Ep. #319: Ben Greenfield on How to Live a Longer, Healthier, and More Enjoyable Life

Ben: So ultimately small amounts of extremely functional muscle on a very high power to mass ratio is what you should shoot for. If your goal in training muscle is longevity.

Mike: Hello. Hello. Mike Matthews here from muscle for life and Legion athletics back with another interview for the muscle for life podcast. And this time around, I talk with the one and only Ben Greenfield. who is a best selling author and competitive triathlete and also a podcaster, content producer, entrepreneur, all around neat guy doing a lot of neat things.

And we actually didn’t really know what we were going to talk about going into this interview, but ended up on the subjects of strength training, muscle building, exercise, diet, and how they affect aging, longevity, and all around health and well being. And if you follow Ben and his work, you know that kind of stuff is his primary hobby horse.

He is obsessed with figuring out innovative and cutting edge ways to improve his body and mind. And he is not afraid to experiment on himself. And in this show, he shares some of his most recent thoughts and his most recent strategies for optimizing his life. So here are a few of the things that we talk about in this episode.

We talk about the role of muscle mass and strength in aging and longevity, the effect of protein intake and intermittent fasting on health, the ketogenic diet for performance and health, Oh, and for those of you who are wondering how the third editions of Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and Thinner, Leaner, Stronger are coming along, they are coming along very well.

I’m actually done with my second draft. I’m working with the editors, which I guess that’s the third draft. And then next week I will start recording the audiobooks. I expect that to take two to three weeks, and that will serve as the fourth and final draft. And then it’s really just a sprint to produce the publish ready files, the ebook files, the audio book files, the print files, the files, the printer needs to start printing the new books.

And I expect that. Everything will be out by early December. I am going to release the ebooks and the audiobooks first. And those should be out live, ready to go in October or November. And by the way, if you’ve already bought one of the ebooks or audiobooks, you are going to get the new edition for free.

Because I’m simply going to be replacing the existing files with the new stuff, which means you will get a notification. I think you get a notification that a new edition is available and that you can update what is sitting on your device, on your phone, your Kindle, whatever. And if you don’t get the notification, you’ll be able to simply manually update the books.

So that’s where those projects stand. Oh, by the way, I’m also updating the year one challenges, the workout journals for men and women as well. excited to get the new ones out because not only are the programs changing a little bit for men and women, but the journals are also going to contain more helpful information.

They’re going to be more of a reference guide than they currently are. And the journals will be coming out at the same time as the new books. So that’s the update. And I have a couple, two, three weeks of intense audio book recording ahead. And then I will be back to my normal schedule of writing for the blogs and recording the podcast and so forth I decided to put everything on hold so I could get through these new books as quickly as possible Because it meant the difference of doing it all in about six weeks versus probably what would have taken four months If I would have tried to squeeze all this stuff in between all the Normal work that I do so I decided to put all the normal stuff on hold and just get through this third edition project as quickly as possible and I think it was the right decision because i’m very happy with how these new books are coming together And i’m very curious what you and everyone else who is going to read them.

Thanks And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my 100 percent natural whey protein powder, Whey Plus. Now, this is a naturally sweetened and flavored whey isolate protein powder made from exceptionally high quality milk from small dairy farms in Ireland.

Weigh Plus also contains no GMOs, hormones, antibiotics, artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. And if I may say so myself, it also tastes delicious and mixes great. And all that is why Weigh Plus has over 1, 400 reviews on Amazon with a 4. 5 star average, and another 600 on my website with a 5 star average.

average. So if you want a clean, all natural and great tasting whey protein supplement, that’s low in calories, carbs, and fat, then you want to head over to www. legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of whey plus today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout.

And you will save 10 percent on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don’t have to return the products. You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans.

You really can’t lose here. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on all of them. The spot, Mr.

Greenfield. Welcome. Welcome. Thanks for taking the time. I think this is the first time. Have we spoken? Yeah, I think so. The first time we’ve ever spoken, this is the first time you’ve called my show. 

I’ve on, on, on my, on my show. Your show on my show 

Ben: could be Mr. Think Matthews. I’ve had you on my show and I know, yeah. I don’t know if I ever have been on muscle for life. That’s me. Yeah. What’s interesting though, you could argue that muscle might confer decreased longevity. Really? Because that’s like the opposite of what people generally think. Why is that? I know. And there’s a lot of, especially gentlemen attempting to get jacked, as they go into old age, but fact is, and Paul’s Yemen, I actually wrote about this a long time ago and his old book, the perfect health diet.

And since then there’ve been plenty of studies and you could even go to pub med and do a search on muscle quality, longevity. And it turns out that because muscle takes a lot of energy to carry and cool and requires you to have a much higher endogenous antioxidant capacity and also has a higher throughput of energy.

So you produce more free radicals. It ultimately reaches a law of diminishing returns. And. That’s really not why bodybuilders wind up keeling over at an early age. Typically that’s due to what’s called cardiomegaly or left ventricular hypertrophy, enlargement of that left ventricle, the heart, but ultimately from just a pure longevity standpoint, carrying around extra slabs of muscle.

