Ben Greenfield's 5 Daily Supplements & the Spiritual Practice He Regrets Missing | Dr. Josh Axe

26:41Most of the time they haven't. And we can do blood work now where you do intracellular nutrients, like what's in the red blood cell or what's in the white blood cell. It's so much more accurate because sometimes people have stuff floating around in their blood, but it's not getting into the cell. And so, like, I'll share this for myself. When I had that spinal infection, afterwards for the next year or two, I was just so exhausted. I'm in just energy. And I was doing so many of the right things. And then I went and did this test to look at what my, you know, a more advanced panel. And it said my vitamin B2 was like zero.

27:12I mean, it was like, but literally everything else was completely normal. But it was almost zero. And I started taking just vitamin B2, riboflavin, and then it was like, boom. Blood panel would have shown adequate vitamin B levels. But when you look at intracellular levels, they were low. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is, but most blood tests, again, they're not even testing for B2 or a lot of the nutrients out there today. Right, right. Or just tissue levels in general. Like here's kind of like the reverse version of that. When you are looking at blood lipids, that doesn't necessarily reflect what's happening on the tissue level.

27:45Yeah. So if you're doing, let's say your standard like ApoB, LP little a, LDL, particle size, HDL, you could theoretically be lit up like a Christmas tree, maybe because you exercise a lot and you're what's called a lean mass hyper responder and your body is just churning out more triglycerides in general to be shuttled around as fuel and then extra LDL to fight inflammation. or you just happen to be someone with really good genetics and you could go and get something like a CT angiography and be fine. Oh, yeah, exactly. No plaque, no calcium, looks great. And then you could have a pretty pristine lipid panel from a blood standpoint and go in, because I've seen this happen before, especially surprisingly in athletes who are just like beating up their hearts a lot, especially endurance athletes.

28:38You can have like 6%, 7%, 8 % plaque accumulation in different areas of vasculature in heart tissue, but the lipids didn't really tell you that. So I think if you have family history of heart disease, or if you're just a male, generally in like the 40, 45-year-old age range anyways, or a woman who is perimenopause plus, it's a good idea to do a CT angiography. Yeah. Just to see if there's any issues because lipids don't tell you the whole picture. Yeah, I totally agree. I think we're going to see more. A lot of these tests, we're coming out with more and more types of testing. Like Gez, who I was telling you about, was showing me this new breast cancer screening that's going to be more accurate than thermography, anything else.

29:25We're going to keep seeing more and more of this stuff. It's going to be less expensive. So I am really excited about it. You know the other thing I'm excited about? I tend to wear a, I like Oura ring. I'm wondering if they can get to the point where, or like a CGM like monitor, where you are looking at cortisol, not just insulin, like looking at some of the other. And that actually doesn't even look at blood glucose exactly. It's something that's related to glucose, but it's, yeah. Yeah, there's some companies working on more metrics that are tested. Like there's a newer ring called Signal. I think Dr.

30:02Matt Cook told me about this one recently. And so that one's doing like blood pressure now, which is a new metric. But as far as, like just to name a few, it would be really cool to see things like cortisol variation during the day. It would actually be pretty insightful to see what lactate is doing because there's some correlation between that and metabolic dysfunction. You can put glucose into that. And then if you're able to do cortisol, theoretically, you could probably do testosterone and a couple other hormones as well. The problem is that using like a photonic measurement or using a light-based measurement, which a lot of these tools are doing, is still inadequate for accurate detection of things like hormones.

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31:25If you're finally ready to heal, go to mybloodwork.com. You'll get an at-home cellular blood work panel shipped straight to your home and reviewed on a private call with one of my senior health advisors at the Health Institute. And this will help you finally connect the dots between your symptoms at the cellular level. will also determine if you're a good candidate for one of our cellular healing protocols so you can finally experience lasting healing. Once again, go to mybloodwork.com to check it out. I want to totally shift gears. I want to talk about spiritual health impacting physical health.

32:02And this is something I've really respected about you. I've loved following your kind of journey in this and in terms of what you've been teaching and doing. But I know when I first met you, this wasn't necessarily as much of a topic conversation, but I want to say it was probably like seven, eight years ago where I saw you start talking a lot more about your faith and how prayer and meditation on the Bible really have impacted you in a really deepened way. Had you always been like that? Was there something that kind of happened, an experience or something that happened that kind of caused you to have even a greater shift in looking towards your faith and incorporating that, even in your health practices?

32:39Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went through the same process that I think a lot of people go through. Not that you have to take this journey. It's just something that happens to a lot of humans, and that is that you climb the wrong mountain. Yeah. You climb the wrong mountain, meaning that you spend a great deal of your life's energy, often in your teenage years, your 20s, sometimes your 30s, pursuing financial wealth, providing for the family, building a business. A lot of times, and I think part of this is related to the absence of a formative ceremonial rite of passage, especially in the upbringing of a young man.

