# Anti-Aging Expert: Stop Touching Receipts Immediately! The Fast Way To Shrink Visceral Fat!

- Channel: [The Diary Of A CEO](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGq-a57w-aPwyi3pW7XLiHw)
- Published: 2026-04-01
- Source video: [Watch on YouTube](https://youtube.com/watch?v=PyhmvAL-iYw)
- Read on ReadTube: https://www.read.tube/p/videos/PyhmvAL-iYw
- Summary language: Simplified Chinese
- Article language: English

## Summary

**远离收据和黑塑料**

罗达·帕特里克在访谈中指出，真正威胁健康和寿命的核心问题之一是内脏脂肪，它会加剧胰岛素抵抗、炎症、疲劳、脑雾，并显著提高早亡、癌症和代谢疾病风险。她解释说，睡眠不足、久坐、压力、过量饮食、酒精以及塑料中的内分泌干扰化学物质都会促进内脏脂肪和激素紊乱，而有氧高强度运动、间歇性禁食、优质睡眠、补充鱼油、维生素D、复合维生素、肌酸、镁和某些植物化合物则有助于把身体维持在接近“峰值状态”的更健康区间。她还特别提醒要减少黑色塑料、热食外卖盒、罐头、收据和非不粘锅具的接触，因为这些都可能带来双酚A、邻苯二甲酸盐和“永久化学物质”等暴露。

罗达·帕特里克的核心观点是：真正拖累健康和衰老速度的，往往不是体重本身，而是内脏脂肪、胰岛素抵抗、睡眠不足、久坐、压力和环境内分泌干扰物。内脏脂肪会引发炎症、提高早死、癌症、脂肪肝和代谢综合征风险，并且它可能在“看起来很瘦”的人身上同样严重。她强调，腰围、体脂扫描和代谢指标比体重秤更能反映风险。

## Article

### Visceral Fat, Toxins, and Household Exposures

We are being bombarded with disrupting chemicals. A lot of them are in art products.

> “Okay, let's go to my kitchen. Come with me. So, this is my fridge.”

> “So, the first thing I notice is this, cuz that's like the worst.”

> “Can I get a bin bag?”

> “This is made from recycled electronics.”

> “What about this?”

> “This is a problem also.”

> “And this?”

> “Ding, ding, ding. This is great.”

> “I'm going to do utensils next.”

> “Heating it up. The plastic is getting into your food.”

> “What about a receipt?”

> “That's bad. that's covered with BPA and study in adolescent boys showed that it was associated with a 50% reduction in testosterone. And then this is one that people often miss.”

The biomedical scientist and anti-aging doctor Rhonda Patrick is back. This time she is talking about health optimization, maintaining peak performance, and the environmental toxins disrupting your body.

> “Dr. Rhonda Patrick, let's talk about something that I've never heard of before. Peak span. What the hell is peak span?”

So it's essentially being within 90% of your peak function. For example, muscle mass and bone density peak around 25 years old and then they steadily start to decline.

> “You're joking.”

And the same goes for cognitive function.

> “So I'm on the way down.”

> “Yeah. And I'm definitely on the way down.”

But we can do things in our life to help maintain that peak span. Like if you exercise 5 hours a week, do some high-intensity interval training in there, and you can reverse heart aging by 20 years. And then sleep is very, very important for preventing your immune system from aging rapidly. And then another thing that you can do that's really important for brain aging is this is associated with a rapid decrease in Alzheimer's disease risk. But what I really want to talk about is intermittent fasting, supplements, and being sedentary.

> “So I want to talk about all of that but we've got to talk about this in my hands at the moment.”

> “So if you have this it's going to double your risk of early mortality.”

> “Double your risk.”

> “Double.”

> “Okay. So talk me through this. I want as much detail as possible. This is super interesting to me.”

My team gave me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. And some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So I have a favor to ask all of you. Please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here? We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So, if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. That is the only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the Dio, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick, I am fascinated by so many of the things that you talked about, and they're front of mind for me at the moment because I'm a 33-year-old man and I know from doing this podcast and looking at graphs like this one, which we'll talk about today, which I don't think most people have ever seen in their lives, that this is the age where things might start changing direction from here on over the next decade. And there are things I can do to set myself up now if I listen to your advice for the remaining decades of my life to be remarkably different. I'm playing with this in my hands at the moment. For anyone that can't see, you should probably look at the screen right now. It's a yellow blob of squidgy, slightly disgusting material. What is this and why does this matter?

> “So, this represents visceral fat.”

### What Visceral Fat Is and Why It Matters

It's something that most people haven't heard of. Many people have heard of fat. They know fat is bad, but they don't realize there are different kinds of fat.

> There is visceral fat. And this is the kind of fat that you can't really pinch at adipose tissue kind of fat, right? I mean, if you opened up your body, you could pinch it because it's deep, deep within your body. It's often referred to as belly fat.

It's surrounding your organs like your liver, your kidney, your intestines. This is a very deep belly fat, and it's very different from subcutaneous fat. You can actually be lean but have a high amount of visceral fat. We call these metabolically unhealthy people.

So visceral fat, you mentioned you're 33. The average 33-year-old male has how much visceral fat?

> According to the data, it says roughly 1.2 pounds at the age of 30. And then for a woman, .5 lb of visceral fat at the age of 30. At 40, it's 1.7 lb for a man and .7 for a woman. At 50, 2.2 lb for a man, 1 lb for a woman. And at 60, 2.7 lb of visceral fat and 1.54 lb for a woman, which is the highest risk for metabolic syndromes at that age.

But I mean, all of them are pretty scary.

> It is. And as you notice, the trend is as you get older, you have a higher risk of having more of it. 70% of women over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat. 50% of men over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat.

This visceral fat, for one, it's going to double your risk of early mortality. Full stop. That's, you know, it's going to double your risk. Double your risk. Double double.

Visceral fat is, as I mentioned, different from the other kind of fat, the subcutaneous kind of fat, the adipose tissue kind of fat, in several ways. One is that it is metabolically active. It is secreting inflammatory cytokines. These are, you know, molecules that are signaling to the immune system, but they're also involved with damaging our cells. And for this reason, people with a high amount of visceral fat are 44% more likely to get metastatic cancer. That's cancer that's going to metastasize. Very dangerous types of cancer.

They're also more likely, you mentioned metabolic syndrome. This is a big, big thing with visceral fat. This type of fat is constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids. It's constantly doing it.

> What's triglycerides?

Triglycerides are how your body is able to store fatty acids and fat and use them for later energy, right? So they're constantly breaking them down and using them. They're using these fatty acids. But typically what happens in your body when you eat a meal, you have your glucose levels go up, right? Your blood sugar elevates, your glucose levels go up, and that signals to the pancreas in your body to make insulin. Insulin is this hormone that plays a role in many things. One of them is to tell different parts of the body to take glucose up, like your liver, your muscle, your adipose tissue.

Well, the problem is this visceral fat is constantly making those free fatty acids. And so those fatty acids, it doesn't respond, this—it's not really an organ, but this type of fat doesn't respond to insulin. So whereas the subcutaneous fat will stop breaking down fat and using fat as energy, it says, "Okay, look, I have energy here. I got to do something with this energy. Let me store it for later use." Right? Well, that doesn't happen with visceral fat. What happens is it just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going.

What happens is when your visceral fat is metabolically active like that, it is basically making it where insulin can't work its job. And so what happens is that glucose can't go into your liver. It stays in your blood system.

> And you really want it to be stored in your liver, right?

You want it to be stored in your liver as glycogen to be used as energy when you're fasting or when you're physically active or whenever you need it, right? Also in your muscle. Same thing, stored as glycogen or stored in your adipose tissue.

And so none of that happens because insulin isn't able to basically act on your organs. There's no signal. So nobody's getting the phone call, hey, time to take the glucose up. It's not happening, right? So the glucose sits around. So what happens is your body freaks out because it's not good to have glucose sitting around in your bloodstream for a while. It causes a lot of damage, right?

> Mhm.

And so what happens is your body makes even more insulin to try to overcompensate. Your body goes, "Oh, maybe that wasn't enough insulin because, you know, the glucose isn't coming in to the organs like the liver like it's supposed to. So let me put some more out."

> And for anyone that doesn't know, insulin is kind of like the taxi driver that goes and picks up the glucose and takes it home.

Exactly. It's taking it home. It's taking it back to the liver. And so what happens when you make more insulin, you're overcompensating in such a way that now glucose really does get taken up into these other organs like the liver. And so much so that it causes your blood glucose levels to go down and you're crashing. And all of a sudden, this is responsible for that. You know, people that eat a meal and they're kind of insulin resistant, they eat a meal and then all of a sudden they're crashing an hour later. We're like, why am I why do I have no energy? Why am I hungry? Right? Because when you're after you crash, your blood glucose levels go down. That's what I mean by crashing. Really far down. Not normal levels, but like below that.

And so then your body tries to overcompensate by going, "Oh, I'm hungry. I need to eat." And so you start to have these cravings for energy-dense foods. And that's part of this cycle of the beginnings of insulin resistance.

And so when I'm talking about here with visceral fat, it causes insulin resistance. And that's essentially the take-home here: by constantly metabolizing fatty acids, it's stopping that taxi car from going and getting the glucose. It's not happening. It's not responding. You're not picking up the driver, right? And so you become insulin resistant. And that has a lot of problems.

One, it's going to affect your immediate energy levels. It's going to affect the way you're feeling. And two, it's going to make you more likely to become type 2 diabetic because eventually your body won't be able to produce enough insulin to bring the glucose in. And so then you become type 2 diabetic. So that is a big consequence of having this visceral fat in addition to those inflammatory molecules that are being generated from this fat. It's just so metabolically active. And that inflammation that you're generating not only does things like raise your cancer

### Health Risks of Visceral Fat

risk by 44%. It also makes you tired. It gives you brain fog, lethargy. When your immune system is being activated by this inflammation, you're taking energy away from your brain. It costs a lot of energy to activate your immune system. So that energy is now going to the wrong place. It's not going to your brain.

> So, you can feel you won't feel cognitively as sharp and

> absolutely won't. Just think about when you have an infection. Your immune system is very active. You're fighting off a pathogen, right? Do you feel like you're tired or do you feel like you're cognitively at your peak?

> Uh yeah, I'm like I'm out of action for several days usually,

Right. You're tired and your brain isn't working. And part of that reason is because your activation of your immune system is sucking energy away from your brain. And the other reason is because the inflammation being generated gets into the brain and disrupts neurotransmitters and things like that. So you're it's like a double whammy. Your brain isn't working properly. And so there's a lot of people walking around constantly feeling tired, feeling lethargic, feeling brain fog, and they might have a high amount of visceral fat and not even know it.

So typically, looking at the data, most people have too much visceral fat. Most people do have too much visceral fat. And typically a really high amount is, I would say, a proxy for it would be measuring your waist circumference. So if women have a waist circumference of 35 in or greater, that is a sign of too much visceral fat. If men have a waist circumference of 40 in or more, that is a sign of too much visceral fat. Ideally, you would go and get what's called a DEXA scan. This is not something that's routinely done, and it doesn't necessarily have to be done unless you're that person that really likes to go the extra mile and directly measure things. That would be another way to do it. You really want to have below 300 grams of visceral fat, ideally closer to zero the better.

> Me and my friend went and got a DEXA scan done and the remarkable thing is I weigh a lot more than him and I'm much bigger than him. He's skinny but after the DEXA scan they said that he had too much visceral fat which I I thought vis I thought you must be like big or obese to have visceral fat but he's a skinny guy and the DEXA scan said too much visceral fat.

Yes, that's the thing. You know, I was involved in clinical research for many years when I was doing my post-graduate training. And we were looking at populations of people that were metabolically unhealthy or maybe overweight, obese in some cases, and you would have someone come in that they looked skinny, they looked like they were metabolically healthy because they weren't overweight. And yet all of their biomarker data was showing the opposite. Like they looked on paper, if you would have shown me their metabolic data, I would go, "Oh, this is an overweight obese person." So these are lean but metabolically unhealthy people and a large percentage of that has to do with an increase in visceral fat. You won't even necessarily know that you're getting higher amounts of visceral fat. It's not necessarily going to be reflected on the scale. You know, you mentioned maybe a pound, maybe a little bit more. That's like daily fluctuation in some cases, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but I can fluctuate a pound from day to day for sure. If you're talking about 500 grams or less, that's not going to be reflected on a scale either.

You might be going, well, what is causing visceral fat? I mentioned age, that's a big one. Hormones is a big one. Women are very susceptible as they go through perimenopause and menopause because estrogen actually helps tell the body how to store energy and it tells it to store energy and fat in adipose tissue, not viscerally. So when your estrogen starts to go down during perimenopause and then menopause, women really start to gain a lot of this belly fat. They gain a lot of the visceral fat. Testosterone also doesn't tell the body how to store the fat so much. It helps you burn visceral fat. So men are a little bit more protected when they're younger as well, but as they age, of course, testosterone goes down as well, and that affects the visceral fat. But mostly, it's our diet and our lifestyle that's really affecting visceral fat.

It's kind of mind-blowing how quickly you can gain visceral fat. Sleep is a big one. When you miss sleep, that is something that can really— you can start to gain visceral fat very quickly. There was a study in healthy young men. These men were sleep restricted. Typically when sleep restriction studies are done, you're looking at four hours of sleep per night. So pretty severe. Not out of the ordinary. I did many of those college graduate school deadlines. Definitely as a new parent, it unfortunately drags on for months. So these men were only sleeping four hours a night for two weeks. These are healthy young men, college age students. They gained 11% visceral fat after those two weeks, but not a pound on the scale. They had 11% higher visceral fat after just two weeks of not getting enough sleep.

> And they weighed the same

> pretty much. So, it was the composition of their body that's shifting.

Yes. Also, the visceral fat, like I said, you're not gaining pounds and pounds and pounds of it necessarily. You're gaining grams and grams, but it's happening and any amount that you're starting to gain is unhealthy, right? It's going to start causing insulin resistance. It's going to start causing fatty liver. That's another thing. It does it because it's around the liver. It basically the liver doesn't know what to do with all the fat. So it starts to make and store it around the fat. And so you start to get this non-alcoholic fatty liver which is happening now in young people.

So sleep is one major major lever for gaining visceral fat. Another is your diet quality and quantity. If you start to be in a caloric excess constantly, you can start to gain visceral fat, and that's also been shown in studies. There was a recent study that again was in healthy young men given about 1,200 extra calories a day and it was mostly from ultraprocessed foods. They're 1,200 calories, so like a Big Mac and a Coke, Big Mac and fries, whatever. You're talking about almost like an extra meal a day and from processed foods, ultraprocessed foods. For 5 days, they were given this extra caloric intake. After that five days, they started to gain visceral

### How Sleep Loss Worsens Visceral Fat

Fat. They started to have signs of fatty liver after five days. And their brains became insulin resistant. And this is important.

> **How many calories were they having in excess?**

**1,200 to 1,500.**

> **In excess.**

More than what they were usually going to eat. Yes. Okay.

Yes. So, you know, a lot of people are eating in caloric excess daily. They are not exercising, there is no energy expenditure, and they are eating more. So they are in, you know, 1,200. Now this is the extreme end, right? I am giving you an extreme end because that is what they do usually in studies like this, because they want to get a significant result. But after five days, they were gaining visceral fat, their brains became insulin resistant. So insulin is also very important for the brain. The brain is telling the body how to store the fat and how to store energy. And when insulin is not able to get into the brain and have its action, then you start to not have the brain tell the body how to store this energy and it ends up storing it viscerally. It is like this default.

> **Do you know, putting those two things together, the thing I've noticed that impacts my performance the most as it relates to articulation, cognitive performance, my ability to think, is those two things coming together. You talked about sleep and diet. It's when I eat late**

close. It is when I eat close to sleep. If I do that a couple of nights in a row, I feel like my brain no longer works.

