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You guys, if you listen to this podcast, no ham porn, I think sleep is.
We've had so many conversations on this show about it,
including the sleep doctor we had on recently in Matthew Walker twice.
And as a result, it's become my top priority.
But it's not just how long you sleep.
It's how well you sleep, too.
And a big part of that comes down to your mattress.
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And they also offer a limited lifetime warranty and clearly whatever they're doing is working.
Because a study they ran showed that 82% of people who slept on a helix mattress
had an increase in their deep sleep cycle.
So if you want to give them a try, head to helixleap.com slash diary for a limited time offer.
We are being bombarded with disrupting chemicals.
A lot of them, they're in our products.
OK, let's go to my kitchen. Come with me.
So this is my fridge.
So the first thing I noticed is this, because that's like the worst.
Can I get a bin bag?
This is made from recycled electronics.
What about this?
This is a problem also.
And this thing thing, this is great.
I'm going to do utensils next.
Heating it up, the plastic.
It's getting into your food.
What about a receipt?
That's bad.
It's covered with BPA and studying adolescent boys.
Show that it was associated with a 50% reduction in testosterone.
And then this is one that people often miss.
The biomedical scientist and anti-aging doctor, Ronda Patrick, is back.
This time, she's talking about health optimization, maintaining peak performance
and the environmental toxins disrupting your body.
Dr. Ronda Patrick, let's talk about something that I've never heard of before.
Peak span.
What the hell is peak span?
So it's essentially being within 90% of your peak function.
For example, muscle mass bone density.
That kind of peaks around 25 years old.
And then they kind of steadily start to decline.
You joking.
And the same goes for cognitive function.
Swarm on the way down.
Yeah.
And I'm definitely on the way down.
But we can do things in our lives to help maintain that peak span.
Like if you exercise five hours a week, do some high intensity interval training in there.
And you can reverse heart aging by 20 years.
And then sleep very, very important for preventing your immune system from aging rapidly.
And then other thing that you can do that's really important for brain aging is...
And this is associated with a rapid decrease in Alzheimer's disease risk.
But what I really want to talk about is intermittent fasting,
a zumbac supplements, and being sedentary.
So don't want to talk about all of that.
But we've got to talk about this in my hands at the moment.
So if you have this, it's going to double your risk of early mortality.
Double your risk.
Double.
Okay, so talk me through this.
I want as much detail as possible.
Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins.
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Thank you so, so, so much.
Dr. Ronda Patrick, I am fascinated by so many of the things that you talked about.
And they're front of my mind for me at the moment because I'm a 33 year old man.
And I know from doing this podcast and looking at graphs like this one, which we'll talk about today,
which I don't think most people have ever seen in their lives, that this is the age where
things might start changing direction from here on over the next decade.
And there's things I can do to set myself up now.
If I listen to your advice for the remaining decades of my life to be remarkably different,
I'm playing with this in my hands at the moment.
It's for anyone that can't see, you should probably look at the screen right now.
It's a yellow blob of squidgy, slightly disgusting material.
What is this?
And why does this matter?
So this represents visceral fat.
It's something that most people haven't heard of.
Many people have heard of fat.
They know fat is bad, but they don't realize there are different kinds of fat.
There is visceral fat.
And this is the kind of fat that you can't really pinch at a post-issue kind of fat, right?
I mean, if you opened up your body, you could pinch it because it's deep, deep within your body.
It's often referred to as belly fat.
And it's surrounding your organs, like your liver, your kidney, you know, your intestines.
This is a very deep belly fat.
And it's very different from subcutaneous fat.
You can actually be lean, but have a high amount of visceral fat.
We call these metabolically unhealthy people.
So visceral fat, you mentioned your 33.
The average 33-year-old male has how much visceral fat.
According to the data, it says roughly 1.2 pounds at the age of 30,
and then for a woman, 0.5 pounds of visceral fat at the age of 30.
At 40, it's 1.7 pounds for a man, and 0.7 pounds for a woman, at 50, 2.2 pounds for a man,
1 pound for a woman, and at 60, 2.7 pounds of visceral fat, and 1.4 pounds for a woman,
which is the highest risk for metabolic syndromes at that age.
But I mean, older than a pretty scar.
It is. And as you notice, the trend is, as you get older,
you have a higher risk of having more of it.
70% of women over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat.
50% of men over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat.
This visceral fat, for one, it's going to double your risk of early mortality.
Full stop. That's, you know, it's going to double your risk.
Double your risk.
Double, double.
Visceral fat is, as I mentioned, different from the other kind of fat.
This subcutaneous kind of fat, the adipose tissue kind of fat, in several ways.
One is that it is metabolically active.
It is secreting inflammatory cytokines.
These are, you know, molecules that are signaling to the immune system,
but they're also involved with damaging ourselves.
And for this reason, people with a high amount of visceral fat are 44% more likely
to get metastatic cancer.
That's cancer that's going to metastasize.
Very dangerous type of cancer.
They're also more likely, you mentioned metabolic syndrome.
This is a big, big thing with visceral fat.
This type of fat is constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids.
It's constantly doing it.
What's triglycerides?
triglycerides are how your body is able to store fatty acids and fat,
and use them for later, you know, energy, right?
So they're constantly breaking them down and using them.
They're using these fatty acids.
But typically what happens in your body, when you eat a meal,
you have your glucose levels go up, right?
Your blood sugar elevates, your glucose levels go up.
And that signals to the pancreas in your body to make insulin.
Insulin is this hormone that plays a role in many things.
One of it is to tell different parts of the body to take glucose up,
like your liver, your muscle, your out-of-post tissue.
Well, the problem is, is this visceral fat is constantly making those free fatty acids.
And so those fatty acids, it doesn't respond, this, we call it, it's not really an organ,
but this type of fat doesn't respond to insulin.
So whereas the subcutaneous fat will stop breaking down fat and using fat as energy,
he says, okay, look, I have energy here.
I got to do something with this energy.
Let me store it for later use, right?
Well, that doesn't happen with visceral fat.
What happens is it just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going.
What happens is when your visceral fat is metabolically active like fat,
it is basically making it where insulin can't work its job.
And so what happens is that glucose can't go into your liver,
it stays in your blood system.
And you really want it to be stored in your liver, right?
I want it to be stored in your liver as glycogen to be used as energy when you're fasting,
or when you're, you know, physically active, or whenever you need it, right?
Also in your muscle, same thing, stored as glycogen,
or stored in your adipose tissue.
And so none of that happens because insulin, it's not able to basically act on your organs.
It's, there's no signal.
So nobody's getting the phone call, hey, time to take the glucose up.
It's not happening, right?
So the glucose sits around.
So what happens is your body freaks out because it's not good to have glucose sitting
around in your bloodstream for a while.
It causes a lot of damage, right?
And so what happens is your body makes even more insulin to try to overcompensate.
Your body goes, oh, maybe that wasn't enough insulin because, you know,
the glucose isn't coming in to the organs, like the liver, like it's supposed to.
So let me put some more out.
And for anyone that doesn't know, insulin is kind of like the taxi driver
that goes and picks up the glucose and takes it home.
Right. Exactly.
It's taking it home.
It's taking it back to the liver.
And so what happens when you make more insulin,
you're overcompensating in such a way that now glucose really does get taken up into
these other organs, like the liver.
And it so much so that it causes your blood glucose levels to go down and you're crashing.
And all of a sudden, this is responsible for that, you know, people that eat a meal
and they're kind of insulin resistant, they eat a meal.
And then all of a sudden, they're crashing an hour later.
We're like, why am I, why do I have no energy?
Why am I hungry, right?
Because when you're after you crash, your blood glucose levels go down.
That's what I mean by crashing really far down, not normal levels, but like below that.
And so then your body tries to overcompensate by going, oh, I'm hungry.
I need to eat.
And so you start to have these cravings for like energy dense foods.
And that's part of this cycle of the beginnings of insulin resistance.
And so when I'm talking about here with visceral fat,
it causes insulin resistance.
And that's essentially the take home here by it's constantly metabolizing fatty acids.
It's stopping that taxi car from going and getting the glucose.
It's not happening.
It's not responding.
You're not picking up the driver, right?
And so you become insulin resistant.
And that has a lot of problems.
One, it's going to affect your immediate energy levels.
It's going to affect the way you're feeling.
And two, it's going to make you more likely to become type 2 diabetic.
Because eventually your body won't be able to produce enough insulin to bring the glucose in.
And so then you become type 2 diabetic.
So that is a big consequence of having this visceral fat.
In addition to those inflammatory molecules that are being generated from this fat,
it's just so metabolically active.
And that inflammation that you're generating not only does things like raise your cancer risk by 44%,
it also makes you tired.
It gives you brain fog, lethargy.
When your immune system is being activated by this inflammation,
you're taking energy away from your brain.
It's a lot of energy to activate your immune system.
And so that energy is now going to the wrong place.
It's not going to your brain.
So you can feel you won't feel cognitively sharp and...
Absolutely won't.
Just think about when you have an infection.
Your immune system is very active.
You're fighting off a pathogen, right?
Do you feel like you're tired or do you feel like your cognitively at your peak?
Yeah, I'm out of action for several days usually.
Right, you're tired and your brain isn't working.
And part of that reason is because your activation of your immune system
is sucking energy away from your brain.
And the other reason is because the inflammation being generated gets into the brain
and disrupts neurotransmitters and things like that.
It's like a double whammy.
Your brain isn't working properly.
And so there's a lot of people walking around constantly feeling tired,
feeling lethargic, feeling brain fog.
And they might have a high amount of visceral fat and not even know it.
So typically...
Looking at the data, I mean most people have too much visceral fat.
Most people do have too much visceral fat.
And typically a really high amount is...
I would say a proxy for it would be measuring your waist circumference.
So like if women have a waist circumference of 35 inches or greater,
that is a sign of too much visceral fat.
If men have a waist circumference of 40 inches or more,
that is a sign of too much visceral fat.
Ideally you would go and get what's called a DEXA scan.
Now this is not something that's routinely done.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be done unless you're that person
that really likes to go the extra mile and directly measure things.
That would be another way to do it.
You really want to have below 300 grams of visceral fat.
Ideally, closer to zero, the better.
Me and my friend went and got a DEXA scan done.
And the remarkable thing is I weigh a lot more than him.
And I'm much bigger than him.
He's skinny.
But after the DEXA scan,
they said that he had too much visceral fat.
Which I thought you must be like big or obese to have visceral fat.
But he's a skinny guy.
And the DEXA scan said too much visceral fat.
Yes, that's the thing.
I was involved in clinical research for many years
when I was doing my postgraduate training.
And we were looking at populations of people
that were metabolically unhealthy,
maybe overweight, obese in some cases.
And you would have someone come in that they looked skinny,
they looked like they were metabolically healthy
because they weren't overweight.
And yet, all of their biomarker data was showing the opposite.
Like they looked on paper.
If you would have shown me their metabolic data,
I would go, oh, this is an overweight obese person.
So these are lean but metabolically unhealthy people
and a large percentage of that has to do with an increase in visceral fat.
You won't even necessarily know that you're getting
higher amounts of visceral fat.
It's not necessarily going to be reflected on the scale.
You know, you mentioned maybe a pound,
maybe a little bit more.
That's like daily fluctuation in some cases, right?
Like, I mean, I don't know about you,
but I can fluctuate a pound from day to day, for sure.
If you're talking about 500 grams or less,
that's not going to be reflected on the scale either.
You might be going, well, what?
Why visceral fat?
What's causing visceral fat?
You know, I mentioned age.
That's a big one.
Hormones is a big one.
Women are very susceptible as they go through
paramanopause and menopause because estrogen actually helps tell the body
how to store energy and it tells it to store energy and fat
in adipose tissue not viscerally.
So when your estrogen starts to go down during
paramanopause and then menopause,
women really start to gain a lot of this belly fat.
They gain a lot of the visceral fat.
Testosterone also, it doesn't tell the body how to store the fat so much.
It helps you burn visceral fat.
So men are a little bit more protected when they're younger as well.
But as they age, of course,
testosterone goes down as well and that affects the visceral fat.
But mostly it's our diet and our lifestyle that's really affecting visceral fat.
It's kind of mind blowing how quickly you can gain visceral fat.
There was, sleep is a big one.
When you miss sleep, that is something that can really
you can start to store.
You can start to gain visceral fat very quickly.
There was a study in healthy young men.
These men were sleep restricted,
typically when sleep restriction studies are done,
you're looking at four hours of sleep per night.
So pretty severe.
Not out of the ordinary.
I did many of those college graduate school deadlines.
Definitely as a new parent.
I mean, it's unfortunately drags on for months.
So these men were only supposed to be four hours a night for two weeks.
Healthy young men, college age students, okay, young.
They gained 11% visceral fat after that two weeks,
but not a pound on the scale.
But they had 11% higher visceral fat after just
two weeks of not getting enough sleep.
And they weighed the same.
Pretty much.
So it was the composition of that body that's shifting?
Yes.
Also the visceral fat, like I said,
you're not gaining pounds and pounds and pounds of it necessarily.
You're gaining grams and grams.
But it's happening and any amount that you're starting to gain
is unhealthy, right?
It's going to start causing insulin resistance.
It's going to start causing fatty liver.
That's another thing.
It does it because it's around the liver.
It basically the liver doesn't know what to do with all the fat.
So it starts to make and store it around the fat.
And so you start to get this non-alcoholic fatty liver,
which is happening now in like young people.
So sleep is one.
Another major, major, I would say,
lever for gaining visceral fat is your diet,
quality and quantity.
So if you start to be in a caloric excess constantly,
you can start to gain visceral fat.
And that's also been shown in studies.
So there was a recent study that again was in healthy young men
given about 1,200 extra calories a day.
And it was mostly from ultra-process foods, right?
I mean, there are 1,200 calories, so like,
big mac and a coke, big mac and fries, whatever.
So you're talking about almost like an extra meal a day.
And from processed foods, ultra-process foods.
For five days, they were given this extra caloric intake.
After that five days, they started to gain visceral fat.
They started to have signs of fatty liver after five days.
And their brains became insulin resistant.
And this is important.
Yes, you know, how many calories were they having in excess?
1,200 to 1,500.
In excess.
More than what they were usually going to eat.
Yes, yes.
So, you know, it's a lot of people are eating caloric excess daily.
They're not exercising and there's no energy expenditure.
And they're eating more.
And so they're in, you know, 1,200.
Now, this is the extreme end, right?
I'm giving you in the extreme end because that's what they do usually in
studies like this because they want to get a significant result.
But after five days, they were gaining visceral fat.
Their brains became insulin resistant.
So insulin is also very important for the brain.
The brain is telling the body how to store the fat and how to store energy.
And when insulin's not able to get into the brain and have its action,
then you start to not have the brain tell the body how to store this energy.
And it ends up storing it viscerally.
It's like this default.
Do you know what putting those two things together, the thing I've noticed
that impacts my performance the most as it relates to articulation,
cognitive performance, mobility to think,
is those two things coming together.
You talked about sleep and diet.
It's when I eat late.
It's when I eat close to sleep.
If I do that a couple of nights in a row,
I feel like my brain no longer works.
Yes, yeah.
You know, obviously we all have to like live our lives and there's social things
and it's fun to go out and have a dinner with your friends or an event, right?
But it's not a good idea to eat a meal,
a big meal, three hours before, fewer than three hours before bed.
So you want to stop eating three hours before bed.
And three is really the magic number in multiple studies.
Because when you eat a meal, it is activating your sympathetic nervous system,
right?
That's the fight or flight response.
That's not what you want active when you're about to go to bed.
When you're activating the sympathetic nervous system right before you're going to bed,
let's say you eat a meal within an hour of bedtime.
You're digesting all that.
It's your sympathetic nervous system's active.
And even if you're sleeping,
it's not good sleep.
It's fragmented sleep.
And so it's disrupted sleep because you need to be in that parasympathetic
part of the nervous system that dominance needs to be parasympathetic,
which is the rest, restore.
It's called rest and digest.
But I don't like digest because actually digesting is what activates the sympathetic nervous system.
So it's like the recovery, right?
So should I stay up then for three hours?
If I eat at midnight, should I stay up to 3 a.m.?
No, no.
You should just go to bed.
But don't do it on a daily basis, right?
I mean, the key is the habit, you know, the habit.
