In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I chat with my good friend, Rhonda, who is 13 days into keto. We talk about the benefits of fasting and how it can be mimicked by a ketogenic diet. I also talk about why I chose to try keto and why I think it could be a great alternative to a traditional diet. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please share it with a friend who needs to hear it! Tweet me and let me know what you thought of it in the comments section below! Timestamps: 3:00 - Why did I start keto? 4:30 - Why I chose a keto diet Why I started fasting How keto has improved my mental endurance 6:15 - When I am in keto, I have more endurance 7:20 - How fast I can I stay focused 8:40 - How long I can stay focused? 9:00 11:30 What is the difference between a fasted and keto Diet 12:15 13:00 My thoughts on keto 15:00 Why I decided to try it out 16:00 What are the benefits 17:00 How I m feeling now? 18:00 Is keto better than a normal diet? 19:00 Do you like it? 22:40 21: What are you feeling? 23:00 Are you feeling good? 26: How do you feel? 27: What do you think about keto's benefits? 29: What is your favorite part of keto ? 32:00 Can you tell me what you would like to do? 35:00 Should I try it again? 36:30 What are your thoughts on it's working for you? 37:30 Do you think it s better? 39:30 Is it better than the best? 45:00 Does it work for me? 41:00 Would you like to try something new? 47:00 Could you try something different? 46:30 How would you like me to try a new food podcast? 51:30 Can you give me some tips on a new recipe? 56:30 Could you give it a try? 55:30 Are you interested in trying it again next week?
00:00:36.000And it's like, why did I start trying it out now?
00:00:40.000Well, I've noticed that when I am in a fasted state, so when I'm in ketosis, when I'm, you know, burning fatty acids and making keto bodies and using them as energy, I'm like on top of my mental game.
00:00:54.000So I've been doing, like when I have any sort of like podcast interviews I'm doing or whatever, you know, I'm always trying to do them fast.
00:01:57.000Pathways that happen as a response to that are beneficial.
00:01:59.000But anyways, so he was talking about when you're in a fasted state, when you haven't eaten, how your nervous system has sort of evolved to become more focused, more alert.
00:02:12.000And that's adaptive because if you can't find food, you have to be alert in order to eat or else you'll die.
00:02:20.000So he's talking about, like, one of the main things that happens is this metabolic switch, is what he calls.
00:02:28.000So you do switch from burning glucose, you know, as a source of energy, to basically, you know, fatty acids are immobilized from your adipose tissue and go to your liver, and you start to, like, oxidize them and use them from energy, and then you make something called ketone bodies as a byproduct.
00:02:45.000Beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate, And most people think about these, well, this is an alternative source of energy.
00:04:17.000I do a lot of time-restricted eating where I'll eat my food anywhere between 8 to 10 hours, and then I'm fasting anywhere between like 14 to 16 hours a day.
00:04:26.000And in order to actually go into this metabolic switch, you have to deplete all of your glycogen levels in your liver and muscle.
00:04:34.000And that usually takes anywhere between 13 to 36 hours, depending on the person's carbohydrate intake, on their physical activity.
00:04:42.000And so, you know, most people never get that metabolic switch.
00:04:46.000Most people are just constantly burning using glucose.
00:04:50.000And then when you're doing that, any fat that you're taking in gets stored as triglycerides and anipose tissue.
00:04:55.000So they're always in this, like, fat storage space.
00:04:58.000Instead of a fat-burning state, right?
00:05:01.000And so, because most people are eating three meals a day and plus snacks, you just, you never get there.
00:05:08.000So with the, you know, anywhere between 14 to 16 hours, that's what I typically was doing.
00:05:16.000I'd noticed that, like, I was really mentally sharp.
00:05:20.000And so as I extended that out a little bit, it was, like, really clear to me that, like, not eating...
00:05:26.000It was good for my brain in terms of I felt smarter.
00:05:32.000It was noticeable, like a nootropic effect, right?
00:05:37.000One of the other things that's probably less well known about beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is one of the major circulating ketones you do make when you're in ketosis, is that it is actually a signaling molecule.
00:05:48.000And this was shown by Dr. Eric Verdin.
00:05:50.000He runs the Buck Institute for Aging in Novato, California.
00:05:57.000Back when he was at UCSF, that beta-hydroxybutyrate activates many different genes, one of them including brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, which I know we've talked about before on the podcast.
00:06:10.000But that's something that is critical for, you know, forming new synapses and for learning in memory.
00:06:16.000I mean, there's all sorts of things that it does.
00:06:31.000It's like, wow, this is something that, like, could be possibly also activating BDNF. Maybe that's partly why.
00:06:37.000I mean, it's a hypothesis, but, you know, it seems like something that people could test and seems kind of, you know, it makes sense, right?
00:06:47.000And so that was something that I was like, wow, what if I could do...
00:06:51.000So I asked Dr. Madsen, I was like, what...
00:06:54.000There's lots of differences between being in a fasted-induced ketosis and a ketogenic diet.
00:06:59.000But there's also a lot of similarities.
00:07:01.000And the similarities are, one, you're making lots of beta-hydroxybutyrate.
00:07:05.000If you do the ketogenic diet right, we can talk about that.
00:07:12.000And then the other thing that overlaps between the two is that you produce a lot of GABA. GABA is the neurotransmitter that's typically more of an inhibitory type of neurotransmitter.
00:07:22.000I'm sure Dr. Dom D'Agostino has talked about this.
00:07:25.000I think I even remember him talking about it before.
00:07:29.000That GABA is increased on both, you know, ketogenic diet and when you're in like a fasting-induced ketosis.
00:07:38.000You know, it kind of has an anxiolytic effect, so, like, helps calm you a little bit, but also seems to affect, and this is what, you know, some researchers think the reason why a ketogenic diet is so beneficial for, like, drug-resistant epilepsy is through GABA,
00:07:53.000because it quiets down the neurons that have been excited through glutamate.
00:07:58.000So, like, right now, we're, like, having an intellectual discussion, and we're, like, engaged, intellectually engaged, and so glutamate's being fired, right?
00:09:01.000I can't tell you how difficult it's been for me to first get to that point.
00:09:07.000It took several days and it's like, I think people, probably like 90 to 98% of people that think they're doing a ketogenic diet, they're not.
00:09:52.000And so my body's used to, like, metabolizing the glucose and doing that whole pathway, you know, we were talking about, like, from carbohydrates.
00:10:00.000And the fat that I'm getting mostly probably is being stored, honestly, as triglycerides.
00:10:05.000But it takes a while for your body to switch to that.
00:10:10.000And I was surprised how long, because I thought, well, I don't need all that refined stuff, so it should be easy.
00:10:20.000And you read about all these foods that are like, okay, vegetables that are keto friendly, you know, like cauliflower, or Brussels sprouts, or a little bit of spinach, or like, I will eat like just a little bit of sauteed spinach, and it'll take me for I will be in like 1.2 millimolar,
00:10:49.000Now I'm doing butter in my coffee, and I'm just trying to get olive oil on everything, and MCT oil on my coffee, and just lots and lots of fat.
00:10:58.000When I started doing that, I was able to get up to 2.2 millimolar, which is good ketosis.
00:11:52.000So your body has mechanisms to make it, you know.
00:11:55.000You can make it from these gluconeogenic amino acids, which are in protein.
00:12:00.000Or you can make it from glycerol, which is like the background of a triglyceride.
00:12:07.000Once you become adapted, and this is something that I know Dr. D'Agostino has talked about a lot, where he's got more of a modified ketogenic diet.
00:12:36.000You know, you read all these recipes, like, I'm going online, I'm trying to do keto recipes and all this, and it's like, none of them work.
00:14:34.000So, one of the things that's interesting about the beta-hydroxybutyrate exogenous ketone esters, and I've tried a few different brands, they all work pretty well.
00:14:48.000For example, if you drink the whole serving, most of them are like 30 mils.
00:14:52.000They can take you from zero to 3.3 millimolar.
00:14:58.000Ketosis that I haven't been able to achieve yet from 12 or 13 days of a ketogenic diet.
00:15:04.000You can experience some of the effects, but it also has the effect of lowering your blood glucose at the same time.
00:15:12.000And it's like, this is something that researchers are actually looking into, like, oh, this could potentially help people that can't regulate their blood sugar levels, you know?
00:15:19.000And this is only through exogenous ketones, esters?
00:15:50.000Because you have no beta-hydroxybutyrate around as the energy source.
00:15:53.000Now, whereas you're in ketosis, actual ketosis, your blood sugar levels are lower, but you're making beta-hydroxybutyrate, right?
00:16:01.000Would there be a benefit to do that, like say if you were going to do something that was like mentally taxing, if you're going to take a test or something like that, would there be a benefit in taking exogenous ketones?
00:16:11.000So I have, I used to kind of use them that way.
00:16:14.000But again, if you don't, it's short-lived.
00:16:17.000Would you take it with some sort of glucose?
00:16:19.000I used to take it with carbohydrates, yeah.
00:16:25.000But even that, like, you know, your blood glucose will peak and then two hours later it's going to go back down.
00:16:29.000So you still, you need to like keep that source going.
00:16:32.000So, and I noticed that like several times.
00:16:35.000It was like, oh, this is good for a very, really the peak of it was like an hour.
00:16:39.000And is there, when you take these ketone esters, is there a number of them, like is there an amount you can take in a day, the amount of times you can take it in a day?
