AI transcript
I did my post-doc training in nutrition and specifically looking at micronutrients.
So these are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals. And these micronutrients are running
our metabolism, they’re running everything, our neurotransmitters that we’re producing,
so our cognition, just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies. So when you think about
the micronutrients that you need in your diet, it makes it a little bit easier to think about what
you should be eating.
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Today my guest is Rhonda Patrick, a research scientist with expertise in the areas of aging,
cancer, and nutrition. I first came across her work years ago and a friend of mine sent me this
mammoth article she posted online on the benefits of Asana. In fact, this is the reason I started
Asana. Our main focus in this conversation is lifestyle habits that reduce biological aging,
improve health span, and improve our cognition. We cover a framework for approaching nutrition
and decisions about food, as well as a deep dive into vitamin D, sun, sunscreen, and hot exposure.
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McDonald’s restaurants in Canada. When I was thinking about where to start, I think the best
place to start is to give people practical frameworks for approaching topics that we come
across every day. So why don’t we start with a practical framework for approaching nutrition
and decisions about the food that we consume? I kind of have my own framework for approaching
nutrition in it. It has a lot to do with, I did my postdoc training in nutrition and specifically
looking at micronutrients. So these are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals that
fatty acids also and amino acids that we have to get from our diet. Those are in a variety of foods
and different foods have different levels and quantities of them. And these micronutrients
are running our metabolism, they’re running everything, our neurotransmitters that we’re
producing, so our cognition, just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies. So
it’s important to get them because if we don’t get them, we can have deficiencies or insufficiencies,
which is quite worse because insufficiencies are kind of something that you don’t notice every day,
but there’s like insidious types of damage just happening each and every day. And it accumulates
over time and plays a role in age-related diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative disease. So
these micronutrients are things like calcium, magnesium, vitamin K, vitamin D, which I’m
sure we’ll talk about is actually something you can mostly get from the sun, omega 3. And so when
you think about the micronutrients that you need in your diet, it makes it a little bit easier to
think about what you should be eating. Well, let’s start with some of the most common deficiencies
in micronutrients. We have magnesium, so almost half of the US population, they get insufficient
magnesium intake. Magnesium is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule, so chlorophyll gives plants
their green color. So it’s really easy to think about foods you should eat to get magnesium. You
should be eating greens, particularly dark, leafy greens. Well, greens are also very high in vitamin
K. And vitamin K1, there’s two forms, vitamin K1, vitamin K1 is essential for all your blood
clotting processes. So you’re like, in order to like have your blood clotting, which is important,
you know, if you have a cut or something, you know, an injury, you want that clotting to happen
so that you don’t have like a hemorrhage, right? So vitamin K is also, you know, high in leafy greens.
You can also get calcium as well from greens. So that’s really an easy way to kind of think about
greens. The other way, the other thing is omega 3s, right? So omega 3s are very high in
fatty fish. So this would be wild Alaskan salmon or cod or mackerel sardines, like these are good
forms of fish that have the marine types of omega 3. So that would be DHA and EPA.
Those are very important for a lot of functions, including brain health and cardiovascular health.
And a lot of work has been done by Bill Harris and his group at the Fatty Acid Research Institute.
And they look at the omega 3 index, which is a way you can actually quantify your omega 3 levels.
And that’s really good to be able to quantify something, because if you don’t quantify it,
you don’t really know if you are getting enough of it, right? So the omega 3 index is they’re
characterizing it from red blood cells, which is different than a lot of other ways of measuring
omega 3, like for example, plasma omega 3, which is basically kind of reflective of your dietary
intake the last week or so. The red blood cell or the omega 3 index is more of a long term status.
So it’s like 120 days for a red blood cell to turn over. So the omega 3 index is a good marker
of your omega 3 status. People that have a high omega 3 index, and that would be 8% or more,
have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people with a lower omega 3 index,
which is more like 4%. Now people in the United States on average have about an omega 3 index
of about 5%. And you compare that to, for example, countries like Japan, where they eat a lot of
seafood, their omega 3 index is around 10%. There’s been tons of studies looking at omega 3 index
and life expectancy. And there’s been also like data where they stratify like looking at, you know,
for example, and this I like talking about this, because I think it really puts in perspective
the framework of nutrition and thinking about instead of focusing on what to avoid,
focusing on what you need, because if you focus on what you need, then it’s obvious what you don’t
need, right? There’s no nutritional value in processed foods. You’re not getting micronutrients,
you’re getting calories, you’re not getting protein, you’re not getting things that you need.
So smoking is something that everyone knows is bad. You should avoid smoking, right? It’s,
you know, heart disease, cancer, you’re going to have a decreased life expectancy,
emphysema, all kinds of problems, right? What Bill Harris’s group had done has,
they looked at life expectancy of smokers and non-smokers, and then they categorized
their omega 3 index. And if you look at this data, it’s just mind-blowing. So obviously,
non-smokers that have a high omega 3 index of 8% or more have the highest life expectancy.
And the lowest life expectancy is smokers with a low omega 3 index. So that’s the worst of the
worst. But when you look at smokers with a high omega 3 index, they have the same life expectancy
as non-smokers with a low omega 3 index. In other words, having a low omega 3 index was
like smoking. And when I say the life expectancy, if you look at the graph in the publication,
the curves like overlay perfectly. It’s kind of freakish where you’re like, whoa, like the people
that are smoking, but they’re getting a lot of omega 3 have the same life expectancy of these
people that don’t smoke, but have very low omega 3. And that’s kind of like, I like talking about
that because I feel like it puts it in perspective for people because like I said, no one’s really
thinking about, I’m not eating my fish today. I’m not supplementing with an omega 3 supplement
to get those omega 3s. But people are thinking about, oh, I shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad,
right? So again, it goes back to that framework of thinking about what you need. And starting there,
as opposed to just like, okay, what should I avoid? Because when you think about what should I avoid,
then people aren’t thinking about magnesium. They’re not thinking about the vitamin K. They’re
not thinking about omega 3. And by the way, magnesium, I said about half the population
in the United States doesn’t get enough. They’re not eating enough greens. And unfortunately,
there’s not a great test for magnesium because our body stores magnesium in our bones. And so
anytime we’re not getting enough in our diet, our body pulls it out of our bones to like,
because we need it. It’s so important. You need it to make energy. Like without magnesium,
you can’t make energy. So nothing’s going to function. You also, it’s needed to repair damage.
Like every time you have, you know, like right now, you and I, we’re having a conversation,
you know, we’re, you know, neurotransmitters are firing, we’re thinking about things like that’s
causing damage, metabolism, all that stuff causes damage on a daily basis. But our body repairs
that damage. But magnesium is a cofactor for these enzymes. These are proteins that are doing
everything for that to function properly. And so if you don’t get enough of that magnesium to do
that, what happens is you don’t repair that damage properly. And that can increase the risk
of getting a mutation that can lead to cancer. You know, it’s been found that for example,
for every 100, you know, milligram increase in magnesium intake, there’s something like a 20%
decrease in pancreatic cancer risk. And there’s been lots of studies like this looking at
magnesium intake and cancer risk. And so the higher the magnesium intake, the lower the cancer risk.
So again, it’s one of those things where it’s, you can’t look in the mirror and go,
as you’re brushing your teeth, Oh, I don’t have enough magnesium today, right? Like nothing’s like
showing you that, but it’s happening. That damage is insidious. And I mentioned you pull it out of
your bone, like it’s pulled out of your bones. And that’s another thing it leads to osteoporosis
over time. So remembering to eat your leafy greens is getting your magnesium. So you,
so women need about, I’d say about 320 milligrams a day adult women need about 320 milligrams a day
of magnesium. Men need around 420 milligrams a day. You know, this can change based on your,
your physical activity level as well. So like if you’re physically active, if you’re sweating,
you sweat out magnesium, you also use it up for energy. So you might actually require anywhere
between 10% to 20% more than that level. So what’s called the recommended daily allowance
in the United States. So, you know, again, and people aren’t even meeting that.
So there’s lots of reasons to invest in, you know, these micronutrients and to think about
the foods that you need to eat. I have so many questions. One is, is there a difference between
consuming magnesium and omega three through food, like leafy greens or fish and supplementation?
Yes, let’s start with magnesium. So magnesium, if you’re consuming it in the form of leafy greens,
it is, it is bound to a, it’s the fiber matrix. It’s called phytate. And that does decrease the
bioavailability of it. You can do raw, but also cooking them will increase the bioavailability
of minerals like magnesium. And it is good. You want to kind of get a variety of things. You
want to have some raw veggies, but you also want to have cooked. And when you cook, it does actually
increase the bioavailability of not just magnesium, other minerals as well that are bound to that,
that fiber matrix that, which has phytate there. Supplementation is also kind of tricky with respect
to magnesium because you don’t really absorb more. I mean, it’s about a hundred, I would say
anywhere between 120 to 150 milligrams per dose. Like once you get above that, you’re not really
absorbing more. You’re just kind of causing more GI distress. And it’s a little bit of like a laxative
effect. So some people actually use it specifically for that reason. So they do hire doses. Generally
speaking, if you are supplementing with magnesium, you want to make sure you’re going at a lower dose
because you’re not really going to absorb more. And it’s just going to cause like gut issues.
If you want to supplement with more than just 150, you have to spread your doses out,
you know, take it earlier with the meal and then take it later in the day as well.
But the other thing is that when you’re getting it from food, it is packaged in with other minerals.
And there are, there’s some argument to be made that having, for example, there’s like,
you know, twice as much calcium as magnesium in a lot of the foods. And so you’re getting this
two to one ratio. And so, you know, there’s kind of a reason for that. I wouldn’t say that it’s
been heavily studied, but it’s thought that you kind of want to keep that ratio correct, like two
to one calcium to magnesium ratio. So if you’re just like supplementing with lots of magnesium,
and let’s say you don’t get enough, maybe you don’t eat dairy, or maybe you’re lactose intolerant,
or, you know, maybe you’re just not getting enough calcium, you can kind of have mineral
imbalances as well. And then there’s the form that you’re going to supplement with, right? So
there’s a lot of different magnesium supplements out there. The most important difference when
you’re looking for a magnesium supplement is to avoid the, what’s called the inorganic forms.
And this isn’t like organic pesticide. What we’re talking about is so like magnesium oxide or
magnesium sulfate, like they’re just not very bioavailable. Like you’re not going to absorb
as much from those. But if you get like the organic form, so this would be something that has like
an organic molecule. So magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate, magnesium
torate, these are all forms of magnesium that are relatively the same in terms of their bioavailability.
I personally like taking magnesium glycinate, because glycinate is like a form of glycine,
which is a inhibitory neurotransmitter. And so I like getting a little bit extra glycine. There’s
like, there’s some science behind, you know, glycine, perhaps being beneficial and supplementing
with it. Just I think that’s the main thing with respect to magnesium supplementation is that
the forms do kind of matter and the dose. And what about the omega-3s? Is it, can I just go to the
store if I’m not going to eat a lot of fish and buy an omega-3 supplement? Or is fish the primary
way that we actually get bioavailability from this? Yeah, that’s also a great question. It
really does obviously depend on quite a few factors. So with respect to the seafood and fish,
the type of fish does matter, right? So like you need, like there’s some fish, like that’s just
not that fatty. The omega-3s EPA and DHA are the marine forms of the omega-3. And those are the
ones I was talking about with the omega-3 index and life expectancy. Those are the forms that have
been used in randomized controlled trials with supplementation that have decreased
cardiovascular events by like 25% compared to placebo. Those are the ones that are important.
They’re only in the really oily fatty fish. So one of the best forms is salmon. And wild salmon
has higher levels than farmed. For example, wild Alaskan salmon is probably one of the best
salmons to consume for omega-3. It also has astaxanthin. It’s what gives the fish that pink
color. If you are eating quite a lot of fish, you’d have to really get an omega-3 index test to
know for sure how much you require. But you know, I would say probably like at least, you know,
you’re eating it four times a week, something like that, which most people do not do. In Japan,
they do. And their omega-3 index is very high. Like I don’t even know if many Japanese supplement,
they’re just, they eat seafood like every day. The other thing to consider is, well,
what type of fish? So we talked about oily and fatty fish, but also you want to look at
contaminants. Like larger fish have things like PCBs and mercury because they’re eating smaller
fish. So those things accumulate in their fat. So like you don’t want to eat swordfish, for example.
It’s just there. The mercury in swordfish is just through the roof, right? So it’s really like the
trade-off there isn’t very good. So again, that’s where salmon comes into the picture because it’s
very low in mercury. It’s high in omega-3 smaller fish. So sardines would be another one. Again,
there’s a lot of data out there that you can look up like USDA has all this like
contamination mercury levels versus omega-3. So that stuff is easy for people to find.
I would say by and large, the easiest way to get a high omega-3 index and these studies have been
done, randomized controlled trials, people giving supplement, supplement forms of omega-3 is definitely
to supplement. And fish oil supplements, generally speaking, if you’re taking around two grams a day
of a fish oil supplement, that is enough to raise someone from a 4% omega-3 index, which is the low
end, to a 8% omega-3 index, which is the high end. You obviously want to make sure you’re getting
enough of the EPA and DHA, those two important omega-3s. And you want to make sure you’re not
getting a high contaminant level like mercury, PCBs. But the other thing to keep in mind is you
want a low oxidation level. So omega-3 fatty acids are prone to oxidation just because their
molecular structure is a polyunsaturated fatty acid. And so the way people, companies, you know,
are manufacturing this fish oil matters. So some good third-party testing sites to look at.
I would say consumer lab is one that’s really, they go and just go to grocery stores and where
people are generally going and buying their supplements. And they just measure and test
all this stuff. And there, there’s some really affordable brands that have decent omega-3 levels,
DHA and EPA levels, and low oxidation, low contaminant levels. And consumer lab, you know,
test all those. So that would be a good site to go to to find a good omega-3 supplement.
Another one is the International Fish Oil Standard Site, I-F-O-S. Those are for the data
nerds, to be honest, because there’s like a lot more data there. And if you’re like into this stuff
and you want to like really dig, because they just give you everything, like all the data,
like you could imagine, that’s a great site for people that are sort of nerd, want to nerd out
on that. But for some people, they’re like, I just want to know my grocery store, what do I get?
Then consumer lab is a great option. It’s like, it’s broken down in a way that like a child could
even understand. It’s okay, this is the one I want to buy. Is there a difference between wild and
non-wild, I guess, or captive or factory farmed, whatever you want to call it, farmed fish,
in terms of the nutrient density that we’re pulling out of them?
You know, there is a difference. I mean, the wild salmon, they’re out there in the ocean,
and they’re eating fish and like, you know, crustaceans and all the things that they’re
supposed to eat, like that’s what they eat, right? In the farmed salmon, I’m pretty sure there’s
some feeding of stuff that’s like not even, I mean, we’re talking like corn and stuff too.
Yeah, if you were to look at the fish before, in the factories before they inject it with
astaxanthin, they look albino because they don’t eat all the right things, so they’re not naturally
pink. I said inject, but I’m not sure, maybe they actually just give it astaxanthin, they eat it.
I forgot, but they’re giving it exogenous astaxanthin so that it does have the pink color.
The Omega-3 content was also higher in the wild salmon. So again, to your question, yes,
there is a difference between the farmed salmon and the wild salmon, but you know,
sometimes when you’re out at a restaurant, like you’re not going to get the wild salmon.
Is it the end of the world? In my opinion, no. Like I said, choose your battles. I still think,
you still are getting Omega-3s. You’re still getting DHA and EPA. It’s not like it’s terrible,
but I do think it’s preferable if you are getting the wild salmon.
You mentioned organic. Is there a difference between organic and inorganic, I guess,
but inorganic in the sense of being non-organic produce? Why would we choose one over another,
and what difference does it make from a composition or bioavailability point of view?
So pesticides are obviously something that are used now in agriculture because these farms are
huge and we’re growing mass quantities of foods, and so they’re spraying things that will ward off
insects. So insecticides or pesticides, as is known, and also fungicides and other things
to prevent fungus and anything that’s going to destroy the crop. A lot of these types of
pesticides are obviously damaging to the insects, but to humans, the question is, well, are they
damaging to humans? There were a lot, especially things like rotonone, perquate. These were used
for a long time, and those are chemicals that actually cause… We use them. Scientists use
them. I’ve used it myself in the lab to induce Parkinson-like symptoms in animals because it
disrupts your mitochondria, which are little organelles inside of almost all of your cells
and that are producing energy. Super important. In Parkinson’s disease, the mitochondria and
your neurons become dysfunctional. You can cause this by just giving them this pesticide,
perquate, or rotonone. It’s funny. I remember the first time I was learning about this in…
This was actually even before I was in graduate school, but also in graduate school, I was like,
“Oh, I’m putting this stuff to give it to a mouse to study Parkinson’s or to induce a Parkinson,
like human model of Parkinson’s.” This was put on our produce, and I was like,
“That was really upsetting to think about.” There’s been studies even on the newer types
of pesticides that are used on produce. There have been studies that have shown they’re
probably not good to have on a daily basis because of that insidious damage that they’re
causing. People are probably thinking of glyphosate. Roundup is a big one as well.
When it comes to those pesticides that are used, there are certain vegetables and fruits that
are very thin skin that absorb it. Even if you washed the vegetable off, it’s already been absorbed
through the skin. Let’s talk about an avocado versus a strawberry. Is it so important to eat
organic for avocados? Not really. It’s got a really thick skin. Strawberries, on the other hand,
have a very thin skin. That would be something that you want to choose organic.
