[Transcript] – Probiotic Enemas, Digestive Enzyme Myths, Breathing 10 Kilograms of Oxygen, Low-Protein Diets & More!

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Transcripts

Podcast from: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2016/11/the-best-way-to-take-digestive-enzymes/

[00:00] Introduction/ Crik Nutrition

[02:32] Zip Recruiter

[04:16] Introduction to this Episode

[06:49] About Matt Gallant

[07:25] About Wade Lightheart

[09:26] Why Would One Do a Probiotic Enema?

[10:53] What Is A Yoga Swing?

[12:02] Matt’s Morning Routine

[14:28] The Vielight Neuro Headgear That Matt Uses in the Morning

[16:22] What Matt Is Using to Alkalanize His water

[17:16] How About Metal Plates on Alkaline Water Makers

[22:14] Wade’s Breakfast and Routine

[23:20] Breathing in 10 kilos of Oxygen – Wade’s Method

[25:15] Why Wade Consumes Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA) Every Morning

[27:41] Why Wade Uses Branched Chain Amino Acids Vs. Essential Amino Acids

[29:23] Four Sigmatic – Winning X Blend

[30:28] Organifi Green Juice

[32:41] How Wade Maintains and Build His Muscle on a Low-Protein Diet

[37:04] Why Can’t The Body Digest Food on Its Own Without an Enzyme?

[45:20] Different Enzymes to Look For in a Label

[50:11] Why Something You Find in Digestive Enzyme Helps in Muscle Recovery?

[54:25] Why a Single Strain to BiOptimizers Probiotic Formula?

[58:02] Can One Take Digestive Enzyme on an Empty Stomach? The Effects?

[1:02:44] Digestive Enzyme as Meat Tenderizer

[1:04:35] Groundbreaking Enzyme Studies

[1:06:50] Probiotic and Enzyme Mixture – Which is more effective?

[1:08:08] Mistakes People Make When Using Digestive Enzymes

[1:12:29] Digestive Enzymes – Before, During or After Meals?

[1:14:23] Mat’s Probiotic Enema – A step by step protocol

[1:22:08] End of podcast

Ben:  Hey, it’s Ben Greenfield and I’m gonna apologize in advance to you because you are about to be subjected to a really nerdy conversation between myself and 2 guys who basically do crazy stuff; shine laser lights on our (censored), and do enemas and take copious amount of fringe supplements et cetera, so my apologies in advance but hey, if anything you’ll at least be entertained and maybe learn a thing or two for this month’s Christmas cocktail party.

But before we jump in, speaking of learning a thing or two, I want to tell you about something that I learned recently and that is the fact that you can dump copious amounts, copious I’ll see if I can spit that out, copious amounts of insect matter into your smoothie.  Copious amounts of insect matter into your smoothie and it still actually tastes pretty good.  Really good actually like a Wendy’s, you know those Wendy’s frosties that you used to get?  I don’t know if anybody even gets those I haven’t been to Wendy’s in a while but I used to get the chocolate frosty.  This one tastes like that but a vanilla frosty.  They do a chocolate one, too.  I just haven’t yet tapped into the chocolate, I have just been using the vanilla.

But it’s this company called Crik c-r-i-k, and they make really super tasty protein and this is protein that has 3 times the protein punch of beef and it actually blows away even organ meat in terms of nutrient density, and of course, it’s ethical but it’s a cricket-based protein powder meaning that it is jam packed with the full amino acid profile that insects have, a lot of people don’t know about this.  As much calcium as milk, more iron than beef or spinach, more potassium than foods like avocado but it tastes really, really good too, and you can just get it in a powder form and throw it in a smoothie.

So I’ve been using the vanilla, they do a chocolate as well but you get fifteen percent off of any of these really tasty cricket-based protein powder from Crik Nutrition and here’s how.  Go to crik.me/bgfitness, that was a mouthful I’ll admit.  Crik.me, you spell it c-r-i-k dot me crik.me/bgfitness, and if you wanna get fifteen percent off of your purchase just use code Ben B-e-n.  So crik.me/bgfitness use code Ben and they even have a hundred percent money-back guarantee which trust me you won’t need to use coz this stuff tastes amazing, and again, it’s just as good as good as beef when it comes to protein.

I also wanted to tell you about a new sponsor and they’re called Zip Recruiter.  So the idea behind Zip Recruiter is that they allow you to go find a job anywhere but if you’re hiring or you wanna post a job they also let you to post a job on all the top job websites.  So you go to Ziprecruiter.com, and you can post to a hundred plus jobsites like social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, but it’s all just in 1 click so you can find people in any city or industry around a nation.  So I figured I’d go to Zip Recruiter and just check it out see if I can find a job so I’m there right now.  I’m gonna go for Fargo, North Dakota.  Fargo, North Dakota, and we’re gonna look for a job as a police officer.

Let’s see if I could get a job as a police officer in Fargo.  So I click search, twenty three police jobs in Fargo, North Dakota.  Where should we email your jobs?  Interesting. Thirty-one B military police, police officer, armed custom protection security officer.  Boom baby!  I’m moving to Fargo.  Anyways though, check it out ziprecruiter.com just like it sounds zip recruiter.  So to be able to post jobs for free here’s what you do, go to ziprecruiter.com/first so if you go to ziprecruiter.com/first that lets you post jobs absolutely free.  For anybody that you wanna hire or if you wanna get a job you could go there too like me I’m gonna be a police officer now, Dad.  So check all that out and now sit back and enjoy this super nerdy interview.  My apologies again.  My apologies.                                      

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness show:

“The most important one and especially for people that are concerned with fitness, recovering athletes and people who wanna build muscle, and I think health in general, the most important one by far in our opinion is protease.  That means your body will hold on to enzymes as much as it can because they’re so essential for bodily functions and I believe that a high quality enzyme that is consumed on an empty stomach will become a metabolic or systemic enzyme inside the body.”

He’s an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America’s top personal trainer and one of the globe’s most influential people in health and fitness.  His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance.  He is Ben Greenfield.  “Power, speed, mobility, balance – whatever it is for you that’s the natural movement, get out there! When you look at all the studies done… studies that have shown the greatest efficacy…”  All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Ben:  Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield, and I want to actually share with you a relatively strange email that I got from today’s guest.  The subject line of the email was Probiotic Enema and the instructions in said email went a bit something like this: “break up in a handful of capsules and ferment in coconut water, reaches peak power around 4 to 5 hours of fermentation.  However, you live in a cooler climate, Ben so it might take longer.  You can drink it and if it’s still sweet, then you can go longer.  When it starts to become acidic that’s when it’s at its peak.  For your enema, retention time should be fifteen to twenty minutes and I like doing the Batman version.  I go upside down with the inversion table so it really works its way down.  I tend to do this after 2 days of fasting so it really takes care of old bad bacteria in my gut.”

That email was actually written to me by today’s guest who is not only, as you would have guessed, a consummate gut biohacker but is also an entrepreneur, he’s a poker champion, an ex-rock guitarist, a strength conditioning coach with a degree in Kinesiology and the CEO of this company called BiOptimizers.  His name is Matt Gallant and as you can imagine Matt tends to think outside the box when it comes to things like nutrition and health, and he’s not on his own today he’s joined by Wade.  Wade Lightheart is your last name is that correct, Wade?

Wade:  Yes, sir.

Ben:  Ok Lightheart as in L-i-g-h-t-h-e-a-r-t?

Wade:  Correct.

Ben:  Interesting.  That’s a very, that’s almost like a dirty hippie name like my children River and Terrain Greenfield.  But Wade, for those of you who are curious who he is, he’s a natural body builder, he’s a vegetarian and a low-protein diet advocate.  We’re gonna talk about that a little bit in today’s show, 3 time all-natural body building champion which means he doesn’t inject steroids into his butt cheek.  He’s the adviser to the American Anti-Cancer Institute, he’s a Director of Education at BiOptimizers which is the company that Matt’s the CEO of, he’s been a vegetarian for over thirteen years, he’s also written a book that I’ll link to it in the show notes called Staying Alive in a Toxic World.  Now everything that we are about to delve into if you don’t want to furiously take down notes and instead want me to do all the hard work for you, you can access over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/gallant as in Matt’s last name bengreenfieldfitness.com/ g-a-l-l-a-n-t.  So Wade and Matt welcome to the show.

Matt:  It’s great to be here, Ben.  I think you’ve got the best health podcast out there so it’s a real honor to be on it.

Ben:  Oh well, thank you it’s an honor to get enema instructional emails from you.