33:23You also tend to spend a lot of time conquering things, like doing lots of bodybuilding or triathlons or Spartan races, or even from a secular standpoint, uh you know just amping up your your body count and your sexual prowess uh to prove to the world that you're a man because no one actually ever like put that man stamp on you because that's just it's not baked into western culture it's baked into our family now but not in the western culture and i i took that path right like i i was working a lot on my business i was flying all over the world i was obsessed with like you know people knowing my name and building up my my podcast best numbers and justifying to myself that the family was good because I was sending home the paycheck.

34:08And there would come a time when I would, once I'd really built that foundation of business, have more time to hang out with my family or to grow the relationship between me and my wife. And of course, 20-20 hindsight, and most everybody knows this deep down inside, it's paradoxical to be working towards supporting the very people in your life who you hold most dear while simultaneously neglecting them emotionally or spiritually, or even just from the standpoint of a man failing to be a good leader for the home, failing to set the right temperature in the home because you're just not around. In the case of me, I was just like the fun older brother type of figure that hung out with my boys, but that really wasn't a true father figure because I was just too too obsessed and too busy with other things.

34:59And then when it came to my relationship with my wife, that was very similar, right? Just like growing distant from her because I was pursuing too many other things that, uh, that I thought would fulfill that, you know, climbing the mountain that I thought would be a good mountain to climb. And then anytime that you are pursuing things like money or power or fame or sex or cars or homes, those are all basically, for most people, idols that tend to eventually get put ahead of God, ahead of your relationship with God. And so you grow distant from God and you grow distant from people. And there is this idea that has been championed by ancient philosophers like Pensies or Augustine or authors like C.S.

35:49Lewis, that we have this eternal hole in our soul, right? This longing for something infinite, this longing for something eternal that I think is hardwired into us because we were created by an infinite creator, made in God's image, given God's stamp. And because of that, we have this deep desire to be connected to something eternal. And when you rip that away or take that out of your life, then that gnawing is never full. Because really, if you think of having like an infinite hole in your soul or this eternal longing, what are the two things that in our daily existence are actually eternal, immortal elements that we interact with on a daily basis or have the opportunity to interact with on a daily basis?

36:36I would say it would be God and people. yeah god and people and you mentioned the bible if you read the bible jesus says that the two greatest commandments if you want to sum up all the law and the prophets it's to love god and to love other people and jesus knew that everything else in the end would be unfulfilling if those two aspects were not the foundation of your life i took until i was like 33 years old to come full circle to that realization that if i was not fully present for my family and prioritizing them And if I was not building my relationship with God through prayer, through scripture, through church attendance, through caring for the soul just as much at the time as I was caring for my body and my business, that I would never be fulfilled.

37:25You know, now I'm happier than ever, but it took kind of like, it took a lot of dedication at home to be the father that I knew I should be, be the husband that I should be. And then also took a lot of just reconnecting to God through prayer, through scripture. You know, I think, I mean, I think every male could resonate with that. I mean, I think that there's this element of, it's a, I was on a men's, I have this amazing men's group. I meet with monthly and we do a trip together once or twice a year. And we were in Park City and we were all having this discussion around a John Elder book. And John Elder kind of puts it like this.

38:04You have these sort of different phases of being a man. But once you go to one phase, you don't necessarily leave the other phase behind, but there's more of a focus on it. And he talks about going from a warrior phase to lover phase to king to more of the sage, mentor sort of phase. And - I think there's probably a jester in there somewhere. It's probably earlier on. It's like college. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And so it's, but it was really good and all of us shared, hey, here's where we're at or here's what we're struggling with, with that type of, with being the king or the mentor or, you know, or the, or I'm still trying to be the warrior.

38:42You know, I'm still trying to, you know, prove myself even now. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And, um, but I want to go back because this is such a big thing. You said something earlier and I want to hear about how, how you now are doing this with your boys, because I think a lot of men, I know in the, you know, when, when you're reading the Bible in the old Testament in Jewish world, when a boy turns 13, there's this sort of, you're a man now. Right. And there's a bar mitzvah, there's a ceremony around it. And a lot, there's a lot of other cultures throughout history. And it tends to be the age 13.

39:1614. It tends to be right around there. I am really grateful though. I definitely had a dad who was an old military guy who like challenged me to do things. And my dad kind of just naturally did that in ways, but I can think of most men, they never had anything like that. You know, a rite of passage, some, some, some kind of a defined crucible that, that, that is a recognized time that you have become a man. You're given more responsibility, recognized as a more contributory member of the household or the community or the city or the church or whatever body that you happen to be in. And women have that forced upon them by nature.

