Anti-Aging Expert on How Missing This Vitamin Is As Bad As Smoking, and What You Should Know About Creatine!

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/855e325097d8a921

Why do people not know that vitamin D deficiency can increase dementia risk by 80%? Why do people not know that having a lack of this mineral is affecting their long term risk of cancer?
Why do people not know that having a low omega-3 index is as bad for you in terms of mortality as smoking? And as a scientist, I've seen firsthand that 70% of the way you're aging is actually due to your lifestyle. And all these things are so easy to do.
So for example, as we age, certain areas of the brain, which is involved in learning and memory, starts to shrink by about 1 to 2% per year. The good news is, studies showed that people being part of an exercise protocol, not only did they not have their hippocampus shrink, it actually grew by one to two percent.
And there's more.
There are other things that don't even require as much effort as exercise, like supplements. And it's been shown study after study that if you take someone and you sleep deprived them for 21 hours and give them 25 to 30 grams of creatine, not only does it negate the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation, it makes people function better than if they were well rested. And then there's magnesium.
There have been studies showing that people with the highest magnesium levels have a 40% lower all-cause mortality and over 300 different enzymes in your body need it to help with short-term survival.
And yet 50% of the population in the United States does not have adequate levels of magnesium.
And there's still more. There's saunas, red light therapy, ketogenic diets, blueberries, electrolytes, and we can talk about all of them. Please. Okay, so I've found when you go into this sauna, something happens that's incredible. So
Just me thirty seconds of your time.
Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the twenty four percent of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.
Here's a promise I'm gonna make to you. I'm gonna do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're gonna deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're gonna continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
Thank you.


Doctor Ronda Patrick.
You strike me as
A fairly obsessed person.
What is it you're obsessed about and why are you obsessed about it?
Because I can see from speaking to you previously how passionate you are about the subjects we're gonna talk to
Yeah.
And so I I was I was um
I was wondering what it is about these subjects that is driving you and what
What you're trying to accomplish.
А в лернтру має експерєс.
So I have a pH d in biomedical science. I've done research.
On ageing on cancer on metabolism nutrition.
Neuroscience a lot of different fields very cross disciplinary.
And
I've realized over, you know, the decades of doing research that there are
Many different small changes that can be made that have a really big impact on our health.
what's called our health span. So this is
Essentially being disease free.
throughout our life being healthy feeling good
And
I'm sort of obsessed with
trying to optimize that and find a protocol to optimize it and then share that information with the world.
And
It's funny because you know, we live in a time now where we've got access to so much information.
overwhelming amount of information.
But the reality is, is that
Simple important
Tools that people can do in their life right now.
to drastically improve the way they age are still not known to the general population.
And so my mission is to
get that knowledge to people so that they can make these simple changes.
And live healthier and feel better.
And what will be the impact on their lives if they understand that information and start to implement their in
That information.
On a real sort of specific practical
In a real specific practical sense.
Well there are things that
people are deficient in, for example, that they could
simply take a supplement.
Vitamin D is a is a good example.
That could affect.
their disease risk their dementia risk
I mean so you're talking about quality of life improvement.
Right now.
And also later, so it affects mood, it affects depression, and it affects your neurodegenerative disease, Rick.
risk like dementia and Alzheimer's disease. So they're low hanging fruits, things that are simple that you can just basically fill these gaps.
I mean, there are things that are also a little more effortful.
And this is where exercise comes in.
Where you put in this effort and it just
If you could pill up what
Exercise does.
In a pill.
I mean it would be the be the biggest blockbuster miracle drug out there. I mean it'd blow of Zimbabwe.
out of the water it'd be I mean just no comparison
So um I think I think that
You know, again, it's it's these little things that you can do.
That is going to help with depression, help with mood right now, make you feel better right now, give you more energy.
Help you be more focused, help you bemo more motivated.
But also affect your long term disease risk, s so that
You know, when you're older in life, you're not demented, and that affects you, it affects your family.
So I think I think it's it's just an important
It's so important because there are easy things that can be done that people just don't know about. Is there a psychological element to this where we kind of see
aging as an inevitability, so we don't fight it. Because we only seem to
interfere with and fight and are motivated by things in life there where we feel like we've got a
A an element of control.
And we see we see everybody get old and we see everybody start to
you know, lean over a little bit and struggle to walk and
Get a little bit more frail.
So I think
'Cause we've observed that so much over the last couple of decades, even I'm thirty years.
I'm just over thirty years old.
I assume that'll happen to me. So I've seen my dad
Yeah.
Get old, uh get a little bit more.
Large.
lose his lean muscle. So I think well, I'm like my dad, I've got the s some some of the same genetics. That's inevitable for me.
So genetics does play a role in the way you age, but it's a small role.
In fact
Seventy percent or more of
the way you're aging is actually due to your lifestyle.
Лет що.
Seventy ish year old men, okay, John and Rob.
And John
You know
He's razor sharp. He can
carry groceries to his car, he doesn't get out of breath.
You know, I mean he's he's feeling healthy.
He is able to he can walk efficiently, right?
And then there's
Rob.
And Rob is
forgetting his words, you know, he's not cognitively sharp. He's out of breath just from walking to his car. He has a really hard time carrying groceries.
Genetics only plays a a small role in in th those two different outcomes for those two men. The biggest
I would say
thing that's dictating the way these two men age is their lifestyle, with a huge part of that actually being exercise.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I know we've all heard it.
from our mother or grandmother, great grandmother, you know, exercise is is good for you. If you eat healthy and you exercise, you're gonna you're gonna be healthier. And that's like a general statement.
But the reality is it is
So true that exercise effects
Everything, you know, down to the molecular level.
In terms of like the way you're aging.
So um
No, it's not just dict dictated by genetics, and it's not inevitable. And there are things that you can do to dramatically age better.
So you
Let's play a little bit
A little game here. So imagine that I listened to
Your advice and the things that you know about health, longevity, aging.
Um and I followed all of them.
Which is very hard to do because, you know, implementation is is not the same thing as knowledge. So imagine that's person A, that's Steve A.
And then there's Steve B.
I do the exact opposite.
Based on what you know about the science and about
outcomes, expected outcomes.
How would Steve A that followed your advice?
live his uh live his life as he ages and how would
Steve.
B.
How were his outcomes?
be as he ages. Like what would you if you had to obviously this is like super you're you're forecasting here and it's not hypothetical, but
What do you think the variance in these two people's lives would be?
Well, if you're talking about the extreme ends.
Like
If Steve B was like
Eating sugar and smoking and drinking and just obese and sedentary everything that you don't want to.
Which is like a lot of the population. I mean, then you're talking like a fourteen year
Difference in life expectancy.
Which is pretty big.
Б на час life expectancy.
The way
Your
Your independence
Right, your your mind.
So you'd be forgetful. I mean it would just be it would it would be a a
terrible quality of life, right? So it's not only are you gonna die earlier.
You're not you're just not gonna live a good quality of life. So so Steve A
might be into his nineties and out surfing.
You know, because
Your
You've exercised, you've you've given your body like the right nutrients that it needs. You've gotten good sleep. You're not overweight.
You're not eating a lot of refined sugar, all these things that sort of accelerate the aging process. And we can talk about
different components of this and how they do affect
the way we age and our disease risk.
But I mean
There's there's studies that show even like a fourteen year difference in life expectancy for like someone who's morbidly obese.
versus lean.
So Steve A could be out surfing at ninety, and Steve B
Would be
Potentially dying at seventy five, but also
his quality of life would his health span would diminish probably in his
Fourties and fifty.
So it's really a it's a fourteen year
reduction in life span, but
Potentially um
thirty, forty year reduction in health span.

Bing able to be functionally independent, being able to be cognitively sharp.
feel good, right? And your mood. I mean, all these things are affected.
You must be sitting on some
some crazy ideas. Because as a biomedical science, you can kind of see
As a biomedical scientist, you can
see some of the research and technology that's coming down the pipe. So I'm wondering before we get into the the conversation, are there any big ideas about the future of aging and longevity?
that are in your mind that you think about
That are actually really important to know because
As Brian Johnson o has often said to me.
You wanna
live to to see these breakthroughs.
Yes.
Yes. I am excited about some gene therapies.
And
being able to sort of reprogram our
ourselves to be more useful.
So, you know, this is this is something that
Was pioneered back in two thousand six by Shinya Yamanaka from Japan, and he actually won the Nobel Prize.
Why his research was so important for the field of aging wasn't really known at that time.
What he had shown is that you could take a cell that's old.
And it could be a s any cell, it could be from an eighty-five year old person with Parkinson's disease, for example.
And you get it, you know, we're constantly getting skin cells and sloughing them off every day.
You can take one of those cells.
And add four different proteins to them. They're called transcription factors. Essentially, all that means is they're kind of like master orchestrators.
Of
many different genes in your body and how genes are activated and turned on and doing what they're supposed to, or they're turned off and quiet.
For the time that they're supposed to be quiet.
And
It's
You you add those four proteins and you can take that eighty five year old
Cell, skin cell from a person with Parkinson disease
And you can make it into what's called an embryonic stem cell.
And
It does that by sort of wiping out.
the what's called epigenome so
People are familiar with their DNA.
Right.
Well the epigenome is
something that s sort of sits on top of your DNA and it regulates, you know, how your genes are being expressed or turned on and off, right?
And it sort of brings it back, reprograms it to this youthful state where it becomes an embryonic stem cell.
And then that embryonic stem cell can then form any type of cell in the body. It can form a heart cell or a liver cell or a brain cell or
A cell from your eye.
And so this is called induced pluripotent stem cells.
And this was a breakthrough at the time because it's
It was so important. It's important for cell regenerative therapies. Okay, let's say someone does have Parkinson's disease and you
Want you know Parkinson's disease people are losing
Dopaminergic.
Neurons and their substantia nigra. So these are dopamine producing neurons. And dopamine is important for motivation and it plays a role in our.
you know, cognitive function, but it's also important for movement, right?
So um people with Park instances are losing those at a rapid rate and they lose control of their motor capabilities.
And so you wanna be able to take an old skin cell from someone
Reprogram it.
to become a dopamine neuron and then inject it into that person, right? It's their own cell, so they're not gonna reject it, right?
So that was like the big thought at the time.
Fast forward, you know, a decade or so.
And
A a whole handful of brilliant aging scientists have discovered that
Instead of
Taking these old cells and putting these four proteins on it to become this sort of stem cell.
They can pulse it.
Just a quick little pulse. What is a pulse? Like an electronic shock.
No, what I mean is it's just not
Incubated.
For as long of a time period. So it's a shorter time interval.
That you're putting these four different transcription factors on top of the cell that reprogram it, right? And the reason for the shorter time is that you don't want it to lose its cellular identity. So let's say it was a skin cell.
You want it to stay a skin cell, not become an embryonic stem cell.
But you want it to be
a skin cell from a one year old, not an eighty five year old.
Mm-hmm. So
The way to do that is
what's called partial reprogramming. And so they
Basically researchers have found that you can just sort of
what I call pulse, it's partial reprogramming, you're kind of putting it on for like a shorter period of time.
And then
That cell keeps its identity.
But it's youth. It wipes out all the damage, everything that's accumulated over those those eighty-five years. And this has been shown in animal studies and rodents that if you if you add these.
four different transcription factors and you give them to mice, you can rejuvenate many of the different organs. So essentially turning back the aging clock in different organs in these mice.
Now this obviously has to be translated to humans.
But I think it's super exciting, and I do think it's the future.
In terms of
solving aging and rejuvenation rejuvenating our organs.
And so it's something that I'm pretty excited about.
And following
Closely.
If they even
Living longer.
Some of these studies were done in animals that are what's called
Accelerated aging.
So
Yes, they were living longer in that background of accelerated aging.
Um the question is
You know.
Can they live longer if it's just a normal mouse that's not like an accelerated aging model? And and these are things that are all being done right now. These sorts of studies are in progress.

Where do you think is the most important place for us to start this conversation?
Based on everything you know.
Presumably that's some like foundational stuff, right?
I do.
I think the import important place to start would be
We're talking about we're talking about aging as a disease, and I think
Being sedentary is a disease.
And I think that's a good place to start. What I mean by being sedentary is
Not
physically active.
Someone who doesn't
engage in any type of physical activity.
And what is the spectrum there of, you know, someone who doesn't move at all for, you know, twenty four hours a day?
versus oh you've got obviously someone that's constantly running marathons and doing crazy stuff. But where is where are most of us on that scale?
And are we moving enough?
Most of us are not moving on that.
Enough. And most of us are
If you're talking about globally, we're on that sedentary.
Scale.
where we're just not physically. We sit at our computer or a desk or a cubicle, you know, all day.
And we're not we're not actually moving around a lot.
Um and I say I say sedentary
Ism is a disease because it's actually been shown
Two
Increase the risk of early mortality.
Even more than diseases that we know of, like type two diabetes.
cardiovascular disease or even
Terrible habits like smoking.
So being sedentary actually could predict early mortality.
Even more.
than those diseases.
But it it it's let's take a step back, it's even bigger than that.
They're
There's this amazing study, it's called the Dallas Bedrest Study.
And
The study started back in the nineteen sixties, and this is done by
Probably the world's
Most
talented cardiovascular
Exercise physiologist.
And so Ben Saltine, uh Jair Mitchell were involved in this early study in the nineteen sixties.
And what they did was they took five men, they were college students.
And they put them on bed rest.
And this is like three weeks of
legitimate bed rest. We're talking
they couldn't get up to go to the bathroom. So they had catheter in them.
They did not move.
For three weeks the researchers wanted to find out what happens to your cardiovascular system.
If you are not moving around for three weeks, and now if you think about it.
You know, there's a lot of people that are undergoing surgery.
Or they have some sort of
bad illness, influenza, or something that keeps them bedridden for
It's not unusual to be three weeks.
To be honest.
So it's not completely irrelevant.
And what was found is after that three weeks, you know, their cardiovascular system was just tanked.
And one of the major they they were probably the some of the most well studied men at the time.
And um one of the biggest factors that was measured was their cardiore respiratory fitness.
This is often called V O to Max, and essentially it's the maximum amount of oxygen.
That you can breathe in.
And your lungs then bring that oxygen to your muscles.
And it's measured during maximal exercise. You're putting in a maximal effort.
And that's called your cardiorespiratory fitness.
And we can talk a little bit more about that, but their cardior respir respiratory fitness tank.
I now
I mentioned this was in the nineteen sixties. About thirty years later.
And this is where uh Ben Levine came into the study. He's at the UT Southwestern in Dallas. He's also very uh one of the most famous, you know, cardiovascular.
exercise physiologist out there right now.
They'd found these five men.
From thirty years earlier.
And
They measured their cardior respiratory fitness and a variety of other parameters that they had measured.
At the time.
And what they found was that three weeks of bed rest was worse on their cardior respiratory fitness.
Than thirty years of aging.
So essentially
Their cardior respiratory fitness was no worse.
Thirty years later.
Than it was after their three weeks of bed rest.
Which is kind of amazing because
You would think that the thirty years of aging would be worse on your
cardiorrespiratory fitness than the three weeks of bed rest. And it's the same the same individuals. The same individuals. The same five men.
Um now after the three weeks of bed rest, you know, back back in the nineteen sixties
they were able to get their cardior respiratory fitness back up again once they started exercising and moving around, and it took a while.
But when you look at their baseline levels, their baseline cardior respiratory fitness.
And you compare it to their cardior respiratory fitness baseline thirty years later.
It wasn't worse.
than what happened when they
They compared it to the three weeks of bed rest.
And you might go, Well
Why is that so significant?
The cardiorespiratory fitness dropping. We know that cardiorespiratory fitness is one of the best predictors of longevity.
So there are studies that have shown that people with a high cardior respiratory fitness.
Live five years longer than people with a low cardior respiratory fitness.