00:17:46.000So my mom has two types of motor dysfunction tremors.
00:17:50.000She has essential tremor, which is the kind of tremor where, like, you know, you kind of just shake, like, when you're doing something or grabbing, like, you know, some spoon or whatever.
00:17:59.000And then she has orthostatic tremor, which is like tremors where if she stands still, her legs shake really fast.
00:18:06.000So she can walk fine, but if she's standing, it's really hard.
00:18:13.000And with all the research on the effects of ketogenic diets on epilepsy, and then there's also some data, and Dr. Mattson talked about this with me because he actually worked with the late Richard Beach on this, who was the guy who invented the ketone ester.
00:20:30.000If glucose is having a hard time getting into her brain and being used by her neurons, maybe that...
00:20:37.000You know, huge sugar rush from the Coke is going to help.
00:20:41.000All the more reason, like, there's been, you know, there's been evidence, both animal and some early clinical evidence, that basically you can take someone with, like, early dementia.
00:20:51.000And one of the earliest signs, actually, of both Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's, I'm not so sure if it's also dementia, but definitely Alzheimer's disease is impaired glucose, like brain use of glucose.
00:21:05.000Like people, like their neurons and stuff are not using glucose well.
00:21:09.000And so like naturally, of course, beta-hydroxybutyrate would be an alternative to that, you know?
00:22:20.000So what I've been doing just these past 12 or 13 days is what I thought was going to really get me in ketosis and be a ketogenic diet, which was protein, avocado, olive oil drizzled all over it, some of the high-fat,
00:22:36.000low-carb nuts like pecans and macadamia nuts.
00:22:41.000And then I thought, oh, you know me, like, micronutrients, I need the magnesium, I need...
00:22:46.000So avocados are great, they're giving a lot of stuff like potassium, but the magnesium, which I'm now supplementing with, is something that's been hard to get without my leafy greens.
00:22:55.000And my leafy greens have been, like, kicking me out of ketosis.
00:23:56.000My multivitamin has all that stuff anyways, but I usually don't have to take extra magnesium because I usually get so much from eating dark leafy greens.
00:24:04.000And so that's like the main one that I've added.
00:24:07.000And you're eating meat pretty much every day?
00:26:21.000I started doing this whole, okay, fasting in the morning, I've noticed I'm more mentally on my game, and then it was like, okay, well, maybe I could just try the ketogenic diet.
00:26:35.000Getting the micronutrient intake has been very important to me, and then, of course, I was pregnant and then I breastfed.
00:26:44.000I did an extended breastfeeding and all this time I didn't want to do any restrictive diets really.
00:26:48.000And then the pandemic hit and it was just like all this excuses.
00:26:54.000But I finally got the motivation once it was very noticeable.
00:27:15.000I haven't actually worked out really hard for 13 days.
00:27:22.000Because you're giving your body a chance to adapt?
00:27:26.000Mostly because I've been so damn busy, but I just haven't been...
00:27:31.000I actually probably should have been working out more because you can actually kick yourself into ketosis by doing that because you deplete your glycogen stores.
00:27:40.000Is there any specific type of workout that's better for that?
00:28:06.000And also from the glycerol backbone of triglycerides.
00:28:09.000You have three fatty acids on a glycerol background.
00:28:11.000When you sort of break that up, that backbone can also do that.
00:28:17.000So strength training can cause you to take amino acids up into muscle.
00:28:23.000And some of those glucogenic amino acids are like some of the branch chain amino acids that you're taking up into muscle.
00:28:30.000So you're basically, if you're strength training, I don't know if this has been shown.
00:28:34.000It's like, you know, a theoretical speculation.
00:28:37.000But like, in theory, you should be taking up some of those amino acids and not converting as much because that's another thing, too much protein.
00:28:45.000Without the fat, it could potentially kick you out.
00:29:30.000And that's the thing that I'm learning is that, I mean, at least initially, like I said, you know, there's there are people out there that have been doing this for a long time.
00:29:37.000And they like, I'm sure they're like, they're much more of an expert, they can tell you exactly what you got to eat.
00:29:42.000And when you can switch over to more of that.
00:34:41.000Like, I don't understand those arguments because, like, you can't convince the whole world to do certain things.
00:34:46.000Now, if the whole world started taking omega supplements and then it became a real issue with, you know, supply and demand, but they're not.
00:34:55.000So like I get so confused when people want everything to be sustainable to the whole world.
00:35:00.000Like when I've told people like, I think that eating wild game is healthier, they'll go, yeah, but that's not sustainable for the whole world.
00:35:08.000The whole world's not doing a lot of things.
00:35:35.000Did you know about, you mentioned the wild game, and like, if we could go back to Omega 3, I'd love to, but like, there have, so there, I've looked at some studies.
00:35:43.000So when the pandemic hit, I like bought a bunch of like, you know, wild elk and like, claim to be wild, you know?
00:35:54.000Well, I was buying that, and then I was buying, like, pasture-raised, this and that, of course.
00:35:58.000And so we looked into, like, the differences of, like, you know, looking at, like, vitamin and mineral profiles and, you know, the omega-3 fatty acid profiles and the fat and the macronut protein and all that.
00:36:10.000And, like, elk, for example, wild, like, wild elk, like, wild game, like, you're getting.
00:36:45.000If you look at it, like the other day I cooked a piece of beef, and then I cooked a bunch of elk, and my family was, you know, we're eating both, and we're looking at the elk versus the beef.
00:37:04.000Your body gets satisfied by it quicker.
00:37:06.000But it's also just that whatever is causing it to be so dark, it's quite evident when you look at that one of them is more attractive to you.
00:38:01.000It is like the conventional fattier as well.
00:38:04.000And before 2017, like that's, for a long time, I was like, the main reason I was avoiding conventional meat was because, you know, these, I don't know what you call them, these farmers, the ones that are growing, like having the cows all packed in and they're, you know,
00:39:07.000Antibiotic resistance is so scary to me because I know several friends that have had MRSA infections and they are absolutely terrifying.
00:39:15.000Because when you do get MRSA, like friends that have had staph infections and it got really bad, the doctors tell you, like, this is touch and go.
00:39:23.000Like, you have to be in the hospital on an IV drip of antibiotics for...
00:39:28.000I had a friend who was in there for weeks and he is a...
00:39:30.000Young, healthy, black belt in jujitsu.
00:40:36.000So these animals, they were feeding them just to get them bigger, and it was causing strains of antibiotic-resistant staph or whatever it is?
00:41:25.000I think I looked into this years ago when I was into that whole thing.
00:41:30.000I think there is a mechanism that's known, but I don't remember exactly what it is.
00:41:34.000It probably has to do with microbiome composition.
00:41:36.000Certain bacteria probably go away, and other ones are making you get the energy, because you can harvest energy better from certain bacteria in your gut.
00:41:48.000So it probably has to do something with that, but I just don't remember the exact.
00:42:05.000So, like, I had a great uncle that, you know, just died of a staph infection.
00:42:09.000Like, he went in for, you know, some kind of type 2 diabetes complication, like kidney or something, and got a staph infection while he was in there, and that's what ultimately took him down.
00:42:18.000There was a Nature paper published, like, literally right around, it was like a year and a half ago, and it was, like, titled something like, Some Medieval Treatment to, you know, Antibiotic Resistance or something.
00:42:32.000And it was like all these components used in like chimchurri sauce, you know, where it's like garlic and basil and parsley.
00:42:39.000And, you know, a lot of these plants do have antimicrobial activity.
00:42:44.000Well, you talked about it, the issue that you had with staph that you actually fixed with using garlic on the actual infection.
00:42:52.000This is a total anecdote, and I had never tested staph.
00:42:55.000The actual abscess to know if it was actually MRSA. But my anecdote goes as this.
00:45:10.000That was a big one that was showing to have an effect, particularly on MRSA. And so I was putting tea tree oil.
00:45:17.000And then I was also taking grapefruit seed extract orally because that was shown to have an effect.
00:45:23.000And I was taking EGCG. Which is, like, from green tea.
00:45:27.000It also was shown to have, like, these are all, you know, studies in vitro showing it has an effect on MRSA. You know, grain of salt.
00:45:35.000It's like, okay, in vitro, you put it on it, it's like, it kills it with a dose of X. Can you explain in vitro to people that it's just cell culture?
00:45:41.000Yeah, so you basically put something in cells that are in a Petri dish, you know?
00:45:45.000So it's hard to extrapolate Something like that to a human.
00:45:52.000And I was taking this stuff, like the oral stuff, like the garlic and the grapefruit seed extract, and I was taking it every one to two hours.
00:46:01.000Is there any benefit to taking fresh garlic versus taking it in a pill form?
00:46:05.000Or even using it as, like you were saying, you took the capsules.
00:46:09.000Would there be benefit in taking actual, real garlic?
00:46:13.000Well, the garlic, real garlic is great, too.
00:46:15.000Once this thing went away for good, I was like, oh, garlic is the bomb.
00:46:19.000So I would eat garlic any time I would feel any sort of sick or anything like that.
00:49:12.000So I went to some place and they do this thread and they get the hair and do this thing where they put it around the hair for hair and pull it out.
00:49:38.000And of course, me and my teacher oil, like, especially at the time, after I was like, after I had like had that, you know, staph infection, whatever it was, go away.
00:49:47.000It was like, teacher oil, anything, any bump, zit, whatever, teacher oil.
