March 15, 2018
[00:00] Introduction
[02:53] News Flashes: The Carnivore Diet
[11:39] Broccoli
[14:47] Vegetarianism on Children
[16:21] Special Announcements: Birdwell Beach Britches/Freshbooks/Joovv Lights
[21:26] Ben’s Adventures
[23:05] Listener Q&A: How To Increase Mobility
[43:11] Vaporizing Essential Oils
[53:23] Everything You Need to Know About Garlic for Health
[01:01:15] How to Get Rid of Sun Spots
[1:08:07] Giveaways and Goodies
[1:10:10] End of Podcast
Introduction: In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show: The Carnivore Diet, Vaporizing Essential Oils, Everything That You Need To Know About Mobility, Garlic For Health, How To Get Rid Of Sun Spots, and much more.
Ben: Brock, today is a day that will go down in infamy.
Brock: [laughs] Of course it will.
Ben: I think infamy is a word, at least. This is the first time in a very long time that I have developed a scratchy throat.
Brock: Oh.
Ben: I haven’t been sick in like 7 years.
Brock: Oh snap.
Ben: I woke up this morning, well its 2° and I did a kettlebell workout in the garage yesterday morning, and in between my kettlebells I was running up and down the driveway with my big, traction-y boots on coz it’s all just snow and ice. And I think I may have overdone the cold, so…
Brock: So you think it’s just an irritation, it’s not like you actually caught a virus or a bug or something while you were doing it, you just irritated the heck out of your bronchial tubes?
Ben: That’s what I’m gonna say.
Brock: Bronchioli.
Ben: I’m gonna keep telling myself my immune system is just unstoppable. Knock on wood, I’ve got some weak parts about my body but I literally, knock on wood again, just don’t get sick, ever. But I smeared a bunch of peppermint on my chest so I smell like a giant piece of gum now.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: And I gargled with, of course, the wonderful Kion Wild Mediterranean oil of oregano.
Brock: Oh, of course.
Ben: Which is, I kinda do that for anything. If I watch a bad movie, I take some oregano.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Or if I’m annoyed at someone, I take some oregano.
Brock: And you rub it on them.
Ben: Mmhmm, mmhmm.
Brock: You’re annoying, “squirt squirt”.
Ben: If I have road rage, I squirt oregano out the window.
Brock: Don’t you have it installed in your windshield wiper fluid?
Ben: Mmhmm.
Brock: You just sorta go “whoosh”.
Ben: Mmhmm, the entire world, to me, is a giant Italian pizza.
News Flashes:
Ben: So speaking of pizza, Brock, have you heard about the carnivorous diet? Is it called carnivorous diet or the carnivore diet?
Brock: I think it’s the carnivore diet, but carnivorous, sure. They both mean the same thing.
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: I can go either way.
Ben: Well I’m a fan of meat but I found a very, very interesting article. Let’s start here, Inc Magazine published an article, and I didn’t know this about this carnivore diet, but apparently it was last year from the time we’re recording this in the fall of 2017. I’ll link to this article.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: If you’re listening just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/382, that’s where all the show notes are, bengreenfieldfitness.com/382. Anyways, in the fall of 2017, apparently a bunch of members of the Bitcoin community, the cryptocurrency community, switched to eating only meat and drinking only water. And that was like the underground movement that started this whole carnivory diet, carnivorous craze…
Brock: “Carnivory.”
Ben: That happens to be going on right now. And so it’s a bunch of Bitcoin enthusiasts and now a whole bunch of blogs have popped up around it and of course a Reddit forum coz there’s a Reddit forum about everything.
Brock: About everything.
Ben: And it is essentially meat, water, and nothing else.
Brock: Nothing else.
Ben: Just meat and water and nothing else. They call it a zero carb diet, or some people do, which is ludicrous because meat stores glycogen.
Brock: Totally.
Ben: So it’s not a zero carb diet FYI, just for anybody listening in. You actually do eat glycogen when you eat meat, your muscles store carbohydrate and so do the muscles of other animals last time I checked. But people swear that there’s this simple zen of eating only fatty, juicy steaks and some other people will include eggs and cheese and of course heavy cream because heavy cream is an animal.
Brock: Of course. [laughs]
Ben: I love to hunt me some heavy cream with my bow and arrow.
Brock: They’re slippery critters though.
Ben: Yeah [laughs] those little heavy creams, chasing them around the pastoral fields. And then with alcohol apparently, and this is where I start to scratch my head, apparently a lot of people do drink on this diet. So it’s already starting to sound a little less dogmatic and less strict.
Brock: It’s falling apart.
Ben: Yeah, it’s falling apart. So a lot of people are losing weight and the article is quite interesting because there are some kinda cool personal anecdotes on the carnivorous diet but it’s not written by a scientist.
Brock: No.
Ben: It’s written by some financial journalist.
Brock: No, and he’s not pretending to be a scientist.
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: It’s not like he’s trying to pass this off as some great literary, scientific thing that should be published in the Journal of Medicine or something. He’s just telling his story.
Ben: Yeah, there’s another guy, my friend Ryan Munsey, he wrote an article where he followed it for 30 days. His website’s at ryanmunsey.com, and he kinda delves into how a lot of people do this because of all the lectin and the gluten and all the other plant compounds that can cause digestive issues like crohn's or leaky gut. And a lot of people are just getting rid of bloat by switching to only meat, which again I think is ludicrous because all it means is that you’re too dumb to figure out how to cook plants the right way.
Brock: Yeah. [laughs]
Ben: But it’s like if quinoa gives you diarrhea, you find pieces of quinoa in your crap, it might not mean quinoa’s bad. It might mean maybe you just grabbed it off the shelf and cooked it, didn’t take time to soak it.
Brock: Yeah, and well there is that whole thing of your body does adjust and develops enzymes and the things it needs to actually digest the things that you give it on a regular basis, so there’s that as well.
Ben: Yeah. He even has a quote from Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey who wrote this book called “Go Wild”, and that book says our primary method to overcome our inability to digest plants is to outsource its job.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: Meaning you let the animals to plants, and then you consume the plant, and it is true, liver for example is very nutrient dense. A lot of meat is really nutrient dense, and some people would even argue that you don’t need as much fiber as we may have been led to believe that one would need, but I also don’t believe that meat is this unhealthy, artery-clogging, fattening, cholesterol-raising, heart attack-inducing, constipating, tumor-producing food that should be avoided like the plague.
Brock: Whoa.
Ben: I don’t believe that, I don’t. I’m preaching it.
Brock: Alright.
Ben: But I also don’t think a plant-based diet is the holy grail of health.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: I’m all about being omnivorous, and as I tweeted last week, I like to have a glass of red wine and some Brussel’s sprouts and sweet potato fries with my rib-eye steak, thank you very much, because I like to live life to the fullest.
Brock: Yup.
Ben: And to me, it’s a little more fulfilling to have other things scattered amongst your meat on the floor and the table. But you have a whole bunch of meat mongers historically, like the Inuit, they did fish and seal and walrus and whale meat…
Brock: Yeah, not because they wanted to.
Ben: The Maasai, they did milk and meat. Yeah, coz they couldn’t grow plants, right?
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: I think there was an Indian tribe, I mean a Native American tribe, sorry for not being sensitive.
Brock: Yeah, that’s it.
Ben: The Sault, how do you pronounce that, the “Sow” tribe?
Brock: “Soo”.
Ben: Yeah, the Sault tribe, the South Dakota folks, they mostly eat buffalo meat. There are some Brazilian tribes who ate mostly just beef and meat. And I get it, and you can certainly survive on a long adventure for a long period of time on whatever, pork rinds and beef jerky, but for me it’s about dietary diversity. It’s about, honestly the long term health of the microbiome. It’s kinda like you feel really good on the vegan diet for a little while and then eventually you’ll build up fatty acid deficiencies and amino acid deficiencies, and I think you can say the same thing for a carnivorous diet, right? You could eventually get to the point where you’re developing some microbiome issues, some bacterial deficiencies, some potential flavonol or polyphenol deficiencies from just not having enough plants in your diet. That’s my take, I dunno, what do you think dude?
