August 24, 2016

Podcast from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2016/08/dr-mercola-podcast/

[0:00] Introduction/ Peak Brain Institute

[3:18] Exo Cricket Bars

[4:18] Four Sigmatic

[6:19] Harry’s Razors

[8:21] Introduction to this Episode

[9:54] About Dr. Joseph Mercola/ mercola.com

[13:41] How Dr. Mercola Built mercola.com

[19:15] Dr. Mercola’s Unique System of Reading Books

[24:30] Why Wear Blue Light Blocking Glasses During the Day

[26:35] How to Ground Your Computer and Keep It From Destroying Your Health

[29:20] Why Dr. Mercola Eats Seafood

[36:50] Little-Known Biohacks of Dr. Mercola Uses to Maximize Mitochondrial Density

[41:30] Why Scrambled Eggs Are Bad

[53:55] The Myth About Iron Levels and The Crucial Test Needed

[58:03] Donating Blood And Longevity

[1:00:38] Joe's Take On Biohacking Devices

[1:00:45] Dr. Mercola’s Take On Quantification Devices and What He Personally Uses

[1:07:31] Why Dr. Mercola Limits Protein Intake

[1:12:30] How to Make Your Own “Anti-Aging” Cocktail

[1:15:10] A Unique One-Two-Combo to Use Prior to Saunas

[1:21:31] What Dr. Mercola Uses for Metal Detoxification

[1:24:45] Other Practices Joe Has In His Life That People Should Know About

[1:27:40] Two Ingredients Dr. Mercola Sprinkles On His Garden Soil

[1:34:10] What Dr. Mercola Takes On Every Airplane Ride

[1:34:16] The Quantlet Bracelet

[1:37:34] End of Podcast

Ben:  What’s up?  It’s Ben Greenfield, and if you hear strange words or clicks or whistles in the background behind not in today’s podcast but in this introduction for you, it’s because I’m at this place called Peak Brain LA.  Yes, I’ve just started into my first 3 days of optimizing my brain.  I know that sounds like a woo woo term, but literally I did what’s called a quantitative electroencephalography (if I can spit that out) QEEG of my brain, and found several areas that could use improvement in terms of everything from executive function to memory, to cognitive processing, especially something I really want to focus on attention and destructibility and… oh hey look, it’s squirrel!  No, I’m just kidding.

Anyways though, so I’m retraining my brain.  So I’m spending 3 days here and then I go home with three months worth of EEG training tools to actually train my brain both consciously and subconsciously where I stir the screen and fly spaceship.  It’s kind of like this idea of achieving a lifetime’s worth of meditation within several months, and it’s extremely interesting.  Right now, all I’m really doing is Snapchatting this story.  But if you want to check it out, if you’re listening to this podcast at the time that it comes out, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/snapchat, and you kinda see what I’m up to and I’m going to be podcasting a very detailed podcast about what this all involves and what it is.

But if in case you’re interested, the name of the place that I’m training at is called The Peak Brain Institute.  The URL should just be peakbraininstitute.com.  So if you live near LA, I believe they’re also up in Orange County, and you wanna try this out for yourself, visit them.  If you call them and let them know or go to their website and let them know that you heard about them through me, they’ll give you the white club treatment.  I think, maybe or perhaps you’ll just be treated like anyone else walking in and off the street not a special Ben Greenfield listener.

Anyways, what you are about to hear in today’s episode is one of the more fun and jam-packed and information-packed episodes that I think I’ve recorded ever, literally ever.  You definitely gonna want to hit the show notes for this one.  It is with, well, you know what? I’m gonna surprise you.  You’re going to find out who it’s with in just a moment.

But first, a few quick things.  First of all, I was reading Men’s Health Magazine last night, and they have this entire article about this growing movement towards ordering organic buffalo worms.  I don’t even know what a buffalo worm is.  I’m not sure I want to.  As well as things like junebags and grasshoppers, and even black flies, and while eating flies and worms may sound disgusting, the fact is that insects especially crickets in particular have a higher percentage protein content than beef jerky, chicken, salmon, eggs, they got all the essential amino acids, twice the iron in spinach and they are sustainable, plus as my kids like to say, crickets don’t fart.  So you produce a hundred times less greenhouse gases than say cows.  So, the idea here why I’m telling all this is that there this company called EXO cricket bars.  Now do they make these bars, but they make them in a variety of flavors: banana bread, coconut, apple cinnamon, blueberry vanilla, and my favorite because it defines everything that is American comfort food – peanut butter and jelly which is right up there in my opinion with macaroni and cheese, and big Macs when it comes to American comfort food.

By the way, if the folks from Exo Protein are listening in, please do a big Mac or macaroni and cheese flavored bar.  I would be all over that.  But in the meantime, if you wanna try anything from Exo Protein, go to exoprotein.com and when you do you can get a sampler pack with all their most popular flavors.  Everything I just listed off for less than 10 bucks and that’s free shipping included.  So, that’s 33% off and you can go discover what all the hype is about over at exoprotein.com/ben.  That’s exoprotein.com/ben.

Now, this podcast is also brought to you by something I’ve been forced to do more of lately because I had to skip coffee for the electroencephalography treatments I’ve been doing. I’m getting better and better saying that word every time I say it.  So, what I’ve been doing in the morning is instead drinking something that kinda sort of  taste like coffee but that replaces the caffeine and it’s called  a chaga elixir.  So this is a dual extracted wild crafted Siberian chaga mushroom extract.  Just a fact that it comes from Siberia, automatically makes it badass.  If anything comes from Siberia, I will take it.  Siberian macaroni and cheese, Siberian children, Siberian wives, Siberia just seems like a very greedy cool place.  I love to visit some day and wander through the frozen tundra.

Anyways though, so this chaga that I’m drinking is Siberian.  Not only it’s Siberian, it’s dual extracted, so it’s water soluble and also fat soluble, so it’s get absorbed quite well and then it’s blended with eleuthero, rosehips, and fieldmint which is also fantastic for your immune system but that complement the fact that chaga is one of the most potent immune boosting compounds that you can consume.  It improves your ability to fight off things like infections and bacteria and colds and viruses, and you just literally rip a packet open and you dump it straight into your mouth if you’re greedy and Siberian like me.  Otherwise, you add it to a cup of water or smoothie or tea, or coffee or anything like that.  Anyways though, here is how you get this stuff for 15% discount and this is kind of clunky so put on your thinking cap or write this down on a notepad, foursigmatic.com.  That’s F-o-u-r sigmatic.com, foursigmatic.com/greenfield and when you go to that URL, use code Ben Greenfield to get a 15% discount.  Count it, 15.

And finally, this podcast is brought to you by, the best shave you’ll ever gonna get.  Actually last night I’m in Beverly Hills like I mentioned, and I went to this place called Lavoda Spa, L-a-v-o-d-a Spa, so what I do when I go to the spa and I was a group of buddies which make this all the more fun is I go 15 minutes hot, 5 minutes cold plunge as many times through as possible.  I actually spent a full 2 hours of hot/cold thermogenesis last night.  You’d think I actually have a life but I actually have nothing better to do than go from hot saunas to cold pools, and afterwards I happen to come across the little cheap ass drugstore razor in the complementary locker room part of the spa and so I shaved with that razor, and it really, really sucked compared to my Harry’s 5-blade German engineered razor.  I actually had to do it because it’s free.  I’m horrible at that.  If I’m walking at the grocery store and someone has like a sample table there, and it’s samples that I know are really bad for me, like say, macaroni and cheese, why not, we’ve already kicked that horse to death.  I’ll eat it anyways ‘cause it’s free.  I’m weird like that.

Anyways though, so I used the razor ‘cause it’s free but I shouldn’t have.  I should have use my Harry’s razor and the reason I like the Harry’s razor is because they’re 5-blade German engineered razors and they’re like a Cadillac for your face.  Flex hinge, lubricating strip, I don’t even understand half the features on this thing.  Ergonomic handle, all I know is it’s an amazing shave, and you too can take part in the same wonderful shave that I get if you go to harrys.com use 5 Dollar code Ben.  H-a-r-r-y-s dot com and enter code Ben to get $5 off anything to shave your face or any other body part that you wanna shave.  Alright, that is it.  I hope you took some notes.  Those are long intro.  Let’s dive in to and even longer podcast and again, an amazing show with the great… Uhhh, I told you, I was gonna surprise you.  So, I will.  Let’s do this.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show:

“This is a measure that has to be spread far away and I’m glad that we had the platform and opportunity to share this with your audience ‘cause they need to know about this.  This is a difference a little between life and death and I’m not exaggerating this in the least.  This is every bit as important as the vitamin D topic that I started promoting about 15 years ago.  In fact maybe more important”.  “From the use of these domestic codings, there’s massive contamination of the ground waters becoming an emerging epidemic in the United States with these ground water contamination.  It’s gonna be huge.  It’s one of the reasons why you wanna filter your water.”

He’s an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America’s top personal trainer and one of the globe’s most influential people in health and fitness.  His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance.  He is Ben Greenfield.  “Power, speed, mobility, balance – whatever it is for you that’s the natural movement, get out there! When you look at all the studies done… studies that have shown the greatest efficacy…”  All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.            

Ben:  Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield, and I would say because I sucked at having mentors and I’m following the advice of other leaders in the health field that there are relatively small number of people who I consider to be extremely trustworthy individuals in my life who I looked to for fitness, or health or longevity.  People who I would consider to be personal mentors or people who I think put out truly cutting edge health information that’s not just kind of like… (chuckles) pardon the expression, vomiting backup, stuff that simply appears elsewhere on the internet.  And my guest today happens to be one of those people who I would place on that pedestal, somebody who are really you pay attention to when they talk about health and fitness, and longevity and nutrition and supplementation, and anything regarding the world that we delve into on the show.

His name is Dr. Joseph Mercola, you if you spend much time on the internet have probably come across his website, mercola.com.  And Jo is a board certified family physician and he saw tens of thousands of patients before he actually turns to what he does fulltime, and something actually helps a lot of people than his private practice did.  And I would imagine and that is his website which has 10 million unique visitors each month that has 80 million unique visitors each year.  It’s one of the most visited health website on the planet for the past 12 years.  It’s translated into 6 different languages.  It’s a wealth of information.  It’s very, very easy at lost in and spend hours on.  So that’s at mercola.com, M-e-r-c-o-l-a dot com, and he’s on the call with me today.  We’ve had a lot of chat recently about everything from optimizing your mitochondrial health to the latest, greatest biohacks for optimizing human potential to fasting, to fat loss, to muscle gain, to protein intake, to much more.  So we’re gonna delve into all that today.  So I hope you’re ready to strap on your propeller hat.  Doctor Mercola, welcome to the show, man.

Joe:  Well, thanks for inviting me, Ben.

Ben:  And I guess to shorten things up, we’ll just call you… are you cool with Joe, the rest of the podcast?

Joe:  Yeah, Joe, is fine.

Ben:  Yeah, cool.

Joe:  Yeah, so this is the second time I’ve been on your podcast, and I’m sorry to say the first time I didn’t know who you were and my new girlfriend Erin Elizabeth who you also introduced from Health Nut News actually introduced us, and she’s kind of known for the dead doctors stories, and they’re actually doing a movie about her, but I thank you for those kind words about being a mentor but I really greatly appreciate what you’re doing because you really teach me a lot.  Ever since that time I realized you’re just a golden nut of information.  So I’ve been listening to your podcast ever since and it’s really one of my favorite.  I think you’re doing a magnificent job out there.  Just absolutely incredible and exposed me to a lot of great new stuff.

Ben:  I’m gonna put that on my own, post that on my wall that says I’m a golden nut of information.

Joe:  (laughs) Golden nugget…

Ben:  (chuckles) Uh, golden nugget of information.

Joe:  (laughs) Sorry about that.

Ben:  Or golden nut.  That could work too.

Joe:  Golden nut, anyone works…

Ben:  By the way, for those of you listening in, your girlfriend Jo, Erin I think one of the ways that we first became associate with one another and for those of you who didn’t get the chance to hear me interview Erin about Lyme disease.  You should listen to that one because that was a fascinating episode and I’ll put a link to that as well as everything else that Jo and I talk about today if you just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/mercola, bengreenfieldfitness.com/mercola.

