Speaker A
We are being bombarded with disrupting chemicals. A lot of them, they're in art products.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses the dangers of BPA receipts, visceral fat's health risks, and ways to maintain peak physical and cognitive function.
Key Takeaways
- Avoid handling BPA-coated receipts to reduce hormonal disruption risks.
- Visceral fat is a dangerous, metabolically active fat linked to serious health conditions.
- Maintaining physical activity and good sleep hygiene helps preserve peak bodily functions.
- Intermittent fasting and targeted supplements can improve brain health and longevity.
- Lifestyle interventions can significantly reduce visceral fat and associated health risks.
Summary
- Exposure to BPA on receipts is harmful and linked to a 50% reduction in testosterone in adolescent boys.
- Visceral fat, unlike subcutaneous fat, surrounds organs and is metabolically active, increasing risks of early mortality and metastatic cancer.
- Visceral fat disrupts insulin function by constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids, leading to metabolic syndrome.
- Peak physical and cognitive function, or 'peak span,' typically peaks around age 25 and declines thereafter.
- Exercise, especially high-intensity interval training, can reverse heart aging by 20 years and help maintain peak span.
- Adequate sleep is crucial for preventing rapid immune system aging.
- Intermittent fasting and supplements can support brain health and reduce Alzheimer's disease risk.
- A significant portion of adults over 50 have high visceral fat, increasing their health risks.
- The video emphasizes the importance of lifestyle changes to reduce visceral fat and optimize long-term health.
- The host encourages viewers to subscribe to support the show and access valuable health insights.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Okay, let's go to my kitchen. Come with me. So, this is my fridge. So, the first thing I notice is this, 'cause that's like the worst.
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Can I get a bin bag? This is made from recycled electronics. What about this?
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This is a problem also. And this? Ding, ding, ding. This is great. I'm going to do utensils next.
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Heating it up. The plastic is getting into your food. What about a receipt? That's bad. That's covered with BPA, and a study in adolescent boys showed that it was associated with a 50% reduction in testosterone. And then this is one that
Speaker A
people often miss. The biomedical scientist and anti-aging doctor Rhonda Patrick is back. This time she's talking about health optimization, maintaining peak performance, and the environmental toxins disrupting your body.
Speaker A
Dr. Rhonda Patrick, let's talk about something that I've never heard of before. Peak span. What the hell is peak span? So it's essentially being within 90% of your peak function. For example, muscle mass, bone density—that kind of
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peaks around 25 years old and then they kind of steadily start to decline. You're joking.
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And the same goes for cognitive function. So I'm on the way down. Yeah. And I'm definitely on the way down. But we can do things in our life to help maintain that peak span. Like if you exercise 5 hours a week, do some
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high-intensity interval training in there and you can reverse heart aging by 20 years. And then sleep, very, very important for preventing your immune system from aging rapidly. And then another thing that you can do that's really important for brain aging is this
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is associated with a rapid decrease in Alzheimer's disease risk. But what I really want to talk about is intermittent fasting, supplements, and being sedentary.
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So I want to talk about all of that but we've got to talk about this in my hands at the moment.
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So if you have this, it's going to double your risk of early mortality. Double your risk.
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Double. Okay. So talk me through this. I want as much detail as possible. This is super interesting to me. My team gave me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe.
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And some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you. Please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show
Speaker A
and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show
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free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double-check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If
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you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that
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promise since the very beginning of the Dio, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show.
Speaker A
Dr. Rhonda Patrick, I am fascinated by so many of the things that you talked about and they're front of mind for me at the moment because I'm a 33-year-old man and I know from doing this podcast and
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looking at graphs like this one, which we'll talk about today, which I don't think most people have ever seen in their lives, that this is the age where things might start changing direction from here on over the next decade. And
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there's things I can do to set myself up now if I listen to your advice for the remaining decades of my life to be remarkably different. I'm playing with this in my hands at the moment. It's for anyone that can't see, you should
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probably look at the screen right now. It's a yellow blob of squidgy, slightly disgusting material. What is this and why does this matter?
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So, this represents visceral fat. It's something that most people haven't heard of. Many people have heard of fat.
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They know fat is bad, but they don't realize there are different kinds of fat.
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There is visceral fat. And this is the kind of fat that you can't really pinch, adipose tissue kind of fat, right? I mean, if you opened up your body, you could pinch it because it's deep, deep within your body. It's often referred to
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as belly fat and it's surrounding your organs like your liver, your kidney, you know, your intestines. This is a very deep belly fat and it's very different from subcutaneous fat. You can actually be lean but have a high amount of visceral
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fat. We call these metabolically unhealthy people. So visceral fat, you mentioned you're 33. The average 33-year-old male has how much visceral fat?
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According to the data, it says roughly 1.2 pounds at the age of 30. And then for a woman, .5 lb of visceral fat at the age of 30. At 40, it's 1.7 lb for a man and .7 for a woman. At 50, 2.2 lb for a
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man, 1 lb for a woman. And at 60, 2.7 lb of visceral fat and 1.54 lb for a woman, which is the highest risk for metabolic syndromes at that age. But I mean, all of them are pretty scary.
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It is. And as you notice, the trend is as you get older, you have a higher risk of having more of it. Seventy percent of women over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat. Fifty percent of men over the age of
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50 have a high amount of visceral fat. This visceral fat, for one, it's going to double your risk of early mortality.
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Full stop. That's, you know, it's going to double your risk. Double your risk. Double, double. Visceral fat is, as I mentioned, different from the other kind of fat. The subcutaneous kind of fat, the adipose tissue kind of fat
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in several ways. One is that it is metabolically active. It is secreting inflammatory cytokines. These are, you know, molecules that are signaling to the immune system, but they're also involved with damaging our cells. And for this reason, people with a high
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amount of visceral fat are 44% more likely to get metastatic cancer. That's cancer that's going to metastasize. Very dangerous types of cancer. They're also more likely, you mentioned metabolic syndrome. This is a big, big thing with visceral fat. This type of fat is
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constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids. It's constantly doing it. What's triglycerides? Triglycerides are how your body is able to store fatty acids and fat and use them for later, you know, energy, right?
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So, they're constantly breaking them down and using them. They're using these fatty acids. But typically what happens in your body when you eat a meal, you have your glucose levels go up, right? Your blood sugar elevates, your glucose levels go up and that
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signals to the pancreas in your body to make insulin. Insulin is this hormone that plays a role in many things. One of it is to tell different parts of the body to take glucose up like your liver, your muscle, your adipose tissue.
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Well, the problem is this visceral fat is constantly making those free fatty acids. And so those fatty acids, it doesn't respond—this we call it, it's not really an organ, but this type of fat doesn't respond to
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insulin. So whereas the subcutaneous fat will stop breaking down fat and using fat as energy. It says, "Okay, look, I have energy here. I got to do something with this energy. Let me store it for later use." Right? Well, that
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doesn't happen with visceral fat. What happens is it just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. What happens is when your visceral fat is metabolically active like that, it is basically making it where insulin can't work its job. And
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so what happens is that glucose can't go into your liver. It stays in your blood system.
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And you really want it to be stored in your liver, right? You want it to be stored in your liver as glycogen to be used as energy when you're fasting or when you're, you know, ph...
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need it, right? Also in your muscle. same thing, stored as glycogen or stored in your atapost tissue. Um, and so and so none of that happens because insulin, it's not able to to basically act on your your your organs. It's there's no
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signal. So no, nobody's getting the phone call, hey, time to take the glucose up. It's not happening, right?
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So the glucose sits around. So what happens is your body freaks out because it's not good to have glucose sitting around in your bloodstream for a while.
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It causes a lot of damage, right? Mhm. And so what happens is your body makes even more insulin to try to overcompensate. Your body goes, "Oh, maybe that wasn't enough insulin because, you know, the glucose isn't coming in to the organs like the liver
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like it's supposed to. So, let me put some more out." And for anyone that doesn't know, insulin is kind of like the taxi driver that goes and picks up the glucose and takes it home.
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Exactly. It's taking it home. It's taking it back to the liver. And so what happens when you make more insulin, you're overcompensating in such a way that now glucose really does get taken up into these other organs like the
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liver. And it so much so that it causes your blood glucose levels to go down and and you're crashing. And all of a sudden, this is responsible for that.
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You know, people that eat a meal and they're kind of insulin resistant. They eat a meal and then all of a sudden they're crashing an hour later. We're like, why am I why do I have no energy?
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Why am I hungry? Right? Because when you're after you crash, your blood glucose levels go down. That's what I mean by crashing. Um really f far down.
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Not not normal levels, but like below that. And so then your body tries to overcompensate by going, "Oh, I'm hungry. I need to eat." And so you start to have these cravings for like energy dense foods. And that's part of this
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cycle of the beginnings of insulin resistance. And so when I'm talking about here with visceral fat, it causes insulin resistance. And that's essentially the take-home here by by it's constantly metabolizing fatty acids, it's it's stopping that taxi car
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from going and getting the glucose. It's it's not happening. It's not responding. You're not picking up the driver, right?
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And so you become insulin resistant. And that has a lot of problems. One, it's going to affect your immediate energy levels. It's going to affect the way you're feeling. And two, it's going to make you more likely to become type two
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diabetic because eventually your body will won't be able to produce enough insulin to bring the glucose in. And so then you become type 2 diabetic. So that is a big consequence of having this visceral fat in addition to those
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inflammatory molecules that are being generated from this fat. It's just so metabolically active. And that inflammation that you're generating not only does things like raise your cancer risk by 44%. It also makes you tired. It gives you brain fog, lethargy. When your
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immune system is being activated by this inflammation, you're taking energy away from your brain. It c it's a lot of energy to activate your immune system. And so, yeah. So, that energy is now going to the wrong place. It's not going to your
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brain. So, you can feel you won't feel cognitively as sharp and absolutely won't just think about when you're when you're when you have an infection. Your immune system is very active. You're fighting off a pathogen, right? Do you feel like you're tired or
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do you feel like you're cognitive cognitively at your peak? Uh yeah, I'm like I'm I'm out of out of action for several days usually, right? You're tired and your brain isn't working. And part of that reason is because your activation of your immune
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system is sucking energy away from your brain. And the other reason is because the inflammation being generated gets into the brain and disrupts neurotransmitters and things like that.
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So you're it's like a double whammy. You're not your your brain isn't working working properly. And so there's a lot of people walking around constantly feeling tired, feeling lethargic, feeling brain fog, and they might have a high amount of visceral fat and not even
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know it. So typically, looking at the data, I mean, most people have too much visceral fat.
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Most people do have too much visceral fat. And typically a really high amount is I would say a proxy for it would be measuring your waist circumference. So, like if women have a waist circumference of 35 in or greater, that is a sign of
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too much visceral fat. If men have a waist circumference of 40 in or more, that is a sign of too much visceral fat.
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Ideally, you would go and get what's called a DEXA scan. Now, this is not something that's routinely done, and it doesn't necessarily have to be done unless you're that person that really likes to go the extra mile and directly
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measure things. That would be another way to do it. You really want to have below 300, you know, grams of visceral fat. ideally closer to zero the better.
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Me and my friend went and got a DEXA scan done and the remarkable thing is I weigh a lot more than him and I'm much bigger than him. He's skinny but after the DEXA scan they said that he had too
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much visceral fat which I I thought vis I thought you must be like big or obese to have visceral fat but he's a skinny guy and the DEXA scan said too much visceral fat.
Speaker A
Yes, that's the thing. You know, I was involved in clinical research for many years when I was doing my post-graduate training. And we were looking at populations of people that were metabolically unhealthy or maybe overweight, obese in some cases, and you
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would have someone come in that they looked skinny, they looked like they were metabolically healthy because they weren't overweight. And yet all of their biomarker data was showing the opposite.
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Like they looked on paper, if you would have shown me their metabolic data, I would go, "Oh, this is an overweight obese person." So these are these are lean but metabolically unhealthy people and a large percentage of that has to do
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with an increase in visceral fat. You won't even necessarily know that you're getting higher amounts of v visceral fat. It's not necessarily going to be reflected on the scale. You know, you mentioned maybe a pound, maybe a little
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bit more. That's like daily fluctuation in some cases, right? Like I mean I don't know about you, but like I I can fluctuate a pound from day to day for sure. If you're talking about 500 grams or less, that's not going to be, you
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know, reflected on a scale either. You might be going, well, what why visceral fat? What's causing visceral fat? You know, I mentioned age, that's a big one.
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Hormones is a big one. Women are very susceptible as they go through pmenopause and menopause because estrogen actually tells helps tell the body how to store energy and it tells it to store energy and fat in atapost tissue, not viscerally. So when your
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estrogen starts to go down during par p parmenopause and then menopause, women really start to gain a lot of vis this belly fat. They gain a lot of the visceral fat. Testosterone also it doesn't tell the body how to store the
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fat so much. It helps you burn visceral fat. So men are a little bit more protected when they're younger as well, but as they age, of course, testosterone goes down as well, and that affects the visceral fat. But mostly, it's our diet
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and our lifestyle that's really affecting visceral fat. It's kind of mind-blowing how quickly you can gain visceral fat. Like there was sleep is a big one. When you're when you miss sleep, that is something that can really you can start to store you can start to
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gain visceral fat very quickly. Um there was a study in healthy young men. These men were sleep restricted. Typically when sleep restriction studies are done, you're you're looking at four hours of sleep per night. So pretty severe. Not
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out of the ordinary. I did many of those college graduate school deadlines. Definitely as a new parent, I mean it's unfortunately drags on for months. So these men were only sleeping four hours a night for two weeks. Okay, these are
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healthy young men, college age students. Okay, young. They gained 11% visceral fat after that two weeks, but not a pound on the scale, but they had 11% higher visceral fat after just, you know, two weeks of not getting enough
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sleep. And they weighed the same pretty much. So, it was the composition of their body that's shifting.
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Yes. Also, the visceral fat, like like I said, you're not gaining pounds and pounds and pounds of it necessarily. You know, you're gaining grams and grams, but like it's happening and and any amount that you're starting to gain is
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unhealthy, right? It's going to start causing insulin resistance. It's going to start, you know, causing fatty liver.
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That's another thing. It does it because it's around the liver. It basically the liver doesn't know what to do with all the fat. So, it starts to make and store it around the fat. And so you start to
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get this non-alcoholic fatty liver which is happening now in like young people. So sleep is one another major major I would say lever for gaining visceral fat is your diet quality and quantity. So if you start to be in a caloric excess
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constantly you can start to gain visceral fat and that's also been shown in studies. So, there was a recent study that again was in healthy young men given about 1,200 extra calories a day and it was mostly from ultrarocessed
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foods, right? I mean, they're 1,200 calories, so like Big Mac and a Coke, Big Mac and fries, whatever, you know?
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So, you're you're talking about almost like an extra meal a day and from processed foods, ultrarocessed foods.
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For 5 days, they were given, you know, this extra caloric intake. After that five days, they started to gain visceral fat. They started to have signs of fatty liver after five days. And their brains became insulin resistant. And this is
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important. Yes. You How many calories were they having in excess? 1,200 to,500. In excess.
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More than what they were usually going to eat. Yes. Okay. Yes. So, you know, it's a lot of people are eating caloric excess, you know, daily. They're not they're not exercising and there's no energy expenditure and they're eating more and
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so they're in in you know 1,200. Now this is the extreme end right I'm giving you an extreme end because that's what they do usually in in studies like this because they want to get a significant result but after 5 days they they were
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gaining visceral fat their brains became insulin resistant. So insulin is also very important for the brain. the brain is telling the body how to store the fat and how to store energy. And when the and when insulin is not able to to get
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into the brain and have its action, then you start to not have the brain tell the body how to store this energy and it ends up storing it viscerally. It's like this default.
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Do you know putting those two things together, the thing I've noticed that impacts my performance the most as it relates to articulation, cognitive performance, my ability to think is those two things coming together. You talked about sleep and diet. It's when I
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h I eat late close. It's when I eat close to sleep. If I do that a couple of nights in a row, I feel like my brain no longer works.
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Yes. Yeah. You know, obviously we all have to like live our lives and there's social things and it's fun to go out and have a dinner with your friends or an event, right? But it's not a good idea
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to eat a meal, a big meal three hours before, fewer than three hours before bed. So, you want to stop eating 3 hours before bed. And three is really the magic number in multiple studies because when you eat a meal, it is activating
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your sympathetic nervous system, right? That's the fight orflight response. That's not what you want active when you're about to go to bed. When you're activating the sympathetic nervous system right before you're going to bed, let's say you eat a meal within an hour
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of bedtime, you're digesting all that. It's your sympathetic nervous system is active. And even if you're sleeping, it's not good sleep. It's fragmented sleep. And so it's disrupted sleep because you you need to be in that parasympathetic part of, you know, the nervous system.
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That dominance needs to be parasympathetic, which is the rest restore. It's called rest and digest.
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But I don't like digest because actually digesting is what activates the sympathetic nervous system. So it's like the recovery, right?
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So should I stay up then for three hours? If I if I eat at midnight, should I stay up till 3:00 a.m.?