39:59Women have a distinct biological experience at some point, usually during their teenage years, where they get onset of menses and suddenly they can produce other members of the human race. Men don't really go through that time. We don't just wake up one morning and not to be crass, but our balls have dropped and our voices have lowered and we're just like, oh, I'm a man today. Women, it's kind of just like happens. And I still think that in many cases, we don't go about recognizing that for women in the right way. I think mom and grandma and a girl at home should actually have some kind of like a ceremony or a celebration or like, hey, this is important and this goes beyond just something annoying that you have to deal with now and stay home from school a couple of days because you're cramping or having a hard time or whatever.

40:54with men, nature doesn't force a rite of passage upon men in most cases, unless there is an intense period of survival or famine where, you know, that boy has to go off and like kill an animal to feed the family, right? That doesn't happen most of the time in, you know, whatever, downtown LA to the random high schooler. So in our family, we have programmed specific rites of passages that occur for a greenfield young man. Specifically, what we chose to do, and this wasn't just like, I didn't randomly come up with this. I talked with a lot of legacy builders, a lot of entrepreneurs who had done similar activities with their sons.

41:36My sons went to a wilderness school and camp every year with a company called Twin Eagles, where the guy who runs that company, Tim Corcoran, is also very big on rites of passage, especially for young men. So I learned a lot and soaked up a lot along the way. So by the time my sons were 12, we and my wife had pretty much figured out what we were comfortable with and what would be formative for them. So what we do is at 12 to 13 years old in that timeframe is a rite of passage into adolescence. And for them, the rite of passage into adolescence was a three-day wilderness excursion solo, still supervised by, in this case, the wilderness organization that we were working with, but a time for them to go off, face their fears, start a fire, not have access to food, and face the wilderness and come back and be recognized afterwards.

42:34We had a party with the family members and grandma and grandpa and the cousins and nieces and nephews and had a special fire ceremony. And so that was step one. Hey, you have become a teenager now, and that's important. And along with that, like they get more household chores. They're doing a lot more with that. They started to like shadow me at work in my office. And it's basically baked into or programmed into the calendar of that young individual's timeline. At 16 years old, they, and they knew this for two years leading up to 16 years old, their responsibility was to leave the house for three months and not come back.

43:15No money from mom and dad. You can choose your adventure. They originally were going to do like some kind of an international trip to Europe. And then they realized that the price of a plane ticket was going to drain most of their food budget for three months. So they got a used car. I worked out a lone relationship with them. They have twin boys. Yeah, they're 18 now. And they're not in prison yet or dead should anybody wonder if this stuff actually works. and they left the house for three months in their car with a tent, like a roof tent on the vehicle, a little Honda Pilot, and they drove from Idaho down to Arizona and back, stopping at national parks, grabbing chicken and beans at Walmart and sleeping out of their car.

44:00And they came back with a much deeper understanding of how it works when mom and dad aren't there to pay for stuff. You've got to have your own budget and how to make campfire spaghetti for 10 nights in a row. And they walked in the house in September of that year with a much deeper sense of responsibility, having left that summer, knowing, hey, we can't go back. So we just got to go out and find an adventure. Well, how was that on your wife? Because you have, I mean, she has these two twin boys that she's cared for, and then they go off for that long. She did have the find my iPhone tracking feature.

44:34And she would look at that thing freaking like every morning, every night. She called him a couple of times. So she did get on a plane and flew to Arizona and surprised them in Arizona when they were down there. They stopped at a friend's house to visit, and she hid in the closet and jumped out. I was pretty jealous. I think that was actually when, that would have been right about when you and I were in London last year. And then 18 years old, or the 17 to 18-year-old time frame is the final vision quest, the right of passage into adulthood, at which point when they come back from that, they're expected to contribute even more to the household as far as like if they want to live at home.

45:16Basically, they have a certain number of chores and contribution that they need to make. They're expected to pitch in a lot more from that standpoint. We start to have deep discussions afterwards about marriage, about working towards getting the first home about what it looks like as far as, because we have a whole, this is an entirely different discussion, a whole Greenfield Family Trust and Greenfield Family Constitution. They can technically borrow against the money in the trust for something like starting a business or taking a loan out for their first home. So those discussions start to happen after that final rite of passage into adulthood, which for them was a 10-day vision quest.

45:54So kind of similar to the 12 a 13-year-old rite of passage but this was longer more intense um and uh and that that was kind of like the final icing on the cake as far as hey here's your stamp of manhood um and uh even though again like they're 18 years old they're not proven models of success but the objective here back to the reason you would do this in the first place is that they spend a lot less time trying to prove to the world that they're a man through conquests of you know money, business, power, fame, girls, whatever, and instead are set to start a family, settle down, start a business.