Now Joe, I was just talking about your website that you get freaking millions and millions of visitors and a huge amount of information on that site.  I know it’s been around since the 90s and that it’s now one of the popular websites in the world when it comes to health, but I’m always curious about these things ‘cause you were just like a private practicing physician and all of a sudden you’ve got this enormously popular website.  What happened?  Were you just like sitting in front of the computer one day and you wrote an article and push it out there?  Was this part of a grand vision or how exactly did Mercola come to be?

Joe:  Well, I’ve always been passionate about health.  I mean, we’re not always as spot in the late 60s when I first started running and been passionate about technology.  I took my first computer class in the late 60s also, the programming.  And Ben, I actually went online in the late 60s, that was before the way of the internet.  You know, actually the internet started in the 60s and I think went on in the mid-70s.

Ben:  I don’t know, whenever Al Gore was born.  That’s when…

Joe:  Yeah, yeah. (laughs)  I actually met the father of the internet once.  His name is Larry… I forget his last name but his in the list of technology…

Ben:  So it’s not Al Gore.

Joe:  No, no it’s not.  So anyways, I’ve been passionate about this and for a long time in the mid-90s I got online, on the web and I started a website.  I realized I was somewhat frustrated with the patients who would come to see me and tell me about the new innovations that I didn’t know about because they were watching it in the news, and I was in the office seeing patients.  So, I said well, let me figure this thing out.  So I realized that the newscasters were getting it from wire services and that you could access the wire service feeds on the internet.

So I started doing that and learning about it before my patients, and then I realized that I had a different perspective on health and what the conventional media did, and I thought that people would like to hear my perspective on that and I start to publish in a weekly newsletter back in ’97.  And actually for the first 3 or 4 years of the site, I didn’t sell one thing on the site.  I just did to share information and actually by the time I generated a half a million dollars in bills, I realized that I had to start selling something or else it’s not gonna scale very well. (chuckles)

Ben:  That’s funny.  Yeah, the internet can be expensive unless you’re actually using it to put some kind of solution out there in people’s hands.  By the way, I remember the very, very first time I actually sat down to put information out there on the internet and actually it wasn’t a blog and it wasn’t a podcast per se, it was a video.  I was reading the national journalist strength and conditioning research which put by the NSCA and every single month I would read this thing out and underline it, and I would highlight and at that time I was running Brick and Mortar personal training studios and gyms, and I would implement this research into my client’s programs but I wanted to tell the world about it.  I felt like it was ways for me to be underlining all these research journal golden nuggets to repeat your term.

And so I would sit in front of my computer at the end of a long day of training at the gym and I figure out how to upload videos to WaZz, I guess it would have been 10, 11 years ago that was video podcasting on iTunes.  And I put out a series of 5-minute videos on iTunes before I realized that videos were way too hard, you had to do your hair, you had to do the camera.  So then I simply converted it into audio but if you go back and you listen to like Ben Greenfield Fitness episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, it’s just me sitting there with a magazine reading journal articles to people.

Joe:  Well, you’ve greatly evolved and really I believed you have one of the best self-podcast out there.  I think it’s crazy to miss your information.  ‘Cause you exposed people and so many different individuals and you do so well.

Ben:  Thanks!

Joe:  You targeted, I don’t know how you come up with these people but you find them.

Ben:  Thanks.  Well, let’s expose people to you.  You’re actually the first guy who turn me on to this book “Tripping Over The Truth” about the metabolic theory of cancer, and as I think you know ‘cause we were talking about it, I did a podcast with Dr. David Minkoff down in Florida about this idea that cancer is not a genetic disease.  That it is actually something that occurs when your mitochondria aren’t functioning properly.

You turned me on to that book and I’ll put a link in the podcast show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/mercola, if people wanna go listen to the episode that I did with Dr. Minkoff about how practically everything we know about cancer, believe about cancer as wrong, but mitochondria is a big, big part of that, and I think in the discussions that I’ve had with you, you probably are one of the more well-versed people I spoken to about how to actually take care of your mitochondria.  Like how to optimize your mitochondria, how to fix your mitochondria, how to ensure they’re operating properly.  So, can we delve in to some of the lesser known biohacks or nutrition tactics, or supplementation tactics or things that you personally do to optimize your mitochondria?

Joe:  That could be 2, 3 hours but I’ll try to keep it brief.  One of my strategies is to, well food is basically a source of electrons.  That’s how that transfer chain in the mitochondria and it produces ATP, and one of the ways that I capture electrons is I live near the ocean, literally a 2-3 minute bike ride from the ocean, and I walk on the beach every day for 2-3 hours, and that’s where I read my books.  And last year I read “Tripping Over The Truth” and that was the best, I read 150 books last year, and that was the best that I read.

Ben:  You mean, are you listening to them or are you holding a book?

Joe:  Oh no, no, no.  I’m holding the Kindle and reading that, yeah.

Ben:  Oh wow!

Joe:  Yeah, so…

Ben:  I would fall on my face.

Joe:  No, you wouldn’t. (laughs)  You’re one of the most talented athletes I know.  There’s no way you would fall.

Ben:  You don’t use the, what’s it called? The whisper sync or you actually listen to them?

Joe:  Oh no, no, no.  I much prefer reading.

Ben:  Wow!

Joe:  And actually I’ve done some EEG real time neurofeedback test to show that my reading comprehension just exploded because of that activity.

Ben:  Wow, interesting.  Okay.  I’m gonna have to try actually holding my Kindle while I’ll go on a walk to see how will I achieve this.

Joe:  Oh yeah, you can do it.

Ben:  So, you must have taken an ungodly number of steps each day.

Joe:  Yeah, I was actually doing the calculations because I started running in 68 and made a mistake of engaging in long distance running over forty years before I realized that was not a wise choice, but lifetime I’ve done about a quarter billion steps, maybe a hundred thousand miles.  And one of the best book I read this year was “Deskbound” by Kelly Starrett who I think you’ve…

Ben:  Fantastic book.

Joe:  Yeah, I just can’t say that is the best book and it’s synopsis must read for anyone of us who has a desk job, and he helped me understand that fascia was important and I know but the biomechanics of it, and a lot of those steps, most I’ve got one akin of bunion because I wasn’t doing external rotations of my hip properly.  So, I do most of that walking with paying very careful attention to the fascia or external rotation of my hips and getting my feet to walk properly, and I can because I’m walking on the beach I can make sure that that’s the case, I’m not walking like a duck that my feet are lined up properly.

Ben:  I wanna get back to mitochondria in a second here but when you read that book “Deskbound” because I actually read that book and then I went out and change a bunch of things.  I bought an ergonomic keyboard, I bought this big old Eizo, a friendly monitor, I already have a treadmill desk and a standup work station but I got one of this stool that you can lean against.  Did you wind up making changes to your personal work station after reading that book aside from the walking modifications?

Joe:  You know, I’d already made this modifications prior to that.  So, his component was really the modification of the walking which is like if you gonna do something again and again on a repetitive basis and you’re not doing it properly, you wind up injured for sure.

Ben:  Oh yeah, okay.

Joe:  I bet he’s got a whole, it’s just a magnificent book as you know since you’ve read it.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.  We’ll link to it in the show notes.  So you walk on the beach…

Joe:  Yes.  So that’s the source and the reason I mentioned that is it’s an important candidate ‘cause it’s the source of electrons, actually protons which are turned to electrons for electric effect in your mitochondria, but then also through grounding by walking along the water’s edge and the water.  So that’s an important component.  And I’ll be eternally grateful for you for exposing initially to Jack Kruse who’s I just been enthralled with and I just a few weeks ago where I learned about him from one of your previous podcast and the man is just brilliant.  So…

Ben:  Jack is very brilliant.  I did one of the ways that you can calculate, speaking of electron potential in the human body, the use of the things that you’re talking about grounding, and exposure to negative ions which you get from running water and trees and many other variables that are outdoors.  One of the things that occur is that changes what’s called the redox potential of your body and you can actually calculate or approximate the redox potential of the human body, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)…

Joe:  He has a way to interpret that but I think he’s become a little disenchanted with the process because of the radio frequencies that are emanated from it in which it has a negative influence on your health.

Ben:  Yeah, we have an upcoming podcast on the use of MRIs and whether or they can be used to analyze the human bodies health, but when you’re talking about walking along the beach Jo, and getting expose to negative ions obviously a lot of people don’t have the beach.

Joe:  That is correct.  That is the ideal and I wasn’t born next to the beach.  It’s something that I learned and as I learn to appreciate health being on the beach is fine but your latitude is also really important.  So I was born and raised in Chicago.  I did all my formal education from kindergarten to post-graduate residence, to training within the Chicago city limits.  So as I grew older and realized that I became progressively frustrated with the lack of sunshine when I moved to Florida.  So that’s where I live now.

So you can put that as one of your goals to get down.  Just being in the sun is another important and powerful component, and prior to being exposed to Dr. Kruse’s work, my primary focus that has been for the last 30, 40 years is really been on food and strategic supplementation but primarily food.  So Kruse help me reconfigure that emphasis and really this light exposure is just profoundly important, and we all know and you’ve talked about it many times in your podcast about the importance of avoiding blue light at night.

I mean, that’s not hard to understand but Kruse is really the only one that‘s helping people understand that anytime you’re exposed to blue light monitors, blue light from artificial sources that could be devastating to mitochondria health.  So that includes any artificial lighting and your monitor.  I’m standing and talking to you in front of a 50 inch monitor that I got for years and didn’t realize it was harming my health because I was looking at it in a day time, but the balance of the light is really predominantly blue which can be pretty significantly deleterious to mitochondria and total health, and actually the risk effect for cataracts and age-related macular degeneration.

Ben:  To set up this question properly, I’ve talked before about the importance for establishing a good circadian rhythm of getting exposed to large amounts of things like natural sunlight in the morning.  Is there a big difference between say like a blue light producing box or a blue light producing device like stirring at your monitor in the morning to wake you up versus going out in the sun.  What’s the primary difference? 

Joe:  Massive difference!  Massive!  And the primary one is that when you look up the light from the sun, you’re getting the complete spectrum and primarily it’s an equal balance between blue and red, and of course you have the infrared and the ultraviolet and purple, those frequencies but you’re only primarily getting blue when you have LED monitor or blue box.  So you do not wanna do that.  One of the key strategies is to go out as soon as you get up without shoes on and least amount of clothes, and just look at the sun if you can for an hour from rising or for at least a few minutes to re-sync your circadian rhythm.  A powerful, free intervention actually, and it doesn’t cost you anything.  So, it’s just crazy not to do that unless your schedule just absolutely prohibits that.

Ben:  Okay.  So basically we’re talking about when were outside we’re getting expose to blue light everywhere but it’s combined with things like UVA, UVV, near infrared, far infrared…

Joe:  And red light, and red light, and red light. Yeah.

Ben:  Yeah, okay.  Got it.  Now, these computer monitors that have the capability to produce blue light, are you using any type of different type of monitor to reduce the actual exposure to blue light during the day?

Joe:  No, I’m not and I’m excited to hear your upcoming podcast on that as I may consider switching but I have a 4k monitor and what I do, I use right now is F.lux but not the default ‘cause F-lux comes out at night.  I go in to settings and I turn it on all the time and I put this, you have to do the advance settings and you can move it all the way to the left.  So you just eliminating basically all the blue light.

Ben:  Right, right.  There’s a technology called Flex Scan.  The only company I know of that that does it right now is called Eizo, E-i-z-o.  They make computer monitors and that actually automatically decreases as much blue light as possible throughout the day.  Kinda similar to F.lux but the problem with F.lux that I’ve found, Jo is that I like to hook my laptop up to an external monitor when for example I am writing fiction at night or when I need to have a larger spectrum of view, and so even though F.lux is on the laptop, it actually doesn’t affect the external monitor that you have plugged in to the laptop.  So, there’s another piece of software that I installed.  It’s called IrisTech.  IrisTech actually interacts with the monitor and does something similar to F.lux in terms of reducing blue light.  So that’s kinda my monitor setup and like you just alluded to, I’m gonna do a podcast on it in the future.

