The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2420 - Chris Masterjohn

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train my day, Joe Rogan, podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 Hi, Chris.

00:00:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:00:14.000 Very nice to meet you.

00:00:15.000 Nice to meet you as well.

00:00:16.000 I have enjoyed your content online for a few years now, so it's really solid stuff.

00:00:20.000 And I thought, what better day than to bring Chris in than right after everybody fucked up their diet?

00:00:25.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:00:27.000 Well, I just want to tell public health message that you did not get sleepy because the turkey was high in tryptophan.

00:00:35.000 Yeah, that's weird.

00:00:36.000 Isn't that a weird one?

00:00:37.000 That's a weird myth that's persisted for a long time.

00:00:40.000 I mean, the weirdest thing is the origins of it.

00:00:42.000 Apparently, it came from researchers in the, I'm sorry, not researchers, journalists in the 80s who were trying to come up with a reason to explain why everyone was tired after Thanksgiving meal.

00:00:56.000 And they just looked as far as, oh, turkey has tryptophan, which is an amino acid that is the precursor to melatonin, which is, you know, you could call it a sleeping chemical.

00:01:06.000 It's what makes you get tired at night.

00:01:08.000 That must be why.

00:01:10.000 But it turns out that, A, turkey's not that high in tryptophan.

00:01:14.000 Like even whey protein is higher in tryptophan than turkey is.

00:01:18.000 And then B, tryptophan doesn't make you tired.

00:01:22.000 Yeah, I dare anyone to go out and have like a just a slice of turkey for breakfast and see if it knocks you out.

00:01:30.000 It's overeating.

00:01:31.000 It's like so obvious.

00:01:32.000 I mean, people are eating tons of stuffing, tons of sides.

00:01:36.000 They're eating so much food.

00:01:38.000 You're gorging.

00:01:39.000 It's a gorging day.

00:01:40.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:01:41.000 Yeah, I mean, it's not good.

00:01:44.000 And if you look at like a lion in the wild, one thing that you'll notice is that they are on the prowl when they are hungry.

00:01:53.000 They're alert, their body's revved up, and then they have a feast and they just fall asleep.

00:02:00.000 And the reason is that we're, you know, our, you even see this in physiology.

00:02:04.000 They call the parasympathetic nervous system the rest and digest system.

00:02:09.000 And that's because we are biologically wired to be alert when we need to work to get our food.

00:02:16.000 And then we're wired to, you know, eat that food, feel like we've gotten our fill, we've done what we need to do, and now we can rest and take a sleep.

00:02:24.000 Yeah, it's normal.

00:02:25.000 I mean, there's a great video of these lionesses, these female lions, after they've hunted and killed and ate all this food, and they're just lying there like this with these enormous bellies, just like, oh, just like your uncle on the couch watching football.

00:02:40.000 Just, oh.

00:02:43.000 Yeah.

00:02:44.000 And I think one, so one thing that I think we should talk about today is I've been in nutrition research for 21 years.

00:02:52.000 And I'm, you know, I think the crowning thesis of my work so far is that we really want to be thinking about mitochondrial function at the root of all health and disease.

00:03:05.000 And so I think an interesting way to see sleep is it's like, why do we have to sleep eight hours a night?

00:03:11.000 And I think with dreaming, there's obviously other things going on there.

00:03:15.000 But deep sleep, one of the primary things that's happening is you need to give your mitochondria a rest because your mitochondria are what produce all the energy that you need for producing everything in your body, for maintaining it, for repairing it, and for distributing it properly and for keeping it going across the lifespan.

00:03:35.000 And so your mitochondria are going to essentially take a nap, take a rest.

00:03:38.000 They don't go off because you die, but they really turn down the volume of the work they're doing.

00:03:42.000 But then you take your metabolic rate way lower than that.

00:03:46.000 And so you can build up the reserves of energy that you had used up the day before.

00:03:52.000 And so it's, you know, that can explain a lot of recent findings that are coming out as well, because there was that recent study where they looked at sleep deprivation with creatine supplementation.

00:04:04.000 And so they randomized people to either drink a placebo drink or drink 20 grams of creatine through the night.

00:04:11.000 And they kept them awake all night, and they had them do brain puzzle quizzes.

00:04:15.000 And when the subjects were getting the 20 grams of creatine, they did way better on the brain puzzles, but they also complained about being tired a lot less.

00:04:25.000 And so the conclusion is creatine is somehow acutely preventing your brain from suffering during sleep deprivation.

00:04:35.000 And the rationale there is, you know, mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell or the power plant that's producing the energy, creatine is like the power grid, and it distributes that energy throughout the cell.

00:04:47.000 And so if the purpose of sleep is to restore the energy that you used up, but then you intervene by putting creatine in there, now you can keep that energy going and you can go more hours before you need to get rest and restore that energy because you've increased your capacity to distribute it.

00:05:05.000 That makes sense.

00:05:06.000 That is an interesting thing because it's fairly recent that people have talked about this, right?

00:05:11.000 I mean, it used to be people only thought of creatine as being a muscle thing to help you recover and help you build larger muscles.

00:05:18.000 But then over the last, I would say, year or two, I started hearing talking about cognitive function, and maybe even more than a couple of years, but about how it improves cognitive function.

00:05:29.000 The sleep thing, though, is very recent, right?

00:05:31.000 Yeah, the sleep thing was in the last year.

00:05:34.000 There is some literature on traumatic brain injury where 20 grams of creatine for six months doubles the rate of healing.

00:05:42.000 Whoa.

00:05:43.000 That's incredible.

00:05:44.000 But it's, yeah, the field is in its infancy.

00:05:46.000 But I think that I actually almost a decade ago did a podcast on just creatine.

00:05:55.000 I called it more than a performance enhancer because if you just look at where it's distributed in the body, almost every cell in every tissue has the creatine system.

00:06:04.000 And so it really is this.

00:06:07.000 And if you look at the literature, they'll say, well, it's more important in certain cells.

00:06:11.000 Like it's really important in your muscles because your muscles have this very polarized, sometimes they're at rest, sometimes their energy demand is going through the roof.

00:06:21.000 And it's really important in like long cells.

00:06:25.000 So for example, your retina is part of your central nervous system.

00:06:29.000 It's a really long cell that's coming from the brain into the eye.

00:06:33.000 And creatine helps move energy back and forth.

00:06:37.000 But if you just look at where, instead of where is it most important, you're just like, where is it?

00:06:42.000 It's like almost every cell in your body has creatine and it's helping distribute the energy that the mitochondria make throughout your whole body.

00:06:50.000 And that includes pumping stomach acid. 0.94

00:06:52.000 It includes sperm swimming up the vaginal canal. 0.99

00:06:57.000 And so if you just look at where it is, you would think that creatine would help a lot more than muscles.

00:07:05.000 And it just turns out that all you need to do is start studying it to start seeing those effects.

00:07:09.000 Is there any studies on creatine and improvement of eyesight?

00:07:13.000 I'm not sure.

00:07:14.000 Not that I know of.

00:07:15.000 Because that kind of makes sense, right?

00:07:17.000 It makes complete sense.

00:07:18.000 Like you would, when it comes down to it, your ability to produce energy is producing, maintaining, and repairing everything in your body.

00:07:28.000 So you would expect to see anything that does improve your energy metabolism improve literally everything.

00:07:34.000 So it'd be kind of shocking if you had no effect on that.

00:07:39.000 But I'm not sure if there are good trials done that.

00:07:42.000 I haven't seen them.

00:07:44.000 Speaking of improving eyesight, I started doing red light about, I guess, about a year and a half, two years ago, got a red light bed, and completely stopped whatever macular degeneration I was going through and reversed some of it.

00:07:59.000 So I don't have perfect vision, but my vision's better.

00:08:02.000 Like it's definitely better.

00:08:04.000 And it's not just through the red light.

00:08:05.000 It's also, it's got to be some of the supplements that I'm taking.

00:08:08.000 One of them, I take a supplement from Pure Encapsulations, no affiliations with them.

00:08:14.000 I just buy it.

00:08:15.000 It's called macular support.

00:08:18.000 And let's see what's got in there.

00:08:20.000 It's got lutein and a few other supplements of the known tool.

00:08:24.000 Yeah, that'll do it.

00:08:25.000 Is that it?

00:08:26.000 Well, yeah, I mean, so with the red light, it is very interesting.

00:08:29.000 Whenever you think of red light, you want to think of your mitochondria because the main thing that we know about red, near-infrared, and far-infrared that they're doing is they're actually going straight into the mitochondrial engines that produce the energy and helping them produce more.

00:08:44.000 And they're also ordering the water structure inside the mitochondria to make those engines produce energy more easily.

00:08:53.000 And there was a study a few months ago that it was just like a one-day study, but it showed that blasting people in the chest with red light improved their eyesight when it was measured the next day.

00:09:06.000 And they covered their eyes to make sure that the red light didn't go into the eye.

00:09:10.000 And so the conclusion is, it's not a clinical study, right?

00:09:16.000 And it's not like a one-year, how does it, you know, does it really improve your eyesight over one year?

00:09:20.000 We don't know.

00:09:22.000 But it shows proof of principle that red light is doing something systemically that does not have to go to your eye that does improve your vision.

00:09:31.000 And to me, that makes sense because your vision is going to be improved by anything that acts directly in your eye to improve energy production.

00:09:40.000 But you've got coordinated energy metabolism going on through your whole body.

00:09:43.000 Like your liver is doing tons of stuff to try to make your eyes healthy and make your brain healthy and so on.

00:09:49.000 So it makes a lot of sense.

00:09:51.000 So I don't doubt at all that the bed is part of that, but the lutein and zeaxanthin are well known to accumulate in the macula where they have a very specific role in protecting against macular degeneration.

00:10:07.000 And actually the best source of those is egg yolks from chickens that are fed anything that has them, but marigolds are super high in them.

00:10:18.000 So if they feed the chickens marigolds, they get super high levels.

00:10:22.000 And the egg yolk has fat that helps them get absorbed.

00:10:26.000 So in terms of, I mean, you could take this with some eggs, but I should feed my chickens marigolds.

00:10:34.000 Yeah, if you have chickens.

00:10:36.000 If you have chickens and if you're spending your money on a lutein zeaxanthin supplement, you might be able to get a maybe the marigolds are cheaper.

00:10:44.000 Maybe I'll just double it up.

00:10:46.000 So this is all the ingredients.

00:10:49.000 Does this stuff make sense?

00:10:50.000 Is something that would help support eyesight?

00:10:53.000 It does.

00:10:54.000 I mean, the vitamin A is going to, that's going to depend on your genetics in terms of how good are you at converting beta-carotene into the form of vitamin A that we need, which is most abundant in liver and egg yolks.

00:11:10.000 It's dependent on genetics.

00:11:12.000 It's, yeah.

00:11:13.000 So there's, you need beta-carotene is this big, and if you chop it in half, you get vitamin A.

00:11:22.000 And so you have an enzyme in your digestive system that does that.

00:11:26.000 But that enzyme is dependent on a lot of things going right.

00:11:30.000 So you need to have good zinc status, good iron status, good thyroid status, and all kinds of stuff like that.

00:11:36.000 And actually, seed oils decrease the conversion.

00:11:41.000 So if you take that with canola oil, you're going to get less vitamin A out of it than if you take it with eggs and butter.

00:11:49.000 And then vitamin A activation is also dependent on mitochondrial function too.

00:11:54.000 So I think, you know, but it makes sense.

00:11:55.000 Vitamin A is great for your eye.

00:11:57.000 Vitamin C is a great antioxidant.

00:11:59.000 and a seal cysteine great antioxidant the glutathione the cetria stuff i'm i'm kind of um i think it's i think it's a little bit of a over overhyped in terms of some you know another type of glutathione i think would have worked fine what's the best glutathione well the Liposomal.

00:12:22.000 The best glutathione is the glutathione that you make yourself from protein that you eat.

00:12:27.000 But if you're going to supplement with glutathione, if you're talking about bang for the buck, I just think straight up glutathione is good.

00:12:39.000 And there are studies suggesting that there's marginal absorption benefits for certain special types, but then they charge three times as much for that type.

00:12:49.000 And it's like, well, am I getting three times more glutathione out of it?

00:12:51.000 Not really.

00:12:52.000 So some people swear by liposomal glutathione.

00:12:54.000 And if you swear by it and if it does its thing for you, great.

00:12:58.000 Do you think it's like 10% better?

00:13:02.000 I think the jury is out on whether there might be 10, 20% better value for those things.

00:13:09.000 So if I'm going to take glutathione, I'm just going to take glutathione.

00:13:12.000 Got it.

00:13:13.000 Okay.

00:13:15.000 What you're saying about producing your own glutathione, that's the same thing as vitamin D, right?

00:13:19.000 It's way better when your body produces it.

00:13:23.000 If it does.

00:13:24.000 I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with getting vitamin D from food, but you don't.

00:13:32.000 The thing is, you do need sunlight, right?

00:13:35.000 So you at least need to get 30 minutes of sunshine in the morning, which is not going to give you vitamin D.

00:13:43.000 And then you need to get like 10 or 15 minutes of unprotected sunshine in the afternoon to get you get vitamin D from that, but you get other benefits from it as well.

00:13:53.000 So I wouldn't say that it's necessarily better to get the vitamin D from the sun than from a vitamin D supplement or from eating fish or from eating cod liver oil.

00:14:05.000 But you don't want to say, well, I don't need to go out in the sun.

00:14:10.000 I'm just going to take vitamin D.

00:14:11.000 Then you're not going to get the benefits of the sun because the sun gives you other benefits.

00:14:15.000 Got it.

00:14:16.000 Is there anything that you can do?

00:14:18.000 Say if you live in Seattle and you're in the winter, it's just raining constantly.

00:14:22.000 Is there a tanning bed that gives you some of that?

00:14:27.000 Yeah, I do think that there is some risk of tanning beds.

00:14:34.000 I'm not 100% comfortable.

00:14:37.000 When I lived in New York, I would try to spend 40 minutes in the afternoon sunshine for three quarters of the year.

00:14:45.000 And during the winter, the UV index just wasn't high enough.

00:14:48.000 And I get eczema in the winter because I'm not getting enough sun.

00:14:52.000 And so I would use a tanning bed not to get tan, but I'd use like two, three minutes at a time just because it just had a systemic effect in like preventing the eczema that I would get in the winter.

00:15:04.000 I think you have to be careful with it because there is some concern that people are just, if they're tanning to tan, they're going to wind up with too much damage to their skin.

00:15:14.000 But what I would do is for morning sunlight, I think you can get like a Lux meter app and just some people are, some people, they think that there's no sun outside, but actually it's like 100 times or 1,000 times brighter than indoors and their eyes are adjusting.

00:15:32.000 And so it's like cloudy or overcast, but there's still a lot of value in going outside.

00:15:37.000 So I would say if you use a Lux meter and it's like under 10,000, you could get a like a light therapy light at home to use to just like turn it on and not look straight into it, but kind of have it going into your eyes.

00:15:52.000 And then for vitamin D, you could do like tanning bed, but just try to really keep it minimal, like going for two or three minutes, not like you're trying to tan.

00:16:04.000 What I was getting at, is there a different kind of tanning bed that's maybe.

00:16:09.000 Yeah, so there are different ratios of wavelengths and the ones that have more UVB or the ones that are going to give you more vitamin D.

00:16:21.000 So if you're just going to a tanning bed place, you probably the staff there tell them that you want like mixed wavelength that gives you a mix of like surface tan and deep tan.

00:16:36.000 I think that's how they, because they don't know the vitamin D science.

00:16:39.000 So I think that's how you have to get the bed that gives you a lot of fun.

00:16:43.000 You have to tell them I want a mix of surface and deep.

00:16:45.000 That's funny.

00:16:47.000 Speaking of red light and speaking of therapy that helps your mitochondria, what is your thoughts on methylene blue?

00:16:57.000 Methylene blue seems to be a very controversial supplement.

00:17:01.000 Some people think it's amazing and it's a panacea for all that ails you.

00:17:04.000 And other people are like, what are we doing here?