And so if you need to eat something before bed,
you should do something that's light, maybe a protein shake with some almond milk,
you know, something that's not super heavy.
I've heard you talk about fiber.
Resistance starch does interestingly seem to help improve sleep.
And so, you know, maybe some rice or potato,
a little bit of rice or potato.
It's fries or something.
Maybe not a fried potato baked baked potato and then cool it because then it's
resistance starch, right?
Because then it's good for your, your gut microbiome.
Why?
It changes the composition of the fiber.
And you can cook it, let it cool, and then heat it again if you like to eat it,
heat it as long as it went through a cooling part, and then you can eat it.
But that's resistance starch.
Resistance starch is also in green bananas, very beneficial for the gut and also for
interestingly for improving sleep.
So things that are really moving the needle to make you gain visceral fat are basically being
in a caloric excess, especially from refined high fat, high sugar foods.
And then not getting enough sleep, move the needle.
Chronic stress is an amplifier of it.
So if you're constantly having cortisol,
that's kind of stopping the body from storing energy right the right way and it's going
viscerally as well.
I would say that amplifies, especially if it's like in the context of being in a caloric
excess and not exercising.
Alcohol is another one if you drink, if you're excessively consuming alcohol,
you're going to store a lot of the energy that you're also consuming is going to be stored
visceral. I mean, you've seen the beer belly, right? I mean, that's like a thing.
It's visceral fat, it's not beer, it's visceral fat.
So alcohol is another one.
In terms of losing visceral fat, I mean, the good news is is that you can lose it quite easily
and quite rapidly.
So you're going to say parents have a hard time because you're naming those things about like
sleep and stress and I was thinking, gosh, parents have like a, have it coming from them
from all sides?
They do. But see, this is where the good news comes in because part of the reason why sleep
is causing you to gain more visceral sleep loss is causing you to gain visceral fat is because
it's causing your body to become insulin resistant. It's like this viscous cycle.
Visceral fat causes insulin resistance, insulin resistance causes more visceral fat,
right? And that's why once you get into that cycle, it just spirals out of control, right?
And you start to gain more and more and more.
Sorry, insulin resistance. What is that? That is when your body no longer produces insulin?
No, no. Insulin resistance is when your body is no longer responding to insulin.
So it's like, it's like you're waiting for the phone to ring and it's ringing, but you can't hear
it, right? Like you're not getting the signal. And so your, your cells are not responding to the insulin
that's made. Insulin is really helping your body bring, move the glucose out, right? Move it,
move it out of your bloodstream where it can cause a lot of damage if it sits around.
And if you put too much pressure, pressure on the insulin system, then it kind of shuts down.
Eventually shuts down. And the thing that puts too much pressure is consuming too much glucose
or too much activity? Too much glucose refined glucose can do that. Visceral fat is one of the,
I would say, bigger causes of insulin resistance. It's actually one of the major, major causes of
insulin resistance because if you are physically active and eating a lot of glucose, that glucose
is going to your muscles. Physical activity makes your muscles very responsive to glucose without
needing insulin. You're the transporters that transport glucose are super, super responsive
when you exercise. It's like physical activity. And this is what I was getting out with parents
is so important. The visceral fat is the really big like concern with insulin resistance. This is,
and this is the thing that again, it's like people don't even know about it. A lot of people
are thinking about glucose and oh, I got to watch my glucose. And that's all fine. I mean, yes,
to some degree, that's also playing a role. But it's the visceral fat that's the real underlying
problem that's causing you to become insulin resistant. You mentioned parents have it like bad
because they're stressed out and they don't get sleep. I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor
when I became a new mother. I was appalled by my fasting blood glucose and by my post-prandial
blood glucose levels. Post-prandial means after a meal. So your levels go obviously much higher
after you eat a meal versus in the morning when you haven't had anything to eat. And my levels were
so high, it was pre-diabetic. And I was just, I couldn't believe it. It's not like I'm eating,
you know, drinking coax and eating terrible, right? But there was a period of time when I'm not as
physically active, particularly in the first couple of months. It's really, you know, that's the time
when you're kind of just in this cave. I immediately was looking into the scientific literature
and found that high-intensity interval training and exercise can help almost negate most of those
poor effects of causing insulin resistance and causing your glucose regulation to not be normal.
That's the good news for parents is that you should prioritize, new parents should prioritize
exercise. And exercise does cause you to lose visceral fat. It's not just any type of exercise,
it really has to be aerobic. And the more vigorous, the better.
So for people that don't know what that means, aerobic and vigorous.
Yeah. So what I mean is resistance training and lifting weights don't really move the needle
in terms of helping you lose visceral fat. It does help you improve your metabolism. It does help
with like glucose, you know, sensitivity and all that like because your muscles are going to be
more sensitive to take the glucose in. But if you want to lose visceral fat, you're going to have
to do running, jogging, cycling, swimming. You want to like get your heart rate up a little more.
Why? It's energy expenditure. It plays a role in getting you to that caloric more caloric deficit.
And that's better. So that's one way. And the other thing is weight, any weight loss program.
So intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, you know, even GLP1 receptor agonist and all the
classes of GLP1. Anything that is going to make you lose weight, lose fat, visceral fat is one of
the first to go. And in fact, people on these weight loss programs or even on exercise training
program, visceral fat is the first fat to go. And so you can lose it quite, quite quickly.
So on this point of fasting, are you a fan of fasting to combat visceral fat? And also,
could you give me your thoughts on being in a ketogenic state as it relates to visceral fat?
Yeah. People when they think about intermittent fasting, they kind of think about, you know,
one thing and they think about weight loss, right? But there's a lot going on here. And I like that
you mentioned being in a ketogenic state because there's also a metabolic switch that happens.
This metabolic switch from burning carbohydrates and glucose to burning fatty acids and getting
in ketosis, right? That's a metabolic switch. It's very important. There are two different
things happening here. But intermittent fasting is essentially a good tool that people can use to
reduce their calorie intake without having to count their calories. That's why I like it.
You can, you can lose weight by counting your calories and reducing your calorie intake.
I personally think that's a lot of work. Some people love doing it and that's great. I think
whatever works for a person. But the way in which intermittent fasting helps people lose visceral fat
is by reducing calorie intake. That's what I'm getting at. It's like a tool that some people like to
use because I like it for one because I can not think, I just, I'll skip one meal,
making sure I get enough nutrients in the meals that I eat and protein in the meals I eat.
But I'll skip a meal and it gets me in a caloric deficit without having to think about
and count everything. So it's easier on me. To fast. To fast versus counting calories.
And how do you do that? So I like to fast in the morning. And the reason I like to fast in the
morning is for the exact reason you mentioned. And that is the ketosis, which I like to call
the metabolic switch. You're not eating while you're sleeping, obviously. So if you're sleeping for
eight, if you're in bed for nine hours, 10 hours, you're not eating during that time. And it takes
about 10 to 12 hours for your liver to deplete glycogen. glucose that's been taken up by the liver
is stored as glycogen so that you can then use it for energy later if you don't have energy coming
in, right? So the glycogen is like the petrol station. Yes. So it runs out of petrol. That's right.
And so it takes switches to diesel. And that's which is to diesel. And so after that switch,
that metabolic switch, when you deplete that glycogen while you're sleeping or while you're not,
you know, not eating after about 12 hours. And by the way, this is all relative because it depends
on the kind of foods you eat and how physically active you are. So if you eat a lot of high
carbohydrate refined sugar stuff, you might take even longer to deplete your glycogen because you're
you're putting a lot of input in there. You keep filling up the fuel tank, right? But if you're
eating things that are more low carb, you might deplete your glycogen sooner. So when you deplete
your glycogen, you get into this metabolic switch because your body still needs energy. But there's
no nothing. No glucose around, right? So you start to switch to, you know, your fatty acids are
mobilized. They come out of your adipose tissue. This is why people lose fat. They come out of the
visceral fat. You start to use those fatty acids and burn them as energy. And as a product of that
energy, you're making ketones ketosis. And the reason I like to do this in the morning is because
then I can really get into that ketotic state where if I'm fasting, I do it typically. I fast
for about 16 hours a day. And then I eat my meals within eight hours of a day. Typically, that's my
what I do. The reason I like to be in that metabolic switch state is many reasons actually. One,
the ketones themselves are providing my brain with energy, very easily-utilizable energy.
But they're also acting as a signaling molecule to my brain going, hey, this is a stressful time.
There's no food. You better be cognitively sharp. You got to find that food. You got to like know
what you're doing, right? It's an evolutionary adaptation, you know, humans for thousands of years
were going through this metabolic switch because we didn't have Instacart. We didn't have postmates.
We didn't have all Uber Eats, right? We had to find our food. We had to hunt our food. And we
always didn't always do that, right? And so when I get into that metabolic switch state, I feel it.
I feel more cognitively sharp. And I feel less anxious, which is part of it because those ketones
also help increase something called GABA. That's an inhibitory neurotransmitter. It's essentially
you can just think of it as like it helps you feel calmer. When I feel calmer, I'm more cognitively
focused because it's like the background anxiety is down, right? It's like you can focus. And so I
love being in that state in the morning because that's when I get my work done. I also like to be
in that metabolic switch state. And this is why I like fasting in addition to, you know, the calorie,
the fewer calories I'm consuming, right? Your body has to be in that fasted state to repair.
If you're constantly in a fed state, fed states are important for anabolic growth. We need it to
grow, right? But the repair state is also very important because with the growth comes damage.
Damage comes along with that. And you want to repair that damage because damage will accelerate
aging. And so I like to be and give my body enough time. I don't want to just wake up and eat where
it's like, oh, I've only barely depleted my liver glycogen. I might even in that repair state very
long, right? I want to extend it a little bit. And so I like to have that repair process active.
And that it is active during, it's fasting activates it. But also you have some amount of active
repair going on even when you're in a fed state. It's just heightened when you're fasted. So those are
the reasons I like to be, I like intermittent fasting. I feel good when I do it. I also do a lot
of training, not all of it. I do a lot of training fasted cardiovascular aerobic endurance exercise
or running, biking, that stuff. I like to do fasted. I'm not going for a 10 mile run. I'm going
for a three mile run, right? I mean, this is, so if I was going for a 10 mile run, I wouldn't be
fasted. I would need some fuel. But there are studies, multiple studies showing that if you do aerobic
endurance training, this kind of running, cycling, swimming, type of training, you actually have
better adaptations if you're fasted versus fed. What does that mean? So much of the benefit from
exercise, aerobic exercise when you're breathing in, you're working hard, is from the working hard,
but your body responds to that, because the working hard is causing inflammation. It's causing
oxidative damage. And your body is responding to that by going, oh, we got to get better at this
stuff. So you have anti-inflammatory pathways activated. You have antioxidant pathways activated.
Your body needs to burn fat. You need fuel. And so if you're fasted, you get better at
burning the fat and oxidizing the fat. And you continue to do that throughout the day better as
well. So you have what are called mitochondrial adaptations that are better. You make more mitochondria,
mitochondria are a very important little tiny organelles inside of most of our cells that make
energy. And they, you know, they're very important for everything. I mean, they're running our
brains right now so we can talk, our heart, you know, so we can breathe, our lungs, everything,
right? And so exercise does make you increase the amount of those new mitochondria that you make
that are young and healthy. If you're fasted. Both, even if you're not, but if you're fasted,
it's even better. This has been a big debate around whether this applies to both men and women.
Should both men and women exercise fasted? This is my read of the literature and my thoughts on this
from also having experts that have studied male versus female responses to exercise. First and
foremost, how do you feel when you exercise fasted? If you feel terrible, that's a sign. I think
listening into your body is the most important thing that you can do. There are times when I have to
eat before I exercise. And I listen to my body. I, that's it. I'm, I'm going to eat. When it comes
to women versus men and doing exercise fasted, it also depends on are you, again, are you doing a
30 minute run? Are you doing a two hour run? If you're doing a two hour run, you need to fuel. That's
a lot. That's a big stress. When it comes to a 30 minute run, you don't really necessarily
need to. Now, the problem with women is that they're often, if you're in too much of a caloric
deficit and you don't eat enough food within, you know, like afterwards, you're not refueling
enough and you're doing very, very long high volume types of exercise, then you can basically
disrupt your, you know, some of your hormones, your, your follicle stimulating hormone,
luteinizing hormone, these things will make you become amenoretic. So you basically stop
ovulating and you stop getting your menstrual period. And what's the evolutionary reason for that?
What's going on there? Because your body's like, there's not enough food and energy around
to sustain a bait, you know, a growing fetus. Like, they're growing baby. So it's, so it's basically
like, hey, we're not going to allow you to have a baby, basically. So you stop, you stop ovulating,
right? So you can't, you're not making, you're not making those eggs. Is this often the case with
women who exercise a lot and no longer have their menstrual cycle? First of all, it's not a common
thing. This is like, this is something that happens in, you know, like athletes, elite athletes,
women that are not eating enough food. Like, I, I did this to myself when I was in my early 20s
and I was running, I was racing marathons and I was running 10 miles a day, you know, eight to
10 miles a day, five days a week and then I was eating carrots and hummus and, you know, I just,
I wasn't feeling myself and I did, I did this to myself too. So how do you feel if you train
fasted? Do you feel terrible? Don't do it. If you want to train somewhat fasted, go for the protein,
you know, protein shake with a little bit of almond milk or something like that where you're not
eating a full meal, but you're getting something. So I do a lot of my training fasted and that has helped
me, you know, I'm 47 years old and paramedic. You're in phenomenal shape. Thank you. Thank you.
But I did notice, of course, as, as I started to reach that paramedic pause part of my life,
that I had to be a little bit more aggressive and put a little bit more effort in to not get
this fat right here on my belly because it started coming up and I didn't want it. I didn't,
it wasn't, it wasn't an option for me. Speaking of studies done for women, I thought you
talking the past about the swan study, which kind of relates to what you just said there.
When relating to women and visceral fat and they found that women experience an accelerated
increase in visceral fat starting two years before their final menstrual period. Yeah, because
that's when their estrogen is about, it's just, it's plummeting, right? You're just going off a
cliff because you're about to go into menopause. Again, what age would that be? Average age of menopause
is between 50, about 50, 52 for women. A lot of that, there's a lot of things that can affect your
reproductive lifespan, your ovarian aging, I guess we can call it. Unfortunately, one of them is when
you, the age you were, when you got your menstrual period. If the younger you were,
the younger you're going to be when you experience menopause. Also, when your mother experience
menopause is very indicative of when you're going to experience it, but lifestyle and diet play a
role too. Obesity accelerates ovarian aging, so you're more likely to go into menopause earlier
with obesity. Also, these chemicals that we're exposed to, and we can talk about those as well,
a lot of these endocrine disrupting chemicals affect the age of menopause as well and accelerate
that. So, in some cases, women go into menopause two years earlier than they would have otherwise.
And you're so you're 47 and a half and a half. And the data that I'm looking at here says,
when we think about prey menopause, it usually starts in mid 40s, which is the age range you're in.
This is where the 8% to 10% annual visceral fat increase begins.
It is. And annual. Yeah, I can tell you from people in my life that I've seen going through this,
it's pretty sudden that you'll see someone in your life that's a woman that's going through
Mary Penn, Perry menopause, and maybe hasn't had any other symptoms yet, so they haven't really
seeked out any treatment. Now, you can you can try to do some hormone replacement therapy as well
to help with that, but they start to gain visceral fat and it shows up around the belly quite
rapidly. And I noticed this in myself, it almost feels overnight, seriously. This is the only symptom
that I noticed in myself where it was like all of a sudden my belly was like growing and you know,
not super, super large, but enough where I was like, there's something wrong. It's not even
necessarily reflected if you get hormone tests, because mine all seem normal. The thing is, is that
the estrogen when it drops that estrogen is so important for telling your body to store energy
differently, not around the organs, but to make it around, you know, other parts of your body,
like your your thighs and your butt, right? Like you're at a post-issue. And so when that estrogen
goes down and declines, it's like, boom, it starts to go right to the belly. So that is why for me,
intermittent fasting has been really important. Like with any weight loss or calorie restriction
protocol, you do need to make sure you're getting enough protein because that's important for muscle,
right? Muscle growth and preventing atrophy of your muscle. And you need to also do resistance
training that also is a very important signal for muscle because the problem is some people
calorie restrict and eat fewer meals and then they're not getting enough protein and they're not
training and they start to lose muscle in addition to fat. And you don't want to do that.
