- Joe Rogan, watch that, check it out.

- The Joe, Rogan, experience.

- Showing my day Joe Rogan podcast my night all day.

(upbeat music)

- Hi Chris, how are you?

- Yeah, how you doing?

- Very nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you as well.

- I have enjoyed your content online for a few years now,

so it's really solid stuff.

And I thought, what better day

didn't bring Chris in?

The right after everybody fucked up their diet.

(laughing)

- Yeah, that's right.

- Well, I just wanna tell public health message

that you did not get sleepy

because the turkey was high in trip to fan.

(laughing)

- Yeah, that's a weird one.

Isn't that a weird one?

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

- I mean, the weirdest thing is the origins of it.

Apparently it came from researchers in the,

and not some, sorry, not researchers, journalists

in the 80s who were trying to come up

with a reason to explain why everyone was tired on thing,

after Thanksgiving meal.

And they just looked as far as,

oh, turkey has trip to fan,

which is an amino acid that is the precursor to melatonin,

which is, you know, you could call it a sleeping chemical,

so it makes you get tired at night.

That must be why.

But it turns out that A,

turkey's not that high in trip to fan,

like even way protein is higher in trip to fan than turkey is.

And then B, trip to fan doesn't make you tired.

- Yeah, I dare anyone to go out and have, like,

just a slice of turkey for breakfast

and see if it knocks you out.

It's overeating, it's like so obvious.

I mean, people are eating tons of stuffing,

tons of sides, they're eating so much food.

You're gorging, it's a gorging day.

- Yeah, for sure.

- Yeah, I mean, it's not good.

- 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.

They're alert, their bodies revved up,

and then they have a feast, and they just fall asleep.

And the reason is that we're, you know,

are, you can even see this in physiology,

they call the person with that nervous system,

the rest in digestive system.

And that's because we are biologically wired to be alert

when we need to work to get our food.

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 we can now we can rest and take a sleep.

- Yeah, it's normal.

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 each enormous belly, just like,

just like your uncle in the couch watching football,

just, ugh.

- Yeah, 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,

and I'm, you know, I think that 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.

And so I think an interesting way to see sleep

is it's like, why do we have to sleep eight hours a night?

And I think with dreaming,

there's obviously other things going on there,

but deep sleep, one of the primary things that's happening is,

you need to give your mitochondria a rest,

'cause your mitochondria, 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.

And so your mitochondria are gonna essentially take a nap,

take a rest, they don't go off 'cause you'd die,

but they really turn down the volume of the work they're doing,

but then you take your metabolic rate way lower than that,

and so you can build up the reserves of energy

that you had used up the day before.

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,

and so they randomized people to either drink a placebo drink

or drink 20 grams of creatine through the night,

and they kept them awake all night,

and they had them do brain puzzle quizzes.

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.

And so the conclusion is,

creatine is somehow acutely preventing your brain

from suffering during sleep deprivation.

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.

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.

That makes sense, that is an interesting thing,

because it's fairly recent that people have talked about this.

I mean, you used to be,

people only thought of creatine as being a muscle thing

to help you recover and help you build larger muscles,

but then over the last, I would say year or two,

I started hearing talking about cognitive function,

maybe even more than a couple of years,

but about how it improves cognitive function.

The sleep thing though, it's very recent, right?

- Yeah, the sleep thing was in the last year.

- There is some literature on traumatic brain injury

where 20 grams of creatine for six months

doubles the rate of healing.

- Whoa.

- That's incredible.

- But it's, yeah, the field is in its infancy,

but I think that I actually, almost a decade ago,

did a podcast on just creatine,

I called it more than a performance enhancer,

because if you just look at where it's distributed in the body,

almost every cell and every tissue has the creatine system.

And so it really is this,

and if you look at the literature,

they'll say, well, it's more important in certain cells,

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,

and it's really important in like long cells.

So for example, your retina is part of your central nervous

system, it's a really long cell that's coming from the brain

into the eye, and creatine helps move energy back and forth.

But if you just look at where,

instead of where is it most important,

just like where is it?

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,

and that includes pumping stomach acid,

it includes sperm swimming up the vaginal canal.

And so if you just look at where it is,

you would think that creatine would help a lot more than muscles,

and it just turns out that all you need to do

is start studying it to start seeing those effects.

- Is there any studies on creatine

that improve in the eyesight?

- I'm not sure, they're not that I know of.

- 'Cause that kinda makes sense, right?

- It makes complete sense.

Like when it comes down to it,

your ability to produce energy is producing,

maintaining and repairing everything in your body,

so you would expect to see anything that does improve

your energy metabolism, improve literally everything,

so it'd be kind of shocking if you had no effect on that.

But I'm not sure if there are good trials on that.

I haven't seen them.

- 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 reverse some of it.

So I don't have perfect vision, but my vision's better.

Like it's definitely better.

And it's not just through the red light,

it's also, it's gotta be some of the supplements

that I'm taking.

One of them, I take a supplement from pure encapsulations,

no affiliations with them, I just buy it.

It's called macular support,

and let's see what's got in there.

It's got lutein and a few other supplements

that have been known to it.

- Yeah, I'll do it.

- This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter.

Today's world will look a lot different

now playing only in theaters.

Is that it?

Well, yeah, I mean, so with the red light,

it is very interesting.

Whenever you think of red light,

you want to think of your mitochondria,

because the main thing that we know about red, near and for red

and far and for red, that they're doing

is they're actually going straight into the mitochondrial

engines that produce the energy and helping

them produce more.

And they're also ordering the water structure

inside the mitochondria to make those engines produce

energy more easily.

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.

And they covered their eyes to make sure

that the red light didn't go into the eye.

And so the conclusion is, it's not a clinical study, right?

And it's not like a one year.

How does it really improve your eyesight over one year?

We don't know.

But it shows proof of principle that red light

is doing something systemically that

doesn't not have to go to your eye that

does improve your vision.

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.

But you've got coordinated energy metabolism

going on through your whole body.

Like your liver is doing tons of stuff

to try to make your eyes healthy and make your brain healthy

and so on.

So it makes a lot of sense.

But that-- so I don't doubt at all that the bed

is part of that.

But the luteen, Enzia Zanthan, are well

known to accumulate in the macula

where they have a very specific role

in protecting against macular degeneration.

And actually, the best source of those

is egg yolks from chickens that are fed anything

that has them.

But marygolds are super high in them.

So if they feed the chickens marygolds,

they get super high levels.

And the egg yolk has fat that helps them get absorbed.

So in terms of--

I mean, this is--

you could take this with some eggs.

But I would--

But I would should feed my chickens marygolds.

Yeah, if you have chickens--

If you have chickens.

And if you're spouting your money on a luteen,

Enzia Zanthan supplement, you might be able to get a--

maybe the marygolder cheaper.

Maybe I'll just double it up.

So this is all the ingredients.

Does this stuff make sense?

Is something that would help support eyesight?

It does.

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.

It's embedded on genetics.

It's-- yeah.

So there's-- you need beta carotene is this big.

And if you chop it in half, you get vitamin A.

And so you have an enzyme in your digestive system

that does that.

But that enzyme is dependent on a lot of things going right.

So you need to have good zinc status, good iron status,

good thyroid status, and all kinds of stuff like that.

And actually seed oils decrease the conversion.

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.

And then vitamin A activation is also

dependent on mitochondrial function, too.

But it makes sense.

Vitamin A is great for your eye.

Vitamin C is a great antioxidant and a steel cysteine,

great antioxidant, the glutathione, the satria stuff.

I'm kind of-- I think it's a little bit of an overhyped in terms of some--

another type of glutathione, I think, would have worked fine.

What's the best glutathione?

Well, the best glutathione is the glutathione

that you make yourself from protein that you eat.

But if you're going to supplement with glutathione,

I don't-- if you're talking about bang for the buck,

I just think straight up glutathione is good.

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.

And it's like, well, am I getting three times more glutathione

out of it, not really?

So some people swear by liposomal glutathione.

And if you swear by it, if it does, it's saying for you.

Do you think it's 10% better?

I think the jury is out on whether there

might be 10%, 20% better value for those things.

So if I'm going to take glutathione,

I'm just going to take glutathione.

