Ben Greenfield: Biohack Your Way to Peak Health and Overall Wellness | Health and Wellness | E369

25:32Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. Speaking about your family, something interesting is that you've got two sons, and they're really privileged to be living in this biohacking life. Most families don't live this way. So if you could compare your family with the average American family, what do you think the difference is? Oh, my goodness. Well, first of all, I don't want to be mean or throw anybody under the bus. No, be mean. Like, what makes your family better, stronger? I'll give you a few examples. Let's say the average American family is eating out a lot and eating a lot of processed and packaged food at home.

26:13And sometimes thinking that they are making healthy choices, right? Like Trader Joe's, Costco, in some cases, Whole Foods, et cetera. Well, back to the blue zones, the reason that I think we see longevity correlated with a relative absence of processed and ultra-processed foods that are largely the type of foods that we eat out of packages and containers is because when that comprises the majority of your diet, you are by definition needing to consume more preservatives, more agents in that food that have been added to it to make it hyper-palatable so that whoever's selling it to you is able to get repeat business, which I have nothing against.

26:58I'm a capitalist, libertarian, but at the same time, you should know many of these places that you shop, if you're buying out of packages, they're designed to be hedonistic, hyperpalatable foods. And typically the food has less water content because when a food is packaged or processed, there's a higher risk of mold and poor shelf life if there's a lot of water and hydration in that product. So you wind up having food that's dehydrated, not as nutrient dense, and full of more preservatives and fillers than you would have if you were, say, shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store, right, where you see a lot of the produce, the fruit, the veg, the meat, the eggs, the dairy, the stuff that's a little less processed, or perhaps even growing some of your food at home or shopping at the farmer's market.

27:47So when you walk into our home and you go into the pantry or the refrigerator, you don't find a lot of labels that you could scan with one of those fancy food scanner apps, right? There's a lot of glass mason jars with quinoa and amaranth and millet and beans and legumes. And when you open the refrigerator, it's a lot of sprouts and fresh vegetables and fruits and foods that are for sure immediately recognizable, but also don't come out of packages. So I think that even if you're shopping at a place that you would consider to be healthy, The just check yourself if you're having like open lots of packages for every meal that you can consume.

28:25And that requires some time. It requires a return to perhaps a little bit more intimate relationship with how to prepare food. We live in a place in Idaho now where Uber Eats is even pretty difficult. But you and I started about 20 minutes late today. I went inside and I prepared a big cut of beef for dinner and I rubbed it down with salt and pepper and turmeric and a little beef tallow. And that'll go in the smoker later on. And that's going to take like a good 45 minutes out of my day compared to just dialing in and ordering food. But I'm developing a more intimate relationship with my food.

28:59My wife will probably make a salad from the garden. One of my sons might make some carrot fries or sweet potato fries. And we'll come together at the end of the day, and I'll get to this briefly, and celebrate as a family. And during that time that I'm losing those minutes or precious hours preparing me, and I'm still listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks, you know, having phone calls with my team members. So it's not as though you can't stack productivity on top of developing a more intimate relationship with your food. So that's one thing. I'll give you two more examples. Another is back to the movement piece.

29:35We weave movement into our lives all day long. My sons and I are always on Pomodoro break schedules where for every half hour, we're stopping for two to three minutes to do jumping jacks or push-ups or kettlebell swings. At the end of the day, our family is playing cornhole, bocce ball, some new game I saw on Shark Tank called paddle smash, pickleball, tennis. We have the sauna heat set up, so we're going back and forth from the heat to the cold. It's pretty rare that after about 5.30 or 6 p.m., you're going to find anybody in our family sitting around decompressing at the end of the day in front of a video game or TV.

30:14we're all just piled outside playing. Even in the winter, we'll go out to a barn or we'll go to an indoor tennis facility or we'll gather around the family room for something active. And so we weave activity into our lives. And my goal has always been with the family to make the house from obstacle courses to an old Frisbee golf course to converted the barn into a pickleball court to make the house such a fun place to move video games and screen time just aren't as appealing compared to having a bunch of fun in the jungle gym that we've created. So that'll be the second thing. And then the third, you know, and again, this ties into the blue zones, Hala is at the beginning of the day, you will find our entire family every day, non-negotiable, no questions asked gathered in a special morning family huddle where we all hug each other.