Matt & Wade:  (laughs)

Wade:  Yeah, great to be here, Ben.

Ben:  Oh and by the way, lest anyone wonder, I did indeed follow that email that Matt wrote me about taking a bunch of probiotics, breaking and opening into coconut water, letting the coconut water ferment and actually hanging myself upside down and trying the enema, I mean, you know what that might be a good little ice breaker here Matt or at least a bleed in, first of all before I ask you about the strange daily routines that you do, why is it that one would actually do a probiotic enema, what’s kind of the reason behind that?

Matt:  Well, a lot of the toxins in our body come from undigested proteins.  So we want to ideally go into every crevice in our body as well as in our blood get some proteolytic enzymes and probiotics can break stuff down.  So that’s where the intellectual or scientific or health concept came from and I was doing a 5-day fast, I’m like you know what, let’s take this to next level so I did a colonic and it was the best colonic ever in terms of what came out the next couple of days and this was like day 4, so it wasn’t food coming out it was like weird shape rubber tar-like stuff so I knew that ok this works, yeah.  So that’s where it all came from.

Ben:  Rubber tar-like stuff you actually get that stuff coming out of your butt see that didn’t happen to me.  Did I get that correctly?

Matt:  Well, and that was a colonic versus an enema, so it went deeper than just the enema would.  But I think if we bump it up from 1 liter to maybe a gallon (chuckles) when we do the enema we might start hitting those spots.

Ben:  And you hang when you do this, you hang upside down but do you actually use an inversion table or do you use, I think what you had mentioned to me was…

Matt:  I use a yoga swing. 

Ben:  Now what is a yoga swing for people who aren’t familiar with this?

Matt:  Yoga swing is a very, very cool portable exercise device.  You can do some bad (curse word) workouts with it.  It’s almost like a TRX but it’s like another level ‘cause you can hang and do some really cool inverted stuff or fall off of it in the gym, and stuff than be laughed at, but yeah it’s a really cool device so there’s a couple of them out there.  It used to be called I think Om Swing or Omni Yoga, so we’ll find the links and pop them in the show notes.

Ben:  Okay, cool.  And this is like a lot of times what you see people using in those acro yoga classes, right?

Matt:  Right, exactly. 

Ben:  Ok, gotcha.  Interesting.  So Matt, you are obviously a bit of a biohacker like me, you have this strange daily routines.  I know that you’ve bounced back and forth on me via Facebook message and email when you’re occasionally up to some crazy biohacks and for you in many cases seems like their nutrition-based.  Can you describe so folks can kinda wrap their heads around the type of things that you do, what your morning routine was leading into today’s call.  I guess it’s about 10am when we’re talking right now.  So imagine you’ve had time to at least get out of bed and engage in some manner of weirdness.  So what have you been up to this morning?

Matt:  Yup, so first of all I woke up wolf-style, I’m referring to that chronotype not howling which means I hit my snooze button 3 times, I actually really enjoy the snooze it’s a good REM opportunity for me.

Ben:  Wait, you said wolf-style, are you referring to the book by Michael Breus about The Power of When”? 

Matt:  You got it.

Ben:  Where people are wolves, dolphins, lions and bears and a wolf if I’m not mistaken, if memory serves correctly that’s more of like a night person, right?

Matt:  Right, so I’m the opposite of you and you’re a lion, right?

Ben:  Okay.

Matt:  And Wade’s a lion too, so you guys are in the same tribe.

Ben:  And so as a wolf actually hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock is supposed to be good?

Matt:  Yeah, I always intuitively felt bad that I’d get a lot of REM in those zones, and I do so and the book kind of endorsed it, and so I’m rolling with it.

Ben:  Ok, gotcha. 

Matt:  I literally put my alarm thirty minutes before I actually wanna wake so that I can hit it 3 times.

Ben:  Ok, gotcha.

Matt:  Uhmm, then the first thing I do I pound about a half a liter to a liter of structured alkaline ionized mineral water, then weigh myself, well actually weigh myself before getting the water but weigh myself, drink the water, rebound for 5 minutes I feel is really one of the best ways to wake up my entire body, then I put on the Neuro from Vielight which is the whole head piece.  Love that device.  It’s just absolutely awesome and then I take a bunch of supplements including a lot of brain stuff as well as enzymes and probiotics to kind of give my body some juice, and then I drink a coffee using alkaline water, a little bit of fats, some of our vitamins and minerals and I’m using some reishi spore extract.  My body just love reishis so I’m really pushing that.

Ben:  Now a few things that I want to delve into just slightly, you mentioned some type of did you say it was like a headgear or glasses that you’re using?

Matt:  Well, you recommended Vielight. but they’ve got… 

Ben:  Oh the V, you mean the intra-nasal light therapy?

Matt:  Right, but they’ve got the whole head piece now called Neuro where you’ve got another piece that goes on top of the head which hits your default network, so not only are you hitting your pre-frontal cortex with the light but you’ve got this headpiece with 5 clusters of lights that are blasting your brain.

Ben:  I feel left out that I didn’t actually know about this.  I’m still way back at the level where I’m just sticking stuff up my nose.  Now you can actually bombard your entire head with this infrared style light therapy?

Matt:  Exactly, and [0:15:13.6] ______ is about double the power and they just released the video where they’ve got somebody wired to a dry EEG machine and the whole brain just floods with alpha which is always a good thing.

Ben:  Oh wow, I’m looking at a photograph of this, I’ll link to this in the show notes for those of you who wanna check it out, the Vielight Neuro.  It’s described as the next generation transcranial intranasal near infra-red headset, and it looks like it uses the eight hundred and ten nanometer wavelength which for those of you listening in the best way I could described this to you if you haven’t experimented with this type of stuff before is it’s like a cup of coffee for your brain and it’s actually the type of thing that they’ve shown to induce increased blood flow to the brain and almost like a therapeutic effect for people with Alzheimer’s, but I had no clue they had an entire full piece of headgear.  This is really interesting I may need to add this to my morning protocol, Matt.

And then the other question I wanted to ask you Matt before we turn to Wade and find out what he’s been up to this morning is you mentioned that you alkalinized or you structure your water when you drink your water in the morning or when you make your coffee.  What are you using to do that?

Matt:  I’m using a Kangen Water Machine which I feel is one of the best health devices I’ve ever purchased and I’ve purchased just about all of them.  So I mean you can control the PH of the water, it micro-clusters the water molecules which means it makes the water molecules smaller and produces an anti-oxidant-rich water instead of unoxidated water.  If you really get into water, Wade Lightheart is one of the top experts on the planet.  So you can dive pretty deep with Wade on that one.

Ben:  Okay, cool but you use one of these units made by the company Kangen?

Matt:  Correct.  Well, Enagic’s the name of the company and SD501 is the device.

Ben:  Okay, now when some of these alkaline water makers, one of the things that people have expressed concern about in the past is that the water passes over like a metal plate and that you might get exposed to some kind of increased heavy metal when you’re drinking the water that’s been structured, that’s been passed over this plate.  You know if that’s the issue with some of these Kangen machines or what’s the deal with the way that the water is alkalinized?

Matt:  I’ll let Wade answer this one.  Go for it, Wade.

Wade:  Yeah, so there’s a couple of issues that can come up when you come to ionization.  First, let me qualify it a little bit is you could ionize any kind of water with a battery and some metal and stick the electricity in there and you get some form of ionization that doesn’t mean that’s gonna be healthy.  So there is a very large range of quality when it comes to creating ionization.  And so, in order to make sure that you’re making an ionized water that’s safe, you wanna use something that’s had a medical grade technology using particularly titanium and platinum, and platinum is what creates the electron donor plates.  So you have a platinum coating over a titanium plate and at a medical grade that’s beyond ninety-nine percent purity.

With cheaper ionizers and I think that’s where a lot of the issues come up or people have concerns about and I think they’re legitimate that they’ll use a seventy percent alloy and you don’t necessarily know what other metals could be there, and you could run into problems.  And that’s one of the reasons why I chose when I did my investigation of both 8-9 years ago when I started and I’ve been on that train for a long time is I chose one that had medical certification at 13485, you wanna have that designation in your ionizer and that’s gonna ensure that you have the safety of the water that you’re not gonna create any metal toxins or things like that that’s gonna cause any problems.  But ionization has been around, it’s been used in medical institutions since the mid-1960’s and it’s very safe if you’re using a medical-grade ionizer.

