if you look at this data it's it's just mind-blowing so obviously non-smokers that have a high omega-3 index of 8% or more have the highest life expectancy but when you look at smokers with a high omega-3 index they have the same life expectancy as non-smokers with a low omega-3 index what is like the most incredible smoothie you can think of that would just be full of health
benefits for the day I do smoothie it does it doesn't have omega-3 but I'll walk you through my my my smoothie that I do one thing we can all afford is vitamin D and we're all sort of lacking in that is sunscreen actually killing us more than just being in the sun deliberate heat exposure what is that doing well that is actually kicking on a physiological response that is in in many ways very similar to moderate
intensity aerobic exercise because maybe we can end with sort of the top three interventions you can think of from a diet perspective and then the top three interventions you can think of from a behavioral perspective that would have the biggest bang on people's lives diet wise like the top three things that people can think about would be when I was thinking about where to
start I think the best place to start is to give people practical Frameworks for approaching topics that we come across every day so why don't we start with a practical framework for approaching nutrition and decisions about the food that we consume I you know I kind of have my own framework for approaching nutrition in and it it has a lot to do with you know I I did my postdoc training in nutrition and um in
specifically looking at micronutrients so these are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals that fatty acids also and amino acids that we have to get from our diet and those are in a variety of foods and different foods have different levels and quantities of them and these micronutrients are running our metabolism they're running everything our neurotransmitters that we're
producing so our cognition just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies so it's important to get them because if we don't get them we can have deficiencies or insufficiencies which is quite worse because um insufficiencies are kind of something that you don't notice every day but there's like Insidious types of damage Just Happening each and every day and it accumulates over time and plays a role
in age related diseases like cancer and neurod degenerative disease so these um micronutrients are things like you know calcium magnesium vitamin K Vitamin D which I'm sure we'll talk about is actually something you can mostly get from the Sun uh omega-3 and and so when you think about the this the the micronutrients that you need in your diet it makes it a little bit easier to think about what
you should be eating okay so well let's start with like some of the most common deficiencies in micronutrients we have U magnesium so almost half of the US population is deficient in or I I would say they're they get insufficient magnesium intake and magnesium is it's at the center of a chlorophyll molecule so chlorophyll makes plant gives plants their green color so it's really easy to think about foods you
should eat to get magnesium you should be eating greens particularly dark leafy greens so um that's something you know a framework where it's like okay well I need to get my greens because they're high in magnesium well greens are also very high in vitamin K and um vitamin K1 there's two forms vitamin K1 you need it it's a essential when you when you take in vitamin K1 and and something like 35%
of the US population is not getting enough of that and I'm sure you know North America and Canada are are very similar I mean we have very similar for diets so um vitamin K1 is essential for all your blood clotting processes so you like in order to like you know have your blood clotting which is important you know if you have a cut or something you know an injury you want that clotting to
happen so that you don't have like a hemorrhage right so um so Vitamin K is also you know high in leafy greens you can also get um mag sorry calcium as well from Green so that's really an easy way to kind of think about greens uh the other the other way the other thing is Omega-3s right so Omega-3s are very high in fatty fish so this would be things like wild Alaskan salmon or Cod or mackarel sardines like
these are good forms of fish that have the Marine types of Omega three so that would be DHA and EPA and um those are very important for a lot of functions including brain health and cardiovascular health and there's a lot of evidence if you actually look at the evidence um a lot of work has been done by Bill Harris in his group at the fatty acid Research Institute and um they have they look at
Omega the omega-3 index which is a way you can actually quantify your omega-3 levels and that's really good to be able to quantify something because if you don't quantify it you don't really know if you are getting enough of it right so the omega-3 index is high in red blood cells and um or sorry it's in it's they're they're characterizing it from red blood cells which is different than a lot of other
ways of measuring omega-3 um like for example plasma omega-3 which is basically kind of reflective of your dietary intake the last week or so the red blood cell or the omega-3 index is is more of a long-term status so it's like 120 days for a red blood cell to turnover so um the omega-3 index is a good marker of your omega-3 status and um people that have a high omega-3 index and that would
be 8% or more have a fiveyear increase life expectancy compared to people with a lower omega-3 index which is more like 4% now people in the United States on average have about an omega-3 IND index of about 5% um and you compare that to for example countries like Japan where they eat a lot of seafood their omega-3 index is around 10% so and they also have a five-year increased life expectancy
compared to people in the United States but um there's been tons of studies looking at omega-3 index and life expectancy and there's been also like data where they Strat statisfy like looking at you know for example and this I like talking about this because I think it really puts in perspective you the frork of nutrition and thinking about instead of focusing on what to avoid focusing on what you need because
if you focus on what you need then it's obvious what you don't need right there's no nutritional value in processed foods you're not getting micronutrients you're getting calories you're not getting protein you're not getting things that you need so um smoking is something that everyone knows is bad you should avoid smoking right it's you know heart disease cancer you're going to have a decreased life
expectancy empyema all kinds of problems right well um what Bill Harris's group had done has they looked at life expectancy of smokers and non-smokers and then they categorized their omega-3 index and if you look at this data it's it's just mindblowing so obviously non-smokers that have a high omega-3 index of 8% or more have the highest life expectancy and um the lowest life
expectancy is smokers with a low Omega-3 index so there's like that's the worst of the worst but when you look at smokers with a high omega-3 index they have they have the same life expectancy as nonsmokers with a low omega-3 index in other words smoking was like having low omega-3 or having a low omega-3 index was like smoking and when I say you look the life expectancy if you look at the graph in the publication
the curves like overlay perfectly it's kind of freakish where you're like whoa like the people that are smoking but they're getting a lot of Omega-3 have the same like life expectancy of these people that don't smoke but have very low omega-3 and that's kind of like I I like talking about that because I feel like it puts it in perspective for people because like I said no one's really thinking
about I'm not eating my fish today I'm not supplementing with an omega-3 supplement to get that those Omega-3s you know but people are thinking about oh I shouldn't smoke because it's bad right so again it goes goes back to that framework of thinking about what you need and and starting there um as opposed to like just like okay what should I avoid because when you think about what should I avoid then you're not like
people aren't thinking about magnesium they're not thinking about you know the vitamin K they're not thinking about omega-3 and by the way magnesium you know I said about half the half the population in the United States doesn't get enough um they're not eating enough greens and unfortunately there's not a great test for magnesium because um our body stores magnesium in our bones and
so anytime we're not getting enough in our diet our body pulls it out of our bones to like because we need it it's so important you need it to make energy like without magnesium you can't make energy so nothing's going to function but um you also it it's needed to repair damage like every time you have you know like right now you and I we're we're having a conversation you know we're you
know neurotransmitters are firing we're thinking about things like that's causing damage metabolism all that stuff causes damage on a daily basis but our body repairs that damage but magnesium is a co-actor for these enzymes these are proteins that are doing everything for that to function properly and so if you don't get enough of that magnesium to do that what happens is you don't
repair that damage properly and that can increase the risk of getting a mutation that can lead to cancer and so there's all sorts of studies that have looked at magnesium intake and cancer and you know it's been found that for example for every 100 you know milligram increase in magnesium intake there's something like a 20% decrease in pancreatic cancer risk and there's been lots of studies like this looking at
magnesium intake and cancer risk and so the higher the Magnesium intake the lower the cancer risk so again it's one of those things where you can't look in the mirror and go as you're brushing your teeth oh I don't have enough magnesium today right like nothing's like showing you that but it's happening that damage is Insidious and I mentioned you pull it out of your bone like it's
pulled out of your bones and that's another thing it leads to osteoporosis over time so you know investing in magnesium so in other words remembering to eat your leafy greens is getting your magnesium so so women need about I'd say about 320 milligrams a day adult women need about 320 milligrams a day of magnesium men need around 420 milligrams a day and um you know this can change
based on your your physical activity level as well so like if you're physically active if you're sweating you sweat out magnesium you also use it up for energy so you might actually require anywhere between 10% to 20% more than that level so what's called the recommended daily allowance in the United States um so you know again and people aren't even meeting that so uh investing in magnesium is like a way you
can think about like also for bone health because you know if you are getting enough magnesium on a daily basis you're not going to be pulling it out of your bones and therefore you're not magnesium is important for for your bones and so as you keep doing that year after year after year it dramatically increases osteoporosis risk right so there's lots of reasons to invest in you
know these micronutrients and to think about the foods that you need to eat um and I and so and Beyond the micronutrients it goes to the macros right so I'll I'll stop there let's pause yeah let's pause just before we we go to the macros for a second here I have so many questions one is is there a difference between consuming magnesium and Omega-3 through food like leafy greens or fish and supplementation so
magnesium if you're consuming it in the form of leafy greens um it is it is bound to a it's like the fiber matrix it's called phate and that does decrease the bioavailability of it um but you can do things like you cook your greens you know so you can do raw but also cooking them will increase the bioavailability of minerals like magnesium so you can do things and it is good you want to kind
of get a variety of things you want to have some raw veggies but you also want to have cooked and um when you cook it it it does actually increase the bioavailability of not just magnesium other minerals as well that are bound to that that fiber Matrix that um which has phate there but supplementation's also kind of tricky with respect to magnesium because it it can be an irritant on on the gut as well and um so you don't