Got it.

OK.

Is what you're saying about producing your own glutathione?

That's the same thing as vitamin D, right?

It's way better when your body produces it.

If it does?

I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong

with getting vitamin D from food.

But the thing is you do need sunlight, right?

So you at least need to get 30 minutes of sunshine

the morning, which is not going to give you vitamin D.

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.

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 for meeting fish or for meeting

caliver oil.

But you don't want to say, well, I don't

need to go out in the sun.

I'm just going to take vitamin D.

Then you're not going to get the benefits of the sun

because the sun gives you other benefits.

Got it.

Yeah.

Is there anything that you can do, say,

if you live in Seattle and you're in the winter,

it's just raining constantly?

Is there a tanning bed that gives you some of that?

Yeah, I do think that there is--

there is some risk of tanning beds.

I'm not 100%-- when I lived in New York,

I would try to spend 40 minutes in the afternoon sunshine

for 3/4 of the year.

And during the winter, the UV index just wasn't high enough.

And I get eczema in the winter because I'm not

getting enough sun.

And so I would use a tanning bed not to get tan,

but I'd use two, three minutes at a time

just because it just had a systemic effect

in preventing the eczema that I would get in the winter.

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.

But what I would do is, for morning sunlight,

I think you can get a lux meter app.

And just some people think that there's no sun outside.

But actually, it's like 100 times or 1,000 times brighter

than indoors in their eyes or adjusting.

And so it's cloudy or overcast.

But there's still a lot of value in going outside.

So I would say if you use a lux meter and it's under 10,000,

you could get a light therapy light at home

to use to just turn it on and not look straight into it,

but have it going into your eyes.

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, you're just--

What I was getting at is there a different kind of tanning

bed that's maybe--

Oh, there are.

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.

So if you're just going to a tanning bed place,

you-- probably the staff there

tell them that you want mixed wavelength

that gives you a mix of surface tan and deep tan.

I think that's how they--

because they don't know the vitamin D science.

So I think that's how you have to get the bed that gives more--

You have to tell them what a mix of surface and deep.

That's funny.

Speaking of red light and speaking of therapy

that helps your mitochondria, what

is your thoughts on methylene blue?

Methylene blue seems to be a very controversial supplement.

Some people think it's amazing, and it's a panacea

for all the nails you.

And other people are like, what are we doing here?

Why are you putting dying your body?

Your piss is coming out blue.

This is weird.

What school are you in?

Methylene blue is something that could do wonders

for your mitochondria if you need it

and could really hurt you if you don't.

And I think that there are certainly

a lot of people raving about it on the internet.

And it's because it's a mix of things.

So there are people that are treating themselves

for a problem in their mitochondria

that they don't know that they have.

And then they get an outsized voice,

because they're the ones raving about how much it helped them.

And so there's like selection, 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.

So that's part of it.

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.

So a lot of people are using like 0.5 milligrams.

But once you get up to 10 milligrams or so,

you're getting some degree of pharmacological

anti-depressant effect because it's an MAO oxidies,

monoamine oxidies inhibitor.

And so I do think that there are some people who are,

they're like, "Oh, I feel so much better."

And it's like, "Yeah, bro, you're taking an anti-depressant."

So that's part of it.

But if you look at what it actually does,

it is a very non-specific rewire of

how your mitochondria produce energy.

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 gonna help the traffic

because that road is blocked.

You actually can't get through there.

And so the side roads that would take you somewhere

are actually better because they're not blocked, right?

So in the context where you need the detours,

the detours help you.

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 gonna get to their destination faster.

They're just getting tricked by the chaos

that was created by people putting up detour signs

that they didn't need.

So methylene blue is something that goes into your mitochondria

and sets up detour signs all over the place.

And how does it do that?

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.

You gotta break that apart, you gotta take out the energy

and you gotta synthesize ATP with it.

ATP is the general energy currency of the cell.

So mitochondria produce usable energy

from food in the form of ATP.

When they do that, they have a bunch of different pathways

through which electrons flow.

And methylene blue is able to grab those electrons

and put them somewhere else.

So they call it a redox cyclor.

So it's taking an electron here,

it's shuttling it over there,

it's taking an electron here, it's shuttling over there.

And so if you have this, let's say the normal way

for your mitochondria 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.

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.

But if you don't have a blockage,

you're just creating random chaos in the mitochondria.

And they're in 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.

And if you don't have any inhibitors

and if the animal is genetically healthy,

then you add methylene blue, they get less ATP.

So the mitochondria is less effective

at converting food to usable energy.

But if they do have it inhibitor,

their ATP production goes down,

you add methylene blue, it goes back up, right?

So if there's a blockage to get around,

methylene blue helps.

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 there was specific blockages

or there.

I ran a biochemical optimization program a while back

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

and he's mood was worse, his fatigue was worse,

he had more anxiety.

A bunch of problems that the dose was too low

to say it was doing a pharmacological messing with his neurotransmitters.

And so I think it was just making his mitochondrial function worse.

And so the mitochondrial testing that we did on him

showed that he was not a candidate for methylene blue

and he actually had some really weird,

like his mitochondria were best at using

a specific amino acid cysteine for energy,

kind of weird and idiosyncratic.

And in his case, it was interesting because he'd actually

gravitated to a stake only carnivore diet

and he didn't feel like it fixed him

but he felt like it took the edge off.

Like he was 50% better on the stake only carnivore diet.

And that's 50%'s a lot.

Well, yeah, it's a lot, right.

But he wanted the other 50% that's why he was coming to me.

So what was, 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 stake,

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.

So figuring that out allowed him to get from 50% to 75%.

But the methylene blue was putting in down at 5% instead of 50.

Can I ask how old he was?

He wasn't that old. He was in maybe 40.

I forget exactly, but 40 give or take five years.

- And is that an age-dependent thing?

Like mitochondrial dysfunction?

Is it more common in older people?

- For sure.

So what, I mean, I would argue that mitochondrial dysfunction

and aging are the same thing.

And you know, there's a bunch of theories of aging,

but if you take them all, you can always ask a question why.

There's like the information theory of aging.

Like why is the information not being carried out correctly?

Or the oxidative stress theory of aging?

Well, why are you making more oxidative stress?

And I actually think, I actually think it's way more simple

than anyone is thinking about it.

It's mitochondrial energy production is producing

everything in your body, it's repairing it,

it's maintaining it, and it's putting where it belongs.

That means that mitochondria produced the energy

that they need to produce everything in the mitochondria, right?

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.

Like, I got sick so many times.

I got injured so many times.

I had days where I didn't eat optimal nutrition so many times.

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, you know, that the extra set of squats that you did.

And they had a little bit left over for themselves.

And they got, you know, a half a percent worse

at producing energy.

And so that sets up a vicious cycle because now,

now that they could not repair themselves as well,

now they get a little bit worse and what, get a little bit worse.

And what you see in the literature is that

as people age, starting around 818 through age 70 to 80,

you're losing your mitochondrial function

average rate of 1% per year.

So by the time you're 70, you have half the energy

that you started out with that baseline.

And that I think what explains that is just the vicious cycle

of the mitochondria got, they lost a quarter percent here

or a quarter percent there and they just started

repairing themselves less effectively

because they're the engines fueling everything

including that.

And so, but, you know, the good news is that age only explains

25% of mitochondrial function.

So it's the average that's going down at 1% per year.

The average person is half, producing half the energy

at age 70 and they were at age 18.

But the spread around that is huge.

And with that, to me, the way that I spin that is,

that means that 75% of this is under your control.

You're gonna, you're gonna go in a downward trend,

but you're in control of whether, you know,

you're way undershooting that trend or you're way

overshooting it.

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 and you can get to age 70

and you're not docked 50%.

You're just docked 10%.

And I think that's what's happening when you see

some of these seven-year-olds who are more fit

than a lot of 25-year-olds, you know.

- Yeah, interesting.

So what are the primary factors in regards

to being able to maintain your function?

- Well, I think that everyone has idiosyncratic things

and I think mitochondrial testing is very important.

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?

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

the rest of the cell,

but that also feeds back in the repair functions

for the mitochondria.

And so I think creatine, optimizing your creatine status

is super important.

