April 11, 2020

From Podcast: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking-podcasts/mumbai-qa/

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:00:46] About this Podcast

[00:02:21] Podcast Sponsors

[00:05:34] Biohacking in India

[00:08:33] What It Means To Be “Boundless”

[00:16:30] How To Optimize Gut Health

[00:21:04] The Harmony Between Ancestral Living And Modern Science

[00:31:20] How Moving Around Helps Digestion

[00:35:53] 5G And EMF Hazards From Mobile Phones And “Smart” Technology

[00:53:38] Podcast Sponsors

[00:56:37] Why It's So Difficult To Thrive On A Plant-Based Diet

[01:08:45] Biohacking Your Workout

[01:18:25] How To Slow Down, Or Stop Altogether, The Aging Process

[01:26:43] How Ben Can Have A Biological Age Of 9 Years Old

[01:33:10] The Right Approach To Aesthetics When It Comes To Biohacking

[01:47:26] Biohacks To Help With A Polluted Environment

[01:53:50] Hacks To Optimize Health While Traveling

[02:02:40] Herbs For Biohacking

[02:08:41] What Wearable Technologies To Use, And Which To Avoid

[02:18:20] Ben And Kris' Top 5 Biohacks

[02:31:24] Audience Q&A

[02:46:16] End of Podcast

Ben:  On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

So, the problem with the modern science is sometimes you become too disconnected from nature, or we develop so many shortcuts that all of a sudden we're no longer living anyway.

Jag:  Our ancestors did that. Why can't we find enjoyment in it instead of always seeking comfort?

Ben:  Biggest contributors to inflammation that exists and that I have found to be in huge quantities here in India, possibly more than in America is —

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Well, here we are. Today's episode is the final of a series of podcasts that you've probably, or maybe not, have heard of my recent trip to India, which I managed to actually escape just in time before this whole pandemic set in. But nonetheless, I did a whirlwind tour of Bangalore, and Delhi, and Mumbai, and recorded all the different panels and Q&As that I was on for your listening pleasure. And today's episode is a doozy. We get into everything from 5G and EMF hazards from mobile phones, and whether we do have to worry about 5G or not. Oh, and by the way, I'm not one of those like 5G causes coronavirus conspiracy theory kind of guys. I've been tweeting a lot of my thoughts about that. So, if you go to twitter.com/bengreenfield, that's where I've been pushing out a ton of, not just information about that, but all of my thoughts, research studies, hacks, et cetera, for coronavirus. That's part of the best way to follow me when it comes to staying up to date on my own research with this whole pandemic.

But we also get into anti-aging, we get into aesthetics, we get into digestion and gut health, a whole host of stuff. So, the shownotes for today's show are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/mumbai. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com/–you guessed it, M-U-M-B-A-I, and guess what, I'm going to give you a 10% discount as a part of this podcast to my company, Kion, site-wide discount on everything. That's a biggie, 10%. Meaning, you are not going to fifth off the cost of everything, our creatine, our amino acids, our immune-boosting oregano and colostrum, our incredibly popular fat loss support compound, Kion Lean, you name it, we've got it.

And all of the products we have there are a blend of ancestral nutrients like herbs and superfoods all the way down to modern newfangled molecules, like the amino acids and the ATP you get from the creatine, a whole lot more, or I guess I should say the phosphate groups you get from the creatine. Anyways though, I digress to take advantage of any of our amazing shotgun formulations for immunity, for gut, for digestion, for muscle gain, for fat loss. We've got it all there, incredibly fun site to shop on, really good articles, too. We have great content. We've recently put out one on stress, on meditation, a lot of cool little downloadable PDFs. It's all there at Get Kion. So, you go to getkion.com, getK-I-O-N.com, and your code is BEN10.

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And then just remember, the shownotes for today's show you can get at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/mumbai, M-U-M-B-A-I. You'll hear me along with a former bodybuilder and amazing man in his own right, Kris Gethin along with fitness entrepreneur, Jag Chima on today's show. So, let's do this.

Jag:  Hey, good afternoon.

Audience:  Hi.

Jag:  Come on. You guys got more than that. Good afternoon.

Audience:  Good afternoon.

Jag:  [00:05:42]  _____ sitting down. So, thank you all for being here today. Before I introduce myself, I just like to know, do we have people here from the fitness industry?

Audience:  Yes.

Jag:  Yeah. Does people here know much about biohacking?

Audience:  Yes.

Jag:  Yeah. And you want to know more, right? Okay. Great. So, let me tell you a little bit about Physique Global and Hammer Clinics, first and foremost. So, Physique Global are the exclusive Hammer Clinics' education partner, and we've had several hundred hammer clinics across the country over several years. We've educated thousands of fitness professionals and fitness enthusiasts and have played a major role in changing the way fitness is perceived in India and helped people to progress with their careers. For the very first time, we are introducing biohacking into India.

Now, Physique Global has always been innovators when it comes to education. Biohacking, we hadn't been told at least to advance to bring to India just yet. I don't believe it is. And we wanted to do something a little bit different. So, as always, we wanted to get the best from any space when it comes to education. So, with me on my right, [00:06:56] _____ for Ben Greenfield. And on my left, you may know of him too, Kris Gethin. My name is Jag Chima. I am the CEO of Physique Global, and my role usually is to put these types of events together with our wonderful team, who play a major role in that.

Today, we're going to be covering a lot of topics within the biohacking space. What we're going to try and do is to make it very relevant and connectible with your everyday lives. Does that sound good?

Audience:  Yes.

Jag:  So, I'll tell you another thing. Any of the seminars, forums that we have, they can be as high energy or as low energy as you want. So, the energy that you give is what you're going to get back. So, at the end of this, you may have a whole lot of REM or deep sleep.

Female:  We don't want that.

Jag:  Right. Okay. Or you'll be walking–

Ben:  Isn't there like a gin and whiskey tasting downstairs? I think we should probably bring some of that up here.

Jag:  But the idea is that when you walk out of it, you should all walk away with something valuable that you can go and change your lives and the lives around you. How does that sound?

Female:  Fantastic.

Jag:  So, the way that we're going to format this is more of a panel discussion. And at the end, we're going to have Q&As. There is quite a lot to go through. So, if I tend to stop anyone of my colleagues from speaking, it's only because of time constraint and the fact that I want to try and get through as much as possible. Is that good?

Audience:  Good.

Jag:  Fantastic. Okay. So, I'm going to sit and speak [00:08:37] ____ appropriate. Ben, I want to congratulate you on your latest publication, “Boundless.”

Ben:  Thank you.

Jag:  It's already the number one bestseller in eight categories on Amazon. That deserves a round of applause.

Ben:  You know more about my book writings than I do.

Jag:  It's a heavy book.

Ben:  Yeah, it is.

Jag:  You've trained with it.

Ben:  It is. My apologies. What does it mean to be boundless? Well, it comes down to energy really, and that's what we're going to be talking a lot about today. That says why we do things like use scientific technology or biohacks, but most of us just want more energy to accomplish more in life to take whatever skills that we have been blessed with, whatever our true purpose and calling is in life and they make the maximum impact with that no matter what our skills or our purpose or our careers are.

And what I noticed with the increasing frequency is that people seem to be, A, getting a lot of phone calls, and B, walking around with less energy than I think a human being deserves to have. For the longest time, I myself was fooled into believing that a proper exercise habit, or movement patterns, or the perfect fitness routine, or the best body, or the biggest muscles, or the most efficient part would make one healthy, especially when combined with the perfect diet. And so, for a long time, I'm [00:10:26] _____ focused on exercise and diet, and neglected so many of the other variables that contribute to our energy or our lack thereof, things like our cognitive performance and how we care for our brain, how we attempted things like neuroplasticity and neural growth and/or inflammation, the blood-brain barrier, neurotransmitter balance, digestion, how to heal the gut, leaky gut, or immune factors that are related to whether or not we get sick with increased frequency. There are a whole host of things to attend to, the mitochondria. Perhaps the most important would be our spirit, our souls, the invisible part inside all of us that really does keep us going at the end of the day when we're 70 or 80 or 90 and it keeps going long after our bodies and our brains perish.

And so, for me, boundless energy comes down to optimizing each of these different areas, not just performance and food, but digestion, brain, sleep, hormones, immunity on down the line. And so, really, what I want to do with the book, what I mean when I say boundless is I want people, I want you to be able to have the energy that you want at your beck and call all day long. And that takes a multimodal approach. It's not the perfect exercise routine, it's not the perfect diet, it's combining all of these different variables you're attending to every aspect of the body that is either going to strip you energy or give you energy. So, being boundless certainly means having all the energy that you want. And that's why I wrote the book.

Jag:  Awesome. Also, Kris, I know that you have recently been reading Ben's book. [00:12:14] _____ to tell us about it so far?

Kris:  Right. It took you about three years to write that?

Ben:  Correct.

Kris:  Yeah. About three years. He must be a very fast writer because that'll probably take me about three years to read it. It is a huge book, but it's full of so much information, [00:12:34] _____ way through it. I like to usually read in bed in this position, but it's brought my posture up just by holding it. But it's a phenomenal piece of information that has a global structure that you'd find in so many other books. Usually, when I read a book within this realm, there's good chapters in there that I take and create my own book from it. And it's still a good book if I take a chapter. It isn't a waste of a book, but this has a chapter after chapter of phenomenal information.

Unfortunately, I just cannot carry that around while I'm traveling. So, now, I'm downloading the audio version to take back with me to the U.S. on my long-haul flight, which is about 40 long hours. But it's information that you can take and apply. I ask all of you to read this book, but don't become the students of learning as so many of us do. As an example, years ago, growing up on a farm in Wales, we struggled financially. But my father purchased a book by Robert Kiyosaki called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” He didn't just read that book, he applied it, and then he purchased an investment property, then another, then another. Ten years later, he had 40 investment properties and left the farm because he applied it for the betterment of us. So, if you read this book, please don't just read it, apply it because you will have so much more boundless adventure and energy for your life and your loved ones. So, please do that for us.

Ben:  And if I could jump in real quick, when it comes to reading in general because I'm a voracious reader, I love to read, but we live in information era, especially in the era of Kindle, for example, where it's so easy to have many, many books and be finishing one book with two or three or four or seven still left in queue to read. I have a lot of principles I follow when I read books. For example, one being I never feel pressure to read an entire book. I'll go through and geek highlights out of the book, get the most important parts, and then simply move on after I devour what I actually want from certain chapters of that book. But then I will take the–what I would deem the perennial bestsellers as Ryan Holiday, my [00:15:08] _____ books that are crucial.

One [00:15:10] _____ on my bookshelf where I shelf the books that I want to read every year, the best, the best. And I think it's better to come back, to return to the classics that really inspired you to drive those home over and over again and to just constantly be reading a book, shelving them and forgetting what's in them. So, make sure that as you're reading–and I would hope of course that Boundless becomes one of those books that you turn to year after year. But just know that that's one of my strategies when I read is I have those books that I do return to year after year, and I even use a program called Readwise. And what Readwise does is it allows me to input the books that were my favorite books, and every week, they'll send me an email with the highlights of those books they [00:15:52] _____ week after week. But just to make sure that as you read, you're cognizant that you want to take the good stuff and come back to it over and over again. That's the technique that I sort of use.

Jag:  Also, Ben, where can people find your book if they want to order it?

Ben:  In India and in many international locations, it would be boundlessbook.com/book-depository. If you don't know how to spell depository, I'm sorry, because your neighbor [00:16:29] _____.

Jag:  Okay. We're going to kick off with gut health. Now, there's a lot of effects of current diets, processed foods on the gut, and I think that's quite a big segment of the biohacking industry. Now, how important is gut health, Ben?

Ben:  Oh, it's important. Yeah. I think everybody knows that the gut is important because that's where we drive [00:16:56] _____ nutrients, but that's where most of [00:17:01] _____ that are not us reside, or bacterium. Certainly, there is a skin biome, and a nasal biome, and a hair biome, but the majority of the biome, the bacteria, thrive and live in the gut and are constantly churning out neurotransmitters and what would be called postbiotics that contribute to a great deal of our energy models or our lack of energy. And so, yeah, the gut is incredibly important not only for our nutrient absorption for food, but also for the care of that bacteria that impacts so many other functions within the body. I mean, we were formed as an embryo in our mother's womb. There were two branches of our nervous system that basically took off, one being the enteric nervous system, and one being the central nervous system. Many of us are familiar with the central nervous system. This is our brains, and our neurons, and our nerves, and the enteric nervous system is that entire nervous system that resides within the gut, and it's all fed and fueled by this vagus nerve that stems from cranial nerves within the head and [00:18:07] _____ through the rest of the body to innervate the rest of the organs.

But the reason this is important is because it means that if we don't care for our gut and we are incognizant as to what the status, on the health standpoint, of our guts are, it's going to affect our mental function and our sleep function, neurotransmitter production, our mood, our emotions dramatically. And so, by caring for the gut, you really are caring for the rest of this body. And so, it's incredibly important, but the problem is that there are a variety of issues that can go wrong with it, and that's why I would say that functional medicine really has it right when they commend most issues by leading the gut, by testing the guy, by asking patients about gut function and by determining what's actually going on the guts, whether it would be inflammation or parasites, or yeast, or fungus, or bacterial imbalances, or anything else because it's such a root cause of disease, and chronic disease, and poor energy levels amongst some people.

Jag:  Kris, what kind of effects does it have processed foods on your gut?

Kris:  There's a lot of effects. It isn't just coming from the processed food, it could be from, like what Ben mentioned, what's in hair. It could be the pollutions. It could be the mold toxicity that can have an effect. I mentioned before that in 2014 when I was diagnosed with mold toxicity by Dr. [00:19:41] _____ Florida. The first thing that he did, I had the stool test, the blood samples, absolutely everything, but it was the brain scan that showed the mold toxicity. But he didn't work on my brain, he worked on my gut. For six weeks, I had the colonic hydrotherapy, glutathione, various forms of IV. But the center focus for the next six months was to heal my gut.

So, of course, fast foods, processed foods can definitely have an effect on that, especially if you look at the sources of the foods today. That doesn't always have to come from fast foods. It could be just the meat that we're buying today that is just full of antibiotics, the vegetables that we think are healthy or the salads that have glyphosates. That's all over it that can have an effect. So, you have to be very, very cognizant of the sources of the food that you eat and whether it's healthy or not, but I think it should be obvious to absolutely everybody that the processed foods, the vegetable fats, the fast foods that we have, and on top of that with inactivity, the sugar as well in combination with all of the above is just a recipe for disaster for your guts that could have an inflammatory effect in your gut, which leads to a chemical response in your brain.

Jag:  Now, there's a lot of myths that I come across, especially meeting people for various gyms across the country where a lot of people compare ancestral living versus modern living. For example, ghee back in the olden days that used to be quite a big part of diet, and even is with some people today, but a lot has changed. So, Ben, what is your view in ancestral living versus modern science?

Ben:  You know, I don't necessarily think that the two need to exist in isolation. I mean, that's just really the way that I live my life, like I live out in the forest and we raise goats and chickens, and we grow most of our own vegetables and I hunt much of our meat, and we spend lots of time in the sunshine and swim in the river and plant foraging, and living very connected to nature in a way that our ancestors would. When we're preparing grains, we soak and we sprout and we ferment, and we use lots of what would be considered more ancestral preparation methods for our foods. But at the same time, I'm sticking laser lights up my nose and standing naked in front of the red-light panels and using all manner of different biohacks for anything from exercise routine to [00:22:24] _____.

And so, I think that the two can go hand-in-hand, and I certainly even wrote “Boundless” with this viewpoint of combining ancestral living with modern science. For example, I would sleep on a mat called the Body Balance Mat, which it gets about 7.8 Hertz frequency that just blasts my body with the same frequency that would be emitted by the planet Earth for reduction of inflammation while I sleep. But I also go outside barefoot. I go for walks, when I walked today, I'm wearing one of these sandals right now called Earth Runners that have copper plugs built into the bottom of it that allow you to soak up the negative ions from the earth and get that anti-inflammatory benefit when I'm simply outside in the sunshine. But of course, I combine that with these modern strategies such as grounding, earthing mats or pulsed electromagnetic field frequency, or other things that help us to mimic what nature might give to us even when we're in our modern indoor offices that we're living in.

So, I think that both can exist together and you can, of course, use either their own way. For example, when it comes to modern science, one thing that I have noticed in the U.S. that I would caution you about your [00:23:47] _____ is you become more interested in biohacking because there are many biohackers who are kind of fat, sick and unhealthy in the U.S. because they rely too much on the technology or they're so disconnected from the nature that they're simply using a bunch of biohacks in their office or their home all day getting bombarded by Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or the non-native EMF that all these devices might produce. I mean, they're not getting biophotonic light or sunlight. They're not nourishing [00:24:19] _____ fresh and they're not maintaining connection with our planet Earth because they're inside on the third floor of an office building and they are using infrared and new red light panels, but not actually in the full spectrum of light from the sun, and they are, for example, sometimes exercising very, very short, brief doses using strategies that don't necessarily mimic the physical activity, the constant all-day physical activity that our ancestors might experience.