Ben:  So you want to look when you’re using something if you’re going to ionize water or experiment with how your body might feel, you’d want to use a medical grade and I noticed that the Kangens because I pulled this up to see if this is the type of thing one could get on Amazon for example, they use what’s called platinum-coated titanium.  Is that what you’d be looking for would be platinum or titanium in terms of the actual metal plates?

Wade:  Yeah, that’s exactly it and you wanna use a solid plate.  There’s a lot of technology out there that they’re using a mesh plate but what we found is mesh plates will break down over time simply because anytime you create ionization you’ll get build-up of minerals on those plates, and then your machine may become defective a year or two years down the road.  Out of the gate it might be okay but when you’re talking about these platinum coatings this is a very, very, very light coating and the surface area an electrical power and how long the water’s exposed that is gonna determine the quality or the intensity of the ionization that you create, and that’s gonna give you what I call the electron donors or the H ions that really power the things, and in my opinion it’s the electrical-based anti-oxidants that make all the difference in ionization not necessarily the alkalinity.

Ben:  Ok.  Got it.  Yeah, I have what’s called a structured water filter at my house which is basically like a series of glass beads in which the water kinda passes through a vortex.  It swirls the water so it maintains some amount of structure and then I mineralize it so I add some trace liquid minerals to it afterwards, but that’s my nerdy little water technique. But I’ve never actually owned or used one of these whole house water ionizers and it would be interesting to mess around with.  I think my wife would probably kill me if I put one more thing on the kitchen counter top though to go along with the water ozinator, the counter top reverse osmosis maker, the soda stream that allows me to carbonate water.  I think honestly her head would explode if I actually added another ionizer to the kitchen counter.

Wade:  Well, if you don’t mind a threat to your marriage, I’ll hook you up with one and you can run some experiments on it.

Ben: Well, who knows I don’t know if I turn into Superman maybe she’ll not complain.  So Wade speaking of Superman, you are a bodybuilder, a natural bodybuilder.  You are also a vegetarian and a low-protein diet advocate which I wanna talk to you a little bit more about ‘cause you don’t see that in the bodybuilding industry too much.  I’m curious first of all since you are a low protein-diet advocate and vegetarian bodybuilder, what did you have for breakfast this morning?  What’s the breakfast of a low-protein bodybuilder look like?

Wade:  First, I took in about ten kilos of oxygen through an intensive deep breathing practice and a meditation practice, so I think that a lot of people just don’t concentrate on oxygen as the primary nutrient of the body, and a lot of people just totally avoid that.  So that was the first thing that I did.  And then like Matt I did about a liter of ionized water with the minerals and the ions, and also I took in about 3 grams of essential fatty acids all plant-based fatty acids, 5 capsules of enzymes, the Masszymes, 2 probiotics and I took in about 3 grams of branched chain amino acids.

Ben:  Interesting.  And just to explore a few of those things a bit more.  How do you measure, you said you breathed in ten kilos of oxygen.  How are you measuring the actual volume of oxygen that you’re breathing in and how are you exactly doing that?

Wade:  Well that’s it, I’ll qualify it that that’s an estimation.  The average person probably breathes in eighty kilos a day, so what I do is I get up in the morning and I have a meditative practice.  So I get up, I have a series of what’s called the energization exercise, in other words I work with the… if you heard of prana or chi…

Ben:  Uhm. 

Wade:  I activate starting with my feet and I go through a series of exercises that just kinda wakes up the body, and gets you to separate the difference between muscular contraction and sending the electrical energy into the muscles.  So there’s two different energy systems and it’s well known in kinda Eastern philosophy, but not so much in the Western maybe athletic world although it’s getting more popular.  So I do that.  I’ll also put my hands around my kidneys, and I’ll start doing a breathing which is very intense which you start inhaling through the nose and exhaling so as I hah, hah, hah, you know that kind of thing, and I’ll do that for maybe five or ten minutes until I get (inaudible). Technically, I guess you’d call it, I get kinda high.  I get an oxygen high and that’s when I know that I’m oxygenated.

Now sometimes depending on where I am or what I’m doing, it will only be a few minutes and sometimes it’s gonna take me ten or fifteen minutes to get that oxygen high.  I’ll just keep going until I feel my brain get completely oxygenated.  And then that’s when I sit and do my meditation, and that practice will be anywhere from fifteen minutes all the way up to an hour although that doesn’t happen as much as I like to simply because of the demands of business, and then from there I take my water, I take my supplements, I take my branched chain amino acids and then I’m off to my day.

Ben:  Now branched chain amino acids as a low protein guy, these branched chain amino acids that you’re putting into your body are these a substitute for the whey protein or the bacon and eggs that someone trying to put on muscle would normally be consuming, or are there other reasons that you’re using branched chain amino acids?

Wade:  Yeah, I’m using the branched chain amino acids just to prevent the breakdown of my skeletal muscle mass and when it comes to a plant-based guy obviously just getting enough protein in your diet if you’re training really hard is an issue, so it’s not just about what you eat, it’s about what you absorb and utilize.  And what I found over the years and I’ve done a lot of experiments to kinda get this into that hyper state.  Prior to using branched chain amino acids I found that seventy-five grams a day is what I could sustain my muscle mass.  I’m around 200 pounds of five foot eight, around ten percent body fat, that’s kinda where my zone is.  If I go below 75 grams, I found that I would drop down.  If I went above a hundred grams it takes a lot of effort as a plant-based guy, then I could put on muscle.

I’m not trying to put on muscle, but now I’ve been doing experiments of how low I can go.  And if I add 3 grams of branched chain amino acids 2 to 4 times a day, I can go to as low as twenty-five grams of protein.  So what I found is it’s the branch chain amino acids and I think that’s where plant-based guys have more of a struggle.  If I have those into my diet I can really lower my protein intake without losing the muscle mass and without getting the food cravings that are often associated with a low protein diet.

Ben: Now why wouldn’t you consume essential amino acids and the reason I ask about that is because the branched chain amino acids for those of you who may not understand what this means is the branched chains are just leucine, isoleucine and valine and there are other supplements that are called EAA’s or essential amino acids that don’t just have the branched chains which are primarily used for energy production and muscle metabolism but they also have all the other amino acids that would be used for like neurotransmitter formation or for healing muscles even more quickly et cetera.  Why do use the branched chain amino acids versus like essential amino acids, Wade?

Wade:  I use the branched chain simply because I found them more effective in preserving muscle mass as far as training.  So I can go out and really kick in a workout.  I go to the gym and do a full body workout or a heavy lifting workout, and have no problems with it.  When I do just the full amino acids spectrum I noticed there’s changes in my appetite.  I’ll find I get a lot (inaudible) have the same performance level at the gym.  What’s the technical reason for that?  I’m not exactly sure but in my own experiments that’s what I found have worked best for me and that’s just the way I roll.

Ben:  Gotcha.

Music plays.

Ben: Hey, it’s me Ben.  I’m interrupting today’s show.  So rude of me but I’m gonna do it anyways because I wanted to tell you about a way that you can ensure that you don’t get sick this cold and flu season.  So there is this idea that mushrooms actually have a whole bunch of ingredients in them that help to boost an inactive immune system and calm down a hyperactive immune system, and help the body adapt to stress.  It’s called an adaptogen when something does that.  And there are a whole bunch of medicinal mushrooms that do this like reishi, and chaga, and cordyceps, and lion’s mane.  They contain turpines and a blend of different chemicals that can actually help you to fight off flus, fight off colds, fight off infections, produce a lot of anti-viral and anti-bacterial compounds, but what if just throwing this out there, what if you were to take all of them and put them into one little packet like every single mushroom?  Would it explode?  No, because I have that packet in my refrigerator right now it’s called the Winning X Blend.

It’s ten different mushrooms, count ém ten and all they’re all the mushrooms that were specifically harvested for the purpose of fighting off infection and helping the body to maintain a super strong immune system using what’s called the dual extract.  So water-soluble extract as well as a fat-soluble extract.  So this stuff is made by a company made by a company called Four Sigmatic.  It’s called the Winning X mushroom blend.  It’s an overdose of mushrooms in a good way and you get 15% off it.  Here’s how: go to foursigmatic.com/greenfield that’s f-o-u-r sigmatic dot com / greenfield and the coupon code that you use to get 15% off of this Winning X stuff or anything there really is Ben Greenfield. So that’s foursigmatic.com/greenfield and use code Ben Greenfield.