00:51:41.000And there's videos of guys getting their gynomastica removed.
00:51:46.000It's basically, like, there's a whole culture on YouTube of, like, these steroid guys, you know, that, like, show all the damage that they've done to their body through steroids, and one of them is guys that have had their boobs cut open to take out this gynomastica, and it's just these big,
00:53:22.000I'm pretty sure that is, unless it's like coming from some strange, you know, weird hormonal imbalance, just a natural irregularity of the body, it's coming from steroids.
00:53:35.000It's very common with guys who've done a lot of steroids.
00:54:20.000I have become absolutely obsessed with sauna use over the last, I guess it started because of you, and then over the last, through the pandemic, the last year and a half or so, I'm in every day.
00:54:38.000I mean, I have to be wrecked to take a day off of sauna use.
00:54:41.000Damn, you're getting all the benefits.
00:54:43.000Even when I come home at night, like last night I had a show and I'm out with all these fucking weirdos with no masks on.
00:54:49.000So I'm like, as soon as I got home, I cooked myself.
00:54:52.000I cooked myself like 15-20 minutes at 185 degrees and just deep breaths.
00:54:58.000There's that paper that I sent you about COVID-19 and the therapeutic intervention of using sauna and this idea that When your body heats up like that, you're trying to kill off a virus when you're sick.
00:55:16.000If you're sick with a viral infection and your body gets a fever, your body's trying to kill that.
00:55:22.000And this idea, this paper is exploring the use of sauna to intervene, to stop it from ever infecting your body, both through your nasal passages, through your airway, and also just through the actual heating of the body.
00:55:55.000It also activates heat shock proteins, and heat shock proteins have a role in your immune system response and how your immune system responds.
00:56:03.000So it plays a role, particularly in innate immunity.
00:56:08.000Which is the kind of immunity that is important when you first see a pathogen that you've never seen before.
00:56:14.000This isn't like an antibody type of response.
00:56:16.000It's like killing of it, you know, before that.
00:56:19.000But there's interesting evidence, I'm sure we've talked about this, coming out of Dr. Jari Lalkonen's lab in Finland.
00:56:27.000This was a few years ago, where he looked at sauna use and, like, incidence of pneumonia.
00:56:35.000And people that like, so in Finland, saunas are ubiquitous.
00:56:38.000You know, most people have one at their house.
00:56:39.000Most people use it at least once, you know, at least once a week.
00:56:43.000But then you have people that are using it like two to three or four to seven.
00:56:46.000And so he always kind of stratifies the data based on like frequency of use.
00:56:51.000And he found that people that use the sauna four to seven times a week were 40% less likely to get pneumonia.
00:56:57.000And this was after like correcting for all sorts of like other lung diseases and other health factors and Exercise and all that stuff.
00:57:05.000At the end of the day, it's a correlative study, right?
00:57:08.000But I thought that was interesting because there's also all these other studies that have been done in the 80s looking at the effects of the sauna on the lung function and helping with a variety of factors of lung function.
00:57:58.000You know, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, respiratory problems, all that stuff.
00:58:03.000And so we argue that sauna use should be up there with things like exercise and good sleep and good diet, you know, things that are known to improve your quality of life.
00:58:14.000There's just tons of evidence, things that we've talked about before, but, you know, talking about the cardiovascular disease improvements, how sauna...
00:58:21.000One of the things I'm most excited about, like I've been getting my mom in the sauna...
00:58:26.000And she's been sedentary, you know, like, her whole life, basically.
00:58:29.000She's overweight, and, like, there's no getting her on a Peloton.
00:58:34.000There's no getting her to go for a jog.
00:59:34.000I mean, granted, there are some contraindications, like certain, if you have certain, particularly certain heart disease risks, that could be a contraindication, meaning you shouldn't do it.
00:59:46.000But by and large, it improves a lot of cardiovascular things.
00:59:50.000Can you mitigate those risks by having a slightly lower temperature, like instead of going to 185, maybe going to 160 or something like that, where it's a more mild form of heat?
01:00:02.000I know that like, to me, that would make sense.
01:00:05.000And this was, you have to like discuss this with your physician.
01:00:07.000But like, for example, people that have like arrhythmias, there could be a very mild contraindication with arrhythmias.
01:00:15.000And so the question is, you know, Would a lower temperature, like 165, which is what I've been doing for my mom, like mostly because she's not adapted to the heat at all.
01:00:26.000And so like, you have to adapt before you can like do 20 minutes at 185. You know, like it takes takes a while for people that aren't used to even raising their core body temperature when they're exercising, you know.
01:00:36.000So again, it's mimicking a lot of the physiological aspects, including that core body temperature going up, you know, the blood flow changes going to your skin and sweating, heart rate, you know, your heart rate gets elevated while you're in the sauna, and then blood pressure goes down after.
01:00:53.000Like, these things have been compared head to head.
01:00:54.000So it does mimic moderate aerobic activity.
01:00:57.000And it's, like, the only way that I'm able to get my mom in there.
01:01:00.000And then there's, like, the brain benefits, you know.
01:01:06.000People that are depressed, like my mom actually has, she's been diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
01:01:13.000And you look at, she's got a variety of SNPs.
01:01:17.000There are certain SNPs that she has that are consistent, like in the serotonin transporter and things like that.
01:01:23.000You can look and see there's evidence that she has things that have been linked to major depressive disorder.
01:01:48.000What they called whole body hyperthermia, which is basically, they were using this really expensive device to elevate people's core body temperature to like 101 degrees Fahrenheit.
01:02:02.000People that were, they were elevating their core body temperature a little bit, so they thought they were getting the treatment, but they weren't.
01:02:09.000So it was- How were they elevating the core body temperature?
01:03:25.000So Dr. Ashley Mason, she is at UCSF, and she specializes in non-pharmacological treatments for depression or sleep or And she actually trained with Dr. Charles Rezon, and she sort of carried on the torch.
01:03:38.000And I'm collaborating with her now, which is really cool, on a clinical trial where she's basically taken...
01:04:15.000They're getting so hot that, like, you know, technicians are having to, like, cool them down with wet towels, you know, and, like, while they're in this thing.
01:04:22.000Because they have to be in to that degree where they're getting, like, a fever.
01:04:36.000And that's kind of, like, you have to, like, show that before you can, like, go on to the next step and use it as a potential clinical treatment for depression.
01:04:43.000So now the study that she's going to be starting any day, which I'm collaborating with her on, is she's going to be recruiting clinically depressed patients or participants and giving them this treatment.
01:04:58.000And it's going to be a dose escalation.
01:05:00.000In other words, she's going to try to do it at least eight weeks.
01:05:03.000I mentioned the first one was one time.
01:05:07.000So they're going to be, you know, see if they can even do this, like if they can handle it, right?
01:05:12.000And she's going to combine it with cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, because that's a known treatment to help with depression.
01:05:19.000And you can't start any study without giving like a treatment that's known to work because it's like unethical.
01:05:25.000But what I'm excited about is the biomarkers that we're going to measure, like, you know, brain drive neurotrophic factor.
01:05:32.000That's been shown to play a role in depression.
01:05:34.000And it's one of the major things, like exercise increases it, and there's been studies showing hot baths increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF. So, you know, it's like, well, let's see if the sauna's doing that.
01:05:46.000Like, that would be one potential mechanism.
01:05:48.000And then there's a variety of other, we'll mention, heat shock proteins.
01:05:51.000They've been shown to play a role in mood and animal studies, and a variety of inflammatory biomarkers.
01:05:58.000Because what was interesting about that pilot study by Dr. Charles Rezon was that he found the people that had the most robust antidepressant effect had higher levels of something called IL-6.
01:06:39.000Super exciting because, like, you know, like, if this could be a potential treatment, getting people – and, like, I know you and I have talked about this, like, probably a million times, but, like, getting depressed people to go exercise – Like, it's not easy.
01:07:06.000What do you think your body temperature is getting to if you're at like what I do, which is like 185 degrees for 20-25 minutes?
01:07:14.000It gets rough, especially at 25 minutes.
01:07:19.000The last five minutes are really hard.
01:07:21.000Yeah, so I asked Dr. Mason about this because she's like gone around into different like banyas and stuff in San Francisco and like had her friends like trying to like get the rectal thermometer and see like, do this or do that.
01:08:48.000One thing I found is I can't stay in the ice bath as long after I've gotten out of the sauna, which is really odd because I almost feel like I'm going to pass out.
01:08:58.000When I get to three minutes in the ice bath after 20 plus minutes in the sauna, my vision is shaky.
01:11:52.000A thing I bought on Amazon, it's a camera that's attached to an ear cleaner, and you have an app on your phone, and you can actually stick this thing in your ear, and you can see the inside of your ear.
01:12:21.000I've got really small ear canals, and I, like, get problems with that.
01:12:26.000And also, like, earplugs hurt me because my ear canals are so small I have to, like, get the, like, baby ones or, like, I need to try to get the custom-made ones because, like, I can't wear that.
01:13:10.000I'm like, what can you really hear with those goofy-ass mangled ears?
01:13:14.000Because if you take your ears and you just go like this, and then you talk, and then I'm folding my ear, and then go like that and open it, it's very different between what it sounds like, like this, and what it sounds like, like this.
01:13:28.000So they're like, their whole life is like, the reason why your ear's shaped like that is so that you can kind of capture sound, right?
01:14:19.000It just vibrates on your bones instead of into your ear.