Joe:  Yeah, I’d like to see that but for those who don’t want to make a type of investment in to hardware and infrastructures that there’s a cheap, much cheaper alternative which is called the $9 Uvex Blue Blocking Sunglasses which I called reverse glasses or indoor sunglasses.  You only wear them when you’re inside.  (laughs)

Ben:  Yup.  I love those glasses.  My kids wear ‘em, I wear ‘em.  We haven’t got my wife on board yet but what about when you’re talking about getting out on the beach, so mitochondrial health, you’ve talked about sunlight, you’ve talked about grounding, for people who can’t get outside, do you have any opinion of these negative ion generators that you can plug into the wall of your office to achieve that or like a heap filter that generates negative ions?

Joe:  I haven’t studied it really carefully but from what I recall or what I did in the past that was a useful strategy, you know, if you’re exposed to natural negative ions like by living near the ocean, I think it’s important or near a forest like where you’re at.  So I think you’re gonna get it from nature, but it wouldn’t hurt.  I don’t think it would hurt.  There’s no doubt of it as far as I know.

Ben:  Yeah, okay.  Got it.  What else are you doing for your mitochondria?

Joe:  Well, when you’re exposed to the sunlight, one of the ways to capture those electrons is to make sure that you’re eating the most important food that you can possibly, you know what that food is?

Ben:  I’m gonna hazard to guess if we’re talking about mitochondria health, something that has chlorophyll in it.

Joe:  Ah, it’s a good guess but not… actually sea food with DHA.

Ben:  Okay.

Joe:  So you can take fish oil, krill oil and supplements but it’s a much different version of the DHA that you get when you eat it in real food.  So making sure that you get that on a regular basis and actually Dominic D'agostino who you’ve interviewed previously I believe, is the one who turned me on to eating anchovies.  So I eat anchovies pretty much every day.

Ben:  So this anchovies are kinda interesting.  I actually took my kids out on a bike ride last night and we stopped at the pizza shop and had gluten-free pizza, and I had the Caesar salad with anchovies, but are anchovies a better source of DHA than say sardines?

Joe:  No, they’re about the same.  They’re equivalent.  I just happened to like the salty version of salmon.

Ben:  Gotcha.  And when you’re eating this much seafood for the DHA to help out with your mitochondrial health, are you doing anything to limit your exposure to heavy metals and mercury, and things like that?

Joe:  Well, that’s an excellent question because most of seafood unfortunately are contaminated with industrial pollution permanently with mercury and dioxins and PBCs, PBDEs, the bio return of these in the ocean.  So, if you eat small fish like anchovies and sardines, it’s almost a non-issue or if you get it from relatively pristine waters like Alaska, so wild Alaskan Salmon if you can be certain it’s certified from there then it’s not an issue and you’re not gonna get contaminated, but later we’ll talk about it.  I have some, just in case detox procedures that if even I was getting it wouldn’t be an issue.

Ben:  Okay, got it.

Joe:  So, ‘cause I think detoxification is absolutely important and it’s almost impossible to live.  I try pretty hard but it’s impossible to live a clean, healthy lifestyle.  You’re gonna be exposed to these toxins routinely in the environment.

Ben:  Absolutely.  Next week actually it will be a week or two if you’re listening in after this podcast, when I was competing at the Train To Hunt National Championships in Park City, I was sleeping in Dr. Pompa’s basement.  Dr. Dan Pompa who’s considered to be one of world’s leading experts on cellular detoxifications.  We had quite a few interesting chats about that and perhaps you and I can…

Joe:  Yeah, good!  ‘Cause I’ve known Dan really well.  He’s in my small study group so there we got some people enrolled in the 24-hour glucose monitoring and he’s one of us.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.  Cool.  Okay, so we’ve got sunlight, we’ve got seafood, we’ve got exposure to negative ions, we have exposure to as much natural blue light as possible during the day.

Joe:  Well, no now, it’s leading to avoiding all un-natural artificial light from sources. That is the key.  I mean, that may be one of the most important health strategies, and I say that it’s free.

Ben:  Yeah, okay.  So, even more or perhaps just as important as getting outside you’re limiting that source of artificial light.

Joe:  Yes.  So that if you’re inside and there’s any light or monitor to put those glasses out.  So as soon as I get up in the morning and it’s dark, I put my blue blockers on, and if my lights come off, I would take the glasses off.

Ben:  Okay, so you don’t just wear sunglasses at night, you wear them during the day.

Joe:  Yeah.  That’s it.  Well, not unless there’s light on in the house or if I go to the grocery store or if my personal trainer have and insist keeping his lights on.  He hasn’t quite opt to this yet so I wear it, like this morning I have my glasses on.

Ben:  Yeah.  This is important for people listening in because I know a lot of folks who are listening in, you guys probably heard me talked about blue light blocking glasses but I personally don’t wear them during the day.  I hadn’t yet considered that.  It’s artificial blue light during the day, not natural blue light, so you wear them when you step outside, you take them off but then when you go back inside and you’re back inside the office, you put them on because the pros out weight the cons of any type of wakefulness effect you might get from a monitor.

Joe:  Oh yeah.  You’re gonna achieve that through synchronization in the morning with the exposure to the bright light from the sun from anywhere from 9 to 11.  That’s why I started to do my walking a little bit earlier before 11 o’clock.  I used to walk about 2 or 3 hours or so.

Ben:  Okay.  You’re changing the fashion habits at the office just about anybody listening in right now.

Joe:  (laughs)

Ben:  I feel like you’re gonna be spoiling their glasses, not just when they get home at night but at the office.

Joe:  Yeah.  Uvex glasses aren’t the most cosmetically elegant or appealing but you can get more expensive ones.  They’re only 10, $9 but you can get and spend $100 and be more fashionable, it’s just that it’s little…

Ben:  Yeah.  I wear the Swanwick ones which actually make cool at parties but…

Joe:  Just make sure that you get a blue light that you can see, and then put the glasses on and see if it changes the color and the blue disappears.  If it doesn’t, it’s not gonna work.

Ben:  Got it.  Okay.

Joe:  It’s got to change that.

Ben:  What are some of the other things you do?

Joe:  Oh let me just expand the seafood ‘cause I think that blocking the blue light, exposure to sunlight and seafood are so critical.  I have sardines and anchovies but I also have shrimp from Alaska and fish roe.  Wild Alaskan fish roe or fish eggs, about an ounce every day and maybe a little salmon but may be 1 to 2 ounces.  So I think that’s the key, so I make sure my DHA levels are really high.  So, the other things…

Ben:  Can I interrupt you for just a second?

Joe:  Sure.

Ben:  Fish roe is not something we’ve talked about on the podcast before.  Obviously it’s something someone could probably can hunt down in their community but have you found a specific brand to be better when it comes to something like fish roe?

Joe:  It’s not cheap.  It’s like $50 a pound but I get mine from Vital Choice.

Ben:  Okay, Vital Choice, yeah.

Joe:  And it’s not only the source of DHA, probably the most concentrated source of DHA in the planet from a food source, but it’s magnificent DHA phospholipids.  Not the same phospholipids you’d get from lecithin which is omega-6.  This is an omega-3, DHA omega-3.  So it’s unbelievable healthy food.

Ben:  Okay, got it.  Got it.  So, fish roe.  I interrupted you.  What are you getting into next?

Joe:  Let me see… we’re talking about mitochondria, right?

Ben:  Oh yeah.

Joe:  Oh grounding!  I think grounding is another component to get electrons into your body.  I’m sure you’ve talked about it in your podcast, but the point here is that most of the grounding devices that they plug into electrical outlets, and I would just suggest that they invest $10, you get on Amazon, an A-foot copper grounding rod pounded into the earth and then run a wire, might have to drill a hole through the wall and fill it with silicone and run it into your grounding device.  Like I have one for my standing desk and one for my bed sheet that I wear at night.

Ben:  What about these devices that you can plug into a computer like a laptop grounding cable.  Like for the laptops that don’t have that 3^rd prong on them that would normally ground a laptop.  Have you seen these that plug into the USB port of a laptop?

Joe:  Yeah, it depends.  I guess if you use a laptop a lot, it might be necessary.  If you don’t use it periodically like I do, it’s not as crucial as important especially if you use them when you’re grounded, but I think if you use a laptop and if you have it on your lap, it would be useful to put something between your lap and the notebook or the laptop, so I typically use some radiant barrier or just a really tough type of aluminum foil that prevent some other radiation from coming through.

Ben:  Oh yeah, yeah.  I have one of those that’s called a HARApad, that’s like an anti-radiation pad basically that you put underneath the laptop that works really well.  Are there any kinda like things that you think fly under the radar whether it’s a, I know you have a lot of biohacks at your home, like I think you’ve told me about hyperbaric oxygen chamber and some things like these?

Joe:  No, no.  I don’t, but I have something that are far less expensive but maybe 10 times as effective as hyperbaric oxygen.  And it’s called EWOT and some have encountered before as Exercise with Oxygen Therapy, so they’re oxygen concentrators, and they blow into a giant bag and you wear a mask, and you breathe in to it.  So, it’s just full, it must be the size of maybe 100 gallons bag and that’s pretty big…

Ben:  And you do exercise sessions with this or do you just wear it when you’re like reading a book?

Joe  Oh no, no.  It’s exercise.  I usually do my peak intensities.  So, we’ll get into the exercise that what I do, but typically I’ll do the sauna 3 times a week, but a very specific detox protocol which I think even this beyond what damn papa told you about.  If you want I can go into that now.

Ben:  Let’s finish up mitochondria.  We’ll talk detox in a little bit.

Joe:  Okay.

Ben:  Go ahead.  So you have this exercise with oxygen therapy.

Joe:   Yeah, that’s another useful tool to get the oxygen because oxygen vs. the alternate electronic scepter, when your electrons come in from your fuel either the sound or the grounding, ultimately it’s got to combine with oxygen after generating ATP, and then be excreted as water hopefully with minimum amount of reactive oxygen species and free radicals.

Ben:  Okay, got you.  There’s a guy in Vegas who worked for the bunch of professional cyclists who wrote an article for my site.  I can link to it in the show notes over at bengreenfieldlfitness.com/mercola, but he talks about just like going to a local medical supply store, getting an oxygen concentrator, special type of mask and some tube.  He has kinda like a DIY exercise oxygen therapy tool.

Joe:  It’s a less expensive version.  Yeah.

Ben:  So, this is similar to something like that?

Joe:  Yeah, it’s just a lot easier.  I don’t know the time to mess with that is like $6,000 for the setup I purchased, but actually you can certainly do it.  it’s not the proprietary difficult to do but there is a bulb on there that actually simulates the alpha G training.  So for a portion of my exercise, I like training maybe 10,000 feet and then so you basically deplete the oxygen for instance PO2 near pulse oximeter might go to 70s or 80 then you just boost it up.  So you super saturate your blood with the oxygen.

Ben:  Okay, interesting.  What else do you have around your house aside from an oxygen concentrator to improve your mitochondrial health?

Joe:  (chuckles) Well, we go to that way and exercise some of these other components. I mean, there’s a lot of gadgets since we last talked.  Well, are we actually going to do that now or…

Ben:  Yeah, let’s hear it.  Let’s have some fun.  To open people’s eyes to things they might not have heard before.

Joe:  Well, let’s talk.  Here’s some pretty cool ones.  This is not so much to get but you should have it.  If you don’t, you should get an induction burner if you cook food.  You know what those are?

Ben:  An induction burner.  No, my wife probably knows.  My wife’s the foodie.  She probably knows.

Joe:  Ben, this is an absolute must.  You know that the higher you cook your food, the more that you’re gonna damage it, right?

Ben:  Right.

Joe:  And it’s almost impossible when a gas or an electric range that you’re gonna cook it a few hundred degrees.  Well, in an induction burner it’s actually the most efficient way to heat and cook food known to man.  You have to use a metal pot or pan and it’s a magnetic device and then you can actually control the temperature for as low as 100 degrees.  You can cook your food at a 110 degrees which is crazy.  You could cook steak like a medium rare steak is 140, and you can cook at 140 and you don’t have to worry about it.  Like you can put it in the sous vide, it’s just great.  So that is a radical way that I’ve improved my ability to make healthy food.