I also wanted to tell you about something that I learned recently.  There is coconut water which you’ve no doubt heard of before, and coconut water is very high in vitamins and minerals and electrolytes but you can actually take coconut water, and you can produce coconut water powder using a freeze-drying method.  So 1 ton of coconut water can make about 60 kilograms or so of coconut water powder, but there is a study that they did in the International Symposium on Medicinal and Aromatic Plants where they tested the actual vitamin and mineral and medicinal property of a coconut water powder and they found that you don’t get any deterioration whatsoever compared to coconut water using this freeze-drying type of method.

So I thought this was interesting because I’ve always wondered where coconut powder comes from if there’s some magic coconut-water-pooping-unicorn in the sky that makes coconut powder, or if it can actually be made in a more healthy way.  And it turns out freeze-drying is the way to go.  So there’s this company that does a greens powder that has coconut powder as its base and their called Organifi.  So they take matcha green tea, and wheat grass, and turmeric, and ashwagandha, and mint, and spirulina, and chlorella, and they added all to this coconut water powder base and it is super-tasty.  You can put it in a blender along with anything.  You can probably blend it up with those mushrooms I was just talking about.  But you get 20% off of this stuff.  And here’s how you get twenty percent off this Organifi Green Juice Powder.  Just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/organifi.  That’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/organifi and when you do, the discount code will be mentioned there to get 20% off.  So use the discount code at bengreenfieldfitness.com/organifi, and enjoy your coconut water powder with a whole bunch of other stuff added to it.  Alright, let’s get back to the show.

Music plays.

Ben:  Now as far as the whole low protein diet, why would you be doing that in the first place?

Wade:  Well, first and foremost it just came out that way just being a plant-based guy, I mean, keep in mind I grew up under the-more-protein-is-better program, and like all bodybuilders that when I first started out, I went crazy on that, and then in 2003 I had a complete bloat after I did the Mr. Universe, and I didn’t understand prior to that there’s a difference between consumption and absorption.  And once I understood that I got educated about that, then I realized that well, it’s not really how much protein you eat, it’s how much you absorb and what’s interesting is that 75 grams in a day I’m probably absorbing and utilizing more protein than a guy that’s eating 250 or 300 grams of protein a day.

Ben:  Hmm.  Interesting.  So as far as the actual vegetarian approach to bodybuilding, obviously amino acids are something that you’re going out of your way to supplement with, but what about a lot of these things that you tend to find vegetarians are deficient in like creatine or vitamin B12 or DHA for neural fatty acid health, those type of things?  Are you also including supplements like that or are you getting all that from food-based nutrients?

Wade:  Ah no, I’m a big believer in supplementation for performance.  I don’t think it’s really possible to hit the highest levels of performance without the addition of supplements, and of course, you also need to know your genetic and epigenetic types.  So for example, you may have issues absorbing and utilizing B12 or things like that.  So again all of my stuff comes down to what’s optimized for myself.  You can do some generalizations but I do take a plant-based essential fatty acids.  I struggled with the EFA program for many, many years, and I think it was because I grew up in that high-protein low-fat diets and just Matt and I are total opposites on how we approach our diets, and for our bodies it was kind of interesting ‘cause we worked together for a long time, we have lots of great discussions about it ‘cause we were trying to find universal ideas.  But I really needed to get that EFA stuff down and I found the plant-based blend that I did and I’ve been tested recently and I’m good as gold on that.

As far as creatine and stuff, I supplement with it periodically if I’m doing a peaking cycle.  I think it’s great.  I don’t use it year round so I might do it for 6 or 8 weeks maybe 2 or 3 times a year depending on if I got a photo shoot or something to do.  I do notice a boost up on that.

Ben:  Ok, got it.  And are you using a specific supplement for your DHA or your EPA?  You mentioned the essential fatty acids that you’ve tested and you’re good to go on those.  What do you actually use?

Wade:  Ah, yeah there’s a plant-based blend by a company called doTERRA that I picked up, man it really, really made a difference for me, and so I’m not associated with the company or anything like that but I really like the blend.  It was great.

Ben:  That doTERRA that’s like an essential oil company, isn’t it?

Wade:  Yeah, it’s an essential oil company, and they have a plant-based version.  I forget the name of that.  I can run out a little bit later and I’ll give it for the notes the article.

Ben:  Yeah, send me a link later, and I’ll put ém over in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/gallant.

Okay.  So that was obviously a bit of a rabbit hole.  You guys have pretty elaborate routines and I would imagine we didn’t even scratch the surface of what your entire day looks like but you’re particularly experts in this whole realm of probiotics and digestive enzymes, and that’s why I wanted to get you on a call because there’s a lot of things other than like shooting probiotics up your butt and hanging from a yoga swing that people don’t know about probiotics and about digestive enzymes.  And enzymes in particular are something that fascinate me because I think that there are a lot of myths and even mistakes that people are making when they’re using something like a digestive enzyme.

So first of all, whichever of you would like to answer this question I’m fine with, but why is it that your body can’t just take the food that you eat and using the body’s own amazing human built-in mechanisms digest food all on its own without actually needing to take some kind of an enzyme before you eat?

Matt:  I’ll answer that.  First and foremost, if we go through a quick rundown of what happens in digestion.  Number one, you put food in your body, you start masticating it, there’s some enzymes released in your ptyalin and starts breaking it down.  The food enters into the upper cardiac portion of the stomach and from there the enzymes present in the food should start breaking that down.  Now with humans we’re the only species on the planet that cooks their food.  Every other species eats the food with its enzymes present and at that stage those will start to be breaking down.

So for example a tiger that goes off and eats a zebra, there’s an enzyme called cathepsin that becomes activated as soon as that enters into the body of the tiger.  So when you consume, any animal whether it’s a vegetarian or whether it’s a carnivore, it always consumes its food in a live state.  When he eats it then the enzymes become active in it that start breaking down that food, so it actually preserves the enzymatic potential of the organism consuming the other one, okay.  So now, after that cardiac portion that first thirty sixty minutes hydrochloric acid starts to come in, the food drops into the lower intestinal tract, they start separating other amino acids inside the body and also disinfecting the food from any pathogens or bacteria.  After that what’s called bicarbonate buffers are added to the mixture and this keeps you from having ulcers in your duodenum,  and things like that, so as it enters into the intestinal tract it’s buffered, and if the formulation or the food is right, you have enzymes reactivated.

Now if you don’t, what happens is your body is going to secrete enzymes stored up in its pancreas for example, that’s been manufactured in the liver and you’re gonna start using these enzymes to break down food.  So your body will have what’s called a metabolic load or an enzymatic capacity load on your body to actually start breaking down the food into smaller levels and then finally the bacteria in your intestinal tract will start converting that into utilizable material.  So that’s kind of the stages of digestion.

Now unfortunately, most people are consuming their food, they don’t have the enzymes present and they don’t cleave the essential amino acids at the top.  They may not have enough hydrochloric acid inside the body to properly continue the breakdown.  It enters into the intestinal tract and we have what I call the ‘turkey dinner syndrome.’  Everybody’s had that Thanksgiving dinner where you ate a big meal, and everybody kinda has a second helping and they all run for the couch or the floor, or you lie there in a pool or drooled until you wake up, and then you go back to the fridge for another helping of grandma’s pie, right?

Ben:  Right.

Matt:  People go, why is that happening?  Well number one, the enzymatic capacity of the body was shunted to digest the food.  And so it says, you know what, Wade doesn’t need to eat right now, he doesn’t need to think right now, he doesn’t need to do anything he just needs to lay down while we digest that.  Now what happens is because we didn’t cleave those essential amino acids in the top part of the digestive process, we started borrowing amino acids from the smooth muscle tissue in the intestinal tract and that has a double effect.  Number one, it has a drain on the form and tone of the colon and over time that can also lead to poor contractions in the intestinal tract for people.  And so, what happens over time is we have this high-protein diets particularly a North American diets where we eat a lot of meat-based proteins, and a lot of animal proteins and milk calcium-based eggs, all that sort of stuff and we’re overloading our systems, and when that happens is we have a load on their enzymatic supply and this was documented by a guy by the name of Dr. Edward Hao back in the  forties ,and he said that by the time a person’s forty they have  about 70% less of the enzymes they had at birth.