00:17:07.000 Why are you putting dye in your body?

00:17:09.000 Your piss is coming out blue.

00:17:10.000 This is weird.

00:17:12.000 What school are you in?

00:17:14.000 Methylene blue is something that could do wonders for your mitochondria if you need it and could really hurt you if you don't.

00:17:21.000 And I think that there are certainly a lot of people raving about it on the internet.

00:17:27.000 And it's because it's a mix of things.

00:17:29.000 So there are people that are treating themselves for a problem in their mitochondria that they don't know that they have.

00:17:36.000 And then they get an outsized voice because they're the ones raving about how much it helped them.

00:17:39.000 And so there's like selection.

00:17:41.000 You know, if some you don't get, if people didn't get a benefit or if they just felt a little worse, they don't go raving about it on the internet as much.

00:17:48.000 So that's part of it.

00:17:50.000 There is also a part of it is that when you get up to a dose of around 10 milligrams or so per day, for perspective, in clinical trials of Alzheimer's are using 200 milligrams, but you can buy like a 0.5 milligram on Amazon.

00:18:08.000 So a lot of people are using like 0.5 milligrams.

00:18:10.000 But once you get up to 10 milligrams or so, you're getting some degree of pharmacological antidepressant effect because it's an MAO oxidase, monoimine oxidase inhibitor.

00:18:20.000 And so I do think that there are some people who are, they're like, oh, I feel so much better.

00:18:24.000 And it's like, yeah, bro, you're taking an antidepressant.

00:18:28.000 So that's part of it.

00:18:30.000 But if you look at what it actually does, it is a very non-specific rewire of how your mitochondria produce energy.

00:18:42.000 And if you can think of it like, let's say there's a main road in the city and it's the best road and that's why everyone's on it, but it's blocked and then they set up detours, people are good, they're going to help the traffic because that road is blocked.

00:18:57.000 You actually can't get through there.

00:18:58.000 And so the side roads that would take you somewhere are actually better because they're not blocked, right?

00:19:04.000 So in the context where you need the detours, the detours help you.

00:19:08.000 But if the main road was not blocked and they start putting up detour signs and people start going out in the side roads, they're not going to get to their destination faster.

00:19:16.000 They're just getting tricked by the mess, the chaos that was created by people putting up detour signs that they didn't need.

00:19:23.000 So methylene blue is something that goes into your mitochondria and sets up detour signs all over the place.

00:19:29.000 How does it do that?

00:19:34.000 All right.

00:19:34.000 So what your mitochondria do to produce energy is they extract, you have a molecule like carbohydrate or an amino acid from the protein that you ate or fatty acid from the butter you're eating.

00:19:47.000 You got to break that apart.

00:19:49.000 You got to take out the energy and you've got to synthesize ATP with it.

00:19:53.000 The ATP is the general energy currency of the cell.

00:19:56.000 So mitochondria produce usable energy from food in the form of ATP.

00:20:02.000 When they do that, they have a bunch of different pathways through which electrons flow.

00:20:10.000 And methylene blue is able to grab those electrons and put them somewhere else.

00:20:16.000 So they call it a redox cycler.

00:20:18.000 So it's taking an electron here, it's shuttling it over there, it's taking an electron here, it's shuttling over there.

00:20:23.000 And so if you have this very, let's say the normal way for your mitochondria to produce energy has a main road where the electrons just flow straight through, methylene blue is coming in and it's just taking that electron over here, it's throwing it in over there and so on.

00:20:38.000 So if you've got a road that goes like this and you've got a blockage right here, and methylene blue is just taking something out there and it's putting it over there, you actually wind up getting better energy with it.

00:20:48.000 But if you don't have a blockage, you're just creating random chaos in the mitochondria.

00:20:54.000 And in the animal experiments, what they've done is they've said, okay, let's give these animals inhibitors of their mitochondria at specific locations and see what methylene blue does.

00:21:06.000 And if you don't have any inhibitors, and if the animal is genetically healthy, then you add methylene blue, they get less ATP.

00:21:13.000 So the mitochondria is less effective at converting food to usable energy.

00:21:19.000 But if they do have an inhibitor, their ATP production goes down.

00:21:22.000 You add methylene blue, it goes back up, right?

00:21:24.000 So if there's a blockage to get around, methylene blue helps.

00:21:28.000 So I think what's important if you really want to make sure that people are using methylene blue right is to actually do mitochondrial testing that will tell you whether those specific blockages are there.

00:21:42.000 I ran a biochemical optimization program a while back.

00:21:47.000 And one of the clients that I had in there, he tried methylene blue, and he only got up to a half a milligram or a milligram.

00:21:54.000 And his mood was worse, his fatigue was worse.

00:21:57.000 He had more anxiety.

00:21:59.000 A bunch of problems that, you know, the dose was too low to say it was doing a pharmacological messing with his neurotransmitters.

00:22:07.000 And so I think it was just making his mitochondrial function worse.

00:22:10.000 And so the mitochondrial testing that we did on him showed that, you know, he was not a candidate for methylene blue.

00:22:16.000 And he actually had, you know, some really weird, like his mitochondria were best at using a specific amino acid cysteine for energy.

00:22:28.000 Kind of weird and idiosyncratic.

00:22:30.000 And in his case, it was interesting because he had actually gravitated to a steak-only carnivore diet.

00:22:36.000 And he didn't feel like it fixed him, but he felt like it took the edge off.

00:22:41.000 Like he was 50% better on the steak-only carnivore diet.

00:22:45.000 50% is a lot.

00:22:46.000 Well, yeah, it's a lot, right?

00:22:47.000 But he wanted the other 50%.

00:22:49.000 That's why he was coming to me.

00:22:53.000 And figuring this out didn't get him to 100%, but it got him to get days with 75% because he could use strategic cysteine supplementation to mimic the benefit he was getting from the steak, but he would be able to be still in the fasting state because his workouts were better in the fasting state and things like that.

00:23:15.000 So figuring that out allowed him to get from 50% to 75%.

00:23:20.000 But the methylene blue was putting him down at 5% instead of 50.

00:23:25.000 Can I ask how old he was?

00:23:28.000 He wasn't that old.

00:23:29.000 He was in maybe 40.

00:23:31.000 I forget exactly, but 40, give or take, five years.

00:23:35.000 And is that an age-dependent thing, like mitochondrial dysfunction?

00:23:38.000 Is it more common in older people?

00:23:41.000 For sure.

00:23:41.000 So, what, I mean, I would argue that mitochondrial dysfunction and aging are the same thing.

00:23:47.000 And, you know, there's a bunch of theories of aging, but if you take them all, you can always ask the question, why?

00:23:51.000 There's like the information theory of aging, like, why is the information not being carried out correctly?

00:23:57.000 Or the oxidative stress theory of aging.

00:23:59.000 Why are you making more oxidative stress?

00:24:01.000 And I actually think, I actually think it's way more simple than anyone is thinking about it.

00:24:06.000 It's mitochondrial energy production is producing everything in your body.

00:24:11.000 It's repairing it.

00:24:12.000 It's maintaining it and it's putting where it belongs.

00:24:15.000 That means that mitochondria produce the energy that they need to produce everything in the mitochondria, right?

00:24:21.000 And so if you have a little gap in your energy production, like let's say you get, I think one way to think of aging is, well, I've just, I've suffered through so many cumulative insults.

00:24:31.000 Like I got sick so many times.

00:24:33.000 I got injured so many times.

00:24:35.000 I had days where I didn't eat optimal nutrition so many times.

00:24:39.000 And I think what all those things are doing is like, well, you know, that period of overtraining that you did, your mitochondria were forced to help you give you the energy for the extra set of squats that you did.

00:24:55.000 And they had a little bit left over for themselves.

00:24:57.000 And they got a half a percent worse at producing energy.

00:25:01.000 And so that sets up a vicious cycle because now that they could not repair themselves as well, now they get a little bit worse and what get a little bit worse.

00:25:11.000 And what you see in the literature is that as people age starting around age 18 through age 70 to 80, you're losing your mitochondrial function at an average rate of 1% per year.

00:25:26.000 So by the time you're 70, you have half the energy that you started out with at baseline.

00:25:32.000 And that I think what explains that is just the vicious cycle of the mitochondria got, they lost a quarter percent here, a quarter percent there, and they just started repairing themselves less effectively because they're the engines fueling everything, including that.

00:25:50.000 And so, but you know, the good news is that age only explains 25% of mitochondrial function.

00:25:56.000 So it's the average that's going down at 1% per year.

00:25:59.000 The average person is half producing half the energy at age 70 than they were at age 18.

00:26:06.000 But the spread around that is huge.

00:26:10.000 And with that, to me, the way that I spin that is that means that 75% of this is under your control.

00:26:17.000 You're going to go in a downward trend, but you're in control of whether you're way undershooting that trend or you're way overshooting it.

00:26:24.000 What you want to do is make your mitochondrial function as good as it can be at any given age so that that downward trend will, you know, it'll be a lot slower.

00:26:35.000 And you can get to age 70 and you're not docked 50%.

00:26:39.000 You're just docked 10%.

00:26:41.000 And I think that's what's happening when you see some of these 70-year-olds who are more fit than a lot of 25-year-olds.

00:26:49.000 Yeah, interesting.

00:26:50.000 So what are the primary factors in regards to being able to maintain your function?

00:26:56.000 Well, I think that everyone has idiosyncratic things.

00:27:00.000 And I think mitochondrial testing is very important.

00:27:03.000 But if I were to pick five things that just everyone should be doing for their mitochondria, a lot of it does look like health advice you might get somewhere else, but it actually is the best stuff, right?

00:27:15.000 So we mentioned creatine, and I think creatine is really important because it's not in the mitochondria so much as it carries forth the mitochondrial energy of the rest of the cell, but that also feeds back in the repair functions for the mitochondria.

00:27:29.000 So I think creatine, optimizing your creatine status is super important.

00:27:33.000 And I think that everyone who's not eating one or two pounds of meat per day should probably be taking creatine.

00:27:43.000 And you can think of it as if you're eating red meat and you're eating it rare, you can err on the side of one pound.

00:27:53.000 And if you're eating, and I would include as red meat salmon, which is like a reddish fish and is actually quite high in creatine.

00:28:01.000 If you're eating white meat, white fish, and you're eating it well done, you want to err on the side of two pounds because they don't have as much creatine, then you cook the creatine out of them and you wind up with much lower dose.

00:28:13.000 We should probably say salmon.

00:28:14.000 You're talking about wild salmon versus farm salmon, which has a dyed pink skin.

00:28:20.000 Well, it's not the red color.

00:28:22.000 I think it's coincidence that it's that it's, I think the red color is coincidence.

00:28:25.000 It's just a helpful way to think about it.

00:28:28.000 But it probably is the case at least like every Atlantic farm salmon that I've seen is you can tell that it's, well, if you look up in a database, it's way higher in fat.

00:28:43.000 But you can tell by looking at it that it just doesn't have that lean look that wild salmon has.

00:28:48.000 So I think creatine is a function of the lean tissue mass.

00:28:54.000 And it might be the case that wild salmon are doing a lot more swimming.

00:28:59.000 Like maybe the wild environment is encouraging them to use their muscles in a way that increases their creatine synthesis.

00:29:04.000 That wouldn't be surprising.

00:29:05.000 It wouldn't surprise me.

00:29:07.000 I have tried to steel man the case of could there be a vegan diet that would make you not need to supplement with creatine.

00:29:15.000 And the steel man that I've got for you is you'd have to be eating a half a kilogram of tofu and a half a kilogram of quinoa per day.

00:29:23.000 And that's not typically what and that might rip a hole in your digestive system, but that's not hurt my stomach just saying that.

00:29:31.000 So I think that most vegans should probably just supplement with creatine, call it a day there.

00:29:39.000 So that's creatine.

00:29:41.000 We mentioned sunlight.

00:29:43.000 So sunlight is when you wake up in the morning, I said before that your mitochondria have not gone to sleep literally, but they've really slowed down the earth.

00:29:53.000 It's like they're on a nap.

00:29:55.000 And there's a transition when you wake up where the mitochondria have to say, oh, you've woken up.

00:30:01.000 Now I need to, I need to wake up and I need to start producing more energy.

00:30:07.000 And sunlight going into your eyes, being translated into your brain, is the signal that actually tells your brain to organize that.

00:30:18.000 And so what happens as a result of that is that signaling helps your mitochondria adapt and start producing everything and actually helps them adjust.

00:30:27.000 And if you don't have the morning sunlight, you are going to have your mornings full of suboptimal energy metabolism that is initiating that vicious cycle of aging.

00:30:41.000 That's what I believe.

00:30:45.000 And then it's also the case that the red and infrared light from the sun is very beneficial to the mitochondria.

00:30:52.000 The best time to get that would be in the morning.

00:30:56.000 When you go out in the afternoon, you've got to deal with like, can I get two hours of this without getting burned?

00:31:02.000 But if you go out in the morning, you can stay out there for one or two hours and you can get a lot of red and infrared light without worrying about burning wavelengths.

00:31:11.000 And then I think the beds and other devices at home are great.

00:31:16.000 And where you want to start thinking about that is I'm getting benefit from red and your infrared light, but I'm getting more.

00:31:25.000 I know that I could get more benefit if I got more of it than I'm able to get through sunlight.

00:31:29.000 So start getting those wavelengths with sunlight as your base and then do whatever you want on top of that with whatever seems to be working well for you.

00:31:39.000 Then nutrition would be number three.

00:31:42.000 And every nutrient is needed for everything in your body, but your mitochondria are using all kinds of nutrients.

00:31:50.000 And there's this idea that floats around in society that nutritional deficiencies are a thing of the past.

00:31:57.000 But if you just look at surveys, 93% of Americans are getting less than they need of at least one nutrient.

00:32:05.000 30% have verifiable blood markers of at least one nutritional deficiency.

00:32:11.000 And 6% have blood markers verifying more than one nutrient deficiency.

00:32:17.000 And I think those are all underestimates because when you're just looking at the official stats on like how much of each nutrient should you eat, there are a lot of people that have needs for way more, right?

00:32:27.000 So I think those stats are grossly underestimating how many people need to get better nutrition.

00:32:33.000 So I think everybody should be getting better nutrition.

00:32:39.000 And to kind of high-level what that looks like, I think some good rules of, there's lots of ways to skin a cap, but some good rules of thumb are different people will do better with more plants or more animals, but when you do eat animals, you should be eating them nose to tail.

00:32:58.000 So at least try to work in liver, at least try to work in bone broth or something like that.

00:33:03.000 The closer to nose to tail you can eat your animals, the better.

00:33:06.000 Do try to diversify across proteins because there's just different vitamin and mineral profiles in different types of protein.

00:33:15.000 Like if you can eat shellfish, eat some shellfish.

00:33:17.000 If you can eat fish, eat some fish.

00:33:18.000 You can eat dairy, eat some dairy.

00:33:20.000 And the more you diversify across those proteins, the better.

00:33:23.000 Most people don't eat enough protein.

00:33:26.000 Good rule of thumb would be at least a third of your plate should be protein. 0.91

00:33:29.000 But if it's if you're talking like eggs and dairy products, you've got to double that because they just the amount of space they occupy per unit of protein that they're giving you is, you know, a third of your plate is eggs is not going to give you enough protein.

00:33:47.000 And then I think try to eat as broadly as you can from different types of carbohydrates.

00:33:52.000 If you have to leave out something, leave out grains.

00:33:55.000 Try to eat whole unprocessed foods and try to eat 80% of your foods cooked at home or prepped at home or whatever instead of eating out.

00:34:06.000 And make sure your digestion is in good order.

00:34:08.000 And those are kind of the, you know, the broad bases of nutrition.

00:34:12.000 Yeah.

00:34:15.000 And exercise is a very interesting one.

00:34:24.000 So if you exercise is incredibly important to the signaling that produce mitochondria.

00:34:32.000 But why is that?

00:34:33.000 It's because you need mitochondria to produce energy for the exercise that you're doing.

00:34:38.000 So I think a lot of people are too reductionist when they look at what type of exercise you should do for your mitochondria.