Yes. Yeah. You know, obviously we all have to live our lives and there are social things, and it is fun to go out and have a dinner with your friends or an event, right? But it is not a good idea to eat a meal, a big meal, three hours before, fewer than three hours before bed. So, you want to stop eating three hours before bed. And three is really the magic number in multiple studies because when you eat a meal, it is activating your sympathetic nervous system, right? That is the fight-or-flight response. That is not what you want active when you are about to go to bed. When you are activating the sympathetic nervous system right before you are going to bed, let's say you eat a meal within an hour of bedtime, you are digesting all that. Your sympathetic nervous system is active. And even if you are sleeping, it is not good sleep. It is fragmented sleep. And so it is disrupted sleep because you need to be in that parasympathetic part of the nervous system. That dominance needs to be parasympathetic, which is the rest and restore. It is called rest and digest. But I do not like digest because actually digesting is what activates the sympathetic nervous system. So it is like the recovery, right?

> **So should I stay up then for three hours? If I eat at midnight, should I stay up till 3:00 a.m.?**

No. No. You should just go to bed, but don't do it on a daily basis, right? I mean, the key is the habit, you know, the habit. And so, if you need to eat something before bed, you should do something that is light. Maybe a protein shake with some almond milk, you know, something that is not super heavy.

> **I've heard you talk about fiber.**

Resistant starch does, interestingly, seem to help improve sleep. And so, you know, maybe some rice or a potato,

> **A little bit of rice or a potato,**

some fries or something.

Maybe not a fried potato, baked potato and then cool it because then it is resistant starch, right? Because then it is good for your gut microbiome.

> **Why?**

It changes the composition of the fiber, and you can cook it, let it cool, and then heat it again if you like to eat it heated as long as it went through a cooling part.

> **Wow.**

And then you can eat it. But that is resistant starch. Resistant starch is also in green bananas. Very beneficial for the gut and also, interestingly, for improving sleep. So things that are really moving the needle to make you gain visceral fat are being in basically being in a caloric excess, especially from refined high-fat, high-sugar foods. And then not getting enough sleep move the needle. Chronic stress is an amplifier of it. So if you are constantly

### Cortisol, Alcohol, and Belly Fat

Having cortisol that is kind of stopping the body from storing energy the right way, and it is going viscerally as well, I would say that amplifies especially if it is in the context of being in a caloric excess and not exercising. Alcohol is another one. If you drink, if you are excessively consuming alcohol, you are going to store a lot of the energy that you are also consuming, and it is going to be stored visceral. You have seen the beer belly, right? That is like a thing. It is visceral fat. It is not beer. It is visceral fat. So alcohol is another one.

In terms of losing visceral fat, the good news is that you can lose it quite easily and quite rapidly.

> I was going to say parents have a hard time because you are naming those things about sleep and stress, and I was thinking, gosh, parents have it coming from them from all sides.

> They do.

But this is where the good news comes in, because part of the reason why sleep loss is causing you to gain visceral fat is because it is causing your body to become insulin resistant. It is like this vicious cycle. Visceral fat causes insulin resistance. Insulin resistance causes more visceral fat. And that is why once you get into that cycle it just spirals out of control, right? And you start to gain more and more and more.

> Sorry. Insulin resistance. What is that? That is when your body no longer produces insulin or—

No, no. Insulin resistance is when your body is no longer responding to insulin. So it is like waiting for the phone to ring and it is ringing, but you cannot hear it. You are not getting the signal, and so your cells are not responding to the insulin that is made. Insulin is really helping your body move the glucose out, move it out of your bloodstream where it can cause a lot of damage if it sits around.

> And if you put too much pressure on the insulin system then it kind of shuts down.

Eventually shuts down.

And the thing that puts too much pressure is consuming too much glucose or too much activity?

Too much glucose. Refined glucose can do that. Visceral fat is one of the, I would say, bigger causes of insulin resistance. It is actually one of the major, major causes of insulin resistance because if you are physically active and eating a lot of glucose, that glucose is going to your muscles. Physical activity makes your muscles very responsive to glucose without needing insulin. The transporters that transport glucose are super, super responsive when you exercise. That is why physical activity, and this is what I was getting at with parents, is so important.

The visceral fat is the really big concern with insulin resistance. This is the thing that, again, people do not even know about. A lot of people are thinking about glucose and, oh, I have got to watch my glucose. And that is all fine. Yes, to some degree that is also playing a role, but it is the visceral fat that is the real underlying problem that is causing you to become insulin resistant.

You mentioned parents have it bad because they are stressed out and they do not get sleep. I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor when I became a new mother. I was appalled by my fasting blood glucose and by my postprandial blood glucose levels.

> Never—

Postprandial means after a meal.

> Okay?

So your levels go obviously much higher after you eat a meal versus in the morning when you have not had anything to eat.

And my levels were so high. It was pre-diabetic, and I was just, I could not believe it. And it is not like I am eating, you know, drinking Cokes and eating terrible, right? But there was a period of time when I am not as physically active, particularly in the first couple of months. That is really the time when you are kind of just in this cave. I immediately was looking into the scientific literature and found that high-intensity interval training and exercise can help almost negate most of those poor effects of causing insulin resistance and causing your glucose regulation to not be normal.

That is the good news for parents: new parents should prioritize exercise, and exercise does cause you to lose visceral fat. It is not just any type of exercise. It really has to be aerobic, and the more vigorous the better.

> So for people that do not know what that means, aerobic and vigorous.

Yeah. What I mean is resistance training and lifting weights do not really move the needle in terms of helping you lose visceral fat. It does help you improve your metabolism. It does help with glucose sensitivity and all that because your muscles are going to be more sensitive to take the glucose in. But if you want to lose visceral fat, you are going to have to do running, jogging, cycling, swimming. You want to get your heart rate up a little more.

> Why?

It is energy expenditure. It plays a role in getting you to a more caloric deficit, and that is better. So that is one way. And the other thing is any weight loss program: intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, even GLP-1 receptor agonists and all the classes of GLP-1, anything that is going to make you lose weight, lose fat, visceral fat is one of the first to go. In fact, people on these weight loss programs or even on exercise training programs, visceral fat is the first fat to go, and so you can lose it quite quickly.

> So on this point of fasting, are you a fan of fasting to combat visceral fat? And also, could you give me your thoughts on being in a ketogenic state as it relates to visceral fat?

Yeah, when people think about intermittent fasting, they kind of think about one thing and they think about weight loss, right? But there is a lot going on here. And I like that you mentioned being in a ketogenic state because there is also a metabolic switch that happens. This metabolic switch from burning carbohydrates and glucose to burning fatty acids and getting in ketosis, right? That is a metabolic switch. And it is very important. There are two different things happening here.

But intermittent fasting is essentially a good tool that people can use to reduce their calorie intake without having to count their calories. That is why I like it. You can lose weight by counting your calories and reducing your calorie intake. I personally think that is a lot of work. Some people love doing it, and that is great. I think whatever works for a person. But the way in which intermittent fasting helps people lose visceral fat is by reducing calorie intake. That is what I am getting at. It is like a tool that some people like to use because I like it for one because I can not think, I just skip one meal, making sure I get enough nutrients in the meals that I eat and protein in the meals I eat. But I will skip a meal.

### Fasting and the Metabolic Switch

and it gets me in a caloric deficit without having to think about and count everything. So it’s easier on me to fast versus counting calories.

#### Fasting in the morning

“How do you do that?”

“I like to fast in the morning.” The reason for fasting in the morning is the exact reason mentioned earlier: ketosis, which is described here as the **metabolic switch**. You are not eating while you are sleeping, obviously. If you are sleeping for 8 hours, or in bed for 9 or 10 hours, you are not eating during that time. It takes about **10 to 12 hours** for the liver to deplete glycogen.

Glucose taken up by the liver is stored as glycogen so that it can be used later for energy if no energy is coming in. The liver glycogen is like a petrol station: it runs out of petrol, and then it switches to diesel. After that switch, once glycogen is depleted while sleeping or while not eating after about 12 hours, the body enters the metabolic switch.

This is all relative, because it depends on the kinds of foods you eat and how physically active you are. If you eat a lot of high-carbohydrate, refined-sugar food, you might take even longer to deplete glycogen, because you keep filling up the fuel tank. But if you are eating things that are more low carb, you might deplete glycogen sooner.

When glycogen is depleted, the body still needs energy, but there is no glucose around, so fatty acids are mobilized. They come out of adipose tissue — and this is why people lose fat. They come out of the visceral fat. You start to use those fatty acids and burn them as energy. As a product of that energy, you make ketones: ketosis.

The reason for doing this in the morning is to get into that ketogenic state. If fasting, the pattern is typically about **16 hours fasting** and then eating meals within **8 hours**. That is what is usually done.

The reason for being in that metabolic switch state is many reasons. First, ketones themselves provide the brain with energy — very easily utilizable energy — but they also act as a signaling molecule to the brain saying, “Hey, this is a stressful time. There is no food. You better be cognitively sharp. You have to find that food. You have to know what you are doing.” It is an evolutionary adaptation.

Humans for thousands of years went through this metabolic switch because there was no Instacart, no Postmates, no Uber Eats. Food had to be found. Food had to be hunted. And people did not always do that. So when entering that metabolic switch state, it is something you can feel. There is more cognitive sharpness and less anxiety.

That is part of it because ketones also help increase something called **GABA**, an inhibitory neurotransmitter. It helps you feel calmer. When the background anxiety goes down, it becomes easier to focus. That is why this state is loved in the morning, because that is when the work gets done.

#### Repair, growth, and aging

Fasting is also liked because the body has to be in a fasted state to repair. If you are constantly in a fed state, fed states are important for anabolic growth — the body needs that to grow. But the repair state is also very important, because with growth comes damage. Damage comes along with growth, and that damage needs to be repaired because damage accelerates aging.

That is why the body should be given enough time. The goal is not to wake up and eat immediately, because then the liver glycogen is only barely depleted and the body is not in that repair state for very long. The aim is to extend it a little bit.

The repair process is active during fasting. Fasting activates it, but there is also some amount of active repair going on even in a fed state. It is just heightened when fasted. Those are the reasons for liking intermittent fasting.

The speaker also feels good doing it. In addition, a lot of training is done fasted, though not all of it. A lot of cardiovascular aerobic endurance exercise is done fasted: running, biking, that kind of thing. The speaker likes to do that fasted.

The example given is not a 10-mile run, but a 3-mile run. If it were a 10-mile run, it would not be done fasted; fuel would be needed. However, there are multiple studies showing that if you do aerobic endurance training — running, cycling, swimming, that type of training — you actually get better adaptations if you are fasted versus fed.

#### Fasted aerobic training

“What does that mean?”

Much of the benefit from exercise, especially aerobic exercise where you are breathing in hard and working hard, comes from the working hard itself. But the body responds to that work, because the work causes inflammation and oxidative damage. The body then responds by saying, “Oh, we need to get better at this stuff.”

That response activates anti-inflammatory pathways. It activates antioxidant pathways. The body needs to burn fat, it needs fuel. If you are fasted, you get better at burning and oxidizing fat, and you continue to do that better throughout the day as well.

There are better mitochondrial adaptations. You make more mitochondria. Mitochondria are very important little tiny organelles inside most of our cells that make energy, and they are important for everything — they are running the brain right now so we can talk, the heart so we can breathe, the lungs, everything.

Exercise does increase the amount of these new mitochondria that you make, and those mitochondria are young and healthy.

“If you are fasted?”

Both, even if you are not fasted, but if you are fasted, it is even better.

#### Men, women, and fasted exercise

There has been a big debate about whether this applies to both men and women.

“Should both men and women exercise fasted?”

The speaker’s read of the literature, and thoughts on this informed by experts who have studied male versus female responses to exercise, is that first and foremost you should ask: **How do you feel when you exercise fasted?** If you feel terrible, that is a sign. Listening to your body is the most important thing you can do.

There are times when the speaker has to eat before exercise, and that is listened to.

### Fast Training for Men and Women

my body. I that's it. I'm I'm going to eat.

When it comes to women versus men and doing exercise fasted, it also depends on whether you are doing a 30-minute run or a 2-hour run. If you're doing a 2-hour run, you need to fuel. That's a lot. That's a big stress. When it comes to a 30-minute run, you don't really necessarily need to.

Now, the problem with women is that if you're in too much of a caloric deficit and you don't eat enough food afterwards, you're not refueling enough and you're doing very, very long, high-volume types of exercise, then you can basically disrupt some of your hormones: follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone. These things will make you become amenorrheic. So you basically stop ovulating and you stop getting your menstrual period.

> And what's the evolutionary reason for that? What's going on?

Because your body's like there isn't enough food and energy around to sustain a baby, a growing fetus. They're shutting down.

> So it's basically like, hey, we're not going to allow you to have a baby, basically. So you stop ovulating, right? So you can't, you're not making those eggs. Is this often the case with women who exercise a lot and no longer have their menstrual cycle?

First of all, this is not a common thing. This is something that happens in athletes, elite athlete women that are not eating enough food. I did this to myself when I was in my early 20s, and I was racing marathons and I was running 10 miles a day, eight to 10 miles a day, five days a week, and then I was eating carrots and hummus, and I just wasn't fueling myself. I did this to myself, too.

So, how do you feel if you train fasted? Do you feel terrible? Don't do it. If you want to train somewhat fasted, go for a protein shake with a little bit of almond milk or something like that, where you're not eating a full meal, but you're getting something.

So, I do a lot of my training fasted and that has helped me. I'm 47 years old and in perimenopause.

> You're in phenomenal shape.

Thank you. Thank you. But I did notice, of course, as I started to reach that perimenopause part of my life, that I had to be a little bit more aggressive and put a little bit more effort in to not get this fat right here on my belly, because it started coming up and I didn't want it. It wasn't an option for me.

Speaking of studies done for women, I, you've heard

### Visceral Fat, Menopause, and Aging

You talked in the past about the SWAN study, which kind of relates to what you just said there. When relating to women and visceral fat, they found that women experience an accelerated increase in visceral fat starting 2 years before their final menstrual period.

> Yeah. Because that's when their estrogen is about — it's just plummeting, right? You're just going off a cliff because you're about to go into menopause.

Again, what age would that be? The average age of menopause is between 50, about 50 to 52 for women. A lot of that, there are a lot of things that can affect your reproductive lifespan, your ovarian aging, I guess we can call it. And unfortunately, one of them is the age you were when you got your menstrual period. So the younger you were, the younger you're going to be when you experience menopause. Also, when your mother experienced menopause is very, very indicative of when you're going to experience it. But lifestyle and diet play a role too. Obesity accelerates ovarian aging, so you're more likely to go into menopause earlier with obesity. Also, these chemicals that we're exposed to — and we can talk about those as well — a lot of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals affect the age of menopause as well and accelerate that. So in some cases, women go into menopause 2 years earlier than they would have otherwise.

> And you're so you're 47

Mhm. and a half.

And the data that I'm looking at here says when we think about perimenopause, it usually starts in mid-40s, which is the age range you're in. This is where the 8% to 10% annual visceral fat increase begins.

> It is. And and I...

Yeah. I can tell you from people in my life that I've seen going through this, it's pretty sudden. You'll see someone in your life that's a woman that's going through perimenopause and maybe hasn't had any other symptoms yet, so they haven't really seen any treatment. Now, you can try to do some hormone replacement therapy as well to help with that, but they start to gain visceral fat and it shows up around the belly quite rapidly. And I noticed this in myself. It almost feels overnight. Seriously, this is the only symptom that I noticed in myself where it was like all of a sudden my belly was growing and, you know, not super, super large, but enough where I was like, there is something wrong. It's not even necessarily reflected if you get hormone tests, because mine all seemed normal. The thing is, estrogen, when it drops, is so important for telling your body to store energy differently: not around the organs, but to make it around other parts of your body, like your thighs and your butt, right? Like your adipose tissue. And so when that estrogen goes down and declines, it's like boom, it starts to go right to the belly.

That is why, for me, intermittent fasting has been really important. Like with any weight loss or calorie restriction protocol, you do need to make sure you're getting enough protein because that's important for muscle, right? Muscle growth and preventing atrophy of your muscle. And you need to also do resistance training. That also is a very important signal for muscle. Because the problem is some people calorie restrict and eat fewer meals and then they're not getting enough protein and they're not training and they start to lose muscle in addition to fat, and you don't want to do that. You want to kind of just lose the visceral fat and keep the muscle, ideally keep gaining muscle.

> And for men, I was reading that testosterone and growth hormone typically peak in their late 20s. So I guess mine's peaked already. Um and starting at age 30, testosterone drops roughly 1% a year. So between the age of 25 and 65, men typically see a 200% increase in their visceral fat even if their total weight stays the same. So is that linked into testosterone decline? Is that what's going on there? What's causing it?