In other words, their ability to do metabolic work is being limited and enzymes are responsible from thinking to blinking.  So the reality is everybody requires enzymes to digest their food.  Whether you’re getting them from the food source that you’re consuming, whether you’re getting them manufactured from your body or whether you’re getting them in a supplemental form, you must have an enzyme to breakdown your food. And if you’re operating at a compromised enzyme capacity which most of us are from our experience and our observations, supplementing your enzymes is probably the easiest, fastest and most efficient way to increase the absorption and utilization of your food, and to reduce the use of undigested proteins which cause a variety of neurotoxin issues and toxicity inside the body.  So that’s what we found and we’ve done and we’ve experimented and we’ve worked on this for the last fourteen years, I guess it’s been thirteen fourteen years and the reality is I think the proof’s in the pudding and just from the experiential effect, the cognitive enhancement and also the health, energy and vitality levels that we experienced.

Ben:  Now what would be the difference between using say like a digestive enzyme and just using what well, you’ll see a lot of cultures like for example, when I was in Italy we drank I believe it was Grappa, or Vinsanta, or like a digestive-based liquor, and you see people doing things like shots of bitters or one very common approach is to simply drink some water with lemon juice in it prior to eating.  What would be the primary difference between doing something like that, and using I guess like a more advanced digestive enzyme complement in capsule form or in pill form?

Wade:  I’ll grab this one.  So yeah, first of all is if we address the examples that you gave, a lot of stuff like some things like warm water activate hydrochloric acid.  so that’s one of the reasons people kind of intuitively like drinking teas and stuff after a dinner.  So that’s one reason people do it and as far as alcohol being a digestive aid, I laugh when I hear that (chuckles).  It’s a good marketing tool as a waiter, hey by the way, do you wanna digestive, but I don’t think it’s gonna really help people break down the nutrients in their food into usable components.

Here’s another way I’ll answer the question and that’s if you were doing very high quality farming, farming your own food, only eating that, and I know you do a lot of this, Ben, so. And of course hunting your food and ideally eating it raw, okay which is pretty wild, but I know there was this one guy who’s kinda suddenly famous for doing this.  Then yeah, maybe you wouldn’t need enzymes, right? so if you have your own organic food and your soil is full of minerals and you’re really doing a great job growing heirloom food that hasn’t been GMO’d, and you’re eating it fresh, then yeah, but the reality is for 99.9999% of the population that’s just not happening.  So I think that’s where supplementing with enzymes is a power move.

Ben:  Okay.  Now with enzymes, I’ve talked about enzymes before in the podcast and I’ve mentioned for example probably the foremost popular enzymes that I believe are in many of these digestive enzyme complexes, and the one’s that I typically see are like papain, bromelain, trypsin and chymotrypsin, right, like an off-the-shelf digestive enzyme complex.  Are there other digestive enzymes that people should know about or are all digestive enzymes just kind of the same molecules that help to break down the foods in your stomach or in your gut, or what are the actual enzymes people should look for on a label?

Wade:  So on a label ideally, again if you’re taking it for the purpose of absorbing more nutrients from your general diet, you want a really broad mix, and I’ll get into the most critical one last, but things like alpha galactosidase which helps you with beans and lentils, and obviously amylase is for carbs in general.  Cellulase, if you’re eating a lot of veggies just a lot of cellulose that your body struggles with cellulase will help with that.  You got things like invertase for sucrose, lactase for lactose or for people that are lactose intolerant, once in a while if they want ice cream, they’ll take lactase to help them deal with it otherwise they’ll spook their family with some gassy bombs, right?

You got lipase for fat, you’ve got things like xylanase for plant fiber again, peptidase for casein and milk proteins.  So it goes on and on, right, we could probably talk about different enzymes for a while, but the most important one and especially for people that are concerned with fitness, recovering athletes and people who wanna build muscle, I think health in general, the most important one by far in our opinion in protease.  And why is that?  Well, first of all protein is how our bodies, well let me be more specific, amino acids is how our body repairs itself, generates neurotransmitters for the brain etcetera, etcetera.  So on the plus side if we can feed or give our body more neurotransmitters, we’re gonna have again better cognitive function, et cetera.

So I have a good friend of mine who is in his 70s, he started taking Masszymes and our P3OM our probiotic, and he was suffering from depression and now he’s off his meds.  I’m not saying that that healed him but I do believe that that’s the price of not being able to break food down is your brain’s gonna get a lot less neurotransmitters with time.  And if you can’t produce…

Ben:  Right, because amino acids are necessary precursors for neurotransmitter formation.

Wade:  Exactly.  And then on the preventing negative side effects, undigested protein is really one of the worst toxins we can have in our bodies.  And I believe most people have way too much undigested protein.  So for those two reasons on the plus side of recovery and we can get some really mind-blowing studies on recovery from injuries and recovery from workouts.  On the plus side, and again avoiding the toxicity, so those are the 2 things that make protease so critical.

Ben:  So undigested proteins would not just be like, and that’s not corn and carrot slices in your crap, that’s actually like auto-immune reactions from undigested protein molecules crossing the gut barrier and winding up in the blood stream?

Wade:  Uhm, you got it.

Ben:  But probably the most common I guess, being one that I’m not sure well I suppose, they make gluten-digesting enzymes that can help with this.  I’m trying to recall the name of the most popular one off the top of my head.  You guys remember, is it gluten peptidase?

Wade:  Yeah, there are enzymes that help and maybe enzymes in general will help, but people that are gluten-sensitive or celiac.  My wife is a celiac, so anytime she accidentally consumes it she’ll take ten capsules and it helps a lot.

Ben:  Accidentally, meaning grabbing that baguette that looks so tasty?

Wade:  No, it’s probably more like me throwing flour in the air as I pound a pizza on a Sunday night and it affects the counter.

Ben:  Oh yes, you’re one of those guys.  So you’ve got a ton of different types of digestive enzymes.  It appears that the body can make itself and that also you could take in like a supplemental form, but one if the things that you touched on as you’re talking was this concept of I believe muscle repair and muscle recovery, and that’s something, I guess that a lot of people don’t think about when it comes to digestive enzymes.  I’ve actually had a few people in the past send me recovery supplements to my friend Doreen.  A lot of times I’ll look at the label of these recovery supplements and they do indeed have some of the same ingredients in them as a digestive enzyme complex would have in them.  What’s the cross over there?  Why is it that something that you’d find in a digestive enzyme would help with muscle repair recovery?  What’s going on from a physiological standpoint?

Wade:  Sure.  So I’ll start with a really cool hack that everybody can do.  And this hack was scientifically proven, we’ll share the study in the show notes.  So what you do you take 3 capsules of Masszymes and a couple of capsules of our probiotic which is also proteolytic and by the way proteolytic means it juts helps digest protein.

Ben:  Okay and by the way, just to interrupt you because I don’t want to confuse people when you say Masszymes that’s a particular blend of digestive enzyme that your company makes?

Wade:  Correct.  So we formulated Masszymes with the intent of giving athletes and bodybuilders an edge.  So most enzymes and not just athletes but people that work out.  Most enzymes are really weak in our opinion.  They’re very low in protease and they don’t have a variety of protease that works in a variety of PH levels  (Inaudible)

So going back to the hack, you take 3 capsules, 2 capsules of P3OM probiotics, you mix it in with whatever protein shake.  It doesn’t matter if it’s whey or hemp like we were big fans of plant-based proteins obviously, so whatever mixture into, throw that in there shake it, and then sip it while you’re working out and literally your body will start repairing itself a lot faster.  So you can achieve more muscle growth, more gains, faster recovery by literally sipping on a predigested protein shake, and that’s really what the enzymes are doing.  They’re breaking down the protein from protein into usable amino acids, and you just sip on it and you’re gonna get a lot more results.  So that’s the mechanism.  Go ahead.

Ben:  Now in my taking… so let’s say I wanna get swoll and I wanna enhance recovery whether or not I’m like a hardcore bike rider or in a gym, I would take protein like say a whey protein or rice or hemp or a P protein, would I swallow the digestive enzyme using this hack that you’re talking about.  Would I break open the digestive enzyme and pour it into the actual shake?

Wade:  Yeah, make your shake and put the capsules in there.  So you break it open and even if you’re lazy and you got a good blender just throw (giggles) the caps in there.

Ben:  Now, but could I do this like in my morning green smoothie, could I just take the digestive enzymes and when I blend the smoothie, blend the enzymes in there with the smoothie?

Wade:  Absolutely, and you’ll see, and here’s the 2 things you’re gonna see one, you’re gonna visually see like there’s a biochemical party happening.  Like you’re gonna see like wow, there’s literally chemical reactions happening that weren’t there before.  You’re gonna see it, and second of all you’re gonna taste it like the taste is very different, you can taste some magic is happening.  So those are the two things that you will see.

Ben:  Really?  Interesting.  Well my green smoothie tastes pretty dang good already so this will be interesting.

