#819: Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. — Protocols for Fasting, Lowering Dementia Risk, Reversing Heart Aging, Using Sauna for Longevity (Hotter is Not Better), and a Few Supplements That Might Actually Matter

25:53I don't have any affiliation with them. They're a brand that, again, 12 different published studies using their supplement. A-V-M-A-C-O-L. That's right. Yeah. And she takes two of their advanced formula. She's taking that. She's taking the multivitamin, the vitamin D, and she's also taking the omega-3. She's doing great. What's funny is that I was able to then get her into CrossFit. And I don't know if it's because her tremors, I think her tremors have lessened a bit. And so she's been more active and wanting to be more active. Like she's out dancing more. My mom likes to dance. And I mentioned how I really wanted to get her into a senior's CrossFit class.

26:31And she sees me do it. I have a coach come to my house and we do CrossFit training at my house. My mom has seen me doing it and she's been interested in it. And I told her that there's a great seniors class and I would be willing to, you know, pay for it and get her in it. It would be huge. And she's been doing it now for a couple of months, maybe like three or four months. And she goes three times a week and she loves it. She loves it. She's made friends there. Sometimes the coaches take videos and she sends them to me. She sends them to her friends. She's so proud. You know, she's doing kettlebell swings.

27:06She's doing wall squats. I mean, it's amazing. Go mom. That's amazing. It's a very different type of atmosphere than your usual CrossFit class would be, right? You're aware that these are seniors. And so they're not doing, you know, barbell, like squatting, like heavy weights and stuff. There's, they start out with wall squats and then they're, you know, squatting with just like a really light bar. And it's, it's really great. Let me hop in for a second here. And I want to know if there's anything else to add to that, but we've talked about this. You and I are texted a hell of a lot about it, that I have Alzheimer's in my family.

27:39I now have multiple relatives who are moderate to advanced with respect to Alzheimer's. Saw my grandmother disintegrate. Terrifying to watch and terrifying to imagine yourself experiencing the same thing. And also, at least one of them is APOE33. And I'm APOE34. So I'm like, well, wait a second. If that is where they are right now, and I'm at hypothetically 2.5x greater risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, AD, I should really double down on paying attention to as much as possible for myself, certainly for them as well, but the earlier the intervention, the better the outcomes generally. So I've been looking at all sorts of things.

28:25And just to reiterate a few things you said, So on the omega-3 side of things, just like with sulforaphane, not all brands are created equal, right? There's a lot of garbage floating around out there. Would you say neither of us have any affiliation with this company, but I know our mutual friend Kevin Rose had this particular brand tested that I guess it's 1.0.n.e, pure encapsulations. Is that what you have your parents taking or did you use a different brand? So with my dad, he is now taking the Zymogen brand, which is also very good. And the reason for that is because it's higher DHA, which is what I wanted.

29:06My mom is taking the one. Both those brands, by the way, are great. They've both been third-party tested and have very high quality fish oil, and I don't have affiliation with either of them. Yep. So I've got my parents on those. I'm taking those. You mentioned lutein and zeaxanthin, which is good for quite a few things. Now, for those people who may be interested, and this probably won't help me with my particular presbyopia, so age-related visual decline, particularly with near work, reading a book, let's say. But AREDS2, people could check out studies that have been done on AREDS2, and two of the principal ingredients are lutein and ceaxanthin.

29:44So there's that. Now, also have been very, very curious about how to activate some of the pathways that you mentioned. Sulfurafen would be a good option for that. Also looking at, and we don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but exogenous ketones, right? Because ideally, sure, I would have my parents maybe do intermittent fasting or some extended fasts. I don't think that's going to happen for a million different reasons, but perhaps exogenous ketones and have looked at that. This is kind of a work in progress I've been doing, and I know you have too, lots of self-experimentation. But there are some case studies in the literature, one of which you sent to me, that are pretty interesting, looking at administration, in other words, giving an older patient with Alzheimer's disease oral exogenous ketones.

30:36They tend to taste like jet fuel. They're not tasty. But the effects of at least in these case studies are pretty remarkable. Now, granted, with the monoester they use in some of these, the off the shelf cost per day would be like$150 or something like that, maybe even more. So there's a sort of a cost question, but I'm just gonna throw a couple of more things out there that are on my mind. So you mentioned the exercise piece. This has been so important for me. So I've hired a trainer and I realized my parents are kind of sneaky and sometimes a little, I don't want to say passive aggressive, but they'll say they're going to do something to please me and then they won't do it.

31:15So getting the trainer to actually pick them up at their house is something that I decided to do because there are a lot of reasons exercise is amazing. One of which is the natural release of clotho and people can look this up. I'm hoping that you'll be able to inject this in the next handful of years. We'll see in humans, but K L O T H O also worth checking out.

31:44Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. I am always on the hunt for protein sources that don't require sacrifices in taste or nutrition. I don't want to eat sawdust. I also don't want a candy bar that's disguised as a protein bar. And that's why I love the protein bars from today's sponsor, David. They're my go-to protein source on the run. I throw them in my bag whenever I am in doubt that I might be able to get a good source of protein. David has 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. And on top of that, David tastes great. Their bars come in six delicious flavors.

32:19They're all we're trying. Adequate protein intake is critical for building and preserving muscle mass, especially as we age. And one of the biggest things that you want to pay attention to is counteracting sarcopenia, age-related muscle loss. And for that, you need enough protein. When in doubt, up your protein. And now you guys, listeners of the Tim Ferriss Show who buy four boxes, get a fifth box for free. You can check it out. You can also buy one box at a time. Try them for yourself at davidprotein.com slash Tim. Learn all about it. That's davidprotein.com slash Tim to get a free box with a four box purchase or simply learn more.

32:56Check it out. davidprotein.com slash Tim.

33:02anything else you would add to that or any commentary you want to sprinkle in am i missing any criticals multivitamin yeah there's commentary but we can get into that if you want to go dive into the why the ketone esters are beneficial and why the exercise is beneficial we can go into that because i'm i love talking about it yeah so this is going to be a conversation, right? Just between you and me. That's how I treat all these things. And I'm very self-interested because I think the personal is the most universal. Maybe that's just an excuse to make this all about what I want. But we have been texting also because I told you I've been thinking about doing a 14-day fast.

33:42And actually, I ratcheted that back from doing a 30-day fast. And I've done 10 days before water only. I've done lots of seven days. And part of the reason is I think I would be better equipped now to do longer fasts because of the intermittent fasting I've been doing. And this ties into the conversation around the parents because what I've noticed is, for instance, doing 16-8 fasting, which was, I'm so sorry, the scientist you mentioned before whose podcast interview I listened to on your podcast, what was his name again? Dr. Mark Mattson. Yeah, Mark Mattson. Amazing, amazing scientist, fantastic conversation, a lot of seminal work related to intermittent fasting.

34:28So 16-8, what does that actually mean? I did this today. I've done this most days now, which is basically eating between, for me, it's like 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. There are arguments that it should be shifted earlier, like noon to 8 p.m. or something like that. But socially, just practically, again, coming back to compliance, like the good system you do being better than the perfect system you don't, generally it's like two to let's say 9 PM is when I eat. And then I fast the rest of the time. And for the first like five to seven days, pretty grumpy, kind of pissy. I'm not going to lie, you know, sent some emails that I probably shouldn't have.

35:03But then once I adapted, I did a recent set of labs and they're my best set of labs that I've seen. I can't solely attribute it to the intermittent fasting, but the best set of labs I've had in ages on things that were very hard to move prior. Also did an oral glucose tolerance test and my sort of insulin sensitivity and glucose management, the best it's been in ages. So I was like, okay, that's really interesting. The last time I did a seven-day fast, it was kind of brutal. I hadn't done one in a few years and I don't think my metabolic machinery was ready for the task. Very unpleasant. But I have some chronic inflammation or at least chronic pain in my low back.

35:44And after doing that seven day fast, I had four weeks of zero symptoms. And that's the first time in three years that that's been the case. So I was like, okay, that's pretty interesting. And so I've ended up harassing you with all sorts of questions such as, well, what if I had a little bit of heavy cream in my coffee in the morning? So it's kind of dirty fasting. But if I did that, what am I accepting as a compromise or a penalty, if anything? Because then I think of, say, Longo's work and others looking at fast mimicking diets where I'm like, well, wait a second. These people are doing, let's just say five days of fast mimicking dieting per month for three months straight.

36:24And they seem to have all these benefits that may be of lower magnitude, but mirror water fasting on some level, but they're consuming a few hundred calories. Let's just say for simplicity per day of those five days of quote unquote fasting. If you look at the actual meal composition, it ends up being very low calorie keto, basically. Very low calorie keto with very low protein, like 10 % or less avoiding animal products. That's the basic way that I've been thinking of it. So I was like, well, should I do something like Wilhelmina in Germany, who have again, quote unquote, fasted thousands of people, but they do give them bone broth, a little bit of juice.

37:04It's akin to the fast mimicking diet, but they'll do that with people for 30, 60, 90 days. Or am I better off doing shorter water fasts or maybe even a 14-day water fast? And a lot of the questions came down to, I know this is a mouthful, but as you know, I've been thinking about this nonstop. I was up until 2 a.m. this morning reading really, really old stuff out of the Soviet Union on psychiatric clinics, fasting patients for schizophrenia. So that tells you metabolic psychiatry also goes back a long, long, long time, not to mention ketogenic diet for epilepsy, right? So there are a lot of similarities.

37:41But if I want the benefits, as many benefits as possible, with the least pain possible, which includes not losing a ton of muscle tissue, which is not always the same thing as lean body mass, what should I do? That's kind of the open question. And that is a huge, huge mouthful. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. But where is your current thinking when it relates to all of this stuff? And I said earlier at the very beginning that it ties into my parents. Why is that? Because when we looked at some of my relatives and I got my docs to come in and do like a real proper full workup looking at all sorts of things that normally wouldn't be tested.

38:28Absolutely some metabolic syndrome, right? In the sense that they're highly, highly insulin insensitive, like insulin off the charts. And it's like, okay, well, this has been going on for years to get to this point. And Alzheimer's is sometimes called type three diabetes. And it's like, okay, well, if I can't help them, at least I want to try to help myself and other people who might be listening at an early enough stage. So how do you think about all this stuff? Well, there's a lot to talk about here and I think we got to kind of... Yeah, chew on one bit at a time. Right. Let's chew on one bit at a time and zoom out for a minute and talk about this intermittent fasting concept and why do people want to do intermittent fasting?

39:11What are the benefits that they're looking for? Now, you mentioned some metabolic benefits that you had noticed after doing your intermittent fasting. So there's lots of different types of intermittent fasting. You've talked about, you mentioned the 16-8. So essentially you're talking about not eating food for a period of time. And that period of time, you know, can either be 16 hours, it can be 24 hours, it can be longer, in which case it would not be an intermittent fast, it would be more prolonged fast, which you also talked about. But with respect to the intermittent fasting, there are a few things that happen and there are a few reasons why people like to do intermittent fasting.

39:48First and foremost, I think most people like doing intermittent fasting is because they want to actually lose weight. And the weight that they want to lose is not necessarily their lean body mass. They actually want to lose their fat mass, right? So they want to lose fat. And that's a big reason why people do intermittent fasting. Well, it turns out that intermittent fasting is more of a tool for weight loss. And what I mean by that is that there have been multiple studies now that have looked at different types of intermittent fasting in sort of a community dwelling aspect where people are just kind of free to eat the way they're going to eat, but they're supposed to be practicing intermittent fasting.

40:24And what it's been discovered is that naturally people end up eating about 200 fewer calories per day when they're doing some form of intermittent fasting. So if they're eating all their food within an 8 or 10 hour period, for example, usually they'll eat their food within a 10 hour period and then they'll fast for 14 hours. If they do that, they end up actually eating 200 fewer calories. And so they end up performing what's called caloric restriction, which we know can lead to weight loss. And so a lot of the weight loss actually comes from reducing calorie intake. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything that's beneficial from intermittent fasting comes down to calories because it doesn't.

41:01But the weight loss definitely seems to come down to the calories because if you keep calories the same and then have people do intermittent fasting or not intermittent fasting, they won't lose the weight, but they will have a whole host of metabolic benefits. You mentioned glucose regulation improvements. I mean, you know, fasting glucose, postprandial glucose, HbA1c, which is a long-term marker of glucose regulation. They're, you know, lipids are more favorable. And then they have improvements in blood pressure, for example. That's another big one that people get with a more of a longer type of intermittent fasting.