Yeah, I mean it is. Testosterone does — you burn, even if you're gaining visceral fat, it helps you burn it. It's also why some women that are in perimenopause want to do testosterone because it helps them burn the visceral fat. So it is linked to testosterone decline as well, but also as men are aging they become more sedentary, they tend to eat a little bit more, they're consuming more calories — all these things are happening, so it's like not just one punch, right? It's like multiple angles are kind of all compounding and coming together, whereas you could get away with it a little bit easier when you're younger because the testosterone was helping you burn it more.

When you're declining, it doesn't work that same way, so even though you're gaining it, you're not burning it as quickly, so you start to have a net gain in it, if that makes sense.

> So going back up to the top then we were talking about things you can do to lower your visceral fat and we talked a little bit about exercise, sleep, diet. Is there anything else in that category?

Yeah, I think those are the main ones. Obviously avoiding excess alcohol consumption.

> Yeah.

And also...

> Stress.

Stress.

> Yeah.

Yeah. The stress, like trying to do relaxation techniques, buffer that stress — that's a big one. It's an amplifier.

> Yeah. People don't talk enough about visceral fat, you know, they look at other markers.

No. Well, most people just want to lose weight and look good.

> Yeah.

Or, yeah, they look at, you know, HbA1c, your long-term glucose, or they're looking at lipids, and visceral fat is just... it's insidious, right? It just...

### Why Testosterone Is Falling in Men

starts increasing, increasing, increasing. You can't see it. You can't see until all of a sudden belly, right? I mean, it's it's it's bad. And it affects the way you feel daily.

On this point of testosterone, why is it the case that testosterone seems to be dropping amongst men? I think it said something like I wrote it down. Yeah, testosterone levels in men have dropped by up to 20% over the last two decades.

> Um, which is quite terrifying.

> It is.

So, look, there's a lot of factors that can affect testosterone. I mentioned dietary factors, refined sugar, sleep is a big one. People aren't getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep drops testosterone. Micronutrients, not getting enough zinc, for example, zinc's very important for testosterone synthesis and magnesium. There are important nutrient components, but I think the big player here is actually environmental. I think that we are being bombarded with what are called endocrine disrupting chemicals. These are man-made chemicals. A lot of them are part of plastic. They're made to help plastic be more durable or more robust, or they're found in things that are water resistant. So there's probably three main endocrine disrupting chemicals that are found in our environment mainly because they're in plastic or they're also in things that are water resistant, oil resistant, fire resistant, flame retardant. BPA, bisphenol A, is one. Another one is phalates, PH phalates. And the last one would be PAS. These are the forever chemicals. These are the three main, I would say, players in terms of disrupting endocrine function. Endocrine meaning hormones. Sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, but also thyroid hormone. Very important for regulating our metabolism, for example.

> Are they really causing a problem?

> Absolutely.

> Really? Like

> absolutely. Because I'm looking at the picture you have there of Pa Pas.

> PAS.

> PAS and it's got like a coat and shoes on there. You're telling me the clothes that I wear are having an impact on my hormones.

They can, but I think it's less of a direct effect and more downstream. So the PAS chemicals, or the forever chemicals, they're used in things to make them oil resistant, stain resistant, water resistant. So the Teflon pans would be the biggest example. You remember those non-stick pans? They have Teflon that has PAS on it.

> We're going to go into my kitchen in a second. So, I'll take all of the viewers that are watching now into my kitchen. We'll have a stroller around my kitchen. You let me know if there's some things.

> Oh gosh, I hope you don't have Teflon. But, I mean, my mom used it when I was, you know, growing up. I remember the non-stick pans. That stuff is coming off into your food and so you're eating these PAS.

> How do we know that they're dangerous?

Okay. Well, I'll tell you how we know. Let's start with the PAS chemicals. Those are ones that are really, they're more affecting the thyroid and they're affecting, I would say, ovarian aging. They seem to target the ovaries and accelerate the age that you're going to get menopause, so you're going to get it around one to two years earlier if you have a high amount of these forever chemicals. But there's been studies, a lot of studies, looking at let's start with BPA, okay, bisphenol A. That's a big one because you see a lot of marketing around BPA free. This plastic water bottle is BPA free. Well, it's BPA free, but it has another chemical called BPS, which is very similar, if not worse, than BPA. So BPA is something that's found in a lot of water bottles. It's in those plastic water bottles. It lines the cups of paper cups, like these to-go coffee cups that you're getting at your favorite coffee place. Plastic is lining them. Yes, plastic lines them because it's protecting it from the liquid, right? BPA has been linked to many different diseases, but really, it is an endocrine disruptor. So what it does is a couple of things. One, BPA acts as an estrogen mimetic. So it kind of mimics estrogen and it binds to the receptors that estrogen do to do its function. And so it sometimes binds to estrogen and either makes it seem like there's estrogen around or it blocks estrogen from working. So it depends on the dose and the concentration. So it can do both, but it also binds to androgen receptors that interact with testosterone, right? And so there have been studies that have found that men that have high amounts of BPA also have low amounts of testosterone. There was also a study done in teens. This is when your sexual development is happening, right? Testosterone is very important during this part of your life during puberty. Teen, adolescent boys that had the highest amount of BPA had 50% lower testosterone than the boys, sorry, that had the lowest amount of BPA.

The biggest one that's affecting testosterone is the phalates. These phalates, they are present in a lot of PVC piping. They're present in a lot of our food packaging. All those thin wraps, or you go to the grocery store and you get a filet mignon steak and it's wrapped in plastic, poultry, all that plastic wrapping and all the foods that we're eating has phalates in them that make it more flexible and stuff. And it's also found in our hair products, our cosmetic products, our creams. And it's also very lipid soluble. It likes fat. It is drawn to fat. So when you have plastic around fat like cheese, things like fat, meat, it's getting into that meat. It's getting into that cheese, the phalates. These disrupt our hormones in ways similar to BPA. So they're binding to the androgen receptor, but they're also going into the testes and disrupting the synthesis of testosterone. So there was a study in men that had the highest phalate levels, those men had 20% lower testosterone compared to men with higher levels.

And this is affecting not only just the testosterone, but it's affecting sperm quality. So the shape of the sperm wasn't good. It's affecting the number, so sperm count is down if they're higher BPA or higher phalates. And also motility, the ability to swim. Pregnant women that get exposed to high levels of phalates and if they have, if they're carrying a male fetus, right, they're having a boy, what's been shown is it's also affecting sexual development. So these boys, they're getting something called hypospadia. That's where the slit on the penis is moved backwards, kind of closer to what a woman would have. And they're getting undescended testicles. So one of their testicles is not descending. And that's associated with infertility, cancer, testicular cancer being the big one. This is happening at an alarming rate. Something like 20% of boys now have an undescended testicle. I mean, it's crazy.

> Because their mother had high phalates.

Well, this is definitely something that is known in our environment to cause that. I don't know if that's the only cause, but it, in my opinion, is a

### BPA, Phthalates, and Plastic Exposure

very very concerning cause that nobody is talking about and that should be addressed. And it's everywhere. We have these in all of our plastic wrappers that we everything that we're eating. You even getting your meat, you think it's, well, it's meat. It's, you know, but it's wrapped in plastic and that phalates are getting into the food. So, they're getting into our bodies and they're disrupting hormones. They're disrupting sexual development. They're disrupting our ovaries, estrogen, you know, ovarian aging, age of menopause. They're disrupting thyroids, the thyroid hormones.

I mean, there's there's even studies now with women, pregnant women that have high levels of BPA. They have they're six times more likely to have a child with autism spectrum disorder compared to women with low levels of BPA. Again, BPA is disrupting the estrogen and androgen receptor. And this is very important because the androgen you you want to have it's it's disrupting aromatase as well, that enzyme that's involved in converting testosterone into estrogen. So, believe it or not, when you're a boy developing in your mom's womb, estrogen plays a very important role in your brain and brain development and what's called masculinizing the male brain. You actually, it's kind of contradictory. You're like, "Oh, well, wouldn't testosterone do that?" Well, actually, estrogen is very important for masculinizing parts of the male brain.

And so when you have aromatase being inhibited by bisphenol A by this endocrine disrupting hormone that is so ubiquitous everywhere — that is found in plastic bottles — plastic bottles it's it's found in yeah it's found everywhere.

#### What to do about exposure

> So what what do you recommend?

First of all I think if you can eliminate and not drink out of plastic bottles as much as possible. If you do want to go coffee either drink it there in their mugs or bring your own to-go mug. Like I bring my like I have like a Yeti kind of to-go coffee mug that I'll bring into a Starbucks or wherever coffee bean and I'll have them fill it up.

Soup cans, canned soup are lined with BPA. They're lined with plastic and soup usually goes into the can hot sterile technique. I mean they they want to make sure it's so you're getting the soup has been classically shown in multiple studies to me to to increase BPA levels by a thousand%. Crazy amounts. So, don't eat canned soup as much as possible. I mean, obviously, this is about the habit, not the one-off, but but you know, try to avoid cans, drinking out of even soda cans, even like your your favorite sparkling water cans. Don't make it a daily habit because they are lined with plastic. That's a source of BPA into your bodies.

There are ways that you can excrete BPA. So, the major way to get rid of it is through urine. It's excreted through your urine, but it has to become water soluble first. It's a fats soluble

### How Food Can Help Detoxify BPA

Compound. And so there are things that we can eat in our diet that will increase that excretion. Compounds in broccoli. Broccoli sprouts being the big one. Sulforaphane activates a pathway that has enzymes involved in making BPA become water soluble. So they come out in your urine.

> "Oh, so broccoli is like a cleanser."

It's like a cleanser. We actually do have these, it's called phase 2 detoxification enzymes, in our body. We have the ability to detox a lot of things. We just have to give our body the right input so that it can activate those pathways.

I personally take a supplement of that sulforaphane because I want a concentrated amount of it. I used to do broccoli sprouts. Broccoli sprouts have a hundred times more sulforaphane than mature broccoli, but you have to sprout them and then there's contamination issues and it's just, you know, some people do it. It's great, but I used to do it. I don't anymore. I just take a supplement.

> "That supplement's called"

The supplement I take is called Avmacol. It's by a company called Nutramax. I'm not affiliated with them. I like their supplement because, one, they've got 12 published studies using it. Clinical studies too, showing that it actually helps with autism. Children and adolescents with autism that take the sulforaphane supplement that they have improved symptoms because it's a detox. It helps. Interestingly, people with autism are like 30 times less likely to excrete BPA. It's a weird thing going on here where BPA increases autism spectrum disorder, but then kids that have it are not able to detoxify it as well.

> "Wow."

Yeah, it's interesting. Again, I think that excretion is important, but avoiding the plastic as much as you can. Make it a habit. Don't freak out. I mean, obviously you can make yourself crazy and stress is not good. As we talked about, I see you like going, "Oh my god."

> "Yeah. No, I'm thinking about just how casual I am about these things, though. And I could easily make small changes. I could frankly I could easy make big changes in the position I'm in. I could just say I can say in my company we no longer buy this kind of stuff. I could say in my kitchen because, you know, to my team or whatever. Let's not buy this. Can we go look at my kitchen now?"

> "Let's do it. Let's go. Let's go to my kitchen. Be right. No, you guys can come too. So we're going to go to my kitchen. If you're listening on the dog walk, this might be a nice time to sit on a bench and look because you're about to go into my kitchen and we're going to look at real things that you might not even know in your kitchen are causing you some of these problems."

### Black Plastic and Recycled Electronics

The team has been here for the last couple of days, and they have been getting lots of takeaways. So this is a higgled piggledy of everybody’s food.

“What’s wrong?”

“You got—you’re pulling **black plastic**.”

“What’s wrong with the black plastic?”

“We talked about plastic. It has BPA. It has phthalates, but it also typically is made from recycled electronics. And the problem here, Stephen, is recycled electronics have flame retardants in them because you don’t want your electronics catching fire. And there have been a variety of studies now that have found that black plastic has a high amount of these flame retardants that…”

### Safer Kitchen Containers and Hot Food

are leeching into the food and getting into people's bodies that way. Not only do you not want to eat out of black plastic, you don't want hot food going in there, right? Because that's like the worst.

> Can I get a bin bag? I need a bin bag. Okay. Okay. So, let's throw that in the bin. What else? I'm going to take all of it out.

#### Black plastic and hot food

> Okay. This is the other thing that really reaches out. Stands out to me because spicy foods, anything acidic that goes into plastic causes the chemicals to leech into it even more rapidly. Kind of the same way the heat does. So, heat, acidic foods, not good in plastic.

> So, my spicy sauce, if it comes in a little plastic tub, it's going to leech in.

> Look, if it's the oneoff, okay, but like not a habit. Yes. A big time leech in it. You're you're you're eating BPA hot sauce.

> Okay. So, the black stuff is out and

> it's going in hot.

> Yeah, this has phalates and had BPA. I mean, look, are you drinking this every day or is it the oneoff?

> No comment. No comment. Mind your business. Okay. What else? What about this?

> This is made of paper.

> Here's my little thing I do. See that waxy? There's a waxy

> a pas

> on the edge.

> Yeah. Does it seem like it has a waxy substance to you?

> Yes.

> This is This is better than the black plastic. If you had to like if there's like tears, this is better than black plastic.

> Okay. And this

> ding ding ding. This is great. This is the best thing that you can do if you're going to have food made for you or you want to order takeout, have someone make it for you and deliver you in this.

> And this is a bamboo lid.

> Bamboo lid with with GL Pyrex glass, right?

> Okay. So, this is what this is good.

> This is great.

> So, I need more of this.

> You need more of this and get rid of all I mean, this is already looking better. This is on the scale. At least it goes in cold. So, here's the thing. Microplastics are also shedding into this. We didn't talk about microplastics. They're shutting into here. the chemicals, not as much in something like this, but they're still getting in. So, this is a little bit better when it comes to like the the tears here. The hot food is the worst. This is a little bit better, but I still would get lettuce

> because it's cold.

> Because it's cold.

> So, it's not seeping.

> Exactly.

> Okay. So, I might be able to keep that then. What else do you notice here?

> So, I noticed that I really like your glass sparkling waters. That's great because, you know, glass is is less likely to have microplastic shedding, less likely to have the chemicals.

> There was a study that actually found, interestingly, there were more microlastics in on the top. So, the paint that's on these lids, plastic polymers are used in that. And during the processing and, you know, bottling up of these things, they get into the the the water. And so, believe it or not, glass bottled water has more microlastics than plastic bottled water. Okay, this is terrible. But I'm going to tell you why I think this still is worse. Okay, so this is got microplastics, but it also has BPA and phalates. They're in this water. This was not always cold. It's, you know, it was some warehouse shipping container. Who knows how it got here? It's been heated up, I'm sure, several times. The problem is is that there was a study showing that glass bottles have a higher amount of microlastics than than plastic. And you might go, why is that? Because they're all coming off on this paint and getting in. When it comes to microplastics, size matter. I'm not as worried about it having more microplastics because it would show that they were large microplastics. Your body doesn't absorb a large ones very well. They come out through your feces. These This has tons of what are called nanoplastics, very, very small particles that get into the gut and get into your bloodstream. So, I still go for the glass water. So, I would avoid drinking out of these as much as possible. So, I like how you have these condiments in the glass. This is how my refrigerator looks as well. I'm very, very obsessive about anything that has acidity in it, like hot sauce and ketchup. It needs to be in glass because the acidity is leeching microplastics and BPA and phalate chemicals into your condiments and then you're putting that on your food and you're eating them. Again, this is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Plastic is everywhere. The chemicals are everywhere. And you're not even thinking about the fact that your hot sauce and ketchup are also, you know, vehicles for delivering these microplastics and, you know, their associated chemicals into your body. So, I really like these. Like this one, I would go for a glass mustard. Those those are better.

> Glass bottle. So, this is plastic. Same thing. It's acidic. I would say um you know, for the most part, the butter. Oh, yeah. This is bad. Is this butter? Oh, cheese. Yeah. So, this is a problem also. So if you look at this um it's that flexible plasticky stuff, right? It has phalates in it.

> Well, this this

> Oh, that's even worse. This is Yeah. So this is the plastic that basically, you know, phalates are in this and they're fat soluble and they are just leeching into this fatty cheese. They're leeching into the fatty cheese. So you can buy cheese that's like without this in just the container that's a little bit better.