01:14:22.000It vibrates on your bone and gets into your head, which is like, you know, if you're in the shower, you do exactly what you were just doing.
01:14:27.000You can still hear the rain hitting your skull, it's just your hearing, or the water, I'm sorry, it's just different.
01:14:33.000But I'm way curious onto someone who has that ear problem, if this creates a better experience, or if it's just like, yeah, I can hear it now, finally.
01:14:44.000You really should drain it right away.
01:14:47.000But I know quite a few friends who've had their ears operated on, where they literally fillet your ear and then they cut out all the calcified blood, which is what it is, right?
01:14:59.000It's like blood pools up in the tissue of your ear and it becomes calcified.
01:16:09.000And so what you should do, what a lot of guys do is they'll get a syringe and right after it happens, like literally I've seen guys do this at the gym where they have a buddy stick a syringe in their ear and suck the pus and blood out like at the gym.
01:16:25.000You know, they just have this thing and pull it.
01:16:27.000Like see if you can find a video of a guy.
01:17:43.000So what happens to me is I can go in the ice bath and I thought I went in the ice bath once for 20 minutes, and I thought I had fucked myself up.
01:18:52.000And now, what I do is, I just do, if I'm going to do the cold, like I did a seven-day challenge recently, where I just get in.
01:19:00.000Dan does this thing like he gets in we keep it like 49 degrees Fahrenheit and he gets in for like 12 minutes I mean he's just in there like he loves it He does it like first thing in the morning.
01:19:09.000Sometimes he does it before bed helps him sleep I Kid like I'm like in there like one minute and I'm like cuz I'm just not adapted You know like I'm not I'm not adapted and I don't have as much brown adipose tissue You know which you know is a good thing if you but you lose it pretty quick like Dan didn't do it for a while and I think?
01:19:49.000So you're going from, like, dilation to constriction, dilation to constriction.
01:19:53.000And, like, you know, a lot of what regulates that is, you know, norepinephrine, which is a hormone and also a neurotransmitter, depending on if you're releasing it, you know.
01:20:02.000Um, if it's being released in the plasma versus in the brain, but part of what it does is cause vasoconstriction.
01:20:08.000And it's, you know, there's just not enough research that has been done on going from the hot to the cold and certainly not going back and forth.
01:20:18.000But in Finland, you know, like at least 10% of the population there of the people that are using saunas do that.
01:20:25.000Not everyone does it, but like a good percentage of people do it.
01:20:28.000You know, like they have gone over to Finland and done it.
01:20:31.000Um, But, you know, so there's just not a lot of evidence.
01:20:35.000And, you know, on the one hand, like, you can feel really good, but, like, there's an amount of stress that, I mean, maybe it's just something from going from the hot to the cold and regulates your blood pressure, right?
01:23:52.000And this is like one of the reasons why it's so cardioprotective among others is that it really helps regulate blood pressure.
01:23:58.000But if you think about it, if your blood pressure is already dipped down below baseline, you know, studies showing that's what happens with the sauna, then you get into something that's vasoconstricting.
01:26:21.000That's that's what I sometimes I'll do a podcast because I never ever ever get to listen to anything if I don't but the majority of time for me I sit and like it's like my time it's like my my time to like reflect you know sometimes I'll even like rehearse things like a presentation or something and like I've done that for a long time I've done that since grad school listen to sets like comedy sets that I've done because it'll help me like tune in for the next one like I was doing that a lot In
01:26:51.000the middle of the pandemic, because I wasn't doing much stand-up, and then I would have to do a show.
01:26:55.000And so I would have to listen to old shows and sort of re-remember my material and get the beats and the rhythm.
01:27:02.000You don't want to just go on stage completely cold.
01:27:16.000That's gotta be, I mean, you're so experienced now doing that, but like, I, like listening to myself, I used to do, I don't do it anymore.
01:27:23.000I mean, time, you know, everyone's excuse, but, you know, when I go on a podcast, like when I, you know, this is my 10th time on this podcast.
01:27:41.000But you learn about the mistakes, things you could do better.
01:27:46.000It's really a way to improve in this aspect, your public speaking, and the way you communicate certain things and how you shouldn't communicate them maybe.
01:29:53.000What new information about the sauna or what some new revelations?
01:29:59.000I think mostly the new stuff is the mood, like the actual evidence on depression.
01:30:05.000But it really, this review article is just a very comprehensive, you can't, like people don't write review articles that are really comprehensive in a field anymore because like there's no money, you know, no grant money in doing that.
01:30:22.000And so you can't find a good review article that just covers everything, you know, like in a certain field, like with the sauna.
01:30:31.000Like, there's review articles on the sauna and cardiovascular health, a lot of that, but this goes into the all-cause mortality, you know, the cardiovascular benefits.
01:30:41.000It goes into the brain benefits and some mechanisms like, you know, the effects on the opioid system.
01:30:48.000It goes into all these different mechanisms like heat shock proteins and, you know, how you – there's lots of cool figures in there too and how you can basically become heat adapted and some of that has to do with you make heat shock proteins at a lower temperature.
01:31:03.000You know, it goes into like what special populations should – Be cautious when they go into the sauna and how long and what temperature and all that you get these benefits that are found in the literature.
01:31:13.000It's just a really comprehensive body of literature, I think.
01:31:19.000And so I'm just pretty excited about that.
01:31:23.000It's also open access to public, so it's not paywalled.
01:31:43.000I think that's basically the gist of it.
01:31:46.000It's not necessarily something new so much as like Very comprehensive and covering, oh, the muscle mass effects.
01:31:54.000Like there's studies on sauna, you know, helping preserve muscle mass and how that we talk, we argue how that has effects for, you know, age-related sarcopenia.
01:32:03.000And so, and that has to do with heat shock proteins as well.
01:32:49.000You know, there are studies showing that if you combine exercise with the sauna, you have even more improvement in your cardiorespiratory fitness than if you exercise alone, which cardiorespiratory fitness is like, you know, it's a big indicator of your physical fitness and it's also an indicator of your overall health.
01:33:09.000So, there's additive effects happening with, you know, doing aerobic exercise plus doing the sauna.
01:33:15.000I also think there's, you know, potentially additive effects for weight training and doing the sauna as well, where you're basically, you know, you're not only, like, with weight training, you're increasing your muscle mass, right?
01:33:28.000There's a growth of muscle hypertrophies happening.
01:33:31.000But with the sauna, it's really good when you're not doing that work to basically increase your muscle mass.
01:33:40.000It's preventing it from degrading, which is like a balance.
01:33:44.000Now, there's a time after weight training where you should not get in the ice bath, right?
01:33:51.000So we just actually released a 23-page article on cold exposure on our website, and it covers all this.
01:33:58.000It covers things that we've been talking about, like norepinephrine, but it also covers this exercise training controversy, which I know you know I've talked about in the past, but Yeah.
01:34:09.000More of this needs to be worked out, but it seems as though doing an ice bath immediately after strength training, resistance training workout, blunts some of the hypertrophy effects.
01:34:21.000And when I say media, it's like five, ten minutes.
01:34:25.000I personally think, and this is a theory, it's a hypothesis, this hasn't been shown, but because the cold Really blunts inflammation and it causes vasoconstriction.
01:34:39.000Your immune molecules aren't traveling to the site like muscle as much as they would be.
01:34:49.000Part of the resistance training causes an inflammatory response.
01:34:54.000And this inflammatory response, including activation of macrophages, which are a type of immune cell, Is important for the increase in what's called IGF-1.
01:35:03.000It's a growth factor that you make in your muscle in response to exercise.
01:35:06.000It's important for, you know, protein synthesis and hypertrophy.
01:35:09.000And so if you look at graphs of like the kinetics of IGF-1, it peaks.
01:35:16.000After about an hour, after resistance training, and then, you know, starts to go back and normalize.
01:35:22.000And so I personally think that if you do cold exposure within that hour after your resistance training, you might be blunting that inflammatory effect that's important for IGF-1.
01:35:35.000Whereas the sauna would actually benefit you.
01:36:23.000To be honest, we don't have any evidence to know for sure.
01:36:25.000I personally think that if you're waiting until later, like several hours later, you're already getting, you know, you're Anti-inflammatory effect has already been activated through the inflammation induced by exercise.
01:36:38.000You know, so I can't see why doing the cold would then blunt that because you've already gone through it, you know?
01:36:46.000But without actual data, it's hard to know, right?
01:36:55.000Well, through your discussions on this podcast and through many other discussions that have come out of that, I think there's been a giant rush, a giant change in the way people think of sauna and how many more people are using sauna.
01:37:11.000I can't tell you how many of my friends who never had any interest in using sauna before are now like complete sauna junkies.
01:38:01.000Do you know the difference between what the omega-3 index is versus like just measuring your omega-3?
01:38:06.000So omega-3 index specifically refers to measuring your omega-3 in red blood cells versus what most companies will do.
01:38:14.000They'll look at like plasma phospholipid.
01:38:16.000And the omega-3 index is important because it's a long-term marker for blood glucose.
01:38:21.000Your red blood cells, you accumulate it in the cell membrane, and your red blood cells take 28 days before they turn over.
01:38:28.000And so whereas if you were to have some sardines or whatever, and then go get your omega-3 levels measured...
01:38:35.000It could be, it could skew the data such that like, oh, I've got great omega-3 levels, you know, because plasma phospholipids are kind of like the short term, like they're really responsive to your diet.