00:34:44.000 If you try to do a study that says like, I'm trying to get more mitochondria in my skeletal muscle, what exercise is going to do it?

00:34:50.000 You're going to do it.

00:34:51.000 You're going to see endurance exercise outperforming other things.

00:34:54.000 And that's because endurance activity requires more mitochondrial function in the muscle.

00:35:01.000 If you're doing like hypertrophy or strength training and you're doing short sets, your muscle's burning a lot of glycogen.

00:35:08.000 It's less dependent on its mitochondria.

00:35:10.000 So you're not going to see the mitochondrial function there.

00:35:12.000 But that doesn't mean you're not improving mitochondrial function because now all that really means is the liver is stepping up to assist the muscle.

00:35:19.000 Like if you're doing sprinting, your muscle's burning through tons of carbohydrates and making a lot of lactate.

00:35:25.000 If that lactate's not being metabolized in the skeletal muscle, it's going to the liver to get converted back to glucose.

00:35:31.000 So your liver, now you're training your liver's mitochondria.

00:35:34.000 When you're doing strength training, you're doing hypertrophy.

00:35:37.000 So I think the right way to look at it is just you should be exercising all the things that are functions that you need to keep.

00:35:45.000 And that means endurance, it means strength, it means mobility, it means agility, it means balance, it means proprioception, it means being able to respond to your environment.

00:35:54.000 I think, you know, to some degree, like just playing a sport that has other people in it is important because if someone's throwing a frisbee and you need to react to that, you're training mitochondria in your brain that are able to energize the systems that provide your reaction time.

00:36:08.000 And I think cognitive exercise for your brain is things like working on your memory and on your creative synthesis and all those different aspects.

00:36:19.000 And I do think that a lot of people are thinking about this when they're 25.

00:36:24.000 They're like, well, I don't care if I can memorize a string of 25 numbers, but you're going to care if you can't remember anything when you're 75, you know?

00:36:32.000 So I think that we really need a broad thought about this.

00:36:37.000 But by the way, do you know what athletes live the longest from the pros?

00:36:45.000 Let me guess.

00:36:47.000 Baseball?

00:36:50.000 It's actually gymnasts and pole vaulters have eight years on the general population.

00:36:58.000 And if you look at, there was a study that came out earlier this year and it tallied up all of the pro sports players from all of the countries who had the dates of their death published and who were notable enough to have been, had an article published about them.

00:37:18.000 And so they had many hundreds.

00:37:21.000 I forget the exact sample size, but they were able to statistically adjust the mortality rate to the general population from which the athlete came.

00:37:33.000 So if it was a Greek athlete, they were adjusted to the mortality rate of Greece when they died.

00:37:41.000 What you would expect after adjusting for location and age and so on.

00:37:45.000 And in the male athletes, you had gymnasts and pole vaulters with eight years on the population.

00:37:54.000 And you've got cyclists who've, and of course you've got sumos.

00:37:57.000 Sumo wrestlers are 10 years below.

00:38:00.000 And you have a lot of sports that have high injury rates that are especially a lot of stuff that has impacts to the hands, martial arts and things like that, where probably the sport itself and its impact on training your body's energy systems is positive, but just the injury rate is taking you out.

00:38:20.000 So you're kind of like not, you're kind of in the middle.

00:38:23.000 You're very close to the general population.

00:38:26.000 Cyclists only have two years on the general population. 0.97

00:38:30.000 And so what I thought was interesting, I think a few things are interesting about that.

00:38:33.000 So first of all, there's a lot of people in the longevity space are taking most of their information about how they should train for longevity from people who specialize in cycling.

00:38:45.000 Well, yeah, I'm not going to name names, but there's a lot of, there's people out there who are, you know, that's where it's coming from.

00:38:51.000 And I, you know, it makes a lot of sense that cycling is, you know, it's good for cardiorespiratory fitness.

00:38:57.000 There's a lot of data that having good cardiorespiratory fitness is a key factor for longevity.

00:39:02.000 But when you look at a study where gymnasts and pole vaulters have six extra years on the cyclists and the cyclists only have two extra years on the general population, I'm like, huh, what, you know, it's not all about the cardiorespiratory fitness.

00:39:17.000 And so when I think about, there's, it's, you know, it's an observational study.

00:39:20.000 You can't prove cause and effect, but it just does make you think.

00:39:24.000 And the way that I think about that is a few things.

00:39:26.000 So first of all, the commonalities between gymnasts and pole vaulters, it's definitely not height because gymnasts tend to be short and pole vaulters are tall.

00:39:37.000 And so the height cancels out.

00:39:40.000 Definitely they're fit.

00:39:42.000 They do both have, it is interesting that they have, you know, cyclists have a good lower body and gymnasts and pole vaulters have a good upper body.

00:39:51.000 So I do think that's interesting that it does make you it does make you wonder if you could skip legday.

00:39:58.000 I don't advocate skipping like day.

00:40:01.000 But to me, what I think is actually going on here is I think that functionality of movement throughout the whole body to facilitate the kind of skills that they have is training things that are getting left out when you just make sure that your heart and lungs are able.

00:40:31.000 to support your running or your cycling.

00:40:34.000 And I think that some of those involve it are probably related.

00:40:40.000 I don't know what they're not dying of.

00:40:42.000 So presumably they're getting less heart disease, they're getting less cancer and they're getting less neurological disease because that's what people are dying of, right?

00:40:49.000 Like the average, if you get far enough for someone to analyze why you died, you know, they're like diabetes and hip fractures and things like that are hitting younger people.

00:40:59.000 But in general, if people are dying because they got old, they're dying of heart disease first, cancer second, and neurological, like if they outlive those two things, you get this diverse spread of things that people die of and diverse neurological diseases becomes pretty heavy.

00:41:13.000 So I think cardiorespiratory fitness is probably the biggest thing in preventing heart disease.

00:41:19.000 But cancer becomes very interesting because there was a study in rodents that showed that stretching prevents tumor growth.

00:41:31.000 And I thought this was wild.

00:41:33.000 I first heard about this on one of Huberman's shows.

00:41:38.000 And so I looked up the study and I was like, this is wild because I happen to know some other things about immune function.

00:41:45.000 So one thing is that when in T cells, which are important both to prevent infections and are also important because they attack you during autoimmunity, and they're also important because they kill cancer.

00:42:02.000 For T cells to be activated, what they do is they don't have enough energy themselves.

00:42:08.000 So they push off the local environment.

00:42:12.000 And that pushing off creates motor proteins inside that generate the energy to activate the T cell.

00:42:21.000 And what cancers do is they modify their extracellular environment to compromise that because it's harder for the T cell to push off of it.

00:42:30.000 Now, I know another thing from Crohn's research, which is that the best way to cure Crohn's disease besides some of the drugs that they're on is a liquid diet.

00:42:42.000 And the recent research on how the liquid diet works is that it removes the pressure in the intestine that is pushing out and is causing inflammation to activate and attack the body, right?

00:42:54.000 So I'm synthesizing these three things and I'm like, this makes a lot of sense that the relative proportions and how stretched out and like what is the quality of your joint tissue and things like that probably has a lot of severely underappreciated Causation in terms of cancer and autoimmune disease.

00:43:18.000 So, I think it would be very interesting to see if actual like functional mechanical activity, like if you optimize for functional mechanical activity such that you can swing around from acrobat from a trapeze and flip around in the air and swing on rings and push yourself up and stuff like that.

00:43:40.000 Does that pay forward into better immune function because your body is more properly structured?

00:43:46.000 I can't prove that, but I think it's very interesting to think about for those two exercises.

00:43:53.000 And then it is very interesting to me that gymnasts and pole vaulters both spend a lot of time upside down and they don't stay upside down for very long, but they just they repeatedly are upside down quite a bit, right?

00:44:08.000 And so this is just again, this is all just hypothesizing interesting ideas, right?

00:44:14.000 So one interesting idea is that a vibration plate is the sedentary man's gymnastics.

00:44:24.000 And that, you know, flipping upside down is better at circulating body fluids than walking.

00:44:34.000 And like a vibration plate is better than walking, but actually spending time upside in the upside down state and flipping around is actually very good for circulating the fluids in your body.

00:44:44.000 I don't, you know, I can't prove any of this, but it's all very interesting to think about.

00:44:47.000 But what I can't, what I kind of conclude from this is you don't want to get sucked into just optimizing VO2 max or something like that.

00:45:00.000 You really want to, the lesson from the gymnasts is like, what are all the things that a gymnast can do that I can't do?

00:45:07.000 And I should be able to approximate them in the best way that I can.

00:45:11.000 And I take that a little bit more literally.

00:45:14.000 So I actually do like, I am trying to convert all my workouts into like, what's the gymnastic version of this?

00:45:22.000 And you think it's because of flipping?

00:45:26.000 I'm just both involving coordination, explosive movement.

00:45:30.000 Right.

00:45:31.000 And I think the skills.

00:45:33.000 I think that, yes.

00:45:34.000 So I think the skill training is big for spilloff into neurological disease because, but I'm just trying to connect them to the three things.

00:45:45.000 So I like, like, I'm not sure exactly what they have lower rates of death from.

00:45:49.000 We need more studies to see that.

00:45:51.000 But the but the body mechanics, I think, is a very interesting possible explanation of why they'd have lower rates of cancer.

00:46:01.000 And what you just said, I think is a great explanation of why they would have lower rates of neurological disease.

00:46:08.000 And I think it's kind of like, you know, if you look at, I think another thing that people mistake in the longevity space is they spend too much time thinking about reverse engineering a hundred backwards.

00:46:22.000 What do I want to not have lost by that time?

00:46:25.000 And not enough time just being in peak function.

00:46:28.000 Because if you look at bone mass, for example, bone mass goes up until you're in your mid-20s, maybe 25 to 30.

00:46:38.000 There's a little bit of difference with men and women, but then it just goes down after that. 0.67

00:46:43.000 And if you want to have good bone mass when you're 75, the most important asset you could possibly have is to have really good peak bone mass when you're 25, right?

00:46:54.000 So I really think that like, it's just like I said before, you might not think memorizing a string of 25 numbers is important at any age, but if you're going to have really awesome peak memory, that gives you a lot of room to decline later on.

00:47:10.000 Whereas if you're trying to reverse engineer like what you don't want to be able to not remember when you're 75, I think you're just setting the bar way too low, right?

00:47:20.000 So if you're 20, you should be thinking about like, what are all the sports I can't do?

00:47:25.000 And not, you know, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with picking a sport, but I do think it would be good for everyone when they're young enough to do so to just try a different sport once a year.

00:47:38.000 And maybe they don't.

00:47:39.000 Love it.

00:47:40.000 They don't fall in love with it, but maybe they learn something like, oh, I didn't realize I couldn't do that.

00:47:44.000 So, for example, I did uh, last year I did a little bit of bjj and I did a little bit of boxing and I was like, oh damn, like my feet don't move like they used to.

00:47:56.000 Um in boxing and in in bjj I was.

00:47:59.000 I was getting a little dizzy doing forward and backward rolls and I was like I don't spend enough.

00:48:03.000 This is before I started thinking about the gymnast being upside down.

00:48:05.000 I was like I don't spend enough time being upside down.

00:48:08.000 So I was like, so I bought some mats and now I just, you know, I do, I do one forward and backward roll every day.

00:48:14.000 No matter, I don't do bjj right now, but I just do one forward and backward roll every day as part of my morning routine.

00:48:20.000 Um, but i've also switched like I was like why would I overhead press when I could try to do?

00:48:24.000 Um, I can do wall push-ups now.

00:48:26.000 I mean I, my hope is by next year i'll be able to do handstand push-ups, but i've i'm working on a handstand right now, so we'll see how that goes.

00:48:33.000 But um I, I think just because you can focus on one thing, you can really miss out that like oh, my favorite workout activities don't.

00:48:44.000 I mean, this is how many people are doing all their favorite workout routine activities and forgetting that they don't have any rotation, they don't have any side bending.

00:48:53.000 You know, like it, like if, if you would, just you just like try a different sport and be like oh, what am what did I not realize, I wasn't able to do at all?

00:49:01.000 And and then pick that and put it in your workout.

00:49:04.000 Um, you know, because if you've got a great programmer, then maybe your workout is perfect, but I think most of us are can like, we gravitate towards some of the exercises that we think are good.

00:49:14.000 And even if, even if you think you're mixing it up, like Crossfit, Crossfit managed to eliminate rotation from everything.

00:49:21.000 Like that, like every sport that involves throwing a ball involves rotation.

00:49:25.000 Right well, they they do.

00:49:26.000 Sometimes they throw the ball sideways against a wall.

00:49:29.000 There's, there's some rotation in it.

00:49:31.000 Maybe they worked it in.

00:49:32.000 When I did crossfit, the ball throwing we did was wall balls, and so it was like depends, I think it depends entirely on who's teaching it.

00:49:39.000 But yeah, that makes sense.

00:49:40.000 Doing windmills, yeah, windmills are kind of a form of rotation.

00:49:44.000 There's a lot of ab exercises they do that are rotational.

00:49:47.000 Yeah, all right, so I that maybe that wasn't fair but um, but my point is that, like a lot, a lot, a lot of a lot of people are not doing any rotation right right um, and and so I I just I, just you just want to tap into that.

00:50:03.000 That diversity of like, what functions am I not exercising when I exercise them?

00:50:08.000 When we're talking about skills, we're talking about the neurological system and the cognitive system synergistically in a dance.

00:50:17.000 Um, when you talk about old people and one of the things that happens when Cognitive function declines is you lose your ability to do puzzles. 0.96

00:50:27.000 And one of the ways to stave that off, they believe, is like do crosswords, do a bunch of different things, your con chess, do something that's actively making your mind fire and work.

00:50:39.000 Wouldn't it just make sense that a skill versus just a workout, just bench pressing and squats and stuff like that, but it's an actual skill where you do like Muay Thai, hitting pads or even light sparring, that you're thinking as well as exercising, which is very different because you're consciously aware of your opponent's movement.

00:51:02.000 You're calculating it.

00:51:04.000 You're trying to time things.

00:51:06.000 There's a whole dance going on between your body and your mind that doesn't really exist in straight workouts.

00:51:14.000 So that alone, I would think, would fight off a lot of the age-related decline in physical activity or physical function.

00:51:23.000 Yeah, I think there are, you mentioned a couple things in there.

00:51:26.000 So I think it's a separate thing to have a skill and to have strategy and to have reaction time.

00:51:33.000 But I think you definitely want to be hitting all those bases.

00:51:35.000 So I think it's good to have a general checklist of what should you be exercising and see that it takes strength and break it down into the different planes and then also take skill, strategy, reaction time, agility, quickness, balance, power.

00:51:57.000 And you have to find a way to, you know, it's hard to work everything at once, but you got to find a way to maybe you cycle through switching your focus, but you find like what is, if I, if I worked on really being able to jump rope without tripping my feet up last quarter, how am I going to take that skill and not lose it?

00:52:20.000 And so for me, for example, like I really focused on jump roping when I realized how horrible I was at it when I was forced to do unboxing.

00:52:29.000 And so I very intensively tried to get good at jump roping.

00:52:35.000 And now I don't want to work on it anymore, but I've just taken in like, okay, every morning I have to do 50 uninterrupted jump ropes just in the course of my warm-up.

00:52:44.000 Just to kind of keep whatever skills that you've done.

00:52:45.000 Yeah, just to make sure that like I'm not losing the basic capacity to do that coordination.

00:52:52.000 Yeah.

00:52:53.000 And if I start to, then I realize I have to work on it more.

00:52:56.000 Yeah.

00:52:58.000 New things, I think, would enhance that even more, maybe than things that you're very comfortable with and things you're very efficient at.

00:53:06.000 Like, say, if you're an athlete in whatever sport and you say, you know, I'm going to try jujitsu or I'm going to try martial arts.

00:53:14.000 Like something completely new like that where you're working out, but you're really thinking because you've got to like really concentrate.

00:53:22.000 It's not like a natural movement to throw a sidekick.

00:53:25.000 You have to really concentrate on picking your knee up, twisting your body and all that jazz.