really absorb more I mean it's about 100 I would say anywhere between 120 to 150 milligrams per dose like once you get above that you're not really absorbing more you're just kind of causing more GI distress and it it's a little bit of like a laxative effect so some people actually use it specifically for that reason so they do higher doses above 150 milligrams because they're looking for
that effect but generally speaking if you are supplementing with magnesium you want to make sure you're going at a lower dose because you're not really going to absorb more and it's just going to cause like GI distress you know more gut issues and if you are going to supplement if you want to supplement with more than just 150 you have to spread your doses out so it's like take it with you know take it earlier with
the meal and then take it later in the day as well so um the other thing is that when you're getting it from food it is packaged in with other minerals and there are you know there's there's some argument to be made that having for example there's like you know twice as much calcium as magnesium in in a lot of the foods and so you're getting this two: one ratio and so um you know
there's there's kind of a reason for that I I wouldn't say that it's been heavily studied but it's thought that you kind of want to keep that ratio correct like 2 to one calcium to magnesium ratio so if you're just like supplementing with lots of magnesium and let's say you don't get enough maybe you don't eat dairy or maybe you're a lactose intolerant or you know maybe you're just not getting enough calcium
you can kind of have mineral imbalances as well so um that's another thing to kind of keep in mind and then there's the form that you're going to supplement with right so there's a lot of different magnesium supplements out there and it's like well there's what do I do and there is I would say the the most important difference when you're looking for a magnesium supplement is to avoid the um What's
called the inorganic forms and this isn't like organic pesticide what we're talking about is so like magnesium oxide or magnesium sulfate like they're just not very bioavailable like you're not going to absorb as much from those but if you get like the organic form so this would be something that has like an organic molecule so magnesium citrate magnesium malate magnesium glycinate
magnesium torate these are all forms of magnesium that are relatively the same in terms of their bioavailability so um those are good forms to go to for your magnesium supplement I personally like taking magnesium glycinate because glycinate is like a form of glycine which is a inhibitory neurotransmitter and so I like getting a little bit extra glycine there's like there's some science behind
um you know glycine perhaps being beneficial and supplementing with it you know may being possibly being beneficial for um life expectancy a little bit of evidence for sleep although it's not so strong I would say it's kind of we need more evidence but nonetheless it is you know it's in that magnesium so I like to supplement with that but um just I think that's the main thing with respect to
magnesium supplementation is is that the forms do kind of matter and the dose and what about the Omega-3s is it can I just go to the store if I'm not going to eat a lot of fish and buy an omega-3 supplement and um or is fish the primary way that we actually get bioavailability from them yeah that's also a great question it really does obviously depend on um quite a few factors so with
respect to the seafood and fish the type of fish does matter right so like you need like there's some fish like that's just not that fatty and so fish the omega-3's EPA and DHA are the Marine forms of the omega-3 and those are the ones I was talking about with the omega-3 index and life expectancy those are the forms that have been used in randomized controlled trials with supplementation that have decreased you
know you know cardiovascular events by like 25% compared to Placebo those are the ones that are important um they're they're only in the really oily fatty fish so one of the best forms is salmon and wild salmon has higher levels than um you know farmed and on top top of that you know the the wild for example wild Alaskan salmon is probably one of the best Salmons to to consume for
omega-3 um it also has asanin it's what gives the fish that pink color um and so because they're eating a lot of those little like Crustaceans and stuff that that make that that corat it's a carotenoid so um if you if you are eating you know fish I would say quite a quite a lot of fish um you'd have to really get an omega-3 in next test to know for sure how much it how much you require but you know I would say
probably like at least you know you're eating it four times a week something like that which most people do do not do in Japan they do and their omega-3 index is very high like I don't even know from any Japanese supplement they're just they eat seafood like every day so you know you can get your Omega-3s from fish now the other the other thing to consider is well what what type of fish
so we talked about oily and fatty fish but also you want to look at um contaminants like larger fish have things like pcbs and Mercury because they're eating smaller fish so it those things accumulate in their fat so like you don't want to eat swordfish for example it's just their the Mercury and swordfish is just through the roof right so it's really like the trade-off there isn't very good so again that's where
salmon comes into the picture because it's very low in mercury it's high in omega-3 smaller fish so sardines would be another one again uh very low in these contam cinat like Mercury and higher in Omega-3s and you can there's a lot of data out there that you can look up like USDA has all this like contamination Mercury um levels versus omega-3 so that stuff is easy for people to find I would say by and large the
easiest way to get a high omega-3 index and these Studies have been done randomized control trials people giving supplement supplement forms omega-3 um is definitely to supplement and fish oil supplements generally speaking if you're taking around 2 gram a day of aish oil supplement that is enough to raise someone from a 4% omega-3 index which is the low end to a 8% omega-3 index which
is the high end and that's relatively easy to do take two grams a day now you said can I just walk into the store and buy any supplement um well yeah of course you can do whatever you want but um let's talk about you know what to look for in omega-3 supplement right so you obviously want to make sure you're getting enough of the EPA and DHA those to important Omega-3s and you want to make sure you're not getting a high
contaminant level like Mercury pcbs but the other thing to keep in mind is you want a low oxidation level so omega-3 fatty acids are prone to oxidation just because they molecular structure it's a polyunsaturated fatty acid and so the way people uh companies you know are manufacturing this fish oil matters and um we live in it's 2024 we have access to so much information now it's great
because there's a lot lot of thirdparty testing sites out there that go and just randomly sample a variety of consumer available Omega-3 supplements and they they look for the concentration of EPA and DHA they look for mercury levels and PCB levels which you want to be low and they look for oxidation status so um some good thirdparty testing sites to look at I would say um consumer lab is
one that's really they're they go and just go to grocery stores and where people are generally going and buying their supplements and they just measure and test all this stuff and there there's some really affordable brands that have decent omega-3 levels DHA and EPA levels and low oxidation low contaminant levels and consumer lab you know test all those so that would be a good site to go to to find a good
omega-3 supplement another one is the international fish oil standard site ifos those are for the data nerds to be honest because there's like a lot more data there and if you're like into this stuff and you want to like really big because they just give you everything like all the data like you could imagine um that's a great site for people that are sort of nerd want to nerd out on that but for some people that're like I
just want to know my grocery store what do I get then consumer lab's a great option because uh it's just again it's going to be Brands you're familiar with and it's like they just it's like it's broken down in a way that like a child could even understand it's okay this is the one I want to buy and they even tell you they even give it ratings like this is this is a good one why like when you
said Japan and they you know sort of scor res ation at the top of the chart when it comes to Omega-3s just by default they're eating Seafood all the time but they're not eating the seafood that we think of as eating Seafood like we go to the store it's all a lot of it is sort of like Factory farmed it's and I don't imagine Japan's allowing that given how neurotic they seem about
everything else so is there a difference between wild and uh non- wild I guess or captive or factory farm whatever you want to call it f armed fish in terms of the nutrient density that we're pulling out of them yeah there's been there's been a a a few studies that have looked at that and and compared you know for example farmed salmon versus wild salmon and you know there is a difference I mean the
the wild salmon they're out they're in the ocean and they're eating the little you know fish and like you know Crustaceans and all the things that they're supposed to eat like that's what they eat right but um in the the farmed salmon I you know correct I I I'm pretty sure there's there's some there's some feeding of stuff that's like not even I mean we're talking like corn and stuff too um now
yeah if you were to look at the fish uh before in the factories before they inject it with aanin or that's the pink the they they look albino because they're lack because they don't eat all the right things so they're not naturally pink that come comes after um and I said inject but I'm not sure maybe they actually just give it a acanth and they eat it I forgot but they're they're they're giving it
exogenous a aanin so that it does have the pink color um so it's not like a natural process right so it looks like it's supposed to look so it looks like it's supposed I mean it is aaz anthon at the end of the day so that's at least good right it's not like like red number 40 but that would be terrifying but it's not like they're not eating the little you know you know creatures that
actually have this asanin in their bodies and that's that's that's typically how salmon get pink their pink color from from the from the foods they're eating so um the omega-3 content was also higher in the wild salmon so again to your question yes there is a difference between the farmed salmon and the wild salmon but you know sometimes when you're out at a restaurant like you're not going to get you're not going
to get the wild is it is it the end of the world in my opinion no like I said choose your battles I still think you still are getting Omega-3s you're still getting DHA and EPA and you know you're getting some ases anthon whether or not it's because I mean if you take an ases anthon supplement it's the same thing right you're getting it's it's a supplemental source of asdan and that's
kind of what the fish are getting so you know it's not it's not like it's terrible but I do think it's preferable if you are getting the wild salmon and you mentioned organic is there a difference between organic and inorganic I guess but inorganic in the sense of being nonorganic produce in the like for eating leafy greens why would we choose one over another and what difference does it make from a composition or
bioavailability point of view um I think the so so pesticides um are obviously something that are are used now in agriculture because we're you know these Farms are huge and we're growing mass quantities of foods and so they're spraying things that'll ward off insects so insec insecticides or pesticides as are known and also fungicides and other things to prevent fungus and anything
that's going to destroy the crop right and you know a lot of these types of pesticides are I would say they're obviously damaging to the insect but um to humans the question is well are they damaging to humans and you know there there were a lot especially things like rotown paraquat these were used um for a long time and those are those are chemicals that actually cause we we use them scientists use them I've