And I think that everyone who's not eating

one or two pounds of meat per day

should probably be taking creatine.

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

and if you're eating,

and I would include its red meat salmon,

which is like a reddish fish

and is actually quite high in creatine.

If you're eating white meat, white fish,

and you're eating it well done,

you wanna err on the side of two pounds

'cause they don't have as much creatine

then you cook the creatine out of them

and you wind up with much lower dose.

We should probably say salmon,

you're talking about wild salmon versus farm salmon,

which has a dyed pink skin.

- Well, it's not the red color.

I think it's coincidence that it's,

I think the red color is coincidence.

It's just a helpful way to think about it.

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 database way higher than fat,

but you can tell by looking at it

that it just doesn't have that lean look

that wild salmon has.

So I think creatine is a function of the lean tissue mass

and it might be the case that wild salmon

are doing a lot more swimming,

like maybe the wild environment is encouraging them

to use their muscles in a way that increases

their creatine synthesis.

That wouldn't be surprising.

Wouldn't surprise me.

I have tried to steal man the case of,

could there be a vegan diet

that would make you not need to supplement with creatine?

And the steal 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.

And that's not typically what,

and I might rip a hole in your digestive system,

but that's what you need to try.

- But that's not to hurt my stomach just saying.

- So I think that most vegans

should probably just supplement with creatine

and could call it a day there.

- So that's creatine, we mentioned sunlight.

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 there.

That's like they're on a nap.

And there's a transition when you wake up

where the mitochondria have to say,

oh, you've woken up, now I need to wake up

and I need to start producing more energy.

And sunlight going into your eyes,

being translated into your brain,

is the signal that actually tells your brain

to organize that.

And so what happens as a result of that

is that signaling helps your mitochondria adapt

and start producing everything

and it actually helps them adjust.

And if you don't have the morning sunlight,

you are going to have your mornings full

of sub-optimal energy metabolism

that is initiating that vicious cycle of aging,

is that's what I believe.

And then it's also the case that the red and infrared light

from the sun is very beneficial to the mitochondria.

The best time to get that would be in the morning.

When you go out in the afternoon,

you've got to deal with like,

can I get two hours of this without getting burned?

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.

And then I think the beds and other devices at home are great

and where you want to start thinking about that is,

I'm getting benefit from red and urine for a light

but I'm getting more, I know that I could get more benefit

if I got more of it than I'm able to get through sunlight.

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.

Then nutrition would be number three

and every nutrient is needed for everything in your body

but your mitochondria are using all kinds of nutrients.

And there's this idea that floats around in society

that nutritional deficiencies are the thing of the past.

But if you just look at surveys,

93% of the Americans are getting less than they need

of at least one nutrient.

30% have verifiable blood markers

of at least one nutritional deficiency

and 6% have blood markers verifying

more than one nutrient deficiency.

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?

So I think those stats are grossly underestimating

how many people need to get better nutrition.

So I think everybody should be getting better nutrition.

And to kind of high level what that looks like,

I think some good rules of,

there's lots of ways it's just gonna 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, so at least try to work in liver,

at least try to work in bone broth or something like that.

Then closer to nose to tail,

you can eat your animals the better.

Do try to diversify across proteins

because there's just different vitamin and mineral profiles

and different types of protein.

Like if you can eat shellfish, eat some shellfish,

if you can eat fish, eat some fish,

you can eat dairy, eat some dairy.

And the more you diversify across those proteins, the better.

Most people don't eat enough protein.

Good rule of thumb would be at least a third of your plate

should be protein.

But 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 a third of your plate

as eggs is not gonna give you enough protein.

And then I think try to eat as broadly as you can

from different types of carbohydrates.

If you have to leave out something, leave out grains,

try to eat whole unprocessed foods

and try to eat most of your,

try to eat 80% of your foods cooked at home

or prepped at home or whatever instead of eating out.

And make sure your digestion is in good order.

And those are kind of the, you know,

the broad basis of nutrition.

- Yeah.

- And exercise is a very interesting one.

So, if you exercise is incredibly important

to the signaling that produce mitochondria,

but why is that?

It's because you need mitochondria to produce energy

for the exercise that you're doing.

So I think a lot of people are too reductionist

when they look at what type of exercise should you do

for your mitochondria.

If you try to do a study that says like,

I'm trying to get more mitochondria in my skeletal muscle.

What's, what exercise gonna do it?

You're gonna do it.

You're gonna see endurance exercise

outperforming other things.

And that's because endurance activity

requires more mitochondrial function in the muscle.

If you're doing like hypertrophy or strength training

and you're doing short sets,

your muscle's burning a lot of glycogen.

It's less dependent on its mitochondria.

So you're not gonna see the mitochondrial function there,

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.

Like if you're doing sprinting,

your muscles burning through tons of carbohydrates

making a lot of lactate.

If that lactate's not being metabolized

in the skeletal muscle,

it's going to the liver to convert it back to glucose.

So your liver, now you're training your livers mitochondria

when you're doing strength training,

you're doing hypertrophy.

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.

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.

I think 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,

your training mitochondria and your brain

that are able to energize the systems

that provide your reaction time.

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.

And I do think that a lot of people are thinking

about this when they're 25, they're like,

"Oh, I don't care if I can memorize a string of 25 numbers."

But you're gonna care if you can't remember anything

when you're 75, you know?

So I think that we really need a broad thought about this.

But by the way, do you know what athletes live the longest

from the pros?

- Oh, let me guess.

Baseball?

- It's actually gymnasts and polevolters

have eight years on the general population.

And if you look at, there's a study that came out

earlier this year and it tallied up all of the pro sports players

from all of the countries who have the dates

of their death publish and who are notable enough

to have been had an article published about them.

And so they had many hundreds.

I forgot the exact sample size,

but they were able to statistically adjust the mortality rate

to the general population from which the athlete came.

So if it was a Greek athlete,

they were adjusted to the mortality rate of Greece

when they died, like what you would expect

after adjusting for location and age and so on.

And in the male athletes,

you had gymnasts and polevolters

with eight years on the population.

And you've got cyclists who've,

and of course you've got sumo's,

sumo wrestlers are 10 years below.

And you have a lot of sports like that have high injury rates

that are especially a lot of stuff

that has impacts to the hands,

martial arts and things like that.

We're probably the sport itself

and it's impact on training your body's energy systems

is positive,

but just the injury rate is taking you out.

So you're kind of like not,

you're kind of in the middle,

you're very close to the general population.

Cyclists only have two years on the general population.

And so what I thought was interesting,

I think a few things are interesting about that.

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.

- Really?

- Well, yeah, I'm not gonna name names,

but there's a lot of people out there

who are, that's where it's coming from.

And it makes a lot of sense that cycling is,

it's good for cardiovascular fitness.

There's a lot of data that having good cardiovascular fitness,

it's a key factor for longevity.

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 cardiovascular fitness.

And so when I think about there's,

it's an observational study,

you can't prove cause and effect,

but it just does make you think.

And the way that I think about that is a few things.

So first of all,

the commonalities between gymnasts and pole vaulters,

they're, it's definitely not height,

'cause gymnasts tend to be short and pole vaulters are tall.

And so the height cancels out.

Definitely they're fit.

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.

So I do think that's interesting that it does make you,

it does make you wonder if you could skip leg day.

Well, I don't advocate,

it's gonna make leg day.

But to me, like what I think is actually going on here is,

I think that functionality of movement

throughout the whole body to facilitate,

very, to facilitate the kind of skills that they have,

is training, it's training things that are getting left out

when you just make sure that your heart and lungs

are able to support your running or your cycling.

And I think that some of those involve,

are probably related,

I don't know what they're not dying of.

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?

Like the average, if you get far enough for someone

to analyze why you died,

they're like diabetes and hip fractures

and things like that are hitting younger people.

But in general, if people are dying 'cause they got old,

they're dying of heart disease first, cancer second,

and they outlive those two things,

you get this diverse spread of things that people die of

and diverse neurological diseases becomes pretty heavy.

So I think cardio respiratory fitness

is probably the biggest thing in preventing heart disease.

But cancer becomes very interesting

because there was a study in rodents

that showed that stretching prevents tumor growth.