31:10We talk about our day. we're a christian family so we read the bible and pray together we talk about what people are doing that day who's got the cars and where what people are making for dinner and who's bringing what what time are we having dinner and it's just this big coming together at the beginning of the day that allows us to all just connect with each other in a way that i think a lot of modern western families don't do it's kind of like you wake up and everybody's like a ship passing in the night and just off doing their thing. We find that very similar to the relationship with my wife and I, right?

31:47If we don't calendar and systematize and structure date nights and time together, keeping your fingers crossed that it's gonna organically happened often doesn't pan out. So we have that. And then same thing, 7 p.m., light clockwork, our whole family gathers together at the end of the day. My sons and I usually discuss a chapter of a book because we go through a new book every two to four weeks. and it's like a father-son book club. So we start off with that. And then I get out the guitar. We sing a song together. We all start to pull out the different foods that we've prepared for the evening.

32:21We say a prayer and then we bust out card games, board games, party games, and just have a massive family party for like an hour and a half, you know, until like 8.30 or so. And we all clean the kitchen together and listen to music and joke and hang out and eventually wind up in one of my son's bedrooms or our bedroom. chatting some more and eventually saying goodnight to each other. And so we have these bookends on the day and it's good for the family and our connectivity. It's also good for me as like a workaholic driven entrepreneur to know that I've got boundaries, right? My boundaries are, I cannot just lock myself away in the office from 5am on because I know I have to be right there in the living room at 7am with my family.

33:08And every day is structured around that. And same thing. Like I cannot be like booking calls at 6 30 PM or banging out emails at 7 PM because I've built in that family gathering at 7 PM in the evening. So it helps put some boundaries on me because don't get me wrong. Like I'm wired up like a lot of entrepreneurs now and just work all day long. Unless I know my family's out there tapping their fingers on the kitchen counter, waiting for me to bust out the guitar at 7 PM. If I'm in my office on a zoom, that's not going to happen. So those are three things, eating close to the planet, weaving movement, making it fun into our daily lives, and then really emphasizing in the same way that we would systematize our calendar or any business activity, the activity of coming together as a family and connecting.

33:55So inspiring. And I know you've got this book, Boundless Parenting, that if anybody really wants to dive deep on your philosophy around that, they can go check that out. So you mentioned that you're making steak for dinner. Now, I talked to Dave Asprey. He's pro-beef, pro-meat. Dan, who studied the Blue Zones, like we just mentioned, said that those regions on average typically only eat about 20 pounds of meat per year, whereas the average American eats 200 pounds of meat per year. And so he's like, don't do meat, do beans instead. And beans have drama too with lectins. So it's very confusing.

34:32So talk to us about your perspective around meat. Yeah, there's always an enemy. It's like the dirty secret in the nutrition industry is if you want to make good money on a book, you write about the one perfect diet for all of humankind. And typically there's some kind of villain, you know, that they need to avoid the enemy. And you're really smart. You design some kind of supplement that will digest the villain for you. And you've got yourself a nice little nutrition business. You know, things just aren't as simple as that. This is such a deep question with so many tendrils into so many different areas.

35:04But a few things to think about is, first of all, there's this book I read. I think it was written in the 60s originally. I found it fascinating when I first picked it up at the library. It's called Biochemical Individuality. And as the name implies, it kind of goes into how we humans have such biochemical diversity, such genetic diversity, different sizes of our stomach and pancreas and liver and different vitamin D excretion rates and different abilities to digest oxalates that we can't say that there's one perfect diet for all of humankind. We can, of course, look at Dan Buehner's work and say, okay, well, we know that no matter what diet you're eating, you should have meals with families and not eat a lot of processed foods and have a good amount of dietary diversity in plants and herbs and spices.