So, the problem with the modern science is sometimes you become too disconnected from nature, or we develop so many shortcuts that all of a sudden we're no longer living any way like human beings have lived for thousands of years. And at the same time, you can also overuse ancestral living. I know many people, for example, will hear about some superfood, whether it'd be ghee or blueberries or kale and simply eat to excess many of these foods that can actually cause issues when consumed in excess, or they'll simply be in a hypercaloric state because ghee is good for them, but they're putting three tablespoons of ghee in every cup of coffee that they're consuming during the day and their triglycerides are sky-high and they have [00:25:38] _____ adipose tissue and they can't figure out why. It's because you overdo anything in an ancestral strategy, and something as simple as developing skin cancer from the sun is a perfect example of that, or the mild, frequent doses of sun are good for you and, in fact, reduce risk of skin cancer. But if you're out in the sun all day long, the opposite occurs.

So, I think that with both ancestral living and modern science, you should be open to the idea of combining the two, right? You don't have to be just that hippie yogi. You don't have to just be some electro-infused biohacker, but by combining the two, you can get the best of both worlds. However, you need to be cautious not to overdo either to approach both with prudence and intelligence and wisdom.

Jag:  Sure. Kris, do you think that modern science has now encouraged people to go back to understanding how ancestral living used to be?

Kris:  Yeah. It's definitely brought awareness to it again. The biohacking side of things is growing, but the awareness of ancestral living has definitely gained exposure, which is a good thing. So, now we're able to combine them both. If we look back, the Blue Zones, and there's a great book that was published a couple of years ago, we see that, for instance, in Okinawa, they look at people that are over 100 years old and they on average sit down and stand up on the floor 50 times per day, and these people don't have any problems with arthritic conditions or anything like that. That is their resistance training and they're moving around all day.

I don't think there's even a word for retirement in those populations. They continue to move around. That population is celebrated and we should think about doing the same as well. We're always constantly thinking, “Okay. How can we biohack our biology? How can we fit in as much exercise [00:27:32] _____ in a short amount of time when we could be moving around all day?” There's no problem with that. And as Ben mentioned with these earthing shoes, yeah, we've got that, and we've also got grassy patches outside that I did this morning. I meditated, I found myself some grass, and I grounded myself and meditated while the sun was shining on me this morning. That's free. Like, I woke up this morning and my readiness to go was down, probably due to our workout yesterday, but I knew that I was going to work out and get in today because I'm going to be on a plane for many, many hours tomorrow, so I'd better get it done. So, I used that opportunity to do something that was free, that was to meditate, and then to manifest the workout that I was about to do because I didn't feel like doing it, and I couldn't wait on the way to the gym. I love that.

And then obviously, there's a lot of things that we participated in yesterday, like the hot and cold exposure, one thing that our ancestors did many years ago. And what we do today, we complain that it's too hot, can't go outside. We complain that it's too cold, can't go outside. Of course we can. It's raining outside, your skin is waterproof. You're okay. You won't drown out there. Go out there. I love it when it's snowing outside. I'm going to lace up and go for a run. Same if it's raining. Whenever I go back to Wales and visit my father, you know this, Jag, we like to climb the highest peak in Wales, which is called Snowdon. And usually, given the Welsh weather, it's always raining, and we hate it on the way up there, but it's our way of bonding through suffering because when we come back down, we've enjoyed this so much more than if it was beautiful, and if it was sunny, and if it was clear at the top of the view. But it's great. And our ancestors did that. Why can't we find enjoyment in it instead of always seeking comfort?

I've done some of the [00:29:34] _____, not through the level that Ben did, but I just did that to get comfortable being uncomfortable and it allowed a transcendence effect of discipline into so many other areas of my life. So, the combination of both should definitely be done. Before we go onto the next question, could you all do me a favor? Can you all put your phones on airplane mode, please? Can you do that?

Ben:  It's actually a good point not only because of distractibility, but because there's zero reason to bombard this room with non-native EMF signals. If you're not actually planning on using your phone–it's something I see a lot of people who–so we have X number of hours on this planet that we can live. And the way I think about it is the fewer number of those hours that I am bombarded by signals that the human body has actually not developed the ability to be able to deal with, the better. So, essentially, if I don't plan on using my phone, it's on airplane mode, period. And it's not just because I want to focus or decrease distractibility, it's because basically, every time it's on, it's that much more damage you're doing to your DNA and your cells. And you might not have control of whether or not the hotel has their Wi-Fi router switched on, but you do have control over the one form of non-native EMF that's closest to you, and in fact, touching your body most of the time, and that's your phone. And even if the phone is on, I'll at least make sure the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are disabled because that's going to reduce some of that EMF. So, yeah, unless your wife is pregnant and about to have baby and is in the hospital, I would say [00:31:18] _____.

Jag:  I just wanted to go back to yourself, Ben. We went in a restaurant the other day and I noticed when you were eating, you were changing positions quite a bit. Does that have anything to do with digestion or anything like that?

Ben:  I'm not necessarily convinced that the position that you are in while you're eating, assuming it is some form of a resting position, is going to increase or decrease digestion. Now, there's something to think about and that is that I engage in low-level physical activity during the most of the day. While I'm at my office, I'm walking, I'm standing, I'm lunging, I'm kneeling. You'll see me even during this panel today, I'm possibly changing positions, not only to release stress on different joints, but also because there's this concept that non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT is one of the biggest contributors to metabolic burn and fat burn during the day. It's this concept of [00:32:12] _____, burn more calories with NEAT than you do with an exercise session. So, when we live in a post-industrial era with chairs everywhere, it becomes important to figure out ways that you can sit or you can rest without necessarily eating in a seated position, which kind of shortens your hip flexors, deactivates your glutes, and can cause low back issues while at the same time, essentially detraining one of the most important functional muscles of your body, your glutes.

Now, at the same time, there is one time when I do rest, when I do allow myself to be in a position of where I would not associate exercise with movement, and that would be while eating because when you eat to get the proper [00:32:57] _____ hormone response, which is going to be things like ghrelin to satisfy your appetite or at least send signals to modulate your appetite, it tastes like insulin, digestive enzyme solution [00:33:12] _____, et cetera, you want to be eating when you were in aggressive or relaxed state.

That's why if, for example, I haven't had breakfast and I have a meeting across town, I don't make myself a smoothie and drink it in the car while I'm driving, I simply fast because I know that the inflammatory blood glucose response [00:33:31] _____ and the lack of digestion that will occur while I'm consuming that food in a stressed state will outweigh any of the nutrient benefits that I might derive from that food. So, when I eat, I'm sure that I eat in a parasympathetic state, and this also includes things like deep breath in and out several times prior to the meal, chewing each bites 25 to 40 times, saying a prayer of gratitude prior to the meal, eating with people rather than eating while working. There's a lot of things that I'll do to ensure that my feeding is actually not harming my body, but was, in fact, enhancing my body that I'm soaking up as many nutrients as possible from that food.

Now, the other advantage of being aware of positioning, in Chapter 18 of my book, it's all about symmetry and beauty in different positions that we can eat in during the day, is that it also affects bone density. Now, it's actually done in Bangalore before we were in Delhi, before we came to Mumbai. And one gentleman I was talking to down there actually had some bone densities [00:34:40] _____ studies of Indian populations and he's noted that a decrease in bone density that coordinates with the shift from a traditional squatting position, which would be a traditional position when eating or defecating to this sitting position, which places less stress on the long bones of the spine and the long bones of the leg, which decreases bone density.

So, there's a lot of benefits from biomechanical and bone density from an activity and calorie burning level, and also from food and digestibility level that are dictated by our posture. And so, it is something we should be aware of. You should be cognizant of burning calories, staying active, keeping the metabolism elevated, keeping the glutes activated, keeping the hip flexors from shortening when you're working, and then when you're rested, especially when you're eating adopting postures that would enhance digestion and allow the body to be in a relaxed state. One of my favorite places to eat is the floor, sitting or kneeling or squatting on the floor, which is very simple to do with cushions and platters. It is really I think a better way to approach eating versus sitting in chairs at a raised table.

Jag:  I think in some cultures, it still happens across the world. Could you imagine life without a mobile phone? Yes? Well, I couldn't. I can't wait for the day [00:36:04] _____. Well, actually, nowadays, mobiles phones are so accessible to almost everybody. Even children at school have mobile phones. And the first thing that people do when they go to someone's house, they say, “Can I get the Wi-Fi password?” So, even before they say hello to you. Actually, it's becoming a problem. People are excited about 5G, for example. I read a lot of blogs and people are talking about how efficient everything is going to be. It's going to be even better than 4G. But, I want to talk about the effects of EMF's 5g, 4G, et cetera, networks and how this affects the sleep cycles possibly–[00:36:44] _____ phone.

We are recording this, by the way, and the previous biohacking seminar was also recorded. So, I would really appreciate if you could switch your phones to silent or airplane mode.

Kris:  [00:36:56] _____. It shows the problems that we have.

Jag:  Okay. So, what are your thoughts on EMF's 5G and the effects on possibly sleep cycles and other issues?

Ben:  Yeah. I mean, I recently interviewed Dr. Joe Mercola about this. He just wrote a fantastic book I think everyone should read called–it's a great [00:37:16] _____ called “EMF*D.” And in that book, he highlights–and many others such as Nick Pineault, who wrote the “Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs,” and other books out there like “Zapped” by Ann Louise Gittleman, and a few other titles that really highlight the biological impact of this non-native EMF, which would come from everything like appliances, especially smart appliances, lighting that has been developed to seek with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, to change the lighting in your home, appliances like washers and dryers, et cetera.

But of course phones with the huge prevalence of them are the biggest contributors to EMF, especially when you consider that with 5G, you need a host of panels spread throughout the city because that small millimeter away does not travel very far, 100 to 200 meters. And then for the 4G signals and other signals, cell phone towers that are necessary. So, it's not just these cell phones that you're carrying around, but it's also the services used to distribute those signals that become a pretty big issue.

Now, the issue biologically I would say that you need to be aware of is threefold. A, our bodies operate electrochemical gradients, negative charge on the inside of the cell and a positive charge on the outside of the cell. There's a great book by Jerry Tennant called “Healing is Voltage.” There's another good book by Robert Becker called “The Body Electric.” And both of these books do a very good job explaining how you create really a metabolic firestorm and that electric chemical balance kind of falls out of whack. That's one of the reasons that I go outside walking barefoot or sleep on one of those Schumann resonance generating mat because they're churning out negative ions the same as a Himalayan salt water, the same as walking on the beach or swimming in the ocean would expose you too because this help to restore the negative balance within the body.

Now, when you are exposed to, say, a cellphone signal, what happens is there's a sharp [00:39:21] _____ calcium into the cell. That's a positive charge. That's building yourself, so you shift that cell from a negative potential inside the cell to a positive charge inside the cell, and that affects most of the metabolic functions within the cell. So, that's one problem. And that problem can be addressed, specifically magnesium. It's a wonderful supplement [00:39:44] _____ charged area because magnesium has some offsets with that calcium influx within the cell. I usually double or triple up my magnesium and take on a day while traveling on airplanes and airports or in an urban environment where I'm surrounded by cell phone powers of 5G panels and a host of different Wi-Fi signals.

Problem number two would be the problem with radiation and its effect on DNA and the protein damage and the protein unfolding that occurs in response to these signals. Now, the DNA damage can also be prepared to a certain extent, and the best way to do that is there's one molecule called NAD, which has become quite popular in the U.S. as a supplement. It can also be administered via IV or via like a transdermal patch, and NAD is fantastic at repairing the DNA faster, over an intermittent fasting or periods of caloric restriction will upregulate NAD, a high intake of fermented foods like yogurt or kimchi or sauerkraut, the wonderful fermented type of pickle preparations that you have here in India. That can be wonderful for increasing NAD, but I think that in a post-industrial era where we find an uphill battle against radiation, I think NAD supplementation is something that becomes crucial.

And NAD will only work to repair your DNA if you also have a high level of sirtuins. Sirtuins are the compounds that you can get from things like cacao, red wine, blueberries or the darkly colored berries like blackberries, black raspberries, bilberries, et cetera, anything, kind of dark purple, dark red. These are high in sirtuin-rich compounds. And many supplements also have sirtuin like resveratrol or something that's about 100 times more potent than resveratrol, pterostilbene. These also have pretty high levels of sirtuin that work very well when combined with NAD.

And then the final area where these cellphones, other signals can cause damage is they can upregulate inflammation, thus, chronic inflammation because they diminish the ability of specific pathway in the body called the NF-kappa B pathway to be able to modulate inflammation. Now, when it comes to stepping the ability of that NF-kappa B pathway to be able to restore its normal inflammation-modulating activity, one of the best ways to do that is to have high levels of ketone bodies in your bloodstream, which again can be achieved via ancestral methods, particularly fasting and restriction of carbohydrates, especially ultra-processed carbohydrates. But you can also use supplements that directly increase your blood levels of ketones and help to regulate that NF-kappa B pathway.

And I certainly do this again on travel days, when I'm flying. I'll do this tomorrow right into the airport. I drink a small bottle of ketone ester. So, these ketones esters are wonderful at taking care of some of that inflammation that you're going to get and a lot of these non-native EMF signals. So, that's some of the damage that you're looking at, right? Positive [00:42:55] _____ cell, DNA damage and NF-kappa B pathways, and those some of the things you can do to control that, too. Magnesium, NAD, sirtuins, ketones, fascinating fermented foods can all help to restore some of the damage that's occurred.

Jag:  Kris, I know that you definitely like to stay away from EMF damage as much as possible. What are some other hacks that you use to protect yourself?

Kris:  I moved out of the city, moved to the outskirts of [00:43:28] _____ with Ben, if it was up to me, but my fiancé wouldn't have it. So, that compromises the outskirts. The protective measures that I do are the obvious things I do with myself as much as I possibly can. I have plenty of berries around my home to do so, but when I'm traveling, of course, we have to have that environment. I travel with what's called [00:43:52] _____ and I have that actually–it's like a bedsheet. I had that whenever I travel just to earth myself because a lot of the times when we're usually traveling with an internal flight maybe every day, which has been a little bit easier [00:44:08] _____ so bad. Then I'll usually earth myself with an earthing mat or an earthing bedsheet on a daily basis.

I honestly found that this had a huge effect, a bigger effect in pretty much everything else that I've applied, I'm pretty sure. And it mentioned something like a PEMF device. I have like a BioBalance bed that I'll–not actually have in my bed because I found that disrupting my sleep. I'll actually have that like on my couch so if I'm reading, I'm on the PEMF device. And obviously, I have like a shielded device that scrambles the EMF on my phone whenever possible. Mine's in a very bad condition than Ben's. I actually haven't gone as far as having somebody come around to my house to check. Brian Hoyer has actually been around to Ben's house, and I believe he's doing it through Spokane and he's actually coming to my place in April. So, he will be able to check in my house where there is the most of dirty electricity, the EMFs that are penetrating my home so I can do whatever I can to spend thousands of dollars, hopefully not, to actually protect my home as well because unfortunately, especially when you live in the city, you just don't know how much you are being penetrated, not just in your home, but by your neighbors as well.

You've got [00:45:41] _____, you've got a lot of tech businesses right next door. You go to do whatever you can to protect yourself in those realms as well. And there are forms of clothing that you can wear. If you look at the statistics on testosterone levels over the past three years, particularly in the military, they've actually done a lot of studies, their testosterone has just declined big time. DNA hasn't changed our environment's house. So, you're going to do whatever you can to protect yourself from various environmental factors. So, wearing the EMF blocking underwear that we wear can obviously be a factor that could contribute to that as well.

A couple of other things that Ben mentioned in regards to having the fermented foods and stuff like that, there's just one thing that I just want to bring up that I mentioned in Delhi because I know in Mumbai, kombucha has come up pretty, pretty rapidly over the past couple of years. I see everybody drinking kombucha [00:46:45] _____ thinking, “This is a great fermented superfood that I'm going to help heal my gut.” You have to be very careful of the sugar that is in that as well, everything in moderation. I haven't actually [00:47:00] _____ blood glucose monitor where I've measured the effects on kombucha. I was very disappointed because I love kombucha myself, but my blood sugar levels actually went through the roof with that, and I think that was the combination of the sugar and the combination as well that have that effect of a little bit of moderation. And Ben's picking up the mic and I'm sure he's going to add to that.

Ben:  I'm not going to add to that, although I do think that if you really are serious about this, that having a building biologist actually walk through your home or your office is very smart. I learned a great deal when Brian Hoyer did the walkthrough with my house about just little things I could change, things I could unplug, little changes I could make, my choice of appliances, my choice of lighting where I was placing sort of things like routers, et cetera. But because we're not even halfway through the day and we're–I would imagine filling you guys with all sorts of fear. It can sometimes feel like, “Oh, geez, what would I do? I'm getting attacked from every angle. I can just curl up in a ball on go hide in a cave.

Just remember, I mean, there are these Blue Zones we've already talked about where people are living a disproportionately long period of time and some of them are cigarette smoking, gin chugging, 109-year-old grandmas who are living long lives despite their lifestyles, not because of them, and this is because they have love, they have a social life, they have relationships, they have spiritual disciplines like gratitude, belief in a higher power. And there's all sorts of things that I think from just a pure emotional and mindset standpoint, to make a lot of this stuff less stressful.