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No. No. You should just go to bed, but don't do it on a daily basis, right? I mean, the the key is the habit, you know, the habit. And so, if you need to eat something before bed, you should do
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something that's light. Maybe a protein shake with some almond milk, you know, something that's not super heavy.
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I've heard you talk about fiber. Resistant starch does, interestingly, seem to help improve sleep. And so, you know, maybe some rice or a potato, a little bit of rice or a potato, some fries or something.
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Maybe not a fried potato, baked baked potato and then cool it because then it's resistant starch, right? Because then it's good for your your gut microbiome.
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Why? It changes the composition of the fiber and and you can cook it, let it cool, and then heat it again if you like to eat it heated as long as it went through a cooling part.
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Wow. And then you can eat it. But that's resistant starch. Resistant starch is also in green bananas. very beneficial for the gut and also for interestingly for improving sleep. So things that are really moving the needle to to make you
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gain visceral fat or being in basically being in a caloric excess especially from refined highfat high sugar foods.
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And then not getting enough sleep, move the needle. Chronic stress is an amplifier of it. So if you're constantly having cortisol that's kind of stopping the body from storing energy right the right way and it's going viscerally as
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well. I would say that amplifies especially if it's like in the context of being in a caloric excess and not exercising. Alcohol is another one. If you drink if you're excessively consuming alcohol you're going to store a lot of the energy that you're also
Speaker A
consuming is going to be stored visceral. I mean you've seen the beer belly right? I mean that's like a thing.
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It's visceral fat. It's it's not beer. It's visceral fat. So alcohol is another one. In terms of losing visceral fat, I mean the good news is is that you can lose it quite easily and quite rapidly.
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I was going to say parents have a hard time because you're naming those things about like sleep and stress and and I was thinking gosh parents have like a have it coming from them from all sides.
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They do. Um the but see this is where the good news comes in because you know part of the reason why sleep is causing you to gain more visceral sleep loss is causing you to gain visceral fat is
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because it's causing your body to become insulin resistant. It's like this vicious cycle. Visceral fat causes insulin resistance. Insulin resistance causes more visceral fat. Right? And becomes this and that's why once you get into that cycle it just spirals out of
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control, right? And you start to gain more and more and more. Sorry. Insulin resistance. What is that?
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That is when your body no longer produces insulin or No, no. Insulin resistance is when your body is no longer responding to insulin.
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So, it's like it's like you're waiting for the phone to ring and it's ringing, but you can't hear it, right? Like you you're not getting the signal and so your your cells are not responding to the insulin that's made. Insulin is
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really helping your body bring move the glucose out, right? move it move it out of your bloodstream where it can cause a lot of damage if it sits around and if you put too much pressure pressure on the insulin system then it
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kind of shuts down eventually shuts down and the thing that puts too much pressure is consuming too much glucose or too much activity too much glucose refined glucose can do that visceral fat is one of the I would
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say bigger causes of insulin it's actually one of the major major causes of insulin resistance because if you are physically active and eating a lot of glucose, that glucose is going to your muscles. Physical activity makes your muscles very responsive to glucose
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without needing insulin. Your the transporters that transport glucose are super super responsive when you exercise. That's why physical activity and this is what I was getting at with parents is so important. The visceral fat is the really big like concern with
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insulin resistance. This is and this is the thing that again it's like people don't even know about it. A lot of people are thinking about glucose and oh, I got to watch my glucose. And that's all fine. I mean, yes, to some
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degree that's also playing a role, but it's it's it's the visceral fat that's the real underlying problem that's that's causing you to become insulin resistant. You mentioned parents have it like bad because they're stressed out and they don't get sleep. I was wearing
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a continuous glucose monitor when I became a new mother. I was appalled by my fasting blood glucose and by my postprandial blood glucose levels. Never postrenal. Postprandial means after a meal. Okay?
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So your levels go obviously much higher after you eat a meal versus in the morning when you haven't had anything to eat.
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And my levels were were so high. It was pre-diabetic and and I was just I couldn't believe it. And it's not like I'm eating, you know, drinking Cokes and eating terrible, right? But there was a period of time when I'm not as physically
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active, particularly in the first couple of months. It's really, you know, that's the time when you're kind of just in this cave. I immediately was looking into the scientific literature and found that high-intensity interval training and exercise can help almost negate most
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of the those poor effects of causing insulin resistance and causing your glucose regulation to not be normal.
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That's the good news for parents is that you should prioritize new parents should prioritize exercise and exercise does cause you to lose visceral fat. It's not just any type of exercise really has to be aerobic and the more vigorous the
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better. So for people that don't know what that means, aerobic and vigorous. Yeah. So what I mean is resistance training and lifting weights don't really move the needle in terms of helping you lose visceral fat. It does help you improve your metabolism. It
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does help with like glucose, you know, sensitivity and all that like because your muscles are going to be more sensitive to take the glucose in. But if you want to lose visceral fat, you're going to have to do running, jogging,
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cycling, swimming. You want to like get your heart rate up a little more. Why? It's energy expenditure. It plays a role in getting you to that caloric more caloric deficit and that's better. So that's one way. And the other thing is
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weight any any weight loss program. So intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, you know, even GLP-1 receptor agonist and all the classes of GLP1, anything that is going to make you lose weight, lose fat, visceral fat's one of the first to go. And in fact,
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people on on these these weight loss programs or even on exercise training program, visceral fat's the first fat to go and and so you can lose it quite quite quickly.
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So on this point of fasting, are you a fan of fasting to combat visceral fat?
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And also, could you give me your thoughts on being in a ketogenic state as it relates to visceral fat? Yeah, people when they think about intermittent fasting, they kind of think about, you know, one thing and they think about
Speaker A
weight loss, right? But there's a lot going on here. And I like I like that you mentioned being in a ketogenic state because there's also a metabolic switch that happens. This metabolic switch from burning carbohydrates and glucose to
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burning fatty acids and getting in ketosis, right? That's a metabolic switch. And it's very important. There are two different things happening here.
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But intermittent fasting is essentially a good tool that people can use to reduce their calorie intake without having to count their calories. That's why I like it. You can you can lose weight by counting your calories and reducing your calorie intake. I
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personally think that's a lot of work. Some people love doing it and that's great. I think whatever works for a person. But the way in which intermittent fasting helps people lose visceral fat is by reducing calorie intake. That's what I'm getting at. It's
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like a tool that some people like to use because I like it for one because I can not think I just I'll skip one meal making sure I get enough nutrients in the the meals that I eat and protein in
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the meals I eat. But I'll skip a meal and it gets me in a caloric deficit without having to think about and count everything. So it's easier on me to fast to fast versus counting calories.
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And how how do you do that? So, I like to fast in the morning. And the reason I like to fast in the morning is for the exact reason you mentioned, and that is the ketosis, which I like to call the
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metabolic switch. You're not eating while you're sleeping, obviously. So, if you're sleeping for 8, if you're in bed for 9 hours, 10 hours, you're not eating during that time. And it takes about 10 to 12 hours for your liver to deplete
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glycogen. glucose that's been taken up by the liver is stored as glycogen so that you can then use it for energy later if you don't have energy coming in. Right.
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So the glycogen is like the the petrol station. Yes. So it runs out of petrol.
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That's right. And and so um it takes it switches to diesel. And it switches to diesel. And so after that switch, that metabolic switch when you deplete that glycogen while you're sleeping or while you're not, you know, not eating after about 12 hours. And by
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the way, this is all relative because it depends on the kind of foods you eat and how physically active you are. So, if you eat a lot of high carbohydrate, refined sugar stuff, you might take even longer to deplete your glycogen because
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you're you're putting a lot of input in there. You keep filling up the the fuel tank right?
Speaker A
But if you're eating things that are more low carb, you might deplete your glycogen sooner. So, when you deplete your glycogen, you get into this metabolic switch because your body still needs energy, but there's no nothing, no glucose around, right? So, you start to
Speaker A
switch to, you know, your fatty acids are mobilized. They come out of your atapost tissue. This is why people lose fat. They come out of the visceral fat.
Speaker A
You you start to use those fatty acids and burn them as energy. And as a product of that energy, you're making ketones, ketosis. And the reason I like to do this in the morning is because then I can really get into that ketoic
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state where if I'm fasting, I do it typically I fast for about 16 hours a day and then I eat my meals within eight hours a day. Typically, that's my what I do. The reason I like to be in that
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metabolic switch state is many reasons actually. One, the ketones themselves are providing my brain with energy, very e easily utilizable energy, but they're also acting as a signaling molecule to my brain going, "Hey, this is a stressful time. There's no food. You
Speaker A
better be cognitively sharp. You got to find that food. You got to like know what you're doing, right? It's an evolutionary adaptation." You know, humans for thousands of years were going through this metabolic switch because we didn't have Instacart. We didn't have
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Postmates. We didn't have all Uber Eats, right? We had to find our food. We had to hunt our food. And we always didn't always do that, right? And so when I get into that metabolic switch state, I feel
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it. I feel more cognitively sharp. And I feel less anxious, which is part of it because those ketones also help increase something called GABA. That's an inhibitory neurotransmitter. It's essentially, you can just think of it as like it helps you feel calmer. When I
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feel calmer, I'm more cognitively focused because it's like the background anxiety is down, right? It it's like you can focus. And so, I love being in that state in the morning because that's when I get my work done. I also like to be in
Speaker A
that metabolic switch state. And this is why I like fasting in addition to, you know, the calorie, the fewer calories I'm consuming, right? Your body has to be in that fasted state to repair. If you're constantly in a fed state, fed
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states are important for anabolic growth. We need it to grow, right? But the repair state is also very important because with the growth comes damage.
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Damage comes along with that and you want to repair that damage because damage will accelerate aging. And so I like to be and give my body enough time.
Speaker A
I don't want to just wake up and eat where it's like, oh, I've only barely depleted my liver glycogen. I'm not even in that repair state very long, right? I want to extend it a little bit. And so I
Speaker A
like to have that repair process active and that it is active during it's fasting activates it but also you have some amount of active repair going on even when you're in a fed state. It's just heightened when you're fasted. So
Speaker A
those are the reasons I like to be I like intermittent fasting. I feel good when I do it. I also do a lot of training, not all of it. I do a lot of training fasted. Cardiovascular aerobic endurance exercise. So running, biking,
Speaker A
that stuff I like to do fasted. I'm not going for a 10-mi run. I'm going for a three- mile run, right? I mean, this is So, if I was going for a 10 mile run, I wouldn't be fasted. I would need some
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fuel. But there are studies, me, multiple studies showing that if you do aerobic endurance training, this kind of running, cycling, swimming type of training, you actually have better adaptations if you're fasted versus fed.
Speaker A
What does that mean? So much of the benefit from exercise, right? Aerobic exercise when you're breathing in, you're you're you're you're right, you're working hard is from the working hard, but your body responds to that, right? Because the working hard is
Speaker A
causing inflammation. It's causing oxidative damage. And your body is responding to that by going, "Oh, we got to get better at this stuff." So, you have anti-inflammatory pathways activated. You have antioxidant pathways activated. Your body needs to burn fat.
Speaker A
You need fuel. And so if you're fasted, you get better at burning the fat and oxidizing the fat and you continue to do that throughout the day better as well.
Speaker A
So you have what are called mitochondrial adaptations that are better. You make more mitochondria.
Speaker A
Mitochondria are very important little tiny organels inside of most of our cells that make energy and they, you know, they're very important for everything. I mean, they're running our brains right now so we can talk, our heart, you know, so we can breathe, our
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lungs, everything, right? And so exercise does make you increase the amount of those new mitochondria that you make that are young and healthy.
Speaker A
If you're fasted both, even if you're not, but if you're fasted, it's even better.
Speaker A
This has been a big debate around whether this applies to both men and women.
Speaker A
Should both men and women exercise fasted? This is my read of the literature and my thoughts on this from also having experts that have studied male versus female responses to exercise. First and foremost, how do you feel when you
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exercise fasted? If you feel terrible, that's a sign. I think listening to your body is the most important thing that you can do. There are times when I have to eat before I exercise and I listen to my body. I that's it. I'm I'm going to
Speaker A
eat. When it comes to women versus men and doing exercise fasted, it also depends on are you again, are you doing a 30 minute run? Are you doing a 2hour run? If you're doing a 2-hour run, you need to fuel. That's a lot. That's a big
Speaker A
stress. When it comes to a 30-minute run, you don't really necessarily need to. Now, the problem with women is that they're often if you're in too much of a caloric deficit and you don't eat enough food within, you know, like afterwards,
Speaker A
you're not refueling enough and you're doing very very long high volume types of exercise, then you can basically disrupt your, you know, some of your hormones, your your follicle stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone. These things will make you become amenoretic.
Speaker A
So you basically stop ovulating and you stop getting your menstrual period. And what's the evolutionary reason for that? What's going on?
Speaker A
Because your body's like there's not enough food and energy around to sustain a ba, you know, a growing fetus like they're growing shutting down.
Speaker A
So it's so it's basically like, hey, we're not going to allow you to have a baby basically. So you stop you stop ovulating, right? So you can't you're not making you're not making those eggs.
Speaker A
Is this often the case with women who exercise a lot and no longer have their menstrual cycle?
Speaker A
First of all, this is not a common thing. This is like this is something that happens in, you know, like athletes, elite athlete, women that are not eating enough food. Like I I did this to myself when I was in my early
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20s and I was running I was racing marathons and I was running 10 miles a day, you know, eight to 10 miles a day, five days a week and then I was eating carrots and hummus and you know, I just
Speaker A
I wasn't fueling myself and I did I did this to myself, too. So, how do you feel if you train fasted? Do you feel terrible? Don't do it. If you want to train somewhat fasted, go for the protein, you know, protein shake with a
Speaker A
little bit of almond milk or something like that where you're not eating a full meal, but you're getting something. So, I do a lot of my training fasted and that has helped me. You know, I'm 47 years old and penmenopause.
Speaker A
You're in phenomenal shape. Thank you. Thank you. Um, but I did notice, of course, as as I started to reach that pmenopause part of my life that I had to be a little bit more aggressive and put a little bit more
Speaker A
effort in to not get this fat right here on my belly cuz it started coming up and I didn't want it. I didn't it wasn't it wasn't an option for me. Speaking of uh studies done for women, you I've heard
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you talk in the past about the Swan study, which kind of relates to what you just said there. Um when relating to women in visceral fat, and they found that women experience an accelerated increase in visceral fat starting 2
Speaker A
years before their final menstrual period. Yeah. Because that's when their estrogen is about it's just it's plummeting, right? You're just going off a cliff because you're you're about to go into menopause.
Speaker A
Again, what age would that be? Average age of menopause is between 50 about 50 52 for women. A lot of that there's a lot of things that can affect your reproductive lifespan, your ovarian aging I guess we can call it. And
Speaker A
unfortunately, one of them is when you the age you were when you got your menstrual period. So the younger you were, the younger you're going to be when you experienced menopause. So also when your mother experienced menopause is very very indicative of when you're
Speaker A
going to experience it. But lifestyle and diet play a role too. Obesity accelerates ovarian aging. So you're more likely to go into menopause earlier with obesity. Also these chemicals that we're exposed to and we can talk about those as well. A lot of these endocrine
Speaker A
disrupting chemicals affect the age of menopause as well and and accelerate that. So some in some cases women go into menopause two years earlier than they would have otherwise.
Speaker A
And you're so you're 47 Mhm. and a half and a half. And the data that I'm looking at here says when we think about permenopause, it usually starts in mid-40s, which is the age range you're in. This is where the 8 to 10% annual
Speaker A
visceral fat increase begins. It is. And and I Yeah. I can tell you from people in my life that I've seen going through this, it's pretty sudden that you'll see someone in your life that's a woman that's going through Mary Pen Perry
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menopause and maybe hasn't had any other symptoms yet, so they haven't really see any treatment. Now, you can you can try to do some hormone replacement therapy as well to help with that, but they start to gain visceral fat and it shows
Speaker A
up around the belly quite rapidly. And I noticed this in myself. It almost feels overnight. Seriously, this is the only symptom that I noticed in myself where it was like all of a sudden my belly was like growing and um you know, not super
Speaker A
super large, but enough where I was like there's something wrong. It's not even necessarily reflected if you get hormone tests cuz mine all seemed normal. The thing is is that the estrogen when it drops that estrogen is so important for
Speaker A
telling your body to store energy differently, not around the organs, but to make it around, you know, other parts of your body like your your thighs and your butt, right? Like your atapost tissue. And so when that estrogen goes
Speaker A
down and declines, it's like boom, it starts to go right to the belly. So that is why for me intermittent fasting has been really important. Like with any weight loss or calorie restriction protocol, you do need to make sure
Speaker A
you're getting enough protein because that's important for muscle, right? Muscle growth and preventing atrophy of your muscle. And you need to also do resistance training. That also is a very important signal for muscle. Because the problem is some people calorie restrict
Speaker A
and eat fewer meals and then they're not getting enough protein and they're not training and they start to lose muscle in addition to fat and you don't want to do that. You want to kind of just lose the visceral fat and keep the muscle
Speaker A
ideally keep gaining muscle. And for men, I was reading that testosterone and growth hormone typically peak in their late 20s. So I guess mine's peaked already. Um and starting at age 30, testosterone drops roughly 1% a year. So between the age of
Speaker A
25 and 65, men typically see a 200% increase in their visceral fat even if their total weight stays the same. So is that linked into testosterone decline? Is that what's going on there?