01:38:47.000Whereas the actual, it's kind of like HbA1c, long term marker for blood glucose levels versus just measuring your blood glucose levels like, well, you could have just eaten, that's why they're high and So like your HbA1c is like that long-term marker.
01:39:00.000So omega-3 index is kind of like that.
01:39:03.000Dr. Bill Harris, and he had a collaborator, I forget his name, but they kind of co-invented this back in, gosh, early 2000s or something.
01:39:14.000But he argues that The omega-3 index is, like, predictive for cardiovascular disease, like, as much, if not better than, like, cholesterol.
01:39:25.000And he's had a couple of interesting studies that came out on mortality and looking at the omega-3 index.
01:39:33.000So, like, there's one study that he did was published last April, so a few months ago, and it was, like, 17 different studies included, and he looked at the omega-3 index.
01:39:42.000And he found that people that had an omega-3 index above 7% versus on the low end, which was less than 4%, they were 17% likely to die prematurely of all causes,
01:40:16.000So if you're in that high group versus low, so higher than 7% versus less than 4, you're also 21% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.
01:40:26.000So that was the first study that was interesting.
01:40:28.000And the premature all-cause thing was what got me.
01:40:31.000I was like, they're less likely to get in some kind of crazy accident that causes them to die.
01:40:37.000So as you and I know, omega-3 affects the brain.
01:40:41.000But the other study he just published last June or something, and it was a Framingham study.
01:41:53.000Because I take massive, I take, you know, four grams a day of fish oil, two grams of EPA, two grams of DHA. But anyways, you know, Japan has a five-year life expectancy increase over people in the United States where you're talking an average omega-3 index of 5% versus like 10. Interesting,
01:43:31.000Yeah, it definitely has to be refrigerated.
01:43:32.000There's lots of oxidation that's possible from polyunsaturated fatty acids, which EPA and DHA are.
01:43:40.000But a lot of the therapeutic studies, like they've done randomized controlled trials showing that you can drop cardiovascular death by 25% if you give people with a various range of heart diseases You know,
01:43:56.000four grams of a purified form of EPA. It's called VASIPA. It's a prescription strength.
01:44:02.000VASIPA. V-A-S-C EPA. And it is a high EPA. It's a purified EPA. And you can get it prescribed from your doctor if your triglycerides are over a certain level.
01:44:16.000I don't know what that level is, but it's something that's like a prescription strength, which I actually want to get my mom taking.
01:44:25.000So what I'm getting at is the therapeutic effects for many of these cardiovascular-related diseases happen at a high dose, where taking a microalgae, like I don't know how many spoonfuls, like how many tablespoons or whatever you're going to have to take,
01:45:12.000Because when you eat rancid fish oil, you know it tastes like gross.
01:45:17.000It tastes disgusting and smells gross.
01:45:19.000There's a website called the International Fish Oil Standards, IFSO, and they sort of like, they rank, I mean not rank, they They analyze data from lots and lots of different companies that make fish oil.
01:45:31.000And they give you all this data based on concentration of EPA and DHA that's actually in the supplement.
01:45:39.000What's called total oxidation levels, TOTOX, and that's important.
01:45:44.000You want less than 10. It has the mercury levels, like PCBs.
01:45:49.000And you can scroll through their website and look at each product sheet.
01:45:53.000And you have to kind of do it often because they update this every so often.
01:45:57.000I've put together like I've gone through them all and made an excel sheet on like all the different brands and like again like the concentration and the the total oxidation and the mercury and all that and just I'm actually just getting ready to post a like screenshot video of me doing that like on YouTube showing people and like what I think some of the top brands are I have no affiliation it's just me helping people try to analyze this data because they've said it like a million times on social media and people still What
01:47:39.000I don't know if it's necessary to separate them.
01:47:41.000There was some, like, you know, evidence conflicting in the literature, like, oh, maybe DHA, like, if you take it at the same time, can compete with the EPA or, you know, something like that.
01:49:41.000So you're better off taking a vitamin D supplement in addition...
01:49:45.000In my opinion, yes, because I think having vitamin D levels between 40 and 60 nanograms per mil Is optimal.
01:49:54.000And for me to get that for myself, I have to take 4,000 to 5,000.
01:49:57.000Well, depending on how much sun exposure.
01:50:00.000Sometimes in the summer I can go with less, but it really depends on the season.
01:50:05.000That was one of the initial factors that they found with people that were in the ICU with COVID, that a large percentage of them were deficient in vitamin D. Right.
01:50:14.000I mean, so the COVID, you know, there are lifestyle factors, I think, that are important for And possibly, you know, helping with severity.
01:50:27.000The problem is, like, you know, doing a clinical trial with someone that already has COVID, and then like trying to give them vitamin D, like, you're not going to fix the severity of COVID, like with...
01:50:55.000So you can give them something that makes it so their liver doesn't have to do that work.
01:51:00.000And there's been a couple of studies showing it helps with people that have already had COVID. But again, there's a large actual clinical study that's ongoing right now being done by Dr. Joanne Manson.
01:51:56.000I mean, vaccines are probably the best way to prevent yourself from both getting and having a severe COVID. We could talk about it in a minute if you want.
01:52:06.000But the omega-3 thing is really interesting because there was an in silico study That show DHA, one of the main marine omega-3 fatty acids, keeps the spike protein.
01:52:20.000So there's a receptor binding domain on the spike protein.
01:52:23.000And that receptor binding domain swings around.
01:52:27.000It goes from open to closed, open to closed.
01:52:29.000And there's like, you know, a few of them on a spike protein, like three or something.
01:52:34.000And when they're closed, like this, they can't bind to the ACE-T receptor.
01:52:54.000But I was like, oh, that's interesting.
01:52:56.000Again, for me, I'm an omega-3 enthusiast in a way.
01:52:59.000I do think there's a huge effect on resolving inflammation, not just But after your immune system's been activated, there's the protectants, the resolvins, the specialized pro-resolving mediators, the SPMs.
01:53:12.000These things are resolving the inflammation so that your immune system doesn't go crazy and become in this hyper-inflammatory.
01:53:21.000I think this potentially could be how it's affecting longevity.
01:53:25.000I think that inflammation is a major source of driving the aging process.
01:53:30.000And there's been studies that have looked at, for example, people that are centenarians, that live to be 100. People that are elderly, so like 80s.
01:53:39.000People that are semi-supercentenarians are like 105. And then the supercentenarians, 110. And they've looked at a variety of biomarkers, telomere length, immunosenescence, you know, glucose, HbA1c, cholesterol, blah, blah, blah, like the whole thing, right?
01:53:54.000And the only thing that could predict a person going to each stage to living To be either then a centenarian and then later a semi-supercentenarian and then later a supercentenarian was decreasing inflammation.
01:54:08.000Like none of the other things predicted each, you know, going to the next stage.
01:54:12.000So that, to me, is very interesting as well.
01:54:15.000The inflammation was like a huge predictor of not only like living the longest, but also cognitive function as well.
01:54:22.000It was like the biggest predictor of cognitive function.
01:56:10.000He said they were giving him three salmon steaks and a big, like, I forgot how much, but, like, It totaled 25 grams, but salmon oil, pure salmon oil.
01:57:18.000But it does, the omega-3s do affect your leukotrienes and prostaglandins and things that do affect, you know, like, platelet aggregation and stuff.
01:57:27.000But, like, Maybe it could be bad if you have some kind of disorder or you're taking some kind of crazy blood thinning medication.
01:57:37.000He argues that's really not even that much of a concern.
01:57:42.000The other concern is that people that already have a cardiovascular problem, there's been a small increase in arrhythmias in some of these people and it's not known why.
01:57:58.000And in fact, if you look at, for example, AFib, the end result of AFib that's bad is stroke.
01:58:05.000And omega-3s have been shown to reduce stroke incidence.
01:58:08.000So it's like, well, if it was, like, really causing AFib or doing something bad, then, like, you should see an increased stroke incidence or, like, no effect.
01:58:15.000But no, it decreases stroke incidence.
01:58:24.000It's like we got to, like, repeat that.
01:58:27.000So, you know, it could be that taking very, very high doses.
01:58:31.000In the studies that that was found, they were taking 4 grams of pure EPA. So it could be maybe there's something to super high doses we don't know about.
01:58:43.000Especially over prolonged periods of time, maybe.
01:58:45.000And these were people with heart conditions as well.
01:58:47.000And yeah, so this was like, these studies were five years.
01:58:50.000This is so fascinating to me that as long as people have been studying nutrition, as long as people have been studying the human body, that there's still so much speculation as to what you should take and when you should take it and how much.
01:59:04.000And people like you who study it constantly are still learning new things all the time.
01:59:09.000Almost every time you come in here, you're like, okay, so there's a new study, and then you're telling me about this and you're telling me about that.
01:59:15.000And it's really kind of wild when you think about the average person That I would venture to say, I don't know what percentage of the average population even takes vitamins.
02:01:01.000Like every time I talk to you, you don't even have any notes in front of you and just rattling off this shit and it's like it's constant and it never ends.
02:01:08.000There's constantly new studies, there's constantly new benefits that are unearthed.
02:01:12.000It's like, it's so hard to keep abreast of all this stuff.
02:02:00.000And then it's like you actually measure something like a biomarker like You know, beta carotene or, you know, something, and you realize, oh, they eat a lot more vegetables than they thought, or they eat a lot less because it's a biomarker, right?