> You know what I mean? Like like I'm thinking of feta cheese for example. Like some feta cheese comes in this plastic wrapper, but you can buy it with just the container and at least it's not like close like with juices like just seeping into it, you know, getting the chemicals into it.

> Ah, but this is fine, isn't it?

> Eggs.

> Yes, eggs are great.

> There we go.

> Eggs are great. We found something. Okay, Vonda. So, spatulas and kitchen utensils. Are these good? Are these bad? What's What's the best?

> Yeah, good question. These are great, right? Okay. There's no plastic here. No possibility of plastic leaking into your foods. You got your nice pasta spoon. These are silicon, I'm imagining.

> in theory, the silicon should be okay. Um, the problem is is that there's a lot of silicon that actually still has it's mixed with plastic, too. So, I go for the wood ones that are like this, like the wooden spatula. That's what I use. You in theory should be good. In practice, a lot of silicone that's been measured out there and tested does have plastic. So, I would say if you want to really be careful, I would switch.

> But most people at home probably have a plastic spatula. Is that accurate?

> Most people at home have plastic spatula and a lot of people also have black plastic spatulas, which again back to that black recycled electronics, flame retardants, these are cancer-causing chemicals in there. Bromelated chemicals that are causing cancer. So yeah, I would say that even shifting from the plastic to this is probably a step up, but I don't know that this is just pure

### Hidden Plastic in Cookware and Appliances

Silicon. I would guess that there is still some plastic in it. And if you are heating it up, the plastic is getting into your food.

> **Okay. What about my pans?**
>
> **What about got my pans here.**

**Great. All-Clad. This is what I use.** These are amazing. No plastic lining, no PFAS, no nonstick. Most people’s pans at home have a sort of protective layer that is nonstick so they can cook their food and it does not stick to the pans. Scrambled eggs are kind of a pain in the butt if they stick to everything. That has the forever chemicals in it, and that is being heated up and leaching into your food, and you are eating it. So really what you want to avoid the most is **Teflon**, right? Anything that is nonstick.

> **It’s harder to cook with these though.**

It is so much harder. But you know what? You are healthier, and that is what you have to imagine.

The other thing I want to talk to you about is this.

> **The blender.**

Ah, yes, the blender. This is one that people often miss. The problem is that most blender tops, the part that is blending your stuff, is plastic. And there are studies showing that when you have a lot of friction on plastic, that releases orders of magnitude more microplastics. And of course, their associated chemicals are hitchhiking along there. There are companies that make a stainless steel version of the blender, and I highly recommend that if you are someone like myself, and I like to do my kale blueberry smoothies, that you switch to the stainless steel. I did. I switched for my family. Essentially, the friction means you are drinking microplastics and chemicals. So that is bad.

> **A receipt.**

Yeah, do not touch it.

> **What do you mean do not touch it?**

Receipts are covered with BPA. I mean, literally just covered. That is how it prints, right? This is not like a printer. This is printed. It is thermal paper, and the BPA is allowing the printing to happen. So they are covered with bisphenol A. People who are handling receipts, like cashiers who are handling receipts, have really high levels of BPA, particularly if they use hand-sanitizing lotion or any lotion, any sort of cream. That makes the BPA, again, BPA is fat-soluble. These creams, the hand sanitizers, are carrying it inside to your bloodstream about a hundredfold higher than not having that. So, first of all, you can opt to have a receipt emailed to you if you need the receipt. I would do that or, you know, do not touch it. But also, if you work in cash, if you are a cashier and you work in this industry, really, really please wear nitrile gloves. I mean, your BPA levels, if you were to go get them measured, which you can, there are companies out there now that do measure BPA levels in urine, you will see that they are extremely, extremely high. So nitrile gloves will protect you from the BPA getting across your dermal barrier and getting to your bloodstream. Latex gloves do not. So make sure they are nitrile gloves. And for people who are not in the industry, try to avoid the receipts. It is a really big exposure to BPA that people are not even realizing.

> **I can tell by the way you’re grabbing the corner of it like it’s feces or something.**

Oh, it is terrible. And my son, kids love paper, and of course I do not want them touching it because we talked about that study in adolescent boys where they had high BPA levels and that was associated with a 50% reduction in testosterone. I mean, this is at a part of your life when testosterone is important for sexual development and development in general. So really, really, really important to remember receipts are a very big source of BPA that people are not thinking about, particularly people who are routinely handling these receipts.

And the other thing I want to talk to you about is water. So here is one of my water filters. I also have a filter attached to the tap. What are your thoughts?

> **So this is filtering water, but it’s filtering it into plastic and it’s also got plastic filter.**

So I think that you are probably filtering away some other things, pathogens, gross other chemicals that might be in the water, but you are essentially reintroducing the plastic. So I do not know that that is necessarily the best way to get the filter. What you have over here is a reverse osmosis water filter. That is absolutely the ideal. Reverse osmosis water filters filter out microplastics, nanoplastics, BPA, phthalates, chemicals, all these things that we are talking about today. People can get a tabletop one, kind of like this is tabletop, but it is a tabletop reverse osmosis water filter. These only filter out the bigger, larger plastic size, microplastic size. And then the last thing I want to mention, Stephen, because you do have a reverse osmosis water filter, is that it does filter out a lot of small particles, including essential trace elements and some essential minerals and stuff. So you want to make sure that you are taking a multivitamin mineral supplement. And you can also get what is called little essential element drops that have things like phosphorus, manganese, iodine, some of these things that are being filtered out of your water and making sure you are reintroducing that to your water.

> **H Okay. So, it takes some good stuff out too.**

It does. Yeah.

> **Okay. Is there anything else that maybe is either in my kitchen now or not in my kitchen that is a culprit of BPAs and phthalates?**

Yeah. Here is the first problem here. And then inside where the hot water is going

### Coffee Makers, Supplements, and Heat Exposure

through is there are plastic pieces. So the hot water is going through plastic to get to your little espresso cup here. These I actually looked into, because at first I thought they were lined with plastic. They're not. My concern is mostly the water going through the system that's heating up. It's got plastic piping in there that it's going through.

> Okay. So I'm going to just stay there and I'm going to just grab Okay. So this is now the coffee that I drink called contier.

They flash freeze it at the perfect moment and it's delivered frozen. So metal and then this is an aluminum lid, right? So it shouldn't be lined with plastic, right? You go like this, press the little button on top and it goes straight into your glass and then this comes out and that's the coffee.

> Oh, I love it.

So you just drop it. It's funny because they're a sponsor.

> Oh, should disclaimer and I'm also an investor in this company. So, no machines at all. Put it straight into the glass, pour the hot water in, and that's it.

So, it's like instant coffee, but it's real coffee that's been frozen. It's from some Stanford engineers who flash freeze it at the perfect moment to lock in the taste. And you can literally smell it.

> Smells good.

> Smells good. Yeah.

> yeah. I'm so glad you're not putting it in a machine cuz that's

No, no longer do that. Okay. So, this is my supplement cupboard. It's a mess, but I've pulled out things that I that I'm personally interested in, good, bad, indifferent. The first one that jumped out at me when I was looking is reduced and active glutathione. This is something that I think people should be aware of. There's marketing involved here. Glutathione is a major antioxidant. We make it in our body. We make it in our brain.

> What does it do? Sorry.

So, it's a very important antioxidant. It helps negate oxidation, which is causing brain aging. It's negating oxidation, which is aging yourself.

People want to supplement with it because they've heard about glutathione and how beneficial it is and how it's a great antioxidant. The problem is because our body makes it inside of our cells, we don't have a transporter to get glutathione from the outside of our cells, like if we eat it and if it makes it through our digestion, which it really doesn't, into our cells. And so this kind of glutathione isn't going to make it inside of your cells.

> So this is just a waste of time.

It is. You're going to want to get something called liposomal glutathione. Liposomal glutathione has been shown to get inside because liposomes are essentially taking the glutathione molecule and encapsulating it in something that's going to fuse with your cell. Liposomal products in general have a higher bioavailability for that reason.

> So let me repeat that back to you. So I've got it. So if it's liposomal, it's basically in a packet which can get through into the cell. If it's not, this one is reduced and active. Then it's never going to get in the cell. So it's a waste of time. It's just going to be excreted.

Yeah, I would say that it's really not doing much and that if you're going to want to supplement with liposomal glutathione, that's what I have.

What about this vitamin D3? I've always been confused because people say take vitamin D, but then this one says D3.

D3 is the form of vitamin D that you make when you're in the sun. That's the major way we make vitamin D is from sun exposure. There is a plant form of vitamin D called vitamin D2. It's found in things like mushrooms, for example. The problem is that there have been studies showing that vitamin D2, which is unfortunately what a lot of vegetarians take because they want a vegetarian form, is not as effective as vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is also found in sheep skin because the sheep are making it in their skin when they're exposed to sunlight. If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, you're going to want to look for vitamin D3 from lichen. Lichen is that green stuff that you can find on trees and stuff that also makes vitamin D3, and so it's a much better option than getting the vitamin D2, which is what a lot of vegetarians do.

So there's actually a recent study showing that people that are vitamin D deficient, so they're not getting enough vitamin D3 because we don't go out in the sun anymore, they have accelerated aging. And if they supplement, this is a very large study, by the way, with vitamin D3, they slowed their biological aging by almost 2 years. That didn't happen in people that were not vitamin D deficient from the start. So it's not like a vitamin D3 supplement is going to do something miraculous if you already have enough vitamin D. The point is to avoid deficiency. And so, you know, someone like yourself that probably doesn't go outside a lot but also, well, you go outside, but you have darker skin, so melanin is a natural sunscreen and so people with more melanin have to spend a lot more time in the sun, and so that is something to consider as well.

> Well, I can always just take my multivitamin.

Right. Multivitamin. I think I might have talked about one study last time we talked, last episode, where men and women that were older adults, they were 65 years and older, took one Centrum Silver a day. And I'm not, you know, I'm not advocating for Centrum Silver. I'm just saying that was involved in the study. And after 3 years, they had reversed their brain aging, global brain aging, by 2.1 years. And they reversed their episodic brain aging by almost 5 years. So episodic memory is the kind of memory involved in remembering events and people and things like that. You know, as you get older, you know that stuff doesn't come as quick, right? So it delayed that aging by 5 years.

Well, this same study also, just recently published literally like a couple of weeks ago, again part of this large study, it's called the Cosmos study, they looked at the multivitamin use and biological aging, epigenetic aging, and they found that the Centrum Silver multivitamin also slowed biological aging, epigenetic aging, by a few months. And this was only after two years, and you might go, oh, a few months, but that was after two years, and that trial was two years long. So if you add two years and then you add another two years and then you add, and then you're talking about 20, talking about 30, talking about 50 years, that is slowing aging the entire time. It adds up. It's cumulative, and it's one of the easiest things that someone can do to basically make sure that they're aging better. There's things that are harder to do, but that to me is such a low-hanging fruit. It's easy.

> What is it about this? What is in here

### Why Most Multivitamins Still Help

That is what makes a male multivitamin have such profound effects: if you look at the back at the supplement facts, there are a lot of vitamins and minerals. Things like vitamin C, vitamin D3, vitamin E, vitamin K, niacin, the B vitamins, folate. You also have things like selenium, the essential elements. These are all things that we need to run everything in our body: all of our metabolism, our neurotransmitter synthesis, our immune system, our liver. These are co-factors that are really important for all those things.

You do not realize how important they are until time goes on and things start to fall apart. It is basically filling the gaps because we are supposed to get these things from our foods. We are supposed to be getting all these vitamins and minerals from our foods, from our water, and it is just not happening for many reasons. One, our soils are depleted. The organophosphates like glyphosate are depleting our minerals. And so the foods that are being grown in the soil are not getting the minerals they are supposed to. The second problem is we are not eating the right foods because we are eating takeout. We are eating foods that are not micronutrient-dense. Things like dark leafy greens. We are not eating the colors of the rainbow, and those are really important for vitamins and minerals.

> So I have got two questions there. Is there a multivitamin that I could take that is not good for me? Because when I go to the shops, there are so many different types these days and I do not know which one is good, bad, or how to tell the difference. And so honestly, sometimes I just go based on the most expensive because I assume the most expensive is the best quality.

Yeah. So, you know, the problem with supplements is they are not regulated. Not that I necessarily want them to be, but it is a problem because supplement companies can kind of put whatever they want in the supplements. They do not necessarily have the amount of active ingredient that they say, or they can either have too little or too much. And so that is the problem with supplements.

> Too much.

Yeah. So, for example, some vitamin D3 supplements and some melatonin supplements have, in some cases, like a 1,000 to 10,000-fold more. And it was a really big problem with melatonin because melatonin is that hormone that you make to help you fall asleep, and there was excessive amounts in them. So it is not regulated, so you really do not know the amount you are getting. I would say number one, go to a trusted brand that is third-party testing. There is so much third-party testing now. ConsumerLab does it. You can look up what they have tested. But for a man, I would say the thing that is essential here is you do not want to get iron. You do not want

### Who Should Avoid Iron Supplements

#### Supplemental iron

> “Well, someone told me to start drinking these iron drinks.”
>
> “Were you iron deficient?”
>
> “No.”
>
> “Okay.”
>
> “I was just sick one time and they said this would really help.”
>
> “So this wasn’t a scientist, just a friend.”

Most men do not need to supplement with iron unless they have a problem with iron and they are anemic. Iron can be very bad. If you are supplementing with iron, it is very reactive and it causes oxidative stress easily. It is called **free iron**. The free iron reacts with other things, with your DNA, your cells. So most men do not need to supplement with iron. In fact, there is even something called **hemochromatosis**, where you already have too much iron, and if you have those genes, which is actually quite common, then you are really talking about iron overload. So you really do not need to supplement with iron.

#### Iron in women

> “Women.”

Premenopausal women are different because premenopausal women do lose a lot of iron from menstruation when they are menstruating. I would say about **16% of menstruating women are iron deficient**. And then if you add exercise on top of that, a lot of endurance exercise, you can get lysis of your red blood cells. So you do need iron for your red blood cells.

If you are eating meat, if you are not a vegetarian, maybe that would be a case if you are like a vegan or something, maybe some iron could come in, but you have to get your iron levels measured. You do not want to be too high because it does cause damage.

I would say that for premenopausal women, iron is especially good around your cycle. Post-menopausal women, once you hit menopause, you kind of shift to what a man needs. You do not need the iron again. So it is very much just premenopausal women that need iron.

#### Omega-3 fish oil

> “That is so funny. I have been drinking these. Omega-3. Does that…”
>
> “Yes.”

Omega-3 fish oil, as has been discussed before, is probably one of the best and easiest things that people can do to improve their health and improve the way they age. Omega-3 fatty acids are not being consumed enough. **90% of the US population** is not getting enough of them, **80% globally**. Everybody is not getting enough omega-3 fatty acids, particularly from seafood. So the EPA and DHA from fish oil are probably the best forms.

There have been studies showing that if you have a high omega-3 index, you have a **five-year increased life expectancy** compared to a low omega-3 index. If you are a smoker and you have a high omega-3 index, then you are going to live as long as a non-smoker with a low omega-3 index. The low omega-3 index is basically like smoking.

A high omega-3 index is linked to a **66% lower chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease**. More recently, there were studies showing that omega-3 slows epigenetic aging. This is not just a deficiency issue. Maybe because everybody is deficient, that is why, but a study showed that omega-3 fish oil supplementation slowed epigenetic aging.

This was a study out of Switzerland. These individuals were mostly active: **88% of them were already physically active** at the start of the trial. I mention that because the trial involved omega-3, vitamin D, resistance training, or the combination of all three. Only the omega-3 was able to slow epigenetic aging, biological aging, because for one, they were already physically active. So adding resistance training on top of their baseline did not do much. And they were vitamin D sufficient. So the omega-3 was able to slow epigenetic aging.

The combination of all three slowed it by **four months** after one year. That does not sound like a lot, but it is compounding. Also, within that study, they looked at real-world outcomes. That correlated with being **60% less likely to be pre-frail**. They were also less likely to get cancer as well. So it is really translating to these health outcomes that we think of. And all you need to do…

### Omega-3, Storage, and Creatine Safety

Supplement with about **1.6 to 2 grams a day of omega-3** to get a good omega-3 index. But one thing to mention, Stephen: **keep it out of room temperature**. That is not a great idea, because fish oil is a **polyunsaturated fatty acid** and it is prone to oxidation. You want to put it in a **low-temperature environment**. I keep all my fish oil **frozen**. I keep a stock of it, buy it, and then it stays in the freezer. When I am ready to use it, I put it in the fridge, with the bottle I am using from. Freezing it does nothing harmful. It is fine. It is basically just keeping it really, really low oxidation.