Especially non functional muscle could cause a decrease in longevity compared to a fast twitch muscle. That’s like the small, compact, powerful, wiry muscle, such as you would find in say like a power lifter. So ultimately small amounts of extremely functional muscle and a very high power to mass ratio is what you should shoot for.

If your goal 

Mike: in training muscle is longevity. Yeah, I could see that. Although I would say your average power lifter is not small, maybe small by Instagram narcissistic depends on the power lifter. 

Ben: Yeah. I 

Mike: mean, 

Ben: There’s some guys, some power lifters that are, of course the stereotypical, Russian with the enormous belly power lifter who can rip 500 pounds off the floor.

And, Hoisted overhead, but then there are very small kind of wiry power lifters that kind of are not the ones that you see on TV or on YouTube as much. But, I’ve talked to a lot of these small wiry guys that are just like super duper strong, you shake their hand. They’ve got an iron grip, but they don’t necessarily, they don’t look like the guys who’d have like biceps bulging out there, welcome to the gun show t shirt.

Yeah. It’s it’s interesting. 

Mike: Yeah. You have obviously anatomy is in play in there. Some people’s bodies are just built to be strong muscle insertions and so forth. And then it also, of course, depends how you train. What would you say if you were to, this might be just, Stretching, but if you were to extrapolate that to some sort of FMI, right?

Once you start getting, once you start getting upward of 25, you’re pretty huge. And you’re probably reaching about the top of, let’s say, 25 to 27 being probably the top of what is naturally achievable for the vast majority of people, at least I think I’m around 23 or so. And I really have don’t.

Have any desire to be bigger than I am. 

Ben: Wait, what are you 

Mike: talking 

Ben: about? 

Mike: BMI? No. FFMI free fat mass index. So like the relationship between your height and your total muscle mass, which is, it’s usually used as a proxy for, Oh, is he Natty bro? So it was how high is his FFMI when you see somebody with a 29 FFMI claiming Natty, no, never. It’s just not possible. It can get so muscular unless you’re talking about like a six foot eight dude who has nine inch wrists and has just been a freak show his entire life. But for the average person, you only can get so big naturally. So with what you were talking about with above, above 25 is considered to be like mildly steroidal, right?

Yeah. Yeah. You’re huge again. I’m maybe 23. I’m in the 23s and I’m big by, maybe normal standards. I’m small and whatever by Instagram standards. But as far as longevity goes, what are your thoughts there? Take me for example. I don’t consider myself a bodybuilder.

I’ve never competed. I don’t think I would do well because I would be scrawny by bodybuilding standards, but I look like a. A fitness guy. You 

Ben: know what I mean? Exactly. I haven’t seen many correlates between FFMI and aging, but I haven’t looked much either at what’s out there in the, in PubMed, for example, as far as anything that’s been looked at correlated to that.

But what I can tell you is that, there are a lot of the popular theories of aging are based on maintenance versus reproduction. Meaning in an ideal scenario, you would strike a sweet spot between having a body that does not require a great deal of maintenance and a great deal of antioxidants to actually take care of and repair and recover.

And at the same time, You achieve a sweet spot for reproductive capacity, meaning you maintain a certain amount of reproductive usefulness and studies that have looked at women and their age of childbearing and their number of children. For example, it confers a significant improvement in longevity when you have a had a lot of kids at an early age and be continued to have kids later into life.

And when we look at men and women, Fertility is, of course, affected by hormone status by cell membranes and by, available fat stores. Of course, as FFMI increases, if the increase were due to, for example, a significant decrease in body fat percentage to the extent to where you write might reach, andropause or progesterone depletion or testosterone depletion or something like that, then, It would, of course, confer a decrease in longevity, but I think the most interesting thing about it is that you need to send your body a message that it either is making babies or is capable of making babies frequently and into old age and that based off of the, This theory of reproductive usefulness is it a pretty good idea if you want to keep yourself around for a long period of time and you look at a lot of these blue zones, right?

The last one that I believe was a story in the New York times, this little village in Italy, they’re known for eating high amounts of Rosemary. Specifically a form of rosemary that’s very high in rosamarinic acid, which is this stuff that, that has a really good antioxidant effect and, a little bit of a natural built in plant defense mechanism.

So your body responds with this, hormesis response of stepping up its own antioxidant production, but then the men who live in that vegetation. Village are having sex up to a very old age, like 90 to a hundred years old and still having sex two to three times a week, which is a lot for somebody that age.

So it appears that that it’s not necessarily just about being swole and may not even be about being that swole as much as it is about being fertile, sexy. Yeah, exactly. Sexy and sexual. Yeah. And honestly, it’s weird because those two often contradict one another. You look at the cover of many popular health magazines and the way that sexy is defined often confers and or paws and, the female athletic triad syndrome and all these issues.

Yeah. Correlated to very low body fat percentages or overtraining or 

Mike: both. Yeah. The same thing goes for guys, right? You only can be so lean for so long and train so hard before you start to feel the effects of it. And, Oh 

Ben: yeah. I’ve been there as, from, I used to do bodybuilding and maintain very low levels of body fat percentage, by eating tuna with relish stirred into it for dinner every night.

