February 15, 2018
[00:00] Introduction
[02:48] News Flashes: Use Coffee before Exercise
[07:00] Glutathione
[09:13] Sunshine Can Burn Fat
[11:00] Bacterial Doping
[15:09] Special Announcements: Freshbooks/Organifi Red Juice
[18:43] Ben’s Calendar
[19:50] Listener Q&A: How to Avoid Distractions During Meditation
[32:51] Two Effective Recovery Biohacks
[41:17] How Much Sugar Do Kids Need
[55:49] How to Fix Plantar Fasciitis
[1:06:47] Giveaways & Goodies
[1:10:13] End of Podcast
Introduction: In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show: Caffeine’s Effect On Testosterone, Meditation Hacks, Can Kids Eat More Sugar Than Adults, How To Fix Plantar Fasciitis, and much more.
Brock: It’s a good thing you can’t see me right now coz I’ve got those horrible goggle marks coz I just got back from the pool 5 minutes ago.
Ben: Well, you know the only thing that’s less attractive than horrible goggle marks all over your face when you go out to dinner after you’ve been swimming laps?
Brock: [laughs] You look so wide awake and not ghoulish at all.
Ben: Yeah. The only thing worse than that is the blue-light blockers a.k.a. the birth control for your head.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: That’s also a pretty bad look. But both are a better look than me right now, I’ve got basically chapped and peeling lips because I…
Brock: Who have you been kissing?
Ben: So here’s why: I got a massage the other night and you know how when your face down on the massage table, you’re all congested when you flip over? And they wanna work on your thighs or your stomach or your neck or whatever and you’re laying there like “gosh, I wish I could actually breathe through my nose.”
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Well, my massage therapist was diffusing this essential oil, and it’s like clove. It’s basically like that Thieves Essential Oil, right? Cloves, cinnamon, rosemary, whatever, all these “hot” essential oils in terms of their effect on the body and I thought “hey, that’s a perfect decongestion.” So I smeared some all over my lips and underneath my nose, and it started burning within 10 minutes and I think that I had that “oh crap” moment. Woke up, my lips were burnt to a crisp, so first-world problems, burning your lips off during a massage therapy session.
Brock: That’s definitely first-world. [laughs]
News Flashes:
Ben: So the first thing that I wanted to mention today, because I know that all of the [0:03:02] ______ listening in just wanna get jacked, they wanna increase testosterone. I’m pretty sure that we could just do every single show on boosting testosterone and we would still have listeners lined up.
Brock: We might even have more actually.
Ben: Yeah, and then all of the women are sending their men to listen to the testosterone episode.
Brock: Yeah. It’s not a bad business model, actually. Maybe we should consider that.
Ben: No, testosterone’s very sexy. Every guy doesn’t wanna lose testosterone, that’s why it’s an ancient ancestral practice to have consumed the balls of living creatures, I’m pretty sure. And I know this coz I’ve driven through Montana and I’ve seen the Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival, and I’m pretty sure that the logical way the ancestral man would’ve thought would’ve been “hey, my libido is failing, I should eat some balls.” I’m pretty sure.
Brock: Well you know, the traditional way of castrating bulls is to just sort of pinch off the sack and them bite it and tear the testes out with your teeth.
Ben: Oh.
Brock: So really it’s not that far off.
Ben: See with our Nigerian dwarf goats, we just tied rubber bands around their testicles.
Brock: Yeah, apparently that’s really not humane. The best way to do it is really quick and just rip it out with your teeth. I learn that from Mike Rowe, everybody.
Ben: We just made a lot of people vegan.
Brock: You’re welcome, people.
Ben: Anyways though, if you don’t wanna eat balls you can also drink coffee. Because it turns out that in this latest study, there’s a 70% increase in testosterone after the consumption of caffeinated gum versus a placebo gum. What they did was they measured the performance and the hormonal response, and this is important, to exercise, meaning when you exercise after having had dumped copious amounts of gum into your system, your testosterone goes up significantly. And there are two things that I should point out about this study, which I’ll link to by the way. All these studies, everything we talk about, I’ll link to over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/380, that’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/380. What I should mention is that (a) they used a pretty copious amount of caffeine. This caffeinated gum was 400mg in, I don’t know if it was a stick or a cube or a gumdrop, but ultimately that’s like 4 cups of coffee.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: That’s a lot of caffeine.
Brock: Or at least two.
Ben: And furthermore, even though testosterone went up, they also measured blood lactate, they measured repeated sprints, they measured cognitive function, and it didn’t appear that there was much of a significant effect on actual performance even though testosterone went up. Although, I’m sure that there must have been some benefit somewhere with the testosterone. Even if it was the fact that one less animal had to lose its gonads because caffeinated gum was available.
Brock: That’s a pretty good benefit.
Ben: Ultimately, interesting study, so try to chew caffeinate gum, and I don’t know what brand they use but there’s a bunch of different brands of caffeinated gum. But try some before a workout and see what happens.
Brock: I’m wondering if does it have to be gum, coz I was taking some caffeine and L-Theanine combo capsules for a while just as a way to refocus myself mid-afternoon. Would that work or is the chewing action, is the delivery important?
Ben: Well I’ve talked about this in talks before about how chewing can increase blood flow to the brain and they’ve actually shown improvement in cognitive function from chewing. And then we also all know that, in the same way that ancient man ate the balls of living creatures, that the Vikings used to chew on leather straps, hence the advent of people using performance enhancing mouth pieces.
Brock: Mouth pieces.
Ben: So either way, it is possible that part of it is the clenching effect of chewing gum except they did have a placebo gum group in which that did not happen. So throw that hypothesis out the window.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: So there we go, chew some caffeinated gum before your workout. And here’s another interesting one, glutathione. I’m personally kinda interested in glutathione because you can get these genetic tests to find out which things that your body could or should be producing maybe isn’t producing or doesn’t have the proper genetic snips to produce enough of. And for me, one of those is the gene responsible for the production of SOD or superoxide dismutase. What this means in a nutshell, and you can go get this test at 23andMe or whatever, any of these genetic testing services, DNAFit, there’s a bunch of them. But you can determine this and then, for me this means that I need to pay close attention to my levels of glutathione, and I think 4 or 5 podcast episodes ago, we did a pretty extensive deep dive into glutathione and all of the different ways that you could increase glutathione, from whey protein to liposomal glutathione to injectable glutathione. But what we didn’t talk about was this study that just came out that investigated the antioxidant content of mushrooms, and this is the first time this has ever been studied. They found that mushrooms have very high amounts of something called ergothianine, which is an important antioxidant, and then also an even more important antioxidant, you guessed it, glutathione.
Brock: Glutathione.
Ben: So the mushrooms, they tested 13 different species but the two mushroom types that had the highest amount of glutathione, if you wanna start to include these in your diet as a potent antioxidant, and again I noted this for myself just because I personally need more glutathione, were… you got any guesses, Brock?
Brock: I would say those little guys, what the hell are they called… Oh, porcini, porcini.
Ben: Porcini?
Brock: Yep.
Ben: Bing, bing, bing.
Brock: That’s like the most common mushroom, right?
Ben: Yeah. Porcini and yellow oysters, very high in glutathione.
Brock: Oh yeah, those are the ones that are sort of flat and girdy-looking.
Ben: Yeah, which is kinda cool coz mushrooms are a pretty decent source of vitamin D as well, especially if they’ve been exposed to sunlight.
Brock: Mmhmm, with their furry parts up.