00:53:29.000 Like, I think stuff like that would, you know, just keep everything firing, no?

00:53:35.000 I think you, yeah, I mean, I think you should do a mix.

00:53:38.000 Like, you always want to be pushing yourself to new achievements, but then you also, I think you want to structure things so that you don't lose the ones that you did.

00:53:49.000 Right.

00:53:50.000 Like, I think a lot of us go through life just making achievement, losing it, and treading water and going nowhere.

00:53:57.000 When I really got into jiu-jitsu, I stopped doing any kickboxing for a long time.

00:54:02.000 And every now and then, I would just hit the bag and just like, oh, I still can do it.

00:54:06.000 But then I started training Muay Thai again.

00:54:10.000 And it was kind of shocking how long it took me to get the flow back to like, whap, like where it really comes off smooth.

00:54:19.000 Everything seemed like a little labored and it was just disheartening to like, oh, I don't really have these skills.

00:54:24.000 Like, I have to like reacquire them.

00:54:27.000 You know, I know how to do it.

00:54:28.000 I've done it.

00:54:29.000 But it's just like right now, everything's a little, the pathways are filled with mud.

00:54:34.000 You know what I mean?

00:54:35.000 It's not clean.

00:54:36.000 It's not nice and sharp.

00:54:38.000 Everything is a little funky.

00:54:39.000 And, you know, but if you want to get good at jiu-jitsu, you don't have time for two hours of Muay Thai a day.

00:54:44.000 You just don't.

00:54:45.000 You know, so it's like you got to pick your poison.

00:54:47.000 You got to pick what you like, which you don't like.

00:54:49.000 Yeah.

00:54:51.000 Well, I think you have to decide what your goal is and what your metric is.

00:54:56.000 Like there's no way that anyone is going to be good at like seven, you know, going to be elite level at any two sports or like great at any seven.

00:55:05.000 Right.

00:55:05.000 So I think you have to say like, okay, do I want to be really good at Mai Thai?

00:55:10.000 And that, and that's, you don't have to do that to have healthy aging.

00:55:15.000 Right.

00:55:16.000 But there are things that you do at Muay Thai that you do have to be able to do to have healthy aging.

00:55:21.000 So if you're just thinking about it from the perspective of how do I know that I'm engaging in healthy aging, I think you don't want to say like, oh, I need to be, I need to be as good as I ever was at Maui Thai.

00:55:33.000 You just have to say, okay, like, why am I bad at some of that?

00:55:37.000 And is that something that I need in general?

00:55:39.000 And I think oftentimes by doing something like that, you can think about it and you can realize, oh, what I really can't do is I'm not agile anymore.

00:55:48.000 I really can't shift my weight quickly anymore.

00:55:51.000 Or I really can't, like my reaction time is slow.

00:55:54.000 Like I just keep getting hit in the head because I don't move it.

00:55:58.000 If you're realizing those things, then I think you have to find some way to train those because you need those for everything.

00:56:04.000 And it's just, it's easy to not challenge yourself in life and don't realize what you're losing.

00:56:10.000 So you do have to challenge yourself with something you're not able to do to figure out what you're weak in.

00:56:15.000 One of the things I wanted to bring up, you brought up earlier, you were talking about martial artists and perhaps like injuries accumulating over time and you lose some of your function because of that.

00:56:29.000 Like you mentioned hands, hand injuries.

00:56:33.000 Is that something that people need to take in consideration that maybe they don't, that maybe just physical damage, like in terms of getting hit and physical damage perhaps from overtraining, physical damage certainly from cutting weight?

00:56:49.000 You know, a lot of these guys cut weight and they're basically on death's door 24 hours before a fight, which is, I think, completely insane and the most avoidable damaging thing about martial arts competition.

00:57:01.000 And yet it's ubiquitous.

00:57:02.000 It's like almost everyone does it.

00:57:05.000 Yeah, I mean, I think there is a degree of subjectivity to it.

00:57:11.000 If your idea of what a life well-lived is, is to win an event that might have you die in the next three years, then how are you going to argue with that value that someone has adopted?

00:57:27.000 But if you are thinking about it from the perspective of how do I stay healthy through, how do I live a long, healthy life, then injury prevention has to be your number one consideration, not your number two.

00:57:41.000 I think even if you were just trying to say like, how can I be the strongest I could be?

00:57:48.000 You would still need injury prevention to be number one.

00:57:51.000 Because, you know, how many people take three months off from a lift that they're working on and wind up six months behind where they had been when they start again as a result of that injury?

00:58:05.000 And where would they have been if they spent that six months getting stronger?

00:58:09.000 And if you're going to do that every two or three years, like that's taking a lot, like a huge toll off even the skill that you could develop and your maximal capacity at that.

00:58:19.000 But like I was saying at the beginning, I really think that the simplest explanation for why mitochondrial function declines 1% per year and gets cut in half by age 70 is just this.

00:58:32.000 When I was injured, my mitochondria were completely obsessed with healing from that injury and a little bit came out of the account used to repair the home base.

00:58:42.000 That's what I was getting at.

00:58:43.000 Yeah.

00:58:43.000 So for someone who's had like, say, a martial artist who's had broken hands, broken ribs, knee surgery, shoulder surgery, a lot of these guys have gone through a bunch of stuff like that.

00:58:54.000 So each one of those things is taking a small toll.

00:58:57.000 Yeah.

00:58:58.000 Yeah.

00:58:59.000 That's not something that people consider.

00:59:00.000 You think, oh, you recovered from that injury, now you're 100%.

00:59:04.000 But you're 100% with the tax of having recovered from that injury.

00:59:10.000 Yeah.

00:59:11.000 And a lot of people aren't necessarily fully recovered from the injury either.

00:59:14.000 Oh, many, many aren't.

00:59:15.000 Yeah.

00:59:16.000 Many, many aren't.

00:59:17.000 I talked to a guy once who was injured in marathon running, and he thought he was recovered.

00:59:29.000 I thought he wasn't recovered.

00:59:30.000 And he thought there was some kind of metabolic stuff wrong with him because he's getting sick all the time.

00:59:35.000 I'm like, bro, you didn't recover yet.

00:59:36.000 Like, what are you doing going out and doing all that running?

00:59:40.000 What was the injury?

00:59:41.000 I don't remember the specific, I forgot the specific injury, but one of the common running injuries.

00:59:48.000 Yeah, one of the things that's really common in MMA is someone getting knocked out and then getting knocked out again because they come back too quickly.

00:59:58.000 It happened recently in a big fight.

01:00:02.000 And it's just there's a thing that happens with these guys where they just want to get back in there and get a win.

01:00:10.000 And a lot of times they're like, I'll be ready.

01:00:12.000 I won't get hit again.

01:00:13.000 I know what I did wrong.

01:00:14.000 I'll be better this time.

01:00:16.000 But they're more vulnerable now.

01:00:17.000 Like they can get knocked out.

01:00:21.000 Is this just neurological damage?

01:00:24.000 Is this just a function of the concussion?

01:00:27.000 Or do you think it's a function of the concussion, the recovery from it, and the diminishing capacity of the body because it had to recover from that traumatic injury?

01:00:35.000 I think it's all of those.

01:00:37.000 But that too, right?

01:00:38.000 So it's not just the fact that you got knocked out and your brain is more vulnerable now.

01:00:42.000 It's like, no, no, no, your body's more vulnerable.

01:00:44.000 You're probably not as strong as you were.

01:00:45.000 You're probably not recovering as quickly.

01:00:48.000 Yeah.

01:00:48.000 I mean, the brain is, it's a small part of the body, but it's massively outsized in terms of the energy that it consumes.

01:00:54.000 And so think about if you're, you know, if you're actually healing the ability for it to, like if it's just sucking even more disproportionate energy from the body.

01:01:05.000 And just think about how much the rest of the body works to support the brain.

01:01:09.000 Like the liver is working all day long to make the brain get enough energy.

01:01:14.000 So yeah, there's no way that healing from a brain injury is not taking a toll systemically.

01:01:19.000 That's impossible.

01:01:20.000 But to accelerate or enhance that, creatine, you think would be a very good option.

01:01:27.000 I mean, creatine is one of the ones that's been demonstrated to do that.

01:01:31.000 And it's been studied 20 grams a day.

01:01:33.000 I don't think anyone really knows, like, do you need 20?

01:01:35.000 Is 30 better?

01:01:36.000 Could it have been done with five?

01:01:39.000 But most of the brain research is being done with doses around 20 grams.

01:01:44.000 And the thought is that the muscles are going to take first dibs and you need to have a high dose to get it to the brain.

01:01:53.000 There's a lot we don't know about that.

01:01:55.000 But as a default, if I was healing from a traumatic brain injury, I would take the creatine.

01:02:02.000 And then I, you know, I think when if you have something that's this serious, you do want to like know what your limiting bottlenecks are.

01:02:09.000 So I think actually doing mitochondrial testing is that's like one of the applications would be like, oh, now it's really important that I have a six-month window where I need to maximize everything I can.

01:02:21.000 And so, you know, testing to understand your unique needs, I think would be, it would be a way to supercharge that process when it's needed.

01:02:32.000 And I think that there are, and, you know, so to take this back to like what can people do in general, I think methylene blue you mentioned is is one of those ones where like I wouldn't even take I personally wouldn't even take it without testing showing that I need it.

01:02:47.000 But CoQ10 is an interesting one because CoQ10 is actually made in the body and it is found in food.

01:02:54.000 And so there, you know, methylene blue was a lot of people emphasized that it was the first, it was the first drug.

01:03:03.000 So it's like the first, you know, example of pharma, basically.

01:03:09.000 But before that, it was actually patented as something that would turn your clothes blue but wouldn't come out in the wash.

01:03:17.000 That was the patent on methylene blue.

01:03:20.000 You know, whereas CoQ10, you eat food, it's there.

01:03:24.000 Your body makes it itself.

01:03:27.000 And what kind of food is it in?

01:03:29.000 Heart is the best.

01:03:31.000 And so I was saying before, you should be eating nose to tail.

01:03:33.000 Like if you're going to eat meat, you should be eating heart.

01:03:37.000 I personally, most of my meat is actually a blend of like 60% ground beef and the rest of it is a blend of liver, heart, kidney.

01:03:49.000 And there are some other, mine is just liver, heart, and kidney.

01:03:52.000 There are some other companies that I've seen recently come out with ones that include spleen and adrenals and very small percentages.

01:04:01.000 But that's, I do strongly believe in a food first, pharma last approach.

01:04:07.000 And that doesn't mean like I'm against pharma, but it means that even with supplements, like if you can meet a need with food, you should meet the need with food.

01:04:17.000 You should use supplements in a strategic sense, not as a replacement for a bad diet.

01:04:22.000 And those supplements should, you know, what you would do next is say, like, okay, I'm really having trouble getting enough whatever nutrient.

01:04:30.000 Maybe I'll supplement to compensate for that.

01:04:33.000 But I think you should go on down the line with, you know, other things that are like supplements of things that occur naturally in your body that are, of course, safe to be in your body because they're always going to be there.

01:04:47.000 Maybe you can supplement with that to help break a vicious cycle of aging or to stimulate a virtuous cycle of healing that, you know, I would, once you're getting all your nutrients and you're trying to do that from food, I think that you could start playing around with that stuff.

01:05:07.000 But even then, so CoQ10 is a great example.

01:05:11.000 I would try eating more heart before I would try supplementing with 400 milligrams a day of CoQ10, for example.

01:05:17.000 Can I ask you this?

01:05:17.000 Does it matter if it's chicken heart, beef heart?

01:05:20.000 Is there a superior?

01:05:23.000 I don't think we have enough data to say that.

01:05:26.000 So CoQ10 is one of those things where the nutritional databases are not that, I mean, you're not even going to find it in USDA database, but there's published literature.

01:05:35.000 But I have not seen all the different hearts compared.

01:05:38.000 So how do we know that CoQ10 is in heart?

01:05:41.000 Well, wherever it's been measured in heart, it's there.

01:05:44.000 So like the representative examples of heart that were used were like an order of magnitude higher in CoQ10 than anything else.

01:05:51.000 And is there we just haven't seen all of the different hearts compared to each other.

01:05:57.000 Is it dependent upon how it's cooked?

01:05:59.000 Like whether it's rare, well done, I think you lose some during cooking, but it's I forget how much, and I don't think it's all of it.

01:06:10.000 So it's, I think it's you're always, I mean, you're always the more gently you cook your food, the better off you are in every conceivable case.

01:06:18.000 It might not always taste the best.

01:06:20.000 Except for parasites, of course.

01:06:23.000 I mean, you don't need to make a steak well done to avoid it.

01:06:25.000 Well, not steak, but pork.

01:06:28.000 Right, right.

01:06:28.000 Yeah.

01:06:28.000 I mean, other things, especially some wild gain.

01:06:32.000 Yeah.

01:06:33.000 Right.

01:06:33.000 So taking that into account, the nutrient value of the food is always going to be highest when the food has been cooked relatively gently.

01:06:42.000 But anyway, so CoQ10 is interesting because it's hard to argue against taking it from the literature because there's dozens of clinical trials.

01:06:54.000 Quite a bit of it is in heart disease.

01:06:55.000 It looks pretty promising in various forms of heart disease.

01:07:00.000 But if you look at that literature, what you see is a dose response where at 1 to 200 milligrams per day of CoQ10, the average person's glucose, insulin, and blood pressure looks better than not taking it.

01:07:17.000 But the average person at 400 milligrams of CoQ10 is actually having worse blood pressure, glucose, and insulin than they were without taking it.

01:07:28.000 And the variability around that is huge.

01:07:31.000 So one person is probably going to be worse at 100 milligrams, whereas another person might get their best at 400 milligrams.

01:07:38.000 But it's like, if you looked at the literature and you would say, where is the sweet spot where the average person is going to be doing really good?

01:07:45.000 It would be 100 to 200 milligrams a day.

01:07:47.000 But I think there are, I've seen a lot of edge cases on either side where some people get miracles and some people get, I wouldn't say catastrophe, but just they just get worse off.

01:08:01.000 So a lot of people complain about insomnia.

01:08:05.000 They complain about their heart racing or heart palpitations, various things like that, overstimulation, feeling like the lights are too bright or the sounds are too strong or whatever, just hyper sensory awareness.

01:08:19.000 It's not common, but it's all the people who do on common stuff always ask me about it.

01:08:24.000 Right.

01:08:25.000 At higher levels?

01:08:27.000 No, no, just like at 100 milligrams.

01:08:29.000 They're just hypersensitive people out there.

01:08:32.000 And is this rare?

01:08:33.000 Is this like...

01:08:34.000 I don't know how common it is.

01:08:36.000 So what I can tell you is that across the trials, you see some people reporting GI side effects, which is super common.

01:08:47.000 You don't see a lot of this mentioned, but you never know if they were looking for it.

01:08:52.000 Like a lot of times the side effect list is dependent on what side effects they asked about.

01:08:58.000 Is this something you take with food or without food?

01:09:02.000 It would be better to take it with food.

01:09:04.000 And is the side effects, is it dependent upon when they take it?

01:09:08.000 Like whether it's morning or evening?

01:09:12.000 I think for some people that have complained about insomnia, they have thought that it was worse when they took it in the evening.

01:09:21.000 Makes sense, right?

01:09:22.000 Yeah.

01:09:23.000 So maybe increase function if you took it early or maybe increase energy levels?

01:09:29.000 Well, you know, okay, so I think let me set the stage for this with just kind of like I think this really helps explain like what should you actually be thinking about to know that you're healthy.

01:09:42.000 And I think we struggle a lot with like I think the I think the medicine just thinks that being healthy is just not having any disease.

01:09:50.000 And I think we as kind of the wellness community or whatever struggle to come up with a good definition for health.

01:09:57.000 I think a really good definition of health for me is you should be abundantly supplied with all the energy that you need to fulfill the goals that you're trying to fulfill.

01:10:09.000 And you should be adaptable enough to be able to handle things changing that were out of your control or your own purposeful changing.