46:32One of the things that's so powerful about this is there is a plan in place to support them growing and overcoming these obstacles and facing these things, you know, because it's like, okay, if you don't do that, it's this saying that we've had before, like, if you don't tell your kids about sex, the world is going to. If you don't tell your kids about how the world is going to. I would much rather have a godly father and mother teach their kids about this than someone in the world that's going to try to take advantage of them. Absolutely, absolutely. You educate your children about the consequences of any decision that they might make and then let them make an educated decision or choice about what it is that they're going to do.

47:11And you're right. Like, I'd rather have, I call it lazy parenting, right? When you just say no to your kid, we don't do that. No, we don't talk about porn. No, we don't eat gluten. No, we don't discuss alcohol. That is for adults. I would much rather like a parent take the non-lazy approach and sit down and educate their child about the effects of porn on neurotransmitters and objectification of the opposite sex and the sex slavery industry and talk about alcohol and what it does to the liver and how it's metabolized and what amount is the appropriate amount and what amount is too much. And rinse, wash, and repeat for health choices, for nutrition choices, but it takes time.

47:49And I think a lot of parents, I don't want to throw parents under the bus, but I think a lot of parents just don't take the time to sit down and educate their kids and create a responsible, free-thinking individual. Yeah, well, I think there's a couple reasons, a couple challenges. One, they've never had it done for them. And so they almost don't even know. I mean, this isn't even on most people's radar. So I think that's one challenge. I think the other one is that we're so busy today and have so many things filling our calendar that actually most people think their priorities are one thing, but it's actually something different.

48:24Yeah. Right. And so I think there's a lot, it kind of reminds me of that parable of the seeds, right? The sower's sowing, and then there's weeds coming up around them, choking them off. Some, the soil, it doesn't get planted deep enough. So I kind of see that as being one of the reasons why, but I absolutely love that you do this. And I encourage everybody, this is something actually I was just talking to my mother-in-law and Chelsea about recently is we're talking about doing a, because we had some friends of ours do this, go through and create our family values in a family crest, like really go through and kind of plan out all of this stuff and thinking about this throughout the, you know, just for our girls, the future of their lives.

48:59Oh, yeah. Bird's eye overview is you sit down as a family and you and your spouse and your children, if you have them, discuss what your values are the same way as you do a business. It's love, honor, transparency, honesty, kind of like a word cloud of family values, preferably no more than 10. You can use those to form a mission statement, wordsmith that into a mission statement that you can hang on the family living room wall or whatever that defines what it is that we do. Elements of ours would be like, we are content no matter our circumstances, or we exist to help people find deeper meaning and purpose and fulfillment in life.

49:36And these are all just elements of what it means to be, in our case, a greenfield. And then you can visualize that mission statement graphically with a logo and or a crest, which is an actual, like, we have a crest. Like, it's a physical big piece of metal, like a shield that hangs in our study that shows all the different things that we hold dear and that we do together and that we stand for and even has elements of the family history, like the lasso around the logo that reflects my wife's Montana rancher background or the, you know, the big table with the chairs in the upper left corner that reflects our love for entertainment or entertaining and relationships and community building.

50:16And then in that same constitution, I mean, use your imagination wherever you want. You can do what we do for Christmas, what we do for Thanksgiving, what we do for Easter, what we do for New Year's, the traditions that are baked into that. Daily rituals, like we have a 7 a.m. morning family huddle and a 7 p.m. family dinner meeting. We have our end of life and memorial plan wishes in there. Each member of the family, like here's what I want my memorial service to look like. And, you know, the food I want served and the ambiance and the music that I want played, which is a super powerful exercise for a child or a young human being to go through all the way down to like, here are the numbers for the family insurance agent, the family banker, if you have one, or the family financial office.

51:01And here's a link to a Dropbox or a drive folder with the actual family trust in there if you want to take an even deeper dive into you know how we manage money and what happens when you're 18 and what happens when you're 21 um so the constitution is basically like a living document and we come back and revisit ours on an annual basis and then that feeds into the family trust to help define what wealth in the trust might be used for whether it be you know a business or you know or what it can't be used for like a trip to Vegas. Yeah. I love that. Man, I love that. I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you, continue on with the part of the spiritual conversation here in terms of what are the practices that you have that you felt like allowed you to become more Christ-like, you know, really grow in your faith?

51:49What are maybe the top three practices you've noticed have been helpful for that? Number one would be God's word. What that looks like for me and for us, as a family is i listen to the bible every morning yeah kind of like our mutual friend jordan rubin uh you know i know he does a lot of that as well yeah um that's the very first thing that goes on it's downloaded the night before i do the daily audio bible so the phone doesn't have to go on at all so no text messages no distractions but that's usually about a half hour reading and then i finish that with my own personal prayer time and that's literally just like five to ten minutes of laying things out before God, thanking God for the day, laying out any anxieties or concerns I have about the day, praying for the family.