> So I need to put this in the fridge.

You need to put it in the fridge, and also make sure you are getting a **quality brand**, right? You want **third-party testing**. Again, you want **total oxidation**, ideally **less than 10**. There are brands out there that do have oxidation less than 10, which means it is more fresh and pure.

> It is more — it is less oxidized.

You do not want to be consuming **oxidized fat**, because that is also not good.

#### Creatine, dosing, and saturation

> Okay. So what else jumps out to you here? We have creatine.

Yeah, creatine is like my new thing. I travel with it everywhere. You got micronized? This is... I have got so many different types.

> This is the one I take.

Yeah, I take **creatine monohydrate** because it is the **most well-studied**. Obviously, I do a lot of training and workouts. I do a lot of **resistance training** and **strength training**, so I at least get **five grams a day**, which is what I was always doing in the past. I increased that to **10 grams a day** as my baseline because I wanted to have benefits in my brain. Studies out of Germany show that once you get to the **10 gram** mark, your brain is actually able to take it up, and it increases creatine in certain brain regions. That does not happen much at lower doses, and that is because your muscles are very greedy.

The creatine in my brain, honestly, for me, I have mentioned this before, it is a **game changer** on a daily basis. I feel like I do not have that afternoon slump. I am in my mid-40s. My brain is not as sharp as it was. Creatine has really helped me get a little bit closer to where I used to be. And when I am sleep deprived, I go even higher. Sometimes I do **20 to 25 grams**. That is because studies have shown that if you go up to a higher dose like that, depending on your weight, it is kind of a scale, it helps you basically **negate the negative effects on your brain from sleep deprivation**, where not only are you cognitively functioning, you are functioning **beyond what your normal baseline was**, which was kind of mind-blowing.

> The question I had is around loading and how long it takes to feel the impact.

When I first heard about creatine, I was 16 and my brother was bodybuilding, and they were told you need to load up on big amounts of it and then in like two weeks your body would be saturated. What is the truth?

Right. The reason creatine loading was done is because there is a short window of time when researchers are doing a study and they want muscle stores to be saturated. So you have to do a **20-gram loading phase** in order to saturate them after about **three or four days**.

If you are not about to compete, and if you have not been using creatine, and you are not participating in a study, it takes about **three to four weeks of five grams a day consistently** to saturate your muscle. So you do not have to do any loading phase. If you are supplementing with **five grams a day** and you have been doing it for a month, your muscle stores are saturated until you exercise and you get that five grams in again. They are already saturated. That five grams a day is keeping them saturated. And that is why I said your muscles are really hungry and greedy. They are wanting that five grams. And that is about what it takes daily to saturate them.

However, if you are starting from ground zero, where you have never taken creatine, it is going to take **four weeks** to really get the effects. Otherwise, yes, you will have to get higher doses. They are not going to be saturated after **5 g**.

> So some people might have tried creatine for a week, have not felt any effect, and given up.

That is a really good point. It is about a **month-long experiment**. I would say close to **four weeks**. I think some people can saturate it at **three weeks**, but it all depends on body size and all that. So four weeks is a good experiment time, and **five grams** is a good dose to start with.

If five grams a day actually makes you more **bloated and nauseous**, cut that down to **2.5 grams** so that you split the doses. If you split the doses, and if you take it with food, particularly **carbohydrates**, it seems to help negate some of the bloating and nausea and negative effects people feel. And obviously, if you are not working out, creatine is not going to grow your muscles. You have to put in the work. You have to put in the effort. What it is doing is helping your muscles grow and giving you the energy to do more training volume so that they can grow bigger and also so that you can be stronger.

If you are traveling and stressed and all those things, yes, creatine is good for the brain.

#### Creatine gummies and regulation

I was seeing, I think it was **James Smith**, did a video about different creatine percentages in the creatine products we drink or eat or consume, and he looked at **creatine gummies** and found that some of the creatine gummies do not even have any creatine in them at all. That was quite shocking, because you just assume that if it says creatine, there is going to be creatine in there.

> This goes back to the whole problem where supplements are not regulated.

Exactly. You never really know what you are getting, and you have to have **third-party testing** and go to a **quality brand**. Gummies in general — there was a study published not long ago, a consumer study, where people went and got a lot of different creatine gummies off the shelf and then measured how much creatine was in them. Essentially, almost all of them had none.

I have talked to some supplement manufacturers, and their basic statement was that it is really hard to get active ingredients into a gummy in general, not even just creatine in general. But the other thing I did...

### Choosing Quality Supplements

When it comes to creatine, you do want to make sure it is **NSF certified**. That is a really important thing because there are contaminants that can even be produced in the processing of creatine and creatine monohydrate. You want to make sure that you are not getting those contaminants, because they can be harmful. Some of them are things like lead, for example, but also some other compounds that are formed. So you want NSF certification, and that is always what I look for when I am buying a creatine supplement, or any supplement. I really like to have all supplements NSF certified because that really means, first, they have looked at contaminants, and second, it has got that active ingredient in there, and that is really what you want.

> **Interviewer:** And the NSF certification is just a little logo on the side of the tub here that says NSF certified sports.

> **Expert:** That is it. Yeah. And it is all on websites too if you buy online.

> **Interviewer:** Okay. So, I have got one challenge for you. If you had to pick five supplements for me to take, assuming that I am male and female.

> **Expert:** Okay.

> **Interviewer:** Okay. So, it is neither gender. And it can be things that are either currently in my cupboard or not. What is the top five? And ideally, give me them in order if you can, in order of importance.

> **Expert:** Fish oil.

> **Interviewer:** Number one.

> **Expert:** Number one, vitamin D, multivitamin. All three very, very strong evidence that you are going to slow aging, you are going to improve your brain function, lower disease risk, live longer, and creatine is going to be there.

> **Interviewer:** So that is one, two, three, four.

> **Expert:** And then the last one is magnesium. Magnesium would be, I mean, it might be number four and creatine number five actually.

> **Interviewer:** Really?

> **Expert:** Yeah.

> **Interviewer:** Are you sure?

> **Expert:** What is magnesium doing for me? Magnesium is running. It is important for 300 different enzymes in your body. It is important to repair damage to your DNA that is being done all the time. It is being done from the iron that you are taking. It is being done from normal metabolism, normal immune activation, but when you are in a state where you have, you know, not eating a good diet or you are not getting enough sleep, magnesium is really important to repair that damage. And that is why studies have shown that magnesium is really important for preventing cancer. And it also helps with sleep. It is really good for sleep. But more importantly, 50% of the population does not get enough magnesium. And I bet you are probably one of those people because most of us are. Do you eat a lot of dark leafy greens or almonds? You are supposed to be getting 400, about 350 to 400 milligrams a day. Are you physically active?

> **Interviewer:** Yeah.

> **Expert:** You are sweating magnesium out. Let us make it six supplements. So, there is a new supplement, uriththn, that I am pretty excited about. The other thing I take that is really important is that I do not necessarily see here.

> **Interviewer:** What is it called?

> **Expert:** Curcumin. All those supplements

### Coffee and Ketone Product Mentions

Steve starts by returning to the studio and picking up from the previous point: “you've mentioned, the first one which I can't say and the second one cumin, we have on the table in the studio. So, let's get back into the studio and we'll pick up from there.”

> “Steve, what are you doing?”
>
> “Uh, just making myself a delicious coffee.”
>
> “From the freezer?”
>
> “From the freezer? Have you not heard about Compier?”
>
> “No.”
>
> “Oh my gosh, this is going to change your life.”

He explains that a couple of months ago, the founder of the business, Matt, sent a big shipment of the coffee to their office in London. He says most people do not know that the processing of coffee takes out a lot of the taste, so the company flash-freezes it at the optimal moment when it is most tasty and sends it in the post as little frozen ice cubes. Max sent a big shipment to his office, he moved it to the kitchen, and told the team, “Knock yourselves out.” Then he saw so many messages in the Slack channel from people saying, “Oh my god, what the hell is that? It's so delicious.”

He describes how all he has to do is pop it out in the morning using the little button on the back of the thing, pour in hot water, mix it, and it is done. He says you can get $30 off your first order of Cometier coffee if you go to `cometier.com/stephven`. He asks people to try it and to Instagram DM him and LinkedIn him to let him know if they love it as much as he does.

He then shifts to another product: every once in a while you come across something with such a huge impact on your life that you would probably describe it as a game changer. He says about 35 to 40 percent of his team would currently describe the product in front of him, called Ketone IQ, as a game changer. He says you can get it at `ketone.com`.

He explains why he became a co-owner of the company and why it is now a sponsor of the podcast: one day when he came to work, there was a box of the stuff on his desk, and he had no idea what it was. Lily on his team said the company had been in touch, so he went upstairs, tried it, and, quite frankly, the rest is history. He says it changed his focus, energy levels, how he feels, how he works, and how productive he is. He calls it a game changer.

He says that if you want to try it, visit `ketone.com/stephven` for 30% off, and you will also get a free gift with your second shipment. He adds that you can now find Keton IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge.

Finally, he says, “Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a”

### Curcumin, Urolithin A, and the Inner Circle

CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I’m launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I’m recording the conversation. We have clips we’ve never released. We have behind-the-scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we’ve never, ever released. And so much more.

In the circle, you’ll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we’re only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So, if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to `daccircle.com`. I will speak to you then.

#### Curcumin and inflammation

Phytoal curcumin is another one that I supplement with. And let’s just start with curcumin in general. Curcumin is found in the turmeric plant. It’s something that is able to pretty robustly and, I would say, consistently lower inflammation. And it’s doing it in a different way than an NSAID like ibuprofen would do it, right?

And that is important because it’s been shown that if you take NSAIDs, these non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, something like ibuprofen, around exercise, it can blunt the adaptations because it’s basically lowering inflammation and prostaglandins and things that are important to cause exercise adaptations. So curcumin doesn’t, hasn’t been shown to do that, but it has been shown to lower something called TNF alpha, and that is a major inflammatory cytokine that is really, really powerfully accelerating aging.

In fact, those epigenetic aging clocks that we talked about earlier, one of the most powerful drugs that’s able to slow them are TNF alpha inhibitors. So these are drugs that people take to inhibit TNF alpha. Certain people take them, like people with rheumatoid arthritis; they have a high level of inflammation. Their immune system is overactive. They’re making a lot of it. Well, guess what? Those individuals taking TNF alpha inhibitors are like they have a 50% less likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s disease than people.

> 50%.

> Mhm.

> Yes.

So I like it because curcumin is one of the most, it is the most naturally occurring dietary compound that I’ve seen data showing that it lowers TNF alpha. I haven’t seen anything else that’s naturally occurring that does it. This does it. It lowers it by quite a bit, by almost five pogs per milliliter.

Phytoal curcumin is the reason I take phytoal. It’s kind of like a liposome, but it’s phytome. So it’s essentially just making the ingredient get into the cells better. It’s more bioavailable because curcumin is easily metabolized quickly by the liver. It’s a xenobiotic. It’s not a compound that’s a vitamin or a mineral or something that the body normally recognizes. It’s seen as a drug, a foreign drug, a xenobiotic, right? And so the liver gets rid of it quickly. The phytoal delivery of it kind of slows that whole process where it’s not getting rid of so quickly. It’s not being metabolized so readily. So that’s why I take that. And also it’s been shown to improve performance in people that are exercising, again because it’s reducing inflammation. Inflammation can be dampening for performance.

#### Urolithin A

And what else have we got here? The other supplement that I really want to talk about is the urolithin A. And as I mentioned, this is a compound that’s usually generated in the gut by the bacteria in your gut. It’s something that we can get from our diet. So if we eat things like pomegranate, pomegranate has a type of polyphenol in it called ellagitannins.

> I’ve never heard about this before.

> Okay, listen to this. This is, this is like, you got to try this supplement. Urolithin A, again, it’s made from eating things like pomegranate. However, 50% of the population doesn’t have the right bacteria to make it. So you’re kind of like a coin toss if you eat pomegranate: am I going to be the person that can make urolithin A or am I not? Right?

So there was a company that did, out of Switzerland, these studies. A lot of these early studies were done in Switzerland, and they ended up making urolithin A and then testing you know doing

### How Urolithin A Supports Mitochondria

Clinical studies, animal studies first and then clinical studies, were done to test what urolithin A is doing. So what is it? It is a compound that is able to basically get rid of damaged mitochondria. That is called **mitophagy**. You have probably heard of autophagy, the process of getting rid of all the gunk and the trash from your cells, making them rejuvenating, rejuvenating them, right?

> Fasting activates autophagy.

Fasting activates autophagy. Fasting activates mitophagy, which is specifically just clearing out damaged mitochondria or pieces of damaged mitochondria. Autophagy is essentially: you have a whole cell, and within that cell you have a lot of different organelles, they are called. Mitochondria is one of them, and autophagy helps clear out all the stuff inside of the cell. Mitophagy is very specific to just the mitochondria within the cell. Those mitochondria get older and they do not have a really good repair process, so they accumulate damage. As they get older, you are not going to be making energy as well. You are not going to be using energy as well. It is going to affect all the cell function because energy is at the core of everything, right? So mitochondrial health is at the core of all health, basically.

This compound very robustly induces mitophagy. There have been many animal studies done preclinically before clinical studies were done. The animal studies were exciting. Old mice that were given urolithin A were able to rejuvenate tissues, and 20% life extension was found in these mice given urolithin. Twenty percent is pretty big for a mouse study. All right, but we are not mice, so let us talk about humans and why I am actually excited about it.

For one, urolithin A and mitophagy were shown to be activated in humans taking it. They took muscle biopsies and found that, in fact, mitophagy was activated. It has also recently been shown that this urolithin A is able to basically rejuvenate the immune system. Older adults were given 1,000 milligrams a day, and as we age our immune system ages, our T cells are not fighting off pathogens as well. The study increased the number of a very specific type of immune cell that decreases with age called CD8 positive T cells. Those were increased. That is very important because you are able to fight off infection better. And then it also increased a kind of immune cell that is able to kill cancer cells and also kill viruses and pathogens. It is called natural killer cells. Those cells increased as well with the urolithin A, and it also decreased markers of like senescence. This is basically when a cell is still alive but it is not functioning. It is basically like it is dead, but not only is it not dead and not functioning, it is secreting inflammatory cytokines, accelerating aging. I know it is complicated. So the study showed that it was basically able to rejuvenate the immune system in older adults.

Younger adults that have taken it, there have been studies showing that untrained athletes supplementing with 1,000 milligrams a day were able to improve their VO2 max 10% more than just exercise alone. If they exercised and took urolithin A, their VO2 max went up 10% compared to the exercise-only group.

> If they were trained athletes, it only went up 5% because trained athletes already are doing a lot, right?

So you always get a bigger increase in VO2 max if you have an untrained athlete. Same with obese people. And on top of that, again, energy: you are clearing out damaged mitochondria. If you combine it with exercise, exercise causes you to make new mitochondria. So the way I look at it, Stephen, is a rejuvenation of all your mitochondria within your cells, whether we are talking about your muscle cells or your immune cells. I think it is probably happening in the brain as well.

It has been shown to increase muscle strength in older adults. Their hamstring strength improved by like 10% to 12% after supplementing versus just exercise alone. I think it is a supplement that is important for aging because it is affecting mitochondria, and pretty much everything relies on mitochondria.

> And you can buy this in a normal shop on the high street.

You cannot buy it in a normal shop. You can buy it online. It is not cheap, unfortunately. That is the other thing. So pomegranate itself is the next best thing for people. There are studies showing that people who take pomegranate juice before they exercise, and over the course of several weeks, can actually increase their VO2 max by up to 17%. This is analysis of multiple studies showing that. So again I think it is all coming down to the urolithin A, and it is a new supplement that I have been experimenting with. Again, the immune system effects. I think I am not getting sick, but I am doing the creatine, I am doing the urolithin A, and I am doing glutamine.