And. Then I moved on to Ironman triathlon, where I also competed for 10 years at a very lean body fat percentage and more of a chronic cardio approach, but neither lent itself very well at all to thyroid optimization, testosterone optimization, really any hormones whatsoever. Across the board, neuro endocrine issues with both of those sports, whether, one was focused more on mass building one more on.

Staying lean for a good power to weight ratio, but ultimately, neither are healthy 

Mike: sport. Yeah. Yeah. Something just what you’re saying with fertility is I forget who it was. It was a doctor, one of the, one of these more prominent doctors who whose work I like, I don’t remember who, but was saying that fertility is a good general indicator of overall health.

So just what you were saying in terms of remaining sexual and sending that message to your body. That, hey biologically speaking, I’m worth having around, it makes sense. 

Ben: Yeah, exactly. That, a lot of the studies on it, interestingly enough, are done in fruit flies. There’s actually pretty good data.

They can extrapolate from fruit flies to humans and a lot of these aging labs, because fruit flies can produce another generation. So quickly, you can study, I don’t know how many dozens of generations of fruit flies over just a few years in a lab, but you can get through a lot more than you can like rodent models or human models.

So ultimately you can learn a lot about aging from these fruit fly populations. There’s some. Some conclusions that you probably can’t extend to humans, but this reproductive one seems to make sense. Like it just makes logical evolutionary ancestral sense. And it also seems to flesh itself out when we look at a lot of these 

Mike: blue zones.

Interesting. And what are your thoughts on the research that’s out there that shows an association between longevity and it really is just total lean mass, right? It’s as you get older, if you don’t do whatever it’s starting in your twenties for most guys, right? If you don’t do anything about it, you’re going to start losing lean mass.

And that just carries on throughout your life and your metabolism dwindles with it to some degree, which it seems like loss of muscle is the primary driver of that. And by at least Yeah. Halting that, which of course requires some sort of resistance training, doesn’t require bodybuilding or weight lifting.

You could probably do it with body weight training but at least not losing lean mass as you get older is associated with longer life and reduced all cause mortality. Is that at least that’s my understanding of the research that I’ve read. Yeah. I 

Ben: mean, more particularly, some of the more compelling research seems to look at some variables that are a little bit more nuanced, particularly hand grip strength.

That’s one, I was going to say like grip strength, having your body work properly. Exactly. Grip strength across the board. Poor grip strength is an independent risk factor for a type two diabetes, for cardiovascular disease. Another one is walking speed. And that’s another interesting one. Like the fastest walking speed has an inverse correlation to mortality.

And so you, and what is that, what does that mean exactly? It’s just in your day to day living. So basically that what the most recent study found was that rapid declines in walking speed actually predicts early death. So as soon as you start to slow down and walking speed, it means that, you’re not necessarily nearing death’s door, but it’s a pretty good sign that you’re aging more quickly.

So hand grip and walking speed muscle definitely has been correlated in many cases with longevity. But again, I think it’s more the quality of the muscle than the quantity of the muscle. And those do go hand in hand to some degree. Yeah. Yeah there’s one longevity protein that’s pretty dependent on the strength of skeletal muscle.

I forget the name of the protein but essentially it’s much more dependent on the strength than the actual number of fibers or the mass of the muscle itself. So I think that the, yeah, the corollary with muscle mass is more the strength that the muscle confers than it is just the, the amount of muscle itself, because, muscle, unless it’s actually, Producing some kind of functional usefulness is just extra maintenance.

And then we go back to that maintenance versus reproduction argument. It’s, it’s it’d be better to focus on your reproductive capacity and your fertility than it would be your actual muscle. But yeah, from a fitness standpoint it usually comes down to hand grip strength, walking speed, and then muscle quality muscle strength, more or less.

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. But there is a, obviously a relationship between Muscle quality, muscle strength, and muscle size. If you’re going to be strong, you’re probably going to be a bit bigger than the average person, 

Ben: right? Yeah. Most strength training programs confer a pretty significant increase in mass.

I just think there’s a law of diminishing returns. But again, part of this comes down to the nutritional component too. I was recently at a mastermind with a bunch of physicians and many of them are, were focused on longevity. And when we look at anything from, like a pulsing approach to management of cancer, to anabolic catabolic cycles to ensure that you have enough mTOR and enough insulin like growth factor and enough insulin to maintain some amount of anabolism, but then not so much that you just have undifferentiated cell growth and accelerated aging, it seems to come down To a pretty good balance between the two and specifically related to this discussion, not being in a constant anabolic state, right?

Not having, mtor constantly activated. And so in a situation like that, it would mean focus on strength training, but don’t necessarily face stuff all the time. Look at like a protein restricted diet on specific days or alternate day fasting or an intermittent fasting approach or macronutrient adjustments.

Based on how heavy your strength training or your training in general is for that day and except the fact that you’re not going to eat the same thing every day, the same amount every day. And instead, you’re going to have certain days where you enter more of a catabolic cycle, or at least certain periods where you enter more of a catabolic cycle and certain periods where you enter a more anabolic cycle, and that can manifest and.