35:50But the first thing to get out of the way is there's not gonna be one perfect diet for everybody. The second thing is that when it comes to meat consumption, there can be a lot of issues with the research on the health aspects, especially regarding red meat, because often the source of the meat is not taken into consideration with these studies. The demographics of the population consuming the meat and what else they're consuming along with it is often not taken into account. And the amount is also important to bear in mind, and I'll explain why briefly. But if you look at someone who, say, has heard that red meat is bad for you, which is something you hear a lot these days, that might be the same person who's smoking cigarettes, drinking a lot of alcohol, probably having a lot of seed oils and fried foods.

36:46And they can skew the demographic considerably, right? There's a way to eat red meat healthy. There's a way to eat red meat unhealthy. And I would say a lot of people, especially in a typical Western scenario, eat red meat in an unhealthy way, depending on the source of the meat, what it's consumed with, and what else their diet is comprised of. So the second thing is that when you look at meat and you look at the meat eaten as the muscle, that muscle has a high amount of the amino acid methionine in it. Methionine is something that can accelerate growth, and you'll find it in high amounts in a lot of supplements designed for muscle building or whatever.

37:28But if it's not balanced out with some of the other amino acids, particularly one called glycine, there can be a lifespan shortening effect because a mammal who's always in pro-growth tends to be at higher risk for things like carcinogenicity or heart disease. So if you look at the dietary habits of many of our ancestors or areas that are not necessarily in the blue zones, because despite how good the blue zones is, I think there's a little bit of a bias towards areas that eat a large amount of plant-based foods. If you look at areas where there are a high number of centenarians, other longevity hotspots that are consuming meat, they're often consuming meat in a nose to tail format, meaning they're having bone broth, bone marrow, liver, kidney, heart, and many parts of the animal that allow them to not just be consuming the muscle meat, the methionine in excess.

38:24I didn't get into the ditty gritty details of tonight's recipe, but the tri-tip I'm preparing, it's got a very basic, you know, salt, pepper, turmeric, oregano, garlic rub on it. But then while I cook it on the grill, it's covered with layering of beef tallow. And then I have bone marrow bones on either side of it that will go on top of the tri-tip as like the sauce. So I'm implementing various parts of the animal, the tallow, the bone marrow, and the meat itself when I'm preparing that recipe. And I'm also including herbs and spices that help to combat some of the potentially carcinogenic effects of heating or charring meat.

39:04And this brings me to the third thing to think about, and that's dietary diversity. We know that the gut microbiome is based on what you eat. And typically, the higher the amount of dietary diversity, the more diverse the gut microbiome. And the more diverse the gut microbiome, the better you become in departments like immunity, brain health, absorption of nutrients, bowel habits, etc. So if you again return to a typical westernized context of red meat intake, where you might have french fries, red meat, coke, and a salad might be like iceberg lettuce and a giant tomato drowned in ranch dressing.

39:50That's far different than what we see in a lot of the blue zones and other longevity hotspots where people are eating a wide variety of herbs, spices, fermented foods, fish, eggs, red meat, organ meats, a very wide and diverse array of foods. And the reason that's important is because the more diverse your microbiome, the more you're able to handle a lot of these plant defense mechanisms that you brought up, Paula, like oxalates, gluten, phytates. plants don't have teeth and claws and antlers and horns and hooves and nails so they've developed compounds that slightly irritate the digestive tract of a mammal that would then cause the mammal not to come back and nuke that plant population or cause the mammal to poop and propagate the seed out elsewhere of the plant but if we don't have guts that can handle those plant defense mechanisms, then they can also cause issues.

40:50Now, in trace amounts, and this is why a very myopic diet isn't such a good idea, in trace amounts, these are known as xenohormetic agents, these plant defense mechanisms that can actually induce your body's own antioxidant production that allow your body to become stronger over time the same way as it would with small amounts of sauna, cold, exercise, cardiovascular movement, strength, etc. Now, the more diverse your diet, the better your bacteria become at being able to handle these plant defense compounds. So kind of a long answer to your question, but when it comes to meat and diet in general, I think the general things to think about are where is the meat sourced from?