Brock: I dunno, I always just look in my mouth and think we were given this vast…
Ben: Dude, you look in your mouth?
Brock: I look in my mouth for answers all the time [laughs], that’s where I keep my answers.
Ben: Mmhmm.
Brock: But my teeth, like our teeth as humans, we’ve got teeth to crush plants, we’ve got teeth to rip meat, we’ve got teeth to crunch through hard stuff. We’ve got all the teeth, so we should use them.
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: That may be totally reductionist of me and not very scientific but it just seems obvious.
Ben: No, that’s the dental approach.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: And then there’s also the approach of if you’re just doing this for longevity, I get the gut health issue and again, what I’m saying with the gut health issue is maybe just prepare your plants better and avoid some of the more fermentable foods like garlic and onions, and try that first before saying bye-bye to everything green. But when you look at studies in longevity between meat eaters and plant eaters, they kinda go back and forth. There’s very little correlation between longevity and a vegetarian diet or longevity and a meat-eating diet, and that’s because they just lump everybody together and I really think that… I was reading a study just last week on the presence of gut bacteria called prevotella, and that gut bacteria’s propensity to allow you to thrive or not thrive on a higher fiber, more plant-based diet. And some people have higher levels or that and some won’t, and some people may confer a great amount of longevity from more plants and some people may have issues with excess methionine from meat. It all comes down to customization in my opinion.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Whenever I see dogmatic diets like this, that’s why I like… did you listen to that interview I did with Dr. Ben Lynch, the guy who runs the strategene service?
Brock: Oh yeah.
Ben: They’re very good, you get tested, you can see what dirty genes you have that might make you less able to process high amounts of folate or you might see a need for more glutathione, things like that. Ultimately, I’m a fan of dietary customization, I’m also a fan of plants, personally. Speaking of plants, got another one for you.
Brock: Speaking of plants, the tiny little trees.
Ben: Broccoli, yes broccoli.
Brock: Delicious.
Ben: I know, I pretend to be a dinosaur when I was a kid, that’s how my mom got me to eat vegetables. I was a dinosaur, it’s like one step up from baby food being on an airplane on a tiny spoon. She said that I’m a dinosaur.
Brock: [laughs] It’s like ages 10-15?
Ben: Everybody who does not have kids right is just going mmhmm. Anyways though, broccoli. So there’s this compound of broccoli called sulforaphane and we know that that’s in broccoli and we know it’s a very beneficial compound especially when it comes to anti-inflammatory effect and its healthy effect on the gut. But vegetables also contain enzymes that they’ve evolved for defending themselves against, speak of the devil, herbivores, people who eat plants. That enzyme is myrosinase and that myrosinase activity is how the sulforaphane gets made. We gotta throw out another word here, vegetables have these things called glucosinolates.
Brock: Glucosinolates.
Ben: I read a lot but I don’t know how to pronounce them, yeah that’s the way I roll. Anyways, so you need to transform these glucosinolates into sulforaphane and the way that you do that is we have this enzyme myrosinase. And to kick that enzyme into gear, you actually have to damage the plant, right? It’s the same reason I like ripping up kale before you rip up kale, concentrates the antioxidants in the kale.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: There’s this really good book called “Eating On The Wild Side” by Jo Robinson, I think her name is. And basically the deal with broccoli in this research study that they did was they pulverized it, chopping it into a bunch of pieces then they took some that they just left regular and raw and some they stir fried. And it turns out that the best way to concentrate all the beneficial compounds, all the sulforaphane is you just cut it or you pulverize it into tiny little pieces about 90 minutes before you cook it, and that my friends is how to biohack your broccoli. And actually when they cooked it, it had less sulforaphane.
Brock: Yeah, yeah.
Ben: Yeah you rip it up or chop it up and then you wait 90 minutes and then you cook it.
Brock: I didn’t get the whole waiting 90 minutes thing. It makes sense to chop it up because you’re increasing the surface area.
Ben: No, it’s coz the enzyme has to get activated by the chopping and go to work.
Brock: Yeah, but wouldn’t that happen immediately?
Ben: No, enzymes do have to take time to work. It’s like if you open up a digestive enzyme that you take to digest a meal better and you sprinkle that on a steak, you can watch it digest a steak but it’s an enzyme.
Brock: Yeah but you’re introducing that exogenously to your steak, it’s not something that’s inside the steak already like you’re not destroying a steak up and let it eat itself.
Ben: I get what you’re saying Brock, but what I’m saying is enzymes take time. If you do any enzymatic process in a chemistry lab, it’s not instant.
Brock: Okay, fine.
Ben: Usually it takes a little time to do its thing.
Brock: Whatever, fine.
Ben: So yeah, that’s okay. Vegetarianism, which we’re obviously talking a lot about, here’s another one: is vegetarianism healthy for children? Turns out we can turn to science for the answer to that question.
Brock: Great.
Ben: This should be controversial, it’s a new paper that criticizes the official stance of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and also the United States Department of Agriculture. And what this paper goes into is the current evidence on vegetarianism and a plant-based diet and its effect on fetuses and its effect on children. I will link to this, again just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/382, but essentially there are serious risks for the brain and the body development that they found in fetuses and in children, and they also found that regular supplementation with the things that people normally take to make a plant-based diet complete like iron and zinc and B12…
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: Did not mitigate these risks, and honestly the final sentence of the abstract kinda sums it up. They say consequently we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children.
Brock: Alright, got it.
Ben: So there you have it, kids need some breast milk with their broccoli.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: Their chopped up, pulverized broccoli. So there you have it, the carnivorous diet, how to make your broccoli biohacks and how vegetarianism is not all that great for a fetus, or a child, or a baby.
Brock: “Afetusii.”
Ben: “Afetusii.”
Special Announcements:
Ben: Hey Brock, have you heard of Birdwell Beach Britches?
Brock: I have, I’ve been wearing their shorts for 25 years.
Ben: You have, really?
Brock: No, but I heard that’s their claim to fame, isn’t it?
Ben: Actually, I have some.
Brock: Really?
Ben: Yeah, and they literally do, they look like the old school, bad-ass, 1960s beach wear.
Brock: [plays old beach music]
Ben: Yeah exactly, put them on, you wanna get on a skateboard and find a hotrod and listen to the Beach Boys. And the cool thing is they’re pretty bad-ass shorts, they’re like this unbreakable two-ply nylon fabric that they fashioned after boat sails.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: I’m guessing the first ones probably were boat sails. Some dude lost his shorts, strapped a boat sail around his waist.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: But they’re guaranteed for life. They’re made in America in Santa Ana, they got a lifetime guarantee and they look amazing and the good folks at Birdwell Beach Britches decided to hook everybody who’s listening up with a discount code, and that includes their lifetime guarantee and free shipping and 10% off. And it’s very simple, you go to, I can’t say without saying it like this, BIRDWELL.
Brock: [laughs]
Brock: Was that your 1960s newscaster voice?
Ben: That’s my 1960s newscaster voice.
Brock: You see? It’s our lifetime guarantees, you see?
Ben: And then you have to say something racist or inappropriate or absolutely unpolitically correct.
Brock: Their toots.
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: By toots and smack ‘em on the ass.
Ben: Alright before this thing downgrades, degrades, however you say that.
Brock: Boom.
Ben: This podcast is also brought to you by Freshbooks Cloud Accounting. It’s actually pretty cool for freelancers and small business owners because we’re all disappearing under a dark abyss of paperwork these days, and cloud accounting allows you to take care of it all online.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: Why is that funny when I say dark abyss?