52:40And then after that, I'm kind of like diving into some morning self-care rituals, foam rolling and stretching. Then at 7 a.m., I gather the entire family and I lead them through the scripture. We just read chronologically through the entire Bible. so we're back in second Thessalonians right now I use a study Bible I'm like a Bible collector I've got like the cultural studies Bible the word on fire the founding fathers Bible the ESV study Bible and so even though we did devotionals for a long time like the one that has really stuck for us that we just haven't moved from for three years is just reading the Bible in the morning and I teach the family out of the Bible and I'm learning a lot as well because I'm going through footnotes and references and here's what this mean and you know here's what this meant what would have meant in the cultural context of that time and then we pray together and once a week we switched up and just do a worship music dance party which is great like just raising our arms and dancing around the backyard the patio the living room to you know some some epic worship song and then um we all memorize scripture every night about 9 9 30 p.m we all gather in me and jessa's room uh our mom in dad's room and we memorize a section of scripture.

53:54Like right now we're memorizing Ephesians 15 and we have done that for five years. So we've memorized a lot of the Bible and that's important not only to train parts of the brain that in an era of GPT and Google and AI, we don't use our memory as much. So I'm a big fan of like, you know, language and music and memorizing quotes and memorizing scripture. So more importantly than that training a specific area of our brain, it's allowing us to place God's word on our hearts, which I think is important. It's something to call upon in a time of need or stress. Yeah. I mean, I noticed for me when I, I mean, if somebody asked me, hey, what is something that just radically changes your day more than anything?

54:34I mean, if I take the first, even if it's five minutes, but five, 20, 30 minutes of my day with God, my entire day goes differently than if I don't. You know, I noticed this in college because in college, when I rededicated my life to Christ, and so I woke up every morning, started praying and reading my Bible, just those two things together. And it was like, wow. And if I would just do that and kind of continue to have the Holy Spirit's presence with me throughout the day, it was like, man, I'm reacting differently to every single thing. I'm thinking differently. I'm walking with this greater sense of like, and you can feel this, right?

55:07There's a sense of even the brainwaves of like, I would call them probably theta waves, but there's this sense of like almost more of this meditative state you're carrying with you throughout the day. You've cast your cares upon something that's greater than you, that's outside of you. And for people who have not started their day with God or with spiritual care, the closest approximation would be how you feel during a day when you don't do something like a morning workout or a morning sauna, cold plunge, if that's your thing, versus how you feel when you've done that thing. You manage stress better.

55:40And I think the best of both worlds, back to the reasons of eternality that I was talking about earlier, is to do both. I work out. I pray. I read the Bible. I connect with family. I'm ticking all those boxes before I'm jumping into any amount of formal, deep work. So that's really how I manage things. And just like the rite of passage or the Constitution, it's all scheduled in. It's got to be part of the routine. It doesn't just randomly happen. And you should get to the point where it feels weird not to read the Bible or listen to the Bible in the morning. It feels like you're missing something, and it feels weird for the family just to have not gathered at the beginning of the day or weird for there to be no formal family dinner prayer or song time, just like it would feel weird to not work out or to not eat protein with lunch or any of those other things that are part of our health routine.

56:35Yeah. Yeah. And I encourage everybody, write it down and then just start doing it, right? Write it down and then start doing it. And then also, I mean, it's the greatest urge to, you know, run to whatever the emergency is. It's almost like, I mean, there is a - There's always an emergency. Exactly. There's a hormonal thing. It's like Elon Musk, right? He says he turns on his phone in the morning, just looks for an emergency. Yeah. It's so true. It's so true. You know, you're talking about your morning routine as well. I'm curious for you. You know, I take a lot of stuff, you know, and I know you do as well.

57:04One thing I think that my patients have appreciated is, is I kind of lay out what they should do. But in addition, a lot of times I say, listen, these are the most important in ranking order. You know, if you're only going to take one thing, take this. If you're only going to take two things, take this. This is hard for people like you and me. But if I gave you your top five supplements in ranking order, what are your top five in ranking order? I would let you do bonuses at the end, but I really want to let you know your top five. So we start with just like dihydrogen monoxide, like drink 32 ounces of water.

57:37I want to get into the hydrogen. H2O. I want to get into that next for sure. Yeah. So I do start every day with giant 32 ounces of water, and that water has minerals in it. So minerals would be one. I think all the more important, considering the fact that we live in an electrical soup that causes a little bit of excess calcium to bleed into the cell. And so you can offset that with magnesium, with minerals. there's other reasons to to start off the day with something like that but i would say minerals would be one i would say if we look at long-term history of good human clinical research for a variety of issues that uh two others like if we wanted to say two and three it would be some kind of omega-3 supplementation yeah uh fish oil or elga oil and creatine yeah um with for the former for the fish oil.