41:38What is the meat accompanied with, and hopefully that's not sugar, seed oils, and processed foods, are you consuming full parts of the animal in a diverse array of animals, fish, chicken slash poultry, meat, liver, organs, bone marrow, bone broth, et cetera? Do you have a high amount of dietary diversity in the realm of herbs, spices, plants, vegetables, fruits, berries, seeds, nuts, et cetera, to go along with that meat. And if so, a wide ranging omnivorous diet is overall a pretty good idea. And then finally, of course, we now live in an era where you can get a food allergy test, a genetic test, a blood test, a stool test, a urine test.

42:24And this is what a lot of my clients do when they come to me. They get all these tests and I sit down with all that data and I say, okay, you don't need vitamin D. Your levels are just fine. You are somebody who needs more vitamin C and more vitamin E in your diet. You have a true food allergy towards legumes and lectins are a big problem for you or oxalates are a big problem for you. So you aren't one of those people who just needs to have more dietary diversity to be able to digest these. They're a true allergy for you. So the data-driven approach now makes it a little bit easier to not guess, but painting with a broad brush, The devil's in the details.

43:01And for the most part, none of these foods that we call poisons are truly poisonous. It's just the amount, the sourcing, what they're combined with that you have to think about. So I was on Amazon the other day and I got into a rabbit hole and I found these vitamins that are like beef organs. And basically it's like beef liver, beef intestines, beef organs generally. And I bought a whole bunch of them. My boyfriend was like, what are you taking? Like, why are you taking these things? And I just thought it was really interesting. So what are your thoughts about, to me, I'm not going to go eat beef heart, but I would take a pill.

43:38What are your thoughts about that? I won't lie. It's hard to make liver and heart and kidney in foods like that taste good. And it also takes longer to prepare them because they tend to be more collagenous and tough. And when I cook foods like that, I even have to soak them in a dairy medium for like 24 hours, you know, like kefir or buttermilk to kind of draw out. some of the gamey flavor and enzymatically pre-digest some of these organ meats. And if that's not your jam and like the time thing, if that's not like your highest priority and you're like, okay, I will grill a steak for myself and my boyfriend, but I'm not going to like spend 48 hours figuring out how to do a liver heart casserole.

44:19Capsules like that can be kind of a cool shortcut. The only thing you have to bear in mind is that when you grind up and powder something like that, you're getting pretty highly concentrated versions of these organ meat. And organs tend to be very high in fat-soluble vitamins. Fat-soluble vitamins, you don't necessarily pee out. Your body can store them. And so I recommend everybody get a quarterly blood test anyways. But if you start onto a protocol that includes encapsulated organs, you should consider doing a test for vitamin A, D, and E particularly, just to make sure that you're not getting any toxic buildup of fat-soluble vitamins.

45:02And in most cases, if you're following the label required instructions, not having like a quarter bottle a day, and you're not stacking it on top of a whole bunch of other organ meat consumption, you're pretty good. And I would consider those to be kind of like nature's multivitamin. That of course highlights the fact that if you're taking those and also taking a multivitamin that has a bunch of vitamin A or D or E or K in it, you should just take that into account and monitor your blood work just to make sure you're not getting too much of a good thing. That's good advice. Okay. So are you measuring your biological age?

45:40Do you do this? It's called a DNA methylation clock. Are you doing that? Yeah, you can measure basically these methyl groups, these carbon dihydrogen groups. I think it's a CH2. They can be cofactors for a whole bunch of different metabolic processes in the body. And by measuring your rate of methylation, you can get what is probably to date the most current gold standard rough estimation of your biological age. So your chronological age, just like when you're born, biological age is how slowly are you aging? Now, a company called TrueAge Diagnostics has probably been the leader in the industry of age testing, and they've got some pretty robust, large population studies and big data showing that the biological age that a methylation clock like this tells you can be pretty close to what your actual biological age is.

46:41And the more you take care of yourself, typically the lower it is. So there's something to this test. They're more accurate. The ones that you used to get like 10 years ago were just based on the rate of telomere shortening. Those weren't super accurate because it was just, all they looked at was the telomeres on your white blood cells from a blood spot or a blood sample that you gave, which aren't indicative of telomere length on the rest of the body, and they were known to be kind of wildly inaccurate, the true age methylation tests are a little bit better at predicting how slowly you're aging.