02:02:15.000So you have these questionnaires or, you know, the clinical studies are being done poorly.
02:02:21.000Not only is it hard to keep up with the data, you have crappy data with salacious headlines like, oh, vitamins do nothing.
02:02:29.000But, you know, the reality is the study is like, okay, we never measured anything.
02:02:32.000We didn't measure, you know, vitamin D, which you can make from the sun, and everyone has different levels at the start of the study.
02:02:37.000And we gave them a supplement where it's like, you know, 400 IUs, where it doesn't even raise your blood levels, anything.
02:02:42.000And then we looked at this endpoint, X, like cancer incidents.
02:02:50.000You know, but makes the headlines and, you know, there are some healthcare practitioners that read those and then they get this idea that, well, they do nothing because I read that study they did, you know.
02:03:02.000And in some cases they're randomized placebo-controlled studies where they are giving a placebo and they are randomizing it and they're doing all that, but they're not measuring the blood levels.
02:04:09.000And then if you think about like to have your immune system in check, to have your body functioning in check, to have your muscle repairing correctly, to have all these factors and to have all your nutrient levels balanced and adjusted accordingly and to make sure that you're getting All your needs as far as your essential fatty acids and your vitamins and your nutrients and your minerals and all these different things.
02:05:20.000I know so little about it, and I try to pay attention to it as much as possible.
02:05:24.000And when I talk to someone like you, I'm aware of how little I really know.
02:05:28.000And it's so complex, and it's so changing and evolving, and there's always new information that's being released.
02:05:35.000Yeah, and I'm also aware of how little I know every time something new comes out.
02:05:39.000Like, there's a question, and I'm like diving into it.
02:05:42.000I'm like, oh, I didn't know any of this.
02:05:44.000So, you know, there's always information coming out.
02:05:47.000Just overall health is so important, and yet there's so little consideration given to it by most people.
02:05:55.000And it's one of the most confusing things about human beings.
02:05:59.000Like, when people are sick, the thing that they want more than anything is to be healthy.
02:06:04.000Like, oh my god, I wish I was healthy.
02:06:06.000But then, once they get healthy, they go back to the same eating habits, the same sedentary lifestyle, drinking alcohol, cigarettes, all the same shit that got them in the mess in the first place,
02:06:22.000and they don't change much about their nutrition, they don't change much about their exercise habits, when it has such a massive effect On the quality of your life, the longevity of your ability to exercise.
02:06:34.000I'm 54 now, and I really haven't lost any ability to exercise rigorously, to do it the same way.
02:06:43.000One of the things I did is I completed that Israeli protocol for hyperbaric chambers where you did 90 days.
02:06:53.000I did 60 sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days.
02:06:59.000Lengthen your telomeres that's appropriate to or approximate to a 20-year decrease in your biological age.
02:07:57.000But it's because of actions, because of things I do.
02:08:02.000And I just don't understand people that don't want to be healthier, and I really wish it was more accessible.
02:08:10.000I really wish it was much more common to get comprehensive blood work, and much more common to get nutritional counseling, and much more common for people to be rigorously exercising, to do it on a regular basis,
02:08:25.000and to realize that when your body is more resilient, When your body's fit, when your cardiovascular shape is higher, you're just better off.
02:08:50.000Trying to not have these comorbidities like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.
02:08:58.000There's a huge lifestyle factor involved in obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure.
02:09:06.000There's definitely things that can be done, you know, that help with that, you know, that help when we were talking about sauna and exercise.
02:09:14.000And, you know, there's even like, you know, other ketogenic diet does help with like weight loss, but there's other strategies for that as well.
02:09:21.000And having the vitamin D, having enough vitamin D and omega-3s, like, you know, to me, it seems like, yeah, it should be beneficial.
02:10:16.000And I do think even with, you know, COVID-19, there's obviously data showing that, you know, people that are obese or have a comorbidity, they're more likely to have a severe form of it.
02:10:27.000And it's like twice as much in some cases, you know, it's not like, you know, something like a vaccine would do.
02:12:25.000Do you know anyone that's had bad reactions to vaccines?
02:12:28.000I personally, interestingly, the only, I know a lot of people that have gotten vaccinated, and the only person that I know that had something was like, she had a headache for like a week and a half, and then it went away.
02:12:41.000Oh no, another person I knew had nausea for a couple of weeks.
02:12:45.000They were nauseous more frequently, but it went away.
02:12:49.000Do you think you would feel differently if you knew someone that had a stroke?
02:13:35.000But with the stroke or the heart attack, you have to...
02:13:40.000So if you're trying to compare, for example, Let's say, you know, you're looking at actual COVID-19 deaths and from heart attacks and strokes, and you're looking at the vaccine adverse events reporting site VAERS, right?
02:14:09.000Most of those people are above the age of 50, and certainly most are above 65. But every 30 seconds, someone's dying from cardiovascular disease.
02:14:18.000Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a stroke.
02:14:22.000Every four minutes, they die from a stroke.
02:14:24.000But this is also very, very rare in young people, particularly young, healthy people.
02:14:28.000But one thing that has occurred in young, healthy people that have been vaccinated is myocarditis.
02:14:34.000And some people have had blood clots, like quite a few blood clots.
02:15:47.000I talked about vaccines in one of my Q&As I do, and they went and got it, and they were younger and ended up having some kind of myocarditis.
02:16:14.000It's inflammation of the heart can lead to that, yeah.
02:16:17.000But it's happening in young athletes with COVID-19, like, and it's happening, like, more frequently than people that are getting vaccinated.
02:16:26.000So it's still like, well, if the person that got vaccinated, look, it is a risk, but it's still pretty rare, and it also is treatable.
02:16:34.000In most cases, they treat it, like, within a few days, and it's isolated.
02:16:38.000Why do you think that people, like, there are people that are completely asymptomatic when they get COVID, or if they do get it, it's very mild.
02:16:47.000Do you think that's because they have a lower viral load that they've been infected with?
02:16:53.000Or do you think it's their immune system that fights it off?
02:18:21.000And most of it, this is happening in teenagers to like 50. Most of the people that are older are not getting this long-haul COVID. It's like happening in people that are mostly not being hospitalized.
02:18:30.000People that don't get hospitalized originally, like, they have mostly, like, pretty mild symptoms, in some cases even asymptomatic.
02:18:36.000You know, there was a study published in The Lancet, like, last year, showing there was a seven-fold increase in stroke incidents in people under 50 in the United States compared to the year before that, before the pandemic start.
02:18:49.000And that is probably because of the spike protein that causes this deterioration of the blood vessels and blood clots.
02:19:20.000Yeah, there was an average of 4.0 additional conditions or causes of death for data on deaths involving COVID-19 by time period, jurisdiction, and other health conditions.
02:19:35.000So it says only 5% that COVID was the only cause.
02:19:38.000So for only 5% of the COVID deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.
02:19:43.000So out of those 600,000 people that died, only 5% died just from COVID-19.
02:19:50.000Well, I mean, so you have people that are, COVID-19 is going to make their comorbidities worse, and that could be the same for a vaccine.
02:19:58.000It could be the same for anything, right?
02:19:59.000I mean, so like something that's going to activate the immune system.
02:20:02.000Yeah, but the concern is what vaccines, the negative effects, what people are worried about, I think, is young people that are healthy that have negative effects, like that have had strokes or that have had thrombosis or myocarditis and those issues,
02:20:58.000Yes, I'm saying that myocarditis from the vaccines is happening in younger people at a higher rate than from the vaccines.
02:21:03.000Do we have accurate data, do you think, about how many myocarditis instances we have from the vaccine?
02:21:09.000Well, you could argue there's an under-reporting.
02:21:12.000I think people, so anyone can submit data to the VAERS, and I think when it comes to someone who's younger, they're more likely.
02:21:22.000I mean, so healthcare professionals have to submit to the VAERS if there's, like, something that's life-threatening, which myocarditis could be.
02:21:29.000Or if it's a death or something that's like, you know, changes their daily functions, like congenital effects.
02:22:05.000But I mean, you know, if you again, even just looking at the deaths in every age group, even like, you know, people that are in my age group, 40 to 49, you know, there's 20,000 deaths that have been linked to the confirmed COVID-19 cases.
02:22:42.000Well, if that's true for all ages, then yes, people with comorbidities are more likely to die.
02:22:49.000But also younger people, like I said, they're more likely to get, you know, these long haul symptoms where I've known so many people, you know, that they've gotten like their loss of smell or taste has been like several months.
02:23:01.000And there's now studies showing that, you know, if you, there was a huge study out of the biobank, UK biobank data, where right before the pandemic started, MRIs were done, brain scans on like, almost 1000 people was like over 800. And then the pandemic hit.
02:23:18.000People got COVID, some people didn't, whatever.
02:23:20.000So they brought the same cohort of people back in for a brain scan.
02:23:26.000And, you know, basically they corrected for people.
02:23:30.000So they had people that they compared people that were the same age, same gender, same sex.
02:23:34.000And then they also timed between scans.
02:23:38.000And they found that both mild and severe COVID-19 cases caused a Right.
02:24:22.000Did they monitor their nutrition or find out what kind of supplements they were on or not?
02:24:28.000I don't know if any of that data was in it.
02:24:31.000Do you think that data would be a factor at all?
