Let's say someone's listening and they go.
This Brian guy doesn't seem like my bag.
Don't want to take an ass full of steroids.
I want to get myself to as healthy a level of testosterone, naturally using lifestyle, a diet and maybe non-clinical supplementation, as I can.
What's the prescription?
This is not medical advice.
Oh my God, dude, that's so general.
What would you do if you were to say, what are the principles that people should follow?
I would say getting to bed at the same time every night ideally, and waking up at the same time every morning, following your circadian rhythm, you know.
As it starts to get dark, you start to wind down, you get to bed at an adequate time, hopefully around, you know, depending on where you live, your schedule et cetera, but ideally no later than like 11 or 12.
Getting up as the sun's coming up.
It's not always going to be perfect like that, but I mean, just following your circadian rhythm in general very, very much aligns with the diurnal rhythm that your like pulsatile secretion of hormones would follow.
And when you start to manipulate that in like an artificial way and trying to i don't know putting yourself in situations that are not conducive to high quality sleep it's, you know, bright outside, you're trying to go to bed or whatever.
You don't have blackout blinds, like there are ways to try and hack it.
But at the end of the day, i think that Even when I track my sleep metrics, when I go to bed at 10 pm versus 2 am, I think it's a dramatic difference in terms of quality.
I feel like in general,
And I don't think anyone actually has a full, clear answer on that, by the way, because I've asked guys like Huberman and stuff about if I go to bed at
2 a.m., but I sleep eight hours and I have blackout blinds and I optimize everything.
Could I get the same health outcomes as if I was, you know, a dialed in like 9.30 p.m. sleeper?
What would be the difference between that and just going to another time zone?
Basically, the only thing you would maybe do is restrict the amount of daylight on the back end, because obviously, nighttime is going to arrive sooner if you've got up a little bit later.
So you're going to restrict the amount of daylight that you got.
But even if you could compensate with that by going right okay, i'm going to overexpose myself to sunlight during the day or to daylight then Yeah, that would be interesting.
Your body's pretty intuitive, and oftentimes I think it knows better than you do.
When people try and hack their body, sometimes they're fighting against something that is not leading to an optimal outcome and they could have otherwise just been following the common principles of go to bed at a good time after the sun goes down, get up at the same time every morning, sort of following, you know, the normal circadian rhythm that a human should follow.
I'm not saying you have to do it, but that's what I would generally recommend.
Okay, that's sleep.
Sleep is sorted.
What else is someone doing?
Optimal testosterone.
Naturally, a good proportion of like not depriving yourself entirely of fats in your diet, because some people will very much, especially in the fitness space will go protein carbs.
They very much want to try and hit their body weight and protein and then they'll have carbs, but then they will neglect fat content, which can be detrimental to testosterone and that's often overlooked.
Even people are eating adequate calories.
They are sometimes depriving themselves of basic things like one macronutrient entirely or micronutrient density.
Like one of the things I do is I plug my diet into this thing called chronometer.
It's kind of like my fitness pal, but it's more comprehensive in that it breaks down all of the micronutrients and minerals of your foods.
So it shows what vitamins and minerals you're deficient in of your diet model.
And then you can then backfill accordingly based on what you're deficient in.
Wow.
So that is typically what I would recommend, too, because if you don't have the cofactors and substrate to actually produce the hormones, even if you're eating what you consider to be a good diet, it might be deficient in adequate zinc or it might be deficient in adequate bioavailable B vitamins or whatever. like it would be worthwhile to kind of at least one time like flesh out if you follow a consistent diet what does that yield in terms of all of the vitamins and minerals and is that satisfactory for optimal hormone output and that's where you can then determine like actual targeted supplementation because oftentimes people are blindly taking shit like oh i think i need to think so i'll just take this compensating for malnutrition in one form or another with supplementation if you need to like obviously food whole foods is in general i would say going to be better but it depends because some people don't want to eat more some people have goals that are you know body fat related and they want to maybe even restrict calories and at that point you might be cutting something out that was hitting your micronutrient allotment for some specific thing, and that's where you would then supplement potentially.
So there is a like a tension between calories, calories in and the micronutrients, that you begin to cut calories to the point where you can't eat enough to be able to get the micronutrients in.
Depending on what your goals are.
Because again, some people don't care about getting, you know, as lean as you, for example.
Come on.
Okay.
So we've got food, we've got sleep.
What else?
What else is in there as the big movers for testosterone production?
Um like, as far as environmental stressors and whatnot, it's hard for me to quantify like oh, the chlorine in your fucking shower is killing your test.
Like i don't know for sure, but i would probably hedge against.
Have you got a special filter?
Yeah, do you.
Yeah, what brand is it?
Do you know?
I don't know, but you can just search like chlorine filter, showerhead chlorine filter or something, or is this?
Um Yeah, probably.