You want to kind of just lose the visceral fat and keep the muscle, ideally keep gaining muscle.
And for men, I was reading that testosterone and growth hormone typically peak in their late 20s.
So I guess mine's peaked already. And starting at age 30, testosterone drops roughly 1%
a year. So between the age of 25 and 65, men typically see a 200% increase in their visceral fat,
even if their total weight stays the same. So is that linked to the testosterone decline?
Is that what's going on there? What's causing it? Yeah, I mean, it's testosterone does you burn
even if you're gaining visceral fat, it helps you burn it. It's also why some women that are
in paramanopause want to do testosterone because it helps them burn the visceral fat. So it is linked
to testosterone decline as well. But also as men are aging, there will be become more sedentary.
They tend to eat a little bit. They're consuming more calorie. All these things are hand-in-hand.
So it's not just like a one punch, right? It's like multiple angles are kind of all compounding
and coming together, whereas you could get away with it a little bit easier when you're younger
because the testosterone is helping you burn it more. When you're declining, it doesn't work
that same way. So even though you're gaining it, you're not burning it as quickly. So you start to
have a net gain in it if that makes sense. So going back up to the top, then we were talking about
things you can do to lower your visceral fat. And we talked a little bit about exercise,
sleep, diet. Is there anything else in that category? Yeah, I think those are the main ones,
obviously avoiding excess alcohol consumption. And also stress. Yeah, we talk about the stress,
like trying to relaxation techniques, buffer that stress. That's a big one. It's an amplifier.
Yeah, people don't talk enough about visceral fat. They look at other markers.
Well, most people just want to lose weight and look at, or yeah, they look at HBA1C,
your long-term glucose, or they're looking at lipids. And visceral fat is just it's insidious,
right? It just starts increasing, increasing, increasing. You can't see it. You can't see until
all of a sudden belly, right? I mean, it's bad. And it affects the way you feel daily.
On this point of testosterone, why is it the case that testosterone seems to be dropping
amongst men? I think it said something like I wrote it down. Yeah, testosterone levels in men
have dropped by up to 20% over the last two decades, which is quite terrifying.
It is. So look, there's a lot of factors that can affect testosterone. I mentioned dietary
factors. Refined sugar. Sleep is a big one. People aren't getting enough sleep.
Lack of sleep drops testosterone. Micro-nutrients, not getting enough zinc, for example,
zinc is very important for testosterone synthesis and magnesium. There's important nutrient
components. But I think the big player here is actually environmental. I think that
we are being bombarded with what are called endocrine disrupting chemicals. These are man-made
chemicals. A lot of them are part of plastic. They're made to help plastic be more durable or
more robust or they're found or they're water resistant. So there's probably three main endocrine
disrupting chemicals that are found in our environment, mainly because they're in plastic or they're
in they're also in things that are water resistant, well resistant, fire resistant, flame retardant,
BPA, bisphenol A is one. Another one is thalates, pH thalates. And the last one would be
PFAS. These are the forever chemicals. These are the three main, I would say, players in terms of
disrupting endocrine function, endocrine being hormones. Sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen,
but also thyroid hormone. Very important for regulating our metabolism, for example.
Are they really causing a problem? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because I'm looking at the picture
you have there of PFAS. PFAS. PFAS. And it's got like a coat and shoes on there. You're telling me
the clothes that I wear are having an impact on my hormones. They can, but I think it's less of a
direct effect and more downstream. So the PFAS chemicals or the forever chemicals they're used
in things to make them well resistant, staying resistant, water resistant. So the Teflon
pans would be the biggest example. You remember those non-stick pans? They have Teflon. That has
PFAS on it. We're going to go into my kitchen in a second. So I'll take all of the viewers that
are watching now into my kitchen. We'll have a stroller around my kitchen. You let me know if this
happens. Oh gosh. I hope you don't have Teflon. But I mean, my mom used it when I was growing up.
I remember the non-stick pans. That stuff is coming off into your food and so you're eating these PFAS.
How do we know that they're dangerous? Okay. Well, I'll tell you how we know. Like, let's,
let's start with, so the PFAS chemicals are ones that are really, they're more affecting
the thyroid and they're affecting, I would say, ovarian aging. They seem to target the ovaries
and accelerate the age that you're going to get menopause. So you're going to get it around two,
one to two years earlier if you have a high amount of these forever chemicals. But there's been
studies a lot of studies looking at. Let's start with BPA. Okay. Bisphenol A. That's a big one.
You see a lot of marketing around BPA free. This plastic water bottle is BPA free. Well,
it's BPA free, but it has another chemical called BPS, which is very similar if not worse than BPA.
So BPA is something that's found in a lot of water bottles. It's in those plastic water bottles.
It lines the cups of paper cups like these to go coffee cups that you're getting at your favorite,
you know, coffee place. Plastic is lining them. Yes. Plastic lines them because it's protecting
it from liquid, right? BPA has been linked to many different diseases, but really, really,
it's an endocrine disruptor. So what it does is a couple of things. One, BPA acts as an estrogen
mimetic. So it kind of mimics estrogen and it binds to the receptors that estrogen do to do
its function. And so it sometimes binds to estrogen and either makes it seem like there's estrogen
around or it blocks estrogen from working. So it depends on the dose and the concentration,
so it can do both. But it also binds to androgen receptors that interact with testosterone, right?
And so there have been studies that have found that men that have high amounts of BPA also have low
amounts of testosterone that there was also a study done in teens. This is when, you know, your
sexual development is happening, right? Testosterone is very important during this part of your life,
during puberty. Teens, adolescent boys that had the highest amount of BPA had 50% lower testosterone
than the boys, sorry, that had the lowest amount of BPA. The biggest one that's affecting testosterone
is the phallates. These phallates, they are present in a lot of PVC piping, they're present in a lot
of our food packaging, all those like thin, you go to the grocery store and you get a filet
manion steak and it's wrapped in plastic, poultry, all that plastic wrapping and all the foods that
we're eating has phallates in them, they make it more flexible and stuff. And it's also found in
our hair products, our cosmetic products, our creams. And it's also very lipid soluble, it likes fat,
it is drawn to fat. So when you have plastic around fat, like cheese, you know, things like that,
meat, it's getting into that meat, it's getting into that cheese, the phallates. These disrupt
our hormones in ways similar to BPA. So they're binding to the Androgen receptor, but they're also
going into the testes and disrupting the synthesis of testosterone. So there was a study in men
that had the highest thallate levels, those men had 20% lower testosterone compared to men with
higher levels. And this is, yeah, and this is like, it's affecting not only just the testosterone,
but it's affecting sperm quality. So the shape of the sperm wasn't good, it's affecting the number.
So sperm count is down if they're higher BPA or higher phallates and also motility, the ability
to swim, pregnant women that get exposed to high levels of thallates. And if they have, if they're
carrying a male fetus, right, they're having a boy. What's been shown is it's also affecting
sexual development. So these boys, they're getting something called hypospadia. It's where like the
slit on the on the penis is like move backwards, kind of closer to like what a woman would have.
And they're getting undescended testicles. So one of their testicles is not descending. And that's
associated with, you know, infertility, cancer, it's a particular cancer being the big one.
This is happening at a alarming rate, like something like 20% of boys now have an undescended
testicle. I mean, it's crazy because their mother had high phallates. Well, it's, this is definitely
something that is known in our environment to cause that. I don't know if that's the only cause,
but it in my opinion is a very, very concerning cause that nobody is talking about. And that should
be addressed. And it's everywhere. We have these in all of our, all of our plastic wrappers that we,
everything that we're eating, you know, you, you even getting your meat, or you think it's
well, it's meat, it's, you know, but it's wrapped in plastic and that phallates are getting into
the food. So they're getting into our bodies. And they're disrupting hormones. They're disrupting
sexual development. They're disrupting our ovaries, estrogen, you know, ovarian aging,
age of menopause. They're disrupting thyroid, the thyroid hormones. I mean, there's,
there's even studies now with women, pregnant women that have high levels of BPA. They have,
there are six times more likely to have a child with autism spectrum disorder compared to women
with low levels of BPA. Again, BPA is disrupting the estrogen and androgen receptor. And this is
very important because the androgen, you, you want to have, it's, it's disrupting aromatase as
well that enzyme that's involved in converting testosterone into estrogen. So believe it or not
when you're a boy developing in your mom's womb, estrogen plays a very important role in your
brain and brain development and what's called masculinizing the male brain. You actually,
it's kind of contradictory. You're like, oh, what wouldn't testosterone do that? Well,
actually estrogen is very important for masculizing parts of the male brain. And so when you have
aromatase being inhibited by bisphenol A, by this endocrine disrupting hormone that is so ubiquitous
everywhere. That is found in plastic bottles. Plastic bottles. It's found in, yeah, it's found
everywhere. So what do you recommend? First of all, I think if you can eliminate and not drink out
of plastic bottles as much as possible, if you do want to go coffee, either drink it there in
their mugs or bring your own to go mug. Like, I bring my, like, I have like a Yeti kind of
to go coffee mug that I'll bring into a Starbucks or wherever a coffee being and I'll have them fill
it up. Soup cans, canned soup are lined with BPA, they're lined with plastic and soup usually
goes into the can hot sterile technique. I mean, they want to make sure it's, so you're getting
this soup has been classically shown in multiple studies to, to increase BPA levels by a thousand
percent crazy amounts. So don't eat canned soup as much as possible. I mean, obviously this is
about the habit, not the one off, but, but, you know, try to avoid cans drinking out of even soda
cans, even like your, your favorite sparkling water cans. Don't make it a daily habit because they
are lined with plastic. That's a source of BPA into your bodies. There are ways that you can
excrete BPA. So the major way to get rid of it is through urine. It's excreted through your
urine, but it has to become water soluble first. It's a fat soluble compound. And so there are
things that we can eat in our diet that will increase that excretion. Compounds in broccoli,
broccoli sprouts being the big one, sulfurophane activates a pathway that our enzymes involved in
making BPA become water soluble so they come out your urine. Oh, so broccoli's like a cleanser.
It's like a cleanser. It's like we, we actually do have these, it's called phase two detoxification
enzymes in our body. We have the ability to detox a lot of things. We just have to give our body the
right, you know, input so that it can activate those pathways. I personally take a supplement of
that sulfurophane because I want a concentrated amount of it because I used to do broccoli sprouts,
broccoli sprouts have a hundred times more sulfurophane than mature broccoli, but you have to sprout
them and then there's contamination issues and it's just, you know, some people do it. It's great,
but I used to do it. I don't anymore. I just take a supplement. That supplement's cool.
The supplement I take has is called Avmacal. It's by a company called Nutramax. I don't,
you know, I'm not like affiliated with them. I like their supplement because one,
they've got 12 published studies using it. Clinical studies too, showing that it actually helps with
autism, children and adolescents with autism that take the sulfurophane supplement,
that they have improved symptoms because it's a detox. It helps interestingly people with autism
are like 30 times less likely to excrete BPA. It's a weird thing going on here where BPA increases
autism spectrum disorder, but then kids that have it are not able to detoxify it as well.
Yeah, it's interesting. Again, I think that excretion is important, but avoiding the plastic
as much as you can. Make it a habit. Don't freak out. I mean, obviously you can like make yourself
crazy and stress is not good as we talked about. I see you like going, oh my god. Yeah,
no, I'm thinking about just how casual I am about these things. I could easily make small changes.
Easily. Frankly, I could easily make big changes in the position I'm in. I could just say,
I can say in my company, we no longer buy this kind of stuff. I could say in my kitchen,
because to my team or whatever, let's not buy this. Can we go look at my kitchen now?
Let's do it. Let's go. Let's go to my kitchen. Be right. Now, you guys can come too.
So we're going to go to my kitchen. If you're listening on the dog walk, this might be a nice
time to sit on a bench and look because you're about to go into my kitchen and we're going to look
real things that you might not even know in your kitchen, of course, in some of these problems.
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thumbs and conditions applied. Okay, so the team we've been here for the last
couple of days, we've been getting lots of takeaways, and so this is a higgledy-piggledy
of everybody's food. What's wrong? You've got your pulling... Black plastic.
What's wrong with the black plastic? We talked about plastic, it has BPA, it has
fallates, but it also typically is made from recycled electronics. And the problem here, Steven, is
recycled electronics have flame retardants in them because you don't want your electronics
catching fire. And there have been a variety of studies now that have found that black plastic
has a high amount of these flame retardants that are leaching into the food and getting into people's
bodies that way. Not only do you not want to eat out of black plastic, you don't want hot food
going in there, right? Because that's like the worst. Can I get a bin bag? I need a bin bag. Okay,
okay, so let's throw that in the bin. What else? I'm going to take all of it out. Okay,
this is the other thing that really reaches out, stands out to me because spicy foods, anything acidic
that goes into plastic causes the chemicals to leach into it even more rapidly, kind of the same
way the heat does. So heat, acidic foods, not good and plastic. So my spicy sauce, if it comes in a
little plastic tub, it's going to leach in. Look, if it's the one-off, okay, but like not a habit.
Yes, a big time leach in. You're eating BPA hot sauce. Okay, so black stuff is out.
Things going in hot. Yeah, this has salads and had BPA. I mean, look, are you drinking this
every day or is it the one-off? No comment. No comment. Mind your business. Okay, what else? What
on this? This is made of paper. Here's my little thing I do. See that? Waxi? There's a waxi.
This? Peepass? On the edge? Yeah. Does it seem like it has a waxi substance to you? Yes.
This is better than the black plastic. If you had it, if there's like tears, this is better than
the black plastic. Okay, and this. Thing thing, this is great. This is the best thing that you can do.
If you're going to have food made for you or you want to order takeout, have someone make it for
you and deliver you in this? And this is a bamboo lid. Bamboo lid with with glass, pyrex glass,
right? Okay, so this is what this is good? This is great. So I need more of this. We need more of this
and get rid of all. I mean, this is already looking better. This is on the scale, at least it goes
in cold. So here's the thing. Microplastics are also shutting into this. We didn't talk about
microplastics. They're shutting into here. The chemicals, not as much in something like this,
but they're still getting in. So this is a little bit better when it comes to the tears here,
the hot food is the worst. This is a little bit better, but I still would get lettuce.
Because it's cold. Because it's cold. So it's not seeping. Exactly. Okay, so am I going to keep that
then? What else do you notice here? Well, I noticed that I really like your glass sparkling waters.
That's great because glass is less likely to have microplastic shedding less likely to have the
chemicals. There was a study that actually found, interestingly, there were more
microplastics on the top. So the paint that's on these lids, plastic polymers are using that.
And during the processing and, you know, bottling up of these things, they get into the water.
And so believe it or not, glass bottled water has more microplastics than plastic bottle water.
Okay, this is terrible. But I'm going to tell you why I think this is still as worse, okay?
So this is got microplastics, but it also has BPA and phallate. They're in this water.
This was not always cold. It's, you know, it was, I don't know, some warehouse, shipping container.
Who knows how it got here? It's been heated up. I'm sure several times. The problem is that
there was a study showing that glass bottles have a higher amount of microplastics than plastic.
And you might go, why is that? Because they're all coming off on this paint and getting in.
When it comes to microplastics size matter, I'm not as worried about it having more microplastics
because it was show that they were large microplastics. Your body doesn't absorb a large one's
very well. They come out through your feces. These, this has tons of what are called nanoplastics.
Very, very small particles that get into the gut and get into your bloodstream.
So I still go for the glass water. So I'm going to avoid drinking out of these as much as possible.
So I like how you have these condiments. And the glass, this is how my refrigerator looks as well.
I'm very, very obsessive about anything that has acidity in it, like hot sauce and ketchup.
It needs to be in glass because the acidity is leaching microplastics and BPA and
phallic chemicals into your condiments. And then you're putting that on your food and eating them.
Again, this is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Plastic is everywhere. The chemicals are everywhere.
And you're not even thinking about the fact that your hot sauce and ketchup are also vehicles
for delivering these microplastics and they're associated chemicals into your body. So I really like
these. This one, I would go for a glass mustard. Those, those are better.
Glass bottles. So this is plastic. Same thing. It's acidic. I would say, you know, for the most part
of the butter. Oh, yeah, this is bad. This is better. It's cheese. Yeah. So this is a problem also.