I mean, I catch a lot of flak for this in a scientific community because I believe in magic, I believe in magic, right? So, for example, I believe that–and I catch flak off this. I believe in Creation, some superpower. In my case, God created the earth. And I believe that I'm going to live forever when I die in eternal bliss and the soul just goes on and lives forever. And I even believe that when I do things like pray or have a positive attitude that there is some amount of protection that is confirmed from that. I think that just the state of positivity can raise your emotional level and your frequency to the point where if you live in an urban environment, you have a job when you walk in and there's 10 Wi-Fi routers and you've got 11 neighbors talking on their cell phones all the time, and you're on a tiny airplane, this metal tube and half the people forgot to put their phones in airplane mode and the airplane is equipped with Wi-Fi and breathing and jet fuel. I mean, you can take things to the nth degree as far as being in a constant state of fear, and that actually renders you a little bit more permeable to the damage that a lot of these things can cause.

So, don't underestimate the value of a positive attitude, a positive spiritual life. Don't just myopically focus on the damage, focus also on your attitude and your emotions because you know what, if I'm having a fantastic dinner and I'm at someone's house and their grandma casserole and casserole is just like drenched in glyphosate and vegetable oils, but I want to respect the family and not making people feel awkward and be part of the love and relationships, I will say, “God, please protect me,” and I'll just dive in. So, I mean, as a believer in magic, I can get away with that. But I just want to emphasize. We don't want to sit here and fill you guys with scare tactics the whole time. We haven't been a big part of it.

Kris:  Yeah. I've offended cultures all around the world, and I'm taking [00:50:52] _____. I totally agree with what Ben is saying there. And if I think to my grandfather, who just recently passed away in his 90s in great health, I'd look at my mother's side of the family and he had just such a great community of people around him the whole time. And I always remember that I've actually thought it was weird [00:51:14] _____ these people never argue, they never had any sort of disruption within their life, everybody is just really connected. And I honestly believe that was what led to him to have such a great healthy life until a lot of part of the years. But then you do have the people like Ozzy Osbourne, who's drinking and smoking and doing drugs and still living his life as he is. But maybe that is within his attitude.

I know for me, when I was competing in natural bodybuilding, I was just stressed. I was edgy, everything had to be scheduled. I was punctual. And I probably just worked myself up with cortisol levels up here that what I was trying to do and feed my body with probably doesn't have any effect that it should because since I retired back over 11 years ago, even though I'm not even trying that hard to put on muscle size, I find my body reacts so much better now at 45 years old and in a 35 years old. And I think just the mental change and the [00:52:21] _____ and being so much calmer, and more mindful, and grateful, and positive with the purpose in everything that I do allows me to function without the inflammation and pain, the problems, the nibbling injuries that used to infest me.

It does have a manifested effect when you change that stroke on [00:52:45] _____ surround you with and surround yourself with, and how you feel, how you purposely go about your day because you can go out there with a bad perception or a good perception, like we've all seen it. People who have everything, celebrities, but they're lonely, they're frustrated, they're depressed, and there's some poor people out here begging on the roads, but they would invite you in to have one of their last meals because they've got a different perception, and we all have that ability to do that within ourselves.

Jag:  Also, we had a 45-minute discussion on EMFs and how this could affect your sleep quality at our last event, and that will actually be posted online. So, if you are following Ben or Kris, or the Physique Global platform, you have an opportunity to learn a little bit more about EMFs and how it can affect your sleep cycle.

Ben:  Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about the clothing that I'm literally wearing right now as I'm talking to you. I have my Vuori blue shirt on and my Kore Short from this company Vuori. They make workout clothing that looks fashionable, that fits amazingly, that's super comfortable that you can use for running, training, spinning, yoga, but kind of cruise around in the rest of the day as well. Ninety percent of the time if you see me, I'm wearing Vuori clothing. Be it on my Instagram or anywhere else, that's usually what I'm sporting because it just works for me and it looks good. My wife likes it. She doesn't throw them out like she does half my t-shirts. So, I know they got to be good if my wife doesn't throw them out.

It doesn't look or feel like traditional athletic gear. It feels more like you're wearing super-duper comfortable pajamas that are distractingly comfortable, but that also work for workouts. So, Vuori is this brand-new athletic gear company, and they are going to give all of my listeners 25% off of any item of clothing from their store. They're spelled like this, V-U-O-R-I. So, you go to V-U-O-R-Iclothing.com/ben. And to get 25% off, you just enter code BEN2020, not as in 20% because you get 25%, 2020 like the year. So, you go to vuoriclothing.com/ben and enter the code BEN2020 at checkout for 25% off anything from Vuori Clothing.

And then this podcast is also brought to you–I recently did an Instagram post where I was showing how I do blood flow restriction band training in my Clearlight sauna now. My boys and I, during this quarantine, have been crawling in there for breathwork and heat every single night, getting our sweat on, activating immune-boosting heat shock proteins, sweating, then going and jumping in the cold pool. We have one of these Clearlight Sanctuary Sauna. It's big enough for me to go in there and do flow yoga, push-ups, BFR training. I've even dragged kettlebells in there. I put a bike in there once.

So, you can do all of that, or you can have friends over, or your family in there and just chillax in your sauna because these things are freaking huge. They have full spectrum heaters that do near-infrared, mid-infrared, and far-infrared heat. They have a lifetime warranty. They're low EMF, meaning, they have EMF shields inside them so you're not blasting yourself with dirty electricity while you're in your sauna and microwaving yourself, which you do on a lot of saunas. It's kind of scary. And you also get all the red blood cell production, you get the detoxification through the skin and through the heavy sweat that infrared produces. If you've never used an infrared sauna, then you're missing out. And the good folks at Clearlight are giving you $500 off. You just go to healwithheat.com. That's healwithheat.com and use code BENGREENFIELD. That will get you $500 off their regular price, free shipping, and a special gift with purchase. So, check it out, healwithheat.com and use code BENGREENFIELD.

Jag:  I want to talk about the misconception of vegan diets, social foods and its effects. What is your view on vegans?

Ben:  Half-hour ago, or I guess it was an hour ago, I logged into Facebook and my brother had a photo of his daughter and he said, “My daughter, she's 11, she just pronounced that she's now vegetarian because she saw a movie how animals are treated in CAFO food lots, [00:57:03] _____ or whatever. And I just commented, “Hooray, more ribeye for me.” But, my heart sunk a little bit, I have to admit, because it's so difficult to thrive on a plant-based diet if you're not doing it right. There are so many holes that need to be filled in. Not only can you not get taurine, creatine, carnosine and L-carnitine, appreciable amounts of vitamin B12, DHA, et cetera, from plant-based foods, but you can also miss out if you're not structuring that plant-based diet properly on a lot of other amino acids and fatty acids.

Furthermore, we know that plants have natural built-in defense mechanisms, like the lectins and chickpeas, or the gluten in wheat, or the fatty acid in soy. And all of these can be problematic for that important component you're talking about earlier, the gut, and do things like it will cause damage to the lining of the gut or cause inhibition of proper nutrient absorption. And can these matters be skirted? Yes. Smart plant-based diets actually can avoid many of these issues. They required doing things like taking your quinoa that you're going to–that's covered in a soap-like irritant called saponins, and actually rinsing that quinoa, and then letting it sit overnight, giving another rinse in the morning. Sometimes three or four rinses is what you need to get rid of all that soap-like irritant. When they do this in South America, they actually don't want to use those soaps to clean our clothing because it's such a good soap.

And afterwards, you can even unlock more of the amino acids and the fatty acids in that quinoa by leaving it in a jar for a date or so until you see little sprouts start to emerge. And then you've got sprouted quinoa [00:59:01] _____ saponin soap-like irritant on the outside. I eat bread. My wife makes this lovely slow-fermented sourdough bread. The process of fermentation as you'd find in the flatbread here in India that is of the sourdough varieties, predigests the gluten, it lowers the glycemic index of the food, and it's a more ancestral preparation method. The same could be said with hummus, right? Like I can eat hummus just fine if it's from chickpeas that have been rinsed and soaked to reduce a lot of the lectin content of those chickpeas. Better yet if they've been pressure-cooked, which will reduce selecting content even more. But if I don't know that that hummus has been prepared with chickpeas that have been treated in such a manner, I avoid them because I know they're a gastric irritant.

The problem is many pint-based advocates do not go through this trouble to treat their food accordingly. In addition, if you're going to eat a plant-based diet, you must be aware of the danger not getting from plants. That would be impossible to get from plants. And I have a few articles on my website, and in my book “Boundless“, I dictate exactly what those compounds are. I rattled them off earlier, these creatine, carnosine, L-carnitine, vitamin B12, DHA, et cetera. Your supplement budget is probably going to go up a little bit if you're not eating meat, which for me, that is the question. If you can get access to ethically-raised meat that's been a pasture in regenerative way that takes into account the carbon footprint of the meat, the way that the soil is treated, the way that the animals are treated, the way that the crops are where the animals are rotated as they graze, then why not get a lot of the nutrients and the amino acids and fatty acids that they need from including small to moderate amounts of meat to a diet, or at least things like fish and eggs?

So, I think that the ideal diet, even though it's going to vary based on your genetics in terms of how much protein, how much animal versus plants, et cetera, I think that the ideal diet is still an omnivorous diet comprised of plants that have been prepared in an ancestral manner and animals that have been raised in an ethical and humane manner. And so, my own philosophy is, yes, I eat animals, but only if I know the source from which they came and whether or not they were ethically and humanely treated, and whether or not the earth is loved in the way that those animals were raised. And I also eat plants and ensure that those plants are coming from sources that have not been sprayed pesticides and herbicides or they have glyphosate residue on them, and also those plants have been prepared in a way that deactivates a lot of their natural built-in plant defense mechanisms.

It's one of the things that really irks me in the nutrition world right now because we have these myopic camp, so the carnivore people and the plant-based people, or the omnivorous people and the vegan/vegetarian crowd, and I think that God's good earth is chock-full of all sorts of things that we can eat and enjoy. But really, it just comes down to love. If we love our bodies, we love the people that we are meeting with and surrounding with, and we love our food, and we're very cognizant of all those aspects that I just talked about, then we're going to be able to comprise a diet that takes into account the health of the planet and the health of our bodies.

Jag:  Sounds good. Kris, as somebody who doesn't love endurance sports, Ironman, would you say, for example, with the game changes, there's a lot of people talking about athletes now and plant-based diets, do you think that makes a difference being vegan or do you think that it doesn't really matter as long as you supplement right?

Kris:  Well, that's more performance-based as opposed to health-based. We do see a lot more endurance-based athletes actually going over to vegan or vegetarian diets, like we know Pritchard from Wales, we learn very well, who competes in [01:03:00] _____ Ironman in [01:03:03] _____ in 30 days, and he's on a plant-based diet. But when I had him on the podcast recently and I'm asking him in regards to his blood reports, his supplementation, he didn't really know that much about it. So, even though he could be performing well, this is health [01:03:19] _____, two completely different subjects. But this is the problem that we have with a lot of these documentaries. Eleven-year-olds have access to it, and maybe they're not old enough to make the right decisions for themselves at this particular time, maybe it should only be accessible for somebody that's 16 or 18. And then that documentary obviously could be very biased. You don't have to take this into account as well.

Now, I don't have a problem with people going vegan or vegetarian or anything like that. I have clients that are so. For ethical reasons, I have full respect, but are they doing it the right way? Like we have [01:03:57] _____. He is a vegetarian, and people will use that as an excuse for not being able to perform, put on muscle or be healthy is a perfect excuse. He's in great shape and he's [01:04:09] _____. And I like his attitude to food as well, but we've been out [01:04:13] _____ a lot of time, but we will eat in front of him because he won't order throughout a lot of the time because he likes to know that it's made at home under love and care, love is being put into that food when it's being prepared. So, he feels that when he's actually eating it. And I have a lot of respect for that.

I've got plant-based at home as you know. We have chickens as well, but not allowed to eat those chickens, just the eggs that comes from it, but it's a very different scope of like the sources of the food as we mentioned before. But we have to be very careful of the information that we are [01:04:54] _____ digested. We were told that the food pyramid, when it was [01:05:00] _____ on its head, that fats were bad and cornflakes for the breakfast were good, which is pretty much like eating cheesecake in the morning. So, we have to be very conscious of the decisions that we're making is based on what we've researched ourselves, on what may work for ourselves, not what a documentary or some expertise tell us to do. We have to know what our purposes behind it, then do whatever we can to get behind it with maybe proper supplementation, but you have to really take a deep look into it. Then you're going to have to supplement with algae or whatever to make sure that you're getting a fundamental fat within your diet so you can function properly.

Ben:  And one of the things I should throw in there is that diets can be used as a tool. For example, if I had cancer, I would immediately stop most of my meat consumption and go on a very low protein diet. I would primarily be eating a plant-rich ketogenic diet if I had cancer. However, that does not mean that that's the perfect diet for everyone, and that just because it's useful for that specific use case, that it works for every single human in any condition. Same thing with something like a carnivore diet. If I had an autoimmune condition or leaky gut and needed to eliminate all these built-in plant defense mechanisms and shift to a food group that's–if sourced properly presents almost no damage to the gut and melamine issues, yeah, eat a carnivore diet for 8 or 10 or 12 weeks until you've alleviated some of that gut inflammation. But don't necessarily convince yourself that that is the diet that you can thrive upon for the rest of your life.

And even in the case of veganism or vegetarianism, many people feel absolutely fantastic when they shift to that diet. It's often because they've eliminated a lot of the things they were eating before they switched to that diet, the hamburgers, and the steaks cooked in vegetable oil, the chicken nuggets, et cetera. And you can feel pretty good. It can be used as almost like a way to reboot or clean up or detox your body, but long-term becomes an issue if you all of a sudden think, “Gosh, I feel so great, I'm going to eat this food next 20 years,” because then you'd start to build up the deficits that I started to talk about.

So, the important thing to realize is that sometimes you need to use a specific diet in a short-term scenario to achieve a specific effect, and then begin to eat more all-encompassing diet. So, it's not as though whatever food or whatever diet that you're eating and it's helping you to feel good, it's the diet that you'll be on for the rest of your life. Sometimes you need to work in different food strategies based on what your goals are at that time in your life.

Kris:  Yeah. And just adding to that, like anybody who follows me will know that I actually go vegan every year. Sometimes I'll do full, sometimes eight weeks. I want to do anything and everything in a cyclical fashion that makes me feel good. And I want you to have that approach every now and again. I feel like it takes a little bit of the stress away from my digestive system every now and again. I find that I'm eating a little bit more plant matter. And then whatever diet I go on to, then I just feel the effects of it that much more.

Now, when I was in Tokyo last year, my father, after the tour, was diagnosed with cancer of the kidney. He had that kidney removed and now he is on a very strict keto diet, high in plants, having high dose of vitamin C. I'd like to know where he got that [01:08:32] _____ that I saw on his stories actually because maybe I'll send one of those over there to him as well. But that is going to soothe him right now during his state as well.

Jag:  Also, I'd like to talk about optimizing workouts and training. I noticed yesterday, we spoke about nasal breathwork, HRV during your workouts yesterday. Could you say a little bit [01:08:56] _____?

Ben:  Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of ways to, let's say, biohack a workout, but I would say that if I could name two things that I need to swipe a bit these days, both of which I've been doing quite a bit here in India because they don't require much special equipment but give you a lot of benefit, number one, yes, we did yesterday. Kris and I did a cardio and strength workout that involves four to five-minute cardio effort on the bike or [01:09:31] _____ rowing machine or treadmill or whatever. And then we move on and we do a superset of strength exercises for about four rounds and go back to the bike.

But every time we got on the bike, the entire cycle was nasal breathing, because nasal breathing not only better oxygenates and cleans the air that you're breathing, but it does things like forces you to do deep diaphragmatic breathing because you're getting a little less air. It causes the induction of something called a HIF, hypoxia-inducible factor, which can cause an increase in red blood cells and erythropoietin and open up nitric oxide. It can allow you to remain a little bit more parasympathetic state, especially between those hard sets where we're breathing through our mouth. So, it teaches to recover more quickly. It allows you to have better VO2 max because you're able to essentially learn how to use the option that you are breathing in more efficiently because there's just less to go around.

So, there's a variety of benefits to not just nasal breathing during the workout, but nasal breathing while you're sleeping. And as you're working during the day, we know that when we chest breathe or when we mouth breathe, we breathe more from our chest. There are fairer receptors in the chest that can cause an amplification of cortisol. So, we can be more stressed when we are breathing through our mouths versus when we're doing that deep diaphragmatic breathing through our nose. We know that when we are breathing through our mouths during sleep, we increase the risk of sleep apnea and we can actually even change our jaw structure.

Since I began to have a nasal breathing about four years ago, I've even received comments about my facial structure and people said, “Oh, your jaw seems more square, Ben. It looks like your facial structure has changed.” And we see not only that happen with people who do nasal breathing, but we see the opposite. And kids who mouth breathe, which in many cases, not to get too complex with you, but in a child who's eating dairy, GMO weeds, unfermented GMO soy, things that they might be allergic to or that would cause some type of food intolerance or food insensitivity, they're congested, they get that mild congestion. So, the kid starts breathing through their mouth and it causes a jaw recession, which results in property formation or bone structure in the face. So, it even contributes to facial symmetry and beauty in the growth of a human. So, there's a lot of reasons that nasal breathing is important, and it's also something that you should train yourself to be able to do during a workout, during a walk. It's not that you don't mouth breath during a workout, but you save your mouth breathing for the hardest parts of the workout. You'd absolutely have to open up the portal and get more air in.