used it myself in the lab to induce Parkinson like symptoms in animals because it disrupts your mitochondria which are the they're little organel inside of almost all of your cells and that are producing energy super important and in Parkinson's disease the mitoch mitochondria and your neurons kind of become dysfunctional and you can do you can cause this by just giving
them this this pesticide paraquat or Rome and that will basically cause their dopamine producing neurons to die and because they can't make energy so they die and they get motor dysfunction very similar to Parkinson's and so I remember this is it's funny I remember the first time I I was learning about this in you know this was actually even before I was in graduate school but also in graduate
school I was like oh I'm putting this stuff you know to to give it to To a Mouse to study you know Parkinson's or to induce a Parkinson like human sort of model of Parkinson's and this was like put on our produce and I was like that was like really kind of upsetting to think about so um I think the point I'm getting at here is you know obviously like as more data comes out and we learn
and go oh we can't you know we have to stop using that but um there's been studies even on the newer types of pesticides that are used on produce you know there have been studies that have shown they're probably not good to have on a daily basis because of that Insidious damage that they're causing and I get you know people are probably thinking of like G glyphosate right Roundup is a big one as well so um if
you can eat organic I I I do think there's like some there's like The Dirty Dozen you know and the clean I forgot how many doesn't Europe like block most of this stuffff like why is it yeah I mean I don't know exactly which they glyphosate maybe they do they they do they do um ban more stuff I I don't know all the regulations differences and why those regulatory maybe you can have
someone on the podcast that can illuminate that but um I do know that when it comes to those pesticides that are used there are there are certain vegetables and fruits that are very thin skinned that absorb it even if you wash the vegetable off it's already been absorbed through the skin and so like let's talk about an avocado versus a strawberry right like like is it so important to eat organic for avocados
not really it's got a really thick skin so that isn't it's really protecting the fruit strawberries on the other hand have a very thin skin you know and so that that would be something that you want to choose organic I would say that yes organic would be the best choice if you can't always afford organic then choose okay bananas is that so important probably not avocados probably not
oranges probably not apples yes right thin skin and there's like again there's like lists out there that like will list the things that are like okay if you're going to not do organic here's the one here's the vegetables and fruits that are the safest to not opt I I love the I mean the dirty doesen list but it's actually more practical to remember the thickness of the skin is sort of like the barrier the membrane between
pesticides and you how do you wash your produce and like and I say this having seen I think last night on Instagram you know some uh guy putting baking soda and vinegar and like soaking it for 20 minutes and like is that how we wash produce like how do you wash produce to like get stuff off of it what do you do I just use water I just use water and wash it because I do buy organic as well
so you're thinking about pesticides you're like oh well I don't want to get Parkinson's diseas or cancer right it's causing damage but so my mentor Bruce Ames um he's you know now 96 years old um I don't know how many years ago it was it must have been back in the 80s he had done some experiments with um uh hematologist from his lab and they were looking at what happens if you don't get
enough folate so that's another one of those essential micronutrients that you have to get from your diet guess what leafy greens are one of the best sorts of full a so leafy greens are are just they're they're packed with certain micronutrients but they don't have a lot of protein right so um folate again we have to get from our diet and if we don't get enough folate it actually
causes damage to our DNA much more than eating a pesticide wood because folate is required to make new DNA it's required to make new DNA and so you know we're constantly making new cells in our body and if you don't have that folate the precursor to make one of the nucleotides of DNA isn't going to be there and so your body substitutes something else in there that's from RNA that's not supposed to be there and it
causes DNA damage and he had done these studies where it was like he took animals put them on a low folate diet similar to what some people in the United States get and then he took the other group of animals and he he irradiated them with ionizing radiation okay this is like yeah you're going to want to avoid this right and the folate deficiency was like ionizing radiation it did the exact same thing it caused
double strand breaks in DNA exactly like the ionizing radiation so not getting that important micronutrient from your leafy greens folate was like being getting ionizing radiation so again back to that theme that we started with thinking about what you need is so important and we're sitting here talking about pesticides oh we should avoid them yes but guess what's worse if you don't
eat the greens you're not going to get enough folate although nowadays Fage so important it's it's you know it's it's in every processed food they put the oxid form of it folic acid which we can get into um you know it's it's it's kind of one of those things where it's like oh it's it's it's a it's another form of of folate and um it is more more stable which is why it's used um in processed foods rather than
folate but uh it's it is not the exact same as folate so it's preferable if you're going to get the folate from your diet from leafy greens let's come back to sort of the framework for approaching this and so we've talked about micronutrients a little bit let's talk about macro so I mean so I'm sitting here talking about all these micronutrients and it it was like vegetables was a big thing we're talking
about right but we also hit on Omega-3s and that was fish protein right so fish is a source of protein protein is you know amino acids are something that we need to get from our diet every day and you know we much like we store glucose as glycogen in our liver in our muscles we store fat like triglycerides right adapost tissue we don't really store amino acids Although our muscle skeletal
muscle is kind of a reservoir for them and during periods of fasting or low protein intake we pull from our muscle to get amino acids because they're essential to survive and what is that mean that means you're pulling important protein from your muscle and that does cause muscle atrophy so you want to avoid that right and so in order to help avoid that all these you know regulatory committees had come up with let's let's
figure out how much protein people need to take in every single day to avoid those losses right you don't want to be pulling it from your muscle you want to replenish everything that that you're that you're losing every day and and so studies were done many many years ago and that number came up to be 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is what was the recommended daily allowance
for protein intake um fast forward decades you know you've got all this new science and new technology that's come out and new ways of measuring things and you know any scientist will tell you that your data is only as sensitive as you know the the tools that you're using okay and so um data from experts like Dr Stewart Phillips and others they started to you know look into how you measure protein losses and
amino acid losses and and and turns out that those studies that were done decades ago were using tools that were o they were basically underestimating the losses of amino acids so it turns out using new techniques that are more sensitive that in order to just prevent your body from like pulling from you know your SK your your skeletal muscle to get amino acids the minimum amount of protein you need
to take in is actually 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight Which is higher than the 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight right so um and that's just you know to the bare minimum like the minimum amount you need to prevent Lo like again to prevent your your body from pulling from muscle and um and they also did some studies looking at well what if you're physically active right you're you're
causing damage to your muscle you're using a lot of energy I mean lots of things going on um that number goes up to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram body weight and um this was a big eye opener for me a couple of years ago when I talked to to Dr Phillips and started looking and reading his research because I always thought people were getting enough protein I thought oh well people
are getting enough and turns out a lot of people are not getting enough protein because they are not getting that at least that 1.2 grams per kilogram you know body weight bare minimum and and so um that I think is you have to think about okay well where do I get my protein meat is all animal Meats probably one of the best sources because essential amino acids are very highly concentrated in poultry and Meat and
Fish um if you're a vegetarian or a vegan you just have to really work really hard and supplement with protein powders and stuff to kind of get that I mean acid composition up is is all sort of like uh animal protein the same like is I would imagine you need a a complete set of sort of amino acids for it to be the most bio available in your body I don't know what I'm talking about here
obviously uh but is there like a big difference between steak and chicken and sort of other sources of protein that we typically think of there are differences with respect to their their micronutrient profiles in in general like you know like steak has a lot more iron for example you know there's a lot of zinc in like shellfish like oysters so you know but with respect to just the essential amino acids you know like
getting them from those any of those sources like like fleshy sources you know meat poultry um fish is pretty good with respect to like protein you will find that they'll like per ounce of you know food that you're eating maybe there's like a little bit more more in like denser in meat than fish or something like that but um yeah there's there there are there are subtle differences between them but also just
in the whole micronutrient profile itself right so like some of them have more zinc some of them have more you know Iron some of them have more B12 so things like that also and then fish have the omega-3 much more than steak so there's generally speaking there's a big difference in there like micronutrient composition generally speaking but with respect to the essential amino acids
like if you're really trying to hit that 1.2 to 1.6 grams a day per per I mean 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight that's very important that's that's a lot it's a lot of protein it is it actually it's really a lot of protein especially for people that are physically active and you might be going well why why is that so important well like you know so if you are if you are constantly pulling amino acids from your
muscle it's like pulling from your retirement fun early right like because when when you so our our muscle ma Mass Peak is probably I would say anywhere between 20 to 30 years old is when we're like Peak muscle mass after 30 as you get into 40 you start going down and and then you know you get to 50 even more so you start to it gets harder that's why exercise is so important as you age so
important to maintain your your yeah I mean there's lots of reasons we can talk about aerobic exercise versus you know resistance training but resistance training is the other way to stimulate like skeletal muscle protein synthesis and increase muscle mass but also muscle strength both of those decline with age and you want to try to build up that muscle mass Reservoir earlier in life
kind of like you do what your retirement fund right like you want to build it up because you're going to be pulling from it no matter what even if you're working out later in life you're still going to be pulling from it because you just lose more muscle mass and strength as you age it's just part of the aging process and so the more the more you can kind of counter that with resistance training
