The Most Important Daily Habits For Health & Longevity - Dr Rhonda Patrick (4K)

are low Omega-3s worse than smoking cigarettes um I don't know that they're worse so omega-3 fatty acids are in you know they're essential for many things and um I think you're referring to one specific study that came out of uh Dr Bill Harris's group he's the head of the fatty acid Research Institute and he's actually the pioneer of the omega-3 index test which is how you should measure your omega-3 levels um they're measur in our red blood cells rather than which you'll 99% of the time find if you get a omega-3 test it's plasma levels so red blood cells take about 120 days to turn over so it's a long-term marker of your omega-3 whereas if you go and get a omega-3 plasma test it's kind of like what did I eat for dinner in the last week right so you you may have had a bunch of salmon but maybe you don't usually eat salmon so so anyways the omega-3 index is a way to measure omega-3 levels and he had done a study looking at omega-3 levels and what's called all cause mortality so people dying from all sorts of non-accidental causes cardiovascular disease disease is always at the top of the list because that's pretty much what everyone's dying of that's like the number one cause of uh death in most developed countries and so um he was looking at all cause mortality and correlating that with the omega-3 index which essentially is measuring omega-3 fatty acid levels and um what he found was that so people that have a low omega-3 index so that would be 4% or less H and then comparing it to people that had a high omega-3 index so that would be 8% or higher so people that had the high omega-3 index had a fiveyear increased life expectancy compared to people with the low now people in the United States on average have about a four to 5% omega-3 index so it's pretty pretty standard pretty standard I would say in terms of like what people in the US have in terms of their omega-3 versus Japan where they eat a less Seafood their omega-3 index is like 10% so and they have a 5-year increased life expectancy by the way compared to people in the United States um so what he also did uh him and his his colleagues looked at they stratisfied the data and looked at other factors physical activity you know BMI smoking and this is where it got super interesting because um and I I I just the graph of this data does it like more Justice you know because you can visually see it but he looked at all cause mortality and people people that like lived the longest were of course the high omega-3 index with no smoking right so like non-smokers they had the longest life expectancy and then people with the lowest life expectancy were smokers with a low omega-3 index but then when he looked at people that smoked but had a high omega-3 index either they're eating a lot of fish or supplementing they had the same life expectancy as people with low omega-3 but didn't smoke so in other words having a low omega-3 index was like smoking with respect to all cause mortality and that's you know and of course I get all the smokers out there going oh so all I have to do is supplement with omega-3 I'm like no no no no no that's the wrong way to think about it you know I think I think most people now know smoking is terrible for your health and it and it goes back to this idea this framework that I like to think about nutrition which is what do we need right instead of like always focusing on what to avoid because if you focus on what to avoid you still may not be getting what you need to run your metabolism to run you know neurotransmitter synthesis and all of that so omega-3 fatty acids are hugely important for many things and we could talk hours for that but with respect to smoking it's really quite you know it's it's kind of a astounding when you just look at that graph and they're like overlaid where you're like oh wow non-smokers are with omega-3 are living as long as smokers with high omega-3 do you think that this is a direct cause of the Omega-3s or is there some healthy user bias that's Upstream from the kinds of people who are the kinds of people that are like people that will have omega-3s in their diet great question so um with this type of data which is observational data it's always a correlation so you can never you know definitively say it's cause right a causation so yes there could be it could be a healthy user bias there were other factors that were accounted for but I will say this smoking everyone thinks about smoking and lung cancer or like cancer risk right actually the biggest problem with smoking is heart disease it is a huge it's so when you so here's the thing that I like to think about like with respect to smoking and disease risk smoking in a dose dependent manner will increase your risk for long cancer so in other words the more cigarettes that you smoke the higher the risk of cancer but it's not a linear increase with respect to cardiovascular disease and heart attack risk so you can just have a little bit of cigarettes and your your heart disease risk skyrockets and Omega-3s one of the biggest things that it protects against is heart disease right doctors prescribe it so there's been randomized control trials where people are given high do omega-3 purified omega-3 um in the form of either EPA which is one of the Marine sources or a combination of DHA and EPA um and and and a variety of Studies have shown that like heart attack risk um risk of of dying from card cardiovas disease is dramatically lower in people that are given Omega-3s compared to a placebo so you know the fact that the the nonsmokers with um a low omega-3 index are probably affect it's affecting their cardiovascular health inflammation is a big also a Big Driver of cardiovascular disease and Omega-3s are really good at lowering inflammation in many different ways so yeah to sort of the long-winded you know answer to your question is no you can't definiely say that healthy user bias isn't involved but there's a mechanism that we could see how it would work there is and you know again there is adjustment for other health factors so you would think that that would show up let's say that someone goes I hadn't even thought about Omega-3s I should probably optimize those what's the 8020 of getting good Omega-3s in your diet someone might struggle with seafood it's kind of hard or expensive to cook at home where would you send them for getting it from diet getting it from supplementation what do they need to know so I think um I talked about the omega-3 index and again you want to get 8% or higher it's always good to measure things but there's been studies done where people with a low omega-3 index so the standard American basically 4% if you give them about two grams a day of Omega-3 they can raise their omega-3 index from 4% to 8% so that would be a supplemental form pretty two gram so I'll just give you to give you some perspective you know Physicians prescribe um what's laesa which is a DHA and EPA ethylester form we can talk about different forms of Omega-3 um of Omega three and they also prescribe uh vispa which is a highly pure EPA form and they prescribe them at gr um in the gram dose of four grams per day so that's twice as much as two grams a day which so what I'm getting at it's a fairly safe dose and um so two grams a day can raise people from 4% to 8% I think that's a really good sort of just starting point or the average person now I take experimentally higher doses but but you know I think generally speaking it's pretty safe for most people to take two grams a day and you're going to get that high Omega-3 index at 8% where are they going to go how are they going to assess without getting some Norwegian farmer that's squeezing fish into a barrel and and doing it holistically himself what can you say about assessing the quality of I I even remember cod liver oil tablets back in the day there's all sorts of uproar before there was even a podcasting Universe to kind of scrutinize it what do people need to know if they're choosing their omega-3 supplement I think choosing omega-3 supplement is um we actually have a lot of data now days and we have access to that data quite easily because there's a lot of third party testing sites that go out and they just randomly get fish oil supplements off the grocery store shelves and they say I'm going to take this supplement I'm going to measure important things I'm going to measure the concentration of the Omega-3s EPA and DHA is the concentration in there what is stated on the bottle I'm going to measure you know so fish it's being isolated it's like it's an oil it's in the fat right so um fish also have contaminants they have pcbs they have mercury among others and so measuring those contaminants is important because fish oil is generally purified but you want to make sure a good job was done so those contaminants are measured and then um oxidation so Omega-3s are a polyunsaturated fatty acid prone to oxidation and so you don't want to get something that has an oxidation greater than 10 so anything greater than 10 of total oxidation you want to avoid because it's like consuming rancid fat right rancid lipids like you don't want to do that so so you those things are all measured and um there's sources out there so consumer lab is a you know thirdparty testing site that you know they just there's a lot of affordable brands that you can find because some supplements are just very expensive so I do like to kind of send people there because I have no affiliation with consumer lab by the way I just like that I I like I use them so I like that you can go and find a a pretty decent quality fish oil supplement if you're a data nerd like me you can take this up a level and you can go to the international fish oil standard site ifos they just I mean it's like data party like they give you so much data but like you have to like know what to do with it so they measure all these things but like and everything else right um and they also tell you the form it's in so I mentioned ethylester for the prescription form there's also triglyceride form those are the two main forms that you can find fish oil supplements or Omega-3 supplements in and um generally speaking triglyceride form is is the most bioavailable triglyceride form is what is the form if you're eating fish the Omega-3s are in triglyceride form when the Omega-3s are purified they take it out of the triglyceride form and they purify it and it's in an ethylester form some companies then reify it back into that form to make it Supreme and more bioavailable both pure and bioavailable exactly but not everyone does that and so if you get an ethylester form which is what is prescribed most people that are getting prescription form of Omega-3 to to help prevent cardiovascular disease they're taking aester form that's what I've got the thing to know is you have to take it with a meal and preferably with a higher fat meal because it is absorb it you will absorb so little if you're taking it on empty stomach it's very important and um I didn't want to get into all the new ones but I mentioned two grams a day of Omega-3 will raise your omega-3 index from low to high right 4% to 8% well if you really kind of look at the form people were taking triglyceride versus ethylester you know they had to take you know less of the triglyceride form to get there but so I like to just average it out and say two but um so if you can get triglyceride form it's it's a great form to get how much salmon or Cod or halit do I need to eat per week if I was going to try and get this through my diet right I mean that's that's a question that I don't have empirical data to back up but Al so so here's my sort of thoughts on that um I do think that wild Alaskan salmon is one of the best sorts of Omega-3 because um that is a fish that has a very low level of contaminants like Mercury um pcbs per gram or per ounce I guess is usually measured per ounce of of the fish right so salmon would be a great source now how much of that do you have to eat uh it's really you know depends on the cooking method like how how cooked was it because you can degrade some of the Omega-3s are somewhat heat sensitive so I don't know how much you You' have to do a test right so you'd have to say okay I typically eat salmon two nights AEK week or three nights a week and and then you want to wait 120 days right because it takes that long for your red blood cells to turn over okay I know here's the pro Ronda just just tell me how much salmon I need to eat come on please I I don't know I T a week at least at least I would I would say you probably have to supplement on top of that I don't know that twice a week is NE necessarily going to go from 4% to 8% got you but if you were to do you know I would imagine a lot of the people that care about this listening to this protocol will think right I'm going to find a good quality uh low oxidation triglyceride version of Omega-3s that are responsibly sourc that I like the look of I'm going to take two grams of that per day and I'm probably going to try and have some sort of fish meal twice per week does that seem realistic that's absolutely that's kind that's what I do I mean I'm that's what I I do I do up the dose a little bit more but like I said you know I like eat it like I take it throughout the day the Omega-3s you mentioned about smoking there did you see that the UK is thinking about introducing it looks like it's going to introduce a disposable Vape ban Countrywide lit Vape ban is there a non-disposable Vapes that will so you know the kind of uh liquid that people the e liquid that people put into the these huge things that look like knuckle dusters so those will still be allowed so people can still get the non-disposable Vape Liquid Plus the Contraptions you need to make it work but the elf bar the Esco bar that stuff what are teenagers getting their hands on what are junior high are they getting them on disposables yeah is that is that the it's just way more it's way more um arduous to be you go and buy this thing and then you get the liquid and then you fill it with the liquid and all the rest of it and the flavors are a little bit more tough to balance uh but yeah it's the Disposable stuff there's a couple of comments about an environmental impact because they do you know the batteries you're basically throwing away a battery with some residual nicotine in it um not good but more not good is the fact that teachers in the UK have found that like a non- insignificant percentage of school children are dependent on disposable Vapes okay so I was going to say I don't there's like I could see arguments either way I'm personally as a parent and I have talked to teachers I mean it's insane huge problem in in you know many schools where in the US yes in the US where vaping vaping in class in the bathrooms yeah they've installed these are 12 13y old detectiv in the bathrooms of uh British schools yeah no it's a problem here too especially in public schools and I so I I personally like I'm biased and I I'm like good like I don't want these like it's ter it's so easy and it's like bubblegum flavored it's like it's like geared towards CH I almost feel like was there a push to like get them earlier but you know uh so in that regard I'm I'm on I'm on bored to be honest have you looked into the dangers of vaping much at all what do you think about that I I you know I've tweeted a couple studies I haven't done a deep dive on it I mean like I know there's some you know studies about like lung issues but like I don't know if it was like contaminants that are hitchhiking in with the Vape you know so no I haven't done a deep dive but I do plan on doing a deeper dive into like that world of like nicotine and and vaping and Now's the Time with this UK ban so yeah it's um I've been thinking about it for a while has the introduction of fruity flavored Vapes like sparkle rainbow unicorn dust flavored Vapes and and stuff which are easily accessible pretty cheap 4,000 puffs or 2,000 puffs or whatever so they last for quite a while has that been a net positive or negative because it certainly allowed a lot of people who were previously smokers and cigarettes are no matter how bad you think the Vapes are cigarettes are so much worse like 20 times worse based on the stuff that I've seen uh as an uneducated reader of non-scientific journals uh but how many more people have been thin end of the wedged into a nicotine dependency because it's more convenient because the smoking bands you can now do it inside tastes better like it's just a more enjoyable experience the hit is very very high and and and fast uh so I wonder whether the introduction of The Vape world has been a net positive or negative against cigarettes because to me cigarettes seem Mark Norman's got this great joke where he says that smoking an actual cigarette cigarette now is so socially uh like pushed back against that if someone saw you in an Alleyway and you were secretly trying to smoke a cigarette and they asked what you were doing you'd say that you were killing a hooker because like that's more socially acceptable wa is it still like that and so I haven't been like the last time I went to I was in like Amsterdam 2015 I was shocked by how many people were just smoking Mainland Europe's different they're a different breed Italians the Spanish the French you know they're eating Quant at 10 p.m. at night just chain smoking with a glass of red wine they're going to live to 105 it doesn't matter right they're different they're built different over there I don't know what's going on but you know what this just kind of brings back to the your your first point was the smoking and omega-3 and don't Japanese men smoke pretty I'm pretty sure and they're living on average longer and they eat a lot of fish right smokers High omega-3 index smoke as much as possible eat enough fish but so here's another thing um max Lugia you know Max no I don't great guy you should he's very much in your world a genius Foods guy real cool dude he introduced me to these things called knickknacks so they are like very um carefully Sauced like nicotine uh mints I guess and um just nicotine is a neutop nicotine is an improver for Focus uh attention seems to be like that's big at the moment but then the pouches and SN and stuff like that there's a lot of questions about what's that doing to your gums what's actually in that there's flavorings in them now where the flavorings coming from so it's like there's this permanent sort of cycle of something new comes in and oh that might be really great and then it comes out at the bottom end and you're like oh we don't know what's in it and it might actually be really dangerous for everyone so someone someone that's in their 30s and in that world that like I'm not in um is the is is who mentioned to me like have you looked into nicotine cuz I like I use these Zen is it Zen yeah and and I'm just like what is this like this is like it's an entire new universe of stimulant I have got to look into all this because like eventually my son will be you know of the age and so that's that's kind of what started my my my um interest in doing a deep dive on nicotine is like okay well is there a negative effect like maybe there's a trade-off there's always a trade-off there's always a trade-off so what is it what is it right very interesting yeah I'm I'm fascinated by what's going to what's Downstream from new technologies whether it be uh legitimate technology like typical sort of screen social media virtual reality Apple's new headset just came out recently or it's Health Technologies or it's deliver delivery mechanisms for things that we used to have but this is in a new way and what does that actually mean so yeah we'll get back to talking to rondra in one minute but first I need to tell you about 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the description below or heading to hmn.com slod wisdom that's hmn.com slod wisdom talk to me about Tim restricted feeding because for a long time that was like the hot new girl in school and everyone loved it and it was really interesting but it seems like the trend is swaying at least a little bit away from Tim restricted feeding especially on a morning so what's your how do you conceptualize all of this now um so Tim restricted feeding or time restricted eating you know it the it's a form of intermittent fasting right and I think that many people when they think about intermittent fasting they think okay well I just need to skip a meal I need to like have a period I need to extend my period of time where I'm not eating and the easiest way to do that is skip a skip a meal um and that's kind of what happened so you know Dr sat and Panda good friend of mine big you know circadian biologist researcher does a lot of research on time restrictive feeding and um you know we talked about this like almost 10 years ago essentially there's a circadian reason to eat your food within a certain time window and then have a period of rest and fasting right so everything on our body runs on a clock and including our metabolism and um you know so so we're most insulin sensitive in the morning least sensitive insulin sensitive in the evening right so you know your blood glucose levels will go much higher with the same carbohydrate intake in the evening versus the morning even you know just calories are the same everything's the same there's also some argument to be made by you just need a period of rest like your gut digestion all that like energy is being diverted to do that when you're digesting food like that's that's a big thing and there's also a lot of responses that happen after you eat a meal causing inflammation and things like that that divert energy there so it's taking energy away from other things like repair so so repairing processes usually happen when you're in a fasted state so just like when you're sleeping your brain shuts down right like your brain if you didn't sleep your brain's not going to repair it's not going to stop like you need that rest period Well the same goes for like other organs like it need they need a rest period and and so it's really important to have that rest period right so the longer the rest the longer the rest period is the better in terms of like having enough energy to like do those repair processes things like that require energy and there's also you know other reasons as well but generally speaking um there's an argument why it's good to have a rest period a fasting period right and is that does it need to be 16 hours does it need to be 20 does it need to be 12 like I don't I don't really know that we know the exact time um to that but what we do know is that talking about this to the public was translated to I need to skip breakfast