Another thing that I do quite a bit of now, we're probably doing later on today after our session, is blood flow restriction training, where I will use tourniquets around the arms and around the legs to restrict blood flow. And what happens is when you do that, it tricks the muscles and the thinking that they're lifting a heavier load than they actually are and they respond by producing more mitochondria and more satellite cells that result in increased growth of muscle fibers even though you're not lifting heavy weights, which of course if I'm in a hotel that only has leg weights or I need to do some type of bodyweight workout like push-ups or squats, with those blood flow restriction bands, I can do that and get a very effective bodyweight training workout.

There's a lot of research in Japan because there, they have even developed these very precise handheld controllers that are linked to pneumatic devices you attach to the arms and the legs called Kaatsu training devices where you can very precisely dial in the millimeters of mercury and pressure that will be placed on the joints by this blood flow restriction training. And you can put on BFR bands and go for a walk, or like I did a couple of days ago, go for a swim, or you can do bodyweight training with BFR on. But I would say that nasal breathing and blood flow restriction training are two of my favorite ways to kind of biohack a workout without having to buy some fancy $50,000 exercise machine.

Jag:  Kris, I noticed that you are also quite big with HRV. Could you share the light of that?

Kris:  Yeah. So, the HRV is something that would be measuring in a couple of ways with a bio strap and an apparel device and an Oura ring. Usually when I'm traveling or lacking in sleep, HRV is down a little bit. So, I'll usually use that as a dictation of if I'm going to go for a walk that day, low-level of cardio, or I'm going to use machines with higher reps and not going to absolute failure, or if my HRV is up, then I'm going to go for a heavy strength workout because I feel good and recovered. I started tracking this when I noticed Ben was doing so and I was getting ready for a lot of endurance events because I noticed with endurance bands, when I started getting light into that social pipeline, these people were finding themselves injured more than strength training athletes, which I found was bizarre that I'm thinking, “God, all these people are doing are just running and swimming and cycling. How can that be? Mostly from running.” But I just found out that a lot of them ignore their HRV. They would just go out and pound it. They're way is like, “Okay. This is [01:14:55] _____. My HRV is down. Maybe I'm just going to go for a 12-mile run today that's hard as opposed to my usual 18.”

So, that's how I started utilizing that more than anything. And obviously, sleep has a big effect on that, as you know that I've always had trouble with sleeping. When I was living here in India, the first time when I had that mold toxicity, I was sleeping on average about three hours a night, but I would pat myself on the back for it because I would still [01:15:24] _____, and I would still work until whatever [01:15:28] _____. You see the entrepreneur space today? They get burned in the candle at both ends and you think it's cool. Well, it catches up with you, eventually.

So, I think with this quantification of the HRV, it definitely has a positive effect on your health and your performance. You just bring yourself back a little bit more than others, not [01:15:48] _____ the clients here in India. I've got one, obviously, [01:15:51] _____ having training five to six days a week. And I'm not always pushing it, but they're not like John Abraham, who would only train like three days a week because his HRV was through the roof because he got a lot of decision-making fatigue, he's a high-playing businessman, as well as an actor, and that definitely had an effect.

Ben:  We should briefly define what HRV actually is. Are you guys familiar with that term?

Female:  Yes.

Ben:  Heart rate variability, HRV, heart rate variability. It's not your actual heart rate, it is the variability in the amount of time in between each beat of your heart. There should be mild beat to the variability between each heartbeat that is indicative that your heart is properly being stimulated by your vagus nerve. Remember, I talked about the vagus nerve when it comes to gut function. This is why an inflamed gut or gut dysfunction can actually lower HRV, and also why stress, which also can impact that vagus nerve, can also impact HRV. The thing is that vagus nerve innervates the sinoatrial node of your heart, which affects all those pacemaker cells of your heart.

And so, if your vagus nerve is toned properly, if you're in a state of low stress, if you're in a state of overall relatively robust health, what happens is that beat-to-beat variation goes up just slightly. Between one beat, there might be 100 milliseconds, between another beat, 97, between another beat, 102. And when that happened, it shows that your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous system are properly tuned. So, a high HRV is a good thing. We often associate high heart rate with being bad or with having poor cardiovascular events, but you want a high HRV if you actually want to be able to quantify whether or not your body is doing a good job dealing with stress, whether or not sleep is optimized. It's a very, very good way to, without fancy blood and biomarker tests, just quantify overall health.

And certainly, a metric that I pay attention to every day, and multiple research sites have shown that when HRV drops, you need to push through a low HRV and continue to do hard workouts when your HRV is low and continue to do stressed workdays when your HIV is low. There is an excellent predictor that you are going to come down with an injury, with an illness, or disrupted sleep within the next two to three days unless you pay attention to that and nip it in the bud. So, it's an excellent metric strike.

Jag:  Awesome. So, with current lifestyles, we've kind of covered a lot of aspects of causes for aging faster. What other things would you say people need to look out for, which actually cause aging faster? And how can we stop aging and, in some cases, reverse the aging process?

Ben:  I've said this many times before, but I think that the two biggest things to pay attention to when it comes to controlling or keeping your finger on the pulse of how quickly you're aging and really your overall health span, not just your lifespan, would be, A, glycemic variability, like how often and the extent to which your blood glucose is fluctuating during the day, and B, your levels of inflammation, particularly, your levels of chronic inflammation. You can measure the former with a cheap blood glucose monitor from the pharmacy in which you prick your finger and take a drop of blood, for example, right after you eat, and then two hours after you eat to see if it's returned to baseline, maybe once in the morning to make sure that it's below 90, and once again in the evening before you go to bed, make sure it's below 90. That's just a simple metric.

You can also wear a continuous blood glucose monitor, which I did last year for about 12 months, and I gave a great deal of insight about things that I might not have been able to get by just doing the finger pricking because it's getting the real-time measurements all day long. But by keeping blood glucose under control using strategies like low-level physical activity during the day, not eating a lot of ultra-processed carbohydrates, lowering levels of stress, et cetera, you can actually keep that glycemic variability in pretty good control. And there were even hacks like cold thermogenesis or cryotherapy that make a great dent in glycemic variability, high consumptions of bitters and herbs and spices, minerals like chromium and vanadium, compounds like bitter melon extract, Ceylon cinnamon, apple cider vinegar, the selection of bitters that might be at the cocktail bar before you had a dinner, all of these things can lower blood glucose and control glycemic variability.

When it comes to inflammation, there are some things that we already talked about that are going to contribute to inflammation. Stress is one. The non-native EMF that we talked about is another. Probably the biggest one that is prevalent in our diets that we often are consuming with breakfast, lunch and dinner, many times without knowing it or many times thinking we are eating healthy foods when we are in fact filling our bodies with one of the biggest contributors to inflammation that exists on the planet and that I have found to be in huge quantities here in India, possibly even more than in America, is vegetable oil. Vegetable oil is a fast track to chronic inflammation. I avoid it like the plague.

Here, in every restaurant I've been to, I call out the chef, I ask that [01:21:26] _____ not be preparing vegetable oil, but they instead be preparing ghee or extra-virgin olive oil. When I buy my healthy foods and travel through the airport, I always look at the ingredient label, every little bag of “healthy sugar snap peas” or beetroot chips with carrot chips or anything else you might buy from the healthy food section of the grocery store or the airport has canola oil, or sunflower oil, or safflower oil, or some kind of rancid, heated, processed, pressurized vegetable oil.

And one of the best things you can do for your inflammation levels is to be ruthlessly cognizant of the amount of vegetable oil that you are consuming and just move your foot down and say, “I'm not going to eat vegetable oil anymore.” Everybody did that. I think that restaurants get a heads-up very quickly. Unfortunately, people just don't ask, don't care, and don't realize that almost everything is cooked in vegetable oil. So, it really is an uphill battle, just like the uphill battle gets cell phones, but it's something to be really aware of. So, those are two biggest things for longevity would be control glycemic variability and control inflammation.

Jag:  Kris, talking about the glucose [01:22:40] _____, I've noticed that was the [01:22:43] _____ time. I think when we met a year ago, you have one on your arm as well. Have you changed the way you eat following what you've learned from the [01:22:53] _____ surprised?

Kris:  There are some things that surprised me, some things that are probably obvious to others, the difference between the [01:23:00] _____. But yeah, I have definitely changed my diet. I don't have half as much of the [01:23:06] _____ used to. I definitely go a little bit more for the high fats because I was always conscious that I needed all these carbohydrates all the time to give me energy for everything that I did, [01:23:17] _____ really didn't, so I just need to be a little bit more efficient and a little bit more selective of the types of fats and the vegetables that I was putting in my food and I'm putting on my plate.

But like I said, I'm a very different person mentally, psychologically. So, I feel that the absorption of the foods are that much better than that because I take my time in eating, I take my time for a couple of minutes before I eat, I acknowledge the food, I'm grateful and I'm present when I'm eating the food. Gratitude is one of those things for sure, but it's your mental place. You have to be in a happier place. You see these people that are stressed all the time. They're working in long hours and they age quickly, and I was definitely one of those people, but thankfully, a lot of people over the past few years have said, “Wow, you look like you're reversing your age.”

Well, I don't think it's coincidence. I'm doing everything that I can to reverse the aging process now, and a lot of it is starting from the neck up. Being happier in a happier place really helps, like I had stem cells about a year and a half ago and I was dealing with a little bit of inflammation, a little bit of a few injuries, which really had an effect on me, not just physically, but the psychological effects. Even when you're not conscious of it, that subconscious pain or that uncomfortability can have an effect. And about six months after the stem cells, I feel amazing, I feel phenomenal. One of the reasons why I had it is because I knew I wasn't going to slow down in what I'm doing. I enjoy what I do, but this had such an effect on me. It may not have a direct effect on my telomeres, but may be indirect that it works.

And obviously, you mentioned the sugar and variability. You can see that with a blood glucose monitor, but some [01:25:15] _____. Since I was living here in India, we've seen Starbucks just pop up absolutely everywhere. Very rarely do I see someone drinking a black coffee. They come out with like an 800-calory filled I don't know what. It looks like [01:25:29] _____. But we consume it not knowing the amount of sugar that we're drinking. That along with the Cokes and with the jaggery and with all the cakes. On top of that are your amazing Indian sweets can really have a detrimental effect, not just what you see on the outside, but what you see on the inside. You are going through all that positive stress.

And a lot of people stay away from the sunlight thinking that's going to age you. Obviously, everything in excess is going to age you. But if you actually go out and get the sunlight, do a little bit of sun gazing like 15 minutes in the morning, in the evening, get that restorative red light, I think that can really have a positive effect. And what have a positive effect on me as well was shortening my workouts, going with quite intense [01:26:22] _____, but doing my strength training, and then the long arduous endurance work as well definitely had a negative effect on me. And just being efficient in taking more time off and quantifying through my HRV data had a positive effect on reversing aging process.

Jag:  So, Ben, recently, there's an article at The Times newspaper in the U.K. They stated that your biological age is actually nine. Could you share a little bit of light on that?

Ben:  And my emotional age is seven. But biologically, that's a telomere analysis. Currently, the most widely available way to quantify age is the measurement of the telomeres, the end caps on your DNA strands that if excessively short, excessive rate of shortening can indicate that your biological age is higher than it should be or it's more rapidly accelerating than it should be. I question some of the accuracy of the telomere analysis simply because it's measuring a limited number of cells into the body, and it's also not analyzing another important factor that contributes to aging and that is methylation.

And within the next year or so, what will be more widely available are these DNA methylation measurements that I think will more precisely quantify how long you can expect to live. But in my case, my biological age was measured via what I would consider to be one of the more accurate forms of telomere testing produced by a company called SpectraCell. Yeah. So, it turns out that a lot of what I'm doing seems to have impacted my biological age in a favorable manner, but I do a lot of things, not only sunlight and earthing, and grounding, and fresh air, and living a less stressful lifestyle, and spending a lot of time with family, prioritizing social life and love and relationships, but I've also done more fringe things. I have done stem cells [01:28:33] _____ combine those stem cells with things that enhance their advocacy such as exosomes, for example, or a pulsed electromagnetic field therapy or hyperbaric oxygen therapy. All of these things can enhance your stem cell mobility and your stem cell health.

I've also used peptides quite a bit. Peptides are a huge trend in the U.S. right now, and there are several peptides that have been researched in Russia to reduce all-cause risk of mortality and have a significant impact on increasing lifespan or decreasing biological age with a few of the more notable ones being one called Epitalon, another one called Humanin, and there's another one called MOTS-c. And these three peptides are simply injectable peptides that even very short series of each year, and they have a very impressive effect on biological age. So, peptides would be another thing that I still use with quite a bit of frequency, short amino acid sequencers that can act to target specific receptors to do things like increase mitochondria or increase satellite cell proliferation and muscle growth, or decrease inflammation, or enhance neural plasticity, or improve the integrity of the blood-brain barrier. I mean, they're kind of like a Swiss Army knife that you can use to reverse anything.

Now, I would say that those are some of the bigger things that I've done from the anti-aging standpoint. The chapter on anti-aging in “Boundless” is over 100 pages of stuff from the Blue Zones, like different fasting strategies, the intake of a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices, even things like having sex with good frequency to convince your body that it's still actively useful all the way down to things like peptides, the use of bioidentical hormone replacement. My wife now takes progesterone, and that's kind of an anti-aging strategy for her. She's still pretty menopausal and it's something that's [01:30:36] _____ the high levels of energy and libido for her, and that's something that's important for females. For men, I'm not opposed to the use of testosterone when the time arrives that testosterone gets to naturally decline. There's a lot of different strategies both from the modern science, as well as from ancestral wisdom. But again, it's a very multimodal approach to anti-aging. And so, by stacking a lot of these modalities, I think we can brace on the impact on biological age.

Kris:  There's just one thing that I want to add to that because I usually [01:31:11] _____ person and it definitely had an effect on my mentality, in a good way, probably. And one of the things that I've done to force myself to be a little bit more sociable, and I actually got this from Paul Saladino, I think the interview that you did with him on your podcast where he has like [01:31:33] _____. So, I created one myself because I don't socialize, otherwise, unless it's [01:31:40] _____. I'm not going to go to a bar to socialize with my friends in Boise. So, on a Saturday or Sunday morning, at eight o'clock in the morning, I'll have people come around the house and we will work out for an hour in my garage. We'll just do [01:31:53] _____ and then we'll finish off with a sauna or an ice bath, a shake or communicate. That's been really good for me purposely.

My fiancé is actually seeing that within me because my fiancé is a social butterfly and I'm always like going out to have a good time. I am good at home with my book and my vinyl collection. I love that. When I get back home to Boise, she goes to Thailand for a couple of weeks, so I've got my books and my Bible ready. But I will have those workouts as well, and that is really [01:32:25] _____ stem cell proliferation, and you can all do for free. As I mentioned, it's fast. That was the devil for me being a bodybuilder, fasting, I'm going to do such a thing. But then when I started to incorporate it several years ago, lo and behold, I didn't wither away, I didn't lose all my muscle, and I was doing it for about eight months straight. And now at the moment, I'm trying to put on a little bit size. I'm just doing it like twice a week. Of course, that's something that we can all do, but I love doing things like the fasting because it is another form of discipline that you can implement into your life that has a transcendent effect on other areas.

Jag:  Awesome. So, just before we move on from anti-aging, there are a lot of clinics that are available in India. For example, the anti-aging clinics that offer cosmetics. I think that's quite a big thing because when we speak about anti-aging in the wellness space as a business, people can get confused and be advised on treatments that they should take somewhat abrasive like Botox and PRP. What would you say, and this is a question for both of you, would be the right approach for the aesthetics? Because there's outside/in and there's inside/out when it comes to biohacking, skin creams and things like that. So, what were your thoughts on that?

Ben:  I can tell you what I do, and I feel like it works pretty well, and I have many of my clients do this as well and they've noted good feedback from their spouses and from their community about the health of their face, their skin, et cetera. First of all, once a week, I do a mask, a clay mask. So, you can get a derma roller. There's all things you can do at home. You [01:34:14] _____. You use the derma roller all over your face, and you can actually use it on–your derma roller wear out faster, but they're not expensive. You can use it on your head too if you want to keep your hair around for a longer period of time.

So, I derma roll everything and then use a clay mask. I use one from a company called Alitura, but it's [01:34:35] _____ clay and colostrum and all these different things that will detox the skin, and at the same time, you use the derma roller getting rid of all the old skin cells. Men have an advantage in that. We shave a lot so we're kind of naturally abrading some of the skin cells on the surface with our daily [01:34:53] _____ shave than these derma rollers, especially when followed up by a clay mask where the pores are open help tremendously. If anytime you are overusing a clay mask or you are using some type of facial serum, which I'll get into in a second, and you can combine that with red light therapy or sunlight therapy, it will actually enhance the effects.

When I do a clay mask, I'll try and–because I'll leave it on for 20 to 30 minutes, I'll go for a walk in the sunshine, look like a freak walk around my neighborhood, clay over my face, or I'll stay in front of one of those photobiomodulation units that will do near-infrared and red light on my face while that mask is on there. Okay. Once the mask comes off, then I do a serum. So, there are a whole bunch of different plant-based oils that can do things like increase collagen and elastin production on the skin that can increase blood flow to the skin surface that can decrease inflammation, and that can actually even feed that portion of the microbiome I was talking about earlier, the skin microbiome. And so, for example, my own company Kion, we developed a serum that does that. There are a lot of other companies that produce these serums that you can put on every single day. So, I'll go and put this serum on after I do the clay mask. But every day, I'll put the serum, by the way. And yes, if I'm derma rolling my hair, I also put the clay mask on my head. So, I go and take a shower after they clay mask, just rinse everything off, then go straight in to put the serum on.