Speaker A
What's causing it? Yeah, I mean it's it's testosterone does you burn even if you're gaining visceral fat, it helps you burn it. It's it's also why some women that are in pmenopause want to do testosterone because it helps them burn the visceral
Speaker A
fat. M um so it is it is linked to testosterone decline as well but also as men are aging their they become more sedentary they send they tend to eat a little bit they're consuming more calorie like all these things are
Speaker A
handinand so it's like a it's not just like a one punch right it's like multiple angles are kind of all compounding and coming together whereas you could get away with it a little bit easier when you're younger because the
Speaker A
testosterone was helping you burn it more when you're declining it doesn't it doesn't work that same way so even though you're gaining it you're not burning it as quickly so you start to have a net gain in it. Uh if that makes
Speaker A
sense. So going back up to the top then we were talking about things you can do to lower your visceral fat and we talked a little bit about exercise, sleep, diet. Is there anything else in that category?
Speaker A
Yeah, I think those are the main ones. Obviously avoiding excess alcohol consumption. Yeah. And also stress. Stress.
Speaker A
Yeah. Yeah. The stress like you know trying to to relaxation techniques buffer that stress. That's a big one. It's an amplifier.
Speaker A
Yeah. People don't talk enough about visceral fat, you know, they look at other markers.
Speaker A
No. Well, most people just want to lose weight and look good. Yeah. Or Yeah. They look at, you know, HBA1C, your long-term glucose, or they're looking at lipids, and visceral fat is just it's it's insidious, right? It just
Speaker A
starts increasing, increasing, increasing. You can't see it. You can't see until all of a sudden belly, right?
Speaker A
I mean, it's it's it's bad. And it affects the way you feel daily. On this point of testosterone, why is it the case that testosterone seems to be dropping amongst men? I think it said something like I wrote it down. Yeah,
Speaker A
testosterone levels in men have dropped by up to 20% over the last two decades.
Speaker A
Um, which is quite terrifying. It is. So, look, there's a lot of factors that can affect testosterone. I mentioned dietary factors, refined sugar, sleep is a big one. people aren't getting enough sleep, lack of sleep drops testosterone, micronutrients, not
Speaker A
getting enough zinc, for example, zinc's very important for testosterone synthesis and magnesium. Like there's a there's there's important nutrient components, but I think the big player here is actually environmental. I think that we are being bombarded with what are
Speaker A
called endocrine disrupting chemicals. These are man-made chemicals. A lot of them are part of plastic. They're made to help plastic be more durable or more robust or they're found or they're water resistant. So there's probably three main endocrine disrupting chemicals that
Speaker A
are found in our environment mainly because they're in plastic or they're in they're also in things that are water resistant, oil resistant, fire resistant, flame retardant. BPA bisphenol AA is one. Another one is phalates. PH phalates. And the last one
Speaker A
would be PAS. These are the forever chemicals. These are the three main I would say players in terms of disrupting endocrine function. Endocrine being hormones. Sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, but also thyroid hormone. Very important for regulating our metabolism for example.
Speaker A
Are they really causing a problem? Absolutely. Really? Like absolutely. cuz I'm looking at the picture you have there of Pa Pas PAS PAS and it's got like a coat and shoes on there. You're telling me my the clothes that I wear are having an impact
Speaker A
on my hormones. They can, but I think it's it's it's less of a direct effect and more downstream. So the the the PAS chemicals or the forever chemicals, they're used in things to make them oil resistant, stain resistant, water resistant. So the
Speaker A
teflon pans would be the biggest example. You remember those non-stick pans? They have teflon that has PAS on it.
Speaker A
We're going to go into my kitchen in a second. So, I'll take all of the viewers that are watching now into my kitchen.
Speaker A
We'll have a stroller around my kitchen. You let me know if there's some things.
Speaker A
Oh gosh, I hope you don't have Teflon. But, I mean, my mom used it when I was, you know, growing up. I remember the non-stick pans that stuff is coming off into your food and so you're eating the
Speaker A
these PAS. How do we know that they're dangerous? Okay. Well, I'll tell you how we know.
Speaker A
like let's let's start with so the PAS chemicals are ones that are really they're more affecting the thyroid and they're affecting I would say ovarian aging they seem to target the ovaries and accelerate the age that you're going
Speaker A
to get menopause so you're going to get it around two one to two years earlier if you have a high amount of these forever chemicals but there's been studies a lot of studies looking at let's start with BPA okay bispenol A
Speaker A
that's a big one because you see a lot of marketing around BPA free. This plastic water bottle is BPA free. Well, it's BPA free, but it has another chemical called BPS, which is very similar, if not worse, than BPA. So, BPA
Speaker A
is something that's found in a lot of water bottles. It's in those plastic water bottles. It lines the cups of uh paper cups, like these to-go coffee cups that you're getting at your favorite, you know, coffee place. Plastic is
Speaker A
lining them. Yes, plastic lines them because it's protecting it from the liquid, right? BPA has been linked to many different diseases, but really really it's an endocrine disruptor. So what it does is a couple of things. One, BPA acts as an estrogen mimemetic. So it
Speaker A
kind of mimics estrogen and it binds to the receptors that estrogen do to do its function. And so it sometimes binds to estrogen and either makes it seem like there's estrogen around or it blocks estrogen from working. So it's it it
Speaker A
depends on the dose and the concentration. So it can do both, but it also binds to androgen receptors that interact with testosterone, right? And so there have been studies that have found that men that have high amounts of
Speaker A
BPA also have low amounts of testosterone. That there was also a study done in teens. This is when you know your sexual development is happening, right? Testosterone is very important during this part of of your life during puberty. Teens, adoles, ad
Speaker A
adolescent boys that had the highest amount of BPA had 50% lower testosterone than men than the boys, sorry, that had the lowest amount of BPA. The biggest one that's affecting testosterone is the phalates.
Speaker A
These phalates, they are present in a lot of PVC piping. They're present in a lot of our food packaging. all those like thin art or you go to the you know to the grocery store and you get a filet
Speaker A
manon steak and it's wrapped in plastic poultry all that plastic wrapping and all the foods that we're eating has phalates in them that make it more flexible and stuff and it's also found in our hair products our cosmetic
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products our creams and it's also very lipid soluble it likes fat it is drawn to fat so when you have plastic around fat like cheese you know things like fat meat.
Speaker A
It's getting into that meat. It's getting into that cheese, the phalates. These disrupt our hormones in ways similar to BPA. So, they're binding to the androgen receptor, but they're also going into the testes and disrupting the synthesis of testosterone. So, there was
Speaker A
a study in men that had the highest phalate levels, those men had 20% lower testosterone compared to men with higher levels. And and this is Yeah. And this is like it's affecting not only just the testosterone, but it's affecting sperm
Speaker A
quality. So the shape of the sperm wasn't good. It's affecting the number. So sperm count is down if they're higher BPA or higher phalates. And also um motility, the the ability to swim.
Speaker A
Pregnant women that get exposed to high levels of phalates and if they have if they're carrying a a male fetus, right, they they're having a boy. What's been shown is it's also affecting sexual development. So these boys, they're
Speaker A
getting something called hypospadia. That's where like this the slit on the ur on the um on the penis is like moved backwards kind of closer to like what a a woman would have. And they're getting undescended testicles. So one of their
Speaker A
testicles is not descending. And that's associated with you know infertility, cancer, testicular cancer being the big one. This is happening at a alarming rate. like something like 20% of boys now have an undescented testicle. I mean, it's crazy
Speaker A
because their mother had high phalates. Well, it's this is definitely something that is known in our environment to cause that. I don't know if that's the only cause, but it in my opinion is a very very concerning cause that nobody
Speaker A
is talking about and that should be addressed. And it's everywhere. We have these in all of our all of our plastic wrappers that we everything that we're eating. you know, you you even getting your meat, you're you think it's well,
Speaker A
it's meat. It's, you know, but it's wrapped in plastic and that phalates are getting into the food. So, they're getting into our bodies and they're disrupting hormones. They're disrupting sexual development. They're disrupting our ovaries, estrogen, you know, ovarian
Speaker A
aging, age of menopause. They're disrupting thyroids, the thyroid hormones. I mean, there's there's even studies now with women, pregnant women that have high levels of BPA.
Speaker A
they have they're six times more likely to have a child with autism spectrum disorder compared to women with low levels of BPA. Again, BPA is disrupting the estrogen and androgen receptor. And this is very important because the androgen you you want to have it's
Speaker A
it's disrupting aromatase as well, that enzyme that's involved in converting testosterone into estrogen. So, believe it or not, when you're a boy developing in your mom's womb, estrogen plays a very important role in your brain and brain development and what's
Speaker A
called masculinizing the male brain. You actually, it's kind of contradictory. You're like, "Oh, well, wouldn't testosterone do that?" Well, actually, estrogen is very important for masculinizing parts of the male brain.
Speaker A
And so when you have aromatase being inhibited by bisphenol A by this endocrine disrupting hormone that is so ubiquitous everywhere that is found in plastic bottles plastic bottles it's it's found in yeah it's found everywhere.
Speaker A
So what what do you recommend? First of all I think if you can uh eliminate and not drink out of plastic bottles as much as possible. If you do want to go coffee either drink it there in their mugs or bring your own to- go
Speaker A
mug. Like I bring my like I have like a Yeti kind of to- go coffee mug that I'll bring into a Starbucks or wherever coffee bean and I'll have them fill it up. Soup cans canned soup are lined with
Speaker A
BPA. They're lined with plastic and soup usually goes into the can hot sterile technique. I mean they they want to make sure it's so you're getting the soup has been classically shown in multiple studies to me to to increase BPA levels
Speaker A
by a thousand%. Crazy amounts. So, don't eat canned soup as much as possible. I mean, obviously, this is about the habit, not the one-off, but but you know, try to avoid cans, drinking out of even soda cans, even like your your favorite sparkling
Speaker A
water cans. Don't make it a daily habit because they are lined with plastic. That's a source of BPA into your bodies.
Speaker A
There are ways that you can excrete BPA. So, the major way to get rid of it is through urine. It's excreted through your urine, but it has to become water soluble first. It's a fats soluble compound. And so there are things that
Speaker A
we can eat in our diet that will increase that excretion. Compounds in broccoli. Broccoli sprouts being the big one. Sulurophane activates a pathway that are enzymes involved in making BPA become water soluble. So they come out your urine.
Speaker A
Oh, so broccoli is like a cleanser. It's like a cleanser. It's like we we actually do have these it's called phase 2 detoxification enzymes in our body. We have the ability to detox a lot of things. We just have to give our body
Speaker A
the right, you know, input so that it can activate those pathways. I personally take a supplement of that sulfurophane because I want a concentrated amount of it because I used to do broccoli sprouts. Broccoli sprouts have a hundred times more sulfurophane
Speaker A
than mature broccoli, but you have to sprout them and then there's contamination issues and it's just, you know, some people do it. It's great, but I used to do it. I don't anymore. I just take a supplement.
Speaker A
That supplement's called The supplement I take has is called Avacol. It's by a company called Neutramax. I don't um you know I'm not like affiliated with them. I like their supplement because one they've got 12 published studies using it. Clinical
Speaker A
studies too showing that it actually helps with um autism children and adolescence with autism that take the sulfurophane supplement that they have improved symptoms because it's a detox.
Speaker A
It helps interestingly people with autism are like 30 times less likely to excrete BPA. It's a weird thing going on here where BPA increases autism spectrum disorder, but then kids that have it are not able to detoxify it as well.
Speaker A
Wow. Yeah, it's interesting. Again, I think that excretion is important, but avoiding avoiding the plastic as much as you can. Make it a habit. Don't freak out. I mean, obviously you can like make yourself crazy and stress is not good.
Speaker A
As we talked about, I see you like going, "Oh my god." Yeah. Know, I'm thinking about just how casual I am about these things, though.
Speaker A
And I could I could easily make small changes. I I could frankly I could easy make big changes in the position I'm in.
Speaker A
I could just say I can say in my company we no longer buy this kind of stuff. I could say in my kitchen cuz you know to my team or whatever. Let's not buy this.
Speaker A
Can we go look at my kitchen now? Let's do it. Let's go. Let's go to my kitchen. Be right. No, you guys can come too. So we're going to go to my kitchen.
Speaker A
If you're Listen, if you're listening on the dog walk, this might be a nice time to sit on a bench and look because you're about to go into my kitchen and we're going to look at real things that
Speaker A
you might not even know in your kitchen are causing you some of these problems.
Speaker A
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Keep this to yourself. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, so the team have been here for the last couple of days. We've been getting lots of takeaways. And so this is a higgled piggledy of everybody's food.
Speaker A
What's wrong? You got you're pulling black plastic. What's wrong with the black plastic? Um, we talked about plastic. It has BPA.
Speaker A
It has phalates, but it also typically is made from recycled electronics. And the problem here, Stephen, is recycled electronics have flame retardants in them because you don't want your electronics catching fire. And there have been a variety of studies now that
Speaker A
have found that black plastic has a high amount of these flame retardants that are leeching into the food and getting into people's bodies that way. Not only do you not want to eat out of black plastic, you don't want hot food going
Speaker A
in there, right? Cuz that's like the worst. Can I get a bin bag? I need a bin bag.
Speaker A
Okay. Okay. So, let's throw that in the bin. What else? I'm going to take all of it out.
Speaker A
Okay. This is the other thing that really reaches out. Stands out to me because spicy foods, anything acidic that goes into plastic causes the chemicals to leech into it even more rapidly. Kind of the same way the heat does. So, heat,
Speaker A
acidic foods, not good in plastic. So, my spicy sauce, if it comes in a little plastic tub, it's going to leech in.
Speaker A
Look, if it's the oneoff, okay, but like not a habit. Yes. A big time leech in it. You're you're you're eating BPA hot sauce.
Speaker A
Okay. So, the black stuff is out and it's going in hot. Yeah, this has phalates and had BPA. I mean, look, are you drinking this every day or is it the oneoff?
Speaker A
No comment. No comment. Mind your business. Okay. What else? What about this? This is made of paper.
Speaker A
Here's my little thing I do. See that waxy? There's a waxy a pas on the edge.
Speaker A
Yeah. Does it seem like it has a waxy substance to you? Yes. This is This is better than the black plastic. If you had to like if there's like tears, this is better than black plastic.
Speaker A
Okay. And this ding ding ding. This is great. This is the best thing that you can do if you're going to have food made for you or you want to order takeout, have someone make it for you and deliver you in this.
Speaker A
And this is a bamboo lid. Bamboo lid with with GL Pyrex glass, right? Okay. So, this is what this is good.
Speaker A
This is great. So, I need more of this. You need more of this and get rid of all I mean, this is already looking better.
Speaker A
This is on the scale. At least it goes in cold. So, here's the thing.
Speaker A
Microplastics are also shedding into this. We didn't talk about microplastics. They're shutting into here. the chemicals, not as much in something like this, but they're still getting in. So, this is a little bit better when it comes to like the the
Speaker A
tears here. The hot food is the worst. This is a little bit better, but I still would get lettuce because it's cold.
Speaker A
Because it's cold. So, it's not seeping. Exactly. Okay. So, I might be able to keep that then. What else do you notice here?
Speaker A
So, I noticed that I really like your glass sparkling waters. That's great because, you know, glass is is less likely to have microplastic shedding, less likely to have the chemicals.
Speaker A
There was a study that actually found, interestingly, there were more microlastics in on the top. So, the paint that's on these lids, plastic polymers are used in that. And during the processing and, you know, bottling up of these things, they get into the
Speaker A
the the water. And so, believe it or not, glass bottled water has more microlastics than plastic bottled water.
Speaker A
Okay, this is terrible. But I'm going to tell you why I think this still is worse. Okay, so this is got microplastics, but it also has BPA and phalates. They're in this water. This was not always cold. It's, you know, it
Speaker A
was some warehouse shipping container. Who knows how it got here? It's been heated up, I'm sure, several times. The problem is is that there was a study showing that glass bottles have a higher amount of microlastics than than
Speaker A
plastic. And you might go, why is that? Because they're all coming off on this paint and getting in. When it comes to microplastics, size matter. I'm not as worried about it having more microplastics because it would show that
Speaker A
they were large microplastics. Your body doesn't absorb a large ones very well. They come out through your feces. These This has tons of what are called nanoplastics, very, very small particles that get into the gut and get into your
Speaker A
bloodstream. So, I still go for the glass water. So, I would avoid drinking out of these as much as possible. So, I like how you have these condiments in the glass. This is how my refrigerator looks as well. I'm very, very obsessive
Speaker A
about anything that has acidity in it, like hot sauce and ketchup. It needs to be in glass because the acidity is leeching microplastics and BPA and phalate chemicals into your condiments and then you're putting that on your food and you're eating them. Again, this
Speaker A
is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Plastic is everywhere. The chemicals are everywhere. And you're not even thinking about the fact that your hot sauce and ketchup are also, you know, vehicles for delivering these microplastics and, you know, their associated chemicals into
Speaker A
your body. So, I really like these. Like this one, I would go for a glass mustard. Those those are better.