A variety of scenarios. It could mean that you’re going to eat red meat, but you’re going to only have like large portions of red meat two to three times a week, or you’re going to have certain workouts where you fast after the workout, which, which may actually cause a slight improvement in growth hormone and testosterone.

And then you can have it. Some workouts where you feed after the workout some days where you fast, I typically fast once a week for 24 hours. That’s a pretty catabolic 24 hours. I’m, I’ve just got water and minerals and multivitamin. I’m not training hard during that time, but the amount of cellular autophagy, cellular cleanup, and even the decrease in the amount of stress and throughput on the gut is pretty significant by me entering that cycle.

So I think a big part of it is. If you’re pairing an intelligent strength training program, along with certain days where you have macronutrient adjustments or protein restriction, or at least you’re going out of your way to not be constantly triggering insulin and IGF 1 and, excess anabolism, then you’re probably not going to get so huge that it begins to show up.

To confer a decrease in longevity. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. I think having worked with many people, most guys, and certainly most women who obviously can build muscle just fine, but start with a lot less of it than guys. And so I hamstrung from the beginning. It’s very hard to get. Jacked like that is without drugs takes a tremendous amount of not just hard work, but smart work.

Not only in the gym in terms of programming and continuing to accelerate volume, continuing to accelerate intensity over time, but also, like you said, on the traditional side of things, it takes. Very strict fairly strict dieting when you are in a surplus as well as when you’re in a deficit, many people are strict when they want to lose fat and they get it done and then just go back to an intuitive eat by feel approach, which obviously isn’t optimal for trying to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible.

But I wonder how much all of that matters and that’s, this is, and this is may come from just my ignorance and not having read enough research, when I just coming from what I have, what, from what I have read and the understandings that have come to, I just wonder how much minor things like this matter when you get.

All the major things, right? Like you are exercising several times per week. You are not overweight. You do not smoke. You do not drink. You do. You have good sleep hygiene. You’re not stressing yourself out. Just in life and in general. And if you have those big things in place I wonder how much does it really matter that you don’t have any fasting in your routine or you don’t, or you just eat protein every day.

You know what I mean? 

Ben: When you look at things like, blue zone data or longevity data, some of the things that you just said we could almost argue against, right? For example, not drinking. All right. It turns out that one to two drinks a day is associated with decrease mortality risks, specifically like tannin and antioxidant rich beverages, such as red wine or, or ferments, like a class with alcohol, we see a lot of these in these longevity hotspots.

So it appears it’s not drinking, it’s actually drinking in moderate amounts. The same with stress. Or like low level hormetic. 

Mike: I mean that, that correlation though, again, that’s not an area that I have read much up on. I’ve listened to, there was somebody in particular, I want to say he headed up a research board.

It might’ve been for life extension, which is a supplement company. And that’s fine. But they have a big board of researchers, MDs, PhDs, smart guy was talking about alcohol. And this was like his pet project for, I forget his name. Cause it was over a year ago that I listened to the interview. The interview, but alcohol was his pet project.

And he had read an absurd amount of the literature looking for what he considered convincing evidence that alcohol was helpful in any amount at all. And again, I’m passing this along more as a. I’m saying it for what it’s worth because I haven’t done the direct research that he has, but his conclusion was that alcohol is a poison in any amount.

And the long story short is some people’s bodies just deal with it. It’s not really a positive for anybody. They’re not missing anything if they don’t have it, but some people’s bodies deal with it better than others. So some people can drink and you really don’t see as long as they don’t go overboard.

You don’t see any negative effects, whereas other people could drink the same amounts and experience negative effects. Yeah. Again, I can’t vouch for one way or the other. There’s just something that’s stuck in my mind because of who the guy was and the amount of research he had done.

It was interesting. 

Ben: There’s certainly some genetic differences, for example, Asian populations and their alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme results in a lot more acetaldehyde, metabolic poison hanging around the system after they’ve drank. So there’s certainly that, a couple of things, first of all, yeah, alcohol is bad for you, but so is kale.

So is quinoa, so are a lot of these plants with natural built in defense mechanisms that seems to confer. A hormetic response that allows you to actually bounce back stronger, just like solar radiation and interestingly, in some cases, nuclear radiation and heat and cold all in mild to moderate arounds seem to confer longevity.

So there could be the fact that it is a slight poison. Can 

Mike: you just clarify hormesis just so that people listening know what you’re talking about? 

Ben: Hormesis, in a nutshell, it’s this idea that things that would be bad for you and excessively stressful in large amounts actually confer increased cellular resilience in small amounts.

They equip your body to be able to bounce back. Stronger, which means that living your life in a bubble and never eating wild plants and some would say, even, avoiding things like grains and dairy or never subjecting yourself to a heavy load or not going out in the UVA and UVB radiation you get from sunshine.

Like you’re gonna get pretty weak. If that’s. If that’s your approach to life, to be living in a digestive bubble or in an environmental bubble, it appears that you do have to get out and do hard things in small amounts, which is, of course, most people would nod their heads in agreement.