Ben: Yeah, another reason to add mushrooms to your diet. Oh, and speaking of sunlight, did you see this? This thing about sunlight and what these researchers at University of Alberta did was they observed that a lack of sunlight actually makes your cells store more fat, with the idea being that the fat cells just beneath your skin, your subcutaneous fat can shrink when it gets exposed to the blue light emitted by the sun. And the why this is supposed to work is that when the sun’s blue light wavelengths, which is the form of light that you can see with your eye, penetrates the skin and reaches the fat cells beneath, the lipid droplets underneath the skin reduce in size and get released from the cells so the cells don’t store as much fat in people who have skin that gets exposed to the sun. Isn’t that interesting?
Brock: Yeah, I thought that was really cool but they didn’t explain where that fat went when it left the cell.
Ben: Well typically if the lipid droplet is reduced in size, that typically means that, and this is probably why to a certain infrared saunas can work for detoxification, is there’s a lysing of actual fat cell and a release of fatty acid to the bloodstream where they could theoretically be burnt as energy.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: What I think is even more interesting about this is people are walking around, again, wearing these blue light blockers at parties or in the evening watching movies, playing on their phone. And I think what’s probably gonna happen is a lot of people are gonna get fat eyes.
Brock: Hmm, I’d say it’s a terrible scourge of the human kind.
Ben: Yeah, we’re gonna have a whole generation of fat eyes. People who sleep really well but they’re gonna have super fat eyes, so there’s that.
Brock: Just like those little aliens from all the movies from the 80’s.
Ben: Yeah, and then finally, bacterial doping and poop doping could be the next big thing according to this article that appeared in Outside Magazine. And this one was pretty interesting, they interviewed this guy named Embriette Hyde who manages the American Gut Project. And one of the things that they’re doing over at the American Gut Project is…
Brock: That sounds like something totally different. American Gut Project? [laughs]
Ben: What does it sound like?
Brock: Well, you know the country’s known for its obesity, right?
Ben: Right. Oh yeah, you’re thinking like… I don’t get it.
Brock: Just going around poking people on their fat bellies or something.
Ben: Yeah, you need to go to the Canadian Humor Project and work on your gut jokes.
Brock: [laughs] That was funny stuff.
Ben: Anyways, they’re testing 150 samples of the microbiome of the poop from professional athletes and from amateur atheletes, and they’re finding some very interesting things. We already know that the things like the fermicide-bacteriod ratio can affect your propensity for obesity and that there are certain bacteria that are responsible for certain personality characteristics or the propensity to gain or not to gain weight. And when we look at actual athletes in sports performance, it turns out that their specific bacteria responsible for whether or not you’re gonna be “superhuman”, shall we say.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: So one of the things that they found was this type of bacteria, and they would name it in the article, they wouldn’t name it publicly, probably because they wanna turn it into some probiotic supplement that they can sell for copious amounts of money to Chinese Olympians.
Brock: That’s smart.
Ben: But what happens is they tested marathoners and they saw this bacteria blooming in large numbers of marathoners shortly after they finished the race. It accumulates in the bloodstream and it accumulates after strenuous exercise and it seems that it breaks down the metabolites associated with fatigue. It can be an actual lactic acid buffering bacteria, and if there is a really good endurance athlete who had that, you could potentially either dope with their poop, or if they were able to formulate this bacteria supplement with said bacteria, it seems like a more promising business model compared to trading athlete poop.
Brock: You’d be surprised.
Ben: Yeah, it’s really interesting. So they’re doing all this meticulous testing on the personal microbiomes of different athletes. Another one that they found especially prevalent in endurance athletes was something called prevotella and they don’t know why, but apparently people who are endurance athletes have a higher than normal amount of this prevotella in their microbiome, especially in cyclists. And so this idea behind poop doping is that in the same way that someone with say [0:13:53] ______ or IBS or IBD or some other gut issue would, and people are doing this. There’s clinics like the Taymount Clinic in the UK.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: They’re finding a health donor, they’re getting the poop from that donor injected into their backside or in some cases taking a poop pill and it’s literally just like rebooting their entire microbiome. Well it turns out you could say for example “I’m an okay, high-level, collegiate endurance athlete, I’ve got a roster here of 12 of the top athletes who have sold their poop to whatever we wanna call, Fit Poop Clinic. And I can go and pay x-amount of dollars to actually reboot my microbiome with their poop.” I don’t see anything going wrong with that scenario, at all.
Brock: I have a total new side business right now, I’m gonna go to all the marathons, sneak into the porta pottys in the little tent area…
Ben: Right.
Brock: Steal the poop and then I’ll just sell it out of the back of a van somewhere just nearby.
Ben: Mmhmm, yep. It also helps to concentrate all that positive bacteria when they sit there and fester in the hot afternoon sun as the marathon goes by.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Perfect business model.
Brock: Million dollar idea.
Special Announcements:
Ben: Alright so Brock, you’re a bit of a trailblazing freelancer, aren’t you? You do some freelancing, do you not?
Brock: I do so much freelancing and the worst part of it is getting people to pay the invoices, I gotta say.
Ben: Hmm, yeah I don’t know why I asked you that. I was Yoda.
Brock: [laughs] I like that.
Ben: Don’t you?
Brock: Hermetically interesting.
Ben: If you could reclaim up to 192 hours of your time each year, would you, Brock?
Brock: [laughs] What kind of ridiculous question is that, of course I would.
Ben: It’s a leading question is what it is. Our friends at Freshbooks, they make this ridiculously easy to use cloud accounting software for freelancers. And they do everything, they invoice, they track expenses, they allow you to get paid online and they literally just finished rebuilding it from the ground up. So what this is is it’s basically everything you’d ever need, like a one-stop shop for freelancers. So they let you invoice, they let you track expenses, they let you get paid and they work with 5 million people to deal with the paperwork. How cool is that?
Brock: You know what’s even cooler is I used to work just down the block from them in Toronto. They’re a Toronto company.
Ben: Oh, well I bet they’re nice chaps.
Brock: They are so freakin’ polite, it’s ridiculous.
Ben: Here’s how nice they are, they’re offering a 30-day unrestricted free trial to all our listeners. Just go to FreshBooks.com/BEN and in the how did you hear about us section, enter code “Ben Greenfield Fitness” which seems redundant. You’d think that if you go to FreshBooks.com/BEN they’d just know, but either way, you’re supposed to go to FreshBooks.com/BEN and enter code “Ben Greenfield Fitness”, that gets you a 30-day unrestricted free trial. Unfettered access, as they say.
Brock: Unfettered.
Ben: This podcast is also brought to you by something I actually had in the afternoon yesterday: the Organifi Red Juice. Have you tried this stuff?
Brock: No I haven’t. I’m waiting for somebody, a good friend of mine, to send me some.
Ben: I’ll have to send you a little. I’ll make a little drink with it, and I’ll put that in a bubble wrap.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: I’ll freeze it and send it your way. I’m not gonna send you my whole canister.
Brock: Yeah, sending liquid across the border is never a problem.
Ben: Nope, never. That, bullets, drugs, anything. But if you just want to get this for yourself, basically it’s like cordyceps, beet, acai, pomegranate, pretty much everything you’d ever want to build your blood or increase nitric oxide. It even has a slight nootropic effect without the drugs, so yeah.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: And it has a fresh [tongue-twisted]…
Brock: A what?
Ben: A fresh, fruit… [laughs]
Brock: [Irish accent] A fresh and fruity? Is it fresh and fruity?
Ben: A flesh and fruity flavor.
Brock: Ew.
Ben: Fresh and fruity flavor.
Brock: That’s better.
Ben: Thanks to the monk fruit that they put in it. So it’s red juice, they do green juice, they got a really good one called gold powder, it’s like turmeric. It’s like, what do they call it, “coffee shop’s golden milk”?
Brock: Yes.
Ben: Turmeric, they make that. And the golden milk has reishi in it so it helps you sleep. You can have a nice piping hot cup of golden milk at night. I make it my NutriBullet, it’s amazing. You go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/organifi…
Brock: With an “I”.