#### Glutamine and the immune system

Glutamine is the last one. What is that? Well, you probably heard of glutamine as an amino acid, right? It is so much more. It is so much more. So glutamine is something that, yes, it is an amino acid, but it gets converted into and metabolized into many different things. One, it can be an amino acid. Two, it can form something called glutarate, which is used by your cells for energy. Mitochondria love it. Or it can be converted into that neurotransmitter that we were talking about, right? Glutamate. So it is really something that can be used for many things.

I supplement with it because I came across some studies in the past couple of years where endurance athletes, and I am not an endurance athlete, but endurance athletes are very prone to respiratory illness because they are really just going hard, right? And their immune system kind of takes attacks on your immune system. Studies were showing that if those endurance athletes supplemented with glutamine, they did not get sick as often. They were having fewer respiratory illnesses. And I remembered back to when I was a graduate student and I was doing research and I used glutamine. I was doing glucose and glutamine and looking at immune cells and how I could make them active or what happens if I get rid of glucose or glutamine. And I remembered how much they love glutamine. They consume it. They are using it for energy.

And it started to make sense to me. This was during a period of time where, again, mid-40s, your immune system is not going as well as it used to. I had a young child that was bringing home all sorts of pathogens. And so I started supplementing with glutamine. It could be placebo, but again, the sickness bouts were going down. I was not getting sick as often.

The other thing it is good for is the gut. That is because glutamine can be converted into something called alpha-ketoglutarate, which is an important energy compound that the gut uses. There are studies showing that it is beneficial for gut health. I think that is what a lot of people think about when they take glutamine: their gut. I am thinking about my immune system. But

### Exogenous Ketones and Gut Support

basically it is very easily used by the gut cells as energy, and that really helps the gut heal.

#### Exogenous ketone shots

> **Okay.** The other thing which I take almost daily. Sometimes I give myself the weekend off depending on how things are going, but almost daily are these *Ketone IQ* shots, which I am affiliated with. I am an investor in the company. Ketone shots, exogenous ketone shots.

> **I take them also quite frequently, not daily.** So what are they doing? There are different forms of them, and why do I take them? And I think let’s talk about what I think people should realize if they are taking them.

So it is essentially giving you that metabolic switch, right? It is getting your ketone levels up as if you were fasted. You are elevating your beta hydroxybutyrate levels. That is the major circulating ketone.

> **Beta hydroxybutyrate,**

> **BHB for short.**

> **Does that just mean ketone?**

It is a ketone. There are several ketones. Acetone is another ketone, but beta hydroxybutyrate is the major one, right? That is the major ketone that is in your body when you are fasted. That is what you are making. And when you are taking these *Ketone IQs* or other exogenous ketones, that is what you are going to get.

So *Ketone IQ* has the precursor for the ketone. It has **1,3 butanediol**, which in your liver gets converted into beta hydroxybutyrate. I take a ketone that has 1,3 butanediol, but also it is esterified to the actual beta hydroxybutyrate.

> **What does that mean?** It means that it has both an immediate action, a fast-acting effect of having your ketones elevated, but it also has a tail-end effect. So the 1,3 butanediol, if you take it, you have to wait for it to get to your liver.

> **You have to— can I have one?**

> **Yes. You have to wait.**

> **Oh, perfect. Okay.**

> **Wow, those taste better.**

So the other exogenous ketone is the beta hydroxybutyrate esterified to the 1,3 butanediol, which just means it is going to have a fast-acting effect but also a long-term effect. You will get a little bit more elevation in your blood ketones from the one that has the beta hydroxybutyrate to the 1,3 butanediol.

That said, the difference is, I think, from what I know, and I do not know a ton, pricing.

> **Yes, it is pricing, but also again concentration.** So, I mean, you are going to get a higher peak quicker and you are going to get higher levels of it with the one that is the Oxford, you know, the Oxford ketone, I guess it is called, but the *Ketone IQ* has 1,3 butanediol, which does get converted into beta hydroxybutyrate.

> **This one I think costs a couple of dollars. And I have the Oxford one here as well, which I think is $30 a pop. So it is quite expensive.** The reason why this has been able to

### Why Ketones Boost Focus

Break into retail, especially across America, is just because it is more affordable for most people to be able to take spend a couple of dollars, right?

The reason I take it is because I like the cognitive boost that I get from it. And I usually take it on occasions like this when I'm doing a show or I'm doing a presentation or I'm doing a lot of heavy research and I just need to be on because I get a cognitive boost from it. And that cognitive boost does come down to what I was talking about with why I like to fast. It's mimicking that, right? I have that beta hydroxybutyrate which is increasing GABA, that inhibitory neurotransmitter that's silencing down some of the anxiety in the back of the brain or the chatter and just helping me focus. And also it increases brain drive neurotrphic factor.

So beta hydroxybutyrate is a signaling molecule. It's able to increase brain drive of neurotrophic factor in the brain that helps with learning, memory, brain aging. It's also been shown to lower oxidation. So, there's all sorts of reasons why I like to take it. For people that are fasting and they're wanting to burn fat, consider that if you take exogenous ketones, you stop you stop burning your own fat because your body thinks it's now got all it's got the ketones there, which is what the metabolism of fat is trying to do is produce ketones for energy. And so, it does shut down what's called lipolysis, which is basically breaking down fat. And so if you're doing fasting and you're doing it for reasons of fat loss, if you take an exogenous ketone during that period of time, it will transiently kind of shut down that process. So keep that in mind. It's one reason why I don't do it every day because I am looking for that effect for losing visceral fat in particular.

> That's a really interesting important point.

> It is

> that people don't talk about.

> Yeah, it's important and it's only going to last as long as the beta hydroxybutyrate lasts in your blood system. So, you know, maybe 3 hours max.

What I noticed was when I was trying to get into ketosis at the top of the year and I was doing exogenous ketone shots, I was struggling to get into ketosis. And so, what I did is I stopped taking the ketone shots for a couple of days, just focused on my ketogenic diet. I got into ketosis and then afterwards I started taking the ketone shots when I was doing podcasting because just like you, I noticed just such a radical radical difference when I take exogenous ketones or when I'm in a natural sort of dietary ketosis. Radical difference.

And as a podcaster, I've said this a million times before, but I'm going to say it again. Two times a week, I do an AB test of how my brain is working. I sit with someone who is an expert in what they do for sometimes four or five hours and I look at them in their face and I have to ask questions and respond and understand big words and hope that my brain is connected to my mouth today. And so I've done 600 or 700 of these AB tests now. And one of the factors that correlates to good performance as an interviewer, a thinker or a speaker on stage is whether I'm in a ketosis state or not. And it's so profound. In fact, I've actually heard Joe Rogan say this. Rogan said that the upside he gets from being in a ketogenic state is so evident for him as an interviewer that he's considered being in that state all the time.

> It's the same for me too. I mean, as you know, I'm also doing the same thing, right? I'm I have a podcast and I'm giving presentations and very very much having to use my brain and be on and it's really made a huge difference for me as well. And that is also why I like to fast because I get the same effect when I'm when I'm fasted. And then I will take an exogenous ketone when I'm also fasted. And so I get into ketosis quicker as well

> because I'm already I'm already kind of there. I don't have other things inhibiting it.

> So it does help. And there's again pros

### From Lifespan to Health Span

#### From lifespan to health span

Let's start with **lifespan** and work our way to **peak span** to give people a frame of reference. Most people are familiar with the word *longevity* — wanting to extend their lifespan, how many years they live, how long they live.

The problem with lifespan is that, yes, you could live longer, but you might also have diseases. Why do you want to live longer if you have Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease, or type two diabetes? Your quality of life is not as good. That is where the idea of **health span** came in.

Health span means increasing the amount of time we live disease-free. That is the new thing that everyone wants to increase and improve: *I want to live longer and not have any diseases while I am living that longer life.*

#### The idea of peak span

Now there is this new concept, very new, from researchers out of Duke University, as well as, I think, some university in China and another university. I want to give them credit. It is still a pre-print study, but it came out on my radar and I immediately loved it. This is the idea of **peak span**.

Peak span says, yes, health span is great, and being disease-free is great, but you are still in a period of decline. You are still declining. Why not try to be as close to your *peak span* as possible?

Peak span is essentially being within **90% of your peak function** for a certain measurement, whether we are talking about **V2 max**, cardiorespiratory fitness, or any other function. That is where this graph comes in: on the y-axis we have our relative capacity, with 100 being 100% and zero being 0%.

### How Different Body Systems Peak

#### Relative capacity across the lifespan

> "What does relative capacity mean?"

It means your capacity for cognitive function, for fertility, for hormones, for your potential.

> "And on the x-axis we're talking about age, right?"

Yes. And what you notice is that different capacities, different organ functions, peak at different rates.

So we can talk about female reproductive function first. It really starts to peak at about 25, and then it sharply declines until you hit 40, right? It is like:

> b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b bmed out.

That is the reproductive female curve.

#### Immune, muscle, and bone decline

Immune function kind of peaks around 25 years old as well, and it also declines, keeping on declining as you get to 80.

> "It's quite scary"

Then there is musculoskeletal function, which is our peak strength, peak muscle mass, and peak bone density. Those also peak around 25 and then steadily start to decline.

The same goes for cognitive function. There are two different kinds of cognitive function.

#### Fluid and crystallized cognition

There is fluid cognitive function, like processing speed. That is the kind of cognitive function where you can answer a question without any prior knowledge.

That peaks around 25.

> "You're joking."

No, I know.

> "So I'm on the way down."

You're on the way down. I'm definitely on the way down. You're on the way down as well. That would be the blue one here, peaking around 25.

Then there is crystallized cognitive function. Crystallized cognitive function is interesting because it peaks around midlife. The reason it peaks around 40, 45 is that it is the kind of intelligence that is like a library, where you have all these facts you have accumulated over the years and you are able to use those facts to answer or solve a problem.

> "Is that wisdom or is that"

It really just means that you have all these facts that you've learned over your life. For me, I have been a biologist since I was 20, so 27 years. I have so much that I have learned over that time. So now I am sitting here and I use that knowledge. I talked about glutamine, what I learned from graduate school. I am using that knowledge. Mphagy, I learned about that forever ago and I have been following it. So you use all these facts and this data that you have learned in your life and you are able to solve problems. Fluid intelligence, I am sorry, crystallized intelligence.

> "I've got to ask a question there. I I we were sat having dinner the other day, me and my team, and we were talking about the difference cuz we're all different"

### How to Preserve Peak Performance

Ages. We’ve got someone in the team who’s 45, 35, 30, and then the other person at the table was 27. And we were all talking about the differences we’ve noticed in ourselves as we’ve aged, and they all said different things.

Leona, on my team, who is just above the age of 40, was saying that she just doesn’t really give a anymore in the same way that she used to care about people’s opinions when she was 30. One of the things I said I noticed about myself was that after I turned 30, I feel like I saw a step change in pattern recognition and, exactly like you’ve just described there, crystallized knowledge. Because I sit here with experts all day, learn all this stuff from them, and then my ability to apply it in my life as an entrepreneur seems to be improving.

So the question I was really going to ask you is: when is the best age? Because you think about entrepreneurship a lot, and a lot of my audience are entrepreneurs in some capacity or aspire to be. I was wondering, as you were saying that, when is the best age? Entrepreneurship is a lot about pattern recognition. It’s a problem in front of you: okay, I’ve seen this before, I’m pulling on different reference points to arrive at a solution. So I was wondering, because it looks like it peaks at like 45.

> 45.

So if we look at it, it’s peaking at 45. And that’s also why a lot of biologists continue to do great work in their midlife as well. And that is something that I do feel like is better for me as well. You know, where I’m now able to pull on... I have so much of a database in the back of my head, you know, where it’s like I’ve got all this knowledge and then it comes up and you can use it.

And so it’s interesting, you can talk about entrepreneurs, but you can, I mean, any sort of career path, right? It would be beneficial to be able to do that. So the question is then: how do we get here? This peak span, you’re going up, and what you want to do is you want to get and maintain about 90% of all these things that we’re talking about peaking, right?

Immune aging peaks at, you know, immune aging actually peaks around adolescence, I think. Musculoskeletal health, 20 to 25. Fluid intelligence, 20 to 25. Cardiorespiratory fitness, that’s also 20 to 25, it peaks and then it goes down. The question is: how do you maintain your peak span? How do you get as close as you can? You’re obviously not going to be 100%, but how do you not drop below 90% of that peak, right?

> Is that possible?

Is it, first of all, possible? And I would say for some organs, no. Which organs are those? I don’t think reproductive life expectancy for a female — I don’t think you’re going to be having babies at 80 years old without actual medical intervention, but that’s a whole other conversation.

So I do think there are ways that we can get really close to our peak for cardiorespiratory, for musculoskeletal, for our intelligence, cognitive intelligence, as well as our immune system. And I think there are blanket things that we could do that affect multiple systems, right? And there are also targeted things. So we’re talking about fluid versus crystallized intelligence, right? Obviously, crystallized intelligence doesn’t peak until the mid-40s.

The things that you can do to improve crystallized intelligence also improve your fluid intelligence. What are those things? One: exercise. The number one thing. Aerobic exercise is increasing brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Very important for both these aspects. It’s also growing new neurons, making connections between the neurons, making your brain more plastic and adaptable so it adapts to the changing environment. Top thing that you can do.

Another thing that you can do that’s really important for brain aging is the omega-3. We talked about that. Really important for brain aging. But the other thing that you can do is what we’re doing right now: engaging in novel cognitive experiences. It could be a discussion. It could be your work. If you are learning new things, novel is key here. Novel. If you’re learning new things, you are going to really help yourself improve both your fluid and crystallized intelligence.

> Is that because you’re raising your potential? i.e. so you’re falling from a higher place as you decline? Because I was thinking about this, like how much of this has got to do with making sure that I peak at a higher place.

Right, yeah. I mean, I think that maybe has something to do with it, but in addition there’s neurochemical things that are changing when you’re learning new experiences. For one, you are increasing brain-derived neurotrophic factor and stuff as well because novelty does that. You’re also glutamate, and you’re having glutamate being activated as well. But yeah, I think the cognitive reserve is what you’re talking about, and that is really important, right? Because you need to have that reserve if you’re going to start pulling from it.

And that also comes with muscle health, right? Muscle and bone. So those are peaking around the same times, 25 or so. Peak muscle mass generally occurs around the age of 25. There are things that you can do to keep close to that peak, though, right? And that would be resistance training. Big, big one. Strength training. Strength goes down. This is something — protein intake, right?

> Avoid the black plastics in my fridge.

Avoid the black plastics in your fridge. Yeah.

> Because then my testosterone is going to go down.

Testosterone is going to go down, and that’s going to affect your ability to gain muscle mass. Exactly. A lot of these healthy lifestyles that we’re talking about are multi-system targeting, right? So you’re targeting, but the key would be strength training and resistance training. And it’s going to also affect your bones. So you’re going to want to do these weight-bearing exercises that are multi-joint, the compound lifts, right? The deadlifts, rows, things like that. Those are very important to help maintain that peak.

Immune system: sleep. Very, very important for maintaining a healthy immune system and preventing your immune system from aging rapidly. So making sure you’re prioritizing sleep. How are you going to do that, right? I mean, there are a lot of ways. A lot of people have sleep problems, and they have sleep problems for different reasons, and there are ways to target them. But just realize thinking about it and prioritizing it is important for your immune system and for your brain.

Also, exercise plays a role in your cardiorespiratory fitness, the brain, everything, muscle. So cardiorespiratory fitness is something that you, we talked about urolithin helping improve it on top of exercise. So there are supplements and stuff that you add in as well. But this idea here is really that we can do things in our life that are healthy to help maintain that peak span to get us...

### AI, Exercise, and Cognitive Decline

Not just free of disease, but close to what we were being. And I do think it's possible. I mean, we talked last time I was here, we talked about that study: you exercise 5 hours a week, do some high-intensity interval training in there, and you can reverse heart aging by 20 years. That's incredible.

> **Speaker:** It's so crazy.

And you're also saying that listening to *The Diary of a CEO* obviously is therefore good for—

> **Speaker:** Yeah. It's good for cognitive, your fluid intelligence and your crystallized intelligence. It's good for learning new things, right? I mean, that's—

So, you would prescribe it.

> **Speaker:** Yeah.