So if you look at this, it's that flexible plasticky stuff. Right. It has the phallates in it.
What is this? Oh, that's even worse. Yeah. So this is the plastic that basically
phallates are in this and they're fat soluble and they're just leaching into this fatty cheese.
They're leaching into the fatty cheese. So you can buy cheese that's like without this in just
the container. That's a little bit better. You know what I mean? Like I'm thinking of
feta cheese, for example, like some feta cheese comes in this plastic wrapper, but you can buy it
with just the container. And at least it's not like close like with juices like just seeping into
it, you know, getting the chemicals into it. But this is fine, isn't it? Yes, eggs are great.
There we go. Eggs are great. We found something. Okay, wonder. So spatula and kitchen utensils.
Are these good? Are these bad? What's the best? Yeah. Good question. These are great. Right. There's
no plastic here, no possibility of plastic leaking into your foods. You got your nice pasta spoon.
These are silicone, I'm imagining. Yeah. In theory, the silicon should be okay.
The problem is is that there's a lot of silicone that actually still has, it's mixed with plastic too.
So I go for the wood ones that are like this, like the wooden spatula. That's what I use.
You in theory should be good. In practice, a lot of silicone that's been measured out there
and tested does have plastics. So I would say if you want to really be careful, I would switch.
But most people at home probably have a plastic spatula, isn't that accurate? Most people at home
have plastic spatula and a lot of people also have black plastic spatulas, which again, back to
that black recycled electronics, lame retardants, these are cancer causing chemicals in there,
bromelated chemicals that are causing cancer. So yeah, I would say that even shifting from the
plastic to this is probably a step up. But I don't know that this is just pure silicone. I would
guess that there's some plastic still in it. And so if you're heating it up, the plastic,
it's getting into your food. Okay. What about my pants? What about my pants here?
Great. All clad. This is what I use. These are amazing. No plastic lining, no PFAS, no nonstick.
So most people's pants at home have a sort of protective layer here that's nonstick so
that they can cook their food and their food doesn't stick to the pants, like scrambled eggs,
they're kind of a pain in the butt, they stick to everything. That has the forever chemicals in them
and that is being heated up and is leaching in near food and you're eating it. So really what you
want to avoid the most is Teflon, right? Anything that's nonstick. It's harder to cook with these
It's so much harder, but you know what? You're healthier and that's what you have to imagine.
The other thing I want to talk about is this. The blender. Yes, the blender. This is one that people
often miss. The problem is most blender pops here that's blending your stuff is plastic. And
there are studies showing that when you have a lot of friction on plastic that releases orders
of magnitude more microplastics and of course there are associated chemicals or hitchhiking along
there. There are companies that make a stainless steel version of the blender and I highly recommend
if you're someone like myself, I like to do my kale blueberry smoothies that you switched to the
stainless steel. I did, I switched from my family because essentially the friction you're drinking
microplastics and chemicals. So that's bad. I receipt. Yeah, don't touch it. What do you mean don't
So receipts are covered with BPA. I mean, literally just covered. That's how it prints it,
right? This isn't like a printer. This is printed. It's a thermal paper and the BPA is allowing
the printing to happen. And so they're covered with Bisfinal A. People that are handling receipts
like cashiers that are handling receipts have really high levels of BPA. Particularly if they use
hand sanitizing lotion or any lotion. Any sort of cream makes the BPA again, BPA is fat soluble.
These creams, the hand sanitizers are carrying it inside your bloodstream about 100 fold higher
than not having that. So first of all, you can opt to have a receipt email to you. If you need the
receipt, I would do that or don't touch it. But also if you work in the cash, if you're a cashier
and you work in this industry, really, really please wear nitrile gloves. I mean, this is like your
BPA levels, if you were to go get them measured, which you can. There are companies out there now that
do measure BPA levels in urine. You will see that they are extremely extremely high. So nitrile gloves
will protect you from the BPA getting across your dermal barrier and getting to your bloodstream.
Latex gloves do not. So make sure they're nitrile gloves. And for people that are not in the
industry, try to avoid the receipts. I mean, it's a really big exposure to BPA that people aren't
even realizing. I can tell by the way you're like grabbing the corner that like it's feces or something.
Oh, it's terrible. And my son like, you know, kids love paper. And of course, I don't want I'm
touching it because we talked about that study in adolescent boys where they had high BPA levels.
And that was the surgery with a 50% reduction in testosterone. I mean, this is at a part of your
life when testosterone is, you know, important for sexual development and development in general.
So really, really, really important to remember receipts are a very big source of BPA that people
are not thinking about, particularly people that are routinely handling these receipts.
And the other thing I want to talk to you about is water. So here is one of my water filters.
I also have a filter attached to the tap. What are your thoughts?
So this is filtering water, but it's filtering it into plastic. And it's also got plastic filter.
So I think that, you know, you're probably filtering away some other things, pathogens,
gross other chemicals that might be in the water, but you're essentially reintroducing the plastic.
So I don't know that that's necessarily the best way to get the filter. What you have over here
is a reverse osmosis water filter. That is absolutely the ideal. Reverse osmosis, water filters,
filter out microplastics, nanoplastics, BPA, phallates, chemicals, all these things that we're
talking about today. People can get a tabletop one. Kind of like this is tabletop, but it's a
tabletop reverse osmosis water filter. These only filter out the bigger, larger, plastic size,
microplastic size. And then the last thing I want to mention, Stephen, because you do have a
reverse osmosis water filter, is that it does filter out a lot of small particles, including essential,
you know, trace elements and some essential like minerals and stuff. So you want to make sure
that you are taking a multivitamin mineral supplement and you can also get what's called little
essential element drops that have things like phosphorus, manganese, iodine, some of these things
that are being filtered out of your water and making sure you're reintroducing that to your water.
Ah, okay. So it takes some good stuff out to you. It does. Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else
that maybe is even in my kitchen now or not in my kitchen that is a culprit of BPAs and P-Files?
Yeah. Here's the first problem here. And then inside where the hot water is going through is there's
plastic pieces. So the hot water is going through plastic to get to your little espresso, you know,
cup here. These, I actually looked into this because at first I thought they were lined with plastic.
They're not. My concern is mostly the water going through this system that's heating up. It's got
plastic, you know, piping in there that it's going through. Okay. So I'm going to just stay here.
And I'm going to just grab. Okay. So this is now the coffee that I drink. We'll come to here.
They flash freezer at the perfect moment and it's delivered frozen. So metal and then this is an
aluminium lid. Right. So this shouldn't be lined with plastic, right? You go like this, press the
little button on top and it goes straight into your glass. And then this comes out and that's the
coffee. Oh, I love it. So you just dropped this funny because they're a sponsor. Oh,
so disclaim, and I'm also an investor in this company. So no machines at all, put it straight
into the glass, pour the hot water and that's it. So it's like instead of instant coffee, but it's
real coffee that's been frozen. It's from some Stanford engineers who flash freezer at the perfect
moment to lock in the taste and you can literally smell. That was good. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad
you're not putting it in a machine because that's no no longer do that. Okay. So this is my
supplement. It's a it's a mess, but I've pulled out things that I'm personally interested in.
Good, bad, indifferent. The first one that jumped out at me when I was looking is reduced and
active glutathione. This is something that I think people should be aware of. There's marketing
involved here. Glutathione is in a major, it's a major antioxidant. We make it in our body,
we make it in our brain. What does it do? Sorry. So it's a very important antioxidant. It helps
negate oxidation, which is causing brain aging. It's negating oxidation, which is aging yourself.
People want to supplement with it because they've heard about glutathione and how beneficial it
is and how it's a great antioxidant. The problem is because our body makes it inside of ourselves,
inside of ourselves, we don't have a transporter to get glutathione from the outside of ourselves,
like if we eat it and if it makes it through our digestion, which it really doesn't, into our
cells. And so this kind of glutathione isn't going to make it inside of your cells. So this is
just a waste of time. It is. You're going to want to get something called lipozomal glutathione.
Lipozomal glutathione has been shown to get inside because lipozomes, it's essentially taking
the glutathione molecule and encapsulating it in something that's going to fuse with yourself.
Lipozomal products in general have a higher bioavailability for that reason. So let me repeat that back
to you. So I've got it. So if it's lipozomal, it's basically in a packet, which can get through into
the cell. If it's not, this one is reduced and active, then it's never going to get in the cell.
So it's waste of time. It's just going to be excreted. Yeah, I would say that it's really not doing
much and that if you're going to want to supplement lipozomal glutathione, that's what I have.
What about this? Vitamin D3. I've always been confused because people say take vitamin D,
but then this one says D3. Right. D3 is the form of vitamin D that you make when you're in the sun.
That's the major way we make vitamin D is from sun exposure. There is a plant form of vitamin D
called vitamin D2. It's found in things like mushrooms, for example. The problem is that there
have been studies showing that vitamin D2, which is unfortunately with a lot of vegetarians take
because they want a vegetarian form. Vitamin D3 is also found in sheep skin because the sheep are
making it in their skin when they're exposed to sunlight. Vitamin D2 is not as effective as
vitamin D3. If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, you're going to want to look for vitamin D3 from
Lycan. Lycan is that green stuff that you can find on trees and stuff. That also makes vitamin D3.
And so it's a much better option than getting the vitamin D2, which is what a lot of vegetarians do.
So there's actually a study, a recent study showing that people that are vitamin D deficient.
So they're not getting enough vitamin D3 because we don't go out in the sun anymore.
They have accelerated aging. And if they supplement, this is a very large study, by the way. If they
supplemented with vitamin D3, they slowed their biological aging by almost two years. That didn't
happen in people that were not vitamin D deficient from the start. So it's not like a vitamin D3
supplement is going to do something miraculous if you already have enough vitamin D. The point is
to avoid deficiency. And so someone like yourself that probably doesn't go outside a lot. But also
when you go outside, you have darker skin. So melanin is a natural sunscreen. And so people with
more melanin have to spend a lot more time in the sun. And so that is something to consider as well.
But I can always just take my multivitamin. Right. Multivitamin. I think I might have talked about one
study last time we talked last episode where men and women that were older adults. There were 65
years and older. They took one centrum silver a day. And I'm not advocating for centrum silver.
I'm just saying that was involved in the study. And after three years, they had reversed their
brain aging, global brain aging by 2.1 years. And they reversed their episodic brain aging by
almost five years. So episodic memory is the kind of memory involved in remembering events and
people and things like that, you know, as you get older, you know, that stuff doesn't come as quick.
Right. So it delayed that aging by five years. Well, the same study also just recently published
literally like a couple of weeks ago. Again, part of this large study, it's called the Cosmos study.
They looked at the multivitamin use and biological aging, epigenetic aging. And they found that the
centrum silver multivitamin also slowed biological aging, epigenetic aging by a few months. And
this was only after two years. And you might go, oh, a few months. But that was after two years.
And that trial was two years long. So if you add two, two weirs and then you add another two years
and then you add, and then you're talking about 20, talking about 30, talking about 50 years,
that is slowing aging the entire time. It adds up. It's cumulative. And it's one of the easiest
things that someone can do to basically, you know, make sure that they're aging better. There's
things that are harder to do. But that, to me, is such a low hanging fruit. It's easy.
What is it about this? What is in here that's making a male multivitamin have such profound effects?
If you look at the back at the supplement facts, there's a lot of vitamins and minerals,
things like vitamin C, vitamin D3, vitamin E, vitamin K, niacin, the B vitamins,
folate, you have things like selenium, the essential, there's essential elements. These are all
things that we need to run everything in our body. All of our metabolism, our neurotransmitter synthesis,
our immune system, you know, our liver, all these, these are cofactors that are really important for
all those things. And you don't realize how important they are until time goes on and things start
to fall apart. It's basically filling the gaps because we're supposed to get these things from
our foods. We're supposed to be getting all these vitamins and minerals from our foods from
from our water. And it's just not happening for many reasons. One, our soils are depleted, you know,
the organic phosphates like glyphosate is depleting our minerals. And so the foods that are being
grown in the soil aren't getting their minerals that they're supposed to. And then the second problem
is we're not eating the right foods because we're eating takeout. We're eating foods that are not
micronutrient dense, things like dark leafy greens. We're not eating the colors of the rainbow.
And those are really important for vitamins and minerals. So I've got two questions there.
Is there a multivitamin that I could take that is not good for me? Because when I go to the shops,
there's so many different types these days. And I don't know which ones get bad or how to tell
the difference. And so honestly, sometimes I just go based on the most expensive because I assume
the most expensive is the best quality. Yeah. So, you know, the problem with supplements is
they're not regulated. I mean, not that I necessarily want to, but it is a problem because
supplement companies can kind of put whatever they want in the supplements. They don't necessarily
have the amount of active ingredient that they say or they can either have too little or too much.
And so that is the problem with, yeah. So for example, some vitamin D, three supplements,
and some melatonin supplements have like, in some cases, like a thousand to ten thousand
fold more. And it was a really big problem with melatonin because melatonin is that
hormone that you make to help you fall asleep. And there was excessive amounts in them. So,
it's not regulated. So you really don't know the amount you're getting. So I would say if number one
goes to a trusted brand that is third-party testing, there's so much third-party testing now.
Consumer Lab does it. You can, you know, look up what they've tested. But for a man, I would say,
the thing that's essential here is you don't want to get iron. You don't want supplemental iron.
Well, someone told me to start drinking these iron drinks. Were you ironed efficient? No.
Okay. I was just sick one time and they said this would really help. So this wasn't a scientist.
Yeah. It's just different. Most men do not need to supplement with iron unless they have,
you know, a problem with iron in their anemic, for example. Iron can be very bad. I mean,
if you're supplementing with iron, it's very reactive and it causes oxidative stress easily.
It's called free iron. The free iron reacts with other things with your DNA, your cells. And so
most men do not need to supplement. In fact, even, you know, something called hemochromatosis,
where you're basically, you have too much iron already. And if you have those genes,
it's actually quite common. Then you're really talking about iron overload. So you really
do not need to supplement iron. Women? Women, premenopausal women are different because premenopausal
women do lose a lot of iron from menstruation when they're menstruating. And so I would say about
16% of menstruating women are iron deficient. And then if you add exercise on top of that, you know,
a lot of endurance exercise, you can get lysis of your red blood cells. And so you do need iron
for your red blood cells. If you're eating meat, if you're not a vegetarian, you know, maybe that
would be a case if you're like a vegan or something, maybe some iron would come in, but you have to get
your iron levels measured. You don't want to be too high because it does cause damage. But I would say
that premenopausal women, iron is especially around your cycle is good. Postmenopausal women,
once you hit menopause, you kind of shift to like what a men needs. You don't need the iron again.
So it's very, it's very much just premenopausal women that you aren't.
That's so funny. I've been drinking these. And maybe green, because that?
Yes. Omega three, fish oil, as we've talked about before. I mean, this is probably one of the
best and easiest things that people can do to improve their health, improve their way they age.
Omega three fatty acids, 90% of the US population is not getting enough of them, 80% globally,
everyone. Nobody's getting enough omega three fatty acids, particularly from seafood.
So the EPA and DHA from fish oil are probably the best forms. You know, we talked about studies.
If you have a high omega three index, you have a five year increased life expectancy compared
to low omega three index. If you're a smoker and you have a high omega three index,
then you're going to live as long as a non-smoker with a low omega three index, right? I mean,
so the low omega three index is like smoking. Basically, you know, you have a 66% lower chance
of getting Alzheimer's disease with the high omega three index. And even more recently,
there was studies showing that omega three slows epigenetic aging. And this is not just the
inefficiency, I guess, because everyone's deficient. Maybe that's why. But a study showed that omega three
fish oil supplementation, this was a study out of Switzerland. These individuals are mostly active.
They're 88% of them were already physically active at the start of the trial. And I mentioned
that because the trial involved omega three and involved vitamin D and involved resistance training
or the combination of all three. And only the omega three was able to slow epigenetic aging,
biological aging, because for one, they were already physically active, so adding resistance
training on top of their baseline didn't do much. And they were vitamin D sufficient. So the omega
three was able to slow epigenetic aging. The combination of all three slowed it by four months.
This was just after one year. So slowed it by four months. And if you imagine that, it doesn't sound
like a lot. Again, it's compounding, but also within that study, they looked at real world outcomes.