Wade:  I’m not saying it’s gonna taste (inaudible) by the way.  You’re gonna taste like it’s gonna be again there’s a biochemical reaction happening.

Ben:  Got it.  Now you have also mentioned to add a probiotics into the mix as well.  Why would that be?

Wade:  Well, again certain probiotics like P3OM are proteolytics.  So they enhance even more the protein digesting effects of Masszymes, so it’s a great one to knockout well.

Ben:  Okay, that makes sense and one thing I wanted to ask you about when it comes to that probiotic that you mentioned, you guys have this Masszymes digestive enzyme which is a blend of I guess you’ve got thirteen or fourteen different enzymes in there to help with everything from gluten digestion to lactose digestion.  I’m now looking at the label and it’s got protease, peptidase, amylase, bromelain, galactosidase, glucoamylase, lipase, lactase, invertase and diastase, but then in your probiotic in stark contrast there’s only one ingredient lacto baccillus plantarum.  Why is it they use that plantarum?  Is it because that’s the one that’s proteolytic or most probiotic complexes you see 7 to 10 different probiotics, why do you guys just have one?

Wade:  Great question.  So our probiotic is a transcient strain versus being a colonizer. So most people don’t understand the difference.  The colonizers will go and ideally build a colony on your intestinal tract of good guys.  Our strain is like a Navy Seal, and it’s a great metaphor because if you read our patent and we’ll put the patent in the show notes.  It’s in our patent that’s been shown to be anti-viral, anti-retroviral, anti-tumoral, so it literally goes and just cleans house and when I say clean house, taking care of the bad guys, the toxins, the bad bacteria just nukes ém, ok?  And we know this to be true, I’ve had probably about 7 different occasions where either myself or my wife or friends of ours have had food poisoning, like you’re going to the wrong buffet or whatever, and you give people ten capsules and within ten or fifteen minutes they’re good versus the people that didn’t get the probiotics, they’re sick for a couple of days.

So that’s we know that they’re incredibly effective at cleaning house.  They’re very aggressive, they double every twenty minutes and you’ve done the probiotic fermentation with the coconut water, I mean it would take weeks to achieve a similar acidity with kombucha for example versus with the P3OM it’s hours, and that’s just because it doubles very quickly.  So in getting into why it’s so special, we took l’plantarum and have put it through kind of a training process to make it stronger and more aggressive so that’s really the secret sauce and you can read some of that inside the patent.

Ben:  Ok, got it.  So you’ll put a link to that patent in the show notes so you can actually see even if we wanna look at the research behind this particular strain, they can check it out?

Matt:  Exactly, and a great metaphor is that most probiotics are like a peace-keeping team versus our probiotics are Navy Seals.

Ben:  Got it.  The Navy Seal probiotic.  You should’ve just called it, man, the Navy Seal probiotic, I think that would be much sexier than P3OM.

Now another question regarding digestive enzymes to backtrack a bit back into enzymes.  You talked about this little hack where I could take enzymes, and this P2OM probiotic and like break it open, and put it into a smoothie or a shake to enhance recovery or to enhance the muscle repair effect that a digestive enzyme can give you.  Now what I’ve heard before is that if you take digestive enzymes and you consume them without food, right like normally they would act upon the food that you’re consuming but if you take them on an empty stomach that they can actually help to breakdown for example, fibronogen that can contribute to muscle soreness, so they can assist with some of the things that would normally cause you to become sore or inhibit you from building muscle.  Is that true or and this is what I’ve always wondered, are the enzymes just going to kind of like eat away at your stomach lining and cause gut distress.  Like can you take digestive enzymes on an empty stomach and if so or if not, what’s the effect that that’s gonna have?

Matt:  We can start and then I’ll share some studies that are really mind-blowing.  Go ahead, Wade.

Wade:  Great, I’ll jump in here.  Great question and one of the things like yourself we’re very extreme in our testing and I want to test this in excess.  So I went on a ten-day fast and consumed a thousand enzymes a day of these Masszymes to see if I would break down and digest or if I don’t get one of two things.  One if that would affect my stomach lining and number two, if I would break the GI barrier in other words get the runs.  That didn’t happen on any level and I did feel really, really alert, and I did notice some other interesting things.

For example, I went through an extreme liver detox.  My first time doing that I was pretty neat.  But what was interesting when you talk about taking in on an empty stomach I had a friend of mine who had a huge fibrous necrosis scar from a spider bite that she had get rid.  It was about a half inch thick scar and probably 3 inches long, and I would give her the Masszymes on an empty stomach and within ten minutes this scar would become red and start to itch and over the course of the next 9 months she continued that taking the Masszymes twice a day on an empty stomach, she took 5 capsules twice a day on an empty stomach.  And in 9 months-time the scar had changed from a reddish color to almost completely clear, and it had reduced down to completely smooth.  In fact her daughter one day was rubbing her shoulder and said, Mom, your scar’s gone.  What happened?  And so there was kind of anecdotal evidence or experience that I got to experience first-hand to see that, you know the breakdown of tissue.

What happens and when you take in a digestive enzyme on an empty stomach and there’s no food let’s say to go, your body is going to preserve that.   You’re not gonna break the GI barrier.  For example, if you look at Vitamin C, there is an old protocol I think that is of  Linus Pauling that you take in as much Vitamin C ‘til you break the GI barrier that is getting the runs and then you cut the dosage, and you stay on that dosage ‘til you get the runs and you cut that dosage.  And that was the protocol used by a lot of guys in orthomolecular nutrition in their early experimentations.  And so, you don’t have that experience and that means your body will hold on to enzyme as much as it can because they’re so essential for bodily functions.  And I believe that a high quality enzyme that is consumed on an empty stomach will become a metabolic or a systemic enzyme inside the body and I think you’re gonna see more and more evidence demonstrating that in the future

I can share with you this from my own personal experience from using Masszymes over the years.  I went from extremely you know, how you get that kinda fibrous very hard muscle tissue from working out all those years and that sort of stuff.  My muscle tissue is extremely pliable and whenever I got a body worker working on me, he or she is usually like, wow! for a guy that carries as much muscle as you have how come your tissues are so pliable?  And I believe there’s a direct correlation with the amount of enzymes that I’m using in your body for enhancement and I think that’s one of the big benefits.  The other thing is you always wanna use the cultured enzyme.  There’s a degree of potency in enzymes so you know you’re regular food enzymes that are found in food, you have animal-based enzymes which are extract from animals, and then you can go all the way up to cultured enzymes which are developed on specific cultures and it’s in a very elaborate process that increases the potency of that enzyme anywhere from a hundred to a thousand times depending on the enzyme how long it was cultured, the quality of the culture, what nutrients were used to grow and what was the extraction process, and that’s what we’ve kinda gone to.  So I think why there’s a lot variance in the experiential reality of how people respond to enzymes is largely in part due to the quality of the enzyme they’re doing, the dosage that they’re doing, and how long they sustain those dosages so that they get enough of the benefit that we can build up their enzymatic pool.

Ben:  Okay, got it.  So this is kinda similar as like what I would do with say like liver, right like a really gamey organ meat that I would imagine.  I guess you probably don’t eat too much of Wade, but to make it a little bit less firm and less chewy, you actually soak it in lemon juice for a period of time or raw milk which also has enzymes in it to actually make it taste good ‘til you make that flesh a little bit more like butter, I suppose.  So what you’re saying is that when you consume digestive enzymes on an empty stomach or consume them for recovery you kinda have a similar effect on things like scar tissue and areas of fibrous build-up etcetera?

Wade:  Exactly.

Ben:  Okay.

Matt:  But it goes even beyond that and by the way, just hack alert, cool tip alert.  One of the things that I do, I take… ‘cause I’m in Panama and it’s tough to find really good meat here.  So I’ll buy some rib eyes that are locally raised, pretty tough meat, but I’ll put 2 or 3 capsules of the Masszymes and spread it on it for about sixty to ninety minutes and it just completely starts…

Ben:  Oh, man. 

Matt:  Immediately it’s breaking down the meat and digesting it so…

Ben:  That’s a good idea.

Matt:  And then I’ll clean it, wash it, put the salt and pepper and whatever, and then cook it.

Ben: So if I don’t have any lemon juice or raw milk on hand I could probably use kinda like what you’re doing as a marinade to soften the meat I could use that on like liver or anything else I was trying to soften and you can just break open these digestive enzymes.