Like you could probably vet out a good one within with a little bit of research.
Don't rely on me for that.
I don't even know if mine's the best one, but I remember when I was looking for it it seemed to be like I would very much do a lot of the same research as other people are thinking like okay YouTube, who do I trust in the industry that otherwise has made videos on this content and has otherwise already dissected the literature?
Okay, does that guy know what he's talking about?
Okay, let me cross-reference it against a couple other people that I trust and are educated.
Boom.
And then you kind of create a conclusive educated guess as to what is the best.
Do they have monetary upside from promoting this thing?
Are they sponsored?
Blah, blah, blah.
Go look at the Amazon reviews.
Does it look favorable?
Obviously, stuff can be manipulated.
You can't ever fully trust anything, I guess.
But I mean, you just do your due diligence and try and do what you can.
What other environmental factors apart from chlorine in your shower water?
Yeah, that was a hyper-specific example.
Off the top of my head, I don't know how impactful the receipts thing is.
Stop touching receipts, son.
That's what I'm telling you.
So that, I guess.
What else?
Oh, cooking in plastics, I think, is something that could be impactful.
Cooking in plastics?
Not cooking, like heating stuff up and storing stuff in plastics.
Drinking out of plastic bottles, not ideal.
Okay, we are killing ourselves.
I'm traveling.
I would normally have a glass bottle.
Yeah.
One thing that I found is a really nice solution for that.
A bunch of different companies make glass, Tupperware plastic lid, glass sides, which I'm going to guess is mostly okay because the food's not going to be touching the top.
Yeah, all my prep meals are in glass containers.
Really nice, super easy to clean, don't smell as much.
If you do end up leaving it for a few days, you don't feel like, oh God, it's infused into the container now and I've permanently got this sort of moldy residue that's going to be in there.
Steel shakers for using protein and whatnot.
Probably some sort of cooler as well would be steel.
I'd be interested to know I'm going to guess that Yeti and companies like that have done a good bit of research into um are the metals leaking in at all?
Is there any, any risk of that?
Uh, Ben Greenfield was on the show and he was telling me that.
Uh Zevia, Zevia is the sweet drink, right?
Um, he had the one of the product development managers at that place on and they, they used a special type of aluminum that uh, was leaking less aluminum aluminum, aluminum.
I'm british, son.
We actually have an extra.
I was double checking.
I know what you're talking about.
Come on now.
Come on, you're canadian.
Come on, do i say stuff weird?
Sometimes bits and pieces, like a boot apparently, do you?
Are you very polite?
I think Yeah.
Well, one of my good friends, Dr Stu McGill.
I landed off a plane and the first thing he said to me when I got to Canada was how are you?
Good.
He says, and how have my countrymen been to you?
Have they been polite?
And I was like, is this like a joke, or is this real?
And he's like, no, no, no.
And I was like, yeah, perfectly polite.
He's like, good, good, good.
And got on with his day.
Apparently you're genetically predisposed to being polite.
But yeah, the fucking metal, the metal that's in the drink, right?
The metal that's in, there's, Zevia can is, they've looked at formulating that in different ways.
So people are certainly coming around to it, but I was walking through Whole Foods with a bunch of friends that are big into the health and fitness anti-seed oil, anti-estrogens in everything, etc etc.
And I was like, what about that?
Can I have that?
And they're like, no, can't have that.
Can't have that.
Can't have that.
It's like, what about those candles over there?
And they said, no, full of estrogens.
Can't have that fucking incense over there.
That's got it in.
So if you actually want to adequately assess the impact of these things though, like again, how impactful are they at the end of the day?
Like even things like your lifestyle, your exercise regimen, all super impactful, above and beyond the sleep, the diet, the exposure to all these toxins, et cetera, doing blood work.
I think is absolutely warranted to have a baseline as early as possible where it's you know, your peak hormone output.
You know 21, 25 years old.
Have some sort of baseline profile that is comprehensive.
So then, if something goes awry, you can then go back and identify where there are deficiencies and balances, et cetera.
What went wrong and why?
So some of these exposures to whatever it is that's detrimental to testosterone or lackluster, fill in the blank.
If you change that, you could then get blood work done to assess is my gonadotropin output now sufficient compared to before, if it was suboptimal?
And you can see pretty clearly, like rather than being speculative about, does this help?
Maybe I should totally change this area of my life because it might be suboptimal.
Like there are some things that might be you don't want to do, that you think are going to be conducive to better hormones.
And maybe it has no impact whatsoever.
And at that point, you could go get a basic testosterone test.
Marichhealth.com.
You could go there.
That would be a worthwhile place to go.
I'll do your ad reads for you.
Thanks, bro.
I appreciate it.
What's happening, people?
If you enjoyed that, then press here for the full unedited episode.
And don't forget to subscribe.
Peace.