So that also correlated with they had a 60% less likely chance of being pre-fail.
A pre-fail, it's a pre-fail tea, right? They also were less likely to get cancer as well. So I
mean, it's really kind of translating to these health outcomes that we think of. And all you need
to do is supplement with about 1.6 to 2 grams a day of omega three to get a good omega three index,
but I will mention one thing, Steven. It's at room temperature. I don't think that's a great idea,
because fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid is prone to oxidation. So you want to put it in a
low temperature environment. I keep all my, actually, I keep all my fish oil frozen, frozen,
and then when I'm ready to use it, I put it in the fridge. So like, I have a store of it,
I have a stock of it, I buy, and then it's in the freezer, and then I put it in the fridge with
the bottle that I'm using from, and it's freezing it. It does nothing. It's fine. So it's basically just
keeping it really, really low oxidation. So I need to put this in the fridge. You need to put it
in the fridge and also make sure you're getting a quality brand, right? So you're going to third-party
testing again. You want to have a total oxidation, ideally less than 10, and there are brands out there
that do have a oxidation less than 10, which means it's more fresh and pure. It's more, it's yeah,
it's less oxidized. You don't want to be consuming oxidized fat, because that's also not good.
Okay. So what else jumps out to you here? We've got creatine. I mean,
yeah. Creatine is like my new. I travel with it everywhere. You got microionized. Is this,
this is? I've got so many different types. Right. This is the one I take. Yeah, I take the
creatine monohydrate, because it's the most well studied. And you know, obviously for I do a lot
of training and workout training, I do a lot of resistance training and strength training. So I
at least get five grams a day, which is what I always was doing in the past. I up that to 10 grams
a day as my baseline, because I wanted to have benefits in my brain studies out of Germany show that
once you get to the 10 gram mark, you're actually your brain's able to take it up. And it's
increasing creatine in certain brain regions. That doesn't happen much at lower doses. And that's
because your muscles are very greedy. The creatine in my brain, honestly, I've for me, I mentioned this
before, it's a game changer. Just on a daily basis, I feel like I don't have that afternoon slump.
I'm in my mid 40s. My brain isn't as sharp as it was. Creatine has really helped me kind of get
a little bit closer to where I used to be. And also, when I'm sleep devised to thrive, I go up even
higher. Sometimes I do 20, 25 grams. And that is because studies have shown, if you go up to a
higher dose like that, depending on your way, it's kind of a scale that it helps you basically negate
the negative effects on your brain from sleep deprivation. We're not only are you cognitively
functioning, you're functioning beyond what your even normal baseline was, which was kind of mind
blowing. The question I had is around loading and how long it takes to feel the impact. Because when
I first had about creatine I was 16 and my brother was bodybuilding. And they were told that you need
to load up on big loads of it. And then in like two weeks time, your body would be saturated. What's
the truth? Right. So the reason that creatine loading was done was because there's a short
window of time when researchers are doing a study. And they want their muscle stores to be saturated.
They want their muscle stores to be saturated. And so you have to do 20 gram loading phase in order
to saturate them after three or four days. If you're not about to compete and if you haven't
been using creatine and you're not participating in this study, it takes about four weeks, three to
four weeks of five grams a day consistently to saturate your muscle. So you don't have to do any
loading phase. If you're supplementing with five grams a day and you've been doing it for a month,
your muscle stores are saturated. And so you exercise and you get that five grams and again,
they're saturated. So they keep their already that five grams a day is keeping them saturated. And
that's why I said your muscles are really hungry and greedy. They're wanting that five grams.
They're wanting that five grams. And that's about what it takes daily to saturate them. However,
if you're starting from gram zero where you've never taken creatine, it's going to take four weeks
to really get effects. Otherwise, yeah, you'll have to get higher doses. They're not going to
be saturated after five grams. So some people might have tried creatine for a week. I've not felt
any effects and given up. That's a good, that's actually a really good point. Yeah, it's about
a month-long experiment, I would say close to four weeks. I think some people can saturate
three weeks, but it all depends body size and all that. So four weeks is a good experiment time.
And five grams is a good dose to start with. If five grams a day actually help makes you more
bloated and nauseous, cut that down a two and a half from two and a half grams so that you split
the doses. If you split the doses, if you take it with food, particularly carbohydrates, it seems
to help negate some of the bloating and nausea and negative effects people feel. And obviously,
if you're not working out, creatine's not going to like grow your muscles. You have to put in the work,
you have to put in the effort. It's what it's doing is it's helping your muscles grow and give you
the energy to do more training volumes that they can grow bigger and also so that you can be stronger.
If you're traveling and stressed and all those things, yes, creatine is good for the brain.
I was seeing, I think it was James Smith did a video about different creatine percentages in
the creatine products we drink and or eat or consume. And he looked at creatine gummies and found
that some of the creatine gummies don't even have any creatine in them at all. And it was quite
shocking because you just assumed that if it says creatine, there's going to be creatine in there.
This goes back to the whole problem where supplements are not regulated. And so you never really
know what you're getting and you have to have third-party testing and go to a quality brand.
Gummies in general, so there was a study that was published not long ago. It was a consumer
study that was done where people went and got a lot of different creatine gummies off the shelf.
And then measured how much creatine was in them and essentially almost all of them had none.
And I've talked to some supplement manufacturers and they're basically their statement was,
it's really hard to get active ingredients in gummies in general, not even just creatine in general.
But the other thing I did want to mention with creatine is that you do want to make sure it's
NSF certified. That's a really important thing because there are contaminants that are even
produced in the processing of creatine and creatine monohydrate. And so you want to make sure that
you're not getting those contaminants which can be harmful. And some of them are like lead,
for example, but even some other compounds that are formed. And so you want NSF certification.
And that's always what I look for when I'm buying a creatine supplement. Is NSF certification
or any supplement? I really like to have all supplements NSF certified because that really means
they've one looked at contaminants and two, it's got that active ingredient in there and that's
really what you want. And the NSF certification is just a little logo on the side of the
top here that says NSF certified sports. That's it. Yeah. And it's all on websites too if you buy
online. Yeah. Okay, so I've got one challenge for you. If you had to pick five supplements for me to
take, assuming that I am male and female. Okay. Okay, so it's neither gender. And it can be
things that are either currently in my cupboard or not. What's the top five? And ideally give
me them an order if you can. An order of importance.
Fish oil. Number one. Number one. Vitamin D.
Multivitamin. All three very, very strong evidence that you're going to slow aging, you're going
to improve your brain function, lower disease risk, live longer. And creatine's going to be there.
So that's one, two, three, four. And then the last one is magnesium. Magnesium would be,
I mean, it might be number four and creatine number five actually. Really? Yeah.
Are you sure? What is magnesium doing for me? Magnesium is running. It's important for 300 different
enzymes in your body. It's important to repair damage to your DNA that's being done all the time.
It's being done from the iron that you're taking. It's being done from normal metabolism, normal
immune activation. But when you're in a state where you have you're not eating a good diet or you're
not getting enough sleep, magnesium is really important to repair that damage. And that's why
studies have shown that magnesium is really important for preventing cancer. And it also helps with
sleep. It's really good for sleep. But more importantly, 50% of the population doesn't get enough
magnesium. And I bet you're probably one of those people because most of us are, do you eat a lot
of dark, reliefy greens or almonds? You're supposed to be getting 400, about 300 or 50 to 400
milligrams a day. Are you physically active? Yeah. You're sweating magnesium out. Let's make it six
supplements. So there's a new supplement. You're with an A that I'm pretty excited about.
The other thing I take that's really important is that I don't necessarily see here. What's it
called? So curcumin? Well, those supplements you've mentioned, the first one which I can't say
and the second one can be human. We have on the table in the studio. So let's get back into the
studio and we'll pick up from that. Steve, what day? Just making myself a delicious coffee.
From the freezer? From the freezer. Have you not heard about content? No. Oh my gosh, this is going
to change your life. A couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big
shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing
of coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So what they do is they flash freeze it at the optimal moment
when it's most tasty. And they send you in the post the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes.
Now Matt sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team,
knock yourselves out. And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going,
oh my god, what the hell is that? It's so delicious. All I have to do is pop it out in the morning
using the little button on the back of this thing. I pour my hot water in and I mix it
and that is done. You can get $30 off your first order of comatier coffee if you go to comatier.com
slash Stephen, try it and please Instagram DM me, link to me and let me know if you love it as much
as I do. You know, every once in a while you come across a product that has such a huge impact on
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So phytosomal curcumin is another one that I supplement with. And let's just start with curcumin
in general. Curcumin is found in a turmeric plant. It's something that is able to pretty robustly
and I would say consistently lower inflammation. And it's doing it in a different way that like a
NSAID, like an ibuprofen would do it, right? And that is important because it's been shown if you
take NSAIDs, right? So these non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, something like ibuprofen,
around exercise, it can blunt the adaptations because it's basically lowering inflammation and
prostate landings and things that are important to cause exercise adaptations. So curcumin doesn't
hasn't been shown to do that. But it has been shown to lower something called TNF alpha,
and that is a major inflammatory cytokine that is really, really powerfully accelerating aging. In
fact, those epigenetic aging clocks that we talked about earlier, one of the most powerful
drugs is able to slow them are TNF alpha inhibitors. So these are drugs that people take to inhibit TNF
alpha. Certain people take them like people with rheumatoid arthritis. They have a high level of
inflammation. They're immune systems overactive. They're making a lot of it. Well, guess what? Those
individuals taking TNF alpha inhibitors are like they have a 50% less likelihood of getting Alzheimer's
disease than people taking it. That's 50%. Yes. So I like it because curcumin is one of the most,
it is the most naturally occurring dietary compound that I've seen data showing that it lowers TNF
alpha. I haven't seen anything else that's naturally occurring. That does it. This does it. It
lowers it by quite a bit by almost five pg per milliliter. Phytosomal curcumin is the reason I take
phytosomal. It's kind of like a liposome, but it's phytosome. So it's essentially just making the
ingredient get into the cells better. It's more bioavailable because curcumin is easily metabolized
quickly by the liver. It's what's called a xenobiotic. It's not a compound that's a vitamin or a
mineral or something that the body normally recognize. It's seen as a drug, a foreign drug, xenobiotic,
right? And so the liver gets rid of it quickly. The phytosomal delivery of it kind of slows that whole
process, whereas it's not getting rid of so quickly. It's not being metabolized so readily.
So that's why I take that. And also it's been shown to improve performance, the people that are
exercising. Again, because it's reducing inflammation, inflammation can be dampening for performance.
And what else have we got here? The other supplement that I really want to talk about is the
uralith and A. And as I mentioned, this is a compound that's usually generated in the gut by
the bacteria in your gut. It's something that we can get from our diet. So if we eat things like
pomegranate, pomegranate has a type of polyphenol in it called elagetanins. I've never heard about
this before. Okay, listen to this. This is like you got to try this supplement. Uralith and A,
again, it's made from eating things like pomegranate. However, 50% of the population doesn't have
the right bacteria to make it. So you're kind of like a coin toss. If you eat pomegranate,
am I going to be the person that can make uralith and A? Or am I not, right? So there was a company
that did out of Switzerland, these studies, a lot of these early studies were done in Switzerland,
and they ended up making uralith and A. And then testing, you know, doing clinical studies,
doing animal studies first and then clinical studies to test, you know, what is uralith and A doing?
So what is it? It is a compound that is able to basically get rid of damage to mitochondria.
So it's called mytoffigy. You've probably heard of autophigy, you know, getting clearing out your
all the gunk and the trash from yourself, making them rejuvenating them, rejuvening them, right?
Which is associated with fasting. Fasting activates autophigy. Fasting activates mytoffigy,
which is specifically just clearing out damaged mitochondria or pieces of damaged mitochondria.
Autophigy is essentially you have a whole cell. And within that cell, you have a lot of different
organelles, they're called. So mitochondria being one. And so autophigy kind of helps clear out
all this stuff inside of the cell. Mytoffigy is very specific to just the mitochondria within the cell.
Those mitochondria get older and they don't have a really good repair process. And so they accumulate
damage. And as they get older, you're not going to be making energy as well. You're not going to be
using energy as well. It's going to affect all the cell function because energy is at the core of
everything, right? So mitochondrial health is at the core of all health, basically.
This compound very robustly induces mytoffigy. And so there have been, of course, many animal
studies that were done preclinically before clinical studies were done. Animal studies were
exciting. I mean, mice that were given, old mice that were given, your elithin A were able to
like rejuvenate tissues. But also 20% life extension was found in these mice given your elithin A.
20% is pretty big for a mouse, mouse study. All right, but we're not mice. So let's talk about
humans and why I'm actually excited about it. For one, your elithin A and mytoffigy was shown to be
activated in humans taking it. So they took muscle biopsies and found that, in fact, mytoffigy was
activated. It's also recently been shown that this your elithin A is able to basically rejuvenate
the immune system. So older adults were given 1,000 milligrams a day. And it basically, as we
age, our immune system ages, our T cells aren't fighting off pathogens as well. And it increased the
number of a very specific type of immune cell that decreases with age called CD8 positive T cells.
Those were increased. That's very important because you're able to fight off infection better.
And then it also increased to kind of immune cell that's able to kill cancer cells. And also
kill viruses and pathogens. It's called natural, natural killer cells. So those cells increased
as well with the your elithin A. And it also decreased markers of like senescence. So this is
basically when a cell is still alive, but it's not functioning. It's basically like it's dead.
But not only is it not dead and not functioning, it's secreting inflammatory cytokines accelerating
aging. I know it's complicated. So this study showed that it was basically able to rejuvenate
the immune system and older adults, younger adults that have taken it. So there's been studies
showing that untrained athletes supplementing with a thousand milligrams a day were able to
improve their VO2 max, 10% more than just exercise alone. So if they exercise and took your
elithin A, their VO2 max went up 10% compared to the exercise alone group. If they were yes.
If they were trained athletes, it only went up 5% because trained athletes already are doing
a lot, right? So you always get a bigger increase in VO2 max if you have an untrained athlete.
Same with obese people. And on top of that, so again, energy. It's your clearing out damage
in mitochondria. If you combine it with exercise, exercise causes you to make new mitochondria.
So the way I look at it, Steven, is a rejuvenation of all your mitochondria within your cells.
Whether we're talking about your muscle cells or your immune cells, I think it's probably
happening in the brain as well. So it's been trying to increase muscle strength in older adults. So
their hamstring strength improved by like 10 to 12% after supplementing versus just exercise
alone. I think it's a supplement that's important for aging because it's affecting mitochondria
and pretty much everything relies on mitochondria. And you can buy this in a normal shop in the
high street. You cannot buy it in a normal shop. You can buy it online. It's not cheap,
unfortunately. That's the other thing. So pomegranate itself is the next best thing for people.
And there are studies showing that people that take pomegranate juice before they exercise,
they and over the course of several weeks can actually increase their VO2 max by up to 17%.
This is analysis of multiple studies showing that. So again, I think it's all coming down
to the uralithin A. And it's a new supplement that I'm I've been experimenting with.
Again, the immune system effects. I think I'm not getting sick, but I'm doing the creatine.
I'm doing the uralithin A and I'm doing glutamine. So glutamine is the last one. What is that?
Well, you probably heard of glutamine as an amino acid, right? It's so much more. It's so much more.
So glutamine is something that it isn't amino acid, but it gets converted into and metabolized
to many different things. So one, it can be an amino acid. Two, it can form something called
gluturate, which is used by your cells for energy, mitochondria love it, or it can be converted into
that neurotransmitter that we are talking about, right? Glutamate. So it's really something that
can be used for many things. I supplement with it because I came across some studies in the past
couple of years where endurance athletes. So these are I'm not an endurance athlete, but endurance
athletes are very prone to respiratory illness because they're really just going hard, right?
And their immune system kind of takes it takes it takes attacks on your immune system.
Studies were showing that if those endurance athletes supplemented with glutamine,
they didn't get sick as often. They were having fewer respiratory illnesses.
And I remembered back to when I was a graduate student and I was doing research and I used glutamine.
And I was doing glucose and glutamine and looking at immune cells and how I could make them active
or what happens if I get rid of glucose or glutamine. And I remembered how much they love glutamine.
They consume it. They're using it for energy. And it started to make sense to me. And this was
during a period of time where, you know, again, mid-40s, your immune system is not going doing as
well as it used to. I've got to have a young child that was bringing home all sorts of pathogens.