You know.
pretty big difference. They're they're basically eighty percent less likely to die of many different causes of
So cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory disease.
Things like that.
than people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness.
So you're really getting, you know, a five-year increase life expectancy. You're sort of pushing and delaying those age-related diseases like cardiovascular disease.
You know, like
cancer, for example, you're pushing him down later in life.
So you're not you're not dying from them sooner.
And we do know that really
Just going getting anywhere out of that low cardiovary fitness. So people with the low cardior respiratory fitness are
People that are sedentary.
And if you just move anywhere above that, even if you're going low from low bad to like low normal.
You're gaining about two years.
increase in life expectancy.
And that's not really that hard to do.
But if you think about
cardiorrespiratory fitness, like right here, just having this conversation, actually even just sitting quietly.
It takes about three milliliters of oxygen per minute per kilogram body weight.
to do that.
to carry groceries to your car, it takes about eleven
milliliters of oxygen.
per minute per body weight, per kilogram body weight.
And so as you're aging.
You're kind of heading towards this cliff.
Right, because your cardior respiratory fitness goes down with age. It does. That's
What happens naturally.
If you're at the point where you don't work on your cardior respiratory fitness, if you're not being physically active.
And there are certain exercises that are better at improving cardiovaspiratory fitness than other others.
If you're not trying to improve it, you're going to be heading towards that clip faster.
And then everything becomes a maximal effort.
You're out of breath just talking. You're out of breath carrying groceries to your car.
Everything is a maximal effort, and you don't want to be there. You don't that that quality of life is not good.
It's not good, right? And then on top of that, you're also gonna
Die sooner.
So you're talking about two things here talking about decreased health span and decreased life span.
So yeah, we should be moving more.
Right. And the question is, well, how do you improve your cardiovas free fitness, right? Yeah. I mean
Do you
Lift weights.
Do you go for runs? Do you bike? What is it?
That
Is really good at improving cardi risk free fitness. And that's the question that a lot of exercise physiologists have answered over the last
couple of decades.
you want to do and engage in what's called vigorous intensity exercise. So this is the kind of exercise
Where you're not able to have a conversation.
when you're engaged in it, right? So
So your heart rate is going up to about
Eighty percent your max.
Heart rate, you're not able to really talk.
And it's
I would say, you know, it's something that can be done in intervals. So you can do high intensity interval training. So you have these intervals.
You're getting your heart rate up.
You're doing vigorous exercise and then you have recovery periods where you kind of
resting, you're you're lowering your heart rate, you're not doing that max that maximal sort of sort of exercise.
And I say this because
Дермен стадії, мультиплеста.
That have shown
People that engage in moderate intensity exercise. So this is the kind of exercise when you can you're breathy, but you can still kind of
Have somewhat of a conversation while you're doing it.
Like the stairmaster, yeah, exactly.
Um
Even people that are engaging in that type of exercise for two and a half hours a week. So this is following the physical activity guidelines.
Forty percent of those people can't improve their cardior respiratory fitness.
And it's like well, I don't know about you, but like
I don't want it to be a coin toss.
In terms of like if I'm doing that kind of exercise, well, if I have a fifty percent chance of not improving my cardiovaspiratory fitness if I'm doing this, I want the sure thing.
And the sure thing is
You take those people.
And then you
have them engage in high intensity interval training and they're able to improve their cardiovasculatory fitness. And that's because
You you're putting a stronger stress on your cardiovascular system.
And so the adaptations are greater.
And part of the adaptations are you're able to bring in more oxygen, carry it to your muscles, carry it to your c your, you know, other other tissues.
Better.
And so that's their cardiovasparatory fitness.
Uh and so and so that's that's really I would say um
The bottom line here is engaging and even just
Once or twice a week.
And I would I would say that the most
Well researched.
protocol for that would be something called the Norwegian four by four.
And that is where
You're doing a longer interval, it's a four-minute interval, and it's best done on either a stationary bike or maybe a rowing machine.
And you're going as hard as you can.
And maintain that intensity for four minutes. And then
You're gonna
go down to light exercise and recover for four minutes and let your heart rate go down.
And you do that four times.
So it's a four by four.
And that is probably one of the most robust ways to improve.
cardiorrespiratory fitness, but there are other ways. Even doing, you know, one minute on, one minute off. So you do one minute as hard as you can go again for that entire minute. You're not going all out.
But as hard as you can and maintain that for the entire minute.
And then you rest a minute and you do that, you know, ten times.
So it's a twenty minute workout.
So
W for the
several million people that are listening right now, if you had to prescribe them all.
Something to do.
And it was the minimum they had to do.
Tell me what exactly the workout would look like and how frequent it would be on a weekly basis.
I would say the minimum effective dose would be once a week.
Okay.
And
It would probably be
The one minute on, one minute off.
If you want like
The upper end.
robust effects of improving cardiore respiratory fitness.
You can still improve it with something like a tabata.
What's it about?
Where you're doing a twenty second
interval and you're going more all out because it's shorter time.
And then you're recovering for ten seconds.
So it's a twenty second on, ten second off. You do that eight times.
And um
If you repeat that twice. So it's essentially a ten minute workout.
That's also something that can improve.
cardio respiratory fitness.
But I would say and I'll tell you I'll tell you why
There's the minimum, right? So the one minute on, one minute off. But I would say the Norwegian four by four.
Is the gold standard.
And that's because it's not only improving cardior respiratory fitness.
This is
Probably one of the most exciting
It's
pieces of evidence I've seen with respect to
You know
exercise and aging, and that is
That being part of an exercise protocol was shown to reverse.
The structural changes that occur with age.
In the heart.
By twenty years.
So
What do I mean by that?
I mean
People that were fifty years old.
That
were sedentary, so they weren't really going to the gym. They weren't engaging in any sort of physical activity.
But they weren't
You know, they didn't have diseases, they didn't have type two diabetes, they didn't have cardiovascular disease. I would argue sedentary being sedentary is a disease, but putting that aside, they didn't have any diseases, right? And they're fifty, so they're midlife.
And um this was again, this was done by Ben Levine out of UT uh South West in Dallas.
He took these, you know, fifty year olds.
And put them on a pretty intense exercise routine for two years.
Or a stretching routine. This was like the the control.
And this type of exercise routine was progressive. So they started out
lighter and sort of work their way up, right? Like you don't want to just start with a Norwegian four by four. People that never never exercise. I mean, that's gonna be tough.
So it was a progressive
Sort of
Building up to that.
But um
Towards the end of about the first six months.
These people were exercising about five to six hours a week.
And that included one to two sessions of the Norwegian four by four.
And it also included a lot of
you know, they're they're doing m moderate to vigorous intensity cycling or running.
and some some strength training as well.
And I did this for two years.
Their hearts were looked at. And so as we age
Our hearts shrink.
And they get stiffer.
And that plays a role in causing cardiovascular disease. I mean that's the number one killer in the United States.
It also affects cardiovaspiratory fitness.
Right.
Why does the
The heart.
You know.
stiffen with time. Well, has a lot to do with actually
Being exposed to a lot of glucose.
When you're eating a lot of refined sugar and refined carbohydrates, you're having a lot of glucose around in your system.
This causes a chemical reaction called glycation. So you get these advanced glycation end products that sort of
React with your
collagen that's lining your heart and your myocardium.
And it causes it to stiffen. And so now the heart can't
really
respond to stress well. It's stiff.
And that plays a role in like heart attacks, for example.
So
Exercise is one of the best things you can do to
Move glucose out of your
vascular system and get it to your muscles.
And so that's that's one of the things that it does and helps with
not causing that stiffening of the heart.
And so
Essentially these fifty year olds had
Their their heart, the structure, so it was bigger and less stiff.
After two years of this
You know, exercise protocol.
It essentially made their hearts look like thirty year olds. And I mentioned they were fifty year olds.
I mean, that's amazing. That's incredible.
that you can take someone midlife.
Put'em on a two year training protocol.
And reverse the aging of their heart by twenty years.
So on this Norwegian four by four.
You've convinced me to give it a shot.
But specifically how I
how I do that. So it's f it's I do my warm up.
And then I do four minutes of hard exercise.
I take a break.
And the exercise I'm doing in those four minutes can be
Any number of things, but I just have to get up to eighty five, eighty percent of my
Exertion levels. Eight eighty percent difficulty.
So the way it works is
As they mentioned, it's it's best if you're doing a cardiovascular type of exercise. So like the assault bike.
You could do a salt bike, yep, a salt bike, you can do a rowing machine, you could do
uh stationary cycling machine as well.
Could I run?
You can
But that is
Is it's definitely um
It's I think it's better on on doing like maybe a bike or a salt bike or something.
Um
But you can run. Like what whatever it is that you like to do, and you are going h as hard as you can for that four minutes and maintain.
within that four minutes, so it's not an all out, or it's far from all out, right?
But you're not really having a conversation while you're doing it. And then the four minutes of recovery
You're if you're running, you kinda go down to walking.
If you're on the rowing machine or the assault bike, you're just going very slow. You just really
going slow and you're letting your heart rate come down.
Letting your muscles kind of recover.
your cardior respiratory venus, you know, kinda your your
cardiorrespiratory fitness system recover somewhat.
And then after that four minute recovery
You go back to the four minutes of like intense
Again.
And you're doing that four times.
It's
Not easy.
But you know, people can start out.
They don't I mean, even if you start out with
Not going super, super hard in those four minutes where you just maybe you can have a conversation, but you're still going hard.
harder than you're used to pushing yourself. And I think
For people that
haven't really engaged in any type of high intensity.
training before, that's a good idea. Where you kind of
You gotta you can't just start doing it.
Right out the gate. You wanna kinda work your way up that so
Doing the four minutes to just try to put in as much effort as you can.
Right, during those four minutes.
And then you do your recovery.
And you repeat that four times.
But then work your way up as you as you do it one week, two weeks, you know, a month later, two months later.
And really try then to get to that point where during those four minutes
You're getting
You know, you're pushing as yourself hard, where you're not really able to have that.
Conversation.
And physiologically, what is going on in my body when I get to that eighty five, ninety percent effort range and I and I stay there for a couple of minutes.
That doesn't occur when I'm doing my
Stairmaster.
I mean
so many things are are happening. I mean there's a lot of different
I would say physiological responses that are
You've got a big smile on your face, when I'm gonna do it.
You know, one of my favorite things to talk about.
And it has to do with
When you're when you're pushing yourself really hard.
You need you need to make energy, right?
And
The way that most of our cells make energy, like our muscles.
Is by using
are mitochondria. These are tiny organelles inside of our cells that produce energy, but they need oxygen to do it.
So that's where the
Oxygen comes into play.
When you start to push yourself really hard, you can't get the oxygen to your muscles quick enough.
But you need to make the energy. And so your body decides to make
Energy in the form of ATP
without the mitochondria and it uses glucose to do that.
And
you're not making as many of those ATP energy molecules.
But you're still making them and you're making them quick and that's what your your body wants to do.
And and and so it's using glucose to do that without the mitochondria.
But as a byproduct, it's making something called lactate.
And
This is what gets me so excited because, you know, for the longest time
Lactate was thought to be this just metabolic
Byproduct of
Glucose metabolism.
You know, where you're when you're pushing yourself really hard, anaerobic. It's called anaerobic. By the way, you're not
You're not
only anaerobic. You're just some somewhat anaerobic. You're still use producing energy with your mitochondria. It's just you're also producing without the mitochondria. It's not like a a sort of black
black and white sort of thing, right? It's a little bit grey.
But the reality is you're producing something called lactate.
For the longest time it was thought this lactate.
Oh, it's just it's bad because
you know, it can form lactic acid and that burns your forms that burn in your muscles and
You know, this was, you know, decades ago, and we now know from the work of George Brooks out of UC Berkeley that
Lactate itself.
Isn't causing the burn.
And not only is it not causing the burn, it's like
A miracle.
molecule that's being made. This metabolite, lactate, gets into your circulation.
And it gets consumed by your heart, by your brain.
By your liver.
And it's used for energy. It's very, it's it's very much similar to beta hydroxybutyrate, that ketone body that you always hear about.
People talk about when they're fasting or doing a ketogenic diet.
It's actually very similar to that. It gets used it gets transported
And it's used like energy very
Similar to that.
Um
But what's more exciting is that lactate
Is a way for your muscles to communicate with other organs like the brain.
And
It's called the signaling molecule. So it's your muscles are going, I'm working really hard, this is really hard, we have to respond to this work.
We have to adapt.
And so your body goes, Okay, I gotta like turn on all this awesome stuff that I have because
I'm working so hard, I need to respond to that so that like I'm I'm good, right? And so what happens is the lactate, this has been shown, it gets consumed a lot by the brain.
And in the brain
It it activates something called brain drive neurotrophic factor.
B D N F
And this is kind of like a miracle grow for your brain.
So essentially it's able to increase the growth of new neurons.
Which is amazing. It's called neurogenesis.
It increases the connections between neurons, so it improves memory, cognition.
And then um it's involved in what's called neuroplasticity. So
the ability of your brain to adapt to a changing environment.
This is all from lactate.
Um
And it also increases neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, so focus and attention, serotonin.
your your mood, you're feeling better, you're, you know, motivated.
All these things are happening because of lactate. And there's been studies in humans showing that.
People that are
compared working hard, working out hard, vigorous exercise versus sort of moderate to light exercise.
They make more lactate.
And that lactate
You know, it's been shown that high levels of lactate are correlated with improved cognition scores.
uh improved impulse control. So serotonin plays a role in impulse control. So you're able to not just go on your impulse, right? You're you're able to kind of like which is
Great if you want more focus and attention, right?
So this is this is all really exciting stuff because it all comes down to just it's it's like your muscles are these little chemical
Pharmaceutical factories.
And the way to make them make these pharmaceuticals is to work them, to challenge them.
And that can be done with an easy high intensity interval training protocol. A variety of them at nor Norwegian four by four can increase brain drive neurotrophic factor, that's been shown.
the one minute on, one minute off protocol also has been shown to increase that again through the lactate.

So that's one of the big
sort of I would say differences between
vigorous intensity exercise and more of of that.
moderate intensity or like low intensity exercise.
And I honestly think
You know, I think the guidelines you know everyone's
sort of obsessed with steps. I need to get my ten thousand steps in. My ten thousand steps. And they have wear wearable devices and I think that's great.
But I think we need to change the ten thousand steps.
Two
at least ten minutes of vigorous intensity exercise. Like you could do ten minutes of
You know
Any type of exercise that's really gonna get your heart rate up.
And it's gonna be so much better.
So this is a really s dumb question, but it's the question that I had in my mind, which is if lactate is such a miracle
Drug.
Why can't I just drink it?
Why can't I just
Get get a shot of Lactate.
Versus having to go through
Vigorous interval training.
Um
There have been studies that have been done looking at, for example
Traumatic brain injury.
Patients of people that have undergone some sort of head trauma.
And
They've
Infused sodium lactate.
Through like an I V.
into their you know system and the lactate immediately gets consumed by the brain.
And it's been shown to improve their recovery. So it's called the Glasgow score. You may have heard of it, but it's kind of essentially this battery of tests that's done to sort of assess how someone's recovering from traumatic brain injury.
And the sodium lactate does improve that.
So there are
you can find out there, you know
different types of lactate that you can consume.
And
Theoretically it should help, but what happens is when you consume the lactate
Lactate actually gets
Used by the gut.
So a lot of it's going into the gut cells.
There's always a trade off with these bloody things. Whenever you try and
trick the system or shortcut the system by like drinking something. I feel like there's a trade off which people don't talk about a lot.
Well the thing is is that I it is good for the gut. In fact, a former col colleague of mine, Mark Chickenaga
Has shown that.
lactate is really beneficial for for uh the gut epithelial cells. And in fact if you think about it.
All these sort of beneficial probiotic bacteria like bifidobacterium, for example.
They're producing
Lactic acid.
And that lactic acid.
does get converted into lactate. It's sort of like this
physiological homeostasis where you have
uh the difference of a just a hydrogen atom, so you're having
Lactic acid and lactate sort of in this equilibrium, so to speak.
But um those those bacteria in your gut are making lactate.
Essentially. And the reason it's so good.
is because it is an very e easily utilizable source of energy.
For the gut cells.
So, not to like go off on a tangent here. Yes, there is always a trade off, especially for doing something orally. But when it comes to exercise,
There's so like I mentioned when we first start talking about exercise, if you could pill up what exercise does.
It sh i I mean it's so many things, right? It's not just the lactate.
Yeah. So many different things, so many different adaptations that occur.
I mean it would be a miracle drug. So there's you're not just getting the lactate, you're getting the you know, the improvement in cardiorespiratory fitness. You're getting the muscular response, right? The adaptations to your muscle. Um, you're you're increasing stress response genes like
Heat shock proteins that are important for preventing neurodegenerative disease. You're making antioxidants because the inflammation that you're generating while you're exercising.
Hundreds and hundreds of things that are happening all in concert from exercise.
And
You just can't.
You can't pill it up.
I have another really silly question, which is

And these other things, even like creatine and you know, all these other things are so good for me.
Why doesn't my body just make more of it?