Now, in addition to that, there is–now let's talk about peptides. Now, most peptides are too large to penetrate the skin surface, which is why they need to be injected, but some are small enough. Peptides are measured in Daltons. And so, a peptide that's about 50 Daltons or less will be able to be absorbed to the skin. And there's one peptide that's fantastic for reversing aging on skin and can also do the same for hair if you put it in your hair. It's called GHK-Cu. It's a copper peptide, and that was wonderful for the skin, or for the hair, or for also increasing the firmness and increasing the collagen and elastin integrity on the skin.

So, that's why I do clay mask, daily use of serum, and then a copper peptide. Now, sometimes serums do not offer enough moisture and the use of natural moisturizer. And stuff like coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil actually works fantastically as the moisturizer, even ghee works pretty well. And there are also companies that produce very natural moisturizers. We don't produce one in Kion. That same company that I get my clay mask from, Alitura, they do a great moisturizer or night mask. It's not that hard to find a moisturizer with all-natural ingredients.

And then finally, in terms of feeding your skin from the inside/out, one of the best things you can do are either collagen or essential amino acids, either are wonderful for again supplying your skin with ample amounts of what it needs for its collagen and its elastin integrity. So, for example, one half as you simply start to eat. Try this for a month. Try to work in 40 grams of a collagen powder each day, or 20 grams of essential amino acids each day for a month and pay attention not only how your joints feel and how your muscles feel, but how your skin looks on your face. It's dramatic, the improvement that you can see just by feeding your skin with what you eat. So, those are a few of the tactics that I use for kind of like external beauty.

Yes, the question was [01:38:20] _____. What I do is with that clay mask, I do not mix the clay with water. I either use apple cider vinegar, which is wonderful as a tonic for the face, or I use something else that's actually wonderful for blood flow and for the actual tone of the face, and that's red wine. If there's a little red wine leftover from the night before, I mix the clay mask with that, especially if you don't like the slight burn in the apple cider vinegar, red wine works really well to mix that clay mask with.

Jag:  Kris, your thoughts?

Kris:  On how I look so beautiful? I've been dying to ask this question. So, I actually do not go out in the street and disturb the neighbors with my clay mask. However, I do multitask and this does include you, Ben. I actually have a coffee enema at that time. It's the Kion coffee enema a lot of the time. And I will use that clay mask once a week. And fortunately, it's going to be a shameless plug, my fiancé actually has a skin care company that doesn't have the power beans, the talc, or anything like that. So, it's a good product that I'll actually use on my face during that time. I'll scrub every day as well to get rid of all of the dead skin cells. I have a sweater. So, I want to be careful of bacteria and things like that. There is actually an app that I use if I am out and I am exposed to other skincare products, or hair products, or shampoos, or anything like that, even cleaning products that you're using. I think it's Think Dirty app. There's various apps out there, but Think Dirty you can pretty much scan everything with your phone and see what is in that particular product that may have a negative effect or transgenic effect, et cetera.

And I think [01:40:16] _____ what do I think about people going in for Botox and stuff like that. Well, it's going to be a psychological effect. I'm very conscious of my teeth, the lower row of my teeth. And I've spoken to you about [01:40:33] _____, get them straightened out, but it never bothered me in the past. Unfortunately, I have typical British teeth and I need to spend a lot of money this year to get rid of the metal that I have in my teeth because I'm doing whatever I can to collate it out, but they still seem a lot of heavy metal [01:40:50] _____ in my work that I need to get this extracted once and for all. But one of the things [01:40:56] _____ the vanity aspect, the front teeth is part of it. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that deal with this and maybe their jawline is square, maybe their teeth aren't right. And it's going to make them feel better. If it makes you feel better, it's not going to have an adverse effect on your health, but hey, why not?

Dry brushing is one thing that I do. I worked on cruise liners back in the '90s as a massage therapist, and one of the things that we would always advise was dry skin brushing or lymphatic brushing, and I'll do that all the time, pretty much on a daily basis. I'll always brush towards the lymphatic system, my [01:41:42] _____. That's one thing that I do. And one that was here in India training, a South Indian actor called Mahesh Babu, some of you may know, he was always in movies with the female, and they'd always have a female that was like 20 years younger than him because he looked so young. So, a lot of the skin care routines I actually learned from him, but then I went more so for the natural versions of that. So, I'm just going onto peptides. You mentioned about like the copper peptides. People here were to actually go out and get those peptides. Is it accessible to everyone, Ben?

Ben:  Most peptides that I get, I get it from a physician because the market is so rife with cheap knockoffs and [01:42:32] _____ peptides, which could be more harm than good. So, I actually always go to a doctor in the U.S. to get peptides. I went to the company called Tailor Made Compounding of Kentucky that uses amino acid sequencers to produce very precise sequences of peptides. So, yeah, you don't just want to go to some Chinese website and get your peptides because they could be more harm than good. So, be careful when it comes to peptides, absolutely. Yeah.

Can I say a couple more things about [01:43:01] _____ real quick? I need to thank India in the Ayurvedic wisdom that stem from here because I certainly, when it comes to oral beauty care, use some Ayurvedic practices. I oil pull every morning with a blend of oils. I get them from a company called Dirt in the U.S. They blended a bunch of different essential oils, extra virgin coconut oil. Extra virgin coconut oil on its own is just fine. You could put a few drops of essential oil like peppermint, for example, in there or thyme or oregano–and you just oil pull for about 10 minutes or so when you get out of bed, number one, first thing, and then just sit down in a trashcan and rinse your mouth with water. That's fantastic for gum and oral health and for the microbiome of your mouth. Another thing that I do is I scrape my tongue. It takes five seconds. I wake up in the morning, just scrape in the back to the front. And tongue scraper is very easy to get and you [01:43:52] _____ the backside of the spoon. But tongue scraping is another one that I do to care for the health of the tongue.

Kris:  [01:43:59] _____.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. I washed the spoon this morning. And then just a couple other things. Dentistry–Kris talked about having metals removed from his mouth, but in the same way that I'm ruthlessly cognizant about [01:44:14] _____ vegetable oils, I wouldn't set foot into the office of the convention dentist, period. It is a fast track to introducing toxins strained into your brain, releasing metals into neural tissue. I only work with a holistic dentist, so I only wrote the holistic organic dentist whose only natural products that was taking care, even if they're removing metals from the mouth, to put you on programs that help to detox those metals that might be leaching into the rest of the body. So, holistic dentistry is very important. And then one good thing I do is xylitol is a natural way to clean the mouth. So, you will always see me chew a gum a lot, always, I'm chewing xylitol gum. I only brush my teeth once per day. When I oil pull in the morning, brush my teeth. At the end of the day, with a bamboo toothbrush with about a medium firmness on [01:45:01] _____ on the skin. I mean, I use a fluoride-free or a charcoal toothpaste, and that's a wonderful way to care for your teeth all day long, something as simple as xylitol gum.

Finally, again to get allude in the big picture, when we're talking about things like beauty or muscle or aesthetics, obviously, they're important because beauty, symmetry, muscle, relatively low body fat percentage, especially the visceral fat around the organs, yeah, they're essential for health and for caring for our health, and we're caring for and attending to our lifespan, we're able to make better impact on this planet with the purpose that we've been given because we have the energy and the help that we deserve. But at the same time, we have to be careful, especially those of us who are in the training and the fitness world and the biohacking world not to shame or to judge others based on their appearance nor feel shame or judgment on ourselves about our appearance.

So, let me talk about things like beauty or symmetry or muscles where you've got a couple of former bodybuilders up here talking to you, and maybe we have more broad shoulders than somebody else might have, or we can do harder workouts than other people. I think one of the–and David Hawkins talks about this in his book, “Healing and Recovery.” One of the lowest energetic frequencies that you can emit is shame, whether shame for yourself or shame on others. So, I really want to encourage you to approach this entire project, biohacking fitness and health in a space of non-judgment.

There are many people who are starting from square one. There are many people who are doing these type of things of limited budget and might not be able to afford a photobiomodulation panel or a clay mask, but they can at least scrub their face and use a little olive oil on their face and go out in the sunshine. But no matter where someone is coming from, be very, very careful onto error, into judgment, or into shaming because of every single human being is worthy of love, every single one of us is worthy of love, and you just need to make sure that you couch all of the things that we're telling you in the context of loving others and the spirit of non-judgement.

Jag:  Amazing. Thank you, Ben. I'm going to cover a little bit about pollution, blue lights and its effects. India has quite bad inequality, especially in places like Delhi, it's hazardous. I was reading an article in the newspaper where the air quality index reduced from like 790 to like 700 and it was good news, but it's still hazardous. And when you compare it to London, we had there like a red alert, whether it went from 0 to 1. So, what's your views on–and I'll start with you on this one, Kris, on air quality and the kind of biohacks that we can do through the problems that we face on a daily basis, even blue lights?

Kris:  Okay. Blue lights?

Jag:  Even blue lights, yeah, that we're exposed to.

Kris:  Okay. Yeah, with the pollution. Obviously, it can start in your home. You can have–oh, yeah, sorry. You know what, like an air purifier. These plants, these certain plants that you can put in your home that can help purify the air. Obviously, there's the masks that Ben was wearing the other day. What was the mask, 95, that is N95?

Ben:  That mask that I'm wearing and that I've been wearing every time I go outside or go through the airport here is the N95. There's another company called Utmost. They recently gave the consumer electronic shows, another mask called the Ao Air, and the Ao Air is an actual tiny little HEPA air filter they actually wear. It's more expensive, obviously, than the disposable face mask. But the N95 [01:49:03] _____.

Jag:  Are there any supplements as well they could take in to help purify the air?

Ben:  There are. I've seen a lot of research on smoking and lung cancer and reversing a lot of the damage of smoking. Taurine is one that's quite helpful, very simple to get. There a variety of companies that make taurine capsules, taurine powder, Full Spectrum antioxidant blend, and there are again many variations of that, but it's not that hard to take in your hands. It's some of these [01:49:33] _____ powders that really helped to introduce a lot of antioxidants. And one fell swoop in your body more than you might be able to get without digestive distress in eating all the salads and all the fruits you might need to eat to get that equivalent number of antioxidants. So, I'm not opposed to antioxidant supplementation.

And I would say probably two of the biggest things to address the neural inflammation and neural damage that it can cause, and also the risk for upper respiratory tract infection, bronchitis, pneumonia, and even coronavirus will be glutathione and N-acetylcysteine, specifically, via nasal spray or via nebulizer. So, up in my room right now, I have a tiny bottle of this stuff called GlutaStat. GlutaStat is a mix of glutathione, N-acetylcysteine, and antioxidants, but you can do it in a nasal spray. Just a few sprays up each nostril and then you snort like this for about 60 seconds and just get it as deep up into the neural tissue as you can. As you use cocaine frequently will know how to do this.

The other thing that I have up there in my hotel room that I've also been using every day, it's very inexpensive, you can get it on Amazon, is a portable nebulizer. And a portable nebulizer is simply a very small unit that attaches to a mask that you can hold up to your face and you pour this GlutaStat, this little delivery portal in it and you can just breathe it. So, what I've been doing in the morning while I'm reading my research articles is I put that nebulizer over my face and I just alternate between taking one deep breath in through my nose and out, and then one deep breath in through my mouth and out, and I do that for about 15 minutes or so in the morning.

So, I'm nebulizing glutathione and N-acetylcysteine and antioxidants. And when I get on the plane, I've got the GlutaStat little nasal spray and I can do that nasal spray every once in a while while I'm on a plane or bus, mall, crowded area, et cetera. So, I think that's one of the best things to do is that nebulize or that inhale via the nose, glutathione, N-acetylcysteine, and antioxidants along with taurine supplementation.

Kris:  So, you mentioned about blocking the blue lights as well. So, one of the things that I definitely do at home, and also when I'm traveling, so I do actually have either incandescent bulbs that I will travel with or I'll have my lava lamps so I can see what I'm doing in my hotel room without having to put on the lamps that obviously gives me a lot of the artificial blue light. I don't always get exposure to the red light whilst I'm traveling. So, I actually do have what's called like a Joovv Go if you want to get that out. So, I'll actually blast myself a little bit–it's not going to have the effect of full panels, but I will blast myself, my face usually with that first thing in the morning and maybe at night if I don't have the exposure through the blue lights.

And obviously, I'll usually wear like the blue light blocking glasses. And also, what Ben is wearing with the yellow lens today and I actually lost mine or broke mine during this trip so I'm wearing the red lens. And the reason why I'm so strict on things like that is because I am sensitive to these things. I notice that, I quantify it. And if I'm not very strict with blocking out a lot of the blue lights, I notice my sleep score is terrible, much like if I walk into a hotel room and I know within five minutes of this [01:53:17] _____, I can just feel it. It feels like that is a dust mite and it affects my chest and my lungs. And one of the other things that I'll do, because there are photoreceptors on the skin as well, for a couple of hours before bed, I'm usually wearing pajamas or something long, covering my arms to assure that I'm not getting a lot of light blasting me down. I unplugged everything in the room last night. So, I didn't have any clocks or any standby lights or anything like that at the same time.

Jag:  Awesome. So, there must be quite a few people that travels frequently here. Is there any of you? Can I see a show of hands? On airplanes most of the time? Right. So, I know that, Ben, when we were traveling, there was quite a few processes I think you are undertaking to protect your own health. Could you tell us some of these travel hacks?

Ben:  Yeah. We've covered some of them like blue light blocking glasses or nebulizing glutathione. I would say some of my babies–the other thing that we haven't covered was the magnesium and the NAD/sirtuins or the ketones for the airline radiation. But a few other things that I do, A, for immunity is I always travel with oil oregano and a bee propolis spray. The oil oregano is the Kion brand, the bee propolis spray is from Beekeeper's Naturals, and with both of those, I'll just do a little bit of that sublingually or spray the bee spray in the back of my mouth, and that's wonderful for airborne pathogens and pollutants for keeping my immune system stable while I travel.

For inflammation, whenever I'm drinking water, I put a couple of hydrogen tablets in the water because hydrogen-rich water is also fantastic for mitigating inflammation. So, not only going to consume a lot of really good mineral-rich water that doesn't have minerals and I'll just add a little sea salt and trace minerals to it when I travel. But I also had that hydrogen water to it when I travel. The EMF blocking, yes, and I even take that to the nth degree for the long-haul flights, not only we're aware EMF blocking underwear such as light the Lambs brand. There are a few other brands out there. Spartan is another brand.

But I actually have a company out of Germany called KTC. They make a full EMF blocking pair of pants, shirt, and hat that I can wear for the really long-haul flights, like I'll do wear tomorrow when I fly back to the U.S. I'll just wear those during the entire flight. Protect myself some of the EMF on the flight. It would be very cognizant of how much you are eating because the fasting can reduce inflammation. Typically, I just got a bag of macadamia nuts, which are very stable, kind of slow-release form of fuel. And I'll do a little bit of that or like some spirulina or chlorella tablets mixed in with the macadamia nuts. It's kind of like a perfect little trail mix, but like a travel-friendly trail mix that detoxifies you, but also upregulates your ketone production [01:56:23] _____ fat utilization while you're traveling because I'm not going to fast all the way back to the U.S. It's too long. So, I'm going to want to eat a little bit. It will be like macadamia nuts with spirulina and chlorella tablets.

Let's see if there's anything else that I do when I travel. Aside from just like movement, little movement rules during the day, like every time I use the bathroom in the airport, on the airplane, I do 40 air squats, just squat up and down. I do that when I'm at a restaurant. So, if you have dinner with me and I come out of the bathroom all red-faced and come back and sit down at the table again, it's not because I'm constipated, it's because I'm the bathroom doing my air squats and I had a little–in “Boundless”, in one section, I've got five different, like three to five-minute short stretch routines and hip openers and things that you could rely upon, not only during busy days, work at the office, but also while you're waiting for the airplane, or while you're on the airplane, or while you're in any other position, or any other state where you're going to be sedentary for long periods of time.

Let me think. Those aside from the stuff that we've already mentioned are probably some of the biggest things that I do when I travel. And then finally, I work in a lot of power naps. So, I always have noise-blocking headphones, a really good sleep mask. I like the Mindfold sleep mask. I have a little bit of reishi mushroom extract, which helps me to sleep without waking and feeling drowsy [01:57:51] _____ when the airplane lands or something like that. And then I use an app called NuCalm, N-UCalm. And it comes with a little like a vagus nerve stimulator and something you wear on your wrist to shift you into a state of parasympathetic activation. That one was really well for these quick 20 to 40-min power naps. And some of the internal studies in NuCalm show that 20 minutes with that device simulates a full 90-minute sleep cycle. So, I can really get high-quality sleep within about 20 minutes. So, the rest [01:58:24] _____ when I travel as well.

Jag:  Awesome. Kris, you have travel hacks?