41:36So they're fasting more like 18 hours and eating their food within like a six-hour window. That's another benefit. Now, you go even further, and I know this is something you're very interested in. So beyond metabolic benefits and people want to get then, they want to get into what's called ketosis. So they want to be making ketones, these things that we're talking about earlier with respect to taking an exogenous ketone ester. Well, you make something naturally when you start to actually burn fat as energy, you start to make something called beta-hydroxybutyrate. But it takes about 12 hours or so.

42:08It depends on the person. It depends on how heavy of a carb diet they eat or how physically active they are. It can be a range, right? So if someone's doing a more ketogenic type of diet, they can actually deplete their liver glycogen quicker than 12 hours. It might even cut it down to like eight. If they're physically active on top of that, you might go down to like even six or something. So there's a big range here, right? But for a standard person on like a normal diet, they're going to take around 12 hours before they start to deplete their liver glycogen and then start to immobilize fatty acids from their adipose tissue and use that as energy.

42:41And when you start to do that, then you start to get into ketosis. Your body starts to then make beta-hydroxybutyrate, the major circulating ketone. Why do people want that in their system? Because it's not just a very energetically favorable source of energy. What I mean by that is that it takes less energy to use beta-hydroxybutyrate to make energy. than it does to use glucose, for example. It takes more energy to actually use glucose. So it's more energetically favorable. It's a clean fuel. Yeah, also BHB, the beta-hydroxybutyrate, as I understand it, I mean, highly anti-inflammatory effects as well, right?

43:16Exactly, that was the next point I was gonna make is that it's called a signaling molecule. So your body knows that it's in this stress mode, okay? There's no food, it's food scarcity time, right? And this is something that it's evolutionarily tapped into our system, into our DNA, where times of food scarcity, when we're not eating, our body switches into ketosis, beta-hydroxybutyrates produce, and it signals to these other genes to basically make more of something beneficial. So it's been shown to reduce inflammation. It depresses something called the inflammasome, which causes inflammation. It's an HDAC inhibitor.

43:53So it's a histone deacetylase inhibitor. So it's globally affecting gene expression in such a way that it reduces genes that are involved in making oxidative stress. It actually activates brain-derived neurotrophic factor. That's the beneficial neurotrophic compound that's made in the brain that exercise also activates as well. So it's doing all these beneficial things, right? And the other thing that it's doing is it's getting into the brain. It's being used as a very great source of energy. And so you have this sort of, you know, bypass for glucose where the glucose can then be shunted to be used to make glutathione, that very important antioxidant I talked about earlier that sulforaphane activates.

44:33Well, it turns out when you give your body ketones or your body's making ketones, your brain actually consumes a lot of that. There have been, you know, tracer studies that have looked at that. And what happens is because neurons are now using the beta-hydroxybutyrate as energy, glucose is no longer needed. And so that glucose that is there is then used to make NADPH, which is a precursor to make glutathione. And so it's called glucose sparing. You get this glucose sparing effect. And so that's another reason why people are interested in intermittent fasting. And then another main reason, and there's many others.

45:10I'm not going to like touch on everything, but the other main reason is it activates repair processes. And what I mean by repair processes is to be in repair mode, you have to be in more of a catabolic state. And we were talking about this earlier. People get so freaked out by the word catabolism. Oh yeah. Last night when I was walking around New York City, we were talking about this, the catabolism. And I think even over the last few years, intermittent fasting has kind have gotten a bad rap because people now equate it with, oh, loss of muscle mass. I'm going to be catabolic. Well, in order to be in a repair mode, you actually do need to be in a catabolic sort of mode.

45:51These repair systems are so important for cleaning up all the garbage that's inside of our cells. And that can be things like protein aggregates. These are things that lead to aggregation, you know, like alpha-signuclein, which is involved in Parkinson's, amyloid beta aggregates, which is involved in Alzheimer's disease. It's not the cause. It's like the cause and the symptom. It's like both. It's involved in Alzheimer's disease. And then aggregates in our cardiovascular system that play a role in cardiovascular disease. But it also cleans out even damaged little, what are called organelles. And so mitochondria or organelle and our organelles get damaged.

46:28So you want to be able to repair that damage. And this process of autophagy is the process that does that. And, you know, there's lots of different types of autophagy. So if it's a mitochondria repairing damage to itself, it's mitophagy. But for all this stuff to be active, you have to be in that more catabolic state, which can be induced by not eating, can also be induced by like heavy endurance exercise as well. Okay. So talking about those sort of outcomes that people are interested in, those different endpoints that people are interested in achieving, I think something that you're specifically interested in is the metabolic effects of intermittent fasting as well as the repair processes like the autophagy.

47:07Yeah, for sure. And that's why I was asking because I don't really look as vain as the next person. I like looking less fat if I can, but it's not my main driver. It's mental acuity and hopefully staving off on some level things like neurodegenerative disease and even cancer possibly, which has been part of the reason I've done a lot of these extended water fasts, which is, I realize there are a couple of hops here in terms of speculation, but it seems plausible that you might zap, punch a couple of precancerous cells in the nuts by doing that. Not only does autophagy play a role in preventing Parkinson's disease, but also Alzheimer's disease as well.

47:52Again, this has been shown in many animal studies. We know that autophagy plays a role and clearing away the amyloid beta plaques that are involved in Alzheimer's disease. And yes, there are some people that have amyloid beta plaques that don't get Alzheimer's disease. They may be the more resilient non-APOE4 type of person. But we do know that many, many people do get Alzheimer's disease with amyloid plaques. And in fact, people that have, again, the SNPs in what's called the amyloid precursor protein, APP, that leads to amyloid beta plaque buildup, they get early onset Alzheimer's disease. So autophagy plays an important role in clearing away those plaques.

48:26And I will say what we don't have a lot of evidence on is like, what's the minimal effect of fasting dose to activate autophagy, right? God, I wish we had this. That, right. I think what we do know in humans from like some of these old studies is that you do see some signal of autophagy activation after 24, 48 hours in humans. Now, does that mean that that is the only amount of time it takes to activate autophagy? No. So most humans are probably doing, you know, anywhere between a 12 to 16-hour nightly fast, right? There's a period of time when we're not eating, and that is when we're sleeping a little bit before bed, right?

49:08Autophagy still happens in people. We just aren't measuring it because we don't have sensitive tools yet. And so it's not that I don't think a 16-hour fast doesn't activate. I believe it does in human. I believe there's some autophagy going on. It's probably not that much. But if you go into that, you know, 48-hour fast, then you're really starting to get more robust activation of autophagy. So you mentioned sleep. And I've been looking, trying to look at Alzheimer's from every possible angle and found literature looking at disruption of sleep architecture in patients with Alzheimer's disease and the possible application of Xyrem, I believe it is, which is another, it's a brand name, in a bifurcated schedule for GHB, gamma hydroxybutyrate, which you have to be very careful with.

49:59It's a party drug. People die of it because it suppresses respiration. The person who bought my apartment in San Francisco, died of a GHB overdose. But it actually is a tremendously interesting compound for increasing, I think it's deep wave sleep specifically, which does what? It helps the cleanup crew, right? To do its work and to actually take out the garbage cellularly. And so if I could wave a magic wand, I would have my relatives on something like Xyrem, might actually be a different type of sleep medication, like the Nora class. Nora might be Dora. I would also look at, and this is something obviously not suitable for most elderly people, but potentially lower dose psilocybin or psilocin.

50:46And there is some actually very interesting, I don't want to call them speculative, hypothetical applications of that to Alzheimer's disease, which you can find on PubMed. And from a mechanistic perspective, They're super, super interesting. So I just want to double click on the sleep because that is such a critical component, whether you're fasting or not, to try to ensure that your sleep architecture is not hyper-disrupted, which can be the case with lots of different types of sleep medications that you might take. And if you have really bad insomnia, it's like, okay, you can do all these other things, but boy, oh boy, it would make a lot of sense to try to fix sleep whenever possible.

51:29Great. I mean, yeah, so true. This low-wave sleep does activate the glimplatic system, which is cleaning out the amyloid beta aggregates as well. And the last thing I kind of want to mention is you were talking about the intermittent fasting and more prolonged fasting and the muscle mass loss or lean body mass, which people equate with muscle mass, which it's not. There's a lot of things going on. So the thing is when people are doing intermittent fasting, I mentioned they eat fewer calories, which means they're eating less meals. They're eating fewer meals. They're not eating as many meals. And so what ends up happening is people lower their protein intake.

52:02And that's an important signal for maintaining muscle mass and certainly growing muscle mass as well. So it increases muscle protein synthesis, which is important. If people are engaged in resistance training and doing intermittent fasting, they're not losing muscle mass. And in fact, they can even gain muscle mass a little bit, not much, but they can gain it too. So I think the key here is that if you're doing an intermittent type of fast, like a 16-8, where you're fasting for 16 hours, that's really not a long, long fast. There's not a lot of concern with losing muscle mass if you're, you know, resistance training.

52:34Now, a more prolonged type of fast, you're talking about 14 days, that's a long fast. And definitely, you're going to be losing some muscle mass no matter what. Now, how much you lose depends on how, I guess, if you can resistance train lightly while you're fasting, that would be huge because you would be then activating muscle protein synthesis through another, you know, signal, which is not protein, it's mechanical force, right? So that I think would be really important for preventing the loss of a lot of muscle mass. But what is interesting is that you do lose lean body mass, a lot of it, when you are doing a prolonged fast like that.

53:14And looking at, you know, the old literature and some of the literature that's been done, a lot of water, up to 10 pounds of like water rate, which is crazy. You lose that and your organs shrink. And this is something that's been also shown in animal studies and also by Dr. Valter Longo many years ago. He's shown in animal studies, prolonged type of fasting actually causes organs to shrink because a lot of the damaged cells, not only is autophagy getting activated and you're cleaning out damage within a cell, but cells that are so damaged that autophagy can't even fix them, they actually undergo death, cell death.

53:52And so you end up getting a lot of cells that die. And then what happens is during the refeeding phase, and this is key, the refeeding phase is the growth phase. And this is when you regrow organs. It's when your muscle mass comes back. You can, you know, go back, get your muscle mass gains back. And so having that refeeding phase is really important and getting the right nutrients like protein, for example, is key for that refeeding phase. But you also lose fat during that fast, and you're losing visceral fat. And you had brought this up last night when we were talking, and I did some reading on it because it was like, oh, it made perfect sense.

54:27Because your organs are shrinking, you're losing a lot of cells in your organs, you're also losing some of the visceral fat that surrounds the organs, right? I can get misclassified. Exactly. It gets misclassified as lean body mass. And so you look at this lean body mass, and all you think about is muscle. Well, it turns out muscle is a small part of that. There's a lot of other stuff that's going into that lean body mass. So yeah, it's a pretty big undertaking, a 14-day fast. But I'll say this, and this kind of like goes into what you mentioned about the fasting mimicking diet and perhaps even adding, you know, cream.

55:02We can talk about that as well. I do think, I mean, the fasting mimicking diet, you're not going to get the same amount of autophagy that you would get if you did a five-day fast, water fast, because it's just impossible. You're getting some protein, you're getting some amino acids, that's activating mTOR that shuts down autophagy. You're getting energy, ATP. There's a ratio called the ATP to AMP ratio, which you want it to be low to activate something called AMP kinase for autophagy to happen. And so when you're eating, when you're eating heavy cream or eating whatever, fill in the blank, any type of calories, you're changing that ratio.

55:37And so that AMP kinase is not getting activated as robustly. Now, the amount of inactivation of those pathways, which then will inactivate autophagy, depends on how much you're feeding, right? How many calories that you're eating, how much of that is amino acids. Specifically leucine, right? In the case of Longo, like really trying to minimize leucine as an activator of mTOR and so on. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So I think for the cream, if you're trying to do 16-8, if someone is trying to do 16-8 on a daily basis and it's a non-negotiable for having an earlier feeding window because social, just everything compliance-wise isn't going to work and you have to do it later, which means you have to wake up and still be fasting in the morning, right?

56:22then you either like have to love black coffee, learn to love it, or try maybe MCT powder, MCT oil, because then you're not getting the amino acids in there to activate the mTOR. But you can do like a small, maybe like a tablespoon of it. And so you'll maybe just get a little bit of depression of autophagy, but not much. That would be my recommendation.

56:48Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in, and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I've had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots.

57:24It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and microcoils that create a soft contouring feel. Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial, fast, free shipping, and a 15-year warranty. So check it all out. And now you can get 27 % off anything on their website, so site-wide. So just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim. One more time, helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now. I also want to clarify for folks listening just to really make it specific. When I have had, I just like saying dirty fasting, I didn't realize that was an expression.