Ben: And you use discount code RedBen to get your discount on Organifi and I should mention, by the way for people listening in, we’ve got a pretty robust calendar now developing over at Ben Greenfield Fitness. My next stop is I’m gonna be in Florida, near Fort Lauderdale speaking at the Academy of…
Brock: Spring Break!
Ben: Regenerative Practices Conference. Bunch of physicians who are gonna learn how to further the field of regenerative medicine from yours truly. Actually I’m just gonna talk about French stem cell injections but it’ll actually [0:19:11] ______, it’s put on by the US Stem Cell Clinic down there so…
Brock: But it has nothing to do with spring break actually.
Ben: Yeah, and I should mention too, the Woodstock of America’s ancestral healthy living movement is coming up: PaleoFX.
Brock: Aha! I was wondering where you were going with that.
Ben: All the goodies, all the links are in the show notes. So all of this stuff here, your FreshBooks, Organifi, everywhere I’m gonna be over the course of March and April, you just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/380 and it’s all there.
Brock: Hurrah!
Listener Q&A:
Jeanne: Hi, I’m wanting to stop my brain thinking, actually surrender my thoughts. During meditation, I find my thoughts just impact me just way too much, and I’m wondering what music you would recommend for me to listen to to attain a higher state of consciousness.
Brock: This is likely the biggest hurdle that most people when they start to meditate should need to get over.
Ben: Let’s just listen to this podcast because I’m injecting sublingual – is that what it’s called, sublingual?
Brock: Sublingual [laughs], we’re slipping things under people’s tongues.
Ben: No, what’s the word, subliminal. [laughs]
Brock: Subliminal. [laughs]
Ben: I was close with sublingual. Yeah, I just invented a new word.
Brock: Sneaking it under your tongue while you’re sleeping.
Ben: Subliminal messages are woven throughout this pod – you will focus, you will not lose focus or you’ll die. Uhm, we will place blue light blockers upon you head. The thing is that I’m pretty sure this is a natural state, this brain wandering thing because about every week I take my little boys, my twin 9 year old boys into our sauna, our big infrared sauna. They should sponsor this podcast because I said that. Our big Clearlight sanctuary infrared sauna, get it now with four easy payments of the…
Brock: $29.99!
Ben: What we’ll do though is I’ll set up a candle that they stare at that’s sitting there on the floor that’s flickering. I also have an hourglass that is a 15-minute hour glass, so you can watch the sand fall.
Brock: it’s a quarter hourglass.
Ben: What we practice on doing… yes, it’s a quarter hourglass. What we practice doing is simply observing the flicker of the candle flame or observing the sandfall, and they’ll generally go about one or two minutes before you start to see fidget here, glancing out the window there. Kind of like elbowing brother to see what he does, and it’s a very natural state, it’s not like we popped out of our mothers just ready to go sit on a Himalayan mountaintop or go to a Vipassana ten-day silent meditation retreat. So yeah, we need some help, and for me I guess this is the way that I’m wired, there’s a lot of articles about “let thoughts go through your mind like a cloud” or… Do you like my voice by the way?
Brock: You’re so soothing.
Ben: Mmhmm.
Brock: So soothing, I just drifted off.
Ben: Except and if the deep emotions persist, seek out the deep place in which they… A lot of that stuff kinda sorta works, and I’ve taken a transcendental meditation course where we talk a lot about that. I interviewed the guy who taught me all my TM, Philip Land, and we discuss a lot of this in that show, this idea behind transcendental meditation and kinda like how to focus as you have this mantra going through your head. But I like to get down to brass tacks and kinda dwell upon a few of the things that we can do from a biohacking standpoint, so to speak.
So one thing that I would recommend is that you want to set up your environment in terms of the senses that are around you to be able to focus better, and for me, sound and aroma are two biggies. Sound and aroma, so for sound, what I mean by that, and I’ll link to some of the interviews and some of the resources I have on this in the show notes, is certain hertz frequencies that are played can induce a sense of concentration and a sense of focus because they induce alpha brain wave production and decrease beta brain wave production. And they can also, some of them depending on the hertz frequency of the music or the way that the instruments are tuned also induce a theta brain wave frequency. This is why certain songs can make you feel really stressed out, like if you listen to Slayer you’re probably gonna get a little more beta brain wave induction and if you listen to Enya, maybe a little bit more alpha-beta or I just wanna go punch my fist through the wall because [sings] this song is driving me crazy.
Brock: [inaudible melodic sounds]
Ben: Anyways though, so two of the tracks that I really like, there’s a company called Lovetuner. I get flak for this sometimes but I actually have this little, teeny, tiny flute like the size of the cap of a pen. And you blow into it and it blows at a frequency of 528 hertz.
Brock: It blows, alright.
Ben: Which among all of us woo-woo hippies is considered to be the hertz frequency that opens up your fourth chakra, your heart, makes you feel these intense emotions of love. And they have a whole 60-minute track that just plays these nice tunes at 528 hertz. There’s another guy named Michael Tyrell who has two different albums, and I’ve interviewed him twice.
Brock: Mmhmm, yeah.
Ben: Once each about each of these albums. One’s called Wholetones and the other one’s called Life, Love & Lullabies. What I do is I have those on my mp3 player and I can also hook them up via the auxiliary cable in the sauna and play them on the surround sound speakers in the sauna, which you get for four easy payments of…
Brock: $29.99!
Ben: Anyways though, I will play those tunes inside the sauna, and as soon as they come on, you get this deep sense of focus and calm and wellbeing.
Brock: And you wet your pants.
Ben: And you wet your pants… No, that’s only at 666 hertz.
Brock: Oh that’s the brown noise.
Ben: That’s the evil, that’s the mark of the beast. If you play the 666 hertz, horrible things happen. You get chapped lips. Anyways though, so I would recommend that you pay attention to sound and there are even apps such as the Sleepstream app. That’s one that I really like, I actually will sleep with that app. My wife gets really jealous, but I sleep with that app quite frequently.
Brock: She’s a very understanding woman.
Ben: Sometimes while I’m in bed with her, I actually have an app-wife threesome.
Brock: Kinky.
Ben: Man, we’re going to the gutter on this podcast. I am, at least.
Brock: Totally.
Ben: Totally did, I’m sorry about that folks. Anyways though, the thing with the Sleepstream app is it’s like a DJ so you can choose pink noise, white noise, brown noise. I made that one up. Pianos, binaural beats that induce focus, that induce concentration, that induce creativity. That’s one that I really like, and then there is another one called Brain.FM. So these are tunes that you can put into your ear, Brain.FM’s more sound based on artificial intelligence algorithms designed to induce creativity, focus or sleep, and the Sleep Stream app is just like a whole bunch of different things. You can actually layer, they’re not like an app where can’t play both at the same time. You can play both at the same time, so you can even mess around and layer them if you wanted to. So I’ll put some of my favorite sound resources in the show notes but then the other thing that I mentioned was… Do you remember, Brock?
Brock: That you mentioned?
Ben: Aroma. Smell.
Brock: Oh, yeah. Just don’t rub it on your lips.
Ben: Yeah, some of the smells that have been shown to increase focus and concentration, one would be rosemary. Rosemary’s a very good one, I like that. Vanilla, cinnamon and peppermint, and you can get an essential oil diffuser or you could just carry it around in this little bottle and snort it or sniff it. Or if you go to my Instagram page, I actually have a little Instagram tutorial on how I make these aromatherapy diffusers, not diffusers, they’re inhalers, right? You go to Amazon, you get these little inhalers, they have a little cotton wick and you dip the cotton wick in the essential oil and then you put the cotton wick in a little glass container that the inhaler comes along with and you can sniff your essential oils.