Matt:  Uhm, exactly and if you want another hack to take you out to the next level is the Masszymes and then salt, like put some kosher salt, put the Masszymes first and then kosher salt on top and that really accelerates it, and then you clean it off.

Ben:  Nice. Digestive enzyme and salt 1-2 combo.  I like it.

Matt:  It’s magic.  So, in terms of the proteolytic enzymes on a systemic level to speed up recovery years 4 really interesting studies and again we’ll link that in the show notes.  One Dr. Fulgrave saw that sprains and strains could go from 8 weeks of inactivity to down to 2 weeks.  JM Zuschlag in a double blind clinical study using proteolytic enzymes for karate fighters showed absolutely mind-blowing improvements and you can read about this is at page 143 of the book Enzymes and Enzyme Therapy.

Ben:  What do you mean mind-blowing improvements?

Wade:  Well here we go.  Hematomas 15.6 days to 6.6 days.  Swelling 10 days to 4 days.  Restriction of movement 12.6 days down to 5.  Inflammation and this is key for everybody, inflammation 10.5 days down to 3.8 and unfit for training 10.2 days to 4.2 days.

Ben:  What were they using for something like this?  Like how much?

Wade:  They were using a proteolytic enzyme mixture.

Ben:  Okay.  Interesting.

Wade:  And on an empty stomach.  The key is to get systemic effects ‘cause if you take it with food it’s gonna break down the food, right?  If you take on an empty stomach it’s actually gonna get into the bloodstream and start doing some of these mind blowing improvements we’re talking about.  Two more quick studies Dr. Baumuller used enzymes, also on double blind studies showed ankle-related injuries would recover up to fifty percent faster and last one is Dr. Leichtman treated boxers and he could take black eyes from ten to fourteen days down to 1-3.  So, that’s what we call systemic effects or benefits of enzymes.

Ben:  Wow.  I just sprained my ankle in this last Tough Mudder race over the weekend so maybe I should go upstairs and pop some digestive enzymes.

Wade:  Popopopound it! 

Ben:  Boom!  I like it.  So in terms of enzymes this is obviously really cool.  I think a lot of people don’t really know that you can use these for so many things other than just digesting food.  Now in terms of the probiotic and enzyme mixture if I take the probiotics and I take the enzymes at the same time. what’s actually going on from like a chemical standpoint that would allow either the probiotic to become more efficacious or the enzyme to become more efficacious?

Matt:  Well we’ve done the experiments and you can actually see it on the website bioptimizer.com/greenfield, you’ll see a video which is an experiment we did.  We took some raw meat and put it in 3 glasses with some vinegar which is to kind of replicate stomach acid.  In one glass there was nothing going on, and the second glass we had just enzymes and then the third one we had our enzymes and our probiotics, and you can see the breakdown is just happening that much faster and it’s because the probiotics are again proteolytic, so they’re gonna help break that protein down to amino acids.  So they’re just a great synergistic thing again the proteases in the enzymes and the proteolytic nature of the probiotics are just gonna completely break down those proteins into usable aminos.

Ben:  Ok, got it.  Now Wade, I had a question for you and in terms of people using digestive enzymes and mistakes that folks make.  You know obviously, you could, I suppose use a digestive enzyme that only has amylase or only has lactase in it or you could just that’s not rocket science that maybe you just when looking at the digestive enzyme label aren’t getting all of the different enzymes that Matt was talking about earlier that were responsible you know, like cellulase for plant fiber, and lactase for milk, and peptidase for gluten, so you’d want a full spectrum but are there other mistakes that people make when their using a digestive enzyme?

Wade:  Yeah, I’ll go and talk a few things that kinda come up.  I think number one, is it’s too weak.  That’s the most common one if you go out to your store shelves and you look around.  The thing is particularly when you’re looking at the performance side of things you really wanna concentrate heavily on the proteases, and what happens is those are the most expensive enzymes to make.  So a lot of companies kind of cut corners on that simply because the average person isn’t sophisticated enough in their education to understand the difference.  The other thing is that I feel from a performance standpoint they don’t take enough volume.

We have developed a process that we’ve tested over the years that we’ve found that taking a high volume of a proteolytic enzyme for say ninety days is sufficient enough that you start to get these kind of ulterior benefits to the product, in other words you get your system optimized if you will, and then you can kinda adjust to your dosage and of course, we’ve gone to even further extremes to that and some of our peak performance guys they really pushed the limits on that, but for the average person they just don’t take enough and they don’t take a high enough quality.  And I had one other piece to it, when you get to protease, a lot of times people just classify protease as protease but when you’re going through that digestive process that I talked about earlier you have to realize that that PH starts to change from let’s say a neutral or an alkaline state after that first thirty to sixty minutes when the hydrocholoric acid comes in, that mixture is gonna drop from say 7 or 8 to 7 to 6 to 5 to 4 to 3, and you want proteases that work in all of those ranges, and the reason why you want that is because that’s what’s gonna cleave the amino acids or the protein into the usable amino acids inside your body.  So we have combined the 3 main ones which is the 6.0, the 4.5 and 3.0.  That way we handle the full spectrum of pH.  If you’re using an animal-based enzyme and there’s a lot of people that are using an animal-based enzyme blend.  It’s limitations within the pH are extreme and therefore you’re not going to get the same effects.

The other thing is if you’re not using all 3 of these you’re not gonna digest, absorb and utilize some of the key amino acids.  And this is where I think you get people that are having challenges with maybe depression, or they’re having trouble putting on muscle, or they’re having a variety of proteolytic enzymatic pathway issues, this is where we make a distinction by having the 6.0, the 4.5, the 3.0.  You’re gonna get all those amino acids utilizable by your body so that it can do the repair.  Make the polypeptide change for your brain and get your whole body rockin’ and rolling the way it was supposed to.  And that’s I think the big, big mistakes that people make.  And the other thing is you know they don’t take them before their meals.  What I do is I carry a little tin with me.  I take an Altoids I have one of those little Altoids containers that you can fit kinda of in that change piece in your jeans and I pack about twenty five enzymes inside that, and I just pop them before every single meal, and it makes a huge difference.  So I think you need to take it just before the meal and that will suspend your body from producing the enzyme.  So you don’t get the metabolic drain on your body.  That’s the other thing, so I think taking them just before is a big factor.

Ben:  So you take it right before.  So what happens if you forget, do you take it during or you take digestive enzyme after meal, will you still get some effect?

Wade:  Oh, you’ll still get the benefits but keep in mind that your body is extremely accurate.  Dr. Hao determined that it had the specific… what do you call it… your body was able to specify what food it has and what amount of enzymes it requires to break down that food.  So if you ingest the food without say taking in your enzymes, your body is going to start preparing the preparation and release of those enzymes.  It’s kinda like Pavlov’s dogs and the salivating.  Same thing with your body.  So if you take it beforehand, your body’s gonna sense that the enzymes are present and it doesn’t need to release and that’s gonna reduce the metabolic drain of your enzymatic capacity.

Ben:  Interesting.  Ok, wow.  There’s a lot here and I’ve been taking notes and I’ve got them again if you’re listening in over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/gallant that’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/ g-a-l-l-a-n-t.

Now a couple of things.  First of all, I know that over there or if you’re listening in you just go over to their website Bioptimizers just like what it sounds like bioptimizers.com/greenfield.  You guys have a discount code over there that people can use or discount that sets in for people?

Matt:  Yeah, they’re gonna get up to between twenty-three and forty-five percent off depending on the size of the package, so yeah we went all in for you.

Ben:  Cool.  And then the other million dollar question, and I’ll put a link to their website for you guys in the show notes or again bioptimizers.com/greenfield.  Other million dollar question ‘cause I think we just didn’t get in to enough detail on this, Matt and it’ll come full circle to how I introduced you.  The probiotic enema thing, what’s kinda like your gold standard method to do this probiotic enema?  Can you walk through this real quick for folks?

Matt:  Well, sure. Go ahead.

Ben:  And also what people can expect to feel like why they would wanna do this.

Matt:  So right.  I’m gonna actually give a bigger protocol so we did not [inaudible) fans of fasting once, twice, three times a year and we usually do, I typically do 3 to 5 days and Wade goes up to ten days sometimes, and of course, the research has come out on the benefits of that, and how it resets the immune system and all this great stuff.  So…

Ben:  You mean fasting without eating anything at all?

Matt:  Correct.

Ben:  Just water?