58:11I just think it feels fun, like a dirty martini. So dirty fasting is kind of cheating in this way. But when I do that, which is not all the time, I usually have black coffee or tea or something like that, but it is heavy cream, which is almost entirely fat. It is not creamer that you would just pull off the shelf. It is not half and half. It is heavy cream, which just from a macronutrient perspective is very, very, very different. And you can really overdo it on the calories also. So it's just like liquid fat effectively. But the MCT powder is a good idea. I tell you what, let's, if you're open to it, let's shift gears a little bit.

58:52I will just say, I wish somebody, nobody's going to do this, but would somehow get the ethics board, IRB, et cetera, to approve long-term human studies again in fasting. That would be great because you used to be allowed to do it. There are case studies of people who literally fast for 300 plus days. I mean, like fat, what is it? 9 ,000 calories per pound. Like there's like, you can do a lot with that fat. So we'll see if I do 14 days. If I can do 14 days and I might just go to 30, but then the refeeding gets really tricky. Yeah. I think people are concerned with gallstones. So when you don't eat for a period of time, long period of time, then you're not stimulating the gallbladder and the gallstone risk increases, which is what I think is the big concern with the long, long fasts.

59:43But I mean, if you're doing something like that once a year, I don't know if it's that big of a deal. Yeah. I mean, that's why I was doing a seven-day fast once a year for a long time. And then I took a break for a few years and I did a seven-day water fast and it was so incredibly unpleasant. And I had orthostatic hypotension where I'd stand up and i felt like i was going to fall over and uh you know vision started to get funny and i was like you know what maybe this isn't for me but i think it's because my machinery just wasn't developed for that having seen really stark differences in my mental acuity and sustained focus with the intermittent fasting i'm like okay i feel like doing intermittent fasting which part of my reason behaviorally for my interest in that also is that getting people to change their diet is fucking hard, meaning their diet composition, the food they eat.

1:00:40So if you can just say, hey, look, keep eating whatever you want, same thing, but you have to fit it within this window. It's an interesting option B that might work for people who otherwise aren't going to follow a paleo diet or whatever. But if you do the IF and then what I've done is like, all right, do the IF, maybe if you have some grains or in my case, legumes and stuff, okay, fine. And then shift to a mostly ketogenic diet for a period of time. Then I feel like you're pretty well teed up for a longer water only fast. Maybe you supplement with electrolytes. This gets into all sorts of controversial territory, but if you're okay with it, let's talk about training for a minute because, and I'll force a really awkward segue maybe, which is one thing I noticed is that my ability to do zone two training, let's just for simplicity's sake, say that for people that you're on a stationary bike or a bike, stationary is just easier to keep consistent.

1:01:41And you're cycling for 60 minutes at a wattage and a speed that leads you to the point where you could have a conversation with someone on the phone in short, full sentences, but you don't really want to, right? That's like the talk test. Intermittent fasting plus ketosis really helps my zone too. And then this leads into the question of just training in general. So I have to click on this. What type of exercise reduces heart aging by 20 years? Do you want to start there or do you want to start with VO2 max? We can start with VO2 max maybe because they kind of bleeding to each other. And people might be going, what is VO2 max?

1:02:24It's essentially a cardiorespiratory fitness. It's calculated by VO2 max, which is essentially the maximal amount of oxygen you can take up during maximal exercise. And what's so fascinating about that is it's a really important predictor of longevity. So there have now been enough studies that have come out looking at cardiorespiratory fitness in the sense of VO2 max and how people with a higher cardiorespiratory fitness have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness. In fact, if you have a low cardiorespiratory fitness and you go anywhere above that, like from low to low normal, it's associated with a two-year increased life expectancy.

1:03:04And people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness actually have higher all-cause mortality that's comparable or worse than people with known diseases like type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease or smokers, for example. So in other words, being sedentary is a disease and we need to think about it as a disease. And we should be trying to train to improve our VO2 max. And that is something that should be in our minds. And I say this because like just having this conversation that you and I are having right now, it takes about 11 milliliters of oxygen per minute per kilogram body weight just to have this conversation.

1:03:43Now just sit still and just breathe it takes about three milliliters of oxygen per minute per kilogram body weight. And that's important because as we're aging, we're sort of heading towards this cliff of VO2 max. Our VO2 max goes down as we age just naturally. Even if you're training and doing everything, it goes down. And once you get to that cliff, everything becomes a maximal effort, like talking, you're out of breath, you know, carrying groceries to your car from the store, you're just out of breath. Everything is a maximal effort and you don't want to be there. So you want to like start from a higher up point so that when you're going down, that cliff is much further away.

1:04:20And that's where the training comes in because you want to sort of, you want to find a training program that's going to improve that cardiorespiratory fitness. And that's where you talked about zone two training. And that's the kind of what I would call moderate intensity exercise. So you're able to sort of the talk test. I like the talk test because heart rate is so dependent on the person's fitness level. But let's just say on average, generally people are, they're not at like 75 or 80 % max heart rate. They're kind of below that on average. Now, some people may actually be above that, but the talk test is great because you can have a conversation, you're breathy.

1:04:58You don't want to have a conversation, but you can. Or so we know that people that are doing that moderate intensity type of training, if they do the standard guidelines of physical activity, which are about two and a half hours a week of moderate intensity physical activity, people that do that for two months, 40 % of those people still can't improve their VO2 max. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just different gears. Well, unless they actually add in high intensity interval training. And that's where I kind of get into this. I think people should be doing vigorous intensity exercise. That's the type of exercise where you're unable to talk, right?

1:05:33So you can't have a conversation because you're going harder. Your heart rate is about 80, 85%. It's above 80 % max heart rate. That type of exercise has been shown to improve VO2 max, especially if you're doing sort of what's called high-intensity interval training. As you know, you've talked about this a lot as well. You're doing sort of these intervals of going more vigorous intensity exercise, and then you have recovery periods where your heart rate goes down. So there's been a variety of different protocols out there that have been shown to improve the VO2 max if you do them. Generally speaking, what's happening is you're putting a stronger stress on your cardiovascular system, so on your muscular system, even on your brain.

1:06:14So the adaptations are greater. One of those adaptations is increasing your stroke volume. So being able to basically transport oxygen to tissues faster. And that's an adaptation that happens when you're going at a harder, when you're training at a harder intensity. What do you do personally? What's your HIIT look like? I do a lot of HIIT. So my training is three days a week, I do some sort of CrossFit training that involves high intensity interval training with it as well. And the high intensity interval training will either be on a rowing machine or it'll be on a stationary bike or a salt bike, or it'll be like a skier, like those skiers or jumping rope.

1:06:54And I also do longer intervals. So I'll do the Norwegian four by four. So that's where I do on a stationary bike or I'll do it on the rowing machine actually as well. I do four minutes of as hard as I can go and maintain for that entire four minutes. So this is obviously not an all out 30 second sprint. This is, I'm just working hard, as hard as I can and maintain that for four minutes. And then you recover for three minutes and then you do it four times. I'm thinking of a variation I do sometimes with my husband. I recover for four minutes because we're switching on the rower. So I sometimes do a little bit longer recovery.

1:07:27But that Norwegian four-by-four where you're doing as hard as you can for four minutes and maintain that intensity for the four minutes, and then you recover for three minutes, you do that four times. That's been shown to be one of the best ways to improve VO2 max. But you can also do one minute on, one minute off, which I've also done. So you do that 10 times. It's more like a 20-minute workout. that's also been shown to improve bo2 max but also even doing something like 20 seconds on 10 seconds off like a tabata again has been shown i do all of these by the way and i do variations of them depending on the week most of my my exercise is high intensity interval training crossfit training which incorporates you know it's more dynamic so it's including like strength training stuff but it's like more high intensity and then i do a couple of runs i do like two 30-minute runs a week, sometimes three.

1:08:17And that's more of my zone two stuff. Yeah, it's a nice roster. I'll share, just for people who might be curious, some of my goals and program at the moment. So I'm about to turn 48 and feel good overall, but have realized that I really hate endurance training, generally speaking. So I've neglected that. And specifically, I've neglected the stuff that makes me think I want to puke into a bucket, i.e. VO2 max training. The zone two is like listen to a podcast. Maybe I have like a slightly breathy conversation. Like it's pretty chill. Watch something on the Netflix. You know, it's pretty straightforward.

1:08:55VO2 max, specifically chatting with Peter Atiyah. I'm doing the zone two, which I do either on a stationary bike or on the treadmill. Typically with a rucksack at a lower incline, I found that when I had the speed too high, incline too high, I ended up getting lower back pain just from a like really long stride with my lordosis and stuff. And then for the VO2 max, doing the four by four that you described. And I think I'm getting this translation right, but the way it was described to me was like, all right, for each of those four minutes, you have these four minute work intervals, and then you have three or four minutes of rest, and then you repeat four times.

1:09:32It's like first minute, you're like, wow, this is a lot of work. Second minute, you're like, wow, this really sucks. Third minute, you're like, I don't know if I'm going to make it. I don't think I'm going to make it. And then minute four is like, I feel like I'm going to die and I'm being chased by wolves. And so it's like, when we say maximal effort, at least as it's been, and those are not Peter's words, but another person I like a lot. It's a lot of work. It's pretty pukey, but I'm going to be doing that given the longevity associations that you mentioned. Now, I would love just to get your two cents, and this relates to vitamin D2 a little bit for me, where I'm like, in these studies looking at VO2 max as a predictor or correlate of longevity, are there other possible confounding variables that might actually be the real McCoy?

1:10:22because you could say, and I know you know all this, but just for the, for people listening, it's like, okay, well, I'll make this up. Like women who do Pilates in Manhattan have, you know, four years of additional lifespan. Okay, great. So you could conclude then we should all do Pilates to improve lifespan. It's like, well, wait a second. Pilates is expensive and maybe they're also following a better diet and so on and so on and so on. So are there any confounders that might apply, possible confounders to these VO2 max studies. I'm assuming they're observational more than intervention-based.

1:10:59So what are your thoughts there? Yeah. I mean, there's absolutely a possibility for some sort of confounding factors in any sort of observational study, including the ones I'm discussing. Because, you know, yes, they're going in and measuring their cardiorespiratory fitness, which is better than a lot of observational studies that you're going off a questionnaire, right? That's already sort of one, at least one up over other observational data. But, you know, at the end of the day, you may have someone that has undiagnosed cancer or some kind of undiagnosed disease because diseases are, I mean, they're supposed to be disease-free or if they have a disease, it's like known, right?

1:11:36And so everything's corrected for. But there's always the possibility that, you know, some people have some disease and And that's why they can't exercise very well because they're diseased, right? And it's the disease that's causing them to have a higher mortality rate than the lower cardiorespiratory fitness is. There are studies always try to account for diet and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, you can never really establish causation, right? So that is why we turn to randomized controlled trials. And I will say this is where the heart aging comes in and also this type of training.

1:12:07So when I've done VO2 max training, my legs grow. My legs grow like weeds. They adapt and get big. And so along with the age-related decrease in VO2 max, there's also sarcopenia and age-related loss of muscle mass. And so I'm like, I wonder if these people who also have higher VO2 max tend to have a higher percentage of lean body mass or muscle tissue, be more heavily muscled than the people without. I don't know. I mean, that's just, I'm just kind of poking out of curiosity. Okay. So the heart aging. This goes into why randomized controlled trials are important because you can establish more causation, right?

1:12:51From an intervention. And this study was done by Ben Levine out of UT Southwest and Dallas. And it's a really, to me, it's just a seminal groundbreaking study that isn't talked about enough. He's, by the way, he's just a phenomenal cardiovascular exercise physiologist. I mean, he trained with like the biggest giants out there. And what he did was he took, him and his lab took 50-year-olds that were sedentary. So the middle age, 50 years old, sedentary, but otherwise healthy. So you didn't have any other diseases besides being sedentary, which I think is a disease, but they didn't have any other diseases like cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes or hypertension, right?

1:13:30So they were otherwise healthy, just not active. And he wanted to see if he could put these guys on a pretty long two-year training protocol, how would that affect the aging of their heart? So as we age, our hearts typically shrink in size and they get stiffer. And that affects not only our cardiorespiratory fitness and our ability to exercise, and I mentioned our cardiorespiratory fitness goes down with age, but it affects our cardiovascular disease risk as well. The reason our hearts get stiffer, by the way, does come down to a lot of glucose. So the more glucose stimulation, more glucose is around in your vascular system, it through a chemical reaction forms advanced glycation end products.