Brock: Oh, it sounds very dramatic.
Ben: It sounds very medieval to me.
Brock: Yes. [laughs]
Ben: No but anything you wanna do, you wanna send your accountant a summary on the tax you’ve collected or pull together a profit-loss summary, generate a report in seconds, Freshbooks does it all and it’s ridiculously easy to use especially if you’re like me, you don’t wanna look at numbers and taxes. I can either not pay my taxes and go to prison or use no Freshbooks. There you have it.
Brock: That’s right, Charlie!
Ben: That should be a motto.
Brock: Freshbooks or prison!
Ben: So anyways, Freshbooks. You get a 30-day unrestricted free trial if you’re listening in you lucky duck. You go to Freshbooks.com/ben and you use code BEN GREENFIELD FITNESS in the how did you hear about us section. That’s a long code, I think you just put the word BEN GREENFIELD FITNESS.
Brock: I think so.
Ben: So go to Freshbooks.com/ben, 30-day unrestricted trial, any freelancers or business owners out there, you’re welcome.
Brock: Bring me some fresh books there, Betsy!
Ben: [laughs]
Brock: This is fun, you should do the rest of the show…
Ben: It’s like there’s a 60s old school female names and then there’s the trailer trash names.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: My favorite trailer trash name, by the way my apologies to anybody listening in who has this name, is Shelly. I’ve been meeting a lot of Shellys and I’m wondering if Shelly is coming back around. That’s kinda like a white trash, trailer trash name, again my apologies to any Shellys.
Brock: Sorry Shelly.
Ben: You can make fun of Benjamin as being, I dunno some uppity Jewish name. Anyways though, this podcast is brought to you by, I actually have this on right now. My legs are spread and I have this on shoved betwixt my gonads.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: Although I’m actually wearing pants. Its infrared light, I use these Joovv lights. They’re good for your collagen and your skin, there’s this guy Dr. John Toma, he actually loved this. He tripled his testosterone in less than 6 months just shining this thing on his balls for 5 minutes a day. There’s actually research behind it, it activates the mitochondria in the leydig cells in the testes.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: So those little bad boys churn out more testosterone but they’ve shown a lot. The European Journal of Applied Physiology showed more than 50% increase in muscle thickness and exercise torque with the photobiomodulation using one of these… I don’t think they use this Joovv light, there’s the same spectrum as these Joovv lights. Joovv, they’re called and they’re just there little light panels you can get for your office or your home or wherever. And you get 25% discount, you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/joovv and you use code BEN25 to get a discount, so there you have it.
Brock: We all need more torque.
Ben: So, very soon, a couple of weeks, our first Spartan race of the season.
Brock: Woohoo.
Ben: Gonna be down in San Jose, so those of you who are in San Jose, I’ll be there in the Diablo. California’s where it’s actually at, racing a Spartan there so I will likely be there both days although I’m only doing short course this year. The short, explosive stuff.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: So anyways though, I will be there and I would love to see some of you out there coming out to race the Spartan. And in addition to that, Paleof(x) is coming up in Austin, Texas, April 27-29, it’s like the Woodstock of the health movement, extremely fun event, you should definitely go. If you’re trying to pick some event to be at, that’s the one to go to.
Brock: Just don’t take the brown acid.
Ben: Yes, exactly… the what?
Brock: That was the Woodstock thing, the brown acid.
Ben: Oh, way over my head.
Brock: Yeah, you’re way too young. Well I’m too young too, that was way before my time. What am I talking about?
Ben: There’s a bunch of other things that I’ll be at like races, Bigfork, Montana at the Montana Sprint Spartan over there. I’m doing the Train to Hunt competition over in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, a little running with obstacle course racing. Whole bunch of stuff, we’ve got it all up at bengreenfieldfitness.com/calendar.
Listener Q&A:
Anthony: Hi, my main issue is no matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to get flexible. I’ve been doing squats and I’ve been doing extra stretching and I’ve been doing martial arts and I’ve been trying different things now for well over three years. And no matter what, it just seem like I cannot get any kind of flexibility, I get no kind of rotation. I can barely squat, however I can run, play sports, I play basketball and I do tons of push-ups and burpees no problem. Just anything with flexibility, I just can’t seem to get over the hump and I don’t know what to do. So do you have any answers as far as how to really get to next level of flexibility, from I can’t touch my toes to I can’t break parallel squats. I’m trying to do overhead presses but I can’t really get my arms up straight over my head, and basically anything that has to do with any kind of flexibility, turning my body left or right, anything turning sideways is definitely an issue. So if you can help me out, that’d be great, and my name is Anthony from Philadelphia, thank you.
Brock: So Anthony can’t reach overhead, can’t touch his toes.
Ben: No.
Brock: Can’t rotate his torso. [laughs]
Ben: No, basically like…
Brock: Isn’t that called ankylosing spondylitis, is it?
Ben: Concrete vegetable with ankylosing spondylitis, exactly.
Brock: Anthony, look that up and you’ll be terrified.
Ben: Yeah, sorry Anthony.
Brock: Hopefully you don’t have that. [laughs]
Ben: Pretty soon you’re just gonna basically just be like a walking splint. Yeah, flexibility, a lot of people are born with lower levels of mobility due to higher levels of tendon stiffness which, honestly my wife has that and she’s a very fast sprinter. She has extremely tight hamstrings and those serve her quite well.
Brock: She’s like a freakin’ spring.
Ben: She also gets IT Band Friction Syndrome when she tries to run long distances also because of those tight thighs, right? So it’s a catch-22, sometimes being inflexible means that you’re more spring-y, you’re more explosive. Your tendons simply can store more potential energy, and at the same time there are other people who have low flexibility because they are stiff and that’s because of these cross linking of fibers. Other people because they’re very stressed out, right? Stress, cortisol, tension, locking the jaw, grinding the teeth, a lot of times that results in tightness or is correlated with or accompanied by tightness throughout the body. And I don’t even like the word flexibility because I don’t care about flexibility that much, I don’t care if you can touch your toes, what I care about is mobility.
Brock: Yes.
Ben: The ability to actually be able to move through a specific range of motion versus just being able to stretch a muscle x amounts of inches. So don’t worry about flexibility, worry about actual mobility to be able to perform the activities that you wanna perform. Now that being said, there are a lot of ways that you can actually improve mobility, but before I get into those, again not to kick this horse to death but stretching and flexibility and being Gumby is not mobility. There’s a host of data that shows that static stretching does not reduce the risk of injury.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Which is one of the primary reasons that you may have been led to believe you should do static stretching before exercise. Multiple research studies have shown that it can inhibit the amount of force that a muscle can produce especially when it comes to jumping or sprinting or lifting. They found that runners, this was a study a few years ago, they were 13 seconds slower for a one mile uphill run, which is a lot for a mile, when they stretched before running up the hill.
Brock: It’s significant.
Ben: So again, mobility is what you wanna go after, not flexibility especially if you are an athlete or somebody who’s trying to perform good, solid workouts. And don’t get me wrong, yoga’s great, it decreases blood pressure, it teaches proper breath work patterns if you’re doing Bikram yoga or Sauna yoga, they can have a detoxification effect and you produce heat shock protein and nitric oxide, but it is not serving you well if you are an explosive athlete.
Brock: But the outfits, I mean the yoga outfits are to die for.
Ben: They are.
Brock: Come on, that’s the only reason they do it in my mind.
Ben: Mmhmm, yeah the flowy shirts and the pants.
Brock: I look fantastic in my pants.
Ben: Uhuh, yeah.
Brock: Tight pants.
Ben: Yep.
Both: [singing] I got my tight pants on.