I mean your body does make it.
The the problem is is that
You know, as we're aging, everything becomes less efficient.
Everything
doesn't do what it used to do as well as it did when it was younger.
Um and it and also in the in the case of creatine, which we can talk about, you know, later if you're interested.
Then um
You know, your body only makes so much of it.
And
Why doesn't it make more?
Maybe I'm not giving it the the minerals or the environment it needs naturally to make more.
I don't know. You you get it from your food too. Creatine is found in meat.
In poultry and fish.
So
Probably that's why your body doesn't make more of it because it
knows you're gonna be getting it from your diet.
as well. And so that is another way to get creatine.
Okay.
Of course, the vegans and the vegetarians, that's a whole other
ball game because they aren't eating meat and so they're really
Essentially only relying on what their body can make.
We'll definitely talk about that later. Um
On this point of the brain then, if if I I don't want to

An older person.
who can't remember things and stutters over my words and s falls into cognitive decline.
And I'm a I'm thirty two now, so I'm I feel like I'm in a moment in time where I can really make decisions now.
have a really big impact on my ninety year old brain and my ability to think straight and clearly and remember things.
Are there things that I can be doing now that will have a profound impact on my cognitive performance at ninety?
Yes. And one of those things. Absolutely. Well, first of all, just to kind of wrap up the exercise story because I think this study is so
profound and in fact it wasn't done in thirty two year olds, it was done in older adults. So we're talking sixty year olds or
or a little bit older.
And these individuals were
put on a aerobic exercise training program for one year.
That
was more of like a seventy to seventy five percent max heart rate. So it wasn't so vigorous.
But it was pretty
Pretty vigorous for them, right?
And um the the basis of this study was to look at brain aging.
As we age. I mentioned our heart aging, right? It gets stiffer and shrinks with age.
Uh
brain also shrinks with age. It's called atrophy.
And as we age, especially starting in midlife, so around the age of fifty.
You're
your brain and certain areas of the brain, like the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory.
starts to shrink by about one to two percent per year.
I don't want that to happen.
Same.
Same. The good news is
Um in this study
After a year of this sort of aerobic exercise training program, they were doing three times a week, about thirty minutes a day.
Really, not even that intense.
These individuals and then there was a control group that was kind of the stretching, they like to use the stretching as the control group.
So the let's talk about the the control group, the stretching group. They did lose
About one to two percent.
in terms of the size of the hippocampus, it shrunk one to two percent after that year.
which is what you would expect normally.
However the group that was training
Not only did they not have their hippocampus shrink by one to two percent, it actually grew.
By one to two percent.
Which comes down to that neurogenesis, that growth of new neurons, the brain drive neurotrophic factor that's able to do that. You're actually able to grow new neurons even when you're in
the age of fifty.
Which is amazing. It's incredible.
So
That study I love because
A couple of reasons. One
It shows that it's possible.
To
Нали став.
you know, some of the components of brain aging.
But to reverse it.
And
Increase it, right? Through exercise.
And number two, I love it because
It's never too late.
Like you can start this.
You know, in your sixties and still have a benefit, right? You're you're talking about being in your thirties.
But you know, some people
watching the show, listening to the show may already be in their fifties or sixties, right? So it's never too late.
Um
Likewise, you know, we're talking about being cognitively sharp and not getting dementia. There's also studies showing that people like women
That were
Brought into the lab, they had their cardior respiratory fitness
Measured.
Those women with the highest cardiorespiratory fitness were eighty percent less likely to come down with dementia over the follow up period of time.
So it again, I think exercise is one of the big ones when it comes to brain aging.
But you asked an important question. You say, What can I be doing?
Now.
That's gonna affect the way my brain ages.
You know
for the subsequent decades of my life.
And there are other things that can also be done.
That don't even require as much effort.
as exercise. Exercise is the gold standard because
And being able to
Not only you know stave off
atrophy of the of the brain, but to like re grow some of it is
Incredible.
Right. I mean that's just
Mind blowing. Have they ever taken people with dementia, Alzheimer's, and put them on an exercise program?
And monitored the decline.
Of
Their cognitive abilities.
On an exercise program.
Yes, I mean it's it's much harder when you already have someone who
is in that pathological state.
Because things just really snowball and accelerate. And there are some benefits. I mean
But it's not
It's not prevention's always the best. Prevention's always the best. And
So, you know, I I think that
If there's any sort of take home here, it's that like let's let's try to
Do what we can now so that we don't get to that point.
Before we get into the the the easier ways of
Staving off cognitive decline.
W d do we know what causes dementia in Alzheimer's, yeah.
Do we do we have any ideas?
Because we can
when they do the brain imaging they can kinda see these plaques on the brain, they say, but
I mean there's a lot of different
It's multifactorial, which means there's a lot of different causes of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
So I would say you mentioned plaques, amyloid beta plaques.
What happens is, you know, that's the aggregation of a protein in our brain called amyloid.
that typically
is cleared from our brain.
And um what happens is this abnormal
you know, thing happens where you're not clearing the amyloid. And so it starts to kind of form these clumps and aggregates.
With
The amyloid.
proteins that are not being cleared.
And that essentially is happening outside of your
Neurons, but it's happening where the synapses are formed between neurons.
And so what happens is it kind of disrupts the synaptic connection between neurons, which is essentially forming a memory.
And so when you start to disrupt that.
connection.
You lose not only the the memories start to go away, but
The whole purpose of
the neuron is to kind of I mean one of the purposes is to f to form a memory.
And so you start to like neurons start to die.
Right, when they start to lose their purpose.
Amyloid aggregation is linked to a lot of things. So for example
I mentioned it being cleared when we sleep.
particularly when we're in our deep sleep stage, slow way sleep.
That is um something happens.
That's kind of incredible.
It's called
activation of the gymphatic system. So you've heard of the lymphatic system.
Well the glenphatic system is essentially this series of like
networks and like almost like these like
highways and essentially roads and stuff all like throughout the brain.
where you're squirting this cerebral spinal fluid throughout the brain and it's clearing away all the garbage.
things like proteins that didn't get cleared, and it's sort of squirting them out and clearing them out through this lymphatic system.
That gymphatic system is activated during sleep. And it's one of the reasons why
People that don't get good slep.
Over the course of decades.
have a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease is because they're getting these amyloid plaques built up in their brains.
But there's other causes as well. So for example
glucose metabolism is disrupted.
in the brains of Alstom's disease.
You need glucose, your neurons need glucose. And so
uh the you know, there essentially um your your brain isn't able to make energy correctly.
Without
the glucose getting into your brain.
And so that's another sort of
metabolic underlying cause of Alzheimer's disease where you're essentially
I mean it's thought to be where
you're eating a lot of refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, and you're not exercising
And essentially your your
Disrupting the glucose.
metabolism in the brain as well as the whole
Body, right?
So the brain and body are connected.
But um
There's also genetic causes as well, and
you know, some people have genes c that can increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease because they're not able to
clear amyloid as well because they're not able to repair damage as well. So the the blood brain barrier
Which is really important for filtering out toxic things from getting into the brain.
it starts to break down.
And that's one of the I would say early, early signs of Alzheimer's disease is that breakdown of the blood brain barrier. And that happens in people that have a genetic risk factor called ApoE four. You may have heard of this, but this is
Probably one of the biggest
G genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease.
About twenty five percent of the population has one copy of this gene.
That increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease by twofold.
If you have two copies of it.
It increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease by tenfold.
So
Two fold being two hundred percent.
Two fold being twice twice as much.
Yeah, two hundred percent.
And tenfold being a thousand percent, right? Your year.
You're basically
Almost I mean it's it's pretty bad. And
It's not like a
It's not your destiny to get the Alzheimer's disease if you have those genes. You can do things in your lifestyle that can sort of
Turn the table so you're not
you're not necessarily gonna be getting that that Alzheimer's disease and a lot of different lifestyle factors like getting good sleep, like exercising, avoiding alcohol, avoiding smoking, not being overweight and obese, like those affect
your Alzheimer's disease risk.
More importantly, if you have one of those genes, then you really have to be cognizant of those things because
If you have one of those, you know, Apollo four.
genes than than essentially
Your lifestyle matters even more.
The people that don't. And you can
Do a test to figure out if you have those genes. Yes, yes. There's a a variety of genetic testing services that can be done.
pretty much all the ones that are out there on on the on the market, you know, ancestry DNA. I mean, depending on where
you live and what there's so many out there right now.
That will that will test for that.
Two of those genes.
Two of them is less common. I when I mentioned the twenty five percent of the population having it, it's usually one allele.
Alcohol
Essentially
can really increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease if you have one of those genes. And I think that there's really no safe amount.
of alcohol that can be consumed.
for people that have Apollo four if you're concerned about
dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The other thing is
Contact sports and traumatic brain injury.

Any of the you know, any one or two of the Ape Four.
Jeans if they have that.
then
If they get a TBI, like if they're playing American football or they're playing soccer or
MA or boxing, whatever. Then you talk about like
going up to a tenfold risk for Alzheimer's disease when you would get like a an injury because people with those genes don't repair damage as well.
So it affects their their
brain's ability to repair damage. And so that's also really important to consider.
So moving back then to this the simple things that we can do to
Improve our cognitive performance as we age, the things that are simpler than doing the vigorous hit training.
There's actually quite a few and
First and foremost, the one I love the most is a simple multivitamin.
And the reason I love this is because
I don't know, it was about ten years ago.
There was a a huge study that was published.
And it was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and it was called Enough Is Enough.
Multivitamins are not only useless, they're harmful.
And it was essentially
looking at a variety of studies and arguing that multivitamins are
Expensive yarn.
You're just not really doing anything.
And in fact, if you take a multivitamin, you might even be increasing the risk of disease.
That study
Was
Terrible.
And I
ten years ago went and just broke it down and, you know
Pulled it apart piece by piece.
But
Here we are, ten years later.
Three large clinical trials have been done. These are randomized control trials.
Where older adults were given either a multivitamin, and this was just your standard run of the mill multivitamin, Centrum Silver.
Or they were given a placebo.
And they were given this for a couple of years.
And what three different studies showed.
with that
A multivitamin improved cognition.
Improved processing speed, it improved what's called episodic memory.
So the kind of memory where you're remembering experiences and you can recall events, things like that.
Not only did it improve it, it improved it so much.
That it was equivalent to reducing
The
aging of the episodic memory by five years.
So
Simple multivitamin, and why is that important? Because
You know, multivitamins have a variety of these vitamins and minerals that we're not getting from our diet.
that are important.
For
Everything.
for metabolism, for the way our neurotransmitters are firing, for reducing
damage that's causing, you know.
Oxidative stress, right?
So
A simple multivitamin how much easier
can it be than taking a simple multivitamin. And the fact of the matter is that we're talking about a randomized control trial. This is
showing cause, right? This isn't just an association. This is showing that you took a multivitamin
For couple of years.
And improved your cognition.
More than a placebo.
Mm-hmm.
So I think that's pretty
Incredible and it's one of the examples that I like.
But um
Diving deeper into to some of the the nutrients. This is this is an area
You know
I started out
А за сієтест, і старта аз за кеміст, аклі, батьна білогії.
I was working in an aging lab.
And studying aging.
It was very interesting to me because
I essentially
with my own experiments with my own two hands.
could could manipulate these like tiny little worms. They're called C elegans.
And their whole genome was sequenced at the time, and this was like in the early two thousands.
And um
They have a lot of genes that are similar to humans. It's called homology.
And one of the genes is the insulin signaling pathway and the IGF one pathway. So insulin signaling would be something that's activated with.
Glucose.
We are eating a lot of sugar.
Right?
And I can take these worms.
And I could genetically
Decrease their insulin signaling.
So it kind of
If you think about a parallel to that, that would be, okay, we're not gonna be eating as much sugar.
Right, we're not gonna be activating that pathway so much.
And I could do that in this worm.
That has a life expectancy of about fifteen days.
And I could extend its life expectancy to
Thirty days.
Right.
So you're increasing its life expectancy by
Pretty much.
You know, a hundred percent.
Right.
Well
Not only did they
You know
live longer, they were healthier and youthful, and you could see that visually. They're moving around and they were just youthful worms.
And so
I was very excited about this, you know, in my twenties.
Because
I was like, wow, this is very relevant.
We have this gene.
And we know lifestyle factors that affect it.
Right? Sugar.
So the take home for me was
Lifestyle matters.
You know, yeah, genetics, maybe that'll be something one day where we're decreasing the insulin singing. But I was looking for the now, not the future technology. And so the now to me was wow, like
I don't wanna be constantly activating my, you know, insulin signaling pathway. Like, look what happens to these worms if you reduce it. I mean, it's amazing. They're youthful and they live longer.
And so I started to kinda get into diet and lifestyle.
sort of just out of curiosity and sort of reading in the literature.
And I came across some studies from
My mentor, Doctor Bruce Ames.
Where
He was showing
that not getting enough nutrients, like for example, folate.
Folate is found in dark leafy greens like kale. You know, folate, if you if you d if you decrease folate and make someone deficient in it.
It essentially causes
double stranded breaks in your DNA.
That
Essentially is like being
under ionizing radiation and that experiment was done like you could take a mouse
Make it like
Put low folate in the in you know
The mouse is
Food.
And then take another mouse and put it under an ionizing radiation machine.
And the amount of double stranded breaks in their DNA which cause cancer.
which accelerate aging, which affect every every you know how how your your cell are functioning.
It was just the same.
So it was like wow.
Th not having a certain nutrient in your diet was like standing under a an irradiating machine, ionizing radiation. No one's gonna wanna stand under an ionizing radiation machine, but no one's thinking about how your diet can do the same thing.
Um and that was kind of
I got into a lot of Bruce's
Bruce's research at the time, so Bruce.
He anyone in the in the science field knows Dr. Bruce Ames. He actually came up with the Ames carcinogen test. And
That essentially was a way of cheaply looking at and identifying whether something's a carcinogen.
And he got into sort of nutrition as he started to figure things like folate.
Basically
being lac of folate being a carcinogen, essentially, right? Like ionizing radiation is a carcinogen.
And then he started to go on to other nutrients as well, like magnesium and B vitamins. But I think for me the aha moment was.
Micronutrients and these vitamins and minerals are affecting
The
Way we age are affecting our health.
On a similar level as these toxic things that we're worried about, like ionizing radiation.
And nobody's
Thinking about it like that.
So I'll give you an example.
Vitamin D.
You talked about dementia, what's gonna help prevent dementia. Vitamin D.
Is it's actually more than a vitamin. Vitamin D gets converted into a steroid hormone.
So a steroid hormone
Essentially
What it does is it goes into the
nucleus of a cell where all your DNA is.
And it it's activating genes and deactivating them. It's affecting your genome.
And it's actually
over five percent of your
Your your genome is being affected by vitamin D.
Why is that important? Because
Seventy percent of the US population has insufficient levels of vitamin D.
The reason for that is because vitamin D three is actually made in the skin.
From UVB radiation from the sun.
And so
If you're not outside
then you're not really making a lot of vitamin D three in your skin.
And vitamin D three then gets converted into this steroid hormone that regulates everything, right?
And so um, you know, modern day society, you know, we're inside all the time.
We're working, we're not outside, and even if you were outside.
There's so many other factors that affect it. So anything that blocks out UVB radiation.
bloc out the availability of of your body to make vitamin D three. So sunscreen.
Right? That's a big one.
Melanin, the the darker pigmentation that acts as a natural sunscreen.
And then latitude, depending on where you live.
Also. So
you know, a good number of months out of the year if you're in a more northern latitude like
England like Wales like
Chicago or Sweden.
You're not UVB radiation's not even hitting the atmosphere.
you know, for several months out of the year.
Combine that with
Sunscreen?
Or melanin.
And you got like this
Disaster, right. In fact, there was a study out of the University of Chicago.
that looked at
African Americans and Caucasians.
And their ability to white people.
Exactly. Their ability to make vitamin D three from UVB radiation.
From the sun. Yeah. And as I mentioned, you know, melanin.
is a natural sunscreen. And you know, people that are
You know, either
you know, from African origin or South American or South East Asian, right? People that are closer to the equator.
usually have more melanin. It's an it's an adaptation to prevent you from burning from the UV rays of the sun.
Well, um
This University of Chicago study found that um
You know, people that are African American had to stay in the sun six to ten times longer.
Than people with fair skin, the Caucasians.
To make the same amount of vitamin D three.
And so as a consequence, if you take someone who
Like yourself, well you're you're you got a little bit more mel melanin. A little bit. Yeah, you've got a little bit more melanin. But let's say you take someone who, you know, has a mum.
She's Nigerian. Okay, your mom from yeah, Nigerian. And let's say your mom moves to Chicago.
Right.
Well she's moved to bloody England. Or if she moved to England, right, exactly. Then
You're talking about a recipe for disaster in terms of vitamin D
Because
You're not only not
Making it several months out of the year. I forgot how many months out of the year, maybe four or five, or something like that, where the UVB radiation is not even hitting the atmosphere, but you have this natural sunscreen.
What's the consequences of that in terms of symptoms?
Well, it's it's kinda it's not like an acute thing where you kind of just
Look in the mirror and you're like, what is the causation then in terms of the thing?
Right, right, yeah. So the reason I say this is because people always think of like, Well, I'm not getting enough vitamin C and I have scurvy and you can look in the mirror and your gums are falling apart, right? It's easy to identify this.
Vitamin D deficiency
or insufficiency is more insidious. It's kind of this damage that accumulates over time. It's something that isn't, you know,
quite.
noticeable or maybe maybe you're feeling, you know, may maybe you're feeling like lethargic or you don't have enough energy, things like that, but you don't really really know quite why. So vitamin D
Insufficiency and deficiency, there are acute effects where like if it's severe, it can cause ricket and like bone malformations and stuff, especially if it's happening early in life.
But um
What we now know is that being
deficient or insufficient in vitamin D.
can increase dementia risk by eighty percent.
And that's been shown in multiple studies.
The
Converse is also true. So people that supplement with vitamin D three and this is where
a simple solution comes in, right? So you're not making it from your skin, but you can take a supplement.
People that supplement with vitamin D three have a forty percent reduced risk of dementia.
So in other words, they're avoiding deficiency.
Which is very common.
And avoiding that deficiency then is reducing their dementia risk. And there's actually even been studies in people with dementia and people with Alzheimer's disease that were giving a vitamin D supplement.
or a placebo control and those individuals given the vitamin D supplement
had improved cognition.
They had um lower markers of amyloid plaques. So those were this will those were also measured as well.
So vitamin D is doing a lot of things. It's it's regulating five percent of your
protein coding human genome.
If I want to increase my probability of getting dementia then, I've gotta stay out of the sun.
I've got to avoid um vitamin D. I've got to drink alcohol, smoke.
B sedentry.
And I've got to sleep really badly.
Yes, and eat a lot of re refined sugar.
Yeah.
Yes, yes, exactly. Okay. Exactly.
Now you might go, Well, how much vitamin D, right? I'm talking about deficiency and insufficiency, and you really want to get a blood test.
To know what your levels are.
There have been
I don't know, thirty plus studies that have looked at
vitamin D levels.
And
All cause mortality.
So that would be again
you know, how you know dying from a variety of different diseases, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancer.
And people that have blood levels of vitamin D between forty
sixty, maybe eighty nanograms per milliliter.
have the lowest all cause mortality. So these people are not
Deficient, not insufficient.
Insufficiency happens at about thirty nanograms per milliliter below that.
Deficiency is twenty nanograms per lil milliliter and below.
And so um
There have been a variety of studies that looked at
For example, the brain and the aging brain and vitamin D levels. And it's been shown that for every
You know, ten nanomol per liter decrease in vitamin D blood levels.
There's an increase in brain damage. It's called white matter hyper intensities. It's basically
damage to the white matter in your brain.
And the white matter in your brain is myelin.
That's how your brain's communicating and and like how, you know, it's electrical impulses are being, you know, moved so that you can think and talk and all that. Exactly. Yeah, I hadn't had one today, so I feel like
You've you've persuaded me.
Most people that are deficient can increase their blood levels to a normal sufficient level by about four thousand IUs of vitamin D per day.
So
Not and that's been done, that's been shown in multiple studies. Not it's not it's not that hard to take. In fact, vitamin D supplements are probably the cheapest supplement out there, it's like 10 cents per pill.
When you talked about these
I was
Really surprised to hear that they have
Cancer preventing
Chemicals in them.
And then um I was looking at some of the research and it does say exactly as you said, things like kale broccoli, brussels sprouts are linked to a a reduction in breast cancer risk, prostate, lung and
polarectal cancers according to the World Cancer Research Fund and
Had met.
Most of us don't eat enough of this stuff.
Because it's not the tastiest stuff.
And you talked about sugar as well.
It it it it makes me think about the diet that I'm currently on, which is the ketogenic diet.
And whether that is an optimal diet in terms of all of the things we've discussed earlier, dementia, longevity, aging.
What is your views on the ketogenic diet?
I think there's
Uh there's the extreme ketogenic diet, like the classical ketogenic diet, and then there's modified sort of low carb.
ketogenic diets that do allow for I mean there's
Yes, these are leafy greens that are carbohydrate.
But they're high in fiber and they're low glycemic index. And so you can actually eat leafy greens on a ketogenic diet.
and still be in ketosis.
So I
The key change diet is very I'm very interested in it because
I do think that
Beta hydroxybutyrate.
which is the ket major circulating ketone body that's produced when you're in ketosis.
is highly beneficial, much like lactate.
It can actually do a lot of what lactate can do.
It gets into the brain and it's an e easily utilizable source of energy by neurons.
These are key tones.
Which is what your body makes when you
Ab abstain from carbohydrates and sugars. Yes. It eventually shifts into ketosis where you're running on ket
You're in ketosis and you're running on ketones. Yes.
It's what you're measuring when you're doing your when you're measuring your fingerprint that it's beta hydroxy butray, that's the major circulating one.
that you're measuring and that's actually
a singling molecule. It's activating brain drive neurotrophic factor in the brain.
And so
It's very interesting because it's it's almost like having
lactate in your body, but having it
Constantly.
So I'm super interested in a ketogenic diet.
Particularly for people that respond well. I mean, some people
their triglycerides go really high, their cholesterol goes really high, and
there's sort of an I would say individual variation in terms of how you respond, and so it's good to always
measure everything, right? To make sure that you're responding well to ketogenic diet or to maybe cycle it. I've been very interested in cycling it for brain benefits as well.
because of the beta hydroxy butyrate.
where it I it's just so beneficial for the brain. You know, it's been shown that
you know, beta hydroxy butyrate. So what happens is when you have
This ketone?
Like
beta hydroxybutyrate get into the brain.
It's able to be used as energy instead of glucose.
I feel like we should take a step back and explain what
Keto is.
for for the for the listener who maybe has never really heard or understood it before. And I know that there's a large
proportion of people that don't know what it what it is because
I spend a lot of time at dinner parties.
Trying to talk about it.
And it's
s super surprising to me that the average person
And she doesn't really know what what keto or ketosis is.
So
I think that's great. Yeah, we can talk about ketosis. Um essentially
If we if we kind of take a
a thousand mile high view of it without getting so technical. Yeah.
I would say the best way to think about
being in ketosis is
Your body is using fatty acids.
as energy and not
much glucose. You'll still use a little bit of glucose. You need to use glucose because
Your red blood cells, for example.
don't have any mitochondria. They need glucose.
But you're mostly using fatty acids as energy that are being produced from they're being released from fat stored in adipose tissue.
Which is like my belly.
Which like your belly, visceral fat.
Um subcutaneous fat. So this one's great. My body's gonna use burn the fat instead of
Burn you know, burning
Glucose which I've got from eating bread or something, so I'm gonna get skinny.
People do lose weight on a ketogenic diet. My dad has lost so much weight, it's ridiculous. It's like shocking. On a ketogenic diet. Yeah, it's crazy. He was
Quite a big man, if I say so myself. Very big belly.
And he sent me this screenshot the other day after a couple of months on a ketogenic diet.
And he's like thirteen, he's just g for the first time ever been thirteen student since since he was
In his teens, he's now thirteen stone.
So he's lost what w the equivalent of about four st four or five stone in weight.
in a couple of months and he just looks completely different. Now not I you know I'm not necessarily saying to stay on that diet forever, but the
The speed in which
one can lose weight on a ketogenic diet is remarkable.
Right. And so you're you're basically the food that you're eating is predominantly
Fat.
Right. So you're you're basically not only using the fat that your body already has store, but you're also
fueling yourself, you're feeding yourself more fat, right? So you're basically using the fat as energy.
And through a whole bunch of
Biochemical reactions.
You produce
ketone bodies as a byproduct of of that.
It doesn't necessarily have to be just
ketogenic diet. Like you can
When you're fasting.
You go into ketosis, right? Because if you think about it.
Your
You're not
Giving yourself food.
Instead you're relying on what your body already has as a source of energy and you only have so much
glucose stored as glycogen.
Right, in your liver.
And not
I would say after there's individual variation, but after about twelve hours.
Of
Not giving your body food.
you sort of deplete all your glycogen stores. And then so you start to s shift to lipolysis, which means the breakdown of fat.