1:14:15So this glycation essentially stiffens the collagen that surrounds your myocardium and your pericardium. And so you get like this stiffer heart that can't respond to stress well. So you want your heart to be very plastic and malleable and flexible, right? You don't want it to be stiff. Doesn't sound good. So just like you don't want your blood vessels to be stiff. So what he wanted to do was see if he could change the structure and the trajectory of these aging hearts. And so he put them on a two-year training program, which involved the Norwegian four-by-four, by the way. And when you start someone out that's not physically active and you want them to do the Norwegian four-by-four, when you have them doing their interval, their four-minute interval, and this speaks to you as well or anyone, you don't have to necessarily go as hard as you can the whole four minutes.

1:15:03You just have to be working hard. Yeah, you do have to last four minutes, right? So you have to last four minutes. And so some people even start off, they're just briskly walking because that's hard for them. Right. So it's all tailored to the individual. And so some people get really intimidated where they're like, oh, I just, there's no way I could ever do that. Well, actually these people did do it and they started out doing Norwegian four by four, but they also did a variety of other exercises, including moderate intensity and some more vigorous intensity exercise, as well as some resistance training.

1:15:33And the control group was just this like yoga, flexible training sort of stuff that people were doing. By the end of the two years, these people were working out about five hours a week. And at some point, they were doing two Norwegian 4x4s a week, and then they went down to just doing one a week. But, you know, over the course of two years, they were getting a lot of exercise, about five hours a week. And essentially, at the end of those two years, the structure of their heart, so the stiffness of it and the, you know, shrinking of it was reversed. So their hearts grew and they became more flexible.

1:16:06And it was reversed in such a way that it was 20 years less aging. So their hearts looked more like 30-year-olds than 50-year-olds, which is pretty incredible. It's amazing. And I think it's also like, well, you think 50, it's too late to start exercising. Well, it's not too late. I mean, you can be in your 90s and get benefits, you know. So I think that's another really important take home with that story is that you can reverse your aging of your heart by 20 years if you really put in the effort. Five hours a week is about what I do. I have five or six hours a week. It's a lot of work. I didn't always do that, but I've decided as I started to get into my mid-40s, I'm going to spend less time podcasting and more time exercising because this is my health.

1:16:50Foundational for everything else. That's the base of the pyramid. All right. So let's park that particular piece of training for a moment. Do you want to piggyback on that and talk about reversing brain aging with exercise? Is it a different type of exercise or do you get two birds with one stone? You do get two birds with one stone. And that's why I do like the vigorous intensity exercise because when you're kind of shifting into working out harder, when you're getting that vigorous intensity exercise, you are shifting somewhat to anaerobic metabolism. So you're working so hard that you can't get oxygen to your muscles fast enough to use mitochondria for the mitochondria to then make energy.

1:17:35And so your body goes, I need energy quick right now. There's not enough oxygen here. And so you start to use glucose outside of the mitochondria as energy, and that's called glycolysis. And you're not just only doing glycolysis, by the way. I mean, even if you're doing an all-out sprint, you're still somewhat using your mitochondria. It's not like a black or white thing, right? It's sort of gray here. But the reality is that when you're not going intense, you're not doing anaerobic exercise. And so what happens is when you're doing that sort of getting in that anaerobic state, what I mean is like you're not using oxygen to make energy, you're just using glucose, you actually make something called lactate as a byproduct.

1:18:13And lactate is what's essential for the brain health. So there have now been a variety of studies. This was pioneered by Dr. George Brooks at UC Berkeley decades ago. So many studies have now shown this now. It's no longer a hypothesis, but it used to be called the lactate shuttle hypothesis, where when you start to do this vigorous intensity exercise, you get your lactate levels higher than baseline. Baseline, you're usually about 0.9 millimolar or so lactate. You start to go above that and well beyond, you're getting 7, 10 millimolar, 15 millimolar, right? The lactate gets into your bloodstream, and it's used by other tissues.

1:18:49So it goes back into the muscle. It's used for energy. It gets into the brain. It gets into the heart, liver quickly. It happens within 20 minutes. You can do a HIIT workout, see your lactate go up to 15 millimolar, measure it 20 minutes later, and it's back to baseline. I mean, it's quick. It gets consumed. One of the major organs that consumes it is the brain. This has been shown in human studies. not only is lactate very much like beta-hydroxybutyrate, our favorite ketone that we've been talking about, because it's an energetically favorable source of energy. Lactate is used by neurons to make energy, just like beta-hydroxybutyrate is very similar.

1:19:23It's energetically favorable. All that stuff is happening in the same stuff. So you're using the lactate, glucose is being spared, you're making glutathione. Lactate's also a signaling molecule. So in the brain, it's activating brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is important for growing new neurons in the brain, which has been shown in human studies. So there have been human studies that have done exercise for even just one year and shown that you can increase the growth of the hippocampus by like 1 % to 2 % after that year of training versus losing 1 % to 2 % of the hippocampus. That usually happens as you get in older age.

1:19:58So the lactate is, again, a product of that vigorous intensity exercise. It's increasing norepinephrine in the brain, serotonin. It's a signaling molecule. It's basically your muscles way of communicating with the brain. Hey, I'm really working hard. This is a stressful time. Let's respond to that stress. Your brain is also working hard during exercise and particularly vigorous intensity exercise. It's stressful in the brain. Anybody that's done it knows that resistance training also increases lactate and resistance training is very stressful on the brain. And so it's like this response to that stress, your brain is now being communicated from the muscles by lactate, which is the communicator, and saying, hey, make all this good stuff so that we can not die.

1:20:37That's essentially the adaptations that are happening. So that's why I like to also incorporate vigorous intensity exercise into my program because I am also prone to neurodegenerative disease. I have Parkinson's disease on my dad's side. I have Alzheimer's disease on my mom's side. So I'm very, very tuned in to neurodegenerative disease and wanting to prevent it and do what I can. And I do think that vigorous intensity exercise is part of that equation because I want to get that lactate, which is so beneficial for brain health. So let me ask you about two other things related to brain health since this is on the mind.

1:21:13The first is related to saunas and the second one is vitamin D. so with saunas i was looking back and i think this is probably summarized by some llm so i want to be very careful with citing numbers so i'm looking at a summary i believe of the findings of a large finnish study published in jam internal medicine 2015 that followed 2 000 middle-aged men for 20 years. That's wild. And it looks like, please correct me if from memory you can correct any of this, but all callers mortality, 24 % lower risk with two to three times per week. This is sauna use and four to seven times per week was associated with 40 % lower risk.

1:21:58And I'll just cut to the one that's of greatest interest to me right now. It says in a follow-up paper, using the sauna four to seven times per week was associated with a 66 % lower risk of dementia and 65 % lower risk of Alzheimer's. Now, at face value, if those numbers are roughly accurate, those numbers seem incredible, right? And I guess what I'm wondering is how should we think about those results? Because if out of 100 people, two people were getting dementia and now it's one person, it's less interesting than other ways of interpreting the data. How should we think about this? And how do you personally use if you do sauna or hot tub or heat stress at this point?

1:22:46So those numbers are accurate, by the way. They're spot on. And there is a dose dependence there, which kind of strengthens the data, right? So people that are using the sauna more frequently are having a more robust effect. You mentioned 24 % lower all-cause mortality and then 40 % if they're doing two to three times a week versus four to seven times a week, they're having a 40 % lower all-cause mortality. And the dementia risk is also extremely interesting to me. And this goes back, Tim, to like some of the earliest experiments that I did as a sort of budding young biologist at the Salk Institute where I was working with these little nematode C.

1:23:23elegans worms and injecting human amyloid beta-42 into these worms and essentially injecting it into their muscle. So that they become, basically the amyloid beta-42 aggregates and forms these aggregates as these worms age. And it happens very rapidly because their life expectancy is only 15 days. So within a day or so, they start to become paralyzed where they can't move their lower half where their muscular cells are. and they can only move their nose to feed in this little Petri dish with E. coli bacteria, which is what they eat. And so I would do these experiments and then I would overact over, basically when you do a genetic manipulation and you can make them overexpress heat shock proteins, which are something that are robustly activated upon heat stress, as the name implies.

1:24:13And sauna has been shown to activate heat shock proteins. If you're in the 163 degree Fahrenheit sauna for around 30 minutes, you can activate your heat shock proteins by 50 % more than baseline. So when I would add heat shock proteins that would be activated in these worms, it would prevent this from happening. These protein aggregates don't happen. And that's because one of the things that heat shock proteins do is they help repair damaged proteins that are misfolded and prevent them from aggregating. And so you want to have more active heat shock proteins. If you're wanting to prevent Alzheimer's disease, now there's a lot of animal studies that have shown this as well.

1:24:49For example, you can take a mouse and sort of give it Alzheimer's disease in a similar way. And if they have a lot of active heat shock protein genes, then they're not getting the Alzheimer's disease. It delays it, right? So I remember reading this study and it was like one of the things I was thinking about was, of course, you know, the heat shock proteins are activated upon the sauna use that you would probably see a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease and even dementia. There's other things as well. Cardiovascular health is really improved with the sauna. So sauna sort of mimics moderate intensity exercise.

1:25:21And so if you're having improved cardiovascular health, that means more blood flow to the brain. Lots of things are happening, right? The one thing I do want to mention, Tim, and this study was, I think it came out in 2020-ish. I don't remember the exact year. But it was not out of Finland. I believe it was a Polish study. And that study looked at sauna use and dementia risk. There was very interesting results there. So they sort of looked at people that are using saunas, but they also sort of categorized them based on the amount of heat, so how hot their saunas got. So in the Finnish studies and adenfinilin, majority of the people are using the sauna at around equivalent of 174 degrees Fahrenheit.

1:26:04That's about what the average temperature of pretty much any of those studies that you cited, that's about the average temperature that they're using them, and they're in there for about 20 minutes. Now, this other study looked at a wide range of different temperatures, that temperature versus like the really, really high extreme end. So people that were doing like 200 degrees Fahrenheit or more. And this is something that you can see nowadays, like there's this sort of, you know, go all in, go hard or go home, right? And so people think that they need to go in a 200 degree sauna. And if they go in a 200 degree sauna, it's going to be better than going in a 175 degree Fahrenheit sauna, right?

1:26:38Apparently not the case. So in that study, again, you saw protective effect of people that use this sauna, and I think it was also dose dependent, but I can't recall. There was a protective effect, but only if they used saunas that were less than 190 degrees Fahrenheit. People that started going into the 190 degrees to 200 degrees Fahrenheit range actually had an increased risk. And so that was something that I don't know that anyone talks about, but I've done really, really hot saunas before. I personally don't like it. I get headaches actually. So, you know, your head is in there and you have to think about that.

1:27:14Your head is getting heated up. And so I don't know that it's necessarily good to go in a 212 degree Fahrenheit sauna, you know, for your head. Now, I don't want to say that with certainty because there could be all kinds of confounding factors, but it's something to keep in mind. And why do you have to go above 190? 190 is hot as hell. That's good enough. You don't have to go above that. Yeah. My default setting in my sauna is 194. So it's just kind of like, well, I guess I said it some time ago. So it's just been set at 194. So that's quite my default. So maybe I want to dial it back. I think 190 is great.

1:27:46Yeah, 190 is great. And I, so you asked about me and how I use the sauna. Now I should also mention that hot tubs are good as well. And in fact, the study just came out a few weeks ago showing that hot tubs have, you know, comparable effects on blood pressure regulation, all these parameters that are looked at with sauna use as well. And a lot of people ask that question, you know, oh, what about a hot tub or a hot bath? And I think not everyone has access to a sauna. Not everyone has access to a hot tub, but a lot of people have access to a hot bath. And I think if you can get a sort of pool thermometer and keep the temperature of your bath 104 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what all the studies use, you have to keep adding hot water.

1:28:25That's fine. It's pretty hot. But you want to stay in there. Yeah, it's pretty hot. You stay in there for about 20 minutes and you're going to have comparable effects. You'll be sweating like you're in a sauna. Don't worry about it. 104. Exactly. 104 is hot. And I actually do, I both, I do a hot tub and I do sauna. I like to do hot tub at night. It does seem to help with my sleep, but sometimes I'll do the sauna in the day and I'll do it after a workout and it sort of extends my workout. I particularly like doing them after a workout, like in the winter when it's cold and if I work out outside.