Ben: The thing with yoga and with stretching is that I do it but I don’t hold the stretches for a very, very long period of time because I don’t want to be excessively stretched. A Golgi tendon organ which is that organ near the center of the muscle that causes that reflexive contraction to protect the muscle when it’s stretched, it takes holding a stretch for about 6 seconds to cause that Golgi tendon organ to relax a little bit, and for you to get a little bit more flexible.
Brock: For those of you out there, the Golgi reflex is the thing that protects you from basically just ripping yourself in two. It stops you from stretching beyond your actual capability or your fiber’s capability.
Ben: Yeah, exactly what the chimps in The Planet of the Apes do not have.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: They can just rip steel bars to pieces and pull cars apart, right? Actually, it is true, chimps have far, far less sensitive Golgi tendon organs.
Brock: Really?
Ben: One of the reasons they’re so strong, that’s why a baby chimp can rip a human apart.
Brock: Huh, but then they pay the price for it afterwards, I guess?
Ben: Yeah if you learn nothing else during this podcast, it’s not to mess with a baby chimp coz of its little Golgi tendon organs.
Brock: Yeah, done.
Ben: So I don’t hold a stretch extremely long, I’ll hold a stretch for at least 6 seconds so I can get a little bit of improved flexibility but I don’t hold the stretch for 30/60 seconds/2 minutes unless I have a very, very… my hips tend to get tight and the hips are one area that I’ll stretch a little bit more than some of the other groups. But when it comes to mobility, of course just basic dynamic stretching rather than static stretching is extremely effective and there’s lots of studies that show that can increase power and strength and performance during any subsequent activity. It’s also called ballistic stretching. This would just be like swings and arm circles, leg swings, walking lunges, bent torso twists, what we would call an active warm-up, a dynamic warm-up.
Brock: Ballistic makes it sound way more violent than it actually is.
Ben: Right.
Brock: It’s not that violent, it’s just swinging.
Ben: There’s a host of great examples like that recent kettlebell swing certification that I did down in San Francisco, we would start out each day with about 10 minutes of lunge for one leg and then drag that hip out to the side, then you lunge for the other leg, then you drop in a down dog but it was just into down dog for a second the forward then back into down dog then forward. Then you’d stand and reach for the sky but then drop down into a squat and reach for the sky from the squat, a whole host of different stretching routines. I even have on YouTube, if you go to the Ben Greenfield Fitness YouTube channel, just go to YouTube and do a search for “Ben Greenfield Mobility “, I have two different videos that show how I’ll combine dynamic stretching and foam rolling.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: Foam roll the hips, stand up, do a bunch of hip swings and hip circles, get back down, foam roll the shoulders, stand up, do a bunch of shoulder swings or shoulder circles. I’ll even do golf balls on the bottom of the feet, stand up, do some down dogs. So I like to combine deep tissue work with dynamic stretching for a really, really big improvement in mobility and that’s kind of like the second part in addition to dynamic stretching to increase your mobility would be deep tissue work. And that would be any type of stimulation that works deep into your muscles and connective tissues that can be active release therapy or Rolfing or… I’ve interviewed people on muscle activation technique, another one called advanced muscle integrative therapy, Graston trigger point therapy, deep tissue sports massage, the whole tennis ball/lacrosse ball, golf ball, foam rolling approach. All of that can remove a lot of the adhesions and the adhesions are what can cause a muscle to be protective, result in friction and pressure and tension and then eventually inflammation and decrease circulation and more adhesions. That’s like a cumulative injury cycle, I talk about this in my book “Beyond Training”, and in that book I get into a whole bunch of different ways that you can kind of incorporate your own deep tissue work.
I also have an article I’m gonna link to in the show notes that goes into not just a lot of really good ways to look into better deep tissue work, like what is advanced muscle integrative technique? That’s based around the fact that every tissue in your body is saturated with these proprioceptors and those monitor and control every part of a body’s function, and when you’re injured or you have a high amount of inflammation, they become protective and they shut off the function, they shut off the mobility in that area and you can actually apply very, very deep pressure using this thing called advanced muscle integrative technique and almost turn off those areas that are being hyperprotective. I had a podcast called “Dr. Two Fingers” Reveals His Teeth-Gritting, Body Healing Secrets where we went into that. I’ve got a podcast on muscle activation technique, Graston technique, trigger point therapy, deep tissue sports massage. I’ll link to an article in the show notes where I kind of really delve into the details on a lot of those, and I also get into really cool forms of dynamic stretching. One that I use quite a bit is called resistance stretching. There’s a book by Bob Cooley called “Resistance Stretching”, it’s about resistance stretching, imagine that.
Brock: I imagined that.
Ben: And you’re actually resisting, you’ll do a shoulder stretch where you’ll pull your shoulder across your body but you’re resisting with the other arm. And by resisting with the other arm, you’re actually firing the muscle that is on the opposite side of the muscle that you’re trying to stretch, and when you do that, the muscle that you’re trying to stretch becomes more flexible. It’s just based on this concept that when you, for example, heavily contract your quadriceps and then stretch your hamstring, your hamstring can move through a greater range of motion. And you can also do the same thing from the opposite spectrum, this is called proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, you contract the hamstring really, really intensely and then stretch it and it moves through a greater range of motion.
So, I’ve got a lot of strategies like that that I’m going to link for you, Anthony. And then there’s also a few other things. You have your joints and you can change the integrity of the fascia and the muscle and the connective tissue with deep tissue work but you’re not doing anything for the actual bone-y, capsular area of the joint itself like the shoulder joint or the hip joint or the knee joint or the spaces in between the knees or the ankles. So that’s where traction comes in. That’s why I have, for example, giant bands scattered around the house where I’ve got a band upstairs in the living room right now, and I’ll wrap that band around my hip and move forward into a lunge and just kind of lunge in and out and through a bunch of different ranges of motion, and that’s actual traction. Hanging from an inversion table, that’s traction.
Brock: That’s what that’s for. I thought that was for sexy times.
Ben: [laughs] You mean the elastic band in my house?
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: Just made an assumption there.
Ben: No, I’m not using that to hold anyone down or to slap anyone or spank anyone.
Brock: Autoerotic asphyxiation?
Ben: No autoerotic asphyxiation. Google that, kids.
Brock: Or don’t. [laughs]
Ben: Yeah, or don’t. Just basically, you attach the elastic band to the joint that you want to put traction on then you move away so far, you can feel tension on the hip or the knee or the shoulder. And works like gangbusters, Kelly Starrett really kicks that horse to death in his book “Becoming a Supple Leopard”, which has a lot of detailed instructions on self-traction exercises. Or you can an inversion table or a yoga swing or gravity boots, I use a lot of that stuff and it really, really helps increase the seeping of synovial fluid in the joints when you’re tractioning like that. So that’s another one, and then finally, you cannot discount the food and supplements piece, right? Like collagen, collagen’s fantastic for joint health and it might not make you more flexible but it definitely goes hand-in-hand with any type of mobility program. I’m right now consuming, based on a little challenge from my friend Mark Sisson, who is lauding the benefits of collagen lately, I’m doing a lot of collagen. About 40g of collagen a day, he told me to just try it, so I am.
Brock: All in one go or spread out over the day?
Ben: No I spread it out throughout the day, you can only absorb about 20-30g per time anyways.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: So, that and amino acids which acts very, very similarly. A good essential amino acids blend like our Kion Aminos in addition to drowning myself in Kion Oregano, I’m also going through almost an entire canister of our Kion Aminos powder every week. I’m just using it all the time.
Rock: Damn.
Ben: Dude, it’s extremely anabolic with zero calories. It’s one of the best ways to keep your muscles put together. The difference between that and collagen is essentially that it does almost the same thing but with no calories. And granted I’ll have collagen coz my body needs calories but if it’s in the afternoon or from fasting and I still wanna continue to put my body into repair mode, I do amino acids. I’ve been doing a lot of amino acids.