Speaker A
Glass bottle. So, this is plastic. Same thing. It's acidic. I would say um you know, for the most part, the butter. Oh, yeah. This is bad. Is this butter? Oh, cheese. Yeah. So, this is a problem also. So if you look at this um it's
Speaker A
that flexible plasticky stuff, right? It has phalates in it. Well, this this Oh, that's even worse. This is Yeah. So this is the plastic that basically, you know, phalates are in this and they're fat soluble and they are just leeching
Speaker A
into this fatty cheese. They're leeching into the fatty cheese. So you can buy cheese that's like without this in just the container that's a little bit better.
Speaker A
You know what I mean? Like like I'm thinking of feta cheese for example. Like some feta cheese comes in this plastic wrapper, but you can buy it with just the container and at least it's not like close like with juices like just
Speaker A
seeping into it, you know, getting the chemicals into it. Ah, but this is fine, isn't it?
Speaker A
Eggs. Yes, eggs are great. There we go. Eggs are great. We found something. Okay, Vonda. So, spatulas and kitchen utensils. Are these good? Are these bad?
Speaker A
What's What's the best? Yeah, good question. These are great, right? Okay. There's no plastic here. No possibility of plastic leaking into your foods. You got your nice pasta spoon.
Speaker A
These are silicon, I'm imagining. Um, in theory, the silicon should be okay. Um, the problem is is that there's a lot of silicon that actually still has it's mixed with plastic, too. So, I go for the wood ones that are like this, like
Speaker A
the wooden spatula. That's what I use. You in theory should be good. In practice, a lot of silicone that's been measured out there and tested does have plastic. So, I would say if you want to really be careful, I would switch.
Speaker A
But most people at home probably have a plastic spatula. Is that accurate? Most people at home have plastic spatula and a lot of people also have black plastic spatulas, which again back to that black recycled electronics, flame retardants, these are cancer-causing
Speaker A
chemicals in there. Bromelated chemicals that are causing cancer. So yeah, I would say that even shifting from the plastic to this is probably a step up, but I don't know that this is just pure silicon. I I I I would guess that
Speaker A
there's some plastic still in it. And so if you're heating it up, the plastic, it's getting into your food.
Speaker A
Okay. What about um my my pans? So what about Got my pans here. Great. All clad. This is what I use.
Speaker A
These are amazing. No plastic lining, no PAS, no nonstick. So, most people's pans at home have a sort of a protective layer here that's nonstick so that they can cook their food and their food doesn't stick to the
Speaker A
pans. Like scrambled eggs, they're kind of a pain in the butt if they stick to everything. That has the forever chemicals in them and that is being heated up and is leeching into your food and you're eating it. So, really what
Speaker A
you want to avoid the most is uh Teflon, right? Anything that's nonstick. It's harder to cook with these though.
Speaker A
It's so much harder. But you know what? you're healthier and that's what you have to imagine.
Speaker A
The other thing I want to talk to you about is this. The blender. Ah, yes. The blender. This is one that people often miss. The problem is most blender tops here that's blending your stuff is plastic. And there are studies showing
Speaker A
that when you have a lot of friction on plastic, that releases orders of magnitude more microlastics. And of course, their associated chemicals are hitchhiking along there. There are companies that make a stainless steel version of the blender, and I highly
Speaker A
recommend if you're someone like myself, I like to do my kale blueberry smoothies, that you switch to the stainless steel. I did. I switched for my family. Um because essentially the friction, you're drinking microplastics and chemicals. So that's bad.
Speaker A
A receipt. Yeah, don't touch it. What What do you mean don't touch it? Um so receipts are Why are you touching it like that?
Speaker A
covered with BPA. I mean, literally just covered. That's how it prints it, right? This isn't like a printer. This is printed. It's a thermal paper and and the BPA is allowing the printing to happen. And so, they're covered with
Speaker A
bisphenol A. People that are handling receipts, like cashiers that are handling receipts, have really high levels of BPA. Um, particularly if they use like hand sanitizing lotion or any lotion, any sort of cream makes the BPA.
Speaker A
Again, BPA is fat soluble. these creams um the hand sanitizers are carrying it inside to your inside your bloodream about a hundfold higher than not having that. So, first of all, you can opt to have an receipt emailed to you if you
Speaker A
need the receipt. I would do that or, you know, don't touch it. But also, if you work in the cash, if you're a cashier and you work in this industry, really, really, please wear nitrial gloves. I mean, this is like your BPA
Speaker A
levels. If you were to go get them measured, which you can, there are companies out there now that do measure BPA levels in urine, you will see that they are extremely extremely high. So, um, nitro gloves will protect you from
Speaker A
from the BPA getting across your your dermal barrier and getting to your bloodstream. Uh, latex gloves do not.
Speaker A
So, make sure they're nitro gloves. And for people that are not in the industry, try to avoid the receipts. I mean, it's a really big exposure to BPA that people aren't even realizing.
Speaker A
I can tell by the way you're like grabbing the corner of it like it's feces or something.
Speaker A
Oh, it's terrible. And my son, like, you know, kids love paper. And of course I don't want them touching it because we talked about that study in adolescent boys where they had high BPA levels and that was associated with a 50% reduction
Speaker A
in testosterone. I mean this is at a part of your life when testosterone is you know important for sexual development and development in general.
Speaker A
So really really really important to remember receipts are a very big source of BPA that people are not thinking about particularly people that are routinely handling these receipts. And um the other thing I want to talk you to
Speaker A
you about is water. So here is one of my water filters. I also have a filter attached to the tap.
Speaker A
What are your thoughts? So this is filtering water, but it's filtering it into plastic and it's also got plastic filter.
Speaker A
So I think that you know you're probably filtering away some other things, pathogens, gross other chemicals that might be in the water, but you're essentially reintroducing the plastic.
Speaker A
So I don't know that that's necessarily the best way to get the filter. What you have over here is a reverse osmosis water filter. That is absolutely the ideal reverse osmosis water filters filter out microplastics, nanoplastics, BPA, phalates, chemicals, all these
Speaker A
things that we're talking about today. People can get a tabletop one kind of like this is tabletop, but it's a tabletop reverse osmosis water filter.
Speaker A
These only filter out the bigger, larger plastic size, microplastic size. And then the last thing I want to mention, Stephen, because you do have a reverse osmosis water filter, is that it does filter out a lot of small particles,
Speaker A
including essential, you know, trace elements and some essential like minerals and stuff. So, you want to make sure that you are taking a multivitamin mineral supplement. And you can also get what's called little essential um element drops that have things like
Speaker A
phosphorus, maganese, iodine, some of these things that are being filtered out of your water and making sure you're reintroducing that to your water.
Speaker A
H Okay. So, it takes some good stuff out too. It does. Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else that maybe is either in my kitchen now or not in my kitchen that is a culprit of BPAs and pouls?
Speaker A
Yeah. Here's the first problem here. And then inside where the hot water is going through is there's plastic pieces. So the hot water is going through plastic to get to your little espresso, you know, cup here. These I actually looked
Speaker A
into this cuz at first I thought they were lined with plastic. They're not. My concern is mostly the water going through the system that's heating up.
Speaker A
It's going it's got plastic, you know, piping in there that it's going through. Okay. So I'm going to just stay there and I'm going to just grab Okay. So this is now the coffee that I drink called contier.
Speaker A
Um they flash freeze it at the perfect moment and it's delivered frozen. So metal and then this is an aluminum lid, right? So it shouldn't be lined with plastic right?
Speaker A
You go like this, press the little button on top and it goes straight into your glass and then this comes out and that's the coffee.
Speaker A
Oh, I love it. So you just drop It's funny cuz they're a sponsor. Oh, should disclaimer and I'm also an investor in this company. So, um, no no machines at all. Put it straight into the glass, pour the hot water in, and
Speaker A
that's it. So, it's like in instead of instant co It's like instant coffee, but it's real coffee that's been frozen.
Speaker A
It's from some Stanford engineers who flash freeze it at the perfect moment to lock in the taste. And you can literally smell Smells good.
Speaker A
Smells good. Yeah. Um, yeah. I'm so glad you're not putting it in a machine cuz that's No, no longer do that. Okay. So, this is my supplement cupboard. It's a It's a mess, but I've pulled out things that I
Speaker A
that I'm personally interested in, good, bad, indifferent. The first one that jumped out at me when I was looking is reduced and active glutathione.
Speaker A
This is something that um I think people should be aware of. There's marketing involved here. Glutathione is in a major it's a major antioxidant. We make it in our body. We make it in our brain.
Speaker A
What does it do? Sorry. So, it's a very important antioxidant. It helps negate oxidation which is causing brain aging. It's it's negating oxidation which is aging yourself.
Speaker A
Right. M people want to supplement with it because they've heard about glutathione and how beneficial it is and how it's a great antioxidant. The problem is because our body makes it inside of our cells inside of our cells. We don't have
Speaker A
a transporter to get glutathione from the outside of our cells like if we eat it and if it makes it through our digestion, which it really doesn't, into our cells. And so this kind of glutathione isn't going to make it
Speaker A
inside of your cells. So this is just a waste of time. It it is. You're going to want to get something called liposomal glutathione.
Speaker A
Liposal glutathione has been shown to get inside because liposomes it's essentially taking the glutathione molecule and encapsulating it in something that's going to fuse with your cell. Liposal products in general have a higher bioavailability for that reason.
Speaker A
So let me repeat that back to you. So I've got it. So if it's liposal, it's basically in a packet which can get through into the cell. If it's not, this one is um reduced and active. Then it's
Speaker A
never going to get in the cell. So it's waste of time. It's just going to be excreted. Yeah, I would say that it's really not doing much and that if you're going to want to supplement with liposal glutathione, that's what I have.
Speaker A
What about this vitamin D3? I've always been confused because people say take vitamin D, but then this one says D3, right? D3 is the form of vitamin D that you make when you're in the sun. That's the major way we make vitamin D is from
Speaker A
sun exposure. There is a plant form of vitamin D called vitamin D2. It's found in things like mushrooms, for example.
Speaker A
The problem is is that there have been studies showing that vitamin D2, which is unfortunately what a lot of vegetarians take because they want a vegetarian form. Vitamin D3 is also found in like sheep skin because the sheep are making it in their, you know,
Speaker A
skin when they're exposed to sunlight. Um, vitamin D2 is not as effective as vitamin D3. If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, you're going to want to look for vitamin D3 from lychen. Lyken is that like green stuff that you can find on
Speaker A
trees and stuff that also makes vitamin D3 and so it's a it's a much better option than getting the vitamin D2 which is what a lot of vegetarians do. So there's actually a a study, recent study showing that people that are vitamin D
Speaker A
deficient, so they're not getting enough vitamin D3 because we don't go out in the sun anymore. They have accelerated aging. And if they supplement, this is a very large study, by the way, if they supplemented with vitamin D3, they
Speaker A
slowed their their biological aging by almost 2 years. That didn't happen in people that were not vitamin D deficient from the start. So it's not like a vitamin D3 supplement is going to do something miraculous if you already have
Speaker A
enough vitamin D. The the point is to avoid deficiency and so you know someone like yourself that does probably doesn't go outside a lot but also well you go outside but you're not you have darker skin so melanin is a natural sunscreen
Speaker A
and so people with more melanin have to spend a lot more time in the sun and so that is something to consider as well.
Speaker A
Well, I can always just take my multivitamin, right? Multivitamin. I think I might have talked about one study last time we talked last episode where men and women that were older adults, they were 65 years and older, they took one
Speaker A
sententrum silver a day. And I'm not, you know, I'm not advocating for sententrum silver. I'm just saying that was involved in the study. And um after 3 years, they had reversed their brain aging, global brain aging by 2.1 years.
Speaker A
And they reversed their episodic brain aging by almost 5 years. So episodic memory is the kind of memory involved in remembering events and people and things like that you know as you get older you know that stuff doesn't come as quick
Speaker A
right so it delayed that aging by 5 years well this same study also um just recently published literally like a couple of weeks ago again part of this large study it's called the Cosmos study they looked at the multivitamin use and
Speaker A
biological aging epigenetic aging and they found that the Centrum silver multivitamin also slowed slowed biological aging, epigenetic aging by a few months and this was only after two years and you might go oh a few months but that was after two years and that
Speaker A
that trial was two years long. So if you add two two years and then you add another two years and then you add and then you're talking about 20 talking about 30 talking about 50 years that is slowing aging the entire time. It adds
Speaker A
up. It's cumulative and it's one of the easiest things that someone can do to basically you know make sure that they're aging better. There's things that are harder to do, but that to me is such a lowhanging fruit. It's easy.
Speaker A
What is it about this? What is in here that's making a male multivitamin have such profound effects?
Speaker A
If you look at the back at the the supplement facts, there's a lot of vitamins and minerals. Things like vitamin C, vitamin D3, vitamin E, vitamin K, nascin, the B vitamins, folate. You have things like selenium, the essential those essential elements.
Speaker A
These are all things that we need to run everything in our body. All of our metabolism, our neurotransmitter synthesis, our immune system, you know, our our liver, all these these these are co-actors that are really important for all those things. And you don't realize
Speaker A
how important they are until time goes on and things start to fall apart. It's basically filling the gaps because we're supposed to get this these things from our foods. We're supposed to be getting all these vitamins and minerals from our
Speaker A
foods, from from our water, and it's just not happening for many reasons. One, our soils are depleted. You know, the organo phosphates like glyphosate is depleting our minerals. And so the foods that are being grown in the soil aren't
Speaker A
getting their minerals that they're supposed to. And then the second problem is we're not eating the right foods because we're taking we're eating takeout. We're eating foods that are not micronutrientdense. Things like dark leafy greens. We're not eating the
Speaker A
colors of the rainbow. And those are really important for vitamins and minerals. So I've got two questions there. Is there a multivitamin that I could take that is not good for me? Because when I go to the shops, there's so many
Speaker A
different types these days and I don't know which one's good, bad or how to tell the difference. And so honestly, sometimes I just go based on the most expensive because I assume the most expensive is the best quality.
Speaker A
Yeah. So, you know, the problem with supplements is they're not regulated. I mean, not that I necessarily want them, but it is a problem because supplement companies can kind of put whatever they want in the supplements. They don't
Speaker A
necessarily have the amount of active ingredient that they say or they can either have too little or too much. And so that is the problem with too much.
Speaker A
Yeah. So for example, some vitamin D3 supplements and some um melatonin supplements have like some in some cases like a,000 to 10,000fold more. And it was a really big problem with melatonin because melatonin is that hormone that you make to help you fall asleep and
Speaker A
there was excessive amounts in them. So it's not regulated. So that you really don't know the amount you're getting.
Speaker A
So, I would say number one, go to a trust trusted brand that is thirdparty testing. There's so much thirdparty testing now. Consumer lab does it. You can, you know, look up what they've tested. But for a man, I would say the
Speaker A
thing that's essential here is you don't want to get iron. You don't want supplemental iron.
Speaker A
Well, someone told me to start drinking these iron drinks. Were you iron deficient? No.
Speaker A
Okay. I was just sick one time and they said this would really help. So, this wasn't a scientist, just a friend.
Speaker A
Most men do not need to supplement with iron unless they have, you know, a problem with iron and they're anemic.
Speaker A
For example, iron can be very bad. I mean, if you're supplementing with iron, it's very reactive and it causes uh oxidative stress easily. It's called free iron. The free iron reacts with other things with your DNA, your cells.
Speaker A
And so, most men do not need to sell. In fact, even you know something called he hemocchromattosis where there you're basically you have too much iron already and you if you have those genes it's actually quite common then you're really
Speaker A
talking about iron overload. So you really do not need a supplement with iron. Women women premenopausal women are different because premenopausal women do lose a lot of iron from menration when they're menrating. And so I would say about 16%
Speaker A
of of menrating women are iron deficient. And then if you add exercise on top of that, you know, a lot of endurance exercise, you can get licis of your red blood cells. And so you do need iron for your red blood cells. If you're
Speaker A
eating meat, if you're not a vegetarian, you know, maybe that would be a case if you're like a vegan or something, maybe some iron could come in, but you have to get your iron levels measured. You don't want to be too high because it is it
Speaker A
does cause damage. But I would say that premenopausal women, iron is especially around your cycle is good. Post-menopausal women, once you hit menopause, it you kind of shift to like what a men needs. You don't need the iron again.