1:28:55So that's kind of how I use the sauna. I was doing hot tubs for a while, like every night. I don't do that in the summer because it's just hot. And so I don't like, I actually shift more to doing cold exposure more in the summer, which is kind of funny. It's pretty much the only time I do it is in the summer. Such a wuss. I like doing the heat a lot in the winter. I would be very curious to see if, you know, they measured like sperm motility and morphology for all the males who are doing this. And they're like, good news. you have this incredibly lowered risk of Alzheimer's. Bad news, you're effectively sterile from all the heat on your swimmers.

1:29:32Good point. You have to, yeah. There's been studies that have shown you do lower motility for sure, the motility rate's lowered, and that those changes are reversed after six weeks of abstaining. So it is reversible. Also don't use it as a contraception method either because I know some people that have tried that. It doesn't work. You can still get pregnant. That's not so smart. Do you still use, if needed, curcumin or theracumin or any of these products? I think Mariva or Mariva was one that you mentioned as a formulation in place of NSAIDs like ibuprofen or naproxen, or is that something that you may have changed your mind on?

1:30:12I actually just did it a couple days ago when I had a headache and I didn't know why. That's the thing that I go to still. I mean, there's some cases where it won't work, like where it's just like, I don't know, this is like a really bad headache. I don't usually get headaches, but if I don't sleep well or something, something going on or my cycle, I will get a headache and I use it. I use 4-Mareva, which is a phytosomal curcumin, which increases the bioavailability of the curcumin. I use the Thorne brand just because I think the brand is reliable, no affiliation with them, but it works for me.

1:30:45It really does. So it's, I think, 500 milligrams of curcumin per capsule, I believe. And so I do four. So I'm getting two grams. Yeah. But I do still use it. Yeah. Just don't take it right after your workout, right? I don't, it doesn't have the same effect. Yeah. It doesn't have the same kind of Cox2 inhibition as the other guys. It doesn't. Uh-huh. And in fact, I think it helps with DOMS to lay down some muscle soreness. And so sometimes actually I do use it actually after or a really like hard squat workout. All right, I'm glad I asked. So speaking of not getting enough sleep, let's hop to creatine because, God, I don't know where I read this, but that higher doses of creatine, maybe like 25 grams, 20, 25 grams could combat sleep loss or some of the effects of sleep loss.

1:31:37What should we know about creatine, right? Creatine's been around for a long time. There are dozens of questionable sports performance, athletic performance products come out every year. Most of them are all marketing, no substance. Creatine has been used by athletes for a very long time. But for at least the last five years, I have been taking it typically five grams a day, more for the cognitive or potential cognitive benefits. But what else should we know about creatine? Because what you put in your newsletter not too long ago was forwarded to me. And then you told me via text, I was like, okay, we should probably talk about this.

1:32:15So how should we think about creatine and best practices for different applications? Well, it's funny, as you mentioned, it's one of those supplements that have been, it was like in the gym bro world forever and still people associate it with that, but yet it's been one of the supplements that's actually stuck, right? It's worked and there's been countless studies showing its effectiveness, particularly with respect to increasing exercise volume. So in other words, what creatine is, is it's essentially, it's stored in our muscles as something called phosphocreatine. When you take creatine exogenously, it's stored in our muscles as phosphocreatine and then used for energy.

1:32:54It's a way to make energy quicker, right? And so the more of it you have stored, the quicker you can sort of make that energy. And so what it's been shown to do is really help with increasing exercise volume. In other words, you can do one to two more reps per set or sets, you know, you could do an extra set or whatever, whatever it is you're doing, right? And that leads to, obviously, if you're increasing your workload, you're going to have increased muscle mass and muscle strength because you're increasing your workload. It doesn't work like protein in the sense that you can increase muscle mass because it's anabolic.

1:33:26You need to put the work in. So creatine by itself isn't going to make your muscles grow. It's going to make you work harder, it's going to be easier for you to work harder. And so you end up increasing your exercise volume, which then has adaptations on your muscle, right? And that's why a lot of people like it because for one, they want their muscles to grow bigger and stronger. And two, some people like to use it during competitions or something because they want to be able to increase that exercise volume as well. It's also really good for the explosive power type of exercise, again, because you're getting that quick mobilization of producing energy.

1:33:56And I'm just glossing over decades of research and a lot of specifics here because I want to get to the brain. But it turns out creatine is something that our liver makes a little bit, I think like maybe one to two grams a day. It's also something that's found in dietary sources, particularly animal products. So it's high in like meat, poultry, fish, dairy, not so much in vegetables. So vegans and vegetarians actually end up, they can have lower creatine if they're not supplementing with it because they're not eating animal products, right? Well, it turns out that it seems as though if you're supplementing and eating a high meat diet, you're getting a good amount of creatine.

1:34:34Five grams seems to be about the point at which your muscles get saturated at least over the course of like a month or so. So if you've been using creatine for a month or two, your muscle stores are saturated and five grams a day is kind of what's consumed by the muscle on a daily basis to kind of maintain that. I would argue that you might want to go above that to get the brain benefits. And here's why. Because your muscle is very, very greedy when it comes to creatine. So that five grams that you're taking, I used to take five grams a day until about last April or March or something like that.

1:35:09So the five grams a day is what's been shown in countless studies. That's probably why you take it. I took it because it was countless studies showing five grams a day was like the dose. That was the dose that you needed to get the muscle benefits. all these brain benefits now coming out seem to be at higher doses. And you mentioned one that was 25 grams, I mean, 20 to 25 grams, which is kind of a crazy study where they, you know, did about 21 hours of sleep deprivation, essentially. They were barely sleeping at all. And giving them the 25 grams of creatine, 20 to 25 grams, depending on their weight, seemed to not only negate the negative effects of sleep deprivation on their cognition, but it also improved their cognition beyond what their baseline normal cognition is when they were sleeping.

1:35:51And that's what was really intriguing to me, as well as some of the other studies where older adults are given, you know, 20 grams of creatine and it improved their cognition. We now have the first pilot study in Alzheimer's disease where again, 20 grams were given to a very small number of people with Alzheimer's disease. It also improved cognition. It turns out that when you start to go above the five grams and you get into more than 10 grams range, then some of that creatine is getting into the brain versus being all consumed by the muscle, right? I personally use creatine now. I do 10 grams a day every day.

1:36:22And what I have noticed, and this could be totally placebo, but I'll tell you when I don't do my 10 grams a day, what I have noticed is that the afternoon sleepiness kind of slump I get is completely gone if I take my 10 grams a day. 10 grams, I don't get afternoon sleepiness, I miss it, I get it. So it's not like a stored up kind of thing. It's like, no, if I miss it that day, it's noticeable. If I travel and I don't have it, it's noticeable. So I'm hooked on the 10 grams a day. If it's placebo, I don't care. It works, right? On top of that, what I've also been doing ever since that study came out with the 21 hours of sleep deprivation, I take about 20 grams of creatine when I'm traveling and I have to give a talk or I'm doing a podcast, particularly because oftentimes I'm traveling either to central time or to eastern time.

1:37:13And I'm, you know, giving a talk early in the morning, which is like 6 a.m. my time. I got to be like on my game. So I take the 20 grams and I kid you not, it's like you get this brain boost, but without like the caffeine. It's hard to explain. Yeah, without the creepy crawly ants on your skin. Right. Without that like jittery thing. and and even that sometimes the caffeine isn't enough like if you're really jet lagged you know it's just especially if you're going well also for me it's like i'm a caffeine fast metabolizer if i have a cup of coffee i'm on fire for 25 minutes and then i'm sleepy i think some of that is actually a glucose response but that's a whole separate thing like i i using glucometer when i was doing all my ketogenic experiments and so on i'm like wow if i have too much coffee there is a huge, which is not that surprising, spike in glucose and then a very predictable subsequent drop-off.

1:38:08So it doesn't end up being net-net that helpful for me unless I'm doing a 20-minute sprint on something, which is probably never. So the creatine is super interesting to me. Let me ask some very specific, maybe mundane questions, but I think they're practical, which is when When the subjects were taking 20 or 25 grams, was that in one sitting? Was that in multiple divided doses? When you take it, is it in powder form? Is it little sachets that you can take with you on travel days? Is it encapsulated? What does it actually look like? With respect to all the studies, I don't remember if they were in one sitting.

1:38:50A lot of studies are. If they do like a 20 gram, it will be in one sitting. What I do is different. I do five gram doses. So creatine monohydrate is the form I take. It's the absolute tri-and-true. It's the gold standard. Yeah. There's a lot of other marketing out there that talks about other types of creatine, but that's really the gold standard. And I had Dr. Darren Kando on my podcast. He's a creatine researcher at the University of Regina in Canada. And like, you know, we talked all about this and he really convinced me creatine monohydrate is the way to go. I asked him about like every type of creatine under the sun.

1:39:23But the way I take it is in five gram doses. And so I do five grams first thing in the morning and then I'll do my workout. And then I do another five grams about 11 a.m. And that's my 10 grams that I get. When I'm traveling, I do have these sachets that, again, Thorn makes, by the way, no affiliation. I mean, there's like probably a million other, you know, I like Thorn because their creatine is NSF certified. And so it's free of contaminants. I really like that. So again, find your own favorite brand, but I like this brand and I like they have sachets, which are five gram sachets. And so I will have my 10 grams for the day.

1:39:58Or again, if I'm traveling for work-related purposes, I will take 15 to 20 grams depending on how much I need. In that case, I will do two 10 gram doses. For me, I can tolerate that. I don't have any GI problems with it. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. Yeah, some people do. I think doing the five gram doses is like pretty easy on the gut. Most people don't have a big problem with the five grams. It's when they go above that. Right. So I'll say a few things. The NSF certified is a pretty simple cheat code just to use as a filtering mechanism for a lot of supplements. And it is shocking how inconsistent supplement contents are.

1:40:36I mean, I've looked at lab reviews of like 20 off the shelf melatonin products, and it ranges from zero melatonin up to like 20x the label amount. it's just bananas. So, you know, I use momentous creatine, but it's passing the same hurdle. And I will say like good news, you can reduce the likelihood of cognitive deficit from sleep deprivation. Bad news is you could increase the likelihood of disaster pants if you have 20 grams at one sitting. And I will say, you know, maybe from personal experience, maybe I'm just talking about somebody else, but if you really want to increase the likelihood disaster pants, then you can do like a bunch of caffeine, double espresso or black coffee with MCT powder, and then have your creatine around the same time.

1:41:28That would be asking. You're going to want to pack some Pampers in your travel kit if you do that. So yeah, just be aware of the GI stuff. But I'm excited to up my intake because the science that you cited in the study or studies in your newsletter seemed really compelling. And it's also one of those supplements where it's like, okay, look, I assume this is on the grass list, like the generally recognized as safe. Seems very well tolerated over decades and decades of research. Assuming you don't have some, who knows, right? Like really outstanding kidney dysfunction or something maybe. So why not?

1:42:08In a sense, it's also relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of things. Let me ask you, just because this has been on my mind, with the sulforaphane, I mangled the pronunciation a bit, sulforaphane, you take that better on an empty stomach, better with food. This has become an issue when I'm doing the intermittent fasting sometimes, right? Especially if there's something like the A-Reds too, which I'm taking for the eye health, which is supposed to be twice a day. And I'm like, oh, it's part of the reason why I've been doing like the quote unquote dirty fasting with a little bit of fat in the form of that heavy cream in coffee was to try to take supplements earlier in the day that are benefited from some type of fat in terms of absorption.

1:42:53So sulforaphane, does it matter? I think if you can take it fasted, that's great. Some people find it kind of is hard on their stomach. And so they like to take it with food. And that's really the only reason to take it with food is because they get like upset stomach. Like it's like, you know, GI problem. So that would be, again, the only really real reason that you would have to really take it with food. I want to loop back around just so people aren't like, Ferris, you forgot about vitamin D. I want to talk about vitamin D. So the vitamin D, I've taken vitamin D forever, tend to take 5 ,000 IU a day.

1:43:30I particularly in the summer get I would say at least an hour in the sun without skin protection and I build up to that I'm not an idiot about it and yet I am barely in my labs I'm always barely squeaking by on vitamin d and for almost all of my adult friends who get labs and this is also race agnostic everybody is deficient or just on the border of being deficient even if they seem to be taking a lot of supplemental vitamin D and getting a lot of sunshine. And I have to ask myself, what the hell is going on here? In what set of circumstances is it possible that everyone would be so deficient if they seem to be getting a bunch of sunlight, they're taking a bunch of supplemental vitamin D?