Brock: That’s an expensive habit.
Ben: Yeah, well Kion is my company so I get a good deal on the products.
Brock: That’s true. [laughs]
Ben: But yeah, amino acids are amazing. I mean not branched chain amino acids, there’s a lot of issues with those especially the high amounts of leucine in those [0:37:14] ______. But a good essential amino acids blend and/or good collagen, amazing. Ginger is another very good one, ginger has a really good anti-inflammatory effect. I feel like a broken record here, that’s actually a key component of our Kion Flex product.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: That’s like a shotgun for your joints.
Brock: Yikes.
Ben: Not like shooting a shotgun through your knee.
Brock: That’s not good.
Ben: It’s like that joke about the old lady who decided that she was gonna try to commit suicide by shooting herself in the heart.
Brock: [laughs] This is not a good joke.
Ben: [laughs] She wasn’t quite sure where the heart was, she looked it up and WebMD said the heart is located just below the left breast area. And so a few hours later she wound up in the E.R. with a gunshot wound to her left knee. [laughs] Anyways, this old woman…
Brock: Aw man.
Ben: Yeah, it’s a sagging breast joke.
Brock: Don’t google that, kids.
Ben: Yeah. [laughs] Anyway, so antioxidants, speaking of plants and possibly another hole in the carnivorous diet is that vitamin B and vitamin C increases cell wall elasticity and joint mobility, and a lot of other inflammation reducing polyphenols and bioactive compounds that we find in plants doing some more things. Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, pomegranates and currants, and colorful vegetables like purple cabbage and dark red tomatoes or carrots that are all sorts of different colors or sweet potatoes and yams and colorful purple taro. All of those, fantastic for joint mobility and flexibility and recovery program. And then if there were any supplements, are you familiar with proteolytic enzymes, Brock?
Brock: I sure am, I used to use those like crazy when I was doing Ironman.
Ben: Yeah, I was talking about enzymes like I’d sprinkle it on a steak and you can buy proteolytic enzymes, sprinkle them on a steak and literally watch, before your eyes, that steak digest. You can also use it as a tenderizer for meat, but you look on the label of a supplement that has proteolytic enzymes and you wanna look for things like trypsin, chymotrypsin, papain, bromelain is another, and those actually roam through your bloodstream and they break down fibrin surfaces and scar tissue and granulomas and tough cell coatings, all of which can cause joint pain and lack of mobility. So [coughs], excuse me, I’m should go grab some more oregano.
Brock: Yes.
Ben: When I’m injured now, I’ll do twelve of those Kion Flexes. Six in the morning and six in the evening coz they’re chock full of proteolytic enzymes. So I do a lot of those and then glucosamine chondroitin as well, can block the action of enzymes that break down cartilage tissue, so that goes really, really well with amino acids or with collagen. And then glucosamine helps to stimulate cartilage production while the chondroitin attracts water to the tissue, so it helps the cartilage to stay more elastic. So anybody who’s trying to increase their flexibility or their mobility should definitely include glucosamine chondroitin, proteolytic enzymes, ginger, some kind of bone broth/collagen/amino acid, and probably the last one would be omega-3 fatty acids. Speaking of a challenge, that 40g of collagen per day challenge?
Brock: Mmhmm?
Ben: Keith Norris, the guy who runs that Paleof(x), he was telling me he tried to do 40g of fish oil per day, which I would think would just give you…
Brock: The leakiest blood ever?
Ben: Fishy, oily, leaky diarrhea that spells like Pike’s Market in Seattle. But in fact he said his vision improved, his joints felt amazing. After I talked to him I actually upped my own fish oil intake to 10g. I didn’t wanna go for 40, so I’m doing 10g of fish oil per day in the morning along with my smoothie, and that also has been studied and found to be associated with decreased risk of bone marrow lesions, helping with stiff or tender or swollen joints, decrease in the progression of osteoarthritis, decrease in the inflammatory aspects of cartilaginous cell metabolism, so there’s a lot of benefits to omega-3 fatty acids as well. So ultimately, all that stuff, good traction, doing traction regularly, doing deep tissue work regularly and when you stretch doing dynamic stretching, those would be some of the better ways to tackle this mobility issue.
Brock: Yeah, I also wanna see, and you can jump in here to, but I also wanna see what Anthony’s doing for the rest of his day. Sure you can go off and do some dynamic stretching and stuff for 30 minutes or 90 minutes if you’re really into it, but what about the rest of the day? How is he moving through the world or not moving through the world for the rest of the time? I think that’s something where Feldenkrais would come in or the Alexander Technique or something, to see what he’s doing the rest of the time. How he’s standing, how he’s moving, how he’s sitting.
Ben: Yeah, the Alexander Technique is really interesting. I just finished a book about that and it really is just awareness, just body awareness and spatial awareness. And I went over to our Facebook page because after reading that book, I recorded a 3 minute audio version of the book just with some of the basic cues that I learned from the book, to remind me when I wake up in the morning, I can listen to that and it’s “pull your left shoulder away from your right hip, and pull your right shoulder away from your left hip.”
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: Imagine your hands becoming wider and longer, keep your knees slightly bent, tongue pressed against the roof of the mouth. If you do all these things they start to become natural, so I’ll link to that Facebook post that I did coz what I did was I just recorded that audio and then embedded it on the Facebook post. Anybody could go download it for free, and I also put a link to the book, that Alexander technique book that I used. So we’ll link to all these resources in the show notes for you, Anthony, and enjoy.
Katie: Hey Ben, this is Katie in beautiful East Tennessee. You’ve mentioned a few times on your show about vaping essential oils. I was wondering if you could give a little more details on that. I have a lot of friends that live very healthy lifestyles other than the fact that they can’t give up their vapes. How does vaping essential oils compare to a regular vape in terms of the amount of smoke it produces, the flavor, and how do you use it. How do you create your blends? In your blends, what vape do you use? If you could give us more details on that, I’d really appreciate it.
Ben: have you ever vaped essential oils, Brock?
Brock: No, the only thing I’ve ever vaped is a little more green and herby looking.
Ben: That’s very, very essential. Essential oils, and marijuana.
Brock: I didn’t say marijuana.
Ben: A lot of oils have terpenes in oils. Oh broccoli, you vaping broccoli?
Brock: Exactly [laughs], but only after chopping it up and leaving it for 90 minutes.
Ben: I had never thought about vaporizing, the vape pen or bong or anything else, essential oils. That was never anything I’d thought of, it makes sense that you would be able to deliver some of these compounds into your lungs but I never thought of it until I was hanging out with Paul Chek, and Paul Chek who I’ve interviewed a few times on the show, he’s an enormous wealth of knowledge on health. He’ll take organic tobacco or a really good loose leaf tea like a chamomile or a lavender or a tea blend.
Brock: So he’s basically a beatnik? You’re describing a beatnik.
Ben: Yes.
Brock: [laughs] That’s exactly what they used to do in the 50’s and 60’s.
Ben: Really? Wait, you mean like vaporized tea?
Brock: Well, not vaporized it but smoked tea and fancy tobaccos and stuff.
Ben: I didn’t know that. Yeah, okay. So he’s a beatnik. So anyways, he’ll also put essential oils on that, sometimes a sativa or an indica and he was showing me he had all these recipes, like you can vaporize something uplifting, a little bit of peppermint with a sativa, a green tea, or you could vape a lavender over an indica strain with a chamomile tea and it’s almost like eating foods. And I started doing this, I sit in my sauna sometimes in the evening while I’m reading, and I vaporize essential oils. Now there are some essential oil vapes, like actual essential oil vapes, and these you gotta be careful with because they actually have a lot of glycerin in them, and you look at the label it says glycerin, sometimes like natural flavors. You’re essentially vaping some things that could be carcinogenic. If you’re just using one of these vape pens that comes loaded with essential oil, they also call them personal diffuser or diffuser sticks or aromatherapy vape pens and they look like these little, hard, plastic cigarettes and their essential oils and glycerin and water. And then there’s like a heating element inside and when you inhale, basically you get this cloud of aromatherapy and you inhale vapor. And there are a lot of benefits in vaporizing essential oils but these vape pens I’m not a fan of because to heat vegetable glycerin, you actually have to get it pretty hot, it’s like over 500° Fahrenheit, and that produces something called acrolein, and that’s a respiratory irritant and carcinogen. So if you’re using these vape pens that have glycerin in them, that’s bad news bears.