And then there’s, when it comes to the nutritional component, that’s probably the one that’s the most argued over, should you eat should you eat wheat? That’s like a non GMO. Good wheat from a natural source and not worry about the gluten. Because frankly, those trace amounts of glutens that the wheat has as a defense mechanism could actually make your gut stronger and more resilient.

People will argue over a lot of the plant based things. There’s books like plant paradox by Steven Gundry, for example, that kind of gets into that, but ultimately the idea of hormesis is that. You try to do some things that are just a little bit bad for you but are good for you in small amounts, right?

The idea though, with alcohol could also be, and I’ll certainly grant this just imagine if you got around with all your friends for one to two hours in the evening and you drank. Water and laughed and socialized and hung out and you were, surrounded by friends and family and this relaxed, de stressed environment.

There’s never been a study that has actually looked at, does it matter then if you’re holding a glass of wine versus a glass of water, right? There are all those things that go along with a nightly consumption of alcohol from a social and a de stressing standpoint. That may actually be some pretty big confounding variables.

I like to think that some of the natural hormetic defense mechanisms and some of the tannins and resveratrols and things like that, and alcoholic beverages actually do give you a little bit of that hormetic response, but ultimately I think part of it is just the fact that social drinking to a certain extent can confer longevity just because we know that.

One of the top things a lot of these blue zones are doing is engaging in friendships and social relationships and hanging out with family and just being in those type of situations where you’re de stressing at the end of the day. But yeah, we got on this kick as you were talking about, some of these more important things and.

Another thing would be exercise. Like we don’t see exercise as a prevailing characteristic in any of these areas where people are living for a disproportionately long period of time. We don’t see a lot of CrossFit wads or triathlons or Spartan races or, bodybuilding or much of any of that.

Low level physical activity all day long, typically in nature. And I realized that’s a very difficult thing for someone living in a post industrial era or Westernized society to actually pull off. You can hack your environment though. Like I, I’m walking on a treadmill right now.

I’ll probably walk like five or six miles today. There’s low level physical activity as I’m dictating emails. And as I’m talking on podcasts and as I’m, writing and reviewing and reading, I’m often either walking or standing or kneeling or lunging or balancing on this little fluid stance board next to my desk.

Or, doing something that kind of tricks my body into thinking that I’m gardening or gathering or hunting. And there’s a kettlebell over by the door, right? When I step over that thing, I got to do about 30 seconds of kettlebell swings. So I’m doing a little bit of high intensity speed work throughout the day.

There’s also a bar, a pull up bar in the door of the office. And my rule is I gotta do three pull ups when I walk underneath that, and then there’s a hex bar. Right outside in the room next to my office, and I go in there 3 to 5 times a day and just lift it 5 times, right? So I’m engaging in this low level physical activity with a little bit of sprinting and a little bit of heavy lifting throughout the day to simulate what those blue zones do, because there really is.

Not much of an exercise in a pill that we see in those environments. And, there, there’s even some evidence that it doesn’t matter how hard you exercise the beginning of the day or the end of the day, if you have your butt planted in a chair for eight hours, the rest of the day. Ultimately I think that your statement that maybe a lot of this stuff doesn’t matter if you’re doing the little things is right.

Assuming that those little things are, low level physical activity throughout the day. Getting out in nature, fresh air, good sunshine, good water. We all know those have a profound effect on the mitochondria, specifically. And then family, love, life, social relationships, perhaps with alcohol, perhaps without.

Who knows? But just that, that de stressful time at the end of the day. Yeah, I think all those things are important. are probably far more important than, figuring out exactly how high you’re going to spike your insulin post workout. 

Mike: Yeah. No argument there. What are your thoughts on the ketogenic diet?

All the rage these days, yeah, these I’m amazed at how well some of these ketogenic cookbooks are selling. They’re like. Go look at the top 10 on Amazon and you know what that means. Dude number one on Amazon means you’re moving like five to 6, 000 copies per day. It’s 

Ben: nuts. And I’ll even name some of my podcasts like keto, this about ketosis, thought about ketogenesis, but because they fricking get downloaded like hotcakes, anything that says keto it’s nuts.

I delved into Ketosis in 2013. So I guess about at the time of this recording, five, five and a half years ago when I was racing Iron Man and I was looking for a good fuel for brain, for liver, for diaphragm, for heart during long-term endurance activities. And ketosis was a new thing, especially amongst athletes, amongst folks like, terry walls or people who are managing epilepsy and seizures and things like that. Ketosis was already a hot topic, but among athletes, it wasn’t being used very much. And so I began to use M. C. T. s. I didn’t have access to ketone salts or ketone esters at the time, but I would use M. C. T. s. I would use essential amino acids a little bit of a really slow release starch.

Like at the time I was using the, you can super starch, like a very kind of slow release. Starch that causes a lot of fermentation and bloating, I think, because a lot of it remains undigested, but ultimately doesn’t spike blood sugar. So it’s like a slow bleed carbohydrate. You can use during exercise.