And I thought this was wild, I first heard about this

on one of Huberman's shows.

And so I looked up the study and I was like,

this is wild because I happened to know some other things

about immune function.

So one thing is that when 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.

For T cells to be activated,

what they do is they don't have enough energy themselves

so they push off the local environment

and that pushing off creates motor proteins inside

that generate the energy to activate the T cell.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Does that pay forward into better immune function

because your body is more properly structured?

I can't prove that, but I think it's very interesting

to think about for those two exercises.

And then it is very interesting to me

that gymnasts and polevolters 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?

And so this is just, again,

this is all just hypothesizing interesting ideas, right?

So one interesting idea is that a vibration plate

is the sedentary man's gymnastics.

And that flipping upside down is better

at circulating body fluids than walking.

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.

I don't, I can't prove any of this,

but it's all very interesting to think about.

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.

You really want to, the lesson from the gymnast is like,

what are all the things that a gymnast can do

that I can't do?

And I should be able to approximate them

in the best way that I can.

And I take that a little bit more, more literally.

So I actually do like, I am trying to convert

all my workouts into what's the gymnastic version of this.

- And you think it's because of flipping?

- Well, I'm just, I'm just thinking--

- They're both involving coordination, explosive movement.

- Right, and I, I think the skills.

- I think the, yes.

So I think the skill training is big for spill off

into neurological disease.

Because, but I'm just trying to connect them

to the three things.

So I, like, like, I'm not sure exactly

what they have lower rates of death from.

We need more studies to see that.

But the, but the body mechanics,

I think is a very interesting possible explanation

of why they'd have lower rates of cancer.

And the, what you just said, I think is a great explanation

of why they would have lower rates of neurological disease.

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,

like, reverse engineering 100 backwards.

What do I want to not have lost by that time?

And not enough time just being in peak function.

'Cause if you look at bone mass, for example,

bone mass goes up until you're in your mid 20s,

maybe 25 to 30.

There's a little bit difference with men and women.

But then it just goes down after that.

And if you wanna have good bone mass when you're 75,

the most important mass that you could possibly have

is to have really good peak bone mass when you're 25, right?

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, you know, if you're gonna have really awesome peak memory,

that gives you a lot of room to decline later on.

Whereas if you're trying to reverse engineer

like what you don't wanna be able to not remember

when you're 75, I think you're just setting

the bar way too low, right?

So if you're 20, you should be thinking about like,

what are all the sports I can't do?

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.

So just try a different sport once a year

and maybe they don't love it.

They don't fall in love with it.

But maybe they learn something like,

oh, I didn't realize I couldn't do that.

So for example, I did 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 in boxing.

And in BJJ, I was getting a little dizzy doing

four and backward rolls and I was like,

I don't spend enough, this is before I started thinking

about the gymnast being upside down.

I was like, I don't spend enough time being upside down.

So I bought some mats and now I just, you know,

I do one forward and backward roll every day

no matter how I don't do BJJ right now,

but I just do one forward and backward roll every day

as part of my morning routine.

But I've also switched, like I was like,

why would I over head press when I could try to do,

I can do wall pushups now.

My hope is by next year I'll be able to do handstand pushups,

but I'm working on a handstand right now.

So we'll see how that goes.

But I think just, 'cause you can focus on one thing,

you can really mist out that like,

oh, my favorite workout activities.

Don't, I mean, this is how many people

are doing all their favorite workout routines activities

and forgetting that they don't have any rotation.

They don't have any side bending.

You know, like if you would just try different sport

and be like, oh, what did I not realize

I wasn't able to do at all and then pick that

and put it in your workout?

'Cause if you got a great program

or then maybe your workout is perfect,

but I think most of us can like,

we gravitate towards some of the exercises

that we think are good.

And even if you think you're mixing it up,

like CrossFit managed to eliminate rotation

from everything, like every sport

that involves throwing a ball involves rotation, right?

- Well, they do sometimes they throw the ball sideways

against a wall, there's some rotation in it.

- Oh, maybe they worked it in.

When I did CrossFit, the ball throwing,

we did moves with the wall balls.

And so it was like.

- Depends entirely on who's teaching it.

But if you're doing windmills, windmills

or if you're kind of a form of rotation,

there's a lot of ab exercises that do it that are rotational.

- Yeah.

All right, so maybe that wasn't fair.

But my point is that like a lot of people

are not doing any rotation, right?

- Right.

- And so I just,

you just wanna tap into that diversity of like,

what functions am I not exercising when I exercise them?

- When we're talking about skills,

we're talking about the neurological system

and the cognitive system synergistically in a dance.

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 and one of the way to save that off,

they believe is like do crosswords,

do a bunch of different things, your contests,

do something that's actively making your mind fire and work.

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're doing like Muay Thai, hitting pads

or even light sparring that you're thinking

as well as exercising, which is very different

is you're consciously aware of your opponent's movement,

you're calculating it, you're trying to time things.

There's a whole dance going on between your body

and your mind that doesn't really exist

in straight workouts.

So that alone I would think would fight off

a lot of the age-related decline in physical activity

or physical function.

- Yeah, I think there are, you mentioned a couple things

in there so I think it's a separate thing

to have a skill and have strategy

and to have a reaction time.

But I think you definitely wanna be hitting all those bases.

So I think it's good to have a general checklist

of what should you be exercising

and see that it like takes strength

and break it down into the different planes

and then also take skill, strategy, reaction time,

agility, quickness, balance, power.

And you have to find a way to,

you know, it's hard to work everything at once

but you gotta find a way to maybe you cycle

through switching your focus, but you find like what is,

if I worked on really being able to jump rope

without tripping my feet up last quarter,

how am I gonna take that skill and not lose it?

And so for me, for example, I really focused on jump roping

when I realized how horrible I was at it

when I was forced to do in boxing.

And so I very intensively tried to get good at jump roping

and now I don't wanna work on it anymore

but I've just taken in like, okay, every morning

I have to do 50 uninterrupted jump roops

just in the course of my warm up.

- Just to kinda keep whatever skills that you've built up.

- Yeah, just to make sure that I'm not losing

the basic capacity to do that coordination.

- Yeah.

- And if I start to, then I realize I have to work on it more.

- Mm, yeah, 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.

Like say, if you're an athlete in whatever sport

and you say, you know, I'm going to try Jiu Jitsu

or I'm gonna try martial arts.

Like something completely new like that

where you're working out but you're really thinking

'cause you've gotta like really concentrate.

It's not like a natural movement to throw a sidekick.

You have to really concentrate on picking your knee up,

twisting your body and all that jazz.

Like I think stuff like that would, you know,

just keep everything firing, no?

- I think you, yeah, I mean, I think you should do a mix.

Like you always wanna be pushing yourself

to a new, 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.

- Right.

- Like I think a lot of us go through life

just making achievement, losing it.

- Oh yeah.

- And like, trotting, watering, going nowhere.

- When I really got into Jiu Jitsu,

I stopped doing any kickboxing for a long time.

And every now and then I would just hit the bag

and just like, oh, I still can do it.

But then I started training Muay Thai again

and it was kind of shocking how long it took me

to get like the flow back.

They were like, blah, blah, blah.

Like where it really comes off smooth.

Everything seemed like a little labored

and it was just disheartening to like,

oh, I don't really have these skills.

Like I have to like re-acquire them.

You know, I know how to do it, I've done it.

But it's just like right now, everything's a little,

the pathways are filled with mud.

You know what I mean?

It's not clean, it's not nice and sharp.

Everything is a little funky.

And you know, but if you wanna get good at Jiu Jitsu,

you don't have time for two hours of Muay Thai day.

You just don't.

You know, so it's like you gotta pick your poison.

You gotta pick which you like, which you don't like.

- Yeah, well, I think you have to decide

what your goal is and what your metric is.

Like there's no way that anyone is gonna be good at like seven,

you know, gonna be elite level at any two sports

or like great at any seven, right?

So I think you have to say like,

okay, do I want to be really good at my tie?

And that's, you don't have to do that to have healthy aging.

But there are things that you do at Muay Thai

that you do have to be able to do to have healthy aging.

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 wanna say like,

oh, I need to be as good as I ever was at my tie.

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

And is that something that I need in general?

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.