Anyways though, any of these things like vanilla, peppermint, rosemary, cinnamon, those will be like the big four. I recommend those for assisting with focus, with not getting too distracted. You’d be surprised, when you get the right music and you get the right smells, how much that can improve concentration.
So, couple of other things I would recommend. First of all, if you do want to get into the woo-woo, there’s one pretty decent article online about three ways to increase focus and it kinda talks about things I haven’t seen people talk about before like to silently ask yourself a really big question before you meditate so you actually have a goal that you’re trying to get out of that meditation. It’s like, for me, one of the first things I write in my journal is what truth did I discover in this morning’s reading. This Christian Gratitude’s that I use every morning because it allow me to read with some amount of cognizance or at least more cognizance about what I’m reading versus just picking eye boogers out of my eyes and trying to squint and figure out what it is that I’m staring at as I try to wake up.
So, same thing before you meditate, right? You’d want to silently ask yourself what you’re actually trying to achieve and then a couple of other recommendations I have with that one is consider the idea that you’re connected to the divine which I think is interesting and they kinda get into that in the article about how you’re part of the vastness of the universe. I’m not totally a Daoist-oneness of everything-type of person, but at the same time this idea that you really are doing something extremely divine and spiritual is a cool way to go into a meditation session and marinate in the idea. So basically figuring out what big ideas you’re kind of pursuing, so to speak, during that meditation and marinating in those ideas. Just basically instead of letting the thoughts come and go like clouds, actually embracing the thoughts, not analyzing them but letting them kinda fill your head, welcoming them rather than feeling like you have to banish them. So, we’re getting kinda woo-woo but those are a few things that I’d recommend when it comes to…
Brock: Well, when we’re talking about meditation to begin with, I think getting a little woo-woo is kind of a given.
Ben: Sorry, I know a lot of people don’t like it when we use that word so I’ll try not to use that anymore.
Brock: What, meditation?
Ben: And then honestly, when you look at books like Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal where they talk about things like microdosing with shrooms enhances spirituality and the spiritual experience. There’s something to a lot of that, and one of my go-to’s for a day where I need more focus and more concentration is not mushrooms, even though I will use those on occasion.
Brock: LSD.
Ben: Microdosing with LSD can also work, but let’s say you don’t wanna go spend cryptocurrency and do illegal things, there’s one supplement, and full disclosure, I support this supplement, I’m like an affiliate for them but it’s called Qualia. I also call it the “God Pill” and it’s got some things in there that I’ve found really, really help me with concentration and with focus and specifically with not having monkey mind that jumps around from task to task. I could just hone in and focus just like write for 2 hours without getting distracted or focus on accomplishing what I would call deep work or deep concentration. And some of the things in there make sense when it comes to inducing this effect like lithium orotate.
Lithium orotate is a neurochemical and it crosses the blood brain barrier and it can have a pretty profound effect on your ability to be able to control ADD and ADHD-like symptoms. It’s got choline in it which acts basically on both the peripheral and the central nervous system as a choline donor to allow for a little bit more like a stable thought pattern. You know there are nootropics in there like Huperzine and Vinpocetine and Thebromine and kinda of a variety of things that play a variety of roles in terms of cerebral perfusion and endocrine regulation but also just the ability to concentrate and focus. So I wrote a big article on this Qualia stuff, this stuff I call the “God Pill” stuff so if you wanted to supplement, we all know that you can just pop a pill and become a better meditator.
Brock: Of course.
Ben: So there’s that too.
Leslie: I’m looking at investing in either a BioMat or the Normatec. I usually run 3-4 days a week and I’m prepping for a 15 mile race, didn’t know how much anti-inflammatory effects the BioMat would have versus the Normatec. Have you used the Normatec before? I’ve never been exposed to a BioMat, thoughts from you please.
Ben: It was kinda funny because, are you familiar with Men’s Health Films, Brock?
Brock: I’m not.
Ben: They do like short films where they’ll go and do like “a day in the life of Rich Froning” or “a day in the life of Laird Hamilton”. And they decided yesterday to do “a day in the life of Ben Greenfield” so they had their film crew show up at my house and…
Brock: Wait, did you know they were coming?
Ben: I did know… No they were “surprise”.
Brock: “Surprise!”
Ben: A singing telegram? No we’re gonna follow you around the house all day with a video camera. Trust me, it’ll be fun. Anyways though, the thing that they thought was quite interesting was my napping habit because after I finish lunch, I’ll usually have a big cup of something like reishi tea during lunch to kinda relax me a little bit. And then I’ll go upstairs and I will… well I actually go upstairs before lunch and I turn on my BioMat, and then by the time I go up there after lunch it’s all warm like a giant, warm, sleepy, cuddly bear that doesn’t actually eat people or claw your face off.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Bears aren’t actually cuddly, kids. Just saying. Anyways though, so I’ll heat up this BioMat and then I have these boots next to it. So they’re following me upstairs and I’m like “so I’m gonna go take a nap now.” And I roll out the BioMat first, and for those of you that aren’t familiar with the BioMat, basically you plug it into the wall but it has what’s called an EMF protector so you’re not getting exposed to a lot of electricity from the wall if you’re concerned about sleeping next to an EMF source if you’re one of those Faraday cage people. Anyways though, what it also has on it is (a) it generates infrared light, so it’s really great for relieving muscle spasms or relaxing muscles or reducing inflammation or improving tissue oxygenation. It’s like a heating mat without the EMF but the heat comes from infrared rays.
Brock: Cool.
Ben: Which we don’t even need to get into all the research behind infrared and it’s very potent anti-inflammatory, I mean we can if we want to get into it.
Brock: We could, but I think it’s been done. And I don’t think it’s even a question anymore.
Ben: No, there’s multiple studies that show that infrared sauna devices and infrared light wave radiation producing devices are safe and effective for healing a variety of different inflammatory disorders, that has been studies extensively so we know that infrared can be very effective for inflammation. For a host of other factors as well but inflammation is really one of the biggies that it’s been shown in clinical studies to actually reduce. So I lay down on my BioMat and also, not to get too out there, it’s lined, I gotta make sure I say this with the right voice.
Brock: Okay.
Ben: It’s lined with tourmaline and amethyst crystals embedded in the actual mat. And again, it might sound a little crazy but when you look at trees, when you look at rocks, when you look at sand on the seashore as you’re walking barefoot on the beach, when you look at all these Himalayan salt lamps the hippies have hanging around their homes, when you have these negative ion generators that are now built into hepa air filters for homes. All of this is based on the concept of negative ions, meaning that the air that you breathe is actually, to a certain extent, electrified. You actually breathing in ionically charged air and one of the things that causes negative ions to be produced is minerals, that’s why Himalayan salt lamps produce negative ions, that’s why rocks produce negative ions, that’s why sand produces negative ions. So when you breathe these in, they have a very beneficial effect on the cell membrane, on the electrochemical potential of the actual cell membrane. And so when you’re sleeping on this, it’s very similar to like grounding or earthing, same type of concept.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: It’s like getting more in touch with our natural earth because it’s lined with a whole bunch of relatively expensive, tourmaline and amethyst crystals. Which is why my kids have a BioMat, I think it was like $800 and I’ve got the big, full one and it’s like $1400, something like that.
Brock: Hmm, cheap.
Ben: But it’s pretty cool. Also, and I’ve got a video online about this, you can turn it into a sauna. You can actually, and this sounds really silly, but if you have some of those space age-y, silver, Mylar thermal heating blankets, you can just lay down on your BioMat and wrap a couple of those around you and you break into a whole lot of sweat within 10 minutes. So if you wanted to use it as a sauna, totally good.