Ben:  Okay.  So this induction burner, that’s just like sits on your counter top and you cook, and do you use like a stainless steel pan?  Is that generally what you do?

Joe:  As long as this metal is okay.  I don’t think aluminum will work but it has to be in a little pan and I think those are the ones that I have, stainless steel.  And you know with the coating, ‘cause we need to be careful ‘cause most of those coatings are fluoride-based and they’re outgas at higher temperatures, and really we don’t wanna breathe fluoride gas.  We just broke huge stories from the use of these non-stick coatings.  There’s massive contamination of the ground waters becoming an immerging epidemic in the United States with this ground water contamination.  It’s gonna be huge.  It’s one of the reasons why you wanna filter your water with really good carbon or charcoal filter to get those items out in there.

Ben:  Really?  Interesting.  So, I’ll ask you about the water in a second, but like when my kids are making say, scrambled eggs in the morning and I have the oil heating on a counter top in the cast iron cookware, what you’re saying is if I were to have my kids, if I wanted to optimize their mitochondrial health, I would get them for example this induction burner to use instead, and it would allow the eggs or any protein we don’t wanna damage.

Joe:  The worst way you can consume your eggs is scrambled eggs.  That is absolutely terrible.  You oxidize the colostrum and damage the fats; the important fats and nutrients in the eggs.  So I cooked mine about 140 I think or 140 or so which is way below the boiling point of water.  It’s 80 degrees lower and it takes a little longer but if you just plan it, you can cook it properly and the white shall turn white, and your yolk is essentially nice and runny so it’s not damage.  It’s actually healthier than poach eggs, the only form of this healthy poached eggs.

Ben:  Adding that to my shopping list.  Water is obviously important for the mitochondria as you’ve alluded to.  You mentioned that your choice of water filter if you would recommend one to people would be a charcoal?

Joe:  No well, this is really a complex topic.  Ideally, the best choice of water is from a local spring and find a spring that’s the way that you can do that.  That’s gonna be inconvenient for most people and if you’re gonna relay, I mean, it’s full top water.  The first thing you have to make sure is that it has no fluoride.  Fluoride is one of the most toxic thing that you can put in your body for your mitochondria.  It’s a dielectric blocker and Jack Kruse calls into it in great detail but you definitely want a fluoride-free water.  So, unfortunately that’s why it’s kinda getting back to my side, you know, I mention we didn’t sell anything but the profits that we generate, I put 20% back.  I just donate it to a non-profit entities, and one of those entities is the FAN group which is committed to removing fluoride from municipal water supplies ‘cause it’s so difficult to take out.

The best strategy is not having your water supply to begin with.  So if you have a whole house water carbon filter, they’re really big tanks, maybe about half the size of a conventional water tank and if you have two you get even bigger.  And if the water stays in there for a while, it’s just a contact surface area, you’ll be able to remove a lot of the fluoride for sure.  So that’s a big step and then I take to have a whole house water filter that we actually produce in our site and then I filter it through an alkaline water system, and not because I want to alkalinize the water because it actually structures the water and makes hydrogen gas, and a hydrogen gas is far more important than pH, pH is irrelevant, it’s not about drinking pH immediate water, it’s about having the hydrogen ions in there, and then having it structured.  And then I take it again…

Ben:  Which structured water filter do you use?

Joe:  Well, it’s just that alkalinizer.

Ben:  So you just use a water alkalinizer and that passes, from what I understand that like passes water over a metal plate and alkalinizes the water?

Joe:  Well, it’s actually the series of them.  This one has one like 9 and then you have to be really careful because most of those will have scale that builds up literally after a few…

Ben:  Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard.  You wind up drinking (inaudible)

Joe:  Yeah, so I have a device that actually changes the polarity every time it’s turned on so that it never gets scaled buildup.

Ben:  What’s it called ‘em?

Joe:  I don’t remember.

Ben:  Okay.

Joe:  It’s was like a beta…

Ben:  It’s a water alkalizer.  So first you pass through a charcoal filter, and then after it passes through a charcoal filter…

Joe:  A whole house charcoal filter which is significant.  So that they’re big babies and then the actual alkalinizer has another filter and once it goes from there then I put it into a vortexer, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of Gerald Pollack’s work, he’s a biophysicist in the University of Washington, but structured water is massively important.  ‘cause water is essentially a battery and it’s the way that once it’s structured, the water in our body is primarily structured and the better you can structure them, the more you can generate that energy into your cell structure and improve your mitochondria function and your general total health.

So I vortex mine with the vortexer that we developed for 3 years, and we still aren’t selling it ‘cause we had trouble finding a manufacturer to do that, but it’s got infrared light and it just spins it, it structures it, and then I put it in the refrigerator.  The refrigerator is lead less, an optimal ‘cause it’s only in metafields but then I put it out over some neodymium magnets to continue the structure and it keep it cold.

Ben:  So these magnets are actually in your refrigerator?

Joe:  Yeah, well, I just literally make a little platform for it that I rest the glass container on.

Ben:  Okay, got it.  So you can buy these magnets and you can put them in your refrigerator and after you’ve structured your water, you’d put it in a big pitcher and then you would put it on top of these magnets?

Joe:  Yup.  They help maintain the structure of the water.

Ben:  Interesting.  Okay.

Joe:  Water is key.

Ben:  Oh yeah.

Joe:  Definitely it’s worth putting time, effort, energy into optimizing your water intake.  It’s one of the biggest variables for your health.  You gotta get that right.

Ben:  Now, I have a little bit different setup than you, and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. I use reverse osmosis rather than charcoal because of finer particle filtration.  Obviously I have to re-mineralize my water and simply have a reverse osmosis filter that has remineralization.

Joe:  Yeah.  You have a holding tank on yours, that’s the key issue.

Ben:  A holding tank in the reverse osmosis filter?

Joe:  Yeah, because it usually pretty slow unless you have a compressor on it so that you stoke in some water, you have to fill up a tank usually a 5 gallon, is that what you’re saying?

Ben:  Yeah, there’s an enormous tank.  It’s actually out in my utility room.

Joe:  I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend that you get rid of that.  And we get a different RO system that has a compressor on it, so you get a higher output if you don’t need the holding thing, but hold it, I can guarantee that holding thing is contaminated.

Ben:  Really?

Joe:  It just has to be, yeah.  And who wants the pain and hassle factor of cleaning that thing every 3 months?

Ben:  Okay, got it.  I’m making a note to talk to my water guy about this.

Joe:  Yeah.  You want a tank-free RO system.  I like RO, I think it’s really good.  It is less expensive than a whole house water filter for sure.

Ben:  Okay.  So it’s called a tank-free reverse osmosis filter.

Joe:  Yeah, it’s tank less, without compressor so you get a high output.

Ben:  And ideally something…

Joe:  You need more pressure than you get from the water, from your house pressure to, otherwise you won’t get much water around, it would take a long time.

Ben:  Yeah.  I see Aquasana has at least one on Amazon but that’s a reverse osmosis tank-free.  Now obviously, you need to remineralized.  For those of you listening in, reverse osmosis will remove a lot of the minerals from water so you ought to get to use trace liquid minerals or use something that remineralizes the water.

Joe:  It doesn’t take all the fluoride out but that’s really one of the better ones to do it.  You could use distilled water to it almost all of it but RO is…

Ben:  Now, the other thing that you mentioned is structured water.  I haven’t talk to you too much about this but…

Joe:  Well, before we go to structured water, let’s go back to the minerals.  I tell you that my best mineral which I also integrated into my routine of agriculture process is extracted from the ocean.  And it’s extracted to this very complex vortexing process, so it gets all the sodium chloride out and it’s basically 80 minerals that you put in back there.  That’s why vortex, my water along with some magnesium citrate and a little bit of zinc.

Ben:  Okay.  So went through that pretty fast but is that an actual, something that connects to your water filter or is that something you would put in to a glass of water?

Joe:  No, no.  It's a product.  It's a supplement essentially.

Ben:  Okay.

Joe:  Yeah.  Which is absolutely essential for anyone using an RO system, and really a good idea for anyone else.

Ben:  And what is the name of that product?

Joe:  Oh, it’s for ocean minerals… I’m not sure what it is but I use it primarily.  I mean, I buy it by 5 gallons and I use it for my plants.

Ben:  So you put that in your garden so that the food that you grow is higher in minerals?

Joe:  Well, actually, I don't put in the soil.  I use it as a [0:49:16] ______ spray application because the absorption is just tremendous.  I mean it's just crazy.  I mean I've got banana trees growing, giving me hundreds of pounds of bananas every year.

Ben:  Are they these things called the ionic ocean minerals that are on your site?

Joe:  The mineral.  That’s it, yeah.

Ben:  Okay, okay.

Joe:  Yeah.  Their work is ionic, they are not… they’re just ions and they really are absorbed easily.  So that’s really potent and effective form of replacing the minerals that you’re taking out with the RO system.

Ben:  Okay.  So if you're using a reverse osmosis system and you're listening in, you would wanna use ionic minerals to add the minerals back in.

Joe:  From the ocean…

Ben:  From the ocean, okay, ionic ocean minerals.  I’ll make sure that I link to these in the show notes which are growing rapidly, by the way, as we talk.  Darn you, you’re causing people a lot of money on this podcast who're hoping to optimize their lives, but this honestly, this stuff is fun.  I’m all about better living through science, I’m all about…

Joe:  Oh, I know!  That's why I just love what you do.  I just haven't found anyone else like you.  I mean other than Kruse, you're just incredible.  You're a gift to the human race.

Ben:  But before we proceed, I mean stepping back, if my kids are 60 years old and killing it in life, I would love to be 130, standing there watching it happen.  I dunno if I did the math correctly on that, but yeah.  Longevity with optimized performance in health is a very, very cool goal, I think, and it's achievable.

Joe:  I don’t think you could get both goals at once.  I was gonna go on to this later but from my understanding of the metabolic physiology, you have to optimize your performance or longevity.  It’s difficult to do both because the metabolic pathways, the mTOR and AMPK, you just can’t do that.

Ben:  Yeah.

Joe:  You get one or the other.  So at some point, I've transitioned a while ago, I'm 20, 30 years past my competitive days, and you're still engaged in them.  So I'm in the longevity mode now.

Ben:  Yeah.  Okay.  Well, hopefully we get a chance to tackle that, but I also, before we leave the topic of water, and then I would like to perhaps move on past mitochondria and talk about a few other things that I know are important here, I don't think we talked about this much, but my dad's business, my dad's career is, he actually travels to large agricultural facilities and farms, and installs structured water filter systems for farms and in agricultural settings to allow livestock to be more healthy and to allow plants to grow more readily, and you talked about a vortex and how it's important for water to, say, pass through a series of glass beads, et cetera.  My dad is the person who sent me Gerald Pollack's book “Fourth Phase of Water”.

Joe:  “Fourth Phase of Water.”  Excellent book.  Strongly recommend it.

Ben:  Which is a great book.  And, yeah.  His website is greenfieldnaturals.com and he has these enormous structured filters that, and that's what I have, it's a whole house structured water filter, but he first introduced to me this concept.  I thought it was nuts. I thought it was a kook.  Then I started to dig into this and I read this book written by University of Washington researcher Gerald Pollack, and now there's a brand new book. I dunno if you've seen this book, Joe, it's written by Dr. Cowan, it's C-O-W-A-N, I forget his last name, but it's about the heart and it's about the fact that we have been…

Joe:  Is it Tom Cowan?

Ben:  Tom Cowan's book about the heart.

Joe:  It's actually, I think it's Cowan.  He is a very interesting guy.  Weston Price, he's connected with them.  I've interviewed him a few times.

Ben:  Fantastic book.

Joe:  He's got some really intriguing concepts.

Ben:  It's called “Human Heart, Cosmic Heart”.  I don't even know if it's available for sale yet, because I just finished reading my review copy, but that book goes into how the heart is not a pump as much as it is a special shape that allows fluids to move through it if those fluids are structured properly.  And one of the things that he says is the best thing that you can do for getting fluids to move through your heart efficiently, for blood to move through heart efficiently, is for that blood to be hydrated with structured water.  He does a great job of explaining in the book, but it really hammered home, that statement that Gerald Pollack makes in his book.