Brock: So the glycerin is actually part of the fluid suspending the essential oil?
Ben: Yeah, and they make a lot of these flavors with something called propylene glycol and that can turn into formaldehyde when you heat it, so you’re essentially inhaling formaldehyde. And many of these companies will put ginseng and melatonin and essential oils, B12 into these sticks but God knows what else when it comes to what you’re actually inhaling. And there are ways that you can do this yourself without having glycerol or propylene glycol in a vape pen, and that’ what I do. So for example, you can look at specific essential oils and they have specific effects when you vaporize them and they even sell vaporizers that you just add your own essential oils to. I have one called a Magic Flight Box that works pretty easily.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: You just put your herb in there and I believe you may be able to get these on Amazon, these Magic Flight Boxes. It’s like this beautiful little device, it’s portable, I’m not sure if you can buy vaporizers like that on Amazon but I’m pretty sure they’ve got most of the Magic Flight stuff on Amazon. And I’ll put a link in the show notes if people wanna get some Magic Flight stuff. But that’s what I use, it’s a Magic Flight, and in addition to that, I did an interview recently with this guy who runs a company called Essential Oil Wizardry, and we talk about some different essential oil vaporizers as well, so that podcast should come out soon. But basically, for example, just to give you an idea of what kind of essential oils you can vape.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: I mentioned lavender as being relaxing or peppermint as being uplifting, rosemary is another really good one, and they vaporize at different temperatures. I also have this vaporizer called Da Buddha, and Da Buddha allows you to adjust the temperature kinda up and down really precisely. Not a lot of vaporizers do that and so if I put an essential oil into the vaporizer and did not get anything off, then I can turn it up just slightly coz lemon or orange essential oil, which is great as an antidepressant or as an immune system assist, it would have a higher vaporizing point than clove or oregano which would also be kind of cytoprotective for your gastric mucosa. I will probably vape oregano tonight because of this little chest-throaty thing that I have going on, but that vaporizes at 250° and lemon is like 350°, and there’s a lot of different oils that you can vape that vape at different temperatures.
Brock: So how do you know what temperature? Does it say on the package when you buy the essential oils or do you need to look those up?
Ben: You gotta look it up, I’ll put a link to a pretty good article that has some of the temperatures that essential oils vape at.
Brock: Cool.
Ben: But anyways, probably the most interesting one is frankincense.
Brock: Frankincense?
Ben: That has some interesting what are called sesquiterpenes in it, and sesquiterpenes can act on the pineal gland. And you know how your pineal gland produces DMT, for example. A lot of people use ayahuasca or DMT as a psychedelic, frankincense actually acts very similarly and you can get a mild psychedelic effect when you vaporize frankincense. It’s actually really good when you vaporize it with, like if you’re into marijuana, you can vaporize it with marijuana, you can vaporize it with teas. I vaporize it with organic tobacco before, but vaporizing frankincense and that’s probably one of the better ones that I have vaporized. And of course you wanna choose from a good company. I use either Young Living Essential Oils or Essential Oil Wizardry, those are the two companies that I’ll get my essential oils from. But yeah, frankincense is actually a really good one to vape. So yeah, you need to be careful, just don’t go buy a vaporizer off the street that already has oil added to it. I would encourage you to do your own mix without all the propylene glycol and everything.
There’s one called Thrive CBD vape pen, and that is one of the few vape pens that you can buy that’s already pre-packaged and that has some essential oils with it along with CBD. I have that one up by my night stand, that one’s really good for vaping at night coz again it’s got no propylene glycol, about 200mg of CBD and you get about 1mg for each hit that you take on it. But extremely healthy, it’s non-psychedelic and that one has a really, really great flavor and it’s just totally organic hemp oil with no propylene glycol and no nicotine. It’s super clean, so if you’re gonna buy a done-for-you vaporizer, that’s the one that I’d go with.
Brock: Cool. Now so, the big question is I’ve got a diffuser I keep in a couple of room in the house and we diffuse essential oils in the house. What would be the advantage of vaping it or is there an advantage to vaping it or over using a diffuser?
Ben: So like you can bend over diffuser, I’ve got one on my desk right now. Right now I’m diffusing lime, lime’s actually great.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: I don’t talk about that a lot but it smells great. It makes me feel like I’m in freakin’ Miami while it’s 2° outside. So I bend over, I just took a big whiff of it and it smells really good, you can breathe it into your lungs, but it’s not quite as mean-minded delivery as going through a vape pen and heating it up a little bit. You don’t get quite as big of a hit, I suppose. You could almost coil is out, I’m gonna sound like a total pothead, but secondhand smoke versus vaporizing marijuana, that kind of thing. But ultimately yeah, you could literally just bend over an essential oil diffuser and get some of the effects that we wanna see. Put a bunch of frankincense oil in there if you have an oil diffuser, and lean over it, breathe a bunch in for about a minute and stand up and go to la la land for a little while. Actually Brock, I just gave myself a great idea.
Brock: Oh yeah?
Ben: I just bent over and smelled this lime, I put a few drops of peppermint in there so now I’ve got lime-mint diffusing and I can breathe that in while we’re podcasting.
Brock: It’s a mojito diffuser.
Ben: Yeah, I just made up a mojito recipe for my diffuser. [coughs] Oh my, mint is strong. Okay, let’s move on.
Mark: Hey Ben, what do you think about aged garlic extract? Seems they recommend this supplement for just about everything and I was wondering what you thought about daily use and in general. Thanks again.
Brock: Garlic extract, hey?
Ben: I read this book called “The Healthy Writer” and I interviewed this physician who wrote “The Healthy Writer” and it’s gonna be a shocker here, but there’s a section of the book on diet and they go into how they had horrible bloating and gas. They would be on the couch exhausted at the end of the day just from gut pain and all they did was eliminate garlic and onions, two of the biggest fermentable vegetables that exist, from their diet overnight. Everything stopped.
Brock: What’s the point of living at that point? Come on.
Ben: I know, I love me a big old roasted elephant garlic with some olive oil and some sea salt. So good.
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: But I read that, and so I took garlic and onions out of my diet and actually I don’t fart as much.
Brock: Again, what’s the point of living? [laughs] One of the greatest joys in life, blowing a good fart.
Ben: I can go without garlic. I can use some garlic spice and stuff like that and I don’t miss onions that much.
Brock: But you miss farting.
Ben: No, I definitely don’t miss farting.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: Anyways…
Brock: I don’t know you anymore.
Ben: I read an article recently…
Brock: Who are you, what have you become? [laughs]
Ben: Cold triathlete farting machine who used to race with you in Thailand and give you rocket fuel behind me on the bike and now I just don’t fart. Fartless.
Brock: You’re just no fun.
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: You changed, man.