58:28I actually don't take fish oil on any days that I'm eating fish anyways. And there's like a solid like three or four days of the week when I have a big cut of salmon, you don't have to double up, but omega-3 supplementation and even paying attention to your omega quant, your omega-3 index is pretty important. Like trying to have that above 8 % if you're able to test it. So minerals, omegas, creatine, I'm biased on this one because I have a company that that sells it but i think a lot of people just don't get enough protein and you can fill in the gaps with essential amino acids um and i take like i've already had 30 grams of essential amino acids per day and getting somewhere in the range of like anywhere from 10 to 40 just to just for maintaining muscle protein synthesis when it's difficult to get quality protein i do a lot more of it when i travel particularly because i have more access to quality protein at home uh but i would put amino acids in that bucket.

59:21And then we discussed some different peptides. And even though it wouldn't technically be classified as a peptide, I'm increasingly for the effect on cognition, on inflammation, on battling sleep deprivation and overall cellular health, becoming a bigger and bigger fan of some form of NAD, whether it's NMN or NR or nicotinamide. I'm getting an NAD IV today, later on. And so you don't have to do the IV route. There are patches. You can take it orally. Yeah. But I would say minerals, fish oil, creatine, amino acids, and NAD would be pretty big ones. That's a solid list. Yeah. That's a solid list.

1:00:07Yeah. And I think for everybody, there's a...

1:00:15Again, you and I are both into personalized nutrition. I think different things are great for different people, but that's a great list. I do think minerals, of course, we could definitely highlight magnesium on studies and what people are deficient in. That's a big one there as well. It's a tricky question because it's so personalized. If you were coming to me and you just had a crappy gut, you'd be like digestive enzymes and probiotics and bitters. Or if you had immune issues, we'd be focusing more on, Maybe I'd be pulling out vitamin D and vitamin K and thymus and alpha-1. And so it's tricky, but just like sledgehammer approach, hey, knowing nothing about you, if you took some of these, you'd probably feel pretty good.

1:00:50Those are a few. Have you tested your testosterone? And also, what would you say your top things in ranking order you've noticed for supporting testosterone? Yeah, yeah. The biggies most people know about, basically, nature doesn't want a human being to bring babies into the world in a time of stress or famine, right? So excess carbohydrate restriction, excess calorie restriction, excess chronic aerobic cardio, and stress, whether it's lifestyle or business or circadian rhythm stress or relationship stress would be the things that would dent testosterone. the base compounds that are necessary for the latin cells to actually make testosterone would be minerals which we already mentioned magnesium amongst those zinc also fitting into that category omega-3 fatty acids vitamin d creatine and boron right so so addressing any of those micronutrient or nutrient deficiencies would be number two there is boron is the one that always surprises people that they're like boron i haven't even heard of boron yeah yeah decent research on boron and testosterone and it's not as sexy as tribulus or you know fedosia or any of these herbs that might work for some people uh definitely work for libido and some for blood flow testosterone is questionable it's like well do you have more testosterone because this herb made you want to have more sex and more sex created a positive feedback loop of more testosterone or is it actually increasing testosterone.

1:02:20And then more sex or more weight training, which will lead me to the next one. Lifting weights with your legs where there's a high concentration of androgen receptors. Even if you don't like leg press and deadlift and squat and lunges, leaving those in is pretty important. So don't be toothpick legs person at the gym. And then excess heat, a lot of people get confused about that potentially dinging testosterone when it's more of the sperm count thing. For my son's 18 birthday recently, I actually got them the ball cooling underwear for those reasons because I want to have grandkids someday and we do the sauna a lot.

1:03:01But anecdotally, there's a guy named Dr. Thomas Seeger who sold me my cold plunge and He's pretty bullish on this, the idea of regular cold exposure for the testes causing an increase in testosterone. And he has a lot of anecdotal evidence on that. It's difficult to find anything beyond just like old Russian power lifter lore that there's something to that. But I can tell you I feel pretty anabolic, high libido, good energy levels, crush a workout if I get cold and I specifically get my balls cold. Listen, I've talked to several men who have done cold blunder. And I've had some of them say it's doubled their testosterone.

1:03:38I mean, I've talked to many. Yeah. Yeah. And then going beyond the basics, all the things that I just mentioned, let's say actual testosterone replacement therapy aside, which should definitely be something to table until you're at least like 35, 40 years old. And for obvious reasons, beyond your childbearing years, there are certain things that can increase LH and FSH production and increase testosterone production. uh kiss peptin peptide would be one of those um and clomiphene uh hcg or gonadarillin all of those would be something that you normally work through a compounding pharmacist to get but they can assist with raising testosterone to pretty appreciable levels without you actually diving straight into actual testosterone replacement therapy which a lot of guys don't need to do like that that's that's getting dropped off at the top of mount everest yeah yeah i agree i mean for me for testosterone therapy for a minute, it's like, I want you to just put it off as long as you possibly can and would.