Joe:  And your readers can prove for themselves.  What they do is do an experiment, grow some sunflower seed sprouts with structured water and regular tap water, and see what the difference is.  You'll see a magnificent shift.  It's just crazy.
Ben:  Yeah.  No, it's crazy.  When I travel, I always just buy glass bottled Pellegrino, or Perrier, or Gerolsteiner because…

Joe:  That's about as good as you can do on the road.

Ben:  Yeah.  When I'm at home, it's just my water is so pristine.  It makes such a big difference.  Now speaking of the heart, I suppose this would be a good segue, I've seen you talk a little bit, and I haven't seen a lot of people talk about this, about the link between iron and heart disease.  And we've got a lot of athletes listening in, we've got people who take iron supplements, some people who even think the more iron, the better.  What's the deal here with iron, and heart disease, and iron levels?

Joe:  Well, it's actually related to mitochondria.  ‘Cause you know what the most mitochondrially-dense tissue in the body is, right?  It's the heart.

Ben:  Yeah.  I guess that's true.  I mean, I suppose when I…

Joe:  And then the brain is number two.  So it becomes a really important issue.  This is a message that has to be spread far and wide, and I'm glad to have the platform and opportunity to share this with your audience 'cause they need to know about this.  This is the difference literally between life and death, and I am not exaggerating in the least. This is every bit as important as the vitamin D topic that I started promoting about 15 years 7ago.  In fact, maybe more important.  Now, let's discriminate between two groups.  First, you have pre-menopausal women who are still menstruating, and children.  That group is usually “Iron okay” or “Iron deficient,” may need to supplement.  Those are about the only groups that do.  Or if someone has an acute bleed would be the other exception.  But for an almost any adult men, or any woman who's past her menopause and not menstruating anymore, high likelihood, I would say probably 95% or greater, that they're gonna be iron overloaded.

And our body was not designed to excrete iron on a regular basis.  It conserves it, it keeps it.  It doesn't get rid of it.  The only way you lose iron is through losing blood.  And so the studies have been done, people who donate one, two, three times a year live significantly longer, have less heart disease, less cancer than those who don't because they are lowering their iron levels.  Now, why does that work?  Why should it work?  Let me just go through the metabolic physiology.  When you have these electrons from food, it goes in, and is hopefully transferred to oxygen and you create water, but maybe 5% of the time it goes through these reactive oxygen species.

The first one is superoxide, which then gets to be converted to peroxide, and then ideally from peroxide to water, but there is a side path that it could take.  If iron levels are high, especially in the inner mitochondria, there's a reaction called the Fenton reaction, and the iron will combine with the peroxide and form superoxide free radical, which is the most toxic free radical known to man.  Decimates your mitochondria's own membranes, and proteins, and DNA. The last thing you wanna do.  You need some, but if you have high iron levels, you're gonna catalyze that reaction, and you're gonna create massive free radical damage as a result of that.

Ben:  Okay.

Joe:  So the key, how do you figure this out?  Simple blood test, you can actually get it online without a doctor's prescription for $39.  It's called Ferritin, F-E-R-R-I-T-I-N. You can get a TIBC, Total Iron Binding Capacity…

Ben:  So you would measure ferritin, the iron storage protein, and not actual iron?

Joe:  Absolutely.  That's the one you need.  That is the measure.  Do not use any of the others, just use that one.  And what are the goals?  You should be below 80.  If you're below 20, it's too low.  You gotta take a supplement or have some type of natural food like red meat, which would be a really good source of iron.  But ideally, I would say somewhere between 40 and 60, which interestingly, Ben, that's about the same range as vitamin D levels.  So it's easy to remember.  40 to 60.

Ben: Forty to sixty is what you're looking for.  Not your iron levels, but your ferritin levels?

Joe:  Ferritin level, which is an indirect measure.  Ferritin, as you mention, is an iron storage protein, so that's probably the best way to find out if you're in the sweet spot.

Ben:  And this is a test you could order through like Direct Labs, or WellnessFX, or something like that?

Joe:  Yes!  Absolutely.  Almost anyone has it.  LifeExtension has it, think also for $39.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  Now in terms of iron, why wouldn't you measure iron in addition to ferritin?

Joe:  It's just not as accurate.  It's just, and I forget the specific chemical reasons why, but ferritin is the one to go with.

Ben:  Okay.

Joe: There's a good book earlier this year called “Dumping Iron” that I read that was written by a late journalist, but it really goes into great depth.  “Dumping Iron” I think it was called.

Ben:  “Dumping Iron”  That's great.  Any book that has “dumping” in the title has gotta be good.  Okay.  “Dumping Iron.”  I'll link to that one in the show notes.  And then finally, you mentioned giving blood.  And I know that giving blood, as my return to your whole performance versus longevity piece that you mentioned earlier, decreases VO2 max by anywhere from 6 to 8%.  I know because I've looked into this, and kind of timed when I go in for my fancy big blood panels based off of when I might happen to have an upcoming race.  So first of all, you give blood multiple times a year, correct?

Joe:  No, because I'm a physician.  So I have the opportunity to [0:58:41] ______ for me giving blood is too much…

Ben:  Okay.

Joe:  So that's 16 ounces.  So what I do is I have essentially a phlebotomy kit.  I ordered some capillary tubes and some big syringes, and I just take out 4 ounces, usually about every four weeks.  Now I'm down to every six weeks 'cause I finally just got my ferritin below 60.  It's like 55 the last time I checked.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  Don't try that at home, people.

Joe:  But it's ideal, it’s not hard to do.  There's lots of phlebotomists around, so that would be the ideal way.  And you don't have the hassle factor, the inconvenience of going to the center.  But you should also know that even though the blood donation sites that are all over the country may not understand it, they have to by law, allow you to do what's called a therapeutic phlebotomy essentially to donate your blood because many people, maybe 30%, 50% of people can't donate their blood because of some type of previous health condition.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  Do you do anything, or do you recommend people do anything after they give blood aside from drink lots of water and take on lots of electrolytes to, kinda returning to my question about the decrease in VO2 max, like return to performance quickly?

Joe:  Definitely plan some down time 'cause that's a lot of blood.  That's why I only take out 4 ounces at a time.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  And how many ounces do you lose when you, say, like go to Red Cross and donate blood?

Joe:  Sixteen.  A pint.

Ben:  Okay.  Yeah.  So that's a significant difference.

Joe:  Yeah.  So I take out a pint in over four months.

Ben:  Or you can just be a geeky biohacker like me and do enough blood panels to where you're constantly filling tubes with blood.

Joe:  Well, you'd have to take a heck of a lot.  ‘Cause I tried doing that with tubes and it's a third of an ounce in one of those tubes.  So you'd have to fill a lot of tubes.

Ben:  Yeah.  Exactly.  Even though the fancy WellnessFX panels, those are about 19 tubes or so of blood.  Interestingly though, I have noticed a decrease in performance for a few days after I do that blood panel.

Joe:  Yeah.  You will.  At your level as an elite athlete, there's no question you will.

Ben:  Yeah.  So one other question that I have, before I wanna turn to some of your thoughts on like fasting and protein intake, because I've seen you talk about that.  We touched briefly on like electromagnetic field exposure, and negative ions, and things like this.  So in terms of these devices, and biohacks, and things like that, are there certain things that you stay away from?  Because I know this is a constant argument in the health sector, as from Fitbits and Jawbone devices, to even like these grounding and earthing things, like EarthPulses and things that produce pulsed electromagnetic field frequencies.  What's your take on that?  Do you use any of these biohacks?

Joe:  Oh, absolutely.  There's no question about it.  And actually there's two that I use from you that I actually stopped using because of after I connect with Cruise.  One of 'em is the Delta Sleeper which did not work for me, and I use it to increase my deep sleep because my deep sleep sucked.  I mean, I was getting from zero to three minutes a night, that was about it.  But now I finally get up to 40 minutes.  I can tell you how I did that in a moment, which relates to the answer of your question, but I tried the Delta Sleeper and I returned it, then I tried OURA Ring.  I love the OURA Ring.  In concept, it's only one milliwatt of power, but it actually emits its radio frequency.  Kruse doesn't really like those at all, so I'm in a process of finding a different one.  But I don't know anything else to measure my deep sleep at this point.

Ben:  I keep my OURA Ring in airplane mode.  That's the way that I do it.  You can go into setting, that was my very first question when I talked to these folks, and if you're listening in and you have no clue what the OURA Ring is, just go to my site and search for it.  I had a podcast with these guys.  But the very first question I asked them was, “What do you do about the Bluetooth signal that most of these devices emit every one to three seconds?”  And you can actually place it, you sync it to your iPhone app, and you go to settings, and you can put it in airplane mode.  That's why it’s so freakin' expensive, because it has this like built-in computer that collects data without actually producing the frequencies.

Joe:  I never wear jewelry.  I haven't worn jewelry in 30 years.  And I get so many compliments on the ring.  They just like it as a piece of jewelry.

Ben:  Yeah!  It looks like a cool magical rock.  But did you know that you could put it in airplane mode?

Joe:  Yeah. I knew then I forgot about it.  Thank you for reminding me.  As soon as I get off this, I'm gonna put mine in airplane mode.

Ben:  Yeah.  So that's what I do is I put in airplane mode.  The other one, tell me about the Delta Sleeper because I'm interested to hear your take on it and I wear it every night.  So I put on my collar bone every night, and it's pulse electromagnetic field frequency, the idea being that it sends a signal from your brachial plexus up to your brain and it emits for about 22 two minutes when you press the little button to turn it on to put you into deep sleep.  So tell me what your take on it was.

Joe:  I didn't like it too much 'cause it was a real hassle factor to put an adhesive all the time, and keep it on, and turn it on.  I just didn't like the design at all.  But if it worked, I would have no problems with it.  Thing is, it's this radio frequency device and Kruse really opposes to those, and I didn't see an improvement in my sleep with it.

Ben:  Well, Dr. Kruse was bugging me about that.  He told me…

Joe:  Yeah.  At Norway, he was telling me, but I just talked to him this week…

Ben:  I dunno.  Should we delve into this or is this too much of a rabbit hole for the podcast?

Joe:  No, no.  It's a rabbit hole because there's a lot of other things I wanna go on.  But what can you do?  Let's keep it focused on the positive.  So one of the things he recommends, and I purchased 15 years ago, it was in my attic for the last 13 years or so, is a magnetic sleeping pad.  He likes the one from Magnetico, and interestingly that's the one I had purchased.  So I started using that as a static magnetic field to sort of insulate and mitigate some of the effects of the EMFs that you're exposed to, but also to really structure the water in your body.  It's just a magnificent thing.  So I did that and I combined it, literally, with blocking the blue light during the day from all artificial sources.  Not just at night.  Those two combinations, I'm sleeping 40 minutes of deep sleep now.

Ben:  Wait.  So it's a Magnetico plus the what?

Joe:  Just blocking the blue light!

Ben:  Just blocking the blue light?

Joe:  From artificial sources, not from the sun.

Ben:  That's your one-two combo.  That's your 80/20.

Joe:  Yeah!

Ben:  Interesting.  And these Magneticos are like sleep pads that you put underneath your sheets?

Joe:  Yeah, like for a queen sized bed, I mean there's just four pads, and each pad weighs about 75 pounds.  I mean these are just full of magnets, so I don't think your wife's going to like me too much when you sleep… (chuckles)

Ben:  I have a Bio-Mat and I use that.

Joe:  Well, that's another EMF!

Ben:  The Bio-Mat?

Joe:  Yeah!  The Bio-Mat!

Ben:  They've got an EMF blocker that the unit plugs into, and it's a relatively low frequency.  If you look at the Earth's magnetic field, that's like about 3 to 6 milligauss, or so.  And if you look at something like a Bio-Mat or something like that Delta Sleeper device, it's an extremely low Gauss field.

Joe:  I get it.  But I am not the expert here.  I would definitely talk to Kruse, that his ball of wax, and he will have a very extensive discussion with you, and I think he'll convince you…

Ben:  Yeah.  I'll talk to him.