And so I started supplementing with glutamine and it could be placebo. But again, I, you know,
the sickness abouts were going down. I wasn't getting sick as often. The other thing is good for
is the gut. And that is because glutamine can be converted into something called alpha-ketoglutarate,
which is a important energy compound that the gut uses. And so there are studies showing that
it's beneficial for gut health. I think that's what a lot of people think about when they take
glutamine is their gut. I'm thinking about my immune system. But basically, it's very easily
used by the gut cells as energy and that really helps the gut heal.
Okay, the other thing which I take almost daily, sometimes I get myself a weekend off depending
on how things are going, but almost daily are these key-ton IQ shots, which I am affiliated with.
I'm an investor in the company, key-toned shots, exogenous key-toned shots.
I take them also quite frequently, not daily. You know, so what are they doing?
There's different forms of them. And why do I take them? And I think let's talk about what I
think people should realize if they are taking them. So, you know, it's essentially giving you
that metabolic switch. It's getting your ketone levels up as if you were fasted. So you're
elevating your beta-hydroxybutyrate levels. That's the major circulating ketone.
Beta-hydroxybutyrate. BHP for short. Does that just mean ketone?
It's a ketone. There are several ketones. Acetone is another ketone. But that beta-hydroxybutyrate
is the major one, right? So, and that is a major ketone that's in your body when you're
fasted. That's what you're making. And when you're taking these ketone IQs or other exogenous
ketones is what you're going to get. So ketone IQ is got the precursor for the ketone. It's got one
three-butane dial that in your liver gets converted into beta-hydroxybutyrate. I take a ketone that
has one three-butane dial, but also it's a sterified to the actual beta-hydroxybutyrate.
What does that mean? It means that it has both an immediate action, a fast action effect of
having your ketones elevated, but it also has a tail end effect. So the one three-butane dial,
if you take it, you have to wait for it to get to your liver. You have to, can I have one?
Yes. Oh, perfect. Okay.
Wow, that stays better. So the other ketone, exogenous ketone, is the beta-hydroxybutyrate
is sterified to the one three-butane dial, which just means it's going to have a fast-acting effect,
but also a long-term effect. So you'll get a little bit more elevation in your blood ketones
from the one that has the beta-hydroxybutyrate is sterified to the one three-butane dial.
That said, the difference is I think from what I know, and I don't know a ton, is pricing.
Yes. It's pricing, but also, again, concentration. So I mean, you're going to get higher peak,
quicker, and you're going to get higher levels of it with the one that's the Oxford ketone,
I guess it's called, but the ketone IQ has one three-butane dial, which does get converted into
beta-hydroxybutyrate. This one, I think, costs a couple of dollars, and I have the Oxford one
here as well, which I think is $30 a pop. So it's quite expensive. I think the reason why this has
been able to break into retail, especially across America, is just because it's more affordable
for most people to be able to take a couple of dollars. Right. The reason I take it is because I
like the cognitive boost that I get from it, and I usually take it on
occasions like this when I'm doing a show, or I'm doing a presentation, or I'm doing a lot of
heavy research, and I just need to be on, because I get a cognitive boost from it, and that cognitive
boost does come down to what I was talking about with why I like to fast. It's mimicking that, right.
I have that beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is increasing GABA, the inhibitory neurotransmitter that's
silencing down some of the anxiety in the back of the brain or the chatter, and just helping me focus,
and also it increases brain drive neurotrophic factors. So beta-hydroxybutyrate is a signaling molecule.
It's able to increase brain drive neurotrophic factor in the brain that helps with learning, memory,
brain aging. It's also been shown to lower oxidation. So there's all sorts of reasons why I like to
take it. For people that are fasting and they're wanting to burn fat, consider that if you take
exogenous ketones, you stop you stop burning your own fat because your body thinks it's now got
all it's got the ketones there, which is what the metabolism of fat is trying to do is produce ketones
for energy. And so it does shut down what's called lipolysis, which is basically breaking down
fat. And so if you're doing fasting and you're doing it for reasons of fat loss, if you take
it exogenous ketone during that period of time, it will transiently kind of shut down that process.
So keep that in mind. It's one reason why I don't do it every day because I am looking for that
effect for losing visceral fat in particular. That's a really interesting important point.
It is. That people that talk about. Yeah, it's important. And it's only going to last
as long as the beta-hydroxybutyrate last in your blood system. So maybe three
hours max. What I noticed was when I was trying to get into ketosis at the top of the year,
and I was doing exogenous ketone shots, I was struggling to get into ketosis. And so what I did
is I stopped taking the ketone shots for a couple of days, just focused on my ketogenic diet,
I got into ketosis. And then afterwards I started taking the ketone shots when I was doing
podcasting because just like you, I noticed just such a radical, radical difference when I take
exogenous ketones, or when I'm in a natural sort of dietary ketosis, a radical difference.
And as a podcaster, I've said this a couple of million times before, but I'm going to say it again.
Two times a week, I do an AB test of how my brain is working. I sit with someone who is an expert in
what they do for sometimes four or five hours and I look at them in their face and I have to ask
questions and respond and understand big words and hope that my brain is connected to my mouth today.
And so I've done 600 or 700 of these AB tests now. And one of the factors that correlates to
good performance as an interviewer and that I think are a speaker on stage is whether I'm in a ketosis
state or not. And it's so profound in fact, I've actually had Gerogun say this. Gerogun said that
the upside he gets from being in a ketogenic state is so evident for him as an interviewer that he's
considered being in that state all the time. It's the same for me too. I mean, as you know, I'm also
doing the same thing, right? I have a podcast and I'm giving presentations and very, very much
having to use my brain and be on. And it's really made a huge difference for me as well. And that is
also why I like to fast because I get the same effect when I'm when I'm fasted. And then I will take
an exogenous ketone when I'm also fasted. And so I get into ketosis quicker as well because I'm
already I'm already kind of there. I don't have other things inhibiting it. So it does help. And
there's again, pros and cons to doing it. You do want your body to be metabolic flexible. So I'm
glad you did do the ketosis like the ketogenic diet and let your body kind of do it and adapt and
then add the ketones on top of that. But they do help. They help with cognitive function for sure.
I mean, I use them every single podcast I do presentation I'm giving. It's part of my routine.
Let's talk about something different, which is something that I've never heard of before.
It's a word that you started to make popular in the health and longevity community, which is
this idea of peak span. I have this graph in front of me, which I'll throw up on the screen. It's
fascinating. What the hell is peak span? I've heard of health span. I've even heard of lifespan.
But I've never heard of peak span. Well, let's start with lifespan and work our way to peak span
to give people a frame of reference. I think most people are familiar with the word longevity,
wanting to extend their lifespan. How many years they live? How long they live, right? But the problem
with lifespan is, well, you could live longer, but you're going to have perhaps you have some diseases.
So why do you want to live longer if you have Alzheimer's disease or cardiovascular disease or
type 2 diabetes? I mean, your quality of life is not as good. And that's where this idea of
health span came in, right? So health span is, well, let's increase the amount of time we live
disease-free. And that's the new thing that everyone wants to increase and improve their health
span. I want to live, I want to increase my health span. So I want to live longer and not have
any diseases while I'm living that longer life. Well, there's this new concept now, very new,
that was just published by some researchers out of Duke University as well as I think the China
some University in China and another university. But I want to give them credit. It's a preprint
study. It came out on my radar. I immediately loved it. And this is idea of peak span.
Peak span says, hey, you know, health span is great. Being disease-free is great, but you're still
in a period of decline. You're still declining. Why not try to be as close to your peak span,
which is essentially within 90% of your peak function for a certain measurement. Whether we're talking
about VO2 max, cardiovascular fitness, we're talking about, you know, any other function. And that's
where this graph comes in. On the Y axis, we have our relative capacity. So if you're listening
now, this is a good time to look at the screen, because Runde is going to show us something.
Okay. Your relative capacity, 100, being 100% and 0 being 0%. What does relative capacity mean?
Your capacity for cognitive function for, you know, for your fertility, your hormonal, yeah,
your potential. Yeah. And on the X axis, we're talking about age, right? And so what you'll notice
is that different capacities, different organ functions kind of peak at different rates.
So we can talk about first, obviously female reproductive, really starts to peak at, you know,
25 or so. And then it just sharply declines until you hit 40, right? It's like bottomed out.
That's the reproductive female, right? Immune function. So let's find a immune function here.
That kind of peaks around 25 years old. And it also kind of declines and it keeps declining.
It's quite scary. As you get to 80. And then we have muscular skeletal, right? So this is our
peak strength, pink muscle mass, pink bone density. Those also peak around 25. And then they kind of
steadily start to decline. And the same goes for cognitive function. We have two different kinds of
cognitive function. We have fluid cognitive function, like processing speed. That is the kind of,
I would say, cognitive function where you can answer a question without any prior knowledge.
You know, that so that peaks around 25. You joking. No, I know. So I'm on the way down.
You're on, I'm definitely on the way down. You're on the way down as well. So that would be the blue one
here, peaks around 25. And then we have the crystallized cognitive function, crystallized
for cognitive functions, interesting because it peaks around mid life. And the reason it peaks around
40, 45 is because it's the kind of intelligence that it's like the library where you have all these
facts that you've accumulated over the years and you're able to use those facts to answer or solve
a problem, right? Is that wisdom or is that? It really just means that you have all these facts
that you've learned over your life. Like for me, you know, I've been a biologist for since I was,
you know, 20. So 27 years, I have so much that I've learned over that time. And so now I'm sitting
here and I use that knowledge. I talked about glutamine and what I learned from graduate school.
I'm using that knowledge, right? My topology, I learned about that, like forever ago, and I've
been following it. So you use all these facts and this data that you've learned in your life
and you're able to solve problems. So fluid intelligence. I'm sorry, crystallized intelligence.
I've got to ask a question that we were sat having dinner the other day, me and my team.
And we were talking about the difference because we're all different ages. We've got someone in
the team who's 45, 35, 30, and the other person at the table was 27. And we were all talking about
the differences we've noticed in ourselves as we've aged. And they also different things. So
Leona and my team who's just is above the age of 40 was saying that she just like doesn't really
give a fuck anymore in the same way that she used to care about people's opinions when she was 30.
One of the things I said I noticed about myself was after I turned 30, I feel like I saw a step
change in pattern recognition. And like exactly what you've just described there, which is like
crystallized knowledge because I sit here with experts all day, learn all this stuff from them.
And then my ability to then like apply in my life as an entrepreneur seems to be improving.
And so the question I was really going to ask you is think about entrepreneurship. Not my lot of
my audience are entrepreneurs in some capacity or aspire to be. I was wondering as you were saying
that, like when is the best age? Because entrepreneurship is a lot about pattern recognition.
It's problem in front of you. I've seen this before. I'm pulling on different reference points
to arrive at a solution. So I was wondering here, because it looks like it peaks at like 45.
Yeah, 45. So if we look at it, it's peaking at 45. And that's also why a lot of biologists continue
to do great work in their midlife as well. And that is something that I do feel like is better for
me as well, you know, where I'm now able to pull on. So I have so much of a database in the back of
my head, you know, where it's like, I've got all this knowledge and then it comes up and you can
use it. And so it's interesting. You can talk about entrepreneurs, but you can, I mean, any sort of
career path, right, but it would be beneficial to be able to do that. So the question is then how do
we get here's peak span? You're going up. And what you want to do is you want to get and maintain
about 90% of all these things that we were talking about peaking, right? We didn't immune aging,
a peak set, you know, immune aging actually peaks around adolescents, I think,
musculoskeletal health 2025, the fluid intelligence 2025, you're having cardiovascular fitness,
that's also 20 to 25 peaks. And then it goes down. The question is, how do you
maintain your peak span, right? How do you get as close as you can as you're obviously not going to be
your 100%, but how do you not drop below 90% of that peak, right? Is that possible? First of all,
is it possible? And I would say for some organs, no, which organs are that? I don't think a
reproductive life expectancy for a female. I don't think you're going to be having babies at 80 years
old without actual medical intervention. That's a whole other conversation. So I, but I do think
there are ways that we can get really close to our peak for cardiovascular, respiratory,
for musculoskeletal, you know, for our intelligence, cognitive intelligence as well as our immune system.
And I think there are blanket things that we could do that affect multiple systems, right? And
there's also targeted things. So we're talking about fluid versus cognitive versus crystallized
intelligence, right? Obviously crystallized intelligence, you know, it doesn't peak until mid 40s.
The things that you can do to improve crystallized intelligence also improve your fluid intelligence.
What are those things? One exercise, number one thing, aerobic exercise is increasing brain
drive, neurotrophic factor. Very important for both these aspects. It's also, you know, growing
new neurons, making connections between the neurons, making your brain more plastic and adaptable,
so to adapt to the changing environment. Top thing that you can do. Another thing that you can do
that's really important for brain aging is the omega-3. We talked about that. Really important for
brain aging. But the other thing that you can do is what we're doing right now. Engaging in novel,
cognitive, you know, experiences. It could be a discussion. It could be your work. If you are
learning new things, novel is key here, novel. If you're learning new things, you are going to
really help yourself improve both your fluid and crystallized intelligence. And so is that because
you're raising your potential, IE, so you're falling from a higher place as you decline.
Because I was thinking about this. How much of this has got to do with making sure that I peek
at a higher place? Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that maybe has something to do with it. But in
addition, there's neurochemical things that are changing when you're learning new experiences.
For one, you are increasing brain drive, neurotrophic factor and stuff as well because novelty does
that. You're also glutamate and you're having glutamate being activated as well. But yeah,
I think the cognitive reserve is what you're talking about. And that is really important, right?
Because you need to have that reserve if you're going to start pulling from it. And that also comes
with muscle, muscle health, right? Muscle and bone. So those are peeking around the same times,
25 or so. Peak muscle mass generally occurs around the age of 25. There are things that you can do
to keep close to that peak though, right? And that would be resistance training, big, big,
big one, strength training. Strength goes down. This is something protein intake, right?
Avoid the black plastics in my fridge. Avoid black plastics in your fridge. Yeah.
Because then my testosterone is going to go down.
That testosterone is going to go down and that's going to affect your ability to gain muscle mass.
Exactly. A lot of these healthy lifestyles that we're talking about are multi-system targeting,
so you're targeting, but key would be strength training and resistance training. And it's going to
also affect your bones. So you're going to want to do these weight bearing exercises that are
multi-joint, the compound lifts, right? The dead lifts, rows, things like that. Those are very
important to help maintain that peak. Immune system, sleep, very, very important for maintaining
healthy immune system and preventing your immune system from aging rapidly. So making sure
you're prioritizing sleep. How are you going to do that, right? I mean, there's a lot of ways to,
people, a lot of people have sleep problems and they have sleep problems for different reasons.
And there's ways to target them, but just realize thinking about it and prioritizing is important
for your immune system and for your brain. Also, the exercise plays a role in your cardio respiratory
fitness, the brain, everything, muscle. So cardio respiratory fitness is something that you can,
we talked about, you're a Lithuan A helping improve it on top of exercise. So there's supplements
and stuff that you add in as well. But this idea here is really that we can do things in our life
that are healthy to help maintain that peak span, to get us not just free of disease, but like close
to what we're peaking. And I do think it's possible. I mean, we talked last time I was here,
we talked about that study. You exercise five hours a week, do some high-intensity interval training
in there and you can reverse heart aging by 20 years. That's incredible. It's crazy, right?
It's so crazy. And you're also saying that listening to the diorevasia, obviously, is
therefore good for? Yeah, it's good for cognitive, you're fluid intelligence and you're crystallized
intelligence. It's good for learning new things, right? I mean, that's so you would prescribe it.
Yeah, yeah, especially the episodes I'm on.
I say that as a joke, but actually it's part of the conversation we have the other dinner was,
I don't think I'm going to appreciate maybe until later in my life how much an unintended
consequence of doing this as a job had on my cognition and my brain. And it's like not something
that I would notice in the moment, but over time, doing this two times a week for sometimes eight
hours a week, learning something new, being forced as a strong word, but having an obligation to
learn something new, eight hours a week from my entire adult life. It's great. I mean, it's one
of the best things that you can do for your brain. That's by learning a new language is associated
with a rapid, you know, decrease in Alzheimer's disease risk. You're working your brain. You're
learning new things. It's so important. One of the worst things that someone can do is retire
and just sit and watch TV, right? I mean, that's like the worst thing. You're going to you're
rapidly going to decline and get dementia. We've got to talk about AI in this conversation.