02:24:34.000I don't know because I know people that supplement that exercise that have had were diagnosed with they had a mild case and they were diagnosed with POTS you know post postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome where their heart was racing like tachycardia was racing just uncontrollably they were dizzy couldn't had no energy I mean this was months and they finally got diagnosed and it's like a lot of people coming out with this but you know Do you know anybody that had COVID and got
02:25:04.000through it with almost no symptoms at all and was very mild?
02:25:49.000It was still 2020. But they looked at patients that were coming in for stroke, and these were younger than 50. And like 30% of them had had COVID, didn't know it because they were asymptomatic and they were younger people.
02:26:02.000So it's like you'd think, well, if they had four comorbidities, they had COVID, they'd know it, right?
02:26:19.000So getting back to like, you know, so there's reasons that I personally think that people that are younger and healthy should get vaccinated.
02:26:32.000For most people, the vaccines are safe.
02:26:34.000And I mean, we just have data to show that, you know, we have hundreds of millions of people that have had the vaccines we're getting in the United States that have been vaccinated worldwide.
02:26:44.000The second, you know, it's just hundreds of millions of people.
02:26:50.000You know, some of this stuff where you're talking about spike protein and you're worried about spike protein.
02:26:56.000So this is important because the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a different spike protein than what's in the vaccine.
02:27:04.000So when the vaccines were made, these are ones in the U.S. So this is both mRNA vaccines, the Pfizer-BioNTech and then the Moderna as well as Johnson& Johnson.
02:27:16.000The protein itself is locked in a conformation.
02:27:19.000It's called pre-fusion, which is kind of like closed together.
02:27:23.000And typically what happens when viruses like interact with our cell membrane, they elongate.
02:27:29.000It's called post-fusion, a post-fusion viral complex, and changes structure.
02:27:34.000And so the actual, both the mRNA vaccines and Johnson& Johnson locked the spike protein in the pre-fusion conformation.
02:28:41.000I think the other part of that is that people are concerned that the mRNA vaccines don't stay in the deltoid tissue and they're somehow getting into circulation and causing havoc, you know.
02:29:14.000Long enough to protect the mRNA from degrading.
02:29:17.000The mRNA, again, the half-life is, you know, anywhere between some 72 hours or maybe like a little longer.
02:29:24.000And the spike protein itself that's made in your cells speaks after 24 hours and then it goes away after 48. The concern from people that the spike protein from the mRNA vaccines or even just the whole mRNA vaccine itself,
02:29:41.000the whole lipid nanoparticle with the mRNAs, like going to other tissues, comes from studies that were done from Pfizer.
02:29:48.000And it was kind of leaked out, and these studies were called biodistribution studies.
02:29:54.000And they injected in—they did rats and they did mice.
02:29:56.000And the rats, they injected 50 micrograms of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
02:30:02.000So humans, we get 30 micrograms per injection.
02:30:07.000They gave the rat 50. So, you know, how big is a rat?
02:30:11.000You know, they're getting almost twice as much as a big human's getting.
02:30:14.000If you look at the rat equivalent dose, 50 micrograms is 10 times the rat equivalent dose.
02:30:21.000They were doing that intentionally for safety and to see what happens when you give 10 times, like, a high dose.
02:31:00.000And so what ends up happening is you have like dendritic cells immediately when something foreign, like this lipid nanoparticle, they chew it up into pieces.
02:31:08.000And through phagocytosis, it's like, you know, it gets taken to, you know, liver and stuff for like metabolic purposes, right?
02:31:16.000So we don't even know what that was, not to mention the fact that it was, you know, 10 times the dose.
02:31:22.000How is it going to get into the circulation that's weird?
02:31:25.000There have been some earlier studies on mRNA vaccines that have shown when you directly inject it, like if you do it like intravenously, it goes to the liver.
02:31:35.000The mRNA vaccine goes to the liver and your liver tries to get rid of it.
02:31:38.000The same bio-distribution study also injected mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech into mice.
02:31:44.000But this time they did the animal equivalent dose, which was two micrograms.
02:31:48.000And there was a little bit found in the liver 24 hours later, but it was gone by 48. Nothing.
02:31:55.000And there was no other organs that at least that they showed.
02:31:58.000I mean, presumably if they were showing up in other organs, they would show that, but like in the animal study.
02:32:05.000The other one I've seen going around is like there was a small study, 13 people, and they were looking at the antibody response to vaccines.
02:32:14.000And within these 13 people, they used a test called the Samoa, S-I-M-O-A, to measure spike protein and the S1 subunit of the spike protein.
02:32:24.000And they found that three out of 13 people had, they could detect spike protein, and 11 out of 13, they could detect some of the S1 subunit.
02:32:34.000But it turns out, like, this test, the Samoa, is really good for looking at, like, IgG, you know, antibodies.
02:32:41.000But when it comes to actual spike protein, it's 25% false positivity rate.
02:32:55.000It's an inaccurate test for spike protein, definitely for spike protein, but also for the S1 subunit.
02:33:02.000So I don't think you can make a claim that because you have 11 out of 13 people showing this, using this test, that's the only study that's shown that.
02:33:11.000That, to me, is like, you can't make any claim from that.
02:33:43.000So these are mRNA vaccines, and they do elicit a pretty strong immune response, and that's why they've been so effective.
02:33:53.000I guess I should say the efficacy, if you're looking at clinical trials, in terms of preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to Johnson& Johnson initially.
02:34:03.000But Johnson& Johnson uses an adenoviral vaccine.
02:34:07.000So this is the first time adenoviral vaccines have been used, you know, widespread.
02:34:14.000Like they've been used in clinical studies dating back to like the 90s or 80s or something like that.
02:34:19.000But I was looking at some of those research studies, and there seems to be a link between blood clots, thrombosis, and the adenoviral vectors back then, back in those studies.
02:34:30.000And I don't think they're understanding.
02:34:35.000And again, you know, COVID is causing blood clots in people, even people that are healthy, you know, like people that are getting a stroke.
02:34:43.000So, you know, I don't know what it is, but it's still pretty rare with the adenoviral vaccines and the thrombocytopenia and things like that.
02:34:53.000The myocarditis, again, still pretty rare, and that's with the mRNA vaccines.
02:35:00.000Inflammation is playing a role in that, and why that is, I don't know.
02:35:03.000Younger people, children and adolescents are more prone to myocarditis from viral infections.
02:35:08.000It probably has something to do with their immune system being so much better, and when you activate it, maybe sometimes in some people...
02:35:13.000You know, there's too much of it going on.
02:35:18.000I don't think that you're going to find, you know, the spike protein from the mRNA vaccines are like floating around in your vascular system and like going to your heart and like finding on...
02:35:56.000He's the one that basically did this two-point mutation and kept the spike protein in the prefusion complex.
02:36:04.000And this was work that he had done previously with RSV, respiratory synsexual virus, is what every kid gets, right?
02:36:11.000And if you want to hear about a vaccine tragedy story, that's the poster child.
02:36:15.000There were clinical studies done back in the 1960s on RSV vaccines.
02:36:21.000And I don't remember the number of people in the actual study of infants and toddlers, but 80% of the infants and toddlers that got the vaccine and then were naturally exposed to the virus got hospitalized and a couple died,
02:36:40.000versus 5% of the infants that did not get the vaccine and were exposed.
02:36:46.000So the vaccine, we know now from what was happening in that sense, was that the vaccine was causing something called antibody-dependent enhancement.
02:36:56.000And what that is, there's two ways that it can happen, but one of the things, and it's induced by vaccines, one of the things that can happen is it can make viruses come into your cells, like, better.
02:37:07.000So you, like, more viral particles, you get infected.
02:37:09.000The other way is, and this is what was happening with RSV, is it basically causes your immune system to become, like, more...
02:37:21.000More dangerous and active and be more harmful after you're exposed to the virus where the vaccine is supposed to be protecting you from.
02:37:28.000And for a long time, and I know I think Jason was involved in figuring this out, Dr. McLellan, that it's the post-fusion antibodies that you make.
02:37:47.000The post-fusion ones are not as good at actually protecting you from the actual virus, but they kind of in some cases can even mask it or become harmful.
02:38:00.000Anyways, they know now that the post-fusion antibodies play a big role in antibody-dependent enhancement.
02:38:05.000And those are not antibodies that are being made in All the vaccines in the United States.
02:38:12.000AstraZeneca didn't do this, 2-proline mutation change, but the vaccines that we're using in the United States are.
02:38:21.000And so the antibody-dependent enhancement theory that's going to happen, that people that are vaccinated, they're all going to be really sick.
02:38:28.000They're going to be sicker than people that just get the virus.
02:38:36.000It's misinformation that's like, you know, so for one, you'd be seeing the hospitals fill up with vaccine people and not unvaccinated, which is what we see.
02:38:43.000But in Israel, they are filling up with vaccinated people.
02:38:47.000Well, in Israel, it's mostly not vaccinated people that are filling the hospitals.
02:38:55.000I was reading something today about that, that the majority of the people that are hospitalized in Israel were vaccinated, and they're attributing that to the higher rate of vaccinations in Israel, and that the idea that these vaccines have a waning life of effectiveness So that after,
02:39:12.000you know, six to seven months or however many months it is, that they're not as effective and then you're seeing people get sicker.
02:39:26.000You could take healthcare workers that were vaccinated and measure their antibody level, neutralizing antibody levels, like, a week before they became infected.
02:39:35.000Or, like, you'd look at their antibody levels a week before they came down with a breakthrough infection.