Ben: Anyways though, so I wrote this article on how to drop a nuclear bomb, how to unleash a nuclear bomb in the cold, the flu. And I actually get into high dose garlic in that, like 9,000mg of what’s called high allicin garlic, I’m a huge fan of this one called Allimax for that as one of the more highly absorbable forms of garlic that exists. If you have been exposed to the flu or you have a cold and you wanna get rid of it fast, it’s a really good way to go, but that’s not aged garlic. Aged garlic is different, you can actually combine it with the aged garlic because aged garlic works different than a high allicin garlic, and it’s got a lot of research behind it, this aged garlic. High allicin garlic, that’s got allicin and allicin turns into a whole different fat and water soluble compounds in your body that are all sulfur-based. They tap into what’s called your hydrogen sulfide signaling system, and that relaxes your blood vessels which is why it’s so great for your blood pressure, if you have high blood pressure, to be using on a regular basis, like a high allicin based garlic extract. But it’s also associated, and this is in a host of studies, with a significantly reduced risk of prostate cancer, colon cancer, stomach cancer, it induces a higher amount of fatty acid burning, it induces secretion of adrenaline so it’s actually a good supplement to take before you do a cold bath or a cold soak it you’re trying to maximize fat loss. It reduces triglyceride levels if you’re trying to improve your triglyceride-HDL ratio, and that would be a high allicin based garlic.
Brock: I’m sorry, I have to say it. “Hi Allison!”
Ben: Hey Allison, what’s up?
Brock: Hey Allison. Hey.
Ben: Yeah, you’re funny Brock.
Brock: I had to, you said it so many times.
Ben: Aged garlic though has some really compelling studies on it in terms of everything that it can do, it’s pretty crazy. So this would include, when it comes to aged garlic, better dopamine transmission, better GABA transmission and better balance of neurotransmitters, improved memory and learning and improved neurogenesis, decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, higher red blood cell count, I mentioned better blood pressure, lower triglycerides, more normalized cholesterol, lower blood glucose and an increase in insulin sensitivity, better conversion of white adipose tissue into brown fat. Like I mentioned, that’s one of the reasons it’s good to take prior to a cold thermogenesis if you’re using that for weight loss, improvement in aerobic exercise capacity, decrease in bone loss, of course we all know about garlic’s impact on viruses but increase in neutrophils, increase in macrophages, increase in killer T-cells, decrease sickness frequency. There’s even some really interesting interactions with hormones where you see a down regulation of cortisol, stabilization of thyroid hormones, decrease in DNA damage. It has interactions like I mentioned earlier with cancer metabolism, it’s great, it keeps vampires away, so there’s that.
Brock: Yeah, yeah.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. So anyways, aged garlic extract, it’s high specifically in something called allylcysteine, and basically that’s the active component that’s different than what you get from normal garlic. And what I talk about in that article I wrote on how to knock a cold or flu out of your body is taking about 3,000-4,000mg of an aged garlic extract per day. That’s how you would get a lot of these immune boosting effects if you’re looking at it for that. There’s not a lot of brands out there, there’s one brand that I like, Kyolic, you can get that one on Amazon. You can also make aged garlic yourself. When you age garlic, it becomes what’s called a tonic herb. That means it can be taken safely for a long period of time, almost like an adaptogenic herb. And aging also removes the garlic’s smell and the garlic odor, which is a plus I suppose.
Brock: Suppose.
Ben: Unless you’re into that whole smelling like a pizza thing, like me, oregano and garlic all day long. Anyways though, so aged garlic, the way you would make it is just get cloves of garlic and you don’t cut them…
Brock: And forget about it for six months?
Ben: Yeah, you don’t wanna cut them or crush them coz then that begins to release the allicin and that causes it to lose a lot of its medicinal and health properties. So you want the whole cloves, and you just peel the cloves, take the whole cloves, and you put them in a mason jar, then you pour a bunch of apple cider vinegar on top of it. You also put, speak of the devil, about a spoonful of oregano extract on top of there. You could use, ideally an oregano oil, you could also use just a chopped oregano herb and then you put a lid on the mason jar with the apple cider vinegar and the garlic cloves and the oregano, and you shake that up, and it’s going to gas up a little bit. So every day after you put a lid on and you put it away, you wanna burp the lid, you open it up and let some of the gas out. And then after about 3 or 4 days the garlic will start to turn green and that’s perfectly normal, then after about 3 weeks it is ready, minimum of 3 weeks. And the longer that you age it, the kinda more mild the taste begins to come, but it’s essentially like a ferment and it’s fantastic for you. And again if you don’t wanna make all that, you can get this Kyolic garlic from Amazon, but you could also vary… I mean that’s so simple to make aged garlic. You can just keep a jar of that around and if you’re ever sick or if you just wanna use it as a daily tonic, it’s amazing. Again, it’s like a blood cleanser and it lowers inflammation, good source of antioxidants. The only person who would wanna be careful with this would be someone who, like I mentioned, is sensitive to high fodmap intake, so if you’re on a high fodmap diet you don’t wanna do this but yeah, that’s what you need to know about garlic, baby.
Anthony: Hi Ben and Brock, appreciate you guys and all the great work that you’re doing. So how can you get rid of sunspots or age spots? So far I’ve tried apple cider vinegar and lemon, so any advice would be great.
Brock: This is our second Anthony of the day.
Ben: I know, there’s a lot of Anthonys out there. Garlic… no, Anthony asked about that mobility issue.
Brock: Yeah.
Ben: It’s a different Anthony though.
Brock: Different Anthony.
Ben: Unless he masked and changed his voice using one of those crazy phone devices that the cops use when they want to bust open a case. We should do this whole response in a different voice. [speaking in inaudible voice]
Brock: [laughs] What is that voice?
Ben: [speaking in inaudible voice] I’m like a dying Sean Connery, that’s what I sound like.
Brock: You nailed it.
Ben: Yeah. How do you get rid of sun spots or age spots, used apple cider vinegar and lemon juice. No Anthony, the apple cider vinegar goes in the garlic, remember?
Brock: Mmhmm.
Ben: So yeah, age spots/sun spots. Well, when your skin gets exposed to the sun, you produce a bunch of melanocytes that increase the melanin in your skin and that turns the skin darker and you can get these age spots. They’re not cancer, in most cases they’re benign but they can be aesthetically unpleasing or annoying and by the way, if you put sunglasses on, did you know that you actually… one of the signals to produce melanin in the skin and to get a tanning effect and to not burn, is the stimulation of light hitting the retina in your eyes.
Brock: Hmm.
Ben: So if you wear sunglasses in the sun, you’ll burn more easily. Ain’t that crazy? But theoretically you would make fewer sun spots, so I would just say put on some sunglasses and you’ll be good to go. Kiss those age spots goodbye, thank Ray Ban. Lemon juice actually can work, it’s a natural bleaching agent and it exfoliates the skin, and it can work. So that’d be one option, it’s the citric acid in it, so you can use anything with a high amount of citric acid in it. Apple cider vinegar also works, it’s got what are called alpha hydroxyl acids in it, and those lighten sun spots and lighten age spots. The problem is, it kinda stings when you put apple cider vinegar on skin.
Brock: Wait, stings or stinks?
Ben: Stings. It’s not a pleasant sensation, but speaking of stinking, onions have sulfur compounds in them that act as an antiseptic and have acids that facilitate exfoliation and you can literally chop up an onion, like cut it in half and hold it against the sun spot, that would be another option. Very sexy option.
Brock: For how long?
Ben: Driving down the highway with half of an onion held up to your face.
Brock: Taped on.
Ben: You leave it on there like 15-20 minutes, that’s a good idea Brock. You can probably sell that. Somebody just sent me a testosterone increasing device, it’s called a Jetpack. It’s like an icepack for your balls, but it literally is just an ice pack that says put this on your balls, right? So you can probably sell an onion with duct tape attached to it and call it “The Sun Spot Miracle” and people would buy it. You could call it a biohack.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: Biohacking, the sun spot biohacker. Horse radish also has vitamin C in it and that can slow the production of melanin in the same way that lemons can so if you don’t have any lemons laying around but you had the prime rib last night and have some extra horse radish, horse radish can help. It’s got glucosinolates in it too, and those increase circulation and can also have an effect on sunspots.