47:13At the same time, I raise an eyebrows. For example, if somebody who's 80 shows a biological age of, let's say, 50, does that actually mean they're going to live another 30 years until they're 110, which is pretty rare these days? I mean, the longest living human on record, I think is 117. Not necessarily. So I think it still needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but it can give you a decent idea of biological age. I've been paying a lot more attention to tests that are looking at mitochondrial health and mitochondrial efficiency, because I think that's a better acute proxy for cellular health.

47:51I recently did a podcast with Versailles Health and they have a screening called a Me Screen. It tests your actual mitochondrial health. And that one, I think, is going to be a really good up and comer in terms of perhaps giving a little bit better indication of how well you're functioning biologically. And I think as they roll tests on the mitochondria out like that, it'll give us a better and better idea of biological age based on something that might even be more accurate or more informative than just methylation. Do you have some sort of age goal that you want to reach? no no i mean back to the longest living human on record when i see people say this happens in my industry right i people call me a biohacker so i fit into this category people say i'm gonna lift off 160 or 180 or 200 or someone on the planet right now has reached escape velocity or whatever they call it now where you know they're actually aging you know only one and three quarters of a day for every two days.

48:56So they've technically, you know, achieved some form of immortality. I think it's silly to expect that we are going to see in the next 10 years, some kind of scientific development that's going to allow us to extend average human lifespan by even like 10 years. Really? I think that's a pretty far cry. However, However, I think what we can extend is health spend. I think that's a more likely metric to adapt really well to a lot of these protocols like oxygen, air, light, electricity, water, supplementation, et cetera. So my plan is to live as healthy as possible, as close as possible to the day that I die.

49:42You know, if you look at how long a greenfield man my ancestry goes, typically, you know, somewhere between like 70 and 80 years old, maybe by doing a lot of the really healthy stuff that I do, I might get 90. I'd be super stoked if it was 100. But my goal is to just basically be throwing a football, riding a snowboard, swimming in the ocean, lifting weights as close as possible to whatever that day is. So it's more important to me to maintain strength and vitality than to chase a number.

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54:04Don't wait and protect your privacy. Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash yapfree and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash yapfree. Let's talk about mindset a little bit. Like I mentioned, I've interviewed Dave Asprey a bunch of times. I think one of the funniest moments on the show is when I was like, Dave, it was when he was 48. So you're 48 years old. And he's like, that's ageist. Don't call me that. I'm 27 % of my age goal.

54:39I'm going to live to be 160 or whatever he was saying. And he actually, in my last episode, was telling me that it's the mindset of him wanting to live to be 160 years old that actually keeps him young. Any thoughts around your mind and if your mind can really control your body in that way? Oh, I mean, we have studies that show this. For example, when you take older individuals and putting them in an environment in which there was a lot of these nostalgic items of their youth, similar TV sets to when they were in their, I don't remember the exact age, but let's say like 20s and similar paintings and layout of the house and colors and music.

55:21And by almost tricking the mind into thinking that it was living in a younger environment, They saw parameters related to aging favorably respond. And I think that people who hang out with younger people, who hit the gym, even when science says they're supposed to be getting weak and bone density is supposed to be decreasing, people who go out on adventures and mini-retirements throughout their life, I think on average tend to have more vitality and vigor later into age. I don't know they necessarily live longer per se. It's tough to say. I don't know that there's really, really good data we could pull on for that.

56:02But the idea of hanging out with young people, working out, doing adventures that people wouldn't normally expect you to do, introducing novelty into your life, learning new things constantly and being a lifelong curious learner, never thinking because you've graduated high school or college that learning is over, doing things that scare you every once in a while. these are all things that I weave into my own life, right? There's not a year that goes by still, and I'm 43 years old, that I'm not signed up for a bow hunting expedition or a spearfishing adventure or a Spartan race or a kettlebell competition or learning how to cook 10 random new things or learning a different finger style pattern on the guitar like I was last night to prepare for an open mic night later this month.