Anyways though, I lay down on my BioMat and these guys are filming me and I’m not done yet. Because then I reach down beside the bed and I…
Brock: Leslie’s getting old as this question gets answered.
Ben: I pull out these boots that are designed by a bioengineer who I’ve interviewed on the show, but they’re called Normatecs, right? And normally if you wear compression tights or tight pants, skinny jeans, anyways though, that helps to transport some fluid out of your limbs but these things actually plug into a device that pumps air in and out of the boots. It’s called Sequential Pulse Technology, so it starts at the bottom of your feet, it squeezes all your veins, your lymphatic vessels up towards your heart using this pressure and then after it’s pulsed the pressure up toward your heart, it returns back to the feet and then does it again. So it’s just like a massage for both legs, they also have attachment gear for your hips, attachment for your arms that makes you look like a silly… who’s the big puffy white guy on the cover of bread and stuff like that?
Brock: The Michelin man?
Ben: No, not the Michelin man, there’s another guy that’s like…
Brock: Oh, the Pillsbury Doughboy?
Ben: Yes, you look like the Pillsbury Doughboy when you put on… thank you Brock, I need my pop culture help on this podcast. Anyways though, and a lot of studies have been done on that, an improvement in arterial resistance and upregulation of what are called PGC-1-alpha, an eNOS which produce nitric oxide, and enhanced flexibility and decreased soreness. So I figured what the heck, if I’m gonna go up and lay in my bed for 20-45 minutes after lunch and take a nap, I want my body to just be getting as good as possible during that nap. So I lay down on my BioMat and I put my Normatec boots on and then I pull a sleep mask over my face and I don’t know how long they filmed me just laying there, coz when I took off my sleep mask and opened my eyes, everybody was gone. I was dead to the world but to answer Leslie’s question, first of all if you really want the full meal deal, the Cadillac of recovery, do what I do and use both at the same time.
Brock: Do both.
Ben: And I also do this, don’t laugh, naked because infrared doesn’t penetrate clothing very well. That’s why if you’re doing Joovv lights or infrared sauna or anything, you wanna wear as little as possible if that’s at all possible. So I did keep my shorts on for the Men’s Health thing but ultimately, when you lay down to take the nap, try to take off your clothes. So anyways, Leslie, when it comes to anti-inflammatory, if you had to choose one, the BioMat just because the Normatec boots don’t really decrease inflammation, they kinda pump it out of the legs but as far as a really good anti-inflammatory boost I would say the BioMat. But if you’re a true, true, real biohacker, both.
Tim: Hey Ben and Brock, its Tim Hoover. I’ve been a long time listener of the show, about three years now. I thoroughly enjoy everything you guys put out, you help me live a better life through, honestly, the things you recommend, so I have a question for you, I have three kids, ages 10, 12, and 14, that are very active but years ago, whenever I switched over to whole clean eating, I switched everybody in my house and so my kids don’t eat processed foods or sugar. And I’m just curious, does the sugar really matter? How much sugar is okay for kids and should I be letting them eat some processed food or some snacks, as high energy as they are, would they burn it off or am I doing things right or wrong because my kids seem to be shorter than the other kids and it could be genetics, I don’t know. I’m just wanting to make sure that I’m feeding my kids properly and helping them grow to be the best little superhumans they can be. Thanks guys.
Ben: Brock, how much sugar do your children eat?
Brock: Not very much coz I don’t have children.
Ben: They don’t exist.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: That’s the way to do it. Then you just don’t need to worry about these things at all. Well, the fact is that in our day and age, normally I would say what I kinda get into in my book “Beyond Training”, that kids are not just little adults. And kids, especially growing kids who might also be strenuously exercising or at least relatively physically active which is what I would assume the majority of the children who belong to listeners of this podcast would be. They’re not little adults, they’ve got a lot of different defining physiological characteristics that make them different than the older population. And I get into this in my book about how for example, we see higher fat oxidation rates in exercising children. Exercising children actually are better fat burning machines, possibly because they just had a lesser period of time of their lives to be eating cereal and scones and biscotti and sugar so they haven’t switched out that fat utilization. But it turns out that they actually oxidize 10-40% more fat during exercise compared to adults. Now does that mean they need less carbohydrate? Not necessarily, but it does mean that because of their high fat oxidation rates, we should be taking into account the fact that they do need a decent amount of fat in their diet, possibly even more than many adults. Now they also burn lower amounts of storage carbohydrates which means children don’t yet have the level of enzymes that are necessary to break down muscle or liver carbohydrate, what we call glycogen, to fuel as fast as an adult can. And so what this means is that giving a child, during very intense glycolytic efforts, some exogenous source of carbohydrate or giving them sweets to fuel intense efforts could be something even more beneficial for a kid than for an adult. So actually having, whatever, a healthy energy bar, and when I say healthy energy bar, I mean Paleo gluten-free, lactose-free, dairy-free, raw, soy-free.
Brock: What did I miss?
Ben: Whatever all those little labels are that everybody has on every energy bar nowadays, those ones. Give one of those to your child during their next soccer game, and it actually turns out that kids actually need that type of exogenous carbohydrate intake during longer exercise sessions.
Brock: I’m gonna stop you for a second, you said beneficial, it might be beneficial to give them one of these gluten-free, fat-free, soy-free treats. Do you mean beneficial to their performance or beneficial to their health and wellbeing?
Ben: Well, if a kid’s running around, kids are pretty insulin-sensitive, there’s not gonna be a big spike in pancreatic cell destruction from excessive insulin production in response to eating an energy bar while they’re running around on the soccer field. That’s not something that you need to worry about. I will get to what happens at rest here in a second, but interestingly it also turns out that during exercise sessions that aren’t that long, about 75 minutes or less, it actually found eating carbohydrates does not appear to give extra performance advantages for kids. And specifically this would be kids under the age of 16. Now I know that all of this is starting to sound kind of confusing.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Ultimately, what that means is that for longer exercise sessions, let’s say a basketball game or soccer game or tennis match that you know is gonna last longer than 75 minutes, your child and especially because they can’t break down muscle glycogen quite as well or liver glycogen quite as well, they’re definitely gonna benefit from exogenous carbohydrate sources, and you probably don’t want a kid to be doing the whole ketosis-low carb thing during an event like that.
If a child is competing in a sports that is 75 minutes or less, something pretty brief, maybe a 500 meter swim at their swim meet or something like that, doesn’t appear that giving them a bunch of exogenous carbohydrates gives them much benefit and in fact because they oxidize more fat, you would probably be better served by sticking to seeds and nuts and nut butters and avocados and a lot of these more Mediterranean fats. So a big part of it depends upon the length of the sporting sessions. Ultimately, big picture to bring this full circle is that if you got a kid who’s in a sport and it’s especially like a sport that’s lasting longer than 75 minutes, make sure that you have some form of carbohydrate-based fuel to give them. If it’s under 75 minutes, then the kid can actually do pretty well eating fat, you don’t have to worry as much as the Gatorade sports scientists would have us to believe about making sure that they’re constantly fueled with some form of carbohydrate.
Now, that all being said, how much sugar’s okay for kids when they’re just hanging out the house, right? Coz technically, kids have a higher metabolism so maybe their blood sugar is not going to get as high because they’re running around a lot more. And ultimately, in both children and adults, huge amount of variability. I mean, we know this from my interview with Robb Wolf and his book “Wired to Eat” about this research that they did in Israel where people, based on their microbiome, vastly different responses in blood sugar in response to like a banana versus a cookie. And they’ve also looked at other genes, not just the microbiome but genes, like there’s one gene called G6PC2, and that decrease the pancreas’ ability to detect sugar in the blood. And that would have a significant effect and actually, people would have a different form of G6PC2 due to that change in their DNA that again, you could look for in a 23andMe test, that would predispose you to slightly higher levels of blood glucose, so you can actually have your child genetically tested, and I personally don’t have any problems ethically with that. For me personally, the pros outweigh the cons, and you could find out “hey, does my child possess some of the genes responsible for higher than normal blood glucose or pancreatic cell destruction or higher than normal risk for type 2 diabetes.” You could also just basically, I know this sounds like biohacking your kid, but you could get a blood glucose monitor and just for like a week in your kid’s typical diet, monitor their blood glucose and scar them for life because daddy is chasing them around with a needle to…
Brock: Try to stab them.