with making sure you're getting enough protein then the better off you're going to be but you know it again it's like if if you didn't do it earlier in life it's never too late like that's something also to like keep in mind like don't give up like oh I'm already 50 it's too late for me um no because like you can you can get gains in muscle mass and really actually great gains in strength
particularly with resistance training uh protein intake is one easy thing like a lot of people like Elder like our parents like so you know not everyone's exercising right they're not doing resistance training and so get that protein intake becomes even more important at that that point and something also that you might find interesting Shane is that we're talking about Omega-3s so there's some work from
Chris mcclory um he's up he's up at um he's at uh he was at McMaster he's in uh he's in Canada gosh what university is he at now I forgot like slipped my mind but um he did training at McMaster and uh with Stu Phillips and he had basically done some research that have found Omega high dose Omega-3s could prevent disuse atrophy so like when people are older they're not using their
muscles a lot and when you're not using your muscles a lot and you're certainly not getting enough protein you start to atrophy even more right but if there was like if he gave them a high dose omega-3 so this was like four grams a day four to five grams a day it totally prevented disuse atrophy and this was in younger they did the study in younger adults and younger females but it was like 50% less and um
Chris Dr mccl has looked into a lot of other you know he's he's done some other studies and mechanism and looking into it and he thinks that what's happening is Omega-3s are sensitizing your skeletal muscle to amino acids in other words it's you're you're you're getting more amino acids into the M you're getting more bang for your buck so more amino acids uh are getting in when you
have the Omega-3s there because yeah Omega-3s are really important for the the skeletal muscle like membrane and stuff and so it might be easier just to get the nutrients in I want to like start using this in a in a practical way right like so if I um were to make a smoothie in the morning what is the best thing to put in my body at the start of the day after having slept which means I've been
fasting um what is like the the the most incredible smoothie you can think of that would just be full of health benefits for the day so it would have like omega-3 it would have protein powder it have like leafy like walk me through this what do you do you do this I do smoothie it does it doesn't have omega-3 but I'll walk you through my my my smoothie that I do I I probably about four to five days a week have have this
smoothie and um typically this smoothie is about I don't know four or so kale leaves and that's usually my green source that I use and so I'm getting the Magnesium I'm getting the vitamin K I'm getting the folate but I'm also getting something in there called lutein and zanthin which is these are carotenoids much like beta carotene or asanin like we were talking about it's another one
that accumulates in the eye rods and cones of the eye so it helps prevent macular degeneration but it accumulates in the brain as well and it's so interesting because there's been studies that have shown that that like giving older adults like supplementing with something like like 20 something like 20 migs which is what like three k leaves has of lutein I mean it's like really
equivalent to just getting it from the greens um it improves neural efficiency so so basically like your brain works better with less energy um there's been other studies in older adults where giving them Lutine and zanthin will improve crystallized intelligence so that's basically as you get older it's the ability to still kind of use all the information that you've learned throughout your life and like still use
it I don't know if that makes sense but um so anyways I know I'm going on a tangent here but it's it's something people don't think about there's other compounds in these in these greens that are not micronutrients they not essential vitamins and minerals and amino acids and fatty acids but they're like these phytochemicals and they're it's interesting because they're so beneficial for us and lutein zanthin is
another one another one of those they're carotenoids they're not essential but they're doing beneficial things and they're accumulating in the brain it's so interesting right and some and there's been randomized control trials showing that it improves again those those markers of cognition that I mentioned um so so that's the kale it also has fiber right fiber is great for your
gut and then um I also add an avocado and avocado also increases the bioavailability of those corot noids the lutein and zanthin by like up to sixfold anywhere between like 3 to sixfold so you're getting more of the lutein and zanthin you're basically making them more bioavailable by adding the avocado also it's a great source of mono unsaturated fat avocados are high in potassium something like 96% of the US
population doesn't get enough potassium and so that's another thing you're getting from avocados I I personally like it because it makes the the Smoothie creamy and then I add a ton of frozen blueberries um and blueberries are yes you're getting your vitamin C and you're getting some fermentable Fiber for the gut but they're also high in those phytochemicals so they have polyphenols in them and they have um
anthocyanins and these things are they're like superpowers for the brain so there's been so many studies that have been done randomized control trials either with freeze dried blueberry extract or actually just blueberries showing it improves cognition um yeah it improves mood so when I was a postdoc I studied um I did some studies in people we were looking at freeze-dried blueberry powder I was
looking at DNA damage in their blood cells so markers of those double stranded breaks I talked about like if you don't get enough folate it causes double stranded braks if you stand in ionizing radiation machine it causes double stranded breaks blueberries um people that are people that are eating terrible diets and that are you know overweight and obese have more double stranded breaks in their
their blood cells so that's something that I've uh measured you know like I was doing some studies on that during my postdoc work and um we were getting a population of people that were overweight and obese and then giving them this free dried BL blueberry extract and over the course of four eight weeks it lowered their DNA damage so again so it's like got anti-inflammatory antioxidant um you know aspects to it
personally it's like I I what I notice is like the mood enhancer it's like I get that blueberry and it's like whoa um but here's a really important thing I used to add bananas to my my my my smoothie years and years ago like 10 years ago or something and I lik the banana because it also it was like uh made it more creamy this is before I like started doing the Vado and you know
there's some it's not that bananas are bad for you but they have this enzyme in them called polyphenol oxidase po well as the name implies it breaks down polyphenols which is what you want from the blueberries to get the benefits in the brain and the benefits yeah exactly what your mouth a jaw drop yeah it's like so there was a very very recent study in 2023 that came out and this was
a controlled trial where people were given a smoothie with blueberries either with with and without the banana and then metabolites of polyphenols were measured in their their urine and blood and if they had the banana their polyphenol levels were just plummeted like they weren't getting them from the blueberries and this is I'll tell you what's enraging about it is anywhere you go you like if you want to buy a
smoothie when you're out and about everything has a has a banana in it and you know like I'm a parent and so I like you know I'm out about and I have my my kid with me and it's like I want to get them a smoothie and it has blueberries in it and I'm like but it also has a banana and I'm like but you know there's been studies on children as well and giving children blueberries improves
their their cognition so they they perform better on like tests cognitive tests and stuff and so you know it's not just good for adults it's like throughout the lifespan and so now I have to like tell them okay don't put the banana but like everywhere you go there's a banana W that's that's I'm going to give you my smoothie recipe after and you can grate it but I'm going to switch it the banana starting
tomorrow but okay so we have kale leaves avocado frozen blueberries and protein powder so um I'll do especially if I'm doing it like you said first thing in the morning when I'm and if sometimes I'll have my smoothie in the afternoon in which case like if I didn't work out and I've already gotten my protein like I won't put the protein powder but these days I'm mostly always putting them to
be honest I'm like doing something every day and so and I just it's hard to get the protein requirement for me so I usually do um some whey protein and then I also add a little bit of hydrolyzed collagen powder as well so uh there's there's some studies showing I mean if you're getting the protein you probably don't need the hydrolyzed collagen powder but there I personally there's studies showing that um randomized
control trials showing that it improves like skin elasticity and you know things that I'm also interested in addition uh with respect to skin I mean there's all sorts of studies also showing it helps with joint health and this and that I mean so um you know I don't know I I like adding that as well and then the other thing I add is I do a little bit of Moringa powder so
Moringa is it's a plant it's it's high in some micronutrients like it has things like zinc and iron and magnesium but it also has something in it that is called um moringen and it is a phytochemical that is very similar to sulfurane which is found in like broccoli broccoli Sprouts it's really high in broccoli sprouts and it activates genetic Pathways in our body the same ones that sulfurane activates
that have been shown to increase antioxidants in the brain like glutathione that have been shown to lower DNA damage in our cells all sorts of benefits but the other thing that it does and I've noticed this so I used to wear a continuous glucose monitor like for years and um it lowers it blunts the postprandial glucose rise from a smoothie when I put Moringa powder in it and I reached out to an expert Dr Jed
fahe who's done a lot of research on you know these compound compounds and I was like have you seen anything and he's like oh yeah this is being explored he like totally knew about it and um as you look into the literature you can start to find some studies on Moringa actually improving blood glucose levels and so I put that in my smity as well now that's a little spicy tasting I would say if
you're like in one of those moods where you don't want the like like not so great tasting smoothie you know you can skip the moringa or go go for a smaller amount but I do like a big heaping tablespoon of it oh and then I add some water yeah water to kind of mix it up that's pretty cool I'm GNA give you my smoothie you can give me a great on this and keep in mind I a parent uh
of two boys who devour food so we came up with this and I've never told anybody that the exact recipe before but here here's basically what it is and we call it the Tom Brady because they they wanted to call it the goat smoothie so we ended up calling it The Tom Brady so we this is what we call it at home it's got protein powder in it it's got ag1 It's got walnuts it's got blueberries yogurt almond milk but like
real almond milk no other additives or anything banana chia seeds and hemp seeds yeah so you're going for the the the the kind of Omega-3 that's in those plant sources like walnuts and chia seeds um is ala and um we were talking a lot about the EPA and DHA which are from the Marine sources ala I mean now walnuts are great there's like studies showing like if you eat a handful of walnuts a
day you're you know you have lower cancer risk and cardiovascular disease risk they're clearly good for you but um they're they're not the same as the EP and DHA so don't substitute I'll tell you you can so your body does convert ala from plant sources of omega 3 into EPA and DHA which is essentially what your the final products that you need are but everybody does it differently and the conversion efficiency is about