56:48Every day I ask myself, am I doing something that's introducing a novel stimuli on a daily basis. And on a yearly basis, is there at least one thing that I'm preparing to do that kind of scares the hell out of me, you know, in terms of either extrinsic social embarrassment or personal physical challenges or some type of mental mountain to climb. And I do think that that factors into keeping you young. Okay, I want to do one more question and then I want to do a game called Boundless or Bunk. Woo! So we touched on this slightly, but I never heard of this concept before researching. There's a concept called longevity escape velocity and it was popularized by Aubrey de Grey.

57:34And it's that science and medicine could extend human life faster than we age, allowing us to live indefinitely. So help me understand, I already said you don't really believe in it or you don't think it's a thing, but talk to us about it. I used the term earlier. I didn't cite Aubrey, but yeah, the term escape velocity is exactly what you've just described. And maybe I am biased because I believe in two elements of immortality that go beyond the idea that we can somehow, by being cold and hungry and libido-less, hunched over in a hyperbaric chamber or cold therapy and injecting as many stem cells and young plasma into our bodies as possible.

58:21Just keep getting an extra year and an extra year and an extra year. I don't think there's good science to show that is possible. However, I do believe in immortality through legacy and immortality of the soul, meaning one of the best things that a human being can do and one of the most rewarding and meaningful things that a human being can do is to have children. When you have children, you all of a sudden are surrounded by little human beings who you're training and educating and teaching and developing to become the most impactful people that they can be so they can go forward and make the world a better place using what you've taught them and do so a long time after you're dead and do so also if you've done a good job training them through your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren and beyond.

59:18So I think that we should be putting as much energy into our family and our children as we should be putting into the science of health optimization. And then secondarily, I mentioned earlier, I'm a Christian, so I also believe in an afterlife. And I believe that in the same way we should engage and the type of physical fitness and mental rigor I was describing earlier, we should have spiritual fitness baked into our lives that we're caring for this one invisible spark inside of us that will arguably go on to exist for eternity. And so for me, that looks like morning spiritual time, reading the Bible, praying, connecting to my creator, singing songs, rinsing, washing, and repeating that with the family.

1:00:10going to a church where I get to sing and hang out with other people who care for their souls and basically placing just as high an emphasis on this one immortal part of me as I do on all of the covering in the shell, which eventually maybe it is going to be 120 or 140 or 160 or 200, who knows, but eventually it's going to be gone. It's not going to be around forever. Physics and entropy dictate that that just can't happen. So I think that focusing on faith and focusing on family lets me see this through a different lens. And honestly, I think it's a really encouraging lens because I don't have to desperately grasp at straws.

1:00:51All I can say is, hey, be as healthy as I can be so I can make as much impact as I can. And also accept the fact that I will die someday, but I'm going to do the best job I can while I'm here on this planet to leave a lasting impact, train my children, and also ensure that my soul goes on for eternity. That's really beautiful. And honestly, Ben, it's why so many people trust you. It's why you've been able to build such an incredible brand is because you're really out here to help people and not sell them an unachievable dream. And I just really appreciate that authenticity. Okay, let's play boundless or bunk.

1:01:29So I'm going to rattle off a biohacking trend, things that we've been hearing about, and I want you to rate it one to 10, one being not good, 10 being really good. Let's go. NAD plus injections. Six. Six. Why? They're beneficial. Your pools of NAD do decline with age. Younger people aren't going to get a ton of benefit out of them. And research hasn't yet shown them to be the biggest dial mover for health, but I still place them on the side of the positive scale. Continuous glucose monitors for non-diabetics. Oh man, seven, maybe closing up on an eight. You know, I obviously wear one. I think what gets measured gets managed.

1:02:15It's one of the best ways to know how lifestyle, exercise, and food habits affect what is arguably one of the most important components of metabolic health, your glycemic variability, you know, how your blood glucose goes up and down during the day. Peptide therapy. Kind of like NAD, I'd put it at a six based on not a huge amount of robust long-term human data on a lot of the peptides. Some long-term data out of Russia on a few for longevity, like epitalon or MOTC, some personal anecdotal success with things like BPC-157 or TBD, T500 for injuries or Tessimorellin for muscle gain or even something like my wife uses when we're going to go on vacation to a tropical climate, something like melanotan for tanning.