01:10:19.000 And I think the North Star for you to see when to know that you are healthy is that your energy to anxiety ratio is very high and your libido is very strong.

01:10:34.000 And so when you start losing, you use energy not only to produce, maintain, and repair everything, but you also use it to distribute everything.

01:10:48.000 And so one of the things that you do with like the last 10% of energy you make is help determine where all the energy goes.

01:10:55.000 And so a lot of people think that like if their mitochondrial function is declining, they should feel tired all the time.

01:11:00.000 But that's not necessarily the case.

01:11:02.000 It might be that you're just losing the energy that you need to actually help the mito, you know, the mitochondrial chemical energy to help control how you use energy.

01:11:13.000 And so you are wasting it as anxiety and that's coming out of productivity.

01:11:20.000 So it's like you look at you look at how much energy did I have yesterday and what did I get done?

01:11:28.000 If the answer is, well, I felt wired all day, but I wasted most of it thinking about why my wife insulted me and then worrying about how I was going to pay the bills.

01:11:40.000 And so I didn't actually get any work done.

01:11:42.000 Like that's a good sign that you are losing control over where your energy is going.

01:11:48.000 So you're not, you're just, that's not good.

01:11:50.000 That's not, that's not healthy.

01:11:52.000 Healthy is you have a, you have abundant energy to put towards productive things.

01:11:59.000 And so you should see from that that you feel energized when you need to be alert, that your anxiety levels are very low, that your libido is very high.

01:12:08.000 And you can adapt that on an age-dependent manner, and that you are able to sleep very deeply.

01:12:17.000 And if all your energy is keeping you up at night and then the next day you're sleep deprived, like your biggest problem is you're just not putting the energy to where it's, where it's supposed to go.

01:12:27.000 So I think when you're looking at something like that, you could say, oh, maybe CoQ10 is just increasing their energy.

01:12:31.000 But to me, they lost a little bit of energy and they lost the energy that they needed.

01:12:36.000 Like they lost the top 10% of their energy.

01:12:39.000 And then that made them not be able to control where the next 20% went.

01:12:44.000 And so it spilled over into their heart was racing or it spilled over until they couldn't fall asleep at night.

01:12:50.000 But I've also, you know, I've also seen other edge cases where people get miracles from CoQ10 that you also are not going to find in the literature.

01:12:59.000 So I had this.

01:13:00.000 What kind of miracles?

01:13:01.000 I'll give you one example.

01:13:03.000 So in the program that I had, I had a client named Jacqueline and she lost her period at 28. 0.53

01:13:12.000 So she's, you call it amenorrhea, but she described it as I hit menopause way too early.

01:13:18.000 She didn't have her period for 10 years.

01:13:20.000 So we did mitochondrial function testing on her that showed that like you have a specific need for a lot of CoQ10.

01:13:27.000 And what was crazy was she had gone to functional medicine practitioners, did homeopathy, all kinds of, you know, just went to whatever she could find and nothing ever changed that.

01:13:39.000 But what's crazy is that like functional medicine practitioners often give bag fulls of supplements to their patients.

01:13:45.000 And, you know, so she had gotten like normal doses of CoQ10 the past, like one, two hundred milligrams.

01:13:50.000 But based on a testing that we did, we said like you should, you should probably experiment with seven, eight hundred milligrams.

01:13:57.000 So, which, you know, by the way, is above where people, the average person's glucose and insulin gets worse.

01:14:04.000 But two weeks into taking the CoQ10, she got her period back.

01:14:08.000 Wow.

01:14:09.000 After 10 years.

01:14:10.000 That's crazy.

01:14:11.000 After 10 years.

01:14:11.000 Yeah.

01:14:12.000 That's crazy.

01:14:13.000 So I think the I think CoQ10 is a methylene blue.

01:14:17.000 I'm a little bit more hardcore.

01:14:18.000 Like you really got to do the testing.

01:14:20.000 Whereas CoQ10, I'm kind of like, you know, you should play around with it.

01:14:24.000 Like you very well may benefit from one to 200 milligrams a day.

01:14:27.000 But my food-first pharma-last approach says, Are you eating heart?

01:14:32.000 Did you eat heart today?

01:14:34.000 Well, that completely makes sense.

01:14:35.000 And it also completely makes sense that it would be more bioavailable in food.

01:14:39.000 You'd absorb more of it.

01:14:41.000 I think that's, you know, that could be part of it.

01:14:44.000 But then it's just also, there's so much other stuff in the food, you know?

01:14:48.000 So it's like people get obsessed with whether they should be taking this thing or that thing, but that thing, if you got it from that food, gave you 36 other things.

01:14:55.000 Right, right.

01:14:56.000 And it's just.

01:14:57.000 And they work together.

01:14:58.000 Yeah.

01:14:58.000 And yeah, and they work together and they can also become imbalanced.

01:15:02.000 So I think a lot of mitochondrial energy metabolism is the bottlenecks that people can have is kind of like jammed up traffic.

01:15:11.000 And a lot of times you can mega dose something.

01:15:15.000 And the main problem of mega-dosing that for anyone would be it would be imbalance with something else.

01:15:20.000 But if you've got a blockage in that something else, now you've just got like a train wreck happening in your mitochondria because you're activating one pathway that has to flow through the next one where you had your blockage and it's like that.

01:15:33.000 So you can go online, for example, and find communities where people are raving about high-dose thiamine.

01:15:38.000 And the RDA, the government recommended amount of thiamine to get is around like 1.3 milligrams.

01:15:45.000 There's people out there who are like, oh, everyone should be taking 2,000 milligrams per day.

01:15:49.000 But I saw one case where this happened before I knew the person, but they had fatigue so bad that they couldn't get off the couch.

01:16:00.000 And so she was self-rating her energy at zero.

01:16:03.000 And a practitioner said, oh, you should really try this high-dose thiamine.

01:16:07.000 So she went on 1,100 milligrams a day.

01:16:09.000 So not 2,000, but big, right?

01:16:11.000 And a lot of people get miracles out of this.

01:16:14.000 And they are vocal.

01:16:16.000 They make communities on Facebook.

01:16:17.000 And so people get the idea that everyone who tries it is benefiting from it.

01:16:22.000 But her energy did improve a little bit, but she developed a new, completely new motor dysfunction problem, unsteady gait. 0.98

01:16:33.000 It just kept getting worse the whole time she was taking the thiamine.

01:16:38.000 She had an existing problem with dizziness that got a lot worse.

01:16:42.000 And a major issue for her was that she had to clear out the thiamine.

01:16:46.000 But the mitochondrial testing that we did on her basically showed that it explained it because it's because she had a block in the pathways that would be most sensitive to mega dosing that supplement.

01:16:57.000 And so winding that back and renourishing those other pathways helped her.

01:17:03.000 I do think that a lot of people, if they're going to go into the wild, wild west of mega-dosing random supplements, should do their own testing of glucose, ketones, and lactate at home.

01:17:16.000 A lot of people test their glucose.

01:17:17.000 Not a lot of people test their lactate, but I'm 100% confident that that woman, had the practitioner said, try the thiamine and see what it does to your lactate.

01:17:30.000 And if it goes down, it's good.

01:17:31.000 And if it goes up, it's bad.

01:17:33.000 I think she would have stopped it after the first few days.

01:17:36.000 And the new onset motor dysfunction never would have happened.

01:17:39.000 And so maybe she wouldn't have done mitochondrial testing with me until months after that, but it wouldn't have been a big deal because she had this real-time indicator of mitochondrial dysfunction that she tested herself at home that showed her, oh, I'm trying this, you know, out of left field thing.

01:17:55.000 Let's see, am I getting a stress signal out of it?

01:17:58.000 Or am I getting the signal that my mitochondria are calming down or more happy with their function, which is really what lactate is telling you?

01:18:05.000 And, you know, most people who do lactate testing do it in exercise.

01:18:09.000 And what you see in exercise is when your body's under an incredible amount of stress, you see lactate levels go up in the blood.

01:18:16.000 You know, halfway through a pro basketball game, lactate is through the roof, right?

01:18:21.000 Well, you know, if I took, if I take thiamine and the next day it looks like I'm halfway through the basketball game when I wake up, that's a sign that something is out of whack in my body, right?

01:18:32.000 So, but, you know, to go back to like if they, if the perspective was you might need more thiamine, so you should try adding some nutritional yeast to the dishes that you want to impart a cheesy flavor to, which is what nutritional yeast tastes like, because nutritional yeast is really high in thiamine, then that probably wouldn't have happened because the dose would have been a lot lower.

01:18:54.000 She would have gradually gone into it much more gradually.

01:18:57.000 But also, whatever those blockages were would have the other nutrients assisting them so the thiamine wouldn't be so out of balance.

01:19:04.000 So it's not just that you absorb it better or whatever.

01:19:07.000 It's also just the food, going food first really helps correct for errors that are a problem with your expertise.

01:19:18.000 Warren Buffett once said that a diversified portfolio is great protection against ignorance.

01:19:25.000 He said, it doesn't really make sense if you know what you're doing, but if you don't know what you're doing, you really should diversify.

01:19:30.000 And so that's what food does.

01:19:32.000 Food is a diversified portfolio.

01:19:34.000 And if you don't have the expertise to run around taking different things that you don't understand, if you don't understand the biochemical pathway of the thing you're mega dosing, you are not a candidate.

01:19:47.000 That's like buying an ETF and you don't even know what an ETF is.

01:19:52.000 Like, give that to your financial advisor.

01:19:54.000 And so, yeah, I think that food first, pharma last is the food first part of that is really just a protection against.

01:20:04.000 But like, I do have the expertise and I still do food first because I know that my expertise in my own body is incomplete.

01:20:13.000 And so I might know a thousand times more than the average person about what thiamine does in the body, but thiamine is doing things in my body and I don't know what they are.

01:20:22.000 So I'm not going to, I'm not going to assume I know everything just because I have top-notch expertise in the field.

01:20:32.000 When you're talking about methylene blue and CoQ10 and the benefits on mitochondria, what's the mechanism?

01:20:40.000 And are they similar?

01:20:42.000 Are they interchangeable?

01:20:45.000 They are not similar and they're not interchangeable.

01:20:50.000 So CoQ10 is, and I, you know, asking me if you want me to go into even more detail, but if you extract energy from food and then you need to carry that energy through a pathway, CoQ10 is about two-thirds through that pathway.

01:21:04.000 And it's just, it's like if you were going down a road and you had to take a shuttle across the river to get to your next destination and then you go get on the next train or something like that.

01:21:14.000 So CoQ10 is just part of the transport pathway as the electrons come through that are taken out of food to ultimately convert to ATP.

01:21:22.000 Methylene blue is, you know, if CoQ10 is like the main fairy, methylene blue is this guy running around waving his hands in the air.

01:21:32.000 Oh, you know what methylene blue is like?

01:21:34.000 It's like those fake taxis at the airport where like you're trying to go to the taxi line and they come right up to you and they're like, excuse me, sir, do you need a taxi?

01:21:43.000 But it's like the shady taxi.

01:21:45.000 So methylene blue is like the, it's like an army of the shady taxis.

01:21:49.000 And they're like, oh, don't take the ferry.

01:21:51.000 Come over here.

01:21:52.000 Right.

01:21:52.000 And so if the ferry is blocked, methylene blue would be great because if there's no taxis left, you'll take the shady wig because you got to get somewhere.

01:22:02.000 So methylene blue is it's operating on the outer edges of the main pathway and it's giving you alternatives.

01:22:11.000 But the mitochondrial pathway that you were born with is the one that is best.

01:22:15.000 It's the most efficient one.

01:22:17.000 So like I was saying before, methylene blue is great if you have a blockage there and you need a detour.

01:22:23.000 It makes you worse off if you don't.

01:22:25.000 CoQ10 is, it's the reason you can overdose on it is because it's like, okay, there's a river and you got to get a ferry going across it.

01:22:34.000 Well, what happens if there's 10 ferries or there's 50 ferries or there's 150 fairies? 1.00

01:22:38.000 At some point, they're going to be running into each other and you're just going to clog up that.

01:22:42.000 At some point, putting more vehicles into any pathway just makes things worse with the traffic that results.

01:22:49.000 And if you have too much traffic, you get accidents and train wrecks and car crashes and your mitochondria aren't good for you.

01:22:55.000 Would CoQ10 have a similar benefit in terms of like red light therapy, increasing mitochondrial function?

01:23:04.000 I think they could be synergistic.

01:23:07.000 CoQ10, by the way, it also helps you make more mitochondria.

01:23:11.000 And that's called mitochondrial biogenesis.

01:23:14.000 Exercise also helps you make more mitochondria.

01:23:16.000 And I do think that you like, so you should never take CoQ10 as an excuse to not exercise because exercise is very specifically putting the mitochondria where they belong to meet the adaptation that you are stressing.

01:23:30.000 So that's, you know, that's mitochondrial biogenesis number one.

01:23:35.000 But CoQ10 will help with that.

01:23:38.000 You don't always want mitochondrial biogenesis.

01:23:41.000 I do think like testing is another case where that might be a case where like you could use a high-dose CoQ10 to try to stimulate more mitochondria if testing shows that you don't have enough and that's your like limiting bottleneck.

01:23:56.000 But the average person whose CoQ10 levels are just a little lower where they should be, it really is just acting as that kind of like you open up the biochemistry textbook, you see the place of CoQ10 in the mitochondrial energy production pathways and it's just doing the basic textbook thing of helping you move those electrons along on the path to convert food to ATP.

01:24:19.000 One of the things you brought up earlier was seed oils impeding the absorption of certain nutrients.

01:24:28.000 Seed oils are a weird thing because so many people pushed against them and said, hey, these are essentially industrial lubricants that have been converted to food oil for profit.

01:24:40.000 And it's not really the best stuff that we should be consuming.

01:24:44.000 And then you have a bunch of online contrarians that say, oh, there's nothing wrong with seed oils.

01:24:49.000 This is all nonsense.

01:24:50.000 There's no data.

01:24:51.000 There's no studies.

01:24:53.000 And I don't understand that thought process.

01:24:57.000 And when you know what they're made with, with hexane and all the whole fucking disgusting process of making them versus pressing olive oil.

01:25:07.000 Like it's it's to me, it just seems so obvious that one of them you should probably avoid.

01:25:13.000 And then when it's connected to all sorts of inflammation and all sorts of various issues and what you were talking about earlier, impeding the absorption of certain nutrients.

01:25:25.000 What do you think is going on?

01:25:28.000 First of all, why are people defending seed oils?

01:25:32.000 And what is the real problem with seed oils in a human diet?

01:25:38.000 Seed oils make your tissues more vulnerable to damage and they don't damage your tissues.

01:25:47.000 And so one of the problems that has caused a lot of controversy, and I think the reason there's so much back and forth over this, is that it takes the right type of study to see seed oils making your tissues more vulnerable to damage because you need enough time for the damage to play out, and you need people who are more vulnerable to the damage.

01:26:13.000 And we've been talking a lot today about how aging is increasing that tissue damage.

01:26:21.000 Like everything is your repair capacity goes down as you grow older because your mitochondrial energy production is going down.

01:26:30.000 And one of the things you want to look at is what do seed oils do to you by the time you're 75?

01:26:37.000 And you don't just want to look at what do seed oils do to you when you're 25 because you might not be seeing the capacity for the increased vulnerability of tissue damage.

01:26:48.000 Another thing is the trials have to be long enough, both because it takes time to see the process of tissue damage play out, and also because we know from long trials of seed oils that short trials are useless.

01:27:06.000 And there are a lot of the people who are talking the loudest in defense of seed oils are looking at trials that last seven weeks long or 12 weeks long.

01:27:16.000 And they're ignoring trials that were done in the 50s, 60s, and 70s that were five to eight years long.

01:27:24.000 And I'm just like, you know, by all means, analyze the shorter trials, but do it in the light of what we know from the longer trials.

01:27:33.000 And the most important of the longer trials was the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study.

01:27:39.000 And this was the primary paper on it was published in 1969.

01:27:43.000 So it takes us back in history.

01:27:44.000 But there was a period between World War II and 1970s where there was a lot of motivation in the research community to do these grand randomized controlled trials of nutrition.