Joe:  I would encourage you to try the static magnetic field and blocking the blue light throughout the entire day from artificial sources, and I will almost guarantee your deep sleep will go up.

Ben:  Okay.  I'll try it.  One last thing I gotta throw in there.  Did you know that in the  study that they did on non-native EMF exposure and cancer, and I actually haven't a chance to talk to Jack about this yet, but I plan on it.  So they did a study in mice and they used an intensity of nearly 10 times of what you get exposed to with one of these pulsed electromagnetic field devices, and then they bombarded the mice with gamma radiation to give them cancer, to see if they were more susceptible to getting cancer when they got blasted with non-native EMF at levels way higher than what you get exposed to with these lower frequency devices or the planet Earth.  So the study itself, it's kinda like the China study where they say that this might be a good way for us to get into the talk about protein and cancer, but they that the China study says that excess animal protein can give you cancer, but what they failed to note was that they gave the animals a bunch of cancer and then gave them the protein.  It wasn't the protein that caused the cancer, it was the protein that…

Joe:  And it was terrible protein too.

Ben:  Oh!  It was a horrible protein.

Joe:  There's a lot of flaws in that study.

Ben:  Yeah.  If you already have cancer, then dumping copious amounts of horrible protein in your body of course is gonna make the matter a little bit worse.  But anyways, we digress.

Joe:  We had this discussion with Jack, but let's get back to this cancer thing which is one of the reasons that Travis book changed my life.  I mean that was really what turned me into mitochondria.

Ben:  You mean the “Tripping Over the Truth”?

Joe:  “Tripping Over the Truth” by Travis Christofferson, yeah.  So what I got from that, and really had a fuller, deeper appreciation, and this is where the divergence between performance and optimization for longevity comes, is how much protein you're gonna take.  So for me, I'm about 175 pounds and I seek to have somewhere about 65 grams a day, almost always under 70, which isn't gonna to give me a lot of muscles, but it optimizes this protein pathway called mTOR, which is short for, the Million Target of Rapamycin.  Have you talked about that before on the show?

Ben:  Yeah, a little bit.  About how excess protein can basically increase the rate at which telomeres shorten.  It has an aging effect.

Joe:  Yeah.  That's a side effect, but there's few important metabolic pathways.  One is insulin, leptin, IGF1, and when those levels are high, you're gonna stimulate mTOR which is going to suppress mytophagy, or an autophagy, which is gonna increase the risk of cancer and conversely it would also decrease AMPK 'cause AMPK and mTOR go hand in hand.  So you will die early if you have consistently high mTOR.  No question about it. On the converse, if you can increase your AMPK levels higher and suppress mTOR, you'll live longer.  And there are some interesting strategies that will do that.  You know what some of those are?

Ben:  I would guess protein restriction might be one of them.

Joe:  Protein is probably the main one, but some other really great ones, and one that you're very fond of, one of your big passions.

Ben:  Intermittent fasting?

Joe:  Well, no.  You're bigger than that.  Exercise!

Ben:  Weight training, specifically.  Is that what you like for the anti-aging effect?

Joe:  Now, I think any exercise will work.  Weight training can do it.  It'll give you specific things.  Actually, weight training little bit can cover it 'cause that will tend to stimulate mTOR in anabolic states.

Ben:  Yeah.  That's a head scratcher for me because I've seen that same data, Joe, about how weight training will upregulate mTOR, but when you look at these studies that look into the strength training effects on telomere length, they actually find that in athletes who have overtraining, and what's called exercise associated fatigue, high levels of CRP, high levels of inflammation, et cetera, they find abnormally short telomeres.  But then when you look at, they did a really interesting muscle biopsy study on powerlifters.

So powerlifters lift a ton of weight, but not like a bodybuilder, they don't damage, they just lift a lot of weight really fast, really explosively, and then they put it down, and what they found in powerlifters was not only were they significantly higher than non-weightlifters, but they were way higher than actual weightlifters, like traditional bodybuilding-style weightlifters, like doing squats and deadlifts very explosively, heavy for short periods of time.  So it depends on the amount of muscle damage that you do is what it looks like.

Joe:  Yeah.  But just exercise in general will do it.  As what fasting, as you mentioned, and there's another interesting supplement called resveratrol, which really increases sirtuins which increases PGC-1 Alpha and secondarily mitochondrial biogenesis.

Ben:  Resveratrol?

Joe:  Yeah.  Resveratrol will do it.  But then there's this other one that we both know about, which is NAD+.

Ben:  Yes.  You filled me and big time on that, but go ahead.

Joe:  Actually, I learned about it from a podcast that you were interviewed on.  I just saw it the other day with Selfhacked.  And he also interviewed this guy named Vince Guillermo, who's about in his 80's and he sounds like he's in his 50's.  He's just really, really mentally clear and a great, great aging researcher, and found out that beta-lapachone increases NAD+.  And what the heck is NAD+?  Well, if you've taken biology, you know it's an electron transferer, responsible for shuttling electrons in the mitochondria.  But also, it has some very important signaling function.  It's sort of a sensor for disease and stress, and as we age, the levels of NAD+ go down by about 50%.  So a really good solution, in fact most of the anti-aging researches that I study are absolutely firmly convinced it is the single most important molecule to upregulate.  No question about it, NAD+.  That's why I was so fascinated with your interview on it, which really focused on using it intravenously, which is obviously not a good wise solution for everyone.

Ben:  Or convenient.

Joe:  It rescued some people.  I'm sure it's expensive as heck, but you wanna turn NAD+ levels around, and one of the most effective ways I found was through Vince, and it was the use of this tea, Pau D'Arco, which is loaded with something called beta-lapachone.  I sent you the information on it, and actually, what I initially did was purchase some of the tree bark and gave you a link for that.  But since that time, I found that there's these magnificent powders that actually dissolve and you can't taste, get the tree bark in your teeth, and you can actually absorb it even better.

But most of these biomolecules tend to be poorly absorbed, so one of the strategies that I do, and maybe it will take your time into some of the foods that I use, but I use krill phospholipids, which is not yet commercially available, but you could easily substitute sunflower lecithin, organic sunflower lecithin too, I spin it in my immersion blender when I'm making my smoothie, and with that beta-lapachone that I soak in water with some of the seeds that I'm consuming for my meal for maybe overnight or eight hours.  And then I spin it with the phospholipids, and I make essentially liposomes, which basically explodes the absorption of these molecules into your system.

Ben:  Yeah.  You can get it through the phospholipid cell membrane and have that antioxidant effect in the cells when you blend it with a fat like that.

Joe:  Yeah.  It even passed the blood-brain barrier.

Ben:  It's kinda funny.  Since you told me about that, I actually have an assistant who helps me out with some things here at the house.  I set out a piece of paper for her yesterday and told her, “Okay, take this, blend it in the blender for three minutes, put the sunflower lecithin.”  She's like, “What the heck am I doing?”  I'm like, “Just trust me. I'm gonna live forever.  Do this.  Leave the mason jar in the fridge.”  And then what I do with that mason jar full of this tea extract that has the concentrated beta-lapachone in it, that you were talking about to increase your levels of NAD, is I'll just use that as a base for smoothies or put a little bit in tea.

Joe:  Yeah.  Absolutely.  But you might wanna get the powdered version rather than sort of, I mean there's a really fine powder that I think it's gonna be in better absorption, 'cause when you put it in water, you'll get a lot better distillate from it.

Ben:  The powdered version of the Pau D'Arco tea?

Joe:  Yeah.  We're gonna actually probably have it on the site, so I can't give you a link to buy it because I don't even know where we got it from, but I didn't even know it existed, but it does exist.

Ben:  Okay.  Got it.  Well for now, for those of you listening in, I'll put a link to the podcast and the article that we did on NAD, and the use of this Pau D'Arco tea, and using that as yet another little anti-aging/health protocol you can throw into your routine in addition to some of these other things that we're talking about.

Joe:  And the researcher who figured it out was David Sinclair, who's from Harvard. He's actually the guy that discovered resveratrol, and he's really probably one of the biggest proponents of NAD+.  You can just look up his name and NAD+, and he's got his own product which is called nicotinamide riboside, which kind of expensive.  It’s too impractical for my perspective 'cause you need too much.

Ben:  I just think it's bad ass to blend up the bark.  It seems cool.

Joe:  Yeah.  But here's another strategy, this is part of my detox.  One of the things I do with my sauna before, and I don't know if you're doing this, I take 4 grams of niacin, not the time-release, just niacin, and 15 grams of ribose, D-ribose.  So they actually kinda combine to form into nicotinamide riboside.  (laughs) Prior to the sauna, it increases NAD+.

Ben:  Okay.  So in the past what I've done when I've gotten into the sauna to help lyse fat cells, which I believe is what you're going after with something like the niacin, is I've used the…

Joe:  No, no, no, no.  I actually increased it for vasodilation to make sure those waves penetrate really help remove the toxins.  It's more detox than it is for…

Ben:  The toxins are coming out of fat cells when you do that, right?

Joe:  Yeah.  But you and I don't have much fat.  I mean, we're looking at 8, 9%.  What are you?  Like 5%?

Ben:  I'm actually, based on the most recent MRI we were talking about, I'm actually at 3%.  I may increase it a little bit.  Anyways though, so yeah, I took the niacin by Thorne, it called Niasafe, the inositol hexaniacinate, because it's a little bit easier on the liver and you don't get as much of flushing.  But you touched on something very important.  You're combining niacin with, what did you say, to increase your NAD levels?

Joe:  D-ribose, which another…

Ben:  D-ribose?

Joe:  Yeah.  It's a sugar, it's a five carbon sugar that is actually used in the construction of nucleotides, and is an important protocol for almost all mitochondrial improvements.

Ben:  So you take D-ribose, and then you take niacin, and then you go into the sauna.

Joe:   It took me a while, it took me a few months to build up the 4 grams, and anyone listening to this, you don't wanna start with 4 grams.  So, you start like at 25 milligrams, or something, then work your way up.  But, yeah.  So I think that the combination, I don't know for sure, but it seems to make sense 'cause that's exactly what nicotinamide riboside is, is nicotonic acid and ribose.

Ben:  Yeah.  That makes really good sense.  Interesting.  Okay.  Well, I'll link to that strategy, that protocol in the show notes.  And related to that, you also exercise, I know, but you have a specific form of exercise that you're a fan of.  Can you tell me about the exercise or the workouts that you do?  Other than walking billions of steps each month while reading your Kindle, what else are you doing?  Like how are you maintaining muscle and things like that?

Joe:  That's a quarter billion over a lifetime.

Ben:  That's a lot.

Joe:  Yeah.  So I do a lot of things.  I have a personal trainer once a week, I do strength coaching, or strength training with him.  I just did that this morning.  The other day I will do functional training, and I'll do a day of strength at home, and I have actually, I love that book you recommended, “Starting Strength” by Mark Rippetoe.  I've never seen a more incredibly detailed orientation on how to lift weights properly, 60 to 100 pages on one lift.  It's just crazy, but you'll understand everything.  So I use that.  I do the overhead squat, the deadlifts, overhead press and a regular squat, and then dips, and pull ups…

Ben:  Okay.  So you do full-body multiple times a week?  Is that your…

Joe:  No.  Just once.

Ben:  And then you walk?

Joe:  I have a power plate too.  And one of things I learned with Kelly Starrett's book is that my external hip rotators were tight, so I'm trying to get into the lotus position, which was a real challenge initially.  I dunno if you can do that, but…

Ben:  Is that like the Saturday Night Live episode with Will Ferrell where he's in yoga class, trying to uncouthly things to himself?  Is it that lotus position?

Joe:  I don't even know.  I stopped watching Saturday Night Live in the 70's.

Ben:  Alright.  So you're doing a strength training routine once per week, like a full-body compound strength training routine.  Are you using a set or rep scenario, like four reps or six reps?

Joe:  Yeah.  Kinda what Mark describes.  I do a set of five and then just increase the weight.

Ben:  Okay.  Gotcha.  And you also have like a high-intensity workout program, like a cardiovascular program as well, am I correct?