that was like the take-home was okay I need to do a 16-h hour I need to do eat my food within eight hours and do a 16- hour fast and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to skip breakfast and keep extend my f lunch at 12 have dinner at 8 grze between then and and that was hands off exactly and that was that was kind of the the take-home the Practical implication there that everyone started doing um the problem with that is that you know so our muscle is the biggest reservoir for amino acids just like you know we store glucose as glycogen in our liver and our muscle we store um triglyceride as you know you know we fat as triglycerides in our atus tissue we don't really store MUSC I mean we don't really store amino acids but you can kind of think of the muscle as a reservoir for it because when we have a period of um basically we're not getting an intake of amino acids we need it we need amino acids to survive like we need them and so our body pulls from our muscle so in the morning if you think about it what's the longest period you go without having amino acids well it's when you're sleeping so breakfast is actually really important it's it's important to get protein amino acids in that first meal because if you extend that me if you extend that fasting period by skipping breakfast your body is going to be like I need protein I need I got to make a bunch of proteins to like have my heartbeat and my kidneys function right so it's going to pull amino acids out of your muscle and so um that can cause muscle atrophy particularly if you're not doing resistance training so amino acid is one way to stimulate muscle protein synthesis um the other way to do it would be resistance training so there have been studies done like for example women that are doing Tim restricted feeding they will not lose muscle mass if they're doing resistance training so does it mitigate the gains of resistance training by doing that it mitigates the the atrophy so it it's mitigating sorry does Tim restricted feeding I.E skipping breakfast limit the gains made from resistance training if both of those things are done together not not if you're getting enough protein I mean not in that study at least I think I think if you're not getting enough protein within 24-hour period yes but like if you're getting so so the to get your gains in and I'm sure you've had people on talking about this but like the RDA for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight and that was like determined like forever ago when we were using older techniques we as in scientist not me because I haven't personally done this experiment but um the scientific committee was using techniques that uh underestimated amino acid losses so so these committees were set up to determine okay how many how much amino acids do you know H what quantity of amino acids do we lose every day and how much do we make sure we have to get each day to replenish that right um and so those losses were underestimated in other words we're losing more than they thought and so what what does that mean that means oh maybe the RDA for protein is too low so people like Dr Stewart Phillips and others have now redone these experiments with like newer more sensitive Technologies because that's what happens with time right we get better Technologies more sensitivity and they've now determined that it's actually 1.2 grams per kilogram to just bare minimum prevent losses another 50% on top of what was originally 50% on what originally and if you're actually doing phys if you're physically active if you're doing resistance training that goes up to 1.6 grams per and well 1.2 is the minimum but like to like build muscle to get the gains you're talking about and there's actually been studies done in older adults this is a big problem older adults are they're not as sensitive to amino acids it's called anabolic resistance so with the same protein intake they won't build as much muscle if they're 65 versus when they were 3 so Granddad needs to be cooking twice as many steaks he needs twice as many steaks and there's been studies looking at the actual RDA if older adults get 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight and then the other group gets 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight the group that got 1.2 has much higher muscle mass gains yep and and just actually prevents the atrophy that is is happening just with age okay so getting back to the time restricted yes eating thing yes how should someone incorporate this into their lifestyle what it sounds like you're saying is have a high protein meal at some point early in the day uh but if you're also saying that it's important for us to have a period of rest and digest so that it's digest rest and repair can actually happen how should people think about about doing that especially given the fact that sorry later in the day insulin sensitivity is uh skewed anyone that did carb night or carb backloading 15 years ago because they read a bodybuilding.com Forum like me knows that so you've kind of got this oh it's good to eat some things later in the day there's this skew down that way but there's also we can't miss breakfast so it's like that just sounds like eating all day to me when do we when do we stop right um yeah sorry I went off on a tangent there but yes so um the the the time restricted eating okay there's a there's a couple good ways to think about it you want to stop eating about 3 hours before you go to bed if possible okay that's last bit of food in mouth Yes yes because it still you got to add another five so last bit of food in mouth doesn't mean I'm now in a fasted State you got to calculate five hours after that it takes about five hours to digest okay so after the five hours after your last bit of food in the mouth now you're in a fasted state right so that's going to be when you're sleeping most likely um you don't have to skip a meal you can eat your food within an eight hour period and fast for 16 hours without having to skip a meal most of the time unless I guess unless you're an Entertainer and your meals do come later then but still you can still like everything's just shifted over and yes you'll be you know Less in insulin sensitive later in the day but you can like do some air squats for two minutes like you could there there there are things you can do to improve insulin sensitivity and also to improve glucose blood glucose levels like later in the evening if you're having a meal and we can talk more about that later but anyway so there are things you can do I think that the way to think about it is the easy way is to to stop eating about 3 hours before bed that's a really easy and also your sleep improves because you're when you're digesting if you eat like right before you get to bed your body's like awake it's like awake right it's like digesting and using energy it's it's not even Beyond what's happening physiologically just the sense of being full so I was a club promoter for 15 years which meant that we would work from we'd set the club up at 9:00 p.m. and we'd finish at 2 in the morning and I'd get back and the food that I'd prepped that morning the day before this morning would be there waiting for me oh well you know haven't eaten in 6 hours 7 hours something like that okay so I'll get in and I'll eat but just the discomfort of having a lot of food in you like even that sucks right right uh and you know the other thing is with with the thinking about it I think um a lot of people got all like you know a tizzy over over the fact that like if you looked at the the time restricted feeding and the weight loss a lot of the weight loss was due to caloric restriction because people were just actually eating less they were skipping meals and it's like yeah so a lot of weight loss I mean when it comes to weight loss like calories in calories out matter like energy balance right so that's important I think that's where a lot of people like oh time restric eating doesn't matter because it's all about caloric restriction and it's like well yeah if you're looking at what end point are you looking at are you trying to lose weight then you caloric restriction like you should be not eating get that however you want right and most people that are like obese even overweight they can actually they can actually fast and not lose as much muscle like some people will go on a fast or do you know limit their they'll skip meals basically and they can lose like up to 30% of their weight will come from muscle so that's crazy it's crazy unless you do resistance training resistance training is Will mitigate that which will presumably only if you're having sufficient protein outside of that intermittent fasting window not necessarily um that will help you gain more but like mitigating the atrophy because you got the stimulus you got the stimulus okay what would you suggest as a good selection of breakfasts that people could have that kind of meet the criteria that you're talking about here what would be some of the things eggs right eggs would be like like four depending on your body weight you know some if you're if you're a dude you're probably going to have like five eggs scrambled eggs are great you've got I mean it's got the protein and eggs are really high and they have like gluten and choline in them Coline is important for brain function um lutein it's much higher in Greens like kale but there's some in at least pasture raised eggs Farm the the farm you know the nonconventional eggs or whatever they're called those are terrible um but what is that just to interject that what is that to know about eggs how do you select your eggs pasture raised um because you want them to eat like grass and stuff the chickens because they're get they're getting like lutein from the greens and lutein is really important for brain function and eye function I would love to talk about that more when we talk about cognitive function because it actually there's like a lot there's not enough ltin in an egg to substitute What's Done in clinical studies but there isn't kale so um but still it's good to get a source of it so I think I think eggs is a really good source of um protein for breakfast because it's you know it's just it's very nutrient-dense with the choline as well choline's really high in egg yolk bacon and eggs steak and eggs yeah I mean like whatever your your jam is like for the for the protein bacon and eggs steak and eggs you know um I like to also have some smoked salmon and eggs so like my Omega-3s what about the people who are training first thing in the morning let's say that they've got to get to work they're part of the you know they're the 6 a.m. CrossFit Clow crowds they're not going to be up at 4:30 doing their scrambled eggs so that they can digest it in time to go do Fran they're going to probably do a protein shake like whey protein so you would still even for the people that are up early and then go to go on train it's such a high PR it that you would still suggest consuming some protein prior to working it's hard to get 1.6 and then you and then like you know so steuart Phillips likes to use this analogy I'll give him credit for it like where you're squeezing the last drops out of the cloth like for people that are like really trying to gain muscle mass like it's like really their thing you can go like up to like two you're getting like two grams per kilogram body weight and so I mean there are some people that like so if you're really trying to like gain that muscle uh you do need pretty much one gram per pound you do yeah you do need unless you know unless you're just going to eat like you know lunch and dinner and lots and lots of protein but it's really not that it's hard to get that much protein we had this uh like rule at Uni which was no one flukes one gram per pound of body weight no one accidentally goes through their day and looks back at the macros they've eaten and goes I hit 180 grams of protein without thinking like it has to be conscious there's no casual diet unless you went to an all you can eat buffet and even if you do that it seems like the upper Bound for protein absorption within one meal is kind of like 50 grams in any case or less yeah 30 to 40 40 yeah yeah so you're like okay well well done you managed to get through four Stakes there but how much of that is actually going to be used by your body so um yeah that's an interesting one I it's I found it fascinating kind of observing this intermittent fasting to we still need to do this but we need to integrate it but we need to frontload the protein earlier in the day uh and also to just alleviate the protein debt that you're 1.6 per k of body weight needs to hit by the end of the day yeah I think that it's it's it's it makes sense when you just think about it like if you're if you're skipping a meal you're going to be losing muscle mass like especially if you're not doing any resistance training and that's like okay well then I probably shouldn't be skipping a meal but I I can still do time restricted eating you know by just stopping my meals before 3 hours before bed and then you know you're going to get a period of fasting really you just want that repair mode you know you want that repair mode and and there's been clinical studies that have looked at other endpoints besides weight loss and it does make a difference like there's improvements in things like blood pressure for example things like that but I don't know that you're going to get the repair like there's animal studies mechanistically looking at that you're not I don't know that we're going to get that in human data on that it's going to be hard to do um not impossible but it's it's definitely going to cost money to get a clinical trial doing that sort of work talk to me about the rest of your framework for approaching nutrition and making decisions about food um I like I said I really like to make decisions about you know so I did my post-doctoral research with Dr Bruce Ames and um he's he's sort of a legend and he's 96 now and uh but you know we he he specialized for uh some towards the end mid to end of his career on micronutrients right these are important minerals and vitamins and amino acids and fatty acids that you need to get from your diet to run your metabolism and when I say your metabolism I don't just mean fat burning I mean DNA repair I mean you know making energy I mean making dopamine and serotonin and everything right so um a lot of minerals are co-factors for enzymes that are doing that in other words if you don't get those minerals then the enzymes aren't going to be working optimally and so you know things aren't going to be working optimally and if you're talking about things like repair what happens is you get this Insidious damage so magnesium is a perfect example half the country doesn't get enough magnesium which is about 320 milligrams for women and 420 for men and so what happens when you're not getting enough magnesium well nothing as far as you know you look in the mirror and you're fine right you're not like oh damage is happening you know you can't see it on a daily basis if you could it would be so much more apparent to us but um it's Insidious it's just it's occurring a little bit each day and as decades build up you're not going to be repairing damage to your DNA and DNA damage is a major major cause of oncogenic mutations these are mutations that lead to cancer so then you get into your fifth sixth seventh de life and you got pancreatic cancer you got fill in the blank cancer um and there are of course studies associating magnesium intake with cancer and you know studies looking at DNA repair as well so the way I like to think about nutrition is what do I need to get for my diet that is essential for for me to be functioning optimally for me to prevent the damage that can lead to neurod degenerative disease to cancer um that's that's kind of the way and then also what do I need to get in terms of like my macronutrients like protein is a really important one I need I need to think about like how much protein to get right because atrophy happens you start to you know you Peak muscle mass 35 20 to 30s I guess and then as you get into your 40s you start to lose a lot more like 8% per decade and then you get into your 70s it goes up sad yeah so that's how I like to think about it where it's like okay I need to get magnesium I need to get omega-3 I need to get vitamin K I need to get so what foods are rich in those and a lot of minerals and um some vitamins that it it's it's spread out amongst different food groups so vegetables particularly leafy greens are really high in Ma you know magnesium they're high in calcium they're high in vitamin K they're high in folate like we need folate this is like amazing uh to talk about this experiment that my mentor did back in like it was like the 80s but um essentially like he took he took animals and gave them a full fate deficient diet in one group and then the other group he irradiated the mice like ionizing radiation like the stuff that gives you cancer okay and and he looked at Double stranded breaks to your DNA and that's like the start of DNA damage that can lead to cancer ionizing radiation causes double stranded breaks in your DNA and he compared the two groups and they were identical so not having folate in your diet was like being ionized getting ionizing radiation oh you can get yourself ionized as much as you want as long as you eat spinach I mean no because it's GNA do the same thing as not eating spinach but the point is that people know to avoid going in a machine that's going to be ey right but they don't think about do I need full light do you know so it's like that again it's that what do I need to avoid mentality which isn't it's not that you shouldn't think about like you do need to think about things to avoid but we need I think the priority and the focus first is what do I need to get for my diet that's so interesting the uh tend toward demonization of certain food groups and awareness and concern about this is poisoning you this is bad for you this is something that you need to avoid absolutely but if you just avoided a ton of stuff you still haven't got what you actually need exactly and if you focus on what you actually need guess what you avoid a ton of stuff yeah and so I also think it sort of has to do with this like it's this learned helplessness mentality where it's like someone else's fault they're poisoning me it's like do you know what I mean rather than what am I not what am I not taking initiative to like know that I need to get into my body yep right versus they're poisoning me it's the pesticides it's the this it's the that it's the and they are kind of to some degree but how worried are you about oxalates in leafy greens yeah so oxalates um Mo mostly high in spinach not kale and you know if you're juicing spinach every day and you have like kidney problems that's probably a bad idea so oxalates um you know if you're if you're cooking the spinach that basically you know causes enzymes to degrade you know these oxalates and it's not as much of a problem um but you know I think there's been like again a demonization of it it's like it's like this anti-nutrient it's like oh this is the reason I shouldn't eat leafy greens because it oxalates and it's going to give me kidney stone and the reality is is that you know oxalates or like you don't you you only absorb so much particularly like if there's magnesium present and there's so much magnesium in these greens that's mostly not the problem and the problem with oxalates again you'll get like that one case study with the woman with failed kidney syndrome that was juicing every day for lck years and it's like don't give me that example like that you know unless you're a power user of spinach it's it's really spinach and some people have been saying so good though spinach is good I love spinach too um spinach salads are not going to like don't it's not you're getting good stuff from spinach it's really high in magnesium it's really high folate was first isolated from my mentors Mentor uh Peter Mitchell from spinach that's he discovered that vitamin he discovered it from any isolated from spinach so it's really high in spinach okay so leafy greens yeah important yes um okay then you want to get B vitamins again fet is a B vitamin but getting getting U B vitamins zinc um also you want to get iron these are also important micronutrients you know minerals that's where you get the meat right so red meat for the iron and protein B vitamins it's got zinc um as well poultry is another option right so these are good sources of um protein and other micronutrients that you're not going to get as much from Plants what do you thinking about when it comes to saucing and choosing your Meats uh yeah so there's been some studies that have compared like grassfed cows versus like meat from grass-fed cows versus like conventionally raised cows and I would say the biggest difference is at least from the data that's been published is you know for one the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid profile so which makes sense if you're if you're feeding a cow a bunch of corn and I think they also have like it's like corn oil like pellet and you know it's like they're going to have a higher Omega 6 profile right they're going to have more Omega 6 cuz that's corn um versus if you're going to give them like plants they're going to eat plants they're going to have a better omega-3 to omega-6 profile and so and that's exactly what you'll find so like even though meat isn't like the best source of Omega-3 if you get if you're if you're eating you know ground beef for a steak from a cow that was you know pasture raised it's going to have a higher omega-3 profile than than the conventional meat and there's you know I there's some there's some argument to be made for that it's like well and then there's also things like well you know what you have to think about like what food um is there is it like are they given food that's that's doused in glyphosate like I don't know like what's you know how the the corn crop is like that's how they're growing lots of corn right so you know there's you can sort of obsess over everything you have to like I think you have to sort of choose your battles otherwise you can just go insane so you know there do do you have to eat pasturised meat I don't know that you do if you can it's better like not everyone can afford like food is so expensive now too right so at the end of the day like our bodies can handle a lot of damage they really can but like that is only if you give them the things they need to repair that damage and be able to like be you know more more optimally functional so um that's kind of my my take on the the you know pasture