park workout, a morning routine change-up, an epic post-race salad and more.

NEW! Click here for the official BenGreenfieldFitness calendar.

Ben will be racing on the Spartan Pro Team for 2017!

You can catch him at any of these races below and you can click here to register:

-Blue Mountain Challenge, July 8
-Southeast Showdown, Asheville, July 29
-The Ascent, West Virginia, August 26

-July 11th, 2017: David Bouley's “The Chef & The Doctor Series” in TriBeca, New York. Please join me at Bouley Botanical for a over a multi-course wine dinner, curated by Chef David Bouley. We'll start with a reception featuring passed canapés and a specialty health tonic cocktail. Guests will have the opportunity to mingle and ask me any questions they like. Chef Bouley will then prepare a multicourse menu with wine pairing featuring products and ingredients to address the topic of the evening. Get your tickets here.

-Sep 8-11, 2017: Who Wants To Live Forever Conference in Reykjavík, Iceland. Most of us not only want to have a long lifespan, but also a long healthspan; to be fit and healthy throughout the course of our lives. As we move into this unprecedented era of human history, a question arises: how far can the human healthspan be extended, and what are the most effective ways to achieve longevity? Click here for tickets!

-Oct 13-15, 2017: Biohacker Summit, Helsinki, Finland. This event is the focal point for learning faster, performing better, living longer, and enjoying more what you wake up to do every day. Discover the latest in wearables, internet of things, nutrition, digital health, and mobile apps to increase performance, be healthier, stay fit, and get more done. Get your tickets here!

-Dec 7-9, 2017: XPT Experience, Kauai, Hawaii. Join me, Brian Mackenzie, Kelly Starrett, Julia Starrett, Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece, for an epic, all-inclusive performance living workshop this Dec 7, 8 and 9 in beautiful Kauai, Hawaii. Come and join us for pool training, underwater workouts, gym training, breathing instruction, outdoor workouts, recovery biohacking and much more! Get your tickets here.

-Dec 17-23-9, 2017: Runga Retreat, Cambutal, Panama. This retreat spans 8-days and centers around fostering heightened awareness, presence, and connection with others through a mandatory “Digital Detox” – or no cell phones, computers, and other technology. Yoga is offered twice per day, everyday. There is also an off-site adventure ranging from hiking volcanoes to white water rafting or zip lining. World-class spa treatments are available and 100% of the food are suitable for vegetarian, vegan, paleo, gluten-free, or ketogenic dieters. Get your tickets here, and use code BEN for 10% off.

Did you miss the weekend podcast episode with Richard Aiken? It was a must-listen – “How To Fix Your Brain And Biology With Plants: An Interview With Neurodietetics Author Richard Aiken On The Best Diet For The Brain.” Click here to listen now or download for later!

Grab this Official Ben Greenfield Fitness Gear package that comes with a tech shirt, a beanie and a water bottle.

And of course, this week's top iTunes review – gets some BG Fitness swag straight from Ben – click here to leave your review for a chance to win some!

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Listener Q&A:

As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Brock Armstrong, the Podcast Sidekick.

How To Build Massive Stamina & Recover Faster From An Endurance Event

Kory says: He's currently training for the Hurricane Heat 12 hour event for Spartan. He did it last year and he got time hacked at the 10th hour and so he's learned from the event and has started to do a lot more rucking, weighted calisthenics and military PT style workouts, but he knows this style of training can do a lot of damage to his joints. He's wondering if you have any tips on how to train for a weight bearing event like this without doing any damage to yourself, and also if you have any special gear you can recommend?

In my response, I recommend:
–Incline treadmill
–Standing workstation
–Hyperwear weighted vest
–Normatec
–Myobuddy
-Eat Early & Eat Often (e.g. like Kokoro)

Everything You Need To Know About Food Combining

Zach says: He just stumbled across the concept of food combining. He's always thought of combining foods to get a balanced meal – getting protein, carbs and fats in each meal – but he's new to the nutrition side of things. What's the low down on food mixing, how do you do it properly and how do you avoid having undigested proteins and other things in your system?

Natural Fixes For Depression

Hannah says: She just broke up with her boyfriend of two years, and she's having trouble coping with the mental and physiological ramifications of break up. She takes lions mane, D3, cordyceps, a good B vitamin and she exercises. She thinks all that is helping, but she's exhausted, she's having trouble sleeping, she can't think clearly, she's breaking down all the time and she's having a hard time coping. She's wondering if you have any suggestions for how to deal with heart break and the physical ramifications that entails?

In my response, I recommend:
–Retimer
–Fish Oil
–Vitamin D/K Blend
–Gratitude

Does The Whole30 Diet Work?

Anonymous says: What are your thoughts on the Whole30 book, lifestyle changes and recipe? Do you think it's beneficial, or are there other ways to figure out what might be causing certain reactions in your body?

In my response, I recommend:
–Cyrex
–Robb Wolf's “Wired To Eat” book
–The Jungle Effect book
–DNA Testing