I really can't like shift my weight quickly anymore.

Or I really can't, like my reaction time is slow.

Like I just keep getting hit in the head

because I don't move it.

You know, if you're realizing those things,

then I think you gotta,

you have to find some way to train those

because you need those for everything.

And it's just, it's easy to not challenge yourself in life

and don't realize what you're losing.

So you do have to challenge yourself

with something you're not able to do

to figure out what you're weak in.

- One of the things I wanna 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.

Like you mentioned hands, hand injuries.

Is that something that people need to take

and 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.

You know, a lot of these guys cut weight

and they're basically on desk door 24 hours before a fight,

which is I think completely insane.

And the most avoidable damaging thing

about martial arts competition.

And yet it's ubiquitous.

It's like, almost everyone does it.

- Yeah, I mean, I think there is a degree of subjectivity to it.

If you're, you know, if your idea of what a life well lived

is to win an event that might have you die

in the next three years,

then, you know, how are you gonna argue

with that value that someone has adopted?

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.

I think even if you were just trying to say like,

how can I be the strongest I could be,

you would still need injury prevention to be number one.

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

and where would they have been

if they spent that six months getting stronger.

And if you're gonna 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.

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 870,

is just this like, 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.

- That's what I was getting at, yeah.

So for someone who's had like a say a martial artist,

he's had broken hands, broken ribs, knee surgery,

shoulder surgery, a lot of these guys have gone through

a bunch of stuff like that.

Like so each one of those things is taking a small toll.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, that's not something that people consider.

You think, oh, you recovered from that injury,

now you're 100%, but you're 100% with the tax

of having recovered from that injury.

- Yeah, and a lot of people aren't necessarily fully

recovered from the injury either.

- Oh, many, many aren't.

- Yeah, many, many aren't.

- I talked to a guy once who was,

he got injured in marathon running

and he thought he was recovered.

I thought he wasn't recovered and he was,

thought he was, there was some kind of metabolic stuff

wrong with him because he's getting sick all the time.

I'm like, bro, you didn't recover yet.

Like what are you doing going out and doing all that running?

Like, what was the injury?

- I don't remember this, I forgot the specific injury,

but one of the common running injuries.

- 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.

It happened recently in a big fight and it's just,

there's a thing that happens with these guys

or they just want to get back in there and get a win.

And a lot of times they're like, I'll be ready.

I won't get hit again.

I know what I did wrong.

I'll be better this time, but they're more vulnerable now.

Like they can get knocked out.

Is this just neurological damage?

Is this just a function of the concussion?

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 a recover from that traumatic injury?

- I think it's all of those.

- It's the, but that too, right?

So it's not just the fact that you got knocked out

and your brain is more vulnerable now.

It's like don't know your body's more vulnerable.

You're probably not as strong as you were.

You're probably not recovering as quickly.

- Yeah, 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.

And so think about if you're actually healing the ability

for it to, like if it's just sucking

even more disproportionate energy from the body

and just think about how much the rest of the body works

to support the brain, like the liver is working all day long

to make the brain get enough energy.

So yeah, there's no way that healing from a brain injury

is not taking the tolls systemically.

That's impossible.

- But to accelerate or enhance that creatine,

you think would be a very good option.

- I mean, creatine is one of the ones

that's been demonstrated to do that.

And it's been studied 20 grams a day.

I don't think anyone really knows,

like do you need 20?

Is 30 better?

Could have been done with five.

But most of the brain research is being done

with doses around 20 grams.

And the thought is that the muscles are gonna take first dibs

and you need to have high dose to get it to the brain.

There's a lot we don't know about that,

but as a default, if I was healing from a traumatic brain injury,

I would take the creatine.

And then I think if you have something that's this serious,

you do want to know what your limiting bottlenecks are.

So I think actually doing mitochondrial testing,

that's 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.

And so, to testing to understand your unique needs,

I think it would be a way to supercharge that process

when it's needed.

And I think that there are,

and so to take this back to like what can people do in general,

I think methylene blue you mentioned 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.

But coq10 is an interesting one

because coq10 is actually made in the body

and it is found in food.

And so there, you know, methylene blue was,

a lot of people emphasized that it was the first drug.

So it was like the first example of pharma basically.

But before that, it was actually patented

as something that would turn your clothes blue

but wouldn't come out in the wash.

That was the patent on methylene blue.

You know, whereas coq10, you eat food, it's there.

Your body makes it itself.

And what kind of food is it in?

Heart is the best, is the best.

And so I was saying before you should be eating those to tail,

like if you're gonna eat meat, you should be eating heart.

I personally, most of my meat is actually a blend of,

it's like 60% ground beef

and the rest of it is a blend of liver, heart kidney.

And there are some other, mine is just liver, heart and kidney.

There are some other companies that have seen recently

come out with ones that include spleen and adrenals

and very small percentages.

But that's, I do strongly believe in a food first pharma

last approach.

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.

You should use supplements in a strategic sense,

not as a replacement for a bad diet.

And those supplements should, you know,

what you would do next is say like, okay,

I'm really having trouble getting enough whatever nutrient,

maybe I'll supplement to compensate for that.

But I think you should go 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.

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, 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.

But even then, so Cocutan is a great example.

I would try eating more heart before I would try supplementing

with 400 milligrams a day of Cocutan, for example.

- Can I ask you this?

Does it matter if it's chicken heart, beef heart?

Is there a superior?

- I don't think we have enough data to say that.

So Cocutan 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,

but I have not seen all the different hearts compared.

- So how do we know that Cocutan is in heart?

- Well, wherever it's been measured in heart, it's there.

So like the representative examples of heart

that were used were like an order of magnitude higher

in Cocutan than anything else.

- And is it?

- But we haven't seen all of the different hearts

compared to each other.

- Is it dependent upon how it's cooked,

like whether it's rare, well done?

- Is that, I think you lose some during cooking,

but it's, I forget how much,

and I don't think it's all of it.

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.

It might not always taste the best.

- Except for barricades for us.

- I mean, you don't need to make a steak well done

to avoid any sense.

- Well, not steak, but pork.

- Right, yeah.

- What are other things, especially some wild game?

- Yeah, I mean, right.

So taking that into account,

the nutrient value of the food is always gonna be highest

when the food has been cooked relatively gently.

But anyway, so Cocutan is interesting

because it's hard to argue against taking it

from the literature because there's dozens

of clinical trials, quite a bit of it is in heart disease.

It looks pretty promising in various forms of heart disease.

But if you look at that literature,

what you see is a dose response

where at one to 200 milligrams per day of Cocutan,

the average person's glucose insulin and blood pressure

looks better than not taking it.

But the average person at 400 milligrams of Cocutan

is actually having worse blood pressure,

glucose and insulin than they were without taking it.

And the variability around that is huge.

So one person is probably gonna be worse at 100 milligrams,

whereas another person might get their best

at 400 milligrams.

But it's like, if you looked at the literature

and you would say, where is the sweet spot

where the average person is gonna be doing really good,

it would be 100 to 200 milligrams a day.

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.

So a lot of people complain about insomnia,

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.

It's not common, but it's,

I mean, all the people down common stuff

always ask me about it.

- Right, at higher levels?

- No, no, just like at 100 milligrams.

Like they're just hyper-sensitive people out there.

- Okay.

- And then is this rare?

Is this like, I don't know how common it is.

So, what, I mean, what I can tell you is that

across the trials, you see some people reporting

GI side effects, which is super common.

You don't see a lot of this mentioned,

but you never know if they were looking for it.

Like a lot of times the side effect list

is dependent on what side effects they asked about.

- Is this something you take with food or without food?

- Makes sense, right?

- Yeah, so maybe increase function if you took it early

or maybe increase energy levels?

- 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?

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 a disease.

And I think we as just kind of the wellness community

or whatever, struggle to come up with a good definition

for health, but I think like 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,

and you should be adaptable enough to be able to handle

things changing that were out of your control

or your own purposeful changing.

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.

And so I, when you start losing,

you use energy not only to produce,

maintain, repair everything,

but you also use it to distribute everything.

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.

And so a lot of people think that like,

if their mitochondrial function is declining,

they should feel tired all the time.

But that's not necessarily the case.