Rays versus conventional I personally do get pasture Rays I prefer it also the hormones if they're not I think generally speaking they go hand inand they like they'll give hormones and antibiotics to cows and stuff and it's like oh do I do I want a bunch of antibiotics in my meat that I'm eating right like that's another thing to consider what do people mean when they talk about prioritizing energy balance I hate this and I I have no idea what they're talking I mean I think ultimately they're they're they calories in calories out kind of thing like you know if you're if you're consuming like a ton of calories and you're not physically active like that's you're going to start storing more fat like it's you know just simple math yep so that's I would say the easiest way to think about it um is is really just calories and calories out really does matter like it really does like you're going to you know so you don't want to just eat eat tons and tons of food like you don't want to eat a bag of potato chips like after you do your pelaton yeah and I guess going back to one of the reasons why intimate and fasting was so popular was that it's you don't really need to be as obsessive with your my fitness pile if you only have a six-h hour eating window because for lots of people it's tough to get over Surplus during just six hours as long as you're eating Whole Foods mostly blah blah blah blah blah uh and that's what it comes down to I think exactly that is that if like the PE their caloric restricting naturally when they're doing intermittent fasting right and so that's why it was it all comes down to calories in calories out that's what caloric restriction is you're restricting you're not eating as many calories and you end up you know losing weight but if you eat Whole Foods and I really do think like the Paleo movement back in when I mean it was like how 15 20 years I don't even know how long ago it was but they were on to something I think that's a really good way to eat because you're not just only eating meat you're not just only eating plants you're getting the broad spectrum of micronutrients and there's other things in plants that are like phytochemicals that are beneficial as well right so it's not just getting the micronutrients it's also getting these other you know chemicals that are like doing better beneficial things in us that we know for sure from randomized control trials are doing beneficial things so you know that's another added reason to kind of have more diverse Whole Foods type of diet we'll get back to talking to rondra in one minute but first I need to tell you about mentas you might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to 1006 and two of the supplements I used throughout that were fidji Regus and tonat Ali I first heard Andrew hubman talk about the really impressive effects that these have on testosterone but the problem is most supplements don't actually Ain what they say momentus make the only NSF certified fed doji grus and tonat Ali in the world meaning that even Olympians can use it because that is the level of testing that these products are put through also if you're looking for a great supply of Omega-3s that Dr Ronda Patrick's just been talking about they also do that too best of all there is a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy everything completely risk-free try it for 29 days and if you do not like it they will give you your moneyb no questions asked right now you can get a 20% discount off everything sitewide including all of the products I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to live.com wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's Liv m o m n t.com modern wisdom what are the most important things to consider when it comes to improving cognitive function a lot of people want better focus they want to be more productive they want to improve their mood they want to do all of those things like what are the big movers when we think cognitive function so there's what I like to think of as there's definitely big movers there's things that require effort and there's like lower hanging fruit right so this is things that like you could take a supplement perhaps and I would say the big movers are the ones that of course are going to require more effort like that's always how it is right and it it's pretty clear now I don't think I think it's pretty scientific consensus that exercise and particularly vigorous exercise is one of the best ways that you can get a cognitive enhancement you know memory executive function processing speed so there have been studies that have been done in older adults in middle-aged adults in children like across the lifespan and it's just undeniable that getting your heart rate up you know getting getting your heart rate up and blood flow up and sweating is going to make you smarter and feel better it's going to make you both so um like there was there was even one study that was done in older adults and this was like a classic study that I I just remember I talked about it for years but other Studies have like repeated it since then but it was like 2011 or 20 2012 published in pnas and um this this researchers took these older adults and they put them on a year-long intervention exercise program and there was a lot of um more vigorous intensity so they're getting up to about 80% max heart rate 75 80% max heart rate and um for one year they did this intervention um and after that year they had a 2% increase in their hippoc cample volume so hippocampus is a part of your brain that's highly involved in learning and memory and they had increased it by like 2% so people that in that age group lose between 1 to 2% of their hipocampal volume per year so they essentially countered that loss that atrophy that they're they're age related you know experiencing each year and um and so part of the reason that happens is when you're doing a vigorous type of exercise you are increasing bra derve neurotropic factor bdnf and that is responsible for growing new neurons in the hippocampus it's responsible for neuroplasticity so that's the ability of your brain to like adapt and change to the changing environment which is what older adults don't do very well right your brain's much more plastic when it's younger like you can adapt to things that's why that's saying you it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks right I mean that's kind of where it comes from so bdnf plays a role in that so you want more bdnf like you an exercise and particularly vigorous exercise if you're working your muscle so hard that they can't get oxygen to them fast enough and that's why I say vigorous um then they're forced to basically make energy without oxygen and that happens by just using glucose and then you make lactate as a byproduct and lactate is what is signaling an increasing that bdnf and lactates really I mean you can measure it there's you know things out there that you can buy and measure it but I don't think you need to I think you can just measure your heart rate and if you're getting if you're doing a vigorous intensity exercise 10 minutes that's all it took was 10 minutes to have improvements in cognition uh executive function processing speed so even just a 10-minute workout and like I did one before I was came here like that's like that's my thing I do you know it's like I want I want to be on top of my game so you just can do a 10-minute you know workout it could be high intensity interval training where you're shifting between periods of vigorous exercise and then kind of resting a little bit and then so you do these intervals or it could just be like I'm going to do a 20 minute like run and I'm going to go you know I'm going to do it so um exercise exercise is the number one I would say big mover as you said it's also the most requires the most effort the other things and this is where I kind of like I'm smiling because there was very recently a new study um one out of three very large randomized Placebo control trials where they're giving one group a placebo and another group a multivitamin okay this is a multivitamin which is the micronutrients I've been talking about magnesium B vitamins folate um Vitamin K is just stuff people aren't getting enough of they're not getting enough from their diets and um they gave older adults so these were people that were 65 and older and um there was three different Trials of this study it was called the cosmo trial and there's about 5,000 participants in total and the evidence was clear that just giving them a multivitamin improved cognition and it slowed brain aging which was it was estimated to slow brain aging by about 2 years and and I this is like it's so it's it's funny because 10 years ago I was like doing I was out there podcast talk you know talking on podcast about huge studies that were coming out saying enough is enough multivitamins are a waste of money don't buy them and they were saying the exact opposite and they were terrible studies and I like tore them apart um but here we are 10 years later complete opposite full circle what's the easiest thing you can do like does that mean a young person can take a multivitamin it's going to immediately make them you know I probably not Insurance yeah it's it's something that you can start now and certainly older adults it made a difference so that that's one um another one is again I mentioned that there's other these phytochemicals in plants that are beneficial they're in vegetables and they're in fruits so blueberries and blueberry extract or even the equivalent of one cup of blueberries this has been done like the equivalent of one cup of blueberries improves cognition executive function it in it improves um memory um also processing speed so that something like if you're like you know fast reaction time I guess it's more relevant for like maybe someone who's athletic but you know find motor coordination things like that um multiple studies showing this I mean there's been meta analyses showing it this is across the lifespan there's been studies in kids there there been studies in middle-aged adults and there's been studies in older adults and it's clear blueberries make you smarter and they make you feel better at least they make me feel better so blueberries are the king of fruits I think I mean it's between blueberries raspberries and pineapple I think for like the top spot in my world of fruits blueberries yeah no blueberries are so they have something in them called anthocyanins and it's what gives the blueberries their like pigmentation raspberries have them too blueberries are very concentrated them in them um they also have so ananin are a type of polyphenol they're actually a flavonoid they're type of polyphenol polyphenols are a sort of wide class of of phytochemicals and phytochemicals there's a lot of them lots of different types of them and they really are beneficial in humans and like I said there's randomized control trials comparing giving this to to a placebo and if it was bad for you then it would be clear right it's good for you so uh blueberries are are are at the top of the list for that uh for improving cognitive function low hanging fruit how easy is it to eat a cup of blueberries a day I eat two it's literally hard to not eat a cup of blueberries a day it's hard not to yeah so that that would be another one um I think another one on my list would be similar to that would be cocoa polyphenol so like from from like dark chocolate um they have another type of polyphenol called kakin and um the best one so there have been studies lots of studies on this and it's mixed on this so some Studies have shown benefits they increase blood flow to the brain they increase you know vascular flow so you can get an immediate effect where you know if you increase blood flow to the brain which is what exercise does right but we're talking low hang fruits easy to do take a pill that would be um something to do it is it's improved cognition executive function and there's a type called cocova and I have no affiliation with them but they've published their they they have studies published with their um proprietary blend which is again um one of the highest concentrated I would say cocoa flavanols out there the kakin consumer Labs tested them and I've seen I've seen the data it's it's very clear they're very high in in they just out compete all the other brands out there and they also have the lowest contaminants so they're really uh a good but expensive way to get those cocoa flavonols which are really good and then the other one would be for cognition would be lutein which I mentioned earlier it's in egg yolk it's not very concentrated it's in kale very highly concentrated in kale almost 24 milligrams in three kale leaves and I say three k leaves because that's what I put in my smoothie so I've calculated it but um so there's 2 4 milligrams of luttin so lutein is a type of carotenoid like beta carotene like lopine and tomatoes you've heard of those things before lutein is in that same category it is a catenoid it accumulates in the rods and the cones of your eye it protects against singlet oxygen from Blue Light like this light we're looking at and also the sunshine when you go outside that damages our eyes it causes macular degeneration and so lutein and zanthin is another carotenoid they're in Greens and they protect against that but they also accumulate in the brain and um there have been a variety of studies so there's been observational studies correlating plasma levels of ltin and zanthin with certain cognitive scores so like C crystallized intelligence older adults that have linee and zanth and higher levels have more crystallized intelligence so that's the ability to use all the information you learned over a lifetime and like use it um there's been randomized control trials looking at giving 8 milligram of ltin now I said 24 is in 3 K so they give 8 milligrams of lutein and something like 23 milligrams of zanan to older adults and it improves neural neural efficiency so this is the ability to basically your your neurons can function with less energy which is nice So that obviously improves cognitive function because it's a very energy demanding process so Saltine menine yeah I know it's in eggs Coline yeah you know colonics generally very important for brain function it is yeah it's it's an important um it's important for brain and there's been studies actually um with pregnant women if you give pregnant women about 500 milligrams of choline per day their children score better on int um the intelligence test yes so so I learned about this of course when I was pregnant and I was like well it was actually before I was pregnant but I was like figuring out like what I'm going to do like what do I and that's why I ate so many eggs during pregnancy because I also supplemented but now you've got like Mastermind babies I do yeah wow but so choline's also important yeah for sure brain function but that comes down to again getting trying to get everything you need from your food um and then Omega-3s there's been so many randomized control trials on Omega-3s improving cognition especially when there it's it has to be two grams or more that's where you'll get the the mixed data if it's like oh we gave them 500 milligrams wasn't enough the studies that are consistently showing improvements in cognitive function or at least two grams a day of the omega-3 so that's my that's my sort of I think lwh hanging fruit for for cognitive function things you can do is that the same strategy for battling neurod degeneration over time as well the things that improve cognitive function now it's just the same it's one and the same it's very similar because I mentioned brain derive neurotropic factor bdnf that plays a huge role in battling nerd degenerate disease risk um a lot of the the anthocyanins the cakin that are in things like blueberries and chocolate um dark chocolate especially when you concentrate the powder down those are they have anti-inflammatory Pro like properties they have antioxidant properties and they're increasing blood flow to the brain as well so they're getting more oxygen to the brain they're getting more nutrients to the brain all those things play a role in both short-term Health but also long-term brain health as well so it's it's both for sure they're they're very much connected what happens when people get brain fog like what what is what is brain fog I know what it feels like but like what's what's going on um yeah so brain foged or as I like to call it uh a reduction in mental Clarity um and such a doct way of vir like I've just heard too many like people say like brain fog brain fog like and it's I I got like this like I was telling you I got this new jerk reaction to like you've got brain fog I do when people like say brain fog I'm like oh no I going to you know but yes it is a thing so it's um you know when when you have a reduction in a mental Clarity it feels like this brain fog and you know there I personally think it all comes down to food I think it really comes down to food I mean when you're sick you have brain fog but we can talk about how it overlaps with that so I think there's really two big it all has to do with meals and and and eating um so the first thing I think that's highly involved in this reduction in mental Clarity or brain fog as people like to call it is what's called the postprandial glucose response so that means blood glucose levels going up after a meal and um what happens is this if you have a really high postprandial glucose response you're eating a high glycemic index food something that's definitely like a refined carbohydrate for example that'll really smash you um you're going to get this really sharp peak in glucose and then like a drop and or a crash as people like to call it um and so it's really hard for your brain to to be functioning properly with that post prandial glucose response and that's partly why you'll hear a lot of anecdotes and myself included people that have tried a ketogenic diet or I used to always like to do podcasts on a fast in a fasted State because um you're not getting that postprandial glucose response is one thing it it really sort of it it's evens it out evens it out yep not everyone responds well to a ketogenic diet and I certainly uh don't think it's easy to continue on forever so there are other things um obviously re avoiding refined carbohydrates is is an easy no-brainer right there's nothing in there anyways what do you need from there nothing no micronutrients you no protein right like you're not getting anything from that so that would be one thing to avoid because that'll make sure you're not going super super high but you can still have it um from from from a meal and um some of the things that you can do to mitigate that one would be exercise snacks so this is like doing a really short burst of intense like vigorous exercise 80% max heart rate for like 1 to 3 minutes and you do it 30 minutes or up 30 minutes up to an hour either before after a meal so you kind of do it within this hour before or after a meal and what happens is that vigorous intensity exercise while you're you know shooting your heart rate up you know and it's it's hard to do you're you're increasing lactate and it doesn't take much it gets soaked up by the muscle and this is then um causing Transporters glucose Transporters to come up to the muscle and opening the gate basically so that when you eat that meal the glucose goes into your muscle it's more anabolic you want it to go there and it's not you're not getting that like huge rise and then drop in the post with the post pandal glucose response so that would be one thing exercise snacks lots of studies out there especially with people with type two diabetes have a problem you know maintaining their blood glucose levels the second thing would be food order like the order you eat your macronutrients on the plate kind of so so I would say about 10 minutes it it can be on the plate depending on how slow you eat so if see food order um there's been studies again largely in people with type two diabetes who have issues regulating their blood glucose if you eat protein or fat 10 to 30 minutes before carbohydrates it can very much blunt and slow the postprandial glucose response so if you have like let's say you eat a can of sardines before you're going to go to a restaurant you're going to eat out you're presumably going to eat more terribly than you would if you're cooking at home right or you do a little protein shake 20 minutes before you're going to go to a restaurant or whatever and that'll or or before like even just if you're going to do a podcast and you need mental Clarity you want to make sure that let's say just eat the protein and and not have the the carbohydrates right um so what that does is it's I mean it's doing essentially like increasing insulin so that when you do have that glucose it's prepped I mean if you were if you were going out for dinner presumably something else you could do is try and have the starter be steak tartar chuna tartar oysters something like that and just be like can we just wait an extra 10 minutes on Mains like however long you think that we need just give us another 10 and then you've encapsulated it within the the entire meal I guess as long as everybody else is on board with that otherwise someone's had a bunch of bread and they just they want the whatever main cause to come out see that they should that's like the worst thing is having the bread on the table first right it should it is good but like eat the pro eat the steak tartar first and then go for the bread right you you'll you'll slow the glucose response there's a place in Aus called Dean's Italian uh it's just down the street from you you should go you should go Dean's Italian yeah I looking for restaurant recommendations please I'll send you some send me some more so uh Deans Three Forks and um the somewhere else that I went the other evening that was phenomenal but Deans Deans and Three Forks are the uh two steak restaurants I go to the most uh but Deans do this they call it a bread Crown so it's like a literally looks like a little crown that comes out kind of about that size and there's a pot of whipped butter in the middle of this thing and it's glazed on top it's got like a salt glaze this thing is like crack it's so good and it's it's just there you arrive you sit down you've got the drinks or whatever and then this thing arrives and you just can't it's impossible to not eat so yeah almost getting is there something that we can do with this like pre-appe Tizer appetizer to come after the appetizers around about 15 minutes if that's okay because Dr Ronda said so yeah so food order you know is is something legitimately that's been studied