So fasting is another way to go to get into ketosis. Another way would be intense exercise. So, like, you know, these endurance athletes that are doing
long duration types of exercise.
also can go into ketosis, right? Because they're depleting their glycogen stores much quicker and they're also using all this energy that they've they've fueled themselves with.
because it's it's it's so intense, right? Long duration type of exercise.
And so and you can combine these things as well, right? You can do endurance exercise with the ketogenic diet and you really kind of can get anti ketosis quicker. Is it like a switch?
So there is something called
metabolic flexibility.
Which essentially means that your body is able to
switch between burning glucose and using glucose as energy, but also using fatty acids.
as making, you know, as energy and then
producing ketones as well.
And the more
I would say the more um if you've done ketosis or if you exercise
a lot like frequently, or you do any form of fasting or what's called time restricted eating. So let's say you eat all your food within an eight hour window.
And then for sixteen hours you're not eating food, your body is used to switching to fatty acid.
metabolism to to using fatty acids as energy. So you're really f
metabolically flexible.
And um not everyone's
able to do that because most people actually they think they eat within a 12 hour period, but they there's been studies that have been done that have shown that actually they eat more like within a 15 to 16 hour period, not even a 12 hour period, certainly not a 10 or eight hour period.
So there's
As I mentioned.
It takes about twelve hours on average.
to deplete all your glycogen levels. Now you can
accelerate that if you're doing a lot of physical activity.
But once you deplete that liver glycogen
That is when you s shift into burning fatty acids and then eventually ketosis, right? In terms of longevity, have they ever done any studies where they've put someone on the ketogenic diet or like a mouse or a rat on a ketogenic diet versus
Then the average diet and then monitored how long they live.
There have been studies.
By uh Dr. Eric Verdin out of the uh Buck Institute for Aging in Nevado, California.
And I mean, this was several years ago. He's done these studies, probably almost 10 years ago, maybe about 2018 or 2017, these studies were published.
But um he he did do some of these studies with a ketogenic diet and rodents.
And it did seem to extend life expectancy, but more importantly.
the health span. So
particularly in the brain.
So it's like their brain had aged much, much better. They had less of the
all of the pathological features of Alzheimer's disease. And again, I do think
Like I mentioned, I I'm I'm super interested in beta hydroxybutyrate.
in particular. I mean there's m it's multi factorial because on the one hand
You're not eating as much glucose.
Right.
in and of itself is important.
Биз глукоски со дами.
Particularly
If you're not physically active.
Because it's n if you if you're physically active and you're eating some amount of glucose, it's going into your muscle. It's not damaging the vascular system.
The vas the card the vascular system is very much related to the brain, right?
So when you start to stiffen your blood vessels and stiffen everything, I mean that's that's affecting blood flow to the brain. It's a you know, it's causing hypertension.
That all affects brain aging as well.
So I think just
You know, and then the the the damage that the glucose does
in and of itself. Like
I mean there's studies, it's really interesting, there's studies showing that
People even on the high end of normal in terms of their blood glucose levels, so they're normal.
But they're kind of on the high end of normal.
They had more brain atrophy.
than people on the
Low end.
Uh
Normal.
By brain atrophy you mean their brain was
Shrinking. Shrinking.
shrinking. And it was the hippocampus, by the way. Again, that that part of the brain that's involved in learning in memory. So the glucose itself,
has this effect on
it causing damage and accelerating the aging process.
But then there's this other very interesting effect of
These chemicals that are made as a byproduct of being in ketosis, and that is the beta hydroxybutyrate, that ketone body.
Gets into the brain.
It's transported across the brain through an M C T transporter. And
When it gets into the brain
It can be used as energy and you
Your neurons don't need to use glucose, and it can do that.
So your br your neurons can use glucose as energy, but it
takes energy to use that glucose to make energy.
When you use the ketone, the beta hydroxybutyrate, it takes less energy to you to make that energy. So it's energetically favorable to actually use that ketone, that beta hydroxybutyrate.
On top of that, this is what's so interesting.
It frees up glucose.
So the neurons aren't using the glucose. Where does the glucose go, right? Because it's there.
It's it it sort of shun it into this other pathway.
That's called the pentosephostate pathway. I don't wanna, you know, burden people with all this technical details, but let's get to the important part of that is that it shunts glucose into this pathway.
That m makes essentially its precursors that make what's called glutathione the major antioxidant in the brain.
And so
You're making more glutathione.
Day after day after day.
That is huge because
Oxidation in the brain, inflammation, this is
A huge cause of brain aging and Alzheimer's disease dementia. We now know neuroinflammation is one of the major causes of it.
And so if you have more
Glutathione in your brain.
You're going to
Basically sequester that damage that's
Causing
Yeah.
That's c that's aging the brain, essentially.
And so
The glucose now is not being used for energy.
It's being used to make an antioxidant in the brain.
Okay, that's also
Really cool.
And there's more.
There's more. Okay. So then
The beta hydroxybutyrate itself is a singling molecule, like lactate. The ketone.
The ketone itself is a signaling molecule.
Where it's basically, you know, it's a little bit of a stressed state, right? So when you're in ketosis, it's
You you're stressing the body, it's either exercise or you're fasting, or you're on this ketogenic diet.
And so your body again is responding to that stress by making like a bunch of
Awesome, resilient stress response things that are
Basically gonna improve the way you age.
And so the ketone
Beta hydroxybutyrate then activates brain drive neurotrophic factor.
This miracle goes for your brain, right? It's involved in growing new neurons, it's involved in increasing the connection between neurons, it's involved in neuroplasticity, all those things.
And so you get this multi level benefit.
Not getting not having the glue glucose causing the damage.
You have um basically
the the glucose now being used, not only is it not coin causing damage, it's being used to make an antioxidant. And then you have the whole ketone
S you know, aspect where you're you're essentially um
Making and activating all these
beneficial pathways in the brain that reduces aging.
And what's going on when we
Fake.
Exogenous ketones, external ketones via a drink or something like that.
Yeah, so what's happening is you're essentially
Giving your body
The
beta hydroxybutyrate ketone that it would make
normally if you were undergoing ketosis and using fatty acids only as energy.
You're giving your body a big boost of it.
So you're kind of bypassing the the way that your body would make it itself and giving it to your body. And it's great for people that
have a hard time with
Doing a ketogenic diet, for example.
maybe they just can't stick with it or maybe they don't respond very well to it in terms of other biomarkers.
They're gonna get a lot of the benefit, but it's only gonna last, you know, one to three hours, right? Yeah, until it flushes out. Until until ex until you use it up.
Yeah, and so it's in addition to just people that wanna get that focus and attention, which is what
Бот юнай в experienced when we've taken these.
you know, supplements, this exogenous ketone.
There's also some potential therapeutic effects.
So people that have
Mild cognitive decline, maybe like the first stages of dementia or Alzheimer's disease.
can kind of perk up.
And um
perform better when they have when they're given
And exogenous ketone, this supplemental ketone.
Beta hydroxybutyrate.
There's not a lot of studies on it, but there's like a few case studies where
case studies being like a single person.
Is given it and they're followed.
And
looked at, you know.
And it's very interesting. I actually know that they're doing studies on exactly that at the moment.
Um, because I've spoken to a few of these companies and a few scientists that are
uh in this field over the last couple of over the last couple of weeks, in fact. And they were saying that we're currently in the process of doing studies to see that if exogenous ketones, which are these ketone drinks with ketone shots, can repair your
Cognitive faculty faculties.
And is that via the process that you described where glucose is
Pushed into this other pathway.
Yes. So um I I think I'm
aware of the same study'cause I've I've looked it up in the clinical trial and
What's what's being looked at.
After giving this
Exogenous beta hydroxybutyrate, the supplemental ketone.
In people with
Alzheimer's disease.
You can repair damage because again.
you are activating brain drive neurotrophic factor, which can it can repair damage. It can grow new neurons. It can help with brain atrophy. It can strengthen connection between neurons. And then
The glucose now is being shunted into that repair pathway. That glutathione's being activated and
And that's able to
you know, repair damage as well.
So
I I'm excited to see the public like that that study
Published?
I would hypothesize that there's gonna be beneficial effects and it's gonna be pretty exciting.
Particularly because
It is hard for older adults, some older adults to do a ketogenic diet. It's not the easiest thing to follow. I mean, you do have to be pretty disciplined.
So this alternative to being able to supplement.
with something that can sort of at least for the course of a couple of hours.
do what being on a ketogenic diet can do is very exciting, right?
When you took the
Keto shop that you a had at home.
What did you experience? You said it was potent, it was powerful.
Yeah, it was like a nootropic effect.
Where
When I mean nootropic effect, it's it's the kind of effect where
You you feel
Focused, your attention, your alertness is enhanced.
You're sort of filtering out all the background noise in your brain that sort of those little
thoughts that pop in and distract you and so
You're more productive.
And um that was very noticeable. In fact, there was a time when I was like before any podcast I would take a shot of it.
I won't do it.

And um
It's kind of expensive, but
It is I it there's a lot of people that are that are using it now, and I think it's
I think it's a better alternative to some other nootropics that are common right now, like nicotine, for example, which can really have a negative
Trade off.
But can do something similar.
Whereas this is like not only gives you that sort of cognitive enhancement, that brain pump.
It also has like benefits for brain aging.
Right.
What are you doing?
Superfoods.
Um, olive oil has become one of my superfoods.
Just a food that I love to just put on as many things as I can because everybody tells me about these polyphenols, which are apparently amazing for you. But what are some of the your sort of favorite superfoods that
you try and consume that most people might not think of.
So we talked about leafy greens, I guess that's one of them. It is. Leafy greens, um, they have their high in magnesium.
And you know
Magnesium's at the center of a chlorophyll molecule. Chlorophyll give plants a green color.
Magnesium is very important for
preventing damage to DNA DNA and cancer and
you know, half half the US population doesn't get enough of it.
They're high in
a lot of different compounds. I mean they're folate, vitamin K, one. So you're getting a lot of these micronutrients that are important. So I do like re le dark leafy greens. I particularly like kale.
Broccoli because of something called sulfurfane.
Which is
Sulfurfin itself is not in them, but a
Precursor when you
Break the plant or you chew it.
Um, it makes sulfurphane.
So there's an enzyme that gets activated that
Converts a precursor in these
plants called glucarafenin into sulfurphane. Sulfurphane is
Also increases glutathione in the brain. It helps detoxify pollutants like benzene, um
bisphenyl A B P A as well.
So
I do like dark leafy greens of the cruciferous family of vegetables. Again, that would be kale, broccoli. Um, those are those are the cruciferous family.
I also like
Blueberries.
Blueberries are a sort of polyphenols. You mentioned olive oil is a polyphenol. It's if you're on a ketogenic diet, olive oil is like the great.
Right,'cause you need fat.
And olive oil is gr so great because it also has those polyphenols that are beneficial and it's been shown
even in studies to improve cognition and memory and uh lower even marker markers of um bad cardiovascular disease like
Ape O B, for example, lower that. So
Blueberries I like because blueberries have also been shown, even a cup of blueberries a day has been shown to improve cognition.
So I like the polyphenols, it increases blood flow to the brain.
I also like
Salmon.
And I think that would be something that
Mm.
Most people would
think is healthy. I like it because it's high in the omega three fatty acids.
Which
I'm very, very
It's I think it's very, very important to get
enough omega three fatty acids I also supplement with them because
There's a lot of research out there and if you want to get into that, we can.
But um the superfood would be the the salmon because it is
A fatty source of fish that is high in
Omega three fatty acids, EPA and DHA, which are found in marine sources, not plant sources of omega three.
I find it really interesting when I was looking at Omega Three that it has an impact on mental health and depression and things like that.
Yeah, it does.
It's it's it resolves inflammation, it's sort of an anti inflammatory.
And inflammation plays a role in depression, big role. In fact we we know that um
People that are injected with
Inflammatory molecules like
something that's made in our gut from the bacteria in our gut called
Lype polysaccharide.
If you inject them with that.