01:28:00.000 We don't have that anymore.

01:28:01.000 And I think it's because scientists love to, in their collective imagination, to say that what they're doing is they're just carrying forth a linear path of addressing knowledge gaps left from the previous literature and just making a linear progress in science.

01:28:22.000 But they're really not because the incentive structure is to publish a large number of papers in high impact journals on a yearly basis as your university reviews get done.

01:28:34.000 And so if you're going to sit, and then there's other incentives too, because you have to get grants with preliminary data.

01:28:42.000 So you have shorter studies that you then say, well, I'm going to do a longer study now and it keeps the grant cycle going.

01:28:47.000 And then the people who write the grants want to see things getting published out of those papers.

01:28:52.000 So for you to be like, I'm going to do a 12-year randomized controlled trial of seed oils is it's going to be hard to get the people, you know, get all those box checked.

01:29:01.000 Like you might not be publishing a paper for a while.

01:29:04.000 So what the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study showed was that they randomized people to seed oils or traditional fats.

01:29:13.000 And in the first two years, you had a little bit of a heart disease benefit, but then it wore off over time.

01:29:22.000 And so the heart disease mortality basically by the end of the trial was just kind of flat.

01:29:27.000 But the cancer was the same for the first two years.

01:29:31.000 But then at the two to five year mark, it started diverging and you see, oh, it looks like there's something there.

01:29:35.000 The five to seven year mark, it's, you know, traditional fats down here and this gap starts widening where seed oils are up here.

01:29:42.000 And then by the end of the study, total mortality was kind of flat the whole time, but it just started to diverge at the end of the study to favor seed oils causing more death.

01:29:53.000 And this study was the longest.

01:29:56.000 And it was also the one where the only trial ever done with seed oils where the people, the mean age was 65.

01:30:03.000 So the people were older than in every other trial.

01:30:06.000 And one of the important things about being old is that that's what makes you able to get cancer.

01:30:11.000 There are some childhood cancers, but in general, people start getting cancer when they live long enough to not die of heart disease first.

01:30:20.000 So doing the trial on older people for longer is what allowed you to see that the seed oils seem to be able to cause cancer.

01:30:29.000 And what the author's conclusion was, was that because the total mortality was just starting to diverge at the eight-year mark, and because they had a plausible reason for it, that the cancer was exploding, they said, we have ultimately left the question of whether these oils are toxic unresolved.

01:30:47.000 And the one thing that we need is instead of the previous goal of the trials being five years long, that the trials be done well in excess of eight years.

01:30:58.000 So scientists think that they're just like looking at the old literature and they're saying, oh, what was the gap in the knowledge that we need to solve next?

01:31:04.000 Well, I'm telling you, they concluded in 1969 that the gap in the knowledge was we need a trial that's a lot longer than eight years.

01:31:11.000 And what did we get?

01:31:12.000 Seven to 12 week trials.

01:31:14.000 It's kind of like that, who was it, Peter Thiel or someone had a tweet that was like, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 180 characters or something like that, whatever that quote is.

01:31:27.000 They promised us well in excess of eight year trials was the next thing we needed to study.

01:31:31.000 And like, you know, 50, 60 years go by and all we've got is these seven week trials and 12 week trials.

01:31:39.000 Now, we also know why seed oils would take a while to have such negative effects, because it actually takes you four years just for your tissues to start looking like the seed oil you're eating.

01:31:52.000 Like if you switch from butter and olive oil today and you go on corn oil, it's going to take four years for your tissues to fully look like the corn oil.

01:32:03.000 And then once that happens, you've got secondary effects.

01:32:06.000 So you start getting your vitamin E levels depleted much faster.

01:32:10.000 But it takes a while for the vitamin E levels to go down in order for other effects, other results of that, like the increased vulnerability to the tissues being destroyed.

01:32:23.000 All that stuff is like, you're not even starting to see it until five, six years go by.

01:32:29.000 And so I think that's the big reason that there's so much controversy is that for whatever reason, there are some people who just don't want to look at the older trials that were very long, and they're spending all their time looking at these very short-term trials.

01:32:44.000 And, you know, is there a motivation behind that?

01:32:47.000 Or is it just laziness?

01:32:48.000 I'm not sure.

01:32:50.000 It's attention.

01:32:50.000 I think part of it is attention.

01:32:52.000 Yeah, it's a big part of it.

01:32:53.000 Part of it is justifying the contrarian position with these short-term trials because then you could dunk on people and get attention.

01:33:02.000 Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense.

01:33:04.000 Like, everyone has to get attention somehow if they want to make it in this world.

01:33:10.000 Well, that's the side effect of this influencer culture, you know?

01:33:13.000 And it's one of the things I really appreciate about your work.

01:33:16.000 You are very evidence-based, and you, you know, I've been paying attention to your stuff for a long time.

01:33:23.000 You're never hyperbolic.

01:33:25.000 It's always very rational.

01:33:26.000 It's very balanced.

01:33:27.000 And I think that is really important because there's a lot of people that they make these Videos or they have social media posts and it's insulting, inflammatory, and they're doing it for attention.

01:33:44.000 And they're doing that, you know, that kind of behavior for attention along with science.

01:33:48.000 They're adding the science into it.

01:33:50.000 But it seems like the science is just a vehicle for them to get attention.

01:33:55.000 Yeah, well, I mean, that's unfortunate because there is health hanging in there.

01:34:01.000 I know it is unfortunate, but it's also common.

01:34:03.000 It's really common.

01:34:05.000 You see it in all sorts of different disciplines.

01:34:09.000 You see it in our archaeology.

01:34:10.000 You see it in everything.

01:34:11.000 There's people that want to dunk on their opposition, and that's part of how they're getting attention is by insulting people.

01:34:19.000 But when you see it in nutrition, it's just really weird because it's not necessary.

01:34:26.000 And the people that are getting attention, whether it's Andrew Huberman or yourself, a lot of people that are just doing evidence-based stuff and being really rational about it.

01:34:36.000 And that's how they're getting attention.

01:34:38.000 And other people are seeing them and going, I need to dunk on that guy in order to elevate my social profile.

01:34:44.000 And the seed oil thing is a weird thing to defend.

01:34:48.000 It just on the way that it's manufactured.

01:34:53.000 If you just watch the process and go, do you want to eat that?

01:34:56.000 Do you want that?

01:34:57.000 Or do you want butter?

01:34:58.000 Butter seems way better.

01:35:00.000 It seems way more normal.

01:35:01.000 It seems like your body would accept butter a lot easier than it would accept this fucking insane process where you're dumping a bunch of chemicals into this goop, this nasty shit that you're pushing out of rapeseed oil, and you're calling it canola oil.

01:35:18.000 You know how many people think canola oil is corn oil?

01:35:21.000 Because corn is canola?

01:35:23.000 You know, you think of corn, oh, corn oil, it must be good for you.

01:35:25.000 It's vegetable oil.

01:35:26.000 Well, it is funny that they named it after a con.

01:35:28.000 It's fucking weird.

01:35:31.000 Yeah, there's an article not by me, but by someone else called The Great Canola.

01:35:35.000 And it's about how canola oil is a con.

01:35:40.000 Yeah.

01:35:40.000 They name.

01:35:42.000 But anyway.

01:35:43.000 That's a good way to put it because canola oil is a con.

01:35:46.000 Because many people, I've seen canola oil where they have a fucking image of a corn of an ear of corn.

01:35:54.000 Have you ever seen that on the label?

01:35:56.000 I don't know.

01:35:56.000 I don't think they do that anymore.

01:35:57.000 I think it's a lot of oil labels, but this is been a while since I bought a bottle of oil.

01:36:02.000 If there's something you can find that shows that, because I hope I'm not having a false memory, but I'm pretty sure there used to be a canola oil that had like an ear of corn on it.

01:36:11.000 It's rapeseed, and it's an industrial lubricant.

01:36:15.000 And that's what they used to use it for.

01:36:17.000 And it's a byproduct.

01:36:19.000 It's a weird, funky thing that they have to pour a bunch of shit into just to take the smell out of it, just to take the rancid smell out of this weird oil that you're cooking with.

01:36:31.000 Yeah.

01:36:32.000 You can buy cold-pressed seed oils.

01:36:35.000 It's not what most people are eating food with.

01:36:39.000 But I still think that the fundamental problem with it's not just the processing.

01:36:45.000 It's also if you look at ancestral human diets, no one ate fatty acid compositions that looked like that because the reason that they usually use hexane to extract it is because it's actually difficult to extract using purely mechanical methods.

01:37:01.000 So olives can be pressed into oil.

01:37:05.000 Right, and that is a type of seed oil, right?

01:37:06.000 If you thuckled it out.

01:37:07.000 Well, no, olive is a fruit oil.

01:37:08.000 Or fruit.

01:37:09.000 But avocado, is that a fruit as well?

01:37:11.000 Avocado oil?

01:37:13.000 Yeah, avocado oil is pressed out of the avocado.

01:37:17.000 Right.

01:37:17.000 Because the flesh is super high in fat.

01:37:20.000 So it's just the pit inside of it is the seed.

01:37:22.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:37:24.000 Yeah, I don't think they make oil out of that.

01:37:27.000 So it's a fruit oil.

01:37:28.000 So whether it's olive oil, the high heat ones are avocado oil.

01:37:34.000 That's one that people like to cook with, right?

01:37:37.000 Yeah.

01:37:37.000 Well, okay, so are there any issues with that?

01:37:42.000 So cooking with an oil, one issue is the smoke point because the oil is burning at its smoke point.

01:37:51.000 And that probably is more of an indication of flavor than it is of health, but it is generally going to correlate.

01:37:59.000 Like if the oil is burning, you're more likely to have damage to the oils.

01:38:04.000 And consuming damaged oils is bad for you.

01:38:11.000 So there's the smoke point, there's the fatty acid composition, and there's the solvents and other chemicals left over from the processing.

01:38:19.000 And I think all of those are an issue.

01:38:21.000 But the fatty acid composition is like we seed oils has become the common thing to use as a nickname for it, but it's but what you're really thinking about is that they're high in polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs.

01:38:37.000 And those polyunsaturated fatty acids are just like it happens to be most things, most oils that are currently on the market for food consumption that are very high in polyunsaturated fatty acids are what we call seed oils.

01:38:54.000 So that's, you know, that's why we call it that way.

01:38:57.000 But the actual fatty acid composition, like if you go back to any oil that was easy for humans to produce before, say, 100 years ago,

01:39:12.000 then you don't see those, like there, you don't see a strong tradition of large consumption of rapeseed oil going back because, or cotton seed oil or corn oil, because it's, I mean, try squeezing a corn kernel.

01:39:29.000 It's not that squeezable.

01:39:32.000 And so when you have these very small, hard things, that's why you wind up getting solvent extraction, but you had to do the solvent extraction because it was not easy otherwise to get oil out of those things.

01:39:48.000 The solvents is a whole nother thing.

01:39:51.000 I was in a lab once where someone had us analyze residual hexane in foods.

01:40:00.000 And they just bought a bunch of grocery store foods.

01:40:04.000 And I was kind of managing the data analysis while someone I worked with was doing the hexane measurements.

01:40:12.000 But let me just say that if it's extracted with hexane, it's got hexane left over.

01:40:17.000 And we saw something that was not hexane.

01:40:20.000 We didn't know what it was, but it was some chemical solvent that was massive in the pump spray oils.

01:40:28.000 And after I saw that, I was like, I'm never using a pump spray oil because they like you could put olive oil in like a mechanical spray bottle.

01:40:36.000 That's fine.

01:40:36.000 But like Pam and those other ones, they're using chemicals to make the spraying work.

01:40:44.000 And there's something that's some chemical solvent that's just like way like massive proportions in it.

01:40:50.000 So after I saw that, I just stopped using that.

01:40:53.000 I won't go near that.

01:40:54.000 Yeah, I don't go near those anyway.

01:40:56.000 But what about grapeseed?

01:40:58.000 I know grapeseed is one that people like to cook with because it has a high smoke point.

01:41:02.000 Yeah, I would put grapeseed oil in the category of a seed oil that I wouldn't consume in high quantities.

01:41:11.000 And is hexane an issue with that as well?

01:41:14.000 Not, I mean, not if it's cold-pressed.

01:41:16.000 I mean, you can get like organic, cold-pressed grapeseed oil that is not solvent extracted.

01:41:22.000 It's not RBD.

01:41:25.000 It's not heated.

01:41:27.000 But you still have to deal with the polysaturated fatty oil.

01:41:29.000 I mean, you're paying a lot to get a high-quality product, but it's still like, you know, there might be studies out there about some therapeutic benefits of some of the components of the grapeseed oil, but I wouldn't want to make those fats be the major oil in my diet because I think you're just overload.

01:41:47.000 Like, it's high in antioxidants, and so you're going to get benefit.

01:41:51.000 There's going to be beneficial things in it, but I don't think that those fats are what you want to be your main fatty acid consumption.

01:42:00.000 What about if you were searing a steak in grapeseed oil?

01:42:03.000 Would that be an issue?

01:42:05.000 I mean, the less of the oil that's there, the less of an issue it is.

01:42:10.000 You know, if you're just coating the pan with it and it's convenient because it doesn't have a high smoke point, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

01:42:16.000 But you're not healthy fats for that.

01:42:18.000 I wouldn't want to be consuming like a tablespoon or upwards of grapeseed oil a day.

01:42:23.000 So I think we would agree that the issue with saturated fats and just in the zeitgeist, saturated fats we have demonized since whatever that study was where the sugar company bribed those scientists.

01:42:41.000 Was it the 50s, the 60s, wherever it was?

01:42:47.000 It started back then.

01:42:48.000 The kind of the crowning turning point was 1984 when Time magazine had a picture of a frowning face made out of eggs and bacon.

01:43:01.000 And the cover said, hold the eggs and butter.

01:43:03.000 Cholesterol has been proved deadly in our diets will never be the same.

01:43:07.000 We got to pull that photo up.

01:43:09.000 That's so crazy.

01:43:10.000 They really did that.

01:43:12.000 Yeah, they actually, they reversed it a few years ago where they took the same image, but they made it a smiley face.

01:43:19.000 And they were like, now we know eggs are good for you.

01:43:21.000 Oh, God.

01:43:22.000 But meanwhile, how many lives did you ruin with your shitty advice?

01:43:26.000 It's so stunning.

01:43:28.000 Yeah, you can see the two right there.

01:43:30.000 Yeah.

01:43:31.000 You can see both side by side.

01:43:32.000 Crazy.

01:43:33.000 Yeah, so the one that's cholesterol is the upper left-hand corner.

01:43:37.000 Yeah, the upper left-hand corner is the new one.

01:43:39.000 And the one on the right is the 1984 one.

01:43:42.000 Scientists labeled fat the enemy.

01:43:43.000 They were wrong.

01:43:44.000 Yeah, you didn't print the whole thing.

01:43:47.000 They got fucking bribed.

01:43:49.000 And not a lot of money.

01:43:50.000 That's what's really crazy.

01:43:51.000 It ruined society.

01:43:53.000 Ruined diets for, what, $50,000?

01:43:57.000 So for $50,000, people started eating margarine and eating seed oil and not eating butter and not consuming cholesterol, which is the building blocks for hormones.

01:44:09.000 It's such an important aspect of the human diet.

01:44:12.000 And when you tell people, like I tell people I eat mostly meat, they go, what about your cholesterol?

01:44:17.000 I just take a I don't know what to tell you.

01:44:22.000 Go read.

01:44:23.000 I just can't.

01:44:24.000 I can't sit there and tell you that higher LDL cholesterol is actually associated with longer lifespans.

01:44:30.000 It's like there's a lot to this whole cholesterol thing.

01:44:34.000 And I think it's kind of been fucked around with by the mainstream media reporting on these sort of ancient narratives, these narratives that, not ancient, but these narratives that were set up in the 50s and 60s, whenever it was, and the 80s, the Time magazine thing, that people just repeat.

01:44:50.000 They don't look into it.

01:44:51.000 They just repeat it over and over again.