empirical data showing it does blunt the glucose post prenal glucose response and um so that is another thing that can really I think affect mental Clarity or brain fog so um just like I said like the protein or or fat like an avocado sometimes I'll have an avocado and that kind of just delays the emptying of your stomach into your tance and it kind of slows it even Keel rather than real high Spike and then lower in other news this episode is brought to you by ag1 nutrition doesn't have to be complicated it just has to work and that's why I've used ag1 every single day for over 3 years now ag1 is literally the best in the world at providing you with a scientifically back blend of ingredients that helps to fuel your body you might have heard Tim Ferris and Joe Rogan and Petra TI and Andrew hubman and myself talk about this product and that's because it is the best daily foundational nutrition supplement on the planet ag1 is a comprehensive nutrition solution formulated to support whole body Health it's got 75 high quality vitamins minerals and Whole Food sourced ingredients best of all it's got a 90-day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it every single day for three full months and if you do not like it at the end of those 3 months they will give you your money back that's how confident they are that you love it right now you can get a year free Supply vitamin D plus five free travel packs by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink a1.com wisdom that's drink a1.com wisdom presumably as well prioritizing the foods during an eating window even if you do the protein shake at home and then go out for dinner afterward prioritizing that and skew that toward protein is just going to cause you to eat less of the carbs if there is dessert at the end you're going to think I'm like not as bothered because I've just put more in me that's been skewed and discriminated in the direction of what you should be prioritizing anyway absolutely so you get more satiety plays a role I mean if like you're eating something before like protein you're just not going to eat as much you know you're not going to eat as much but that kind of leads into the second that's not the only part of the meal or food or eating that I think plays a role in this reduction of mental Clarity and brain fog the other thing is the postprandial inflammatory response so eating a meal causes inflammation it happens in everyone every meal it's no there's no avoiding it like to some degree it happens and but you can minimize like how much of an inflammatory response you're having so people um eating a very high sugar and high fat meal it really that's the real those are the two real big movers of it um but even if you're just doing a ton of fat without like fiber or protein fat is Harsh on the gut and so what ends up happening is your gut epithelial cells there's like things holding them together tight junctions they open up and they let little pieces of bacter so our microbiome I mean we got trilli leaky gut is exactly what it is it's intestinal permeability and it allows pieces of bacteria to get for every for every like bro science term I've got you've got the specific term that comes out of medicine is it brain F it's a reduction in mental Clarity is it leaky gut it's so the the wall lining of the intestine is opened up to yeah intestinal permeability or leaky gut as it's called that's what you're doing so meals cause that to happen transiently uh some people have like a very big problem with leaky gut but so transiently you're letting bacteria get into your bloodstream and this is what happens is it's pieces of bacteria they're called endotoxin or lipopolysaccharide same thing but um they're getting into your circulation because they're opening up right getting from the gut you're not supposed to be there right and your immune system gets activated so your immune system's like it it knows those pieces of the bacterial membrane it recognizes it that's how it you know recognizes a bacterial and pathogen and so it gets activated and um what ends up happening there is one your immune system is activated okay that requires a ton of energy so energy is shunted away from your brain and it goes to the immune system because your body goes triage is it goes I need to survive there's a bacteria there's a bacterial Invader in my system right now I'm going to take all my energy and I'm going to make sure that I get rid of this invader I don't die right so that's that's the first thing that's happening in terms of like energy is being diverted from the brain from neurotransmission from thinking everything and it's going to the immune system to activate it okay it doesn't you know happen for that long of a period but it it's happening after a meal um the second thing that's happening is that your immune system itself is creating cyto kindes that are activating other immune cells that's how they like talk to each other and these things are um they're essentially can be somnogen so they can make you sleepy so when you're sick what happens when you're sick you're you have no energy right because all the energy is going on your immune system resp and you're sleepy y so that's exactly what's happening after a meal what's happening when you're sick to a smaller degree is happening after a meal the post post prandial inflammatory response and then the other thing that's happening is those cyto kindes also are Crossing into your brain and disrupting neurotransmission disrupting connections like we now know that it's the bloodb brain barrier does not keep immune molecules out it gets get in they get in there and they're wreaking havoc so it's another reason why you don't want to have you know inflammat a lot of inflammation but so then the question is okay what do I do right so that's the question how do I not get such a big postprandial inflammatory response and it's also again why a lot of people myself included always feel like more mentally clear when I'm fasted right uh but I'm like I don't want to lose the protein I mean the the muscle mass so I need to get some food um the question is what do you do one obviously avoid the sugar high sugar high fat okay that's clear two um smaller meals have less of a postp parial inflammatory response so the bigger the meal the bigger the response Spike and then Spike and then down yeah but it's like now we're talking you're getting both you're getting the glucose and you're getting the inflammatory response yep the that's another thing so actually like smaller meals does help that so like if you need mental Clarity and stuff like don't have a big meal um and the other thing that actually makes an effect on that is believe it or not we're going full circle omega-3 omega-3 has been sh in clinical studies to blunt the post post pral inflammatory response with the meal or at any point throughout the day so that's why I take my Omega-3s throughout the day with meals and it's doing it to some degree both to some degree both there's something systemic but there's also something acute exactly there's something systemic the inflammation process but there's something acute in the gut that it's also playing a role in preventing the lipop poly CID from getting into circulation is there a is this dose dependent if I have one gram with each meal you say two grams of triglyceride responsibly saued blah blah blah from a Norwegian guy that's doing it like this with fish can I have one gram with each meal would that be sufficient I think the studies and I can't remember I think it was like they were lower dose like 500 milligrams I think it wasn't even that high so I typically do the one gram with each meal I think that's a safe it's a nice way to remember to do it but yeah a nice way and um and that's so so I like to do the reason I like to have omega3 throughout the day is for one that reason blunting the post parial inflammatory response too I want these like specialized resolving like these specialized resolving molecules in that they produce like when your metabolism in my blood constant resolving inflammation very interesting yeah so through uh throughout my 20s I said I was a club promoter and I I thought I had depression or like acute depression that would come on every so often like intermittently throughout the year I think looking back it was just low mood and burnout I think that's what was going on but the way that it would manifest for me is I wouldn't get out of bed I wouldn't want to go to work and see people and I was the I was in charge of this company so I could do whatever I wanted no one could tell me otherwise but one of the things that I would do is I would order pizza or like high sugar foods and sweets and stuff like that and it would comfor e right like i' comfor e and that would be something I'd do but I'd notice especially if you have you know a big Domino's in front of you and you've got some sweet stuff to have after that the sense that you get in your body especially if you haven't been outside if you've basically not moved because you're feeling a little bit miserable and you the curtains are drawn and you've just laid in bed and the Uber driver or whatever's come and you've taken the food off him the inflammation like the throbbing that you feel in your body it's almost like your heartbeat feels like or your blood pressure feels like it's gone up and then almost all of the time after that and I think this is very common for people that deal with low mood if they do Comfort eat like that they'll then fall asleep so shortly after that and then that disregulation of your sleep pattern also makes you feel even more like [ __ ] and then you out of this sleep your emotions are all over the place you've still got tons of like either blood sugar rushing around you or you don't or you've got digestive discomfort because you've just eaten all of this food and um yeah just seeing that as like a little uh petri dish microcosm for what happens if the least amount of movement possible like you've gone from bed to door back to bed and that's it nothing in terms of any kind of stimulation already in low mood and then you go to sleep the most sedentary of all of the positions uh yeah it's you can feel that inflammation that cyto kind response and your thoughts again super super muddy which more so um feeds back into that low mood it's a vicious cycle right exactly no and you mentioned it's funny how you mentioned people get when you get sleepy after a meal it's like that's the cyto kindes that are somnogenic it's a post-inflammatory infl inflammatory respon and again it happens with the bigger meal too you'll notice like the bigger the meal if you overeat the sleepier you are right so it's more of an inflammatory response so now you can think about it as oh I'm not sleepy it's oh I'm I've got some inflammation going on after that meal interesting what about improving mood what do people get wrong when thinking about that I mean so improving mood is you know we were talking about exercise and and that would be the most effortful way that you can improve mood and there's studies that have compared it to like running to essentially to standard SSRI treatments which are pretty classic um anti-depressant that are used and it's performed as good as an SSRI with added health benefits of course right um so but you you said something interesting when you were talking about when you were feeling depressed um and that was that you couldn't even get out of bed right you know so there it's clear that exercise will help mitigate depression it will improve your mood very clear but not everyone is going to go for a run not everyone that is pressed will get on the pelaton or fill in the blink type of exercise right there are some people that like it's hard to get out of bed so what could be a non-pharmacological treatment to help improve mood right um and I think that this is what is super exciting and this comes into to heat deliberate heat exposure and and sauna and it's something I personally experienced firsthand when I was in graduate school I was uh extremely stressed out which can manifest with depression depression anxiety right like you those all come connected and this was like 2009 I started using the sauna every day before I would go into the lab and I all of a sudden was you know handling my failed experiments better I was like handling the stress for my advisor and just all the things I had to do so much better I mean it was so noticeable that I initially went oh my gosh there's something going on here like I need to figure this out um and so that's what initially even got me interested in the Sonic was the effect on my mood and at the time I like I've published on this since I published on this back in 20122 but I had come up with some theories about there's lots of reasons why um I had come up with a with a theory on it affecting the opioid system or natural endogenous opioid system so when you get in the sauna um or when you're under you know deliberate heat exposure say a hot bath something similar you release endorphins and that's the Feelgood opioid that you when you're running you know same thing um but you also release something that's the opposite of that it's called dorphin and that is the opioid that's responsible for that discomfort feeling that dysphoric feeling like it's hot this is miserable I hate it why am I doing this myself exactly and that's when you're running what it it happens during physical activity as well and um and so what it does it actually cools down your core body temperature somewhat and that's why it's like a natural response and um but when you release that discomfort feeling there's a feedback loop it actually tell it you actually make more receptors and you make them more sensitive to the feel-good endorphins so that you feel better later and um so now there's been um some scientific research first from Charles Ron back in I think it was like 2016 he had done a study where people were they basically like it was a type of of sauna more like an infed SAA it was elevating their core body temperature to about feverish State like a 101.3 and there was a sham control which was the placebo they were getting hot enough to think they were getting the treatment but it wasn't raising them it wasn't giving them a fever and so um that was done just one time and this was in people with major depressive disorder like this like legit depression and the people that got the active you know sauna treatment had an anti-depressant effect that lasted six weeks after one time right no way yeah one time um so now Dr Ashley Mason at UCSF um she running the osher center which is they do a lot of non-pharmacological treatments for a lot of stuff and um I I've been lucky enough to collaborate with her on uh some of these studies where she now right now has a paper in press which in press sorry in U peer review um but she basically trained with Chuck Rison and carried on the torch and now has done either four treatments or eight treatments and some people and looked and these are people again um with depression and did a battery of of scores you know that these people do when they're measuring depression and it's just off the charts unreal like so damn exciting like I can't tell you how exciting it is the people that got this sauna treatment I mean they I think it's something like the Hamilton score where you need like a a three or four point change for it to be significant I mean these people are changing like 16 points and ssris I think are only two two or three I don't know what they are but it's not loads it it I all I can say is she's doing an infrared s on her is um it's a head out infrared sauna so it's like it's like a dome I've seen those people look so funny and yes but they're but they're in there for a very long time have you considered that it's just them overcoming the discomfort of looking so stupid while being in one of those tents that has your head sticking out the top there's probably so many mechanisms that play you know I but but you know there's there's some argument to be made for head out you know we could get into that but like I I I do think that inflammation so sauna does what exercise is doing and to some degree with respect to you know causing both acute inflammation but having a strong anti-inflammatory response but then I think the opioids could be in there's so many things like it's not known what's happening exercise get hot if you can get hot while you exercise probably also you can do both but but getting hot like some people like again getting into a sauna is like getting into a spa it's a lot easier to go from your bed into this other little chamber where you're just lying there's no eff no there's no effort doing it for you the Heat's doing it for you we'll get back to talking to rondra in one minute but first I need to tell you about element stop having coffee first thing in the 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nt.com slod wisd system what about people who are at standardly acceptable mood uh but think I really want to kind of elevate the way that I feel throughout the day I don't I I just don't feel that sort of excited or fired up about the obviously there's like what are your relationships like what's the job that you do do you have meaning and purpose in your life ET all of those sort of things but are there any interventions from a physiological perspective where you think this is something that you should prioritize right um so I think that it it comes down to obviously like doing an exercise snack we talked about exercise just doing like a two-minute you know high knees or squats or something it makes a difference it really does you're getting you're getting that oxygen to your brain you're getting more nutrients and bdnf plays a role in depression so that stuff I think immediately improves mood but there's also um you know so so what neurotransmitters are involved in mood or you know mood what is mood when we talk about it well I mean it's complicated like I don't even know that we can Define it exactly I mean there's there's you you have things like serotonin it's involved in mood uh motivation that you have to be in a good mood to be motivated right they're they're really hand inand same with dopamine norepinephrine is another one that's involved Focus attention mood uh you know things like that they're all sort of you know involved in the in the mood motivation that sort of Pathways so there's like a a there are behaviors that you can engage in to sort of optimize for those neurotransmitters so neurotransmitter optimization is is sort of like trying to engage in behaviors that can optimize for those neurotransmitters so one high-intensity exercise does it it's been shown serotonin goes up it goes up because again your lactate is increasing the serotonin but it also goes up because Branch chain amino acids which you're getting when you're eating protein they compete with tryptophan tryptophan is a precursor it has to get into the brain and they compete for transport into the brain with those branch chain amino acids and tryptophan is a precursor for serotonin so if you're eating a bunch of protein which have Branch chain amino acids like Lucine isol leucine things that are building muscle basically and you're not exercising then your tryptophan can be outcompeted and there's been studies doing this they've given they've given people a big like shake like a protein shake essentially that does not have any um trip it has no tryptophan in it so they're essentially just dosing them with branchin amino acids and their tryptophan levels Fall by like 90% in the brain and and subsequently their serotonin levels plummet and people get in a terrible mood their long-term planning shuts down so serotonin plays a role in impulse control like being able to like control your impulses and not engage in behaviors that are just very impulsive um and so that that goes down and it's just normal people that you know are drinking this shake of branchin amino acids so what makes the brancho amino acids go into muscle exercise so if you want to do that then you're going to get more tryptophan in the brain to make serotonin what is the Adaptive justification or the Adaptive mechanism for this is it that if human was doing relatively high-intensity extended exercise that would often be some sort of pursuit hunting type thing therefore you need a natural painkiller to encourage said human to keep chasing said wilderbeast because if they feel better they will keep chasing it which means they're more likely to catch it which means they won't starve and die that sounds like a great explanation um yeah I mean we used to move around like you said um it it doesn't necessarily have to be high intensity it could be just lifting weights too it causes Branch amino acids to be taking up to muscle but you're you're moving yeah so there there's a you know I think there's could be an evolutionary P you know reason why there is for every in my world there is an evolutionary reason for absolutely everything not because it's the only thing I've got any expertise in uh but yeah that's that's interesting to think about I mean I wrote this like 10 years ago when I was still suffering with low mood and stuff like that that if you gave me the choice between a good night sleep of 9 hours or a hard training session of 1 hour my mood reset before and after training is greater than before and after sleep I found more bleed from pre- to posts sleep than pre- to post training and it's it's so ruthless that if you are suffering with a low mood or if you're under a period of high stress or whatever it is one of the things that you go to First is sleep even though in my experience the higher Roi thing is the thing that's hardest to do when your mood's the lowest because your motivation to do difficult things is also at its lowest totally absolutely it's funny that you mentioned the sleep thing too because like you know I do think sleep is important but nowadays I'm like you know it's exercise like like I don't know that anything matters as much if you are putting in that effort to exercise and you know that could be shown in data if you look at you know studies that have looked at all cause mortality and people that don't you know sleep as much like they're getting 6 hours or less they have a higher all cause mortality than people that are not sleep but only in people that are not physically active so people that are physically active and sleep terribly had the same all cause mortality as people that were you know slept fine without so in other words interesting exercise can negate the bad effects of lack of sleep on all cause mortality and I also glucose response goes up with lack of sleep like you're you're you're um you're basically