Or a placebo control, which is saline, it causes depression, but if you give them an omega-3 fatty acid supplement, EPA,
Yeah.
Blunts the depressive symptoms. So in other words
If you're causing the inflammation
By injecting something that causes inflammation.
In people.
It causes depression. But if you give those same people something that blunts that inflammation, omega-3 fatty acids,
It doesn't cause the depression.
Which is kind of amazing. And there's a ton of other evidence out there.
But um omega three fatty acids are
They're so p important and what's interesting was there's a study out of Harvard
That identified
The marine source, so I talked about salmon.
E P A
D H A, and then there's the plant source A L A.
And I say marine source because it's really those are the important ones that you really want.
From the ocean.
From fish.
Seafood?
So this Harvard studied identified not eating enough seafood
As one of the top
Six.
Preventable causes of death.
Up there with
Навні хайтен, на смакін.
So essentially
Not getting
Enough omega three from seafood.
Was
So important for preventing early death.
That it was comparable to people having high blood pressure, having cardiovascular disease, for example. And again, it's one of those things where people just don't think about what they're not.
eating, what they're not getting.
And um there's so much research that have been done even since that that study that was published in like two thousand nine.
looking at omega three fatty acid levels in our blood cells.
red blood cells. This is called the omega three index.
Oh.
It's really an important marker of our long term omega three.
Because our um our red blood cells are
stay around in our system for like
A hundred and twenty days.
So it's a long term marker of your omega three intake.
And there's been a variety of studies done from Dr. Bill Harris out of the Fatty Acid Research Institute. So I'm an associate scientist scientist there.
Showing that people with what's called a high omega three index.
Which is a lot of omega three. A lot of omega three. Their omega three index would be eight percent or higher.
That's considered high.
compared to a low omega three index, that would be four percent.
Or lower.
The average omega three index in the United States is about five percent. So it's on the low.
low range.
people that had the high omega three index, in other words, they were either eating a lot of fish, like salmon.
And or supplementing with fish oil.
or microalgae oil, which is another s a marine source of these omega-3 fatty acids.
They had a five year increase life expectancy compared to people with a low omega three index.
Pretty big difference there in all
All you have to do is essentially
either eat enough seafood and or supplement with
A
Fish oil supplement.
But what was so fascinating about this study
was that
Bill and his colleagues not only looked at the omega three index
They looked at people that also smoked.
And they said, Okay.
We know smoking is terrible for your heart. We know it's causes early mortality, cancer, and all that, right?
What about people that smoke?
And their omega three index.
So there were four groups that were looked at. Smokers
That have either a high omega three index. So these smokers were either supplementing or they were eating an a lot of seafood.
And then there were smokers with a low omega three index.
And they compare them to non smokers.
with a high omega three index versus a low omega three index.
And what was so fascinating about this study was that
Smoking.
Was like
As bad for you in terms of mortality.
as having a low omega three index.
So the smokers
With a high omega three index had the same mortality risk.
As non smokers with a low omega three index.
Which is
Fascinating because
Everybody knows to avoid smoking. Smoking if you wanna take yours off your life, if you wanna decrease the quality of your life.
Start smoking right now.
But
The same mortality risk was found in non smers.
who did not have a high omega three index.
Right?
Now
I say this. I'll
Talk about this and smokers will say, Oh great. Now all I have to do is
Take fish oil and I'll have the same life expectancy as a non smoker with, you know, a low omega 3 index. But of course, the the take home here is that.
For those of us that are not smoking, but we're not
Getting enough omega three from our diet.
That's like smoking in terms of mortality risk.
So
super important and I like talking about this because it really makes it, again, really clear.
That not getting these essential nutrients.
Can be very detrimental to our health. And it's easy to fix. You can take a fish oil supplement, you can increase the amount of salmon that you're eating. And there have been studies from Bill's group that have shown people that supplement with between one to two grams of.
Fish oil per day.
can go from a low omega three index to a high omega three index.
Which is not hard to do.
So I guess two questions which is
Is having these little omega capsules the same as eating the salmon in terms of the omega three that I'm getting?
And how long do I have to take these little omega capsules for?
to move from having a low index to a high omega three index.
Well, these are great questions, Steven. So
Essentially.
This little capsule here.
Is not the same as eating salmon.
And there's a few reasons why. So for one
When you're eating a fish that's high in omega three, like salmon.
You have this omega three in what's called triglyceride form. So the omega three is is is bound to a glycerol backbone. And that's really important for the way you absorb it.
Some fish oil supplements don't have that. They're
they're a stere they're they're basically they're molecular distilled and then they're put they have an ethanol back.
backbone. So it's not quite as
Bioavailable.
But I think more importantly is that these fish oil supplements are
Purified.
So you're not getting
Mercury.
Or microplastics.
Or things that are also found in the whole fish. So these are better.
Unfortunately, I think so.
I do.
Um, as much as I think it's
It's better, you know, it for the longest time I always h I was always a whole foods first approach.
Um, but we do have this environmental pollution problem.
And fish have been contaminated with heavy metals, they've been contaminated with microplastics.
I would say that salmon is one of the lowest
fish that has the lowest amount of mercury compared to other fish. So it pr on a on a per gram basis.
You're getting less mercury.
per gram with salmon than you would be with, you know, something like swordfish, for example.
But
But you also have microplastics, unfortunately, that are now in fish.
And it is something that enters our body when we eat the fish. And so
I do think the fish oil supplements are a good alternative because you're getting those omega three fatty acids and you're not you're you're not getting some of the other bad things that are in the fish. That's fascinating. I I didn't really I didn't really think of omega three as being that imp important, especially as it relates to longevity. I always thought about it as being something that would help my brain work better today.
You know, cognitive performance now. Well, it does that.
And it also helps prevent the cognitive decline later. And also cardiovascular disease. That's a big one. So there have been some really large randomized controlled trials that have actually given people with cardiovascular disease that are on
You know, some c sort of standard of care treatment like a statin. And they've given them four grams a day of a purified form of omega-3 called EPA.
versus a placebo and the people given the omega three
had twenty five percent less
cardiovascular related death or events like heart attacks and strokes.
So
It's not only like preventing
You know, we talked about all cause mortality and this association where you live longer.
It's also helping people that already have cardiovascular disease and reducing their risk of dying from it.
When I asked you before this conversation started rolling.
what you're really excited about at the moment. Your response to me was there was a few things, but one of them which lit up your face was
Creating.
Yes.
And it's funny because It lit up your face again. Yeah.
Yeah, it's it's funny because creatine has been around for I mean
Ever for decades, and it's always been
In my mind it was like one of those Jimbro things. I'm like, I don't need to be
Swole. I don't need creatine to get get swole. And you know, this is this was the thought for for many, many years.
And then over the last
Five
Years or so
The effects of creatine on the brain.
starts to really get my interest. Anything that affects the brain, I really
become interested in
And so that's kind of what
Did get me the most excited about
About creatine.
But also I started doing a lot of resistance training. And so I was like, Okay, here I am now. I'm like one of those gym guys. I'm doing I'm doing the barbells, I'm doing the you know, the squats and the deadlifts and all that. And so
So why not give myself some of the creatine? Well what is creatine, right?
Why is it important?
You talked about
Earlier, you know
why doesn't our body just make more of these things that are so beneficial?
We do make creatine. We make about
I don't know. Our liver makes
About one to three grams a day of creatine.
And our brain also makes creatine and those are the two organs that make it.
Creatine.
gets consumed by
other tissues like the muscle's probably the one that's the greediest because
Creatine is
stored as phosphorcreotine, but it's used to make energy, essentially.
So it can increase
Muscle mass, it can increase muscle strength.
in combination with resistance training.
because you're able to regenerate and make energy.
Faster.
So for example
I became interested in it after reading studies where
People that supplemented with creatine that were engaged in resistance training.
were able to gain more lean body mass, they were able to gain more strength. It was increasing their training volume. So
You can do one to two more reps.
Right.

And it seems to decrease the recovery time between those those sets as well.
So you're able to increase your training volume. Well, anything that's gonna incre increase your training volume
is going to then have the downstream effect of a
you know, increasing the adaptations like increased muscle mass or increased muscle strength.
I started supplementing with creatine about a year ago.
And I started supplementing with it for that reason, for the my training.
And I was doing about five gram a day because that was really
What was shown to be beneficial for muscle health in combination with resistance training. And it's important for people to realize that.
Supplementing with creatine.
by itself without any type of resistance training isn't gonna grow your muscle. It's not gonna make you stronger. You have to put in the effort.
Because what creatine is doing
It's helping you make
the energy quicker, right? And that and then
being able to make that energy quicker means that you're able to then do that exercise.
Better.
um harder.
More of it, right? So
Um, it's sort of supercharging your exercise routine.
And
Five grams a day was like, Okay, perfect. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing five grams a day.
And
definitely noticed a an effect on my training volume where I was, you know, doing more more reps.
So that was like okay, a year ago.
I had already been aware of the effects on the brain. I thought maybe the five grams a day would do that. So what are the effects on the brain? Well, your brain also consumes a lot of energy, you know, needs a lot of energy.
So it does make its own creatine.
But it turns out
If you can if you can give your brain more of that creatine
Particularly under a period of anything that's causing stress.
So
Лек сліп.
Or
Леце ему психологічку стрес.
Or in my case
high cognitive load
Where you're just every day learning concepts, complex things, you're trying to remember them, you're putting ideas together and coming up with.
new hypotheses and you know, you're just you're just you're studying a lot and it's very
cognitively demanding and it's
It's a type of stress on your brain. That's like my life, right?
Um
Under this condition of
Stress. Depression's another one. That's a stress on your brain. Or
Neurodegenerative disease. That's a stress on your brain. So
Any kind of stressful condition.
That's where creatine shines.
In the brain.
I would argue that
All of us who who has the perfect amount of sліp never has stress.
Nobody, right? There's always some sort of stress in the background.
So um that's when I was like okay so
If you're the perfect person, you have no stress, you get the perfect amount of sleep every night, your brain makes enough creatine to kind of
Do what it needs to do.
I know that I'm constantly under stress. So um I'm like okay, well I think I need a boost.
And this is where a lot of very interesting studies have come out of many different labs.
Um, some out of Germany that looked at the dose of creatine.
And how it increases creatine levels in the brain.
And this is why I now supplement with ten grams a day.
So the study out of Germany
found that five grams a day of creatine if you're supplementing with five grams a day
your muscles are greedily consuming it, particularly if you're working out.
They want it. They want it.
After about five grams a day, especially over a few months, like you're you're saturating your muscle and that's enough, right?
Anything above that kind of spills over to the brain.
And so they've what this German study is.
Found was that ten grams of creatine.
increased creatine levels in several different regions of the brain. And that was probably the most exciting
you know, I would say evidence that supplementing higher than five grams a day was
actually doing something in terms of getting creating in the brain.
There have now been a variety of studies that have looked at
different outcomes, right? So if you supplement with
10 cr grams of creatine or even go higher than that, like 20 grams of creatine, how does that affect cognitive function, right?
And so um some of these studies have been been done by uh Dr. Darren Kandau. He's um at the University of Regina in Canada.
And it's looked they've looked at things like sleep deprivation.
And it's been found that
If you take someone
And you sleep deprived them for
Twenty one hours.
And give them about
twenty five to thirty grams of creatine.
It completely negates the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation. Actually, not only does it negate the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation.
Yeah.
makes people function better
than if they were well rested.
That's where I was like
Wait a minute.
There's many times when I'm traveling, I'm jet lagged. Uh, lots of times when I'm sleep deprived and I have to be doing a podcast or a presentation, whatever.
And
In those situations I go up from my ten grams to more like twenty grams, like today.
For example.
I wasn't really
sleep deprived, but you know, there's a lot of high cognitive demand. This is a long podcast. There's all that stuff. And so I went up to twenty grams today on my creatine.
And I will I will say even at the ten grams.
For me.
We were talking about this with respect to being in ketosis.
I don't feel that.
Mid afternoon crash.
when I have the creatine.
Not being on a ketogenic diet, not being in ketosis.
It's very clear for me, and I've done this where sometimes I only do five grams.
And then
If I do that, I'll notice I'm like, why am I tired right now?
So there's something interesting and maybe it's placebo. I'm gonna throw that out there. Very possible.
But I don't know, maybe the creatine is again, it's able to regenerate that energy.
What?
And so that's also beneficial for the brain.
And now I I would say all these creatine researchers, a lot of them are shifting to the brain. It used to be all muscle focused.
And now people are super interested in what creatine.
Is doing to the brain, especially if you're supplementing with more of it.
And you know, this is important for people that are under a stressful situation.
But also for vegans, because creatine
is found in food, mostly in animal products like meat and poultry and fish, dairy.
A lot of vegans don't eat that, and I've had so many of my vegan friends
I've got them on the creatine and it's changed their lives. I mean they're like
This is like
Incredible. You know, can you imagine someone who's not getting any creatine from their diet'cause they eat no meat.
And all of a sudden they start supplementing with five, ten grams of creatine.
And it's like they have energy.
Some people say they they require less sleep, which is kind of interesting. That's kind of a
comment I've heard many, many times from people is that
It's like they're