I would say that, yes, organic would be the best choice. If you can’t always afford organic,
then choose. Bananas, is that so important? Probably not. Avocado is probably not.
Oranges probably not. Apples, yes. Thin skin. Again, there’s lists out there that will list the
things that are like, okay, if you’re going to not do organic, here’s the vegetables and fruits
that are the safest to not. I love the dirty dozen list, but it’s actually more practical to
remember the thickness of the skin as the barrier, the membrane between pesticides. How do you wash
your produce? I say this having seen, I think last night on Instagram, some guy putting baking soda
and vinegar and soaking it for 20 minutes and like, is that how we wash produce? How do you wash
produce to get stuff off of it? What do you do? I just use water. I just use water and wash it,
because I do buy organic as well. You’re thinking about pesticides. You’re like, oh,
well, I don’t want to get Parkinson’s disease or cancer. It’s causing damage. My mentor, Bruce
Ames, he’s now 96 years old. I don’t know how many years ago it was. It must have been back in
the 80s. He had done some experiments with hematologists from his lab, and they were looking
at what happens if you don’t get enough folate. So that’s another one of those essential micronutrients
that you have to get from your diet. Guess what? Leafy greens are one of the best sorts of folate.
So leafy greens are just, they’re packed with certain micronutrients, but they don’t have a
lot of protein, right? So folate, again, we have to get from our diet. And if we don’t get enough
folate, it actually causes damage to our DNA much more than eating a pesticide wood,
because folate is required to make new DNA. We’re constantly making new cells in our body.
And if you don’t have that folate, the precursor to make one of the nucleotides of DNA isn’t going
to be there. And so your body substitutes something else in there that’s from RNA. That’s not supposed
to be there, and it causes DNA damage. And he had done these studies where it was like,
he took animals, put them on a low folate diet similar to what some people in the United States
get. And then he took the other group of animals and he irradiated them with ionizing radiation.
Okay, this is like, yeah, you’re going to want to avoid this, right? And the folate deficiency
was like ionizing radiation. It did the exact same thing. It caused double strand breaks in DNA,
exactly like the ionizing radiation. So not getting that important micronutrient from
your leafy greens, folate, was like getting ionizing radiation. So again, back to that
theme that we started with, thinking about what you need is so important. And we’re sitting here
talking about pesticides. Oh, we should avoid them. Yes, but guess what’s worse? If you don’t
eat the greens, you’re not going to get enough folate. Folate is so important. It’s in every
processed food. They put the oxidized form of it, folic acid. It’s kind of one of those things where
it’s like, oh, it’s another form of folate and it is more stable, which is why it’s used in
processed foods rather than folate. But it is not the exact same as folate. It’s preferable if
you’re going to get the folate from your diet, from leafy greens. Yeah, let’s come back to
sort of the framework for approaching this. And so we’ve talked about micronutrients a little bit.
Let’s talk about macro. So, I mean, so I’m sitting here talking about all these micronutrients and
it was like vegetables was a big thing we’re talking about, right? But we also hit on omega
3s and that was fish. Protein is amino acids or something that we need to get from our diet every
day. Much like we store glucose as glycogen in our liver and our muscles, we store fat, like
triglycerides, right, adipose tissue. We don’t really store amino acids, although our muscle
skeletal muscle is kind of a reservoir for them. And during periods of fasting or
low protein intake, we pull from our muscle to get amino acids because they’re essential to
survive. And what does that mean? That means you’re pulling important protein from your muscle and
that does cause muscle atrophy. So you want to avoid that, right? And so in order to help avoid that,
all these, you know, regulatory committees had come up with, let’s figure out how much protein
people need to take in every single day to avoid those losses, right? And so studies were done
many, many years ago and that number came up to be 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight
is what was the recommended daily allowance for protein intake. Fast forward decades, you know,
you’ve got all this new science and new technology that’s come out and new ways of measuring things.
And, you know, any scientist will tell you that your data is only as sensitive as the tools that
you’re using, okay? Data from experts like Dr. Stuart Phillips and others, they started to,
you know, look into how you measure protein losses and amino acid losses. And it turns out that
those studies that were done decades ago were using tools that were, oh, they were basically
underestimating the losses of amino acids. It turns out using new techniques that are more sensitive
that in order to just prevent your body from like pulling from, you know, your skeletal muscle to
get amino acids, the minimum amount of protein you need to take in is actually 1.2 grams per
kilogram body weight, which is higher than the 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight, right?
And they also did some studies looking at, well, what if you’re physically active, right? You’re
causing damage to your muscle. You’re using a lot of energy. I mean, lots of things going on.
That number goes up to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram body weight. This was a big eye
opener for me a couple of years ago when I talked to Dr. Phillips and started looking
and reading his research because I always thought people were getting enough protein.
And turns out a lot of people are not getting enough protein because they’re not getting at
least that 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight, bare minimum. That, I think, is you have to think
about, okay, well, where do I get my protein meat? Is animal meat? It’s probably one of the best
sources because essential amino acids are very highly concentrated in poultry and meat and fish.
If you’re a vegetarian or a vegan, you just have to really work really hard and supplement with
protein powders and stuff to get that amino acid composition up.
Is all animal protein the same? I would imagine you need the complete set of amino
acids for it to be the most bioavailable in your body. I don’t know what I’m talking about here,
obviously. But is there a big difference between steak and chicken and other sources of protein
that we typically think of? There are differences with respect to their
micronutrient profiles. Steak has a lot more iron, for example. There’s a lot of zinc in
shellfish, oysters. With respect to just the essential amino acids, getting them from any
of those sources is pretty good with respect to protein. You will find that per ounce of food
that you’re eating, maybe there’s a little bit more denser in meat than fish or something like
that. But there are subtle differences between them, but also just in the whole micronutrient
profile itself. But with respect to the essential amino acids, if you’re really trying to hit that
1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight, that’s very important.
That’s a lot of protein. It’s really a lot of protein, especially for people that are physically
active. Why is that so important? Well, if you’re constantly pulling amino acids from your muscle,
it’s like pulling from your retirement fund early. Because our muscle mass peak is probably,
I would say, anywhere between 20 to 30 years old is when we peak muscle mass.
After 30, as you get into 40, you start going down. You want to try to build up that muscle mass
reservoir earlier in life, like you do what your retirement fund. You want to build it up
because you’re going to be pulling from it no matter what. Even if you’re working out later
in life, you’re still going to be pulling from it because you just lose more muscle mass and
strength as you age. It’s just part of the aging process. The more you can counter that with
resistance training, with making sure you’re getting enough protein, then the better off
you’re going to be. If you didn’t do it earlier in life, it’s never too late. That’s something
also to keep in mind. Don’t give up. I’m already 50. It’s too late for me. No, because you can get
gains in muscle mass and really actually great gains in strength, particularly with resistance
training. Protein intake is one easy thing. A lot of people, like our parents, not everyone’s
exercising. They’re not doing resistance training. Get that protein intake becomes even more important
at that point. Something also that you might find interesting, Shane, is that we’re talking about
Omega-3s. There’s some work from Chris McGlory. He had basically done some research that have found
high-dose Omega-3s could prevent disuse atrophy. When people are older, they’re not using their
muscles a lot. When you’re not using your muscles a lot and you’re certainly not getting enough protein,
you start to atrophy even more. If you gave them a high-dose Omega-3, so this was like
four to five grams a day, it totally prevented disuse atrophy. They did the study in younger
adults and younger females, but it was 50% less. He’s done some other studies and mechanism and
looking into it. He thinks that what’s happening is Omega-3s are sensitizing your skeletal muscle
to amino acids. In other words, you’re getting more amino acids into the muscle. You’re getting
more bang for your buck. More amino acids are getting in when you have the Omega-3s there,
because Omega-3s are really important for the skeletal muscle membrane and stuff. It might
be easier just to get the nutrients in. I want to start using this in a practical way. If I
were to make a smoothie in the morning, what is the best thing to put in my body at the start
of the day after having slept, which means I’ve been fasting? What is the most incredible smoothie
you can think of that would just be full of health benefits for the day? It would have a
Omega-3, it would have protein powder, it would have leafy. You’d walk me through this. Do you do
this? I do a smoothie. It doesn’t have Omega-3, but I’ll walk you through my smoothie that I do.
I probably about four to five days a week have this smoothie. Typically, this smoothie is about,
I don’t know, four or so kale leaves. That’s usually my green source that I use.
I’m getting the magnesium, I’m getting the vitamin K, I’m getting the folate, but I’m also getting
something in there called Lutein and zeaxanthin, which is, these are carotenoids much like beta
carotene or astaxanthin, like we were talking about. It’s another one that accumulates in
the eye, rods and cones of the eye, so it helps prevent macular degeneration,
but it accumulates in the brain as well. It’s so interesting because there’s been studies that
have shown that giving older adults supplementing with something like 20 megs, which is what three
kale leaves has of Lutein, it improves neural efficiency. Basically, your brain works better
with less energy. There’s been other studies in older adults where giving them Lutein and zeaxanthin
will improve crystallized intelligence. That’s basically, as you get older, it’s the ability
to still use all the information that you’ve learned throughout your life and still use it.
That’s the kale. It also has fiber, right? Fiber is great for your gut. I also add an avocado,
and avocado also increases the bioavailability of those carotenoids, the Lutein and zeaxanthin,
by up to six-fold, anywhere between three to six-fold. You’re getting more of the Lutein and
zeaxanthin. You’re basically making them more bioavailable by adding the avocado. Also, it’s a
great source of mono-insaturated fat. Avocados are high in potassium. Something like 96% of the
US population doesn’t get enough potassium. Then I add a ton of frozen blueberries.
Blueberries, yes, you’re getting your vitamin C, and you’re getting some fermentable fiber for the
gut, but they’re also high in those phytochemicals. They have polyphenols in them, and they have
anthocyanins. They’re like superpowers for the brain. There’s been so many studies that have
been done, randomized control trials either with freeze-dried blueberry extract or actually just
blueberries, showing it improves cognition, it improves mood. When I was a postdoc, I did some
studies in people. We were looking at freeze-dried blueberry powder. I was looking at DNA damage
in their blood cells. Markers of those double-stranded breaks I talked about, like if you don’t get
enough folate, it causes double-stranded breaks. People that are people that are eating terrible
diets and that are overweight and obese have more double-stranded breaks in their blood cells.
That’s something that I’ve measured. We were getting a population of people that were overweight
and obese, and then giving them this freeze-dried blueberry extract. Over the course of four,
eight weeks, it lowered their DNA damage. Personally, what I notice is the mood enhancer.
It’s like I get that blueberry, and it’s like, whoa. I used to add bananas to my smoothie years
and years ago. It’s not that bananas are bad for you, but they have this enzyme in them called
polyphenol oxidase, PPO. Well, as the name implies, it breaks down polyphenols,
which is what you want from the blueberries to get the benefits in the brain and the benefits.
Yeah, exactly. There was a very, very recent study in 2023 that came out,
and this was a controlled trial where people were given a smoothie with blueberries,
either with and without the banana, and then metabolites of polyphenols were measured
in their urine and blood. If they had the banana, their polyphenol levels were just plummeted,
like they weren’t getting them from the blueberries. I’ll tell you what’s enraging about it.
Is anywhere you go, if you want to buy a smoothie when you’re out and about,
everything has a banana in it. I’m a parent, and so I’m out and about,
and I have my kid with me, and it’s like, I want to get a smoothie, and it has blueberries in it,
and I’m like, but it also has a banana. There’s been studies on children as well,
and giving children blueberries improves their cognition. They perform better on tests. It’s
not just good for adults, it’s throughout the lifespan. Now I have to tell them, okay,
don’t put the banana, but everywhere you go, there’s a banana in the smoothie.
That’s interesting. I’m going to give you my smoothie recipe after, and you can create it,
but I’m going to switch out the banana starting tomorrow. Okay, so we have kale leaves, avocado,
frozen blueberries, and protein powder. Protein powder. Especially if I’m doing it,
like you said, first thing in the morning, and sometimes I’ll have my smoothie in the afternoon,
in which case, if I didn’t work out and I’ve already gotten my protein, I won’t put the protein
powder, but these days, I’m mostly always putting them to be honest. I’m doing something every day,
and it’s hard to get the protein requirement for me. I usually do some whey protein,
and then I also add a little bit of hydrolyzed collagen powder as well.
If you’re getting the protein, you probably don’t need the hydrolyzed collagen powder,
but I personally, there’s studies showing that randomized control trial is showing that it improves
like skin elasticity, and things that I’m also interested in addition with respect to skin.
I mean, there’s all sorts of studies also showing it helps with joint health and this and that,
and then the other thing I add is I do a little bit of moringa powder.
So, moringa, it’s high in some micronutrients, like it has things like zinc and iron and magnesium,
but it also has something in it that is called moringogen, and it is a phytochemical that is very
similar to sulforaphane, which is found in like broccoli, broccoli sprouts. It’s really high in
broccoli sprouts, and it activates genetic pathways in our body, the same ones that sulforaphane
activates that have been shown to increase antioxidants in the brain, like glutathione,
that have been shown to lower DNA damage in our cells, all sorts of benefits,
but the other thing that it does, and I’ve noticed this, so I used to wear a continuous glucose
monitor like for years. It blunts the postprandial glucose rise from a smoothie when I put moringa
powder in it, and so I put that in my smoothie as well. Now, that’s a little spicy tasting. I
would say if you’re like in one of those moods where you don’t want the like not so great tasting
smoothie, you know, you can skip the moringa or go for a smaller amount, but I do like a big
keeping tablespoon of it. Do you use like a liquid and ice? Oh, and then I add some water, yeah.
Water, okay. Water to kind of mix it up. That’s pretty cool. I’m going to give you my smoothie.
You can give me a grade on this, and keep in mind, I’m a parent of two boys who devour food,
so we came up with this, and I’ve never told anybody the exact recipe before, but here’s
basically what it is. And we call it the Tom Brady. It’s got protein powder in it. It’s got AG1.
It’s got walnuts. It’s got blueberries, yogurt, almond milk, but like real almond milk, no other
additives or anything. Banana, chia seeds, and hemp seeds. Yes, you’re going for the kind of
omega-3 that’s in those plant sources like walnuts and chia seeds is ALA. And we were talking a lot
about the EPA and DHA, which are from the marine sources. ALA, I mean, now walnuts are great.
There’s like studies showing like if you eat a handful of walnuts a day, you’re, you know, you
have lower cancer risk and cardiovascular disease risk, they’re clearly good for you. They’re not
the same as the EPA and DHA, so don’t substitute. I’ll tell you, you can, so your body does convert
ALA from plant sources of omega-3 into EPA and DHA, which is essentially what the final
products that you need are, but everybody does it differently. And the conversion efficiency is
about 5%. Now women, when they’re making, when they’re high in estrogen, that can go up really,
that can go up much higher. And I think that’s because, because during pregnancy and child
development in utero, the DHA is so important that your body makes sure you’re just turning all
that ALA into that DHA, because when you’re pregnant, your estrogen level goes, it’s like
100-fold higher, it’s like super high. If there are people that are relying on just plant sources,
of omega-3, that is a mistake. And if you do an omega-3 index test, and there’s, you know,
omega-quant is probably one of the best places to do that, then you’ll figure, you’ll figure that
out really quick that year. Okay, well, yeah, well, this is great, right? So like, what would we
supplement here? We take out the bananas and, because they’re counteracting the blueberries,
we’d add avocado, that’s a lot of fat in there. What else would we like take out or add or
switch? What would you say? So you’re doing the AG greens as your source of green?
I’m doing that as sort of like the base vitamin, because they have a daily multivitamin, and I
just count that as their daily multivitamin. That’s their daily multivitamin. Okay, but what,
did you add any greens in there? I didn’t. No, there’s no greens in there. So that would be,
that would be something that I would add some, sneak some kale leaves in. Oh my god, if they saw
that, they wouldn’t drink it. No, don’t let them see. Do they have to make it to be part of it? So I
put kale leaves in my sons or even romaine lettuce. Here’s the other thing. So there’s really not a
lot of foods that can go into a smoothie that would degrade the polyphenols, because they’re high in
that enzyme polyphenol oxidase. But the ones that are are bananas and beets and anything in that
family. So like chard, I used to put chard in my smoothie, like like Swiss chard, you know, like
they’re so, it’s so good. And look, these are great foods to eat. Like just don’t put them in your
smoothie with blueberries. It’s exactly. So I mean, I used to put chard in my smoothie and
like this, this like changed my world. I was like, this is unbelievable. I can’t, you know,
thankfully I stopped doing the banana in my smoothie. In fact, I just kind of just got lazy
and it was like, okay, kale, I just need like a base of greens, you know what I mean? Thankfully,
like years ago. So even though this study just kind of came out last year, I’ve, I’ve been ahead
again. I wish I knew that they’re going to blame me for their poor test results. Now they’re going
to be like, you know, you sent us to school with blueberries and bananas. Dad, like,
what were you thinking? Are they, are they physically active? Cardio respiratory fitness
is another thing that’s like, it correlates with academic performance. So like the better fit the
child is, like they score better on a lot of academic tests as well. Okay. I want to get to
fitness and say, I want to cover a sort of grass fed and then heat and cold exposure. And then we
we can dive into fitness grass fed, non grass fed. Is there a difference? I see this everywhere
between grass fed butter, non grass fed butter, grass fed beef, non grass fed beef. Is there a
difference from a consumer point of view in terms of what I’m ingesting? There’s slight
differences there. Definitely. So we were just talking about the omega three profile. So I would
say one of the biggest differences is the omega three and then the omega six profile in let’s talk
about meat, like grass fed, you know, cows that are grass fed versus not. So what I mean by that
is like, they’re getting that plant source of omega that ALA that that plant source of omega three,
they’re getting if they’re, they’re eating like grass, right? They’re getting it from from the
plants that they’re eating. And they’re also not getting as much of what would be a type of food
that is higher in omega six. So this would be like if they’re being fed corn, for example,
a corn, you know, oil-ish processed kind of like pellets or whatever, you know, if you’re eating,
you know, for example, ground beef from a just conventional cow, then you’re going to have a
lot more of the omega six and less of the omega three. I never thought about this before, but
like you just said, like we’re not supposed to eat processed foods, but then we’re eating animals
that are eating processed foods. Yeah. Again, this goes back to my take on nutrition and how to
and thinking about the framework of how to eat. First and foremost, I think the most important
thing is how do I get these important vitamins and minerals and fatty acids and amino acids like
protein? How do I get all those right? Okay, I’m getting I’m getting an idea of how I should be
eating. Then it comes the next layer. Do I need to have organic or, you know, is a little bit of
pesticides okay? Do I need to eat grass-fed or, you know, because at the end of the day, food’s
expensive, right? Yeah, totally. Way more expensive now than years ago. Exactly. It’s even worse now.