And then just electrolytes, right? Because I found as most people do that, my mineral and electrolyte needs went through the roof. As soon as I started dumping all the glycogen, I was dumping and your potassium needs particularly go. Go very high up when you’re in ketosis. So I raced like that in a couple of races in Canada.

And then after that in Ironman Hawaii, and it just felt like it was rocket fuel to be in ketosis for these long endurance bouts. We’re out there for nine or 10 or 11 hours. And then the next year after that, I actually. Followed 12 months of strict ketosis, meaning that I was eating like 5 to 10 percent carbohydrates max.

And that was for Jeff Volokh’s faster study in which he took athletes who rather than as they do in a lot of these studies, follow a ketotic high fat diet for just like four days or two weeks leading into the study. He had people get, what a lot of folks will call fat adapted or turn to Fat burning machines by at least theoretically by following a ketotic diet for six to 12 months.

So I did this for a year going into that study, and then they took the group that followed a high fat diet, a ketotic diet, and compared it to a traditionally fueled, 55 to 75 percent carbohydrate based diet, and they did VO2 max test. They did a 3 hour treadmill test, which is horrible. You just stare at a white wall in the lab and.

Run on the treadmill for 3 hours and they collected muscle biopsy, fat biopsy, resting, metabolic rate, exercise, metabolic rate, blood, microbiome, whole bunch of stuff. The biggest takeaway, though, was that they found that people who follow the high fat diet were burning. 1. 6 to 1. 7 grams of fat per minute went up to that point, most exercise physiology textbooks would say the maximum amount of fat one could burn during exercise is like one gram a minute.

So essentially at rest and during exercise, the group that followed the high fat diet became very well adapted to burning fats as a fuel. And so it appeared to be from a performance standpoint, especially an endurance performance standpoint, a good hack. Now, at the same time, compared to following a traditional, endurance based diet of 55 to 75 percent carbohydrate, I had less gut distress and I had better endurance, but I had a horrible thyroid, it was getting cold.

I was watching my TSH go through the roof. It got up to about between six and seven, which, for clinical hypothyroidism, that might not be high enough, but it’s definitely enough to cause concern for healthy people. I think should be between about 0. 5 to 0. 7. To two for their thyroid stimulating hormone, their TSH, my testosterone plummeted.

My, my total T went below 200 and started to get down towards like low one fifties and again, like pretty sure my my five year old son might’ve had you beat. Yeah. Yeah. Already five year old daughter. The thing is though, there, there was a trade off, right? Like enhanced endurance performance, but at the cost of.

Either metabolic downregulation or neuroendocrine downregulation or both because of a lack of available glucose for everything from, glycoprotein formation to glucans to, to, to insulin receptors to thyroid receptors to, everything that’s necessary, even, enough for the latex cells to produce testosterone, obviously.

Since then I’ve been able to maintain a ketosis, maintain a very low RQ, a resting metabolic rate that relies primarily upon fat, but get my testosterone back up and my TSH back down along with adequate T3 and T4 by adopting a more cyclic approach, meaning that essentially I just eat a lot of plants, a lot of vegetables, a lot of oils, a lot of fats, seeds, nuts cold water, fish small amounts of protein and even include especially pre workout like a ketone salt or a ketone ester throughout the day.

And then at the end of the day, I will eat ad libitum carbohydrates. Like last night I had coconut ice cream in a waffle cone for dinner with a sweet potato mash and some sea salt. It was just like almost all carbohydrate and tonight I’ll be taking my kids out to sushi, so I do, 100 to 200 grams of carbohydrate at the end of each day.

Tops off my energy stores and I wear a continuous blood glucose monitor. My glucose stays elevated for a very sane and normal amount of time after the meal. I also have ketone monitors in my office, so I can duck down and check that if I want to. And I’m well into ketosis by the time I wake up in the morning again.

So I’m able to have my cake and eat it too. With that type of cyclic ketogenic approach, that’s the way I coach most of the athletes that I work with as well. Yeah. Assuming they don’t have like familial hypercholesterolemia or they don’t have some type of a gallbladder issue or, anything else that might interfere with oil or fat metabolism, but ultimately it’s, that’s the approach I take now after experimenting with ketosis for a while as a strict approach and finding it to be very unfriendly from a neuroendocrine standpoint.

Hormonal standpoint, overall energy standpoint and we of course know that, multiple studies have backed up this fact that it harms anaerobic performance that it might not be all that great for the hormones, especially when combined with high levels of physical activity.

So I think that I think that a ketogenic diet needs to be modified, especially for an active 

Mike: population. Yeah. And that’s I think. Spot on and that’s the key takeaway of people listening. So I’m sure a lot of people listening. You just hear about it so much now and you have some very strong proponents of it who basically say it’s the next thing.

This is the next evolution of the human diet. And this is how we should all be eating regardless of our circumstances, our physiologies, our lifestyles, our goals. This is it. And yeah, I don’t agree. You clearly don’t agree either. Now. The, do you find that with what you’re able to do now and with how quickly you’re able to get into ketosis, is that something that was, you had to develop, so to speak, or because to somebody else, to somebody listening, that’d be like, oh, so it’s Just car, it’s like intermittent fasting, but it’s with carbs instead where you wake up.