Speaker A
So, it's very it's very much just premenopausal women that need iron. That's so funny. I've been drinking these. Omega3. Does that Yes. Omega-3 fish oil, as we've talked about before. I mean, this is probably one of the best and easiest things that
Speaker A
people can do to improve their health, improve the way they age. Um, omega-3 fatty acids. 90% of the US population is not getting enough of them. 80% globally, everyone. Nobody's getting enough omega-3 fatty acids, particularly from seafood. So the EPA and DHA from
Speaker A
fish oil are probably the best forms. You know, we talked about studies if you have a high omega-3 index, you have a fiveyear increased life expectancy compared to low omega-3 index. If you're a smoker and you have a high omega-3
Speaker A
index, then you're going to live as long as a non-smoker with a low omega-3 index, right? I mean, so the low omega-3 index is like smoking. Basically, you know, you have a 66% lower chance of getting Alzheimer's disease with a high
Speaker A
omega-3 index. And even more recently, there were studies showing that omega-3 slows epigenetic aging. Um, and this is this is not just a in deficiency. I guess because everyone's deficient, maybe that's why, but um, a study showed that omega-3 fish oil supplementation.
Speaker A
This was a study out of Switzerland. These individuals are mostly active. There were 88% of them were already physically active at the start of the trial. And I mentioned that because the trial involved omega-3, it involved vitamin D, and it involved resistance
Speaker A
training or the combination of all three. And only the omega-3 was able to slow epigenetic aging, biological aging, because for one, they were already physically active. So adding resistance training on top of their baseline didn't do much. And they were vitamin D
Speaker A
sufficient. So the omega-3 was able to slow epigenetic aging. The combination of all three slowed it by four months.
Speaker A
This was just after one year. So slowed it by four months. And if you imagine that, uh, it doesn't sound like a lot. Again, it's compounding, but also within that study, they looked at realworld outcomes. So that also
Speaker A
correlated with they had a 60% less likely chance of being pre fail uh pre- frail. So pre-frailty, right? Um they also were less likely to get cancer as well. So I mean it's really kind of translating to these health outcomes
Speaker A
that we think of. And all you need to do is supplement with about 1.6 to two grams a day of omega-3 to get a good omega-3 index. But I will mention one thing, Stephen, it's at room temperature. I don't think that's a
Speaker A
great idea. Um because fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid. It is prone to oxidation. So you want to put it in a low temperature environment. I keep all my actually I keep all my fish oil frozen. Frozen and then when I'm ready
Speaker A
to use it, I put it in the fridge. So like I have a store of it. I have a stock of it I buy and then it's in the freezer and then I put it in the fridge with the the bottle that I'm using from
Speaker A
and it's freezing it does nothing. It's fine. It so it's basically just keeping it really really low oxidation.
Speaker A
So I need to put this in the fridge. You need to put it in the fridge and also make sure you're getting a quality brand, right? So, you're going to third party testing. Again, you want to have a
Speaker A
total oxidation, ideally less than 10. And there are brands out there that do have a oxidation less than 10, which means it's more fresh and pure.
Speaker A
It's more It's Yeah, it's less oxidized. You don't want to be consuming oxidized fat because that's also not good.
Speaker A
Okay. So, what else jumps out to you here? We've got creatine. I mean, yeah, creatine is like my new I travel with it everywhere. You got microionized is this this is I've got so many different types, right? This is the one I take. Yeah, I
Speaker A
take I take the creatine monohydrate because it's the most wellstudied and you know obviously for I do a lot of training and workout train you I do a lot of resistance training and strength training. So I at least get five grams a
Speaker A
day which is what I always was doing in the past. I up that to 10 grams a day as my baseline because I wanted to have benefits in my brain. Studies out of Germany show that once you get to the 10
Speaker A
gram mark, you're actually your brain is able to take it up and it's increasing creatine in certain brain regions. That doesn't happen much at lower doses and that's because your muscles are very greedy. The creatine in my brain,
Speaker A
honestly, I've for me, I've mentioned this before, it's a game changer just on a daily basis. I feel like I don't have that afternoon slump. I'm in my mid-4s.
Speaker A
My brain isn't as sharp as it was. Creatine has really helped me kind of get a little bit closer to where I used to be. And also when I'm sleep deprived, I go up even higher. Sometimes I do 20
Speaker A
25 grams. And that is because studies have shown if you go up to a higher dose like that, depending on your weight, it's kind of a scale. Um that it helps you basically negate the negative effects on your brain from sleep
Speaker A
deprivation where not only are you cognitively functioning, you're functioning beyond what your even normal baseline was, which was kind of mind-blowing. The question I had is around loading and how long it takes to feel the impact. Because when I first
Speaker A
heard about creatine, I was 16 and my brother was bodybuilding and they were told that you need to like load up on big loads of it and then in like two weeks time your body would be saturated.
Speaker A
What's the truth? Right? So the reason that creatine loading was done was because they there's a short window of time when researchers are doing a study and they want their muscle stores to be saturated. They want their their muscle
Speaker A
stores to be saturated and so you have to do 20 gram loading phase in order to saturate them after you know three or four days.
Speaker A
If you're not about to compete and if you haven't been using creatine and you're not participating in the study, it takes about four week 3 to four weeks of five grams a day consistently to saturate your muscle. So you don't have
Speaker A
to do any loading phase. If you are supplementing with five grams a day and you've been doing it for a month, your muscle stores are saturated until you exercise and you get that five grams in again. They're saturated, right? So,
Speaker A
they keep they're they're already that five grams a day is keeping them saturated. And that's why I said your muscles are really hungry and greedy.
Speaker A
They're wanting that five grams. They're wanting that five grams. And that's about what it takes daily to saturate them. However, if you're starting from ground zero where you've never taken creatine, it's going to take four weeks to really get the effects. Otherwise,
Speaker A
yeah, you'll have to get higher doses. are not going to be saturated after 5 g.
Speaker A
So, some people might have tried creatine for a week, have not felt any effect, and given up.
Speaker A
That's a good that's actually a really good point. Yeah, it's about a month-long experiment. I would say close to four weeks. I think some people can saturate it at 3 weeks, but it all depends body size and all that. So, four
Speaker A
weeks is a good experiment time and five grams is a good dose to start with. If five grams a day actually help makes you more bloated and nauseous, cut that down to 2 and 1 half and 2 and 1/2 grams so
Speaker A
that you split the doses. If you split the doses, if you take it with food, particularly carbohydrates, it seems to help negate some of the bloating and nausea and negative effects people feel.
Speaker A
And obviously, if you're not working out, you know, creatine is not going to like grow your muscles. You have to put in the work. You have to put in the effort. It's what it's doing is it's helping your muscles, you know, grow and
Speaker A
give you the energy to to do more training volume so that they can grow bigger and also so that you can be stronger. If you're traveling and stressed and all those things, yes, creatine is good for the brain. I was
Speaker A
seeing I think it was James Smith did a video about different creatine percentages in the creatine products we drink and um or eat or consume and he looked at creatine gummies and found that some of the creatine gummies don't
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even have any creatine in them at all. And it was quite shocking because you just assume that if it says creatine there's going to be creatine in there.
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This goes back to the whole problem where supplements are not regulated and so you never really know what you're getting and you have to have third party testing and go to a quality brand.
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Gummies in general. So, there was a study that was published not long ago. It was a consumer study that was done where people went and got a lot of different creatine gummies off the shelf and then measured how much creatine was
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in them. And essentially almost all of them had none. And I've talked to some supplement manufacturers and their basically their statement was it's really hard to get active ingredients in gummy in general, not even just creatine in general. But the other thing I did
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want to mention with creatine is that you do want to make sure it's NSF certified. That's a really important thing because there are contaminants that are even produced in the processing of creatine and creatine monohydrate.
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And so you want to make sure that you're not getting those contaminants which can be harmful. And some of them are like lead for example, but even some other compounds that are formed. And so you want NSF certification. And that's
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always what I look for when I'm buying a creatine supplement is NSF certification or any supplement. I really like to have all supplements NSF certified because that really means they've one looked at contaminants and two it's got that
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active ingredient in there and that's really what you want. And the NSF certification is just a little logo on the side of the tub here that says NSF certified sports.
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That's it. Yeah. And it's all on websites, too, if you buy online. Yeah. Okay. So, I've got one challenge for you. If you had to pick five supplements for me to take, assuming that I am male and female.
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Okay. Okay. So, it's neither gender. Um, and it can be things that are either currently in my cupboard or not. What's the top five? And ideally, give me them in order if you can, in order of importance.
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Fish oil number one. Number one, vitamin D. Multivitamin. All three very very strong evidence that you're going to slow aging, you're going to improve your brain function, lower disease risk, live longer, and creatine is going to be there.
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So that's one, two, three, four. And then the last one is magnesium. Magnesium would be I mean it might be number four and creatine number five actually.
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Really? Yeah. Um you sure? What is magnesium doing for me? Magnesium is running. It's important for 300 different enzymes in your body. It's important to repair damage to your DNA that's being done all the time. It's being done from the iron that you're
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taking. Um, it's being done from normal metabolism, normal immune activation, but when you're in a state where you have you're, you know, not eating a good diet or you're not getting enough sleep, magnesium is really important to repair
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that damage. And that's why studies have shown that magnesium is really important for preventing cancer. And it also helps with sleep. It's really good for sleep.
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But more importantly, 50% of the population doesn't get enough magnesium. And I bet you're probably one of those people because most of us are. Do you eat a lot of dark leafy greens or almonds?
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You're supposed to be getting 400 about 350 to 400 milligrams a day. Are you physically active? Yeah. You're sweating magnesium out. Let's make it six supplements. So, there's a new supplement uriththn that I'm pretty excited about. The other thing I take
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that's really important is that I don't necessarily see here. What's it called? Um, so curcumin. All those supplements you've mentioned, the first one which I can't say and the second one cumin, we have on the table in the studio. So,
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let's get back into the studio and we'll pick up from there. Steve, what are you doing?
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Uh, just making myself a delicious coffee from the freezer. From the freezer? Have you not heard about Compier?
Speaker A
No. Oh my gosh, this is going to change your life. A couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing of
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coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So what they do is they flash freeze it at the optimal moment when it's most tasty and they send you in the post the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes. Now
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Max sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team, "Knock yourselves out." And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going, "Oh my god, what the hell is that? It's so
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delicious." All I have to do is pop it out in the morning using the little button on the back of this thing. I pour my hot water in and I mix it and that is done. You can get $30 off your first
Speaker A
order of Cometier coffee if you go to cometier.com/stephven. Try it and please Instagram DM me, LinkedIn me and let me know if you love it as much as I do. You know, every once in a while you come across a product
Speaker A
that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a gamecher. And I would say for about 35 to 40% of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you
Speaker A
can get at ketone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box
Speaker A
of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was. Lily in my team says that this company have been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly, the rest is history. in terms
Speaker A
of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am.
Speaker A
Game changer. So, if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com/stephven for 30% off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now you can find Keton IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your
Speaker A
first shot is completely free of charge. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is
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a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never
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released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me.
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You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So,
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if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to daccircle.com.
Speaker A
I will speak to you then. So, phytoal curcumin is another one that I supplement with. And let's just start with curcumin in general. Curcumin is found in the turmeric plant. It's something that is able to pretty robustly and I would say consistently
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lower inflammation. And it's doing it in a different way that like a NSAIDE like an ibuprofen would do it, right? And that is important because it's been shown if you take NSAIDE, right? So these non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, something like
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ibuprofen around exercise, it can blunt the adaptations because it's basically lowering inflammation and and prostaglandins and things that are important to cause exercise adaptations.
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So curcumin doesn't hasn't been shown to do that but it has been shown to lower something called TNF alpha and that is a major inflammatory cytoine that is really really powerfully accelerating aging. In fact those epigenetic aging clocks that we talked about earlier one
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of the most powerful drugs that's able to slow them are TNF alpha inhibitors. So these are drugs that people take to inhibit TNF alpha. Certain people take them, like people with rheumatoid arthritis, they have a high level of
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inflammation. Their immune system is overactive. They're making a lot of it. Well, guess what? Those individuals taking TNF alpha inhibitors are like they have a 50% less likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease than people.
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50%. Mhm. Yes. So, I like it because curcumin is one of the most it is the na most naturally occurring dietary compound that I've seen data showing that it lowers TNF alpha. I haven't seen anything else that's naturally occurring
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that does it. This does it. It lowers it by quite a bit by almost five pogs per milliliter. Phytoal curcumin is the reason I take phytoal. It's kind of like a liposome but it's phytome. So, it's essentially just making the ingredient
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get into the cells better. It's more bioavailable because curcumin is easily metabolized quickly by the liver. It's a it's what's called a xeninoiotic. It's not a compound that's a vitamin or a mineral or something that the body body normally
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recognized. It's seen as a drug, a foreign drug, xeninoiotic, right? And so the liver gets rid of it quickly. The phytoal delivery of it kind of slows that whole process where it's not getting rid of so quickly. It's not
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being metabolized so readily. So that's why I take that. And also it's been shown to improve performance in people that are exercising again because it's reducing inflammation. Inflammation can be dampening for performance.
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And what else have we got here? The other supplement that I really want to talk about is the uraliththan A. And as I mentioned, this is a compound that's usually generated in the gut by the bacteria in your gut. It's something
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that we can get from our diet. So if we eat things like pomegranate, pomegranate has a type of polyphenol in it called elagitanins.
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I've never heard about this before. Okay, listen to this. This is this is like you got to try this supplement.
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Uthin A again, it's made from eating things like pomegranate. However, 50% of the population doesn't have the right bacteria to make it. So you're kind of like a to a coin toss if you eat pomegranate. Am I going to be the person
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that can make uriththna or am I not? Right? So there was a company that did out of Switzerland these stud a lot of these early studies were done in Switzerland and they ended up making uriththn and then testing you know doing
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clinical studies doing animal studies first and then clinical studies to test you know what is uroliththna doing. So what is it? It is a compound that is able to basically get rid of damaged mitochondria. So it's called mphagy.
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You've probably heard of autophagy. you know getting clearing out your all the gunk and the trash from your cells making them rejuvenating rejuvenating them right which is associated with fasting.
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Fasting activates autophagy. Fasting activates mphagy which is specifically just clearing out damaged mitochondria or pieces of damaged mitochondria.
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Autophagy is essentially you have a whole cell and within that cell you have a lot of different organels they're called. So mitochondria being one and so autophagy kind of helps clear out all the stuff inside of the cell. Mphagy is very
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specific to just the mitochondria within the cell. Those mitochondria get older and they don't have a really good repair process and so they accumulate damage and as they get older you're you're not going to be making energy as well.
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You're not going to be using energy as well. It's going to affect all the cell function because energy is at the core of everything, right? So mitochondrial health is at the core of all health basically. This compound very robustly
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induces mphagy. And so um there have been of course many animal studies that were done preclinally before clinical studies were done. Animal studies were exciting. I mean mice that were given old mice that were given uraliththna were able to like rejuvenate you know
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tissues but also 20% life extension was found in these mice given uralithn. 20% is pretty big for a mouse mouse study.
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All right, but we're not mice. So, let's talk about humans and why I'm actually excited about it. For one, urthan A and mphagy was shown to be activated in humans taking it. So, they took muscle biopsies and found that in fact mphagy
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was activated. It's also recently been shown that this uriththnan A is able to to basically rejuvenate the immune system. So older adults were given a thousand milligrams a day and it it basically as we age our immune system
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ages our te- cells aren't fighting off pathogens as well and it increased the number of a very specific type of immune cell that decreases with age called CD8 positive tea cells. Those were increased. That's very important because you're able to fight off infection
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better. And then it also increased a kind of immune cell that's able to kill cancer cells and also kill viruses and pathogens. it's called natural natural killer cells. Um so those cells increased as well with the uriththan a
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and it also decreased markers of like scinsessence. So this is basically when a cell is still alive but it's not functioning it's basically like it's dead but not only is it not dead and not functioning it's secretreting inflammatory cytoines accelerating
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aging. I know it's complicated. So the study showed that it was basically able to re rejuvenate the immune system in older adults younger adults that have taken it. So, there's been studies showing that untrained athletes supplementing with 1,000 milligrams a
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day were able to improve their V2 max um 10% more than just exercise alone. So, if they exercise and took uriththan A, their V2 max went up 10% compared to the exercise alone group. Wow.
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If they were Yes. If they were trained athletes, it only went up 5% because trained athletes already are doing a lot, right? So, you always get a bigger increase in B2 max if you have an untrained athlete. Same with obese
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people. And on top of that, so again, energy, it's you're clearing out damaged mitochondria. If you combine it with exercise, exercise causes you to make new mitochondria. So the way I look at it, Stephen, is a rejuvenation of all
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your mitochondria within your cells, whether we're talking about your muscle cells or your immune cells. I think it's probably happening in the brain as well.
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So it's been shown to increase muscle strength in older adults. So, their hamstring strength improved by like 10 to 12% after supplement supplementing versus just exercise alone. I think it's a supplement that's important for aging because it's affecting mitochondria and
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pretty much everything relies on mitochondria. And you can buy this in a normal shop on the high street.
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You cannot buy it in a normal shop. You can buy it online. It's not cheap, unfortunately. Uh that's the other thing. So, pomegranate itself is the next best thing for people. And there are studies showing that people that
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take pomegranate juice before they exercise they and over over the course of several weeks can actually increase their V2 max by up to 17%. This is analysis of multiple studies showing that. So again I think it's all coming
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down to the uriththna and it's a new supplement that I'm I've been experimenting with. Again the immune system effects. I think I'm not getting sick but I'm doing the creatine. I'm doing the uriththna and I'm doing glutamine.