And so I do think it is better if you can afford it. If you can afford it, great. If not, don’t
worry about it. If not, like the most important thing is what if you’re eating conventional meat
and you’re getting a little bit higher omega six? Well, if you’re supplementing with fish oil over
a day, who cares? You’re getting that getting the omega three is what is most important. It’s
and people are so focused on, oh, but the omega six is so high when your body actually needs omega
six. So if you’re getting it from like, you know, dietary sources versus like oils, process cooking
oils and stuff. And even that, look, I don’t cook with vegetable oil. I don’t use vegetable oil at all.
However, I’m going to be frank. Okay, when you look at the data, taking people that are eating
like a high saturated fat diet. So they’re eating more like butter, you know, saturated fat like
coconut oil and substituting that with vegetable oil. There’s no effect in their cardiovascular
disease risk, or they do better. You can look at this two ways. You can say, oh, well, if it’s the
same saturated fat versus vegetable oil, then clearly saturated fats, not as bad as we thought it
was. That’s true. But the second way you can look at it is, oh, they substituted the saturated fat
with the vegetable oil, and it wasn’t any worse. So maybe the vegetable oil isn’t killing us as
bad as we thought. And this is the one thing I like to point out, because I still don’t use them,
because when I think about it from like my mechanistic brain point of view, it’s like,
well, vegetable oil is very high in polyunsaturated fat, like we talked about omega threes being
a type of poly, they’re prone to oxidation. And when you add heat into the picture,
boom, that’s like tons of oxidation. Perhaps in those studies where they’re substituting
saturated fat for vegetable, were they putting vegetable oil on salads, or were they frying it,
deep frying, and consuming oxidized lipids? We don’t really know. You’re still better off avoiding
the vegetable oil, particularly for cooking, in anything that’s with heat. And then obviously,
processed foods have tons of vegetable oil that have been cooked at a high heat. When you go out
to eat, I mean, like those restaurants are using vegetable oil, it’s cheaper, they’re probably
reusing it, which is even more oxidized, right? I mean, these are things like you don’t want to
think about it, you’ll just never go out. I mean, like you have to like enjoy life, right?
Be practical, totally. Yeah, like you can’t obsess over everything or like you become like a maniac.
One thing we can all afford is vitamin D, and we’re all sort of lacking in that.
Walk me through sort of how we can get that, the difference between sunlight
and supplementation, as well as the effect of sunscreen on our absorption of vitamin D, and
is sunscreen actually killing us more than just being in the sun?
So vitamin D, food is not a great source of it. Like you can find, like it is fortified in some
fatty foods, unfortunately, it’s fortified with the wrong form, it’s fortified with D2 rather
than D3, which is what we make in our skin from the sun. The primary source of it is, as you
mentioned, it’s from the sun, and specifically it’s UVB radiation from the sun. That is really
important because UVB radiation only occurs during certain times of the year. In regions where you’re
more northern, so for example in Canada, you’re not making vitamin D a good four or five months
out of the year. It’s very challenging to make a lot of vitamin D from being out in the sun.
Summertime, different, lots of UVB radiation, right? So you need to be in the sun and you
need to be at a certain time of year, depending on where you live, there’s lots of things.
You mentioned sunscreen as well. There’s a lot of factors that are involved in
the ability to produce vitamin D3 in the skin from the UVB radiation, and that has to do with
sunscreen. So anything that blocks out UVB radiation is going to block out the ability to
make vitamin D. Melanin, the pigmentation that is like a sunscreen, it’s natural sunscreen and
people that some people have, like in some regions of the world that are certainly more equatorial,
that is also a natural sunscreen. It blocks out UVB radiation, which is why your body responds
when you’re in the sun, your body tans because it’s like, “Oh, next time I’m in the sun,
I need to protect myself.” It’s an adaptation. The other thing that regulates the production
of vitamin D3 from the sun is age. The older you get, the less, I would say, efficient your body
is it making vitamin D3 from the sun. For example, a 70-year-old makes four times less than their
20-year-old former self. Bioavailability of vitamin D3 is important as well, and that’s
regulated by body mass and weight. You make vitamin D3 in your skin, but it gets released into your
bloodstream, then it’s converted into another form that is actually not a vitamin, it’s a steroid
hormone. Vitamin D is actually much more important. It’s not just a vitamin, it’s actually a hormone
that our body needs. Basically, the more body fat you have, the less bioavailable vitamin D3 is,
and so you actually need more vitamin D3, the more body fat that you have. This hormone
is extremely important because it is regulating about 5% of the human genome, the protein encoding
human genome. It’s doing a lot of things, and you can imagine, so what it does, there’s actually
a little sequence inside of our DNA. It’s a little repeat sequence that vitamin D recognizes,
and this whole complex of vitamin D in a receptor goes down and binds to that little
sequence of DNA, and it turns on a gene or it turns off a gene, and it does it in a very coordinated
manner. When you don’t have enough vitamin D, that stuff all goes wrong, and so lots of things can
happen. Because of sunscreen, because of our modern-day lifestyles, we’re inside technology,
we’re on our computers, less farming, less agricultural work out in the sun, majority of
people are not getting enough vitamin D3. Something around 70% of the US population
is insufficient in vitamin D3, so that is defined as having blood levels of vitamin D
less than 30 nanograms per milliliter. Another percentage of the population is
deficient, so there’d be less than 20 nanograms per milliliter.
But we’ve been told not to go outside. We’ve been told to layer up the sunscreen.
Are these things getting in the way of vitamin D? Are they helping us? How do we make sense of all
this? Let’s be clear. If you have fair skin and you’re going out in the sun a lot, then you can
increase your risk for DNA damage, and skin cancer is one. For example, Australia. Australia is like
the melanoma cancer is through the roof in Australia, and melanoma is the worst type of
skin cancer to get. There’s a lot of fair skin people living there, and Australia is very close
to the equator. There’s definitely many months out of the year where you’re just
lots and lots of UVB radiation, but people that were sort of native to that region had darker
skin. They had more melanin, and so the solution to people that are more fair skin living in
Australia is actually sunscreen and a hat and a vitamin D3 supplement. Yeah. The question is,
where do you find the balance? How much sun exposure is enough? Do I need to supplement,
and do I have to wear sunscreen? I think that all depends on a variety of factors. It isn’t
like a one-size-fits-all. It’s like, okay, well, where do you live? Do you live in Southern California,
like where I do? Do you live in Australia? Do you live in Canada? Those are all factors to
keep in mind. Then just measuring vitamin D levels. Where am I at? Then you can go, okay, well,
clearly, I don’t wear sunscreen. I don’t go out in the sun a lot because I work inside a lot.
Even without the sunscreen, I’m still not getting enough vitamin D3. You have to
measure something. Is there a difference? If I go out and buy a vitamin D3 supplement,
is there a difference between that and the sun? Then do I want to take that with anything I notice?
I think athletic greens includes vitamin K with that. Is that for the bioavailability?
No, it’s not for the bioavailability. Let’s address your questions because they’re really
great questions. Differences between sun exposure and supplemental form. Again, vitamin D3 supplemental
form, which is key. The differences between vitamin D3 from the sun versus supplemental,
yes, there’s differences. Let’s say you’re in sub-Saharan Africa where you’re so close to the
equator and you can make vitamin D3 from the sun and you’re out in the sun. Let’s say you’re a
Bushman or something out there all the time. There’s been studies that have measured the
levels of people that are aboriginal to these equatorial regions like Bushman in sub-Saharan
Africa. Their natural vitamin D levels are something like anywhere between 80 to 100
nanograms per mil. They don’t really go above that. The reason is because your body senses
like the vitamin D levels. When you’re still being exposed to the sun, instead of converting it
into vitamin D3, it converts it into this other metabolite. It’s like, okay, we’re putting the
brakes on this. We’re not going to do anymore. If you’re taking a supplement and you don’t measure
anything, let’s say you’re taking an insane number. There’s upper limits that have been
sort of identified as the safe amount to supplement with vitamin D3 every day. The Institute of
Medicine in the United States has set that as 4,000 IUs a day. That doesn’t mean you can’t go
above that. That’s just the safe upper limit where you’re not going to have any toxicity effects.
Let’s say you’re taking 100,000 IUs a day, way over 4,000. Those natural mechanisms aren’t going
to kick in in the skin that they do when you’re being exposed to a lot of UV radiation and your
body’s like, oh, I have enough vitamin D3, so I’m going to stop. You can over-supplement with
vitamin D3. It is fat-soluble and it can be toxic. It’s challenging to do. You would have to take
something like 100,000 IUs or something a day for a year. The biggest effect is vitamin D3 can
you can make your calcium more bioavailable. We’re talking about bioavailability of other
minerals. Calcium is much more bioavailable in the presence of vitamin D, so you absorb about
40% more calcium from your diet if you have adequate levels of vitamin D. One concern is,
well, if I have a lot of vitamin D and I’m taking calcium, then maybe I’m going to get hypercalcemia,
right? Too much calcium in the bloodstream. There are studies that have shown it’s exceedingly
high doses that you have to do for a long time to get that, but that is the concern with taking
too much vitamin D3 is that you’re going to get too much calcium in your blood, which can have
acute toxicity effects, but also long-term effects with calcification of your arteries and your
vascular system because calcium can form a precipitate really easy. That’s the concern.
Then you mentioned your athletic greens. They put vitamin K2 in there. I mentioned vitamin K1,
which is found in leafy greens. It’s involved in blood coagulation, so clotting. When you
take in your greens, you’re getting the vitamin K1. It goes to the liver, and it activates all
those coagulation proteins, blood for blood clotting. When you get enough of that from the
greens, it stays in circulation, and it does exactly what vitamin K2 does, which is activates
proteins that are involved in shuttling calcium out of your vascular system and bringing it to
your bones, bringing it to your muscle where you want calcium to be, and not in your vascular system
where it can form a precipitate and then a plaque. I want to mention one other thing because you did
say bioavailability. It’s related, and it has to do with magnesium. We were talking about it’s
a cofactor for enzymes like DNA repair. I didn’t talk about a really important one. It’s actually
a cofactor for both enzymes that convert vitamin D3 into the circulating form of vitamin D that we
go and we measure. It’s called 25-hydroxy-vitamin D, and then eventually into the act of steroid
hormone. There’s been studies showing that people that don’t get enough magnesium, even if they’re
getting enough vitamin D, even if they’re supplementing with it, they won’t convert it into the
steroid hormone. It’s a hormone that we need. As I mentioned, half of the US population doesn’t
get enough magnesium. If you’re not getting that magnesium, that’s a problem. Something
like athletic greens does have magnesium in it, I think. But also, if you’re doing greens,
that’s a really good source of magnesium as well. You want to make sure you have your magnesium
covered, especially for the vitamin D as well because they work together. You need them both.
Let’s switch gears and talk about a framework for approaching
deliberate heat and possibly deliberate cold exposure.
Deliberate heat exposure. When we say deliberate heat, you’re going into a hot environment.
You’re going to do something like a hot sauna, a steam room, a hot bath, something that is
either the ambient temperature of the room is elevated or the water and your body is submerged
in the water. What is that doing? Well, that is actually kicking on a physiological response
that is in many ways very similar to moderate intensity aerobic exercise because when you are
exposed to this deliberate heat exposure, when you’re exposed to the ambient increases in
temperature, you’re elevating your core body temperature, which is what’s happening with
physical activity. Your heart rate increases. Your plasma flow increases. Your stroke volume
increases. All these things that are happening during physical exercise are happening during
this deliberate heat exposure. There’s a somewhat of a, I would say,
mimicking effect of moderate intensity aerobic exercise. There’s actually been studies that
have compared that head to head. They’ve looked at being on a stationary cycle, doing not anything
crazy, but 120 watts and then comparing that to sitting in a sauna for 20 minutes, doing each of
those for 20 minutes. They were comparable in terms of heart rate elevation during the physical
activity or during the heat exposure, the changes in blood pressure during the activity,
and then the improvements after. Blood pressure improved after the stationary cycling. Blood
pressure improved after the deliberate heat exposure. Resting heart rate improved after
the stationary cycling and resting heart rate improved after the deliberate heat exposure.
Certainly, it’s important for people that are disabled, people that can’t go for a run or a jog,
or even get on a bike, but it’s also important for the population, I think, of people that
won’t get on a bike or go for a run or they would rather just feel like they’re sitting in a spa
and at the very least, or maybe people that are just so adverse, there are people that are so
adverse to cardiovascular exercise that if you can just get them into a sauna and we can talk
about parameters in a minute, but if you can get them into something that’s at least mimicking
the moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise and they’re getting those adaptations, those
cardiovascular adaptations that they would get with at least a little mild to moderate intensity
exercise, that’s going to be beneficial in the long run as well. Then it’s also beneficial for
people that are physically active. You might go, “Well, why is that?” Being physically active,
like being aerobically active, doing aerobic exercise, one of the best benefits is it improves
what’s called cardiorespiratory fitness. That’s probably one of the, I would say,
one of the best biomarkers of longevity, like concrete things that you can measure.
It’s measured by measuring something called VO2 max. It’s the maximum amount of oxygen you can
take in during maximal exercise. Cardiovascular exercise improves that, particularly if you’re
doing a high-intensity exercise training, things that are high-intensity interval training, for
example, is one of the best ways to improve it, especially if you’re doing longer intervals of
like at least a minute. There’s been two types of studies, observational data looking at people
that just routinely exercise or people that routinely exercise and do the sauna. Then there
was measurements of cardiorespiratory fitness. It was pretty clear that people that routinely
exercised and routinely did the sauna had a better cardiorespiratory fitness than people
that only routinely exercised. In other words, there was a benefit to do sauna on top of the
exercise. Then there’s been intervention studies where it’s like, “Okay, we’re going to take people,
give them an exercise workout. I think it was a stationary bike.” Then right after that exercise
workout, they’re either going to just do passive recovery or they’re going to go into a sauna and
recover for 15 minutes. I forgot how many weeks it was, something like on the order of four weeks
or something like that. They measured cardiorespiratory fitness in a variety of other biomarkers,
like lipids, like LDL, total cholesterol, blood pressure, things like that. While there was
improvements, obviously with exercise, the ones that did exercise plus the sauna had an even
greater improvement in their cardiorespiratory fitness. Their VO2 max was improved even more
than exercise alone. They also had greater improvements in blood pressure and greater
improvements in their lipid numbers and things like that. There was every reason to
add a deliberate heat exposure on top of exercise as well.
You’re the reason I have a sauna. I think I first came across your work and you had this 70-page
website on the benefits of a sauna. I remember skimming the first three pages of it going,
“I really need a sauna.” You’re the reason I have a sauna. When we say “doing the sauna,”
what does that mean in terms of temperature, in terms of duration? Is a hot tub the same as the
sauna? Talk to me about that. A lot of the studies that have been done on sauna have come out of
Finland where they’re using Finnish sonnas, which are generally speaking, it would be what I would
call a regular sauna where you have an electric heater with some rocks that are hot. In Finland,
they often use water and they pour it on the hot rocks. There’s a humidity aspect there anywhere
between 10 to 20 percent humidity. A lot of the observational studies and intervention studies
showing, like I just mentioned one about VO2 max improvements, blood pressure improvements,
they’re done in Finland and a lot of those parameters used. Generally speaking, our regular
sauna is about 175 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 to 20 percent humidity. The average time spent in this
sauna is about 20 minutes for the benefits to really be, I would say, robust. Then there’s
frequency. How often do you do it? There have been a variety of studies that have looked at
all-cause mortality, so dying early from all causes that are non-accidental and then looking at
cardiovascular-related mortality like dying from a heart attack, for example. People that are more
frequently using the sauna, that’s a dose-dependent effect. People that use the sauna, for example,
two to three times a week have a 24 percent lower all-cause mortality compared to people that only
use it one time a week, but people that use it four to seven times a week have a 40 percent lower
all-cause mortality compared to people that only use it one time a week. In other words, it seems
like the minimal effect of dose to get the most robust effect would be four times a week. The
same goes for other parameters. Dying from cardiovascular-related mortality, it’s 50 percent
lower in people that use the sauna four to seven times a week compared to one time a week, whereas
if you’re only doing it two to three times a week, it’s something like 27 percent lower.