Oh my gosh. Because I actually woke up this morning and I got a message. I'll check with him
that I can put this in before I say out that before it's published, but I got a message from my
chairman, Nikki. Nikki's an incredible man. He's, you know, 25 years Boston Consulting Group. He's
seen it all. And he said to me that one of the things he's thinking a lot about the moment is how
across our, you know, businesses, but just generally in society, how AI is going to impact
critical thinking and what that then might mean for our teams, our executives, etc. So this is
a conversation I was having this morning with him. And it's also something I've noticed. There
are some people I interact with now where I do not feel at all like I'm dealing with their brain.
I feel like I'm dealing with what came out the other end of a chat GPT prompt. Yes.
Good bad indifferent. Like I don't, you know, yeah, it's, it's an interesting and important
question, Stephen, because I've been thinking a lot about what, with AI, it's changing so much.
And the question is like, do you focus on, you know, the negative parts and the short term parts?
Do you focus on the potential benefits that could be great and grand? And I do think a lot of it
is people are worried about things like, oh, AI's going to take all of our jobs. Oh, we're going
to have brain rot because we don't use our brains anymore. And those are concerns to have,
but there's also a lot of exciting things to think about. I also worry about the brain rot part
where it's like, well, okay, these people aren't critically thinking for themselves. I've seen
comment, I can, I can spot AI a million miles away, a million miles away, right? And you know,
part of it is, if AI is accurate and they're, and people are more easily accessing the accurate
accurate information and they're learning it, that's great. Like that's what it's supposed to be
there for, right? I think that's big if, right? If, right. If. And it does have a lot to do with
the version of AI you're using. It has a lot to do with the prompt. It has a lot to do with the
question. How much, you know, reasoning it has to do. I mean, there's, we're, it's still evolving,
but I agree. It's kind of like, the worry is, are we going to have a generation of people growing
up that don't know how to critically think? You've heard about that London taxi driver test
experiment. I think I've heard you talk about it before, actually. Yeah. I mean, well,
they have these maps and their heads, right? And you have these taxi drivers in London that,
they don't use GPS. Like they know everywhere to go. By the way, I was in London a couple of years
ago. I love the taxi drivers there. They are so awesome. Like they're just different. They're
totally different than. For anyone that doesn't know, I'm absolutely going to butcher this.
To become a London taxi driver, you have to take a test for many, many years. You have to learn
for many, many years. And you have to learn like every street across London from the top of your
head without using GPS. So yeah, when you get in a black cabin London, it's amazing. You can go,
I kind of want to go to and they go, got you. They know everywhere. They have maps in their brain.
I mean, think about the cognitive reserve they have. Think about the like all the things they learned
and what and the spatial memory and all that. And do these, do these guys ever get Alzheimer's
disease? I don't know that they do. I mean, there's studies out there showing that these,
these types of taxi drivers like do not get Alzheimer's disease. They have to learn 25,000
streets and it's called the knowledge. And they have physically larger hippocampus centers in their
brain, which is the memory center. And I like to extrapolate if I may and think that all this
cognitive learning that I do daily and that you're doing by like talking to guests from all sorts of
fields is also very, I mean, you're learning things. It's not just going, you're interested in
things and you're learning them. And it really is also a type of brain exercise. And so I think
that this is ultimately what we were getting to is basically, we're going to talk about AI because
I know we got to get there. But is essentially like if you can engage in intellectual types of
activities or anything that's going to exercise your brain, whether it's learning the map of London
or it's learning about my topogy, whatever it is, you know, it's really good to engage in that
novel learning. It's really good for your brain. It's working your brain out.
I've been thinking a lot about this. I've just come back from South by Southwest and every
conversation was about learning. I really, they were asking me a lot about AI. So before I went
on stage, I was looking at some of the studies and I concluded that at the moment we are in society,
there's going to be a bit of a bifurcation of people. One group is going to take the path of
least resistance with AI, which is they're going to defer their thinking to AI, which is,
you know, one of the things I learn from people like you often is that if you don't use it, you lose it.
And that part of their brain, whatever it is, will begin to atrophy to some extent. And I think
there'll be another group of people who will just like we go to the gym now, because we have to,
because our lives are so easy, they will go to like the mental gym, which means they will set aside
time to intentionally solve difficult cognitive problems or challenges. And I've, I literally have
said to some of my executives, we'll have a moment where we're talking on WhatsApp or Slack.
And I'll literally say, let's try and solve this problem with our brains because I believe that
solving this problem with our brains will create a deeper understanding of the first principles of
the problem, not the just surface level one plus one equals two, but like what is one? What is a
number? And this is the difference, like, AI can give you the answer, but it's not going to give you
the foundation so that you can solve other problems in the future, because if I never told you what
the number one was, you would never in the future be able to use it yourself. All you'd know is one
plus one equals two, but there's foundations like what are numbers? What is one? What is two? What is
plus that you need to understand to be able to do one plus two equals three? And the study,
one of the studies I looked at, which has been heavily discussed, was from last year. And it found
staggering memory cost using generative AI in the study, which I'll throw up on the screen,
83% of AI users were unable to remember the details of a passage of text that they had written
with AI's assistance. EEG scans showed that brain connectivity was almost halfed when individuals
outsourced their thinking to AI compared to writing manually, which created cognitive debt.
You get output faster, but you don't build the long-term neural hardware to understand
the information or the knowledge. So true. It's so true. You know, what's interesting about what
you just said is the when you're writing something, whether you're typing it or even actually the
most, I think there's been some studies on this like handwriting something, something about handwriting
it really ingrains it into your memory. And I have this process when I'm trying to, there's a lot
of facts that I have to remember, you know, when I'm talking about them. And I have this process
that I do. And the first one is the research, right? You research it and you find it. And then I
type it in a Google Doc. And then I write it. And that process is really what gets it into my
memory. All the like statistics and, you know, statistics are always harder because it's just a
number, you know, versus like you're saying, you're understanding the fundamental nature of something
that I'm interested in, that always helps. And so it's interesting that if you're writing something,
if you're writing it, like typing it or writing it handwriting, they're probably talking about
typing it. Even that really does help you remember something. If you're just copying it and then
trying to do some recall, it's not going to, it's not going to work. And then there's the whole
other layer of that you were talking about, which is like you're not even using the novelty isn't
there. You're not like really into it and learning. And that's what it really takes to build that
cognitive reserve, to improve the connections, to increase brain drive and aerotropic vector, right?
You need that novelty. So I do love AI, but I also know that I need to continue using my brain.
And I have my own protocols that I like and that I still do. I still write things down.
I have a, you know, I have my little notebook. And I want to, before I go on a podcast too,
I like to go through and write stuff down that I've already typed, that I've learned and things
that I wanted to cover. It really makes a difference in memory. So for people that are like
you and I and learners and optimizers, take that, take that pointer because it really does work.
This was one of my favorite things with the iPad. Listen, I'm not the type of person that does a
huge amount of writing on pen and paper, although I would do more because everything you've said
is proven to be true for me. If I write something down, it's like I'm writing it directly into my brain.
But the iPad now allows you to split what you're reading in terms of a book. On one side,
and then a note pad on the other. So what I do when I read is I read the thing. And then I try
and write out the lesson on the other side of the page. So I'll say, we've got microbiome has 42
trillion bucks. And I'll go, they've got microbiome has 42 million bucks. I love it. I love it.
And then I turn the page and I'm trying to do exactly what you said because I realize that a lot of
stuff I learned doesn't land unless I write it. It's something about the act of writing. And if
you add the layer of like what I do, it takes time, you know, so you have to type it and then write.
Then it really sticks in your brain. Like those are the ones when I've done those are the ones that
really have stuck if I've done them both. But I love that. I don't use iPads ever. And I still
like read books, you know, like old books. And when I have time to do them and I just have my notebook.
I think it shows that you have an unbelievable ability to remember so many things.
But I still love AI. You know, I still, I think there's a lot of benefits. And I think that,
you know, scientists in general are using AI is now their collaborator, right? They're,
they're pretty smart collaborator that has access to a lot of data and can analyze a lot of data
quickly. What are your thoughts on exercise and the current suggestions and recommendations
around exercise? Well, I'm glad you asked this question. I think I've been thinking about this a
lot. I did a podcast on the current exercise guidelines. And I think they need to be updated.
I think they're, they're not good enough. And it's important for people to realize how these
extra exercise guidelines were formulated and what they mean. So typically you'll hear exercise
guidelines 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise is good for optimal health
or 75 minutes to 150 minutes a week of vigorous intensity exercise, right? So they're basically
a two to one ratio, right? Twice as many minutes for for moderate intensity as vigorous intensity.
What is defined as moderate versus vigorous? That's also important because it's different across
different studies. In these guidelines, it's basically moderate intensity is you're walking.
You're moving with intent, but not really, really fast. You're walking, you're walking at maybe
a fast pace, but you're not jogging and you're not running. That kind of activity would be considered
moderate. Bigger risk would be considered jogging, running, swimming, cycling. So the kind of activity
where you're actually moving fast with intent. Why do we have this two to one ratio? Where did it come
from? Well, it all came from energy expenditure. You burn twice as many calories if you're doing
vigorous intensity exercise as you do if you're doing moderate intensity, right? So if you're
walking one mile, you'll burn x amount of calories. If you jog that mile, you'll burn twice as many
calories. That's where these guidelines came from the two to one ratio, right? Weight loss, energy
expenditure, but that's not necessarily what's important for reducing cancer mortality, reducing
cardiovascular related mortality, reducing all-cause mortality, right? These guidelines
use that data, this two to one ratio of energy expenditure, and then they looked at other studies
and said, okay, how much exercise is required to reduce cardiovascular related mortality or
all-cause mortality? And they kind of like connected the dots. By the way, these studies also
were using questionnaires. They weren't actually measuring how active people were.
A new study came out, and I did a journal club podcast on it because it was the study that I
felt was so important that I wanted to break down all the components of the study with another
scientist and talk about them because it's very important. So journal clubs, typically in science,
you have them in my career. It was, you know, sometimes it was once a week, other times it was
once a month, and someone you choose a study that's important, and you break it down and you talk
about the results and you talk about the methods and talk about the findings mean. That's what a
journal club is, and it's essentially you choose a journal and a publication within that journal,
and it's a club. You have different scientists that are talking about it.
Why did this warrant a journal club? Because I think this study basically is strong enough data
that it's implying we need to change our exercise guidelines, at least the messaging of them
at the very least, and I'll tell you why, because I talked about these guidelines, how they're
formulated, they're using questionnaires, or not measuring anything. Well, a new study came out.
Not only did it measure physical activity through these accelerometers, it was able to measure
how active people were, and the type of activity, whether it was, I mentioned moderate versus vigorous,
they also measured light physical activity that would be considered walking around your house,
kind of doing that kind of light activity, not necessarily going for a walk or going for a run.
And they looked at deaths from different causes of disease. They looked at deaths from all causes.
So all cause mortality, they looked at cancer-related deaths, they looked at cardiovascular-related
deaths, they looked at type 2 diabetes, they looked at heart attacks, right?
And what was so profound was that what we found, what they found, and what we now know is that
everything changes in terms of how important vigorous intensity exercise is.
It's so much more valuable than we thought. It's not 2-to-1. So if we're looking at all cause
mortality, you know, dying from all causes, cancer, respiratory, anything related, that's non-accidental.
For every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise, you had to do four minutes of
moderate intensity, and you had to do like 100 to 150 minutes of light exercise to get the same
reduction in all cause mortality. For every one minute. For every one minute of vigorous
intensity exercise, it gets better, okay? For every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise,
to reduce your death from cardiovascular disease, you had to do eight minutes of moderate intensity
and 200 minutes of light exercise for every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise.
It's huge. To reduce your type 2 diabetes risk, for every one minute of vigorous, you had to
do 10 minutes of moderate intensity, or you had to do again, you're in the 150 minutes to 200
minutes of light exercise. To reduce your risk of dying from cancer, for every one minute of
vigorous intensity exercise, you had to do four minutes, about four minutes of moderate intensity.
And for light, it was like, it was almost not even happening. I mean, it was like 250, 300,
like you had to just a ton of minutes, unbelievable amount of minutes, okay?
But the value of vigorous intensity exercise is so much more than this 2-to-1 ratio
based on energy expenditure, based on burning calories that our guidelines were based on.
It's time to rethink them. It's time to tell people, hey, if you're getting out and you're going
for a run, it is worth way more than you think it is in terms of reducing your disease risk and
your death from that disease, right? Also, what was really interesting about this study,
and this goes back to this exercise snacks that we talked about before our last episode,
is that because there were people or participants were wearing these accelerometers on their wrist,
they were able to measure all physical activity. Let's say you're, you have a new puppy and
you're sprinting in the yard and playing with them for a minute or two minutes or three minutes
or whatever, not 30 minutes in the gym, right? Or not 30 minutes on the treadmill, but you're just
to short-burst or you're playing with your grandkids or your kids and you're playing tag, whatever.
Those moments count. They really add up, and that is also a take home from this study and other
studies, is that you can actually get massive benefits from the sprinting, the vigorous exercise,
one minute, two minutes, three minutes. Women that did three and a half minutes of just this
vigorous types of exercise per day lowered their cancer risk by 40%. Yes, three and a half minutes
a day. This was in women. Now, there's bigger studies showing men and women that exercise,
nine minutes a day, the short vigorous types of exercise, adding up, not nine minutes altogether,
but like a minute here, a minute there, a minute here, right? It adds up, 40% lower cancer
related mortality, 50% lower cardiovascular related mortality. And that's another big take home from
this study that I really want people to know about because some people don't like spending 30 minutes
or putting out blocking out a 30 minute time or an hour long time to go to the gym. They should,
I mean, if they want their peak span, that's what you're going to have to do. But if you're just
wanting to avoid disease and be, you know, health span, you know, you can get that by doing these
short moments of short bursts of physical activity and those count. And some people are like, oh,
thank God, thank God I can do that because I hate going to the gym. I'll, you know, they just won't
do it. They won't do it. A lot of people as well are caught up with this 10,000 steps a day thing.
Yes, 10,000 steps a day. What's that facial reaction for people that can't see your face? She
looked up into the corner like I personally offended her. Yeah, I look. Any exercise is better than
none. I want to just get that on the table. Okay, that's important. I don't want to totally
diss the 10,000 steps a day. But I think that we need to ditch it. I think we need to ditch 10,000 steps
a day and say 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day of getting your heart rate up. You can, you can,
you can do body weight squats. You can, you know, play tag with your kids or your grandkids.
You can do shorter bursts of it, but it needs to be 10 minutes. And if you get to that 10 minutes a day,
50% lower cardiovascular rate mortality, 50% lower all-cause mortality, 40% lower cancer mortality.
That is what you're going to get. 10,000 steps a day is not going to get you that. We just talked
about it. It's not going to get you that, right? It's a different ratio. It's not two to one ratio.
I imagine those people thinking, you use three terms, they're vigorous, moderate, and light.
We probably need to quite clearly define those definitions. Like, what is vigorous?
Right. Heart rate, is it all? Vigorous intensity exercise can be heart rate,
and it is heart rate in a lot of studies that are done. In terms of the exercise guidelines,
they don't use heart rate. They're using movement. Like, when I say accelerometer, I mean moving fast.
So they're able to measure the acceleration of your movement. And so the way that they're
talking about it in these exercise guidelines studies is moving fast. Moving fast would be jogging,
running, swimming, biking, you're moving. Steper would step or we'd be moving fast. Even weights
are moving fast. That's part of it, too. You're doing weights. Because they're on your wrist.
And so if you're doing bicep curls or you're doing something with your wrist that are fast,
it's part of that equation as well. Heart rate isn't the thing they were measuring,
but that's a consequence of moving fast. It is. So you want to be thinking about getting your heart rate?
Personally, when I think about it, and if I'm talking about it in the context of these exercise
guidelines, I would say that heart vigorous would be probably considered 70% or more of your max
heart rate would be considered vigorous. Previously, in my, when I'm talking about vigorous,
I also talk about high intensity interval training. And that's more like 80% of your max heart rate
are higher. Very important for improving VO2 max and cardiovascular fitness. But in these studies,
heart rate is more like a 70% your max heart rate and more. Because that's, you can be jogging
at that rate, right? jogging or running, that's a big, that's vigorous intensity exercise.