Speaker A
So glutamine is the last one. What what is that? Well, you probably heard of glutamine as an amino acid, right? It's so much more. It's so much more. So, glutamine is something that it is an amino acid, but it gets converted into
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and metabolized to many different things. So, one, it can be an amino acid. Two, it can form something called glutarate, which is used by your cells for energy. Mitochondria love it. Or it can be converted into that neurotransmitter that we were talking
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about, right? Glutamate. So, it's really something that can be used for many things. I supplement with it because I came across some studies in the past couple of years where endurance athletes, so these are I'm not an endurance athlete, but endurance
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athletes are very prone to respiratory illness because they're really just going hard, right? And their im your immune system kind of takes a takes it takes attacks on your immune system.
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studies were showing that if those endurance ath athletes supplemented with glutamine, they didn't get sick as often. They were having fewer respiratory illnesses. And I remembered back to when I was a graduate student and I was doing research and I used
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glutamine. And I was doing glucose and glutamine and looking at immune cells and how I could make them active or what happens if I get rid of glucose or glutamine. And I remembered how much they love glutamine. They consume it.
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They're using it for energy. And it started to make sense to me. And this was during a period of time where, you know, again, mid-4s, your immune system is not going doing as well as it used to. I've got a had a young child
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that was bringing home all sorts of pathogens. And so, I started supplementing with glutamine. And it could be placebo, but again, I you know, the sickness bouts were going down. I wasn't getting sick as often. The other thing it's good for is the gut. And that
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is because glutamine can be glut uh converted into something called alpha ketoglutarate which is a important energy compound that the gut uses. And so there are studies showing that it's beneficial for gut health. I think that's what a lot of people think about
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when they take glutamine is their gut. I'm thinking about my immune system. But basically it's very easily used by the gut cells as energy and that really helps the gut heal.
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Okay. The other thing which I take almost daily. Sometimes I give myself the weekend off depending on how things are going, but almost daily are these ketone IQ shots which I am affiliated with. I I'm an investor in the company.
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Ketone shots, exogenous ketone shots. I take them also quite frequently, not daily. Um, you know, so what are they doing? There's different forms of them and why do I take them and I think let's talk about what I think people should
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realize if they are taking them. So, you know, there it's an it's it's essentially giving you that metabolic switch, right? It's getting getting your ketone levels up as if you were fasted.
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So you're you're elevating your beta hydroxybutyrate levels. That's the major circ circulating ketone. Beta hydroxybutyrate, BHB for short.
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Does that just mean ketone? It's a ketone. It's there are several ketones. Acid acetone is another ketone, but that beta hydroxybutyrate is the major one, right? So and and that is a major ketone that's in in your body when
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you're fasted. That's what you're making. And when you're taking these ketone IQs or other exogenous ketones is what you're going to get. So ketone IQ is got the precursor for the ketone.
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It's got 13 butane dial that in your liver gets converted into beta hydroxybutyrate. I take a ketone that has 13 butane dial but also it's asterified to the actual beta hydroxybutyrate.
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What does that mean? It means that it has both an immediate action, a fast action effect of having your ketones elevated, but it also has a tail end effect. So the 13 butane dial, if you take it, you have to wait for it to get
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to your liver. You have to Can I have one? Yes. You have to wait.
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Oh, perfect. Okay. Wow, those taste better. M. So, so the other ketone exogenous ketone is the beta hydroxybutysterified to the 13butin dial which just means it's going to have a fast acting effect but also a long-term effect. So you
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you'll get a little bit more elevation in your blood ketones from from the one that has the beta hydroxybutyrate to the 13bin dial. That said, the difference is I think from what I know and I don't know a ton is pricing.
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Yes, it's pricing but also again concentration. So, I mean, you know, you're going to get you're going to get a higher peak quicker and you're going to get higher levels of it with the one that's the the Oxford, you know, the
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Oxford ketone, I guess it's called, but the ketone IQ has 13 butane dial, which does get converted into beta hydroxybutyrate.
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This one I think cost costs a couple of dollars. And I have the Oxford one here as well, which I think is $30 a pop. So, it's quite expensive.
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The reason why this has been able to break into retail, especially across America, is just because it's more affordable for most people to be able to take spend a couple of dollars, right? The reason I take it is because I
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like the cognitive boost that I get from it. And I usually take it on occasions like this when I'm doing a show or I'm, you know, doing a presentation or I just I'm doing a lot of heavy research and I
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just need to be on because I get a cognitive boost from it. And that cognitive boost does come down to what I was talking about with why I like to fast. It's mimicking that, right? I have that beta hydroxybutyrate which is
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increasing GABA, that inhibitory neurotransmitter that's silencing down some of the anxiety in the back of the brain or the chatter and just helping me focus. And also it increases brain drive neurotrphic factor. So beta hydroxybutyrate is a signaling molecule.
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It's able to increase brain drive of neurotrophic factor in the brain that helps with learning, memory, brain aging. It's also been shown to lower oxidation. So, there's all sorts of reasons why I like to take it. For people that are fasting and they're
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wanting to burn fat, consider that if you take exogenous ketones, you stop you stop burning your own fat because your body thinks it's now got all it's got the ketones there, which is what the metabolism of fat is
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trying to do is produce ketones for energy. And so, it does shut down what's called lipolysis, which is basically breaking down fat. And so if you're doing fasting and you're doing it for reasons of fat loss, if you take an
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exogenous ketone during that period of time, it will transiently kind of shut down that process. So keep that in mind.
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It's one reason why I don't do it every day because I am looking for that effect for losing visceral fat in particular.
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That's a really interesting important point. It is that people don't talk about. Yeah, it's important and it's only going to last as long as the beta hydroxybutyrate lasts in your in your blood system. So, you know, maybe 3
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hours max. What I noticed was when I was trying to get into ketosis at the top of the year and I was doing exogenous ketone shots.
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I was struggling to get into ketosis. And so, what I did is I stopped taking the ketone shots for a couple of days, just focused on my ketogenic diet. I got into ketosis and then afterwards I started taking the ketone shots when I
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was doing podcasting because just like you, I noticed just such a radical radical difference when I take exogenous ketones or when I'm in a natural sort of dietary ketosis. Radical difference. And as a podcaster, I've said this a million
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times before, but I'm going to say it again. Two times a week, I do an AB test of how my brain is working. I sit with someone who is an expert in what they do for sometimes four or five hours and I
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look at them in their face and I have to ask questions and respond and understand big words and hope that my brain is connected to my mouth today. And so I've done 600 or 700 of these AB tests now.
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And one of the the factors that correlates to good performance as an interviewer, a thinker or a speaker on stage is whether I'm in a ketosis state or not. And it's so profound. In fact, I've actually heard Joe Rogan say this.
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Rogan said that the upside he gets from being in a ketogenic state is so evident for him as an interviewer that he he's considered being in that state all the time.
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It's the same for me too. I mean, as you know, I'm also doing the same thing, right? I'm I have a podcast and I'm giving presentations and very very much having to use my brain and be on and
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it's really made a huge difference for me as well. And that is also why I like to fast because I get the same effect when I'm when I'm fasted. And then I will take an exogenous ketone when I'm
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also fasted. And so I get into ketosis quicker as well because I'm already I'm already kind of there. I don't have other things inhibiting it.
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So it does help. And there's again pros and cons to doing it. You do want your body to be metabolic flex flexible. So I'm glad you did do the keto like the ketogenic diet and let your body kind of
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do it and adapt and then add the ke ketones on top of that. But um they do help. They help with cognitive function for sure. I mean I I use them every single podcast I do, presentation I'm giving. It's it's part of my routine.
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Let's talk about something different, which is something that I've never heard of before. Um it's a word that you started to make popular in the health and longevity community, which is this idea of peak span.
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I have this graph in front of me, which I'll throw up on the screen. It's fascinating. What the hell is peak span?
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I've heard of health span. I've even heard of lifespan, but I've never heard of peak span.
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Well, let's start with lifespan and work our way to peak span to give people a frame of reference. I think most people are familiar with the word longevity, wanting to extend their lifespan, how many years they live, how long they
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live, right? But the problem with lifespan is well, you could live longer, but you're going to have per perhaps you have some diseases. So why do you want to live longer if you have Alzheimer's disease or cardiovascular disease or
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type two diabetes? I mean the qual your quality of life is not as good and that's where this idea of health span came in right so health span is well let's increase the amount of time we live diseasefree
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and that's the new thing that everyone wants to increase and improve their health span I want to live I want to increase my health span so I want to live longer and not have any diseases while I'm living that that longer life.
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Well, there's this new concept now, very new that was just published by some researchers out of Duke University as well as I think um the China some university in China and another university, but I want to give them
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credit. They just it's a pre-print study and it came out on my radar. I immediately loved it. And this is idea of peak span. Peak span says, hey, you know, health span is great. Being disease-free is great, but you're still
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in a period of decline. You're still declining. Why not try to be as close to your peak span which is essentially within 90% of your peak function for a certain measurement whether we're talking about V2 max cardiorespiratory fitness we're
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talking about you know any any other function and that's where this graph comes in on the y ais we have our relative capacity so if you're listening now this is a good time to look at the screen because
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uh Rhonda's going to show us something okay your relative capacity 100 being 100% and zero being 0%.
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What does relative capacity mean? Your capacity for cognitive function for you know your fertility hormonal Yeah. your potential. Yeah.
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And on the x- axis we're talking about age right? And so what you'll notice is that different capacities, different organ functions kind of peak at different rates. So we can talk about first obviously female reproductive really starts to peak at you know 25 or
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so and then it just sharply declines until you hit 40 right and it's like b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b bmed
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out. So that's the reproductive female, right? Mhm. Immune function. So let's find immune function here.
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That kind of peaks around 25 years old and it also kind of declines and it keeps declining.
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It's quite scary as you get to 80. And then we have muscular skeletal, right? So this is our peak strength, peak muscle mass, peak bone density.
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Those also peak around 25 and then they kind of steadily start to decline. And the same goes for cognitive function. We have two different kinds of cognitive function. We have fluid cognitive function like processing speed. That is the kind of I would say cognitive
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function where you can answer a question without any prior knowledge. Mhm. You know that. So that peaks around 25.
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You're joking. No, I know. So I'm on the way down. You're on I'm definitely on the way down. You're on the way down as well. So that would be the blue one here. Peaks around 25. And then we have the
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crystallized cognitive function. Crystallized cognitive function is interesting because it peaks around midlife. And the reason it peaks around 40, 45 is because it's the kind of intelligence that it's like the library where you have all these facts that
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you've accumulated over the years and you're able to use those facts to answer or solve a problem, right?
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Is that wisdom or is that It really just means that you have all these facts that you've learned over your life. Like for me, you know, I've been a biologist for since I was, you know, 20, so 27 years. I have so much
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that I've learned over that time. And so now I'm sitting here and I use that knowledge. I talked about glutamine, what I learned from graduate school. I'm using that knowledge, right? Mphagy, I learned about that like forever ago and
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I've been following it. So you use all this these facts and this data that you've learned in your life and you're able to solve problems. So fluid intellig I'm sorry, crystallized intelligence.
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I've got to ask a question there. I I we were sat having dinner the other day, me and my team, and we were talking about the difference cuz we're all different ages. We've got someone in the team who's 45, 35, 30, and it was the other
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person at the table was 27. And we were all talking about the differences we've noticed in ourselves as we've aged. And they all said different things. So Leona and my team, who's just is above the age of 40, was saying that she just like
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doesn't really give a anymore in the same way that she used to care about people's opinions when she was 30. One of the things I said I noticed about myself was after I turned 30. I feel like I saw a step change in pattern
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recognition and like exactly what you've just described there which is like crystallized knowledge cuz I sit here with experts all day learn all this stuff from them and then my ability to then like apply it in my life as an
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entrepreneur seems to be improving. And so the question I was really going to ask you is you think about entrepreneurship lot my a lot of my audience are entrepreneurs in some capacity or aspire to be. I was wondering as you were saying that like
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when is the best age because entrepreneurship is a lot about pattern recognition. It's problem in front of you. Okay, I've seen this before. I'm pulling on different reference points to arrive at a solution. So I was wondering here because it looks like it peaks at
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like 45. 45. So if we look at it, it's peaking at 45. And that's also why a lot of biologists continue to do great work in their midlife as well. And that is something that I do feel like better for
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me as well. you know, where I'm I'm now able to pull on I have so much of a database in the back of my head, you know, where it's like I I've got all this knowledge and then it comes up and
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you can use it. And so it's interesting you can talk about entrepreneurs, but you can I mean any any sort of career path, right? What it would be beneficial to be able to do that. So the question is then how do we get here's peak span
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you're going up and what you want to do is you want to get and maintain about 90% of all these things that we're talking about peaking right we immune aging it peaks at you know immune aging actually peaks around adolescence I
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think muscularkeeletal health 20 25 the fluid int intelligence 2025 you're having cardiorespiratory fitness that's also 20 to 25 it peaks and then it goes down the question is how do Do you maintain your peak span? Right? How do
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you get as close as you can? You're obviously not going to be your 100%. But how do you not drop below 90% of that peak right?
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Is that possible? Is it first of all, is it possible? And I would say for some organs, no. Which organs are that? I don't think a reproductive life expectancy for a female I don't think you're going to be
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having babies at 80 years old um without actual medical intervention but that's a whole other conversation. So I but I do think there are ways that we can get really close to our peak for cardiorespiratory for muscle skeletal
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you know for our our intelligence cognitive intelligence as well as our immune system and I think there are blanket things that we could do that affect multiple systems right like and there's also targeted things so we talking about fluid versus cognit versus
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crystallized intelligence right obviously crystallized intelligence you know it doesn't peak until mid-4s you the things that you can do to improve crystallized intelligence also improve your fluid intelligence. What are those things? One, exercise number one thing.
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Aerobic exercise is increasing brain derived neurotrophic factor. Very important for both these aspects. It's also, you know, growing new neurons, making connections between the neurons, making your brain more plastic and adaptable so it adapts to the changing environment. Top thing that you can do.
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Another thing that you can do that's really important for brain aging is the omega-3. We talked about that. really important for brain aging. But the other thing that you can do is what we're doing right now. Engaging in novel
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cognitive, you know, experiences. It could be a discussion. It could be your work. If you are learning new things, novel is key here. Novel. If you're learning new things, you are going to really help yourself improve both your
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fluid and crystallized intelligence. And so, is that because you're raising your potential? i.e. So you're falling from a higher place as you decline because I was thinking about this like how much of this has got to do with making sure that
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I I peak at a higher place right yeah I mean I think that maybe has something to do with it but in addition there's neurochemical things that are changing when you're learning new experiences for one you are increasing
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brain drive neurotrphic factor and stuff as well because novelty does that you're also glutamate and you're h you're having you know glutamate being activated as well But um yeah, I think the cognitive reserve is what you're talking about and that is really
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important, right? Because you you need to you need to have that reserve if you're going to start pulling from it.
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And that also comes with muscle muscle health, right? Muscle and bone. So those are peaking around the same times 25 or so. Peak muscle mass generally occurs around the age of 25. There are things that you can do to keep close to that
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peak though, right? And that would be resistance training, big big one. Strength training. Strength goes down.
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This is something protein intake, right? Avoid the black plastics in my fridge. Avoid black plastics in your fridge.
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Yeah. Because then my testosterone is going to go down. Testosterone is going to go down and that's going to affect your ability to gain muscle mass. Exactly. A a lot of these healthy lifestyles that we're talking about are multi-system
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targeting, right? So, you're targeting, but key would be strength training and resistance training. And it's going to also affect your bones. So, you're going to want to do these weight bearing exercises that are multi- joint, the compound lifts, right? the deadlifts,
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rows, things like that. Those are very important to help maintain that peak. Immune system, sleep, very, very important for maintaining a healthy immune system and preventing your immune system from aging rapidly. So, making sure you're prioritizing sleep, how you
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going to do that, right? I mean, there's a lot of ways to people people a lot of people have sleep problems and they have sleep problems for different reasons and there's way to ways to target them. But just realize thinking about it and
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prioritizing is important for your immune system and for your brain. Also the exercise plays a role in your cardiorespiratory fitness, the brain, everything, muscle. So cardiorespiratory fitness is something that you we talked about uralithn helping improve it on top
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of exercise. So there's supplements and stuff that you add in as well. But this idea here is really that we can do things in our life that are healthy to help maintain that peak span to get us not just free of disease but like close
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to what we were peing. And I do think it's possible. I mean we talked last time I was here we talked about that study you exercise 5 hours a week do some highintensity interval training in there and you can reverse heart aging by
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20 years. That's incredible. It's so crazy. So, and you're also saying that listening to the diary of a sea obviously is therefore good for Yeah. It's good for cognitive um your fluid intelligence and your your crystallized intelligence. It's good for
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learning new things, right? I mean, that's So, you would prescribe it. Yeah. Yeah. Especially the episodes I'm on.