1:03:03However, kind of like NAD, they're not like the biggest dial movers for health, but I still put them on the positive side of the scale at six. What is peptide therapy? What is it exactly? Hepatites are short chains of amino acids, usually 20 amino acids or shorter, that when injected can act on a specific organ with pretty good precision. So this morning, I was just in LA and one of my friends who I was with down there, she texted me and she has COVID and I was with her for like three hours. And so I injected something called thymusin alpha one this morning, which makes my body churn out a whole bunch of extra killer cells.

1:03:42And that's an example of using a peptide in a smart way to, in this case, act on the thymus to upregulate my immune system. Cold exposure for fat loss. For fat loss? Five, because it depends. New research shows that when you do a cold bath or cold exposure, the average person goes on to eat an extra 300 to 400 calories. so if you don't combine it with actual appetite control it's probably going to be a wash it is a myth that women shouldn't do it it's not like extra stressful for women and won't make women fat it's a myth that it's not good for muscles because you got to be in there for like 10 plus minutes for that effect to set in so overall it can be pretty good but only if someone is also controlling how many calories they eat but if i can burn an extra 250 calories by doing a cold plunge and get all the blood sugar regulating and nervous system benefits and not eat an extra 250 calories that balances that out, it would actually help with fat loss.

1:04:45All right, last one, infrared sauna. Six for infrared sauna, primarily because of a lot of the longevity data, reduced all-cause risk of mortality, dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, et cetera, that has come out of Finland, but not higher than a six because most of that research was done on dry saunas. And infrared saunas take much longer for that heat shock protein production to set in. And so even though you get a deeper sweat and arguably, I think, long-term research will show infrared saunas could be better for something like, let's say, heavy metal detoxing. I think we haven't seen as much research on infrared as we have on dry saunas and my personal protocol is I cold plunge twice a day.

1:05:34I do it the morning before my workout and I do it in the afternoon, typically towards the end of the day, just to refresh my body for the rest of the day. I do infrared sauna one to two times per week. And that's usually some type of like a flow yoga that I do in a big sauna that I have. That's big enough for a six foot three guy to do flow yoga. And then I do dry sauna, super hot at 230 degrees for about 10 to 15 minutes every day. Okay. So I want to end this interview. I want to be respectful of your time on business stuff. So I'm going to ask you a few business questions. If you were building a startup today in the wellness space, where would you place your bets?

1:06:16I would say a few of the trends that I am focusing on and would focus on would be things that are performing really well right now on the supplement side of things, namely creatine, protein, gummies, and keto. All four of those are crushing right now from a supplements or nutrition standpoint. And then I would say another area would be community. I'm very bullish on community. and social combined with fitness activities and workouts, any apps, any communities, any websites, any services, any individuals who have a method to bring people together in an analog environment or digital environment to engage in community, tribe, and friendships along with their fitness is also going to be something more and more important going forward as AI gets better and better at writing out the perfect workout and the perfect nutrition plan for you.

1:07:16We instead are going to see people valuing the ability to build tribe and social life and community around that. Okay. My last question on business. So you've built this great YouTube channel. You've got an awesome podcast. You've written many bestselling books. You've got a business. You're a real creator entrepreneur. You are one of the top five people when you think biohacking. You're at the top of your field. What is your advice to everybody else, regardless of industry, who wants to be a thought leader in their niche category from a creator entrepreneur lens? I have a little bit more of, I guess, a Tim Ferriss-esque approach to this, who probably got it from Kevin Kelly's original essay, Thousand True Fans.

1:07:58I think that when you're excited about something, authenticity really shines through. and that if you are creating content and recording you doing or talking about something that you truly are excited and passionate about versus doing and talking about something that the numbers have told you you should be excited and passionate about, you are A, going to have a good number of people who are also interested in what you're interested in, sometimes simply because they've seen how excited you are about it, and B, you're gonna be happier because you're more authentic, right? And if you look at the span of my career, I have gone from being 90 % Ironman triathlon and endurance sports content to kettlebell, Spartan obstacle course racing stuff to family parenting legacy to biohacking, anti-aging, longevity.