When I said duration in the sauna, it’s really important so those studies were also done looking
at, okay, let’s say people are only staying in the sauna for 11 minutes versus greater than 19
minutes, so 20 minutes. They didn’t have that robust 50 percent reduction in cardiovascular
related mortality if they only stayed in for 11 minutes. It was much less. It was a little bit
like it was improved, but it was not 50 percent. The temperature and the duration and the frequency,
those are three parameters that are important with respect to using a regular hot sauna.
The reason I say regular hot saunas is because another type of sauna that’s very popular are
infrared saunas. Infrared saunas do not get as hot, so they’re not warming the ambient air around you.
They’re working through another mechanism and they’re moving molecules inside your body around
and heating you up in a different way. You do sweat a lot and you can get your core body temperature
elevated, particularly if you stay in quite a long time. You do have to keep in mind that you
can’t take those parameters and go, “I’m going to stay in a 145-degree infrared sauna for only 20
minutes,” because that’s what those Finnish studies have shown because they’re completely
different. If you’re just staying in for 20 minutes, like the same amount of time in each,
you’re not going to get those blood pressure improvements from an infrared sauna, which makes
sense. It’s not as hot. It takes longer to elevate that core body to get your heart rate elevated.
Anyone that’s done, like, I’ve done a lot of infrared sauna and I’ve done a lot of regular hot
sauna and I know, and also wearing a heart rate monitor, you can wear your Fitbit or your Woop
or whatever into the sauna and you’ll know when your heart rate starts to get elevated and it’s
not going to be after 20 minutes in an infrared sauna. For me, I’d say 16 minutes is more like the
duration that I would have to stay in to start to get more elevations in my heart rate. Again,
that’s that mimicking of the modern intensity exercise, but there’s also biomarkers that
have been measured. For example, we haven’t gone into this yet, but heat shock proteins.
These are one of the adaptations that happen when your body is forced to increase its core
body temperature, whether that’s through physical activity, which is making you hot,
making you sweat or a deliberate heat exposure. Studies have been done looking at people that
go into a relatively hot sauna. This would be 163-degree Fahrenheit sauna. If they stay in for
30 minutes, they can raise their heat shock proteins about 50% over their baseline levels.
Heat shock proteins have a lot of beneficial effects. They’re involved with preventing proteins
from aggregating and forming plaques in the brain, in the vascular system. They also are very
important for preventing muscle atrophy. There have now been studies that have been done showing
that just even locally heating, the studies that have been done have been called immobilization
studies where they’re mimicking an injury or an event. Let’s say you go and an older person
goes into the hospital. They have the flu, whatever. They’re basically immobilized for a
period of weeks. They’re not using their muscles. Their muscles were atrophying at a rapid rate.
Studies have been done where if you apply even just local heat, you can cut that disuse atrophy
by as much as 40%. Heat shock proteins are a good biomarker for heat stress. So is increased
heart rate. We talked about you’re getting up to 110, 120. You can get up to 120 beats per minute
sitting in the hot sauna. That’s really an indication that your core body temperature is
being elevated. Your body is doing that work. You can elevate your heat shock proteins by
being submerged from the shoulders down for about 20 minutes in about 104 degree Fahrenheit water,
which is the standard hot tub level. I do think there are comparable effects with respect to the
modality of heat exposure. Whether we’re talking about a hot sauna or a hot bath, perhaps an infrared
sauna, again, the duration, the parameters will change. The parameters will change. But I do think
that you can find comparable effects. There are personal preferences at play. I like both hot
tub and hot sauna. I find that I cheat more with a hot tub. I’m more prone to put my arms out when
I get really hot. When I’m in the sauna, there’s nowhere to go. If I’m getting hot, then I have
to get out and then I’m like, “Oh, I’m giving up mentally.” I’m like, “No, I’m not going to give
up.” But if I’m in the hot tub, I don’t feel like I’m giving up when I’m just getting my arms out.
There’s an immune benefit too. Your immune system, isn’t there?
There is. There have been some observational studies as well looking at pneumonia risk.
I think it was something like 40% lower in people that use the sauna four to seven times a week.
There have been a lot of really early studies on, again, these are coming out of Finland where
there’s humidity. There’s steam involved as well. You’re working your cardiovascular system.
The lungs are affected. I don’t know all the mechanisms. I don’t know that they’ve all been
worked out, but there is some sort of benefit on the lugs and also just the immune system as well.
It seems like immune changes happen as well. It’s funny. I do get into the sauna when I’m feeling
a little under the weather or even if I am sick because I find it’s easier than getting on my
Peloton. I get in there and I’ll do the steam and I feel so much better. I feel so much better.
There’s my grandmother or grandfather used to tell me, “Sweat it out.” There’s almost
like something true to that when you are feeling sick. Absolutely. When you are sick, you get a
fever. The fever response, your core body temperature is elevated and heat shock proteins are
activated. Heat shock proteins do play a role in what is called the innate immune response.
That’s the immune response that you have when you’ve never seen a virus or a bacterial
pathogen before. It’s not the antibody response. It’s that, “Okay, let’s fire away and get,”
so heat shock proteins do play a role in that. When you are getting in the sauna, when you’re
doing some form of deliberate heat exposure, you are elevating your core body temperature.
The fever response is a very important part of our immune system’s way of
dealing with the pathogen. It’s important. We get a fever for a reason. The reason I actually
got into the sauna way back in 2009 had nothing to do with cardiovascular effects or even the
effects on muscle mass, but it was the effects on my mood. I was very stressed out in graduate
school. This was 2009. I was using the sauna every morning before I would go into the lab
and do my experiments. That would often fail. It was very stressful. I started to notice quite
quickly that I was able to handle that stress a lot better. I wasn’t getting so depressed after,
and so down and anxious. That’s when I was like, “Something is going on here.” It was very noticeable
for me. Then I started to look into the literature and come up with my own theories, which I,
connecting the dots, where I actually did publish on this back in 2022. It’s in my huge review article
on the sauna. It’s called, “How sauna use can increase health span?” I think it has to do with,
when you get into the sauna, again, you’re mimicking a lot of the same effects that
cardiovascular exercise. You’re releasing a lot of endorphins as well. Those are the
feel-good opioids that we release in our brain. What’s really interesting is that also the opposite
of endorphin is called dinorphin. It’s also an opioid that we release in our body. It’s that
opioid that’s involved in the discomfort feeling. When you’re working out, when you’re getting
hot, you’re feeling uncomfortable. Your body’s making dinorphin. Dinorphin is part of what it
does is it cools down your body. It’s playing a role in, okay, you’re elevating your core body
temperature. The adaptive response is, “Okay, we need to cool down somewhat.” Dinorphin plays a
role in that, but it also is what’s responsible for that uncomfortable feeling when you’re like,
“Oh, I’m so hot. I want to get out.” When you release dinorphin, you have a response, a feedback
loop in your brain, where dinorphin causes your body to make more receptors to the feel-good
endorphin, and it sensitizes those receptors. It makes sense if you think about it. When your
body’s not feeling good and you’re getting that uncomfortable feeling, it wants to make sure that
it’s going to counter that with feeling-good. The next time you make endorphins from a hug,
from your child, or a joke, you laugh at whatever, you’re going to feel even better because you’re
going to be more sensitive to those endorphins. It’s called mu-opioid receptors, and that’s
what you make when you increase endorphin. Anyways, but now there’s lots more research coming out,
so work from Dr. Charles Raison, and now his protege, Dr. Ashley Mason. It’s a type of sauna
that’s like a bed, and it’s a chamber with a head out, and so your whole body is in it.
They are elevating your core body temperature to about 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, so you’re
getting a fever. They’re inducing a feverish response. Now, many people have to be in this
sauna, and an infrared gets up to about 145-ish or something like that, and they’re in there for
60 minutes, 50 minutes to 60 minutes, and they’re getting a feverish response. It’s a
very intense procedure, but they induce this feverish response 101.3 Fahrenheit just one time
in people with major depressive disorder, or they did a sham control where they made them
feel like they were getting hot, but it wasn’t hot enough. The people that got the active treatment
had an antidepressant effect that lasted six weeks after. It was enormous and crazy. Placebo
group didn’t get it at all. It’s amazing what our body can do to heal itself when we’re not always
injecting it with stuff, too. There’s all these other ways to go about healing it. It’s almost
like it knows what it’s doing sometimes. It does. I agree with you. I mean, it’s so exciting to
potentially have a non-pharmacological treatment for depression, because it’s undeniable that
doing aerobic exercise, like they have compared running to classical antidepressants like SSRI,
so serotonin, reuptake inhibitors. In terms of the antidepressant effects, it’s the same.
Only the running has all the other benefits. There are people that are really severely depressed
that just can’t even get out of bed. They’re not going to go for a run. It’s true. There are people
that will not get out of bed, but will they get into a sauna? It’s a lot easier. It really
opens up doors. It’s just so exciting. Super promising as we age, too, for the aging population.
A lot of people who don’t want to exercise when they get a lot older, or the aches and pains,
and maybe it’s a low-intensity way to do that. I can say for myself, during COVID,
it was probably one of the most stressful periods of my life. The sauna, I think it saved my life
a lot. I was using the sauna five, six times a week, and it was just sort of like, A, it was
mentally grounding. It was something I look forward to. It was a great ritual, but it sort of kept
me out of trouble for some reason. I could never explain it. I’m an N of one, and I’m not super
scientific and all that, but I was like, “This is working. This is keeping me happy, and going,
and motivated, and I got to keep doing more of this,” because yeah, it was really crazy.
I want to talk about exercise. Maybe we’ll do that in part two, because I don’t think we’re
going to do it justice here in the next 10 minutes. Maybe we can end with the top three
interventions you can think of from a diet perspective, and then the top three interventions
you can think of from a behavioral perspective that would have the biggest bang on people’s lives.
Diet-wise, the top three things that people can think about would be to make sure they’re getting
enough of their marine source of omega-3, so supplementing with two grams of a pretty decent
quality fish oil brand per day. It’s like low-hanging fruit. Then I would say vitamin D3.
Most people, 4,000 I use is a pretty safe bet. At the very least, doing 4,000 I use a day of
vitamin D3, as you mentioned, it’s the cheapest supplement. It’s something like a penny a pill.
It’s the most affordable thing to do. Then making sure you’re eating your greens and
getting your protein, so thinking about the magnesium and then the 1.2 grams per kilogram
body weight a day are the biggest bang for your buck, I think. Then with respect to behavioral
exercise, and particularly doing a good amount of high-intensity exercise, and we didn’t get so
much into it, but it really is one of the most important things that you can do. There’s studies
showing that people just doing one to three minutes of getting their heart rate up to 80%
max heart rate for one to three minutes three times a week is associated with a 50% reduction
in all cause mortality and cancer related mortality. It’s easy to do. You can do that.
You can just get up and do three minutes. It’s not that challenging. Also, resistance training
and muscle mass, super important. You need to be building that muscle mass and maintaining it,
because frailty, you get to a point when you start to get older and all of a sudden you have an event
where you’ve got influenza or whatever and then you start to not working out. You lose so much
muscle and you get a couple of those stacked on over a couple of years and then all of a sudden you
can’t walk. Your mobility goes down and then the curve just drops. Resistance training is extremely
important. If you’re doing those two things, you’re probably going to be maintaining a healthy
body weight because at the end of the day calories in, calories out, doesn’t matter. If you’re doing
the exercise and the resistance training and you’re focusing on getting the proper micronutrients
from your veggies and protein intake, you’re probably not going to be eating all the junk.
The last thing I would say, behavioral wise, I would add sauna or deliberate heat exposure.
I think that’s huge for a lot of reasons. For the cardiovascular reasons, there’s mental health
effects as we talked about. There’s also other brain effects. Dementia risk is lower as well.
Then muscle atrophy, you can do the deliberate heat exposure to help prevent muscle atrophy
as well. I think those are the three behavioral changes. By the way, exercise can forgive a lot
of sins, including lack of sleep. That’s why I start with that. I don’t make the sleep the most
important. I actually think it’s exercise. We’re going to have to have you on for part two because
I really want to dive into both resistance training and cardiovascular exercise with you.
This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
Well, I look forward to your round two, Shane. Thank you for all the great questions. It’s been
a lot of fun. Wow. What a fun conversation that was with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. I just want to go
through some of my takeaways and notes from this one. I think the big overarching message that we
got across today is that a lot of people focus on the micro. If you notice,
Rhonda kept bringing it back to the macro. I don’t mean in terms of nutrients. I mean,
in terms of what we focus on, we’re overly focused on these little minute things because
they’re really within our control. We want to feel like we’re doing something when in reality,
there’s these big things that we’re not focused on that nobody’s really arguing about. You might
argue whether seed oil is bad for you. I think it is or not. At the end of the day, are we getting
the right magnesium? Are we getting folate? Are we getting omega-3s? How are we positioning
ourselves? This is how I think about food personally. This is one of the reasons I’m
exploring this with Dr. Rhonda Patrick and some other guests is the food that you put into your
body is sort of a lead domino for a whole bunch of other things. It affects your mood.
It affects your energy. It affects how you handle stress. It affects how you handle your
emotions. It really dictates a lot of what comes downstream. Paying attention to the food in your
body is a really good way to take control of your life. It’s a really small thing you can do to put
yourself on easy mode every day. We didn’t get into talking about sugars. We didn’t talk about
oils too much. I really wanted to get into that. I also really wanted to get into exercise routines
and talk about that. But I think we’ll try to do that in the next episode. We’ll definitely do a
part two of this. I did take away sort of like grass-fed was better. If you can afford it,
if not, don’t stress over it. Same as organic. If you can afford it, great. If you can’t,
don’t stress over it. Again, if you had to pick and choose, I loved her heuristic for using thin
and thick skin as the way to pick and choose. If you’re sort of like, “Oh, I want to do some
organic,” and not all, I liked her approach to sort of washing veggies. It’s very practical and
pragmatic. It doesn’t have to be sort of the Instagram that you see of the vinegar and the
baking soda and the water and soaking it for 15 minutes. I liked the very end when we talked
about sort of like here are three behavioral interventions that you can do that really make a
difference. Here are three sort of supplement dietary things. Again, they were fish oil,
vitamin D3, greens and protein, and then high intensity exercise, resistance training, and
sauna, which I really like in part because I’m biased to have a sauna. I think that that makes
a big difference. It made a big difference for me during COVID. I think it’s made a big difference
for other people that I’ve talked to. One thing we didn’t talk about was sleep. I know a friend
of mine, Andrew Worgensen, has one and he says it really, really drives his sleep. I don’t know if
it helps me sleep. Sometimes I get in there and I nap to be honest with you. I like talking about
this smoothie. If you remember, she had a smoothie recipe and it was sort of like four kale leaves,
avocado, frozen blueberries, which she actually went out of the way to say a ton of frozen blueberries,
protein powder, collagen powder, and there was that meringue of powder water. Then we talked
about my smoothie, the one that I make with the kids and how I was unintentionally adding bananas
and blueberries together and sort of undoing the amazing effect of blueberries. I’m going to switch.
I’m going to try to switch it out and see what the kids think or even if they notice,
switch out the banana, put in avocado. Again, in mine, we call it the Tom Brady. It was protein,
A.G.1, walnuts, blueberries, yogurt, almond milk. I’m going to switch out the banana, chia seeds,
and hemp seeds if you want to. Hemp seeds are a really good sort of source of extra calories and
fat for the kids. If you are trying to get them to eat more, which I have one kid who eats a
lot, one kid who doesn’t eat a lot, I’m always trying to get more nutrient dense food into both
of them. What else do we talk about? We sort of talked about the sun and sunscreen and so
circumstantial. There’s not a lot to take away from that other than when you’re out in the sun,
be careful about what you’re sort of putting on your skin and also be careful about how much
sun you are getting. You don’t want to get sunburned. Yeah, I just really thank you guys for
listening. If you have any questions or follow-ups, just send me an email, Shane@fs.blog. What I’ll do
is I’ll sort of create a little sheet and we can make questions for follow-up for round two. We’re
definitely going to do this again. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen and
learn with me. As you can see, this is my journey and I’m learning along with you, so I really
appreciate it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes,
show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project.
The Furnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book,
Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It’s a transformative
guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making,
and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear.
Until next time.
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So these are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals. And these micronutrients are running
our metabolism, they’re running everything, our neurotransmitters that we’re producing,
so our cognition, just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies. So when you think about
the micronutrients that you need in your diet, it makes it a little bit easier to think about what
you should be eating.
Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have
already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I’m your host, Shane Parish.
If you’re listening to this, you’re missing out. If you’d like access to the podcast before
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support the show you love, join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link.
Today my guest is Rhonda Patrick, a research scientist with expertise in the areas of aging,
cancer, and nutrition. I first came across her work years ago and a friend of mine sent me this
mammoth article she posted online on the benefits of Asana. In fact, this is the reason I started
Asana. Our main focus in this conversation is lifestyle habits that reduce biological aging,
improve health span, and improve our cognition. We cover a framework for approaching nutrition
and decisions about food, as well as a deep dive into vitamin D, sun, sunscreen, and hot exposure.
It’s time to listen and learn!
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McDonald’s restaurants in Canada. When I was thinking about where to start, I think the best
place to start is to give people practical frameworks for approaching topics that we come
across every day. So why don’t we start with a practical framework for approaching nutrition
and decisions about the food that we consume? I kind of have my own framework for approaching
nutrition in it. It has a lot to do with, I did my postdoc training in nutrition and specifically
looking at micronutrients. So these are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals that
fatty acids also and amino acids that we have to get from our diet. Those are in a variety of foods
and different foods have different levels and quantities of them. And these micronutrients
are running our metabolism, they’re running everything, our neurotransmitters that we’re
producing, so our cognition, just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies. So
it’s important to get them because if we don’t get them, we can have deficiencies or insufficiencies,
which is quite worse because insufficiencies are kind of something that you don’t notice every day,
but there’s like insidious types of damage just happening each and every day. And it accumulates
over time and plays a role in age-related diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative disease. So
these micronutrients are things like calcium, magnesium, vitamin K, vitamin D, which I’m
sure we’ll talk about is actually something you can mostly get from the sun, omega 3. And so when
you think about the micronutrients that you need in your diet, it makes it a little bit easier to
think about what you should be eating. Well, let’s start with some of the most common deficiencies
in micronutrients. We have magnesium, so almost half of the US population, they get insufficient
magnesium intake. Magnesium is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule, so chlorophyll gives plants
their green color. So it’s really easy to think about foods you should eat to get magnesium. You
should be eating greens, particularly dark, leafy greens. Well, greens are also very high in vitamin
K. And vitamin K1, there’s two forms, vitamin K1, vitamin K1 is essential for all your blood
clotting processes. So you’re like, in order to like have your blood clotting, which is important,
you know, if you have a cut or something, you know, an injury, you want that clotting to happen
so that you don’t have like a hemorrhage, right? So vitamin K is also, you know, high in leafy greens.
You can also get calcium as well from greens. So that’s really an easy way to kind of think about
greens. The other way, the other thing is omega 3s, right? So omega 3s are very high in
fatty fish. So this would be wild Alaskan salmon or cod or mackerel sardines, like these are good
forms of fish that have the marine types of omega 3. So that would be DHA and EPA.
Those are very important for a lot of functions, including brain health and cardiovascular health.
And a lot of work has been done by Bill Harris and his group at the Fatty Acid Research Institute.
And they look at the omega 3 index, which is a way you can actually quantify your omega 3 levels.
And that’s really good to be able to quantify something, because if you don’t quantify it,
you don’t really know if you are getting enough of it, right? So the omega 3 index is they’re
characterizing it from red blood cells, which is different than a lot of other ways of measuring
omega 3, like for example, plasma omega 3, which is basically kind of reflective of your dietary
intake the last week or so. The red blood cell or the omega 3 index is more of a long term status.
So it’s like 120 days for a red blood cell to turn over. So the omega 3 index is a good marker
of your omega 3 status. People that have a high omega 3 index, and that would be 8% or more,
have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people with a lower omega 3 index,
which is more like 4%. Now people in the United States on average have about an omega 3 index
of about 5%. And you compare that to, for example, countries like Japan, where they eat a lot of
seafood, their omega 3 index is around 10%. There’s been tons of studies looking at omega 3 index
and life expectancy. And there’s been also like data where they stratify like looking at, you know,
for example, and this I like talking about this, because I think it really puts in perspective
the framework of nutrition and thinking about instead of focusing on what to avoid,
focusing on what you need, because if you focus on what you need, then it’s obvious what you don’t
need, right? There’s no nutritional value in processed foods. You’re not getting micronutrients,
you’re getting calories, you’re not getting protein, you’re not getting things that you need.
So smoking is something that everyone knows is bad. You should avoid smoking, right? It’s,
you know, heart disease, cancer, you’re going to have a decreased life expectancy,
emphysema, all kinds of problems, right? What Bill Harris’s group had done has,
they looked at life expectancy of smokers and non-smokers, and then they categorized
their omega 3 index. And if you look at this data, it’s just mind-blowing. So obviously,
non-smokers that have a high omega 3 index of 8% or more have the highest life expectancy.
And the lowest life expectancy is smokers with a low omega 3 index. So that’s the worst of the
worst. But when you look at smokers with a high omega 3 index, they have the same life expectancy
as non-smokers with a low omega 3 index. In other words, having a low omega 3 index was
like smoking. And when I say the life expectancy, if you look at the graph in the publication,
the curves like overlay perfectly. It’s kind of freakish where you’re like, whoa, like the people
that are smoking, but they’re getting a lot of omega 3 have the same life expectancy of these
people that don’t smoke, but have very low omega 3. And that’s kind of like, I like talking about
that because I feel like it puts it in perspective for people because like I said, no one’s really
thinking about, I’m not eating my fish today. I’m not supplementing with an omega 3 supplement
to get those omega 3s. But people are thinking about, oh, I shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad,
right? So again, it goes back to that framework of thinking about what you need. And starting there,
as opposed to just like, okay, what should I avoid? Because when you think about what should I avoid,
then people aren’t thinking about magnesium. They’re not thinking about the vitamin K. They’re
not thinking about omega 3. And by the way, magnesium, I said about half the population
in the United States doesn’t get enough. They’re not eating enough greens. And unfortunately,
there’s not a great test for magnesium because our body stores magnesium in our bones. And so
anytime we’re not getting enough in our diet, our body pulls it out of our bones to like,
because we need it. It’s so important. You need it to make energy. Like without magnesium,
you can’t make energy. So nothing’s going to function. You also, it’s needed to repair damage.
Like every time you have, you know, like right now, you and I, we’re having a conversation,
you know, we’re, you know, neurotransmitters are firing, we’re thinking about things like that’s
causing damage, metabolism, all that stuff causes damage on a daily basis. But our body repairs
that damage. But magnesium is a cofactor for these enzymes. These are proteins that are doing
everything for that to function properly. And so if you don’t get enough of that magnesium to do
that, what happens is you don’t repair that damage properly. And that can increase the risk
of getting a mutation that can lead to cancer. You know, it’s been found that for example,
for every 100, you know, milligram increase in magnesium intake, there’s something like a 20%
decrease in pancreatic cancer risk. And there’s been lots of studies like this looking at
magnesium intake and cancer risk. And so the higher the magnesium intake, the lower the cancer risk.
So again, it’s one of those things where it’s, you can’t look in the mirror and go,
as you’re brushing your teeth, Oh, I don’t have enough magnesium today, right? Like nothing’s like
showing you that, but it’s happening. That damage is insidious. And I mentioned you pull it out of
your bone, like it’s pulled out of your bones. And that’s another thing it leads to osteoporosis
over time. So remembering to eat your leafy greens is getting your magnesium. So you,
so women need about, I’d say about 320 milligrams a day adult women need about 320 milligrams a day
of magnesium. Men need around 420 milligrams a day. You know, this can change based on your,
your physical activity level as well. So like if you’re physically active, if you’re sweating,
you sweat out magnesium, you also use it up for energy. So you might actually require anywhere
between 10% to 20% more than that level. So what’s called the recommended daily allowance
in the United States. So, you know, again, and people aren’t even meeting that.
So there’s lots of reasons to invest in, you know, these micronutrients and to think about
the foods that you need to eat. I have so many questions. One is, is there a difference between
consuming magnesium and omega three through food, like leafy greens or fish and supplementation?
Yes, let’s start with magnesium. So magnesium, if you’re consuming it in the form of leafy greens,
it is, it is bound to a, it’s the fiber matrix. It’s called phytate. And that does decrease the
bioavailability of it. You can do raw, but also cooking them will increase the bioavailability
of minerals like magnesium. And it is good. You want to kind of get a variety of things. You
want to have some raw veggies, but you also want to have cooked. And when you cook, it does actually
increase the bioavailability of not just magnesium, other minerals as well that are bound to that,
that fiber matrix that, which has phytate there. Supplementation is also kind of tricky with respect
to magnesium because you don’t really absorb more. I mean, it’s about a hundred, I would say
anywhere between 120 to 150 milligrams per dose. Like once you get above that, you’re not really
absorbing more. You’re just kind of causing more GI distress. And it’s a little bit of like a laxative
effect. So some people actually use it specifically for that reason. So they do hire doses. Generally
speaking, if you are supplementing with magnesium, you want to make sure you’re going at a lower dose
because you’re not really going to absorb more. And it’s just going to cause like gut issues.
If you want to supplement with more than just 150, you have to spread your doses out,
you know, take it earlier with the meal and then take it later in the day as well.
But the other thing is that when you’re getting it from food, it is packaged in with other minerals.
And there are, there’s some argument to be made that having, for example, there’s like,
you know, twice as much calcium as magnesium in a lot of the foods. And so you’re getting this
two to one ratio. And so, you know, there’s kind of a reason for that. I wouldn’t say that it’s
been heavily studied, but it’s thought that you kind of want to keep that ratio correct, like two
to one calcium to magnesium ratio. So if you’re just like supplementing with lots of magnesium,
and let’s say you don’t get enough, maybe you don’t eat dairy, or maybe you’re lactose intolerant,
or, you know, maybe you’re just not getting enough calcium, you can kind of have mineral
imbalances as well. And then there’s the form that you’re going to supplement with, right? So
there’s a lot of different magnesium supplements out there. The most important difference when
you’re looking for a magnesium supplement is to avoid the, what’s called the inorganic forms.
And this isn’t like organic pesticide. What we’re talking about is so like magnesium oxide or
magnesium sulfate, like they’re just not very bioavailable. Like you’re not going to absorb
as much from those. But if you get like the organic form, so this would be something that has like
an organic molecule. So magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate, magnesium
torate, these are all forms of magnesium that are relatively the same in terms of their bioavailability.
I personally like taking magnesium glycinate, because glycinate is like a form of glycine,
which is a inhibitory neurotransmitter. And so I like getting a little bit extra glycine. There’s
like, there’s some science behind, you know, glycine, perhaps being beneficial and supplementing
with it. Just I think that’s the main thing with respect to magnesium supplementation is that
the forms do kind of matter and the dose. And what about the omega-3s? Is it, can I just go to the
store if I’m not going to eat a lot of fish and buy an omega-3 supplement? Or is fish the primary
way that we actually get bioavailability from this? Yeah, that’s also a great question. It
really does obviously depend on quite a few factors. So with respect to the seafood and fish,
the type of fish does matter, right? So like you need, like there’s some fish, like that’s just
not that fatty. The omega-3s EPA and DHA are the marine forms of the omega-3. And those are the
ones I was talking about with the omega-3 index and life expectancy. Those are the forms that have
been used in randomized controlled trials with supplementation that have decreased
cardiovascular events by like 25% compared to placebo. Those are the ones that are important.
They’re only in the really oily fatty fish. So one of the best forms is salmon. And wild salmon
has higher levels than farmed. For example, wild Alaskan salmon is probably one of the best
salmons to consume for omega-3. It also has astaxanthin. It’s what gives the fish that pink
color. If you are eating quite a lot of fish, you’d have to really get an omega-3 index test to
know for sure how much you require. But you know, I would say probably like at least, you know,
you’re eating it four times a week, something like that, which most people do not do. In Japan,
they do. And their omega-3 index is very high. Like I don’t even know if many Japanese supplement,
they’re just, they eat seafood like every day. The other thing to consider is, well,
what type of fish? So we talked about oily and fatty fish, but also you want to look at
contaminants. Like larger fish have things like PCBs and mercury because they’re eating smaller
fish. So those things accumulate in their fat. So like you don’t want to eat swordfish, for example.
It’s just there. The mercury in swordfish is just through the roof, right? So it’s really like the
trade-off there isn’t very good. So again, that’s where salmon comes into the picture because it’s
very low in mercury. It’s high in omega-3 smaller fish. So sardines would be another one. Again,
there’s a lot of data out there that you can look up like USDA has all this like
contamination mercury levels versus omega-3. So that stuff is easy for people to find.
I would say by and large, the easiest way to get a high omega-3 index and these studies have been
done, randomized controlled trials, people giving supplement, supplement forms of omega-3 is definitely
to supplement. And fish oil supplements, generally speaking, if you’re taking around two grams a day
of a fish oil supplement, that is enough to raise someone from a 4% omega-3 index, which is the low
end, to a 8% omega-3 index, which is the high end. You obviously want to make sure you’re getting
enough of the EPA and DHA, those two important omega-3s. And you want to make sure you’re not
getting a high contaminant level like mercury, PCBs. But the other thing to keep in mind is you
want a low oxidation level. So omega-3 fatty acids are prone to oxidation just because their
molecular structure is a polyunsaturated fatty acid. And so the way people, companies, you know,
are manufacturing this fish oil matters. So some good third-party testing sites to look at.
I would say consumer lab is one that’s really, they go and just go to grocery stores and where
people are generally going and buying their supplements. And they just measure and test
all this stuff. And there, there’s some really affordable brands that have decent omega-3 levels,
DHA and EPA levels, and low oxidation, low contaminant levels. And consumer lab, you know,
test all those. So that would be a good site to go to to find a good omega-3 supplement.
Another one is the International Fish Oil Standard Site, I-F-O-S. Those are for the data
nerds, to be honest, because there’s like a lot more data there. And if you’re like into this stuff
and you want to like really dig, because they just give you everything, like all the data,
like you could imagine, that’s a great site for people that are sort of nerd, want to nerd out
on that. But for some people, they’re like, I just want to know my grocery store, what do I get?
Then consumer lab is a great option. It’s like, it’s broken down in a way that like a child could
even understand. It’s okay, this is the one I want to buy. Is there a difference between wild and
non-wild, I guess, or captive or factory farmed, whatever you want to call it, farmed fish,
in terms of the nutrient density that we’re pulling out of them?
You know, there is a difference. I mean, the wild salmon, they’re out there in the ocean,
and they’re eating fish and like, you know, crustaceans and all the things that they’re
supposed to eat, like that’s what they eat, right? In the farmed salmon, I’m pretty sure there’s
some feeding of stuff that’s like not even, I mean, we’re talking like corn and stuff too.
Yeah, if you were to look at the fish before, in the factories before they inject it with
astaxanthin, they look albino because they don’t eat all the right things, so they’re not naturally
pink. I said inject, but I’m not sure, maybe they actually just give it astaxanthin, they eat it.
I forgot, but they’re giving it exogenous astaxanthin so that it does have the pink color.
The Omega-3 content was also higher in the wild salmon. So again, to your question, yes,
there is a difference between the farmed salmon and the wild salmon, but you know,
sometimes when you’re out at a restaurant, like you’re not going to get the wild salmon.
Is it the end of the world? In my opinion, no. Like I said, choose your battles. I still think,
you still are getting Omega-3s. You’re still getting DHA and EPA. It’s not like it’s terrible,
but I do think it’s preferable if you are getting the wild salmon.
You mentioned organic. Is there a difference between organic and inorganic, I guess,
but inorganic in the sense of being non-organic produce? Why would we choose one over another,
and what difference does it make from a composition or bioavailability point of view?
So pesticides are obviously something that are used now in agriculture because these farms are
huge and we’re growing mass quantities of foods, and so they’re spraying things that will ward off
insects. So insecticides or pesticides, as is known, and also fungicides and other things
to prevent fungus and anything that’s going to destroy the crop. A lot of these types of
pesticides are obviously damaging to the insects, but to humans, the question is, well, are they
damaging to humans? There were a lot, especially things like rotonone, perquate. These were used
for a long time, and those are chemicals that actually cause… We use them. Scientists use
them. I’ve used it myself in the lab to induce Parkinson-like symptoms in animals because it
disrupts your mitochondria, which are little organelles inside of almost all of your cells
and that are producing energy. Super important. In Parkinson’s disease, the mitochondria and
your neurons become dysfunctional. You can cause this by just giving them this pesticide,
perquate, or rotonone. It’s funny. I remember the first time I was learning about this in…
This was actually even before I was in graduate school, but also in graduate school, I was like,
“Oh, I’m putting this stuff to give it to a mouse to study Parkinson’s or to induce a Parkinson,
like human model of Parkinson’s.” This was put on our produce, and I was like,
“That was really upsetting to think about.” There’s been studies even on the newer types
of pesticides that are used on produce. There have been studies that have shown they’re
probably not good to have on a daily basis because of that insidious damage that they’re
causing. People are probably thinking of glyphosate. Roundup is a big one as well.
When it comes to those pesticides that are used, there are certain vegetables and fruits that
are very thin skin that absorb it. Even if you washed the vegetable off, it’s already been absorbed
through the skin. Let’s talk about an avocado versus a strawberry. Is it so important to eat
organic for avocados? Not really. It’s got a really thick skin. Strawberries, on the other hand,
have a very thin skin. That would be something that you want to choose organic.
I would say that, yes, organic would be the best choice. If you can’t always afford organic,
then choose. Bananas, is that so important? Probably not. Avocado is probably not.
Oranges probably not. Apples, yes. Thin skin. Again, there’s lists out there that will list the
things that are like, okay, if you’re going to not do organic, here’s the vegetables and fruits
that are the safest to not. I love the dirty dozen list, but it’s actually more practical to
remember the thickness of the skin as the barrier, the membrane between pesticides. How do you wash
your produce? I say this having seen, I think last night on Instagram, some guy putting baking soda
and vinegar and soaking it for 20 minutes and like, is that how we wash produce? How do you wash
produce to get stuff off of it? What do you do? I just use water. I just use water and wash it,
because I do buy organic as well. You’re thinking about pesticides. You’re like, oh,
well, I don’t want to get Parkinson’s disease or cancer. It’s causing damage. My mentor, Bruce
Ames, he’s now 96 years old. I don’t know how many years ago it was. It must have been back in
the 80s. He had done some experiments with hematologists from his lab, and they were looking
at what happens if you don’t get enough folate. So that’s another one of those essential micronutrients
that you have to get from your diet. Guess what? Leafy greens are one of the best sorts of folate.
So leafy greens are just, they’re packed with certain micronutrients, but they don’t have a
lot of protein, right? So folate, again, we have to get from our diet. And if we don’t get enough
folate, it actually causes damage to our DNA much more than eating a pesticide wood,
because folate is required to make new DNA. We’re constantly making new cells in our body.
And if you don’t have that folate, the precursor to make one of the nucleotides of DNA isn’t going
to be there. And so your body substitutes something else in there that’s from RNA. That’s not supposed
to be there, and it causes DNA damage. And he had done these studies where it was like,
he took animals, put them on a low folate diet similar to what some people in the United States
get. And then he took the other group of animals and he irradiated them with ionizing radiation.
Okay, this is like, yeah, you’re going to want to avoid this, right? And the folate deficiency
was like ionizing radiation. It did the exact same thing. It caused double strand breaks in DNA,
exactly like the ionizing radiation. So not getting that important micronutrient from
your leafy greens, folate, was like getting ionizing radiation. So again, back to that
theme that we started with, thinking about what you need is so important. And we’re sitting here
talking about pesticides. Oh, we should avoid them. Yes, but guess what’s worse? If you don’t
eat the greens, you’re not going to get enough folate. Folate is so important. It’s in every
processed food. They put the oxidized form of it, folic acid. It’s kind of one of those things where
it’s like, oh, it’s another form of folate and it is more stable, which is why it’s used in
processed foods rather than folate. But it is not the exact same as folate. It’s preferable if
you’re going to get the folate from your diet, from leafy greens. Yeah, let’s come back to
sort of the framework for approaching this. And so we’ve talked about micronutrients a little bit.
Let’s talk about macro. So, I mean, so I’m sitting here talking about all these micronutrients and
it was like vegetables was a big thing we’re talking about, right? But we also hit on omega
3s and that was fish. Protein is amino acids or something that we need to get from our diet every
day. Much like we store glucose as glycogen in our liver and our muscles, we store fat, like
triglycerides, right, adipose tissue. We don’t really store amino acids, although our muscle
skeletal muscle is kind of a reservoir for them. And during periods of fasting or
low protein intake, we pull from our muscle to get amino acids because they’re essential to
survive. And what does that mean? That means you’re pulling important protein from your muscle and
that does cause muscle atrophy. So you want to avoid that, right? And so in order to help avoid that,
all these, you know, regulatory committees had come up with, let’s figure out how much protein
people need to take in every single day to avoid those losses, right? And so studies were done
many, many years ago and that number came up to be 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight
is what was the recommended daily allowance for protein intake. Fast forward decades, you know,
you’ve got all this new science and new technology that’s come out and new ways of measuring things.
And, you know, any scientist will tell you that your data is only as sensitive as the tools that
you’re using, okay? Data from experts like Dr. Stuart Phillips and others, they started to,
you know, look into how you measure protein losses and amino acid losses. And it turns out that
those studies that were done decades ago were using tools that were, oh, they were basically
underestimating the losses of amino acids. It turns out using new techniques that are more sensitive
that in order to just prevent your body from like pulling from, you know, your skeletal muscle to
get amino acids, the minimum amount of protein you need to take in is actually 1.2 grams per
kilogram body weight, which is higher than the 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight, right?
And they also did some studies looking at, well, what if you’re physically active, right? You’re
causing damage to your muscle. You’re using a lot of energy. I mean, lots of things going on.
That number goes up to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram body weight. This was a big eye
opener for me a couple of years ago when I talked to Dr. Phillips and started looking
and reading his research because I always thought people were getting enough protein.
And turns out a lot of people are not getting enough protein because they’re not getting at
least that 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight, bare minimum. That, I think, is you have to think
about, okay, well, where do I get my protein meat? Is animal meat? It’s probably one of the best
sources because essential amino acids are very highly concentrated in poultry and meat and fish.
If you’re a vegetarian or a vegan, you just have to really work really hard and supplement with
protein powders and stuff to get that amino acid composition up.
Is all animal protein the same? I would imagine you need the complete set of amino
acids for it to be the most bioavailable in your body. I don’t know what I’m talking about here,
obviously. But is there a big difference between steak and chicken and other sources of protein
that we typically think of? There are differences with respect to their
micronutrient profiles. Steak has a lot more iron, for example. There’s a lot of zinc in
shellfish, oysters. With respect to just the essential amino acids, getting them from any
of those sources is pretty good with respect to protein. You will find that per ounce of food
that you’re eating, maybe there’s a little bit more denser in meat than fish or something like
that. But there are subtle differences between them, but also just in the whole micronutrient
profile itself. But with respect to the essential amino acids, if you’re really trying to hit that
1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight, that’s very important.
That’s a lot of protein. It’s really a lot of protein, especially for people that are physically
active. Why is that so important? Well, if you’re constantly pulling amino acids from your muscle,
it’s like pulling from your retirement fund early. Because our muscle mass peak is probably,
I would say, anywhere between 20 to 30 years old is when we peak muscle mass.
After 30, as you get into 40, you start going down. You want to try to build up that muscle mass
reservoir earlier in life, like you do what your retirement fund. You want to build it up
because you’re going to be pulling from it no matter what. Even if you’re working out later
in life, you’re still going to be pulling from it because you just lose more muscle mass and
strength as you age. It’s just part of the aging process. The more you can counter that with
resistance training, with making sure you’re getting enough protein, then the better off
you’re going to be. If you didn’t do it earlier in life, it’s never too late. That’s something
also to keep in mind. Don’t give up. I’m already 50. It’s too late for me. No, because you can get
gains in muscle mass and really actually great gains in strength, particularly with resistance
training. Protein intake is one easy thing. A lot of people, like our parents, not everyone’s
exercising. They’re not doing resistance training. Get that protein intake becomes even more important
at that point. Something also that you might find interesting, Shane, is that we’re talking about
Omega-3s. There’s some work from Chris McGlory. He had basically done some research that have found
high-dose Omega-3s could prevent disuse atrophy. When people are older, they’re not using their
muscles a lot. When you’re not using your muscles a lot and you’re certainly not getting enough protein,
you start to atrophy even more. If you gave them a high-dose Omega-3, so this was like
four to five grams a day, it totally prevented disuse atrophy. They did the study in younger
adults and younger females, but it was 50% less. He’s done some other studies and mechanism and
looking into it. He thinks that what’s happening is Omega-3s are sensitizing your skeletal muscle
to amino acids. In other words, you’re getting more amino acids into the muscle. You’re getting
more bang for your buck. More amino acids are getting in when you have the Omega-3s there,
because Omega-3s are really important for the skeletal muscle membrane and stuff. It might
be easier just to get the nutrients in. I want to start using this in a practical way. If I
were to make a smoothie in the morning, what is the best thing to put in my body at the start
of the day after having slept, which means I’ve been fasting? What is the most incredible smoothie
you can think of that would just be full of health benefits for the day? It would have a
Omega-3, it would have protein powder, it would have leafy. You’d walk me through this. Do you do
this? I do a smoothie. It doesn’t have Omega-3, but I’ll walk you through my smoothie that I do.
I probably about four to five days a week have this smoothie. Typically, this smoothie is about,
I don’t know, four or so kale leaves. That’s usually my green source that I use.
I’m getting the magnesium, I’m getting the vitamin K, I’m getting the folate, but I’m also getting
something in there called Lutein and zeaxanthin, which is, these are carotenoids much like beta
carotene or astaxanthin, like we were talking about. It’s another one that accumulates in
the eye, rods and cones of the eye, so it helps prevent macular degeneration,
but it accumulates in the brain as well. It’s so interesting because there’s been studies that
have shown that giving older adults supplementing with something like 20 megs, which is what three
kale leaves has of Lutein, it improves neural efficiency. Basically, your brain works better
with less energy. There’s been other studies in older adults where giving them Lutein and zeaxanthin
will improve crystallized intelligence. That’s basically, as you get older, it’s the ability
to still use all the information that you’ve learned throughout your life and still use it.
That’s the kale. It also has fiber, right? Fiber is great for your gut. I also add an avocado,
and avocado also increases the bioavailability of those carotenoids, the Lutein and zeaxanthin,
by up to six-fold, anywhere between three to six-fold. You’re getting more of the Lutein and
zeaxanthin. You’re basically making them more bioavailable by adding the avocado. Also, it’s a
great source of mono-insaturated fat. Avocados are high in potassium. Something like 96% of the
US population doesn’t get enough potassium. Then I add a ton of frozen blueberries.
Blueberries, yes, you’re getting your vitamin C, and you’re getting some fermentable fiber for the
gut, but they’re also high in those phytochemicals. They have polyphenols in them, and they have
anthocyanins. They’re like superpowers for the brain. There’s been so many studies that have
been done, randomized control trials either with freeze-dried blueberry extract or actually just
blueberries, showing it improves cognition, it improves mood. When I was a postdoc, I did some
studies in people. We were looking at freeze-dried blueberry powder. I was looking at DNA damage
in their blood cells. Markers of those double-stranded breaks I talked about, like if you don’t get
enough folate, it causes double-stranded breaks. People that are people that are eating terrible
diets and that are overweight and obese have more double-stranded breaks in their blood cells.
That’s something that I’ve measured. We were getting a population of people that were overweight
and obese, and then giving them this freeze-dried blueberry extract. Over the course of four,
eight weeks, it lowered their DNA damage. Personally, what I notice is the mood enhancer.
It’s like I get that blueberry, and it’s like, whoa. I used to add bananas to my smoothie years
and years ago. It’s not that bananas are bad for you, but they have this enzyme in them called
polyphenol oxidase, PPO. Well, as the name implies, it breaks down polyphenols,
which is what you want from the blueberries to get the benefits in the brain and the benefits.
Yeah, exactly. There was a very, very recent study in 2023 that came out,
and this was a controlled trial where people were given a smoothie with blueberries,
either with and without the banana, and then metabolites of polyphenols were measured
in their urine and blood. If they had the banana, their polyphenol levels were just plummeted,
like they weren’t getting them from the blueberries. I’ll tell you what’s enraging about it.
Is anywhere you go, if you want to buy a smoothie when you’re out and about,
everything has a banana in it. I’m a parent, and so I’m out and about,
and I have my kid with me, and it’s like, I want to get a smoothie, and it has blueberries in it,
and I’m like, but it also has a banana. There’s been studies on children as well,
and giving children blueberries improves their cognition. They perform better on tests. It’s
not just good for adults, it’s throughout the lifespan. Now I have to tell them, okay,
don’t put the banana, but everywhere you go, there’s a banana in the smoothie.
That’s interesting. I’m going to give you my smoothie recipe after, and you can create it,
but I’m going to switch out the banana starting tomorrow. Okay, so we have kale leaves, avocado,
frozen blueberries, and protein powder. Protein powder. Especially if I’m doing it,
like you said, first thing in the morning, and sometimes I’ll have my smoothie in the afternoon,
in which case, if I didn’t work out and I’ve already gotten my protein, I won’t put the protein
powder, but these days, I’m mostly always putting them to be honest. I’m doing something every day,
and it’s hard to get the protein requirement for me. I usually do some whey protein,
and then I also add a little bit of hydrolyzed collagen powder as well.
If you’re getting the protein, you probably don’t need the hydrolyzed collagen powder,
but I personally, there’s studies showing that randomized control trial is showing that it improves
like skin elasticity, and things that I’m also interested in addition with respect to skin.
I mean, there’s all sorts of studies also showing it helps with joint health and this and that,
and then the other thing I add is I do a little bit of moringa powder.
So, moringa, it’s high in some micronutrients, like it has things like zinc and iron and magnesium,
but it also has something in it that is called moringogen, and it is a phytochemical that is very
similar to sulforaphane, which is found in like broccoli, broccoli sprouts. It’s really high in
broccoli sprouts, and it activates genetic pathways in our body, the same ones that sulforaphane
activates that have been shown to increase antioxidants in the brain, like glutathione,
that have been shown to lower DNA damage in our cells, all sorts of benefits,
but the other thing that it does, and I’ve noticed this, so I used to wear a continuous glucose
monitor like for years. It blunts the postprandial glucose rise from a smoothie when I put moringa
powder in it, and so I put that in my smoothie as well. Now, that’s a little spicy tasting. I
would say if you’re like in one of those moods where you don’t want the like not so great tasting
smoothie, you know, you can skip the moringa or go for a smaller amount, but I do like a big
keeping tablespoon of it. Do you use like a liquid and ice? Oh, and then I add some water, yeah.
Water, okay. Water to kind of mix it up. That’s pretty cool. I’m going to give you my smoothie.
You can give me a grade on this, and keep in mind, I’m a parent of two boys who devour food,
so we came up with this, and I’ve never told anybody the exact recipe before, but here’s
basically what it is. And we call it the Tom Brady. It’s got protein powder in it. It’s got AG1.
It’s got walnuts. It’s got blueberries, yogurt, almond milk, but like real almond milk, no other
additives or anything. Banana, chia seeds, and hemp seeds. Yes, you’re going for the kind of
omega-3 that’s in those plant sources like walnuts and chia seeds is ALA. And we were talking a lot
about the EPA and DHA, which are from the marine sources. ALA, I mean, now walnuts are great.
There’s like studies showing like if you eat a handful of walnuts a day, you’re, you know, you
have lower cancer risk and cardiovascular disease risk, they’re clearly good for you. They’re not
the same as the EPA and DHA, so don’t substitute. I’ll tell you, you can, so your body does convert
ALA from plant sources of omega-3 into EPA and DHA, which is essentially what the final
products that you need are, but everybody does it differently. And the conversion efficiency is
about 5%. Now women, when they’re making, when they’re high in estrogen, that can go up really,
that can go up much higher. And I think that’s because, because during pregnancy and child
development in utero, the DHA is so important that your body makes sure you’re just turning all
that ALA into that DHA, because when you’re pregnant, your estrogen level goes, it’s like
100-fold higher, it’s like super high. If there are people that are relying on just plant sources,
of omega-3, that is a mistake. And if you do an omega-3 index test, and there’s, you know,
omega-quant is probably one of the best places to do that, then you’ll figure, you’ll figure that
out really quick that year. Okay, well, yeah, well, this is great, right? So like, what would we
supplement here? We take out the bananas and, because they’re counteracting the blueberries,
we’d add avocado, that’s a lot of fat in there. What else would we like take out or add or
switch? What would you say? So you’re doing the AG greens as your source of green?
I’m doing that as sort of like the base vitamin, because they have a daily multivitamin, and I
just count that as their daily multivitamin. That’s their daily multivitamin. Okay, but what,
did you add any greens in there? I didn’t. No, there’s no greens in there. So that would be,
that would be something that I would add some, sneak some kale leaves in. Oh my god, if they saw
that, they wouldn’t drink it. No, don’t let them see. Do they have to make it to be part of it? So I
put kale leaves in my sons or even romaine lettuce. Here’s the other thing. So there’s really not a
lot of foods that can go into a smoothie that would degrade the polyphenols, because they’re high in
that enzyme polyphenol oxidase. But the ones that are are bananas and beets and anything in that
family. So like chard, I used to put chard in my smoothie, like like Swiss chard, you know, like
they’re so, it’s so good. And look, these are great foods to eat. Like just don’t put them in your
smoothie with blueberries. It’s exactly. So I mean, I used to put chard in my smoothie and
like this, this like changed my world. I was like, this is unbelievable. I can’t, you know,
thankfully I stopped doing the banana in my smoothie. In fact, I just kind of just got lazy
and it was like, okay, kale, I just need like a base of greens, you know what I mean? Thankfully,
like years ago. So even though this study just kind of came out last year, I’ve, I’ve been ahead
again. I wish I knew that they’re going to blame me for their poor test results. Now they’re going
to be like, you know, you sent us to school with blueberries and bananas. Dad, like,
what were you thinking? Are they, are they physically active? Cardio respiratory fitness
is another thing that’s like, it correlates with academic performance. So like the better fit the
child is, like they score better on a lot of academic tests as well. Okay. I want to get to
fitness and say, I want to cover a sort of grass fed and then heat and cold exposure. And then we
we can dive into fitness grass fed, non grass fed. Is there a difference? I see this everywhere
between grass fed butter, non grass fed butter, grass fed beef, non grass fed beef. Is there a
difference from a consumer point of view in terms of what I’m ingesting? There’s slight
differences there. Definitely. So we were just talking about the omega three profile. So I would
say one of the biggest differences is the omega three and then the omega six profile in let’s talk
about meat, like grass fed, you know, cows that are grass fed versus not. So what I mean by that
is like, they’re getting that plant source of omega that ALA that that plant source of omega three,
they’re getting if they’re, they’re eating like grass, right? They’re getting it from from the
plants that they’re eating. And they’re also not getting as much of what would be a type of food
that is higher in omega six. So this would be like if they’re being fed corn, for example,
a corn, you know, oil-ish processed kind of like pellets or whatever, you know, if you’re eating,
you know, for example, ground beef from a just conventional cow, then you’re going to have a
lot more of the omega six and less of the omega three. I never thought about this before, but
like you just said, like we’re not supposed to eat processed foods, but then we’re eating animals
that are eating processed foods. Yeah. Again, this goes back to my take on nutrition and how to
and thinking about the framework of how to eat. First and foremost, I think the most important
thing is how do I get these important vitamins and minerals and fatty acids and amino acids like
protein? How do I get all those right? Okay, I’m getting I’m getting an idea of how I should be
eating. Then it comes the next layer. Do I need to have organic or, you know, is a little bit of
pesticides okay? Do I need to eat grass-fed or, you know, because at the end of the day, food’s
expensive, right? Yeah, totally. Way more expensive now than years ago. Exactly. It’s even worse now.