1:04:34You know, I ran into Mark Sisson at the gym and we talked about this a little bit too. And I think even when he was on the show, we talked about it in terms of like, hey, I think when you get in your seventies, you know, or just later in life, the lowest dose possible. But generally I'm always a, let's do it with food. Let's do it with exercise. Let's lower cortisol to your point. Let's do all those things. And then let's try things like peptides, you know, Let's do it absolutely last. And I'm seeing more and more guys jump on testosterone therapy in their 30s. I mean, it's happening. Oh, yeah, because it's easy.

1:05:06Yeah. It's like back to the spirituality thing. It's the same thing as just like vaping DMT to have a spiritual experience. Yeah, it's going to drop you straight off at the top of Mount Everest, but because you didn't have to do a whole lot of work to get there in many cases, Like, is it going to last? And is it going to be as deep and profound as a true spiritual experience, like daily on your knees with God? So with testosterone, what happens is you get on testosterone replacement therapy via a pellet or cream or gel or injection or now an oral or a nasal spray. And you feel incredible. And you often feel so incredible.

1:05:47You're like, gosh, like this is working. I don't need to like back squat. I don't need to make sure I'm eating adequate fats and getting sunshine and doing a cold plunge or taking vitamin D. This is just my Band-Aid for everything. So you see a lot of people on testosterone with inflammation, oxidation, poor lifestyle practice, poor sleep. So, yeah, the testosterone is elevated, but it's kind of like a subpar elevation when it comes to overall health. Well, if you think about it, too, if they go to a doctor and their doctor is like, hey, just get on testosterone. and they have an underlying non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

1:06:23They've got inflammation just blowing up their arteries all the time. It's like a lot of times it is a Band-Aid that's going to lead to death. I mean, there are side effects. Yeah, yeah. And you could make a case that, okay, once you get on it, you've got enough motivation to do all those other things. And that is true, but I think there's a greater number of people who just use it as a crutch. Yeah, I totally agree. We are going to do rapid fire here. Let's go. Okay. What is the best book you've read in the past year? Sahil Bloom's The Five Types of Wealth. I thought it fit into a similar category as like the almanac of Naval Ravikant or Charlie Munger with a little bit of like a Tim Ferriss, you know, four-hour work week thrown in there.

1:07:10You know, time wealth, social wealth. I've heard several people bring this book up. Yeah, I think it's a good book. and we have father-son book clubs. So every month me and my sons go through a new book and then we chat for five to 10 minutes before dinner about the chapter that we read that day. And that was one of the, I think one of the books that was a highlight last year. That's so great. What is, if you could only live off of one food, what would that food be? Are we supposed to think like a scientist here? Are we thinking from like purely Epicurean, hedonistic standpoint? Let me say this.

1:07:41Okay, so how about this? How about you got sent into a wilderness and you got to survive for a month? Yeah.

1:07:53So I would probably go with, assuming I had access to fire, I would probably go with salmon. Yeah, I would go with salmon too. What is something that maybe your wife is doing health-wise that she has said, wow, this is really helping her health?

1:08:21Natural hormone replacement therapy. She's on progesterone, DHEA, estradiol, and testosterone. And it's very well and properly managed. she would be considered like still like pre-menopausal. But just as far as like her libido levels, her energy levels, it's like it's a game changer for her. Like we recently went to Mexico and she just forgot everything and didn't have a great week down there, which is kind of like the catch-22 with hormones. Like when you're on them and then you don't have them, you don't feel so well. And then you have to accept the fact that if you're on them, you're probably going to be on them for life unless you're doing some pretty intense bodybuilding style cycling.

1:09:03but I would say hormone replacement therapy is something that's, that's pretty, pretty well ranked for her besides like her little, she has like a face laser thing she does every day. Yeah. Yeah. Beyond my understanding. My wife, she loves gua sha. So she does a lot of gua sha on her face. She's always got something on her face. Oh yeah. No, no. I mean, there's, there's no doubt. Like for me, I don't do any, like I'm not, I'm very not that conscious there. My wife, I mean, she spends more time. I'm sure most women do than men. So that's probably normal. One exercise. What exercise do you feel?

1:09:38And it could be just a standard exercise that everybody's familiar with or something not. But what is the type of exercise you're saying for your body that you feel like you've seen really good results with? Yeah. Kettlebell swings and push-ups. Yeah. Honestly, that's all I had was a kettlebell and body weight I could work out all year long. And those would be two of the top exercises. How do you stay healthy while traveling? What are a thing or a few things you always try and do? I carry as many elements of my morning routine at home as I can when I travel, meaning I get up, I listen to the Bible.