1:44:17Can you shed any light on this? I can. Yeah. Or is there a problem with this measurement in the first place, which is why I was talking about like proxies and confounders and stuff earlier with respect to some of the other studies. Please educate me. So the way vitamin D is measured, so vitamin D actually gets converted into a steroid hormone. And this steroid hormone, essentially it's going inside the nucleus of our cells where all of our DNA is and it's activating 5 % of the protein encoding human genome. Many of these genes, it activates Clotho, by the way, you mentioned Clotho. Vitamin D is important for activating clotho.

1:44:52Yeah. So very hugely important for dementia risk, which we can talk about. But to sort of answer your question, so your vitamin D levels are measured by a proxy, and it's called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the precursor to the steroid hormone. So essentially, vitamin D3, which is made in your skin, or if you supplement with it exogenously, gets into your bloodstream. And that vitamin D3 then goes to the liver, and it's converted into 25-hydroxyvitamin D. That's the major circulating form of vitamin D. After it's, you know, 25-hydroxy vitamin D is made in the liver, it then goes to the kidneys and it's made into the actual active steroid hormone, which is called 125-hydroxyvitamin D.

1:45:32Well, it turns out the enzymes that are doing the conversion of vitamin D3 into that stable form that everyone gets, you know, when they're getting a vitamin D blood test, that's what they're looking at, requires magnesium to work. And there have been studies showing that with low magnesium, it doesn't happen readily at all. And so 50 % of the U.S. population has insufficient levels of magnesium. So you're talking about a coin toss here, right? One out of two, one out of two, right? You have a 50-50 chance a person's not going to be getting enough magnesium. That's been shown to actually play a role in circulating levels of vitamin D.

1:46:08So there have been N-Haden studies and stuff showing that people that have low magnesium intake also have low circulating forms of 25-hydroxyvitamin D. So that's one thing. Another thing comes down to genetics. There's actually a lot of people that have SNPs, very common ones, that probably came from southern areas that don't make as much vitamin D3 from the sun exposure because probably they're getting so much sun, right? So essentially, there's the genetic component as well. And I've seen a lot of people's different SNP makeups. And I know quite a few people that actually have to take a super high level of vitamin D3 to actually get enough vitamin D.

1:46:47And then the other thing is that you mentioned earlier, the variation between supplements. There have been studies on vitamin D supplements, and it's the same problem with melatonin. There are some vitamin D supplements with a fraction of what is stated in terms of concentration of vitamin D3 on the nutrition facts. And then some of them have like 10 times as much vitamin D. So there's just like this huge variation where you're like, it says it has 5 ,000 IUs, but it only has 500. There's a lot of different factors that could be contributing to that as well. And then there's also like, you know, in terms of like people getting sun exposure, you said you don't wear sunscreen.

1:47:22Some people do. People that have darker skin pigmentation have melanin. That's a natural sunscreen. There have been studies showing that like, for example, out of the University of Chicago, there was a study that was published a few years back showing African-Americans have to stay in the sun six to 10 times as long as a Caucasian to make the same amount of vitamin D3 from the same amount of sun exposure because they have a natural sunscreen, melanin, which is that darker skin pigmentation. It's a natural sunscreen. It's also why their skin always looks great as they're aging. You're like, oh, you're 75.

1:47:53Your skin looks like you're 30. Yeah. I remember, I won't mention him by name, but meeting this African-American fellow and I thought he was like 25 and he was 53 and had like five bigs. And the way we got to that as I was like, Oh, you, are you married? And he's like, I have five kids. And I was like, wait, what? You have five kids. You don't look Mormon. Like, wait, what's going on here? And, uh, and lo and behold. So let me, let me dig into some of this real quick. So recommended brands for vitamin D and how much should someone like me potentially be taking as a starting point? Because I'm also wary of taking too much vitamin D.

1:48:29I don't want to overdose on vitamin D. It seems like there are some risks associated with that. Maybe I'm overstating them. But how do you think about that? And then in terms of this rate limiting factor that you mentioned, magnesium, what type of magnesium, how much, how should I think about both of these? Okay. So first of all, we need to talk about vitamin D levels and what the optimal levels are. And that's really important for someone to figure out how much they should supplement with. I tend to think anywhere between 40, 60 to 80, like 40 to 80 nanograms per mil, you're in an optimal range.

1:49:04I like 40 to 60. I think that's my sweet spot. And that's because there's lots of studies out there showing all cause mortalities lower within that range. So 50 nanograms per mil would be great. I mean, that's a great place to be if you're below 30. If you're about just 30, you might want to try to get up to 40. So depending on where you are... Let's just say for argument's sake that I'm at 30. I think I'm probably closer to 40, but let's say it's 30. Okay. For someone that's at 30 nanograms per mil is supplementing with 5 ,000 IUs a day? Yeah. Or 4 ,000? 5 ,000? Yeah, 5. 5 ,000 IUs a day and getting an hour of sun in the summer without sunscreen, you probably should be closer to 50 nanograms per mil, I would say, if you're taking that.

1:49:54I'll check my last labs. I just had them pulled two weeks ago, so I'll double check. Right. So for someone in that case, you might go up to 7 ,000 IUs and check and see where you're at a month later. Then in the 40 to 50 range, then that's your optimal dose to take. And this is an important conversation to have, Tim, because it really is, there's an individual component here and people just want to, at the end of the day, they want to, how much do I take? How much do I take? Like, well, you have to get a vitamin D blood test. This is one of those that you have to really measure because, as you mentioned, there's huge variation there in terms of absorption and then the magnesium issue, right?

1:50:30And that's something, again, so people, there's the RDA for magnesium, right? So for men, it's about 400 milligrams a day. For women, it's about 300 milligrams a day of magnesium intake from diet or supplemental sources. If you're taking a supplement and also if you're athletic and sweating a lot and using the sauna, those requirements can go up between 10 % to 20 % depending on how physically active you are. If you're like the endurance athlete, you're on the 20 % higher range. If you're more just like the average, like I'm a committed exerciser, then you might have to go up 10 % above that. So typically the best forms of magnesium to take are the forms of magnesium that are the organic forms.

1:51:15So that would mean it's bound to like a salt, like magnesium citrate or magnesium malate or magnesium taurate. Those are more bioavailable than magnesium oxide, for example. There's also magnesium glycinate, which is also a very bioavailable form. It's the form that I take as well. And dose range, you know, you can take 300 milligrams a day and probably not have an EGI distress. And so that gets you most of the way there and then you get the rest from your diet, right? You're eating some leafy greens, you're eating maybe some almonds or something, which are really high in magnesium. If you're not getting any greens at all, then you're going to have to go up a little bit more to the 400, 450 milligram range, especially if you're athletic.

1:52:00But if you're taking something like electrolytes, you're getting some magnesium there. So you can figure out how much magnesium is in your electrolyte and that can be counted towards it as well. There's also magnesium threonate, which is the magnesium form that is allegedly able to cross the blood-brain barrier better than other forms of magnesium that I mentioned. And I say allegedly because it's animal studies that have shown that. There have been a couple of human studies. Unfortunately, there's a conflict of interest. They were done by the makers of the magnesium threonate supplement. So that's always important to keep in mind.

1:52:37But they have shown that magnesium 3NA could improve some cognitive scores if you kind of pulled all the cognitive scores together. And so I think that there's no reason why if you're interested in cognition and stuff trying the magnesium 3NA, a lot of people like it as well. So that's another form of magnesium. Although I do think you should probably take some magnesium glycinate along with that because you don't want all the magnesium going into your brain. You want some of it going into your liver and activating the enzymes that are converting vitamin D3 into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, right? So that is something to keep in mind.

1:53:10If that form of magnesium indeed is going into the brain more, you want to make sure you're getting some of the other forms to cover the other bases of other organs as well. What brand of vitamin D supplementation and magnesium glycinate do you use? Is that also Thorne or are they other suppliers? I use pure encapsulations for the vitamin D. I have some friends, mutual friends of ours, that like the Vessisorb vitamin D3. So people that are not able to increase their vitamin D as well, Vessisorb really increases the bioavailability of a lot of things, including ubiquinol, the CoQ10 I mentioned.

1:53:50I should have mentioned that by my dad, that's the form I get for him because it increases the bioavailability. Also some fish oil has been shown to increase the bioavailability. So Vessisorb vitamin D3 can be found at pure encapsulations. I don't have an affiliation with them either. They also have a lot of clean third-party tested products as well. And then I use their magnesium glycinate. For the magnesium threonate, I use zymogen. I like the zymogen magnesium threonate. Great. All right. Thank you. I will get on the magnesium. And I will also check my last labs. I mean, I am very bespoke about this stuff.

1:54:24And to your point, you got to check your levels, guys. You can't just be shooting in the dark here. It's not a good idea. All right. Where should we zig and zag to next? Do you want to talk about microplastics and mitigation strategies? It's really a big mess. And the microplastics are now, it's not just, okay, well, I'm not going to drink out of bottled water, plastic bottled water. or, you know, if you can get any kind of water filter, any kind of water filter is great. Reverse osmosis is the best because it filters out the smallest, smallest nanoplastics, which are the kind that are actually crossing the blood-brain barrier and getting into the brain.

1:55:03In the brain, they're associated with Alzheimer's disease and all kinds of things. But we now know they're in chewing gum. So anything with the word gum base is made of a plastic polymer. So if you chew gum, it has to be plastic-free gum. And it's not the same, I'll tell you that. but it's in gum. It's tea bags. You know, tea bags, if you make tea with tea bags, all sorts of tea bags. They're releasing like just thousands of microplastic into your beverage. They're in essentially everything. And the problem is, is that it's very hard to avoid. The best things that you can do to avoid them is reduce exposure, which would be the water filter.

1:55:39Try to avoid drinking out of any type of, you know, water that's in a plastic bottle. But it turns out a new study just came out showing it's also been found in glass bottles. And the reason for that, I know, I know. It's like, are you kidding me? Come on. Apparently, the paint that's on the lid of the glass bottle is like shedding little particles into the beverage. And those are microplastics because the paint is like got plastic in it. And so essentially my take home from this is if you're traveling and you have to choose between a plastic water bottle with water in it and a glass one to buy, I would still buy the glass one because the particle size is higher, it's larger in the glass bottles.

1:56:25And that doesn't get absorbed in the gut very well at all, if any. You actually excrete it through feces. And so I think the next study that's going to be done will show this. Essentially, I'm sort of speculating here, but because the size matters, the size of plastics in the plastic bottles are super small. And that's really absorbed well by the gut epithelia and taken up into the bloodstream and gets to the other organs. Also, the plastic chemicals like BPA are in plastic. They're not in the glass. I still think that opting for glass is the best option, even though that study came out, oh, glass has more plastic than plastic bottles.

1:56:58It's like one of those sensational headlines. The devil's in the details, right? There's always like nuance there. The size matters. In this case, size matters. The size matters in this case, for sure. But, you know, when it comes to, you know, people want to know, well, is there anything I can do to sort of detox these microplastics, right? Like that's the big concern that people have. Well, if I can't reduce, if it's impossible to reduce my exposure because they're just absolutely everywhere, then can I sort of get rid of them? And unfortunately, there's not a lot of evidence right now out there that you can, perhaps some of this electrophoresis sort of thing where you kind of filter your blood.

1:57:35But like, who's doing that? Like, maybe you'll do it. But like, you know, that's not something that the public's generally going to do. And I don't even know that I'm going to do it. It's also even if they were going to do it or willing to do it, it's not readily accessible or cost effective for people to use. Exactly. Yeah. So again, your best strategy here is minimizing your exposure to them. And the way to do that for one would be obviously a water filter top of the list, because the water that's coming through your tap, you know, through your sink does have microplastics in it. And that's a major, major source of microplastic exposure for many, many people.

1:58:16So if you can get any type of water filter, again, you can even get countertop reverse osmosis water filters. Those are great for filtering out the majority of microplastics. I wonder if the big Berkey countertop filtration system... is effective at filtering out microplastics. I don't know. It is. It's effective at filtering out microplastics. It's not clear about like the nano nano, like the super, super small size ones. It might, it might not. I don't know, but it does definitely the micro size ones. It does filter out microplastics. So the thing with reverse osmosis is it's really filtering out all like even the nanoplastics as well.

1:58:56Of course, you have to consider like re-adding like certain minerals and trace elements that are found in water back to your water. and some reverse osmosis companies do that. You can have them put on a filter that'll just add it back in after it filters out all the microplastics. But you can also just buy mineral drops and put those in your water or you can take a mineral supplement that has some of these minerals that are taken out as well. The other thing I do want to mention is that the plastic associated chemicals are another concern and that would be like the BPA, BPS. These chemicals are endocrine disruptors.