Ben: Their fingertip. And ultimately, we’re now coming out with some pretty cool infrared technology that could give you a decent idea of blood sugar levels, but ultimately what I’m saying is that we live in an era where you can quantify DNA and you can quantify microbiome and you can do a blood glucose analysis and see what’s going on with your kid’s blood sugar levels. Do kids have higher metabolisms than adults? In most cases, yes. Are they running around a lot more? In many cases, yes as well. And so am I asking myself a lot of questions on this podcast so that I can respond to them?
Brock: You sure are.
Ben: What kind of questions are those called? Not a leading question, I’m blanking on this. When you ask a question but you know the answer, it’s not a leading question.
Brock: Rhetorical.
Ben: Yes, a rhetorical question. I think it’s a rhetorical question.
Brock: No, a rhetorical requires no answer at all, it’s just to make a point.
Ben: Yeah, and that’s what I’m doing, right? I’m asking these questions to create a dramatic effect on this podcast.
So, what do I do with my kids? My kids, they get carbohydrates, they get sugar, and here’s the way that I do it with my children. First of all, my kids understand that the main time that the body can have not a very deleterious response to the intake of carbohydrate is pre-exercise, post-exercise or during exercise, when the insulin response is gonna be blunted and you’re body’s gonna be pretty insulin-sensitive and glucose transporters are gonna be upregulated, et cetera. I’ve actually taught my children that concept, and so they will, a lot of times when they get a sucker from Wells-Fargo, when we go to the bank or when they go to Awana’s on Tuesday nights and they get new candy, they’ll actual save that. They’ll bring it to school sometimes and down it before P.E., they’ll take it before or after jiu jitsu. When I say take it, it sounds like medicine. Consume it like Cookie Monster in the back seat of the car on the way home from jiu jitsu, but they realize there’s a time and a place when carbohydrates can be less damaging.
In addition to that, I don’t do with them as I do with myself when it comes to restricting carbohydrates completely until the end of the day, and that is because of children’s rapidly growing bodies. The need for extra glucans for joints, the need for a little bit of extra glucose to go around for their rapidly elevated metabolisms. I mean a typical day for my kids, out the door to school, running around at school, P.E., recess, coming home, piano, jiu jitsu, running around, chasing each other with Nerf guns, eating dinner running around more, hanging from the yoga trapeze. They’re, honestly, more active than I am in these situations, and so for example, they’ll come home from school and they’ll grab a brown rice cake and they’ll put some raw honey and almond butter on that. Or they’ll blackstrap molasses, another very nutrient rich sweetener that we use, organic maple syrup that they’re making themselves. So now they’re cutting their pancakes and their waffles that the make in the morning with a scoop of protein, which is a great strategy but they’re also using an organic maple syrup. A little bit more nutrient-dense than say something more sugary, less nutrient-dense.
Brock: Corn syrup.
Ben: Artificial maple syrup, dates and figs, they do a lot of cooking with those. So ultimately, and I say cooking with those I mean they actually have a cooking podcast and they actually make cakes and sweets and things like that, and they’ll use dates, figs, blackstrap molasses.
Brock: They really do.
Ben: Raw honey, organic maple syrup, a lot of these nutrient-dense sweeteners. So, I don’t ban them from doing that but I encourage them to do it when they’re more physically active, they don’t really have that kind of stuff when we’re on a long car ride. It’s more like avocados and carrot sticks and things that aren’t gonna spike their blood glucose, so full circle. I know I just went through a lot, but here’s the idea.
Brock: Yeah, I had no idea you were gonna like this question so much. You’re totally lengthening up on this one.
Ben: I wanna write a book about kids someday. Just about kids and how they work.
Brock: You should.
Ben: How to make ‘em, how to raise ‘em, coz I’m so wise. I have twin 9 year olds, obviously I’ve cracked the code on successful children.
Brock: Obviously.
Ben: Because they’re 9 and I’m not dead. Anyways though, so full circle.
Brock: Full circle.
Ben: Long workouts exceeding 75 minutes, make sure that your child has good healthy carbohydrates on hand. Under 75 minutes, don’t worry about it as much as all the others seem to be doing. At rest, long car rides, long plane rides, et cetera, do your kids the same as you should do with yourself: higher fat intake, moderate protein, low carbohydrate. Normal day when your kids are running around being super active, don’t shun carbohydrates, don’t shun sugar, make sure that they know the best time for them to be taking it in during the day is when they are being pretty physically active, not when they’re sitting around reading or watching TV, but use nutrient-dense sugar sources have them around, teach your kids the concept of nutrient-density. And then if you really want to get into things hardcore, using blood glucose monitoring and DNA testing to figure out the actual genetic propensity to something like type 2 diabetes and if you’ve got a child with 40% higher than normal risk for type 2 diabetes, you may want to make a different choice in terms of the afternoon snack that you feed that child a.k.a. rice cake with raw honey versus avocado with olive oil and sea salt because of that kid’s unique genetic predispositions. And the two best books to figure this out, in my opinion, excellent new book called “Dirty Genes” by Ben Lynch and also the book that I already mentioned, Robb Wolf’s book “Wired to Eat”. Oh and by the way, because my kids are twins and they were born at 4 ½ lbs. each, and twins are just technically a little bit smaller than other kids.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: They’re also freakin’ like their mom, super skinny, high metabolism, running around all the time, I don’t think the fact that they’re small is gonna make that big of a difference aside from in terms of macronutrients, just overall. Calories maybe a little bit les, but all the rules I just outlined apply, it’s just that big, old Bruce down the street who’s kicking the pants off of the child growth chart may have a whole avocado whereas your paltry, small, feeble, little child only gets ¾ of an avocado.
Brock: Oh, poor kid.
Glen: Hey Ben, it’s Glen here from Saskatchewan, Canada. I have a question for you today about plantar fasciitis. I used to be a pretty avid long distance runner, I’d run about a half marathon 5-6 days a week, never had any problems with my feet or anything like that. Then what happened about 4 years ago I switched from a very active career to a desk job, and when I did that, I gained about 20 lbs. And as soon as that happened, I got plantar fasciitis almost within the first month. And since then, I have not been able to get rid of it. I’ve pretty much had completely stopped running at this point, haven’t run for ages, for years. I’m able to go to the gym still and I wear these padded shoes that have a ton of padding in them, just trying to protect my feet. But even that, the plantar fascia gets super inflamed and tight every single time I do anything. Even if I just go for a walk around the block, I would get pretty extreme pain in my heel and even up into my ankle. Just wondering if you have any advice for how to get rid of a case of plantar fasciitis like this that’s been sticking around for quite some time. Cheers.
Ben: Brock, you’ve been dealing with this a little bit, yeah?
Brock: I have but I was actually under the impression that I wasn’t fasciitis anymore, they didn’t call it that. It was a fasciopathy.
Ben: Oh fasciopathy.
Brock: That’s the new way to refer to this injury.
Ben: Yeah, interesting. I actually did not know.
Brock: Coz it’s not an inflammation.
Ben: Fasciopathy. So it’s a pathological fasciopathy. What’s the difference? What’s supposed to be the difference between fasciopathy and fasciitis?
Brock: Semantics.