5% now women when they're making when they're high in estrogen that can go up really they can go up much higher and um I think that's because because during pregnancy and child development in utero the the DHA is so important that your body makes sure you're just turning all that ala into that that DHA because when you're pregnant your estrogen level go go it's like a 100 fold higher it's
like super high but um so if there are people that are relying on just plant sources of Omega-3 that is a mistake and if you do an omega-3 index test and there's you know Omega Quant is probably one of the best places to do that um then you'll figure you'll figure that out really quick that you're okay well yeah well this is great right so like what would we supplement here we we take out the
bananas and because they're counteracting the blueberries we'd add avocado that's a lot of fat in there what else would we like take out or add or or switch what would you say so you're you're doing the AG greens as your source of green uh I'm doing that as sort of like the base vitamin because they have a daily multivitamin and I just count that as their multivitamin okay but what did you add any greens in
there I didn't so that would be that would be something that I would like add some sneak some kale leaves in oh my God if they saw that they wouldn't no don't let them see or do they do they have to make it to be part of it so I put K leaves in in my sons um or even Roma lettuce you know that would be don't put chard in there so here's the other thing so there's really not a lot of foods
that can go into a smoothie that would degrade the polyphenols because they're high in that enzyme polyphenol oxidase but the ones that are are bananas and and beets and anything in that family so like chard I used to put chard in my smoothie like like Swiss chard you know like they're so it's so good and look these are great foods to eat like just don't put them in your smoothie with blueberries not with blueberries
exactly um so I I mean I used to put chart in my smoothie and and it was just like like this this like changed my world I was like this is unbelievable I can't you know thankfully I stopped doing the banana and my smoothie quite in fact I just kind of just got lazy and it was like okay kale I just need like a base of like greens you know what I mean like years ago so even though this study
just kind of came out last year I've I've been ahead of game on that I wish I I knew that they're going to blame me for their poor test results now they're going to be like like you know you sent us to school with blueberries and bananas dad like what were you think are they are they Physically Active cardiorespiratory Fitness is another thing that's like it correlates with academic performance so like the better
fit the child is like that they score better on a lot of academic tests as well so okay I want to get to fit in a sec I want to cover uh sort of grass-fed and then heat and cold exposure and then we we can dive into fitness grass-fed non-grass fed is there a difference I see this everywhere between grass-fed butter non-g grass-fed butter grass-fed beef non-g grass-fed beef is there a
difference from a a consumer point of view in terms of what I'm ingesting there there's slight differences there definitely um so we were just talking about the omega-3 profile so I would say one of the biggest differences is the omega-3 and then the Omega six profile in let's talk about meat like grass-fed you know cows that are grass-fed versus not and um so what I mean by that is
like they're getting that plant source of Omega that ala that that plant source of Omega-3 they're getting if they're they're eating like grass right they're getting it from from the plants that they're eating and they're also not getting as much of what would be a type of food that is higher in Omega 6 so this would be like if they're being fed corn for example corn you know oil is like processed kind of like pellets or
whatever you know um that that would be a so they would have if you're eating you know for example ground beef from a just conventional you know cow then you're going to have a lot more of the Omega 6 and less of the omega3 that's probably I never thought about this before but like you just said like we're not supposed to eat processed foods but then we're eating animals that are
eating processed those Foods is it like the end of the world I think it's more important again this goes back to my take on nutrition and how to and thinking about the framework of how to eat and first and foremost I think the most important thing is how do I get these important vitamins and minerals and fatty acids and amino acids like protein how do I get all those right um then okay I'm getting I'm getting an
idea of how I should be eating then it comes the next layer do I need to have organic or you know is a little bit of pesticides okay do I need to eat grass-fed or you know because at the end of the day food's expensive right yeah totally way more expensive now years exactly it's it's it's even worse now and so you know like you do kind of have to be practical as well so I do think it is better if you
can get if you can afford it if not don't worry about it if you if you if not like the most important thing is because like okay well what's the deal with the what if you're eating conventional meat and you're getting a little bit higher omega-6 well if you're supplementing with fish oil over day who cares you're getting that you're getting that the Omega getting the omega-3 is
what is most important it's and people are so focused on oh but the Omega 6 is so high when your body actually needs omega-6 so if you're getting it from like you know dietary sources versus like oils processed cooking oils and stuff and even that look I don't cook with vegetable oil I don't use vegetable oil at all however I'm going to be frank okay when you look at the data like there's
data out there where taking people that are eating like a high saturated fat diet so they're eating more like butter uh you know saturated fat like coconut oil and substituting that with vegetable oil they actually either there's no effect in their cardiovascular disease risk or they do better in other words you can look at this two ways you can say oh well if it's the same saturated fat versus vegetable oil then clearly
saturated Fat's not as bad as we thought it was that's true but the second way you can look at it is oh they substituted the saturated fat with the vegetable oil and it wasn't any worse so maybe the vegetable oil isn't killing us as bad as we thought and that's true and that's kind of like it's one of those things that in my head I'm like okay there's data showing and there's multiple studies showing this I mean
multiple multiple Meta Meta analys Anis in other words they look at many many different trials and analyze them and and this is the one thing I like to point out because I still don't use them because when I think about it from like my mechanistic brain point of view it's like well vegetable oil is very high in polyunsaturated fat like we talked about Omega-3s being a type of Po they're
prone to oxidation and when you add heat into the picture boom that's like tons of oxidation so perhaps in those studies where substituting saturated fat for vegetable were they putting vegetable oil on salads or were they frying it deep frying and you know like consuming oxidized lipids like we don't really know so I would say um it's still better to probably it's still better you're
still better off avoiding the vegetable oil particularly for cooking like in anything that's with heat you know and then I mean obviously processed foods have tons of vegetable oil but that have been cooked at a high heat when you go out to eat I mean like those restaurants are using vegetable oil it's cheaper they're probably reusing it which is even more oxidized right I mean these are things like you don't want to think
about you'll just never go out I me like you have to like enjoy life right not like you can't obsess over everything or like you become like a maniac but I think at the end of the day I just wanted to point out that maybe it's not as bad as like you think right because the data is showing what I already talked about um one thing we can all afford is vitamin D and we're all sort of lacking in that
[Music] [Music] During certain times of the year so you know winter early spring no UVB radiation happening especially in regions I mean I wouldn't say no I'm saying in regions where you're more Northern in Latitude something like above like the 37th parallel or something like that if you're looking on like a map so for example in Canada like you know you're not making vitamin D a
good you know four or five months out of the year it's very it's very challenging to make a lot of vitamin D from being out in the sun summertime you know different lots of V UVB radiation right same thing is like well you're not laying out in the sun to get a tan in December because tanning is like if you're tanning you're also making some vitamin D at this like that the same process right the the UVB
radiation is causing the same thing so um so you need to be in the Sun and you need to be at a certain time of year depending on where you live it all there's lots of things and um you mentioned sunscreen as well there's a lot of factors that are that are involved in you know the ability to produce vitamin D3 in the skin from the UVB radiation and that has to do with sunscreen so anything that blocks out
UVB radiation is going to block out the ability to make vitamin D um melanin the the pigmentation that is like a sunscreen it's natural sunscreen and people that some people have like in some regions of the world that are certainly more equatorial um that is also a natural sunscreen it blocks out UVB radiation which is why your body responds when you're in the sun your body Tans because it's like oh next time
I'm in the sun I need to protect myself it's a it's an adaptation right so um the other thing that regulates the production of vitamin D3 from the Sun is age so um the older you get the worse the the less I would say efficient your body is at making vitamin D3 from the Sun so for example a 70-year-old makes like four times less than their 20-year old former self and then um bioavailability of vitamin D3 is
important as well and that's regulated by body mass and weight so so so you make vitamin D3 in your skin but it gets released into your bloodstream and um then it's converted into another form that is actually not a vitamin it's a steroid hormone so vitamin D is actually much more important it's not just a vitamin it's actually a hormone that our body needs and um body so B so basically the more
body fat you have the less bioavailable vitamin D3 is and so you actually need more vitamin D3 the more body weight the more body fat that you have um so this hormone is is extremely important because it is regulating about 5% of the human genome the protein and Co coding Human Genome so it's a lot it's doing a lot of things and you can imagine so what it does there's actually a little
sequence inside of our our DNA in you know it's it's a little repeat sequence that vitamin D recognizes and it like this whole complex of vitamin D in a receptor goes down and binds that little sequence of DNA and it turns on a gene or it turns off a gene and it and it does it in a very coordinated Manner and when you don't have enough vitamin D that stuff goes wrong and and so lots of
things can can happen and um because of sunscreen because of our modern day Lifestyles we're inside technology we're on our computers less less farming less agricultural work out in the sun we're indoors majority of people are not getting enough vitamin D3 and so um something around 70% of the US population is insufficient in vitamin D3 so that that is defined as having blood levels of vitamin D less than 30
nanograms per milliliter and then a another percentage of the population is deficient so they'd be less than 20 nanograms per milliliter but we've been told like not to go outside we've been told to you know layer up the sunscreen we've been I mean are these things getting in the way of vitamin D are they helping us what how do we make sense of all this if you have you know fair skin
and you're going out in the sun a lot then you can increase your risk for DNA damage and you know skin cancer is one like for example Australia so you know fair skinned PE Australia is like like the the meel melanoma cancer is like through the roof in in Australia and melanoma is like the worst type of skin cancer to get so um you know there's a lot of fair skinn people living there