Sure. We all wake up we stop eating whatever, when we stop eating, depending on when we go to bed, we sleep for seven, eight hours and we wake up. That doesn’t necessarily mean though, that, I don’t, I’m not waking up in ketosis like you are. I would assume, right? You might be, but 

Ben: ultimately it takes one to two years for your body to become fat adapted, especially if you like most Westernized kids at some point switch from breast milk, which is actually pretty high and in ketone producing bodies to Cheerios and Gerber sweet potato mash.

And then cornflakes and cereal. We spend in America, at least, from the time we’re about. Two, until we discover a healthy diet, if that ever happens eating an extremely high amount of carbohydrate, really down regulating our ability to be able to efficiently burn fats as a fuel and, reliance that upon glucose and everything.

That’s the. That’s where everything from like keto fluid poor energy levels to what typically causes someone after about two weeks to two months to drop off of a low carbohydrate approach to do so is because they don’t give it enough time. One theory is that part of it comes down to mitochondrial density and that, that high amount of fatty acid oxidation could actually improve mitochondrial density.

And you have to get to the point where your mitochondria are efficiently burning fat as a fuel and have increase in density to the point where you can feel really damn good. On a high amount of fat and lower amounts of that, that fast burning kindling versus the slow burning log. There are so many issues though, you talked about genetic individuality and, we touched on that regarding alcohol, but you could also say the same thing of starch digesting genes.

There are certain people, I think it’s the AM, it’s like the AMY1 gene, something like that, but ultimately some people do a really good job at producing salivary amylase. Breakdown carbohydrates very efficiently without a steep insulin response. And these would be like, some Pacific Islanders, some Sub Saharan populations, some Asian populations.

And those people are people with, like I mentioned earlier, familial hypercholesterolemia the APOE44 gene. There’s a lot of. People who have an inflammatory response or a digestive distress response, or an elevated triglyceride and LP little a response to high amounts of fat, particularly saturated fats.

And so there are some people for whom a ketogenic diet would not only not be a good choice, but it could increase your risk of dying an early death. So I think that, that in an ideal scenario, you go out and you get like a 23 and me. And feed that through a couple of analyses like Ben Lynch has a good program called strategy gene.

There’s a good one from Dr. Rhonda Patrick. I don’t remember the name of hers. There’s one called genetic genie. You want to look for snips that particularly affect your ability to be able to digest carbohydrate or to be able to digest fat or that Reflect your ability to be able to handle high amounts of saturated fat, for example, along with your omega 3, omega 6 fatty acid ratios and use that to determine whether you would be a good candidate for something like a ketogenic diet, because, I would say there’s a good chance.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just an estimate. This is a total rough estimate, not based on science, just based on, me looking at blood and biomarkers of some of the folks I work with and looking over genetic data, about a 10 to 15 percent at least portion of the population who do not do well on a ketogenic diet or for that matter, even an intake of saturated fats that goes much above 10%.

Mike: Yeah. I remember reading some saturated fat research a little bit ago, I was writing an article on sat on dietary fat, and this is more in response to the paleo craze, but it’s the paleo craze has now morphed into the ketogenic craze. It seems from a marketing standpoint and they’re selling similar approaches, at least in terms of the high fat.

And yeah, I’ve just had this discussion via email with a lot of people. Saying in simple words, like you, you may do fine with a lot of saturated fat. You may do very not fine with a lot of saturated fat and I, it’s not, I just can’t in the, in good conscience recommend just saying, yeah, sure.

Cause you’re not necessarily gonna know it right away. Yeah. There could be things going on in your body, negative things that are accumulating and are happening that you’re not aware of until I wouldn’t. You catastrophize it, but until you do become aware of it, because it has gotten at least bad enough to where it’s on your radar, 

Ben: and maybe there are things that have happened since paleo times.

And I realized saying paleo times like paleo diet isn’t necessarily eat what your caveman ancestors would have eaten. But like, when I look at the paleo movement, it’s not just about, shunning of modern agriculture. Which I think actually lent a great deal to societal stability and a feeding the world’s population but, it also, tends to now be heavily skewed towards polyamory and really plant based medicine trips that are just ayahuasca and psilocybin, but not in stoic amounts, but like these big heroic hedonistic trips into plant medicine journeys.

And you see this whole kind of I hang out in a lot of these paleo sectors and I love many aspects of the paleo movement, but I think that things like agriculture and monogamy and and. Trading off, deep hedonistic trips into plant based medicine with a more stoic approach to drugs.

I think all of this provided more societal stability and perhaps even conferred greater longevity to the human race compared to, just the whole, I realize we’re opening up a huge can of worms here but this whole like plant medicine, polyamory, all agriculture is bad type of approach that like a strict paleo enthusiast would endorse.

Mike: I didn’t know that’s like part of the ethos because I don’t I’m just, I’m not active and I just sit in my cave and write stuff. Yeah, 

Ben: I don’t interact with 

Mike: her. You should dig into it 

Ben: sometime. It’s yeah I catch a lot of flack in, in especially the paleo movement because, I’m a, I’m a.