Ben: Yeah, coz I mean…
Brock: Apparently it’s because it’s not a true inflammation. -itis refers to something being inflamed but it’s not necessarily that you’re plantar fascia is inflamed, it’s that it’s aggravated.
Ben: Yeah, I was under the impression that a -pathy, a pathological condition was something that is manifesting itself in some kind of like a -pathy describes the actual pain. Like I have plantar fasciopathy which means that you have inflammation, it covers that but also you have pain, you have limited range of motion, it’s a pathological condition versus plantar fasciitis which might be inflammation of the plantar fascia that’s not symptomatic or asymptomatic. I dunno.
Brock: Yeah. I actually tried to ask my, I have a really smart chiropractor that I see quite often, I tried to ask him the difference and he, when I said it was plantar fasciopathy, he actually sort of waved his hand dismissively in my face [laughs] and shook his head.
Ben: Impossible!
Brock: He did not want to discuss that, so apparently it’s not a big deal.
Ben: He probably just wanted to adjust T5 and T6, that’s the answer to everything in a chiropractor’s office. “That’s your thoracic.” “But my upper neck…” “No it’s your thoracic.” “But my lower…” “No it’s your thoracic.” Just kidding, I actually love chiropractic docs. There’s a few weirdos out there but most of them are pretty cool, I have a lot of friends who are chiro.
Brock: Some of them are full of [censored].
Ben: Anyways, so we digress.
Brock: Totally went off.
Ben: First of all, I’m not gonna go over all the stuff that you’ve tried, Glen, coz you tried a lot. I could tell you how to buy the frozen juice cans at the grocery store and roll those under your feet and how to get a night support brace which, in my opinion, works really well, and how to do a little exercise where you pick up the marbles with your big toes and drop them into the cup or scrunch up the towel then extend it with your toes. Sounds like you’ve kinda done all of that, bro. I’m not gonna insult your intelligence, I’ll fill you in on a few other things that you may wanna try that you haven’t yet.
First of all, one of the things that you could do is just break up the tissue and there’s some pretty interesting studies on the ability of something called pulsed electromagnetic field therapy to kinda act similar to almost ultrasound in terms of not just increasing the uptake of oxygen into pathological (see what I did there) tissue areas that are inflamed, but also to do things like induce heat shock proteins to reduce some tissue damage, to increase ATP production, simulates what’s called myosin phosphorelation, and the actual hertz frequency. There’s one device that I like coz it’s small and would fit almost perfectly underneath your heel, it’s called a Flexpulse and that one has a setting where it goes back and forth between 10 hertz and 100 hertz. That would be a pretty good one to consider using on the foot, so if you haven’t used PEMF yet, definitely look into PEMF. Another one, and I had this done on my soas, and Gabby Reece down in Kauai.
Brock: Did you say your sore ass?
Ben: Yeah, my sore ass. Gabby Reece down in Kauai hooked me up with this girl named Angie down there who, Angie Mueller, I forget her website’s name, you can probably look her up, and in Kauai, she did dry needling on me. And dry needling is something that actually has been looked at for inflammation of the plantar fascia, and if you don’t know what this is, it’s an actual, just like it sounds like. It’s a long ass needle that’s so small that it doesn’t really hit the nerves too much but you definitely feel a slightly uncomfortable amount of pressure from it, but they kinda put it into specific areas to reduce inflammation and to reduce pain. A treatment on your plantar fascia would take maybe 15 minutes and they’ve shown that this can actually, it’s essentially just repeated puncturing of your tissue with an empty hypodermic needle that can have a really effective effect on the plantar fascia.
Brock: Effective effect.
Ben: And actually they combine that, in one study, with ultrasound guided steroid injections, which this is similar to what I did with stem cells where they went into my hip and used ultrasound digital thermography to identify the areas then they put the needle exactly where the area is.
Brock: Oh yeah.
Ben: They can do that same thing with your plantar fascia. In this study they used steroids but you can probably try it with prolotherapy, with PRP, with stem cells, any of those but you’d want an ultrasound guided injection so you put it exactly where it needs to go. But this is another thing that you could look into would be dry needling, preferably with some kind of a thermography to image it. Similar to PEMF, there’s also this thing called extracorporeal shockwave therapy, same thing I did to my [censored] down at GainsWave. You can probably have them do your [censored] and your foot at the same time if you want to.
Brock: You probably don’t want to though.
Ben: And it’s high intensity acoustic soundwave therapy that breaks open old blood vessels and builds new blood vessels and you can use that on plantar fascia and this is another one that they’ve studied and they’ve used and found efficacy for. Little bit more expensive, I mean you’re looking at $500-$3000 dollars for shockwave therapy, and sometimes two or three treatments of that, but if it’s just a vein in your side and you can’t walk, it’s something you could look into.
Brock: It’s not that expensive here anyway, in Canada. I paid $65 for my physiotherapy appointment and they just did it because they thought that was what I needed.
Ben: But you’ve also been paying taxes out the ass since you were 18 years old.
Brock: Sorry, I wasn’t trying to compare our medical system to the American medical system. I’m just saying I don’t think you have to pay the thousand dollars.
Ben: Oh you’ve paid for it. Someone is paying for it. You wanna have this debate right now? We could throw down right now.
Brock: No! That’s not what I meant to start. Nobody wants to hear that.
Ben: [laughs] Says Ben who basically wants to privatize healthcare completely. Anyways that’s just me, I digress. I’ve not only lost several podcast listeners but also created vegans out of the ones who don’t wanna think about tying rubber bands around animal’s testicles. We’re on a roll.
Okay, two other things I would look into. First of all you can order these peptides to your house for like pennies on the dollar. Two, and very few studies behind these, this is more of like a go to the BroScience body building forums and a lot of people have used it for this. And I’ve written articles on this, they’re called peptides and they can repair tendon, they can repair muscle. It’s like a poor man’s prolotherapy or a poor man’s PRP or a poorman’s stem cell. BPC-157 and TB-500, those sound like robots out of Star Wars, but they’re actual peptides that you can inject to a joint. So those two I would consider too, and the problem is there’s not a lot of loose skin to inject those subcutaneously around the plantar fascia, but if you get it even close to the area of pain and you’ve got some skin to pinch, you can get it subcutaneously up around in there.
Brock: Hopefully you’ve got a fat heel there Glen.
Ben: Well as long as you heel isn’t getting exposed to the sunshine it probably is fat. We know that thanks to today’s news flash.
Brock: There you go.
Ben: And then finally, there is this study about high load strength training, improving outcome in patients with plantar fasciitis.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: And in this study, they actually have these people doing heel raises with the towel underneath the toe. It’s essentially almost like eccentric, same thing that they did with Achilles tendonitis back in the day. Ironically enough it appears that loading the Achilles and doing eccentric-like muscle tearing on it actually helped to realign a lot of those fibers. Same thing, in this study they actually did high load strength training and high load eccentric plantar flexion in these patients with plantar fasciitis and they did this every other day so about 48 hours for recovery and actually found that to have a pretty decent effect as well.
Brock: That’s actually what’s working the best for me on my plantar fasciitis. As soon as I introduced that, I did a series of about three weeks of doing it every single day and it just pissed off my plantar fascia, made it worse but now I’ve backed off to every second day and it’s almost like magic. I barely have a slight ache in there now.
Ben: Well, if that doesn’t wind up working, you could diffuse essential oils down by your foot, like vanilla, peppermint and you could play the heart chakra lullabies and it’ll probably heal up.
Brock: Oh yeah.
Ben: And probably have double black medical study about that. I practice gratitude too, really good.
Brock: I’m so grateful to my heel.