going to have a higher postprandial glucose response to food you're going to have a higher fasting blood glucose level when you don't get enough sleep well you're also going to select for foods that are more salty more sweet I mean I found this as well that I I for the first time in my entire life when I had a stable sleep and awake pattern was covid that was the first time that I'd ever gone to bed as an adult the same time most nights out of two weeks because I was always running our events you know which would mean I'd be up until 2 3 5 in the morning cashing up a hill driving back from one of the club nights in a different city doing something like that and I remember thinking I always thought that I had low mood and was a bad sleeper and I just realized I was doing shift work the shift work is considered I think the World Health Organization literally considers shift work a health risk so this is uh firefighters this is Nurses this is anybody that's got an irregular pattern and um yeah I I thought that was me I was like oh this is it was so formative and such a foundation to the way that my uh lifestyle and uh the texture of my mind existed that I didn't I couldn't imagine what life would be like different and then Co comes in and obviously nightclubs immediately all get shut down and well I guess I guess I'll try this going to bed at 11:00 every night thing and then mood started to just like linearly get better throughout all of 2020 and uh yeah that was wild to see that that case study of someone who basically had no theory of mind for what it would be like to not be like that to then actually get stable sleep and wake was it was crazy it was a really big change yeah that's it it really is like you said the shift work I mean I'm so respectful for people that are doing it and um sat and Panda has actually done re work with like firefighters and stuff and shown that if the shift workers do Tim restricted feeding and eating like that if they're doing that while they're doing their shift work they actually do have better at least like metabolic um outcomes and stuff like or Not by outcomes but um biomarkers so there is somewhat so so it helps because you know they're obviously their body is completely out of cycle and whack but if they can at least keep that food intake clock on the right you know path and right clock uh it does make a difference so they're not eating All Around the Clock basically presumably if they were also doing training if they were exercising that would help to mitigate mitigate mitigate I think the exercise would be the most important thing that they could do and firefighters I mean they are they do have to be physically fit right I mean I think that's part of like the requirement so fir fight is basically like being a a halfway house into the Armed Forces like a lot of my friends that are there that you know they have uh PT they have yard time they have Kit inspections they have all this sort of stuff I don't know whether it's the same I don't think it's the same for people that are accident and emergency uh nurses and and and doctors and stuff like that uh I don't know if it's the same for the police I guess if you're part of a SWAT team and stuff that would that would be very heavily prioritized but I don't know if the you know the classic Bobby on the beat with a big gut and I'm thinking British here and like one of the silly hats that our British police officers wear I don't know whether they're put through the same kind of uh Fitness I suppose their job sometimes is less physically demanding than a firefighters but then if you're chasing some scall down a an Alleyway and chasing after some person that's just committed a crime you need to be pretty fit for that yeah super super interesting uh when we're talking about cold and heat exposure which is something that you've spent an awful lot of time thinking about what's the best way to utilize cold and heat routine throughout a week like what's just the the simplest way to do an evidence-based cold and heat protocol I think um one of the best ways would be if so most people should be training right they should be doing some sort of resistance training or endurance training um vigorous exercise doing the heat after that I think would be one of the best because you're you're extending your workout to some degree so there's been there's been studies looking at the on the endurance side like if you're uh intervention studies that have taken people that have done Exercise on a stationary bike or they've done the same exercise on the stationary bike and then done 15 minutes of hot sauna like right after that and with basically no break with no break they just go into the sauna after and then V2 Max was measured so V2 Max is like your best way to measure cardiorespiratory Fitness right so maximum amount of oxygen you're taking in a maximal you know exercise so um the their VO2 max was better in people that did that exercise the the stationary bike plus the sauna versus just the stationary bike right and that is a lot because sauna to some degree is mimicking moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise you know it's it's doing a lot of the same things a lot of the same physiological responses happening so I would say um doing the sauna right after the workout but also there's a new study that came out showing people that did resistance training and then got into a sauna had like better muscle gains and it just makes your work out more of whatever you did it makes your you know but I think some of that has to do with the heat shock proteins too and um also yeah there's been studies showing that if you um increase blood flow like like if you do resistance training it used to be like this thing where it's like oh don't do any endurance training like like at the on the same day that you're doing resistance training because you're going to blunt your gangs or something I don't remember what it exactly was called but that's kind of been put to rest it's not true uh so so to to well I guess there's always extreme there's always outlayer I should say ways you could do it but generally speaking like getting some blood flow to your muscles after you've done training actually improves hypertrophy right because you're getting some growth factors and things there and immune cells things that are like playing a role in the hypertrophy is there a window post training that you need to get into the heat within not necessarily no within the same day no I think you should do it if you okay you act you asked me about the optimal protocol I would say optimally it would be after training it doesn't have to be because also Heat plays a role in sleep so PE some people choose to do their heat at night like a couple hours before they're going to go to bed you can go I actually have been kind of obsessive about this of late and I do both so I do I get in the sauna after I work out and then I do the jacuzzi at night with my husband um which is another form of heat stress you're in you know 104 degree Fahrenheit water you can be in there for 20 minutes and get similar responses in terms of biomarkers as a sauna so I do think um if you're only going to do one you can kind of choose like do you have a hard time sleeping being do you want to or do you want to kind of extend your workout and now I don't know that you have to do it like I think there's also been observational data by the way the study with the cyclist and the sauna that was in untrained people so you might go oh what about trained people yeah but then there's observational data showing that people that do exercise or people that exercise and sauna so this is all sorts of people this is these are people that are exercising these aren't newbies right the people that do exercise in sauna have a higher V2 Max compared to people that only exercise so there's evidence I think that that kind of makes it a little stronger that it's not just a newbie gain right like that it's probably something going and I think it's because it's it's mimicking cardiovascular exercise so do you have to do it after a workout no you don't have to uh but I do think it's I I personally like to do it after a workout it's like I've already got my heart rate up you know it's it's so it's really just like extending extending my workout some to some the two uh windows that seem to be at least interesting to use would be 2 hours is finishing 2 hours before bed I say that yeah because some people take longer to cool down yeah me too I do exactly so yeah two hours like to get out before you know like because then you don't want to be like trying to go to sleep then you'll have the opposite effect right you're too hot you can't fall asleep and then post-workout so postwork workout and a couple of hours before sleep what temperature how long per week what else yeah so um temperature duration frequency like how many times you know so there's all sorts of studies coming out of Finland where saunas are ubiquitous and everyone's using one looking at you know sauna use and all cause mortality cardiovascular rated mortality dementia Alzheimer's disease all those things right and what's clear is that there is a dose dependent effect with frequency and duration in the sauna so in other words the more frequent the sauna use the more bust of the effect so I'll give you an example all cause mortality is 40% lower in people that use the sauna four to seven times a week so four times would be minimum right versus people that use it two to three times a week they have a 24% lower all CA mortality right so the bare minimum would be two if you want something um this is compared to people that use it one time a week but if you want the most robust effects the bare minimum would be four up to seven right every day so that would be frequency now temperature and duration most of those studies in Finland the average temperature in the Publications is about 174 175 degree Fahrenheit and the duration in that sauna is also important so if people only stayed in for 11 minutes they weren't getting a very robust effect they had to stay in for at least 20 minutes so 20 minutes at 174 degree fah four times a week is the recipe for I would say the the best you know uh effects for cardiovascular brain all cause mortality what about if you increase temperature and reduce duration yeah so this question usually I get it the opposite because people are interested in infrared saas and infrared saas go only to like 145 degree Fahrenheit they kind of heat you up a little differently they're not the ambient air is not as hot it's like you know electrons that are like moving your molecules in your body up but um and so in that case you would want to stay in a much longer duration and that's what's used in like Ashley Mason study but the opposite so like if you're going to you know what 180 or how how hot are we talking M was 230 today okay so um heat is so heat is a stress it's it's a stress on the body right and you have this stress response to the heat right so your body makes heat shock proteins for example you get dark thoughts you you get dark thoughts yeah exactly and then and then you get and you feel great but um you also get chatty in there so um it's it's important to keep in mind that you don't want to go too extreme on heat because it is a stress like just like you don't want to like exercise like all day like you need recovery right you don't want to fast like forever like you need food these things are stressed they stressors on the body and our body has a stress response to them so this is kind of like hormesis we talked about hormesis a lot right hot heat is the same thing um heat can permeabilize the bloodb brain barrier when you start to go to extreme temperature melting my brain I'm concerned that that 230 is too high yeah there's so there was one study that came um that was published was it 2022 it was kind of recentish and um it wasn't from um Dr Yari Lenin's group who is the main researcher who does a lot of studies out of Finland uh looking at you know sauna use and dementia for example he found Sona use is associated with like a 66% reduction in Alzheimer diseas and dementia if you're they're using it four to seven times a week well another study came out and this was in gosh it was quite a few I don't remember it was two or 5,000 adults it was a lot or maybe it was more actually um well anyways they looked at temperature and they looked at duration and they looked at Alzheimer's disease risk and you know it was clear that you know if you use the sauna you had a lower degree a lower risk of of dementia and alcer disease but there was a subset of group where people were using it at 200 degrees Fahrenheit or more that had the opposite effect wow so you shaped curve to temperature I think so I don't talk about I don't want people to get freaked out because it's like but not everyone's doing 200 I think there's the extreme there's always this extreme push where I'm gonna go hard and if you're that personality type you're going to be that person that goes all the way because that's what you do on everything you do the dialup yeah so um I do think with sauna though it's important to keep in mind that it is a pretty strong stress on the body particularly if you're not head out right but if you're getting your head in there and warming it up to 230° yeah this plunge thing is really really intense I mean there's a couple of things when you think about like where's the thermometer actually located is it is it it's at the top unless you're stood on your tiptoes on the bench you're not actually going to get your head to that point and the difference between this one that I've got is two benches and the lower bench is way cooler half half as hard as sitting on the upper bench and the upper bench isn't at the all the way at the top and if you're at the other side to where the rock heater thing is if you're over there then it's easier and if you're at the front then it's a bit hard so you can kind of mitigate within that I suppose um one consideration like four times a week can be quite intrusive for somebody to get that heat exposure especially if they don't even if you do have a sauner at home it's still pretty intrusive like got to go back and forth to the thing and preheat it and all the rest of the stuff is there a or if you were to do 20 minutes in at 180 190 something like that uh to make sure that it's 174 uh and then take a little break and then go back in is that a way that you could maybe get away with doing three times a week or two times a week and still try and capture some of those really good gains um I don't know that that data is there to make that statement but I do know that there have been studies looking at going repeatedly and taking taking a few minutes break and going back into the sauna and what is clear is that you do get big major boost in growth hormone is this the thing that 16 increased yes tell tell us that yes so what they were doing is they were going so they're going I don't remember how many times but it was quite full times 30 minutes with a break yeah with break something like that yeah so it's been years since I've talked about that study but yeah so um and that that could give 16 fold increase in growth hormone which you know it does it's transient it doesn't like last forever but you know also growth hormones involved with sleep and in deep sleep and so it's it's another reason why doing that like timing your sauna around around bedtime could be highly beneficial for a lot of people like a lot of people really do benefit so I personally like I said I do I kind of do both I did like the I do the hot tub um which is 104 degrees and I'm in there for like 30 minutes and but the difference being that it's 104 degrees of liquid touching your skin exactly no and there's been studies that have looked at so there's heat shock proteins that are activated um in the sauna and they're also activated in the hot tub and brain Drive neurotrophic factor which is from exercise also is activated when you get in a hot tub so and and the sauna so it's like when you start to see the biomarkers that are similar between the different heat modalities you kind of go well at the end of the day is your heart rate going up in the H tub yes it's like I've been I've done the sauna for like years and years and years and years I like I know how I feel I feel the exact same way in the sauna I like the the sauna better because I'm less likely to cheat like I will cheat e in a hot tub I will get my arms out I like you have to have your shoulders down for 20 minutes so you have to really like didn't you uh I saw you on Twitter get into a you got in trouble with big steam like the steam room versus uh Sauna versus jacuzzi thing I think there's a lot of people that are like evangelists for the sauna being the only way to get hot and I think that you'd mentioned there quite a lot of different ways that you can get hot there's a lot of different ways you can get hot and I think I mean I've done a lot of steam showers again you're getting your heart rate up you're you're getting you're increasing your uh cardiac output you're getting blood flow increases you're sweating like all these things are happening it's it's the heat shock response you're you know there's a lot of ways what is it the a lot of rams to a lot of roads to Rome right I mean it's not what uh if somebody doesn't have uh access to e easy access to a sauner or doesn't have on in the house what about just running a hot bath and then continuing to like I I mean how much is a thermometer that you put in the bath it probably $5 maybe $10 or something throw that in get it at what temperature and stay in for 20 minutes exactly I do this a lot when I'm traveling by the way like I get I do the um the portable sauna I Do I Do It um but so what I what I like to to recommend is like so go and get one of those pool thermometers right I mean they're like you said they're like anywhere between five to 15 floaty ones the little floaty ones you put that in your bathtub and you get it up to 104 set your timer for 20 minutes make your make sure your shoulders are down like submerged below and if the the the temperature starts to go down just add some more hot water and that's that's it most most people have a bathtub and so I like that it can be accessible because that's another thing I get a lot of oh well I don't have a sauna position yeah you know and yeah there's a lot of gyms but this isn't Finland like we're you know everyone has a sauna you so so I do realize that there's a limitation on the saunas and you well then why do I need to like do I need it you know like I said so there's the V2 Max you know that you're getting you're getting even better than just exercise now there's people out there that are endurance athletes like they're I don't know do they need it like for VO2 max probably not but it also helps with disuse atrophy muscle atrophy um and those Studies have been done so they've done studies where they do like this they immobilize a limb and people for like a period of weeks and they did local heating in in one study but there's been a lot of animal studies doing sort of whole body Heating and it'll prevent disuse atrophy by like 40% I snapped my achilles 3 years ago full Detachment playing cricket and it was 13 days from when that happened until when I got my surgery uh so I'm waiting for I wanted a very particular surgeon in the UK to come and do it one of the the guys had been highly recommended to me which meant I had to wait a little bit longer 13 days of not stepping on my right leg and it was gone it was so alarming to look down and see especially because you've got the other leg to [ __ ] compare it to so you're laid in the bath or whatever looking down and thinking like this is wild it's so crazy and obviously you see people that are in wheelchairs who maybe don't use their lower limbs all that much and they've got very thin legs and yeah it was what it was crazy to see that in 13 days well you were young when this happen and so you can recover you can bounce back quite quickly um but people that are older like they go and they get influenza and they're like convalescing for like weeks right they're not moving they're not using their muscles they can't recover like they'll never get back to that that pre and and this is where I think the heat comes in and also Omega-3s so I know omega-3 it's like I can't like like there's like there's like a few low hanging fruit right is brought to you by Omega-3s but it it's been shown to cut disuse atrophy by like 50% so and this but this is something that's not going to happen like you have to preload it so you have to it it the Omega-3s accumulate in the muscle membranes and it takes about four weeks for that to happen so you have to plan ahead or just be the person that's already taking him that way it's already there right and so then you're ready talk to me about cold we've got hot cold cold exposure yeah so deliberate cold EXP exposure um is another typee of hortic stress and there's some overlap but there's different like you can increase heat Chuck proteins from cold exposure heat Chuck he these stress response Pathways there's a lot of overlap where you can like because it's just it's it's an it's an adaptation right we were meant to move we were meant to be hot we were meant to be cold we meant to get plant phytochemicals where there you know our our bodies respond and we activate all these really beneficial genetic Pathways so they all kind of overlap some do it better than others like heat chock proteins are more robustly activated by heat but cold also activates them just an interesting thing to to think about um so cold Exposure One of the most robust physiological responses to cold cold exposure would be norrine release and we were talking uh earlier about mood and like neurotransmitter optimization things to do like behaviors you can engage in and and timing of those behaviors around things that are you know perhaps um GNA require a better mood or motivation or something like that right so Co norepinephrine does play a role in in in motivation and mood and those things and like I got in the cold shower before I came here and I usually do that before like a talk or you know something like that as well but um so Norine release is one of the the most consistent physiological responses you can get that from 20 seconds at like 40° fit water or two Excuse Me 2 minutes at um 49 or 50° Fahrenheit water will will release norep norepinephrine twofold over Baseline um or you can be crazy and stay in like 50 degree water for an hour who does that um and you'll get a five-fold increase so um why we why would you want norepinephrine well it is a neurotransmitter it does play a role in Focus