Christian monogamist guy who uses plant based medicine in moderation, but turns down, all these invitations to go on ayahuasca trips. And and I love to eat my wife’s slow fermented sourdough bread. And I’ve got little pygmy goats out back. And I realized that this is blasphemous, but we milk them and drink their milk.

Which is horrible because no, no mammal drinks the milk of other mammals. No mammal also flies spaceships through the sky and invents computers. We hit, we happen to have a large brain for a reason. So probably a bad time considering I know we only have a couple of minutes left for us to open that can of worms, but I, maybe for 

Mike: another discussion, cause that’d be fun.

Yeah. I’d love to hear more about your bigoted fascistic views. So you have a few more minutes. Let’s wrap up with, I’m curious myself, what are, do you have any interesting projects that you’re working on that you want to tell people about? Do you have another book coming? You had mentioned writing, is that more articles or like what’s what’s on your plate right now?

Ben: I am working on a book. And the book really is more focused on some of the topics at hand, on this podcast, like particularly longevity, more of a focus on longevity and spirituality and even mental optimization than physical optimization, because I’ve written about that before.

I have a book I’m very proud of. It’s called beyond training, shameless plug. It’s 500 pages of how to biohack yourself physically. I love it. From digestion to sleep, to, to muscle, to endurance and beyond. But I feel as though I left a lot on the table when it comes to living a long time and being happy while you live a long time.

Everything from purpose to happiness, to spirituality, to a lot of these woo concepts like, quantum physics and movement of protons and their effect on epigenetics. And also. what we can learn from a lot of these blue zones, for example, that we were talking about earlier I’ve filled a lot of the book, which is 900 pages long.

So a lot’s going to go to the cutting room floor here when I finish, but that’ll get published next year. So that’s just, if you go to Ben Greenfield, fitness. com I will certainly send my newsletter list and an email once that bad boy is ready. The other thing I’m working on right now, I guess if I could name one other thing I’m most excited about is this Chocolatey, coconutty, gooey mess of mouth orgasm that I’ve been developing the past year and a half that is like this clean fueled bar that’s got, organic almonds and sesame seeds and coconut flakes and chocolate liqueur and cacao nibs.

And it’s just like a melt in your mouth. Amazing. Mind blowing bar, and I’m launching that in a couple of weeks. I had the first few boxes arrive at my house a few weeks ago, my kids and my wife and I’ve been mowing through them. And so again, another shameless plug, but I would say the book that I’m working on and also this new.

Clean energy bar that I’m working on. Those are the two things I’m most excited about right now. The bar is called the the Keon Bar. By the way. That’s the name of my supplements company is Keon, KION. So I’m excited about that too. It’s not 

Mike: ketogenic by the way. Sorry to this point.

We, we got that from the ingredients. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna humbly request a box ’cause I and the guys here eat bars. I don’t eat bars too much these days, but the guy I’ll send, 

Ben: I’ll send you a box along with our coffee, our coffees, like you make a cup of coffee with our coffee and the crema on your espresso is like twice as high as you get from a normal, even my French press that I make with this stuff.

It’s the crema is like an inch high, but the coffee tastes like it tastes like chocolate and cherry. It’s, it’s also amazing. Deliver the goods. I’m tooting my own horn. Deliver the goods. I will send you, I will send you a box of bars and a couple of wonderful bags of coffee from Keyon. Great. Great.

They’ll get 

Mike: used. We all we are coffee enthusiasts here, but the espresso machine just gets pounded all day. All right. I’m writing a note to myself right now. Awesome. We’ll ship it out. Thanks for taking the time, Ben. This was fun talk. And I’d be happy to bring you back on whenever your schedule permits to go into the other stuff, which is really, it seems, it sounds like it’s right in line with the book that you are researching and writing right now.

So it might also be fun just from that perspective to, I don’t know, that’s for me in terms of the process. It’s always helpful to go over your content and just have free flowing discussions about it because sometimes new, cool ideas come to, yeah. I’d love to, man. It’d be fun. Cool, man. That’s it for this time.

Hey there. It is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility. And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at Mike at MuscleForLife. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. Alright, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

Oh, and before you leave, let me quickly tell you about one other product of mine that I think you might like. Specifically my 100 percent natural whey protein powder, whey plus. Now this is a naturally sweetened and flavored whey isolate protein powder made from exceptionally high quality milk from small dairy farms in Ireland.

Whey plus also contains no GMOs, hormones, antibiotics, artificial food dyes, whey. Fillers or other unnecessary junk. And if I may say so myself, it also tastes delicious and mixes great. And all that is why way plus has over 1, 400 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average and another 600 on my website with a five star average.

So if you want a clean, all natural and great tasting whey protein supplement that’s low in calories, carbs, and fat. Then you want to head over to www. legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of Weigh Plus today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code PODCAST at checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order.

And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don’t have to return the products. You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans.

So you really can’t lose here. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now, place your order, and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot.