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