attention it regulates mood um it helps with like anxiety all those things are important so it's kind of I personally like to time it around things like cold exposure um also sort of benefits with respect to mitochondrial biogenesis you can get in cold plunge and stay in there for 15 minutes and increase mitochondrial biogenesis markers in muscle tissue so that's the growth of new mitochondria in your muscle tissue that's great mitochondria are producing more energy so it's associated with less muscle atrophy it's assoc but you can get that from a high-intensity workout too so you don't have to necessarily do the cold um when should you do the cold so I I can tell you when not to do it when not to do it would be after sort of a strength training or resistance training workout how long's the window so so that's the good question so I've come up with my own sort of window on this and I can tell you the rationale behind that but so here's the thing there's been a couple of studies and it's actually not all consistent the first study that came out that was like the big made the big deal um it was like I don't know 2015 or so when it came out or something like that and the study did it was a cold ice bath and it was five minutes after a strength training workout where people the like the men went in and like put their leg or something like that in the in the ice bath for 15 minutes and this was right after the workout okay or they did passive recovery where they were actually on a stationary bike so the control group wasn't just sitting around they were actually in my opinion increasing hypertrophy by movement okay just that's clear I think that's a flaw of the study and so the people that did the ice bath right after there were there was train work at how still had hypertrophy but they had less than the control group Y and so that was was like oh it's blunting gains and so I was like dive back then I would dive into I was trying to dive into leg or legs I don't remember right I was just wondering because it would be interesting if they compared the leg the other leg Yeah I don't I don't remember um it's been so long since I've read that study but uh so when you are when you're doing exercise when you're doing resistance training you're obviously causing an inflammatory response right that's part of the stress and there's a counter to that there's a very potent anti-inflammatory response and um with the with the resistance training you're actually damaging muscle right you're damaging the muscle it's like a mechanical force activating all sorts of Pathways Well turns out that immune cells have to get to that muscle and that plays a role in in the hypertrophy but like this whole response if you look at like some of the cyto kindes and igf-1 that's involved in in signaling and all that it happens like it Peaks like an hour after after resistance training and then after that it kind of goes back down and so the question is when you're getting in the cold you're causing basil restri constriction so norepinephrine I mentioned is a uh neurotransmitter it's also a hormone it's made in the periphery as well and it's involved in basoc constriction which is the opposite of what heat does vasod dilation so when you're basoc constricting you're cutting off the roads to get to your muscle right like the growth factors the immune cells all those things can't get there right you're you're stopping that I think this is what's happening uh and so you know it's like well what if I just wait like an hour or two would I be safe possibly or maybe just you know do it at a few hours like five hours what's the rule you use five um so I I personally don't do as much much cold exposure as I should do because I talk about it I do it a lot more in the summer when it's hot and but when I do do it most of the time it's before something I know it's like it's ridiculous but it's the truth um or I'll do it in the morning like so I personally don't like to time it right after my heat exposure mostly because blood pressure changes for me that are just freaky that I don't it's wild doing contrast therapy is very very weird it is yeah I mean some people like that right I I enjoy it but it's like a dizzy feeling it's a dizzy and I've had like even more extreme where it was like vertigo and I like it sit on the and just yeah exactly stare at the floor and hope that it goes away yeah so I'm I'm not too like fond of that feeling so I like to separate them you know a little bit um although I think if I if I wait like 5 to 10 minutes after I get out of the sauna like and just kind of at room temperature just chill out for a minute let my heart rate come down then I get in the cold I don't have that response so like waiting a little bit so um I think the rule of thumb for cold exposure is I think that neurotransmitter optimization optimization like when do you want to use it to get that noop and Efron hit because it does help with Focus intention it helps with mood anxiety and so like you know if you want to like if you wake up in the morning first thing and do it that's a great way to start the day um I like to wake up and get on my pelaton or do my workout uh but also just timing it around things like I said I did a cold shower before I came here y um if I'm at home I'll get into the cold plunge before something that you know is going to cause me more anxiety or just I need more focus and attention so you mentioned uh 20 seconds at 40° is enough for the norepinephrine but what about if we're looking for the full Cascade we're going to capture as much as we can most that is realistic for people to do how long how frequently how cold per week so we talked about nephrine and we talked a little bit about mitochondrial biogenesis the growth of new mitochondria in skeletal muscle and that was 15 minutes at 50° which if you can get to the 3 minute 3 and a half minut minute Mark at 50° you can get to 50 the rest of it's fine yeah but um there's another benefit we didn't talk about which is actually making more mitochondria and your adapost tissue and that's an adaptation that is a response to cold exposure because when you have more mitochondria in your fat you're you're basically making it's basically you're making more energy you burn more energy but you also release heat as a byproduct and so it's an adaptation the more you use the cold the it's called Browning of fat and the reason for that is because when you look at a fat droplet under a microscope and there's more mitochondria in it it looks Brown compared to White so so that's also something that happens and most of the studies looking at Browning of fat in humans have not been done in getting into cold water they've been done in like humans walking around at 50° Fahrenheit or putting on a cold suit that's 50° Fahrenheit I know it's like one of those things you like walk around with the air yeah and um and so again for those I mean it's it's it's anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour you start to you start to get that so 15 minutes I think is a good marker for session for a session for you the whole shebang yep right like not just the norepinephrine but the mitochondrial benefits if you're also looking for Browning of the fat and you know the muscle at what temperature and so that would be like 50° 49 degrees Fahrenheit if you can and which is it's I mean that's cold some people go that's pretty miserable I mean what you to again it's so funny like the Bro version of me and my friends that do this in Austin if we go to kuya uh where I've said that you should go if if you're coming through um it's 220 in the sauna it's 37° in the ice bath and we're doing 20 and three three times like but it seems like dialing that back in terms of intensity and increasing it in terms of frequency and duration is where we're actually going to May not even capture more gains but reduce some of the negative uh effects of us going hell for leather on yeah I mean you got to think about like you know the the fact that this you are stressing your body right like you want a you want the stress to be good and great enough and you know robust enough but you don't like there's a window right like you don't want to like go outside that window where it's like damage yeah but we're all one rep max pilled on everything so all of the Bros that go and do it go well look like when I went into the gym going to failure or doing Drop sets or you know pushing myself until I want to throw up that worked that has to be the universal rule for all modalities of stimulus therefore I'll just do the sa till I like want to pass out and I'll crawl out and that's got to be the best how long are you do you stay in that 230 uh and do you get down do you keep going down to each step up and down it depends on whether my housemate's there and we also watch stuff so we'll put a speaker in there and like watch little bit of like uh an interview or YouTube or whatever um usually about 15 to 20 minutes is like my real upper Bound for that 231 that's a lot for that hot yeah it was it was rough it burns the inside of your nose like if you try and breathe in through your nose it hurts it hurts my nostrils to do that anyway um 15 minutes 50° uh not done within 5 hours of hypertrophy training let's just say it to be safe right uh also probably not done within a couple of hours of going to sleep because that's maybe going to cause some complications when it comes to getting your body cold temperature right uh you talking about cold yes I know I think I think it's like like it can help with sleep too actually doing cold so both hot and cold can both hot and cold can help with sleep because if you go hot then it's going to bounce back and pull you into cold it it it yeah your body does go like if you notice when you get out of sauna like doesn't take it I don't know how it it varies on each person but after a little bit of time all of a sudden you're really cold right you're like yeah so um I don't know that it you know I think people even do like hot and I've done this hot and cold and it does really help with s doing both as well okay but it's also kind of a exhausting thing with your with your body which makes sense right I went to this place in Toronto called other ship have you heard of this it sounds yes yeah I have yeah my so they're cool it's similar to kuya in Austin other ship do classes for heat and cold so they've got this 90 person sauna which is like a Coliseum and it's this ra sort of seating and benches and it's huge this SAA thing at the front looks like a massive barbecue grill for the biggest party that you've ever seen and then they have coaches that guide you through the cold exposure as well so there's kind of like pts stood at the end of each of the cold tubs and they say what are you wanting to get out of the session today and they'll take you through different modalities one of the ones that they did with us which I really loved was 30 seconds in 30 seconds out three rounds of the cold and while you were in there you were moving both arms and legs and doing a little bit of toning like vocal like toning stuff and uh that was wild I'd never done that before we tend to just get in sit in for two to three minutes get out go back in the SAA but that was really interesting the effect of doing that was was pretty cool yeah doing a workout in there because again you're you're it's like making your workout harder right it's like because they're both sort of to some degree doing like doing at least physiological response is kind of similar with respect to cardiovascular well there's also something about if you don't have an agitator in the cold tub everyone's everyone's done this everyone knows that you get in and you sit and you're like I'm just going to wait for the film of warm water to kind of get around me and if I really really don't move it'll be less painful but doing this is just it's so miserable so miserable uh frequency 15 minutes uh 50° how often I I don't know that there's an established frequency like there is with the sauna right this isn't like there's not large observational studies looking at people that are cold plunging but I will tell you so I talked to Dr Lain and about this is said what what percentage of people in Finland because the saunas are the sauna studies are coming out ground finland's ground zero yeah like are doing are because they a lot of people will just they'll they'll do they have like these public SAS as it's called and the community will get in there and then they go in like in the winter time they just go into the Baltic and jump in and it's cold and I I've been there I've experienced it I've seen it so um he was saying about 10% of people I was actually thought it was going to be more than that U but it's not about 10% of the people are are doing are going doing contrast therapy so they're going from hot to cold so then you you go oh well because I wanted to know I was like are some of these benefits like from the contrast and there's not a lot of research on it you know so the the question is like I don't I don't think that you can give a frequency like with absolute confidence four to seven times per week exactly yes so it's more of a okay well are you looking for these Browning of fat is that because it'll go away when you stop doing it so you have to keep it up um and the more you do it it is kind of dose dependent so what do you try and do I told you that I don't do enough cold exposure unless it's the summer what would you try and do um yeah I mean so I look I feel great I feel great this morning when I was doing my cold shower right like I like to use it for that like mood booster acute so performance it's an acute performance enhancer that neurotransmitter optimization thing that's why that's why I like to use it and every time I do it I'm like why don't I do this more I know why because I'm doing the hit and the muscles and then I'm the mom and I like got the podcast and that you know so it's like that's it's almost like I think it's almost easier to just at least if it's winter to just get into the cold shower because it's like less of like something about the cold plunge you got to like lift the lid lift the lid you got to lift the lid you got to think about you're like oh it's the cold plunge and I got to get past that that three three and a half minute Mark where you know you you're burning and then you're not burning so um I think I think that I just would like to start using it on a more of a daily basis for the way it makes me feel and that's why I like it mostly it seems to me based on what you're saying here that although there is definitely a place for cold exposure and deliberate cold exposure has some effect that you don't capture with the sauna if you were to make a pie chart of what's happening with heat and cold a lot of it is coming from heat and only a little bit of it is coming from cold yeah when we're talking about aot of these Health outcomes with respect to cardiovascular disease and dementia and all cause mortality all it is it's all but you know again the hot is mimicking moderate intensity exercise so yeah that makes sense um the cold I I I really just it come all comes back again to that makes you feel so good you're getting that norrine it does brown your fat and like look Browning of fat is a therapeutic Target for many researchers that have been researching this now and for you know over a decade where there it it it's it's it's being looked at to help as a treatment for type two diabetes because you do improve metabolic Health like from browning of fat but compare that to like exercise diet what you're eating I don't know that it matters I don't know that the cold even compares like don't I don't even know that we should been talking about the metabolic benefits of it when you're when there's like so much more bang for your buck sprinkling on the top of the icing on the top of the yeah exactly and it's like okay I'm making more mitochondria and my muscles but I want to be doing hit and vigorous EXC for all the other benefits and guess what I get mitochondrial biogenesis from that like pretty robustly is that um with the brown browning of the fat is that uh wrists in and clavicle in is that one of the cues that I've heard about this have you seen this stuff no I don't that's interesting so there'll be people screaming at us in the comments but um when I was at other ship when I've been to kuya uh when I've been with uh huberman uh there's something to do with the wrist area kind of up to the bottom of the palm and something about the clavicle as well uh being an area which is particularly susceptible to um benefiting from cold exposure for this brown adpost tissue thing I heard this story that sounded true which was during World War II the Germans were trying to work out why their fighter pilots were dying so quickly when they were ejecting over the British Channel let's say that they'd run out of fuel or they'd been shot down or that the engine had failed for some reason or another and the pilots were ejecting and they were finding them dying very shortly after the plane had gone down so they had a lot of prisoners in one form or another that they were able to do these tests on and what they found was that if the life jackets lifted the clavicle up out of the water the survival time went through the roof so there's something very important about this area of the body being under the water and that is the converse reason apparently which is why your clavicle should be under when you're doing deliberate cold exposure that's interesting I know there's a you know when you're when you get into cold water particularly if you're not uh adapted like you're not deliberately doing it there's a cold chock response right and so I wonder you know and some of that plays a role in like people actually having you know dying from from getting in really cold water I don't I wonder if there's a connection there between the cold chock response and very interesting yeah because less of them is under the water when it comes to exercise what is your framework for designing an exercise routine um well so for me I personally get very motivated when I understand how things work and and look at data and see outcomes and I think okay well I need to you know get my routine around this whatever you know is is is the data um and so I have been pretty convinced that I've always been like a runner I've always been endurance more of an endurance Chucky I'm not an athlete like I've done like one marathon in my entire life you know I'm not out there clocking those kinds of miles but I do enjoy going for runs and I enjoy um that sort of endurance exercise so um for me that was always what I might go to and less focusing on resistance training as we've talked about hugely important for muscle mass but um the question is well how hard do I to go on the you know on the endurance so does it need to be more of a vigorous exercise workout or moderate intensity lower intensity is anything better than nothing yes I think at the end of the day like the most important thing is habit like what are you going to consistently do right like you're going to consistently do some sort of physical activity and it needs to be that like whatever it is that you will do otherwise like you can talk about what's the best but if you won't do it uh it doesn't matter right so um I try to get a lot of vigorous intensity exercise in so that would be 80% max heart rate and um the reason for that is because I've been pretty convinced that if you are not an athlete doing more than 10 hours a week or 10 or more right of you know endurance training so if you're if you're not that person um I think that it's more beneficial the data suggests it's more beneficial to engage the majority of the time in more vigorous intensity exercise versus what's zone two training right so like a lower intensity or I guess it's more moderate intensity the talk test kind of exercise right where you're breathy but you can still have a conversation which I do like doing those as well particular when I'm having a conversation with someone on a run it's nice I enjoy it but um I do also go harder um I do a lot of high-intensity interval training and um I think that the there's there's evidence for that uh if you are going harder and you're getting that heart rate up to 80% max heart rate you're increasing that lactate and we've talked about this that you know that in itself is beneficial um it's beneficial for the brain and I think that's one reason I'm particularly motivated because I'm very interested in brain health and so lactate has been shown lactate is consumed by the brain during physical activity this has been shown in humans and it fuels basically your normal function while you're exercising it's your brain is working harder while you're exercising just like your heart and your mou muscles your brain is working harder too and lactate is feeling that and you're you're you're basically increasing norepinephrine and serotonin from that lactate so lactated self is actually it can be used as an energy source a very utilizable energy source much like beta hydroxy berate which is a ketone body that you make when you're either fasting or on a ketogenic diet um it's very similar and so lactate increases those neurotransmitters it also increases that brain Drive neurotrophic factor which has been beneficial for growing new neurons it's beneficial for neuroplasticity for basically making you feel better making you smarter staving off neurogen or disease like there's you want bdnf like that's what you want and so and again this is all evidence-based studies that have been shown in hum showing that the higher intensity the more intense the workout the more vigorous the more lactate and lactate is signaling to increase that it's the way that your muscles communicate with other organs like it's it's increasing lactate and lactate is going to other it's being shuttled to other organs and and it's signaling to them to do these beneficial things it's called the lactate shuttle it's also being shuttled back into your muscle and doing things like increasing glucose subate we talked about that as well so the lactate itself is only going to come when you're cranking up the intensity when you're working hard enough that you can't get enough oxygen to your muscles you know to to basically produce energy so that's sort of the the I'm actually trying to make more lactate and the lactate increase doesn't last long it's pretty transient like 20 minutes or so you'll be back to your Baseline after a pretty intense workout so um there's data not only showing that it's beneficial for the brain and be brain brain Drive neurotrophic factor and these neurotransmitters is talking about but also um lactate itself is used by