and Australia is very close to the equator you know there's there's definitely many months out of the Year where you're just lots and lots of VB radiation but um people that were sort of native to that region had darker um skin they had more melanin and so the solution to people that are more fair skinned living in Australia is actually sunscreen and a hat and um and a vitamin D3 supplement because you know like
these people that are fair skinned in Australia migrated from like a region like you know Britain right where it was not like that it's much further from the equator and so their fair skin was an adaptation to help them make more D3 from a little bit of sun right that they get during the the summer and um you know spring and stuff so um yeah the the the question is where do you find the
balance right like how much sun exposure is enough and do I need to supplement and do I have to wear sunscreen and I think that all depends on a variety of factors it isn't like a one-size fits-all it's like okay well where do you live do you live you know in Southern California like where I do do you live in Australia uh do you live in in Canada um where do you live like how
much exposure to the sun are you getting um you know so those are those are all factors to keep in mind and then just measuring vitamin D levels where am I at then then you can go okay well clearly I don't wear sunscreen I don't go out in the sun a lot because I'm indoor work I work inside a lot so you know even without the sunscreen I'm still not you know getting enough vitamin D3 so you
have to kind of measure something so is there a difference if I go out and buy a vitamin D3 supplement uh is there a difference between that and the Sun and then do I want to take that with anything I noticed I think athletic greens includes vitamin K with that is that for um is that for the bioavailability no it's not for the bioavailability let's let's let's address your questions because they're
really great questions um differences between sun exposure and supplemental form again um vitamin D3 supplemental form which is which is key because the vitamin D there there are there is a plant form of vitamin D that's made in like mushrooms for example it's called vitamin D2 and that's that is different than vitamin D3 and in fact there's been some preliminary work showing that it
may even inhibit some of the vitamin D3 and conversion into the steroid hormone um which is important so so the differences between vitamin D3 from the Sun versus supplemental yes there's differences so like you know let's let's say you're um you're like in like sub Sahara Africa where you're like so close to the equator and you just you know you can make vitamin D you know three from the Sun and you're out in the sun let's
say you're like a Bushman or something out there all the time um there's been studies that have measured the levels of you know people that are like Aboriginal to these equ equatorial regions like Bushman in subsaharan Africa and their natural vitamin D levels are something like anywhere between 80 to 100 n gr per Mill but they don't really go above that and the reason is because your body
senses like the vitamin D levels and when you're still being exposed to the Sun instead of converting it into like vitamin D3 it like converts it into this other metabolite so it's like it's like okay we're putting the the brakes on this we're not going to do anymore right if you're taking a supplement and you don't measure anything like you can let's say you're taking like an insane number like so um there's
there's upper limits that have been sort of um identified as the safe amount to supplement with vitamin D3 every day so like The Institute of medicine in the United States has set that as 4,000 IUS a day that doesn't mean you can't go above that that's just the the safe you know upper limit where you're not going to have any toxicity effects like that's safe and um but like let's say you're
taking like 100,000 IUS a day like way over 4,000 right I mean and you don't measure anything well I mean you're just taking it and Tak so so you're those natural mechanisms aren't going to kick in in the skin that like they do when the when you you're being exposed to a lot of U radiation and your your body's like oh I have enough vitamin D3 so I'm GNA you know stop so um you can over
supplement with vitamin D3 it is fat soluble and it can be toxic however it is it is not it's challenging to do like you would have to take something like 100,000 IU you know or something day for like a year you'd have to take so there's been studies done and like you can take 10,000 IUS a day 50 thou even 50,000 IUS a day and the biggest effect is um vitamin D3 can you can you can make your calcium more bioavailable so
we're talking about bioavailability of other minerals um calcium is much more bioavailable in the presence of vitamin D so you absorb about 40% more calcium from your diet if you have adequate levels of vitamin D and the hormones steroid hormone right so um one concern is well if I have a lot of vitamin D and I'm taking calcium then maybe I'm going to get hyper calcemia right too much
calcium in the bloodstream and that's the major concern there are studies that have shown it's in it's exceedingly high doses that you have to do for a long time to get that but um that is the concern with with taking too much vitamin D3 is that you're going to get too much calcium in your blood which can have acute toxicity effects but also long-term effects with calcification of
you know your arteries and your vascular system because calcium can form a precipitate really easy and so um you know that's that's the concern and you mentioned um your your athletic greens so they put vitamin K2 in there which is so I mentioned vitamin K1 which is found in leafy greens and it's inv involved in blood coagulation so clotting um it was when you take in your green you make
you're getting the vitamin K one it goes to the liver and it activates all those coagulation proteins blood for blood clotting when you get enough of that from the greens it it stays in circulation and it does exactly what vitamin K2 does which is activates proteins that are involved in shuttling calcium out of your vascular system and bringing it to your bones bringing it to your muscle where you want calcium to be
and not in your vascular system where it can form a precipitate and then a plaque right so there's been sort of this push in the I think in the in in not a push but like a awareness I guess is a better word awareness in um in the health sphere that you know if you're if you're going to be absorbing more calcium with having you know adequate vitamin D that you also want to make sure that you're
that calcium that you're absorbing is going where it's supposed to and that's where the K2 comes into hand but like I said K1 does the same thing especially when you're getting enough of it and it doesn't take much for blood coagulation so um but I want to mention one other thing because you did say by bio availability and it's related and it has to do with magnesium because magnesium
is a we're talking about it's a co-actor for enzymes like DNA repair I didn't talk about a really important one it's it's actually a co-actor for both enzymes that convert vitamin D3 into the circulating form of vitamin D that we go and we measure it's called 25 hydroxy vitamin D and then eventually into the active steroid hormone which is 125 hydroxy vitamin D but we'll just call it the the active steroid hormone
and so there's been studies showing that people that don't get enough magnesium even if they're getting enough vitamin D even if they're supplementing with it they won't convert it into the steroid hormone and So you you're not going to get the important effects that vitamin D3 the whole point of vitamin D3 is to get converted into the steroid hormone it's a hormone it's a hormone that we
need so if you're not getting that magnesium that that's a problem and it also comes down to a lot of um conflicting studies in the the scientific literature because I as I mentioned half of the US population doesn't get enough magnesium and so if you did you get a random sampling of the population and you say okay we're going to take this group and give them a vitamin D supplement and then we're
going to take this group and give them a placebo but you don't even consider their magnesium status you're going to just know from the get-go half of the people are not going to have enough and that will affect their ability to form the steroid hormone and so um it really plays a role in my opinion in this the conflicting data with with the vitamin D3 supplementation studies which is kind of all over the place um and that's a
completely different episode but um I just thought because you mentioned bioavailability and again if you're put yeah if you're putting like so something like athletic greens does have magnesium in it I think but also if you're doing greens right that's like a really good source of magnesium as well so you want to make sure you have your magnesium um covered especially for the Vitamin D as well because they work
together you need them both um I think so and did I address all the questions or was there another one yeah no this is great let's switch gears and talk about a framework for approaching U deliberate heat and possibly deliberate cold exposure deliberate heat exposure and when we say deliberate heat it's it's really you know you're you're going into a hot environment right so you're
you're going to do something like a hot sauna a steam room a hot bath something that is you know either either the ambient temperature of the room is elevated or the the water and your body is like you know submerged in the water right and um what is that doing well that is actually kicking on a physiological response that is in in many ways very similar to moderate intensity aerobic exercise
because when you are when you're exposed to this deliberate heat exposure when you're exposed to the ambient you know increases in temperature you're elevating your core body temperature which is what's happening with physical activity your heart rate increases your plasma flow increases um your stroke volume increases all these things that are happening during physical exercise are happening during
this dber heat exposure and so there's like there's like a a somewhat of a I would say mimicking effect of moderate intensity aerobic exercise and there's actually been studies that have compared that head-to-head so they've looked at being on a stationary cycle doing you know not not anything crazy but like 120 watts and then comparing that to sitting in a sauna for 20 minutes doing each of
those for 20 minutes and they were comparable in terms of heart rate elevation during the physical activity or during the heat exposure um the changes in blood pressure during the activity and then the improvements after so blood pressure improved after the stationary cycling blood pressure improved after the deliberate heat exposure heart rate resting heart rate improved after the stationary cycling
and resting heart rate improved after the deliberate heat exposure so in other words um there's there's comparable effects with respect to uh you know cardiovascular adaptations that are occurring during deliberate heat exposure and um so that's that's one sort of I I think important framework to think about is there is a mimicking effect and why is that important well certainly it's important for people that
are disabled people that can't go for a run or a jog or even get on a bike right and and so um it's really important for that population of people but it's also important for the population I think of people that won't get on a bike or go for a run or they would rather just feel like they're sitting in a spa and um and at the very least or maybe people that are just so ad adverse there are people
are so adverse to cardiovascular exercise that if you can just get them into a sauna and we can talk about parameters in a minute but like if you can get them into something that's sort of at least mimicking the moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise and they're getting those those adaptations those cardiovascular adaptations that they would get with at least a little
mild to moderate intensity exercise that's going to be beneficial in in the long run as well and then it's also beneficial for people that are Physically Active you M well why is that um and so there so being Physically Active like being aerobically active doing aerobic exercise one of the the B best benefits is it improves what's called cardiorespiratory Fitness and um and that's probably one of the I would
say one of the best biomarkers of longevity like like concrete things that you can measure it's measured by by measuring something called V2 Max it's the maximum amount of oxygen you can take in during maximal exercise and cardiovas vular exercise improves that particularly if you're doing a high-intensity um exercise training things that are like high-intensity interval training for example is one of
the best ways to improve it especially if you're doing longer intervals of like at least a minute but what's interesting is that there's been data showing that people so there's been two types of studies observational data looking at people that just routinely exercise or people that routinely exercise and do the sauna and then they they measured these you know there there was
measurements of cardiorespiratory Fitness and it was pretty clear that people that routinely exercised and routinely did the sauna had a better Carter respiratory Fitness than people that only routinely exercise in other words there was a there was a benefit to do sauna on top of the exercise right and then there's been intervention studies where it's like okay we're going to take people give them an exercise
workout uh I think it was the stationary bike and then right after that exercise workout they're either going to just do passive recovery or they're going to go into a sauna and recover for 15 minutes and um there was I forgot how many weeks it was something like on the order of four weeks or something like that um they measured cardiorespiratory Fitness and a variety of other biomarkers like
lipids like LDL total cholesterol blood pressure things like that and while there was improvements obviously with exercise the ones that did exercise plus the sauna had an even greater Improvement in their cardiorespiratory Fitness so their V2 Max was improved even more than exercise alone they also had greater improvements in blood pressure and greater improvements in
their lipid numbers and things like that so there was every reason to add uh deliberate heat exposure on top of exercise as well I want to pause here for a second for two reasons one you're the reason I have a sauna I think I first came across your work and you had this like 70 page uh website on the benefits of a sauna and I remember like skimming the first like three pages of it going I really need a sauna
and so you're the reason I have a sauna but when we say doing the sauna like what does that mean in terms of temperature in terms of duration is a hot tub the same as the sauna talk to me about that so a lot of the studies that have been done on sauna have come out of Finland where they're using Finnish saunas which are generally speaking it it would be what I would call like it's it's a regular sauna where you have like
an electric heater with some rocks that are hot um in in Finland they often use water and they pour it on the hot rocks and so there's a humidity aspect there any anywhere between 10 to 20% humidity so a lot of the observational studies and intervention studies showing like I just mentioned one about BO2 Max improvements blood pressure improvements um they're they're done in Finland and a
lot of those parameters used generally speaking are um you know regular saunas of about 175 Dees fahr and 10 to 20% humidity the average time spent in the sauna is about 20 minutes for the for the benefits to really be I would say that robust and and then that there's frequency right so like how often do you do it and so there have been a variety of studies that have looked at all cause
mortality so die so so you know dying early from all causes that are non accidental and then looking at cardiovascular related mortality mortality like dying from a heart attack for example um and people that are more more frequently using the sauna it's a dose dependent effect so people that use the sauna for example two to four sorry two to three times a week have a 24% lower all cause mortality compared to
people that only use it one time a week but people that use it four to seven times a week have a 40% lower all cause mortality compared to people that only use it one time a week so in other words it seems like the minimal effective dose to get the most robust effect would be four times a week and the same goes for other parameters so cardiovas dying from you know cardiovascular related
mortality it's 50% lower PE in people that use the sauna four to seven times a week compared to one time a week whereas if you're only doing it two to three times a week it's something like 27% lower so frequency matters as well and when I said duration in the sauna it's really important so those studies were also done looking at okay let's say people are only staying in the sauna for
11 minutes versus like greater than 19 minutes so like 20 minutes right um they didn't have that robust 50% reduction in all sorry in cardiovascular related mortality if they only stayed in for 11 minutes it was much less it was a little bit like it was improved but it was not 50% so the the temperature and the duration and the frequency those are three parameters that are important with
respect to to using you know a regular hot sauna and when I say I the reason I say regular hot sauna is because another type of sauna that's very popular are infrared saunas and infrared saunas do not get as hot so they're not warming the ambient air around you they're working through another mechanism and they're sort of like moving molecules inside your body around and and sort of heating you up in a different way and
you do sweat a lot and you do get your you can get your core body temperature elevated particularly if you stay in quite a long time but um you do have to to keep in mind that you can't take those parameters and go I'm going to stay in 145 degree infrared sauna for only 20 minutes because that's what those finished Studies have shown because they're completely different in
respect to um uh you know the the the ways that they're working and so um there have been studies that have compared for example like a head-to-head comparison of like a regular hot sauna versus an infrared sauna and and looking at things like blood pressure improvements and if if you're just staying in for 20 minutes like the same amount of time in each you're not going to get those blood pressure improvements
from an infrared sauna which makes sense it's not as hot right you're not it takes longer to elevate that cor body to get your heart rate elevated and anyone that's done like I've done a lot of infrared sauna and I've done a lot of regular hot sauna and you know I know and also wearing a heart rate monitor right you can wear like your Fitbit or your whoop or whatever in into the sauna
and you'll you'll know when your heart rate starts to get elevated and it's not going to be after 20 minutes in an infrared Zona now um so that's important to keep to keep in mind that's you know you just have to kind of increase the duration in there for me I have to stay in like 45 like I'd say 60 Minutes is more like the duration that I would have to stay in to start to get more elevations in my heart rate um again
that's that mimicking of the Moder intensity exercise uh but there's also biomarkers that have been measured so for example um we haven't gone gone into this yet but heat Chuck proteins these are one of the adaptations that happen when your body is forced um to increase its core body temperature whether that's through physical activity which is making you hot making you sweat or if it's
deliberate heat exposure and Studies have been done looking at people that go into a relatively hot sauna so this would be 163 degree Fahrenheit sauna if they stay in for 30 minutes they can raise their heat truck proteins about 50% over their Baseline levels and heat shock proteins um have a lot of beneficial effects so they they're involved with preventing proteins from aggregating and forming plaques uh in
the brain in the vascular system they also are very important for preventing muscle atrophy and there have now been studies that have been done showing that um just even locally heating um a person's like leg let's say they're you know so the studies that have been done have been like they're called immobilization studies where they're sort of mimicking an injury or an event like let's say you go and like an older
person goes into the hospital they have the flu whatever they're they're basically immobilized for a period of weeks and so they're not using their muscles and their muscles were atrophying at a rapid rate right well um Studies have been done where if you if you apply even just local heat that you can cut that disuse atrophy by as much as 40% and and animal Studies have looked
at um mechanistically they've repeated this and they've shown that it has large it's it's due to the increase in heat Shu proteins so heat Tru proteins are a good biomarker for heat stress so is increased heart rate we talked about like you're getting up to 110 120 you can get up to 120 beads per minute um sitting in the hot sauna and that's really an indication that your core body
temperature is being elevated your your body is doing that work so um you asked about hot baths and there have been studies looking at hot baths and heat shog proteins and you can elevate your heat shog proteins um by by being submerged from the shoulders down for about 20 minutes in about 104 degree Fahrenheit water which is a standard hot tub level so U hot tub heat level is what I would should say so um I do think
there are comparable effects with respect to the modality of heat exposure whether we're talking about a hot sauna or a hot bath perhaps an infrared sauna again the duration the parameters will change the parameters will change but I do think that you can find comparable effects there are personal preferences at play like I I like both hot tub and hot sauna I find that I cheat more with
a hot tub like I'm like more prone to put my arms out when I get really hot when I'm in the sauna like there's nowhere to go right like like if I if I'm getting hot then I have to get out and then I'm like oh I'm giving up like mentally I'm like no I'm not going to give up but if I'm in the hot tub I don't feel like I'm giving up when I'm just like getting my arms out because you know so there's reasons this is my
personal sort of anecdote but there's reasons why I like to I I like to do both but I really like to do the sauna because I feel like I'm so much less likely to cheat with respected like making sure I don't put any limbs out or anything like that um as well so um yeah I mean and then of course there's there's many there's many benefits to using the heat exposure um we talked
about the cardiovascular benefits there's an immune benefit too like your IM system is yeah so there was um there have been some observational data studies as well looking at like pneumonia risk it's I think it was something like 40% lower in people that use the sauna four to seven times a week and there have been a lot of really early studies on um again these are coming out of Finland where there's
humidity so you know there's steam involved as well and um you know you're you're you're working your cardiovascular system I mean the lungs are affected and I don't know all the the mechanisms and I don't know they've all been worked out but there is some sort of benefit on the lugs and also just the immune system as well it seems like immune changes happen as well and it's funny I do get into the sauna when
I'm feeling a little under the weather or even if I am sick it because I find it's easier than getting on my pelaton I I get in there and I'll do the Steam and I feel so much better it's like uh there's my my grandmother or grandfather used to tell me like sweat it out and there's almost like something true to that when you are feeling sick well absolutely so when you are sick you get
a fever and the fever response your your core body temperature is elevated and heat chock proteins are activated and heat chock proteins do play a role in what is called the in in the innate immune response so that's the immune response that you have when you've never seen a virus or bacterial pathogen before it's that like it's not the antibody response it's that like okay let's fire away and get so heat chock
proteins do play a role in that and um when you are getting in the sauna when you're doing some form of deliberate heat exposure you are elevating your core body temperature and so the fever response is a very important part of um our our our immunes our immunes way our immune systems way of um dealing with the pathogen right it's important like we get a fever for a reason and so um