1:59:30They disrupt hormones. They're also associated with Alzheimer's disease. They're associated with cancer, all sorts of things, right? And those can actually, I think, this is a big speculation on my part just based on animal studies. I think sulforaphane plays a role in detoxing BPA from our system. And that's because of the whole situation where it activates the very same enzymes that do excrete BPA through urine. It does that and it's been shown in animal studies. animal studies that are given sulforaphane and then given a high dose of BPA, it completely blunts the toxicity of the BPA, which is pretty interesting as well.

2:00:10So the other thing to keep in mind is heat. And I'll say this, all the to-go cups that you're out there buying when you go to your favorite coffee shop, fill in the blank for the most part, with the exception of the blue bottle coffee, phenomenal. They're great. All these paper cups are lined with plastic. And when you add a hot beverage into the plastic lining, it releases like all these microplastics into your beverage and it releases the chemicals like BPA into them, like 50 fold. Blue bottle coffee, by the way, they apparently line their cups with sugarcane, polylactic acid. And so they don't have any plastic.

2:00:44I remember the other day I went into a blue bottle coffee shop and I was like, I really wanted to get a hot tea. And I was like, do you guys line your cups with plastic? And she's like, no, we line them with sugarcane. I was like, yes. So that's something to keep in mind. You see a lot of people drinking these to-go cups everywhere and you're pouring a hot beverage into it. It's a really, really major source of microplastic exposure because you're accelerating the breakdown of the plastic. He accelerates the breakdown of the plastic. And essentially, you're doing that in real time, like in an instant, right?

2:01:11Right. Bring your own cup. The tea bags, right? And the tea bags. So you have to do loose leaf tea, which is what now I'm like always, it's got to be loose leaf. I'll bring my own little, I'll sometimes open the tea bag out and I bring my own little tea steeper thing with me. The half globes that connect together? Mine are the ones that you kind of squeeze on it and opens up and then closes the clamps back together. But yeah, so I use that because the tea bags, again, you're getting the heat on top of the plastic polymers that are making up the tea bag and accelerating to break down the plastic.

2:01:44So you're drinking plastic beverage, right? There's all these health consequences now associated with microplastics. You mentioned the brain. It's been found like 20 times to accumulate 20 times more in the brain than in other organs. And people with Alzheimer's disease have up to 20 times more microplastics in their brain than people that didn't have Alzheimer's disease. And then the same goes for like cardiovascular disease. There's been a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine about a year ago showing that people that had microplastics in their whatever aortic part that they were doing surgery on, those individuals like ended up dying of a heart attack.

2:02:20like within the next three years versus ones that didn't have any microplastics. Anyways, all sorts of interesting stuff. We don't know enough about it, but I think enough said, we do know that they're not good and we want to try to avoid them as much as we can and that they are pervasive. They're everywhere, right? It's ubiquitous. Yeah. And there's some simple things people can do. I mean, this is not necessarily in the same category, but it's like, look, the effects at least seem to be, I don't know if they're well-established. Maybe there are animal studies on this, but certainly there's a lot of seemingly compelling evidence pointing to the effects of, say, phthalates as endocrine disruptors on male fertility.

2:02:58And it's like, look, if you have shampoo or soap with a really strong fragrance, just stay away from it. I mean, they're like very simple guidelines for some of these things that I think can be very helpful. Yeah, the microplastic stuff is kind of terrifying. I did not realize the gum. I knew about the tea bags, the water filtration, did not realize the gum. I don't chew a lot of gum, but one of my relatives who has Alzheimer's has chewed like four packs of gum a day for 10 years. And I was like, oh shit, I wonder if that's a contributor. Wow. That's crazy. I started chewing gum when I learned about the research showing that xylitol could inhibit some of the S mutagens bacteria that are involved in cavity formation.

2:03:46And then a few years later, you're like, God damn it. Well, I was able to reverse cavities multiple times. And my doctor was like, keep doing it. And I'm like, yes, the xylitol. And then I, yeah, I found out like, it was like this year I found this out, Tim. This year the study came out with the gum. And I was devastated. I mean, I've chewed so much gum, so much gum. And I've let my child chew it. And it's like, all I could think about was how great it was for the teeth. And now it's like, oh my God, this has been a source of microplastics that I had no idea. I did thankfully find an alternative xylitol source of gum that is microplastic-free.

2:04:23But yeah. It's like chewing on bark. Is it like chewing on tasteless bark? It's actually made from bark. No, it's made from like trees, like some kind of sap or something from the bark. Like resin or something. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds delicious. You can't just do xylitol mints. You have to chew it. I guess you have to get it up. You can do zalitolments. Yeah, you can do zalitolments. I have those as well. Well, you know, just to, on the same thread of, you know, you don't always get it right, completely right. I was looking at some of the research doc that I have in front of me. And there's one section that I highlighted, which was each three-hour increase in nighttime fasting was linked to 20 % lower odds of elevated hemoglobin A1C, right?

2:05:11this long-term marker of blood glucose. And then one of your bullets was the effects of alcohol on the brain and cancer risk. And so I was reading this document over dinner. I sent this to you and my time zones are all screwed up because I just got back from Polynesia. And so I'm eating at like 10 PM, first of all. And then I had a glass of wine. So I put the glass of wine on top of my research document with all of this text visible and I sent it to you and I was like, am I doing it right?

2:05:42You're not going to always get it right. But let's talk about, do you want to talk about the booze for a second? I mean, so alcohol, yeah. And especially since we were talking about A.B.E.4. Just to depress people after the microplastics. I know. It's like, you can't have any enjoyment at all if you want to live a long, healthy life. No, you need to find a good balance, obviously. So alcohol is a toxin. It's also a lot of fun, right? I mean, it's fun to drink and have a glass of wine. Sometimes it helps kind of, it feels like you're lowering your stress, lowering some inhibitions. It's fun to do with a group of friends and stuff.

2:06:22It's not so great for the brain, though. And certainly, if you're concerned about Alzheimer's disease and dementia risk, And I will say that there's been a lot of mixed research out there looking at alcohol consumption and dementia and Alzheimer's disease where some of it says, well, if you're doing moderate alcohol consumption, you can actually have a protective effect against dementia and Alzheimer's disease, right? Where it's like this idea that alcohol, like a glass of wine a day, is actually beneficial for you. So you should be drinking that. I wonder if it's actually these social interactions facilitated by alcohol versus the moderate alcohol itself.

2:06:56I wonder. Well, there's a lot of things going on here. Certainly social interactions, that's a confounding factor. Also, when people were then looked for their APOE genotype, it was found that it was actually in the non-APOE4 carriers, that you would find that benefit, not in the APOE4 carriers. And then on top of that, there's been all this research that over the years has looked at moderate alcohol consumption. And depending on the study, that number changes, which is such a big bummer. It's like, well, what does that even mean? In some cases, it can be, you know, seven drinks a day. In some cases.

2:07:33Seven drinks a day? Sorry. A week. Oh, my gosh. No. In some cases, it's seven drinks a day. Obviously, a week for a woman. But for a man, it's like 14 drinks a week. Wonder who authored that study. Yeah, exactly. It's a big difference. But on average, like, moderate alcohol consumption is more like a seven drinks a week. Seven drinks a day would definitely be heavy alcohol consumption. that would be substance use or alcohol use disorder. Let's cut the substance abuse part out. Alcohol use. Why can't you say abuse anymore? Why do these things have to keep changing? It's so ridiculous. And it's hard for me because I'm always tripping on my words.

2:08:07Use disorder sounds better than abuse. I mean, what are the reasons behind this? Do you know? I guess it's politically correct. I'm finding all this psychedelic stuff and it was like abuse for a long time and then all of a sudden, nope, verboten. Can't say that. Who knows? It's funny. I still have read so much of the literature that I still say abuse because that's what I'm familiar reading. But anyways, back to this, what I was saying, which is seven weeks. Sorry. All right. We're going to cut this out, Tim. Seven drinks a week. How many drinks have you had before this podcast, Rhonda? Well, I did have some ketone ester.

2:08:46There's a little bit of alcohol that is involved with that. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, watch out for the 1-3-butan dial. anyway. Right. There's something called the sick quitter hypothesis, which is essentially a lot of these studies were comparing people that are drinking this moderate alcohol consumption with non-consumers, people that abstain from drinking. And it turns out that many, many, many, many studies did not account for the sick quitter aspect, which is essentially someone gets sick. Oh, sick quitter. I got it. Sick quitter. Quitter, yes. So essentially what it means is they get sick and so they quit drinking alcohol.

2:09:29And then when they're filling out their questionnaire, you know, however many years later, whatever, they are asked, how many drinks do you have a week? And they say zero because they quit. The question wasn't asked, were you a former drinker? prior drinking habit. Yes, very important. And now more studies are, when they're doing the questionnaires, are asking that question. But many, many, many years and many, many studies did not ask that question. And so it's very possible when you're looking at these, you know, cohorts of people that are comparing moderate alcohol consumption to, you know, no alcohol consumption, they're saying, oh, look, there's a benefit.

2:10:08You have less cardiovascular disease risk, you have less dementia risk if you drink versus not drink. We don't really know if that's because these people were former drinkers and did so much damage already that that's why they're getting dementia more. In the non-drinker group. In the supposed non-drinker group. Quote, unquote, non-drinker group. Right. Which could have been a former drinker. But I think at the end of the day, when you look at alcohol and cancer, it's just unambiguous, right? Alcohol is now classified as, I think it's a, is it a group one carcinogen? It's known to play a role in causing cancer.

2:10:48There's no gray area here. And there's many, many different cancers that it's associated with. So alcohol does get metabolized into acetyl aldehyde. That is something that can be a mutagen, it is a mutagen, can cause cancer, right? And so there's a lot of different cancers associated with breast cancer, colon cancer, for example. Breast cancer is a big one because women's lifetime risk of breast cancer is already high. I mean, a woman has a lifetime risk of one in eight of getting breast cancer. So if you have a room with eight people, one of those women, if you're at a dinner party, you know, and eight women are there, then one of those women will come down and be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime.

2:11:29So when you add alcohol consumption on top of that, if you're talking about moderate alcohol consumption, that risk can go to one in six, which is very significant for lifetime risk, right? So I do think that alcohol, I mean, obviously, like some people enjoy it. And I don't know that there's any amount that's actually safe. But if you're really like looking for a number, it seems like one or two drinks a week seems to be the safe spot. I mean, the safest would be zero, zero drinks. But like if you're really not wanting to have the damage, the light drinking, which is like the one to two drinks a week, that's where you're probably the best off.

2:12:09Talking about a weekend, right? You have a weekend and you're doing like a glass of wine, maybe Friday or Saturday night. That's the safest if you're looking for like some alcohol consumption. If you're going above that, just be aware. There is definitely a risk of increasing dementia, increasing cancer risk. However, there are other lifestyle factors that also play a role here, like being obese and exercise. In fact, there's some of the exercise, some of the alcohol and dementia studies that have shown an increase in dementia incidence with alcohol consumption were negated by people that were highly physically active.

2:12:43So I do think there's other things to consider. You can't just silo everything, right? I mean, you've got to look at the whole flexion. So air squats before gelato and my tequila shots. Well, let me ask you, what is the purported mechanism, maybe it's known, by which alcohol increases the likelihood that you will experience some of these maladies like cancer, dementia, etc.? Is it acting as an acetyl aldehyde acting as a mutagen and therefore just smashing your DNA so you have these mutations that then proliferate and turn into some type of... dangerous cancer. Like, is there more to the story of mechanism of action?

2:13:25Yeah. I mean, acetylaldehyde is one aspect of it. It's an important one, but the alcohol itself is causing inflammation. I mean, it's causing gut permeability, essentially. It's very hard on the gut. And so what ends up happening is you release inflammatory factors into your bloodstream. Lipopolysaccharide gets released into the bloodstream. Inflammation gets, you know, activate. Inflammation is a major cause of cancer and also brain aging. So the brain aging aspect is definitely linked to the oxidative stress component and the inflammation component. Damage is happening to neurons. And I think one of the reasons why people with ApoE4 are a little more sensitive to alcohol is because the repair processes in individuals with ApoE4 isn't as robust.

2:14:12It's compromised already. It's compromised already, right? And so they're not able to repair that damage that's being generated from the alcohol, whereas people without the 8.4 somewhat can repair it a little bit better. And then you add the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier on top of that, and then you're just getting more inflammation into the brain. And neuroinflammation is a major cause in Alzheimer's disease. I mean, it's really a known factor now. And you're disrupting mitochondria. You're disrupting just everything you know about to be important for health is sort of affected by alcohol through a variety of mechanisms.