Brock: This podcast is making me hungry.
Ben: I know, a lot of these things you can hold up against your face. Papaya is another one. You can actually exfoliate the skin and it’s also got alpha hydroxyl acids in it so you can use papaya. You can make yourself a meal and just put the whole meal on your face and get rid of your sun spots.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: Go to the keg, and buttermilk also and yogurt. My wife puts yogurt on her face sometimes, apparently it works and that’s because of the lactic acid in the yogurt. The lactic acid also has an acidic effect, castor oil which is great if you rub it onto your stomach for stomach issues and gut issues but you can also rub it onto sun spots along with aloe vera. Same thing, then if you wanna go the essential oil route, the essential oil used is sandalwood. Sandalwood can reduce the appearance of age spots. So a lot of ways to go, but I actually use the skin serum every single day coz it’s got aloe vera in it, it’s got oregano in it…
Brock: Check.
Ben: It’s got 8 concentrated extract from all the compounds that I just talked about, palmarosa, organic lemon, so it’s really concentrated vitamin C, juniper berry, geranium, what else is in there? Lavender, it’s got lavender in it, it’s got triphala in it, those are three different ayurvedic herbs and so it’s really rejuvenating, it balances what are called your doshas so it has a little bit of an ayurvedic twist to it. The amla in it, that’s one of the richest and highest natural sources of vitamin C you’ll find. It’s also called indian gooseberry, aloe vera like I mentioned is amazing for getting rid of scars and redness and irritation and itchness and that’s got some really good skin nourishing properties. Anyways, there’s twelve different essential oils and it took me a year and a half to make this product. It’s called Kion Skin Serum and I eat my own dog food, everything. I take Flex everyday and I take the Kion Oregano and the Aminos. I use all, the Kion products are pretty much my playground, that’s why I use it every day. So that Skin Serum, I just keep one in my bag, one in my bathroom counter, and smear that on my face and it works like gangbusters. I do that and then clay mask once a week. Not to sound narcissistic but my skin looks great.
Brock: [laughs]
Ben: I don’t have any of those damn age spots, so that’s where I would start.
Brock: I bought some of that serum for my mum and my sister for Christmas but I’ve actually never used it. Is it an oily thing, is it a lotiony thing?
Ben: No, it’s hard to describe. It’s a little bit oily but not like coconut oil oily or olive oil oily. Some people use a moisturizer in addition to it, sometimes I’ll put that on my face and then go downstairs and I’ll put a little olive oil to follow it up or just add a little bit of a moisturizer covering effect.
Brock: Sounds more watery.
Ben: A little bit but it has enough oil in it to moisturize as well if you want it to, between the aloe vera and some of those other oils. So it’s pretty versatile, and I’ll link to that in the show notes too. I realize I’m biased but I would honestly skip the grocery store and just go straight to the big guns and use that stuff. But if you wanna smear buttermilk and yogurt and papaya, lemon, apple cider vinegar on your face, be my guest. One tasty head.
Brock: Or just tape an onion to your face, patent pending.
Ben: Alright, so this is the part of the show where we decide…
Brock: Where we have a really awkward silence. [laughs]
Ben: Yeah. Well I guess this is the part of the show where we shut up and let somebody else do the talking, somebody who left a review. Did you see this review on iTunes?
Brock: I didn’t see it on iTunes but I’m staring at it right now. Don’t think that’s the person’s name, just guessing.
Ben: Well first of all, this is the part of the show where if you hear your review of this show read on iTunes, we will send you a sweet swag pack.
Brock: Sweet swag.
Ben: That would include a BPA-free water bottle and a slick, tech T-shirt, and also a beanie, a toque. And this gentleman, or lady, not quite sure, is named JjjjjjJjjiJJhjHH.
Brock: [laughs] Not their real name.
Ben: And the title of this is called Fatfueled at50. They apparently had an epileptic seizure on the keyboard, but they did use a copious number of exclamation marks.
Brock: 5 stars and 15 exclamation points.
Ben: Very excited, very excited. They probably did LSD and coffee, a nootropic and Adderall before writing this review. But do you wanna take this one away?
Brock: Even their ellipses has five periods instead of three.
Ben: That’s impressive.
Brock: They’re just really, really excited.
Ben: Take this one away, Brock.
Brock: I’m gonna try and be as excited as JjjjjjJjjijjHjhh. “Just discovered this amazing podcast! I’m binge listening and learning so much! I started keto 8 months ago, 52 is the new 32… no joke! This podcast is my new favorite! I’m learning so much! I’m now strength training! Thanks Ben!!”
Ben: You sound like the hyperactive kid on South Park, what’s the kid on South Park?
Brock: Oh Twitch?
Ben: Yeah, Twitch. [incoherent speaking] I love this podcast, goodbye!
Mar 15, 2018, Podcast: 382 – How To Increase Mobility, Vaporizing Essential Oils, Everything You Need To Know About Garlic For Health, and How To Get Rid Of Sun Spots.
Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right (or go to SpeakPipe), use the Contact button on the app, or click the contact link in the footer..
News Flashes [00:02:53]:
- The carnivorous diet looks interesting… but boy, I do like things like glazed brussells sprouts with my steak 😉
- Here’s a good reason to chop your broccoli into small pieces about 90 minutes prior to cooking.
- Is vegetarianism healthy for children? Here’s what science says.
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Ben's Adventures [00:21:26]:
-NEW! Click here for the official BenGreenfieldFitness calendar.
–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!
-May 5-6, 2018: Montana Beast and Sprint Weekend, Bigfork MT. Join Spartan Race and Discover Kalispell as we attempt to make history by breaking the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS for most people performing burpees at one time.
-May 26, 2018: Train to Hunt / Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Whether you’re a flatlander, hunt out West, or past your prime, we want to make you a better hunter through fitness.
Giveaways & Goodies [01:08:07]
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——————————————
Listener Q&A:
As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Brock Armstrong, the Podcast Sidekick.
How To Increase Mobility [00:23:05]
Anthony says: My main issue is, no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to get flexible. I have been doing squats, stretching, martial arts, and a bunch of different things for well over 3 years and no matter what I can't get any flexibility or rotation. I can barely squat but I can do everything else. I don't know what to do. Do you have any answers? The problem is in my arms (overhead), legs (can't touch my toes) and torso (rotation).
In my response, I recommend:
–Kion Aminos
–Kion Flex
–Primal Collagen
–My article on mobility
-My audio on the Alexander technique
Vaporizing Essential Oils [00:43:11]
Katie says: Recently you talked about Vaping essential oils. I was wondering if you could give us more details on that. I have a bunch of friends who live very healthy lifestyles aside from the fact that they can't give up their vapes. How does vaping essential oils compare to a regular vape? How much smoke does it produce? How is the flavour? How do you choose your blends? How do you use it?
In my response, I recommend:
–Aromatherapy Inhaler
–Thrive CBD Vape Pen
–Essential Oil Vaporizer
–Podcast 1 with Paul Chek
–Podcast 2 with Paul Chek
–Magic Flight Box
-Da Buddha vaporizer
–Article about the temperatures essential oils vape at
–Young Living Essential Oil
–Essential Oil Wizardry
Everything You Need To Know About Garlic For Health [00:53:23]
Mark says: What do you think about aged garlic extract? It seems they recommend it for just about everything and I was wondering what you thought about it for daily use.
In my response, I recommend:
–Kyolic aged garlic on Amazon
–How to make aged garlic
–My article on stopping colds and flus
How To Get Rid Of Sun Spots [01:01:14]
Anthony says: How can you get rid of sun spots or age spots? So far I have used Apple Cider Vinegar and lemon juice. Any advice would be great.
In my response, I recommend:
–Kion Anti-Aging Serum