It might be that you're just losing the energy

that you need to actually help the mitochondrial

chemical energy to help control how you use energy.

And so you are wasting it as anxiety

and that's coming out of productivity.

So it's like, you look at how much energy

did I have yesterday and what did I get done?

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.

And so I didn't actually get any work done.

Like, that's a good sign that you're,

you are losing control over where your energy is going.

So you're not, you're just, that's not good.

That's not, that's not healthy.

Healthy is you have a, you have abundant energy

to put towards productive things.

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.

And you know, you can adapt that on an age dependent manner,

but and that you are able to sleep very deeply.

And if all your energy is keeping you up at night

and then the next day your sleep deprived,

like your biggest problem is you're just not putting

the energy to where it's where it's supposed to go.

So I think when you're looking at something like that,

you could say, well, maybe cook your tent

is just increasing their energy,

but to me that they lost a little bit of energy

and they lost the energy that they need it.

Like they lost the top 10% of their energy.

And then they, that, that made them not be able

to control where the next 20% went.

And so it spilled over into their heart was racing

or it spilled over into they couldn't fall asleep at night.

But I've also, you know, there,

I've also seen other eight edge cases

where people get miracles from cook your tent

that you also are not going to find in the literature.

So I had those what kind of miracles?

I'll give you an example.

So in the program that I had,

I had a client named Jacqueline

and she lost her period at 28.

So she, you call that amenorrhea,

but she described it as I met a pause way too early.

She didn't have her period for 10 years.

So we did mitochondrial function testing on her

that showed that like you have a specific need

for a lot of co-cutan.

And what was crazy was she had gone to functional medicine

practitioners at homeopathy, all kinds of,

you know, just just went to, whatever she could find.

And nothing ever changed that.

What's crazy is that like functional medicine practitioners

often give bagfuls of supplements to their to their patients.

And you know, so she had gotten like normal doses

of co-cutan that passed like one, two hundred milligrams.

But based on the testing that we did,

we said like you should probably experiment

with 7,800 milligrams.

- Whoa.

- So which, you know, by the way,

is above where the average person's glucose

and insulin gets worse.

But two weeks into taking the co-cutan,

she got her period back.

- Wow.

- After 10 years.

- That's crazy.

- After 10 years, yeah, that's not.

- That's crazy.

- So I think the, I think co-cutan is a,

it's methylene blue on a little bit more hardcore,

like you really got to do the testing,

whereas co-cutan, I'm kind of like,

you know, you should play around with it.

Like you very well may benefit

from one to two hundred milligrams a day.

But my food first, pharma last approach says,

you know, are you eating heart?

Did you eat heart today?

- Right, right, right.

Well, that completely makes sense.

And it also completely makes sense

that it would be more bio-available in food.

You'd absorb more of it.

- I think that's, you know, that could be part of it.

But then it's just--

- Come on in now.

- It's just also there's so much other stuff

in the food, you know?

- Right.

- People get obsessed with

whether they should be taking this thing or that thing,

but that thing, if you got it from that food,

give you 36 other things.

- Right, right.

- And it's just--

- And they work together.

- Yeah, and yeah, and they work together

and they can also become imbalanced.

So I think a lot of mitochondrial energy metabolism

is the bottlenecks that people can have

is kind of like jammed up traffic.

And a lot of times you can mega-dose something.

And the main problem of mega-dosing that for anyone

would be it would be imbalanced with something else.

But if you got a blockage in that something else,

now you've just got like a train wreck

happening in your mitochondria

'cause you're activating one pathway

that has to flow through the next one

where you had your blockage and it's, you know, like that.

So you can go online, for example,

and find communities where people are raving

about high-dose thiamine.

And the RDA, the government recommended amount of thiamine

to get is around like 1.3 milligrams.

There's people out there who are like,

well, everyone should be taking 2,000 milligrams per day.

But I, you know, 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.

And so she was self-rating her energy at zero.

And a practitioner said, well, you should really try

this high-dose thiamine.

So she went on 1,100 milligrams a day.

So not 2,000 but big, right?

And a lot of people get miracles out of this

and they are vocal. They make communities on Facebook.

And so people get the idea that everyone who tries it

has benefit from it.

But she, her energy did improve a little bit,

but she developed a new, completely new motor dysfunction

problem, unsteady gate.

It just kept getting worse the whole time

she was taking the thiamine.

She had an existing problem with dizziness

that got a lot worse.

And a major issue for her was that she had to clear out

the thiamine, but the mitochondrial testing that we did

on her basically showed that like it explained it

because it's because she had a block in the pathways

that would be most sensitive to mega-dosing that supplement.

And so, you know, whining that back

and re-nursing those other pathways helped her.

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.

A lot of people test their glucose.

Not a lot of people test their lactate,

but I'm 100% confident that that woman had she,

had the practitioner said, try the thiamine

and see what it does to your lactate.

And if it goes down, it's good.

And if it goes up, it's bad.

I think she would have stopped it after the first few days

and the new onset motor dysfunction never would have happened.

And so, maybe she would 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.

Let's see, am I getting a stress signal out of it?

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?

And, you know, most people who do lactate testing

do it in an exercise.

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.

You know, halfway through a pro basketball game,

lactate is through the roof, right?

Well, you know, if I took, if I take thiamine

in the next day, it looks like I'm halfway

through the basketball game when I wake up.

That's the side that something is out of whack in my body, right?

So, but, you know, to go back to like,

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.

She would have gradually gone into it much more gradually.

But also, whatever those blockages were,

would have the other nutrients assisting them.

So, the thiamine wouldn't be so out of balance.

So, it's not just that you absorb it better or whatever.

It's also just the food, going food first,

really helps correct for errors

that are a problem with your expertise.

Warren Buffett once said that a diversified portfolio

is great protection against ignorance.

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.

And so, that's what food, food is a diversified portfolio.

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, that's like, you know,

buying an ETF and you don't even know what an ETF is.

You know, like it's like,

give that to your financial advisor, right?

And so, yeah, I think that food first,

pharma last is the food first part of that

is really just a protection against.

But I do have the expertise and I still do food first

because I know that my expertise in my own body is incomplete.

And so, you know, I might know a thousand times more

than the average person about what thiamin does in the body,

but thiamin's doing things in my body

and I don't know what they are.

So, I'm not gonna assume I know everything

just because I have like, you know,

top lunach expertise in the field, you know?

- Right.

When you're talking about methylene blue and co-Q10

and the benefits on mitochondria is,

what's the mechanism and are they similar?

Is it, are they interchangeable?

- They are not similar and they're not interchangeable.

So, co-Q10 is, 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,

co-Q10 is about two-thirds through that pathway.

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.

So, co-Q10 is just part of the transport pathway

as the electrons come through that are taken out of food

to ultimately convert ATP.

Methylene blue is, you know, if co-Q10 is like the main ferry,

Methylene blue is this guy running around waving his hands

in the air, oh, you know what?

Methylene blue is like, it's like those fake taxis

at the airport where you're trying to go to the taxi line

and they come right up to you.

They're like, excuse me sir, do you need a taxi?

But it's like the shady taxi.

So, Methylene blue is like an army of the shady taxis.

And they're like, oh, don't take the ferry, come over here, right?

And so, if the ferry is blocked,

Methylene blue would be great because, you know, if there's no taxis left,

you'll take the shady way because you got to get somewhere.

So, Methylene blue is, it's operating on the outer edges

of the main pathway and it's giving you alternatives.

But the mitochondrial pathway that you were born with

is the one that is best, it's the most efficient one.

So, like I was saying before, Methylene blue is great

if you have a blockage there and you need a detour.

It makes you worse off if you don't.

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.

Well, what happens if there's 10 ferries or there's 50 ferries?

Are there 150 ferries at some point?

They're going to be running into each other

and you're just going to clog up that.

Yeah, at some point putting more vehicles into any pathway

just makes things worse with the traffic that results.

And if you have too much traffic, you get accidents.

And you know, train wrecks and car crashes

and your mitochondria aren't good for you.

Would CoQ10 have a similar benefit

in terms of like red light therapy,

increasing mitochondrial function?

I think they could be synergistic.

CoQ10, by the way, it also helps you make more mitochondria

and that's called mitochondrial biogenesis.