2:14:43Do you ever drink? I don't drink very much. I used to drink more. You know, sometimes I go several months without having anything. I do. So I'm not like, I'm not putting you on the stand here. I don't drink all the time, but I'm just, I'm just giving you a little leeway. Yeah. I used to drink like at least, you know, a couple of times a week, you know, where I would do like the weekend thing, but I don't drink much anymore. Once in a while, I'll have like a glass of Prosecco for a celebration. I do enjoy it, but I definitely try to limit it to certainly once a week. But like I said, these days I'll go like, you know, a couple of months without having anything.

2:15:20And then I'll have a social situation where I like to do it. And the great thing about that is I'm so sensitive to the alcohol that I'm such a lightweight. And it's great because I get like one glass of Prosecco and I'm like, this is amazing. I forgot to mention with respect to the dementia risk and alcohol, you asked about mechanisms, the sleep aspect, right? Oh, for sure. That's a huge one. Yes. It's a huge one because alcohol does disrupt sleep despite the fact that people - That's massive. Massive. People use it because, I know people that use it because it helps them fall asleep easier. So it's definitely something that decreases that sleep latency.

2:15:58People can fall sleep easier, but it completely disrupts. So they have more awakenings in the middle and in the night and it disrupts REM sleep. I mean, so there's every reason to definitely not drink and certainly don't drink close to bedtime. You want to kind of be able to get rid of the alcohol before you go to sleep. Going back to your picture, you were doing everything wrong, but... Oh, that was... Yeah. Am I doing it right? Yeah. That was very much deliberate. But Rhonda, one thing, and I'm so curious if maybe you've heard reports of this. I can ask my audience and figure it out. Wasn't placebo effect because I didn't expect it.

2:16:35But it seems like when in ketosis, like past 1.5 millimolars, even above like 1.2 for me, and I use a Precision Extra device to track that. I've tried a number of other devices that are remarkably erratic. Like in any case, I am much more sensitive to alcohol, much, much, much, much, much more sensitive to alcohol, which is great because then I'm a cheap date, right? I could have my one glass of mezcal or whatever and I'm good. And I don't drink super often. I might take like three or four weeks off, but then it'll be like this week I'm in New York City. This is a city of drinking. A lot of people have decided to do ketamine instead, which I think is a Faustian bargain shitty trade for a number of reasons.

2:17:15but and then i'll stop you know party with my oldest friends this weekend i'm sure there's going to be drinking and then i'll stop for two weeks and take a month off or two months off or something like that's kind of how i operate these days but the ketosis seems to sensitize me which is i thought was pretty interesting i hadn't noticed that before when i was in ketosis probably because i wasn't drinking during those periods but on the ketamine substitute right oh this is what I'm using now as a healthier alternative. I think the, is this risky question is often, is this risky or is this bad for me can be answered in absolute terms, but it can also be answered in relative terms.

2:18:00So zero alcohol might be better than two drinks. Seems pretty unequivocally that's the case. But if you then ask in relative terms, as compared to what, if you're swapping in another behavior or smoking after your dinner or i mean smoking is a whole different kettle of fish that we could unpack some other time nicotine is pretty interesting but lung cancer less interesting there is the as compared to what when people find another coping mechanism so i just wanted to throw that out there as just another question that i think is is worth people asking If they're going to abandon something, that's great if you can just delete it without replacing it with something.

2:18:43But if there is a substitute, if there is an alternative or something that you may end up adding to your behavior or your consumption, just to be aware of that, because you have to measure A versus B, not just A versus lack of A. I just wanted to throw that out there. I've seen so many people unravel from ketamine that it's, I feel, a moral responsibility to mention it because it can be so, so incredibly addictive. Fast acting, short duration, even though it is very successfully used to treat, say, treatment-resistant depression when it's administered in a clinic at reasonably higher doses for, let's just say, six infusions over two weeks, something like that.

2:19:23John Crystal at Yale has done a lot of great research and his teams and co-authors used recreationally actually increases your predisposition to depression. I think psilocybin is a better candidate when it comes to something like that, you know, because it's really not addicting. I don't know if you saw this, Tim, but this really, it's, of course, people may not be aware, but it's been shown to treat depression as well. And more than one study. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The two major applications are major depressive disorder and alcohol use disorder as it stands right now. This study just came out like, gosh, like last two weeks or something showing is the animal study that psilocybin increased life expectancy by almost 20 % in mice.

2:20:08Yeah, I saw that. I think that was out of Emory. Am I making that up? I think it was out of Emory. Yeah, I think it was. And I remember looking at it because I was like, wait a fucking second. I think they were giving something like five milligrams of psilocybin to these rats or mice. And I'm going to mess up the numbers a little bit. but I was like, wait a second, because I've funded a lot of the science. And for humans who are walking around at one, let's just call it whatever, 125 to 200 pounds, it's 25 to 30 milligrams. So on a like migs per kigs basis, are those rats getting like the equivalent of 300 dried grams of mushrooms on a monthly basis?

2:20:56I was like, let me look at that. Let me look at that a little more closely. And the metabolism is very different, but it's still non-trivial. I do think those little furry friends are probably tripping balls. Because all of the, I do think the life extension stuff is interesting. And I would say just anecdotally, looking at people who have consumed in South America ayahuasca for decades, they can't prove cause and effect, but almost always sharper than the rest of the people in their age cohort. Almost always. which is interesting. I mean, it raises more questions than it provides answers. But the life extension stuff is interesting.

2:21:33And I've been funding some science that Chuck Nichols is doing, looking at the anti-inflammatory applications of different psychedelic compounds. And they are profound, really profound. And what makes it most interesting is that it can be achieved depending on the compound, and he's tested dozens of them, with very, very trace quantities, in sub-perceptual quantities. You do not need any hallucination, any reality distortion to achieve the anti-inflammatory effects. So like a microdosing? Yeah. Even less than what someone would consider a microdose, like a nano dose. It's remarkable. And part of my reason for looking at the fasting, the ketogenic diet, also looking at cold exposure.

2:22:22And most recently, this is a whole separate topic, obviously for another time, I'll be having a scientist on this podcast soon, super credible, very, very well cited to talk about vagus nerve stimulation. But when you look at how fasting, right? I was talking about this old Soviet work looking at schizophrenia. Okay, interesting. Ketosis for epilepsy and also all sorts of psychiatric conditions, but also things like potentially rheumatoid arthritis or any number of Crohn's disease, let's say in the case of like vagus nerve stimulation. My theory also with psychedelics is that in a lot of cases, the antidepressant effects, the anxiolytic effects, this would be true for exogenous ketones as well, maybe largely, I don't think it's a trivial piece of the puzzle mediated by anti-inflammatory effects addressing chronic inflammation, including neuroinflammation.

2:23:20Totally. And so, as you said, right, if you're chronically suffering from neuroinflammation, does not bode well for later life with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and things like this. So I'm trying to throw everything, sort of the kitchen sink at this to see what these subjective and then measurable objective effects are. So it's like, okay, if I did intermittent fasting and I'm doing then cold exposure during, which by the way, past a certain point does seem to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation, particularly with certain breathing patterns. Like, okay, if I did that during the intermittent fast, I'm taking the sulforaphane, right?

2:24:01Doing all that stuff. And then the exercise we talked about. And once a quarter doing a three to seven, let's call it probably every quarter I used to do a three-day fast. I don't think I'd do a seven-day every quarter. That'd probably be once a year. But just looking at like, okay, and then like the curcumin, right? It's like, all right, can we throw, if we threw four or five at this problem and didn't get too crazy, go America, like more is better. Like we did the minimal effective dose, but recognize there might be a synergistic effect. What happens and what can we measure? So I'd like to do, and I'm in the position where I could spend a lot of money just to see like, okay, if we take out my white blood cells and then look at their ability to produce cytokines after certain interventions, like, okay, cool.

2:24:49Like let's spend the money. Let's see what happens after you do this stuff for a couple of weeks. Very, very, very, very interested in all this. Let's do this. Rhonda, where can people find you, find what you're up to, get into all things Rhonda Patrick? I have a podcast. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube. It's called Found My Fitness. You can also just search Rhonda Patrick. One of the OGs. You've been doing it for a while now. Doing it for a while, yeah. And I've got a website, foundmyfitness.com. you can find all my stuff there you can follow me on twitter or sorry x and also i still do it i still do it you can follow me on x or instagram found my fitness all one word or look just search my name dr ronda patrick and you have a newsletter i have a newsletter yeah i send out a weekly email that covers some fascinating new either science health fitness nutrition related study and usually it's applicable.

2:25:48Sometimes it's something that's misunderstood in the media and I break it down every week. I sent you the creatine one. You know, we covered a vitamin D, dementia one as well. I mean, a lot of different fascinating studies. So you can again find that on my website, foundmyfitness.com. You can sign up for the newsletter there. Awesome. Yeah, I took so many notes. As always, I always take a lot of notes when we have our conversations, not necessarily on the podcast, but also in our text exchanges, very actionable i so appreciate what you do in the world you've called a lot of things early looking at our timelines it's been wild to look back and i'm like wow april 2014 talking about the stuff that now all the fitness influencers are ranting and raving about today in 2025 it's like yeah you called you've called a lot of things early and i appreciate your ability to simplify without mangling, simplify without disfiguring the science.

2:26:47I really respect that. It's not easy to do. It is such a service to people who care about being scientific literate, but they also care about and benefit from someone who can take what could be impenetrable and translate it without mistranslating it into something that they can test with limited downside and plausible or supported upside. I just think it's such a tremendous service. So I appreciate you, Rhonda. I really do. I appreciate you too, Tim. Thank you for all you do. And your podcasts have been great. I've listened to them over the years. You're one of the few podcasts that I've listened to.

2:27:25So you've got great, insightful, thoughtful questions and I've read your books. So I appreciate all you do. So the feeling's mutual and I'm glad we get to still have conversations over 10 years later. I know, I know. I love it. Yeah, the long game. It's fun to play the long game. So nice to see you, Rhonda. Everyone, we will put links to everything Rhonda Patrick in the show notes. Check her out. You will not be disappointed. And as always, until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off.

2:28:06And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over the weekend. that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

2:28:45And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Traditional budgeting apps, they can be interesting. Yeah, they can be helpful. I've tried out a bunch, but they don't compare to the complete financial command center that you get with today's sponsor, Monarch Money.

2:29:22And a number of my friends have recommended them publicly, have recommended it to me. And I had my entire team basically test this app out and they're all still using it. Monarch is like your own personal CFO giving you full visibility and control so you can stop merely earning and start growing. For instance, one person on my podcast team has tried four other budgeting apps, said linking his accounts, which includes banking, investments, and crypto had never been easier. And Monarch had the cleanest, simplest, yet most complete UI he's ever seen. It made him want to track his finances. Monarch was named the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025.

2:29:58And it's the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts with more than 30 ,000 five-star reviews. So get control of your overall finances, the whole shebang with Monarch Money. Use code TIM at monarchmoney.com. Just type it into your browser for half off of your first year. That's 50 % off of your first year at monarchmoney.com with code TIM. Creatine isn't just for muscle, it turns out. It's essential daily fuel for your brain, your body, and long-term performance. For me, I have Alzheimer's and dementia risk in my family. The cognitive benefits are the reason I take creatine every single day.

2:30:35And it also seems there's some evidence to support if you don't get enough sleep that you can use creatine to compensate, to recover from that. I also use it for that purpose. And today's episode sponsor, Momentus, is the gold standard in creatine. There's a lot of BS floating around, a lot of questionable creatine. But I choose them. Why? Because they source CreaPure creatine, the purest, most effective creatine monohydrate available, single sourced from Germany and not cut with fillers or junk, which is hard to avoid otherwise. Their new lemon travel packs make consistency easy, naturally flavored, perfectly portioned, single serve packets that you can take with you on the road or at any time to mix with water and you're set.

2:31:17every batch is NSF certified for sport this is something I look for on a lot of products I use which means it's independently tested for safety label accuracy and banned substances so if you've been curious about creatine this is your moment to get back on track or try it for the first time with a formula you'll actually enjoy it will make you feel great thanks to superior quality and quality assurance. So just go to livemomentus.com. That's live, M-O-M-E-N-T, like live moment, O-U-S, livemomentus.com slash Tim for 35 % off your first subscription or simply use code Tim at checkout, livemomentus.com.