So um
I've been a big fan of the creatine, um, not only for the muscle, especially because you know, working out is something that's very important.
But for the brain as well.
I always thought of creatine as something that you you took and you kinda had to load up on and then over a couple of weeks or months the effects would kick in. But you're telling me that if I had creatine in the morning
that same day I would experience potentially improved cognition if I have a big enough dose.
Yes, so um
Great question.
A lot of studies that have been done that you're referring to
Have been done in the context of exercise and muscular performance.
And
The reason why people have to load up on like they do a loading phase, let's say twenty grams.
And then they go down to this sort of maintenance phase of five grams.
is because it takes
I don't know, but I think it's about a month or so before you can saturate your muscular stores of creatine.
And then you can't.
It means that um the creatine, which is actually stored in your muscles as phospho creatine, is there and ready to be used to make energy.
I so it so it takes
Again, it takes a uh about a month or so to do that.
unless you are really giving your muscles a high dose. Right. So the five grams a day, it only it it can only do it for
so many days, and then finally you get saturated. When you do this loading phase, you kind of just accelerate that whole process.
And so that's why when people are doing these experiments where they want to test the effects of creatine, they want they want the participants to have really high levels of creatine in their muscles quick because
They don't want to do a month long experiment, right? They want the experiment to be like a couple of weeks or a week. So that was kind of the whole concept behind this loading phase.
If you're not someone who's
going to some kind of competition.
You know, like your CrossFit games or something.
You don't really need to do that loading phase if you've already been supplementing with five grams a day for like a month.
When it comes to the brain.
What's happening if you get above that five grams, that's
Pretty much all consumed by the muscle.
You're having some left over in circulation.
And the brain takes it up.
And it takes it up, right?
when it re when it really shines is under that stressful condition, which again for me I feel like every day is is is is like
cognitively demanding for me'cause I'm constantly
you know, learning new material or learning new information or working on things, right? And so there's a lot of cognitive stress on my brain. And so I feel like I'm constantly under that stress. And that's where
getting the creatine in your brain helps you make that energy quicker. And so that's why like I've done I've had, you know, been jet lagged and have have to give a talk at you know, you know, like five AM in the morning, my my biological time after not getting sleep and
I've done like twenty five grams of creatine.
And it
It's insane how much it helps me.
Again, it could be placebo because I'm anticipating that effect, which is fine. Placebo is a real thing. It's great. I'm all about it.
But there's some evidence also
that this works, right? That the creatine is helping with under that sleep deprivation and that stressful condition.
I was reading about a study in two thousand twenty five where
They
Uh gave creatine to people that had
Depressive symptoms alongside CBT training.
and the people that had creatine and the cognitive behavioral therapy training.
experienced a greater improvement in their depression symptoms than those who just received the cognitive behavioral therapy.
Which is which is
Incredible.
It's fascinating. I mean, depression is a type of brain stress, right? I mean
We know inflammation plays a role in in depression. We know oxidative stress is plays a role in depression.
And
There have now been some
Animal studies that have shown creatine is somehow having an anti inflammatory effect.
I that hasn't all been worked out.
So I don't know if it's all just the energy.
component of it.
It could also be this other sort of newly identified role that creatine's playing in sort of
having an anti inflammatory effect. And I don't know a much
enough about that. I don't know that there's enough even known about that, but I do know that it exists and it's fascinating p because again
I think
where creatine really shines in the brain.
And it's been shown study after study is under some kind of stressful condition, depression or sleep deprivation. Or there's a new study that came out. It was published.
I don't know, a month ago or so.
showing that it was a very small pilot study, and I want to caveat this.
There was no placebo control.
But
It did show that giving
People with Alzheimer's disease, creatine.
I believe it was twenty grams a day.
Did improve their cognition.
And so again, it's this
A whole new field where now we're looking at creatine in the brain, not just the gym bro bros and not just the muscular effects, but in the brain and how it's
affecting the brain and being beneficial for cognition, for
Brain aging.
For depression.
Is there a a a link or an association with cancer outcomes in creatine?
'Cause there was there was uh there was a study that I was looking at earlier.
Yeah, this one. It says a a two thousand twenty five study of twenty five thousand people each
Found that for each additional zero point zero
nine grams of creatine over a two day average was linked to a fourteen percent reduction in cancer risk.
Right. Which was in the Frontiers Journal and report by the BBC. Yeah, that it's like a new
unexplored, you know, association here where it's like I I don't know why
creatine is doing it? Is it the anti inflammatory effect? Is it
Who knows? But again, I mean that I I was aware of that study and it's like
A whole new
area that needs to be explored where
You know, some people were worried about creatine actually causing cancer. I've actually had
People ask me that question.
And it's actually the opposite where it seems to be reducing cancer risk.
There's some of the other sort of misconceptions around creatine are that
It's gonna I mean
there was this stereotype that people take it, they get massive muscles and they become bloated. So I think that put a lot of women off in particular, according to some research that we actually did just to f understand perceptions of creatine.
In my investment fund.
But the other one was hair loss. People think
There's some sort of association with
Hello, I
If you take creatine, you're more likely to lose your hair.
Right.
So there was this one study that was published
I don't even know how many decades ago.
Uh, maybe you can pull it up.
But it was in rugby players, I believe.
And these rugby players that were given I I believe it was a high dose, maybe it was twenty grams. I can't remember the exact dose.
But um they had increased levels of dihydro testosterone D H T.
Which is something that is linked to
Androgenic alopecia. So this would be, you know, basically your
The the DHT can affect the hair follicle and keep it in this like stunted phase where it's not growing. And so that can cause hair loss.
And that one study
Didn't measure hair loss. It just again looked at the the DHT, the dihydrotestosterone levels.
It's never been replicated.
There's after so many decades, it's never had any
Animal evidence showing that this actually causes hair loss.
Nothing has really come up.
showing that this is something to be concerned about.
So
I take it as
Okay, it's like a one off thing, who knows what was going on here, but like you would think
If it was real, it would be replicated after
When was it published? Two thousand and nine. Two thousand and nine.
Yeah, so th it was a r group of rugby players that were given twenty five grams a day of of creatine. Um but there was actually a studied a randomized control trial done in two thousand and twenty five, this year.
With
Forty five resistant trained men all given five grams a day of creatine over twelve.
And there was no significant difference found in their hair outcomes.
Or DHT versus placebo.
There we go. When was that published? Two thousand twenty five. Oh, this year. Amazing.
Thank you.
Well, I mean to get to get also to the your your other point about
the water weight gain. I know this is a real thing because also m several of my f my girlfriends were concerned about this as well.
And it's funny, you know, creatine does
Bring water into the cell.
And but that's actually a
It's not a bad thing.
Right. And it it you're really not gonna get a big
gain in weight. I mean, I can't imag there's nothing more than like two pounds.
You know, if if if if anything.
At all.
So
I do think that is sort of uh something that's
I don't know.
It's a it's a it's a fear that's not justified, in my opinion. I mean you lose you you gain f you know, four pounds of water weight when you're on your menstrual cycle.
Yeah.
You mentioned fasting.
There's been lots of conversation around fasting, around whether it's good, bad, how long to fast, or whether just restricting your calories is
the same as fasting. A lot of people talk about autophagy. And my girlfriend talks about water fasting.
What is your perspective on the role of fasting? How we should do it, if we should do it, when we should do it, who should do it?
I think
It depends on what your goal is.
So
You mentioned people talk about calorie restriction and really
You know, is the fasting just about the calorie restriction?
And I think when it comes to
Weight loss.
Losing losing weight.
Predominantly hopefully fat.
Not muscle.
Then
Calorie restriction is the main
thing to do here and intermittent fasting is sort of a tool.
To get you there. In other words, people that are doing intermittent fasting tend to eat fewer calories. And that's been shown in several studies, even if they aren't counting their calories.
Because they're
limited in the amount of time they're eating.
And then they're fasting for a longer period of time, they end up just consuming naturally fewer calories. Being in a calorie deficit.
Is that
Gonna put you into the ketogenic state.
That you get from not fasting.
No, not if not necessarily. No, it's not.
So you can be in a calorie deficit.
But
It it depends, right? So
When you're f when you're in the fastest state.
What's important here is
You're activating a bunch of
Pathways that
don't become active when you're in a fed state. And there's a lot of biochemical reactions that sort of dictate all that.
But you mentioned autophagy, right?
And and that's the big one that's happening.
Only when you're really in a fast state.
What is it?
There's different types of it. So
Generally speaking, it's the clearing out
Of
damage stuff within your cell.
So what is damaged stuff? It can be protein aggregates.
For example, if we think about neurons
Amyloid Beta.
protein aggregates. So autophagy could play a role in clearing that out. The plaques and stuff you get in your brain. Exactly.
But you also get plaques in your cardiovascular system, so autophagy can play a role in clearing that out.
Um, but it also could be fragments of
DNA, it can be, you know, all all sorts of gunk and stuff that just can accumulate inside of your cell.
And so you're kind of getting rid of that.
Also, it can be even on the level of let's say
It's the organale level. So you can actually have your mitochondria. We talked about mitochondria being the major source of energy.
Inside of our cells, mitochondria are very important for the health of all of our cells, our neurons, our muscle.
Because they produce energy.
But mitochondria also accumulate a lot of damage quite easily because they produce energy and they use oxygen to do that. They make a lot of what's called reactive oxygen species. So these are things that can really react.
with our DNA with proteins inside of our
our our cells with with um lipids so the cell membranes
So
Your mitochondria.
don't really have a repair system like our DNA does. So we have DNA repair enzymes that can repair damage to our DNA, right? That's where magnesium comes in. Magnesium's required for these enzymes to be activated to repair damage to our DNA to prevent cancer.

Our m mitochondria don't have that kind of repair system.
They have another repair system, and one of it is what's called mitophagy, which is kind of a sub part of autophagy. And it's where the mitochondria
They accumulate damage.
You can essentially
Take that mitochondria and get rid of it.
Right, or a piece of that mitochondria that damage and get rid of it through this sort of
autophagy type of thing, but it's called mitophagy.
And that happens with other types of
what are called organelles within ourselves.
So
This autophagy process, this autophagy is sort of a general term.
But it's essentially the cleaning out of damage. It's the repair process for damage. And it's something that happens most of the time when we're in a fast state, which typically happens when we're sleeping. How long do I do I have to be in a fast state for?
I mean it depends. I would say
That we haven't really worked that out great in humans because
People aren't measure measuring biomarkers of autophagy.
In humans.
There have been some studies that have looked at being
in a fasted state for like sixteen hours. And essentially once you get once you break through that part of
Depleting all your liver glycogen.
That's an important, you know, precursor for activating autophagy. So I mentioned earlier that happens after about twelve hours, right?
So as you get to twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours, then you're probably getting to that state of autophagy.
Um, however there's such limited evidence evidence on
that in humans, a lot of it comes from animal studies.
With that caveat, I will say
that you can get a lot of benefits. So some of the metabolic benefits for fasting.
include improved glucose levels, improved um blood pressure regulation.
Metabolic effects improved, for example, weight loss, right?
Now
Can you get all of that from just doing caloric restriction versus doing time like this intermittent fasting, right?
You can get a lot of it.
But there have been studies showing that doing
Doing this sort of intermittent fasting
is beneficial.
uh for some of these metabolic parameters outside of the caloric being in a caloric deficit. What does that mean, metabolic parameters? Again, glucose regulation, blood pressure
your blood pressure control as well.
So these things have been shown in
in people that are doing time restricted eating. So they're basically doing a type of intermittent fasting where especially if they're doing a really
compressed window. So they're eating all their food within six hours and then fasting for like eighteen.
Hours.
That's really beneficial, right? Because and even if they have the same amount of calories.
as people that are calorically restricted.
They've compared those head to head.
People that are doing the fasting have
better improvements in their glucose regulation, better improvements in in um their blood pressure.
than people that are even still
Eating fewer calories but not doing the fasting component.
So what would you recommend for the average person? I I ask you earlier on to give me a a sort of a perfect uh
A perfect prescription of what I should do in terms of fasting.
On a daily basis, you think I should have
Eating uh sort of
fasted windows of
Yeah.
twelve to tw twenty hours.
You know, I think
it really depends on what you're looking for. And personally, if you are wanting to have this more autophagy kind of
Potentially autophagy activation where you're
You're clearing away stuff within your cells.
Again, we don't really know the hard number.
Get.
But I would say
Yeah, you probably want to be around a sixteen.
our window of not eating. What do you do?
I mean it depends on the day, you know on an optimal day.
Most of the time I'm I'm probably eating all of my food within a ten hour window.
And so I'm fasted for fourteen hours.
But
Optimally, like it all depends on my family and like eating dinner with my family and what's going on. Do you ever do longer fasts?
I don't do I mean f I would say a day a day is like the longest that I do.
But I do a lot of exercise on top of that. And so you can kind of kick yourself into that autophagy state a little bit more.
Because it's kind of like we talked about this, it's a way of sort of supercharging your ketosis.
And so if you're exercising and fasting.
Um, that kind of supercharges that whole
autophagy system as well.
But um it
I do think it's a kind of an interesting
idea to do some longer fast, maybe once a year, once a quarter, depending why.
Because you are activating that repair.
process. Now you have to do resistance training because you don't want to lose muscle mass.
Protein is important. It's one of the signals for
you know muscle protein synthesis
which is essential for you know gaining muscle mass and maintaining muscle mass, right?
So after a fast, you want to break the fast with something protein rich. Absolutely, definitely protein rich, for sure.
Um, but I think also during a fast if you can do ki some kind of
you wanna you wanna stimulate your muscles with mechanical force because that's the other signal.
to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.
And so
I I think one of the biggest concerns people had with fasting, and this was over the last five years or so.
Is that
Studies have shown people that undergo intermittent fasting
Tend to lose
Muscle mass.
Because
They're eating fewer meals.
They're not getting as much protein.
And perhaps they're not doing resistance training. Now there have been other studies that have looked at people doing intermittent fasting.
and resistance training and they don't lose muscle mass because they are doing they're getting that mechanical
stimulation of their of their muscles, which is preventing the loss of muscle mass.
And so I think the take home here is if you are doing intermittent fasting, you wanna make sure you're getting all your protein.
One point six one point two to one point six
grams of protein.
per kilogram body weight per day.
Depending on how much your resistance training.
And
You also you want to make sure you're getting your protein in that small window that you're eating, and you wanna make sure that you're doing resistance training as well. Those are two really important things if you are gonna do intermittent fasting. There was a study I read which is linked to that, which said uh linked to that, but sort of adjacent that says uh
In in in nine human trials they found that
twenty three percent of people enjoyed better sleep after intermittent fasting.
Cause causation's obviously hard to establish there, but
Right.
I I think and that brings us to this other sort of
aspect of intermittent fasting
Which is time restricted eating.
Essentially
What?
what's the best thing to do is really
You wanna you wanna
Eat within an earlier time window.
And there's a lot of
Reasons for that.
One of them is
that when you eat later
In the day.
Let's say
eight o'clock at night.
Nine o'clock at night.
Your body's starting starting to naturally make melatonin.
That's the hormone that's involved in helping you get sleepy.
Well melatonin
Also
inhibits the production of insulin.
And so you basically
Will have elevated blood glucose levels when you're eating later in the day.
Because
your your less your your basically less glucose your your glucose regulation is impaired somewhat.
Right.
So
It's better to try to eat your food earlier in the day, but then there's also this
This area of
you want to probably stop eating like three hours before your natural bedtime. And that does affect sleep.
So if you think about it, when you're sleeping
You don't want to be digesting.
Like there's all these things that are activated during digestion and that's gonna affect
The way you sleep.
And so there are some interesting studies that have found
That people sleep better.
If they stop eating at least three hours before bed, that is something that I do.
try to do almost
Daily.
And um
It's also something that was very interesting. I think a friend of mine, Dr. Sachin Panda at the Sulk Institute, was one of the first people to
Observe that he's got this
This app that he um has called My Circadian Clock, and he used he's used this app over over the years for clinical trials.
Where people will take a picture of their food.
And it time stamps the foods that that he knows what time they're eating and when they stop eating.
And and people that are part of this trial started to send him comments going
Oh, I stopped eating earlier and all of a sudden my sleep is better. And after you start to get about ten
twenty
thirty people making the same comment, you start to go, wait a minute, there's something here, right? And so I think he was one of the first people to actually
Um
observe that that correlation between
Stop eating earlier.
And sleeping better.
Well you talked about protein earlier when we talked about resistance training and fasting.
Uh.
W when should I
Someone told me that you're supposed to take protein straight after you did the
a resistance training workout straight after you lift the weights, like thirty minutes after.
Does it matter?
Well, we that's what was thought, I think previously for I don't know how many years it was thought this was there was an anabolic window, right?
where you wanna take in this protein within thirty minutes to an hour of doing your resistance training.
And that way the amino acids
That are anabolic like leucine are going into the muscle and building
muscle essentially, right?
We now know that
it's not really an anabolic window. It's about your daily protein intake because what exercise is doing, what the resistance training is doing, is it's sensitizing
All your transporters and your muscle to amino acids. And that's that's happening over the course of 24 hours. So you can take that protein in.
within that day and it it really
still do the same thing.
So I don't think you have to slam your protein shake.
within thirty minutes to an hour.
Maybe, maybe if you're like
a bodybuilder and you're really trying to
get that little tiny, tiny, tiny percentage, maybe you'll have a little bit.
of a benefit. But generally speaking, most people what you want to look at is your daily protein intake, because that's essentially
um the most important thing and the exercise itself is
Sensitizing all these, you know.
transporters on your muscle that are allowing the amino acids to come in and build
Protein increase muscle protein synthesis.