02:39:40.000And it predicted the breakthrough infection.
02:39:43.000In other words, people with lower neutralizing antibodies were more likely to get this breakthrough infection.
02:39:49.000And then another study was published by Miles Davenport Group, It was published in Nature Medicine, where he did some kind of modeling and found you had to have six times more neutralizing antibodies to protect from actually getting infection than from, like, you know,
02:40:31.000So in other words, protecting you from actually getting the infection and then like protecting from severity, so hospitalizations.
02:40:38.000And so this is with the Delta variant because everything's changed now with Delta variant, right?
02:40:43.000I mean, like these vaccines were much more effective at preventing infections with the Alpha variant being dominant, which was the dominant one before July.
02:40:50.000How do they know when you get infected if you have a Delta variant?
02:40:52.000Because the friends that I've had that have gotten sick with COVID, particularly ones that have already been vaccinated that got sick afterwards, they didn't test for what variant.
02:41:02.000They just tested whether or not they're positive.
02:41:44.000The side effects of the Moderna were a little stronger as well, right?
02:41:48.000Because the Moderna conferred more of the spike protein and it made your body more resilient to the virus, but it also gave you harsher side effects.
02:42:16.000But, like, getting back to that, you know, with the transmission and looking at, you know, overall transmission, like, even aside from something called onward transmission, there's two types of transmission.
02:42:36.000It's reduced, but like when you have, you know, it's still, you know, 40% of the people that have the Pfizer X amount of months later, again, neutralizing antibodies probably play a role in that, you know, if you have more, if you're younger.
02:42:49.000So there's all sorts of studies showing that older people make less neutralizing antibodies with vaccines.
02:43:12.000Well, if people are getting sick while they're vaccinated, and if the vaccinated people can still spread the virus, how are they preventing?
02:43:38.000There's also onward transmission and that's where a lot of this new stuff has come with Delta where there's been some, you know, the CDC put out some data and then there was a study, a big study out of the UK where they measured peak viral levels in vaccinated people and compared it to unvaccinated.
02:43:57.000And peak viral levels were the same in terms of, you know, how much virus they were shedding.
02:44:03.000But The virus basically, you know, it's replicating for a number of days and you're shedding for a number of days.
02:44:15.000And so a Singapore study looked at that.
02:44:17.000They looked at, this was, you know, not a huge study, but this was with the Delta variant.
02:44:22.000And they saw that while the initial levels of virus were the same in both vaccinated and unvaccinated, vaccinated people cleared it quicker.
02:44:56.000Vaccinated people have less viral, this is with Delta, they have less viral load than unvaccinated, which is what you expect if vaccinated people are clearing it quicker.
02:45:06.000So there is even some evidence to suggest that even with Delta variant, vaccinated people are somewhat still even affecting onward transmission as well.
02:45:16.000In other words, you know, preventing the transmission through just your infectiousness, making other people sick.
02:45:23.000But if there's these issues that you were talking about with people that even have very mild cases, that they're developing these problems with brain matter and all these different issues, these are still happening to people who are vaccinated who get COVID, right?
02:46:47.000And I continued the same stuff that I always do in terms of my protocol, like with the sauna and all the other stuff that I do and vitamins and supplementation.
02:47:40.000If the effectiveness wanes of the vaccine over six months or however much time it is, And you need a booster.
02:47:49.000Do we have any information or any data as to what the effects of the booster is?
02:47:53.000If we have the information about the second dose of the mRNA vaccine being more difficult for some people to tolerate, they have more difficult side effects.
02:48:05.000Do we have any data about what a third shot is going to be like or possibly a fourth or ongoing?
02:48:11.000And is there a point in time where it's going to be detrimental to your health to continue getting booster shots?
02:48:22.000Is that the road that we're getting on?
02:48:37.000Elderly people, and maybe those people with the four comorbidities or two or whatever it is, any comorbidities probably, those people are, you know, what we're seeing in hospitals right now, most of them are people that are immunocompromised or older.
02:48:52.000And they might benefit because they have a lot to lose if they get COVID. They have a lot to lose.
02:48:59.000They have their life, potentially, right?
02:49:00.000So there may be an argument for people to get a booster.
02:50:03.000I do think that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that neutralizing antibody levels can predict whether or not you get the SARS-CoV-2 infection.
02:50:13.000In fact, if you look and compare at people that have had natural immunity, Yeah, I think.
02:50:34.000Three, four times less likely to get it.
02:50:38.000Having natural immunity plus the vaccine.
02:50:41.000But also people that have had natural infections and then have the vaccine have a much higher likelihood of getting an adverse side effect.
02:50:58.000And then he got vaccinated and he was wrecked for 11 days.
02:51:02.000I personally don't, and this is probably controversial, but I don't, I think, you know, an individual has to decide and, you know, the CDC is saying people that have had natural immunity should get vaccinated, but I don't see any reason why they have to.
02:51:14.000To be honest, unless they're just terrified and don't want to get it and maybe they have that four times comorbidity or something like that.
02:51:23.000In all fairness, he's the only one that I know that had an adverse side effect that was also vaccinated and had COVID. All the other friends that I've had that were vaccinated after they had COVID had no problems.
02:52:07.000What do you think about prophylactic use of certain medications?
02:52:11.000Like the big and the most controversial one is Ivermectin, of course.
02:52:16.000They use it in Argentina with critical care workers and they use it prophylactically and they had a very high success rate with using it prophylactically.
02:52:28.000And there's some real controversy because there's no real studies.
02:52:31.000There was something that just came out recently out of India and India's use of ivermectin, but there's not something that there's like real rock-hard data that you can show that points to the effectiveness of it.
02:52:43.000But you have like the frontline critical COVID care workers who, you know, like Pierre Corey, Dr. Pierre Corey, who's promoting the use of ivermectin and many other people that also have shown they've had good use of it.
02:52:58.000Like a lot of people don't even want to prescribe it.
02:53:01.000A lot of doctors, they don't even want to hear about it.
02:53:06.000So I have done a lot of sort of trying to read the, like, I don't have the anecdotal evidence that Dr. Pierre Corey has in treating frontline COVID patients.
02:53:18.000I don't have any of that anecdotal evidence, none of it.
02:53:20.000So all I can do is look at data and data that's, you know, either preprint or data that actually has been peer reviewed and published.
02:53:31.000And what I see, and I mostly see that a lot of people doing this on websites.
02:53:36.000They're, like, aggregating all this data and putting it together.
02:53:38.000But there's, like, some major, major problems with the way they're showing the data.
02:53:47.000The one is that, you know, people are using different, obviously, doses, but there are different co-interventions with both the treatment group and the control group.
02:53:56.000So you have people getting ivermectin, or you have people getting ivermectin and azithromycin, or you have people getting ivermectin and doxycycline, or you have people getting ivermectin, you know, azithromycin, they're getting, like, anticoagulants in some cases, they're getting vitamin C,
02:54:13.000they're getting the kitchen sink, okay?
02:54:18.000They're getting, you know, maybe in some cases, in the best case, a placebo, or they're getting, you know, the standard of care treatment, or they're getting hydroxychloroquine, or they're getting hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
02:55:04.000And they're aggregating all these studies together.
02:55:08.000And then the other problem is that you have, and it's kind of something you alluded to, is that you have small, small sample sizes in such case that the incidence of something is going to be so small because the sample population is so small.
02:56:44.000Taking it if you know you've been exposed, in which case I think is a little more reasonable than like, I'm going to take it instead of a vaccine, in which case there is no evidence that ivermectin is going to protect you from getting it like a vaccine or prevent you from being hospitalized by vaccine.
02:56:59.000There's certainly, I don't even know if there's any evidence on Delta variant.
02:57:03.000We don't even know, what is ivermectin doing now?
02:57:05.000We've had to change the whole gang with vaccines.
02:57:08.000So that's another issue, but My opinion is that when I look at all the data, I see like, you know, you'll see like, again, it's like all over the place.
02:57:26.000I would think something like this would be more effective if you give it earlier on and you're preventing from, you know, severe hospitalization or something like that.
02:57:33.000I think that's the idea behind it, along with monoclonal antibodies, which are now Regeneron.
02:57:38.000Now Regeneron's not even working as well against the Delta.
02:58:53.000So I do think, it is my opinion, I've known people, not knowing them personally, my family has friends That were taking ivermectin that was prescribed by a doctor.
02:59:04.000By the way, taking animal-grade ivermectin is a huge...
02:59:07.000Like, that could be bad because the dose is way off.
02:59:22.000But, again, I know people that were anti-vax and they were taking ivermectin and they ended up in the ICU. They ended up in the ICU from ivermectin?
02:59:32.000No, with COVID. They got COVID and then it was like bad.
03:00:19.000I'm not telling someone to do something, but I hope they choose to.
03:00:23.000It is the safest way to protect yourself from this and also to help us get our society back to normal and also help not overwhelm ICUs because you don't want to get in a car accident or have a heart attack if the ICU is full.
03:01:53.000If I were a grocery store worker, someone that's in the service industry or someone that's going to be exposed, I wouldn't want to get the SARS-CoV-2.
03:02:31.000It's called foundmyfitness.com forward slash JRE. It has timelines and notes to every podcast we did with references to a lot of the stuff talked about.
03:02:40.000For all other nine of them and soon to be this one as well.
03:02:43.000That's an insane amount of work to do all that.