And so I do think it is better if you can afford it. If you can afford it, great. If not, don’t
worry about it. If not, like the most important thing is what if you’re eating conventional meat
and you’re getting a little bit higher omega six? Well, if you’re supplementing with fish oil over
a day, who cares? You’re getting that getting the omega three is what is most important. It’s
and people are so focused on, oh, but the omega six is so high when your body actually needs omega
six. So if you’re getting it from like, you know, dietary sources versus like oils, process cooking
oils and stuff. And even that, look, I don’t cook with vegetable oil. I don’t use vegetable oil at all.
However, I’m going to be frank. Okay, when you look at the data, taking people that are eating
like a high saturated fat diet. So they’re eating more like butter, you know, saturated fat like
coconut oil and substituting that with vegetable oil. There’s no effect in their cardiovascular
disease risk, or they do better. You can look at this two ways. You can say, oh, well, if it’s the
same saturated fat versus vegetable oil, then clearly saturated fats, not as bad as we thought it
was. That’s true. But the second way you can look at it is, oh, they substituted the saturated fat
with the vegetable oil, and it wasn’t any worse. So maybe the vegetable oil isn’t killing us as
bad as we thought. And this is the one thing I like to point out, because I still don’t use them,
because when I think about it from like my mechanistic brain point of view, it’s like,
well, vegetable oil is very high in polyunsaturated fat, like we talked about omega threes being
a type of poly, they’re prone to oxidation. And when you add heat into the picture,
boom, that’s like tons of oxidation. Perhaps in those studies where they’re substituting
saturated fat for vegetable, were they putting vegetable oil on salads, or were they frying it,
deep frying, and consuming oxidized lipids? We don’t really know. You’re still better off avoiding
the vegetable oil, particularly for cooking, in anything that’s with heat. And then obviously,
processed foods have tons of vegetable oil that have been cooked at a high heat. When you go out
to eat, I mean, like those restaurants are using vegetable oil, it’s cheaper, they’re probably
reusing it, which is even more oxidized, right? I mean, these are things like you don’t want to
think about it, you’ll just never go out. I mean, like you have to like enjoy life, right?
Be practical, totally. Yeah, like you can’t obsess over everything or like you become like a maniac.
One thing we can all afford is vitamin D, and we’re all sort of lacking in that.
Walk me through sort of how we can get that, the difference between sunlight
and supplementation, as well as the effect of sunscreen on our absorption of vitamin D, and
is sunscreen actually killing us more than just being in the sun?
So vitamin D, food is not a great source of it. Like you can find, like it is fortified in some
fatty foods, unfortunately, it’s fortified with the wrong form, it’s fortified with D2 rather
than D3, which is what we make in our skin from the sun. The primary source of it is, as you
mentioned, it’s from the sun, and specifically it’s UVB radiation from the sun. That is really
important because UVB radiation only occurs during certain times of the year. In regions where you’re
more northern, so for example in Canada, you’re not making vitamin D a good four or five months
out of the year. It’s very challenging to make a lot of vitamin D from being out in the sun.
Summertime, different, lots of UVB radiation, right? So you need to be in the sun and you
need to be at a certain time of year, depending on where you live, there’s lots of things.
You mentioned sunscreen as well. There’s a lot of factors that are involved in
the ability to produce vitamin D3 in the skin from the UVB radiation, and that has to do with
sunscreen. So anything that blocks out UVB radiation is going to block out the ability to
make vitamin D. Melanin, the pigmentation that is like a sunscreen, it’s natural sunscreen and
people that some people have, like in some regions of the world that are certainly more equatorial,
that is also a natural sunscreen. It blocks out UVB radiation, which is why your body responds
when you’re in the sun, your body tans because it’s like, “Oh, next time I’m in the sun,
I need to protect myself.” It’s an adaptation. The other thing that regulates the production
of vitamin D3 from the sun is age. The older you get, the less, I would say, efficient your body
is it making vitamin D3 from the sun. For example, a 70-year-old makes four times less than their
20-year-old former self. Bioavailability of vitamin D3 is important as well, and that’s
regulated by body mass and weight. You make vitamin D3 in your skin, but it gets released into your
bloodstream, then it’s converted into another form that is actually not a vitamin, it’s a steroid
hormone. Vitamin D is actually much more important. It’s not just a vitamin, it’s actually a hormone
that our body needs. Basically, the more body fat you have, the less bioavailable vitamin D3 is,
and so you actually need more vitamin D3, the more body fat that you have. This hormone
is extremely important because it is regulating about 5% of the human genome, the protein encoding
human genome. It’s doing a lot of things, and you can imagine, so what it does, there’s actually
a little sequence inside of our DNA. It’s a little repeat sequence that vitamin D recognizes,
and this whole complex of vitamin D in a receptor goes down and binds to that little
sequence of DNA, and it turns on a gene or it turns off a gene, and it does it in a very coordinated
manner. When you don’t have enough vitamin D, that stuff all goes wrong, and so lots of things can
happen. Because of sunscreen, because of our modern-day lifestyles, we’re inside technology,
we’re on our computers, less farming, less agricultural work out in the sun, majority of
people are not getting enough vitamin D3. Something around 70% of the US population
is insufficient in vitamin D3, so that is defined as having blood levels of vitamin D
less than 30 nanograms per milliliter. Another percentage of the population is
deficient, so there’d be less than 20 nanograms per milliliter.
But we’ve been told not to go outside. We’ve been told to layer up the sunscreen.
Are these things getting in the way of vitamin D? Are they helping us? How do we make sense of all
this? Let’s be clear. If you have fair skin and you’re going out in the sun a lot, then you can
increase your risk for DNA damage, and skin cancer is one. For example, Australia. Australia is like
the melanoma cancer is through the roof in Australia, and melanoma is the worst type of
skin cancer to get. There’s a lot of fair skin people living there, and Australia is very close
to the equator. There’s definitely many months out of the year where you’re just
lots and lots of UVB radiation, but people that were sort of native to that region had darker
skin. They had more melanin, and so the solution to people that are more fair skin living in
Australia is actually sunscreen and a hat and a vitamin D3 supplement. Yeah. The question is,
where do you find the balance? How much sun exposure is enough? Do I need to supplement,
and do I have to wear sunscreen? I think that all depends on a variety of factors. It isn’t
like a one-size-fits-all. It’s like, okay, well, where do you live? Do you live in Southern California,
like where I do? Do you live in Australia? Do you live in Canada? Those are all factors to
keep in mind. Then just measuring vitamin D levels. Where am I at? Then you can go, okay, well,
clearly, I don’t wear sunscreen. I don’t go out in the sun a lot because I work inside a lot.
Even without the sunscreen, I’m still not getting enough vitamin D3. You have to
measure something. Is there a difference? If I go out and buy a vitamin D3 supplement,
is there a difference between that and the sun? Then do I want to take that with anything I notice?
I think athletic greens includes vitamin K with that. Is that for the bioavailability?
No, it’s not for the bioavailability. Let’s address your questions because they’re really
great questions. Differences between sun exposure and supplemental form. Again, vitamin D3 supplemental
form, which is key. The differences between vitamin D3 from the sun versus supplemental,
yes, there’s differences. Let’s say you’re in sub-Saharan Africa where you’re so close to the
equator and you can make vitamin D3 from the sun and you’re out in the sun. Let’s say you’re a
Bushman or something out there all the time. There’s been studies that have measured the
levels of people that are aboriginal to these equatorial regions like Bushman in sub-Saharan
Africa. Their natural vitamin D levels are something like anywhere between 80 to 100
nanograms per mil. They don’t really go above that. The reason is because your body senses
like the vitamin D levels. When you’re still being exposed to the sun, instead of converting it
into vitamin D3, it converts it into this other metabolite. It’s like, okay, we’re putting the
brakes on this. We’re not going to do anymore. If you’re taking a supplement and you don’t measure
anything, let’s say you’re taking an insane number. There’s upper limits that have been
sort of identified as the safe amount to supplement with vitamin D3 every day. The Institute of
Medicine in the United States has set that as 4,000 IUs a day. That doesn’t mean you can’t go
above that. That’s just the safe upper limit where you’re not going to have any toxicity effects.
Let’s say you’re taking 100,000 IUs a day, way over 4,000. Those natural mechanisms aren’t going
to kick in in the skin that they do when you’re being exposed to a lot of UV radiation and your
body’s like, oh, I have enough vitamin D3, so I’m going to stop. You can over-supplement with
vitamin D3. It is fat-soluble and it can be toxic. It’s challenging to do. You would have to take
something like 100,000 IUs or something a day for a year. The biggest effect is vitamin D3 can
you can make your calcium more bioavailable. We’re talking about bioavailability of other
minerals. Calcium is much more bioavailable in the presence of vitamin D, so you absorb about
40% more calcium from your diet if you have adequate levels of vitamin D. One concern is,
well, if I have a lot of vitamin D and I’m taking calcium, then maybe I’m going to get hypercalcemia,
right? Too much calcium in the bloodstream. There are studies that have shown it’s exceedingly
high doses that you have to do for a long time to get that, but that is the concern with taking
too much vitamin D3 is that you’re going to get too much calcium in your blood, which can have
acute toxicity effects, but also long-term effects with calcification of your arteries and your
vascular system because calcium can form a precipitate really easy. That’s the concern.
Then you mentioned your athletic greens. They put vitamin K2 in there. I mentioned vitamin K1,
which is found in leafy greens. It’s involved in blood coagulation, so clotting. When you
take in your greens, you’re getting the vitamin K1. It goes to the liver, and it activates all
those coagulation proteins, blood for blood clotting. When you get enough of that from the
greens, it stays in circulation, and it does exactly what vitamin K2 does, which is activates
proteins that are involved in shuttling calcium out of your vascular system and bringing it to
your bones, bringing it to your muscle where you want calcium to be, and not in your vascular system
where it can form a precipitate and then a plaque. I want to mention one other thing because you did
say bioavailability. It’s related, and it has to do with magnesium. We were talking about it’s
a cofactor for enzymes like DNA repair. I didn’t talk about a really important one. It’s actually
a cofactor for both enzymes that convert vitamin D3 into the circulating form of vitamin D that we
go and we measure. It’s called 25-hydroxy-vitamin D, and then eventually into the act of steroid
hormone. There’s been studies showing that people that don’t get enough magnesium, even if they’re
getting enough vitamin D, even if they’re supplementing with it, they won’t convert it into the
steroid hormone. It’s a hormone that we need. As I mentioned, half of the US population doesn’t
get enough magnesium. If you’re not getting that magnesium, that’s a problem. Something
like athletic greens does have magnesium in it, I think. But also, if you’re doing greens,
that’s a really good source of magnesium as well. You want to make sure you have your magnesium
covered, especially for the vitamin D as well because they work together. You need them both.
Let’s switch gears and talk about a framework for approaching
deliberate heat and possibly deliberate cold exposure.
Deliberate heat exposure. When we say deliberate heat, you’re going into a hot environment.
You’re going to do something like a hot sauna, a steam room, a hot bath, something that is
either the ambient temperature of the room is elevated or the water and your body is submerged
in the water. What is that doing? Well, that is actually kicking on a physiological response
that is in many ways very similar to moderate intensity aerobic exercise because when you are
exposed to this deliberate heat exposure, when you’re exposed to the ambient increases in
temperature, you’re elevating your core body temperature, which is what’s happening with
physical activity. Your heart rate increases. Your plasma flow increases. Your stroke volume
increases. All these things that are happening during physical exercise are happening during
this deliberate heat exposure. There’s a somewhat of a, I would say,
mimicking effect of moderate intensity aerobic exercise. There’s actually been studies that
have compared that head to head. They’ve looked at being on a stationary cycle, doing not anything
crazy, but 120 watts and then comparing that to sitting in a sauna for 20 minutes, doing each of
those for 20 minutes. They were comparable in terms of heart rate elevation during the physical
activity or during the heat exposure, the changes in blood pressure during the activity,
and then the improvements after. Blood pressure improved after the stationary cycling. Blood
pressure improved after the deliberate heat exposure. Resting heart rate improved after
the stationary cycling and resting heart rate improved after the deliberate heat exposure.
Certainly, it’s important for people that are disabled, people that can’t go for a run or a jog,
or even get on a bike, but it’s also important for the population, I think, of people that
won’t get on a bike or go for a run or they would rather just feel like they’re sitting in a spa
and at the very least, or maybe people that are just so adverse, there are people that are so
adverse to cardiovascular exercise that if you can just get them into a sauna and we can talk
about parameters in a minute, but if you can get them into something that’s at least mimicking
the moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise and they’re getting those adaptations, those
cardiovascular adaptations that they would get with at least a little mild to moderate intensity
exercise, that’s going to be beneficial in the long run as well. Then it’s also beneficial for
people that are physically active. You might go, “Well, why is that?” Being physically active,
like being aerobically active, doing aerobic exercise, one of the best benefits is it improves
what’s called cardiorespiratory fitness. That’s probably one of the, I would say,
one of the best biomarkers of longevity, like concrete things that you can measure.
It’s measured by measuring something called VO2 max. It’s the maximum amount of oxygen you can
take in during maximal exercise. Cardiovascular exercise improves that, particularly if you’re
doing a high-intensity exercise training, things that are high-intensity interval training, for
example, is one of the best ways to improve it, especially if you’re doing longer intervals of
like at least a minute. There’s been two types of studies, observational data looking at people
that just routinely exercise or people that routinely exercise and do the sauna. Then there
was measurements of cardiorespiratory fitness. It was pretty clear that people that routinely
exercised and routinely did the sauna had a better cardiorespiratory fitness than people
that only routinely exercised. In other words, there was a benefit to do sauna on top of the
exercise. Then there’s been intervention studies where it’s like, “Okay, we’re going to take people,
give them an exercise workout. I think it was a stationary bike.” Then right after that exercise
workout, they’re either going to just do passive recovery or they’re going to go into a sauna and
recover for 15 minutes. I forgot how many weeks it was, something like on the order of four weeks
or something like that. They measured cardiorespiratory fitness in a variety of other biomarkers,
like lipids, like LDL, total cholesterol, blood pressure, things like that. While there was
improvements, obviously with exercise, the ones that did exercise plus the sauna had an even
greater improvement in their cardiorespiratory fitness. Their VO2 max was improved even more
than exercise alone. They also had greater improvements in blood pressure and greater
improvements in their lipid numbers and things like that. There was every reason to
add a deliberate heat exposure on top of exercise as well.
You’re the reason I have a sauna. I think I first came across your work and you had this 70-page
website on the benefits of a sauna. I remember skimming the first three pages of it going,
“I really need a sauna.” You’re the reason I have a sauna. When we say “doing the sauna,”
what does that mean in terms of temperature, in terms of duration? Is a hot tub the same as the
sauna? Talk to me about that. A lot of the studies that have been done on sauna have come out of
Finland where they’re using Finnish sonnas, which are generally speaking, it would be what I would
call a regular sauna where you have an electric heater with some rocks that are hot. In Finland,
they often use water and they pour it on the hot rocks. There’s a humidity aspect there anywhere
between 10 to 20 percent humidity. A lot of the observational studies and intervention studies
showing, like I just mentioned one about VO2 max improvements, blood pressure improvements,
they’re done in Finland and a lot of those parameters used. Generally speaking, our regular
sauna is about 175 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 to 20 percent humidity. The average time spent in this
sauna is about 20 minutes for the benefits to really be, I would say, robust. Then there’s
frequency. How often do you do it? There have been a variety of studies that have looked at
all-cause mortality, so dying early from all causes that are non-accidental and then looking at
cardiovascular-related mortality like dying from a heart attack, for example. People that are more
frequently using the sauna, that’s a dose-dependent effect. People that use the sauna, for example,
two to three times a week have a 24 percent lower all-cause mortality compared to people that only
use it one time a week, but people that use it four to seven times a week have a 40 percent lower
all-cause mortality compared to people that only use it one time a week. In other words, it seems
like the minimal effect of dose to get the most robust effect would be four times a week. The
same goes for other parameters. Dying from cardiovascular-related mortality, it’s 50 percent
lower in people that use the sauna four to seven times a week compared to one time a week, whereas
if you’re only doing it two to three times a week, it’s something like 27 percent lower.
When I said duration in the sauna, it’s really important so those studies were also done looking
at, okay, let’s say people are only staying in the sauna for 11 minutes versus greater than 19
minutes, so 20 minutes. They didn’t have that robust 50 percent reduction in cardiovascular
related mortality if they only stayed in for 11 minutes. It was much less. It was a little bit
like it was improved, but it was not 50 percent. The temperature and the duration and the frequency,
those are three parameters that are important with respect to using a regular hot sauna.
The reason I say regular hot saunas is because another type of sauna that’s very popular are
infrared saunas. Infrared saunas do not get as hot, so they’re not warming the ambient air around you.
They’re working through another mechanism and they’re moving molecules inside your body around
and heating you up in a different way. You do sweat a lot and you can get your core body temperature
elevated, particularly if you stay in quite a long time. You do have to keep in mind that you
can’t take those parameters and go, “I’m going to stay in a 145-degree infrared sauna for only 20
minutes,” because that’s what those Finnish studies have shown because they’re completely
different. If you’re just staying in for 20 minutes, like the same amount of time in each,
you’re not going to get those blood pressure improvements from an infrared sauna, which makes
sense. It’s not as hot. It takes longer to elevate that core body to get your heart rate elevated.
Anyone that’s done, like, I’ve done a lot of infrared sauna and I’ve done a lot of regular hot
sauna and I know, and also wearing a heart rate monitor, you can wear your Fitbit or your Woop
or whatever into the sauna and you’ll know when your heart rate starts to get elevated and it’s
not going to be after 20 minutes in an infrared sauna. For me, I’d say 16 minutes is more like the
duration that I would have to stay in to start to get more elevations in my heart rate. Again,
that’s that mimicking of the modern intensity exercise, but there’s also biomarkers that
have been measured. For example, we haven’t gone into this yet, but heat shock proteins.
These are one of the adaptations that happen when your body is forced to increase its core
body temperature, whether that’s through physical activity, which is making you hot,
making you sweat or a deliberate heat exposure. Studies have been done looking at people that
go into a relatively hot sauna. This would be 163-degree Fahrenheit sauna. If they stay in for
30 minutes, they can raise their heat shock proteins about 50% over their baseline levels.
Heat shock proteins have a lot of beneficial effects. They’re involved with preventing proteins
from aggregating and forming plaques in the brain, in the vascular system. They also are very
important for preventing muscle atrophy. There have now been studies that have been done showing
that just even locally heating, the studies that have been done have been called immobilization
studies where they’re mimicking an injury or an event. Let’s say you go and an older person
goes into the hospital. They have the flu, whatever. They’re basically immobilized for a
period of weeks. They’re not using their muscles. Their muscles were atrophying at a rapid rate.
Studies have been done where if you apply even just local heat, you can cut that disuse atrophy
by as much as 40%. Heat shock proteins are a good biomarker for heat stress. So is increased
heart rate. We talked about you’re getting up to 110, 120. You can get up to 120 beats per minute
sitting in the hot sauna. That’s really an indication that your core body temperature is
being elevated. Your body is doing that work. You can elevate your heat shock proteins by
being submerged from the shoulders down for about 20 minutes in about 104 degree Fahrenheit water,
which is the standard hot tub level. I do think there are comparable effects with respect to the
modality of heat exposure. Whether we’re talking about a hot sauna or a hot bath, perhaps an infrared
sauna, again, the duration, the parameters will change. The parameters will change. But I do think
that you can find comparable effects. There are personal preferences at play. I like both hot
tub and hot sauna. I find that I cheat more with a hot tub. I’m more prone to put my arms out when
I get really hot. When I’m in the sauna, there’s nowhere to go. If I’m getting hot, then I have
to get out and then I’m like, “Oh, I’m giving up mentally.” I’m like, “No, I’m not going to give
up.” But if I’m in the hot tub, I don’t feel like I’m giving up when I’m just getting my arms out.
There’s an immune benefit too. Your immune system, isn’t there?
There is. There have been some observational studies as well looking at pneumonia risk.
I think it was something like 40% lower in people that use the sauna four to seven times a week.
There have been a lot of really early studies on, again, these are coming out of Finland where
there’s humidity. There’s steam involved as well. You’re working your cardiovascular system.
The lungs are affected. I don’t know all the mechanisms. I don’t know that they’ve all been
worked out, but there is some sort of benefit on the lugs and also just the immune system as well.
It seems like immune changes happen as well. It’s funny. I do get into the sauna when I’m feeling
a little under the weather or even if I am sick because I find it’s easier than getting on my
Peloton. I get in there and I’ll do the steam and I feel so much better. I feel so much better.
There’s my grandmother or grandfather used to tell me, “Sweat it out.” There’s almost
like something true to that when you are feeling sick. Absolutely. When you are sick, you get a
fever. The fever response, your core body temperature is elevated and heat shock proteins are
activated. Heat shock proteins do play a role in what is called the innate immune response.
That’s the immune response that you have when you’ve never seen a virus or a bacterial
pathogen before. It’s not the antibody response. It’s that, “Okay, let’s fire away and get,”
so heat shock proteins do play a role in that. When you are getting in the sauna, when you’re
doing some form of deliberate heat exposure, you are elevating your core body temperature.
The fever response is a very important part of our immune system’s way of
dealing with the pathogen. It’s important. We get a fever for a reason. The reason I actually
got into the sauna way back in 2009 had nothing to do with cardiovascular effects or even the
effects on muscle mass, but it was the effects on my mood. I was very stressed out in graduate
school. This was 2009. I was using the sauna every morning before I would go into the lab
and do my experiments. That would often fail. It was very stressful. I started to notice quite
quickly that I was able to handle that stress a lot better. I wasn’t getting so depressed after,
and so down and anxious. That’s when I was like, “Something is going on here.” It was very noticeable
for me. Then I started to look into the literature and come up with my own theories, which I,
connecting the dots, where I actually did publish on this back in 2022. It’s in my huge review article
on the sauna. It’s called, “How sauna use can increase health span?” I think it has to do with,
when you get into the sauna, again, you’re mimicking a lot of the same effects that
cardiovascular exercise. You’re releasing a lot of endorphins as well. Those are the
feel-good opioids that we release in our brain. What’s really interesting is that also the opposite
of endorphin is called dinorphin. It’s also an opioid that we release in our body. It’s that
opioid that’s involved in the discomfort feeling. When you’re working out, when you’re getting
hot, you’re feeling uncomfortable. Your body’s making dinorphin. Dinorphin is part of what it
does is it cools down your body. It’s playing a role in, okay, you’re elevating your core body
temperature. The adaptive response is, “Okay, we need to cool down somewhat.” Dinorphin plays a
role in that, but it also is what’s responsible for that uncomfortable feeling when you’re like,
“Oh, I’m so hot. I want to get out.” When you release dinorphin, you have a response, a feedback
loop in your brain, where dinorphin causes your body to make more receptors to the feel-good
endorphin, and it sensitizes those receptors. It makes sense if you think about it. When your
body’s not feeling good and you’re getting that uncomfortable feeling, it wants to make sure that
it’s going to counter that with feeling-good. The next time you make endorphins from a hug,
from your child, or a joke, you laugh at whatever, you’re going to feel even better because you’re
going to be more sensitive to those endorphins. It’s called mu-opioid receptors, and that’s
what you make when you increase endorphin. Anyways, but now there’s lots more research coming out,
so work from Dr. Charles Raison, and now his protege, Dr. Ashley Mason. It’s a type of sauna
that’s like a bed, and it’s a chamber with a head out, and so your whole body is in it.
They are elevating your core body temperature to about 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, so you’re
getting a fever. They’re inducing a feverish response. Now, many people have to be in this
sauna, and an infrared gets up to about 145-ish or something like that, and they’re in there for
60 minutes, 50 minutes to 60 minutes, and they’re getting a feverish response. It’s a
very intense procedure, but they induce this feverish response 101.3 Fahrenheit just one time
in people with major depressive disorder, or they did a sham control where they made them
feel like they were getting hot, but it wasn’t hot enough. The people that got the active treatment
had an antidepressant effect that lasted six weeks after. It was enormous and crazy. Placebo
group didn’t get it at all. It’s amazing what our body can do to heal itself when we’re not always
injecting it with stuff, too. There’s all these other ways to go about healing it. It’s almost
like it knows what it’s doing sometimes. It does. I agree with you. I mean, it’s so exciting to
potentially have a non-pharmacological treatment for depression, because it’s undeniable that
doing aerobic exercise, like they have compared running to classical antidepressants like SSRI,
so serotonin, reuptake inhibitors. In terms of the antidepressant effects, it’s the same.
Only the running has all the other benefits. There are people that are really severely depressed
that just can’t even get out of bed. They’re not going to go for a run. It’s true. There are people
that will not get out of bed, but will they get into a sauna? It’s a lot easier. It really
opens up doors. It’s just so exciting. Super promising as we age, too, for the aging population.
A lot of people who don’t want to exercise when they get a lot older, or the aches and pains,
and maybe it’s a low-intensity way to do that. I can say for myself, during COVID,
it was probably one of the most stressful periods of my life. The sauna, I think it saved my life
a lot. I was using the sauna five, six times a week, and it was just sort of like, A, it was
mentally grounding. It was something I look forward to. It was a great ritual, but it sort of kept
me out of trouble for some reason. I could never explain it. I’m an N of one, and I’m not super
scientific and all that, but I was like, “This is working. This is keeping me happy, and going,
and motivated, and I got to keep doing more of this,” because yeah, it was really crazy.
I want to talk about exercise. Maybe we’ll do that in part two, because I don’t think we’re
going to do it justice here in the next 10 minutes. Maybe we can end with the top three
interventions you can think of from a diet perspective, and then the top three interventions
you can think of from a behavioral perspective that would have the biggest bang on people’s lives.
Diet-wise, the top three things that people can think about would be to make sure they’re getting
enough of their marine source of omega-3, so supplementing with two grams of a pretty decent
quality fish oil brand per day. It’s like low-hanging fruit. Then I would say vitamin D3.
Most people, 4,000 I use is a pretty safe bet. At the very least, doing 4,000 I use a day of
vitamin D3, as you mentioned, it’s the cheapest supplement. It’s something like a penny a pill.
It’s the most affordable thing to do. Then making sure you’re eating your greens and
getting your protein, so thinking about the magnesium and then the 1.2 grams per kilogram
body weight a day are the biggest bang for your buck, I think. Then with respect to behavioral
exercise, and particularly doing a good amount of high-intensity exercise, and we didn’t get so
much into it, but it really is one of the most important things that you can do. There’s studies
showing that people just doing one to three minutes of getting their heart rate up to 80%
max heart rate for one to three minutes three times a week is associated with a 50% reduction
in all cause mortality and cancer related mortality. It’s easy to do. You can do that.
You can just get up and do three minutes. It’s not that challenging. Also, resistance training
and muscle mass, super important. You need to be building that muscle mass and maintaining it,
because frailty, you get to a point when you start to get older and all of a sudden you have an event
where you’ve got influenza or whatever and then you start to not working out. You lose so much
muscle and you get a couple of those stacked on over a couple of years and then all of a sudden you
can’t walk. Your mobility goes down and then the curve just drops. Resistance training is extremely
important. If you’re doing those two things, you’re probably going to be maintaining a healthy
body weight because at the end of the day calories in, calories out, doesn’t matter. If you’re doing
the exercise and the resistance training and you’re focusing on getting the proper micronutrients
from your veggies and protein intake, you’re probably not going to be eating all the junk.
The last thing I would say, behavioral wise, I would add sauna or deliberate heat exposure.
I think that’s huge for a lot of reasons. For the cardiovascular reasons, there’s mental health
effects as we talked about. There’s also other brain effects. Dementia risk is lower as well.
Then muscle atrophy, you can do the deliberate heat exposure to help prevent muscle atrophy
as well. I think those are the three behavioral changes. By the way, exercise can forgive a lot
of sins, including lack of sleep. That’s why I start with that. I don’t make the sleep the most
important. I actually think it’s exercise. We’re going to have to have you on for part two because
I really want to dive into both resistance training and cardiovascular exercise with you.
This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
Well, I look forward to your round two, Shane. Thank you for all the great questions. It’s been
a lot of fun. Wow. What a fun conversation that was with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. I just want to go
through some of my takeaways and notes from this one. I think the big overarching message that we
got across today is that a lot of people focus on the micro. If you notice,
Rhonda kept bringing it back to the macro. I don’t mean in terms of nutrients. I mean,
in terms of what we focus on, we’re overly focused on these little minute things because
they’re really within our control. We want to feel like we’re doing something when in reality,
there’s these big things that we’re not focused on that nobody’s really arguing about. You might
argue whether seed oil is bad for you. I think it is or not. At the end of the day, are we getting
the right magnesium? Are we getting folate? Are we getting omega-3s? How are we positioning
ourselves? This is how I think about food personally. This is one of the reasons I’m
exploring this with Dr. Rhonda Patrick and some other guests is the food that you put into your
body is sort of a lead domino for a whole bunch of other things. It affects your mood.
It affects your energy. It affects how you handle stress. It affects how you handle your
emotions. It really dictates a lot of what comes downstream. Paying attention to the food in your
body is a really good way to take control of your life. It’s a really small thing you can do to put
yourself on easy mode every day. We didn’t get into talking about sugars. We didn’t talk about
oils too much. I really wanted to get into that. I also really wanted to get into exercise routines
and talk about that. But I think we’ll try to do that in the next episode. We’ll definitely do a
part two of this. I did take away sort of like grass-fed was better. If you can afford it,
if not, don’t stress over it. Same as organic. If you can afford it, great. If you can’t,
don’t stress over it. Again, if you had to pick and choose, I loved her heuristic for using thin
and thick skin as the way to pick and choose. If you’re sort of like, “Oh, I want to do some
organic,” and not all, I liked her approach to sort of washing veggies. It’s very practical and
pragmatic. It doesn’t have to be sort of the Instagram that you see of the vinegar and the
baking soda and the water and soaking it for 15 minutes. I liked the very end when we talked
about sort of like here are three behavioral interventions that you can do that really make a
difference. Here are three sort of supplement dietary things. Again, they were fish oil,
vitamin D3, greens and protein, and then high intensity exercise, resistance training, and
sauna, which I really like in part because I’m biased to have a sauna. I think that that makes
a big difference. It made a big difference for me during COVID. I think it’s made a big difference
for other people that I’ve talked to. One thing we didn’t talk about was sleep. I know a friend
of mine, Andrew Worgensen, has one and he says it really, really drives his sleep. I don’t know if
it helps me sleep. Sometimes I get in there and I nap to be honest with you. I like talking about
this smoothie. If you remember, she had a smoothie recipe and it was sort of like four kale leaves,
avocado, frozen blueberries, which she actually went out of the way to say a ton of frozen blueberries,
protein powder, collagen powder, and there was that meringue of powder water. Then we talked
about my smoothie, the one that I make with the kids and how I was unintentionally adding bananas
and blueberries together and sort of undoing the amazing effect of blueberries. I’m going to switch.
I’m going to try to switch it out and see what the kids think or even if they notice,
switch out the banana, put in avocado. Again, in mine, we call it the Tom Brady. It was protein,
A.G.1, walnuts, blueberries, yogurt, almond milk. I’m going to switch out the banana, chia seeds,
and hemp seeds if you want to. Hemp seeds are a really good sort of source of extra calories and
fat for the kids. If you are trying to get them to eat more, which I have one kid who eats a
lot, one kid who doesn’t eat a lot, I’m always trying to get more nutrient dense food into both
of them. What else do we talk about? We sort of talked about the sun and sunscreen and so
circumstantial. There’s not a lot to take away from that other than when you’re out in the sun,
be careful about what you’re sort of putting on your skin and also be careful about how much
sun you are getting. You don’t want to get sunburned. Yeah, I just really thank you guys for
listening. If you have any questions or follow-ups, just send me an email, Shane@fs.blog. What I’ll do
is I’ll sort of create a little sheet and we can make questions for follow-up for round two. We’re
definitely going to do this again. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen and
learn with me. As you can see, this is my journey and I’m learning along with you, so I really
appreciate it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes,
show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project.
The Furnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book,
Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It’s a transformative
guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making,
and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear.
Until next time.
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Shane Parrish sits down with the renowned biochemist Dr. Rhonda Patrick to explore the intricate world of nutrition and health. Dr. Patrick provides a deep dive into the role micronutrients play in our daily health, detailing how deficiencies and insufficiencies in vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, and amino acids can lead to serious health issues over time. Shane and Dr. Patrick also discuss the science behind deliberate heat exposure. She outlines the optimal sauna conditions—temperature, duration, and frequency—necessary to achieve these health benefits and explains the physiological mechanisms at play.
Rhonda Patrick has a Ph.D. in biomedical science and a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry/chemistry from the University of California, San Diego. She has done extensive research on aging, cancer, and nutrition.
(00:00) Intro
(04:40) A philosophy for nutrition
(15:36) Micronutrients through supplements vs. food
(25:43) Wild-caught vs. farm-raised fish
(28:44) Organic vs. non-organic vegetables
(36:14) On macronutrients
(40:20) How protein levels differ in different foods
(45:27) The best morning smoothie recipe
(54:48) Dr. Patrick grades Shane's ”GOAT” smoothie recipe
(59:14) Grass-fed vs. non-grass fed
(01:04:40) On vitamin D (Is sunscreen killing us more than the sun?)
(01:19:48) Deliberate heat and cold exposure
(01:44:27) Top three behavioral and diet interventions for life and health improvements
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