Yeah. Especially the episodes I'm on. No, I say that as a joke, but actually it's part of the conversation we had the other day at dinner was I don't think I'm going to appreciate maybe until later in my life how much an unintended consequence of doing this as a job had on my cognition and my brain. And it's not something that I would notice, you know, in the moment, but over time, you know, doing this two times a week, for sometimes eight hours a week, learning something new, being forced is a strong word, but having an obligation to learn something new for eight hours a week for my entire adult life.

> **Speaker:** It's great. I mean, it's one of the best things that you can do for your brain. That's why learning a new language is associated with a rapid, you know, decrease in Alzheimer's disease risk.

You're working your brain. You're learning new things. It's one of the worst things that someone can do is retire

and just sit and watch TV, right? I mean, that's like the worst thing. You're gonna, you're rapidly going to decline and get dementia.

We've got to talk about AI in this conversation.

> **Speaker:** Oh my gosh.

Because I actually woke up this morning and I got a message. Look, I'll check with him that I can put this in before I say it out before it's published. But I got a message from my chairman, Nikki. Nikki is an incredible man. He's, you know, 25 years bossing consulting group. He's seen it all. And he said to me that one of the things he's thinking a lot about at the moment is how across our businesses, but just generally in society, how AI is going to impact critical thinking and what that then might mean for our teams, our executives, etc. So, this is a conversation I was having this morning with him. And it's also something I've noticed. There are certain people I interact with now where I do not feel at all like I'm dealing with their brain. I feel like I'm dealing with what came out the other end of a ChatGPT prompt.

> **Speaker:** Good, bad, and different. Like I don't, you know.

Yeah. It's an interesting and important question, Stephen, because I've been thinking a lot about what with AI, it's changing so much. And the question is like, do you focus on the negative parts and the short-term parts? Do you focus on the potential benefits that could be great and grand? And I do think a lot of it is people are worried about things like, oh, AI is going to take all of our jobs. Oh, we're going to have brain rot because we don't use our brains anymore. And those are concerns to have, but there's also a lot of exciting things to think about. I also worry about the brain rot part where it's like, well, okay, these people aren't critically thinking for themselves. I've seen comment. I can spot AI a million miles away, a million miles away, right? And part of it is if AI is accurate and people are more easily accessing the inaccurate information and they're learning it, that's great. Like that's what it's supposed to be there for, right?

> **Speaker:** I think that's a big if, right?

If, right, if. And it does have a lot to do with the version of AI you're using. It has a lot to do with the prompt. It has a lot to do with the question, how much reasoning it has to do. I mean, we're still evolving, but I agree. It's kind of like the worry is: are we going to—

### Building Cognitive Reserve in an AI World

have a generation of people growing up that don't know how to critically think.

> "You've heard about that London taxi driver test experiment. I think I've heard you talk about it before, actually."

> "Yeah. I mean, well, they have these maps in their heads, right? And you have these taxi drivers in London that they don't use GPS. They know everywhere to go. By the way, I was in London a couple of years ago. I love the taxi drivers there. They are so awesome. They are just different. They're totally different than..."

> "For anyone that doesn't know, I'm absolutely going to butcher this. To become a London taxi driver, you have to take a test for many, many years. You have to learn for many, many years, and you have to learn every street across London from the top of your head without using GPS."

> "So that's incredible."

> "So yeah, when you get in a black cab in London, it's amazing. You can go, I kind of want to go to... and they go, got you. They know everywhere. They have maps in their brain. I mean, think about the cognitive reserve they have. Think about all the things they learned and the spatial memory and all that. And do these guys ever get Alzheimer's disease? I don't know that they do. I mean, there's studies out there showing that these types of taxi drivers do not get Alzheimer's disease."

> "They have to learn 25,000 streets and it's called the knowledge and they have physically larger hippocampus centers in their brain, which is the memory center. And I like to extrapolate if I may and think that all this cognitive learning that I do daily and that you're doing by talking to guests from all sorts of fields is also very... I mean, you're learning things. It's not just going... you're interested in things and you're learning them and it really is also a type of brain exercise. And so I think that this is ultimately what we were getting to is basically we're gonna talk about AI because I know we got to get there but is essentially like if you can engage in intellectual types of activities or anything that's going to exercise your brain whether it's learning the map of London or it's learning about mphagy whatever it is you know it's really good to engage in that novel learning it's really good for your brain it's working your brain out"

I've been thinking a lot about this. I've just come back from South by Southwest and every conversation was about bloody AI. I was there too.

I really, they were asking me a lot about AI. So before I went on stage I was looking at some of the studies and I concluded that at the moment we are in society there's going to be a bit of a bifurcation of people. One group is going to take the path of least resistance with AI, which is they're going to defer their thinking to AI, which is, you know, one of the things I learned from people like you often is that if you don't use it you lose it and that part of their brain, whatever it is, will begin to atrophy to some extent. And I think there'll be another group of people who will just, like we go to the gym now because we have to because our lives are so easy. They will go to the mental gym, which means they will set aside time to intentionally solve difficult cognitive problems or challenges.

And I've literally said to some of my executives, we'll have a moment where we're talking on WhatsApp or Slack and I'll literally say, let's try and solve this problem with our brains because I believe that solving this problem with our brains will create a deeper understanding of the first principles of the problem. Not the just surface level 1 plus 1 equals 2, but what is one?

> "What is a number?"

And this is the difference: AI can give you the answer, but it's not going to give you the foundation so that you can solve other problems in the future. Because if I never told you what the number one was, you would never in the future be able to use it yourself. All you would know is 1 plus 1 equals 2. But there's foundations like what are numbers, what is 1, what is 2, what is plus that you need to understand to be able to do 1 + 2 equals 3.

And the study, one of the studies I looked at which has been heavily discussed was from last year, I found staggering memory cost using generative AI. In this study, which I'll throw up on the screen, 83% of AI users were unable to remember the details of a passage of text that they had written with AI's assistance. EEG scans showed that brain connectivity was almost halved when individuals outsourced their thinking to AI compared to writing manually, which created cognitive debt. You get output faster, but you don't build the long-term neural hardware to understand the information or the knowledge.

> "So true. It's so true. You know what's interesting about what you just said is the when you're writing something, whether you're typing it or even actually the most I think there's been some studies on this like handwriting something, something about handwriting it really ingrains it into your memory. And I have this process when I'm trying to there's a lot of facts that I have to remember, you know, when I'm talking about them. And I have this process that I do. And the first one is the research, right? you research it and you find it and then I type it in a Google doc and then I write it and that process is really what gets it into my memory all the statistics and, you know, think statistics are always harder because it's just a number, you know, versus like you're saying you're understanding the fundamental nature of something that I'm interested in that always helps and so it's interesting that if you're writing something if you're writing it like typing it or writing it, handwriting, they're probably talking about typing it. Even that really does help you remember something. If you're just copying it and then trying to do some recall, it's not going to work. And then there's the whole other layer that you were talking about, which is like you're not even using the novelty isn't there. You're not really into it and learning. And that's what it really takes to build that cognitive reserve to improve the connections to increase brain derived neurotrophic factor, right? You need that novelty. So I do love AI, but I also know that I need to continue using my brain and I have my own protocols that I like and that I still do. I still write things down. I have a, you know, I have my little notebook and I when before I go on a podcast too, I like to go through and write stuff down that I've already typed that I've learned and things I wanted to cover. It really makes a difference in memory. So for people that are like you and I and"

### Exercise, Writing, and Better Learning

learners and optimizers, I keep take take that pointer because it really does work.

> This was one of my favorite things with the iPad. Listen, I'm not the type of person that does a huge amount of writing on pen and paper. Although I would do more because everything you've said is proven to be true for me. If I write something down, it's like I'm writing it directly into my brain,

> right?

> But the iPad now allows you to split what you're reading in terms of a book on one side and then a notepad on the other. So what I do when I read is I read the thing and then I try and write out the lesson on the other side of the page. So I'll say the gut microbiome has 42 trillion bucks. And I'll go the gut microbiome has 42 million bucks. I love it. I love it.

> And then I turn the page and I I'm so I'm trying to do exactly what you said because I realized that a lot of stuff I learned doesn't land unless

> right

> I write it out myself.

It's something about the act of writing, and if you add the layer of what I do, it takes time, you know, so you have to type it and then write, then it really sticks in your brain. Those are the ones, when I've done those, are the ones that really have stuck if I've done them both. But I love that I don't use iPads ever and I still read books, you know, old books, and when I have time to do them I just have my notebook.

> I think it shows though you, you, you have an unbelievable ability to remember so many things.

But I still love AI, you know, I still think there's a lot of benefits, and I think that scientists in general are using AI as their collaborator, right? They're a pretty smart collaborator that has access to a lot of data and can analyze a lot of data quickly.

What are your thoughts on exercise and the current suggestions and recommendations around exercise?

Well, I'm glad you asked this question. I think I've been thinking about this a lot. I did a podcast on the current exercise guidelines, and I think they need to be updated. I think they're not good enough. And it's important for people to realize how these extra exercise guidelines were formulated and what they mean.

So typically you'll hear exercise guidelines: 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate-intensity exercise is good for optimal health, or 75 minutes to 150 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity exercise. Right? So they're basically a 2:1 ratio, right? Twice as many minutes for moderate intensity as vigorous intensity.

What is defined as moderate versus vigorous? That's also important because it's different across different studies. In these guidelines, moderate intensity is basically walking. You're moving with intent, but not really, really fast. You're walking. You're walking at maybe a fast pace, but you're not jogging, you're not running. That kind of activity would be considered moderate. Vigorous would be considered jogging, running, swimming, cycling. So the kind of activity where you're actually moving fast with intent.

Why do we have this 2:1 ratio? Where did it come from? Well, it all came from energy expenditure. You burn twice as many calories if you're doing vigorous-intensity exercise as you do if you're doing moderate-intensity. Right? So if you're walking one mile, you'll burn x amount of calories. If you jog that mile, you'll burn twice as many calories. That's where these guidelines came from, the 2:1 ratio, right? Weight loss, energy expenditure, but that's not necessarily what's important for reducing cancer mortality, reducing cardiovascular-related mortality, reducing all-cause mortality. Right?

These guidelines used that data, this 2:1 ratio of energy expenditure, and then they looked at other studies and said, okay, how much exercise is required to reduce cardiovascular-related mortality or all-cause mortality? And they kind of connected the dots. By the way, these studies also were using questionnaires. They weren't actually measuring how active people were.

A new study came out, and I did a journal club podcast on it because it was a study that I felt was so important that we wanted—I wanted—to break down all the components of the study with another scientist and talk about them because it's very important. So journal clubs, typically in science, you have them. In my career, it was sometimes once a week, other times once a month, and someone— you choose a study that's important and you break it down and you talk about the results and you talk about the methods and you talk about what the findings mean. That's what a journal club is. And it's essentially you choose a journal and a publication within that journal, and it's a club: you have different scientists talking about it.

> Why did this warrant a journal club?

Because I think this study basically is strong enough data that it's implying we need to change our exercise guidelines, at least the messaging of them, at the very least. And I'll tell you why. Because I talked about these guidelines, how they're formulated. They're using questionnaires. They're not measuring anything. Well, a new study came out. Not only did it measure physical activity through these accelerometers, it was able to measure how active people were and the type of activity, whether it was—I mentioned moderate versus vigorous—they also measured light physical activity, that would be considered walking around your house, kind of doing that kind of light activity, not necessarily going for a

### Why Vigorous Exercise Matters Most

walk or going for a run. And they looked at deaths from different causes of disease. They looked at deaths from all causes. So all-cause mortality, they looked at cancer-related deaths, cardiovascular-related deaths, type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, right? And what was so profound was that what we found, what they found, and what we now know is that everything changes in terms of how important vigorous-intensity exercise is. It's so much more valuable than we thought.

It's not 2 to 1. So if we're looking at all-cause mortality — dying from all causes, cancer, respiratory, anything related that is not accidental — for every one minute of vigorous-intensity exercise, you had to do 4 minutes of moderate intensity, and you had to do like 100 to 150 minutes of light exercise to get the same reduction in all-cause mortality.

> For every one minute,

For every one minute of vigorous-intensity exercise, it gets better. For every one minute of vigorous-intensity exercise to reduce your death from cardiovascular disease, you had to do 8 minutes of moderate intensity and 200 minutes of light exercise. For every one minute of vigorous-intensity exercise, it's huge, to reduce your type 2 diabetes risks, you had to do 10 minutes of moderate intensity, or you had to do again, you're in the 100, 150 minutes to 200 minutes of light exercise to reduce your risk of dying from cancer. For every one minute of vigorous-intensity exercise, you had to do about 4 minutes of moderate intensity, and for light, it was almost not even happening. It was like 250, 300. You had to do just a ton of minutes. Unbelievable amount of minutes.

But the value of vigorous-intensity exercise is so much more than this 2:1 ratio based on energy expenditure, based on burning calories, that our guidelines were based on. It's time to rethink them. It's time to tell people, hey, if you're getting out and you're going for a run, it is worth way more than you think it is in terms of reducing your disease risk and your death from that disease.

Also, what was really interesting about this study, and this goes back to these exercise snacks that we talked about before last episode, is that because the participants were wearing these accelerometers on their wrist, they were able to measure all physical activity. Let's say you have a new puppy and you're sprinting in the yard and playing with them for a minute or two minutes or three minutes or whatever. Not 30 minutes in the gym, right? Or not 30 minutes on the treadmill, but you're just a short burst, or you're playing with your grandkids or your kids and you're playing tag, whatever. Those moments count. They really add up. And that is also a take-home from this study and other studies, is that you can actually get massive benefits from the sprinting, the vigorous exercise. One minute, two minute, three minutes.

Women that did 3.5 minutes of just these vigorous types of exercise per day lowered their cancer risk by 40%. Yes, 3.5 minutes a day. This was in women. Now there's bigger studies showing men and women that exercise 9 minutes a day, the short vigorous types of exercise adding up — not 9 minutes altogether, but like a minute here, a minute there, a minute here, right? — it adds up: 40% lower cancer-related mortality, 50% lower cardiovascular-related mortality. And that's another big take-home from this study that I really want people to know about, because some people don't like spending 30 minutes or blocking out a 30-minute time or an hour-long time to go to the gym. They should. I mean, if they want their peak span, that's what you're going to have to do. But if you're just wanting to avoid disease and be your health span, you can get that by doing these short moments, these short bursts of physical activity, and those count. And some people are like, "Oh, thank God. Thank God I can do that because I hate going to the gym." They'll just won't do it. They won't do it.

> A lot of people as well are caught up with this 10,000 steps a day thing.

Yes. 10,000 steps a day.

> What's that facial reaction for people that can't see your face? She looked up into the corner like I personally offended her.

Yeah. Any exercise is better than none. I want to just get that on the table. That's important. I don't want to totally diss the 10,000 steps a day, but I think that we need to ditch it. I think we need to ditch 10,000 steps a day and say 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day of getting your heart rate up. You can do bodyweight squats. You can play tag with your kids or your grandkids. You can do shorter bursts of it, but it needs to be 10 minutes. And if you get to that 10 minutes a day, 50% lower cardiovascular-related mortality, 50% lower all-cause mortality, 40% lower cancer mortality. That is what you're going to get. 10,000 steps a day is not going to get you that. We just talked about it. It's not going to get you that, right? It's a different ratio. It's not a 2:1 ratio.

> I imagine there's people thinking you use three terms there. Vigorous, moderate, and light. We probably need to quite clearly define those definitions, like what is vigorous,

Right?

Heart rate is it or...

Vigorous-intensity exercise can be heart rate, and it is heart rate. In a lot of studies that are done in terms of the exercise guidelines, they don't use heart rate. They're using movement. Like when I say accelerometer, I mean moving fast. So they're able to measure the acceleration of your movement. And so the way that they're talking about it in these exercise-guidelines studies is moving fast. Moving fast would be jogging, running, swimming, biking. You're moving even...

> Stepper.

Stepper would be moving fast. Even weights are moving fast. That's part of it too. Weights you're doing... you're doing weights...

> Weight...

Because they're on your wrist. And so if you're doing bicep curls or you're doing something with your wrists that are fast, it's part of that equation as well.

Heart rate isn't the thing that we're measuring, but that's a consequence of moving fast. Typically, it is.

> So you want to be thinking about getting your heart rate.