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No, I say that as a joke, but actually it's part of the conversation we had the other day at dinner was I don't think I'm going to appreciate maybe until later in my life how much an unintended consequence of doing this as a job had
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on my cognition and my brain and it's like not something that I would notice you know in the moment but over time you know doing this two times a week for sometimes eight hours a week learning something new being forced is a
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strong word but having an obligation to learn something new for eight hours a week for my entire adult life.
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It's great. I mean, it's it's one of the best things that you can do for your brain. That's why learning a new language is associated with a rapid, you know, decrease in Alzheimer's disease risk.
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You're working your brain. You're learning new things. It's so one of the worst things that someone can do is retire and just sit and watch TV, right? I mean, that's like the worst thing.
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You're gonna you're rapidly going to decline and get dementia. We've got to talk about AI in this conversation.
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Oh my gosh. because I actually woke up this morning and I got a message. Look, I'll check with him that I can put this in before I say out before um it's published. But I got a message from my
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chairman, Nikki. Um Nikki is an incredible man. He's, you know, 25 years bossing consulting group. He's seen it all. Um, and he said to me that one of the things he's thinking a lot about at the moment is how across our, you know,
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businesses, but just generally in society, how AI is going to impact critical thinking and what that then might mean for our teams, our executives, etc. So, this is a conversation I was having this morning with him. And it's also something I've
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noticed. There are certain people I interact with now where I I do not feel at all like I'm dealing with their brain. I feel like I'm dealing with what came out the other end of a chatbt prompt.
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Yes. Good, bad, and different. Like I don't, you know. Yeah. It's it's an interesting and important question, Stephen, because I've been thinking a lot about what with AI, it's changing so much. And the question is like, do you focus on,
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you know, the negative parts and the short-term parts? Do you focus on the potential benefits that could be great and grand? And I do I do think a lot of it is people are worried about things like, oh, AI is going to take all of our
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jobs. Oh, we're going to have brain rot because we don't use our brains anymore.
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And and those are concerns to have, but there's also a lot of exciting things to think about. I also worry about the the brain rot part where it's like, well, okay, these people aren't critically thinking for themselves. I've seen
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comment. I can I can spot AI a million miles away, a million miles away, right?
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And and you know, part of it is if AI is accurate and they're and people are e more easily accessing the in accur accurate information and they're learning it, that's great. Like that's what it's supposed to be there for,
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right? I think that's a big if, right? If right if and and it does have a lot to do with the version of AI you're using. It has a lot to do with the prompt. It has a lot to do with the
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question, how much, you know, reasoning it has to do. I mean, there's we're it's still evolving, but I agree. It's kind of like the worry is are are we going to have a generation of of people growing up that don't know how to critically
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think. You've heard about that London taxi driver test experiment. I think I've heard you talk about it before, actually.
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Yeah. I mean, well, they have these maps in their heads, right? And you have these taxi drivers in London that um they don't use GPS. Like, they know everywhere to go. By the way, I was in London a couple of years ago. I love the
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taxi drivers there. They are so awesome. Like they are just different. They're totally different than For anyone that doesn't know, I'm absolutely going to butcher this. To become a London taxi driver, you have to take a test for many, many years. You
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have to learn for many, many years, and you have to learn like every street across London from the top of your head without using GPS.
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So that's incredible. So yeah, when you get in a black cab in London, it's amazing. You can go, I kind of want to go to and they go, got you.
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They know everywhere. They have maps in their brain. I mean, think about the cognitive reserve they have. Think about the like all the things they learned and what and the spatial memory and all that. And um do these do these guys ever
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get Alzheimer's disease? I don't know that they do. I mean, there's studies out there showing that these these types of um taxi drivers like do not get Alzheimer's disease.
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They have to learn 25,000 streets and it's called the knowledge and they have physically larger hippocampus centers in their brain which is the memory center.
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And I like to extrapolate if I may and think that all this cognitive learning that I do daily and that you're doing by like talking to guests from all sorts of fields is also very I mean you're learning things. It's not just going
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you're you're interested in things and you're learning them and it really is also a type of brain exercise. And so I think that this is ultimately what we were getting to is basically we're gonna talk about AI because I know we got to
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get there but is essentially like if you can engage in intellectual types of activities or anything that's going to exercise your brain whether it's learning the map of London or it's learning about mphagy whatever it is you know it's really good to engage in that
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novel learning it's really good for your brain it's working your brain out I've been thinking a lot about this I've just come back from South by Southwest and every conversation was about bloody.
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I was there too. I really they were asking me a lot about AI. So before I went on stage I was looking at some of the studies and I concluded that at the moment we are in society there's going to be a bit of a
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bifocation of people. One group is going to do take the path of least resistance with AI which is they're going to defer their thinking to AI which is you know one of the things I learned from people like you often is that if you don't use
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it you lose it and that part of their brain whatever it is will begin to atrophy to some extent. And I think there'll be another group of people who will just like we go to the gym now because we have to because our lives are
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so easy. They will go to like the mental gym which means they will set aside time to intentionally solve difficult cognitive problems or or challenges. And I've I literally have said to some of my executives, we'll have a moment where
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we're talking on WhatsApp or Slack and I'll literally say, let's try and solve this problem with our brains because I believe that solving this problem with our brains will create a deeper understanding of the first principles of the problem. Not the just surface level
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1 plus 1 equals 2, but like what is one? What is a number? And this is the difference like I AI can like give you the answer, but it's not going to give you the foundation so that you can solve
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other problems in the future. Because if I never told you what the number one was, you would never in the future be able to use it yourself. All you would know is 1 plus 1 equals 2. But there's
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foundations like what are numbers, what is 1, what is 2, what is plus that you need to understand to be able to do 1 + 2 equals 3. Um, and the study, one of the studies I looked at which was has
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been heavily discussed was from last year, I found staggering memory cost using generative AI. In this study, which I'll throw up on the screen, 83% of AI users were unable to remember the details of a passage of text that they
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had written with AI's assistance. EEG scans showed that brain connectivity was almost halfed when individuals outsourced their thinking to AI compared to writing manually, which created cognitive debt. You get output faster, but you don't build the long-term neural
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hardware to understand the information or the knowledge. So true. It's so true. You know what's interesting about what you just said is the when you're writing something, whether you're typing it or even actually the most I think there's been
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some studies on this like handwriting something, something about handwriting it really ingrains it into your memory. And I have this process when I'm trying to there's a lot of facts that I have to remember, you know, when I'm talking about them.
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And I have this process that I do. And the first one is the research, right?
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you research it and you find it and then I type it in a Google doc and then I write it and that process is really what gets it into my memory all the like statistics and you know think statistics are always
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harder because it's just a number you know versus like you like you're saying you're understanding the fundamental nature of something that I'm interested in that always helps and so it's interesting that if you're if you're writing something if you're
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writing it like typing it or writing it, handwriting, they're probably talking about typing it. Even that really does help you remember something. If you're just copying it and then trying to do some recall, it's not going to it's not going to
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work. And then there's the whole other layer that you were talking about, which is like you're not even using the novelty isn't there. You're not like really into it and learning. And that's what it really takes to build that
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cognitive reserve to improve the connections to increase brain derived neurotrophic factor, right? You need that novelty. So I do love AI, but I also know that um I need to continue using my brain and I have my own
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protocols that I like and that I still do. I still write things down. I have a, you know, I have my little notebook and I when before I go on a podcast too, I like to go through and write stuff down
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that I've already typed that I've learned and things I wanted to cover. It really makes a difference in memory. So for people that are like you and I and learners and optimizers, I keep take take that take that pointer because it
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really does work. This was one of my favorite things with the iPad. Listen, I'm not the type of person that does a huge amount of writing on pen and paper. Although I would do more because everything you've said is proven to be true for me. If I
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write something down, it's like I'm writing it directly into my brain, right? But the iPad now allows you to split what you're reading in terms of a book on one side and then a notepad on the other. So what I do when I read is I
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read the thing and then I try and write out the lesson on the other side of the page. So I'll say the gut microbiome has 42 trillion bucks. And I'll go the gut microbiome has 42 million bucks. I love
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it. I love it. And then I turn the page and I I'm so I'm trying to do exactly what you said because I realized that a lot of stuff I learned doesn't land unless right I write it out myself.
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It's something about the act of writing and if you add the layer of like what I do it takes time you know so you have to type it and then write then it really sticks in your brain. Like those are the
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ones when I've done those are the ones that really have stuck if I've done them both. But I love that I don't use iPads ever and I still like read books, you know, like old books and when I have
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time to do them and I just have my notebook. I think it shows though you you you have an unbelievable ability to remember so many things.
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But I still love AI, you know, I still I think there's a lot of benefits and I and I think that, you know, scientists in general are using a AI is now their collaborator, right? They're they're pretty smart collaborator that has
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access to a lot of data and can analyze a lot of data quickly. What are your thoughts on exercise and the current suggestions and recommendations around exercise?
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Well, I'm glad you asked this question. I think I've been thinking about this a lot. I did a podcast on the current exercise guidelines and I think they need to be updated. I think they're they're not good enough. And and it's
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important for people to realize how these extra exercise guidelines were formulated and what they mean. So typically you'll hear exercise guidelines 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise is good for optimal health or 75 minutes to 150
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minutes a week of vigorous intensity exercise. Right? So they're basically a 2:1 ratio, right? Twice as many minutes for for moderate intensity as vigorous intensity. What is defined as moderate versus vigorous? That's also important because it's different across different
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studies. In these guidelines, it's basically moderate intensity is you're walking. You're moving with intent, but not really really fast. You're walking.
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You're walking at maybe a fast pace, but you're not jogging, you're not running. That kind of activity would be considered moderate. Vigorous would be considered jogging, running, swimming, cycling. So the the kind the kind of activity where you're actually moving
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fast with intent. Why do we have this 2:1 ratio? Where did it come from? Well, it all came from energy expenditure. You burn twice as many calories if you're doing vigorous intensity exercise as you do if you're doing moderate intensity. Right? So if
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you're walking one mile, you'll burn x amount of calories. If you jog that mile, you'll burn twice as many calories. That's where these guidelines came from, the 2:1 ratio, right? weight loss, energy expenditure, but that's not necessarily what's important for
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reducing cancer mortality, reducing cardiovascular related mortality, reducing all cause mortality. Right? These guidelines used that data, this 2:1 ratio of energy expenditure, and then they looked at other studies and said, okay, how much exercise is required to reduce cardiovascular
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related mortality or all cause mortality? And they kind of like connected the dots. By the way, these studies also were using um questionnaires. They weren't actually measuring how active people were. A new study came out and I did a journal club
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podcast on it because it was a study that I felt was so important that we wanted I wanted to break down all the components of the study with um another scientist and talk about them because it's very important. So journal clubs
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typically in science you have them in my career it was you know sometimes it was once a week other times it was once a month and and someone you choose a study that's important and you break it down
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and you talk about the results and you talk about the methods and you talk about what the findings mean that's what a journal club is and it's essentially you choose a a journal and a publication within that journal and it's a it's a
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club you have different scientists that are talking about it why did this warrant a journal club because I think this study bas basically is is strong enough data that it's implying we need to change our exercise guidelines, at least the messaging of
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them at the very least. And I'll tell you why. Because I talked about these, you know, these guidelines, how they're formulated. They're using questionnaires. They're not measuring anything. Well, a new study came out.
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Not only did it measure physical activity through these accelerometers, it was able to measure how active people were and the type of activity whether it was I I mentioned moderate versus vigorous, they also me they also measured light physical activity that
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would be considered walking around your house kind of doing that kind of light activity, not necessarily going for a walk or going for a run. And they looked at deaths from different causes of disease. They looked at deaths from all
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causes. So all cause mortality, they looked at cancer related deaths, they looked at cardiovascular related deaths, they looked at type2 diabetes, they looked at heart attacks, right? And what was so profound was that what we found, what they found and what we now know is
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that everything changes in terms of how important vigorous intensity exercise is. It's so much more valuable than we thought. It's not 2 to one. So if we're looking at all cause mortality, you know, dying from all causes, cancer,
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respiratory, anything related that's non-acal, for every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise, you had to do 4 minutes of moderate intensity and you had to do like 100 to 150 minutes of light exercise to get the same reduction
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in all cause mortality. For every one minute, for every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise, it gets better.
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Okay? For every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise to reduce your death from cardiovascular disease, you had to do eight minutes of moderate intensity and 200 minutes of light exercise. For every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise, it's huge. to reduce your type
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two diabetes risks. For every one minute of vigorous, you had to do 10 minutes of moderate intensity or you had to do again you're in the 100 150 minutes to 200 minutes of light exercise to reduce your risk of dying from cancer. For
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every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise, you had to do four minutes about four minutes of moderate intensity. And for light, it was like I it was almost not not even happening. I mean it was like 250 300 like you had to
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just a ton of minutes unbelievable amount of minutes. Okay. But the the value of vigorous intensity exercise is so much more than this 2:1 ratio based on energy expenditure based on burning calories that our guidelines were based on. It's time to rethink them. It's time
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to tell people, hey, if you're getting out and you're going for a run, it is worth way more than you think it is in terms of reducing your disease risk and your death from that disease. Right?
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Also, what was really interesting about this study, and this goes back to this exercise snacks that we talked about before last episode, is that because there people were participants were wearing these accelerometers on their wrist, they were able to measure all
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physical activity. Let's say you're you have a new puppy and you're sprinting in the yard and playing with them for a minute or two minutes or three minutes or whatever. Not 30 minutes in the gym, right? Or not 30 minutes on the
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treadmill, but you're just a short burst or you're playing with your grandkids or your kids and you're playing tag, whatever. Those moments count. They really add up. And that is also a take-home from this study and other studies is that you can actually get
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massive benefits from the sprinting, the vigorous exercise. One minute, two minute, three minutes. Women that did three and a half minutes of just this vigorous types of exercise per day lowered their cancer risk by 40%.
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Yes, three and a half minutes a day. This was in women. Now there's bigger studies showing men and women that exercise 9 minutes a day. The short vigorous types of exercise adding up not 9 minutes altogether, but like a minute
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here, a minute there, a minute here, right? It adds up 40% lower cancer related mortality, 50% lower cardiovascular related mortality. And that's another big takehome from this study that I really want people to know about because some people don't like
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spending 30 minutes or putting out blocking out a 30 minute time or an hour long time to go to the gym. They should.
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I mean, if they want their peak span, that's what you're going to have to do.
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But if you're just wanting to avoid disease and be be your health span, you know, you can get that by doing these short moments of short bursts of physical activity and those count. And some people are like, "Oh, thank God.
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Thank god I can do that because I hate going to the gym. I'll, you know, they just won't do it. They won't do it.
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A lot of people as well are caught up with this 10,000 steps a day thing.
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Yes. 10,000 steps a day. What's that facial reaction for people that can't see your face? She looked up into the corner like I personally offended her.
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Yeah. I look, any exercise is better than none. I want to just get that on the table. Okay. That's important. I don't want to totally diss the 10,000 steps a day, but I think that we need to ditch it. I think we need to ditch
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10,000 steps a day and say 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day of getting your heart rate up. You can you can you can do body weight squats. You can, you know, play tag with your kids or your
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grandkids. You can do shorter bursts of it, but it needs to be 10 minutes. And if you get to that 10 minutes a day, 50% lower cardiovascular related mortality, 50% lower all-c cause mortality, 40% lower cancer mortality. That is what
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you're going to get. 10,000 steps a day is not going to get you that. We just talked about it. It's not going to get you that, right? It's a different ratio.
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It's not 2 to1 ratio. I imagine there's people thinking you use three terms there. Vigorous, moderate, and light. We probably need to quite clearly define those definitions like what is vigorous, right?
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Heart rate is it or vigorous intensity exercise can be heart rate and it is heart rate. In a lot of studies that are done in terms of the exercise guidelines, they don't use heart rate. They're using movement. Like
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when I say accelerometer, I mean moving fast. So they're able to measure the acceleration of your movement. And so the way that they're talking about it in these in these exercise guidelines studies is moving fast. Moving fast would be jogging, running, swimming,
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biking. You're moving even stepper. Stepper would would with stepper would be moving fat. Even even weights are moving fast. That's part of it too.
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Weights you're doing you're doing weights weight because you're because they're on your wrist. And so if you're if you're doing bicep curls or you're doing, you know, something with your with your wrists that are fast, it's part of that it's
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part of that equation as well. Heart rate isn't the thing that we're measuring, but that's a consequence of moving fast. Typically, it is.
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So you want to be thinking about getting your heart rate. Personally, when I think about it, and if I'm talking about in the context of these exercise guidelines, I would say that heart vigorous would be probably considered 70% or more of your
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max heart rate would be considered vigorous. Previously in my when I'm talking about vigorous I also talk about highintensity interval training and that's more like 80% of your max heart rate or higher very important for improving V2 max and cardiorespiratory
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fitness but in these studies heart rate was is more like a 70% your max heart rate and more because that's you can be jogging at that rate right jogging or running that's a big that's vigorous intensity exercise if you're below that
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if you're like you know 50% your max heart rate that's considered moderate intensity and then you know maybe even lower than that if you're just sort of you know walking around the house. I mean that's not even going out much at
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all. That's light. That's considered light. 10,000 steps would be probably considered it depends because actually they're saying steps which means could just be around the house. If you walk around your house, how long does it take to do 10,000 steps? Like an hour, hour
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and a half. Yeah, probably just doing six or 7,000 just walking around the office. So, but that's considered light exercise.