Exercise also helps you make more mitochondria

and I do think that you,

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.

So that's, you know, that's mitochondrial biogenesis number one.

But CoQ10 will help with that.

You don't always want mitochondrial biogenesis.

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.

But the average person who's CoQ10 levels are just a little lower

when 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.

- One of the things you brought up earlier was seed oils

impeding the absorption of certain nutrients.

It's, seed oils are a weird thing because, you know,

so many people pushed against them and said,

hey, these are essentially industrial lubricants

that have been converted to food oil for profit.

And it's not really the best stuff

that we should be consuming.

And then you have a bunch of online contrarians that say,

oh, there's nothing wrong with seed oils.

This is all nonsense.

There's no data.

There's no studies.

And I don't understand that thought process.

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.

Like to me, it just seems so obvious

that one of them you should probably avoid.

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,

what do you think is going on?

First of all, why are people defending seed oils?

And what is the real problem with seed oils in a human diet?

- Seed oils make your tissues more vulnerable to damage.

And they don't damage your tissues.

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 the enough time

for the damage to play out.

And you need people who are more vulnerable to the damage.

And we've been talking a lot today

about how aging is increasing that tissue damage.

Like everything is your repair capacity goes down

as you grow older because your mitochondrial energy

production is going down.

And one of the things you want to look at is

what do seed oils do to you by the time you're 75?

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.

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.

And there are a lot of the people

who are talking the loudest and defensive seed oils

are looking at trials that last seven weeks long

or 12 weeks long.

And they're ignoring trials that were done

in the 50s, 60s and 70s that were five to eight years long.

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.

And the most important of the longer trials

was the LA Veteran's Administration Hospital study.

And this was the primary paper on it was published in 1969.

So it takes us back in history.

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 control trials of nutrition.

We don't have that anymore.

And I think it's because scientists love to,

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.

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.

And so if you're gonna sit,

and then there's other incentives too

'cause you have to get grants with preliminary data.

So you have shorter studies that you then say,

well, I'm gonna do a longer study now

and it keeps the grant cycle going.

And then the people who write the grants

wanna see things getting published out of those papers.

So for you to be like,

I'm gonna do a 12 year randomized control trial

of seed oils is, it's gonna be hard to get the people,

get all this box checked.

You might not be publishing a paper for a while.

So with the LA Veterans Administration

hospital studies showed,

was that they randomized people to seed oils

or traditional fats.

And the, in the first two years,

you had a little bit of a heart disease benefit,

but then it wore off over time.

And so the heart disease mortality basically

by the end of the trial was just kind of flat.

But the cancer was the same for the first two years,

but then at the two to five year market started diverging

and you see, oh, it looks like there's something there.

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.

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.

And this study was the longest.

And it was also the one where the only trial

ever done with seed oils where the people,

the mean age was 65.

So the people were older than in every other trial.

And one of the important things about being old

is that that's what makes you able to get cancer.

There are some childhood cancers, but in general,

people start getting cancer when they live long enough

to not die of heart disease first.

So doing the trial and older people for longer

is what allowed you to see that the seed oils

seemed to be able to cause cancer.

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

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.

So scientists think that they're just like

looking at the older children, they say,

"Oh, what was the gap in the knowledge

that we needed to solve next?"

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

and what did we get seven to 12 week trials?

It's kind of like that who was it Peter Teal

or someone had a tweet that was like we,

they promised us flying cars

and all we got was 180 characters

or something like that, whatever that quote is.

They promised us well in excess of eight year trials

was the next thing we needed to study.

And like 50, 60 years go by

and all we've got is these seven week trials

and 12 week trials.

Now we also know why seed oils would take a while

to have such negative effects

'cause it actually takes you four years

just for your tissues to start looking

like the seed oil you're eating.

Like if you switch from butter and olive oil today

and you go on corn oil,

it's gonna take four years for your tissues

to fully look like the corn oil.

And then once that happens, you've got secondary effects,

so you start getting your vitamin E levels depleted much faster.

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.

All that stuff is like you're not even starting to see it

until five, six years go by.

And so I think that's the big reason

that there's so much controversy is that for whatever reason,

there's 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.

And is there a motivation behind that

or is it just laziness?

I'm not sure.

- I think it's attention.

- I think part of it is attention.

- Yeah, it's a big part of it.

Part of it is justifying the contrarian position

with these short-term trials

because then you could dunk on people and get attention.

- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

- Everyone has to get attention somehow if they want

to make it in this world.

- Well, that's the side effect of this influence or culture.

And it's one of the things I really appreciate about your work.

You are very evidence-based.

And you've been paying attention to your stuff for a long time.

It's you're never hyperbolic.

It's always very rational.

It's very balanced.

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.

And they're doing that kind of behavior

for attention along with science.

They're adding the science into it.

But it seems like the science is just a vehicle

for them to get attention.

- Yeah, well, I mean, that's unfortunate

because there is health hanging in that.

- You know, no, it is unfortunate.

But it's also common, you know, it's really common.

You know, you see it in all sorts of different disciplines.

You know, you see it in our archeology.

You see it in everything.

There's people that want to dunk on their opposition

and that's part of how they're getting attention.

It's by insulting people and you see it,

but when you see it in nutrition, it's just,

it's really weird, you know, because it's not necessary.

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

and that's how they're getting attention.

And other people are seeing them

and going, I need to dunk on that guy

in order to elevate my social profile.

And the seed oil thing is a weird thing to defend.

It's just on the way that it's manufactured.

If you just watch the process and go,

do you want to eat that?

Do you want that or do you want butter?

Butter seems way better.

It seems way more normal.

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.

You know how many people think canola oil is corn oil?

'Cause corn is canola.

You know, you think of corn oil, must be good for it.

It's vegetable oil.

- Well, it is funny that they named it after a con.

- It's fucking weird.

- A con?

- Yeah, there's an article not by me,

but by someone else called the great conola.

And it's about how canola oil is a con.

But it's, yeah, they named, but anyway.

- That's a good way to put it because canola oil is a con

because many people, I've seen canola oil

where they have a fucking image of a corn,

of an ear of corn.

Have you ever seen that on the label?

I don't, I don't like that kind of oil.

- It's been a while since I bought a bowl.

- If there's something you can find that shows that.

'Cause 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.

It's rapeseed and it's an industrial lubricant.

And that's what they used to use it for.

And it's a byproduct.

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.

- Yeah, you can buy cold pressed seed oils.

They, you know, it's not what most people are eating food with.

But I still think that the fundamental problem with,

it's not just the processing.

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.

So, you know, all of this can be pressed into oil.

- Right, and that is a type of seed oil, right?

If you think of it.

- Well, all of this is a fruit oil.

- Or fruit, but avocado is that a fruit as well?

Avocado oil?

- Yeah, avocado oil is pressed out of the avocado.

- Right, and there's octopuses.

- The flesh is super high in fat.

- So, it's just the pit inside of it is the seed.

- Yeah, I don't think they make oil out of that.

- So, it's a fruit oil.

So, whether it's olive oil, the high heat ones are avocado oil

that's one that people like to cook with, right?

- Yeah, well, okay, so are there any issues with that?

- So, cooking with an oil, one issue is the smoke point

because the oil is burning at its smoke point.

And that probably is more of an indication of flavor

than it is of health, but it is generally going to correlate.

Like if the oil is burning, you're more likely

to have damaged the oils.

And consuming damaged oils is bad for you.

But there's the smoke point, there's the fatty acid composition

and there's the solvents and other chemicals left over

from the processing.

And I think all of those are an issue.

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 poofas.

And those polyunsaturated fatty acids are just,

like it happens to be most oils that are currently

in the market for food consumption.

That are very high in polyunsaturated fatty acids

are what we call seed oils.

So that's why we call it that way.

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,

then you don't see those, like they're,

you don't see people 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 the corn kernel.

It's not, that's squeezable.

And so when you have these very small hard things,

that's why you wind up getting,

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.

The solvent is a whole nother thing.

Well, I was in a lab once where someone had us

analyze residual hexane in foods

and they just bought a bunch of grocery store foods.

And I was, I was kind of managing the data analysis

while someone I worked with was doing the hexane measurements.