Joe:  Yeah.  Well, you're the expert on exercise.  I mean, it's crazy for me to talk about it, but what I do is I think a little tweak on it is I combine it with the EWOT, the exercise with oxygen therapy and the oxygen concentrators.  So I do that after the infrared sauna. So I'll do the infrared sauna.  I use mine.  We have a low EMF, full spectrum infrared sauna.  I'll crank it up to about 136, 138, go in it for 15 minutes. I do a cold shower, then come back in for another 15 minutes, and I do the EWOT for 30 minute.  And then during that EWOT, I'm doing either a recumbent bike or an elliptical peak training.  So I'll warm up for three minutes, and then to go out.  I cut it down to twenty seconds, and I'll relax for 140, and just do multiple sets of them, and for the rest of 30 minutes.

Ben:  Okay.  Gotcha.  Why do you do the sauna before instead of after?

Joe:  Intuitively, I think it would be before, but my personal physician actually, who's guiding one of the challenges I’m taking with him, he said it would be better for me to do that.  He did some pretty exhaustive testing and said that…

Ben:  You mean better to do the sauna before or to do the sauna after?

Joe:  No.  Sauna before, for me.

Ben:  Okay.  Gotcha.  The reason I asked you is that I have a sauna in my gym, and I'll turn that on sometimes a half hour before I'm going to go train, to heat up the muscle tissue.  You can get in it.  It's like a warm up.  And those infrared rays, as you alluded to earlier, those penetrate tissue, so you get a really good muscle warming effect. But the study in which they've shown that sauna can actually increase erythropoietin production almost similar to the blood doping with EPO, what they did with that group was they had a group do a training session to exhaustion.  And then after the training session, they had 'em sit in a sauna for about 30 minutes, and this wasn't an infrared experiment.  It was just a dry sauna.  So what I try to do is I try to, if I'm gonna combine sauna and exercise, Dr. Pompa and I did this in Park City a couple days ago.  We went to the gym, we did a weight training routine, but then we got in the sauna afterwards to get that almost like that blood doping effect.

Joe:  Yeah.  Well, see, this is where we diverge.  You're optimizing performance, I'm optimizing for longevity.  I'm not doing Spartan races at Park City.  So I don't need to have my EPO up.  I'm doing it for other reasons.

Ben:  Right.  Okay.  That makes sense, and it is really good for warming up as well.

Joe:  Yeah.  Let me just finish the detox, 'cause I do some interesting things that Dan doesn't.  I don't think he's doing the niacin and the ribose, which is an important component.  But I also use his Cyto Detox, which is great.  It's available in his group.  I'm sure you'll talk about it.

Ben:  That's what I use now as well.

Joe:  If you aren't, you need to be on Cyto Detox.  No question about it.

Ben:  For those who have no clue what we're talking about, wait until next week.  I've got 90 minutes with Dan where we talk about Cyto Detox.  But go ahead.  What were you saying?  What else do you do?

Joe:  I do Cyto Detox, and I use some parsley, I use chlorella, and I also use something called IMD from Chris Shade.  I dunno if you've interviewed Chris.  He's probably the top, if you haven't, you should.  He's the top metal detoxer, probably in the world.  He's got a Ph.D.

Ben:  Chris Shade?

Joe:  S-H-A-D-E.  He's in Colorado, and his company's called Quicksilver.

Ben:  That's funny because I was at a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado last week, and I was talking to this…

Joe:  I think that where he's at.

Ben:  This big, tall Indian gentleman walked in, and this guy's job is like a TV show host where he goes to people's houses and completely reinvents their entire routine.  It's called “Doctor in the House,” I think is the name of the show.  So I'm standing there talking to him, and this other guy comes up, and he starts talking about metal detox. And he said, “Well, I've got this really unique form of detoxification.”  And I asked him what it was, and he said, “It's called Quicksilver.”  Is this a guy you're talking about?

Joe:  Oh, yeah.  Same guy.

Ben:  That's crazy.  I ran into him at a random coffee shop last week.

Joe:  Tim Ferriss just interviewed Tony Robbins, at his broadcast interview, last week or the week before last.  And at the end of the interview, he talks about how Chris Shade saved his life.  ‘Cause Tony, early on, ate tons of salmon, or seafood that was just loaded with mercury.  He had one of the highest levels Chris ever tested.  So he basically put him on the detox and changed his life, and he gives him a big shout out in Tim's interview.

Ben:  Yeah.  Quicksilver, so they make glutathione.

Joe:  Yeah.  Well, they make liposomal glutathione.  I'm not sure, I mean, it might be good for the detox, but I also use Alpha-lipoic acid when I'm doing that on those days.

Ben:  Okay.  So Quicksilver Scientific is the name of the company, and you said what you use from them for your detoxification is…

Joe:  Actually, I don't use any.  There's this other one, it's called IMD.

Ben:  IMD.  Okay.

Joe:  Yeah.  That is the most potent supplement known to man to extract metals and mercury out of your body.  It's like 20 or 100 times more than chlorella.  It's just crazy.  And you need like about an eighth of a teaspoon, that's it.

Ben:  And that's made by this company Quicksilver Scientific?

Joe:  Yeah.  That's what I use.  IMD.

Ben:  Okay. Got it.  So I'll put a link to some of the stuff in the notes.  So that your detox protocol.  You do a lot of these things like the parsleys, and the cilantros, and things to help to detox.  Then you do this IMD, and then you do the Cyto Detox.

Joe:  And niacin, yeah, and the Cyto Detox.  I don't know anyone that's doing that.  I kinda put all these things together.

Ben:  You do that every day?

Joe:  No, no, no.  Three times a week.

Ben:  Okay.  So just three times a week, you have certain days where you'll take these supplements to help you to detox.

Joe:  I don't think you should be doing that detox every day.  It's not a wise strategy.

Ben:  I tried that Cyto Detox every day and it just destroyed me.  I had to back off a little bit.

Joe:  Yeah.  You don't wanna do that.

Ben:  Okay.  Gotcha.  So I know that you garden, you have your house there on the beach, you've got all these kinda interesting biohacks.  What are some things that we haven't talked about that you think would be intriguing to people as far as practices that you have in your life that more people should know about in your opinion?

Joe:  Well, for a biohack, I use and I referred to it earlier, the continuous glucose monitoring made by Dexcom.  And Dan and his group of physicians, I think it there's about six or eight of us now who are gonna do this, and I've been doing it for about six months and it's really intriguing.  It's opened my eyes a lot.

Ben:  And this is the glucose monitor that you put underneath your skin and it does 24 hour glucose, is that correct?

Joe:  Yeah.  You change your sensor once a week.  But, yeah, it gives you continuous readout.  Now obviously that's freak radio figures coming out of your body, but I want the data.  I wanna know what type of food I'm eating that's gonna impact it.  So I learned a lot of great things from this.  It’s like we talked about fasting, I think fasting is great but ideally it’s intermittent fasting.  So how long do you intermittent fast?  When I initially learned about it, I was telling people breakfast is not the best meal of the day, it’s the worst.  Now, I reverse that position.  I think breakfast is an important meal, but the most important meal is the meal that you’re gonna consume before your biggest exertion of energy.  That when you need the biggest amount of calories.  So, I think if you’re gonna restrict calories to a 6 to 8 hour window, I think it’s most important that you restrict them before you go to bed at least 3 hours, maybe 4 or 5.  I actually go for 5 hours if I can, sometimes 6 before I go to bed.  Why?  Because you are the least metabolically active when you’re sleeping and why would you even think about putting fuel generally if you can’t use it?  That’s gonna clock up your system greatly.  Reactive oxygen species, secondary free radicals (crosstalk)

Ben:  I can answer that question if you wanna get swole…

Joe:  (laughs)

Ben:  Actually, when I was a bodybuilder, that’s what I would do.  [1:26:37] ______ to know with catsup and relish like 3 cans before bed.

Joe:  Yeah.  This is where we defer.  That is not right or wrong.  You wanna get swole, I wanna lift…

Ben:  I don’t wanna get swole anymore.  Now, my philosophy Jo, is I make no argument that doing an Ironman or Spartan, I’ll be doing Spartan Ultra Beast next month.  Twenty six miles of just 8-9 hours of suffering out, of course, I don’t argue that that is not potentially shurping a few hours if not days, if not weeks off my life.  I think my take on is we have to strike an ideal bounce between like living this limitless, bold, edgy, exciting life, but also not completely destroying ourselves as much as possible.  Getting and finding that balance between longevity and performance.

Joe:  Yeah.  It’s a key.  No question.

Ben:  For those people who are tempted or hard-wired to just wanna go out and don’t stop to compete…

Joe:  Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Right.  And then maybe a certain phase of your life, I certainly engage in that.  There’s no question.  I kinda regret it now but I did it, it was fine.  So, my other passion is what you’ve mentioned, when you have shared is regenerative agriculture.  So I live close to the beach and on the beach, and most of my soil is sand.  So a few years ago, I put half a million pounds of woodchips on there and it’s converted to some real nice deep soil, but before I put the chips on, I use something called biochar.  Have you heard of biochar?

Ben:  Biochar.  No.

Joe:  Yeah.  It’s incredible.  It was originally called Terra preta which was developed by this ancient Indians in South America thousands of years ago when they had the most fertile soil on the planet down there.  And you can actually buy some of that but it’s essentially when you decompose biomass anaerobically without oxygen.  It’s essentially like wrapping type carbon structures that formed this magnificent hotels for the microbiomes and the soil and will last for centuries.  So it’s incredible and I use this ionic ocean minerals as a foliar spray and I’m telling you, I’ve creating a lot of food in my plates.  I’ve got 60 fruit trees which is crazy, I’ve got olives, avocado, pecans, macadamias, mangoes, bananas, tangerines, figs, cherries, peaches, apricots, plums, mulberries, those are just the trees.  And these cherries I’ve got, I live in Florida so they’re called Barbados cherries but the other name is acerola cherries.  Have you ever heard of them?

Ben:  Oh yeah.  Absolutely.  Yeah.

Joe:  Unbelievable!  Ben, these trees produced 6 months out of the year.  I picked literally 50 to 70 or 80 cherries a day.  Each cherry has 80 mgs of vitamin C!

Ben:  Yeah, acerola cherries for vitamin C, they’re unparalleled.  But this biochars, are they basically like probiotics for the soil?

Joe:  No, no, no.  It’s not a probiotic.  It’s a structure that the bacteria and the other microbes in the soil can hang out.  It’s like a hotel for them.  So, by itself it’s not any good, it has to be sort of charge.  It doesn’t work right away.  It takes months, maybe years before it really gets inoculated with the microbes.  So what’s in there is unbelievable stuff.  I can send you some links of the book that’s just incredible.  Ideally it’s heavy, I put like 4 or 6 tons on my property into the soil and it basically will last almost your life.  It’s the fertilizer that never quits because the microbes are decomposing the nutrients in the soil and feeding the plants.  It’s all about optimizing the microbes in the soil.

Ben:  I’m looking at my window right now.  There are 8 raised garden beds and my wife is actually out there right now.  I’m wanna rush out at the door and tell her to get biochar and the ionic ocean minerals because…

Joe:  Well, the ionic ocean mineral is right away but the biochar, you have to integrate it into the soil and be careful.  Make sure it’s activated because you don’t want raw biochar, they’ll make things worse.  Now, for anyone listening in, they’ll say, “Wow! You can’t do that” Well, yes you can!  You can do things like sunflower seeds sprout which is 30 times more nutrient dense and even an organic vegetables in your wife’s raised beds.  So you can grow those in a college dorm room easily.

Ben:  Does the biochar or the soil conditioner, does it come with instructions on how to apply it properly so that you do indeed use it in a correct manner?

Joe:  Yeah.  It’s not that hard, you just look up on [1:30:58] ______ it’s pretty straight.  The major caution is that you don’t wanna use raw biochar.  It has to be ideally combined with compost and recharged ‘cause it’s not just good for the soil usually.

Ben:  Yeah.  We do a lot of compost.

Joe:  It’s incredible.  You can read miracles on biochar.  It last for centuries, it doesn’t give out.