If you're below that, if you're like, you know, 50% your max heart rate, that's considered
moderate intensity. And then, you know, maybe even lower than that, if you're just sort of,
you know, walking around the house. I mean, that's not even going that much at all. That's light.
That's considered light. 10,000 steps would be probably considered. It depends because actually,
they're saying steps, which means could just be around the house. If you walk around your house,
how long does it take to do 10,000 steps? Like an hour, an hour and a half? Probably just doing
six or seven thousand, just walking around the office. So, but that's considered light exercise.
So that's why I think we need to get rid of that. It's not enough. It's not enough.
It's better than sitting because sitting is bad. Sitting is an independent risk factor for
disease, for cancer in particular. This was one of the most replayed moments last time I spoke to you.
Was people replayed the section where you talked about being sedentary and how much of an issue
that is for all of us. And it's really stayed with me to the fact, I don't know if this helps,
but I've been using standing desks everywhere. Even when I travel around the world,
now I've actually got a portable standing desk just to try and keep me up because as a podcast,
I've sat in this chair for a while. I've sat down for six hours today and it's 3pm.
Right. Yeah. Kelly Starrett wrote a book desk bound some years ago and, you know, he really
played a role in popularizing this idea and I think in the public as well. Being sedentary is
time you're, you're spent sitting, right? Time you spend sitting. It doesn't necessarily mean,
I used to think about being sedentary as, oh, do you work out? Yes or no? No, you're sedentary.
Yes, no, you're not sedentary. That's not what sedentary is. Sedentary is time you're spending
sitting. We've been sitting here quite quite a few hours. We've been sedentary this whole time.
So being sedentary and sitting is an independent risk factor. Even if you're exercising,
it's an independent risk factor for diseases. I mentioned cancer in particular that seems to be
the one that's more strongly correlated to being sedentary. But standing, standing helps.
If you're standing up or also getting up and doing exercise snacks so you can get up every hour
and like do some body weight squats, do some jumping jacks, do some high knees, get your heart
rate up. That breaks up the sedentary time. So now it's only an hour of sedentary versus eight
hours or six hours. However long you're sitting at your desk, it makes a difference. And those
exercise snacks are easy to do. I have a standing desk. I don't use it enough. I still have it.
I do do exercise snacks. And I like doing the exercise snacks because literally if we were to
get up and do body weight squats right now for one minute, you're going to feel better. You feel
better after the blood flow to your brain. It gives you a little pump. I love it. I love the pump.
It's just one minute of it and you get a short pump to your brain and it makes you feel better.
So exercise snacks are a really good way to break up sedentary time. They're also adding up. They count.
As I just mentioned, they count towards your exercise goal and they're vigorous. You're getting
you're moving fast, right? Vigorous exercise. You're getting your heart rate up.
Or I could just take a Zampak. I just get the pen out, jab, jab, jab. And it's all of this stuff
disappears, right? I could do all of this stuff where I can just as Zampak it.
I mean, so many people are taking a Zampak. So interesting. And I listen, I have to say it's
saving people's lives. Amazing. I've heard so many of my friends who are on a Zampak and
taking the GLP1 pens say that they've had profound benefits. Their knees are better.
They can walk upstairs. They feel better. Yeah, I mean, let's be real here. Being obese and
overweight is one of the worst things you can do for your health, right? It's going to accelerate
the aging process and it's going to increase the risk of every age related disease,
cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, you know, visceral fats happening.
You're insulin resistant. You know, it's all it's all happening. It's going to affect your
quality of life. It's harder to walk around. You're not as mobile. Your joints are getting more
stress on them, right? So anything that can help you lose that weight is going to be beneficial.
And so these GLP1, you're talking about a Zampak. That's the GLP1 receptor agonist, right?
They are very... They're life changing for people that are obese. People that need to lose,
you know, 40 pounds, 50 pounds, 30 pounds. It's not easy to lose that weight with diet and lifestyle.
Yeah. Well, let's talk about the butts. Let's talk about... So the benefits are obviously if
they're going to lose that fat, the visceral fat, they are going to become insulin sensitive.
They're going to reduce their risk for all those diseases. And that's what the data shows.
Cardiovascular disease risk goes down, cancer risk goes down, except for one type of cancer
goes up kidney cancer. But, you know, that all times, disease risk goes down. Anything that you're
going to... When you lose weight, those risks are going to go down. There are side effects,
and there are things to consider when you're taking. I'm calling them GLP1s because we have first
generation, second generation, and now third generation. And they're affecting not only the GLP1
receptor, but they're affecting glucacon, for example. They're affecting another peptide called
GIPGIP. So I'll just call them GLP1s, for short. Okay.
Semiglutide or Zembeck is one of the first generations. We now have the second generation that's
targeting two pathways. You can lose even more weight. Mujaro would be something that people would
relate to. That's one of the second generation ones. And I think that for people that are going
to start these drugs, first of all, they have to realize there's a good chance. They're going to
have to be on them for the rest of their lives. And that's something that you have to be willing to
do. And I say that because many studies have shown now that individuals that do take these GLP1s
do lose a lot of weight. And it's very beneficial to lose that weight. But if they stop taking the GLP1s,
they gain the weight back. And often, oftentimes, they gain all the weight back because your
body's kind of trying to go back to that reset point. And their hunger comes back with a vengeance.
And so part of what GLP1 drugs are doing are they are basically, you know, they're making you
feel satiated and not hungry. So they're affecting your satiety hormones. So you don't feel hungry.
They're also slowing gastric emptying. So food stays around in your intestines longer. So you feel
full when food is in your intestines. You don't feel hungry. So they're slowing that process. And so
people don't feel hungry. And so what ends up happening is in many ways, it's mimicking calorie
restriction and fasting, right? You're basically not eating as much food. So that's essentially,
but it's doing it for you. It's not, you don't have to put in that. You don't have to feel hungry.
You don't have to put in that work and it's doing it for you, right? And so people are losing a lot
of weight and they're losing it very rapidly. And I said, you might have to be on it for the rest of
your life. And what I mean by that is because a lot of studies show that majority of people do
gain back their weight. Their appetite comes back. It comes back with the vengeance.
And they regain the weight over over a year or so. So that's one thing to consider. Are you
willing to take it for the rest of your life? There was a New York Times piece where they looked at
a lady called Stacey Cantibri. She had lost 50 pounds on one of the GLP ones that you mentioned
reaching her peak goal weight. And after stopping the drug due to insurance issues,
she regained 20 pounds back straight away in a month. Interestingly, she described the return of
hunger not as a gradual increase, but as a ferocious, animalistic urge to eat. That was far more
intense than before she ever started the medication. And the New York Times did a big piece about that
because one of the things that I've come to learn is that there's no free lunch in life, no pun intended.
There's no free lunch. There's no free biological lunch. It's true. Yeah, people's appetite. That's
why I said it comes back with the vengeance because it seems to be the case where your body's like
it hasn't been hungry. And it's like, wait a minute. I've been starving for so long. I need to
eat, right? So it's kind of like feed me. And that's obviously something to consider. So the question
is, well, what happens if you're on these drugs long term? And you know, we've got these drugs,
early, early versions of them have been around. They also help treat type two diabetes, right? That's
part of like where they first came from. They've been around a while. We do have some data.
Mostly the data is positive because people are losing a lot of weight. And that is what's putting
them at a high risk for these diseases. And so when you lose that weight, what ends up happening
is your disease risk for all these diseases goes down, right? So it's hard to on couple weight loss
from what the drugs doing itself. But there are side effects in addition to that, right? Nausea,
GI upset, all that stuff, maybe temporary. Some people it kind of sticks around.
Some other effects, I think, that people are a little more concerned about are the muscle loss
and bone loss. That's a big one. And that is probably something coming from just rapid weight loss
and not eating enough food and not resistance training. So when you're, when you're largely fasting
throughout the day, if you're not getting enough protein, then your muscle's not going to have amino
acids to help, you know, basically keep growing and not only keep growing, not use its own amino acid
reserve for making protein, right? So you break down muscle. In fact, there's weight loss studies
showing that in any weight loss diet, you know, if you're not eating enough protein and you're not
resistance training up to 40% of your weight can come from muscle weight loss that you're losing.
I just say lean mass, including muscle. So that's a little different. But it's, it's a big percent,
right? And so you're talking about losing a lot of muscle as well. And that is something that
happens with these drugs. If people are training, it's really helps. If the resistance training,
it's really helping because that's a signal to your muscle, to grow muscle. It's a mechanical
force that helps you grow muscle, right? That's how many consider bone loss is another one.
You can also lose bone from rapid, rapid weight loss. I don't know if there's an independent,
like GLP1 receptors that are on bone doing something directly there yet to be uncovered, I think.
We don't really know why bone loss occurs. It's thought maybe it's just the weight loss. But like
I said, maybe there's something that we don't understand yet. Kidney cancer is another one.
It seems like there's an increased signal for kidney cancer. Don't know why that is.
Needs to be studied. There's a black box warning on them for thyroid cancer increase.
That's never really been shown in human studies. It all comes from animal data. But it's there,
nonetheless, something to consider. And it's pretty early. So I feel like we're going to have
conversation in five years time when there's more understood about these compounds.
Well, the thing that worries me is that, you know, okay, you have the person who's 300 pounds,
and they have to get down. That's really unhealthy, right? That can really be a game changer for
them. But now what we're seeing is Hollywood. We're seeing just your average moms that are like,
I want to lose 10 pounds, but I want it to be easy, right? They're 10 or 15 pounds, whatever.
And they're going to these GLP ones. And the question is, I don't know that we have data showing it's
actually beneficial in that population because they're already pretty, pretty lean. And they're just
wanting to look a little bit better. We don't really know. We don't really know if it's beneficial.
We know that losing weight's beneficial for sure. And that's what these drugs are doing.
You're losing a lot of weight rapidly. The other thing is gallstones. You're getting the increased
risk of gallstones, right? Some people's gallbladder has to be removed. What about like anorexia
and stuff like that? Because I've got a couple of friends who are on the pen. And they have dropped
weight at a speed that has blown my mind. And part of me is going, stop, stop, stop, stop, you know,
I'm thinking like, I'm thinking, gosh, does this just keep going down and down and down and down and down?
I don't, yeah, I mean, I don't think it keeps going down and down and down and down generally. I think
you kind of stay. You hit a certain point in stay. If the dose remains the same. If the dose remains
the same. And I think that people that are already kind of like at a certain healthy weight should
taper down the dose too, right? And that's also been shown to help at least with weight regain too.
If you want to stop and get off it, you have a better chance of success if you taper down the
dose and don't just full stop, you know, get off of it. It seems like tapering down helps people
at least slow the weight regain where it's not happening all the sudden your body kind of adjust.
But I also want to mention, you know, there are other ways that you can lose weight, right?
Intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is so on the lowest dose of some of these drugs,
like ozambic, for example, if you're on the lowest dose, you can achieve a similar amount of weight
loss from intermittent fasting as you do from that. And that's not, you know, if it's five,
you know, five to 10 percent body weight, not huge amount, but, you know, for people that don't
need to lose a huge amount, that's a good way to do it because you're going to get the metabolic
switch. You're going to get the ketosis. You're not going to have to worry about this side effects.
You don't have to worry about regaining the weight because guess what? You're going to adapt your
body adapts. You get used to the fasting becomes easier. So I think that, you know, it depends on
the population that we're talking about here. Do I have concerns? Yes, I do. I have concerns,
but do I also think some of these people that are obese and will never lose that weight? Are they
getting a benefit from these drugs? Absolutely. I think they are. But it all comes down to the
population who's using them. And right now it's become so popular in everyone. And there's
so many people I don't think need to lose it to lose their 10 pounds. It's ridiculous.
People take the path of least resistance. I don't think here's to be the path of least resistance
for many. So we shall see, I guess. Ronda, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves
a question for the next, don't know who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you,
I think is a great one. It is what is a purchase that you made that is less than $100 that improved
your quality of life the most? That was probably, okay, I have two. I would say the
omega-3 index test. That is measuring your omega-3 fatty acid levels. And you can get it at home.
You can order it online and get it at home. And you do a little, you do like a little spot of blood.
It's like a finger prick blood spot spot. And just knowing that you're not in that A1 to be
8% range, 8% range is the five year increased life expectancy. It's the, you know, 66% lowered
dementia risk. I mean, it's really where you want to be to be the healthiest. And you might,
you might be supplementing with an omega-3 supplement that's not really working and you won't know
it unless you do take that test. And I think it's one of the easiest ones that I've done.
And how did that improve your quality of life? Were you saying it helps you avoid a bad quality of life?
It's no, I think it's improving my quality of life because it's slowing, it's slowing my aging.
That's been shown with omega-3. It's absolutely slowing aging. I told you the omega-3 was the
only supplement that was able to do that. Even in the context of people that were healthy and
physically active, I mean, these Swiss people are healthy. If they did this study in the US,
there's no way 88% of them would be physically active. Not a chance, right? Yeah. So it's
slowing the aging process. And that is exactly what I want to do. It's going to help with peak
span. It's going to help with, you know, health span. It's going to help with life span as well.
So, and it's affordable. Less than 100 bucks. And the second one?
The second one, I think the one that really did improve my
quality was a continuous glucose monitor. And I thought you were going to say,
curating. Okay, continuous glucose ones. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, it did.
Because I realized how important sleep was for my metabolic health. I thought I was doing
everything right for metabolic health. And it was knowing how not getting enough sleep was
affecting my glucose. I never would have thought that and never would have known.
And most people that get the continuous glucose monitors never think about that either.
They think about the food they're eating. They don't think about sleep.
And when you get that continuous glucose monitor, what is it you're looking at to figure out
the connection with sleep? You can look at first. You can look at your fasting blood glucose
levels and you can go online and for your age and and gender and figure out what's a normal range.
So that's when you have an eaten. Yes, first thing in the morning, and you have not eaten.
That would be the easiest thing to look at. And the second thing?
Yes, the second thing would be to look at after you eat a meal,
30 minutes to an hour later, making sure that you're clearing that glucose from your meal.
And if you're not seeing that peak come down and clearing, there's something wrong.
Okay, I might wear another one of those. It's been a while. And they're quite cheap.
You can get $20 on the internet. Dr. Ronda, I think people are going to want to continue to learn
from you. So where should they go to learn more from you?
I have a podcast called Found My Fitness. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
everywhere you listen to podcasts. That would be the best place. I have a website foundmyfitness.com.
I have a wonderful newsletter every week. We put out something. We put out one on that peak
span paper. We put out a newsletter on updating the exercise guidelines. I have a great team.
We put out an email newsletter that's free every single week. And they're really good.
They're really good in-depth emails. So you can find me there. I'm on social media.
Ronda Patrick found my fitness. That's all my, that's my handle, my website name, my podcast name.
I'll link it below for anyone as well that would like to go check out that information. It will
be in the description below. I highly recommend. I mean, I don't really need to tell people how
incredible you are. I think they've just observed that. So I shan't. I shall. You are incredible.
Thank you. So thank you so much for doing this. I've learned so much. I've done so many of
these health conversations on this show. And it's almost at a point now. I'm wondering if there's
much more that I've got to learn. But because I think you stay at the very cutting edge of the studies
that are coming out and you're so good at both articulating them in a simple way that someone
like me can understand, even though I can't understand a lot of the literature as it comes out of
these sort of scientific journals, I think that you're a person. People do need to follow.
Because the world and the scientific understandings are always changing. And it's good to have
someone who can distill that down for you in a way that is relevant, accessible, and scientifically
rigorous. And that's exactly sort of the three times that I think of when I think of you.
So please do continue to do the work you're doing because it's teaching me so much. And by way of that,
it's meaning that I can have a happier, healthier life. And I appreciate you for that, under.
I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Stephen. I love coming and having discussions with you.
Thank you.
You guys, if you listen to this podcast, no ham porn, I think sleep is. We've had so many
conversations on this show about it, including the sleep doctor we had on recently and Matthew
Walker twice. And as a result, it's become my top priority. But it's not just how long you sleep.
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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett



