The Biohacks Ben Greenfield No Longer Uses (and What He Does Instead)

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Ben Greenfield
I have learned a lot since being fooled into thinking that you can out exercise your diet and like chronic repetitive motion exercise is the healthiest way to go. Now, I'm a huge fan of walking.

Dr. Mark Hyman
These are all bio hacking tools. If you only keep three practices, what would they be? Ben Greenfield is a world renowned bio hacker. And performance coach. From world class endurance to leading breakthroughs in human health.

He's spent decades testing what actually works. What's emerging around rejuvenation practices Mhmm. That are a little bit strange?

Ben Greenfield
The newer thing that I just discovered is salmon sperm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What I'm hearing you say is that some of these technologies that have helped us in many ways live better also have a dark side.

Ben Greenfield
There's even a term called the paradox of loneliness. I think it was surgeon general in 2023 identified loneliness as the equivalent of smoking like 15 cigarettes a day. And I used to think you gotta make the money first.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What made you kind of flip

Ben Greenfield
in terms of your priorities? Almost getting a divorce.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We seem to be in a protein craze right now. Are we kind of going overboard on the

Ben Greenfield
too much protein side? I would hate to cause people to think that they shouldn't prioritize something like

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, Ben, it's been a while. It's been about five years since you've on the podcast. You know, you you've been a really instrumental figure in helping a lot of people figure out how to up level their health. There's a term that's thrown around a lot by by people in the space called biohacking.

Ben Greenfield
It's like It is thrown around

Dr. Mark Hyman
a lot. Some ways, I I I like the term, in some ways I don't. Yeah. And and the way I think about it, and and I'd like you to define it is is the way I think about it is is anything that's gonna help you optimize your health or improve your body's own functional systems. Mhmm.

And how do you how do you think about biohacking? Yeah. And what would you how would you define it?

Ben Greenfield
I I would say anything that you can use to optimize your cellular metabolic health that would be considered something that allows you to do it in a more time efficient or efficient way than you might be able to do in a native state. Yeah. So you're essentially hacking the OS using a tool or technology or whether it be a peptide or hyperbaric oxygen or red light therapy or anything like that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So the Native Americans out west who used to do sweat lodge, they were biohacking. Well, I mean, technically

Ben Greenfield
they created a natural environment in which they increased heat. And maybe, you know, if we acknowledge that biohacking would be considered a more scientific approach. Maybe if they were inside of some type of a, you know, electronically configured machine that could get hotter than they might be able to create with a native sweat tent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, those are those are pretty damn hot. Have you

Ben Greenfield
ever been in one? They are very hot and dark and there's Yeah. The drumbeat gets pretty loud and you kinda wanna bust out of there. Yeah. Yeah.

But I agree that the term is used a lot and sometimes if I'm like gonna give a talk on a stage or do a podcast and somebody introduces me as a biohacker, I don't know quite what to think. Seems like, I don't know, they can't have the term biohacker.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean Dave Aspies popularized that and all the gizmos and gadgets and I think

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
At a very fundamental level for me though, it's about understanding human biology

Ben Greenfield
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and the levers you can pull to move it toward a state of more vibrant optimal health.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And there's a lot of things you can do from what you eat to different types of exercise to restoration tools, relaxation, optimizing sleep. These are all kind of incense biohacking tools. Yeah. But I think the things that I I'll talk to you about are things that you've learned over doing this for twenty years about what works, what doesn't work, what's sort of the things that you used to lean on that you've now find maybe aren't all there or cracked up to be.

What are the sort of some of the newer things that that you maybe weren't doing back then that you maybe have have changed and evolved and and maybe shifted more from just elite sports performance to more enhanced health?

Ben Greenfield
I would say probably the two top things that come to mind would be my approach to exercise and my approach to community. I was was hardcore. You know, I I raced for Team Timex in Ironman Triathlon for ten years. I switched to Reebok and raced obstacle course racing for another four years. Before that, I was two years as a bodybuilder.

I mean, literally, just like lean, mean, 3% body fat and two hundred and fifteen pounds, just like a piece of libido less muscle who'd hang out on the couch and go visit the gym and drink protein shakes. So I experienced Yeah. The extreme Not ahead of Ironman triathlon and bodybuilding do not do those sports for help. Get in for photos and to climb your own personal Mount Everest, but don't fool yourself into thinking that those are actually healthy sports. And I think researchers like James O'Keefe have popularized this idea that there's a so called Goldilocks zone of exercise.

Right? Once you exceed I think it's about a hundred and fifty minutes of moderate intensity exercise and about seventy minutes of high intensity exercise, which we could define because I think some people get scared when they hear don't exceed seventy minutes of high intensity exercise until they understand what high intensity exercise truly is. But anyways, once once you exceed those bounds, then you start to see things like atherosclerosis, increased risk of mortality, arterial stiffness, lot of the things that you would expect if someone was in a chronic inflammatory state Yeah. Without adequate recovery. And, you know, if you look at, I don't know, you know, either the the bodybuilding or the marathoning craze of the eighties or the surge of CrossFit and fitness competitions, you know, Spartan, high rocks, it's very easy to fall into that category of someone who overexercises.

I certainly did for a long time and and experienced a lot of the issues that go along with that. You know, not to mention that I was also one of the early adopters of the whole keto low carb thing for endurance sports, which is another kind of nail in the coffin if you don't have it's not a bad approach, but if you excessively restrict carbs, you just don't have enough for thyroid, for testosterone, for the proteoglycans and joints. You can basically destroy yourself with excessive carb restriction married to excessive exercise. Yeah. So I have learned a lot since being fooled into thinking that you can basically out exercise your diet, that the more is better, and especially that chronic repetitive motion exercise, you know, like running and cycling and swimming that I did a lot of is the healthiest way to go.

Now, I'm a huge fan of walking.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. That's like a big iron man. Huge fan

Ben Greenfield
of walking.

Dr. Mark Hyman
100 mile races.

Ben Greenfield
I run occasionally. So well, if I'm playing pickleball, I guess that counts as running. Pickleball or family tennis on Wednesday nights. Yeah. And then occasionally, when I walk down to the mailbox, because we have a long driveway, I'll be like, okay, I'm gonna grab the mail and run back up the driveway.

Yeah. Mean, Mark Sisson just wrote a book about this, Born to Walk. It's about this whole idea that human beings are more biomechanically designed for walking and it's more favorable for cardiovascular adaptations without excess damage to the body compared to running, which

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think is

Ben Greenfield
a good idea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Chase and catch an animal, Right?

Ben Greenfield
You do.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But for

Ben Greenfield
very short periods of time, not at a slow pace, know, in short bursts. And I consider that to be like like a healthy form of running. But yeah, a hundred and fifty minutes of moderate intensity exercise, first of all, that definition would be not necessarily what people might think of as like going for a walk or gardening or cleaning the garage or even tooling around your house with a 10 pound weighted vest on if that's your thing. Like I consider all of that to be just primal natural Movement. Movement.

You know, in physiology, you you'd call it NEAT, right? Non exercise activity thermogenesis. Yeah, I did a lot

Dr. Mark Hyman
of that. Was called fidgeting.

Ben Greenfield
Used to have the people in the fridge.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Fidgeting. You call them the That's crazy.

Ben Greenfield
The fancy name for these. There was actually a study that came out on glycemic variability and doing this. They called them a soleus push ups, which is basically what you and I probably call a seated calf raise. But those type of little things, none of that falls into category of the hundred and fifty minutes of moderate exercise that if you exceed would be bad for you. We're talking about like the frowny face, like jaunt on the treadmill for forty five minutes a day or the triathlete or marathoner or swimmer or cyclist who's getting like, one and a half to two hours of moderate intensity aerobic exercise.

Definitionally, if you wanted to get into the physiology of it, you've got your aerobic threshold. Technically, you have two different thresholds that you cross during exercise, VT one and VT two. VT one is ventilatory threshold one. That's when it starts to get hard to carry on a conversation and that's when you've reached what's called aerobic threshold. That's what a lot of people now call zone two.

I think for example, probably Doctor. Peter Attia has has popularized the most this notion of zone two exercise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Zone two exercise, that'd be kind of like the zone you get into when you get to VT one. Then you exercise and exercise and you're gradually burning more and more carbs and less and less fat and lactic acid is starting to build up and you're beginning to be hungry for oxygen and you eventually reach VT two, which is when lactic acid starts to accumulate more quickly than it can be removed. Some people also call that like the anaerobic threshold. So that hundred and fifty minutes of moderate intensity exercise that if you exceed is no longer that great for you is that whole stretch between v t one and v t two. Right?

And so, again, most people who are just moving around during the day, they're still below v t one. Yeah. Right? Like I can I walk on my treadmill sometimes when I'm doing a podcast? Right?

Yeah. And that all counts as just, you know, nothing close to the type of exercise that'll be bad for you. And then the 70 that if you exceed that per week is also bad for On

Dr. Mark Hyman
top of the one fifty.

Ben Greenfield
Right. Exactly. It's not the the combinatorial effect of the two of them. It's like don't exceed a hundred and fifty minutes of moderate intensity exercise or at least try not to exceed it too much. And then also don't exceed seventy minutes of vigorous intensity exercise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Within that one hundred fifty minutes or in addition, like two twenty minutes or

Ben Greenfield
They would be So so let's say you are, give you an example. Let's say you're an endurance athlete and you're barely doing any vigorous intensity exercise, but you're logging like three hundred minutes of moderate intensity exercise throughout the week, you would be past the Goldilocks zone regardless of whether or not you've done the high intensity stuff. And similarly, if you're a CrossFitter who's logging like a hundred minutes of vigorous intensity exercise per week and barely doing any of the hundred and fifty minutes of moderate intensity exercise, you'd also fall into that no zone. Interesting. That would be risky to get into.

The seventy minutes, that high intensity exercise, that would be all the stuff that's past VT two. That would be pretty intense burn, going pretty hard. Most people Talk

Dr. Mark Hyman
during that.

Ben Greenfield
You walk into the average gym and one person out of a 100 might really truly be in that zone. But it's still there's still a lot of people who do and keep saying this word, I don't wanna throw them under the bus, but, like, CrossFit six times a week. Yeah. Or, you know, they're training for something very intense, obstacle course racing, you know, an an athlete who's heavy in training. Again, like, I have no problem with people going out and doing an Ironman or training for CrossFit or anything like that.

What I'm saying is that I used to think that that was heart healthy activity. And now I can see that, oh, it's more something that's great for perseverance, for endurance, for character, and to again climb your own personal Mount Everest, but it's not healthy for you. And I used to think that it was, and I changed my stance on that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so the data basically is that if you overexercise in the ways you just talked about, that you increase your risk of inflammation, oxidative stress

Ben Greenfield
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Cardiovascular disease, vascular stiffness, all things you don't want as you get older. Yeah. Now the problem has been I don't think most people even come close to one hundred and fifty minutes.

Ben Greenfield
I think we're speaking to the subset of the population that's like the gym junkies, which I think is still a significant portion of people. And then the other thing

Dr. Mark Hyman
Although I I went to Maui and there wasn't a lot to do because everybody's like

Ben Greenfield
hiding exercise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I would work out, drink in morning, and then I would go for a two and a half hour bike ride

Ben Greenfield
with Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
2,500 feet elevation get my heart I don't know. I felt great Yeah. That I might play tennis in the afternoon. Yeah. I was probably overdoing it.

Ben Greenfield
Possibly, which you can do for for short sense of time. And then the other thing is like you and I were talking about biohacking. I doubt that any of the studies that have looked into excessive exercise have taken those training populations and given them like NormaTec or Hyperice recovery boots and a hyperbaric chamber and some red light therapy and cryotherapy and all these things that can accelerate recovery of the neuromuscular and the musculoskeletal systems. So it's possible that if you have the right tools at your disposal, you could go significantly beyond those two zones that have been identified as you know, excess exercise. That's so You be able to hack it a little bit.

Because I I know like, if I'm able to be at home exercising and I'm using all my special tools at home, like laying on a PMF mat or breathing oxygen or hitting the red light bed or something like that, I feel way better than if I'm traveling and I do the same workout. I'm just like back into the hotel room. Yeah. So now I walk. I do a little bit of super slow weight lifting, like two or three times a week, moving the Have you done super slow training?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I've heard

Ben Greenfield
about it. Yeah. Doug McGuff, I think he was an emergency room physician, he wrote a great book called Body by Science, where he gets into the fact that when you move muscles very slowly, very high amounts of what is called time under tension, up to about two minutes or so, that you can get really great strength and cardiovascular results with a very low amount of training volume and a low risk of injury because you're moving the muscles in a very predictive and controlled fashion.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You use heavier weights to do that?

Ben Greenfield
Use heavier weights. Well, I use there's a lot of machines now that can make it easier. There's the tonal.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I have one of those. Was just working out on it.

Ben Greenfield
Tonal's got a setting on there. The eccentric setting Yeah. The burnout setting. Like like you can literally load up your tonal with let's say deadlift, chest press, pull down, squat, row, and overhead press. But there's a setting on the tonal where instead of choosing number of reps, can choose number of seconds.

You set that on a hundred and twenty seconds, and you just do one set of each of those exercises. You put the tonal on burnout mode and preferably also on eccentric mode, right, so it's pulling you back Yeah. Yep. Every time that that you're finishing a rep. That would be a perfect example of super slow training.

And the nice part about it is it's over with quickly and you get really great strength adaptations with a lower risk of injury. The sucky part about it is it sucks. Like it's

Dr. Mark Hyman
It hurts.

Ben Greenfield
Not only a little boring, but it it hurts a little bit going for two minutes and you, you know, you think you're That's a long time. You think you're at about a hundred and fifteen seconds and you look at the screen and it says like sixty five or something like that. Yeah. There's the ARX. That's the one that I use.

And that it's kind of a horse. I mean, literally is like a two horsepower engine. I tell my friends it's like fighting a giant robot. Oh, but same thing. That one will push and pull you through a range of motion.

But again, it's just one single set for each exercise. So when I'm at home, I do that about three times a week. And when I travel, I kinda try to use like Nautilus machines at the gym or free weights

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
To do the same thing. Or I use blood flow restriction bands

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Which you can put around the arms and the legs to trick your muscles into thinking they're under a heavier load than they actually are because the lactic acid isn't able to get into

Dr. Mark Hyman
the muscles. I did like 10 pounds with bicep curls.

Ben Greenfield
It's hard. I feel like it worked weekly, but that's great for like rehab or when you don't have access to much training equipment. I mean, if I'm traveling, like here in Austin, even though I've had access to fantastic training facilities since I've been here, I always throw in my bag one elastic band, some BFR bands, and one of those door frame suspension straps that you can do pull ups with. And that's like two pounds worth of equipment.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I can get

Ben Greenfield
a great workout in my hotel room or in a park

Dr. Mark Hyman
just about Yeah. So there's some ways to do that.

Ben Greenfield
So yeah, walk, I do that. And besides that, just like play pickleball, play tennis, built a frisbee golf course on the new property. So yeah, besides that, it's just sports. But if you would've talked to me, like, back to the root of your question, like, you know, ten years ago,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I would've been like, well, I wake up in the morning and I ride my bike to the gym and

Ben Greenfield
I swim 2,000 meters, then I go upstairs and I hit the weights, then I ride home. And later on that afternoon, I go for a run.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And when you did that, did you feel okay

Ben Greenfield
or did you feel badly? I thought I felt okay and now I have way more energy, way more libido. My inflammatory markers, my lipids, like everything looks way better on blood work. So yeah, I feel a lot better with the I probably average what someone might call exercise about forty five to sixty minutes a day. And then everything else is just walking and moving and staying.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's good. That's good. It's still more than most people do.

Ben Greenfield
But it is it is more, but it's Yeah. I would say I've definitely changed changed my stance on exercise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And now you're you're you're heading over 40, right?

Ben Greenfield
I'm 43.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. Well, I'm forty three, but I was telling you before we recorded, I I For the past two days, I've been doing a plasma exchange with the the little bag that I had infused after I gave two liters of my plasma. It's an 18 to 25 year old healthy male plasma. And so that was dripping into my body the past couple of days. So I don't know.

I might be 18 to 25 now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Send Okay, this is a whole another radical I wanna go down, which which is sort of what's emerging around rejuvenation practices Mhmm. That are a little bit strange. And I wanna talk about them because I I found them very helpful. But there's some really interesting strategies that you can get into when you're older that really help you to stave off some of the ravages of aging.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And in your sort of exploration of what's out there, you know, you focus on diet, you focus on exercise, and some of these other recovery tools, you know, whether it's red light therapy or a PMF mat or hyperbaric chamber, hot and cold therapy. These are all things that help you heal and recover and repair. What are the things that are are have you found that are that are now kind of catching your interest as as innovations that have science behind them that help people to to deal with the complications of aging.

Ben Greenfield
Let's see. We could probably chunk it into like kinda like face, body, and internal cellular processes. Would say, and this is something that that I do on a regular basis, You can get a microneedling pen. Most of the really good face products come out of Korea. They're big on aesthetics and face and beauty there.

So you get a microneedling pen or you can, of course, go to a clinic that does microneedling. Even though it's a little more a little bit more of a ripping effect, you can use a derma roller. You know, consider this to be like aerating your lawn. And then once you've done this, you would apply a product that would allow for renewal of cells or stimulation of collagen or elastin in the face.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And that stuff really works.

Ben Greenfield
I mean, if you look at before after photos of people who do it, I can't cite like a human clinical study that says that it works because this this is all very qualitative when we're talking I about the do that about once a week. My wife does also and then Do

Dr. Mark Hyman
go to a clinic or have a machine that

Ben Greenfield
does it? She has done both a clinic and then also has a little thing at home that you do it with yourself.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A little pen? Because this is like this is like Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
It's under two needles. You go to a clinic, like, they can do it very quickly with like the full on, you know, they have like think like But it hurts. Bigger version of microneedling. It's not comfortable. Like, it's it's less than a bumblebee sting, but you can feel it.

The derma roller, same thing. It's it's The derma roller feels a little bit more abrasive, almost like you're scraping your face. The microneedling feels like teeny tiny punctures, but it's it's not bad. Some clinics, if you go to a clinic to do it, will literally numb your face

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Before they do it. So you can barely feel anything at all. It's just weird if you I had it once later on, your lips are numb like like they would be if you left

Dr. Mark Hyman
the I went to a clinic, a stem cell clinic in Costa Rica and they basically put put you asleep and then they the needles and then they put the stem cells in.

Ben Greenfield
If you're gonna do a full stem cell protocol or a cold laser protocol on the face with which literally makes your face look like you've been hit by a truck for about three weeks. And typically, people who do this, you know, if they're a Hollywood celeb and they disappear for a little while or somebody goes on medical tourism to Tijuana or wherever, they're disappearing for a while because they just look like trash for about three weeks, and then you look fantastic. And I only know this because my wife has done it, and she just looks scary and couldn't leave the house for a couple of weeks. And then about a month later, she I mean, she looked way younger. And that was a cold laser with the stem cells.

But as far as doing something a little less invasive, just self inflicted derma rolling or microneedling, and then you typically apply a facial product, there are absorbable peptides now. Companies like Young Goose or Alitora who are doing some, you know, peptides like GHK copper peptide using things like NAD Mhmm. In their face products. A lot of times, you'll combine it with something like a red light mask, you know, to to drive it deeper into the tissue or to enhance the the collagen attraction to the face or the elastin production. But then the newer thing that I just discovered is salmon sperm.

I'm not joking, but I was just at a clinic and they told me that they wanna do the know, they wanted to give me like an exosome microneedling facial and I'm sitting there nodding and then they say, then we finish it up with salmon sperm. And apparently, there it's some kind of like a DNA isolate from literal salmon sperm. Maybe it's from from Clearwater down Orphenol. I don't know. They got some they got some steelhead down there.

Yeah. You could probably just like start a milking farm yourself. But yeah. So salmon sperm is the newer thing that they're putting on people's faces, apparently with very good result. Is kinda crazy.

That's what you have. For the face, typically, you are initiating some type of mildly aggressive damage to the face and then following that up with a product that assists with healing, almost like exercise. Right? You're damaging muscle, then allowing it to repair and recover so that it grows back in a more renewed fashion, stronger fashion.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Laser or whatever.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. For the body, I think a lot of people already know about stem cells and exosomes. I think there's there's always been a lot of up and comers in the stem cell industry. I would say the two that seem to be most popular right now in regenerative medicine circles would be something like a v cell, which is a very small embryonic like cell, I believe is what that stands for, V S E L. They'll typically do some kind of injection and then red light therapy, which apparently attracts more signaling molecules to the area that they've injected, and that's something that's used for like a joint treatment, for example.

And then another form of cells, MUSE cells. Yep. I forgot what MUSE stands for, multilineage

Dr. Mark Hyman
Stress inducing cell, yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah, stress inducing cells, something like that. But apparently, they have a really good effect with very good or or less chance of like an immune system reaction in the body unless I believe it's called tumoro you would know this word better than me. Tumorogenicity. Yeah. Something like that.

So less cancer causing potential. There's always some kind of new forms of stem cells that's

Dr. Mark Hyman
Using those for orthopedic treatments for injuries or trauma or things that we wanna repair, yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. Yeah. But then as far as biohacking is concerned

Dr. Mark Hyman
Those get very expensive. They're

Ben Greenfield
like Yeah. Spendy things. Yeah. But I'm a huge fan of the idea of, and I do this just about every day at home, some kind of electricity, right, to restore the electrical potential of the body, especially considering the electrical soup that we all live in nowadays.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You like a PMF mat or

Ben Greenfield
Man made electrical soup. PMF mat, grounding mat, earthing mat. You know, wearing grounding shoes right now, so these these shoes allow me to have conductivity when I'm walking outside. You know, I've I've just built a new house and the house is tricked out as far as like air, light, water, electricity, everything. But for the electrical component, every single floor of the house is grounded with a copper conductive surface that then feeds into the ground.

So if I'm on the Third Floor of the house, it's still as though I'm barefoot on the planet.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you notice the difference now you feel from it?

Ben Greenfield
Oh, absolutely. You feel fantastic. I mean, you feel like you're outside as a dirty barefoot hippie. You know, it's inside your house during the day. You sleep better, you feel better.

PMF mats are kind of like a concentrated version of that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And what what is can you describe that? Because you mentioned it a few times. What is a PMF mat? What does it stand for?

Ben Greenfield
What does

Dr. Mark Hyman
it do?

Ben Greenfield
Electromagnetic How does it field therapy, is what PMF stands for. These are usually a mat. Sometimes there's some type of a PEMF unit that is attached to a coil or a bed. There's companies that produce like full on like lounger chairs and massage tables. And usually there is a Hertz setting that you can set it on, like anywhere from zero up to, in some cases, thousands of hertz, and an amplitude or power setting.

And when you wrap it around a joint or you lay on one of these, it causes the cell to have an influx of negative ions. So you're essentially depolarizing the cell, you know, and and so you're supposed to have a slightly negative charge on the inside of the cell, a slightly positive charge on the outside, and this allows for better blood flow and also allows your cell membranes to have a better electrical charge across the membrane. So you would heal faster, you would have less inflammation, you'd recover better. My favorite way to use it is if I have a cramp or a tight spot in my back or my left knee gives me issues sometimes, I will wrap a PMF coil around that or lay down on the PMF mat on my back, And the higher intensity PMF mats just seem to relax everything once you've laid in them for a little while.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I had back surgery recently and I got a PMF machine. Yeah. You lay in this kind of sandwich. There's a coil on top and coiled on the bottom.

I did it for myself and I would notice it would go right to the area where I had the surgery. It would go right to where the pain was.

Ben Greenfield
Right. That's very And the area that's the tightest is the area that feels like it initially reacts in almost like a nearly like a painful

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I and I didn't know that it was I thought it just goes to everybody like that, like in my hips and my back. And then I had somebody else use it and they're like, oh, went to my stomach or it went to my shoulder or Yeah. It went to exactly the area where I'm having challenges. And I

Ben Greenfield
was like,

Dr. Mark Hyman
that's amazing that it actually seems to go right to where the issues are and you feel the intensity of it. And you feel I mean, the one I have particularly is a super high powered one and it Yeah. Called the Hugo that really you can jack up the current in it and it feels so intense.

Ben Greenfield
The Hugo and then the other one I know of that's super powerful, the pulse centers, those would be like the two that are really good for actual injuries. Doctor. William Pollock, he has one on his website. Forget the name of it. It's also like a high intensity one.

That's good for like back cramps, muscle spasms, injuries, etc. And then there's lower intensity ones that seem to induce more of like a full body effect that you'd use for just relaxation or stimulation or wakefulness. Like the one I have underneath the top sheet in my bed is called a Pure Wave, and that one you can barely feel at all unlike the Hugo or the Pulse Centers, but it's kind of more like a full body sweep that's alternating between thousands of different frequencies. Whereas like the Hugo or one of these others, you just put it on a certain hertz frequency like 7.8 for example, you just like target a muscle at that frequency for

Dr. Mark Hyman
a short period of It's only there for

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Twelve to Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Thirty minutes. Exactly. Yeah. And it feels great.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. If you were somebody the other day who had back and pain they were like, oh, this

Ben Greenfield
is amazing. Incredible for the back. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I've injured my back a few times in different cities and one of the first things I'll do is like Google PMF plus the name of this and try and hunt down a mat that I can actually use because it's that effective

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Ben Greenfield
At acute injuries. In addition to electricity, light I use light a lot, not only for circadian rhythmicity, but also for the recovery effects and the blood flow effects.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You mean red light therapy?

Ben Greenfield
Red light therapy and also from a circadian standpoint, blue light therapy. I mean, you know, the sun has the has this whole bluish green spectrum. It's kinda cool. Even saw meters now where you can hold the meter up and and see the the light spectrum frequency in a different room or where you might be outside. As a matter of fact, if you have like a pair of blue light blocking glasses or something like that, you can put the lens over the cover of this light meter and actually see what it's actually blocking or what it's concentrating, which is kinda cool to see if your blue light blockers actually Yeah.

Yeah. For example, in my house, what we did was we put throughout the house bulbs into each can that when you flip on the light bulb once, it will go to daytime mode. You flip it on again, it goes to twilight mode. You flip it on again, it goes into evening mode. So you don't have to have like different lamps and different lamp stands in each area of the house.

You just got one bulb. It's called a full spectrum bulb. Boncharge makes one. Block Blue Light makes one. Those are two companies that do like a flicker free.

Mhmm. Right? So there's no back end flicker. If you were to take a video of it with your, you know, iPhone camera in slow motion, wouldn't catch a flicker, which is something that kinda causes a little bit of retinal irritation during the day and eventually can lead to kind of a brain foggy feeling if you've been under

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Bright light. If you and I were like under these lights all day, we'd definitely feel it. Right. Because we're getting a little bit of flicker. And then they're low EMF, right, which is something you also want to take into consideration with your lighting system.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically, these light bulbs that go in any light socket.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah, exactly. And then the main areas of the house because you're missing out on some of the full spectrum of sunlight, even though they're a little bit more of a power hog and they're harder to find, we have incandescent lighting. Right? So we've combined incandescent with OLED lighting for the circadian rhythm component. And then if I'm For example, I'm in

Dr. Mark Hyman
Texas right science project.

Ben Greenfield
It is. It's super fun. If I'm in Texas right now and I fly back to to Idaho at I get home on Sunday. So at 7AM on Sunday morning or let let's let's put it this way. At I've been waking up about 6AM here.

So at 4AM on Sunday morning, Idaho time, it will be 6AM Texas time, and my eyes will probably, you know, flip wide open and I'll be ready to rumble because my body still thinks it's 6AM. So the way you can kind of play with circadian rhythmicity is rather than flipping on lights, rather than taking your phone out of night mode, rather than, you know, looking at a computer, you would actually put on blue light blockers, this is something I'll let you put on blue light blockers, keep the phone in night mode, keep the lights in the house as dim as possible, and then when the time arrives when you actually do want to start waking up, that's when you just blast yourself with blue light using either like

Dr. Mark Hyman
Sunlight, which you can go out.

Ben Greenfield
Sunlight, there's devices, let's say, I don't know, like Las Vegas, you don't have access to sunlight or you can't get outdoors. You can wear glasses, like there's a pair called IOs, A Y O. There's another pair called the Retimers and these produce really bright bluish green light that shifts your body into your new time zone more rapidly and now they even make lenses. So you know these I just mentioned blue light blockers. Now they have blue light concentrator glasses that will concentrate just the blue light spectrum from the room or from outdoors so that in the morning, if you really wanna blast yourself with blue light, you just wear glasses that instead of blocking blue light, concentrate blue light like the first thirty minutes of the day.

Yeah. And this can jump start your circadian rhythm and not a lot of this has to do with healing the body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, there's But you had lot to, of course. I had surgery as I mentioned and I slept for like four hours a night for a couple of months. And in my recovery, the sleep doctor I was working with trying to get my sleep reset had me wear these special things in the morning, which I can show you later. It basically is a it's like a you put it on and it gives you like bright light in your eyes. It's like glasses that just shoots

Ben Greenfield
And light in it was like kinda bluish, greenish, Yeah. Yeah. It's like those seasonal affective disorder lamps.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly, But they were. But you were, Exactly right.

Ben Greenfield
There was a company, I don't think they're in business anymore, they're called the Human Charger. And they were designed to stimulate the photoreceptors in your ears with bright light. I don't know if they still make them, but yeah, there was a time when you could literally have the light in your ears and the light in your eyes if you wanted to shift your circadian rhythm forward or backward. Yeah. And of course, the opposite applies also.

Know, we'll we'll dim the lights at night. Yeah. Like Christina. Is different than like red light panels or red light beds or red light wraparound devices. I'm a fan of all of those for enhancing recovery and use them almost every day.

But I'm more kind of intrigued and find more useful the idea of using light for circadian rhythmicity. And then oxygen is kind of That's kind of like a new thing for me. Like, you were showing me how you have an IHHT device, intermittent hypoxic and hyperoxic training.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And in English that means you That go Mount Everest and

Ben Greenfield
you come down to see that one. Go up to Mount Everest, but without getting off the couch. Right? So you're essentially training your cellular physiology and flooding your cells with oxygen after starving them of oxygen while you're just sitting there, which is fantastic, especially if you're just watching something or meditating. I think a lot of people find that they almost shift into more of like a theta wave state Mhmm.

When they're using something like that. I feel like that in hyperbaric actually. So it's good for a nap, good for meditation. Another way to starve the cells of oxygen and then flood them with oxygen is called EWAT, exercise with oxygen training. And this would be a similar idea, except in this case, you would use I have a device called the the Liv o two.

It's like my my exercise apparatus, my my cardio machine. I can breathe hypoxic air and then at the flip of a switch, for example, if I'm gonna sprint, flip it

Dr. Mark Hyman
to

Ben Greenfield
hyperoxia and flood my cells with oxygen, which normally you'd only be able to do if you were under pressure, like in a hyperbaric chamber. So there's two different ways to do this. Either get into a hyperbaric chamber or you exercise or sit while giving your cells hypoxia plus hyperoxia.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Then Low oxygen and high oxygen.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. And honestly, like if you I don't know if you're hungover, if you're tired, if you're just getting started warming up in the gym and you feel a little stale, if you just put on an oxygen mask, if you happen to have one of these devices and just breathe Just put it on full oxygen, so you're bringing like 93% oxygen

Dr. Mark Hyman
for the

Ben Greenfield
first few minutes of your workout, you feel incredible. Yeah. You feel unstoppable. I mean, without a fancy

Dr. Mark Hyman
pre workout. And so what is a low oxygen state doing? The hypoxia?

Ben Greenfield
The hypoxia is starving the cells of oxygen, so it's a brief almost like hormetic effect to where you're going to upregulate oxygen intake once you turn the oxygen back up. So you're basically going to get more oxygen into the tissues than you would otherwise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A lot of these machines, they work on on helping your mitochondria rejuvenate. That helps you with mitophagy and getting rid of old mitochondria and then helps you create new mitochondria and help them work better.

Ben Greenfield
Probably the the mitophagy would be induced by the hypoxic state. Right? Essentially creating a stressor that kills off old mitochondria and then flooding the cells with oxygen afterwards.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So mitochondria basically run on oxygen and food. Yeah. That's what makes energy.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. Yeah. You're taking away the oxygen. I don't know if it'd work any better if you were in a fasted state, you know, like in a low glucose state also. But electricity, light, oxygen, I would say those are three big ones for me in the whole like recovery performance department that I use almost every day at home.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And hyperbaric oxygen chambers also Yeah. Will do something different. Yeah. But they they're very effective for recovery and

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. You're breathe breathing oxygen. Typically, you're breathing oxygen even though you don't have to. You're still gonna get a little bit of oxygen delivery just in a pressurized environment. But in most cases, you'd have a cannula, you know, or a mask and you're breathing oxygen.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're breathing up to a 100% oxygen. Yeah. Exactly. Oxygen under pressure. Yeah.

And what does that do to your body?

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. The pressure drives more oxygen into tissue.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the way of of oxygen yourself but the we're finding that it actually has a lot of benefits in activating stem cells and increasing stem cell production, all the zombie cells, which are the senescent aging cells that cause inflammation throughout your body. They increase telomere length. They have a lot of increasing kind of rejuvenation properties. Brian Johnson just published something.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah, the hyperbarics.

Dr. Mark Hyman
He was talking about how all the things he'd done over the years, when he did a series of these hyperbaric sessions, it led to him improving a lot of his biomarkers that he had were stuck. Israel a study where they've used this technology for brain health and rejuvenation and longevity and they had pretty compelling data about

Ben Greenfield
it. Yeah. It is pretty impressive and I'm glad you you said the word series because I think a lot of people will hear hyperbaric and they'll do one session and expect the results. But, you know, in most of these studies, they're doing several weeks of hyperbaric. Like you're doing twenty, thirty, 40 sessions.

Yeah. Sessions. Like an hour, an hour and a half.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Couple hours, yeah. You can get an FPMF back if your back hurts and it'll be better right away. This is like

Ben Greenfield
a Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A commitment.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. Mean, don't get me wrong. Like if you're jet lagged or hungover and you do a hyperbaric session, you're gonna feel a little bit better. But if you're in it for the longevity effects.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So these are kind of cool tools and and they're Some of them are expensive like a hyperbaric chamber but some of them, you know, are not that that price prohibitive and they can be things you add to your daily life

Ben Greenfield
to You can walk outside barefoot in the sunshine and do breath work for for free.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Ben Greenfield
Which is, you know, like I mentioned community and I think that's that's the thing is that you see like whatever the, you know, 110 year old grandma in Sardinia, Italy who's, you know, smoking the occasional cigarette and perhaps drinking more alcohol than would be considered the hormetic effect and yet still living a long and happy life Mhmm. Because of the community piece.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Ben Greenfield
And and, you know, I I think it was the surgeon general in 2023 identified loneliness as the equivalent of smoking like 15 cigarettes a day, you know. And so you're you're seeing increased blood pressure, increased cortisol. What else? Increased inflammation. You see even increased expression of genes related to inflammatory cytokines and a decreased regulation of genes responsible for antiviral activity.

It's almost like nature wants to kill you off

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean

Ben Greenfield
when you're lonely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's an interesting field called sociogenomics. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. No. But I actually came up with this term independently because I I realized, you know, after working in Haiti and learning about the work of Paul Farmer who used community health workers and basically neighbors helping neighbors to help people treat AIDS and TB and Wow. Some of the most challenging public health conditions in the world, which most of the public health community had given up on as they had to take their medications on a regular schedule for multi drug resistant TB and for AIDS.

And it was too hard. They didn't have clean water, they didn't have watches, they were like, they were just super poor and and difficult. But he he really used the power of community to help heal. And I realized that, you know, when I started looking to literature that that it can work for good or for bad. Like if you're in a in a dynamic with somebody and then you're in a conflict situation or fight Right.

You're gonna express all these genes that are inflammatory. As your emotions get inflamed, your biology gets inflamed. But if you're in a loving deep heart center connection with somebody, the opposite happens. You activate all these anti inflammatory genes and healing genes and repair genes which is fascinating to me. And and so Yeah.

You can use community as a tool. I know you you just launched a new community platform which is to help Yeah. People connect around

Ben Greenfield
Oh, yeah. And I think that's useful if you

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's called Go Life Network, right?

Ben Greenfield
I mean, there's there's a lot of community platforms. I mean, there's I mean, yeah, I think a lot of the people in the industry now, you know, mentioned Dave Asprey, I think he has one. Gary Breca has one. Brian Johnson who we were just talking about, he has one. Do have a community?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. We can call the Hyman Hive.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a great Is it like H Y V E?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No, it's HIVE. Oh. Still HYVE. That's a good idea though.

Ben Greenfield
Anyways though, I think the importance if you're in a community is even if it's a digital community is to try and connect with people in that digital community who might actually be in the same region as you or be traveling to the same area or conference as you because there's actually a book by Sherry Turkle called Reclaiming Conversation where she gets into the idea that a digital interaction misses a prefix and it misses an actual, you know, IRL relationship, you know, an in real life Yeah. And I think one of the you know, if if you look at the underlying biological mechanisms behind that, you know, if if like I were to shake your hand, we're triggering skin receptors, you know, your Pacinian corpuscles. So you're getting you're you're getting a stimulation of the vagus nerve, which is gonna lower blood pressure and lower heart rate and lower cortisol and all those things that we look for when we're trying to increase heart rate variability. We'd see like an oxytocin release, which, you know, is your your trusting, loving, snuggling hormone, which a lot of animals who are monogamous and mate for life have oxytocin receptors, a lot of animals who who do not don't, But you can genetically modify like a mouse to express oxytocin receptors and it will become more socially active when you do that.

Know, whereas like a

Dr. Mark Hyman
We used got a dog here. Human or a

Ben Greenfield
prairie hole, like we already got them built in.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I know we got a dog. He must have a lot of those receptors because he's constantly

Ben Greenfield
Dogs, kittens, yeah, a lot. We have we have baby goats, think they have a few. You get the oxytocin release, then of course that can result in a subsequent serotonin release. You've got another feel good neurotransmitter hanging around. You've got the you you look at like the research by the Heart Math Institute on the electromagnetic signal produced by the brain or produced by the heart that can actually affect the energy of those around you.

And we miss a lot of those if we're in a purely digital environment. And so, you know, even me, like, I tend to be an introvert. I tend to be a loner. I'm one of those guys who can be super happy by myself for long periods of time. And yet, when I look at all the research, you know, I think if I'm spending time doing, you know, light and water and electricity and air optimization and all these biohacks that

Dr. Mark Hyman
Getting a hug could be a biohack.

Ben Greenfield
I I need I need to be going out of my way to also build community. You know, beyond just, Dunbar's number is one fifty. Right? The the the approximate network of people that we're able to to interact with and stay in touch with. But what Dunbar was getting at when he came up with that number was also the idea that the deeper those layers, the more satisfied and happy a person was.

Right? So you have like your five intimate family members or very close friends, and 15 kind of sort of friends, then 50 people who you get around with on a regular basis, and maybe a few dozen others in your community. Yeah. And once you fall out of those layers, you know, it's like this built in ancestral mechanism where you just break out. Right?

So it's like the body goes into this state of nervous system stress.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You mean if you don't have those relationships?

Ben Greenfield
If you if you aren't connected to people, you know, it's it's the equivalent of banishment, which would mean, you know, in a time

Dr. Mark Hyman
That was a punishment. That would have

Ben Greenfield
been punishment or death. Right? It wouldn't have been ostracism. You know, that's that literally comes from a Greek term for the pottery shard called the that they used to actually write the name of the person who they wished to banish for ten years from, you know, in in the church and organized religion. Yeah.

You know, ex communication putting you out of communion. Yeah. The exact opposite of companionship. Yeah. Pan is like breaking bread with someone companionship.

You know, ex communication is getting thrust out of that banishment. Yeah. It's a it's, you know, I think that's a French word, you know, to send away, to expel, to push out. So if that happens to a human, we go into this sympathetic nervous system back to the, you know, running from a lion mode because we become hyper vigilant, we no longer have anyone around us to protect us, and that would have served us very well in an ancestral environment in which we had no one around us, so we had to have our guard up in order to not get eaten by a bear, you know, alone out in the forest. Now, there's even a term called the paradox of loneliness.

And the paradox of loneliness is similar to the paradox of obesity, for example. Right? We have built in calorie conservation mechanisms that have served us really well thousands of years ago. If we didn't have access to ample amounts of food and we came across, let's say, a kill, I don't know, a woolly mammoth or whatever, we would wanna eat as much as possible to store away as much fat as possible for when the times of need arose again. Yeah.

And now with twenty four seven access to hyper palatable food and like a Ben and Jerry's like two blocks away, those same calorie conservation mechanisms cause overweight or obesity, which is paradoxical. With loneliness, it's it's also paradoxical, right? Because when we're away from people or even perceive that we're away from people, because there is this idea of not just subjective loneliness, right, being lonely, but also subjective loneliness, seeing whatever friends and followers and fans and likes somebody else has, comparing that to yours and suddenly feeling like you're not keeping up and you're subjectively lonely. Whether it's objective or subjective loneliness, those same biological mechanisms that we were talking about, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, increased cortisol, What's that make you? Nervous, anxious, depressed, irritable?

Mhmm. And here's the paradox part, being the type of person who's exactly the type of person that nobody wants to hang around with, so you almost create like this vicious cycle of loneliness. So, you know, that's why I think it's it's so important to check yourself and, you know, ask, hey, have I been by myself all week? You know, am I in loner mode? Am I keeping in touch with old friends or making new friends?

You know, am I taking my earbuds out and maybe, you know, foregoing a podcast and just going on a hike with somebody and having a chat, you know? These are

Dr. Mark Hyman
things Underrated. It's underrated.

Ben Greenfield
People need to think about. Yeah. Just as much as whatever, red light bed

Dr. Mark Hyman
or Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Or PMF or whatever.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's one of the key things around longevity. Remember traveling a lot to the Blue Zones when I was writing my book Young Forever and, you know, it was just striking to me how there wasn't loneliness. How everybody Yeah. Even if they're, you know, they didn't have kids, they'd be taken in by a niece or nephew when they got older.

They'd be Yeah. Somebody's wife died, they'd be all their kids would move in with them. There was just a whole network in the community where everybody was part of it and there was community celebrations, community connection and Yeah. It was pretty remarkable. And I think there was you know, Dan Buehner has talked a lot about this but it's definitely underrated.

Like, you can do all these fancy things and take all the supplements and eat all the great food and exercise and do all these biohacking things, but be If you don't have community

Ben Greenfield
Huddled up and lonely inside a hyperbaric chamber sucking on a b propolis lollipop with your binaural beats and and yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're still by yourself. Mean, you know, back to Moscow, Idaho. My my mom, who doesn't exercise and eat as healthy as she knows her son would like her to

Dr. Mark Hyman
Welcome to the club. Is actually in

Ben Greenfield
pretty good health because she has a coffee shop in Downtown Moscow and it's like the hub of the town and she's like the grandma of the community, you know, and she's hanging out all these college students and pouring beer and, you know, walking all over the coffee shop and visiting with people. And I am so glad that she has that outlet because I know after having seen a lot of these, you know, studies and data and the blue zone stuff on loneliness that, you know, even if she's not exercising and eating as healthy as I'd like, like, she is she's up to some very good activity when it comes to her longevity, her happiness. Right? That's a like the what's the article? Five regrets of the dying.

You

Dr. Mark Hyman
know, it's

Ben Greenfield
an article in the book by the palliative care practitioner where she talks about what people expressed on their deathbeds, and it was basically, I wish I'd chosen to show my true emotions more. I wish I'd chosen to be happier. I wish I'd work less. I wish I'd been my true authentic self instead of who I thought the world expected me to be. And the last one was, I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And it wasn't I wish I answered all my emails.

Ben Greenfield
Right. Wish I wish I got the zero inbox every Thursday. No. Because because, I mean, everybody knows. Like, your work will eat you alive if that's the highest order of priorities.

You know, it probably took me till I was like 35 years old to figure that out, that, know, my order of priorities is God and my spiritual health and then my wife, because if you and your spouse don't put your oxygen mask on first, you can't be there for the kids, and then the kids, and then my health, which isn't hard for me because it's an industry that I work in, and then business comes last. Yeah. You know, I used to think you just gotta make the money first and then once you've made enough money, you'll be able to take care of the kids and have enough time to, you know, go on adventures and have mini vacations and

Dr. Mark Hyman
What made you kind of flip

Ben Greenfield
in terms of your your priorities? Almost getting a divorce. Like like literally, I was such an unpleasant father and husband traveling all over the world at the time, not just for speaking in conferences, but also racing, you know, in in Ironman. And I was really not putting my family first. My wife, for the first five years of my son's existence, was basically raising my sons almost by herself, you know, because I'd pop in, pop out, you know, go out and give myself the excuse that I was just out, you know, slaying dragons and providing family.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
It took a pretty rocky patch with her for me to buckle down and start to put family first. And I mean, I I literally I'm kind of like an all or nothing guy, so I jumped into it pretty hardcore. And we started to build like a family constitution and a family mission statement based on a family core set of values. We all went to a cabin in Utah for three days and developed a family logo, which then led to a family crest and family flags and a giant, you know, family logo sign and logos on our pickleball paddles and our hats and our shirts that we wear out. We started doing a morning and a a family meeting where every morning I gather the whole family at 7AM and we sit around the living room and we talk about our evening, we talk about the day, we read the Bible together, we pray, we have a big hug and just this super happy coming together in the morning and then the same thing

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you get your teenage boys to do this.

Ben Greenfield
That's impressive. Yeah. 7PM like clockwork. We all gather in the kitchen. We sing a song together.

I bring my sons through a book that we are typically going together with. Know, each month, I bring them through a book, we have our chapter discussion before dinner and we have a whole game closet full of hundreds of games, and we play games for an hour and a half. And so every single day, I've almost guarded me from being a workaholic because I bookended 7AM no matter what I'm doing, I have to be Present. On the living room floor with the family. Somebody's gonna wonder, you know, where I am or what's going on.

7PM, same thing like clockwork. That's my ending because I have to be there with the family. Get to be there with the family because it's like this amazing party

Dr. Mark Hyman
that

Ben Greenfield
we And we've been doing that for ten years.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's incredible.

Ben Greenfield
So not only do my sons have a real identity of what it means to be a Greenfield and what we stand for and what we hold dear and what each little portion of the family crest means, but they feel a real sense of belonging, you know, and I think there's a far less chance of creating like a, you know, rags to riches to rags mentality or silver spoon mentality Yep. In a young man or young woman who really identifies with a sense of pride in the family name and wanting to build generational health and generational wealth and continue to to build upon what you started as a parent, you know, basically legacy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's incredible, man. That is incredible. That's true biohacking. That's like Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
That And it's so meaningful. I mean, I miss out on work. Like, work less than I used to. I probably make money at a far slower pace than a lot of my friends. But, you know, it was kinda like the a little bit like the old adage of, you know, mom ain't happy and nobody happy.

If my whole family's happy

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, you've rejiggered your priorities I feel incredible. To understand what matters.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it takes a long time for people to figure that out if ever. Yeah. You know?

Ben Greenfield
If And

Dr. Mark Hyman
you know, all the things you probably do in your day, my guess is that's probably the thing that keeps you the happiest and the healthiest. Oh, it's it's it's the best. I mean,

Ben Greenfield
it's, you know, not to get too esoteric or or woo, but I mean, you know, if you think about the two most eternal things that we are surrounded with every day of our lives, it's either other souls or God. Everything else is gonna pass away. You know, all of our books and homes and money and sex and cars and and everything. Yeah. There's this this idea that comes from ancient philosophers like Penzies or Augustine or, you know, more modern authors like C.

S. Lewis of this hole in the soul, this eternal hole in the soul that will always feel empty unless you fill it with something eternal. Right? So all material wealth, our business, you know, even our our health, all of that is material and temporary. But if you're able to fill that hole with a relationship with a higher power and relationship with other people, then all the other stuff becomes even more fulfilling.

It's almost like the icing on the cake.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true.

Ben Greenfield
And I think a lot of people just miss out on the part of starting with the eternal, and then all the other stuff becomes fulfilling and instead chase money, you know, chase cars, chase houses, chase women, chase men, whatever, thinking that's what's gonna make them happy when it's, you know, it's family, it's community, it's God.

Dr. Mark Hyman
For me, it was similar. I mean, I went through many years with just, you know, focusing on my career and work and and I had to kind of rejigger things and realize what was important. And now, you know, I I just went through this pretty serious health crisis, back surgery and almost died and it was pretty intense. Wow. An infection in my back.

And you know, what was so meaningful and powerful was the amount of people that were there for me. Who Yeah. Were in the hospital with me, who came and visited me, who There was like I think a WhatsApp thread of like It was sort of a 100 and plus people. Wow. There was It was healing circles and people praying for me and it you know, made me realize that, you know, I've invested a lot of time and energy in building connections and community and friendships that are deep and Yeah.

That are not related to who I am but in terms of in the world, but just more who I am as a human being. Yeah. And in terms of, you know, my my soul friends, I call them.

Ben Greenfield
It's a powerful Yeah. Memento Mori esque exercise, this idea of asking yourself. And actually, there's there's an author named John Ortberg, and I think he puts it like this. He's got he has a book that says or his book is called I'd Like You More If You Were More Like Me. He a lot of books, but this is a great book.

And he has a part of that book where where he lists kind of like the five regrets of the dying, all of the questions you might be asking yourself when you're at death's door towards the end of your life. And the last question that he lists there is who will cry at my funeral?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Who will cry at my funeral? Yeah. And even in even in digital community, like, I know, like, I probably have, like, thousands of people who follow me on Instagram or Facebook or whatever who really are not gonna give a crap about my funeral and move on to the next expert or author or podcast or whatever if I were to pass away. But my local network of community and friends and family members and people who I've built, you know, again, IRL, flesh and blood relationships with, those people will.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
And, you know, back to the loneliness piece, it is kinda sad that we do live in a time when it's so easy to build those super Digital relationships. Shaky digital relationships that unless they blossom into something else are kinda flat at the end

Dr. Mark Hyman
of That's the amazing. And and, you know, when you when you have, you know, that kind of structure that you put in your day around connection and family and just even having the thought of creating, you know, family values and what your mission is and how you take care of each other, how you relate to each other, what's important and what you focus on. It it's it's something I think, you know, just so few people ever think of doing. Yeah. And and you're My guess is your kids are pretty well adjusted.

They're probably not addicts.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. They're

Dr. Mark Hyman
doing okay in school.

Ben Greenfield
They're Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, probably happy.

Ben Greenfield
And we give them a lot of drugs and hanging from cages and I'm kidding. I I think if a child is given time and love and presence, that's one thing and I think most parents and people are aware of that. But I think it's time and love and presence and this deep sense of belonging, like knowing that they're part of a movement or part of something greater. I'm not saying like turn your family into a cult or something like that, but this idea of like having in the same way that you would brand a business and in an ideal scenario in a successful business, all your employees know what the business's values and mission statement and core purpose is. You essentially brand your family the same way as you would brand a business all the way down to the freaking logo and the sign on the wall.

And that's what we did for our family and it's it's incredible.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, you're sort of like kinda touching on this concept of like rules to live by. Like what are the simple principles and rules to live by? Right. And most people probably don't know this piece about you. And I think that's a It's such a gift that you shared it because it's something that I think most people probably hopefully take away from this and understand that that it makes them reflect on where they have done it or haven't done it in their own life.

And hopefully it'll inspire people to actually lean into this.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and I I wonder, you know, given all the things, you know, you've you've talked everything from your soul to, know, PMF mats. Like the saphysperm. Saphysperm, plasmapheresis. Like after years and years of experimenting and and optimizing and at every level, you're obviously your body, your mind, your spirit, your soul. I'm wondering like what you kind of are down to and distill down to in terms of like key practices that you wanna keep.

Like what are the Let's say, if you only keep three practices, what would they be? Or five, whatever whatever you think is that sort of stood the test of time and and and you wanna carry

Ben Greenfield
forward going forward. Key principles, move well. And as we've established, not too much at too high an intensity Yeah. But I think movement is underrated and it's very easy to not move. I'm shocked at the number of people who get a movement meter or wearable and think they're taking 10,000 steps a day and they're taking 3,000.

Yeah. So move more. Eat well, which I think most people are aware of and you have many books about this and you don't have to follow a special diet. But back to the blue zones, you know, eat in a mindful state, eat a wide variety of plants and herbs and spices, you know, throw a little bit of hormesis in there occasionally from plants and herbs and spices and maybe even alcohol, avoid ultra processed foods, and eat well. I would say thermal stress or discomfort is underrated.

Live in Hot

Dr. Mark Hyman
and cold.

Ben Greenfield
Temperature controlled climate, so subjecting yourself to like the ancestral rigors of heat and cold on a regular basis. That's why I think we've we've we see a growing body of research on things like a sauna practice, and I think we'll see more and more coming out on cryotherapy and cold immersion because very similar to exercise, you know, we need to be throwing stress ores at our body, you know, even down to the hypoxia that we were talking about for mitophagy, just for cellular autophagy in general and cellular resilience. You know, you need to do uncomfortable things within limit, you know, as we were talking about earlier. So it's all move well, eat well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But stress our bodies.

Ben Greenfield
Thermal stress, yeah, or just discomfort in general. And if I could name a couple of others, I would say take care of your personal environment. We touched on air, light, water, and electricity. So pay attention to quality of your air and the cleanliness of your air, your water filtration system, and what kind of water bottles you're drinking out of when you travel. Your lighting environment, especially how much LED high flicker high EMF light you might be exposed to on a regular basis and sunlight on the good side of things.

And then the electrical environment that you live in, you know, even my house, like, there is no WiFi. You pull up to the bar at the kitchen and you peek under the bar and there's six little Ethernet ports there where anybody can plug in if they want to, but they're not gonna get a WiFi signal. I didn't want a house where it was inconvenient and I'd have a bunch of upset visitors who could never get on the Internet, so I literally have cat eight metal shielded Ethernet throughout the entire house so you can just plug in. You don't have to go to those extremes, but little things like unplug your WiFi router where you're sleeping at night, for example. Personal environment, discomfort, move well, eat well, and I would say the last thing is something that we just got done touching on.

It would be the fifth thing I'd name and that would be your your spiritual health, which I think includes your spiritual practice and your relationships slash community. And like those would probably be the five that I would distill it down to.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Pretty pretty sage advice, pretty solid. Yeah. And I think, know, the one part I think people might not completely understand and it's worth diving more into your work about this, you know, is is this piece around how do you control your environment to support your health, whether it's,

Ben Greenfield
you know How do you build your own blue zone?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people feel pretty bad most of the time. Yeah. And and it's often the result of things that we're not aware of like the quality of our air or the quality of our water or the Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
They're eating healthy and they still feel like crap by 2PM.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and so you're What What I'm hearing you say is that some of these technologies that have helped us in many ways live better, more fun or interesting lives also have a dark side. Yeah. And and that there's ways to mitigate that dark side

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And rejuvenate your body in in many different ways. So lastly, just kinda wanna sort of hear what your thoughts are about the latest longevity trends. What what are the things that are, you know, popping for you that you think are worth leaning into? And what are the things that maybe are like, you know, misconceptions or things that are misunderstood

Ben Greenfield
or maybe not not really. We talked about some of the beauty trends. Yeah. And so Salmon sperm. I'm gonna take

Dr. Mark Hyman
that away.

Ben Greenfield
Salmon sperm and yeah, we didn't touch on this but but another thing the same clinic does is they do Botox injections at your sexual organs, which apparently relaxes the muscle tissue and allows for better vascularity. To My wife was very concerned when I told her I was going to Austin to get a paralytic toxin injected into my my my man piece.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
But, you know, they just had this health optimization event down here and it was a lot of, you know, the things that you would expect to see. Lots of different kinds of, you know, the 18 flavors and variants of beef tallow and

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Beef jerky and energy bars. And I think a lot of the the cool technologies like we discussed, you tend to see those more like a four m in Vegas or something like that that that are kinda like the cool things coming down the pipeline. For me personally, that I have been getting super into, and I briefly mentioned this to you as I was looking at your at your biohacking setup here, the idea of combining different modalities to relax and kinda down regulate the nervous system. Namely, haptic sensations, light and sound in some kind of combinatorial environment. So what I mean by that is when I travel, I have one of these Apollo wristbands or ankle bands that will vibrate, and then a neurovisor, which is a headset that you wear that produces light and sound.

And there's something about light plus sound plus vibration that will knock me out on an airplane or after a busy day at a conference when I have too many central nervous system stimulants in me. And at home, I have this vibrating chair called the Shiftwave, which is kinda cool. It just vibrates your whole body. You can wear a fingertip sensor and it'll kinda do it in combination with your actual heart rate variability as you breathe in and breathe out. But then right above the Shiftwave chair, I've got this lamp called the Roxiva and that also does light sound therapy.

So I've got a travel setup, the NeuroVisor plus the Apollo and at home, kinda like the big guns, the the Shiftwave plus the Roxiva And So you don't

Dr. Mark Hyman
wear an eye mask when you do the shift wave?

Ben Greenfield
The shift wave, you can wear an eye mask if you're just doing the shift wave. But the way I do it is I've got eyes open and there's

Dr. Mark Hyman
like a AV cable that comes out

Ben Greenfield
of the Rokceva because they've got about 20 different sessions that are built for haptic sensations.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And haptic is like vibration.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah, like vibration. The Rokceva comes with this teeny tiny little bass speaker that you put under a table to vibrate your body. So I thought, why not hook it up to the freaking shift wave? So I plugged the AV cable into the input of the shift wave, so now when the lights come on, they're just blasting it off to outer space, which is incredible if you just need to check out at 3PM and turn your brain off. You're getting blasted with light, you have the headphones in, so the sound is doing the thing in conjunction to the light and then that's feeding into full body vibration.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
And it's pretty cool to essentially just knock stress flat out of your body. Like I feel incredible when I do that or the

Dr. Mark Hyman
For ten minutes.

Ben Greenfield
The Apollo. Oh, I'll I'll run it. My my scheduling team knows that you don't schedule anything for Ben between about two and 03:30PM because I finish lunch and I go into my little lounge and I'll spend just anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes. You know, it's kind of part of my job if you wanna call it that, to try out all these new devices. Yeah.

So the other day I was trying to new Muse has some new Athena headband that detects blood flow and brain waves or I'll be messing around with the shift wave or what happens if I plug this into that or if I take my neurovisor into the hyperbaric chamber. So that's my relaxation experimentation time. Yeah. And I'm not in there for an hour and a half but usually,

Dr. Mark Hyman
you know Well, that's important.

Ben Greenfield
Little bit of padding time on the other end to come out and you know, get back in the emails and stuff.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What I found is that stress is is probably exhausting thing in your body. And if you have ways of discharging the stress Tony Robbins talked about changing your state, whether it's just jumping up and down or breathing or whatever. And this is a A

Ben Greenfield
prey animal would relax after being chased by a predator by shaking.

Dr. Mark Hyman
By shaking. Yeah. And so there's there's these devices or tools Yeah. You can use to help reset your nervous system. You can do it with breath work, you can do it meditation Yeah.

You can do it with, you know, stretching. There's a lot of ways to do it, yoga. But these these technologies are pretty cool because they It is all playground. Kinda We all are living in this heightened state of cortisol. Yeah.

And so how do you kinda drop out of that? And so these technologies are

Ben Greenfield
pretty it's a routine thing too. Like I'm typically up between 04:30 and 5AM because I like to have that time when the world doesn't expect expect me to be up and I don't have to be guilty about having my phone off, so I can do my morning routine and get ready for the day and have my time with God and have my coffee and just have my morning to myself because I also have a family and we have these wonderful glorious family dinner parties. I'm usually not in bed till ten. Right? So I'm getting maybe six hours of sleep a night.

But I find that if I can program in thirty to sixty minutes of relaxation in the afternoon, it's almost like time hacking. Because if you add it up, you know, that's still only like seven hours. I'm supposed to be getting, you know, depending on the research, you're looking at seven to nine hours. But I can be super present for my family at dinner as long as I have that afternoon checkout time. So I'm I'd much rather get up super early and nap than sleep in, not have my morning, and just bang out the rest of the day.

So I would say, that's what I'm excited about, just use of haptic sensation, light and sound. And then,

Dr. Mark Hyman
would you ask me what is overrated? Yeah. What what what are the things that you like are like, that's kind of

Ben Greenfield
like misconceptions. I would hate to cause people to think that they shouldn't prioritize something like, you know, like the whole CECO calorie in calorie out equation because I do think that trumps a lot. But I think there's a lot of people, maybe this is similar to to my reply to you about exercise, who are overdoing the whole intermittent fasting keto thing. Mhmm. There's know, I talk to a lot of, for example, especially like premenopausal women who are doing like sixteen hour fasts and they're seeing, you know, these intense hormonal imbalances and downregulation of fertility and, you know, they're essentially treating themselves as men when women, especially premenopausal women do better on like a ten to twelve hour intermittent fast and strength training and adequate protein and all the I see a lot of cardio bunnies, not to stereotype, who are doing excess intermittent fasting.

So that's one thing that I think is overrated. And then, look, I am all about controlling glycemic variability. You know, a lot of times I wear a blood glucose monitor. I am aware and cognizant of my carbohydrate, starch and sugar intake. But I think a lot of people now, especially with the surge in CGMs, they're just scared of carbs, scared of sugar, and often equate what would be considered traditionally a therapeutic ketogenic diet.

Yeah. Right? Like 30 to 40 grams of carbs or whatever a day that you'd used to, you know, in in a situation of TBI, concussion, Alzheimer's, etcetera. And they're saying, yeah, this this is like my new cognitive enhancing superpower. And you tend to see, back to what I was saying earlier for me back when I did that when exercising a lot, impact on the thyroid, impact on testosterone, impact on joint health.

The way that I do things now after experimenting with a lot of different approaches is I kind of think you can have your cake and eat it too. I don't eat a lot of carbs and sugars most of the day. Right? I save my carbs until the evening, which is typically the the meal that tends to be the most social, the most difficult sometimes to control what you're eating because you're out of restaurants, you're with friends, you're at a party, whatever. Yeah.