Kris:  So, I haven't gotten all the clothes just yet, [01:58:34] _____ stylish, you know. I'll actually have on the long-haul flights I'll wear a DefenderShield blanket. So, instead of the blanket that they give you on a plane so you should just put that overhead and I'll have a DefenderShield blanket to help it scramble a lot of the EMF that I'm surrounded with. Luckily, of course, we have the gamma rays, but they don't have the Wi-Fi on in India, which I'll be flying back on. So, that's always a good thing to disconnect.

And whilst I'm going through the airport, sometimes they drop you off and you do walk to the [01:59:09] _____, so I am wearing these shoes with [01:59:15] _____ on the back, so at least I can earth myself from one plane to the next. And much like [01:59:24] _____ Ben mentioned about the toilet [01:59:26] _____, it's something that I definitely did live with movement and I'll always bother the waitresses there. Do you call the waitresses [01:59:34] _____? Where I will just stretch. I'll usually stretch for about 15 minutes every couple of hours there because I just do find that I tighten up the spine, like I've got a major curvature of my spine. It did accumulate quite a lot of that from 15 years of motocross.

And the only time that I have back issues, and my back is pretty tight from yesterday, is from flying. I can deadlift, I can work out, no problem, but it's flying. But if I'm flying, I stretch myself out, play at times, then I'm pretty good with that. And the mask that I actually use is called a Remedy mask from BLUblox. The reason why I like that is I don't know why this is. If I wear a conventional mask, like the ones that you get on the airplane, the tightness around my head will create some form of subtle anxiety for me. So, it has to be loose-fitting that then also blocks out the light. So, I found that it got its padding around the eye blocks out [02:00:39] _____. I find that mask previously works well for me. And then on top of that, the noise-cancelling headphones and plugs inside just in case there's a two-year-old screaming in my ear behind.

Ben:  And I've got one quick thing [02:00:54] _____ back here. If you hold the mic in front of my face, I'll show people this real quick. So, this is something I'll do quite a bit on planes and in cars or when I'm sitting like you guys are at a conference. So, I do about five of these anytime my back is feeling tight. You can try it if you'd like. You put your hands on the front of your knees. And then what you'd do is you're holding on your knees, you're gripping your knees, you're able to use them as counter pressure, and then you extend your back. And as you extend your back, you take a giant breath in and just suck as much air as you can like this, extending, extending, extending. And then you exhale and curl yourself down and over, and then you inhale and extend again, breathe, breathe, breathe, and exhale and down.

We'll do one more. Inhale, extend, extend, extend, push those hips forward, and exhale and just fold yourself over. And if you're relegated to a seated position, that's just like a simple little hack that you can do that not only oxygenates you, but also can lengthen those hip flexors, get a little bit of cerebrospinal fluid and blood flow to the spine. That's one quick one that I'll do just when I'm sitting for a long period of time. And I [02:02:15] _____ stretch.

Kris:  And a couple of lacrosse balls [02:02:19] _____ can really help as well?

Ben:  Yeah. You mean like using lacrosse balls and [02:02:26] _____?

Kris:  Yeah. Just kind of massage yourself or if you're stuck in that position for a long time or sometimes you're stuck in a Mumbai traffic that you can utilize it in your car [02:02:35] _____.

Jag:  Just a little sleep check. Is everyone still awake?

Audience:  Yes.

Jag:  Good. Awesome. So, just before we get onto technology and wearable technology and quantify some of these hacks, I want to talk about some basic herbs. There is a lot of products that we spoke about that may not be readily available in India, but India is known for Ayurveda and there is a lot of herbs that are available. What kind of herbs would you say are good for biohacking and what are their benefits? I mean, one of the most talked about herb is probably turmeric. What are your flavors?

Ben:  Turmeric is certainly up there. We use that in our Kion Flex product. We don't use curcumin, we use turmerosaccharides, which are fantastic for joint inflammation, kind of a lesser talked about component of turmeric, but much more bioavailable of my consumption than curcumin. I'm a huge fan of turmeric, especially when blended with things that make even more bioavailable such as black pepper and ghee. Two readily available compounds here in India, you can make yourself tea with turmeric, black pepper, and ghee. It's amazing. If you had a little coconut milk and stevia to that, it's almost like a great little latte-like tincture. And that would be like hot coconut milk a follow it with a latte frother.

I am a big fan of astragalus or longevity. I am a big fan of ashwagandha for relaxation. Let me think about a few other herbs that I work in. Mushrooms, I kind of sort of chunk into that category. I didn't talk about this when I talk about [02:04:17] _____, but chaga and turkey tail mushroom are absolutely amazing not only for anticarcinogenic properties, but also for their ability to be able to strengthen the immune system. And then the reishi mushroom extract we talked about earlier for sleep. And let me think. I really like bitter melon, bitter melon extract or berry to act similar to the diabetic drug metformin for decreasing blood glucose after you've had a very carbohydrate intense meal, kind of before or after a big dinner can be really effective at lowering blood glucose after a meal.

There's one kind of shotgun formulation, the Chinese traditional herbs that I use called TianChi. That's kind of just like a general tonic, and it's not only in ashwagandha and astragalus, but a host of other Chinese herbs that I can't even pronounce, like [02:05:14] _____, all these different compounds that are absolutely amazing for focus and immunity, for health, for energy, et cetera. So, the one caution I would give to you is there was a recent study displaying of how toxicity, the liver stress, but a lot of these herbs and herbal formulas place it on the body because they're laced, they're laced with pesticides, they're laced with herbicides, they've been sprayed with some kind of stabilizer or preservative.

So, you do need to be careful with the source. Typically, you get what you paid for with Chinese herbs, with Ayurvedic herbs, et cetera. So, I would be pretty careful to make sure that you're getting the herbs from certified good manufacturing practices facility. Really the best way to go with herbs is to actually go to a doctor of Ayurvedic medicine or a Chinese herbologist or a doctor of Chinese medicine and actually have them give you the herbs. And for people who have used herbs and gone to a doctor and get the actual real thing, the actual concentrated extract of the herb that is pure and clean, it's a night and day difference. So, just as with peptides, with herbs' sources is very important.

Kris:  Yeah. So, one just [02:06:30] _____ Ben mentioned the patented ingredients, the one to look for when you're actually looking at some of these Ayurvedic herbs. We actually visited the KSM-66 plant here that has that patented form of ashwagandha that Ben mentioned. We actually watched how it was sourced, how it was cleaned with milk. It was cleaned with milk as opposed to any harsh chemicals or anything like that. So, go for the patented ingredients. Sometimes you'd see like an R or TM next to it. There's quite a few that I actually source here from India, KSM-66, ashwagandha being one of them, and the LJ100, which is a positive form of the Eurycoma longifolia root extract and primavie, which is the positive form of the shilajit as well. And turmeric, yeah, of course. That is a huge one for me.

I actually came across turmeric as being very beneficial just by accident. And did anyone see the 12-week muscle-building video trailer that was filmed here? Yeah. So, I remember as I was on my way to filming on one day and I never had nose bleeds and it would not stop. And then one of the crews just stopped at the market and said, “Shove this up your nose,” and it was turmeric. [02:07:55] _____ just stopped bleeding, straightaway. I do turmeric quite a lot and I'll usually mix that with black pepper or [02:08:02] _____, help with the bioavailability of that. And Gymnema sylvestre as Ben mentioned about [02:08:12] _____ help with the blood sugar regulation. I do use that, and I'll use like chromium or chromate, which is a passive form of that chromium as well. There's that probably at the time. Some of those that you'll notice were like testosterone supports. As I'm getting a little bit older and I'm very active, I want to make sure that I've maintained my natural healthy testosterone levels as much as I possibly can as well.

Ben:  [02:08:37] _____ testosterone?

Kris:  Yeah.

Jag:  Awesome. So, when we talk about technology and wearable technology, we've spoken about how we need to stay away from EMFs, they're harmful, but then at the same time, sometimes people are confused. Should we use Bluetooth headphones? Should we use watches to track [02:08:58] _____? Does that have an effect on us? Because of course most of these wearable technologies you have to connect it with a mobile phone. I'm sure there could be some damage on that side. So, there's Bluetooth headphones, rings, watches, heart rate monitors, guided meditation. So, you're wearing devices for that also. And of course, there's so many apps. So, what's your views on wearable technology when it comes to biohacking?

Ben:  So, I actually have a pretty strict filter. I mean, if there is a wearable technology, and I only wear three things, [02:09:32] _____, it must be something that has the option for me to be able to disable the Bluetooth, to disable the Wi-Fi and place it in airplane mode, and it also has to be something that if it were to be tested by a building biologist, or if I use an actual RF meter on, it does not reduce a lot of dirty electricity. If it does, then in many cases, the pros outweigh the cons. I'm still shocked in the biohacking movement and how many people come out with some kind of sleep-enhancing mattress or some kind of wearable gadget to track your HRV, et cetera, and they don't take into account at all the biological impact of the EMF that it's producing.

I'm not going to sleep on mattress with built-in Wi-Fi that's throwing out a signal all night long to try and collect some kind of information on my body and transmitted with–in many cases, something can be producing a very low frequency or collecting information without producing appreciable amounts of EMF. And then once I do connect that to upload the information to a device, then it's for a very short period of time to receive EMF, then it can be deactivated. So, for example, I'm wearing on my ankle right here something called the Apollo band. And the Apollo is developed by a company called Apollo Neuroscience. It was developed by a researcher who is on plant medicine such as psilocybin or ayahuasca as a way to address trauma or PTSD.

And for people who could not do plant medicine or did not want to do plant medicine, he wanted to figure out a way to actually elicit the same effect. So, he developed a device that delivers a non-audible sound frequency that can cause a neurotransmitter or a brainwave response that can do things like induce a state of relaxation or induce a state of focus. Now, this is not on right now. What I just did was I enabled Bluetooth on my phone. Okay. So, Bluetooth was off. My phone is in airplane mode. I just enabled Bluetooth. I'm going to flip here and I'm going to put it in open mode, which just basically makes a little bit more social and open. Okay. So, there. I just click that, I'm going to press play, and now the Apollo is on. I can feel this mild vibration traveling up my [02:11:57] _____, traveling up my tibia. That's going to immediately begin to stimulate my brain.

Now, most people once they turn this on, they'd be like, “Okay. It's on. Good to go.” But there's always one extra step. So, as soon as I do that, I scroll to the screen that shows me the battery life on it and I click, place on airplane mode. And I tested this. And when I don't go through that extra step, it turns out there's much dirty electricity as my cell phone the whole time it's on. As soon as I put on airplane, it's good to go. So, sometimes it depends on how the device functions. That's one wearable that I use quite a bit.

The other one is the Oura ring, it's self-quantifying and gather activity data, heart rate variability data, deep sleep data, light sleep data, et cetera. But again, this thing will turn out dirty EMF unless I turn it on airplane mode. So, once it's on my finger, I had to put it on airplane mode. And it's kind of a hassle because any of these devices that can be enabled to be put on airplane mode can only be taken off airplane mode once you put them back on the charger [02:13:03] _____. So, I'll do [02:13:04] _____ airplane mode for as long as possible. And then once the battery is dying, then I'll put that back on the charger, recharge, and that enables me to reconnect them to the device.

And the only other thing that I wear is that cheap ass $15 Timex watch because almost all the watches out there, especially the Apple watch, it's one of the biggest culprits that's out there, but [02:13:25] _____ devices, et cetera, is literally like 24/7 computer right against your skin that's constantly bombarded you with EMF. And it's really hard to use those in a functional manner and have airplane mode enabled on. So, I just wear a cheap old watch, I wear an Oura ring, I wear the Apollo when I need to use it for a specific function, and everything else, I make sure that it can be disabled or that Bluetooth or Wi-Fi can be disabled.

We talked about AirPod. I have a Molekule air filter, very, very fine filtration, better than I had the air filter that I keep next to my bed. But often you'll know [02:14:04] _____ manufactures website, dig through the manuals on the website, find out that it does have built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi so that they can deliver upgrades to the hardware that's built into the unit. Then I had to go through a series of steps to disable all of that. And so, it can be kind of a pain in the ass, but I care about my body, I care about my brain. So, if I'm going to use [02:14:26] _____ science, I go through extra steps to make sure I'm not simultaneously being bombarded with EMF. That's kind of my approach. That's the lens through which I do a lot of this stuff.

Jag:  Kris?

Kris:  Yeah. It's funny you mentioned that about the mattress. The company contacted me about 10 months ago and they really wanted to send me these pillows that help with your sleep quantification. However, it's a Bluetooth device that has to stay on all night and your head is placed next to this thing. So, how many of you actually have a phone in your bedroom on? Hands up. It's okay. It's all right. I am judging you. Just think about that. These are a good six to eight hours throughout the day that you do not have to add it on. How many of you actually check it first thing in the morning since you wake up? Come on, come on, be real. That's it. That is potentially setting you up for a bad night sleep first thing in the morning. The way that you act upon waking is usually how your day is detected and how you will actually go to bed at night.

So, do yourself a favor. You're not going to go get to the end of your life and go, “You know what, I really regret not actually having my phone on me more. I really wish I checked it two minutes earlier upon waking.” Use that time to spend with yourself, with your thoughts. Meditate, manifest your day. But there's no reason why you need to have that device next to your bed. Are you going to get fired if you don't answer the phone at two o'clock in the morning? Maybe you should change your job if you do. So, be very cognizant of when you have the phone with you, keep it downstairs. If you're working out, maybe have it outside or on airplane mode, as Ben mentioned before.

The Oura ring is something that I use. It is great because you can put on airplane mode all the time and it is still tracking. These guided meditation devices, as you mentioned, they can be good in the beginning, just like you have a virtual trainer in the beginning. But my job is, as a trainer, that I will train you, but you won't need me after several months. Hopefully, you've got all the tools needed if you apply it on yourself. And it's the same with these guided meditations. Maybe they help you in the beginning, but maybe you don't need it after. So, you're not constantly penetrating yourself and actually having that device of distraction next to you.

I actually went through–there's a place in Boise that just opened last year called Source Meditation. And we actually go into this meditative space with no devices. And once a week, or twice a week, they actually have sound meditation classes, and I love this. You can really feel the vibrations within your body, the positive vibrations. So, that's what I think when everyone do the meditation now [02:17:28] _____ listen to the sounds, what vibrations did they have and what is that effect on me, and when in guided meditation, you can’t always get that. So, obviously, [02:17:39] _____ certain device, of course we're going to get penetrated with that, but usually, it's an hour, half-hour. I'm balancing my life. I'm not going to completely be [02:17:49] _____. I'm going to do whatever I can to keep my head afloat. And the other thing that I have used is [02:17:55] _____ for my HRV, but I pretty much use the Oura ring for everything else.

Jag:  Also, we did actually speak about a lot of these gadgets at our last [02:18:05] _____, which was in Delhi. Now, we will be posting this on the social. So, a lot of the topics which we may not have covered today have already been covered in the previous seminar, which you will be able to listen to online —

Ben:  Or the “Boundless.”

Jag:  Or the “Boundless,” yes. We also did a podcast last night, which was quite interesting. We spoke a lot about India and Ben's experiences, which we'd also be able to hear once it goes live. I asked a question to Ben last night about his top 10 biohacks, and I think there was a lot more than 10. But I'm going to put Ben, and Kris on the spot, top five you have to choose before we go to questions?

Ben:  Alright, top five. Number one would be light, the use of these photobiomodulation wearable devices, photobiomodulation panels, the use of red incandescent lights in the bedroom, regular incandescent lights throughout the rest of the house. I'm always cognizant of the type of lights that I'm using, and also even some of these light frequency devices that can do things like shift brainwave function, et cetera. So, probably the two that I use most frequently, the Vielight, V-I-E-light for the head, and the Joovv light for the rest of the body. Number two would be grounding and earthing, whether the use of grounding or earthing mats that I'll use while I'm sleeping, while I'm working, or grounding and earthing shoes or pulsed electromagnetic field technology, which is just a form of that same type of signal frequency.

Number three would be hyperthermia. I didn't talk about this when you're talking about beauty and skin health, but I did with deep sweat nearly every day when I'm at home, and I think it's wonderful for detoxification. I also think it enhances skin health and it increases red blood cell production, it helps you to maintain muscle even when you're not exercising, it increases red blood cell production. So, I have an infrared sauna, I use the infrared sauna or a really good [02:20:05] _____ style dry sauna and getting a deep sweat on a few times a week. That would be number three.

Number four would be the use of cryotherapy or cold thermogenesis. That's again something I do every single day. When I'm traveling, it's cold showers or [02:20:18] _____ cryotherapy chamber, or swimming in a cold pool or cold river, cold lake, cold ocean. When I'm at home, it's an ice bath or a cold pool. There are some clients who I coach, I do Skype consults and coach people all over the world, and one of my clients I was just within India, he's in Bangalore, he just has some ice packs in his freezer and he has a device called the cool fat burner because he has an office job and he just puts these ice packs in his cool fat burner up when he's at work. He'll do about 30 to 40 minutes of cold during his first few hours, his first [02:20:54] _____ workday. It allows him to start his day with cold, which is also fantastic for reducing your blood glucose the rest of the day. That's one thing that really surprises me when I wear a continuous blood glucose monitor was how effective cold is that's stabilizing blood glucose during the day.

And then I would say–this is something simple but it's a real game-changer for me as part of my energy levels go, and something that I discovered back when I was racing Ironman Triathlon. I had very high levels of physical activity combined with stress, and I would lay awake in bed at night due to the blood pounding in my ears. It feels as though I was hypercortisolic and the adrenals sort a great deal with the specific compound. It has to be imbalanced in a lot of people, especially people using like table salt or sodium chloride, and that's trace minerals. I use trace minerals every single day. You can get a really good trace liquid mineral like the company Quinton, Q-U-I-N-T-O-N, that's wonderful, that I travel with and that I use at home.

You can get a really good salt, like probably one of the better ones is Celtic salt that you can put [02:22:03] _____ really good full mineral salt into every glass of water that you drink during the day. But I think a lot of people are not [02:22:10] _____ potassium and deficient in magnesium, but [02:22:14] _____ a lot of trace minerals. And since I started using trace minerals, it's been a real game-changer for my health, for my sleep, for my energy levels. So, I would say those would be the big three, lighting, grounding and earthing, heat, cold, and minerals.

Kris:  There's a lot of repetition here, anyway, but yeah. Number one on that list for me is the hot and cold thermogenesis. I like to pair these two together as much as I possibly can. I do have an infrared sauna and my own lovely [02:22:42] _____. He looked forward to the sauna. I'm not sure he looked forward to the ice bath that follows it. So, the reason why I'll do sauna, probably about five times a week minimum is because it does release what's called the heat shock proteins. We have folded proteins in our body just through the aging process. So, how do we fix that? A lot of it is through heat. You actually can get this as well through extreme activity like hip training, but heat actually helps with this.

Now, one of the reasons why I did heat a lot is I actually had a shoulder surgery a couple of years ago is that studies have proven that after that heat itself can prevent muscle [02:23:27] _____. Okay. They've done a lot of studies, particularly in the elderly as well. And a lot of it is because it helps with heat shock proteins, it can increase your testosterone levels, your natural growth hormone levels. And obviously, it's a great detoxification for your skin to get rid of a lot of these heavy metal contaminants, particularly the ones I had in my teeth, and the cold therapy.

So, even though Jag may not look forward to that as much, I actually look forward to the cold. I run very hot. I'm usually sweating. I grew up in Wales where it's very, very cold, and I got used to that at very young age, getting up at five o'clock in the morning, whether it's snow or whether it's rain, then going and feeding the animals. I just become, I guess, accustomed to it. So, I've struggled in the heat, but the cold, I love it. The reason why I like the hot and cold thermogenesis together is because it stimulates what's called the vagus nerve at the back of your neck. So, whenever I get in the ice, I make sure that I cover my thyroid and tone that vagus nerve. Okay?

In doing so, I find that I'm much more emotionally stable than I was previously, not that I was a psychotic killer or anything, but you will deal with frustration and stress and anxiety. I have some weird anxious times. Jag knows about them; I cannot take anything other than an aisle seat. I have to have an aisle seat. I don't care if it's economy, Jag. Just don't put me in a middle seat or window seat. I have to have an aisle seat. And I can't be around little dogs. I have an anxiety issue with little dogs. And unfortunately, when I met my fiancé, she had Chihuahuas. Now, they're at her mother's place, but I still visit her mother. But what I found just since I've started doing hot and cold, mostly cold thermogenesis and simulating that vagal nerve tone. I am so much more stable emotionally. Jag may not agree. I'm sure my fiancé, hopefully, would agree, but that is one thing that I would say is number one, number one for me.

I see people that deal with depression. I have clients that deal with depression. I know people on medication for depression, but I haven't met anybody that has actually been treated and cured of depression on medication. I just haven't seen it. So, one thing that I get all my clients to do is, whenever possible, is the hot and cold thermogenesis together. And the lights have been a big thing for me because being a bodybuilder, I'm always indoors, [02:26:14] _____ on the artificial light. But then, when I actually started doing more endurance work, and we're living in the beautiful mountains of Boise, I found hundreds of miles of trails. And that's how I've got into ultramarathon because I thought, “Wow, this is my form of meditation now, active forms of meditation. I can listen to the sound underneath my feet, I can listen to the birds, I smell the fresh air, I've got the sun, and I'm out there by myself.” It's peaceful, it's tranquil, and I'm getting exposure to the sun because usually I'll stop and run at four or five o'clock in the morning, and I'll watch that sunrise.

So, the light has been a huge thing for me. So, whenever possible, I'll always try and get outside in the morning, and then at night, but if not, [02:27:00] _____ device. I'll make sure that I blast myself in the morning. Actually, my fiancé messaged me yesterday because she's got an inactive thyroid. She said, “I didn't know what's going on, I've been on everything with my supplements. I'm staying hydrated. I've been sleeping, but I still feel lethargic.” I said, “Have you been blasting yourself in the morning with a Joovv?” Because it's still quite cold in Boise and she had it. So, one thing that I'd say is blasting yourself with sunlight in the morning whenever possible because that can really, really help.

Meditation and gratitude is huge for me, being grateful because we're always chasing that woman, that car, that house. “I want more numbers, I want more clothes, I want more mics.” When we're chasing for something. I learned this from bodybuilding, always trying to get that win. And if you're not getting that win, second place and the first place is loser, and not really enjoying the journey because I never really enjoyed bodybuilding. I didn't like being on stage, I didn't like posing, [02:28:05] _____ or anything like that, unless there was some nice female [02:28:09] _____. I never really enjoyed it, but there's a great form of accountability because what way you're putting your urgency on the line standing on stage in your underpants. So, it's not [02:28:23] _____ and hide it.

So, I like that sense of urgency and that allowed me to evolve and create a lot of discipline and structure in my life because in Wales, I got into the party scene drugs, alcohol. I could see what was happening with my social circle. So, I needed this structure. So, really to [02:28:42] _____, but I was never grateful in the journey. I'd never had a gratitude in what I was trying to pursue. I'm always getting to an abyss after the show of depression because now I've lost the structure, I lead by [02:28:59] _____ and punctuality. So, now, I actually participate in everything with complete gratitude.

When I'm competing at an endurance event, I'm not pushing myself to the extent of like what Ben was. I just wanted to make sure that I enjoy the process and finish within a good time. I'm not there trying to finish in the last hour or anything, but I'm enjoying the process and I'm staying injury-free during that. So, I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the encouragement along the way. I'm grateful that every single one of you showed up. I'm grateful that Jag and Ben here are up here with me. I want to enjoy every moment. When my life flashes back before me, before I die, I'm going to have a lot of gratitude for the experience and the people that I've met along the way.

The PEMF, that really helped me as well. So, I have like what's called a BioBalance and a FlexPulse at home. I started using the FlexPulse when I had my shoulder surgery. There's a lot of things that I was doing, but I just found the PEMF device, the earthing, a lot of the things that I was doing. Like I remember being woken up and having my essential amino acids. I don't remember it, but [02:30:15] _____ immediately after the surgery. The PEMF device has really, really helped in that regard. So, it's like a triple charge. You can get these massive powerful devices that a lot of physicians have. And occasionally, I'll use them, but this is kind of like a triple charge of a battery that you have at home.

And the earthing, that's a big thing. Yeah, it's probably there in the top five for sure. I'll use that as a form of my meditation, and sungazing usually in the morning. There's a place [02:30:49] _____ take my dog's legs up for a run in the morning. Whilst he's running around causing chaos, I'm usually there sungazing and earthing at the same time. And I'll say the last one is the quantification of the Oura ring because I get my clients to use this whenever possible because it gives me so much data if they're sleeping well and if they're recovering well, if they've got a lot of decision-making fatigue, if there's stress, all these sort of things. So, I'll say the Oura ring would be the last but not least.

Ben:  That was six.

Kris:  That was six. Well, I knew I was repeating [02:31:22] _____.

Jag:  Right. So, now it's time for questions, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of questions. We do have a limited clock and we have tried to cover as much as we possibly can. So, I'm going to open up for questions if you have a question.

Male:  Hi. I want to ask you about BPC-157. Where do you get BPC-157?

Ben:  Where do you get it?

Male:  Yeah. It's really difficult to find out.

Ben:  Admittedly, I don't know where to get high-quality peptides in India because I've never had to actually source them here. My client in Bangalore, he travels to the U.S. and brings them back on ice and gets them from the doctor or whatever. I don't know that there are any companies currently producing peptides in India, but my knowledge is limited as to whether or not there's a quality source here. So, [02:32:17] _____ for sure.

Male:  What about the alternative [02:32:20] _____ Dr. Seeds?

Ben:  The only peptide that is abled at this point to be orally consumed is kind of a variant of BPC. It's not exactly BPC-157. There's a guy named Dr. Seeds and he has this thing called Dr. Seed's BPC. It's kind of similar. It's not as effective as the injectable peptide, but [02:32:42] _____ oral tablet you can get. Even that's not as good as like the injectable BPC-157, so yeah. I wish I had a better reply for you, but I don't.

Female:  I noticed that you do recommend sun more than steam. Is there a reason for that?

Ben:  The reason that I generally do not recommend steam is because you don't know the source of the water that they're reheating into steam room. I noticed how clubs and gyms and hotels do not filter that water. So, you're essentially breathing in birth control pills, pharmaceuticals, fluoride, anything else that might be in the water supply when you're in a steam room. So, I'm very careful with steam rooms. And if I'm in a spa, I actually straight up ask the type of water filtration that they use for their steam. And if they don't know, I don't go in.

Male:  Hi. My question is about supplements. So, how does one actually decide what kind of supplementation do they need for themselves after having a natural diet and actually planning to consume a natural diet by understanding that these are the best kind of micronutrients you get from that kind of food. So, how do we decide whether we need a magnesium or zinc or vitamin A, something like that?

Ben:  Yes. The best way is via self-quantification. Meaning, for digestive type of supplements, you got to test to see which [02:34:06] _____ you actually should be taking, whether you need digestive enzymes, whether you need anti-parasitics, et cetera, or bloodwork. You can identify vitamin D, magnesium, different thyroid needs like iodine, selenium, et cetera. Probably the best kind of like full panel to get would be NutrEval. That covers a lot of the bases in terms of identifying all little holes in your diet that may need to be filled in with supplementation. That's a NutrEval now made by the company Genova Diagnostics.

Female:  Can you spell it?

Ben:  N-U-T-R-E-V-A-L. That being said, there are specific supplements or specific nutrients or vitamins or minerals that nearly everyone tends to be deficient in or benefit from. Probably the biggest would be creatine, magnesium, some kind of mineral, multivitamin complex. That's like a blend of multivitamins that are accumulated to minerals. And in addition to magnesium, creatine, and mineral with multivitamins, probably the last biggest one would be some form of really good omega-3 fatty acids like a really good high-quality fish oil, just because omega-3, omega-6 ratios in most diets are a little bit too — well, omega-6 to omega-3 is too high. So, those would be some of the ones that I think across the board most people can benefit from.

Male:  First of all, thank you guys for being here. [02:35:40] _____ hot and cold thermogenesis. I know that Ben spoke about hot/cold showers [02:35:46] _____ that you talk about is 20 seconds cold and 10 seconds hot. I know that Kris just mentioned that when Jag comes to visit they probably do a sauna and then they will get into a nice bath [02:36:04] _____. This is a technical question, but is there a benefit doing one first and then the other, or it does not make a difference if you do hot first or cold first?

Ben:  Hot first because if you come to the hot/cold, it takes that much longer in hot, right? I would assume [02:36:21] _____ cold because if you finished with cold, you're going to burn a bunch of fat and more calories and increase your metabolic rate as your body tries to warm up. Aside from those two rules, start with heat and finish with cold, whether you're doing, whatever, you got a hot tub next to a cold pool, you got one-minute hot tub, one-minute cold, two minutes hot and two minutes cold, finishing over five-minute hot and five-minute cold, or you're doing 30 minutes in the sauna and 5 minutes in the cold pool, whether you're doing 20 seconds of cold, 10 seconds of hot, and finishing with the 20 seconds of cold. There's no hard and fast rules aside from start with heat, finish with cold.

Kris:  Yeah. So, just to follow up with that, obviously, yeah, following with a cold really helps, especially at night helps with your sleep. I find it really helps with my deep sleep cycle. And obviously, if you've finished with a cold as well, as Ben mentioned, just measuring through the blood glucose monitor, it really helps with your blood sugar regulation throughout the day.

Male:  Right. So, thank you, Ben, for [02:37:21] _____ process right now. So, my quick question was how do [02:37:29] _____? What do prebiotics and probiotics have to do with [02:37:35] _____?

Ben:  Well, it's a pretty big topic, but I would say that most of my clients who come to me for coaching always begin with, A, Genova Diagnostics test. That's a three-day gut test. That will test for parasites, yeast, fungus, et cetera. So, we are actually quantifying what is going on. Those who can't afford to do so or who want to do so will also do a microbiome test such as the Viome or the Onegevity. But if I had to prioritize them, I would say the Genova Diagnostics test is — it gives you more applicable, readily, actionable information that has more research beyond it versus the whole microbiome test, which I think is still in its infancy when it comes to the research about whether or not we test low and, say, XYZ bacteria, whether replenishment of that with ABC probiotic is going to actually make appreciable difference in health.

So, I'll always start with that kind of quantification. In most cases, there's some element of inflammation or leaky gut present. In many cases, there's also some type of small intestine bacterial overgrowth present. For the former, it's simply using things that heal the gut lining. Sometimes it's the implementation of a short-term diet that we talked about earlier that eliminates most common food problems. I typically will use something like the paleo autoimmune diet, or these days, I'm beginning to use something like a nose-to-tail carnivore diet, or something else that just restricts a lot of built-in plant-defense mechanisms and gives the gut a little bit of a break. Typically, that's combined with [02:39:18] _____ with those intermittent fasting, et cetera.

At the same time, I introduce nutrients that help to heal the gut. Some of my favorites are colostrum, bone broth, L-glutamine, and then a specific form of soil extract that can heal the gut from the ravages of glyphosate. That one is called lignite. It is made by a company called [02:39:41] _____ in the U.S. So, those are some of my favorites [02:39:44] _____ plant-based diet, who [02:39:48] _____ bone broth, I'll have to make the chia seed gel. It takes a chia seed and mix with water and a nice little slurry that's for healing and nourishing a leaky gut.

In the case of the latter, in the case of SIBO, it is far more complicated because when there is bacterial overgrowth, there are often mold, mycotoxins, biofilm, and a lot of things that need to be addressed via the host of different herbal protocols like [02:40:15] _____ extract, oregano, [02:40:21] _____. The list goes on and on and sometimes different bacteria will respond differently to different protocols, but that's always combined with a low FODMAP, low-carb diet. So, you're not feeding the bacteria, and in many cases, has to be combined with like low-dose antibiotics, anti-parasitics, et cetera. And then finally, a slow re-introduction of probiotics and fermented foods, which in the case of SIBO can aggregate SIBO if you haven't taken care of the bacterial overgrowth first.

And then, finally, we're going to the question on probiotic supplementation. If you do think of your gut as a giant garden hose that travels from your mouth to your anus, and you think about taking a capsule like a probiotic, it's almost like sprinkling little bits of bacteria here and there throughout that garden hose that may or may not populate the gut. And when you look at fermented foods, like a bunch of fiber wrapped in a bolus and bacteria that travels throughout the entire garden hose and paints the entire interior of that garden hose as it passes through.

It makes me think that whether or not we're supplementing with probiotics, the use of fermented foods, as long as you tolerate the fibers and things like that that are present in those foods is a better, kind of more ancestral holistic approach to replenishing the bacteria of the gut. So, I tend to favor a wide variety of fermented foods over probiotic supplementation. And my own protocol is a wide variety of foods to provide with one probiotic that I use called Seed that's wrapped in an algal medium that withstands the acidic nature of the gut. It tends to do a good job populating the gut, although I don't think it's enough. I think it needs to be combined with a wide variety of fermented foods, which of course are also going to give you the prebiotic fiber that will feed the bacteria. Great question.

Male:  Thank you.

Male:  Hey, Ben. Great question. [02:42:28] _____ Mediterranean diet for the rest of motivation. Do you think the same applies for [02:42:36] _____?

Ben:  The reason that I tend to, if someone cannot afford or has not yet done self-quantification, bloodwork, genetic work, gut work, et cetera, to very precisely determine which diet is going to be proper for them is because it appears that humans probably originated from somewhere close to the general area of the Mediterranean. And so we tend to be genetically favored to do pretty well with that mix of a rich variety of plants, herbs, spices, fish, high omega-3 fatty acids, and not a ton of, for example, processed carbohydrates or copious amounts of red meat, or very, very large amounts of, say, unfermented dairy, et cetera.

Now, that being said, let's take an example of a country like India where a fiber-rich plant dominant diet, heavy in legumes has been a staple along with some choice meats such as lamb and chicken, for example. That's a perfect case in which if you're not living in America, which is a genetically [02:43:58] _____ where these things become more confusing, but you can trace your ancestry back, largely Indian. And eating like your ancestors is a pretty good idea, provided that the ancestral food that you're eating is, to return to what I was talking about earlier, say, rich in chickpeas, but the chickpeas have been prepared properly. So, rinsed, pressure-cooked, or the meat has not been cooked in vegetable oils, or the chickens have not been raised in tiny cages and fed corn and grain, but have instead been raised out in the pasture on insects. And so if you can identify what your ancestors eat or ate, and then approximately, that diet in the weight of how your ancestors will eat it without all the bastardization of it that we've introduced in modern culture, it's probably going to be on a pretty good track to eating a diet. So, that's appropriate for you.