Personally, when I think about it, and if I'm talking about in the context of these exercise guidelines, I would say that vigorous would be probably considered 70% or more of your max heart rate. Previously, when I'm talking about vigorous, I also talk about high-intensity interval training, and that's more like 80% of your max heart rate or higher, very important for improving V2 max and cardiorespiratory fitness, but in these studies heart rate was more like 70% of your max heart rate.

### Sedentary Time and Exercise Snacks

#### Light, moderate, and vigorous activity

Rate and more, because that’s you can be jogging at that rate, right? Jogging or running, that’s a big—that’s vigorous intensity exercise. If you’re below that, if you’re like, you know, 50% your max heart rate, that’s considered moderate intensity. And then, you know, maybe even lower than that if you’re just sort of, you know, walking around the house. I mean, that’s not even going out much at all. That’s light. That’s considered light.

10,000 steps would be probably considered, it depends, because actually they’re saying steps, which means could just be around the house. If you walk around your house, how long does it take to do 10,000 steps? Like an hour, hour and a half.

> Yeah, probably just doing six or 7,000 just walking around the office.

So, but that’s considered light exercise. So, that’s why I think we need to get rid of that. It’s not enough. It’s not enough. It’s better than sitting because sitting is bad.

#### Sitting as a risk factor

Sitting is an independent risk factor for disease, for cancer in particular. This was one of the most replayed moments last time I spoke to you, was people replayed the section where you talked about being sedentary and how much of an issue that is for all of us. And it’s really stayed with me to the fact—I don’t know if this helps—but I’ve been using standing desks everywhere. Even when I travel around the world now, I’ve actually got a portable standing desk just to try and keep me up, because as a podcast, I’ve sat in this chair for what—I've sat down for six hours today and it’s 3 p.m.

> Right. Yeah.

Kelly Starret wrote a book, *Deskbound*, some years ago, and he really played a role in popularizing this idea, and I think in the public as well, being sedentary is time you’re spent sitting, right? Time you spend sitting. It doesn’t necessarily mean I used to think about being sedentary as, oh, do you work out, yes or no? Are you sedentary, yes? No? You’re not sedentary? That’s not what sedentary is. Sedentary is time you’re spending sitting. We’ve been sitting here quite a few course—we’ve been sedentary this whole time.

So being sedentary and sitting is an independent risk factor. Even if you’re exercising, it’s an independent risk factor for diseases. I mentioned cancer in particular. That seems to be the one that’s more strongly correlated to being sedentary.

#### Standing and exercise snacks

But standing helps. If you’re standing up, or also getting up and doing exercise snacks, then you can get up every hour and, like, do some bodyweight squats, do some jumping jacks, do some high knees, get your heart rate up. That breaks up the sedentary time. So now it’s only an hour of sedentary versus eight hours, right? Or six hours or however long you’re sitting at your desk. It makes a difference.

And those exercise snacks are easy to do. I have a standing desk.

### GLP-1 Drugs and Weight Loss

#### Exercise snacks and the sedate body

I don't use it enough. I still have it. I do exercise snacks. And I like doing the exercise snacks because, literally, if we were to get up and do bodyweight squats right now for one minute, you're going to feel better. You feel better after the blood flow to your brain. It gives you a little pump. I love it. I love the pump. It's just one minute of it, and you get a short pump to your brain, and it makes you feel better.

So exercise snacks are a really good way to break up sedentary time. They're also adding up. They count as I just mentioned. They count toward your exercise goal, and they're vigorous. You're moving fast, right? Vigorous exercise. You're getting your heart rate up.

> Or I could just take a Zen. I just get the pen out, jab, jab, jab, and it's all of this stuff disappears, right? I could do all of this stuff or I can just zen it, right?

Yeah. I mean, so many people are taking a Zen. So interesting. And listen, I have to say it's saving people's lives. Amazing. I've heard so many of my friends who are on a Zen and taking the GLP-1 pens say that they've had profound benefits. Their knees are better. They can walk upstairs. They feel better.

#### The health impact of obesity

Yeah. I mean, let's be real here. Being obese and overweight is one of the worst things you can do for your health, right? It's going to accelerate the aging process, and it's going to increase the risk of every age-related disease: cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, cancer, you know, visceral fats happening. You're insulin resistant. You know, it's all happening. It's going to affect your quality of life. It's harder to walk around. You're not as mobile. Your joints are getting more stress on them, right?

So anything that can help you lose that weight is going to be beneficial. And so these GLP-1s—you know, you're talking about ombic, that's the GLP-1 receptor agonist, right?—they are very, they're life-changing for people that are obese, people that need to lose, you know, 40 lb, 50 lb, 30 lb. It's not easy to lose that weight with diet and lifestyle.

#### Benefits, risks, and generations

Well, let's talk about the butts. Let's talk about So, the benefits are obviously if they're going to lose that fat, the visceral fat, they're going to become insulin sensitive. They're going to reduce their risk for all those diseases. And that's what the data shows: cardiovascular disease risk goes down, cancer risk goes down. Um, except for one type of cancer goes up, kidney cancer, but you know, the Alzheimer's disease risk goes down. Anything that you're going to when you lose weight, those risks are going to go down.

There are side effects and there are things to consider when you're taking—I'm calling them GLP-1s because we have first generation, second generation, and now third generation. And they're affecting not only the GLP-1 receptor, but they're affecting glucagon, for example. They're affecting another peptide called GIP, GIP. So I'll just call them GLP-1s for short.

Semiglutide or zic is one of the first generations. We now have the second generation that's targeting two pathways. You can lose even more weight. Marjaro would be something that people would relate to. That's one of the second generation ones.

#### Long-term commitment and regain

And I think that for people that are going to start these drugs, first of all, they have to realize there's a good chance they're going to have to be on them for the rest of their lives. And that's something that you have to be willing to do. And I say that because many studies have shown now that individuals that do take these GLP-1s do lose a lot of weight. And it's very beneficial to lose that weight. But if they stop taking the GLP-1s, they gain the weight back, and often they gain all the weight back because your body's kind of trying to go back to that reset point and their hunger comes back with a vengeance.

So part of what GLP-1 drugs are doing is they are basically making you feel satiated and not hungry. So they're affecting your satiety hormone so you don't feel hungry. They're also slowing gastric emptying so food stays around in your intestines longer so you feel full. When food is in your intestines, you don't feel hungry. So they're slowing that process and so people don't feel hungry. And so what ends up happening is in many ways it's mimicking calorie restriction and fasting, right? You're basically not eating as much food. So that's essentially—but it's doing it for you. You don't have to feel hungry. You don't have to put in that work, and it's doing it for you, right?

And so people are losing a lot of weight and they're losing it very rapidly. And I said you might have to be on it for the rest of your life. And what I mean by that is because a lot of studies show that majority of people do gain back their weight. Their appetite comes back. It comes back with a vengeance and they regain the weight over a year or so. So that's one thing to consider. Are you willing to take it for the rest of your life?

#### Appetite returning with a vengeance

There was a New York Times piece where they looked at a lady called Stacy Canterbury. She had lost 50 pounds on one of the GLP-1s that you mentioned, reaching her peak goal weight. And after stopping the drug due to insurance issues, she regained 20 pounds back straight away in a month. Interestingly, she described the return of hunger not as a gradual increase, but as a ferocious, animalistic urge to eat. That was far more intense than before she ever started the medication. And the New York Times did a big piece about that because one of the things that I've come to learn is that there's no free lunch in life. No pun intended.

There's no free lunch. There's no free biological lunch. It's true. People's appetite—that's why I said it comes back with the vengeance because it seems to be the case where your body's like it hasn't been hungry. And it's like, wait a minute, I've been starving for so long. I need to eat. Right? So it's kind of like feed me. And that's obviously something to consider.

#### What the data suggests

So the question is, well, what happens if you're on these drugs long term? And we've got these drugs—early versions of them have been around. They also help treat type two diabetes, right? That's part of where they first came from. They've been around a while. We do have some data. Mostly the data is positive because people are losing a lot of weight, and that is what's putting them at a high risk for these diseases. And so when you lose that weight, what ends up happening is your disease risk for all these diseases goes down, right? So it's hard to uncouple weight loss from what the drug's doing itself.

### Risks of Rapid Weight Loss

There are side effects in addition to that, right? Nausea, GI upset, all that stuff. Maybe temporary. For some people it kind of sticks around. Some other effects I think people are a little more concerned about are **muscle loss** and **bone loss**. That is a big one.

That is probably something coming from just rapid weight loss, not eating enough food, and not resistance training. So when you are largely fasting throughout the day, if you are not getting enough protein, then your muscle is not going to have amino acids to help basically keep growing. And not only keep growing, but not use its own amino acid reserve for making protein, right? So you break down muscle.

In fact, there are weight loss studies showing that in any weight loss diet, if you are not eating enough protein and you are not resistance training, up to **40%** of your weight can come from muscle weight loss that you are losing. I should say lean mass, including muscle. So that is a little different, but it is a big percent, right? And so you are talking about losing a lot of muscle as well. And that is something that happens with these drugs.

If people are training, it really helps. If they are resistance training, it is really helping because that is a signal to your muscle to grow muscle. It is a mechanical force that helps you grow muscle, right? That is something to consider.

Bone loss is another one. You can also lose bone from rapid, rapid weight loss. I do not know if there are independent GLP-1 receptors on bone doing something directly there yet to be uncovered. I think we do not really know why bone loss occurs. It is thought maybe it is just the weight loss, but like I said, maybe there is something that we do not understand yet.

Kidney cancer is another one. It seems like there is an increased signal for kidney cancer. Do not know why that is. Needs to be studied. There is a black box warning on them for thyroid cancer increase. That has never really been shown in human studies. It all comes from animal data, but it is there nonetheless. Something to consider.

And it is very early. So I feel like we are going to have a conversation in five years time when there is more understood about these compounds.

The thing that worries me is that, okay, you have the person who is **300 lb** and they have to get down, like that is really unhealthy, right? That can really be a game changer for them. But now what we are seeing is Hollywood. We are seeing just your average moms. They are like, "I want to lose 10 pounds, but I want it to be easy," right? They are 10 or 15 pounds, whatever. And they are going to these GLP-1s. And the question is, I do not know that we have data showing it is actually beneficial in that population because they are already pretty lean and they are just wanting to look a little bit better. And we do not really know. We do not really know if it is beneficial.

We know that losing weight is beneficial for sure, and that is what these drugs are doing. You are losing a lot of weight rapidly. The other thing is gallstones. You are getting the increased risk of gallstones, right? Some people's gallbladder has to be removed.

> What about anorexia and stuff like that? Because I have got a couple of friends who are on the pen and they have dropped weight at a speed that has blown my mind. And part of me is going, stop, like stop here. You know, I am thinking, gosh, does this just keep going down and down and down and down and down?

I do not think it keeps going down and down and down and down generally. I think you kind of stay. You hit a certain point and stay.

> If the dose remains the same.

If the dose remains the same. And I think that people that are already kind of at a certain healthy weight should taper down the dose too, right?

And that has also been shown to help at least with weight regain too. If you want to stop and get off it, you have a better chance of success if you taper down the dose and do not just full stop, get off of it. It seems like tapering down helps people at least slow the weight regain, where it is not happening all of a sudden. Your body kind of adjusts.

But I also want to mention there are other ways that you can lose weight, right? Intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is so, on the lowest dose of some of these drugs, like Ozempic for example, if you are on the lowest dose you can achieve a similar amount of weight loss from intermittent fasting as you do from that, and it is not, you know, if it is 5 to 10% body weight, not a huge amount, but for people that do not need to lose a huge amount, that is a good way to do it because you are going to get the metabolic switch, you are going to get ketosis, you are not going to have to worry about the side effects, you do not have to worry about regaining the weight because guess what? You are going to adapt. Your body adapts. You get used to it. Fasting becomes easier.

So I think that it depends on the population that we are talking about here. Do I have concerns? Yes, I do. I have concerns. But do I also think some of these people that are obese and would never lose that weight are getting a benefit from these drugs? Absolutely. I think they are. But it all comes down to the population who is using them. And right now, it has become so popular in everyone, and there are so many people I do not think need to use it to lose their weight.

### Closing Reflections and Farewell

10 pounds. It's ridiculous. >> People take the path of least resistance though, don't they? And it appears to be the path of least resistance for many. So, we shall see, I guess.

Rhonda, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you, I think, is a great one. It is: what is a purchase that you made that is less than $100 that improved your quality of life the most?

That was probably okay. I have two. Um, I would say the omega-3 index test that is measuring your omega-3 fatty acid levels.

> And you can get that at home or

You can order it online and get it at home. And you do a little, you do like a little spot of blood. It's like a finger-prick blood spot. And just knowing that you're not in that, you want to be 8% range. 8% range is the 5-year increased life expectancy. It's the, you know, 66% lower dementia risk. I mean, it's really where you want to be to be the healthiest. And you might be supplementing with an omega-3 supplement that's not really working, and you won't know it unless you do take that test. And I think it's one of the easiest ones that I've done.

> And how did that improve your quality of life, or are you saying it um

It helped me avoid a bad quality of life? It's no, I think it's improving my quality of life because it's slowing my aging. That's been shown with omega-3. It's absolutely slowing aging. I told you omega-3 was the only supplement that was able to do that. Um, even in the context of people that were healthy and physically active. I mean, these Swiss people are healthy. It's like if they did the study in the U.S., there's no way 88% of them would be physically active. Not a chance, right? Um, yeah. So, it's slowing the aging process, and that is exactly what I want to do. It's going to help with peak span. It's going to help with, you know, health span. It's going to help with lifespan as well. So, and it's affordable. It's less than 100 bucks.

> And the second one,

The second one I think, um, the one that really did improve my quality of life was a continuous glucose monitor.

> Oh, I thought you were going to say creatine. Okay. Continuous glucose monitor. No, no, no. You can't go back now.

Yeah, it did. It did because I realized how important sleep was for my metabolic health. I thought I was doing everything right for metabolic health, and it was knowing how not getting enough sleep was affecting my glucose. I never would have thought that. Never would have known. And most people that get the continuous glucose monitors never think about that either. They think about the food they're eating. They don't think about sleep.

> And when you get that continuous glucose monitor, what is it you're looking at to figure out the connection with sleep?

You can look at first you can look at your fasting blood glucose levels and you can go online and for your age and gender and figure out what's a normal range.

> So that's when you haven't eaten.

Yes. Okay. First thing in the morning and you have not eaten. That would be the easiest thing to look at.

> Mhm. And the second thing

Yes. The second thing would be to look at after you eat a meal, 30 minutes to an hour later, making sure that you're clearing that glucose from your meal. And if you're not seeing that peak come down and clearing, there's something wrong.

Uh, okay. I might wear another one of those. It's been a while and they're quite cheap. You can get them for like $20 on the internet.

Dr. Rhonda, I think people are going to want to continue to learn from you. So, where should they go to learn more from you?

> I have a podcast called *Found My Fitness*. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, everywhere you listen to podcasts. That would be the best place. I have a website, foundmyfitness.com. I have a wonderful newsletter. Every week we put out something. We put out one on that Peakspan paper. We put out a newsletter on updating the exercise guidelines. I have a great team. We put out an email newsletter that's free every single week. And they're really good. They're really good in-depth emails so people can find me there. I'm on social media. Rhonda Patrick, found my fitness. That's all my handle, my website name, my podcast name.

> I'll link it below for anyone as well that um would like to go check out that information. It'll all be in the description below. I highly recommend. I mean, I don't really need to tell people how incredible you are. I think they've just observed that. So I shan't. Um I shall. You are incredible.

> Thank you.

Um so thank you so much for doing this. I've learned so much and I've done so many of these health conversations on this show and it's almost at a point now where I'm wondering if there's much more that I've got to learn. But because I think you stay at the very cutting edge of the studies that are coming out and you're so good at both articulating them in a simple way that someone like me can understand even though I can't understand a lot of the literature as it comes out of these sort of scientific journals. I think that you, you know, you're a person people do need to follow um because the world and the scientific understandings are always changing and it's good to have someone who can distill that down for you in a way that is relevant, accessible, and scientifically rigorous. And that's exactly sort of the three terms that I think of when I think of you. So, please do continue to do the work you're doing because it's teaching me so much. And by way of that, it's meaning that I can live a happier, healthier life. And I appreciate you for that, Ronda.

> I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Stephen. I love coming and having discussions with you. They're fun.

> Thank you.

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