there there's a lot of similarity there right between the deliberate heat exposure and the um the fever response and it's interesting because um the reason I actually got into the sauna way back in like 2009 had nothing to do with cardiovascular effects or you know even the effects on on muscle mass but um it was the effects on my mood and that was you know I was very stressed out in
graduate school and this was like 2009 and I was using the sauna every morning before I would go into the lab and do my experiments that would often fail it was very stressful and um I started to notice quite quickly that I was able to handle that stress a lot better I was just I was like I wasn't getting so depressed after and so like down and anxious and um and that's when I was like something is going on here like it
was very noticeable for me and so then I started to look into the literature and come up with my own sort of theories which um I connecting the dots where I I actually did publish on this back in 2022 it's in my huge review article on the sauna it's called how sauna or sauna use can increase health span and I think it has to do with when you get into the sauna again you're mimicking a lot of
the same affects that cardiovascular exercise and so you're you're releasing a lot of endorphins as well those are the feel-good opioids that we release in our brain um but what's really interesting is that also um the opposite of endorphin is called dorphin so it's also an an opioid that we release in our body and um it's it's that it's that opioid that's involved in like the
discomfort feeling so like when you're working out when you're getting hot you're like you're feeling uncomfortable your body is making dinor and dorphin is um part of what it does is it cools down your body so it's playing a role in it's like okay you're you're getting you're elevating your core body temperature and so the Adaptive response is okay we need to cool down somewhat dorphin plays a role
in that but it also is what's responsible for that uncomfortable feeling when you're like oh I'm so hot I want to get out um and what was super interesting um that I sort of dove into at the time was that when you release dorphin you um you have response a feedback loop in your brain where dorphin causes your body to make more receptors to the feel-good Endorphin and it sensitizes those those receptors and
it makes sense if you think about it right when your body is not feeling good and you're getting that uncomfortable feeling it wants to make sure that it's going to counter that with feeling good and so um you you start to like the next time you make endorphins from a hug from your child or a joke you laugh at whatever you're going to feel even better because you're going to be more
sensitive to those to those endorphins from those it's called mu opioid receptors and that's what you make when you increase endorphin anyways that was a sort of you know I would say rabbit hole I went down many many years ago but now there's lots more research coming out so work from Char Dr Charles Rison and now um his prote Dr Ashley Mason who I've been a collaborator with and Tiny Foundation has funded a lot of her
research um that's being done and she is using infrared saunas it's it's it's a it's it's a type of sauna that's like a it's like a bed and it's a chamber with the head out and so your whole body is in it and um those the the research that's done in her lab and that was previously done in her Mentor Dr Charles Ron's lab is they are elevating your core body temperature to about 101.3
degrees Fahrenheit so you're getting a fever they're inducing a feverish response now many people have to be into in this sauna and it it's an infrared it gets up to about 145 is or something like that and they're in there for like 60 Minutes any 50 minutes to 60 minutes and they're getting they're getting a feverish response so it's not it's a it's a very intense procedure um and the
what the fir what Chuck Rison showed in the first study was that they could just do this one treatment and it was actually a different type of infrared SAA but I won't get into that um and but they induced this feverous response 101.3 Fahrenheit just one time in people with like major depressive disorder and um they or they did a sham control where they made them feel like they were
getting hot but it like wasn't hot enough it wasn't inducing that fever response so they were it's called like a sham control or it's like they're getting the placebo effect because they think they're getting the treatment and the people that got the active treatment had an anti-depressant effect that lasted like six weeks after and it was like enormous and crazy um placebo group didn't get it at all and so now Ashley
Mason has has kind of carried the torch on and she's doing these these studies um and she's very very promising data fingers crossed I know it's like in I I think it's in submission right now for peer review but she's done like four sessions in some cases some people did eight sessions of it and it's just amazing the effects that it's having on people with respect to the anti-depressant effect it's amazing what
our body can do to heal itself when you know we're not sort of always injecting it with stuff too there's all these other ways to go about healing it it's almost like it knows what it's doing sometimes it does I agree with I mean it's it's it's so exciting to potentially have a nonpharmacological treatment for ression because you know and I've I've shared a lot of studies on
like Twitter and talked about like there's now it's undeniable that doing aerobic exercise like they've compared running to classical anti-depressants like SSRI so serotonin re um retic Inhibitors right um and it's the the in terms of the anti-depressant effects it's like the same only the running has all the other benefits right uh but like some people point out that like there people people that are really severely
depressed that like just can't even get out of bed like they're not going to go for a run and it's true there are people that will not get out of bed but will they get into a sauna I mean it's it's a lot easier and so it really opens up doors that are just it's just so exciting super promising as we age too for the Aging population a lot of people who don't want to exercise when they get
a lot older or they you know they a and pains and maybe it's a low intensity way to do that I can say for myself drink Co was probably the you know one of the most stressful periods of my life and the sauna like you know I think it saved my life a lot you know what I mean like it I was using the sauna five six times a week and it was just sort of like a it was mentally grounding it was something
I look forward to it was a great ritual but it sort of kept me out of trouble for some reason and I could never explain it and I'm an N of one and you know I'm not super scientific and all that but I was like this is working this is keeping me like happy and going and motivated and I got to keep doing more of this because uh yeah it was really crazy totally I was the same I mean the
same way for me during during that period I was doing this on like six I was doing it like every day I mean it was like you know and and again I but I had known I was like this does affect my mood and again it it comes down to like probably a lot of things we don't really know is it immune related the opioid system everything like all like all combined like there's there's a lot to
un I didn't care why it work I knew it was working I'm like I don't care if this is a seeo like this is great I'm glad it it's not you know I still religiously use the SAA uh all the time but people that don't don't can't afford a sauna you know it's not like so like in Finland it's it's ubiquitous everyone I mean it's like everyone has it and there's public saunas that are free and um you know we do have saas and gyms
here but like it is nice to know and I do think that if you can most people do at least have a bathtub and I think if you get one of those like little pool like temperature gauges like where you can measure the temperature and you get your your bath up to 104 and make sure you maintain it at that temperature you might have to keep turning on the faucet for 20 minutes and stay stay in the water like
that is something that can also be done and it is a powerful form of deliberate heat exposure as well and it's nice to keep that in mind I love that there's a son out of my gym the problem with what we've all talked about is like when you're sick it's good to go in the saunas I've noticed a lot of people when they're they probably shouldn't be out of their house they like to sauna at the
public sauna and I'm just like oh my God I leave when that happens but I do see a lot of people using that I want to talk about exercise uh maybe we'll do that in part two because I don't think we're going to do it justice here in the next 10 minutes but maybe we can end with sort of um the top three uh interventions you can think of from a diet perspective and then the top three interventions you can think of
from a behavioral perspective that would have the biggest Bang on people's lives diet wise like the top three things that people can think about would be to make sure they're getting enough of their Marine source of Omega-3 so supplementing with two grams of a pretty decent quality fish brand fish oil brand per day and that's so it's like low hanging fruit and then I would say vitamin D3 most people uh 4,000 I use as
a pretty safe bet and and you're you know I think that at the very least doing 4,000 IUS A Day vitamin D3 as you mentioned it's like the cheapest supplement it's something like a penny a pill it's like the most affordable thing um you know to do and then um making sure you're eating your greens and getting your protein so like the mag thinking about the magnesium and then
the the 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight a day are are are like the biggest bang for your buck I think um and then and then with respect to behavioral um just exercise and particularly doing a good amount of high-intensity exercise and we didn't get so much into it but it really is one of the most important things that you can do and even just like I mean there's studies showing that people just doing
one to three minutes of like getting their heart rate up to 80% max heart rate for like one to one to three minutes you know three times a week is associated with like a 50% reduction in all cause mortality and cancer related mortality so it's easy to do like you can do do that right you can just get up and do 3 minutes you know like it's not it's not that challenging um so getting
that that high intensity exercise also I mean resistance training and muscle mass super important like you need to be you need to be building that muscle mass and maintaining it because Frailty um you know you get to a point when you start to get older and all of a sudden you have an event where you're you got influenza whatever and then you start to you're not working out you lose so much muscle and that you get a couple
of those stacked on over a couple of years and then all of a sudden you can't walk your Mobility goes down and then it's just the curve just drops right so um resistance training is extremely important and if you're doing those two things you're probably going to be you know maintaining a healthy body weight because at the end of the day calories in calories out does matter right so if
you're doing the exercise and the resistance training um and you're kind of focusing on like getting the the proper micronutrients from your veggies and protein intake you're probably not going to be eating all the the junk but then on top on the last thing I would say um behavioral wise I would I would add I would add sauna in or deliberate heat exposure I think I think that's huge for um a lot of reasons you know
for the cardiovascular reasons there's there's mental health effects as we talked about there's also other brain effects um dementia risk is lower as well and then muscle atrophy you can do the deliberate heat exposure to help prevent muscle atrophy as well so I think those are the three three behavioral changes and by the way exercise can forgive a lot of sins including lack of sleep so that's why I
start with that and and and I don't make the Sleep the most important I actually think it's exercise so we're gonna have to have you on for part two because I really want to dive into both resistance training and cardiovascular exercise with you but this has been an amazing conversation well I look forward to around to Shane and thank you for all the great questions it's been a lot of fun