1:08:54Well, now I've got, you know, if you were to look out my office window right now, I have a tractor out there working on a pond project. I've got four high schoolers down the driveway laying out mats and digging ditches for permaculture and soil and water. And so if I could predict five years from now, you're going to see 60 to 70 % of my content is farming permaculture and homesteading, right? And that's not because I've done hefty research into whether or not that's what's going to perform well with my audience. I'm simply doing what I'm interested in and loving. I'm recording it, filming it, and educating people along the way, it might actually make less money than me saying, okay, I'm gonna make my entire channel a creatine keto gummies channel, but I'm certainly gonna be happier if there's a camera over my shoulder recording me doing what I love and teaching people what I love to do.

1:09:46Such great advice. I love that advice. Okay, so I end my podcast with two questions I ask everyone. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? I would say identify at least for the next week, three things each day you're doing that you don't need to be doing because they're below your pay grade or that your skill set doesn't require those and outsource or delegate them. My business took off as soon as I got out of scarcity mindset and hired my first VA. I went on to make multiple additional hires. And anytime I still do this, I find myself doing something repeatedly that is not my best calling or purpose, or that gives me a frowny face.

1:10:31I immediately find how somebody, either a person or a machine, can replicate that. And what would you say your secret to profiting in life is? And that's profiting in all areas of life. Order of priorities. Business used to be first for me. And because my business is the health business, I would say health was probably a close second or equal with business. Now it's way different. My order of priorities from the time I get up till the end of the day is number one, God. Number two, my wife. Number three, my kids. Number four, my health. And number five, my business. And that has allowed me to thrive and be fulfilled.

1:11:13And I would say a big reason for that is because we all have an eternal hole in our souls that longs for something eternal. And you can put all the houses and cars and money and businesses and sex and hobbies and sports and anything else to try to cram it in that hole to fill it up. But until you filled up that hole with something eternal, you're never going to be fulfilled or satisfied. and the only two eternal things that I know of that we interact with or are surrounded by on a daily basis are number one, God, and number two, the souls of other people. So by prioritizing God and the other people in your life as the top two things, everything else becomes way more fulfilling and you become a more happy person.

1:11:55So beautiful. Ben, where can everybody learn about you? How can people work with you? You mentioned that you help people with their health. Tell us about that. So my content hub is bengreenfieldlife.com. You can find my book wherever you get books. And then I also do some coaching and have several coaches also coach for me. And that's all at bengreenfieldcoaching.com. And then I also travel all over the place and speak at various places. So that's at bengreenfieldspeaking.com. Amazing. Ben, it's always such a pleasure to have you on the show. I can't wait for you to be back already. I had so many more questions for you.

1:12:31Thank you so much for joining us today. Awesome. Thanks, Hala. I'll be thinking of you while I eat the dry tip.

1:12:41Yeah, fam, today's conversation with Ben made one thing clear. True longevity isn't about clinging to extreme hacks or chasing some unrealistic age like 120 years old. It's about living a life rich in health, connection, and purpose. We all have the power to build a life and a home that makes thriving the default. That starts with crafting an environment that supports movement and energy, nourishing your body with foods that sustain you, and protecting the relationships that anchor you. And remember, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for this. Faith, family, and daily movement, though, are real non-negotiables for a life well-lived, according to Ben.

1:13:18The beauty of Ben's approach is that it doesn't require becoming a full-time biohacker or spending a fortune on optimization tools. It's about small, intentional choices that compound over time and shape the quality of your life. So today, I encourage you to take one step toward the life that you want. Create a space that invites health, a routine that energizes you, and connections that give your life meaning. Stack those wins and watch them transform not just your years, but the experience you have living them. If you listened, learned, and profited from this episode, share it with somebody in your circle.

1:13:50You never know, it could be the spark they need to start living a boundless life. And if you can, drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and keeps bringing you world-class guests like Ben Greenfield. You can also catch the full video on our YouTube channel. Just search Young and Profiting, hit that subscribe button, and drop a comment with your favorite takeaway from today's episode. To connect with me directly, you can find me on Instagram at yapwithhala or LinkedIn. Just search my name. It's Hala Taha.

1:14:19As always, I gotta give a massive thank you to the Yap Media family. you guys keep this show at the top of its game. This is your host, Halataha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.