Ben: Alright, now before we offend people, let’s give something away, shall we? So this is the part of the show where if you email [email protected], that’s [email protected] and you let us know your T-shirt size, and we read your review, there’s a lot of hoops to jump through. But you go leave a review, we read it here on the show, and if you hear it read and you e-mail us your T-shirt size, we send you free [censored], that’s what I’m trying to say. Beep. So, this one’s called “Getting reacquainted with biology”, 5 star review by Scooter Jones.
Brock: I love it, I hope his name really is Scooter.
Ben: His name, Scooter. Alright, take it away Brock.
Brock: Alright, it goes like this. “Ben presents information as a trained expert although he’s a total A-hole.”
Ben: Hmm.
Brock: Oh no wait, that’s not what it says, sorry.
Ben: Haha. You woke up on the funny side of bed this morning.
Brock: “Ben presents information as a trained expert but with the open mind of a perpetual student.” [laughs] It’s actually a really nice complement there, you’re a perpetual student, Ben.
Ben: That didn’t graduate ever.
Brock: Yeah, there’s no graduation ceremony for you. “His educational background provide a solid background to measure different health, fitness and wellness trends and tactics against while his curiosity and courage to try fringe techniques and report back on their results benefits the greater good.”
Ben: Oh, thanks. Benefit of the greater good.
Brock: “I’ve enjoyed the ride so far, as well as getting reacquainted with words I thought I’d left in the last biology class I took.” That’s awesome. “Thanks, Ben!” Totally, reinvigorating that bio-twenty.
Ben: Yeah, I wanna know one of the new words that he learned. How about one of those doozies I threw around today, like sublingual or subliminal or what’s another good one from today’s show, Brock? There was that last one, hypothetical, as in a hypothetical question. Hey Brock, is this podcast over? Yeah. Should we probably go? Yeah. Did I enjoy talking to you? Yeah, probably.
Brock: That’s just called a response now, that’s not even…
Ben: Alright, later dude.
Brock: Are we done?
Feb 15, 2018 Podcast: 380 – How To Avoid Distractions During Meditation, Two Effective Recovery Biohacks, How Much Sugar Do Kids Need, and How To Fix Plantar Fasciitis.
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.
News Flashes [00:02:48]
Another good reason to use coffee before exercise.
Yellow oysters and porcini mushrooms for glutathione? Here’s the latest… probably smart to include if you want more glutathione.
Geez. Sunshine can burn fat.
Bacterial doping and poop doping could be the next big thing. Very interesting article. 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 [00:15:09]
This podcast is brought to you by:
-Freshbooks – FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30 day free trial for all my listeners. Go to FreshBooks.com/BEN and enter “BEN GREENFIELD FITNESS” in the how did you hear about us section.
-Organifi – Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/organifi to get your GREEN JUICE and use Discount code BEN for 20% off your order! Or get your RED JUICE and use the discount code REDBEN for 20% off your order!
–Click here to follow Ben on Snapchat, and get ready for some epic stories about his morning, day and evening routine! Ben’s Adventures: -NEW! Click here for the official BenGreenfieldFitness calendar.
-March 2-3, 2018: 2018 Academy of Regenerative Practices Conference & Scientific Seminar, Weston, FL. Top stem cell innovators, researchers, and medical practitioners will be joining to further the field of regenerative medicine. Attend the two-day seminar to discover the latest in the field and learn how regenerative therapies can help your practice grow. Featured speaker: Ben Greenfield. Get your ticket here.
–March 24-25, 2018: San Jose Super and Sprint Weekend, Diablo, CA. There’s nothing mediocre about this middle distance race. The Spartan Super offers the ideal blend of distance and speed. If you consider yourself a more seasoned athlete determined to push beyond excuses, you just might have the mettle for a Spartan Super. Serving up 24-29 Spartan Obstacles and 8-10 miles of rugged terrain, the Spartan Super spares no one. Developed as the second race in the Spartan Trifecta, the Super is where you prove to yourself you’ve got everything it takes to face the Beast. Bring out all the support you’ve got for this one, spectators welcome! Aroo! Get your tickets here.
-April 27-29, 2018: Paleof(x) in Austin, TX. Paleo f(x)™ is the world’s premier wellness event, covering health, nutrition, fitness, sustainability, & everything in between. Our tribe gathers to learn and grow together! Bringing the latest, most cutting-edge science and strategy together to help you create your very best life, Paleof(x) is like the Woodstock of the ancestral movement, and I will be there! Sign up now to be the first to get tickets to this very exciting event! Sign up here and see you in Austin!
Giveaways & Goodies [01:08:00]
-The folks at Clearlight Infrared Saunas are GIVING AWAY a Clearlight Sanctuary-2 Full Spectrum Sauna ($6295 value!) to one lucky Ben Greenfield Fitness fan! If you need to know why you need to own an infrared sauna, this article explains my deep love for a daily sauna and also why Clearlight is the only sauna I recommend. To enter, all you need to do is visit: BenGreenfieldFitness.com/SaunaGiveaway
-Click here to get your own GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com gift pack, handpicked by Ben and chock full of $300 worth of biohacks, supplements, books and more. All at 50% discount!
-Grab your 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!
Listener Q&A:
As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Brock Armstrong, the Podcast Sidekick.
How To Avoid Distractions During Meditation [00:19:50]
Jeanne says: I am wanting to stop my brain thinking, and actually surrender my thoughts, during meditation. I find my thoughts impact me way too much. I am wondering what you would do (or music you would recommend) for me to attain a higher high state of consciousness?
In my response, I recommend:
–Lovetuner audio tracks
–Wholetones by Michael Tyrell
–Life, Love & Lullabies by Michael Tyrell
–Sleepstream App
–Brain.FM
–Essential oils such as vanilla, peppermint, rosemary and cinnamon to assist with focus
–3 Ways to Increase Your Focus During Meditation
–The Qualia “God Pill”
Two Effective Recovery Biohacks [00:32:51]
Leslie says: I am looking at investing in either a BioMat or a Normatec. I usually run 3-4 days a week and am prepping for a 15-mile race. I don’t know how much anti-inflammatory effect the Biomat would have vs. the Normatec but I would love to hear your thoughts on this, please. Any other suggestions?
In my response, I recommend:
–The Biomat
–Normatec boots
–Video: How to turn a Biomat into a sauna
How Much Sugar Do Kids Need [00:41:17]
Tim says: I have 3 kids who are very active but a few years, we all switched over to a more clean eating diet. That means my kids don’t get processed foods or sugar. I am wondering does the sugar really matter for kids? How much sugar is ok for kids? Should I let them eat some processed food and snacks? As high energy as they are, would they burn it off? My kids seem to be shorter than the other kids (maybe genetics) but I want to make sure I am raising my kids to be the best little superhumans they can be.
In my response, I recommend:
–Blackstrap molasses –Raw honey
–Organic maple syrup
–Dates / figs
–Ben Lynch’s book Dirty Genes
–Robb Wolf’s book Wired to Eat
How To Fix Plantar Fasciitis [00:55:49]
Glen says: I used to be an avid runner and never had any trouble with injuries but then I got a desk job and gained about 20lbs and developed a case of plantar fasciitis. It has lasted for years now and I only ever get relief for a few days before it flares up again even just from walking (I haven’t been able to run for years). I have tried everything (compression, ice, relaxing, foot braces, night support, heel cushions, anti-inflammatory diets) but I am hoping you have a suggestion that I haven’t tried.
In my response, I recommend:
–High-load strength training improves outcome in patients with plantar fasciitis
–My article on TB-500
–My article on BPC-157
–Flexpulse
–Plantar Fasciitis | Feat. Kelly Starrett | Ep. 77 | MobilityWOD
Read more at: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking-podcasts/380-caffeines-effect-testosterone-meditation-hacks-can-kids-eat-sugar-adults-much/