1:10:12I don't have red light therapy when I travel typically, but I'm usually out in the sunshine within 30 minutes of waking. I have my big glass of water. I have most of those supplements that I mentioned that I travel with. I typically like we started this podcast at 10 30 a.m. A lot of times have people who want to start a recording at eight or nine or 9 30. I typically don't start anything until mid-morning so that I can get my workout my movement my spiritual time in take care of emails. So typically like starting the day later when I travel. Yeah. And then I do use a higher dose melatonin but just when I travel typically for the first couple of days to realign the circadian rhythm.

1:10:54and um i outfit my hotel room or my airbnb with as many things as possible to make it more natural like i typically put a help of air filter in there um and either like buying one and giving it to the hotel afterwards or having a company like jasper ship one out uh always have a whole foods order waiting with like glass bottled water and macadamia nuts and some blueberries just like healthy food so I don't have to eat at the hotel restaurant or Starbucks or whatever. And then typically I have like grounding shoes like I'm wearing right now, just for when I'm walking, get in touch with the planet.

1:11:32And yeah, I would say grounding, earthing, light, fuel, movement, circadian rhythm timing, and then just like managing stress and not trying to rush too much, especially in the morning would be some of the biggies. What do you think is the most underrated biohack that's out there today i have been to a lot of medical clinics lately i've been like doing a lot of consulting with a lot of medical clinics just like want they want to chat with me about exercise or about like you know the layout of the facility or whatever and i'm still surprised at how many of them like don't have um p.m.f like i'm like i think for like chronic and acute injuries inflammation i use p.m.f every day at home i have one of those like nice ones like i have one by my bed while i'm like so good i've got one by my desk and i'll put on like a knee or an elbow from a workout that morning um i think pmf is pretty underrated um yeah i agree like eat like if you have like a health clinic and you have an iv lounge like why not just like make the chairs pmf chairs and have people like kill two birds with one stone yeah yeah i agree yeah i've been doing it on my uh i did the one of the dumbest things i've ever done Well, it wasn't intentional.

1:12:41I was swimming underwater. I'm trying to increase the amount of time I can swim underwater. And the pool was really weird to where it was kind of like it was curved, all the same color. My goggles were fogged up. I thought I had one more stroke. I went right into the wall. And I had stinging pain in both palms, my arms. My facets are still jammed. But I got back here and I started doing PEMF a couple times every day, red light a couple times every day, started doing BPC and peptides every day just to kind of get it to where it needs to be. And then I'll get some regenerative kind of therapy in there as well.

1:13:24There's TheraWave Duos, like the vibrating peanut-shaped roller that you can kind of roll up and down behind the neck. Yeah, it's another good one. Although ultimately, really the number one secret to being able to swim for long periods of time underwater. You know what it is? Oh, what? A snorkel. Wow, you know, that's one of the better jokes I've heard in a long time. I don't know if it's a joke, but it's just an observation. It's always worked for me. Wow. And you're funny. Wow. Hey, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is so fun. I know we're going to be together in London here at the Health sometime this year again.

1:13:58We'll have to do another Russian beating slash cold plunge slash sauna session. And I want to encourage people to check out more about Ben. Ben has an amazing website. He has a great social page, a great podcast. So if you want to learn more about Ben and follow his work, I want to encourage you to just search him on all platforms everywhere out there today. He's also got a couple of great books. One is Boundless, and that book is all about upgrading your body and defying aging. And he's also got some great spiritual books. If you just go on Amazon.com and search Ben Greenfield, there are many, many books, things he's written, great products.

1:14:34just a number of things that he has that are out there that I think you'd really enjoy as well. And hey, if you're watching on YouTube, we'd love to hear from you. Are you a fan of Ben? Are you doing any of the biohacking or practices we talked about? And also, what do you think about his family practices with the male rite of passage and what he's done with his boys here? I'd love to hear from you there as well. So hey guys, thanks so much for watching. Remember, the number one thing you can do here to support the show is subscribe and share. There are millions of people that don't know the truth about how to use food and lifestyle medicine to heal your body physically, mentally, spiritually.

1:15:12So thanks, Ben, for coming on today. Thank you for watching the show. We'll see you on the next episode.

1:15:22It's Mushrooms with me, Matty Matheson. You know what's better than thinking about dinner too hard? Not. Stop that and just choose mushrooms. Five minutes. Done. Dinner's that easy and you feel like a genius. It's not magic. It's mushrooms. Stop stressing at mushroomcouncil.com. A text says, you're on my mind. A bouquet from 1-800-Flowers says, you're my everything. Heartfelt moments belong in the real world, not just your phone. For 50 years, 1-800-Flowers has helped millions of people make memories that'll last a lifetime with gifts they'll cherish forever. Their expertly curated arrangements and gift baskets shipped nationwide with a 100 % satisfaction guarantee.

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