neurons so the lactate that's going into your brain it's it's transported across the bloodb brain Bearer it's used by neurons as an energy source and in fact our neurons prefer lactate so our asites which is a supporting cell in our brain they make a lot of lactate because they actually are what's called glycolytic they use glucose without their mitochondria as energy and they shuttle the lactate out and neurons take it up and so neurons like to use lactate because they use they they it they can use lactate as an energy source without um using as much much energy as they do with glucose so it takes more energy to use glucose to make energy then it does lactate that makes sense it's so funny you know even when you were in school people would learn about the lactate threshold and they know that that was the reason that your muscles burn when you're doing CrossCountry running and you're 13 years old or whatever and it's almost like the enemy in some ways it's a thing that hurts I don't want it I don't like that and now you're telling me that it might actually be super useful super it's it's it's definitely the thing that you want um it's it's it's just it's hugely beneficial for the brain you know again it's it's also beneficial for the bloodb brain barrier it's increasing VF which is a growth factor that helps you grow new blood vessels and like repair blood vessels at your blood brain barrier so it doesn't break down which happens with age so it is and I was talking about the neurons using it um there's there's evidence that when so when your neurons use lactate they spare glucose they don't need glucose because they're using lactate for energy right and what happens is called the glucose sparing effect and what that means is glucose can be used for other things and what it's used for is producing it's a pre it makes a pre precursor for glutathione which is the major antioxidant in the brain and so um there's actually there's there's research out there looking at giving people lactate infusions that have TBI does that feel like well it's like sodium lactate so it feels like you know saline but oh okay yeah so so people that have a TBI a traumatic brain injury they have massive like injury in their brain right and um they need glutathione it's a very potent antioxidant but their glucose is being used up to make energy I mean it's not there's nothing there to make the glutathione and so there's these studies that have shown that the sodium lactate infusions is has a beneficial effect with TBI because it again I think this is the mechanism that's happening one of many is it's helping with the glucose sparing so glucose is used to make more antioxidant in your brain so that on top of it's also making bdnf brain dfic Factor okay so I think that there'll be a lot of people listening who fall into one of two camps almost everyone listening will be training in some way or another right this is an audience of Jack people but one will skew toward the bodybuilding style training it'll probably be a three to five day split like Push Pull legs or maybe a body part split or something like that uh and those people will likely be trying to hit you know their six to 10,000 steps per day so they'll be focused very much on the resistance training there'll be another Camp of people who are like heavy on zone two there'll be the runners there'll be the cyclists maybe there'll be some hybrid training people that are in there but even the hybrid training guys are going to just be doing like either Camp one or Camp two what you're saying is that there is third Camp which is this high-intensity vigorous exercise and that that may be the most important one of all so I think that uh if we're talking about the the camp with the zone 2 and if we're if we're talking about athletes more I mean these are people that are clocking a lot of miles right just normal people okay so these are like committed exercise is doing maybe you know four two to four hours a week of exercise they'll do a PO run and they'll like you know they'll they'll they'll keep on top of that runs throughout the week or whatever yeah I think that if that's so again going back to like if that's what they're going to do every it's running is beneficial like you're also going to get a lot of benefits from just doing Zone 2 right like if but you know there's I think that if you can step it up to being a little bit more vigorous if you can still do that and habitually Do It um incorporate some high intensity enable training in there as well uh I do think it's very beneficial and you know it's also beneficial for the V2 Max improvements like there's been studies that have been done looking at people that are actually meeting the requirements for um aerobic exercise per week so it's like two and a half hours a week and even if they're Meeting those like doing moderate intensity exercise there's like 40% of those people will not improve their V2 Max like they're called non-responders it's not really known why they don't respond respond but it's thought because you know improvements in in your cardiorespiratory Fitness as measured by V2 Max it's an adaptation and in in order to have that adaptation like a stronger stressor will produce a little bit more of a robust adaptation and so there are studies that have identified like people that don't respond if they then engage in more high-intensity training they can get those V2 Max Improvement that's 40% of people that would be be doing your Zone 2 plus resistance training style stuff that doesn't Peak up I mean Petra tier told me that V2 Max is the single most important metric when looking at someone's longevity how much truth do you think's in that I I think that absolutely he's right I think V2 Max is one of the single and and and the thing I love about it is that it's something that you can measure it's a biomarker I think it's one of the most important things absolutely and there's you know there's there's some evidence that like doing doing this vigorous exercise is important but it has to be like a longer interval type of exercise so you know at least 1 minute that would be sort of the minimum but like better if you can get to 4 minutes so there's something called the Norwegian 4x4 protocol and that's four minutes at the highest intensity that you can maintain for that entire four minutes followed by three minut minute recovery of like light light exercise I mean you want your heart rate to come down so that you could do it again four times right so miserable sounds absolutely miserable the Norwegian 4x4 um and you know there's there was a study and I like I like this is one of the studies that inspired me and this is this was a study out of uh UT Southwest and Dallas and um the study took 50y olds that were healthy but they were not physically active so they didn't have like type two diabetes and all that but they weren't active they're also drained exactly they're drained and they put them on a pretty intensive training protocol for 2 years okay two years it was a 2-year intervention and it was a progressive protocol so obviously when you have an untrained person you don't just write out the bat Norwegian 4x4 day one no that's not going to happen so it took them six months to kind of work up their their their training right their endurance and by the time they got to their six-month Mark they were doing about you know 4 hours a week of what's called maximal intensity exercise so this is vigorous this is this is 4 hours a week of maximum intensity yeah wow so they were doing so they were basically doing it was like as as high as you can maintain you know in vigorous intensity workout for 30 minutes basically so they're doing these 30- minute workouts where you're doing like 75 80% max heart rate for 30 minutes okay so they're doing that eight times a week yeah I mean so no they're also doing they're doing other things as well so they're doing it's not when I say four hours a week they're exercising four hours a week they're also thought you meant they were doing four hours of this full by full no no no no no they were doing exercise four hours a week um but they were doing um a majority of that was maximal intensity exercise so a lot of that was they were doing like 30 minute sessions of this and I think they were probably doing like one and a half to two hours of that Y and then they were also doing some strength training and then they were doing the Norwegian 4x4 so it was kind of a nice sort of balanced and then the control group was doing this sort of I say strength training but it was more I guess body weight you know kind of stuff um the control group was doing that so it was a type of sort of body weight training but it wasn't high intensity like it wasn't like the the CrossFit kind of stuff that you could do it was it was more like lower stretching kind of stuff maybe yoga is kind of thing and um so so after two years these people like the the cardiac structure so as we age our heart gets smaller and it gets stiffer and this happens it's like part of aging um that results in a lot of things so cardiovascular disease risk goes up but also like your exercise performance and capacity goes down so so after that two years of you know doing this pretty vigorous intensity exercise protocol they um the people the 50-year-olds they reversed their cardiac structure aging by 20 years so their hearts were looking more like 30-year-old Hearts versus 50-year old hearts and this is after 2 years of doing this and to me it was so motivating to go wow these 50-year-olds can do this like these were untrained people who don't usually work out and by the end of these two years I mean they were like getting at it um and so I've you know kind of stepped up my my game a bit also like I've got a coach coming and I'm working with um two two days a week and to do I'm doing a lot of uh it's like a resistance training but like kind of interval as well so I'm getting the high heart rate and and that interval training it's so funny to see Peter tier and yourself kind of converge on this new not it's not as if it's new but it was definitely something that I wasn't hearing about four years ago I wasn't hearing people talk about this everything was zone two it was you know like go slow to go fast or whatever the tagline is and um one of the problems with Zone 2 is that you need quite a high duration like by Design because you know 45 minutes or an hour multiple times per week she's actually difficult so lots of benefits of improving V2 Max what are take us through the Norwegian 4x4 again and then what else is in there if there was a protocol or a number of protocols you were going to design here's a program that you can take away today into your gym and do that will help to improve your V2 Max what would you tell people I would say the Norwegian 4x4 is by far the best and you're going to get the if for the people that are really um determined and committed that would be it that would be the four minutes of the exercise intensity as hard as you can go and maintain it for that entire four minutes so obviously dig into that what what do you mean as hard as you can go and maintain it what does that mean it means you don't want to go like all out like like 95% of your your max heart rate um because then you can only last for like a minute you know and so so then you're going to go down you're going to you're going to slow down right so what it means is like you want to go you know it might for some people might be like 75% max heart rate right so some people might be 80% but you want to go as hard as you can for the 4 minutes uh without like really slowing down so you kind of have to pace yourself a little bit but you don't want to go too slow right like you definitely can't be talking like you should not be able to talk for sure when you're doing it so it's hard enough that you just absolutely can't talk but it's not all out so four minutes four minutes and then 3 minutes of totally light like you're going all the way this is like you know your like back to like Zone one if you want to call it something if your heart can come come down your heart come down yeah and you're doing that for 3 minutes because you want to give your you want to recover so that you can do it again and it and you repeat it it's it's a four it's a four-time protocol so you do it once and then you repeat it three times or you just call the 4x4 I think that's probably one of the the best protocols to improve V2 Max now uh Dr Martin gabala um I've had him on my podcast he's a real expert on these high-intensity interval training protocols he does a lot of research on it at McMaster University um in Ontario Canada and he also says you there you know there there's evidence that a one minute protocol so like just even doing like an interval like one minute interval and then doing that like you know a few times also can improve V2 Max so that's a little easier and ALS it's easier like I like I I do one minute intervals um I'm trying to now incorporate the 4x4 into my routine um which is coach's help with that so um but it I imagine it's a motivation thing which is probably one of the biggest hurdles to get over that just if you've got any program in for interview that isn't the Norwegian 4x4 for the day you go ah maybe it's back in biceps or ah maybe I'll just go for a little J it's like Manana Manana Manana yeah it is but again like I said you do have to do you try to make it consistent so uh frequency per week well the Norwegian 4x4 would be like one time a week oh okay and that's that's the that's the hard day that's less that's less Mis day it is okay is there any benefit to going twice per week probably yeah but it would have been so much better if said but these 50y olds yeah these 50y olds did it one time a week for two years and they reversed their cardiac structure aging by 20 years um of course they were they were also doing other vigorous intensity exercise it wasn't the torturous Norwegian 4x4 yep you know like so if Norwegian 4x4 is gold standard at the moment for improving V2 Max what would be some examples of other vigorous exercise uh workouts what else is in that bucket well people can do what they enjoy doing so you can go for a run like I often go for a run and you know I'm doing 75 80% my max heart rate uh usually it's like a 20 minute run that I do that you know so like is as as intense as you can maintain for 20 minutes like that's what you want to do you want to kind of get that you get a feeling for that um so if you like runs because there's a lot of benefits to running you're out in nature well I guess some people do on treadmill I'm not so big on treadmills like I I'll do them like when I go to a gym or something traveling but I like running out in nature I think there's that just there's lots of benefits to doing that um some people like to get on their bike and cycle so like you can just get on your bike and do a 20 to 30 minute uh 75 80% max heart rate cycle right so what we're aiming for here is 75 to 80 % max heart rate for around about 20 minute exposure you can or you can do you could do like a high-intensity interval training so um so high-intensity interval training would be you're going to you're going to go more than 85 80% right you might go you're going to do like more of like a sub maximal perhaps uh perhaps even a maximal interval so you can go up to 90 95% max heart rate so that would be I mean obviously you can only maintain that for like so long right some people might be 30C pushes I do a lot of tobas as well um often times I like to do something every day um most days of the week and it's funny I kind of adopted this this routine when I was I was kind of trying to U do a little bit like Joe Rogan sober October but it was like every day October I was trying to work out every day and I noticed I was like I could do this I'm doing it for like one month and I don't I wasn't going as hard as like the this guys doing the sober October where they were like competition it was like they were just in the if you do something ex do something every day so sometimes I'll do like a 10-minute Tabata where I get on there and I just go hard for 10 minutes it's 20 you know it's most of the time I'll do a 45 second on um 15c off so it's a 3 to1 ratio I really like that one but sometimes I'll do 20 second on 10 uh 10 second off so it's like I do both but like even just 10 minutes again I time it around like like I got I'm going to go do work I'm I want to feel motivated I want to feel better I want to be more focused and all my game and I just get on there for the bike for 10 minutes and do it um you know there's there's studies out there um these sort of exercise snacks now 10 minutes is longer than an exercise snack but there's studies out there where uh people are wearing these like wearable devices right and so you can track their their heart rate you can track how how the heart rate's going up and so there's large large studies they're called the vigorous intensity lifestyle activity and um most people are taking advantage of everyday life like they're they have stairs every day to work they Sprint up them they don't walk up them they Sprint they get their heart rate up to like 75% max heart rate 80% max heart rate they're they're getting intense and people that do this anywhere between 1 to three minutes a day um I mean these these guys have like a 50% lower cancer related mortality cardiovascular related mortality and this was even true for people that identified themselves as non-exercisers so they aren't these are people that are not going to the gym or doing other like tennis or whatever they don't have Leisure Time physical activity so the benefits were also in people that identified as non-exercisers so my point is that the vigorous intensity these like even short bursts of it just consistently like every day a little bit like they do add up there's additive effects and they make a difference so that's also I think really something that's very encouraging because some people oh I got to go and work out for 30 it's like it you need that motivation right like some people don't have that motivation and so um it's a lot easier to just get up and do something for 2 minutes it's hard but you can do it and you can do it at your house what apart from running up and downstairs what are some other ways that people can incorporate exercise snacks to take advantage of this body weight squats um are a great one so you just you're just you know doing your squats and you do it for a minute and then rest for whatever 15 seconds and then do another minute I mean those are hard and they get your heart rate up so you can do that for like 3 minutes uh that's a really good one and then you're going to be really sore if you're not used to it but and then there's the high knees so you do high knees um I mean you could do chair squats you could do plank um the not planks the burpees those burpees so you do like the the plank thing and then you come up and jump and like those are all I think really great examples of just like easy ways to do exercise snacks like even at your desk and um just even breaking up we're talking about improving cognition improving mood breaking up your workday with those like it makes a difference on your mood on your cognition like it it helps you're getting blood flow immediately to your brain so um yeah you were talking you were telling me about um the need for people to break up their sedentary time that there's some very specific risks that people can encounter if they're too sedentary for too long too frequently what's happening there yeah it's interesting um so I never identified myself as sedentary because I've always done something like running or jumping rope or something like going to the gym something I'm where I'm physic active so it's like oh I'm in the Physically Active group I'm not sedentary well it turns out um being sedentary is like what we've been for the past couple of hours we've been sitting here that is sedentary so even when you're even if you you know go to the gym or you go for runs when you are sitting at your desk for a period of hours you are sedentary and sedentary being sedentary itself is an independent risk factor for disease like cancer so now do I think the marathon runner that you know also has a you know desk job where they sit at their desk for8 hours is going to come down with cancer probably not because they're they're they're really putting a lot of effort in and they're they're Physically Active but um I certainly am not the athlete and I am a committed exerciser right so I'm I'm putting in anywhere between you know two to five hours of you know exercise in a week depending on the week right so um for me like I spent a lot of time sitting I spent a lot of time sitting and so that to me was like a big thing it's like oh that's an independent risk factor for breast cancer um which you know a woman's breast cancer risk and just lifetime risk is one in eight it's incredibly high and of course there of course there's lifestyle factors that can sort of increase or decrease that um and just s sedentarism is a independent risk factor for that so again it's it's really and so easy so I've I have started incorporating exercise snacks um I'll get up and I'll start doing some some body weight squats I think that's my my go-to I also like doing um burpees I've been doing some burpees and high KNE I'll do um every hour um I think every couple of hours I've also been starting to time them around my meals um so that's that's another thing I think being aware of the postprandial glucose response and how it affects my my cognitive function my mood uh and also just knowing that it's healthier and it's so easy to do like just do like two or three minutes ofe pre food you can do it pre or post food both trying to do burpees post food might be difficult you can do it up to like an hour after right yeah so one of the things that Dr Stu Mill number one back pain specialist on the planet taught me about forever ago and then Mark Bell also popularized this 10-minute walk 50 minute walk post eating because insulin sensitivity because of helping to re um adjust glucose levels within the blood uh also the muscles of the hips uh and the arms cross across the stomach so actually helps with digestion of food a little bit as well like if you've had a really big meal and all you want to do is lie down actually probably one of the best things that you can do to make yourself feel better is maybe go for a a walk what would you say here we've got the The postmeal Walking crowd and the postmeal burpees crowd like is there something that that that you're missing from one of those or are you happy with either um well I don't know about the whole arms movement aing and digestion thing all