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There's a term that you've used a few times which I'm I'm not super well educated on, which is
Insulin resistance.
W what is insulin resistance and is that something associated with diabetes? And uh d therefore does someone like me need to care I don't have diabetes.
Okay, let's take a step back.
When you are eating something that is going to raise your blood glucose levels.
Right.
So like a piece of bread or some sugar or whatever. Right.
So essentially if you're increasing that glucose spike in your
In your bloodstream.
You want to have that glucose go somewhere. You want it to go to your muscle on
Or sometimes it goes to your adipose tissue, but in order to do that.
You have to activate.
Insulin and insulin then causes
These
transporters that
usually aren't active to kind of come up.
And take in the glucose.
So insulin resistance is when you're basically constantly, constantly
activating that pathway.
Um such that your
Cells don't respond to the insulin.
Like they used to. And so the insulin isn't doing its job.
as well. And so essentially your blood glucose levels stay elevated.
And that causes all sorts of damage. The glycation and things like that we've talked about. So it's really insulin failure.
Insulin's failing to do its job.
Well, it depends because you're still making the insulin, but it's essentially not the insulin receptor isn't responding to that insulin.
And so
It's it's not doing its job. Yes, it's not doing its job. But it's different from type one diabetes in in the sense where you're type one diabetes, you're actually not even making the insulin. Right. So that's very different. So yeah, insulin is not able to do its job.
But insulin resistance and
I mean there's there's so many different
Diseases that's been linked to.
But everything I think everything is so complicated. So I don't know that everything's due to insulin resistance, but it's like one component of
you know, something that's accelerating the way you age.
I had a a light doctor in here the other day, a sunlight doctor the other day, and we spent a lot of time talking to talking about light and sunlight and one of the things that I've been really
Fascinated by his red light therapy.
over the last couple of
Months. Do you do an have a sort of red light therapy routine?
It's interesting that you asked the red light therapy.
in the scientific literature called photobi modulation.
Um, I know that's a complicated word. But you know, there's essentially a variety of different wavelengths.
that can be used to
Stimulate.
physiological processes like mitochondria inside of your your cells to to do stuff, right?
I now am convinced that red light therapy plays a role in
helping with skin aging. So I do have a mask.
It helps with with skin aging and wrinkles. There have been enough studies now.
That is pretty convincing that it does seem to improve the way skin ages.
I do think the important thing here is
The parameters that are done. It's not just
Wavelength, but it's also like the energy, so a radiance. And so you have to kind of look at all those parameters and make sure you can replicate that with whatever product that you're using.
What about infrared sawness?
Infrared saunas or traditional saunas?
The infrared ones. So infrared saunas
Are
A type of sauna that is using
It's using you know
Essentially infrared radiation, right? Infra infrared wavelengths to heat up the body.
And so they're not very hot. So if you look at like the ambient temperature in an infrared sauna.
It goes up to like a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit.
Which is very different from a traditional sauna.
So
Infrared saunas don't have all the same benefits as a traditional hot sauna, something that maybe goes up to 175, 180 degrees Fahrenheit.
Unless you are staying in that infrared sauna for like a very long time, perhaps even twice as long as you would or more.
In a traditional sauna.
The interesting thing about infrared saunas
I would say, um so a colleague of mine, a collaborator of mine, Doctor Ashley Mason, she's at UCSF.
And she's been doing what's called the heat bed study.
And it's an infrared sauna.
That is essentially a head out.
heatbed. So your whole body is in this infrared
Sort of
Bad.
But your head is out of it. Your head's not in it.
And
People um she's done she's now done a couple of studies and the most recent study
has been done in people with major depressive disorder.
So they have
Depression.
And these people are are doing an infrared sauna to a pretty extreme degree. So she's
Elevating their core body temperature.
By around two degrees.
So they're essentially getting in a somewhere state.
And in order to do that, I mean these people are in this infrared sauna.
For well over an hour.
So not like most people.
that are doing infrared zone us, they're probably staying there for like twenty.
Thirty minutes, right?
So people are getting very, very hot to the po to the point where the core body temperature is going up to you know increasing
to um like one one and a half to two.
Degrees, right?
And
She's looking at
the effects on depression. And so what she has found
is kind of amazing.
Is that
People that are doing this infrared sauna, this heatbed.
And doing cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT.
They
Are experiencing massive antidepressant effects. So there's something called the Hamilton scale, which is like a battery of tests that are done to assess depression.
And just to give you like um
Sam
Some sort of
basis of like
If you if there's something considered clinically significant
then you have like a three point change on that scale.
Well, essentially this infrared sauna plus the cognitive behavioral therapy.
Improved the Hamilton scale.
You know, assessment.
by sixteen points. And these are people that did
Four or eight.
Rounds of it. So it was over the course of either one month or two months. Some people just couldn't finish it because it is pretty intense. Like you're you're heating your body up.
And you're sitting in this.
you know, infrared sauna for over an hour. And it's it's a it's a pretty intense. But the magnitude of effect on the antidepressant effect was
It's it's stunning.
And this kind of all stems back from
Her mentor, Doctor Charles Raison.
His research
That um
was essentially like an infrared sauna. So he did something this was, you know, back in twenty sixteen.
He did the study.
Where he put people
In this sort of infrared sauna like thing.
And it it elevated their core body temperature again by about two two degrees. There are people with major depressive disorder.
Or he gave him a sham control. So
It was
kind of hot and people were thinking they were getting the treatment, but it was actually a placebo. Okay. It was enough for them to think they were getting the treatment, but it wasn't el elevating their core body temperature enough. And they did one treatment of this, okay.
And he showed that the people that did one treatment of this
had an antidepressant effect that lasted six weeks later after one treatment.
Sham control didn't get this.
Beautiful study. Um
You know, actually kind of
followed on that study and showed
multiple sessions of it really had an even more robust effect.
But
I say this because I don't wanna like
I don't wanna like say infrared saunas aren't.
Great.
However, there's a lot of benefits that have been
related to
more hot traditional types of saunas, Finnish saunas, for example, traditional saunas that are that are
Hotter.
Right. And so you're staying in these
Hundred and seventy five, hundred and eighty degree sauna for like twenty minutes.
And it's associated with
you know, lower cardiovascular rated mortality. So if you you're doing it four to seven times a week.
Um, that's associated with a f sixty sorry, fifty percent lower cardiovascular related mortality versus doing it one time a week.
Or
All cause mortality. It's associated with forty percent lower all cause mortality.
Versus doing it one time a week.
So
What's going on there. Right, exactly. What's going on there. And so the the the really fascinating thing to me about this deliberate heat exposure from Asana.
is that it is sort of mimicking
moderate intensity.
Aerobic exercise.
And this has actually been shown, it's been compared head to head to moderate intensity like cycling on a stationary bike.
a lot of the physiological responses so your core body temperature goes up.
Your heart rate goes up, right? When you're exercising, your heart rate goes up. Same thing happens when you're in
A hot sauna, your heart rate goes up.
Your cardiac output.
is increased, right? Your blood flow is increasing. All these things are happening and they're very similar.
Exercise
Heat stress, you're sweating, right, to co cool down your your body.
So it's a way of sort of mimicking this moderate intensity exercise.
That doesn't really happen in an infrared sauna if you do the same amount of time.
as you're doing in a hot sauna.
Now perhaps if you increase that time it would happen.
But there's all these benefits that are happening with
Just doing a deliberate heat exposure from a sauna.
That
Seem to not only
Sort of
mimic cardiovascular exercise, but they add on to it.
So we were talking about cardiovaspiratory fitness and how important that is for longevity, right?
Where there have been studies that have looked at people
That
Exercise on a stationary bike.
Or they exercise on a stationary bike and then follow that up with a fifteen minute sauna.
And it's been shown that those people that do the fifteen minute sauna on top of the exercise have
A more a higher improvement in their cardior respiratory fitness.
They have more improved um levels of their their cholesterol and lipids, their blood pressure improvements were greater. So there's this additive effect of adding on the deliberate heat exposure with the exercise that isn't happening with exercise alone.
So
Again, that's sort of just more
Evidence of why
you know, doing a deliberate heat exposure like a sauna and in fact hot tubs.
That's something that's also been shown to improve blood pressure. In fact, a study just came out
couple of weeks ago.
Showing that a hot tub is very beneficial for improving blood pressure for doing all the same things that Asana does, which is kind of exciting because not everyone has a sauna.
I heard that you sometimes rehearse
Important talks and studies in Saunas.
Yeah, I mean this started back
When I was in graduate school.
Um I used to go to this I lived across the street from a YMCA and I used to go to the sauna and use the sauna before I would go into my lab and do experiments.
And
There's a couple things I noticed. One
I was able to handle stress better.
My stress of
you know, failed experiments, mentors putting all this pressure on me, all that stuff, right?
If I went to the sauna
Beforehand, I was very much
It's like I was more resilient to the stress. And that was when I started to look into
effects on the brain. And that's where I also am very interested in depression research as well, right? Because you're you're causing like brain resilience.
But um
Once I started to realize like this is affecting my mood, this is affecting my ability to handle stress.
I was using the sauna like every day. I mean, I was like religious about it. It was crazy. I mean it was like six to seven days a week I was going that sauna.
And because it was like
using it every day, you have to multitask.
You only have so much time in the day, right?
And so I'd start rehearsing my presentations, like going through them in my mind while I'm sitting in the sauna.
with these other people from the Y M C A who probably think I'm crazy'cause I'm sitting here like saying things, but
I noticed that
I was able to remember things better.
If I had gone through them in my head with the heat.
And
It wasn't until many, many years later, I mean, I kept doing that. Like even sometimes when I travel and I'm giving a presentation or a talk.
I'll get in the hot bath in my hotel room.
And I'll just lay in the hot bath.
And I just go through my talk in my head.
Or I'll like look at my notes and like if I forget something, I'll go through it in my head.
And it wasn't until several years later that I started looking into the science behind that. Like there's something going on here. What is going on?
And I found that actually
When you go into the sauna
So there's a lot of physiological changes that happen. Growth hormone goes up.
Um, in fact, it depending on the the temperature and duration, growth hormone can go up anywhere between two fold.
To like
Sixteenfold.
like insane levels of of growth hormone.
But there's something else that goes up called IGF two.
And that
is associated with improving
Memory and learning.
So there have been animal studies that have done this.
And so I've kind of connected the dots here and go, maybe that's why. I don't really know why. I mean, sometimes just like a very strong emotional response can sort of help you remember something. And you are at the end of the day
causing a very strong stress response when you're getting in the heat.
So I like to use the sauna for a lot of things. I do I do it it depends on the day. Sometimes I do it
I like to do it before bed, so I'll do like the hot tub or the sauna, it improves sleep.
Improves my sleep.
And that has to do with the growth hormone.
It has to do with
What are called somnogenic cytokines. These are inflamm inflammatory molecules that are made that are
That cause sleepiness.
So if you think about when you're when you're sick.
And you have, you know, inflammation going on when you're when you have an illness, you're very tired, you're sleepy.
you're producing a lot of what are called somnogenic cytokines. These are cytokines that are invol inflammation.
um molecules that are involved in making you sleepy.
Those are also produced when you are undergoing deliberate heat exposure, like a hot tub, or that's been shown.
uh as well as a sauna. So sometimes I like to do the sauna at night, like to relax and help help my sleep. Sometimes I like to do it after a workout.
um to extend my, you know, my work out like the study I talked about, where you're improving your cardiorist free fitness as well.
Would you like some tea?
My team can make you some tea if you'd like some tea. I would love some loose leaf tea in a metal cup.
This this two.
Sometimes my friends don't want to talk to me.
Because I'm like the bearer of bad news, you know, where
It's like what am I what is Rhonda gonna tell me now that I shouldn't be doing that I love doing, right?
Another obsession of mine of late has been microplastic exposure. And I know you've talked about this on the podcast before, and it's it's in it's in the news now. A lot of people are sort of familiar with microplastics, right? Breakdown of plastic
Particles that are
Tiny
Uh, depending on the size.
And getting into our circulation, right?
Mm-hmm.
And when you think of microplastics, do you think of plastic. When you think of plastic, you think, Oh, that plastic water bottle.
Yeah, well I'll just avoid
That plastic water bottle, right?
What you don't realize is that
Everything.
Everything.
has plastic.
So you have here this to go coffee cup.
Which
I don't know how many
coffees I and teas I've had and a to go coffee.
Cup, but it's
Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds.
And the thing that's so disturbing is I learned
that you know these pl many, most all of these plastic, I mean sorry, these um paper looking
Coffee cups.
are actually lined with plastic.
They're lined with the plastic.
Liner.
to prevent like the liquid to you know leaching into the paper, right?
And that plastic lining, when you add heat to it.
I. e.
Boiling water for tea.
Or hot coffee.
It accelerates the breakdown of the plastic lining. So you're drinking microplastic
Yeah.
And also the chemicals associated with them. So there was this classic study that was done that showed heating up.
Plastic.
Essentially causes
These these
Toxic, you know, plastic associated chemicals like BPA, bisphenol A, which is an endocrine. It disrupts hormones, it sort of mimic mimics.
Estrogen.
So you know it's
it it's sometimes like called an estrogen mimetic.
It causes that to leach into your beverage fifty five times.
More. Fifty five times. Fifty five fold, yes. Which is five thousand five hundred percent. Yes. And so you're talking about
drinking, you know, plastic chemicals and microplastics.
So
That was like, okay, well fine, I'm gonna bring my mug in any time I'm traveling.
and ask them to put my coffee in that. So
I I see so many people with these these to go, you know, paper cups and and and they're drinking coffee in it and it's like it's so hard for me because I realize it's like this plastic
Soup that you're drinking.
Now you have a tea bag on top of that.
And that is something that there've been over the course of the last
Seven or eight years.
There have been studies that have come out that
These these tea bags.
Are
Composed of made of.
you know, there's plastic polymers in them.
And so there's thousands
of microplastics that are released in every milliliter.
of tea from these tea bags. And there's a variety of different tea bags
Essentially all of them release microplastics. The ones that's that that look like they won't
Release them.
So now
While I used to drink a lot of tea when I'm on the go, I ha I bring my own with me.
I bring my own loose leaf tea with a little, you know.
When those little steepers that can steep the T.
And I use that because
Mostly because the heat
You know, it's just it's accelerating that breakdown.
Yes, I'll drink.
plastic I mean, I'll drink water out of a plastic bottle sometimes when I'm traveling because there's no other options.
And actually there was a study that just came out, I'm sure you saw it. Did you see the study that showed
glass had higher levels so water that was in glass had higher levels of microplastic than water that was in plastic containers. This was a study that came out of France. Oh come on. You didn't see the study? No. Oh my gosh, this is like everywhere. Everywhere. I mean it came out I don't know in the last two weeks or so.
Um
The study came out of France and it was
Essentially showing that
Glass bottles.
had more microplastics in the liquid.
that they contained.
Than plastic.
bottles which contain liquid.
And you might go
What?
That makes no sense, right? I mean, why would the glass have
plastic particles at a higher level than a plastic bottle.
Well, it turns out that the paint on top of the lid.
Of the glass bottle.
has is comp it has plastic polymers in it.
And so
The paint is flaking off.
And getting into the water.
Mm.
There is, I think, a silver lining here, and that is well
Okay, there might be more microplastics in the beverages that are in the glass bottle compared to the plastic bottle, but the size matters. So it was shown that the size
is larger
In the glass bottles compared to the plastic bottles. The size of the plastic. The pl the size of the microplastic. And there's a reason why this is important because.
Microplastics and nanoplastics, as you get smaller in size, they get smaller. They're called nanoplastics.
Those are the most dangerous because it can be more easily absorbed in the gut.
and get into the circulation. If it gets into circulation, it can more easily bypass the blood brain barrier and get into the brain. Size matters. And so the larger size

Із лес ликвід.
by the gut and to get into circulation. Now this has to be shown.
I'm sure that's gonna the study's gonna be done next. Like this is gonna be the next study. It hasn't been shown yet. I've heard you talk about fibre as well playing a role in getting microplastics out of our body.
Okay, so yes, the fiber is interesting. This all comes from animal studies.
And
Fiber seems to play a role in the absorption of microplastics and nanoplastics in your gut cells. And that's really important because if you don't absorb them, it's excreted through feces, right? And it's been shown we only absorb about one to two percent of these microplastics that we're ingesting.
Fiber.
What it does is two things. One
It moves the microplastics through the intestines quicker, right? Which is what fiber does.
But I think the more important thing is the type of fiber. So you want this fermentable type of fiber, soluble fiber.
That's the kind of fiber that's really good for your gut microbiome.
And what that does is it's essentially
creating this viscous gel like.
Sort of.
gel like, you know, mucusy
Stuff inside of your gut.
That encapsulates the microplastics so that it can't be absorbed by the gut.
You know, what are called the gut epithelial cells.
And so if you're
Essentially not able to absorb those microplastics.
then they're not getting into circulation and that's like
The biggest thing that you can do, right, is not get them into circulation. Now, this is all based on animal evidence. I did speak with
with a a microplastics researcher.
at Harvard, Doctor Um Carrie Nadal.
And she wasn't even aware of this and now she's like on it. So I'm hoping
that there'll be some human human evidence coming soon looking at whether or not microplastics
If you're eating fiber, if that can basically
Blunt the absorption of the microplastics into the system.
I think
people that are eating more fiber in their diet probably are
getting less of that microplastics into their into their system, but that hasn't been shown in humans. It's only been shown in animals.
I'm guessing you don't eat canned soup either.
Ha.
Yes, yeah. So the canned soup is interesting, you know, again
Aluminum cans are lined with this plastic.
You know, lining.
And that prevents the the sort of breakdown of the uh of the
The aluminum.
Right? The metal.
Uh I'm
Fortunately, it also causes
these chemicals like BPA that are in the plastic lining to leech into
The
In this case the soup.
Or the beverage or the liquid.
that they're contained in, right?
There was a study.
That showed, I think it was was it a thousand percent increase in of bpa after drinking.
Like soup out of a can versus a soup out of a glass.
A thousand percent increase in
Bisphenol A levels. I mean that is
Bisphenol A levels being BPA. Which is the bad thing in microplastics. It's the it's one of the bad chemicals in plastics.
That
is an endocrine disruptor, so it's disrupting hormones.
And you know that
can play a role in a lot of different things.
Um
Depending on
what we're looking at.
So it's
hugely important for obviously like
Neurodevelopment in children. So like
pregnant women.
But even like
You know, disrupting disrupting hormones in general, like mimicking estrogen. I mean, that's not something that guys want to do either.
Right.
So
It does it is something to be aware of, but the thing is is that
You know, BPA, it was this beautiful marketing strategy.
that came out I don't know how many years ago.
But
All this BPA was replaced with something else that wasn't BPA, it was BPS. And so now everything is marketed as BPA free.
And people think
That is like oh oh it's not dangerous, it's BPA free.
However
What it's replaced with is doing the same thing as BPA, if not worse, and that's been now shown in multiple studies. So it's also an endocrine disruptor. It's doing the same thing, and yet people think
You know, that it's it's
Safe because it's BPA free.
Did you hear about this study of people that live close to a golf course?
Yes.
Yeah. There's a study that came out, I don't know how it was very recent, maybe a month and twenty five. Yeah. So maybe I think it was a couple months ago.
And the studies showed that people that lived near within a mile or so of golf courses.
Had a much higher incidence of Parkinson's disease, right? It says a hundred and twenty six percent.
higher risk.
Right. Okay. So then why is that? Right? And this is where I want to get into the the pesticides.
Issue because
It's it's known like any scientist that's done research in
neurodegenerative disease.
It's
one of the ways that you induce Parkinson's disease in animals
Is you give them
Insect you give them essentially a pesticide.
So rote and known being one paraquat.
And what that does is a mitochondrial toxin.
So it's it's basically
causing you mitochondria.
Two
die and then essentially when the mitochondrias are d are are dying or apoptosing, you know, the cell undergoes apoptosis and dying. So you you're essentially you can induce Parkinson's disease in mice by giving them these types of
Essentially, you know, these types of i insecticides and herbicides.
So it's well known that that can cause, you know, Parkinson's disease.
It's important to know that it's mostly the ingestion of it, not the inhalation of it.
And that was a big concern because
It gets into the water source.
And that's what's thought to be the underlying cause.
people that are living close to a golf course, it's getting into the it's contaminating the water source, essentially. And so people are are drinking
These
You know.
This basically is pesticides.
Insecticides and herbicides, right?
So um a water filter.
Like a reverse osmosis.
You know, water filter or something like that that that can filter out.
Some of these molecules hugely important. And I think that's the solution to people that are living near a golf course.
Or people that are living near any tort sort of agricultural place where they're using a high volume of these types of
you know, herbicides.
What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about?
Wonder.
I think
We talked a little bit about magnesium.
But
I don't know that we talked enough about magnesium.
And
It is important because it's something that
is required for
Gosh, over three hundred different
Enzymes in your body.
need it to function properly.
So it's what's called a co factor.
And I mentioned DNA repair enzymes.
So there's it's also used to make energy.
So you need magnesium.
To make energy and to use energy.
You need magnesium to repair damage that's happening all the time.
And close to fifty percent of the population in the United States.
Does not have adequate levels of magnesium.
Because they're not eating the foods that they need to.
to get the magnesium, dark leafy greens. I mentioned it's at the center of a chlorophyll molecule.
There have been studies that have shown that
For every
Hundred
Milligram.
decrease in magnesium intake.
There's a twenty four percent increase in pancreatic cancer incidence.
And that's in a dose dependent manner. So you keep going up and up.
I think that
People don't realize that they're not getting enough magnesium. Magnesium's required to make
To turn vitamin D three into the steroid hormone. So some people have a magnesium
you know, insufficient amount of magnesium they're taking in.
And they're actually not able to make enough vitamin D into that steroid hormone. Again, magnesium's controlling
Three hundred enzymes.
Some of those enzymes are actually the ones that are converting vitamin D3 into the steroid hormone.
So magnesium's hugely important.
It's something that
Can be
Easily corrected. The deficiency could be easily corrected by taking a supplement, but also eating more leafy greens, which is the best source of magnesium.
The question is
What do supplements do? What kind of supplements do you take? How much should you take?
All these things are I think
Questions that people are interested in.
So I've got some magnesium here.
Is um is taking magnesium gonna
Have a positive role then on my
My speed of aging.
I do think so. I think so, yes. We talked about cancer incidents, right?
Magnesium
So I think magnesium is one of those sort of
Minerals.
That
is ca when you ha when you don't have enough of it, it's causing that insidious damage over
Time that accumulates and then
rears its ugly head, you know, in the fifth, sixth, seventh ticket of life.
And that ugly head happens to be cancer.
So I do think that if you are able to avoid
magnesium deficiency and insufficiency.
then you are gonna be able to basically make sure there's enough magnesium around
for everything in your body to use it with with what it needs it for.
So um and I've heard you say that fifty percent of people are deficient in the United States in magnesium.
Right, close to fifty percent. And not to mention
You just talked about you know electrolytes, well athletes
They actually require between ten to twenty percent more magnesium than the general population because of their magnesium m their magnesium losses are so great. And so they can be even more deficient. Magnesium is needed for red blood cells and so.
You know, people can have lower energy as well. So magnesium magnesium is so important for so many different things.
And you know, like I said, I think there I do think there's a trade off here where
Whatever magnesium you are getting from your diet, if you're not getting enough of it.
it's probably going to make energy instead of being used to repair damage because
You need to make energy every day, right? That's the most important thing.
If you don't make energy, you die.
Like you can't survive.
So whatever magnesium your body
Is getting
It's not going to
That
process of preparing DNA, which doesn't really matter until you're in your, you know, fifth, sixth, seventh decade of life in cancer.
you know, risk increases, right?
And so there's this.
idea this put out by my mentor, Doctor Bruce Ames, called triage theory and he's shown some evidence of it.
Magnesium is one of them, where magnesium seems to be triage to
energy production at the expense of repairing your DNA.
What does that mean?
It means that
If you're not getting enough magnesium
through your dietary intake and you're not supplementing with it.
Whatever magnesium that you're getting, there's three hundred different enzymes that need it to do their function.
That your body is
Finding a way to triage it to the most essential.
functions that are gonna basically help with short term survival. Triage means it's basically allocating. Yes. It's allocating it to the
The processes inside your body.
That are essential for short term survival right now.
Long term health.
Diseases of aging like cancer.
That doesn't matter.
As much, right? If you're deficient.
Yeah, your bod your body basically says no, I don't I'm not gonna give whatever
precious magnesium I have right now to prevent cancer because I need to live long enough to reproduce and pass on my genes. And cancer doesn't happen until I'm well well past that, right?
So this idea, it's called the triage theory, and he's he it's been shown for um several different micronutrients. Another one is vitamin K.
So vitamin K is really high in dark leafy greens.
Well what Bruce.
Bruce, um
has shown is that
Vitamin K is important for a couple of things. One, it's important for blood coagulation.
Blood clotting.
And that all happens in the liver. You activate proteins in the liver.
for blood clotting. If you don't have vitamin K.
You can't do that.
Right. It's it's one of the reasons why when a baby's first born, they give it a vitamin K shot.
So that
They have blood coagulation. On your YouTube channel, you made a video about magnesium.
Which I recommend everybody goes and watches if you are interested in going deeper on this subject. And um on your YouTube I found a a stat that said, For every hundred milligram drop in magnesium intake.
is linked to a twenty four percent high risk of pancreatic cancer.
Yes. Which is shocking.
It is.
And again, it comes down to
The DNA repair enzymes.
That are
That require magnesium to be activated and of over a lifetime.
You're part of that fifty percent of the population in the United States that doesn't get enough magnesium.
then you're talking about not being able to repair damage to your DNA over decades.
And essentially what that means is, you know, at some point damage happens to your DNA in the right part of a gene.
that is what's called oncogenic. It's cancer causing.
And so eventually it's gonna cause cancer.
If you're not able to repair that damage, right? And so
m getting enough magnesium is important to make sure you're repairing that damage.
And um
It's not only important for cancer, but also all cause mortality. So there's also studies showing that people with the highest magnesium levels.
have a forty percent lower all cause mortality than people with the lowest magnesium levels.
And they have a fifty percent lower cancer related mortality compared to people with the lowest levels. So again, cancer is still in there. And we're seeing that magnesium intake is very important with respect to cancer.
And that is something that
You know, people don't realise when they're not
getting enough of magnesium in their diet, they're not eating their leafy greens.
Or they're to not taking a supplement.
That there's sort of
Affecting their long term risk of cancer.
So people with high magnesium levels
have a fifty percent lower risk of cancer death than those with low levels.
Right.
Hm.
And it's like
You you obviously can't do like a double blind
placebo control test on that. So they're tr they're really establishing causation. So it could be other things like
It could be there the dietary factors that go into
Go into that.
If we think about causation, people that
eat a lot of hamburgers, don't have a lot of like
Leafy greens.
Exactly. You nailed it. Um essentially
Magnesium is packaged in these foods that are beneficial, like dark leafy greens, and there's so many other benefits along with them.
That you can't establish causation and say, aha, it's just the magnesium. I would argue it's probably not just the magnesium, but magnesium does play an important role.
It's just you can't, of course, pinpoint it to just magnesium because you're right, there are many
other important
healthy things in these
micronutrient in these plants that are beneficial for health as well.
There was a really random thing that I think parents might appreciate us talking about, which was
When I was looking at your work, you mentioned this chemical that if
Parents take while they're
Baby is inside them.
Mothers take.
The baby is smarter.
Yes, choline.
Choline. Yeah.