01:44:53.000 And they're really worried.

01:44:54.000 Like, I'm trying to eat less red meat.

01:44:56.000 Like, why?

01:44:57.000 Why are you trying to eat less meat?

01:44:58.000 Well, it's, you know, cholesterol.

01:45:00.000 Like, oh, boy.

01:45:02.000 Yeah.

01:45:03.000 Well, I do think that you don't want to see your blood cholesterol going crazy high because that can be a sign that you're not using it well, right?

01:45:12.000 Like if your cholesterol is turning over and it's being used to make bile acids to support your digestion, it's being used to make adrenal hormones and sex hormones.

01:45:23.000 It's being used to make testosterone.

01:45:25.000 being used to make brain synapses to support your memory.

01:45:29.000 Like all those things that cholesterol does are incredibly important.

01:45:34.000 But I think a lot of people, their cholesterol going up can be a sign that they're not using it properly.

01:45:41.000 And so I think that's why you do see, you know, like it is true that if you take people at a certain age, you can see inverse correlations between cholesterol levels and mortality.

01:45:56.000 But if you take people who are younger and you look at who's going to get heart attacks later, you do see that higher cholesterol when you're younger prospectively predicts a higher risk of heart disease later.

01:46:08.000 And I don't think that's because cholesterol causes heart disease, but I think it's because it's a reflection of your overall metabolism being more slow in terms of actually using up the cholesterol.

01:46:23.000 Makes sense.

01:46:24.000 And that also, but it's interesting, though, that if you look at the mechanisms of how does cholesterol, like how does cholesterol cause atherosclerosis, the cholesterol is inside a lipoprotein, which is like a spherical container for the cholesterol.

01:46:43.000 It's got a bunch of fat-soluble vitamins and other things in it.

01:46:46.000 But the outside is fatty acids, specifically in the form called phospholipids.

01:46:54.000 But what happens that drives the atherosclerotic plaque is that the fats you get from seed oils that are on the outside of it get damaged.

01:47:02.000 And when they get damaged, the immune system recognizes it as a toxin that could hurt the blood vessel.

01:47:08.000 And so the immune system gobbles it up and sequesters it.

01:47:11.000 And that sequestering is like a quarantine.

01:47:14.000 And that's what the plaque develops from.

01:47:17.000 And so that's why, like, even though you see prospectively that if your cholesterol is higher, that that predicts that you're more likely to get heart disease later, in the randomized controlled trials, you saw something quite different when they used seed oils to lower the cholesterol.

01:47:36.000 So the Minnesota coronary survey was another, it was, I mentioned the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study.

01:47:44.000 That was, these were the two double-blind randomized controlled trials that were done of seed oils.

01:47:49.000 The Minnesota Coronary Survey was very big.

01:47:51.000 It was the only one that included women.

01:47:53.000 And it wasn't as long, but it was way larger.

01:48:01.000 And back when they published the results, it looked like there was an 8% increase in the risk of heart disease with the seed oils.

01:48:10.000 But they mentioned that they measured actual atherosclerosis and they didn't report it.

01:48:18.000 So decades later, like I think it was about 10 years ago, researchers noticed this and they said, well, the guys that did this study are dead, but I wonder if the atherosclerosis results are around.

01:48:31.000 So they did some digging and it turned out that in the basement of the house that the lead investigator lived in, who had died a long time ago, there were boxes of data that had not been published from that study.

01:48:44.000 And they included all the atherosclerosis measurements.

01:48:47.000 And what they found was that the seed oil group had double the atherosclerosis.

01:48:52.000 Not only that, but every 35 milligram per deciliter drop in cholesterol was associated with something like 30% more heart disease.

01:49:03.000 And so the original results didn't look very, they didn't look good for seed oils.

01:49:07.000 They looked bad, but they didn't look that bad.

01:49:09.000 And they weren't statistically significant.

01:49:12.000 But it was because there was a lot of, people were coming in and out of the trial.

01:49:18.000 It kind of weakened the results.

01:49:20.000 But this, you know, the atherosclerosis results and the correlations that were buried in those boxes show that when you look at the data from that angle, like the seed oils look a lot worse.

01:49:30.000 And I think what you're seeing there, this is one of the reasons why there's so much material to work with to make controversy out of this, is that you see that people with higher cholesterol when they're younger are more likely to go on to have a heart attack.

01:49:45.000 But when you use seed oils, which lower the cholesterol in the blood, but increase the amount of these easily damaged fatty acids that carry the cholesterol, and they get damaged and they drive the atherosclerotic plaque, that's why you see this divergence.

01:50:02.000 Like that correlation exists there, but not everything that you do with your diet to change it, to try to make the correlation work in your favor does you good.

01:50:12.000 Right.

01:50:13.000 Right.

01:50:14.000 I'd read that.

01:50:15.000 I'd read something about that and also something about there's a profound difference between someone who consumes their cholesterol, like say if you're on just a seed oil-free, just vegetables and meat with healthy fats, like those kind of carbohydrates, or those kinds of proteins and fats without complex carbohydrates, without consumption of a lot of grains,

01:50:44.000 there's a difference in the results that they were having in terms of the impact of cholesterol.

01:50:53.000 In general, you are going to have higher cholesterol if you're eating less fiber.

01:50:59.000 Right.

01:51:00.000 And is it all dependent upon the activity level of the person?

01:51:05.000 Like if you're talking about using the cholesterol.

01:51:08.000 Well, yeah, I think, I mean, this is a great tie back to the things we were talking about before because the clearance of cholesterol from your blood is driven by the mitochondrial energy production that gives your brain the signal that you are in a state of abundance and should put that cholesterol toward good things.

01:51:30.000 And you have a bunch of hormones that communicate that, leptin, insulin, thyroid hormone are all involved.

01:51:37.000 But what is ultimately driving this is your brain, especially in the hypothalamus, is taking information in that says, are you getting enough food for me to consider this a state of abundance where I ramp up your digestion, I ramp up your libido, I ramp up all these things.

01:51:58.000 And we tend in nutrition science to think that this is about calories or it's about carbs, and it is about those things.

01:52:08.000 But if you are half as good at mitochondrial conversion of food to ATP as the next guy over, you know, is your hypothalamus going to give you full credit for the food you ate in terms of calculating your state of abundance?

01:52:27.000 It's not.

01:52:28.000 It's going to dock you by half.

01:52:30.000 And this is because the hypothalamus takes all these signals and then it looks at inside the hypothalamic cells.

01:52:35.000 It looks at, okay, how well do I convert those food molecules into ATP using my mitochondria?

01:52:43.000 And if it's 50% dropped, it's going to dock you in your state of abundance.

01:52:46.000 And it's going to say, you know, actually, you ate all the food, but you didn't get all the energy.

01:52:50.000 And so we're just going to let things stagnate.

01:52:54.000 And the cholesterol is going to go up in the blood.

01:52:56.000 Your sex hormone is going to go down.

01:52:58.000 And, you know, you can look at that and say, well, there's an age, you're going through andropause.

01:53:05.000 There's an age-dependent decline in testosterone and adrenal hormones and stuff like that.

01:53:10.000 And then you can do hormone supplementation therapy.

01:53:13.000 But what you're not actually fixing, but that can also be kind of a negative feedback loop.

01:53:18.000 Like if you're supplementing everything that your cholesterol would turn, that your body would turn cholesterol into, that also is going to slow cholesterol turnover because your body's like, oh, I don't, I don't need, like, I don't need to turn that into testosterone if I'm supplementing with it.

01:53:33.000 So I think that what we're missing in the whole discussion is thinking about how do we ramp up mitochondrial energy production?

01:53:43.000 How do we prevent it from declining and aging so that the body, so that the brain can rightly perceive that I am in a state of abundance and it is rational to ramp up this metabolic rate.

01:53:56.000 I think there are, when you have a marker like this, it's not like every single case of high cholesterol represents a failure to convert it into anything good.

01:54:06.000 Some people just produce more cholesterol or they absorb more cholesterol.

01:54:09.000 And I don't think those are all equal in terms of their heart disease risk or their health implications.

01:54:15.000 But sluggish metabolism, like high cholesterol is in general a sign of sluggish metabolism under the average circuit, the average set of circumstances.

01:54:23.000 And a really interesting thread that got left behind in 1976 is Broda Barnes wrote this book called Solved the Riddle of Heart Attacks in 1976.

01:54:35.000 And his perspective was all about thyroid hormone.

01:54:39.000 And he argued that people who died of infectious diseases were hypothyroid.

01:54:45.000 We allowed them to live longer.

01:54:46.000 Now all the hypothyroid people are getting heart disease. 0.99

01:54:49.000 The reason he thought that is because thyroid hormone communicates to your whole body that you are in a state of abundance.

01:54:56.000 And so if your brain thinks that you're not and you add thyroid hormone in, now your whole body is receiving the false signal that you are in a state of abundance.

01:55:05.000 And you feel better and many things improve and you can argue about whether that's good or bad, but you're intervening at the point of the communication instead of at the point of actually creating the abundance.

01:55:14.000 But thyroid hormone does signal, take up cholesterol from the cell, move it along, do things with it.

01:55:21.000 And so no matter whether you're hypothyroid or not, people were up through the night, up until the 1970s, they were lowering cholesterol and they were lowering heart disease risk by just putting everyone who had high cholesterol on thyroid hormone.

01:55:33.000 And the reason they stopped doing it is because some practitioners got overzealous and they killed a few people because they overdosed them.

01:55:41.000 But Broda Barnes argued that we don't have to be overzealous and overdose them.

01:55:46.000 We could just be rationally dosing thyroid hormone.

01:55:49.000 My perspective is different from Broda Barnes.

01:55:52.000 I take what he said.

01:55:53.000 I think there's a lot of value to it.

01:55:54.000 But I say, why is thyroid communicating the state of abundance?

01:55:58.000 It's because your mitochondria are doing a great job converting your food to ATP.

01:56:03.000 Now, you don't have to have a mitochondrial dysfunction to have low thyroid hormone because you're not in a state of abundance.

01:56:08.000 You can just not eat any food.

01:56:10.000 So if you look at the metabolic consequences of starvation, you just don't eat any food.

01:56:13.000 Your thyroid hormone will go in the gutter.

01:56:17.000 So there are people out there who just aren't eating enough.

01:56:19.000 Like that is a thing.

01:56:20.000 But it's also just natural in the process of aging that we're all getting progressively dysfunctional mitochondria and that we can intervene at any point to have at least 75% of control over that.

01:56:31.000 And so we want to step up the game and work.

01:56:35.000 So if there's two things that people take away from this from me today, I would want it to be always think about your mitochondria first.

01:56:43.000 And when you're thinking about them, always go with a food first, pharma-last approach.

01:56:49.000 So naturally create a state of abundance in the best way that you can and then move on to other things after you've done that.

01:56:57.000 That way, if you're going to intervene with testosterone replacement or thyroid hormone or statins or whatever else, I mean, statins or mitochondrial toxins are kind of counterproductive from a mitochondrial energy production standpoint.

01:57:11.000 And on that note, statins, the debates of statin-associated myopathy are the rates of them are debated.

01:57:19.000 The rates at which statins cause diabetes is debated, but it's there.

01:57:24.000 And it's because statins actually inhibit your CoQ10 synthesis, but they also inhibit other things in the mitochondrial energy production engines that you can't take a supplement for.

01:57:35.000 So there's just no way around that statins will decrease your mitochondrial function.

01:57:38.000 So I think by not thinking about mitochondria first, it's like instead, you take these people with mediocre mitochondrial function.

01:57:48.000 Their LDL in their blood would get taken into their cells.

01:57:52.000 You would do valuable things with it if the state of abundance was present, because not only does all the signaling say do something with the cholesterol, but the way you can actually get cholesterol into the cell is to burn through a bunch of ATP with motor proteins that actually move it from outside the cell to inside the cell in order to facilitate that turnover.

01:58:11.000 So we've got a situation where we know that everyone could improve their mitochondrial function, but instead of doing that and then saying, okay, do we really need a statin?

01:58:19.000 We just say, oh, go straight for the statin.

01:58:22.000 And now you're hurting the mitochondrial function even more.

01:58:24.000 And you're saying, well, the ROI is good enough because I'm lowering their cholesterol and they won't get heart disease.

01:58:30.000 And the other mitochondria aren't doing as great, but that's okay because we lowered the cholesterol.

01:58:34.000 I think that's totally backwards.

01:58:36.000 You should always be trying to optimize mitochondrial function first.

01:58:40.000 You should always be doing that with natural foods before you try anything else.

01:58:45.000 And then move on.

01:58:46.000 Just set the foundation.

01:58:49.000 Set a good foundation and then build your house on top of it however you want.

01:58:53.000 I'm not saying never use any pharmaceuticals.

01:58:55.000 I'm just saying, if you're going to build your house out of pharmaceuticals, do it on a good foundation.

01:59:01.000 Right.

01:59:02.000 Make an educated decision.

01:59:03.000 What can be done to increase thyroid function?

01:59:09.000 The first thing is you actually want enough food and you want good mitochondrial conversion of the food to ATP.

01:59:15.000 But there's other things that could be important to having good thyroid function as well.

01:59:20.000 Like having, if you just look at what is thyroid hormone.

01:59:24.000 So thyroid hormone is made from the amino acid tyrosine, which you get from the protein in the food that you eat.

01:59:30.000 And then you add iodine to it.

01:59:31.000 So if you don't have enough protein, you're not going to have good thyroid function.

01:59:35.000 If you don't have enough iodine, you're not going to have good thyroid function.

01:59:37.000 So those are the step one basics of the 101 of the nutrition that I need to have good thyroid hormone.

01:59:45.000 And is iodine from supplementation or from food?

01:59:49.000 You can supplement with it, but again, I always believe in food first.

01:59:52.000 And what's rich in iodine?

01:59:56.000 There are many things that can be rich in iodine, but it's highly dependent on the soil.

02:00:00.000 So a potato, for example, from one part of the United States could be 100 times richer than a potato from another part of the country.

02:00:10.000 So that's a problem.

02:00:12.000 Seafood is reliably high in iodine because the rainfall just facilitates the minerals just falling into the ocean.

02:00:19.000 So it's, you know, a lot of the places that are low in iodine, it's because the pattern of evaporation causes the iodine to evaporate into the clouds.

02:00:27.000 But then like the cloud pattern goes around some mountain and it never drops back down on you.

02:00:31.000 And so you get these areas of the country where they're just on the wrong side of the mountain and they just get progressive decline in the iodine.

02:00:39.000 So I do think that it's good for people to eat just some seafood because like if you eat one or two pieces of fish per week, for example, or you eat a little bit of seaweed every day, that's going to cover your bases.

02:00:51.000 Whereas like in if your food comes from one area, you might be able to get enough iodine just eating whatever you want.

02:00:57.000 And in another area, you won't.

02:00:59.000 I personally add in a quarter teaspoon of kelp powder to my food prepped meals per day.

02:01:07.000 And so it's always in there.

02:01:09.000 It's got a little bit of flavor, but I just mix it into everything so you don't even taste it.

02:01:12.000 It's like, it's just like I fortify my own, I fortify my food myself instead of letting the government do it.

02:01:19.000 But, you know, so that's one way to do that.

02:01:22.000 And then there are some things that increase your iodine requirements.

02:01:27.000 So women with big, big breasts, for example, can need much more iodine because iodine, the breasts are a sink for iodine. 1.00

02:01:36.000 Part of that is just the nature of the tissue.

02:01:38.000 Part of it is very logical because if you do have a baby, you are going to start feeding the baby the iodine.

02:01:44.000 And so that might be part of why that's prepped.

02:01:47.000 But there's some evidence that a lot of breast problems are solved by extra iodine.

02:01:52.000 So fibrocystic breast disease, for example, there's some support for getting 10, 15 times the normal amount or even 50 times the normal amount of iodine.

02:02:02.000 And I think that's because some women with very large breasts just, they just, you know, 98% of it goes there. 1.00

02:02:10.000 And then there are also like the less, the more toxic your living environment is, the more iodine you're going to need because there's a lot of bromine that's in synthetic materials for couches.