Kris:  I just want to take this opportunity to really thank Ben for coming over here to provide all this information to you, even though I only live like a 30-minute flight from him. I bumped into you like in Salt Lake, in L.A., and now in India of all places, but it's an absolute pleasure to share  this stage. Now, this happened when we actually did a podcast in L.A. and Jag just happened to be in L.A. for some meetings. And Jag always says, “He's fool to become [02:45:16] _____.” And I did because he mentioned to Ben about coming here and Jag has just done a phenomenal job for putting on the very first biohacking forums here in India for you guys. So, I just want to thank both Jag and Ben.

Ben:  And I want to thank Kris for being such a badass good-looking muscleman dude that I feel safe, ultra-safe just everywhere I traveled. And I walk through the airport and feel like if shit goes south, I got Kris on my side. So, yeah, this dude is a real deal. Good man with a big heart. So, you give a hand to Kris too.

Jag:  Thank you, Kris. Oh, yeah. Just to say thank you to all of you because without the support that we've got for Physique Global over the years, these events definitely wouldn't be possible because we need that motivation to be able to bring more innovation.

Male:  Thank you.

Ben:  Amazing. Cheers.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the shownotes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful “Ben Recommends” page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormone, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please, also, know that all the links, all the promo codes, that I mentioned during this and every episode, helped to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. When you listen in, be sure to use the links in the shownotes, use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

 

 

On my recent whirlwind media and Boundless book tour of India, I hosted, along with my friends Jag Chima and Kris Gethin, a massive biohacking Q&A and panel in Mumbai, directly after the one we recorded in New Delhi, which you can listen to here (you may also be interested in our private hotel room chat here). We covered an enormously wide range of topics, including:

• The harmony between ancestral living and modern science…
• How to optimize gut health…
• Does moving around help digestion…
• 5G and EMF hazards from mobile phones and “smart” technology…
• Why it's so difficult to thrive on a plant-based diet…
• How to slow down, or stop altogether, the aging process…
• How Ben can have a biological age of 9 years old…
• The right approach to aesthetics when it comes to biohacking…
• And much more!

Jag Chima, born in England, is an entrepreneur, investor, visionary, health and fitness enthusiast, and philanthropist with business interests that include real estate, construction, finance, lifestyle, and health and fitness. Jag is the founder of The London Group, a diversified conglomerate with extensive operations in the UK, India, and other parts of the world. The London Group is comprised of companies in property consultancy, property development, estate agents, lifestyle brands, fitness education, talent management, and health clubs.

Jag has carved a niche for himself as a passionate and astute professional, with experience that started in 1998. He has also been featured on many media platforms including BBC News Asia, BBC Asian Network, and MATV. He is a sought after speaker and strategic advisor on business affairs and believes in facing fears and taking on challenges for growth and personal development. Jag recently completed a triathlon and also a 1450 km bicycle ride from Delhi to Mumbai. He is a proud supporter of The Unique Home for Girls in Jalandhar India, a home for unwanted, abandoned girls in Punjab, India.

Originally from Wales, Kris Gethin has established himself as one of the most versatile fitness entrepreneurs in the industry. Before founding Kaged Muscle, Kris competed as a lifetime natural pro bodybuilder, placing as high as second place in the Natural World Championships. As a personal trainer, his clients have included Bollywood celebrities, billionaire businessmen, and champion athletes. In between training clients, he has certified more than 800 personal trainers. Somehow, this tireless innovator found time to co-found a health club franchise called Kris Gethin Gyms. He has shared his extensive knowledge through books, newsletters, videos, and podcasts.

Now, he’s moved into the nutrition sector with Kaged Muscle, a company dedicated to creating cutting-edge, ultra-premium sports nutrition supplements for athletes of all types. All of Kris’ pursuits are consistent with his mission of helping others reach their health and fitness goals.

In this episode you'll discover:

-What it means to be “boundless”…8:41

• We just want more energy to accomplish our goals, purpose, etc.
• We go about our lives with less energy than we're capable of; it's more than just exercise and diet
• Oft-neglected variables: cognitive performance, digestion, blood-brain barrier, spiritual disciplines, etc.
• “Read the book, but don't become a student of learning. Put it into action.”
• Book: Rich Dad, Poor Dadby Robert Kiyosaki
• Mitigating hazards of the Information Age:
  • Don't feel pressure to read the entire book
  • Have one shelf of books you'll read again and again
  • Readwise
• How to get your hands on Boundless:
  • In the U.S.
  • International

-How to optimize gut health…16:30

• The gut is where most of the bacteria reside and thrive
• Postbiotics contribute to our energy levels
• Two branches of the nervous system: Enteric and Central
  • Enteric resides within the gut; fed and fueled by the vagus nerve
• Neglect of the gut will affect our mental function, sleep, neurotransmitter, mood, etc.
• Functional medicine has it right: go to the gut first in determining the issue
• Other deleterious variables affecting the gut:
  • Processed food
  • Pollution
  • Sources of the food we eat
  • Inactivity
  • Sugar intake
• Kris had mold toxicity in the brain; the functional medicine doc went straight to the gut

-The harmony between ancestral living and modern science…21:04

• The two don't need to be mutually exclusive
• You can overdo anything
• Many biohackers rely too much on tech that they become disconnected with nature
• Eating “ancestral” foods (ghee, blueberries, etc.) to excess
• Modern science has spawned a rediscovery of ancestral living
• “Retirement” is a foreign concept in Blue Zonesaround the world
• Always look for opportunities to move, ground with the earth, etc.
• Don't let the weather be an excuse for getting outside
• Discomfort, suffering encourages other disciplines in our lives
• Keep your smart phone on airplane mode whenever possible
• Book: Blue Zonesby Dan Buettner
• BioBalance mat
• Earth Runnerssandals

-How moving around helps digestion…31:20

• Low-level physical activity throughout the day
• Rest without being in a seated position all day
• Why recline or rest while eating:
  • Allows you to be present while eating
  • Consuming food in a stressed state may negate any nutritional benefits of it
  • Choose to fast if you don't have time to eat in a relaxed state
• Bone density decrease that correlates with a shift from squatting to sitting position

-5G and EMF hazards from mobile phones and “smart” technology…36:00

• Three issues to be aware of:
  • Our bodies operate on an electrical chemical balance
  • Radiation and its effects on DNA and protein damage
  • Upregulate inflammation in the body
• Podcast with Dr. Mercola on EMF and 5G
• Book: EMF*dby Dr. Mercola
• Book: The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFsby Nick Pineault
• Book: Zappedby Ann Louise Gittleman
• Book: Healing is Voltageby Jerry Tennant
• Book: The Body Electricby Robert Becker
• Schumann resonance generating mat 
• Magnesium supplementsoffset calcium deficiencies as a result of 5G and EMF
• NAD can offset protein damage
  • Fasting/caloric restriction
  • NADsupplementation
  • You want a high level of sirtuins: cacao, red wine, blueberries, dark purple and red foods
• Use supplements that increase blood levels of ketones (ketone esters)
• Ground with the earthas much as possible
  • Earthing mat and earthing bed sheets
• PEMF matin the bed or on the couch
• EMF scramblerfor a smartphone (code: BEN)
• Brian Hoyer, building biologist
  • Podcast with Brian Hoyer
• Testosterone levels have declined
• EMF blocking underwear(use code: BEN for a 20% discount – limited to one per email address)
• A disciplined spiritual life can help mitigate the psychological effects of exposure to EMFs (don't live in fear)

-Why it's so difficult to thrive on a plant-based diet…56:37

• You need to know how to do it; know which holes need to be filled in
• Plants have built-in defense mechanisms; these can be problematic for the gut
• Smart plant-based diets:
  • Quinoarinsed and sprouted can unlock more amino acids
  • Pre-digested gluten
  • Hummus from chickpeas rinsed and soaked; pressure cooked
  • Soak and sprout time for common seeds, nuts, beans and grain
• Many plant-based advocates are ignorant or unwilling to go through the trouble
• Ethically-raised meatcan supply the amino acids and nutrients you need
• The ideal diet will vary based on your genetics, but is omnivorous
• Be aware of the source:
  • Ethical treatment of animals
  • How is the land treated?
• Some endurance athletes thrive on a plant-based diet, but is their health optimized?
• Beware of documentaries on Netflix that preach a plant-based diet
• Diets can be used as a tool to be used for a specific purpose, but it may not be the ideal diet forever

-Biohacking your workout…1:08:45

• Nasal breathing
  • Encourages diaphragmatic breathing
  • Improves facial symmetry
  • Use the mouth only during the hardest part of the workout
• Blood flow restriction training
  • Tricks muscles into thinking they're carrying a heavier load
  • BFR bands(use code BEN20 for a 20% discount)
  • KAATSUtraining device (use code BEN for a 5% discount)
• Heart rate variability (HRV) measurement
  • HRV is the time between beats of the heart
  • Indicative of the health of the vagus nerve
  • Neglecting HRV can be very detrimental
  • High HRV is good; indicative of good overall health
  • Oura Ring

-How to slow down, or stop altogether, the aging process…1:18:25

• Glycemic variability
  • Dexcomblood glucose monitor
  • Cold thermogenesis
  • Bitter melon extract, ceylon cinnamon, apple cider vinegar
• Levels of inflammation, particularly chronic inflammation
  • Stress
  • Non-native EMF
  • Vegetable oil is a fast track to chronic inflammation
• Spiritual disciplines
  • Gratitude, being present
  • Being in a happier place
• Stem cell therapy
• Be aware of sugar intake
• Shortening workouts

-How Ben can have a biological age of 9 years old…1:26:43

• Telomere analysis(Spectra Cell)
• Methylation measurements may be more precise in the future
• Exosomes
• PEMF therapy
• Hyperbaric oxygen therapy
• Peptides
  • Epitalon
  • Humanin
  • MOTS-C
• Social workouts

-The right approach to aesthetics when it comes to biohacking…1:33:38

• Alitura derma roller, clay mask, and moisturizeruse code GREENFIELD for a 20% discount (mix w/ apple cider vinegar or red wine)
• JOOVV Red light therapy
• Kion Serum
• GHK-Cu peptides
• Collagenand essential amino acids
• Think Dirtyapp
• Dry skin brushing
• Dirt oil pulling mouthwash
• Tongue scraper
• Only work with a holistic dentist
• Xylitol gumin the morning
• Don't shame others or yourself based on appearance

-Biohacks to help with a polluted environment…1:47:26

• Plants in the home can help purify the air
• N95 face mask
• Taurine
• Full Spectrum antioxidant blends
• Blue light blocking glasses

-Hacks to optimize health while traveling…1:53:50

• Oil of oregano
• Beekeepers Naturalsbee propolis spray (use code BEN for a 15% discount)
• Hydrogen tablets (use code GREENFIELD for a 10% discount)
• EMF blocking underwear
• KTC EMF-blocking clothing
• Fasting can reduce inflammation
• Spirulinaand Chlorella (use code BEN for a 10% discount)
• Air squats on the plane
• Power naps
• Mindfold sleep mask
• Reishi mushroom(use code BENGREENFIELD for a 15% discount)
• NuCalm(65% off first month of any new monthly subscription, discount applied automacially)
• DefenderShield blanket
• BLUblox Remedy sleep mask

-Herbs for biohacking…2:02:41

• Turmeric is used in Kion Flex
• Black pepper, turmeric, gheewith hot coconut milk
• Astragalus
• Ashwagandha
• Chaga, Turkey Tail, and Reishimushroom (use code BENGREENFIELD for a 15% discount)
• Bitter melon extract
• Berberine
• TianChiChinese traditional herbs

-What wearable technologies to use, and which to avoid…2:08:40

• It must be able to disable bluetooth, wifi, put in airplane mode
• Apollo wearable band(15% discount automatically applied at checkout)
  • Podcast with Apollo founder David Rabin
• Oura Ring
• Molekule air filter(code: BEN)
• Don't look at your phone first thing in the morning!
• Keep phone out of the bedroom

-Ben and Kris' top 5 biohacks…2:18:40

• Ben:
  • Photobiomodulation
    • JOOVV
    • Vielight
  • Grounding
    • Grounding mat
    • PEMF mat
    • Grounding shoes
  • Hyperthermia
    • Clearlight infrared sauna(use code BEN for $450 off)
  • Cryotherapy and cold thermogenesis
    • Cold showers
    • Swim in a cold lake, river, etc.
  • Trace minerals
    • Quinton(use code GREENFIELD10 for a 10% discount)
    • Celtic sea salt
  • Kris:
    • Hot and cold thermogenesis
      • Stimulating the vagus nerve
      • Promotes emotional stability
    • Sun exposure/light therapy
      • JOOVV
    • Meditation and gratitude
    • PEMF
      • Biobalance
      • Flex Pulse
    • Grounding/earthing
    • Self-quantification
      • Oura Ring

-Audience Q&A…2:31:24

• How to obtain BPC-157in India
• Why Ben recommends sauna over steam
• How to decide which supplements are appropriate for you
  • Nutreval by Genova Diagnostics
  • Creatine
  • Magnesium
  • Multi-vitamin that's chelated to minerals
  • Omega 3fatty acids
• Is there benefit to doing hot before cold thermogenesis, and vice versa
• What do prebiotics and probioticshave to do with gut health
• Determining the proper diet for you

Resources from this episode:

– Books:

• Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
• Boundlessby Ben Greenfield
• Blue Zonesby Dan Buettner
• EMF*dby Dr. Mercola
• The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFsby Nick Pineault
• Zappedby Ann Louise Gittleman
• Healing is Voltageby Jerry Tennant
• The Body Electricby Robert Becker

– Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast Episodes:

• Mercola: The Shocking Truth About You Getting “EMF’D”: 5G, Wi-Fi & Cell Phones – Hidden Harms & How To Protect Yourself
• Brian Hoyer: The Intriguing Science Of Building Biology (Along With A Complete Analysis & Surprising Results From Ben Greenfield’s So-Called “Biohacked Home”)
• Clint Ober: My New #1 Hack For Zapping Inflammation, Increasing Deep Sleep & Recovering Faster – Earthing (The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?)
• David Rabin: A Whole New Way To Deal With Stress, Trauma & PTSD In Just Seconds: The First Clinically Validated Wearable That Helps You De-Stress, Focus, Sleep, Stay Energized & Remain Calm.

– Supplements:

• Magnesium
• Ketone Esters
• Trace minerals
• Creatine
• Berberine
• TianChi Chinese adaptogenic herbs
• Collagen
• Kion Aminos
• Taurine
• Full Spectrum antioxidant blends
• Glutathione
• N-Acetylcysteine (NAC)
• GlutaStat nasal spray
• Kion Oil of Oregano
• Hydrogen tablets(use code GREENFIELD for a 10% discount)
• Spirulina and Chlorella tablets(use code BEN for a 10% discount)
• Kion Flex
• Astragalus
• Ashwagandha
• Chaga, Turkey Tail, and Reishi Mushrooms(use code BENGREENFIELD for a 15% discount)
• Bitter melon extract
• Quinton

– Physique Global

– Readwise

– BioBalance mat

– Earth Runners sandals (use code BENG10 for 10% off)

– Earthing mat and earthing bed sheets

– PEMF mat

– Brian Hoyer, building biologist

– Lambs EMF blocking underwear (use code BEN for a 20% discount – limited to one per email address)

– Schumann resonance generating mat

– EMF scrambler for a smartphone (code: BEN)

– Oura Ring

– International Peptides Society

– Alitura Derma roller, Clay Mask, and Moisturizer (use code GREENFIELD for a 20% discount)

– JOOVV (use code BEN for a free gift at checkout)

– Kion Serum

– Think Dirty app

– Dry skin brushing

– The Dirt oil pulling mouthwash

– Tongue scraper

– Xylitol gum

– N95 face mask

– RA Optics Blue light blocking glasses

– Beekeepers Naturals bee propolis spray (use code BEN for a 15% discount)

– KTC EMF blocking clothing

– Mindfold sleep mask

– NuCalm (65% off first month of any new monthly subscription discount applied automacially)

– Defender Shield blanket

– BLUblox Remedy mask

– Apollo wearable band (15% discount automatically applied at checkout)

– Molekule air filter

– Vielight

– Clearlight infrared sauna

– Celtic sea salt

– Flex Pulse

Episode sponsors:

–Kion: My personal playground for new supplement formulations, Kion blends ancestral wisdom with modern science. Ben Greenfield Fitness listeners, receive a 10% discount off your entire order when you use discount code: BEN10.

–Paleo Valley Beef Sticks: 100% grass-fed AND grass-finished. Keto friendly and higher levels of Omega 3 Fatty Acids. Receive a 15% discount off your order when you go to paleovalley.com/ben.

–Vuori: Activewear and athletic clothing for ultimate performance. Vuori is built to move and sweat in, yet designed with a West Coast aesthetic that transitions effortlessly into everyday life. Receive 25% off your first order when you use discount code: BEN2020.

–Clearlight Saunas: You can be sure that I researched all the saunas before I bought mine and Clearlight was the one that stood out from all the rest because of their EMF and ELF Shielding and their Lifetime Warranty. Use discount code: BENGREENFIELD to get $500 off your sauna and a free bonus gift!