that um I do know that the more vigorous intensity when you're actually going to start that feeling that burn right when you start to when you start to get up to that okay I'm making some lactate that's what's actually increasing the the Transporters glucose Transporters GL they're called glute four they're in your muscle and they have to like move their way up to the top and glct is what signals them to do that so when I'm just thinking about the glucose and improving blood glucose levels vigorous is better um you're actually chasing that burn you're chasing the burn and there's been studies that have that have compared Walkers to interval Walkers so these are people that are just walking versus walk pick up the pace while they're walking walk slower pick up the pace while they're walking now they're not running but they're just they're interval walking and it's been shown that interval walking improves a variety of metabolic parameters more than just walking and again it it makes sense because when you're picking up the pace you're you're you're working harder you're making lactate and that's one of the big signals for these glucose Transporters to come up to the top of the muscle and let the glucose in so uh I do think from U mechanistic understanding that and also data showing walking versus interval walking interval walking is better when you can when you can pick up the pace when you can go a little bit more intense it's better all right what about becoming muscled for longevity so that's I'm I'm working on you probably don't I'm not all jacked up but I'm that's that's my that's been my new goal um particularly of of late but for like the past year um I've become more aware of it I've spent more time focusing on it I now have a coach um who's great and coming to work with me to focus on that because I feel you know I'll tell you when it really hit me um I had I had someone on the podcast Mark Dr Mark Matson and he I have admired his work for years he's he's like the intermittent fasting King like he's I I've known of his research since he was in my 20s right like he's also done a lot of work on hormesis and I you know I've just I followed his work for so much of my scientific career so um it was very cool to have him on the podcast and talk to him and uh we were talking all about everything under the sun with respect of fasting and hormesis and and we started talking about uh training and he he has been a you know track you know Runner forever big big endurance athlete you know mountain biking everything and he told me he said you know the one thing that I really reg regret um in my life is that I didn't spend more time building muscle mass because he had an accident he had a mountain biking accident and you know basically couldn't walk around and use his muscles for quite a period of time and he said it it really hit him hard and so um that was my first kind of like oh wow like this like I'm I've always focused on endurance I never thought I really needed to f Focus much on muscle I'm not a bro like I didn't have that incentive to like you know build the muscle and I knew it was important but uh I didn't really I didn't dive in deep enough and and convince myself that it was as important so um that was the first sort of eye opener for me and then I had steuart Phillips on who does a lot of research on resistance training he's the one that like I helped you know identify that the the RDA for protein intake is likely too low um and he he has a really good way of explaining you know muscle mass and this What's called the disability threshold which is what I think everyone that has an older parent or grandparent has seen in in action where you're they get older and they experience that you know take where they're they're out for whatever a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden of course they can't gain their muscle back and then it happens again and then again and then all of a sudden it's just downhill and they can't walk they you know and and the trajectory just plummets um and you know it's it's just not good so in order to sort of you know not let that disability threshold be so devastating you really have to build up your muscle mass earlier in life actually it's never too late but if you can do it earlier in life it's better so um training wise like I now am I'm I'm I used to just do I mean really it was like 30 minutes a week or so of like resistance training you know where I'm just doing dumbbells or something and now I'm doing 2 hours a week maybe a little bit more so that is a new focus and I'm working with the coach because I've noticed I do I'm much more likely to injure myself when I'm just like doing it myself and I don't really know what I'm doing and I'm following like a pelaton class or something so now I'm working with a coach who's um really great and I just I'm I was so sore just after the first training session I was like I thought I was fit you know and here I am like just little T and muscle like I just didn't even know we there so now I'm I'm really trying to get I think minimum like two hours a week of some sort of resistance training where I'm working uh a lot of my muscles not just you know my biceps or my triceps so if investing in muscle mass is like contributing to a retirement fund that you can then withdraw from right in later life what is the age where it starts to become more difficult and then after what age is it basically impossible to gain muscle mass so there's muscle mass and there's muscle strength and I've everything that I know I've learned from the experts like Dr Stuart Phillips like Dr Brad shenfeld and reading their work and um their Publications so um you know muscle mass Peak around 20 to 30 and then after that you start to lose about 8% per decade until you get to 70 it's 12% per decade but strength decreases are even greater than that so um you know we we talk a lot about muscle mass and that's important but but strength is important right like you want to be able to get up and out of a chair like it it makes a difference on your quality of life like being able to be independent and function independently and so that's where um There's Hope especially because so we're talking about muscle mess gains well it's like so what happens when you reach reach the age of 50 it's you know you're not your your anabolic resistance is starting to kick in right you're not being as sensitive to the protein intake you really have to rely more on on the the mechanical force you know of of stimulating muscle protein synthesis as the form of increasing muscle mass and hypertrophy so um is there a time when you won't gain any mus I think you'll continue to gain it it just won't be as much right you're really battling atrophy at that point too so you know the more you can contribute earlier the more you'll have to pull from but I do think the strengths the gains in strength are what is really good because um at least there's studies showing in older adults even ones that haven't really worked out much if they start a um a resistance training program they can counter the atrophy losses and they can gain in they can like regain strength like years that they've lost so you can really gain your strength gains can be really good even in old age and I think that's one of the things that people might be thinking I'm 42 like does that mean that it's too late basically for me me to start gaining muscle or gaining strength or is it is it am I a lost cause at this age no no not at all no not 42 I mean it's going to get more challenging when you're 72 um but even then you're going to gain strength I mean there's studies showing that for sure you know it muscle mass gains won't be as good but you will you will be countering that that atrophy you know it's it's not like it's not beneficial do people need to lift heavy well that's that's the that's the the golden question that first two Phillips he showed that years ago um that people he he didn't untrained people first so he he showed that untrained men um could gain just as much muscle mass and strength uh lifting lighter weights as people as the men gain uh lifting heavy weights as long as they put in the effort so the volume and effort has to be high so you have to like you'll probably do a longer duration it'll be more you you'll be doing you know more more effort but you can gain as much muscle mass and strength if you're doing lighter weights as long as you're putting in that effort um and then Brad shenfeld came in after because he was like ah steu that was that was untrained men come on and he then did it in trained men and lo and behold guess what same data same results so uh the trained men also could gain as much muscle mass and strength by lifting lower doing lower weights as long as the effort that's the key effort right you have to put in enough you have to be fatigued you're not know who Dr Mike is Rell is no I don't professor of exercise science at Leman College um probably I think the best guy for evidencebased hypertrophy training on the internet at all at the moment I had him on the show last week and um he's just so I would you really really need to connect with him because the guy is so phenomenal he's also jacked out of his mind right so he like walks the talk uh but he came on and he was explaining about about the the typical sort of Bro Science rep range which was 8 to 14 any more than 14 and it's completely pointless his rule or at least what the evidence seems to show is that anything over six and below 30 as long as when you finish you are looking at one to two uh one to three R reps in reserve so that's what you're talking about here he's Brad shonfeld is one of the guys that he respects the most in the industry as well and um the point is you can get yourself to 28 and if you're like I could do three more maybe that's good now one of the disadvantages that you have of doing that is obviously your session length is going to be longer uh but one of the advantages that you have is that your injury risk is going to be lower so I think I mean that was fascinating to me as someone who's spent his entire life like allergic to going over 16 reps like no no no that's just cardio like that's just you know that's just lame um that was really interesting uh a couple of the other things that he taught me that I thought were fascinating he's a huge proponent of tempo so it seems like the tempo of the movement is super crucial the entire duration of the rep should not be less than two seconds so you could get away with 1 second up and 1 second down but it's very important to control the Ecentric portion of the movement most of the muscle growth comes in the Ecentric portion of the movement the long stretch that you get at the very end range of the movement as well seems to be particularly where muscle growth is discriminated toward so what you want to try and do is do exercises which incorporate that stretch for instance if you see um people that do wide grip lat pull Downs you get to this position and you're like well my lats aren't actually all that stretched whereas if you go a little bit more narrow you go overhand uh pull-ups or one of his favorites which is this like a single arm wraparound uh lat pull across so if you imagine that you've got a cable machine over there and you're actually getting into this really super stretch position and you're pulling right back around and you're feeling that that um but yeah for him the the key things that I took away from that was one to three reps and Reserve uh Tempo seems to be just a great way again to reduce down the load because you could still get to three reps in reserve on 10 reps but because you've been doing Tempo it's so much harder so again you have all of these different things that you can use to manipulate the difficulty and the amount of reps that you need to go through uh and just a little pause at an extension in whatever it is the bottom of a squat it's going to mean again that you don't need to use quite so much weight it's going to put you into that uh the muscle stretched position which is where most of the hypertrophy occurs and just I think a two countdown on whatever it is that you're doing just seems to be the smartest way to do it it's going to reduce injury risk it's going to mean you don't need to use as much weight it's going to maximize that uh time under detention uh that we're talking about and it's going to mean that if you do do a little pause at the bottom and then get it back up it's fine so that's now for me all of my training my entire training protocol is built around that type of tempo rep range uh and loading with the stretch at the bottom so it was it was so simple it was great to hear really really good yeah that's a really great I mean easy to follow kind of protocol I mean for sure and I I do remember um Dr Brad scheld talking about the some of the same things with the Ecentric movement and the stretching of it and all that like being really important for hypertrophy and of course my my new coach who knows everything she's like on top of all of it so pointing out you telling me what about training when you're tired a lot of the time people don't get as much sleep as they want or they're a little bit more stressed or whatever they think I'm tired should I train yes if I train I make myself more tired that might be dangerous or whatever what what do you think well yeah absolutely that's the that's the time where you should train most and and we were kind of talking about this right so you know there's studies showing that if you don't get enough sleep you can have a higher all cause mortality than someone who gets enough sleep unless you're physically active physical activity blunts some of those negative effects of not getting enough sleep so you're tired you should you should go get at it and also guess what happens you don't feel more tired you feel like especially if you're going to go do like a hit workout you feel invigorated you feel better you you're increasing blood flow to the brain that's what you need right you're lowering inflammation inflammation is what's making you tired inflammation is what's giving you that that tired feeling and so exercises is the the counter to that right exercise is one of the most robust ways you can have an anti-inflammatory response because your body is naturally you know there's one thing I mean we talked about taking Omega-3s I mean there's ways to reduce inflammation by by by taking certain phytochemicals or Omega-3s but exercise is forcing your body to use all of its genetic Pathways to counter that inflammation and it does it for a long time it's not just a as quick as you metabolize it how long is it in your BL what's the halflife of the compound deal this is like days after right so the the little bit of stress that you're putting on your body that anti-inflammatory effect is so much greater that it counters the stresses of Life of everything metabolism of just you know thinking and breathing so I think that exercising when you're tired you should be motivated and know that you're actually you're going to feel better it's you're going to you're going to be less tired after like you really are especially if you don't go for like a 5H hour run I mean like let's like you know there's an upper bound yeah I suppose as well you know one of the things when you're tired your injury risk does go up your ability to do fine control motor movement and stuff like that so if you're going to go and get that session but you've only had 5 hours sleep because the kids woke up at 4:00 a.m. this morning and it's been a nightmare or you just got back from a flight or whatever like don't try and max out today right it's not it's not 3 RM deadlift day it's I go in and I try and work hard but not kill myself day right you either I mean if it's you know it's always easier to like like I said if you could just do like a hit session that's great or just do you know do a high-intensity sort of body weight exercise workout right you do some push-ups you do some P you know some pull-ups and then some squats or whatever you know or lift lighter like you were saying where you're not you're not going to the other thing is how like the story that you tell yourself about being the sort of person that maybe didn't have an ideal night's sleep but still went and got after it and this is totally separate to the physiological effect yeah I suppose the endorphins of the actual session will help with this but like I overcame a difficult thing today like that story that you tell yourself is so powerful and it it helps to kind of reinforce this positive self-image of being someone who happens to life as opposed to life happens to them yeah I mean this is like this is something that I think about a lot as a parent like the little winds are such confidence boosters you know like it doesn't have to be like the big thing that you're going for but like just a little win like I went and I did 10-minute workout you know it's like a little win like good [ __ ] world yeah I mean you it it makes a difference and I think you you said it like beautifully like it it's it's a confidence booster and I mean those things do sort of I I think they add up and make a big difference for sure what else haven't we said about exercise is there anything else lurking in there that people need to be aware of um I think you know the big thing was was cover with respect to vigorous intensity really focusing on on getting that vigorous intensity every week focusing on the voax training knowing the brain benefits and then any any kind of resistance training obviously is important those are the really I think big main things what would be if someone isn't going to go and get their lactate tested or do a V2 Max test with the mask on and all of this stuff what is a rough Benchmark that people can use to check I am making progress this awful Norwegian 4x4 torture device that I've been doing every Sunday for the last six months has helped like what how can people do the like home version of the test yeah so obviously a lot of people use their um Apple watch which does measure V2 Max but I would say um if you want an evidence-based way to measure V2 Max and um the reason why the Apple watch isn't necessarily accurate is uh because so so the the thing that really been shown to to be a good way of estimating BO2 Max is What's called the 12 minute run test or 12 minute walk test depending on your Fitness level right but um you need to have access to like a flat either track or something some sort of you know thing that's that's that's flat right you could also I mean no it's got to be distance so if you can somehow yeah clock that in on your your watch as well as you're on a bike I think the best thing would be a a track field or something like that and um what you do is you you in 12 minutes you run as fast as you can to and maintain that pace for 12 minutes and then um you have to have that distance measured right so that distance is measured um and then that there's this calculation that is done um considering you know the distance that you're whatever you've run and everything and that turns out your V2 Max and that's kind of what the Apple watch uses but the Apple watch doesn't know when you're like running hills and stuff so it's it's kind of because that that takes it into account so if you're running hills and stuff it's more challenging you're not going to go as far right um and so that's kind of where I go oh well the Apple watch is only so good so I wonder whether I'd be interested to know if there's people who can uh cheat this test in some way let's say that uh one person builds their V2 Max what I'm thinking with this Norwegian 4x4 I probably do need to start doing it airbike to me seems to be the best thing that I could think of it's the easiest machine for me to get my heart rate very high on it's both arms and legs it's stationary there's no picking it up putting it down resetting it and it also means that during those three minutes you can kind of just push away like this but I would imagine that the person who does running intervals for their Norwegian 4x4 will develop a number of efficiencies that are uh disproportionately advantageous for this 12-minute run test right my someone does it in the pool right someone does swimming intervals 4 minutes 3 minutes whatever um how much that will cross over so there's definitely going to be ways like H rocks hybrid training this whole thing at the moment is a huge huge burgeoning it's basically filled the hole that CrossFit used to have I think um and I think a lot of people are going to have that but I wonder how many people have um like disproportionately good 12-minute run tests that may actually overclock the V2 Max because of their efficiency that they've developed using running as their modality for building that V2 Max right no I mean it's a good point I think for sure um most of the Norwegian 4x4 Protocols are done on a stationary bike most of the time that's the king yeah Dr Ronda Patrick ladies and gentlemen Ronda it's been really great to meet you I love your work I love the fact that you've just got this broad evidence base that you can tap into and teach us me and morals about what's going on in the world of fitness and such you've got this bdnf protocol.com thing which is a free uh guide that people can take in order to maximize different ways to get bdnf what's what's in that um it's a bunch of protocols that that have been uh evidence-based that are you know how to increase bdnf exercise protocols sauna protocols polyphenols so we're talking about blueberries things like that and then I kind of have my protocol in there intra weaved it's like well this is what I do uh but yeah so it's uh I think some people want to know well how much you know how hard do I go to get my my bdnf from a run or a workout or what do I need to do so there's there's it's like kind of evid evidence-based protocols on different things different lifestyle factors and behaviors you can engage in to improve it oh yeah where else should people go they want to keep up to date with your work uh have YouTube channel and it's called found my fitness I have podcasts I interview experts sometimes I do standal load videos where I talk about the science of something um diving into magnesium next I also have one on vigorous exercise and then um on podcast Apple podcast Spotify uh then my website fitness.com that's where you can find me sign up for my newsletter but I would go to the bdnf protocols to to get all the the good protocols on uh improving brain health basically hell yeah thank you Ronda thank you so much it's been fun thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Ronda I have a conversation with Dr Peter which you can watch right here go on tap it