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So, that's why I think we need to get rid of that. It's not enough. It's not enough. It's better than sitting because sitting is bad. Sitting is an independent risk factor for disease, for cancer in particular.
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This was one of the most replayed moments last time I spoke to you was people replayed the section where you talked about being sedentary and how much of an issue that is for all of us.
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And it's really stayed with me to the to the fact I don't know if this helps but I've been using standing desks everywhere. Even when I travel around the world now I've actually got a portable standing desk just to try and
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keep me up because as a podcast I I've sat in this chair for what I've sat down for six hours today and it's 3 p.m.
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Right. Yeah. Uh Kelly Starret wrote a book Deskbound some years ago and you know he really played a role in popularizing this this idea and I think in the public um as well being sedentary is time you're you're spent sitting
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right time you spend sitting it doesn't necessarily mean I used to think about being sedentary as oh do you work out yes or no you're sedentary yes no you're not sedentary that's not what sedentary is sedentary is time you're spending
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sitting we've been sitting here quite quite a few course we've been sedentary this whole time. So being sedentary and sitting is an independent risk factor.
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Even if you're exercising, it's an independent risk risk factor for diseases. I mentioned cancer in particular. That seems seems to be the one that's more strongly correlated to being sedentary. But standing standing helps if you're standing up or also
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getting up and doing exercise snacks. So you can get up every hour and like do some body weight squats, do some jumping jacks, do some high knees, get your heart rate up. That breaks up the sedentary time. So now it's only an hour
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of sedentary versus eight hours, right? Or six hours or however long you're sitting at your desk. It makes a difference. And those exercise snacks are easy to do. I have a standing desk.
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I don't use it enough. I I still have it. I do do exercise snacks. And I like doing the exercise snacks because like literally if we were to get up and do bodyweight squats right now for one minute, like you're going to feel
Speaker A
better. You feel better after the blood flow to your brain. It gives you a little pump. I love it. I love the pump.
Speaker A
It's it's just one minute of it and you get a short pump to your brain and it makes you feel better. So exercise snacks are a really good way to break up sedentary time. They're also adding up.
Speaker A
They count as I just mentioned. They count towards your exercise goal and they're vigorous. You're you're getting you're moving fast, right? Vigorous exercise. You're getting your heart rate up.
Speaker A
Or I could just take a Zen. I just get the pen out, jab, jab, jab, and it's uh all of this stuff disappears, right? I could do all of this stuff or I can just zen it, right?
Speaker A
Yeah. I mean, so many people are taking a Zen. So interesting. And I listen, I have to say it's saving people's lives. Amazing.
Speaker A
I've heard so many of my friends who are on a Zen and taking the GLP1 pens say that they've had profound benefits.
Speaker A
Their knees are better. They can walk upstairs. They feel better. Yeah. I mean, let's be real here. Being obese and overweight is one of the worst things you can do for your health, right? It's going to accelerate the
Speaker A
aging process and it's going to increase the risk of every age related disease. Cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, cancer, you know, visceral fats happening. You're insulin resistant. You know, it's all it's all happening. It's going to affect your
Speaker A
quality of life. It's harder to walk around. You're not as mobile. Your joints are getting more stress on them, right? So, it anything that can help you lose that weight is going to be beneficial. And so, these GLP1, you're
Speaker A
talking about ombic, that's the GLP1 receptor agonist, right? They are very they're life-changing for people that are obese, people that need to lose, you know, 40 lb, 50 lb, 30 lb. It's not easy to lose that weight with diet and
Speaker A
lifestyle. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the butts. Let's talk about So, the benefits are obviously if they're going to lose that fat, the visceral fat, they're going to become insulin sensitive. They're going to reduce their risk for all those
Speaker A
diseases. And that's what the data shows. cardiovascular disease risk goes down, cancer risk goes down. Um, except for one type of cancer goes up, kidney cancer, but you know, the Alzheimer's disease risk goes down. Anything that you're going to when you lose weight,
Speaker A
those risks are going to go down. There are side effects and there are things to consider when you're taking I'm calling them GLP-1s because we have first generation, sec second generation, and now third generation. And they're affecting not only the GLP-1 receptor,
Speaker A
but they're affecting glucagon, for example. they're affecting another peptide called GIP, GIP. So, I'll just call them GLP1s for short. Okay. Um, semiglutide or zic is the f one of the first generations. We now have the second generation that's targeting two
Speaker A
pathways. You can lose even more weight. Marjaro would be something that people would relate to. That's this one of the second generation ones. And I think that for people that are going to start these these drugs, first of all, they have to
Speaker A
realize there's a good chance they're going to have to be on them for the rest of their lives. And that that's something that you have to be willing to do. And I say that because many studies have shown now that
Speaker A
individuals that do take these GLP1s do lose a lot of weight. And it's very beneficial to lose that weight. But if they stop taking the GLP1s, they gain the weight back and and often oftentimes they gain all the weight back because
Speaker A
your body's kind of trying to go back to that reset point and their hunger comes back with a vengeance. And so part of what GLP-1 drugs are doing are they are basically, you know, they're they're they're making you feel satiated and not
Speaker A
hungry. So they're affecting your satiety hormone so you don't feel hungry. They're also slowing gastric emptying so food stays around in your intestines longer so you feel full. When food is in your intestines, you don't feel hungry. So they're slowing that
Speaker A
process and so people don't feel hungry. And so what ends up happening is in many ways it's mimicking calorie restriction and fasting, right? You're basically not eating as much food. So that's essentially but it's doing it for you.
Speaker A
It's not you don't have to put in that you don't have to feel hungry. You don't have to put in that work and and it's doing it for you, right? And so people are losing a lot of weight and they're
Speaker A
losing it very rapidly. And I said you might have to be on it for the rest of your life. And what I what I mean by that is because a lot of studies show that majority of people do gain back
Speaker A
their weight. Their appetite comes back. It comes back with the vengeance and they they regain the weight over over a year or so. So that's one thing to consider. Are you willing to take it for the rest of your life?
Speaker A
There was a a New York Times piece where they looked at a lady called Stacy Canterbury. She had lost 50 pounds on one of the GLP ones that you mentioned, reaching her peak goal weight. And after stopping the drug due to insurance
Speaker A
issues, she regained 20 pounds back straight away in a month. Interestingly, she described the return of hunger not as a gradual increase, but as a ferocious, anim animalistic urge to eat.
Speaker A
That was far more intense than before she ever started the medication. And the New York Times did a big piece about that because one of the things that I've come to learn is that there's no free lunch in life. No pun intended.
Speaker A
There's no free lunch. There's no free biological lunch. It's it's true. Um yeah, people's appetite, that's why I said it comes back with the vengeance because it seems to be the case where your body's like it hasn't been hungry.
Speaker A
And it's like, wait a minute, I've been starving for so long. I need to eat.
Speaker A
Right? So it's kind of like feed me. And that's that's obviously something to consider. So the question is, well, what happens if you're on these drugs long term? And you know, we've got these drugs early early versions of them have
Speaker A
been around. They they also help treat type two diabetes, right? That's part of like they where they first came from.
Speaker A
They've been around a while. We do have some data. Mostly the data is positive because people are losing a lot of weight and that is what's putting them at a high risk for these diseases. And so when you lose that weight, it what
Speaker A
ends up happening is your disease risk for all these diseases goes down, right? So it's hard to uncouple weight loss from what the drug's doing itself. But there are side effects in addition to that, right? Nausea, GI upset, all that
Speaker A
stuff. Maybe temporary. Some people it kind of sticks around. Some other effects I think that are are that people are a little more concerned about are the um muscle loss and bone loss. That's a big one. And that is probably
Speaker A
something coming from just rapid weight loss and and not eating enough food and not resistance training. So when you're when you're largely fasting throughout the day, if you're not getting enough protein, then your muscle is not going to have amino acids to help, you know,
Speaker A
basically keep growing. And not only keep growing, not use its own amino acid reserve for making protein, right? So you break down muscle. In fact, there's weight loss studies showing that in any weight loss diet, you know, if you're
Speaker A
not eating enough protein and you're not resistance training, up to 40% of your weight can come from muscle weight loss that you're losing. I should say lean mass, including muscle. So that's a little different, but it's it's a big
Speaker A
percent, right? And so you're talking about losing a lot of muscle as well. And that is something that happens with these drugs. If people are training, it's really helps. If they're resistance training, it's really helping because that's a signal to to your muscle to
Speaker A
grow muscle. It's a mechanical force that helps you grow muscle, right? That's something to consider. Bone loss is another one. You can also lose bone from rapid rapid weight loss. I don't know if there's an independent like GLP-1 receptors that are on bone doing
Speaker A
something directly there yet to be uncovered. I think we don't really know why bone loss occurs. It's thought maybe it's just the weight loss, but like I said, maybe there's something that we don't understand yet. Kidney cancer is
Speaker A
another one. It seems like there's an increased signal for kidney cancer. Don't know why that is. Needs to be studied. There's a blackbox warning on them for thyroid cancer increase. that's never really been shown in human studies. It all comes from animal data,
Speaker A
but it's there nonetheless. Something to consider and it's very early. So, I feel like we're going to have a conversation in 5 years time when there's more understood about these compounds.
Speaker A
Well, the the thing that worries me is that, you know, okay, you have the person who's 300 lb and like they have to get down like like that's really unhealthy, right? It's that can really be a gamecher for them. But now what
Speaker A
we're seeing is Hollywood. We're seeing just just your average moms. They're like, "I want to lose 10 pounds, but I want it to be easy." Right? They're 10 or 15 pounds, whatever. And they're going to these JLP1s.
Speaker A
And the question is, I don't know that we have data showing it's actually beneficial in that population because they're already pretty pretty lean and they're just wanting to look a little bit better. And we don't really know. We
Speaker A
don't really know if it's beneficial. We know that losing weight's beneficial for sure and that's what these drugs are doing. You're losing a lot of weight rapidly. The other thing is gallstones.
Speaker A
Um you're getting the increased risk of gallstones, right? Some people's gallbladder has to be removed.
Speaker A
What about like anorexia and stuff like that? Cuz I've got a couple of friends who who are on the pen and they have they have dropped weight at a speed that has blown my mind. And part of me is
Speaker A
going stop like stop here. You know, I'm thinking like I'm thinking, gosh, does this just keep going down and down and down and down and down?
Speaker A
I don't Yeah, I mean, I don't think it keeps going down and down and down and down generally. I think you kind of stay. You hit a certain point and stay if the dose remains the same.
Speaker A
If the dose remains the same. And I think that people that are already kind of like at a certain healthy weight should taper down the dose too, right?
Speaker A
Um, and that's also been shown to help at least with weight regain too. you want to stop and get off it, you have a better chance of success if you taper down the dose and and don't just full
Speaker A
stop, you know, get off of it. Um, it seems like tapering down helps people at least slow the weight regain where it's not happening all of a sudden. Your body kind of adjust. But I also want to mention, you know, there are other ways
Speaker A
that you can lose weight, right? Intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is so on the lowest dose of some of these drugs like ozic for example if you're on the lowest dose you can achieve a similar amount of weight loss
Speaker A
from intermittent fasting as you do from that and it's not you know if it's five five you know 5 to 10% body weight not huge amount but you know for people that don't need to you lose a huge amount
Speaker A
that's a good way to do it because you're going to get the metabolic switch you're going to get the ketosis you're not going to have to worry about the side effects you don't have to worry about regaining the weight because guess
Speaker A
what? You're going to adapt. Your body adapts. You get used to the fasting becomes easier. So, I think that, you know, it it depends on the population that we're talking about here. Do I have concerns? Yes, I do. I have concerns.
Speaker A
But do I also think some of these people that are obese and would never lose that weight? Is are are they getting a benefit from these drugs? Absolutely. I think they are. But it all comes down to the population who's using them. And
Speaker A
right now, it's become so popular in everyone. And there's so many people I don't think need to use it to lose their 10 pounds. It's ridiculous.
Speaker A
People take the path of least resistance though, don't they? And appears to be the path of least resistance for many.
Speaker A
So, we shall see, I guess. Rhonda, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for.
Speaker A
And the question left for you, I think, is a great one. It is, what is a purchase that you made that is less than $100 that improved your quality of life the most?
Speaker A
That was probably okay. I have two. Um, I would say the omega-3 index test that is measuring your omega-3 fatty acid levels.
Speaker A
And you can get that at home or you can order it online and get it at home. And you do a little you do like a little spot of blood. It's like a finger prick blood spot spot. And
Speaker A
just knowing that you're not in that you want to be 8% range. 8% range is the 5year increased life expectancy. It's the, you know, 66% lower dementia risk.
Speaker A
I mean, it's really where you want to be to to be the healthiest. And you might you might be supplementing with an omega-3 supplement that's not really working and you won't know it unless you do take that test. And I think it's one
Speaker A
of the the easiest ones that I've done. And how did that improve your quality of life or are you saying it um helped you avoid a bad quality of life?
Speaker A
It's no, I think it's improving my quality of life because it's it's it's slowing it's slowing my aging. That's been shown with omega-3. It's absolutely slowing aging. I told you omega-3 was the only supplement that was able to do
Speaker A
that. Um, even in the context of people that were healthy and physically active. I mean, this the Swiss these Swiss people are healthy. It's like if they did the study in the US, there's no way 88% of them would be physically active.
Speaker A
Not a chance, right? Um, yeah. So, it's it's slowing the aging process and that is exactly what I want to do. It's going to help with peak span. It's going to help with, you know, health span. It's going to help with life lifespan as
Speaker A
well. So, and it's it's affordable. It's less than 100 bucks. And the second one, the second one I think um the one that really did improve my in quality was a continuous glucose monitor.
Speaker A
Oh, I thought you were going to say creatine. Okay. Continuous glucose monitor. No, no, no. You can't go back now.
Speaker A
Yeah, it did. It did because I realized how important sleep was for my metabolic health. I thought I was doing everything right for metabolic health and and it was it was knowing how not getting enough sleep was affecting my glucose. I
Speaker A
never would have thought that. Never would have known. And most people that get the continuous gluc glucose monitors never think about that either. They think about the food they're eating.
Speaker A
They don't think about sleep. And when you get that continuous glucose monitor, what is it you're looking at to figure out the connection with sleep?
Speaker A
You can look at first you can look at your fasting blood glucose levels and you can go online and for your age and and gender and figure out what's a normal range.
Speaker A
So that's when you haven't eaten. Yes. Okay. First thing in the morning and you have not eaten. That would be the easiest thing to look at.
Speaker A
Mhm. And the second thing Yes. The second thing would be to look at after you eat a meal 30 minutes to an hour later making sure that you're clearing that glucose from your meal.
Speaker A
And if you're not seeing that peak come down and clearing there's something wrong. Uh, okay. I might wear another one of those.
Speaker A
It's been a while and they're quite cheap. You can get them for like $20 on on the internet. Dr. Ronda, I think people are going to want to continue to learn from you. So, where should they go to learn more from you?
Speaker A
I have a podcast called Found My Fitness. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, everywhere you listen to podcasts. That would be the the best place. I have a website, foundmyfitness.com. I have a wonderful newsletter. Every week we put out
Speaker A
something. We put out one on that Peakspan paper. We put out a newsletter on updating the exercise guidelines. I have a great team. We put out an email newsletter that's free every single week. And they're really good. They're
Speaker A
really good in-depth emails so people can find me there. I'm on social media. Rhonda Patrick found my fitness. That's all my that's my my handle, my website name, my podcast name.
Speaker A
I'll link it below for anyone as well that um would like to go check out that information. It'll all be in the description below. I highly recommend. I mean, I don't really need to tell people how incredible you are. I think they've
Speaker A
just observed that. So I shant. Um I shall. You are incredible. Thank you. Um so thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker A
I've learned so much and I've done so many of these health conversations on this show and it's almost at a point now where I'm wondering if there's much more that I've got to learn. But because I think you stay at the very cutting edge
Speaker A
of the studies that are coming out and you're so good at both articulating them in a simple way that someone like me can understand even though I can't understand a lot of the literature as it comes out of these sort of scientific
Speaker A
journals. I think that you, you know, you're a person people do need to follow um because the world and the scientific understandings are always changing and it's good to have someone who can distill that down for you in a way that
Speaker A
is relevant, accessible, and scientifically rigorous. And that's exactly sort of the three terms that I think of when I think of you. So, please do continue to do the work you're doing because it's teaching me so much. And by
Speaker A
way of that, it's meaning that I can live a happier, healthier life. And I appreciate you for that, Ronda.
Speaker A
I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Stephen. I love coming and having discussions with you. They're fun.
Speaker A
Thank you. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior.
Speaker A
And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out and I bet you you might love
Topics:visceral fatBPA receiptsanti-agingRhonda Patrickmetabolic syndromepeak spanintermittent fastinghigh-intensity interval trainingtestosterone reductionhealth optimization