is an essential nutrient that is
It's really
Concentrated in egg yolk.
That's a really good source of choline.
But it's important for
It's a precursor for the neurotransmitter acetyl coleine.
It's also important for producing all these
epigenetic changes called methylation that regulates the way our genes are expressed.
And it's also
um very important for
Our cells like
The membranes of our cells.
And it it makes something called phosphatidyl colon. It's doing so many things, is the point I'm getting to. I don't want to get into all this nitty-gritty because people can get lost in that. But the point is that.
P pregnant women that were given like the R D A, close to the R DA, it was like five hundred. What's the R DA?
the recommended daily allowance. Actually, I think in this case it was the DRI, the the dietary
Recommended intake.
So pregnant when we're g were given close to what is the dietary recommended intake. So they were given 480 milligrams.
a day of choline or they were given almost double that. So they were given nine hundred and
Thirty milligrams a day.
And
I don't remember what trimester uh they started in.
But
They were given this, you know, throughout a certain
time frame and during pregnancy.
And then a variety of
cognitive tests were done after the child was born. And the children that were given, the mothers that had
children that were given the really high choline intake, the nine hundred and thirty milligrams.
scored better on all these IQ tests. And so essentially
Their children were
Smarter.
if they're if they if their mother had taken choline throughout pregnancy. And I think this is really interesting because it's the one
Easy thing that people can do. They can supplement with choline and or they can eat.
a lot of eggs with egg yolk, which is something I I did both during pregnancy.
I was eating probably like six eggs a day.
And supplementing with choline.
So I was doing both.
And um
Every mot every ch mother wants to think, every parent wants to think that their child is smart, but I bet your child is smart.
He's a smart cookie, yeah. How old is he now? Almost ten? Seven. Seven. Okay.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
And the question left for you.
Interesting.
If you could go back
And change one thing about your life.
What would it be?
And you cannot say nothing.
That's what it says.
I would say
The
One thing that I would change.
I'm forty seven years old.
Just turn forty seven.
Last month.
I have one child.
And I think if I could go back in time.
I would
change my decision to only have one child and I would have
Another child.
Why?
Because
I love being a mother.
I love
The joy that children bring
to your life is it's unexplainable until you experience it.
Everything about it.
Helping
Shape them.
Learning with them.
Going through
hard times and experiences, but also experiencing the joys.
I
Regret.
Sort of
You know, I had children later in life because I was really pursuing my career.
And
It is definitely challenging being
An entrepreneur.
That's a mother.
I made a d decision that I was gonna have one child because I wouldn't be able to
Do
as much of what I love doing outside of being a mother if I had more than one child.
And now I realize that.
say that when I'm older
And closer to dying.
I know now that
I'm not gonna think about doing one more podcast when I'm on my deathbed.
I'm gonna think about all the experiences I've had with my family.
And I do I do have a pretty balanced, I would say balanced
personal life and family life with my career.
I don't know that it was
the easiest decision to make where I had to sort of
give up some of my
Intellectual pursuit, some of my entrepreneurial
My productivity, essentially.
I had to give some of that up to to to be the best mother that I wanted to be, to be present with my husband and my my son and enjoy everything that I enjoyed because that takes time and that time that I'm
With them, I am not.
doing my
podcasting or my research or any of that, right?
And I'm happy with that decision.
And in fact, I would even give up more of it.
For
Another trial.
Um, and that's a very personal thing that I'm discussing, so
Hopefully.
I'll be okay with it.
It's not the first time I've heard this.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, it's not the first time.
I I hear this a lot.
Which is fascinating to me.
High performance women.
It is. It's you know
I say that
It's very hard.
to be a very high
performing
Female
And a mother at the same time.
You айдер хавти сакрафіс
being present with your family or your health.
because you don't sleep as much, you wait you know, you're you're basically
Not gonna be
getting as much sleep because you're gonna be working rather than sleeping during some of the those hours, right?
So I do I do think that
It is very challenging and
I'm not saying that um
There aren't really high performing mothers out there.
But it is it is
A very
Difficult thing to do.
When you say you you made the choice to have one,
Was that an intentional choice? I you you you and your partner
Did family planning and said we want one. Or was it
Because you said your child is seven, you're you said you're forty seven. So at forty obviously it's it's becomes a little bit more tricky than it than it does when you're thirties to
Conceive. Right.
So
I think what in my in my case, um I
I got pregnant when I was thirty-eight.
For the first time.
And I gave birth when I was thirty nine.
Yeah.
So I was
Pretty late already.
Mm-hmm.
And at that point
I didn't you know, as I was it was I was so overwhelmed and my productivity had gone down so much just from that.
event.
Mm.
that I was worried
that I wouldn't be able to keep it up.
If I
another one right away, which I had to do because I had waited so long. Now why did I wait so long?
I was pursuing my career.
You know, I mean and
I would argue now that I could have had a kid in graduate school.
I could have had a child as a
Postdoctoral
Fellow.
But
Again, it's one of those things where you just you keep you wanna like get to this milestone and then this milestone and then you want everything to be perfect. And you start to like this perfectionism can sometimes be a double edged sword, right? Yeah. Where your perfectionism then is like, Okay, well, you're you're gonna have a trade off here. Yeah. And that trade off for me was my reproductive lifespan.
You know, I'm I was older when I sort of having children now.
There's a lot of technologies out there now that can help with that, but
You know, forty seven. It's
I would say not looking good.
Uh I think I ask about this and I'm curious about this because me and my partner, I'm thirty two, she's
Turned thirty three last week.
We don't have any kids. We've been together for almost seven years now, I think.
And so
You can imagine in my life how easy it would be.
to make excuses that I need to get through this year because this big thing's happening, or I'm moving to LA, so now's not the right time. And then she's got her business going on. So now's not the right time for her. And she's traveling and doing these retreats around the world. So that's not perfect timing. And then
Because of this podcast.
I've played the scenario forward because I get to meet people.
who are a little bit further down the line than me, and I get to ask them about their regrets and the decisions they wish they'd made and
Were they intentional about fat family planning? Did they wish they'd done it earlier? And the thing it's changed in me is it's made me realize that.
To start the process if it's something I wanna do.
Well before I'm ready.
Because there is a there w whether we like it or not, there is a biological clock.
And
the thing that I've observed in the guests, specifically high performance women, whether the yes you
Ronda Rousey, the UFC champion, who I sat and interviewed and who was in tears talking about her failed IVF uh
But
I don't know, the fifth, sixth, seventh time, or other women that I've sat here and interviewed and looked in their faces is the regret
Of
having that decision taken taken away from you.
is gonna be much, much worse than
The inconvenience.
Of
The
choosing an imperfect time to have the kid. So
Funnily enough, I walk I don't people don't really know this because I don't talk about this, but I walk away from this podcast just after hearing this story over and over again.
And I went to the women in my lives and I was like it's like super annoying being that guy,'cause especially as a guy saying it, I'm like
By the way.
Family planning.
as early as possible is probably a good idea. And whether that means freezing your eggs or freezing your embryos or
Just giving yourself the option in the future.
um is probably a good idea. And it was so interesting to actually see the reaction to me saying that to some of the women in my life that I care about like most you know.
My siblings or my partner.
Because
Upon saying it.
It wasn't
incredibly well received because
I think it's a confronting thing to say.
To somebody?
Because there's a bit of a stigma associated with like freezing your eggs and IVF and freezing your MBOs.
And even with my partner, the first time I said it to her.
It was it was almost as if I was
Like insulting a little bit?
Insulting her.
how I thought she took it for the first three or four minutes. But then when I explained what I was saying by like, give g let's give ourselves the option.
When we're older.
You know, if you know, let's just give ourselves the option. And also if you f go through these procedures when you're younger, you have
higher quality yield from the eggs you freeze or the MBOs you freeze. Let's give ourselves the option.
And then she kinda turned five minutes into the conversation, and then she got super excited about it, like fifteen minutes in. And now we're like super excited. So like
We're
W we're trying to conceive, but also we're gonna be freezing our eggs and freezing embryos.
In this year in September.
Because
And I've just tried to be a really big influence to the women in my life to like give yourself the option. And I say this because I've seen the regret on this podcast.
That's what I'm saying. I think all I think all people that can and I know it's expensive.
As early as you can should consider
The fact that we live in a world that is
driving productivity, that is making us work later and later in life, that is making us more obsessed with our careers and
Without us really knowing it, there is a clock and it's robbing us of the option to make
Family planning decisions.
Hundred percent agree.
I
I can't I can't
agree more exclamation, exclamation, everything you just said. I mean, if I had frozen my eggs or we had done, you know, IVF and frozen embryos that were viable and healthy.
then we'd have the option, right? I mean it's it's it's
It's so true and
I don't know.
I think
I think I was just really
Blinded by
and overwhelmed by, you know, how much work I have to do and thinking, Oh, there's no way I could do
more than one because again I
When I'm a mother
I go all in.
Yeah. When I'm a podcaster I go all in exactly. I you know, it's not just
You know, when I have a guest on, like, I really like I I need to like be really interested in them and
You know so there's it it's all in, but
Not giving myself that option is a big regret, you know, where at least if I had frozen my eggs down.
Then
I would be at a point now. This if I'd done this
You know, when I was thirty nine or forty.
Or even if I had done it the first time bef you know, when I was earlier in my thirties, I should have done that.
You know, but um
I just didn't have the foresight enough to to do that and I and I do regret it. So
It's great. It's great that you talk about it to the the women you n that are in your life and even on the podcast.
Yeah.
We're really bad at forecasting the fact that we
Will change.

This and I think this is like really at the heart of it. Like we're really bad at forecasting the fact that our current state of mind might not be our future state of mind. But you've only got to look backwards in your life and realize how different you were and how you think and what your priorities were. I was in nightclubs at 18 and 19. I there's nothing uh for me going to a nightclub now would be like a form of like it'd be like waterboarding me. It'd be like torture.
I changed.
And so at like thirty five at forty at f uh forty five.
There's a high probability that I'm gonna have a different perspective than the one I have now. So give myself the fucking option.
At forty five.
To like, you know So that's kind of how I think about it. And
I say this out publicly'cause I just think
I don't like I don't like seeing that regret.
And people.
It's hard. Yeah.
It's it's definitely hard.
Thankfully I do have this joy in my life. Yeah. And I'm so glad I have that.
But
I have to acknowledge the fact that many people even
if they did want the option for fertility reasons, can't have children, so
Um it's not still not an option for everybody because there are
You know.
people have certain health complications and
um other issues which prevent them from having kids even if they wanted to and even if they're young. And I've got friends in my life that uh unfortunately are in that situation, but
Yeah.
Thank you so much for the work that you do. It's um it's really, really important work in part because you're so unbelievably engaging, but you're so because of y your obsession, you're so
unbelievably rigorous and in the detail of the things you talk about. And as you said, there's so many people around the world. And I know because we we meet them wherever we go in the world that don't have access to this information. Like they're they're not going to be on PubMed reading through the journals and trying to distill these big words. And I think you do a brilliant job of
educating many, many millions of people in every corner of the world through your YouTube channel and your Instagram, et cetera.
And um making these like complicated things accessible. And if if if you're successful in that, which you very much are, you're you're tilting the trajectory of their life, but also therefore their future and their kids' lives and their kids' kids' lives. And um and that's a really wonderful thing. And we need more public educators like you that have the talent of articulation and engagement that you do.
is the very, very rare and hard to come by. I do a podcast where I look at all these people and you're like the very, very best at it. And you've done it for so unbelievably long and that's why. So thank you so much for educating us and allowing us to live the future that uh
That would be most conducive with our health and happiness.
Well, thank you so much, Stephen, for the really engaging conversation and for asking the hard questions.
Thank you.
Just give me thirty seconds of your time.
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Thank you.
Uh