02:02:23.000 It's flame retardants. 0.99

02:02:26.000 So all kinds of paint and materials that are used in household living can be a source of environmental bromine.

02:02:34.000 And then fluoride.

02:02:35.000 If you drink fluoridated water and you brush your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste, it's going to increase your need for iodine as well.

02:02:42.000 So there's a bunch of reasons that people might want to – well, I'll say this.

02:02:47.000 I think it's crazy that every time I've seen a woman who's on thyroid hormone and I've seen and I've had them get iodine data, their iodine is low and they've never gotten it tested before.

02:03:00.000 And I just, you know, there's these, medicine has these myths about nutrition that like we solved all the nutritional deficiencies 100 years ago, so we don't need to think about it.

02:03:08.000 But they did these dumbass things that made, that like nullified that.

02:03:13.000 So for example, the reason that we didn't have iodine deficiency anymore is because they fortified salt with it.

02:03:19.000 They said, everyone eats salt, so let's just put the iodine in the salt.

02:03:23.000 And so everyone had fortified salt.

02:03:26.000 But then what did they do?

02:03:27.000 They came along and they said, don't eat the salt.

02:03:29.000 It's going to give you a heart attack.

02:03:31.000 And so what they didn't realize was when they told people to not eat the salt, now they're not getting their iodine.

02:03:36.000 And now, you know, so there's some places where there's like, I talked to one cardiologist who works out in the Midwest.

02:03:42.000 He says, I see people walking in with a, look, you can see the lump in their throat now.

02:03:47.000 And they have a goiter, which is just like the, a goiter is a very hungry thyroid gland where it's like, I don't have any iodine.

02:03:54.000 Where's the iodine?

02:03:55.000 It just starts growing to try to find it.

02:03:57.000 And you wind up with, you can feel a lump in your throat and not see anything.

02:04:00.000 But if it gets really, really bad, you can see a bump in the neck.

02:04:04.000 And if it gets insanely bad, you can have like a grapefruit hanging from the neck.

02:04:08.000 That doesn't happen anymore.

02:04:10.000 But, you know, this cardiologist told me, like, I actually see people with goiter now, but no one's looking for it because they don't think people get goiter anymore.

02:04:17.000 And so most, they just, most of them just walk around with a lump in their neck until they find me, he said.

02:04:23.000 That's wild.

02:04:25.000 No salt in the diet is so wild.

02:04:26.000 Yeah.

02:04:27.000 That one is so crazy.

02:04:29.000 And then there are other things too.

02:04:31.000 Like the supplement that you're taking has glutathione in it.

02:04:34.000 Well, selenium is a mineral that helps you use glutathione to protect your thyroid gland from damage.

02:04:44.000 And there are a number of trials that show that selenium lowers the autoimmune antibodies that occur in Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is a type of autoimmune thyroid problem.

02:04:58.000 And the reason it does that is because it's helping glutathione protect the thyroid from damage because producing thyroid is a very messy process.

02:05:06.000 But that also, you know, if you look at what that would imply, it would also imply that all the other antioxidant nutrients are very important in the thyroid as well, because vitamin C and zinc and copper, manganese, and a whole suite of iron, even.

02:05:23.000 Too much iron is bad for you, but you need iron to protect yourself from oxidative stress.

02:05:28.000 So all of these things are helping prevent tissue damage in the thyroid gland, which helps prevent the immune system from going haywire, trying to deal with that damage.

02:05:39.000 And so all of those things are important for thyroid hormone.

02:05:43.000 One more thing I wanted to talk to you about is you brought up arthritis, I don't know how to say that word right, arthurial sclerosis.

02:05:51.000 What is the supplement, natokinase?

02:05:54.000 Yeah, natokinase is an enzyme that helps break down blood clots.

02:06:00.000 And atherosclerosis is what it really is, is the immune system quarantining damaged particles.

02:06:10.000 Those particles are damaged because you loaded them with seed oils and then your mitochondrial function declined and you lost your defense against the damage.

02:06:18.000 And then you got progressively more seed oil damage that the immune system is trying to protect the blood vessel from it.

02:06:26.000 That's what the plaque is.

02:06:27.000 But that plaque is highly inflammatory.

02:06:30.000 This is a crazy statement.

02:06:31.000 So the plaque that people have always considered to be from most people will tell you it's from cholesterol.

02:06:37.000 If you ask the average person, you believe it's really from seed oils.

02:06:43.000 I'm not alone in this.

02:06:45.000 So if you are.

02:06:48.000 So if you go back to 1984 when we saw that Time magazine picture, the other thing that was going on politically and scientifically in 1984 was the NIH consensus conference that said that they had proven Time Magazine cover was a reaction to the NIH consensus conference where they said we as the scientific community now certify that we are in consensus that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.

02:07:15.000 And that's why Time Magazine ran with that with that cover.

02:07:19.000 Was Fauci running the NIH back then?

02:07:23.000 Fauci when the age crisis so Fauci was not running this, but that was, I think, possibly also the year that Fauci took over at NIAID.

02:07:36.000 Okay.

02:07:36.000 Yeah.

02:07:37.000 It's, you know, it's sidebar, but there's a very interesting study that looked at the average age of principal investigators of studies.

02:07:48.000 Principal investigator means like the guy who ran the lab.

02:07:52.000 And so since 1984, the average age of an NIH-funded principal investigator has gone up by one year per year.

02:08:03.000 And so that looks like the one group took over the money in 1984, and then they've just been giving themselves grants ever since.

02:08:14.000 And now they're really old.

02:08:15.000 That's what that looks like.

02:08:18.000 But anyway, so yes, I think I believe you can fact check me on this, but I believe Fauci took over NIAID, where he got, where he became very in control of a lot of NIH money in that same year.

02:08:31.000 So it's really weird the way these years work out.

02:08:35.000 Like, you know, like 1913, you've got Federal Reserve, you got World War I, you've got all these changes to the structure of the government.

02:08:42.000 Like they picked this year out of history, and there's always these big, massive, big things all happening in different areas.

02:08:50.000 But anyway, so there was something in the air in 1984.

02:08:54.000 Maybe it was self-fulfilling prophecy from Orwell.

02:08:57.000 But anyway, so the chair of the NIH Consensus Conference in 1984 was Daniel Steinberg.

02:09:05.000 Daniel Steinberg passed away a few years ago, but he was kind of, there were three big names that came out of that conference.

02:09:14.000 And Steinberg was one of them.

02:09:16.000 And the others were Brown and Goldstein, who won the Nobel Prize in 1985, the next year, for, you know, you can see how they hooked up their Nobel Prize.

02:09:25.000 So they, 1985, they got the Nobel Prize for discovering the LDL receptor, which is the thing that brings cholesterol from your blood into your cells.

02:09:35.000 And all the drugs that work on this are targeting that receptor.

02:09:40.000 So that became the springboard for all the drugs that people are on for cardiovascular disease now.

02:09:44.000 So this is kind of funny that the Nobel Prize was, it was probably in the fix in 1984.

02:09:50.000 You know, that was the other thing they were working on.

02:09:51.000 But because there's no way that would have happened if the 1984 consensus conference didn't happen.

02:09:56.000 But the point I want to make is that Daniel Steinberg agrees with me.

02:10:00.000 I didn't come up with this idea myself.

02:10:02.000 I mean, he's dead now.

02:10:03.000 But for decades, he was one of the people who believed that because it was his lab that discovered that the PUFAs, which are seed oil fats, have to become damaged on the outer membrane of the LDL particle for it to get taken up by the immune system.

02:10:23.000 That was his discovery.

02:10:25.000 And he's the guy that chaired the conference that led to the Time magazine cover.

02:10:29.000 So I'm not pulling this out of my ass.

02:10:31.000 I'm pulling this out of my having read Daniel Steinberg's papers.

02:10:37.000 And so he was, this is how olive oil became the darling of the Mediterranean diet, which is, you know, the met so the Mediterranean diet is kind of funny because it's not that big.

02:10:49.000 It's very loosely based on what they eat in the Mediterranean.

02:10:53.000 And it's really just kind of like a branding thing where they said, like, okay, well, this diet is good enough for us to say, eat this, this, this, and this, and we're going to call it Mediterranean.

02:11:01.000 But anyway, so what happened was after the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study showed in 1960, well, actually, they published it a few years later.

02:11:13.000 So somewhere in the early 70s, it's kind of looking like seed oils cause cancer.

02:11:19.000 And so they're looking at that and they're like, well, maybe corn oil is not the best.

02:11:23.000 And they're like, well, we already told people to eat the corn oil because they can't eat the saturated fat.

02:11:28.000 So we can't tell them to go back to the butter.

02:11:29.000 So what are we going to tell them to eat?

02:11:31.000 And they were like, well, olive oil is a nice balance.

02:11:33.000 It's kind of in between the two.

02:11:35.000 It's not saturated fat, but it's probably not going to cause cancer like we're worried about this.

02:11:41.000 And so olive oil is kind of born out of that.

02:11:43.000 And Steinberg's perspective on promoting olive oil as being good for heart disease was, you know, Steinberg is saying, I'm worried that the real problem with these lipoproteins in the blood causing the plaque is actually the seed oils that we're telling people to eat.

02:12:02.000 And so, yeah, we can use cholesterol as a marker for that, but I don't know that I want to be telling people to eat corn oil.

02:12:08.000 So what am I going to tell them to eat?

02:12:09.000 Because I'm going to have egg on my face, pun intended, if I, you know, if I tell them to go back to eating eggs and butter.

02:12:16.000 So olive oil is this happy middle ground where maybe we can consume a lot of, we can consume olive oil to our heart's content, and it's not going to create the tissue damage that drives the plaque, but it's also not going to ramp up the cholesterol.

02:12:30.000 And so we can just navigate the middle that way.

02:12:33.000 And the reason that no one appreciates this is because medicine thinks in binaries.

02:12:44.000 So I have this saying, all medical diagnoses are false, but some are useful.

02:12:51.000 And I take this from a staying in statistics, which is all models are false, but some are useful.

02:12:58.000 And what that is, is an appreciation that once you impose a model on the data, you're now biasing it towards the way you think about it.

02:13:09.000 And so it's a reality distortion filter to make the data more usable.

02:13:13.000 So if I can use the model to try to predict something and I see it's true, I might leave details behind, but I'm focusing on the things that help me make those decisions.

02:13:22.000 So a medical diagnosis is a hypothesis that the patient will respond to the treatment that they're given.

02:13:29.000 And you test that hypothesis by giving the patient that treatment, and then you see if they get better.

02:13:34.000 And if they don't get better, you take them off the treatment.

02:13:36.000 That's why, you know, some things they just people just stay on the drug they're put on, but look at how they treat depression or epilepsy.

02:13:43.000 They, you know, they, epilepsy, they just put them on one benzone, it doesn't work.

02:13:47.000 They put them on the next one.

02:13:48.000 They keep rotating until they find one that stops the seizures.

02:13:51.000 Depression, they put people on one antidepressant.

02:13:54.000 Oh, it didn't work.

02:13:54.000 We'll put them on the next one.

02:13:55.000 They just rotate through it because they're just looking at it like they have a model that predicts their hypothesis that they'll respond.

02:14:02.000 They didn't.

02:14:02.000 So they switched them onto the next approach.

02:14:06.000 So because medicine cares about triaging decisions about what to do for treatment, they say, I only need a model that helps me do that.

02:14:19.000 And I can ignore all the other details.

02:14:21.000 But what happens is you leave these historical threads behind.

02:14:25.000 Like the fact that the chair of the conference that proved to put in your magazine that everyone had to change their diet because of the concept that they said was proven that is now the basis for the drugs that I'm going to prescribe you.

02:14:42.000 The fact that he had these, you know, that he also showed that it was seed oils in the membrane of the LDL particle that drive the plaque doesn't matter because that doesn't change whether I'm going to give you a statin.

02:14:53.000 You know, and so if it doesn't change how I'm going to treat you, it doesn't matter, which means that I could ignore it if someone asked me what you should eat.

02:15:05.000 You know, but the problem was when they did the randomized controlled trials with the seed oils, they were like, oh, it doubled the atherosclerotic plaque.

02:15:12.000 What do we do?

02:15:13.000 Put it in the box in the basement.

02:15:16.000 And so there's all this like, well, yes, those details are true, but Master John, get out of my hair.

02:15:22.000 I don't want to, I don't.

02:15:23.000 I can't handle the truth.

02:15:24.000 Right, right.

02:15:26.000 And so how does nanokinase?

02:15:28.000 Oh, yeah, right.

02:15:29.000 So I brought you way off the table.

02:15:32.000 I did it.

02:15:33.000 I did it.

02:15:34.000 Okay.

02:15:35.000 So the problem, when you get a, when you get a heart attack or a stroke from atherosclerosis, it is not because in like 98% of cases, it is not because the plaque occluded the blood vessel and stopped the blood flow.

02:15:54.000 In fact, usually when a plaque develops, it develops backwards.

02:15:58.000 Like it, it just, so you're, let's say this is your blood vessel.

02:16:03.000 The plaque's going to bulge out this way instead of this way because your body tries not to narrow the blood vessel because you do need the blood flow, right?

02:16:12.000 So it's almost never the case that the plaque is just squeezing the blood vessel shut.

02:16:15.000 What happens is the inflammatory process inside the plaque, which is especially driven by the seed oils oxidizing in there and going rancid.

02:16:24.000 That's not the only factor, but it's one of them.

02:16:29.000 That process degrades the collagen that covers the plaque and it makes micro tears.

02:16:38.000 And the micro tears and the collagen get healed by scar tissue that gets laid on top of it.

02:16:45.000 And so when you get narrowing into the blood vessel, it's because you're building up scar tissue on top of, like it keeps breaking and you keep building scar tissue on it.

02:16:54.000 But if it breaks and you get a blood clot that is big enough in the acute moment to block the whole artery, that's what usually causes most heart attacks.

02:17:05.000 Nattokinase is an enzyme derived from natto, which is a Japanese fermented soybean paste that is also incidentally very high in vitamin K2, which helps you protect against calcium deposits that weaken the plaque and make it more likely to rupture.

02:17:25.000 So actually just eating natto would be better.

02:17:27.000 This is food, why food first works, right?

02:17:31.000 If you had K2 and natokinase, you'd be even better off.

02:17:34.000 But the natokinase helps break apart blood clots.

02:17:37.000 So if in some people, you might just have a predisposition because you've got systemic inflammation where like you just clot more easily, or you might have someone who's got a genetic defect and the ability to degrade clots.

02:17:49.000 And so their baseline clotting is higher than normal.

02:17:53.000 If that's the case, then they're even more likely to get a heart attack or a stroke when the plaque ruptures because their baseline predisposition to clot is higher.

02:18:02.000 And then on top of that, if you've got someone with really bad atherosclerosis, they might be clotting all the time.

02:18:10.000 Like every day might be a new day where they're going to have a heart attack.

02:18:13.000 And so in both of those cases, natokinase is going to degrade the clots as soon as they occur, and it's going to lower the total clotting.

02:18:22.000 And the downside risk of that is, you know, maybe you bleed too easily if you get cut.

02:18:27.000 But the upside potential of that is if you're one of the people who are a candidate for any one of these days now, you're going to get a heart attack or a stroke.

02:18:34.000 Having taken 2,000 IU of natokinase that day may have prevented you from getting a heart attack or a stroke because the clot formed and you degraded it more quickly.

02:18:46.000 Fascinating.

02:18:47.000 Listen, this is a lot to take in.

02:18:50.000 But let's do this again.

02:18:51.000 Yeah, please.

02:18:52.000 And tell everybody where they can find you and where you are on social media and your website and all that.

02:18:58.000 I write a newsletter at ChrisMasterJohnphd.substack.com and you can look into my mitochondrial testing at mito.nee.

02:19:07.000 All right.

02:19:07.000 Thank you very much.

02:19:08.000 This is really fun.

02:19:09.000 I really appreciate it.

02:19:10.000 I'm glad we did it.

02:19:11.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 29, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2420 - Chris Masterjohn

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