So I eat like low carb, relatively keto most of the day and then I'll have like two fifty to 350 grams of carbs at night, which is great because you sock away a little bit of liver glycogen and muscle glycogen for a great workout the next morning.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So would you go with that serotonin and melatonin response?

Ben Greenfield
It's not

Dr. Mark Hyman
gonna be like white flour, you're not eating

Ben Greenfield
No. Sweet potato, purple potato, yam, beet, parsnip, dark chocolate, yogurt. Mhmm. So, you know, good carbohydrate sources.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, do a lot of

Ben Greenfield
like carrot fries, sweet potato fries. Yeah. So But not a lot

Dr. Mark Hyman
of grains or beans.

Ben Greenfield
Not a lot of grains or beans besides my wife does really, really good fermented sourdough bread. So she makes those crunchy cannonballs, which are pretty good with a little bit of honey and sea salt on them. I'm basically in a pretty glycemically stable state the entire day, quick feeding at night that because I'm usually doing something active before dinner, playing tennis or pickleball with the family, doing a sauna cold plunge, going on a quick walk or even using bitters for example, before the meal, I'm inducing almost like a temporary state of heightened insulin sensitivity prior to the evening carbohydrate feeding. So I'm not getting a huge blood sugar spike that last till midnight and then a hypoglycemic drop that wakes me up at 1AM or whatever. So I'm active around dinner time.

I have some bitters with dinner, which kinda act as glucose disposal agents. And then I sleep like a baby and then get up the next morning and rinse, wash and repeat. And I see a lot of people who just like go for way too long restricting carbohydrates. Whereas I think more of like a carb refeeding approach works way better. And that's the way I've eaten for like probably more than a decade now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and and you're not You're talking about carbs like sweet potatoes and Right. That are much are much lower glycemic Right. And have lots

Ben Greenfield
of fiber. I I avoid You're having refined sugar. Nutritionally dense carbohydrates, generally avoid. So like Period. Ice cream?

Yeah. Well, depends on the ice cream. There's some good brands

Dr. Mark Hyman
out now

Ben Greenfield
and, know, we have goats. My sons make some pretty good goat milk ice cream. Mhmm. That's amazing. But yeah, it it depends.

But yeah, most ultra processed starches and sugars you should avoid in general, but especially even in like the health world. I just see people being carb phobic.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, you see fat phobic. Good stuff. Car phobic.

Ben Greenfield
Exactly. And then Yeah. Hopefully it doesn't become protein phobic soon. Yeah. That'd be the

Dr. Mark Hyman
one Well, that's interesting, Hameis. Protein is something we've talked about on the podcast and other guests like Gabrielle Lyon. But you know, we seem to be in a protein craze right now. And in all the natural food Yeah. Expo, all the Yeah.

Meat bars and protein bars and protein. Actually yesterday I tried a new bar that was you know, made with, you know, whey protein and beef collagen and Yeah. Beef tallow. And it was actually There's pretty

Ben Greenfield
a lot of them. They're super tasty.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And I was like, wow, this is like really lots of good fat, lots of high quality protein. What's your take? Are we are we kind of going overboard on the too much protein side or are we

Ben Greenfield
I mean depending on the on the studies that you look at. I mean there's some that go for like three grams per pound and some you know, studies on bodybuilders on protein intake. I'm I'm kind of a fan of the one ish gram per pound sweet spot.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which is twice as much or more than than the RDA, which is the government sort

Ben Greenfield
of minimum amount. Exactly. And I think if you're if you're not physically active, you might be able to get away with a little bit less than that. I would rather people be prioritizing protein than running from it. But I think with protein, it's the quality that matters, you know, because if you well, you know, let let's say you're plant based and you're, you know, rotating legumes and grains and, you know, eating a variety of unlike quinoa and peas and maybe some seeds and nuts, etcetera.

The issue on that side is unless you're taking the time to properly prepare, you know, soak, sprout, ferment, slow prepare those foods, is gonna do a number on your gut and you're not gonna unlock a lot of amino acids from those protein sources anyway, so you're probably gonna wind up a little bit protein deficient unless you really go out of your way to do a plant based diet correctly. And then on the omnivorous or carnivorous side, you see people who a lot of times have more of the I I f y m approach and they're just like, hey, I'm getting enough protein. I don't care if it's from a, you know, McDonald's Big Mac with the maybe the bun removed or something like that or a or a Costco steak or a Rose R steak or, you know, or, you know, hopefully, you know, grass fed, grass finished good pasture sources. So I think the cleanliness of the animal from which you're getting the protein is really important, not necessarily because the protein is gonna be that different, but because of all the other things that

Dr. Mark Hyman
You you're getting along with

Ben Greenfield
know, whatever one what might be concentrated in the fats or something like that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Although there may be there may but there may be good things. I mean, you know, there's some interesting studies looking at bison. And bison just that are purely fed on regenerative methods using kind of multiple wild plants that they eat versus bison that's that's you know, mostly grass fed but then is you know, feedlot fed at the end with corn and grains. And they did very detailed metabolomic studies where they looked at not just, you know, things that were bad because, you know, they they probably weren't giving these bison hormones and antibiotics and things like that, but they were still eating like grain diet. That the metabolites in the in the meat of the fully regenned bison were really quite different and had all sorts of phytochemicals that weren't in the other meat.

They had all sorts of fatty acids that weren't in there and other benefits that you wouldn't expect.

Ben Greenfield
I'm not convinced the amino acid composition

Dr. Mark Hyman
would You be

Ben Greenfield
know, we're talking about purely the proteins, but yeah, I I think, you know, as much as you can go out of your way to ensure that the quality of the protein source is superior Yeah. You know, the better. If if you look at some of the people who are, you know, waving the red flag on protein, typically, it's around potential for something like gluconeogenesis, you know, where you get excess protein causing some type of an insulin genic reaction Yeah. Or glucose spike.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I met a guy at Carnivore recently Yeah. And he's like, his insulin levels were pretty high. I'm like, that's interesting because he's Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. Exactly. What you can do, you also tend to see folks in the longevity camp who raise concerns about excess stimulation of mTOR, which

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
Theoretically results in impaired longevity from excessive methionine intake. Right? The amino acid that you find in a lot of meat, especially if you're not eating a nose to tail source and balancing out methionine with glycine.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Ben Greenfield
So I think the variety of your protein intake matters, you know, getting sources that are rich in glycine and collagen and gelatin and not just eating meat

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Ben Greenfield
Is important. Like bone broth. Yeah. I think include I think I don't like the term lean protein for the most part. You know, I I think that a fatty cut of salmon and the egg with the yolk and, getting as long as the animal's been fed well, a little bit of the CLAs and the saturated fats from well fed pork

Dr. Mark Hyman
or

Ben Greenfield
cow, I think that's a good idea. But yeah,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think that you could make a case that if you

Ben Greenfield
get too much methionine and too high protein intake to the point of like acidity or excess m four activation or gluconeogenesis or something like that, like, it could be bad, but I don't think many people are reaching that higher level of protein intake.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I agree. I agree. I think, you know, it is the only macronutrient we need in gram amounts.

Ben Greenfield
Yeah. You

Dr. Mark Hyman
know, essential fatty acids, need milligram amounts of carbohydrates. We don't need them, although they they help us in different ways, there's no essential carbohydrate. Yeah. So it's it's an interesting moment. Like, we've got this low fat, low carb, high Yeah.

Think the world just kinda keeps spinning around the nutrition confusion. Yeah. I think People need to just like focus on

Ben Greenfield
very dogmatic. Know, nutrition is very dogmatic and it's also an easy industry to make money in because people want a perfect solution. That's right. Right? So if you can come up with a perfect bar or the perfect book or you know, the perfect diet or whatever, like you're gonna rake in some cash for a little bit and then people will move on to the next big thing once they realize that one isn't working for them.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. I it's I always say don't let your ideology run over your biology. Yeah. Pay attention to how you feel and what's going on in your body.

Ben Greenfield
Don't let your ideology run over your biology.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Because they gotta listen to your body. Basically the bottom line. Yeah. It's generally the smartest doctor in the room.

Yeah. And Ben, you know, your work's been so great. You've you've really helped bring so many of these ideas into public consciousness. And I think I really encourage people to check out more of your work. And you've got a new book coming out that's sort of an update of your older book, right?

The Boundless Yep. Is just coming out April. Well, so what Where can people find you on online?

Ben Greenfield
My my hub is ben greenfield life dot com. Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Ben Greenfield life and you can

Ben Greenfield
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Connect everything you're doing there.

Ben Greenfield
Pretty much. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's great. And thank you so much for being such a sort of pioneer and thinking about tools and practices and things from a scientific perspective and kind of separating the week from chaff and helping us sort of navigate what are often very strange and controversial topics with with, you know, humor, intelligence and and great. Thank you, Ben, for being on Thanks, man. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman.

Please reach out, I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the doctor Hyman show.

This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services.

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