But let me just say that if it's extracted with hexane,

it's got hexane left over.

And we saw something that was not hexane.

We didn't know what it was,

but it was some chemical solvent

that was massive in the pump spray oils.

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, that's fine.

But like Pam and those other ones, they,

they're using chemicals to make the spraying work.

And it's, there's something that's some chemical solvent

that's just like way like massive proportions in it.

So after I saw that, I just stopped using that.

I'll go near it.

- Yeah, I don't go near those anyway.

But what about grape seed?

I know grape seed is one that people like to cook with

'cause it has a high smoke point.

- Yeah, I would put grape seed oil in the category

of a seed oil that I wouldn't consume in high quantities.

- And is hexane an issue with that as well?

- Not, I mean, not if it's cold pressed.

I mean, you can get like organic cold pressed

grape seed oil that is not solvent extracted.

It's not RBD.

It's, you know, not heated.

- But you still have to deal with the plant-

- I think it's saturated fatty acids.

- Yeah, I mean, it's very, 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 grape seed oil.

But I don't, I wouldn't want to make those fats

be the major oil in my diet

because I think you're just overload.

Like, it's high in antioxidants.

And so you're gonna get benefit.

There's gonna be beneficial things in it.

But I don't think that those fats are what you want

to be your main fatty acid consumption.

- What about if you were searing a steak

in grape seed oil, would that be an issue?

- I mean, the less of the oil that's there,

the less of an issue it is, you know,

if you're just coating the pan with it

and it's convenient 'cause it doesn't have high smoke point,

I wouldn't worry too much about it.

- And you still get it?

- But I wouldn't be one of the fats.

- I wouldn't want to be consuming like a table spoon

or upwards of grape seed oil a day.

- So I think we would agree that the issue

with saturated fatty acid, saturated fats

and just in the zeitgeist.

Saturated fats, we have demonized

since whatever that study was with the sugar company,

bribed those scientists, was it the '50s,

the '60s, where it was, where they spent--

- It started back then.

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 and the cover said,

hold the eggs and butter, cholesterol has been proved

deadly and our diets will never be the same.

- And we gotta pull that photo up, that's so crazy.

They really did that?

- Yeah, they actually, they reversed it a few years ago

where they took the same image,

but they made it a smiley face and they were like,

now we know eggs are good for you.

God, but meanwhile, how many lives did you ruin

with your shitty advice?

It's so stunning.

- Yeah, you can see the two right there.

- Yeah.

- You can see both side by side.

- Crazy.

- Yeah, so the one on the right is the upper left hand corner.

- Yeah, the upper left hand corner is the new one

and the one on the right is the 1984 one.

- Scientists labeled fat the enemy, they were wrong.

Yeah, you didn't print the whole thing.

They got fucking bribed and not a lot of money.

That's what's really crazy.

Ruined society, ruined diets for what, $50,000?

So for $50,000, people started eating margarine

and eating seed oil and not eating butter

and not consuming cholesterol,

which is building blocks for hormones.

It's such an important aspect of the human diet.

And when you tell people, I tell people I eat mostly meat.

- They go, what about your cholesterol?

I just take a, I don't know what to tell you.

Go, go read.

I just can't, you know, I can't sit there

and tell you that higher LDL cholesterol

is actually associated with longer lifespans.

It's like there's a lot to this whole cholesterol thing.

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 in the 80s, the time magazine thing,

that people just repeat, they don't look into it.

They just repeat it over and over again.

And they're really worried.

Like, I'm trying to eat less red meat.

Like, why?

Why are you trying to eat less meat?

Well, it's, you know, cholesterol, like, oh boy.

- Yeah, well, I do think that you don't,

you don't want to see your blood cholesterol

go in crazy high because that can be a sign

that you're not using it well, right?

Like, if your cholesterol is turning over

and it's being used to make bile acids

or your digestion, it's being used to make

adrenal hormones and sex hormones.

It's being used to make testosterone.

It's being used to make brain synapses

to support your memory.

Like, all those things that cholesterol does

are incredibly important.

But I think a lot of people, their cholesterol going up

can be a sign that they're not using it properly.

And so I think that's why you do see, you know,

it is true that if you take people at a certain age,

you can see inverse correlations

between cholesterol levels and mortality.

But if you take people are younger

and you look at who's gonna get heart attacks later,

you do see that higher cholesterol

when you're younger,

prospectively predicts a higher risk of heart disease later.

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.

- Makes sense.

- And that also, but it's interesting, though,

that if you look at the mechanisms of how does cholesterol

cause atherosclerosis, the cholesterol

is inside a lipoprotein which is like a spherical container

for the cholesterol.

It's got a bunch of fat-soluble vitamins

and other things in it.

But the outside is fatty acids,

specifically in the form called phospholipids.

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.

And when they get damaged,

the immune system recognizes it as a toxin

that could hurt the blood vessel.

And so the immune system gobbles it up and sequesters it.

And that sequestering is like a quarantine

and that's what the plaque develops from.

And so that's why 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.

So the Minnesota coronary survey was another,

I mentioned the LA Veterans Administration Hospital study.

That was, these were the two double blind, randomized,

controlled trials that were done of seed oils.

The Minnesota coronary survey was very big.

It was the only one that included women

and it wasn't as long,

but it was way larger.

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.

But they mentioned that they measured actual

atherosclerosis and they didn't report it.

So decades later, like I think it was about 10 years ago.

Researchers noticed this and they said,

well, the guys that did the study are dead,

but I wonder if the atherosclerosis results are around.

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

and they included all the atherosclerosis measurements.

And what they found was that the seed oil group

had double the atherosclerosis.

Not only that, but every 35 milligram per desolate

or drop in cholesterol was associated with something

like 30% more heart disease.

And so the original results didn't look very,

they didn't look good for seed oils.

They looked bad, but they didn't look that bad.

And they weren't statistically significant.

But it was because there was a lot of people

who were coming in and out of the trial

that kind of weakened the results.

But this, 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.

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.

But when you use seed oils which lower the cholesterol

and 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.

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.

- Right, yeah.

- Right, I'd read that.

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 kinds of carbohydrates,

or those kinds of proteins and fats

without complex carbohydrates,

without consumption of a lot of grains,

without that there's a difference

in the results that they were having

in terms of the impact of cholesterol.

- In general, you are going to have higher cholesterol

if you're reading less fiber.

- Right, and is it in and at all dependent

upon the activity level of the person?

Like you're talking about using the cholesterol.

- 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.

And you have a bunch of hormones that communicate that,

leptin, insulin, thyroid hormone are all involved,

but what is ultimately driving this

is your brain, especially 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.

And we tend in nutrition science to think

that this is about calories or it's about carbs

and it is about those things.

But if you are half as good at mitochondrial conversion

of food to ATP as the next guy over,

is your hypothalamus gonna give you full credit

for the food you ate in terms of calculating

your state of abundance, it's not.

It's gonna dock you by half.

And this is because the hypothalamus takes all these signals

and then it looks at inside the hypothalamus cells,

it looks at, okay, how well do I convert

that those food molecules into ATP using my mitochondria?

And if it's 50% dropped, it's gonna dock you

in your state of abundance and it's gonna say,

you know, actually you ate all the food

but you didn't get all the energy.

And so we're just gonna let things stagnate.

And the cholesterol is gonna go up in the blood,

your sex hormones are gonna go down.

And you know, you can get, you can look at that

and say, well, there's an age,

you're going through andropause,

there's an age dependent decline in testosterone

and adrenal hormones and stuff like that.

And then you can do hormone supplementation therapy,

but what you're not actually fixing in that,

but that can also be kind of a negative feedback loop.

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 need,

like I don't need to turn that into testosterone

if I'm supplementing with it.

So I think that we, what we're missing

in the whole discussion is thinking about

how do we ramp up mitochondrial energy production?

How do we prevent it from declining and aging

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?

I think there are, it's, 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.

Some people just produce more cholesterol

or they absorb more cholesterol.

And I don't think those are all equal

in terms of their heart disease risk

or their health implications,

but high cholesterol is in general a sign

of selfish metabolism under the average set of circumstances.

And a really interesting thread that got left

behind in 1976 is Brota Barnes wrote this book