Ben:  Okay.  Got you.  We have plenty of goat and chicken poop outside that my wife compost with food scraps from our kitchen and then I’ll talk about this biochar and she’s really keen on gardening and geeks out on these stuff all the time.  So, I think that she’s gonna really like this.

There are obviously (chuckles) hours and hours that we could cover on everything that you know…

Joe:  Well, let me just… One more thing that’s really good.  This last one is the brainwave entrainment that I mentioned earlier, the EEG, real time biofeedback.  But I know you’re really passionate about sleep, and I use a company called Clear Mind I think, and professionally I think it’s like 20,000 and their [1:31:58] ______ are like 6 or 7,000 or somewhere in that range, but maybe it’s $1500 but they’ve got this sounds in there.  I’m in the process of really seeing if they can make it inexpensive and just get people the sound waves but you put ‘em on these headphones, unbelievable!  These signals, they entrain your brain the waves to come down to delta and it’s like a half hour program, and I swear, I put it on like every night now.  Usually I don’t have problems when I sleep but literally in 10-15 minutes, I’m asleep and I wake up 2 hours later and realized that every time, it’s just that I never listen to the program ‘cause I’m just falling asleep.  It hit me to delta.  Boom!

Ben:  So, with Clear Mind, they would sell you like neurofeedback systems but what you’re saying is, all you’re doing is you’re just using like an audio that they have on their website?

Joe:  No, it’s not on their website.  It’s a homey, it’s called the focus unit that you can have this programs because basically they do an EEG recording like what you’re doing in a different company, where they take a trace scene of your brainwaves and then they get real time biofeedbacks that you can train those waves to be more optimal configuration which why I’m doing also.  I do that for about 30 minutes.

Ben:  Gotcha.  Now I see it.  It’s on their website.  The NI Focus Unit, the personal brain trainer for home or on the go.

Joe:  Right.

Ben:  Okay, cool.

Joe:  Yeah.  It’s just too expensive just to do that.  Just to do their 1 program, so I’m talking to the company to see if we can just sell that 1 unit for the sleeping ‘cause I can’t believe how effective it is.  I thought it was like almost magic.  It was just get you to go to sleep, it’s like instant.

Ben:  Yeah, I’m actually flying to LA tomorrow to spend a week at Peak Brain LA where we gonna be doing 3-4 hours of neurofeedback a day to basically re-wire use of my brain to have poor blood flow to the brain from everything from concussions to Spartan races, to life, to toxins in general, and then I come home with their little $20,000 god-cap or whatever you wanna call it that you train with for a long time thereafter.  It’s a long biohack.

Joe:  Yeah, that’s what Clear Mind cost too.  But the one last thing is when you’re flying to LA, use the Cyto detox.  Use it at a high level ‘cause that will definitely help the free radicals, no question about it.  But you know what’s gonna be better than that?  You and I are both gonna get it.  It’s not available yet but I think you know it.  The Quantlet.

Ben:  Oh the Quantlet bracelet.  Yes.

Joe:  Yeah, I’m getting one from Rubin next month.  He’s coming down.

Ben:  Yes.  I have a huge podcast on the Quantlet and I’ll link to that in the show notes.  This for those of you who are listening in, it basically exposes your blood to both light and cold, and it just sits on your wrist.

Joe:  And the cold is a form of magnetism.  It basically induces changes in your body.

Ben:  Cool.  I’ll link to that podcast as well.  Tons of stuff.  Tons of stuff…

Joe:  We just spend another 2 hours in it.  We didn’t have even the diets.  My major expertise.  We went all the other stuff but it’s okay.

Ben:  So first of all, for those of you listening in, Dr. Mercola will be back for sure.  I guarantee it, I will twist his arm.  I actually planning on going down and seeing him in Florida at some point in the next few months.  So it might even be in one of those fun little face to face podcast that you guys get to listen into every now and again.  So in the meantime though, if you want to delve into the all the goodness that we went through in today’s episode, everything from biochar to the Starting Strength book, to the water filters, to blue light blocking glasses, everything we talked about along with Dr. Minkoff. (chuckles) Dr. Minkoff’s episode will be in there too but Dr. Mercola, there’s two Dr. M’s I talked to these days.  All of that, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/mercola, that’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/mercola and check it out.  And I would also highly encourage you to go to mercola.com as well and check out their newsletter, check out some of the articles.  There’s tons of cutting edge stuff over there if you didn’t get the idea that Jo’s on the cutting edge, you now know that he is.

So Joe, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Joe:  All right.  Well, thanks Ben.  Looking forward for connecting with you.

Ben:  Yes, personally.  I will be in Florida.

Joe:  Good luck on your race, and definitely take that cyto detox when you’re on the plane.  It’s one of the probably the most important ways to protect yourself, and you got it.  So use it.

Ben:  It will go into my bag.  It’ll be packed tonight.

Joe:  That’s good.

Ben:  Alright folks.  Well, thanks for listening in.  I’m Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Joseph Mercola, signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.  Have a healthy week!

You’ve been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.  Go to bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

 

 

There are very few people who I consider to be personal mentors, extremely trustworthy individuals in my life who I can look to for fitness, health and longevity advice, or people who I think put out truly “cutting-edge” health information.

Dr. Joseph Mercola is one of those people.

Dr. Mercola is a board certified family physician who had seen tens of thousands of patients before transitioning to a full time internet journalist, as he felt he could help far more people than he could in private practice.

It turns out he was right…because every month he has ten million unique visitors and 80 million unique visitors each year. Mercola.com has been the most visited natural health site for the last 12 years and is now translated into six different languages.

Dr. Mercola’s passion is optimizing mitochondrial health, and during today’s discussion, you’ll discover:

-How Dr. Mercola built Mercola.com into one of the most popular health websites in the world…[14:00]

-Dr. Mercola’s unique system that allows him to digest dozens of books each month while taking a quarter billion+ steps over his lifetime…[19:15]

-Why you should wear blue light blocking glasses during the day, not just at night…[24:30]

-How to ground your computer and keep your laptop and monitor from destroying your health…[26:35 & 35:20]

-Why Dr. Mercola eats both seafood and one surprising compound found in seafood every day of the week…[29:20]

-The little-known biohacks Dr. Mercola uses to maximize his mitochondrial density…[36:50]

-Why scrambled eggs are very bad for you, and what you can do about it…[41:30]

-The myth about iron levels and a crucial test you must take to keep iron from “rusting out” your body…[53:55]

-The best book Dr. Mercola has ever read on strength training, and how he combines it with a special hack called “EWOT”…[20:20 & 79:10]

-Dr. Mercola’s take on whether or not quantification devices like rings and wristbands are good or bad for you, and what he personally uses…[60:45]

-Why Dr. Mercola limits protein intake, and how he strikes a balance between anti-aging effects of muscle and aging effects of too much protein…[67:30]

-How to make your own “anti-aging” cocktail…[72:30]

-A unique one-two combo you can use prior to saunas to maximize your detoxification, fat burn and fat cell death…[75:10]

-Two ingredients Dr. Mercola sprinkles on his garden soil to get 10x+ production of cherries, organic produce and more…[87:40]

-The liquid dropper that Dr. Mercola takes on every airplane ride…[94:10]

-And much more!

Resources from this episode:

–Tripping Over The Truth

–My interview with Dr. Minkoff “Why You’ve Been Lied To About Cancer”

–Cronometer.com/mercola

–My podcast with Dr. Mercola’s girlfriend Erin Elizabeth on Lyme disease

-The book “Deskbound” by Kelly Starrett

–Negative ion generator

–Eizo computer monitor

–Iristech software for reducing blue light on monitors

–Swannies stylish blue light blocking glasses

–Laptop grounding cable

–Organic fish roe

–Induction burner for cooking foods at low heat

–DIY Exercise With Oxygen Therapy

–HARAPad anti-radiation laptop pad

–FindASpring.com

–Whole House Charcoal Water Filter

–GreenfieldNaturals.com structured water filter (use 15% discount code “friendofben”)

–Tank-free reverse osmosis filter with remineralization

–Neobdyium magnet

–Ionic ocean minerals

–Human Heart, Cosmic Heart: A Doctor’s Quest to Understand, Treat, and Prevent Cardiovascular Disease

–Gerald Pollack’s book “The 4th Phase Of Water”

–Dumping Iron: How to Ditch This Secret Killer and Reclaim Your Health

–DeltaSleeper SR1 Device

–Oura ring

–Magnetico sleep pad

–Ben’s article on strength training and anti-aging

–Ben’s article on using NAD+ and pau d’ arco bark tea for anti-aging

-This one-two combination of d-Ribose and niacin pre-sauna

–Ben’s article on “hacking your sauna”.

–Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe

–Quicksilver Scientific IMD Intestinal Cleanse (use GREENFIELD15 to save 15%)

–Biochar

–Clearmind NI focus unit

–Ben’s podcast on the Quantlet 

Do you have questions, comments or feedback for Dr. Mercola or me? Leave your thoughts below and one of us will reply!

————————-

Addendum: Ben’s notes on the DeltaSleeper/PEMF discussion:

The info below regarding the “Ramazzini Team” study on PEMF and cancer does not take a genius to figure out. The Ramazzini team followed what is commonly known as an initiation-promotion protocol. Male and female Sprague-Dawley rats were exposed in their mothers’ wombs and then for the rest of their lives to 50 Hz magnetic fields at an intensity of either 20μT or 1,000μT (200 mG or 10 G). At the age of six weeks, they each received a single 0.1Gy dose of gamma radiation, a known cancer agent.

So let’s take a look at what we have here.

1. The six week old rats were given a single 0.1 Gy dose of Gamma radiation. A KNOWN cancer agent. Gamma rays are classified as ionizing. This means they have the power to cause permanent cellular damage. See Below: Primer on Electromagnetic Fields.
2. They were exposed continuously for the rest of their lives to 50Hz magnetic fields at either 200 milliGauss or 10 Gauss fields. This is completely unnatural. The Earth’s magnetic field is 3-6 milliGaus (0.3-0.6 Gauss). The SR1 creates a field exactly within this natural range. I don’t believe the 50Hz magnetic pulse itself would cause any damage however the SR1 device provides a much lower frequency pattern.

So basically, these rats did not stand a chance of not developing cancer.

Further into the report we find the following from Fiorella Belpoggi, the Scientific Director of the Institute who notes that:

“No Cancer Seen with EMFs Alone”

In an interview, Belpoggi said that they are planning to publish the results of a concurrent experiment in which rats were exposed to power-frequency EMFs, without any other treatment. “In our preliminary data, ELF EMFs alone didn’t appear to show an increase of cancer in experimental animals so far,” she disclosed. “The main result of our experiment,” she said, is that “ELF EMFs have a synergistic effect: They are able to enhance the effects of a well-known carcinogen at low doses that was negative at those doses in the same experimental model.”

It’s important to understand the difference between EMF’s in something like a DeltaSleeper and EMF’s from higher power devices, so keep reading…

EMFs are classified as ionizing or non-ionizing according to their frequency.  Ionizing fields have very short wavelengths and frequencies between 10¹⁶ Hz. and 10²³ Hz. These fields are above visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum (10¹⁵ Hz.) and include cosmic rays, gamma rays and X-rays which have the power to knock electrons off their nuclear orbits and cause permanent cellular damage.

Non-ionizing fields have longer wavelengths and frequencies below 10¹⁴ Hz.  Although they have less power than ionizing fields they are still capable of having biologic effects.

Important EMF modalities in medicine today are non-thermal applications of non-ionizing radiation. Medical applications of non-thermal, non-ionizing EM fields include non-union fracture bone repair, neuronal stimulation, nerve stimulation, tissue regeneration, immune system stimulation, osteoarthritis therapy, wound healing etc.

Non-ionizing fields are classified as thermal, which means in biological terms, causes gross tissue heating, or non-thermal, indicating no gross tissue heating is involved.

And the SR1 Device is a non-ionizing, non-thermal device. Furthermore, is switched on for just 22 minutes per use.

The Earth’s magnetic field ranges from 0.3 Gauss – 0.6 Gauss. The SR1 Device field strength falls within this range. They are in effect “Copying Nature” with that technology.