Matt:  Right, but being a bioptimizer (laughs), so we’re always looking to speed things up and accelerate the process, right? so we will do a couple of things during the cleanse.  One of them is yeah, we’re not eating food but we’ll take ten capsules of Masszymes and 5 capsules of P3OM three times a day.  So what that’s doing is getting into my blood stream doing that those beautiful systemic benefits we talked about as well as breaking down old undigested protein in my intestinal tract which I think there’s always some stuff there.  So that’s 3 times a day, ten capsules of Masszymes, 5 of P3OM.

We also love to do the batman enema.  So that’s where you’re gonna take and I believe more is better here, so on my next one and I’ve got one coming up soon.  I’m gonna go up to a gallon I think (giggles).  I used to do a liter but again without the colonic machine it’s hard to get deep as where I wanna go.  So I’m gonna prepare about a gallon of coconut water, obviously get some nice fresh coconut water.  With about a gallon you’ll probably gonna need about 6 or 7 capsules of P3OM depending on the temperature of your ambient room because you know why you get sick and your body temperature goes up, and that’s because every degree Celsius that your body goes up, enzymes double in capacity or function.  So that’s why your body turns up the heat so that the enzymes in your body can do more good.  And it’s similar with when you’re fermenting things the warmer the room is the faster it’s gonna go.  Four to 8 hours depending on the temperature is what you wanna do.

And again, you should drink it and it should be a little bit acidic because the probiotics are literally eating the sugar which is another hack by the way especially with the holidays coming up, if I’m pounding sugar like I did last night for example, I’m gonna take ten capsules of P3OM to help literally break that sugar down and feed the probiotics instead of me taking on the full blown blow there, but anyways back to the protocol.  Take the probiotics, throw it the coconut water when it becomes acidic that means it consumed the majority of the sugar and the pH is starting to change.  And then you’re gonna basically go in the shower, put your feet up, have an enema bag, you know get some help (giggles), and then drop a liquid in there and if you don’t have the yoga swing or what not, keep your legs up for again fifteen to twenty minutes, and if you have an inverted table or some sort of yoga swing hang, and just let that liquid work its way through and clean house.  So that’s the protocol.  And usually you’ll see that nothing comes out ‘cause your body absorbed it, but if you go deep enough you might notice the next couple of days some interesting things come out.

Ben:  Okay, got it.  So basically you ferment your probiotics for 48 hours at room temperature and if it’s slightly hotter it’s gonna ferment faster, and you’re fermenting it in coconut water and then you basically do a normal enema by your putting all that fermented probiotics up into your butt and hanging upside down for ten minutes.

Matt:  You got it.

Ben: Ish.  Cool I like it.  There’s a little experiment I’m gonna try this week.  And if you wanna use Matt and Wade’s probiotic mix, if you wanna use their digestive enzyme mix to tenderize meat or to shoot thing up your butt, you can go to their website bioptimizers.com b-i optimizers dot com/greenfield, or just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/gallant, if you want all the show notes, the studies they talked about.  I’ll put a link to the previous podcast that I did with Vielight on that light that Matt was talking about early on in the podcast.  My Power of When podcast with Michael Breus about how to know if you’re a lion, or a dolphin, or a wolf, or a bear, and plenty of other resources for you guys if you want to take a deep dive and you need this stuff.

And in the meantime, Matt and Wade thanks for coming on the show and sharing all these stuff with us guys, you’re a pair of unique dudes who are men after my own heart when it comes to trying to optimize the human body and brain using cutting edge science.  So thanks for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us.

Matt:  Ben, thank you if it wasn’t for you I would not have tripled my deep sleep in the last 6 months like literally.  I’ve always been a big fan of sleep, but the content that I’ve learned from you in some of your blog posts have completely radically changed my sleep, and of course my quality of life as a result.  So thank you for doing what you do.

Ben:  Sweet.  Well thanks, man.  That’s music to my ears.  I’ll keep doing it now that I know that somebody’s listening in.

Matt/Wade:  (laughs)

Wade:  Yeah, we both love your podcast and I feel that you rate on the cutting edge of the health world so it’s a real pleasure to share a little bit of time with you.

Ben:  Cool.  I’m gonna end this thing then before I get a big head.  Alright you guys, well thanks for listening in again bengreenfieldfitness.com/gallant is where the show notes are.  Go to bioptimizers.com/greenfield, if you want some fat discounts on Matt and Wade’s probiotic and enzyme complex.  And until next time, I’m Ben Greenfield along with Matt Gallant and Wade Lightheart signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.  Have a healthy week.

 You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.  Go to bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting-edge fitness and performance advice.

 

 

Matt Gallant is an entrepreneur, a poker champion, an ex-rock guitarist, a strength and conditioning coach with a degree in kinesiology, the CEO of a company called BiOptimizers, and a guy who send me e-mails like this:

Subject line: probiotic enema

Break open a handful of capsules and ferment in coconut water…reaches peak power around 4-5 hours of fermentation. However you live in a cooler climate so it might take longer. You can drink it, and if it’s still sweet then you can go longer. When it starts to become a bit acidic, that’s when it is at it’s peak. For enema, retention time should be 15-20 minutes. I like doing the Batman enema. I’ll go upside down with the Om Swing so it really works it’s way down. I tend to do this after two days of fasting so it really takes care of old bad bacteria…”

As you can imagine, this dude thinks outside the box when it comes to nutrition and health.

He is also joined on today’s podcast by , a natural bodybuilder, vegetarian and low-protein diet advocate. Wade is a 3-time All Natural Bodybuilding Champion, advisor to the American Anti-Cancer Institute, director of Education at BiOptimizers Nutrition and a vegetarian for over 13 years. He is also the author of several books including the best-selling books “Staying Alive in a Toxic World”.

During our discussion, you’ll discover:

-The reason Matt does probiotic and digestive enzyme enemas…[9:25]

-The full-head laser light therapy treatment Matt does on his body each morning…[14:40]

-What you need to look for if you are going to use an ionizing water plate to alkalinize your water…[16:30]

-The method Wade uses to breathe in 10 kilograms of oxygen each morning…[22:20]

-Why Wade consumes Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA’s) each morning…[25:15]

-How Wade maintains and builds muscle on a low-protein, vegetarian diet…[32:40]

-Why can’t your body just digest food all on it’s own without an enzyme…[37:00]

-The 13 different types of digestive enzymes, and how to know when you should take which…[45:20]

-A muscle-building hack you can use by breaking open digestive enzymes and probiotics and adding them to a shake or smoothie…[50:20]

-Why BiOptimizers only has one single strain in their probiotic formula…[53:50]

-What happens if you take digestive enzymes on an empty stomach…[57:50]

-How to use digestive enzymes combined with salt as a potent meat tenderizer…[63:25]

-The groundbreaking enzyme study that showed hematoma recovery to go from 15.6 days to 6.6 days, swelling from 10 days to 4 days, restriction of movement from 12.6 days to 5 days, inflammation from 10.5 days to 3.8 days and unfit for training status from 10.2 days to 4.2 days…[64:45]

-The biggest mistakes most people make when using digestive enzymes…[68:00]

-Whether you should take digestive enzymes before, during or after a meal…[71:55]

-Matt’s step-by-step protocol for giving yourself a highly effective probiotic enema…[74:15]

-And much more!

Resources from this episode:

Bioptimizers website where you can find Matt and Wade’s probiotic and MassZymes P3-OM digestive enzyme blends <–click for discount

OmSwing Yoga swing

The Power Of When podcast about Wolves, Dolphins, Lions and Bears

Vielight Neuro (10% discount code is “GREENFIELD”)

Kangen water machine for alkanizing and structuring water

-Website with study: “Double-Blind Clinical Study Using Certain Proteolytic Enzymes Mixtures In Karate Fighters

-Website with study: “Therapy Of Ankles Join Distortions With Hydrolytic Enzymes; Results Of Double-Blind Clinical Trials”

Traumatic Injury In Athletes paper

-Website with study: Enzyme Therapy And Sports Injuries

 

 

 

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

2 thoughts on “[Transcript] – Probiotic Enemas, Digestive Enzyme Myths, Breathing 10 Kilograms of Oxygen, Low-Protein Diets & More!

  1. Jordan Jakab says:

    Hey Ben – The Kangen Ionizer is out of my price range and wanted to see if you have come across any cheaper alternatives. I also rent, so wouldn’t want to install a home system.

    Thanks for all you do!

  2. Gabriel Audick says:

    I’m already taking Seed Probiotics after listening to Ben’s podcast with it’s cofounder.

    I just go a free bottle of P3-OM, though

    Should I stack them and take them together each morning?

    Thanks

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